How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?
Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?
Equity ownership, stocks and shares owned by politicians, influenced their legislative and financial monitoring activities. The financial interests of politicians increased the probability that banks received bailout money, how much support these institutions received and how quickly.
Representatives’ stock ownership influenced members of the US House of Representatives to bailout the financial sector by voting for the bills HR 3997 on 29 September and HR 1424 on 3 October, 2008. In the initial vote, the likelihood of voting for the bailout was 41 percent for non-investors and 58 percent for equity owners. In the final vote, the likelihood was 55 and 69 percent respectively.
Congressional equity ownership in a given firm was also shown to affect the probability of receiving a bailout, the bailout amount and the timing of government support to that firm. Congressional committees with jurisdiction over the finance sector can affect regulatory outcomes. Equity ownership of members of these congressional committees affects bailout decisions, largely due to the powerful members in each committee, the chairs and ranking members.
Lobbying is indubitably an important means of exerting influence in politics. In the United States, campaign donations also matter. What has gone virtually unnoticed thus far though is that politicians also are investors. Part of their wealth rests with firms whose wellbeing falls under their legislative and regulatory influence.
Professor of Business Laurence van Lent of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Ahmed Tahoun of Manchester Business School (UK) drew these conclusions on the basis of an analysis of 555 publicly listed financial sector firms, 295 of which received government support under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Professor of business, Paul Lawrence, says he has discovered a new idea he calls “Renewed Darwinian” theory. He tells us it addresses questions that have “been amazingly ignored by the academics”, but have “been on the minds of humans since we have had history”. It is a renewed version of Darwin! The common idea is that Darwin is all about the survival of the meanest and the fittest. The most ruthless survive. But Lawrence thinks there is more to it than just being mean fit and ruthless.
It is curious that anyone nowadays should think, like a Christian fundamentalist, that Darwin’s notion expressed as survival of the fittest means that the physically fittest, or the meanest, are the ones who survive the struggle for existence. Evolutionary theory says there are more ways to be fit besides having big muscles, big teeth or claws, and a disregard for anything other than self. And nor have these other methods been ignored by the academics, unless Lawrence is talking about academics like himself, academics in fields other than biology. The academic experts in biology and evolution never doubted that there are many ways of being fit to survive, from being very small to being very big, from being very fast to being very slow, from having unusual senses like echo location to having other peculiar qualities like intelligence, and so on.
Professor Lawrence seems amazed by some of Darwin’s views expressed in his book The Descent of Man:
Any creature, whatsoever, that has the social instincts comparable to those of humans and the intellectual capacities close to those of humans would inevitably develop a moral sense of conscience.
Lawrence explains:
Now, what he’s saying here is that if humans—any creature—had the drive to bond, a social instinct, and a drive to intellectual drives like to comprehend, would have the conscience to help them fulfil those two drives because without conscience you could not fulfil those two drives.
In attempting to explain it further, he tells us a great deal about the mentality of many modern Americans, the people of the “Christian Nation”. He says:
We’ve all heard of the Golden Rule: “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you”, But, we’re not quite sure what it means!
Despite all that Christianity, Americans and, it seems, especially American corporate and political bosses, do not know what the Golden Rule means. That is quite staggering but explains a great deal that has utterly baffled us foreigners, who have admired aspects of American life, but been bemused by American mass selfishness, lack of empathy for others, and readiness to kill everyone they meet in the world to get their own way.
It also confirms a Pew Poll that showed us that, though maybe 90 percent of Americans might claim to be Christians, three quarters of them do not know enough about Christianity or relevant aspects of their own constitution to be able to honestly claim they actually are Christians. Let is not assume that all of them are sociopaths, but simply that the US is not the freedom loving place they like to propagate for the good of the rest of us. Most Americans bend to the pressure of their peers because they are afraid of becoming the butt of their peers’ humor, or worse in a country with more guns than people, put up with their disdain and anger.
People have a natural social need or drive to bond with others, and a desire to be liked and respected. They are indeed aspects of evolution because humanity is a social species. We have evolved to live together, and for that to have happened, we have to have certain instincts or traits like the ones that Lawrence has just discovered, albeit late by over a century. For all that, it is to be hoped that Lawrence will continue to carry forward his ideas into the territories where they are anathema, into the US in general, and management there and in many other countries too.
So has Professor of business studies Lawrence actually understood Darwinism to come up with something novel? Well, he says that humans beings have other drives besides the drive to gain resources. He says we are born with four drives, essential for our basic survival. They are necessary for our species to thrive as a whole species and they are encoded in our DNA and we sense them and feel them mostly by the emotional messages we get from our subconscious as we witness the world around us.
These four drives are:
Well, there is not much there that the academics did not know, though it might indeed be new to financiers and business men who always behave as if the whole purpose of life is to grab as much as you can, even though you have no idea how to use it all when you have it.
Lawrence seems to believe that these principles he thinks he has newly discovered go beyond the preservation of particular genes, but he has not so far shown that these traits he describes are not conditioned by genes. But, now perhaps he gets to do his job when he tells us that good leaders take into account all four drives, not just the desire to acquire. He asks us to note that we all have these drives as human beings, and the good leader recognizes it, and ought not put all the emphasis on greed. In practical terms, it means, Lawrence says:
These are the ways to have strong long term relationships, and they are natural ways for humans to behave. It is natural too for huimans to look to a leader, but you have to have and keep their respect by helping them understand, acquire and develop basic human drives for themselves. It is having a good conscience, because the Golden Rule in application makes the helper and the receiver feel good, and ready to reciprocate the assistance in future.
Lawrence rightly equates good leadership with good moral leadership. Leaders without any conscience, or one only poorly developed, simply cannot have any fellow feeling:
They do not know what compassion is, they do not know what empathy is, they do not know even what love is. That is something they are never going to experience in their life because they don’t have that feature in their brain when they are born.
If we try to figure out how do we respond to fulfil those drives for ourselves, and are successful in doing so, people will begin to pay attention to us, and maybe think they’ll trust us to leadership. Leadership grows out of one’s own success in leading one’s own life. But, though we mostly have the necessary abilities, we have to refine them, practice them, train our minds to be more effective in ourselves and leading others. So, experience is also needed.
An example is that the world has a lot of organizations loaded with distrust. People do not trust enough in each other to cooperate properly. They think they are going to be undercut some way. The good leader can use the skills inherent in humanity to encourage cooperation, but people have to feel secure enough.
It is refreshing to hear him say that a disproportionate number of leaders are sociopaths, who lack the drive to bond with others. It is a problem for less than 4 percent of the population, but Lawrence guesses that 10% of people in positions of power may be sociopaths. Like Tony Blair, the former PM of the UK, and in many people’s opinion an archetypal sociopath, they are often charming, and use their charm and lack of scruples about others to climb to positions of power.
A lot of history records the fact that such people have gotten into important positions. The Renaissance was an effort to move away from a sociopathic kind of leadership. The Constitution of the United States was a effort to create a government able to keep free of such leadership. Balancing the power, and not getting power concentrated in any one office are ways of avoiding that kind of leadership.
Some prominent leaders in business are highly suspect of being sociopathic. Lawrence suggests the recent Wall Street crisis, with the crash in the market and the resulting worldwide depression, illustrates sociopaths at work. Some in the big banks saw that by buying subprime mortgages—granted with little regard whether they could be repaid and so subject to foreclosure—they could sell them to Wall Street banks which could dice them up into derivatives and sell them as Triple-A bonds to people who were trustees of pension funds and endowments, and collect 100 percent on the dollar for them. The bonds were phony, worth maybe half of their face value when they bought them.
And that was the con, the absolute fraud that was pulled off. And we still don’t have a clear understanding by the public or even by the Department of Justice that that is what happened, and we should be prosecuting those people and getting the evidence out that will prove that those are criminal actions.
Profesor Lawrence does not have anything new in scientific terms but he does something new in speaking out about the perilous state we are in through neglecting the traits of our evolved nature. The western economic system, called capitalism, requires us to act as if we were solitary creatures fending only for ourselves, and perhaps our immediate families, in a state of nature—meaning acting like savages. Humans though are not savages, not solitary, and the reason is that we have evolved to be social animals who live amicably together in groups by sacrificing a little personal freedom—the freedom to be savage towards others—so that others will work with us in a community for our mutual advantage.
As soon as someone took more than a fair share of the communal produce, human society traditionally shamed them, and if that did not work, it expelled them from the group, exiled them. They were left to fend for themselves by themselves, unless another group was willing to accept them. As most groups will have realized why some human was wandering alone, they would have been chary at admitting them into their own group.
Now we cannot expel people from society, but bad crimes are seriously punished. The bad crimes that, so far, have not been seriously punished are the banking and financial crimes, like the scam described by Professor Lawrence. It is time these criminals against humanity were properly punished, and it is time that immoral profits by the few at the expense of the many were progressively taxed and redistributed so that there is no underclass of people abandoned on the grounds that they are work shy, when there is not enough work to go round.
A society of chimpanzees will look after the ones among them that are not fully capable, and even the alpha male will show care and compassion to a defective or disabled chimpanzee. Why cannot human leaders be the same? Obviously, they can, and professor Lawrence suggests how, but society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the massively greedy, who move their money to wherever in the world it will continue to accumulate profit, irrespective of what happens to the poor and unemployed in their own country. These are the people without consciences that Lawrence describes. They are indeed criminals. Punish them!
Sam Pizzigati, editor of Too Much, an online newsletter on excess and inequality, reports that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has issued for the first time a Global Wealth Report based on financial data from over 200 countries. It shows that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000. Credit Suisse sums up:
The past decade has been especially conducive to the establishment and preservation of large fortunes.
The world has more than enough wealth to ensure no one on the planet need be potless. The study shows the world has 4.4 billion adults and the total wealth they own is $194.5 trillion. Shared out, every adult in the world could have $43,800. The fact is, though, that three billion people, almost 70 percent, have less than $10,000, and 1.1 billion, a quarter of all adults, have less than $1,000. These figures are net worth, meaning their assets less their liabilities. Half the people on earth who are 20 and older have less than 2 percent of global wealth—each less than $4,000.
The world’s richest 1 percent—adults who have at least $588,000—hold 43 percent of the world’s wealth. They constitute the ruling class, the wealthiest class, and they break down as:
Those wealth differences are exacerbated by the local conditions. In uncivilized societies with poor public health care, poor quality public education, and no state pensions, then the poor are hit by ill health, a miserable old age, and ignorance because they cannot afford to pay for the absent public services. Moreover, epidemics like swine flu, natural disasters, like Katrina, and unemploment are additional shocks for which the poor do not have the reserves to survive easily. In a society with the opposite conditions, a history of civilized caring governments which have provided public services and benefits then poverty does not have the stigma and practical horrors it has in poor societies.
No other nation has as much total wealth as the United States, with only 5.2 percent of the world’s population. It has 23 percent of the world’s adults worth at least $100,000 and an even greater proportion, 41 percent, of the world’s millionaires. Yet, it is a society with inadequate social services, so its people need more personal wealth to survive than people in countries like France, Sweden and Germany which have good social services.
Canada has a national public health insurance. Credit Suisse calculates the wealth of the typical Canadian family is $94,700, double the $47,771 US average. It shows that good public services add to a nation’s wealth. Public services provide jobs, and need private business suppliers, and health and pension security means people are less risk averse, and will be more inclined to start up new businesses.
Why then have we given trillions of dollars to the banks, depleting our treasuries so much that we are told we have been living too extravagantly? It is a big lie, and we ought to be taking direct action to change it. But we can do without Tea Party economics. We do not need tax cuts for the rich, we need services for the poor, paid for by taxing the rich. They can afford it, we cannot!
Something is profoundly wrong, with the way we live today.Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land
We have wasted the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have been consumed by the locusts, or more precisely by the shamelessly greedy. It has been the era of all the Dicks, from Cheney to Fuld, politically “an age of the pygmies”. Unregulated markets have crashed. Wars of choice have left bloody destruction in their wake. The snouts have been buried deep in the trough. Beyond the noise of guzzling, we can hear no moral critique of what has happened, no shout of rage that things don’t have to be like this.Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land
As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed, not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land
Tony Judt… encourages dissent from conformity, for which there is much to be said. Blessed are the troublemakers.Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land
[But] social democracy is not something that Americans can talk about, though there is a bit of cognitive dissonance about their attitudes to the public and private realms of social provision… [In the first thirty years after the War] planning, progressive taxation, high public spending and nationalized services brought inclusive economic growth with increasing equity and social harmony. A mostly benign state provided the security for which people yearn, replacing the market’s invisible hand with more visible supportive direction. Maybe all was not for the best, but it was pretty good all the same—and would have gladdened the heart of that scion of egalitarian Eton, John Maynard Keynes… According to Judt, since the 1980s, from Reagan to Bush, from Thatcher to Brown, it has been downhill all the way, with growing inequity, a declining belief in the role of the state and a falling away from civic engagement.Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land
Tony Judt is proudly a man of the left… He is intellectually brave—witness his well founded criticisms of Israel’s policies in Palestine. Beyond the imaginings of most of us, Judt is personally brave, too; motor neurone disease has left him quadriplegic.Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land
From The UK Observer
Dozens of soldiers are spilling out of choppers around the villages. The insurgents are on their radios, getting ready to strike. [Captain] Dan is not going to let them, and soon the night sky lights up with air strikes, gunships, rockets and bombs. Around dawn, Dan's lieutenant radios. He is with the village elder. There are five dead and 11 wounded women and children. Dan is depressed. he wants to go down and explain. He wants the villages to know there were bad guys there… NYTimes, writer, Elizabeth Rubin
Rubin asked Captain Dan whether he knew this would happen. “Yeah, I did”, he replied. She adds that his choice was “my soldiers or the Afghans”.
Rubin is content to leave it at that, but Captain Dan was attacking Afghan people, men, women and children in their own homes in their own villages, and to Captain Dan—doubtless one of our heroes—the Afghan men, by defending their homes and families, are defined as being “bad guys”. Naturally, the Afghans, defending what is theirs, do not realize they are bad guys at all and have to have it explained to them—if they are still alive!
Is it right that we should be killing people in their own homes, thousands of miles away from our own homes, because our odious and gruesome leaders have decided that they are bad guys who will kill us in our beds if we do not kill them in their beds first? It plainly is not. The enemy has metamorphosed from being international terrorists, Al Qaida, to being the Taliban, a local Moslem sect who had nothing to do with 9/11! They are the heroes, not our brave boys. Our brave boys are the bad guys, by any standard of morality. Which one of us would not defend our own homes if we were placed in the situation the Afghans have been put in? The Americans did it against the British. Why then are they objecting to others doing the same? Why are they acting as imperialists, like king George's British? Are they hypocrites?
Stop the War!
Incidentally, the UK’s heroic Christian leader, Dr Gordon Brown, says he will spend an extra £5 billion on the war next years, yet he is cutting public services and sacking people allegedly to save a few million pounds. Are our leaders insane idiots, or do they just take us to be? Do not vote for a war party!
Ted Honderich made the opening speech in a debate in the Oxford Union on 29 January 2010, the evening of the day when Tony Blair appeared at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. The motion was that this House believes that in politics, money talks loudest. The motion was carried. Here is a slight synopsis of the full speech online at Ted Honderich’s website.
“The motion before us two parts, one explicit and one implicit. There is the explicit proposition of fact, and there is the implication of it—that it raises a question of rightness, or indeed isn’t right. Talking openly of what is right or wrong is unusual in this time in England, and may seem curious, perhaps moralistic, maybe innocent or immature, anyway not familiar.
Cant, in particular cant by our democratic politicians, is the dismal order of the day, along with the brazen policy that the response to a question is not an answer but an evasion of it. The cant and the evasion have reduced the clarity and hence the intelligence of public discussion, indeed brought it to its lowest state in 50 years. A society in decline since 1979 has declined further.
Instead of speaking of right and wrong, of what ought not to happen, the political class declares or intones the cant that this or that is “unacceptable”. They are saying that is wrong—what we must not do. They prefer to be inexplicit instead. When you say plainly that something is wrong, or right, you are expected to produce a reason, an argument, something clear headed.
So, what are the things that according to the motion money talks louder than in politics? One answer is truth. It is not only the first victim of war. A second thing that money talks louder than is the logic of ordinary intelligence. That consists in clarity, analysis, relevance, consistency, validity, and completeness, not leaving things out. Truth and logic bring along some humanity with them. You can’t be truthful and logical without humanity—humanity being what is right.
Being simple minded, which our political class is, is also to be avoided. One way of being simple minded about the motion in front of us is to think the part that is the factual proposition can be settled just by some figures. It can’t be settled that way, useful as some general figures are.
It is true that the economically best off tenth of population in Britain and America have something like 70% of the wealth, and the worst off tenth has as good as none. As for income, the best off tenth has about 30% or 40%, and the worst off 2% or 3%. That means that the poorest have nothing to spend on politics, indeed no time left to engage in it after getting their 2 or 3%, and the very richest have a lot.
I say, without fear of any economist or student of the dismal science in this house, the dismal science that never gets around to quantifying what is fundamental, that the richest have more than 1000 times the political influence and power of the poorest. Remember that the poorest have as good as no wealth. 70 times zero is infinitely less than 70 times 1. What does the 1000 times more political influence and power do? More than corruption in the House of Commons, and more than the fact of lobbying even on an American scale. More than industries and interests infesting the regulation of themselves.
The 1000 times more political influence and power can make and maintain what can mildly be called a certain convention of thought and feeling in a society, mainly a successful pretense about what is necessary and what is possible. It consists in illusions upon illusions. About war, classes, the economy, public services, private profit and the profitization of things, taxation, banks, competition, co-operation, foreign ownership, utilities, health, education, politics itself, ideologies and religions, terrorism. Today, there is the illusion about the need to reduce public spending rather than reduce private profiting.
Illusions work better than an army and police on motorbikes. Owning newspapers and paying for ordinary advertisements in them is part of the convention. So is a government broadcasting service. A compliant church despite a brave Archbishop is another part. There is no need for conspiracy, although there is some of that, to make the whole thing intentional.
The illusions bring to mind the other part of the political cant about the “unacceptable”. Our dim but not too dim political class, when they intone “unacceptable”, don’t only mean that something is wrong, they also mean it is somehow unthinkable. Its ambiguity saves them from being challenged either about something’s being wrong or its being or its being believed necessary or impossible by all the relevant persons.
Let us think a little, which you’re allowed to do in a university, even in a debate, by asking what can best be said for democracy. What can best be tried in its justification? The hope is that it is a better decision procedure for a society than any other, for a particular reason—in plain English, it is that two heads are better than one, and more better are than two. What is in heads, according to this argument, is different and compensating kinds of knowledge, different experiences of a society, different wants. But it only works if what is in the heads gets equal and free expression.
In our hierarchic democracies, there is nothing of the sort, nothing remotely like equal and free expression. So there can be no reasonable assumption that our democracies are right about anything at all—social goods, or profitization against co-operation, or terrorism, or our own terrorist war. So put aside the fiction, indeed the illusion, of a democratic guarantee of good policies.
How should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our democracy—thinking about that outcome? What principle or other method should we use? Our political class never asks how you should go about judging the outcome. Should we do it by the viciousness of the tradition of conservatism, New Labour wholly being within it? Conservatism is no more a political tradition of self interest than any other, but the politics has no principle of right and wrong at all to support its self interest. Liberalism has better impulses than conservatism, but it is without a real principle to give content to its better impulses. It is without a will to act on those impulses, including its decency in opposing a terrorist war.
Should you judge the result of money in politics by the principle of the Utilitarians, that what is right is what produces the greatest total of happiness, well being or satisfaction—no matter how it is shared out, even if the biggest total rests on some people, a class at the bottom, having lives that are really nasty, British and short? Should you throw psychoanalysis and neuroscience into the plan, as they now say at the London School of Economics, to make people happier without changing the world that was making them unhappy?
Maybe you should try instead a principle of judgement heard of in Cambridge sometimes these days? That is the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It tells you to treat everybody not only as a means but also as an end. It’s all about respect. Its clearest upshot is that you should nod decently to the homeless fellow in the street when you don’t buy a copy of The Big Issue magazine he sells for a crust.
So, how should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our politics? What sums up what is right on any subject anywhere, is the Principle of Humanity. It is that what is right is what according to the best judgement and information gets and keeps people out of bad lives. Bad lives are defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, denial of the fundamental desires of human nature—six of them—a decent length of life, bodily well being, freedom and power, respect and self respect, goods of relationship, the goods of culture.
“Money talking loudest” is a standing violation of the Principle of Humanity. It denies every great human good, every denial aided by suppression of truth and evasion of logic. If you’re not pushy or a pusher, you live less long for a start, you have less consciousness, and you suffer pain, constraint, weakness, disdain, self disdain. Your children don’t learn. You read Murdoch newspapers that stop you from escaping the stupidity owed to your ignorance.
Earlier today Blair, a man who managed this democracy into a terrorist war, the Iraq war, insulting the decency that remains in this democracy, appeared before a weak committee, a wretched committee of old boys neither capable of questioning him effectively nor willing to. Not a court. Not Nuremberg. Blair sought today, by the audacity of a shyster lawyer unconstrained by a judge, his policy in the House of Commons, to blunt the truth that he is a war criminal, a criminal against humanity. Old Germans around Nuremberg can feel less bad tonight about the German past. They can say that Nuremberg happened.
In Blair’s wholly intentional killing of innocents in and after the war, wholly intentional since wholly foreseeable, and in his wholly intentional causing of fear supposed to be the stuff of only terrorism, and in everything else of his New Labour, Blair has been and is a creature of money talking. He has been a creature who listens to it talking, goes to ask for more, and pays for it.
What should we do? What should be done about all the denials of the great goods, about taking from people what we all desire? What should be done about the monstrous selfishness? Truth and logic is all we have to rely on, some say. But surely it can’t be the only hope. That would be too terrible. A colonel of the British Army, at the time of English civil war, said:
For really I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…Thomas Rainsborough”
Honderich wonders whether revolution could be an answer, or mass civil disobedience, much more insistent than the large demonstrations at the outset of the Iraq war, or a boycott of the market. Any such insistent demonstrating, or a colonel driving a tank into Parliament Square is likely to be what a neoconservative government like this New Labour one would love. They could institute martial law, and declare plainly the fascism they have hitherto been hiding but preparing for.
Honderich thinks revolution isn’t a rational means to the end of the Principle of Humanity. Nor is it, it is the breakdown of society for the very reasons he is outlining, and the Principle of Humanity can only work in a functioning society—by civilized people! Mass civil disobedience, funded by the US has worked in a few places in the last couple of decades. “It brought down a wall, ended an empire. It has changed governments.” Revolution is getting more feasible as the western powers weaken, the very reason for their drive towards fascism.
The eastern countries India and China are becoming serious rivals to the US and Europe. The financial system, as Honderich shows, is getting more and more openly corrupt, and politics too. Society is crumbling and revolution, consisting of the components Honderich mentioned looking more likely, but it will have to fight off fascism first, or somehow force some government to scrap the mass of repressive legislation New Labour has introduced. At present the British are sleepwalking. Mostly they are ignorant of what is going on as long as they have Murdoch’s media, reality TV and celebrities, and can still borrow on credit. They have a rude shock ahead.
US ambassador Douglas Griffiths, opposing the human rights resolution at the UN, said the Goldstone report written by South African Judge, Richard Goldstone, was unfair towards Israel. But Goldstone investigated both sides of the conflict, Israel and Hamas. The 575 page document concluded that, during its incursion into the Gaza Strip, on 27 December 2008, to root out Palestinian rocket squads, Israel:
It also pointed out that Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, deliberately targeted civilians and tried to spread terror through years of rocket attacks on southern Israel. In fact, the report required both Israel and Hamas to look publicly and fairly into their respective human rights failings in the conflict, and, if they failed to conduct credible investigations within six months, recommended a reference of the offending party to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague.
So, the report itself is balanced, but the UN resolution emphasized the Israeli part because far more innocents were killed by Israeli professional soldiers than by Hamas fighters. The three week conflict in Gaza left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. It was the continuation over decades of such one sided “defense” of the territory that until 1948 had been the Palestinians’ for twelve centuries that has caused the hatred of Moslems worldwide. Consequently, the resolution agreed in Geneva called for the UN General Assembly to consider the Goldstone report, and then for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report, on Israel’s adherence to the resolution, to the Human Rights Council.
For Washington, justice is a “distraction from the peace process”, according to the US ambassador. Naturally, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, claimed the resolution “provides encouragement for terrorist organizations worldwide and undermines global peace”. Israel is not the terrorist organization he meant. Meanwhile Ambassador Griffiths continued with the usual pro-Israeli stance of all US administrations:
We had worked for a resolution that recognized the right of a state to take legitimate action to protect its citizens in the face of threats to their security while also condemning violations of international law regardless of the actor.
Read this carefully. “A state has the right to take legitimate action to protect its citizens.” It is true, and is enshrined in the Human Rights Act, but the US ambassador means Israel has the right, not the Palestinians who are actually fighting for the life and land of its people, yet always suffer completely disproportionally in the one sided war going on between Israel and Palestine. Numerous UN resolutions have been directed against Israel, but they lead nowhere because of US intransigence and veto.
In 40 years, Israel has featured in 65 Security Council UN resolutions, passed by two thirds majorities or better in the 15 nation Security Council—often 14 to one, the US! These resolutions have censured and deplored Israel’s actions and policies in respect of massacres of Palestinians, land grabbing since the 1948 partition, destroying Palestinian buildings including homes, making them refugees in their own land, restricting their access to water and electricity, illegal imprisonments, deliberate harassment and settling Israelis in illegal settlements. These are all violations of human rights, yet The US and Israel justify them by the fact that Palestinians protest against them! If someone did it to you, what would you do? Tip your cap in gratitude? Something is seriously wrong with the world when people wronged for half a century are treated as if they are criminals for trying to assert some sort of justice themselves.
For international justice for them is a joke, through US protection of Israel. It is impossible for them to find justice wherever they turn. Insurmountable obstacles are constantly placed in their way, legal channels are blocked, and their human rights are mangled in the interest of US oil imperialism. They have lost their own land, and are promised a share of it, as a Palestinian state but the never get even to share what was theirs sixty years ago. In the end, they only have one course open to them— to fight for their rights—then they are called terrorists.
Is it any wonder that Arab and African countries can only see US double standards in this, and try to use the UN for its proper purpose. The Israelis do all the damage, and the Palestinians get all the blame. Those who believed President Obama would act differently have already been disappointed. Change? He talks the talk but no longer walks the walk, in this key issue of foreign affairs. Typically and especially typical of his predecessor, he insists on a nuclear free Middle East, except for Israel, whose 60 nuclear bombs, though held contrary to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty never meet any US disapproval while Iran gets threatened with nuclear attack just for enriching uranium for legitimate reasons.
How can the leaders, and indeed the general population, of this immensely powerful superpower, the US, claim to be a moral nation, or even understand what morality is, when they have such an immoral attitude to some of the most ill treated people in the world. The Palestinians are treated as less than dogs. So much for the respect the meretriciously Christian Americans have for God and His creation, and Christ’s famous saying that to mistreat anyone is to mistreat himself in the same way!
At the root of the US hypocrisy is the unqualified protection America gives its Middle Eastern colony, Israel. The US can veto anything brought before the UN Security Council blocking any call to bring Israel to justice before the International Criminal Court. Israel therefore knows it stands above international law. It can therefore act just as it likes to its Arab neighbours, launching attacks wherever it fancies. The illegal segregationist wall stretches through the West Bank to protect the illegal Israeli settlements being expanded there—Arab land—and Gaza is still being illegally blockaded.
As the US ambassador said, countries have the right to self defense, and that is what the Palestinians have been doing, but the US has its own agenda behind its immoral attitude to foreign policy. It is the agenda of the magnates and militarists who make megabucks out of other people’s distress, and so have a permanent policy of causing it, not just in Palestine. It is time for American liberals and the genuinely Christian American, if any exist, to speak out against the criminality of their own leaders serving those who sacrifice human beings to the insatiable Moloch of greed and war bucks, America’s caste of robber barons.
In a special session, 25 members of the 47 nation UN body voted in favor of the resolution that chastised Israel for failing to cooperate with the UN mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone. Another 6 voted against—the US and Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine—while 16 others abstained or did not vote. Britain, France and three other members declined to vote. Russia and China, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, were among those voting yes.
Britain, which used to pride itself on its respect for law and for human rights did not vote, according to David Milliband, the UK's Jewish Foreign Secretary, because it had not finished discussing the issue, effectively colluding with Israel to keep its generals and officials from prosecution. The British Foreign Office prevaricated last month, over a private visit to London of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his wife until they had immunity from prosecution.
Moreover, the United Nations itself ignores Israel's flouting of Security Council Resolutions and has shelved the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, its own careful investigations into Israel's crimes.
Goldstone, a noted judge, who is a Jew and has been under strong pressure from Zionist Jews and Israelis, concluded that both Israel and Hamas, the militant ruling party of Gaza, elected by the Palestinian people, committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict.
So the responsibility was evenly divided between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian people, having been consistently failed by international bodies and the international legal system, it can scarcely surprise anyone that they have tried to take matters into their own hands. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did the same—they fought back even though against the odds. why is it right for Jews to fight fascist oppression but it is not right for Arabs to do it against Israelis, Jewish colonists in the US colony of Palestine.
Israel is portrayed as the minnow even though it has nuclear weapons and every modern WMD it wants from their protectors the USA. The Palestinians have almost nothing, though Israel launched its vicious attack in response to some rockets fired from Gaza in late December 2008. These rockets were not professionally made military hardware, but are ingenious home made contraptions, little more than self propelled mortar bombs, and quite untargetable. They have caused some casualties and damage to property, but no fair judge can compare it with the full scale professionally equipped onslaught of the Israeli army last January.
And who can doubt the injustice looking at the figures of casualties from the three week long invasion of Gaza by the Israeli troops and their tanks. Almost 1,400 Palestinians—400 children—were killed during conflict, and just 13 Israelis, half by friendly fire! What is moral or defensible about professional soldiers killing defenseless women and children in their homes?
How can the US justify such immoral behavior? How can Obama especially justify it? It is not moral in the least to beat up and murder helpless people, and it is the Palestinians who are helpless not the Israelis. Obama in less than a year has been corralled by the military clique in Washington, yet has won a Peace prize. So too did Kissinger, but he at least gave his back. Why doesn't Obama change? Change was his slogan. Why not try it in foreign affairs as well as in health care? And even there he is struggling. We have to conclude that the Christian-Zionist military axis ruling the US is too strong for anyone. The US people themselves need to respond.
An inquiry into the killing of an Iraqi hotel worker, twenty six year old Baha Mousa, has heard he was arrested along with a number of other civilians by soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Basra in 2003. It is a horrible and devastating story which should bring tears to the eyes of anyone reading it, tears of shame and humiliation at what was done to him in our name.
These Iraqi civilians were subjected to brutal and vicious abuse from British troops, were subjected to sensory deprivation techniques, kicked and beaten repeatedly. The inquiry saw video footage of hooded and bound prisoners being beaten and abused by Corporal Donald Payne of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. In his opening address to the inquiry, Rabinder Singh QC, representing Mr Mousa’s family, said:
Baha was a human being, yet to his guards he was known as “fat boy” or “fat bastard”.
Mr Mousa’s father is a colonel in the Iraqi police. While being tortured for 36 hours on the floor of a filthy toilet at a holding facility, Baha Mousa was heard to scream for respite, and say he thought he would die. Mr Singh read out the statement of another detainee, describing what were Mr Mousa’s last moments on the evening of the second day:
I heard Baha Mousa screaming, “Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Leave me alone. Please leave me alone for five minutes”.
After he had been tortured to death, Mousa’s body was released. He had suffered 93 separate injuries. Neither Mousa nor any other of the civilians detained had been tried or convicted of anything. He had recently lost his young wife to cancer and had been left working in a war zone with two motherless, and now fatherless, children.
Solicitor for the detainees Phil Shiner said the responsibility for Mr Mousa’s death rested at the highest level. He said the inquiry must establish:
How it came about that senior politicians, civil servants, lawyers and senior military personnel knew—or ought to have known—that British soldiers and interrogators were using coercive interrogation techniques in Iraq and thought these were permittable and lawful.
The use of hooding and other torture techniques were banned under the Geneva Convention, and outlawed by the UK Conservative Heath government, in 1972, following the use of sensory deprivation techniques during internment in Northern Ireland. Mr Singh wondered whether the use of these techniques had ever ceased:
In 2003, the so-called “conditioning” techniques were used in Iraq on civilians in the name of the people of Britain. Stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, food deprivation and noise all came back. Perhaps they never went away.
It is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that this case was simply one of indiscipline. This case is not just about beatings or a few bad apples. There is something rotten in the whole barrel.
For the abuse and murder of Baha Mousa and the indignities and outrages perpetrated on countless numbers of Iraqi victims, only one man has been found guilty of war crimes and that man, the only one who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to only a year in prison and dismissed from the service. Defence Secretary, Des Browne, admitted “substantive breaches” of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights that protect the right to life and prohibit torture, still no one in the army’s hierarchy has been identified as responsible and punished, though the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay out £2.83 million to those who were mistreated, accepting some culpability.
The Baha Mousa inquiry may provide some answers to what went wrong in the army’s chain of command. It may expose ignoble and immoral conduct among British soldiers, including senior officers, in wartime. And all three of the major parties supported the war. Though the Liberals made a token protest, it was not enough to exonerate them. The British public ought to recognize that politicians from all parties carry the guilt of the wounding and deaths of myriads of Iraqis.
But the army’s political masters, the Blair-Brown neo-Nazi concoction called the New Labour government, remain in power, the personal guilt of ministers unacknowledged, their draconian laws still on the statute book, and their own crimes still unpunished. We need to remove these criminals from office, and to send them to the law courts for judgement. We are supposed to know, from our experience of Naziism that military might ought not be used to achieve political objectives.
Zionist Jews commonly use the accusation of “antiSemitism” to try to stifle any criticism of Israel. Howard Jacobson, the professional Jew retained by the UK Independent, is often commended by his fellow Zionists for attacking those knaves who would scurrilously attack poor Israel for killing innocent Arab kids in Gaza, a pastime they are fond of. Jacobson pleads that Jews cannot label any critics of Israel as anti-Semitic, though they never cease doing so.
For Jacobson and his cohorts, I am anti-Semitic. I am confusing racial prejudice with a moral stance to condemn Israel for its bombing of Palestinian civilians. Like most good people, I was horrified by the extent of the slaughter of the Arabs trapped in Gaza. My moral stance is not a prejudice against Jews, but is a prejudice against evil. It is formed from the widespread evidence that the conflict was not fair, and that Israeli soldiers were just butchering the helpless. Or is the death of 400 children not a massacre, but merely inevitable damage caused by the “fighting”? I object to being called anti-Semitic from a man who is little more than a verbal pimp, for reading widely about the Israeli army, which has no compunction about shooting unarmed volunteers or young children going home from school, using the weapons the US has paid for as if it were a joke, and concluding that they are wrong.
Such propaganda pimps complain about anti-Semitism whenever the Nazis who now run Israel are ever actually correctly identified. In this instant who could fail to compare the herding of defenceless Arabs into Gaza to be murdered with shells and phosphorus bombs with the Warsaw Ghetto when Nazis perpetrated a similar crime on Jews. So, Caryl Churchill’s powerful play, Seven Jewish Children, shows Jews as supporting everything Israel has done to the Palestinians in parallel with Jewish treatment by Nazis. Though the Palestinians did not initiate the Holocaust, they are paying the price. Gaza was the latest extension of the war of invasion and conquest waged since WWII against the indigenous Palestinians, who remain oppressed and humiliated, their homes demolished, their livelihoods destroyed, their crops uprooted.
Inevitably, the leagues of professional Zionist letter writers ply their media targets with grapeshot. They, and others like them, relentlessly tell the world that Israel is in the right, whatever it does, regardless of the self-evident selfishness of its occupation and settlement of Palestinian land and the barbarity of its suppression of Palestinian resistance. If increasing numbers today are thinking most Jews are Zionists, then the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbi, and people like Howard Jacobson can take some of the responsibility. Yet, for the first time ever, major sections of the Jewish community, even in the United States, dissociated themselves from what Israel was doing in Gaza, and in Israel at least a substantial minority of Jews freely opposed the invasion, or expressed grave doubts about the atrocity. The UK Zionist rally supporting Israel attracted less than a fifth of the numbers of previous rallies.
That criticism of Israel’s murderous attack on the Semitic population of Gaza as anti-Semitic is bizarre, but is meant, of course, to be a “big lie”, the method used by Göring. And does anyone seriously think Israel is poor, these days? That is another lie—the David and Goliath lie. Israel is wealthy. It is not militarily weak, but is the strongest power in the region, with a nuclear bomb, and a well equipped army and air force. The Palestinians have none of this, and have no prospects of getting any sort of military equality while the US plays superpower politics in the region. As the greater power, Israel can make choices the Palestinians cannot. They can choose to be merciful and enable everyone to live peacefully and with dignity.
It is a dastardly slur to suggest that there is something racist about the expression “the Chosen People of God”, an honour that has given Israelis the right to do just as they like in someone else’s land. And, if Israelis seem not to care about dead children, as long as they are not Jewish, when they are mercilessly killing Arab children and innocent passers by, how can anyone avoid coming to that conclusion. The suggestion is “outrageous” to the Zionist scribblers. What is outrageous is that the Israelis continue to get away with it. There are Israelis now who openly want to force a loyalty test on Palestinians without which they would be “transferred”! Whatever next will the Israeli fascists and their comforters think of?
Jewish actress, Miriam Margolyes’s family from Belarus were wiped out by the Nazis at the Treblinka extermination camp. “I honor their memory, but I can’t think about the bad things done in Israel. It’s a slur on the memory of the Holocaust.”
Margolyes thinks Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians is a form of betrayal. “One of Judaism’s ideals is to do as you would be done by. We are betraying it. I’m Jewish. I feel I have a responsibility to say:
“Look at what’s happening. Look at these people with their lives in ruins. We’ve done this. How do you expect people to stop bombing you when you are bombing them? But Israelis feel that they are the victim. They haven’t been to Gaza. When you see little boys being shot at, you know it’s wrong. We’re so used to being the victim, we’re not realizing that now we are the oppressor.” It is a matter of right and wrong. “I have a fierce sense of justice. I’m 67. If I don’t tell the truth now, when am I going to start?”
The injustice must eventually end in reconciliation, as in South Africa. But “the fact is that Israel was founded by taking land from people. They pretend it wasn’t and gloss over it, but it was. We have a responsibility to those people to repair their lives. That land has to be shared out. I don’t have all the answers, but one has to be to stop the killing, and take the wall down.”
George Lakoff has explained that for forty years, from the late 1960s, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to fit much of our political discourse to their worldview. The conservative message machine is still huge and ongoing. About 80% of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Yet Obama based his inaugural address on his view of fundamental American values—empathy, social and personal responsibility, self-improvement, and improving the USA itself—as progressive values. Laissez-faire free markets assume that greed is good, and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests, but empathy-based values opposed pure self-interest. Empathy-based moral values are opposed to the traditional conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. An economic program should be a moral program. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Budgets are moral statements. So, four economic issues—education, energy, health, and banking—are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment. They are what is needed to promote empathy, social responsibility, personal responsibility, and a better future for us all in the USA. Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality—for everyone, not just for some special people. Empathy leads us to democracy. To stop us being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws. Empathy with everyone leads to equality. No one caring treats some people worse than others. Caring is Christian. God in the person of Christ taught it. How can any Christian reject empathy while pretending to be a Christian?
Morality rests, first, on empathy—putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and caring about them—and, second, acting on that care—taking responsibility for oneself and others, accepting one’s social and personal duty.
Summarized from G Lakoff
