The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!

How Do You Say "Head Fake" In Mancunian?

I almost titled this post, "How do you say 'Head Fake' in Scouse?" Many may not know this, but British actor Bernard Hill, who played King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings movies, got one of the bigger breaks of his career playing a Scouser unemployed asphalt layer named Yosser Hughes in the British 1980's series The Boys From The Blackstuff.  I have never lived in Britain, so I cannot tell the difference between a Mancunian accent and a Scouse accent.  However, I did discover that Bernard Hill is actually from Manchester - thus not a Scouser at all.  Such is the power of good acting, that a skillful actor is able to so thoroughly disguise his origins and identity in pretending to be someone else.  (I remember seeing one other instance of this several years ago, when a coworker foisted a DVD of Secondhand Lions off on me, and insisted that I watch it, which I did.  I couldn't really stand the kid in the movie, nor did I particularly like the movie itself, but Michael Caine did a very creditable job of pretending to be Texan.  Could'a fooled me...)

Such cases of pretending can be quite entertaining when part of a well-done drama, although they can't save a cheesy plot from annoying the living daylights out of those who are forced to be its audience.  As I think of Manchester, and of the recent "terror" attack which took place there, I have to confess that I am annoyed.  The trouble to me is that it has all the markings of other attacks which were perpetrated in Europe and the United States over the last several years, characteristics such as the following:

• The attacks were supposedly perpetrated by some vague, shadowy "Islamic State" bent on imposing Muslim rule throughout the world;
• The attacks did not materially degrade the military capabilities of the nations where they took place;
• The attacks had an effect exactly opposite the supposed aims of the supposed perpetrators.  The actual effect of the attacks was to provide an excuse to inflame anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant (especially anti-dark-skinned-immigrant) sentiment in the nations where they took place, and to provide a justification for the nations of the Global North to attack Muslim and Arab nations where there were large concentrations of mineral resources.
• The alleged perpetrators of the attacks all wound up conveniently very dead, and thus unable to stand trial in pubic.
• After each attack, critical thinkers began to expose holes and inconsistencies in the official narrative put forward by government authorities.  One example of this includes the fact that after a supposed Islamic jihadist supposedly drove a truck into a crowd of people in France last year, French anti-terror police asked the city in which the attack occurred to destroy all video surveillance footage of the attack.  (See this also.  And, oh, by the way, did you know that remotely driven trucks have existed for years?)  If the police were really interested in getting to the bottom of this attack, why destroy video footage that could provide valuable evidence?  Another example is the presence of faked passports among the dead in the 2015 Paris terror attack.  Now in the wake of Manchester, an analyst and critical thinker is again raising questions.  And even some of his potential enemies have begun to listen. 

There is additional evidence of plans to carry out false flag attacks over the last few months, such as the case of the German army officer who tried to pose as a Syrian refugee in order to plan an attack that would have been blamed on Syrian asylum-seekers. I think the cases I have mentioned only scratch the surface of the false-flag phenomenon as it is now being practiced by powerful interests in the Global North.  The goal of these attacks is actually to prop up these powerful interests, who have succeeded in capturing the governments of the United States and Russia, and who have succeeded in the recent reversal of freedoms in many other countries such as the Philippines.  These false-flag operations prop up such regimes by validating the myth of redemptive violence which is devotedly taught by so many oppressive regimes because each autocratic leader of such a regime can cast himself as Marduk, the Babylonian autocrat deity who alone preserves the world from...chaos!!!  Those subjects who live under autocratic rule are thus taught again and again to fear...chaos!!!..., to fear disorder, to fear any deviation from the micromanaged script dictated to them by the Marduk who rules their society, and most of all, to fear those whom Marduk deems to be enemies of the state, for those enemies are the potential seeds of...Chaos!!!  And if those enemies don't care to act like enemies, Marduk must arrange incidents which portray these enemies as agents of...CHAOS!!!

In his book, The Powers That Be, theologian Walter Wink does a good job exposing the myth of redemptive violence and the uses which dictators and autocrats make of this myth in propping up their regimes.  If you follow his logic, you can see that George W. Bush was Marduk.  Dick Cheney was Marduk.  Ronald Reagan was Marduk.  Donald Trump is Marduk.  (Indeed, Trump is a spectacular Marduk, as he is only good for protecting us from "threats" that don't exist.  Other than that, he is worthless as an agent of the common good.)  Maybe Theresa May is about to become a Marduk.  (In that case, "he" will become "she" for a while.)  And Vladimir Putin is Marduk, as he showed in March of this year when he rallied his security forces against the outbreak of...CHAAAOOOOSSSS!!!!!!

The execrable part of this program is that too often, it actually brainwashes ordinary people who are susceptible to national narcissism, as in the case of Germany at present, where in 2016 there were about ten attacks a day against asylum-seekers, or in the case of Portland, Oregon, in the United States, where last Friday, a crazed white supremacist killed two passengers with a knife and seriously injured a third while they were riding a MAX train. 

What is the actual nature of the "chaos" of which the Marduks of the Global North are afraid?  If we're going to be honest, this "chaos" is nothing more than the loss of white supremacy and global domination, and the emergence of a world in which one nation cannot bully or unilaterally impose its will on other nations.  It is a world in which you can't get anywhere without taking your turn, saying "Please," or "Thank you."  It is also a world populated by many, many really neat, decent people - even though they are not of European descent!  It is a world in which nations that formerly dominated the world must acknowledge these non-European people as people, as fellow human beings.  It is a world in which national narcissism simply won't fly, but will instead lead to a moment in which the leaders of narcissistic nations are forced to look at each other and say, "You arrogant coyote, you've killed us!"  Britain is having such a moment just now.  For narcissists always miscalculate.  And the outworkings of damnation always find those who have made themselves damnable.  "Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap."

So...Who's the Dangerous One Again?

I have a couple of posts in the embryonic state, which I hope to develop and publish within the next few weeks.  But something happened that demands a response.  At around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, a male white supremacist began screaming racist and anti-Muslim insults at two young women on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon.  I think it was probably the same line that I often rode home from work at around that time for many weekdays over the last several years.  When some male passengers tried to calm this man down and de-escalate his behavior, he viciously attacked them with a knife, killing two of them and wounding a third.  Then he fled the train.

I wonder what was going through the accursed head of Jeremy Joseph Christian when he started his screaming and shouting, and when he began to kill.  Did he think he was being some kind of hero?  Was this his way of trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory to compensate for a life wasted as a felon and a loser?  Some prominent politicians and community leaders have called on Donald Trump to publicly condemn the bigotry embodied in Jeremy Joseph Christian, but if I were them, I wouldn't hold my breath, because Trump, like Jeremy, is a loser and a felon who is trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory before being thrown into an incinerator.  Trump and Jeremy, moreover, are symptoms of a larger national and ethnic narcissism which seems to have permanently taken hold of a certain sector of the American public - a sector which can easily be egged on to re-enact the myth of redemptive violence (see this also) at the slightest provocation because the enactment of this myth enables them to project the shame of their own lives onto convenient targets, even if the choosing of those targets makes no sense, as was the case with Pizzagate.  This is the sector which doesn't believe it actually exists unless it can prove its existence by terrorizing people who don't belong to it.  But it is inescapably - bit by bit - losing its ability to terrorize.  For its members, the future contains only a yawning abyss, because this sector is good for nothing.

I am a Christian and not a Muslim.  But when Muslims are actively performing deeds of reconciliation and healing in a nation and society that is being polarized and torn apart by knuckleheads for the benefit of its wealthiest members, what does that say about America as a "Christian" nation?  Only that "the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."

The Power of Decentralized Resistance

I've been enjoying listening to some talks by Jamila Raqib, who is Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution and a Research Affiliate of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In one of those talks she made a point about the nonviolent struggle waged in the American colonies for over ten years which granted de facto independence to many of these colonies months before the start of the Revolutionary War.  Her words got me thinking (and Googling) for more information.

In my search, I ran across a book (which, I must admit, I haven't read yet) called The First American Revolution - Before Lexington and Concord, by Ray Raphael.  In reading various summaries and reviews of the book, I came across some surprising information about the decentralized, grassroots nature of the vast majority of the resistance in Massachusetts to British rule.  No matter what one thinks of the aims of the revolution itself, one can't help but appreciate the wealth of information captured by recent historians about the ordinary acts of social and political disconnection by ordinary citizens which weakened and eventually destroyed de facto British rule throughout many of the colonies.

According to one source, the points made by Raphael concerning the revolution in Massachusetts are these:

• The revolution was strongly democratic, and therefore highly decentralized.
• Because the revolution was decentralized, it was ubiquitous (in other words, it sprang up everywhere, "taking place everywhere and at once without any central organization, specific times or geographical locations.").
• Many of the revolutionaries were people who had had their voting rights taken away by the British.  Hence, the strong commitment on the part of these revolutionaries to participatory direct democracy among themselves at the local level. 
• The revolution occurred without bloodshed.
• Because the revolution was decentralized and ubiquitous, it was extremely hard for centralized British authorities to counter, or even to understand.  

To the British governor and his superiors, it must have seemed as if they were being eaten by a school of piranhas - a diffuse resistance which was highly effective in drawing economic and political (but not physical) blood, yet which presented no easy target against which the British could concentrate their forces.

This presents an important lesson in the power of everyday resistance.  A grand strategy of resistance is very important, and a wise and well-executed strategy by a wise leadership insures the success of a resistance movement.  Yet ordinary everyday resistance is also very important, even though acts of everyday resistance are not likely to make it into the news or the history books.  Such everyday resistance was used by the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles East Germans, Hungarians and Czechs in their struggle against Russian Soviet occupiers in the latter half of the 20th Century.  (See this for instance.)  Such everyday resistance is also part of a manual for civilian-based defense published by the Lithuanian government in 2015 and designed to help Lithuanians foil any future Russian attempts to invade their country, whether that threat comes directly or through "hybrid warfare."

There is just one cautionary point I want to make about everyday resistance, as it is defined and has been studied by political scientist James Scott.  His catalogue of acts of everyday resistance includes acts that most societies would consider criminal, such as arson, sabotage and theft.  I don't think these acts should be part of the toolbox of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  The reason why I would exclude such acts is that criminal acts - even if they are nonviolent - weaken the mechanisms by which nonviolent resistance removes the pillars of support of a dictatorship, in much the same way that violence weakens nonviolent resistance.  Those who engage in such criminal acts give the oppressor an excuse for his oppression.  Instead, nonviolent resisters should be guided by the following principle: "...let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or an evil doer..." - 1 Peter 4:15.

That still leaves many very legitimate acts of everyday resistance that can be employed.  (See this and this, for example.)  Using your imagination and creativity can be a lot of fun here.  In a future post I will describe an an idea that recently came to me for just such an act of everyday resistance.  Let's explore how to take bites out of the Trump regime, shall we?

Of Sympathy And Negotiations

This last week has been less than kind to the junta which now holds the reins of the U.S. presidency.  Things have been particularly hard on the figurehead and namesake of that junta, a certain Mr. Donald Trump.  After losing his bid to exclude travelers from seven Muslim countries, his administration was embarrassed by news reports that revealed that Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor, had tried to cut a deal with Russia before the election to remove U.S. sanctions against Russia under a Trump administration - and that Trump knew about this weeks before he took office.  As a result, the Trump team ditched Flynn and Trump had to defend himself in a Thursday press conference in which Trump's answers and comments sank to the level of word salad.  That press conference also induced Mr. Trump's first pick for a replacement national security advisor to decline the job.

One interesting thing came out of that conference, however, namely an offer by Mr. Trump to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus.  This coincided with the release of issues of some of the glitzier gossip magazines sold at the checkout counters of supermarkets across America - magazines which sought to induce sympathy on behalf of Melania Trump (and by extension, on behalf of the Donald himself) in the hearts of many of us who buy groceries.

My problem is, I find that I keep having sympathy for the many people from Arab and Muslim countries who are in the U.S. legally and who were terrorized by Mr. Trump's abortive travel ban a couple of weeks ago.  I keep feeling sympathy for Elizabeth Warren.  I keep having sympathy for the many Hispanics who have been arrested by the ICE over the last several days, and who are now threatened with deportation.  I keep having sympathy for the members of the U.S. Congressional Hispanic Caucus who this week were ordered away from a meeting with the ICE chief by the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  My sympathies are also for everyone of Hispanic descent who lives in the U.S., for they are all potentially threatened by a proposal entertained by the Trump administration to use 100,000 National Guard troops in eleven states to round up supposed "illegals."  (Do not think for a moment that they would limit themselves solely to deporting those who could be proven by due process to be in the United States illegally.  Mass deportations have occurred at other times in U.S. history, and have targeted many legal citizens as well as illegal residents.) My sympathies are for the refugees and asylum seekers who can no longer find a place of refuge in the nation of Franklin Graham.  But for the Trump junta, I have no more sympathy than I would have for Scarlett O'Hara.  And that's quite a bit less sympathy than I would have for a pile of used toilet paper.  You feel me?!

Trump's offer to "reach out" to the Congressional Black Caucus may by an attempt to gain some positive PR from supposed "negotiations."  But as far as negotiations go, I think there is a need for extremely clear thinking on the part of all decent people, as political theorist Gene Sharp once wrote.  Indeed, in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy, he makes some very wise comments on the dangers of negotiating with dictators:

"Democrats should be wary of the traps that may be deliberately built into a negotiation process by the dictators. The call for negotiations when basic issues of political liberties are involved may be an effort by the dictators to induce the democrats to surrender peacefully while the violence of the dictatorship continues. In those types of conflicts the only proper role of negotiations may occur at the end of a decisive struggle in which the power of the dictators has been effectively destroyed and they seek personal safe passage to an international airport."

 And there's this:

"Resistance, not negotiations, is essential for change in conflicts where fundamental issues are at stake. [Emphasis added.]  In nearly all cases, resistance must continue to drive dictators out of power. Success is most often  determined not by negotiating a settlement but through the wise use of the most appropriate and powerful means of resistance available. It is our contention, to be explored later in more detail, that political defiance, or nonviolent struggle, is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom."

We have seen that the Trump team is capable of attempting appeasement when backed into a corner, although the attempts are artless and very badly done.  Yet even well-done attempts at appeasement used by abusive persons to pacify their prey should almost always be rejected.  I have written at length of the insights that can be gleaned from viewing dysfunctional national governments through the lens of family and intimate partner dysfunctional relationships in which at least one of the parties has a personality disorder.  While others have also written along these lines, this way of thinking of national and global politics has become well known only in the last few years.  Yet, just as one can predict the behavior of a non-periodic mathematical function by modeling it as a Fourier series, one can also predict the behavior of a dictatorship toward its subjects by modeling it as an interaction between a physically abusive man and his wife or girlfriend.  The interaction goes in cycles - first, the honeymoon, then the buildup of tension, then the abuse, then the apology and honeymoon, and so on.  The cycle stops only when the woman manages to put an effective barrier between herself and her abuser - a barrier that prevents any further contact.

In the same way, those of us who are the intended targets of the Trump regime should wage what Dr. Erica Chenoweth calls a maximalist campaign against the regime.  (This is only fitting when opposing someone who himself wants to cause maximal hurt to others.)  The campaign should use nonviolent means to shatter the regime's pillars of support in order to disintegrate the regime.  That means not only Trump himself, but Mike Pence, Steve Bannon, and all the others in the legion of demons who have now possessed the American government.

The New Regime's Zero for Two

I've been more than a little grouchy this week.  I think it has to do with the regime that is currently infesting the U.S. Government (on account of which I have been avoiding reading the news, lest I read something that might make my grouchiness worse).  But today I read something that put a long-absent smile on my face.  What I read also confirmed certain hunches that I've been harboring concerning the short-term future of the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world.

The first thing I read is that Trump seems for now to have lost his bid to ban refugees from seven Muslim countries from entering the United States.  It's more than a little amusing to see him belch forth his frustration over that loss.  (May he choke on it.)  In covering this story, several journalists have also shed light on the incoherent character of Trump's administration to date.  (I mean incoherent as in, a bunch of psychotic people who forgot to take their meds.)  I think it's safe to say that what normal people would correctly regard as a teaching moment will be utterly lost on Trump and the regime he represents.

Which leads me to the second thing I read, namely, that on at least two key foreign policy issues, Trump has been forced back into compliance with treaties and diplomatic approaches adopted by earlier U.S. presidents - namely, the treaty between the United States and Iran negotiated under President Barack Obama, and the "one-China policy" negotiated between the United States and China under President Richard Nixon.  This happened after Trump's bombastic promises to bully China and Iran by American military force.  I think what has happened is that Mr. Trump has been forced to realize the following:

1. America is in no position to carry through on its threats to bully China or Iran - militarily or otherwise.
2. Should Trump actually try to follow through on his threats, he will find that Iran and China can inflict catastrophic losses on any American forces that attack them.  Even Iran is in fact unconquerable.
3. Threats against China may well cause that nation to administer a righteous thrashing to the U.S., a thrashing that need not require the firing of even a single physical weapon.  For China is one of the world's three biggest creditor nations, and the United States is China's biggest debtor.  Although Japan holds more U.S. debt than China, a trade war (or any other kind of war) with China could still yield disastrous consequences for the U.S.  Can anyone say "currency crash"?

I think the future of American domestic and foreign policy therefore lies in another direction.  Trump has been set up as a convenient point person to lead his regime in that direction, as well as being set up as a convenient scapegoat to be blamed when that direction turns out to lead to disaster.  So it is important to recognize that the current deranged direction of the United States is not the fault of Trump alone, but rather, in the words of Professor Dennis Etler (cited in the link in the third paragraph of this post), "It should be clear to one and all that Trump is not a free agent. He is, in reality, a front man for a faction within the US deep state and ruling elite that wants to impose an extreme right-wing agenda domestically and a balance of power regime geopolitically. This is seen by his handlers as the only way to maintain US imperialist rule both at home and abroad..."  (One note on the quote from Etler: In addition to the so-called American "deep state," we must not ignore the role played by the global far right and especially by Russian President Vladimir Putin in helping to install Trump in power.)

Therefore, having threatened both China and Iran, and having been told unequivocally by both of these nations to quit that mess, he and the regime he represents will search for easier prey to terrorize.  This is why I think that despite his recent legal loss regarding his travel ban, he will most definitely try again to impose such a ban.  It is also why I think he is serious about renegotiating NAFTA - because he thinks that by doing so, he can terrorize Mexico.  However, what he has succeeded in doing is to motivate Mexico and China to forge deeper trade ties, while threatening revenues of American farmers.  (By the way, his abortive travel ban cost U.S. airlines $185 million while it lasted.)

In other words, the actions of the current regime in charge of the U.S. are causing nations far and near to begin in earnest the process of "going No Contact" with the U.S.  You see, No Contact can be done even when it is employed against a national government.  And it imposes costs.  Those who supported Trump as some sort of "anti-globalist" were disingenuous in not discussing those costs, as they were also dishonest in their reasons for hating globalism.  What they would have liked is the sort of situation which British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to negotiate in the aftermath of the Brexit - namely, a situation in which a nation that has exhausted its own resource base, and therefore its ability to earn things by manufacturing, is able by gunboat diplomacy or by providing "financial services" to continue receiving something for nothing from other nations while excluding the citizens of other nations from entering its borders.  What such people will find is that they cannot create such a situation - either in Britain or in the United States.

As for those of us who live in the U.S. and who are potential or actual targets of oppression due to skin color, language, religion or national origin, we too can go No Contact with an oppressive regime.  In fact, going No Contact is the necessary first step in a campaign of nonviolent resistance whose purpose is to impose the kinds of costs that bring down a dictatorship.  In future posts I will have more to say on this process, as well as the factors which led to economic globalism as it now exists.

A Thinking Cap for Resisters

In the wake of Donald Trump's ill-gotten capture of the Presidency, it has been mildly interesting to see mainstream television entertainers pleading with Americans to give Donald a chance.  I guess it's only fitting that among his flying monkeys should be people who make a living by acting silly or by pretending to be what they are not.  The Donald fits right in with them, as the former star of a cheesy "reality" TV series.  Those who study dysfunctional family dynamics will also recognize the parallels between the people begging us to give the Donald a chance and those members of dysfunctional families who cover and make excuses for those members of their own families who are the actual cause of family dysfunction. 

The problem is that ever since it was announced that the Donald "won" the Electoral College (with only 25 percent of all people in America of voting age supporting him!), he has had chance after chance to show that he is capable of sane, moral, just and fair leadership.  And every day he has failed the test in one way or another.  Asking the majority of people of voting age in this country to give him a chance sounds a bit like a violent and/or substance-abusing husband asking his wife to give him another chance even when there is no evidence that the husband has begun to do the hard work of repentance.  Those of us who are being asked to "give him a chance" are therefore being asked to ignore the lessons of pattern recognition, to ignore the data points supplied by the trajectory of Donald's life from way back in the day up to the present, to expect that a man who has enthusiastically pursued a course of selfishness and petty evil and has shown no sign of changing his course will suddenly be a different person tomorrow.

Those of us who have to live in this country under a Trump presidency would do well to avoid having any hopeful illusions about him.  I think it would be reasonable to assume that the Donald will try to do just about everything he threatened to do during his campaign.  (The leaders of some of the countries which the Donald threatened during his campaign are assuming that very thing, and have begun to issue warnings that if the new administration revokes certain treaties and agreements, or re-imposes certain sanctions, there will be consequences.)  I think it is also reasonable to assume that many of the more objectionable types who have latched onto Trump and to whom he pandered during his campaign are an accurate reflection of his character.  This means that a large number of us will be targeted for suffering, repression, denial of equal protection, false imprisonment, economic discrimination and threat of physical violence by these types.

Therefore, it will be necessary for us to resist.  Resistance, moreover, is not optional.  If we don't resist, we will suffer for sure.  If we do resist, we may still suffer - but we might also win.

Moreover, the resistance must be nonviolent.  There are ethical and moral reasons for this, especially for those of us who are Christians.  (No, this is not the time for so-called "Christian patriots" to bust out their hardware and their ammo.  If you're in that crowd, grab a clue from Luke 3:14.  By the way, the translation I quoted renders this verse exactly as it is written in the Greek, so don't try to weasel out of it.)

But there are also very pragmatic reasons why the resistance must be entirely nonviolent.  A number of those reasons have been captured in the work of Maria J. Stephan of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and by and Erica Chenoweth of Wesleyan University.  In a 2008 paper titled, "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict," Chenoweth and Stephan examined a large number of nonviolent resistance efforts which took place over the last hundred years or so, and discovered the shocking fact that nonviolent resistance movements had a success rate of over 50 percent.  Violent resistance movements, on the other hand, had a success rate of only 26 percent.  In addition, societies which experienced successful nonviolent resistance tended to be much more stable and peaceful afterward than those societies which experienced violent revolution or civil war.  Chenoweth and Stephan have expanded their findings and published them in a book, and there are other researchers who have confirmed their findings as well.

The goal of nonviolent resistance is not necessarily to persuade an oppressive, powerful and violent opponent to "listen to its better angels."  After all, it may not have any "better angels!"  Rather, the goal is to deprive the opponent of its ability to continue its oppression by removing the sources of power of that oppression.

As for the strategy and tactics of nonviolent resistance, there are a number of sources.  (See this and this, for instance.)  One source I have been enjoying over the last few days is How Nonviolent Struggle Works, by Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution.  How Nonviolent Struggle Works is a short, easy-to-read condensation of a much longer book by Mr. Sharp, who has written several lengthy books on the subject.  If you see yourself as a resister in these days, and you're wondering what to do, Mr. Sharp's short book would be a good place to start.

A Wolf's Fear Of The Future

As I think about this present time, I am reminded of special days which I have grown to dislike over the years.  One of those special days is, oddly enough, Christmas.  Don't get me wrong - I am all for people taking time out of the year to celebrate the birth of Christ.  What I choke on is being barraged by holiday music and holiday shopping advertisements from the day after Halloween until the day after New Year's.  Another holiday I am not too fond of is Halloween (although I make sure to dress as a grown-up every year).

But the day which I have come to despise most of all in the United States is Election Day.  Indeed, one of the most annoying aspects of life in the USA just now is the fact that we seem to be in a never-ending election season designed to produce maximal angst and fear among those who have to live through it.  A particularly vexing element of this is having to cut through the games played by wolves who want to bury their real agenda behind a bunch of non-issues.  Today's post will attempt to clarify the real issues at stake in the national elections, at least, as I see them.

Many of those who are campaigning for Donald Trump claim that a Trump presidency would bring world peace by ending American neocon attempts to expand American power throughout the world.  Some of these people seek to paint Hillary Clinton as some sort of war criminal, either because some American operatives died at Benghazi after the U.S. had overthrown the lawful government of Gaddafi, or because Ms. Clinton had a personal Gmail account while she was Secretary of State.  (If having a personal email account is a crime, you may as well throw many of us in jail, because we too have personal email accounts in addition to our work accounts.)  Indeed, there are many mouthpieces trying by every possible means to make Mr. Trump palatable enough to get enough votes to win the Presidency.  (Some of these people have actually tried to use the angle that he is "the lesser of two evils."  They forget that by saying this they are admitting that he is evil.)

But if we take Mr. Trump at face value - especially concerning the statements and speeches which won him the Republican nomination - we see the real motive behind the Trump candidacy, and behind the efforts of the American right wing over the last decades.  These efforts are coming to a head now, in 2016.  For the central issue is the survival of white supremacy and First World hegemony.  Trump and his supporters (along with the Murdoch and Breitbart media empires and American evangelical media) believe that this supremacy and hegemony are in mortal danger of being swept away, especially in the United States.  Thus the candidacy of Trump represents a last-ditch attempt to stop the clock, or better yet, to reverse the clock of world history and to bring the 1950's back as a permanent state of world and national affairs.  The 1950's hold special appeal for these people because these were the days in which white America dominated the world and Americans oppressed whomever they wanted to, without any fear of consequences or resistance.  Americans who enjoyed the privileges of the 1950's grew to believe that they would never have a need for politeness, compromise, consensus, respect of differences, or the need to work harmoniously with others.  And they even remade God into their own image (or for a while, as it seemed), as the God who "gave us this great land and promised us that we should rule the world!"

This has been the real agenda of the Right for a long time.  This is the real agenda of the Right at this present time.  This is what is at stake in the current election.  And on a certain level, this agenda is not only national, but international in scope, although on the international level, there are some differences.  (How many of you know that the far-right movements now at work in Europe are partially financed by Russia?  See this also.  And Russia is financing Trump.)  On the international level, the agenda morphs into an effort to maintain the hegemony of the First World over the rest of the earth, by attempting to arrive at a gentleman's agreement over who is allowed to exercise control over particular "spheres of influence".  The gentleman's agreement is then paid for at the expense of the nonwhite majority world, who get to enjoy continuing to be carved up by First World "spheres of influence" while being excluded from the concentrations of wealth which the nations of the First World have amassed by robbing everyone else blind.

The trouble with establishing such an agenda is that the factors which would cause such an agenda to succeed are now changing very rapidly.  As far as the United States, the most recent census data shows that by 2020, the majority of children in the United States will be nonwhite.  From 2011 onward, the majority of births in the United States each year have been nonwhite.  Moreover, many of these children are multiracial.  And they do not have the same agenda as the media outlets whose mouthpieces constantly demonize them as "terrorists," "heathen," "criminals" or "savages."  They don't care about Benghazi or emails.  They (and their parents) just want to live their lives in peace.  But because the current masters of American society continue to engage in conversations which the future majority population doesn't care about, the current masters of America risk becoming irrelevant in very short order.  This translates to a loss of power, if by power one means the power to bully, to oppress, to rob, to dominate, to impose oneself and one's culture on others.

The same trends are at work in Europe, which is why many European far-right groups have arisen to try to stop this process.  It could also be argued that this is a motivation for the Russian intervention in Syria.  Don't get me wrong - I think that the attempt by the West to overthrow yet another country should have been stopped.  However, based on things I have learned and sources I have read over the last several months, I don't believe the Russians intervened out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather, to stop the influx of people considered nonwhite into Europe (and potentially, into Russia).

Trump supporters have the misguided hope that perhaps he can reverse the loss of white supremacy in the U.S. - perhaps by a massive increase in police shootings of unarmed black Americans, or perhaps by wholesale, indiscriminate deportation of anyone who looks foreign or has a non-English last name, even if they were born in the U.S.  (Such deportations have happened before in U.S. history, by the way.)  But there is yet another trend at work which cannot be stopped by any political leader on earth.  And that trend is the continued impoverishment and decline of the global industrial economy owned and controlled by the nations of the First World.  For that decline is driven inexorably by the depletion of the resources needed to make that economy run.  Global production of all petroleum products is now past peak.  Coal production is about to peak, if it has not already.  The same is true of many other resources.  This also translates to a loss of power on the part of those who were formerly dominant.  How will the formerly powerful respond to the impending loss of their power?  Their response will show whether they have learned to become decent people or whether they are still wolves.

In closing, I will mention the church service I attended today.  It was at a Vietnamese church which shares a church building with a Hispanic congregation and a Karen (Myanmar/Thai) congregation.  This Vietnamese congregation held a joint Vacation Bible School with their Hispanic brethren this past summer.  Their youth groups have also had joint worship services together.  A couple of Christmases ago, I visited this church and heard some of the Vietnamese children singing Feliz Navidad.  I have also seen some of the Mexican members of the Hispanic church attending the Vietnamese Nativity service.  Today, the Vietnamese pastor was preaching out of Romans 12:6-8, and he was talking about how there is tremendous diversity in humanity.  He also mentioned that in the Body of Christ, that diversity is part of a unity.  (I was also able to see his sermon notes on a church member's iPad, and in his notes the pastor had alluded to the great evil of trying to persecute each other over our differences.)  The pastor and his congregation are not terrorists or criminals, but they have learned how to get along with others and how to be a blessing to others.  Why is it so hard for mainstream America to learn this lesson?  Could it be that America is infected by a terminal case of narcissism?

A Brief History of COINTELPRO in America

Another week, another mass shooting in America.  (Actually, there were several, but only one managed to be selected as worthy of national news coverage.)  I overheard a couple of co-workers yesterday talking about what happened in Dallas on Thursday night.  They were eyeing me during their undertone conversation, so, having no TV and blissfully unaware of Thursday's events, I strolled over cheerfully and asked, "What's up?"  They proceeded to tell me, and to offer a number of opinions regarding how American society should view both Black lives and police lives.  My next words must have shocked them.  "Have you ever heard of a false flag operation?" I asked.

From the looks on their faces, I could tell that this was not a possibility they had considered, even though one of them acknowledged that he knew what the term means.  I consider this to be a shocking failure of our outlets of culture and media to inform adults who have the right to vote, who live in what is supposedly the "most powerful country on earth," and who therefore should be much better informed.  Consider this post to be my attempt to rectify this deficiency.

I want to begin by introducing a potentially unfamiliar term to you.  According to Wikipedia, COINTELPRO "was a series of covert, and at times, illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations."  The COINTELPRO operation was conceived under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  Note the words, "discrediting" and "disrupting."  If you read the Wikipedia article, you can see the United States from the 1950's to the 1970's as a nation whose favored members enjoyed the greatest privilege the world had ever seen - yet that privilege was built on the backs of those peoples of the world who had been violently oppressed in order to build that privilege.  So the favored members of American society lived in a great deal of insecurity and felt horribly threatened by the presence of any voices challenging their privilege and the oppression on which that privilege had been built.  They were frightened by those voices which were asking for a more equitable life for all.  COINTELPRO was designed by the FBI and others as a way to discredit and neutralize the voices of those who protested the oppressive order set up by the United States and other First World nations.  Read how COINTELPRO especially targeted the leaders of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's.  One of the tactics of COINTELPRO was the use of agents provocateurs, paid police agents used to attempt to incite protest organizations to engage in illegal activity so that law enforcement would have a justification for arrests.

One thing to note: there is at least one case on record of undercover police being implicated in staging violence by protesters against police during a political rally.  I am sure there are many more cases that can may be discovered by an enterprising researcher.  I leave that as an exercise for the reader.  (You might start here, here, here, here, or here.  Goodness gracious, I think I've done a lot of the work for you!)

Now a funny thing happened in the 1970's.  In 1971, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI managed to break into an FBI office, and stole several files which contained records of the COINTELPRO operation.  (See this also.)  They then dutifully leaked these records to the press.  Many press outlets refused to publish the leaked documents, but they eventually were widely circulated, and the FBI was forced to ostensibly "end" COINTELPRO.  But like many things that are evil (including sewage leaks), the basic mechanisms of COINTELPRO never really ended.  They just went underground.  (See what was done in the 1980's to environmental protest groups, for instance.)  Indeed, the Wikipedia article cited at the beginning of this post shows that from 1980 onward (and especially during the presidency of George W. Bush), there has been a sharp revival of COINTELPRO-like operations.

As far as the Dallas sniper incident, note the following details:

• Not only were police shot, but protesters as well.  (How very similar to what happened in Maidan in the Ukraine just before the Western backed coup that plunged that country into civil war.)  
• Initial reports stated that several snipers were involved, and a number of Black men were arrested.  However, the official police story against these men fell apart, and the official narrative was changed to implicate only one man, who, of course, "died in a gun battle with police" after managing to fire on police from several positions in a superhuman feat of mobility.
• Police responders and media were conveniently on scene to provide an instant high-drama "response" to the incident.
• The man who has been implicated as the lone sniper is conveniently very dead right now, and therefore cannot stand trial.
• The dead man was implicated in less than 24 hours after the incident, in contrast to the many unreported mass shootings (defined as shootings in which four or more people are hit), in which police don't find a perpetrator for days or weeks. 
• The dead man's race and supposed political ideology were used to attempt to implicate and scapegoat entire group of people in order to justify the ongoing oppression and violence practiced by a dominant majority against this group.

In the details of the list I have presented are similarities with a number of high-profile incidents over the last two years, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Paris Massacre, the San Bernardino shootings, and the Orlando nightclub shootings.   The official narrative of these incidents has been mercilessly picked apart by a growing spectrum of people who are tired of being oppressed and especially tired of a dominant society which seems bent on finding ongoing excuses to continue the oppression and scapegoating.  So it is not surprising that one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is identifying the Dallas shooting (and similar incidents which have taken place in other parts of the United States in the last two days) as a false flag operation.

I agree with her.

Zombies of London

 Image taken from The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches, Heinrich Hoffman, 1858.

(I offer my apologies in advance to Warren Zevon.)

One of the ways in which personality-disordered people sometimes garner lots of attention to themselves is by committing suicide in a slow, dramatic way.  Imagine, for instance, someone climbing in broad daylight to the very top of the arch of the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon, while wearing a bright fluorescent lime-green clown suit.  Picture him swaying precariously over the Willamette River while screaming his intentions through a bullhorn to all and sundry for an hour or so.  Then, after traffic has shut down in both directions, while drivers are out of their cars staring raptly skyward, and news crews swarm like bugs in helicopters all around the bridge, watch him jump off and make the biggest (and last) splash of his entire life as he hits the water.

That's how Great Britain seems to me in the aftermath of the Brexit vote.  While I have been following the rise of far-right racist ultranationalism in Europe over the last few years, I hadn't been watching Britain very closely.  Much of what I know has been hastily gleaned from news over the last two weeks.  Many of you may know far more.  Yet things have played out pretty much as I might have expected, and the British are now getting their very own taste of the outworkings of damnation.

Here's what I know so far:

• The breeding ground of the Brexit campaign consisted of the frustrations of many Britons who were experiencing the loss of the standard of living that had been promised to them under a "free market", capitalist economy.  They felt that their country was at the mercy of a foreign bureaucracy over which they had no control.  In this, as an observer in the USA, I'd have to agree somewhat with them.
• That frustration was fed and amplified by the fomenting and encouragement of completely unrealistic racial and national pride, violent racism and dangerous xenophobia.  Immigrants - especially the dark-skinned, and especially the Muslim - were targeted and blamed for the unraveling of the British working class and middle class.  (But surprisingly, that blaming extended to the targeting and blaming of white Eastern Europeans as well.)
• The cheerleaders of the campaign to scapegoat immigrants - the same who championed the entire Brexit campaign - were a handful of doofus fly-by-nighters, among whom were Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Nigel Farage.  They played a classic scapegoating game of the type seen in textbook cases of dysfunctional families where the family member who is causing the greatest damage manages to deflect blame onto a family member who has no logical connection to the suffering which the family is experiencing.  Farage, Gove, and Johnson are members of Britain's wealthiest class, and it is the predatory policies which this class has championed, not only in Britain, but worldwide, which are causing the suffering now being experienced by ordinary Britons.  (For an example of predatory policies, try looking up the word "austerity" and the phrase "income inequality.")
• It is also coming out now that many of the claims made by these men during the Brexit campaign were in fact lies.  Indeed, Nigel Farage has admitted that some of his claims were false.  I think he feels free to admit this because he feels that his victory is now secure.  Also, the Brexit campaign led directly to the murder of a British member of Parliament in a killing that had a distinctively American style, as a gun was used by a disgruntled Angry White Male to do the killing.

Among the biggest lies told by the Brexit champions was that leaving the European Union was the guaranteed ticket to the revival of the British standard of living and the revival of British national strength.  Why is this a lie?  According to the World Factbook published and maintained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Britain is a net importer of almost every commodity and resource which it needs.  For instance, British agriculture is able to supply only 60 percent of Britain's nutritional needs.  British manufacturing accounts for only 10 percent of British economic output.  Britain is running a net trade deficit.  Britain has been a net energy importer since 2005.  (Read what the Energy Watch Group of Germany had to say about British oil, gas and coal reserves in its 2013 report on fossil and nuclear fuels.  And note that the situation for Britain is worse now than in 2013.)  By far, the main sector of the British economy is the service sector, which accounts for 83.5 percent of British GDP.  Central to the British service sector is the financial "industry", comprised of banking, insurance and business services.  According to the Factbook, the United Kingdom has, until now, enjoyed a position as "the central location for European financial services."

And now that enjoyable position, and all that depends on it, has all gone up in smoke, set on fire by the architects of the Brexit.  Other nations are already re-thinking their reliance on British financial services.  The British pound has already suffered a drastic decline.  The Brexit architects have, in the space of two weeks, already shown themselves to be incapable of governing a country.  (Hey, man, if your feet can't reach the pedals, you shouldn't be behind the wheel.)  The Brexit is already threatening a serious increase in trouble for an economy that was already in trouble.  (See this, this and this, for instance.)  And the Brexit vote has fractured the British body politic - perhaps incurably.  Britain is about to find out in a hurry that it is no autarky, no self-sufficient paradise.

I know that Schadenfreude is a sin, yet there is something in me right now that feels more than a little satisfaction.  It is a dark satisfaction, the kind that a researcher or scientist might feel when reality validates a theoretical model, even though that model has predicted something horrible.  For the troubles that Britain has gotten itself into are a direct validation of Galatians 6:7 - "Don't be deceived. God is not mocked.  For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.  For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption..."  It is also bitingly funny (more bite than a very strong and bitter cup of espresso!) to think of how the Brexit champions will cope with the damage they've done, now that they are running out of scapegoats.  Think of the doofus right here in the USA who is pulling similar scapegoating stunts in a bid to capture the White House this November.

A June Commentary on the Flux of Election-Year Events

I noticed this week that someone posted a recent comment on my post, "The Breakup of Pathological Spaces."  I also noticed two other things: first, that my site traffic has recently gone through the roof, and second, that my commenter made a few violations of my comment policy.  The first violation was in posting anonymously.  (Normally, I don't publish anonymous comments.  Google ID or equivalent is required.)  The second was in throwing some profanity into his (her?) comment.  I only publish comments that are written in family-friendly language.  Call me old-fashioned, or a "prude", but I have my reasons, and no one has been able to talk me out of them.

However, when someone puts up a spirited disagreement with one of my posts, I am strongly tempted to give them a hearing, even if they violate my policies.  So I have decided to reproduce Mr. (Mrs.?  Ms.?) Anonymous' comment below (with some minor edits):

"A rather foolish contortion of NPD to fit your "America so evil" narrative. On another note, calling what happened in Orlando a false flag is disgraceful to us gays (yes I am gay, and a liberty-lover just the same), I really should be commenting on that post but alas its to the same end. How can you honestly imply American culture is at-large more narcissistic, more sociopathic than the self-righteous dogmatism of Islam, which could [care] less about the freedoms of women, gays, any free thinking person, of freedom of spirit and heart? Sure the power elites ripping the world to shreds are sociopathic slime, but western individualism is not simply narcissism. Collectivism is at the heart of all governmental evil in this world. Baffles me to think people are still defending muslims who hide their immorality, sadism and vitriol behind their [garbage] religion, playing the victim at every corner until they're in every corner of western civilization because of the white man's pathological on..."

(Here Blogger cut off the rest of the comment.  Anonymous, whoever you are, if you want to finish your thought, feel free to submit the rest of what you wanted to say - subject to my comment policy, of course!)

But for now, I have a few answers to the comment from Anonymous.  As to the assertion I have made that mainstream American culture is increasingly narcissistic and sociopathic, just look at how widely the ideals of selfishness are preached nowadays - through the mouths of entire political parties (Republicans and parties to the right of them); through mainstream American evangelicalism which venerates predatory capitalism, American exceptionalism and white supremacy; and  a "press" which is no longer free, but wholly owned by a handful of sick rich people (Rupert Murdoch being one of them) who want to reproduce their disease in as much of their audience as possible.  (Ever heard of Ayn Rand?)

As for the assertion that calling Orlando a false flag is disrespectful to the victims, there are people who for years have called 9/11 a false flag, yet these people meant no disrespect to those victims.  False flag operations do hurt people - that I acknowledge.  Yet the attempt to investigate the question of why a thing happened must rest on a truthful examination of facts, because it is the body of facts which determines why things happen and who the perpetrators are.  Asking "Why" is not disrespectful to the victims, nor is it disrespectful to pay careful attention to who benefits from a thing that has happened or what use (political and otherwise) is being made of that thing.  Your statement about being disgraceful is a non sequitur.

Lastly, regarding Islam, let me tell you something.  I am a Biblical Christian, and not a Muslim.  I will never convert to Islam.  However, I think that Islam has been set up as a convenient scapegoat for decades, complete with its convenient stereotype of the typical Muslim as some emotional, crazed, violent fanatic who goes around killing people solely because he "hates their freedoms!!!!!"  You are a self-professed homosexual, and yet it is ironic that you are spouting the same sort of stereotyped cliches that the American Religious Right spouted after 9/11.  (Here are two books to check out: The Blood of the Moon, and Islam Unveiled.  The latter book must have set a world speed record for being written and published within a few short months after the 9/11 attacks.  (It was published on January 1, 2002!)  Rather odd, considering that for a long time, the typical time to publish a book from the finishing of the author's manuscript was two years.)

A closer look at the reality of Islam in the world today - if you actually care to take a look - will reveal a much more diverse body of practitioners than you may have realized.  You will understand that there are divisions within Islam that are very similar in many ways to the denominations of Christianity.  You would also have discovered a host of Islamic countries where the values of community and hospitality are so deeply ingrained in the culture that Western visitors are blown away by the kindnesses they receive.  (Check out some bicycle touring blogs if you don't believe me - like "To Catch A Rainbow (Somewhere In Iran)", "Iran Alborz Mountains", and TravellingTwo.)

Anonymous, you've been living in a toxic bubble of American propaganda for too long.  Step away from the Kool-Aid, please...

For the rest of my readers, my next blog post will describe the ways in which the campaign of Donald Trump has been using the Orlando mass shooting.

Killing A Predator - Nonviolently

Among the animals there are natural-born predators - animals who are specifically designed to live by eating other animals.  They are incapable of relating to certain other animals as anything but a food source - a fact which, no doubt, causes a great deal of stress in the animals who are regarded as food by the predators.  After all, nobody likes being eaten, or living under the constant threat of being eaten.  What if among humans, there are people who can't look at their fellow humans in any other way than as something that would look good between two pieces of bread?  How should the rest of humanity look at such human predators?

There are a few possible responses one could choose.  The first would be to be on the lookout for those in our midst who are natural predators, and who are incapable of being reformed, and to physically attack and destroy these people before they can make a meal out of you.  The trouble with this, however, is that some predators have used this justification for accusing and attacking people who were not a threat to them, in order to prey on them.  Or, we could let the predators run society so that they could shape society into the form most advantageous to them.  (This is the model adopted by the United States from 1776 until now.)

But what if you were bound by a moral code that prohibited you from doing violence to your fellow human beings, even if some of them were predators?  Would that mean that you had to passively offer yourself up to be eaten whenever you met a predator?  Surprisingly, opinions are divided on the answer to this question.

If you asked me what I thought, I would tell you that I am a Christian; therefore, I am prohibited from physically attacking those whom I recognize as human predators.  On this point, the New Testament is quite clear, if one is willing to take what it says at face value.  But where opinions diverge is on the question of whether we are obliged to keep constant company with predators, once we see that their fangs and claws have come out.  One school of thought would quote Luke 6:27-36: “But I tell you who hear: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you...", and would say that our duty is therefore to embrace every opportunity to do good deeds to abusive people, even going so far as to choose to remain in situations where we must endure long-term abuse, in order to have the opportunity to minister to abusive people.  This is how an acquaintance of mine counseled me after I told him of my recent decision to leave the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, after I had heard some statements from some of their clergy who tried to justify the many police shootings of unarmed African-Americans over the last few years.  The acquaintance told me that I should stay with the Lutherans in order to "minister" to them, in the hope that "the Holy Spirit might reach them."  I didn't take his advice.  But it is the sort of advice that tickles the ears of the sort of people who want some of us to be like the central character in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

For there is another school of thought which says that placing yourself in situations of long-term abuse is sometimes a codependent behavior, and is not a sign of health on your part, but rather of pathology.  For such a response on your part enables the abuser to continue with his dysfunctional behavior.  ("Enabling" can be defined as "removing the natural consequences to the addict of his or her own behavior.")  So while I do indeed submit to Luke 6:27-36, I am also guided by Matthew 10, where the Lord sent His disciples out to do good to a nation which He knew would not receive His message.  There He says, "Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves.  Therefore be wise (some translate this as "shrewd") as serpents, and harmless as doves.  But beware of men..."   Someone who is shrewd is smart or clever in a practical sort of way; he or she has an ability to understand things and make good judgments, and he or she possesses hard-headed acumen.  (In the original Greek, the word translated "wise" or "shrewd" is the Greek word φρόνιμος , or, "phronimos.")  In Matthew 10, the Lord also told His disciples that if their intended audience rejected the message of the good deeds done to them, the disciples were to leave them and move on to someone else.  And He said, "But when they persecute you in this city, flee into the next..."  (Emphasis added)  In other words, don't stick around.  

Things get even clearer when the abuser calls himself or herself a Christian.  For 1 Corinthians 5 says that we are not to associate with anyone who is called Christian if that person practices certain sins, among which are scheming to steal other people's stuff (which is a rough working definition of covetousness), or threatening other people in order to rob them (which is a rough working definition of extortion).  In other words, we are called to separate ourselves from those who are hell-bent on being abusive.  (That also applies on a certain level to abusive nations that call themselves "Christian".)

What if the abusers own the major institutions of society, and own the playing space in which the great game of economic advancement is played?  Then separation will not be without cost.  But those who do separate themselves will discover an amazing thing, namely, that they can indeed live outside of the system, if they are willing to stop wanting the things the system has to offer.  In other words, they discover that they don't need the things the system told them they needed.  1 Corinthians 7 commands us not to make full use of the world, since this world is passing away.  

So let's bring this to the realm of secular geopolitics.  The United States and Britain have, for the last sixty or so years, sought to refashion the world into their own personal possession, a united Anglo-American empire rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the British empire, on which "the sun never set."  They have imposed the dollar on the world as the world's reserve currency, the de facto currency of international trade.  They have enforced monetary policy via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and have made the world into their oyster, an oyster which has only one choice, namely, to be eaten.  For they have made the pursuit of all other options impossibly painful for the oyster (or so they thought).  

But the oyster is now discovering that it does not have to be prey.  Syria (with a great deal of help from Russia) has just successfully resisted Anglo-American attempts to dismember it.  Iran recently announced that it will no longer conduct international trade with any other nation in dollars, but will trade in euros from now on.  China has announced that it will no longer peg its currency exclusively to the U.S. dollar, but rather to a basket of currencies.  (See this also.)  Russia and China are now trading with each other in Chinese yuan and not in U.S. dollars.  Other nations are also now ditching the dollar.  (See this also.)  And even inside the U.S. there is an increasing number of people who are unplugging from the system, financially and in other ways, by adopting simpler, more frugal lifestyles.  (One such development: note the swelling numbers of people who don't have a cable subscription, who don't even watch Netflix, and who don't have a TV.  Note also the very successful boycotts of year-end holiday shopping by African-Americans over the last two years.)  Such developments - not widely reported in Anglo-American media - must be giving a lot of hunger pangs to the predators who want to eat the oyster.

And this - the fear of starvation - is one big reason why predators start getting nervous when the prey begins to leave the pathological space created by the predators.  Just as no prey likes to be eaten, no predator wants to die of starvation.  The other reason why predators get nervous when their prey leave them has to do with the dynamic that emerges between predators once there are no longer any prey among them.  Along those lines, last week I was fascinated to hear a TED talk by Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril.  In her talk, she described an experiment performed by William Muir of Purdue University, which involved two groups of chickens.  Chickens might prey on worms and bugs, but they normally don't prey on each other.  However, Muir took both groups of chickens through six generations of his experiment.  With one group (the control group), he did nothing but feed and care for them in the usual way.  However, in each generation of the second group, he separated out from them the best and most productive egg-layers (also known as the "super-chickens"), and used them as the breeding chickens for the following generation.  After six generations, the control group - the flock of mostly average chickens - was happy and thriving.  However, in the group which was subjected to selective breeding, by the sixth generation, only three of the "super-chickens" were alive.  The rest had pecked each other to death.

The Case Of The Moth-Eaten Inverness

"Then He said to them, 'Watch out, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.'" - Luke 12:15

Back when I was a kid in what my generation called junior high school (that's middle school for you who are now kids), it was the job of the English teachers at our school (who would now be called "language arts teachers" in most places in our country) to pour what our society called "culture" into our pubescent brains, by means of making us read "literature" whose origins were almost entirely British or American.  This "literature", packed into 7th and 8th grade anthologies called "readers", contained a large assortment of the kind of stories that would bore most 11 to 14 year old boys to tears.  However, these books did contain a few inclusions from more spicy authors.  (As an aside, I remember one English class in which we were told to read a slow story about a complicated adult situation and to analyze the feelings, emotions, and responses of all the characters.  I just couldn't bring myself to be interested, so I flipped ahead to a Mark Twain story, and spent the rest of the period trying to stifle frequent snickers and chuckles while the rest of the class wondered what was wrong with me.)

One of the more spicy authors included in my "reader" was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories.  These stories naturally appealed to me, as they involved danger, solving mysteries, and catching bad guys.  But there was a side effect to these stories which I did not notice until many years later.  For Sherlock Holmes was presented as the sort of heroic character which one might naturally expect to be produced by British society, a society which was itself presented as the most refined, intellectual and "civilized" society on earth.  Thus were the tastes, customs and culture of upper-crust British society presented as the pinnacle of human development.  And Sherlock Holmes became a pinnacle of civilized fashion (at least when he was out in public), as a representative of the British gentleman class.

When this gentleman class (and its American cousins) deigned to look at members of other cultures, it was usually with extreme disdain - disdain especially at the tokens which those other cultures used to honor those members whom they deemed to be worthy of honor.  Thus the civilized Anglo upper crust despised the feathers of the headdress of many Native American warriors, and refused to learn the meaning behind that headdress or the significance of the honor it represented.  This disdain extended to the art and music of various African tribes and nations, the food and religion of many Latin American countries, the rites of passage experienced by Australian aborigines in their cultures, the rituals of respect and honor of elders embodied in many Asian cultures.  After all, why was there any need to respect these?  The Anglo-American culture (and its European cousins) had conquered all, and in conquering all, had shattered the soul and identity of these other cultures, producing generations of people who no longer knew and who were therefore not comfortable with who they actually were.  The most these "lesser" peoples could hope for was to somehow learn to become a feeble, dark reflection of Sherlock Holmes, with his trappings of civilization: his Inverness cape, his cravat, his briar pipe, his various habits.  Or, to learn to be the 20th-century reboot of Holmes, namely, James Bond or any of the other macho spies with expensive tastes and really cool stuff who were spun off from him.  Or, failing that, simply to live large like the Anglo-Americans and the Europeans who had managed to fill their lives with really cool possessions.

And this is what I began to realize many years after my exposure to Sherlock Holmes: that Holmes, and the smug, upper-crust society he represented, were guilty of the very things they had despised in the cultures they conquered and subjugated.  And this guilt extended far beyond the veneration of the tastes of a couple of glorified fictional Anglo action-adventure heroes.  How was the fixation of 19th and 20th century British upper crust on their fashions any different or better than the reverence of any other culture for its tokens of honor?  To call one such reverence idolatry would be to automatically condemn the other reverence.  Who says that the tastes of a violent British spy who likes his martinis shaken, not stirred, are any better, more refined or more "civilized" than the tastes of anyone else on earth?

This leads to a larger question, namely, why anyone should consider the culture of Europe or the Anglo-American empire to be any better or more special than any other culture, especially when that claim to specialness rests on nothing more than having acquired more stuff than any other culture.  European and Anglo-American claims to specialness have come to rest on the possession of more, better and cooler "stuff" than anyone else has come up with, and this possession of "stuff" has even produced class consciousness and social stratification within European and Anglo-American society - a social identity based on creating a material paradise for one's own class while excluding everyone who is deemed to be beneath one's class.  But as the Good Book says, "...we brought nothing into the world, and we certainly can't carry anything out."

And even in this life, those who have based their identity on their stuff can lose it all, thus losing their identity in the process.  That has already begun to happen to the Anglo-American empire and to Europe.  The process is driven by the cold, hard limits to the global industrial economy which I mentioned in a previous post, and which others have explained in depth.  (See this, for instance.)  There is nothing that can be done to stop it.  The loss is striking at many who are, no doubt, very surprised at the losses they are suffering, as seen in the following links:

• "Nationwide Layoff Watch: Biglaw Firm Cuts Headcount; Attorneys Among The Victims," Above The Law, 14 January 2016
• "Nationwide Layoff Watch: More Lawyer Jobs Slashed Due to Weak Market," Above The Law, 28 October 2015
• "21st Century Fox Looks to Cut $250 Million In Film, TV Staff," Variety, 1 February 2016
• "Catholic University Turns to Buyouts and Layoffs to Cut Spending," Washington Post, 16 April 2015
• "Cal Considers Sports Budget Cuts, Layoffs To Close Big Deficit," SFGate, 10 February 2016
• "Declining Enrollment At University of Phoenix Suggests Much Leaner Apollo Ahead," AZCentral, 5 October 2015
• "The Demise of Private Schools," The Atlantic, 2 September 2015
• "The End of Middle Management?", BBC, 25 June 2015
• "Mergers and Layoffs Strike The Semiconductor and Wireless Industries," IEEE Spectrum, 31 July 2015
• "More Bank Layoffs: Barclays Is Reportedly Cutting 20% Of Its Investment Banking Staff," Business Insider, 4 December 2015
• "Layoffs Watch 2016: If You Work At A Bank, Gird Your Loins," Dealbreaker, 14 December 2015

There are many sources like these which describe the recent and increasing vulnerability of people who are in professions formerly considered to be immune to economic troubles.  Many of these people face a future in which the tokens of honor which they have collected will be forcibly taken from them, and they will be stripped to a level of nakedness which will shatter their souls and identity.  For it will destroy all they thought themselves to be.  (I could post some stories of the newly homeless, if I had the time.  Some of them never imagined that they'd be in that situation.)  What is Sherlock Holmes without his Inverness cape?  What is James Bond without his martini, shaken but not stirred?  If you can no longer afford an upper-class life, then welcome to the ranks of the permanently embarrassed millionaires.  Now you look just like the rest of us.

The Breakup of Pathological Spaces

Update - 9 March 2020: This post should be taken with a grain of salt.  I wrote it during a time in which most of the West was being flooded with propaganda from Russian sources such as The Vineyard of the Saker, Russia Today, and the blog of Dmitry Orlov, to name a few.  These sources were created as part of a larger Russian campaign of disinformation designed to fragment and fracture the West in order to bring the fractured pieces under Russian influence.  This was in accordance with the geopolitical strategy of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin.  Unfortunately I drank some of their Kool-Aid, but I have now detoxed, as can be seen in my much more recent post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance."  Everything the Putin regime has touched has turned to garbage.  One of his garbage deeds was to help install a racist, narcissistic, idiot President into the United States government in 2016.

Today, I am offering a re-post of "The Breakup of Pathological Spaces".  I want to add a couple of clarifying comments.  Some might read this post and think immediately of how the European Union is currently under attack from those who want to secede from that union.  Many of the "secessionists" in this case are fascist ultra-nationalists motivated by a strong racial pride and a strong desire to exclude refugees who are entering European nations from Mideast nations which the EU has helped to destroy.  Hence their love for border guards, walls and fences.  While I agree with them that the EU as currently constituted should die, I question their ultimate motivations.  They should be careful, lest they succeed in breaking free from one pathological space by creating other, smaller pathological spaces, which is what they would turn their countries into by pushing their agenda.

In thinking of a "healthy" breakup, I am reminded of "Third World" countries which have managed to escape from the larger pathological space created by the earth's dominant nations.  I think of Cuba under Fidel Castro, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez (while he was still alive), and Bolivia under Evo Morales.  These leaders have all had the same goal: namely, to return sovereignty and self-determination to their own people, and to end the exploitation of their people by Europe and the Anglo-American empire.  Each of these countries has had varying degrees of success in achieving that goal, and each of these countries had to pay a price for setting that goal for themselves.  But each of these countries is still standing in some sense as sovereign nations.   Their citizens have not been turned into refugees.  Over the last decade, they have been joined by Fiji.  (See this also.  The "undemocratic" rulers of Fiji have an approval rating of at least 66 percent, due in part to their policies to help the poor and to reduce ethnic conflict.  How many people have to like you before you stop being "undemocratic"?)

To be sure, in the West, there is a much more negative view of how well these nations are doing, and how well their leaders have done for them.  The negative Western view is promulgated by Western media and Western "journalists".  But is it not obvious by now that most of these "journalists" are liars?  (See this also.)