Paldywan Kenobi's
archive of articles
|
Paldywan Kenobi's view on Iraq (2)18th August 2003Palden JenkinsOn 5th February 2003 I circulated an article saying I did not believe the Iraq war would happen. I knew I might be proven wrong. The war seemed to me miscalculated, narrowly-considered, and I incorrectly reckoned moderating influences and good sense might in the end prevail in USA. The war did happen. It brought a time of truth. Here are my afterthoughts. Many of those who demonstrated worldwide against the war on February 15th did so in what turned out to be a vain hope that they might be heard. Subsequent events re-mapped the scenery and, like it or not, everyone had to adjust - in particular Iraqis. Fixed positions of all kinds were compromised - reality did a mighty twist. What we learn from this is important, and we're all learning different things. One is that decisive geopolitical actions, military or peaceful, must genuinely work, and work out well, for the greatest good. They need a quality of intuitive correctness, starting from the very beginning. The disjunction in early 2003 between popular will and people in power demonstrated, to me at least, the emergence of a new 21st Century agenda. This agenda is not clearly stated, yet it is nevertheless partly visible, defining the way forward in decades to come. Who writes it? It is written collectively and unconsciously, composted from a heap of buried anguish, loss and bottom-line truth accumulated over time by the victims of gulags, chain-saws, bulldozers, bombs, cruelty, toxicity, alienation and oppression, and by everyone, each in their own ways. It is stoked up by the unfulfilled dreams of forgotten millions. The events of the 1990s and recent years have brought the new agenda into sharpened focus. It is emerging now because, deep down, humanity has matured to a level where it is ready to tackle major questions it avoided before. Unconsciously, growing numbers are now fed up with 'the same old thing'. Collective awareness has shifted its focus a few subtle degrees. It now sees and judges things differently. This has also generated a counteractive, uneasy escapism - a perverse exploration of ever more avoidances, ranging from obesity to war. Exploited by dominant interest-groups to replicate the old order, avoidance of big issues is supported by a reluctant public acceptance of pressures to conform. The friction between seeing and avoidance generates heat - many people want change as long as changes don't happen in their own backyard. Thus many conflicts are more serious than they need to be; depression, AIDS and cancer eat away at society from within; and the gulf between the overfed and the underfed, the winners and losers, widens dangerously. The crevasse between the worlds is creaking open. A schizoid battle has built up between dualities lodged within ourselves. On one side are our conditioned, educated, enforced beliefs, explanations and default actions, all geared to maintain 'normality'. On the other side are our natural, instinctive, intuitive and humanising sensitivities and insights that tend to see things as they are, feel the undercurrents and interpret deeper messages from life. Today's events expose this schizoid inner conflict, addressing specific issues in detail. The significance of events is getting sharper, as situations intensify worldwide and people's perceptions evolve. Things have not reached boiling point, but occasionally buried, semi-conscious 'stuff' simmers up. Having seen refugees, war zones, famines and plague victims so many times before, something deep down says "Wasn't this supposed to be consigned to the past by now?" Official culture is in denial. Denial is partially an historic product of civilisation, of man-made, urban-centred culture. Current events in Iraq, where urban civilisation began, symbolise an unconscious global addressing of the 'matter of civilisation'. Civilisation involves cutting out significant factors - the influences of nature and human naturalness - in favour of selected constructs judged to be beneficial, such as refrigerators, money and regulated behaviour. Our anchorage to naturalness, commonsense and 'natural justice' is severely stretched, terribly complexified. This is not new but, like environmental devastation, selective breeding or warfare, it has reached a critical pitch. An image of a very different civilisation, designed for humans, made to fit our planet's needs, is slowly surfacing. It's common to blame governments, intelligence services, media giants, corporate interests and other targets for this mess. Yet we still permit and encourage them to perpetuate the mess. They help us maintain a painful normality we're not quite good enough at imposing on ourselves. We need fear, guilt and shame to help us remain pot-bound, and they provide it for us. This is 'winners and losers' or 'oppressors and victims'. Democracy is presumed to be the solution, but electoral democracy, as practised, gives us George Bush, Ariel Sharon and Tony Blair, and democratic countries have dirtied their hands by supporting tyrants such as Saddam Hussein. The full implications of democracy are greater than this. USA has an admirable democratic constitution that is nevertheless royally abused, a plaything of the wealthy and powerful, readily influenced and bypassed by background interests driving their own agendas. This is a fundamental glitch. True public influence is not really ensured by democratic constitutional arrangements: it is a state of mind and a societal process that establishes optimum truth for everyone and carries it out. The fear is that such empowerment means anarchy, but actually it implies a maturing of public consciousness such that people interact healthily with authorities and power-holders, guiding their actions and retaining final control. During the buildup to the Iraq war, neither people nor authorities felt understood by each other, and this disjunction comes not just from authorities but also from public disarray and indifference. In this regard, the anti-war demonstrations of February 2003 marked a milestone of democratic failure advancing the longterm cause of a truer democratic evolution. They marked a defining moment when history moved forward another inch, toward an eventual crunch point. The gravitational fields of public consensus and establishment control will scrape and collide again, eventually establishing which is to orbit the other. The future is bigger, wider, higher and deeper than we can currently see. The rules, not just the game, are changing. We cannot know the reality-base our descendants will look back from when they look on our present as their past. Yet paradoxically the aims and objectives of the 21st Century are quite clear. They comprise simple messages that lie at the bottom of current events. I'd suggest the agenda is, more or less:
There might be more, and these might be stated differently, but this roughly sums it up. It is a world where we do to others and the world what we would like them to do to us. In today's ridiculous framework, this sounds improbable or idealistic. Yet, to cede to future generations a world worth living in, such objectives are basic and foundational - as far as we currently know and judge. So they need to underpin our longterm priorities. This involves setting goals for 50 and 100 years, and framing present decisions in terms of future aims. Governments, business and official culture are on the whole past-oriented, justified and rationalised to the hilt. Visualising the future demands a more intuitive approach. Current events have a coherence that calls up intuition or gut instinct. In a sense we have already unconsciously crossed the great divide, without fully realising it, around the Millennium. Humanity runs much the same agenda as before, yet we do so in a changed operational context. Old default solutions nowadays show greater invalidity and obsolescence. We're in a period of scrabbling to reinvent and re-present the same old stuff. February 2003 marked a statement by the world public that we smell a rat. New conclusions are being formed. The key lies in crisis-points where humanity is confronted with examples of its problem. One example was seen in the weeks following 9-11. The first omens of the new agenda showing itself were the spontaneous, caring outbursts of solidarity seen in the streets of an otherwise normally hard-hearted New York, and the empathy felt worldwide, even from people unsympathetic to Americans. This was stirring stuff. The next signs were those thoughtful voices who observed that terrorism arises from genuine causes that sincerely need addressing. This implied that changes were needed on our own home ground as well as 'out there' where the threats come from - a taking of responsibility and a retraction of negative projection on 'the enemy'. The third sign, contradicting the above, was the declaration of war on terror. Here, an ageing order, dependent on polarisation and force, sought to reinstate control over an overflowing river threatening to change course. To channel this flood, the power groupings of 'Old America' consigned USA to a mission which was to cost a billion dollars for every ten dollars spent by the terrorist troublemakers. Dangerous. This bankruptcy trap, once set by USA for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan two decades earlier, was now successfully applied to America by the very people USA had trained to help fell USSR - Osama & Co. It was unintelligent to fall into al Qaeda's trap - a consequence of seeing things in terms of the past. The wars on terror and on Iraq were pre-emptive strikes against an emergent reality, a 20th Century recipe recycled. But something has shifted. Thirty to forty years ago we supported or permitted the battle against Communism, the spraying of crops, the murder, debilitation or marginalisation of people standing in the way, the paving of paradise to put up parking lots, and an indefinitely-expanding, caffeine-powered formula of economic growth. Today, people are unhappy with this, more aware that alternatives exist - even if they don't know what they are. When a distressing world event comes along, avidly covered on our TV screens, a deep unease is exposed. It's a friction between our 'civilised' conditioning and natural knowingness. The first says (for example): "If we cut agricultural subsidies to save (mere, faraway) African farmers, food prices will rise and our national interest and prosperity will suffer - and this cannot happen". The second says: "These refugees-victims-orphans-widows could be us, so we should care for them" - or, simply, "There's something just not right about all this". The balance-of-power between these superpowers of the collective psyche is delicately poised to shift. Divergence between the 'official line' and public intuition, at crisis times, gets excruciating. The drift of current events asks us to respond differently, in line with deeper knowing, sensitivity and commonsense - even if we don't know where this leads. It 'felt right' when Nelson Mandela came to power, or when the Taliban fell, and it didn't feel right when the Tienanmen Square demonstrations failed, or when Baghdad fell into chaos. It costs less and yields better results to do what 'feels right'. In the protests of February 2003, the voice of the social mainstream expressed this. It wasn't even outrightly anti-war: it was saying "This needs doing another way, with integrity". However, pursuing 'other ways' can open cans of worms. Thirty years ago, with regret, it looked as if only an enormous apocalyptic disaster would wake up humanity. Yet we have had many shocking disasters - Chernobyl, Rwanda, Palestine, forest fires and el Niņo - and changes have happened mainly in terms of undercurrents, not actions or official policy. What seems to impact strongest is the symbolism, not necessarily the magnitude of events. Forgive me if I call 9-11 a relatively small global event but, objectively, other events such as Vietnam, Nicaragua or the Congo outstrip it. But 9-11's significance lay in the soulquakes and wider implications it set in motion. Since it happened on America's home ground, it gained importance. In Britain, the death of just one person, Princess Diana, produced an enormous soulquake, exposing a collective sense of loss of innocence, compassion and altruism, of mutual care, vulnerability and security. It made us aware that we are all as messed up, lost and unloved as Diana felt while alive. In the week between her death and burial, the national atmosphere was transformed: crime rates, violence, hospital admissions, traffic congestion, stress, drunkenness and social divisions all plummeted visibly. Public willingness to behave sanely, sensitively and to mutual benefit was outstanding - at least for that week. London smelt of flowers. Back to Iraq. We can argue indefinitely about the rights and wrongs of what happened there. But one thing unites most sides: the underlying feeling that the course pursued was counter-intuitive, poorly thought through and questionably wrought. What is to be learned here? One lesson is that greater weight must be placed on intuitive, commonsense options, even when they differ from everything we have known thus far. Such an approach opens cans of worms, and much is feared around this. The true solution to the problem in Iraq was the oft-quoted Irish solution: 'To get to Dublin, I wouldn't start from here'. The Iraq situation went back to British and other foreign interventions in the area since WW1, various coups d'etats, support for dictatorships and terrorists in the 1950s-90s and wider issues around the oil and arms trades - to name a few. In my book Healing the Hurts of Nations, the chapter on Iraq's history traces causal threads going back five thousand years. Understanding wider causes helps greatly, but we must still deal with problems as presented, start from here, and not create further avoidable problems for the future. When cans of worms are prised open, we fear the wriggling. But they're our worms, already informing our current unconscious actions. They can bust open the can themselves. One clause of the 21st Century agenda seems to state: opening cans of worms is, in the end, more fruitful, less costly and painful than not opening them. In the case of the wars on terror and on Iraq, the can has been kept hammered shut, suppressing the real reasons these situations have arisen - though worms are escaping anyway. Billions are being invested in strategies allegedly aiming to reduce world violence, yet arguably they are increasing it. People and landscapes are being damaged to block the emergence of a new politics of awareness. In richer countries, we invest vastly in keeping the problem 'out there' in Africa or the Middle East, but it already impacts on us 'here'. Our poverty is that of hollow comforts, obesity, hapless consumptiveness and addiction. Our wars we label 'youth crime', 'divorce', 'paedophilia' or 'unemployment'. Our own refugees live in propertied, insured, embattled nightmares of affluence, bereft of real homeliness, community and soul-nourishment. How might we start from here? By paying attention to the guiding message of current defining events. Nowadays they hit us several times each year. Each contains specific, simple yet profound lessons, presenting us with contrasts, paradoxes and options. They encourage a new kind of awake moderation, a need to get off our ideological hobby-horses and address the situation as it presents itself. There is something blatantly factual about current trends and events, slapping us awake, forcing us to recognise the price of doing nothing or of staving off the day of reckoning. No ideology or philosophy guides the politics of the 21st Century and there is no neat ground-plan. Yet an agenda of simple, key priorities reveals itself through today's defining events. This forces us to fine-tune our emergent, formative values, in response to events and the feelings they raise. A sense of making history lurks here. The world unconsciously struggles to start forming a new consensus. No one knows the big answer (though some believe they do), yet answers will be found by bravely entering a global reality process, one event at a time. Public opinion is challenged to move beyond fitful demonstrations and outbursts of feeling toward a more consistent, clear, ongoing collective astuteness and participation in the world process - this is one lesson from 15th February 2003. Global solutions lie in the hands of the much-vaunted 'international community', but that community must properly take shape as a functional entity and really work - get a grip on global issues. American unilateralism fills a geopolitical vacuum where the international community should be standing. The world stands on the edge of a community-building process. It's not a matter of power-holders, corporations or America, the global superpower, stepping back. It's a matter of people, social groups, nations and humanity stepping forward, taking hold of the reins. |
Paldywan Kenobi'sarchive of articles |
|
© Palden Jenkins. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: