Reply #21: Gen. President Eisenhower pegged the middle-of-the-roaders...

[Octafish]

... "Those who take the middle of the road have a yellow stripe down the middle of their back."



kk897, thank you for giving a damn and knowing that this stuff is important today. More than just the present case of the poor Schiavo woman, used by the BFEE for political gain, this is the blueprint of what they plan to do to those they don't use or enslave.

Those who scoff and don't know, I feel sorry for. Odd how those who think they know act when facing the unknown, they hide. It's hard to feel sorry for them. Science warned us...



Unaccountable Defense: The Human Tragedy of

the United State's Cult with the Atom

Michele Chwastiak
University of Wollongong
Department of Accounting and Finance
Wollongong, NSW 2522
Australia
March, 1999

Unaccountable Defense: The Human Tragedy of

the United State's Cult with the Atom

Introduction

This paper demonstrates the amount of harm that can be produced when power is consolidated in an unaccountable entity given that our notion of "progress" requires vast degrees of destruction to sustain. In particular, the research documents the human rights abuses conducted by the U.S. national security state against its own citizens during the early years of the Cold War. However, the implications from this study apply to all organizations that place material goals above human welfare and are unaccountable to society at large, including corporations.

The objective of the Enlightenment, from which our current notion of progress was cultivated, was to make man free from the realm of necessity through the creation of mechanical processes that would liberate him from the whims of nature. However, before these manmade processes, which produced value through devastation, could gain legitimacy, a radical reconceptualization of the world was required. All natural creativity had to be socially constructed as worthless in order to turn nature into a passive raw material to be used, rather than the giver of life. By stripping nature of its own subjectivity and rendering it into a dead externality, the moral constraints against its exploitation, which had previously permeated social life, were effectively removed (Merchant, 1983; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Plumwood, 1993). To facilitate these practices, a language that objectified and reified nature arose and as a result, the symbiotic relationship between nature and humans was disrupted (Mies, 1990; Fox Keller, 1992).

However, the vast scale of exploitation required by the economic system which Enlightenment thought made credible (e.g., capitalism) could not have been sustained by a conceptual re-representation of the world alone, for capitalism creates an enormous number of losers and wrecks havoc on indigenous cultures. Hence, to keep the rabble in line, a vast machinery of repression located within the state, where violence had been predominantly deposited since the inception of the "civilizing" process, was also necessary (Mies, 1986; Bauman, 1989; Parenti, 1995).

Once violence had been monopolized by the state, war preparation became concentrated in a centralized source free from competitive pressure. This provided the physical conditions necessary to create weapon systems of unprecedented lethality and technological sophistication (Bauman, 1989). Yet, the centralization of violence was not a sufficient condition for the development of horrendous technologies like the atom bomb. A terror like the atomic bomb would not have been feasible without a science divorced from the ethical and moral concerns of human life (Mies, 1990; Fox Keller, 1992; Ikeda, 1995, 1996).

One of the products of modernity has been the development of a rational, bureaucratic work culture aimed at increasing efficacy by eliminating all moral interference from the process of administration (Mumford, 1970; Bauman, 1989; Lowy, 1995). This rational, bureaucratic culture was supported by a system of thought (e.g., instrumental reasoning) which represented the world in such a way that only behavior which aligned itself with the goals and expectations of the organization would be sanctioned as appropriate. Given that instrumental rationality refuses to allow the end result of action to be an object of serious enquiry, Hitler could transfer the skills from administering the business firm to the mass production of death and U.S. scientists could create a technology to destroy the world, without either enterprise ever clashing with the value system underlying the principles of rational, goal directed behavior (Peattie, 1984; Bauman, 1989; Lowy, 1995). Hence, by measuring success only in terms of the degree to which the objective is completed and by being blind to the means and the ends, instrumental rationality provides no checks on the destructive capacities of modernity and capitalism.

CONTINUED...

http://panopticon.csustan.edu/cpa99/html/chwastiak.html