Archive for the ‘war’ Category
world war three – or what?
So, there were only 21 years between the first and second world war, which ended over 80 years ago, and we’re all more civilised now, right? Some more than others of course – there are still plenty of nazis and fascists around. But who are these people?
Don’t get caught up in the nazi anti-Jewish thing, which was terrible of course, but nazism was more about racial elitism and superiority, together with lies about history and some fake previous ‘reich’ or estate or empire that needs to be resurrected. I’m tempted to call today’s efforts in that direction ‘Putinism’, but that might be getting too personal. No doubt an effective name and rallying call will be thought up soon enough – just another repetition of the fascism of old.
It’s unclear as yet whether this new world war has already started, slowly for the rest of the world, not so for Ukraine, and there are many things that could derail its escalation, most notably Putin’s liquidation. Currently, though, 73-year-old Putin is trying hard to give every impression that he’s not finished yet, that he’s just getting started. Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, though not by a large margin. It’s arguable that their military doesn’t have the discipline and training of their opposites, the USA, but that’s hardly a comforting thought. Putin clearly has no conscience with regard to the slaughter of innocents, and has encouraged his minions, and the Russian people in general, to think likewise.
So Russia is currently the epicentre of fascism and totalitarianism, and with the USA currently completely rudderless, western Europe has to shoulder the responsibility of effectively deterring Putin from using the nuclear option, which he’s undoubtedly considering. The problem, of course, is that Russia and the USA together possess 90% of the world’s nukes, leaving NATO (sans the USA) without much bargaining power. Anna Reid’s Borderland, updated from the 90s to cover the Putin era and his full-scale war on Ukraine, gives an indication of just how popular Putin is, and how catching his contempt for ‘the west’ has been, in Russia. It’s a bit similar to the popularity of Trump among the USA’s vast ‘left behind’. It’s hard, though, for anyone with the most basic humanist principles, to understand how such events as the Bucha massacre can be casually dismissed, or more likely, denied. It’s particularly difficult, I suppose, for someone of my own background, so far from such brutality, so cushioned against anything like this horror.
I would highly recommend Reid’s book, which has sometime brought tears to my eyes, sometimes enraged me, and often made me feel a strange mixture of good luck and a kind of ridiculous envy that I’ve never been remotely tested by the kinds of experiences that so many Ukrainians have gone through over the past twenty years or so, whatever their first language might have been. In Australia we struggle to find differences between east and west in this incredibly massive continent, with an area about 12 times that of Ukraine and only two-thirds or so of its population (which has declined since the war due to slaughter and emigration), and we would also struggle to find crises within our borders – though there are the occasional piddling anti-immigration protests, and a few days ago I encountered a few people protesting on the steps of our state parliament (in South Australia) – Cambodians protesting against Thai aggression – a border dispute that I know very little about, but it makes me wonder…
Border disputes are all about what part of some disputed land is ‘yours’ or ‘mine’. Having read Anna Reid’s book about the ‘disputed’ territory that is Ukraine, with its predominantly Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west (to put it very simplistically), I’ve now embarked on another book, Shattered Lands, by Sam Dalrymple, which deals with the old British Raj and its partitioning, no doubt involving border disputes aplenty – not, though, including the Thai-Cambodian dispute, but likely the Thai-Burmese border to the west.
But all wars, including world wars, are border disputes, are they not? The second world war was about expanding the German ‘reich’ – to the east, the west, the north, the south and all points between. The first world war was about all sorts of border tensions, with British and French expansionism, the holding struggles of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. And of course there have been many others – North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, the Mexican-American war of the 19th century. And think of China – to quote AINL:
China has historically expanded and currently asserts its borders through a mixture of war, military pressure, and diplomatic agreements, often stemming from long-standing historical claims.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine, 2022
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands: five partitions and the making of modern Asia, 2025
https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/six-causes-world-war-i
some thoughts on the Ukrainian tragedy
M Carney and V Zelenskyy with their Action Plan for the Implementation of the Agreement on Security Cooperation between Ukraine and Canada.
I’m by no means an expert on international affairs, though of course I’m interested in humanist, peaceful, equitable solutions to what’s happening in troublespots such as Ukraine, Palestine and the USA, to name the only three that I know a little bit about at present, but I have to admit that the very sight of Putin, Trump or Netenyahu or their minions on my screen has negative impacts on my health, as I’ve always been a bit overly emotional. So I’ve been both chillaxing and better informing myself recently by listening to articulate, intelligent, calm (above all calm, even humorous!) members of the commentariat (mostly female,) discussing these troublespots and troubling characters (mostly male).
So, with that, let me return to the Putin-Ukraine horror-show. Russian troops began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, though you might say the 2014 annexation of Crimea was Putin’s prelude, and the pre-2022 aggression in the Donbas region helped to clarify his entirely hostile intentions, not to mention the build-up of troops and materiel on Russia’s border with Ukraine in the preceding months.
It could be argued, and Putin would certainly argue, that Kievan Rus was central to the ‘development’, mostly through warfare, of the pan-Russian nation. These irredentist views of a Greater Russia that needed to be revived and presided over by Vladimir the Great have been central to Putin’s grand vision. To strengthen his claim, as least to his compatriots, he concocted a Ukrainian government infested with neo-nazis intent on wiping out the Russian minority in the eastern Donbas.
So when the ‘denazification’ invasion came, from the Belarusian border in the north, threatening Kiev, with accompanying attacks into the Donbas and threatening Kharkiv, and in Crimea, it looked, at least for a moment, that the claim by Belarusian president and Putin puppet Aleksandr Lukashenko (among others) that Ukraine would belong to Putin within three days would be proven.
But the march on Kiev was stalled and soon abandoned, to the whole world’s surprise it seems, and the reasons remain murky, and were probably multi-faceted. They include – bad weather and poor reconnaissance regarding terrain; Ukrainian attacks; fuel shortages and maintenance problems; poor planning, organisation and communications. The long delay before the initial march southwards allowed Ukrainian forces and individuals to prepare sniper and other attacks. Russian forces began a retreat from Kiev only three months after launching their northern invasion.
Currently, some three and a half years after the war began, Russia has control of some 20% of Ukrainian territory. The death toll, especially on the Russian side, is extremely hard to pin down, given Putin’s obsession with disinformation, but at least 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with another 8 million or so being internally displaced. Of course their have been multiple human rights abuses, and ICC arrest warrants have been issued for Putin and other Russian officials.
Putin has been in power in Russia for well over 20 years now, having eliminated all opposition and bolstered and clarified his dictatorship. However, this invasion and war has clearly endangered his position and indeed his life. One might fancifully compare it to Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in the 1940s. If the advent of Trump, a product of the world’s worst democratic political system, had not supervened, and a more NATO-supportive and decisive US President had been elected in 2020 and/or 2024, Putin’s fate would have been sealed. Instead we’re forced to witness what we’re witnessing.
The USA’s floundering, destructive horrorshow is essentially a reprieve for Putin, though it’s always possible that Trump will flounder in the direction of liberation for Ukraine. Of course that can’t be counted on. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has just visited Kiev and given a rousing speech with promises of financial and military support, and even the possibility of ‘boots on the ground’. We need much more of this.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO, and it should be. It seems that some NATO countries are reluctant to accept Ukraine’s membership at this time of war, which seems to me cruelly crazy. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine came very close to NATO membership in the pre-Yanukovych era, though popular support for the move was low. Today, unsurprisingly, it’s at an all-time high, and NATO membership was been a priority for successive governments since 2014. So why the delay?
Apparently there’s this thing called a Membership Action Plan (MAP), which is the Royal Road to NATO membership, and this has been touted for years for Ukraine, but fear of Putinland seems to have been central to the delay. Here’s what the Latvian foreign minister had to say on the issue, in April 2021:
We are watching closely as Russia draws troops to Ukraine’s borders. It is not clear at this time what this is: a show of force or real aggression. But there is every reason to worry … Ukraine has been trying to join NATO for 15 years by obtaining a Membership Action Plan. Apparently, it is time to provide this Plan to Ukraine [!]. This will be at least a signal from us [NATO] that Ukrainians will not be left without support. I will definitely support this decision…
You would think that Putin’s aggression would’ve stiffened the resolve of all NATO nations to include and support Ukraine. Pusillanimous is the word that comes to mind. And this has clearly cost lives.
Putin has to be defeated, kicked out of Ukraine completely. He, for one, will never compromise, and is completely incapable of negotiating in good faith. As various pundits have pointed out, withdrawing now, giving up, will likely be the end for him, with all the suffering this has caused to so many Russians. We – the west, NATO, the democratic world, whatever, need to go full bore at finishing this war and offering Putin nothing. He’s a criminal of the worst kind and always has been, throughout his adult life. The Canadian PM has shown the way, and we must all offer what we can, for humanity’s sake.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Kyiv_convoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–NATO_relations#Popular_opinion_in_Ukraine
slowly slowly catchy monkey
As we approach the rather significant US election on November 5 (and the fact that they hold their national elections on Tuesdays is very stupid, but one of the least stupid things about their elections in general), I’ve been indulging in absurd fantasies – though I prefer to call them thought experiments – about a future electoral system. ‘Absurd’ isn’t a term I like to use about myself, but I must admit that when I mention this thought experiment, I get a ‘please go away and stop bothering me’ response. So what do I do when nobody wants to listen? I post it on my blog and pat myself on the back.
So my idea is that, perhaps under the influence of some soma-type happy drug, or perhaps just because there’s a near world-wide irritation with male political leadership, at least in the democratic world (let’s not get too optimistic), laws are passed in quick succession banning males from standing for political office and banning males from voting (ok, let’s leave aside for now all the gender-bending categories… if you identify as female you can vote?…but what if you’re pretending to identify…?)
Anyway, in justification of such an absurdity, in the US Presidential elections, which began in 1788-9, 45 separate individuals have been elected, none of them female. Women weren’t given the right to vote until 1920, under the 19th amendment, after decades of heroic struggle. Hilary Clinton became the first woman to stand for election, in 2016, after nearly 230 years of elections! She won, of course, on the popular vote, but that don’t matter in the US of A.
So how would such an impossible scenario go? And, yes, of course I’m going to invoke bonobos.
Well of course there are fascist-style, ‘I alone can fix it’ type women, but they’re far out-numbered by the men of that type, and there are collaborative-style, non-adversarial men, but women are generally better at working together. Just look at the stats, from any country you prefer, on male versus female violence. Just look at the Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace organisations, which have been struggling together for decades, with no male alternative. Just look at the hooliganism associated with men’s soccer games, in some countries, and its absence in the women’s game. Just think of (projected) 30% rules in the various military organisations worldwide, because it’s known that female boots on the ground are more effective at winning hearts and minds, and finding collaborative solutions. Actual peace-keeping.
Of course, banning men from this or that organisation or activity is coercive and won’t happen (to men), but it’s certainly a pleasant thought experiment. An all-female military? Imagine it if you can. You certainly won’t have trouble imagining an all male one. It fact it doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. Any more than an all-male Presidential system, an all-male Politburo, or an all-male dictatorship.
So while I’m not trying to create a new SCUM manifesto, I do think that cutting down severely on male domination, in politics, finance and every other power-making activity, something that the WEIRD world is oh so gradually doing, is pretty well essential for our long-term survival. And bonobos provide something of a template.
It’s easy to scoff and point out that we’re so vastly superior to our language-deprived, tree-climbing closest rellies. After all, look where patriarchy got us – eight billion plus people, world domination, and geniuses like Donny Trump and Vlady Putin. But today’s human aims – sustainability rather than endless increase, sharing the resources of the biosphere rather than exploiting them, peace, persuasion and preservation rather than domination and destruction, and so on, are obviously more suited to the nurturing sector of humanity than the murderers and blowhards.
So how to give power to the bonobo possibilities within our human natures? By noticing, that’s the first thing. Actually taking note. Not only of how bonobos bring up children, deal with families, and treat (bonobo) strangers with guarded friendliness and peace offerings, but of how similar behaviour in humans, led predominantly by the females, bring about a similar bonding, mutuality and trust. Think of the waste, the desolation created by Putin’s territorial nonsense, by Xi’s pretended ‘need’ to take back Taiwan, by the hapless hope of many ‘Arabs’ and ‘Israelis’ of winning and ridding their world of the other. Think how very male it all is.
Of course, I’m being very idealistic, or at least too impatient. Humanity evolves, and, I’m hoping, in a good way. Yes we’re facing, or I should say creating, huge problems – climate change, over-population, species depletion, the nuclear threat, the lure of fascism, and still, decisions are being made here and there, that are worsening the situation. I don’t quite believe in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity depiction of humanity’s future, but I do think that, overall, we’re evolving in the right direction. Patriarchy is coming under pressure, and the pressure is very gradually growing. And bonobos, those dumb primates, are putting us to shame in that department.
So – slowly slowly catchy monkey.
References
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
a year after Pudding’s invasion
Canto: So more than a year has passed since Mr Pudding sent Russian forces into Ukraine, giving no good reason, to the world or to those he believes to be his subjects…
Jacinta: Well, for domestic consumption he insisted that it was a special operation – though whether it was to denazify the place or to simply incorporate it into the Fatherland, I’m not Russian enough to know. I suspect he doesn’t feel it overly necessary to explain exactly why he’s sending a proportion of the Russian population into harm’s way. He loves his country and he’ll never do it no wrong.
Canto: We’ve been listening, or half listening, to a number of well-reputed pundits on the situation, including Julia Ioffe, Fiona Hill, Timothy Snyder, Vlad Vexler, Marie Yovanovich and Bill Taylor – most of them United Staters, but with independent minds and humanist principles….
Jacinta: Haha, careful what you’re saying. We also watched recently a series of interviews with a cross-section of ‘ordinary Russians’ both for and against the war and their everlasting leader. And really it’s the same everywhere, no matter the country or type of government. So many just say ‘I’m not a political person,’ and make vague but dogmatic remarks about patriotism and fully backing the smarts at the top.
Canto: The impression I got from those interviews was that the war wasn’t much affecting them personally, and I suppose that as long as that’s the case, complacency will rule.
Jacinta: Well it’s not easy to ascertain the death toll, for Russians, of this operation. The New York Times, in an article from early February, claimed around 200,000 Russian deaths, but it was pretty vague as to sources. To be fair, they’re dealing with a country notorious for disinformation:
… officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured…
Canto: Both sides would be keen to keep a lid on numbers for reasons of morale, but this has surely been the worst conflict we’ve seen in our lifetimes, in terms of loss of life…
Jacinta: Ahem..
In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters.
That’s according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. But of course we have no idea when this current war will end or what the actual death toll numbers are today.
Canto: So what will bring it to an end? Most commentators on the NATO side are saying we need to do everything in our power to help Ukraine win as quickly and decisively as possible. That doing only enough to prevent Ukraine from losing would be a disastrous approach, with more lives lost. That would seem to mean the most sophisticated and destructive weapons, sent by NATO countries, since no NATO countries are prepared to supply soldiers, and in terms of manpower, Mr Pudding has the edge, since he’s at present prepared to sacrifice everyone he can muster to the cause, and that’s a lot more cannon-fodder than Ukraine has.
Jacinta: Yes, and I’m hearing mixed views, and noting some foot-dragging on the sending of materiel…
Canto: Well with the winter just ending, they’re talking of spring offensives, so these next months might be decisive. I’ve heard that the Chinese Testosterone Party, in the form of Chairman Xi, has let it be known that the nuclear option must definitely be ruled out. That’s important – according to one expert who strikes me as reliable, China is very much the senior partner in its relation with Russia, obviously for economic reasons, though that would stick in the Pudding’s craw…
Jacinta: Yuk. Yes, I’ve long considered that going nuclear would be the Pudding’s only real chance for victory, only it wouldn’t… There’d be retaliation, and no winners… It just has to be a non-option.
Canto: But I can’t see him giving up at this stage. There has just been a decision, on the first anniversary of this war, to send Leopard tanks to msUkraine, something Zelensky has long been asking for. They’re also hoping for fighter jets, but none are currently forthcoming. It seems to have been a bit like pulling teeth, though according to a BBC article I’m reading, one reason for the delay is the need to train Ukrainian forces in the operation of this sophisticated weaponry. The BBC also has an interesting graphic on the amount of money spent per nation (including the EU) on military aid to Ukraine. The USA has spent almost three times more than all the European nations put together.
Jacinta: Which is a bit surprising, but then the USA has long been obsessed with being a military behemoth, and the toughest kid in town.
Canto: Well, if you can’t be the smartest… Germany is now sending Leopard 2 tanks as well. The BBC article is long on detail of the materiel being supplied, about which of course we’re far from expert, but here’s a list: as to tanks, there’s the Leopard 2, the Challenger 2, the T-72M1, and the M1 Abrams. As to combat vehicles, the Stryker armoured fighting vehicle and the Bradley fighting vehicle. For air defence, the Patriot missile system, the S-300 air defence system and Starstreak missiles. Other nasties include the Himars rocket launcher system, M777 howitzers, anti-tank weapons and drones.
Jacinta: Yes it all sounds impressive – but as to jets, it’s not just the lack of training – many are worried that this might take the war inside Putinland, though I don’t personally see a big problem with that.
Canto: True, Mr Pudding would hardly be in a position to complain, but the general argument might be that innocent people would be being killed on both sides. It’s difficult, as Pudding seems unfazed by the numbers he’s committing to this operation…. But I don’t think any restrictions should be placed on how they use the materiel supplied to them. They’re fighting for their existence, and hitting at the heart of Russia might be the best way to get Pudding to stop.
Jacinta: But mightn’t it widen the conflict? China could get involved, say…
Canto: I don’t think so. We – those of us supporting Ukraine – would need to keep dialogue going with China and other countries with ties to Russia. Not that they don’t know who’s to blame for this war.
Jacinta: Okay so let’s look at the current situation. More weapons are being sent to Ukraine, but currently there’s a big battle around Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Russian forces are trying to encircle the city, which has been the site of some of the most intense fighting in the war. It has probably suffered more damage than any other Ukrainian city, and has changed hands a couple of times. Ukrainians are just holding onto it for the time being, and it’s likely to change hands a few times more before the end.
Canto: Yes, it’s the city centre they’re currently trying to capture, so that they can cut off supply lines from the west, so it seems. They already have control of the eastern suburbs. And I should say thank you to the various sources reporting on the action, whose accents I’m trying to get used to!
Jacinta: Yes, it’s like trying to be part of the action, like watching your favourite sports team trying to win, though the stakes are a million times higher, and the moral dimensions incalculably more significant.
Canto: Times Radio, from Britain, has been a good source of news and analysis on the war, and I’ve just watched one of their YouTube videos in which reporter Jerome Starkey talks about ‘Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries’ being used as cannon fodder in the assault on Bakhmut, threatened with being shot if they retreat – which is both horrific and confusing. I thought mercenaries were volunteers by definition…
Jacinta: Well I think they’re more like professional soldiers for hire. But I can’t imagine anyone signing up for a paid job under those conditions. You could say they’ve been trapped by their own mercenary motives, though that hardly exonerates Pudding and his cronies….
Canto: There’s a Wikipedia article on the Wagner Group, for which the TLDR acronym might’ve been invented, but basically it’s a force of amoral military thugs under the pay of Pudding, and operating outside of any legal jurisdiction. As you can imagine, many of them are driven by far-right ideologies as well as macho ideation.
Jacinta: And to compensate for their teeny-weeny penises.
Canto: They’ve been around for about a decade, and of course have been associated with multiple war crimes and atrocities wherever Pudding’s whims have sent them. So getting back to Bakhmut, many of the Russians fighting there, whether part of the Wagner group or not, have been ‘recruited’ from prisons and press-ganged into service. They may have the numbers to take Bakhmut for the time being, but my uneducated guess is that NATO-Ukrainian weaponry and the ability to deploy that weaponry effectively will win out in the end.
Jacinta: Experts, if there are any for this scenario, are saying that there’s no sign of an end in sight. That it’ll drag on at least for the rest of this year.
Canto: Well it looks like Bakhmut will be retaken by the Russians for the time being, and hopefully the remaining residents can be evacuated before then, but it may be a Pyrrhic victory because sadly the place has already been reduced to near-rubble. Meanwhile money, arms and ammunition continue to be funnelled to the Ukrainians, China has been warned by the EU not to support Pudding with weapons, threatening ‘sanctions’, and the Cold War world continues to freeze over….
References
https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-in-the-Vietnam-War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/4/russia-ukraine-war-list-of-key-events-day-374
19: the USA – an anti-bonobo state?
Of course it would be ridiculous to compare the complex, diverse collection of human apes – some 330 million of them – who call the USA home, to the few thousand bonobos who make their home in the forests of the Congo. So call me ridiculous.
Bonobos appear to be an egalitarian lot. They have fun together, sexually and otherwise, they share responsibilities, they look after each other’s kids, and they generally nip disagreements, which do occur, in the bud, either with sexual healing or with female group force. Unfortunately they don’t read, write or do much in the way of science, but you can’t have everything.
They don’t kill each other, which their close rellies the chimps occasionally do. And it’s the male chimps who tend to do this, just like male human apes.
Now, Americans. They like to think they’re exceptional, many of them, but to an outsider like me they seem exceptional in only two respects – their religiosity and their jingoism, neither of which I have much time for. The nation’s foundational religiosity has been well dealt with by Sam Harris and many others, and the backlash to their writings, as well the more recent kowtowing by so-called evangelical Christians to the mendacious messianic misanthrope whose presidency has effectively destroyed the nation’s reputation for the foreseeable, indicates that they still have a lot of growing up to do. Their jingoism seems another form of infantilism, and I suspect they get it drummed into them from kindergarten on up. That’s why even their best cable news pundits and politicians carried on a ‘how has the mighty fallen’ narrative over the four years of the misanthrope’s reign, without seeming to realise that the problem wasn’t Trump but their massively flawed federal political (and legal) system. It’s also why they’ll never engage in the root and branch reform of that system, the failings of which Trump has done them the great favour of exposing.
However, in comparing Americans unfavourably to bonobos, it’s not their lack of modesty and self-awareness that I want to focus on, but their violence. The violence of the state, and states, towards individuals, the violence, or violent feelings, of individuals towards the state, the violence of partisanship, and ordinary violence between individuals. And of course the gun culture.
Incarceration is a form of violence, let’s be blunt. The USA, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has some 22% of the world’s prisoners, making the nation’s incarceration rate the highest in the world. It was up at nearly 25% twelve years ago, and declined slightly during the Obama administration, but no doubt has been rising again under Trump. State authorities have also played a role in rising or declining rates of course.
The nation tries to delude itself by calling their prisons correctional institutions, but very little in the way of formal correction is attempted. The tragedy is exacerbated by prison privatisation, which first occurred under Reagan in the eighties. A for-profit prison system, fairly obviously, benefits from a high prison population, and from skimping on counselling, training, facilities, and even basic needs, covering all of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As is well known, US prisons are top-heavy with those people designated as black (I’ve always been uncomfortable with black-white terminology). So much so that a 2004 study reported that ‘almost one-third of black men in their twenties are either on parole, on probation, or in prison’. So it would surely be correct to say that every person ‘of colour’ is touched by the prison system, either personally or via friends and family. I won’t go into the reasons why here, except to mention the obvious issues of poverty, disadvantage and endemic despair, exacerbated by the imbecilic war on drugs, but clearly imprisonment is itself violently punitive and rarely leads to human betterment. It appears to be a ‘sweeping under the carpet’ response to all these issues. People are free to do whatever they like, but if they make a nuisance of themselves in the street, and make the place look bad, best to put them out of the way for a while, until such time as they clean themselves up. But the sad fact is that very few if any of those incarcerated blacks have done anywhere near as much damage to the nation as has their outgoing President.
As to a sense of violence towards the state, this is evidenced by paramilitary anti-government groups and the strange sense amongst a huge swathe of the population that if governments try to do anything interventional or ameliorative that in any way affects their lives they’re engaging in socialism, thus leaving the path open for white-collar crime (especially the gleefully celebrated crime of tax evasion), bank banditry and the like, and for real minimum wages to fall well below those of comparable countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Japan etc. And so, while their fellow-citizens are struggling in poorly paid jobs with inadequate conditions, people placard the streets screaming about their constitutional right to be protected from their Great Enemy, government in all its despicable forms. Ronald Reagan, who seems to have become a doyen of the moderate right, is now celebrated for saying that government is the problem, not the solution, surely one of the most imbecilic utterances of the pre-Trump era.
So with this eschewing of government oversight and guidance, the USA has devolved into a war of all against all, with rights eclipsing responsibilities, and with parts of the country resembling the worst of so-called third world countries in terms of entrapment, suffering and despair. But of course it’s different for the rich, who protect their own.
Finally I want to explore another form of violence, which relates to the US military. It’s amusing to note that there are arguments raging online about whether or not the US military is a socialist organisation, since it’s run and massively funded by by the federal government, with congress never delaying and rarely debating such unaudited funding. This is all fun to read since so many Americans become apoplectic when the word socialism comes up, but the fact remains that the Pentagon is, to most outsiders, something like a supermassive black hole sucking in funds that are never to be seen again.
US military spending is estimated to be close to one trillion dollars over the 2020-21 year, with something like 85% described as discretionary spending, which means essentially that they can spend it any way they choose. Three attempts have been made in the past three years to audit the Pentagon, and they have all ended in failure, but it’s unclear whether the auditor or the Pentagon is the responsible party. Needless, to say, conducting such as audit would be a largely thankless task. Of course defenders of all this expenditure claim that vast sums of money are required to keep safe this exceptional beacon of liberty to the world. Yet much of US military personnel and materiel are deployed outside of the country, and the USA has never been under serious attack from any other nation since its foundation. The fact is that the US uses its military as has every other powerful military state in history, dating back to the Egyptians and before, and including the Romans, the Brits, the Germans and the Japanese, that’s to say, to enhance its power and influence in the world. And the US certainly is exceptional in its military. Its defence budget is ‘more….than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined’.
Every powerful nation in history has fallen for the same fallacy, that their economic and military superiority somehow infers moral superiority. Might is right, essentially, and this translates to non-human ape societies too, as they all have their power hierarchies. Bonobos, however, less so than any of the others. In bonobo society, it seems, group power is used to stifle individual power-mongering, so that the group can get back as quickly as it can to the main purpose of their lives, surviving and thriving, exploring and foraging, looking out for each other and having fun. If we could have all this, in our more mind-expanded, scientific, with-knowledge-comes-responsibility sort of way, what a wonderful world this would be.
References
https://bonobohumanity.blog/category/identity-politics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
A bonobo world, etc, 18: gender and aggression in life and sport
bonobos play-fighting
human apes play-fighting?
If anyone, like me, says or thinks that they’d like to be a bonobo, it’s to be presumed they don’t mean they’d like to live in trees, be covered in hair, have a shortened life-span, a brain reduced to a third of its current size, and to never concern themselves with why the sky is blue, how the Earth spins, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. What we’re really interested in is how they deal with particular matters that have bedevilled human societies in their infinite variety – namely sex, violence, effective community and the role of women, vis-a-vis these matters.
While making a broad generalisation about human society, in all its billions, might leave me open to ridicule, we seem to have followed the chimpanzee and gorilla path of male domination, infighting as regards pecking order, and group v group aggression, rising to warfare and nuclear carnage as human apes became more populous and technologically sophisticated. One interesting question is this: had we followed the bonobo path of female group bonding and controlling the larger males by means of those bonds, and of group raising of children causing reduced jealousies and infanticides, would we have reached the heights of civilisation, if that’s the word, and world domination that we have reached today?
I realise this is an impossible question to answer, and yet… Human apes, especially in post-religious societies, are recognising the power and abilities of their women more and more. Social evolution has speeded up this process, bringing about changes in single lifetimes. In 1793 Olympe de Gouges, playwright, abolitionist, political activist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, was guillotined by Robespierre’s disastrous Montagnard faction, as much for being a moderate as for being a woman. Clearly a progressivist, de Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and capital punishment generally, and favoured a constitutional monarchy, a system which still operates more or less effectively in a number of European nations (it seems better than the US system, though I’m no monarchist). Today, capital punishment generally thrives only in the most brutally governed nations, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, though there are unfortunate outliers such as Japan, Singapore and arguably the USA (none of those last three countries have ever had female leaders – just saying). One hundred years after de Gouges died for promoting female equality and moderation, women were still being denied a university education in every country in the world. However in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, we’ve seen dramatic changes, both in the educational and scientific fields, and in political leadership. The labours of to the Harvard computers, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury and many others, working for a fraction of male pay, opened up the field of photometric astronomy and proved beyond doubt that women were a valuable and largely untapped intellectual resource. Marie Curie became the most famous female scientist of her day, and inspired women around the world to enter the scientific fray. Today, women such as Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of CRISPR-Cas9 fame, and Michelle Simmons, Australia’s quantum computing wizard, are becoming more and more commonplace in their uncommon intellect and skills. And in the political arena, we’ve had female leaders in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia (okay, in the eighteenth century), China (nineteenth century), South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka (the world’s first female PM), Israel, Ethiopia and Liberia, and I may have missed some. This may seem an incredible transformation, but many of these women were brief or stop-gap leaders, and were all massively outnumbered by their male counterparts and generally had to deal with male advisers and business and military heavyweights.
So it’s a matter of rapid change but never rapid enough for our abysmally short life spans. But then, taking a leaf from the bonobo tree, we should look at the power of female co-operation, not just individual achievement. Think of the suffragist movement of the early 1900s (the term suffragette was coined by a Daily Mail male to belittle the movement’s filletes), which, like the Coalition of Women for Peace (in Israel/Palestine) a century later, was a grassroots movement. They couldn’t be otherwise, as women were then, and to a large extent still are, shut out of the political process. They’re forced into other channels to effect change, which helps explain why approximately 70% of NGO positions are held by women, though the top positions are still dominated by men.
When I think of teams, and women, and success, two more or less completely unrelated fields come to mind – science and sport. In both fields cooperation and collaboration are essential to success, and more or less friendly competition against others in the field is essential to improve quality. Womens’ team sport is as competitive as that of men but without quite the same bullish, or chimp, aggressiveness, it seems to me, and the research backs this up. Sport, clearly, is a constructed form of play, in which the stakes are sometimes very high in terms of trophies, reputations and bragging rights, but in which the aggression is generally brought to an end by the final whistle. However, those high stakes sometimes result in foul play and overly aggressive attempts to win at all costs – and the same thing can happen in science. Sporting aggression, though, is easier to assess because it’s more physical, and more publicly displayed (and more likely to be caught on camera). To take my favourite sport, soccer, the whole object for each team is to fight to get and maintain possession of the ball for the purpose of scoring goals. This battle mostly involves finesse and teamwork, but when the ball is in open play it often involves a lot of positional jostling and other forms of physicality. Personally, I’ve witnessed many an altercation in the male game, when one player gets pissed off with another’s shirt-tugging and bumping, and confronts him chest-to-chest, nature documentary-style. The female players, when faced with this and other foul play, invariably turn to the referee with a word or a gesture. Why might this be?
In 1914, the American psychologist E L Thorndike wrote:
The most striking differences in instinctive equipment consists in the strength of the fighting instinct in the male and of the nursing instinct in the female…. The out-and-out physical fighting for the sake of combat is pre-eminently a male instinct, and the resentment at mastery, the zeal to surpass, and the general joy at activity in mental as well as physical matters seem to be closely correlated with it.
a bonobo world and other impossibilities 15
returning to the ‘farm’ in 1919 – 10 million dead, 21 million more mutilated
stuff on aggression and warfare
Warfare has long been a feature of human culture; impossible to say how far back it goes. Of course war requires some unspecified minimum number of participants, otherwise it’s just a fight, and one thing we can be certain of is that there were wars worthy of the name before the first, disputed, war we know of, when the pharoah Menes conquered northern Egypt from the south over 5000 years ago. The city of Jericho, which lays claim to being the oldest, was surrounded by defensive walls some three metres thick, dating back more than 9000 years, and evidence of weapons of war, and of skeletal remains showing clear signs of violent death by such weapons, dates back to 12000 years ago. None of this should surprise us, but our knowledge of early Homo sapiens is minuscule. The earliest skeletal data so far found takes us back nearly 200,000 years to the region now covered by Ethiopia in east Africa. We know next to nothing of the lifestyle and culture of these early humans. There’s plenty of dispute and uncertainty about the evolution of language, for example, which is surely essential to the planning of organised warfare. The most accepted estimates lie in a range from 160,000 to 80,000 years ago, but if it can ever be proven that our cousins the Neanderthals had language, this could take its origins back another hundred thousand years or more. Neanderthals share with us the FOXP2 gene, which plays a role in control of facial muscles which we use in speech, but this gene is regulated differently in humans.
In any case, warfare requires not only language and planning but sufficient numbers to carry out the plan. So just how many humans were roving about the African continent some 100,000 years ago?
The evidence suggests that the numbers were gradually rising, such that the first migrations out of Africa took place around this time, as our ancestors sought out fresh resources and more benign environments. They could also be escaping human enemies, or seeking out undisputed territory.
Of course there may have been as much collaboration as competition. We just don’t know. What I’m trying to get at is, were we always heading in the chimp direction of male dominance and aggression, or were there some bonobo traits that tempered this aggression? Of course, I’m not talking about influence – we haven’t been influenced, in our development, by these cousins of ours in any way. We only came to recognise them as cousins very recently. And with this recognition, it might be worth learning more from family.
Human warfare has largely been about the expansion or defense of territory, and it was a constant in Europe from the days of the Roman Empire until well into the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, armaments became far more deadly, and the 1914-18 war changed, hopefully for good, our attitude to this activity, which had previously been seen as a lifetime career and a proof of manliness. This was the first war captured by photography and newsreels, and covered to a substantial degree by journalism. If the Thirty Years’ War had been covered by photojournalists and national newspapers it’s unlikely the 1914-18 disaster would have occurred, but the past is another country. Territory has become more fixed, and warfare more costly in recent times. Global trade has become fashionable, and international, transnational and intergovernmental organisations are monitoring climate change, human rights, health threats and global economic development. Violent crime has been greatly reduced in wealthy countries, and is noticeably much greater in the poorer sectors of those countries. Government definitely pays a role in providing a safety net for the disadvantaged, and in encouraging a sense of possibility through education and effective healthcare. It’s noteworthy that the least crime-ridden countries, such as Iceland, New Zealand, Portugal and Denmark, have relatively small populations, rate highly in terms of health, work-life balance and education, and have experienced long periods of stable government.
Of course the worry about the future of warfare is its impersonality. This has already begun of course, and the horrific double-whammy of Horishima-Nagasaki was one of the first past steps towards that future. Japan’s military and ruling class had been on a fantastical master-race slaughter spree for some five decades before the bombs were dropped, but even so the stories of suffering and dying schoolchildren and other innocents in the aftermath of that attack make us all feel ashamed. And then what about Dresden? And Auschwitz? And Nanjing? And it continues, and is most egregious when one party, the perpetrator, has far more power than the other, the victim. Operation Menu, a massive carpet bombing campaign of eastern Cambodia conducted by the US Strategic Air Command in 1969 and 1970, was an escalation of activities first begun during the Johnson administration in 1965, in the hope of winning or at least gaining ground in the Vietnam war. There were all sorts of strategic reasons given for this strategy, of course, but little consideration was given to the villagers and farmers and their families, who just happened to be in the way. Much more recently the Obama administration developed a ‘kill list’, under the name Disposition Matrix, which has since been described as ‘potentially indefinite’ in terms of its ongoing targets. This involved the use of drone strikes, effectively eliminating the possibility of US casualties. Unsurprisingly, details of these strikes have been hard to uncover, but Wikipedia, as always, helps us get to the truth:
… Ben Emmerson, special investigator for the United Nations Human Rights Council, stated that U.S. drone strikes may have violated international humanitarian law. The Intercept reported, “Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes [in northeastern Afghanistan] killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
Cambodians, Afghans, distant peoples, not like us. And of course it’s important to keep America safe. And the world too. That’s why the USA must never become a party to the International Criminal Court. The country is always prepared to justify its violent actions, to itself. And it’s a nation that knows a thing or two about violence. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the USA is ranked 121st among the most peaceful countries in the world.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strike#United_States_drone_strikes
https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/non-economic-data/most-peaceful-countries
a bonobo world? 11
another bitter-sweet reflection on capacities and failures
I was in a half-asleep state, and I don’t know how to describe it neurologically, but subjectively I was hearing or being subjected to a din in my head, a kind of babble, like in an echoing school canteen. Then I heard a knocking sound above the din, then in a transforming whoosh all the din stopped in my head, it became silent apart from the knocking, and then, as a kind of wakening crystallisation clarified things, another sound, of trickling water. I quickly realised this was the sound from the shower above me, and the knocking was of the pipes being affected by the rush of hot water. But what really interested me was what had just happened in my brain. The din, of thought, or inchoate thought, or of confusedly buzzing neural connections, was dampened down instantly when this new sound forced itself into my – consciousness? – at least into a place or a mini-network which commanded attention. It, the din, disappeared as if a door had been slammed on it.
I can’t describe what happened in my brain better than this, though I’m sure that this concentration of focus, or activity, in one area of my brain, and the concomitant dropping of all other foci or activity, to facilitate that concentration, was something essential to human, and of course other animal, neurology. Something observed but not controlled by ‘me’. Something evolved. I like the way this is shared by mice and men, women and wombats.
But of course there are big differences too. I’ve described the experience, whatever it is, in such a way that a neurologist, on reading or listening to me, would be able to explain my experience more fully, or, less likely, be inspired to examine it or experiment with its no-doubt miriad causal pathways. I suppose this experience, though more or less everyday and unthreatening, is associated with flight-or-fight. The oddity of the sound, its difference from the background din, or perhaps rather my awareness of its oddity, caused a kind of brain-flip, as all its forces, or most of them, became devoted to identifying it. Which caused me to awaken, to marshall a fuller consciousness. How essential this is, in a world of predators and home intruders, and how much fun it is, and how useful it is, to try for a fuller knowledge of what’s going on. And so we go, adding to our understanding, developing tools for further investigation, finding those tools might just have other uses in expanding other areas of our knowledge, and the world of our ape cousins is left further and further behind. For me, this is a matter of pride, and a worry. I’m torn. The fact that I think the way I do has to do with my reading and my reflections, the habits of a lifetime. Some have nerdiness, if that’s what it is, thrust upon them. I’m fascinated by the human adventure, in its beginnings and its future. Its beginnings are connected to other apes, to old world and new world monkeys, to tarsiers, to tree shrews and rodents and so on, all the way back to archaea and perhaps other forms yet to be discovered. We need to fully recognise this connectivity. Its future, what with our increasing dominance over other species and the earthly landscape, our obsession with growth, our throwaway mindset, but also our ingenious solutions, our capacity for compassion and for global cooperation, that future is and always will be a mystery, just outside of our manipulating grasp, with every new solution creating more problems requiring more solutions.
A few hundred years ago, indeed right up to the so-called Great War of 1914, human warfare was a much-celebrated way of life. And we still suffer a kind of hero-worship of military adventurism, and tell lies about it. In the USA, many times over the most powerful military nation on earth, the media are always extolling the sacrifice of those who fought to ‘keep America safe’. This is a hackneyed platitude, considering that, notwithstanding the highly anomalous September 11 2001 attack, the country has never had to defend its borders in any war. Military casualties are almost certain to occur in a foreign country, where the USA is seeking to preserve or promote its own interest, generally against the interests of that country. In this respect, the USA, it should be said, is no better or worse than any other powerful country throughout history. The myth of military might entailing moral superiority, which began with the dawn of civilisations, dies hard, as ‘American exceptionalism’ shows.
But globalism, international trade, travel, communication and co-operation, is making for a safer and less combative human society than ever before. So, as militarism as a way of life recedes, we need to focus on the problems of globalism and economic growth. As many have pointed out, the pursuit of growth and richesse is producing many victims, many ‘left-behind’. It’s dividing families and creating a culture of envy, resentment and often unmitigated hatred of the supposedly threatening ‘other’. The world of the bonobo – that tiny community of a few tens of thousands – tinier than any human nation – a gentle, fun-loving, struggling, sharing world – seems as distant to us as the world of the International Space Station, way out there. And yet…
Operation Pressure Pump, the struggle with anti-Americanism, and the future of humanism (!?)
Having succumbed to the strange lure of Korean period dramas, and the not-so-strange allure of the incomparable Ha ji Won, in recent times, I’ve been reading a real history of Korea, Michael Seth’s fast-moving, highly readable book in the Brief History series.
Seth’s book moves perhaps a bit too quickly through the vast time-span of Korean civilisation before the twentieth century, but no matter, I was keen to find out more about the Korean War, its causes and consequences, about which I knew practically nothing.
In brief, the Korean War was an outcome of the Japanese occupation of the peninsula, and its surrender and withdrawal in 1945. The vacuum thus left was occupied by the Americans in the south, and the Russians in the north, a division demarcated arbitrarily by the 38th parallel. This quasi-official division, which seemed to go on indefinitely and which the Koreans were never consulted about, came as a massive affront to a people who had effectively governed their own undivided region for centuries.
Nevertheless, communism was in the air, and held a certain appeal for some of the Korean peasantry and some intellectuals, fed by Russian and Chinese propaganda. In the poorer north, Russian and local communist leaders were able to introduce reforms which had a direct and immediate benefit for the landless peasantry, while the Americans, apparently clueless about Korean politics and history, tried to maintain order by continuing some of the hated repressive measures of the Japanese.
People on both sides of the 38th parallel wanted and expected reunification of the country in the near future, which makes what eventually happened one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. The north, under the discipline of Russian Stalinist policies of ‘x-year plans’ and ultra-nationalist workaholism, took the initiative, building up a powerful military force with which to invade the south and enforce reunification, and a Stalinist paradise. By this time Kim Il Sung had imposed himself as the Great Leader of the north, dealing ruthlessly with all rivals.
The north’s attack took the south completely by surprise, and was almost a complete success. They captured all the southern territory except for a small area around Busan, Korea’s second city in the south-east corner. By this time General MacArthur had been appointed to head the southern defence, and with American arms and reinforcements arriving quickly, the invaders were pushed back.
The northern invasion was extremely unpopular in the south, and few of the peasantry, who were generally better off than their northern counterparts, were interested in what Kim’s Stalinists had to offer. So – and again I’m simplifying massively – things eventually went back to a stalemate centred upon the once meaningless, and now very meaningful, 38th parallel. Warfare dragged on for another couple of years, mostly around that parallel.
And that’s how I come to the title of this piece. Operation Pressure Pump, which commenced in July 1952, came about as a result of American frustration with the stalemate. Here’s how Seth describes it:
Thousands of bombing raids destroyed every possible military and industrial target, the dams and dikes that irrigated the rice fields. Pyongyang and other northern cities began to look like Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the A-bomb, with only a few buildings standing. More bombs were dropped by the Americans on this little country of hardly more than 8 million than the allies had dropped on either Germany or the Japanese Empire in WWII. As a result, the North Koreans were forced to move underground. The entire country became a bunker state, with industries, offices and even living quarters moved to hundreds of miles of tunnels. Nonetheless, civilian casualties in these bombing raids were appallingly high.
A brief history of Korea: isolation, war, despotism and revival – the fascinating story of a resilient but divided people, p 126
Now, this was new knowledge to me, and I haven’t heard too many Americans talking about it, in the various media outlets I’ve been listening to lately, as a black mark against the country’s name – and some Americans are self-critical in this way. Okay, it was sixty-odd years ago, and since then there’s been Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), and a few other ‘minor’ interventions, so, who’s remembering?
So, I’ve been quite critical of the USA on this blog, and I do actually worry from time to time that I’m being unfairly anti-American. I try to relieve this concern by noting that the USA simply follows the pattern of every other militarily and economically powerful country in history. It bullies its neighbours and exploits all other regions, including its allies, to enhance its power. It also falls victim to the same fallacy that every previous powerful nation falls victim to – that its economic power is evidence of moral superiority. Their myth of American exceptionalism is arguably no worse than that of British benevolent imperialism or the civilising influence of the Roman/Egyptian/Babylonian empire. In fact, all nations are 100% self-interested in their own way. A middling country like Australia bullies smaller countries, such as East Timor over oil in the Timor Sea, while kowtowing to more powerful countries like China and the USA, in which case its self-interest lies in how to kowtow to one country without offending the other.
But let me return to Operation Pressure Pump. The greatest casualties of war are ordinary people. It’s worth dwelling on this as ordinary people currently face the consequences of stupid decisions over Iran. ‘Ordinary people’ might seem a condescending term, but it’s always worth remembering that the vast majority of people – in Iran, North Korea, Australia, the USA or elsewhere – aren’t intellectuals or politicians or national decision-makers or religious leaders or general movers and shakers – they’re people whose lives revolve around friends and family and trying to make a reasonable living. Warfare, and the damage and displacement it causes, isn’t something they can ever seriously factor into their plans. It just happens to them, a bit like cancer.
So the US bombing campaign was something that happened to the North Korean people in the early fifties. Another thing that happened to them was ‘communism’ or the despotic nationalist madness of Kim Il Sung. So they were doubly unlucky. As a humanist, I like to think my politics are simple. I consider bullies to be the worst form of human life, and I expect governments to be most concerned about protecting the bullied against the bullies, the exploited against the exploiters. I actually expect government to be an elite institution, like the media, the judiciary, and the science and technology sector. I also expect governments to put humanism above nationalism, but that’s a big ask. The UN hasn’t so far proved to be an enormous success, as members have generally put national interests above broader global interests, but it’s certainly better than nothing, and some parts of it, such the WHO and the UNHCR, have proved their value. I don’t think there’s any other option but to struggle to give more teeth to the UN, the International Criminal Court and other international oversight agencies. We should never allow one nation to accord to itself the role of global police officer. Of course these international bureaucracies are cumbersome when flashpoints occur – the aim is always to prevent these things from happening. The current Iran situation was entirely preventible, and was entirely due to the USA’s appalling Presidential system, which has allowed an irresponsible, attention-seeking buffoon to hold a position with way too much power and way too little accountability. There’s no doubt that Soleimani was an unpleasant character, but reports were that his activities were much reduced due to the Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015, a famously well-crafted deal by most accounts, which was destroyed by the buffoon.
So, this piece of unilateral bad acting by the USA takes us back to the terror bombing of North Korea in the early fifties. I’m certainly not saying that this cruelty made North Korea what it is today, but it didn’t help. We just have to learn to be more collaborative, more willing to negotiate and to understand, to hear, the other side, and stop being such belligerent male arseholes. We have a long way to go.
women and warfare, part 2: humans, bonobos, coalitions and care
Shortly before I started writing the first part of this article, I read a sad and disturbing piece in a recent New Scientist, about an Iron Age citadel in modern Iran, called Hasanlu. Its tragic fate reminded me of the smaller scale tragedies that Goodall and others recount in chimpanzee societies, in which one group can systematically slaughter another.
Hasanlu was brutally attacked and destroyed at the end of the ninth century BCE, and amazingly, the massacred people at the site remained untouched until uncovered by archeologists only a few decades ago. One archeologist, Mary Voigt, who worked the site in 1970, has described her reaction:
I come from a long line line of undertakers. Dead people are not scary to me. But when I dug that site I had screaming nightmares.
Voigt’s first discovery was of a small child ‘just lying on the pavement’, with a spear point and an empty quiver lying nearby. In her words:
The unusual thing about the site is all this action is going on and you can read it directly: somebody runs across the courtyard, kills the little kid, dumps their quiver because it’s out of ammunition. If you keep going, there are arrow points embedded in the wall.
Voigt soon found more bodies, all women, on the collapsed roof of a stable:
They were in an elite part of the city yet none of them had any jewellery. Maybe they had been stripped or maybe they were servants. Who knows? But they were certainly herded back there and systematically killed. Its very vivid. Too vivid.
Subsequent studies found that they died from cranial trauma, their skulls smashed by a blunt instrument. And research found many other atrocities at the site. Headless or handless skeletons, skeletons grasping abdomens or necks, a child’s skull with a blade sticking out of it. All providing proof of a frenzy of violence against the inhabitants. There is still much uncertainty as to the perpetrators, but for our purposes, it’s the old story; one group or clan, perhaps cruelly powerful in the past, being ‘over-killed’, in an attempt at obliteration, by a newly powerful, equally cruel group or clan.
Interestingly, while writing this on January 4 2019, I also read about another massacre, exactly ten years ago, on January 4-5 2009. The densely populated district of Zeitoun in Gaza City was attacked by Israeli forces and 48 people, mostly members of the same family, and mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed, and a number of homes were razed to the ground. This was part of the 2008-9 ‘Gaza War’, known by the Arab population as the Gaza Massacre, and by the Israelis as Operation Cast Lead. The whole conflict resulted in approximately 1200-1400 Palestinian deaths. Thirteen Israelis died, four by friendly fire. And of course I could pick out dozens of other pieces of sickening brutality going on in various benighted parts of the world today.
Attempts by one group of people to obliterate another, whether through careful planning or the frenzy of the moment, have been a part of human history, and they’re ongoing. They are traceable as far back, at least, as the ancestry we share with chimpanzees.
But we’re not chimps, or bonobos. A fascinating documentary about those apes has highlighted many similarities between them and us, some not noted before, but also some essential differences. They can hunt with spears, they can use water as a tool, they can copy humans, and collaborate with them, to solve problems. Yet they’re generally much more impulsive creatures than humans – they easily forget what they’ve learned, and they don’t pass on information or knowledge to each other in any systematic way. Some chimp or bonobo communities learn some tricks while others learn other completely different tricks – and not all members of the community learn them. Humans learn from each other instinctively and largely ‘uncomprehendingly’, as in the learning of language. They just do it, and everyone does it, barring genetic defects or other disabilities.
So it’s possible, just maybe, that we can learn from bonobos, and kick the bad habits we share with chimps, despite the long ancestry of our brutality.
Frans De Waal is probably the most high-profile and respected bonobo researcher. Here’s some of what he has to say:
The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations–and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.
Bonobo sex and society, Scientific American, 2006.
Now, I’m a bit reluctant to emphasise sex too much here (though I’m all for it myself), but there appears to be a direct relationship in bonobo society between sexual behaviour and many positives, including one-on-one bonding, coalitions and care and concern for more or less all members of the group. My reluctance is probably due to the fact that sexual repression is far more common in human societies worldwide than sexual permissiveness, or promiscuity – terms that are generally used pejoratively. And maybe I still have a hankering for a Freudian theory I learned about in my youth – that sexual sublimation is the basis of human creativity. You can’t paint too many masterpieces or come up with too many brilliant scientific theories when you’re constantly bonking or mutually masturbating. Having said that, we’re currently living in societies where the arts and sciences are flourishing like never before, while a large chunk of our internet time (though far from the 70% occasionally claimed) is spent watching porn. Maybe some people can walk, or rather wank, and chew over a few ideas at the same (and for some it amounts to the same thing).
So what I do want to emphasise is ‘female-centredness’ (rather than ‘matriarchy’ which is too narrow a term). I do think that a more female-centred society would be more sensual – women are more touchy-feely. I often see my female students walking arm in arm in their friendship, which rarely happens with the males, no matter their country of origin (I teach international students). Women are highly represented in the caring professions – though the fact that we no longer think of the ‘default’ nurse as female is a positive – and they tend to come together well for the best purposes, as for example the Women Wage Peace movement which brings Israeli and Palestinian women together in a more or less apolitical push to promote greater accord in their brutalised region.
Women’s tendency to ‘get along’ and work in teams needs to be harnessed and empowered. There are, of course, obstructionist elements to be overcome – in particular some of the major religions, such as Catholic Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which date back centuries or millennia and tend to congeal or ‘eternalise’ the patriarchal social mores and power structures of those distant times. However, there’s no doubt that Christianity, as the most western religion, is in permanent decline, and other religions will continue to feel the heat of our spectacular scientific developments – including our better understanding of other species and their evolved and unwritten moral codes.
The major religions tend to take male supremacy for granted as the natural order of things, but Melvin Konner, in his book Women after all, has summarised an impressive array of bird and mammal species which turn the tables on our assumptions about male hunters and female nurturers. Jacanas, hyenas, cassowaries, montane voles, El Abra pygmy swordtails (a species of fish) and rats, these are just a few of the creatures that clearly defy patriarchal stereotypes. In many fish and bird species, the females physically outweigh the males, and there’s no sense that, in the overwhelming majority of bird species – whose recently-discovered smarts I’ve written about and will continue to write about – one gender bosses the other.
Turning back to human societies, there are essentially three types of relations for continuing the species – monogamy, polyandry and polygyny. One might think that polyandry – where women can have a harem of males to bed with – would be the optimum arrangement for a female-centred society, but in fact all three arrangements can be turned to (or against) the advantage of females. Unsurprisingly, polygyny (polyandry’s opposite) is more commonly practiced in human society, both historically and at present, but in such societies, women often have a ‘career open to talents’, where they and their offspring may have high status due to their manipulative (in the best sense of the word) smarts. In any case, what I envisage for the future is a fluidity of relations, in which children are cared for by males and females regardless of parentage. This brings me back to bonobos, who develop female coalitions to keep the larger males in line. Males are uncertain of who their offspring is in a polyamorous community, but unlike in a chimp community, they can’t get away with infanticide, because the females are in control in a variety of ways. In fact, evolution has worked its magic in bonobo society in such a way that the males are more concerned to nurture offspring than to attack them. And it’s notable that, in modern human societies, this has also become the trend. The ‘feminine’ side of males is increasingly extolled, and the deference shown to females is increasing, despite the occasional throwback like Trump-Putin. It will take a long time, even in ‘advanced’ western societies, but I think the trend is clear. We will, or should, become more like bonobos, because we need to. We don’t need to use sex necessarily, because we have something that bonobos lack – language. And women are very good at language, at least so has been my experience. Talk is a valuable tool against aggression and dysfunction; think of the talking cure, peace talks, being talked down from somewhere or talked out of something. Talk is often beyond cheap, it can be priceless in its benefits. We need to empower the voices of women more and more.
This not a ‘fatalism lite’ argument; there’s nothing natural or evolutionarily binding about this trend. We have to make it happen. This includes, perhaps first off, fighting against the argument that patriarchy is in some sense a better, or more natural system. That involves examining the evidence. Konner has done a great job of attempting to summarise evidence from human societies around the world and throughout history – in a sense carrying on from Aristotle thousands of years ago when he tried to gather together the constitutions of the Greek city-states, to see which might be most effective, and so to better shape the Athenian constitution. A small-scale, synchronic plan by our standards, but by the standards of the time a breath-taking step forward in the attempt not just to understand his world, but to improve it.
References
Melvin Konner, Women after all, 2015
New Scientist, ‘The horror of Hasanlu’ September 15 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath, 2013