“To work for peace, you must have a peaceful heart. When you do, you are the child of God. But many who work for peace are not at peace. They still have anger and frustration, and their work is not really peaceful. We cannot say that they are touching the Kingdom of God. To preserve peace, our hearts must be at peace with the world, with our brothers and our sisters. When we try to overcome evil with evil, we are not working for peace. If you say, ‘Saddam Hussein is evil. We have to prevent him from continuing to be evil,’ and if you then use the same means he has been using, you are exactly like him. Trying to overcome evil with evil is not the way to make peace.”
Posts Tagged ‘war’
The Origins and History of Consciousness
November 17, 2008“The ’sanctification’ of unaccustomed activity is still the best method of getting a man out of the rut of everyday habit and conditioning him for the required state of work. To take an example: the transformation of a petty office clerk into the responsible leader of a death-dealing bomber squadron is probably one of the most radical psychic transformations that can be demanded of modern man. This metamorphosis of the normal peace-loving citizen into a fighter is, even today, only possible with the help of symbols. Such a transformation of personality is achieved by invoking the symbols of God, King, Fatherland, Freedom, the ‘most sacred good of the nation,’ and by dedicatory acts steeped in symbolism, with the added assistance of all the elements in religion and art best calculated to stir the individual. Only in this way is it psychologically possible to divert psychic energy from the ‘natural channel’ of peaceable private life into the ‘unaccustomed activity’ of slaughter.”
Hot, Flat, and Crowded
November 3, 2008“Our oil addiction is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system in four fundamental ways. First and most imporant, through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most inolerant, antimodern, anti-Western, anti-women’s rights , and antipluralistic strain of Islam – the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.
“Second, our oil addiction is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism. I call this phenomenon ‘the First Law of Petropolitics’: As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down; and as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.
“Third, our growing dependence on oil is fueling an ugly global energy scramble that brings out the worst in nations, wheter it is Washinton biting its tongue about the repression of women and the lack of religious freedom inside Saudi Arabia, or China going into partnership with a muderous African dictatorship in oil-rich Sudan.
“Finally, through our energy purchases we are funding both sides of the war on terror. That is not an exaggeration. To the extent that our energy purchases enrich conservative, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf and to the extent that these governments share their windfalls with charities, mosques, religious schools, and individuals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, and around the Muslim world, and to the extent that these charities, mosques, and individuals donate some of this wealth to anti-American terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and preachers, we are financing our enemies’ armies as well as our own. We are financing the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps with our tax dollars, and we are indirectly financing, with our energy purchases, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.”
Hot, Flat, and Crowded
November 3, 2008“We can no longer expect to enjoy peace and security, economic growth, and human rights if we continue to ignore the key problems of the Energy-Climate Era: energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss. How we handle these five problems will determine whether we have peace and security, economic growth, and human rights in the coming years.”
The Origins and History of Consciousness
November 3, 2008“The relation to the outside world is, in large measure actuated not directly by the individual, but by that imaginary entity the ‘group,’ whose incarnation is the leader or leading animal, and whose consciousness does duty for all parts of the group*.
*That this same relationship still remains catastrophically in force in Western civilization is painfully obvious. Even today, the ruled are mostly supine members of the herd with no direct orientation of their own. The ruler, the State, etc., acts as a substitute for individual consciousness and sweeps us blindly into mass movements, wars, etc.”
In My Own Way
August 13, 2008“When we get heavily serious about either sex or religion there follow crimes of passion, suicides, bitter divorces, inquisitions and holy wars – all of which are signs of imbecility rather than sincere conviction.”
In My Own Way
August 13, 2008“The industrial system offers few jobs that any self-respecting person wants to do, and the intelligent young are sick to death of a way of life that wastes and squanders material for the production of baubles and bombs.”
The Bhagavad Gita
June 1, 2008“In killing my brothers, Krishna, I cannot see anything noble – I do not want this victory, this glory, this happiness. What is glory to us, Krishna, what are pleasures and life, if those who from us deserve glory, pleasure, and life, are ready to fight us, having given up the world’s delights – our uncles, our sons and our grandfathers, our eldest kinsmen, acharyas, our fathers-in-law and our grandsons.
I would not kill them, not for the three worlds, let alone the earth. I had rather they killed me, Krishna.”
The Book of Merlyn
April 28, 2008“After every war, all the officials on the losing side who held a higher rank than colonel ought to be executed out of hand, irrespective of their war-guilt. No doubt there would be a certain amount of injustice in this measure, but the consciousness that death was the certain result of losing a war would have a deterrent effect on those who help to promote and to regulate such engagements, and it might, by preventing a few wars, save millions of lives among the lower classes. [However], it seems less reasonable than it seems, partly because the responsibility for warfare does not lie wholly with the leaders. After all, a leader has to be chosen or accepted by those who he leads. The hydra-headed multitudes are not so innocent as they like to pretend.”
The Once and Future King
April 28, 2008“Men must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”
