People are not ‘a thing’ but rather a ‘process’ and, according to Kant’s philosophy, an end in themselves. They are not ‘things’ to be ‘consumed’ as was the case, for example, with the kings of the Khmer Empire. Further, according to Buddha’s dharma, what one experiences is all a cause and result, or karmic, ‘projection.’ It’s the playing-out of endless cause and result episodes or strings, as is featured in Twentieth Century Physic’s String Theory. At least, this is how it can seem to our ordinary perception, if we care to notice. In ultimate reality, however, once having penetrated conventional reality’s veil of ignorance, everything is really happening at once in an interdependency that transcends time and space. It is in fact void of inherent reality because of its very causeless, connate nature, one that is simultaneous and complimentarian with all phenomena. This is one’s primordial nature and none other than one’s own mind ‘in itself’ after a trained and sustainable gaze inward.
In this ‘vision’ there isn’t any difference between ourselves, others, and the environment in which we perceive ourselves living. An environment that can be reimagined and physically shaped in any way imaginable. This means we create and should therefore be able to control our own reality. A delusive selfhood however plays out in many ways, having seemingly quite real and dire consequences, like, torture, wars, famine, and genocide. This, mainly because we fail to see our lives and its ‘I, me, mine’ orientation as a cause and result, simultaneously arising, open-ended and continuous, process. It’s ignorant, delusional, and destructive to imagine anything simply as an independent, static, and unchanging ‘thing’ or ‘self’ to be owned and controlled.
A good example of ‘process’ versus ‘thing’ is the so-called Iranian nuclear bomb program which is thought to have reached a nuclear bomb producing capacity many times over in the last three decades. Part of this process has been, at times, drastically thwarted in their goal to develop nuclear energy in general, whether for warfare or civilian purposes. Like when they signed the JCPOA agreement and voluntarily destroyed a large portion of their nuclear program under IAEA supervision. This by constraining fuel cycle activities that could lead to the production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. The agreement was formally activated on 20 January 2014. That day, “an IAEA report stated that Iran was adhering to the interim agreement, including stopping enrichment of uranium to 20%, beginning to dilute half of the stockpile of 20% enriched uranium to 3.5%, and halting work on the Arak heavy-water reactor.”
All of this highly detailed process was under IAEA surveillance until President Trump, newly inaugurated, cancelled the deal in his first term. Why did he do this? Apologetically, one might say, because he saw the agreement, which also remunerated Iran, as fiscally and geopolitically benefiting a know sponsor of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. So, counterproductively, “the United Statesannounced its withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ or the ‘Iran deal,’ on May 8, 2018.” This lapse of seven years gave credence once again to the hysteria that Iran is close, yet again, to having ‘the bomb.’ Rewinding and set ticking, once again, Israel’s imaginary doomsday clock.
The ‘thing’ of Iran being always almost ready to deliver a nuclear attack is of course not a thing at all. But rather a symptom of hysteria caused by those undermining our innate ability to control the world in which we live. For example, Trump’s recent bombing of Fordo with 30,000 pound ‘bunker busting’ ordinances, as well two other sites, alternately using Tomahawk missiles on one thought too deep to penetrate. After this he claimed Iran’s nuclear program was obliterated and their ability to deliver a nuclear attack set back by decades.
But here’s the latest, at the time of this writing, well informed, determination about that: “Speaking to CBS News on Saturday, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said while key facilities had been hit, some are “still standing. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium,” Grossi said, adding, “it could even be sooner. (https://aje.io/qgg3f6)
The fear of nuclear annihilation, especially on Isreal’s part, as ‘a thing,’ is now sufficient cause, evidently, globally justifiable, for a deadly preemptive strike on Iran by any of its paranoid enemies. Worse, weapon’s grade nuclear enrichment by Iran is a process that has more a chance of actually coming to fruition as ‘a thing’ rather than an eventual, unhindered developing nation state process, as it mostly likely happened in Israel, because it generates mutual alarm requiring readied countermeasures of an existential order on both sides. Therefore, keeping it at the level of ‘a thing’ gives everyone a good excuse to keep fighting against it and, unfortunately, promoting its likelihood through a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It should be remembered, not only is one’s mind the architect of reality, as Buddha taught in the Dhammapada, but even more-so is the karmic collectivity of ‘group think.’
It’s like in the nineteen-fifties’ paranoid horror movie, The Thing, starring the actor who played Gunsmoke’s ‘Marshal Dillion,’ James Arness. The so-called menacing thing outside their frozen bunker, was really just their own isolated thoughts. In such mentally destabilizing conditions, once the quiet part is spoken aloud all options, especially violence, are on the table. So clearly paranoid discourse comes at a great cost, as in JFK’s persuasive domino theory speeches which eventually abetted America’s quagmired involvement in Vietnam. Ultimately, paranoid or even imprecise public discourse, as Jordan Peterson suggests, promotes viral irrationality, which in turn gives rise to rash judgments and violence. Usually carried out by dull minions just doing their jobs, until they become out of control. Think stormtroopers, masked ICE agents, and teenage Khmer Rouge wielding sharp implements again the old, the infirm, and people just wearing glasses.
Bibi Netanyahu has been trading in a violence prone hysteria almost the entirety of his political career. It’s served him well, as in Isreal—a fear based state—whoever is perceived as protecting the people best, wins. And, if you are an indicted or convicted felon, as both he and Trump are, it also keeps you out of jail. This fearful dynamic is somewhat understandable after the Jewish holocaust. Cambodia, which had an autogenocidal holocaust, half-a-century ago, at the bloody hands of the Khmer Rouge, still observe a fearful reticent of any serious political contention.
Israel has now created its own genocidal holocaust against the Palestinians in a completely asymmetrical retribution for the possibly ‘green-lit’ Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. Lest we forget, that’s “when Hamas-led militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 815 civilians, were killed, and 251 taken hostage with the stated goal of forcing Israel to release Palestinian prisoners.” This, of course, is the obligatory boiler plate rationale from Isreal’s side.
Let’s consider then some recent horrific numbers from the Palestinian authorities: “As of 25 June 2025, over 58,400 people (56,772 Palestinians and 1,706 Israelis) have been reported killed in the Gaza war according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as well as 180 journalists and media workers, 120 academics, and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, a number that includes 179 employees of UNRWA.” Further, “scholars have estimated 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians. A study by OHCHR, which verified fatalities from three independent sources, found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children.”
These facts, possibly in need of some adjustments, show the extent of asymmetrical, inhumane warfare, blatantly illegal under numerous international charters. That Bibi, his extremist accomplices, and other leaders not only in Isreal but America too, have together destroyed the very reason for Israeli state. That is, to preserve and protect the Jewish people who, while stateless, were unprotected and then mercilessly slaughtered. But now, as a legitimate developing nation—which is a process—they no longer legally exist, even if they ever did.
Rather, they have now tragically attained the status of a rogue, genocidal, terrorist nation with warrants out for its leaders, Netanyahu and Galant. To wit: “On 21 November 2024, following an investigationof war crimes and crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for two senior Israeli officials, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the former Minister of Defense of Israel, alleging responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts during the Gaza war. The warrant against Netanyahu is the first against the leader of a Western-backed democratic country for war crimes.” (en.m.wiki.org, passim)
This incriminating witness on part of the ICC cannot be advertised enough, despite the hypocritical attempts by Isreal and America to discredit, if not disband, that agency of international justice. In place of such international justice—once validated by the unstoppable Mossad, who pursued and captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, bringing him to Israel to stand trial—there is now a global lawlessness. This discredits that very ardent, honorable Israeli pursuit, once recognized by the international community, when they trapped and caught ‘the monster’ hell bent on its people’s extinction.
Predictably, and with no less irony, almost immediately after the evil course of the then infant state of Isreal, it began to prove correct two famous German philosophers: Nietzsche, who warned of un-circumspect pursuit of monsters, such as the Nazis of the Third German Reich, and Ardant, who said Israeli must be careful, now as a nation, not to develop hegemonic, colonial tendencies toward the people it chose to move in with, the now annihilation targeted, Palestinian people. Tragically, it appears both philosophers were prophetic.
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