Letter to Robert Stewart at the Canadian Peace Institute on Peace Studies under Hectoring Hegemons
To: Robert Stewart, Director, Canadian Peace Institute [stewartr @ peace.ca]
Subject: Achieving peace when hectoring hegemons hold all the cards of hegemony
Date: Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 11:14 AM
Dear Robert,
Hello, I came across your website and since both peace and war research are my key interests, I was intrigued enough to read your introduction. I applaud your good sentiments and your keen desire to teach peace in order to achieve it. I am however reminded of an interview Aldous Huxley did with a television reporter in which Huxley was asked:
Herman Harvey: “What does one do?”
Aldous Huxley: “Well this is the real problem. Nothing is easier than to formulate high ideals, but few things are more difficult than to discover the means for by those ideals might be implemented, and the categorical imperatives which spring from them can be a pain. This is the real problem. I mean one has to dream, but one has to dream in a pragmatic way to consider how... Merely preaching to people doesn't have much effect, people have been preaching for an awefully long time and we are still pretty much where we were.”
(see minute 2:38, pt 2) Sum and Substance with Aldous Huxley, co-produced with University of S. California, KNXT Public Affairs. http://www.huxley.net/ah/huxley-interview.html
Well, I thought I'd take a page out of your intro note on teaching:
“Ken Blanchard, noted professor and author of the One Minute Manager and Situational Leadership series of training materials, suggests giving students the 'final exam' questions at the start of the course and then teaching how to arrive at the answers - his formula for win/win learning.”,
and leave you with the following statement from one of my essays “Dialog among Civilizations: Whytalksfail? Part-1” as the lead-in to what may be learned in the rest of the essay:
.“It is my humble belief that following this Humanbeingsfirst Rules of Dialog among Civilizations, in contrast to the Hectoring Hegemons arbitrary rules of “might makes right” engagement, all issues among mankind can be resolved to the point of “knowing the right thing to do” space. There will no longer be any confusion of who is right, and what is “right”, who is the aggressor, the oppressor, and who are the aggrieved, and the oppressed. At that point, whether or not the right thing to do is pursued further, is up to the members dialoging, their respective constituencies, and their moral imperatives if they are human beings first.
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/dialog-among-civilizations-whytalksfail.html
Thanks for your time, and I hope to read more of your website.
Finally, please permit me to conclude with this long note of realism, that, as you may have already read in “The Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of PEACE” – and which if one has eyes to perceive, one can see its considerations being empirically put into practice today to seed world government – there is no concept of moral considerations, JUSTICE, [and] fair play, in empire's peace games, peace studies, and “American peace” planning anymore than there is in empire's war planning and war making. For “full spectrum dominance”, the best peace is in the stability of a prison where you are the prison warden; moving towards the future stability of the prison for the mind where the world bows willingly in voluntary servitude before the rule of the 'ubermensch' as in the “Brave New World”, a far more desirable and effective peace than is portrayed in “1984” which is the intermediate stage we are bizarrely living in today.
Just looking around you with eyes wide open and the television unplugged bears the truth of those statements. That's the kind of thousands of man-years of thinking and policy-planning for statecraft of hegemony they do for the Pentagon and the White House at places like the RAND Corporation, the Council of Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, and the hundreds of other privately funded think-tanks along the Potomac and in the various prestigious academic enclaves from Harvard to Princeton under the banner of academic and psychological research, etceteras, as I am sure anyone seriously involved in peace studies would be intimately familiar with. There is a bizarre realism in the thought that if you want to know what will be happening in the world ten years into the future, read some decade old issues of CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. Both “World-government” and “Islamofascism” peak through in those back issues well before anyone in the public had ever heard of those terms.
The system of hegemony is always psychopathic, amoral, and is run by psychopaths who “walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds” as Shakespeare put it in MacBeth, earning their blood-payoffs with Nobel Peace prizes. Under such circumstance of tortuous reality-space soaked in Newspeak that is entirely beyond the ken of ordinary citizens – and the vast majority of the planet's peoples are indeed just ordinary peoples – the import of Huxley's statement, “how”, is all the more crucial, and begs re-quoting for full emphasis: “Nothing is easier than to formulate high ideals, but few things are more difficult than to discover the means for by those ideals might be implemented.”
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Source URL of this letter: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/09/lett-canadian-peace-institute-pstudies.html
