A critique of From Ungrieved Trauma to Globalized Insecurity focused on making the paper more accessible, grounded, and actionable. This episode asks how the analysis can lead with human trauma before theory, weave the Middle East case throughout the argument, and operationalize the Life-Knowledge Commons through concrete mechanisms of accountability, declassification, sanctions review, and life-coherent security. Read More
A deep dive into how institutions weaponize human trauma. This episode explores war as a self-reproducing system fueled by ungrieved grief, fear, enemy construction, secrecy, finance, structural violence, cultural dehumanization, and the autopoietic state — while asking how life-coherent security can interrupt the cycle. Read More
Table of Contents
The article begins with an overview of the historic moment of ‘the end of the Cold War’, and of the paradoxically deepening moral, social, and environmental problems posed by the military system. It demonstrates that historical and contemporary analyses of defence and war have dogmatically presupposed the military paradigm, and have therefore failed to recognize the self-reproducing structure of coven premisses and inferences upon which it rests. In laying bare this underlying system of unreason, the analysis demonstrates that the military paradigm’s ultimately self-contradictory concepts of ‘security’ and ‘defence’ repose on unstated interests of social and political rule. Proposing new distinctions between pathological and life-enabling forms of war, and between guilty and innocent combatants, the argument develops alternative, non-military principles of war to guide rational and moral agency
This paper presents a rigorous philosophical inquiry into the deep structure of war, challenging entrenched assumptions underpinning the dominant military paradigm. McMurtry demonstrates that prevailing concepts of “national security,” “self-defense,” and “just war” rest on unexamined metaphysical premises that normalize mass homicide as a rational necessity. By exposing the fallacies of equating national interest with militarized aggression and conflating security with destructive power, the paper argues for a fundamental reframing of war. McMurtry distinguishes between pathological wars — those that annihilate human life and capacities — and enabling wars, which target disabling patterns such as disease, corruption, and environmental degradation without destroying life. He contends that the primary enemy is not other nations or peoples but the institutionalized military system itself, which perpetuates cycles of violence, fear, and economic exploitation. The paper proposes a redirection of collective energies towards non-military modes of “war” that liberate human and ecological potential, challenging the conflation of survival with domination and opening a horizon of transformative alternatives for global peace.
Causality is, as often said, not a law but the form of a law; a discourse used to bring some understanding to a chaotic world. In that discourse the two words “cause” (C) and “effect” (E) are subject to rules of speech: E cannot precede C in time. And the connective relating them, an arrow, like C–>E, translated as “C causes/leads to/is followed by E”, or some synonyms, is two-way.
Below are two emails I penned yesterday and disseminated which I am reproducing here (with minor spelling and grammatical corrections). Dear Colleagues: It is fitting that this be shared as I have been following Prof Werner’s work over several years and there is life-value consilience between McMurtry’s (LVOA), Galtung’s (Peace Studies), Eisler’s (Cultural Transformation Theory),… Read More
Reproduced from: https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-and-peace-the-lost-principles-of-science-and-value/5456055 War and Peace: The Lost Principles of Science and Value Peace Activists Blame the Enemy without Science or Life-Value Compass By Prof. John McMurtry Global Research, September 14, 2015 In recent months we have seen one ‘peace activist’ organization after another framing global conflicts in US war-propaganda terms. There is no criterion of… Read More
Reproduced form: https://renegadeinc.com/western-imperial-power-set-destroy-syria/ How Western imperial power set out to destroy Syria By Daniel Margrain POLITICS There are 22 members of the Arab League, 21 of which are clients of the US. Syria is the remaining Arab state whose allegiances lie elsewhere. Syria is a client state of Russia and Iran is their only ally.… Read More
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by… Read More
