Dietrich Bonhoeffer - on Stupidity

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

VE Day Plus Eighty Years

As the world today celebrates the eightieth anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day--the end of the Second World War in Europe--it is good to pause and reflect on what that means.  

For nearly six years Europe had been at war, a war that claimed an estimated 20 million European lives, nearly one third of whom were civilians, murdered in industrial-scale concentration camps, for no reason other than their ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation.  

There was still a great deal of fighting ahead in the Pacific war against Imperial Japan (the invasion of Okinawa had only just begun), but the war in Europe was over.  

The surrender of Nazi Germany ended that fascist regime's continent-wide terror campaign.  But the defeat of a nation is not the defeat of an idea.  The danger of fascism, and the hatred and prejudice on which it feeds, has never been defeated.  The dictatorship of Franco, which Hitler and Mussolini made possible, remained in power for another thirty years.  Fascist cliques in Greece, Chile, Argentina, and many other places around the world have sprung up over time, with the resultant ruin.  Greed knows no nationality, nor ethnicity.  There is no place that is immune.  Vigilance, and the willingness to resist dictatorship wherever it appears is the only defense - the only way to honor those who have suffered in the past, and who sacrificed so much to end that horror eighty years ago.  

Operation Market-Garden

We love to remember and celebrate our past military victories.  But the most instructive lessons from history are often from our failures and defeats.  We don't often hear about them - but should.  

Just such an opportunity occurred eighty years ago ago, along the front lines of the Western Front in Europe.  Since the success of  the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and the struggles in the hedgerow country, the allies were experiencing an unbroken string of successes. Progress came so quickly, that they began to believe that the Germans were on the verge of collapsing.  But with this rapid success, as the Allies continuing east, new problems arose.  Their progress began slowing, not just due to German resistance, but to to the  incredibly difficult logistics of trucking supplies the increasing distance from Normandy and Brittany to the front lines.  The search was on for a port closer to where the supplies would be needed.

In address this, and to accelerate the defeat of Germany, allied leaders developed a bold plan to leapfrog over the front, landing thousands of paratroops in Holland; closer to Rhine River, and Germany.  Operation Market Garden was a highly complex attack; starting with the largest airborne drop in human history, followed by a coordinated assault from land forces to strengthen the bridgeheads.  

The complexity and necessary coordination of the operation was such that any part that failed, or was even delayed, could cause the entire operation to fail.  But such was the confidence of the Allies since D-Day (The Greek playwrights had a word for this kind of confidence - 'hubris', and it rarely worked out well for the protagonist), that they went forward with it anyway.  

As it turned out, many key dependencies proved to be flawed, and elements of the plan began to fail very early on.  But, because the first element of the operation was to strand thousands of paratroopers well behind enemy lines, there was no turning back.  

Facebook is no place to discuss this in detail.  This operation is well documented, including a book and movie, 'A Bridge Too Far', which are considered among the most historically accurate recreations of war ever committed to film.  

As an interesting counterpoint to the failure of Market Garden, the German military developed a bit of hubris of their own, that led to their invitation of the Ardennes a couple months later, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.  

Berlin Airlift 75th Anniversary

OPERATION VITTLES

Tomorrow will be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Airlift; the fifteen-month campaign to supply West Berlin by air with all its needs—from food and medicine to clothing, and even coal to operate their power plant—in defiance of a Soviet blockade of all other methods of supply.  

The events that led to the blockade comprise another complex story - though one that is well worth learning.  This post celebrates the tightrope walk of Harry Truman and his counterparts in London and Paris; ready to do everything required to preserve the freedom of West Berlin – while taking precautions that these efforts not trigger World War III.  These efforts were not only successful in that, but transformed nations who were, just three years earlier, hated enemies, into allies - and friends.  

Richard Reeves' history of the airlift 'Daring Young Men', is a tribute to the veterans who were suddenly called back to duty to help save the same people they had only three years earlier been bombing into oblivion.  He includes a story that illustrates this transition. He tells about Captain Arlie Nixon, who was called up from his job as chief pilot at TWA (that paid $750 per month) to go back rejoin the military (at $150 per month).

"Arlie tells the story of before the Airlift really got underway, he would go into a restaurant in Frankfurt and every German would stand up and walk out when he went in," Reeves said. "Two weeks after the airlift was underway, he went back and walked into the same restaurant and everybody stood up and went to the bar and bought him a stein of beer and cheered him as he drank the first one."  

I'm not among those who drape themselves in the flag, but this chapter in our history makes me feel very proud.  

There's a particularly heartwarming sidebar about the 'Candy Bomber', and the effect that 'Operation Little Vittles' had on children who gathered near the airport for treats.  

Candy Bomber

Macron Reelection

It was gratifying to see that Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France.  

The vote was not particularly close, until one considers who his opponent was.  The fact that a far-right anti-immigrant, anti-minority candidate such as Marine Le Pen garnered over 40% of the vote is as terrifying as the sway Donald Trump holds over the American right wing.

Macron's speech included a note of conciliation toward those who have been disaffected during his first term of office - and the realization that his shortcomings are directly related to the attraction of somebody like Le Pen.  French people who feel left behind by economic changes, and ignored by politicians who focus more on urban and suburban interests are a powder keg.  Another series of 'yellow vest' demonstrations could be enough to tip the balance to dangerous populists, who might spell the devolution of the European Union and NATO into fractious individual countries, vulnerable to manipulation by tyrants like Vladimir Putin.  

So I celebrate his victory, but more so, the lessons to which he offers promises.  It is critical that he finds a way to make those promises a reality.  

Slow Strangulation of Putin Regime

I commend the approach our nation, along with our allies in Europe and elsewhere, have taken in response to Putin's brutal, criminal, invasion of Ukraine.  

As viscerally satisfying as direct military retaliation would have been, such rash action would have led to escalation - perhaps even including the use of nuclear weapons.  Once things escalate, it becomes easier for each side to point to the other, with tangible evidence that the other is the aggressor - obfuscating the historical record.  

The more measured, more effective, approach the world has taken has already begun to devastate the Russian economy.  While Russians can't speak out publicly, this damage will serve to delegitimize the Putin regime, and may eventually even topple it.  

It is important, even after Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine (or at least whatever part of Ukraine negotiations call for them to evacuate), sanctions must not be lifted immediately.  Aside from the cruel human toll, this unprovoked aggression has caused a great deal of damage to private and public property, utilities, and other infrastructure throughout Ukraine.  That nation must be restored to it's pre-invasion state before sanctions are lifted.  The costs of repairs to these must be borne by Putin and his supporters.  

Additionally, those who commanded and/or oversaw the well-documented campaign of atrocities must be brought to justice.  An international warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin must be issued.  Though he is unlikely to turn himself in, he will become a prisoner of the nation he rules - his most inner circle of victims.

Critique of a Critique of Obama

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/23/a-man-child-in-a-promised-land/?fbclid=IwAR046KKaS80JStkvnakyPnpFK7T8O77PBVskqagznbouZ3_9qBAjY9st8Rs

I understand the perspective offered in the Counterpunch article, but with most of the reservations Tony mentions.  

Barack Obama, along with his many other roles in our culture, served as a Rorschach test.  As the first Black president—elected a mere forty years after Martin Luther King gave his life to make it possible for such a man to be elected for the content of his character (or perhaps his charisma), rather than his pigmentation—his ascendancy was attended by all the expected range of aspirations and fears.   

Many of the hope and fears were based upon the same two-dimensional caricature of the beholder, rather than by Obama’s promises or policies.  For every paranoid racist who feared a military-backed Mau-Mau uprising, there were others for whom that would be a prayer answered.  

But Barack Obama was not without a track record, and was not silent about his plans.  The author compares him disparagingly to the Clintons.  I feel that the comparison has merit, we should consider the alternatives.  I personally consider myself somewhat to the left of President Obama.  But when we consider the domestic and international ecosystem we inhabit, how much more progressive a candidate could be elected; indeed, how much more progressive could policies be, and hope to be enacted by a Congress which represents a center-right constituency?  Would we prefer a president whose administration went down in flames ‘fighting the good fight’ for a public option on healthcare, or one who will settle for a program that meets most of the needs, but leaves this important program to be taken up by a future administration?

We need perspectives like Paul Streets - though they could better be phrased more civilly.  We need to remember what has been left on the table, lest we forget and leave it there indefinitely.  But, as painful as it can be, we need to remember that politics plays out in the theater of the possible.  And we need to evaluate the success of an administration compared to the promises the candidate actually made, rather than those we imputed upon him or her, based upon our own aspirations.  

Governor Cuomo and COVID-19

 Response to Jack Scofield's criticism of Governor Cuomo, and Cuomo's concerns around a new vaccine that has to be kept extremely cold (-80 F).

Jack's post:

Let me get this straight...

According to this self-serving idiot, (exceeded only by his Hollywood wanna-be Brother) five long months ago, the world was coming to an end due to the COVID plague. Now he’s bitching about the burden of dispensing the vaccine?

Thank Gawd! We must begin assembling committees and legislative counter measures to keep this potential panacea under control and away from the gullible public he so adroitly protects.

My response: 

Excellent, if baseless, takedown of Governor Cuomo - and a bonus takedown of his brother. Your expression of contempt seems heart-felt, and worthy of the current embittered lame-duck insult-comic president. Good work!

Since you asked, let me help you ‘get this straight’.

Five months ago, Governor Cuomo was absolutely correct. He never said the ‘world was coming to an end’, but his well thought-through daily briefings provided an intelligent counterpoint to the bullshit coming out of the White House that COVID would ‘just go away’.

The good news is that New York—one of the hardest-hit states early in the pandemic—has a better handle on the crisis than almost all others, due primarily to measures taken by Governor Cuomo and his administration. Note the time series in this graphic, and watch NY disappear off the ‘worst-case’ list in early June, and rise to one of the safest states by the end.

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/3835611/?fbclid=IwAR0y8yVE2CuVNbmtw3jfuc1ymSicjwDhnMVHtf3jX55me85dAjbW-KRJeKI 

I watched this video. Governor Cuomo is expressing well-grounded concerns about the logistics of distributing to an entire population a vaccine that becomes, at best, ineffective, if not dangerous, if it experiences a temperature excursion above -80ºC (-112ºF). Its efficacy is not regained by just chilling it again; it must be KEPT below that temperature. Such a distribution to an entire population is totally unprecedented, even if it didn’t have to be precisely duplicated for each person six weeks later.

So what part of Cuomo’s comments do you dispute?

COVID - Quarantine vs. 'Herd Immunity'

I am very aware of the toll that quarantine is taking on people, both financial and psychological.  One of my dearest friends has pretty much given her life over to babysitting her granddaughter every school day - attending virtual classes with her, as the child’s mother is in the other room being a virtual school counselor - to dozens of kids with special needs, who are also isolated at home with (or maybe without) parents distracted by other obligations.  This is taking a serious toll on Pam, and her relationships with her family.  So many kids don’t have a grandmother who can just drop everything to be a full-time nanny.  This can only be much tougher for them - and a serious setback to the children’s education.

We are ALL ready for this to be over.  I don’t compare my sacrifice to that of others, but I was supposed to be in Europe for two months this spring, taking the unstructured vacation I should have taken when I was nineteen.  I will not be hosting my family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year - which is the first time in almost a decade.  Since I live alone, and don’t see my family that often  that means a great deal to me each year - but so does the safety of my loved ones.  We also lost our brother this spring, and have not been able to gather to commemorate him.  Compared to what Pam, her daughter and grand-daughter, and your grand-children are facing, my story is inconsequential - but still worth sharing.  

Worldwide, this plague is taking a toll, both where restrictions are stric, as well as where they are lax.  In most of Europe, they imposed strict quarantine measures in the early spring, and held this disease at bay for months.  But isolation was exhausting for them, and they eased the restrictions, or people started violating them, and now their infection rate comes close to ours.  

My comment about mass murder wasn’t intended to suggest motivation.  But the reality is that large-scale infections and deaths are the inevitable result of loosening restrictions when there is no other way of limiting infection rates.  The concept of ‘herd-immunity’ is only humane when it is achieved through vaccination.  There is no way of truly isolating vulnerable populations as a deadly disease runs its course through the general population.  Because we don’t have a national approach to handling this, each state has run it as they choose.  The results speak for themselves.  

To complicate matters, this disease seems to be mutating in such a way that surviving it may only afford a person a brief period of partial immunity … which means that letting it run its course through the population would not result in herd immunity anyway.  It is to be hoped that researchers will develop a vaccine with broad enough effect that the immune response will be durable for a long period of time.  

Minority viewpoints DO need to be heard.  And the consequences of choices need to be weighed against one another, so the decision can be informed.  Unfortunately, a pandemic is not a place where each family should be allowed to decide for themselves how to approach it.  

I wish I had assurance that if we all just hunkered down for a few more months, this would go away … or, alternately, that if we just let it run its course, it would soon be over with.  The reality is that nobody knows … not you or me, not Anthony Fauci, and the majority of the world's epidemiologists, and not those who promote the Great Barrington Declaration.  

Profiles - Courage and Cowardice

 One of the most courageous things for a leader in a democracy to do is to take a necessary, but unpopular stand, and stick with it, despite tremendous pressure to change their mind.  John Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage is a collection of stories of US Senators who took such stands, knowing it could (and generally did) cost them their jobs.  

Career-limiting decisions like these are courageous under the best of circumstances.  How much more courageous to stick to such a decision in a broken society, where gangs of armed dead-enders form up into ersatz militias, and form plans to violently overthrow authorities who make decisions with which they disagree.  

One thing such leaders can typically count on in our country is the support of law enforcement, and the federal government.  How vastly more courageous it must be for a governor to sustain a necessary, but unpopular decision when the local sheriff sides with the anti-government vigilantes - and even the president tweets dog-whistle endorsement for their criminal plotters.  

A profile in courage stands out most boldly within a milieu of cowardice.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/08/politics/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-cnntv/index.html

1940 Crises and Election

 At times like this, when so much history is being made (for better or worse), it is sometimes hard to step back and look a little further back in history. 

Eighty years ago, there was an important election in the US.  The world was in the midst of a major crisis, that showed all the signs of getting much worse before it got better.  Totalitarian, violent regimes on opposite sides of the globe were running rampant.  Imperial Japan had brought war and devastation to large parts of China and Southeast Asia.  In Europe, Nazi Germany had defeated France, and was preparing to invade Great Britain.  The Battle of Britain, fought in the skies over southern England and London foiled that plan, but left Germany in command of most of continental western Europe.  

Within this environment, Franklin Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term in office.  Both he and his opponent, Wendell Wilke, knew that the US would be drawn into the war, but neither dared to be the first to acknowledge that to an isolationist electorate.  They had sort of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to not make that part of the election.  

The crisis revealed an ugly side of many prominent Americans.  Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford were prominent voices for staying out … motivated in part by their virulent anti-semitism.  Joseph Kennedy, our ambassador to Great Britain, joined their isolationist cause, if only because he felt that Hitler had already won, and we needed to just accept it as a fait accompli.  

I highly recommend Susan Dunn’s book, ‘1940’, for a deep dive on these crises, and this election.  It really does help to try on the lens that a view of history provides. 

Public Option and Competition

I'm a little bit confused by the opposition to a public option to the for-profit health-care choices that dominate our system.  On the one hand people are concerned that these programs will be a drain on public resources.  Then, without missing a beat, we are told that such a program ... even one without public subsidies, would present unfair competition to insurance companies. 

In general, most people leveling these criticisms believe them.   honestly intended, but inconsistent.  I mean, either the system is so inefficient that we can't afford to offer it, or it's so efficient that it is unfair competition to 'for-profit' competitors. 

The reality is that it is neither. 

Little Sisters and Birth Control

… and if your manager is a nun, you don’t even need to bother asking. 

In a way I don’t blame the Little Sisters of the Poor for their objections.  It makes sense because we pose the wrong question in this country.  Even with the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ‘ObamaCare’), the procurement and administration of health insurance is still left to employers, who peruse the details of costs and coverage.  This is a vestige of the ancient ‘patron’ theory of employment—which enabled broad invasions of employee privacy—most aspects of which have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Health insurance is a human right, and the minimum basic coverage required under the ACA is bare bones.  It is much better to view paying for the coverage as part of the cost of employing people, while leaving the selection and administration to professionals.  That administration is time-consuming and costly for small employers; it is terribly inefficient for, say, a restauranteur to be expected to gain enough expertise (not to mention power) to negotiate with a huge insurance company.  No other advanced industrial country burdens employers with this; we shouldn’t either.

It would be much more efficient and affordable to establish a single risk pool, called ‘human being’, and negotiate rates for minimum basic coverage en masse.  For those employed, the employer’s role would simply be to contribute the appropriate amount into a fund to cover their obligation – much as is done with Social Security and Medicare.  It is not an employer’s business to look into the details of a human being’s healthcare coverage, any more than a range of other personal choices they make. 

I understand the Little Sisters balking at having to specifically procure health insurance coverage that contains clauses they find immoral.  This should not be in their hands; they should not be customizing coverage – any more than an employer who is a Christian Scientist might customize coverage that covers only prayer. 

Modern Propaganda

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  - Garry Kasparov

We are inundated with an amazing torrent of misinformation.  I had naïvely hoped that the global pandemic we face might have encouraged at least some of the purveyors to take a break, or tone it down a bit.  But, to the contrary, they have ramped up the nonsense, and the sources have proliferated.  

Manipulators easily find wedges, and offer easy answers to those confused by the complexity of the real problems we face.  Otherwise intelligent people are overwhelmed by it all, and give up their filters.  The timeless siren song of the deceiver, ‘You can’t trust anybody … so trust me!’ echoes throughout the canyons of our society, emerging from the depths of the dark web.  And we products of the sixties and seventies, trained to be skeptical of authority, are easy prey for those who claim that their voices have been silenced by a cynical establishment.

There is an entire ecosystem of fraud.  Much of it is not even internally consistent, but once somebody has been captured within its web, they no longer expend the effort to connect the dots; they just believe.  And because distrust of outside influences is integral to the program, it is extremely difficult to correct the record from outside the bubble.  

We who exist outside the bubble face the difficult decision to either listen dispassionately, as people repeat these paranoid fantasies, or offer corrections and clarification - tearing friendships apart, and promoting the very social discord and disunity the deceivers seek.   

I, for one, am utterly exhausted, depressed, and totally pessimistic about the potential victory of truth over ‘alternative facts’; of serious peer-reviewed science over ‘maverick’ nut-cases; of evidence and statistics over well-coached gut feel, denial, and cognitive dissonance.  

Mechanisms of Cults

Observing the workings of a cult is an excellent study in human psychology and sociology.  If you don’t know what to look for, you can miss it as it takes root and grow in your midst.  

Cult leaders rarely start right out with the ‘big lie’.  Even the most gullible of potential members would laugh in their face and move on if they did.  Rather, they lay the groundwork over time; exploiting their followers’ alienation from the modern world – or fear of changes in society.  They begin with smaller, more ambiguous fabrications that gradually draw followers in. 

As leaders strengthen their hold, they isolate followers from outside influence.  This may be overt—prohibiting members from contacting families, reading newspapers, watching television, or listening to the radio—but is more likely subtle.  It is equally effective to consistently ridicule outside sources of information, encouraging members to cut themselves off.  Over time, these sources are less frequently brought into conversation – unless distorted for use as a straw-dog, to reinforce the cult’s orthodoxy.  Outside news sources are ridiculed as the ‘liberal press’, ‘mainstream’ media, ‘drive-by’, or ‘lame-stream’ media.  Peer pressure and embarrassment cause members, over time, to avoid these altogether.  Those who stray from this prohibition are viewed with suspicion by their fellow members. Rather than risk alienation from the group, the transgressor mends his or her ways, and avoids connection with these threatening influences. 

The true test comes when the cult leader tells members something that is clearly, verifiably, false … then asserts it repeatedly.  If the hook is set, followers will come around to believing the leader, rather than their own eyes.  A guru may claim he is flying, thought he is clearly just sitting still in the lotus position – or that he is bench-pressing some ridiculously high weight, when a system of pulleys is clearly visible.  Or a leader might claim to have attracted the largest crowd in history to his inauguration, when photographic evidence clearly shows a sparse crowd.  So, who are you going to believe; your eyes, or the object of your adoration?  

Once this point is reached, credulous True Believers can be led to believe almost anything, and followers become, in essence, an extension of the leader.  Outsiders lose all influence; their silence is perceived as assent; disagreement, if heard at all, is perceived as a threat.  Cognitive dissonance—the fear that if one admits the error of one claim, it could weaken of destroy one’s entire perceptual framework—creates a curtain of denial.  The more ridiculous the lie that comes to light, the more intense is this effect.  Rather than causing followers to question their beliefs or their fealty to the leader, a clear falsehood makes them cling ever more tightly. 

Those who help cultists escape the hold of their leaders have a daunting task under the best of circumstances.  Escaping members they must be shielded from cult influences in order to reenter normal reality – and even so, it takes a long time, and leaves the former member disoriented and unmoored.  When a cult has multiple, easily accessible channels of mass media, and controls all branches of a nation’s government, the prospects for members to escape are dismal.

Problem Analysis - Gun Violence

To seriously analyze a complex problem, one must deconstruct it and look at the pieces: where is it happening, and where is it not?; when is it happening, and when is it not?—then look at the differences.  Keep asking ‘Why’, even after you think you’ve gotten to the answer, because it’s likely that the root cause is much deeper. 

Why does the United States, with only a small percentage of the world’s population, have such a huge percentage of the mass killings – as well as other firearm deaths?  Is it the violence in our movies?  Is it those first-person shooter video games?  Is it young men raised in homes without fathers?  Is it untreated mental illness?  Social isolation?  

All of these factors may play a role in tipping an already unbalanced person toward violence.  And all are worth examining for ways in which we can improve them as a society.  But are they unique to the United States?  

Regardless of where they are produced, Hollywood’s reach is global; our movies are everywhere.  Single-parent households, mental illness, and social isolation are likewise not uniquely American issues – though the fraying of our already thread-bare social safety net means that many human needs, which are addressed elsewhere, are left unmet in our country.  

But the most relevant factor that truly is unique to the United States is also the most obvious.  It is incredibly easy for anybody—including unbalanced, potentially violent people, many of whom may have been affected by the factors mentioned above—to access weaponry that can amplify an angry outburst into a community-wide tragedy.  

To pretend to analyze gun violence in America, while discounting our ongoing wide-open nationwide firearms bazaar, is to ignore an elephant that utterly fills the room.  It’s not real analysis, it’s industry-sponsored verbal gymnastics.   Those who smugly scorn the students who are peacefully protesting gun violence today tacitly condemn those who will be the next victims, and the ones after that, to a cruel fate.  

The Battle of Passchendaele

One hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres—better known as the Battle of Passchendaele—began in Belgium.  It was an attempt to gain high ground near the northern end of the Western Front, before German reinforcements arrived from the Eastern Front, in the wake of the Russian collapse there.  

The prior three years had been a horrific, bloody stalemate near Ypres, with troops in mud-filled trenches—shouting distance apart—under constant artillery bombardment.  

In a war remembered for wasteful, senseless carnage, Passchendaele is remembered as one of the worst.  A wildly optimistic British plan for quick victory, degraded by weather into a battle of attrition. By the time the fighting slowed (it never actually stopped on the Western Front) in mid-November, over a half million casualties had been suffered by the British, their imperial and commonwealth allies, and Germans.  

Nasty little crossroads in that area.  Twenty-three years later, there would be a massive evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, about 40 miles northwest of Passchendaele.  And 103 years earlier, Napoleon’s career ended about 90 miles east, near a place called Waterloo.  

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-40727428
 

Gravity and Society

Gravity is one of the fundamental forces that define our universe.  It is the effect of matter that organizes moons, planets, and stars – keeping them from simply wandering off on their own.  Gravity holds us to the Earth, and holds the elements of the Earth together—even defining our planet’s spherical shape.  It is the physical manifestation of matter’s drive to aggrandize itself across the vastness of space.  

Concentrated in stars, gravity is so strong, it literally warps space-time, creating a well, drawing distant objects nearer.  It crushes hydrogen atoms, fusing nuclei together to form helium, generating and radiating massive energy to heat and light our world – making life possible.  

But where the aggregated mass is too great, space-time is not just warped, it is consumed.  Gravity becomes an end in itself, swallowing up everything nearby, even light – which is why such phenomena are known as black holes.  Within this region, the distortion is so complete that the normal laws of physics no longer apply.  The distortion reaches far beyond its black horizon; nothing within a vast area is unaffected; ultimately everything is drawn in and destroyed.  

In human experience, the desire for material goods and control are likewise fundamental drives.  In normal proportions, these drives encourage us to independently feed and shelter ourselves and our families, provide security, sustain communities, educate ourselves, learn productive trades, seek self-actualization, and build a legacy to assure a better life for our children.   It drives incredible innovation and creativity.  

But when wealth and power become comingled and overly concentrated, they too become ends in themselves; reshaping reality, and isolating those within from the outside.  This concentration distorts everything nearby.  The rules of normal civil society no longer apply.  Information filtering in from the world outside is warped to fit the reality within.  Evidence, established science, and any sense of community, are mangled in transit; replaced by an elite plutocratic alternate reality.  Concerns of the world—if they are perceived at all—are faint and unclear, filtered and distorted through the thick, blurred window of entitlement.  

Advanced societies have institutions to counter this concentration of wealth and power, serving to slow or prevent societal collapse.  Progressive taxation of income and wealth, a fundamental culture of community, self-sufficient educational institutions, and an alert, assertive mass media all serve as bulwarks to sustain balance, maintain awareness, and act as an enduring reference against the alternate reality within.  

But, in their relentless drive for greater wealth and power, those at the center of this concentration seek to draw in, and co-opt these protective institutions; absorbing and distorting them, nullifying their restraining effect, and accelerating the drive toward singularity and socioeconomic annihilation.  Without these moderating influences and references, the population is helpless to resist the trend, or at times, even be aware it is occurring.  Perhaps the most pernicious distortion is the assertion that democratic institutions, and market competition can continue to thrive within the black hole of its influence.    

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Aeschylus’s axiom that ‘In war, truth is the first casualty’ rings as true today, as it did when he wrote it 2,500 years ago.  Wars begin with the lies, exaggerations, and distortions that make up the carefully-crafted casus belli, which continue throughout the conflict, and are often its most enduring legacy.  

To those with narcissistic personality disorder, their entire existence is a war that pits them against all others.  They see themselves immersed in a world surrounded by others as venal and opportunistic as they.  This world is governed only by the rules of war – including those that apply to truth.  For these people, there are no true friendships, only alliances – shifting alliances, directed at feeding their insatiable hunger for wealth, recognition, and power.  

To them, there is no objective truth – only what is useful.  Because narcissists are accountable only to themselves, even a story they invent extemporaneously—become as real to them as objectively verifiable truths are to the rest of us.  These fabrications are at once a convenience, and a new battleground to defend against a hostile world.  

To the narcissist, a promise—even a written contract—is merely a means to an end; once the end is achieved, the contract is no longer useful, and is ignored.  

They are as likely to violate marriage vows, as they are a written contract; they tend to be unfaithful partners in all realms.  Fine print, Intimidation, and a willingness to ‘out-lawyer’ any who trust them, work in concert to further the narcissist’s goals, and minimize the consequences.  

Psychiatrists say that narcissistic personality disorder is particularly hard to treat; partly because one of the key manifestations is an inability to trust – including the therapist.  Also, because the compulsive drive for gain resembles healthier forms of motivation, these people are often highly successful in business and in politics.  But, rather than seeking success as a means to promote security or the well-being of their family, or society, the success for the narcissist is an end in itself.  

These people are to be pitied; they know no peace, and live without real love or connection to others.  But they are not to be trusted; though they compulsively seek power, no effort should be spared to prevent them from attaining it.  They are incapable of the empathy that moderates the ruthless exercise of power, and are capable of great destruction.  

The West Bank and Sanctions

For decades, the United States and Israel have danced a well-choreographed pas de deux around the subject of the West Bank of the Jordan River.   Whenever a resolution came before the United Nations Security Council sanctioning Israel for planting colonies in these occupied territories, the United States would use its veto to scuttle the resolution.  Then behind the scenes, we would elicit promises to stop, or at least limit, settlement activity.  

The West Bank poses incredibly complex problems for Israel; historical, strategic, philosophical and existential.  They can't annex it without risking their identity as a democratic Jewish state; either Jewish citizens would become a minority of the electorate, or they would have to deny voting privileges based on ethnicity - neither of which is considered compatible with that identity.  There is a consensus among those whose goal is a just peace that there must be some form of a two-state solution, with side-by-side contiguous Israeli and Palestinian nations – divided approximately along the pre-1967 border, but integrating mutually agreed swaps of land.  At the best of times, this has reached a point where the only remaining questions were the details of which tracts go to which state.  This goal is shared not only by the international community, including the United States, but also by significant segments of the Palestinians and Israeli populations, who would be most directly affected.  Neither side’s extremists would get all they want, but in the view of those who seek justice, this is an exchange of ‘land for peace’.  

But there is powerful opposition to this, and always has been.  There are segments of Palestinian society who cannot be reconciled to losing any of their historical homeland – including the internationally-recognized territory of Israel.  And within Israeli society, there are those who dream of a ‘greater Israel’ that incorporates all of the West Bank.  Leaders from this segment of Israeli society have allowed, and in some cases, promoted the planting of colonies throughout the occupied West Bank.  Netanyahu is from this segment of society, and has promoted colonization at an unprecedented rate.  

Each of these colonies (often referred to as settlements) is surrounded by a broad ‘security perimeter’, and they are linked by a network of roads that Palestinians are not allowed to travel, or even cross, except at specified checkpoints.  What the people of this region are left with are isolated islands, with limited movement, within which they are always subject to unexpected, violent intrusion.  The humiliating conditions in these isolated enclaves in the West Bank closely resemble those of apartheid-era South African ‘homelands’.   

There is a virtual news blackout in this country about the conditions of this military occupation – so not surprisingly, there is little sympathy when a Palestinian acts out in defiance.  

Whatever the underlying conflict, it is made more intractable by the continued colonization of the West Bank.  Though Israeli politicians—even those like Netanyahu, who doesn’t mean a word of it—claim to seek a just negotiated settlement, these settlements make that impossible.  Palestinians sometimes use the analogy of two people sitting across a table, deciding how to divide up a pizza, as one of the people keeps grabbing slices and eating them.  It is Netanyahu’s intention to gorge until there is no pizza left to divide

This colonization of the West Bank is also promoted by arms merchants in the US and elsewhere, whose profits would be devastated by an emerging peace in this region.  The symbiotic relationship between them, American right-wing religious leaders, and the expansionist wing of the Israeli body politic forms an implacable barrier to any just settlement of this problem.  As has been evident this week, they respond in outrage even when the United States does not actively stand in the way of international recognition of the obvious problems posed by colonization of these occupied territories.