I think the same about Wal-Mart. Give them 40 years and they'll be gone too.
Amazon make a mistake order recently and corrected it with a free $30 gift card. Amazon is going to be along for a long time. Don't they realize the customer is always right and you have to take care of his concerns?
I read this book in my early 20s and lost my copy in a move. That author speaks on having the experience of God - "the AM" of which Jesus spoke, which reminds of of is comment that was going to bring us "life in all its fullness" Joseph Campbell echoed this thousands of years later with his quote that people want to feel "truly alive." This book was written many decades ago but is as relevant now as then.
In which we learn how to say 'war crimes' in Malaysian.
Last week, Richard Clarke, the man to whom nobody in the administration of C-Plus Augustus listened because what did he know, anyway?, had a chat with Amy Goodman in which he minced no words regarding his former employers.
"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It's clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it's clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."
And, something that most of us missed, there was a court on the other side of the world that agreed.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were... found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia...At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
At the very least, this court parceled out the blame for the torture program in a fair manner and all the way up the chain of command. The testimony of the victims was as horrible as you might expect:
The court heard how Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers; Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall; Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement, Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter. The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.
In related news, Ed Kilgore notes that Cheney continues to glory in his status as the most inexcusable American who ever lived. It's like giving Pol Pot a late-night TV gig.
At times, Mr. Cheney seems to relish his villainous public persona. Outside the rodeo arena, he took a moment to show off the latest feature on his truck, a Darth Vader trailer-hitch cover, a nod to his alter-ego from the Bush days. "I'm rather proud of that," he said, flashing his signature uneven grin. To paraphrase Rick Blaine, I don't object to a vampire, I object to a gutless one. I'll buy the stake if someone else buys the garlic.
There is a military saying: "Good people in back, sorry people up front." It's why the military is so big on IQ tests.
The main reason Dubya Shrub refused to fly his fighter plane in Vietnam is cowardice, but another reason is that he was one of the wealthy "elites." The lower classes are the ones who are supposed to fight and die. You know - "Rich man's war, poor man's fight." And Dubya said that God had chosen him - a coward and war criminal - to be President.
The wealthy throughout history have always used captives, criminals and the lower classes as sacrifices.
Humanity hasn't changed at all except modern man has advanced technology, which, as Arthur C. Clarke noticed, when sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
I've mentioned before the movie, "The Cabin in the Woods," in which there is an elite, secret Deep State organization that uses advanced technology to sacrifice teen and preteen children to ancient Lovecraftian gods asleep under the earth. The technology is so advanced it can be considered magic.
This was written by Kali Holiday and is from AlterNet.
Religion has long been a useful tool for social control, with fear of god used in service of every despicable practice from slavery to war. A new study reveals that religious rites, particularly ritual sacrifice, helped create and maintain class stratification in ancient societies. According to researchers from the University of Auckland, Victoria University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the findings reveal a “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies” than once thought.
The analysis focused on 93 Austronesian cultures, meaning peoples who originated in Taiwan, later settling in Madagascar, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Researchers found that the more class stratification that existed in a society—elites on top, with the rest of the populace on the bottom—the more likely it was to engage in ritualistic killings. The powerful frightened the masses into staying in proverbial line by employing “god-sanctioned” sacrifice, which entailed implicitly threatening the lives of many for supposed wrongdoing. Those at the top became, by proxy, gods among men and women, and they maintained those positions by doling out killings as they deemed necessary.
“By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralize the underclass and instill fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control,” lead study author Joseph Watts stated in a press release.
“[H]uman sacrifice provided a particularly effective means of social control because it provided a supernatural justification for punishment,” says study co-author Russell Gray. “Rulers, such as priests and chiefs, were often believed to be descended from gods and ritual human sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of their power.”
The method by which sacrifices were carried out reads like a horrifying laundry list of ways you would never want to go out. Ritual killings took the form of “burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being cut to pieces, crushed beneath a newly built canoe or being rolled off the roof of a house and decapitated.” Once a society began using sacrifice to keep the ancient equivalent of the 1 percent in the top slot and slaves at the bottom, the system became self-perpetuating.
“What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force,” says researcher Quentin Atkinson, “making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social structure."
The study, which was published in Nature, holds obvious implications for the roles of religion—and fear—in our own top-down, elite-ruled culture.
“Religion has traditionally been seen as a key driver of morality and cooperation,” states Watts, “but our study finds religious rituals also had a more sinister role in the evolution of modern societies.”
“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. This a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color.” - John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)
There are three kinds of "conspiracies."
The first kind are the ones that don't exist, but people think they do. For the past several years the most popular of these is the belief that two remote-controlled planes flew into the WTC, both buildings of which were wired with explosives. Then the conspirators blamed the attacks on unknown people who disappeared, never to be seen again.
This is the belief in the perfect conspiracy, one that involves people all of whom are geniuses, all of whom are evil, all of whom are rich and all-knowing and all-powerful, and who wish to advance some agenda that generally involves conquering the world. The closest person I can find who fits all these criteria is Dr. Evil from “Austin Powers.”
The believers in these conspiracies are not motivated by reason (although they think they are) but by hate and anger and resentment. They always direct their ire at someone they dislike. They never complain about the people behind a conspiracy they like.
That hate and anger clouds their reason and makes them prone to believing the most ridiculous of conspiracy theories. It also makes them project all evil onto the conspirators, i.e. scapegoat them, then they want them brought to "justice" and destroyed.
Here's an example. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, noted that when Communism did not work in the Soviet Union, scapegoats had to be found, as always happens at every place and at every time. In this particular case, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were convicted as "wreckers" and shot or given sentences up to 25 years.
The second kind of conspiracy are the ones that do exist. An example is FDR conspiring to get the United States into World War II by getting Japan to attack the U.S.
What all these true conspiracies have in common is that none of them are perfect; all are flawed. I am reminded of that old military saying, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
FDR, like most Americans, thought the Japanese were short, myopic, bucktoothed incompetents whom the U.S. could easily defeat. Right after Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the Germans were behind it, because they did not believe the Japanese were capable of pulling off the attack. They were horribly wrong.
The third kind of conspiracy is not, strictly speaking, a conspiracy at all, but an argument can be made they can be called by that name.
This third kind is when people who have shared interests and shared goals get together and attack someone. This is the kind that only looks like a conspiracy, but really isn't.
A good example of this in the recent past is the Duke non-rape case. Many of the teachers at the university, who are leftists and therefore ruled by their feelings and not their intellects, got together and attacked the lacrosse players, assuming them to be guilty. Ironically, they were unwitting “conspirators” attacking what they were convinced was a criminal conspiracy by the players, but in reality didn't exist at all.
This type of conspiracy is called "mobbing." I have seen animals do it, specifically birds when they attacked a cat and drove him away. People also do it, the difference from animals being they delude themselves they are rational, but are instead motivated by blindness, self-righteousness and hate - and don't give up for decades, if ever.
Animals don't do that.
Here is what historian Ralph Luker wrote about Sally Deutsch, dean of Social Sciences at Trinity College, when he spoke to her about the Duke non-rape case:
"She bristled noticeably when I said that, after all, he’d (blogger and historian K.C. Johnson) turned out to be correct about the lacrosse case. 'You mean about the charges being dropped?' she asked. I started to say: 'No. Read my lips: There was no rape.' But the hairs were already standing up from the back of her neck up over to her eyebrows and her eyes were flashing."
This is an "intellectual" not run by her intellect but by feelings of hate, resentment and anger. Take a bunch of these loons, get them all together, and you'll have a mob...looking to do some mobbing. They want to find some to scapegoat, imprison, and human nature being what it is, ultimately murder.
The 9-11 Truthers are another example of mobbing. Anyone who disagrees with them is attacked, mocked, ridiculed, called a "shill," a "dupe," "blind," or even accused of being involved in the conspiracy itself. The intent is to marginalize, ostracize, scapegoat and ultimately expel them.
Unfortunately, and I see this as a frightening thing, mobbing is almost exclusively based on the belief in non-existent conspiracies. The genocide in the Soviet Union, the Duke non-rape case, and the Truthers are perfect examples.
Mobbing is not based on reason, but on primitive, raw hate and anger. No good can come from this.
The angrier people are at something, the more likely they are to believe in the most extreme of conspiracy theories. In a perverse sense, they worship as idols people whom they have never met (and as conspirators don't exist), making them into the most malicious of monsters whose evil and whose abilities could not be more perfect. The people who believe these things aren't totally sane. Not insane, but maybe "unsane."
Not only do those who believe in these extreme conspiracy theories always want to find a scapegoat they desire to destroy, they never want to confront their own faults and problems. To their way of thinking any problem is never their fault, but is always based on something external, and therefore does not lead to any kind of rational policy to confront the problem. They believe in ghosts which are the cause of everything afflicting them.
Why do believers in unrealistic conspiracy theories believe as they do? They obviously get a great deal of meaning to their lives from their beliefs. Self-righteousness (isn't that just a form of feeling superior?) excitement, satisfaction, figuring out a puzzle normal dolts cannot, those are some of the reasons. And don't forget: don't let the truth get in the way of a delicious story!
Ultimately, I think they believe they are in a battle between Good and Evil, with them of course on the side of Good. They want to vanquish the Evil. More correctly, those they define as evil, even if they're not. They think there are few things in this world more important than slaying monsters and holding back the forces of Chaos. They're the basis of a lot of the world's literature. Including a lot of pulp fiction.
I've written before of the fairy-tale of Pure Good and Pure Evil. This purity doesn't exist. No one is purely good or purely evil. Yet when people believe in those psychopathic polymaths, or "wreckers," or rapes that didn't happen, it's pretty obvious those "monsters" are being defined as close to pure evil as it gets – and those who attack them are definitely defining themselves as good. The next step (and this always happens) is the scapegoating of which I have written so tiresomely. This often leads to murder - especially mass murder.
The worst "conspiracies" are not the Masons or Illuminati or David Icke's blood-drinking shape-shifting reptilian space aliens, but the mobbing behavior of those who share the same beliefs, the same goals and who attack the innocent.
Such conspirators, although they believe they are rational, are in fact ruled by their feelings, and their self-righteousness and self-blindness leads them into Dionysian orgies of scapegoating, purging and, ultimately, imprisonment and murder.
The awful history of humanity is of the mass slaughter of the innocent, after having projected a nonexistent evil onto them. That is what is at the bottom of the dark abyss of "conspiracy."
Very shortly, we decided this arrangement was not going to work. So, we took two of the recliners and put them in the back yard, with a table between them. This worked out just fine, since it allowed us to sit in the backyard at midnight, drink beer and watch shooting stars.
One night, while we were doing this, he said to me, "Do you see what I see over there on the pavement under the streetlight?"
I did, but from that distance we couldn't make out what was going on. From where we sat it looked like some sort of dark, moving, swirly-pattern. When we walked over to investigate, what we saw were about half-a-dozen cockroaches apparently having a square-dance. We just stood there with our beer bottles in our hands, staring at them in disbelief. It felt like we were in a dream.
Now these weren't the little one-half-inch ones that college students find on the bathroom sink waving their antennae. These were the big two-inch Terminator ones. These guys weren't going to go down the drain with a little water from the faucet.
I had only seen one of these Intergalactic Death Roaches once before in my life, when a woman caught one in a jar and showed it to me. Now I was looking at maybe six of them. My friend had never seen ones this size, and had a look on his face that would have fit just fine on a character in a Stephen King novel when he finds the door to the Bioweapons Laboratory ripped open from the inside.
We weren't about to stomp on these creatures because a) if we succeeded there would have been a horrible mess that required throwing our shoes away because we weren't going to clean them, or b) not succeeding and possibly being body-slammed to the ground by these things, which then would probably get an ankle-lock on us.
These sonsofguns were living in our back yard, right under our noses. Maybe even under our recliners. It was like something out of one of those stories were two universes intersect and you find that in one of them cockroaches really did outlast mankind.
To this day neither of us know what those roaches were doing. Maybe it was a mating ritual, or maybe they just were having the roach version of a rave. I've never bothered to research it, and neither has he. We've been content to know that for a few minutes we stepped into a Far Side cartoon, which was enough for both of us until we decided to return to the civilized world of booze and Barcaloungers.
Whenever I think of that episode (along with the one in which I found a garter snake swallowing a toad while the toad was screaming), the next thought that often occurs to me is how foolish and naïve are those Noble Savage nitwits who idealize nature and think it's our friend.
Primitive man certainly didn't think nature was his friend. He wanted to get as far from it as fast as he could. Nobody put a hat on Smokey the Bear until the 20th century, when the free market and technology had advanced civilization enough that people could go camping with sleeping bags, tents and .45 caliber semi-automatics in case real bears, as opposed to cartoon ones, decided that humans were the ursine version of Cheesy Poofs. And even with all our technology, we still can't do much when Trailer Court meets Tornado.
Nature is certainly beautiful on the surface, with mountains and blue skies and sunshine and cute little prairie dogs but underneath is a different story. It's a good thing insects aren't any bigger than they are; the wars they have with each other would make our 20th century look like kids' dirt-clod fights. I'd hate to have to keep a Tommy gun in the house in case one crashed through the door looking for bread crumbs.
Animals are a lot better than insects only because we've semi-tamed them. But we'll never completely domesticate them. My parents had a cat that would consistently bring home live birds and mice, all of them held daintily in his mouth. When I asked a vet why he was doing this he answered, "You're supposed to kill them and eat them."
It turns out a lot of animals bring home live prey to their young so they can learn to kill them. Our cat was treating us like we were kittens. When I shooed away the mice and birds he probably thought I was nuts, the way human parents might think something is wrong with their kid if he always threw Oreos and milk out the window.
And yet now, we have people – environmentalists – worshipping the earth and all the serial-killer bugs and animals inhabiting it. Although, I suspect, in their minds, they don't really see it that way. The two-inch roaches and cats with the birds and mice don't really figure into their calculations. All they can see is humans as some kind of skin cancer growing all over the surface of the earth.
One of the things I decided a long time ago is that religion will never be gotten rid of, contrary to the claims of the materialists and the secular humanists (both of which are themselves religions). For one thing, as far as I am concerned, everything is religion. Some are just better than others. Others aren't worth anything at all.
We can either search for the truth or take the easy way out and believe in lies and superstition. The problem is discerning which is which. I don't think it's that hard. The Earth and what inhabits it are not to be worshipped. That prohibition is up at the top of the Ten Commandments.
One of the lies that people believe in, a Strange God they worship, is environmentalism. For those who believe in it, it is a religion, although they don't see it as one. They see it as the truth, separate from religion.
The late writer Michael Crichton has called environmentalism "the religion of choice for urban atheists," and has labeled it a "perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."
"There's an initial Eden, a paradise," he said, "a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe."
Crichton is right on the mark ("missing the mark" is hamartia, which is usually translated as "sin"). Environmentalism even has its own theology, that of junk science. It also has something of which Crichton did not speak, but which all perverted religions have – human sacrifice.
We rightly perceive ancient peoples who rolled their infants into the fires in the belly of Moloch as a bunch of savages worshipping false gods. But when environmentalists today want to see millions of people die to "save the environment," what exactly is the difference between their savagery and that of some primitive tribe? The difference is that the modern ones kill more people. A lot more people.
Paul Ehrlich, an insect biologist-cum-knucklehead-cum-Elmer Gantry environmental false prophet, claimed that 60 million Americans would die of starvation in the 1980s. He's been saying these kinds of things since the '60s. Everything he's predicted has been wrong but some people are still mesmerized because he's one of the high wizards of a false religion based not on facts but on faith.
And it certainly sounds to me as if Ehrlich wants these people to die, to be sacrificed for the false god known as Gaia. A high wizard calls for human sacrifice to appease his god so it won't kill everyone. Am I talking about today, or 4000 years ago? Both.
Environmentalists believe in the fairy tale of Pure Good and Pure Evil, in themselves as the Children of Light, opposed to those who disagree with them and want to pollute the earth and kill Thumper and Bambi, the Children of Darkness. Environmentalists are religious fanatics in the worst sense of the word. All Eric Hoffer True Believers are the same, no matter what they worship. What unites all of them is their belief that those they define as their opponents need to be sacrificed on their Altar of Not-Truth.
We're running out of oil, these false prophets wail. Global warming will fry us, and nuclear power will give three eyes and a foot growing out of the top of our heads. Overpopulation will suffocate the world, so thank God AIDS will devastate us. And let's not forget the depletion of the ozone layer. And on and on and on. Their solution? In two words: human sacrifice. A new Flood (although not as water but as disease or famine) to cleanse the earth, and afterwards, the few Chosen left will step out of their Ark and start anew on a pristine earth.
Another part of the not-the-answer involves giving money and power to these self-anointed modern preachers of Woe&Doom. "Oh, no," writes P.J. O'Rourke in All of Trouble in the World about the tactics of groups like Greenpeace, "Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out."
So far environmentalism has killed between 10 million and 30 million people since the 1970s, all sacrificed to the non-existent god know as "the environment." And let us certainly not forget that the World Trade Center collapsed prematurely because the builders were not allowed to spray asbestos on the upper floors. To "save one life" from non-existent asbestos poisoning we lost 3000. That's not a fair trade to anyone but environmentalists with heads full of voodoo.
And why were all these people sacrificed? So two-inch-long cockroaches can roam free and unmolested?
Human sacrifice is alive and well. Its supporters just go by different names now than in the past; instead of Aztecs they're called members of PETA. And they've got a leg up over ancient murderers in being more subtle than simply ripping out their victims' hearts in public. Now they do things like get DDT banned so millions of kids die from mosquito-borne malaria.
God forbid that wretched fanatical buttinskis like Ehrlich and Al Gore and Ralph Nader gain the political power they so crave. All have the same motto – "People – we just need a whole lot less of them. And we'll make sure it happens."
I'm sure every roach in the world would dance to that tune.
These days, forcing the boys and girls to "share" and "get along" is called "multiculturalism." It has never worked in the past, anywhere. It doesn't work now, anywhere, and it won't in the future, ever. There are many reasons why it doesn't work, but I think the simplest is what I will call the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat.
Human nature is such that people instinctively gather into tribes. Every living creature, from ants to elephants, does it; why should people be any different?
This tribalism is a problem that will never go away, so there is no way around its existence. People want community, and that community usually involves being with people like them, or whom they like. This has to be dealt with, which is something most libertarians rarely do because of their obsession with "the individual."
"Tribes" may be a primitive term, but it was applicable not only in the past but also certainly today. You might want to call them "ethnic groups" or "nations" instead. It doesn't matter. They're still tribes, whether they're big or little, powerful or weak.
Problems arise because every tribe in the past has, with monotonous regularity, because of our inborn narcissism, grandiosely called themselves “the People" or "the Humans." Anyone outside the tribe was, obviously, devalued into being non-People and non-Human. That gives a foot in the door to murdering them.
All tribes today still consider themselves "the Humans," even though they use different words. No country today is going to call itself "the United States of All Humans" or "The Union of All People, and Everyone Outside Isn't," but all countries will say God has chosen them and is on their side, which logically means the Other Guy is on the Other Side. That's pretty much saying the same thing as "We're human, and you ain't."
During World War II, for example, the Russians spoke of "Holy Mother Russia," which implied that God had chosen Russia. Their opponents, necessarily, had to have the Devil on theirs. We're the People; you're the Unpeople!
Their opponents, the Germans, did the same thing the Russians did, when they talked of the “Fatherland” (and today, for us, ominously, it’s the “Homeland”).
German soldiers used to march into battle with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles. I suppose it was a magic talisman to stop bullets. The question is: on whose side was God during the battle of Stalingrad, where both sides lost, combined, more soldiers than America has lost in all of its wars? The answer: neither.
It's painfully obvious that a grandiose certainty that God is on your side does not equal God being on your side, even if nutcases Jerry Falwell believed it. Neither does it mean your tribe is human and the other is not, even if you think God told you that. A movie example that comes to mind: I remember watching a Japanese officer, in The Last Emperor, exclaim, "The Japanese are the only divine race!" Later, when Russian soldiers closed in on him, he scrambled his brains with a pistol bullet. Self-proclaimed divinity always has a price, never a good one.
People in the U.S., cultural differences aside, are in some essential ways no different than people anywhere else. All people have a shared human nature.
People ask, "God bless America." It's never, God bless another country; it's always, God bless America. God should keep America's soldiers safe, but never any other country's. Our soldiers should be saved by God; their soldiers should die. Is that any different than those German soldiers with their talismans? Why should God bless America if America does not follow God's laws? It should be so simply because we, in our magical thinking, believe it should be so?
It's all pretty grandiose. It's assuming Americans are the Chosen, just as every tribe in the past has thought it was the Chosen. They weren't, and neither are we. Other tribes are full of humans, even if we pretend they aren't and act as if their deaths mean nothing and are just the "collateral damage" that always happens in war.
The biggest problem, though, is that every tribe projects its problems onto the outsider. There are, not surprisingly, two archetypes in literature called the Scapegoat and the Outsider. Often - in fact, maybe always - they are the one and the same.
The most famous, or maybe infamous, story about the Outsider and the Scapegoat is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," which everyone in the recent past had to read in middle school. Every year, someone was chosen as a scapegoat, which made them an outsider, then stoned to death. It was an example of scapegoating always leading to human sacrifice, of projecting "badness" on someone and then killing them, in order to "save" the tribe.
The human sacrifice in Jackson’s story was a fertility rite, which scapegoating and sacrifice always are: once we kill them, our culture will be renewed and reborn, since the “evil ones” will have been eradicated. This is why to the Greeks Dionysius was a fertility god, or why the Aztecs ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people. They thought it made sure the sun would continue to rise.
Since every tribe grandiosely considers itself "good," all "evil" must be projected elsewhere. If one tribe considers itself human and good and chosen by God, then the other tribe, the outsider, must necessarily be evil, sub-human, and of the Devil.
Maybe we don't consciously believe it, but emotionally we do. It why most people don't care - indeed sometimes even cheer - if foreigners die in wars. Then we act shocked when foreigners cheer when we die, the way some cheered about 9-11. How dare they act like us! Since we are good, they must be evil!
It was horrible that nearly 3000 innocent people were murdered on 9-11, but was it was a good thing the federal government murdered all those people in Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq? But since they were outside our tribe, they don't really count, and sacrificing and killing them doesn't matter because it was to "liberate" them.
Today in the U.S. you can see our tribe projecting certain of its problems on the outsider. The U.S. attacked Iraq twice ago when it didn't attack us, then blockaded the country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then placed troops in Saudi Arabia, and supported Israel uncritically no matter what it did. We did this because we are "good," at least in our tribe's collective groupthink mind, if not in the mind of other tribes.
And since scapegoating and human sacrifice are always fertility rites, bombing and destroying other countries is of course supposed to make them be reborn and “grow” right – usually by trying to seed them with democracy and feminism.
When resentment, envy, anger and hate sent blowback our way on 9-11, we denied the bad things we had done to others, and instead claimed our attackers had to be "evil," and attacked us because we are "good." Maybe things are that simple in the childish, black-and-white fantasy of Bizarro World, but certainly not in reality.
It's bad enough to have different tribes in different countries get into wars, but when tribes in the same country war, that is a prescription for national suicide. And multiculturalism, if it is anything, is several ethnically-different tribes fighting over the same land and for political power, which is power over others. It is therefore an attempt at national suicide.
Each tribe is going to grandiosely call itself "the Humans" in some form, then deny its flaws and instead project them onto the devalued other, which it will want to remove or murder. Each tribe will also try to use other tribes as fertilizer, to make their own tribe and its culture grow and prosper.
Every empire in the past has fallen not because of attacks from the outside, but because of attacks from the inside. Once the barbarians are inside the gate it's harder to remove them. They may claim they're not barbarians, but apparently the Greek story of the Trojan Horse isn't taught to Americans in school anymore.
Some examples of tribal warfare? How about "Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan," whose motto is "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." It translates as, "Everything for the race. Everything outside the race, nothing." That's clearly grandiose, and fits exactly the idea of one tribe denying its flaws and projecting them onto a devalued other. It is projection/scapegoating leading to human sacrifice. They're the cause of our problems, not us. Remove them or rub them out!
Another example in the U.S.? In the original teachings of the Nation of Islam (related to Islam in name only) blacks are gods, the original men, and whites are devils. Guess who's completely to blame for the problems of the former? You've got it. It's just another example of "Since we are good, you must be evil and the cause of our problems, so we must eradicate you." Denial and projection. Lies (to oneself and to others) followed by scapegoating and human sacrifice.
People will always define themselves not just as individuals but as part of family, nation, religion. If large enough different groups of people try to share the same land and vie for political power, each is going to define itself as good, the others as bad, then deny its own flaws and instead project their problems on those defined as outsiders. Leftists, who support multiculturalism, don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all, not when they believe several large tribes can co-exist peacefully on the same land.
The only way that different tribes can occupy the same land is if one is tribe is 95% of the population, and the other tribe is five percent. But three tribes that are each one-third of the population? There has never been a society in the history of the world that has survived such an attempt.
The problem is made far worse when the State gets involved, because each group will fight for political power to protect itself and hurt the other. Each group will try to capture the State to use for its own purposes, which involves removing the others, or, ultimately, killing them.
State-sponsored "multiculturalism," a misguided attempt to force different tribes to get along on the same land, will, as it always does when the State gets involved, have the exact opposite effect: it will make them fight even more, to the detriment of those involved, and, ultimately, the nation. Not only are the boys and girls not going to share and get along, they're going to get into constant vicious, bloody, murderous brawls.
