Lost Horizons

I thought I'd just drop this here.  

 James Hilton condensed a conversation between Connolly and the High Lama (about the war to come) in his novel Lost Horizon, 1933, and put it in the Preface to the 1936 edition: 

"It will be such a storm as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms,, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos... The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed ..."

 

How much happier one would be to dismiss all this as thoroughly out-of-date, than to admit, as one must, that in 1936 it has become more terrifyingly up-to-date than ever! 

 

The War to Come did come, of course, soon enough, and it was worse, much worse, than the previous world war, and yet most people survived, most of "civilization" endured, most of the ruins were cleared, most of the earth recovered more or less well, and we carried on. Hilton's vision was shared by many others at the time. They knew or sensed that the Great War had concluded nothing, that another round of the fight would be coming, and no matter the efforts to forestall it, the world would be plunged into darkness for the duration yet again. 

And here we are again on the precipice of darkness, chaos and annihilation of civilization. Many of us share the vision of absent future, destroyed by the vanities of the powerful and not very clever few who rule over us. They cannot seem to stop themselves. War-fever and bloodlust have spread so widely now that I don't see any way for the ruling classes to back away from the brink. 

Let's hope they do, but how many people hoped the same in 1914, 1939, and on and on and on. Only occasionally -- and almost accidentally -- did wiser heads prevail. This time around, I'm not seeing any wiser heads atop the rulers.

American Shooting Gallery

Yet another mass killing at yet another American "safe space" -- a school this time (again) -- and the fury in Parkland, FL, seems to be somewhat greater than Our Rulers are used to.

Getting Closer To Labor Day and the End of Summer

The closer we get to Labor Day and the End of Summer, the more apprehensive I become. It's a form of conditioning, I guess, driven by an understanding that the first week of September has turned into the pivot of the year, and what follows is often horror almost beyond comprehension.

Summertime events can be bad or they can be foolish, but after Labor Day, things get real. Real and often harsh.

This year seems to be soaked in the blood of innocents and the somewhat off-kilter. It's a matter of police killings by the great gross, one after another, all over the country, now well over 1,000 dead at police hands -- don't believe the "400 annually", it's a deliberate deception to make you think that "well, it's not so bad". But it's much more than that, too. The US has been engaged directly or peripherally in numerous bloodlettings in hotspots all over the world, pushing, pushing, pushing the edges of neo-imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and (apparently) in the Americas as well. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have paid for this neo-imperial expansionism with their lives and it looks like many, many more must do so before this phase is done.

What did we do to deserve this? "We" in the sense of the global non-elite, the ordinary people who seem to get blown up and blown away willy-nilly and who have little or no say in the march of this or any other empire.

It is not for us to say they tell us. Not for us to say.

As we get closer to the year's pivot, I become more and more apprehensive as there are so many potential explosion-points, far more than I can recall in any previous year. Many observers have seen parallels to the outbreak of World War I or the outbreak of World War II, and many have seen madness in the eyes of Our Leaders. They are careening out of control, and without some form of intervention, they will almost inevitably lead us into apocalypse and catastrophe. They seem to want it desperately.

The question is whether there can be an intervention before the end.

I don't know.

But I shudder to think where the madness is headed.

Liars, Thieves and Murderers -- The Empire of Chaos and Disruption Knows No Bounds

This year marks the 400th Anniversary of Don Juan de Oñate's exile from New Mexico and the New World. That may seem like a minor footnote in history, and for many people, it is. Oñate is not well known outside of Texas and New Mexico, but for many people here, especially Hispanos and Pueblo Indians, his record of conquest, chaos and cruelty cannot be forgotten. Though 400 years have passed since he was sent back to Spain for those very crimes and failings, his legacy lives on as an undercurrent in New Mexican society -- which may have something to do with the levels of police and public cruelty we are experiencing today.

Oñate's advent north of the Rio Grande was a disaster for the indigenous inhabitants whom he seemed to take immense pleasure in slaughtering and crippling, thieving from, lying to, and otherwise disrupting as he and his colonists made their way through the Puebloan communities proclaiming the Mercy of Christ and the suzerainty of Felipe Rey de Castile, Leon, y Aragon, and then killing them, crippling them, raping their women, enslaving the survivors and looting their pueblos.

Those were the days. Complaints were made, and in due time, Oñate would be recalled from New Mexico, trial would be held, and ultimately Oñate would be returned to Spain where he lived out his remaining years as a minor functionary to the King. 

This Blood Summer of Chaos and Disruption seems to be an echo of those times we thought we'd gotten past. Perhaps we haven't. At least in those days, appeal could be made to the King when the sub-rulers he set over his domains got out of control. Some record could be made and at least an attempt at justice and redress could be made. Now there's no one to intervene and seemingly nothing to be done.

Will there be no end to the madness of our rulers? As the world -- at least a goodly portion of it -- spirals ever further into the pits of perdition, one must ask: what must be done, and by whom, to halt the madness, bring dignity and peace to the multitudes, end the suffering of the innocent, repair and renew the global environment, and do those other things so necessary to survival and sanity?

Among the many tomes in our library of the obscure and forgotten, we have a number of books written in glum apprehension between the wars (that is between WWI and WWII) that either predict a New War Just Around the Corner or which posit means and methods to avoid one. The enemy is posited to be Germany and Japan, just as they would be in the end. There are a few anti-communist/anti-Russian volunes, but mostly the concern is over the aggression of Germany and Japan in Europe and Asia and the lesser but still worrisome aggression of Italy in Africa. As much as the capitalist class loathed and despised the nascent Soviet Union, they did not see it as an expansionist and aggressive threat. That would come at the end of World War II when, having defeated the totalitarian expansionist German Nazis and Japanese Empire, attention was turned to the prostrate, ruined Soviet Union as the New Threat. There always has to be an existential threat, doesn't there?

Europe and Japan would be rebuilt along Anglo-American capitalist lines (with a bit of Socialism thrown in to calm the restive masses for a while) and the Soviet Union would be ham-strung and boxed and allowed to play in Eastern Europe so that no one in the West need concern themselves with that region for the time being.

Red China was the New Dragon in the East. It was, of course, the offspring of Red Russia. Dealing with that unanticipated result of the Japanese defeat in WWII would take up most of the energy of the Western powers -- ultimately leading to military stalemate in Korea and military disaster and defeat in Vietnam.

There's little doubt that the totalitarian governing systems that expanded during the period between the wars were ruled by liars, thieves and murderers, as all large scale governing systems seem to be, including the vaunted Democracies. The totalitarians were just more overt about it, let's say, so it was obvious. There was no lack of liars, thieves and murderers in ruling positions within the "democratic" Imperial nations. The case could be made -- and some made it -- that for all their fine words about self-determination and democracy and whatnot, the Imperial West (particularly Imperial Britain, but no less so France and Belgium... and the United States) were monstrous in their colonial enterprises.  Liars, thieves and murderers only begins to describe what what unleashed on the uncivilized peoples of the world by those powers.

Ridding the world of the "uncivilized" peoples (sub-humans, actually) was something of an idealized goal. It could be accomplished by extermination when necessary -- viz: the various conquests and exterminations of the Native Peoples of the Americas -- or by conversion and/or assimilation. But the point was to make over all of the "uncivilized" peoples into some version of "civilized" and subservient or to make them be gone.

This was the Western European colonial enterprise in a nutshell.

And here we are again.

All of the current blood-lettings and slaughter-fests under way this summer appear to be some version of the colonial wars of yore, conquests for the purposes of subjugation, extermination, control and extraction of resources, and destruction of so-called primitive cultures which threaten the brutal and cruel cultures of the West and the powers they wish to assert over everyone on earth.

Here we go again.

None of these neo-colonial wars seem to be going well, but they do go on a very long time just the same. The victims pile up in ever-growing stacks of bodies, streets run with blood, cities are laid waste. There is a repeating cycle of disruption and destruction, revolt and suppression, and with each cycle, the cruelties become normalized.

New Mexicans may have been able to get rid of Oñate when time was, but getting rid of him did not get rid of his legacy, and even the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 -- viciously revenged in the de Vargas Reconquista of 1692-95 in which thousands of Indians were slaughtered -- did not fully restore what now had passed.

The cycle of violence and destruction we're in today will no doubt pass, and perhaps some of those responsible will be judged and a sense of justice restored, but what used to be cannot be restored -- and perhaps it shouldn't be.

May we nevertheless learn to be better.

Israel Rampages in Gaza Again

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

This happened was during today's "4 hour humanitarian cease fire." According to witnesses and reports from the scene, shortly after 12:00n local time, as residents (survivors?) of Gaza were attempting to get necessary supplies at a market section adjoining the Shujayea neighborhood, several mortar or tank shells landed among the shoppers, killing between 17 and 20 (a figure likely to increase significantly) and wounding hundreds. 

This is what Israel does: it declares a "cease fire" then waits for people to gather in response, then the IDF kills them. It kills them in hospitals. It kills them in refugee centers and schools. Wherever Gazans are gathered in large numbers for protection or under the banner of a "ceasefire," Israel aims its missiles and shells and kills them by the score, wounding many more. 

It is apparently an identity thing to the Israelis. 

Lull and lure the Arabs into believing their safety is assured. Then kill them.

This is how the UNRWA Representative in Gaza Christopher Gunness responded to the latest school shelling in which dozens were killed -- as they slept -- and hundreds were wounded:

The UNWRA statement is unusually blunt and harsh.

Statement by UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl

Jerusalem

Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced. 

We have visited the site and gathered evidence. We have analysed fragments, examined craters and other damage. Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school, in which 3,300 people had sought refuge. We believe there were at least three impacts. It is too early to give a confirmed official death toll. But we know that there were multiple civilian deaths and injuries   including of women and children and the UNRWA guard who was trying to protect the site.  These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army.  

The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times,  to ensure its protection; the last being at  ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling. 

I condemn in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law by Israeli forces. 

This is the sixth time that one of our schools has been struck. Our staff, the very people leading the humanitarian response are being killed.  Our shelters are overflowing. Tens of thousands may soon be stranded in the streets of Gaza, without food, water and shelter if attacks on these areas continue. 

We have moved beyond the realm of humanitarian action alone. We are in the realm of accountability. I call on the international community to take deliberate international political action to put an immediate end to the continuing carnage.

As many have pointed out during this latest round of Israeli rampaging in Gaza, Israelis are losing their humanity. 

Indeed. But there are so many places where just that loss of humanity has become routinized. This Blood Summer still is only half over, too.

The Blood Summer Strikes Again

I've been trying to digest the story I first heard yesterday or perhaps the day before about two homeless men bludgeoned to death in Albuquerque while they slept. Three teens, the youngest 15, have confessed to the crime and seem to be boasting that they have committed altogether fifty or more other attacks on the homeless in the last few months. Fifty or more.

Caveat: I don't know any more about this incident and the series of incidents that it seems to be part of than what has been in the news, and I've been shocked and appalled at what I've seen and heard, I really haven't wanted to follow it in any detail, so I suspect that a good deal of what I write about it here will be very incomplete and/or erroneous.

Fifty attacks in the last few months. Yes, there has been some mention made from time to time that this or that homeless wanderer has been attacked while he (generally it's a he) sleeps somewhere on the streets or in a vacant lot or wherever he can find a moment's rest, a little shelter. There have been stories of men or women run over by drivers seemingly looking for homeless wanderers to brutalize and kill. There have been stories or bludgeonings and frantic escapes. There have been so many stories of pain and misery and bloodshed.

Victims rarely report the crimes, they rarely go to the police, they're terrified of the police. They are terrified not solely because of the executions of the homeless which the police commit with impunity but because the police treat any homeless wanderer with routine contempt and violence; they are no protectors of the vulnerable. That's for Father Rusty at the St. Martin's homeless shelter. He'll get right on it.

The men who were killed over the weekend were called "Cowboy" and "Yazzie" according to reports, and they were from the Gallup area. Navajo. Not unusual for Indians to travel around, to live off the land, to get drunk and get by as best they can. Their friend, called "Skeets", was beaten up but survived and escaped and described the killers to police. Within a day, the boys, Alex Rios, 18, Nathaniel Carillo, 16 and Gilbert Tafoya, 15, were rounded up. Police say they confessed and provided extensive details of their other attacks on the homeless in Albuquerque the past few months.

Almost as if they were boasting.

They were doing their part, no? To clean up the riff-raff, the vermin, the losers lower than them.

Doing their part.

The police want others who might have been victims of these boys to come forward and make reports, but the victims live in fear, fear of the police certainly, but also of a system that has no regard for them, no place for them, wherein they have no home and no voice. They will not go to the police willingly. So the police are doing what they call "outreach," by sending plainclothes detectives among the homeless -- "our homeless" they're being called by suddenly compassionate news outlets -- to conduct surreptitious surveillance and interviews, to try to further develop cases against these boys. It's not, in other words, on behalf of the homeless, it is on behalf of the system, and on behalf of the police themselves.

The authorities will get to the bottom of this!

Well, no. No they won't.

The system the authorities serve has no use for drunken Indians (for God's sake!) out of Gallup who somehow made their way to Albuquerque and died there with their skulls crushed by rogue youths out for a lark. Too bad, so sad. They are simply surplus, disposable -- and anybody would understand they were going to die anyway. There was no way the system was going to salvage them, so maybe it's better for them and for everyone that... they're gone now, to their reward in Heaven or wherever... human waste disposal took care of it.

Too bad for those three boys who will now have to live with the consequences of what they did for the rest of their lives -- or at least until they are 21, when they might, under other circumstances, be released from juvenile detention. In fact, we're told, they will be tried as adults and face adult consequences for murder most foul, and that might be some consolation, but for the fact that there are no doubt others who think like they do, and when the spirit moves them (what kind of dark spirits are afoot), they will go on their own killing sprees, disposal efforts, removals of the unwanted...

I can't say what motivated these boys to do what they say they did, but I do know that they, like all of us, are immersed in a culture of impunity, a culture in which crimes of this sort are committed by authority with complete impunity (as with, for example, the cases of James Boyd and Mary Hawkes in Albuquerque, and how many tens or hundreds or thousands of others all over the country?) Abuse and killing of the homeless by authority is hardly considered worth the time to discuss these days -- except as a caution to others not to get out of line, or it could happen to you. Yes, you.

The situation in Albuquerque has been highlighted since the execution of James Boyd in March, and the situation in Albuquerque is definitely bad, awful, appalling and all the other terms used to describe police misconduct in this country, but in actuality, the problem is nationwide and getting worse.

Police misconduct, murder, abuse and impunity has reached epidemic proportions, at least if you follow the news. There are stories at least every week of some horror committed under color of authority including numerous questionable killings. There are entire YouTube channels devoted to documenting police misconduct, and (primarily libertarian) think tanks have devoted whole sections of their operations to studies and reports of police misconduct. It's a cottage industry in the land of the free and home of the brave.

Statistics show somewhat less certainty that things are getting worse, but statistics can be manipulated to show pretty much anything. Statistics appear to show that overall murder rates have plummeted to nearly an all-time low, which may be part of why so many murders now seem to gain so much attention, whether committed under color of authority or just because. They are actually so rare, at least according to statistics, that murders almost command attention by their very rarity. Seems counter intuitive, but there you are.

Police killings and abuse may or may not be on the rise. It is hard to say because data is scattered. There is no comprehensive statistical data. From what is available, it appears that police killings of suspects and bystanders run about 500 a year, year in and year out, practically without change. But that figure may be low. Reports of abuse run into the thousands, tens of thousands, but it's hard to say whether it's worse over time. Those with some memory of the past will often say that things were once far worse than they are now...

Yet we are conditioned to believe that the situation we face today is the worst it has ever been... It's always bad and getting worse, unless we fight.

Nevertheless, murders like those committed over the weekend in Albuquerque tear at the conscience and the heart. It's not a matter of "why" -- it's a matter of such horrors happening at all, and it's a matter of the overall sense of powerlessness in the face of such monstrousness.

This is what millions of Americans feel, but also what millions, perhaps billions, of people around the world feel in the face of the mounting cruelty of the world as it is and is becoming, and the blank-faced disinterest of those in power to do anything about it.

Powerlessness that's being countered to an extent, even on the mean streets of Albuquerque, by notions of common interest, mutual aid, concern. No only are the police doing "Outreach to Our Homeless," so are the many, many, many agencies and offices set up to help.

Even the frequently absent mayor of Albuquerque says "we must do more."

Well. Good.

Yes, do more. But understand, when authority is allowed to behave with impunity toward those who... don't fit, let's say, whatever standards of behavior or appearance that are required at any given moment, is it any wonder boys like those who confessed to the murders of these homeless men do what they do?

The problem starts at the top, not the bottom. Change the culture at the top, and what happens below changes too.

Summer of Our Discontent

What a blood-soaked summer we're in, and it's not even half over. The slaughters throughout the Middle East crescent go on and on, more and more mountains of bodies piling up, or like that poor man I read about in Gaza, collecting the parts of his exploded child in a plastic shopping bag. I gagged and then I cried. What is the matter with people that allows and requires this to go on?

The Malaysian plane shot down in Ukraine is only a handful of dead compared what I'm hearing are thousands already killed in the conflict, many tens of thousands forced to flee, villages and parts of whole cities left in ruins.

And the bloodletting goes on and on and on while our leaders celebrate it, yes they do, each and every one, gleeful at the spilling of more and ever more blood. It is a passion among them, this thirst for blood.

Victim blaming continues without let up.

The victims are always to blame, the rebels are always to blame, the dead are to blame.

It's insane. And it is becoming more and more universal.

Renewing the Anti-War Coalition?

Could be.

Given the ridiculous disparities in casualties in the current round of bloodletting in Israel-Palestine, the ludicrous propaganda from the hasbaraniks, the truly vile and disgusting support of the Gazan slaughter by nearly every western power, and the grotesque arc of suffering and bloodletting throughout the Middle East these days, it's as close as it's been in more than a decade for the many domestic and global anti-war outfits to coalesce once again and say "No more" to war.

Our governments have long behaved as if the People and the public interest don't matter. They certainly seem to get a thrill at governing contrary to the public interest and will, quite openly and actively supporting the interests and will of an oligarchy that simply cares nothing for anything that is not immediately profitable to their bottom lines. The multitudinous wars and police actions they engage in to force neo-liberal policies on resistant local populations, whether in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Africa or southeastern Europe, merely serve to reinforce the notion that "there is no alternative," and all must fall into the orbit and follow the directives of the international bankers and financiers and the governments they sponsor -- or else. Misery, death and destruction are guaranteed.

Can a revival of the anti-war coalition of the past reverse this trend?

Not immediately, no. But if people see their common interest is to be found in thwarting the warring mentality of their Betters, refusing to go along with it, countering it with peace, dignity, justice and community, we can see a time in the not too distant future (probably after my lifetime, though) when war will once more be seen as the abomination it is.

I've noticed that in Albuquerque, the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition is far and away the most active and reliable community group organizing against police abuse. A.N.S.W.E.R. was also the in the lead of the anti-Iraq War protests more than a decade ago, and at the time, no one really knew who they were. Many people still have no idea. It didn't matter at the time, because they were organized and they were the energy behind protest marches that involved hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people domestically, millions overseas. Those protests did not stop the Iraq War of course.

What may have had a more profound effect was the simple shaming action taken by Cindy Sheehan and others on the roadside near the entrance to the Bush's Crawford ranch (known as the "Pig Farm.") Though Cindy has since been denounced and dismissed as a Communist and a crank -- oh my! -- her efforts brought enormous shame to the Bush - Cheney regime, and it has had a cumulative effect over time.

By combining the efforts of a highly organized outfit like A.N.S.W.E.R. with the individual shaming efforts of those who have suffered irreparable loss, it's conceivable that a new global Anti-War Coalition can be generated.

Bloodshed and destruction seem boundless at the moment. It's past time to reverse the trend.