The shadow of her smile
How WE are responsible for the evil that enslaves us
...and what to do about it
by John Kaminski
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find
themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world
that no longer exists."
- Eric Hoffer
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I used to love fireworks. But I haven't been able to watch them for
better than a decade now, ever since that first time,
lying in a pristine field in a small country town, when I looked up at
the pretty colors in the night sky and imagined,
unmistakably, that what I was hearing were the screams of dying Iraqi
children.
Sometimes when I'm shaving that part of my face I don't call my
beard, I'll catch a face in the mirror; not mine, but down
in the corner of my eye, an image will stop me from what I'm doing. It's
a fleeting face, tiny and indistinct. I'll look more
closely and it will be gone. But it will linger in my memory, and I've
come to think of those hallucinated faces as the lives
our American prosperity is built on, living people we never knew whose
lives were tossed away in an anonymous cauldron
of carnage in some faraway place we seldom ever hear about.
How many times have we said it: "America is the greatest country in
the world." And it is. Everything is just perfect... if
we don't contemplate the unknown horror and unreported violence upon
which our paradise is built.
William Blum, author of Rogue State and chronicler of American
depredations throughout the world, estimates the
U.S. has killed seven million innocent people since World War II. Most
people don't stop and think how we get what we
have, where all this opulence comes from.
So I go back to shaving, but now, as long I live, and because of
what I know, the smile on the face staring back at me
contains a shadow I dread to see again.
• • •
Many of us who read such skeptical underground publications as
Paranoia, American Free Press or From the
Wilderness don't really need to be updated about the latest lies our
leaders tell us, although God knows they come at us
faster than we can handle them. We've made it our business to know
what's going behind the headlines and consequently
can perceive the avalanche of falsehoods that camouflages the endless
robbery of the poor by the rich and the damage
these demonic fictions do to our planet and its inhabitants.
Yet the lies and wars and phony justifications continue from one
generation to the next, and no amount of investigative
reporting - no matter how accurate or shocking - seems to be able to
change the behavior of that warped family of
aristocratic human predators who have taken control of the way we think
and behave. This control enables them to say and
do what they want, and the people of the world - distracted by their
more mundane concerns like children and paychecks
- continue to be afflicted by the schemes of the powerful, with no
measure of supposedly democratic participation able to
derail this pathological parade of lethal greed that now threatens to
make our planet completely uninhabitable.
The two primary mechanisms that keep ordinary Americans distracted
from these schemes of tyranny are the schools
and the media. A third mechanism, which I shall deal with later, is
religion, and the sacred approval these hypocritical
institutions have provided to mass murderers throughout history.
But for now, as we face the new police-state threat foisted on us by
the George W. Bush gang and its predecessors, the
two primary vehicles that allow the powers that be to remain largely
invisible and unaccountable as they plunder the
planet and enslave its residents seem to be the schools, which in the
past century have become little more than programs
to teach people not to question authority, and the media, which are
owned by the same rich men who create the wars and
sell the weapons that make them fabulously wealthy.
If you accept this argument, the solution becomes obvious: change
the schools from indoctrination programs that
create well-dressed day laborers to genuine educational institutions
that produce thoughtful philosophers, and detach the
media from the rich criminals who own them. I know, I know: easier said
than done. And maybe impossible.
A logical first step in beginning the process of reclaiming our
schools and our media as nontoxic members of our
society is recognizing the phemonenon known as corporate personhood. In
1886, the Supreme Court of the United States
issued an edict that was as damaging to human freedom as its 2000 ruling
to make Bush II the president. The infamous
Santa Clara decision gave corporations the same rights as humans,
whereas prior to that, corporations had to be chartered
by the states, they couldn't own other unrelated businesses that weren't
included in their original charter, and these charters
could be revoked if the corporations engaged in bad behavior. Just
imagine: if corporations were criminals, their charters
were taken away and their assets liquidated.
How much human misery could have been averted if those laws had
remained in effect?
But they didn't. Just like today, judges and senators were bribed
and the measure eventually passed without even any
debate.
Ever since, American citizens have been the powerless subjects of big
business fat cats, and communities have been
destroyed by tycoons who make criminal decisions from far away.
Currently, there are two major organizations working to bring this
issue to public consciousness: Reclaim Democracy and POCLAD [Program on
Corporations, Law and Democracy]. Their efforts are still patchwork and their
objectives are still a little fuzzy in the public mind, but
they share the aim of taking away the real power in our country and the
world from soulless corporations and returning
that power to people with consciences. It could be done legislatively if
our elected representatives were not so corrupt.
What kind of world do we want? Do we want the best possible products
or the best possible communities? The highest
possible profits or the best possible lives for all humans? I urge all
of you to investigate this matter more carefully, but I
realize what we're up against in regard to getting such measures as
restarting the corporate charter system through our
criminal legislatures. Therefore, what is needed are ballot initiatives
to overturn the 1886 Santa Clara decision and begin to
return ultimate power to ordinary people in an actualized democracy.
However, we face another complicating factor before we can address
the corporate personhood issue: electronic
voting. The recent implementation of Touchscreen voting machines in most
states poses the single biggest current threat
to our freedom. These machines are all owned by political operatives,
who by computer manipulation can change any
vote total at any time.
Plenty of evidence of this surfaced in the 2002 elections, and a
national movement is growing to outlaw all computer
voting machines, because no one can adequately audit the vote totals. A
truly honest country would invalidate the entire
2002 election because of this, but we know what the score is, and unless
all of these machines can be eliminated, all hope
for a legitimate democracy and an honest vote count are gone. For more
information on this and other aspects of vote
manipulation, check out Talion.
And even if this were accomplished, the lack of a legitimate
opposition party in the United States all but guarantees the
destructive practices of the power elite cannot be thwarted in the
foreseeable future. Consider the current Democratic
candidates lining up to oppose Bush in the 2004 election: Skull & Bones
cultist John Kerry and Zionists Hillary Clinton
and Joe Lieberman. So even if this new electronic vote scam is fixed,
the candidates of the power elite will assure that
nothing will change, and the slide toward oblivion for the planet and
economic enslavement for ordinary people will
continue.
Still, we cannot but try to at least restore some degree of
integrity to our voting system.
Once voting is again conducted with pencils on paper ballots (it's
the most honest way, and used all over Europe,
which has banned voting machines) and the corporate personhood issue has
been resolved in favor of actual people, then
we can begin to deal with the totalitarian problems of schools aimed to
create robots and all the newspapers and TV
stations owned by that small circle of billionaire thugs.
Currently, schools are headed in the wrong direction, with all sorts
of corporate incentives being dangled in front of
cash-strapped school districts and teachers. Polluting industries
besiege teachers at conventions, twisting facts to get
teachers to tell their students global warming is a fallacy. Huge
agribusiness throws money at schools to teach that
pesticides and biotech foods are good things. Schools sell space to
advertisers and as a result receive unhealthy products
for free. And now, so-called faith-based initiatives threaten to erase
the last vestige of progressive ideas from our less
fortunate neighborhoods and replace them with a corrupt series of
discriminatory control mechanisms ruled over by
morally bankrupt fundamentalist Christian zealots.
If you've watched TV lately, the environment and the common person
have no defenders. A one-sided stream of pseudo-patriotic
invective glorifies the lies of George Bush and treats each fictional
claim about Iraq's threat as being beyond question.
Then, when the pro-war public relations gimmicks are one-by-one exposed
as lies, they are buried at the bottom of
newscasts as incidental corrections.
No one person should own more than one newspaper, or one TV station.
In fact, no one should own any property they don't
live on. (A humane society of the future will pass that law, if the
human race regains control of itself.) But on TV, owned
by the same masters who make the weapons and the drugs, no one talks
about any of that.
Beginning with A.S. Neill and his famous school and book
Summerhill, all compassionate and honest educators
have known that the best educational system is one chosen by the
children, and not one determined by psychologists or
drug companies. Currently, most objective observers describe today's
schools as being driven by the forces of marketing,
as multinationals try to brainwash our children into becoming
brand-loyal consumers.
School officials have notoriously sold out to the forces of
capitalism in exchange for big salaries, and most
conscientious parents with the financial wherewithal to choose
alternatives no longer send their children to public schools.
Many teachers betray their primary missions by focusing on the authority
of their teaching rather than the genuine needs
of the children being educated.
Teachers have been brainwashed, too, and seek to impose that
brainwashing on their unwitting pupils.
A child free to choose individual courses of study - and we all want
to be educated; no child, given a choice, would
choose not to be educated - will become an adult demanding accurate news
reports, not like now, when all kids are
hammered into the same trendy molds, riddled with drugs and
corporate-concocted music, and expected to partake in the
same lockstep media crap that now afflicts us all. No wonder they rebel
and shoot guns at their peers!
So if the school problem could be fixed, the media problem would
take care of itself, and politicians would no longer
be able to say they couldn't reveal certain information because of
national security, because all people would be
intimately involved with the security and progress of their own nation
or state.
The only reason government officials seek to keep details of their
deals secret is not for reasons of national security, but
because their rich friends are making money off the deals they cloak in
righteous, patriotic rhetoric. Throughout history, it
has always been this way. The public just never catches up with that
realization, because, victims of inferior education that
they are, they are overwhelmed by the phony stories, and by neighbors
who have been bribed to support the scams
convincing skeptics not to rock the boat in the name of patriotism.
Imagine a really intelligent person who had created and achieved her
own educational goals having to choose from the
ridiculously delusional media spectrum of today, where everything is
aimed toward duping consumers into buying
products they don't really need. Truly educated people would all simply
stop reading and listening to the false information
now perpetrated on Fox, CNN and Clear Channel Radio. These bad acts
would go out of business in a heartbeat.
All the colleges would fail, too, because they now try to do the
same thing as the public schools - try to hammer
disparate personalities into pre-packaged slots to create more effective
worker bees and unquestioning consumers. Even
the medical professions suffer from this rigid regimentation, and the
public suffers as less popular but more relevant
medical treatments are shut out by curricula determined by commercial
interests rather than healers with integrity. That's
why the doctors give everybody so many drugs - it's profitable and
better yet (for them), no one ever gets well.
OK, let's review so far. The mainstream media are our big problem
(not because they're too right or too left; those are
phony distinctions designed to distract you) because they don't ever
tell you what's really going on. They don't tell you
the U.S. is in Colombia to smooth the flow of drugs to the international
cartels; they say America is there to stop the
flow of drugs to street dealers. They don't tell you American soldiers
beat people to death in the streets of Colombia
simply for growing up in the wrong neighborhood, either, but it happens,
a lot more often that you would like to believe
(and in many other countries, too, from Panama to Bosnia).
The mainsteam media are never going to tell you that the U.S.
government created AIDS at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
because they make far too much money accepting advertising from the
pharmaceutical giants who helped implement that
program to ever reveal a truth so close to home.
You seldom hear about the Bush family's connections to either Adolf
Hitler or Osama bin Laden - or that these
so-called al-Qaida terrorists were funded by the U.S. and their Saudi
co-conspirators because, well, that wouldn't be
patriotic! Instead they hammer out lie after lie beneath logos blaring
"Showdown with Iraq" without mentioning that all the
stated rationales for such a rash excursion are out-and-out falsehoods,
unprovable assertions designed only to aid in the
flow of cash to the rich men who make the guns, the radioactive waste,
and the prescription drugs.
I could go on about this; most of you already know the score. What
is really needed is a wider circulation of the
perceptions many of us already have to those less informed, less wordly,
with less access to the independent, underground
web media that try so hard to dispel the myths that distract us.
We need to talk about the 9/11 questions in a rational manner: why
the air defenses didn't react, why Bush went to that
school and talked to children for a half hour even though he knew two
planes had attacked New York, why so many people
were tipped off not to fly on that fateful day. This outreach is
essential to have a larger audience questioning the fictions
about 9/11, Enron and other noteworthy corporate crimes that now are not
being adequately addressed.
The amazing thing about talking to people who haven't had access to
a lot of the revealing details about recent political
events that are now found on the web is that they tend to already know,
intuitively, what you're saying. Most people know
the media polls have been lying all along; Bush is ridiculous. If his
level of evolution were the level of American culture, we
wouldn't even have invented the car yet.
Everybody, in their own way, knows that something is profoundly
wrong with today's American society. It's just a
matter of those having the information at their disposal disseminating
it effectively. You also have to weed out, or avoid,
those who have been paid off to maintain a pro-establishment point of
view, either by political entities or religious
organizations. There are a lot of moles out there, who will string you
along for awhile before revealing their true objectives,
be they members of the impotent Democratic party, cynical Christian
schools or deceptive Zionist apologists (sometimes,
you get three in one). These three groups are working against the
improvement of society in favor of their own
narrow-minded goals, which often they don't really believe themselves
but have been talked into believing because of their
guilt over not really understanding what is truly going on.
Which leads us to the most important aspect of our current dilemma -
the matter of religion, specifically, the killer
religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Adherents of each demonize
the other two, claiming their version of God is the
infallible one, even though all three derive from the same teachings,
known as the Torah or the Pentateuch (first five books
of the Old Testament), and even have the same founder, Abraham.
Up until the present day, devotees of these religions are the
greatest murderers of human beings in history. Members of
each religion are currently prominent in the most of the major political
conflicts of the present day. It is probably
disingenuous to insist that these religions are the causes of current
conflicts - because the politicians who determine wars'
causes exploit religion, they don't practice it - but it is undeniable
that religions provide the behavioral groundwork for
practitioners of these "holy" rites to indulge in the mass murder of
their opposition. So in that sense, they do bear a
fundamental responsibility for the continuing violence, in that they all
condone the slaughter of innocents as a legitimate
redress for their real or trumped-up grievances.
I bring this up for the purpose of pointing out that without these
holy orders to kill from the most respected teachers in
each of these religions, we likely would not have the intensity of
political conflicts that now cause us so much tragedy.
Sure, the stated reasons of most of these conflicts involve commodities
like oil, but the political rhetoric that finally triggers
them is inevitably couched in terms and concepts we learned from our
holy books.
We scapegoat others for behavior that we ourselves practice. As the
old saying goes, one person's terrorist is another
person's freedom fighter. In religious terms, the holy killing of our
enemies makes us feel more alive, which is really why
the killing happens in the first place.
Very few people can as yet see that the lie we tell ourselves about
eternal life is directly related to war. Belief in an
afterlife cheapens life on this planet. And from this epiphany comes the
explanation of why Bush is so popular among
those who do not think deeply, and why so many of us want this war -
want any war - because it makes us feel more
secure in some primitive, unexamined way.
As the little known cultural anthopologist Ernest Becker pointed
out, the evil men produce derives from the very heroism
they seek to achieve. We seek to achieve this this heroism because it
insulates us from the terror of death, it gives us a
reason to live in an otherwise meaningless world. Death denial - a.k.a
the belief in an afterlife - allows us to live
comfortably but makes us practice rituals of destruction, and from this
destruction, we derive pleasure and justification for
our sad little lives.
As the world's multifaceted environmental crisis intensifies - the
oceans are poisoned, the air is fouled, half all animal
species have disappeared since the start of the Industrial Age, and
global warming threatens to soon change the face of our
landmass - the time has definitely come in human history to question all
of our behavior, but most especially that
supernatural religious propaganda that not only allows us to kill
everything in sight - but praises us for doing it in
defense of senseless, ephemeral and deluded goals.
I wouldn't go so far as to blame God for all these problems, but I
would lay the problem squarely at the feet of our
priests, who were always supposed to tell us how to live justly, but who
have really only shown us how to kill without guilt.
If we could begin to fix this problem, I have a hunch a lot of the
other, lesser problems would evaporate, because then we
would be living lives of true compassion and justice. And as long as we
worship a jealous, vengeful God who urges us on
to the glorious slaughter of our enemies, peace is simply not going to
happen, and we are truly doomed to live out our lives
with increasing levels of mass murder, pollution, and meaninglessness.
• • •
As I look in the mirror, I see that all this is my fault, as much as
anybody else's. The world has been pretty much
destroyed on my watch, in my lifetime. In 1974 when I first woke up to
the lies of Nixon and the shameless charade in
Vietnam, sure, I got out and waved my signs, but like so many others,
couldn't identify the clearly evident sociological
patterns of exploitation and destruction that I have described herein.
They existed then as well as now. But I hid my head,
pursued my trivial desires, and hoped somebody would fix this mess.
Nobody did.
I wouldn't care all that much now, because I don't have too many
days left on this planet, except than when I look in the
mirror to shave, down in the corner of my eye, I see, fleetingly, this
little girl's face. An imaginary construct, no doubt,
etched in my memory from some Save the Children ad on TV. A little girl
with a dirty face, smiling, but long dead,
bludgeoned to death by some Guatemalan death squad working for a coffee
plantation billionaire, or napalmed from
30,000 feet in Vietnam, or decayed to death in Iraq after playing with
her doll in some depleted uranium dirt. She was
killed unnoticed by the American war machine, the same evil entity that
now prepares to do more of the same in virtually
every country on Earth.
It is this little, unnoticed face that American prosperity is built
upon. It happened in my lifetime, right before my eyes.
Her smile is the shadow in my heart.
– John Kaminski
John Kaminski is writer who lives on the coast of Florida.
Relevant reference material:
• Two books by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924-74):
The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil,
explain, among other things that "war is sociological safety valve that
cleverly diverts popular hatred for ruling classes into
a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies," and that "killing
others lessens our own fear of dying, although it is
our own sense of animality and inferiority we try to kill - and never
succeed."
• Summerhill: The first school in England where inspectors must use
the children's opinions in the evaluation of the
school: s-hill
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