Howard Zinn speech and interview excerpts
Human nature and aggression (2001)
15. Human nature is often learned experience
I always found in any discussion, on war. Inevitably, any discussion on war. At certain point in the discussion, somebody would say, Oh well, its human nature. And, ah, well, first of all from my own experience, ah, and I still have to tell this to people, because there still people who talked about the desire of young men to go to war, the thrill it is for young men to be in war, to shoot their guns to kill, then I thought about my own experience in the air force, and it was very clear to me, looking around all these guys around me, who are dropping bombs, and who are killing people, that did not come from inside, it did not come from, oh, god, how good it would be to kill some people today, you know, there was no urge to kill, even though, they were the enemy. No, ah, what it came from, was simply we had been trained, ah, and also we had been told it's a good war, we've been told we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, it will be bad if they won, and good if we win, we've got to drop the bombs, and so we'll do it, and do it as well as we can, there was no spontaneous urge to kill. Ahm, and ..., that's my own personal experience. Simply recoiled at the idea that, ah, soldiers, ah, have this kind of killing instinct, or the young men have this killing instinct. And then when I got away from my own experiences. And just began to study history, history of war. Ah, some thing became clear to me. And that is, wars don't take place out of the rush of a population demanding war. It isn't the population that demands war. It's the leaders who demand war, and who prepare the population for war. I mean it's, ah, world war one, you didn't, you didn't, have the American people clamouring for the United states to go to war. Not at all. In fact, if anything it was the opposite. People did not want to go to war. That's why Wooddrow Wilson when he was campaigning in 1916, the war in Europe was on, and the question was, will the United states get into it, And, and, Wilson campaigning in 1916, and knowing this would be popular thing to say, said, no. Ah, and, and, ah, ah, we are not going to go to war. Then, he's elected. And then, almost immediately, he calls upon the nation to go to war. But the nation does not response immediately. Ah, ... if there was a spontaneous urge to kill, why would they need a draft. Ah, we would just take advantage of natural desire of people to kill, and give them an opportunity. But no, you have to draft people. Ah, you have to do two things really, in order to to mobilize an army for war. Ah, you have to, ah, persuade them, that this is good thing to do, a noble thing to do. And you have to work very hard to persuade them. Because after all, ah, they are going to risk their lives. Ah, and so, world war one, a massive propaganda campaign was mounted by the Wilson's administration. You know, they hired number one ... public relation person in the country to to organize, you know, 75,000 (seventy five thousand) speakers, to go around country, ah, to give speeches, every where in the country, and and the war spirit was built up, built up, built up, and atrosity stories, ah, the Huns, the Kaiser, ah, the ah, ah, really inflaming the public, only then, was it possible, ah, to really mobilize the nation for war, so you have on the one hand, you have the, the ah, the propaganda campaign. On the other hand, you have, ah, the coercion, the draft, and the punishment. You, you, ah, if you are neither seduced by the propaganda nor compell to go by the draft, and if you resist, you will go jail. Ah, so it takes, in other word, powerful, powerful, inducement and threats to mobilize the young population of the nation for war. And if you have a spontaneous urge for war, you wouldn't have to do that. Ah mmm, and and in fact, there's no scientific evidence. I mean, when I got interested in the question of human nature, I would sort of look at the work of anthropologists, zoologists, you know. And I would read Conrad Lorrenze (sp?), On aggression, who is, ahmm, ah, you know, zoologists. Ah, and I would read the work of anthropologist, study different groups of people, primitive tribe as we call them, and, and it was clear to me from looking at the works of anthropologist, there were some tribes that were fierce and some tribes that were peaceful, it clearly wasn't a universal quality, it depended upon the conditions on which they lived. And er this guy, Colin Turnbold wrote books about the forest people and the mountain people. And the forest people, pygmies, in the forest, lived in a kind of conditions which made them violent. The people in the mountains were living under a different kind of conditions and they were peaceful. So, you know I just didn't see any scientific evidence. And even when some body would refer me to the work of a scientist, like E. O. Wilson, Edward Wilson at Harvard, who wrote a book about sociobiology. Then he wrote a book, On human nature. And he said, well, here is a very smart scientist, and he believe, the instinct for aggression. And so I read his book, E. O. Wilson book. And, it was ..., and when I read it, it was very clear to me, no, that's not quite true. That, Wilson, even though he talks about propensity for aggression said, the environment determines whether any kind of propensity that you have is acted out. And, also the word, aggression, is a very ambiguous term. Er, because you can take out the aggression in many ways. You don't have to take it out by killing people. And all subject to environmental circumstances. So, to me, what was clear, was that, there was a very important political consequence of this belief in human nature as a basis for war and violence. Because of consequence, in believing that war come as a result in human nature, to place the blame for wars on individual people, on citizenry. And to take the blame away from the leaders of the nation, who are driving the country into war.
which is probably why we use the term, human nature
That's right. That's right.
er, so then begin, very important for me, to knock down, argue against that idea, when ever I could. Because it's an idea that's so deep in grain in people. Because, it's ..., it had this insidious effect of turning their attention away from the policy maker toward themselves. It's like telling the poor that you're poor because of your own faults, and not because you lived in a society in which the wealth is distributed very unjustly.
End.
source:
audio visual interview with Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn : you can't be neutral on a moving train
the life and times of historian, activist and author of ‘A people's history of the united states’
This film looks at the life of renowned historian, activist, and author Howard Zinn.
bombardier in World war II
A film by Debb Ellis and Denis Mueller
narrated by Matt Damon
www.howardzinn.org
____________________________________
Lee Allyn Davis, Man-made catastrophes, 1993 [ ]
written by Lee Allyn Davis
p.94
United States
Washington, D.C.
May 20—July 28, 1932
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
World War I veterans, out of work during the Great
Depression, marches on Washington, D.C. in May 1932 to
demand that a bonus due them in 1945 be paid immediately.
On July 28, an army unit led by General Douglas
MacArthur cleared the veterans out and set fire to their
encampment. One (1?) veteran was killed; scores (20+?) were injured.
From inside cover
• The most tragic maritime disaster of all time occurred in the Baltic Sea in 1945 when an unidentified Soviet submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, loaded with refugees. While the death toll from this incident is estimated to be nearly five times the number of fatalities of the Titanic tragedy, this disaster has gone virtually unrecorded.
• One of the most bizarre airplane accidents happened on July 28, 1945 when a U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber flying in heavy fog collided with New York's Empire State Building.
• The worst train wreck in India's history was caused by an engineer's decision to brake for a cow on the tracks. This 1981 incidents near Mansi resulted in more than 560 deaths.
p.ix
Stupidity.
Neglect.
Avariciousness.
The three weird sisters, the archetypal three of man-made disasters, wend their way through practically every one of the several hundred entries in this volume, often in triplicate and duplicate.
p.ix
But more often than not, other forces have made that human error easy to commit, and certain to cause a cataclysm. Human sloth and corporate greed often figure in the faulty instrument provided the engineer in the doomed plant, in the failure to provide a proper evacuation plan for a nuclear facility, in the decision of a captain who goes to bed and leaves the bridge to a midshipman in treacherous waters, in the failure of the management of a building or a discotheque to provide the proper fire exits for its patrons, in the neglect of the owners of a shipping line to provide the proper number of lifeboats or the correct filling in the jackets for its passengers.
p.ix
If, then, there is any constant thread that weaves through the fabric of man-made disasters, it is the presence of those three weird sisters, Stupidity, Neglect and Avariciousness, their pervasiveness before, during and after the disasters and the uncomfortable truth that without them, some of the worst of these disasters never would have occurred.
pp.ix—x
But except for very few instances, these presences are secondary, and it is what occurs before or during these emergencies that matters in man-made disasters. The judgement of the captain of a ship or an airplane, the decisions made by fire chiefs or rescue squads, the advice given by experts to engineers fighting to bring an industrial plant under control spell the difference between disasters and accidents. And once those Shakespearian dominoes have been set in motion by that act of bad judgement, ignorance, badly placed cowardice or misplaced bravado, the dividing line between trouble and cataclysm is crossed. And there is no going back.
pp.x—xi
... And there are disasters that, for one reason or another, either have not found their way into record books or, because of lack of information or withheld information, remain incomplete stories.
Take, for instance, the worst disaster at sea ever reported. Supposedly, 6,000 Chinese Nationalist soldiers lost their lives in the sinking of a troopship near Manchuria in 1949. But there are no official records, no eyewitness reports, no historians' loggings of this incident that this writer could find after exhaustive research.
Or take the strange case of the Wilhem Gustloff. Its sinking brought about the worst loss of civilian life at sea in all of history. And yet it has scarcely been mentioned in history books of its period, and finding even the few details available took considerable digging. That the Wilhelm Gustloff was a German hospital and troopship and that she was sunk by an unidentified Soviet submarine at the very end of World War II undoubtedly accounts for the lack of information. And yet here was a disaster with casualties that were nearly five times that of the Titanic, and the incident has remained buried for 45 years in some back room of history.
Finally, take the silence of the Soviet Union after the enormous explosion that shook the Ural Mountains, at a nuclear dump site near the city of Kasli, in 1957. Although the CIA and, presumably, the governments of other Western countries were aware of the explosion, no news of it leaked out until a Soviet scientist, Dr. Zhores Medvedev, emigrated to the West and published a reference to it in a scientific journal. And even then, heads of atomic energy commissions worldwide scoffed at the news. If it had not been for the determination of Medvedev to assert his newfound freedom of expresion, this catastrophe might well have remained buried under an international mountain range of official denials.
p.xi
... There is no necessity to cover up a natural disaster. But because of the origin of man-made disasters, there has often, unfortunately, been ample——if persuasive——reason to alter or suppress the facts, figures, origins and particularly, in the case of nuclear disasters, the implications of these catastrophes.
p.xi
And it is for this last reason, incidentally, that, except for four cases in which helpless civilians were the victims, disasters that took place during a war were omitted. War is, in itself, humankind's very worst self-created disaster. And the fact that humankind has not yet learned that war's endless horror and universal devestation are the most eloquent argument against its recommitment is yet another reason to exclude it from a survey of disasters created by human beings. It is, using Arthur Miller's definition, the most pathetic and least tragic of human enterprises culminating in disasters, one that brings to mind John Wilkes Booth's last words, "Useless, useless, useless . . ."
(Davis, Lee Allyn., Man-made catastrophes : from the burning of Rome to the Lockerbie, 1. Disasters., D24.D38 1991, 904——dc20, copyright © 1993, )
____________________________________
Lee Allyn Davis, Man-made catastrophes, 1993 [ ]
p.x
In his introduction to this play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller separates the merely pathetic from the truly tragic by using the image of a man being hit by a falling piano.
The situation is this:
A piano is being moved into a fifth-floor apartment via a block and tackle. It hovers outside a window, five stories above a city sidewalk.
An unsuspecting man turns the corner, whistling. He strolls down the sidewalk, and then, just as he gets underneath the piano, a rope breaks. The piano falls, crushing the man.
The next day, an article, headed "Man Hit by Falling Piano," appears in the newspapers. It reports the facts and nothing else.
Is that, asked Miller, pathetic or tragic?
It's pathetic, according to Miller, because you don't know where the man came from or where he was going. If, on the other hand, you knew, for instance, that he had just paid the last installment on his mortgage and was on the way to the jewelry store to pick up the engagement ring to give to the love of his life, it would be tragic. Summing it up, Miller concludes, "You are in the presence of tragedy when you are in the presence of a man who has missed his joy. But the awareness of the joy, and the awareness that it has been missed must be there."
(Davis, Lee Allyn., Man-made catastrophes : from the burning of Rome to the Lockerbie, 1. Disasters., D24.D38 1991, 904——dc20, copyright © 1993, p.x)
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
written by Daniel Ellsberg
p.211
A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly indispensable ── the culture of RAND, the u.s. marine corps, the defense and state departments, international and domestic politics, game theory and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies, understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them better, analyzing the relations of abstract enemies: All that had been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed. To try to operate in the world of men and nations without the concept of enemy would have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero.
p.212
India-China war
p.212
In Gandhi's teaching, no human should be regarded or treated as being “an enemy”, in the sense of someone you have a right to destroy, or to hate, or to regard as alien, from whom you cannot learn, for whom you can feel no understanding or concern. These are simply not appropriate attitudes toward another human being. No one should be regarded as being ── in his or her essence or permanently ── evil or as utterly antagonistic. No people should be seen as being evil persons, as if they were without good in them, a different, less human order of being, as if one could learn nothing from them or as if they were unchange able, even if what they were doing in the moment was harmful and terrible, indeed evil, and needed to be opposed. Thus the whole notion of enemy was both unneeded and dangerously misleading.
p.213
satyagraha (“truth force”)
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Matthew Kelly, Rediscover catholictism, [2010]
Rediscover catholictism: a spiritual guide to living with passion & purpose, 2010
pp.130─131
To whom does the future belong? What will our society be like 20, 50, or 100 years from today?
The most powerful and influential position in any society is that of the story teller. Story tellers are not just the mythical cultural icon who dress up on Thursday afternoons and read stories to your children in local libraries and bookstores. Musicians are story tellers. Teachers, preachers, nurses, lawyers, priests, scientists, salespeople, artists, mothers, fathers, poets, philosophers, brothers, sisters, babysitters, grandparents ... we are all storytellers.
The future belongs to the storytellers and it belongs to us. What will it be like? Well, that depends very much on the stories we tell, the stories we listen to, and the stories we live.
Stories have a remarkable ability to cut through the clutter and confusion and bring clarity to our hearts and minds. Stories remind us of our hopes, values, and dreams. They sneak beyond the barriers of our prejudices to soften our hearts to receive the truth. Great periods in history emerge when great stories are told and lived. Stories are history that form the future; they are prophecies set in the past.
Never underestimate the importance of stories. They play a crucial role in the life of a person and in the life of a society. They are as essential as the air we breathe and the water we drink. Stories captivate our imaginations, enchant our minds, and empower our spirits. They introduce us to whom we are and who are capable of beings. Stories change our lives.
If you wish to poison a nation, poison the stories that nation listens to. If you wish to win people over to your team or to your point of view, do not go to war or argue with them ── tell them a story.
All great leaders understand the persuasive and inspirational power of stories. When did you last hear a great speech that didn't contain a story?
A story can do anything: win a war, lose a war, heal the sick, encourage the discouraged, comfort the oppressed, inspire a revolution, transform an enemy into a friend, elevate the consciousness of the people, build empires, inspire love, even reshape the spiritual temperament of a whole age.
65 per cent of the Gospels are stories, or parables. 100 per cent of the Gospels is the story of Jesus Christ ── and it is the most influenctial story over told.
The future belongs to the story tellers, and we are the story tellers. What type of stories are we telling? Because I can promise you with absolute certitude that the stories we tell today are forming the future.
____________________________________
• a rare moment of candor
── operation shamrock
── At one point, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked Raven how long he had been familiar with Operation Shamrock. “Well, you might consider me a Johnny-come-lately,” he responded. “I was on the problem in 1940, and I had been off and on it since 1940.” Later Raven recalled, “I thought Mondale would choke! . . . He said I was the first person he had met who would admit they had known any of these problems over five years.”
• the truth does not have to become public, at least, not at that moment anyway (how about 50 years later, or 100 years later; so that all the people involved would already be buried or burned, literally); however it would be good to get each perspective and the truth - as far as each party know and understand the situation - on the table:
── “Now, as I sat there that afternoon,” Raven recalled, “the guy who was the witness knew the answers to the questions that they were asking. Roy Banner and Juanita Moody didn't. If the guy had been permitted to give the answers ── the truth ── there wouldn't have been any problems . . . but the two of them [were] putting in all kinds of . . . asinine legal objections and questions and quibbling over the questions and quibbling over answers, and they didn't know what they were talking about.”
── In looking back on the experience, Raven believed that NSA had been wounded badly in the committee hearing primarily because it had “too defensive an attitude and [was] trying to fight the committee rather than get the truth on the table.”
written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982
pp.298-299
The real problem was actually one of casuistry. The NSA has always maintained that eavesdropping occurs only when a person is “targeted,” not merely when his or her communications are intercepted, even though that same nontargeted intercept may eventually be recorded, transcribed, and disseminated to other agencies.
Despite his debut before the Pike Committee, Allen knew that the real test would be in the tug of war the Agency was waging with the Senate Intelligence Committee and its chairman, Senator Frank Church. During the summer and early fall, the Church Committee had been hearing testimony in executive session from both current and former Agency officials, and the mood was growing less and less cordial. Of the witnesses to be called, probably the most sensitive was to be the chief of G Group, the organization that ran most of the Agency's domestic operations. But the current chief of G Group had been on the job for barely six months, and the Agency, feeling that he lacked the background to field the committee's tough questioning, sent him on a “panic” trip to Europe.
Six months earlier Frank Raven had retired from the Agency after heading G Group since its inception almost fifteen (15) years before. Now Director Allen needed him back. “We have a real problem with our testimony for the Church Committee,” he told Raven in a telephone call, and then asked him to appear as the witness for the questions about G Group's activities. Raven reluctantly agreed.
Throughout his thirty-five-year (35-year) career in NSA and its predecessors, Frank Raven had suffered from a syndrome that remains endemic in the Puzzle Palace ── a reluctance to comment on world events out of fear of inadvertently revealing information picked up through SIGINT. When conversations at social events turned to the Middle East or the latest coup in South America, he would suddenly clam up ── which would inevitably provoke his wife, who called him by a family nickname, to issue the gentle admonition: “Philly, talk!”
Now, as he was getting out of his car to begin his first day before the closed Church Committee hearings, his wife issued a new admonition: “Philly, keep your damned mouth shut!”
Throughout the first day, as he sat in the rear of the hearing room waiting to be called, Raven had a chance to listen to the testimony of other NSA officials, and he was growing increasingly perturbed. “They were hanging NSA,” he recalled. “NSA was getting deeper and deeper in trouble, and NSA didn't deserve it. They were on the defensive. Instead of trying to cooperate with the committee, and trying to find out what had happened, and who had done what, they had a chip on their shoulder and they were fighting the committee every inch of the way.”
Seated at the witness table as each official was called to testify were Roy Banner and Juanita Moody, who was responsible for liaison with the rest of the intelligence community as well as the distribution of all SIGINT. “Now, as I sat there that afternoon,” Raven recalled, “the guy who was the witness knew the answers to the questions that they were asking. Roy Banner and Juanita Moody didn't. If the guy had been permitted to give the answers ── the truth ── there wouldn't have been any problems . . . but the two of them [were] putting in all kinds of . . . asinine legal objections and questions and quibbling over the questions and quibbling over answers, and they didn't know what they were talking about.”
Frustrated by the Agency's attempt to muzzle the witnesses, Raven, who was due to take the stand the next day, called General Allen's office and issued an ultimatum: if the Agency wanted his testimony, it first would have to issue a direct order from General Allen forbidding anyone else from NSA from speaking unless he ── Raven ── asked him or her for advice. He would answer all direct questions from the committee, and if he needed help or a legal opinion, he would ask for it. “I wasn't going to have staff types,” said Raven, “who didn't know what my answer was going to be, cutting in and quibbling over the legal technicalities of the NSA charter and the CIA charter and such, when they had no idea of what I was going to say.”
Raven got his order, and the next day neither Banner nor Moody appeared; rather, they sent assistants, who remained silent during the former G Group chief's testimony. The result, apparently, was unexpected candor. At one point, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked Raven how long he had been familiar with Operation Shamrock. “Well, you might consider me a Johnny-come-lately,” he responded. “I was on the problem in 1940, and I had been off and on it since 1940.” Later Raven recalled, “I thought Mondale would choke! . . . He said I was the first person he had met who would admit they had known any of these problems over five years.”
In looking back on the experience, Raven believed that NSA had been wounded badly in the committee hearing primarily because it had “too defensive an attitude and [was] trying to fight the committee rather than get the truth on the table.”
p.209
According to Frank Raven, chief of G Group until 1975, the major reason for the NSA's taking charge was the failure of the Army to allocate sufficient intercept spaces and resources for the much-needed strategic intelligence, such as diplomatic and economic targets. “The Army fought like hell to avoid intercepting it,” said Raven. Until NSA moved in, the Army had been using the station primarily for tactical coverage. Also, NSA was upset because no resources had been devoted to intercepting the newer forms of communications, like satellite microwave.
p.209
Most of the signals intercepted are too sophisticated to be attacked at the station and are therefore forwarded by satellite back to Fort Meade for analysis.
·‘’•─“”
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Human nature and aggression (2001)
15. Human nature is often learned experience
I always found in any discussion, on war. Inevitably, any discussion on war. At certain point in the discussion, somebody would say, Oh well, its human nature. And, ah, well, first of all from my own experience, ah, and I still have to tell this to people, because there still people who talked about the desire of young men to go to war, the thrill it is for young men to be in war, to shoot their guns to kill, then I thought about my own experience in the air force, and it was very clear to me, looking around all these guys around me, who are dropping bombs, and who are killing people, that did not come from inside, it did not come from, oh, god, how good it would be to kill some people today, you know, there was no urge to kill, even though, they were the enemy. No, ah, what it came from, was simply we had been trained, ah, and also we had been told it's a good war, we've been told we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, it will be bad if they won, and good if we win, we've got to drop the bombs, and so we'll do it, and do it as well as we can, there was no spontaneous urge to kill. Ahm, and ..., that's my own personal experience. Simply recoiled at the idea that, ah, soldiers, ah, have this kind of killing instinct, or the young men have this killing instinct. And then when I got away from my own experiences. And just began to study history, history of war. Ah, some thing became clear to me. And that is, wars don't take place out of the rush of a population demanding war. It isn't the population that demands war. It's the leaders who demand war, and who prepare the population for war. I mean it's, ah, world war one, you didn't, you didn't, have the American people clamouring for the United states to go to war. Not at all. In fact, if anything it was the opposite. People did not want to go to war. That's why Wooddrow Wilson when he was campaigning in 1916, the war in Europe was on, and the question was, will the United states get into it, And, and, Wilson campaigning in 1916, and knowing this would be popular thing to say, said, no. Ah, and, and, ah, ah, we are not going to go to war. Then, he's elected. And then, almost immediately, he calls upon the nation to go to war. But the nation does not response immediately. Ah, ... if there was a spontaneous urge to kill, why would they need a draft. Ah, we would just take advantage of natural desire of people to kill, and give them an opportunity. But no, you have to draft people. Ah, you have to do two things really, in order to to mobilize an army for war. Ah, you have to, ah, persuade them, that this is good thing to do, a noble thing to do. And you have to work very hard to persuade them. Because after all, ah, they are going to risk their lives. Ah, and so, world war one, a massive propaganda campaign was mounted by the Wilson's administration. You know, they hired number one ... public relation person in the country to to organize, you know, 75,000 (seventy five thousand) speakers, to go around country, ah, to give speeches, every where in the country, and and the war spirit was built up, built up, built up, and atrosity stories, ah, the Huns, the Kaiser, ah, the ah, ah, really inflaming the public, only then, was it possible, ah, to really mobilize the nation for war, so you have on the one hand, you have the, the ah, the propaganda campaign. On the other hand, you have, ah, the coercion, the draft, and the punishment. You, you, ah, if you are neither seduced by the propaganda nor compell to go by the draft, and if you resist, you will go jail. Ah, so it takes, in other word, powerful, powerful, inducement and threats to mobilize the young population of the nation for war. And if you have a spontaneous urge for war, you wouldn't have to do that. Ah mmm, and and in fact, there's no scientific evidence. I mean, when I got interested in the question of human nature, I would sort of look at the work of anthropologists, zoologists, you know. And I would read Conrad Lorrenze (sp?), On aggression, who is, ahmm, ah, you know, zoologists. Ah, and I would read the work of anthropologist, study different groups of people, primitive tribe as we call them, and, and it was clear to me from looking at the works of anthropologist, there were some tribes that were fierce and some tribes that were peaceful, it clearly wasn't a universal quality, it depended upon the conditions on which they lived. And er this guy, Colin Turnbold wrote books about the forest people and the mountain people. And the forest people, pygmies, in the forest, lived in a kind of conditions which made them violent. The people in the mountains were living under a different kind of conditions and they were peaceful. So, you know I just didn't see any scientific evidence. And even when some body would refer me to the work of a scientist, like E. O. Wilson, Edward Wilson at Harvard, who wrote a book about sociobiology. Then he wrote a book, On human nature. And he said, well, here is a very smart scientist, and he believe, the instinct for aggression. And so I read his book, E. O. Wilson book. And, it was ..., and when I read it, it was very clear to me, no, that's not quite true. That, Wilson, even though he talks about propensity for aggression said, the environment determines whether any kind of propensity that you have is acted out. And, also the word, aggression, is a very ambiguous term. Er, because you can take out the aggression in many ways. You don't have to take it out by killing people. And all subject to environmental circumstances. So, to me, what was clear, was that, there was a very important political consequence of this belief in human nature as a basis for war and violence. Because of consequence, in believing that war come as a result in human nature, to place the blame for wars on individual people, on citizenry. And to take the blame away from the leaders of the nation, who are driving the country into war.
which is probably why we use the term, human nature
That's right. That's right.
er, so then begin, very important for me, to knock down, argue against that idea, when ever I could. Because it's an idea that's so deep in grain in people. Because, it's ..., it had this insidious effect of turning their attention away from the policy maker toward themselves. It's like telling the poor that you're poor because of your own faults, and not because you lived in a society in which the wealth is distributed very unjustly.
End.
source:
audio visual interview with Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn : you can't be neutral on a moving train
the life and times of historian, activist and author of ‘A people's history of the united states’
This film looks at the life of renowned historian, activist, and author Howard Zinn.
bombardier in World war II
A film by Debb Ellis and Denis Mueller
narrated by Matt Damon
www.howardzinn.org
____________________________________
Lee Allyn Davis, Man-made catastrophes, 1993 [ ]
written by Lee Allyn Davis
p.94
United States
Washington, D.C.
May 20—July 28, 1932
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
World War I veterans, out of work during the Great
Depression, marches on Washington, D.C. in May 1932 to
demand that a bonus due them in 1945 be paid immediately.
On July 28, an army unit led by General Douglas
MacArthur cleared the veterans out and set fire to their
encampment. One (1?) veteran was killed; scores (20+?) were injured.
From inside cover
• The most tragic maritime disaster of all time occurred in the Baltic Sea in 1945 when an unidentified Soviet submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, loaded with refugees. While the death toll from this incident is estimated to be nearly five times the number of fatalities of the Titanic tragedy, this disaster has gone virtually unrecorded.
• One of the most bizarre airplane accidents happened on July 28, 1945 when a U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber flying in heavy fog collided with New York's Empire State Building.
• The worst train wreck in India's history was caused by an engineer's decision to brake for a cow on the tracks. This 1981 incidents near Mansi resulted in more than 560 deaths.
p.ix
Stupidity.
Neglect.
Avariciousness.
The three weird sisters, the archetypal three of man-made disasters, wend their way through practically every one of the several hundred entries in this volume, often in triplicate and duplicate.
p.ix
But more often than not, other forces have made that human error easy to commit, and certain to cause a cataclysm. Human sloth and corporate greed often figure in the faulty instrument provided the engineer in the doomed plant, in the failure to provide a proper evacuation plan for a nuclear facility, in the decision of a captain who goes to bed and leaves the bridge to a midshipman in treacherous waters, in the failure of the management of a building or a discotheque to provide the proper fire exits for its patrons, in the neglect of the owners of a shipping line to provide the proper number of lifeboats or the correct filling in the jackets for its passengers.
p.ix
If, then, there is any constant thread that weaves through the fabric of man-made disasters, it is the presence of those three weird sisters, Stupidity, Neglect and Avariciousness, their pervasiveness before, during and after the disasters and the uncomfortable truth that without them, some of the worst of these disasters never would have occurred.
pp.ix—x
But except for very few instances, these presences are secondary, and it is what occurs before or during these emergencies that matters in man-made disasters. The judgement of the captain of a ship or an airplane, the decisions made by fire chiefs or rescue squads, the advice given by experts to engineers fighting to bring an industrial plant under control spell the difference between disasters and accidents. And once those Shakespearian dominoes have been set in motion by that act of bad judgement, ignorance, badly placed cowardice or misplaced bravado, the dividing line between trouble and cataclysm is crossed. And there is no going back.
pp.x—xi
... And there are disasters that, for one reason or another, either have not found their way into record books or, because of lack of information or withheld information, remain incomplete stories.
Take, for instance, the worst disaster at sea ever reported. Supposedly, 6,000 Chinese Nationalist soldiers lost their lives in the sinking of a troopship near Manchuria in 1949. But there are no official records, no eyewitness reports, no historians' loggings of this incident that this writer could find after exhaustive research.
Or take the strange case of the Wilhem Gustloff. Its sinking brought about the worst loss of civilian life at sea in all of history. And yet it has scarcely been mentioned in history books of its period, and finding even the few details available took considerable digging. That the Wilhelm Gustloff was a German hospital and troopship and that she was sunk by an unidentified Soviet submarine at the very end of World War II undoubtedly accounts for the lack of information. And yet here was a disaster with casualties that were nearly five times that of the Titanic, and the incident has remained buried for 45 years in some back room of history.
Finally, take the silence of the Soviet Union after the enormous explosion that shook the Ural Mountains, at a nuclear dump site near the city of Kasli, in 1957. Although the CIA and, presumably, the governments of other Western countries were aware of the explosion, no news of it leaked out until a Soviet scientist, Dr. Zhores Medvedev, emigrated to the West and published a reference to it in a scientific journal. And even then, heads of atomic energy commissions worldwide scoffed at the news. If it had not been for the determination of Medvedev to assert his newfound freedom of expresion, this catastrophe might well have remained buried under an international mountain range of official denials.
p.xi
... There is no necessity to cover up a natural disaster. But because of the origin of man-made disasters, there has often, unfortunately, been ample——if persuasive——reason to alter or suppress the facts, figures, origins and particularly, in the case of nuclear disasters, the implications of these catastrophes.
p.xi
And it is for this last reason, incidentally, that, except for four cases in which helpless civilians were the victims, disasters that took place during a war were omitted. War is, in itself, humankind's very worst self-created disaster. And the fact that humankind has not yet learned that war's endless horror and universal devestation are the most eloquent argument against its recommitment is yet another reason to exclude it from a survey of disasters created by human beings. It is, using Arthur Miller's definition, the most pathetic and least tragic of human enterprises culminating in disasters, one that brings to mind John Wilkes Booth's last words, "Useless, useless, useless . . ."
(Davis, Lee Allyn., Man-made catastrophes : from the burning of Rome to the Lockerbie, 1. Disasters., D24.D38 1991, 904——dc20, copyright © 1993, )
____________________________________
Lee Allyn Davis, Man-made catastrophes, 1993 [ ]
p.x
In his introduction to this play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller separates the merely pathetic from the truly tragic by using the image of a man being hit by a falling piano.
The situation is this:
A piano is being moved into a fifth-floor apartment via a block and tackle. It hovers outside a window, five stories above a city sidewalk.
An unsuspecting man turns the corner, whistling. He strolls down the sidewalk, and then, just as he gets underneath the piano, a rope breaks. The piano falls, crushing the man.
The next day, an article, headed "Man Hit by Falling Piano," appears in the newspapers. It reports the facts and nothing else.
Is that, asked Miller, pathetic or tragic?
It's pathetic, according to Miller, because you don't know where the man came from or where he was going. If, on the other hand, you knew, for instance, that he had just paid the last installment on his mortgage and was on the way to the jewelry store to pick up the engagement ring to give to the love of his life, it would be tragic. Summing it up, Miller concludes, "You are in the presence of tragedy when you are in the presence of a man who has missed his joy. But the awareness of the joy, and the awareness that it has been missed must be there."
(Davis, Lee Allyn., Man-made catastrophes : from the burning of Rome to the Lockerbie, 1. Disasters., D24.D38 1991, 904——dc20, copyright © 1993, p.x)
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
written by Daniel Ellsberg
p.211
A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly indispensable ── the culture of RAND, the u.s. marine corps, the defense and state departments, international and domestic politics, game theory and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies, understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them better, analyzing the relations of abstract enemies: All that had been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed. To try to operate in the world of men and nations without the concept of enemy would have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero.
p.212
India-China war
p.212
In Gandhi's teaching, no human should be regarded or treated as being “an enemy”, in the sense of someone you have a right to destroy, or to hate, or to regard as alien, from whom you cannot learn, for whom you can feel no understanding or concern. These are simply not appropriate attitudes toward another human being. No one should be regarded as being ── in his or her essence or permanently ── evil or as utterly antagonistic. No people should be seen as being evil persons, as if they were without good in them, a different, less human order of being, as if one could learn nothing from them or as if they were unchange able, even if what they were doing in the moment was harmful and terrible, indeed evil, and needed to be opposed. Thus the whole notion of enemy was both unneeded and dangerously misleading.
p.213
satyagraha (“truth force”)
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Matthew Kelly, Rediscover catholictism, [2010]
Rediscover catholictism: a spiritual guide to living with passion & purpose, 2010
pp.130─131
To whom does the future belong? What will our society be like 20, 50, or 100 years from today?
The most powerful and influential position in any society is that of the story teller. Story tellers are not just the mythical cultural icon who dress up on Thursday afternoons and read stories to your children in local libraries and bookstores. Musicians are story tellers. Teachers, preachers, nurses, lawyers, priests, scientists, salespeople, artists, mothers, fathers, poets, philosophers, brothers, sisters, babysitters, grandparents ... we are all storytellers.
The future belongs to the storytellers and it belongs to us. What will it be like? Well, that depends very much on the stories we tell, the stories we listen to, and the stories we live.
Stories have a remarkable ability to cut through the clutter and confusion and bring clarity to our hearts and minds. Stories remind us of our hopes, values, and dreams. They sneak beyond the barriers of our prejudices to soften our hearts to receive the truth. Great periods in history emerge when great stories are told and lived. Stories are history that form the future; they are prophecies set in the past.
Never underestimate the importance of stories. They play a crucial role in the life of a person and in the life of a society. They are as essential as the air we breathe and the water we drink. Stories captivate our imaginations, enchant our minds, and empower our spirits. They introduce us to whom we are and who are capable of beings. Stories change our lives.
If you wish to poison a nation, poison the stories that nation listens to. If you wish to win people over to your team or to your point of view, do not go to war or argue with them ── tell them a story.
All great leaders understand the persuasive and inspirational power of stories. When did you last hear a great speech that didn't contain a story?
A story can do anything: win a war, lose a war, heal the sick, encourage the discouraged, comfort the oppressed, inspire a revolution, transform an enemy into a friend, elevate the consciousness of the people, build empires, inspire love, even reshape the spiritual temperament of a whole age.
65 per cent of the Gospels are stories, or parables. 100 per cent of the Gospels is the story of Jesus Christ ── and it is the most influenctial story over told.
The future belongs to the story tellers, and we are the story tellers. What type of stories are we telling? Because I can promise you with absolute certitude that the stories we tell today are forming the future.
____________________________________
• a rare moment of candor
── operation shamrock
── At one point, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked Raven how long he had been familiar with Operation Shamrock. “Well, you might consider me a Johnny-come-lately,” he responded. “I was on the problem in 1940, and I had been off and on it since 1940.” Later Raven recalled, “I thought Mondale would choke! . . . He said I was the first person he had met who would admit they had known any of these problems over five years.”
• the truth does not have to become public, at least, not at that moment anyway (how about 50 years later, or 100 years later; so that all the people involved would already be buried or burned, literally); however it would be good to get each perspective and the truth - as far as each party know and understand the situation - on the table:
── “Now, as I sat there that afternoon,” Raven recalled, “the guy who was the witness knew the answers to the questions that they were asking. Roy Banner and Juanita Moody didn't. If the guy had been permitted to give the answers ── the truth ── there wouldn't have been any problems . . . but the two of them [were] putting in all kinds of . . . asinine legal objections and questions and quibbling over the questions and quibbling over answers, and they didn't know what they were talking about.”
── In looking back on the experience, Raven believed that NSA had been wounded badly in the committee hearing primarily because it had “too defensive an attitude and [was] trying to fight the committee rather than get the truth on the table.”
written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982
pp.298-299
The real problem was actually one of casuistry. The NSA has always maintained that eavesdropping occurs only when a person is “targeted,” not merely when his or her communications are intercepted, even though that same nontargeted intercept may eventually be recorded, transcribed, and disseminated to other agencies.
Despite his debut before the Pike Committee, Allen knew that the real test would be in the tug of war the Agency was waging with the Senate Intelligence Committee and its chairman, Senator Frank Church. During the summer and early fall, the Church Committee had been hearing testimony in executive session from both current and former Agency officials, and the mood was growing less and less cordial. Of the witnesses to be called, probably the most sensitive was to be the chief of G Group, the organization that ran most of the Agency's domestic operations. But the current chief of G Group had been on the job for barely six months, and the Agency, feeling that he lacked the background to field the committee's tough questioning, sent him on a “panic” trip to Europe.
Six months earlier Frank Raven had retired from the Agency after heading G Group since its inception almost fifteen (15) years before. Now Director Allen needed him back. “We have a real problem with our testimony for the Church Committee,” he told Raven in a telephone call, and then asked him to appear as the witness for the questions about G Group's activities. Raven reluctantly agreed.
Throughout his thirty-five-year (35-year) career in NSA and its predecessors, Frank Raven had suffered from a syndrome that remains endemic in the Puzzle Palace ── a reluctance to comment on world events out of fear of inadvertently revealing information picked up through SIGINT. When conversations at social events turned to the Middle East or the latest coup in South America, he would suddenly clam up ── which would inevitably provoke his wife, who called him by a family nickname, to issue the gentle admonition: “Philly, talk!”
Now, as he was getting out of his car to begin his first day before the closed Church Committee hearings, his wife issued a new admonition: “Philly, keep your damned mouth shut!”
Throughout the first day, as he sat in the rear of the hearing room waiting to be called, Raven had a chance to listen to the testimony of other NSA officials, and he was growing increasingly perturbed. “They were hanging NSA,” he recalled. “NSA was getting deeper and deeper in trouble, and NSA didn't deserve it. They were on the defensive. Instead of trying to cooperate with the committee, and trying to find out what had happened, and who had done what, they had a chip on their shoulder and they were fighting the committee every inch of the way.”
Seated at the witness table as each official was called to testify were Roy Banner and Juanita Moody, who was responsible for liaison with the rest of the intelligence community as well as the distribution of all SIGINT. “Now, as I sat there that afternoon,” Raven recalled, “the guy who was the witness knew the answers to the questions that they were asking. Roy Banner and Juanita Moody didn't. If the guy had been permitted to give the answers ── the truth ── there wouldn't have been any problems . . . but the two of them [were] putting in all kinds of . . . asinine legal objections and questions and quibbling over the questions and quibbling over answers, and they didn't know what they were talking about.”
Frustrated by the Agency's attempt to muzzle the witnesses, Raven, who was due to take the stand the next day, called General Allen's office and issued an ultimatum: if the Agency wanted his testimony, it first would have to issue a direct order from General Allen forbidding anyone else from NSA from speaking unless he ── Raven ── asked him or her for advice. He would answer all direct questions from the committee, and if he needed help or a legal opinion, he would ask for it. “I wasn't going to have staff types,” said Raven, “who didn't know what my answer was going to be, cutting in and quibbling over the legal technicalities of the NSA charter and the CIA charter and such, when they had no idea of what I was going to say.”
Raven got his order, and the next day neither Banner nor Moody appeared; rather, they sent assistants, who remained silent during the former G Group chief's testimony. The result, apparently, was unexpected candor. At one point, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked Raven how long he had been familiar with Operation Shamrock. “Well, you might consider me a Johnny-come-lately,” he responded. “I was on the problem in 1940, and I had been off and on it since 1940.” Later Raven recalled, “I thought Mondale would choke! . . . He said I was the first person he had met who would admit they had known any of these problems over five years.”
In looking back on the experience, Raven believed that NSA had been wounded badly in the committee hearing primarily because it had “too defensive an attitude and [was] trying to fight the committee rather than get the truth on the table.”
p.209
According to Frank Raven, chief of G Group until 1975, the major reason for the NSA's taking charge was the failure of the Army to allocate sufficient intercept spaces and resources for the much-needed strategic intelligence, such as diplomatic and economic targets. “The Army fought like hell to avoid intercepting it,” said Raven. Until NSA moved in, the Army had been using the station primarily for tactical coverage. Also, NSA was upset because no resources had been devoted to intercepting the newer forms of communications, like satellite microwave.
p.209
Most of the signals intercepted are too sophisticated to be attacked at the station and are therefore forwarded by satellite back to Fort Meade for analysis.
·‘’•─“”
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ,ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ,ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
____________________________________
*2 “This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.”
──From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p.139)
“This [copy & paste reference note] is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is [archive] with the understanding that the [researcher, investigator] is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.”
──From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
--
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher.
The W. Edwards Deming Institute. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ── electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other ── without written permission from the publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowlege. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Storey publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information.
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
notice: Do not purchase this book with the hopes of curing cancer or any other chronic disease
We offer it for informative purposes to help cope with health situations and do not claim this book furnishes information as to an effective treatment or cure of the disease discussed ─ according to currently accepted medical opinion.
Although it is your right to adopt your own dietary and treating pattern, never the less suggestions offered in this book should not be applied to a specific individual except by his or her doctor who would be familiar with individual requirements and any possible complication. Never attempt a lengthy fast without competent professional supervision.
____________________________________
*2 “This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.”
──From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p.139)
“This [copy & paste reference note] is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is [archive] with the understanding that the [researcher, investigator] is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.”
──From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
--
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher.
The W. Edwards Deming Institute. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ── electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other ── without written permission from the publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowlege. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Storey publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information.
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
notice: Do not purchase this book with the hopes of curing cancer or any other chronic disease
We offer it for informative purposes to help cope with health situations and do not claim this book furnishes information as to an effective treatment or cure of the disease discussed ─ according to currently accepted medical opinion.
Although it is your right to adopt your own dietary and treating pattern, never the less suggestions offered in this book should not be applied to a specific individual except by his or her doctor who would be familiar with individual requirements and any possible complication. Never attempt a lengthy fast without competent professional supervision.
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