Paris death tolls, claims of responsibility, false-flag theories, vows of merciless retaliation, military forces mobilized—the future of unlimited war our rulers promised after 9-11 continues to unfold before a world aghast at the atrocities. A ruthless logic underlies the apparently senseless violence. Unlimited war requires an unlimited supply of enemies, and an unlimited supply of enemies requires manufacturing an unlimited supply of hatred. That hatred now exists in overflowing abundance, not only hatred of the western corporate empire waging this war, but also hatred among the empire's unwitting subjects for the very people victimized in manufacturing the hatred. And, of course, unlimited war guarantees unlimited profits for the corporations that gain access to resources, markets, and cheap labor through its conquests.
Yet the day-by-day atrocities of this war mustn't make us lose sight of atrocity in a wider perspective. I don't mean the media bias that highlights 128 deaths in Paris while neglecting 40 deaths in Beirut. I mean the contrast between such attacks and overt state terrorism like Israel's assault on Gaza in 2014 that killed over 2200 Palestinians, 800 of them children and women. I mean the contrast between such isolated state terrorism and the US invasion of Iraq which has thus far killed at least half a million people. And I mean the even greater contrast between the atrocities of today's "war on terror" and those of the last world war, when the US killed 100,000 Japanese within minutes by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Overall, World War II killed more than 60 million people, half again as many as lived under the Roman Empire at its largest. Nothing can surpass armed central authority in brutality and violence—violence committed not because of hatred, but for purposes of geopolitical dominance.
This doesn't make the Paris or Beirut death tolls less atrocious, it makes clear the cosmic atrocity of modern political power at work. Unlimited war turns restaurants, places of worship, and concert venues into battlefields, turns citizen against citizen in divisive hatred, casts a constant pall of terror over our daily lives. It tricks us into accepting fascism as a defense of "security" that only secures the advantage of our rulers, tricks us into funding, supporting, even dying in wars that only advance the frontlines of corporate conquest. Since Domination was invented 6000 years ago, the price of political power and privilege has always been paid in innocent human blood. Unless we condemn and challenge political power as such, rise up against it worldwide and dismantle its deadly institutions, the rivers of blood will continue to flow.
www.enginesofdomination.com
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Friday, November 13, 2015
Engines in Arabic subtitles
I'm thrilled to announce that Engines of Domination is now available in Arabic subtitles. This is our sixth translation, including Polish, Greek, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese, all done by volunteers.
View the video on our YouTube channel here.
Or on the website www.enginesofdomination.com
View the video on our YouTube channel here.
Or on the website www.enginesofdomination.com
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Why Johnny Can't Learn Algebra, or Math "Education" as Thought-Control
So-called "education" is obviously a key component of modern thought-control, but my career teaching math showed me how something as innocent as algebra could inadvertently reinforce the system.
First, you should know that in middle school I was advanced from regular math courses into the celebrated "new math" curriculum. I'd been an outstanding math student previously, but suddenly I couldn't understand anything. I failed algebra for three semesters before the administration declared me "learning disabled" in mathematics. Never mind that there's no such thing as a mathematics learning disability, apart from the rare "discalcics" who can't understand numbers and arithmetic. It would make as much sense to say that a student who repeatedly fails history has a "history learning disability."
Yet the diagnosis seemed correct for many years. When I asked knowledgeable friends to show me how to solve simple equations, I always experienced the same, "What? I don't get it!" block as in middle school. I finally learned what was going on when I dared myself to take a beginning algebra course after returning to college in my mid-twenties.
The professor was no help, a Cuban with poor English and illegible handwriting. But the textbook was a miracle. One of an innovative series of self-instructing books by Keedy and Bittinger, it broke algebra down into small perfectly logical steps, explaining the mathematical principles behind every technique and operation. A revelation! I had never been told WHY to do what the teachers said to do, AND THEY DIDN'T KNOW EITHER, or at least how to explain it clearly. The more intelligent my questions, the more the teacher was intimidated—and the more the teacher responded by ridiculing me for not understanding.
I proceeded to be become an award-winning math and physics student, and to successfully teach those subjects for 35 years. My teaching experience strongly reinforced my conclusions. Whenever I'd get a student who said, "I just can't do math," I'd ask, "When did you have your bad teacher?" And there was always one teacher who'd been intimidated and made my student feel stupid for asking important questions. I designed my own two-year high school algebra course for arts-emphasis students notoriously uninterested in math, basing every step on a clear understanding of principles, and dozens of previously "math disabled dummies" excelled in math and came to love it.
When "taught" by teachers who don't understand the principles of algebra, algebra becomes pure obedience-training at its worst, monkey-see-monkey-do, or else. Of course, the entire authoritarian structure of modern education primarily functions as obedience training: submit to the authorities and excel at obeying their orders under high stress, or else. But in the case of algebra, the humiliation is even greater than other subjects. Lacking the mathematical principles that underlie algebra, the subject has NO CONTENT, so the required obedience there is meaningless, obedience for the sake of obedience. Either you "get it" and replicate the demanded actions, or you're "dumb." Naturally this leaves tens or hundreds of millions of students totally incompetent in mathematics, and with a lifelong abhorrence of it. Thought-control, tragically, is the winner: the more citizens feel unable to understand things, the better.
www.enginesofdomination.com
First, you should know that in middle school I was advanced from regular math courses into the celebrated "new math" curriculum. I'd been an outstanding math student previously, but suddenly I couldn't understand anything. I failed algebra for three semesters before the administration declared me "learning disabled" in mathematics. Never mind that there's no such thing as a mathematics learning disability, apart from the rare "discalcics" who can't understand numbers and arithmetic. It would make as much sense to say that a student who repeatedly fails history has a "history learning disability."
Yet the diagnosis seemed correct for many years. When I asked knowledgeable friends to show me how to solve simple equations, I always experienced the same, "What? I don't get it!" block as in middle school. I finally learned what was going on when I dared myself to take a beginning algebra course after returning to college in my mid-twenties.
The professor was no help, a Cuban with poor English and illegible handwriting. But the textbook was a miracle. One of an innovative series of self-instructing books by Keedy and Bittinger, it broke algebra down into small perfectly logical steps, explaining the mathematical principles behind every technique and operation. A revelation! I had never been told WHY to do what the teachers said to do, AND THEY DIDN'T KNOW EITHER, or at least how to explain it clearly. The more intelligent my questions, the more the teacher was intimidated—and the more the teacher responded by ridiculing me for not understanding.
I proceeded to be become an award-winning math and physics student, and to successfully teach those subjects for 35 years. My teaching experience strongly reinforced my conclusions. Whenever I'd get a student who said, "I just can't do math," I'd ask, "When did you have your bad teacher?" And there was always one teacher who'd been intimidated and made my student feel stupid for asking important questions. I designed my own two-year high school algebra course for arts-emphasis students notoriously uninterested in math, basing every step on a clear understanding of principles, and dozens of previously "math disabled dummies" excelled in math and came to love it.
When "taught" by teachers who don't understand the principles of algebra, algebra becomes pure obedience-training at its worst, monkey-see-monkey-do, or else. Of course, the entire authoritarian structure of modern education primarily functions as obedience training: submit to the authorities and excel at obeying their orders under high stress, or else. But in the case of algebra, the humiliation is even greater than other subjects. Lacking the mathematical principles that underlie algebra, the subject has NO CONTENT, so the required obedience there is meaningless, obedience for the sake of obedience. Either you "get it" and replicate the demanded actions, or you're "dumb." Naturally this leaves tens or hundreds of millions of students totally incompetent in mathematics, and with a lifelong abhorrence of it. Thought-control, tragically, is the winner: the more citizens feel unable to understand things, the better.
www.enginesofdomination.com
Living Under the Yoke
Quote from the script of Engines of Domination.
"If [abolishing Domination] seems impossible, we must ask why. No one has ever tried to abolish Domination, so this judgment can’t be based on historical experience. In fact, the feeling that Domination is inevitable comes from domestication. Any animal trainer knows that the animal must understand who’s in charge, and that there’s no alternative. We’ve lived under human domestication for hundreds of generations now, so naturally we’re brought up knowing who’s in charge, and that there’s no alternative. But that is precisely domestication: to accept our captivity and learn to live under the yoke. The first and most important step is to believe that we can be free, and that we have every right to throw off the yoke. The feeling that we’re powerless is Domination’s greatest weapon against us."
www.enginesofdomination.com
"If [abolishing Domination] seems impossible, we must ask why. No one has ever tried to abolish Domination, so this judgment can’t be based on historical experience. In fact, the feeling that Domination is inevitable comes from domestication. Any animal trainer knows that the animal must understand who’s in charge, and that there’s no alternative. We’ve lived under human domestication for hundreds of generations now, so naturally we’re brought up knowing who’s in charge, and that there’s no alternative. But that is precisely domestication: to accept our captivity and learn to live under the yoke. The first and most important step is to believe that we can be free, and that we have every right to throw off the yoke. The feeling that we’re powerless is Domination’s greatest weapon against us."
www.enginesofdomination.com
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Anarchism—Unthinkable?
Domination has afflicted more and more of the world during its 6000-year history, and today the whole world is under its grip. Its pattern of privileged elites living at the expense of dominated masses has left many people feeling that nothing else is possible. In particular, anarchism seems unthinkable. How could the world exist without Domination?
Yet before Domination was invented in the late Neolithic, communities worldwide had lived in anarchism for a quarter of a million years, without armed central authority and ruling elites. Ironically, for peoples who lived during those times, the idea of anarchism truly was unthinkable. Consider native peoples who had never worn shoes or encountered people who did. They could have no such idea as "barefoot"—the absence of something beyond their knowledge or imagination. The same was true of "anarchism."
Human ingenuity has often created the previously unthinkable and unimaginable. It created Domination, and now we must organize our ingenuity and energy to create a world where our descendants find Domination unthinkable—a nightmare of the legendary past, banished forever.
www.enginesofdomination.com
Yet before Domination was invented in the late Neolithic, communities worldwide had lived in anarchism for a quarter of a million years, without armed central authority and ruling elites. Ironically, for peoples who lived during those times, the idea of anarchism truly was unthinkable. Consider native peoples who had never worn shoes or encountered people who did. They could have no such idea as "barefoot"—the absence of something beyond their knowledge or imagination. The same was true of "anarchism."
Human ingenuity has often created the previously unthinkable and unimaginable. It created Domination, and now we must organize our ingenuity and energy to create a world where our descendants find Domination unthinkable—a nightmare of the legendary past, banished forever.
www.enginesofdomination.com
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