Tag: General

  • I sat

    Reading about Bernardone and Thoreau
    Continuing Ed. about
    Seeing the tree within the forest
    Seeing the individual within humanity

    Listening to Denver
    Relearning about the inspiration
    Found within a landscape
    Reconnecting to the flora, fauna, and each other

    Remembering a temperature inversion and smog in Donora, PA
    And the Clean Air Act
    Remembering the Cuyahoga River fire
    And the EPA

    Thinking about the struggle for
    Peace, justice and equality
    On this universally obscure planet

    I stood up
    To walk paths well known to me
    I noticed changes and
    What has remained the same

    I thought

    Children of the Earth
    We are all one
    It is in our genes

    Celebrate the day
    Celebrate our existence
    Celebrate the Earth

    Paul Cech has been writing poetry since 1970. Several of his poems have been published as Saturday Poems in the Pittsburgh- Post Gazette and the Thomas Merton Center of Pittsburgh has published several of his poems in NewPeople. Read other articles by Paul.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Imagine this scenario:

    A month before the vote on the federal budget, progressives in Congress declared, “We’ve studied President Biden’s proposed $753 billion military budget, an increase of $13 billion from Trump’s already inflated budget, and we can’t, in good conscience, support this.”

    Now that would be a show stopper, particularly if they added, “So we have decided to stand united, arm in arm, as a block of NO votes on any federal budget resolution that fails to reduce military spending by 10-30 percent. We stand united against a federal budget resolution that includes upwards of $30 billion for new nuclear weapons slated to ultimately cost nearly $2 trillion. We stand united in demanding the $50 billion earmarked to maintain all 800 overseas bases, including the new one under construction in Henoko, Okinawa, be reduced by a third because it’s time we scaled back on plans for global domination.”

    “Ditto,” they say, “for the billions the President wants for the arms-escalating US Space Force, one of Trump’s worst ideas, right up there with hydroxychloroquine to cure COVID-19, and, no, we don’t want to escalate our troop deployments for a military confrontation with China in the South China Sea. It’s time to ‘right-size’ the military budget and demilitarize our foreign policy.”

    Progressives uniting as a block to resist out-of-control military spending would be a no-nonsense exercise of raw power reminiscent of how the right-wing Freedom Caucus challenged the traditional Republicans in the House in 2015. Without progressives on board, President Biden may not be able to secure enough votes to pass a federal budget that would then green light the reconciliation process needed for his broad domestic agenda.

    For years, progressives in Congress have complained about the bloated military budget. In 2020, 93 members in the House and 23 in the Senate voted to cut the Pentagon budget by 10% and invest those funds instead in critical human needs. A House Spending Reduction Caucus, co-chaired by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, emerged with 22 members on board.

    Meet the members of the House Defense Spending Reduction Caucus:

    Barbara Lee (CA-13); Mark Pocan (WI-2); Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12); Ilhan Omar (MN-5); Raùl Grijalva (AZ-3); Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11); Jan Schakowsky(IL-9); Pramila Jayapal (WA-7); Jared Huffman (CA-2); Alan Lowenthal (CA-47); James P. McGovern (MA-2); Peter Welch (VT-at large); Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14); Frank Pallone, Jr (NJ-6).;  Rashida Tlaib (MI-13); Ro Khanna (CA-17); Lori Trahan (MA-3); Steve Cohen (TN-9); Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), Anna Eshoo (CA-18).

    We also have the Progressive Caucus, the largest Caucus in Congress with almost 100 members in the House and Senate. Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is all for cutting military spending. “We’re in the midst of a crisis that has left millions of families unable to afford food, rent, and bills. But at the same time, we’re dumping billions of dollars into a bloated Pentagon budget,” she said. “Don’t increase defense spending. Cut it—and invest that money into our communities.”

    Now is the time for these congresspeople to turn their talk into action.

    Consider the context. President Biden urgently wants to move forward on his American Families Plan rolled out in his recent State of the Union address. The plan would tax the rich to invest $1.8 trillion over the next ten years in universal preschool, two years of tuition-free community college, expanded healthcare coverage and paid family medical leave.

    President Biden, in the spirit of FDR, also wants to put America back to work in a $2-trillion infrastructure program that will begin to fix our decades-old broken bridges, crumbling sewer systems and rusting water pipes. This could be his legacy, a light Green New Deal to transition workers out of the dying fossil fuel industry.

    But Biden won’t get his infrastructure program and American Families Plan with higher taxes on the rich, almost 40% on income for corporations and those earning $400,000 or more a year, without Congress first passing a budget resolution that includes a top line for military and non-military spending. Both the budget resolution and reconciliation bill that would follow are filibuster proof and only require a simple majority in the House and Senate to pass.

    Easy.

    Maybe not.

    To flex their muscles, Republicans may refuse to vote for a budget resolution crafted by the Democratic Party that would open the door to big spending on public goods, such as pre-kindergarten and expanded health care coverage. That means Biden would need every Democrat in the House and Senate on board to approve his budget resolution for military and non-military spending.

    So how’s it looking?

    In the Senate, Democrat Joe Manchin from West VA, a state that went for Trump over Biden more than two-to-one, wants to scale back Biden’s infrastructure proposal, but hasn’t sworn to vote down a budget resolution. As for Senator Bernie Sanders, the much-loved progressive, ordinarily he might balk at a record high military budget, but if the budget resolution ushers in a reconciliation bill that lowers the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 or 55, the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee may hold his fire.

    That leaves anti-war activists wondering if Senator Elizabeth Warren, a critic of the Pentagon budget and “nuclear modernization,” would consider stepping up as the lone holdout in the Senate, refusing to vote for a budget that includes billions for new nuclear weapons. Perhaps with a push from outraged constituents in Massachusetts, Warren could be convinced to take this bold stand. Another potential hold out could be California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who co-chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, the committee that oversees the budgeting for nuclear weapons. In 2014, Feinstein described the US nuclear arsenal program as “unnecessarily and unsustainably large.”

    Over in the House, Biden needs at least 218 of the 222 Democrats to vote for the budget resolution expected to hit the floor in June or July, but what if he couldn’t get to 218? What if at least five members of the House voted no—or even just threatened to vote no—because the top line for military spending was too high and the budget included new “money pit” nuclear land-based missiles to replace 450 Minute Man missiles.

    The polls show most Democrats oppose “nuclear modernization”—a euphemism for a plan that is anything but modern given that 50 countries have signed on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons making nuclear weapons illegal and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires the US pursue nuclear disarmament to avoid a catastrophic accident or intentional atomic holocaust.

    Now is the time for progressive congressional luminaries such as the Squad’s AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley to unite with Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, as well as Barbara Lee, Mark Pocan and others in the House Spending Reduction Caucus to put their feet down and stand as a block against a bloated military budget.

    Will they have the courage to unite behind such a cause? Would they be willing to play hardball and gum up the works on the way to Biden’s progressive domestic agenda?

    Odds improve if constituents barrage them with phone calls, emails, and visible protests. Tell them that in the time of a pandemic, it makes no sense to approve a military budget that is 90 times the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Tell that that the billions saved from “right sizing” the Pentagon could provide critical funds for addressing the climate crisis. Tell them that just as we support putting an end to our endless wars, so, too, we support putting an end to our endless cycle of exponential military spending.

    Call your representative, especially If you live in a congressional district represented by one of the members of the Progressive Caucus or the House Spending Reduction Caucus. Don’t wait for marching orders from someone else. No time to wait.  In the quiet of the COVID hour, our Congress toils away on appropriations bills and a budget resolution. The showdown is coming soon.

    Get organized. Ask for meetings with your representatives or their foreign policy staffers. Be fierce; be relentless. Channel the grit of a Pentagon lobbyist.

    This is the moment to demand a substantial cut in military spending that defunds new nuclear weapons.

    Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. @MedeaBenjamin

    Marcy Winograd, Coordinator, CODEPINK Congress, also co-chairs the foreign policy team for Progressive Democrats of America. In 2020, she was a DNC delegate for Bernie Sanders. 

    @MarcyWinograd  gro.kniPedoCnull@ycraM

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Years ago, I was sitting in a café with my rabble-rousing friend James, both of us gnawing our teeth over the myriad difficulties facing the peace and social justice movement in the United States. We cited the usual suspects that stood in the way of progress: the entrenched corporate and financial elite; the embedded Pentagon machine; too much TV.

    “But you know what our biggest problem is?” James said, growing animated. “It’s our low expectations! Think about it, man. Folks in this country will always fight back when pushed hard enough, yet we always seem to settle for crumbs, grateful to achieve anything. And that’s because we’ve accepted that we can’t win much anymore. I mean, yeah, we want a better world, can imagine one, but we don’t expect it, not really.”

    James went on to say that our expectations are triply low when it comes to the political and electoral arena, where choosing between lesser evils seems the best we can do, the most we can hope for.

    “We accept that they’re all a bunch of crooks and lairs and even murderers,” he said. “But for the most part, we don’t settle for that ‘quality’ about our teachers and doctors—or even our car mechanics!”

    James had a point, and his words ring truer to me now than when he uttered them a decade ago. This lowering of the bar has gone on for so long that having a president who can speak in complete sentences is considered a lofty achievement. If the sentences are about the righteousness of war and empire, well, who cares if they’re slurred or bellowed as long as they can work a crowd?

    It seems increasingly the case now that we live under an epidemic of low expectations; a resignation to despair that has narrowed our struggle and sapped our vision of what is possible. A system so broken, that even good, intelligent people that I know, generous of heart and spirit, are losing the capacity to imagine genuine alternatives to a U.S. Empire mired in endless wars; where even common sense issues devolve into a bewildering and complex morass. What, for instance, could be easier to figure out than nationalized healthcare for all, which exists in one form or another virtually everywhere? Yet a lot of progressives have been trained to lower their expectations to think this is simply too complicated to do; a continuous loop of being “realistic and “practical” with both our choices and solutions, because, hey, what can we do?

    Of course, expectations are part of the human condition. Some we are consciously aware of. Many others, we are not. Often they produce stress. Expectations that are too high set us up for failure, to feeling frustrated, angry, and demoralized. Conversely, when our expectations about ourselves, life, and others are too low, we experience depression, defeatism, and diminished self-esteem.

    I’m equally guilty of being infected with low expectations of what’s possible in our social justice movement; that the best we can do is keep up the good fight, lumber forward and play the crummy cards we’ve been dealt.

    On the hand, there are still days when I try to maintain a revolutionary optimism; i.e., a belief based not on abstract hope but in the power of collective action; in the knowledge that a people’s movement has won before and can do so again, even when victory seems impossible, distant at best.

    David Perez is a writer, journalist, activist, and actor, born in the South Bronx in New York City and currently living in Taos, New Mexico. Read other articles by David.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We can hardly count ourselves lucky in the west and particularly Britain, given the level of media corruption and collusion with sites of power.  As Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Glenn Greenwald put it…

    The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.  I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

    To all extents and purposes in the UK we have lost our mainstream democratic sphere.  But over the last 20 years we can count ourselves fortunate that we have had the work of Media Lens – staffed by David Cromwell and David Edwards – shining a spotlight on the enormous volume of journalistic and professional political caste abuses.

    The two Davids have done some quite extraordinary work.  This year they have published two very different articles of great quality.  In Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 1 David Edwards debunked the ideology of pro-war propagandists, by allowing readers to experience the horrors of conflict through the eyes of First World War veteran, actor and Playwright Arnold Ridley.  20 Years Of Media Lens: A Selection Of Remarkable Replies From Journalists is a meticulously catalogued historical list of abusive, aggressive, self-serving, self-aggrandising and misleading responses from corporate media journalists, furious at being asked to be held publicly accountable.  Here the two Davids allow the industry to critique itself.

    But they haven’t suddenly hit a purple patch of publishing quality out of the blue, as the duos work critiquing the Iraq War and its aftermath demonstrated.  Some readers might recall a Harriet Harman appearance on BBC Question Time, where she repeated the misleading mantra “of course mistakes were made.”  This gives the impression neoliberals popped out to get a book of stamps, tripped on a loose paving stone, and accidentally at the head of an army, violated another country’s borders; facilitated a million civilian deaths, a generation of Iraqi babies born with birth defects, whose pregnant mothers were exposed to western invaders’ depleted uranium ammunition; plus inadvertently colluded with US torture practices.

    This nonsense was firmly put to bed in articles such as The Mythology of Mistakes, Hiding Imperialism under a Cloak of ‘Benevolence’, The BBC Buries the Truth with the Dead in Iraq,  and The Liberated and the Dead.  Unsurprisingly, Media Lens count John Pilger and Noam Chomsky among their admirers.

    The other facet to Media Lens’ work is that of solidarity.  They have done their utmost to keep Julian Assange’s name and plight in the public’s consciousness and done the same for Chelsea Manning.  They have defended the reputation of the late Robert Fisk.  They have similarly defended Jeremy Corbyn and the values he brought back to the Labour Party.

    Their actions either scrutinising the media or defending victims of the new McCarthyism has brought them enemies.  Corporate media faux leftist Owen Jones has even blocked them on twitter.   In summer 2014 Israel bombarded Gaza with “6,000 airstrikes, 14,500 tank shells and 45,000 artillery shells unleashed between July 7 and Aug. 26”.   According to these UN figures, Israel killed 551 children out of a total victim death toll of 2,252 Palestinians.  The response by Owen Jones was to immediately do propaganda on behalf of those who supported the settler aggressors entitled Anti-Jewish hatred is rising- we must see it for what it is (August 2014).  A year later when there was a risk the indigenous victims might be commemorated, Jones’s article response was instead Antisemitism has no place on the left. It is time to confront it (August 2015).  By comparison Media Lens showed solidarity with the Palestinians writing ‘Disgustingly Biased’ – The Corporate Media On The Gaza Massacre and ‘Grievous Censorship’ By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed’s Blog. They have via an evidence-based methodology continued to vigorously defend the Palestinians and those oppressed by the new pro-Israel corporate media McCarthyism.  No wonder Jones daren’t allow them on his twitter feed.

    The solidarity of Media Lens is not just restricted to their writings.  On twitter and Facebook, Media Lens has championed countless number of activists, campaigners, young and new writers.  They are an important part of an important network.  Has it really been 20 years?

    Gavin Lewis is a freelance Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and film and cultural studies at a number of British universities. Read other articles by Gavin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As we saw in Part 1, in 1914 and again in 1939, millions of men and women welcomed war. Arnold Ridley and his pals did make this choice, but in reality the choice had been made for them by decades and centuries of the relentless ‘patriotic’ propaganda described by Tolstoy, which most people were powerless to resist.

    The enthusiasm for war seems immensely significant. It tells us that, facing the ultimate test of self-interestedness – whether they were willing to risk being shot, burned, blasted and horribly mutilated in the ‘national interest’ – many millions of people put that self-interest aside and marched off to kill and be killed.

    This fact alone should encourage us to question the extent to which our capacity to be self-interested – to work for our own benefit over the imposed demands of others – is undermined more generally. Erich Fromm described the reality:

    Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself. It lies in the fact that we have lost the sense of the significance and uniqueness of the individual, that we have made ourselves into instruments for purposes outside ourselves, that we experience and treat ourselves as commodities.

    In her remarkable book, ‘For Your Own Good – Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence’, psychologist Alice Miller traced the roots of Nazi militarism in wildly popular pedagogical theories that flourished in 18th, 19th and early 20th century Germany.

    Did Nazi stormtroopers arise out of an orgy of self-centred self-indulgence? In fact, they were nurtured by what Miller called a ‘poisonous pedagogy’ that crushed the will of the child, destroying the child’s ability to follow his or her own feelings and self-interest.

    Miller quoted J. Sulzer from his highly popular book published in Germany in 1748, An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children. Sulzer commented on infant behaviour:

    They see something they want but cannot have; they become angry, cry, and flail about. Or they are given something that does not please them; they fling it aside and begin to cry. These are dangerous faults that hinder their entire education and encourage undesirable qualities in children… The moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not become thoroughly depraved.

    Therefore, I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness and to persist until they have reached their goal.

    The chief target for attack, wrote J.G. Kruger in Some Thoughts on the Education of Children (1752) was defiance:

    Such disobedience amounts to a declaration of war against you. Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him. The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master. Therefore, you must not desist until he does what he previously refused out of wickedness to do.

    In Handbook for Fathers and Mothers of Families and Nations (1773), J. B. Basedow recommended additional beatings in response to the inevitable, ‘annoying’ tears:

    If after the chastisement the pain lasts for a time, it is unnatural to forbid weeping and groaning at once. But if the chastised use these annoying sounds as a means of revenge, then the first step is to distract them by assigning little tasks or activities. If this does not help, it is permissible to forbid the weeping and to punish them if it persists, until it finally ceases after the new chastisement.

    The conscious aim was to destroy the will of the child and replace it with the will of parents and teachers. Sulzer wrote:

    …willfulness must be the main target of all our toils until it is completely abolished… The first and foremost matter to be attended to is implanting in children a love of order; this is the first step we require in the way of virtue.

    Sulzer noted that it was vital to break children at an age when they would be unable to remember what had been done to them:

    One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.’ (Miller, my emphasis.)

    Miller commented:

    If primary emphasis is placed upon raising children so that they are not aware of what is being done to them or what is being taken from them, of what they are losing in the process, of who they otherwise would have been and who they actually are, and if this is begun early enough, then as adults, regardless of their intelligence, they will later look upon the will of another person as if it were their own. How can they know that their own will was broken since they were never allowed to express it?  (Miller, my emphasis.)

    In 1858, D.G.M. Schreber explained how this cultivated in the child ‘the art of self-denial’: ‘the salutary and indispensable process of learning to subordinate and control his will’.

    Do we imagine these efforts to break the will of children, to teach them ‘the art of self-denial’, were limited to pre-Nazi Germany? In a comment that will be familiar to many of us in our time, Miller quoted a German schoolteacher (1796) explaining how he promoted obedience:

    I reward the one who is the most amenable, the most obedient, the most diligent in his lessons by preferring him over the other; I call on him the most, I permit him to read his composition before the class, I let him do the necessary writing on the blackboard. This way I awaken the children’s zeal so that each wishes to excel, to be preferred. When one of them then upon occasion does something that deserves punishment, I reduce his status in the class, I don’t call on him, I don’t let him read aloud, I act as though he were not there. This distresses the children so much that those who are punished weep copious tears.

    Miller commented:

    I have selected the foregoing passages in order to characterize an attitude that reveals itself more or less openly, not only in Fascism but in other ideologies as well. The scorn and abuse directed at the helpless child as well as the suppression of vitality, creativity, and feeling in the child and in oneself permeate so many areas of our life that we hardly notice it anymore.’ (Miller, my emphasis.)

    Yes, in many areas of our life! The evidence is all around us and deeply rooted in our cultural traditions. For example, German pedagogues loved to quote the Bible:

    He who loves his son chastises him often with the rod, that he may be his joy when he grows up’, and, ‘Pamper your child and he will be a terror for you, indulge him and he will bring you grief.

    The Prime Coercive Instrument For Cultural Modification

    Are we pursuing freely-chosen self-interest when forced to wear uniforms and trained for conformity and ambition at school? Is it our choice to be manipulated to feel exalted when we do better at exams than our friends and humiliated when we do worse? Is it self-indulgence that has us spending our precious youth memorising dead facts and figures for regurgitation, supposedly establishing our level of ‘brightness’? Is there any essential difference between the way we are manipulated to become cogs in the educational machine, the corporate machine and the war machine?

    Sobering perspective is supplied by cultural anthropologist John Bodley’s description of the methods employed by Western colonisers to undermine traditional cultures:

    In many countries schooling has been the prime coercive instrument of cultural modification and has proven to be a highly effective means of destroying self-esteem, fostering new needs, creating dissatisfactions, and generally disrupting traditional cultures. As representatives of the prestige and power of the dominant culture, teachers deliberately assume positions of authority over students, overshadowing parents and traditional tribal leaders…

    Training us for ambition is about far more than just boredom and stress. Every moment in the classroom, the child’s natural prioritisation of the present moment is, in effect, outlawed. No choice is allowed – the childish love of play must be sacrificed to the educational Higher Cause. We quickly learn that we will suffer serious, escalating consequences if we follow our instincts. This powerfully undermines our ability to be sensitive to, and to follow, our feelings, our true self-interest. Time and again, we are taught to reject our natural inclinations – to reject what we find most fascinating and enjoyable for the sake of what we find utterly boring. We learn that we cannot safely be in the moment, that the price of respecting our feelings is too high – we must prioritise the future and the opinions of authority.

    Our capacity to feel and respect our feelings is subject to relentless attack. If we don’t know what we feel, we don’t know what we want. And if we don’t know what we want, state-corporate interests are free to decide for us.

    As the leftist poster says, ‘If you liked school, you’ll LOVE work.’ Education dovetails perfectly as we replace black or grey school uniforms with black or grey work suits, pack ourselves into trains, buses and cars to perform as cogs in corporate machines, allowed an hour off for lunch and four or five weeks ‘annual leave’ (extra ‘leave’, possibly paid, or not, if we suffer a ‘blighty one’). All of this we hate, but we have already been trained to do what we hate, to perform relentlessly boring tasks at school, to override our internal opposition, which we cannot properly feel.

    We are also not following our self-interest when we sit in front of the TV to watch corporate entertainment filtered of all but the most banal, advertiser-friendly content. As media analysts Michael Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur noted, our freedom extends to watching ‘TV programmes that flow seamlessly into commercials, avoiding controversy, lulling us into submission, like an electronic tranquillizer.’   The last thing advertisers want is for us to be so interested in the programme we’re watching that we’re lost in thought during the ad break.

    It is not you or I who decides that happiness lies in high status work facilitating high status consumption, any more than we decide it is ‘glorious’ to die in battle. Again, Bodley reflects our own contemporary experience:

    One of the most significant obstacles blocking native economic “progress” was the ability of the natives to find satisfactions at relatively low and stable consumption levels… Outsiders quickly realised that if tribal peoples could somehow be made to reject the material satisfactions provided by their own cultures and if they could be successfully urged to desire more and more industrial goods, they would become far more willing participants in the cash economy.

    As late as 1963, applied anthropologist Ward Goodenough described Western strategies to undermine the contentment found in traditional cultures:

    The problem that faces development agents is to find ways of stimulating in others a desire for change in such a way that the desire is theirs independent of further prompting from outside. Restated, the problem is one of creating in another a sufficient dissatisfaction with his present condition of self so that he wants to change it. This calls for some kind of experience that leads him to reappraise his self-image and re-evaluate his self-esteem.

    This is the same process of manufacturing discontent by which you and I are targeted. US psychologist Tim Kasser commented:

    Existing scientific research on the value of materialism yields clear and consistent findings. People who are highly focused on materialistic values have lower personal well-being and psychological health than those who believe that materialistic pursuits are relatively unimportant. These relationships have been documented in samples of people ranging from the wealthy to the poor, from teenagers to the elderly, and from Australians to South Koreans.

    Where, then, is the freedom that allows us to be considered self-interested, self-centred, self-indulgent? It doesn’t exist. The call for us to sacrifice ourselves thrusts a red-hot poker into a wound of imposed self-neglect that has made us such well-schooled, career-climbing, war-fighting, self-destructive pawns of state policy, corporate profit and, yes, revolutionary fervour.

    Our problem is not that we are too indulgent, too selfish. Our problem is that we are not self-centred enough; that we are manipulated, seduced, punished, conformed away from exploring, feeling and respecting our actual self-interest. We are made to seek happiness in very specific ways by systems of power that need us to be unhappy, discontented, and even to die in wars, in ways that benefit them.

    This has been disastrous, not simply because our real self-interest has been hijacked, but because our whole society has become oblivious to a buried treasure of human experience found at the end of an authentic exploration of self-interest. It is a truth that has been understood by cultures around the word for millennia, but is almost completely unknown to our primitive Western corporate monoculture.

    The Man With No Skin

    What happens when we are genuinely self-interested, self-centred? What happens when we don’t subordinate self-awareness to external pressures?

    Consider the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, unique among 18th century Enlightenment philosophes in that he retained extreme sensitivity and respect for his feelings. Rousseau radically bucked the trend promoting ‘man’s indifference to himself’.

    The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who knew Rousseau well, described him as ‘one of the most singular of all human beings… his extreme sensibility of temper is his torment’; ‘he is like a man who were stripped not only of his clothes but of his skin’.

    Rousseau felt every pleasure, every pain, every delight and despair, deeply. It was this acuity of awareness that helped him uncover a hidden secret of the human condition.

    Remarkably, Rousseau’s final work, Reveries of The Solitary Walker, written in the two years before his death in 1778, contains a basic guide to what amounts to ‘zazen’ meditation (‘zazen’ sounds esoteric but literally means ‘just sitting, doing nothing’). As clearly as any Eastern mystic, Rousseau began by describing the inevitable failure of ordinary happiness:

    Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting happiness. Even in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single moment of which the heart could truthfully say: “Would that this moment could last for ever!” And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come?

    Readers might like to conduct this thought experiment for themselves! Looking back, it is clear that even our happiest moments are tainted by fear of change, failure and loss.

    Attainment of some object of desire gives momentary pleasure, then, but our minds remain ‘empty and anxious’ – we quickly latch onto some other person, experience or object ‘yet to come’, and desire reaches out into this new, alluring distance. The distance is alluring because it provides us with a blank or half-empty canvas on which we can project our idealised fantasies. Desire is endless, insatiable, because the mind quickly tires of reality, but not of fantasy, our inexhaustible dream fuel.

    Two and a half centuries before ‘mindfulness’ became the rage, Rousseau wrote:

    Foresight! Foresight which is ever bidding us look forward into the future, a future which in many cases we shall never reach. Here is the real source of all our troubles! How mad it is for so short-lived a creature as man to look forward into a future which he rarely attains, while he neglects the present which is his!… We no longer live where we are, but where we are not!

    If we reject self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and investigate how we actually feel, we arrive at the key understanding that it is impossible to satisfy a mind that ‘neglects the present’, that values only what it does not have. Corporate culture being, of course, the ultimate manifestation and exploitation of this phenomenon.

    Ironically, we are so readily seduced by calls to sacrifice ourselves precisely because the mind is ever ready to sacrifice the devalued present – all the ‘uninteresting’ stuff that we have here and now – for some fantasy-hyped future. We spend our lives aspiring to the next moment, sure to be a ‘glorious adventure’, even if that means fighting and dying on some distant battlefield.

    Along with mystics like Buddha, Bodhidharma, Chuang Tzu, Ikkyu, Jesus, Kabir, Krishna, Lao-tse, Mansoor, Meera, Nanak, Patanjali, Tolle and Yoka, the ultra-sensitive Rousseau came to understand that all attempts to find happiness in external pleasures and ‘success’ fail. The end-point of self-aware self-indulgence, he found, is a great turning point – a turning within. But what on earth might we find there?

    As we all know, our standard search for external happiness generates a torrent of mental activity: we must forever plan, scheme, worry and strive to shorten the distance between ourselves and our ever-retreating, ever-changing goals. Having attained one desire, another instantly pops up on the horizon and mental activity surges again.

    But when, time after time, this exhausting campaign fails, when the futility of the effort becomes undeniable because we can see that every attainment ‘leaves our hearts still empty and anxious’, mental activity can start to subside. This may happen naturally as the search for external happiness is met with disillusionment and disaster, or it can be consciously encouraged through meditation, by paying careful attention to our thoughts and feelings. We cannot think and feel at the same time – repeatedly focusing on emotions in our chest, for example, interrupts and slows compulsive thinking.

    As mental chatter subsides, gaps start to appear between thoughts. In even the briefest moments when this happens, in tiny silences between thought, something completely unexpected occurs – deep delight arises from nowhere for no apparent reason. This is not just happiness; it is ecstasy, a bliss saturated with love for everyone and everything. Even a sliver of this ‘light’ is devastating, but the potential exists to experience an inner supernova. Kabir said:

    As if thousands of suns have arisen in me… I cannot count them, the light is so dazzling.

    Rousseau discovered this phenomenon simply by paying close attention to his suffering and happiness:

    But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced in my solitary reveries on the Island of Saint-Pierre…

    As Osho commented, this experience is the revolutionary moment in the life of a human being:

    Now you are nothing but misery. Those who are cunning, they go on deceiving themselves that they are not miserable, or they go on hoping that something will change, something will happen, and they will achieve at the end of life – but you are miserable.

    You can create faces, deceptions, false faces; you can go on smiling continuously, but deep down you know you are in misery. That is natural. Confined in thoughts you will be in misery. Unconfined, beyond thoughts – alert, conscious, aware, but unclouded by thoughts – you will be joy, you will be bliss.

    This is why Jesus made the extraordinary comment that has mystified non-meditators for millennia: ‘Resist not evil’. It is not that turning the other cheek, or giving someone your cloak as well as your shirt, is best practice for managing bullies and petty criminals.

    The point, as Jesus also said, is that ‘The kingdom of heaven lies within’ – the experience described above. If a choice is possible, it is better to go the extra mile to avoid conflict so that we can remain centred in this inner love and bliss. When we resist external ‘evil’, we inevitably generate great storms of thought in ourselves and others, which obstruct love and bliss in them and us. The remarkable truth is that, for all its practical usefulness, thought is subtly dehumanising, and torrential thought is deeply dehumanising.

    The best measure of the extent to which our society is truly civilised is the number of loving feelings in our hearts, not the number of loving, just, egalitarian thoughts in our heads. Thought is hot air. Disconnected from feeling, it means almost nothing.

    ‘Ehi-Passiko’ – ‘Come And See!’

    The central claim is not a fantasy, not an invention; it is a simple but almost completely hidden truth: confined in thoughts we will be in misery; unconfined, beyond thoughts, we will be in ‘complete and perfect happiness’.

    This, not collapsing on the sofa with junk food, is the end-point of self-aware self-centredness: a limitless source of loving kindness that naturally overflows to others in what we say and do.

    It is a truth that can be known only through feeling, through the heart, when we are free to experience and respect our emotions, unhindered by calls to sacrifice ‘trivial’, ‘indulgent’ personal concerns to ‘duty’, ‘service’, the ‘national interest’, the ‘Fatherland’, the ‘Revolution’.

    Of course, thinking is needed; of course, working for the benefit of others, and even subordinating our welfare for others, can be a beautiful thing; but the most beautiful thing of all is when we subordinate everything to a profound investigation into what does and does not make us miserable and blissful.

    Without this investigation, we may end up doing more harm than good. As Norman Mailer said:

    I think that the only way socialism can work is if there is a religious core. A belief that there is some larger sense of things.

    Otherwise, Mailer argued, ‘you just get the play of egos’. 

    Alas, trying ‘to make the world a better place’ is a prime way of winning attention, applause, respect, even fame outside the corporate ‘mainstream’. If the rich and famous feel ‘special’, what to say of ‘altruists’, so heroic that they subordinate their personal concerns, risk their very lives, for the welfare of others?

    If our motivation is attention, applause, we may look like a counter-force to ego-driven, state-corporate capitalism, but, in fact, we may be a version of the same madness, almost a kind of niche marketing. Like corporate executives, we will compete furiously with the rival activists we are supposed to be supporting, tear them down at the first opportunity for utterly trivial reasons (rational disagreement on key issues is another matter entirely). Above all, we will be highly vulnerable to the seductions of a ‘mainstream’ that has the power to bestow far more respectability, fame and fortune.

    Rooted in our heads rather than our hearts, we will be miserable and spreading that misery around us. Regardless of what virtue we claim as our motive, our first priority will be, not other people, but the expansion of our egoic empire. We will contribute to the building of a ‘righteous’ but ugly world where barely a drop of genuine love and happiness is found.

    To those so keen for us to sacrifice ourselves for a Higher Cause we can answer that there is no Higher Cause than the pursuit of self-aware self-interest because this is the only way to become a genuinely blissful, genuinely loving human being. And only when we become genuinely blissful and loving are we able to resist the calls to sacrifice ourselves on some distant educational, corporate, or actual battlefield.

    The insatiable, tragicomic craving of the Trumpian ego – to have more, to be more, to spend more, to consume more, to be applauded more – can never be transcended on the level of the mind. Only when we experience genuine happiness, a loving bliss with no taint of suffering, do the baubles and toys of ego start to lose their appeal.

    As Buddha said, there is no need to take his or anyone else’s word for it: ‘Ehi-passiko’, ‘Come and see!’ Try it for yourself – all is not as it seems.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Two dangerous things are happening simultaneously.

    First, the official COVID narratives are mutating in ways that threaten to make it a forever phenomenon—unsurprisingly to anyone who’s been paying attention. Second, the titans of Hi-Tech, in league with the Deep State and its political lapdogs—are hell-bent on eliminating voices of dissent on various Internet platforms.

    It seems to me that we have to fight extreme with extreme. But our extreme might be simple. Hard, yes, but a very direct action. Might we, for instance, begin our resistance by ditching our smartphones? In the one’s and two’s? Or in rallies where we dump them en masse? Might this make the agenda of the corporate and political elite harder to implement, particularly all the surveillance apps supposedly for our health?

    While we’re at it, can we consider that the digital world in general has now reached the point (perhaps long past the point) where it serves the oppressors far more than it serves us? Has our habit of evaluating the benefits of technology in strictly personal terms been trumped by its use by empire for economic, political, social and militarized rule?

    Can we overcome the feeling that high tech is a runaway juggernaut we’re helpless to control?  Re-imagine an old normal independent of behemoths like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter, free from the tyranny of algorithms, our self-worth measured in digital likes and shares?

    When does acceptance become surrender?

    I realize, of course, that because of COVID, millions of people are now more dependent on the Internet and apps like Zoom for their bread-and-butter, and only for the grace does my income situation enable me to opt-out. Nevertheless, it’s a real question: Is our being forced to spend more time online potentially another health hazard?  To quote that 1985 Aretha Franklin song: “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”

    It could very well be that the Luddite Might-Wannabe inside me has fed over the years by my job at Op Cit Bookshop in Taos, New Mexico. Formerly known as Moby Dickens, the store has been operating in the same location for over 30 years as a time machine to the past, some might say an ancient past.

    Our Point of Sales (POS) system still runs on MS-Dos, the precursor to Windows built-in 1977 and too old to be linked to the Internet. The computer monitor is a CRT with green lettering and the keyboard functions with F keys. We also use an Okidata Dot Matrix Printer. The only thing missing is Pong.

    Alas, we do have a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection, which allows us to order inventory from distributors like Ingram, as well as checking emails and doing research on bookstore-related news. But by and large Op Cit operates very old school. We even use index cards and scrap paper to take special orders and leave each other notes.

    When customers, a steady mix of locals and tourists, discover how low-tech we are, they invariably respond with something like, “Oh my God, that’s so awesome!” Many of them, youth in particular, wonder how such an old operating system could have lasted this long. We wonder the same thing.

    Personally, the Op Cit experience has caused me to examine just what it is that I truly need. As science author Nicholas Carr wrote in The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (W.W. Norton, 1994): “We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better. What makes a one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges or diminishes us, how it shapes our experiences with nature and culture and one another.”

    Writer and reporter David Sax makes a similar point in The Revenge of Analog (Public Affairs 2016), a detailed book that shows how youth are at the forefront of getting unplugged from a relentlessly digitized world. Sax writes: “There’s an argument that the world has fundamentally changed and we should just get used to it. That the amount of time spent on computers, smartphones and so forth is because the young love it, it’s their way of communication. To deny that is to deny reality. Moreover, the technology is good; it is liberating and has opened vast new frontiers.”

    The book shows how it’s the exact opposite. It is the younger generation that has become less enamored with digital technology, and warier of its effects. Sax explains: “These were the teenagers and twentysomethings out buying turntables, film cameras, and novels in paperback. They were the students who told me how they would rather be constrained by the borders of a page than the limits of word processors.”

    Good to know, right?

    Hey, I totally get the challenges. The Internet is a vast resource with enormous benefits. This very article for this very website demonstrates its use value, and I’ve been clicking and scrolling for decades. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps we’ve reached a crossroad, maybe gone past it. That digital addiction has become the real lockdown, hiding in plain sight, weaponized on behalf of the ruling class. And as I stated in the beginning, their agenda relies heavily on pumping up the drug.

    So, might our ultimate liberation depend on getting unplugged, or at least moving in that direction? Extreme measures that lead us back to community and love?

    David Perez is a writer, journalist, activist, and actor, born in the South Bronx in New York City and currently living in Taos, New Mexico. Read other articles by David.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When I arrived in Rangoon in 2008, I felt as though I stepped into the pages of a forgotten colonial story within a musty old book. As I looked around Rangoon on my daily walks outward from central Rangoon, I saw the city was fully developed but neglected and abused by a lack of electricity and repair. Staunch British colonial architecture often sat behind rusted barbed wired fence pinched by wild-grown landscape and tall cackled trees. Absent in the decayed city was an overabundance of cars on the streets. Generators on curbsides everywhere belched exhaust into sweet jasmine air and shot power into buildings. Still, most people had no generators, and for them, the Dictatorship doled out stingy amounts of current late at night, usually between one to five in the morning. Burma’s people lived without basic necessities everyone in the modern world took for granted. Life moved slowly among street markets and sidewalk teashops that edged into the road, occasionally across two full lanes. Specialized markets appeared once or twice a week, such as the infamous Thieves Market on Shwe Bon Tar Street, where you could bargain for unique items with your hands protecting your own bag or pockets.

    Information from outside Burma was then often spread through conversations and rumors. Broadcasts of international media were received by illegal satellite dishes, but the Dictatorship cut signals when news about Aung San Suu Kyi or Burma appeared. Most people used transistor radios at night to listen to Voice of America or Radio Free Asia. Mobile communications were terrible. If you had the extra cash and wanted a mobile phone, the cost was around thirty thousand Kyat or roughly thirty US dollars. A SIM card to go with it, however, cost over five million Kyat.

    One could easily imagine the Burmese people were spiritually broken from the dictatorship’s oppressive habits. No doubt some were. In Burma, I saw how people lived inside a dystopian nightmare in which General Aung San’s request that the Burmese develop “discipline” as a guiding cultural trait was twisted by the Dictatorship into a brutal concept that actually preceded its rule. The Colonial British practiced “discipline” with totalitarianism as explained so well by none better than George Orwell, who served the British Empire in Burma as a policeman. From Orwell’s days until even as late as 2011, no one was safe from undercover police, military intelligence, and citizen informants. An utterance overheard by the wrong person could lead to harassment by a conniving local street or area boss seeking tea-money in exchange for silence, or a worse outcome if one seemed obtuse or apparently fearful. Without electronic surveillance, privacy was snatched away by word of mouth or prying eyes noticing you pass – your trail was easily traced no matter where you went. Notes on you were kept. Your movement was monitored rather than digitally recorded as it is today; it just took more time for police to learn your habits then, and inside pre-reform Burma time was an abstract concept. If you stepped out of line politically at any point in your life, years later, at any time, you could be investigated by dutiful authorities who would make no mistake sizing you up.

    Once I got past my newness as a stranger in a strange land and past the requisite fawning period over everything new and unusual to me, I began to see the multiple layers of life and living habits in Rangoon. So rare was it to meet a non-tourist foreigner to most locals to talk with for an extended period, it soon became evident to me that when local people got comfortable with me, they could barely contain their anger about the dictatorship and their need to tell me something about their life. More importantly, many people I met needed to talk about the horrors and hardships of living under the world’s most brutal military dictatorship in modern history.

    Rabbit Hole

    By January 2010, as an English Language Fellow under the US State Department’s English Language Programs, while at the US Embassy sponsored school in Rangoon, called the American Center, I was well grounded in Burma. I was accustomed to the local language, social nuances, and cultural norms as much as I could be. I was also well versed in local politics, for an outsider.

    The American Center on Tawin Street in 2010 was a sort of ground zero for the Burma democracy movement in Rangoon. It was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural hotbed of intrigue complete with spies from various military and police agencies. Most of the students were political, faith, and social activists, many were ex-political prisoners or from political families, and a few claimed to be apolitical. Most students from outside Rangoon were granted from political, cultural, and religious organizations, and finally, there were the sons and daughters of the military and crony classes. The American Center Library was busy and open to anyone with a library card. Dozens of patrons visited the library each day. I taught language and literature classes and quietly taught journalism students in an old basement level broom and file cabinet closet that we converted into our office space. I volunteered when requested at every opportunity and gave as much time as I had to the students. It was the sort of experience for a serious and genuinely dedicated teacher that one would be thankful to have.

    One day a small group of students who formed the Cultural Impact Studies Club asked me to help them. Zin Mar Aung, a 2012 Woman of Courage Award recipient and a current Parliament member, said to me inside a dampened taxi ride one rain-soaked night, “We want you to help us help our people.” All I could say is, “Of course, if I can,” and just like that, I jumped into the labyrinthine rabbit hole of the Burmese underground Democracy movement with only one condition. First, they could not tell anyone I existed because I knew they would be seen by other locals and authorities as controlled by a foreigner, which was certainly never the case. I adopted several Burmese names for various reasons, and I was prepared to be detained or deported at any moment every day for the next two years. The dutiful students kept a spotlight off of me so well that on the day my journalism students released the final issue of a yearlong monthly journal to the American Center Library, the Head Librarian, Daw Myat San, asked me, “Who is U Thiha?” U Thiha wrote a farewell piece for the final issue and was always listed as one of the co-editors. I told her with a satisfied grin, “I thought you always knew, it’s me.” We had a good laugh. Such was the nature of how people in Burma shifted names.

    Upon joining the Cultural Impact Studies Club, I began two years filled with enlightenment, intrigue, tumult, observation, self-learning, and fulfillment. I quickly learned just how brave my students were. They laughed at the idea of going back to prison since they’d all been there for years. Such was the spirit of ex-political prisoners in Burma. Upon release from prison, political prisoners chose to resume their work as political activists or remain an activist but outside of political currents. They all followed the teaching of Aung San Suu Kyi and lived free from fear. We held Poetry of Witness and Art of Witness events, which were illegal public events attended by hundreds of people each time. Poets read poems for which they had been imprisoned for reading years earlier, and ex-political prisoners displayed art made while in prison even when such a display was also a crime. Another time we held a grand welcoming party for newly released political prisoners at the American Center with the help of a courageous Public Affairs Officer, Adrienne Nutzman. Outside the American Center gate, as many as fifty journalists protested because they were denied entry. We started a Self-Help Group for Ex-Political Prisoners that offered counseling and humanitarian assistance, the Yangon School of Political Science, the I-Nature environmental group, and the list grows longer though I’ll end it there. It was a glorious time, and we accomplished much despite the devious efforts at sabotage by a non compos mentis American Center Director who actions were eerily similar to the Burmese Special Branch police.

    The Cultural Impact Studies Club was led mainly by Zin Mar Aung with Myo Aung Htwe and Ko Bo Bo. Myo was sentenced to serve life in prison at sixteen years old for unknowingly standing near a broken handgun during a protest in 1988. Ko Bo Bo, an Army Colonel’s son, saw his dominos fall in 1988 when his curiosity to see a protest got him arrested during the mayhem, from then began his road toward several periods of imprisonment for his commitment to making Burma free. Among others who were ever-present was Ko Sein, a brave man who now leads the Peoples Alliance for Credible Elections.

    Suu Kyi Didn’t Lose Her Halo

    By June of 2011, all was quiet. There was little or no noticeable progress regarding Burma’s political situation or Aung San Suu Kyi’s future. In June, the Cultural Impact Studies Club held a birthday party for Suu Kyi in the secure family home of a friend and supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, who secretly arrived alone as she had ditched her NLD handlers by declaring she was tired and needed rest. Suu Kyi spoke as a leader, an ex-political prisoner, an activist, or a mother, as the Burmese students called her. Suu Kyi’s spoken kindness toward all of Burma’s people was revealing of her nature. There was no press, no handler, no filter.

    I know Aung San Suu Kyi. I was present many times when she met and spoke with so many different groups of people. I know she’s done everything possible, and impossible, to nurture the seedling to Democracy in Burma. Missteps not withstanding, no one is perfect, Suu Kyi took far too much criticism from far too many people regarding the military’s offensive on the Rohingya. It was easy for everyone in the world to point at Aung San Suu Kyi, accusing her, and say genocide was her fault. Her detractors will still say anything to hurt her. Oxford Tea Circlers canceled her awards, removed her portrait, and thousands of so-called journalists literally rewrote the exact same article about how Suu Kyi “lost her halo.” They all viciously attacked and weakened Suu Kyi. Such bitter and shameless acts are marks of low intelligence. All the while, Aung San Suu Kyi stood firm for Myanmar and Myanmar’s people, as she said she would. Now anyone can see, as if it matters to anyone now, it was the Military Dictatorship all along. The civilian government with a non-elected State Counselor was an illusion, a distraction, and now it’s gone.

    In hindsight, I wonder how Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi Gyi would have fared in the modern world with Twitter, cancel culture, and narcissistic attention-seeking know-nothings trying to get Likes and Follows for shouting negative disgusting slurs at great people for reasons they can barely explain on their best day.

    No Return to the Past

    As Suu Kyi spoke that day, there was one moment that stood out to me overall. Someone asked her when she would call for protests. In fact, many activists from the 1988 Uprising era were then eager to stage a nationwide protest. Student protest is a tradition in Burma that goes back at least to British Colonial rule. I’ve seen references to student protests in poetry, most famously references to Ko Ba Hein, a student activist who claimed that the British government’s crackdown on protests would “let the fire be ablaze in the entire country by one beat of the horse-hoof.” With that blaze in mind, Aung San Suu Kyi explained how she changed her mind about mass protests. She seemed to have a heavy heart when talking about the thousands of people killed by the dictatorship during past protests. Her regret was unashamed, her eyes watered. Suu Kyi explained why she was opposed to protests and said that the result would be the same and therefore futile, and, frankly, it was what the dictatorship wanted since it was an excuse to reject sharing governance with civilian leadership. She said there would be no return to past failures.

    If only the Generals who forged the recent coup could agree with Suu Kyi about no return to the past.

    With a heavy heart, I now think of the many, many people I know dear and well who have to relive with, yes, an Orwellian nightmare under the weight of the military dictatorship. It’s as if the recent few years of hyper-capitalism with personal freedom and unlimited opportunities were merely a dream state, and now it’s time for the people to wake up to greet the same past decades of literal enslavement inside of their own homes. When I saw U Mya Aye and Min Ko Naing’s names on the list of those detained by the Dictatorship several days ago, I stopped to think about them. They are two of the most sincere and genuinely nice people I’ve ever known. I met up with Min Ko Naing near the Berkshires in Massachusetts in 2018. He visited with a friend at my home, and I remarked how he seemed so happy and carefree. He smiled. His life was moving on in ways he’d never imagined it could have during the long years he spent as a political prisoner – for being a poet.

    Myanmar, as Burma is called today, is not the same as in 2010. Technology and communications have brought Myanmar citizens into modernity, especially with the newest generation with smartphones in hand almost from birth. I thought that Myanmar youth would grow up to be immune from past generations’ hardships and the sacrifice made by tens of thousands of unnamed people whose one dream was for a better future for their children — and for freedom. I was wrong. On social media, it’s the tech-savvy youth organizing online campaigns, artful memes, and undoubtedly making plans for protests. Their vigor and energy on Twitter are spirited with talk about the sacrifice of their parents, relatives, friends, and the generations preceding their own. Growing up with abundance and technology has not made them politically aloof or spoiled. They retrieved the flags carried by student activists over the previous decades, they are bold, and they seem to accept political and social activism as their rightful duty in Myanmar society.

    The Dictatorship seized total control and quickly shut down mobile communications, turned off the Internet for hours, banned Facebook, and now threatens to ban Twitter. But can they ban Twitch, Gab, Discord, and the many other social and content platforms easily accessible without cutting the Internet? I wonder if the Dictatorship knows that millions of people will take to the streets to demand Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. Maybe that’s what the Dictatorship wants. Time will tell. People are organizing protests by banging pots and pans – everyone in Myanmar at the same time while they sing protest songs. People are beginning to gather in the streets for demonstrations, all Myanmar people, all professions, work stoppages, stay home strikes, public statements, in all manners of civil disobedience. It’s only a matter of time before mass protests begin.

    The question now is only, how will the Dictatorship respond? Everyone knows the Generals will kill a lot of people as they have the Rohingya, Rakhine, Kachin, Mon, Chin, Karen, Kaya, Shan, Wa, and Barma. Will they again kill protesters?

    It’s 2021 in Myanmar. The Myanmar people will not stop being free. They will fight. That is what Democracy looks like.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Rhythms of red, white, blue ‘party’
    lights flashing beneath screaming
    sirens; The rush of warm crimson
    drawing 2, 4, 6, 8, 10—and then some…

    Robotic legs, arms—possessed—
    punching, kicking a fetal fraction—
    prone red shirt; black face; fractured
    eye socket, exploding eyeball; broken
    ribs drowning in swarming blue savagery:
    The viral video sparks flashbacks to a few
    of my… narrow escapes…

    “Keep still, punk, or I’ll bust
    your damn head open!”
    13 year-old reaching for wallet,
    complying with ID ‘command…’

    “You been runnin’, haven’t you, boy?”
    15 year-old jogging to get home before
    Curfew; before cuffing and seating in
    black and white backseat…

    “Someone robbed a store down the street—
    your jacket and cap match the description;”
    Gun in gut of a
    20 year-old strolling home from library…

    Back to the viral video—
    infested with dozens of loitering,
    swaggering, threatening gun-thugs
    Ambling, dawdling, strutting,
    prancing, parading, promenading,
    putzing ‘bout—on our clock—blocking
    Residents from their neighbor’s slowly
    fading cries for help…

    Are we financing the framers—“Finding
    Fathers—“ finding evidence locker guns,
    knives, drugs—magically appearing at
    shootings—or in poor peoples’ pockets?

    Are we funding the epithets fired through
    donut holes—like ‘rubber’ bullets shred-
    ding the 1st Amendment?

    Are we subsidizing six-figure salaries and health-
    care for killers masquerading as ‘peace’ officers?
    Are we paying pensions for the privilege of ’10-
    ring’ targeting on lethal 9-1-1 calls?
    Are we suckers and losers, bankrolling blu klux
    klansmen—death squads slaughtering 1,000 a year—
    Sucking up .50 cents of our every dollar?

    Are we underwriting Rotten Orchard bad
    apples protecting/serving the 1%? Are we
    bankrolling badges breaking bones—“earning
    ink—” on our dime?

    Are we bankrolling Banditos, Riders, Regulators,
    Executioners, Vikings, Spartans, Grim Reapers,
    Jump Out Boy-white supremacist dinosaurs—use-
    less as milk pails beneath bulls?
    The Gloves Davis, Foot Doctor Siapnos, Choker
    Vasquezs, Clubber Williamses of the world?

    Are we blinded by Blue Ribbon Commissions
    crooning “Body-Cam” and “Better Training
    Blues,” professing to teach Al Capone etiquette;
    Andrew Jackson Native American Medicine—
    Hitler Torah?
    Or, are we ready to return thin blu lines of inked
    arms, bent badges to 1850s enclaves—Abolishing,
    Dismantling, disassembling, de-
    constructing ‘collective’ EXTORTION agreements?

    Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet privileged to have read at the Harriet Tubman Centennial Symposium. He is Artistic Director of the stalwart JazzPoetry Ensemble UpSurge and has appeared at numerous festivals and venues including the Monterey Jazz Festival and Panafest in Ghana West Africa. He currently is Poet-in-Residence at Black Agenda Report. Turner has opened for such people as James Baldwin, People’s Advocate Cynthia McKinney, radical sportswriter Dave Zirin and CA Congresswoman Barbara Lee following her lone vote against attacking Afghanistan. He is Co-Chair of the NY Chapter National Writers Union (NWU). Read other articles by Raymond Nat, or visit Raymond Nat’s website.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by T.P. Wilkinson / November 28th, 2020

    The Great Reset Hymn

    I have heard a lot of discussion about when the war will end that began in April 2020.

    Yes, war. I have spent the better part of the past ten months trying to determine what the best attitude or approach to the current unpleasantness ought to be taken.

    A tension has been created over the course of the year between those who think about what has been happening and those who do not. I have alluded to this tension in previous articles. Meanwhile there are a few others who seem to have grasped not only the urgency but the necessity of appropriate language for the current situation.

    As I argued in February, we are not faced with a health issue and never have been. The People’s Republic of China was faced with a health issue and acted accordingly. This is not the place to discuss that history. However, at no time from December 2019 to the present has any national or international authority in the West ever been in the least interested in health and well-being of the inhabitants of the planet or those particular political entities that comprise the Anglo-American Empire and its suzerain states.

    In a recent conversation with my music teacher I remarked that I was never very good at memorising anything. In previous articles I have alluded to this quality. Hence my entire intellectual development could be said to have been devoted to observation and the construction of relationships. For relationships to make sense one has to have an appropriate perspective or context. One way to see this is as a kind of pyramid or hierarchy, as metaphor an explanatory regress. The point is to construct a sufficiently broad view of events so as to organise the observations as intelligible relationships.

    One day several years ago I visited the battlefield of Waterloo, a tiny place in Belgium not far from Brussels. There the visitor will find an artificial hill topped by a bronze lion, symbolising the forces of the British Empire and its allies who defeated Napoleon’s armies there. Atop this hill, a kind of observation post, there were plates depicting more or less the topography of that battle. By chance while I was there I overheard a conversation by two British NATO officers in mufti discussing the battlefield. Of course, when the battle was being fought there was no such hill and hence no such perspective. One officer said to the other, look at that small space and imagine. First the artillery fires across that field. Then the cavalry charges. Hundreds of horses churn up the earth. Then the infantry in line has to try to advance through all these mud and holes, marching in formation, trying to reach the range from which to fire on the French lines. The conversation continued in a technical fashion which I certainly found informative. But the point here is that from the top of the Waterloo monument one could contemplate the entirety of practical, tactical and strategic difficulties of two massed 18th/early 19th century armies battling in a space comparable to the Champs de Mars in Paris or the Mall in Washington or Green Park in London. Thousands of soldiers could barely see in front of them — this was before the introduction of smokeless powder — trying to maintain the infantry line which constituted massed firepower in the age before the machine gun.

    From the top of the hill nearly two centuries later, it was easy to adopt a perspective that would explain many details of the battle as well as the problems each belligerent had to confront. In 2020 it takes some concentration and perhaps audacity to find a “hill” from which to see what has been happening and where the fronts are. It takes no imagination if one has studied the plans and the operations of the belligerent — the aggressor — to see what has been done so far. It takes only a bit more work and analysis to determine what the probable tactical objectives of the aggressor are — his strategic objectives are a matter of record.

    In the course of the 20th century a kind of “rule of thumb” has become established in strategic circles that says essentially, the destruction, displacement or demobilisation of about 20% of a country’s population is sufficient to subjugate the country as a whole. I seem to recall this point being made while Ronald Reagan was presiding over the subjugation of Central America in the face of democratic movements in Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. At the official conclusion of those undeclared and illegal wars fought covertly through US proxies in the respective countries, 20% of Guatemaltecans and Salvadorans were either dead or in exile — many of whom comprising part of the despised migrant labour force north of the Rio Bravo.

    If, however, we look back at the period from 1936 until 1945, we find that conservative figures record a 20% loss of population in both the Soviet Union and China as a result of combined Allied aggression. Unlike some sentimentalists I do not believe it appropriate to treat dictatorships that were heavily funded by the Anglo-American Empire (whether residing in Rome or Berlin) as hostile to it. The relationship between the Japanese Empire and the American Empire was comparable to that prevailing between Britain and Germany. The details of those relationships have been discussed elsewhere so those who are interested and not dismissive can find them with a bit of effort.

    So reviewing the 20th century, roughly from 1912 onward from atop the hill at Waterloo, I find one cannot avoid some conclusions or some forecasts.

    After the longest economic crisis of the 19th century in which the greatest gangsters the world had ever known, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, DuPont (just to name those in the US) had seized unimaginable fortunes, the accumulated and slowly consolidating organisations of labour were educating and mobilising people throughout the empires to demand economic and social justice. The parallel competition among the elite demanded conquest. While competing for empire, all empires were agreed that labour had to be disciplined. Some 4 million dead ought to do the job. Even if in 1914 there was no hill from which to see the Somme, Verdun or Yprés, the spirit of victory was there: victory over the competition and above all victory over the lower classes.

    A hundred years later the same vile gangsters, some with other names and more plebeian sartorial tastes, have been faced — no later than 2008 with the same dire problem. Well, in fact, that is the absurd aspect of this war. Unlike in 1912, there is no organised lower class, no organised middle class. In fact, since 1989 class has ceased to mean anything at all except — until air traffic came to a virtual standstill — the section of the aircraft one happened to occupy. For thirty years there has been no opposition to the plutocracy that emerged victorious in 1945.

    So what is driving the war by those same “types” against the rest of us? They have managed to organise most of our youth around MTV, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. What more do they want?

    However, that is the wrong question. When in New York or some other city dominated by elected and unelected criminals you are cornered at gunpoint, there is no natural limit to what you are expected to surrender. When you are audited by someone from the tax office who has been told, “your retention or promotion depends on bringing home the bacon, without litigation”, there is no limit to what you may have to pay.

    When, however, you are dealing with the descendants of those vile aristocrats and monarchists, the power of the feudal system, many of whom continue to resent the revolution of 1789 and its continuation in 1917, then you are also dealing with an equally irrational, rabid pack. When the GDR was annexed and the Soviet Union dismantled, their assets stolen from the citizens to feed vultures, this was not merely gratuitous capitalist enrichment. It was vengeance.

    We are not faced with a war — with the attack of the 0.01% just for money and assets. In fact, since they destroyed our public service sectors, plundered our pension systems, and squandered whatever taxes we paid on wars to conquer what they had not yet stolen, they have nonetheless remained unsatisfied.

    Why were Louis Capet and his Habsburg spouse Marie Antoinette beheaded? Not because the French would not have a king. Rather because that king refused to be French. Louis XVI refused to accept the end of a regime in which people and countries were dynastic property. He refused to accept the role of citizen rather than owner of people and land in France. For the same reason the somewhat more thorough Russian Revolution abolished the dynasty and not just its paramount member.

    The British — all their insincere claims to democracy and constitutional monarchy notwithstanding — and their North American cousins in the Anglo-American Empire never accepted either the French or the Russian Revolutions because they violated their deep feudal convictions. I have omitted the Papacy here for the purpose of brevity. However, what we currently face is the monstrous vindictiveness of the Reaction to 1789 and 1917.

    This is not a virus. It is not a pandemic. If we are honest what we face today is a plague borne by the vermin that never accepted the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity — the humanist values that drove ordinary people to overthrow the feudal order in which the Church and nobility owned us.

    If you ask them what they learned from history they will surely tell you — just like the WEF — “back then, they owned nothing, and we were happy”.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.