I
have not, until now, commented on the pictures, or scandal, of American
troops and intelligence forces torturing Iraqi prisoners, most of whom,
according to a Bush administration announcement today, are going to be
released in the next few days since there is no evidence they ever did
anything wrong. My reaction was simple: What did you think was going on in these prisons?
There have been reports of such abuses, some of them well documented,
for almost a year. Many, many people born in the Mideast have been
deported to their countries of birth, with no explanation, where they
were tortured for months, killed, or simply "disappeared". The
activities in the torture chambers of almost every Mideastern nation,
some of them working in collaboration with the CIA, make the
"indignities" suffered by the Arabs in the CBS-released photos look
like a picnic. And surely no one believes that anything less is going
on in the Guantanamo camp, where the US will not allow prisoners,
almost none of whom have been charged with anything, to even have
contact with families or lawyers, and where the press are only allowed
on scheduled, chaperoned visits.
How naive can people be that they find this torture, to use the
Presnit's words, "abhorrent" and "repugnant"? Do people really believe
that there is something civilized and decent and honorable about
war? Here are the far more rational reactions from two Arab
journalists, neither of whom expressed any surprise or indignation at
the revelations:
The United States probably expected to get away with such horrible
abuse because Arabs had long been passive about torture. Who will take
pictures of the even more hideous practices in the Arab world's prisons
where thousands upon thousands of prisoners of conscience have been
tortured for many years while we, the millions of Arabs outside the
prisons, pretend to neither see nor hear? - Ahmad Amorabi, Al Bayan
President
Bush has asked the world not to judge his countrymen on the debased
acts of a few. That's what we said after 9/11. Don't judge
the intentions of the Muslim world by the crazed, deranged acts of a
few. - Mona Eltahawy, Al Sharq al Awsat
These kind of abuses, and much, much worse, go on every day, in most of
the countries of the world, and with the full knowledge and often
acquiescence, sometimes even complicity, of the Presnit and every other
world leader. Some see it as one of the costs of freedom. Others
realize that we cannot prevent or stop these abuses by any political or
military means.
So what is the cause of this? Organized violence is nature's way of
responding to extreme stress, stress that cannot be solved by waiting
for nature's balancing mechanisms (natural predators, epidemic disease
etc.) to kick in. As Edward Hall explains in The Hidden Dimension, all
animals react the same way in response to stress caused by overcrowding
and scarcity. The first-stage reaction is to test the boundaries of the
community, to see whether it can expand and take over more land to
relieve the pressure. If that is unsuccessful, the second-stage
reaction is a form of shock, fueled by an overload of secreted
adrenaline that produces hyperactivity, depression, distraction, and
metabolic instability, which lead in turn to higher rates of
spontaneous abortion, lower fertility, and more suicides. If even this
is insufficient to reduce numbers and alleviate overcrowding and
scarcity, the third-stage reaction is a form of madness: war, violent
and unprovoked aggression, mass suicide, and the eating of the young.
This 'last resort' ensures that no species can seriously disrupt the
ecological balance of life long enough or severely enough to produce an
ecological crash. It's the self-regulating process that has worked well since the first
living creatures appeared on the planet three billion years ago.
The evidence that the human species is in this third-stage state of
madness is pretty overwhelming: The number and extent and level of
violence in wars is unprecedented. Social violence has exploded to the
point that in many places there are more people in prisons than in
schools. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels -- our modern form of
eating our young is to sexually, physically or psychologically abuse or
neglect them, repress them, throw them into the streets, incarcerate
them in juvenile detention centres or schools that rob them of their
spirit, self-worth, and physical and psychological security -- or send
them off to fight wars that are so cruel and violent that even those
who return physically intact are often psychologically damaged for
life. Suicide and murder are now the leading causes of death for those
under 30 in many countries. And the abject poverty and destitution that
many in the third world (and an increasing number in the first world)
face every day of their lives is the perfect breeding ground for more
level-three behaviour -- rampant crime and corruption, 'terrorism' and
other anti-social acts.
We are so caught up in this madness that we can't see it. War is the very manifestation
of the insanity that produces a Saddam Hussein, a Kim Jong Il, suicide
bombers, Al Qaeda, Enron, and the Patriot Act, and will never be a solution
for anything. We can either let our third-stage madness play itself
out, with consequences too grim to imagine, or start to take some
responsibility for dealing with the underlying causes --
overpopulation, inequality, overcrowding, ecological destruction, and
ignorance -- quickly, dramatically, and immediately.
In the meantime, we should not be surprised at what is happening behind
the doors of prisons, homes, institutions, schools, factory farms, and
old-age facilities. We are merely playing out the instructions embedded
in our DNA for three billion years. And if we don't do something very
different very soon, it's going to get much worse.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
