Keith, Why are western systems so prone to mega-violence? It almost seems that everything in the Western mentality points to a war, and a big war,
. to clean out the pipes, . reset the brain, . cut down on population . mix up the genetics and to achieve some kind of renewal of their drive. The article below is typical of the articles being written here and anyone who knows anything about Lincoln and the Civil War knows that these are the types of things being said and written prior to that great American reset button, 1860 Civil War. Does America really need a huge holocaust to reset that place, destroy old prejudices and make everyone feel like they need each other to succeed? The difference in the West, and even more different than Genghis's empire, is the machine like or "chorus" like need for things to happen not in hundreds of peoples but in thousands and now in millions. "A Mighty Fortress is our God" sung by millions. In Europe in the 20th century there were 90 million people killed as a result of WWI and II. Genghis would kill you if you fought him but his alpha male empire considered such slaughter to be waste. Human capital was far more important to him than physical property. He stole craftsmen and trinkets not whole countries. They continued simply under his alpha maledom and paid taxes but were basically free to live their lives locally. Even the Golden Horde in Iran, converted and became local. No big deal. But you kill a master artisan and he would burn your city. Much of the beauty of modern China is due to the mongals and their movement of thousands of artisans from the Islamic countries to China where they built the modern capital and set the model for the later native Chinese regimes to build the Imperial City in all its glory. They also opened free trade, instituted diplomatic immunity and worked in human capital because, unlike the Romans, they were the true children of the Wolf system of dominance and not just the singers. They weren't human children sucking the teets of a mother wolf. They were the system of the Ani-waya, mother wolf herself. They knew the rules of the Alpha system. But, like the Europeans, they were systemically violent people. Violence cleaned out the dross. Brought in new resources. Cleared the head and made you know what was real and what was made up by economists and other philosophers working their imaginations. I don't know what to make of such violence. When I was taught about Freud, the same person who taught me recommended that I go into the Army to "grow up." When I enlisted I auditioned and was accepted as a soloist with the U.S. Army Field Band and toured with them for a year and then transferred to the U.S. Army Chorus in Washington that provided the music for the government for several years. My old mentor was upset. She wanted me to go to war, where given my physical infirmities, I would have died. (I had to talk the Army doctor into accepting my recruitment with the words that I would only be singing, because I had damaged ankles that couldn't be fixed. I barely made it through basic training because I had casts on those ankles to make them strong enough to complete the course. Casts were not an option for combat.) But my wonderful mentor, who was from the American South and very much a part of the Southern Elite, wanted me to "go become a man" in a life and death situation. Instead, I rock climbed for a time to deal with the issue of courage until I realized that concertizing on the piano took far more courage and endurance than climbing a mountain. But my elder who was half Cherokee on her mother's side, still had that European mega-violence bug. It would be later that I would realize that the chemicals from the pollution in my childhood made much more control of my personal violence necessary than anyone who had been raised in the genteel south with its honor code. In Krugman's article I hear the reset button and the honor code raising it's bloody head again. Amongst my people with a code of blood payment, such foolishness was largely absent. If someone caused a death, any member of that offender's clan could be taken in payment by the clan of the other. It didn't matter who, man, woman or child. As a result, clan's policed themselves and would give up the offender since the clans were intermixed in every town and city. They didn't live segregated lives because they couldn't marry within their clans. That would be considered having sex with your mother. A criminal could be a cousin but a different clan. There's was practically no crime in the old Cherokee Nation and little violence but a lot of games of great physical endurance. Will the next European bloodletting finally kill the world because they forgot the Law of Blood and couldn't replace war with a good game of stickball? Is that the genetics you've been talking about. Not enough cleaning of the blood through clan marriage? REH November 22, 2010 There Will Be Blood By PAUL KRUGMAN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/pau lkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be - after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction. So here's what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: "I can't wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they're going to look around and say, 'What in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give 'em a piece of meat, real meat,' " meaning spending cuts. "And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary," he continued. Think of Mr. Simpson's blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize. Some explanation: There's a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they've done it before. Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America's role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson "can't wait." And he's what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican. The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation - cooperation that won't be forthcoming. Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality. Thus on the same day that Mr. Simpson rejoiced in the prospect of chaos, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appealed for help in confronting mass unemployment. He asked <http://federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20101119a.htm> for "a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits." My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too? After all, the G.O.P. isn't interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House. Indeed, far from being willing to help Mr. Bernanke's efforts, Republicans are trying to bully the Fed itself into giving up completely on trying to reduce unemployment. And on matters fiscal, the G.O.P. program is to do almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Bernanke called for. On one side, Republicans oppose just about everything that might reduce structural deficits: they demand that the Bush tax cuts be made permanent while demagoguing efforts to limit the rise in Medicare costs, which are essential to any attempts to get the budget under control. On the other, the G.O.P. opposes anything that might help sustain demand in a depressed economy - even aid to small businesses, which the party claims to love. Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits - an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there's no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn't work that way anymore. And opposition for the sake of opposition isn't limited to economic policy. Politics, they used to tell us, stops at the water's edge - but that was then. These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it's an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it. How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern. My sense is that most Americans still don't understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what's necessary. But that was another country. It's hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
