I recently watched The Fog of War - 11 life lessons of Robert S Mcnamera, and after doing so I am convinced of this. It also cements the logic of my last post. So why am I convinced?
Let me explain.
The most compelling reason to watch The Fog of War (link on the left), is that it interviews the leaders of both sides of two of the most contentious conflicts in the 20th Century and CLEARLY puts to rest arguments that when we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Japan was almost ALREADY totally destroyed due to the low level air guided fire bombings BEFORE we dropped those bombs.
In the Cuban missile crisis, Castro says he DID have nuclear missiles in Cuba - when many in the military who were part of the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned about (last post) - were clamoring to go to war with him. He also DID tell Kurschev he would use them if attacked. We only averted total nuclear annihilation because someone closse to JFK had empathy for Kruschevs position.
In the Vietnam conflict, the Vietnamese people were fighting a civil war and we thought it was a war against communism and treated it so. In other words, we made crucial errors in judgment , by not seeing things though the eyes of the people there, that cost millions of lives. What Mcnamera says is that this is EXPECTED in war but with nuclear weapons, you don't get a chance to make mistakes.
He says that every military general, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they have made mistakes - we are all people and therefore fallible. I agree with this.
In other words, the problem was one of awareness and then developing empathy for your enemy's position and their thinking - to see things though their eyes - precisely what the Advocacy Corporation is specifically designed to address.
If bad policies are the problem, then we can solve that problem by increasing visibility to that problem. Today, we are actively doing the opposite.
Policies are created based on stakeholder involvement. If you do not have all the stakeholders (advocates), involved in a decision, you get a slanted policy.
If JFK did not have the other person to his side saying that there was another way to deal with Castro, (though Kruschev), we would not be here today. This other person was a stakeholder who had a voice. Thank God for that voice.
Conversely, JFK had tried to get us out of Vietnam by reducing the number of military advisors. First, the leadership of South Vietnam was assassinated. 3 weeks later, JFK was assassinated. Shortly after that Martin Luther King was assassinated after also being rather vocal about Vietnam. By removing all the advocates for a peaceful solution, we then got what SOME people wanted, WAR. What a price to pay.
Today, we have a similar situation unfolding. Read the Stratfor (Global Strategic Intelligence), reports (link on left), or look at both extreme points of view, to know how complex things REALLY are today (as they were then). STOP watching the news - it's at best entertainment and at worst, propaganda - and you are not really learning anything.
But this is not a post about the past. This is a post about the future.
This post is about how we can reduce wars. To do that, you need more than tolerance and understanding - you need advocacy and you need awareness.
I recently wrote about learning tolerance and understanding about other religions on Helium (link on left). In summary, I don't believe in tolerance. I believe in respect. Respecting people for their similarities and differences. Tolerance is about respecting an idea or belief system - NOT a person.
To respect others you need to understand others. To understand others you need to increase your level of awareness to encompass their world view. THAT is the problem.
IT IS NOT PROFITABLE TO INCREASE PEOPLE'S AWARENESS
In fact, corporations and governments regularly prey and DEPEND upon people's LACK of awareness so they can continue to do EXACTLY what they want to do. Do you really think that when Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle" about chopped off body parts being found in the food people ate, the meat packing/preparation companies just said "ok, we will fix that"? No, there needed to be outcry from INFORMED people and this is how the FDA was formed.
Do you really think that it matters much if you sit in a room with a large group of Iranians and come an understanding of one another parting with hugs and the next day your government attacks their homeland and kills their relatives? THIS is what we are talking about here.
The problem we have is - we don't see their relatives get killed (that's WHY we have embedded journalists - do you really think that if people had to SEE people dying that would go good for the war effort?). We are misinformed deliberately by key stakeholders who benefit from decisions made, so the battle is really over YOUR heart and YOUR mind. Win that battle and every lie dies at the altar of truth.
I can assure you we are not going to agree on a lot of things (remember there is some weird stigma in society where religion and politics are off limits), but what we can agree on is that we have a common goal:Allow the information in our society to flow freely and let people make up their own minds about things with ALL the other information available to them
The Advocacy Corporation - protects the advocate - YOU are the advocate.
It does not matter what is going in the world or what truths or lies that are present - with advocates - with YOUR involvement whatever truths or lies can be identified by an informed and active citizenry. We are neither informed or active. With the creation of the Advocacy Corporation, I intend to change both.
What YOU can do TODAY is become more aware and more inclusive in your world view taking in a wide variety of sources of information and exposing yourself to people critical of your ideas then wars for the wrong reasons will end.
Create the Advocacy Corporation and ensure that it BECOMES profitable to increase your level of awareness and the wrong reasons for doing things and the wrong things we are doing, will get weeded out faster...
