NOTE: For these 6 Finale videos, there is no accompanying written essay that matches each video, because the videos are each presentations given extemporaneously, with charts. The following text is an introduction to the video that does not include the bulk of the video’s material but that contains additional material not included in the video.
While there seems to be little hope of turning back, of undoing what has begun of WW3, I offer these last six videos in my final personal attempt to help avert an even more devastating war and planetary demise.
For 21 years, since 9/11, I have been trying in vain to research, write, and spread ideas to reform US foreign policy. Other peacemakers have tried for decades longer than I and in ways that have sacrificed even more of their lives. For more than two centuries before this, as described in Murray Polner and Tom Woods’ peace anthology, We Who Dared to Say No to War, American peacemakers have offered – also in vain – their sound reasoning based upon facts, logic, morality, and compassion to try to stop US wars. I see now that there is only the faintest ray of hope of ever enlightening the minds of the peculiar breed of human being that has monopolized control over US foreign policy for generation after generation.
US foreign policymakers, including legislators and executive branch members, are a breed crippled by false definitions of happiness and morality. They are possessed by shallow drives and values of greed, rivalry, competition, and status. As described in the previous Essay Part 4Q, this is a breed that is psychologically unevolved: goaded by aggression, fear, self-indulgence, and self-centeredness – the negative traits of the child ego, and by prejudice and punitiveness – the negative traits of the parent ego. It is a breed completely lacking in the ability to base foreign policy upon the mature, impartial, unprejudiced gathering and analysis of comprehensive information with an attitude of cooperation and mutual caring.
It is a breed that is easily intimidated into groupthink and obedience to higher-ups. It is then led to intimidate other nations, all the while believing that such intimidation is indicative of morality and righteousness. It is daily distracted by trivial matters and questions of lesser importance that prevent it from ever taking the time to study, to learn, and to acquire the knowledge necessary to overcome ignorance about the most crucial matters of life and death, war and peace. It is incapable of learning more about international conflict through cooperative dialogue with other nations and within itself but steadfastly believes in its own convictions or in that which it is told to believe.
This breed is too embarrassed by faddish ideas of popularity and conformity to even care about truth and research. It lives in a culture that derides the quest for knowledge as uncool and that simultaneously kills the natural drive to learn and even think from hours of forced skin-deep learning of answers and excessive devotion to irrelevant minutiae in school. It is represented by a mainstream media that is equally cowardly, equally afraid to stray from groupthink, corporate advertisers’ wishes, and government dictates, lacking in curiosity to investigate more, and lacking in the intellectual rigor necessary to acquire comprehensive knowledge of truth.
It is a breed spawned by a culture of human relations that relies on bribes and punishments to elicit proper behavior and that fails to attain anything close to the human potential of love, friendship, and joy. It possesses – not 360 degrees of empathy – but a stunted form of empathy that only cares for the suffering of one side in conflict. It is a breed that closes its eyes to the evil of its own hatred and violence and instead derives a sense of false pride, morality, and even closeness to God by killing enemies it clumsily labels as evil.
It is buoyed up by an entertainment industry that glorifies violent adventure and that monotonously reinforces prejudice against enemies and the false script that conflict is a matter of good vs. evil requiring violence for goodness to win. And it is insulated and preserved by wealthy fossil fuel and weapon industry corporate leaders and unrepresentative foreign lobbyists who prey upon captive US tax dollars to fund and serve their psychologically and spiritually imbalanced drives for profit, victory, false self-esteem, and a false sense of security based upon intimidation, violence, and injustice.
I emphasize that US foreign policymakers do not deserve harm, injury, or death. Such actions only further engrain habits of violence and hostility, only further promote violence as a solution, and escalate distrust, rage, and terror within a society, making that society even less capable of creating peaceful relations. But US foreign policymakers do deserve sound national and international condemnation, edification, and training, particularly in cooperative dialogue, cooperative forms of negotiation, group decision-making, and organizational culture. And many of them deserve legal prosecution. US foreign policymakers are severely misguided, and they are using their stunted skills at human relations and their truncated knowledge to sow disaster worldwide.
Yet it is highly unlikely that they will agree to such edification and training. Therefore, I offer these solutions, not necessarily directed at US foreign policymakers, for it is highly unlikely they will ever listen or see. They reside beyond an impenetrable wall. And even if they were to see, they would very likely not understand but would assume I’m yet one more enemy or perhaps a crazed ignoramus. I instead direct these ideas to the people of other nations and other governments, or perhaps to future generations of US foreign policymakers, in case there is someone who can benefit from them, if they survive, if their minds and hearts are not already irreparably corrupted and deformed.
Thank you, Countercurrents, for publishing these essays and videos. It was extremely difficult even prior to the current Russia/US conflict for American peacemakers to find places for publication of their ideas within the US mainstream media and within publishing houses. Now it is exceedingly rare if not impossible, as the mainstream media and even part of the alternative media is brainwashed by US propaganda and the wall of disinformation we receive. The few letters to the editor that manage to get published in a newspaper are immediately pounced upon by those deploring the ignorance of anyone who has not swallowed the US propaganda.
American peacemakers are not alone in their banishment from the publishing and media world, a world that prefers banal human interest articles, descriptions of victorious captures and attacks, and patriotic tunes of conquest, goodness, and shallow forms of unity based upon hatred of others. Peacemakers from other nations are faced with similar obstacles, and foreign governments may be blighted by some of the same problems that plague US foreign policymakers. And so US and various foreign governments, media, and culture can slowly addle the minds of those once engaged, once hopeful, to a state of bitter apathy, with the determination never to try again for peace and justice, to block out the world to which they are not invited to speak.
Is this the eagerly anticipated result of world globalization? An obedient, brainless, heartless clone population in which individuals equate goodness with completing their school assignments, sticking to their job descriptions, and solemnly believing all that they are told? Better not to be born at all.
In this video, we again strive to overcome apathy, bitterness, and the status quo by focusing on positive solutions. While the charts were created with US policymakers in mind, please apply them to the development of just and peaceful governments in other nations as well, where such ideas may actually take root, unless they, too, are already corrupt in their own way or purchased puppets of US foreign policymakers.
The previous video, Part 4, presented key solutions for creating peace using 1st Facet mental tools of Human Development, and this video, Part 5, discusses other important solutions: 2nd Facet legal tools of Justice, including the separation of wealth from power, and 3rd Facet physical tools of Physical Control, including expanded criteria for Just War, proxy war, and weapon shipments and the development of DaVinci standards of humanity when contemplating the construction of a nation’s arsenal and behavior in war.
The solutions presented in these videos of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Facets of the Paradigm for Peace model I believe are essential for the creation of genuine peace and justice. With a dynamic and determined spirit of peace and caring, caring both for those who are victims of others and victims of the weaknesses of their own minds, we can strive to implement these ideas.
Kristin Christman has been independently researching US foreign policy and peace since 9/11. Her channel focuses on US-Russian relations at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-10lk-CwU-5vAElcg. Kristin graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in Russian, and she holds Master’s degrees in Slavic languages from Brown University and public administration from SUNY Albany. She is a contributing author to the peace anthology Bending the Arc: Striving for Peace and Justice in the Age of Endless War (2020), edited by Breyman, Amidon, and Aumand. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice recently published her article on suicide, culture, and peace in their special edition on suicide, Vol. 33 No. 4. [email protected]
