Peace, the no.1 War Crime

You know, whenever I leave home, I walk down the street and I see people wearing expensive clothes, counting money for their next shopping frenzy, getting on their fast cars with energy pumping in their veins, stepping hard on gas, basically being happy the way we've learned to be. They wear bright colorful clothes, listen to fist-thrusting pop and rock, and spend hilarious amounts trying to prove they are the happiest. And any man's mind might just wonder; have they forgotten what happened in the last decade? Is this the natural reaction to what we did? To keep our society the way we live it, we ruthlessly invaded countries based on lies others made up for us, and which we coped with. This decade has been one of the darkest ones, and yet our culture does not reflect it. We keep on blaming Iraq on Bush's war policy and on american troops in the region. But why are we angry? Is it because they did it for oil? Just look around you: who isn't using oil? which one of us can claim he's not enjoying this greedy society that needs to brake people from distant countries to prevail?

Some of us know. Some of us are smart enough to know the reasons behind Iraq. They are usually europeans. Many are americans too. It's easier when you're in Europe to hate the war in Iraq because you have another country to blame. We've been taught to point at the other side of the ocean whenever things go wrong. The war in Iraq was a dupe. Americans and europeans as their allies were duped into believing there was something dangerously elusive in Iraq besides oil dollars that, well... still weren't ours. We rushed into that land based on some impressively convincing fiction to make sure we got all the oil we ever needed. And we got it. Of course, now the very companies we sent to make the profit for us are speculating over it, so things aren't as nice as they could be. But we made a lot of money...
This society we live in is based on the fact that money's awesome. Why do you work? For money. Why do you seek profit? to be happier. Why should you be happier? because that increases your productivity. I remember after the war in Iraq started some big company's CEO said 'We invest in Iraq so the lives that were lost were not in vain.' Armed Forces from the Coalition of the Willing liberated Iraq as we witnessed another Vietnam, casualties reaching similar figures. And all because at some point, our money manufacturers eventually pointed in the same direction, and it happened to be buried right smack in the middle of Iraq's soil.

Now a lot of people are aware of this. They go marching in the streets, shouting 'Peace in Iraq'. Actually most people are quite conscious up to a certain level. Most europeans I know are, and I guess over half of the americans too. So these people, who call Bush and his troops murderers, they're getting ready for their sit-in. Let's call one of them Mr. Klean. M. Klean looks at his watch made of PS (polystirene) and shoot! notices he only has half an hour before the protest. So he runs, puts on his shoes with synthetic rubber soles and runs. On his way out he finds that package from Amazon with that book on 'Dirty oil profits in Iraq' shipped by airmail, quicly resolves his joy and resumes his flight. Gets in his car, sits in his seat that was assembled to the rest of the car thanks to its shipping from Kyoto, Japan to Detroit, MI, fires up the engine running on gas, and races fast. When he gets there, he stops the car, opens the door and pulls out a big board on which he wrote: 'DON'T SOIL FOR OIL!'.
Now tell me, where exactly did this man avoid using Iraq's bloody oil? With the plastic, the shippings, the gas... some drop of it must have fallen at some point in the big oil cauldron where his life was prepared.

I do not believe in war crimes. We do our little lives, dealing with our pathetic problems as though they could in any way be compared to the ones that are common in third world countries. But when something starts to threaten those tiny details which make our lives so much easier we have to do something about it. Well, not we of course. But someone. Europeans blame the States, in the States, democrats blame republicans, republicans call for necessity and blame it on Al Qaeda. The truth is we all wanted this. The ones who sent the army to invade Iraq might be the obvious lying scum, however, they will never be as big liers as we are. Our daily actions hire the soldiers who massacred a village in Karbala, they buy the bombs and the napalm that was dropped to rip iraqi faces off their heads, they afford the mines that will blow up cute little kids legs for the next 15 years, and they pay for the pipe-lines, the pumps, the drills, all the gear that will bring the oil to us. Every time you drive your car, every time you burn up your money on unecessary goods, just every smallest second of our consumer's lives. We are worried about a few men who were willing to invade a rightful country for oil profits, yet we support it in every decision we make. The insults tossed at them, our protests, our morality, the very definition of war crime is like a tribunal of crooked murderes judging a fellow murderer. And when we hang them publicly, it's nothing but good old dog eat dog, except that one of the dogs calls himself righteous. We lie. War is no crime. Our ways have squeezed these lost violent souls into Iraq, put them in a situation where aggression is as simple and natural as breathing, and then we dare to point our dirty finger at them when the heat is too much and their actions become devilish. War is never a crime. The concept of War Crime is a lie. In war people are there to kill, pillage and murder. That is what war is all about. Humiliation is nothing there, amongst the cries, the tearful widows and the limbless children. The one and only crime is what led to war, this greedy all-consuming peace of ours that can't sustain it's own combustion.

Telling who took the last shot won't make any difference; the shot has been taken. Many more wars will come as long as we keep on living greedily, and terrorism will keep on as long as we keep showing off our satisfied futile needs, our needless purchases and the short range of our shallow care.

You want war?

good, stop acting like you don't.

You don't want war?

great, don't make it happen then.

XXIst century: Building the Masturbative Society

It is a curious fact that Man has always wondered what his place is in the Universe's plot - his ultimate purpose, and yet with every technological breakthrough the human race has been laying down milestones towards its complete uselessness. We were born with this overgrown brain, a evolutionary leverage which ultimately might lead us to creating a world that can keep on going on its own (still, according to our ways) and in which our presence is minimally noticed or even irrelevant. Fate has not lost its sense of irony since the biblical times, and our efforts will eventually cradle an existence in which we need not interfere, just as Nature - that once gave birth to our own species - did. To keep us from realizing too painfully that very fact, we have developed inumerous clever ways to veil our lack of use. Welcome to the Masturbative society.

Our features gladly give away our initial habitat, the one we were conceived to survive in. Two legs, opposable thumbs and ultra cerebral development: we are runners meant to manipulate our environment in order to reproduce and carry on with survival. Our bodies are tough, our muscles can be quite powerful. Our legs can carry us, along with a heavy payload, should our arms or back care to help. Our arms are meant to throw, bash and carry, our legs are meant to run... we are natural hunters. But where is all of this nowadays?
We don't need to hunt anymore. Even if we did, we invented rifles. Rifles shoot animals with a minimal effort. Aim&Pull hardly takes any physical work out. Going to the supermarket by car takes even less. Yet some have found a way to keep the body useful. Because the truth is our body is slowly losing all its abilities and will eventually shut down (which we call heart attack due to morbid obesity) when it reaches a severe state of purposelessness. So we go to gyms. We won't walk to work but we don't mind spending 60 bucks a month to go run in a gym for an hour, like guinea-pigs, chasing after a still wall for 40 minutes. Yet others try to keep their hunter's instincts alive: they gather up to hunt, shooting rabbits with guns that would punch every mosquito in a cloud if you gunned it. Then they hang them around for their friends to see and later their wives cook up another (certified) rabbit meat they bought at the supermarket. Fisherman return the fish to the water, kids play soccer on their playstations when its sunny outside... This is the world we have created to live without our bodies. Our mind has taken over the power because our body's uses are limited to those demanded by Nature. And we definitely want more. But we can't live without them. Hence we keep faking their use, just to make sure they will hold till we're very old.

However, I don't mean to say that our society has only renegated the physical realm. In fact, it has quite curiously taken an immense interest in it lately. Botox, gyms, liposuction: everybody wants to show they fake the better. This is actually good. It means society has realised this fact, sucked it up and moved on. Though something worse is also at work...

Our muscles have lost their ability to our brain. But that was a while ago. Then our brain lost its own use to itself. Extracting cubic roots in your head is more of a circus show rather than something actually useful. Even solving equations with a pen and a pencil isn't very useful. Computers can think for us. Machine can do all the work that consists of either mental or physical stone hammering, because doing it is just a pain in the ass. It's not human we may say. Animals can do it. Machine can do it. We won't. This is actually a lot more recent than the gym thing. A little over ten years ago, there was this man at CERN (the great european physics laboratory) who was a sweeper; he sweeped floors at the theory division. But from time to time a door would open there and some physics lunatic would invite him to his office (no, this is not gay porn) and ask him to compute this huge calculation. Because he could do it faster than computers. Eventually, in the late nineties, his freakish skills got overthrown. We work out sudokus and we run for our health to maintain a flesh and a mind that are no longer useful in this world we have created. So what's left for us? Why are we not extinct yet?

Is it desire? Could be desire. After all, desire is what moved us to build this world that relinquishes us now, like a twenty-year old forsakes his parents who are outdated and obsolete. But is it really desire the last outpost of true use we have? Try to put yourself in a stone man's shoes (or rather stone man's bare feet) who, thanks to some space-time wormhole, suddenly appears in 2008. It's like paradise: pretty women everywhere with all their teeth on, endless hallways of food sitting like dull game within his grasp, fierce beasts far away along with disease and cold... What's left to wish? That man would be the happiest cave man in History. So why do we crave so much for everything around us? Why do we just got to have that car? or that pair of shoes? that MagicSweeper from TVShop? Our society has come up with a brilliant solution, a fake-out masterpiece. People don't need the damn 200$ shoes. So let's just hang a picture of those shoes wherever they go and talk about it on whatever they listen to. That'll get them to buy them. We are faking our own desire. Why? Because we can't live without desire. We have nothing left to wish that really matters. But, just like we can't live without our body and our mind, we have to keep our desire burning or our emotional and psychological system will start to meltdown, like a nuclear power plant meltsdown when its reaction isn't controlled by the electric network's needs. That's why rich people who fail to become prehenptively shallow have such mental problems and 90% of them end up depressed.

Damn! so it looks like we're heading towards becoming a silly party of rudiculous merry-makers, cheering in joy and crying in sorrow, while our creation struggles in the backgournd to provide for our basic needs. For it's our creation that has really taken our place in the world. And the fact that we've created it is what makes us unique and essencial to this universe.

Creativity. Creativity is what we have left for ourselves. Computers can't create. "They lack the imperfection for it." Nothing leaves the rules that were once established for them. We are the guide that leads the way into the future because the products of our creation still can't step off the road laid for them. Maybe this is how God felt about 2.2 million years ago, before he invented the humans. There He was, writing on his blog, telling his other deity friends how creativity was what distinguished them from all the rest and Bam! these monkey-looking creatures start walking around, making tools, painting stuff, building towers, writing books. But they were some ugly mother-fuckers. So He and his mates, Shiva, Allah, Odin, paid no attention to them. Tough luck. 2.2 million years later, atheists rule the world.

So which one of our "ahumanist" creations will rule the world in 2.2 million years?