Running on caffeinated fuel, all synaptic pistons firing, I’m writing away, polishing up my next novel, The Sufi’s Ghost, and what happens? The stranger sits nearby. I keep my head to my laptop screen, taking cover. The stranger always comes in, white guy with the curly afro gray hair and suit, no tie.
Inevitably, he asks, “What are you writing? You’re here every morning early.”
Impromptu conversations at Starbucks always carry the opportunity costs…a waste of perfectly tuned caffeinated inspiration humming along. I say, “Just work.”
It’s never smart to admit to any creative endeavor, not here in Orange County, California where every man, woman and child engages in nose-bleed unbridled enterprise. Many a corporate professional speeds down the wide boulevards here, chasing after that promotion through the office political maze. Corporate automatons abound, wearing their pay checks in fine German cars. Engines of our economic strength, they live in the fast lane with hardly a smile, only a denial that they’re part of the middle class. Delusional nouveau riches, they vote right-wing just to feel like they’re part of that class of real wealth.
“How are you doing,” I say. “You’re here often. What is it you do?”
“Psychologist,” he says, “retired. I also taught English Literature down the street.”
“So, you like to read novels?” I ask.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, take a look. I just got a thriller out,” I say, shamelessly hawking my latest. I hand him a bookmarker with the pitch: Mojave Winds, Available at Amazon.com.
“Sounds interesting. Takes place in the Mojave… What’s it about?” He asks.
Now I eagerly say, “…a guy, Kris Klug comes back from extended combat missions in Iraq…tries to readjust to civilian life…looking to start his life, get over whatever post-traumatic stress he might have. Picked up some shrapnel and he lost part of his ear. He doesn’t have much family, so he relies on his uncle Fred for a job. A colorful character, Uncle Fred owns a trucking company that hauls goods between LA and Vegas. Once Klug arrives in LA, though, he begins to learn that Uncle Fred has a lot more going on than just trucking…”
“Sounds like a fun read,” the stranger sips his coffee, scrutinizing the bookmarker.
Silence falls. I return to editing.
“So, what’re the morals of your story?” The psychologist asks.
“There’s several…like individual spirituality.”
“What else?” He pushes on.
“Fundamentalism is another theme.”
“What do you mean?” He continues slurping his coffee.
“Fundamentalists…ones who believe in the holy books as the literal word of God…strictly by the text.” I look at him.
“Holy book as in the Bible?”
“Yeah, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran…whatever. Most any religion uses a holy book as a guide. Fundamentalists stand out by using their holy book as the word of God’s law.”
“I’m a fundamentalist.” He says. “But there are preachers, I’ll admit, who go overboard. They preach to others just to feel superior.”
“You mean like they have some sort of personality disorder?” I ask.
“Yes, some preachers do have personality disorders. I’ve seen them. They like to tell people how morally inferior they are, sinners. There are social-paths and insane people everywhere in normal working society…they can be functional, get work done…be productive and still have many symptoms of serious disorders. The manual of psychology defines personality disorder in clear terms. A severe disorder…a person must exhibit at least five of the nine main symptoms.”
“So, what are the nine? Manipulative?” I ask, having read a little on the subject.
“Yes. And tricking others. And bending the truth, lying, in order to satisfy their own fantasies. And such people would also be extremely narcissistic…always looking to accomplish some agenda, often a farfetched one.”
“And completely out of touch with reality?”
“Exactly,” says the psychologist, “and I’ve often seen that this type of disorder…Narcissistic personality disorder…they’re alcoholic or drug abusers.”
“Cocaine?” I ask the psychologist.
“Yes. They also often portray themselves as superior to others…talking with smirk…and a tone as if what they say is so obvious…that if other people don’t agree, then they’re just too stupid. Individuals with this disorder might strut and swagger…and talk tough, in a bullying way…arrogant.”
“Someone who would manipulate the truth so much just to show everyone that he is right and everyone else is wrong?” I ask, beginning to see a pattern here.
“Yes,” says the psychologist, “they start this often at an early age, trying to outdo their parents. I’ve seen boys with this problem always trying to belittle their fathers to prove...”
“Okay,” I say, “and the boys, when they get together, they only enhance their sickness?”
“How did you know?” He sips his coffee.
“Well, isn’t this the profile of George W Bush…joined up with Cheney…Rumsfield?”
“What?” Says the psychologist. “I have no way of knowing what President Bush is like. He didn’t manipulate the truth. He’s a man of God. He overcame his alcoholism by accepting Christ into his life. He takes counsel from many prominent Christians. He doesn’t manipulate the truth. He merely used what the intelligence community gave him.”
“Right.”
“There’s no way of telling what happens in those political circles,” he says.
“I see how you’d make a good teacher,” I say, figuring the guy could show kids how to toe the party line, go with the flow and blend in with corporate culture. I finish my triple espresso and focus back to my laptop.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Why are there Suicide Bombers?
Are suicide bombers similar to others who commit suicide? Do they derive their motivations from the same sources?
The more than four suicide bombings just last Monday to mark Cheney's visit to Iraq, keep this question alive every day we walk down the street. A woman entered a mosque in Karbala, killing dozens and wounding another hundred. What drove her to this?
When Mahmoud Marmash, a young bachelor, blew himself up near Tel Aviv, in 2001, he took several Jews with him, perhaps to the same afterworld, or maybe not. “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians.” From a poor community-- he grew up where many people despair in poverty and hopelessness-- Mahmoud’s act is difficult for many of us to understand. We wonder what would push a person to such extremes?
An examination of suicide, though, uncovers that politically-based suicide is nothing new. It appears more than seven times in the Old Testament. Remember Samson in Judges 16:29-30? As an escape from the despair of Roman oppression, martyrdom is common in the New Testament.
Many of the same motivations for political suicide drive other types of suicide victims. Most infamously, many “experts” on TV News discussed the case of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, as a well-established professional with a doctorate in architecture.
What most people fail to mention is that he never fit into the German culture where he studied and thus, lonely, frequented a mosque that indoctrinated him to fundamentalism of an extreme flavor. Like most such suicide cases, Atta was alienated and woefully under- or un-employed most of the time.
Contrary to many current assertions, a careful gander into this subject teaches us that the suicide bomber draws motivation from the same wellspring as other types of suicide victims.
As civilized people, we should be able to do much better than the Bush-Cheney approach: throw our hands up and say, "Nothing to do but kill them all. "Bomb the hell out of the entire Middle East! That'll fix it. Sweep it all up." The last sentence is an actual quote by Rumsfield.
Little wonder that terrorism has only increased greatly since the US Supreme Court elected the neocons into the Executive Branch.
We can diagnose this sickness and identify its causes in order to reduce them, and thus avoid so much violence.
Suicide at the Foundation of Sociology
In the early 20th century, sociologist, Emile Durkheim studied and categorized the reasons for suicide. Emile Durkheim lived during the peak of the industrial revolution, what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, when wealth was extremely concentrated among the ownership class and labor movements incited violent riots, including terrorist bombings.
This was a time of great social and economic upheaval. Perhaps this explains both Durkheim’s theories of suicide and his interest in the subject. After careful analysis, Durkheim found it was the individual’s bonding to society that could determine whether or not he was likely to commit suicide, and he described four different types of these bonds:
Altruistic: Durkheim explained that too much social integration leads to self-sacrifice for society, patriotism, honor; the altruist, such as the WWII kamikaze pilots, commits himself to a goal beyond himself and considers this world an obstacle and burden.
Egotism: Too little social integration leads to alienation, loneliness; the egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose.
Anomic: Whenever an economy is not regulated enough, conditions such as unemployment or iniquitous distribution of wealth arise. Unlike the Neoconservative's preference for Milton Friedman's unbrindled "free market economy," Durkheim believed that it is the role of society to regulate the economy, and he sees a relationship between a society’s suicide rate and the way it performs this important regulative function.
Fatalistic: When society sets economic expectations too high, individuals who fail to meet these standards can lose all sense of self-worth.
Cultural beliefs can directly influence each of these types of suicide. Durkheim’s last three types of suicide seem to apply variously to most any culture, including American society.
Suicide in America
America’s culture and economic system often creates huge financial inequities and hardships leading to suicides. In volume of suicides, the U.S. ranks among the top forty among all countries in the world and 9th among industrialized countries.
Why would the so-called "wealthiest country in the world” rank so high above most third world countries?
The vicissitudes of America’s economy leave a vast majority of individuals to despair from unemployment and iniquitous distribution of wealth. In such situations, individuals are exposed to at least two of Durkheim’s motives for suicide: anomic and fatalistic.
Studies in the U.S. during the 1980’s found that every one percent increase in unemployment related to suicide increases of 360 per year. The U.S. offers hardly any social infrastructure to the unemployed. This often leads to the anomic and fatalistic suicide motives, as well as higher rates of crime and gang activity.
At the same time, consumer advertising promotes the expectations that everyone can take a piece of the pie if they work hard and "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." When a culture raises expectations high and some individuals do not prosper, hopelessness can overtake even the brightest individual, including the soldiers returning from extended combat missions, struggling to readapt to civilian life.
Sometimes our own political leaders contribute to the feelings of economic disparity. G.W. Bush’s administration recently promoted the U.S. as the beacon of free-market prosperity, a privileged nation, God-chosen to spread democratic wealth.
Bush used this image, as his most frequent among many ploys, to justify the preemptive attack in Iraq. However, compared to the world’s democratic nations, the U.S. currently grows one of the largest gaps between rich and poor: one percent of the population relishes in 40 percent of the wealth while 50 percent of the population struggles with 3 percent of the wealth.
The poor get poorer, the rich, richer. Fatalistic despair and broken expectations increase among those who fall behind, while the winners in the economic cycles sometimes suffer the emptiness of their egotistic drives to success. These economic gaps intensify the social hardships and represent causes for suicide in America, Durkheim’s last three motives: anomic, fatalistic, and egotistic.
Internationally, the U.S. government commands enormous influence over countries whose regimes it protects through military support. We call such countries “client states” such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait...and so on.
In these countries, the U.S. supports autocratic rulers, such as the former shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the Royal Family of Saud, and even the early years of Saddam Hussein--before he made his fatal decision to nationalize Iraqi oil--among others. These autocratic states maintain much higher levels of economic gaps between the ruling elite and the working classes than those in the U.S.
The tough, autocratic Islamic cultures exacerbate the gap between the wealthy ownership class, such as the Royal Family of Saud, and the poor. They create environments of great social, economic, and political crisis. They push some groups to extreme behavior such as suicide bombing. This explains why 15 of the 19 highjackers of 9/11 were Saudi.
This crisis was long in the making through Muslim social and economic failures over generations. The list of humiliations goes on today through American military dominance in Muslim territories and unconditional support for Israel, not to mention decades of European colonization breaking up the Ottoman Empire.
The Middle East -- A Hotbed of Suicide Bombers
In many Muslim countries, unemployment runs high and the wealth generated by oil revenues trickles down like water in the Sinai. “Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, an unsually enlightened Saudi prince said at the opening of a conference,” according to an AP report.
Saudi Arabia remains in the third world in terms of poverty even though its oil revenues provide a per capita GDP much higher than that in, say, Texas. The private owners of the oil wealth distribute it among the royal family members (19,000) while the population of Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, equals that of Texas (23 million).
“The very production of oil," says an AP report, "in otherwise underdeveloped societies often skews the local economy -- funneling vast wealth to a few and thus intensifying the preexisting antagonism between the haves and the have-nots.”
While Durkheim’s last three motives abound in the Middle East, fundamentalist religion adds a fanatic ‘altruistic’ motive to the mix, creating an apocalyptic cocktail in some Islamic societies.
In Muslim countries we find the suicide bomber for whom all four of Durkheim’s motives seem to work simultaneously.
National Public Radio reporter, Christopher Joyce, quotes a Palestinian psychiatrist as saying, “most of them [suicide bombers] are very nice, timid, introvert, have had a problem with power in their childhood, …personal experience with serious traumatic events in their lives…witnessing the helplessness of their fathers.” Joyce notes that terrorists groups use religious rites to create a sort of ritual bonding among bombers.
In USA Today, reporter Jack Kelley characterized suicide bombers from Jordan as young, sexually frustrated and “frustrated by the economic and political duress...”
Muslims are alienated and detached from their culture if they do not participate in mosques. Families sometimes support martyrdom as a successful fulfillment of the faith.
Thus, by altruistic martyrdom, terrorists win in many ways: they fulfill a perceived benefit for the entire community, gratify their own eternal salvation as well as sexual satisfaction with the promised 72 virgins they expect to meet in heaven--something the Prophet Muhammad promised after the Battle of Badr in the 7th century.
They find revenge in the injustices that they believe the infidels caused throughout history, such as American military presence, or European colonization. They attain notoriety in their community, all great improvements from their desperate poverty.
A defensive Jihad is legitimate and, for many, it is the duty of every Muslim when infidels encroach upon the Islamic territories, as the 7th century fundamentalist Khawarijites emphasized in the convoluted, confusing verses of the Koran.
In the Middle East, Muslim cultures often create all four of Durkheim’s motives simultaneously. Iniquitous distribution of wealth causing frequent high rates of unemployment, coupled with fundamentalist schools, these elements alone create a culture that encourages suicide bombing and aggression against any Western, infidel intrusion into Islamic territories.
In fact many people in the regions of Saudi Arabia hold burning resentment against the tyrannical monarchy which the US supports and defends for their petroleum partnership. In many ways, it's easier to attack the US or Europe than to attack a well fortified small group of Arab royalty.
Terrorism is a tactic of guerrilla warfare. It's a stateless enemy of insurent revolt against a tyranny. As we now well know, it has nothing to do with a nation like Iraq. Only after the US invasion did suicide bombing become especially widespread and kamikaze in style.
Peaceful Solutions
Through its fundamentalism, some Muslim cultures tend to intensify all of Durkheim’s motives for suicide to create the Muslim martyrs. By understanding the suicide bomber’s motives, economic, social, and religious, we learn its causes. By looking closely at the causes, we gain insight into how to eliminate them in order to solve the problem at its roots in a peaceful way.
Until now, the U.S. has supported oppressive, fascist regimes in its “client states” of the Middle East. We must change this economic and political situation in order to eliminate the terrorist’s martyrdom.
Though changing the economic and policital situation is no simple task. It's run by elite owners of wealth and vested power.
We can also take lessons from these causes for suicide as reasons for the high levels of suicide and crime within our own country.
In the Old Testament, Samson committed an act of suicide terrorism when he brought down the Philistine temple and killed thousands of his oppressors. He was in an extremely helpless situation.
In the New Testament, Christ, along with thousands of other Jews, willingly went into a martyr’s crucifixion as a form of defiance against the Roman Empire’s oppression. They had few alternatives. Likewise, in the Middle East, economic and social despair lead people to this terrorist’s martyrdom because they are left without even a glimmer of hope to live with dignity and respect.
The more than four suicide bombings just last Monday to mark Cheney's visit to Iraq, keep this question alive every day we walk down the street. A woman entered a mosque in Karbala, killing dozens and wounding another hundred. What drove her to this?
When Mahmoud Marmash, a young bachelor, blew himself up near Tel Aviv, in 2001, he took several Jews with him, perhaps to the same afterworld, or maybe not. “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians.” From a poor community-- he grew up where many people despair in poverty and hopelessness-- Mahmoud’s act is difficult for many of us to understand. We wonder what would push a person to such extremes?
An examination of suicide, though, uncovers that politically-based suicide is nothing new. It appears more than seven times in the Old Testament. Remember Samson in Judges 16:29-30? As an escape from the despair of Roman oppression, martyrdom is common in the New Testament.
Many of the same motivations for political suicide drive other types of suicide victims. Most infamously, many “experts” on TV News discussed the case of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, as a well-established professional with a doctorate in architecture.
What most people fail to mention is that he never fit into the German culture where he studied and thus, lonely, frequented a mosque that indoctrinated him to fundamentalism of an extreme flavor. Like most such suicide cases, Atta was alienated and woefully under- or un-employed most of the time.
Contrary to many current assertions, a careful gander into this subject teaches us that the suicide bomber draws motivation from the same wellspring as other types of suicide victims.
As civilized people, we should be able to do much better than the Bush-Cheney approach: throw our hands up and say, "Nothing to do but kill them all. "Bomb the hell out of the entire Middle East! That'll fix it. Sweep it all up." The last sentence is an actual quote by Rumsfield.
Little wonder that terrorism has only increased greatly since the US Supreme Court elected the neocons into the Executive Branch.
We can diagnose this sickness and identify its causes in order to reduce them, and thus avoid so much violence.
Suicide at the Foundation of Sociology
In the early 20th century, sociologist, Emile Durkheim studied and categorized the reasons for suicide. Emile Durkheim lived during the peak of the industrial revolution, what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, when wealth was extremely concentrated among the ownership class and labor movements incited violent riots, including terrorist bombings.
This was a time of great social and economic upheaval. Perhaps this explains both Durkheim’s theories of suicide and his interest in the subject. After careful analysis, Durkheim found it was the individual’s bonding to society that could determine whether or not he was likely to commit suicide, and he described four different types of these bonds:
Altruistic: Durkheim explained that too much social integration leads to self-sacrifice for society, patriotism, honor; the altruist, such as the WWII kamikaze pilots, commits himself to a goal beyond himself and considers this world an obstacle and burden.
Egotism: Too little social integration leads to alienation, loneliness; the egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose.
Anomic: Whenever an economy is not regulated enough, conditions such as unemployment or iniquitous distribution of wealth arise. Unlike the Neoconservative's preference for Milton Friedman's unbrindled "free market economy," Durkheim believed that it is the role of society to regulate the economy, and he sees a relationship between a society’s suicide rate and the way it performs this important regulative function.
Fatalistic: When society sets economic expectations too high, individuals who fail to meet these standards can lose all sense of self-worth.
Cultural beliefs can directly influence each of these types of suicide. Durkheim’s last three types of suicide seem to apply variously to most any culture, including American society.
Suicide in America
America’s culture and economic system often creates huge financial inequities and hardships leading to suicides. In volume of suicides, the U.S. ranks among the top forty among all countries in the world and 9th among industrialized countries.
Why would the so-called "wealthiest country in the world” rank so high above most third world countries?
The vicissitudes of America’s economy leave a vast majority of individuals to despair from unemployment and iniquitous distribution of wealth. In such situations, individuals are exposed to at least two of Durkheim’s motives for suicide: anomic and fatalistic.
Studies in the U.S. during the 1980’s found that every one percent increase in unemployment related to suicide increases of 360 per year. The U.S. offers hardly any social infrastructure to the unemployed. This often leads to the anomic and fatalistic suicide motives, as well as higher rates of crime and gang activity.
At the same time, consumer advertising promotes the expectations that everyone can take a piece of the pie if they work hard and "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." When a culture raises expectations high and some individuals do not prosper, hopelessness can overtake even the brightest individual, including the soldiers returning from extended combat missions, struggling to readapt to civilian life.
Sometimes our own political leaders contribute to the feelings of economic disparity. G.W. Bush’s administration recently promoted the U.S. as the beacon of free-market prosperity, a privileged nation, God-chosen to spread democratic wealth.
Bush used this image, as his most frequent among many ploys, to justify the preemptive attack in Iraq. However, compared to the world’s democratic nations, the U.S. currently grows one of the largest gaps between rich and poor: one percent of the population relishes in 40 percent of the wealth while 50 percent of the population struggles with 3 percent of the wealth.
The poor get poorer, the rich, richer. Fatalistic despair and broken expectations increase among those who fall behind, while the winners in the economic cycles sometimes suffer the emptiness of their egotistic drives to success. These economic gaps intensify the social hardships and represent causes for suicide in America, Durkheim’s last three motives: anomic, fatalistic, and egotistic.
Internationally, the U.S. government commands enormous influence over countries whose regimes it protects through military support. We call such countries “client states” such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait...and so on.
In these countries, the U.S. supports autocratic rulers, such as the former shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the Royal Family of Saud, and even the early years of Saddam Hussein--before he made his fatal decision to nationalize Iraqi oil--among others. These autocratic states maintain much higher levels of economic gaps between the ruling elite and the working classes than those in the U.S.
The tough, autocratic Islamic cultures exacerbate the gap between the wealthy ownership class, such as the Royal Family of Saud, and the poor. They create environments of great social, economic, and political crisis. They push some groups to extreme behavior such as suicide bombing. This explains why 15 of the 19 highjackers of 9/11 were Saudi.
This crisis was long in the making through Muslim social and economic failures over generations. The list of humiliations goes on today through American military dominance in Muslim territories and unconditional support for Israel, not to mention decades of European colonization breaking up the Ottoman Empire.
The Middle East -- A Hotbed of Suicide Bombers
In many Muslim countries, unemployment runs high and the wealth generated by oil revenues trickles down like water in the Sinai. “Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, an unsually enlightened Saudi prince said at the opening of a conference,” according to an AP report.
Saudi Arabia remains in the third world in terms of poverty even though its oil revenues provide a per capita GDP much higher than that in, say, Texas. The private owners of the oil wealth distribute it among the royal family members (19,000) while the population of Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, equals that of Texas (23 million).
“The very production of oil," says an AP report, "in otherwise underdeveloped societies often skews the local economy -- funneling vast wealth to a few and thus intensifying the preexisting antagonism between the haves and the have-nots.”
While Durkheim’s last three motives abound in the Middle East, fundamentalist religion adds a fanatic ‘altruistic’ motive to the mix, creating an apocalyptic cocktail in some Islamic societies.
In Muslim countries we find the suicide bomber for whom all four of Durkheim’s motives seem to work simultaneously.
National Public Radio reporter, Christopher Joyce, quotes a Palestinian psychiatrist as saying, “most of them [suicide bombers] are very nice, timid, introvert, have had a problem with power in their childhood, …personal experience with serious traumatic events in their lives…witnessing the helplessness of their fathers.” Joyce notes that terrorists groups use religious rites to create a sort of ritual bonding among bombers.
In USA Today, reporter Jack Kelley characterized suicide bombers from Jordan as young, sexually frustrated and “frustrated by the economic and political duress...”
Muslims are alienated and detached from their culture if they do not participate in mosques. Families sometimes support martyrdom as a successful fulfillment of the faith.
Thus, by altruistic martyrdom, terrorists win in many ways: they fulfill a perceived benefit for the entire community, gratify their own eternal salvation as well as sexual satisfaction with the promised 72 virgins they expect to meet in heaven--something the Prophet Muhammad promised after the Battle of Badr in the 7th century.
They find revenge in the injustices that they believe the infidels caused throughout history, such as American military presence, or European colonization. They attain notoriety in their community, all great improvements from their desperate poverty.
A defensive Jihad is legitimate and, for many, it is the duty of every Muslim when infidels encroach upon the Islamic territories, as the 7th century fundamentalist Khawarijites emphasized in the convoluted, confusing verses of the Koran.
In the Middle East, Muslim cultures often create all four of Durkheim’s motives simultaneously. Iniquitous distribution of wealth causing frequent high rates of unemployment, coupled with fundamentalist schools, these elements alone create a culture that encourages suicide bombing and aggression against any Western, infidel intrusion into Islamic territories.
In fact many people in the regions of Saudi Arabia hold burning resentment against the tyrannical monarchy which the US supports and defends for their petroleum partnership. In many ways, it's easier to attack the US or Europe than to attack a well fortified small group of Arab royalty.
Terrorism is a tactic of guerrilla warfare. It's a stateless enemy of insurent revolt against a tyranny. As we now well know, it has nothing to do with a nation like Iraq. Only after the US invasion did suicide bombing become especially widespread and kamikaze in style.
Peaceful Solutions
Through its fundamentalism, some Muslim cultures tend to intensify all of Durkheim’s motives for suicide to create the Muslim martyrs. By understanding the suicide bomber’s motives, economic, social, and religious, we learn its causes. By looking closely at the causes, we gain insight into how to eliminate them in order to solve the problem at its roots in a peaceful way.
Until now, the U.S. has supported oppressive, fascist regimes in its “client states” of the Middle East. We must change this economic and political situation in order to eliminate the terrorist’s martyrdom.
Though changing the economic and policital situation is no simple task. It's run by elite owners of wealth and vested power.
We can also take lessons from these causes for suicide as reasons for the high levels of suicide and crime within our own country.
In the Old Testament, Samson committed an act of suicide terrorism when he brought down the Philistine temple and killed thousands of his oppressors. He was in an extremely helpless situation.
In the New Testament, Christ, along with thousands of other Jews, willingly went into a martyr’s crucifixion as a form of defiance against the Roman Empire’s oppression. They had few alternatives. Likewise, in the Middle East, economic and social despair lead people to this terrorist’s martyrdom because they are left without even a glimmer of hope to live with dignity and respect.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Stop Loss: Winter Soldier, Part III
Emotional numbness, flashbacks, nightmares…self-esteem evaporates, jail time, criminal charges, thoughts of suicide…suicide.
When soldiers die after combat, after discharge…after they’ve lived on the streets homeless or at home mindless…they are not counted as casualties. A hose, a rope around the neck and hanging from the garage rafters...a round in the head…needle in the arm. Combat doesn’t leave them until they can shut it off.
It happens especially in this war that has not a single moral footing. A veteran comes home and wonders, why? The question wanders around the soul, through the mind, and over and over again in the heart until the answer comes…in the offing.
Lumbering, slothful bureaucracy of healthcare stands silent, hands in pocket, for the veterans, the middle class, and the poor...the disposable.
Looking for the American Dream in all the wrong...
American patriots sign up to serve their country often because they want healthcare, financial support for a college education...to improve their civilian lives. The US government promises many benefits from military service but delivers much less. Once in, civilians lose their freedom and become warriors.
The government can force the 'all-volunteer, professional military' to stay in combat for extended tours. The stop loss law keeps them captive.
Winter Soldier Conference
We learn from the Winter Soldier Conference that the veterans who have been retained for more than three tours of duty, more than a third will suffer life-long emotional trauma at least, assuming they're not wounded physically.
A president declared a pre-emptive war based on a list of shameless, flagrant lies. Neither democrats nor republicans do a damn thing about it in neither Congress or in Senate. The Government has fallen deaf to realities, whored out to the corporate and the special interest group lobbyists.
Candidate John McCain supports the Iraqi occupation, even though the US does not admit officially to maintain imperial colonies. Nobody voted for that, nobody wants it, except certain parties.
Neither democrat nor republican candidate makes this criminal war a top priority in the campaign for the next presidential election.
Mainstream journalism is complicit now with W's Admin in controlling public opinion. The current issue of Newsweek's cover story: "While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights." Hooray for Petraeus...oops...another suicide bomb in a Karbala mosque today, dozens dead. At least four suicide bombs today...but who's counting?
Comatose Journalism USA
Mainstream media hardly covers the disgraceful and criminal acts of pre-emptive, imperial war and its effects.
The American people focus on what the media does cover: sex scandals, hot sophisticated call-girls in NY, and the rate of foreclosures...and even then, for the later, look at the symptoms of economic failure…but don’t touch the causes. W is all for bailing out the banks and to hell with the middle class families. Thank you.
The Washington Post as well as Pacifica and NPR radio covered Winter Soldier, yet the bulk of the mainstream journalism slipped away into the shadows once again.
The media sleeps on the job rather than cover stories of national and international importance. It slips into the shadows…some gang of hoodlums in the dark alleys of complacency…conspiracy. Did the corporations and the conservative, religious groups…the special interest groups…did they get to American journalists?
Who can buy the soul of America for a few million bucks? Corporations pay for advertisement on TV…on radio…not so much to peddle their products…”Boeing – Remembers those who served…the Proud and the Brave”….”Halliburton: Proud to Serve our Troops”…
The advertisements pay for the silence. American journalism took the weekend off to shop in the malls of America with their bonuses for behaving according to the new rules.
Defense Contractors
The fat defense contractors have bullion for their advertising campaigns…blood money. But the Veterans Admin doesn’t have a nickel…nothing to help the veterans of wars…Vietnam…Iraq…Afghanistan... That’s what we learned last weekend at the Winder Soldier Conference. Let's keep that shushed up…between you and me.
Meanwhile international journalists were there; they covered the event. Journalists from France, Spain, Germany…from all over Europe…they were there…from Japan…but hardly an American Journalist. It wasn’t news worthy for America…not a front page story…not even a story for the obituaries.
Patriots Testify
Mournful-faced and anxious, nerve-rattled veterans by the hundreds sat before an audience of several hundred last weekend in Silver Spring, Maryland and shared their war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jaded, hard-bitten, combat weathered military men spilled their guts out how they witnessed or participated in atrocities. Vetted US Warriors, one after another, told how they followed orders from the highest levels of command...following the ‘rules of engagement.’ The US occupation has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Let’s not talk about it…shush.
Tears puddled up around their shoes…soldiers told how they fired randomly on Iraqi vehicles...an apartment building filled with Iraqi families devastated by an American gunship. Some described gruesome…criminal…vicious acts of war…the wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Not a polite discussion topic…shush.
All stories streamed live to the IVAW Website. They draw conclusions from their experience on the ground: the occupation of Iraq is a losing policy no matter how long the US military stays there, no matter how many soldiers die there, no matter how much money.
Civilian Awareness?
The four-day event, featured “Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) sponsored the conference which drew more than 200 veterans of the two wars. Planned for the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war's start next week, the IVAW organizers hoped that the soldiers' accounts would spawn public awareness and opposition.
Like many other combat veterans, former Marine Jon Turner described episodes in which he and fellow Marines shot people out of fear or retribution. "I'm sorry for the hate and destruction I've inflicted upon innocent people," Turner said. "Until people hear about what is happening in this war, it will continue."
Reporting War Atrocities-An American Tradition
Winter Soldier continues the tradition after the well-known and controversial 1971 gathering of the same name at which Vietnam War veterans gathered to describe atrocities.
The 2008 Winter Soldier echoed many of the same war stories. This time, though, the Iraq War is no longer a war but an military occupation that the Iraqi citizens resent and fight.
Story after story, the veterans repeated how the Iraqi civilians feel their lives were much safer and better before the US invaded and continues to occupy their country.
The stories these veterans are telling slap cold reality on the Bush Admin's fear that the public might hear about them. W and his cronies do everything they can to hide the Americans who return from W's War with stories to tell.
Since the beginning, many first-hand combat stories have been published in books: The Deserter’s Tale, Generation Kill…
Don't Support Our Troops--Hide Them
The conference covers the virtual absence of any medical or post-service support for the troops from the Veterans Administration.
While our government pays defense contractors millions and billions of dollars to accomplish little or nothing at all, the Bush Admin prefers to sit on its hands rather than provide adequate care for veterans.
The continued occupation of Iraq benefits only the coffers of defense contractors while corpses rot under the Iraqi sun, and veterans are treated as disposable pawns.
When soldiers die after combat, after discharge…after they’ve lived on the streets homeless or at home mindless…they are not counted as casualties. A hose, a rope around the neck and hanging from the garage rafters...a round in the head…needle in the arm. Combat doesn’t leave them until they can shut it off.
It happens especially in this war that has not a single moral footing. A veteran comes home and wonders, why? The question wanders around the soul, through the mind, and over and over again in the heart until the answer comes…in the offing.
Lumbering, slothful bureaucracy of healthcare stands silent, hands in pocket, for the veterans, the middle class, and the poor...the disposable.
Looking for the American Dream in all the wrong...
American patriots sign up to serve their country often because they want healthcare, financial support for a college education...to improve their civilian lives. The US government promises many benefits from military service but delivers much less. Once in, civilians lose their freedom and become warriors.
The government can force the 'all-volunteer, professional military' to stay in combat for extended tours. The stop loss law keeps them captive.
Winter Soldier Conference
We learn from the Winter Soldier Conference that the veterans who have been retained for more than three tours of duty, more than a third will suffer life-long emotional trauma at least, assuming they're not wounded physically.
A president declared a pre-emptive war based on a list of shameless, flagrant lies. Neither democrats nor republicans do a damn thing about it in neither Congress or in Senate. The Government has fallen deaf to realities, whored out to the corporate and the special interest group lobbyists.
Candidate John McCain supports the Iraqi occupation, even though the US does not admit officially to maintain imperial colonies. Nobody voted for that, nobody wants it, except certain parties.
Neither democrat nor republican candidate makes this criminal war a top priority in the campaign for the next presidential election.
Mainstream journalism is complicit now with W's Admin in controlling public opinion. The current issue of Newsweek's cover story: "While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights." Hooray for Petraeus...oops...another suicide bomb in a Karbala mosque today, dozens dead. At least four suicide bombs today...but who's counting?
Comatose Journalism USA
Mainstream media hardly covers the disgraceful and criminal acts of pre-emptive, imperial war and its effects.
The American people focus on what the media does cover: sex scandals, hot sophisticated call-girls in NY, and the rate of foreclosures...and even then, for the later, look at the symptoms of economic failure…but don’t touch the causes. W is all for bailing out the banks and to hell with the middle class families. Thank you.
The Washington Post as well as Pacifica and NPR radio covered Winter Soldier, yet the bulk of the mainstream journalism slipped away into the shadows once again.
The media sleeps on the job rather than cover stories of national and international importance. It slips into the shadows…some gang of hoodlums in the dark alleys of complacency…conspiracy. Did the corporations and the conservative, religious groups…the special interest groups…did they get to American journalists?
Who can buy the soul of America for a few million bucks? Corporations pay for advertisement on TV…on radio…not so much to peddle their products…”Boeing – Remembers those who served…the Proud and the Brave”….”Halliburton: Proud to Serve our Troops”…
The advertisements pay for the silence. American journalism took the weekend off to shop in the malls of America with their bonuses for behaving according to the new rules.
Defense Contractors
The fat defense contractors have bullion for their advertising campaigns…blood money. But the Veterans Admin doesn’t have a nickel…nothing to help the veterans of wars…Vietnam…Iraq…Afghanistan... That’s what we learned last weekend at the Winder Soldier Conference. Let's keep that shushed up…between you and me.
Meanwhile international journalists were there; they covered the event. Journalists from France, Spain, Germany…from all over Europe…they were there…from Japan…but hardly an American Journalist. It wasn’t news worthy for America…not a front page story…not even a story for the obituaries.
Patriots Testify
Mournful-faced and anxious, nerve-rattled veterans by the hundreds sat before an audience of several hundred last weekend in Silver Spring, Maryland and shared their war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jaded, hard-bitten, combat weathered military men spilled their guts out how they witnessed or participated in atrocities. Vetted US Warriors, one after another, told how they followed orders from the highest levels of command...following the ‘rules of engagement.’ The US occupation has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Let’s not talk about it…shush.
Tears puddled up around their shoes…soldiers told how they fired randomly on Iraqi vehicles...an apartment building filled with Iraqi families devastated by an American gunship. Some described gruesome…criminal…vicious acts of war…the wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Not a polite discussion topic…shush.
All stories streamed live to the IVAW Website. They draw conclusions from their experience on the ground: the occupation of Iraq is a losing policy no matter how long the US military stays there, no matter how many soldiers die there, no matter how much money.
Civilian Awareness?
The four-day event, featured “Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) sponsored the conference which drew more than 200 veterans of the two wars. Planned for the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war's start next week, the IVAW organizers hoped that the soldiers' accounts would spawn public awareness and opposition.
Like many other combat veterans, former Marine Jon Turner described episodes in which he and fellow Marines shot people out of fear or retribution. "I'm sorry for the hate and destruction I've inflicted upon innocent people," Turner said. "Until people hear about what is happening in this war, it will continue."
Reporting War Atrocities-An American Tradition
Winter Soldier continues the tradition after the well-known and controversial 1971 gathering of the same name at which Vietnam War veterans gathered to describe atrocities.
The 2008 Winter Soldier echoed many of the same war stories. This time, though, the Iraq War is no longer a war but an military occupation that the Iraqi citizens resent and fight.
Story after story, the veterans repeated how the Iraqi civilians feel their lives were much safer and better before the US invaded and continues to occupy their country.
The stories these veterans are telling slap cold reality on the Bush Admin's fear that the public might hear about them. W and his cronies do everything they can to hide the Americans who return from W's War with stories to tell.
Since the beginning, many first-hand combat stories have been published in books: The Deserter’s Tale, Generation Kill…
Don't Support Our Troops--Hide Them
The conference covers the virtual absence of any medical or post-service support for the troops from the Veterans Administration.
While our government pays defense contractors millions and billions of dollars to accomplish little or nothing at all, the Bush Admin prefers to sit on its hands rather than provide adequate care for veterans.
The continued occupation of Iraq benefits only the coffers of defense contractors while corpses rot under the Iraqi sun, and veterans are treated as disposable pawns.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Mojave Winds -- A Big Success
I’m happy to talk about how the launch of Mojave Winds shows every sign of success. Since its launch with a national press release at the end of February 2008, Mojave Winds has attracted a consistent stream of visitors to the author’s website (www.markbiskeborn.com)
My website is hosted on a server equipped with refined statistics software. It shows me that people are extremely interested in the story, Mojave Winds.
Since 29 February, 9,000 to 12,000 people visit the website every day to learn more about the novel, Mojave Winds. Of these “hits,” people view several pages at the rate of more than 800 per day.
…and these numbers are climbing.
As of Saturday, 1 March, I began holding author signing events at bookstores. I am delighted to see how people come to the bookstores and eagerly buy my book. It is gratifying. So far I have sold all the copies that the bookstores pre-order for the events and I enjoying having to go out to the parking lot to fetch more copies of Mojave Winds from my own “inventory” to sell beyond the number ordered.
I enjoy holding author signings for Mojave Winds. Many people come to me and ask what the book is about. I explain, “It’s about a guy, Kris Klug, who comes back from the Iraq War…looking to readapt to civilian life…find a job…and to get past whatever post traumatic stress disorder he perceives from too many extended combat missions. He doesn’t have much family, so he relies on his Uncle Fred for a job in his trucking outfit hauling goods between Los Angeles and Las Vegas…”
I have so much fun talking with people and seeing how they become interested in the story. The time passes by quickly at the author signing events.
My website is hosted on a server equipped with refined statistics software. It shows me that people are extremely interested in the story, Mojave Winds.
Since 29 February, 9,000 to 12,000 people visit the website every day to learn more about the novel, Mojave Winds. Of these “hits,” people view several pages at the rate of more than 800 per day.
…and these numbers are climbing.
As of Saturday, 1 March, I began holding author signing events at bookstores. I am delighted to see how people come to the bookstores and eagerly buy my book. It is gratifying. So far I have sold all the copies that the bookstores pre-order for the events and I enjoying having to go out to the parking lot to fetch more copies of Mojave Winds from my own “inventory” to sell beyond the number ordered.
I enjoy holding author signings for Mojave Winds. Many people come to me and ask what the book is about. I explain, “It’s about a guy, Kris Klug, who comes back from the Iraq War…looking to readapt to civilian life…find a job…and to get past whatever post traumatic stress disorder he perceives from too many extended combat missions. He doesn’t have much family, so he relies on his Uncle Fred for a job in his trucking outfit hauling goods between Los Angeles and Las Vegas…”
I have so much fun talking with people and seeing how they become interested in the story. The time passes by quickly at the author signing events.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Scientology or Islam -- It's a toss up.
Who’s to say which religion is better than the next? Most often a person ends up following a particular religion by location. What are the chances that someone growing up in Afghanistan would attend a synagogue rather than a mosque? Would someone raised in Peru wager his chips for eternal life with anything but the Catholic Church?
In America it’s often considered shameful to criticize religion. We’re supposed to accept religions without question. Who would dare publically highlight the flaws in Judaism? Who scorns Evangelicals or Catholics? Mormons? What about those faithful to the Book of Mormon which Angel Moroni handed down to Joseph Smith as a revelation in 1830?
It’s widely assumed that we should reserve a special reverence and respect for religions, especially the mainstream, ol’time variety—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. We tiptoe around the so-called holy books—the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible. We don’t dare question organized religions as if they were prickly and prone to furious offence. For religious people we mentally construct some thick fortified wall and grant asylum to members of the faith, as if they’ve ascended a step higher than the rest of us mere mortals.
In the US, after Christians, the second largest group is secular. We don’t hear from this group because they’re not organized and, unlike the Christians and especially Jews, they don’t lobby or bribe politicians for special demands. Despite the fact that a huge portion of the American population doesn’t pray, we bend over backwards to accommodate those who do, especially the Christians. Hell, we’ve even begun to throw out scientific method in schools for the sake of “creationism”—some half baked “faith based” explanations about how the world was formed and how humans arrived on earth.
Meanwhile, we freely mock Scientology. We taunt the celebrities who’ve hitched their faith to Hubbard’s alter. It’s all over the news, stories about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and others who regularly attend the Church of Scientology.
Push aside whatever bias. It’s really a hip religion for our new world order. Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a pulp science fiction writer of the 40’s and 50’s. Scientologists claim to captivate 8 million members. Hubbard wrote the book of Dianetics which explains the process of ‘auditing’ or clearing the mind of ‘engrams,’ those mental reactions to traumatic events that obstruct a person’s life. In the process of erasing engrams, an individual reaches higher levels of ‘clarity,’ the highest level, measured as an 8. Hubbard’s E-meter, an electronic device, helps Ministers to measure a person’s progress toward higher Clarity. Depending on a person’s wealth, Hubbard’s Church expects donations in thousands of dollars for auditing its members and erasing their engrams.
Other more traditional and well established religions—the Abrahamic ones—found in synagogues, mosques, and churches, might expect smaller donations or tithes, but then, they only offer the standard and vague prayer, blessings, atonement, and sins.
Meanwhile Scientology provides rigorous auditing of engrams with the use of sophisticated electronic E-meters, and clearing services that enable self-realization.
In Scientology we learn a whole new creationism, an explanation for how the earth was created and how humans found their home here. According to Hubbard’s prophetic visions, Xenu reigned as dictator over the "Galactic Confederacy;" and 75 million years ago, he brought billions of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them using hydrogen bombs.
Scientology holds that the souls, or “thetans” of these aliens remained, and that to this day they gang up and attach themselves to human souls, causing us spiritual harm. The Scientology Church offers services to cleanse the souls of these aliens from us humans…for a reasonable price…uh…donation.
What’s so far-fetched about that? Consider the alternatives.
The first five books of the Old Testament—Book of Moses—come from the Jewish Torah. The Christians and Jews believe in the same God, though they differ greatly in understanding that God.
Likewise, Islam recognizes the Jewish and Christian holy books, prophets, Mother Mary, and most of the other biblical characters. In many ways the beautiful poetry of the Koran reads like a convoluted reference book to the Jewish and Christian holy books.
Newsflash: Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God, but they have one hell of a time agreeing on what God is or does. Even though they can’t agree on God within their own congregations, they’re often at each others’ throats to defend whatever vague idea they have about God.
Human history bathes in blood for the deadly attempt to defend the one and only portal to eternal life. Religion often calls for inner peace, though it’s packed with raging emotions as if many believers were a little insecure about their guaranteed portals to eternal life.
For centuries, we took it ‘on faith’ that Moses wrote the Book of Moses. Alas, faith often ignores reality. For centuries anyone who made that claim risked life and limb by the Catholic Church.
Yet, reading the book of Moses, we can find many anachronisms—things that Moses was supposed to have known but which didn’t exist in his time—domesticated camels and peoples, like the Philistines…
So, we have to ignore many facts as in history, in order to take things on faith. We have to accept blind ignorance for the sake of taking a nice story as the-word-of-God truth. Inconsistencies, anachronisms, and other such fallacies plague the holy books and beg for broad poetic license.
With low levels of literacy, many folks have to rely on one religion or another for hope in otherwise confused lives. In this way religion does serve some benefit in popular culture, a quick and ready-made explanation for the big questions.
Take the Koran. According to Islam, back in the 7th century Angel Gabriel whispered divine revelations into the Prophet Muhammad’s ear. Muhammad was illiterate but found good Arabic scribes to write down what Gabriel told him.
We also have to believe that Muhammad took an intense supernatural Night Journey, a mystical flight from the Kabbah, riding astride a winged animal, a Buraq, guided by Angel Gabriel. The beast delivered him to the former Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, where he met and held discussions with celebrities like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus who prayed with him. He rose to the highest limits of heaven where divine radiance touched him. Once there, Moses advised him that Muslims should pray five times per day. The trip placed Muhammad on an even footing with the other prophets, so, believing his story is much easier.
In light of these options, though, if I had fifty grand, I’d pay to take the celebrity fast-track ride to spiritual freedom with the Scientologists.
In America it’s often considered shameful to criticize religion. We’re supposed to accept religions without question. Who would dare publically highlight the flaws in Judaism? Who scorns Evangelicals or Catholics? Mormons? What about those faithful to the Book of Mormon which Angel Moroni handed down to Joseph Smith as a revelation in 1830?
It’s widely assumed that we should reserve a special reverence and respect for religions, especially the mainstream, ol’time variety—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. We tiptoe around the so-called holy books—the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible. We don’t dare question organized religions as if they were prickly and prone to furious offence. For religious people we mentally construct some thick fortified wall and grant asylum to members of the faith, as if they’ve ascended a step higher than the rest of us mere mortals.
In the US, after Christians, the second largest group is secular. We don’t hear from this group because they’re not organized and, unlike the Christians and especially Jews, they don’t lobby or bribe politicians for special demands. Despite the fact that a huge portion of the American population doesn’t pray, we bend over backwards to accommodate those who do, especially the Christians. Hell, we’ve even begun to throw out scientific method in schools for the sake of “creationism”—some half baked “faith based” explanations about how the world was formed and how humans arrived on earth.
Meanwhile, we freely mock Scientology. We taunt the celebrities who’ve hitched their faith to Hubbard’s alter. It’s all over the news, stories about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and others who regularly attend the Church of Scientology.
Push aside whatever bias. It’s really a hip religion for our new world order. Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a pulp science fiction writer of the 40’s and 50’s. Scientologists claim to captivate 8 million members. Hubbard wrote the book of Dianetics which explains the process of ‘auditing’ or clearing the mind of ‘engrams,’ those mental reactions to traumatic events that obstruct a person’s life. In the process of erasing engrams, an individual reaches higher levels of ‘clarity,’ the highest level, measured as an 8. Hubbard’s E-meter, an electronic device, helps Ministers to measure a person’s progress toward higher Clarity. Depending on a person’s wealth, Hubbard’s Church expects donations in thousands of dollars for auditing its members and erasing their engrams.
Other more traditional and well established religions—the Abrahamic ones—found in synagogues, mosques, and churches, might expect smaller donations or tithes, but then, they only offer the standard and vague prayer, blessings, atonement, and sins.
Meanwhile Scientology provides rigorous auditing of engrams with the use of sophisticated electronic E-meters, and clearing services that enable self-realization.
In Scientology we learn a whole new creationism, an explanation for how the earth was created and how humans found their home here. According to Hubbard’s prophetic visions, Xenu reigned as dictator over the "Galactic Confederacy;" and 75 million years ago, he brought billions of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them using hydrogen bombs.
Scientology holds that the souls, or “thetans” of these aliens remained, and that to this day they gang up and attach themselves to human souls, causing us spiritual harm. The Scientology Church offers services to cleanse the souls of these aliens from us humans…for a reasonable price…uh…donation.
What’s so far-fetched about that? Consider the alternatives.
The first five books of the Old Testament—Book of Moses—come from the Jewish Torah. The Christians and Jews believe in the same God, though they differ greatly in understanding that God.
Likewise, Islam recognizes the Jewish and Christian holy books, prophets, Mother Mary, and most of the other biblical characters. In many ways the beautiful poetry of the Koran reads like a convoluted reference book to the Jewish and Christian holy books.
Newsflash: Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God, but they have one hell of a time agreeing on what God is or does. Even though they can’t agree on God within their own congregations, they’re often at each others’ throats to defend whatever vague idea they have about God.
Human history bathes in blood for the deadly attempt to defend the one and only portal to eternal life. Religion often calls for inner peace, though it’s packed with raging emotions as if many believers were a little insecure about their guaranteed portals to eternal life.
For centuries, we took it ‘on faith’ that Moses wrote the Book of Moses. Alas, faith often ignores reality. For centuries anyone who made that claim risked life and limb by the Catholic Church.
Yet, reading the book of Moses, we can find many anachronisms—things that Moses was supposed to have known but which didn’t exist in his time—domesticated camels and peoples, like the Philistines…
So, we have to ignore many facts as in history, in order to take things on faith. We have to accept blind ignorance for the sake of taking a nice story as the-word-of-God truth. Inconsistencies, anachronisms, and other such fallacies plague the holy books and beg for broad poetic license.
With low levels of literacy, many folks have to rely on one religion or another for hope in otherwise confused lives. In this way religion does serve some benefit in popular culture, a quick and ready-made explanation for the big questions.
Take the Koran. According to Islam, back in the 7th century Angel Gabriel whispered divine revelations into the Prophet Muhammad’s ear. Muhammad was illiterate but found good Arabic scribes to write down what Gabriel told him.
We also have to believe that Muhammad took an intense supernatural Night Journey, a mystical flight from the Kabbah, riding astride a winged animal, a Buraq, guided by Angel Gabriel. The beast delivered him to the former Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, where he met and held discussions with celebrities like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus who prayed with him. He rose to the highest limits of heaven where divine radiance touched him. Once there, Moses advised him that Muslims should pray five times per day. The trip placed Muhammad on an even footing with the other prophets, so, believing his story is much easier.
In light of these options, though, if I had fifty grand, I’d pay to take the celebrity fast-track ride to spiritual freedom with the Scientologists.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Book Review: Blackwater
The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, Avalon Publ. Group, New York, NY; 452 pp., 2007
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
In his new book, Jeremy Scahill traces the explosive growth of Blackwater, USA, a private and secretive mercenary company based in the backwaters of North Carolina. Scahill writes that “in less than a decade [Blackwater] has risen out of the swamp in North Carolina to become something of a Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called war on terror."
By following the mercs’ (mercenaries) missions, Scahill takes us on a tour of some of the most outrageous policy blunders in the occupation of Iraq. Based on every aspect of this so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom, from policy, planning, strategy, and daily tactics, this has everything to do about colonization for economic gains, and very little about liberating the citizens.
In the Introduction, Scahill reminds us of President Eisenhower’s famous and prophetic farewell speech in 1961 about the perils of the American industrial-military complex:
The operative phrase in Eisenhower’s speech: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. The popular vote in 2000 resulted in a win for Al Gore. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of Bush because he won in the electorate college. By 2004, with tanks rolling through Baghdad, the popular vote did what it has always done during wartime, it voted for “staying the course.” History has proven for many presidents that military conflict guarantees staying power for the second term. Whether or not the American citizenry passed the test of alert and knowledgeable, remains for debate.
Scahill argues that the Bush administration has given us a new America, one in which misplaced power rose to excess, one in which the huge industrial and military machinery degenerated into disastrous abuse.
According to Scahill, Blackwater has:
• an international branch, Greystone, in Barbados for tax-exempt status
• more than 2,300 soldiers deployed in nine countries
• a database of 21,000 special forces troops and retired police that it could deploy at a moment's notice
• a private fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships
• 7000-acre headquarters—the world’s largest private military facility
• new facilities in California, Illinois, and a jungle training facility in the Philippines
• training for tens of thousands of law enforcement officials a year from the U.S. and other nations
• over $500 million in government contracts – and that does not include “black budget” operations for U.S. intelligence agencies or contracts with private corporations or foreign governments
• U.S. government “cost-plus” contracts: the more they spend, the more they profit—leading to abuse and inefficiency
• Capability to overthrow many of the world’s governments
Theocratic Military Power
“Blackwater is a private army,” Scahill writes, “and it is controlled by one person: Erik Prince, a radical right-wing mega-millionaire who has served as a bankroller not only of President Bush’s campaigns but of the broader Christian right agenda.”
Erik Prince’s father Edgar played a major role in creating and funding many right wing Christian political movements, such as James Dobson’s Family Research Council.
Scahill calls this a “theocratic movement” which motivates the rise of mercenary corporations like Blackwater which was founded in the mid-1990s. And only during the theocratic based Bush administration did it win the contracts that exploded its growth.
Many on the Christian right considered the newly elected Clinton administration illegitimate. First Things, a journal that Scahill calls “the main organ of the theocratic movement,” published a special issue entitled The End of Democracy, which featured essays that predicted a civil war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government. Erik Prince’s close friend, former Watergate conspirator turned Christian fascist, Charles Colson, wrote in the issue, “A showdown between church and state is inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”
Fallujah
Immediately after 9/11 Blackwater landed a $5.4 million contract to provide 20 security guards for the CIA’s Kabul station. But a big break for the company came when it landed a $27 million contract for providing security for Paul Bremer, who was in charge of running the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The senior U.S. official in Iraq and the public face of the occupation, Bremer would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but by Blackwater.
Blackwater soldiers sent to guard Bremer:
Blackwater USA Corporation first came to public attention on 31 March 2004 when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. People in the city dragged the bodies through the streets, burned them, and strung two of the mercenaries over the bridge over the Euphrates River.
The press portrayed the incident as an Iraqi mob irrationally attacking “contractors”—not armed mercenaries—who were helping to rebuild Iraq. The headline in the Chicago Tribune read, “Iraqi Mob Mutilates Four American Civilians.” Scahill reveals the true situation in Fallujah before the attack on the Blackwater soldiers.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Fallujah had been the site of a major massacre when a “precision bomb” hit a densely populated area smashing through a market and apartment complex killing over 130 civilians. After U.S. troops occupied the city in 2003, U.S. troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration killing 13 and wounding 75.
The attack on the mercenaries was used as a pretext, quite possibly a staged bait, to launch a massive assault on Fallujah delivering a horrific collective punishment to the whole city.
Thousands of U.S. troops invaded the city, 1000- and 2000-pound bombs were dropped, and hospitals were closed so those injured could not get medical aid. Over 800 people died in the U.S. attack and tens of thousands were forced to flee.
A reporter from Al Jazeera wrote, “I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children…These were scenes that were unbelievable unimaginable. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph while I was at the same time crying.”
And at the time, President Bush told U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to destroy Al Jazeera by bombing it. “He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere.”
Above All Laws
Mercs from Titan and CACI—two other mercenary businesses like Blackwater—were involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. According to a class action suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Titan and CACI conspired with U.S. officials to “humiliate, torture and abuse persons” to win more contracts for their “interrogation services.” Despite the hot spotlight on these corporations, business continued to bustle.
None of these military contractors has been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq. In fact the contractors operate outside the law, completely immune from prosecution. One of Paul Bremer’s last official acts before leaving Iraq was to sign Order #17, that “contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of any Contract to sub-contract thereto.”
In addition, until very recently, contractors have been immune from military law that governs U.S. troops. Blackwater also claims that it is immune to civil suits filed in U.S. courts, because it is part of the U.S.’s “total force” in Iraq. The mercs can have it both ways, literally above all laws both civil and military.
In late 2006 Congress added an amendment to a Defense Department spending bill that said that contractors could now be prosecuted by the military. No charges have filed. If its mercs were brought in front of military tribunals, Blackwater would likely challenge the right of the military to prosecute them.
Merc Contractors Making a Killing
By the time Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006, the ratio of active-duty U.S. soldiers to private contractors deployed in Iraq had reached just under one to one, a statistic unprecedented in modern warfare.
The reasons for this huge change in the use of non-government military are numerous. As a seemingly purposeless, goalless war, few men are willing to sign up, volunteer for the low paying job as a grunt. On the other hand, mercs received up to four or five times the salary of U.S. soldiers. In this war, patriotism no longer drives most warriors.
And a draft would be out of the question as a means to conscript a new crop of men willing to serve…the country…Bush’s own war… A draft would rouse a new antiwar movement that would make the 1960’s look like a small rally.
The Vietnam War grew over the course of many years from the days of French colonialism to a gradual U.S. involvement through a series of policies of several U.S. Presidents.
The war in Iraq is unique. Bush junior, a single man, is responsible for the decision to go to war. He pushed for his own war by lying to the U.S. public. He pushed the ratification for the war through a Republican Congress. He lied about the WMD’s, which the UN inspectors never found long before the invasion; he lied in a long string of justifications for going to war.
When Rumsfeld left his office, President Bush did make one very truthful statement thus far in his Presidency: Rumsfeld made the “most sweeping transformation of American’s global force posture since the end of World War II.”
Unfortunately, Bush’s words may now mean something very different than what he may have thought he tried to say.
The U.S. military has been ground down to exhaustion, many a retired General has testified to this, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said in 2006, “the active Army is about broken.”
The uses of a army for hire offer many possibilities for humanitarian peacekeeping missions. Corporations like Blackwater could serve as a quick and easy solution to deploying units of military professionals to “solve problems” such as deterring the sorts of killings we see in Africa or coup d’etats in places like Haiti.
On the other hand, many questions arise:
• Who controls these private armies?
• To what are these private armies loyal? The U.S. Constitution? The al-Saudi Royal family? Or just the highest bidder in contracts to kill?
• Once such a private army gains real military might, what are the limits?
• What prevents a Blackwater from raiding the Pentagon on a Thursday morning?
• Blackwater is an example of a military run by an extremely right-wing Christian fundamentalist group. What if they decide that their ideology should be the only way to live for all of America…or some other nation for that matter?
• What’s to stop private corporations like Chevron or ExxonMobile from hiring a Blackwater brigade to take back the oil fields in Nigeria which they believe belong to them?
As we see in the case of Fallujah, Blackwater may very well have instigated the insurgency. Who was there to stop it? Who was there to deter it? Or was it a paid-for mission? Was it a “strategy” drawn up in a back office of theocratic, neoconservative political leaders?
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, Avalon Publ. Group, New York, NY; 452 pp., 2007
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
In his new book, Jeremy Scahill traces the explosive growth of Blackwater, USA, a private and secretive mercenary company based in the backwaters of North Carolina. Scahill writes that “in less than a decade [Blackwater] has risen out of the swamp in North Carolina to become something of a Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called war on terror."
By following the mercs’ (mercenaries) missions, Scahill takes us on a tour of some of the most outrageous policy blunders in the occupation of Iraq. Based on every aspect of this so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom, from policy, planning, strategy, and daily tactics, this has everything to do about colonization for economic gains, and very little about liberating the citizens.
In the Introduction, Scahill reminds us of President Eisenhower’s famous and prophetic farewell speech in 1961 about the perils of the American industrial-military complex:
”The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
The operative phrase in Eisenhower’s speech: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. The popular vote in 2000 resulted in a win for Al Gore. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of Bush because he won in the electorate college. By 2004, with tanks rolling through Baghdad, the popular vote did what it has always done during wartime, it voted for “staying the course.” History has proven for many presidents that military conflict guarantees staying power for the second term. Whether or not the American citizenry passed the test of alert and knowledgeable, remains for debate.
Scahill argues that the Bush administration has given us a new America, one in which misplaced power rose to excess, one in which the huge industrial and military machinery degenerated into disastrous abuse.
”What has unfolded…particularly in the Bush administration is nothing less than the very scenario Eisenhower darkly prophesied.”
According to Scahill, Blackwater has:
• an international branch, Greystone, in Barbados for tax-exempt status
• more than 2,300 soldiers deployed in nine countries
• a database of 21,000 special forces troops and retired police that it could deploy at a moment's notice
• a private fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships
• 7000-acre headquarters—the world’s largest private military facility
• new facilities in California, Illinois, and a jungle training facility in the Philippines
• training for tens of thousands of law enforcement officials a year from the U.S. and other nations
• over $500 million in government contracts – and that does not include “black budget” operations for U.S. intelligence agencies or contracts with private corporations or foreign governments
• U.S. government “cost-plus” contracts: the more they spend, the more they profit—leading to abuse and inefficiency
• Capability to overthrow many of the world’s governments
Theocratic Military Power
“Blackwater is a private army,” Scahill writes, “and it is controlled by one person: Erik Prince, a radical right-wing mega-millionaire who has served as a bankroller not only of President Bush’s campaigns but of the broader Christian right agenda.”
Erik Prince’s father Edgar played a major role in creating and funding many right wing Christian political movements, such as James Dobson’s Family Research Council.
“Erik Prince has been in the thick of the right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as sort of armed wing of the movement. Prince says ‘Everybody carries guns, just like the Prophet Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.’”
Scahill calls this a “theocratic movement” which motivates the rise of mercenary corporations like Blackwater which was founded in the mid-1990s. And only during the theocratic based Bush administration did it win the contracts that exploded its growth.
Many on the Christian right considered the newly elected Clinton administration illegitimate. First Things, a journal that Scahill calls “the main organ of the theocratic movement,” published a special issue entitled The End of Democracy, which featured essays that predicted a civil war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government. Erik Prince’s close friend, former Watergate conspirator turned Christian fascist, Charles Colson, wrote in the issue, “A showdown between church and state is inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”
Fallujah
Immediately after 9/11 Blackwater landed a $5.4 million contract to provide 20 security guards for the CIA’s Kabul station. But a big break for the company came when it landed a $27 million contract for providing security for Paul Bremer, who was in charge of running the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The senior U.S. official in Iraq and the public face of the occupation, Bremer would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but by Blackwater.
Blackwater soldiers sent to guard Bremer:
“embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tackey wrap-around sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater t-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the crosshairs, sleeves rolled up…Their haircuts were short and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists, ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy”
Blackwater USA Corporation first came to public attention on 31 March 2004 when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. People in the city dragged the bodies through the streets, burned them, and strung two of the mercenaries over the bridge over the Euphrates River.
The press portrayed the incident as an Iraqi mob irrationally attacking “contractors”—not armed mercenaries—who were helping to rebuild Iraq. The headline in the Chicago Tribune read, “Iraqi Mob Mutilates Four American Civilians.” Scahill reveals the true situation in Fallujah before the attack on the Blackwater soldiers.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Fallujah had been the site of a major massacre when a “precision bomb” hit a densely populated area smashing through a market and apartment complex killing over 130 civilians. After U.S. troops occupied the city in 2003, U.S. troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration killing 13 and wounding 75.
The attack on the mercenaries was used as a pretext, quite possibly a staged bait, to launch a massive assault on Fallujah delivering a horrific collective punishment to the whole city.
Thousands of U.S. troops invaded the city, 1000- and 2000-pound bombs were dropped, and hospitals were closed so those injured could not get medical aid. Over 800 people died in the U.S. attack and tens of thousands were forced to flee.
A reporter from Al Jazeera wrote, “I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children…These were scenes that were unbelievable unimaginable. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph while I was at the same time crying.”
And at the time, President Bush told U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to destroy Al Jazeera by bombing it. “He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere.”
Above All Laws
Mercs from Titan and CACI—two other mercenary businesses like Blackwater—were involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. According to a class action suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Titan and CACI conspired with U.S. officials to “humiliate, torture and abuse persons” to win more contracts for their “interrogation services.” Despite the hot spotlight on these corporations, business continued to bustle.
None of these military contractors has been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq. In fact the contractors operate outside the law, completely immune from prosecution. One of Paul Bremer’s last official acts before leaving Iraq was to sign Order #17, that “contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of any Contract to sub-contract thereto.”
In addition, until very recently, contractors have been immune from military law that governs U.S. troops. Blackwater also claims that it is immune to civil suits filed in U.S. courts, because it is part of the U.S.’s “total force” in Iraq. The mercs can have it both ways, literally above all laws both civil and military.
In late 2006 Congress added an amendment to a Defense Department spending bill that said that contractors could now be prosecuted by the military. No charges have filed. If its mercs were brought in front of military tribunals, Blackwater would likely challenge the right of the military to prosecute them.
Merc Contractors Making a Killing
By the time Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006, the ratio of active-duty U.S. soldiers to private contractors deployed in Iraq had reached just under one to one, a statistic unprecedented in modern warfare.
The reasons for this huge change in the use of non-government military are numerous. As a seemingly purposeless, goalless war, few men are willing to sign up, volunteer for the low paying job as a grunt. On the other hand, mercs received up to four or five times the salary of U.S. soldiers. In this war, patriotism no longer drives most warriors.
And a draft would be out of the question as a means to conscript a new crop of men willing to serve…the country…Bush’s own war… A draft would rouse a new antiwar movement that would make the 1960’s look like a small rally.
The Vietnam War grew over the course of many years from the days of French colonialism to a gradual U.S. involvement through a series of policies of several U.S. Presidents.
The war in Iraq is unique. Bush junior, a single man, is responsible for the decision to go to war. He pushed for his own war by lying to the U.S. public. He pushed the ratification for the war through a Republican Congress. He lied about the WMD’s, which the UN inspectors never found long before the invasion; he lied in a long string of justifications for going to war.
When Rumsfeld left his office, President Bush did make one very truthful statement thus far in his Presidency: Rumsfeld made the “most sweeping transformation of American’s global force posture since the end of World War II.”
Unfortunately, Bush’s words may now mean something very different than what he may have thought he tried to say.
The U.S. military has been ground down to exhaustion, many a retired General has testified to this, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said in 2006, “the active Army is about broken.”
“While Blackwater executives may have initially set their sights high in aiming to be a wind of the military—like the Marines or the Army—now, reeling from its successes, the company is no longer content to be subordinate to the United States. While it still maintains its plege of loyalty and patriotism, Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force, albeit one accountable to Blackwater’s owners rather than member nations.”
The uses of a army for hire offer many possibilities for humanitarian peacekeeping missions. Corporations like Blackwater could serve as a quick and easy solution to deploying units of military professionals to “solve problems” such as deterring the sorts of killings we see in Africa or coup d’etats in places like Haiti.
On the other hand, many questions arise:
• Who controls these private armies?
• To what are these private armies loyal? The U.S. Constitution? The al-Saudi Royal family? Or just the highest bidder in contracts to kill?
• Once such a private army gains real military might, what are the limits?
• What prevents a Blackwater from raiding the Pentagon on a Thursday morning?
• Blackwater is an example of a military run by an extremely right-wing Christian fundamentalist group. What if they decide that their ideology should be the only way to live for all of America…or some other nation for that matter?
• What’s to stop private corporations like Chevron or ExxonMobile from hiring a Blackwater brigade to take back the oil fields in Nigeria which they believe belong to them?
As we see in the case of Fallujah, Blackwater may very well have instigated the insurgency. Who was there to stop it? Who was there to deter it? Or was it a paid-for mission? Was it a “strategy” drawn up in a back office of theocratic, neoconservative political leaders?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)