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Introduction Greetings loyal readers! I would like to open by printing a retraction of something I said in last month’s column. I had asked regular Wall Street Journal readers if they could ever recall seeing Daniel Pearl’s byline and they all said they could not recall a single time. My friend Robert Lederman did a search and found a total of eight (8) articles with Pearl’s byline. Of these eight (8), five (5) were authored by Pearl and the other three were co-authored by Pearl and another writer. This only serves to strengthen my hypothesis that Daniel Pearl was an intelligence agent, not an actual journalist. Do real staff journalists on major newspapers publish eight (8) articles in seven (7) years? I don’t think so, and I suspect you don’t either. Deconstructing Conventional Wisdom Those of us in the pacifist community are feeling particularly isolated these days, as the right-wing media creates the impression that the hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians are justified casualties of the war on terror, while the dozens of dead Israelis (mostly military personnel) are horrible tragedies. The New York Times presents the news as if somehow Palestinian deaths are less important than Israeli deaths. Meanwhile, most US Americans have happily forgotten about the starving and suffering Afghani civilians who are dying in droves. Why? Because the mainstream media have completely censored all reports of the continued deaths in that region. The fact that these civilian deaths are due to US military misadventures is one the mainstream media have been ordered not to report. The Bush administration quite rightly fears public knowledge of the widespread devastation and the horrible living and dying conditions currently prevailing in Afghanistan, because such knowledge would swiftly eliminate widespread support for the alleged war on terror. In discussing these important issues with friends, acquaintances and strangers, I am struck by a phrase I hear repeated over and over again as justification for all the horrific goings on in the world. People tell me there will always be war, because war is the result of human nature. This statement is an absurdity. Deconstruction of this myth is critical to the survival of all sentient beings on this planet. Human nature by itself does not result in any external action, so human nature by itself cannot be responsible for war (or anything else, for that matter). War results not from human nature, but from human choice. Conscious thought is the catalyst for any human action. In order to tie your shoe, you must first have the thought in order to carry out the action. So war results not from any inherent natural characteristics, but from human thought. Humans can choose violence, or they can choose peaceful compromise. Humans can choose to take up arms, or to lay them down. Fascist and totalitarian regimes throughout human history have branded war opponents as “unpatriotic” and “cowardly.” All states brainwash their subjects into allegiance and loyalty to the state. So refusing to support one’s government in perpetrating barbaric and inhuman actions upon another state is seen as disloyalty to the state. But since states are made up of people, how can loyalty to humanity possibly be against the interests of any state? Ultimately being disloyal to the leaders of a state that wants to commit barbarism against human beings IS patriotism, because it is loyalty to humanity of which the state is comprised. Furthermore, it is anything but cowardly to oppose the use of destructive force against human beings. It is cowardice to storm a people with tanks. It is cowardice to drop weapons of mass destruction from locally and remote-controlled flying machines instead of engaging in face-to-face combat with one’s adversary. It takes courage to lay down one’s arms in the face of a hostile opponent and make the first attempt to forge peace. Thus pacifists are highly patriotic and extremely courageous for advocating peaceful and non-violent solutions to human conflicts. Yet we get branded as cowardly and unpatriotic. If you tell a big enough lie long enough, people accept it as truth. Now is the time for the big lies to be exposed. Why are people so resigned to thinking that war must always exist? Why are people unable to conceive of the possibility that billions of people worldwide could choose to resolve their differences through mutual respect and cultural understanding? People tell me this can never happen. People want to believe it will never happen, because then they don’t have to take responsibility for changing the status quo. Yet what these people fail to realize is that by avoiding the struggle to change the existing power structure, they are nourishing its existence. Properly employed, the mass media could operate to produce this result. Yet the media chooses to foster a violent and negative mentality. This is because the media are owned by people who profit greatly from the mass suffering and destruction caused by war. They profit from selling the implements of mass destruction. They profit from supplying the people who rebuild what has been destroyed. They profit from making people so desperate for food, water, shelter and employment that they will willingly become slaves to the global power structure. The mass media will never relinquish their power willingly. Yet such power can be taken from them. I predict this will happen as a direct result of the power structure’s unbridled greed. The situation with Enron and Arthur Andersen is just the tip of this iceberg. As I have said before, the crony capitalism that brought about Enron’s demise extends to virtually the entire financial services industry. Recently several more major financial services concerns reported bearing liability for Enron-related losses. These include such “luminaries” as Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Financial collapse is only one part of the upcoming disaster equation. In case you haven’t noticed, the climate is changing dramatically. Here in New York as I write this in mid-April we are experiencing record-breaking heat. Never in my 46 years of life in the Northeast can I ever remember a winter and spring as we have had this year. There were crocuses blooming in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day. The tulips, which usually don’t come out until the end of April, came out the second week in April and were almost gone by the third week. Tulips like cool weather, and our weather has been anything but cool. The lilacs started opening in mid-April and all the crab apples bloomed early. The drought we’re having in the Northeast is becoming severe. Combine all these events with a few natural disasters (fierce hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) and the resulting economic collapse could affect the entire eastern seaboard. Things are about to become so bad on this planet that people will have to open their hearts to compassion in order to survive. In this way, they will realize the mind control they have been subjected to, and it will no longer enslave them. They will organize and unite to elect new leaders who will act in the people’s interest, instead of a wealthy, corrupt and insane few. Because if we don’t, the entire human race will be extinct before the century’s end. Copyright 2002 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com. |