8 Steps to Oblivion
By Steve Davies
Preamble
I stirred from a deep sleep at around 2.30pm last night. Like millions of people around the world I am deeply disturbed about the slaughter of innocents in Gaza.
I grabbed the notebook I keep next to my bed. My starting point? Knowing all that I do about moral disengagement I asked myself what would I write about what is being done to the people of Gaza if I was completely morally disengaged. What steps would be taken to ensure success?
What I scribbled in capital letters is that people want to live in a safe world. And they certainly want governments that actually serve and care for people. That they want governments that listen and are morally engaged.
Then I went back to sleep.
When I got up this morning I started writing typing in earnest. Carefully interpreting my scribbled notes. I’m a left-handed spider writer.
The eight steps
The cold logical and deeply disturbing facts are this:
- Innocents get killed in all wars.
- In large scale targeted bombings, large numbers of innocents will be killed. They will be labelled ‘collateral damage’.
- The killing of innocents in such bombings will increase in proportion to the explosive power of each bomb used.
- The killing of innocents in such bombings will be maximised by increasing population density of the ‘enemy’.
- Such killings will be further increased by the design of the bombs being used. For example, through the use of bunker busting bombs on urban areas.
- In shear logical terms all of the above would be known and taken into account in all aspects of military planning.
- To do all of the above requires dehumanisation of the ‘enemy’ regardless of whether they are actual combatants or not. Success is highly dependent on personnel abandoning all sense of moral agency.
- Crucial to the success of the preceding steps is the dismantling of Gazan society. This means destroying all social infrastructure. Health, education, social welfare, food production and distribution, along with all economic infrastructure.
The lesson
The historical and contemporary lesson? The greater the degree of distance between victims and participants in genocide the more successful the implementation of the eight steps.
The terminator hypothesis
The power of technology provides the moral disengagement (detachment as it were), to carry out the eight steps.
This, I contend, is the highway to hell and oblivion and, moreover, it is blatantly the case that money is no object.
Millions of people have seen the movie The Terminator. With advances of technology – surveillance and targeting technologies, artificial intelligence and drones – we are a heartbeat away from removing the human element from the perpetration of inhumanities.
The dire impact of that on societies, economies, communities, individuals, government and civilisation today and into the future cannot be underestimated.
The driver of this is normalised and deep moral disengagement.
The question ourselves and our governments need to ask.
Is that the world we want ourselves and those who come after us to live in?
Reality
As I emphasised at the beginning people want governments that actually serve and care for people. That they want governments that listen and are morally engaged.
That’s the positive change that’s needed. And, even in Australia, we are living and seeing the opposite in far too many respects.
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8 comments
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Return to home pageGood. Sleep again, reconsider, rephrase, reassess. There’s much we do, and ought to, think about…
“What I scribbled in capital letters is that people want to live in a safe world. And they certainly want governments that actually serve and care for people. That they want governments that listen and are morally engaged.” Which is exactly what we don’t have, nor do most populations around the world. It’s up to us to change that.
When a politician says starving 2 million people to death is moral and right , then it matters little whether the process is done by humans or technology . The essential values are lost . At least he admitted that ‘ the world won’t let him! ‘
This is not an anti semitic comment, but a cry for a better way !
What I find most deeply concering is that the people who are survivors or descenends of the most horrendous planned genocide, the Nazi holocaust are now inflicting their own ‘hohlcaust’ on the Palestinian people in Gaza and while eyes are averted continue the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the West Bank
The arrogance of retaining the victim badge cannot excuse what is occurring in either Gaza or the West Bank.
“As I emphasised at the beginning people want governments that actually serve and care for people. That they want governments that listen and are morally engaged.” …. and rightly so, but demonstrably this is not what is being delivered.
I don’t have any answers or solutions to this conundrum; it seems to be the case that it is beyond the capacity of contemporary political entities to structure their behaviours, policies and strategies in a way that meets these entirely reasonable wishes of communities. Politicians often seem to start off promising but fail to deliver. All recent American presidents utterly failed to improve the status quo. And all recent Australian & British prime ministers, the same. We would appear to be living through an era characterised by the failure of political systems to meet the standards expected of them in terms of best practice and outcomes.
The corollary, or consequence, would thus seem that less than best practice has become acceptable; witness governmental – at best, turning a blind eye or muttering mealy-mouthed tut tuts, or at worst – actively aiding & abetting of genocidal practice by a heavily armed and hate filled entity against a practically unarmed foe, accompanied by an egregious lack of concern for the slaughter of unarmed and defenceless non-combatants. Need we be reminded at this point that the Jews have historically held non-Jews in utter contempt, labelling them vermin and cockroaches among other sweet epithets? Such embedded arrogance goes some way towards explaining their indifference to the slaughter of those of whom they now occupy their stolen lands.
Or, in other areas, spending king’s ransoms on weaponry in anticipation of armed conflicts yet to materialise, monies that could have been spent of such critical matters as shoring up food security, water availability, environmental protection, best practice natural resource management, housing and education and health care and infrastructure maintenance & repair and development, along with sensible and appropriate rates of adoption of non-fossil based energy supply technologies.
But, yeah, nah, at least in this country, we’re Strayans, mate, she’ll be right, no wuckers, all good, what’s yer problem eh, what’s the rush, there’s always tomorrow?
Until there isn’t. Watch The Grab if you can, if you want a hint of what’s around the corner.
I have been reading George Monbiot on the subject of Neo-Liberalism, and seen some interviews.
I think he may have a point in suggesting that we are “A nation of altruists governed by psychopaths”.
Its a learned reaction in our attempt to make sense of chaos.
Sleep will come more easily if we do some relearning.
#7 “dehumanisation of the ‘enemy’ regardless of whether they are actual combatants or not.” How true.
Only a ‘dehumanized’ person can do that. There’s a class of people, who through life circumstances, have been ‘educated’ to be exactly that. It serves the parasite class, so educated, to create wars and survivors so traumatized that they create secondary trauma in the surrounding community. Guess who profits? The parasite class.
I ran across some material by Nathan Reynolds (snatched from the flames) who writes and speaks about his experiences growing up within a “Family’s Criminal Empire”. He gives an insiders view shaped by an understanding of “Radical Intelligent Evil and its war against innocence, curiosity, and life”.
Strange most politicians & MSM cannot see genocide when it is staring them in the face. Not really strange though is it, our politicians will do nothing on their own accord, they are captive to corporations profitting from war.
Politicians are soon transformed from pretenders of all knowingness to a fearsome paranoia of being cast aside as failures.
This becomes a double whammy when faced with the power and guile of the corporatised world.
Where fight or flight is controlled, increasingly through the survival instinct of mirroring, eventually voters and politicians engage in an automaton’s circular dance of fearsome paranoia. Nothing gets done until a fight breaks out, then it’s mayhem.
In the surveillance states, it seems the only choice is whether to be captured by the mirror or not.