[P2P-F] Fwd: After Paris: A deeper analysis & Strategy than you'll find in the media

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 7:39 PM
Subject: After Paris: A deeper analysis & Strategy than you'll find in the
media
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com


<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=aD9exT%2FIYABdMAuJHswOUiDJEyEHE4wi>
Read this online at http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/25711
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 and feel free to paste this onto your home page, on your social media and
twitter, and encourage your friends to read it and share it with everyone
they know.--Tikkun magazine

Paris: A World That Has Lost Its Ethical Direction & Spiritual Foundation
and a Media that Cheerleads for Fear and Militarism

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

           For many years, we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual
Progressives have warned that the domination and power-over strategies to
achieve “homeland security” have been tried for over 7,000 years and all
they have produced is more wars and violence, interspersed with short
periods of peace that have, with the help of the sensationalist and
natioanlist  media and professional apologists for the existing
inequalities, managed to hide from public view the degree of covert
structural violence that every system of inequality and domination
embodies. (Please read Cynthia Moe-Lobeda's important study *Resisting
Structural Evil--Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation* published by
Fortress Press to get a full understanding of how deeply our own daily
lives in Western societies are built on the exploitation and impoverishment
of people around the world).

 We  have called for a new approach to “homeland security”—the Strategy of
Generosity, as manifested in part in our proposed Global Marshall Plan
(please download the full version and read it atwww.tikkun.org/gmp
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=BNZTWJBL%2BMrrGt41A2edxiDJEyEHE4wi>).
Until the powerful countries of the world are seen as mainly driven by a
desire to care for the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the
wellbeing of the planet itself, and care not only out of self-interest but
also out of a new consciousness in which we all come to truly understand
our mutual interdependence and oneness, what we saw in Paris this past week
is destined to be an increasing reality in the coming decades. The Global
Marshall Plan we support would have the U.S. take the leadership with the
advanced industrial countries of the world in working with local
communities throughout the developing world, donating 1-2% of our Gross
Domestic Product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end (not
must ameliorate) global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate
education, and inadequate health care--and repair the damage done to the
environment of 150 years of irresponsible forms of economic development
sponsored by colonial and imperialist and materialist oriented capitalist,
socialist and communist societies alike. This is a central part of a
Strategy of Generosity, but it goes well beyond this to involve a massive
recentering of our energies toward healing and repairing the damage that
our global economic system has generated, changing our international trade
agreements so that they no longer disadvantage the poorest people in the
world while advantaging our multinationals, and many other reparative
steps.

 Instead, we are moving toward doing more damage in response to terrorism.
The more fear of “the Other,” the more resentment and anger those others
will have toward us, and the cycle of violence will become more a part of
daily life not only where it already is (mostly in the countries of the
Global South and East), but also in the advanced industrial countries. As
fear grows, fascistic and racist right-wing forces will grow more popular,
their anti-immigrant policies will be portrayed as “common sense,” their
empowering of domestic intelligence forces to invade our private lives
will  receive greater support,  because people will never have heard an
alternative path to security as supposedly liberal leaders seek to show
that they too can be “tough.” You need only listen to Hillary and Bernie
competing for who can sound more like the most interventionist and
pro-militaristic response to the horrendous loss of human life in Paris to
see the foreign policy future of the U.S.

Yet for those of us in the spiritual or religious world, the Torah command
to “love the stranger” still resonates, so we are impelled, even while
condemning unequivocally the terrorist acts of ISIS, to seek to understand
how we might limit the ability of these haters to win new support as the
US, France, Russia and others engage in drone attacks that have already
killed more innocent civilians in Syria and Iraq than were killed by the
terrorists in France. Healing of our world requires psycho-spiritual
sophistication to combat tthe terrorists' appeal to those who have suffered
from the West's past militarism and the structural violence built into the
global capitalist system, on the one hand, and to combat the way that the
terrorists generate support in the West for new levels of fear-generated
militarism which then keeps the cycle of violence repeating and
intensifying. That path is a path of love toward the people of the world
and then policies that embody that love. Not policies of hunting for and
expelling from the U.S. or European countries the many "undocumented
workers" who escaped the economic or political violence in their own
countries only to become suspects and hunted in the advanced industrial
countries, yet that is what many out of fear are supporting in Western
countries even before the Paris carnage, and more so now.

We saw how the legitimate grief and upset at the horror of 9/11 was
channeled into a set of wars and narrowing of our rights to privacy and
protection from invasive governmental power. Those wars created the prelude
to ISIS/Islamic State. We are today at another moment of choice about how
to respond. We already see supposedly liberal leaders embracing
militaristic solutions and reducing freedoms in order to prove that they
are “tough” as the right-wing militarists insist is needed. But we, the
people of the world, could reject this approach if we were to embrace an
alternative consciousness to the drumbeats of fear and revenge that the
Western political leaders think they must support lest they be thrown out
of office. You in the media personally could play a role in resisting the
dominant discourse by exposing Americans to a different voice--the voice of
those of us in the spiritual and religious world who believe that the
militarist approach has failed and that it is time to make a sea change in
our direction and embrace instead a Strategy of Generosity. .



       That new consciousness must include a powerful commitment to
nonviolence and to genuine caring for the wellbeing of everyone on our
planet. And it will require rejecting the ethos of the competitive economic
marketplace with its inevitable fostering of selfishness and materialism,
and its powerful way of infusing in all of us a narrow utilitarian or
instrumentalist way of seeing other human beings who increasingly are
valued to the extent that they satisfy our needs or interests rather than
as beings who are intrinsically deserving of love and respect, and its way
of seeing the Earth and the universe solely as vehicles to fulfill our
immediate needs rather than as the sacred reality that has given birth to
life on this planet and as deserving a response of awe, wonder and radical
amazement at the magnificence and mystery of all being. This new
consciousness is not some utopian ideal—it is the survival necessity for
human life on this planet.

 My heart mourns for the latest victims of our world’s craziness—the
hundreds wounded and the over 130 murdered in Paris this past Friday. Every
life lost to senseless violence is a tragedy. If, as Jewish tradition
teaches, “she who saves one life is as if she saved the entire world,” then
the converse must also be the case, that “those who cause the death of even
one person are destroying the entire world, bit by bit.”



       And when one of the members of our Tikkun editorial board told me
that she was scared that the violence in Paris might soon become a norm in
the U.S. as well, I had to agree. What lies ahead if we keep going in the
direction we've been going since 9/11 is an ever increasing cycle of
violence that will inevitably manifest in the U.S. and other Western
countries as well as those outraged by our policies, our drones, our
economic exploitation, and our cultural imperialism,  and the impact of our
global system on the lives of people they know or witness through the media
drives some to the immoral and criminal acts of terrorism.

          No, I don’t believe that ISIS, the Islamic State, or the other
hate-filled fundamentalists, racists, misogynists, anti-Semites,
xenophobes, and ultra nationalists will disappear the moment we start
acting from a new spirit of generosity. We will need to take measures to
protect ourselves. But as long as our resources (and here I include not
only the U.S. and the West, but also China and Russia) are primarily
focused on military, economic, cultural and political domination of the
world, what we saw in Paris will become an increasing reality worldwide.

         As long as we in the most powerful countries of the world persist
in supporting a global system that inflicts daily violence on  the people
of the world, there will be consequences that are predictable and yet
unstoppable no matter how much force, violence, control of borders, spying
on everyone’s emails and phone conversations, imprisonment or torture is
used to protect us.

        “What, us…violent? It’s always the others who do that to us, and we
only defensively respond.” That’s the story the media daily reinforces, and
turns into a pervasive mantra whenever there are acts of others that are
responses to the suffering we’ve created.

          Yes, some politicians have pointed to the war in Iraq started by
President Bush, but also supported by most Democrats in Congress who
continually voted for the funding for that war year after year, and by
President Obama who supported a surge in the fighting, and continued it for
3 years into his presidency, and then left American armaments in the hands
of a Shi’ite government more interested in repressing Sunnis than in
establishing a society that could give equal rights and respect to all of
its diverse groups. Rarely do they mention the documented atrocities
committed by U.S. troops or the torture that our military and intelligence
forces implemented not only in Abu Ghraib and which continued in
Guantanamo, but also in more secret torture locations around the world,
sometimes run on behalf of the U.S. by torture-friendly regimes in other
countries.

Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. The United Nations estimates that
somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 children under the age of five die every
single day from starvation or diseases related to malnutrition or that
could have been cured with adequate health care available—so somewhere
between 2-4 million children a year. And that’s not counting those who are
older who similarly die from inadequate nutrition or health care. The UN
estimates that 2.8 billion of the worlds 7 billion population live on less
than $2 a day. We, the rich countries of the West, barely let this
information into our consciousness, yet there is every reason for the media
to tell us every day the stories of those thousands who have died the day
before from malnutrition that could have been cured had we in the West
shared our food with the hungry of the world.

 This is what we call “structural violence,” and all of us in the advanced
industrial societies that vote for candidates who do not address this issue
directly are morally implicated in the resulting suffering that our global
economic system generates. The unequal distribution of wealth and the
resulting extremes of poverty, combined with the violence done  by the
regimes of elites who need to suppress dissent in order to keep their
power,  are a leading cause of global suffering. Add to that the trade
agreements that we have implemented that benefit a small elite in the
global South and East while destroying the ability of small farmers in
those countries to make a living, forcing them to move to huge urban areas
where they often find that they have to sell some of their children into
sexual slavery in order to feed the rest of the family, or alternatively to
risk their lives to get to the richer countries where as “undocumented”
workers they might be able to feed their children, and you get another part
of the picture. And as the environmental crisis deepens, a recent study
predicts that we will soon be faced with over 100 million environmental
refugees in addition to all the economic and political refugees.

          Equally important is the way many people feel dismissed, their
suffering of no consequence to the rest of the world. They see people like
themselves being daily harassed or humiliated, whether that be in US
torture chambers in Iraq and Guantaamo or at the Israeli checkpoints in
Palestine, in the tendency of global media to blame all Muslims for the
extremism of the few, in the way that the mass murder and genocide
perpetrated by Western countries in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen (not
to mention the First and Second World Wars where tens of millions of people
were killed) or by Russia and China, are forgotten while the crimes of the
jihadis are described as a threat to civilization itself. The hypocrisy of
the West infuriates people around the world who have suffered from the
Western-imposed inequalities of wealth and resulting inequalities in
health. They feel outraged and humiliated...a slippery slope toward
violence.

 The cumulative effects of a world lacking generosity of spirit and
generosity of action plays an important role in shaping the psychological
underpinning that leads people to act out in various ways, of which ISIS is
only one manifestation. The ruthless and immoral character of their actions
seem to them (not to me) internally justified in their own
self-understanding because they have been either personally subjected to
humiliation, or watched as others with whom they identify being mistreated
and systematically disrespected and can see no way to change that given the
absence of any recognition of what they see being re-presented to them in
the media or in public or political discourse. None of this excuses the
behavior, but it is critical to understand it in order to develop
strategies that can actually be effective in the way that more bombings and
more suppression have not been.



  Add to this the inner suffering of hundreds of millions of people in
Western socieites reared in competitive market societies where they are
taught to distrust each other, to believe that human nature inevitably
leads to “looking out for number one” and that hence the only rational way
to live is to advance one’s own interests without regard to the
consequences for others, and who then find themselves surrounded by others
who are just looking out for themselves and who therefore can’t really be
trusted to be true friends of allies when circumstances get tough. These
ways of thinking, now increasingly exported to the rest of the world
through Western media and Western movies and television and computers, play
an important part in undermining communities and solidarity among
people--and resisting the West is in part about resisting this aspect of
Western culture.



Our societies  have been amazingly successful in channeling the boiling up
anger and outrage that so many people feel into self-blame, psychological
depression, and other self-destructive paths: addictions to alcohol, drugs,
television, sexual conquests, social media, endless consumption of material
goods, nationalistic and religious chauvinisms, and you can add more to
this list. For the most part, all this internalization  creates unhappy
people, and then manipulative politicians often succeed in channeling their
unhappiness into anger at some external group —African Americans, women,
homosexuals, immigrants, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, liberals—and the same
pattern repeats itself around the world with a rotating “Other” depending
upon the ruling elites of a given country. If you happen to be in Islamic
countries,  Sunni or Shiite Muslims are the “Other,” if you’re in Europe or
America, African Americans and Muslims are the “other,” if you’re Jewish,
it’s the Palestinians and if you’re Muslim or Christian, it has
historically been the Jews.

 The legacy of ignoring global pathologies generated by global capitalism
and other systems of domination that preceded it has led to the current
reality—and it will be with us for many years to come. If we continue to
respond to only the immediate threats without the awareness of the context
that creates them, generations into the future will be paying the price.
But if we start now to embrace a Strategy of Generosity, build the Caring
Society (Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Planet) the current crop
of haters will not grow but diminish in strength and ability to attract
others. It will be harder and harder for the haters to convince their
neighbors and young people that the world as currently constituted is evil
if that world is deeply involved in manifesting genuine love and caring not
only for themselves but for every person on the planet and caring for the
planet itself.  Instead of letting politicians focus solely on what to do
now, we could insist that right now they take steps that involve
articulating publicly and beginning to implement a long-term strategy of
generosity.

As two concrete steps in this direction,  please help build support for our
Global Marshall Plan and our ESRA, our proposed Environmental and Social
Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which not only will
require public funding of all state and national elections and ban every
other source of money, but will also require that large corporations
operating in or selling goods or services in the U.S. (those with incomes
over $50 million/yr) be required every five years to prove a satisfactory
history of social and environmental responsibility to a jury of ordinary
citizens who will hear testimony from people all around the world who have
been impacted by the operations, products, services, environmental
behaviors and economic policies of these corporations.



Sound utopian and fanciful? No, what is utopian and fanciful is believing
that somehow through more militarism, more repression, more thought-control
in our schools and media, more self-serving demeaning of others, more
capitalism, and more infringements in privacy, we can avoid the terror and
other manifestations of hatred that will dominate public life in the years
ahead.

And why is it not utopian to believe that we can build a different kind of
world? Because most human beings actually would love to live in a world
based on love, kindness, generosity, environmental sensitivity and awe and
wonder at the grandeur of the universe (what we at Tikkun and the NSP
Network of Spiritual Progressives call The New Bottom Line). Please read
our vision of what this would look like by going to
www.spriitualprogressives.org/covenant
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lDoOp0hQVRTtPetZ6cXECiDJEyEHE4wi>
and then join as dues paying members our interfaith and secular humanist
and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives
www.spiritualprogressives.org/join
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=nzBm3%2BEKD99JRzvr6VRaNiDJEyEHE4wi>.


So don’t ever say that “I didn’t know what to do,” because joining our
movement is what you actually can do—so do it now! And by the way, insist
that any candidate asking for your support (in the coming elections in
whatever country you reside) be explicitly committed to implementing the
Global Marshall Plan and explaining to the people of her or his country why
the Strategy of Generosity is far more likely to succeed than the Strategy
of Domination. And outreach to your local city council, state legislators
and Congressional reps to endorse both the Strategy of Generosity (by that
name) and the Global Marshall Plan and the ESRA.



Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine  www.tikkun.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Kk5i1ZgHGQ6zJ%2F3jJaVh7iDJEyEHE4wi>
(winner of the Best Magazine of the Year Award from the Religion
Newswriters Association both in 2014 and again in 2015), chair of the
interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual
Progressives, and author of 11 books including two national best-sellers *The
Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right* and *Jewish
Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation*. His most recent book,
*Embracing
Israel/Palestine* shows how to apply the strategy of generosity to one of
the world’s seemingly most intractable struggles, his book with Cornel
West *Jews
and Blacks:Let the Healing Begin* shows a path to renew the alliance
between these two groups, and his book *The Politics of Meaning* presents
some of the ideas that Hillary Clinton was claimed to have embraced when
the media in 1993 mistakenly dubbed Rabbi Lerner “the guru of the Clinton
White House.” If this analysis moves you, please join the Network of
Spiritual Progresssives or make a tax-deductible contribution to Tikkun at
www.tikkun.org/donate
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QhSwE8vVEXcCMU%2BA7P5B%2FyDJEyEHE4wi>
and then contact RabbiLerner.tikkun at gmail.com to discuss how you can help
build this movement for a world based on love and justice.
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