A new book by social epidemiologist, Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (New Press, 2005), concludes that the stress experienced from inequality is the leading deep cause of sickness and illness, far greater even than more conventionally attributed causes such as environmental toxins.

Social and economic inequality is extraordinarily corrosive. It affects our health because the quality of social relations is crucial to well-being. The psychosocial impact of stratification, a structural malady that has coincided with the advent of urban civilization some 5500 years ago, effects deeply how people feel and is devastatingly stressful. It is an overriding cause of ill health and breakdowns in social relations.

Wilkinson concludes that modern societies, despite material success, are social failures.

Equality (Justice) is our greatest healer!

A book published more than a century ago, Mutual Aid: A Factor Of Evolution by Russian Prince/anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1902), in essence makes the same point from an evolutionary perspective.

From the conclusion of Kropotkin’s masterpiece: “Man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support – not mutual struggle – has had the leading part. In its wide extension…we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.”

And from the introduction: “It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience – be it only at the stage of an instinct – of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all.”

Our species’ survival hinges on a leap in consciousness that recognizes that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere (MLK, Jr.). Equality is not just a nice idea, it is indispensable for our survival. Empathy is an embedded foundational human characteristic for assuring equality. Cooperation, sharing and mutual aid in social relations, are keys to equality and sense of well-being. This is the revolution within our evolutionary journey begging to be accessed within our individual and collective consciences.

The inarticulate presidency of George Bush II successfully unmasked the US empire for everyone to see in its gruesome glory – laying bare all the lies, sordid details, and egregious consequences of unfettered greed. Then the hopium associated with Obama’s election served as a soothing tranquilizer, quieting the movement, at least for a time. Yet, no matter who is in power, wars continue ad nauseum. To learn why we must examine the vertical/hierarchical, patriarchal political-economic system to which we humans have adapted over millennia.

First, let’s look at US history. The record reveals a chronic, depressing pattern of war making – 550 direct military interventions since 1799 in more than 100 countries. More than 300 of these have occurred since World War II, including bombing of 28 countries. In addition, the US has conducted thousands of covert interventions, mostly in “Third World” countries.

The longer view: Since the advent of “civilization” around 3500 BC (55 centuries ago), there have been 14,600 recorded “decisive wars,” not counting thousands of smaller, “indecisive” ones, according to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. This coincides with development of writing and emergence of patriarchal, hierarchical kingdoms, most of which later became empires. The rulers of these kingdoms gained power by manipulating surplus that had grown out of the agricultural revolution. Another coincidence with the advent of civilization is a notable increase in findings of human remains for which the cause of death has been attributed to warfare injuries. Archaeologists have found little if any evidence of systemic warfare prior to this time.

Since 1500 AD, war scholar Quincy Wright documents 3,000 recorded “battles” which involved casualties of at least 1,000 in land battles, and 500 in naval ones, with an additional quarter million “hostile encounters.” The US Army alone has been engaged in over 9,000 “battles and skirmishes” between 1775-1900, most against Native Americans, with the US Navy engaged in over 1,100 encounters in addition.

Efforts to prevent wars are also well established. Historical sociologist Jacques Novicow documented more than 8,000 treaties for peace between 1,500 BC and 1860 AD.

Modern efforts to impose accountability for war behavior include the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced war altogether. Since the 1950s, the US Army Field Manual adopted provisions of international law, absolutely prohibiting targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. It has done little, if anything, to retard murder of civilians.

Attempting to understand this chronic pattern of human carnage, scholars such as Lewis Mumford, Thomas Berry, Marija Gimbutus, Riane Eisler, and James Hillman chronicle the record of more than five millennia of the four patriarchal establishments – classical empires, ecclesiastical institutions, nation-states, and modern corporations. All four can be described as male-dominated, vertical hierarchies dependent for their functioning on strict obedience from their population base.

“Civilization” is marked by a dramatic shift from long-standing decentralized, horizontal, matriarchal societies, to centralized, vertical/class-oriented, patriarchal societies, in which obedience to a King was required, and slave labor utilized to construct massive projects like tombs, irrigation and grain storage systems. Class and stratification ripped people from their historical roots as autonomous beings living in small cooperative tribal groups. This separation of people from their intimate connections with the earth produced deep insecurity, anxiety and fear in the psyche, and ecopyschologists such as Chellis Glendinning and Theodore Roszak suggest that such fragmentation created a traumatic primordial breach. Being forced to live and work in a class system generally leads to a feeling of lack of self worth. People will avoid this shame at any cost, often by adopting “defense mechanism” such as projecting demonization onto others “below,” and/or deference of authentic autonomous freedoms to belief in authority structures and adoption of their accompanying mythologies and ideologies.

For 300 generations civilization has required obedience. This has become a cultural habit enabling each of us to successfully adapt to our non-Indigenous culture. Observers such as Etienne De La Boetie have discovered that virtually all vertical power quickly becomes ego-tyrannical, inherent in concentration of political, social and economic power, whether achieved through elections (such as the USA), force of arms, or inheritance. Method of rule is essentially the same – achieving mass consent through either fear or propaganda/myth. Barbara Tuchman describes the historical folly of ego-maniacs at war in her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

In essence, by being conditioned to obey the laws and mores of modern society dictated and shaped by vertical political-economic systems, we have been living contrary to our authentic nature as cooperative beings capable of self-governance in small communities without authority from above. In addition, in the West, with but 20 percent of the world’s population, we have materially benefited from 500 years of colonial exploitation at the expense of the remaining 80 percent. This is not only immoral, it is ecologically unsustainable. In the US, with but 4.6 percent of the world’s population, our insatiable consumption devours more than 30 percent of the globe’s resources. Habits of obedience to our system have historically been reinforced by our personal addiction to consumer goods, fed by the myth that our material well-being derives from our “exceptionalism” as US Americans. Our allegiance to this myth and our addiction to its benefits are what enable those dreadful wars – these are nothing more than imperial projects to assure, at gunpoint, continuation of our American Way Of Life, not to mention endless profits for the “emperor” and his entourage.

In summary, we are addicted to war because we are addicted to a materialist way of life, which requires obedience to an infrastructure of imperialism that enables business as usual. That it is totally unsustainable is only now being realized.

The prescription: Re-discover the eco-consciousness that already resides in our visceral genetic memory outside our brains. Choosing to live with less stuff in locally sufficient, food producing and simple tool making/artisan cultures can be joyful, and pockets of such revivalist cultures are cropping up in many places as people strive to re-establish their local autonomy. We are coming full circle – those we exterminated because we deemed them “savage,” were in fact authentic. We are the savages and now must turn to the authentics to help in our healing.

U.S.: "Empire of Liberty," Built Upon Three Holocausts

In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson bragged of a new "empire of liberty," i.e., a nation created essentially for the benefit of White male property and slave owners/speculators, who were to thrive in freedom, prosperity, and tranquility through expansion. Even before formal creation of the Republic, acquisition of Florida, Cuba, the West Indies, Mexico, the western frontier, and Canada were discussed so frequently there was an assumption that Providence intended it. George Washington talked in 1783 of "a rising empire." James Madison believed in "imperial republicanism" as he led the 1787 Constitutional convention behind locked doors to create a new and far more powerful national government. Note that a people’s democracy was not intended by our "Founding Fathers" [See Tucker, Robert W. and David C. Hendrickson. (1990). Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. Oxford: Oxford University Press; William Appleman Williams. (1980). Empire As A Way Of Life. Oxford, especially chapters 2-4, and pp. 31, 43, 51, 59].

The ugliest truth is that our civilization is built on three unspeakable holocausts, each justified by a White racist ideology, causing the murder of millions, each committed with impunity: (1) acquiring free land at gunpoint while systematically brutalizing hundreds of Indigenous cultures; (2) acquiring free labor by force from ancient Indigenous cultures in Africa by violent removal of those who survived capture; and (3) acquiring cheap resources, labor and markets through thousands of overt and covert interventions at gunpoint into more than 100 countries.

Four Blips in Modern Human History

In addition to our three unspoken holocausts mentioned above, we have been deeply influenced by at least four major blips in history. First, the 5,500-year (nearly 300-generation) period of acceptance and deference to large vertical authority structures (whether monarchial, military, or elected) has led to a chronic pattern of mindless obedience (De La Boetie). Second, 500 years of Eurocentric colonialism materially benefited 20 percent of the world’s population as it impoverished and plundered the non-Eurocentric 80 percent. Third, in a much briefer blip, we have become conditioned to the conveniences of the industrial revolution/oil age (soon to be over). And fourth, an even briefer blip of the post-WW II middle class (now virtually depleted).

Consequently, those of us living today among the rich 20 percent, even if personally not so rich, have profited from the wonders of "Western civilization." We have been conditioned to live by its materialist values. But we have become addicted to a grotesque way of life, spending nearly $50 billion a year alone on cosmetics and toiletries (and nearly $80 billion each on tobacco and soft drinks, $15 billion on pet food). [SEE euromonitor.com/factfile].

Materialism’s Pathologies

Addictions

It is instructive to examine the psychic dynamics of the U.S. "More is not enough!" [See psychiatrist Peter C. Whybrow's, America Mania (2005), in which he discovers that the biochemical processes in the brain related to highs induced from shopping are similar with that of alcohol and drug use]. Our addictions suggest that substantial human archetypal needs are unmet in materialist, class-oriented societies. Psychologist Carl Jung concluded that Western materialist cultures lose connection with deeper meanings of life. Social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson recently documented that individuals and whole societies have become severely stressed from social and economic inequality [The Impact of Inequality (2005)]. Class positioning, he concludes, is the most common cause of sickness and social malaise, and that inequality seriously obstructs sustainable economic activity and social health.

The majority of European Americans grew up in the brief post-WWII middle class. All of us grew up in the 200-year blip of the oil age and the industrial revolution that facilitated the speed, complex technologies, and population explosions that accompany the religion of consumption. For the most part, if we were living in the middle or upper class, life seemed like a good deal. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that it has all been a delusion.

Our "wonderful way of life" has always been dependent upon a massive system of both domestic and global exploitation beyond comprehension. This has been facilitated ad nauseum by our political/economic/military "democratic" system directed by one oligarchic party with two right wings, one of soft imperialism, the other hard. Believing ourselves to be exceptional, it has been nearly impossible to understand the consequences of our lifestyle on billions of other people and the Earth herself.

Individual and Collective Complicity

Nonetheless, most of us routinely legitimize the entire scam by voting for one of the usually White male oligarchs/plutarchs while dutifully paying the taxes demanded by their laws (which we foolishly call our laws). To add insult to injury, we allow ourselves or our sons and daughters, often with enthusiastic patriotism, to become loyal military troopers implementing the forceful global policies that allow us, who comprise but 4.6 percent of the world’s population, to continue consuming anywhere from 25 percent to nearly half the Earth’s resources.

The social myth lingers that we live in a democratic society committed to "justice for all." However, this mythology has pre-empted our capacity to SEE the ugly social secret that our system is in fact an oligarchy committed to exploitation of the many for the benefit of a few.

In these early years of the third millennium, we are finally experiencing the convergence of several ominous political, economic and ecological realities serving as epochal wake-up calls – for example, global warming, peak oil, the 9/11 event, and Bush’s brazen, terrifying responses to 9/11. Perhaps these harsh realities are cosmic offerings sent to wake us from our "holiday from history," as Slovenian psychoanalyst/philosopher Slavoj Zizek describes our severe amnesia. Zizek concludes that September 11, 2001 revealed to U.S. Americans the "desert of the real," the distilled version of the essence of five centuries of behavior of the "civilized West." The U.S. culture and our European predecessors have committed the equivalent of thousands of 9/11s over more than 400 years, directed primarily against non-Europeans, murdering and maiming millions to protect "national security" (read AWOL, the American Way Of Life). We have virtually no clue about the extent of our demonic behavior.

Arrogance

I myself did not have a clue to this tangle of lies, illusions, and delusions until I found myself in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta villages shortly after air strikes where I witnessed the napalmed and burned bodies of as many as 900 unarmed fishing villagers and their children over the course of just one week. This bombing was committed with malice aforethought, intended to systematically eliminate (murder by genocide) all Vietnamese who did not openly support the South Vietnamese Government, a corrupt bunch in turn created by our own corrupt, Mafioso-like government.

Subsequently, I delved into details of "American" history. What we did in Southeast Asia from 1950-1975 turns out to be no aberration, just as Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations. From the moment our ancestors became "settlers" on this continent, the die was cast. Our savagery has known no limits. Whatever is perceived as being in our way is removed as w
e seek expansion, profits, and convenience via free land, cheap resources, slave labor, hegemonic power, and hateful vengeance.

Assimilation or elimination

Invariably we describe people who would obstruct our imperial goals with derogatory names like "savages", "gooks", "communists", "evil people", "terrorists", etc. Read the history of how one’s hometown came to be settled. For example, the quaint little university town of Arcata, California, once known as Union(town), where in 1860 "little children and old women were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed by axes," their bodies being stacked in town. Or Geneva, New York where in 1779, George Washington’s orders were ruthlessly carried out to complete "its total destruction and devastation." Consider today’s settlers in Israel/Palestine. Note how easily they justify inflicting barbaric behavior on others (projections outward) by describing their inferiority while believing in themselves as superior (disowned shadows). The spectacularly frightening nature of the 9/11 crimes is familiar to a majority of the world’s people. From 1965 to 1973, for example, a period of nearly 3,300 days, the United States waged an unspeakable war of atrocity, a de facto policy of genocide, against the peoples of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, such that more than 1,500 human beings were murdered every day! Read about the thousands of skirmishes the White militia and/or the U.S. Army engaged in against the Indigenous of this country over several hundred years. Over 10 million Indigenous in North America alone succumbed to removal, imprisonment, or death due to strange diseases, bullets and axes. Our ancestors often recorded vivid accounts that included gory details such as bashing the brains of "merciless Indian savages" (a phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence).

From the 1790s to the early 2000s, the U.S. military overtly intervened more than 500 times in over 100 nations to pursue its hegemonic designs (and thousands of covert interventions). One military study revealed that between 1869 and 1897, the U.S. Navy made 5,980 port calls to further U.S. commercial and political advantages. Virtually all U.S. wars and interventions have been masked under elaborate rhetorical pretexts, such that we learned an extraordinarily censored version of history. The U.S. military and various police agencies have also intervened hundreds of thousands of times domestically.

The pattern has been consistent: either people will assimilate into the White culture, or be eliminated by it. White supremacy is the cult and we have all been subjected to it – either in complicity with it, or to be crushed by it. Our origins intrinsically are possessed by shame of genocide through terror.

Our Shadow

Living with painful shame I believe has driven us to do nearly anything to avoid facing the disowned part of our collective and individual psyche. Disowned shadows possess explosive emotional energy, often manifesting in pathological distractions like avoidance, denial, invasions, addictions, etc., which push us to further regress, as if reverting from adolescence to early childhood.

Facing the fraud of our mythological "exceptionalism" terrifies us. We project onto others the very "terrorism" that has built our civilization. Ironically, we have to project our own shadow, "terrorism," onto others, such that we actually come to believe those "evil" others are terrorizing us at every moment. I believe that the political leaders we "choose" or accept, ironically represent our own unmet needs for security. Disowned shadows possess intense subconscious power over us, such that we tend to look to authority figures to rescue us. The capitalist predators and their oligarchic political protectors thrive on inducing fear to maintain an obedient, consuming populace.

Our most imperative healing need is to reckon with our imperial history, our lifestyle addictions, and the consequences of both, and prepare for a leap in consciousness that will take us on a path of responsibility for the consequences of our choices. Focusing on the whos and hows of 9/11, and the evils of Bush, easily can become obsessions. However, I believe they serve as huge distractions from facing our collective shadow, the denial of which overwhelms us with its emotional charge. Our government’s deranged and extraordinarily dangerous response to 9/11 can be explained partially because the spectacular 9/11 act, like the shocking, humiliating slaughter of Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn one hundred twenty-five years earlier, pierced our self-delusion of omnipotence, requiring us to resort to historic acts of vengeance (distraction) to preserve the delusion. Note that after Custer’s fiasco, the nation was obsessed with completing the genocide of the Indigenous people (eliminating the "Indian problem"), which it accomplished with brute force in 15 years. The emotional energy of disowned shadows is enormous, and extremely lethal when not owned up to.

As a people we are totally capable of busting out of our fear and insecurity and seeking solace in our community as we refuse to comply with the demands of the market. That means we stop shopping other than from local economies, reduce driving and flying to radically minimal levels, and instead, begin cycling, rebuilding local neighborhoods, striving for regional (100-mile?) food diets and zero net energy housing. It means understanding that the mechanical process of voting is the least significant act of participation in a vibrant decentralized democracy. It means recognizing that our system is broken, broken beyond repair. Our way of conducting political business and choosing "leaders" has failed. Political survival goes to the richest. This stalemate offers us humble human beings an incredible opportunity for a renewal from below. Now we have permission to consciously consider not voting in national political selection shams, and more certainly means not paying money (taxes) to our multi-headed Hydra "democracy" that insists on doing whatever it wants despite the expressed sentiments of the people. Thus, creative downsizing and simplifying (contraction) is indispensable to our liberation.

Healing: Contraction, not Distraction

I dream that those responsible for the 9/11 crimes will someday be held to account, and that Bush and company (and all the elected politicians who support a war OF terror, preventive wars, warrantless wiretapping, elimination of Habeas Corpus, torture, etc.) will face Nuremberg trials. Impeachment is an insufficient response, and assumes that the political system itself is authentically accountable. But the distractions, even obsessions, about 9/11 and ridding ourselves of Bush conveniently allow us to avoid addressing directly our disowned, dark cultural shadow: historical complicity with empire through obedience, silence, and consumerism. Our one-party centralized system, disguised as a "Constitutional democracy," thrives on continued plunder which is legitimized by and with our votes and tax dollars!

Facing our addicton to AWOL is a precondition to healing. Taking responsibility suggests radically altering our lifestyles toward right livelihood and sustainability. This requires dramatic contraction. "Slow, simple, small, quiet, and local" (the motto of the 2006 Veterans (Human-Powered) Ride For Peace and Sustainability from Eugene, Oregon to the national Veterans For Peace convention in Seattle, Washington) offers a bold antidote to the impending austerity, likely die-offs, and almost inevitable collapse of every system we are dependent upon. Breaking addictions to mindless consumption and rapid travel are revolutionary ac
ts. Aligning our actual day-to-day choices with our values and rhetoric enables survival with dignity. Once we know deeply within ourselves that every choice has a consequence (the Iroquois Seventh Generation discernment principle), our choices will change dramatically, a leap in consciousness begging to happen.

Our body-minds already know at very deep levels that everything is interconnected in a sacred weave, everywhere at every moment. We just need to access that wisdom. Quantum physics confirms Martin Luther King Jr.’s wisdom, "an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Right here, right now, where I am standing – very local! The only sustainable social model in evolutionary history has been the local, steady state economy, what visionaries now call bioregionalism, comprised of hundreds if not thousands of sustainable local communities. This is the modern synthesis of the Neolithic, Stone Age village with appropriate technology, utilizing iron, bicycles, solar energy and a partnership model.

Thus, these agents, identified as U.S. military recruiters, are acting in an unlawful manner asking people to participate in unlawful activities.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 prohibits unequal treatment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in all areas of employment. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires affording "equal protection of the laws" to all persons within each state, and by virtue of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), such equal protection binds the federal government through the 5th Amendment’s "due process" clause. Thus, in discriminating against gay persons, the military recruiters are violating the Constitutional civil rights of potential recruits, and the provisions of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

A number of academic institutions have banned military recruiters on their property because of discrimination policies, bans which have been upheld by at least one federal court.

But the most egregious offense of these federal agents, i.e., military recruiters, is that they are recruiting young people who, it can be reasonably predicted, will have a great probability to be ordered to participate in illegal wars and occupations (crimes against peace, and possibly crimes against humanity) and to target civilians and civilian infrastructure (war crimes).

The U.S.-led wars against, and occupations of, Afghanistan and Iraq, 2002 to the present, are illegal on their face. No war was declared as required by the U.S. Constitution. The United Nations (UN) Charter to which the U.S. is a signatory, allows military action in only two instances: (1) if authorized by the UN Security Council, or (2) if undertaken in self-defense against an existing or imminent armed attack. Neither of these conditions were met or sought. Under Article VI, Clause 2, of the U.S. Constitution, the provisions of the UN Charter are incorporated into the Supreme Law of the Land of the United States, and therefore the U.S. violated both the UN Charter, and its own Constitution.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has publicly declared that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was and remains an illegal act that contravenes the UN Charter.

Richard Perle in 2003, when a senior advisor to the Department of Defense Policy Board, admitted that the Iraq war was illegal because the U.S. had broken international law, behavior not consistent with the rules of the UN.

U.S. military judge, Lt. Commander Robert Klant, in May 2005, found Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Pablo Paredes had "reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq were illegal." He came to this legal conclusion after hearing testimony at Paredes’ trial that:

(a) the wars violated the UN Charter, ratified by the U.S., which forbids force unless carried out in self-defense or with the approval of the UN Security Council, neither of which were applicable to or sought by the U.S.;

(b) torture and inhumane treatment well documented in Iraqi prisons constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, ratified by the U.S., and are considered war crimes under the U.S. War Crimes Statute;

(c) both the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions are part of the Supreme U.S. Law under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution;

(d) the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires all military personnel to obey lawful orders, that a general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution and laws of the U.S.;

(e) the Nuremberg Principles, applicable to the U.S. and each of its citizens as part of international law, and the U.S. Army Field Manual, create a duty to disobey unlawful orders; and

(f) Article 509 of Army Field Manual 27-10 specifies that "following superior orders" is not a defense to the commission of war crimes unless the accused "did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that the act ordered was unlawful."

We now have the benefit of the seven leaked confidential British Downing Street Memos, dated from March to July 2002, that paint a damning portrait of the U.S. march to war a full year before its March 2003 invasion. The head of the British Intelligence Service M16 reported in these 2002 memos that "war was now seen as inevitable," that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." "Regime change" was the policy, but without any justification, and "has no basis under international law." The memos also declare: "There is no recent evidence of Iraq complicity with international terrorism. . . . There is no credible evidence to link Iraq with Usama Bin Laden." Regarding Iraq’s possession of WMD, the "intelligence is poor."

Recruiter Abuse: Coercion, Misrepresentation, Harassment, Deception

Reports of serious recruiter improprieties — including fraud and coercion has surfaced and the Army has been forced to investigate 480 allegations of impropriety by recruiters since Oct. 1, 2004.

One recruiter was caught encouraging a recruit to create a fake high school diploma to cover for the fact that he had dropped out. Another recruiter was discovered driving a recruit to a store to purchase a detoxification kit to rid his system of supposed marijuana traces.

Recruiters in Ohio, New York, Washington, Texas and New England said that as long as an offending recruiter met his enlistment quota of roughly two recruits a month, punishment was unlikely. "The saying here is, ‘Production is power,’ " the recruiter in northern Ohio said. "Produce, and all is good."

"The problem is that no one wants to join," the recruiter said. "We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by."

U.S. Army Recruiting Command provides a recruiting handbook to the 7,500 recruiters who are ordered to approach tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders — repeatedly.

Conclusion

U.S. military recruiters should be prohibited from (a) participating in acts (recruitment) that discriminate against persons on the basis of sexual preference, violating protected civil rights, and (b) inducing with historical patterns of misrepresentations the signing of contracts with young people who, it can be reasonably predicted, have a great probability of being ordered to participate in acts prohibited under U.S. Constitutional and statutory law.

Military recruiters are acting as accomplices in inducing others to join an organization (the U.S. military or one of its branches) that is currently violating international law, therefore violating U.S. Constitutional law, and whose servants are being ordered to behave in a manner resulting in commission of crimes and participation in lawless behavior.

Recruiters are accruing personal gain. Matching or exceeding, or failure thereof, superior-mandated recruiting quotas relate directly to career promotions/demotions and, therefore, increased/decreased pay grades. Thus, inducing people to sign a military contract where the recruits will likely participate in prohibited activities directly benefits the recruiter in career promotion and pay increases. Furthermore, the recruiter is participating in a conspiracy with his/her superiors to meet quotas (a) without regard to telling the truth, (b) through uttering various misrepresentations, and (c) perpetrating unwanted harassment.

Military recruitment during the period of illegal wars mandates formal prohibition of such behavior in each jurisdiction where it is occurring. Furthermore, military recruitment deserves permanent bans as long as the milit
ary discriminates against openly gay persons.

[Source citations are available for all facts included in above essay.]

Addictions and Denial

Those of us living in "developed" industrial nation states are experiencing extraordinarily dysfunctional and destructive cultures. We possess little respect for the biocentric (life-centered) values of sacredness and interconnectedness. Most of us growing up in these societies have been taught to be anthropocentric (man-centered), individualistic, quite separate from one another and superior to — rather than part of — nature. This model supports a selfish pursuit of values defined by scientific materialism with little or no consciousness of the social, economic, ecological, spiritual, psychological, genetic, or cultural costs of such a "get what you can" philosophy.

Many people are beginning to understand that this materialistic, man-centered model means death, literally. It seems incumbent upon those of us representing ourselves as healers and teachers, concerned about the well-being and wholeness of people and community, to be radically (going to the root) holistic as we share our own healing journeys with others. Martin Luther King once said, "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice every-where." No life is healthy or, as we are beginning to sense, unless all life is healthy or safe. Everything, all of life, organic and inorganic, including homo sapiens, is in a dynamic process of sacred interconnectedness.

Striving to live the American Way Of Life (AWOL) is dangerous for all living beings. It cannot lead to psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual, or ecological health. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we become aware of the clear distinction between what we have been taught and conditioned to believe and what we come to know to be closer to the truth from our personal experiences. The earth-centered consciousness now emerging as an alternative to the model of selfish materialism that most of us have been taught suggests a need for conscious, intentional distancing from the many addictions that commonly form the essence of our mass consumer culture. However, without interactive face-to-face communities, creative interdependence with the larger culture is extremely difficult. The loss of vital, sharing communities is one of the most significant contributors to the extreme dysfunction of our era.

The depth of denial that exists in all Western and oligarchic societies is profound. Denial is a "defensive" necessity, consciously or unconsciously, enabling continuance of insatiable demands for a lifestyle that is diabolically exploitative of the majority of the world’s people and the earth’s natural resources.

The richest fifth of the world’s population receives 82.7% of world income, while the poorest fifth receives 1.4%. The United States, with 4.6% of the world’s population, consumes 25-50% of the world’s resources. People in the U.S. spend $5 billion annually on calorie reduction diets while 30,000 of the world’s children die every day from malnourishment. U.S. Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, $3 billion more than the estimated cost of providing basic education to everyone in the world. America and the European nations together spend $17 billion a year on pet food, $4 billion more than the estimated annual cost of providing basic health and nutrition worldwide. The average U.S. family affects the environment 40 times more than a family in India, 100 times more than a family in Kenya.

Various rationalizations, some originating in a deep racism and nationalism, are used to justify this enforced disproportionate privilege of the few at the expense of the many. People generally do not feel good about participation in egregious theft. Thus, insidious and deeply pathological denial systems develop, enabling the continuance of massive exploitation with a minimum of consciousness and resistance. Denial, at the individual or societal level, generally manifests in various types of addictions.

Hearing the Voices

Historian, philosopher, and novelist Theodore Roszak (The Voice of the Earth, 1992) believes therapists have been ignoring the most important inner voice of all — the "ecological unconscious." The greater ecological realities of which we are an integral part penetrate our psyches, the voice of the earth expressing her pain through our seemingly unrelated tensions and diseases. Roszak proposes eco-psychology as a solution to the shortcomings of both psychotherapy and environmentalism.

I believe this kind of ecological consciousness/unconsciousness is involved in all efforts for healing. Furthermore, I would include in eco-psychology Martin Luther King’s understanding of injustice. The socioeconomic wounds of which we are a part, whether conscious of them or not, surround and tweak our psyches as well.

Massive injustices are occurring everywhere on the planet, most related in one way or another to the incredible global imperial policies of the United States, empowered by the systemic insatiable greed of the American Way Of Life. The voices of the poor, the oppressed, and those being terrorized because they cry out for bits of justice and dignity, ultimately and inevitably, I believe, become part of our inner voice — manifesting through our seemingly unrelated tensions and dis-eases. We are in fact all one, just as indigenous peoples have tried in vain to teach us.

Not just the voice of the wounded inner child, but the voices of wounded others and the voice of the wounded earth are important to hear and address for profound healing to occur. Internal justice, social justice, ecological justice, and their interplay with one another are necessary in order to achieve holistic health and heightened consciousness. Everything is interconnected, and each piece within the whole affects every other piece and, therefore, the whole.

The practical implications are profound. As a physician asked me once, "How can I help an entire family recover from pneumonia and once again send them back to their unheated shack in the Tennessee winter, knowing they will soon return with another bout of pneumonia?" This particular doctor discovered how local bank redlining policies prevented Black residents from acquiring housing loans, relegating them to the only housing available to them — unheated squatter shacks with no utilities. This doctor felt obligated to become politically active against local racist bank practices in order to successfully treat his pneumonia patients. This is an easy-to-understand example of the connections between a clearly identifiable socio-economic injustice and a physical disease. Many connections are far more insidious and systemic than this example. Since everything is truly interconnected with everything else, it is not difficult to begin to comprehend that one seeking, as well as offering, healing needs to be aware of not only the voice of the inner wounded child, but the voices of other children wounded by political or socioeconomic conditions, and the voice of Mother Earth’s pain.

Withdrawing to Heal

The wisdom of a decentralist, biocentric consciousness and the hope it offers in these dark times provide us a choice that may lead to our salvation. A truly decentralized, grassroots participatory biocracy — democracy is for humans conspiring against nature — enables us to withdraw from our extreme dependency on the dangerous, dehumanizing, and violent consumption economy. As we simplify into local, bioregional communities of economic and energy self-sufficiency, we create a new foundation for the necessary radical changes. The many holistic healing and teaching modalities that respect ancient wisdoms of the e
arth, of cultures, and of an interconnected consciousness offer tremendous hope for integrating physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, political, social, and ecological healing.

Real traditional medicine and healing evolves from accumulated and transmitted experiences, generally over long periods of time. It tends to be low tech, based on very archetypal but experientially proven principles in the use of local, earthy, natural remedies and the inner energies and capacities of homo sapiens, and is accessible to everyone. This is a moment in history when we critically need hope through unrelenting honesty, while affirming an earth-centered consciousness urging radically different life and work styles. Slow and small in fact are beautiful. Fast and massive may soon be seen as dysfunctional, superficial, and ugly.

A Dishonest Hoax

Following World War II the U.S. became the world’s leading superpower, acquiring control of virtually all the planet’s resources, assuring an almost unlimited expansion of consumption by a majority of her citizens. As a result, a popular mentality has developed — a myth — that ever increasing consumption is a law of nature. This leads to unthinking, wasteful habits. To maintain this myth, it has become increasingly important to operate in a world of our own, as unaffected as possible by the larger human, ecological, and global issues. This is called denial.

Most of the effects on society and the environment are not calculated and included in the costs of our consumptive lives. Thus there has been a distortion that has pervaded our pricing system because of our failure to include social and environmental costs (massive degradation and destruction) and because of numerous and various kinds of subsidies and welfare for corporations and the rich. In sum, the entire system has been rigged, a dishonest hoax! When the needs of a system — no matter at what level — are not met from within the system, a severe price is paid in energy consumption, inferior food, pollution, and worsening social, economic, and physical health.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s seriously pierced this comfortable paradigm that seemed so sacred and invincible; but there has ever since been an attempted revival of AWOL — a last hurrah, if you will. However, increasing numbers of conscientious, sensitive human beings know, intuitively if not consciously, that there are numerous observable, objective signs — whether social, economic, political, psychological, genetic, ecological, spiritual, or physical — suggesting very deep and systemic levels of deterioration and sickness.

Ancient Wisdoms

Recently there has been a revival of people searching for community. I believe this comes from an ancient wisdom deeply buried in our subconscious, where cooperation and mutual aid are understood as far more important than competition and selfishness. Alienation has steadily increased through the historical process of substituting money — in effect a substanceless artifact — for spiritual and community values. Money has become a substitute for affiliational ties with community and place. Even when people don’t understand their malaise or cannot identify a cause of feeling incomplete or unfulfilled, they do know that something about our way of life is not right.

Fortunately, we also know of choices we can make individually and collectively to walk a radically different path, to the beat of a different drummer. We know, for example, that we need — and must consume — less; that we must respect all of nature, including people of diverse backgrounds; we must share more equitably; we must live and work locally for both ecological and personal well-being; use far fewer — perhaps no — fossil fuels; plant many trees; eat more healthfully and locally; exercise regularly; assure regular quiet and reflection time; take personal responsibility for our emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health; seek participation in forms of community, etc.

A couple of years after my rude awakening as a military officer in Vietnam, I began earnestly searching for ideas that might define a radically healthier view of the world from the one I had been taught and so blissfully accepted before Vietnam. The military experience had caused me to suspect virtually every speck of the "American mystique" as well as my own personal identity. My fledgling legal career was in big trouble because of my emerging contemptuous feelings about the legal system as a protector of class interests. I was beginning to read and talk about ideas of community empowerment and local self-reliance. I was gradually coming to honor an inner intuitive distrust of any centralization of economic and political power and to be attracted to its opposite, decentralization.

I began developing an appreciation of ancient wisdoms, rituals, and indigenous cultures. I discovered the refreshing 19th century anarchist thinkers like Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Petr Kropotkin who articulated decentralized people-power politics. Tolstoy’s and Gandhi’s ideas of self- reliant communities as the basis of genuine freedom and autonomy made a deep impression. Learning of 20th century U.S. thinkers such as Ralph Borsodi, Scott Nearing, Paul Goodman, and Lewis Mumford affirmed for me that other offspring of the AWOL upbringing had very clearly and harshly critiqued American/Western political and economic values and structures and offered radical, decentralist alternatives. I was very much influenced by the ideas of British economist E. F. Schumacher and his book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.

We Are Not Worth More

Up to the moment of the U.S. massacre of Iraq in 1991, I spent a solid decade as a dedicated activist working for justice in both U.S. foreign and domestic policies and for a radical transformation in our conscious-ness and understanding, as people recovering from the arrogance of self-righteousness and greed. In that decade I traveled to nearly two dozen countries learning about other cultures and the reaches of U.S. intervention into popular movements around the globe. I wrote and spoke out about the interventionist policies, lobbied political leaders, fasted on a number of occasions, organized solidarity efforts in the U.S.-inflicted war zones of Nicaragua and El Salvador, participated in civil disobedience actions, and almost lost my life in this country while attempting, with others, to nonviolently stop the flow of lethal munitions designed for the killing and maiming of thousands of sacred human beings.

As I have said many times over: "We are not worth more. They are not worth less." Yet we live as if we are worth more, and they suffer incomprehensibly as a result. In effect, they are worth-less, and, as a result, we have rationalized the most diabolical policies and lifestyles imaginable.

After the first Gulf War, I communicated with people in — and traveled to — Cuba, Haiti, Palestine, Israel, Golan Heights/Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. These trips viscerally exposed me to the post-Cold War, unipolar, Pax Americana world where increasingly now the capitalist "free" market, global supermarket economy is being asserted and inflicted with more vigor than ever. The results I observed were, and are, powerfully anguishing. An exponential increase in the disparity between haves and have-nots is producing a depth and extent of suffering and economic and social deterioration that I had not experienced in previous trips. I have always been shocked, anguished, and angered by what I have seen and understood to be "Third" World suffering related to "First" World exploitation. But I was not ready to observe how much worse it has become. My God! Help us come to our senses, our inner and interconnected natures and sacredness! Help!

As the supermarket economy envelopes the entire globe, so does poverty. They ab
solutely go hand in hand. The post-Cold War global economy is enforcing draconian economic and social restructuring upon every Third World country that seeks credit from First World economic structures, in effect holding these countries hostage. Thus, external "debt" has become war by another name. Many more people will now die from malnourishment and disease than from all past wars.

Haunted at Home

I know how comfortable many people in the "First" World have become used to feeling — a kind of safety from such suffering reinforcing an attitude of superiority and racism. This is extremely dangerous. What we observe elsewhere — as we increasingly understand the connections of suffering elsewhere to attitudes, values, and policies here at home–is like an advance barometric reading of what will be coming home to haunt us.

As I have continued to travel within the U.S. — to such locations as San Francisco, Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, New York City, Trenton, Camden, Boston, Springfield, Mass., and Washington, D.C. — I have noted with a deep sinking feeling in my stomach the corresponding Third World phenomenon within the U.S. The disparity between Haves and Have Nots is widening at an alarming rate, with catastrophic implications for our society. Racism, an original sin in U.S. history, seems more insidious and widespread than ever. Death rates, homicide rates, illness rates, school drop-out rates, malnutrition rates, among other indicators, reveal that minorities’ social welfare is deteriorating to deep levels.

The myth of AWOL and the Western oligarchic way of life in general is rapidly exploding into disintegration. Violence, so prevalent in the United States, is one of the major symptoms of disintegration. Epidemic despair, hopelessness, street and suite crime, out-of-control drug use as well as middle class anomie, all contribute to an increasingly dangerous situation. As injustices mount and become more systemic and prevalent, it is not hard to comprehend that fewer and fewer of us will enjoy justice and peace. No matter how much protection the wealthy can afford, when injustice is everywhere, their lives and property will not be safe.

These social indicators and trends — from the many ecological factors that are clearly suggesting catastrophe for the future — spell disaster for all human communities, unless there is radical and revolutionary change unparalleled in human history. To be radical simply means going to the roots of understanding our recent genocidal and exploitative history and the origins of our arrogant, racist, self-righteous values. In this case, to be revolutionary means turning around a value system, a consciousness, and a paradigm — from adherence to savage materialism toward faith in the reality of the sacred interconnectedness of all of life.

It has become important for me to integrate the big picture with my own internal growth and maturity — no small task! This requires focus on local relationships with self, family, friends, acquaintances, community groups, and natural habitat as the locus for integration. Integrating our global with our local experiences and awareness, along with our internal transformational process, has caused many of us to deeply appreciate the beauty of the slow as well as the small.

1. A U.S. resident (”any person”) is prohibited from committing an act that is illegal under international law (Principle I), and therefore under U.S. Constitutional Law, even if commanded to do so by one’s superiors, including the President, provided a moral choice was in fact possible (Principle IV). One must disobey an illegal order or command.

2. The complement of the above is that individuals are responsible for obeying international law even if their government’s policies carried out by superiors are not so obeying.

3. Complicity is a crime (Principle VII), i.e., one is prohibited from participating in any act which knowingly furthers the crimes against peace, war crimes, or crimes against humanity under international law (Principle VI), & therefore under Constitutional law.

Commentary:

Thus, if a nation engages in an illegal overt or covert war, i.e., a crime against peace, or commits a war crime or crimes, or commits crimes against humanity, each of that nation’s citizens who is aware of such violation(s) is under obligation to disobey the command and refrain from participating in this illegal conduct.

Punishable under international law are crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (Principle VI, a.,b.,c., the essence of the Nuremberg Principles). The plea of superior orders or demands of state is no defense (Principle IV).

Example:

If one chooses to refuse compliance with military orders to fight in or political laws to pay for an illegal war, the person is not breaking the law. Nor is that person simply obeying a higher law. The person is in fact obeying existing U.S. law.

The U.S. Law:

Resistance law is established in the “Law of Land Warfare” in the U.S. Army Field Manual, Secs. 498-511 (FM 27-10, July 18, 1956). The manual incorporates the Nuremberg Principles which apply to “any person, whether a member of the armed forces or a civilian.” Consequently, one is obligated to obey only lawful orders; to disobey unlawful orders.

It is further clarified as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, especially Articles 2.3 and 2.4 prohibiting member nations from using “force or threat of force,” a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1945, thereby intrinsically part of the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution.

The Nuremberg Principles themselves are part of U.S. law, enunciated in the Executive Agreement the U.S. signed with the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom, and France, August 8, 1945, and part of the U.N. International Law Commission as reformulated in 1950, and further set forth in the U.S. Army Field Manual (above).

TO: Members of Arcata, California City Council:

RE: An Explanation of the Nuremberg Principles and Obligation, and Impeachment, as it Relates to Arcata Residents and their City Council

U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry recently declared his willingness to launch "pre-emptive" war, thereby mimicking Bush II’s dangerous illegal doctrine. In essence, these two major presidential candidates have each openly declared themselves as proud war criminals. They both are committed to continuing the illegal interventions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and have promised that other nations are likely to be victims of aggressive intervention via this same pre-emptive attack doctrine.

Nearly 60 years ago, the Charter for the International Military Tribunal (IMT), Nuremberg, Germany, in response to the egregious crimes committed during World War II, declared three categories of offenses whereby individuals are punishable under international law: crimes against peace (i.e., aggression), crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Under the Nuremberg Principles as reformulated in 1950 by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, individuals, including leaders and their subordinates, have international duties which transcend the obligations of obedience imposed by the nation-state, especially when asked to commit offenses they believe are in violation of these international laws.

"Planning, preparation, initiation or waging a war of aggression" was judged "the supreme international crime." Chief U.S. American prosecutor at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, declared that "launching a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify…" and "if certain acts in violation of treaties [e.g., the U.N. Charter] are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or Germany does them…We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

Despite this step forward, since World War II an estimated 170 million people have been murdered in armed conflicts, both overt and covert, the majority due largely to aggressive U.S. policies, but no one person or leader has been held criminally accountable. There is promise this might change with the recent creation of the International Criminal Court.

The U.S.-led military invasions and bombings of Iraq and Afghanistan are excellent examples of crimes against peace (aggression) as prohibited by Nuremberg and a number of international laws, including, therefore, our own U.S. Constitution. Current statistics reveal nearly 160,000 total casualties so far–murdered, killed, and wounded.

I first became conscious of Nuremberg and its historic meaning for international law as a child. I grew up respecting Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson because he retained his local residency. He had practiced law in a small town just a few miles from my farming community before going on to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. In addition, I had an uncle who, as a U.S. Army captain, worked as a war crimes investigator at Nuremberg. Many years later, ignorance led to my own participation in crimes against peace (illegal, aggressive intervention in Viet Nam), despite having learned "The Law of Land Warfare" in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which incorporates the Nuremberg Principles and Obligation. The atrocious war crimes I witnessed in Viet Nam (mass murder and maiming of civilians) so distressed me, I have spent much of my subsequent life documenting ongoing U.S. violations of international and domestic justice laws, including torture, committed with virtual impunity.

Like so many U.S. Americans, I was led to believe that we live in a constitutional democracy where government is instituted as a practical device to carry out the will of the people–all the people. But democracy requires participation of and by the people, for the people. Its building blocks, and its power, reside in the people at the base–those living at the local level in 33,000 cities, villages, and towns in over 3,100 counties throughout this country. The most important dynamic is found in what people do and say on a daily basis in these popular building blocks that enable and determine the health of a democratic society. Unfortunately, as materialism has come to consume much of our society, the quality of political participation at the local level has often been deferred to a national oligarchic structure in which policy-makers are beholden to the privileged rich, rather than to the whole body politic and necessary eco-ethic. This skewed top-down power scheme has terribly hurt the quality of local governments and their services, as funds have been dramatically diverted upward and outward to military spending and other costs associated with protecting the interests of a few. This has directly contributed to a severe fiscal crisis that often produces a dark psychological side effect as well – a sense of hopelessness and depression. To the extent we accept limitations imposed from the top, we in effect choose to mute the expression so necessary for assertion of people power over the power elite.

How can we as a people, including you and I here in Arcata, maintain faith in our constitutional democratic process when the two major presidential candidates each have resolved to continue the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging a war of aggression" against unnamed enemies, as well as continuing an egregious illegal occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Whomever is likely to be president, we are told in advance, intends (with malice and forethought) to commit the supreme international crime of aggression against other states. By so doing these men totally undermine their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

Where does this grotesque lawlessness stop? It must stop with us, the people, with people like you in locally elected bodies representing people like me. If the people of this country are not willing to utilize the people’s constitutional mechanism of impeachment of our executive officers for their continued commission of egregious crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, then what remedy is left to us? Can we seek legal restraint in advance to prevent a president from carrying out his vow to commit pre-emptive, criminal war in violation of his constitutional oath?

I urge the City Council of Arcata to resolve the need for impeachment proceedings, or in the alternative, urge appropriate legal bodies to seek a restraining order to prevent current U.S. president George H. Bush, and candidate/possible president John F. Kerry, from carrying out their announced plans to launch pre-emptive strikes against anyone, anywhere, as they so determine. Please act in the name of your citizenry, your consciences, and your oath to uphold the constitution. Our very future is at stake.

Albert Camus’ poignant essay, Neither Victims Nor Executioners (1946), declares that "there is no suffering, no torture anywhere in the world which does not affect our everyday lives." He suggests that people of conscience who identify with victims of injustice and war must recognize the manner in which their own political loyalties and beliefs either legitimate or resist murder and injustice. Those who wish not
to be victims of murder must also refuse to be executioners. Camus concludes: "All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being" (Translated by Dwight Macdonald). Let us refuse to be complicit with murder with all our force and being!

Thank you for considering the historical importance of preserving accountable government by being vigilant over national policies that deleteriously affect all of us, including you and your constituents in Arcata. Please, consider resolving support for impeachment and spread the word widely, or in the alternative, publicly urge the filing of a restraining order in an effort to prevent further crimes against peace.

Sincerely,

S. Brian Willson, M.A., J.D., LL.D.
Executive Committee, Humboldt Bay Veterans For Peace, Ch. 56

As the egregious lawlessness, criminality, and utter destructiveness of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq continues (latest totals: nearly 158,000 killed and wounded), our elected representatives in Washington seem paralyzed. They have refused to cut off funding for the unconstitutional war; refused to demand the immediate withdrawal of our military forces who are illegally marauding those two countries while needlessly being in harm’s way; and have refused to put a stop to the continued crimes against humanity directed by our president (e.g., via impeachment).

It is encouraging that the Arcata City Council recognizes that this wayward war detrimentally affects the proper fiscal functioning of local government (stealing $11,000,0000 from Arcata alone) while creating a disturbing psychological angst for many of her citizens. Arcata previously asked the House of Representatives to look into the case for impeachment with no response to date. The city may take up the issue again, more emphatically, spurred on by a resolution adopted by Veterans For Peace Humboldt Bay Chapter 56.

On July 21, Arcata will consider a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military forces currently staging (illegal) operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Right on!

We are in good company. The California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, representing more than two million members, voted overwhelmingly to "demand an immediate end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and to support the repeal of the Patriot Act and the reordering of national priorities toward the human needs of our people." Earlier, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU) voted unanimously to end U.S. occupation and to bring the troops home. On June 29, four members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors initiated the placement of an initiative on the November ballot enabling its voters to vote on a referendum to pull the troops out of Iraq. Win Without War, a national coalition of 42 organizations, has formally called for an immediate end of occupation.

Impeachment becomes ever more appropriate because of the President’s recent reiteration of his commitment to pursuing pre-emptive wars, illegal and unconstitutional under every definition and interpretation, and increasing evidence of the President’s explicit support for grotesque crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those calling for impeachment of the president in past months have been advised to wait for the election, but recent reports suggest that the presidential election could be delayed due to "terrorist" threats.

The people’s constitutional remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors is impeachment initiated by the U.S. House of Representatives. Increasing calls for impeachment are being heard from many quarters. It is a distinctly separate accountability mechanism than an election, the latter of which a monarchial-thinking president can conceivably cancel. Not so with impeachment proceedings initiated by the people through the House of Representatives.

The long history of attempts at creating, then preserving, democratic government reveals that only when the people become vigilant with their elected representatives can tyranny and lawlessness be prevented, or overturned. Democracy is a government OF THE PEOPLE, not of the elected representatives that serve those people and take an oath to uphold the constitution. However, the people must actively participate from their home communities throughout the land enabling a constitutional democracy to work.

There is a long history of local participation in assuring popular policies in the United States. At this historical juncture we must reactivate our empowerment to be publicly vigilant, including through and with our locally elected governments.

As a former officer who served in Vietnam and witnessed horrific carnage, all needless, I deeply wish that I had been exposed to role models in my hometown who dared to question the arrogant and interventionist policies of our national government. Like so many others, I was caught up in the groupthink of the moment, only to regret it later, having to live with memories of participating in crimes against humanity due to my ignorance and lack of exposure to critical thinking.

I praise the Arcata City Council for continuing to possess a vision for what good, constitutional government is all about–of, by and for the people, and speaking up on the people’s behalf when the national government goes awry!

POSTSCRIPT: On July 21, 2004 the Arcata City Council, voted 5-0 for a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Examine the shadow, and heal from it, or in the alternative, continue projecting the shadow outward until all life is eliminated.

In early April 1969, I found myself in a surreal situation, after which I was never the same. I was in a small village (name unknown), accompanied by a South Vietnamese lieutenant named Bao. Educated in the United States, Bao spoke English fluently, and knew the area well. I was standing no more than 3 feet from the mangled body of a young Vietnamese woman who it appeared had been struggling to protect her children as the village came under fire. Both of her arms remained clutched around her three small children. The village had been bombed just minutes before our arrival by U.S.-trained and equipped South Vietnamese pilots.

Dozens of bodies lay strewn on the ground in this small rice-farming village located between the city of Sa Dec and the Bassac River a few miles to its south in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Many appeared dead; others moved ever so slowly while making moaning sounds. A water buffalo with a huge gaping hole in its belly lay about 20 feet to the right, emitting shrill groans. My eyes, however, were intensely focused on the open eyes of the woman at my feet.

I bent over to get a closer look, my eyes glued to hers, wondering whether she was alive. Seeing no evidence of life, no blinking, no apparent breathing, I began to gag, then whimper. I was aghast to discover that napalm had incinerated her eyelids and much of the skin on her face and neck. Her children had suffered a similar fate. My crying exploded into chest heaves. As I slowly stood erect I noticed that many, if not all of the villagers had been hit by a combination of machine-gun fire, shrapnel from bombs, and napalm. Though this scene was fairly typical after bombing missions on villages, I had never before been a witness to such horror. And I saw no evidence of weapons of any kind among the rubble and debris.

Almost immediately after I began gagging and crying, Lt. Bao, with a strange grin, asked me what was wrong. In shock, I responded with words incomprehensible to him and amazingly startling to myself. I said something to the effect that these people were like part of my family. The words simply came out my mouth, without any forethought.

Our mission had been to double-check on the ground whether South Vietnamese pilots were in fact deliberately missing their targets as had been rumored. We learned that, at least in this case, the pilots had accurately hit their target–a seemingly defenseless village suspected of being sympathetic to the VC.

As we returned in my jeep to our airbase less than 10 miles further southeast at Binh Thuy on the other side of the Bassac River, which we crossed by ferry, Bao and I rode in silence. My cheeks felt hotter than the roasting heat of the midday sun. Racing through my mind was a notion that the horror we had just observed, and then abandoned as quickly as we had arrived, represented something terribly wrong about the war. Even if this particular bombing had been a mistake, what about those dozens that appeared egregiously wounded? Who was to look after their medical condition? Somehow it was none of our business; no one really cared.

Could a mature, rational, intelligent society dedicated to justice and democracy be doing such a thing–deliberately bombing civilian villages thousands of miles from home–in order to help people? Another question that kept popping up in my mind on that ride was, “Who is really authentic in this war?” Here I was, standing a tall 6′ 3″ with European ancestry, a God-fearing American educated and trained to stop the spread of evil communism. I had traveled thousands of miles ostensibly to save these yellow-skinned villagers, who stood barely 5′ tall, from this evil ideology. Was I not the epitome of the world’s heroes? Then there was this mangled woman and the three children she was clutching, none of whom likely ever traveled more than a few dozen miles away from their home village, and all the other villagers left strewn on the ground like scum. These people had been living a simple, subsistence lifestyle in their village. Who was more authentic? This provocative question increasingly found its way into my consciousness as I endured the rest of my time in Vietnam. It followed me home. The more I pondered the question, the more I came to believe that I was not an authentic person at all, at least not as long as I was saddled with this rigid ideology about being the good guy. The Vietnamese villagers, on the other hand, who sought to live at peace in their own country, represented a kind of humble authenticity that I had never known existed. I had never experienced anything like this before.

It wasn’t long before I understood these bombing missions to be routine and deliberate, not aberrations or the result of mistakes. Virtually all Vietnamese in the post-1968 Tet period of the war, in the area in which I found myself (Phong Dinh, Vinh Long, An Giang, Ba Xuyen, and Vinh Binh Provinces around Can Tho City north and south of the Bassac River) nearly 100 miles south of Saigon, were considered VC enemy.

The question led to others, like, “How could I have so easily followed orders to travel across the Pacific Ocean to participate in destroying a culture I knew absolutely nothing about?” What a feat it was that the U.S. government, as most other governments, so easily convinced young, mostly men, to travel to other countries to kill, maim, or be killed and maimed? And from where did my crazy idea originate that these foreign people were part of my family? They were strangers to me. Why should seeing their demise elicit such intense vomiting and sobbing? I began to understand that I had experienced what the Bible refers to as an epiphany, a manifest appearance of a new set of eyes, a whole new perspective I never knew existed. I wondered if other people had had experiences like this.

Searching answers for these questions has guided my journey for the 30-plus years since I was in Vietnam. I have just barely scratched the surface of what can be learned from the studies of history, politics, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, spirituality and theology that have accompanied my personal healing journey. I wanted to know how it was that I was so easily brainwashed. More accurately, I wanted to know where was my soul as a young man. I wanted to know about epiphaniesówhat are they, and how often in history, indeed in each person’s history, they occur.

A SOCIETY OF FEAR AND SHAME

One thing I learned fairly quickly in my post-Vietnam quest for truth is the manner in which the U.S. civilization was founded and how it has sustained itself. Considered an “exceptional” civilization, this image has been conveyed so successfully from generation after generation that I thanked God in my nightly prayers in the 1940s and 1950s for having been blessed with birth in “America.”

The United States civilization, including the European ancestors who created its basic ideas, values and forms, was born in arrogance and a racism that manifested in behavior nothing short of barbarism and terrorism. It was expressed brutally at gunpoint against the Hemisphere’s original Indigenous inhabitants, enabling early settlers to obtain virtually “free” land upon which to live and work. Multiple millions were killed. Then “free” labor was acquired at gunpoint through participation in the African slave trade. Again, multiple millions were killed. Holocaust number three took place from the late 1890s to the present, what some call “The American Century.” During this period the United States, through over 300 overt military actions and an estimated 10,000 covert interventions, acquired its expanding resource base at gunpoint from “Third World” countries, killing and maiming dozens of millions, assuring impoverishment of billions. This helps explain “American” exceptionalism. It has murdered, pillaged, and plundered its way to having what is claimed the highest standard of living in the world. After all, “there is no way like the American Way.”

It is not that other nations and their developing empires have not behaved similarly. After all, this basically Western, exploitive model can be traced back to the earliest of the urban civilizations at the end of the Neolithic period some 5,500 years ago. It has consistently prevailed, with some notable exceptions at certain periods of times in certain locales, with its male dominator model, using hierarchical and bureaucratic regimes to control the labor of large numbers of workers, either as chattel or wage slaves, with violence always being the ultimate enforcement technique. However, the United States has surpassed all previous imperial civilizations in the amount of violence, devastation of cultures, and in the global territory controlled.

However, the leaders and many of the inhabitants of the United States still consider that they live in an “exceptional” society. Unfortunately, our society is deeply rooted in the use of terror to get its way. That is the American Way. Over the last several decades, a number of individuals, organizations, and written reports have increasingly exposed this fraudulent, make-believe version of exceptionalism, such that larger numbers of U.S. citizens either know of the lie, or are having to work much harder to remain in denial about it. Indeed, facing the truth–a huge shadow that hangs over us like a dark thundercloud–takes a bit of courage, maybe even an epiphany here and there. The fantasy that Bush II is masterfully attempting to carry out–the final stage in which the Western civilization model is carried to every nook and cranny on the globe–if successful, will likely provoke the cataclysmic collapse of life as we have known it for thousands of years.

The scene in that village near Sa Dec in April 1969 was no aberration. It could not have occurred without a sick imperial mind that deluded itself into thinking that it was good fighting evil. That mind has been developing for a long time, and it has had more than three additional decades of expansion since. Who are the authentic people? Who are the evil ones? It is time to understand that our fears of facing the truth of our civilization, our huge shadow, if not embraced so as to be honestly addressed, will be projected through demonizing people and nations the world over until all life is eliminated. You and I will go down with our deluded plutocrats.

Only withdrawing our support while organizing massive resistance to and non-cooperation with our imperium, while refocusing our energies and resources on creating local, self-reliant communities, gives us a vision of responsibility and feeling of empowerment. We as people can create a sustainable society that the male dominator, western oligarchic model is unable or unwilling to even consider.

When I was a young man growing up in western New York State I had several Seneca Indian acquaintances who jokingly remarked on occasion, "White man speaks with forked tongue." They called the U.S. American flag, "Old Gory." These remarks were made with a wide smile. I would laugh as well. After all, we were acquaintances playing on opposite high school basketball teams, and all our conversations were light and friendly. Their remarks were not to be taken seriously.

Now, in March 2003, I know that those young Indigenous men nearly 50 years ago were reciting truths handed down to them by their ancestors. They did not state them seriously, perhaps because they feared being ostracized by their white peers. At one point they voiced that the red stripes in the U.S. flag represented their blood, and the white stripes their bones, spilt and crushed as they attempted to protect their ancient lands and way of life from the onslaught of European settlers that began in the 1600s.

Since those blissful, innocent days of my youth, I have experienced war first-hand in Vietnam where I tragically realized later, I was an ignorant but serious invader of another people’s culture and land. In the process I witnessed the incomprehensible carnage of war, and it has had a profound impact on my psyche, and physical and mental health. It has provided me with a new set of eyes that sees from the heart as well as the head.

Subsequently, I have traveled to over two dozen countries examining the nature and effects of arrogant, racist U.S. interventionist policies on people, economies, and cultures. I have re-studied the history of the U.S. civilization and discovered that it acquired its land base, labor, and resources at gunpoint, causing the murder and maiming of hundreds of millions of Indigenous Americans, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. In effect our civilization is built upon three holocausts — against the Indigenous Americans for land, Africans for labor, and "Third World" for resources. This violence and the carnage left in its wake is virtually incomprehensible. The U.S. government has overtly intervened more than 400 times since 1799, and covertly thousands of times since 1947, into the affairs of more than 100 nations. Since most of us grew up learning nothing about this wrenching, authentic people’s history, but only the make-believe version we were taught, it comes as a shock to discover these historic truths. We have been living in a fantasy that has defined our rote "patriotism," our personal identity, and, up ’til now, our feelings of security. We have become dependent upon a way of life that is not only built upon incredible violence but, upon examination, a totally unsustainable paradigm.

American Way Of Life (AWOL)

With but 4.5 percent of the world’s population, the collective people comprising the United States civilization consume anywhere from 25 percent to upwards of half the world’s resources, depending on the resource examined. For, example, the U.S. uses 26 percent of the world’s current oil production. The insatiable consumption rate of U.S. and Western consumer/citizens, and the attitudes of individual and cultural selfishness that lay behind it, are the dynamic fuels that drive our "democratic," capitalist system — the transborder corporations and the nation-state political structures that are expanding the globalization of commodification, privitization, and de-regulation. This process accelerates the dependency upon dwindling, finite, non-replenishable Earth’s capital while toxifying it. Furthermore, it destroys cultures and ancient values and wisdom that have guided human evolution for millennia, and it tragically increases the gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots. When all of the "First World" is taken into consideration, 25 percent of the global population consumes 85 percent of the world’s resources. That leaves the "Third World" squeezed with but 15 percent.

"Full Spectrum Dominance"

Now, for the first time, the U.S. government has formally and publicly defined in bold and terrifying terms its global imperialist intentions to be, "beyond challenge," exercising "full spectrum dominance" over all dimensions of life. In fact, this imperialism and endless gobbling up of resources is absolutely necessary to enable the unimpeded continuation of the American Way Of Life (AWOL). Never mind that it is a policy that cannot possibly continue much longer because it is totally unsustainable. It dooms our race and many other species to extinction in the near future. Thus, we live in a grand delusion that will kill us all if we do not snap out of it, like the frog sitting in water who adapts to the increasingly hot temperature, mesmerized and in total denial of its lethal danger, until it boils to death.

The current lawless, aggressive attack on Iraq, and the Middle East in general, on top of 13 years of "genocidal" sanctions and 12 years of bombings, is a step in establishing the U.S. as the ultimate hegemonic power controlling all resources everywhere. Commensurate with this goal is the need to assure that the artificially overvalued U.S. dollar is not replaced in global economics by the European Union’s euro. Since 1999, Iraq has been trading oil in EU’s euros, threatening to start a trend with other oil producers such as Venezuela. This would severely interfere with U.S. global dominion, and conceivably lead to virtual collapse of the dollar and our entire, already weak economy. This factor cannot be minimized. Nonetheless, underneath all of the desperate, insane efforts to assure U.S. hegemony, is the protection of the insatiable consumption patterns that define AWOL, a way of life that has been politically determined, over and over, to be non-negotiable. This is why our nation is addicted to war, why it can’t kick militarism. [See the extraordinarily educational 64-page comic book, Addicted to War, Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism by Joel Andreas, available from local bookstores, the Arcata, CA Peace & Justice Center, or from publisher Frank Dorrel, P.O. Box 3261, Culver City, CA 90231; (310) 838-8131; addictedtowar.com].

Perceiving Our Danger; Enabling the Quantum Leap

An "easy" solution to the so-called war on "terror" as defined by the U.S. government, by far the most dangerous terrorist rogue state of them all, is to be willing as a nation to seriously re-negotiate AWOL. We need a way of life based on a global justice model rather than on a selfish, bully model. This would, of course, require a Manhattan Project-like effort (which hurriedly developed the Atomic bomb during World War II) that will only happen if the body politic undergoes a radical shift. This shift must come from below, from people like you and me in our local communities throughout this country who are experiencing a radicalization of our consciousness. This will enable us to begin making refreshingly different choices as to the manner in which we choose to live and govern our lives. These choices may startle us as to the amount of empowerment we actually possess. A bioregional model offers us a wonderful alternative to the unsustainable and ungovernable nation-state model we have been complicit with up to now. The latter is oligarchic, bureaucratic, plutocratic, and violent. In effect, the U.S. remains an oligarchy run by white male supremacists, the likes of whom founded our republic in the first place. Perhaps one can envision the bioregional alternative being a synthesis of the best of the Neolithic village, with what British economist E. Fritz Schumacher called Buddhist economics (or right livelihood) and appropriate (intermediate) technology. [See Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher (New York: Harper &am
p; Row, 1973)].

As a species we have been evolving some 7 million years or so. The Western model (male oligarchy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, hierarchy, enforced labor pools, violence, and expansion) has been more or less unfolding for about 6,500 years, when urban civilizations began preempting many Neolithic villages. Perhaps George II has been offered to our dumbed-down U.S. society as a cosmic gift in disguise that we might finally see the lethality of our attitudes, ways, and policies. When the human psyche is able to perceive threats to its continuation on this branch of the evolutionary tree, it is totally capable of making sudden and radical shifts. Perhaps that perception is beginning to take hold in people’s hearts and minds. Once able to process the extreme danger of raw global power to our own survival, we will humbly choose to quickly and radically make the necessary changes. The sacred interconnection of all life is awesome. With enthusiasm, imagination, and courage we can choose to live within the carrying capacity of each bioregion on the earth. The stakes are extraordinarily high — our very survival depends on it!

The World Wildlife Fund, in its Living Planet Report 2002, using ecological footprint (EF) analysis, concluded that the earth has 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space. Divided between the global population of over 6 billion people, this total equates to just 1.9 hectares per person. The EF of the average African, Asian, or Latin American consumer was less than 1.4 hectares per person in 1999. The average Western European’s EF was 5 hectares, but the average North American’s was about 9.6 hectares. This means that an average U.S. American requires, according to our current way of life, nearly 7 times the amount of land to live than an average person in the "Third World." This gross disparity compares similarly with the 15 percent global resources remaining for the poor versus 85 percent militarily assured resources for the world’s rich, a nearly six-fold differential. This is grotesquely immoral and ecologically unsustainable.

The EF of the average world consumer in 1999 was 2.3 hectares per person, or 20 percent above the earth’s biological capacity of 1.9 hectares per person. Thus, humanity already exceeds the planet’s capacity to sustain its consumption of renewable resources. The prestigious Washington-based Worldwatch Institute recently reported in its State of the World 2003 that the human race has only one, or perhaps two, generations to rescue itself!

I begin this open-ended, 300 calorie per day fast in Arcata, California for several reasons. Three-hundred calories represents about one-seventh the average daily calorie intake for a U.S. American, symbolizing the approximate disparity between "Third World" and "First World" resource consumption.

First, I choose an experience enabling me to feel some type of real sacrifice in solidarity with the suffering Iraqi people who are worth no less than myself or any other human being on the planet.

Second, I do the same for those U.S. men and women who have been ordered placed in harm’s way for lie after political lie, grotesquely violating international law.

Third, I want to participate in a focused reflection on the kinds of deep feelings that inhibit Westerners, and especially U.S. Americans, from liberating ourselves from the dehumanizing claustrophobic "box" that AWOL has squeezed us into. Some of these feelings, such as fear of losing our way of life, must be honestly dealt with so as to be overcome, freeing our ancient imagination for a genuinely sustainable way of life, where less is actually experienced as more.

Fourth, I want to deeply reflect on the consciousness of a biocentric life where I can internalize with others a new awareness of the awesome, sacred weave of life that intrinsically connects all life in the same destiny.

Fifth, I want to be wide open to the wisdom of the Great Spirit, and, from many wonderful fellow and sister seekers, the courage to discover and express our empowerment and imagination for changing our respective lives now. We welcome a revolution of our human consciousness, moving quickly from an anthropocentric (man-centered) to a biocentric (earth/life-centered) paradigm.

And Sixth, I hope this experience will lead myself and others in Humboldt County and elsewhere, to begin articulating intimate knowledge of our own bioregion, utilizing footprint analysis as a useful accounting tool for energy inputs and outputs. This will enable us to develop a concrete local plan for humans in this part of the earth to integrate within the carrying capacity of Mother Nature, modeling an alternative to our present imperial, dangerous nation-state model.