elijahradioprophet

2009-06-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

After the taking up of our Lord Jesus Christ, I John was alone upon
Mount Tabor, where also He showed us His undefiled Godhead; and as I
was not able to stand, I fell upon the ground, and prayed to the Lord,
and said: O Lord my God, who hast deemed me worthy to be Your servant,
hear my voice, and teach me about Your coming. When You shall come to
the earth, what will happen? The heaven and the earth, and the sun and
the moon, what will happen to them in those times? Reveal to me all;
for I am emboldened, because Thou listenest to Your servant.

And I spent seven days praying; and after this a cloud of light caught
me up from the mountain, and set me before the face of the heaven. And
I heard a voice saying to me: Look up, John, servant of God, and know.
And having looked up, I saw the heaven opened, and there came forth
from within the heaven a smell of perfumes of much sweet odour; and I
saw an exceeding great flood of light, more resplendent than the sun.
And again I heard a voice saying to me: Behold, righteous John. And I
directed my sight, and saw a book lying, of the thickness, methought,
of seven mountains; and the length of it the mind of man cannot
comprehend, having seven seals. And I said: O Lord my God, reveal to
me what is written in this book. And I heard a voice saying to me:
Hear, righteous John. In this book which you see there have been
written the things in the heaven, and the things in the earth, and the
things in the abyss, and the judgments and righteousness of all the
human race. And I said: Lord, when shall these things come to pass?
and what do those times bring? And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear,
righteous John. There shall be in that time abundance of corn and
wine, such as there has never been upon the earth, nor shall ever be
until those times come. Then the ear of corn shall produce a half
chœnix, and the bend of the branch shall produce a thousand clusters,
and the cluster shall produce a half jar of wine; and in the following
year there shall not be found upon the face of all the earth a half
chœnix of corn or a half jar of wine.

And again I said: Lord, thereafter what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then shall appear the
denier, and he who is set apart in the darkness, who is called
Antichrist. And again I said: Lord, reveal to me what he is like. And
I heard a voice saying to me: The appearance of his face is dusky; the
hairs of his head are sharp, like darts; his eyebrows like a wild
beast's; his right eye like the star which rises in the morning, and
the other like a lion's; his mouth about one cubit; his teeth span
long; his fingers like scythes; the print of his feet of two spans;
and on his face an inscription, Antichrist; he shall be exalted even
to heaven, and shall be cast down even to Hades, making false
displays. And then will I make the heaven brazen, so that it shall not
give moisture upon the earth; and I will hide the clouds in secret
places, so that they shall not bring moisture upon the earth; and I
will command the horns of the wind, so that the wind shall not blow
upon the earth.

And again I said: Lord, and how many years will he do this upon the
earth? And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Three
years shall those times be; and I will make the three years like three
months, and the three months like three weeks, and the three weeks
like three days, and the three days like three hours, and the three
hours like three seconds, as said the prophet David, His throne have
You broken down to the ground; You have shortened the days of his
time; You have poured shame upon him. And then I shall send forth
Enoch and Elias to convict him; and they shall show him to be a liar
and a deceiver; and he shall kill them at the altar, as said the
prophet, Then shall they offer calves upon Your altar.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will come to pass? And I
heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then all the human
race shall die, and there shall not be a living man upon all the
earth. And again I said: Lord, after that what will You do? And I
heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then will I send
forth mine angels, and they shall take the ram's horns that lie upon
the cloud; and Michael and Gabriel shall go forth out of the heaven
and sound with those horns, as the prophet David foretold, With the
voice of a trumpet of horn. And the voice of the trumpet shall be
heard from the one quarter of the world to the other; and from the
voice of that trumpet all the earth shall be shaken, as the prophet
foretold, And at the voice of the bird every plant shall arise; that
is, at the voice of the archangel all the human race shall arise.

And again I said: Lord, those who are dead from Adam even to this day,
and who dwell in Hades from the beginning of the world, and who die at
the last ages, what like shall they arise? And I heard a voice saying
to me: Hear, righteous John. All the human race shall arise thirty
years old.

And again I said: Lord, they die male and female, and some old, and
some young, and some infants. In the resurrection what like shall they
arise? And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Just as
the bees are, and differ not one from another, but are all of one
appearance and one size, so also shall every man be in the
resurrection. There is neither fair, nor ruddy, nor black, neither
Ethiopian nor different countenances; but they shall all arise of one
appearance and one stature. All the human race shall arise without
bodies, as I told you that in the resurrection they neither marry nor
are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God.

And again I said: Lord, is it possible in that world to recognise each
other, a brother his brother, or a friend his friend, or a father his
own children, or the children their own parents? And I heard a voice
saying to me: Hear, John. To the righteous there is recognition, but
to the sinners not at all; they cannot in the resurrection recognise
each other. And again I John said: Lord, is there there recollection
of the things that are here, either fields or vineyards, or other
things here? And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John.
The prophet David speaks, saying, I remembered that we are dust: as
for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he shall
flourish: for a wind has passed over it, and it shall be no more, and
it shall not any longer know its place. And again the same said: His
spirit shall go forth, and he returns to his earth; in that day all
his thoughts shall perish.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then will I send forth mine
angels over the face of all the earth, and they shall lift off the
earth everything honourable, and everything precious, and the
venerable and holy images, and the glorious and precious crosses, and
the sacred vessels of the churches, and the divine and sacred books;
and all the precious and holy things shall be lifted up by clouds into
the air. And then will I order to be lifted up the great and venerable
sceptre, on which I stretched forth my hands, and all the orders of my
angels shall do reverence to it. And then shall be lifted up all the
race of men upon clouds, as the Apostle Paul foretold. Along with them
we shall be snatched up in clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And
then shall come forth every evil spirit, both in the earth and in the
abyss, wherever they are on the face of all the earth, from the rising
of the sun even to the setting, and they shall be united to him that
is served by the devil, that is, Antichrist, and they shall be lifted
up upon the clouds.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then shall I send forth mine
angels over the face of all the earth, and they shall burn up the
earth eight thousand five hundred cubits, and the great mountains
shall be burnt up, and all the rocks shall be melted and shall become
as dust, and every tree shall be burnt up, and every beast, and every
creeping thing creeping upon the earth, and every thing moving upon
the face of the earth, and every flying thing flying in the air; and
there shall no longer be upon the face of all the earth anything
moving, and the earth shall be without motion.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then shall I uncover the
four parts of the east, and there shall come forth four great winds,
and they shall sweep all the face of the earth from the one end of the
earth to the other; and the Lord shall sweep sin from off the earth,
and the earth shall be made white like snow, and it shall become as a
leaf of paper, without cave, or mountain, or hill, or rock; but the
face of the earth from the rising even to the setting of the sun shall
be like a table, and white as snow; and the reins of the earth shall
be consumed by fire, and it shall cry unto me, saying, I am a virgin
before you, O Lord, and there is no sin in me; as the prophet David
said aforetime, You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be made
pure; You shall wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow. And
again he said: Every chasm shall be filled up, and every mountain and
hill brought low, and the crooked places shall be made straight, and
the rough ways into smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of
God. Isaiah 40:4

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then shall the earth be
cleansed from sin, and all the earth shall be filled with a sweet
smell, because I am about to come down upon the earth; and then shall
come forth the great and venerable sceptre, with thousands of angels
worshipping it, as I said before; and then shall appear the sign of
the Son of man from the heaven with power and great glory. Matthew
24:30 And then the worker of iniquity with his servants shall behold
it, and gnash his teeth exceedingly, and all the unclean spirits shall
be turned to flight. And then, seized by invisible power, having no
means of flight, they shall gnash their teeth against him, saying to
him: Where is your power? How have you led us astray? and we have fled
away, and have fallen away from the glory which we had beside Him who
is coming to judge us, and the whole human race. Woe to us! because He
banishes us into outer darkness.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? And I heard a
voice saying to me: Then will I send an angel out of heaven, and he
shall cry with a loud voice, saying, Hear, O earth, and be strong,
says the Lord; for I am coming down to you. And the voice of the angel
shall be heard from the one end of the world even to the other, and
even to the remotest part of the abyss. And then shall be shaken all
the power of the angels and of the many-eyed ones, and there shall be
a great noise in the heavens, and the nine regions of the heaven shall
be shaken, and there shall be fear and astonishment upon all the
angels. And then the heavens shall be rent from the rising of the sun
even to the setting, and an innumerable multitude of angels shall come
down to the earth; and then the treasures of the heavens shall be
opened, and they shall bring down every precious thing, and the
perfume of incense, and they shall bring down to the earth Jerusalem
robed like a bride. Revelation 21:2 And then there shall go before me
myriads of angels and archangels, bearing my throne, crying out, Holy,
holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of Your glory.
Isaiah 6:3 And then will I come forth with power and great glory, and
every eye in the clouds shall see me; and then every knee shall bend,
of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth.
Philippians 2:10 And then the heaven shall remain empty; and I will
come down upon the earth, and all that is in the air shall be brought
down upon the earth, and all the human race and every evil spirit
along with Antichrist, and they shall all be set before me naked, and
chained by the neck.

And again I said: Lord, what will become of the heavens, and the sun,
and the moon, along with the stars? And I heard a voice saying to me:
Behold, righteous John. And I looked, and saw a Lamb having seven eyes
and seven horns. Revelation 5:6 And again I heard a voice saying to
me: I will bid the Lamb come before me, and will say, Who will open
this book? And all the multitudes of the angels will answer, Give this
book to the Lamb to open it. And then will I order the book to be
opened. And when He shall open the first seal, the stars of the heaven
shall fall, from the one end of it to the other. And when He shall
open the second seal, the moon shall be hidden, and there shall be no
light in her. And when He shall open the third seal, the light of the
sun shall be withheld, and there shall not be light upon the earth.
And when He shall open the fourth seal, the heavens shall be
dissolved, and the air shall be thrown into utter confusion, as says
the prophet: And the heavens are the works of Your hands; they shall
perish, but You endure, and they shall all wax old as a garment. And
when He shall open the fifth seal, the earth shall be rent, and all
the tribunals upon the face of all the earth shall be revealed. And
when He shall open the sixth seal, the half of the sea shall
disappear. And when He shall open the seventh seal, Hades shall be
uncovered.

And I said: Lord, who will be the first to be questioned, and to
receive judgment? And I heard a voice saying to me, The unclean
spirits, along with the adversary. I bid them go into outer darkness,
where the depths are. And I said: Lord, and in what place does it lie?
And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. As big a stone
as a man of thirty years old can roll, and let go down into the depth,
even falling down for twenty years will not arrive at the bottom of
Hades; as the prophet David said before, And He made darkness His
secret place.

And I said: Lord, and after them what nation will be questioned? And I
heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. There will be
questioned of Adam's race those nations, both the Greek and those who
have believed in idols, and in the sun, and in the stars, and those
who have defiled the faith by heresy, and who have not believed the
holy resurrection, and who have not confessed the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Ghost: then will I send them away into Hades, as the
prophet David foretold, Let the sinners be turned into Hades, and all
the nations that forget God. And again he said: They were put in Hades
like sheep; death shall be their shepherd.

And again I said: Lord, and after them whom will You judge? And I
heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John. Then the race of the
Hebrews shall be examined, who nailed me to the tree like a
malefactor. And I said: And what punishment will these get, and in
what place, seeing that they did such things to You? And I heard a
voice saying to me: They shall go away into Tartarus, as the prophet
David foretold, They cried out, and there was none to save; to the
Lord, and He did not hearken to them. And again the Apostle Paul said:
As many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law, and
as many as have sinned in law shall be judged by means of law. Romans 2:12

And again I said: Lord, and what of those who have received baptism?
And I heard a voice saying to me: Then the race of the Christians
shall be examined, who have received baptism; and then the righteous
shall come at my command, and the angels shall go and collect them
from among the sinners, as the prophet David foretold: The Lord will
not suffer the rod of the sinners in the lot of the righteous; and all
the righteous shall be placed on my right hand, Matthew 25:33 and
shall shine like the sun. Matthew 13:43 As you see, John, the stars of
heaven, that they were all made together, but differ in light, 1
Corinthians 15:41 so shall it be with the righteous and the sinners;
for the righteous shall shine as lights and as the sun, but the
sinners shall stand in darkness.

And again I said: Lord, and do all the Christians go into one
punishment?—kings, high priests, priests, patriarchs, rich and poor,
bond and free? And I heard a voice saying to me: Hear, righteous John.
As the prophet David foretold, The expectation of the poor shall not
perish for ever. Now about kings: they shall be driven like slaves,
and shall weep like infants; and about patriarchs, and priests, and
Levites, of those that have sinned, they shall be separated in their
punishments, according to the nature of the peculiar transgression of
each,—some in the river of fire, and some to the worm that dies not,
and others in the seven-mouthed pit of punishment. To these
punishments the sinners will be apportioned.

And again I said: Lord, and where will the righteous dwell? And I
heard a voice saying to me: Then shall paradise be revealed; and the
whole world and paradise shall be made one, and the righteous shall be
on the face of all the earth with my angels, as the Holy Spirit
foretold through the prophet David: The righteous shall inherit the
earth, and dwell therein for ever and ever.

And again I said: Lord, how great is the multitude of the angels? and
which is the greater, that of angels or of men? And I heard a voice
saying to me: As great as is the multitude of the angels, so great is
the race of men, as the prophet has said, He set bounds to the nations
according to the number of the angels of God.

And again I said: Lord, and after that what will You do? and what is
to become of the world? Reveal to me all. And I heard a voice saying
to me: Hear, righteous John. After that there is no pain, there is no
grief, there is no groaning; there is no recollection of evils, there
are no tears, there is no envy, there is no hatred of brethren, there
is no unrighteousness, there is no arrogance, there is no slander,
there is no bitterness, there are none of the cares of life, there is
no pain from parents or children, there is no pain from gold, there
are no wicked thoughts, there is no devil, there is no death, there is
no night, but all is day. As I said before, And other sheep I have,
which are not of this fold, that is, men who have been made like the
angels through their excellent course of life; them also must I bring,
and they will hear my voice, and there shall be one fold, one shepherd.

And again I heard a voice saying to me: Behold, you have heard all
these things, righteous John; deliver them to faithful men, that they
also may teach others, and not think lightly of them, nor cast our
pearls before swine, lest perchance they should trample them with
their feet. Matthew 7:6

And while I was still hearing this voice, the cloud brought me down,
and put me on Mount Thabor. And there came a voice to me, saying:
Blessed are those who keep judgment and do righteousness in all time.
And blessed is the house where this description lies, as the Lord
said, He that loves me keeps my sayings John 14:23 in Christ Jesus our
Lord; to Him be glory for ever. Amen.

=09
Word and Revelation of Esdras,
The Holy Prophet and Beloved of God

IT came to pass in the thirtieth year, on the twenty- second of the
month, I was in my house. And I cried out and said to the Most High:
Lord, give the glory,(1) in order that I may see Thy mysteries. And
when it was night, there came an angel, Michael the archangel, and
says to me: O Prophet Esdras, refrain from bread for seventy weeks.(2)
And I fasted as he told me. And there came Raphael the commander of
the host, and gave me a storax rod. And I fasted twice sixty(3) weeks.
And I saw the mysteries of God and His angels. And I said to them: I
wish to plead before God about the race of the Christians. It is good
for a man not to be born rather than to come into the world. I was
therefore taken up into heaven, and I saw in the first heaven a great
army of angels; and they took me to the judgments. And I heard a voice
saying to me: Have mercy on us, O thou chosen of God, Esdras. Then
began I to say: Woe to sinners when they see one who is just more than
the angels, and they themselves are in the Gehenna of fire! And Esdras
said: Have mercy on the works of Thine hands, Thou who art
compassionate, and of great mercy. Judge me rather than the souls of
the sinners; for it is better that one soul should he punished, and
that the whole world should not come to destruction. And God said: I
will give rest in paradise to the righteous, and I have become(4)
merciful. And Esdras said: Lord, why dost Thou confer benefits on the
righteous? for just as one who has been hired out, and has served out
his time, goes and again works as a slave when he come to his masters,
so also the righteous has received his reward in the heavens. But have
mercy on the sinners, for we know that Thou art merciful. And God
said: I do not see how I can have mercy upon them. And Esdras said:
They cannot endure Thy wrath. And God said: This is the fate of such.
And God said: I wish to have thee like Paul and John, as thou hast
given me uncorrupted the treasure that cannot be stolen, the treasure
of virginity, the bulwark(5) of men. And Esdras said: It is good for a
man not to be born. It is good not to be in life. The irrational
creatures are better than man, because they have no punishment; but
Thou hast taken us, and given us up to judgment. Woe to the sinners in
the world to come! because their judgment is endless, and the flame
unquenchable. And while I was thus speaking to him, there came Michael
and Gabriel, and all the apostles; and they said: Rejoice, O faithful
man of God! And Esdras said:(6) Arise, and come hither with me, O
Lord, to judgment. And the Lord said: Behold, I give thee my covenant
between me and thee, that you may receive it. And Esdras said: Let us
plead in Thy hearing.(7) And God said: Ask Abraham your father how a
son pleads with his father,(8) and come plead with us. And Esdras
said: As the Lord liveth, I will not cease pleading with Thee in
behalf of the race of the Christians. Where are Thine ancient
compassions, O Lord? Where is Thy long-suffering? And God said: As I
have made night and day, I have made the righteous and the sinner; and
he should have lived like the righteous. And the prophet said: Who
made Adam the first-formed? And God said: My undefiled hands. And I
put him in paradise to guard the food of the tree of life; and
thereafter he became disobedient. and did this in transgression. And
the prophet said: Was he not protected by an angel? and was not his
life guarded by the cherubim to endless ages? and how was he deceived
who was guarded by angels? for Thou didst command all to be present,
and to attend to what was said by Thee.(1) But if Thou hadst not given
him Eve, the serpent would not have deceived her;(2) but whom Thou
wilt Thou savest, and whom Thou wilt Thou destroyest.(3) And the
prophet said: Let us come, my Lord, to a second judgment. And God
said: I cast fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah. And the prophet said: Lord,
Thou dealest with us according to our deserts. And God said: Your sins
transcend my clemency. And the prophet said: Call to mind the
Scriptures, my Father, who hast measured out Jerusalem, and set her up
again. Have mercy, O Lord, upon sinners; have mercy upon Thine own
creatures;(4) have pity upon Thy works. Then God remembered those whom
He had made, and said to the prophet: How can I have mercy upon them?
Vinegar and gall did they give me to drink,(5) and not even then did
they repent. And the prophet said: Reveal Thy cherubim, and let us go
together to judgment; and show me the day of judgment, what like it
is. And God said: Thou hast been deceived, Esdras; for such is the day
of judgment as that in which there is no rain upon the earth; for it
is a merciful tribunal as compared with that day. And the prophet
said: I will not cease to plead with Thee, unless I see the day of the
consummation. And God said:(6) Number the stars and the sand of the
sea; and if thou shalt be able to number this, thou art also able to
plead with me. And the prophet said: Lord, Thou knowest that I wear
human flesh; and how can I count the stars of the heaven, and the sand
of the sea? And God said: My chosen prophet, no man will know that
great day and the appearing(7) that comes to judge the world. For thy
sake, my prophet, I have told thee the day; but the hour have I not
told thee. And the prophet said: Lord, tell me also the years. And God
said: If I see the righteousness of the world, that it has abounded, I
will have patience with them; but if not, I will stretch forth my
hand, and lay hold of the world by the four quarters, and bring them
all together into the valley of Jehoshaphat,(8) and I will wipe out
the race of men, so that the world shall be no more. And the prophet
said: And how can Thy right hand be glorified? And God said: I shall
be glorified by my angels. And the prophet said: Lord, if Thou hast
resolved to do this, why didst Thou make man? Thou didst say to our
father Abraham,(9) Multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars
of the heaven, and as the sand that is by the sea-shore;(10) and where
is Thy promise? And God said: First will I make an earthquake for the
fall of four-footed beasts and of men; and when you see that brother
gives up brother to death, and that children shall rise up against
their parents, and that a woman forsakes her own husband, and when
nation shall rise up against nation in war, then will you know that
the end is near.(11) For then neither brother pities brother, nor man
wife, nor children parents, nor friends friends, nor a slave his
master; for he who is the adversary of men shall come up from
Tartarus, and shall show men many things. What shall I make of thee,
Esdras? and wilt thou yet plead with me? And the prophet said: Lord, I
shall not cease to plead with Thee. And God said: Number the flowers
of the earth. If thou shalt be able to number them, thou art able also
to plead with me. And the prophet said: Lord, I cannot number them. I
wear human flesh; but I shall not cease to plead with Thee. I wish,
Lord, to see also the under parts of Tartarus. And God said: Come down
and see. And He gave me Michael, and Gabriel, and other thirty-four
angels; and I went down eighty-five steps, and they brought me down
five hundred steps, and I saw a fiery throne, and an old man sitting
upon it; and his judgment was merciless. And I said to the angels: Who
is this? and what is his sin? And they said to me: This is Herod, who
for a time was a king, and ordered to put to death the children from
two years old and under.(12) And I said: Woe to his soul! And again
they took me down thirty steps, and I there saw boilings up of fire,
and in them there was a multitude of sinners; and I heard their voice,
but saw not their forms. And they took me down lower many steps, which
I could not measure. And I there saw old men, and fiery pivots turning
in their ears. And I said: Who are these? and what is their sin? And
they said to me: These are they who would not listen.(13) And they
took me down again other five hundred steps, and I there saw the worm
that sleeps not, and fire burning up the sinners. And they took me
down to the lowest part of destruction, and I saw there the twelve
plagues of the abyss. And they took me away to the south, and I saw
there a man hanging by the eyelids; and the angels kept scourging him.
And I asked: Who is this? and what is his sin? And Michael the
commander said to me: This is one who lay with his mother; for having
put into practice a small wish, he has been ordered to be hanged. And
they took me away to the north, and I saw there a man bound with iron
chains. And I asked: Who is this? And he said to me: This is he who
said, I am the Son of God, that made stones bread, and water wine. And
the prophet said: My lord, let me know what is his form, and I shall
tell the race of men, that they may not believe in him. And he said to
me: The form of his countenance is like that of a wild beast; his
right eye like the star that rises in the morning, and the other
without motion; his mouth one cubit; his teeth span long; his fingers
like scythes; the track of his feet of two spans; and in his face an
inscription, Antichrist. He has been exalted to heaven; he shall go
down to Hades.(1) At one time he shall become a child; at another, an
old man. And the prophet said: Lord, and how dost Thou permit him, and
he deceives the race of men? And God said: Listen, my prophet. He
becomes both child and old man, and no one believes him that he is my
beloved Son. And after this a trumpet, and the tombs shall be opened,
and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.(2) Then the adversary,
hearing the dreadful threatening, shall be hidden in outer darkness.
Then the heaven, and the earth, and the sea shall be destroyed. Then
shall I burn the heaven eighty cubits, and the earth eight hundred
cubits. And the prophet said: And how has the heaven sinned? And God
said: Since(3) ... there is evil. And the prophet said: Lord, and the
earth, how has it sinned? And God said: Since the adversary, having
heard the dreadful threatening, shall be hidden, even on account of
this will I melt the earth, and with it the opponent of the race of
men. And the prophet said: Have mercy, Lord, upon the race of the
Christians. And I saw a woman hanging, and four wild beasts sucking
her breasts. And the angels said to me: She grudged to give her milk,
but even threw her infants into the rivers. And I saw a dreadful
darkness, and a night that had no stars nor moon; nor is there there
young or old, nor brother with brother, nor mother with child, nor
wife with husband. And I wept, and said: O Lord God, have mercy upon
the sinners. And as I said this, there came a cloud and snatched me
up, and carried me away again into the heavens. And I saw there many
judgments; and I wept bitterly, and said: It is good for a man not to
have come out of his mother's womb. And those who were in torment
cried out, saying: Since thou hast come hither, O holy one of God, we
have found a little remission. And the prophet said: Blessed are they
that weep for their sins. And God said: Hear, O beloved Esdras. As a
husbandman casts the seed of the corn into the ground, so also the man
casts his seed into the parts of the woman. The first month it is all
together; the second it increases in size; the third it gets hair; the
fourth it gets nails; the fifth it is turned into milk;(4) and the
sixth it is made ready, and receives life;(5) the seventh it is
completely furnished; the ninth the barriers of the gate of the woman
are opened; and it is born safe and sound into the earth. And the
prophet said: Lord, it is good for man not to have been born. Woe to
the human race then, when Thou shall come to judgment! And I said to
the Lord: Lord, why hast Thou created man, and delivered him up to
judgment? And God said, with a lofty proclamation: I will not by any
means have mercy on those who transgress my covenant. And the prophet
said Lord, where is Thy goodness? And God said: I have prepared all
things for man's sake, and man does not keep my commandments. And the
prophet said: Lord, reveal to me the judgments and paradise. And the
angels took me away towards the east, and I saw the tree of life. And
I saw there Enoch, and Elias, and Moses, and Peter, and Paul, and
Luke, and Matthias, and all the righteous, and the patriarchs. And I
saw there the keeping of the air within bounds, and the blowing of the
winds, and the storehouses of the ice, and the eternal judgments. And
I saw there a man hanging by the skull. And they said to me: This man
removed landmarks. And I saw there great judgments.(6) And I said to
the Lord: O Lord God, and what man, then, who has been born has not
sinned? And they took me lower down into Tartarus, and I saw all the
sinners lamenting and weeping and mourning bitterly. And I also wept,
seeing the race of men thus tormented. Then God says to me: Knowest
thou, Esdras, the names of the angels at the end of the world?
Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Gabuthelon, Aker, Arphugitonos,
Beburos, Zebuleon. Then there came a voice to me: Come hither and die,
Esdras, my beloved; give that which hath been entrusted to thee.(7)
And the prophet said: And whence can you bring forth my soul? And the
angels said: We can put it forth through the mouth. And the prophet
said: Mouth to mouth have I spoken with God,(8) and it comes not forth
thence. And the angels said: Let us bring it out through thy nostrils.
And the prophet said: My nostrils have smelled the sweet savour of the
glory of God. And the angels said: We can bring it out through thine
eyes. And the prophet said: Mine eyes have seen the back parts of
God.(9) And the angels said: We can bring it out through the crown of
thy head.

And the prophet said: I walked about with Moses also on the mountain,
and it comes not forth thence. And the angels said: We can put it
forth through the points of thy nails. And the prophet said: My feet
also have walked about on the altar. And the angels went away without
having done anything, saying: Lord, we cannot get his soul. Then He
says to His only begotten Son: Go down, my beloved Son, with a great
host of angels, and take the soul of my beloved Esdras. For the Lord,
having taken a great host of angels, says to the prophet: Give me the
trust which I entrusted to thee; the crown has been prepared for
thee.(1) And the prophet said: Lord, if Thou take my soul from me, who
will be left to plead with Thee for the race of men And God said: As
thou art mortal, and of the earth, do not plead with me. And the
prophet said: I will not cease to plead. And God said: Give up just
now the trust; the crown has been prepared for thee. Come and die,
that thou mayst obtain it. Then the prophet began to say with tears: O
Lord, what good have I done pleading with Thee, and I am going to fall
down into the earth? Woe's me, woe's me, that I am going to be eaten
up by worms! Weep, all ye saints and ye righteous, for me, who have
pleaded much, and who am delivered up to death. Weep for me, all ye
saints and ye righteous, because I have gone to the pit of Hades. And
God said to him: Hear, Esdras, my beloved. I, who am immortal, endured
a cross; I tasted vinegar and gall; I was laid in a tomb, and I raised
up my chosen ones; I called Adam up out of Hades, that I might save(2)
the race of men. Do not therefore be afraid of death: for that which
is from me--that is to say, the soul--goes to heaven; and that which
is from the earth--that is to say, the body--goes to the earth, from
which it was taken.(3) And the prophet said: Woe's me! woe's me! what
shall I set about? what shall I do? I know not. And then the blessed
Esdras began to say: O eternal God, the Maker of the whole creation,
who hast measured the heaven with a span, and who holdest the earth as
a handful,(4) who ridest upon the cherubim, who didst take the prophet
Elias to the heavens in a chariot of fire,(5) who givest food to all
flesh, whom all things dread and tremble at from the face of Thy
power,--listen to me, who have pleaded much, and give to all who
transcribe this book, and have it, and remember my name, and honour my
memory, give them a blessing from heaven; and bless him(6) in all
things, as Thou didst bless Joseph at last, and remember not his
former wickedness in the day of his judgment. And as many as have not
believed this book shall be burnt up like Sodom and Gomorrah. And
there came to him a voice, saying: Esdras, my beloved, all things
whatever thou hast asked will I give to each one. And immediately he
gave up his precious soul with much honour, in the month of October,
on the twenty-eighth. And they prepared him for burial with incense
and psalms; and his precious and sacred body dispenses strength of
soul and body perpetually to those who have recourse to him from a
longing desire. To whom is due glory, strength, honour, and
adoration,--to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now
and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.

For a footnoted version: http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-106.htm

2009-06-26T11:59:00.001-07:00

THE REPTILIAN-HUMAN CONNECTION
By: John Rhodes81994

INTRODUCTION

My name is John Rhodes and I am a researcher, explorer and lecturer in
the realms of ufology, occulted archaeology and metaphysics. In this
report, I will be providing you with compelling evidence, gathered
over many years of research, as to our genealogical connections with
the overlord reptilian alien race and the occulted historical
archaeology that clearly demonstrates that these reptilian beings have
coexisted on this planet Earth with us for thousands of years prior to
our current era.

The reason that I place an emphasis on archaeology and metaphysics is
because, in my opinion, they are the key elements to unlocking the
secrets of the UFO phenomenon that surrounds us all in these trying
times of ours. The result of the research that I am about to provide
to you is not compiled by myself alone. These theories those of
individuals, like myself, that have endured immense difficulties and
danger in order to unveil that which has been hidden from the public
for many, many years. These individuals remain unknown at present due
to reasons of survival, however, it is not only our duty, but it is
time to unveil this information for all to hear, see and contemplate
upon, for we are about to shift our shared reality.

Today, we are all witnessing a simultaneous deterioration of
geopolitical and geological stability, increase of UFO abduction
related phenomenon and a rapidly changing climatological environment.
The psychological pressure associated with these shifts in reality is
compounded by the fact that many believe that we are experiencing the
unfolding of prophecies handed down to us by generations passed.

We have all been told through the prophecies of many religions and
cultures around the world that our generation will witness the
unveiling or the "revelation" of the true reality in which we live.
Our species is struggling with impeding global disaster brought upon
us by natural and man made causes, thus we find ourselves desperately
reaching into the shadows for answers. I believe that this is no more
evident than in our interest in "New Age."

The information that "New Age" is founded upon is not new at all. Long
ago, secret societies made every effort to remove the truly powerful
esoteric knowledge from public libraries so they could drunkenly abuse
and use it to dominate Earth's inhabitants. Many of the sacred
mysteries that enable one to attain their true source of inner power
have existed here in on the American continent for thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands, of years. UFOs, alien beings, cosmic cycles,
atomic manifestation and other "mysterious phenomenon" still survive
within the legend, myth and lore of the red race of beings known as
the American Indian.

By studying these stories and those of other ancient civilizations, we
can translate the truth into modern day linguistics and expand our
view of the reality in which we belong. Archaic wisdom transforms our
spiritual link with corporeal matter. The words may change and the
cryptic way in which brotherhoods have passed down secrets may have
become more difficult to decipher, but "the truth is out there" for us
to discover . . . if you want it.

I do not question whether or not aliens or their craft are here on our
planet. After all, historical documentation, video tapes, abduction
cases, leaked government information and numerous other data confirm
their existence. The most important question, in my opinion, happens
to be "Who are the main players?" and "How do we fit into the 'big' plan?"

Throughout the history of extraterrestrial contact, many different
types of alien beings have reportedly stated that they are not able to
interfere to any great extent with human beings or their affairs. If
this is true, then why are we receiving an increasingly larger number
of abduction and contactee reports that repeatedly describe two types
of intelligent life forms, those of the Grey and Reptilian aliens? Why
do they have exclusive rights to interfere with our species when other
alien beings do not?

If interaction between these beings and our own species has been
occurring throughout history, as legend and myth would have us
believe, then where is the supporting evidence as to their existence.
Where are they from and why are they so interested in us? Before we
proceed further, lets answer the questions as to who these beings are
and where the historical connections are that reveal their presence.

COLD BLOOD IN ANCIENT SUMERIA

According to the ancient writings and petroglyphs of the area of our
Earth considered to be the cradle of humanity, namely Mesopotamia or
Iraq, there existed a god like race of beings that ruled over a region
of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley known as Sumeria. This society
apparently flourished around 3500 B.C. and was remarkably advanced in
their culture. According to their sand pitted records, their rulers or
"gods" were humanoid creatures of extraterrestrial origin that
descended in magical crafts, or rocket like ships. Their image was
cast into history in the form of reptilian-humanoid statuettes that
over fired to a green hue color.

The surviving clay tablets from this area of the world declare that
before Homosapiens walked upon the Earth, these "gods" did much of
their own manual labor. In order to achieve a higher standard of
living, this nonhuman society genetically created a new form of life
by mixing their own DNA with that of the evolutionary mammalian man or
"Ape-Man." The successful results of this experiment yielded a new
breed of worker class known as Homosapiens.

In the beginning, apparently, these god-like race of beings immensely
enjoyed the benefit of having their slaves endure the hardships of
manual labor. Excavation, farming, building and mining operations were
the toil of this new born race. This labor, however, was not provided
willingly. It was forced through the use of severe and ruthless
governorship.

These, not so bright, beings suffered greatly under the firm rule of
their strange looking gods and their misery did not go unnoticed by a
few of the nonhuman masters. According to the Sumerian tablets, inside
the god society, a conspiracy was brewing to free Homo sapiens from
their bonds of slavery and teach them the spiritual and scientific
knowledge necessary to uplift their essence to a god-like stature.
Apparently, the name of this rebellious reptilian being leader was
Enlil or Ea.

EA EXPERIMENTS IN HIS DEN

The Sumerian tablets tell us that the rebel God called Ea was the
extraterrestrial being that controlled the genetic creation of
Homosapiens in abeyance to the instructions of his superiors. After
his involvement with the original genetic experiment, his compassion
for the plight of the slave race shifted his role as a genetic
engineer to that of a freedom fighter. It is also related that Ea's
headquarters was in a swamp like area he called "Snake Marsh" because
it was also a den to many reptiles or snakes. In other words, the
first fight for freedom took place in an area known as Ea-Den.

It's an interesting point that, according to Biblical text, a snake or
"reptilian" not only seduced Eve, the first female caretaker of the
garden, away from the arms of Adam, but also gave them knowledge in a
beautiful garden called E-DEN. We are also told that this was done
against the wishes of his superior and, as punishment for this
treasonous act, the progressive reptilian and his cohorts were ordered
to remain underground, within the vast cavern systems of the earth.
Along with this punishment, it was ruled that the reptilian was to
never interfere with humans again and that their generations will not
only not know of each other, but will learn to hate each other. This
last declaration was initiated by changing the name of the reptilian
being from "Lucifer" which literally means the bringer of light or
knowledge to "Satan" or adversary. The Sumerian texts also relate a
somewhat similar fate for the reptilian being called Ea.

The teachings of the reptilian Ea, thereafter referred to as the
esoteric mysticism of the snake brotherhood, caused a major shift in
the perceptions of reality for the early Homosapiens. It is in the
assorted descriptions of this turning point in human evolution that we
get our first glimpse as to what these advanced beings actually looked
like in comparison to our own physical characteristics.

THE REBELLIOUS TEACHER

For the sake of mental focus, the following example is taken primarily
from the Christian Bibles Book of Genesis. It's deeply rooted
symbolism is thought, by some people, to be a compilation of occulted
Genesis legend or physical beginnings from all spiritual beings around
the world. This is important to remember because one must be aware of
the fact that I am in no way attempting to push anyone religion in
this presentation. The historical description of reptilian beings
having had a monumental influence on human evolution can be seen in
the multi cultural symbolism and myth surrounding the tree of knowledge.

The symbolical tree of knowledge, the Palm tree in Ea-Den, is depicted
as having a trunk around which a half-man, half-snake being is
entwined. It is from this tree that the rebellious reptilian taught
the human, Eve. As the information was absorbed by Eve and hence
passed onto Adam, their perceptions of awareness and reality quickly
shifted, rendering the two in a severe state of shock and fear (thus,
it is said that a person who is totally unaware of the reality in
which they live, resides in an "Edenic state"). The legend explains
that, soon thereafter, they both ran from the voice of God, not
because they had their first sexual relationship with each other or
that they were shy of their nakedness, it was because they were
suddenly aware that there was a profound physical difference between
the Gods and themselves. The reptilians had scales covering their
bodies as a form of protection from the elements and the Homosapiens
suddenly realized that they didn't. Until this time, the Homo sapiens
had no conception that they were in any way physically different from
their reptilian counterparts. They had finally leapt from their
childlike ignorance of their situation into to the realization that
they were intended, by design, to be tillers of the field and slaves
to the other reptilian overlords.

Years later other messengers also arrived upon the scene and, once
again, attempting to free mankind from the bondage of slavery by
teaching spiritual and magical knowledge. They also were punished
severely by the rulers of the population. One difference was, however,
that instead of being labeled "Satans" or adversaries, one was named
Quetzalcoatl or "Feathered Snake" and the other the Savior Yashua, or
Christ.

The symbolism of the tree of knowledge is not limited to the
Christians, but it is also represented by the Banyan tree from under
whose branches the East Indian God Krishna sat upon a coiled serpent
and bestowed upon man spiritual knowledge. Another reptilian God whose
death upon a crucifix was etched into stone was that of Quetzalcoatl,
the winged serpent god of the great Toltec and Aztec civilization. The
wooden crucifix upon which those that endowed knowledge upon mankind
are crucified represents, not only the sigil of the supreme God called
the Tau or ankh, but the crucifix also represents the trunk and
branches of the tree of knowledge. For their teachings, they were killed.

The remarkable fact is that throughout all ancient and modern
civilizations, the serpent or dragon bestowing knowledge upon the
human race figures prominently in all religions and histories. The
Christian reptilian or "fallen angel" LUCIFER, the Mayan serpent God
QUETZALCOATL, the enormous plumed serpent God of the Hopi Indians,
BAHOLINKONGA, the East Indian mystical human like reptilians known as
NAGAS, the Egyptian serpent God KNEPH, The Phoenicians AGATHODEMON and
even the Hebrews NAKHUSHTAN or Brazen Serpent that led Moses and the
Israelites through the desert by pillar of cloud and fire. These are
but a few of the vast amount of records that exist world wide and
describe their early gods as having reptilian-human like physical
features as well as having descended from the heavens or stars.

From within the shadows and crevices of the earth their influence upon
all mankind can be no more evident than when one considers the ancient
British god who was considered "The Dragon-Ruler of the World." His
subjects called him HU - thus we call ourselves Hu-Man!

REPTILIANS PRESENT - NO ARTISTS/PHOTOGRAPHERS ALLOWED!

One might ask that if these reptilians once openly roamed the Earth
with Homosapiens, why aren't there any pieces of art that clearly
depict them as bipedal snake gods? The answer to that may lay within
one common religious law that most of these ancient cultures still
adhere to, either by their own ignorance of the reptilians physical
appearance or out of pure obedience, and that is the law that one is
forbidden to make idols or drawings of anything that is in heaven.

The Hopi Indians to this day refuse to recreate the images of their
reptilian ancestors because they fear an instant death.

The closest imagery that was ever allowed to remain was cryptically
tucked away in the Hebrew or Christian works of the Books of Genesis
and the Exodus.

As we have already gone over the symbolism of the reptilian in the
cradle of humanity or Garden of Eden, it can only be said that we must
remember that Lucifer was considered an angel who fell from the
heavens. Yet we are told at the same time that he was a snake. And
although Moses declared that his God said not to make idols or images
to false Gods, he placed a snake upon his staff and proclaimed to his
people that he who looks upon this image will be healed. This is the
origination of the physicians' caduceus. Could it be that late one
evening, during a solitary walk outside the Israelite's encampment,
Moses had an encounter with one of these reptilian beings that were
flying this pillar of smoke and fire? Could this have been the reason
he considered this snake upon his staff a real image of God and not a
false one? It makes one wonder.

Obviously, if these snake people or reptilians really did once openly
live amongst the Homosapien population, they have gone to extreme
extent not to be revealed since they went into hiding.

Could it be that part of the great Biblical Revelation prophecy is the
unveiling of the reptilian presence on Earth?

THEY WHO HIDE TRUTH

We are now aware that numerous societies record, as the Sumerians did,
that the reptilian half-man, half-snake empowered Hu-mans with the
knowledge necessary to be free from the grips of their slave masters.
But, what happened to the spiritually powerful knowledge that was
given to us "gardeners of the planet" by the original reptilian Ea as
his cohorts? After all, his plans were to free us from slavery, right?
Well, some would say that we are still enslaved within a carefully
constructed illusion. I would tend to agree. So, what happened? What
has kept us from reaching our fullest potential?

Many of the individuals, in the course of written history, who have
given the masses powerful information, whether it's political or
spiritual, have had either their credibility destroyed or their bodies
destroyed. Most of the times it's both. If the information has taken
root before it can be erased, then history has demonstrated that newly
founded "insurgence" groups or movements are quickly infiltrated by
the opposition and allowed to flourish under the guidance of their own
secret shadows. This is not only a premise by which groups struggle
for control in affairs of war, secret societies and politics, but also
the struggle of balance of power in religion. The mystical knowledge
given to man by the snake brotherhood suffered under this same
manipulation. For thousands of years, the high priests of religion
encrypted the mystical knowledge that was passed onto the humans by
the reptilian race and used that knowledge to control, manipulate and
spiritually enslave those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Reptilian beings displayed both benevolent and evil characteristics at
different times in history. They have taught peace, love,
spirituality, healing and knowledge of the sciences and, as the
Delaware Indians describe in their ancestral mythology, they have
rained down destruction upon the Earth in the name of God. This is why
various cultures recognize the reptilian image as effigies of the
balance of nature. In other words . . . Good-Evil, Negative-Positive.
It is, perhaps, not to far out to imagine that on some other planet or
in some other dimension, the human figure might also symbolize both
aspects of good and evil, positive and negative.

The symbolism and resemblances of each of these god-like beings from
around the world is too similar to have been simple imaginary
god-forms from totally unconnected parts of the planet. There had to
be a more influential factor at work in ancient times, but what could
it have been?

There are three explanations which could answer this puzzling
question. One, primitive cave dwelling settlements around the world
were naturally drawn to the reptilian image because they had somehow
retained a genetic memory of their reptilian heritage. Two, highly
advanced spiritual beings that had reptilian physical characteristics
assimilated themselves into various social structures in order to
influence the trend of spiritual progression. Three, all of the
ancient civilizations sensed their genetic connections to the reptile
AND reptilian beings influenced their spiritual evolution throughout
history. I believe, that both influences were at work and I will
expand on and prove my theory in just a few moments.

It is in this researcher's opinion that these records, when carefully
and open mindedly studied, reflect a historical foundation upon which
all modern day extraterrestrial contacts or abductions can be based.
We have evolved as a species and our progression has been carefully
monitored by the elusive reptilian race that live within the cavernous
Earth itself.

If it is true that we are genetically descended from a mixture of ape
man and a bipedal, intelligent reptilian species, then what evidence,
other than legends and historical documentation supports our theory?
Where lays the personal connection, the physical proof? To answer
these questions, it is important to address a little known fact
regarding the formation of the human embryo in the womb.

THE PHYSICAL CONNECTION

During the formative stages of intrauterine development, the fetus
undergoes several different phases of genetically encoded evolution.
Deep within the information pool of the gene, instructions are given
to the forming cells to repeat the major evolutionary steps that link
us to the non primate mammals, reptiles and fish before we finally
reach the recognizable form of the human being. At one point, our
primordial genetic information even creates gills for the embryo.
These, of course, disappear as development continues. In the fourth
week, the human embryo is remarkably similar to the embryos of birds,
pigs and sheep and remains that way until the eighth week, then it
takes on dissimilar physical characteristics.

In some cases of evolutionary throwback, as according to the Oxford
Monographs on Medical Genetics no. 27, the genetic chain of command
sometimes forgets to continue onwards in their evolutionary
reenactment, leaving some babies with actual tails. These "caudal
appendages," as they are called, form at the lower lumbar area and are
generally hairless. Although most of these cases are immediately
attended to by surgeons in order to protect the families from adverse
ridicule, in some third worlds countries where surgery is unavailable,
the children quickly adapt to their tails and live out normal lives.
It is interesting to note that in some of these cases the tail wags
during moments of excitation.

Now that we have covered the fact that passing glimpses into our
evolutionary heritage can be witnessed during the formation of our
fetuses, we can proceed to discover which part of this re enactment
was so pronounced that it permanently formed within us and provided
our strongest primordial link.

One late evening I happened to be watching a television interview with
Carl Sagan in which the audience members were asking him questions.
When asked what he thought of the crop circle phenomenon, He replied,
and I'll paraphrase here, "Don't you know that it has been proven that
all of these, so-called crop circles, are hoaxes created by two
gentlemen in England. They've admitted it." He went on to say that the
media loves a UFO angle and that they purposely ignore the confessions
of two older gentlemen in order to sensationalize. When I heard this,
I thought that there's no way that a man as intelligent as he claims
to be could be so blatantly ignorant, that is unless he is the mouth
piece of the federal government. If that was the case, then it is only
human nature to wonder what's in it for him.

It is in my opinion that the information about our genetic heritage
and relationship with the reptilian alien beings that live on our
planet was shared with Mr. Sagan as a gift for his expected continued
secrecy and servitude to certain authorities within the federal
government. Accompanying this "gift" of truth, I believe, was a
promise of increased fame and fortune in return for his performing the
duties of disinformation in regards to the flying saucer phenomenon
this is why he has continually ridiculed anything that even hints of
extraterrestrial contact. As long as he plays "their" game of
information management, he will be allowed to release certain
information in a very unobtrusive and cryptic fashion. All this, of
course, was done under the watchful eyes of his superiors. Evidence of
a portion of this "leak" is written within the pages of his book The
Dragons of Eden in which "speculates" upon the evolution of human
intelligence.

In Mr. Sagan's aptly named book The Dragons of Eden, it is emphasized
that in our search for the evolution of human intelligence, it is
extremely important that we do not ignore the most ancient part of the
human brain upon which all other segments are but additions. According
to the neuroanatomist Paul MacLean, that ancient area of the "triune"
brain, is driven by another prehistoric region that some
neuroanatomist call the R-Complex or the Reptilian-Complex. It is
called the R-Complex because we share this particular structure of the
brain with reptiles.

Mr. Sagan carefully points out the fact that the human brain develops
from the inside out, building itself atop the brain stem and in order
of evolutionary sequence. First, the neural chassis, which regulates
the heart, blood and respiration, is grown. After this has occurred,
the R-complex, the area of the brain that is thought to house the most
primordial intelligence, is developed. The limbic system and neocortex
are later additions to this central core.

MacLean also states that the R-complex plays an important role in the
aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritualism and establishment of
social hierarchies. (which, by the way, are behavioral and social
qualities that are frequently expressed by reptilian beings during
abductions and contacts) Much or our own behavior as human beings is
ruled by this archaic region of the brain, and as Mr. Sagan himself so
eloquently phrases it . . .

"It does no good whatsoever to ignore the reptilian component of human
nature, particularly our ritualistic and hierarchical behavior. On the
contrary, the model may help us understand what human beings are all
about."

Throughout The Dragons of Eden, one can find other subtle hints as to
his true knowledge of our genetic connection with the reptilian beings
that have played an important role in our species existence. He
mentions how much of our behavior is even expressed in reptilian
terms, such as "cold blooded" killer and that the common human sounds
commanding silence or attracting attention being that of hissing
snakes. These and other clues pervade his book right down to the M.C.
Escher illustration of two reptilian iguanas floating in a
three-dimensional Star of David in space.

Along with the fact that the pheromone of women and female iguanas are
a chemical match(Omni, May 94), here lie the reasons why the reptilian
beings are so interested in our genetic evolution. We are more
physically and mentally connected to reptiles than previously
understood, so their interest in us is justified when one realizes
that we may be, as myth and legends have related, actual reptilian
genetic offspring. This connection may now allow one to understand why
the abductions and clinical experimentation on humans beings are being
carried out by the elusive reptilian race. It may also be because some
things never change, even since the days of Eden.

I cannot, however, complete this discussion about Carl Sagan without
quoting a passage from his book for it truly brings forth that which
Mr. Sagan has tried to hide between the lines.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

"You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the
laws of their own nature . . . Do not go about . . . encouraging
triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a
triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable
end."

(By the way, I find it somewhat bewildering that someone who
understands the reptilian part of the brain so well is named Sagan,
because his name spelled backwards is that of the mystical east Indian
reptilian Gods, the-NAGAS!)

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

As reported in the beginning of this discussion, reptilians have
coexisted on this planet with us since history began. And, as eluded
to in Genesis, divisions of these reptilians remained behind in the
cavernous regions of the Earth whilst the creators ventured outward
across the face of the deep waters or space.

Legends from different parts of the globe all tell of underworld
inhabited by mystical beings of varied forms. I believe that the
reptilian races, consisting of both benevolent and evil beings, still
reside to this day underground, hidden away in the dark crevices of
the Earth and in the depths of the oceans. The evidence supporting
this proclamation is also available through recent reports and
historical documentation.

First, and most important, is our understanding that our own United
States government has duped us to believe that the wonders of the
universe lie beyond our reach. That our progress to understanding who
and what we are as intelligent, life forms rest solely on the efforts
of the inept workings of NASA, JPL and a myriad of other money sucking
aerospace corporations. Almost fifty years of continued rat
experiments outside the envelope of our planet and we are to believe
that this is the ultimate pace of human exploration! This is
absolutely not the case. Publicly viewed space exploration is nothing
more that a magic show and, as most people realize, when the magician
says to look at his right hand, his left is doing all the work. Such
is the case with exploration. If you really want to get to see the big
show, don't look above your head, look below your feet.

Investigation into the interior of the Earth began with map surveyors
and explorers venturing out into unknown territory in order to chart
the wilderness. Once in a while, they'd come across a cave or cavern
and then descend into its depths to hopefully find treasures or
artifacts. Once these hollowed out recesses of the Earth along the
coastlines were discovered, their location was kept secret and certain
groups of individuals purchased the properties. They used, and still
use, their subterranean chambers for illegal activities, social
gatherings or modes of concealed travel for reasons of their own. Some
say that Washington, D.C. was purposely established above a huge
catacomb, so certain Freemasonic fraternities and the like could
utilize their hidden corridors while governing the nation. I believe
that may have been the case.

Large oil interests modernized seismic technology and geological
exploration with an ever increasing pace. Due to this wave of
subsurface exploration, more and more artifacts were discovered that
defied mainstream historical and explanation. As these artifacts were
collected by USGS and Smithsonian Institution employees, they were
concealed from the public, carefully studied by unknown entities
within and outside of the Federal administration and then mysteriously
lost.

As years wore on, more and more mystifying archaeological discoveries
were made. Those who studied these artifacts were well aware of the
fact that things were not as they appeared to be, so it must have been
of little surprise to these scientists and archaeologists when Kenneth
Arnold spotted his first UFO or flying

DINO-Saucer vehicle while flying his private airplane over Washington
state June 24th, 1947.

It was also around this time that our government began to build a vast
web bunker systems connected by tube shuttles. After all, they were
now dealing with a highly advanced species that could wipe out a
surface structure with no problem as well as a cold war threat with
the former Soviet Union. Ensuring governmental survival was a
priority. It was also around this time in history that underground
nuclear testing was being performed for military and peaceful
purposes. One such series of tests was called project Plowshare.

DULCE BASE - ALTERNATE PERCEPTIONS

In the early 1960s, a subterranean nuclear blast occurred about 30
miles southwest of Dulce, New Mexico right off U.S. 64. This nuclear
blast was conducted under the umbrella project Plowshare, and was
named project Gassbuggy. It has recently been alleged that this
particular subsurface nuclear blast was used to create a hollowed out
chute or chimney for development of a substation for a super secret
tunnel system attached to an underground black book project base known
as Dulce Base.

According to Thomas Edwin Castello, a former Dulce Base security
officer, this particular underworld city is a highly secret base
operated by humans as well as reptilian aliens and their worker cast,
the commonly encountered greys. It is here, apparently, that a
multitude of experimentation projects are carried out. The projects
are, apparently, primarily genetic in nature and are carried out
either men, women or children that have been declared missing by
authorities. There is a myriad of other specialty science projects
taking place at Dulce base including, but not limited to, Atomic
manipulation, cloning, studies of the human aura, advanced mind
control applications, animal/human crossbreeding, visual and audio
wiretapping, the list goes on.

If it was true that this base existed long before human occupation,
then it construction and layout may possibly tell us something about
its original occupants, the reptilians. We know this because the
sacred teachings of ancient metaphysics relate that imagery created by
ritualistic and intelligent beings often contain information occulted
in symbolism.

The Dulce base floor plan was illustrated, as per the originals by
Thomas Castello, and released in 1994. When inspected carefully, it's
layout appears to be extremely well planned.

From a vertical viewpoint, it resembles a wheel with a central hub and
corridors radiating outwards like spokes. This "hub" is the focal
point of the entire base. It is surrounded by central security and
extends through all levels of the base. I believe this core to be the
Achilles heel of the entire facility. It probably contains fiber optic
communications and power lines. This would justify its highly guarded
and central location as well as explain its vertical continuation
through all levels. With all communication lines and power lines
focused towards the hub, it is possible that any level could be
completely "locked down" by its own security or the security hubs from
either above or below its own level. This would provide maximum
control over the entire facility.

The "spokes" or corridors radiating away from the central hub, lead to
numerous other labs in five different directions. Connect the spokes
and a pentagon is revealed in its design. From above, this base
resembles the layout of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Complete with
halls, walls and military insignias! Since we do not have the exact
heading of its corridors, magnetic alignments are impossible to determine.

When viewed laterally, its appearance takes on the look of a tree with
a trunk at its center and its floors extending outwards like the
branches. If this is a facility of science, then one could easily say
that its lateral appearance is like that of the tree of knowledge. Was
this purposely designed this way or does it just happen to be a
coincidence?

The overall design of this facility reminds one of a multi stacked
subterranean Hopi Indian kiva. Although I believe that it's somewhat
of a disservice to the Hopi to even be spoken of in association with a
cave of horrors like the Dulce Base, its similarity in design should
not be forgotten.

As cultures around the world tend to bring their own styles of
architecture with them during periods of migration, so perhaps did the
advanced civilization that original built Dulce Base. And, if the
reptilian influence over man is as great as archaic documentation and
myth would have one believe, then there have to be other subterranean
dwellings similar to this in other locations.

If we locate another subsurface habitation similar in appearance to
the Dulce base and linked it to a reptilian or snake legend, we will
have obtained supporting evidence as to the reality of the Dulce
facility and our reptilian overlords. In my personal quest to
investigate and discover these connections, my journey led took me to
the mystical land of the North American Indians. The Four Corners of
the world.

HOPI - THE REPTILIAN EXAMPLE OF SPIRITUALITY?

In the southwestern region of the United States, specifically the four
corners area of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, one can find
remnants of the most ancient of all American Indian cultures. The Hopi
Indian tribe.

The Hopi live out their fairly non progressive and ritualistic lives
atop mesas on a reservation located in the north eastern portion of
Arizona. They originated from the eastern part of the Grand Canyon and
slowly migrated eastward to where they reside today. Surrounded by the
progressive and formerly nomadic Navaho nation, they await the
forthcoming Great Purification or, as many people call it, the day of
Revelation.

The religion and myth of the Hopi Indian are based upon the worship of
the snake. Their legend of Genesis also recounts how reptilians or
snake people played an important part in their ancestry.

Today, the ancestors of the Hopi tribes are referred to as their Snake
brothers or El-der brothers and their reverence towards their
reptilian ancestors is evident throughout all ceremonies of the Hopi
Indians. When their most sacred of all underground kiva rituals are
performed, that of the Snake dance, rattlesnakes are present to hear
their prayers. These snakes are then later released into the
wilderness so as they can return to the gods of the Underworld with
the tribes prayers.

According to Hopi myth, they used to live in a great subterranean
underworld alongside a race of beings called the Ant people. These Ant
people, which might by today's standards be considered grey aliens,
helped feed and clothe the Hopi during their lives in the Underworld.
One day, under the direction of their matriarchal Goddess Spider
woman, they ascended to the surface by way of a hollowed bamboo shoot
which sprung forth through an opening in the ceiling of their cave
called the Sipapuni.

They say that soon after their arrival on the surface, a mocking bird
came along and confused the language of the Hopi, the results of which
encouraged them to break up into small clans of different languages.
This is remarkably similar to the story of the Tower of Babel. One day
soon there after, an exceedingly bright star, or star-ship, appeared
above them in the sky. Believing it was a God, they followed it during
it's journey across the sky. They did so until it stopped in one
place. When it stopped, some of the Hopi remained and settled. When
the star later appeared, the other Hopi followed it until it stopped
once again. This continued until all the Hopi were settled. This is
the Hopi description of the original planting of their race.

The myths of the Hopi Genesis would be considered, as others, based
upon fantasy and imagination if it wasn't for one, solitary discovery
that was made by a man traveling down the Colorado river aboard a
skiff in the Grand Canyon almost ninety-five years ago. That mans name
was Kincaid and his discovery was that of the Hopi Indian underworld
or the Sipapuni.

THE GREATEST STORY EVER ATTEMPTED TO BE TOLD

On March 12th, 1909, a small article appeared in the Arizona Gazette
newspaper announcing the arrival in of a man by the name of G.E.
Kincaid, who had just completed a Colorado river rafting trip from
Green River, Wyoming. He stated that he enjoyed his trip and planned
on returning the following winter for another run at the Colorado
River. He also mentioned his discovery of some "interesting artifacts"
which he was mailing to the Smithsonian Institution.

Three weeks, three days later on April 5th, 1909, a front page article
appeared in the Arizona Gazette (article attached to this report) in
which Kincaid is interviewed in detail about his archaeological find.
This discovery of Kincaids, as notably remarked in the article, was to
be considered the most significant archaeological find in the world
throughout all history.

As the article is quite long and detailed, I will only briefly repeat
the most important facts concerning this discovery that will help us
throw light upon our search.

Mr. Kincaid had apparently discovered a massive underground city that
was cut into a wall of the Grand Canyon with the precision equaled
only to that of the Great Pyramid. The highly advanced civilization
that inhabited this subterranean city was of unknown origin, although
several different artifacts were found, such as a Buddha, mummies and
hieroglyphics, that were of Oriental, Egyptian and central American
origin.

As the Smithsonian Institution archaeological team, spearheaded by a
professor S.A. Jordan, continued their treks into the depths of this
city, they discovered hundreds of rooms. Some rooms were as small as
an average living room and others as large as several hundred feet in
length and breadth. It was estimated that the area explored so far by
the team could have comfortably housed fifty thousand people!

The location of this discovery was veiled in secrecy because, as Mr.
Kincaid put it "They don't want to be disturbed." His only clues were
that is was about 42 miles north of the Crystal creek. After the
completion of his interview and the printing of this story the next
day in the Arizona Gazette newspaper, not a single thing was ever
mentioned about it again publicly until the original article
resurfaced once again three years ago. So spin the wheels of secrecy
and conspiracy.

THE DULCE-SIPAPUNI-REPTILIAN CONNECTION

Upon reviewing the article in detail, I was able to discern Three
immensely important clues as to whom the occupants and their rulers
may have been. The first clue has to do with the Sipapuni's builders
or stone masons.

If there is an underground city in the Grand Canyon that is large
enough to house fifty thousand people, as Kincaid would have us
believe, then the engineering skills needed to construct such a
underworld would have rivaled those used to create the Great Pyramid
of Gizeh and the other highly engineered stone fortresses and temple
platforms that are scattered across the Earth. Except for Kincaids
remarks as to the antiquity of this underground citadel, he said that
it appears to have been built many years previous to the Christian
era. Could it have been built in the same era as was the Great
Pyramid? Could it have been created by the same hands that built the
other anomalous structures around the world?

These questions become even more intriguing when one realizes another
absolutely fantastic "coincidence." It has been seriously speculated
by many well-known researchers and archaeologists that the original
great Pyramid may have been built under the direction of the Sumerian
reptilian gods and by the labor of the first Mediterranean and world
travelers called the Phoenicians. Is it just another coincidence that
not far from this area of Arizona lies the great city if Phoenix and
that the inhabitants refer to themselves as Phoenicians? Was this some
strange coincidence or is it an occulted signature from those in the know?

The second clue is the fact that is that when Kincaid discovered the
Sipapuni, he discovered a floor plan that was remarkable similar to
that of the Dulce Base. In Kincaids own words that he describes the
Sipapuni floor plan as having "a mammoth chamber from which radiates
scores of passageways, like the spokes of a wheel." This is the same
configuration as to that of Dulce Base, the underground facility that
is reported to have been originally occupied by the reptilian being
species.

The third, and most important, factor is that both underground worlds
are associated with reptilian beings. Thomas Castello, the man
claiming to have been a former security officer in the Dulce Base,
said that the commanders of the nonhuman grey alien beings were
humanoid reptilian creatures that were tall and had vertical slit
pupils. The Hopi mythology and oral traditions, on the other hand,
state that their EL-der brothers had snake forms and were the rulers
of the underworld. These two perspectives are strikingly similar, with
the only difference being that one is derived from history and the
other from our present era.

In all, there exists a combination of three important elements that
are apparently shared by both underground facilities or cities. One,
they are both huge underground cities. Two, they both have a similar
floor plan design and Three, they are both associated with reptilian
overlords. Are these associations coincidental or are we beginning to
reveal a pattern of some sort?

Most importantly, after three years of intense research and field
explorations into the Grand Canyon area, I believe that I have finally
located the Hopi Sipapuni underworld that G.E. Kincaid initially
discovered in 1909. I have acquired physical evidence indicating
anomalous activity occurring during that time period, new
interpretations of an ancient Hopi prophecy supports the "story" of
Kincaids discovery and I, and a close colleague of mine, have stood
upon the same ground where Kincaid once stood in awe.

Evidence of this recent discovery has been relayed to several key
people across the United States for security purposes. A more detailed
report of this discovery is forthcoming and will be made available to
the public in the very near future.

SUMMATION

Various pieces of evidence accumulatively indicate a strong
relationship between the human and reptilian species. Mytho-histories
of aboriginal tribes across the world record their presence on the
surface of the Earth. Underground cities that are reported to exist in
the southwestern United States, such as Dulce base and the Hopi Indian
Sipapuni, appear to have been constructed by reptilian beings,
experiencer reports continue to describe contacts with nonhuman life
forms that have a reptilian anatomy and the human brain reminds us of
how the human race evolved from reptiles.. This reptiliform influence
is more than just symbolism. It appears to be a manifested reality in
our lives that refuses to disappear.

The reptilian beings are on Earth now, they always have been on this
planet and, if we can overcome our inherent fear of the reptilian
image and understand how it has been used against us, we will one day
realize that, although we are physically different, we are from the
same primordial essence.

I LEAVE YOU WITH ONE LAST THOUGHT

I end this article with one last thing for you to think about and that
is that as we near the end of the millennium, several prophecies
appear to be becoming fulfilled. The most important one being
witnessed in Mexico City which is built upon the ancient Aztec capital
Tenochtitlan. It is here that during the solar eclipse in 1991, a
gradually escalating wave of UFO sightings began and continue to this
day. Could this signal, as once promised long ago, the return of the
plumed feathered serpent God Quetzalcoatl? Time will tell

2009-05-14T23:36:00.001-07:00

Contents

*

Who Was Dagobert II?
*

The Unified Field Theory of Dagobert’s Revenge
*

King Dagobert II - Mascot of the OLE (Ordo Lapsit Exillis)

Return

Who Was Dagobert II?

from DagobertsRevenge Website

recovered through WayBackMachine Website

In the year 469, the Roman Catholic Church made a pact with Clovis I, King of the Franks, bestowing upon him the title "New Constantine", in exchange for his conversion to the faith. Thus began the Holy Roman Empire, with the promise that the title would be passed down to his descendants from that moment on. In the year 800, that promise was broken.

Dagobert II was a French king from the sacred Merovingian bloodline, the last Merovingian to hold the title "Holy Roman Emperor". The Merovingians were a dynasty of Frankish priest-kings who were believed by their subjects to have magical powers derived from their long red hair. There were rumors of witchcraft, fortune telling and crystal-ball gazing, among others. In fact, portraits of Merovingian kings customarily depict them holding one of these crystal balls in the left hand. Since the time of Clovis I, the Merovingians had presided over the Holy Roman Empire, but by the time Dagobert II was born, the power of the throne had already been weakened, with authority increasingly being usurped by court chancellors known as "Mayors of the Palace".

On the death of his father, the 5-year-old Dagobert was kidnapped by then Palace Mayor Grimoald, who tried to put his own son on the throne. Human compassion saved him from death, and he was exiled to Ireland, only to return years later and reclaim the throne in 679. But the problems of the Mayors of the Palace continued. Three years later, apparently displeased with Dagobert’s lack of allegiance, the Roman church entered into a conspiracy with Mayor Pepin the Fat. On December 23, while on a hunting trip, Dagobert was lanced through the eye by his own godson, supposedly on Pepin’s orders. With Roman endorsement, Pepin passed political power onto his son, Charles Martel, thus starting the Carolingian dynasty that would later become so famous. After that, the Merovingian bloodline faded into obscurity.

All subsequent Merovingian kings were essentially powerless, and they were officially thought to have died out with Dagobert’s grandson, Childeric III. 49 years later, Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne was anointed Holy Roman Emperor. The church had finally washed its hands of the Merovingian problem, or so they thought.

And what was the problem, exactly? Well, rumor has it that the Merovingian bloodline was descendant from Jesus, or one of his brothers, who fled Roman persecution at the time of the crucifixion and escaped to France, where they intermarried with French royalty. This claim is made by certain members of modern European nobility, who trace their own ancestry back to Dagobert’s son Sigisbert. According to this claim, the Merovingians knew the truth about Jesus and his actual significance as King of the Jews.

They knew the Roman church had stolen their birthright - Jerusalem, co-opted the idea of Jesus and created a fictionalized version of the messiah to further their own agenda - world domination, both secular and spiritual. The Merovingians knew that the fantasy of Christ as a virgin-born diety who suffered willingly for our sins and ascended to heaven was just that - an "opiate of the masses" used by the Romans as an excuse to set themselves up as the arbiters of God in order to perpetuate their faltering empire. This might have been the whole reason for the pact with Clovis I, to effectively shut him and his family up. And with the death of Dagobert II, they thought they had eradicated this threat for good. They were sorely mistaken.

Back to Top

The Unified Field Theory of Dagobert’s Revenge
by Tracy R. Twyman

from DagobertsRevenge Website

recovered through WayBackMachine Website

Dagobert’s Revenge Magazine is based on a theory of history, a concept of theology, and a body of literature that exploded onto the public consciousness in the early 1980s with the publication of the best-selling Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh. This book presented a radical new theory: that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, but lived on to father children with his wife, Mary Magdalen, whose descendants intermarried with what became the Royal House of France. And it all started with Henry Lincoln’s investigation in the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau.

It was in this tiny village in the south of France that a poor parish priest named Berenger Sauniere discovered 4 parchments that were to change his life, and the surrounding village, forever. Two of these parchments were genealogies of this magazine’s mascot, Dagobert II, the last of the Frankish dynasty of Priest-Kings known as the Merovingians. The other two contained ciphered messages which, when decoded, displayed the following:

"To Dagobert II, King, and to Sion belong this treasure and he is there dead."

and:

"Shepherdess - No temptation that Poussin and Teniers hold the key; Peace 681 By the cross and this horse of God I destroy this dæmon of the guardian at noon blue apples."

After finding these parchments, this once-poor parish priest became suddenly and inexplicably wealthy, perhaps because of having found some buried treasure. He began hanging out with members of the Parisian upper-crust occult set, such as composer Claude Debussy and opera singer Emma Calve. He began redecorating his church and surrounding property in a most bizarre fashion, leaving behind strange clues in an effort to communicate to future generations the secret that he had learned from the parchments. These clues, many involving the use of occult, qabalistic, alchemical, Masonic, and Templar-oriented symbolism, seem to indicate the involvement of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion.

The Prieuré de Sion (Priory of Zion) was a chivalrous fraternity created in medieval France with the purpose of preserving the Merovingian bloodline and returning them to the throne of France. They were officially founded as the Order de Sion by Godfroi de Bouillon, in either 1090 or 1099. This was just prior the First Crusade, which was also headed by de Bouillon. Their official headquarters was the Abbey of Notre Dame du Mont de Sion in Jerusalem. In March 1117 they had Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem (who, it is said, owed his throne to them due to their efforts on his behalf) negotiate the constitution of the Order of the Temple, A.K.A. the Knights Templar, as the military and administrative arm of the Order de Sion.

The Templar order, which had already been around more than a decade, was headed by Hughes de Payen, who was also a founding member of the Order de Sion. They are not mentioned again in history until 1152, when King Louis VII of France brought them 95 new members and gave them the priory of Saint-Samson at Orléans.

The Templars, according to tradition, were created for the purpose of safeguarding pilgrims on the road to the Holy Land, and they are most famous for their brave fighting on behalf of Christiandom for the capture of Jerusalem. However, evidence indicates that this was not at all an orthodox Christian organization, but that their secret rituals and doctrine were much more mystical, hermetic, and occult-oriented, and derived not from the Church, but from Christ himself.

Now the Knights Templar had quite a career after the Crusades. They basically took over Europe financially, dominating all the major industries, especially that of money lending. They invented the modern checking system, and within a few years had all of Europe’s kings indebted to them. This is why, even though they were disbanded by the Pope and the Grand Master burnt at the stake for heresy, some people believe that the Templars still exist today, continuing to manipulate the affairs of Europe behind the scenes. The Swiss nation, especially, is believed to be controlled by them. The same can be said for the Priory of Sion, which continues to this day, according to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

In fact, a number of illustrious figures in history, including Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau have served as the Priory’s Grand Masters, or Nautionniers (Navigators.) The Priory has been credited by some with the creation of the European Union. The same insignia which they proposed for the flag of the United States of Europe in the 1950s is being used on the flag of the EU today. Former President of France François Mitterand was believed to be a member of the Priory, and many other very powerful people. They are also said to be in league with the CIA, MI5, and the Mafia. As for the Merovingians, their bloodline continues on. Through incestuous intermarriage, most of the royal families of Europe can claim descent from them. And from these royal families, have come all 44 of the United States Presidents.

Who exactly were the Merovingians, you may ask, and what is so special about them? They were the first kings of what is now France, the first to unify the kingdom, and the first to preside over the prototype of the Holy Roman Empire. They were granted the title of New Constantine in perpetuity by the Pope, some believe, because the Vatican recognized the descent of the Merovingian bloodline from that of Jesus Christ, who, according to this theory, was the husband of Mary Magdalen, and sired a child through her. Mary and her child later fled to France, were their descendants married into the local Visigothic nobility. This would explain why the Vatican granted the Merovingians the title New Constantine, in recognition of the descent from the King of Kings himself.

It also explains why the Knights Templar wished to take control of Jerusalem - because they considered it their rightful inheritance. Christ, as the biological son of Joseph, was a descendant of King David, and therefore the rightful king of Jerusalem, so his descendants would have been as well. It would also explain why the Templars were called the "Guardians of the Grail", and as many have pointed out, "Holy Grail" comes from the French word "Sangreal", which could just as easily be translated as "royal blood", meaning the bloodline of Christ.

But why, many have asked, if he was not the son of God, and did not die on the cross for our sins, should his bloodline be so important. If the people who ascribe to this theory do not believe in his divinity, why should they care about his descendants? This is something that has never been adequately explained in past genre literature, but Boyd Rice and I believe that we have the answer, which we will describe in full in our upcoming book. Fact is, Jesus was the "Son of God", but not he pseudo-mystical force that supposedly impregnated Mary’s virgin womb. It goes back to King David, and further than that, to ancient Sumer, Atlantis, and the very beginnings of human history.

For the kings of the ancient world were the "gods" whose rule is now recorded in the mythologies of every past and present culture across the globe, and their descendants are the human kings who have reigned since the Flood, when the gods left the Earth. The bloodline of Christ and King David, and of almost all royal houses throughout history can be traced back to these "gods" or Pre-diluvian kings. That is where the concept of kingship came from, and that is where all of our ancient traditions, religious principles, and all of the basic arts and sciences of civilization came from. And the secret hermetic doctrine of occultism, which is popular in the underground today, can be traced there as well.

The implications of our theory are absolutely mind-blowing. It synthesizes a number of facts and theories regarding history, folklore, secret societies, and occultism that have so far remained disparate, creating a "Unified Field Theory" of the Grail mystery, where all interpretations of the Holy Grail - as a cup, a stone, a tablet, a secret doctrine, a spiritual experience, or a royal bloodline - are reconciled with one another. We are not saying that every part of our theory is absolutely correct, but with what we’ve learned we certainly can’t be all wrong. And if even a fraction of our theory is correct, then human history will have to be rewritten. The implications of what we have to present to you, in our forthcoming book, and in the future issues of this magazine, are positively staggering.

2007-11-23T04:39:00.000-08:00

The Final Empire Chapter 12

COLONIALISM IN THE MODERN WORLD

Zaire: The Congo Atrocity Evolves

Following the end of the rubber boom, the French-Belgian created bloodbath in the Congo basin subsided somewhat but the basic extraction of profits went on. By 1960 the Congo, now called Zaire, was being readied for independence like many African colonies. Independence was to be with a Belgian-chosen leader and with continuing outside ownership and control of the rich resources of oil, cobalt, copper and other minerals. As Independence Day neared, an indigenous leader, Patrice Lumumba arose and began to win elections. By the day of independence he was the acknowledged leader of the new country. Soon a former sergeant in the Congolese army, Mobutu, who had been handpicked by Belgian Intelligence and the U.S. CIA to be the leader, had much of the military behind him and Lumumba murdered. By 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko became the absolute dictator and continues to rule this hapless land to this day under the direction of the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. They oversee security affairs while the industrial elite is represented by such groups as the International Oil Cartel, Union Minie’re, owned at the time of independence by the Belgian Corporation, the Special Board of Katanga and the company well known in South Africa, the Anglo-American company, Oppenheim de Beers.¹

Prior to independence the Belgian directed export agriculture had also made the country food self-sufficient (prior to colonialism the area had been food self-sufficient for thousands of years). The money making export crops were sugar, rice, corn, millet, cassava, bananas and other minor crops. As the society disintegrated under the Mobutu dictatorship, food production fell. In 1988 the country imported 60% of its food.

Like other U.S. backed dictators such as Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza of Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran who were super thieves, Mobutu has simply thrown open the country to the trans-nationals who pay a sum to Mobutu for the resources. The Mobutu government occupies itself with robbing the people of what little is left while Mobutu travels to his many palaces, including 26 luxury apartments, villas, chateaux and palaces in Europe. Some place his personal fortune at $8 billion, all of it stolen from the impoverished people of Zaire.

Journalist Steve Askin reports that despite Zaire’s being one of the richest countries in Africa, the country is $5 billion in debt to the international banks. The Zairian people are the ninth poorest on earth yet they must struggle to bear up under a typical International Monetary Fund "austerity plan." "Zaire has fired 40 percent of its government workers, withheld wage increases from those still on the payroll, [and] drastically cut its already meager social service spending. By this economic bloodletting of the population, Zaire is able to pay the international bankers 30 percent of the national budget for debt repayment."²

Three billion dollars of the loan money that incurred this debt went to the Trans-National construction company of Morrison-Knudson to build a power line 1,100 miles long from a dam near Mobutu’s capital of Kinshasha, to Katanga province where the cobalt and copper mines are located. Even though there is hydro-electric potential near the mines, this $3 billion was spent so that Mobutu could "turn off the lights" from Kinshasha, 1,100 miles to the north, in case of any secessionist effort.

Mobutu is used by the U.S. for votes in the UN and the Organization of African Unity. The country is used as a staging area for CIA warfare, projected into other African states and Mobutu’s army is used as a U.S. surrogate for invading other African countries according to the needs of U.S. strategy. Torture, including the CIA’s favorite, the electric shock machine, is widely used against both political and criminal detainees. Total fascism is the form of government under the dictator and total neglect is the social policy. Estimates are that less than 10% of the roads that existed on Independence Day remain and indigenous commerce has all but stopped. After three hundred years of colonial plunder Zaire still has riches to loot, the people continue to starve and the living conditions deteriorate under the "neo-colonialism" of the industrial order.³

Following the ouster of Mobutu the situation has deteriorated even further. Warfare is coursing across much of Africa. Even though major powers each have favorite players that they encourage from the background, the value of the resources that could be gained in such a volatile area do not appear to be enough to bring in heavy military investment from major colonial nations. Also, with the retreat of the Soviet Union it is difficult to convince taxpayers that vast expenditures for military adventures in far flung regions are necessary.

The reason that Zaire was never a matter of household conversation in the U.S. is that the International Corporate Media does not report the situation. The mass information media is essentially controlled by the state in the socialist countries and in the capitalist countries the capitalist class owns it. In the U.S., according to Ben Badgakian, in his study, The Media Monopoly, the whole of television, films, radio, newspapers, magazines and book publishing is essentially owned by less than twenty-five huge conglomerate corporations. This number has been falling steadily for decades. As Michael Parenti explains in his recent book, The Mass Media, the corporate owned media do not so much alter the facts, but frame the facts of each event within the social and ideological framework of the national security state- the militarized juggernaut. Within the context of the National Security State the CIA has significantly infiltrated the ranks of the media as we began to learn in the late 1960’s. In addition to subsidizing the publications of many books, there are working writers on the CIA payroll, or the payrolls of CIA front groups, as well as media workers who are conduits for information that the agency wishes to be presented to the public. Because of the CIA infiltration of journalism, especially in Third World countries, it is possible for them to conduct worldwide disinformation campaigns.

During the initial stages of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States a secret government was formalized within American democracy. For the first time an elaborate system of security clearances and classified documents was created along with a presidentially appointed National Security Council that was not provided for in the U.S. Constitution. This placed a firewall between the electorate and the activities of the higher reaches of government. This is especially true concerning activities of the U.S. government outside its borders. This has enabled the U. S. Government to conduct activities on behalf of the economic elite throughout the world while clothing these activities in the pieties of "aiding democracy" or "free trade."

Antarctica: Empire at the End of the World

Nothing describes the needs and motives of the present industrial empire so well as the final rape-Antarctica. This beautiful and mysterious land is literally the end of the world. It is the south end of the planet and it is the last piece of the planet that has not been plundered by the culture of empire.

Because of the convection currents and because Antarctica is exposed to all oceans, it occupies a pivotal place in the planetary cycles of weather and biology. Barney Brewster in his, Friends of the Earth, book about Antarctica says that:

"Although the Southern Ocean represents only five per cent of the world’s oceans in area, it accounts for 20 per cent of the total marine photosynthesis and plays a major part in deep-ocean water circulation, influencing waters far to the north. Antarctic deep-ocean water carries nutrients which feed economically important fisheries in many parts of the world - Argentine hake, Brazilian tuna, South African pilchard and the remnants of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery."⁴

Ocean upwellings around the periphery of Antarctica provide the nutrient to charge the food chain. The phytoplankton feed the masses of krill. Krill are a small shrimp-like organism that grow up to three inches long and exist in the Antarctic waters in the amounts of millions of tons. They are the basic energy of the simple food chain of Antarctica. They directly feed the baleen whales, squid and small fish, crabeater seals, adelie penguin, and the sea birds. The next level of the food chain that feeds on the krill eaters are the large fish, weddell and ross seals, killer whale, leopard seal, gull and emperor penguin. The whales in the southern waters were early hunted to near extinction as they migrated in, seasonally, to feed on the krill. Now, "It is estimated that blue whales are less than 5 per cent of their original stock, humpbacks 3 per cent, and fin whales less than 20 per cent."⁵ The fur seals around South Georgia and the South Shetland islands have been slowly increasing since the devastation for the Yankee trade to China but some authorities believe the small population is now going down again because of the initial krill fishing in the area which is impacting the food chain.⁶ In the islands north of Antarctica, especially toward Australia, there, historically, have been industries that boiled seals and penguins for the oil in their bodies but so far as is known, no extinctions have been the result of that practice.

The landmass of Antarctica has not yet been devastated by human activities. Most of the visitors have been "scientific expeditions" who are there to do science as well as to bolster their respective country’s claim to a piece of the action by their presence- as well as look for industrial valuables. Approximately 700 people winter over at Antarctica and the population rises to 4-5,000 in the summer. This population is scattered at 33 year-round bases and other temporary sites. Two thousand tons of cargo and food come in each year as well as 20 million litres of fuel. Very little is taken out.⁷ Most of these human settlements are on the rocks or other spots bare of ice. This has created a conflict with the animals and birds who themselves heavily use these scarce sights for nesting and other life activities. Because there are no land animals larger than three centimeters in size (mites), the living population is centered on the ocean and the shorelines, which are essential to them. This is also the location where the human exploiters will congregate as they arrive and set up operations.

Increasing human populations are a threat to the Antarctic environment. Another continuing threat is human stupidity. In 1962 the United States Navy brought in a nuclear power plant in violation of the Antarctic treaty. After ten years of trouble and leaks the reactor was shut down. It was shipped back to the U.S. with 101 large drums of contaminated earth and was followed later by 11,000 cubic meters of radioactive rock. After six years of work, the site was declared sanitized.⁸

That the industrial predators are preparing to dismember the Antarctic is plain. The most serious threats at the present are krill fishing, whaling, sealing, oil drilling and mining. Krill fishing has been commenced by Japan and the former USSR. Other countries are testing products made with the krill to try to find ways to make money from it. The krill catch was estimated by the FOA at 20,000 to 40,000 tons in the early 1970’s and has been rising steadily. The life habits of the krill are quite complex and little is known about them and little is known about the whole complex of krill and krill eaters. Nonetheless, the industrialists have charged ahead. Harvesting the krill could have serious effects. The nearly extinct whale species need it to revive their numbers and other krill feeders depend on it.

There are pirate whalers who have connections with the Japanese fishing fleets in the area who are still killing the nearly extinct large whales. The large scale whalers of recent years, the Russians and the Japanese, are taking minke whale in the area but have not killed the endangered fin, blue, humpback or southern right whales as far as is known. Because of the expense of operating in Antarctica, exploiting the area is to a great extent dependent upon how desperate countries become for protein, minerals and oil. As ecological catastrophes and exhaustion of resources progress outside Antarctica, the likelihood of industrial exploitation of Antarctic increases.

A very serious possibility is a rush for the "black gold." A number of countries have had oil exploration teams and programs in Antarctica. If oil production begins, Antarctica will be finished. Already there are reports of penguins covered with oil from local spills from ships in the area. The biodegradation rate in the area is far longer than in warmer areas. All garbage, equipment and other debris left since the first humans came there is still there. Oil spills and the locating of human communities that would be needed for the work on Antarctica could finish the life that needs the sea and the strip of land close to it. The krill, the baleen whales that filter seawater to catch the krill, the penguins, seabirds and seals that travel from land to water would all be devastated. In an environment like the Antarctic, clean-up would be almost impossible and if a blow-out occurred it could be under conditions that would make it difficult to stop and if it could not be stopped, (in mid-winter for example) it would simply continue to drain into the sea.

The approach of the industrial countries to Antarctica demonstrates that the essential dynamics of empire culture have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. The motive of immediate gain continues to take precedence over all other values.

Empire in the Modern World:Managed Opinion

The evidence of history suggests that as the public awareness increased in the First World countries, the imperial elites found it necessary to manage domestic opinion and sources of information. The motives and methods of extorting the colonies did not change but the sensibilities of the public in the imperial countries became more acute. The French Revolution, the American Revolution and other changes brought a more sophisticated view of the rights of citizens and the functioning of elites. The motives and strategies of colonialism do not change but the justifications and explanations to the public of the First World have become a smooth integral part of the operation. In the Sixteenth Century no explanation to the European public was necessary but later imperialism became a phenomena of cultural opinion. It became a social ideology. As this change occurred it became necessary for the elites to reflect back to the public the charitable and beneficial effects on the colonies and to conceal the basic motives and methods. In the U.S. it was clothed in "Manifest Destiny," God was often said to have given the New World to the deserving Christians and this encouraged the "missionary fervor" which was encouraged by the elites. All this combined into a jingoistic support for empire. In the present the continuing enterprise to extort valuables from the colonies and to ensure control of them, is clothed in a mythology of "anti-communism," "antiterrorism," and bringing democracy and economic development to the less socially developed masses. The competing elites of the industrialized countries have managed to thoroughly militarize human society. The elites often say that the reason that we must have such tight police control of civilized society is because of "human nature." That is, humans are so violent and savage that there must be outside control of their behavior. On the world scene, the justification for the military control of the planet is said to be the threat of "capitalist imperialism," "the terrorist threat," "communist subversion" or "guerilla insurgency." The reality is, however, that empires expend the effort to have colonies because they are getting something from them - money- markets and resources. Now, with the huge debt of Third World countries, the elites of the capitalist group can literally take over these countries. When the debt cannot be paid and the country is desperate for capital, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank will extend another loan if the country agrees to allow the bankers to send in its own teams to run the economic planning and commerce departments of those countries. The "austerity" or "reform" programs that the bankers subject the country to, are designed to sell off socially owned enterprises to the planetary economic elite and squeeze money out of the masses of the country to pay the debt. The foreign exchange to pay the debt is generated by exporting the country’s resources and impoverishing its citizens. This impoverishes the workers, the country's society, the ecology and tends to centralize the remaining economy in the hands of the domestic and international elite.

Controlling the Colony

In a world of empires, colonies and competing "spheres of influence," there is the threat that some competing empire may steal a colony but there is also the greater threat that the population of the colony may try to stop the extortion and throw out the invaders. This threat of "nationalism" is dealt with by preventing any social development in the colony that is not under the control of the colonial elite. The colonial elite, in turn, ultimately is under the control of its handlers, in the First World industrial elite.

Just after the close of World War II the centers of imperial power began to consolidate their turf. The USSR surrounded itself with dominated colonies, China began to assert its old imperial dominance and the U.S. and European capitalists moved to manage the control of the old colonial structure. This colonial control exercised by the capitalists often took the form of "giving independence" to a colony run by a colonial elite but covertly maintaining control of that former colony’s military and economic infrastructure. One technique of control used in the U.S., "banana republic" colonies is revealed by a Central America study group who say:

"In 1870, US banks began the practice of offering to pay a Central American nation’s entire European debt in a lump payment under the condition that the nation would agree to place itself under a customs receivership in which the US would control the nation’s foreign trade and many aspects of its domestic economy. This economic relationship replaced political colonization with an equally effective method for controlling the trade, resources and labor of another country. Nicaragua was under a US customs receivership until 1949."⁹

After the close of World War II, first Britain, then the U.S. assisted in fighting a war in Greece against indigenous and left leaning forces that had been the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. These populist Greek forces were defeated and a puppet (and Fascist, in the case of the military dictatorship) colonial elite was installed. The old colonial empires then fought the indigenous guerrillas, the "Huks" of the former U.S. colonial possession of the Philippines,to a standstill in the 1950’s and a peasant revolt in British controlled Malaysia in the same era. This was a historical recreation of the original U.S. takeover from the Spanish. In the earlier era both Cuba and the Philippines had anti-colonialist forces who were nearly to throw out the Spanish. The U.S. saved the day for the empire by frightening off and defeating the Spanish and then wiping out the anti-colonialist resistance. The U.S. in the Kissinger era was able to role back "threatening" nationalism in Indonesia under Sukarno. Kissinger and Nixon backed a military coup and the CIA handed out lists of people marked for elimination. The estimate is, at least one half million people died in this strategy to control empire. Eventually a war was fought in Vietnam in an attempt to regain the French colony that had been taken over by the anti-Japanese resistance under the leadership of Ho Chi Min.

In the post-World War II era, a system of conflict and competition evolved wherein secret government agencies were used as the spearhead of covert war. This system exists and evolved because of this same motive- to conceal these foreign activities both from the "enemies" and the First World domestic populations. The home populations would not approve of them, or the policies they serve, if they were known. That is the functional reason for the shroud of secrecy of the "National Security State." Honorable government actions are not kept secret from the people. Secret covert action agencies like the U.S., CIA and Russian, KGB exist now in many governments of the earth. After World War II, the imperial governments used their secret war agencies to set up secret police and covert action agencies in their colonies. The KGB assisted the creation of secret police in Eastern Europe and the CIA helped create secret police and intelligence agencies like the hated Savak in the Shah’s Iran, the CIA counterpart in West Germany under General Rheinhard Gehlen and the KCIA in Korea. These agencies carry out domestic and foreign activities. The foreign activities are usually acts and atrocities that the elite would not want to be associated with publicly.

At times the clothing of "anti-Communist" rhetoric was not used but some other negative image such as "nationalist," as in the CIA overthrow of Mohammed Mossedeq of Iran to get the oil fields. Generally, such as in the overthrow of Arbenz, the nationalist leader of Guatemala in 1954, with CIA assistance, all of the drumbeaters and "anti-Communist" cheerleaders in the corporate controlled mass media were called out to manipulate the mental images of the populace of the empire. By the time of the CIA’s war in Vietnam, the control of empire was being called "counter-insurgency warfare." Not only the control of the colonial elites was necessary but also it became necessary to control the infrastructure of society itself. In Vietnam, the CIA discovered that they were fighting the very society itself, in a war of colonial domination. The response to this was the perceived need to destroy indigenous social leadership. Operation Phoenix and the strategic hamlet concepts came out of this. Operation Phoenix was a program to murder or imprison persons who occupied positions of social leadership not controlled by the empire. Strategic hamlets were created usually by forced relocation of peasant populations and imprisonment in guarded "villages" that were under military control.

These strategies have developed into the present such that colonial militaries and police forces that are trained in the First World, maintain "death squads" who’s task it is to eliminate any indigenous leadership that may compete with the controlled cadres of the empire. Farm cooperative leaders, labor leaders, church leaders who advocate compassion for the poor, doctors, teachers who may teach self-help or assist the dispossessed are all seen as creating the possibilities of social power outside of imperial control and so are kidnapped, tortured and murdered. These assassination team members have often been trained at the U.S. base in Panama or at the torture schools at U.S. bases in Texas and Louisiana maintained by the CIA. "Low-intensity warfare," the new name for imperial control, is not always intended to have dramatic winners, often it is used simply to "soften-up" a country for some policy strategy. This amounts to simply bashing the target country with terrorism, divisiveness and sabotage until the country is shredded and its people suffering and easily controlled. What is called low-intensity warfare is not really warfare but simply the covert management techniques of the empires. This does not necessarily have anything to do with violence but involves such things as manipulating the local media through journalists, militarists and politicians who are on the foreign intelligence agency’s payroll.

There is usually foreign participation in elections above ground, such as through the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO and CIA linked American Institute for Free Labor Development, and the CIA-U.S. Chamber of Commerce linked Center for International Private Enterprise. There are also underground conduits of cash, supplies and experts offered to selected candidates and parties. Books are published clandestinely and widely circulated, serving covert strategies. Particular social groups and institutions are organized and financed within the target country, which serve particular strategies. In effect only the imagination limits these covert action agencies who have huge budgets hidden within their own home government’s accounting.

There is the motive to protect the investments and profits in the colony and there is also the motive to prevent the example of independence of a colony, its escape from a "sphere of influence."

Creation of the "Internationalist" Empire

Although we now have the imperial centers of the U.S., Europe, and China, the coordination of the capitalist powers has integrated into a powerful elite under the auspices of the Rockefeller/Kissinger created Tri-Lateral Commission with what appears to be the executive function in the annual Bilderburg Conference. These groups include some of the richest people in the world, leading military figures (not always in uniform), the major international bankers, some representatives of wealthy royal families and high government officials especially from the U.S., West Germany and Japan. Membership in the Tri-Lateral Commission is centered on corporate entities that do business in from several to many countries. This "Commission" has developed along with a homogenized elite that owns and controls the international class of Trans-National corporations.

In a country such as the U.S., being 6% of the world’s population and consuming more than half the entire planet’s resources each year, most coming from outside its borders, the need to control the resources and markets is obvious on the face of it. As with the old slaving days and the opium days, the masses in the First World countries must be convinced that the activities of their governments are absolutely altruistic. "Helping," "economic development," "anti-terrorism," "assisting democracy," "winning hearts and minds," and of course the "communist menace" are images used to camouflage what is really happening, which is the control and operation of an industrial empire who’s vast flow system needs massive amounts of raw materials and equally massive markets for the products. Much of the control, planning and execution of these policies is out of view of the electorate and often are performed by clandestine groups such as CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the KGB and the covert action groups of the other industrial states. The structure of power that has developed from the earlier colonial empires is one of complete militarization of the world through alliances such as NATO, ASEAN, Warsaw Pact, and other military aid and currency loan connections. This has spawned the largest arms race the world has ever seen. Countries that cannot feed their people can always get loans for armaments from First World states.

The struggle for planetary supremacy is conducted with secret strategies and it is conducted in the minds of the people through the mass media. The control of sources of information is an important factor in domination of each empire’s "sphere of influence."

(A full bibliography is included for those interested in the covert management of the contemporary empire.) ¹⁰

Although industrial investment in the colonies generally returns large profits (25% per year being the standard), super-profits since World War II have come from guns and drugs. The U.S. has been the largest armaments producer, with other countries now catching up rapidly. Alliances and militarization have been encouraged all over the world and this has seen the militaries take power (overt or covert) in most societies. The petroleum industry is the largest planetary industry but it is closely followed by the armaments industry in size and production. The armaments industry mushrooms as all forms of colonial exploitation grow. A modern example is the [1989] Iran-Iraq war, where 42 arms-exporting countries sold weapons to the combatants and 36 sold to both sides.

Some now estimate the planetary drug market to be $500 billion per year. The sources of opium are Turkey (where the plant originated), Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Laos and Mexico. A few peasants in remote areas do not control the huge volumes of this valuable substance. Peasants are not seen transporting the trainloads of cash involved in this trade. It is not difficult to see that commerce of this importance requires people of equal importance to conduct it. This super-profit trade is controlled by some of the more powerful people in the world. Governments of origin get cuts, international transporters get cuts and controllers of distribution in the rich countries get cuts. The opium poppy growing regions are (with the possible exception of portions of the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia) substantially under the control of the U.S. In many regions such as with the Meo tribesmen of Laos, the tribals of Afghanistan/Pakistan, and the colonial elites of the cocaine producing countries of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, there are strong historical contacts with the U.S. CIA.

The economic trade relations of empire are simple. The price of manufactured goods produced in the industrial countries rises faster than the price of raw resources sold by the Third World countries. This is the basic economic relationship. This has historically been the case. In the field of economics, the studies that developed this information are called the Prebisch Thesis, named after Raul Prebisch. Prebisch worked at the United Nations in the 1960’s when he developed these statistical studies. Because of this export/import disparity and because of the energy price rise of the 1970’s, the Third World has gone heavily into debt with the international bankers. This gives the bankers the opportunity to manage the economies of the Third World. In return for new loans the country must accept an economic plan that effectively bleeds the country and destroys remaining healthy ecology in the name of "resource extraction." In 1990, the net flow of money from the developing world to the developed nations was over $100 billion (U.S.) per year. This is a net figure, meaning the excess over the flow from the developed to the developing nations.¹¹

The possibility of Third World countries taking over their own countries for their own benefit is slight. The overwhelming destructive power of secretly maneuvering covert action groups, an economic blockade by First World governments, a "capital strike" (the withdrawing of funds from the colony), strangulation by the international banks and a cutoff of funds by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is almost certain to smother any indigenous movement. Just as workers can withhold their labor in a labor strike, so can capital withhold investment. Though the remaining and remote forager/hunters of the earth can still survive nicely without the industrial empire, everyone in the money economy, who’s survival systems are dependent on industry, are subject to those who control the money, guns and industrial production.

NOTES

1 My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. Andre’e Blouin. Praeger Scientific pub. New York. 1983. p. 267.

2 National Catholic Reporter. July, 29, 1988. vol. 24, no. 36. "Rule by Kleptocracy in Zaire wins Mobutu U.S. backing," Steve Askin. p. 9.

3 ibid. pp. 7-11,14.

4 Antarctica: Wilderness At Risk. Barney Brewster. Friends of the Earth. San Francisco. 1982. p. 97

5 Let’s Save Antarctica!. James N. Barnes. Greenhouse Publications. Victoria, Australia. 1982. p. 18.

6 ibid. p. 19.

7 Brewster. Antarctica. op. cit. p. 49.

8 ibid. p. 56,57.

9 EPOCA UPDATE. Summer 1990. Earth Island Institute. San Francisco, CA. p. 2,3.

10 Sources of information on the conduct of covert strategies of the modern empire.

RELEVANT PERIODICALS:

Intelligence/Parapolitics. monthly, $20/yr. P.O.Box 50441, Washington, D.C. 20004 or 16 rue des Ecoles, 75005 Paris, France.

The National Reporter. quarterly, $13/yr. P.O.Box 21279, Washington, D.C. 20009.

Covert Action Quarterly. quarterly, $15/yr. P.O.Box 50272, Washington, D.C. 20004.

Lobster: Intelligence-Parapolitics-State Research. published occasionally, $14/yr. 17c Pearson Ave., Hull; HU5 2SX; United Kingdom.

RELEVANT BOOKS:

The World War II Era.

The War Lords of Washington: The Inside Story of Big BusinessVersus The People in World War II. Bruce Catton. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1948.

The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy. Rodney Campbell. McGraw-Hill Book Co. 1977.

Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power 1919-1933. James Pool and Suzanne Pool. Dial Press. 1978.

Trading With The Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. Charles Higham. Delacorte Press. 1983.

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance. Michael R. Beschloss. W.W. Norton & Co. 1980.

The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. Marin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer. Little, Brown & Co. 1974

The Post-World War II Era.

Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelligence Agent. Erhard Dabringhaus. Acropolis Books Inc. 1984.

Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich. Ladislas Farago. Simon & Schuster. 1974.

The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals. William Stevenson. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1973.

The Belarus Secret. John Loftus. Alfred A. Knopf. 1982.

(When John Loftus was an Assistant Attorney General working for the Justice Department he was assigned to investigate the existence of numerous Nazi war criminals living comfortably in the U. S. When little action was taken, he wrote this account of the case.)

The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection. Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1984.

The General was a Spy: The Truth about General Reinhard Gehlen.. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc. 1971. (How part of Hitler’s intelligence apparatus was merged with the CIA.)

The Super-States, The Korean War and the Present Era.

The Hidden History of the Korean War. I.F. Stone. Monthly Review Press. 1952.

Global Rift: The Third World Comes Of Age. L.S. Stavrianos. William Morrow & Co. 1981.

The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. Frank J. Donner. Alfred A. Knopf. 1980.

The CIA: A Forgotten History/ US Global Interventions Since World War 2. William Blum. Zed Books. 1986.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights. Vol. I Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. South End Press. 1979.

After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and The Reconsideration of Imperial Ideology. Vol. II. Chomsky & Herman. South End Press. 1979.

The Geography of Empire. Keith Buchanan. Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation pub. 1972.

The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to The Second Indochina War. Peter Dale Scott. Bobbs-Merrill Co. 1972.

Torture In The Eighties. Amnesty International Report. 1984.

War Without End: American Planning For The Next Vietnams. Michael T. Klare. Alfred A. Knopf. 1970.

Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA. Ralph W. McGehee. Sheridan Square Pub. 1983.

In Search Of Enemies: A CIA Story. John Stockwell. W.W. Norton & Co.1978.

Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World: How America’s Worldwide Interventions Destroy Democracy And Free Enterprise And Defeat Our Own Best Interests. Jonathan Kwitny. Congdon & Weed, Inc. 1984.

The Secret Team: The CIA And Its Allies In Control Of The United States And The World. L. Fletcher Prouty, Col., U.S. Airforce (Ret.) Prentice-Hall. 1973. (Excellent introductory volume by an official who served many years at the highest levels of the U.S. government/military.)

None of Your Business: Government Secrecy in America. Norman Dorsen and Stephen Gillers, Editors. Viking Press. 1974.

State Secrets: Police Surveillance in America. Paul Cowan, Nick Egleson and Nat Hentoff. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1974.

Agent’s Of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against The Black Panther Party and The American Indian Movement. Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall. South End Press. 1988.

Inside The Shadow Government: Declaration of Plaintiffs’ Counsel Filed by the Christic Institute, U.S. District Court, Miami, Florida, March 31, 1988. Edith Holleman, et. al. Christic Institute Pub. 1324 North Capitol St. N.W., Wash. D.C. 20002.

On The Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy. Jim Garrison. Sheridan Square Press. 1988.

High Treason:The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: What Really Happened. Robert Groden. Conservatory Press. 1989.

The Yankee and Cowboy War. Carl Oglesby.

Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Jim Marrs. Carrol & Graf Pub.1989.

The Assassinations: Dallas And Beyond: a guide to cover-ups and investigations. First edition. Peter Dale Scott. Random House. 1976.

Works Concerning the Corporate Sector of the Same Era.

In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican. Penny Lernoux. Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1984.

Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning For World Management. Holly Sklar, ed. South End Press. 1980.

The Bohemian Grove And Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-class Cohesiveness. G. William Dumhoff. Harper Torchbooks. 1975.

Inside Job: The Looting Of America’s Savings and Loans. Stephen Pizzo.McGraw Hill. 1989.

Drugs and the International Elite

The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams And Covert Operations In The Reagan Era. Johnathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter. South End Press. 1987.

Out Of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War In Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipelines, and the Contra Drug Connection. Leslie Cockburn. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1987.

The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. 1980.

The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia. Alfred McCoy. Harper & Row. 1972.

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Alfred McCoy. Lawrence Hill/Chicago Review Press. Chicago. 1991.

Of Grass and Snow. Hank Messick. Prentice-Hall. 1990.

The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Facism. Trans. from Danish. Henrick Kruger. Black Rose Books. Canada. 1990.

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America. Peter Dale Scott, et. al. U of Calif. Press. March, 1991.

Deep Cover: The Inside Story Of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence And Subterfuge Lost Us The Biggest Battle Of The Drug War. Micheal Levine. Delacorte Press. N.Y. 1990.

Elite Control of the Mass Media.

A Dangerous Game: CIA and the Mass Media. Vitaly Petrusenko, Interpress, Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1977.

Even The Gods Can’t Change History: The Facts Speak for Themselves. ,George Seldes. Lyle Stuart pub. 1976.

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. Senator J. William Fulbright.Vintage Books. 1970.

Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. 1986.

The CIA And The Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up. Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone (magazine). 20 Oct. 1877.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Pantheon. 1989.

EPOCA UPDATE. Summer 1990. "Are Debt-for-Nature Swaps the Answer?" Earth Island Institute. San Francisco, CA. p. 3.

End of Chapter 12 and Volume One

2007-11-23T04:38:00.002-08:00

The Final Empire: Chapter 11

THE HISTORY OF MODERN COLONIALISM

If we imagine a hive of honey bees, working cooperatively, gathering nectar in the rhythm of the seasons, all working together, fanning their wings to cool the hive, working together to raise the brood and if we saw them adopt the social ethics of civilization we would see immediate social breakdown.

We would no doubt see warlordism break out. Factions would develop, fighting for the control of the hive. Other groups may develop to attempt to steal the honey for themselves. Hierarchies would develop and each war group would struggle against the other to enslave the workers for their own benefit. Cooperative efficiency would plummet. The hive itself would begin to deteriorate without the constant repair, but certain strong warlord groups would corner the large shares of the honey and live royally. Workers would be told that if they are loyal and if they compete, they might someday have a large horde of honey such as controlled by their warlord. The history of empire culture is not much more complex than this, other than the dates and names. It is a history of conquest, of thievery and killing.

The basis, the fuel, of this dynamic is the living flesh of the earth. The competition/conflict enters with the question of who controls and thus is able to extort this living fertility. We have reviewed the early development of this dynamic and described its history. In this chapter we look at recent historic times. We must see that this is an immediate and present part of our existence. The elites and their controlled media will acknowledge the moral and personal experience of the enslaving of African people but they will never put this information into a context of the wider history of slavery, imperialism and colonialism going back to Babylon and the original Chinese dynasties. It is not pointed out that slavery is only a part of a whole dynamic of control and coercion that still exists, without human ownership of humans, but the rest intact. In 1998, fewer than 500 billionaires have more wealth than more than one-half of the world population. Little has changed. The new development is that now the elites do not have the expense of the upkeep of the wage slaves, they are no longer valuable property.

The conflict/competition for power pervades the culture. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the struggle for control is imbedded in the very psyche of the neurotic culture. The struggle for power goes on among family members, in the "office politics" of all mass institutions, between mass institutions and between governments. This struggle for power is at the base of modern colonialism. Much of modern colonialism has been a competitive struggle between the various empire culture governments of Europe in a race to loot the planet. We have examined the extortion basis of the culture of empire. The system of extortion began with the biological slaves and went on to female slavery and general plantation slavery of humans as a production mechanism within society. In examining the recent history of what has become the world industrial empire, we will see that the techniques of coercion have only grown more efficient since Babylonian, Greek and Roman armies went out on slave hunting expeditions.

The development of mechanical technique (a.k.a. science) in important ways has been to facilitate and make more efficient the coercive extortion of fertility from the earth. We will see that those ruling the empires have never shrunk away from the most atrocious methods by which to obtain power. The quest for super-profits (economic power) has used slavery, drugs, munitions, the fomenting of war, sugar, rum and any other addictive, corrupting substance or product by which to gain control and wealth.

The morality of honesty, truthfulness, cooperation and sharing of the former forager/hunter culture existed on a functional basis. There was little hierarchical power to struggle for. The organized hunts and the running of the camp needed truthfulness to benefit all and there was no reason to lie to gain advantage. The carrying out of cooperative enterprise requires that everyone be truthful in order for it to succeed. In our former culture there was a real functional basis for that morality. After the inversion, lies, thievery, murder, selfishness, and slavery became the path of power for individuals and emperor/elites. As we review the history of colonialism we see that the espoused social morality is only a facade to quiet the masses while those who are really serious about the strategy of power practice what is necessary to maintain the huge disparity of power and wealth.

The Invasion of The Americas

"Like monkeys they seized upon the gold. They thirsted mightily for gold they stuffed themselves with it, and hungered and lusted for it like pigs."

-From the Florentine Codex of the Mayas, a Sixteenth Century Mayan account of the Spanish invasion of the Americas.

In the islands of the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus and his Spanish crew were met with hospitality. The indigenous people came out to the ships with flowers, food and friendship. Great feasts were celebrated in the travelers' honor. Columbus and his colleagues came to hold these people in awe.

He says, in his journals, that it had seemed to him that it would be good to take some persons, to carry to the sovereigns, so that "they might learn our tongue, so as to know what there is in the country, and so that when they come back they may be tongues to the Christians, and receive our customs and the things of the faith. Because I saw

and know," says the Admiral, "that this people has no religion nor are they idolaters, but very mild and without knowing what evil is, nor how to kill others, nor how to take them, and without arms, and so timorous that from one of our men ten of them fly, although they do sport with them, and ready to believe and knowing that there is a God in heaven, and sure that we have come from heaven; and very ready at any prayer which we tell them to repeat, and they make the sign of the cross.

"So your Highnesses should determine to make them Christians, for I believe that if they begin, in a short time they will have accomplished converting to our holy faith a multitude of towns.

"Without doubt there are in these lands the greatest quantities of gold, for not without cause do these Indians whom I am bringing say that there are places in these isles where they dig out gold and wear it on their necks, in their ears and on their arms and legs, and the bracelets are very thick."

Before Columbus had finished his several trips to the islands a gold mine had been established and five hundred natives had been carried away in captivity to Spain. Ultimately, because of the activities of Columbus, the islands and their inhabitants were devastated.

The Spanish led the assault on the cultures of the Americas, pursuing gold. Nothing highlights the materialism of the cultures of Europe better than the "gold fever" that grips minds conditioned by ideas of power and wealth. In 1519, Cortez and his followers stormed into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán lusting for the yellow metal. Historical records state that human blood ran through the streets of the capital for days. The records maintain that the Europeans and their native allies tired of the drudgery of butchering people day after day.

The invasion of Mexico proceeded and after the invasion of Mexico, the Spanish invaded the Mayan regions in Central America. Had the Spanish been a different people, had they not been fanatics of the collective ego of European culture who could not see the value of any other culture, they would have been able to understand the value of the cultures they destroyed. The vast knowledge of the people of these groups and the productive capacity of their societies would have been worth far more to Europe than all of the gold they carried away. The art, the collective creativity of several cultures, was melted down and shipped to Europe. In many cases the art had more value than the yellow metal with which it was created, but that concept was too sophisticated for the invaders to comprehend at the time.

The writings of the Aztecs and Mayans, including a vast storehouse of astronomical and cultural knowledge, were burned by the fanatical cleric, Bishop Diego De Landa. What is now known as the "Florentine Codex," quoted at the beginning of this chapter, was shipped to Europe where it remains today in the private library of the Vatican. Pizzaro, European invader of the Inca society, was motivated by such deficient morality that his troops were in the habit of murdering local Indians and then quartering their bodies to hang from the porches for dog food. Everywhere the Spanish employed the torture techniques of the Catholic Inquisition against native people.

Today the vast highways, agricultural systems and irrigation works of Inca society lie in disuse and disrepair. Even though Pizzaro could destroy Inca society and extract the gold, the Spanish were not competent to administer the region. The population in the former land of the Inca have not yet, to this day, attained the cultural vitality or living standards enjoyed in the days before the European invasion. The Aztec and Inca societies were empires themselves, in that they were hierarchical structures of power. They were also male-dominated.

The Aztecs depended upon tribute from conquered peoples and it appears from what we know about them that materialism was an incipient factor in their culture. The Incas on the other hand seemed to have created an aboriginal communism. In cases, the Inca system added tribes when they petitioned for admission and in cases negotiations brought in new groups. When the Inca system came to a new group, the Inca engineers would create new irrigation systems, roadways, storage structures for crops and other amenities for the local population. In return the locals paid a share of the produce, which was far less than the tax that was to come with the Spanish.

The Incas built sophisticated highways and irrigation systems that have yet to be equaled. By transporting guano (seabird manure) fertilizer from the Galapagos Islands up into the elaborate high mountain terrace agriculture, the Incas had created an ecological niche for themselves that provided stability, much like the stability created by the flooding of the Nile Valley in Egypt prior to the construction of the Aswan Dam.

The Mayan culture as a whole was not until its last days, based on military power. It was significantly different from that of either the Aztecs or Incas. It was not based upon the large irrigation systems or highways of the Incas, nor was it based upon conquest and tribute such as with the Aztecs. The Mayas were a rainforest culture that relied on sophisticated and sustainable rainforest horticulture, which was primarily decentralized. The ruins that remain in Central America were not population centers with markets and administrative apparatus but ceremonial centers for native religious/cultural practices.

After the Aztec gold was gone the Spanish continued their quest for precious metals, establishing mines in any area that seemed promising. Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Ixmiquilpan, Zimapan, Pachuca, Chaucingo, Temascaltepec, Tlalpujahua and Parral, in Mexico were denuded of vegetation for the smelters and of natives for the labor. When so many natives had been worked to death that there was danger that the mines might shut down, African slaves were imported to work the Mexican mines as they had been to work the plantations of the Caribbean after the natives had expired there.

The Spanish did not progress as rapidly in the tropical Central American region as they had in Aztec lands further north because of the rainforest and because there was a relative paucity of gold amassed in the Mayan ceremonial centers. The Spanish Empire did establish a thin European political hegemony all through the region on the coasts and the flat lands of Central America. A plantation economy, designed to extort the fertility of the soil with slave labor, was established in the more level areas where rainforest was cleared and the empire culture was able to gain a foothold.

From these bases, exports could be shipped and European products (especially military supplies) could be received, insuring continued European domination of the region. In this manner the imperial hierarchies became rooted in the area. Human slavery is identified with the plantation slavery of Africans in the social mind of empire. In actuality, empires themselves are institutionalized coercion and slavery. The hierarchical systems of order provide significant control of people while slavery is total control. This, in contrast with our former culture in which there were no police, jails or centralized power over others.

During the Spanish conquest the King of Spain would "give" large grants of land in the Americas to prominent conquistadors and colonists. All native people that existed on that land were also included. In practice the conquistadors enslaved those that were needed and killed drove away or sold the rest. Cortez, for example, received twenty-three thousand vassals (slaves) for his efforts in the conquest.¹

Though we call it by various euphemisms, the power relationships between the oligarchy and the peasants of El Salvador have not changed since the Indians were enslaved to work the original estates of that country. This remains true in much of Latin America where Indians are dominated in a system of violence, coercion and Latino racism. Modern armies supplied by the industrial state now enforce this caste-racial system. The difference in the colonial systems between "settler" countries like the U.S., Australia and New Zealand and "conquest" countries like El Salvador, Peru and Bolivia is that in the former, European settlers swarmed into the areas to create a society and economy that replicated the mother country but was centered in the colonial country. In the colonial style exhibited by El Salvador, Peru and Bolivia, the colonization was to profit by export to the mother country. This was in the style of the latifundia, the large state-owned and slave or peasant-worked farms of Roman times. The profit from this "landed estate" system goes to benefit a small elite who controls the land and the masses of the population. On the other hand, in the countries that began as smallholder-settler colonies, there were not the large factory-farm systems that could profit by cheap labor. Because of this, in the places like the U.S., if the natives could not be used as cheap labor on the settlers' farms and or industries, they were pushed away and confined or eliminated by wars of extermination.

In the "conquest" areas Natives were more likely to be worked to death. Historian Alanzo de Zorita describes conditions in the occupied territories of Mexico where the latifundia system was established:

"The collective tribute and labor demands of the Spanish settlers, the Crown, and the Church far exceeded the relatively puny exactions of the Aztec rulers, nobility, and priesthood. The more advanced European economy demanded a large increase in the supply of labor. The conquistadors or their sons became capitalist entrepreneurs with visions of limitless wealth to be obtained through silver mines, sugar and cacao plantations, cattle ranches, wheat farms. The intensity of exploitation of Indian labor became intolerable. And the Indians, their bodies enfeebled by excessive toil, malnutrition, and the hardships of long journeys to distant mines and plantations, their spirits broken by the loss of ancient tribal purposes and beliefs that gave meaning to life, became easy prey to disease, both endemic and epidemic, to maladies with which they were familiar and to scourges imported by the Europeans: smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, malaria. A demographic tragedy of frightful proportions resulted. The Indian population of Mexico, according to a recent estimate based on published tribute records, declined from approximately 16,871,408 in 1532 to 2,649,573 in 1568, 1,372,228 in 1595, and 1,069,255 in 1608.

"Technological changes of Spanish origin contributed to this disaster. A horde of Spanish-imported cattle and sheep swarmed over the Mexican land, often invading not only the land vacated by the declining Indian population but also the reserves of land needed by the Indian system of field rotation. The introduction of plow agriculture, less productive than Indian hoe agriculture per unit of land, and Spanish diversion of scarce water resources from Indian fields to their own fields, cattle ranches, and flour mills, also tended to upset the critical balance between land and people in Indian Mexico."²

It is estimated that Mexico was heavily forested on over half of its land area at the start of the conquest. Now less than 10% is forested and that is swiftly being destroyed. The process of empire culture has reduced present-day Mexico to a bare skeleton. The only thing of value in that region that can be dug up and sold today is the oil from the ground. Most of the land of Mexico is in an advanced state of eco-death, while its impoverished population explodes. Population doubling time in Mexico is now 25 years. A large share of the Natives died in the mines that the Spanish quickly opened after the Aztec and Inca treasures were hauled away. Eduardo Galeano in his Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, tells of Potosí in the present country of Bolivia. Potosí is now a relic but it was once a huge city of splendor, living from the silver mines in the area. In 1650, Potosí was one of the biggest and richest cities in the world. Luxuries from the far-flung parts of the empire were shipped to Potosí in return for silver. The luxuries of the Colonial Europeans were generated by the enslavement of the native society. Galeano says that in three centuries the mines of Potosí consumed eight million Indian lives. He says that: "Many people claimed mestizo status before the court to avoid being sent to the mines and sold and resold on the market."³

"The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million. When the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million."⁴

The land of Mexico, Central America and Latin America is still, with the exception of Cuba and Nicaragua, owned and controlled by very small but powerful elites. Large modern plantations still generate wealth for the colonial elites and their allies, the bankers and industrialists of the First World.

The Onset of Machine Culture

Modern European imperialism may be said to have begun with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests during the late 1400's and early 1500's. Originally, the European conquests simply replicated European feudalism on new continents, continuing a pattern of imperialism not unlike that of Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and other Indo-European imperial predecessors, or the Han Chinese. But something new was afoot upon the earth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the Spanish and Portuguese consolidated their colonies in Latin America, Africa and Southern Asia, a change began to occur in Europe, which is now called the Industrial Revolution.

Fueled by transworld trade promoted by a new and growing class of mercantilists, the Industrial Revolution was to simultaneously alter European peasant society almost beyond recognition and to ensure the destruction of native cultures worldwide. The pattern of empire is to conquer peripheral territories, rape them, and ship the valuables to the center of the empire, to feed its further expansion. The initial purpose of the Spanish Empire was to get gold. Gold was the premium article because it could be absorbed easily by the mother country. But ultimately, in order to efficiently absorb the food and fiber shipments that were being drained from the colonies, the infrastructures of the imperial centers were going to have to change. The industrial revolution solved this problem neatly by initiating the pattern of industrialism that exists today.

A mechanized industrial society could use much greater inputs of imported resources than could a feudal society. Industry allowed more types of resources to be utilized. The new machines began to process those raw materials and turn them into finished, manufactured items. While most of the production enriched Europe, some was shipped back to the colonies for sale at high prices, which further exploited the colonies. Colonial governments displaced natives from their traditional means of survival, and actively discouraged European colonists and natives from developing their own cottage industries, thus forcing the colonies to purchase European manufactured goods. (This type of exploitation was eventually to spawn the Boston Tea Party in America.

The famous Swadeshi movement of Mahatma Gandhi, formed in British-colonized India during the late 1800's, aimed to reclaim the economic power of the spinning wheel back at the cottage level. The British had prohibited many cottage industries including home cloth making in India because they wanted to create consumers for manufactured items like the cloth produced by the textile industry of England. The Swadeshi slogan was, "production by the masses, not mass production.")

The End of Peasant Subsistence Culture

The shift to markets and a manufacturing economy dismembered peasant subsistence culture all over Europe. The machine and its cultural accouterments was the last lever to pry Europeans away from any remaining natural relationship to the land and to organic reality. Europe in the Middle Ages was still largely an agrarian society. The feudal lords of Europe jostled each other for power, wealth and territory, but the organization of society had not yet attained complete dependence on gold as the organizing principle of the society. Currency and markets had not yet become all powerful.

In their daily lives, the medieval peasantry conducted a human community-centered society with extended family systems. Despite centuries of domination by Roman and post-Roman civilized thought forms, and despite the fact that the peasants themselves had descended from invading patriarchal Indo-European tribes such as the Celts, Angles, Saxons, and others, fifteenth-century European peasant society retained significant qualities of ancient human culture. People shared food and took some responsibility for each other. Individual starvation seldom occurred. Peasant society was a subsistence community devoted to the feeding, housing and care of its members. The peasants' relationship to the land was strong and carried with it limited rights. Society had not yet become a market economy. Yet the essence of medieval peasant society had degraded vastly from tribal hunter-forager existence. These people were the inheritors of thousands of years of Indo-European divergence from Natural culture. They lived in a society structured by hierarchy and patriarchy, where the elite accumulated material wealth and power by pursuing military adventure. Peasant surpluses, "the rent" enriched an elite class of landed nobles and royalty.

Patriarchy appears to be endemic to Indo-European culture. The root language, which linguists call Indo-European, was spoken at least ten thousand years ago by peoples in the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia. Linguist Emile Beneviste writes of the primacy of paternity over maternity, "All the facts up to now prompt us to recognize the primacy of the concept of paternity in Indo-European."⁵ Beneviste finds no female counterpart to the formal word for father in the original Indo-European language. His linguistic study points to "the non-existence of any legal status for the mother in Indo-European society. The absence of a word matrius as a counterpart to patrius may be cited."⁶ Strict patriarchy certainly characterizes the cultures of Indo-European linguistic groups from India to England. A steady swing of the axe had gone on in Europe for thousands of years after invading Indo-Europeans displaced the ancient forager/hunters who had populated Europe. Cattle, sheep, and goats, brought into Europe with the Indo-European cultural groups, cannot well utilize forests. Cereal grains, the basis of the Indo-European cultural metabolism, cannot be grown unless the forest is cut down and open fields established. Because this metabolism depends upon good soils for their agriculture, we find them in many areas where forests had formerly existed.

After the Thirteenth Century AD, when the Arabs invaded the Iberian peninsula, heavy sheep grazing became part of the culture of Spain, spreading from there to Italy. The forests of these areas went down to create grasslands for grazing, resulting in severe soil erosion. As European empires developed, the forests were increasingly decimated for smelting and shipbuilding for foreign trade and war fleets as well as being cleared for agriculture. The introduction of industrial machinery to weave cloth in England in the Sixteenth Century created a flourishing cloth and wool industry there. The English quickly became the leaders in the Industrial Revolution. As the English drew resources out of their new colonies, they manufactured items such as cloth for sale back to the colonies. Large supplies of cotton and wool were necessary. These were obtained from Europe and from colonies such as Egypt and what is now the southeastern United States. European land-based peasants and gentry alike began to be cashiered from the land by industrialists who needed the land to produce raw materials for industry, such as to raise sheep to supply the new woolen mills.

Dispossessed peasants were forced into the swelling labor pool of the young industrial system. Land and humans were becoming commodities for sale on the labor markets and commercial markets of the industrial empire. People did not give themselves up to the labor market easily. The bulk of the peasantry produced most of what they needed from their own plots and by their own effort. They had little relation to the money (market) economy and little incentive to work in the horrible conditions of the factories. Commentators of the day noted that higher wages produced less work. The reason was simple if wages were high, people would more rapidly gain the little they needed for subsistence and would quit sooner. The laboring classes were still of peasant culture. They produced most of what they needed within their families and had not yet developed unlimited needs or desires for material wealth that would keep them at the wheel indefinitely. Economic historian Karl Polanyi writes:

"The Lyons manufacturers of the eighteenth century urged low wages primarily for social reasons. Only an overworked and downtrodden laborer, they argued, would forgo to associate with his comrades and escape the condition of personal servitude under which he could be made to do whatever his master required from him. Legal compulsion and parish serfdom as in England, the rigors of an absolutist labor police as on the continent, indented labor as in the early Americas were the prerequisites of the 'willing worker.' But the final stage was reached with the application of 'nature's penalty,' hunger. In order to release it [labor] it was necessary to liquidate organic society, which refused to permit the individual to starve." ⁷

In England, as in many other European countries, parcels of land, and the people on the land, were divided up among landowning nobles. In cultural practice, however, feudal society functioned somewhat like a large family. The peasants had obligations to the baron and the baron had obligations to the peasantry, especially to provide military protection. In this large, somewhat communal family, land tenure was not based on the concept of private property but was held according to "traditional use," a complex of culturally sanctioned arrangements. The agreements of traditional use were destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly the English land barons began to say, "I own this land and now I want the peasants removed." The notorious English "enclosure laws" of the sixteenth century stripped peasants of the forest and pasturelands that they had traditionally held in common with the aristocracy.

The numbers of poor and wandering homeless rose. Polanyi writes of this period:

"Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted. Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves. Though this happened only in patches, the black spots threatened to melt into a uniform catastrophe."⁸

Vagrancy laws were also instituted at this time. It became a crime not to have money. This was particularly directed toward the self-sufficient peasantry because, though they were well fed and housed, they participated only marginally in the money economy. Their domestic industry was land-based, not market-based. Though they were self-sufficient, according to the new laws they were vagrants, and as such were rounded up and sent to the poorhouses where they were rented out as workers to the monied landowners and factory owners. (Vagrancy laws continued to be enforced in the U.S. as late as the 1950's.)

The slums of the new industrial towns were filled with former peasants who were now little more than slaves. Polanyi describes their plight:

"Local authorities were gladly taking advantage of the unexpected demand of the cotton mills for destitute children whose apprenticing was left to the care of the parish. Many hundreds were indented with manufacturers, often in distant parts of the country. Altogether the new towns developed a healthy appetite for paupers. Factories were even prepared to pay for the use of the poor. Adults were assigned to any employer who would take them for their keep just as they would be billeted out in turn amongst the farmers of the parish, in one or another form of the roundsman system. Farming out was cheaper than the running of 'gaols without guilt,' as workhouses were sometimes called."⁹

What had been accomplished was a pattern as old as empire, separate self-sufficient people from the land and force them into dependency on the food distribution of the elite. In recent centuries this means being forced into the money economy controlled by the elite. In older times this meant depriving forager/hunters of the use of their traditional gathering areas.

By 1700 the wealth of Europe was concentrated in a few hands and the poverty of the masses was well advanced. By that time subsistence culture was doomed, the power of the nobles was on the decline, and the entrepreneurial "gentlemen farmers" and wealthy industrialists had the upper hand.

Waves of social revolution swept Europe throughout the twelfth through eighteenth centuries. These various and diverse movements, including the Luddites, the Levellers, the Diggers, the Chartists, the Quakers, and others, were spiritually based. They were usually anti-materialist in the sense that they were a move toward a social form of communalism, which incorporated the sharing of meals and property. The impulse toward communalism and anti-materialism was strong. Resistance to the shredding of the last of human social environments as represented by feudalism caused constant revolt and even at times, civil war. Occasionally, whole areas and cities were taken over by these groups. The popes and royalty put these affronts to hierarchy and elitism down by bringing out armies to massacre the participants. Even so, spiritual heirs of these movements continue to attempt to return to a more natural way of life, even to this day.

The Conquest of Rationalism

"Progress," "development" and "productivity" were the intellectual banners of the new entrepreneurial class as it attacked traditional society. A social movement developed, led by the commercial interests whose rallying cry was "free markets" and "unfettered freedom of action for commerce." Then, as now, the touted benefits went largely to the new industrial class, as the numbers of the poor and dispossessed grew. As poverty increased among the masses, the industrialists secured their hold on society. Foreign trade, foreign adventurism and imperialism increased. Most of us have been taught in our schools to regard this era of industrial assault as a time of great progress but it was only "progress" for the elite.

The philosophers of the new movement were the "rationalists." The rationalists believed that human "reason" should be the basis of human conduct. They were set in opposition to the "traditionalists" of various stripes, who accepted truth based on revelation, the Christian Bible, tradition, other "non-scientific" beliefs, or on the remnants of aboriginal knowledge still in the culture. The products of mechanical invention and the new empirical-experimental science continually revolutionized industrial expansion. The vitality of life came to be perceived as the rigid functioning of chemical processes and the earth was perceived as a machine, a giant clock. As scientists projected the new society's thought-forms onto the universe, the mystery and awe of life evaporated. Science and industry promulgated a world-view, which turned millions of years of human culture, on its head. Now consciously seeking to "subdue" Nature, they waged social war against tradition.

Women were singled out as enemies of the new rationalism. For centuries European village women had retained and passed on remnants of the knowledge of pre-Roman, pre-Christian culture. Women were often powerful figures in peasant village life, maintaining the stability of the people's relationship to the land by practicing their knowledge of healing, of herbs, of the natural life of the earth. The power of these women had long stymied the efforts of the patriarchal Church of Rome to control the peasantry. Now the church, the mercantile state, and the new philosophers of rational "science" joined forces in a largely successful assault of torture and murder aimed at physically eradicating all remaining practitioners of natural healing arts. A bloody convulsion of state- and church- sponsored witch-hunts took place throughout Europe during the sixteenth century. In the several countries for which we have records, over 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft, over 80 per cent of them women.¹⁰ In some cases; female populations of whole villages were tortured to death. The Christian hate propaganda, an early example of the cover-ups and misinformation campaigns of the type which today are used to rationalize the murder of the last tribal peoples on earth, masked, and continues to mask, the true aim of the witch hunts: to finally stamp out Natural culture.

The concept of "progress" is really the old mythos of linear increase dressed in new clothing. People believed that commerce, science, industrialism and the conquest of the inferior by the superior would cause the human family to continually improve its condition (and by the end of the sixteenth century the lot of most of human society in Europe desperately needed improving!). Not even the most rash would say that there would ever be any end to the linear increase of wealth and its benefits created by marketing and technology. It appeared that progress would be infinite, even to the stars. Thus Europeans, en masse, fell victim to the imperialist belief system and the subliminal justification for empire became ingrained in the culture.

Europe Explodes Across the Earth

In 1800 well over half of the earth was populated by tribal, hunter-forager people. These people had maintained their cultural patterns since Pleistocene times. These cultures, which emphasize balance with the natural world, had stable populations. It was against this background of stability that the European Empire exploded.

In Europe the social and environmental disruption caused by empire culture was accelerated dramatically by the Industrial Revolution. It created a population explosion. Demographers estimate that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the doubling time of the "civilized" world population was approximately once every 250 years, a rate of increase that had generally remained stable back into the distant past. Between 1850 and 1930 world population doubled -in 80 years. The populations of the U.S., Canada, Australia and Argentina tripled between 1850 and 1900. During the nineteenth century the world population of Europeans, including both the inhabitants of the European continent and the overseas colonials, increased between three and four times as fast as the native populations of other continents.¹¹ Today, in the 1980's, the world population doubling time is estimated to be only 33 years and is falling. The reasons for this human population increase may be discerned by studying natural life. Stability prevails in undisturbed natural systems. Species populations of a stable ecosystem remain in balance with one another. When the ecosystem is injured or destroyed, food sources are thrown out of balance. Some foods become more abundant while others disappear, causing the populations of some species to expand while others diminish or become extinct. For a time the ecosystem experiences upheaval, as out-of-balance populations experiencing unchecked growth, swell, exhaust food sources, and crash. Slowly, after a natural disruption, such as a volcanic eruption, the system heals and stability returns.

In Europe, centuries of human disturbance had depleted the land, and human populations had already suffered several large expansions followed by dramatic crashes caused by plagues. By the sixteenth century, human populations of Europe were just recovering from the decimation of the latter waves of medieval plague. During the time when human populations had plummeted, the resilient European landscape, especially the forests, had recovered somewhat from the depredations of farming, and mining inflicted upon it in previous centuries. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution the commercial interests quickly exploited the health of the land of Europe but there was a new development, the imported raw materials. The new inflow of raw materials from the colonies swelled the productive capacity of European society beyond anything previously imagined. Despite the general misery, the population of Europe increased.

One of the great services the colonization of North America performed for Europe was the export of European population. Had not massive transfers of the exploding European population occurred, sooner or later the progressively impoverished masses of Europe may have achieved their growing demands that the rich share food and wealth. By exporting masses of population the European elite could keep its wealth and control, and the colonists would generate even more wealth from abroad to enrich the empire. This is one of the reasons that elites of all empires demand growth. If there is a growth situation, the people experience increases and don't demand what the elite have. At the same time, if the pie is growing, the elite's percentage share grows faster and the new shares at the bottom come from growth and not from the accumulations of the elite.

Between 1820 and 1930 Europe exported more than 50 million people, one-fifth of the population.¹² Thirty-five million people were exported from Europe in the last half of the Nineteenth Century alone. During approximately that same period, tribal populations worldwide declined precipitously. Anthropologist John H. Bodley writes:

"...It might be conservatively estimated that during the 150 years between 1780 and 1930 world tribal populations were reduced by at least thirty million as a direct result of the spread of industrial civilization. A less conservative and probably more realistic estimate would place the figure at perhaps fifty million." ¹²

The varying estimates of world tribal populations are partially a result of newer research. As the European conquest proceeded, there were many areas into which they spilled that were "empty." Like the wild horse that proceeded the European-human arrival on the Great Plains of North America by centuries, human diseases from Europe raced ahead of the conquerors. In his work, Ecological Imperialism, Alfred W. Crosby shows that when Cortez was retaking the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs holding the city were already and at the same time undergoing a severe epidemic of smallpox. By the time Pizzaro came to ravage the Incas, smallpox had already been there and decimated the population.

Crosby states that:

"The disease often spread far beyond the European frontier, often to people who had barely heard of the white invaders. Smallpox probably reached the Puget Sound area on the northwest Pacific coast in 1782 or 1783, a part of the world then as distant from the main centers of human population as any place on earth. When the explorer George Vancouver sailed into the Sound in 1793, he found Amerindians with pockmarked faces, and human bones scattered along the beach at Port Discovery - skulls, limbs, ribs, backbones - so many as to produce the impression that this was 'a general cemetery for the whole of the surrounding country.' He judged that 'at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present.' It was an assessment that he could accurately have extended to the entire continent."¹³

The toll of the human massacre that was the European -industrial colonization of the earth was in the multiple tens of millions. The conservative anthropological guess that makes estimates from tribes now existing, is thirty million. From the public health view of Crosby this may be boosted to well over one hundred million people. Whatever the monstrous statistics are, we should be alerted that this is the most incredible murder of human populations that has ever happened on the planet. Also it should be noted that in our cultural reality this has gone into the memory vacuum. The significance of this mass murder occupies little space in history books and the public has little understanding that their colonies are based in such dimensions of death.

Given the respective cultural assumptions held by invader and native about life and reality, there was and is no way that the two views of life could live side by side. The one lives stably in its habitat, the living world. The other eats up the living world for its growth. The European existed in a mental-cultural realm of products and beliefs attached to the cultural centers of Europe. The tribal native represented the antithesis of what European culture described as the "proper" way to live. In many cases it was difficult for the Europeans to view the natives as actual human beings. In some areas the natives were consciously worked to death, and in many areas were hunted like game animals. In the early Anglo settlement of California, for example, parties of gentlemen hunters often gathered in San Francisco to go out "hunting" the peaceful natives in the northern part of the state. The programming and conditioning of the culture of empire is so profound that even today it is difficult for the person of industrial culture to see a human being of another culture who is lacking money or high-priced manufactured possessions, as significant.

The truly horrible things done by the Nazis to the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and anti-fascists during the holocaust are held up to the world as an extreme example of human inhumanity to human, and deservedly so. This inhumanity happened to white-skinned people of European culture and so is deemed nightmarish by the civilized mind. Little notice is taken by the "official" histories of the tens of millions of native victims of the atrocities during expansion of the European Empire. The colonizers of the empire on the frontier periphery functioned in a vacuum of official attention, and in many cases enjoyed official complicity while doing their killing and torturing of natives. The "frontier" industrial culture settlers were armed with the latest machine made weapons from the factories of Europe. Native people of the world were little prepared to roll back the invasion.

There were those back in the capitals of Europe and in the colonies that began to clothe these thefts of land and killing of alien people, in theological, moral and legalistic phrases. In his study of the legal relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. government, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, Vine DeLoria Jr. points out that the early Puritans claimed the biblical edict of "go forth and multiply" as the reason that they should take native land. As there was no room in Europe to "go forth and multiply," therefore God must have meant them to come to North America.¹⁴ To a European of that time and to a transnational corporation of our time, the idea that human beings can live on the earth without substantially altering and "developing" it is absurd. When empire culture people encounter tribal hunter-forager people who live on the earth without altering it, they assume that the land is not being "used." They refer to it as "wilderness" and abhor this condition. To the European, it is clearly justifiable to take land not being put to "proper use" in order to make it "productive" through farming or herding. DeLoria exposes one of the big myths in European culture- the myth that when native people are exposed to the "obviously superior" culture of the empire they will voluntarily give up their culture and join the invader's culture.

This myth contradicts the worldwide warfare with native people, which has taken place throughout the imperial-industrial expansion. This myth is supported by the basic assumption of the imperial psyche that its own culture is superior to all others. This in turn is supported by the competitive social Darwinist view, which further twisted the nineteenth-century notion of "survival of the fittest" into the idea that those who muscled their way to the top of social hierarchies were obviously the "fittest" to rule. (Nazism and fascism developed logically from this thought.) DeLoria goes to the heart of the matter when he says: "One of the final and more sophisticated arguments for taking the lands of the aboriginal peoples involved the transmission of the benefits of civilization to the uncivilized. Taking the lands by whatever means possible was justifiable because, in return, the Indians were receiving the great benefits of Western Civilization, which had allowed the European peoples to create such military and economic power as to make it possible for them to dispossess other peoples."¹⁵

The advancement of the frontier of the empire of industrial civilization took a uniform pattern throughout the world. First, all easily transported valuables were shipped to the mother country, then settlers were needed to work the land and obtain the raw materials of the area. Finally, the labor of the enslaved natives was necessary, if that was appropriate to the use of that land. When plantation agriculture was instituted, when mining was to be pursued, or rubber gathering carried out, it was planned and presumed by all colonial authorities that this labor would be carried out by native labor. The justification? John H. Bodley recounts an opinion delivered in 1921:

"The American legal authority, Alpheus Snow, pointed out that natives simply lack the acquisitive drive characteristic of civilized man, and doing virtually anything that will correct this mental deficiency is permissible and even a moral duty of the state."¹⁶

The global expansion of the industrial empire was proceeded by armed violence and was followed by missionaries and government administrators who performed the function of destroying native culture. In the U.S., the practice of any religion other than Christianity by the subjugated natives was outlawed for many years. In Soviet Russia, Bodley describes how the Soviet industrialists actually created a Lenin-Stalin cult that was used to destroy native cultures of the East, deemed inimical to "progress." Soviet government functionaries circulated printed material and pictures representing Lenin and Stalin as all powerful solar deities to replace tribal shamanism.¹⁷ All over the world where the European empire intruded, millions died. In the 1890's, Germans swarmed over the cattle-herding Herero tribes of the Southwest African region now known as Namibia. By 1906 the original Herero population of 300,000 had been reduced to 20,000 landless fugitives, following numerous massacres and unequal battles between tribespeople with spears and German soldiers with guns and cannons. One of the leaders of that territorial government, Paul Rohrbach, proclaimed the imperial position in 1907, after ordering native herdsmen to turn over their grazing lands to white European settlers:

"...The native tribes must withdraw from the lands on which they have pastured their cattle and so let the White man pasture his cattle on these self-same lands. If the moral right of this standpoint is questioned, the answer is that for people of the culture standard of the South African Natives, the loss of their free national barbarism and the development of a class of workers in the service of and dependent on the Whites is primarily a law of existence in the highest degree. For a people, as for an individual, an existence appears to be justified in the degree that it is useful in the progress of general development. By no argument in the world can it be shown that the preservation of any degree of national independence, national prosperity and political organization by the races of South West Africa would be of greater or even of equal advantage for the development of mankind in general or the German people in particular than that these races should be made serviceable in the enjoyment of their former territories by the White races."¹⁸

This is an example of the types of encounters that happened daily on a worldwide basis, for centuries- and still continue wherever there are aboriginal people remaining.

Slavery and Empire

In the culture of empire, with its social hierarchies, the society is a system of extortion of humans and nature. Given this reality it is difficult to establish a set definition of slavery other than the outright chattel slavery of the plantation system where masses of humans were purchased solely as labor power. The mass system of slavery, which powered the Roman Empire finally ended but the serf system of European land tenure, in its hierarchical nature, was a system of coerced labor to a considerable degree. Some actual buying and selling of European people continued into the times of the Middle Ages. European slavery in the pre-industrial days was more akin to indebted servitude or debt peonage. Slaves of European origin were sold in the port cities of the Mediterranean, traded into North Africa and the Mid-East. For their part, some stratified societies of Africa also sold slaves into North Africa and Europe. In those stratified societies of both Europe and Africa, the social definition of a slave was not what it was with "plantation slavery" or "industrial slavery." The authority on the history of slavery, Basil Davidson describes the type of slavery that existed just prior to the development of the mass African slave trade that paralleled the development of the industrial revolution:

"As in Africa, so in Europe: the medieval slave, in one as in the other, was a captive who could win access to a system of mutual duty and obligation that bound noble and commoner together. And what went for the manners of society went for the morals of the merchants too - whether in Europe or Africa. European traders sold their fellow-countrymen to the overseas states of Egypt and North Africa. Pressured by the need for European goods, the lords of Africa began to sell their own folk to the mariners who came from Europe."¹⁹

When the Europeans and in particular the Portuguese, arrived in the 1500's on the west coast of Africa they encountered "kingdoms" in some places, stratified African societies. These were peoples who generally had been influenced by the patriarchal/hierarchical cultures of Islam. They were generally contiguous to the Islamic influenced areas of Sahara, Sudan and Ethiopia. These stratified African societies were by no means universal. Many African societies existed without kingships or other centralizing institutions of political or economic power.²⁰

The initial source of slaves was from the stratified African societies. The early beginnings of the trade in the mid-1400's quickly began to dwarf any slave trade that had gone before. No longer were a few slaves on a ship filled with cargo but whole ships full of slaves began to ply the trade. The Portuguese trade began by purchasing slaves from the Kingdoms on the West Coast of Africa. These kingdoms held slaves, most of who were captured in war. This grew into industrial slavery, not the kind where a few people were added onto a feudal barony but the kind of mass system where the millions of slaves were absolutely enslaved in an imperial plantation and production system in the money economy.

As native populations of the New World dwindled, in areas of mass slavery such as the mines of Mexico, the plantations of the Caribbean Islands and the plantations of the Southeastern U.S., colonialists imported human slaves to help them enslave the earth, as it were. They turned accessible flat areas into huge monocultures to produce products for export to Europe. After the purchase price, the labor of slaves was practically free. The great demand for slaves made super profits for the slave traders. One of the first Englishmen to develop the market in African slaves (in the mid-1500's) was John Hawkins, rumored to be Queen Elizabeth's lover. After he spent many energetic years in the slave trade, Elizabeth knighted him for his efforts. During the award ceremony, she described his labor in the colonies as: "Going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."²¹

When the supply of slaves purchased from African kingdoms was not large enough, slavers began to raid the coast. At first the slavers, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese, could simply put ashore on the coast of West Africa and begin raiding villages. As the coast became devastated they began to move inland. E.D. Morel in his classic, Black Man's Burden, says that:

"The trade had grown so large that mere kidnapping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighborhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organization of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community."²²

There is no accurate count of the number of slaves taken. Morel indicates that the British alone transported three million between 1666 and 1766, to British, French and Spanish American colonies. One quarter of a million people died on the voyages when these three million were transported and it is estimated that one-third of those on the land route to the slave shipment ports on the coast of Africa died. We may assume that many millions of lives were involved and the lives of many others were disrupted or extinguished after their villages were devastated and crops ruined. Some slave raiding by Arabs in Africa, for the Mid-East market runs far back into history and that total will never be known either, but the medieval and later era can be traced somewhat by historians from written records. The historian Basil Davidson estimates that the complete toll of humans transported out of Africa over the many years into slavery, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, may run up toward fifty million people.

Slavery was institutionalized within the social system of Europe. Given the belief in their superiority and the general ideology of an expansionist, conquering empire, civilized people committed the most horrifying acts. E.D. Morel quotes a personal report, an account of a day in the life of a slaver:

"Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people."²³

In a culture where the lot of the common English sailor differed from that of a slave only by degree, and the condition of a child laborer working 15 hours a day and living in the slums, was similar, it was easy for the European population to accept slavery. Slavery was widely accepted and condoned. Even religions got into the business. Morel says that at least one missionary offshoot of a major church was involved. He says that the, "'Society for propagating Christianity,' including half the Episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in 'teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men.'"²⁴

European slave traders constantly fomented wars between tribes. They thus created lucrative markets for European-made arms while reaping a harvest of slaves for sale from the victors. At times guns were traded to one group in order to create markets with other groups who scrambled to get guns to redress the balance of power. Like the slave trade, the arms industry produced super profits for imperial exploiters.

Apologists of slavery have said that the slave's lot was good because they were cared for and protected as property, something that the lowly wage laborer was not. Morel gives a short report from one slave holding region: "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."²⁵

Many areas of the world that were once used in the plantation/slave production system are now ecologically destroyed. The island of Haiti, prior to the European expansion for example, was once a rich and dense tropical rainforest inhabited by Natural culture people. First the new invaders' plantations worked virtually all the native labor to death. African slaves were then imported and replaced by more African slaves as they in turn were worked to death. The replaceable cheap labor provided by the slave trade enabled exploitation of the land to intensify at an unprecedented rate. Finally, toward the end of the era of mass slavery, the slaves of Haiti revolted and established their own government. The population began to grow and as it grew the last of the natural ecosystem was eliminated. To survive, people were forced to cultivate more and more fragile areas. As the mountainsides were deforested, severe erosion began.

The island of Haiti is now a barren ecological sink, populated by hungry people who can only drive it into further ecological collapse in their attempt to survive. Similarly, soils in the southeastern U.S. have not recovered from the overuse and erosion engendered by the plantation slavery-driven cotton plantations of the same era.

In many cities of the Greek Empire more than half the population were slaves. The same condition obtained in the Babylonian Empire. We see the dynamics of the culture arranged so that it is a monolithic system of extortion of biological energy. The energy comes from the soil, the plant world, animals and the human population. The modern industrial system is simply a refinement of these dynamics. The semantics have changed but the patriarchal/hierarchical system continues to funnel energy to the elite. Now, though they may be called office workers, factory workers or even scientists who labor in the laboratories of "defense" contractors, their power and wealth relationship to the elite is the same.

The World-Wide Extermination of Natural Culture

In the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, while the "mopping up" of the tribal populations and the invasion of their habitats was in progress in the U.S., a similar war using the Remington rifle, was going on in South America against the Araucanian, Puelche and Tehuelche tribes of the pampas and the Araucanians of Chile. These tribes were almost exterminated outright, leaving only a handful to dwindle away. Human slavery had been abolished in many countries in the mid- to late, 1800's because of the outcry by sympathetic groups in Europe and the U.S. Because of rising awareness of brutality in the colonies, the activities on the "frontier" and military conquests such as Cuba and the Philippines were increasingly described to the public as "civilizing," "opportunities for primitives to work and learn the value of money," and "moral and material regeneration." A large protracted war, primarily fought by settlers from England and Scotland was conducted against the native Maori of New Zealand in the 1860's and 1870's, while the British and other colonialist countries fought wars against hill tribes all across Southeast Asia, through the foothills of the Himalayas and into the Hindu Kush toward Afghanistan. In Bangladesh and in India efforts are still underway to dominate the last remaining tribal peoples which the British Colonial Administration was unable to subdue completely.

In Southeast Asia the assault on tribal groups continues to this day. In Formosa, in the early 1900's, the incipient industrial empire of Japan used their armed forces to invade the land of the aboriginal Formosans who had been holding out against the Chinese settlers. After conducting warfare against the natives for some years they finally ended the native resistance by using heavy cruisers at sea to bombard the villages with cannons. In other areas such as Australia, the South Sea Islands, Siberia, Tasmania, Lapland, Africa, the cold regions and equatorial regions of the Americas and the rainforest regions of Southeast Asia there were many little wars or in other cases Natural people were simply overwhelmed and pushed aside. Even with increased public awareness of what was taking place in the colonies, the slave trade known as "blackbirding" captured native South Sea Islanders and sold them for labor in the plantations of Queensland, Australia. This trade endured for 50 years, between 1860 and 1910. The anthropologist John Bodley estimates that 60,000 people were successfully enslaved. A large percentage of these were killed or died from diseases brought by the slavers.

These practices were presented to the public mind and world press as "contract labor."²⁶ The genocide of native tribal hunter-foragers goes on today in India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, Paraguay, Chile and in the Amazon jungle, carried out by militaries, industrial interests or settlers. The perpetrators continue to justify their behavior in the traditional manner, as the modern empire assaults life in its manifold forms. Human slavery is only an extreme form of what is basic to imperial society itself, the overt or subtle coercion of the masses to produce surpluses for the elite. It is the purpose of empire to conquer and enslave. Some modification of coercion was used on all native peoples who were needed as labor for the productive process. The whole intent was to conquer other lands and make them rewarding for the imperial elite, either by native labor or the labor of the exported poor of Europe. Even without personal, private ownership of other human beings, the very existence of colonies, where the native people are forced into a style of life that serves the material and social interest of the invaders, is a form of slavery.

Historically, the super-profits from guns, drugs, rum, sugar and slaves have driven imperialism. When we look at the vast amount of historical detail we see that there is no limit on murder, torture, pain and destruction that the culture of empire will impose in order to further its ends. It has finally culminated in a situation where whole imperial societies are dependent for their survival upon the ravishing of other societies and other landmasses. A culture that will murder millions in the process of looting whole continents will stop at nothing. Substances that have a compulsive and addictive chemical reaction in the human body have been especially profitable. Galeano says that the Inca Empire distributed coca leaves during ceremonial days but that when the Spanish had established themselves, they began to push the drug and tax it. He says:

"In Cuzco four hundred Spanish merchants lived off the coca traffic. Every year one hundred thousand baskets with a million kilos of coca-leaf entered the Potosí silver mines. The Church took a tax from the drug."²⁷

In Asia the imperialists found opium. They took this addictive substance, greatly increased its production and turned it into an instrument of foreign policy.

Opium and Empire

The old degenerate empires of Asia fell to modern colonialism, just as did the world's tribal populations.

After Britain's colonial concessionaire, the East India Company, had consolidated control of India, it began to import tea from China. In 1715, the English established a trading center outside the city walls of Canton. The English Empire soon became habituated to Chinese tea. By 1830 the East India Company was making a profit of one million, pound sterling per year, from the China tea trade. The tax on tea levied by the British government was beginning to represent a substantial base of the government budget. The importation of tea soon became a fundamental element of the British economy, but the other side of the equation was deficient. The English could find very little that the Chinese were interested in buying. There was nothing that the Europeans had that the Chinese wanted. The English had tried selling wool and cotton in China, but the Chinese already had fine silks and cotton of their own. The New England Yankees did strike a small bonanza when they discovered that the Chinese would buy seal pelts. In twenty-seven years they nearly wiped out the seal populations of the Falkland Islands and the Aleutian Islands. By 1830, when the seal breeding grounds had been destroyed, that trade collapsed.

As the tea trade grew, the English treasury began to be drained of its silver, which was the only currency the Chinese traders would accept. The balance of payments problem became severe. The English searched for something that they could sell in China to get the silver back. Opium became the answer to the English dilemma. Not only could opium return super-profits from those addicted to the drug but it helped soften-up Chinese society for the penetration of English imperialism (and the other colonial empires trying to nudge their way into the massive "China market").

The French and Dutch had been the first in the opium trade in the mid-1700's, purchasing huge volumes in Bengal. The Dutch in particular used it as a political tactic against Indonesia, whose populations were resisting the imposition of the plantation system in their area. The Dutch flooded Indonesia with opium and then after the social disintegration, were able to take it over. The English saw the success of this tactic. When Bengal fell to the English Empire the East India Company then had a monopoly on the opium trade and they encouraged additional production in new areas of India. Jack Beeching, in his history, The Chinese Opium Wars, says: "In 1782 there had been no sale for the cargo of Bengal opium that Warren Hastings had sent hopefully to Canton. By 1830, the opium trade there was probably the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world." ²⁸

The East India Company was not inclined to miss a chance for profits. They began also to import opium into England for the home population. Soon opium was sold in England in packets of powder and in liquid elixirs called generically, laudanum. Commercial preparations at the retail level were wearing such trade names as Godfrey's Cordial and Mother Bailey's quieting Syrup.²⁹ In the United States where the drug was also legally sold; there were 120,000 opium addicts by 1875.³⁰

By 1700, Chinese society had become stagnant under foreign Mongol rulers. From 1700, until the take-over by the cadres under Mao Tse-Tung after World War II, the European powers plus Canada and the U.S., pummeled the closed society of China breaking in at the edges, trying to create markets for their goods. Armed outbreaks and at times small wars were fomented, the whole period is referred to as the "opium wars." At the time of the opium wars, an administrative class of Manchus governed Chinese society. The Manchus were invading Mongols who continued to maintain close relations with their original homeland, Manchuria. At times they even brought in horse cavalry from the steppes to fight the various groups busily dismembering the huge decadent Chinese Empire. China was twenty times the size and population of England.

China, being a culture of empire, resembled European imperial culture in many ways and it was much older and the cultural images were more thorough. There were few ideological divisions. In China the

Emperor was the Son of Heaven, the ruler of the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. The rigid patriarchy was culturally bolstered by the Confucian doctrines of ancestor worship and submission to the emperors and those more elevated in the hierarchy. The Han Chinese, the ethnic group that makes up 97% of China, consider themselves culturally and racially superior to all others, whom they refer to with a term equivalent to "barbarians." Though the throne of China had been captured several times by the nomads from the north during the thousands of years of history, Chinese society had never been completely shattered in war. China had remained for thousands of years as the center of gravity of East Asia. For thousands of years the fortunes of individual Chinese dynasties have ebbed and flowed. They have enslaved the geographical areas adjacent to them in Southeast Asia and to the north of them, but they seldom absorbed anything cultural in excess of the material extortion of the peripheral satraps. The Chinese culture is so thoroughly imbued with super-race feeling that especially in the early days of European contact, "barbarians" were kept out of the walled cities as much for the convenience of the Chinese as for the safety of the foreigners. The simple sight of non-Chinese caused immediate riots among the population. When the powerful European religious organizations began attempting to penetrate Chinese society for their own organizational motives, the missionaries met with little success because they were so restricted and confined. The simple sight of a European missionary on the streets of a city would provoke riots that posed serious physical danger.³¹

The elites of many powerful social structures within the European empires were getting benefits from the opium poisoning and disintegration of Chinese society. The Catholic hierarchy and the Protestant hierarchies also moved with many strategies toward furthering their growth and power in China. The East India Company was a major force in exploiting China and smaller trader groups from many countries were loitering around the sidelines picking up what crumbs they could.

Because of internal decay and because of the pressures exerted by the outside powers, the decadent Manchu regime finally dissolved in the first decade of the 1900's. The battle to rule China was picked up by indigenous Chinese warlords under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen and the foreigner assisted Koumintang under the Methodist Church member Chaing Kai-Shek. Although opium importation (officially) stopped after the fall of the Manchus, the Japanese Empire revived it when they invaded in 1938 as a method of extorting money from Chinese society. This was certainly not the end of drug pushing as an instrument of foreign policy.

Mao Tse-Tung and the peasant rebellion represented the resurgence of Chinese imperial culture. Although they had a new ideological twist, they essentially reunified the old imperial culture and campaigned against foreign "contamination." The Communists under Mao succeeded in ridding China of missionaries, traders and other remnants of the "barbarians." China has now rejoined the "family of nations" as a modern imperial state.

Alfred W. McCoy is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin and author of the books The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia. He traces opium to the present in Southeast Asia:

"In Indochina, you have to understand first of all that the extensive opium trade, mass consumption, particularly in the cities, was a result of European colonial policy. It's only in Southeast Asia that colonial governments paid for their very dynamic development: irrigation, massive road networks, rail networks by direct taxes upon indigenous consumers, taxes on alcohol, salt, and particularly opium. In British Malay 40 percent of colonial taxes came from opium. In French Indochina it ranged about 15 percent from the period from the 1870's up through the 1950's, when as a result of UN pressure, all of these governments abolished the state opium trade. Thailand was the next to last to do it. It didn't abolish its state opium monopoly, rather like an alcohol beverage control that a lot of states have, until 1957. Laos didn't abolish theirs until 1961. So you have mass opium consumption in Southeast Asia as a result of the colonial policy of making the colony pay with opium.

"Most of the opium was not produced in Southeast Asia. It came from abroad, either southern China or India."³²

In the early 1950's the U.S. agency, the CIA, sponsored the creation of what became the world's largest opium growing industry in Southeast Asia. They did this to create an economic base for their "allies" in the secret wars of the 1950's and on into the present. The first group of allies was the Nationalist Chinese generals and their troops who were chased into Southeast Asia by Mao's Red Army. Others were different tribal groups that were forced by various elites: Chinese Generals, indigenous elites and the employees of the CIA to create an economic infrastructure based on opium and their males for use as cadre in the wars. In the present all areas of opium poppy and coca production are also areas of historic U.S. government and CIA contacts. These are the Andean nations who have for many years received U.S. military equipment, money and training, the Syrian generals who control opium growing in the Bekka Valley, the opium growing Afghanistan mujahadeen, the Pakistani Generals, and the military and political elites throughout Southeast Asia.

There have always been the "shadow cadres," the covert operators of empire who would do the clandestine bidding of the elite. This type of situation existed, for example, when the Spanish were shipping the treasure out of the Americas. The English elite sponsored "pirates" who would raid the Spanish Galleons. The covert political strategy is created in situations where the rulers want to be able to have their diplomats say one thing while the shadow players are unsuspectingly making hidden moves. The shadow players perform acts that often violate social norms and thus the ruling elite must be able to deny any association with them. The existence of these "spooks" or intelligence agencies has created a BI-level world where there exists the "accepted" reality of the media and the political dialog and then there is the shadow reality where various international power plays take place.

It is only in the last century that drugs have joined guns and money as the chief lubricants of empire. In earlier days the insertion of modern munitions into a region could throw the balance of power in some direction. The necessary association of the covert operators with the international arms market has led them into the international financial system as well. Now, these groups have "proprietaries," companies and economic groups that they control (Air America is a well-known example). This has led to a situation where the CIA and others have their own economic base and can act without approval or budget from elected officials. Though they may avoid control by elected officials such as in the case of the Iran-Contra scandal, they are always on the side of the International Financial Elite and they are never on the side of peasants struggling for justice.

This brings us to the present day reality of the world drug market that is estimated to be five hundred billion dollars in size. This rivals major industries on the planet. Common sense tells us that the five and ten dollar bills from the street sales in major cities of the world aren't loaded by street pushers onto freight trains and sent to the points of origin of the drugs. Common sense tells us that profits of this magnitude will attract the biggest economic powers in the game and they will have to have shadow players to watch over and administer the profit taking. They might even have to create a War on Drugs to crack down on any competitors that try to muscle in on the super profits!

There appears to be nothing that the controlling elites of the imperial hierarchies will not do to service their greed and their craving for power. Guns, drugs, slavery, torture, massacre, assassination, and the most massive destruction, ecologically and socially is the stock in trade. Because public education and awareness was growing in the industrial countries in the 1800's, we see also the beginnings of the relationship of the elites to their own First World populations in terms of the control of information to which they are allowed exposure. We see in one example, with the "rubber boom" experience of the Congo, that it is possible for the elites of the industrial societies to literally alter history. We see this also in the opium wars.

Because of the distasteful nature of the colonial activities in the Far East, the facts about the creation of a market for opium in China were downplayed if not obscured. Jack Beeching in his history, The Chinese Opium Wars, recounts one public disinformation campaign conducted by the opium traders. William Jardine was head of one of the largest groups importing opium into China. He spearheaded a media campaign financed with a self-imposed tax on each chest of opium imported into China by all importers. In a letter to Jardine, at that time, in London, a fellow trader instructed Jardine, "You will not, however, be limited to this outlay, as the magnitude of the object can well bear any amount of expense ... you may find it expedient to secure, at a high price, the services of some leading newspaper ... we are told there are literary men whom it is usual to employ ..."³³ The opium smugglers had abundant cash to bribe newspapers and politicians.

Beeching indicates that the disinformation campaign in the London media worked well. He says, "subsidized or not, sensational pamphlets and news items multiplied. All London was rapidly made aware how honest British [opium] merchants in Canton had been besieged, imprisoned, deprived of food, and actually threatened with death." In fact this was the inflated description of an incident in Canton that was no more than an ultimately failed attempt by one Chinese official to stop the importation of opium.

The Rubber Boom

With the invention of the automobile, demand for rubber increased enormously. In the tropical regions of the Amazon and the Congo, the "Rubber Boom" of the late 1800's and early 1900's resulted in the deaths of millions of people. There were few "laborers" to be found in the rainforests where the extraction of the sap of the rubber tree took place. When the boom began, the industry was faced with the problem of finding a labor supply. The solution to this problem adopted by the rubber companies, like the early industrial revolution, was to force natives out of their subsistence culture in order to turn them into "slave labor." In the western Amazon the British-owned Peruvian Amazon Company sent armed gangs to capture natives. Bodley reports that "rape, slavery, torture by flogging and mutilation," and "mass murder by shooting, poisoning, starvation, and burning," were practiced against the native people. The colonial government of Peru never acted to restrain the British company. Similar atrocities took place in other areas of the Amazon where rubber was gathered, ending when rubber plantations of the East Indies took over the market after 1915.³⁴

Though the Amazon exported rubber; the richest source was the Congo Basin in Africa. The Congo River drains most of the watershed of the African equatorial rainforest. Villages and tribes ran for several thousand miles along its banks. Most of the native people lived in settled villages where they maintained rainforest gardens, raised tree crops and foraged in the forest for additional sustenance. Native trading all over the Congo was active, although the culture did not support any kind of empire-style market economy. The stability of the many different tribal cultures up and down the Congo River and into the expanse of forest was maintained by thousands of years of complex bartering patterns. By the late 1800's, most tribes of the rainforest of Central Africa had become dominated by European colonial powers. One man, King Leopold II of Belgium, personally owned one million square miles of the Congo, along with everything on it, including the people. As a private estate, the Congo Free State, as the area was known, was subject to no law or scrutiny of any government. It was this peculiar ownership that helped the rulers of the Congo Free State shield their activities from public view even from the view of the Belgian government.

In the Congo, companies that were financed by the sale of stock in Europe were given rights by the King to exploit specified sections. The King retained one-half the shares in each company. Stock in these incredibly profitable companies was distributed around elite financial circles, political circles and the diplomatic circles, cutting many of the "well placed" of Europe into the game.

European merchants had traded up the Congo for many generations exploiting the resources for a lucrative European market for redwood, camwood powder, wax, ivory, tin, copper, lead, and palm oil. But the big new stockholder-owned companies were interested solely in the super-profit trade in two items, ivory and rubber. All other trade was prohibited. The company controlling each area hired gangs of thugs, detribalized and marginalized natives, criminals, and mercenaries to collect a "tax" payable only in ivory or rubber, which had been levied on the natives by the companies themselves. Trade was abandoned in favor of out-and-out-extortion. For twenty years, the mercenary hierarchies in each region assaulted native Congo villages, burning, killing, raping, looting, burning down gardens and fields and killing orchard trees. One popular method to get a village to pay the tax was to imprison all of the women and children of the village until the men paid the tax by gathering rubber or by ravaging elephant herds for ivory. In areas where the rubber plant did not grow, the people were forced to give fish or agricultural products to support colonial administrations in the areas where rubber was tapped.

Soon the rubber and ivory trade began to rival other colonial bonanzas such as the gold and diamonds of South Africa that were produced by quasi-slave labor. By1900 the French had parceled out the French Congo, just west of the Belgian holding, to 40 concessionaire companies. In both the French and Belgian Congo, mercenaries were routinely awarded bonuses for bringing back hands, sexual organs and ears to the local administrators after a punitive raid on native people designed to compel them to gather more- by terror. One missionary reported: "It is blood-curdling to see them (the soldiers) returning with hands of the slain, and to find the hands of young children amongst the bigger ones evidencing their bravery.... The rubber from this district has cost hundreds of lives, and the scenes I have witnessed, while unable to help the oppressed, have been almost enough to make me wish I were dead...."³⁵ E.D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Movement, reported that, "in one region 6,000 natives were killed and mutilated every six months."³⁶ In all, Morel reports that some nine million natives were forced to, "spend their lives in the extremely arduous and dangerous task of gathering and preparing India-rubber in the virgin forests...." ³⁷ The population of the Congo Free State, which in 1884 had stood at an estimated 20 to 30 million, had shrunk to nine million by 1911.

The huge dividends on the shares in the concession companies were causing a furor in Europe. Morel writes, "French finance was excited by the wild wave of speculation in Congo rubber shares which swept over Belgium, and by the prodigious profits of the great Belgian Concessionaire Companies."³⁸The power of the dozens of concessionaire companies reached from Africa into the political and diplomatic circles of England and the Continent. They and their political allies who profited by the outrage in the Congo conducted a constant disinformation operation in the European press through their own statements and the assistance of compliant pundits and politicians. The line was that the Congo natives were, "...little better than animals, with no conception of land tenure or tribal government, no commercial instincts, no industrial pursuits, 'entitled,' as a Belgian Premier felt no shame in declaring, 'to nothing.'"³⁹

Reformers in both France and England worked for years to expose the crimes committed against the peoples of the Congo. The publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Morel's book, Red Rubber, in 1906, spawned vocal protests over the activities in the colonies. But the evidence was well concealed. Though the French government did not use the words "National Security," popular today, it nonetheless suppressed all evidence held by the government concerning the Congo. Thousands of church people and other concerned citizens, primarily in England and on the Continent, became involved in the Congo Reform Movement. They visited the Congo, interviewed travelers, surreptitiously obtained suppressed government reports and yet the European elite succeeded in altering history. Governments set up "commissions of inquiry" which themselves were actually a damage control and disinformation tactic. When the reform groups finally accumulated voluminous damning evidence, the elite press would not report it. Many in the press held concession shares. The murder of, in excess of ten million people in a twenty-year period by the most grotesque butchers was excised from the history of Western Civilization by the cheerleaders and profiteers of imperial conquest.

By 1915, human society came to an end in the Congo. All trading stopped. Villages were deserted. The forest grew back over the gardens. Any survivors were either enslaved as farmers, porters, mercenary fighters- or they were in hiding in the frontier areas and the deep forest. By 1910 the rubber tree plantations in Southeast Asia were beginning to take over the trade. As World War I began, few paid attention to events in the colonies. Though a veil continued over the deep Congo, the manipulation by outside, covert forces has never really stopped to this day.

NOTES

1 Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Eduardo Galeano. Monthly Review Press. New York. 1973. p.53.

2 Life and Labor In Ancient Mexico. Alonso de Zorita. trans. & intro. Benjamin Keen. Rutgers U. Press. 1971. pp. 8,9.Galeano.

3 Open Veins of Latin America. op. cit. p. 50.

4 ibid. p. 51.

5 Indo-European Language And Society. Emile Benveniste. Elizabeth Palmer, trans. U. of Miami Press. Coral Gables, Florida. 1973. p. 175.

6 ibid. p. 175.

7 The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Karl Polanyi. Beacon Press. Boston. 1957. p. 165.

8 ibid. p. 35.

9 ibid. p.116.

10 The Death Of Nature: Women, Ecology And The Scientific Revolution. Carolyn Merchant. Harper & Row Pub. New York. 1979. p. 138.

11 Man's Role In Changing The Face Of The Earth. Thomas, Jr. ed. Vol. 2. U. of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1956. "The Spiral of Population," Warren S. Thompson. p. 974.

12 Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Alfred W. Crosby. Cambridge U. Press. New York. 1974. p. 5.

13 ibid. p. 203.

14 Behind The Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. Vine Deloria, Jr. Dell Pub. Co. New York. 1974. p. 93.

15 ibid. p. 94.

16 Victims Of Progress. John H. Bodley. Cummings Pub. Co. Menlo Park, Ca. 1975. p. 130.

17 ibid. p. 115.

18 ibid. p. 55,56.

19 The African Slave Trade. Basil Davidson. Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 1980. p. 42.

20 Iibid., pp. 36-37.

21 The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I. E.D. Morel. Modern Reader Paperbacks. New York. 1969. p.17.

22 ibid. p. 20.

23 ibid. p. 15.

24 ibid. p. 21.

25 ibid. p. 22.

26 Bodley, op. cit. p. 35-36.

27 Galeano. The Open Veins Of Latin America. op. cit. p. 58,59.

28 The Chinese Opium Wars. Jack Beeching. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York. 1975. p.39.

29 ibid. p. 28.

30 ibid. p. 178.

31 Saving China: Canadian Missionaries In The Middle Kingdom 1888-1959. Alvyn J. Austin. U. of Toronto Press. Toronto. 1986. p. 13.

32 Z Magazine. January 1991. "The Politics Of Drugs: An Interview with Alfred McCoy." pp. 65-66.

33 ibid. p. 83.

34 Bodley, op. cit. p. 31-32.

35 Morel, op. cit. p. 121.

36 ibid. p. 123.

37 ibid. p. 141.

38 ibid. p. 128.

2007-11-23T04:38:00.001-08:00

The Final Empire: Chapter 10

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMPIRE

Biological life on earth assembles and unifies energies. The tree sprouts from a seed and begins to draw the energies of air, water, soil and sun to it for assemblage into biological form. As the tree creates its unity of form it then integrates with the other systems around it, the soil community, the plants and animals. This interaction increases as energy pathways and new biological niches are created which support new life forms. It is the balanced integration and the proliferation of energy pathways that potentiates the living world and provides its power of endurance.

Wheat, barley and rice, the initial biological slaves of empire, were able to produce surpluses because they could drain the energy of the assembled unities of the soil community. It is this energy; gained by looting the laboriously assembled natural unities that fuels empire. This has allowed the explosive growth of civilization. The ecologies of forests, grasslands, wetlands, continental shelves and so forth are dismantled and the energy is turned into the growth of civilization.

The life of the earth functions in its balanced way because each being lives according to its particular nature. The decentralized power of all life resides in each being. The pattern of empire culture in contrast, is to centralize power over life and consequently the natural patterns disintegrate. A golf course, for example, appears very neat and orderly. With its edged borders, well watered grass and trees, it represents the epitome of orderliness to the mind conditioned by empire. In the reality of earth life, created and conditioned by cosmic forces, it is a gross disorder. Where once stood a life potentiating, balanced and perpetual, climax ecosystem with its diverse circulating energies and manifold variety of beings, there are now a few varieties of designer plants kept alive by chemicals and artificial water supplies. A staff of maintenance people is kept busy battling the integrated life of the earth that attempts to rescue this wound by sending in the plants, animals and other life forms that are naturally adapted to live in the area.

This same disintegration occurs in human society when it is impacted by empire. When empire strikes the forager/hunter tribe, the fragile thought form of culture, all of the memories of the oral literature, the ways of making utensils, dwellings and tools and the natural modes of relationship begin to disintegrate.

The natural web of relationships disintegrates and the people become entrapped in a coercive relationship with the invader. In this pattern, the individual experiences physical and psychic disintegration. In empire culture the individual is alienated and thrust into conflict on all levels. Both the social structure of empire and its ideational contents shape the individual and it is not an integrative and healing system.

We live in a culture that conditions us toward psychological disintegration. It is a culture that confuses and masks our biological identity, encouraging us to believe that we are something other. The examination of these disintegrative factors will aid us in creating a new culture that is pointed toward healing and wholeness.

Human Life is Severed From its Source

The culture of empire has severed itself from its center in the life of the earth. Civilized people find their survival not in the life of the earth but in human society. They are dependent upon what human society produces. The empire feeds on the earth like a tumor, irrespective of natural patterns. The individual person in the culture of empire does not directly feed from the earth, as do forager/hunters, that person feeds from the tumor body. The social body sucks energy out of the earth by means of mass, centrally directed, organization and creates massive artificial environments conducive to this further extortion. The continual conflict of culture with the natural patterns of life creates insecurity, which pervades the society. Natural culture is one of affluence. In empire unlimited demands and growth create scarcity and insecurity. The pattern of the culture itself also creates a context of competition and conflict for each individual. This leads to insecurity, which follows most people throughout life.

Insecurity generates fear and defensiveness. Fear and defensiveness generate anger and negative emotional states. Anger and negative emotional states generate conflict. Individual fear, defensiveness, anger and conflict are entirely congruent with the career of empire itself. Empire is a culture of conflict internally and externally.

Disorder in the Society of Cells

The integrated nature of organic forms and the role of each life form are demonstrated by their place in the metabolism of the whole. But there is an example of a life form, which like empire does not follow the pattern. This example is cancer. The cancer cell breaks the cooperative and sharing relationship with its fellow cells and becomes "God," as it were, or from another point of view, ceases to be part of "God." Instead of remaining integrated and adapted to the body, the cancer cell creates a social body of its own design that feeds on its host.

Cell biologist L.L. Larison Cudmore examines the morality of cancer, which opposes the natural pattern on the cellular level. She says:

"Cancer cells do not respect the territorial rights of other cells and refuse to obey the two rules obeyed by all other cells: they neither stop growing nor stop moving when they encounter another cell, and they do not stick to their own kind. Quite simply, they are cells that have decided on autonomy and independent growth, rather than cooperation. There would be little in this to criticize if they were discreet about it. But they are not. They run amok with as much violence and insensibility as any Malay caught in that terrifying frenzy. Cancer will not stop its hideous course of uncontrolled growth and invasion until it or its victim is dead. Cancer is illegal and dishonest. It secretes a substance that lures blood vessels to it. Once supplied with its own circulation network, it pirates nutrients from the body, in greedy and ever-increasing insatiability. It turns invasive, growing into other tissues, dissolving the connections between cells with Samson-like strength. It can bore holes in muscle and bones. As it divides, its daughter cells lose more and more of what was once the fine sensibilities of the cell. They do not stay with their parental mass they leave, and totally undismayed by the fact that they may not belong in a kidney, a liver, or a lung, they colonize these organs with as little regard for any of the right of the inhabitants as the worst of human imperialists. They grow and grow. Over cells, and around cells, stealing their food and space."¹

The beginnings of individual psychology in empire start with the severance from the mother, the birth process. In the culture of empire, fear begins at birth. The birthing method of modern industrial medicine itself causes deep-set psychological fear and insecurity. Arthur Janov is the author of The Primal Scream, originator of Primal Therapy and a researcher for many years into the psychological complexities of the birthing process. He comments on the differences between contemporary and natural birthing methods:

"In one of society's great paradoxes, our supposedly most advanced methods have produced the most primitive consequences, and in the most primitive societies we find the most advanced (that is, natural and beneficent) birth practice: the simple stoop-squat-deliver method. Modern technology must not interfere with natural processes but should be used instead to aid those practices."²

Joseph Chilton Pearce in his study of childhood psychology, Magical Child, points out certain stage-specific actions that are carried out during the birthing process. The periodic contractions of the vaginal canal massage and enliven the peripheral nerve endings in the skin of the baby who is emerging from a fluid environment of nearly 100 degree heat. The periodic contractions also begin compressing the chest, beginning the breathing action that is soon to come. As the baby emerges from the vaginal canal, it is grasped by the mother and put to her chest where it can again hear the heart beat that it has known for nine months. At this point the mother looks into the baby's eyes (Pearce says this is extremely important in the bonding process). As the mother looks into the eyes of the child she begins stroking the baby which further activates the nerve endings of the skin. At some safe point after this, the umbilical cord is cut and the mother presses the baby to her nipple. The chemistry of the mother's milk is stage specific and it changes as the baby grows through the biological stages until weaning.

Birthing is one of the great transformations of life and to help generate the vigor to survive this experience the common blood supply of the mother and child produce a stress hormone, cortisol. Pearce feels that drinking the mother's milk just after birth helps the body of the infant eliminate this substance so that it becomes calm.

The process of bonding of mother and child is exemplified by the old story of the baby duck that bonds to the first thing that it perceives after coming out of its shell. Humorous stories are told of the baby duck that bonds with the family dog, people and other animals. The process of bonding is as fundamental as the bonding of proton and electron. The process of bonding happens on many levels and in subtle ways. An important kind of bonding is for living things to be bonded with their home, the living earth and cosmos. Bonding is a positive psychological relationship that provides a sense of self and the security of being at "home."

Janov, Pearce and many others think that the brief sequence of bonding during birthing is one of the most important in an individual's life. It is this sequence that produces the proper bond between mother and child. It is at this initial point of the sequence of bondings, beginning with the mother and then radiating out to include the earth, that the subconscious tenor of the child is imprinted for the balance of its life. In the modern medical setting the infant may be subjected to the stress of a cesarean operation where there is no birthing sequence or alternatively the infant's first contact with the outside world may be the drugs carried to it from the mother through the placental wall. The chances are good that the infant will feel the metal of the forceps around its head, pulling it out of the mother. The infant will be held up, swatted to begin the breathing and then handed to a nurse for deposit on a cold metal scale. The baby is then deposited alone in the sterility of the maternity ward.

That the few moments in which all of this takes place can make such a substantial difference in one's whole life is shown by a discovery made in Uganda. Joseph Chilton Pearce relates that Marcelle Gerber who was doing research for the United Nations Children's Fund in Uganda discovered what the researchers considered "genius" babies:

"She found the most precocious, brilliant, and advanced infants and children ever observed anywhere. These infants had smiled, continuously and rapturously, from, at the latest, their fourth day of life. Blood analyses showed that all the adrenal steroids connected with birth stress were totally absent by that fourth day after birth. Sensorimotor learning and general development was phenomenal, indeed miraculous. These Ugandan infants were months ahead of American or European children."³

After causing a stir among child development specialists it was discovered that there were some babies in Uganda whose development resembled that of industrial medicine countries. These babies they found in the few hospitals in Uganda:

"Gerber found that they did not smile until some two and a half months after birth. Nor were they precocious in any sense. They showed no signs of Sensorimotor learning, displayed no uncanny intelligence for some two and a half months, at which point some signs of intelligence were apparent. Blood analyses showed that high levels of adrenal steroids connected with birth stress were still prevalent at two and a half months. These infants slept massively, cried when awake, were irritable and colicky, frail and helpless. So the issue was not in some racial predisposition toward early intellectual growth. The issue lay solely with what happens to the newborn infant in hospitals."⁴

Birth trauma and the failure of bonding are serious matters to the future life of the baby. Such a simple thing as cutting the umbilical cord too quickly in the modern assembly-line hospital setting causes irreparable harm by causing brain lesions- minor strokes, which are referred to as anoxia. Newell Kephart, Director of the Achievement Center for Children at Purdue University, says that 15 to 20 percent of all children examined had learning and behavior problems resulting from minor undetected brain injury. Others say that 20 to 40 percent of the school population are handicapped by learning problems that may be related to neurological impairments at birth.⁵

Pearce in his study Magical Child, tells of the tests done by medical doctor William F. Windle. Windle became doubtful about the birthing methods of industrial medicine and created a test with monkeys, (who normally need no help giving birth). Windle took a number of pregnant monkeys and subjected them to the normal hospital birthing methods, including drugs, anesthesia, forceps and the cutting of the umbilical cord in the usual time he had seen it done in hospitals.

He found that because of the drugs and anesthesia the baby monkeys could not breathe and needed the artificial resuscitation that hospitals customarily use. Instead of clinging to the mother shortly after emergence, Windle's monkey babies were helpless and could not perform this task. In fact they could not cling to their mothers for several weeks.

Later Windle autopsied the infants that had died during birth or whom did not live full term. He found severe brain lesions in every case from the anoxia at birth. Later he autopsied the monkeys who lived to adulthood and found that they also had brain lesions. Windle later autopsied human babies that had died during birth or shortly after and found that they had brain lesions similar to the monkeys in his tests.

Brain lesions are not the only effect of modern birthing methods. The imprints of the birth trauma itself are often severe. The mass institution of modern industrially based medicine, with its vast array of expensive machinery and industrially produced drugs seems to produce results consonant with the quality of civilization itself- mechanicalness, unfeelingness and human alienation. Instead of the warm comfort of the mother, the infant is treated as an object, slapped by a stranger and taken away by another stranger into a nursery where it is put into a crib. It is at this point that civilized people often bond to material objects, namely, the security blanket. Pearce asks, "What is the great learning? What is being built into the very fibers of that mind-brain-body system as the initial experiences of life?" It is that, "Encounters with people are causes of severe, unbroken, unrelenting stress, and that stress finds its only reduction through contact with material objects."⁶

Even a satisfactory birth is one of the great traumatic experiences of any individual's life. The birth experience is in fact a fight for life. Fetal death is the fifth cause of death in the U.S. Arthur Janov as a psychiatrist had been early led to birth trauma as the origin of some of his patients' problems. After some years he created a method of therapy that involved conscious recall of the birth experience. He found that if the conscious adult could relive the birth experience and understand the experience within the adult context, the symptoms of fears, phobias, mental blocks and so forth would evaporate. He began to call this Primal Therapy.

After years of work with Primal Therapy, Janov concludes:

"I have seen every possible combination and permutation of mental illness. I have seen what bad families can do, what orphanages and rejection can do, what rape and incest can do and it is still my opinion that birth and pre-birth trauma are prepotent over almost any later kind of trauma. For in that birth process is stamped the way we are going to handle our lives thereafter. Personality traits are engraved. Ways of looking at the world are imprinted. Attitudes are shaped. What we will become is found in the birth matrix.

"The best testimony I know of to the importance of altered birth practices is the qualitative difference between children born naturally and non-traumatically and those born under conventional circumstances. The second best testimony I know of is the enormous change that takes place in Primal patients who have relived the traumas they underwent at birth."

The birth trauma, as Janov describes, is the first imprint upon the person, but is not the last. There is the important matter of the bonding sequence that Joseph Chilton Pearce and others describe.

The Failure of Bonding

The bonding of newborns, the integration and adaptation of natural culture to the living earth, food chains, and the web of ecology are all similar phenomena. These functions are how life integrates itself. As we proceed, we will see that the violation of the bonding of infants is an important factor in the creation of the psychology of empire culture. In modern society we see the progressive violation of these patterns, especially with modern birthing methods. Marshall Klaus of Case Western Reserve Hospital, who is considered to be one of the top authorities on the functioning of the bonding process, feels that it is an instinctual response genetically built into mother and baby. It may be that hormones are involved in the process and it is obvious that breast-feeding has much to do with it.

The innate phenomenon of bonding has long been observed in domesticated animals. In the case of domesticated sheep it has been found that if the mother sheep is prevented from licking the after-birth from the body of the baby sheep the chances are very high that the baby will die.

Some anthropologists have commented on the depth of bonding in Natural cultures. When observers were looking for that effect, they reported that bonding was so close that the children when carried (such as on the hip) were never messy because the mothers knew by conscious rapport when the child had to urinate or defecate.⁷

In civilization the process of bonding is often much distorted, creating stress in later life. Even before birth, if the baby is gestated by a neurotic, stress filled mother, the baby is already accustomed to stress through participation in the blood supply of the mother with its load of adrenal hormones. If stress hormones from the mother impact the babies in utero they are already being imprinted with free floating, non-objective anxieties that may stay with them the rest of their lives.

Pearce says that the development of intelligence and the learning of identity happens as the child interacts with the environment that it is bonded to, its matrix. The child is filled with intent to explore and interact with its worlds. The worlds (matrices) are the content to be known. The process of bonding says Pearce, begins with the mind-brain structuring its knowledge of its first matrix, the womb. On emerging from the womb, the mother becomes the matrix. When the child emerges from the mother it is placed on her chest where it can hear the familiar heartbeat. In the developing series of bondings that Pearce describes a child going through, it is by its knowledge of the previous matrix that the child is able to relate to the new. In order to adjust to the new matrix the child must be able to relate it to something that it already knows, such as hearing the mothers heart-beat in utero and on the mother's chest.

"Biologically, we are supported at each matrix shift with enhanced physical ability, a spurt of new brain growth that prepares us for new learning, and specific shifts of the brain's ways of processing information," says Pearce.⁸ The cycles of developmental bondings are timed essentially the same in the whole species, and in different cultures they may differ slightly in timing, but never in sequence. The physical changes accompanying these bonding sequences go on irrespective of the bonding or failure of bonding that takes place.

At birth the child emerges from the womb and learns, ideally, to bond to the mother. From its secure place near the heartbeat the child is focused on the mother's face and body. From this secure place the child begins to perceive the earth, the outer environment, its next matrix. At approximately the twenty-fourth month the brain of the child achieves a spurt of development and the next bonding, to that of the earth begins. The child, secure in its bonding to the mother begins to explore the world. The child touches and tastes the world and develops physical and personal power in dealing with it.

At age seven a bonding shift occurs and the child begins to become aware of self. "Autonomy-becoming physically independent of parental help and learning to physically survive the principles of the physical world-is the goal of the period," Pearce says.⁹ At age seven the growth of the corpus callosum, a late-developing organ of the brain, has been completed and another brain growth spurt occurs. It is at this age that childhood art changes worldwide. Childhood art maintains an essential sameness up to this period when the art begins to change according to the new information of the culture that is being assimilated. It is at this stage that the child stands in the earth matrix and explores into the self. At this stage the child develops personal power and creative logic but this is power and logic based in the concreteness of the physical world. (Unfortunately it is at this point that civilized children are forced to deal with abstract word and idea systems that have no relationship with immediate physical reality.) At a point when the "left brain" system is attempting to develop, the child is put into the anxiety ridden, win/lose educational institution and forced to learn the abstract cultural logic and idea systems, rather than immediate cause and effect physical logic, such as arrow making or deer stalking.

At around the age of eleven the child begins naturally to separate word from the object. Here the child begins to develop abstract thinking. After sexual maturity the person begins to bond to the mind, begins to understand that it is not it's own thoughts and emotions, but is the observer of them.

An important point made in Pearce's work is that the trajectory of the series of bondings from child to adult is from matter toward abstraction. The series of bondings lead from the womb, to mother, to earth, to self, to mind and although not stressed by Pearce, one could consider the realization of spirit as the final outcome.

The design of the biological plan for individual human development is the growth of autonomy both as physical organism in the physical world and as an autonomous personality in the world of thought. In the intricate and complex pattern of nature, the final series of transformations bears the person out into the cosmos as an independent being.

Ideally, in a natural culture surrounded by the living earth, this biological process should bear a human out onto the surface of the planet with full understanding of their identity as an authentic life form that will take its place in the natural world as do all other organisms. In the natural web of life, each organism has a purpose- to live, and to aid in the furtherance of biological life. Whether it is the bison spreading the grass seed and manuring the landscape or the tiny coral reef organisms creating rich habitat for many other life forms, all have a contributory role and each has an identity given by its nature and its place in the metabolism. There should be no identity crisis and there should be no anxiety experienced by one psychically secure in the knowledge that they are located where they should be and doing what their nature dictates.

This does not necessarily mean that humans must be forager/hunters, but it does mean that humans need understand their grounding identity as organic beings and participants in the life of the earth and the necessity of living in balance with that life. As Pearce describes the experience of the child growing up in modern society, he finds violations of these natural bondings at every turn, which reinforce the alienating effect of the original birth trauma. This is alienation from the body of the mother, the social body and the body of the earth.

Free Floating Anxiety: The Negative Psychological State of Civilization

From the point of the birth trauma and failure of proper bonding the young civilized human is beset by anxiety. Not being grounded in the reality of self and earth, the human tends to bond to and identify with material objects and to word-built ideological systems. The focus of attention is not the relationship between the humans and the living earth- the focus of attention in industrial, imperial culture is on the society and its products.

In this shifting field, the question of identity rages, but the underlying emotional state remains constant- anxiety. Fear and anxiety causes the decline of consciousness. Fear takes the mind off more expansive, intuitive questions of life in the universe and focuses the attention on immediate safety. Fear also creates the need to control. This urge to control, which is a fundamental factor of empire culture, comes about with the anxiety stricken child. The child (or adult in the same psychic situation) who is not centered within itself, experiences fear. The child attempts to reassure itself of its security by trying to control its environment, the things and people around it, usually in this case an adult. If the child can get the adults to respond on cue it becomes reassured of its security- momentarily. This is the civilized situation- suffering constant anxiety, attempting to control and manipulate a shifting social and ecological background. The culture as a whole in the larger realm relates to the planetary life in the same manner.

Both socially and individually, the culture of empire is devoted to the maximization of material wealth. Natural culture is devoted to the maximization of life. The culture of the empire is severed from its matrix in the life of the earth and becomes a reality solely of the intellect, furnished with symbols and meanings having little relationship to the earth. The child, having suffered rebuffs to the emotional body, having withdrawn emotionally because of birth trauma and the competitive psychic environment, is taught by the school system to seek rewards through the exercise of the intellect and restrict emotional empathy. The child begins to invest meaning in word-built realities. The child begins to live abstractly, alienated by filtering its perception of reality through these intellectual images.

Fear is the basic motor of the empire. It is a basic, fundamental, psychic fear convincing humans it is necessary to do something to achieve identity rather than to be something, inherently, as a source of one's identity. When this occurs people move out of balance with the natural world. The human of the empire no longer has a home, no longer has an identity in the balanced universe, so it is always seeking to create its emotional sustenance and security by accumulating material objects-inflating its identity- and by controlling its environment as much as possible. The subconscious mind, the vegetative mind, runs the body, just as the mind of the world runs its organic body on its level of being. Yogis, who have conscious control of their "involuntary" physical systems, or persons in hypnotic trance, are able to control their heartbeat and circulation as well as direct their vegetative apparatus to do various things. This aspect of mind is the same mind as the consciousness of plants, or that aspect which empowers the bodies of all animals in a natural state. This organic mind is the whole mind of the world, our basic identity. In the psyche of empire this mind is submerged. People become cut off from the very basis of their existence. The focus of consciousness is forced up predominately into the intellect; the quick surface thinker needed when playing fast moving games of power and wealth. While the anxiety of not fundamentally knowing one's identity slips below the threshold of conscious attention, it still endures. The person becomes cut off from their dream life, cut from the hunches and intuition that formerly helped the human negotiate in the natural world.

Further disintegration develops when the socially conditioned mind begins to injure the body. A fundamental conflict develops between the conscious mind, its ideas and the vegetative mind with its realities of cellular cooperation and metabolism. Negative emotion and negative thoughts immediately poison the body through the production of stress hormones that are loaded into the blood stream by the endocrine gland system. This injures the body just as do dietary habits- such as anorexia or bulimia-that have emotional motive rather than a feeding motive.

A psychogenic illness is one in which the mind injures the body. In extreme cases of psychogenic illness, the ideas in the conscious mind have impacts on the vegetative mind resulting in organic damage and sometimes death. Bleeding ulcers, colitis, spastic bowel syndrome, asthma and migraine headaches are results of a conscious reaction to the environment that the consciousness exists in, which are communicated to the vegetative mind.

The organic aspect of the human body follows the pattern of the cosmos. It seeks to maintain balance internally among all its parts. Scientists refer to this balancing as homeostasis. This homeostasis results from the operation of the organic system adapting to the environment on its own level. As the body goes through its life, it makes internal changes in response to external stimuli of the environment seeking to keep the body on an "even keel" of blood pressure, temperature and so forth.

Though the biological organism maintains homeostasis, the mind can be the fly in the ointment. A human, living in the natural world responds to the physical reality of threat with the familiar fight or flight syndrome accompanied by shots of adrenaline and blood sugar into the system preparing them for the physical exertion necessary. In civilized culture there is a serious problem involved with this adaptive mechanism. The problem is that the physical operations of the flight or fight syndrome are connected with the emotions. If a saber tooth tiger is charging, the body responds to the threat by physically gearing up to meet it. The body responds in the same way when a person is sitting quietly in a chair watching television and sees something on the screen about the threat of Communism or Capitalism to which they have been programmed to respond, so that it makes them angry and emotionally upset. The stress hormones produced in the body are not used because there is no tiger and no physical exertion. Instead, the substance that would aid muscle activity lies in the physical system and slowly poisons it- because it has not been excreted in physical exertion.

The culture of empire is a culture of insecurity, tension and competitive conflict. This generalized emotional tenor has profound effects. Most of the top ten causes of death for example are generally related to stress. Negative emotional states, interpersonal conflict or the bill collector may trigger the body's endocrine gland system to gear up for extreme physical effort when none is needed. Dr. Hans Selye who has done years of research on this, which he calls the General Adaptation Syndrome, describes what occurs in the body when this stress reaction is triggered:

"The stressor excites the hypothalamus (through pathways not yet fully identified) to produce a substance that stimulates the pituitary to discharge the hormone ACTH (for adrenocorticotrophic hormone) into the blood. ATCH in turn induces the external, cortical portion of the adrenal to secrete corticoid. These elicit thymus shrinkage, simultaneously with many other changes, such as atrophy of the lymph nodes, inhibition of inflammatory reactions, and production of sugar (a readily available source of energy). Their production is facilitated through an increased level of corticoid in the blood, but the autonomic nervous system also plays a role in eliciting ulcers."¹⁰

It is from the constant triggering of these physical systems that damage to the body occurs- caused by ideas in the mind-ideas conditioned into the mind by culture.

Heart disease, such as the stressed-based heart disease in the empire, is generally absent in Natural culture. Cancer is also unknown in Natural culture. Cancer is caused by a malfunction of the autoimmune system. Everyone's body produces malformed cancerous cells all of the time. In a properly functioning body these cells are eliminated by the body's autoimmune defense system. It is when the auto-immune system loses its sense of identity, loses its ability to tell self from other, that the cancer cell is able to multiply, create tumor bodies and establish colonies. This is doubly dangerous when the autoimmune system fails and toxic and other intrusions from the environment multiply.

Industrial medicine uses the words autoimmune system but this obscures the reality. The autoimmune system is the vegetative consciousness of the body. This function of telling self from other, knowing one's identity, is a function of consciousness itself and it is the malfunction of this that is causing serious medical problems in the culture of empire. Cancer, AIDS, allergies, candida albicans and other maladies are caused by "auto-immune system" failures. It is the failure of identity, the failure of the mind to know what it is, that is the base of the problem. Though this is the base of the problem it is known that events and substances such as toxics and antibiotics can "shock" the body consciousness into bewilderment about its identity.

The psycho-biological problem of identity exists with the individual as well as the body of empire, which does not recognize itself as an organic entity of the earth.
The Crisis of Identity

The human identity crisis now threatens the earth. When one observes the activities of civilization, aside from all the talk, one sees that the dominant conception of human purpose on earth is believed to be the creation and accumulation of material objects. People think of their possessions as part of their identity. Social status, positions and degrees are also accumulated but wealth is the base of the identity question.

The civilized baby that was, just after birth, symbolically and literally bonded to the material "security blanket," ultimately begins to identify with its accumulation. The child derives emotional gratification from material objects. No longer does the human have an organic identity but achieves identity by personal effort of accumulation within the context of a highly stratified and intellectualized society in which abstract mental symbology- ideology- has more perceived reality than the living forms of the earth. It is this cultural conditioning in the minds of billions that is driving the earth to destruction.

For several million years humans identified themselves as part of a living, spiritually vivified earth. One of the essential differences between nomadic, forager/hunter cultures and the culture of empire is that in a sharing culture, persons do not have the deeply imbedded impulse to hang on to things, especially when they have to carry them on their backs. Their existence and their identity are not predicated on what they have or the competitive heights that they may have struggled to.

Although tribal people admire their members for innate talents and for personal achievements, these factors are not brought about by socially structured competition. Tribal people who are secure in the flow of life, secure in the knowledge that the mothering earth produces life and sustenance continually, do not allow material goods to divide them or to become an issue. In Natural culture it is people who share the most that are held in the most esteem. Jules Henry, who has lived with many natural cultures during his life as an anthropologist, summarizes his view of this issue in his book Culture Against Man. He observes that contemporary, civilized people place no limit on their desires for material goods. He says:

"Most, though by no means all, primitive societies are provided with intuitive limits on how much property may be accumulated by one person, and the variety of ways in which primitive society compels people to rid themselves of accumulated property is almost beyond belief. Distributing it to relatives, burning it at funerals, using it to finance ceremonies, making it impossible to collect debts in any systematic way-these and many other devices have been used by primitive culture, in veritable terror of property accumulation, to get rid of it. Rarely does primitive society permit the accumulation of vast quantities of wealth."¹¹

In civilization, only by continual accumulation in the competitive field of object ownership can one continue to "furnish" one's identity. A study done by the Chicago Tribune shows that the urge to accumulate is not simply a motive of greed but is also an institutionalized behavior. It is a means of emotional sustenance. The study looks at shopping sprees of upper middle class housewives:

"Our excursions into specific stores-and particularly the excursions women take to fashionable clothing stores-indicate more than we realize about our status and our status aspirations. The clothing we buy says a great deal about our status. The Chicago Tribune's study of shoppers and their habits in three homogenous communities outside Chicago reveals that many women see the shopping trip to a prestige store (regardless of any purchase made) as a ritual which, if successful, reassures the woman of her own high status. The trip, the Tribune's investigators found, 'enables her to test her self conception status-wise against the conception others hold of her.'

"Such women dress up for the shopping trip. They strive to look their most chic and poised, and if the trip is a success they feel 'Pride, pleasure, prestige' in patronizing the store and in the satisfaction of 'looking down' on the customers of the lower status store (where women typically don't dress up to shop). Some women said it made them 'feel good' just to go into a high status store. The investigators concluded that 'shopping at a prestige store enhances the status of the shoppers and vice versa.' "¹²

The Anguish of Sexual Love in the Empire

Anguish, shame, guilt and automatic negative response to sexual love is so deep in the culture and in all of us that discussing it brings up fear and aversion. This is the reason that it must be discussed, because it is fundamental to understanding the social effects that radiate from this physical relationship. Here again is another force in personal psychology that tends to separate and fragment when the very functioning of sex and love is to unify. The eminent psychologist Wilhelm Reich became a martyr because of the anxiety concerning this act. In his clinics he looked at the condition of sexual love among thousands of people. He said that the culture causes people to be sexually dysfunctional and that this cripples their lives. The reaction of the culture and of the authorities to Reich, displays the hysteria that tends to confirm what he was saying. When Wilhelm Reich began his work in Germany in the early 1930's he was ostracized from the Freudian circles of orthodox psychology. When he persisted in discussing the severe problem of sexual distortion among industrial youth, he was thrown out of the Communist Party of Germany. Still he persisted and had to flee Germany to Scandinavia when Hitler came to power. Still fleeing, he arrived in the U.S.A. where he was persecuted by the Food and Drug Administration, thrown in prison and because of complications, died- in a U.S. jail. Reich was persecuted because he challenged what he called the "emotional plague," the "pleasure anxiety" (the fear of pleasure) that is generalized throughout civilized society, and particularly the Judeo-Christian heritage. With all organisms, the function of reproducing themselves is a central part of their life activities. Reproducing is as important a function as eating. In human society the sex and reproduction function is a central fact. In the patriarchal culture of empire, the control of sexual love and of women is a basic pattern. Women are culturally defined and socially controlled for the sexual use of men and for the reproduction of children and workers. The control of sex and the definition of women, as under the control of men, have been a pivotal fact in the history of empire. It is this pattern of sexual control mechanisms of the empire that Reich challenged. Reich states that:

"...All biological impulses and sensations can be reduced to the fundamental functions of expansion (elongation, dilatation) and contraction (constriction)."¹³ This elementary contraction/expansion function of organisms is expressed in the human sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems. Reich says that the para-sympathetic system is operative wherever there is "expansion, elongation, hyperemia, turgor and pleasure. The sympathetic is operative whenever there is contraction, withdrawal of blood from the periphery, anxiety and pain. In the state of being when the para-sympathetic nervous system is functioning, the body experiences pleasurable excitement, the peripheral blood vessels dilate, the heart itself expands (parasympathetic dilatation), the heart beat becomes slow and even and the skin reddens." This is a biological state akin to reaching out to the universe in acceptance and positive emotional states. In the contractive, sympathetic state characterized by fear and defense, "the heart contracts and beats rapidly and forcibly," it has to drive the blood through constricted blood vessels and its work is hard.¹⁴

In Reich's view, upbringing in a typical authoritarian and patriarchal, civilized family, promotes the contractive, damming-up of energies that lead to later emotional problems. It is the patriarchal family that instills the sex repression on a subconscious level. Toilet training at the same age is another culprit says Reich. Defecation is also a pleasurable act but because of authoritarian toilet training, becomes associated with negative emotion and anal retention. These childhood training practices plus the general experience of growing up in a sex, pleasure-repressed culture create a generalized "pleasure anxiety" in the population. Just as they are taught by early conditioning, people react negatively and contractively to the experience of physical pleasure.

The natural sexual energy becomes dammed up and finds release in pathways other than natural sexuality. Release is found in expressions such as constant anxiety, muscular spasms, pathological sexual distortions, neurosis of various kinds and the internalization of the discipline practiced by society and family. In Reich's view, a fundamental of emotional health is orgiastic potency. "Orgiastic potency is the capacity for surrender to the flow of biological energy without any inhibition, the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body."¹⁵

This is the positive emotional opening of oneself to the lover and the universe which is much different than "conquering" someone for a unilateral sexual act.

As the child is conditioned to avert itself from physical pleasure, says Reich, the emotional and sexual energy becomes contracted and accumulated in the body of the person. The person has become conditioned to be his own emotional censor. When this flow of energy is blocked it results in tension and spasms of the muscles that Reich describes as, "neurosis anchored in the musculature." From this he derives the concept of "body armor." Body armor is the peculiar contraction of the body and face that shows how people hold tension in the musculature.

Having stolen the individual's chance for psychic health and independence, civilization instills the authoritarian censor, dependence and conformity. Reich feels that the authoritarian, sex-repressed upbringing leads to a dependent person. This person has little personal power and being powerless- psychically and socially- yearns for, admires and focuses unnatural amounts of attention on questions of power. This is the key, says Reich, to the mystery of the working classes of industrial society that admire and vote for authoritarian personalities like Hitler. They admire them because they represent power, which is the object of the yearnings of the financially, institutionally, and emotionally powerless laboring classes on the bottom rung of industrial society.

Characterizing the sex and pleasure repressed civilized person, Reich says, "He is helpless, incapable of freedom, and he craves authority, because he cannot react spontaneously he is armored and wants to be told what to do, for he is full of contradictions and cannot rely upon himself."¹⁶

The sex-repressed, armored and dependent person exists in a negative emotional state. This person is easy prey for philosophies of violence that tell him that he is the most "evolved." This is the emotional seedbed from which spring violent mass movements. In joining the mass movement the individual identifies with it and becomes transformed into something of power and importance. In a more general way this is the same rationale as the justification for colonialism practiced by the more "evolved" imperial culture.

A Culture of Violence

Persons who are secure and centered with their place on the earth and within themselves do no feel a need to make gratuitous displays of power nor are they pre-occupied with questions of power. It is fear that generates the questions of security, violence and power that rage within the culture of empire. It is fear that underlies the ubiquitous defensive responses in empire culture. Empire has always been a culture of violence. That is its basis. The historian Barbara Tuchman gives us a glimpse of earlier scenes from Fourteenth Century Europe- of the culture that we have inherited:

"Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom-by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts-usually dripping blood. The crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.

"In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs until, to the laughter of spectators, he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. It may be that the less than tender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years."¹⁷

Though everyday violence is not now as visible in the First World countries as it was in the Fourteenth Century, mass violence of modern warfare, mass starvation and poverty are ever present. Violence also continues to pervade the culture on a more subtle level in such things as entertainment and war toys. The culture of empire is not a cooperative endeavor; it is a culture of competition, violence and coercion. Fear is used in the empire to condition the masses and maintain elites in power. The elites understand well that if the masses are powerless, fragmented and frightened they will assent to domination by a strong "protector." They will demand it. If societies in the culture of empire do not have enemies they will create them. If there is no current war, they will create one.

The Cold War is a classic example of the creation of fear in the populace so that the elite could consolidate power and get agreement to fund a vast militarization of society that gives huge profits to the elite and restricts the political rights of the masses.

The mass media which gives the point of view of the elite, focuses not on appealing to us to work peacefully, cooperatively and in a sharing way with each other for equal benefits for all, but on threats to the society and the individual's security. In this emotional climate, the most violent television programming attracts the widest audience. Violence, carnage and death are the themes of the mass media. When these impressions are created, the elites then appeal to the masses to give them more power and taxes so that everyone may be protected. If people are isolated, insecure and terrified, they will give up their self-determination and independence in return for protection.

Institutionalizing the Masses

The structure of hierarchical power in empire culture is holographically reflected in mass social institutions. Spontaneity and independent self-direction is conditioned out of the individual and in its place is put the values of empire. Obedience, "dependability" and mechanicalness are imposed. The patriarchal, authoritarian family is a mini-empire where the children are conditioned early for their later life in mass institutions. The lives of the people in industrial society are governed by these institutions (zoning departments, planning departments, investment councils, motor vehicle departments, educational institutions, huge industrial bureaucracies, government bureaucracies and all the others that govern mass society). The people have little or no control over these institutions and are dependent upon them. Their lives are controlled from birth.

The mass educational institutions controlled by political elites are the most important institutions for social conditioning. They teach empire culture. If Natural culture children are put in these institutions, they fail. The reason they fail is that the maturity of Natural culture teaches the young that it is unseemly to struggle to be superior to one's fellows. The immodesty and divisiveness of children frantically waving their hands to give the answer first and receive recognition in a modern classroom, is the epitome of the desperate win/lose competitive conditioning of empire culture. After we, in our youth, have sat in a classroom with our heads pointed toward the blackboard, nodding in an affirmative manner for eighteen years, we have been furnished with a world-view that exists on a subconscious as well as a conscious level. Acculturation- social conditioning- is the same phenomenon as a suggestion given in hypnotic trance. A suggestion given several times in deep hypnotic trance (a highly concentrated focus of attention) effects a change in the subconscious mind. But the same thing occurs in light trance (any focused state of attention) with repetition over a lengthy period of time, such as schooling (or television watching). In this way the culture creates images of reality that exist on subconscious levels. Though it has little relationship to the cosmically created reality of the life of the earth, it becomes real for the individual by the daily reinforcement in socially created situations. The personal daily life, the artificial environments and the images presented by the mass media, all combines into an internally consistent "picture" of the world, that to us is reality.

Mass institutions facilitate the control of societies by small elites. Control of society by a small elite insures inequality. Imperial culture has developed from the days when the emperor owned everything to the point now that a small elite own and control the important factors of society. They then delegate authority down the hierarchy. This pattern of ruling and owning other people is so thorough that patriarchy seems natural to the population. Paulo Freire, in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is concerned with empowering people in the urban slums of Brazil by teaching them to read. He writes of the difficulty of people on the bottom rung of the hierarchy, being able to realize their personal power and independence- their liberation. He writes, "...Almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors.' The very structure of their thoughts has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men, but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of 'adhesion' to the oppressor." In the social situation of powerlessness and dependency, Freire says, "The oppressed seek to ameliorate the conditions of their oppression by imitating the oppressor."¹⁸

The conditioning of social hierarchy is so deep that the people who colonized North America institutionalized political "freedom" but they could only conceive of white males as being included and then only the white male elite who owned property. Culturally, a hierarchy existed based on sex and race, with white males at the top. In early Babylonian hierarchies, brown males used huge, terrifying, blond, blue-eyed white tribal males of Northern Europe as palace guards. It is not race; it is the conditioning of empire culture that results in hierarchy. Hierarchy is distinction not inclusion. The culture highlights distinctions and differences because of the fundamental separative pattern. Everyone is not simply an equal member of a tribe; each person in empire has a different rank in the hierarchy of power that is demonstrated by wealth and privilege.

The dominance/submission syndromes conditioned into us by hierarchy are so deep that they cannot even be given up in the sexual embrace. In the empire, males are conditioned to "conquer" women and females are conditioned to "submit" to men. This is not an equal and real exchange of energies. This is a continuation of the psychic isolation. This alienation from our basic need for authentic human relationship is so deep that in the patriarchal, empire culture of the Arabs and some of the cultures in east Africa that have been contaminated by them, clitorectomy is practiced. Clitorectomy is the practice of cutting out the clitoris of young women. In some of these groups, most or all of the women have suffered this brutality. In all areas of empire, some degree of psychological clitorectomy is practiced.

In the culture of empire, most are suffering and they are conditioned to momentarily relieve the pain by sharing it with others. This shows the final spiritual destruction of the human family- to rob them of their humanity to the extent that they cannot even relate in terms of human relationship- spiritually, emotionally and physically. The exercise of the psychological pathology of empire is to coerce others and cause them pain as a demonstration of personal or institutional power.

It is the culture of empire that creates the ladders of power that in turn create anxiety stricken dependent people who will ape the boss for survival. Everyone is robbed of authenticity. Dominance and coercion allow a person to control others without having a real and respectful relationship. It is also this cultural context that produces the dominance/submission syndromes wherein people become servile to superiors and abusive toward inferiors. People in industrial society are not like the forager/hunter. They do not have the power of providing their own food or shelter. They are dependent on others to provide their physical security. No matter how high the executive position, if the paycheck-dependency linkage to the mass institution is cut, they become totally powerless. The route of personal power by achievement within institutionalized society can be cut at any time by those who have the real power- the elite class, so people must conform.

The authors Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky in their seminal work, Love and Addiction, broke through many stereotypes to view the phenomena of addiction/dependency in a context of a culture of dependency. They say:

"Addiction is not an abnormality in our society. It is not an aberration from the norm, it is itself the norm. The dependency, which is addiction, is a mirror image of more basic dependencies that we learn at home and in school. The addict's search for a superficial, external resolution of life (whether through drugs or so-called 'love') follows directly from the superficial, external relationships we are led to have with each other, with our own minds and bodies, with the physical world, with learning and work and play." ¹⁹

The cosmos generates organic, self-regulating beings on the surface of the earth that function according to their own nature. The culture of empire enslaves the life of the planet and its beings and destroys this sense of identity for the aggrandizement of the elite.
The Social Isolate Becomes "Individualist"

Industrial society has seen a growth of mass institutions and an increase in the power of the elites. We have seen the clan disintegrate, we have seen the extended family disintegrate and the nuclear family has all but disintegrated. For millions of years the songs, oral literature, skills, wisdom and knowledge of the human family was passed down from generation to generation. This was human culture, decentralized and personally empowering to everyone. Now, the elites have usurped human culture and society is administratively and militarily controlled. No longer is human culture inherited familiarly. "Cultural" conditioning now comes from the institutions of schools, television and other forms of mass communications that is controlled by elites.

We are offered individual "success" by struggling up the hierarchical ladder of mass institutions. As power is consolidated by the industrial elites, the individual becomes more and more a social isolate. Contradictorily, the powerless, anxiety stricken individual is conditioned to believe that he is an individualist, a gunslinger or tycoon character amassing personal power. For several million years the clan has been our natural social reality. Now, not having a relationship to the natural world or the social reality of a clan, the individual human, who is already conditioned to be emotionally distant from others, becomes more of an emotional and social isolate depending on secondary relationships in the shadow world of glamorous illusions.

The ruse is total. Not knowing the security of life and the earth and not knowing the security of a natural clan providing the learning of human sociability, the industrial human becomes a victim of all the forces of society that tend to make the person powerless and dependent, the perfect subject of addictive dependencies. Rather than the satisfaction of physical pleasure and genuine social camaraderie, the person is conditioned to word-built realities- social and religious ideologies, which are themselves separative from the living earth and cosmos.

The emotions are inclusive. When one is angry, one is angry all over. People experience emotion in a unitary way. The intellect on the other hand is divisive and comparative. That is, its basic functioning is divisive in the way it works. The intellect divides and compares, measures each, decides this, not that. The intellect is by its nature divisive and this is what industrial people have been given- frozen emotional bodies, and over-exercised intellects.

Not only can ecological and social disintegration be traced to the structure of empire, but personal disintegration is caused as well. Psychologist Nathaniel Braden in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem, says that:

"It is generally recognized by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists that pathological anxiety is the central and basic problem with which they must deal in psychotherapy- the symptom underlying the patient's other symptoms. The neurotic's essential attribute, his chronic response to the universe, is uncertainty and fear."²⁰

When we psycho-biological isolates are finally cut from all natural relationship, we end up living in the "whole world" of the ego, that construct of the intellectual mind that sucks energy (by material accumulation and constant ego-reinforcement and gratification) into itself to defend against the state of non-being. This contraction of energy is the pattern of the neurotic.

The cancer cell, that psycho-biological resonance of empire, is also neurotic in the sense that it follows the same pattern. It also sucks energy out of the system that supports it without having reciprocal relationship with the whole. To continue the holistic, holographic analysis, the phenomenon of neuroticism that occurs to empire culture, as a whole, is reflected in militarism, conquest and acquisition- as its fear promotes it to suck energy into its contracted center.

The logical extrapolation of civilization is the mental institution. Because of the developmental failures that we have reviewed, we tend to fear authentic relationships with other people. We find our own personal world more comforting- the world of the ego/identity fortress. People who are so driven into themselves, who have become so self-centered that they can only focus on and talk about themselves (and their problems), we call neurotic. People who have retreated farther into the comfort of their own world and who begin to hear and sometimes answer voices, we call schizophrenic. People who retreat totally into their own satisfying world and who do not relate to the outside world we describe as catatonic. This, which is politically defined as insanity, is simply a logical extension of the already existing social isolation of the individual in the culture of empire. It is also the logical end of the culture itself in the cosmos, lost in space and surrounded by life but talking only to itself.

The culture of empire has stolen our natural power as human beings. By its cultural conditioning it has channeled the energy of emperor and slave alike into purposes that are anti-life and contrary to the welfare of the human family and the welfare of the earth.

Significantly, we live in a culture of such limited psychological rewards that the children kill themselves rather than grow up in it. In the U.S., which is said to be "the richest country in the world," the youth are committing suicide in epidemic numbers. In the age group 15 to 25, suicide is the number one cause of death.

The End of Empire

Life is community. Community is biological. Our innate experience of natural morality is a biological feeling. It is not an intellectualization or romanticism. To be kind, helpful, sharing, and joyful is a natural state that comes right out of our cellular existence. That sense of unity and positivity is the way the universe works. No matter how damaged any of us have been by the culture of empire, almost everyone retains at least some shred of this positive sensibility. The personal experience of security, solidarity, sharing and love is the experience of beauty just as is a walk through an undamaged forest or sitting on a remote beach.

With the loss of our free roaming natural life and direct relationship with the life of the cosmos came an all-enveloping attack upon the beauty of our lives and the earth. The beauty of our lives, the song, the dance, the direct participation in creation suffered, along with the beauty of the earth's body, the forest, the sparkling stream, the song of the bird and the call of the animals. The diseased human culture produced the ugliness of the injured and bleeding ecology, the eroding and withering life of the land and the visual ugliness of the modern city where the homeless huddle in cold doorways of architectural boxes and elites of the contracted social body grasp for absolute security behind heavily guarded barricades.

Separation, isolation, disintegration, and death is the process of empire that is suffered by the homeless, the executive of transnational corporations, social bodies of empire culture and the ecosystem alike.

Eight thousand years ago we began to see death of ecosystems from over-grazing and agriculture in Central Asia, the Indus Valley and China. Five thousand years ago we began to see the death of the conquered, the slaves and the land, as the empires grew. Two thousand years ago, death was accelerating with the Mediterranean empires. Five hundred years ago death was spreading planet-wide. Now all of the corners of the world are filled up. The finale of disintegration is upon us.

The swelling mass that eats up its own sustenance has now reached the end. There is no more, but the mass continues to swell. It is not likely that the habits of empire, set subconsciously in the minds of billions, can be reformed in the decade or two decades that would be necessary to save the situation. Barring transcendental transformation of the whole culture of empire, we will see the trends of ten thousand years of imperial history culminate in our lifetime.

The power of the empire is the power to destroy. Our role is not to fight for the power of destruction but to unify with the creative power of the cosmos. Our role is not to isolate, extort and destroy but to love, live and create.

We are not fighting to reform a maladaptive and dying social body. There is no conflict with civilization, it is passing away. There is no battle for civilization's power, the power to kill. There is only the open, positive and sharing sustenance of the new life. The emergence of the new growth is our focus of attention. The emergence of our new babies, the emergence of our new culture and the emergence of the new earth is the focus. We have the standards of existence on this planet before us. They are simple and fundamental. We are simply righting the inversion.

As with a physical wound, the imperial tissue that has lost integration with the body, lost coherence with the complex flows of energy, falls away. One allows the diseased and injured portions to fall away, while resisting injury to that which is still healthy. One focuses on the new growth, the area of healing. We attempt to protect the best that remains and focus on the new biological growth for the future. One focuses on the smiling faces of that seventh generation of the future that will be created.

A crisis, according to Webster, is, "A stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events is determined, a turning point." In the case of civilization, it is now poised, tipping and beginning the slide into complete disintegration. We are at the cusp of the last cycle. Since World War II we have seen the acceleration of the disintegration. Human population and the consumption of the earth's life- "resources" have grown exponentially. Now the seepage of poisons is so great that everyone on earth is endangered. The seeping of poison is symbolic of the movement of the whole of industrial society. The popular parable of our situation is the boiling of the frog. If the frog is thrown in boiling water it will hop out. If the frog is put in cold water and the water is heated slowly the frog will not be able to recognize the rising of the heat. That is our situation. We do not consciously perceive the increments of dissolution. We now are at the pivot point where we still have the ability to maneuver. We are not yet in a state of social collapse with most of our valid options closed off.

Our future is not a political problem or a technical problem; it is a cultural problem. We live in a diseased culture. It is our way of life that is destroying the earth. Look at the big, dead and poisoned spot on the planet that is called a city. Simply the poisons that run off of it in rainstorms are killing life for miles around. Civilization is now so poisonous that if a city were blown up in a war the most severe danger would be from the spread of chemicals from factories as well as the nuclear power plants rather than simply from the bomb itself.

Humans easily could deal with the problem. Humans, individually have the innate abilities. If all humans on the planet could center their attention on the whole picture at the same moment, see the problem and then take action, the solution could be at hand. They would then reduce the birth rate to one child per woman and begin to live in balance and to restore the life of the earth. As the birth rate radically declined the "wealth" would increase proportionately.

Rather than wait for this to occur, we need take action now. We must overcome our paralysis of fear and confusion and take control of our lives. We must cease investing our emotional energy and condition in the events of civilization. It is diseased to the core. We must realize the "dear thing" cannot be saved, even with major surgery. Anytime change is presented to us we suffer a wave of reaction, a "security crisis." We begin to grasp for rationales. We begin to find reasons why we cannot change. "If we prepare to survive, 'they' will just come get what we have," is a customary response, which rests on some unexamined assumption that presents future masses of hungry refugees wandering about while "survivalists" sit on a pile of goodies. The image of the "survivalist" is the final extrapolation of the social isolate. The reality is- that if we cannot reach out to community, to cooperative self-organization, we cannot survive. It is the movement toward a positive and adaptive new culture that is needed.

The path leads back to the source. The standard to guide us is the "solar budget." We must allow the planet's life its net photosynthetic production, aid it, and live from the increase. The full-blown climax ecosystem is the standard of health for our earth. This means drastic reduction of human population density. We must return to what our human family has known for two million years, a life that produces life and encourages full participation by every member. This reality is our basic grounding. Our task is to create the healing of self, community and planet. There is no other way.

NOTES

1 The Center Of Life. L.L. Larison Cudmore. New York Times pub. 1978. pp. 127-128.

2 Imprints: The Life Long Effects of the Birth Experience. Arthur Janov. Coward-McCann, Inc. pub. New York. 1983. p. 249.

3 Magical Child: Rediscovering Nature's Plan For Our Children. Joseph Chilton Pearce. Bantam pub. New York. 1980. pp. 42,43.

4 ibid. pp. 43,44.

5 ibid. pp. 56,57.

6 ibid. p. 70.

7 ibid. pp. 58,59.

8 ibid. pp. 19,20.

9 ibid. p. 25.

10 Stress Without Distress. Hans Selye, M.D. N.A.L. New York. 1974. p. 30.

11 Culture Against Man. Jules Henry. Random House. New York. 1963. P. 42.

12 The Status Seekers. Vance Packard. Cardinal. New York. 1965. pp. 112,113.

13 Function of the Orgasm. Wilhelm Reich. World Pub. New York. 1971. p. 257.

14 ibid. p. 258.

15 ibid. pp.77,78.

16 ibid. pp. 209,210.

17 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th. Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Ballantine Books. New York. 1979. p. 135.

18 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire. Seabury Press. New York. 1970. pp. 29,30.

19 Love and Addiction. Stanton Peele & Archie Brodsky. Signet, NAL pub. New York. 1975. p. 6.

20 The Psychology of Self Esteem. Nathaniel Branden. Bantam Books. New York. 1981. p.

2007-11-23T04:37:00.001-08:00

Part Four: THE ANALYSIS OF EMPIRE CULTURE

The Final Empire: CHAPTER 9

THE CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF EMPIRE

Human cultures obey rules of metabolism. They are an energy code. A large part of human culture deals with food and eating. The life forms of the planet fit into niches within the flow of solar energy (NPP). Each species of organism fits into a niche so that it receives food energy and also makes a contribution to help support the system. Birds transport the seeds of trees, bees pollinate the flowers that they rely upon for food and all bodies eventually die and feed the soil.

All beings in the flow system of life/energy adapt in some manner to the whole. Human societies have been guided by cultures, adapted to certain ecosystems. On both coasts of North America, Europe and the British Isles there were massive migrations of fish at one time. This flow of protein in turn created niches for many life forms. Eagles, bears and humans were prominent in utilizing this food source. The young humans learned to fish. Fish were the subject of tribal art. Fish were the focus of spiritual attention through ceremony and ritual. Fish were food and their parts, such as bones, became useful tools and functional articles. All of these things were learned as part of the culture. The culture is an energy code instructing the young how to derive energy from their niche in the living world.

Our ancestors, the forager/hunters, had adaptations to reindeer migrations, bison migrations, salmon migrations and in the far north, whale, walrus and other migrations. There were many cultures also that had no single primary dependence but were adapted to the whole diversified ecosystem. We functioned according to the metabolism of the larger life flows. We followed the seasons nomadically; we knew each harvest of each watershed, as it became available. The metabolism of the earth set the pattern of dynamics for the forager/hunter cultures. The success of our endurance for three million years as a human family was our adaptation, our congruence with the larger cycles of energy. Our ancient culture was diametrically opposed to the form of civilized culture.

Civilized culture is not a linear and qualitative improvement; it is simply an inversion of our previous culture.

In our ancient culture we functioned in what anthropologists call a "domestic mode of production." That is, we produced what we needed within the clan and tribe. We were nomadic, we did not attempt to accumulate surpluses or create markets. Bartering was a peripheral and minor activity. Food and goods were distributed through familial systems of sharing that were conditioned by each culture. Marshal Sahlins, a noted anthropologist and author of the widely circulated book, Stone Age Economics, reports that after studying many tribal economies, he finds that none of them come near the maximum yield of their environment. That made them stable and sustainable.

One of the myths of civilization is that our ancestors were hungry, lived short lives, and only by a high birth rate, could sustain their populations. Just the opposite is true. Tribal people consciously kept their populations under control by herbal contraception, abortion, abstinence, long nursing periods and infanticide.

Anthropologist Robert Allen in examining the !Kung Bushmen who live in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa finds that, "The proportion of men and women over 60 is 10 per cent-smaller than in the industrial countries of Europe and North America, but significantly greater than in the nonindustrial countries of the tropics."¹ Infant mortality is higher in forager/hunter groups. Once puberty is reached though, their good health insures long life. When this is averaged, including their higher infant mortality, it causes the life-span numbers to be lower. This has allowed the familiar canard that "primitives lived short lives." We see here a tribal group living in an exceptionally harsh environment whose life expectancy exceeds most third world countries. Other tribal peoples, now gone, who lived in richer ecosystems must have been better off. The Kalahari is similar to the conditions of the Mojave Desert of California or the Negev in the Mid-East.

Robert Allen says that, "The Dobe !Kung...eat more protein than the British. Indeed, each person's daily protein intake, 93.1 grams, is exceeded by only 10 countries today."² A time-and-motion study pointed to by Allen shows that the Bushmen were not desperate for food or they would have devoted more time to food gathering and hunting. Allen says that, "It was found that they never spent more than 32 hours a week searching for food, and that the average was half that-or just over two hours a day for a seven-day week!"³ We must keep in mind that most tribal peoples conducted a full and rich human culture with voluminous oral literature that was continuously spoken and they conducted many ceremonials and tribal rituals. Their time was not all taken up with subsistence matters.

John H. Bodley in his, Anthropology And Contemporary Human Problems, reports:

"In 1965, 75 anthropologists assembled in Chicago to examine the latest research findings on the world's last remaining tribal hunting peoples, who were expected soon to become extinct. The result was a new description of life in these simplest of ethnographically known societies, showing their existence to be stable, satisfying, and ecologically sound, and not at all 'solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,' as Thomas Hobbes had proclaimed in Leviathan in 1651. It was learned, for example, that even remnant hunters such as the Bushmen, who survived in extreme and marginal environments, were not eking out a precarious existence, constantly on the edge of famine, as was thought. Indeed, they devoted only a few hours a week to subsistence and suffered no seasonal scarcity. When uncontaminated by outsiders, tribal hunters seemed to enjoy good health and long lives, while they had the good sense to maintain their wants at levels that could be fully and continuously satisfied without jeopardizing their environment. One researcher even suggested that this was, after all, the original 'affluent society.'

"Most significantly, when the discussions ended, it was concluded that the hunting way of life, which had dominated perhaps 99 per cent of humanity's cultural life span, had been 'the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved....'"⁴

In viewing the cultural change that has occurred since we were all forager/hunters, we confront the myth of "man's evolution." There is the linear concept of biological, "genetic," evolution and a corollary concept of "social evolution." The picture is that "man the toolmaker" has laboriously evolved, socially, by his inventions. First the rocks were chipped for tools, then the bow and arrow, then agriculture and now computers. In order to logically justify this linear concept, those farthest back on the linear path must be understood to have been in much worse condition than we are today. In this myth, we, today, in the richest industrial countries are at the forefront of social evolution. We are the most "evolved." The emphasis is that we laboriously "invented" agriculture as an escape from the previous, less satisfactory condition. This is the standard myth. Others seek to use other functional reasons in addition, to explain why humans became civilized. Other theories to explain what influenced this cultural change are a rising population of forager/hunters that may have forced farming intensification or that the worldwide die-off of large mammals after the last ice age forced forager/hunters into agricultural intensification and a sedentary way of life.

The standard measure in the field of anthropology is that forager/hunters today, as in the past, spend an average of 500 hours per year per adult person in subsistence activities, the traditional villager spends 1,000 hours and of course the modern 40 hour week amounts to 2,000 hours per year. As anthropologist John Bodley so ably points out, this presents a problem for the linear concept, namely why would the forager/hunters opt for a system in which twice as much time would be taken up with subsistence? He points out that there are examples where village agriculturists have actually returned to forager/hunter life styles when the opportunity presented itself.⁵ The linear concept would argue also that humans "discovered" agriculture somehow, as if foragers with their intimate knowledge of the natural world did not know that plants grow from seeds!

The big myth, which we are confronting in this essay, is the myth that says that there has been a qualitative advancement with the change from forager/hunter culture to civilization. We have already seen that only ten of the countries in the world exceed the protein intake of the !Kung Bushmen. This means that most of the civilized people of the world can't even feed themselves to the level of the forager/hunters and this is no doubt true for most of the people (other than the elites) in history who have lived in "civilization." Civilization actually represents a lowering of living standards, using the values of longevity, food, labor and health for most people outside of the elite class. Only by restricting our view to "inventions," could we say that there has been a linear progression. We live in a world where starvation is increasing. It is a world of myth where millions and soon hundreds of millions, die of starvation and we still say we are making "progress" by counting the number of devices created. This may be the ultimate of materialism (the belief that material objects are the ultimate value), that as billions die on a dying planet, we say that we have made great progress because we invented airplanes, computers, satellites and we went to the moon in a rocket ship.

Many have theorized about the cause of the change from forager/hunter to civilization. We simply do not know for sure. None of us were there and little hard evidence exists. Though we don't have hard evidence for the why of the change we have abundant information about what the change was. We can easily understand the meaning and impact of these functional patterns in human society.

The functional change was the domestication of plants for agriculture both in China and in the original Indo-European area of the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia. The Indo-Europeans also domesticated sheep and goats. This was accompanied by the creation of villages. Early villages in what is now Turkey have been dated at 8,000 years in the past. Smelting and copper working in the area have been dated at approximately 5,000 years in the past.

The Cultural Inversion

The large question that we seek to answer is, "What is it about the culture of empire that has produced the prospect of planetary suicide for us?" To understand this we must look at how this culture functions, its functional basis, its dynamics. When this change to empire occurred, human culture in effect inverted. In forager/hunter societies we were ecologically balanced. The archeological evidence from one area, southern Africa, is that humans lived stably for 130,000 years without overwhelming the ecosystem upon which they depended.⁶

In the inversion,

human culture changed from one of sharing and cooperation in clan society to one of deliberate inequality of goods.
The culture changed from one of social equality to one of hierarchies of authority and despotism ruled by the Emperor and associated elites.
The culture changed from emphasis on fecundity, Mother Nature and what anthropologists call matrilocal culture, to patriarchy- control and ownership by males.
The culture changed from emphasis on cooperation in clan society to an emphasis on the cult of the warrior and violence. This is a change from cooperation to coercion.

The emphasis in tribal society was on sharing. In most tribal societies the chief spokesperson for the group was generally the poorest in material terms. This is because that person had shared the most and was therefore held in esteem by the group. This changed to an emphasis on materialism symbolized by the emperor who possessed riches amongst his peasant subjects who had little.

The inversion represented a severance from the consciousness of the living world, what some call a change from pantheism to deism.

Natural culture has a continuing contact with the spiritual consciousness of the living world. Each person in Natural culture had the cultural understanding that each living thing was a spiritually conscious entity as well as the understanding that everything in material reality was spiritually vivified. When the inversion caused the severance from this, human spiritual sensibility became abstracted into "religion." No longer was the entire world spiritually animated but the focus was on a pantheon of abstract deities or on one deity. These "sky gods" were not part of the corporeal world but were abstracted somewhere in mental space. This was the first alienation and separation from life. This radically changed human perception. In the former world of the forager/hunter, the cultural experience was a continuing and direct spiritual contact with the cosmos. When the culture inverted this was severed and the narrow focus was placed on abstracted "Gods," priestly hierarchies and material goods. Natural culture, the forager/hunter culture that lived in integration with the natural world, viewed reality as a composite life where all beings worked together to produce the whole in a natural manner. With the advent of empire the reality view changed to centralized power concepts such as the abstracted gods and goddesses and the centralized authority of the emperor who in most cases claimed to be ruling by divine right granted by a male god. This tendency toward abstraction demonstrated itself in money as an abstraction of biological energy and in writing as an abstraction of human speech. We can also say that now, empire culture is abstracted- removed- from the earth and only retains a "resource" relationship with the living world.

Wisdom and human maturity were casualties of the inversion. Generally in Natural Culture, humans managed their numbers and had great awareness of their cooperative relationship with the living world and great respect for it. All species are self-regulating with respect to their environments. This on the human level we could call maturity. Later, we will show that tribal society and also animal species go to considerable lengths to be self-regulating. The examples of population control are equaled by the care not to overburden the environment with hunting or other use. There was respect for the living world as well as a concern about future generations. With inversion, group responsibility and responsibility to the young, so that they could endure, has been lost. This has been replaced by a focus on individual accumulation with disregard of responsibility to the group, the living world or concern about the future survival of the young. Animals all seek to protect their young and provide them with optimum survival but the culture of empire does not. A popular example of the wisdom of Natural Culture is the rule of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, that all decisions in council be viewed with respect to their effects upon the seventh generation. These values of Natural Culture were centered on one fundamental- respect. People had respect for themselves-valued themselves- respect for others and respect for the cosmos that had given life to all. The effect of the inversion has been to elevate the negative social values of violence, selfishness, lying, stealing (conquest) and irresponsibility to the level of cultural standards.

The Dynamic Cultural Factors

Our ancestors lived by adaptation to the life of the earth. When the pathology of empire broke out in the human family this adaptation and unity with the cosmos faded, and rather than adapt to the cosmos, humans became "God," as it were. Humans sought control rather than adaptation. This is the pivotal fact of the culture of empire. Humans in empire culture began this control with domesticated "biological slaves": wheat, barley, sheep, goats, water buffalo and rice. When this change occurred, human culture changed from ecological balance to ecological imbalance. The biological slaves have historically been used along with human slavery to extort energy from the earth's metabolism in a parasitic relationship. This led to the idea that humans have no need to unify and act responsibly and cooperatively with the cosmos but instead it was the cosmic role of humans to control the cosmos. Thus, the suicide pact of empire began. This need to control, so characteristic, truly, of a position of weakness, is the pivotal fact from which the coercive dynamics of empire culture flow.

The attitude of control rather than cooperation with a greater power is a quantum shift in human perception. From a position that all perceived reality is manifest from unseen spiritual dynamics with which tribal people sought to be in contact, humans in empire began to see the world as a source of gratification for culturally defined needs-the accumulation of material wealth and power over the earth and other people. Meaning was taken from the spiritual forces of life and the cosmos and placed on material accumulation. In this respect the cosmos became meaningless. This also contributed to a generalized sense of the meaninglessness of human life within the Culture of Empire.

The fundamental dynamic of the Culture of Empire is linear increase. The massing of human population into the early towns was based on the productivity of agriculture and herding. This quickly went above a sustainable level. It meant that the humans would soon exhaust the soils and foraging areas and so must turn to some way to continue these methods. Once this inversion had occurred, rather than the previous balance, it became to the advantage of the humans to spur further growth in food production by expansion. Further growth in human numbers added to the human energy applied to agriculture, stock raising and the production of material goods. Further growth also increased the security of the larger sedentary population. Because the increasing, sedentary population needed military conquest to expand their food base, patriarchy, militarism and hierarchy were strengthened.

Once the human population exceeds that of balanced forager/ hunters, the ecology of the area inevitably becomes denuded. This is the trigger mechanism. When one eats up what is in one's own backyard- when one exceeds the natural productivity-it is necessary to go to other areas to get more to sustain the massed group. This requires militarism and the social ideology of conquest. The idea of accumulation of material goods and the idea of linear increase becomes ingrained into the social ideology.

A profound change takes place in the psyche of the culture when this change from forager/hunter to civilized, imperial, energy systems occurs. Where natural human culture tended toward unities of person, tribe, and cosmos- in cooperative relationship, the culture of empire tends toward disintegration, separation and isolation on all levels. Conflict/competition, not cooperation, becomes the dynamic. The cooperative unities are supplanted by the coercion of the controlling elite with its military force, as in early empires, or with administrative-legal control in the later empires. Human culture, which had been passed down through generations, person to person, disintegrated, but the social body was still held in form by the power of the elites with their hierarchies of coercion. Order in imperial society ultimately rests upon the monopoly of violence. Within the imperial worldview, the imperial cultural mind, power is the ability to compel another person or to force change in the material world. Power to compel and force is a central dynamic. This power is the dynamic by which the heathen are conquered, the aristocrat becomes emperor, material goods are produced or gold is accumulated.

This coercion is the element of militarism in empire. The complete inversion of human society from Natural to Empire Culture did not take place overnight but took thousands of years to become what it is today. What it is today, nonetheless, is a direct extrapolation of the original dynamics that were initiated when human population began to swell. When the inversion occurred, human attention shifted from relationship with the living world to extortion of the fertility of the living earth. The extortion factor of empire is in effect stealing. Though civilization fears to name it, conquest is piracy and as the anarchist theorist, Kropotkin, says, ownership is theft. Differential profits are theft. The First World sucking the Third World dry of their resources is theft. Male ownership of females and the use of their energy, which was sanctioned by common law until recently, is theft. Human slavery is theft. The using up of the earth's life by unbalanced culture is theft from one's children. Empire culture is based upon the theft of conquest and the socially sanctioned practice of theft runs throughout the society under many names. The deliberate inequality of hierarchy introduces competition and a struggle for power. Hierarchy is not a social form in which all share equally. It is a form in which the few in the elite are winners and the supporting masses are losers. Much of the conflict, covert and overt in the culture of empire concerns who gets the scarce goods. Any possible separation or difference such as race or gender is used to gain advantage. Hierarchy is a social context of coercion. Hierarchy creates a context of dominance/submission and a competition for power.

We see this lack of wise management, this immaturity of competition now in world society. Because the people of Empire Culture are locked into an accumulative, competitive structure, there is no management of the whole. Each person, social institution or country simply struggles to maximize their power and wealth. There is only grasping for short-term gain at the expense of long-term survival. In a competitive market the farmer who incurs the long-term expense of preventing soil erosion- will go broke. In a hierarchical/competitive environment, short-term gain must take place over long-term gain because the farmer that makes the short-term gain will remain and the other will be eliminated from the system. No one in the empire advocates long term gain in soil fertility when the short-term gain of profit margins or production quotas are the whole point of the effort. This is the reason that nothing real will be done to avoid the final collapse of civilization. The structure of empire is to enrich the emperor/elite at the expense of the earth and society- not to manage affairs for the benefit of the whole life of the earth.

Agriculture and herding began the energy system of empire, rooting in the soil, extracting energy directly out of the planetary metabolism - and growing by the force of violence employed against the earth. The development of mass societies demands stasis, immobility rooted in the soil organ. As the hierarchy of human power relationships grows in the cult of empire, the energy of the soil community and the general life that it finances declines. Empires have historically run great net deficits of the fertility of the earth. The cultural ideology of the warrior cult of empire may have survived into our time, but the individual energy cycles of each empire such as the Indus Valley, Sumeria and Greece that have adhered themselves to the earth's metabolism, have each cycled into ecological exhaustion. Unfortunately, the cultural form had spread before they deflated.

Empire replicates itself in the mind of the young by means of the patriarchal family. The family itself is a mini-empire that provides the conditioning, which prepares both the male and female children for their later roles in the larger social body. In the family the young females learn their submissive, dependent roles and the young males learn their roles as the favored "mini-emperors" of the hierarchical structure. The sexual imbalance of patriarchy and female ownership, or more accurately, female slavery, is inherently involved with militarism and with the inherent growth dynamic of empire. War, inherently brings the males to supremacy within a culture. Not only is empire forced to expand because of the exhaustion of "resources" in its central areas but also there is a growth dynamic in the sociology of warrior cultism itself. It is simply that a general amounts to very little unless there is a war to fight. In a culture of militarism it is the role of the males of the culture to foment war. War is the raison d'être of militaries. In ancient times, the country of Greece did not have to conquer the "known world" in order to feed and clothe itself. Nonetheless, Alexander laid down and cried when there were no peoples left to conquer. He cried not because Greece had any functional need to conquer the whole world but because he and his culture had internalized the values of empire.

Patriarchy, militarism and growth are defining characteristics of empire culture. The growth of a large family sired by the patriarch is a factor in the power of the patriarch's mini-empire (and in population explosions). In the whole empire, numbers mean power when the cultural destiny is to accumulate and conquer. Even now, with almost universal knowledge of the consequences of the population explosion, some empire culture governments still cannot help but worry about the slowdown of population growth. Some governments aid population growth through tax incentives and other subsidies not enjoyed by single people or childless couples. All the patriarchs of religions and governments of the various sectors of the final empire understand that even as poor as individual Chinese citizens are, the mass of them creates the fact of a world power (though the Chinese government has recognized limits and has instituted birth control programs). The present population explosion is not an inevitable or natural occurrence. It is clear that the human population explosion is the result of cultural and religious factors. For the millions of years of the human family there was no world population explosion until empires began.

It is these "values of imbalance" functioning in the human social body that are killing the life of the earth. These values are: materialism, militarism, patriarchy, hierarchy, the idea of linear increase and extortion. Superficial political reform of this culture is no answer, technological innovation is no answer. The answer is that all of these dynamics must end and new culture must be created. Any human group functioning according to these dynamics will ultimately destroy the earth. The planetary crisis now is a product of these dynamics. Whether one drains the ecosystem of its energy slowly or rapidly, the ultimate conclusion is nonetheless, death for all.

The Cosmology of Empire

Materialism is the end of the spiritual world. When humans began to believe that they could "own" part of a planet, when humans began to selfishly "possess" things, cutting themselves off from the reality of the beneficent cosmos and its flow of energy, spiritual contact fell away. When the empire irrupted, when the focus of consciousness turned from the cosmos with all of its diversity of forces and beings, the focus narrowed, simplified. From the grand diversity of the cosmos, humans focused narrowly on the self and what the self identified with-its possessions- existing in a social context of the valuation of material objects. The value of humans became "wealth"- the objects that they possessed. One cannot live in holistic reciprocity with the forces and beings of the cosmos and be selfish. Generally, in the pattern of imperial culture the focus was turned inward, toward isolation, to concern with self rather than self/tribe/earth as was the focus of non-empire culture. Generally, in tribal society no one dies of starvation unless everyone dies. Food is shared. In present day empire culture the rich gaze out of the windows of fine restaurants at the poor, homeless on the streets. To them this is justified on a subconscious level by the linear increase-based, social- Darwinist programming of the cosmology of empire, with which they have been conditioned since birth. Social Darwinism says that there is only survival for the fittest, there are the weak and the strong, the unevolved and the evolved. That is why might makes right. In fact, it is said by some colonialists, that at times, the lesser should give up to the more fit, in order to aid "evolution." The mind conditioning of the societies of empire says that there is "evolution" measured now by technological invention. Those who are most progressed are leading the whole planet toward a utopian destiny for the human race. Inasmuch as these "most progressed" groups are carrying the burden for the whole, sacrifices of the other lesser peoples to help the more advanced are justified. Here, a biological theory has been inflated to become cosmology. Cosmologies are each culture's explanation of the plan and pattern of the universe as it works itself out on earth. The cosmology of a culture explains whom we are, how we got here on this planet and what the purpose of life is.

The Darwinist myth of the "survival of the fittest" rests within a larger mental construct- the basic subconscious image of linear increase. Rather than the organic view of a cyclic pulsation of life maintained by our ancestors, the culture of empire rests upon the image of linear increase. For example, the religious perspectives of empire from China, India and the Mid-East are linear in the sense that they believe we are not now adequate (we are sinners or we are unenlightened) but we are progressing in a linear manner toward some distant point of perfection. In social and economic realms we are progressing toward the utopian goal of wealth by making economic progress. In the technological "man the toolmaker" realm, we are inventing utopia where mechanical slaves will do our bidding.

In the cosmology of empire, the earth, its life and material forms became simply objects for manipulation and accumulation. They have no inherent meaning. Empire culture began to invest meaning in material objects themselves, with no relation to the cosmos. One's identity became associated with one's material accumulation as it hopefully increased in a linear manner. Materialism became a basic factor in the cosmology of empire. In this worldview, the earth is a "resource" to be used in service of empire.

The ideology of empire is fascism. From the belief in the centralized maintenance of "order" to the belief in the inherent racial, moral, physical, spiritual and intellectual superiority of the elites, the ideology has not changed since the first "son of heaven," Chinese emperor or first Sumerian tyrant. In our own era we had the exemplars of civilization, the Nazis. Just as with the "old boys" in English mens' clubs, in private yankee boys schools in New England, among the inheritors of social privilege in Italy, among the patrician class of Spain and in corporate board rooms throughout the industrial world, there is a bedrock belief in human inequality. All believe that the tribal people in the highlands of New Guinea are "less evolved" than they. They (as well as the social conditioning of all civilized people) state that they are on the forefront of linear increase, "advancement," "progress," "being civilized." The Nazis said that they were on the forefront of evolution. They were carrying the burden of human advancement, genetically and technologically. They said that this was demonstrated by their superior machines, their superior military power and their superior culture, things that were only said behind the doors of the private men's clubs of imperial England or now in transnational corporate boardrooms. Inasmuch as the Nazis believed they were carrying the evolutionary burden for the entire race and planet it seemed reasonable to them that other lesser breeds should step aside or be exterminated. Isn't this the basic belief of the colonists who landed at Plymouth Rock? Cortez in Mexico? the Chinese now in Tibet? Isn't this the social ideology of the last two hundred years of imperial conquest of the planet? Fascism is Empire, is Civilization!

In the natural human culture, life is adequate in and of itself. Life and its living is the point of it all. Life is a natural occurrence that is manifest as the intent of the cosmos. Life produces the needs of humans who live in balance. Life produces those needs as constantly as the tree grows and the rain falls. In the world of natural culture, life survives by its successful adaptation to the larger whole, not by conflict and control.

In the empire culture, people struggle for materialist salvation. When the herder exhausts the grasses, more must be found. When the agriculturist exhausts the soil, more wilderness must be conquered. When the general conquers one country, there are always more. In the inadequate present, one must struggle, battle and compete in linearity toward salvation, which is that point in which one has conquered and then owns and controls everything in the universe. This is linearity. This is mechanistic evolution in which repeated chance collision of chemicals rather than the intelligence of the cosmos produced the world. The myth of linear evolution is laid as a template over reality. It allows academicians, politicians and personal egos to justify much of the destruction and death caused by the empire. It allows people who should know better to say that self-sufficient tribal people should be displaced by economic development so that "they can become educated and productive."

"Man the tool maker" is a correlate myth. In predicating that the cosmic role of humans is to make tools (to produce material goods), academicians find stone spear points, fit the many types of spear points into an evolutionary line and then declare that this is evidence for the role of "man the toolmaker." Of course humans have always made tools but this was not the basic purpose of the society. It is, though, the basic purpose of industrial society. By taking what the basic pattern of empire culture has been through history and looking at the world through that pattern, the leaders of empire have "discovered cosmic patterns" like, "the hidden hand of God in the 'free enterprise' market," "dialectical materialism," or "the survival of the fittest," and its derivative, social Darwinism- the theory that in the dog eat dog competitive social struggle the best always wins and that is what improves the human species. The linear growth myth justifies the contempt and racism directed toward Native people (who are not "evolved") and it justifies the contempt for the "lesser" in the hierarchy. As the empire races toward suicide it scorns the "less evolved" human ancestors that have lived sustainable manner for a million years. As the materialism and markets of Empire Culture developed, humans began to increasingly focus human energy upon the production of material goods. Markets became the mechanism that accelerated the extortion of the earth's fertility. Empire is a culture of violence, arranged according to coercive hierarchies of social power based on the extortion of the fertility of the planetary metabolism. An empire is a temporary, pathological human culture. It grows based upon declining resources and then collapses.

The general dynamic of empire culture assumes a life of doing on the part of humans. Humans work and produce goods and services. Humans invent new "tools." Prior to the inversion the emphasis of human life was on Being. There was nothing to do but gather and hunt the "fruits" of the earth and be in spiritual consonance with the cosmic pattern and will as demonstrated in the life of the earth. This is a clear inversion between being and doing.

The conditioning in empire, the "doing" culture, carries psychological consequences. Within the body of myth, that each of us play out each day in our personal lives, we assume subconsciously that life is not yet adequate but that we are moving toward utopia. This means that each of us see our lives as somehow wrong and as yet inadequate, none the less we are struggling toward completion. This is a bedrock psychological assumption. Life is not yet full, complete and adequate. It is in this manner that we live out the pathology of the imperial whole in each of our personal lives.

NOTES

1 Natural Man. Robert Allen. The Danbury Press. (no location given). printed in Madrid, Spain by Novograph S.A. & Roner S.A. 1975. p. 24.

2 ibid. p. 16.

3 ibid. p. 18.

4 Anthropology And Contemporary Human Problems. John H. Bodley. Second Edition. Mayfield pub. Palo Alto, CA. 1985. pp. 18,19.

5 ibid. p. 94.

2007-11-23T04:36:00.001-08:00

Final Empire Part Three: THE EXHAUSTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRE

CHAPTER 8: POPULATION, POISONS AND RESOURCES

The Human Population Disaster

There is no such thing as unlimited growth of numbers in the natural world. The populations of organic beings in the web of the natural world do not press constantly against their food supply. For several million years humans maintained a stable population with respect to their environment. The idea that there is something inevitable about human population expansion is wrong. Historically, population explosions have only happened within the human culture that we know as civilization. The idea of linear increase of population was popularized by Thomas R. Malthus and picked up by Charles Darwin in his theory of evolution. Population increase was the basis of the biological dynamics of Darwin's model. Darwin says that, "A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase." Here is one of the grim assumptions that are typical of Darwin's era.

Darwin's concept of population increase fits with the reality perspective of empire culture. In Darwin's scheme organic life is a grim struggle of competition, violence and "survival of the fittest."

The reading of the social values of empire culture into biology is not accurate:

"No species strives to increase without limit, any more than an individual tends to grow to infinity. And animal populations are limited not by struggle, starvation, and death, but by restricting the number of breeders in various ways and by varying the number of offspring produced at a time by each female. Biologist V. C. Wynne-Edward's comments on Darwin's assumption that every living thing strives to increase its numbers geometrically.

" 'This intuitive assumption of a universal resurgent pressure from within held down by hostile forces from without has dominated the thinking of biologists on matters of population regulation, and on the nature of the struggle for existence, right down to the present day.

" 'Setting all preconceptions aside, however, and returning to a detached assessment of the facts revealed by modern observation and experiment, it becomes almost immediately evident that a very large part of the regulation of numbers depends not on Darwin's hostile forces but on the initiative taken by the animals themselves; that is to say, to an important extent it is an intrinsic phenomenon.' "¹

Self-regulation of populations occurs in natural, undisturbed ecosystems but once those ecosystems are disturbed, populations fluctuate wildly. The apologists of empire will attempt to say that there has been a "social" evolution (linear increase) and that this has progressed since "man the toolmaker" first chipped a rock for use as a tool. This is social ideology, not reality. The human family remained stable for millions of years until the recent inversion to empire. It was only at that point that the "linear increase" of population began. Anthropologist, John H. Bodley states that; "In practice, various cultural controls helped maintain population well below any theoretical maximum carrying capacity based on the ultimate limits of food production."² It appears that with the human and other species, population levels are quite elastic. Much evidence in the field of biology suggests that, "A wide range of animals vary their litter size and clutch size according to the amount of food available."³ This means that in years when the traditional foodstuffs of a species is not abundant, they limit reproduction or do not breed at all.⁴ This picture of self-regulation of population by species is contrary to cultural ideology (which is why it took researchers so long to focus on the question) but it agrees with what we know of ecology. The life of the earth is not some mindless, random event. The more modern society learns of the natural world and its ecology, the more we see that life is an extremely complex, balanced, cooperative, intelligent and self-regulating organism.

Once the natural culture of the human family was destroyed by conquest and forced acculturation, the natural wisdom was gone and the lid came off human population. With natural culture, which lived in conscious balance with the surrounding life, the cultural motive was to limit human population. When culture inverted with empire, the cultural motive of linear increase resulted in increased population as the patriarchs had conscious motive to increase family size for economic reasons as well as patriarchal pride. With empire agriculture, more human labor was needed because they did not gather, they "worked" the land and needed the labor of more sons and daughters. More people were needed for agriculture and more people were needed for militaries. As this increase in the number of people occurred, further pressure existed to then increase food production.

When the balance was exceeded, the compounding effect of the exponential increase began. If two people have three children and those three have three and this occurs among millions, the compounding of numbers becomes a rush. Now, in present day reality we have the unnatural Malthusian spectacle of population increase in exponential amounts- just like the rabbits that were turned loose in Australia where there were no adequate predators.

As imperial culture's development of techniques to extort fertility from the earth progressed, there were surges in population that correlated with surges in food supply. Fritz M. Heichelheim, Professor of Greek and Roman History at the University of Toronto, describes the change that occurred when the Romans invented the steel bottom plow:

"When the heavy soils, the most fertile of our globe, were taken under the plow for the first time in human history, enormous population increases outside of Egypt, Babylonia, and other territories of 'hydraulic' civilizations were the consequence." ⁵

Finally, when the mercantilist-industrialist elite of the industrial revolution succeeded in finally breaking the last vestiges of culture inherited from tribal Europe, which existed then in the form of self-supporting, subsistence-agriculture peasantry. Population, which had been creeping upward, began another compounding surge that we now see worldwide. The relatively stable, landed peasant culture was broken, their lands confiscated and the peasants were forced into the cities to become a growing labor pool.

The European Population Explosion

By 1650, the explosion of population in Europe fueled major colonization efforts. By improved technical ability to extort fertility and materials from the earth, plus the increased efficiency of the newly invented weapons allowing conquest of colonies, a massive increase was financed. Scholarship reveals that the increase in the population of European settlements outside of Europe went from 113 million in 1650, to 935 million in 1950. In that same period of time the population of Europe itself (Europe and Asiatic U.S S.R.) went from 103 million to 594 million.

The population of Europeans increased much more rapidly than the other parts of the world at the time. Armed with extractive technologies, the Europeans spilled into "rich" ecosystems still undamaged by the march of empire. Experts estimate that world population stood at approximately 545 million in 1650. By 1950 the world population had increased to 2,406 million, an almost 2 billion increase in 300 years.⁶ The doubling time of world population from 1 AD to 1800 AD was somewhere between five and seven hundred years. As the exponential increase began to gain momentum the doubling time had shortened to one hundred and twenty years in 1800. In 1988 the world population doubling time stood at 40 years. Since 1900, most of the increase, of the increase, of world population has happened in the Third World nations.

The projected future increase in human population appears very grim, according to the World Resources Institute:

"Africa's projected growth rate is the highest of all regions, increasing from 555 million in 1985 to almost 2.6 billion in 2100. Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to grow from 405 million in 1985 to 1.2 billion in 2100. Asia is projected to add the largest number of people, growing from 2.7 billion to 4.9 billion. Developed regions are expected to follow a low-growth pattern; by 2100 they are expected to account for only 14.1 percent of the total population, compared to 24.4 percent today."

World population will never reach those projected numbers. At some point the population begins to completely eliminate their survival systems and major die-offs will begin. The world rate of death from starvation now stands at 40 million per year, but this is not yet because of massive die-offs of whole regions.⁷

Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute describes a three-stage decline to disaster. In the first stage the population of a region is well within its ecological support systems. In the second stage it begins to eat up its survival systems (by such things as burning up fuel wood faster than it grows or destroying the soils). In the third stage the biological support systems collapse and a population die-off follows.⁸

Many Third World countries have now passed the threshold of increased food per person and are now sliding backward, as population outpaces food supply. Brown states that there are now some 40 countries where per capita grain production is going down.⁹

At the same time as these preconditions of starvation develop; the age structure of the populations of dozens of Third World countries grows younger. Now, in the early 1990's, 40-50 percent of the population of many Third World countries is under the age of 15. This means that the age of child bearing is just beginning and that another surge is on its way.

The Industrial Poisons

There was never a poison problem with the natural human family. Pollution, garbage, and industrial poisons are specific to empire culture. Any refuse or debris of natural culture would simply biodegrade, but with a culture that is out of balance with the cosmos, there is no integrated flow and the garbage simply backs up into giant mountains or is dumped in the backyard of others. No one really knows what to do with it.

The question of industrial poisons must be considered in the context of the whole of civilization, which itself is out of balance with planetary life. It is not just the matter of industrial poisons, which do not fit with the web of life; they are simply a more recent manifestation of a cultural system that has been fundamentally injurious to life since it began.

Industrial poisons now pervade the planet Earth. Many of the chemical formulations produced by industrial processes have never existed on the earth before. No one really knows what their long term effect will be, either individually or in any of the millions of possible mixtures they could assume in the environment. The count stands now at 70,000 artificially produced chemicals, with at least 1,000 new ones produced each year. The industry dominated Environmental Protection Agency of the U. S. government classifies 35,000 of these as harmful or potentially harmful; the actual count is no doubt much larger.

The poisoning of the planet by toxic chemicals is not a static problem. It is a problem that is exploding. Recent statistics from the U.S. shows the trend worldwide. According to a current report: "U.S. production of organic chemicals grew from 4.75 million tonnes [5.3 million tons] in 1967 to 7.9 million tonnes [8.48 million tons] in 1977- an increase of 67 per cent."¹⁰ Only a handful of the more popularly known toxins have been thoroughly tested for their carcinogenic, tetragenic (producing deformities of the fetus) or mutagenic properties (producing physical mutations that travel down the generations). The process of testing toxins is long and expensive. The testing process itself can also be corrupt as seen with the case of International Biotest Laboratories in the U.S. whose actual faking of tests called into question approximately 500 compounds that had been approved based on their work. Several of those company executives were sent to federal prison but the system that produced them was not changed nor were the chemicals in question pulled off the market.

Most toxins that have been approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have not been tested for their cancer causing or birth defect causing properties. Years ago the U.S. congress ordered the agency to begin testing already approved compounds for these additional dangers but by 1990, only six of those chemicals had been thoroughly tested.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council states that enough studies and tests have been done to make complete health hazard assessments possible on 10 per cent of the pesticides produced, 2 per cent of cosmetics, 18 per cent of drugs and drug excipients (binders) and 5 per cent of food additives. In all, we can get this complete information on only between 10 - 12 per cent of the chemicals used by commerce.¹¹

Even if the impossible could be achieved and all seventy thousand plus the one thousand new compounds per year could be thoroughly tested, there is the matter of what compounds are created when these substances are indiscriminately mixed together. Agricultural poisons are often mixed before they are applied. The substances are mixed in waste dumps. The substances mix in the industrial production process itself. The substances also mix when they escape into the environment. Even non-toxic chemicals when mixed, can become toxic at times. If we have 70,000 substances and we calculate the number of possible mixtures, we then see the absurdity of guaranteeing any safety.

The production of many of the furnishings of the industrial lifestyle produces toxins. 70 per cent of hazardous waste comes from the chemical and petrochemical industries. Production of such necessities of the industrial lifestyle as plastics, soap, synthetic rubber, fertilizers, synthetic fibers, medicines, detergents, cosmetics, paints, pigments, adhesives, explosives, pesticides, and herbicides produce toxic byproducts, are toxic themselves, or both.

The U.S. leads the world in production of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. In 1981 the estimate was that the U.S. alone was producing 320.7 million tons of hazardous waste.¹² World totals are not precisely known but informed estimates for that year run between 363.73 and 551.15 million tons.

There is no compelling motive for industry to devote much money or attention to the determination of the exact volume or the effects of the poisons they are producing. The motive for obvious reasons is to hide the numbers. Industrial society gropes in the dark when this entire question of heavy metals, industrial chemicals or radiation poisoning is raised. The public has no way of knowing the facts unless they are given by industry or government. It is in the interest of industry not to do studies, as it only furnishes ammunition for their opposition and often government is in complicity with industry, directly or indirectly. In actual fact the humans and the environment are the guinea pigs. Historically it usually has not been until human cancers, birth defects or die-off occur, that the discovery of poisoning has been made and any legislative or administrative action is taken.

As we saw with the case of Agent Orange and the Vietnam veterans, establishing absolute proof of the connection between toxic chemical or radiation and resulting health effects is very difficult. When ordinary citizens are poisoned they are faced with the producers and users raising every possible objection from their position of power, wealth and ownership of the media. Cancers from radiation exposure appear typically twenty to thirty years after exposure and effects from toxic chemicals often have a similar time lag. In addition, these poisons trigger malfunctions in the body (such as damage to the auto-immune system) and it is difficult to prove in a court of law, the direct link- that one caused the other- especially when there are a number of possibilities.

In one particularly clear and unique case, that of the Navajo Uranium miners on the Navajo Reservation in the Southwestern U.S., the connection was inescapable. A large number of miners lived in the same area under similar conditions-and a preponderance of them developed lung and other cancers while the surrounding people did not. Most of these cancers did not begin to develop for twenty to twenty-five years.

With the transience of modern society, it would be difficult to say what toxic field, ingested substance, or water borne chemical one may have been exposed to twenty years ago! Because the absolute proof is so difficult, killers -mass murderers- go right on killing life (people included), wreaking damage upon the earth and her forms. It is only because of the heavy mental conditioning that the public does not react to their own poisoning. When the government approves a substance that causes only one cancer death per one million people, this is hundreds of people who will die out of a population of several hundred million people. Without the twisting of words and reality the public would ordinarily call this mass murder. The industrialists find it more profitable to dump their poisonous excrement on the public than to figure out what to do with it themselves. In one recent "toxic incident" during the summer of 1988, 730,000 gallons of diesel fuel were, according to those responsible, accidentally allowed to enter the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Several days after the crisis began, workers found that quantities of other unrelated chemicals were appearing in the water. They found high concentrations of chloroform, methylene chloride, and 1,1,1-trichloromethane, all proven cancer causing substances. The consideration for the environment and other people is so low that other industries were using the crisis as a cover to dump their own poisons in the river!

Poisoning of the planetary waters is extremely serious. Industrial toxins are also poisoning underground aquifers, where it is permanent. This is done by deliberate injection of waste into wells, a common industrial practice; by percolation down from the surface; seepage from common municipal landfills; from hazardous waste landfills and from nuclear installations. Agricultural chemicals also poison underground aquifers.

In the U.S., at least 30 states have been found to have more than 50 different pesticides in their underground waters. One quarter of the people of Iowa drink pesticide contaminated water.¹³ So far, 200 substances have been identified in U.S. underground aquifers, this includes 175 organic chemicals, many already known to cause cancer or birth defects. A vague estimate of the U.S. EPA is that 2 per cent of the underground aquifers of the U.S. are contaminated.¹⁴ Nearly 20 per cent of the wells surveyed in the U.S. by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1985 were found to be contaminated with nitrates used in industrial agriculture.¹⁵ The world's rivers suffer the fate of being the dumping ground of many industries.

The Rhine of Europe, for example, drains 150,000 square miles of the most industrialized and populated region on earth. The Rhine discharges into the North Sea each year, 10,000 tons of toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Its waters are fifty times above normal background levels for cadmium and twenty times the normal background level for lead and mercury.¹⁶"The Rhine, Elbe and Weser carry more than 450,000 tons of phosphates and nitrates into the sea. The concentrations of these nutrients, which contribute to the lethal alga blooms, have increased four-fold over the last 20-30 years adding five to ten times the nutrients that derive from natural sources. Coupled with the industrial inputs of the Ems and Scheldt, these rivers annually channel some 50 tons of cadmium, 20 tons of mercury, 12 tons of copper, 10 tons of lead, 7,000 tons of zinc, 300 tons of arsenic, and 22.5 million tons of sewage and other human detritus into the sea."¹⁷

The Thames River, on Britain's East Coast, contributes an annual load of 150 pounds of the pesticide Lindane, 225 pounds of DDT, plus about five million tons of partially treated sewage. On the coasts of Norway and Sweden, mines, mining dumps, logging operations and paper mills, dump and leach a host of pollutants into the sea. Emissions from cars, power plants and factories contribute up to 50 per cent of the heavy metals absorbed by the North Sea, plus tons of sulfur and nitrogen.¹⁸ This is only a partial accounting of the total toxic load dumped into the North and Baltic seas annually from Europe and the British Isles. As these poisons constantly grow in volume and accumulate, we are seeing the actual death of the whole ecology in the North Sea and Baltic Sea areas. The die-off of seals and fish populations in these two areas, many scientists are calling late symptoms of eco-death. The North and the Baltic seas are in the advanced stages of where many other ocean areas are rapidly headed. It must be kept in mind that these chemicals are tested on animals to determine their cancer causing properties. These poisons are not just a threat to humans; they are a threat to every organism in the ecosystem.

There are four considerations in the subject of industrial poisons (toxic chemicals, heavy metals and radiation). The first issue is the low-level dispersion throughout the planetary environment. The second issue is the contact with these substances from simply being in the normal artificially created environments of civilization and eating the commercial food. The third issue is the waste produced by industry. The fourth and by far the most important issue is that there is now no known method, that scientific opinion agrees upon, of disposing of this waste and until this disposal is created, the material continues to contaminate the planet.

Researchers say that the body of every person in the world contains some DDT and some PCB's. The contamination by chemical toxins is so great that in some areas of the U.S., nursing mothers are advised to cease breast-feeding. The amounts of toxic chemicals in some mothers are so high that mini-seizures are caused in the infants from the poisonous milk. In the Netherlands, contamination is so heavy that human mother's milk contains even polychlorinated dibenzodioxin and polychlorinated dibenzofurans, which are produced and spewed out into the environment by the incineration of waste.¹⁹

Toxins come to us in the water, the air and in our food. During the period 1982-1985, several studies detected 110 different pesticides in fruits and vegetables commercially sold in the U.S. "Of the twenty-five pesticides detected most frequently, nine have been identified by EPA to cause cancer (captan, chlorothalonil, permethrin, acephate, DDT, parathion, dieldrin, methomyl, and folpet)."²⁰ Many toxins are airborne and researchers have found that water droplets of fog concentrate poisons. In a study released in 1987, U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers Louis A. Liljedahl and Dwight E. Glotfelty and James N. Seiber of the University of California at Davis report that they found 16 pesticide compounds in fog. These substances came up off of agricultural areas. The poisons occasionally reach very high concentrations relative to reported rainwater concentrations of these same poisons.²¹

It is one thing to examine particular poisons such as radiation, many chemicals and heavy metals that can't be seen, tasted or smelled. It is another to view the gross contamination of industrial societies. Poland shows a good example of what the outlines of the future are for the whole of industrial culture.

The Case of Poland

Poland is a mid-range European industrial country. There, the citizens were finally prompted by industrial pollution to organize into the Polish Ecological Club (and this caused the government to create a tame, government controlled environmental group). The PEC has been successful in bringing the problems to the attention of the government. The government has made some plans for clean up but it is very expensive and it remains to be seen if it can be accomplished.

Airborne poisons are so strong in the Polish industrial area of Krakow that they corrode the railway tracks, forcing a speed limit of forty miles per hour for railway trains in the summertime. Don Hinrichsen, an environmental writer says: "Strolling around Krakow on a windless day is like walking through a coal yard. The 'Pearl of Poland' is under siege from an unusually virulent mixture of pollutants ranging from coal dust and carbon monoxide to airborne lead, hydrocarbons, and corrosive acid rain."²² He says that in the town of Zabrze, near Krakow, there is a, "15 percent higher incidence of circulatory illness, a 47 percent higher rate of respiratory ailments, and 30 percent more cancers than the rest of the Polish population."²³ The rise in mental retardation among Polish children is related to lead poisoning. A survey in the Katowice area found 35 percent of the children had lead poisoning. In that same city, the soil was found to be contaminated with lead, cadmium, copper and zinc. Garden vegetables had lead and cadmium 30-70 per cent higher than World Health Organization standards.²⁴ The Vistula; the river that drains most of Poland is so poisoned that in most areas it cannot be used even for industrial purposes. Yearly, the Vistula pours 90,000 tons of nitrogen, 5,000 tons of phosphorus and 80 tons of mercury, cadmium, zinc, lead, copper, phenol, and chlorinated hydrocarbons into the bay at Gdansk, where the beaches have been closed for years.²⁵ One-fourth of the agricultural land of Poland is so contaminated that it is unfit to grow human food and only one percent of the water is safe to drink. The industrial elites make no provision for the people, the forests or the rest of the life of the area. Like all empire cultures, the population of Poland exists simply as a productive mechanism to increase the power of the elite. Because of this, the land, water and people continue to be abused. Twenty percent of the food products from one poisoned area were classified as hazardous to public health by the corrupt government's own inadequate standards. Vegetables contained 220 times the limit for cadmium, 165 for zinc, 134 for lead, 34 for fluorine and 2.5 times for uranium.²⁶ In Poland's worst ecological disaster areas, even Polish law says the people should be evacuated, but there are 11 million of them (30 per cent of the population) and there is no where for them to go.²⁷ "...Life expectancy for men between 40 and 60 years old has fallen back to the level of 1952. Thirteen million of the country's 40 million residents are expected to acquire at least one environmentally induced illness- respiratory disease, cancer, skin disease, or afflictions of the central nervous system."²⁸

The direct annual cost of environmental deterioration in Poland may now equal half of the government's annual budget. The government has created some ambitious plans to clean up the country, which it uses as propaganda to placate and confuse the people, but like other industrial countries little has been done. The Polish economy has been in a state of depression for years. It is mortgaged to the hilt to the International Bankers and there is little money left over for such "frills" as environmental clean up. The U.S. also has said that it will clean up its toxic waste dumps and nuclear leakage but they say too, that it will cost billions of dollars- hundreds of billions-and so far little has been done.

In the World War II era in the U.S., one in thirty people died of cancer. Now, between one in four and one in five die of cancer. The rate of birth defects has doubled since 1950. Cancer is a problem of the autoimmune system as are many other maladies such as asthma, AIDS, candida albicans and allergies. It is known that toxins shock and affect the autoimmune system.

The medical establishment may replace war as the central industry and source of profits for the elite of civilization- and toxins alone could put an end to civilization if somehow it continued indefinitely. Now, in the U.S., the medical establishment is the third largest industry. How can it be that the scientist/technologists surge ahead with their creations, oblivious to any harm to others or the environment? In his profound work, The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul points out that technique and technology have their own internal logic. What is most efficient and profitable will be done and this has little to do with side effects or long term effects. Ellul makes the point that instead of technology serving people, technology has now taken over the whole of human culture and is conditioning the conditioning agent of industrial culture itself. The human culture is molded to the needs of the machine process.²⁹ After Oppenheimer and the gang at the nuclear bomb factory in Los Alamos, New Mexico had developed the first nuclear device, they still did not know if it would set off a nuclear chain reaction that would blow up the entire planet or if it would be a limited reaction and just explode the bomb. In fact the scientists facetiously placed bets on the outcome of the first test. Here we have the culture of empire. After a huge social effort by thousands of people and the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, finally a device is created, but there is danger involved. A choice exists between extinction and power, glory, promotions and more research grants for the makers. The well-known choice was made and fortunately the test was only a limited chain reaction. But, now we have nuclear energy with all of its dangers. This choice between individual and institutional gain versus the life of the earth is made throughout civilization every day.

Modern Living Environments are Toxic

This is the reason that we live in toxic environments. The social considerations of power and profit for the emperors of the corporate mini-empires are stronger than consideration for living things. Because of this, even the average house in civilization is an ecological sink of poisons. Aerosol sprays, asbestos, fiberglass, building materials of various types, dry cleaning fluids, spot removers, rug and upholstery cleaners, fabric finishes and cements, antistatic agents and fabric softeners, shoe-care products, spray starch, flame retardant, furniture and floor products, detergent soaps, lead soldered pipes, gasoline, oven cleaners, drain cleaners, bleaches, toilet bowl cleaners, window cleaners, scouring powders, plastics of various types and many more common household products may injure or kill.³⁰

A typical example is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a plastic used in many products including food packaging and water pipes. Vinyl chloride is used in its formulation and during manufacture. This substance often leaches out into the environment. Vinyl chloride is a proven cancer causing substance. After tremendous energy and effort, citizens groups have forced the government to pay attention to vinyl chloride (with a limit of one part per million). But even so, the plastic product PVC, from which vinyl chloride leaches, is not controlled. It exists in building construction materials, household furnishings, consumer goods, electrical uses, packaging, vehicle parts and even in some commercial mouthwashes.³¹There is so much PVC in the interiors of modern aircraft for example, that if one is not killed by a plane crash, one will certainly die from the poisons as the interior burns.

If there is any doubt about the morality of the industrial elite, one need only look at the fact that one-quarter of the pesticides exported from the U.S. each year are either severely restricted or banned for use in the U.S. DDT was banned for use in the U.S. in 1972 but 18 million kg is still produced in the U.S. each year for export to the Third World.³²Actually a whole range of dangerous products are dumped on the Third World. Massive citizen lawsuits finally stopped the sale of the birth control device; the Dalkon shield in the U.S. but it is still sold throughout the Third World with impunity.

The link between one specific poison and a specific cancer in a specific person may not always be demonstrable but we can certainly discover the connection of pollution rates and illness rates. New Orleans for example, exists at the final outflow of the Mississippi River, which drains the poisons from much of the east central U.S. In a test concluded in 1969, the over-all cancer rate there was found to be 32 per cent higher than the national rate. For specific cancers, the New Orleans rate was three times higher than Atlanta or Birmingham, which do not drink Mississippi River water.³³

Municipal Waste

Eutrophication occurs when an excess of nutrients enters a waterway, the life activities of plants are speeded up and the oxygen suddenly is used up, creating a dead area. While nutrients are good for plants, nutrients in unnatural amounts are harmful. Eutrophication does not normally happen in the natural world, it is a function of the culture that is not resonant with the order of the cosmos. Municipal landfills create a similar situation-even if it were just biodegradable household garbage put all in one place. If we add the poisonous articles of household garbage and the other poisonous items produced in municipalities we have a toxic waste dump of considerable proportions. Even if only moderately toxic, there are so many of them and the volume is so large that municipal landfills themselves pose a serious threat to the water tables and waterways of industrial countries. Municipal landfills leach carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chrome, zinc, lead, iron and other poisons into water tables. Poisonous garbage is dumped into municipal landfills by small businesses and industry with little or no monitoring and dumpers often slip extremely toxic waste into municipal landfills.

Toxic Industrial Waste

As if the matter of slowly leaking municipal landfills that are spread ubiquitously over the industrial countries were not enough, there are the dumps that society defines as "hazardous waste sites." One indication of how serious this exploding problem of poisons in the environment is can be seen by the fact that so little is known about them other than that they exist. Because of the control of information and its deliberate falsification, we can only see the broad outlines of the problem, but what we do know indicates disaster. The disaster is compounded by the fact that the profits and power of the elites are seriously hindered by the proper disposal of industrial poisons. Proper disposal is extremely expensive and the motives on the part of the industrial elites to continue "free dumping" are compelling. The estimate of annual world production of 551.15 million tons is only an educated guess. There are very few countries where the public is informed of toxic waste being produced by facotries. Nor are they told who is producing it, in what quantities and exactly what chemical or metal it is. Germany, for example, has a cradle to grave tracking system but this only functions within the country. Shipments of toxic waste that cross borders, are becoming commonplace, and these shipments disappear from the system. It is estimated that Europe exports 500,000 tons of toxic waste each year (usually to Third World countries). Exactly where this waste goes and under what conditions it is disposed of no one knows.

What we do know is that there is not now any competent method of disposal of toxic waste. Toxic waste is dumped on the ground, injected into wells, dumped into municipal sewage systems, loaded into "approved" toxic waste dumps, dumped into rivers, dumped into oceans and incinerated by low technology and high technology methods which themselves produce toxic waste. Much toxic waste is clandestinely dumped on backroads, back lots and in various bodies of water. Industrialists will pay substantial but still cut-rate amounts for shadowy figures to come to their plants and make their problems disappear. It is well established that Organized Crime (in the U.S. at least) is now well entrenched in this, yet another, super-profit business.³⁴

In the U.S., government agencies have begun to estimate the number of toxic waste sites. So far the estimates of the number of sites seem to correlate with the exposure of each agency to industry influence. The Government Accounting Office, which is possibly the most independent, estimates the number of priority sites at more than 4,000, with the clean-up cost, estimated to be $40 billion. Other sites, which are not classed as "priority," the Environmental Protection Agency says numbers 20,000 and they are not scheduled for clean up at this time. The U.S. congress set up a Superfund for clean-up of especially hazardous sites, but after five years, only 13 sites have been "cleaned up" and there remains disagreement whether these sites themselves were adequately sanitized.³⁵ The joke is that they simply scoop up the poison along with the contaminated dirt and move it to another landfill that will eventually leak or incinerate it, spewing poisons out into the atmosphere.

Just as the medical industry generates huge profits from environmentally induced cancers, a large, powerful and profitable industry has grown up around garbage and toxic waste. Like the medical industry that does not point the finger at the actual source of the profitable cancers, the waste industry generates public relations propaganda about recycling but resists source reduction of waste. The most recent "technological fix" that has been waved in front of the public and the politicians, is the very expensive (and profitable) practice of incineration. It is yet to be conclusively demonstrated that any of these plants can be operated without emitting poisons- especially the deadly dioxins-into the atmosphere. There is also no answer to the question of where to put the toxic ash from the plants. In March of 1987 a Norwegian freighter docked in Guinea on the West Coast of Africa. It was hauling incinerator ash from a garbage incinerator (not a toxic waste incinerator) in Philadelphia. Bulkhandling, the name of the Norwegian company, had contracted to haul away 250,000 tons of ash laced with heavy metals and dioxin. Some of the waste had fraudulently been sold to a cement company in Guinea to use as a brickmaking material. Fortunately the environmental organization Greenpeace blew the whistle on the deal and the Government of Guinea ordered the shipment out of the country. Greenpeace earlier had notified Panama that a deal had been made to dump the same ash in a pristine Panamanian wetlands area inhabited by the endangered manatee and other rare wildlife. When Panama refused to accept the poisoned waste, the contract with Philadelphia fell through but Bulkhandling was stuck with 30,000 tons of ash. An Ohio landfill was used to dump 15,000 tons and the rest, they tried to send to Guinea.³⁶ This is only a small example of the mysterious ways in which much toxic waste disappears.

Radioactive Waste

In the period 1970-1985 alone, commercial, electricity generating nuclear reactors in the non-communist countries generated 65,697 tons of radioactive waste. This does not count shutdown reactors or military reactors in those countries.³⁷ This is an inconceivably large amount of bulk material and it does not include low level waste, medical or military generated waste. It also does not include the statistics from the socialist world. The figures on total world radioactive waste are not available but the above figure indicates the enormity of the problem. In the almost fifty years since radioactive substances began to be produced there is still no acceptable method for the disposal of the waste. It sits in landfills, ponds and other makeshift sites, often leaking into the ground or air with no solution in site.

The human family has never before dealt with anything as dangerous as nuclear radiation. It can cause immediate death, burns, cancers, birth defects, mutations and many other maladies. A study done by the U.S. Council on Economic Priorities of 50 commercial reactors and 175 nearby counties indicates that the nuclear power plants are causing 8957 extra premature deaths per year. 2113 of these were infant deaths and 6532 of these were cancer deaths.³⁸ The radiation already produced must be isolated from the life of the earth for the duration of its toxicity. In releasing this monster, the elites of imperial society are assuming that organized society will endure for an unimaginable length of time and that the society will have the means and the will to guard the deposits of poison. Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 million years. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 240,000 years.³⁹ Other radioactive elements have shorter lives but they are nonetheless toxic until they expire. Researchers state that little more than one curie of radiation can cause genetic abnormalities. By 1984, the U.S. alone had accumulated 16,200,000,000 curies of radioactive waste. Projections are that the U.S. will accumulate 42,000,000,000 by the year 2000.

Although the elites blithely continue to increase their production of this waste year after year, there is not yet any satisfactory method to deal with it. The only underground depository created so far, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a deep cavern dug in a salt formation near Carlsbad, New Mexico has already been found to be leaking water. The Project was created, "for the express purpose of providing a research and development facility to demonstrate the safe disposal of radioactive wastes resulting from the defense activities and programs of the United States."⁴⁰ In 1987, a group of scientists from the University of New Mexico found, after a study of the site, that the salt formation contained much more water than the builders had anticipated and they concluded that, "over time, a liquid mixture of brine and nuclear waste could form and eventually reach the environment through unintentional human intrusion or fractures in repository shaft and tunnel plugs and seals." The scientists then explained a factor that would make any underground or undersea depository problematical. Concentrated nuclear waste is not moribund, but continues to, "bubble and boil." The scientists stated that migration would occur, "because of pressurization of waste rooms resulting from gases generated within TRU [transuranic] waste drums and the gradual closing of the waste emplacement rooms due to the creeping action of the surrounding salt.⁴¹ There is not now a solution at the end of the nuclear cycle and the beginning of the nuclear cycle is marked by similar industrial incompetence. On the Navajo Reservation alone there are roughly 80 million tons of uranium mine tailings exposed to the atmosphere. On that reservation..."At Shiprock, New Mexico, uranium mine tailings are within one mile of the public school, a housing development, the business center, and a daycare center." Lora Mangum Shields and Alan Goodman, using a March of Dimes grant, investigated the outcome of 13,300 Navajo Births from 1964 to 1974 born at the Shiprock Indian Health Service hospital:

"Birth defect rates two to eight times higher than averages of the nation or other Indian tribes was found in this high radiation exposure period at Shiprock. In 1975, coincident with a number of reductions in the [atmospheric] radiation exposure, birth defect rates fell decisively towards normal."⁴²

On that same reservation, another example of the dangers of the mining portion of the nuclear fuel cycle occurred. On July 16, 1979, ninety-four million gallons of effluent from a uranium mine tailings pond near Churchrock, New Mexico, owned by United Nuclear Corporation, spilled into a local stream, the Rio Puerco. The Rio Puerco is on the watershed of the Colorado River. This spill spread more radiation than did the accident at Three Mile Island. In 1985, the Rio Puerco, at Chambers, Arizona, from which Navajos drink and water their sheep, still tested over the EPA limit by a factor of 50, for gross alpha and beta radiation.

Further along the fuel cycle we have the example of Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal, near Denver. This installation, which produces parts for nuclear bombs, has spread plutonium and other isotopes into the surrounding suburbs and into the water supply causing a rise in the cancer rates.

Covered by the characteristic secrecy, little had been known about the military reactors that are spread around the U.S. until the incompetence of the operators became so great that radiation began leaking off site. Investigations were begun, some military nuclear plants were shut down and the controversy is whether to spend the tens of billions of dollars to clean up the areas or simply to close them up and leave them set... slowly leaking out onto the earth.

An example of the dangerous irresponsibility of the bureaucratic hierarchies that control radioactive waste is that of the inactive, temporary, waste sites under the control of the U.S. Department of Energy (military only), the contamination that has been allowed will require $60 billion to clean up. This figure is for old inactive sites alone and does not include any other sites.⁴³

Managers of the military weapons plants have been criminally irresponsible. Investigators state that: "Billions of gallons of radioactive wastes from making bomb-grade material have been dumped directly into soil and groundwater. Millions more gallons of concentrated waste have been stored in tanks, many of which have leaked. These wastes are now beginning to contaminate public water supplies. The wastes also form explosive gases that could rip the tanks open and spew the material over a large area, creating a Chernobyl-scale accident." This statement is from investigators, Robert Alvarez and Arjun Makhijani, writing in Technology Review.⁴⁴ DOE estimates now, before the cost-over-runs have begun, that $100 billion will be required to clean up all its weapons plants.

There is now, no answer to where the final resting-place will be of radioactive materials from decommissioned reactors. "Expert" opinion is that the cost of decommissioning will be between tens of millions of dollars and a billion dollars per reactor.⁴⁵DOE is presently decommissioning the Shippingport plant at an estimated cost of $98.3 million, before cost over-runs. There were in 1981, more than 250 electricity generating reactors, in 22 countries.⁴⁶The irresponsibility of going ahead with this energy system without considering or revealing these huge costs to the public and going ahead without even knowing where the waste could be safely placed, demonstrates the dire danger the planet is in, simply because of the immaturity and corruption of the people in control of these dangerous substances.

The Profits and Losses of Empire

The costs to society of the killing, maiming and deforming humans by industrial poisoning is tremendous and as this cost grows it will be an important factor in the final implosion of civilization. The negative feedback of industrial poisons could themselves, ultimately drag it down. Other sources of radiation are medical x-rays. "Probably most cancers of childhood and even some of those during the puberty period are contracted during pregnancy," because of x-rays of the mother. X-rays have been implicated in causing cancer in adults and they have been shown to increase the rates of heart disease in adult males.⁴⁷ Public health researchers calculate that cutting the exposure of the U.S. population to radiation by 50 per cent would save $53.2 billion at current prices. The social costs of learning disabilities and birth defects they set at $4.3 billion and added that diseases of the aging process cost $48.9 billion. This cost is calculated for the exposure to x-rays during pregnancy, x-ray exposure to the general population, and fallout from nuclear plants and bomb testing.

The same sources calculate that heavy metals pollution results in $9.6 billion costs in birth defects and learning disabilities and more than $10.2 billion in autoimmune system damage, cancers and early senility in the general population. Chlorinated chemicals and dioxin are calculated to cost the society $1.5 billion in birth defects and learning disabilities and there is no estimate yet available for the general population. Simply halting the use of prescription therapeutic drugs during pregnancy could save the society $3.4 billion in the cost of special programs, medical attention, and etc. for the birth defected and the learning disabled.⁴⁸

A 1984 study in Australia further points out the negative feedback problem of the "quick fix." Rather than feed the soil and nurture the health of the soil community to help it produce human food, the industrial society uses artificial fertilizers which are more profitable to industry and agriculture. This practice pollutes underground waters with nitrate compounds (among other things) wherever industrial agriculture has spread. The Australian study found that drinking well water contaminated with nitrate compounds, rather than rainwater, increased the occurrence of neural tube, oral-alimentary tract, and muscle-skeleton birth defects 2.8 times. (The same effects were found in laboratory animals.) A complete inventory of all poisonings and costs in industrial society would fill volumes but the above examples illustrate the trend. The quick fix, the rapid extortion of energy from the system, can temporarily finance higher population and more "wealth" but ultimately there comes the time of the balancing of the account books, the period the Hopis call "The Great Purification." The actual heavy metals behind these numbers, many chemicals and many atomic isotopes do not go away, they continue to accumulate.

Poison and the Morality of Empire

Certainly, if we could strip away the Public Information Officers, the media consultants and the psychological-operations groups and question one of the handful of human beings of the elite, they would respond that they are seeing the "big picture." The response would be that it is they who are making the "hard decisions" for the whole people, not just for the "special interests," such as the consumers who eat poisoned food, the workers who are poisoned on the job, the farmers suffering pesticide poisoning, the urbanites breathing poison air, the parents complaining of deformed babies or the youth who ask for a future. Like the villages that were bombed in Vietnam to save them, we must industrially produce our way out of our problems, even if it kills us.

The industrial poisoners now pose a grave threat to the entire earth. It is their strategy to confuse, obfuscate and lie to conceal their criminality. A long-haired hippie with a protest sign or an aggrieved black man with a gun gets a lot of attention from the elite controlled media but elite groups who kill, maim and deform millions with their poisons are seldom exposed. In the few cases that have been exposed, we find that the asbestos manufacturers knew of the danger of their products long before the citizens exposed and stopped them. The manufacturers of Agent Orange, which was dumped on Vietnam, knew that it contained dioxin long before it was stopped. The U.S. military also knew, long before they banned it. The examples are profuse of industrialists who will dump injurious articles, pharmaceutical drugs and poisons on their earth and their fellow human beings in order to increase their financial power.

The automatic response of the elite when exposed is to deny, lie and cover-up. The first response of the elite after the accident at Three Mile Island was to issue a press release stating that there had been no accident. The British nuclear disaster at Windscale in 1957 was simply covered up and the facts leaked out slowly over the years. In the Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the elite was silent for three days until the Scandinavians began to monitor the severity of the crisis and expose it. Other governments, heavily invested in nuclear technology, began damage control of the Chernobyl crisis by putting out the line, "Yes, but it couldn't happen here because...." Over 20 countries received doses of airborne poisons from Chernobyl. The response of many of these countries that are nuclear invested, was to minimize the danger so as not to alarm the people about the nuclear question. Elites in Italy, United Kingdom and France especially, maneuvered to downplay the threat. The French government even falsified a weather map shown on national TV to show that the toxic cloud that in fact came over France went somewhere else. The childish irresponsibility and deficient morality of the bureaucratic hierarchies puts the whole earth in danger when substances such as toxic poisons, heavy metals, nuclear radiation, the genetic tinkering of biotechnology, and radiological, chemical and biological warfare are involved. Just having these substances under the control of irresponsible bureaucracies is dangerous. Contractors have demonstrated this time and again in the construction of nuclear plants for example. It has been amply demonstrated that it is not possible to operate such dangerous devices without massive cheating on the safety of the workers in the plants or the public outside. Civilization as presently constituted simply does not have the moral necessities to avoid it's own suicide simply because the social institutions set up to guard against these dangers such as toxins and radiation are so morally corrupt that they can't function so as to guard the public safety.

The Fuels of Empire

Imperial culture finds it more profitable and easier to dismantle an ecosystem or suck the fluids from the earth and profit from the brief burst of energy rather than to add to the Net Photosynthetic Production and lives from the increase.

Since the beginnings of empire, fuels have been the fountain of its growth. Early, the fuels to heat buildings, cook food and smelter metal were taken from the forests. Forests were also the source of materials for building construction and ships. The course of empire can easily be charted by tracing the exhausted forests of Asia and Europe. As the forests of Europe were becoming exhausted, particularly near smelters and ports, civilization began to depend upon coal. The utilization of coal energy spurred the development of iron and steel refining. From the energy base of coal and the material base of iron, a phase of civilization developed in which iron and steel were used as materials for many applications in society.

As the petroleum age developed, that substance also became the base of plastics, which have replaced wood and metals for many uses. Now society is as dependent upon petroleum for materials as for fuel. Since the "oil crisis" of the early 1970's many citizens have looked to other, small-scale sources of energy such as solar, wind, water and ocean power. As the threat of this development became real, the oil cartel moved to buy out the research on these new technologies and to usurp the field. Citizen action in these areas has essentially been stopped and the only plans in the field are for huge centralized technologies such as solar collectors in space. With the immense profits from the oil price rise in the early 1970's the oil cartel has moved into dominant positions in coal, uranium and now the "alternate energies" of solar, wind, etc.

The Transnational corporate elite no doubt feel that they have now positioned themselves so that they will profit by each of the shortages and exhaustion in the coming years. As petroleum runs out they will profit by the coal that they control; as coal runs out it will be discovered that they control the remaining reserves of uranium ore and if that ultimately fails, they will hold the patents and the technology of wind and solar energy.

There is no question that these fuels of civilization will become exhausted and there is no question that this will bring a massive restructuring of that same civilization. The strategy of the elites is simply to stay on top of it as it shifts, and of course it remains to be seen whether they will be successful. Capitalism and socialism are simply window dressing for the basic fact of industrialism. Neither capitalism nor socialism works if there is no industry or "resources." In the last two centuries we have seen the pristine living earth devoured by industrialism and much breast beating about the myths of efficiency and ideology. The truth is that machines and abundant primary materials- not ideology- are what has allowed the industrial revolution and it is cheap energy that has fueled its one act production. Energy will now become more and more expensive until it is finally gone.

We can expect massive catastrophe in the next several decades as the supply of petroleum runs out. As the whole of industrial society is predicated on cheap petroleum energy and we are running out of that energy with no replacement in sight, there can only be one result. Although the Transnationals have control of the coal and other energy sources, those sources are not a substitute for petroleum. They are a different energy regime and the switch cannot occur without tremendous dislocation.

The industrial society, which now exists, is a product of truly gargantuan injections of petroleum energy. The huge quantity of petroleum and the constantly growing volume of its use mean that if a switch were made to coal on an equal basis, simply the smoke from the coal plants all over the earth would asphyxiate us in a short time.

M. King Hubbert, in his book, Energy Resources of The Earth, points out how swift the growth in the use of fossil fuel has been. Hubbert explains:

"It is difficult for people living now who have become accustomed to steady exponential growth in the consumption of energy from fossil fuels to realize how transitory the fossil fuel epoch will prove to be when viewed over the longer span of human history.... The period that encompasses most of the production is notably brief. The 102 years from 1857 to 1959 were required to produce the first half of the cumulative production: Only the ten year period from 1959 to 1969 was required for the second half."

The volume of energy to keep the industrial society going is so great that now the discovery of large oil fields only provides a few years supply. The decline of discovery rates (barrels of oil per foot of well drilled) in the U.S., began in 1970 and continues today. Phillips Owen in his Last Chance Energy Book says:

"The flow from Alaska will not reverse the decline, we can anticipate arresting it for a year or two, but after that, it will resume its dismal course. The fact is that between the time the Alaskan oil fields were discovered and put into production, the other oil reserves declined by more than the total amount that had been found. We're not ahead- we're behind, because we're using oil at much faster rates now."⁴⁹

The North Sea oil field of Europe is similar in size to the Alaska field. Here we see within context what these two, much publicized oil fields actually represent- only a few years of use. As a general view of the petroleum energy situation it can be said that we are extracting oil twice as fast as we are discovering it.⁵⁰

In a mid-summer, 1988 interview with journalist Thomas A. Petrie, William L. Randol who heads the Oil Analyst Team of the U.S. based Transnational bank, First Boston, said that oil consumption was up 3 per cent that year. He said that gasoline was the main component of that rising demand. Further, the declining U.S. domestic output means that oil imports will rise to over 50 per cent in several years, from the 41-42 per cent in 1988. Already, Randol sees that the decline in the Alaskan, Prudhoe Bay oil field is not far off.⁵¹

In 1987, the Worldwatch Institute calculated that the U.S. energy reserves within the U.S. were 36 million barrels which was enough to propel U.S. society for 8 years at the 1987 rate of consumption- if it used only U.S. supplies.⁵² The supply of natural gas is also declining swiftly. According to the Transnational corporation Exxon: "U.S. natural gas production peaked in 1972 and has been declining ever since. Production is not expected to recover to 1972 levels, even with production from new offshore leases and from the Alaska north slope.⁵³

The supply of uranium ore was never abundant anywhere on the planet. The U.S. is calculated to have had the equivalent of 630,000 tons of which 270,000 tons have already been used and the rate of discovery is declining precipitously.⁵⁴

World energy consumption increased 38 per cent between 1970 and 1984 even with the huge price increases of the early 1970's. If somehow the world population were able to halt the increase of usage and maintain energy use at the 1984 rate, the known global reserves of petroleum would last only 31 years, natural gas 52 years and bituminous coal 175 years.⁵⁵

The increase of energy use in Third World countries has been enormous just to stay abreast of population increase. The following table describes why there is much less than 31 years worth of petroleum remaining:

INCREASE IN ENERGY CONSUMPTION 1970 - 1984 ⁵⁶

Location	Total Increase	Per Capita
World	+38%	+6%
AFRICA	+112%	+41%
N. & CENT. AMERICA	+7%	+13%
S. AMERICA	+78%	+29%
ASIA	+106%	+55%
EUROPE	+21%	+13%
(former) USSR	+65%	+45%
OCEANIA	+58%	+25%

Caution needs to be exercised in viewing the figures that relate to petroleum and its reserves. The only people who really know how much oil there is are the companies who explore and drill. We can, none the less, use these numbers as a broad gauge of trends in the field. The number of barrels recovered per foot of exploratory well drilled gives us a good gauge and the reports of experts like M. King Hubbert who have worked inside the industry are helpful.

Another aspect of the amount of reserves is that some of the reserves in old fields are not now economical to recover. Here, as with minerals, we have the situation in which there may be oil but its recovery may be prohibitive. Thus the calculation of reserves is a function of how much energy and money we are prepared to spend to recover the oil. At the point that it requires more energy to extract a gallon of crude oil than exists in that gallon of crude oil, it won't matter what the reserves of it are.

Given the massive exponential expansion of oil consumption, which must keep growing to avoid industrial collapse, a few years in the calculation of reserves, is of minor importance. The compounding of an exponential growth curve is so swift, from 1 to 2 to 4 to 16 to 1056 to 1,115,136, that only if the oceans were filled with petroleum could the supply continue. Another aspect that becomes important in these latter days is the external effect of using the substance. If by chance some new reserves were found it would only increase acid rain, the greenhouse effect, smog, the churning of the wheels of industry, which spew out poisons and which would use up remaining resources faster.

The Minerals of Empire

"... Since 1950 human beings have managed to consume more minerals than were mined in all previous history..." says Richard J. Barnet. Of the eight most important metals in world industry in the past twenty years (aluminum, copper, lead, nickel, tin, zinc, iron, steel), the U.S., Soviet Federation and Japan are the largest consumers. As a gauge of the exponential increase of consumption of minerals and specifically these eight metals, World Resources 1987 states that the increase in world consumption of the eight has been from 416.67 thousand tons in the year 1965, to 648.61 thousand tons in 1985.⁵⁷

There are plenty of minerals remaining for world society. If we pulverize the crust of the earth and extract all of the minerals from the waters of the ocean there will be plenty. The problem of computing how much remains is, that even in a handful of dirt there is some percentage of minerals. The question is, how concentrated the ore and how much capital and energy it will take to extract it.

Barnet says for example:

"In 1700, typical copper ores contained 13 percent copper. 1900 had exhausted the super rich deposits but technology had improved to the point where deposits from 2.5 percent to 5 percent copper were profitable to exploit. Today copper is frequently extracted from 0.5 percent deposits."⁵⁸

Just as the energy-intensiveness of the agricultural system is increasing, Barnet points out also that the energy cost of producing minerals is high. "To produce a ton of copper requires 112 million BTU's or the equivalent of 17.8 barrels of oil. The energy cost component of aluminum is twenty times higher."⁵⁹

Critical shortages and steeply rising prices are the obvious future for world minerals. When more energy, more technology, more water and more capital are required to process increasingly lower grades of ore, the future can only go in one direction.

Elite Control of the Industrial Process

The elites control the sources of information concerning energy and mineral resources. It is the elites that will decide on the technologies that will utilize different fuels or different metals. It is the elites also, who control the supplies and prices. In the past twenty-five years the oil cartel has been able to spread its ownership and control into all energy industries except hydro. They have even usurped the fields of solar and wind generation of energy. The decisions concerning the industrial configuration of society and the social conditions of the individual citizens of society are made by these small elites when they make broad industrial/military decisions. The decision to scuttle non-centralized energy production (solar, wind, small private hydro, wood) was made by elites who control centralized systems (oil, nuclear, electric grid, and coal). These decisions will have much to do with the fate of the earth as the primary resources become exhausted. As these finite resources become increasingly scarce, military, industrial and technical attention and conflict will focus on the locations of the remaining resources, such as the Middle East.

One of the basic reasons that empire can generate "surpluses" from the earth is that industrial technique and the "productive masses" can be mobilized under the control of small elites. To give the general picture on a global scale, at the beginning of the last decade of the Twentieth Century, 20 per cent of the world's population were consuming 80 per cent of the world resources.⁶⁰ In the capitalist countries in particular, there is a further severe imbalance where a minority owns the majority of resources. The control of world industrial society has come to rest in fewer hands and its control begins with energy and minerals, the backbone of industry. In the Capitalist world, control rests with the international financial elite, people who are members of the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. Coal energy, because of the heavy investments in mining and distribution; have traditionally been under centralized control. Petroleum began to be utilized in the era of the great trusts at the beginning of the 19th. Century. Until recently, what were called the Seven Sisters; (five U.S. corporations and two British and Dutch) controlled the capitalist world oil supply. Due to mergers, there are now even fewer Transnationals that are dominant in the world oil business. It is this elite who plan the volume of production and from which area it will be produced. The minerals industry is very centralized. "The marriage of high finance-Morgans, Rothschilds, Schiffs, Bernard Baruch-and the most successful mining entrepreneurs, principally the Guggenheims, in the early years of the century laid the foundation for the minerals oligopolies that control the world market today."⁶¹

As the collapse of civilization begins to accelerate in the coming years it is these small elites who will continue to make the planning decisions. The well known diplomat and author George F. Kennan, who was known as a liberal, stated the groundwork for this contemporary era in a State Department Policy-Planning Staff paper (#23), in February 1948, when he was head of this group. He wrote:

"We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction ... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."⁶²

It is from this perspective of muted desperation that the present structure of world society has developed. Since that time a centralized military-industrial complex has developed in the First World and the Third World has become thoroughly militarized. In 1979, $35 billion and one-half million scientists and engineers were engaged in military research.⁶³The military weapons industry is now the second in size in the world after the oil industry. Military spending in the Third World doubled between 1974 and 1984.⁶⁴

The profits and production of the armaments industry is so huge that all the UN, programmes for health, children, food and such could run for two centuries for the amount of money spent in one year on planetary armaments (1982 figures).⁶⁵

The concentration of power in the transnational corporation-government-military complex group has created a foreign policy of industrialism. This strategy is to maintain control of the Third World and its markets and resources by feeding and controlling its militaries and preventing any "nationalist" movement that might attempt to use these resources for the benefit of the indigenous population.

The United States produces the largest volume of military hardware and it is followed by the Soviet Union who is a remote second (in 1980 the U.S. accounted for 50 per cent of the military hardware in world trade and the U.S.S.R., 30 per cent).⁶⁶ Now, the world imperial system of militarism has reached into the Third World countries with the U.S. weapons industries there. "The Department of Defense has more than forty coproduction projects under which it assists other nations to become weapons producers in their own right. Private U.S. firms have another seventy-five such projects."⁶⁷ When we look at the world perspective from this angle we see how readily the official policy of the U.S. government- Low Intensity Conflict- fits into the overall scheme. LIC simply means controlling the geography of resources and markets as long as possible.

The internal logic of empire is toward elitism, centralization, and militarism. As the World Empire disintegrates, we will see the elite continue to draw off more energy and materials for their own purposes while strengthening their control over the increasingly impoverished masses. This will continue until the final shoot-out around the gas pump when the hegemony of the internationalist corporate-government-military elite itself begins to disintegrate.

NOTES

1 The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature. Robert Augros & George Stanciu. New Science Library. Boston & London. 1988. p. 128.

2 ibid. p. 166.

3 ibid. pp. 126,127.

4 ibid. pp. 126,127.

5 Man's Role In Changing The Face Of The Earth. (International Symposium - Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research). William L. Thomas, Jr. Editor. with collaboration of Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates & Lewis Mumford. Wenner-Gren Foundation For Anthropological Research & the National Science Foundation, pub. U. of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1956. vol. 1. p.166.

6 Man's Role In Changing The Face Of The Earth. William L. Thomas, Jr., ed. U. of Chicago pub. Chicago. 1956. vol. 2. p. 972.

7 Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management. Norman Myers, ed. Anchor Books. Garden City, NY. 1984. p. 48.

8 State of the World: 1987. Lester Brown, et. al. W.W. Norton pub. New York. 1987. p. 27.

9 ibid. p. 36.

10 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p. 123.

11 World Resources 1987: An Assessment of the Resource Base that Supports the Global Economy. Basic Books Inc. New York. 1987. p.204.

12 ibid p.202.

13 State of the World 1988: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. Lester Brown, et. al. W.W. Norton & Co. New York. 1988. p.122.

14 World Resources 1987. op. cit. p. 203.

15 The Amicus Journal. (a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council) Spring 1988, vol.10, no.2. p.28.

16 Environment. December 1986. vol.28, no.10. "Editorial" by William C. Clark.

17 Greenpeace. "The Seal Plague: Pollution and the Collapse of the North Sea." Andre Carothers. vol. 13, no. 6. November/December, 1988. p. 7.

18 ibid. pp. 6-7.

19 Birth Defect Prevention News. November 1986, Fifth Edition. National Network To Prevent Birth Defects, pub. Box 15309, Southeast Station, Washington, D.C. 20003. p. 7.

20 ibid. p.7.

21 Nature. February 12, 1987. vol. 325. "Pesticides In Fog." D. E. Glotfelty, J. N. Seiber & L. A. Liljedahl. p.602.

22 The Amicus Journal. op. cit. p. 4.

23 ibid. p. 6.

24 ibid. pp.6,7.

25 Greenpeace. Nov/Dec, 1988. op. cit. p.14.

26 ibid. p. 19.

27 ibid. p. 15.

28 Brown. State of the World 1988. op. cit. p. 7.

29 The Technological Society. Jacques Ellul. Vintage Books. New York. 1964.

30 The Household Pollutants Guide. Center for Science in the Public Interest. Albert J. Fritsch, Gen. Ed. Anchor Books. Garden City, New York. 1978.

31 ibid. pp. 197-203.

32 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p.123.

33 Laying Waste: The Poisoning Of America By Toxic Chemicals. Michael H. Brown. Pantheon Books. New York. 1980. p. 103.

34 Poisoning For Profit: The Mafia and Toxic Waste In America. A.A. Block & Frank R. Scarpitti. Morrow pub. New York. 1985.

35 World Resources 1987. op. cit. p. 207.

36 Greenpeace. November/December 1988. vol. 13, no. 6. "Return To Sender: Clamping Down On The International Waste Trade," by Judy Christrup. p.8.

37 World Resources 1987. op. cit. p. 306.

38 Birth Defect Prevention News. March 1987. op. cit. p. 6.

39 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p. 125.

40 Department of Energy National Security and Military Application of Nuclear Energy Authorization Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-164).

41 "Status of the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant." statement of Keith O. Fultz, Senior Associate Director Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division Before the Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives. September 13, 1988. GAO/T-RCED-88-63.

42 Birth Defect Prevention News. March, 1987. op. cit. p. 7.

43 "Nuclear Waste: Problems Associated With DOE's Inactive Waste Sites." United States General Accounting Office. August, 1988. GAO/RCED-88-169. p. 5.

44 Utne Reader. #31, January/February 1989. "Cleaning up after the Pentagon: The dangers of nuclear weapons waste." Robert Alvarez & Arjun Makhijani. reprinted from Technology Review. August/September 1988. p. 50.

45 "Nuclear Regulation:'s Decommissioning Cost Estimates Appear Low." Report to the Chairman, Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives. July 1988. GAO/RCED-88-184. p. 4.

46 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p. 124.

47 Birth Defect Prevention News. March, 1987. op. cit. pp. 5,6.

48 Birth Defect Prevention News. November, 1986. Fifth edition. op. cit. p. 3.

49 The Last Chance Energy Book. Phillips Owen. Johns Hopkins U. Press. Baltimore, MD. 1979. p. 38.

50 ibid. p. 39.

51 "Poison Peace: What The End of the Iran-Iraq War Means for Oil." by Thomas A. Petrie. Barrons Business & Financial Weekly, July 25, 1988. p. 6.

52 State Of The World: 1987. op. cit. p. 11.

53 Owen. The Last Chance Energy Book. op. cit. p. 48.

54 ibid. p. 50.

55 World Resources 1987. op. cit. p. 299.

56 ibid. pp. 300-301.

57 ibid. p. 299,307.

58 The Lean Years: Politics In The Age Of Scarcity. Richard J. Barnet. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1980. p.117.

59 ibid. p. 118.

60 EPOCA UPDATE. Summer 1990. The Environmental Project On Central America. Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway suite 28, San Francisco, CA. 94133. p.2.

61 ibid. p. 138.

62 The Chomsky Reader. Noam Chomsky. James Peck, ed. Pantheon Books. New York. 1987. p. 318.

63 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p. 204.

64 ibid. p. 246.

65 Myers. Gaia. (atlas). op. cit. p. 248.

66 Barnet. The Lean Years. op. cit. p. 223.

67 ibid. p. 223.