war

Dear Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968 by Caboindex Flickr/creative commons

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929-1968
by Caboindex
Flickr/creative commons

Dear Martin . . . How happy I am today to see the next generation fully embrace the ideals that identified your short life: the end of poverty, racism, and war, precepts to which I have continued to dedicate my life.

With numerous conferences and forums throughout your birthday weekend, before and after, your mass of followers are playing an invigorating and crucial role right now in schooling the mass of newly minted young activists who are fully committed to ending the murder of young black people, and all attempts to erase an entire race through mass incarceration and domestic and foreign policies favoring whites. This new, gigantic effort is committed to non-violent means to solve these conflicts, a true testament to your life’s work.

As an idealistic teen growing up in post-war America, your ideals called to me as they still do. As a pre-teen I  came into contact with young freedom rider friends of my (Jewish) family who were helping black southerners register to vote, and challenge a rigged system (that is today being re-rigged, unfortunately). I became an activist working throughout the 1960s and 70s, putting more than just boots on the ground in protest of the Vietnam War. Your life and work were the keys that completed my full radicalization, and still motivate my activism today.

In our youth, you and I wrongly supposed that, “Oh, this is going to be solved next week because our arguments were so persuasive and the evidence so damning!” But it wasn’t solved in a week. Instead, it is being solved by the generation we gave birth to.

Today, more than ever before in history, legacy and new activists are working together, communicating through free mass communications, bringing about co-equal citizens of the world who fully envision that better and more humane future: a happy and healthy cohabitation of world citizens in place of the corporatized, enslaving stranglehold by a small number of elites (all old, white, men).

Your dream is becoming a reality, Martin. Your deep compassion for all of humanity is in full flower. It’s just taking this long because it turned out there was and is so much work to do. Nevertheless, we are reveling in this major step forward in out quest for Peace.

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Take Heart, Evidence Pouring in Hourly (Part 1)

Photo by Håkan Dahlström Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Håkan Dahlström
Flickr/creative commons

The far right believes they have a chance
to remake the world into the christian,
capitalist theocracy they have always wanted.

Even liberal media says, “If they win
this election cycle
they will do things that would
reverse history for 75 years!”

But none of that’s going to happen.

Just before the U.S. Election a week ago, I put forth the theory that non-Republicans should not fear, in fact we ought to take heart — that the probable Republican takeover the Senate and their increased footprint in the House were going to be good things for progressives. This is the right time in history to put these jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for whom they really are.

Since the election, I’ve taken particular delight in just how fast and furious the Republicans are continuing to repudiate their reputations and dispel their humanity in the things they do and say. The timeline for their backward thinking to be completely expunged here and abroad has been immeasurably upstepped. The circumstances for progressives to act boldly have arrived.

Check the bread and circus for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Assess for yourself the relative levels of buffoonery in whatever issue Repubs haplessly find themselves talking about, from the climate, the military, technology, you name it. Nothing they do or say suggest any understanding of the inherent equality of all people, of history, or even how our government actually works.

The only measurement we have, the one that matters, is the amount of special interest cash that is always involved. Whenever and wherever we follow the money, it leads to what’s rotten. Fortunately, these rotten cavities of entrenched special interests, rewarding corporate elites at everyone else’s expense, also offer a crystal clear roadmap for populists and all activists devoted to economic and social justice.

Some of my musings on this subject can be found in Part 2, tomorrow, and I would enjoy hearing from you if you too see it for yourself and want to share, here or on Facebook. (Maybe I should start numbering each of their rabbit holes for posterity.)

Each time one of them opens their mouth to speak, they show themselves to be, at best, uninformed, and, at worse, delusional. A shady combo of plain greed and stupidity takes over their thinking. It doesn’t appear they’ve read the news or read a book or seem to have studied much in college or since. Add to that the sweaty hysteria of desperate people driven by fear gasping for relevance, it’s almost sad (but not, really).

In VenusPlusX’s quest for a more perfect world of peace and universal equality, where every child born survives with all of its human rights unchallenged, we of course continue to focus on life-threatening issues such as climate change and the military and supporting net neutrality to make sure all voices are heard.

Freedom will not be a reality until we address the most pressing problems, the ones that are direct threats to life on this planet. The good news is that it will be the process of our joining together across borders and cultures to solve these life-threatening problems that will perforce bring about solutions to all the scaffolding issues such as ending racism, sexism, genderism, xenophobia, ageism, income inequality, and unharnessed capital greed.

Solving these planetary problems will re-enfranchise the voiceless of this world, and make sure we do have a world. Get active, do something. If you are already an activist in any area, continue to connect the dots between all of these issues — they are all connected, and all, in the end, are matters of life and death.

 

#####

 

Wartime Sexual Abuse — of Men and Boys

“Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s,” says Stewart M. Patrick, a senior fellow at the DC-based, non-partisan think tank The Council on Foreign Relations, writing for The Internationalist. His recent report was widely circulated this summer on the startling 22% of males and 30% of females who have been sexually assaulted as a terror tactic and weapon of war used throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lisa F. Jackson’s award-winning documentary,  The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, likewise offers disturbing data on this nascent crisis. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution condemning rape as a weapon of war.

Rape is always a crime of opportunity wherein the victim is not targeted based on appearance, gender, or behavior but because he or she is simply available. War only enlarges and magnifies the politics of this violence.

The male rape epidemic has affected men in Bosnia, El Salvador, and many other war-torn nations, and in the androcentric world, focused on men, the image of a weak man has not been sympathetic.

How will this male-on-male rape be incorporated in and be fairly addressed by the United Nations, the individual state, and/or Non-Governmental Organizations? Patrick addresses this question and encourages you to take progressive action for these victims.

 

 Adrianna Midbama contributed to this post. The full article appears below.

Stewart M. Patrick’s, “Stopping Wartime Sexual Abuse – of Men

Today, I would like to draw your attention to a disturbing phenomenon ignored by the foreign policy community but all too common in global conflict zones: The pervasive sexual abuse of men in war.

Women, of course, bear the main brunt of wartime sexual violence—as they always have. Last December, my CFR colleague Mark Lagon hosted a sobering meeting with the eminent legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon. Now the special gender adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Mackinnon in 2000 argued the path-breaking legal case Kadic vs. Karadzic — about mass Serbian rape of Bosnian women — which for the first time established mass rape as an act of genocide. Over the past two decades, international attention to rape as a weapon of war has been growing. Documentary filmmakers have often been in the forefront. In 2006 Lisa F. Jackson traveled to DRC to interview thousands of rape victims, and their perpetrators. Her resulting film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution-condemning rape as a weapon of war. Several of my CFR colleagues — including Laurie Garrett, Isobel Coleman, and Matthew Waxman — have spoken and written eloquently on the scope of such atrocities and the need to hold perpetrators accountable.

At the same time, as the Guardian reported on Sunday, the United Nations (UN) and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) “barely acknowledge” the pervasive sexual violence against men that occurs in modern war.

The article documents the terrible suffering of a Congolese refugee who was captured by rebels and raped multiple times per day, and watched countless other men be similarly brutalized. 22% of men in Eastern Congo reported being victims of sexual violence, compared to 30% of women. One victim reported the crime to police, and was laughed at. A doctor in whom he confided merely gave him Panadol (a local equivalent of Tylenol). He described:

Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s.”

The violence, and the disregard, is global. 80% of Bosnian males imprisoned in concentration camps and 76% of El Salvadoran male political prisoners report sexual abuse. Yet, of roughly 4,000 NGOs addressing wartime sexual violence, only 3% mentioned male victims (and usually only in passing).

Read: U.S. trade policy; is America AWOL?

International institutions are also falling short. They should be lauded for attempting to address mass violence against women during wartime, but the protection and outreach must be extended to all victims.

The Guardian quoted one refugee who sought help from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was told “‘we have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.’” Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict counters that UNHCR does assist both men and women, but that women are “overwhelmingly” the victims. Emerging studies, however, suggest sexual violence against men is more widespread than commonly acknowledged.

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that some countries do not criminalize sexual abuse of men, as this report (PDF) by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documents. International humanitarian law criminalized rape in the twentieth century, but “prosecution was nonexistent” during the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its Rwandan counterpart (ICTR) included rape in the category of crimes against humanity, war crime, and genocide, but abuse against women earned harsher punishment than abuse against men.

However, Lara Stemple of the University of California’s Health and Human Rights Law project also notes that:

“There are dozens of references to “violence against women” — defined to include sexual violence — in United Nations human rights resolutions, treaties and agreements, but most don’t mention sexual violence against men.”

The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution.”

“Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates ‘female’ with ‘victim’, thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability.”

I recognize that this is not an easy subject for men, in particular, to acknowledge. But we all need to shine the spotlight on such suffering to underscore that sexual abuse, no matter the gender of the victim, is abhorrent—and that perpetrators must be held to account. And the world needs to provide legal resources and psychological support to men who demonstrate the courage to come forward in reporting such crimes, despite the social stigma so often attached to their plight.


Why Has Everyone Lied to Me All My Life?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español Check out Terence McKenna’a “Culture is Not Your Friend” on YouTube for a quick overview on the subject of this post.

From cradle to grave, most of us fail to realize how comprehensively devoid of truth many fundamental precepts of “modern society” actually are. People are always talking to us from the day we are born. Eventually we figure out what they are trying to say and we try to do what they tell us to do, to be a part of “group think.” After a while they tell us to read stuff. And then they start telling us what is what. They tell us this is real and that is not. They tell us this writer is right and that one is wrong. To believe this and not to believe that. If and when we ever have an original opinion, stray away from the group thinking or chance to have our own opinion, to not behave or not believe or not speak as they demand, they show us they will go to any end to crush our resistance and make us support their ridiculous viewpoint. There are no bounds on the dominating group’s willingness to abuse us nor to what extent collective society comprehensively defends itself against truth when presented with it. It is said Hitler killed 20 million Russians, but Stalin killed 200 million.

For the most part, the person who tells you a falsehood and tries to force you to believe and act upon it is themselves acting on a falsehood delivered to them by another presumed “authority.” The fact that they believe they are telling you the truth is no excuse for their actions for they have within their minds the ability to discern truth if they will but try. If there were truly a Hell, then the road to it would indeed be paved with these assumptions.

Each and every individual has the personal power to discern the truth for themselves and a moral obligation to refuse to accept and, when feasible, to actively oppose and refute the impositions of falsehoods by blighted bigots who presume to “guard” the false foundations of human society. The chain of deliberately communicated ignorance in human discourse necessarily begins with an individual who, knowing the truth, deliberately communicates a falsehood, usually with some authority or even force of violence.

Unfortunately, these social assumptions are the false beliefs that are invariably laid down when we are open-hearted children who have no intellectual defense against the ignorance and bigotry of our parents and society. When we are most vulnerable, we are viciously abused by those who actually owe us the greatest duty of fairness, truth, and honesty. And this parental and societal abuse of children becomes the foundation upon which, as young adults, they will be forced to accept as given the obvious and demonstrable insanities promulgated by all religions, governments, and economies of our past age. This systematic lying, which penetrates every aspect and dimension of societal engagement, destroys the personality potentials of those who engage in it more surely than physical suicide.

How is one to deal with this torrent of falsehood that streams at us from every media outlet, every organizational mouthpiece, and most of the people we randomly engage in life? My personal policy is to believe nothing anyone tells me until I have had a chance to evaluate motives, content, context, and other factors. Then I will decide whether to conditionally adopt the idea into my personal noosphere. A constant reevaluation your most fundamental assumptions is required in modern society to assure you can maintain a consistent, coherent, current, and true world view.

Every individual is faced with a fundamental choice in life. The outer world, the environment, provides a wealth of sensory inputs as well as information-carrying data in the form of interpersonal communications, by speech, reading/writing, etc. When this information enters the human mind, it may then be tested against the individual’s inner sense of Truth. Under ideal circumstances, all true information would be identified and incorporated into the individual noosphere, while the untrue information would be discarded. This capability is certainly attainable by those open minded people able to learn from their mistakes and undertake extensive reformulation of their concepts of reality, when shown appropriate evidence. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people feel their inner sense of Truth to be something that is not especially important to worry about when dealing with an external apparent reality. In response to threats of force, these individuals disregard their inner sense of Truth and fling their support behind their oppressors, becoming bullies in their own right. Whenever you allow fear of oppression to undermine your dedication to Truth, you transfer your personal power to the ignorant and despicable bully who wants you to believe what he says.

There is no reason anyone should have to choose between becoming a victim of socially sanctioned physical and/or psychological violence and living in a way that is true to their inner selves. Coerced into living a life of accumulated falsehoods, you enlist in automatically indoctrinating the next generation.

In understanding and living the truth, we have indeed entered the age of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Although completely freeing youth from the distortions of an immature society may take a generation or more, we have entered the New Age spirit of Transhuman consciousness symbolized by the Child, that today is freeing more and more people who are forever liberated from  decrepit and misguided legacy of our pastfathers.

The Crowned and Conquering Child is the newborn spirit of the Transhumans of the New Age, which cannot and will not be bullied. Rather, they are the final judgment upon all bullies and all social systems based upon bullying.

—Dan Massey

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 1 of 2)

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

When I was growing up in Chattanooga in the 50s, I somehow acquired the belief that the United States of America was the best country in which to be born and live. I gave thanks to my god of the day I had been born an American, and wondered at the miracle of such privilege in a world torn by war, famine, disease, and poverty, in which it seemed no group of national cults could exist in peace.

Before Kent State was the Boston Massacre

When I went to college in the Boston area at the start of the 60s I was abruptly exposed to a very different view, no less idolatrous, but couched in historical ideals and events that supported two related viewpoints on which our republic was founded—a desire for intense socialization of agrarian freedoms on the one hand, simultaneously opposed and supported by mercantilist and capitalist interests where commercial advantage could be found. In Boston, we thought all the unrighteous capitalists were slave owners in the slave states.

In the 90s I moved with my family to the National Capital Region of Virginia and, in the 00s to the District of Columbia. Virginia (and Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania) really evoke the terrible realities in the birth of a new cult of nationhood. It is impossible to visit Manassas, Antietam, or Gettysburg without recalling the thousands of lives sacrificed to fear, disunity, and greed, where the soil is soaked with yet more thousands of liters of blood. And, having grown up in Chattanooga, I already knew the horrors of Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and Chickamauga. I remembered the words of that hideously false, yet weirdly inspiring line from The Battle Hymn of the Republic which says “…as he died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free.” Can mass emotional insanity built on ignorance reliably serve the cause of love and truth? We now know it cannot, does not, and never has. Today we are heir to the results of living with such foolish ideas.

Once we moved to the District, I saw how Jefferson’s forced decision to have the national capital at its present location initially captured, within one city-to-be, the national vision of union based on unity without uniformity, avoiding New York in favor of a fresh start where Georgetown and Alexandria competed for economic favor, based on different social models. I contemplated the Rosicrucian geomancy that L’Enfant drew on in planning the city, as well as the artistic ideals inspired by Paris and other great cities of Europe in that day. I understood how the desires for balanced and fair peace had inspired this most occult design, as if the greatness to be of the city and the republic for which it stands could be invoked and established within an urban architecture designed to be a subliminal parable of truth.

The National Mall, designed by the McMillan Commission at the start of the 20th century, ripped the ramshackle and decrepit commercial heart out of the original, unplanned collection of businesses, services, and residences that occupied the swampy flats west of Capitol Hill, moved the city plan closer to its Masonic origins, yet made me feel I had entered a Federal Disneyland recreation of the Roman Forum on a much grander scale, where everything was brand new classical revival and beaux-arts architecture, a gleaming alabaster city “undimmed by human tears.” Unfortunately, to me the brilliance of this parklike setting for our Federal buildings and monuments was drenched in the human blood spilled to achieve the triumphalist vision of a newborn world empire. This especially came home to me when the World War II memorial was completed. Emperor Trajan, the prolific builder of second-century Rome, would have been proud.

Those who walk the streets of this city patrol the paths of destiny. When we marched for equality in October 2009, the light of truth on which this city was founded and designed broke through the ocean of clotted blood and stinking death wrought by foolish greed, showing us the glorious rainbow of a better age, unconquerable and soon to be all there is.

Can the future learn from the past? Or must the future be imprisoned by the limited wisdom of the past? How can our nation escape the prison of literalistic and untruthful government and triumphalist imperial ambitions in which it seems trapped? Today, Lincoln’s words continue to apply, “…a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation…can long endure…” Now as we realize and expose how cruelly our nation continues to fail to build on the ideals for which so much life was sacrificed to the worship of greed, from the Revolution through the Civil War, we more clearly see the roots of oppression that prevent human freedom and social progress. In answer to the implied question, we now know this new nation has not endured, and has finally been destroyed by a bunch of ignorant humans flying a false flag of Supreme authority. Will yet another war be needed to achieve liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all?

See how far we have lost our way as a national cult of freedom. Colonial sentiment was strongly anti-slavery, but the political power of slaveholders could not be denied, even as the extraction and financial industries cannot be denied today. Jefferson wrote of the King, in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to drestrain this execrable commerce.”

General Jeffrey Amherst

Does our nation live up to this standard today? Or have we actually become suborners of true freedom to serve delusions of historical and religious mythology? Or were we ever willing to put the interests of the powerless who depend on us for survival behind our personal greed and national desire for empire. For example, our national myth ignores the intentional genocide against the American aboriginal peoples (the “indians” that fought the “cowboys”), which began with the policies of British Commander Jeffrey Amherst, who conducted biological warfare against the Indian population of Ohio, among other things, directing his troops to deliberately infect gift blankets with smallpox. It is likely these actions by British troops caused a major smallpox epidemic among the native population.

Such mass social cruelty to an entire people has continued unabated to this day. After personally starting the French and Indian War (out of abyssal ignorance) George Washington led forces that ferociously destroyed the villages and societies of the Iroquois Confederation across New York state. He was known to the Indians as Caunotaucarius, which means “devourer of villages.” Many years later, when Washington was President and the settled Seneca were suffering under the continual abuse and cruelty practiced on them by American frontier rogues, they sent a delegation, headed by Cornplanter, their great spiritual leader of the time, who had encouraged them to adopt agrarian ways compatible with European frontier development. This delegation was to beg the great white man for mercy from his government and to require the frontier citizens to obey treaties and the law. After Cornplanter made his appeal, the delegation was given gifts and promises and sent home. On the way back they were robbed several times and, of course, nothing changed on the frontier. In retrospect it is easy to see that, in those days, the President and Federal government were powerless to control the frontier. It seems there has been no time when our nation was willing to live up to its grand promises for its aboriginal peoples.

This discussion continues tomorrow.

—Dan Massey