N
noise
Guest
I got this in an e-mail yesterday from a friend and looked for a link on this guys site (yesterday) but didn't find one. I didn't really do much research on him, though a few of his works have been on rense.com. My thoughts on it were that contagions and psychopathy could easily fall into this article as well. The friend said the article came to him through my-space and I'm kind of curious if anyone has heard of this guy. It's a pretty good article in my opinion but that doesn't mean that others might not discern something different.
------------------------------
Counter-terrorism, Antibiotics, and the Myth of Contagion
by Sean Donahue
Back when the war in Afghanistan began, Donald Rumsfeld said that the U.S. strategy in fighting "terrorists" was to "drain the swamp they live in."
Besides revealing the racism at the core of our foreign policy, Rumsfeld's malarial metaphor reveals strong links between our culture's approach to terrorism and its approach to disease: We are conditioned to think that the greatest threats to our bodies and our nation come from outside, and so we try to come up with defenses to protect the integrity of their borders. When we're attacked, we try to wipe out the attackers with powerful weapons -- be they antibiotics or cruise missiles.
But again and again, in medicine and foreign policy, those weapons fail to prevent attacks from coming, and often increase the instability that created the problems to begin with. And all our focus on defending ourselves from invasion and infiltration prevents us from looking at the imbalances in our bodies and in the body politic that undermine our strength.
The Germ Theory of Disease
The theory that our diseases are caused by tiny creatures infiltrating our bodies is a recent one, advanced by Louis Pasteur in the late nineteenth century. Its rooted in a mechanistic theory of biology which sees our bodies as well ordered machines whose function is suddenly disrupted by the presence of contaminants that jam its cogs. It ignores the reality that rather than being discrete entities, our bodies are a complex community of many kinds of cells, some of which can't survive on their own and some of which function independently but symbioticly. Biologist Lynn Margulis has convincingly argued that the individual components of plant and animal cells were once independent, free-roaming bacteria who came together to create new kinds of living communities. The distinction between "germ cells" and "healthy cells" is an arbitrary one.
Pasteur had his detractors among his contemporaries, and modern ecology and immunology are beginning to prove them right. Stephen Harrod Buhner writes in The Lost Language of Plants that:
"Pasteur's germ theory was not the only one; there were many competing schools of thought at the time. Researchers such as Max von Pettinkofer and Elie Metchinkoff insisted that it was not the bacteria that caused disease, but an interruption in the normal healthy ecology of the body that allowed pathogenic bacteria to infect it. To prove their point Pettinkofer in Bavaria, Mechtinikoff in Russia, and a number of others around the world ingested liquids filled with millions of cholera bacilli. Other than experiencing a mild diarrhea none became ill. Their point was that human beings live in a sea of bacteria all the time, and the human body has learned throughout its long development to deal with them. Something must be upsetting the body's normal ability to respond to such bacilli and that is what allows them to grow unimpeded. That is the source of disease."
But rather than seeking to identify, understand, and correct those imbalances, conventional medicine identifies bacteria as the problem and seeks to eradicate them. An infected wound and a case of bronchitis are treated in much the same way.
In the same sense, discourses about terrorism and insurgency ignore the differences between a wide variety of violent and unstable situations, justifying governments' efforts to correct them by eliminating the people and organizations they believe to be responsible for the violence. As Colombian sociologist Ricardo Vargas Mesa noted shortly after September 11:
"'Global terrorism' is a loaded term that both hides realities and legitimizes policy decisions. In fact, those decisions are often pre-determined by the term's very use. [ . .. ]To begin with, it hides the political motivations behind dramatic acts of terror. Global terrorism is so shocking that it causes most to ignore the particularities of the conflicts that engender it - conflicts which generally involve multiple actors, dissimilar positions and in general a complexity of relations. The term has a sense of 'the present' that ignores historical trajectories. Time is thrown out of order. . [ . . . ] It also confuses a means of irregular war, 'terror,' with an end in itself. It gives the appearance that there are no fundamental causes of conflict: what exist are terrorists, agents of insecurity, terrorist sanctuaries."
Asking why people are angry and desperate enough to hijack airplanes and blow up buildings is taboo. And doctors are too busy trying to cure infections to spend much time looking at what conditions in the body allowed bacteria to start multiplying out of control. And so the doctors and the generals keep attacking the same problems with the same methods over and over again -- never asking whether the methods they are using make future attacks more or less likely.
Indiscriminate Weapons
A lack of discrimination in diagnosing diseases and imbalances leads to the use of indiscriminate methods to address very different situations -- and those methods tend to involve the use of indiscriminate weapons that exact heavy "collateral damage."
In the case of bacterial infections, conventional medicine favors the use of antibiotic drugs that kill all manner of bacteria. Penicillin will kill streptococcus bacteria in the throat just as readily as it will kill any bacteria moving into a gash in the knee. The problem is that it will also kill the bacteria in the gut that are essential to digestion. And gut function is closely linked to immune function. So after a course of antibiotics, the body is more vulnerable to disease than it was before.
Likewise, a cruise missile attack on a suspected "terrorist" stronghold will inevitably kill many of the "terrorists'" neighbors. A house to house search for "insurgents" terrorizes neighborhood residents and almost always leads to innocent people being arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. The fabric of the community is disrupted, creating more instability, and brutality creates rage that often provokes a violent response. Brutal "counter-insurgency" operations from Fallujah to Sadr City have radicalized many Iraqis and destroyed community institutions that once helped to restrain violence, creating more "terrorists" than the military killed or captured.
Resistance is Fertile
Living systems are almost infinitely creative and adaptable. Under attack they come up with more and more ways to survive.
Buhner describes how antibiotics spur bacteria to develop and pass on new strategies of resistance:
"Bacteria have the capacity to generate scores of unique chemical compounds. As soon as a bacterium encounters an antibiotic, it begins to generate possible responses. This takes time, usually bacterial generations. But bacteria live a lot more quickly than we do: a new generation occurs every twenty minutes in many species, some 500,000 times faster than people. And in that quickened time scale, bacteria have found a lot of solutions to antibiotics. [ . . .]
"Once a bacterium develops a method for countering an antibiotic, it systematically begins to pass it on to other bacteria at an extremely rapid rate of speed. In response to the pressure of antibiotics, bacteria and the first thing that they do is share resistance information, using a wide variety of resistance mechanisms."
In fact, the presence of antibiotics provokes such rapid evolution in bacteria that they often develop resistance to drugs they haven't yet encountered. In one experiment, the E. coli bacteria in the feces of chickens who had been fed low doses of tetracycline were found to be resistant to tetracycline, ampicillin, streptomycin, and sulfanamides. This resistance was passed on to the E. coli in the digestive tracts of a nearby group of chickens who hadn't been fed antibiotics, and eventually to the bacteria in the guts of the members of a nearby farm family who had no direct exposure to the chickens.
Its worth noting, as Buhner does, that E. coli bacteria, which occur naturally in our guts, were not pathogenic until very recently, when the bacteria picked up genetic material from Shigella bacteria and evolved into a deadly new strain, E. coli O157:H7. He quotes the disturbing conclusions of researcher Marguerite Neill, who writes that:
"Judicious reflection on the meaning of this finding suggests a larger significance -- that E.coli O157:H7 is a messenger, bringing an unwelcome message that in mankind's battle to conquer infectious disease, the opposing army is being replenished with fresh replacements."
The parallels to counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategy are clear. Attempts to control dissent and quell unrest through violence and repression inevitably spawn new forms of more violent resistance:
* In 1962, concerned that popular movements in Colombia's cities and small groups of armed militants in remote areas could combine to form a full-blown armed insurgency, a team led by U.S. Special Forces Commander, Gen. William Yarborough, urged the formation of armed paramilitary groups to "perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." The Colombian government adopted the U.S. recommendations, launching Plan Lazo, a brutal campaign against mostly nonviolent dissidents, and carried out bombing raids against rural militants. The repression spurred the development of two Marxist guerilla groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which continue to fight today.
* British repression of Northern Ireland's nonviolent civil rights movement, especially the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre of 13 unarmed civil rights marchers by British paratroopers, spurred a resurgence of the Irish Republican Army's armed campaign to drive the British out of Ulster.
* Israel's repression of open resistance by Palestinians during the first Infitada in the Occupied Territories led to a rise in clandestine, armed resistance, including the widespread use of suicide bombers by later Palestinian resistance movements.
And, of course, the widespread use of "Improvised Explosive Devices" and other "terrorist" tactics by insurgents in Iraq can be easily traced to U.S. efforts to silence most other forms of resistance against the occupation.
Living Systems Can't Be Controlled
In both politics and medicine, war is a failed metaphor rooted in the illusion of separateness and the delusion of control. Living systems, be they groups of people or communities of bacteria, are dynamic, constantly evolving. Rigid structures, be they the fixed molecular structures of pharmaceuticals or the mechanistic strategies of soldiers and police, can never succeed in containing them, destroying them, or stopping their spread. Only dynamic responses that restore the imbalances that gave rise to the problems at hand can restore health to bodies, communities, and societies.
Sean Donahue is a poet and freelance journalist who divides his time between central Maine and eastern Massachusetts. He can be reached at seandonahuepoet@(omitted but can be found on his site I guess). Much of his work is available online at _http://www.seandonahue.org .
-------------------------------
Can anyone else see this in terms of psychopathy as germs/contagion? Seems it could be a template/quotable material for comparing war/terrorism/psychopathy and disease. Any thoughts?
------------------------------
Counter-terrorism, Antibiotics, and the Myth of Contagion
by Sean Donahue
Back when the war in Afghanistan began, Donald Rumsfeld said that the U.S. strategy in fighting "terrorists" was to "drain the swamp they live in."
Besides revealing the racism at the core of our foreign policy, Rumsfeld's malarial metaphor reveals strong links between our culture's approach to terrorism and its approach to disease: We are conditioned to think that the greatest threats to our bodies and our nation come from outside, and so we try to come up with defenses to protect the integrity of their borders. When we're attacked, we try to wipe out the attackers with powerful weapons -- be they antibiotics or cruise missiles.
But again and again, in medicine and foreign policy, those weapons fail to prevent attacks from coming, and often increase the instability that created the problems to begin with. And all our focus on defending ourselves from invasion and infiltration prevents us from looking at the imbalances in our bodies and in the body politic that undermine our strength.
The Germ Theory of Disease
The theory that our diseases are caused by tiny creatures infiltrating our bodies is a recent one, advanced by Louis Pasteur in the late nineteenth century. Its rooted in a mechanistic theory of biology which sees our bodies as well ordered machines whose function is suddenly disrupted by the presence of contaminants that jam its cogs. It ignores the reality that rather than being discrete entities, our bodies are a complex community of many kinds of cells, some of which can't survive on their own and some of which function independently but symbioticly. Biologist Lynn Margulis has convincingly argued that the individual components of plant and animal cells were once independent, free-roaming bacteria who came together to create new kinds of living communities. The distinction between "germ cells" and "healthy cells" is an arbitrary one.
Pasteur had his detractors among his contemporaries, and modern ecology and immunology are beginning to prove them right. Stephen Harrod Buhner writes in The Lost Language of Plants that:
"Pasteur's germ theory was not the only one; there were many competing schools of thought at the time. Researchers such as Max von Pettinkofer and Elie Metchinkoff insisted that it was not the bacteria that caused disease, but an interruption in the normal healthy ecology of the body that allowed pathogenic bacteria to infect it. To prove their point Pettinkofer in Bavaria, Mechtinikoff in Russia, and a number of others around the world ingested liquids filled with millions of cholera bacilli. Other than experiencing a mild diarrhea none became ill. Their point was that human beings live in a sea of bacteria all the time, and the human body has learned throughout its long development to deal with them. Something must be upsetting the body's normal ability to respond to such bacilli and that is what allows them to grow unimpeded. That is the source of disease."
But rather than seeking to identify, understand, and correct those imbalances, conventional medicine identifies bacteria as the problem and seeks to eradicate them. An infected wound and a case of bronchitis are treated in much the same way.
In the same sense, discourses about terrorism and insurgency ignore the differences between a wide variety of violent and unstable situations, justifying governments' efforts to correct them by eliminating the people and organizations they believe to be responsible for the violence. As Colombian sociologist Ricardo Vargas Mesa noted shortly after September 11:
"'Global terrorism' is a loaded term that both hides realities and legitimizes policy decisions. In fact, those decisions are often pre-determined by the term's very use. [ . .. ]To begin with, it hides the political motivations behind dramatic acts of terror. Global terrorism is so shocking that it causes most to ignore the particularities of the conflicts that engender it - conflicts which generally involve multiple actors, dissimilar positions and in general a complexity of relations. The term has a sense of 'the present' that ignores historical trajectories. Time is thrown out of order. . [ . . . ] It also confuses a means of irregular war, 'terror,' with an end in itself. It gives the appearance that there are no fundamental causes of conflict: what exist are terrorists, agents of insecurity, terrorist sanctuaries."
Asking why people are angry and desperate enough to hijack airplanes and blow up buildings is taboo. And doctors are too busy trying to cure infections to spend much time looking at what conditions in the body allowed bacteria to start multiplying out of control. And so the doctors and the generals keep attacking the same problems with the same methods over and over again -- never asking whether the methods they are using make future attacks more or less likely.
Indiscriminate Weapons
A lack of discrimination in diagnosing diseases and imbalances leads to the use of indiscriminate methods to address very different situations -- and those methods tend to involve the use of indiscriminate weapons that exact heavy "collateral damage."
In the case of bacterial infections, conventional medicine favors the use of antibiotic drugs that kill all manner of bacteria. Penicillin will kill streptococcus bacteria in the throat just as readily as it will kill any bacteria moving into a gash in the knee. The problem is that it will also kill the bacteria in the gut that are essential to digestion. And gut function is closely linked to immune function. So after a course of antibiotics, the body is more vulnerable to disease than it was before.
Likewise, a cruise missile attack on a suspected "terrorist" stronghold will inevitably kill many of the "terrorists'" neighbors. A house to house search for "insurgents" terrorizes neighborhood residents and almost always leads to innocent people being arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. The fabric of the community is disrupted, creating more instability, and brutality creates rage that often provokes a violent response. Brutal "counter-insurgency" operations from Fallujah to Sadr City have radicalized many Iraqis and destroyed community institutions that once helped to restrain violence, creating more "terrorists" than the military killed or captured.
Resistance is Fertile
Living systems are almost infinitely creative and adaptable. Under attack they come up with more and more ways to survive.
Buhner describes how antibiotics spur bacteria to develop and pass on new strategies of resistance:
"Bacteria have the capacity to generate scores of unique chemical compounds. As soon as a bacterium encounters an antibiotic, it begins to generate possible responses. This takes time, usually bacterial generations. But bacteria live a lot more quickly than we do: a new generation occurs every twenty minutes in many species, some 500,000 times faster than people. And in that quickened time scale, bacteria have found a lot of solutions to antibiotics. [ . . .]
"Once a bacterium develops a method for countering an antibiotic, it systematically begins to pass it on to other bacteria at an extremely rapid rate of speed. In response to the pressure of antibiotics, bacteria and the first thing that they do is share resistance information, using a wide variety of resistance mechanisms."
In fact, the presence of antibiotics provokes such rapid evolution in bacteria that they often develop resistance to drugs they haven't yet encountered. In one experiment, the E. coli bacteria in the feces of chickens who had been fed low doses of tetracycline were found to be resistant to tetracycline, ampicillin, streptomycin, and sulfanamides. This resistance was passed on to the E. coli in the digestive tracts of a nearby group of chickens who hadn't been fed antibiotics, and eventually to the bacteria in the guts of the members of a nearby farm family who had no direct exposure to the chickens.
Its worth noting, as Buhner does, that E. coli bacteria, which occur naturally in our guts, were not pathogenic until very recently, when the bacteria picked up genetic material from Shigella bacteria and evolved into a deadly new strain, E. coli O157:H7. He quotes the disturbing conclusions of researcher Marguerite Neill, who writes that:
"Judicious reflection on the meaning of this finding suggests a larger significance -- that E.coli O157:H7 is a messenger, bringing an unwelcome message that in mankind's battle to conquer infectious disease, the opposing army is being replenished with fresh replacements."
The parallels to counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategy are clear. Attempts to control dissent and quell unrest through violence and repression inevitably spawn new forms of more violent resistance:
* In 1962, concerned that popular movements in Colombia's cities and small groups of armed militants in remote areas could combine to form a full-blown armed insurgency, a team led by U.S. Special Forces Commander, Gen. William Yarborough, urged the formation of armed paramilitary groups to "perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." The Colombian government adopted the U.S. recommendations, launching Plan Lazo, a brutal campaign against mostly nonviolent dissidents, and carried out bombing raids against rural militants. The repression spurred the development of two Marxist guerilla groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which continue to fight today.
* British repression of Northern Ireland's nonviolent civil rights movement, especially the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre of 13 unarmed civil rights marchers by British paratroopers, spurred a resurgence of the Irish Republican Army's armed campaign to drive the British out of Ulster.
* Israel's repression of open resistance by Palestinians during the first Infitada in the Occupied Territories led to a rise in clandestine, armed resistance, including the widespread use of suicide bombers by later Palestinian resistance movements.
And, of course, the widespread use of "Improvised Explosive Devices" and other "terrorist" tactics by insurgents in Iraq can be easily traced to U.S. efforts to silence most other forms of resistance against the occupation.
Living Systems Can't Be Controlled
In both politics and medicine, war is a failed metaphor rooted in the illusion of separateness and the delusion of control. Living systems, be they groups of people or communities of bacteria, are dynamic, constantly evolving. Rigid structures, be they the fixed molecular structures of pharmaceuticals or the mechanistic strategies of soldiers and police, can never succeed in containing them, destroying them, or stopping their spread. Only dynamic responses that restore the imbalances that gave rise to the problems at hand can restore health to bodies, communities, and societies.
Sean Donahue is a poet and freelance journalist who divides his time between central Maine and eastern Massachusetts. He can be reached at seandonahuepoet@(omitted but can be found on his site I guess). Much of his work is available online at _http://www.seandonahue.org .
-------------------------------
Can anyone else see this in terms of psychopathy as germs/contagion? Seems it could be a template/quotable material for comparing war/terrorism/psychopathy and disease. Any thoughts?
