The
below was posted by the President of the United States of America on
a social media site, ‘Truth Social’.
‘Tuesday
will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in
Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you
crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be
to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
‘
The
below is taken from the Geneva Convention Additional Protocol 1977
Article
51 - Protection of the civilian population
1.
The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general
protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give
effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional
to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in
all circumstances.
2.
The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians,
shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the
primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian
population are prohibited.
3.
Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless
and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
4.
Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a)
those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b)
those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be
directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which
employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be
limited as required by this Protocol;
and
consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military
objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
5.
Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as
indiscriminate:
(a)
an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a
single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct
military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area
containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects;
and
(b) an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss
of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or
a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the
concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
6.
Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of
reprisals are prohibited.
7.
The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual
civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune
from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield
military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede
military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the
movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order
to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield
military operations.
8.
Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to
the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the
civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take
the precautionary measures provided for in Article 57 .
The
below is from the Socialist Standard of April 1998.
‘The
Greek phrase "an-archon" or "no leader" gave us
the word "anarchy". Yet "anarchy" to most people
is another name for chaos, or disorder. The assumption is that
without leaders, there can be no civilisation. Our contention is the
opposite. Leaders, and the followers who create them, are holding us
back from any real global civilisation.
Think
what some of these leaders have accomplished for humanity. Hitler,
Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Margaret Thatcher, Mao Tse Tung,
Saddam Hussein--it would be perverse indeed to claim that such
leaders have benefited the human species, and yet stubbornly the
leadership cult persists. Anyone can write a long list of "bad
leaders". But try writing a list of "good leaders" and
see how far you get.
The world is obsessed by leaders and
leadership. Corruption charge may follow sex scandal in the halls of
power, and it doesn't seem to matter how many political, religious or
other leaders are exposed as liars and frauds, nothing seems to dent
the idea of leadership as a practical and reliable method of
organising human affairs. The evidence may say differently, the
individuals in real life may be as bent as a rubber shilling but the
principle of leadership is still considered perfectly valid. Is this
because we believe that some (mostly) men are just superhuman, or
because we are over-rating the few and under-rating the many?
The
comic-strip character "Superman" has to save the human race
so often he must get really bored with it. In most adventure stories,
books and films, and in true heroic form, one or other man usually
saves us all. With this plot, write your own blockbuster. We have a
"hero" fixation, perhaps shaped in a modern form by
Nietzchean ideas of perfectibility, but born originally in the vacuum
left by the death of old gods and antiquated religions, and justified
by a rather freudian view of history as the sequential biographies of
great leaders and lords. All this continues to inform our art, our
imagination and our politics. If only we had the right people in
charge, everything would be better.
Or would it? In
nature, any species which relied so heavily on certain "heroic"
individuals to save it just wouldn't last a single sweaty afternoon.
Human beings are far too inventive and adaptable to leave themselves
in such a fix, and in order to persuade ourselves that we need
leaders we somehow have to forget this fact, and keep on forgetting
it.
Humans are remarkable. Our very diversity as a species
is the key to our success, if that is the word, in dominating all
other species. We have the most complex brain ever evolved in nature
and by trading ideas through the medium of our collective diversity
(that is to say, society) we have multiplied our latent ingenuity by
many orders of magnitude. In a geological second or two we have
climbed down from the trees, given ourselves a name, learned to
produce food in abundance, and sent our spacecraft to explore our
planetary system.
That's not bad going for an unpromising
and rather weedy bald, deaf ape with bad eyesight and no sense of
smell. Nobody would have put money on us back in the Pliocene.
We
now we dominate the globe. And are we looking after it properly?
Obviously not. The rest of the animal species are at our mercy, and
we are making them extinct. Are we content? No, we're not. Can we
stop destroying everything around us? No, we can't. What's wrong with
us?
Post-scarcity era
It's because we can't
let go of the past. Yes, we've had to fight all the way to survive.
Yes, we've had slavery of one sort or another and, yes, we've been
dominated by priests, kings and presidents for all our written
history. We're in a new era now, the post-scarcity era, and we don't
need to fight anymore, but we haven't woken up to the fact. We still
think we have to dominate everything, including each other. Our
social systems, our behaviour, the cast of our ideas are all
predicated on the inevitability of competition for wealth and favour,
on the need for leaders and followers. We are still hypnotised by the
historic glare of power and domination, lulled and gulled by the soft
insistent tones of our leaders that they and their ilk are as
inevitable as the stars in the sky, that leadership, the power of it,
and the competition for it, are as natural as birth, sex and death.
That's the way the world is, people say, even Darwin said so.
But
he didn't say so. There is nothing in the human brain that inclines
it to subservience. Nor is there a "must-dominate" gland.
Attempts by so-called Social Darwinists to justify our terrible
oppression of ourselves as natural and correct have long been
discredited, while efforts by some modern sociobiologists to do
essentially the same have also been severely attacked. To imagine, as
did the Social Darwinists, that evolution is entirely a process of
merciless competition is to take no account of the alternative and
co-operative tactics nature also employs, while to suggest, as do
some sociobiologists, that our genes may dictate our behaviour and
therefore our culture (including leadership culture), is merely to
sit down very heavily on one end of that old see-saw, the
Nature-Nurture argument, and hope the riders at the end fall
off.
But although there is nothing "natural"
about our social condition, there is nothing unnatural about it
either. Where evolution calls forth one or another set of behaviour
patterns in other species, we have the ability, and indeed, the
obligation, to make our own conscious changes. We have changed in the
past often enough as circumstances demanded. In the new post-scarcity
era, we can and must adapt again, this time in the interest of the
whole planet.
Each of us can be our own leader. The
greatest command is that over oneself. Our capitalist world,
controlled by a few rich people and their minions, has done its level
best to school out of us the very things which make us such a great
species in the first place--initiative, experimentation, imagination,
diversity. But society can't reduce us, because it is attempting a
self-inflicted wound. The rich need us to be smart to run their
wealth-collection system for them, but they try to keep us in our
place by browbeating us and treating us like children. It won't work
for ever, even if it seems to be working at the moment.
The
leaders we are asked to support, and sometimes choose between, are a
myth, created and maintained by--leaders. They are poor examples of
honesty, integrity, even of humanity. They are not interested in
truth, justice, or any of the grand notions they spout about. They
exist, have always existed, will always exist, for one purpose only:
to line their own pockets and empty yours. They are parasites on the
social body, unwanted, unnecessary and destructive. To follow leaders
is to hand over your heart on a platter, with knife and fork
attached. It is an admission of defeat, acceptance that you are
inadequate, in and of yourself. It is an act of submission and indeed
an act of cowardice unworthy of the human animal.
To
refuse to follow leaders is a liberating step, one which the working
class has yet to take. When we realise that the post-scarcity world
can be run very efficiently and healthily by democratic co-operation,
that our own lives would be vastly better without states,
governments, police, and all the trappings of leadership, we will
collectively be in a position to make that step. And then we will see
a revolution unprecedented in history.
The Socialist Party
has no leaders in fact or theory. Socialism wouldn't operate that way
and neither do we. All decisions are made by common vote, all
administration is above-board and open to inspection, and all work is
voluntary. None of us is perfect, and that's why democracy works
better than leadership. Mistakes by one person are not disasters for
the many. Private interests don't count. Power doesn't exist.
Socialists are their own leaders, and they follow nobody but
themselves.
Socialism--common ownership in a leaderless
global democracy--could not work with people unwilling or unable to
think for themselves, to take responsibility, or to co-operate, but
fortunately it doesn't have to. Human beings are better than that. We
can think, and we can co-operate, and we don't need the bigots of the
Right to tell us we're worthless, nor do we need rescuing by some
"heroic" and entirely untrustworthy vanguard of the
Left.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius
advises Laertes: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."
Socialists, having to truck with the money system in any case, would
instead offer the following injunction: "Neither a follower, nor
a leader be." So the next time you are asked to vote for a
leader, do yourself a big favour. Don't.’
Paddy
Shannon
