Author: paulm100m

Another round of negotiations for peace between Israel and “Palestine”- sigh

Richard Falk in his blog article, Reviving the Israel-Palestine Negotiations: The Indyk Appointment notes one of many absurdities in  this current round of “peace negotiations” between Israel  and the Palestinian  Authority,  brokered by  the U.S., is the US appointment of the chief negotiator, Martin Indyk. Martin Indyk, Falk notes, is a “former ambassador to Israel (1995-97; 2000-01), onetime AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) employee, British born, Australian educated American diplomat, with a long list of pro-Israeli credentials.” Hardly what might be described as an independent arbiter

As www.jadaliyya.com display in their simple but effective poster on the displacement of the Palestinian peoples since 1948 by Israeli soldiers and gunmen, by 2008, more than 5.3 million Palestinians were living in enforced exile, often in extreme conditions of hardship. Those who remain in the ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza, imprisoned behind ever higher Israeli concrete walls and for Gazans, facing increasing limitations to their access to food, medicine and the basic necessities of life, by the illegal Israeli blockade. In addition, thousands of Palestinian political prisoners are imprisoned in Israel for their rightful attempts to   break a savage illegal occupation, or like the hundreds of young children imprisoned and often tortured, maybe threw a stone or two against an Israeli soldier or settler.

This is no round of equal party negotiations; this is negotiations between one all powerful  (and totally supported in  every way by  the “independent arbiter”  the U.S.) and the Palestinian  agency  which  has no  democratic legitimacy with its own people (Hamas does)  and which  has absolutely no negotiating leverage.

Falk also notes that “John Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State, whose show this is, dutifully indicated when announcing the Indyk appointment, that success in the negotiations will depend on the willingness of the two sides to make ‘reasonable compromises.’” One might ask what further compromises the Palestinians may  be asked to make;  having lost almost all  their land, hundreds of thousands of lives, the loss of a  state entity and thousands of their “citizens’  in  Israeli  prisons.  All the while, Israel continues to expand with more settler housing into the occupied territories, destroying more Palestinian homes and orchards and creating more Palestinian refugees. 

Peace in Palestine, if it can be obtained, must surely require the just settlement of past wrongs and the creation of a stable, sustainable and just society for the inhabitants of that region. In my view, some elements of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission model, along with the reconciliations (and compensations) achieved via New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal for indigenous Maori, will achieve that goal.

This model translates, in the land of Palestine, to compensation for lands misappropriated by Israeli Jews, compensation for the deaths and torture of Palestinians and Israelis since the Nakba , and equal status for all citizens, whether Jewish, Muslim or any other religious or ethnic identity who currently inhabit those lands – in other words –  a single state solution. A peace settlement requires a just settlement.

In every way, these current negotiations, as all the previous peace negotiations have been, are both a farce and tragedy.

 OsloPalestine

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Links

Reviving the Israel/Palestine negotiations: the Indyk Appointment– Richard Falk

Choosing Martin Indyk to Lead the Israel Palestine Peace Talks is a Disaster – Policy Mic

Former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk to oversee talks with Palestinians –  The Guardian

John Kerry’s Doomed Peace Process-Foreign Policy in Focus

 Two-state IIlusion-New York Times Opinion  by Ian Lustick

 

The Magdelen Laundries

magdelene3

The Magdelen Laundries were penitentiary (interesting to note the word’s  origin from  the fact  that the  inmates were “penitents”) institutions run by  by  four Catholic nunnery congregations: (the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Religious Sisters of Charity  and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd).

These 4 congregations operated  10 laundries in Ireland  between 1922 and 1996. These and other  forced labour religious institutions used well over 10,000 young women  over that period  as involuntary labour (or more technically: slaves) to launder  washing and provide an income for the convents. The women on  “referral” to the laundries  were assigned a number and their name taken from them;  they were often beaten, starved, had their heads shaved as punishment, received no  education  were kept in captivity indefinitely; sometimes til the end of their days.

Institutions known as Magdalen Laundries were not confined to Ireland, nor were they exclusively Catholic-established or operated.

Their furthest history in Europe may date back to medieval times, but the first of what could be termed a ‘Magdalen Home’ was established in England in 1758. The first in Ireland was a Protestant asylum established in 1765.

Historians estimate that by the late 1800s there were more than 300 Magdalen Institutions in England alone and at least 41 in Ireland. These early institutions –variously entitled Asylums, Refuges and Penitentiaries – included institutions of all denominations and none.

The focus and purpose of these early institutions was closely tied to women in prostitution or women regarded as in danger of falling into prostitution, including unmarried mothers. This purpose, however, appears to have changed over time and based on the records it identified, the Committee found that the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland, after 1922, was not associated in the same strong way with prostitution or unmarried mothers. From the “Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries” ;  Dr. McAleese February 2012

Made infamous by the 2002 movie the Magdelene Sisters and the subsequent heart-rending song composed by  Joni Mitchell, the government of Eire was finally moved to commission a  report in  2010  to identify  whether the government had any responsibilities for the suffering inflicted by  the Magdelen Laundries.

The reporting committee was composed of Senator Martin McAleese, eight Civil Servants and Nuala Ní Mhuircheartaigh, a civil servant who acted as the report’s “analyst and drafter”;  and then the report has five pages of acknowledgements. Bishops, Archbishops, Accountants, Doctors, Historians and Academics, Agencies of the State and named Civil Servants are name checked. Advocacy and Representative Groups administrators are thanked by name. Finally, just before the bottom of page 5 we get the last line of the acknowledgements.

“And finally a special thanks to all the women who shared the story of their time in the Magdalen Laundries with the Committee.”

The Irish convents identified in the McAleese report claimed that the Laundry’s made no profit,  despite large incomes, an unpaid workforce and tax exemption. But as Labour Party representative, Eamonn Maloney, said;

“They did make money, they made lots of money,” he said during Dáil statements on the report, adding that most commercial laundries in the 1940s and 1950s closed because of competition from the Magdalenes.

 

After the McAleese report was released, representatives of some the Magdelen Laundry survivors said: the report delivered by former Senator Martin McAleese fell short in many ways; one of the most glaring was to write of “self-referral”.

Was a destitute woman thrown on the street by her parents “willing” when her choice was between selling herself or a hell-hole of slave labour?

Was a motherless child “willing” when a Catholic priest took her from the care of her widowed father because to have her free in society left her open to “moral hazard”?

More importantly, if every woman still alive who was ever locked in one of those dark, fearful places was a prostitute; if every woman there had given birth to children “out of wedlock”, there should still be no “stigma”. They were human, that’s all: human like the rest of us. And they were ignorant of the world and its ways, the ignorance as enforced as was their incarceration.

The stigma is ours, and ours alone, to be shared by all of us except the women victimised and brutalised by Irish society as a whole. That the women could have perceived themselves as bearing a stigma for their incarceration reflects on us, not on them.

 Magdelen2

It is noteworthy that Martin McAleese found limited evidence of physical  or sexual  abuse in  the Magdelen Laundries from the interviews he  personally  undertook alone with the women,  with whom he “engaged broadly”

However, according to the Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) group, more than 800 pages of transcripts of first-hand oral evidence was offered to the McAleese inquiry, but never used. Much of that unused testimony referred to systemic abuse of all  kinds by  nuns and priests. JFM collected testimony from survivors who attested to severe psychological and physical suffering incurred during even short stays of less than a year.

Apparently only women  who would sign  a declaration of anonymity  were permitted to testify to McAleese. In addition, the Report Committee agreed a Data Protection policy with the nunnery orders consulted, under which the Committee could access records containing personal data, but could not publish the names of the residents of the laundries – even those of deceased women to whom data protection law no longer applies.

Eire Human Rights reports that: Those interviewed include a small sample of 118 survivors, of whom 58 still live in the care of religious orders. Most were introduced to the Committee via representative organisations and survivors’ groups. They were interviewed in private. There were no public hearings. Claire McGettrick of  Justice for Magdalenes describes the manner in which the Committee interviewed survivors of the Laundries here.

Initially, the committee didn’t even want to speak to women in person, but we fought for that. The women gave their testimony verbally and then we were given very little notice of a second meeting where we were to look at the format of the initial testimony. Instead, the women were brought in one by one for a meeting with the commission where they asked repeated questions.

Their overall impression was that they were being checked to ensure that their memories were correct. The women came out of those meetings very quiet and subdued. None of them, none of us, had been expecting for them to be questioned like that.

The women are allowed scant quotations in which to share their stories. (This is in contrast to, for instance, the long passages of quotation from identified benign male authority figures later in the chapter – GPs who attended the Laundries, the chaplain of the Sean McDermott Street Laundry [who appears again at length in Chapter 9 to explain, unchallenged, the famous photograph of police and women from the Laundry marching in a religious procession (shown below)

 magdelene1
McAleese however did say in his  report that “the large majority of women who engaged with the committee… spoke of the deep hurt they felt due to their loss of freedom, the fact that they were not informed why they were there, the lack of information on when they would be allowed to leave, and denial of contact with the outside world, particularly family and friends”.

The report’s Executive Summary ends with the following assessment of the first hand evidence of the women who witnessed and experienced these institutions

“Although identifying common patterns in these stories, the Committee did not make specific findings on this issue, in light of the small sample of women available.”

Simon McGarr in his article on  the McAleese report states that “In fact the Executive Summary is a shameful farrago of guesses, elisions and wilful ignorance. It proposes the most unlikely of explanations for the most serious of issues. On the lack of death certificates for women and the total failure to ever report any women’s death to a Coroner it says

“It is not possible to state definitively whether the deaths for which certificates were not found were unregistered; or whether registration occurred under a variation of the woman’s name or at her former home-place rather than the district in which the Laundry was located.

Simon McGarr a solicitor, also notes that:

A) The Committee concedes it went outside its brief to present the argument made by the Religious Orders as to the profit the laundries did (or, it is claimed, did not) make. It says it did so because it was in the public interest.

B) The Committee decided its brief did not allow it to decide who was liable for anything. It decided this also meant treating the first hand evidence of the women who had been in the Magdalene institutions as merely “input to the process.”

The only member of the Committee to meet with any women who worked in the Magdalene institutions was Martin McAleese. Paragraph 31 assures the reader he ‘engaged broadly’ with them.

“It is unfortunate that Martin McAleese chose not to include anything more of the women’s accounts in this report,” said Mr McGarr.

The Eire  Human Rights website reports  that

  • At least 2,500 women were sent to the laundries by the State.
  • The State gave laundry contracts to the Magdalene Laundries, participating in a system which ran on forced unpaid labour and which did not comply with social insurance obligations.
  • The State oversaw that system of forced, unpaid labour in that it inspected the Laundries under the Factories Acts.
  • The State, in various contexts and for various purposes, funded some of the activities of the Magdalene Laundries.
  • The Gardai pursued and returned some women who had escaped from the Magdalene Laundries, often on an informal, non-statutory basis.

It should be noted that the Magdelen Laundries were just one symptom of a lack of moral  and ethical behaviour by  the government and society of Eire. In the absence of significant government welfare institutions in  an impoverished society,  responses to poverty, criminality or “immoral” behaviour were abdicated to   community and religious institutions with minimal oversight and control. Inevitably, as in every isolated  institution around the world,  such institutions became a magnet for those who  had a penchant for cruelty and abuse or simply a lust for power over others.

PaddyDoyle reports that

By 1966, Ireland was incarcerating a higher proportion of its people in mental hospitals than anywhere else in the world. It follows that very many of these people (21,000 at the height of the system) were not mentally ill but were locked up for social, political and familial reasons. Conditions were generally abysmal. Mental hospitals were not just grim places of incarceration, they were also death traps.

O’Sullivan and O’Donnell show that an astonishing 11,000 people died every decade in Irish mental hospitals – that’s 33,000 people between the 1930s and the 1950s. Many of them died because of neglect and insanitary conditions. “Around one in 20 patients died each year from a variety of ailments, such as tuberculosis, influenza and malignant tumours . . . Occasionally patients perished because they had been given the wrong medication, or tried to escape but fell into a river, or lost their lives in ways that are unexplained, but seemed to involve neglect or deliberate harm. Only in exceptional circumstances were staff called to account for such deaths.” Basic decency demands that the State should, at the very least, commission a full independent historical report on the mental hospital system.

However the McAleese report also offers one other salutory lesson; the importance of recognizing, valuing and accepting as truth, the narratives of victims.

It should be painfully obvious to all that, as in so many similar formal  analyses of wrongdoing across the world;  that the statutory  and community/religious agencies involved have reputations to keep and budgets to  hold, while the victims had their reputations to lose and their fears re-generated in  telling their stories. What is comforting however, is that in the end, the victims’ and survivors’ stories always win out.

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Links to Magdelen Laundry Research

Testimony from Magdalen survivors is located here

https://www.facebook.com/groups/justiceformagdalenes/?ref=ts&fref=ts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum

http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/02/06/the-magdalene-report-a-conclusion/

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2013/02/25/the-magdalen-laundries-were-used-as-reformatories-where-girls-were-sent-without-due-process-but-they-were-not-brutal-anti-catholics-have-lied-about-them/

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/4812617/For-three-years-I-was-a-child-slave-in-the-Magdalene-Laundries.html

http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Magdalene-Laundry-nuns-defend-their-actions-in-new-Irish-radio-documentary-196311881.html

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_truth_of_the_magdalene_laundries_emerges

http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/02/06/how-to-read-the-mcaleese-report-into-the-magdalen-laundries/

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/bruce-arnold-mcaleese-report-flies-in-the-face-of-painful-evidence-of-laundry-victims-29077086.html

http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/lawyer-slates-mcaleese-report-as.html

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/02/06/mcaleese-report-magdalene-laundries-2013/

http://www.paddydoyle.com/category/magdalen-women-forgotten-voices/

http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cat/docs/followup/JusticeforMagdalenes_Ireland_CATFollowup.pdf

The Testimony of the survivors by Justice for Madgalenes http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cat/docs/followup/JusticeforMagdalenes_Ireland_CATFollowup.pdf

http://www.irishexaminer.com/analysis/opinion-maeve-orourke-laundries-apology-is-now-needed-221772.html

Democracy/Hypocrisy in Egypt

 So by now it should be clear to every  Western  and Arab citizen, that  western  governments don’t support the will of the majority; otherwise known as democracy-they  support “their man”.

The removal  of Mohammed Morsi  as the legitimately elected President of Egypt by  the US funded  Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Egypt, Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, on the 3rd July after one year in office, with  scarcely a murmur of concern from  any Western  “democracy” is indicative of the contempt the governing Western powers have for the will  of the people.

It can  certainly be argued that  Morsi , whose Muslim Brotherhood renaissance was largely funded by  Qatar, did not deliver on  the promises he made in  the pre-election process last  year.  However if that rule of thumb for instituting a  coup  were to be used against  every  democratically elected leader in  this world, there would be  few remaining in  power after their first year in   office!

Certainly  Morsi  changed his political  agenda frequently  over the past year based on  the  likelihood of funding becoming available from the US or Saudi Arabia or Qatar. But again, if that yardstick  were used against elected leaders  to  define legitimacy,  there are currently  few “un-bought” leaders in  democracies who  would pass that  measure.

Dodge
Dodge van

Don’t get me wrong , I am not an apologist for any kind  of religious based political agenda; whether Christian, Buddhist Muslim or any other sectarian  view of the world. By definition, those sectarian  views breed intolerance,  fear, hypocrisy and violence. But then  again  we have many apparently non religious Western leaders whose non-religious sectarian  views breed that  same intolerance and fear.

No, the most significant  issue is the breathtaking hypocrisy  of those Western leaders who  regularly call  for “democracy”  in  this or that state (usually with some natural  resources they want) ,  but whose agenda is now manifestly clear: ” regime change” is all that matters as long as the new regime is “our”  regime.

Secondly what  is also  breathtakingly clear is the total  corruption and fawning of the mainstream western media to  the powers-that-be.  No  headlines on  why  the UK and US and its European “allies’  are supporting a  military  coup  over democracy,  in what  has been trumpeted for so long as the new democratic “arab spring” ;  no hint of dissonance expressed…..

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Postscript

The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup: Exposing the Hypocrisy of ElBaradei and His Liberal Elites-  Counterpunch

Richard Falk’s as always, great  analysis  in his Egypt: Extreme Polarization and Genocidal Politics

 

Everything is secret about us and nothing secret about you…

A  disturbing article by Cyrus Safdari  of Iran Affairs about the rights of US citizens where ‘state secrets’ just  could be involved…

The (Reuters article on Iran winning legal  battles about blocking the activity  Iranian banks)   article goes on to mention the procedure used in the UK to present classified information as evidence in the court whilst minimizing the risk of disclosure by allowing the judge to see the “secret’ evidence privately. In this case the judge was apparently not terribly impressed by the quality of this evidence since he still ruled in favor of Iran.

The US has a similar procedure ( limited to criminal prosecutions) but I don’t know if any such lawsuits in US court would be as successful, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the State Secrets Privilege, which once invoked by the govt has the effect of ending all lawsuits because the govt can prevent the disclosure of any evidence during the trial that it claims would risk exposure of national security secrets. All the govt lawyers have to do is say “State Secrets Privilege” and usually that’s the end of the case since crucial information is then prevented from being considered by the court.

Tilly the kitten
Tilly the kitten

 

Tilly the kitten

Read the rest here

And a wonderful  little piece  here by  Peter Lee at  Asian  Times Online  about three earlier NSA whistleblowers and what  Snowden  can expect in  terms of US justice..

And a lovely piece by  William Pfaff on  the US’s indefatigable attempts to  undermine the rule of international  law here

Or read that  always acerbic Australian  John Pilger here on ‘Understanding the Prism leaks is understanding the rise of a new fascism’

Or, another great cutting article about secrecy and  corporatism  from  Arthur Silbur entitled  “Intelligence, Corporatism, and the Dance of Death”

Or an  erudite article on Snowden by David Bromwich at  London Review of Books

Or this great little article by  Digby  at  Hullabaloo analysing  what  is already  very  clear:-that  these “spymasters” are about as incompetent and basically just  as stupid  as you can possibly  imagine..

Or this authoritative article on  international  law by  Richard Falk  entitled Misreading the Snowden Affair

This post is a revised and modified version of an essay published as an Op/Ed two days ago by Al Jazeera English; it attempt to reflect on the significance of the Snowden disclosures, and why governments did not rebuff the American efforts to take Snowden into custody as an accused criminal by the simple assertion that ‘political crimes‘ should never be the subject of cooperative inter-governmental efforts to achieve the enforcement of criminal law in a foreign country. The world benefits from the safety valve of such sanctuary, as does the country that is seeking to arrest and punish the whistleblower even if most of its leaders and opinion makers do not realize this.

An interesting Wikipedia note on Russ Tice, NSA whistleblower in  2005, who  noted  the very  same issues that  Snowden refers to. ( note that Tice’s allegations were dismissed by the Inspector General , who  stated in  an unclassified report that found “no evidence” to support Tice’s claims.[4]

 

Remembering the Nakba

thenakbaI need say  nothing more than note this image, (courtesy  of  www.jadaliyya.com)

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Postscript:

A comment from the always erudite and supremely reasonable Helen Cobban from Just  World News

Living on the Planet “Stupid”

A recent sobering article in the Guardian notes that as of May  2013 we have now reached the new exciting record of having 400  parts per million of Co2 in our atmosphere!

The Guardian  states that:

The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.

These conditions are expected to return in time, with devastating consequences for civilisation, unless emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil are rapidly curtailed. But despite increasingly severe warnings from scientists and a major economic recession, global emissions have continued to soar unchecked.

Hockeystick

The CO2 “Hockeystick” graph (courtesy of http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2013/may/10/climate-warming-gas-carbon-dioxide-levels-interactive )

However what is most sobering, is that last slide in  this Guardian narrative, which shows the likely scenario of reaching 1000  parts of carbon  dioxide per million by  2100 if industrialization continues as it has for the past 200 years; which is everybody’s best guess at  this point.

Not one government in  the world is committed to real  carbon  dioxide emission reductions  at  this point. Most governments talk about reducing carbon  emissions, but in  reality pedal  “progress’  and ‘economic growth ” as the panacea to their  little national  problems of recession or poverty…  However  “growth” and  “progress” are the true causes of our death-wish.

By the time  real decisions are made to  reduce industrialization and consumption  globally, we will be well  and truly past  the point of ensuring our  survivability as a species  with any significant numbers on the planet,  along with  thousands of other species. In  reality,  right now, we are  long-gone.

What  the impacts of living on  a planet with 1000 parts per million of carbon  dioxide will be; no-one knows. Nor do  we know what the short to medium term impacts of this totally  never-before-witnessed  sudden change in our atmospheric composition will have on  this planet.

Nor does anyone know, even if we stop producing CO2 right now, how long it will  take before  CO2 levels start to  decline,  and consequently the world’s  climate begin to return to”normal ” conditions. Quite possibly it may take  thousands of years for climate conditions to return to the levels of the 1960s; if they ever do  at  all.

What  we do  know is that we have  entered an unfamiliar world-there is no  going back.

Be prepared for the unexpected!

 

 

Peddling Over the Cliff

George Monbiot in  his blog “The Great  Unmentionable” once again  powerfully articulates the insanity of consumerism -the relentless drive by  governments, media and corporates to encourage us all  to not only maintain  our spending on  foolish things, but to increase it.

Monbiot points out that it is not  heating lighting and transport which  are the predominant carbon  emission culprits-it is the “stuff’  we buy – which  increasingly is produced for “us’  Westerners by  ‘those’ people over there.

In its quest  for economic   growth  and more wealth  for the wealthy, corporates attempt to  even commodify nature; where would we be for instance without our little sticky labels on  our fruit and veges, not knowing  which  international  conglomerate had marketed that piece of produce?

But by far the most insidious aspect  of consumption of  “stuff” is the central part it plays in the relentless destruction of  the natural world- the loss of natural habitat, the annihilation of species after species, for  more pieces of short-lived pieces of ‘stuff ‘ that no human will want in  a  year  or so.

The environment may be able to be resurrected  after the factories have been pulled down, as some artificial and dumbed-down version of true nature -but without the ever-growing list  of  extinct  species that  can never return to us.

SAM_2053
Maple Trees in Autumn

 

As our species becomes more and more urbanised, we lose our  awareness of our indelible link  with nature; our capacity to just  watch  and listen  and wonder at  the glorious  real world around us ;  our heads  down  watching  ‘smartphone” screens or  plugged in  to our latest preference for noise on our mp3 player. We become  immune to the beauty  and randomness and unexpectedness of nature of which  we are an integral  member-and  have blinded ourselves to that reality.

Instead of being open  and alive to  new and unexpected events and situations, we increasingly self-select our perception of the world from  an ever-narrowing mechanical IT menu driven by  our past experience.

We lose our connectedness to  the world around us-our inherent knowledge that we are transient fragile beings like all  other sentient things on this planet: that  we are different-but no better-  than all  the other species we live with.

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Postscript:

A great little article on  international  debt and how it fuels the crazy  cycle of “growth”  by Dinyar Godrej at the New Internationalist

Debt – a global scam

The standard response to the current financial crisis has been to punish the presumed debtors. Are the creditors blameless, then? asks Dinyar Godrej.

It’s almost a reflex. Think about debt and we think first about something owed. Then come secondary considerations of whether it ‘should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’ be paid back, how this should happen, and whether possible.

Large outstanding personal debts – say a mortgage taken out during a housing bubble – can turn even the stoutest of us into ‘quivering insomniac jellies of hopeless indebtedness’ (as Margaret Atwood so accurately puts it). Debt is, we feel, whatever the rights or wrongs, ‘our own fault’.

We can’t help it, we are socialized to take such a moral view of debt.

 

False Flaggers

The Boston killings are just one of so many examples over the past 10  years since 9/11 of terrorist  activities on Western soil which have pre-existing strong links to  “intelligence”  services. Actually the term ‘Intelligence Services’ is rather an oxymoron, given that those intelligence officers are the ones who  want to play  James Bond  without any normal civilizational  rules for the good of the  “homeland ” or some other jingoist identity…

And  a passing  reference to Glen Greenwald as to why mass killers using guns   in the US are not  terrorists,   but two  brothers who  apparently put together, and exploded  two ?  (now supposedly eight ) bombs,  are terrorists.

But before you  leap  away muttering about  paranoia and  conspiracy theories, consider the  following historical examples of false flag operations…

The Gulf of Mexico  US battleship Maine’s explosion in Havana Harbour in 1898 , likely through   an  accidental bunker fire igniting munitions,  was later used as a pretext  for war with Spain; “Remember the Maine,  to hell  with Spain ‘  was the cry.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, in which  the USS destroyer Maddox opened fire on  two  North Vietnamese torpedo  boats  and was then fired upon  by  the two  small  boats.   The Maddox was approaching Hòn Mê Island, three to four miles (6 km) inside the twelve-mile (19 km) limit claimed by North Vietnam. This territorial limit was not recognized by the United States.  The  captain of the Maddox radioed to say  the Vietnamese were attacking the US warship and  US warplanes were used to attack  the retreating patrol  boats. The incident was subsequently used by  President  Johnson  to escalate the war against  North Vietnamese.

And today, intelligence services in  the Western world have a wealth of opportunities to exploit opportunities for violence using angry young men ( and increasingly women) who  have been marginalized in  the society they currently live in, and see their cultures of origin  destroyed and maligned by  Western governments.  Intelligence operatives are therefore in  a unique position to  justify their own jobs and the weapons manufacturers who  “subsidise” such intelligence communities,  by facilitating   “terrorists” (really just  violent criminals ); in many cases  providing the information on bomb-making,  funding, communications,  physical resources etc to   people  who  are simply angry and naive  and , were it not for the intervention of these government agencies, would remain  simply angry  and frustrated.

See Michael German’s Manufacturing Terrorists article where he reviews journalist Trevor Aaronson’s  The Terror Factory,  which  documents over 171  instances of the FBI creating faux terrorists using sting operations since 9/11.

To complicate matters,  over the past 20 years there has also been an unprecedented rise in  the creation  of predominantly US based private armies funded by  both   state governments and the independently rich  and powerful eg…G4S (the second largest  employer in  the world after Walmart), Blackwater,  The Craft  etc,  along with  a rise in  the private armies of drug-runners and institutionalized  mafia type organisations as can be seen in the  War on Drugs drug-running activities by  CIA operatives (whether independent of the CIA or as part of fund-raising initiatives)  in Central America.

The Craft
The Craft Logo

 

The clear identification of terrorism culprits has therefore been made much harder when a state entity can  deny all  knowledge of the violence committed through  the entrapment of foolish  radicals into violent acts by  private but  government  contracted security forces. It is thus disturbing and revealing  when clearly psychopathic personalities like  Chris Kyle (“famed”  sniper and ex- US Navy SEAL shot and killed in  an ironic twist of fate by another  war  traumatised ex-SEAL)   of  The Craft (US mercenary trainers and deliverers of security, and apparently providers of contracted security to the Boston  Marathon), have as their motto “Despite what  your momma told  you…. violence does solve problems”. Only in  the United States could such an organization be permitted to exist with such  puerile and overtly  violent traits and be contracted to provide security.

While the  paranoid culture of the United States on  both the “left” and right wings have in a few days developed an amazing range of conspiracy theories explaining the reasons for the massacre, it is clear that in  the case of the Boston bombings,  some of the linkages  with State and security agencies are unusual-not least  the fact  that the US appears to be a keen supporter of Chechen fighters in Russia. (Note that  the two suspected Boston bombers are/were Chechen).

However it seems apparent that on the whole, governments and intelligence services exploit existing weaknesses or  violent tendencies of others for their own political and economic purposes, rather than  creating  a terrorism threat from nothing.

That  said, the linkages can be tenuous, as in  the current Canadian case of two young men who it would appear, indulged in some foolish conversations about  how they might like to blow up trains. However the intelligence of the security forces obviously came under a little strain  when they made the implausible accusatory  link (now retracted) between Al Qaeda and Iran -both  of whose Islamic roots are violently anathema to each other. The fact  that the clam  was initially made at all by Canadian  security forces is a wonderful  example of both the intellectual  capacity and the political motivations of those security agencies.

What  is therefore very  clear  is that  state  agencies, their  intelligence arms and the private mercenary  armies operating in  the world often  at their behest, are  absolutely clueless as to the impacts and likely blowbacks from their actions. They  are  quite literally, playing with fire.

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Postscript:

For a more detailed look  at  the CIA/Chechen connection read here

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Links

http://www.parapolitical.com/2013/03/5qr

http://occupynewsnetwork.co.uk/britam-false-flag-hacking-revelations-true-or-false/

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/conspiracy-theories/uk-court-finds-7-7-was-false-flag-secret-service-op-t22412.html

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21566625-business-private-armies-not-only-growing-changing-shape-bullets-hire

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-220413.html

US Chechen links http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/04/19/usa-the-creator-sustainer-of-chechen-terrorism/#more-19602

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/04/22/boston-terror-preparing-for-the-police-martial-law-state/

http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2013/04/21/17675.shtml

http://www.kavkaznews.com/eng/content/2013/04/20/17666.shtml

http://www.naturalnews.com/039981_Boston_marathon_suspects_media_blackout.html

http://thecraft.com/   “Despite what your momma told you.. violence does solve problems”

http://www.blackwaterusa.com/

http://www.g4s.com/en/Who%20we%20are/

http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/corporations-and-conflict/private-armies/action/17469-take-action-now-to-end-the-impunity-of-private-security-contractors

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“Not with a Bang” or “Peak Capitalism”

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men alludes to the end of the world coming “not with a bang, but with a whimper..” However the end of capitalism  will not be the end of the world; far from it.  It will be a glorious new beginning for humans and the other species on this planet.

In  a  blink  of evolution’s eye, capitalism  has done more damage to  the planet we co-habitate, than any meteorite strike or cataclysmic galactic event. The destruction of species is occurring at  phenomenal  speed, the  changes to  our climate through  gaseous emissions, the poisoning  of much  of our planet for millenium… and for what?- a bank balance with lots of numbers?, some pretty things that  self-destruct in  your hands after a year or two?, the capacity to  tell  your friends about  all the places you have seen?; merely “Dust in the Wind”  as the band Kansas would say..

To change the direction of  this juggernaut of self-destruction requires more than political  will,  a mass movement or  a United Nations declaration; we are all of on board this juggernaut -whether we are up there in  the driving seat, or hanging on for dear  life on the roof desperately  trying  to  claw our way inside to the easy seats while it hurtles towards oblivion.  We all  have an investment in  ensuring  that this insane model  of “progress” continues;  we are “locked in”  for the ride. .. (the university degree that  you  spent all  those  years sweating over  so you could get the job of your dreams,  the expensive house you spent years slaving away  at a  horrible job to afford, or simply the years you spent at the factory so  your kids could get  an education…)

However some have a greater investment in it than others.

John Peterson from the Arlington Institute  argues it this way:

It’s almost as though there is a “coefficient of adaptation” associated with human societies that varies with the relative level of “development” (whatever that means) which describes the amount of change that a social system can effectively assimilate without becoming unstable. It’s not just quantitative, but also qualitative, having clear hot-button issues (often related to women and the role of government) that, if pushed too hard, accelerate the movement toward state change.

What also happens, of course, is that the powers that be, regardless of the particular discipline or sector, see the abrupt change as a threat and, like white corpuscles rushing to staunch a wound, leap forward in defense of the status quo – regardless of the relative merit of the new proposal. This is where I get hung up. It’s as though the “system” embraces the status quo, even though things are clearly not working very well and treats thoughtful new proposals as mortal threats, even as people die and suffer because of the present policies. And it’s not just that they defend the status quo, but that they leap to attack the new ideas in very non-rational and sometimes inhumane terms. 

Does all  this imply we should all be living as medieval peasants in  some country idyll?

Kelp
Kelp seaweed

 

No ,  but we can, if we have time,  start to turn the wheel, take the foot off the accelerator and truly experience the scenery-instead of watching it whipping past in  a blur. Imagine if the money  and hype that is now put into selling this or that useless product,  was instead put into showing you how to  work alongside your neighbour,  how to create living spaces around us instead of neat  and tidy  ones, how to co-exist with the other species we live alongside, how to avoid conflict  and promote peace, how to  stop and just  enjoy these brief moments we all have in  this life.

Yes, we surely need good sanitation,  clean water, cheap healthy  food and good shelter. There is plenty to  go  around  for all  the billions of humans on  this planet right now. Yes we  will need to  learn how to  consume less and enjoy more; there are plenty of tools out there to do that right now if one cares to look.

We cannot afford to have  people  control  this world and its resources whose only interest is the production of power and money  for themselves and to hell  with everything and everyone else. Those fools are dragging us  to oblivion , the point at  which literally this planet  becomes a hell-hole. Poisoning  the world and its living things, paving over the  living earth, killing our  fellow species, for a few cheap  baubles -that is truly insane. Sadly we are all  “locked-in”: -we cannot see the madness.

But, there is a saving grace to this. While Lovelock has reneged on   his  view of the Earth  as a living entity “Gaia”- this planet has not!  We are rapidly reaching the point as humans where we are opening our eyes to  the damage we have caused;  where the cost  of “improving’  or maintaining our standard of living becomes too great-we have reached “peak  capitalism”.

And just  as with “peak oil”,  the point of optimum utilization of a particular process  is invisible to the onlooker;  the  forces change and adapt. The price of oil rises inexorably year by year  but we only notice the ebbs and falls; the capacity to  pump  oil crude out of the ground wanes, but production stays with demand  as we develop  more costly and more environmentally damaging  processes  like shale oil… and  consequently economies begin  their progressive  wilt under  the ongoing pressure….

The fundamental flaws in  the capitalist  system become ever-widening abysses into the unknown; and we have the opportunity now to create something wonderful for ourselves as human beings and for  our fellow species on  this planet.

That opportunity is neither capitalism or communism  or any other “ism” created to  capture or -redistribute the “wealth” of this planet. It is an understanding that we are not the guardians of this planet, (we have made the most appalling job of trying to do that!);  we are simply co-habitators whose guidance will  come from listening and valuing everything around us.

 

 

Valueing Sentient Beings

In recent days we have seen vast Western media publicity on the Boston Marathon bombings: the dead, the wounded and the  likely perpetrators. At the same time, more than 140 people have been killed in multiple bombings in  Iraq with almost no  Western publicity.  And no  doubt,   many more “invisible” killings in  other countries have occurred  over that period, including at  least  5 people killed by  US drone attacks,  ‘collateral damage’  killings  in  Afghanistan,  not to mention  the mercenary wars going on in Mali  and other regions in  Africa, and  the Burmese civil  wars.

In my world view, every being killed is worthy  of equal  respect  and value as another. I  believe it is important if we are to be  truly compassionate human beings; (and is it not compassion that marks us as  being fully human?), that  we pay our  respects to those who have been  killed and wounded  in Boston, but that  we also  also  pay our  respects to all  those who  have died  elsewhere. I will also mourn all  those multitudes of beings from other species who  we as humans have killed in  our war  against our own environment; whether it be  through   our “need’  to  eat other fellow mammals or fish, or simply the collateral damage from  agri-business, mining,  logging, chemical spills, or our relentless need to seal the ground over for roads, carparks and buildings…..

Why  are we so  selective in  our valuing some humans over other humans,  and why  are humans so highly prized over other species on  this planet?

In my understanding, we value those who  are most like us, and de-value those who  are not like us-the other”.  That  “otherness” is encompassed in  our judgements about everything about our world; from people with other skin  colours not our own,  to  living beings who are not ‘cuddly’ and warm (and furry?) like us mammals. In  addition, from birth we are fed a diet of  reminders of what  a savage world it is outside , and only “we”, the familial clan,  can protect  you.  Upbringing, fear, ignorance and  a small  smattering of genes, all combine to give us permission to  brutalize all  those who  are “other”.

Without these selective filters on our senses, we would be able to see that  “we”  are no better  than “them” , we are fundamentally and unequivocally equal ;  we co-habit this little blue ball  together, and for own  collective wellbeing we must  nourish  and protect our fellow travellers on  this journey through the universe.

Are we really that simpleminded and judgemental  and superficial to do otherwise?- it would sadly appear so.

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Postscript:

Harmony – the ultimate goal between humans and nature by  Yuan Tze