Only Truth And Clear Seeing Can Lead Us To Peace And Harmony
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The Independent has an article out titled “Inside a southern Gaza hospital: Screaming orphaned children, amputee toddlers and the stench of rotting flesh,” which begins as follows:
“A badly burned toddler screaming for the mother he doesn’t know is dead — and screaming because doctors do not have enough painkillers to relieve his suffering. An eight-year-old boy whose brain is exposed as bombing damaged parts of his skull. A teenage girl, her eye surgically removed, because every bone in her face is smashed. A three-year-old double amputee, whose severed limbs are laid out in a pink box beside him.
“And in the background is the stench of rotting flesh as maggots ‘creep out of untreated wounds’.”
These horrors are all caused by a genocidal onslaught that is being backed to the hilt by the US government, who just single-handedly blocked a UN resolution demanding a ceasefire to end this nightmare. Instead of focusing on the unfathomable depravity of all this, Americans are being propagandized into worrying about a completely fictional epidemic of university demonstrators chanting for the genocide of Jews.
But for all the efforts to spin, justify and distract from the mass atrocity Israel and its allies are perpetrating in Gaza, more and more people are opening their eyes to what’s happening, and are ceasing to fall for the propaganda any longer.
This is largely because for the last two months the horrific images described in text by The Independent have been cascading down our social media feeds in jarringly graphic photos and videos. Those who’ve only been peripherally aware of Israel’s actions in Gaza may find those descriptions astonishing, but for anyone who’s been following the Gaza massacre it’s just a verbal description of what we’ve been looking at since October.
It’s much, much harder to propagandize the public into accepting military atrocities when they have decent visibility into how those atrocities are actually manifesting as they inflict themselves on human flesh. In an age where photos and videos of events can go viral within minutes of their occurrence, and in an area where it’s still possible to upload some footage onto social media, it’s far more difficult to persuade people to believe this is anything other than what it is.
If everyone on earth could really truly see what’s happening in Gaza, and actually viscerally grasp and appreciate what they were seeing, the killing would end tomorrow. It would end tomorrow because the entire world would force an end to it by any means necessary. These atrocities would no longer be tolerable by humanity’s collective consciousness once they had been fully seen.
And really all of humanity’s problems are like this. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend how horrific war is, war and militarism would end immediately. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend how insane and self-destructive ecocide is, ecocide would end immediately. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend the horrors of poverty, abusive prison systems, police brutality and institutional injustice, these things would no longer be permitted to exist in our society.
Seeing is all that’s required for humanity to begin moving out of dysfunctionality and towards health. That’s true regardless of what scale of humanity you’re talking about, from the largest problems of global civilization right down to the subtlest dysfunctionality in the inner processes of the individual. Once enough seeing has happened, the dysfunctionality cannot continue.
Corruption and malfeasance doesn’t stop until it has been exposed to the public. Abuse doesn’t stop until the abusiveness has been clearly seen for what it is and brought to an end. Addiction and other self-destructive behavior patterns don’t abate until the inner dynamics which drive them have been brought into consciousness and seen clearly. Self-realization only occurs when there’s been a clear seeing into the nature of awareness and perception.
Seeing is crucial to ending dysfunction at every scale of human life. That’s why Julian Assange figured that the best way to help the world would be to find a way to make it easier for the public to see what’s going on behind the veils of secrecy that the powerful enshroud themselves with, and that’s why Assange is now currently in prison. Those who want more health and harmony are always trying to find ways to make things more seen, while those who want to preserve the status quo of domination and dysfunction are always trying to keep things hidden.
In this sense we actually are kind of looking at a struggle between light and darkness, because there is an ongoing battle between the impulses within our species to make things seen and the impulses to make things unseen. On one side you have real journalism, true education, authentic activism and dedicated inner work trying to bring the unseen into the light of awareness, and on the other side you have government secrecy, censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the war on journalism trying to obstruct and obfuscate the truth from the public eye. Those who desire peace, health and harmony will always find themselves on the former side, while those who desire domination, destruction and exploitation always find themselves on the latter.
That’s why Israel has been systematically exterminating journalists, artists and academics in Gaza, and why it tries to restrict internet access and communications as much as it can get away with. It’s why the US empire is imprisoning Julian Assange and continually working to control what information the public sees online while hiding a tremendous amount of its activities behind government classification. It’s why the abusive husband works to isolate his wife from her friends and family and tells anyone who says anything about his abusiveness that it’s none of their business. It’s why when we sit in meditation there are forces within us which squirm and flail around rather than allow stillness and inner clarity to set in. Humanity is in a constant struggle with itself — between staying hidden and becoming a truly conscious species.
But we can’t hide from ourselves forever. Already more and more cracks in the walls are appearing, and the light is streaming in through them. The aspects of our species which want to remain hidden are leaving fingernail marks on the floor as the aspects of ourselves which want to be seen are dragging them kicking and screaming into the light of consciousness.
There can only be one winner in this fight. We’ll either become a conscious species that is guided by truth and lucid understanding or we’ll kill ourselves by nuclear war or climate catastrophe in our frantic efforts to remain hidden. Either way, the tower of lies and secrets is coming tumbling down eventually.
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I'm rereading Chris Hedges' "The Greatest Evil is War" and I'm once again struck by the testimony of ex-officers like Spenser Rapone who tells us that "the (U.S.) military's inherent function is the abuse and degradation of other people". And "I was inflicting violence on the poorest people on earth. How is their any morality in that?'
Rapone's testimony and that of other U.S. service members goes a long way toward explaining why the US is so strongly committed to Zionist Israel's violence against Palestinians. After all, as our acolytes, Zionists learned it from the masters of violence, of genocide --- US. Thank you Uncle Sam. Genocidal maniacs stick together.
I am shocked that Presidents of Harvard, MIT and U Penn could not make it clear that a student holding a sign, calling for a Palestinian Intifada is not the same as calling for the genocides of Jews. In particular they should have made it clear that the threat of actual genocide comes from those who have the power to carry it out, ie. Israel. The context of an angry child telling their mother that " he/she is going to kill her versus a man who is pointing a gun at the mother with his finger on the trigger says he is "going to killer her" are the same words in different context. This is a good analogy because Palestinians are incapable of killing all the Jew, while it could be said that over a long period of time the Israelis are actually committing genocide. Most nation states capable of genocide don't talk about it, they just do it, although one could read between the lines and conclude that genocide is a stated policy of the( Lukkud) sp? party in Israel