Introduction:
The ultimate
weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing
it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through
violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish
the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder
hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence
for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already
devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
MARTIN LUTHER KING,
JR., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or
Community?; pp. 62–63 (1967).
We are witnesses to a dramatically changing world in which our
old concepts of international peace and security, human rights and democracy
have been challenged by the perverse logic of terrorism and the inflammatory
rhetoric and violent responses of anti-terrorism. A growing concern, supported
by a vast array of validated information, has also been surfacing as to whether
these two apparently opposite poles are in fact somehow actually linked.
This includes the documented facts on public record of
September 11th as follows:
Members of the Bin-Laden family held a stake in the
Carlyle Company, the same military arms company as George Bush Senior-both ex
president of the USA and a former director of the CIA was a paid advisor for.
The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with
an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative.
Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle
Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of
its founding, becomes one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father,
Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the
revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after
September 11 (4).
Osama Bin-Laden was recruited by the CIA--and therefore,
the U.S. government--as well as Saudi Arabia in order to fight the Russians in
Afghanistan (5).
The official FBI and independent investigations into the
anthrax scare in the U.S. stopped at the highest levels of the U.S.
government's bio-security establishment USAMRIIDS. Approximately 50 million
people were exposed to the virus. The perpetrators had prior knowledge of
September 11th and were working in concert with it. They left clues to
implicate Iraq as the source for the anthrax but the strain was conclusively
proven to have originated in USAMRIIDS. The perpetrators were also determined
to have worked there as well. The investigation has been officially stopped
and blocked at this point (6).
The justification given to the public for invading
Afghanistan was that the Taliban were not cooperating with the USA and were
supporting al-Qaeda. This information runs contrary to the following evidence
that was suppressed from the public:
Former BBC correspondent in Kabul, Kate Clark, reported
on 2 September, 2002 that "An aide to the former Taleban foreign
minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, has revealed that he was sent to warn
American diplomats and the United Nations that Osama bin Laden was due to
launch a huge attack on American soil". "The minister was deeply
worried that the US military would react with deadly vengeance against
Afghanistan. As he put it, 'al-Qaeda, the Taleban's guests were going to
destroy the guesthouse'." Neither organisation heeded the warning, which
was given just weeks before the 11 September attacks. One US official
explained why: "We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff," he
said. "When people keep saying the sky's going to fall in, and it
doesn't, a kind of 'warning fatigue' sets in." (7)
George Bush, not winning the popular vote in the USA, came
into power under investigation for using a variety of intimidation and voter
corruption practices. In the state of Florida where his brother Jeb Bush was
governor many blacks were not allowed to vote because George Bush's state of
Texas, of which he was governor at that time, had sent official papers to
Florida claiming that many of their blacks were criminals and that they must be
disqualified from voting. As such a high percentage of blacks' votes were
disqualified from voting even though it was later proven that these people were
not criminals. In Florida particularly and throughout the USA many of the voting
booths of the poor districts were not functioning correctly and were set up so
that it was easy to vote for the wrong candidate. Most of the poor traditionally
vote for the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party of George Bush since
he represents USA's ultra-wealthy elites.
These issues, which are not even the tip of the iceberg, are a
matter of public record. They do not prove personal guilt of crimes, but they do
point to highly suspicious circumstances in extreme want of proper
investigation. If this were any other country belonging to the UN, the
international community would intervene to help facilitate the re-establishment
of proper voting practices. On the contrary, the international community is
almost mindlessly being intimidated into accepting at face value everything that
the present regime controlling the U.S. is spoon feeding to the world, even to
the extent of going to war in these unprecedented circumstances.
The devastating atrocities of September 11, 2001 and the
global reaction to them have raised many new issues for human rights defenders
and advocates of democracy alike. The use of terror and the unbridled response
of military force, without effective legal structures for public oversight,
combined with the negation of dialogue--in a world which depends on peace and
human development--demands attention and needs to be addressed. Yet there is no
existing forum, mechanism, or tool by which the public can effectively do so.
The only tool the public has is one of world wide protest which is largely
ineffective to save lives since by nature it is reactive. For a protest to
really gather momentum a war must already exist in which case people are already
dying and being killed. Further the entire corpus of alternative possibilities
is reduced to either a yes or no vote from the public to largely unresponsive
governments. By the time the public has gathered enough momentum to protest and
stop a war the objectives of the war have already been achieved.
Governments cannot claim public mandates for their actions
based on responses to spoon fed information given to their employers, the
people, via the entertainment industry: the media. Thousands of people in
Afghanistan have been killed and maimed including children, women, elderly and
the infirmed. Most of these people have probably never flown in an airplane,
conversed with westerners, and would be hard-pressed to point out where the Twin
Towers were on a map. Much less, these people, many of who were living day to
day on subsistence levels of resources, could be described as a threat to global
security. Even in a country like the USA that has the death penalty, one cannot
kill a person unless it is in self- defence, and it must be tried in a court of
law utilising due process with all the evidence revealed for scrutiny and cross
examination. Nor could you justifiably kill bystanders or an attacker’s
neighbours, family members, and so forth and still claim self-defence. In fact
you would be guilty of murder if you had done so. This is not a problem of
living in a democratic society as some would have it, but rather, it is a
problem of not having an effective democracy that responds to the will and
wisdom of an informed people.
Although we now realize that the world is not as safe as we
may have once believed, we must not allow fear, suspicion, prejudice, and
military might to be the defining features of international relations. Rather,
we must redouble our efforts to create optimal conditions for lasting
international peace and security; namely, respect for human rights, justice, the
rule of law, and the effective empowerment of the people: the re-establishment
of a functional democracy. The eradication of war and its causes was the
principal reason for setting up the United Nations. The violation of human
rights has been found by a consensus of experts across the planet to be one of
the major causes of war. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is drafted
and signed by countries around the world acknowledging this link.
Effects of a universal income
In a functional democratic society where everyone is the boss or sovereign there
is no unemployment. Physical and psychological poverty would be rendered almost
obsolete. The stress issues associated with inability to live and provide
adequately for a household with dignity as well as the power conflicts that lead
to violence between races, sexes and the various other classes of people would
dramatically decline. Everyone would share the highest status attainable in a
free society and would have equal access to essential life resources like
education and health.
The cause(s) of violence have been the source for debate for many years.
The debate has focused on the nature of violence being either learned--a product
of environmental/social causes--or biological. The evidence has almost unequivocally been recognised
in recent years now as being fundamentally learned or acquired from the social
environment with biological factors being secondary in importance. One of the
major contributors to the learning--or social acquisition of violent
behaviour--has been that of low-socio-economic status: poverty. A summary of the
issues are quoted by three experts in the field as follows (2):
Dr. Gerald Patterson, Child Psychologist, Oregon Social Learning Center
Adverse conditions can set in motion a process that will produce delinquent
children… And the studies done by the sociologists Sampson and Loeb show
beautifully that extreme poverty produces a kind of a chain reaction that leads
to this outcome.
Dr. Eric Taylor, MRC Child Psychiatry Unit
All those biological causes are, as best we know, relatively unimportant by
comparison with the very important impact of social and psychological factors.
If I wanted to make a child anti-social, then I wouldn't start with their
biology. I would start by bringing them up in a very harsh, deprived
environment.
Dr. Klaus Miczek Psycho-pharmacologist of Tufts University
It is absolutely true the effect of poverty and lower socio-economic status
has on increasing violent behaviour. The statistics on this are overwhelming.
The important issues here are that [the stresses of] poverty and lower-economic
status can impact on neural chemistries. Behaviour experiences alter neural
chemistries. The street is really a two-way street, not just neural chemistry
determines behaviours but behaviours feedback to neural chemistries.
For example, in the case of domestic violence, where women may find
themselves entrapped within dysfunctional or violent relationships, they would
have the financial resources readily available to easily leave and start their
own lives. This would be likewise true in the reverse cases for males. Many
youths who have been excluded from society economically may join gangs for
acceptance, support and survival. The acknowledgement of the youth as equals in
deed, not just in words, accepts and values them as human beings. They will no
longer need gangs and will model more socially appropriate bahaviours. Crimes of
violence would then be more related to mental health issues and would be treated
accordingly, not through the criminal justice system.
It was a crime to single out the poor as a primary source for the targeting of
budget cuts in welfare spending during the 1990s in New Zealand. The society
robbed from those who were in highest need and were the most vulnerable and gave
their income to those with the most resources (See Ph.D. Srikanta Chatterjee's Sharing the
National Cake in Post Reform New Zealand: Inequality Trends in Terms of Income
Sources ).
This
action was a primary crime that caused the secondary effect-crimes of violence
and stealing by some of the poor who used the only skills they had to cope with
their discriminative ostracism from society. They were denied their equal right
to a job of their choice that would pay them enough to raise a household, their
right to free health care, their right to a free education that would help them
learn how to effectively and peacefully pursue their rights as well as
participate in the creation of a society in which they would most like to live.
A Universal Income would reduce crimes that are based on stealing. In
Auckland, up until the late 1980s, "honesty boxes" with large amounts
of money use to lay unattended on main streets of the major vendors of
newspapers. During those times people had reasonable incomes and therefore had
no real need to steal: so they didn't. The Universal Income would become a
tangible symbol of the society’s restoration of the values of self-worth and
respect of those days similar to the parallel of the Semai tribe studied by
Robert Denton in Malaya when they returned home (3).
Strong evidence that violence and aggression are learned rather than
instinctive forms of behaviour comes from the Semai of central Malaya. Left to
themselves, the 13,000 Semai are so gentle that not a single murder has ever
been recorded among them and they do not even feel the need for a police
force.
According to anthropologist Robert Dentan, who spent more than a year
living with them, the Semai learn to be non-violent from the time they are
children. Youngsters see gentle behaviour all around them. Although they hunt
and kill animals for food, they also raise large numbers of animals as pets
and for trade; the animals they raise they treat tenderly and rarely kill.
Adults never hit each other, and if two children appear to be on the verge oŁ
a fight, their parents quickly separate them.
Such Pacific behaviour may change drastically if the Semai are transplanted
to a culture in which they are exposed to violence. In the early 1950s, the
British recruited and trained them for a force to fight Communists in Malaya.
When some of them were killed in battle by the Communists, their comrades
reacted with great ferocity. So aggressive can they become that a veteran
later recalled, ‘We killed, killed, killed. We only thought of killing.
Truly we were drunk with blood.’
When the fighting was over and the Semai soldiers returned to their homes
they quickly reverted to their old non-violent ways. At home and abroad, the
decisive factor in their behaviour was what they were taught.
It should be added that the US government, in order to avoid investing in
social spending on the poor as they see it, are continuing to fund researchers
at the National Institute for Health in order to find a genetic cause for
violence.
Wars
Wars have been recognised, by experts internationally, to have as their root
cause violations of human rights (See the Preamble " Universal Declaration
of Human Rights").
The motivation for the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights was founded on this common understanding.
Universal Income Systems are an acknowledgment of this. They have at their
root the recognised parameters outlined by the UDHR as well as its recommended
follow-up legal extensions the International Bill of Human Rights. They ensure
the education, resourcing and empowerment of the people to meet the needs of
human rights, sustainability and peace everywhere.
UI
systems shift the power of a country back to the people. As such wars waged,
like today, by elite groups for their own special interest concerns--usually to
maintain the disparities--without
proper consultation with the public, would be far more difficult to do. The
public would have the time, skill and resources to get more involved in
understanding the issues. If the war is pushed through anyway, the people who
are opposed to it could financially afford to simply choose not to go to war. It
is much more difficult to incite a war when the people they are sending to kill
and be killed for reasons they don’t understand--or agree with--do
not need the wages.
Footnotes
1. For more information on some of these stress factors see
" Social Inequalities in Health:
New Zealand 1999" on page42" .
2. Wot you lookin at?, video,
written and produced by Oliver James and David Malone, London: BBC Videos for
Education and Training, 1993,
http://www.sprachenzentrum.hu-berlin.de/med/katalog/ englisch/e613gese.htm.
Available at Humboldt University Berlin.
3. Violence and
Aggression, Ronald H. Bailey and Editors, Human Behaviour, Time-Life
International (Nederland) B.V. 1977, ch 2, p 48.
4. Has
someone been sitting on the FBI?, BBC News | NEWSNIGHT | Greg Palest
report transcript - 6/11/01 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/
english/events/newsnight/newsid_1645000/1645527.stm.
5. Centre for
Research on Globalisation, by Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics,
University of Ottawa, Canada, http:// www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html.
6. The Hunt for
the Anthrax Killer, documentary written and produced by Martin Wilson,
BBC News and Current Affairs, 2002.
7. BBC News,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2242594.stm.
