Mr Bagus and the American Rightwing ~ excerpts from a virtual debate on might-as-right and the military solution (repost)

I started the Magick River Network on 22 June 2001 after a free e-bulletin service I had been using decided to charge an annual fee. With their permission I migrated all members on my mailing list to Yahoogroups - and I'm grateful to Yahoo for hosting so many virtual forums as part of its service to the web community.

After 13 years, I'm astonished that none of the original members has resigned from the forum, even though it has fallen silent ever since facebook appeared on the digital horizon. Indeed, as of today, we still have 143 members (144, if you count Mr God as an honorary member). As virtual forums go, the Magick River Network was blessed with a great variety of acute and articulate minds - all endowed with expansive and loving hearts - even the few with obnoxious opinions!

The intense discussions that ensued on every imaginable subject are now archived in the message folder - and a few have been retrieved from crashed hard drives, like my response to Mr Bagus - nickname for a dear friend of mine from 1969 - when he was posted to Batu Pahat as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Paul's 22nd birthday in Batu Pahat

When I first met Paul Herzenberg, he reminded me of the actor Elliot Gould, with his trendy sideburns and long, wavy curls. Paul was a practicing hedonist - fond of good food, pretty girls, big bikes, waterbeds and loco weed. He became a close family friend and later married a beauty named Peggy Liew from Kulai, Johor. When their first and only child was born, Paul suggested naming him "Kit Chen" - in my honor and as a nod to his family business, called "Kitchens by Herzenberg." Peggy snatched the pen from her hubby and formally recorded her boy's name as "David."

David Herzenberg turned 24 and decided to go backpacking around Asia. His dad insisted he look in on me. David stayed a total of 9 days at the newly constructed Bamboo Palace and when he got back to the U.S., sent me an invitation to join him on facebook. And that's how I became, quite possibly, the first Malaysian facebooker in mid-2005.

Handsome son of a gun: David Herzenberg

Anyway, much to my surprise, Paul Herzenberg joined the Magick River Network and, before long, began stirring up controversy with his hard-headed rightwing views (this was around the time of 9/11 and George W. Bush's fraudulent war on terror). There was a lot of heated discussion around the Neo-Con White House and its criminal invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq. Paul, posting as "Mr Bagus," defended the U.S. plan to bomb Baghdad and "take out" Saddam Hussein...

From Bagus2@xxx.com
Date Friday, January 31, 2003 8:33 am
To magickriver@yahoogroups.com
Subject Re: [magickriver] America is screwed! / PAUL'S RANT

Hey Ant and everyone................. [snip] You know; Like.... Here is an ass hole [Saddam] who is going to do his best to take us out... and Now is the time to get him away from the seat of power he has stolen from his people and also to add an element of stability in the world oil market which benefits every single country and especially the poorest citizens on the planet. Faham tak?

My friend, what I "faham" is this:

Nothing extraordinary or unusual about your worldview. Fact is, a good 85% or the human race thinks along those lines, including most of my blood relatives. It's weirdos like me who are out of sync with the COLD FACTS OF LIFE, with our hippie notions of universal love and abundance for all, including the roaches and the vipers and the sandflies and those poor misguided fundamentalist-types who have been oppressed for so many generations they only know how to blow themselves up along with as many others as they can take with them. Only difference is, my uncles & aunties aren't on the Internet - not to mention being on this list - but YOU are, and you're self-confident and honest enough to charge right in and tell us what goes on in your head at the end of a long day and you have trouble sleeping.

David R. Hawkins
(author of Power vs Force)

Well, Mr Bagus-Bagus, let me tell you something that might be of interest to you: according to David R. Hawkins (Power vs Force) that same 85% of the human race doesn't even know what INTEGRITY actually means - they can't tell falsehood from truth and are thus easily manipulated by the newspapers, magazines, and TV programs they subscribe to. What Hawkins says is that to date 15% of the human race calibrates spiritually at 200 and above. At 400+ you value scientific precision above all else and at 500+ you begin to experience universal compassion and Christ consciousness. At 600+ you're a master of your own destiny and beyond 800 you're a living saint. Fortunately the tiny minority who calibrate above 600 exert such a powerful influence on the electromagnetic grid, they compensate for the rest of us who are still floundering in false beliefs and reactive programming.

Neo-Nazi Bush

I'd say you calibrate around 166 at this point in time, not too far from the level of Integrity. The more open we are to new notions and possibilities, the more likely we are to attain ever increasing calibrations. And once you make it past the crucial 200 mark, it's relatively easy to make huge jumps in no time at all. However, the spiritual consciousness of Nazi Germany calibrated at 177 - the level of intense ego arrogance on a national scale, and certainly nowhere near a love-thy-neighbor state.

It's remarkable that George W. Bush, Jr - the self-anointed leader of "The Free World" - calibrates at only 52, way below the level of integrity. In fact, 52 indicates that on the soul level, the entity is undergoing torment in hell - while his physical vehicle has been hijacked by a non-human program controlled by hidden hands. Those of you who practice kinesiology may want to check my readings independently. I'd love to hear what you come up with.

Is free enterprise really free? Or has it been a rigged game all along?

Marlon Brando as The Godfather

Life is great, business is good, there is an endless supply of condoms at the drug store, food is everywhere and there is the occasional smoke which we used to enjoy so much. All made possible and plentiful by the beautiful American system of free enterprise with appropriate rules and regulations. I'll tell you, it's a pleasure to pay my taxes. In America: Business is the religion of the country. We can, all of us Jew/Moslem and Christian and/or Buddhist or whatever, participate together in the religion of business. This is a religion that does not lie and have bullshit fairy tales; it is one that sustains us and by doing so allows us to love each other. When you go home at the end of the day you are free to go to the Mosque or Church and fool yourself any way you wish. But the true religion of America is business and we are getting better and better at getting along and taking advantage of it.

First we make you very sick, then we sell you the patented cure... on a lifetime plan

Just takin' care of Bizniz. Nuttin' poisonal... BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD! Scene right out of some mobster movie I once saw (with Angelica Huston as the Capo's daughter). Well, the God of Business is also called MAMMON - and her psychotic brother AMEN (or MOLOCH) is armor-plated and armed to the teeth. And terrified of Death, hence his vampiric tendency to extend his life at others' expense... just like any corporation or state. 

Don't get me wrong - trade itself is an ancient activity by which means tribes were brought into mutually beneficial interaction. However, with the onset of gunboat diplomacy and piracy on the high seas, the equation became lopsided. It was no longer "fair exchange" but outright exploitation - rape, plunder, pillage. No doubt it was all part of Empire Building, the Father-Knows-Best syndrome, look at the size of his cannon! Put those giant toothpicks you call spears away...

A nobler level of intertribal intercourse would be cross-cultural collaboration. I could never have accessed the Iranian or Japanese psyche - except through literature, music, or films produced by sensitive Iranian and Japanese artists. These days, the overall trend of "global" business is homogenization - what social philosophers call Coca-Colonization.

Nicolas Cage in Lord of War: "If I don't sell them guns, someone else will do it."

As such, the game has fallen into the hands of the Big Players - and the local grocery has been taken over by a predatory global franchise. In effect, your Religion of Business is a 19th century carryover which no longer applies in the 21st century - if only because there was never any real soul in the rough game of money-grubbing where Darwinian beliefs made it okay for the strong to bully the weak - instead of helping them.

It's the best example the rest of the world can have. Create common interests and create scenarios whereby strangers can be in close proximity and work together. Forget the false love shit - be friends first and the rest will take care of itself.

Peter Finch as newscaster Howard Beale (1976)

Did you ever see the movie Network (starring Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway)? You sound just like the CEO of the TV Corporation who called Finch in and converted him from Corporate Critic to Corporate Apologist.

Push them buttons all you want but the truth, if you live long enough to see it, will be there for all to see........... The good guys are going to win over the religious fanatics.

A fanatic is a fanatic, regardless of ideology. Takes one to know one. There are no good or bad fanatics - only rampant or reformed ones. BTW, Paul, you're not the only American friend from the Good Old Days (1960s/70s) who's taken refuge in comforting rightwing beliefs in their late middle age. My best friend from West Essex High School recently found my email on a search engine and we were delighted to once again be in contact. But 4 or 5 emails down the line, I discover he's considering a job with the NSA (National Security Agency) - the ultra-secret office that supervises all covert operations.

George Herbert Walker Bush: his father Prescott
co-founded the Skull & Bones Society

THAT is the saddest outcome of what has transpired on this planet since Daddy Bush inaugurated the New World Order in 1990.

Incidentally, I'm re-reading a first novel by Daniel Blair Stewart called AKHUNATON: The Extraterrestrial King (Frog Ltd, 1995). I'm truly impressed with Stewart's acute insights and research which he skilfully combines into a monumentally significant allegory for the New Millennium. The final chapter is chillingly prophetic of what's happening right now within the Pentagon: fundamentalist Christian hawks taking over from the old war god Amen whose high priests demanded human sacrifice... just as they do today, never mind if they're Iraqi children or brainwashed American conscripts. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING AT THIS TIME!

It's a funny world. It's a beautiful world with almost infinite possibilities...

Paul, that's the mellowest thought you've contributed to the discussion so far and I was touched by your use of the phrase "infinite possibilities" - because that's my definition of "heaven on earth."

Seed by Richard Sarson

A world of Infinite Possibilities allows for a total change of heart that will stay the hand of a would-be hunter or sniper or defense secretary. It allows for spontaneous understanding and sudden enlightenment and the effortless reconciliation of antagonistic viewpoints. It allows for the miraculous realization that separation is really an illusion, that there is a profoundly beautiful coherence waiting to be experienced as an unexpected epiphany.

As a species we can only evolve as swiftly as the slowest, most fearful, most aggressively resistant family member. Your opinions serve a great purpose, in that those of us who do not share your views are forced to be more compassionate and patient in the way we look at earthbound humans.

We have to adjust to the psychodynamics of apparently conflicting perspectives without giving up on communication and sharing. Even if occasionally we unleash a harsh or unkind response, it's a case of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never really harm me." Hurling the worst manner of invective at our foes - whether Al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or George Bush or Dick Cheney or Squinty Rumsfeld - is okay, even if it gets us hot under the collar. But launching bombs and depleted uranium missiles is NOT okay. And I hold this truth to be self-evident.

Speaking softly is optional...

Herein lies the crux of the issue: the moment we give up on gentle persuasion and resort to the big stick, we have lost moral ground. In the case of geopolitics, if we cannot win hearts and minds over through the power of all-embracing love and understanding - and are compelled to use brute force - then our self-righteousness becomes hollow and hypocritical. And this disqualifies us from any claim to moral leadership in the game of planetary futures. We become "fair game" - and will be 'taken out" even as we plot and scheme ways to "take out" those we accuse of malice and wrongdoing.

Sending you a blast of tropical warmth,
Antares
~^@^~


[Excerpts from the Magick River Network forum, January-March 2003. First posted 4 July 2012, reposted 8 August 2014]

Farish A. Noor on the gory history of corporal punishment (reprise)

Punishing the Body or the Person?
Why Some Cannot Accept Physical Punishments

By Farish A. Noor ~ August 28th, 2009

In his book Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran (1994), the scholar Darius Rejali looks at how the processes of torture and punishment have evolved over the centuries in Iran, from the period of the Qajar dynasty all the way to the regime of the Shah and the Islamic Revolutionary government. He makes one interesting and important observation which remains relevant to all of those who are concerned about the use of corporal punishment and torture by modern states today: that corporal punishment dates back to the medieval era where the popular perception of punishment was that it was a public spectacle that ought to be enacted upon the body of the individual, and not the subject him/herself.

In this respect, the modes of torture and punishment that were used in pre-modern Iran were no different from the modes of punishment that were used in China, India, Africa or Europe. Throughout the world during the pre-modern era the popular understanding of punishment was that it was meant to be a form of public humiliation, operating through the mode of public violence, that was intended to compel the guilty to repent and alter his/her ways through the threat of violence and force.

Hence we see how in medieval Europe, Asia and the Arab world the modes of public punishment were all equally gory and bloody: Heads were chopped off, bodies were impaled, whipped, burned, branded, broken, quartered and sliced to pieces. Most of these punishments were carried out in public, ostensibly as a 'lesson' to others. But as many modern psychologists have pointed out, these public spectacles of violence also served the voyeuristic inclination of those who relished the sight of bodies being violated in public, and were thus also forms of bizarre public pornography.

In his study on the evolution of torture and punishment in Iran, Rejali notes how this medieval mode of punishment gradually developed to become a more sophisticated mode of care and policing instead. The violent spectacles of state-sanctioned violence that involved public enactments of torture eventually gave way to the regime of the prison and the culture of pastoral care and reform of the Self instead. Why?

Simply put, the reason behind this evolution lay in the growing consciousness that the medieval modes of punishment of the past were simply barbaric, primitive, and missed the point. Particularly after the advent of the Iranian revolution, Iranian lawmakers realized that the aim of law enforcement was not simply to exercise legitimate state violence upon citizens, but to help citizens reach their full potential as rational agents and responsible individuals. Medieval modes of violent punishment could not do that for the simple reason that by abusing and violating the bodies of the condemned, they were targeting the body, and not the conscious Self.

The argument can be illustrated thus: Pre-modern modes of punishment assumed that if an individual had committed a crime or a wrong against society, then the offending organ or part of the body of the individual would pay the price. Hence in many primitive societies we come across instances of bodily abuse and torture that target the organs or parts of the body that were to 'blame': The person who lies or slanders, for instance, would have his tongue cut out. The voyeur would have his eyes gouged out. The thief would have his hand cut off. The rapist would be castrated, and so on.

Such modes of physical punishment were, however, deemed to be less and less effective and furthermore failed to solve the problem of criminality itself, for the punishment was not being inflicted on the truly offending party, namely the subjective Self. For it is not the tongue that lies, but the person. It is not the hand that steals, but the person. It is not the penis that rapes, but the person. Addressing the responsibility of the person entailed going beyond the body, and dealing with the psychology of the individual itself. This in turn meant that violence was not a solution to the problem, but in fact only made things worse: For a state that endorses violence as a means to achieve justice eventually arrives at a different destination altogether. Such a state merely normalizes violence and makes violence more and more commonplace and acceptable. Rather than morally uplifting society, it debases and brutalizes society even further. An example would be the case of the French Revolution, where the revolutionaries who executed the leaders of the old regime eventually ended up being murdered themselves too, including Robespierre, who died at the guillotine that he himself introduced.

The development of the related notions of justice, care, reform (of the Self) and responsibility (of both the State and the Individual subject) only came about much later, with the development of modern social sciences that included political sociology, psychology and notably the psychology of criminality. The modern age marks its difference from the medieval age by accepting that bodies are not to be blamed, but rather subjectivities and selves. In other words, modern human beings relinquished their obsession with violent torture and punishment when they realized that torturing and abusing people would not make them better human beings.

Which brings us to the current debate about caning in Malaysia, be it caning that is enforced by civil secular law or by Islamic law. Already in Malaysia we have the instance of a woman who may soon be caned for the Shariah offence of drinking beer. And meanwhile in Malaysia we have illegal immigrants being caned for over-staying their visas and entry permits in the country.

Human rights activists who oppose caning and other forms of state-sanctioned physical violence do so on the grounds that we believe that such violent punishments do nothing to solve the attendant problems and issues that need to be addressed in another, more intelligent way. Caning an illegal immigrant does nothing to reform the person, but merely violates and abuses his/her body. Likewise caning someone for what is perceived to be a moral crime by religious law does nothing to reform the person’s subjectivity, but merely abuses the body of the person instead. Why, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran the regime of the Ayatollahs realized that physical torture was never and could never succeed in making someone a better human being, but would actually lead to the opposite and create a society that was more and more violent and accustomed to violence. Hence their use of public education and counselling instead.

Malaysians are now faced with a similar question and we need to ask ourselves whether the time has come for this society of ours to understand and accept the fact that violence is not and will never be a solution to the social problems of our times - be it criminality, corruption, abuse of power or the breakdown of the social contract. The modern human subject realizes that one cannot be forced to be just or good, and that a good society cannot emerge out of violent compulsion. State violence merely brutalizes us further and denies the value and primacy of human reason and the capacity for human beings to think rationally and to alter themselves rationally too. Whipping someone into submission cannot ever do that; for violence and reason are never complementary.

Would you like a Norwegian fishwhipping? Great for your morals!

[First posted 28 August 2009, reposted 15 November 2014]