America lost its mind after 9/11 – but did it lose its soul? When did that occur?

Telegraph.co.uk

America lost its mind after 9/11 – but did it lose its soul?

Resorting to techniques every civilized society regards as a criminal abuse of power does the terrorist’s job for him, argues Janet Daley.

Detainees sitting in a holding area watched by military police at Camp X-Ray inside Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Photo: REUTERS

British secret service agents may or may not have been complicit with – or “aware of”, or “in the same building as”, depending on which vague account you read – the CIA torture operation. We will probably never know definitively. But one thing is certain: the head of MI6 will not give a press conference that takes the same tone as the extraordinary one from the CIA director John Brennan that was broadcast live last week.

What Mr Brennan said (and what he didn’t say) explains a great deal about the difference between the United States and Britain. And I am not referring here to what many America-philes might assume: that the frankly emotional, apparent openness of Mr Brennan’s statement is testimony to the transparency of US officialdom and the expectation of accountability that pervades its political culture.

No, I’m afraid that anybody who took that message away from the director’s performance was trying too hard to be charitable. What Mr Brennan did, unwittingly, was much more revealing than what he intended to do – which was to exculpate his own agency from what can only be seen as a hideous programmed of criminal behavior that breached the most basic principles of decency, let alone human rights.

First, there were the opening remarks to set the operation in context. Designed to appeal to the nation’s traumatised recollection of the 9/11 attack, they were blatantly emotive: as the nation “ached, cried and prayed” in the aftermath of the “greatest tragedy in US history”, the CIA vowed “never again”. Its agents, although they had “little experience or training” in interrogation, were looked to for answers: even “while we grieved [we] carried on our investigations”, under pressure from the Bush White House, which was convinced that a second and third wave of attacks were about to be launched.

To most British ears (and quite a few American ones) this sounds like an embarrassingly inappropriate mix of self-pity and crude exploitation of popular sentiment. Here was one more instance of that psychotherapeutic approach to public life in which America indulges to the bemusement of the British: so long as you make a public confession of your personal anguish, you may be forgiven whatever transgressions you commit.

But there was a psychological truth here that is worth grasping. The terror attack of 9/11 was infinitely more devastating to the American psyche than most Europeans – who have lived through two world wars and innumerable terror campaigns on their own soil – can comprehend.

Almost all Americans either are themselves, or are descended from, people who fled from persecution or fatal degrees of poverty, often going from imminent death to new life. The American dream was not just the possibility of prosperity. It was safety, security and a future free from immediate threat.

The US was the land that lent its resources to those who were in danger of extinction: in itself, within its great continental boundaries, it was seen as impregnable. So yes, in the aftermath of 9/11, America had a national nervous breakdown. As Mr Brennan implied, the country briefly lost its mind. The question is, did it also lose its soul?

The reaction to the torture report is now, characteristically for Washington, bogged down in partisan politics. All anybody wants to talk about is whether a clutch of Democratic senators are flogging the Bush administration and their Republican apologists in the run-up to a presidential election.

The epidemic of sniping will almost certainly mean that the big questions that should be raised by these shameful revelations will not be asked – even though America is the very country in which it is most urgent that they be asked because it is the only one in which they could conceivably be answered. That is, it is the only advanced country in which there is no hereditary acceptance of secret authority: no class, or historical clique that is more or less unquestionably assumed to be capable of making the right decisions about the safety and probity of the nation.

Britain likes to think it has left deference behind, but the insouciance with which it accepts the invisible machinations of those George Smiley characters who run its clandestine government-within-a-government would be shocking to Americans, who believe they have a right to know everything that is done in their name.

The other side of this coin is that the US has no ancient set of received rules of behaviour as the old cultures do. As a result, it tends to formalise its definitions of unethical or unruly conduct in law. It is often described as a lawyer’s paradise for this reason – but its legalism also provides a peculiarly concrete, explicit rendering of the concepts of citizenry and social responsibility which are left unarticulated in Europe.

So let’s hope that the miasma of party point-scoring will not drown the debate that the US needs to have for all our sakes. How can a free society protect itself from the enemies of freedom? A nation that was self-consciously created to protect human liberty and the rights of the individual is confronted with a nihilistic campaign to murder its citizens and to destroy the possibility of the kind of life it believes to be their birthright: what action can it legitimately take?

Put like that, it seems obvious that there is one thing it must not do. If modern democracy (especially as understood in America) means freedom under the rule of law, then the law must not be broken in some misguided attempt to protect democracy. Resorting to techniques which every civilized society, and international law, regard as a criminal abuse of power simply does the terrorist’s job for him: it strips your country of any pretense of moral authority.

This is not unlike the dilemma with which Britain, and many European societies, have been struggling over Islamic fundamentalism. Should a liberal society tolerate illiberalism? Tolerance obviously implies an acceptance of difference, but how different? And what must “acceptance” involve?

France has banned the burka because it is judged inconsistent with female equality. Britain has moved against schools which inculcate values that contradict British cultural norms in spite of the fact that we have such difficulty defining what those are.

But the trickier questions remain: where exactly is the boundary between prohibiting the inculcation of hatred and creating a thought crime? The law should forbid acts not attitudes, but when does inflammatory speech become incitement to violence?

It isn’t enough to say, as Mr Brennan did with more than a hint of despair, that there are no simple answers. There are going to have to be, at the very least, provisional ones because we need to find a way through this without losing our own ethical bearings. If the CIA experience shows us anything, it is how quickly terror can dissolve the conscience of a state even when it believes passionately in its founding principles of liberty and justice. These are not abstract philosophical questions that can be complacently consigned to the seminar room of history.

The Western democracies have to produce a day-to-day working formula for confronting an existential challenge that puts their own social values under almost impossible strain – without losing their souls in the process.

Cleaning Hillary's Disaster: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Libya?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Libya?

Analysts discuss the humanitarian, security, and political crises emanating from a country in chaos

BY ASHISH KUMAR SEN

Karim Mezran (center), Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, moderates a discussion on Libya at the Atlantic Council in Washington May 20 between Mattia Toaldo, Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Abdul Rahman Al-Ageli, a Nonresident Fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center.

 The chaos in Libya that has prevailed since the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 has placed both a humanitarian as well as a security crisis on Europe’s doorstep.

Libya today has two governments—one in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk. Only the latter is internationally recognized. Its borders are porous. Its security in the hands of groups that often have no more than local control. 

An illicit network of traffickers has thrived amid this chaos. Thousands of migrants daily risk deadly voyages across the Mediterranean Sea to flee desperate conditions in their homes in Africa and the Middle East.

The traffickers are not the only ones exploiting the instability. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), also known as the Islamic State (IS), has put down roots in Libya prompting concern that the terrorists are now at striking distance from Europe.

Mattia Toaldo, a Policy Fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Abdul Rahman Al-Ageli, a Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, were in Washington this week. In an interview with the New Atlanticist’sAshish Kumar Sen, Toaldo and Al-Ageli discussed developments in Libya and the prospects for peace.

Here are excerpts from our interview:

Q: What are your thoughts on the European Union’s plan to interdict, and even take military action, against smugglers’ ships to prevent migrants from flooding into Europe? 

Toaldo: The language in the conclusions of the European summit speaks of disrupting the business model of smugglers, which gives them leeway in terms of what kind of response they want. 

If you listen to the Italian navy, which will probably take the lead on this because the headquarters of the mission will be in Italy, what they want is to have rules of engagement that give them the option of responding if they are attacked by smugglers, which has happened in the past.

On the other hand, there is a lot of talk of going onshore and that, I think, is the dangerous and tricky part. I am not sure that those who advance that option are actually aware that it means getting involved in Libya’s civil war, antagonizing the local communities, and ultimately acting like the colonial power that didn’t really care about what was happening in Libya and only cared about migrants coming from Libya. 

Q: Can the solution, as it is presented now, work?

Toaldo: Absolutely not. The whole idea that you stop smugglers in the Mediterranean doesn’t make much sense. We are talking about people who usually leave the Horn of Africa, western Africa or Syria. That is where the ultimate response should be in terms of providing them with safe and legal channels of access to Europe as well as protection near their homes. 

You also need to address the communities for which smuggling is such an important part of the economy. In the end, we will have to discuss with them which goods it is OK to trade, and which are absolutely not OK. Drugs, weapons, and human beings are at the top of the list of things that should not be smuggled. But we need to offer them an alternative.

Al-Ageli: There haven’t been much operational details that have been released [by the EU]. They haven’t said how they will cooperate with Libyan forces on the ground or Libyan authorities, or even with which authority. So far both authorities have come out and said this [EU plan] wasn’t done in coordination with them. 

Q: What are authorities—either in Tobruk or in Tripoli—doing to crack down on the flourishing trafficking networks? Are either in a position to do anything?

Al-Ageli: There isn’t the capacity to deal with this problem; and there aren’t any clear policies. That’s partly because both authorities do not have full monopoly on the use of force through formal military or security structures. The use of force is mostly controlled by semi-state or non-state groups that provide local security services.

Toaldo: The problem is also that there was a system put in place in cooperation with the Europeans, especially the Italians, under Gadhafi. This was based on a number of detention centers for migrants. These are still active, but they are not under the control of what is left of the Libyan government. They are managed by local armed groups and they have turned into kidnapping centers where migrants are brought and released only upon payment of ransom. This only adds to the push factors for these migrants and refugees to leave Libya as soon as possible and to pay whatever the price to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. 

If there is something that the two governments are doing it is actually increasing the flow of migrants. A crucial change that should be implemented by Europeans is not to continue this policy of outsourcing the pushbacks—this creates leverage in local actors in order to continue with the civil war—and justify this in the eyes of Europeans as “We Are fighting illegal immigration.” This is particularly dangerous for Europeans because it doesn’t actually solve the problem. You only solve the problem by on the one hand addressing the situations from which these people are fleeing, and on the other by offering legal means to access Europe. 

Q: What, if anything, do the Libyan authorities want from the European community to help address this problem?

Al-Ageli: Most of the strategies that were being implemented in cooperation with the international community on border security, and particularly illegal migration, were happening before the eruption of conflict in the summer of 2014. 

The issue of illegal migration has exacerbated because the networks involved in that activity have taken advantage of the void in governance. Without a viable Libyan counterpart, the international community and the European Union in particular, have been forced to take up the issue themselves. 

Q:  Can the migrant crisis be addressed without first finding a solution to the chaos in Libya?

Al-Ageli: It would be possible to do it in parallel. The way people talk of the EU strategy is a “bomb the boats” strategy. That is why it is being widely criticized. The international community is supporting the United Nations’ effort [to form a national unity government]; it’s just that the results are not forthcoming. 

Is it possible for the Libyans to deal with the migrant issue? At the local level, yes, but at the central level I find it difficult to believe. At the end of the day, there are incentives and human will at play that are far more powerful than the Libyan government’s will to stem the issue. A lot of these people are desperate and if they want to arrive in Europe they will. If Libya is cut off they will find another way to get to Europe. 

Toaldo: What we are seeing in the past few months is that almost an equivalent number of Syrian refugees are trying to enter Europe from the eastern, route rather than from Libya. If you are fleeing a civil war you will find a way to get to Europe because you have a very potent motive to run away. What Europe is getting is just a trickle of the ten million displaced Syrians. 

But it is a huge number for some European countries. Sweden has been getting hundreds of thousands of Syrians in a population of ten million. That is having an impact on domestic politics in Europe. That’s why, for some European governments, containing migration is a priority over solving Libya. 

I think the priorities need to be reversed. Unless you address Libya, it is very hard to address migration. The priority should also be to avoid migrants and refugees getting into Libya. That’s why it is important to offer legal means of access to Europe so people don’t have to cross the Mediterranean just to submit an asylum application. That is nonsense. That is part of the EU plan, which I hope will be implemented sooner rather than later. 

Q: What percentage of migrants fleeing Libya are actually Libyans?

Toaldo: Microscopic. Out of the 170,000 who arrived in Lampedusa in Italy last year from Libya only 200 were registered as Libyans.

Q: What are your thoughts on the UN peace effort? How have the rival sides responded to UN envoy Bernardino Leon’s power-sharing deal and is a final deal possible by Ramadan (June 17) as Leon hopes?

Al-Ageli: All signs are pointing to the fact that that would be a very difficult result to achieve by Ramadan. The two delegations have been in discussions for months making amendments to the various drafts of the agreement. The latest draft is being heavily criticized by Tripoli because it is perceived as being favorable to the government in Tobruk. 

Toaldo: The biggest obstacles for Leon’s work are not really in Libya. The biggest obstacle is to implement a power-sharing agreement in a region where the alternative game seems to be a zero-sum game. 

If you look across the region, the idea is to exclude your enemies from power by force. That is what is happening in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. It is hard to find an inclusive solution in Libya given these regional circumstances. At the moment the only exception to this rule that I can think of is Tunisia. 

In west Libya, in particular, today there are the dynamics that would allow for at least local ceasefires. But it’s hard to have them survive in this regional context where the idea is that you are going to physically eliminate your enemy.

Q: Even as Leon sought to bring all sides to the negotiating table, the government in Tobruk appointed Gen. Khalifa Haftar, an anti-Islamist, to the position of army chief fueling distrust in Tripoli. Do you share a concern raised by some Libyans that Libya is heading toward an Egypt-like situation?

Al-Ageli: The only thing I would accept is that there are certain factions in Libya that perceive that to be a real threat. That fear has manifested itself into conflict. Realistically, I find if difficult to believe that one side could use force to gain Libya-wide monopoly and use that to create a totalitarian regime. 

In reality, both sides actually desire that situation. The [Tobruk government] has a fear that if the Islamists [In Tripoli] gain control of Libya they will also implement an exclusionary, totalitarian regime. Both sides have an inherent fear of exclusion. 

Toaldo: One of the many watershed moments in post-Gadhafi Libya was the approval of the political isolation law by which one side tried to politically eliminate the other side. This was implemented as a consequence of use of force that was used to threaten the Libyan parliament to approve this law. The law resulted in the ousting of the then head of state [General National Congress President Mohamed al-Megariaf]. 

The people in Tobruk could read that as a coup attempt in the Libyan way. And the people in Tripoli could read Khalifa Haftar’s operation as a coup attempt the Egyptian way. Unless there is a regional context that avoids the zero-sum game and helps deescalate the civil war, I don’t see any solution. 

Haftar is clearly one of the problems. The best example of that is twice his forces have bombed Tripoli’s airport while the delegation from Tripoli was flying to the UN dialogue. That is a demonstration of his commitment to dialogue!

Q: Has military support from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates for Haftar undermined the UN effort to make peace in Libya?

Al-Ageli: The regional dimension is very important. Unfortunately, in the past few years the region has been just as polarized as Libya in their political positions on some of the conflicts in the region. 

Regional support to either of the two factions is an obstacle to successfully concluding a dialogue process. The international community should be playing more of a role to obstruct regional interference that is not productive to a dialogue and reconciliation process.

Toaldo: I agree!

Q: How serious and widespread is the ISIS threat in Libya?

Toaldo: We must be careful in addressing this issue because it has been manipulated by several actors in Libya using the playbook of the Gadhafi dictatorship. As long as you shout “Terrorist! Terrorist!” someone in the West will hear you and it will justify whatever you do to crush your domestic opponents. The first takeaway from the past months is that we shouldn’t be fooled by local actors into siding in the Libyan civil war based on that threat.

Having said that, I do think that the threat is serious more in terms of potential than in its current form. ISIS has, unfortunately, great potential, especially as long as two crucial forces in Libya feel the threat of exclusion. It is paradoxical that these forces are fighting each other.

We are seeing more and more defections from Islamist armed groups towards ISIS. On the other hand, we hear about rank and file from the Gadhafi loyalists willing to join ISIS also out of the marginalization that they have suffered since 2011. 

We shouldn’t fall into the war-on-terror trap. The more inclusive the solution to Libya, the better it is in the fight against ISIS. ISIS is also a military threat, but the use of force must take place within a political strategy otherwise we may find ourselves in the same situation as we are in Syria and Iraq where we haven’t really offered an alternative to enfranchise Sunnis. 

Al-Ageli: I agree!

Q: Can the ISIS threat unite the two main rival factions in Libya?

 Al-Ageli: The idea of using IS [the Islamic State] as a common enemy to unite both sides is an attractive idea to some, although practically what it would entail is over exaggerating the threat in order to unite everybody against them. That would possibly lead to the evolution of the organization into a more sophisticated and regionally integrated organization than it is now, which is something that has happened in other countries.

Toaldo: It was my hope in February that the emergence of the Islamic State in Libya would unite the factions and be a push factor for a national unity deal.  But what we have witnessed since then is that the different factors have tried to use IS to win support from the West for their domestic goals.

I fail to see how we can peel off support for IS absent a more inclusive vision for the future of Libya. I realize IS is an emergency for the West, and I am not denying that, but I do think that we need to address the long-term problems of Libya if we want to tackle IS, otherwise we risk taking short-term solutions, which actually create long-term problems.

Ashish Kumar Sen is a staff writer at the Atlantic Council.

Leavers and Takers: To Be a Leaver or Not, that is Never the Question!

To Be a Leaver or Not, that is Never the Question!

Cultural survival means resurrecting tribal thinking and the way humans thought a million years ago up to the Great Forgetting

by Paul Haeder / January 9th, 2016

There’s a real sense that we are past staying this mono-cultural collapse, and a book that came out 20 years ago, enlightens now more than ever, with the multiple forces of environmental, economic and societal collapses occurring under the weight of an elite and the barbarity of capitalism and extreme ecosystems and social systems exploitation.

This concept is what the subtitle suggests – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A book that ties into an earlier one, Ishmael, where writer Daniel Quinn gives us a gorilla with the power of human history locked up inside his brain, whereupon he communicates through the life stream of extra sensory perception.

The ideas are deep in The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, but in reality the understory of the magnificent storytelling is a simplicity that can cause anyone to pause – how it is, now in this totalitarian and singular culture of takers, those in the agency capitalism, unfathomable plundering of ecosystems, and unbridled consumerism, that more and more people are listless, brutalized by media, drugged or boozed out, looking for the pornography of emptiness, suicidal, feeling worthless, and counting on some redemption in a singular god with big G afterlife.

Leavers, as outlined in Ishmael, are tribal people, tied to community of place and the geography of time, embedded in nature, as one community, that is, a single small species in the entire web of millions of others. Hunting and gathering is a determining process that keeps clans small – 30-ish – and people with song and stories and art and language who understand the scheme of things — a culture based on all species webbed and interconnected with everything else, each blade of grass, grub, predator, prey.

The leaving part of the leaver culture is in knowing we are one inside a natural world, an element among other elements, part of nature, not here to subdue it, tear it, control it, and wipe out all other parts of it to reign as King of the Jungle. Quinn emphasizes that the natural world, which includes “Leaver” cultures, sustains itself through what he calls the law of limited competition. Under this peace-keeping law, he says, you may not hunt down competitors or deny them food or access to it. You also may not commit genocide against your competition.

With that, and in the The Story of B, Quinn goes into a deeper history of humans, looking at the 200,000 years as Homo Sapiens, with that big shift 12,000 years ago adopting a taker thinking; i.e., agriculture. It’s something I’ve been teaching for forty years, and Quinn refines it in a book about B, first a man in Germany who meets with anyone, in theaters and out of the way places, to talk about the Great Forgetting. B (Charles) gets assassinated on a train, and his role is subsumed by a woman named Shirin, the new B. Eventually, she and others are inside a theater when a bomb goes off, survive, and then the priest is now enlisted — he disavows his Christ and his religion — to be B. But the Great Remembering clan is on the run, fearful of the forces of religion and militarism.

Jared is that Laurentian priest, given the gold master card by his boss to investigate B, which the priesthood hierarchy suspects is the AntiChrist because of his heretical teachings about human life way past the date of first town and farm. It’s a look at civilization’s greatest minds drawing humanity’s very birth from the city and farm — forgetting that we are from a lineage 4 million years old, and several hundred thousand years as Homo sapiens in that hunter and gatherer role, comprising thousands of distinct and diverse cultures. That is the antithetical nature of the story, how what we were then, for a million years or more, that those principles and ways, that we were born from that, and our humanity comes from that space and time.

To think humanity is rooted from that past into what we are now, or that we are defined by the advent of armies and machines, religions and famines, and pestilence, politics and kings, despots and consumer insanity, is to erase millions of years of history — a time that even modern thinkers see as pre-history, an insignificance, savages!

That valuable wealth of knowledge and action, those terms of human exchange and how we knew our role in nature, what nature was, how the planet was made up of millions of great brothers and sisters with fins, wings, claws and fur, it has been marginalized and demolished. Leavers were wiped out by disease, the ax, the gun, the poisons, the bombs of Taker society.

I find that this readjusting in my students, to understand what it means to be of one rotten, eating from the inside out culture, is so hard for them, almost like signs from Mars . . .  and as blind as anything we as supposed thinker species could have believed, and continue to believe in our hubris of forgetting the elements of power in being and intuitive knowing our place in nature, not outside it, ready to slash and burn and pollute it into oblivion.

In Ishmael, the gorilla says: “And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law — and it wasn’t an entire species, it was only one people, those I’ve named the Takers. Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, ‘No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law,’ and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point.”

That way is totalitarian agriculture, which pushes all other species and systems to the brink of collapse in order to satisfy this Taker mentality of wiping out all competitors to satisfy a bizarre aim at growing more and more food, way past any clan’s needs. Surpluses have added to human population in incredible numbers, where for 150,000 years there probably were 10 million of us, and then, as the grain and legume were planted, civilizations sprang

Our totalitarian system is all about toiling, and famines, plagues, masters and slaves, disease, insanity, punishment, laws, politics – and B talks about the millions, tens of millions and hundreds of millions over the course of 5,000 years of history who died of starvation even as food production bulldozed more land, more water was poisoned, and bigger and uglier cities were built. Imagine, those great numbers dying in what was supposed to be the civilized cultures, without the savage tie to earth and sky, even though food growing increased and increased. Population grew along with food growing: amazing doubling of the population and doubling more and doubling and doubling, until we now have 7.1 billion, going for 9.2 billion by 2050 (or is it 11 billion?).

Famines throughout history — not beginning with the Irish potato famine of 1848, 1.5 million dead; Vietnamese of 1945, 2 million; Bengal famine of 1770, 10 million dead; Soviet famine of 1932, 10 million dead; Chalisa Famine of 1783, 11 million dead. Famines go back to Greece and Egypt and Spain and Italy . . . thousands of years ago. What accounts for this, when our population goes up and farming goes up with it?

B explains this and more in his Great Remembering talks, a way to reframe who we are, since Homo-something (I call us today, Retailopithecus or Consumopithecus Sapiens, here and here). So we, thousands of cultures, Leavers, have been around for 4 million years, and we worked well in those gene pools and behavioral suits, until around 12,000 years ago.

Growing crops by clearing the land, killing the species, mucking the waters, it became a way to control people – power – and great abundance of food propelled armies and made wars and greater wars possible. But simply put, as B states in the book,

Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others. (Story of B, Chapter 26, Page 260)

These ideas are those that we were supposed to talk about with youth, K12, and in college, and understanding how wrong this mono-culture is, and how we have to change our total thinking, our mindset, our emotional attitudes, to survive . . . .

Quinn, in an interview, says,

According to the mythology of our culture, the world was made for Man to conquer and rule–and Man was made to conquer and rule it. Man is eminently fit for this job, and “humanizing” the world (for example, by clearing a formerly untouched habitat and putting it to the plow to produce human food) is a blessed thing to do. According to our mythology, humans represent a separate and higher order of being from the rest of the living community (which of course Christianity confirms). According to our mythology, the world is a human possession, to be used as suits us; it has no intrinsic value, no value outside the human frame of reference. Songbirds exist to provide us with musical entertainment, and if we decide we can do without that entertainment, we’re free to dispense with songbirds. Faced with a stand of trees, the only question to be asked is, “Would we rather leave it as it is and have a park or level it for a shopping mall?”

According to our mythology, we are humanity itself, and those who lived before were merely “savages” (like the Yanomami and Gebusi), which is to say, something less than human. We live the way people were “meant” to live from the beginning of time, and everyone in the world should be made to live the way we do. According to our mythology, there is one (and only one) right way for people to live, and we have it (which is why it must be imposed on all others). Because we live the way people are “meant” to live, we must cling to it even if it kills us. At the same time, according to our mythology, humans are deeply and irremediably flawed, and this accounts for the fact that so much of what we do turns out badly. The fault is not to be found in the way we live, therefore, but in human nature itself. And since we are the ONLY true representatives of humanity, we need only look at ourselves and our own history to discover what “human nature” is.

Chilling, how out of balance our species has become, and for evolutionary minds, it’s tied to farming, to the big project of plowing earth and exploding rivers and killing species to grow more and more stuff for more and more armies so fewer and fewer kings and bankers and rulers will control the masses.

For one million years before now, there were 125,000 of us, and 300,000 years before now, 1 million, and we sit on our thumbs and think that our populations can keep growing, and growing, and that technology and machines and chemicals and homogenized culture will get us out of this dilemma of many snake heads — climate change, perpetual war, environmental pollution, toxicity, unending pain and exploitation of fellow humans, and the extinction of 200 species a day.

Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.

— Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit,  Chapter 10, Page 82

Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. A forthcoming book,Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber, looks at 10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice, and before, to bring defiance to the world that is now lobotomizing at a rate never before seen in history. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2016 at 1:22am and is filed under Book Review, Capitalism, Education, Environment, Life/Animal Rights,Original Peoples, Philosophy.

How Would the Buddha Handle North Korea? Mindfulness in Diplomacy

How Would the Buddha Handle North Korea? Mindfulness in Diplomacy

Seok-Hyun Hong Become a fan 

Chairman and CEO of the JoongAng Media Network

Today's diplomacy is dysfunctional, and it seems as if the more we try to fix things without negotiations, the more serious the problems become. Recently the challenges in places like Iraq or Syria have grown so dire that we have to wonder whether we simply have the fundamentals wrong.

It may seem odd that this age of global integration would give birth to serious diplomatic tensions and occasionally to brutal conflicts. Part of the problem can be traced back to fundamental assumptions in the Western diplomatic tradition that have dominated international strategy since the seventeenth century.

The Western frame of mind that informs international relations assumes rivalry to be an essential principle. Throughout Western diplomatic history it has been assumed that one side must win over others through a winner-take-all struggle for hegemony.

But is such a vision appropriate for this age of the global community and of shared concerns such as climate change? Do all our exchanges have to take place in a Hobbesian world of all against all?

My experience in diplomacy suggests that the Eastern philosophical traditions of Daoism, Hinduism and above all Buddhism offer alternative approaches to diplomacy that have come of age. Buddhism places emphasis on harmony, rather than rivalry, and offers concrete strategies for engagement that help us to respond to the diplomatic challenges of an interconnected world.

The Buddhist approach does not naïvely assume that humans will always cooperate. Rather, it provides insights into the potential for true progress in all circumstances, a potential one can only grasp when one sees the duality and complexity of relations. There are deeper patterns in human relations that go beyond the simplistic impressions of good and evil that we find everywhere in the media, depictions that often apply and exploit an unstated religious framework in a Judeo-Christian interpretive matrix.

Many assume that diplomacy is a ruthless game of hegemony in which one just gives lip service to harmony as a strategy for justifying one's actions. But what if harmony was actually the goal of diplomacy?

To be sure, the concept of harmony among nations is not foreign to the Western diplomatic tradition. The historical diplomatic aim of achieving a "concert of Europe" would seem to appeal to just such a longing for peaceful, cooperative order. Despite the appealing metaphor, though, we would better understand this term as a euphemism, a pleasant name for the disposition of the affairs of small countries by the great powers, to the advantage of the latter. In the words of one historian, the "concert of Europe" implied a harmony that "really meant that the smaller nations were coerced into carrying out what the great powers had agreed upon among themselves."

Buddhism regards such hegemonic approaches to international relations as simply less effective in assuring security than simple dignity and a commitment to harmony. There is a deeper order beneath the surface of things and our sense of harmony, played out through small symbolic steps, can change the very nature of the debate in a positive direction.

The game of chess has come to symbolize diplomacy in the Western tradition. Just as in the game of chess, the Western strategist assumes a zero-sum framework wherein you must take the opponent's pieces and eventually checkmate his king. (Tellingly, the English word "checkmate" derives ultimately from a Persian expression that means "the king is dead.")

But the more dignified approach to game-play in the East is based on the assumption of the possibility of co-existence and co-prosperity. Asian games like weiqi (Chinese chess) or baduk(known as go in Japanese) differ from Western chess fundamentally in that the game assumes a mutual harmony even in competition, rather than ruthless elimination of the enemy.

Western chess assumes only one simplistic victory based on hegemony: you go after the king and destroy him, at which point the game ends. But in weiqi, there are millions of ways of winning the game. You can win with a half-house, or you can win by several hundred houses. There is a winner, but the myriad of potential games unfolds like a dance, without an assumption of total domination. Success in weiqi comes from harmony and balance.

The metaphor of balance, like that of harmony, has long had a place as a term of art in the Western tradition of diplomacy. From the eighteenth century through the early twentieth, the concept of a "balance of power" guided the conduct of international relations among the European great powers. Acting in accordance with this principle, diplomacy wove shifting alliances and international understandings in an effort to prevent the rise to hegemony of any one power or bloc. Yet the nature of the balance sought was curiously limited. This approach recognized and served only the aims and interests of the established club of the great powers; other nations and peoples often played the role of pawns, or of the stakes of the competition, in the scramble for domination and colonial mastery.

Also, the constant need to reestablish equilibrium among the powers was made necessary by the very fact that no nation regarded the principle of balance as, in itself, a desirable goal or guiding principle. Rather, it was the means available to prevent rivals or enemies from achieving the unstated goal privately maintained by each participant in the game, namely that of reaching the top of the hierarchy of relative status and power and of exerting a determining influence in the affairs of the other competitors. In this light we see that the balance maintained by this system of relationships was of an unstable sort that could last only so long as circumstances did not allow one side to upset the balance to their own advantage: there was no commitment to balance, or to the benefits that could follow from it, as worthwhile ends in their own right. The dangers inherent in this unstable equilibrium can hardly be overstated, as clearly shown by the outbreak, one hundred years ago at this writing, of the First World War.

Balance is an essential value in Buddhism, and that approach to human affairs has an immediate application with regards to North Korea. Many Western strategists approach Pyongyang with a hegemonic way of thinking. They simply assume that you "go after " North Korea and win by changing the regime, or by getting rid of the top person. But, as we know from experience, such an approach does not necessarily lead to success. Decades of US intervention in Latin America and the Middle East have shown that each unilateral intervention carries with it the threat of later "blowback," the unforeseen consequences that complicate and escalate conflicts. Although you may achieve your short-term goal, you will so disrupt the harmony as to create new problems, especially for ordinary people. After all, where North Korea is concerned, eliminating nuclear armaments is important, but if that process is disruptive, it will lead to only greater problems.

In my own diplomatic career, I have constantly fallen back on the wisdom of Buddhism, finding uses for mindfulness, balance and awareness in all aspects of international relations.

It is essential that when one is distressed by a diplomatic situation, when the situation seems hopeless, to take time out and return to one's inner self. I find that taking time to meditate, to feel at peace with oneself and regain composure, can do wonders for one's perspective. One should not make a serious decision until one has been centered.

Whomever I may be working with, I want to imagine a win-win situation, rather than fantasizing about destroying my opponent. The act of seeking harmony as an end in itself can lead one to discover previously unimaginable solutions. And in today's interconnected world, we have no choice but to think about harmonious solutions that avoid dangerous confrontations.

One valuable concept in Buddhism is "mushim" which is an important part of my personal practice. Mushim means something like "no mind," or more precisely "no fixed thinking." It is a state in which the mind is open to all things and is not occupied by a thought or an emotion. In such a state, one is always neutral and calm, with a perspective from outside of one's self. In such a state one can move beyond one's prejudices and see one's counterpart as he is.

Step one is taking the emotions out of diplomacy. There is no reason to lose your temper at the remarks or the actions of your counterpart. They are not part of you. You should be like a mirror that reflects back those comments and actions. A mirror does not become irritated by the images that it reflects back. They come and go. But of course one should be aware of those images, those shifts in message and in direction. And one should be aware of one's own emotional responses. If one can keep up that detachment, can be aware of what is happening and of one's emotional responses, then one reaches a state of mushim.

An analogy to the ocean is useful. Your mind is like an ocean rocked by waves throughout the day. Shocks and insults cloud your thinking. But if one achieves an even, level state with few disruptions, the ocean can reflect the sky perfectly. So also can the mind reflect on the world with remarkable accuracy if it is not churned by emotions. Things come and go. When you can let things come and go, you catch the essence. You become a more objective observer of yourself and your counterpart as your ego fades from the dialogue.

The most common error we make is to mistake our obsessiveness, our fascination with events and images, with true mindfulness.

Buddhism suggests that meditation helps in any profession. Even thieves will do a better job if they meditate! That is to say that meditation is not a matter of value judgments. It is rather about focus and awareness. For the same reason, Buddhist practice does not conflict with any particular religion. Mindful practice mixes well with Christianity or Islam.

After all, moral judgment is a matter of perspective. If you think in terms of history on the scale of thousands of years, you can come to a judgment of an event or actor with some detachment. But you will be far away from the actual moment. But if you focus in on the moment and make a value judgment, what you thought was right may prove to be the opposite in a month, a year, or a decade.

Thus I once met an American who spoke about the North Korean regime and said to me, "We cannot trust North Korea, we should attack the WMD sites and push for a regime change."

In response, I started out by expressing my agreement with the goal in a general sense of transforming North Korea and eliminating nuclear weapons. But I then continued his logic, asking about what the consequences of our actions would be for ordinary North Koreans. I kept coming back to the ultimate purpose of change in North Korea, suggesting that co-prosperity and coexistence, in whatever form, was the goal. I also suggested that, although not everything is possible at one time, there is a win-win out there. I never denied the validity of his position. I only suggested that there were other approaches that needed to be exhausted first.

I sensed that he was obsessed with one goal without thinking out the variety of paths by which that goal might be reached. I tried to get him to focus more on process, on the issues faced by specific people in the North, in the South, in surrounding nations.

While I was ambassador to the United States during the regime of the Roh Moo-hyun government, I received many comments to the effect that Korea is not sufficiently concerned about human rights in North Korea. My response then was to say: I'm very concerned with the human rights issues, in a big sense. I fully understand the tragedies that the people from the North suffer through.

I then explained that if we become obsessed with the images we see in the media, and fail to understand the larger institutional and cultural issues behind these injustices, then we are likely to respond impulsively and will inadvertently make human rights issues worse for the short and medium term.

In this sense, mindfulness means a true awareness of human rights as something more than just the right to vote or freedom from arbitrary arrest. We need to consider the millions of people who are undernourished or starving to death. How are we bringing human rights to them? That is an essential question for us.

Buddhism offers to diplomacy a focus on the long term and on balance in all relations. Progress can be made in international relations, but we must consider always the Buddha's middle way. To the degree that we can create a win-win for all players, and avoid extremes, we can go forward in a meaningful way. If we try to force the issue by insisting on one perspective and by falling back on military strikes, we are unlikely to get more than a temporary result that will soon be reversed. Action undertaken in this spirit could easily lead to a worse result than doing nothing.

Only by remaining mindful of how our impulsive reactions, winner-take-all outlook, and shifting policy objectives can undermine our deeper commitment to the common causes of humanity can we establish a balance, not of power, but of perspective, and in the process aspire to a harmony among nations worthy of the name.

The author is chairman of JoongAng Media Network -- one of South Korea's leading media groups, including the prestigious JoongAng Ilbo daily and a former South Korean ambassador to the United States.