Is Evil the Same as Totalitarian Communism? What Did Ralph Nader Discover About Corporate Executives?

Discussing the disguised murder/assassination of Brother Thomas Merton. This is a lot to digest. The world is a dangerous place, do you think in working to preserve freedom and western civilization from communism, the organization didn’t check its power? I don’t think I got an accurate history of the world in school, or of the US. Large powerful organizations can become utilitarian, forget about human suffering. I would like to go work in the children’s shelters and on humanitarian projects someday, to learn more about the problems. I don’t know how to understand immigration, I don’t know how we can improve the governments in countries with so much corruption, seems like there have been attempts but the poverty and suffering remain, and the drug cartels. Someone told me the CIA is involved in that but I don’t understand that either. Yesterday at 8:08 PM Fri 8:08 PM You sent "The world is a dangerous place"? Well, let´s see. Who says that? When I was in high school, my dad was a Brazilian diplomat who got a PhD from MIT, then jumped ship from the Brazilian dictatorship that had been installed with CIA contacts. He went to work for the United Nations in the decolonization department. I didn´t understand all the details, and as an atheist humanist, was just getting warmed up to education. My dad had rejected religion as an ex-Catholic condemning the violence of church history. However, he didn´t dwell on that so much, but focused his anger on the "Multinationals", a big part of what I now call as a rule "profiteering businesspeople." My college education was an exploration, seeking the truth of human nature, which I did kind of intuitively. From pre-med to sociology to biological anthropology. In fact, in high school I heard about the Reagan era US support of guerrilla terrorism against the Nicaraguan Sandistas who had defeated the Somoza oligarchic regime. My short high school letter said, in essence "If the US is so great, why don´t we send teachers, instead of blowing things up?" A three page letter came in from a student at a nearby school on the cancer of communism and the domino effect. Did you know, no less, that Castro in Cuba in 1959 had to decide how to proceed? US belligerence against his pro-social interests gave him no choice at that time but to ally with the social pretenses of totalitarian Soviet Russia. Just to understand a little more of the complexities. Now, like I said, in high school I didn´t know why US militarist anti-communism bothered me. I didn´t know the context and frameworks of social justice, profiteering business, and totalitarianism that well, nor the issues of hypocrisy and integrity. My first angle of clarity after majoring in Bio Anthro became eco-consumerism, mostly ecological sustainability and public health. I worked with the PIRGs for a summer and learned about Ralph Nader, Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. PIRGs means Public Interest Research Groups. The world is not that dangerous a place, and it gets more dangerous if you "live by the sword" as Jesus taught. Augustine developed ideas about "Just War" in Jesus´ legacy, not Total War. The Quaker Friends were led in being co-founded by George Fox in the 1650s with their meditative worship on the Inner Light of Christ, and the importance of individuals and women, stopping bowing to aristocrats, and protesting injustice. Quaker Friends became known for their integrity in Jesus Christ, as the well-known company name "Quaker" suggests. James Watt invented the steam engine, that UK businesspeople turned into industrial factories. Laborers in the UK were being worked so hard, even kids, that they tried to organize unions. The aristocrats in the UK banned labor unions until 1871. Robert Owen was a successful up and coming merchant around 1790 when he learned from a Christian doctor in Manchester who was trying to help kids already working under bad factory conditions. Owen made history and a reputation for his pro-labor-social efforts. He also tried to spark utopian community projects, as a Deist. He didn´t have much success himself, but inspired a group of workingpeople in Rochdale near Manchester by the 1840s along with the effects of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Those workingpeople in Rochdale started the first modern co-operative, co-owned grocery store and business model. That´s the business model with integrity in Jesus´ loving standard. Now its clear in Social Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNVzOsZt6ew&t=28s The Story of the Rochdale Pioneers Yesterday at 8:35 PM Fri 8:35 PM Farah I watched the video, I like coops Farah Farah Buck Peace activists argue against even just war. They say no war is just Yesterday at 9:01 PM Fri 9:01 PM You sent The USSR, Soviet Russia, didn´t hold its own, adding a key additional deflation of any "anti-communist" propaganda. "Anti-communist militarism" always needed to be defined in terms of Jesus´ loving integrity, and "living by the sword to die by the sword" would always have served, along with the clarity of "Just War" or not. The Vietnam conflict showed that, crucially. I already intuited these issues as someone committed to education, and starting to learn about the lawyer Nader´s term "public interest." Civil Society concerns, and seeking green businesses, like Credo Telecom and Patagonia outdoor wear were also early discoveries I made. Later, food co-op stores, credit unions, and green power co-ops. In the Catholic world, the Mondragon industrial co-op was founded in a fascinating situation after the Spanish Civil War and the victory there of the authoritarian Gen. Franco. A wounded Basque journalist became a priest, opened a polytechnic school for the underprivileged, taught co-op sociology, and was called in by students who became engineers. They wanted him to help them make their company a co-operative, co-owned one. It´s an amazing account. Knowing such things helps understand the problem of unchecked covert operation military power, or better, indulgence in its abuse that has resurfaced in different forms from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and simply the GW Bush admin´s fabrication of false premises to invade Iraq. Besides undercutting military supplies. So, absolutely, this is about education in the real world after graduation. Note how language works. You said, "large powerful organizations can become utilitarian...." In fact, it is people in organizations, with power, privileges, and pleasure they experience. I went to Africa to teach for a year, then worked in social services with substance abusers. My second agency folded after about two years because of corruption. In social services. I have cultivated the therapeutic and pro-social development approaches that social services emphasizes, along with the range of efforts in not for profit groups, and personal growth activities. When you refer to "improving governments in countries with corruption", the issue rebounds to the US itself. The activities that further pro-social culture everywhere are those engaging in co-operative, co-ownership enterprise, also called economic democracy. Mohammed Yunus´ education in western economics he took when he returned to Bangladesh and started Grameen Bank, pro-poor and pro-woman. The US credit unions have started the World Council of Credit Unions, for what good it does. Fair Trade was started by a Dutch religious services worker, extending the co-op business model. I got my masters in International Relations and had a chance to look closely at how all that works. Columbia was a doozy. Brazil is no pie in the sky situation. However, the landless workers movement here, MST, is top notch. In a neo-aristocratic culture, MST has used law and occupation squatting to claim land all over this country and establish their co-operative farms and communities all over this large country. Around 1990, both MST and an activist Catholic interdenominational project CPT won the Right Livelihood Award. https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/comisso-pastoral-da-terra-cpt/ Sure, the CIA is not a bunch of Shao Lin monks. More recent reports about that mercenary group contracting in Iraq, Blackwater?, are all about the problem of profiteering businesspeople´s ideologies. The solution involves modernizing understanding that begins with connecting the basic dots. I had to innovate this formulation, that we live in Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity for Moses et al and God in University-based, UN human right-sustainability society with structured pluralism. Key problems are the human bio-psychosocial tendencies that reflect the tendencies of ideological materialism. Economic, secular, and scientific. Individualistic materialism. Studying the historical sociology of Universities, social movements, and the specific social movement of co-operative pro-social business in particular, and the rise of UN community of nations is full of insights into pro-social democratic society with many important insights in Social Europe, and across the US in more activist communities, whether a city like San Francisco, the mayors Climate Change agreement, Vermont, or the US NCBA for co-op biz. Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) - Right Livelihood You sent Peace activists CAN, and perhaps often, are total pacificists. That has its own problems. In an era of post-Vietnam, covert ops, and the Iraq War militarism, I have no problem making the clear distinctions. Yeah, Just War is fine, like responding to Bin Laden by attacking Afghanistan. So, how did Iraq come into the picture based on totally fabricated premises with Big Oil fantasies? At a "price tag" of 100,000 plus lives and wounded, and $2.2 tn and counting? I like the Quakers, but I talk about Just War, then look at anti-communist and profiteering militarism, the Military Industrial Complex and US total lack of gun regulations, NRA style. Gandhi, the same way. I believe in Just War, and massive pacificism and thanks to Buddhism, Right Action of all kinds. Yesterday at 9:28 PM Fri 9:28 PM You sent I recommend the Right Livelihood Award´s accounts of winners, and the Goldman Environmental Prize, as well. Ursula Sladek won the GEP in 2011, as a schoolteacher in smalltown Germany, who led an organizing effort of a local co-op that did national fundraising to buy their local grid. After the USSR´s Chernobyl nuke plant blew in 1986. Germans went crazy as they can, organizing massive numbers of green power co-ops, following the Danish model, and inspiring an EU network. In 2007, before Spain or France had any gp co-ops, an amazing American story began with two 12 year olds and a mom. SUN solar co-op is now up to 15 states and a low income project. Food co-op stores are also in dozens upon dozens of places across the US, since the 1970s in many cases. Credit unions have been around since 1908, although many need a little activist input. https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org/about-us/our-history/ Our story Today at 3:02 AM 3:02 AM Farah Pollution from California's 2020 wildfires likely offset decades of air quality gains — Los Angeles Times Farah Farah Buck All the environmental policies and for nothing, because of fires. Sad. Today at 2:17 PM 2:17 PM You sent Sure, I also find that to make me feel sad. However, with the practice of spiritual self-care and loving self-talk, I also have the wisdom to understand that the obstructionism of Big Oil and Big Auto has delayed many efforts at green tech change. I´ve been aware at one level or another as I observed how much I loved biology, then the outdoors in college, and started noticing environmental protection campaigns around ORVs at Massachussetts´ beaches. My college degree in Bio Anthro, no less, involved studying the meaning of words. A guy named Stuart Chase wrote The Tyranny of Words, and actually looked at the term "communism." Etymologies can be a fun version, like "ketchup" being a Chinese word at first, then using tomatoes as an ingredient in Boston I think, with tomatoes coming from a South American indigenous word. Meanwhile, consider that FD Roosevelt said in an interview, "I´m not a communist, nor a capitalist. I´m a Christian and a democrat (small 'd')." In that way, it occurred to me that your earlier statement about the "threat of communism" reflects how devious modern greed propaganda has been. The issue of "evil" is what relates pretty directly to Jesus´ mentioning Satan, Hell, and wickedness. Making "totalitarian communism" a justification for military aggression was based on making it the enemy, and defining it as the ultimate evil. No Thomas Merton or other monastic style high integrity, as Jesus said, "Take the plank out of your own eye before dealing with the dust in others´ eyes." Scapegoating communism, and funding right wing preachers with right wing theologies that "communism is the devil" also put America´s pro-rich profiteering businesspeople off-limits. K Kruse´s book One Nation Under God discusses that, online https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030/ FD Roosevelt was influenced by the Social Gospel in his Boston high school as a rich kid. They did social missions into needy neighborhoods. Eleanor Roosevelt, no less, engaged with Jane Addams´ kind of settlement house projects in New York City. I don´t feel much admiration for the way minister Rev Fifield developed a pro-rich, anti-social gospel in Los Angeles that he presented to America´s corporate business executives already in the 1940s, according to K Kruse´s book. That was the line of development that apparently led to Nixon, Reagan and the right wing onset with Reagan of the modern full force pro-rich, anti-social GOP and the loud Religious Right. That makes me feel sad, and rather a lot more like angry. It takes useful knowledge to transform that kind of anger appropriately, and that´s what Ralph Nader, Sierra Club, the PIRGs, Greenpeace, and so on represent. Dorothy Day was a CAtholic activist of note in that way, as was Daniel Berrigan. I met one in social services, Sister Pat (Mahoney?).