Although I cannot prove it I get a feeling that all this focus on Putin’s attack on the Ukraine keeps giving details without analysis. A deeper analysis is called for here and it’s urgent.
Putin declared war on Ukraine and invaded, blowing up the cities, killing people, who have no role in this conflict other than to defend their country. We know that help has been offered to Ukraine in the form of more funding for weapons which will help the arms industry but not the small children and their parents who are traumatised. We know the feeling of outrage because the media on this side have recorded the responses of the people, in answer to questions that can predict the response. Their home, school and hospitals are blown up and they are asked to speak into a microphone. “How are you feeling?”
Their answer is predictable—they cannot sleep during night time raids, they cannot run for shelter because they have been destroyed, their children cannot go to school and they cannot go to the hospital for treatment. Not to mention that food is scarce and power for heat or cooking is often not there.
My first question is - how is it that society has been organized so just one man can decide who will live and who will die? Why do societies support and worship the power of a minority. What moral obligation does the ruler, the president or the king have towards those who are trying to survive? And what does it do to the psyche of a man who is hungry, homeless, and desperate to find shelter in complex social structures.
A system of scapegoating takes the responsibility away from those in position of leadership and directs it to a nameless mass who have no microphone at their mouth asking for their opinion.
The holocaust is one example of how evil men can arrange for the death of innocent people, because death is all that is required to silence the confused masses. War is another example.
Dressing up a chosen upper class as powerful, beautiful and intelligent, is the way societies have found a fleeting power until the public understand the cost to them. Keeping information away from the masses is another way of making them so powerless they look for victims to bully for a fleeting sense of having power. Conversations about power are not welcome in a society so invested in keeping the masses ignorant, in fact the ones who are well informed are silenced through fear mongering.
But I am getting angry at hearing about all the injustice and violence in the world without hearing the questions almost screaming from neglect. How many others feel powerless?
The cause of war, starvation, injustice, the holocaust, witch hunts, misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, excessive greed, and all the abuses we call the “way of life” is the human mind overcome with fear too afraid to ask themselves what they think.
The great thinkers we applaud today are dead. The thinkers still alive are silenced and shunned, run out of town (business, office, city) like the poor goat who doesn’t understand why he has been sent away. And extra support for the trivial comes through entertainment.
Other events to help establish a pecking order, are wars, pandemics, poverty, homelessness, and prejudice. Media that applauds the worst in human society by repeatedly reporting all the bad news. The wasteful extravagance of celebrities, the vanities of narcisistic privilege, the worship of power-over above kindness and social responsibility.
If there was ever a phrase that capitalism and business hates its social responsibility. Right wing governments ridicule any one or group who call for fairness. Left wing governments are too few to find a generalization.
Meanwhile we are entertained by one hour dramas around cunning characters who have no integrity, conscience or bleeding heart for the future of this planet and the life that depends upon it.
Have we become the savages we love to hate?
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