Former Marine Sgt. Saw Violence As Top Tool In Hands of An Agent of Change
by Smedley Butler Jones, CPW News Service
Videos of the former Marine Sgt., Gavin Long, have surfaced providing a window into the Baton Rouge cop killer's mental processes.
"Mr. Long references George Washington's leadership of the American rebellion against the British and notes that the American populace was right to support a war for liberty and freedom. He also notes that when it came to Blacks the same principle did not apply. Was he correct? Yes and no. Mahatmas Ghandi was considered "black" by his British oppressors and he managed to free the entire nation of India without violence. Jesus of Nazareth had no standing army and did not counsel violence, either. Spain and England had outlawed slavery before the United States. The history of Wilberforce's challenge to slavery in England provides the historical background to Britain's thinking on slavery. Spain had repealed slavery of Native Americans in their New Laws of 1542. Spain abolished slavery of Africans in Cuba in 1866 and in Puerto Rico in 1873," said historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth who is troubled by and, yet, understands how Mr. Gavin felt about the injustices in life.
"Trained as a Marine to kill in what two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, called "the racket of war" that had even Col. Theodore "Ted" Westhusing, West Point professor and leading ethicist who confronted General David Petraeus about the corruption he saw in Iraq in the Green Zone in 2005 becoming the subject of the first chapter of Christian T. Miller's book Blood Money. It is not surprising that another soldier like Gavin Long would return home feeling sullied by the experience and angry at white Europeans, but Europeans aren't monolithic. Consider the Hatfields and McCoys. If Long was suffering from PTSD, and who wouldn't be, how do you sanitize, legitimize and normalize such a god awful clustered copulation as war based on such a scummy national bamboozle?" asked Wigglesworth. "The warrior returns and the local police pay the price!" he added.
"Has violence worked in history as a catalyst for independence?" asked Wigglesworth. "For a while. William Wallace and Robert Bruce in Scotland. Yes. Sometimes, for a while, but its a painful, costly and ultimately unworkable solution for the planet. Violence leaves huge ruts in the physical and emotional landscape. There are still undetonated bombs in London and Dresden and there are likely more Sgt. Longs in the shadows. Hard feelings. Vengeance. Retribution. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Ghandi had wisely said 'If we always practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth soon all of us will blind and toothless,' said Wigglesworth who wishes he had been able to talk with men like Long and others before they went over the edge.
Wigglesworth is saddened by Gavin Long's rush to judgment in Baton Rouge and for his apparent inability to get the help he needed to thread a positive course through the perplexities of modern life and to become a long-term agent of change. "Gavin Long had married and divorced, saw himself as a life coach and instructor making, he said, a book tour in Dallas in the days before going to Baton Rouge to kill three cops, one an African American who by all accounts was a peace officer not a Black life taker," said Wigglesworth.
This is a bizarre time in which we live according to Wigglesworth. It is time that local communities of like minded people double down on education of the citizenry in an atmosphere of nonthreatening acceptance and compassion according to Wigglesworth.
"Was Gavin Long correct in saying that 'blood and revenue' is all that the power elites care about? Yes and no. Wars are waged by power elites and fought by common people who do the majority of the bleeding and dying. Consider our Civil War. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest saw war as a waste of human life, started and then abandoned the KKK because of its violence and in his later years appears to have become like Governor George Wallace, but Forrest did one important thing that most Blacks in the U.S., Anglos, too, don't know. He apparently surmised....figured out by watching Braxton Bragg, Jefferson Davis and perhaps Caleb Cushing.... that the Civil War was fought not for the traditional two major motives, abolition of slavery on the one hand and states rights on the other, but for a rail route to the Pacific and to the China Trade beyond including the poppy fields of the Middle East. One rail route was across the North, the other across the flat Great Southwest from Savannah to San Diego that Jeff Davis laid out in 1850-51. That's a lot to go into here, but suffice it to say that we are still paying the personal and political prices assessed to that third motive in things like unending wars on terror and drugs....which are deeply intertwined in that third motive for which the power elites fought while controlling the national myth, kept their motive out of the press while the common men fought for the first two motives....the high moral ground over which people will fight and die....essentially for freedom. The nation is, as Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Smedley Butler counseled us, built on the racket of war as are all great nations in history, but that was history and what worked in the past cannot sustain life on planet earth in the future. Empires practice imperialism and imperialism uses weaponry to extend the borders. Can this sustain life on planet earth? It didn't sustain life in Germany in the 1940's, in Japan, in Italy and it cannot sustain life in the U.S. if that is the mission upon which the nation is solely focused," said Wigglesworth who sees weapons, oil and opioids all part of the military industrial complex that is rushing planet earth into the abyss of global warming.
"Any freedom fighter wishing to replace one alpha male image with another alpha male image is seeking a return to the law of the jungle. That was never Charles Darwin's image of survival, anyway. "With increasingly deadly and indiscriminate weapons in our hands the law of the jungle is the door to destruction. 'Only the strong survive' was NOT Darwin's contribution to understanding history and apex predators are quickly going extinct. My apologies to Quentin Terantino and D'jango Unchanged, but N.N. Barth's article "Tarantino Drinks Koch" captures the essence of that myth, too. Those who live by the sword, like Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, John Joel Glanton and even abolitionist John Brown whose "secret six" backer from Boston, munitions mogul George Luther Stearns who longed for war, faced the same reality. The law of adaptation is about adaptation. Survival does not go to the brute, but to the one able to adapt and change. David slew Goliath on that principle, but stuck in the reality of his humanity Biblical King David could not really usher in a Golden Age, unless you consider that last-born David had influenced the evolution of future Western philosophy, the seeding of the Magna Carta and egalitarian principles until in America Washington and the First Continental Congress instructed Thomas Jefferson to write out of U.S. law the primogeniture rules that put and kept kings on thrones....be they Tudors or Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, Zulus or Saudi royals which some recent American political dynasties seem to have forgotten was the hallmark of life in the New World. Sharia law does not challenge primogeniture rule of the Saudi royals. Tribal rule does not either. Gangs don't either. To the degree that the U.S. leaves the principle the self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal we return to the law of the jungle and gang rule. Within that imagery, thank you Darwin, we see that the survival of the African American community in whatever new and threatening land they found themselves in from the Serengeti to the jungles of Central and South America or the Western plains of North America was based not on raw strength and force, but mostly on subtle change and the nurturing acceptance of the matriarch of the clan who is often under appreciated and discounted as the bigger source of male and female makeovers," said Wigglesworth.
"Look," said Wigglesworth, "when it comes to the male hormones, testosterone provides the alpha male impulses and estrogen provides the feminine receptivity. Mother earth could nurture us all for billions of years if we're adapting. Even in women testosterone is the driving force for procreation so you could rightly argue that the males are drilling themselves, but if we are only about drilling down on everything and everyone we will soon kiss our existence goodnight," said Wigglesworth.
"You can argue that William Wallace and Robert Bruce's advances to freedom came by swinging their Claymores against the heads of Englishmen, but it wasn't until the British and Scots put aside their Claymore swords and started swinging golf clubs together that their real powers were increased and their joint fortunes improved. I'm not a golfer, but didn't Tiger Wood prove the point? But it's the same for everyone, everywhere. Now we have to learn how to put aside the things that are kissing our existence goodnight and learn to play a more civilized game, together," said Wigglesworth. "The goal in golf is not chopping up the grass, but in dropping the ball into the cup and in getting more and more people to play the same game because its a better world when it's not a battlefield," said Wigglesworth.
by Smedley Butler Jones, CPW News Service
Videos of the former Marine Sgt., Gavin Long, have surfaced providing a window into the Baton Rouge cop killer's mental processes.
"Mr. Long references George Washington's leadership of the American rebellion against the British and notes that the American populace was right to support a war for liberty and freedom. He also notes that when it came to Blacks the same principle did not apply. Was he correct? Yes and no. Mahatmas Ghandi was considered "black" by his British oppressors and he managed to free the entire nation of India without violence. Jesus of Nazareth had no standing army and did not counsel violence, either. Spain and England had outlawed slavery before the United States. The history of Wilberforce's challenge to slavery in England provides the historical background to Britain's thinking on slavery. Spain had repealed slavery of Native Americans in their New Laws of 1542. Spain abolished slavery of Africans in Cuba in 1866 and in Puerto Rico in 1873," said historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth who is troubled by and, yet, understands how Mr. Gavin felt about the injustices in life.
"Trained as a Marine to kill in what two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, called "the racket of war" that had even Col. Theodore "Ted" Westhusing, West Point professor and leading ethicist who confronted General David Petraeus about the corruption he saw in Iraq in the Green Zone in 2005 becoming the subject of the first chapter of Christian T. Miller's book Blood Money. It is not surprising that another soldier like Gavin Long would return home feeling sullied by the experience and angry at white Europeans, but Europeans aren't monolithic. Consider the Hatfields and McCoys. If Long was suffering from PTSD, and who wouldn't be, how do you sanitize, legitimize and normalize such a god awful clustered copulation as war based on such a scummy national bamboozle?" asked Wigglesworth. "The warrior returns and the local police pay the price!" he added.
"Has violence worked in history as a catalyst for independence?" asked Wigglesworth. "For a while. William Wallace and Robert Bruce in Scotland. Yes. Sometimes, for a while, but its a painful, costly and ultimately unworkable solution for the planet. Violence leaves huge ruts in the physical and emotional landscape. There are still undetonated bombs in London and Dresden and there are likely more Sgt. Longs in the shadows. Hard feelings. Vengeance. Retribution. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Ghandi had wisely said 'If we always practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth soon all of us will blind and toothless,' said Wigglesworth who wishes he had been able to talk with men like Long and others before they went over the edge.
Wigglesworth is saddened by Gavin Long's rush to judgment in Baton Rouge and for his apparent inability to get the help he needed to thread a positive course through the perplexities of modern life and to become a long-term agent of change. "Gavin Long had married and divorced, saw himself as a life coach and instructor making, he said, a book tour in Dallas in the days before going to Baton Rouge to kill three cops, one an African American who by all accounts was a peace officer not a Black life taker," said Wigglesworth.
This is a bizarre time in which we live according to Wigglesworth. It is time that local communities of like minded people double down on education of the citizenry in an atmosphere of nonthreatening acceptance and compassion according to Wigglesworth.
"Was Gavin Long correct in saying that 'blood and revenue' is all that the power elites care about? Yes and no. Wars are waged by power elites and fought by common people who do the majority of the bleeding and dying. Consider our Civil War. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest saw war as a waste of human life, started and then abandoned the KKK because of its violence and in his later years appears to have become like Governor George Wallace, but Forrest did one important thing that most Blacks in the U.S., Anglos, too, don't know. He apparently surmised....figured out by watching Braxton Bragg, Jefferson Davis and perhaps Caleb Cushing.... that the Civil War was fought not for the traditional two major motives, abolition of slavery on the one hand and states rights on the other, but for a rail route to the Pacific and to the China Trade beyond including the poppy fields of the Middle East. One rail route was across the North, the other across the flat Great Southwest from Savannah to San Diego that Jeff Davis laid out in 1850-51. That's a lot to go into here, but suffice it to say that we are still paying the personal and political prices assessed to that third motive in things like unending wars on terror and drugs....which are deeply intertwined in that third motive for which the power elites fought while controlling the national myth, kept their motive out of the press while the common men fought for the first two motives....the high moral ground over which people will fight and die....essentially for freedom. The nation is, as Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Smedley Butler counseled us, built on the racket of war as are all great nations in history, but that was history and what worked in the past cannot sustain life on planet earth in the future. Empires practice imperialism and imperialism uses weaponry to extend the borders. Can this sustain life on planet earth? It didn't sustain life in Germany in the 1940's, in Japan, in Italy and it cannot sustain life in the U.S. if that is the mission upon which the nation is solely focused," said Wigglesworth who sees weapons, oil and opioids all part of the military industrial complex that is rushing planet earth into the abyss of global warming.
"Any freedom fighter wishing to replace one alpha male image with another alpha male image is seeking a return to the law of the jungle. That was never Charles Darwin's image of survival, anyway. "With increasingly deadly and indiscriminate weapons in our hands the law of the jungle is the door to destruction. 'Only the strong survive' was NOT Darwin's contribution to understanding history and apex predators are quickly going extinct. My apologies to Quentin Terantino and D'jango Unchanged, but N.N. Barth's article "Tarantino Drinks Koch" captures the essence of that myth, too. Those who live by the sword, like Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, John Joel Glanton and even abolitionist John Brown whose "secret six" backer from Boston, munitions mogul George Luther Stearns who longed for war, faced the same reality. The law of adaptation is about adaptation. Survival does not go to the brute, but to the one able to adapt and change. David slew Goliath on that principle, but stuck in the reality of his humanity Biblical King David could not really usher in a Golden Age, unless you consider that last-born David had influenced the evolution of future Western philosophy, the seeding of the Magna Carta and egalitarian principles until in America Washington and the First Continental Congress instructed Thomas Jefferson to write out of U.S. law the primogeniture rules that put and kept kings on thrones....be they Tudors or Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, Zulus or Saudi royals which some recent American political dynasties seem to have forgotten was the hallmark of life in the New World. Sharia law does not challenge primogeniture rule of the Saudi royals. Tribal rule does not either. Gangs don't either. To the degree that the U.S. leaves the principle the self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal we return to the law of the jungle and gang rule. Within that imagery, thank you Darwin, we see that the survival of the African American community in whatever new and threatening land they found themselves in from the Serengeti to the jungles of Central and South America or the Western plains of North America was based not on raw strength and force, but mostly on subtle change and the nurturing acceptance of the matriarch of the clan who is often under appreciated and discounted as the bigger source of male and female makeovers," said Wigglesworth.
"Look," said Wigglesworth, "when it comes to the male hormones, testosterone provides the alpha male impulses and estrogen provides the feminine receptivity. Mother earth could nurture us all for billions of years if we're adapting. Even in women testosterone is the driving force for procreation so you could rightly argue that the males are drilling themselves, but if we are only about drilling down on everything and everyone we will soon kiss our existence goodnight," said Wigglesworth.
"You can argue that William Wallace and Robert Bruce's advances to freedom came by swinging their Claymores against the heads of Englishmen, but it wasn't until the British and Scots put aside their Claymore swords and started swinging golf clubs together that their real powers were increased and their joint fortunes improved. I'm not a golfer, but didn't Tiger Wood prove the point? But it's the same for everyone, everywhere. Now we have to learn how to put aside the things that are kissing our existence goodnight and learn to play a more civilized game, together," said Wigglesworth. "The goal in golf is not chopping up the grass, but in dropping the ball into the cup and in getting more and more people to play the same game because its a better world when it's not a battlefield," said Wigglesworth.
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