We are all human, and in the sea of sorrow at the suffering that occurred in Paris on Friday 13th. November, it is difficult to focus on the bigger picture, we are overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of the dead, wounded and traumatised. We feel it greater because of the close proximity, we feel less for similar suffering far away, Iraq for example, but it is a small world. The traumatised, weeping parents, family and friends is repeated across the Middle East on a daily basis, but our mainstream media doesn't cover it in the same manner.
I don't believe "evil",( a word I detest) pops out of a bottle from nowhere, it usually has a history, a birth somewhere in the past. Short term memory will never solve the problem, we have to look a lot deeper into the past, the seeds were sown somewhere at some point.
I found the article, For the World to Live, "Europe" Must Die. by Russell Means, brings clarity to this whole question of violence, placing it firmly in an historical context.
“The only possible opening for a statement like this is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate thinking": what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” -- Russell Means (in a 1980 speech)
The following are two rather large quotes from his article, however, the whole article is well worth the time it takes to read.
And a little further on:
The deaths of hundreds of people in a third world country evidently do not send the world’s press into high alert. In fact, while 500,000 Iraq children died [UNICEF figure] as a result of U.S. bombing of Iraq’s power generation, water purification and sewage processing infrastructure compounded by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions/embargoes of essential food and medical supplies to Iraq, it was given coverage but not the sort of frantic coverage given by ‘terrorist attacks’ in the U.S., Britain, Spain and most recently France. It is hard NOT to compare this lack of empathy to third world citizens to the cultural genocide inflicted on indigenous peoples of North America by European colonizers.
The attention given to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, that Means and Churchill refer to as; ... ‘some people pushing back’, and, ... ‘chickens coming home to roost’, .. are treated as one-offs, and are not viewed by the Western press or Western leaders as part of a ongoing conflict that began with 15th century European colonization. Instead, they are portrayed as coming out of nowhere for 'no reason' [why would anyone attack innocent others?] as if they are pre-shocks that warn of an imminent Armageddon.
In the wake of the attacks in France, yesterday, Barack Obama’s comment was;
Once again we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. This is an attack, not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and universal values that we share.”
‘Once again’, ... we see Western world leaders pull out the binary ‘good versus evil’ framing, characterizing the colonizing powers and their supporters as ‘good’ and ‘innocent’ and as ‘victims’, ... while those people ‘pushing back’ are characterized in this binary framing, as ‘evil’ and ‘guilty’ and as ‘offenders’.
Few people can help but think about themselves and their own families undergoing such horror, whether watching helplessly as their children die in the terrible conditions in Iraq arising from infrastructure bombings and embargoes, or whether slaughtered quickly and suddenly in shootings and bombings in Paris restaurants and concert halls.
Strife is inevitable and war is hell, but pulling out this logical and moral reference framing, which Nietzsche euphemistically terms ‘a great stupidity’, amounts to such blatantly obvious denial that it can only amplify the radicalizing of some increasing fraction of the millions of those who ‘dream of pushing back’ but who, in the larger fraction, remain committed to less violent remedial paths.
Western leaders are ‘scientific thinkers’ and their discursive reasoning is based on logical assumptions adopted by science, such as;
“Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past.” — Poincare, ‘Origin of Mathematical Physics’
Such simplification, termed ‘economy of thought’ by philosophers of science, is very convenient when one has gained the position one now has through a program of global domination via colonization [military appropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples] and cultural genocide. It is a scientific concept reinforced by the Enlightenment European view of man as an ‘independent reason-driven being’, a ‘human being’ that is fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour.
So, look out, push back people, because the statute of limitations on prosecuting colonizer and sovereigntist atrocities expires before it starts, and where there is push-back, those who push back violently will be judged fully and solely responsible for ‘their evil and offensive behaviour’ against the ‘innocent colonizing powers and their innocent, victimized constituents’.
This essay is NOT aimed at justifying push-back retribution in Paris, New York, London, Madrid and elsewhere. There is no support in it for Western moral judgement based retributive justice. This essay is a commentary on the hypocrisy of Western leadership and the pathetic façade of holier-than-thou innocence coupled with sternly self-righteous commitments to ‘rid the world of evil’. The physical reality of our natural experience is NOT binary; i.e. if we are to be honest we must “embrace in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon” and thus connect the authorship of the push-back to colonizing powers who have been spring-loading the pushers-back for a long, long while.--------
Read the full article HERE:
Meanwhile, global media rushes to support the bald-faced political pitch of ‘good and evil’ on each eruption of push-back violence. Nevertheless, in the intervals, even mainstream media opinion-shapers such as BBC’s Adam Curtis are making documentaries such as ‘Bitter Lake’, advertised quote/unquote as; “How Western leaders' simplistic "good" vs. "evil" narrative has failed”, and how Western political leaders have come to recognize that the source of their power has shifted from rallying people onward and upward towards a Utopian society, to defending people against a global decline and free-fall towards a horrific Dystopia.
What is unfolding is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s predictions. Nietzsche, in the 1890s, suggested that it would take two centuries for ‘Europe to die’ in the very same sense that Russell Means intends it; to suspend this ridiculous pretense of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ as binary realities; i.e. to restore intuition and harmony-seeking to their natural precedence over reason and morality.
He didn’t say how it would play out, exactly, other than that there would be “devaluation of the highest values”; i.e. ‘good and evil’ ‘truth and falsehood’, morality and reason.
Both are already looking pretty shabby on Friday, November 13th, 2015.
