The Transmogrification of Wester

The identity of ‘Western Man’, white Western most of all, upon objective study and by taking particular note of his heavy jackbooted footprint on history, will be transmogrified from a Nietzschean apotheosized Superman into a global bête noire. Before the modern era, these Supermen were tribal leaders, kings, emperors and the like. They were men like Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Attila the Hun who came with their legions and dominated their chosen enemies using swords, spears and projectiles. In the Egyptian Empire period, in particular, the 13th century BCE, Ramesses II is commonly considered to pharaoh of that time and scholars report that it was him with whom Moses squabbled. Moses was regarded as a son and trained in the arts of government, law, and warfare. The Egyptians of the centuries around the seventeenth and thirteenth were warlike. Moses, circa 1,700 to 1,200 BC, is said to have been a general under the pharaoh Ramses II.^{^[1]} Genghis Khan^{^[2]} is a major example of the warring leaders in Mongolia in the period 1,000 to 1,200 BC. The Romans were always fighting the Turks. The Anglos constantly were fighting across their own borders. Then there were wars between the British and the French and Spanish. German, French, and other European kings, and King Richard the Lionheart of England personally, carried out, over a period of two-hundred years, Crusades against the Turks to re-conquer and claim Jerusalem. Western history has been a quest for increasingly more lethal weapons to destroy more effectively other nations to flaunt their superiority and acquire more land and wealth. It has been a long and garish parade of aggression and plunder.

Archaeology has uncovered evidence of warfare as far back as prehistoric times. Fighting was done using clubs and spears as early as 35,000 BC. Arrows, maces, and slings were developed around 12,000 BC. Recorded history of war begins around 3,000 BC.^{^[3]} Chariots, pulled by animals like the ox, donkey, and later the horse, originated around 2,000 BC.

The early kings or emperors either had visions conquest or suspected that another nation was going to attack and prepared for war by inventing lethal weapons and conscription of young males. Like all adolescent and young adults, these conscripted young men had a schemata based on their immediate surroundings such as their home, family, neighbor, activities that they and their peers engaged in, and not much more. That was reality to them. If they were told there was an enemy that had to face and kill, they would not question, they would just do it. To do otherwise might be labeled cowardice. Like in most militaries, they would be told that to disobey or desert could be met with execution. They were educated and trained in the arts of warfare. Perhaps sons of higher status families entered special education to become officers; just as American youth from higher status families are privileged to enter WestPoint or Annapolis. They were perfect pawns at the hands of their military leaders and the military leaders were equally good as pawns for the king. Nothing much has changed over the millennia. The militaristic ambitions of kings were fulfilled by levying taxes on the people. Since wars required all sorts of supportive resources, kings had to demand more that taxes and soldiers. To carry out a war successfully, a king had to have a complex hierarchy of government officials who supervised work of non-military citizens whose labor was the equivalent of slavery. War, conscription, burdensome taxes, and slavery required a high-level coercive organization. To enforce such hardships, the officials in this organization had to be paid far more than the majority of the population and awarded special privileges and exemptions as well. Here we see the origins of elite classes. These features of early nations, particularly their governments, laws, and military have continued unabated for millennia up to the contemporary international scene.

The very fact of having a nation surrounded by borders adjacent to those of other nations invites conflict. Any time a line is drawn between people; there is always the possibility and more likely the temptation to transgress the border. The possible threat of transgression requires that the king be prepared to defend his borders and counterattack. Consequently, he (or she) must maintain an army. An army is trained for combat and typically does nothing else but train or fight. When an army of young males in the prime and saturated with their male hormones designed for hard work, fighting, or sex is idle, trouble is waiting to happen. The king must either feign having a potential enemy ready to attack or find some pretext to invent a war. This same social psychology is characteristic of gangs of young men. Their leaders, usually older and savvier, must keep their lieutenants and foot soldiers disciplined and goal oriented. The leaders must plan and execute some criminal act or keep the gang vigilant against rival gangs. From this perspective, kings and their governments and armies and exactly like so-called illegitimate gangs. Within both governments and gangs there always arise rivals for control. And so it has gone on for countless millennia. For the modern world, history illustrates this with many nations in their crushing, murderous marches toward expansion into foreign continents and global conquests.

Beginning soon after the discovery of American, the Spanish Conquistadors, terrifying the Incas and Aztecs with loud bursts from their harquebuses, or musket guns, and safe behind their virtually impenetrable suits of armor, defeated them handily with their spears and crossbows. They destroyed these ancient civilizations from northern South America to southern North America. Following upon Columbus, early Americans soon followed this trend of domination and conquest, and again, using guns and phony treaties, began the long and bloody history of the decimation of the Native American nations and confiscating their land.^{^[4]} Later, in the early nineteenth century, there came the Belgians, English, German, and French who subdued and occupied the central and South African continent mainly by using their guns.^{^[5]} They colonized parts of North Africa and innumerable islands across the global waters. The British subdued and occupied India. Spanish claimed much of South America. In Africa, Europeans commandeered the rest of native African’s land. They built railroads across the continent to aid in exploiting their abundant natural resources and enslaving African natives. Capitalizing on the success of the European conquest of Africa, Americans began kidnapping the strongest from within the African tribes to bring them to America to be slaves.

These Westerners, claiming to graciously bestow their superior civilization and Christianity on other peoples and continents, brutally defeated and dominated almost every corner of the globe while stealing their natural resources, and enslaving their indigenous peoples. The Chinese had their Genghis Kahn, yet neither the Chinese nor Indians have had anywhere near the atrocious militaristic, bloody, invasive, exploitative, rapacious history of the Caucasian male.

The mindset of the Westerner is and always has been inveterately militaristic. Those who receive honor in Western societies are the unscrupulous leaders and the malleable, meatheaded young males whom they order into their vainglorious battles. Kings and presidents easily bate their youth to rush bravely into mortal combat for the paltry rewards of uniforms and ribbons. It never occurs to the populace, not even to the mothers, that the peacemakers among them are never acknowledged. The ancient Norsemen had their Valhalla for those men who honorably died in combat. This category of modern military man, what we call hero, likewise, receives regal celebrations for dying honorably in combat. Of course, this celebration of dead heroes makes it all seem appreciated and worth it in the eyes of their mothers and family. This is a time-honored convention in the Western world. Contrariwise, it should not be a surprise that our young males are not commissioned by kings and presidents to teach the arts of conflict resolution and negotiation. Leadership and teacher traing does not include skills for coaching the young in the arts of peacemaking or how to handle interpersonal relationships with maturity. Again, It should be no surprise that there is no Valhalla for mediators who prevented conflict from escalating into war. Nor are there accolades for young men who have learned the art of nonviolent solutions to conflict. The fact that there is only a modern-day equivalent of a Valhalla for men who died honorably in combat is a gruesome signature of the character of the Western male.

There is one recurrent, dominant beat beneath the otherwise checkered and cacophonous drums of the evolving civilizations of human history. That is the thunderous sound of rampageously adventurous Westerners as they militantly march across the globe. Western man’s history tells a story of a grimly strewn trail of death left behind by his spears, arrows, and guns. It is also an ironic tale of how he has cast a reflection from his flares of vainglorious self-adulation for his heinous deeds that has shown all across the earth’s terrain. In their wake has always been the merchants who, with trickery and threat of more violence, take the spoils and exploit whatever else is worthy of plunder. Finally, there is a penultimate testimony to his arrogance in the infamous representation, ostentatiously drawn by Anglicized cartographers, of his conquests on their expanding maps of the world.

This elitist, proprietary, militaristic mindset goes back to the very beginnings of our nation. The haughty new western American men who immigrated to the northeast coast of America were the epitome of history’s worst in this trajectory of murderous brutality territorial confiscation. After building settlements and surviving with the help of the Native Americans, they began to oust them as they built and expanded their colonies. Next, they collected the colonies into a federation, which eventually was the basis for creating the United States. First, they had to defeat the British and then formulate a Constitution for their new nation. Whom, among these new Americans do you think formulated this Constitution? They were not of the ilk of the tired and hungry emigrants whom our leader eventually beckoned to be our laborers. No, rather they were the intelligentsia, the descendents of disenfranchised English elite. They were men who were ambitious to be, in their new world, the British equivalent of royalty, albeit without their titles of nobility or their old world entitlements. These men held an inveterate proprietary sense toward their new country and toward all other, not so aristocratic, men within, immigrating, or native to it. They felt inherently entitled to use and dispose of other men. This seemed to be a necessary part of the natural order of things. They brought with them the legacy of the mentality of British Lords and Generals. As such, they had an inherent militaristic mind set, albeit, toward their British governors, that mindset was initially defensive. Not so with respect to the Native Americans.

These were the new world’s Titans. They would never have thought of themselves as white supremacists, but to be exact, that is exactly what they were. The lives of those whom they would trample upon, drive out, and murder by the millions were insignificant in comparison to the importance to them of fulfilling their dream of expanding, founding, and governing their new nation from its sea to shining sea. What's more, they saw themselves as pretenders to the offices of governor of the states they would carve out on ‘their’ continent.

Thomas Hobbs, renowned British philosopher advocating the use of absolute power and force as the only way to control the brutish and unruly masses, now has had his day since first penning this ruthless, elitist philosophy. Historians attribute inspiration for our Constitution to the likes of Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, whose influence came a bit later. However, for centuries before Hobbs and thereafter, there has been no hamlet so small, no office corner so out of sight, nor alleyway so dark, as to escape the Hobbsian mentality of an obfuscated, cryptically enunciated ideology of control and its subsequent embodiment in the contemporary modern merger of political and corporate power.

When the opportunity arose for these ‘nouvellement puissant’, or newly powerful, nation builders, they designed a Constitution with a representative democracy that gave them uncontested sway over governance, legislation, justice, commerce, and the military. They designed laws and institutions that favored the landed gentry. Parallel to their new form of government and with a laissez faire orientation, they designed an economy dependent on slavery. Their original constitution even had the separation of State and business built in by virtue of an absence of reference to the conduct of business. The one exception was a clause forbidding the institution of a debtor’s prison. Consistent with this, there were no provisions prohibiting the ownership of slaves. They wrote into the constitution that voters must be free citizens. George Washington even had three-hundred- and-fourteen slaves.

Had a ‘no ownership of slaves’ provision been in the constitution, the novice American leaders would never have attained their level of affluence and power. They would never have achieved their extraordinary success unless they had done it on backs of their slaves. Slavery and the confiscation of Native American lands left these power-wielding landowners vulnerable to rebellion and certain attack. However, by now, they not only had guns but cannons to control and protect against the unruly and uneducated populace, and uprising or rebellions of their slaves and the Native Americans that stood in their way of seizing all territories as far as they could envision. In addition, eventually, these weapons would provide the means to rout the British who threatened a permanent suzerainty that would forever undermine their coveted sweeping prerogatives.

This was the state of being and state of mind of the Founding Fathers of our nation. They were men who enjoyed that special collegiality only shared my members of elite secret societies. This was more than an original ‘good ole boys club.’ This was more like the exclusive club of kings and emperors. However, you would expect them to avoid monarchy’s iron hand, favoritism toward loyalists to the crown, and to avoid the opulent, unearned privileges bestowed upon royalty.

Of course, if a country were to start from scratch to build a nation and draft an entirely new constitution, you would expect those who were most well educated and more familiar with government to play the major roles. Having seen the snarls in their former homeland, Britain, you would expect them to try to draft a constitution that avoided the causes of those snarls.

You would expect them to include a clause for the separation of Church and State.

Of course, the monolithic nature of the monarchy would prompt them to devise a government with a separation and co-equality of powers between judicial, the legislative, and the executive branches. You would also expect them to draft clauses that would insure even-handedness in the conduct of the justice system. Of course, after having been forced at gunpoint to submit to the exaction of unfair taxes by the British, you would expect them to include the strong language of ‘no taxation without representation’ in their Constitution.

FOR THE RECORD: THERE COULD HAVE BEEN A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE KIND OF CULTURE IN THE NEW WORLD

It was not as if there were no possible alternative forms of government and economy. America could have begun as a true egalitarian society. It could have maintained the style of mutual support among neighbors that was common in early, small, frontier, and farming communities. This is a style seen to today as in Obama’s early community organizer days and in the Quaker’s non-hierarchical church polity. There also are pockets here there today that have community organizations that are not hierarchically structured in the Romanesque manner or on the model of our contemporary two political party system. They manage mutual assistance programs; conflict resolution or mediation in place of police and courts; employment assistance; people’s free clinics; food banks for the needy; farmer-to-market, low cost grocery stores; child-care; educational programs that rely on a non-graded, self-directed approach; recreational programs for youth; mentors for children with single or disabled parents; care for the elderly and shut-ins; and all either not based on voting or at least not on a two party voting system. Many simply rely on a Quaker-like group process for decision-making.

If your view of the world and conducting business is a continuation of the non-regulated trade practices begun many millennia ago, your constitution will reflect that.

If your view of the world and how to govern the world is hierarchical as in the ancient monarchies or is modeled after the Roman Empire with its hierarchy and privileged elites representing constituents, then your constitution will reflect that. If your idea of government includes a military, as has every government since governments have existed, you will provide for a military force in your Constitution. however, once you have a military, then your soldiers can be difficult to control when there is no enemy. In times of peace, control of your ragamuffin, deluded recruits or conscripts becomes a serious problem and a top priority. Having an army will make a government predisposed to, and in actuality, use force with the slightest pretext. Political leaders will put their military force to use as their way of dealing with challenges to their economically preeminent position. That tends to make trade partner nations acquiesce before the brandishing of menacing arms. This allows governments leeway to assume entitlement to swindle, defraud, and even extort unfair trade concessions abroad. This sort of military intimidation serves two purposes. It is both an enforcer over oppositional foreign nations and it keeps the military forces alert and on the ready. If you have a military, you will be unlikely to deal peacefully with other 'uncooperative' or resentful nations, for example as was the case with the Native American nations, when they oppose your incursion on their rights, when they revolt over your violation your treaties with them, when you lawlessly and wantonly kill their people and 'savagely' seize their land.

If your concept of how to deal with disputes and offenses derives from the likes of the Hammurabi Code, the Hebrew Law and Judges, or the Roman legal system, then take note that these legal systems did not include mediation. Our modern legal system, when stacked against the ancient systems, is not nearly class-biased. Ours is not as disinterested in ascertaining the precise nature of the cause of an offense. In addition, ours is not nearly as brutally punitive. Ours has a far more non-discriminatory air about it.

Our modern Western courts go to great lengths to create an appearance of austere formality and professionalism that borders on regality. On the other hand it displays, or exudes, an outward appearance that is sanctimoniously humane. It has something of an ethically sanitary façade in the way the Judge is elevated above the people in expensive hardwood furnishings. The procedures of our courts adhere to precise regimentation.

From the perspective of a moderately educated person from middle class to the impoverished ghetto dweller, the majestic halls of justice are powerful and intimidating enough to squelch the minutest smidgen of resistance. No one date to risk questioning of its rights of authority. No one doubts its intent to dispense judgments that are truly in the interests of egalitarian, socially constructive approaches to the immediate and ultimate causes and beneficial remedies of human conflicts. It never occurs to the well educated, much less the uneducated and powerless, that these awe-inspiring edifices with their ostentatious insignias, flags, and officially attired officers (substitute flunkies here), are actually designed to maintain a lofty distance from the people it judges. Nor does it occur to the vast majority of the populace that all this pomp is designed to authenticate the primary purpose of our justice system, which is keeping Hobbs’ unruly masses under the control of the elite. The people, the TV audience, are so easily deceived because their exposure to crime and justice is almost exclusively the most rare, glamorous, and heinous crimes with the most fancy court proceedings. The vast majority crimes are far more prosaic and socially inconsequential. The majority of court proceedings are far more perfunctory and speedy. They typically are devoid of the flowery, suspenseful, and erudite disputations of TV court dramas. There is no resemblance in these of what was common to early America and prescribed in the US Constitution.

Moving into the twentieth century, history records the Germans first futile attempt to defeat and subjugate the world. After the burdensome Treaty of Versailles, Hitler and his Fascism inspired the Germans to rise from the ashes and once again attempt to wage war on all surrounding nations, killing many millions of Jews, Polish, Russians, and Americans in this second failed attempt. Following on the heels of the desolation, Russia’s Stalin murdered many millions of his countrymen in order to enforce the submission of the populace to his rule. Japan had its day of horrors invading China. Later they joined in the Germans in the fight America in the Second World War. Stalin’s success in subjugating Russians was followed by Marx and Engels’ successfully installing a new Communist government. In the aftermath of World War II, the economic elite in America had succeeded in creating their highly profitable military-industrial complex. Roosevelt had created the Pentagon that now could orchestrate an unbelievably huge network of arms related corporations. Corporations in this military-industrial complex were in the process of gaining a surreptitious, invincible control over the three branches of the US government.

Paradoxically, it was not the earlier KKK nor the illegitimate contemporary white supremacist militias that define white supremacy. No, rather, far out of sight, up within the apogee of architectural spires, where they survey all beneath them, from sea to every shining sea, and gloat over ‘their’ subdued, teaming, toiling masses. It does not matter to them that, when those masses look up, they see only an extravagant anathema. These lofty Titan victors, self-described fittest of all survivors in a social Darwinian world, are shocked to learn that ‘their’ ungrateful masses cannot see them as benevolent patricians bringing to them the benefits of their glorious Western democracy and capitalism.

In truth, it is not “She who rocks the cradle rules the world.” Rather it has always been “He who cradles the rocket rules the world!”

The US now was prepared to dominate the worldwide weapons milieu. Russia’s communism provided a perfect pretext for maintaining superiority in an arms race. The US propaganda machine bombarded the American public with stories about how horribly treated were the people under Russia’s communism. The Communist people were portrayed as totally regimented by the government and as having lost their freedom and forced into miserable poverty. Our media described Communism as morally perverse and as the godless anti-Christ. The US media described Communism as having a failed economy and educational system. Their science was criticized as inferior to the US and as being distorted as a tool for Communist propaganda. On the other hand, Americans were told that Communism was trying to take over the world.

No nation in the world would dare defy a country with enough nuclear tipped rockets to totally destroy them all in one gigantic, instantaneous, fell swoop. That is none until now!

A virtual psychotic paranoia of Communism was created in America. In addition to America, Russia’s closest neighbors, Korea and then Viet Nam, were said to be the immediate targets for a Communist takeover. With this fabricated scenario, now the stage was set for these new American warlords to test their mettle by attacking meekly armed Eastern nations like Korea and Viet Nam. The spread of Russian communism was the pretext for invading these countries. The American warlords were becoming wealthier on a geometrically increasing scale. Their corporations owned the paper media, radio, and television. Ancillary Corporations aligned with weapon manufacturing corporations also paid for media content with advertizing dollars. All the while, the voices of independent investigative journalists were being squeezed out and only had a fraction of the American audience. The big media corporations were merging vertically and horizontally into a rapidly creeping monopoly aligned with the military-industrial complex. These mergers were all approved by the FCC as the Sherman Anti-trust Act was increasingly re-interpreted to the benefit of the media giants. The Justice Department was permitting a national rush toward corporation mergers against the long tradition of preserving competition. All corporations assimilated into the giant web of the military-industrial complex now could collaborate, not for the defeat of Communism, but for the new American World Empire.

The character of individuals conforms to the character of their nation. The maturity of individuals will vary along a bell curve. The bell curve for one nation, it median and upper and lower extremes will vary when compared to other nations. You will find few in one nation who reach or go beyond the upper extreme of another nation with a higher median score. In a nation whose character is oriented toward self-interest and material self-aggrandizement, most individuals will exhibit those characteristics. In a nation whose character is oriented toward power, winning, and aggressiveness, most individuals will exhibit those characteristics. A power-oriented society is incompatible with empathy and transparency. In a nation whose character is oriented toward mutual care and assistance, empathy, and transparency, most individuals will exhibit those characteristics. In such a nation, it is not likely that a person not exhibiting characteristics of mutual care and assistance, empathy, and transparency will be elected. If a person with those latter characteristics is elected in a power and material self-aggrandizement oriented nation, loud and aggressive protests will emerge from the power-oriented segment.

The modern era has this ingenious new configuration of power. So circuitously imposed and so seemingly legitimized is this new form of power that it escapes recognition by the masses under its ubiquitous, entrancing, electronic thumb. The systems of institutions so deftly designed and tightly interdigitized by the elitist power structure are presented to the people, not just as unquestionable reality, but also as there for their benefit. Those members of the masses who are so unfortunate as to fall outside their guidelines experience the destructiveness of its ironclad rules. They find out just how harsh but effective is the accursed use of force by our modern monolithic institutions.

Was there ever, in days past, a suppliant slave who did not harbor an unavenged hatred for his master? Analogously for the contemporary equivalent, is there any subordinate who, under the corporation’s puppet bosses, does not harbor a similar, smoldering, unavenged hatred? Yet, ironically, and thanks to the triumph of brilliantly veiled media propaganda, our modern day slaves of corporations hold hatred toward a target that is indiscernible. It is similar to that of a neurotic person’s feeling of free-floating anxiety or perpetual, vague sense of impending doom. The corporate-controlled-media’s wicked, yet enchanting, wielding of words like democracy and freedom keeps the blinders intact over the eyes of both workers and professionals. Furthermore, consider the exercise of the people’s vote based on unimaginably nebulous misinformation. This modern omnipresent, fabricated, media coverage of politics and all things commercial has made the creeping corporate coup d’état even seem quite legitimate and even seem desirable to our new population of mentally blank-slate couch potatoes.

The crafty manipulation of beliefs, the favorite ‘tool of tyrants’, has made these modern-day duped slaves think that they are actually supporting and voting for politicians who represent of their own fundamentalist religious beliefs and down-home, cherished traditional values. The people are so easily swayed they eagerly ingest the media’s titillating ads portraying products tinged with suggestive sexuality or macho power. These ads coax the gullible population into believing that these superfluous products are the sure roads to popularity and status or that they will keep you safe from harm and germs. An entire nation daily swallows manure without thought.

In spite of this entire corporate campaign of brilliant hoodwinking skullduggery, the days of the Titans has passed. The new day the Olympians has come. They have finally succeeded in transforming themselves, in the eyes of the populace, into that long-coveted image of benevolent patrician. However, be not too hasty in this conclusion. Their conquest using the hypnotic media may be seeing a reversal of fortune.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan

[3] http://www.warscholar.com/Timeline.html

[4] 500 Nations

[5] Guns, Germs and Steel