Violence trickles down, and the myths that enable it
By Andrew Klein
One of the most dangerous, evil myths permeating western culture is the idea that good things happen to good people and bad shit happens to bad people. This mindset is rarely questioned; it’s become an integral part of the western world view.
Hand in hand with the callous indifference created by the neoliberal philosophy and the fiction of the free market bringing about ‘good’ outcomes, it is a simpletons view of the world that ignores the influences of state and non-state actors who actively engineer social outcomes.
The moment we see a disadvantaged individual, a homeless individual for example, there are plenty who immediately assume that the individual has failed, is flawed and was an active agent in their own suffering and disadvantage. With the ‘you must have done something to deserve this’ attitude, the observer moves on not questioning the factors involved. They can be dismissed.
Gaza and the ongoing slaughter of countless innocent and the failure of the west to take steps to end the slaughter and encourage steps that would benefit both sides in the long term is an example.
The suffering, the ongoing slaughter is dismissed out of hand. They, the obviously very different, must have done something to deserve it, and the butchery continues.
Careful examination of history and current political events are avoided. They ‘must have done something to deserve it’ is fed by crafted misinformation and lack of context. That none of this would be possible without the support of western powers is ignored. Political ideology and religious history are conflated and brutal partisanship is enforced.
It speaks to the cognitive dissonance created in the west; it may even speak to the level of violence we see in our own communities: The victims of domestic violence, the number of women killed whilst in relationships. The historic treatment of rape victims.
The victim is used to re-enforce the dangerous myth. The victim must have contributed to their own demise or suffering.
If you can look at any victim, the mutilated bodies or the homeless and food insecure in our own country or any other, and snub them because “bad shit happens to bad people”, then you are complicit in perpetuating this evil myth.
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24 comments
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Bert -
ajogrady -
Canguro -
corvusboreus -
leefe -
wam -
Phil Pryor -
corvusboreus -
Canguro -
Canguro -
Bert -
John C -
Arnd -
Canguro -
Fred -
Steve Davis -
Florence Howarth -
Clakka -
corvusboreus -
Clakka -
Terence Mills -
corvusboreus -
New England Cocky -
Terence Mills
Return to home pageSo if that myth were true, up until 1945 Jews must have been bad, but somehow that changed when returned to the lands mythological god had promised Abraham some 4 thousand or so years ago.
Then suddenly the people who had occupied that land became bad people although they had probably been quite good until that time.
Yep, it all suddenly makes sense.
Not only have Zionists stolen Palestinian land but the Zionists stole the Jewish religion to do it. Zionism is a political ideology, not a religious or ethnic identity. The egregious, false equivalence between it and Judaism is the only way Israel and the West can justify genocide. Zionists have forever shamed the Jewish religion.
The Zionists genocidal war on Palestinians is not just a war on Palestinians. It is a Zionist war on humanity, Christian values, international law, common decency, freedom and the Jewish religion itself. While these acts are evil and despicable now Zionists have made antisemitism their weapon of choice. The manufactured and contrived outrage by Zionists use of anti sematism to censor debate is the last refuge of conniving scoundrels. The cynica, contrivedl and contemptuous use of antisemitism by the Zionist propagandist demeans and devalues the pain and suffering experienced by those of the Jewish faith at the hands of German Nazis. How is it the responsibility of the Palestinian people to right the wrongs of the atrocities of Nazi Germans upon the Jewish people.
These notions of good & bad are, to state the obvious, utterly subjective and without any substantive basis. Anyone who has at the minimum a passing sense of history, whether modern or ancient or both, knows that it’s often a case of ‘friends today, enemies tomorrow, and a bit down the track, friends again.’ When enemies, we’ll slaughter you without respite, but tomorrow, hey, we’ll gather around and drink to companionship and good times.
The human animal is a fickle, unpredictable and dangerous creature.
In WWII, to take a recent example, we (the ‘Allies’ (hah!)), did our best to annihilate the Germans and the Japanese, and Russia was on our side in this contest. Now, we embrace those who we tried to slaughter and demonise the Russians. China was also on the side of the western powers against the common enemy, Japan, but is now caricatured as the biggest threat to western civilisation.
Go figure!
There’s clearly, evidently, something deeply flawed in the human psyche; Semitics both, the Palestinians and the Jews, locked in a to the death struggle which has no end and will likely never see reconciliation. Nothing so hateful and bitter as blood feuds.
I’m unlikely to be here for the final act, but I imagine these battles between humans will continue to be a feature even as the planet cooks, crops fail, waters rise, cities and systems are destroyed; and all the while man upon man will be gripping the other’s throats in a struggle to the death. Madness, total and utter madness.
Gaia, sentient as ever, is overdue for her deep sighs of relief after the human experiment runs its course.
Historically speaking, bad shit generally doesn’t happen to bad people (although they occasionally receive comeuppance), it is more often inflicted on the societally or geographically vulnerable, sometimes by coincidence of circumstances, sometimes by powermongering sociopaths (aka “evil people”).
In the ‘special military operation’ being conducted by the IDF to ‘eradicate Hamas & liberate the remaining hostages’, ordinary Israeli citizens are being conscripted and ordered to commit warcrimes against Palestinian civilians.
Both the governing bodies of Israel & Gaza are currently driven by primitive theocratic imperatives, and both harbour ambitions ranging from ethnic-cleansing through to complete genocide, the only real applied variance being due to power imbalance.
My sympathies?
There (as in Ukraine) they generally tend to lie with moderate people attempting to live normal peaceful productive lives whilst being systematically shelled and shot by warmongering phuqwits.
As for local homeless folk?
I consciously try to make my assessments by observing their consequential personal conduct rather than reactively judging because of disadvantaged situational circumstances.
The Just World Fallacy. People even apply it to victims of CSA.
Anything rather than disrupt the steady complacency of their lives.
If anyone has read the news corp bullshit about the Alice being a world crime city??
The source of the accusation about The Alice is a Serbian based member data collection agency whose data, according to university academics, is not only unreliable but often misleading!!
In the top 50 crime cities, where official statistics are used, all but 3, (in South Africa) are in the Central, South and North Americas.
ps Yes, Cangaru, spot on we can add the septics armed Ho Chi Minh he beat theJapanese. The the septics let the French dark and Ho beat the French then the septics(and us all the wayers) fought him till his inheritors beat they yanks. Then the petulant losers continued a terrible economic fight and Vietnam has won that war.
The history is clear, the superstition is silly filth, the usual superficial attiudes remain and who is correct (enough) about this difficulty?? Zionism is a concept of murder, robbery, occupation, misery, humiliation and utter racist filth, conceived, since the nineteenth centry, to steal land. The utterly unreliable and treacherous British had this ancient area in charge, with duties to the people and not to dreams of dirty crime, and they FAILED, quite deliberately, so as to get Jewish money through the Great War, to satisfy a stupidity of Balfour and others, to get rid of Jews basically, a “problem” for centuries, to spend the last coins of British Imperial filth, oppression, perversion of duty and truth, and to get out of anything embarrasing. But Hitler was to come… Palestinians, unrecognised, dismissed, disregarded, racially ignored, disgustingly betrayed as humans, belittled as bedouins not fit to be counted as worthy, shunned as sub-human by British shitheaded operators like Balfour, Churchill, Bonar Law, Asquith, Lloyd George the superturd, by French manipulators and connivers; this is the filth history fails to see in its relentess orthodoxy and submission, The Zionists know they have the old testament, the stupidity of religious superstitious orthodoxy, conformity, even loyalty to CRIME in the CAUSE of western supremacy, and the criminalty goes on, is talked down, is even misunderstood, forgiven, is turned into a case for big power Insitutional wrong. You Big Filthy Criminal Operators .
Lest anyone think that “bad shit is the lot of bad people” is a purely ‘western’ construct, I would point out that the world’s most populous nation (India) predominantly operates on the religious assumption that any disadvantages being suffered by now-you are probably just the result of past-you transgressions.
CB, when in Korea and hanging out with a K-lady who herself hung out with the monks at her local Buddhist temple, taking tea and imbibing Buddhist esoterica, on one particular occasion when the two of us were descending the escalator towards the depths of the subway in Seoul, where at the base stood an elderly Korean gentleman dressed in traditional cloth, begging, an unusual sight in that country, and when I reached into my pocket to gather coins to pass to this old man, she intervened, saying, No!, don’t, this man is in this circumstance as a function of past life behaviour, and he must suffer in this life as a consequence of his past; I admit I gave her precedence, given her frequency of tea-taking and my relative ignorance in these matters. Subsequent reflections suggest I ought to have passed the coins, if only to assuage the degree of difficulty that the old gentleman was undergoing, karma notwithstanding.
Thank you, Phil Pryor, for your usual frank and brutally honest evaluation.
It’s not just theRW MSM. So much hate is now spread through social media. That is unfiltered and ugly, inciting the hate we see expressed through the violence in Israel/Palestine and the west bank as well as Ukraine.
It seems gentle, peaceful voices are not allowed.
Saw a painting at an art show on the weekend, the three monkeys,
See no evil,
Hear no evil,
Speak no evil
now have a fourth monkey saying leave it to me, I have a smart phone.
I took a photo of it, but am not tech savvy enough to post it here….. maybe just as well, need to respect the artist’s copyright.
Sent it off to my friend who sends me angry youtube videos…. he’s not sent me anything this week (yet)
“The human animal is a fickle, unpredictable and dangerous creature.”
Couldn’t have said it any better myself Canguro! We are indeed that and so much more. Our capacity for violence sometimes seems to have no bounds. No other animal on this planet has ever come anywhere close to our, what seems like, insatiable lust for blood and mayhem over such petty reasons. We are supposed to be the most intelligent creatures ever given life on this planet but that I think is very debatable when you look at our record of slaughtering each other throughout our history. We have a looong way to go!
Canguro:
Don’t forget that in passing some coin to the old penitent reincarnate, you might have garnered a few extra bonus points towards your own future reincarnate circumstances. Buddhist indulgences, like?
Arnd, yes indeed, it is so.
Not that it matters but I did, much later, spend two years living on a Buddhist forest monastery, where among other things I planted hundreds of trees, slashed acres of grass again and again, put up with the eccentric manifestations of an irascible old monk… an exercise in patience and forbearance if ever there was, along with being the general dog’s body jack of all trades; more than one of the regular visitors who came for meditation sessions noted that I had garnered some element of credit by virtue of my two years of hard labour.
I should have helped the old Korean gentleman though, who I expect has long since passed onto the next phase of existence.
I’m going out on a limb, but isn’t religion the main reason why we have so much conflict. So much hate and intolerance, vented in the name of god, with each religion being the only “correct” one. Religions appear to have places and reduced legal obligations which allow truly evil people (pedophiles) to survive and flourish. For those attending the Olympics, take time out and visit some of the residences of Bishops and churches to see the opulence in which those at the top of the hierarchy lived. Religion has used fear to control the masses on the basis of being the moral high ground and the conduit to the afterlife – give money or you will go the hell without any proof of god, hell, etc. Europe is awash with the history which documents religions involvement in war and other mass injustices. It’s a pity we can’t stop all religions and the accompanying nonsense.
Fred, I think you’re both right and wrong.
Some religions have done, and continue to do, great harm. Others appear to be extremely narrow in outlook, stunting the personal development of members. Yet they can do great good in the world, and can nurture personal self-development.
It’s obvious that two years in a forest retreat did Canguro no harm, and may have made a huge difference to him personally. He seems to think so, and although no-one else can comment on that, we see that he has the courage to reveal his innermost thoughts to the world, and that’s a rare quality.
Did two years in the forest give him that courage? Only he knows.
Fred, my advice is, check out some branches of Eastern philosophy such as advaita, Buddhism, Taoism. There you’ll find no focus on the existence of God that seems to concern you. No requirement for faith. However, as with everything else, you have to sort the wheat from the chaff.
To get the flavour of Eastern philosophy, do a search for quotes from Lao tzu. You’ll find gems such as —
“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.”
But it can get really profound as with
“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
Think of it as an adventure Fred. Or in a more sober vein, remember that when we stop growing we die.
Violence never trickles down. It floods destroying all in its path.
Good article, great topic, and excellent comments,
Religion has always been embedded in politics and remains so, and perhaps was in fact the first politics. Violence (and fear) has always been the major leverage used by both. IMO, violence is not just in the human domain, but in all animals for the purpose of both survival and threat – part of the genetic imperative.
Try as we might to educate away from violence and doctrines manipulating through ‘otherness’, it is largely easily tipped to a more crude base instinct of blame and violent revenge or protective stance.
I agree entirely with Phil Pryor’s appraisal of the Israel ‘situation’
And yes, indeed it persists, known by all, at least the five-eyes, with all actions now collected and collated by the USA’s NSA via satellite through Oz Pine Gap etc. (I have written on this in AIMN before – no doubt anyway you all know). There’s no excuse, the USA (and POTUS) have it all at their fingertips, every phone call, email, radio comm, internet comm, security network, military base, weapons cache, every launch and every target and who (important) is where, within seconds, 24:7:365. They know about all goings on in Israel, Palestine, the Middle East and etc.
I was reminded of it again last night on ABC RN LNL discussions: Pine Gap & Des Ball, nukes etc with the director John Hughes of doco Twilight Time: Des Ball the man who saved the world, (to be launched at Melbourne International Film Festival) and Richard Tanter: Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute and former President of the Australian board of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). It’s a rather stark reminder that it is now much more than the wiles of silly old men in funny hats, it’s fully automated, and ready to go bling-bang at a moment’s notice.
In another interview with Bruce Wolpe on Kamala Harris, US democracy, Trump and the upcoming DNC and Federal elections, Wolpe of course dredged through Trump’s bleeding ear, the US history of political violence and the potential for civil war. Wolpe said, “America has always been violent”, as if it was an fait accompli, yet also said ‘Project 2025’ was irrelevant, and what Americans are most interested in is entertainment. Yikes!
It seems to me no accident that politics in the USA prefers to encourage Holywood psycho-dramas, and the mainstream media to continue with their BS junk, sensations and unfounded prognostications, as cover for real issues such as why, per se, they keep up the flow of deadly armaments to Israel, and who else they don’t and do provide arms to and impose strategies upon.
And to who and how they butter up, by keeping up the flow of alcohol, narcotics and amphetamines. Seems it could all be a trickle-down by design, but now overabundant and confused beyond control.
Clakka,
I tend to regard religion, by it’s definitional affiliation with binding articles of doctrine & ritual, to mostly be an imposition of organised and incorporated authoritarian structures over personal matters of faith, superstition, theology and existential contemplation.
Corvus,
Me too. Perhaps I shoulda made myself more clear in my opening para.
I was pleased to see that Kamala Harris was not afriad to let Netanyahu know what her position on Gaza is.
She stated that “what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time — we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies, we cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”
This will infuriate the misogynists Trump and Netanyahu who do not like uppity women and it may take her to the White House but then again she still has to beat Murdoch and Fox and the good old boys : good luck to her !
Terrence,
Must admit, that’s a far more bold/bald statement of rare/raw truth than I would have expected, let alone hoped, to have heard emit from an establishment candidate like VP Harris.
Certainly casts a stark contrast to candidate Trump lambasting president Biden (aka ‘genocide Joe’) for denying ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu sufficient lethal aid to “finish the job”.
The GENOCIDE IN GAZA conducted by Bibi the ZION@ZI BUTCHER & the amoral ZION@ZI IDF has killed 38,000+ Palestinian mainly women & children so that the demolished cities can be cleared away by international carpet-baggers to build new residences for the next influx of fresh ZION@ZI COLONIST SETTLERS escaping from the Russian conscription, the American chaos or even European indifference.
DO NOT BE MISLEAD ….. THE ISRAELI KNESSET BACKS THE GAZA GENOCIDE 100%
BAN + DIVEST + SANCTION = BDS ALL ISRAELI GOODS & SERVICES.
Forty-five surgeons, emergency room physicians and nurses from the US and Canada who volunteered in several Gaza hospitals over recent months laid out in a letter to Biden/Harris what they described as the “massive human toll from Israel’s attack on Gaza, especially the toll it has taken on women and children.”
Because of the very high number of children with bullet wounds they believe that IDF snipers are
targetting children.
They believe that the Gaza death toll is closer to 90,000 !
This is the letter they wrote :
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bf4mfymnmn4t1wyvdkx4h/Letter.pdf?rlkey=z3ekl4u9gtya2p33ek6ud2zet&e=3&dl=0
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/25/israel-gaza-war-biden-letter