Small steps to wider détente

Umberto Eco | New Statesman | 21 August 2008

Umberto Eco meditates on localised truces as a strategy to inspire broader peace

When we talk of peace and wish for peace, we always think in universal, global terms. We would not talk of peace if we thought of it only for a few, otherwise we’d go live in Switzerland or enter a monastery, as people used to do in the dark days of endless invasions.

The second way of thinking about peace, complementary to the first, is that it is an original state. From the idea of an Edenic society to that of a golden age, peace has always been advocated as the restoration of a primal condition of humanity that was at a certain point corrupted by some act of hatred and injustice. But let’s not forget that, with regard to the myths of the golden age, Heraclitus was rational enough to say that “struggle is the rule of the world and war is the father of all and the king of all”. He was followed by Hobbes and his homo homini lupus and Darwin and his “struggle for life”.

So let’s try to imagine that the general curve of entropy is dominated by conflict, destruction and death, and that the isles of peace are pretty little blips in the overall entropic fall, exceptions to war that need a lot of energy to survive.

The great peaces we have known in history, the ones that involved large territories, such as the Pax Romana, or in our time the Pax Americana (but there was also a Pax Sovietica that for 70 years curbed areas that are now in turmoil and seething with mutual conflicts), were the result of continuous military pressure. This arrangement might please those who stand in the eye of the hurricane, but those at its margins suffer from the wars that serve to maintain the equilibrium of the system. As if to say that if there is peace, it is always ours, never that of others.

I don’t believe that on this earth men, who are wolves preying on their fellow men, will attain global peace. The historian Francis Fukuyama was thinking about this peace with his idea of the end of history, but recent events have shown that history repeats itself, and always in the form of conflict.

There remains the possibility of working gradually for peace. If universal peace can result only from a military victory, local peace can spring from a cessation of belligerence. It is established when combatants are weary and a negotiating agency offers to mediate.

A succession of local peaces might lead to a long-term decrease in the tension that keeps war alive. Even if we do not always achieve this end, a peace realised like a small blip in the general entropic curve to chaos would still serve as an example, a model.

Peace as an example. This may be a very Christian concept, but I would argue that it would have been accepted by many pagan sages. Let’s make peace between us two, even if only between the Montagues and the Capulets; it will not solve the problems of the world, but it will show that negotiation is still possible.

An extract from Umberto Eco’s “Turning Back the Clock” (Vintage, £9.99), out now

Seeds of Destruction, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Stephen Lendman | Global Research | January 2, 2008

Today, we’re all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who’s written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant’s Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He’s also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he’s a regular contributor.

Engdahl also wrote two important books – “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” in 2004. It’s an essential history of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America’s post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity – unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources.

Engdahl’s newest book is just out from  Global Research: “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” and subject of this review. It’s the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling. The book’s compelling contents are reviewed below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless intent to use it – Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl’s book focuses brilliantly on one of them. To fully cover its vital contents, this review will be in three parts for more detail and to make it easily digestible.

The New Road to Serfdom

By Christopher Hayes | In These Times | November 7, 2007

Over the course of 500 pages in The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein documents the moments of chaos and disruption that allow a small coterie of experts to swoop in and administer what’s invariably called “bitter medicine,” “painful reforms” or “shock therapy”

In the early ’80s, as Naomi Klein attempted to hack away at England’s substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn’t fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile’s aggressive model more faithfully.

In her reply, Thatcher explained tersely that “in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a higher degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times, the process may seem painfully slow.”

The Hayek/Thatcher exchange is one of many revealing historical nuggets unearthed in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein’s ambitious history of neoliberalism. Hayek isn’t the star of The Shock Doctrine—that dubious honor goes to his protegé and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. But Klein’s totemic, capacious and brilliant alternate history of the last three decades of global political economy can best be understood as a latter-day response to Hayek’s classic right-wing manifesto, The Road to Serfdom.

Susan Eisenhower Leaves the Republican Party

Reflections on Leaving the Party

Susan Eisenhower | nationalinterest.org | August 21, 2008

I have decided I can no longer be a registered Republican. For the first time in my life I announced my support for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, in February of this year. This was not an endorsement of the Democratic platform, nor was it a slap in the face to the Republican Party. It was an expression of support specifically for Senator Barack Obama. I had always intended to go back to party ranks after the election and work with my many dedicated friends and colleagues to help reshape the GOP, especially in the foreign-policy arena. But I now know I will be more effective focusing on our national and international problems than I will be in trying to reinvigorate a political organization that has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn.” And now, as the party threatens to trivialize what promised to be a serious debate on our future direction, it will alienate many young people who might have come into party ranks.

My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucusus, and this has undermined U.S. national security. At the same time, the McCain camp appears to be comfortable with running an unworthy Karl Rove–style political campaign. Will the McCain operation, and its sponsors, do anything to win?

This week, I changed my registration from Republican to independent. The two political parties as they exist today, and the partisanship that they foster, reflect the many fights of the cold war, the Vietnam era, the post–cold war and the 9/11 periods. Today we are in a different place altogether, where our security as a nation is challenged not just from abroad but also close to home. The energy, health-care and financial crises threaten our national prosperity and well-being, just as surely as any confrontation overseas or an attack by radical terrorists.

McCain’s neocon warmonger

Patrick J. Buchanan | WorldNetDaily | August 22, 2008

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

James Blight on the Cuban Missile Crisis

James Blight | TruthDig | August 21, 2008

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans.
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. …
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

– Bob Dylan, composed in late October 1962

In his riveting new book, “One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War,” Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs shows us why Bob Dylan was right all along. Dylan, as Dobbs reports, was holed up during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 in a Greenwich Village apartment, writing his apocalyptic masterpiece “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall.” Dylan told an interviewer, “People sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I.” It was that scary, or at least it seemed so at the time, a near miss to nuclear oblivion. Yet in the quarter-century following the crisis, it became the fashion among many memoirists and academics, the members of what was to become a substantial literary cottage industry on the crisis, to try to explain the miss while minimizing, or even ignoring, just how near to catastrophe the world had come during the crisis. Michael Dobbs, marshaling a virtual Everest of evidence from a dizzying array of sources, convincingly reverses the emphasis, by describing the American, Russian and Cuban details of the nearness—some of the evidence never before available—while attributing the miss to a mixture of last-minute caution on the part of the leaders in Washington, Moscow and Havana, along with good luck. This is the Cuban missile crisis up close, and very personal. There is no disputing Dobbs’ conclusion: Bob Dylan, along with much of the rest of the world, was right to be afraid in October 1962. It might all have ended right then and there, via any number of scenarios that, in Dobbs’ reconstruction, seem frighteningly plausible.

The Conquest by Presidentialism

David Sirota | TruthDig | August 21, 2008

You have to hand it to John McCain—his campaign ads are (inadvertently) the most incisive commentary on the death of Jeffersonian democracy ever broadcast.

Superficially, they lambaste Barack Obama’s worshipful crowds and messianic promises that a heavenly “light will shine down” on his candidacy. But what the ads really lampoon is what Vanderbilt professor Dana Nelson calls presidentialism: our paternalistic view that presidents are godlike saviors—and therefore democracy’s only important figures.

“The once-every-four-years hope for the lever pull sensation of democratic power blinds people to the opportunities for democratic representation, deliberation, activism and change that surrounds us in local elections,” she writes in her new book, “Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People.”

In a country whose anti-royalist founders constitutionally constrained executive authority, what explains the metastatic growth of presidentialism? The evisceration of journalism and social movements.

The media’s Watergate triumph sired the current Age of Stenography. With personal glory the new priority, correspondents figured out that transcribing White House prognostication is a far easier way to gain notoriety than Woodward and Bernstein’s shoe-leather investigations. The result is journalism run by grotesque sloth and vapid speculation—the kind exemplified by The New York Times’ top three political correspondents this week. As inflation hit crisis levels and the Russia-Georgia conflict inched the planet toward World War III, these “reporters” devoted a stunning 2,148 words to fact-free guesses about selections for vice president—a position with no power and zero impact on ordinary people’s lives.

Media consolidation and cost-cutting have sped up this decline, turning many local news outlets into collages of wire copy and presidential punditry from D.C. bureaus. Meanwhile, the 21st century’s most celebrated model of “grass-roots” movement-building is MoveOn.org—a top-down group whose primary function is to land stories about itself in Washington gossip rags and send e-mail spam about presidential candidates.

The resulting noise reiterates one message: The only thing that matters is 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Obama has some important news!

Friend –

I have some important news that I want to make official.

I’ve chosen Joe Biden to be my running mate.

Joe and I will appear for the first time as running mates this
afternoon in Springfield, Illinois — the same place this campaign
began more than 19 months ago.

I’m excited about hitting the campaign trail with Joe, but the two of
us can’t do this alone. We need your help to keep building this
movement for change.

Please let Joe know that you’re glad he’s part of our team. Share
your personal welcome note and we’ll make sure he gets it:

http://my.barackobama.com/welcomejoe

Thanks for your support,

Barack

P.S. — Make sure to turn on your TV at 2:00 p.m. Central Time to join
us or watch online at http://www.BarackObama.com.

Government Biological Weapons Legislator: Anthrax Inside Job Cover Up Continuing

Says criminal elements of the government “can and will” use bio-weapons to scare and terrorize Americans when it is politically convenient

Steve Watson | Infowars.net | Friday, August 22, 2008

A former government biological weapons legislator appeared on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones Show yesterday to discuss his detailed knowledge of the cover up of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which he is adamant were perpetrated by criminal elements of the US government in an attempt to foment a police state by killing off opposition to hardline post 9/11 legislation.

Dr Franics A. Boyle literally helped write the law with regards to terrorism, as he was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush Snr.

Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia- Herzegovina at the World Court.

For the full story, go to Infowars.net.

CNN: Conspiracy theorists ‘not swayed’ by WTC7 explanation

David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster | Raw Story | Friday, August 22, 2008

RELATED: NIST WTC 7 Report: Shameful, Embarrassing And Completely Flawed

What really happened at 7 W.T.C. on Sept. 11, 2001? Government investigators say they know the truth.

Fires, and not controlled demolition, caused the collapse of the tower, claims a new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The institute, a federal scientific agency which promotes technical industrial standards, is the first government agency to present an all-encompassing theory of the building’s demise.

But that theory is being met with consternation among those who believe something more sinister was afoot on 9/11.

“It has been a mystery since 9/11,” said CNN’s Deborah Feyerick in a Friday report. “Why did World Trade Center building seven collapse nearly seven hours after the twin towers fell?