Reprinted from Counterpunch: Article by Bill Quigley

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu

One. Build and rebuild community.

When disaster hits and life is wrecked, you immediately seem to be on your own. Isolation after a disaster is a recipe for powerlessness and depression. Family, community, church, work associations are all important –get them up and working as fast as possible. People will stand up and fight, but we need communities to do it. Prize women –they are the first line of community builders. Guys will talk and fight and often grab the spotlight, but women will help everyone and do whatever it takes to protect families and communities.

Powerful forces mobilize immediately after a disaster. People and politicians and organizations have their own agendas and it helps them if our communities are fragmented. Setting one group against another, saying one group is more important than another is not helpful. Stress and distress is high for everyone, but community support will multiply the resources of individuals. Build bridges. People together are much stronger than people alone.

Two. Self-reliance.

Your community must be ready to re-settle your property as soon as possible and care for those most in need. Prioritize help for the elderly, the sick, children and women, especially the poor. The prime cure for helplessness is taking control over your own life and joining others to fight for justice.

Groups and people will want to treat you like a victim –say you are traumatized and incapable of making basic decisions about yourself. They will tell you they know best and act like they know best. Tell them to get lost.

[… please, read the whole article at CP! …]

Resist the tendency to think someone else is going to come save you. There is no leader out there. We must each become leaders and followers in order to bring about the change that is needed. Each of us is challenged to get beyond our pre-disaster comfort zone. New leadership is essential to avoid just repeating the mistakes that contributed to the disaster.

[… did I mention that the whole article is worth reading?…]

Building communities of resistance and working for human development is long-term work. Love is a tremendous source of energy. But we have to love ourselves as well so we can keep living this resistance with others. We have and will continue to make mistakes. We have to get back up, dust ourselves off, forgive ourselves and others, and get back to working in community to create a more just world.

It is important to laugh too. Remember that last job held by the guy in charge of disasters for the entire US government was as head of an association of dancing horses! We can’t make this stuff up.

Katrina was a small scale localised disaster. Peak Oil and climate destabilisation are ongoing, global-scale disasters that, I suspect, will colour and condition the rest of the lives of all people living today. Bill Q’s Ten Lessons learned by our brothers and sisters in NOLA are applicable to all of us, everywhere on earth, where an ongoing disaster (and accelerating Disaster Capitalism — as if there had ever been any other kind) is now the environment in which we live and raise our children.

Community. Women. Food. Solidarity. Resistance. Priorities — every single day, from now on.

Posted by DeAnander as Analysis at 3:07 AM PDT

Copyright 2007 by James Craven

“Chutzpah” used to be defined as “Killing one’s parents and then pleading mercy of the court on the grounds that one is now an orphan.” The new defintion of “Chutzpah” is Chickenhawk and Deserter-During-Wartime Bush and Chickenhawk Cheney speaking to a VFW audience–and, speaking on the need for “Staying the Course” in Iraq as “WE” should have “stayed the course” in the Vietnam War they both worked so hard to avoid. What is also disgusting is some of those patently stupid and backward types found in the VFW and American Legion, (the older they get the bigger “heros” they used to be) actually sitting and listening to the lies and rationalizations of failure of both of them and even applauding.

There are indeed many parallels between Vietnam and Iraq Wars. And there are also many parallel myths born of cognitive dissonance: the naked contradiction between the BELIEF vs EMOTION, BELIEF vs FACT or EMOTION vs FACTs.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:02 PM PDT

BY Stan Goff

Part 8

After World War II, the US inherited three M’s: Military superiority, Monetary dominance, and the Middle East. This 3M inheritance would eventually bring us to where we are today… talking about “Homeland Security” as a political device, while our political practice has set us on an unspeakably dangerous course of insecurity.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 3:42 PM PDT

BY Stan Goff

Part 7

While the United States was in the process of breaking England to its will in the Sterling Zone and figuring out how to fill the newly emerging post-colonial voids in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, Eurocommunism began gaining a popular foothold in places like Italy, Spain, France, and Greece. This did not sit well with Truman, whose administration had settled on a strict policy of “containing” communism, especially since communist-led governments — still following Moscow’s lead — were unlikely to go along with GATT. The additional benefit of anticommunism was to paint the communist political movement as a nearly-demonic threat as a means of justifying massive spending abroad to a war-weary American population, and to push Western Europe under a putative American security umbrella.

During the war, the most disciplined and tenacious of the underground resistance movements to Nazi occupation had been peopled and led by communists. This gave communism a positive reputation among the masses, and instilled the Eurocommunists with a sense of postwar political entitlement.

In Greece, as early as 1944, this resulted in an open conflict between the Greek monarchy and the Greek Communist Party’s resistance movement, the Democratic Army. By 1946, this conflict deteriorated into a full-scale civil war. In a typically cynical maneuver to protect Soviet national-interest strategies at the expense of other national communist parties, Stalin had agreed in secret with Churchill in 1944 to cede Greece to the British as an area of “influence.” When the civil war began, it began with British occupation still in place.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:49 AM PDT

BY Stan Goff

Part 6

The term “nationalism” is a little like the term “love.” People use it all the time to mean many things and would be hard-pressed to provide definitions for any of them.

Calling nationalism a “love of one’s country,” then, is not just tautological, it is multiply-ambiguous. It is also ahistorical.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 3:11 PM PDT

Part 5

Two seemingly unrelated things began just as Britain was pulling out of the Middle East as part of its general imperial stand-down: William Levitt (of Levitt & Sons) broke ground on a potato field near Long Island in 1947 for a housing project called Levittown, and in 1948 European Jews who had spent the last few decades moving into Palestine as part of a militant, secular colonial sect called Zionists declared a “Jewish State” in the heart of Arab Palestine.

Levittown — a housing development of 17,447 homes, all nearly identical — would come to be seen as the vanguard of a new phenomenon, the residentially-zoned car-suburb.

The State of Israel would come to be seen — in the guilty post-holocaust imaginations of “the West” — as a struggle between European (civilized) Jews and primitive Arabs, as a David and Goliath struggle between the embattled Israelis and an Arab Goliath, and as as forward base of civilization in the wild Middle East. The term “Judeo-Christian” that linked the two religions in a common genealogy gained currency only after WWII as a mechanism of denial for a largely anti-Semitic Christianity after the public acknowledgment of the death camps, and it supported the political policies of a newly emergent American global empire with an ideology of common cause against “Muslim savages.”
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 9:33 AM PDT

BY Stan Goff

Part 4

Earlier in this series, I said that money is not a fixed value. Actually, that is just an entre to the mysteries of money. Money is a (soul-less) form of communication. Money is a weapon. Money is a social solvent. And money is perceived differently based on context. This recognition of how money shape-shifts is essential to understand the phenomenon of political Islam… now seen in the popular US mind as the principle source of “terrorism,” and therefore our most urgent security threat.

The Market (TM) is an objectifying and homogenizing cycle of social existence. When everything has a price, then we have the peculiar duality that a pair of shoes, a ride on a Go Kart, a meal, or a pint of blood in the Emergency Room, are all qualitatively different things and at the very same time reducible to the same thing… different only in quantity. Price is a varying quantity of the same quality. If price were played on the piano, there would be no chords. One dollar: ding. Five dollars: ding ding ding ding ding. It only has one note.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 1:31 PM PDT

The Junk Credit Crisis

As we move forward with the “Homeland Security” series here at Insurgent American, one of the components of system-evolution that is being woven into this materialist conception of recent history is the increasingly dominant role of the financial pole of capital in the system and in the crisis of that system. This Counterpunch piece by Mike Whitney — using a libertarian POV, and without IA’s attention to gender and ecological factors — is a news flash from that crisis. Quoting von Mises and calling on support for prez-candidate Ron Paul is a dead giveaway on the libertarian orientation. Libertarians are gold bugs; and they have shown a past predisposition to the-sky-is-falling catastrophism. But the liquidity crisis is real, and it is ultimately unsustainable. Whitney’s contention that a couple trillion bucks worth of value was evaporated is true, even if Henry Liu has a better take on what this means: “devaluation camouflaged as growth”.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:01 AM PDT

BY Stan Goff

Neither the universe nor life is linear. Things weave through one another. The past and future are more than discrete units of time apart from the shifting instant of now. The ripples on a pond crash into and through one another. The political realities of our time are likewise over-determined, complex, irreducible, a splashing, surging, whirling current of evolutions — personal, geographical, institutional, cognitive-and-affective, inter-subjective, and cultural… so we have to circle these phenomena — like a recon team circling an objective — to get the fuller picture of what we observe and try to understand. The patterns that emerge from the totality of these observations we might begin to call a system. And if that system is a horror; then we cannot escape the responsibility for confronting that system and simultaneously escape the consequences of our inaction.

In 1979, after a break in my Army service and having recouped my sergeant’s stripes as a mechanized cavalry scout in Fort Carson, I volunteered for the Rangers. Off to Ranger School I went, and upon completion I was assigned to 3rd Platoon, Company A (Alpha Company), 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Infantry Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington. Each of the three rifle platoons (organizations of around 40 light infantrymen) had nicknames, in this case, First to Fight, the Blacksheep, and Third Herd. A Company, known for its iron discipline, was called the Alpha-bots. When I left there in 1981 to become a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, I never had a notion that I might somehow be entangled with Alpha Company again… two-and-a-half decades later.

Brothers Pat and Kevin Tillman were Alpha-bots, assigned to the Blacksheep (2nd Platoon), when Pat was killed by friendly fire on April 22, 2004 near a tiny village called Manah in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. When I was a member of the adjacent platoon in the same building, Pat was a baby.
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 10:44 AM PDT

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Copyright 2007 by Jim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi

I am convinced that cognitive dissonance explains a whole lot of human behavior. I might even buy it as a central component of a meta theory of human history. Examples: What is a conservative? Answer: A Liberal that has been mugged. What is a Liberal? Answer: A Conservative that has been outsourced or downsized.

Cognition comes from the Latin root “cognoscere” or becoming acquainted with something or “knowing”. And dissonance refers to disharmony. Put the two together you get cognitive dissonance. Those, who seek to create human robots, build empires on the blood and obedience of innocents, cover-up crimes, create advertising, in military psyops and those who design curricula and cultures of military boot camps understand it well.

We have different ways of thinking about things and we have different things we think about. There are “facts” we discover or are presented with which we may or may not bother to discover, think about or accept as facts. We have beliefs about ourselves, those closest to us and about where we live and what we do that come from and are modified by a variety of sources. We have emotions or passions about things that often correspond to our interests or what we think are our interests.

Cognitive dissonance arises when certain purported facts come into conflict with certain beliefs; when certain beliefs come into conflict with certain emotions; when certain emotions come into conflict with certain facts. Something has to give lest a potentially physiologically and psychologically disturbing, sometimes even life threatening, dissonance or contradiction develops.

I still remember my first day of Boot Camp at Fort Ord, California as if it was yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by stan as Analysis at 9:48 PM PDT