The Black Night of 10/18

The Black Night of 10/18
By Naseem Mahnavi (mnasim_99@yahoo.com)

The ghastly carnage in Karachi on the night of 18th October, 2007 was perhaps the worst thing that ever happened in Pakistan after independence. No amount of condemnation and consolation can give solace to the bereaved families in particular and the nation in general. It was a heinous crime whose facilitators must be demobilized and punished in an exemplary manner. For now one can only pray for the peace of the deceased and the safety of those who live in this country.

However, it would be extremely imprudent if one does not look back and ponder impartially the events and circumstances that made such a thing possible. The following points come to my mind that should make those who deserve to blame themselves do so.

Pakistani generals who need clearance from the Pentagon for their promotions would do anything to please their mentors.
Perhaps this arrangement was agreed when the USA supplied sophisticated hardware to Pakistani military including Star fighters which were clumsily bugged and crashed at regular intervals. How reliable is the rest of American military hardware?

Generals promoted recently to key posts seem to have emotional personalities that can be manipulated easily.

The US administration would like to have Benazir at the head of government in Pakistan when they attack Iran so that she may control the violent reaction of Pakistani Shias. Insecure as she has proven to be, she would literally be on American strings.

The responsibility of the 10/18 carnage lies heavily on the shoulders of those who had persuaded her to return to Pakistan and played a part in facilitating it.

Pakistani politicians are wishful thinkers and get over-excited at the slightest hint of glory. Nawaz Shrif got swollen headed when the Supreme Court gave verdict that he could not be prevented from returning to his home country and Benazir thought that she was returning as the joint viceroy of the US president and British queen.

Benazir was to be accompanied by a number of British MPs and US Senators and security arrangements were being made accordingly to befit the foreign dignitaries. When she boarded the plane with mere Pakistanis the security arrangements were scaled down to those demanded by other not so popular ex-prime ministers such as Jamali and Shujaat. Why Benazir's foreign friends ditched her at the last moment can only be explained by them.

Benazir was aware of an impending attack and yet she chose the insane option of traveling in an open truck at one mile per hour in the darkness of night through terrorist infested roads. Martyrdom is not for a family woman.

Only days before the Swiss investigating magistrate completed his enquiries and sent the case to the prosecutor general, Benazir gave up all her objections to the military dictatorship and tacitly supported Musharraf in his re-election in uniform in exchange for the withdrawal of criminal cases against her. Was Benazir really afraid or did she give in to blackmail?

Hundreds of thousands of destitute and desperate people were brought to Karachi from interior Sindh and other provinces to the welcome rally on 18/10, but tens of thousands did not return. In the coming months there is going to be a proliferation of street beggars, thefts and robberies in this city.

Pakistanis are fighting a war against extremism, but in doing so one should be careful not to introduce a new kinds of extremism, such as democratic extremism or judicial extremism.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan is examining the eligibility of Pervez Musharraf for the third part-time presidential term and the jurisdiction of the existing Electoral College to elect a new president. He has already submitted an undertaking that if he is declared elected, he would give up his part-time job as army chief. He is already past the maximum age for army service, so perhaps he can get around some of the difficulties by submitting a backdated resignation.

This is with due apologies to anyone who feels hurt or embarrassed by the stark, undiluted truth which is necessary to ensure sanity and purpose in a confused nation.

A Tale of Two Deals

Back in 1970 the pathetic general did a deal with Daddy to get him elected prime minister if he would let him remain president for as long as he liked. Free, fair and transparent elections were held in which Daddy’s brand new political party which had never contested elections before won 60% of the seats in this wing. Daddy was expecting better. In the other wing, the old party threw a spanner in the works by hijacking the rigging plan and winning 99% of seats in that wing and claiming the right to form government. Daddy insisted that he should be made prime minister as per the deal. The motherland was thrown into complete chaos. The jealous neighbor took advantage of this opportunity and moved its forces into that wing. The pathetic general surrendered that wing and left the office of president in disgrace.

Back in 2002 the smart general who had staged a military coup while flying in the air was having difficulty getting himself recognized as president by anybody but the super power. So, on behalf of the super power, the neighbor massed its troops on the borders of the motherland to pressurize the politicians and the courts into cooperating with the smart general. The smart general got a five year term in the presidency.

By the end of the 5 years, like all bad politicians, the smart general had lost his popularity and there seemed no way he could remain president and also general as before. So he decided to make a deal with Baby, whereby he would make her prime minister while she would help her remain president and also general. Nothing wrong with that; but the deal must include the following two points:

1. If the rigging plan fails, Baby would not insist on her pound of flesh at the expense of motherland.

2. Reforms will be carried out in the military recruitment policy and training content to make it more focused on its professional obligations.

Power of the Pen

“The pen is mightier than the sword” is an old saying whose origin can not be traced, although it exists in many languages in all parts of the world. Normally it is interpreted as meaning that a scholar wields greater power than a soldier or military general. However, the study of the history of colonialism yields a different and interesting angle to the adage.

The indigenous populations of the American and Australian continents were almost completely wiped out by the invading colonizers from Europe. One thing common among those nations was the fact that in spite of being reasonably civilized and organized they lacked a written language or script.

The disadvantages of being illiterate are manifold. For one thing, they could not send written messages or make written agreements. It is a simple fact that the spoken word can only be heard by those present within a limited distance and repetitions by the listeners are often inaccurate to say the least. On the other hand, the written message can be read for ever and transmitted in original or in exact copies to any part of the world. That is why we do not have an account of what happened from the view point of the obliterated nations.

At the same time the people of the lands where literacy or a written language existed managed to survive the onslaught of the equally cruel and blood-thirsty invaders starting from the Aryans in India to Europeans in most parts of the world. Most countries of Asia are examples of this survivability of literacy. In fact most of the once colonized literate nations were able to eventually oust the colonizers and some are now taking a leading role in the community of nations.

My antagonists must be wondering, “What about Africa?” The answer is quite simple. Most nations in the coastal areas of Africa had already had contacts with Arabic language and literature. Although the literacy rate there may not have been enviable, there must have been at least a few literate persons in each community. As for the semi-civilized and illiterate people in the hinterlands, they were lucky that Christian missionaries had reached them before the Christian soldiers and given them the divine shield of literacy.

If there are any ambitious generals or politicians in the world who think that the history of the American and Australian continents can be repeated, they will be disappointed. Literate peoples can not be obliterated.

The Nuclear Explosions

Nostradamus -- Century VI, Quatrain 97

Cinq & quarante degrez ciel bruslera,
Feu approcher de la grand cité neuue,
Instant grand flamme esparse sautera,
Quand on voudra des Normans faire preuue,

At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,
Fire to approach the great new city:
In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,
When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.

Usually such quatrains of Nostradamus start with a year and month indicating the time of the event. The second and third lines of this quatrain evidently describe an above-ground nuclear explosion. The first three nuclear explosions on earth took place in 1945. The first was the atomic bomb Trinity exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945. The second and third were Little Boy and Fat Man dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan with an interval of three days in August, 1945. It is possible that Nostradamus had multiple visions and confused the dates and locations writing down only forty five which was part of 1945. None of the three places at which the atomic bombs exploded was known to Europeans at the time Nostradamus wrote the quatrain.

It would, therefore, be fair to infer that the prediction refers to the atomic bombing of the new cities of Hiroshima or Ngasaki or both in the year 1945. The explanation by some nightmare merchants that the new city refers to New York does not seem to hold water, although anxiety created in that rich city may benefit some people in some ways.

As for the fourth line of the quatrain, the meaning is not hard to understand. One asks for proof from someone whom one does not trust. It means that as a result of the barbaric atomic attacks, the world would stop trusting the men from the north, perhaps meaning North Americans and North Europeans. The cold war following the Second World War is a testimony to that.

It should be understood here that no one can see what has not happened. The visions of Nostradamus consisted of pictures of what had happened in the past at some place in the Universe. He was only trying to correlate them with likely places and times when some thing similar would be repeated on earth. It seems that a specie similar to human beings has existed somewhere in the past and gone through all the developments and experiences that we are now going through. Whether we shall have a better end than them is up to us.

The War of Terror Must Stop

The recently declared American intentions of making armed incursions into Pakistan to kill assumed terrorists are unbecoming of a civilized nation. The proposition is reminiscent of the old imperial technique of turning people into nobodies, then killing them in cold blood and claiming that “nobody was killed.”

Today, world civilization has reached a state in which there is no such thing as an “outlaw”. Every human being has or should have a legal identity and should be made to follow the law.

I would suggest that the Pakistani government should enforce Pakistani laws in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by making it a province of Pakistan with a governor, provincial assembly, divisions and districts, police stations, courts and local government; the army should establish cantonments there.

As for the foreign nationals there, they should be treated as refugees and given political asylum if they apply for it. Once a list of refugees and asylum seekers is prepared, the world would know whether or not Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar actually exist. And if they do, they should be brought to justice according to international law. They shouldn’t be killed in sleep because their trial would expose embarrassing truths about their accusers.

If the Americans really want to get rid of the terror that haunts them, they should, among other things, help Pakistan in integrating FATA into the State.

Definitions - 3

Alqaeda = International forum of dissidents originated by veterans of Afghan freedom struggle against USSR to free other countries of the region from covert foreign occupation, involved or implicated by North Atlantic powers in terrorist acts and turned into the most outlawed entity.

Atom = Scientific belief in the unseen.

Beauty = Ability to cause favorable reaction beyond vocabulary.

Buenocracy = Domination by good people. (It doesn't exist anywhere.)

Capitalism = Domination by money and riches.

Cell Phone = The conquest of distance.

Christianity = Worship of the anointed one and belief in morality based on the parables in the pre-Muhammadan Divine Books which originated in the Middle East.

Civilization = A society in which ethical restraints prevent people from going as low as they can.

Communism = Domination by the least educated and skilled members of community.

Computer = An inorganic appendage to human beings for sharing large amounts of knowledge,
information or data and analytical power not possible by sensory or organic means.

Crime = An act whose committer deserves punishment.

Democracy = Universal equality of opinion and domination of majority opinion.

Democratic government = Domination by a group of people who have demonstrated their ability to manipulate public opinion better than others.

Democratic Society = A society in which leadership emerges from the common people through the natural processes of social organization, self government and unrestricted intellectual activity.

Discipline = Ability to restrain oneself before being restrained by others.

Duties = Basic building blocks of civilization – universal or circumstantial human obligations whose neglect is crime. (The UNO has not prepared a charter of human Duties.)

Engineering = Art and science of creating inorganic life.

Evil = Ability to harm or destroy.

Failure = One who ruins every thing when feeling confident.

Freedom = Ability to take one’s own decisions and define one’s own limits.

General = One authorized to get soldiers killed.

God = The Singularity discovered thousands of years ago, but never defined scientifically.

Gravity = Inherent interconnection among bodies of matter.

Guantanamo = Infamous and illicit outfit of US armed forces where people abducted from all over the world are subjected to unconventional psychological experiments without being compensated.

Happiness = Disciplined pursuit of pleasure that does not result in regret.

Hindu = Black-skinned pre-Aryan people of ancient India. The Vedas were their religious books.

Human being = The most advanced organic biological (animal) species capable of conversing, calculating, planning, communicating, building and developing and enforcing ethics.

Islam = Surrender to reason and worship of a conceptual ideal being called Allah as taught by Muhammad.

Israelis = A minority ethnic group of ancient Egypt originating from the Union of an Arab named Abraham and his black African partner. The half breeds were treated badly by the natives and fled from Egypt under their leader Moses who was accused of wanton murder.

Jew = Believer in the earliest moral and religious traditions of the Middle East.

Judaism = Culture based on ancient Middle Eastern traditions, constituted by European money lenders to acquire the status of God’s chosen people.

Kashmir = Historically independent mountain country turned into a disputed territory by North Atlantic powers to create military competition among bordering nations and prevent them from attaining their full economic potential threatening North Atlantic domination.

Law = Collectively adopted limits of individual freedom.

Leader = One who knows the way better than others and stays in front.

Life = Ability to change others' perceptions.

Love = Urge to protect, nourish and share pleasures with, and willingness to make sacrifices for.

Marriage = License to share privacy.

Mulla = One who knows nothing but religious rumor and is not prepared to learn more.

NATO = Enigmatic North Atlantic military outfit that prevents ethnic cleansing where it chooses and carries out ethnic cleansing where it chooses.

Nation = A group of people who identify themselves with each other.

Nazism = Reaction of German Christians to Judaic claim of being the chosen race, asserting superiority over other people on account of undiluted Aryan descent.

Patriot = One willing to make sacrifices to defend the freedom of his or her homeland.

Peace = Absence of irritation.

Politics = Exploitation of the community's weaknesses.

Poverty = Absence of affluence.

Power = Ability to cause beneficial action.

Quality = Comparison with an established standard.

Realist = One who can differentiate between a virtual reality and the actual reality.

Relative Space = Location based on three linear coordinates with reference to an arbitrary point and a fourth age coordinate relative to an arbitrary event (date and time).

Religion = Fixed belief in the imperceptible and the unknown.

Rights = Reward of fulfilling duties or obligations whose denial or violation is crime.

Science = Study of the nature and working of things and events; and belief in proven and verified facts.

Shia = Descendants of Hussain ibn Ali and his own and step brothers, who did not accompany him to the battle of Karbala and regretted it – and many others who joined the sect for their own reasons.

Soldier = One trained to obey orders without questioning and to live constantly in peril.

Space = Occupied part of the void.

Spiritualism = Interaction of central nervous and autonomic systems.

Successful Person = One who learns his or her lessons early.

Taliban = Highly bigoted ethnic minority of Afghanistan who fancy the lifestyle of 7th century Arabs and aspire to establish the Kingdom of God.

Terrorism = Tendency to achieve by violent intimidation rather than by asking, bargaining, creating, developing or earning.

Time = Differential element of age.

Traitor = A citizen who acts against the interests of his or her country or sacrifices national interest for personal gain, and a soldier who points a weapon at an innocent, peaceful, unarmed citizen of his or her own country.

War = Legitimized crime or violent response to it, often a contest of terror.

Weapon = A potentially lethal implement used for persuasion by the mentally weak, for protection by the physically weak, and for committing crimes by the ethically or morally weak.

Zero = Difference between equals.


©Mohammad Nasim

The Second Comedy of Errors

Once upon a time there was an inactive chief justice of a supreme court.
The guy who was actually very smart an aggressive had become inactive
because a stupid television jester had written him a letter but in his
stupidity had put a wrong address on the envelope. The letter somehow
reached the once dismissed general and somehow elected president (the
same person) and the hired temporarily from a bank and charitably elected
prime minister (a single entity). Neither of these men had the slightest
inkling of law or good manners. They had read the constitution and not
found the term contempt of court in it. So they had the chief justice
brought into their office and demanded his resignation because they
thought that someone else could be more useful to them in their pursuit
of greater power. Whether they had committed contempt of court or not is
a matter for the courts to decide, but they had certainly brought the
country into disrepute. The prime minister also ran out of the field not
having the courage to face the situation. If the matter was referred to
the ICC they would definitely get at least a three match ban or its
equivlent in politics, may be even a life ban if the rush of blood could
be related to a contraband substance. The lawyers came out in the streets
and stopped going to the courts. Some people saw history repeating
itself. When the army chief was dismissed and suspended in mid air, his
henchmen revolted and took control of the government, so the lawyers had the right to do the same in their turn. The turn of businessmen, doctors,
engineers, plumbers, coblers etc. would come in due course. Each could
work for period of ten years or so for the benefit of his own community.
But that did not happen. The president and the prime minister withdrew
the reference and tendered public and unconditional opology from the
chief justice who forgave them and everyone went back to his own
business.
Moral: Some stories can be quite boring.

Definitions - 2

Definitions - 2
By Naseem Mahnavi

Atom = Scientific belief in the unseen.
Beauty = Ability to cause favorable reaction beyond vocabulary.
Buenocracy = Domination by good people. (It doesn't exist anywhere.)
Capitalism = Domination by money and riches.
Christianity = Worship of the anointed one and belief in morality based on the parables in the Divine Books which originated in the Middle East.
Crime = An act whose committer deserves punishment.
Democracy = Universal equality of opinion and domination of majority opinion.
Democratic government = Domination by a group of people who have demonstrated their ability to manipulate public opinion better than others.
Duties = Basic building blocks of civilization – universal or circumstantial human obligations whose neglect is crime. (The UNO has not prepared a charter of human Duties.)
Engineering = Art and science of creating inorganic life.
Evil = Ability to harm or destroy.
Freedom = Ability to restrain oneself before being restrained by others.
General = One authorized to get soldiers killed.
God = The Singularity discovered thousands of years ago, but never defined scientifically.
Gravity = Inherent interconnection among bodies of matter.
Happiness = Disciplined pursuit of pleasure that does not result in regret.
Hindu = Black-skinned pre-Aryan people of ancient India. The Vedas were their religious books.
Islam = Surrender to reason and worship of a conceptual ideal Allah as taught by Muhammad.
Israelis = A minority ethnic group of ancient Egypt originating from the Union of an Arab named Abraham and his black African partner. The half breeds were treated badly by the natives and fled from Egypt under their leader Moses who was accused of wanton murder.
Jew = Believer in the earliest moral and religious traditions of the Middle East.
Judaism = Culture based on ancient Middle Eastern traditions, constituted by European money lenders to acquire the status of God’s chosen people.
Law = Limits of freedom.
Leader = One who knows the way better than others and stays in front.
Life = Ability to change others' perceptions.
Love = Urge to protect, nourish and share pleasures with, and willingness to make sacrifices for.
Marriage = License to share privacy.
Nation = A group of people who identify themselves with each other.
Nazism = Reaction of German Christians to Judaic claim of being the chosen race, asserting superiority over other people on account of undiluted Aryan descent.
Patriot = One willing to make sacrifices to defend the freedom of his or her homeland.
Peace = Absence of irritation.
Politics = Exploitation of the community's weaknesses.
Poverty = Absence of affluence.
Power = Ability to cause beneficial action.
Quality = Comparison with an established standard.
Religion = Fixed belief in the unknown.
Rights = Reward of fulfilling duties or obligations, whose denial or violation is a crime.
Science = Study of the nature and working of things and events; and belief in proven and verified facts.
Soldier = One trained to obey orders without questioning and to live constantly in peril.
Space = Occupied part of the void.
Spiritualism = Interaction of central nervous and autonomic systems.
Successful Person = One who learns his or her lessons early.
Terrorism = Tendency to achieve by violent intimidation rather than by asking, bargaining, creating, developing or earning.
Time = Differential element of age.
War = Legitimized crime.
Zero = Difference between equals.

The Truth about the Holocaust

A British historian is jailed in Austria for doubting the stories of the holocaust, the Iranian president threatens to deny the authenticity of the holocaust if he is denied the right to enrich uranium, and the Pope visits an ex-Nazi concentration camp to commemorate the holocaust. By any count, it must be something very important and deserves to be looked into.

It is now accepted by historians that between 5.6 and 5.9 million Jewish men women and children were brutally killed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators. Even if that number is divided by a hundred, it turns out to be a tragedy of great magnitude and one can not but commiserate with the survivors. It is also said that an equal number migrated from Germany and its occupied lands to other countries. The painful irony is that it all happened in the very cradle of Western civilization, arts, sciences, technology and philosophy; the lands of Gutenberg, Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mahler, Einstein, Diesel, and Freud.

It is estimated that there were nearly four million Jews in the European territories conquered by the Nazis, out of which nearly three million were exterminated. The remaining three million Jews must have been massacred in Germany itself. This means that Germany lost nearly 10 percent of its most educated and affluent population during the early forties by slaughter and migration.

Under normal circumstances, if a country loses a tenth of its population within a few years, its economy and its social order would collapse. Yet in the case of Nazi Germany one finds that the opposite happened. The German economy and productivity grew and the country became so powerful that it was able to continue the war effort unabated.

It is claimed that nearly 450 tons of gold were collected from the gold fillings in the teeth of the Jews who were killed and destroyed, and the gold was melted and cast into coins in Italy. If you divide 450 million grams of gold by 6 million Jews killed it would appear that on average every European Jew had 75 grams (two and a half ounces) of gold in his or her teeth. It is simply an unbelievable proposition.

Holocaust historians claim that nearly two divisions of the Nazi German army were deputed under Eichman to the task of destroying Jews. It is against all logic that an army pressed hard on half a dozen different fronts would spare two divisions to carry out a massacre of innocent and harmless civilians.

It is obvious that there is a lot of exaggeration in the tales of the holocaust.

The Austrian law making the denial of the Holocaust a criminal offence is another anomaly. After the Second World War there were no Jews left in Austria to lobby for such a law, and most of the legislation was done under the dictation of the allied occupation forces. If the Austrians just wanted to forget the nightmare they would have made any discussion at all of the holocaust a crime.

It seems likely that the massive propaganda about the holocaust was invented by the American war machine to divert world public opinion from its own horrendous crimes such as the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities. They made themselves look good by comparison to the Nazi war crimes. The cover up was ensured by whisking away a quarter million surviving European Jews to Palestine.

It is said that most of the Jews of Germany and its occupied territories who could not escape were arrested and placed in concentration camps manned by the military, and were executed in batches. It is quite possible that allied air forces (mainly American and British) may have mistakenly bombed some of the concentration camps or convoys of captive Jews and killed a few hundred thousand of them. It is also possible that the Nazis may have used large numbers of Jews as human shields in and around military installations hoping that influential Jews in USA would persuade the military to stop the incessant carpet bombings, but the trick failed and the human shields were obliterated along with the targets. The Nazis didn't have the face to publicize it, and the allies would rather hush it up when they discovered their mistake or mistakes. The subsequent propaganda and legislation against denying the holocaust may have been a part of the cover-up. In this way, the Allies were also able to put the blame and the responsibility for compensation on the Germans. It also explains why the Americans and the British often quite irrationally support those heinous actions of the Israelis that the entire civilized world condemns. Perhaps they are constantly being blackmailed by the Israelis who can prove that large numbers of Jews in Germany and its occupied lands were actually killed by the Americans and the British.

It is high time that those who have the facts about the accidental killings of Jews during the Second World War came out with the truth and put the record straight. It would certainly help to bring sanity to international politics and ensure a better future for mankind. There may be a temporary uproar and souring of relations, but it will come to pass.

The question now is, "Can there be another holocaust of Jews?" Unfortunately, the answer is "yes." The reasons are as follows.

The Nazi philosophy of Aryan purity versus Judaic abomination was a reaction to the Judaic claim of being God's chosen people with a birth right to dominate all other peoples of the world. Add to it the tyranny of the money-lending profession monopolized by the Judaic people of Europe and you get a perfect recipe for making hated outcasts. History has failed to record the many destitute and bankrupt people who must have been mercilessly killed or humiliated by the money lenders for not returning their loans. The opinion held by European Christians about the Jews during the past few centuries can be found in any history book and need not be repeated here.

"A life for a life" is the divine Jewish law of retribution. The Israelis have already accumulated a considerable debt of lives to the Palestinians as a result of the frequent massacres of helpless Palestinians in refugee camps and elsewhere. If they continue the massacres at the present rate, then by divine justice the grandsons of today's Israelis may have to return the debt of a few million lives in the form of another holocaust, at which no one would cry. The leaders of Israel and their supporters should pause and think objectively about the long-term risks in what they are doing today. The first thing they need to do is to win the trust of the people among whom they live, and it certainly can't be done by wanton massacres or high handed treatment of the weak. They should stop taking revenge of the sufferings of their ancestors by inflicting pain and misery on innocent people. They can overcome their worst fears of annihilation by the Muslims only by befriending them sincerely.

The New World

Any account of the history of struggle for freedom and democracy can not be complete without the mention of the relatively recent and apparently successful movement that took place in the North American continent. However, in order to understand the democratic fundamentalism and fascination for weapons so deeply entrenched in the people of that part of the world, especially the USAians, one must go back to the origins of civilization itself.

Anthropologists tell us that initially the human race consisted of hunters who had to compete with animals for survival. Gradually, humans learned and developed home-building and cultivation which enabled them to establish agricultural settlements. However, although farming fulfilled the needs for grains and vegetables, a section of the male population still had to go out hunting to provide meat. Thus the communities divided into two distinct categories, namely farmers and hunters. The farmers concentrated on growing crops, developing new techniques of agriculture and experimenting with new crops to increase their output to feed the growing population. The hunters, apart from killing animals in the jungle and bringing their carcasses home, tried to develop new tools, weapons and methods of hunting. Soon it was found that it was more convenient to catch or herd the cattle to their villages, pen them and kill them when needed – and get milk as a bonus.

Later when the art of animal husbandry was developed, the hunters found a new vocation in protecting the villages from wild animals and attacks from the hunters of other villages, resulting in the evolution of civil and martial factions within the villages. As time passed, new professions developed and artisans and traders also became part of the civilian community while the martial community organized itself into an army of sorts. It was also discovered that locating the animal pens in the centre of the villages reduced the chances of their loss to both human and animal predators.

Eventually, fortifications were built in the middle of the villages for safe-keeping of some of the crops and cattle, and most of the valuables of the villagers. Each fortification was, probably, manned by a respectable administrator, a team of record-keepers, and a group of armed hunters or soldiers led by the bravest individual in the village. As the population and prosperity grew, fortifications were built around the entire city and the central depositories were converted into royal palaces, thus creating city-states or capitals of kingdoms. At some stage in the ensuing history, greed and opportunism overcame the guardians of public assets. The custodians and the soldiers conspired and the custodians took control of all the wealth of the people, appointed a king from among themselves and began to rule with the help of the soldiers. The farmers and artisans were forced to pay a portion of their produce as taxes in return for protection from both internal and external predators. Frequent skirmishes were fought with neighboring villages to keep people in a state of insecurity. Naturally, the king and the soldiers were very unpopular among the people and ways had to be found to remove this feeling. The king sent his soldiers to plunder the nearby weaker villages and celebrated the victories with the civilians. After a few generations the original usurpation was forgotten and the king became the divine ruler and source of inspiration. The king's word became the law. It is interesting that even in those days the rulers had discovered the psychological principle that given a high enough state of stress caused by threat and insecurity the people would fantasize and persuade themselves to admire the person or group capable of protecting them, no matter how evil he might be or how much he debased them.

As time progressed, reformers in various parts of the world tried to undo the tyrannical dichotomy and create homogeneous societies, without much success. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were large numbers of people in Europe who were looking for a way out of the system. The accidental discovery of the American continent in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, who had actually set out to find India, was the answer to their prayers. They braved the mighty ocean in large numbers and landed in the areas of the 'new world' now called USA, and founded a more or less uniform community of farmer-cum-hunters who set enviable examples of courage and patience in their dual roles. The cowboy was the manifestation of the ideal of farmer-cum-hunter.

However, the American continents were not uninhabited when the Europeans arrived. There were well civilized and organized, though illiterate and sparsely distributed, tribes of copper colored people whom the Europeans mistook as Indians or called them Indians because they were nearly black to differentiate them from the African black people who were already dubbed Negros. The Native Americans quite rightly opposed the influx or illegal immigrants into their lands and took measures to stop them. But the European immigrants were already at the point of no return and with the help of their superior weaponry, massacred nearly the entire population of the continent. Whether the Native Americans were too proud and freedom loving to accept alien domination or the European intruders were plain sadistic psychopaths is difficult to ascertain. Some historians suggest that 90% of the natives died of diseases and epidemics brought by the European invaders who themselves had immunity to those diseases, which also explains why the natives considered them abominable and dangerous.

Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Swedish colonies were established on the eastern coast of North America beginning 1519, mainly for trading and contacts were established with the local population for the exchange of goods. Only the English established colonies of agricultural settlers, about 400,000 coming in the 17th century mainly due to religious persecution at home. In 1624 King James I of England made Virginia the first royal colony. White servants worked the farms until the late 17th century. But earlier in the century, English tobacco and sugar planters in the Caribbean had adopted African slavery, long the chief labor system in Portuguese and Spanish sugar colonies in those islands. By 1700 the English colonized islands were characterized by large plantations and by populations that were overwhelmingly African. These African slaves were victims of a particularly brutal and unhealthy plantation system that killed most of them. It was not a coincidence that these islands produced more wealth for England than its other colonies. By 1720, most of what is now the USA was part of the British Empire. The American war of independence started in 1775, independence was declared in 1776, the war ended in 1783 and the constitutional US government was established in 1787. The American Revolution, as some historians call it after the French Revolution, accomplished two noble objectives. First, the war achieved independence from Great Britain. Second, the newly created United States of America established a republican form of government, in which power resided with the people.

Meanwhile, democratic movements had started in Europe and elsewhere in the world and kings were forced to separate their administration and tax collection from the military. In some places, the kings had to delegate much of their powers to civilian leaders such as significant property owners and bankers. The French revolution established a civilian as a president and a body of law makers to formulate legislation, state policies and budgets. The military was restricted to its barracks. The uniqueness of the US constitution was that it was the first political instrument that defined the basic rights of its citizens and limitations of the government in clear terms.

The people of the USA succeeded in forming a relatively conscientious society based on justice for and social equality of white men which transcended European national and religious prejudices and received due recognition from intellectuals all over the world. They were also able to evolve a unique ethos of fidelity based on shared interests -- institutional or economic, rather than ethnic bond or theological obligation. The poetry of Mr. Wiggleworth which combined the Islamic concept of resurrection and Judgment day with Christian and Jewish religious beliefs may have played a significant part in the evolution of the conscientiousness. This secularly righteous attitude combined with the benefits of free slave labor abducted from Africa, Ferguson’s agricultural machinery and Eli Whitney's invention of mass-production, resulted in unprecedented progress and prosperity in a relatively short period of time. Some historians suggest that the African slaves were actually bought by the white Americans from black Africans, but one can still find people of real Indian origin in the Caribbean islands who remember how they were abducted by the British from the streets of Calcutta and Madras in the early 20^th century.

The new American philosophy of life also developed aberrations in due course. By the early 20^th century the American dream had turned into a nightmare with distinct social divisions, growing militarism and corruption far in excess of that in Europe. However, there were good leaders trying their best to reform the society. At one time even an attempt was made to prohibit the use of liquor which had to be given up after about fifteen years. However, the abundance of opportunities had attracted people of other inclinations as well and, before long, the American society was also split into two functional groups -- the farmer-cum-hunters and the fortune hunters -- resulting in what is called the Capitalist system. The two shades of gray are quite discernible today and Veblen's leisure class really seems to exist. The basic weakness of the Capitalist system is that the vast majority of the population is so comprehensively bound in mortgages and loans that most people actually own nothing and are economically insecure. Any increase in stress level due to increase in the feeling of insecurity makes them cross the rationality threshold and allows a crook to become a temporary hero. Yet, one can not deny the great scientific and technological accomplishments of the people of USA resulting in such wondrous achievements as the moon landing and internet.

The two World Wars played a significant role in the shaping of US politics and economy. Encarta has this to say about World War I:

"Since the outbreak of war in Europe, pacifists and reformers had deplored the drift toward conflict; financiers and industrialists, however, promoted patriotism, “preparedness,” and arms buildup." About World War II, it says:

"Most Americans of the 1930s recoiled from involvement in the European conflict; they favored U.S. isolationism, and many supported pacifism. Some believed that “merchants of death” (bankers and arms dealers) had lured the United States into World War I…….

In 1935 and 1936, Congress passed a group of neutrality acts to keep the United States out of Europe’s troubles. The first two acts banned arms sales or loans to nations at war. The third act, a response to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), extended the ban to nations split by civil war……..

In September 1939 Roosevelt called Congress into special session to revise the neutrality acts. The president offered a plan known as cash-and-carry, which permitted Americans to sell munitions to nations able to pay for them in cash and able to carry them away in their own ships."

The American participation in the first and second World Wars resulted in the formulation of American national defense policy of maintaining a weapons and ammunition production capacity that would allow it to jump into a new World War at short notice. In order to keep the unnecessarily huge military hardware industry in working order, it must keep producing something all the time. But since there is a limit to the quantity and time period for which equipment and ammunition can be stored unused, they must find or contrive wars and keep selling or consuming the weapons and ammunition all the time. In the process, they also keep getting a lot of their own soldiers and citizens of other nations killed.

It is interesting to note that the Chinese, who feel militarily threatened by the USA, spend an amount nearly one fifth of the US military budget to maintain a defensive capability. The Indians, who feel threatened by the Chinese, spend an amount nearly a quarter of the Chinese military budget to maintain a viable defensive power. The Pakistanis, who have reasons to feel threatened by the Indian military might, spend an amount nearly a quarter of the Indian military budget to maintain a credible defensive posture.

The World would be a far better place to live in if the leaders of USA could be convinced that they can safely cut down on the defense production capability, arsenals and munitions stockpiles, and limit military production to only the quantities needed for training and exercises. The re-engineering of the US economy to make it a peace-time economy would bring unprecedented peace, security and prosperity to the American people and also the rest of the world. The problem is, ‘how to make it happen?’