Take a bite out of this 'reality sandwich'. Charles Shaw is spot on.

To learn more about Charles Shaw (highly recommended) visit, www.realitysandwich.com

This little snipit is from his book, also posted online, called, "Exile Nation." It's about his life in prison for a drug charge. Listen to the wisdom he has to offer.


You'll just have to read one of the paragraphs, then, most likely, you'll be hooked.

Have fun.




The Gaza “pullout” is in its seventh day, and it has dominated the news. That is to say, the Israeli point of view has dominated what coverage is being offered. It’s difficult to listen to these clearly fanatical—and I mean that literally, Likkud and other far-Right and ultra-orthodox religious factions make up the bulk of them—settlers (ex-settlers now) histrionically screaming about the Nazis and Israeli government betrayals. One settler said, “these are dark days in Jewish history.”

The appropriate term for the reaction I had hearing that phrase uttered is called “cognitive dissonance.” It’s the phenomena that occurs when the mind holds two contradictory truths or ideas at the same time, generally creating feelings of discomfort, frustration, sadness, or rage, and often, over time, resulting in a kind of neurosis. I fail to see how Israel—a very rich, nuclear armed, heavily defended nation enjoying the highest level of prosperity for its people—is in any darkness except for that of its own creation. Perhaps the Hassid who wailed this into the camera was projecting a sort of collective shame as a reaction to his own cognitive dissonance knowing full well that his people invaded and occupied Palestinian land, and have brutalized the Palestinian people for 60 years. No self-respecting person—Jew or Gentile—can look you in the eye and deny that. In the case of Israeli Jews, the oppressed has become the oppressor. You can quibble about how and why Israel is in the position it is in, but you can’t deny what has been done. You want to prevaricate and deflect by bringing up terrorist bombings, remember that your war of independence began when you bombed the British headquarters at the King David hotel, and remember that there were no suicide bombings until there was an occupation.

Worse still, how do you sleep at night knowing that you use the atrocities committed by the Nazis against your people to justify your treatment of the Palestinians, and threats to annihilate your Muslim neighbors? When will you learn that the only way to break the cycle of violence and terror your people have suffered is to not turn into the very thing you have hated throughout your existence.

Of course, there are those that have learned this. But are they interviewing anyone from the full half of the Israeli population who oppose the occupation? No. They only show the position of the Likudniks. And not one Palestinian on the street has been interviewed that I have seen. By the nature of this coverage, I can’t see how things will ever get better. Watching the IDF literally pull Hassidic Jews from their temple kicking and screaming, covered in the blue paint of the riot cannons, I can’t even begin to fathom how they will remove 300,000 settlers from the West Bank without an all-out civil war.


August 20, 2005

Kate O’Hare was sentenced to five years in prison for her political opposition to the US entering the First World War. She was convicted under the draconian “Espionage Act,” “Trading with the Enemy Act,” and the “Sedition Act,” which made any dissent against the war a high crime. O’Hare was jailed with famed anarchist and dissident Emma Goldman, who wrote that the Espionage Act, “turned the country into a lunatic asylum, with every state and federal official, as well as a large part of the civilian population running amuck” as non-combatants and conscientious objectors from all social classes began to fill the prisons and jails. O’Hare published detailed accounts of the prison conditions she and Goldman experienced in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, which eventually led to reforms.

O’Hare wrote after the fact:

“The results gained by placing many hundreds of political prisoners in our penitentiaries have not been quite those sought by the political administration…as a by-effect, the searchlight of intelligent study and keen analysis has been turned into the darkest and most noisome depths of our social system—the prisons… The political prisoners, in common with all sincere students, found that the prisons are the cesspools of our social system and that into them drain the most helpless, hopeless products of our body, brain, and soul-destroying struggle for existence. There is no doubt that it was a good thing for our country that a large group of well-educated, intelligent, socially-minded people should have gone to prison…if I were ruler of the universe, I would see to it that many more respectable folk went to prison, for the good of their souls and the welfare of the country.”

In these days of martial legislation like the Patriot Act, when nonviolent demonstrators are herded into temporary prison camps and razor-wire “Free Speech” zones and a million citizens are incarcerated for morality crimes of a victimless nature, it seems obvious, when contemplating O’Hare’s words, what my role should be once, as one Shepherd said to the other Shepherd, I get the flock out of here. If it is only to create awareness, then that will be honoring my duty to the “general welfare.”

Victimless drug crimes are political crimes. They are the criminalization of one’s lifestyle and personal choices, as well as the direct violation of the sanctity of one’s own physical and cognitive self. In this regard, we of this vein are all political prisoners.


August 21, 2005

“The war altered every aspect of American life. American capitalism emerged a hero for its remarkable accomplishments in providing the sinews of war, not only for the United State Army and Navy but for the Allies as well. Its prestige was enormously enhanced, or perhaps, considering the bitter criticism to which it had been subjected since the Civil War, it might be more accurate to say that the reputation of Capitalism was not so much enhanced as created. Moreover, Capitalists elated by their new popularity and their generally favorable press, took the offensive against those individuals and groups reckless enough to criticize them. Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers hired hundreds of highly paid publicists to proclaim the virtues of business, big and small, and to denounce their opponents as unpatriotic and, worst of all, as “reds,” unwitting dupes of Russia or wily agents of Bolsheviks. It was a novel notion—the idea that criticizing capitalism and capitalists constituted subversive activity. What had been, almost since the beginning of the Republic, a common exercise now fell under a ban. Criticizing capitalism could (and often did) result in the critics being clapped in jail.”

– Taken from “WWI: America Enters the War” in A People’s History of the Progressive Era by Page Smith

Not only were publicists hired to sell capitalism, they were also hired to sell the war. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud who is largely credited with inventing “Public Relations,” helped Woodrow Wilson “sell” World War I to the American public, essentially by inventing a marketing slogan: "Making the World Safe for Democracy." Bernays openly acknowledged that PR “is really just propaganda, but we couldn't use that word because the Germans already had." If you want to see something that will blow you away, see the BBC documentary The Century of the Self. It basically explains how consumerism was invented and promulgated as a means of social control. Think you’re living in a free market? Think again. The choices you think you are freely making when you purchase consumer goods are in reality a carefully calculated exploitation of your baser instincts, done as a means of getting you to buy into a larger system of control without you knowing.

Using his Uncle’s theories of the unconscious, particularly those that purported to govern the sex drive, Bernays showed American corporations how to make people buy material goods they didn't need by connecting those products to their unconscious desires and unmet needs. He used the tremendous influence he gained (through making a few people incredibly rich and powerful) to propose that the same principles be used politically to control the masses, who were deemed volatile, unruly creatures governed by hidden passions. Maintaining control was the primary goal of the social engineers, and consumerism and other material indulgence became a formidable tool. Slowly strip away the ability for people to take care of themselves, one-by-one turning each necessary survival skill over to the marketplace—growing and preparing food, building a home, making furniture, clothing, even our faith and our pastimes—which are then sold back to us piecemeal, to keep us helpless and dependent, with lots of distractions and medications to help keep things running smoothly like a machine, key word: machine.

This social-control-through-indulgence model was what Huxley was excoriating in Brave New World. It was a critique of consumerism, conformity, collectivism, and the vapidity of a culture based in pleasure seeking. There, freethinking and human attachment was either outlawed or genetically modified out of the human species. In its place was a dumbed-down class-based society overrun by high-tech entertainment, sexual promiscuity and a powerful, all-purpose intoxicant/narcotic/dissociative drug called Soma, which was used to quell any unpleasant feelings. Golly gee whillickers, Batman, why does this scenario sound soooooooooooo familiar?

It’s interesting to note that the two major future dystopia novels, Brave New World and 1984, portray societies where the religious or spiritual self has been hijacked and transferred to other social-control constructs. In 1984 the oppressed citizens of Oceania, clamoring for survival in their bombed-out world of austerity, worship the State through a cult of personality built around the Stalinistic image of “Big Brother.” The purportedly free citizens of Brave New World, unwittingly enslaved in a never-ending state of adolescent indulgence, shrouded in ignorance of one’s own history, worship the market in the form of “Our Ford,” the god of industrialization.

Carl Jung, Freud's student and eventual rival, thought Freud was missing the point altogether. He thought compulsive behavior addresses a spiritual loss or deficiency. Because the addictive experience is mimetic of the spiritual experience, you can have an imitation of bliss or oneness through indulgence, but it doesn't last. Jung believed only a true spiritual awakening will end this feeling of emptiness.

Likewise, only a global spiritual awakening will end the indulgence that is ravaging the planet

Last Edited by Spike on 03/25/2010 12:55 PM