‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

A growing Spiral Dynamics influence in the Middle East

 international conflict, Middle East, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Aug 222009
 

As proud as I am of Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) , as grand as our ambitions are – and partially redesigning the United Kingdom is pretty ambitious!! – as committed to them as I am and as daunting as the challenges we face are, it seems at times relatively ‘small beer’ compared to what the Center for Human Emergence Middle East (CHE-ME) is up to.

Our members don’t live in a semi-hot war zone, with the ever-present threat of real violence (whether terrorist activities – suicide bombers and rockets – or heavy-handed military responses such as in Gaza at the start of this year). The UK might be bothered about corruption in government, desperate to recover from what is being labelled as the worst recession since the 1930s, very unsure of itself as a multi-cultural society in certain parts of the kingdom and iffy in its relations with the EU whilst at the same time being uncertain as to the changing constitutional relationship between its 4 constituent countries. But CHE-ME is faced with a real and frequently violent conflict between one country (Israel) and the stateless land of a dispossessed people it occupies (Palestine), with that stateless land split both geographically and politically. CHE-ME is faced with 2 wars – Israel vs Palestine and Fatah (aka Fateh) vs Hamas – both in fragile ceasefires that threaten to boil over into murderous warfare at any moment.

So it’s a pleasure for me once again to draw attention to the work of Elza Maalouf and CHE-ME – which, it should be stressed, is strongly supported by Integral Israel. In the 5 years since Rafael Nasser first invited Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck to present to Integral Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, enormous progress has been made behind the scenes – particularly in terms of building Palestinian capacity for self-government so that Palestine can be a full and competent partner to Israel in designing a viable and sustainable 2-state solution.

As Elza reports in her article for the Common Ground News Service, ‘6th Convention Fateh’s and the Building of a Nation’, the Convention has made clear recommendations to the Fatah-led government of President Mahmoud Abbas that a new national agenda needs to be designed based on economic development. Many of those who voted for positive change at the Convention had been through some form of training and/or briefing by Maalouf & Beck.

What it seems CHE-ME is beginning to bring about is a major shift in sections of the Palestinian consciousness. That shift is from the old anti-Israeli/Palestinians-as-victims ethos PURPLE and BLUE had got them locked into – which RED demagogues have so ruthlessly exploited for the past half-century and more – into the first stirrings of an ORANGE-driven entrepreneurial culture. The old Palestine, an alienated and divided society embittered with hatred towards Israel and split into its own warring factions, all but invited Israel to occupy and suppress. A new Palestine geared towards the well-being of its people and the economic prosperity of the region must be an attractive proposition as a trading partner for Israel.

The emergence of the ORANGE vMEME, as Beck lays out in his development of Muzafir Sherif’s Assimilation-Contrast Effect, breaks up the log jam of intractable positions by working towards a new and better future.

But, in her big picture perspective, Maalouf knows that Hamas can’t be left out of these developments. So, in her Common Ground article, she points out that the olive branch needs to be offered to Hamas. (Though their work to date has been mostly with Fatah, she & Beck have made some inroads into Hamas and know that there are potentials for change and voices of reason all too often missed in the Western media’s portrayal of that terrorist organisation.)

So, some wonderful news of progress in one of the world’s most troubled and dangerous regions!

For those interested in progress in the Middle East, may I also recommend Bitter Lemons, an EU-funded site dedicated to helping Israelis and Palestinians understand each other’s points of view on the issues which are seen to divide.

‘Britishness’ at the Regent’s College Summit

 community, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, regeneration, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  27 Responses »
Jun 302009
 

Down in a basement meeting room of the Holiday Inn Oxford Circus…that’s where the Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) was born on the afternoon of Friday 26 July 2009. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck, Jon Freeman (author of ‘God’s Ecology and the Dawkins Challenge’), Rachel Castagne, Lynne Sedgemore CBE,  Ian MacDonald of the Integral Centre,  the veteran activist and author Rosemary Wilkie and myself harmonising an intent – creating a spirit, if you will.  That intent is to build MeshWORK alliances to design natural solutions to local problems in the context of a globalised world.

The next 2 days, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th, saw CHE-UK host its first event, ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ at Regent’s College. Don, Rachel and Jon led the event and old HemsMESH colleague Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke flew in from Switzerland to lend his talents to a task-and-feedback session on the Sunday.  About 50 people joined us to get a feel for what the real issues are confronting the UK and what we might do about them.

The general consensus was that in the UK a lot of the positive influence of the BLUE vMEME has been diminished by the emergence of GREEN (a not-uncommon pattern in much of North America and Western Europe).  This weakening of BLUE has had a number of negative effects – ones especially noted were:-

  • the lack of discipline in our culture, particularly amongst young people – resulting in RED excesses such as binge drinking and violent rowdiness on our city centre streets at weekends
  • the collapse of effective regulation in our financial markets, resulting in toxic ORANGE taking the kind of foolish gambles on debt and investment which have brought the banking systems to their knees
  • the RED, thoughtless greed of many politicians milking the expenses system to and beyond its limits – with some clearly having committed fraud

The ‘expenses scandal’, it was generally agreed, served as the tipping point for so much anger amongst the general population that has been building up, suppressed and simmering, for so long.  The occupants of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the cradle of modern Democracy, are now perceived far and wide to be ‘on the take’ just like the officials of those corrupt regimes our government used to be so fond of criticising.  That only about a third of MPs have been exposed in this way and the actual sums involved are piddling in the grand scheme of things –  eg: National Debt estimated at £1.3 trillion!! – are beside the point.  As a kingdom, we are humiliated and in one hell of a mess.

As Lynne commented, people are now genuinely outraged.

A deeper malaise?
There was a recognition that there was a lot of variation in just how far the recession was affecting people in different parts of the country. Ali Gibson made the point that in leafy Buckinghamshire £200-£300 on a new handbag was still a ‘normal’ purchase while in a neighbouring health authority hospital waiting times were way below national targets due in part at least to lack of funding.

As a northerner I was keen to stress the ‘disappearance’ of much the traditional male working classes in the north of England, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands and the effect on the health of PURPLE and RED that was having in their communities. For many in those classes, the recession began in the 1980s and has continued more or less since. (See my previous Blog, ‘The Thatcherite Era is ended. Whither Britain?’, for more on that.)

But, interestingly, in our discussion groups the sense of an even deeper malaise began to emerge as we talked about what it mean to be British…the nature of the British identity. The source of that malaise, it was felt, was the loss of Empire. Britain through the16th-19th Centuries was an invader and a conqueror. With our Empire eventually stretching over a third of the habitable globe, much of the world’s story in that time was our story. There was belief in ourselves and the religions we espoused – all those Christian missionaries! – which fed a stream of great innovations, from the road building of Thomas Telford to George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the medical breakthroughs of Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner to the astounding engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A sense of: “We are British. We can do.”

As a trained historian very aware of the horrors of colonialism – knowing that many of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are rooted in the European boundaries which cut right through tribal territories and made artificial nations of unwilling tribal slices mixed with unwilling tribal slices – I found the thought that there could be any good in ‘Empire’ initially quite a challenge to my GREEN.

However, as Don pointed out, the rights and wrongs of what the colonialists did, in the context of our current discussion, were only relevant in that GREEN was still castigating us for the evils done. The question, then, is: does this castigation actually obscure the damage to our RED pride and BLUE nationalism by the loss of Empire…?

Add to that the fact that the once-mighty conquerors are increasingly looked upon as a liability by our military allies. Our army, having relied on American air support in Helmund province and still being unable to suppress the Taliban, American troops are now flooding in to do the job we can’t.

Discussion then raised the issue that, as an island nation, not invaded since 1066, do the recent waves of immigration constitute an invasion of sorts? Thus, the mighty invaders and creators of ‘Empire’ are now themselves diminished and invaded. For me, this was all a series of challenges that became ‘ah-ha moments’. I had previously tended to see racism and ethnic hatred as simply PURPLE’s rejection of those ‘not our tribe’ – especially when security (jobs) are threatened. But, for the British at least, is there also an element of invasion and loss of national pride involved?

What made these discussions particularly astonishing were that there were people in the room from the former Empire – Asians, West Indians, etc – whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been subjects of British rule and its many indignities. But nobody got upset. Nobody got overly-emotional. Nobody wanted to decry the Empire and rake over the ‘evil coals’. Everybody was completely focussed on the collective character of the British psyche, where it was now and why and what needed to be done to lead that British character to a new place.

These were truly 2nd Tier discussions that transcended personality and history. Truly, truly astonishing!

Of course, not everyone there was well-versed in Spiral Dynamics. But a couple of brief-but-potent presentations from Don gave everyone enough of a flavour to contribute to the discussions. Another pleasure of the weekend for me was seeing so many people get turned on to the power of the Spiral Dynamics model to explain human motivation.

Hope from the mess
In discussing the nature of the British character, we also identified many positives. We are and remain:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric – often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threat – eg: the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being rediscovered in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombs in London. (See Dave Lowe’s comment on the Blog ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’) Under pressure, the identity of the tribe expands to include all on our side.
  •  Humour-full – we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

These exercises  gave us the sense that there is still much Britain has to give the world; but, to do that, we have to sort out our current problems and believe in ourselves again. As Rosemary put it: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”

We need strong RED proud in the BLUE frame of responsibly  ’doing your duty’ as just the start of creating that new story.

But our new story has no place for the prejudices, discriminations and abuses that have sometimes sullied our past. One of the most interesting tales of the weekend was one with which Rachel effectively closed the summit. She had been to a folk festival recently. One of the performers, the traditional singing legend June Tabor, had asked the audience what it meant to be English. After some repartee and banter, Tabor answered her own question: “If you love this land, then you’re English.”

Of course, there is no single homogenous English identity. And there certainly isn’t a British one – just ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish! But there is a sense of being English…and there is a sense of being British, whichever of our 4 constituent countries you come from. And, using Tabor’s definition, if you’ve just arrived in this kingdom for the first time but you love this land, then you’re one of us.

At the end of the 2 days, we hadn’t come up with magic solutions. We didn’t have an agenda to present to Government. Those things will come in time; but we had made a start on serious work.

And there were a lot more of us at 5 PM Sunday than there were at 5 PM Friday. Welcome. Juliana. Welcome, Denise. Welcome, James. Welcome, Jon (Twigge). Welcome, Willa. Welcome, Ali. Welcome, Faheed. Welcome, Richard. Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome, Carragh. Welcome, Dave. Welcome, Julian. Welcome, Laura. Welcome, Eileen. Welcome, Shaun. And so on…and so on…and so on…and so on…..

There will be 4 more summits to follow on from this weekend and then there is the EuroConfab at Gatwick 23-25 October – the first time the Confab has been held in the UK. If you’ve a mind to understand and a heart that loves this land, then please join us!

[For a more formal description of the founding of CHE-UK, see: ‘From Rule Britannia to Cool Britannia to Integral Britannia’.]

De Menezes: was it Policy pulled the trigger?

 human rights, international conflict, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 102007
 

It beggars belief. It really does. On 22 July 2005 one policeman holds an innocent man down while two others execute him.A total of 11 shots are fired –7 into his head. The bullets used are ‘dum-dums’– illegal in warfare under the Geneva Conventions – with flattened noses so they cause maximum damage. The man’s head is effectively blown apart. The execution takes place in full view of the passengers of a tube train.

No one is tried for this MURDER – because that’s what it was.

In this country: England, the ‘mother of democracy’, with one of the most respected justice systems in the world…?

For all the subsequent revelations about his drug use and migrant status, in this context Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent; he was not doing anything to indicate he was about to commit an offence of any description. The police officers had decided he was a suspected suicide bomber and respresented an immediate threat to the public.  So they deliberately killed him without warning.

Whatever happened to that centuries-old axiom of English law that a man (or woman) is innocent until proven guilty?

Last week’s Old Bailey ruling that the Metropolitan Police were guilty under Health & Safety law of very serious operational/procedural failings which put the public (and de Menezes) at risk is a relative side show to the decision made in July 2006 by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). On the basis of a 2-part investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), they took the decision not to prosecute either any of the officers directly involved in the muder or any in the chain in command – policy-making or operational – whose decisions led to the murder.

As London mayor Ken Livingstone said after the Old Bailey decision: “At the end of the day mistakes are always going to happen in situations like this.”

Few procedures are perfect and the human beings who operate the procedures certainly aren’t! Unfortunately it was a particularly bad series of errors at nearly every level of communication which led to the officers putting their guns to de Menezes’ head and pulling the triggers. Believing they were chasing a suspected suicide bomber – in the bowels of Stockwell Station, cut off temporarily from their colleagues – they would almost  certainly have been driven by the RED vMEME’s gung-ho express self now without thought of consequences motif. As they were most likely the kind of ‘action men’ who volunteer for that type of firearms duty, it is quite plausible that they were high in the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism.

Given these factors and the overall desperate mentality of the Metropolitan Police in their search for the failed suicide bombers of the day before, in the wake of the very real attrocities of 7 July, it is not entirely surprising that something like de Menezes’ execution occurred.

The failings of the Met put those officers and de Menezes on that fatal collision course. From a 2nd Tier ‘Big Picture’ point of view, it is entirely right that the Met’s failings in this respect have been exposed so that there is substantial pressure on them to improve the procedures, the communication systems and the training of the men and women who have to operate them.

But, how ever much the operational aspects need to be improved, are they the real issue?

Two days after de Menezes’ murder Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick told community leaders in Stockwell he could not guarantee a similar error would not happen again. The reason such a guarantee could not be made…? As Met supremo Sir Ian Blair told Muslim community leaders the following day, the force’s shoot-to-kill policy for suicide bombers was to remain in place.

Changing Precedent?
The question for me is whether the officers who executed de Menezes were acting on their own initiative, on orders or on policy.

If they can be said to have acted on their own initiative, then are they culpable?

Although some commentators have recognised the implications almost from the immediate aftermath of the Stockwell tube murder, it has not been widely discussed in the media; but the 2006 decision of the CPS not to prosecute, if not challenged, may change one of the fundamentals of English law by precedent.

It would appear that, if police officers have a suspicion that someone is a dangerous and/or violent suspect (the police had apparently mistaken de Menezes for Hussain Osman, one of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers) and they think that person represents an immediate and serious danger to themselves or to others, they may now kill that person legitimately.

The next time a police officer kills an innocent person they think may be an immediate and dangerous threat, in their defence, will they be able to cite the de Menezes killing as precedent?

The de Menezes family have been threatenting a private criminal prosecution against the Metropolitan Police for some time; the Old Bailey decision opens the way for them to sue the Met under civil law. It is to be hoped the family do choose the more arduous route of criminal prosecution because the issue of whether police officers  as individuals do have the right to summarily execute a suspect needs testing in full court proceedings.

Because if a police officer does have the right to kill someone on the grounds that they might be dangerous, does a suspect, in the established right of self-defence, have legitimate cause to kill a police officer they think might be about to kill them?

If we generalise that line of thought, don’t we all have the right to kill someone – anyone! – we think may be about to harm us? In which case, shouldn’t we be allowed to carry weapons to defend ourselves against people we think may be about to harm us?

If our society should eventually descend into a widespread state of paranoia, where we kill each other merely on suspicion something might be done to harm us, then our society will have failed and the terrorists will have won.

Further comments made by Ken Livingstone on the Old Bailey verdict are very telling…

“I think this is disastrous. If an armed police officer believes they are in pursuit of a terrorist who might be a suicide bomber, and they start making reasonable calculations based on this, ‘how’s this going to be seen, am I going to be hauled off to court?’”

For Livingstone, it would indeed appear that ‘might be’ is sufficient grounds for summary execution of a suspect.

Policy more than Procedure
The Old Bailey trial was largely concerned with errors in operational procedure – of which clearly there were many. Since the Met’s failings put those officers in the invidious position of being face to face alone with a man they believed was most likely a suicide bomber and able to detonate himself, for all that de Menezes was murdered, it might be that the right charge to be brought against the officers individually and certainly against the Met as a corporation is manslaughter. After all, no one intended that an innocent man called Jean Charles de Menezes should die on that day. So what to do? The police and the government have a duty to protect the citizenry from harm – and some would argue: even if that means occasionally executing the wrong person. (Some apologists make a similar case for the death sentence.)

Undoubtedly the officers who killed de Menezes did so on their own initiative; but there was confusion as to just what their orders were and the information they had been given. Certainly they did not intend to kill an innocent man; but, in the ‘adrenaline rush’ of the moment, they certainly did intend to kill the man they suspected of being a suicide bomber.

So, in its bunglings, the Met, as a corporation, is culpable also.

However, I would contend that the real issue is at policy level: should the police have the right to execute someone merely on the suspicion they might be about to commit a highly-dangerous offence?

Of course, armed police officers and their commanders sometimes do have to take difficult decisions very, very quickly – sometimes virtually at the level of automatic response! – and tragically they do sometimes make the wrong decision. The fatal shootings of Harry Stanley in 1999 (when in semi-darkness police mistook the chair leg in his hand for a shot gun) and Derek Bennett in 2001 (wielding a cigarette lighter that was a convincing replica of an automatic pistol) are examples of such desperate mistakes. But in such cases the person was acting in an aggressive manner, warnings were given and the officers had tangible evidence on which to base the assumption that they and others were at serious and immediate risk. The policy in such instances was essentially correct and the procedures were examined by the IPCC to see if they could be improved.

Unfortunately the rise of the suicide bomber puts police officers in the position where the evidence of intent to commit a highly-dangerous act is not always tangible – and that puts us as a society in the position where we have to decide whether we are going to authorise our police to execute suspects with no tangible evidence of intent. Ie: on mere suspicion.

Metropolitan Police policy in regard to dealing with suspected suicide bombers is codenamed Operation Kratos and is in part at least derived from Israeli and Sri-Lankan tactics in dealing with suicide bombers. The policy of shooting in the head with a highly-destructive dum-dum round comes from the determination to destroy the suspected suicide bomber before they can detonate the explosives they are thought to be carrying. Shooting to the head rather than the usual police marksman’s target of the upper toros is not only so much more likely to  result in instant incapacitation and very likely a quick death but avoids the risk of the bullets hitting the explosives belt (usually worn across the torso) and unintentionally triggering the explosion.

But there is a fundamental difference between the Israeli and Sri-Lankan situations and that of the British.

Israel and Sri-Lanka are effectively engaged in low-level wars with terrorists from different ethnic groups than their majority populations. While there undoubtedly is a significant GREEN voice in Israel that objects vociferously to such policies, the PURPLE/BLUE religious/nationalist harmonic which dominates much of Israeli national culture doesn’t place the same value on a Palestinian life as an Israeli one. Thus, if an Israeli policeman makes a mistake and shoots dead an innocent Palestinian on suspicion they might be a suicide bomber, it’s not much of an issue. For many Israelis, the occasional mistaken execution of an innocent Palestinian is a price well worth paying to stop the suicide bombers.

And, as the Sri-Lankan government has been getting away with some pretty brutal oppression of its ethnic-Indian Tamil population for at least a couple of decades, it’s probably safe to assume that many Sri-Lankans don’t overly value Tamil lives either.

(In both cases the PURPLE-BLUE devaluing of the other side’s lives also strongly influences the actions of Palestinian and Tamil extremists.)

In multi-ethnic Britain, where GREEN’s egalitarianism and valuing of all life influence much political thought and social commentary and where the threat of suicide bombers comes from within our own citizenry, executing citizens on mere suspicion of intent gives the police and the government a huge problem.

A highly-significant number of people in this country, most of the intelligensia and the greater part of the media consider what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes simply unnacceptable in a ‘decent society’.

The IPCC report on the de Menezes execution, released this week, makes it clear that Kratos was not formally sanctioned on 22 July but expresses concerns that its ethos of shoot-to-kill-suspected-suicide-bombers has permeated the culture amongst Met firearms officers. As IPCC commissioner Deborah Glass said at the report’s launch: “The difficulty with having an operation called Kratos that is specifically about suicide bombers is that there is an implicit assumption that you are going to be always dealing with suicide bombers,” she says. “You are giving it a level of certainty that does not appear in real life. So the problem can well be that if you create a mindset in firearms officers that you are dealing with a suicide bomber then the concerns commanders would have about what is the level of the threat may well be overtaken.”

So we can conclude de Menezes was killed by a combination of adrenaline-rushed officers, misinformed and badly let down by bureaucratic bungling, all operating with a policy-bred-but-undiscriminating maximum lethal force ethos.

A 2nd Tier Solution?
And it could be argued that, while GREEN would be totally against allowing legitimate execution on mere suspicion of intent on the grounds that all life is precious and a few cannot be sacrificed for the many, true 2nd Tier thinking would sanction it as a lesser evil than letting the suicide bombers wreak their carnage. From the little known about it, it is claimed that the TURQUOISE vMEME is indeed prepared to sacrifice parts of the whole for the overall good of the whole.

However, TURQUOISE will also know that the agents of the law taking the law into their own hands and engaging in summary executions, whatever the immediate justification, can only work as a very short-term measure in a democratic society supposedly based on the rule of law . If widespread respect and support for the law is undermined and BLUE fails at a macro-cultural level, then, in a cultural jungle, RED will indeed assert itself. Then we do risk the nightmare scenario of police officers and ordinary members of the public trying to kill each other on the suspicion that the other intends them lethal harm.

Small wonder IPCC chair Nick Hardwick has called for a public debate on the shoot-to-kill policy and the very real difficulties facing the police in combatting terrorism.

Clearly there are no easy answers. The terrorists would indeed appear to have us in a dilemma of moral ambiguity.

But what about YELLOW? We know a fair amount about YELLOW thinking, thanks to the work of psychologists like Clare W Graves and Abraham Maslow (who termed the effects of this vMEME ‘Self-Actualisation’, 1943). One of the characteristics both men attributed to this level was its incredible problem-solving capabilities – four times greater than GREEN, according to Graves (1971/2002).

So, if the suicide bombers really do leave us with no option other than to incapacitate through execution on the mere suspicion of intent but that option is unnacceptable in our kind of society, we need to get YELLOW problem-solving to work on changing some part of this paradoxical equation.

One possible avenue YELLOW might pursue is the manner in which West Midlands Police arrested another of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers, Yasin Hassan Omar, just five days after de Menezes’ execution, using a Taser stun gun. While Sir Ian Blair publicly criticised the use of a Taser as there was a risk the electric charge could have detonated any explosives on Omar’s person, the fact West Midlands incapacitated their suspect without lethal force does suggest their methodology should be studied.

Clearly, when his own force had made such an appalling mistake, it suited Blair to rubbish the other force’s achievement – and it may indeed turn out that West Midlands took an absurdly-silly risk and were astonishly lucky to pull off their coup. Nonetheless, at a time when we are putting innocent lives at risk in our efforts to combat the terrorists, it behoves us to study any possible means of incapicating a suspected suicide bomber that doesn’t cause that person serious harm. 

Inside the mind of a suicide bomber…?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  16 Responses »
Jul 172005
 

“Their cause is not founded on injustice. It is founded on belief, one whose fanaticism is such that it can’t be moderated. It can’t be remedied. It has to be stood up to.”
- Tony Blair, London, Saturday 16 July 2005.

In every point in that statement, other than the first one, Tony Blair is correct. In saying it is not founded on injustice, he makes a fundamental error. Injustice, in fact, feeds their cause.

Back in the Autumn of 2001, I was seriously impressed with the way Blair went around the capitols of the Middle East and Asia, persuading the kings and the sheiks and the generals and the dictators that, if they would not openly support the imminent American onslaught on Afghanistan, then at least not to publicly oppose it. He learned passages from the Qur’an to support his case with Muslim leaders. For a time I actually wondered if Blair could do 2nd Tier thinking. What he did was certainly way beyond the red/BLUE simplistic black & white thinking of George W Bush.

However, Blair’s support for Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq showed a distinct dearth of global or strategic thinking. Defeating the military of Saddam Hussein, seriously degraded by the Gulf War of 1991, proved deceptively easy. Managing the occupation of Iraq and the transition to a Western-style democracy has so far proved beyond the capability of an Anglo-American coalition seemingly bereft, when they entered the country in March 2003, of a plan for what they would do with post-Saddam Iraq.

Millions of British voters protested against the intention to go to war with Iraq. Even more millions of voters have been appalled since by the political and military quagmire that Iraq has become. Labour, with no concerted credible opposition, was punished for Iraq by the voters in the May 2005 General Election by having its huge parliamentary majority significantly reduced. Blair was widely regarded as finished, a ‘lame duck’ prime minister waiting to hand over power to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

However, through skillful handling of European issues – the constitutional crisis, Jacques Chirac’s gastronomic gaffes and the budget rebate row – and support for measures to combat African poverty and climate change, Blair’s ORANGE has enabled him to bounce back considerably. (Getting photographed with Sir Bob Geldoff just before Live8 was very clever!)

His star has risen again so much there is even rumoured to be talk in Downing Street of Blair staying on to fight for a fourth term. So far he’s handled the London bombings with an appropriate mix of grit and flair. The last thing he needs now is for them to be linked in the public eye to the mess in Iraq.

Identity – who do you belong to?
They say 7 July 2005 – designated ’7/7′ to emphasise the 9/11 similarities -  has changed everything for Britain.

British nationals became suicide bombers and slaughtered their fellow commuters in the morning rush hour.

It’s interesting that much of the media tends to refer to the 4 bombers as ‘British nationals’, rather than ‘Britons’ – as though they’re not really ‘true Brits’!

It’s almost as though we now have an ‘enemy within’. Of course, the media points out that the vast majority of the 1.6 million Muslims in Britain are peaceful and law-abiding. Yet there is a sinister undercurrent – a sense of potential ‘witchunt’ – lurking beneath the platitudes about the ‘majority of Muslims’.

On Friday (15 July), Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told Muslim leaders in Romford that the Islamic community in Britain had been in denial about the ‘lunatic fringe’ in their midst for far too long. Then he went on to say: “Now, it is your problem…. We have to seize a moment in which the Muslim community changes from your state of shock and disbelief into active engagement in counter-terrorism.”

In other words, Muslims must root out the terrorists living in their communities. (And the unspoken sanction if they don’t…?)

The following day (16 July) Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, while urging Muslims to be “absolutely vigilant”, expressed concern about the singling out of the Islamic communities in this way, saying, “This is a major burden that cannot be passed on to the community – the capacity to police themselves in terms of finding out the criminality is not on….The Muslim community is no different to any other community in this country and they should not be treated as any different. Once you treat a Muslim community differently in the way it is being perceived, as though it is a criminal community, a troublesome community, then we will not get the support we would want from them.”

Wittingly or not, Sacranie is being a little disingenuous. The very fact that the Muslim community is a religious community makes it distinctive and requiring some different considerations from a non-religious community. Of particular importance is the emphasis Islam places on brotherhood.

The Qur’an says: “The believers are but one single brotherhood” (49:10) – with a purpose: “Verily, this brotherhood of yours is a single brotherhood, and I am your Lord and Cherisher: Therefore, serve Me and no other” (21:92).

On this basis, does nationality count? Can one be both a Muslim and a Briton? And, if you can, does being a Muslim take priority?

In Spiral Dynamics terms, Islamic brotherhood meets PURPLE’s need to belong and enshrines it in BLUE’s compliance with doing ‘the right thing’.

This powerful meme of belonging, of all being brothers in the faith, is common to most religions – for example, the Bible New Testment tells Christians to “Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God” (1 Peter 2:17). Fundamentalist Christians face the same dilemma of choosing God or their country when they are in contradiction – “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Since God clearly is greater than man, the true, or fundamentalist, believer will usually choose God over man.

The question comes then: can a Muslim betray his ‘brother’ to non-believers without betraying the brotherhood – without betraying God?

I’m not that familiar with the history of Islam; but certainly the history of Christianity is littered with examples of Christians who refused to betray their brothers when they had contravened the laws of the country they were in.

Of course, the Christians who hid their ‘brothers’ (and ‘sisters’) in the Roman catacombs two thousand years ago justified their actions by saying that the government was acting immorally and in contravention of the laws of God. Therefore, it was ‘right’ to disobey the laws of the government. Yet the Roman government saw the early Christians as a threat to the Roman way of life in a manner not too dissimilar to the way many in the modern West view fundamentalist Islam.

The Nature of Fundamentalism
Not every Muslim who attends a mosque believes the Qur’an is the undiluted ‘Word of God’ any more than every person who calls themself a Christian believes every verse in the Bible is the absolute Truth.

When the BLUE vMEME is in the ascendant, however, the tendency is towards absolutism and rigidity in belief.

Over 50 years ago Theodore Adorno, one of a number of psychologists researching why hundreds of thousands of people from a sophisticated and highly-developed nation like Germany allowed their country to be turned into a police state and at least supported – if not actually participated in – some of the worst attrocities of the 20th Century. From their  research Adorno et al came to believe that some people have an Authoritarian Personality with rigid beliefs in conventional values, hostility towards other groups, intolerance of ambiguity and submissive attitudes towards authority figures – all traits associated with unpleasant manifestations of BLUE, all characteristics of fundamentalism, whether of the Christian or Muslim flavour..

Adorno devised a system for assessing the Authoritarian Personality: the Fascism Scale (or F-Scale).

Those American commentators who have started to use the term, ‘Islamofascist’, are closer to what is driving the fundamentalists than perhaps they know.

“The mindset of many young Muslims across the world is being framed by images of the shock and awe bombing of Baghdad, of the massacres in Fallujah, of torture in Abu Ghraib, of the orange-clad, chained prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and, of course, the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people.”
- John McDonnell MP, London, Saturday 16 July 2005.

Their BLUE has them responding as Authoritarian Personalities to imams who seem more holy and pious than others and who are very certain of the Truth, enabling them to take the Qur’an at face value. Their PURPLE groans for the travails of their ‘brothers’ around the world and their BLUE tells them that the right thing to do is to wage jihad on those who are mistreating, abusing and killing their brothers.

In the Hadith, the Prophet Mohammed said: “The similitude of the believers in their kindness, mercy, affection and compassion toward one another, is like a body, when one organ ails, the whole body is drafted to take care of the problem.”

From the fundamentalist point of view, the true believer is effectively obligated to help his ‘brothers’ wherever they are in trouble.

In truth Islam offers many ways of helping out – with a big emphasis on charitable works – but parts of the Qur’an, like the Bible Old Testament, can be used to legitimise violence – viz: “Slay the unbeliever…wherever you find him” (9:5).

In its editorial last Thursday (14 July), the Daily Mirror said: “Already a mountain of words has been written and spoken in an attempt to explain how they could have done what they did. But the truth is that we will never understand. There is no explanation for an insane act.”

How wrong could they be?!? The BLUE certainty of knowing that you are doing the right thing – and feeding your PURPLE sense of belonging by helping out your brothers at the same time – these are the drivers. Maybe, for some, their RED system gets excitement from a bombing venture – but the dominant vMEMES in the vMEME Stacks of the young jihadis  are most likely to be PURPLE and BLUE.

And with the certainty that God rewards those who die in battle in His cause, the young jihadis set out to do battle with the unbelievers who are mistreating, abusing and killing their brothers.

Clearly, the understanding I’ve developed in this Blog is basic. There is much more to say about differences between Muslims – particularly between Sunni and Shia – and differences between the impoverished and desperate Palestinian bombers, the zealous foreign fighters in Iraq and the urban bombers who travelled from Leeds to London on 7 July.

All that needs exploring to develop a detailed Integrated SocioPsychology viewpoint of the issues.

However, we also need to ask: what can we do about it?

Tough on Terrorism, Tough on the Causes of Terrorism
When Tony Blair said: “It is founded on belief, one whose fanaticism is such that it can’t be moderated. It can’t be remedied. It has to be stood up to.” - he was right.

Until BLUE loses its grip, the jihadis can’t be reasoned with; they can only be fought. That means attacking their resources/funding, prohibiting radical speakers, penetrating their networks and arresting and interrogating suspects, et, etc - all the kinds of things the government is all too slowly starting to put in place.

However, that will only slow the recruitment of jihadis; it won’t prevent it. So we’ll only be a little safer – still not safe. To achieve that, we, the West have to put right the many injustices that feed the cause.

Injustice will probably never be eradicated; it seems to be a part of the human condition. And there will always be those Jews and Muslims whose RED feeds on the excuses for violence offered in the Old Testament and the Qur’an. However, we do need to develop a world where suffering and injustice can not be so easily associated with the particular religion of a people.

Then we might well find that the moderate Muslims will co-operate willingly in exposing the ‘lunatic fringe’.
Tony Blair might possibly be up to developing such a world. George Bush almost certainly isn’t!

Suicide Bomber – right or wrong?

 American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, Middle East, morality, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  4 Responses »
Jul 092005
 

Written by DAVE LOWE

 

As the country reels from the London bombings, I received this thought-provoking message from Dave Lowe, a graphics artist and trainee counsellor in Hull. Dave wants it put up for public discussion. So here goes…

I listened to Bush on the news and yet again he said ‘we will find the perpetrators of these terrible acts’. Does that guy have any idea that it’s not about 10, 100, 1,000 guys with olive skin trying to blow up some folks on a bus?! Bush sees only goodies & baddies in his singular ORANGE view.
There are very different thought and value structures in different parts of the planet. All Bush sees is the free individual acting for his/her rights, being attacked.( orange in the US, orange/GREEN in Europe) He sees the attackers as the same as him, just with darker skin.

How wrong he & Blair have been has been recently shown when they have tried to present the people of Iraq with the freedom to choose a multi-party democracy (just like the one at home) – and they didn’t want it. Offering GREEN values to a BLUE society that is in RED turmoil !

Bush does not see that the Arab & Muslim world is based on a purple tribal view, with a strong BLUE functioning state , complete with intermarriage and huge extended family. As fast as the world is becoming connected by ORANGE technology – offering GREEN connectedness – it remains more disconnected than ever by culture, belief, values and the technology makes it all happen faster than ever.

Our western values have got horribly stuck in self, individual ambition. The focus is always inward. Even Maslow, Rogers has some part to play in this! (and what might be an alternative be to ‘inward focusing self-actualization’ – which is supposed to turn us into social & spiritual beings by separating our consciousness from everything else on the planet, and focus on ourselves as individuals, our internal feelings, desires etc. Does that really add up ??)

Until we change (in the western world) – to be prepared to adopt a world integrated view, to understand that different people, countries are passing through different time zones – different consciousness’s – we have no chance of understanding the mindset of the suicide bomber on the bus, train , plane.

His intentions are for the good & survival of his culture. How can he be seen as the baddie when we have bombed, torn his country apart and tried to offer our own brand of brainless culture in exchange for his history & tribal values?

Dave