5. On self defense in the face of overwhelming lethal force — the need for building community
25th April 2006
Posting 5. in the On the Ground category, by George Salzman
The following sequence of e-mails began as a response to a statement I made about the Israel-Palestinian conflict (which I cannot find right now, but will include if possible), and went on to the topics of ownership of land, government oppression, taxes, citizens’ resistance, “traditional” 18th and 19th century piracy, gun ownership, etc. The e-mails circulated among a variable “small” list ranging from a few up to about 50 individuals, depending on whether people responded individually, hit Reply or hit Reply All.
Subject: Re: Jewish lobby report doesn’t help achieve Middle East peace
From: Lawrence Salzman <>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:21:39 EDT
To: George Salzman <>
In a message dated 4/22/2006 11:42:41 AM Eastern Standard Time, George Salzman writes:
> The Israeli and U.S governments have no interest in a just peace or a two-state “solution”.
George: If these are your words, you’re about as on target as you were in 1948 in supporting Henry Wallace and in the 1960s when you supported Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
In Israel’s recent election Lukid lost much ground and now is a minor party in the Knesset. Israeli voters overwhelmingly voted for parties that are for a two-state solution.
You apparently ignore and/or dismiss the political and social impact of last Monday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv where nine people waiting on a line at lunchtime to buy something to eat were killed and dozens wounded. Hamas not only didn’t condemn this senseless bombing, but said it was a response to Israeli policy.
George, do you really think people will react to such terrorism by deciding to commit political suicide and even possible personal suicide? Frankly, it’s absurd that you could assume such policy on the part of Hamas and its directly or indirectly controlled terrorists would have the effect Hamas proclaims it desires, that is, Israel should let itself be destroyed without any response.
What Hamas is “achieving” is to convince Israelis that their only course of action is to perform surgery, geographic and economic.
Geroge, if Israel were as you seem to believe, it would have “solved” the problem in the manner Hamas has stated it wants to solve the problem if and when it gains the power, i.e., just going in and killing by the tens of thousands.
You and I can read all the writings of all the people and all their respective opinions and thoughts, but the bottom line is that Hamas has stated with absolute clearity that it will not recognize Israel’s right to exist. If you were told by another that he/she didn’t recognize your right to live, you’d defend yourself, or at least I assume that’s what you’d do. I don’t picture you lying down on the ground and motioning to the person threatening you to thrust his knife into your back.
I read these notes that are sent around and some of them are signed “brother.” George, I hope you never have to count on these people if you’re ever in need and have nothing to give them in return for their help. I’m probably one of the very few whom you could really turn to in a time of true need. Los
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From: George Salzman
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:30:18 -0500
To: Lawrence Salzman
CC: Adam D. Sacks <>, Alan M. Dershowitz <, … (CCs to a total of 30)
BCC: (Blind CCs to 22 addresses)
Oaxaca, 22 April 2006
Lawrence, why don’t you post your note to the weblog, or at least send it to the “small” multiply-addressed group? I’m unable to deal individually with everything coming in, and find what you write totally ignores the history of Zionist conquest of the Palestinians, which was wrong from its inception. We can disagree of course without becoming “enemies.” I know that and I treasure that possibility.
Maybe we’ll have a chance to argue this summer, and maybe you’ll take the opportunity to read some accounts of what I understand to have been the history. I believe you are immersed in a false interpretation, which is tribalist, racist, capitalist, and nationalist, in essence very right-wing, though I know you think of yourself a liberal Jew. I’m doing my best to stimulate open discussion. Of course I have my bias: Everyone is potentially my “brother” or “sister”. I don’t give a shit about whether someone is labelled Arab, Jew, Russian, Catholic, Baptist, we are all, to use my friend Joe Bageant’s term, “brothers under the skin.” Give up thinking that “Arabs” and “Jews” are different kinds of homo sapiens. Forget Thomas Friedman and The Jew York Times. It just occurred to me, I can send this note to the “small” group. Have you read the papers by Gabriel Ash that I mentioned in my earlier note today? If not, I recommend them to you.
All best wishes,
George
group of recipients, not to my “mass” e-mail distribution list (of
about 1400), if you wish to be added to or removed
from this “small” list, please let me know.
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From: Dan Hughes <>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:56:13 +0200
To: George Salzman, Lawrence Salzman
The IRA ‘terrorism’, such as it was, was unpleasnt (I lived in London during all of it), but it was effective. It has brought about a change. If the other guy has jets and uses them on you, and you don’t any help like that from the USA, what do you do?
Silly nonsense, much of this.
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From: Lawrence Salzman
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 15:48:19 EDT
To:
CC: (CCs to a total of 31 addresses)
In a message dated 4/22/2006 1:30:53 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
> I’m doing my best to stimulate open discussion.
George: When you refer to the New York Times as the “Jew York Times” do you really think you’re stimulating discussion or just appealing to those who think as you do?
You tell me I ignore what you write. Realize you ignore the facts I present to you. Please tell me what political purpose is served when a suicide bomber blows himself up at a luncheon counter at lunchtime in Tel Aviv, killing nine and wounding dozens?
Let’s assume Zionists “stole” all this land from Palestinians. Okay, when are all these folks who think as you do, including that women in Seattle who told me my response was stupid when I mentioned to her that she’s living on land stolen from Native Americans, going to “go home” to where their families came from? When we chatted on the phone you sort of chuckled and asked me if they should move back to Europe. Well? 
Realize, we were still stealing Native American land when grandpa’s three sisters and their husbands, left Minsk in the 1880s and became pioneers in what at that time was called Palestine and controlled by Turkey. The time dimension is the same. Therefore, people who feel as you do who live in the Southwest and other areas where we stole land from Native Americans, including parts of the Northwest should reverse their families earlier emigration and return to Europe or possibly Asia, depending on their background.
I’ll leave it at that as I don’t want to “yell” at you as I believe you’re as blind as you claim I am. Be well. Los
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From: Adam Sacks <>
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 03:22:59 -0700 (PDT)
To: Lawrence Salzman, George Salzman
CC: (CCs to 31 addresses)
Not only did “we” steal land from indigenous peoples on this continent (and not only in the west), but we continue to steal from them. Nor are we the only ones to overrun and destroy cultures throughout a long history of human migrations and mixing, but the scope of our work is unprecedented in its breadth and destruction.
Does that mean it is forever thus? Well, maybe, but I think we must nevertheless do our best to bring humanity into human affairs. We have the potential for a global perspective and the opportunity to know and do better. That’s why I maintain that at least some of the problems with Zionism, little that I know about it (notwithstanding the reflex stereotyping on the part of people who don’t know anything about me), like most of the other “isms” including mainstream environmentalism, is the concentration of wealth and decision-making power away from people whose lives are directly affected.
The forces of colonialism and corporate globalization are doomed because they are unsustainable. Unfortunately, following the current course they will take much of life on earth with them, nor do they show any signs of turning the ship around. We might have an opportunity to change that course, but only when human beings everywhere have the opportunity to exercise our birthrights - to make the decisions that affect our lives and to base our decisions on the seventh generation.
Where to start? Right in our local communities, and when we organize right (and non-violently) we become a wedge under the toenail of the oligarchy which has the potential to bring it to its knees.
Cheers,
Adam
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From: Thomas K Wilson <>
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 17:03:39 -0500
To: Adam Sacks, Lawrence Salzman, George Salzman
CC: (CCs to 11 addresses)
There are a couple things on my mind as I follow this exchange. One is the extent to which our rantings and ravings and bickerings have NO effect on the progress of Imperial Capitalism as it crushes the life out of us and the planet. Another is this whole thing about who has a “right” to what property.
Should the US support the secular state of Zions Biblical claim to the land they are calling Israel? Who knows, and what the hell IS the US anyway? What and who is it really comprised of? Can the state be said to actually exist any more than, say, imaginary debt backed fiat “money”, for example?
As far as I can tell, the state is merely comprised of the intentions and activities of a few and the acquiescence of the rest, for their own purposes (whether or not they even understand what those purposes are or that they are able to agree or not agree to anything). For the most part this arrangement is enforced at gunpoint. In fact, the state, as it exists nearly everywhere, is, in and of itself, the definition of coercion.
(George, if this is too heady for you or Bageant, oh well; but I hammer nails for a living and I have discussions like this all the time with “Joe Sixpack” as we’re so derisively labeled by the elitist “progressive” intelligentsia. We’re not stupid just because our fingernails are broken.)
What matters is what is actually happening. When someone is shot in the head they are usually actually dead. When someone forces you off “your” land or out of your domicile then you are shelterless. If the other guy is armed and you are not and he intends to do you harm then you are shit out of luck.
First of all I do not see how anyone can assume to “own” property. What I understand is that we all need to eat and to shelter ourselves and our progeny, where ever it is we happen to be, either by birth or misadventure. In order to do that we need some level of security; of the ability to continuously use a piece of land or an area of land. We could, as pirates do, steal what we need from other people who have produced the things we want or need, or trade for it and live like the Romani, moving from place to place. Some how each of us has to make it from cradle to grave.
I , personally, have an arrangement with the state and some usurers posing as bankers, whereby I occupy a piece of land in return for which I turn over pieces of paper representing time I’ve spent doing tasks for other people (that they are unable or unwilling to do for themselves). In return for the surrender of these “chits” for which I’ve traded the irreplaceable hours of my life as well as skills I’ve had to pay to acquire (either in time or money), my “right” to use this property is enforced by other men with guns (who are also compensated with pieces of paper for the use of their time and skills). In return I get a piece of paper which serves as my title to this arrangement.
You could say I have a treaty with the state which protects my use of the land, WHICH I CANNOT EVER LITERALLY OWN.
As long as I want to continue to use the land, I have to pay, either for the protection of the state, or for the imaginary claims of the usurers (who created the pieces of paper in the first place with their clever pens by “lending” “money” they did not actually possess [actually manipulations of other men’s promises to repay].) NOBODY EVER OWNED THAT LAND AND NOBODY DOES STILL. NOBODY EVER REALLY PAID A NICKEL FOR THE LAND, ONLY THE “TITLE”, SO HOW DOES ANYONE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEMAND MONEY FROM ME FOR IT? Because they have more guns than I do.
The only fact that is not in dispute is that men with guns control its use. What matters is that which actually happens.
What about Israel? The only reason Israel exists is that the would-be-Israelis had more guns, and arrangements with people with more and bigger guns, to take control of the land they now occupy. Any claim to Biblical title is imaginary shit, just like claims to any title to any land anywhere by anybody (including the allegedly indigenous). Membership in the club (Juda-ism in this case) is also imaginary shit. Everyone is from somewhere else and ultimately their ancestors were not members of the club but made up the rules and, voila’, the club existed, at least in their imaginations. Make up the rules and then decide who to exclude from the club. All clubs are imaginary shit even if the people you exclude don’t look or talk like you. Even if you get guns and shoot them.
We shoot each other for imaginary reasons all the time (like those goddamned communists we had to shoot to keep America safe from…?).
The question is, do the people of the United States want to be a party to enforcing this claim? [I sure as fuck don’t. Do you?]
The question then becomes, how do we opt out of this arrangement? How do we get clear of the enforcers?
How are we bound and how do we dissolve the bonds?
The bonds dissolved in the USSR when “they” could no longer afford to pay their military to enforce the contracts they assumed to hold against the people. The same could be said for Argentina. The same was true in Rome.
The power the “theys” of the world hold over us is imaginary (and monetary) in nature. As I’ve said, money is also imaginary, just like club memberships. That does not mean that the men with guns are using imaginary bullets.
I would say if all of us held an equal ability to force our will on others or protect ourselves from having the will of others forced on us then we would have a mighty fine Mexican Standoff.
My favorite Jewish organization:
http://www.jpfo.org/
The only political party worth a crap:
http://www.gunsanddope.com/
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From: Adam Sacks
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:03:18 -0700 (PDT)
To: Thomas K Wilson <>, Lawrence Salzman <>, George Salzman <>
CC: Adam Sacks <>, Alan Dershowitz <>, As’ad Abukhalil <>, Gush Shalom <>, Benjamin Melançon <>, Bill Templer <>, Dan Hughes <>, Dorothy Naor <>, Eldad Benary <>, Fred Nagel <>, Gabriel Bolaffi <>
Hey TK -
Aside from the gun scenario, in which I think we all wind up shooting one another or always wondering when/where the next bullet is coming from (just like now), I think your analysis is right on target. I do disagree with you about pirates, however. They got a bum rap since they were anti-nation-state, and the nation states wrote the history books.
Many pirates were men (and some women) who were impressed into the British Navy and abused and tortured (and often slaughtered) to keep them working as cogs in that empire machine. Every once in a while they pulled off a mutiny, and established democracy at sea. The pirate code in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was based on all that they were determined never to do to each other – as the Brits had done unto them – and they established democracy on the high seas. One person, one vote; elected officers who were obeyed only in the heat of battle, otherwise they were just like everyone else; booty shared equally; health care, such as it was, for everyone. No wonder they had to be eliminated, and to top it off, forever the target of calumny. But that’s what nation states do for a living.
BTW, what I see in my work is that some of the most radical democratic work in this country is being done by so-called “Joe Sixpacks”; we “progressives” are mostly part of the problem, not the solution – which has always been the case in the “progressive” movement since its beginnings in the late 19th century.
Cheers,
Adam
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From: Lawrence Salzman
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:14:43 EDT
To: Thomas K Watson
CC: George Salzman
In a message dated 4/23/2006 6:08:29 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
> There are a couple things on my mind as I follow this exchange.
Enjoyed reading your note, even though I don’t agree with everything you say. However, I do relate to your idea that nobody “owns” land as our “ownership” is time dimensioned while the land is assumed to be forever, hopefully. We “rent” land, even though most have the illusion that they own it.
As far as present day Israel, it has the same legitimacy as any other nation. It fought for its life, and yes, with the assistance of some other countries. Those who tried to prevent Israel’s birth were also supported by other countries, but they did not prevail.
Realize, without the help of France, the American Revolution might just be a paragraph in British history books.
One of the folks who feels that Israel is a country founded on “stolen” land, called me stupid when I suggested to her that she lives on land stolen from Native Americans in the state of Washington. That was a most interesting comment on her part, not for what it said, but what it implied. She accepts as a given that she’s entitled to live on stolen land because “we” drove the former owners off of the land and anyway, they are not a problem anymore. We humans are capable of rationalizing any behavior that suits our thoughts and most often are not even aware we are implicitly accepting facts “on the ground” and in disregard to how these facts developed.
Anyway, I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment. For the record, George is my “older” brother. He’s 80 and I’m the kid at 75. We have disagreed politically at least as far back as 1948 when he supported Henry Wallace while I went for Harry Truman.
Just another thought. When viewing another’s logic, always try to determine his/her assumptions. It’s assumption which “drive” logic and you can reach any conclusion logically if you choose, explicitly or implicitly, the “proper” assumptions.
As has been said, “False assumption, impeccable logic, absurd conclusion.
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From: Thomas K Wilson
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 21:59:29 -0500
To: Adam Sacks, Lawrence Salzman
CC: George Salzman, L. Urban Kohler <>
I’m responding to this limited group since I don’t dare hit “reply all” since there’s no way for me to see the entire list of addressees, and several people just asked to be un-included (don’t ask me why I can’t I just can’t). If any of you think this exchange would be of interest to anyone you are free to forward:
I don’t feel any differently about Israel than I do any other aggressive nation state. I dislike them all and disagree with their “right to exist” just like and for the same reasons that I disagree that corporations have rights.
I understand why many Jews from a variety of countries wanted a place of their own where they might have some freedom from assaultive neighbors (Richard III threatened to murder some of my ancestors if they didn’t convert or leave England in the 1300’s) but the fact that they decided on Palestine and not Miami was just utter fucking stupidity as far as I can tell (I understand that’s a vast oversimplification; I’m familiar with the history of the Zionist movement). Maybe stupidity tinged with wishful (fantastical) thinking and lots of arrogance. As if any God worth his/her salt would be that much of a prick, to send his/her “chosen” people to someplace they’d be guaranteed to be hated.
It was as much a move of Anglo imperialist anti-Semitism (nobody wanted those Jew-bastard-troublemakers in their country; least of all Harry Truman) as any act of faith.
It was a dumb move. Like, I’d take my dumb white ass to Harlem because some of my ancestors owned property there once (and they may have). I don’t think so. But I digress.
Adam, the gun scenario is central to the argument. Might may or may not make right, but an oral argument will never trump a loaded .38 .
I will grant you that not everyone is cut out to take their own protection into their own hands, but all of us need protection to exist. The pirates understood this. How many of them armed themselves exclusively with fountain pens? None, I think. They had an equal say in their society because they insisted on it and could back that up. They would have guffawed Ghandi off the plank.
The ability to apply equal and opposing force of some kind is what keeps us in balance. That applies to truth and reason and walking and swimming and tai chi, as well as force of arms.
Keep in mind that aside of various epidemics, states have been responsible for way more loss of life than individuals or even gangs. States have murdered over 100 million people (non-combatants) since about 1900. Usually those people were disarmed, legally or by force, by the state first; then they were slaughtered.
How is putting all of us on an equal defensive footing going to do anything worse than that? I see no improvement over that in the current unequal, racist and classist system. If we do not need states for protection we do not need states. In fact, states are by and large “protection rackets” that we are unable to resign from without being brutalized.
I will not accept that there is a class of people (the police/military) who have superior judgment, are wiser or more capable of protecting me than I am myself. It is entirely unfair, not to mention foolish, to lay that responsibility on anybody else.
The question is; how do we get from blabbing to each other on the internet to turning these ideas into practical on the ground practice by real people? Obviously, many people are living in intentional communities, or, like me, have gone back to the land to one degree or another. I don’t know how to accelerate this process (necessity may do it in the near future) effectively. I also don’t have any idea how to stop the mayhem which is being committed in my name by persons effectively beyond my control.
One last thought. I believe voluntary association is more to the point than the over simplistic idea of “non-violence”.
I think that if I am not harming anyone and someone attempts to coerce me into doing anything I don’t choose to, especially if they threaten my life (anyone attempting to coerce you while wearing a gun is threatening your life), then that should be considered by any sane person to be a capital offense. I think coercion needs to get a real bad rep; like seriously bad; like no-one-would-be- stupid-enough-to-attempt-it bad.
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From: Adam Sacks
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:52:13 -0700 (PDT)
To: Thomas K Wilson, Lawrence Salzman
CC: George Salzman, L. Urban Kohler
Hi TK -
Great insights, and I think will have to agree to disagree about arguing with loaded .38s. If someone is hell-bent on pulling the trigger there’s not much to say. But oral arguments frequently trump explosion chemistry, and shooting has never led to anything but more shooting as far as I can tell. Nor is there any way your loaded .38, your Uzzi, your dirty bomb, is going to trump the armed might of the nation state. It’s the oral argument (or demagoguery) that
ultimately rallies the populace to change that (for better or worse).
If I’m anything resembling a pacifist, it’s because violence never seems to result in peace (unless you call such things as the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction “peace”). Even if pulling the trigger in locale “A” quiets things down a bit, the ripple is felt elsewhere in this irrevocably connected web we weave.
Cheers,
Adam
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From: George Salzman
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:15:38 -0500
To: Adam Sacks
CC: Thomas K. Wilson, Lawrence Salzman, L. Urban Kohler, James Herod <>
Oaxaca, Tuesday, 25 April 2006
Hi Adam,
Thanks for responding to Thomas. I’ve been over my neck these last couple of weeks, and am unable to jump in as I’d like. I am as outraged as you Tom, but small arms are just that, small. The excerpt from James Herod’s essay, Getting Free, is also the view I have of how we ought to proceed:
A further assumption I make is that it is impossible to defeat our ruling class by force of arms. The level of firepower currently possessed by all major governments and most minor ones is simply overwhelming. It is bought with the expropriated wealth of billions of people. For any opposition movement to think that it can acquire, maintain, and deploy a similarly vast and sophisticated armament is ludicrous. I have nothing against armed struggle in principle (although of course I don’t like it). I just don’t think it can work now. It would take an empire as enormous and rich as capitalism itself is to fight capitalists on their own terms. This is something the working classes of the world will never have, nor should we even want it.
This does not mean though that we should not think strategically, in order to win, and defeat our oppressors. It means that we have to learn how to destroy them without firing a single shot. It means that we have to look to, and invent if necessary, other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act, or resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place? Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of violence, or resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a main ideological weapon of a very violent ruling class. They use it to pacify us. They use their mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. It’s an effective weapon because we all (but they don’t) want to live in a peaceful, nonviolent world. We would do well to chart a careful course through this swamp.
These 2 paragraphs are from the preface to his essay, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/P.htm. I’ve found James’ work inspirational and suggest you check it out. He’s only wrong about a few points, the ones he and I disagree on.
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From: Lawrence Salzman
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:02:16 EDT
To: Thomas K. Wilson
CC: George Salzman, Adam Sacks, L. Urban Kohler, James Herod
In a message dated 4/25/2006 10:13:45 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
> The only way Israel is going to end the Palestinian “problem” is either by
> absorbing the Palestinian state whole (which looks pretty unlikely) or by
> exterminating anyone in the middle east capable of presenting resistance
OR;
> by getting the fuck out of Palestine.
> This shit about creating a heavily armed and fortified garrison state is not
> just not workable; it is not rational.
> There may be other solutions that would work that have not occurred to me
> (duh) but clearly I can’t think what they are.
Here’s an idea. Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist. Appoint Abbas, for instance, and let him sit down with Israeli leaders and attempt to pound out a two-state compromise, as he has often stated is the path to peace.
Realize the recent election in Israel clearly expressed the desire of the voters for a two-state solution. Likud lost many of its seats in the Knesset and is now a minor party.
When you people leave the land you are living on that has been stolen from Native Americans, I’ll be more impressed with your basically no-compromise attitude to a “solution” of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel.
Do any of you really think suicide bombers will bring Israel to its knees? By the way, study what happened in Hebron in 1929 when Arabs living there killed and drove out all the Jews. There had been Jews living in Hebron literally since the time of King David as it was the capital of Judea at that time.
It was King David who moved the capital from Hebron to Jerusalem. (The names are still the same after roughly 3,000 years.) The Jews living in Hebron in 1929 were not “Zionists,” but religious Jews whose families had lived there for centuries if not since biblical times. When you cut someone with a knife, the wound heals, but it leaves a scar.
Unfortunately, the “solutions” proposed by many who send these notes back and forth will not solve the problem in either George’s or my lifetime. Actually, our family which goes back to the 1880s in what was then Palestine, were for a bi-national state. Unfortunately, it developed into a political impossibility for reasons just like the Hebron pogrom and other “incidents” such as the killing of two of our great uncles who were farmers. There can be no solution unless both sides sit down and pound out a compromise.
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From: L. Urban Kohler <>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:45:44 -0700 (PDT)
To: Lawrence Salzman <>
I don’t know if this is really relevant to the discussion, but my feeling from election results, etc. is that most Middle-easters would love to find a peaceful compromise, but that there is something naive being assumed by any of us when we point out that current strategies are not working.
I think it’s because a small faction (maybe it could be described as a guerilla movement that thrives on crisis and instability, which could include some unexpected bedfellows, such as arms makers and bankers, as well as neocons) really don’t want peace.
Another thing I see operating is something former 60s activist Rennie Davis (one of the “Chicago 7) believes is a newly discovered principle of physics, that perception actually CREATES physical reality. Here’s something I wrote to a local talk show after hearing Rennie Davis interviewed:
As a veteran of 1969 war moratorium protests in DC I was excited to hear Rennie Davis on JeffExchange. He makes a good case for the power of perception in creating reality. (and for the conclusion that we can & must create a better world by expecting and percieving our world the way we desire it to be)
But how can I escape from the pessimistic thought that a very powerful faction of humanity (the most powerful, not in numbers but in capacity to create reality,) now percieves, and insists that we ALL percieve, the world as divided into armed camps with greedy and competetive agendas and machiavelliasn intentions?
Does not THIS perception currently “precede reality” and is this not exactly why we have this greedy, nasty, deadly world? (certainly there are people and areas that son’t fit this negative description, but overall, uhnless you are pollyanna ostrich, you have to see that for most, life is less than utopian!)
A perfect smaller example of what I would call a self-fulfilling reality driven by preconceptions (Rennie’s physics principle of thought preceding physical reality) is Israel’s prdicament. By perceiving themselves the objects of Arab hatred and acting accordingly they have BECOME the objects of Arab hatred. It’s like my neighbor’s dog, a sweet-looking border collie, who sets up incessant barking whenever I am in my yard and if I approach the fence and talk sweetly to her, even bring her treats (which she accepts) she neverltheless gets more agitated the closer I get, charging at me and baring fangs, and barking ever more visiously.
Yes, perception precedes and creates reality! My neighbor’s dog, Israel, and the neocons all live in the world created by their perceptions. But this is MY world too, yet against my will I am helping pay for their perpetrating of these ugly perceptions. It seems to me perceptions backed by bared fangs, by occupation and intimidation and by pre-emptive war, are winning out over perceptions backed by love. Much as I’d like to (and try to) address my neighbor’s dog and the world’s problems with love, so far it is not working. I honestly don’t blame the dog.
I truly believe the majority of us (perhaps every single one of us!) has good intentions. For this we deserve love, and yet our world does not seem to be a manifistation of widespread good intentions. How come??
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An added note: In a private e-mail, Adam Sacks mentioned the book The Many-Headed Hydra, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, a history of the Atlantic trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. I don’t have his note (can’t save everything), but recall him saying it was a period of much racial and ethnic mixing, a very vital time. Sounds interesting — so much does.
Please, if you want to add comments to the above discussion, it would be a great help if you decide to post them directly to the blog rather than writing me. On the other hand, if you want to write other individuals whose addresses are given, that’s fine with me. It’s just that I’ve been overwhelmed with the volume. Many thanks for your interest. George