War on Terrorism

 
Or War on Citizen’s Rights?
 
Or both?
 
Regardless of how or why the war on terrorism began the result is that the government is using it as an excuse to spy on its citizens and shroud a lot of government activity in secrecy. This is a threat to the basic principles of democracy. In order to have a successful democracy the public has to have a good education and access to the information they need to make decisions, and they also need to know what their government is doing. The secrecy that is being used to combat the war on terror may be more dangerous than the terror itself especially since their doesn’t seem to be that much damage from the war on terror compared to many other much worse disasters even if you include 9/11. Or at least there isn’t as much damage to Americans compared to other disasters. If you count the damage that is being done to third world citizens it may be different.
 
The problem with terrorism should be solved the same way as any other problem, by finding the cause and preventing it. This won’t happen if everyone is driven into a panic mode. The assumption that war is the solution to all our problems is false. War is the absence of solutions where everyone is fighting each other and trying to destroy the opposition. A closer look at history and the events that led up to the war on terrorism will help do this but in order to do this successfully there needs to be a good look at all relevant aspects of the subject not just the aspects that the Mass Media and the government drill into the heads of the public.

There are many contributing causes to terrorism but most of them may fall into two categories generally speaking. The first one is that most of these terrorist come from violent communities where they have little or no opportunities to lead a pleasant life. They are often raised in countries run by tyrants that suppress their people with violence and the only way they learn to deal with problems is by fighting violence with violence. Many of these tyrannical regimes have been supported by the United States or other European governments at one time or another and in many case they are still receiving some degree of support from these governments. The most effective way of addressing this problem is to put an end to tyrannical governments in the most effective way possible and set up a rational education system so that the citizens of any given country can learn how to run their own country.

The second leading cause is that instead of receiving a rational education from birth they are often indoctrinated into one belief system or another without any rational attempt to sort out the truth. The truth is often dictated to these people and when they try to challenge false beliefs they are often intimidated or punished from birth. They learn not to challenge authority as long as that authority has sufficient power at any given time. If this starts at birth and goes on long enough they may adopt a fanatical belief system where logic doesn’t apply. Once again the most effective way to address this problem is to set up a rational education system in third world countries where different ideas can be explored and the public can be involved in sorting through the details and figuring out what is true. These are long term solutions and they aren’t the solutions the government and the Mass Media are focusing on. What the government and the Mass Media are focusing on seems to be efforts to try to stop terrorism just barely before it happens. This is having limited success and at a great cost. A closer look at history including some reliable source that the government isn’t pointing out to the public indicates that the government is almost certainly exaggerating the threat as they did when we were in the cold war and they exaggerated the amount of missiles the USSR had. The government is also overlooking many things that may indicate that some of these terrorists may have some legitimate grievances. That doesn’t mean they are expressing their grievances well, they aren’t nor does it mean that terrorism is justified by these grievances. However they should still be taken into consideration even if they aren’t legitimate. Just because many people in the western world doesn’t understand these grievances doesn’t mean they aren’t a part of the problem that needs to be addressed. In many cases the USA has supported many tyrannical regimes and supplied them with arms in the past when it served their purposes but then when they no longer needed the people from these third world countries they abandoned them. The United States has propped up the government of the Shah on several occasions before it was overrun by religious extremists, in the eighties they supplied weapons to both sides in the Iran Iraq war at times, they supplied weapons to the Mujahedeen which later became the Taliban and Al-Qaida, they continue to support the government of Saudi Arabia even though they still support radical Islamic fundamentalists. The US isn’t operating from some sort of moral high ground nor have they earned the trust of the citizens of the USA or the world. Any trust they have obtained is a result of the control or influence they have over some of the most powerful institutions in the world including the Mass Media.

Contrary to the image they project of themselves they aren’t fighting to protect democracy around the world. In order to protect democracy they have to help preserve and expand the educational systems in the world and make sure the public has access to the moist important information they need to make rational decisions and stick up for their own rights. Not only haven’t they been doing this abroad but they are also providing the citizens of the US with an enormous amount of propaganda that ignore many of the most important facts and keep the majority of the public so that they don’t provide much resistance to the political institutions in power. The US government is dominated by two parties both of which receive the majority of their campaign finances from multinational-corporations that conduct business around the world often with some of the worst tyrants that suppress their people and provide breeding grounds for terrorism. The same multinational-corporations have excessive control over the Mass Media. This means that some of the most powerful institutions of the world are actually responsible for inciting terrorism.

The USA has also been involved in many other conflicts unrelated to Islamic extremism around the world often protecting the financial interests of major corporations even when it involved suppressing the people of those countries. Many of the countries that were influenced during the cold war based on the assumption that we had to fight the threat of communism were actually manipulated for the best interest of many of the most powerful corporations. This includes the influence in many of the countries in Central America and South America and it probably includes Viet Nam as well. A closer look at history from the right sources clearly indicates a lot of the history that is presented to the public is very selective and it ignores many inconvenient facts. One good source to check is “The Peoples History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. This is just one of many low profile books that the Mass Media has virtually ignored.

The multi-national corporations use a very sophisticated system to influence the public which most people don’t understand but they often do understand that something is wrong and they are getting the short end of the stick while those with political power lead much better lives. If this was simpler it would be much easier to understand. Consider what would happen if a high school bully beats someone up every day and that person starts to hate him and seeks revenge. In this simple instance it is easy to understand why the victim hates the bully. This would be similar to what is happening on a global scale but it is done by huge institutions controlled by a small percentage of the public. They control the Mass Media and they understand how to manipulate a larger percentage of the public and use divide and rule tactics to maintain their power. They are doing the same thing in a more complicated way so they can maintain plausible deniability. As Robert Bowman says “We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom, and human rights. We are hated because we deny these things to people in third world countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations.” The multi-national corporations are working with countries around the world that deprive their citizens of basic rights and they are supported by the USA. Instead of educating the public in these countries and allowing them to learn how to run their own governments the USA is supplying arms and money to the tyrants running many countries in return for their natural resources and cheap virtual slave labor. This creates a breeding ground where fanatics can recruit uneducated people for their cause who are smart enough to know that they are not having the freedom that US propaganda claims they are. The US Media pays little or no attention to what they often call collateral damage. This means that there are hundreds of thousands being killed and tortured around the world. In addition to that they have very little benefit if any from the natural resources of their own countries. The environment is being destroyed and many people have to fight for clean water or their basic needs.
 
The following is a quote from the declaration of Independence. "....all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." The majority of the public hasn’t fully comprehended what this means but many of the people who have been manipulating the public have. They have set the stage so that there is a fairly large middle class in the USA and other western countries with a reasonable education and a reasonably good life style or at least one that is good enough to forestall major protests from these people. These people are often a fairly strong voting block perhaps second only to the richest people. They have some say in the way the country is run as long as they pay enough attention. This is usually limited to a few issues and even they don’t have as much influence as they think. Then there are the lower classes in the USA who have less education and don’t know how to stand up for their rights as well as many others. When they do they often do so based on information given to them from a demagogue. In many cases the various demagogues cancel each others influence and while they are arguing amongst themselves and paying attention to the scandal of the day usually about sex or some other issue that doesn’t influence policy the upper classes pretty much do what they want. While this is happening in the USA there are many people in other countries who have to suffer evils that are insufferable and they strike out in the only way they know how. Since they usually have even less education then the lower classes in the USA and because they are usually being suppressed with violence they usually strike out with violence.
 
H.L. Mencken once said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” He wasn’t quite right but he was close. If they were all imaginary it would be tough to convince the public they were real; if they picked a real “hobgoblin” or some one that most didn’t understand so they seemed like a hobgoblin and incited them so they would strike out in a violent way then exaggerated the threat the public would be much more likely to believe it. This is exactly what is happening now. The war on terror is just another divide and rule tactic.

The government is also much less inclined to protect security when it comes to infringing on the rights of those with political power. Most of the 9/11 bombers were Saudi’s yet they gave the Saudi royal family a free pass out of the country without much if any investigation. They haven’t done much if anything to real the Saudis in despite the fact that they still infringing on the rights of many of their people and support radical Islam. Nor do they do much if anything to slow down the massive amount of goods crossing the border due to the NAFTA agreement yet the majority of the public is expected to undergo embarrassing pat down searches and or body scans even little children and old ladies. The USA has also been responsible for providing many of the arms that have often been turned against us. In many cases the weapons sent to tyrannical regimes that suppressed their own people have come from the USA including the arms sold to the Shah before the radicals took over as well as the arms supplied to the Mujahedeen and the USA continues to make it easier to get weapons in the USA than many if any other country in the world. When the US invaded Afghanistan the CIA found a manual that taught their people to take advantage of the loop holes in gun control laws like lack of background checks at gun shows. Many terrorist groups including the IRA have obtained guns for export in the USA so they could use them for terrorism in other counties.

Part of the reason many of these people resort to violence is because it is the only thing they know how to do. They didn’t receive the education necessary to get ahead in the current complex system and they weren’t taught non violent ways to protest besides many of the people that do use nonviolent ways to protest are virtually ignored. If some of these people did have a better education they might participate in the nonviolent protests and they might be too big to ignore or even better they might find a better way to reform the system that is more efficient and educates the public in a more efficient manner.
 
Many people that are consulting with the government or other institutions that influence the government already understand this. The FBI has a Behavioral Science Unit that studies this on a domestic level, The political campaigners study different ways to manipulate the public, and the CIA has been consulting with Psychologists, sociologist and other academics for at least forty or fifty years. Some of these former members of the FBI’s BSU have written several books about profiling and Victor Marchetti and John Marks came forward over thirty years ago to report on many of the tactics the CIA have been using and this was endorsed by former CIA director William Colby endorsed it. This indicates that many of the people conducting the war on terror have a much better understanding of how flawed it is than the majority of the public. There needs to be a much better effort to educate the public.

The USA is ignoring the root causes of terrorism and scapegoating those that are least able to stand up for themselves in a rational manner. They are instigating hatred in sophisticated manners and then when people strike out they call them a terrorist and follow this up with an enormous amount of propaganda that is designed to convince the public these people are guilty until proven innocent and they don’t even deserve the right to a defense. King George tried similar things over 200 years ago when he labeled the rebels rabble. How the terrorist are portrayed in the future depends on who “wins” the war and writes the history. The truth may not be taken into consideration if the most powerful people have their say.
 
Declaration of Independence:
http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/index.htm 
 
For report on “Guns and Terror: How the terrorist exploit our weak gun laws”
http://www.bradycampaign.org/studies/view/83/  http://www.bradycenter.org/xshare/pdf/reports/gunsandterror.pdf

To read Robert Bowman’s comments see:
http://www.rmbowman.com/ssn/Terror2.htm
 
For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

Health Care Premiums and where they go

 Neither the major insurance companies, the Mass Media nor the government make much if any attempt to tell the public how the insurance premiums collected from the public are spent. If they did then it would be much easier for the public to know how to reform the health care system. Even without this information the public can do a lot to understand how to reform this just by setting up an organizational method to understand the break down. Once you look at this perhaps you may think it will be worth considering to require disclosure and open books from the insurance companies. As far as I know all the money for health care comes from the premiums collected from the public by the insurance companies but they have other expenses so all the money the collect can’t go to health care. A closer look at the break down of where the money does go could help the debate on health care reform.

The following numbers are just guesses. This isn’t intended to be accurate but it does give you an idea how the true figures can be broken down and how it could help understand how to reform health care. Even without credible numbers it will still help to look at the categories when deciding where expenses should be cut.
 
Medical expenses:
Outpatient care 10% or A%
Inpatient care 21% or B%
Major operations 15% or C%
Pharmaceuticals 20% or D%
Preventive medicine 4% or E%
Prevention education less than 1% or F%
Total  75% or G%
Percentage of health care going to children 10% or H%
Percentage of health care going to retired people over sixty-five 10% or I%
Percentage of health care going to adults up to age sixty-five 55% or K%

Non medical expenses:
Advertisements 8% or L%
Lobbying 2% or M%
Claims adjusters or claims processors 4% or N%
Commissions 1% or O%
Profits 8% or P%
Other expenses 4% or Q%
Total 25% or R%
 
One of the biggest arguments for the current system is that the free market should be allowed to compete to provide the best health care. They offer little or no explanation as to how they compete amongst themselves; however once you realize that the insurance companies don’t actually provide the health care they just finance it then you can tell that either they compete on the nonmedical expenses or they pressure the care givers to cut costs. If they pressure the health care providers to cut costs how do they do it? Do they pressure them to cut costs on the short term expenditure at the expense of the long term preventative health care?

If they cut costs on the non medical costs then do they compete by advertising less or more? Do they compete by seeing who does the most effective job convincing the public they provide good care whether or not they do or not? 
 
From the point of view of a policy holder it should be clear that advertising dollars don’t do anything to improve health care but they do a lot to convince a lot of people that health care is better than it is if these people don’t take the time to think it through. The more money spent on administrative costs and other non medical costs like advertising and lobbying the less will be available for actual health care.
 
From the point of view of a stock holder the opposite is true. The more spent on effective advertising the more business they get regardless of whether or not the customer gets a good deal. This indicates a clear conflict of interest. Unfortunately the insurances companies seem to have much more influence with the Mass Media and the government than the public. Insurance companies spend a large amount of money on both advertisements and on lobbying. They also share a lot of stock holders with many other corporations including the major media outlets. This certainly seems to have an influence on the policies of the government and the reporting of the Mass Media.
 
If there is something that should be increased it is the amount of money spent on preventive medicine and educating the public about a healthy lifestyle. Prevention education is virtually non existent in the current system due to the fact that they can’t limit it to the people who pay the premiums. In a public system with full disclosure there would be a much better chance to set up a system where the public can be better educated since there would be no need to make sure people that don’t pay for education don’t get it. Education should be made available to the public in the most effective way possible. This would require a way to pay for it of course but many members of the public would be much more willing to pay taxes if they thought they would get their moneys worth.
 
We also need much more attention on child health care since this has a much bigger impact on the long term productivity of health care. If children get good health care it could dramatically reduce costs in the long run since it would mean catching problems before they get worse. In many cases it doesn’t seem as urgent when a child gets sick but the long term implications can be much worse. Elderly need care to of course and their problems often seem much worse but the impact can never be as big as the impact for children. Under the current circumstances we spend much more for elderly in the last few years of their lives than we do for children and it still doesn’t save their lives or in many cases improve the quality of their lives. More attention should be given to improving the quality of the lives of the elderly and reducing their pain when necessary. Spending an enormous amount of money to prolong the life of a few for a short period of time and neglecting the young is a form of rationing that is done unintentionally by neglecting to think things through.
 
Just because some of the categories are for legitimate health care concerns doesn’t mean all the money for these categories goes to legitimate uses. The same process should be repeated to see how the hospitals and drug companies spend their money. We should have some access to information about how profitable these companies are as well. If they are padding their profits by giving insufficient care or charging excessive prices that should be disclosed. For example the expenditures of the drug companies could be disclosed and we could find out how much goes into manufacturing these drugs and how much goes to research. Then we would have a better idea of how much of the price of drugs are because of excessive patent rights. In many cases the same drug costs half the price in Canada. This is due to different patent laws. We should have a more organized look at the way other systems are run so that we can compare them and find out which works the best. One of the biggest reasons many people believe the USA has the best health care system in the world is because of the massive advertising campaign and a sense of patriotism by many people. It doesn’t appear to be because we actually do have the best health care system in the world or even close. If there are some good things we do better than the rest of the world we should find them and keep them but get rid of the corruption.
 
Another argument against a public run system is that the government is incompetent. This has been true in many cases but not all. In many cases it depends on how they are held accountable or if they are held accountable. What we need is an open system where the public can understand how things are run whether it is public or private. Then the public can find problems and fix them. Also in many cases the people that accuse the government of being incompetent work for the same corporations that finance the campaigns of politicians who appoint incompetent people to run certain departments. If the corporations corrupted the politicians and then the politicians appointed incompetent people to regulate the corporations then it would be the fault of the corporations. This is like letting the fox guard the henhouse. Direct evidence for this may be hard to find but there is an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence to indicate this may be happening.

 In at least one case they have advocated a policy that is clearly designed to charge more for those who aren’t paying attention or have a hard time affording health care coverage. They have proposed a penalty for those who don’t buy mandatory health coverage. I think this may have been put into practice in Massachusetts already. In most cases these people are less likely to pay attention to elections either. They are clearly trying to increase profits at the expense of the people who are less politically active. 
 
The fact that there is little or no discussion about how the premiums are spent and the lack of disclosure should raise some major red flags indicating that the way health care is being handled including the current debate on health care reform is insincere. It should also raise major questions about the credibility of both the Mass Media and the government. If neither of them explain the most obvious basics while trying to reform health care then it would appear as if they may be trying to avoid accountability and they may not deserve the trust they ask for.
 
In order to address this the public needs to take the lead in reforming health care. The public needs to do what it takes to educate themselves since it is clear that the most powerful institutions are unwilling to do it. In order for this to be successful there also needs to be reform of the election process and the Mass Media as well. The fact that none of the major Media outlets are informing the public of the basics indicates that we don’t have the free press that is necessary to have a true democracy. The Mass Media has often complained that they deserve the right to free speech and rightly so but that shouldn’t give them the right to drown out the right to free speech for the majority of the public. The Mass Media doesn’t tell the public about many issues and even when someone tries to buy advertising in some cases they reject it for one reason or another. Under the current system free speech for the majority means they can talk to a very
small percentage of the public but the Mass Media can get their messages across to the vast majority of the public and they can repeat it so often that it has the effect of indoctrinating a significant percentage of the less educated members of the public.
 
The insurance companies shouldn’t be allowed to withhold the most important information about how premiums are spent from the public.
 
For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

Manipulation Tactics

 

The most important thing to understand about manipulation tactics is that if you don't understand it and your leaders do they will be able to manipulate you to do what is in their own best interest at your expense. Even if you do understand these tactics others may not and if special interests manipulate them then their votes may be under the influence of the special interests and this may influence you; therefore it will be in your best interest if these manipulation tactics are taught to the public to strengthen our democracy.

As long as tyrants understand these manipulation tactics and more and the public doesn’t then there will never be a true democracy.

The most effective way to manipulate the public is to withhold education from them and if necessary do what it takes to make sure they don’t get an education on their own. This is why it has often been considered a crime to educate slaves. This is why we need education reform or a nonviolent educational revolution. In order to ensure that education reform isn’t just another form of indoctrinating the public it is important for this to include education about the tactics that have been used to manipulate the public in the past.

A large percentage of the information the public obtains is from advertising or it is financed by advertising money. Corporations have done an enormous amount of advertising research to understand what the most effective way to sell their products to the public. Basically what this means is they are studying the public like guinea pigs. This may not seem like the general perception of research subjects but the trial and error method is there which is the most important ingredient of research. They try to promote their products one way and if it doesn’t work they do something different. They are trying to do what it takes to maximize profits. This means trying to convince the public they need stuff and they should pay for it. They also want to convince the public they are getting a good deal without actually giving it to them. In order to maximize profits it helps to keep prices high hence the tried and true tactic of marking up to mark down. Just about everything the advertising industry does is intended to create the appearance of honesty and increase the profits of corporations at the same time. In many cases even though the ads are clearly unreliable by repeating them over and over again it makes them seem acceptable to those who aren’t on their guard. For example the ads telling the public they are “covered, totally covered, completely covered” are flawed in a simple basic manner; the more the insurance companies spend on the commercial the less money they have for medical coverage. By repeating it over and over again and not having any other alternative available from the Mass Media the consumers either go for the ad or a similar one that isn’t any better. Many people doubt that they are influenced by advertising yet if they weren’t then the enormous amount of money spent on advertising would be a total waste. Either the advertising is very effective or the corporations are run by an enormous amount of incompetent people.  The fact that the Mass Media is financed solely by advertising dollars mainly from the most powerful corporations also creates a conflict of interests since they are also the leading watch dogs that report on the wrong doing of corporations.

If the public understood how much they were being effected by advertising and how much it is influencing the news content they might take a second look at the way public TV should be financed and create boards to at least provide recommended guidelines or perhaps more influence over the programming content. The Mass Media is controlled by a very small amount of people and by repeating things over and over again they have an enormous influence on what the public thinks about if not what the position of many members of the public is. In many cases they do have a disproportionate amount of influence over the political positions of the less educated people simply by drowning out the points of view of those that disagree with the mass media. They also do a very effective job at manipulating the emotions of the public and keeping them distracted from the most important issues. Without a high profile alternative media with influence from sincere academics, civil rights advocates and members of the public we will never have a true democracy.

The major political parties have been doing an enormous amount political research on how to win elections. This is similar to corporate advertising only for political reasons. This means that when they do their polling and other form of research they are studying ways to manipulate the public like guinea pigs also. They do this by using an enormous amount of propaganda to manipulate the prejudices and emotions of the public. They are often trying to do everything they can to keep the public distracted from the important issues by flooding the airways with discussion about the most trivial issues that have little or no effect on important policies. The most common distraction they use is sex scandals which are repeated over and over again. They also spend a lot of time manipulating the prejudices of the public. This keep the public distracted and prevents them from understanding many if any of the most important issues when they go to the polls. If the public doesn’t know what the politicians are doing they can get away with anything. Then with the scandals come out they often come up with sham token solution.

In many cases the politicians have created regulation systems that are supposed to protect the public from corruptions on many issues including environmental protection. This is just one example and the same tactic they use for this can be seen in other examples like tobacco legislation, auto safety, health care malpractice etc.  In the case of environmental protection they created the EPA to regulate environmental pollution then the same elected politicians who have been involved with the corporations that are polluting the environment appoint people to run the agency. In some cases the polluters have even been consulted about who is going to regulate them. There have been times where nongovernmental organizations have uncovered wrong doing by the corporations and found that the EPA has been reluctant to do anything. This is an example where corruption caused by corporations causes the government to be inefficient then the same corporations that caused the inefficiency in the first place using indirect tactics accuse the government of being inefficient and say this is a good reason to let the free market rule.

One of the most common tactics the ruling class has used in the past is divide and rule. By playing different races, nationalities or exes against each other they can maintain their own power as long as the lower classes are fighting amongst themselves. This is a tactic that has been used successfully for thousands of years going back to the roman time when they Romans often allied themselves with different tribes to fight against other tribes. Then they would take on the loyal tribe as client states with a lower status. These client states would often turn out to be the enemy at later times but by maintaining discipline and being more organized the Romans managed to remain on the top for hundreds of years. When the Roman Empire finally did collapse it was because they couldn’t stop the divisions from within not without. This raises a major problem with divide and rule it could eventually turn on those who use it if they don’t learn how to get along better. This tactic continued to be used by the English, Spanish, Dutch and French empires as well as many other regimes. Both the Spanish and the English and later the USA used this tactic to virtually wipe out the Native Americans. They set one tribe against another allying themselves with one then turning on the tribe that was their former ally. They repeated this until there was an almost complete genocide.

Divide and rule tactics were also used to set white indentured servants against black slaves. When white indentured servants and black slaves were first brought in to work for the property owners in the 1600’s they were unfamiliar with each other and they got along. Prejudices had not yet developed. This made sense from the point of view of the masters since they would be less productive if they were fighting amongst themselves. But then what happened is that they joined forces at times to rebel against their masters. At this time there were laws passed to begin segregation and then they gave some benefits to the whites to put them above the blacks. Demagoguery was also used and prejudice became institutionalized. A more effective method of handling the situation from the point of view of modern human right activists would be to teach them about their cultural differences and to provide more education but this isn’t what the ruling class of the time wanted. This prejudice became o strong that the majority of the poor whites fought and died to protect the right of the rich whites to own slaves. At first they chased down escaped slaves for the property owners then the poor whites took the front lines for the rich during the civil war. After the civil war the same ruling class kept the majority of the land that was returned to them by Andrew Johnson. The divide and rule tactics continued for over a hundred year until the civil rights slowed it down but didn’t eliminate them.

Divide and rule tactics have also been routine against the labor organizations. By controlling the financial systems the ruling class has often used their power to coerce concessions from the poor who lacked the education and resources to find any other alternative. Prior to the rise of industrialism the poor had good hunting and farming skills that they could use as long as they had the land to hunt or farm but after industrialization the ownership of property prevented the poor from doing this and they were dependent on a system they couldn’t control or completely understand without education and money. Once the upper classes had dominance over the most powerful institutions the poor had few options except to unionize and create bargaining power. This was routinely met with attempts to break up the unions or bring in labor from other part of the country or even the world. The ruling class has routinely hired one race or nationality to replace another when there were strikes and the unions often struck out against the scabs instead of the rich because the rich had guards to protect them and they were often not near the unions. Examples of this include when there were Chinese or Irish imported to do work and they often were attacked by the unions. In many cases the ruling class would prefer to spend more money to bring in cab labor or hire security than to allow the workers to have higher wages. This was an enormously inefficient way of running the economy. If not for the work stoppages and destruction caused by these tactics there would have been much more money available to split up. This often seems as George Orwell put it like seeking power for the sake of power.

Divide and rule tactics continue to be used to day in many way including the immigration laws that make it illegal for aliens to work and the free trade laws that make it easier to trade but do little or nothing to protect the rights of workers around the world or to protect the environment. Globalization as it is currently being practiced is just another divide and rule tactic designed to erode democracy and the civil right of the majority for the benefit of the rich. If it continues unchecked it could lead to so much unrest that we could wind up in a downward spiral of war and environmental destruction that could destroy our culture as we know it.

When leaders use divide and rule tactics they rarely if ever do it in a clear manner. This is almost always done using more complex tactics and it is up for those that are being manipulated to recognize it and stop it.

In many cases the ruling class uses tokenism or allowing some people to climb the class system as long as they don’t do more to stick up for the lower classes they leave behind. This is a variation of divide and rule tactics and it is done in several different ways. One way this is done is when they hire police national guards or detective agencies to break up strikes. In order to obtain the loyalty of the people they hire they have to give them some incentive to risk their lives to put down violent strikes this presumably involves paying the guards more than the workers. Another example of this could be when the corporations deal with union leaders or civil rights leaders behind closed doors and they come to an agreement that may not be ion the best interest of the majority but one way or another the living standard of the leaders of the protesters is improved and further protest is averted. In this case there may be leaders pretending to do the best they can for the majority but they wind up giving them more lip service than actual solutions. In order to address this discussion should be held out in the open.

Peer pressure is often used to convince people to conform. This is often done with encouragement from a leader or demagogue that is most popular among the group. This can be averted if people are taught to tolerate different points of view from an early age and they learn to discuss the details of any given belief or customs. In many cases peer pressure is often used to unify a group when a conflict arises against another group. When this happens peer pressure is often at its worst. This often involves the your with us or against us attitude and it may mean that anyone who criticizes the leader of the group may be ostracized. This could happen even if there is legitimate criticism that involves looking at the situation from the point of view of the opposition. This often means that it is difficult if not impossible to come to a compromise that ends any given rivalry, dispute or war.

War and war propaganda is often used to manipulate the public and convince them to fight for the best interest of the leaders often at a much bigger expense to the majority than the leaders. In many cases members of the upper classes are often involved in war profiteering that enables them to make more money during war than in peace time even while the majority is making much bigger sacrifices. War is routinely used to provide an excuse for secrecy so that the public doesn’t know what the government is doing or why. In many cases in the past the wars have been started on false pretences and these weren’t exposed until after the war was over. In fact if you look close enough at past wars it becomes clear that this happens far more often than not. The vast majority of the lives lost routinely involve the lower classes and the vast majority of the benefits if any routinely go to the upper classes. The upper classes routinely control the information that is given to the lower classes and pray on their hatred. War propaganda is often used to demonize the enemy and when a small percentage of the public look into the details of some of these claims they are often portrayed as traitors. The true traitors are the ones who are misleading the public but unless the public learns how to control their emotions they rarely ever see this.

Philanthropist is often used to convince the majority of the public that the rich are looking out for their best interest since they give to charities. Imagine if someone robbed you and beat you up then they gave you back a small fraction of what they stole from you. Would you consider them benevolent? If it is done in such a straight forward way then of course you wouldn’t which is why the rich don’t do this in a straight forward way. They set up a very complex system and maintain control over the press so that the philanthropism is highlighted and the atrocities are given very little attention. For example many of the major corporations that run the most powerful institutions have been around for a long time and were involved in the labor movement during the nineteenth century. They often used troops to beat down strikers and even killed them and they benefited from huge give aways like the large amount of land that was given to the railroads. These are rarely mentioned in the press today and are almost forgotten by most people today. There are other more sophisticated ways they still use to manipulate the system but they don’t get as much attention as the helping hand they sometimes promote from organizations like the Carnegie institution, the Ford foundation or Rhode scholars. In some cases corporations actually spend more money on advertising their charitable contributions than they do giving to charity. The biggest example of this is the tobacco companies. In many cases these contributions come with strings attached that are not well publicized if at all. They may often be tacit conditions that are unspoken. An example of this could be the large amount of money given to public television from major corporations. They are unlikely to receive these contributions if they are going to investigate the corporations.

Single issue voters are often manipulated very easy by many politicians. They can simply repeat over and over again that they stand up for the right position of that single issue then they can get large voting blocs as a base and they don’t have to tell them much if anything about any of the other issues that affect the public. In many cases they don’t even stick up for that single issue as well as they claim. The most common example of this is often the abortion issue. This is an issue that many groups get very emotional and fail to think rationally about. The pro life point of view focuses solely on abortion and often ignores many other issues that cause much more death than the abortion issue. The people that support the pro-life position on the abortion issue often ignore the environment safety issues war and many other issues that have a major impact on preserving life and the quality of life. There is a similar narrow mindedness on other single issue subjects like guns etc.

Control of major institutions that influence large parts of life, by a minority is a common way of manipulating the majority. Ten thousand years ago there were no major institutions that had major impacts on the culture of the human race. People lived in tribes and supported themselves by hunting and later on farming. That way of life is no longer available for many people in the world. Large institutions have evolved that control many of the most important aspects of life and these are often run by a small group of people behind closed doors and the public has little or no understanding about how they operate. Unless these are run in an honest open manner the public can’t understand how to influence them or how they influence the public. If the biggest and most powerful institutions are able to conduct their activities in secret there can never be a true democracy. The leaders of these institutions will be able to know about the public and how they can influence them but the public won’t be able to know what the institutions are doing.

Some of the most influential institutions are often influenced by each other and they influence the public indirectly. One of the biggest examples is religion. Religious institutions often receive money from major corporations or other business institutions and they often stand up for the best interests of those institutions. In one cases in the nineteenth century a major corporation attempted to require church attendance in Dover NH. Religions have often preached more about responsibility to the poor and looked the other way at the wrong doing of the rich. In one famous case there was a common lecture by a religious leader, Russell Conwell,   called "Acres of Diamonds". In this he preached that the reason the rich obtained their wealth was because they were honest and the poor were not. He preached a sense of honesty that accepted without question the propaganda that the rich put out that told the poor how important it was to live up to their responsibilities but looked the other way at the rich. This was even more common hundreds of years ago when the Catholic Church approved kings and supported their regimes even when they were turning the population at large into virtual slaves. This type of activity continues today often in more subtle ways; however they aren’t always so subtle. In some cases they are clear if you look in the right places like televangelists who manipulate the public and bilk them out of large contributions.

Another example where major institutions have been manipulated by corporate interests as well as religious interests has been education. Throughout most of history education was controlled solely by the church. They taught the public only what the leaders thought the public needed to know in order to function. This started with worship of God and believing what they were told without question. During the industrial age this wouldn’t work due to the fact that religion didn’t acknowledge the principles used by many new forms of technology. In the nineteenth century public education was initiated by corporations because they found that uneducated people couldn’t handle the new technology. This was often limited solely to what the public needed to become more effective workers in factories. In some cases when education wasn’t necessary to conduct a job the public didn’t receive it at all. This included children who often had to work in factories for long hours and often died very young due to bad work conditions. These children were treated like virtual slaves who received no more than they needed to become more productive workers and if they were injured or died they and their families were abandoned without any compensation.

Influence by religions, corporations and politicians still has a major impact on education today. There is a common argument that school should deal with reading, writing, arithmetic and perhaps a few other subjects like science and social subject only. This is supposed to prevent teachers from having an unreasonable influence on children or perhaps to indoctrinate them with their own political views. What this essentially does is prevent well intended teachers from teaching many students how to avoid manipulation tactics. Once these conservatives prevent teachers from informing the students about these tactics then it is much easier for politicians to manipulate the public with propaganda. What these politicians are essentially saying is don’t warn them so we can preserve the current political system. One way or another the most powerful college institutions are also being influenced. The cost of tuition is constantly going up even when technology is helping to cut expenses. Computer technology has made it much easier to share technology inexpensively but instead of doing this they are inventing more technology to help prevent infringement on copyright laws which are clearly excessive. Copy right laws are in some cases even being applied to lectures so that they can’t be taped and shown to those that don’t pay tuition. Colleges seem to be more concerned with making high profits and controlling education than with the best interest of the majority of the public. This is why we need education reform.

All these manipulation tactics are much more effective if they are used on uneducated people. The most effective way to strengthen democracy and prevent massive fraud is to set up an education system that educates everyone in the most effective way possible regardless of whether or not they can afford it. Education isn’t a natural right; nature doesn’t set up an education system, but it is in the best interest of the majority of the human race to make it a man made right by setting up institutions that are controlled by an educated public.

to read about "Acres of Diamonds" see:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdiamonds.htm

 

To read more about falicies or indoctrination tactics see the following sites including another page of mine:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ 

http://www.nobeliefs.com/fallacies.htm 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/culttactics.htm

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm 

Reform School

 

Reform School is supposed to help troubled children reform and teach them to stay out of trouble. Unfortunately in the past it has often done the exact opposite. This is presumably not nearly as bad as it used to be but there still needs to be more attention drawn to it so that those schools that haven’t fixed these problems will be reformed and so that the public can better understand how violent criminals became that way. There are several mass murderers and spree killers that went to reform school and later told of serious abuse that went on their including Charles Manson and Gary Gilmore. These claims have been partially confirmed in several ways. There has been a lot of research to indicate that violence brings out more violence and some psychologists have studied the behavior and found that escalating trouble at the time of Charles Manson’s most serious claims of abuse fit the pattern. It is not uncommon for abused children to strike out even more after being abused at home or in reform school and this seems to be what Charles Manson did. The same pattern of abuse has also been confirmed by other former inmates of reform school in several widely reported incidents. There are almost certainly many more schools that have had problems in the past and in some cases still have problems now.

 

Ideally it would be better to get to troubled children as early as possible before they even get to reform school. If they receive the attention they need when they are in early grade school then in many cases they can be addressed earlier and they may never need to go to reform school at all. If they do need to go to reform school there should be close scrutiny to make sure they are not abusing each other or that the teachers and care givers aren’t abusing the children. There needs to be some kind of out side scrutiny to check up on this with discretion. There should be no need to publicize the troubles of these children in most cases. If there are exceptions it should only be to avoid further violence. Everyone involved should receive the appropriate training and they should understand that beating children into submission doesn’t work in the long run. It may seem to work to some people especially if they have been raised in a violent environment as well but in the long run the children only become angrier and more violent.

 

Exposing the problems in reform schools will have an enormous impact in the long term crime rates especially violent crimes. This will be much less expensive than dealing with the problems after they escalate.

 

Here are some examples of reports of abuse at reform school. I’m sure this is a very small sample and the majority of this is going un reported due to denial.

 

http://www.abominablefirebug.com/Reform.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/20/irish-reform-schools-thou_n_205719.html

http://www.caica.org/FLORIDA_Reform_school_severe_beatings_rapes_10-19-08.htm

http://www.alternativesmagazine.com/48/ulriksen.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8318133.stm

http://www.richardgartner.com/fcinematic4Z.html

 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

Educational Revolution

 

 

There have been several tyrants in the past that have at times appeared to be the ones bringing salvation or democracy and then they have turned out to replace one tyrannical regime with another tyrannical regime. These people include Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler and many more. These tyrants have often told the people what they want to hear or they actually provided some good advise in the beginning but the people weren’t educated enough to understand them and implement them. In Hitler’s case I think it is pretty clear that although he provided a few good ideas they were very few and he relied much more on manipulating people’s emotions and prejudices, but others like Robespierre may have actually been sincere in the beginning. Robespierre was initially against the death penalty and censorship. He may have truly wanted a democracy for France but when it came time to implement it the public may not have known how to respond to educational ideas. He isn’t the only people who spoke out against censorship and found out that when the public starts speaking they often express some very bad ideas which reflect the bad education or indoctrination they received in the past. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also ran into this problem. They spoke out against censorship when it was used against them and later they either advocated it or came close. This led many of their opponents to use some arguments many of which were unreasonable that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wound up opposing sometimes with what seemed like some justification. In order to find out whether the opposition has a good argument the debate has to happen. In some cases if it goes to far it may lead to distractions that effectively censor good ideas that are being drowned out. Sorting through this takes time. If the public didn’t have an adequate education they may have only been willing and able to understand emotional pleas at that time. This is because they never had the education they needed to implement a true democracy. This is why we need an educational revolution preferably without an armed revolution.

 

Prior to the Russian and French revolutions as well as many other revolutions the lower classes were never provided with the education they needed to know how to run their own government. In many cases the general public may have understood two things generally speaking. One was how to do the menial tasks that they were trained to do from birth. This may have included farming for some people or others may have been trained to do factory work. This didn’t include an education about the basics about how the economy was run.

 

Another thing they may have learned was how to strike out in anger. In many cases these people were raised in violent homes where parents were often taught that if they spared the rod they spoiled the child. Parents weren’t taught to spend time to teach their children. Many of these parents often beat their children when they disobeyed or disagreed with their parents. This is a very important fact that is often overlooked when it comes to peaceful revolutions. In the long run children need to be taught at an early age to behave in a civil manner if they are going to participate in a successful democracy. So in order to this there needs to be a strong campaign against child abuse.

 

The United States is often considered the exception where the revolution was successful and they set up a government that lasted. This is partially true; they did set up a government that lasted and it was better than the one before but it wasn’t nearly as democratic as it has often been made out to appear. The reason they were successful in setting up a new government is because the people that arranged the revolution had some experience running a government. Most of the organizers of the revolution were the people that were selected to run the colonial government. They were primarily property owners that were selected to do the work of the king in the absence of the English government. The King couldn’t handle the details from afar so he had to allow the local leaders to partially govern themselves. This experience is what made them capable of running a government after the revolution.

 

The problem was they were only a small percentage of the population. The original republic didn’t allow blacks, woman or many uneducated poor whites to participate. These people didn’t gain their rights until the civil rights movement more than a hundred years later. They had to learn more about how the government worked before they could participate in it successfully. When they saw the arguments the founding fathers mad against the king they realized that they could also be made to defend the rights of the lower classes. Through many civil conflicts since the revolution minorities and woman improved their status when they held their government accountable but in many cases if they weren’t vigilant these improvements have been rolled back. The majority of the public still doesn’t truly understand how their government works so they only have the illusion of a democracy now. In order to have a sincere democracy in the USA there needs to be a better educations system available to everyone including the poor. The public has to understand how the government works and how they have been manipulated in the past.

 

Woodrow Wilson once said "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." What this effectively means is that those who don’t receive a good education often wind up being manipulated by those who do especially when that education includes political activity and understanding tactics to manipulate those that are less educated. There have been many cases where members of the upper classes have criticized the masses for being uneducated and at the same time the upper classes have often either withheld the education the masses need or provided distorted indoctrination to the masses. In many cases the same people indoctrinating the public are the ones criticizing them for being uneducated.

 

In order to have a successful Educational Revolution the public needs to have access to data about any given subject in an organized fashion starting with the basics of each subject. This is easier said than done; in some cases the basics may be very obvious like in math. The basics start with arithmetic followed by fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry etc. However in other cases the basics aren’t so clear like in chemistry. Now the basics may start with the table of elements and electrons and protons etc. but for thousands of years most people didn’t know that. They had to do a lot of research before they could organize the basics in a way people could understand it and there are still a lot of people that have a hard time with it.

 

This is also true about other subjects that are considered the most important to the public right now including Climate Change, Health Care Reform, the War on Terror etc. The information being presented to the public on all these subjects by the Mass Media is very biased. They are ignoring some of the most important facts about each subject.

 

In the case of Climate Change or any other type of pollution the public needs to know more about the conclusive facts about each subject. The information the Mass Media is providing over and over again is the controversial facts. The Mass Media isn’t making any effort to let the public know about how many people are dying due to carbon monoxide poison. I believe I have seen a few studies that said that this may contribute to as much as fifty thousand deaths a year in the USA alone but it receives only a rare brief mention. There is little effort to inform the public how many oil spills there are around the country or the world and many other important facts are being almost totally ignored while the Mass Media obsesses on the most controversial subjects that go no where.

 

The Mass Media is doing similar things with Health Care Reform and War Propaganda. They are paying no more than a toke amount of attention to preventive medicine, patent laws, the basics about how insurance companies pool money from the policies to pay for ads profits then health care. There is an enormous amount of waste by insurance companies that are doing more to convince the public they are providing health care than they are to actually provide health care. When ever you see a commercial that spends a lot of time telling the public you are “covered totally covered completely covered” keep in mind they spent a lot of money on that commercial and that money comes from the premiums. The money spent on commercials isn’t being spent on coverage.

 

In the case of Wart propaganda they spend much more time telling the public about all these people that want to kill us but little about why. Many of these people lack the education and opportunities they need to have a good life so they strike out. By providing more education before people are driven to desperation they could do much more to prevent terrorism that by intimidating the public with exaggerated terrorism scares over and over again.

 

In order to do this successfully there has to be a closer look at the domination by the Mass Media and the copyright laws that are being used to maintain control over as large amount of information. Robert W. McChesney has explored this in his book “The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century”. The Mass media is controlled by a small percentage of the public. Most of the media is under the control of only five corporations many of whom share a lot of stock holders. Although the board members aren't the same they do meet in other boards of other corporations that they also belong to. There needs to be a much more diverse influence on the Mass Media that includes more input from many academic experts in any given subject as well as the public themselves. The public may not understand any given subject as well as they could and should but in order to change that they need to be allowed to be more involved in the discussion.

 

Copyright laws were created originally to provide compensation for people who did a lot of work to sort through the details of many different subjects. I’m not sure this is the best way to compensate them but even if it is it has gone way too far. It is now being used to protect the rights of corporations that obtained the copyrights and heirs to the original writers. Corporate copy writes are now 95 years from the date they are issued and personal copyrights are 70 after the death of the authors. This is way to extreme and it is being used to control the information available to the public and provide profits for corporations more than it is being used to compensate the original authors. In some cases new copy writes are being issued hundreds of years after the original writings to people who shouldn’t have any rights to control the information at all. In “The Debate on the Constitution” There are over 2,000 pages of papers that were originally written over 200 years ago. In the front of the Book as usual it says “all rights reserved”, then it goes on to explain that some of the papers not all were issued copy rights to colleges in the 1970’s and 80’s almost 200 years after they were written. They take credit for keeping them in print and making them available to the public but they don’t do a good job distributing them and they withhold the right to put many of them on line for free. This should be considered an outrage especially since these papers had a very important influence on the way the US government was created. The general public should have full rights to read this without paying for the copyrights of colleges. Copyright reform is especially important when it comes to major issues that have a major impact on how our governments are run. This should include when there are books about political or corporate wrong doing. In some cases there are authors who investigate the wrong doing then righting about it but instead of making it available to the public in the most efficient way possible so the public can act on it they control the distribution of this information with copyright laws. Only those who know where to look and pay for it have access to this information.

 

There also needs to be a better education available to the public so that they know how to process this information. This should be done in the regular school system but since it hasn’t there should be a public relation campaign to encourage those that didn’t learn to do this the first time around to learn. A much better effort needs to be made to make education as inexpensive as possible without sacrificing the quality. A big obstacle to this is the copyright laws and how they apply to text books. With the new technology provided by the internet this should dramatically reduce cost since it makes it much easier to exchange and organize information if it is done right. This could include making some of the best educational lectures by teachers available on tape to every one. There is no reason why these teachers should have to repeat them over and over again; if the students watch them ahead of class then class can be used for discussion and those that can’t afford complete education can get a head start by watching the tapes and follow up at a later date when the financial situation is better. Perhaps the most determined should qualify for scholarships. Unfortunately this isn’t happening instead they are searching for new technology to prevent people from cutting and pasting and making information available to everyone. In some cases even though operating costs are going down there are attempts to increase the cost of education. Some teachers may be more concerned with protecting their jobs than providing the best education possible. I doubt if this represents most teachers but it may represent some of the ones with the most political power. The fact that some political figures including William M. Bulger have been appointed to head major colleges should raise some red flags. When William M. Bulger was the President of the Massachusetts State Senate he was involved in a lot of political scandal and when he moved onto become President of the University of Massachusetts System in addition to influencing education policy he also help organized a major presidential debate between All Gore and George Bush. Having educational institutions help with the interview process for political candidates is a good idea but if it is organized by corrupt political appointees it defeats the purpose.

 

One good way to improve education without increasing cost could involve encouraging people, young and old, to help educate themselves. This can involve looking up information on their own and forming study or discussion groups. This doesn’t necessarily have to involve putting any teachers out of jobs since they will still need them. This would just allow the public more educational opportunities. Existing teachers can still provide advice at these study groups or when there are unresolved issues they can consult with the teachers. In many cases this can help people prepare for college at a low cost and enable them to get the best out of the system.

 

This isn’t entirely a new idea the sit down strikers and others recognized how important it is to provide a better education to the working classes. In some cases during the sit down strikes the unions brought in people to help educate the workers. Strikes are generally inefficient but settles on the demands of the capitalists has often been even worse and this is one good way to improve the effectiveness of strikes if they can’t be avoided.

 

The bottom line is that in order for the public to have a true democracy they have to understand how it works and what they are voting for.

 

Free Press has done some good work on this subject:

 

 http://www.freepress.net/ 

 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

 

Tyranny opponents or advocates?

 

This question is more important than it may seem at first glance when you consider that throughout history revolutions have often replaced one tyrant with another therefore it is important to understand why this is happening and how to stop it from continuing to happen over and over again. In many case the tyrants often seem to believe they are looking out for the best interest of the public however even if they do believe this they shouldn’t be allowed to preserve tyranny. If they believe their own version of truth they may not be a true advocate of tyranny but they aren’t an opponent either. Ultimately the most important thing is to set up a system with checks and balances from people who are sincere and have different points of views. There needs to be more sincere input from all classes and in the cases where a group of people or even animals can’t stand up for themselves then there needs to be an effort to look at it from the best interest of these people. This is especially true of children who haven’t yet received the education they need to make decisions for themselves and they are the future.

 

The most effective way to create and preserve a sincere democracy involves a free press that encourages input from sincere academics as well as a diverse segment of the public. The most effective way to preserve tyranny is a press that appears to be free even though it may be controlled by a very small segment of society. 

 

If someone is in favor of tyranny with themselves as the tyrant they would never come out and say they are in favor of tyranny instead they would try to figure out the most effective way to install themselves in power and secure their power. This generally involves trying to do their best to appear like they are looking out for the best interest of the public. This means unless the public takes a close look at these past tyrants and finds out what type of tactics they used and how to hold them accountable they may continue to choose the wrong people to lead them or stand by silently while tyrants and dishonest politicians take advantage of the public in big ways and small.

 

Throughout history the most effective way to preserve tyranny has always involved providing better education for the upper classes including about methods to manipulate the public than they do to the lower classes. There have been many cases throughout history where educating lower classes including African American slaves has been declared a crime to keep them from understanding how to stand up for their own rights. Modern Tyrannies have a sophisticated system where they control the information presented to the public on a massive basis mostly from the Mass Media that presents a distorted view of reality. The most effective way to counteract this is to organize information starting with the basics and confirming it a little at a time.

 

The most effective way that I know of to know whether or not any given leader is an opponent of tyranny or advocate or in many cases someone who doesn’t know the difference is to understand the information needed to make decisions on any given subject. No one person could ever do this so the next best thing would be to set up a system where the basics on any given subject is presented in an organized fashion and presented to the public. This would mean that the public would have the opportunity to check the facts and understand the subject. Instead of trusting the leaders they would have the option of trusting the facts. In many cases the Mass Media and other governmental organizations often present the most important information in a distorted manner so that the public will make decisions that are designed to benefit the best interests of a select group of people at the expense of the majority.

 

The most effective demagogues often do a good job convincing the public that they are looking out for their best interests by appealing to their emotions and prejudices. In order to avoid this there are two things that need to be done generally speaking. First there needs to be a much better education system for the public. This should be available to everyone if possible. In order for the public to have a truly democratic system they need to understand the basics of any given subject and how to recognize who is the more credible expert when it comes to more complicated things they can’t understand. This should include access to well organized information that they can fact check and an earlier education that enables them to do at least some of the work on their own so they won’t be relying mainly on the credibility of experts many of whom aren’t as credible as they seem. This may be better achieved if there was an educational revolution instead of a violent revolution. In the past revolutions were often successful at overthrowing governments then the people in power didn’t know how to set up a new government so it reverted to tyranny again sometimes even worse. Another advantage of an educational revolution would be that it wouldn’t require violence and it wouldn’t force the opposition to fight to the end often resulting in much more damage than the previous tyranny was doing. This may make it appear as if the previous tyranny was better even though it was seriously flawed. This can’t happen quickly. There has to be a long term effort to make this successful.

 

The second thing that needs to be done is that the public needs to develop a much better understanding of the methods that are used to manipulate their emotions. This needs to involve understanding many ways that some people are using to manipulate more naïve people. This begins with simple things like peer pressure in school and advertisements directed to children when they are young and impressionable. In many cases the people that have ulterior motives are far more persistent when it comes to indoctrinating children especially if they don’t have good parents to teach them well and look out for them. In many cases it is because the parents may not have been taught well when they were young either so they don’t know how to look out for the best interest of their children. If this is the case then there should be more programs that are open to scrutiny to help these people. Since it often means that if this doesn’t happen then the children may grow up to be more susceptible to false arguments and they may vote on decisions that effect others as well as themselves. An example of this is Global Warming and other pollution related subjects where there are an enormous amount of efforts to distract the public and look the other way preventing solutions.

 

It is hard to see how an educated and informed person could believe that the current system dominated by the Mass Media and the Multi-national corporations is truly democratic. It seem clear to me that few if any people in a high position of power either in the government or the Mass Media are truly tyranny opponents. Some of them may be doing the best they know how to under the circumstances in which case they wouldn’t be tyranny advocates either but others are clearly presenting a distorted point of view so bad that it is clear they are not concerned about true democracy at all and they are tyranny advocates.

 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

 

Environmental Apocalypse

 

Environmental Apocalypse doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with any prophecies but that isn’t the point there is an enormous amount of damage being done to the planet and it could easily create a snow ball effect where things start getting worse at a much faster rate and it will be to late to stop it until there is an enormous amount of damage. This could lead to wars over dwindling resources and we could wind up with something similar to those post apocalypse scenarios like Mad Max or the Postman. If that does happen it is unlikely that there will be many if any heroes like Costner or Gibson to come along and save the day. This is the real world not Hollywood.

 

Like any other problem we need to find the cause of it and prevent it. Generally speaking this means we need to stop pollution and restore the damage that has already been done. This isn’t the only problem though the economic system and the control structure that created this problem also need to be fixed.

 

The easy part may actually be to understand how to stop pollution and repair it in fact that information is almost certainly already available to the public if they look in the right places. Simple things like using more efficient ways of conserving energy and clean renewable energy like wind solar and geothermal can be a very important part of the solution. There also need to be efforts to replace all the trees that have been cut down. Rivers and lakes need to be cleaned up and more importantly future pollution needs to be prevented. One of the most important things that needs to be done is that the public needs to be educated about conservation and they need to understand that if they continue buying things that are beyond their needs and things that are built in inefficient ways it comes at a long term cost that may be greater than the short term benefit. This doesn’t always mean that the public needs to go without in fact with new technology I suspect that there are already many ways that the Public can maintain if not improve their standard of living if they adopt more efficient ways.

 

The tougher part may be to challenge the current political system and the multi-national corporations that have an excessive amount of political power. This must involve exposing the way things are currently being done in many cases without the knowledge of the public and finding a better way of doing things in the future. In order to do this there has to be a massive public education project so that the public can understand how things are done and participate in the political system. In order to do this they need to understand the basic facts about any given subject. This means we need reform for the Mass Media in the long run. If we can’t get it in the short run then there needs to be a better effort to educate as many people as possible through other grass roots means.

 

The way the Mass Media portrays the economy you might get the impression that all trade is good whether the customer receives a good deal or not. In many cases the Mass Media is often promoting items that have little or no benefit for the consumer and they use a lot of hype to convince the public that they are getting something worthwhile. We need an economic system where the best interest of the consumer are given at least as much consideration ads the best interests of the corporations. In order to do this the public needs a better education about how the economy works. This means that corporate secrecy has to be reexamined. In many cases corporate secrecy often means they should have the right to prevent the public from knowing how much they are getting away with.

 

The public needs to have a better understanding of how much damage is being done to the environment in many ways. This can be done buy creating organized studies of just about everything and presenting it to the public in a way they can understand it. In many cases I suspect these studies may have already been done but they aren’t being presented to the public. This may be because the public is too dependent on the Mass Media for information and they have an incentive to hide it since they are collecting an enormous amount of advertising money from the corporations that are doing the pollution. In many cases the best thing to do is to provide organized lists of all the damage that is being done. If people had any idea how many oil spills there were around the world they would realize that the Exxon Valdez is just a drop in the bucket. This is just one example of how organized list could help educate the public. Other lists or studies could include lists of polluted lakes and rivers, studies to tell people how many rain forests have been cut down. Once people understand just how big the problem is they will be much more inclined to act on it. This will also require a great deal of organization to address these problems once the public understands them.

 

Addressing these problems can’t be done without massive political reform. The biggest threat may be the multi-national corporations who have too much power. This may not be what prophecies referred to but regardless it should be addressed. There needs to be a much better system set up to allow the public to participate in the system and control the elections. This needs to be done in an open manner. A good election reform would involve setting up a system where the public control the election process and handle it more like an interview process. Candidates for office should be required to fill out a job application which should be written by the public with input from expert on any given subject. This should involve questions about how the leaders would handle any given subject starting with the basics based on the most accurate facts available after they are scrutinized for accuracy. The fact that the leaders of our countries have been able to keep so many secrets is part of the problem. There needs to be a right to know for the public in order for them to have the information they need to make decisions.

 

Similar things can be done for other potential causes for Apocalypse or some threat that seems similar to it. These would involve organizing the information available on any given subject like famine or threats from tornados and finding the causes of these problems and preventing them or if that isn’t possible finding the best way to deal with them. For example a good agriculture system should be able to prevent famine but storm can’t be prevented so a good way to deal with them could be to build tornado resistant houses made out of concrete or the strongest material available so they will last.

 

If these things aren’t done it could lead to an increasing amount of desperation among the third world residences when they are deprived of the necessities of life including food water and a safe place top live. These are already recruiting territories for the so called terrorist organizations. This is because the people in these areas may not understand how the system is working but they do understand they are getting the short end of the stick so if the traditional leaders won’t address their concerns they may turn to the terrorists. It has often been said that some future wars may be fought over water not oil because the water in many parts of the world is becoming more polluted with the advancement of the global economy. Environmental protection is often only for those with political power. Those who don’t have it often have their homes destroyed and they no longer have incentive to try to get along with others in the world since others are clearly not concerned about their rights.

 

In order to address this and prevent a snowball effect that can’t be stopped there should be a much better effort to educate the public and set up systems of governments that are truly democratic and stick up for the rights of all instead of just those who have the proper education and know how to stick up for their own rights.

 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

Apocalypse: a self fulfilling prophecy?

 

The literal meaning of Apocalypse is revelations and the literal meaning of Armageddon is Megiddo; however these terms are more often associated with the end of times. Even though the current belief is not the original one this is the one I am referring to because many people believe it anyway and they often base their decisions on this interpretation.

 

In many cases in the past there clearly have been examples on a smaller scale where Armageddon prophecies have encouraged people to pursue a course of action that often brings about their own destruction. Carl Sagan once described a simplified example where there was a prophecy of war following the passing of a comet. This was presented to the people who came to believe it. Then eventually a comet did come to pass and a leading member of society said this meant there would be war and they started beating the war drums and preparing for war. The other side heard of it or perhaps they also were familiar with the same prophecy and they also prepared for war which eventually led to a war and the appearance of a legitimate prophecy. This legitimacy begins to fall apart as soon as you look a little closer and realize that the prophecy helped encourage people to bring about the war and their own demise. A simalar historical example is when Croesus was told that if he attacked the Persians, he would destroy a great empire which he thought was good if it was the enemy he destroyed but he wound up destroying his own great empire.

 

There are many more recent examples of small scale self fulfilling Apocalypse prophecies including David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Lundgren and many more. All of these cult leaders pursued a course of action that helped bring about the destruction of their own cults often the death as well either by suicide or in a conflict of some sort. These were all partially encouraged by myths about Apocalypse that often tell people they should trust their leaders who will lead them into victory in a great battle. It is often hard to tell which leader is the Christ or the good messiah and which one is the anti-Christ or the false messiah. Either way people are expected to trust their leader without scrutiny. The scrutiny that they pass up on is what is needed to find out whether their leaders deserve trust. If they allow the scrutiny and the public understands the basics of any subject they don’t have to base their decisions on trust alone. They can often confirm a lot of what they need to make rational decisions. Trusting any leader without scrutiny is almost guaranteed to backfire.

 

There are also many more of these Apocalypse prophecies and the believers that expect them to come true and may act to bring them about. Some of the larger ones include more widely accepted organization like the Christian Zionists and other fundamentalists. These people seem to believe the way to bring about salvation is to bring about war in Israel so that it will usher in the return of Jesus and the final great battle that will be world wide. Intentional or not some activities have taken place that did stir up unnecessary conflict in Israel. One of the most blatant was when Arial Sharon went to the holy wall with guards in 1999 even though he knew it would anger the Palestinians whether it was to prove that he is within his rights to got their or for some other reason isn’t the important thing. In fact anyone should have had the right to go there but that doesn’t mean it was the best way to defuse the situation. What is important is that instead of trying to educate the public and try to settle the difference in a peaceful way he incited an uprising. The peace process came to a halt including the work that Seeds of peace were trying to accomplish. Further more they went on to elect the person who incited the riot to Prime Minister. It took years before they could partially recover from this and they are still in a constant state of turmoil because they continue to incite each other instead of trying to put it behind them.

 

The Apocalypse prophecies may also be making it easier to maintain the war on terror based on flimsy evidence in many cases. There may be a lot of people that are allowing their religion to influence their decisions when they do their part to support efforts to save the world by nonstop battle and secrecy. This may not be as clear cut but the implication is still there and even if it isn’t then it doesn’t change the fact that the best way to bring about peace in the long term is to learn how to get along and educate everyone who is capable of learning.

 

The Mass Media is doing a lot to increase the belief in these prophecies by focusing so much attention on it in what they consider an unbiased manner. The most effective way to be unbiased is to present all points of view including the views of the most educated people who do a good job researching any given subject and showing the work so the public understands and can come to rational conclusions. They have been putting a lot of attention on the Apocalypse lately but they haven’t been doing as much as I think they could have to debunk it rationally. They have also been putting a lot of attention on the Mayan 2012 doomsday scenario as well this could encourage more panic responses by some people who are less capable of sorting out the details and avoiding Apocalypse instead of bringing it about. This just seems to another end of days date of which we have already had dozens if not hundreds and they have often been accompanied with small scale cults that self destructed and often brought others with them. The only difference is that this one is being encouraged by the Mass Media on a larger scale and it is accompanied by many potential dangers which are legitimate like environmental damage, famine, war and other legitimate problems which should be dealt with in a rational manner by finding out the cause of each individual danger and preventing it. It does no good to create a panic that could raise emotions and make people more likely to follow the leader into war.

 

Instead of try to lead people into a great battle they should have been trying to find out how to avoid any battle at all if possible if not how to minimize the damage and build a society that will know how to get along better afterwards. This isn’t what Apocalypse prophecies generally do. The way to accomplish this is to study the battles in the past and more important the things that led up to these battles so that we can figure out what the causes of them are and how to prevent them. This hasn’t been done in the past based on prophecy so if people want to avoid wars and the destruction of the planet or lesser conflict they need to try something different.

 

Wars are not the only things predicted in many of these prophecies and some of the other things in some of these prophecies often seem to be coming true as well. If this is the case then it is important to organize the different threats whether or not they are part of a prophecy or not. Then regardless of what the threat is the best thing to do is to figure out what the cause of is and prevent it.

 

One example that has often been portrayed as a potential cause of Apocalypse is a potential asteroid impact. The people in the past couldn’t have known to predict this since they didn’t even know that asteroids existed but it has recently been reinterpreted as a possible cause of Apocalypse. This has been played up a lot in recent years yet it isn’t a new threat. The only thing that is relatively new is the ability of the public to understand it. There haven’t been any major impacts that could threaten civilization in thousands if not millions of years. There is no reason to panic about this in fact NASA has clearly outlined a two step effort to avoid it generally speaking. The first step is to set up a system to track asteroids and find them long before they hit the Earth. The second step involves experimenting with new technology to find out how to safely divert them. A third step should be added to educate the public better. NASA is financed by tax dollars they should do more to let the public know what is going on since they are working for the public. This doesn’t have to be expensive. They already have a massive amount of data available to their own scientist. They just need to make this available to the public in a way the people can understand it starting with the basics. In the past when I checked NASA’s web site it hasn’t been as organized as it could or should be and they have often changed it sometimes for the worse. They should set it up in the most organized way possible and keep it that way without fancy graphics to amaze the public. The most important thing should be to educate the public.

 

Other potential dangers should also be handled in the most rational manner possible whether any one believes it is associated with Apocalypse or not. The most important one may be the damage being done to the environment and the governmental and Mass Media control structure that is preventing this from being dealt with in a more rational manner.

 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

 

Enemy Du Jour

 

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out why we always have at least one enemy to guard against and address the situation even if it is entirely their fault? 

For many leaders the most important objective doesn’t seem to be to learn how to get along with everyone fairly. It often seems as if they may want to maintain a segment of society that is disenfranchised and uneducated. They often don’t know how to stick up for their own rights but they do recognize they are getting the short end of the stick for one reason or another.  When these people get angry and strike out they can be demonized and the blame for many problems can be put on them.

 

There are always plenty of people that we have to guard against whether it is a country that wants to go to war with us, terrorists or predators including mass murderers and pedophiles. Finding out the cause for this may not be easy but if we want to avoid having enemies all the time someone needs to try and then get the message across to the public. There are some people that have actually been trying to do this but the Mass Media and the politicians haven’t been doing a good job giving the bully pulpit to the right people. As I have stated before the biggest problem is child abuse. This is true whether it is the abuse that a mass murderer receives before he becomes a monster or the widespread abuse that many children have to go through around the world providing a lot of angry adults ready to fight wars. There are of course many other problems that need top be addressed but this is the most important one. 

George Orwell warned us over fifty years ago about this when he predicted that the world would constantly be fighting one enemy or another and constantly switching without acknowledging the enemy has changed. Big Brother always used this as an excuse why the leaders couldn’t tell the public what was going on. They advise the public to just trust the leaders who lead them from one war to another. This wasn’t the result of a gift of prophecy; he just recognized a repeating pattern of history than satirized it in his book. Then the public for the most part forgot much as Orwell described in his book where the public always forgot the stories were changing. There was little or no effort by most of the public to learn from this and when necessary put his description in clearer ways so that the public could understand his message easier.  

The most powerful governments and the Mass Media have always been using the enemy Du Jour as an excuse to keep secrets from the public and often to manipulate their emotions for their own purposes. There are some things that they can teach the public without infringing on the secrecy supposedly needed to protect us. This includes the research that many good academics have already done on how child abuse leads to future violence. There is also a lot of work on different ideas on diplomacy including organizations like the Peace Corp, Seeds of Peace, Habitat for humanity, the Marshal plan and much more. A more accurate perception of how the economy is run could also be presented to the public. In many cases the Multi-national corporations that dominate our economy often deal with tyrants that repress their people and the tyrants that they supported in the past have often become future Enemies Du Jour. There is much more the public can learn about how past conflicts have arisen and how future conflicts can be avoided. In many cases it may involve letting the public know what really has been going on in the past in a more organized manner. There are many cases where the US government and other governments have clearly mislead their own people while they lead them into war often based one the excuse of national security which often turned out to be a false premise. This includes the Gulf of Tonkin incident plus the fact that the US government was propping up the South Viet Nam government at the time, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, The installment of Pinochet, the reinstallment of the Shah of Iran in 1953 and many other cases.  These have been reported in many cases by reputable sources and acknowledged by the government itself at times. However that doesn’t mean the message has gotten through to the public or in some cases even to the members of congress. Joe Wilson made a passionate denial of the fact that the USA sold chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein despite the fact that this has been reported in the news on several occasions. If the congressmen aren’t even willing to acknowledge accurate facts how can they be trusted to make rational decisions? 

Not only do some congressmen make decisions based on emotional beliefs but so do a large percentage of the public partially thanks to the media demagogues who are constantly leading them on. Instead of trying to get the facts straight the public is routinely encouraged to jump to emotional conclusions and follow their leaders to fight the Enemies Du Jour. There is little effort if any by the Mass Media to focus the attention of the public on the root causes of conflicts abroad and at home and to find rational solutions to them. The Mass Media and the government is using the threat of the Enemies Du Jour as an excuse to avoid accountability and this is a much bigger threat to democracy even than the legitimate enemies.  

There is also some doubt about whether the Enemies Du Jour are legitimate enemies in some cases but even if they are the Bush government obviously over reacted so did the Mass Media and the Mass Media is still overreacting. One of the biggest enemies the USA has been fighting is of course Al-Qaeda who is supposedly responsible for 9/11. They are not nearly as powerful as the Mass Media and the government often makes them pout to be with a massive amount of propaganda. These are a bunch of people who have little if any rational education and their base is supposedly in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There funds were initially provided by Osama bin laden who is or was a millionaire. It’s hard to believe he still has much money if any or even that he had as much money as they claimed before. Keep in mind that during the eighties he was funding the war against the USSR instead of running his business.  We are supposedly trying to defend against people with box cutters shoe bombs and other primitive devices. This is supposedly adequate to justify the secrecy and the obsession with the war on terror. I don’t dispute that terrorists are a problem but keeping the public in a constant state of panic and shrouding most of the activities of the government in secrecy isn’t the best way to solve the problem. Like any other problem the best way to solve it involves finding the root causes of the problem and preventing them. In this case the root causes of the problem is that these people come from parts of the world with little or no rational education available to them instead they have a massive amount of religious indoctrination forced on them. Another part of the problem is that they really are being oppressed by both their own governments and in most cases other governments often with the help of multi-national corporations. In many parts of the world the multi-national corporations are extracting the resources of third world countries and providing little in return to the local residents. This includes little or no effort to educate them. Without a good education and when they see that their resources are being shipped abroad is it any surprise that they are angry at the western governments. Also in many cases they are fully aware that western governments have propped up past tyrants and supplied weapons to their enemies. One of the most obvious cases is Iran and Iraq where not only did the USA pop up the Shah in the fifties but in the eighties they provided arms to both sides of the war with Iran keeping it going and many of the common people paid the price. When Sadam Hussein attacked Kuwait, a rich country, the USA stepped in and made promises but then when Sadam attacked the Kurds and other Iraqi’s the USA abandoned them. What they need to solve this problem is mainly more education for the public and better democratic opportunities. Lethal force should be at best the last resort not the first. In most cases the education needs time to take effect so this has to be a long term commitment. The most important thing the military can do is to protect the schools and other social institution until the countries are more stable. This may not seem like it should be our responsibility to many but when you consider that USA corporations and governments are partially responsible perhaps it should be especially if the USA continue to claim they are fighting for democracy. Also in the long run it will be cheaper to educate the public than to fight one war after another. This I very similar to the idea that if you educate a single child right the first time when they are little kids it is easier than to wait until they are troubled teens and try to reform them. It will just be on a larger and more complicated scale so people have to stick with it longer.

The Obama government isn’t doing much better as far as I can tell. Obama seems to have taken a few small steps and promised to do more but he could do much better. If nothing else he could use the bully pulpit to educate the public much better about the causes of these problems with the help of many academics that have studied any given subject. Then he could do much more to advance diplomatic and educational programs around the world hopefully with the support of the public at home and abroad once they understood the subject better. The problem is that he was put in a position to win the presidency with the help of donations from the same multi-national corporations that are part of the problem. No high profile politician can gain national office or statewide office under the current system without the support of money that can only come from the supporters of the multi-national corporations. In the long run we need a better system where the control of the elections and the media is reformed. This doesn’t mean more censorship when it comes to reforming the media but less. In the past the Mass Media has had the bully pulpit to stand up for their right to free speech then they have used it to drown out everyone else’s right to free speech.  We need a system that enables the scholars that have studied any given subject and the common man to have more influence over what the Mass Media presents to the public. In order for the common man to know what to do with their right to free speech they need better access to a good education that isn’t distorted by indoctrination from the Mass Media. 

In the short term we need a better grass roots effort to educate the public with or without the help of the Mass Media and as the public becomes more educated they will understand how the enemy du jour is being used to manipulate their emotions. This can be done in many ways and I suspect that in some cases it is already happening but the Mass Media isn’t reporting on it so many members of the public don’t know about it; instead many of them are being led by demagogues like the ones who seem to be organizing the tea parties including Dick Army. Organization like Free Press and Vote Smart as well as many anti-war organizations can do a lot to educate their members. Also more can be done to organization like Wikipedia to organize information so that the public can understand it if they can overcome the opposition by some people within Wikipedia that are resisting this. I have written more about that on another page cited below. 

If Obama or the Mass media do more to educate the public about this in the right way fine but they can’t be trusted to continue to do this in the future. If they could be trusted to do this they would have done it long ago instead of praying on peoples emotions and demonizing the enemy du jour. 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm  

For links to Free Press and Vote Smart see the following

http://www.freepress.net/

http://www.votesmart.org/

 

For more about how Wikipedia can be reformed check Wikipedia out for yourself or read the following: 

https://zakherys.tripod.com/wikipedia_censorship.htm

 

Protect the Afghan Schools

 

And the schools of many other third world countries including Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Columbia, Sri Lanka and many more. This doesn’t mean the right to abuse these children by the natives should be protected though. This is easier said than done of course. 

The long term hopes for peace depend on how the children of the next generation are educated. If the USA and other western countries truly want to advance democracy around the world the most important thing is to teach the children right and provide them with an education that enables them to set up their own government and run it themselves. Past efforts to negotiate with local warlords to keep the peace have failed to do this. What may often happen in many countries is that local leaders are put in place with the help of the western governments who are sympathetic to the ideologies of the west. They often wind up dealing with western corporations in a manner that puts capitalism ahead of the best interest of the people they are supposed to serve. The resources are often plundered from many of these third world countries and used to promote the best interest of a small number of rich people at the expense of the majority. The most effective way to avoid this is to make the best education possible available to these children. In the modern age this should also involve developing a good supply of computers hooked up to the internet so that these children can benefit from a vast source of information. 

There needs to be more concern with minimizing collateral damage to prevent a large number of people from joining the forces that are fighting the western countries the best way to do this may involve greater risk to American and allied soldiers but if they truly are trying to advance democracy this is what needs to be done. There is an enormous amount of propaganda about how these soldiers are sacrificing their lives to preserve freedom but this often proves not to be the case. If they want to back up this propaganda with honesty they need to do as much to protect the schools and other social institutions as they often say they do. If the Western countries led by the USA truly want to be considered the protectors of the world they need to consider the needs of less educated people who don’t know how to run their own governments and stand up for their own rights. In order to do this the local people need a much better access to education than they have had in the past. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other authors have written about how many third world countries have a very violent culture that encourages strict disciplinarian methods that often cross the line to child abuse which tends to teach the children to become violent when they grow up. This will not help these countries look out for their own best interests but lead to more constant fighting. It may not be easy to tell them that they need to try to do a better job raising their children but in the long term that is what needs to be done. There needs to be a better education system set up to help young parents as well as the children. Many of these parents were raised in violent homes themselves so this may not be quick in many cases. Some of these parents may be more open to criticism than others so they should be the ones in the short term to receive help since it may be the most effective. However the ones that are the most likely to resist criticism can’t be ignored since they may be the ones who wind up raising the most dysfunctional children. There needs to be more safe places for children so that they can grow up without fear. If they can’t protect them every where right off the bat they might want to consider safety zones that can gradually be expanded until whole countries become stable and prosperous.  

There have been efforts like this in the past to reeducate children and they have often involved indoctrination rather than education. Hitler was one of the most famous ones that did this with the Hitler Youth. Hitler was at one point competing with Eugenio Pacelli over who would control the Schools and neither of the two was very open to fact checking. Both sides wanted to dictate the truth to the children based on their own ideology or religion. This needs to be avoided. The best way to do this is to make sure there is an open system set up that allows for fact checks. Different points of view need to be considered before finding out what is true. There may be a lot of resistance from people who want to protect their way of life and in most cases this should be respected but if their way of life involves setting up an indoctrination system that turns the public into a virtual slave class then it will mean they are protecting the way of life of the tyrants at the expense of the innocent who deserve to have their rights protected. It is often very difficult to tell who is truly more interested in looking out for the best interest of the public or who is just trying to appear to look out for the best interest of the public. To do this often takes time and a calm look at the details.  

One of the most common excuses why this shouldn’t be done is that you can’t force democracy on the public which is true but you can force tyranny on the public and this is often what happens when people settle for this answer. It is also true that more can be done so that these people get a better education so that they can choose democracy on their own. The excuse that you can’t force democracy may sound good at a glance but a closer look will expose flaws in this excuse.

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm