- WEAPON MENTALITY 1

Fascism and modern politics are too much alike. Why?

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
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The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:07 the shared intent of fascism and modern political thought
• 2:05 weapon mentality
• 5:04 pacifists and militarists
• 10:54 two sorts of anarchy

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
 From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld 
Learner, begin

- WEAPON MENTALITY (I) -

In the text that follows, replace the term “Fascism” with “modern political thought.” 

“Fascism contemplates above all the future and the development of mankind merely from the vantage point of political reality and believes neither in the possibility nor the usefulness of eternal peace. It rejects therefore pacifism, which under a pretense of magnanimity hides the renunciation of combat and cowardice. [Author’s note: pacifism hides the renunciation of cowardice, indeed! Mussolini typifies those moral cowards whose life-meaning collapses the moment they stop inflicting pain on someone, anyone]. Only war brings human energies to their highest tension and ennobles those peoples [that] dare to undertake it. All other tests are only substitutes, which never put men before the highest decision, that of the choice between life and death [Russian roulette, Your Predaciousness? Be my guest!]. Therefore, every doctrine which starts out from a premeditated revolution for peace is foreign to Fascism.” Mussolini, quoted by Alfred Vagts in A History of Militarism, Greenwich Editions, 1959, p. 437.

Did you make the switch? Despite its relevance and many attempts to duplicate it in my head, I found this exercise unmanageable. So let me make it easy for you:

Modern political thought contemplates above all the future and the development of mankind merely from the vantage point of political reality and believes neither in the possibility nor the usefulness of eternal peace. It rejects therefore pacifism, which under a pretense of magnanimity hides the renunciation of combat and cowardice. … Therefore every doctrine that starts out from a premeditated revolution for peace is foreign to modern political thought.

Note the shared intent of fascism and modern political thought, even though they are supposed to be at odds. Those interchangeable politics are imposed on us without subtlety or valid alternative. We are summoned to “choose” between Clinton and Trump, Le Pen and Macron, standard-bearers of different politics equally bad, pending worse “choices” downstream.

Weapon mentality is the operating system that drives the hardware/wetware of weapon technology through the application program (constantly upgraded) of weapon management. Weapon mentality takes great pride in the finality of its cruel and arbitrary dictates. It is more interested in its routines and traditions than in their moral consequences. It would rather fantasize about its perfection than resolve its enduring contradictions. 

It and its outcomes are neither aberrations nor errors. Learners should defy those weapon myths. Greed, psychosis, stupidity and gross criminality (those eternal bugaboos) are mere symptoms of the problem, not its cause. The chainsaw logic of weapon mentality is consistent; its barbarity, fully justified and “moral” within its own frame of reference. Wherever weapon mentality roams unchallenged, it distorts every facet of life. Paraphrasing Churchill’s quip about German imperialists, weapon managers are either groveling at our feet or lunging for our throats. 

Weapon mentality is a parasite that lacks creativity except to compel and terrorize. Incapable of independent productivity, it relies on peace technology for sustenance. Unable to destroy humanity’s innate sense of dignity and grace, it twists those root truths just enough to suit its purpose. 

First off, it crams our constellation of political metaphors with weapon myths. 

For weapon mentality, human compassion is a needless burden. Vicious battle elites find rank, power, comparative wealth and imaginary security as faithful servants of weapon mentality. Anyone who takes a moral stand can be co-opted, marginalized and attacked. Promotion is based on willingness to compromise natural conscience and inflict the most allowable harm. A promising career and frequently professional survival decree that good conscience be abandoned. 

An analogy is the biblical tale in Genesis 22, in which God commands that Abraham sacrifice his son — except that, unlike merciful God, weapon mentality sees that this sacrifice will be executed to its bloody conclusion, by the book.

Weapon mentality is stoical, abusive and contagious. It is anti-moral though very moralistic. It operates in direct contravention of peace values. Like a virus, weapon mentality penetrates healthy peace management cells to replicate its own. Gathering whatever it finds useful and culling the rest, it crosses with impunity every barrier of empire, race, religion, nationality and ideology. You know, all those familiar notions heroes routinely die for? Weapon mentality treats them like the phantasms they really are. 

Abusing its ascendancy in a Darwinian struggle for survival of the deadliest, weapon mentality perverts human culture and obstructs every overture of peace. It has done little else throughout history, with our consent. What’s more, weapon mentality remains “fixed” in human history. Dependable peace has never endured for very long. Prior to today’s global communication networks, no prototype peace reign could spread fast enough through surrounding weapon cults. 

Peace technologies weaken under attack, even as their adherents strengthen themselves in suffering and sacrifice. Only a few civilizations made peace their first priority. Without exception, they fell to the weapon technologies that surrounded them, and became “pre-historic.”

Since I’m much less of a man than Gandhi, I cannot call myself pacifist while I serve hard time on this hell-world among these simpering killer primates. Every nation secretes an inescapable battle elite of vile individuals. It is our repellent obligation to practice selective violence against them, smother their toxic influence and shelter the children — provided we redistribute wealth and power in peace. 

The tendentious designations of Pacifist and Militarist have been talked to death elsewhere. Yet their rivalry has had little more effect than the skittering of mice when compared to the hobnail tread by legions of weapon stalwarts. 

There are striking similarities between pacifists and warmongers. Both enlist small bands of sullen fanatics on the margins of society. Both rely on powerful, charismatic patrons to dispel routine lethargy, shatter petty deadlocks, deflect police scrutiny and promote themselves far and wide. Both share moral attitudes that are chronic in modern society and turn acute in high-stress situations — like herpes virus in a stressed individual or the latent TB that may bring me down some day. Both make noisy claims during periods of social turmoil. During these stressful times, one group brightens our courtrooms and punishment cells with its reawakened conscience while the other inks the next pages of history with the blood of its victims. Both rely on mass media to multiply their small numbers and amplify their impossible demands. 

Pacifists range from those who would rather starve to death than let their bodily defenses kill off microorganisms normally, (as Jain elders often opt to do), to conscientious objectors who may or may not fight for a cause they find just, or cooperate with their nation when it goes to war. This form of half-hearted cooperation describes the common mass of weapon stalwarts, whether or not they choose to murder each other at war. 

To sum up, some cosmopolitan individuals – like me – seek PeaceWorld. More often than not, they support an alternative less feasible and less coherent than mine. Their wishful thinking leads them to fantasize about peaceful nationalism (a patent contradiction) and touchy-feely sentimentalism instead of seeking the nuts, bolts and binding washers of a pragmatic, global peace.

Pacifism serves as a term of law to designate another group of people who hinder weapon management in times of war. Along with them come spies, rebels, deserters, draft dodgers, traitors and aliens. These people aren’t considered “pacifists” despite their collective preference for cosmopolitan peace. 

The term pacifist was coined as a legal pigeonhole for a few thousand conscientious objectors who protested against World War I (sic) for the record and thus the hard way. They earned equal shares of contempt and brutality from Allied and Central Power bureaucrats. 

Rarely having been shot at (that I know of), I suspect that most people who come under fire turn out to be devout pacifists. “There are no warmongers in the foxholes!” 

To date, organized pacifists have insulated themselves and their cherished ideals from mainstream society. More often than not, the weapon media paint them as decadent, pasty-faced, “morally superior” outsiders and wise guys. Many pacifists embrace these labels to the detriment of their cause. 

The term militarist describes those who advocate ruinous military preparation and/or preemptive aggression. Ruinous because it is profitless and supplants more advantageous investment. The essence of military preparedness is aggression, since battlefields are the only valid training ground for real armies, and mortal enemies, their only effective instructors. It includes the proponents of any weapon state other than our nationalists who are, of course, peace loving, anti-militarist libertarians. 

Sure thing, buddy.

Weapon states may remain overtly militaristic even though they’ve spent the last decades at peace with everyone but their own minorities. Some of the grossest empires – bloated with war booty, conquered territory, devastating firepower and drone populations of slaves, warriors, warlords, convicts, unemployed and disenfranchised minorities – simply deny their own militarism. 

Militarists often call themselves patriots: “The last refuge of the scoundrel,” per Boswell’s Life of Johnson. 

Like most weapon terms, these designations are as clumsy as they are vague. 

Pacifists usually seek their shade in center-left politics, while militarists hunt opportunistically from the far right (their usual turf) through the middle ground to the far left — wherever they can pull down the most cash. 

As hobbies go, weapon technology is very spendy.

I’d rather replace these common expressions with those taken from the vernacular of Learner, as follows:

·      Militarists in general: weapon mentors, weapon sectarians, weapon managers, battle elites, and weapon technicians (depending on their actual job assignment). 

·      Pacifists, opposition activists, and random, reductive meliorists: weapon dissenters.

·      The crushing majority of humanity, nameless and for the most part peaceful, but who would march off to war if asked nicely; and their children, taught to expect a warrior’s pittance instead of the abundance of peace: weapon stalwarts.

·      Revolutionaries of significant transformation: Learners.

Everything depends on the person in question: if they know what they are doing and why. My terms focus on results rather than intent. I hesitate to pigeonhole specific people and institutions based on their political packaging and outlook rather than their results. 

People tend to respond flexibly to complex and often paradoxical circumstances internal as well as external. Many say one thing and do the opposite, then applaud the paradoxical outcome of their behavior. Too many more claim the best intentions, compulsively scrutinize their means and yet accept as inevitable the horrifying consequence of their prejudices. 

The weapon/peace dialectic admits two sorts of anarchy. 

In misleading us in this way, this self-contradiction matches most of our political metaphors. Two contrary definitions serve to render a term meaningless and therefore more useful to weapon mentality. Deeper meanings of truth and peace are poison to it. Weapon political metaphors require no more specific meanings beyond those needed to lie and kill.

For peace mentality, words like justice and liberty have a specific meaning naturally defined by personal conscience, which corresponds to real-time behavior. Either there is justice or there isn't. Simple. 

For weapon mentality, mushy words like those are just reassuring noise parroted robotically by people with no conscience, about actions they can reverse whenever they find it convenient and still call them the same. There can be injustice and they call it justice. No problem. 

The supreme commands: lie, kill, sacrifice the Other we point out to you, etc., those must be shouted loud enough and understood soon enough by everyone on the national parade ground or the global battlefield. Contrary expressions of peace need never be so accurate or consistent. 

The main function of classical philosophy is to render all the other (non-military) terms as amorphous and meaningless as possible in the most confusing manner possible. 

The clarity you may find in Learner, despite its middling prose, is forbidden by classical philosophy and chased from its primary texts. Elaborate protocols and wordy formulae hold the twin goals of neutralizing valid ethics and thwarting peace. The facts among others to be established without dispute by classical philosophy are that the yearly starvation of millions of babies is inevitable and that world peace is impossible and unwise. 

Your infant grade and the publication of your grownup manuscript will depend on the beauty of your prose admitting these revolting principles and the sturdiness of your “logic” confirming them.

Reactionaries define anarchy as the following nightmare scenario. Learner calls it chaosism, and its practitioners, chaosists. A chaosist may commit any crime his ruthlessness, strength and firepower allow. During periods of chaosism (reactionary anarchy), no bourgeois may doze off at night, confident that his throat won’t be slit, his property stolen or vandalized and his family enslaved before he reawakens.

Today’s gun nuts are going to feed this future nightmare, should this social collapse occur.  Once they and their insane measures get them killed quickly, they will provide unlimited stocks of firearms and ammunition for passing psychopaths to renew their murderous agenda. As usual, humanity is hosing raw gasoline into a white-hot foundry. Global warming, ecocide, runaway overpopulation, nuclear power and weapons: the list of self-inflicted catastrophes is premeditated; it is too long, too systematic, too irreparable, and too horrifying not to be.

Don’t bother reminding reactionaries that their nightmare is exactly what happens to those unfortunate enough to get caught in the path of armies in wartime, or to the poor in any case. They won’t listen. According to reactionaries, the average anarchist promotes this kind of anarchy; and it would be a good thing to shoot him like a rabid dog. 

Anarchists have a different take on anarchy. In their version, every rule of property and class should be discarded in favor of self-discipline and fellow feeling. That would lead to absolute justice and equality. No more poverty, bigotry, inequality, war or vice. In short: the freedom of Neolithic hunter-gatherers. They, in turn, consider property-owners rabid dogs, etc. … 

Nobody pays attention to the psychopaths who dominate both factions and every other one on Earth so far.

Learner uses the term “chaosists” to describe the whipped-child-turned-adult who rise and fall like yo-yos during intervals of chaosism (chaos for its own sake). Think of the Thirty Years War or Rwanda at its worst. Some individuals might have survived, but no one they would recognize. Victims and murderers alike, the survivors and the dead: their core identity from the past was brutally struck down. 

Also included under the designation chaosist are people unbalanced enough to want to make it happen: people like the Unabomber, Book of Revelation fanatics, those who applaud bloody jihad (holy war on behalf of Islam), and just about everyone else having a really bad day. 

Learners would reserve the term “anarchist” for iron-willed utopians like Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Gandhi: some of the most decent men this indecent world has forged. 

Anyone who runs around draped in black with the intention of setting garbage dumpsters afire, smashing shopping windows and upsetting an innocent bystander’s car – all in the name of Glorious Anarchy, but actually in submission to their glandular hyperactivity – is obviously an amateur chaosist. Suicide bombers, likewise. Professional chaosists tend to pass their unarmed neighbors under mortar bombs and machetes, and send young suicide bombers out to shred themselves among the others, while they remain smug and snug at home preaching from their Good Book. If someone conscience-driven comes looking for them seriously armed, they run and hide like cowards and lie about their crimes.

The Learner Commonwealth will be neither brutally nor evangelically lawless. Chaosists will be neutralized and sent down Learner paths more theatrical, therapeutic and useful; moral anarchists will be held to their highest ideals.

… 

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- WEAPON MENTALITY (2) -