Put on your thinking caps ladies and gentlemen, one of this week's features is a serious neuronal workout (staves off Alzheimers, didn't you know?). Here is the first part of a thought-provoking essay by author Laura Knight-Jadczyk, on the US immigration debate which considers this problem from a truly unique angle.
Blue Ibis***********************************************************
Immigration: Ignota nulla curatio morbi!
(Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand)
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
SOTT
Mon, 04 Jun 2007 06:06 EDT
Today I'd like to talk a bit (in a special way) about several items that have caught my eye over the past week or so, all of them having to do with immigration, or mass movements of people in various places around the planet.
Mexicans fear U.S. immigration plan
South Carolina's Republican convention "boo" new immigration proposal
Bush Praises Bipartisan Immigration Deal Nobody Else Likes
Illegals deal alienates everyone
Illegal immigrants refrain: 'Leaving America is not an option'
France says no to mass legalisation of undocumented immigrants
France sends back 24,000 immigrants in 2006
Afghan refugees forced home, but to what?
There is a lot more to this immigration issue than meets the eye!
In the last two articles linked above, we find that the immigration problem is what is turning the Far Right Fundies against Bush. Peggy Noonan, a loyal Republican who is not on the fringe, writes in Too Bad:
The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism." [...]
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq. [...]
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Peggy Noonan knows she is seeing something ugly, but she really has no clue about what she is observing and that there really is a simple explanation, and if she had the knowledge she so desperately needs, she would have seen it a long time ago as so many others have. But, of course, they call the ones who can actually SEE what is really going on "conspiracy theorists." There are several issues here that I would like to cover, so bear with me.
The first thing that occurred to me as I read some of these items was that the reason people wish to emigrate is because of some situation in their homeland that makes living either uncomfortable or impossible. Let's face it, nobody picks up and emigrates just for fun. And if someone emigrates to "make more money," it's usually because they cannot make enough where they live to survive. Of course, there are those that want to do more than just make enough money to send home so that the family can have a roof over their head and food on the table, but we will get to that.
So, considering that emigration is a symptom of a country's failure in some sense, it's decline in equitable distribution of wealth, what can be at the root of such a problem? Why are so many countries full of people who want to go somewhere else?
Exploitation. The global economy has, by and large, been rigged to benefit a small ruling elite and to begger everyone else.
The fact is, poverty in most of the world is directly caused by large landholdings - the big estates of the ruling elite, and the war mongering of same in their efforts to acquire more land, more resources, more wealth. That is why Mexico has a flood of dispossessed seeking escape to the US; that is why Iran has so many Afghan refugees; that is why there are so many Muslims in France; that is why urban areas are so poor and overcrowded and crime ridden and wages are so low for everyone. And in most cases, it is due to the covert or not-so-covert U.S. involvement in the finances and internal policies of those countries.
In the present day, society is not much different from the time of Dickens when there were huge estates of England and starving, dying masses of people in East End London. Just look at South America and the stupendous land holdings of the Rockefellers and other international bankers.
So, what is at the root of the exploitation problem?
Psychopathy: those who seek to feather their own nest to an obscene degree at the expense of others.
It is psychopaths who have arrogated the world's wealth to themselves. Psychopaths are always and ever monopolists of the world's wealth, and they justify their having the wealth by their various pathological economic theories. It is psychopaths that say that "common" people "breed like rabbits and that if the masses had money and land and leisure they would just increase the population until their new land was just as teaming with poverty and stench as before". What is hidden behind this paramoralistic ideology is the truth that psychopaths fear the population of normal humans with conscience and a feeling of connection to other human beings. Noonan reports that Bush "declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me." She is only reporting the perspective of essential psychopathy. On this topic, let's take a look at what psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski has written about pathocrats:
In a civilization deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individuals [psychopaths and other deviants] driven by the[ir] feeling of being different usually find a ready echo in other people's insufficiently developed consciousness. Such individuals are dreaming of imposing their power and their different experiential manner upon their environment and their society; unfortunately, their dreams have a chance. [...]As the above excerpt indicates, the problem of most scarcity on this planet is created by psychopathy, a criminal class that controls psychologically damaged or uncritical human beings and uses them to control the money and credit systems. They then use these systems to imperialistically grab land and resources, to charge monopoly prices for production and offer less that living wages to labor....[I]n each society there are people whose basic intelligence, natural psychological world-view, and moral reasoning have developed improperly. Some of these persons contain the cause within themselves, [genetic] others succumbed to childhood influences o[f] psychologically abnormal people. Such individuals' comprehension of social and moral questions is different, both from the natural and from the objective viewpoint; they constitute a destructive factor for the development of society's psychological concepts, social structure, and internal bonds.
At the same time, such people easily line the social structure with a ramified network of mutual pathological conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure. These people and their network participate in the genesis of that evil which spares no nation. This substructure gives birth to dreams of obtaining power and imposing one's will upon society... [...]
Their dreams do not lack a certain idealism similar to the ideas of normal people. They would like to reform the world to their liking but are unable to foresee more far-reaching implications and results. Spiced by deviance, their visions may influence naive rebels or people who have in fact suffered injustice. Existing social injustice may look like a justification for a radicalized world-view and the assimilation of such visions. [...]
[Pathological deviants] are aware of being different as they obtain their life-experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into "us and them" their little world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally. Their sense of honor bids them to cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or signatures is customary behavior. They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals. This dichotomy of worlds is permanent and does not disappear even if they succeed in realizing their youthful dream of gaining power over the society of normal people. This proves that the separation is biologically conditioned.
In such people a dream emerges like some youthful Utopia of a "happy" world and a social system which would not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate, where they would of course be assured safety and prosperity. Those "others", different, but also more technically skillful, should be put to work to achieve this goal. "We", after all, will create a new government, one of justice. They are prepared to fight and to suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also, of course, to inflict suffering upon others. Such vision justifies killing people, whose suffering does not move them to compassion because "they" are not quite conspecific. They do not realize that they will consequently meet with opposition which can last for generations. [...]
Every society worldwide contains individuals whose dreams of power arise very early. ... They would like to change this unfriendly world into something else. Dreams of power also represent overcompensation for the feeling of humiliation, the second angle in Adler's rhombus. A significant and active proportion of this group is composed of individuals with various deviations who imagine this better world in their own way, of which we are already familiar. [...]
The following questions thus suggest themselves: what happens if the network of understandings among psychopaths achieves power in leadership positions with international exposure? This can happen, especially during the later phases of the phenomenon. Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest ... They do not understand that a catastrophe would otherwise ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.
If such and many managerial positions are assumed by individuals [lacking] abilities to feel and understand most other people, and who also betray deficiencies in technical imagination and practical skills-(faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters) this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations. Within, the situation shall become unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable modus vivendi. Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. [...]
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements, as well as the accompanying ideologies characteristic for the time and the ethnological conditions, and turned them into caricatures of themselves. This occurs as a result of ... participation by pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential properties. Contemporaneous ones easily find a common language, even if the ideologies nourishing them and protecting their pathological contents from identification differ widely. [...]
The moment at which a movement has been transformed into something we can call a pathocracy as a result of the ponerogenic process is a matter of convention. The process is temporally cumulative and reaches a point of no return at some particular moment. Eventually, however, internal confrontation with the adherents of the original ideology occurs, thus finally affixing the seal of the pathocratic character of the phenomenon. Hitlerism most certainly passed this point of no return, but was prevented from all-out confrontation with the adherents of the original ideology because the Allied armies smashed its entire military might. [...]
A great ideology with mesmerizing values can also easily deprive people of the capacity for self-critical control over their behavior. The adherents of such ideas tend to lose sight of the fact that the means used, not just the end, will be decisive for the result of their activities. Whenever they reach for overly radical methods of action, still convinced that they are serving their idea, they are not aware that their goal has already changed. The principle "the end justifies the means" opens the door to a different kind of person for whom a great idea is useful for purposes of liberating themselves from the uncomfortable links of normal human custom. Every great ideology thus contains danger, especially for small minds. Therefore, every great social movement and its ideology can become a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its parasitic life.
The actions of [Pathocratic rule] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every village, small town, factory, or collective farm. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country, creating a "new class" within that nation. This privileged class feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.
A normal person deprived of privilege or high positions goes about performing some work which would earn him a living; but pathocrats never possessed any solid practical talent, and the time frame of their rule has eliminated any residual possibilities of adapting to the demands of normal work. If the law of normal man were to be reinstalled, they and theirs could be subjected to judgment, including a moralizing interpretation of their psychological deviations; they would be threatened by a loss of freedom and life, not merely a loss of position and privilege. Since they are incapable of this kind of sacrifice, the survival of a system which is the best for them becomes a moral idea. Such a threat must be battled by means of psychological and political cunning and a lack of scruples with regard to those other "inferior-quality" people. [...]
Pathocracy survives thanks to the feeling of being threatened by the society of normal people, as well as by other countries wherein various forms of the system of normal man persist. For the rulers, staying on the top is therefore the classic problem of "to be or not to be".
We can thus formulate a more cautious question: can such a system ever waive territorial and political expansion abroad and settle for its present possessions? What would happen if such a state of affairs ensured internal peace, corresponding order, and relative prosperity within the nation?
The overwhelming majority of the country's population would then make skillful use of all the emerging possibilities, taking advantage of their superior qualifications in order to fight for an ever-increasing scope of activities; thanks to their higher birth rate, their power will increase. This majority will be joined by some sons from the privileged class who did not inherit the corresponding genes. The pathocracy's dominance will weaken imperceptibly but steadily, finally leading to a situation wherein the society of normal people reaches for power. This is a nightmare vision [to the pathocrats].
The biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of this majority [of normal people] is thus a "biological" necessity. Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule. Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy. ...
After all, pathocrats give short shrift to blood and suffering of people they consider to be not quite conspecific. Kings may have suffered due to the death of their knights, but pathocrats never do: "We have a lot of people here." ...
Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long as that "other" world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into and within the strivings of the non-pathological majority, thereby creating a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country's population will never stop dreaming of the reinstallment of the normal man's system in any possible form. This majority [of normal people] will never stop watching other countries, waiting for the opportune moment; its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be educated and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings. This goal must be pursued doggedly so that everyone knows what is being fought for and in whose name harsh discipline and poverty must be endured. The latter factor effectively limits the possibility of "subversive" activities on the part of the society of normal people. ...
The ideology must of course furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality. [...]
Economic factors constitute a non-negligible part of the motivation for this expansionist tendency. Since the managerial functions have been taken over by individuals with mediocre intelligence and pathological character traits, the pathocracy becomes incapable of properly administering anything at all. The area suffering most severely must always be whichever one requires a person to act independently, not wasting time searching for the proper way to behave. Agriculture is dependent upon changing climate conditions and the appearance of pests and plant diseases. A farmer's personal qualities have thus been an essential factor of success in this area, as it was for many centuries. Pathocracy therefore invariably brings about food shortages.
However, many countries with normal man's [social and political] systems abound in sufficiency as far as industrial products are concerned and experience problems with their food surpluses even though there are temporary economic recessions and the citizens are by no means overworked. The temptation to dominate such a country and its prosperity, that perennial imperialist motive, thus becomes even more strong. The collected prosperity of the conquered nation can be exploited for a time, the citizens forced to work harder for paltry remuneration. For the moment, no thought is given to the fact that introducing a pathocratic system within such a country will eventually cause similar unproductive conditions; after all corresponding self-knowledge in this area is nonexistent [to pathological deviants].Unfortunately, the idea of conquering rich countries also motivates the minds of many poor non-pathological fellows who would like to use this opportunity to grab something for themselves and eat their fill of good food.
As has been the case for centuries, military power is of course the primary means for achieving these ends. Throughout the centuries, though, whenever history has registered the appearance of the phenomenon [of the rise to power of pathological types] (regardless of the ideological cloak covering it), specific measures of [achieving and maintaining control] have also become apparent: something in the order of specific intelligence in the service of international intrigue facilitating conquest. This quality is derived from the ... personality characteristics inspiring the overall phenomenon [that of psychopathy]; it should constitute data for historians to identify this type of phenomenon throughout history.
Read more here . . . .
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