A Wider World of War

We live in the age of Pax Americana.  It is an empire wihout the need to maintain large armies in pace, not unlike the original Pax Britannia.  Those 70.000 Special forces are the real army of such a regime.  As with Britain, large wars prove futile and best avoided.

But local agitators still exist and must never be allowed to prosper or win..  A small sufficient force early ensures there is no later.  So suddenly a nascent unrising aimed at Nigerian oil wells is suddenly facing way more than they can hope to handle.

The purpose is to snuff such activity out.  There is no problem on earth that a greed merchant will not drum up to produce relative advantage.  Perhaps we can be past apologizing for them.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Wider World of War 

Posted by Nick Turse at 8:07am, December 14, 2017.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176363/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_a_wider_world_of_war/

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve come to that moment again. You know, the one at year's end when I ask all of you for money to keep this website afloat. It’s hell to do (and no fun to read I’m sure), but your contributions do truly keep us going. I’ve written an end-of-year funding letter to all TomDispatch subscribers that begins this way: “If you just heard a deep sigh, that was me. Right now, if we're not in the world from hell, then where the hell are we? You know perfectly well what I think about it all, as I write weekly at TomDispatch on that president, those wars, those plutocrats, and the environmental crisis that's going to make our grandchildren's world, the one I will have long left, a potential nightmare of the first order.” It includes, of course, the necessary plea for donations. If you’re not a TD subscriber but visit this site regularly, you can click here to read my whole letter. Or you can just go directly to the TD donation page and contribute if the mood strikes you. In return for a $100 donation -- $125 if you live outside the U.S. -- you can choose a signed, personalized copy of any volume from a selection of Dispatch Books and others as a token of our thanks. Tom]

Ambassadors of the traditional kind? Who needs them? Diplomats? What a waste! The State Department? Why bother? Its budget is to be slashed and its senior officials are leaving in droves ever since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office. Under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, hiring is frozen, which means those officials are generally not being replaced. (Buyouts of $25,000 are being offered to get yet more of them to jump ship.) Dozens of key positions have gone unfilled, while the secretary of state reportedly focuses not on global diplomacy or what, in another age, was called “foreign policy,” but on his reorganization (downsizing) of the department and evidently little else. Across the planet, starting with the A’s (Australia), American embassies lack ambassadors, including South Korea, a country that has been a focus of the Trump administration. Similarly, at the time of the president’s inflammatory Jerusalem announcement, the U.S. had no ambassadors yet in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, among other Middle Eastern states. It’s quite a tale and it’s being covered as the news story it certainly is.

All of this could be seen, however, not just as the foibles of one president surrounded by “his” generals, but as the culmination of a post-9/11 process in which American policymaking has increasingly been militarized. In this context, as the State Department shrinks, don’t think this country has no ambassadors across the planet. America’s Special Operations forces increasingly act as our “diplomats” globally, training and bolstering allies and attempting to undermine enemies more or less everywhere. We’ve never seen anything like it and yet, unlike the slashing of the diplomatic corps, it’s a story barely noted in the mainstream. Nick Turse has, however, been covering it for TomDispatch in a groundbreaking way since 2011. In these years, he’s focused on what should have been seen as one of the major developments of our era: the phenomenal growth and historically unprecedented deployment of this country’s special operators in an atmosphere of permanent war in Washington.

In the post-9/11 years, the once “elite” units of the U.S. military, perhaps a few thousand Green Berets and other personnel, have become a force of approximately 70,000. In other words, that secretive crew cocooned inside the U.S. military has grown as large as or larger than the militaries of countries such as Argentina, Canada, Chile, Croatia, South Africa, or Sweden. Now, imagine that those Special Operations forces, as Turse has again been reporting for years, are not only being dispatched to more countries annually than ever before, but to more countries than any nation has ever deployed its military personnel to. Period.

Shouldn’t that be a humongous story? We’re talking, as Turse points out today, about the deployment of special ops teams or personnel to 149 of the 190 (or so) nations on this planet in 2017. You can, of course, find articles about our special operators in the media, but over the years they’ve generally tended to read like so many publicity releases for such forces. The story of how our special operators came to be our “diplomats” of choice and the spearhead for American foreign policy and how expanding wars and spreading terror movements were the apparent result of such moves has yet to be told, except at places like TomDispatch. Tom

Donald Trump’s First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops 

Elite Commandos Deployed to 149 Countries in 2017 

By Nick Turse

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.

Earlier this year before that same Senate committee -- though Graham was not in attendance -- General Raymond Thomas, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), offered some clues about the planetwide reach of America’s most elite troops. “We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” he boasted. “Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands... providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.”

In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, deployed to 149 countries around the world, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. That’s about 75% of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration. It’s also a jump of nearly 150% from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House. This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.

“Most Americans would be amazed to learn that U.S. Special Operations Forces have been deployed to three quarters of the nations on the planet,” observes William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “There is little or no transparency as to what they are doing in these countries and whether their efforts are promoting security or provoking further tension and conflict.”

Growth Opportunity

America’s elite troops were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, according to U.S. Special Operations Command. The map above displays the locations of 132 of those countries; 129 locations (in blue) were supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command; 3 locations (in red) -- Syria, Yemen and Somalia -- were derived from open-source information. (Nick Turse)

“Since 9/11, we expanded the size of our force by almost 75% in order to take on mission-sets that are likely to endure,” SOCOM’s Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. Since 2001, from the pace of operations to their geographic sweep, the activities of U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) have, in fact, grown in every conceivable way. On any given day, about 8,000 special operators -- from a command numbering roughly 70,000 -- are deployed in approximately 80 countries. 

“The increase in the use of Special Forces since 9/11 was part of what was then referred to as the Global War on Terror as a way to keep the United States active militarily in areas beyond its two main wars, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hartung told TomDispatch. “The even heavier reliance on Special Forces during the Obama years was part of a strategy of what I think of as ‘politically sustainable warfare,’ in which the deployment of tens of thousands of troops to a few key theaters of war was replaced by a ‘lighter footprint’ in more places, using drones, arms sales and training, and Special Forces.”

The Trump White House has attacked Barack Obama’s legacy on nearly all fronts. It has undercut, renounced, or reversed actions of his ranging from trade pacts to financial and environmental regulations to rules that shielded transgender employees from workplace discrimination. When it comes to Special Operations forces, however, the Trump administration has embraced their use in the style of the former president, while upping the ante even further. President Trump has also provided military commanders greater authority to launch attacks in quasi-war zones like Yemen and Somalia. According to Micah Zenko, a national security expert and Whitehead Senior Fellow at the think tank Chatham House, those forces conducted five times as many lethal counterterrorism missions in such non-battlefield countries in the Trump administration’s first six months in office as they did during Obama’s final six months.

A Wide World of War

U.S. commandos specialize in 12 core skills, from “unconventional warfare” (helping to stoke insurgencies and regime change) to “foreign internal defense” (supporting allies’ efforts to guard themselves against terrorism, insurgencies, and coups). Counterterrorism -- fighting what SOCOM calls violent extremist organizations or VEOs -- is, however, the specialty America’s commandos have become best known for in the post-9/11 era.

In the spring of 2002, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, SOCOM chief General Charles Holland touted efforts to “improve SOF capabilities to prosecute unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense programs to better support friends and allies. The value of these programs, demonstrated in the Afghanistan campaign,” he said, “can be particularly useful in stabilizing countries and regions vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.”

Over the last decade and a half, however, there’s been little evidence America’s commandos have excelled at “stabilizing countries and regions vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.” This was reflected in General Thomas’s May testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The threat posed by VEOs remains the highest priority for USSOCOM in both focus and effort,” he explained.

However, unlike Holland who highlighted only one country -- Afghanistan -- where special operators were battling militants in 2002, Thomas listed a panoply of terrorist hot spots bedeviling America’s commandos a decade and a half later. “Special Operations Forces,” he said, “are the main effort, or major supporting effort for U.S. VEO-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America -- essentially, everywhere Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are to be found.”

Officially, there are about 5,300 U.S. troops in Iraq. (The real figure is thought to be higher.) Significant numbers of them are special operators training and advising Iraqi government forces and Kurdish troops. Elite U.S. forces have also played a crucial role in Iraq’s recent offensive against the militants of the Islamic State, providing artillery and airpower, including SOCOM’s AC-130W Stinger II gunships with 105mm cannons that allow them to serve as flying howitzers. In that campaign, Special Operations forces were “thrust into a new role of coordinating fire support,” wrote Linda Robinson, a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who spent seven weeks in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries earlier this year. “This fire support is even more important to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a far more lightly armed irregular force which constitutes the major ground force fighting ISIS in Syria.”

Special Operations forces have, in fact, played a key role in the war effort in Syria, too. While American commandos have been killed in battle there, Kurdish and Arab proxies -- known as the Syrian Democratic Forces -- have done the lion’s share of the fighting and dying to take back much of the territory once held by the Islamic State. SOCOM’s Thomas spoke about this in surprisingly frank terms at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, this summer. “We're right now inside the capital of [ISIS’s] caliphate at Raqqa [Syria]. We'll have that back soon with our proxies, a surrogate force of 50,000 people that are working for us and doing our bidding,” he said. “So two and a half years of fighting this fight with our surrogates, they've lost thousands, we've only lost two service members. Two is too many, but it's, you know, a relief that we haven't had the kind of losses that we've had elsewhere.”

This year, U.S. special operators were killed in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Sahelian nations of Niger and Mali (although reports indicate that a Green Beret who died in that country was likely strangled by U.S. Navy SEALs). In Libya, SEALs recently kidnapped a suspect in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. In the Philippines, U.S. Special Forces joined the months-long battle to recapture Marawi City after it was taken by Islamist militants earlier this year.

And even this growing list of counterterror hotspots is only a fraction of the story. In Africa, the countries singled out by Thomas -- Somalia, Libya, and those in the Sahel -- are just a handful of the nations to which American commandos were deployed in 2017. As recently reported at Vice News, U.S. Special Operations forces were active in at least 33 nations across the continent, with troops heavily concentrated in and around countries now home to a growing number of what the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies calls “active militant Islamist groups.” While Defense Department spokeswoman Major Audricia Harris would not provide details on the range of operations being carried out by the elite forces, it’s known that they run the gamut from conducting security assessments at U.S. embassies to combat operations. 

Data provided by SOCOM also reveals a special ops presence in 33 European countries this year. “Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally or through various multinational events,” Major Michael Weisman, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, told TomDispatch.

For the past two years, in fact, the U.S. has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. “[W]e've had persistent presence in every country -- every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats,” said SOCOM’s Thomas, mentioning the Baltic states as well as Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia by name. These activities represent, in the words of General Charles Cleveland, chief of U.S. Army Special Operations Command from 2012 to 2015 and now the senior mentor to the Army War College, “undeclared campaigns” by commandos. Weisman, however, balked at that particular language. “U.S. Special Operations forces have been deployed persistently and at the invitation of our allies in the Baltic States and Poland since 2014 as part of the broader U.S. European Command and Department of Defense European Deterrence Initiative,” he told TomDispatch. “The persistent presence of U.S. SOF alongside our Allies sends a clear message of U.S. commitment to our allies and the defense of our NATO Alliance.”

Asia is also a crucial region for America’s elite forces. In addition to Iran and Russia, SOCOM’s Thomas singled out China and North Korea as nations that are “becoming more aggressive in challenging U.S. interests and partners through the use of asymmetric means that often fall below the threshold of conventional conflict.” He went on to say that the “ability of our special operators to conduct low-visibility special warfare operations in politically sensitive environments make them uniquely suited to counter the malign activities of our adversaries in this domain.”

U.S.-North Korean saber rattling has brought increased attention to Special Forces Detachment Korea (SFDK), the longest serving U.S. Special Forces unit in the world. It would, of course, be called into action should a war ever break out on the peninsula. In such a conflict, U.S. and South Korean elite forces would unite under the umbrella of the Combined Unconventional Warfare Task Force. In March, commandos -- including, according to some reports, members of the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 -- took part in Foal Eagle, a training exercise, alongside conventional U.S. forces and their South Korean counterparts.

U.S. special operators also were involved in training exercises and operations elsewhere across Asia and the Pacific. In June, in Okinawa, Japan, for example, airmen from the 17th Special Operations Squadron (17th SOS) carried out their annual (and oddly spelled) “Day of the Jakal,” the launch of five Air Force Special Operations MC-130J Commando II aircraft to practice, according to a military news release, “airdrops, aircraft landings, and rapid infiltration and exfiltration of equipment.” According to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Dube of the 17th SOS, “It shows how we can meet the emerging mission sets for both SOCKOR [Special Operations Command Korea] and SOCPAC [Special Operations Command Pacific] out here in the Pacific theater.”

At about the same time, members of the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group carried out Teak Jet, a joint combined exchange training, or JCET, mission meant to improve military coordination between U.S. and Japanese forces. In June and July, intelligence analysts from the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group took part in Talisman Saber, a biennial military training exercise conducted in various locations across Australia.

More for War

The steady rise in the number of elite operators, missions, and foreign deployments since 9/11 appears in no danger of ending, despite years of worries by think-tank experts and special ops supporters about the effects of such a high operations tempo on these troops. “Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit,” General Thomas said earlier this year. “Despite growing demand for SOF, we must prioritize the sourcing of these demands as we face a rapidly changing security environment.” Yet the number of deployments still grew to a record 149 nations in 2017. (During the Obama years, deployments reached 147 in 2015.)

At a recent conference on special operations held in Washington, D.C., influential members of the Senate and House armed services committees acknowledged that there were growing strains on the force. “I do worry about overuse of SOF,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, a Republican. One solution offered by both Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran who served in Iraq, was to bulk up Special Operations Command yet more. "We have to increase numbers and resources," Reed insisted.

This desire to expand Special Operations further comes at a moment when senators like Lindsey Graham continue to acknowledge how remarkably clueless they are about where those elite forces are deployed and what exactly they are doing in far-flung corners of the globe. Experts point out just how dangerous further expansion could be, given the proliferation of terror groups and battle zones since 9/11 and the dangers of unforeseen blowback as a result of low-profile special ops missions.

“Almost by definition, the dizzying number of deployments undertaken by U.S. Special Operations forces in recent years would be hard to track. But few in Congress seem to be even making the effort,” said William Hartung. “This is a colossal mistake if one is concerned about reining in the globe-spanning U.S. military strategy of the post-9/11 era, which has caused more harm than good and done little to curb terrorism.”

However, with special ops deployments rising above Bush and Obama administration levels to record-setting heights and the Trump administration embracing the use of commandos in quasi-wars in places like Somalia and Yemen, there appears to be little interest in the White House or on Capitol Hill in reining in the geographic scope and sweep of America’s most secretive troops. And the results, say experts, may be dire. “While the retreat from large ‘boots on the ground’ wars like the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq is welcome,” said Hartung, “the proliferation of Special Operations forces is a dangerous alternative, given the prospects of getting the United States further embroiled in complex overseas conflicts.”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. He is the author of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

The African Enlightenment

In the end, the enlightenment was successively promoted in the one place able to properly respond and that is Europe generally and England specifically and by extension America.  That scholars from elsewhere hugely informed it is no surprise at all as we see just that happening today.


That response is still taking place while the seeds are now centuries past.  The rise of India will see this tradition powerfully reinforced and re - energized.  The rise of Trump will also refresh the West.


This item adds other voices to the classical enlightenment and there are many more as well. The is ample historical work to be done and of great value.  It is worth seeing that the ideas were important but still rarely original.  The difference was in the ground upon which they fell.

The African Enlightenment 

The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave 

Near Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia, the location of Zera Yacob’s cave. Photo by Raymond Depardon/Magnum

Dag Herbjørnsrud

is a historian of ideas and founder of SGOKI (the Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas) in Oslo. His latest book is Global Knowledge: Renaissance for a New Enlightenment, forthcoming (2016 original in Norwegian).

https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant? 

Do Yacob and Amo deserve to be members of the Enlightenment's pantheon?

The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In fact, no other era compares with the Age of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity is inspiring, but a world away from our modern societies. The Middle Ages was more reasonable than its reputation, but still medieval. The Renaissance was glorious, but largely because of its result: the Enlightenment. The Romantic era was a reaction to the Age of Reason – but the ideals of today’s modern states are seldom expressed in terms of romanticism and emotion. Immanuel Kant’s argument in the essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) that ‘the human race’ should work for ‘a cosmopolitan constitution’ can be seen as a precursor for the United Nations.

As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.

But what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.

Yacob was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)

In the 1620s, a Portuguese Jesuit convinced King Susenyos to convert to Catholicism, which soon

 became Ethiopia’s official religion. Persecution of free thinkers followed suit, intensifying from 1630. Yacob, who was teaching in the Axum region, had declared that no religion was more right than any other, and his enemies brought charges against him to the king.

Yacob fled at night, taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David. He headed south to the region of Shewa, where he came upon the Tekezé River. There he found an uninhabited area with a ‘beautiful cave’ at the foot of a valley. Yacob built a fence of stones, and lived in the wilderness to ‘front only the essential facts of life’, as Henry David Thoreau was to describe a similar solitary life a couple of centuries later in Walden (1854).

For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.

In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s reason-based philosophy is presented in his main work, Hatäta (meaning ‘the enquiry’). The book was written down in 1667 on the insistence of his student, Walda Heywat, who himself wrote a more practically oriented Hatäta. Today, 350 years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and priest Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on Ethiopian philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing Press in Addis Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last year into Norwegian, but an English version is still basically unavailable.

Ethiopia was no stranger to philosophy before Yacob. Around 1510, the Book of the Wise Philosophers was translated and adapted in Ethiopia by the Egyptian Abba Mikael. It is a collection of sayings from the early Greek Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle via the neo-Platonic dialogues, and is also influenced by Arabic philosophy and the Ethiopian discussions. In his Hatäta, Yacob criticises his contemporaries for not thinking independently, but rather accepting the claims of astrologers and soothsayers just because their predecessors did so. As a contrast, he recommends an enquiry based on scientific rationality and reason – as every human is born with intelligence and is of equal worth.

Far away, grappling with similar questions, was Yacob’s French contemporary Descartes (1596-1650). A major philosophical difference is that the Catholic Descartes explicitly denounced ‘infidels’ and atheists, whom he called ‘more arrogant than learned’ in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). This perspective is echoed in Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), which concludes that atheists ‘are not at all to be tolerated’. Descartes’s Meditations was dedicated to ‘the dean and doctors of the sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris’, and his premise was ‘to accept by means of faith the fact that the human soul does not perish with the body, and that God exists’.

In contrast, Yacob shows a much more agnostic, secular and enquiring method – which also reflects an openness towards atheistic thought. Chapter four of the Hatäta starts with a radical question: ‘Is everything that is written in the Holy Scriptures true?’ He goes on to point out that all the different religions claim theirs is the true faith:

Indeed each one says: ‘My faith is right, and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and are the enemies of God.’ … As my own faith appears true to me, so does another one find his own faith true; but truth is one.

In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator. His discussion of whether or not there is a God is more open-minded than Descartes’s, and possibly more accessible to modern-day readers, as when he incorporates existentialist perspectives:

Who is it that provided me with an ear to hear, who created me as a rational being and how have I come into this world? Where do I come from? Had I lived before the creator of the world, I would have known the beginning of my life and of the consciousness of myself. Who created me?

In chapter five, Yacob applies rational investigation to the different religious laws. He criticises Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Indian religions equally. For example, Yacob points out that the Creator in His wisdom has made blood flow monthly from the womb of women, in order for them to bear children. Thus, he concludes that the law of Moses, which states that menstruating women are impure, is against nature and the Creator, since it ‘impedes marriage and the entire life of a woman, and it spoils the law of mutual help, prevents the bringing up of children and destroys love’.

In this way, Yacob includes the perspectives of solidarity, women and affection in his philosophical argument. And he lived up to these ideals. After Yacob left the cave, he proposed to a poor maiden named Hirut, who served a rich family. Yacob argued with her master, who did not think a servant woman was equal to an educated man, but Yacob prevailed. When Hirut gladly accepted his proposal, Yacob pointed out that she should no longer be a servant, but rather his peer, because ‘husband and wife are equal in marriage’.

In contrast to Yacob’s views, Kant wrote a century later in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764): ‘A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess certain high insights.’ And in Kant’s lectures on ethics (1760-94) we read that: ‘The desire of a man for a woman is not directed to her as a human being, on the contrary, the woman’s humanity is of no concern to him; and the only object of his desire is her sex.’

Yacob wrote ‘all men are equal’ decades before Locke, the ‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper 

Yacob looked upon the woman in a completely different way, namely as a philosopher’s intellectual peer. Hirut, he wrote: ‘was not beautiful, but she was good-natured, intelligent and patient’. Yacob cherished his wife’s intelligence, and he stressed their mutual and individualistic love for one another: ‘Since she loved me so, I took the decision in my heart to please her as much as I could, and I do not think there is another marriage which is so full of love and blessed as ours.’

Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. That is because all humans are created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason:

All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist.

The words ‘all men are equal’ were written decades before Locke (1632-1704), the ‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper (indeed, he was born the same year that Yacob returned from his cave). But Locke’s social-contract theory did not apply to all in practice: he was secretary during the drafting of The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave white men ‘absolute power’ over their African slaves. And he invested heavily in the English Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the Royal African Company. In the Second Treatise (1689), Locke argues that God gave the world ‘to the use of the industrious and rational’ – which the philosopher Julie K Ward at Loyola University in Chicago argues can be read as a colonial attack on the right to land of American Indians. Compared with his philosophical peers, then, Yacob’s philosophy often reads like the epitome of all the ideals we commonly think of as enlightened.

Some months after reading the work of Yacob, I finally got hold of another rare book this summer: a translation of the collected writings of the philosopher Anton Amo (c1703-55), who was born and died in Guinea, today’s Ghana. For two decades, Amo studied and taught at Germany’s foremost universities, writing in Latin. His book, Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana, bears a subtitle that describes the author: ‘Student. Doctor of philosophy. Master and lecturer at the universities of Halle, Wittenberg, Jena. 1727-1747.’ According to the World Library Catalogue, just a handful of copies, including those in the original Latin, are available in libraries around the world.

Amo was born a century after Yacob. He seems to have been kidnapped from the Akan people and the coastal city of Axim as a young boy, possibly for slavery, before being brought via Amsterdam to the court of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Amo was baptised in 1707, and he received a very high-standard education, learning Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, in addition to probably knowing some of his mother tongue, Nzema. The great polymath G W Leibniz (1646-1716) frequently visited Amo’s home in Wolfenbüttel when he was growing up.

Amo matriculated at the University of Halle in 1727, and became well-respected in German academic circles of the time, holding lecturing positions both at the universities of Halle and Jena. In Carl Günther Ludovici’s 1738 book on the Enlightenment thinker Christian Wolff (1679-1754) – a follower of Leibniz and a founder of several academic disciplines in Germany – Amo is described as one of the most prominent Wolffians. While in the dedicatory preface to Amo’s On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, hailed Amo’s compendious knowledge and ‘the praises he received thanks to his genius’. He also set Amo’s contribution to the German Enlightenment in a historical context:

In the past, the veneration given to Africa was enormous, whether for its natural genius, its appreciation for learning, or its religious organisation. This continent nurtured the growth of a number of men of great value, whose genius and assiduousness have made an inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs.

Kraus stresses ‘the development of Christian doctrine, how many were its promoters who came from Africa!’ And he cites intellectuals such as Augustine, Tertullian, and the Amazigh (Berber) Apuleius as examples. The rector also underscores the European Renaissance’s African heritage, ‘as the Moors coming from Africa crossed through Spain, they brought knowledge of the ancient thinkers, while also bringing much assistance to the development of letters which were coming out of the darkness little by little’.

Amo wrote of other theologies than the Christian, including the Turks and the ‘heathens’

Such words from the heart of Germany in the spring of 1733 might make it easier for us to remember that Amo was not the only African to achieve success in 18th-century Europe. At the same time, Abraham Petrovich Gannibal (1696-1781), also kidnapped from sub-Saharan Africa, became the general of Peter the Great of Russia. Gannibal’s great-grandson became Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. And the French author Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was the grandson of an enslaved African woman, Louise-Céssette Dumas, and son of a black aristocratic general born on Haiti.

Neither was Amo alone in bringing diversity or cosmopolitanism to the University of Halle in the 1720s and ’30s. Several talented Jewish students studied there and received doctorates. The Arab teacher Salomon Negri of Damascus and the Indian Soltan Gün Achmet from Ahmedabad were others who arrived in Halle to study and teach. Amo himself developed a close relationship with Moses Abraham Wolff, a Jewish medical student, who was one of the students he supervised. And in his thesis, Amo wrote explicitly that there were other theologies than the Christian, including among them the Turks and the ‘heathens’.

Amo discussed such cosmopolitan issues when he defended his first thesis, the legal dissertation On the Right of Moors in Europe in 1729. Amo’s dissertation is not available today. It might be that the defence was given only orally, or that the text has simply been lost. But in the Halle weekly paper of November 1729 there is a short report from his public disputation, which was granted to him so that the ‘argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation’. According to the newspaper report, Amo argued against slavery with reference to Roman law, tradition and rationality:

Therein it was not only shown from books and history that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed [given freedom in exchange for pledged service] by the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by Christians in Europe extends, according to the usual laws.

Did Amo hold Europe’s first legal disputation against slavery? We can at least see an enlightened argument for universal suffrage, like the one Yacob had advanced 100 years earlier. However, such non-discriminatory perspectives seem to have been lost on the central Enlightenment thinkers later in the 18th century.

In his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753-4), Hume wrote: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.’ He added: ‘There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor any individual eminent either in action or speculation.’ Kant (1724-1804) built on Hume (1711-76), and stressed that the fundamental difference between blacks and whites ‘appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour’, before concluding in Physical Geography: ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.’

In France, the most famous Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire (1694-1778), not only described Jews in anti-Semitic terms, as when he wrote that ‘they are all of them born with raging fanaticism in their hearts’; in his Essay on Universal History (1756), he also wrote that if Africans’ ‘intelligence is not of another species than ours, then it is greatly inferior’ (fort inférieure). Like Locke, he invested his money in the slave trade.

Amo’s philosophy is often more theoretical than Yacob’s, but they share an enlightened perspective of reason, treating all humans alike. His work is deeply engaged with the issues of his day, as in Amo’s best-known book, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), which is built upon a logically deductive method using strict arguments, seemingly in line with his former juridical dissertation. Here he grapples with Cartesian dualism, the idea that there is an absolute difference in substance between mind and body.

At times, Amo seems to oppose Descartes, as the contemporary philosopher Kwasi Wiredu points out in A Companion to African Philosophy (2004), when he writes: ‘Human beings sense material things not with respect to their mind but with respect to their living and organic body.’ Wiredu argues that Amo opposed the Cartesian dualism between mind and body, rather favouring the Akan metaphysics and Nzema language of his early childhood: that you feel pain with your flesh (honam), not with your mind (adwene).

But at the same time, Amo says that he will both defend and speak against Descartes’s view (from his Letters, Part I) that the soul (mind) is able to act and suffer together with the body. Hence, Amo writes: ‘In reply to these words we caution and dissent: we concede that the mind acts together with the body by the mediation of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body.’

The examples of Yacob and Amo make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason 

Amo argues that Descartes’s statements in these matters are contrary to the French philosopher’s ‘own view’. He concludes his thesis by stating that we should avoid confusing the things that belong to the body and the mind. For whatever operates in the mind must be attributed to the mind alone. Perhaps it is as the philosopher Justin E H Smith at the University of Paris points out in Nature, Human Nature and Human Difference (2015): ‘Far from rejecting Cartesian dualism, on the contrary Amo offers a radicalised version of it.’

But could it also be that Wiredu and Smith are both right? For example, if the traditional Akan philosophy and Nzema language had a more precise Cartesian body-mind distinction than Descartes, a way of thinking that Amo then brought into European philosophy? It might be too early to tell, as a critical edition of Amo’s works is still pending publication, possibly at Oxford University Press.

In Amo’s most thorough work, The Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately (1738), he seems to anticipate the later Enlightenment thinker Kant. The book deals with the intentions of our mind, and with human actions as natural, rational or in accordance with a norm. In the first chapter, writing in Latin, Amo argues that ‘everything knowable is either a thing in itself, or a sensation, or an operation of the mind’.

He elaborates in the next paragraph, stating that ‘for the sake of which cognition occurs, is the thing in itself’. And in the following demonstration: ‘Real learning is cognition of things in themselves. It thus has the basis of its certainty in the known thing.’ Amo’s original wording is ‘Omne cognoscibile aut res ipsa’, using the Latin notion res ipsa for the ‘thing-in-itself’.

Today, Kant is known for his notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (das Ding an sich) in Critique of Pure Reason (1787) – and his argument that we cannot know the thing beyond our mental representation of it. Yet it is acknowledged that this was not the first use of the term in Enlightenment philosophy. As the Merriam-Webster Dictionary writes on the term thing-in-itself: ‘First known use: 1739.’ Still, that is two years after Amo’s main work was turned in at Wittenberg, in 1737.

The examples of these two Enlightenment philosophers, Yacob and Amo, might make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason in the disciplines of philosophy and history of ideas. Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the ideas of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803) paved the way for the state’s independence, new constitution, and the abolition of slavery in 1804. The historian Laurent Dubois concludes in Avengers of the New World (2004) that the events in Haiti were ‘the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal’. In a similar vein, one might wonder: will Yacob and Amo also one day be elevated to the position they deserve among the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment?

The Mayas . . . Facts that you will never see on a television program!

What leaps at us is that hte whole sophisticated pyramidculture was completely developed in the Aericas by 3500 BC which is about a thousand years before The Meditterranean.  It is thus plausible that the two way stream of cultural exchange began even then.  Recall the 2400 BC date for the Great Pyramid, Grand Manaan and Lake Superior needed a long time to build out the Great Circle route.  Thus i expected a thousand year prehistory and now we have it.

Recall also that our Bronze Age culture seem to have had alien led culture centers as well.  We have the remnants of one in Peru.  Thus the advent of a major sea borne metal trade is deliberate and fast as well.  Actual metal absorption was otherwise much slower.  Whose idea was it to make gold so valuable?

We also get hints of thereal population mass on the coast on contact.  Population then collapsed due to disease failed to reover because of slaving which immediately consumed the seedstock of full recovery.

The Mayas . . . Facts that you will never see on a television program!

Posted by Richard Thornton | Dec 15, 2017 | Archaeology, Architecture, Guatemala, Mayas, Mexico, Mysteries, Spanish History | 3 |

https://peopleofonefire.com/the-mayas-facts-that-you-will-never-see-on-a-television-program.html

PART FIVE OF THE MAYAS IN NORTH AMERICA SERIES

The crowd gasps . . . “But that National Geo program said that the Maya civilization disappeared around 900 AD!”

During the past 40 years, it seems that about every nationality in the Old World has claimed to have founded the first civilization in the Americas. The problem is chronology. By 3500 BC, there were folks in Peru and the Amazon Basin building pyramids and cities, plus preserving their loved ones as mummies. The Bilbo Mound and Circular Port in Savannah were begun around 3545 BC. The Watson Brake circular earthworks and mounds were constructed around 3450 BC. 

At least by 3500 BC, the indigenous peoples in Alberta were building stonehenges and used a solar cross as a sacred symbol. The earliest stonehenge in the British Isles dates from around 3,000 BC. Solar crosses began appearing on European petroglyphs around 2500 BC. So . . . if anything . . . one comes up with the heretical speculation that peoples from the Americas jump-started civilization in Europe and North Africa. Old World civilizations accelerated ahead of the Americas because of domesticated animals and a much larger land area on which innovative ideas could be spawned.

When one narrows the focus to the Mayas, the level of misunderstanding becomes appalling, even among anthropology professors and mainstream TV network documentaries. It seems that most people’s concept of the Maya civilization never matured beyond high school, a five day vacation in Yucatan or perhaps pseudo-history programs such as Ancient Alien Astronauts. 

One does not have to watch fringe TV networks to get bogus history. In the past two years, both PBS and National Geo have produced documentaries, which stated that all Maya cities had been abandoned by 900 AD and that all the Mayas went back to living simple lives in the jungle!

Dr. Morales has determined that dignitaries from present day Florida and Georgia visited Chichen Itza in the period between 900 AD and 1200 AD.

Dirty little secrets about the Mayas that your teacher never told you

(1) The “Mayas” were originally many ethnic groups, speaking over a hundred languages and dialects. Even today there are very distinct differences in the physical appearances of the various surviving branches of the Mayas. In other words, they were NEVER a single tribe as typically described in TV documentaries. Over the 3,000+ years of living near each other, the languages evolved and blended. Nevertheless, several “Maya” languages are not mutually intelligible. A “Maya” in Tabasco State, Mexico would probably be better able to understand a Miccosukee from Florida than the “Maya” languages, spoken in Belize and Honduras.

(2) North Americans mispronounce Maya! The letter Y in Spanish is pronounced as a long E, so the correct pronunciation in English phonetics is Mä : ē : ä . . . not Mī : yä.

(3) But the Mayas never called themselves the Mayas, until the Spanish told them that was their name. They had no concept of being a single ethnic group until the Spanish created an administrative district, which included all the people that they called Mayas. The Spanish did the same thing in Florida by creating the tribal labels of Apalachee and Timucua. Neither the Florida Apalachee nor the Timucua ever called themselves by that name, until their conquerors told them their new name.

(4) Bartholomew Colon (Columbus) dreamed up the name Maya around 1498, while exploring the coast of Central America, he encountered a massive trade canoe that his native guides said was from Ma-e-am, a powerful province on the northern Yucatan Peninsula. The equivalent names of this province were Ma-e-pan (Mayapan~Mexica/Nahuatl), Ma-e-ab (NE Yucatan and Belize) and Haw-e-pas (Itza). In Chontal Maya, Ma-e-am means “Water-Principal or Big (lake)-Place of.” Colon wrote down their ethnic name as Maya (Ma-e-a) and the name stuck. The trouble is that there are no lakes in the northern Yucatan Peninsula and very few streams. So where was this lake, where these people originated? 

You will see another translation of the word Mayab in Wikipedia – “few people.” However, I think that is one of those many speculations by anthropology professors, which no one fact-checked. The people of Mayam or Mayapan did not speak Belize Maya! I looked up the anonymous author’s translation of “few people” and it is entire different words in Yucatec Maya . . . plus, makes no sense. 

(5) In 1500 AD, a smallpox plague killed millions of Natives in Yucatan, Guatemala and the Gulf Coast of the Southeastern United States. The plague reduced the population of Yucatan by 50-75%. It was apparently introduced by the crew of Bartholomew Colon’s fleet. This holocaust was preceded by a 50 year long civil war between provinces in northern Yucatan, which caused the abandonment of most of its large cities. Thus, if the Spanish had arrived in 1400 instead of 1500, they would have encountered a fairly dense population there. Until the smallpox plague, the Chontal Mayas, Calusas and Uchees (yes, Uchees) carried on a brisk trade between Yucatan, Cuba, Florida and the Gulf Coast of the USA. The traders died along with the coastal towns they infected. There would be no myth on television programs about the Maya country being left uninhabited after 900 AD, had not this plague occurred.

(6) At the time of the Spanish Conquest, there were three provinces named Am Ixchel on the rim of the Gulf of Mexico. Am Ixchel is Chontal Maya and means “Place of the Goddess Ixchel.” They formed a perfect equilateral triangle and were located (a) the coastal region between Mobile Bay and the mouth of the Apalachicola River, (b) the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula near Merida and (c) Tampico Bay in Tamaulipas State, Mexico. Thus, there is irrefutable evidence of frequent navigation between the Yucatan, Tamaulipas and Southeastern United States, prior to the arrival of Europeans.

(7) Recent archaeological work has revealed that “Maya Civilization” began at the same time as “the Olmec Civilization.” The reason that this was overlooked was that for a thousand years these peoples mainly built “Injun Mounds” not stone veneered pyramids. The Maya mounds were underneath the later stone structures.

(8) Mound-building (aka pyramids) and pottery-making were introduced to eastern Mexico from the Southeastern United States around (1000 BC – 900 BC). The peoples of southern Mexico and Guatemala (commonly called the Olmec and Maya Civilizations) did not start constructing earthworks the scale of those at Poverty Point, Louisiana until around 700 BC or later.

Cuban archaeologists have labeled these reconstructed ruins in western Cuba as “Taino” but in fact, they do not resemble Taino architecture in the rest of the Caribbean. What they do resemble are the houses and village site plans of the Apalache elite in North Georgia, which were derived from Uchee architecture. 

The Uchee-Cuban Connection

There was very little archaeological work in Cuba until the Revolution. What one reads in standard references and Gringo anthropological texts is a mixture of partial facts, speculations and myths. They assume that there was no evidence of cultural contacts between Cuba and southeastern North America. Supposedly all of Cuba’s indigenous population and cultural influences came from the Caribbean Basin and South America. This was what I was taught in graduate school also. Put anything else on a test question, and you would get a F. 

The true Native American history of Cuba couldn’t be more different, but first we will talk about the Uchee. The Uchee have always said that in ancient times, they colonized Cuba. No anthropologists or historians paid any attention to this tradition . . . but probably, very few, if any ever talked directly with the Uchee. Also, both the Uchee and the Creeks were known to have traded with Cuba until the Second Seminole War, when US Navy ships blockaded the Florida Coast. One of the primary reasons that the Creek Confederacy created its own navy in the 1780s was to protect boats traveling back and forth from Havana from pirates.

The information gleaned from 50 years of intensive archaeological study in Cuba is now appearing on the web . . . in recent months written in English to attract cultural tourists. Here is the actual chronology of Cuban indigenous history, written by Cuban anthropologists. Notice how starkly different it is from the Wikipedia article on Cuban history. 

8000 BC – Cuba was settled by peoples from North America.

 

4,500 BC – Cuba was settled by peoples from southern Mexico, Honduras and Venezuela 

1500 BC-1000 BC – Western Cuba was settled by shell ring people from the Southeastern United States. They introduced permanent villages, pottery and construction of shell rings on the coast. 

500 BC – Cuba was settled by mound builders from Florida and the Southeast. This is probably the Uchee colonization. The mound builders continued to live in the western tip of Cuba even after arrival of the Arawaks (Taino). 

600 AD – 800 AD – Immigrants from the south settle in the Mayan or Mayanabo Province area. It is now called Camaguey and is on the north-central coast, opposite south Florida. The article does not specifically state, who these immigrants were. Mayan probably refers only to specific provinces names Mayam. 

1000 AD – Immigrants arrive from the Antilles Islands and settle on the eastern end of Cuba. These were probably ancestors of the Taino. 

1400 AD – Caribs begin establishing settlements on the southern coast of Cuba. 

This is what Waka-te on Lake Okeechobee, Florida looked like when Mayapan was founded around 990 AD. 

Did the “real Mayas” originate in Florida?

The indigenous name of Lake Okeechobee and the culturally advanced indigenous province around it was Mayami. The word Miami was derived from it. It Florida the word is interpreted as meaning “Big Water” because the Itsate Creeks translated this word into their language as Oka chopi (Water Big) = Okeechobee in English.

Mayami is Chontal Maya . . . the “Pigeon Maya” of the people of the Tabasco Marshes, who became the premier mariners of the Mesoamerican world. It means, “Lake-Place of-Principal or Capital.” In plain English that means that this was the homeland and capital of the Big Lake People.

Strangely, the explanation of the Miami Indians in southwestern Ohio is that their name was Mayami-ke, which probably means “downstream people,” but the author did not know what language this word was from. Well, for starters, “ke” is the suffix for “people or tribe” in Muskogee-Creek. So Mayami-ke is a hybrid word, which means “Big Lake-Place of- People.” This is highly significant because the Miami Indians of Ohio are associated with the Fort Ancient Culture, an Ohio Valley element of the so-called Mississippian Culture. Large serpent effigies, probably associated with the Itza-Chontal Sky Serpent God, can be found on Lake Okeechobee, the Georgia Mountains and in southern Ohio.

This myth that Cuba was not a cultural bridge of the Americas has put blinders on anthropologists in the United States. No one seems to see the obvious linguistic connection between the four locations of peoples named Mayam or Mayami . . . the northern tip of Yucatan, north-central coast of Cuba, the southern tip of Florida and southern Ohio.

These “Mayans” were probably in Florida during the Classic Maya Period when great cities were sprouting up everywhere in Yucatan, Tabasco, Chiapas, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Their towns were interconnected with hundreds of miles of canals and raised causeways, even though apparently (but not for certain) they did not practice large scale agriculture. They developed a highly sophisticated society that utilized almost all the cultural and artistic themes, now called “Mississippian.” 

In the next article . . .

The city of Mayam or Mayapan was not even founded until after the Classic Maya Civilization collapsed. What’s really odd is that Mayapan, the Lamar Village and Etowah Mounds were founded at the exact same time. In Part Six POOF will take a look at the comparative timing of events in Mesoamerica and the Southeast to see if there are parallel developments. The readers will get to see a time line that compares what was happening at several locations in the Southeast, Cuba and in Mesoamerica. There is a direct correlation between the timing of dramatic events at Teotihuacan, Palenque, Chichen Itza and Mayapan with cultural changes in the Southeast.

Unless they read the People of One Fire, Southeastern anthropologists don’t even seem to be aware that there was a large Panoan and Arawak population in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina at the time of European Contact. In Part Seven, we will use the comparative time line to try to determine when these peoples from the south arrived and what impact they had on those, who had arrived in the Lower Southeast before them.

Royal commission report makes preventing institutional sexual abuse a national responsibility

What has never worked is a culture of denial.  This report is a serious contribution to the discussion that is now taking place globally.  The surprise is how much there is hidden away in the cracks of society. That all forms of child care would be a magnet is a given, yet i wonder also if natural caring can be thus stigmatized..

I personally suspect that we will not resolve these types of problems until we properly establish the natural community as the foundation to society even if only for the lower third in economic terms although the natural efficiency should make it much larger component.

I truly became aware of the problem around thirty years ago when a lone wolf was caught and jailed, but that only seemed to prove rarity.  Before then i was almost oblivious.  It has now become almost fully disclosed and it is the extent of the problem that is troubling.  Certainly all vulnerable institutions are on high alert and i do not think that the cleansing is even near complete.

What is completely clear is that the perps form a necessary network of mutual support in order to both survive and even prosper....

 . 

Royal commission report makes preventing institutional sexual abuse a national responsibility 

December 14, 2017 11.49pm EST 

https://theconversation.com/royal-commission-report-makes-preventing-institutional-sexual-abuse-a-national-responsibility-88564 

Author 

Michael Salter 

 

Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Western Sydney University 

The study and discussion of child sex offending is replete with stereotypes of predators and molesters who prey on children. These stereotypes are often used to characterise child sexual abuse as the problem of a deviant minority, and so the only available response is to identify and incarcerate those responsible.

In contrast, in its final report, released today, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse presented a socially and historically contextualised understanding of child sexual abuse. While accepting that some institutional abusers are “fixated, persistent” paedophiles, the commission found the majority are not.

Instead, it concluded that most institutional offenders are opportunistic or situational – that is, most offenders are not driven to abuse children by mental illness or perverse sexuality. Instead, institutional sexual abuse arises through an interaction of personal, situational, institutional and social factors.

These interactions have been shaped by the historical period and the circumstances in which children and adults find themselves. By placing institutional abuse within its larger context, the commission has made the prevention and identification of child sex offending a collective responsibility. 

A psychosocial model of offending

Child sex offenders are a diverse group. However, the commission identified a common set of predisposing issues among identified perpetrators of institutional abuse. These included adverse childhood experiences, interpersonal and emotional difficulties, and cognitive distortions about children and sexuality. 

Personal risk factors can be exacerbated within institutional settings. Institutional cultures and hierarchies can foster feelings of superiority or impunity among ordained or lay members. Abusive sexualities form where adult entitlement and authority facilitate close contact with children in institutional settings.

Disrupting the process of unethical sexual development in institutional settings requires multiple strategies. The commission identified ten standards that are essential for all child-focused institutions. It is also calling for a national framework and a national office for child safety. 

Importantly, the commission recognised the lack of early intervention initiatives for men who think they are at risk of abusing children. It recommended the establishment of information and help-seeking services for men concerned about their sexual feelings toward children. This is a major service gap in Australian responses to child sexual abuse.

Abuse in religious contexts

Several recommendations relate to the governance structures of churches and religious denominations in order to enhance democratic decision-making, accountability and transparency. 

This has included specific recommendations to a variety of denominations to ensure that theology and tradition is not operating to conceal sex offences or to place children at risk.

The commission flagged clericalism – the belief that ordained people are superior to the laity – as a contributing factor to child sexual abuse. Clericalism not only reinforces perpetrator feelings of impunity and entitlement, but reduces the likelihood that victims will be believed. It can also promote institutional complicity and cover-up in the aftermath of an abuse incident. 

61% of survivors of abuse in a religious institution nominated a Catholic institution as the site of their abuse. The commission was concerned by trends toward clericalism in Australian Catholicism, and criticised “catastrophic” failures of leadership shown by senior Catholic figures in relation to child sexual abuse.

The commission identified canon law and compulsory celibacy as contributing factors in child sexual abuse.

The training of priest and clergy is a crucial intervention point for the prevention of child sexual abuse. The commission proposed training on child protection and ethical relationships throughout clerical formation.

Tellingly, representatives of both the Catholic and Anglican churches told the commission that the increased involvement of women in church leadership would be protective of children. The need for both organisational and theological reform confronts many religious denominations in the commission’s aftermath.

Tackling power and abuse

Institutional abuse often involves the eroticisation of the socially legitimised power of adults over minors.

Children are frequently not listened to in institutional settings, or seen as a “problem” to be managed. The lack of power afforded to children in institutions has provided many opportunities for abuse, and can discourage them from complaining when abuse takes place.

To disrupt this dynamic, the commission called for enhanced opportunities for children’s participation and decision-making in the institutions of which they are part. This is particularly crucial for young people in out-of-home care.

Although the proportion of children in out-of-home care is lower today than in the past, the commission identified that this group is at particular risk of abuse and exploitation. It recommended increased investment in their empowerment and care.

The commissioners acknowledged that almost one-in-four survivors reported institutional sexual abuse by another child. Their recommendations included a range of interventions to prevent harmful sexual behaviours by children and responses after the fact to victims and those children exhibiting harmful behaviour.

The commission also called for improved community understanding of harmful sexual behaviour by children.

Everyone’s responsibility

By positioning abuse as a problem driven by social norms and values, as well as institutional failures and the conduct of perpetrators, the commission made child sexual abuse a national responsibility and concern. As its report says:

For institutions to be safe for children, the communities in which they operate need to be safe for children. The whole nation can contribute to change to keep children safe.

Recommendations include social marketing campaigns to change abuse-supporting and victim-blaming attitudes, and prevention education for children and parents.

Increased training in abuse and child protection for child-focused professionals would increase the capacity of the Australian workforce to prevent, identify and respond appropriately to child sexual abuse.

At the commission’s close, it is clear that child protection is not just the responsibility of underfunded and stretched statutory services, and child abuse is not just caused by a small group of deviant offenders.

We all have a role to play in child safety. And as the royal commission finishes, this work has only just begun.