The Cult of Violence

We live in a violent society. Wars rage relentlessly and almost continually. People abuse one another economically, physically, mentally and verbally. Our past time in the media is obsessed with violence. Violence permeates our lives on just about all quarters. Despite the hand rubbing gestures to limit this display, we find that instead, it is sex that comes under fire. Here the assaults can be among the most brutal.

Mankind has been engaged in the fine art of honing brutality to an excruciating edge of all permeating agony. If you wanted a definition of hell, we have managed to engineer it beyond even the wildest fantasies of the medieval mind set. The list of humanities inhumanity is almost endless.

There are those among us that would deny the holocaust. Yet, it is just one of several just in this century.

• Every one is familiar with the genocide of the Jews and other undesirables in Nazi Germany, killed in murder factories, burned in specially made ovens or bulldozed into mass graves.

• The atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must also be seen as a monstrous holocaust in its own light. The after effects are still with us today in the form of continuous radiation related suffering. In addition, we have developed depleted uranium (DU) bombs which are used routinely.

• The reign of Pol Pot saw the killing of 1/3 of his entire citizenry in a mad experiment to force everyone back into an agrarian form of life.

• The Hutu and Tutsi went mad and slaughtered each other in the hundreds of thousands in mere weeks. The stench of death hung over Rwanda and Barundi for years. Millions were forced into feted refugee camps where disease flourished. The war is still in progress and has spread into the Congo.

• The Balkans recently suffered a holocaust when the Serbs and Albanians in the most recent chapter of hundreds of years of blood letting between Christians and Muslims. Entire cities and regions were razed to the ground. Several million land mines were planted, making vast regions of farmland treacherous and unusable. Added to this was the air bombing by NATO and UN related forces in Kosovo backing the Serbs.

• When the Ayatollah Khomeini took Iraq in a fundamentalist revolution in 1979, he began a purge of huge dimensions, killing unknown numbers and driving millions out of the country just because they were in violation of the Koranic law in one small way or another. El Shira law has supplanted secular law and focuses on spectral evidence and hearsay rather than solid evidence.

• Stalin in all his murderous brutality murdered some 70 millions during his long tenure in the former Soviet Union. This was largely out of paranoia and on grounds of supposed counter revolutionary activity on part of the targeted including all of the original Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky was the last to die half a world away by a Stalin appointed assassin. Stalin's reach was long and brutal, including the sabotage of the Spanish revolution. Stalin is also the mastermind behind the engineered famine, perfected in the Ukraine during the period of 1932-1933 during which 30 million died.

• Currently, a war still rages from the skies and on the ground of Iraq. The US has played a central role since Dessert Storm. According to some sources, the bombing of Baghdad has continued daily for over a year with well over a million deaths and even more illness and crippling. DU was used extensively.

• A war is now raging in central Africa, now considered being Africa’s first world war. Human casualties are high, but many species, like the African elephant are now threatened with extinction due to the ferocity of the war.

• Then there is Agusto Pinochet who recently got off and returned back to Chile, received by cheering crowds of his supporters. He is infamous for a violent coup d'etat against the leftist Alende government on Sept. 11, 1973, that was legitimately voted into power earlier. After this, he relentlessly pursued, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands just because they voted or supported "left" causes. He was placed into power after Chile decided to nationalize and US backed Jackals were sent in to “restore order”. Though convicted of crimes against humanity, he got off from being forced to go to Spain to answer to crimes against Spanish people during his reign of terror.

More situations threaten to explode at any time.

• India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons and teeter on the brink of a major holocaust. Artillery salvos were being fought over the Kashmir area on the boarder of both countries. Now Pakistan is the focus of US troop buildup as Afghan Taliban troops are allegedly taking refuge there.

• China is demanding that Taiwan submit to mainland rule, threatens an invasion and the US is posturing to prevent this. China and the US both have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over vast distances.

• The peace process has fallen apart in Ireland and elsewhere.

• Palestinian and Israeli peace talks often collapse due to ongoing atrocities. Palestine is seeking to be recognized as an ind pendant nation within the UN, but support is not unanimous, especially with Israel blocking the process.

On the economic front, violence is perpetrated against those who have been down sized out of the economy through millions of mortgage defaults, loss of jobs and social support income. This is despite propaganda of "no poor", "full employment” and an “end to poverty by 2015." The streets tell a different story. Here we see sad and desperate realities.

• Many years ago, California enacted a "Three strikes and you're out law." The result is lifetime prison terms for such things as violating city health ordinances by feeding the homeless and poor in public parks. Or it could come from stealing three slices of pizza in separate instances. It may be for convictions out of the past, paid for under older laws but now made non-effect by a retroactive clause. This is thought to be a method to fill private for profit prisons with an imprisoned slave work force to be competitive with the minimum wage work force. Recent news suggest that the prison labor force will not be paid anything.

• In Georgia, the chain gang was reintroduced as well as in other states and in Alberta, Canada.

• Several decapitations of the homeless have occurred in almost as many cities. This in not to mention hundreds who die of exposure due to total neglect each and every winter. Moscow alone suffered several hundred such deaths during one especially brutal winter day.

• Hospitals in poor districts are closed and razed to the ground in the Bronx and in Edmonton. In other areas, the poor are thrown out of emergency clinics by security guards. Doctors now refuse to help the uninsured, which number in the tens of millions in N. America.

• In areas where welfare still exists, the application procedure is so tough, than most people in need are screened out. This is not true for banks too big to fail with their bailout welfare for banks and corporation schemes. The Salvation Army now fingerprints those applying for their meager rations. The ending of welfare was sold on the idea of community charity, which is virtually non-existent in poorer communities. Poor and homeless line the streets of the first world industrial nations' cities, just like in third world Calcutta, India.

• The cry for lower taxes is sold on the idea that social programs like Medicare/Medicaid, unemployment insurance, old age pensions and welfare must be scaled back. This was done, but for the majority, taxation has not changed. Only those who are well off saw appreciable tax cuts. Military spending has increased. In some areas, military expenditure has increased while almost everything else was cut back. There are whole areas of research costing billions that are kept out of public scrutiny. Indeed, if one stumbles on these areas, they can be shot on sight. Human rights can be waived under "certain conditions." With the passing of the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act and the loss of Habeus Corpus, civil rights no longer exist, but this loss is kept quiet.

• Humanity is held hostage to the gouging demands of the oil cartels and banks. There exists in the patent files, hundreds of inventions that make the internal combustion engine obsolete. But can we get our hands on it? No! These things are buried and censured from use. Inventors are bought off or eliminated to keep the world subservient to the demands of oil moguls. A double violence is committed here, economic and physical, let alone what harm is done to the world environment. One day the oil will run out. It is likely under current policies that most will not be ready for that reality. But then again, most were not ready for sharp increases in the cost of gas and heating oil. The same cartels in collusion with large auto manufacturers gutted mass rapid transit in the 1930s in favour of more cars. Today, most cities are a gridlock nightmare. Great for gas consumption, disastrous for the environment and our long-term survival. But then again, the masses do not figure in the equation for the near future.

Not only is the reality of violence ever present, we are fed a nearly constant diet of it on the media. There is little aside from parental censure that prevents much of it from reaching everyone's senses. Now sex of course, is something that is under heavy censure. Violence raises it ugly head in commercials as well. From the news, to our daily lives, to entertainment and in commercials, violence has become the norm. As for the foregoing, this is merely scratching the surface. We must come to terms with this reality and deal with it on an individual and societal basis. We must examine why there is so much war that is heavily damaging to the planet. When we recognize the cause of it is mainly due to greed, then we have to take steps to take greed out of the equation. This must start at the personal level and then extend all the way to society and the world at large. Many have pat answers as to how the cult of violence will come to an end and it is usually by violent means, making that answer self contradictory. What must be done is to remove violent people from places of power if they refuse to stop being violent. This will require the support of the majority in action such as refusing to engage in violent activity for gain. Someone once stated that one person murdering another is a capital offense, but murdering million in war is foreign policy. It is this kind of thing that has to end if we are to end the cult of violence that pervades our lives.