Subject: LET HISTORY JUDGE: THE MORAL
BACKRUPTCY OF THE SYSTEM THAT GOVERNS US AND ITS MAJOR PLAYERS.
12 July 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
A radical search for the sources of innumerable contemporary
problems which we suffer today requires that we gain a historical perspective
that predates capitalism. Of course the private
profit motive is a destructive driving force today, generating war, famine,
unemployment, homelessness, disease and genocide, but life without the profit
motive can be as bad or worse. The despotism
of past pre-capitalist regimes speak to the abuses of
class domination and hopeless, voluntary servitude in a violent world history
of social controls. What appears new and different today is the presence of information technology and popular
access to these instruments of political power. How much longer can the old
social order stand in the face of this new technological potential?
Certainly mass delusions will be of no long-term assistance. History allows us
to take account of relationships in the past, some of which have changed; many
of which have not. With this perspective on our present (and despite the
cognitive interference of capitalist culture), we are enabled to ask radical
questions, like : Is this the kind of life we wish to
live in the future?
The treatment of other species (as well as our attitude towards all
vulnerable beings over which we might easily gain abusive power), is a tell-tale sign
of our values, and our capacity for self-delusion. If we are not who we say we
are, then who really are we? Do we know? Do we even care? How can we find
the truth about ourselves and reorgainze our society accordingly? Yuval Noah Harari is among
the few authors who have tried to find answers to these radical questions:
The Industrial Revolution yielded an
unprecedented combination of cheap and abundant energy and cheap and abundant
raw materials. The result was an explosion in human productivity. The explosion
was felt first and foremost in agriculture.
. . .
Even plants and animals were mechanized. Around
the time that Homo sapiens was elevated to divine status by
humanist religions, farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that
could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines. Today
these animals are often mass-produced in factory-like facilities, their bodies
shaped in accordance with industrial needs. They pass their entire lives as
cogs in a giant production line, and the length and quality of their existence
is determined by the profits and losses of business corporations. Even when the
industry takes care to keep them alive, reasonably healthy and well fed, it has
no intrinsic interest in the animal’s social and psychological needs (except
when these have a direct impact on production).
Egg-laying hens, for example, have a complex
world of behavioral needs and drives. They feel strong urges to scout their
environment, forage and peck around, determine social hierarchies, build nests
and groom themselves. But the egg industry often locks the hen inside tiny coops,
and it is not uncommon for it to squeeze four hens to a cage, each given a
floor space of about twenty-five by twenty-two centimeters. The hens receive
sufficient food, but they are unable to claim a territory, build a nest or
engage in other natural activities. Indeed, the cage is so small that hens are
often unable even to flap their wings or stand fully erect.
Pigs are among the most intelligent and
inquisitive of mammals, second perhaps only to the great apes. Yet
industrialized pig farms routinely confine nursing sows inside such small
crates that they are literally unable to turn around (not to mention walk and
forage). The sows are kept in these crates day and night for four weeks after
giving birth. Their offspring are then taken away to be fattened up and the
sows are impregnated with the next litter of piglets.
Many dairy cows live almost all their
allotted years inside a small enclosure; standing, sitting and sleeping in
their own urine and excrement. They receive their measure of food, hormones and
medications from one set of machines, and get milked every few hours by another
set of machines. The cow in the middle is treated as little more than a mouth
that takes in raw materials and an udder that produces a commodity. Treating living
creatures possessing complex emotional worlds as if they were machines is
likely to cause them not only physical discomfort, but also much social stress
and psychological frustration.
Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not
stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not
motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference. Most people who
produce and consume eggs, milk and meat rarely stop to think about the fate of
the chickens, cows or pigs whose flesh and emissions they are eating. Those who
do think often argue that such animals are really little different from
machines, devoid of sensations and emotions, incapable of suffering.
Ironically, the same scientific disciplines which shape our milk machines and
egg machines have lately demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that mammals and
birds have a complex sensory and emotional make-up. They not only feel physical
pain, but can also suffer from emotional distress.
Evolutionary psychology maintains that the
emotional and social needs of farm animals evolved in the wild, when they were
essential for survival and reproduction. (Sapiens,
pp.382-384)
This grim history of violence against domestic animals is, of course, only part of a larger paradigm, in which the ends are used to justify the means; the destiny of which is self-annihilation. What we do to pigs, and to cows, and to chickens we will do to each other.
"La deuxième droite"
avec J-P Garnier
http://www.lesmutins.org/la-deuxieme-droite-avec-j-p
The 19 items below reflect the debacle that
international capitalism is undergoing. The desperate search for profitable investment
has had a decisively bad affect on human health and the environment, while the
political elite are operating on automatic pilot, indifferent to the
“collateral damages” which they inflict daily.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of American
Studies
University of Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
a.
Is
NATO Necessary?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/07/04/nato-necessary/DwE0YzPb8qr70oIT9NVyAK/story.html
by Stephen Kinzer
===========
b.
What's Wrong
With England ?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16723
Laura Flanders talks to Paul Mason about the alternatives to capitalism in the
UK, followed by Patrick Cockburn on ISIS
===========
c.
How to Sell a War
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/07/how-to-sell-a-war/
by Kenneth Eade
===========
d.
Are You Planning Your Retirement?
Forget About It. You Won’t Survive To Experience It.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45065.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
===========
e.
Tim DeChristopher Arrested Again in the
"Age of Anticipatory Mass Graves" for Climate Victims
===========
f.
60 Black Democrats Sign Letter in AIPAC-Backed Effort
to
Discredit Cornel West and BDS
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16693
===========
g.
Haaretz Confirms: Britain Has Been Operating As An
Israeli Puppet Within The EU
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45032.htm
by
Gilad Atzmon
===========
h.
Will Brexit
Lead to Grexit?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16640
Dimitri Lascaris says
so-called leftist or socialist governments throughout the EU are engaging in
self-immolation by embracing austerity, and then become wildly unpopular with
the electorate.
===========
i.
Greek Leaks Expose IMF
Chief Overruling Pro-Debt Relief IMF Negotiator
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16453
Securities lawyer Dimitri Lascaris
says recent leaks to the press show that IMF Chief Lagarde
forced her negotiator to give up the previously stated position to insist that
creditors offer debt relief to Greece.
===========
j.
Socialism In the Air
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16676
At this year's Socialism Conference in Chicago, organizers and activists
are discussing an age-old question that, for the first time in decades,
resounds strongly with the rest of America
===========
k.
Is it Time for a New Deal Federal Jobs Program?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16683
Bernie Sanders advisors Bill Black and Stephanie Kelton
tell Paul Jay that the public-private partnership model is a disaster, and
increased infrastructure spending combined with austerity would throw the
economy into a recession
===========
l.
Turkey On The
Ropes
http://www.unz.com/tsaker/turkey-on-the-ropes/
by The Saker
===========
m.
There Is No Scientific Method
===========
n.
EU Army To
Face Russia
Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Juncker: Nigel Farage
Video
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45016.htm
Nigel Farage accuses EU of 'poking Russian bear with
stick' over Ukraine.
===========
o.
‘Israel Firsters’ In US
Politics
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45026.htm
by
Philip Weiss
===========
p.
Francis,
A great (and devastating) piece on Wiesel published years ago by
Alexander Cockburn.
ed herman
Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”
|
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/truth-and-fiction-in-elie-wiesels-night-2/ |
===========
q.
Former
CIA Officer: Listen To Your Enemy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45022.htm
Amaryllis Fox is still in the process of getting her CIA cover rolled back.
by Cavan Sieczkowski
July 03, 2016 "Information Clearing House"
- "HP"-
Amaryllis Fox is a writer, a peace activist and a former CIA Clandestine
Service officer.
She recently sat down with Al Jazeera’s AJ+ to
discuss what she’s learned from working undercover in counterterrorism for
nearly a decade.
Her takeaway? Listen to your enemy.
===========
r.
From: "Jim O'Brien" <jimobrien48@gmail.com>
To: haw-info@stopthewars.org
Sent: Wednesday, 6 July, 2016 7:37:52 PM
Subject: [haw-info] HAW Notes 7/6/: Links to recent articles of interest
Links to Recent Articles of Interest
"It
Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's
Legacy"
By Max Blumenthal, AlterNet.org, posted June 5
By Ellen Schrecker, Chronicle
of Higher Education, posted June 30
The author is a professor of history emerita
at Yeshiva University.
"The
Roots of Hillary's Infatuation with War"
By David Bromwich, The
National Interest, posted June 29
By Stephen Kinzer, Boston
Globe, posted June 23
"We
Buried the Disgraceful Truth"
By Steve Coll, New York Review
of Books, June 23 issue
On the experience of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
"Lessons We
Failed to Learn from the Origins of the Second Indochinese War"
By Ron Briley, History News
Network, posted June 14
Review essay on three books by William J. Rust on US policy in
Laos and Cambodia in the 1950s and early '60s
"Why
Trump Now? It's the Empire, Stupid"
By Greg Grandin, The Nation, posted
June 9
The author teaches history at New York University.
"Bob
Kerrey's Return to Vietnam: Like Drowning Cats"
By Rich Gibson, CounterPunch.com, posted June 6
The author teaches history at Southwest College in San Diego.
"Bombing
Hiroshima Changed the World, But It Didn't End World War II"
By Oliver Stone and Peter Kushnick, Los
Angeles Times, posted May 26
Peter Kushnick teaches history at
American University.
Thanks to Margaret Power and an anonymous reader for suggesting
articles that are included in the above list. Suggestions can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
===========
s.
Clinton's
Candidacy Will Unite the Corporate World
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16383