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Dear Franklin,

I have just read your letter to Janet with its heart-rending account of the Sabra-Shatilla massacre. It is good to know there are still people who care about humanity and display a decency that is all too rare among humans, especially the most powerful – those who control such events as the Sabra-Shatilla massacre as described at A Letter To Janet About Sabra-Shatilla.

We live in a sick, sick world, a world that is full of hypocrisy and duplicity. Science has opened the door to all kinds of wizardry that allows evil people to control the destiny of most of humanity. I was taught Physics by the man who first split the atom (in 1932). He was a mild-mannered man who, on seeing where his discovery was leading, left Cambridge to return to his native Ireland and dedicate himself to teaching. Ironically, he was a pacifist. Who can tell what evil men will do with our discoveries? But science marches on regardless, putting more and more powerful weapons into the hands of powerful and unscrupulous humans: such is the madness of the human brain.

Recently, I have read the accounts given by Arundhati Roy of what is happening to the poor forest-dwellers of India who are being dispossessed of their lands and way of life by International mining companies, aided and abetted by a government which actively supports global corporations against the people whose interests they supposedly represent. The lives of these innocent, harmless people are being torn apart in the most violent manner, both physically and mentally, by so-called educated and civilised human beings, the elite of our society. What is the future of humankind in such circumstances?

Robotic planes now deliver death from the sky on innocent civilians. These are the modern-day equivalents of the olden day thunderbolts of vengeful gods. They are controlled by vengeful and evil men, men that WE elect into power.

I have just finished reading a little of the evils perpetrated by Christian Europeans against many, many innocent millions in North America, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Australia, and in South and South-East Asia. Their evil rivals and, in scale, far outdoes all that happened in Sabra and Shatilla. All this is done by people who pride themselves on being the acme of cultured civilisation, but who are strangely blind to their own true nature.

I ask myself why these things happened, and keep on happening again and again? The only explanation I can think of is that it lies in the human brain, and in particular in the imagination, that uncontrolled part of the brain that in our blindness we so much admire: the inventive/creative imagination.

We invent language. We invent writing. We tell stories and invent god(s). We invest these gods with all kinds of power. We then focus on a single god – THE GOD – God of gods! We imagine we are made in the image of this god of ours. We image that HE (note the gender – isn’t that a give away?) gave us dominion over all life, to treat as we will, and, of course, this god of ours blesses us whenever we are called to arms to slaughter our fellow-men with the same enthusiasm and lack of conscience as we slaughter and destroy the rest of life. In raining death down without mercy on the innocent, we are indeed made in his image.

Your account of Sabra-Shatilla was a another painful reminder of just how despicable humans can be, not least when they are fulfilling the imagined destiny decreed by this god of ours.

If ever we are to find a way out of the mess our imaginations have created for us (and the rest of life) it will surely come from our confronting the evil that is us, and then seeking honestly to devise a better way of life. Your message serves this end since there can be no peace without justice, and no justice without truth.

Thank you for your contribution to truth.

Yours sincerely,

David Kennedy

19 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Written by David Kennedy

Posted: 22 April 2010 00:00

Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.

Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.

Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable — at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan — would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.

Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that — it goes without saying — only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet’s premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.

It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.

It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.

It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.

The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us — whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country — the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there — by proxy and directly — on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.

Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.

In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.

And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate — and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).

The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.

It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.

Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously — including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.

Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different — and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn’t end.

And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country.

We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.

A Brief History of American Withdrawal

Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw — not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.

And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.

Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.

A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. (“We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorian base,” he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.

Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come “cut and run” charges and blame for “losing” Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.

In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after… Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”)

If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.

In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1,875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country.

Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool” of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”

Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.

Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.

Written by Tom Engelhardt

Posted: 27 April 2010 11:53

25 April, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

[Note of thanks: I found a brief commentary TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz sent around of particular interest in thinking about this piece. Let me just add that the offhand comments of my friend Jim Peck often bear fruit in pieces like this, and the daily news summaries and updates from Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz are a constant help. A bow to all three of them.]

25 April, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Countercurrents.org

This article is a adapted from the introduction to the upcoming book Sacred Economics. The purpose of the book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe.

Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of all our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought “I can’t afford to” blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term “a sellout” demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the moneychangers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. When a politician seeks money instead of the public good, we call him corrupt. Adjectives like “dirty” and “filthy” naturally describe money. Monks are supposed to have little to do with it: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately, looking at the world around us, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature. It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus and “prosperity programming” teachers would have us believe; rather, we will create a new kind of money that embodies and reinforces our changed attitudes. Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It also explores the metamorphosis in human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money. The changed attitudes of which I speak go all the way to the core of what it is to be human: they include our understanding of the purpose of life, humanity’s role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the human and natural community; even what it is to be an individual, a self. This should not be surprising, since we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun “mine” to describe it, the same pronoun we use to identify our arms and heads. My money, my car, my hand, my liver. Consider as well the sense of violation we feel when we are robbed or “ripped off,” as if part of our very selves had been taken.

A transformation from profanity to sacredness in money, something so deep a part of our identity, something so central to the workings of the world, would have profound effects indeed. But what does it mean for money, or anything else for that matter, to be sacred? It is in a crucial sense the opposite of what sacred has come to mean. For several thousand years, increasingly, the concepts of sacred, holy, and divine have referred to something separate from nature, the world, and the flesh. Three or four thousand years ago the gods began a migration from the lakes, forests, rivers, and mountains into the sky, becoming the imperial overlords of nature rather than its essence. As divinity separated from nature, so also it became unholy to involve oneself too deeply in the affairs of the world. The human being changed from a living soul to a mere receptacle of spirit, a profane envelope for a sacred soul, culminating in the Cartesian mote of consciousness observing the world but not participating in it, and the Newtonian watchmaker God doing the same. To be divine was to be supernatural, non-material. If God participated in the world at all, it was through miracles — divine intercessions violating or superseding nature’s laws.

Yet, paradoxically, this separate, abstract thing called spirit is supposed to be what animates the world. Ask the religious person what has changed when a person dies, and she will say the soul has left the body. Ask her who makes the rain fall and the wind blow, and she will say it is God. To be sure, Galileo and Newton appeared to have removed God from these everyday workings of the world, explaining it instead as the clockwork of a vast machine of impersonal force and mass, but even they still needed the Clockmaker to wind it up in the beginning, to imbue the universe with the potential energy that has run it ever since. This conception is still with us today as the Big Bang, a primordial event that is the source of the “negative entropy” that allows movement and life. In any case, our culture’s notion of spirit is that of something separate and non-worldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money! It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ’round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper, but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature’s most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural. The natural substance that comes closest to these properties is gold, which does not rust, tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold was therefore used both as money and as a metaphor for the divine soul, that which is incorruptible and changeless.

Money’s divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things, reached its extreme in the early years of the 21st century as the financial economy lost its mooring in the real economy and took on a life of its own. The vast fortunes of Wall Street were unconnected to any material production, seeming to exist in a separate realm.

Looking down from Olympian heights, the financiers called themselves “masters of the universe,” channeling the power of the god they served to bring fortune or ruin upon the masses, to literally move mountains, raze forests, change the course of rivers, cause the rise and fall of nations. But money soon proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). Soon, perhaps, we will blame the priests themselves.

What we call deflation, an earlier culture might have called, “God abandoning the world.” Money is disappearing, and with it a third property of spirit, the animating force of the human realm. At this writing, all over the world machines stand idle. Factories have ground to a halt, construction equipment sits derelict in the yard. Yet all the human and material inputs to operate them still exist. There is still fuel, there are still raw materials, and there are still human beings in abundance who know how to operate the machines. It is rather something immaterial, that animating spirit, which has fled. What has fled is money. That is the only thing missing, so insubstantial (in the form of electrons in computers) that it can hardly be said to exist at all, yet so powerful that without it, human productivity grinds to a halt. It is as if God had forsaken the world. Even beyond the mechanical realm, we can see the demotivating effects of lack of money. Consider the stereotype of the unemployed man, nearly broke, slouched in front of the TV in his undershirt, drinking a beer, hardly able to rise from his chair. Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited.

We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing the soul from the flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly and unnatural. So when I speak of making money sacred, I am not invoking a supernatural agency to infuse sacredness into the inert, mundane objects of nature. I am rather reaching back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.

My understanding of sacredness is secondary to my feeling of sacredness, or to put it better, to the feeling of being in the presence of the sacred. I cannot define that feeling, nor need I define it, because I am sure that you have felt it as well. In the presence of the sacred, we are moved to the very core of our being, we feel reverence and awe, humility and amazement, and a profound sense of gratitude. Even though, intellectually, I know that I am in the presence of the sacred all the time, only rarely do I actually feel its fullness. When I do, I feel like I have returned to a home that was always there and to a truth that has always existed. It can happen when I observe an insect or a plant, hear a symphony of birdsongs or frog calls, feel mud between my toes, gaze upon an object beautifully made, apprehend the impossibly coordinated complexity of a cell or an ecosystem, witness a synchronicity or symbol in my life, watch happy children at play, am touched by a work of genius. Extraordinary though these experiences are, they are in no sense separate from the rest of life. Indeed, their power comes from the glimpse they give of a realer world, a sacred world that underlies and interpenetrates our own.

What is this “home that was always there, this truth that has always existed”? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something far greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself. In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves: something of our very being is lost. We can feel this sense of loss directly, as an emotion, as well as indirectly through the multiplying health crises of our time. This book will draw from ecology to help describe a sacred economy. For example, in the planetary ecosystem there is no such thing as waste: the waste of one creature is the food of another, creating a sacred gift circle. For an economy to be sacred, it must be the same.

If the sacred is the gateway to the underlying unity of all things, it is equally a gateway to the uniqueness and specialness of each thing. A sacred object is one-of-a-kind; it carries a unique essence that cannot be reduced to a set of generic qualities. That is why reductionistic science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks. This conception mirrors our economic system, itself consisting mainly of standardized, generic commodities, job descriptions, processes, data, inputs and outputs and, most generic of all, money, the ultimate abstraction. In earlier times it was not so. Tribal peoples saw each being not primarily as a member of a category, but as a unique enspirited individual. Even rocks, clouds, and apparently identical drops of water were thought to be sentient, unique beings. The products of the human hand were unique as well, bearing through their distinguishing irregularities the signature of the maker. Here was the link between the two qualities of the sacred, connectedness and uniqueness: in their uniqueness, objects retain the mark of their origin, their place in the great matrix of being, their dependency on the rest of creation for their existence.

In this book I will describe a vision of a money system and an economy that is sacred. In other words, I will describe an economy that is no longer separate, in fact or in perception, from the natural matrix that underlies it. I will describe a reunion of the long-sundered realms of human and nature. The human economy will no longer be something separate from nature; it will be an extension of nature that obeys all of its laws and bears all of its beauty, wholeness, and enchantment.

Within every institution of our civilization, no matter how ugly or corrupt, there is the germ of something beautiful: the same note at a higher octave. Money is no exception: its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance. How instead money has come to generate scarcity rather than abundance, competition rather than sharing, is one of the threads of this book. Yet despite what it has become, in that original beauty of money we can catch a glimpse of what will one day make it sacred again. We intuitively recognize the exchange of gifts as a sacred occasion, which is why we instinctively make a ceremony out of gift-giving. Sacred money, then, will be a medium of gifting, a means to recreate the gift economy of a hunter-gatherer or village society on a planetary level. A sacred economy will be an economy of the Gift.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then, I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: “We must reduce carbon emissions by 90%.” Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it, that did not describe what I, personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions can come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call “living in the Gift.”

The economic crisis we face today is just one of many crises that are converging upon us all at once: crises in energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, and the environment. My previous book, The Ascent of Humanity, traced the origin of each to a common root, millennia old, that I call Separation. Their convergence is a birth crisis, in which we are expelled from the old world into the new. Unavoidably, these crises invade our personal lives, our world falls apart, and we too are born into a new world, a new identity. This is why so many people sense a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis.

I dedicate all of my work to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I say our “hearts”, because our minds tell us it is not possible. Our minds doubt that things will ever be much different than experience has taught us. You may, as you read the forgoing encomium to a sacred economy, have felt a wave of cynicism, contempt, or despair. You might have felt an urge to dismiss my words as hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself was tempted to tone down my description, to make it more plausible, more responsible, more in line with our low expectations for what life and the world can be. But such an attenuation would not have been the truth. I will, using the tools of the mind, speak what is in my heart. In my heart I know that an economy and society this beautiful is possible for us to create, and indeed, that anything less than that is unworthy of us. Are we so broken, that we would aspire to anything less than a sacred world?

Written by Charles Eisenstein

Posted: 27 April 2010 11:46

25 April, 2010

Realitysandwich.com

Dear Student Leaders at the University of California – Berkeley

It was with great joy that I learned of your recent 16-4 vote in support of divesting your university’s money from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power.

I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the moral thing. You are doing that which is incumbent on you as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.
I have been to the Ocupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write this letter with a special indebtedness to your school, Berkeley, for its pioneering role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in Apartheid. I visited your campus in the 1980’s and was touched to find students sitting out in the baking sunshine to demonstrate for the University’s disvestment in companies supporting the South African regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

To those who wrongly accuse you of unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one’s own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. You, students, are helping to pave that path to a just peace. I heartily endorse your divestment vote and encourage you to stand firm on the side of what is right.

God bless you richly,

Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town.

By Archbishop Desmond Tutu .

Archbishop Tutu is an active and prominent proponent of the campaign for divestment from Israel

Yusuf al-Qaradawi: ‘If the Prophet Mohamad was alive today, he would lend his support to NATO

“… Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based (and financed) preacher often described as the de facto spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has recently kept up a barrage of verbal attacks on the Shias. He is president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, a loose Brotherhood-inspired body designed to pronounce on issues of common concern to Muslims. Founded in the friendlier climate of 2004, its top ranks also include Shia clergy.

But Mr Qaradawi now attacks Shias for compromising the oneness of God (about the worst thing a Muslim can do) by ascribing semi-divine status to the people they regard as Muhammad’s legitimate successors. Another accusation is that Shias poach souls in Sunni lands.

Time was when Mr Qaradawi praised the feats of Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Shia militia in Lebanon, as fighters against Israel. But in recent punditry he has stressed the gap between Sunni and Shia beliefs and passionately called for regime change in Syria, where, among other things, a Sunni majority is rebelling against a ruling elite whose Alawite belief is a Shia offshoot. Senior Shia clergy have deplored his hardening line. Mr Qaradawi, whose utterances command attention from Marseilles to the north Caucasus, also backs Bahrain’s Sunni rulers in their anti-Shia stance.”

By  Yorum Yaz

16 May 2012

@ www.velfecr.com

A large swath of the US Midwest and mid-South has been devastated by extreme heat and the worst drought since at least 1956. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) declared more than 1,000 counties disaster areas—more than half of the land surface of the country—making the drought officially the largest disaster on record in the country. More than two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought.

The US is the world’s largest producer of corn, soybeans, and wheat, accounting for one in every three tons of the grains traded globally. In its weekly crop estimates this season, the USDA has repeatedly downgraded its forecasts for yields on corn and soybeans. The two crops are staple foods, and prime components of animal feed, cooking oils, and many other products.

On Monday, the government found only 34 percent of soybean acreage was in “good” or “excellent” condition, down six percentage points from the week before and 31 percentage points lower than the 10-year average for this time of year. Good/excellent ratings for corn fell to 31 percent, less than half the 10-year average rate. In the major corn-producing states of Indiana and Illinois, two-thirds of the crops were rated “poor” or “very poor.” In many of the 18 states surveyed, only 1 percent of crops were found to be “excellent.”

Overall, the government has cut its projected corn harvest to 13 billion bushels, the lowest yield since 2003.

The long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences of the extreme weather may be even more catastrophic than the immediate disaster. Meteorologists have noted that the 2012 drought is unusual in comparison to previous years in that it is impacting virtually all US growing areas at once. The widespread nature of the disaster, like other recent severe weather events, points to the impact of global warming.

“There’s not an exact definition of what the USDA means by ‘very poor’ except that it can’t be any worse,” explained Chris Hurt, an agricultural economist at Purdue University in Indiana, who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site by phone Tuesday. “For crops in that rating, it’s probably approaching no yield. The conditions continue to be extreme and the temperatures are in triple digits. We’ve only gotten spotty rain, and the forecast remains pretty much the same for the next two weeks.”

“The drought is really the worst we’ve experienced in the Midwest since 1988,” Hurt said. The drought of 1988 marked a turning point for the family farm in America, when small farmers went out of business en masse after a decade-long crisis.

“If this weather continues, it will surpass that year,” Hurt added. “We will have to go back to 1934 and 1936 for comparison. The Dust Bowl is associated with that period, and those were its worst years.”

Hurt noted that climatologists have projected that the primary corn belt would move north and westward due to warming. “I think we are seeing that. There are also many implications on animal and plant species,” he said. “Planting dates are two to three weeks earlier than they were 20 to 30 years ago.”

In addition to downgrading grain estimates, the USDA rated half of the nation’s grazing land in poor or very poor condition. Indeed, US grasslands have been so dry that since June some two million acres have burnt in wildfires.

Increasing numbers of cattle deaths have been reported in long-blighted Texas, some attributed to poisonous weeds because of the depleted pasture grass and fodder. The distress in some parts of the agricultural southwest bears a growing similarity to famine-stricken regions of Africa, and suggests a creeping desertification of arable land in the US due to climate change and poor agricultural practices.

Low river and water table levels have forced larger farms to halt irrigation, placing in question the harvest quality of currently healthy acreage. The state of Nebraska ordered 1,100 farms to halt irrigation this week because of plummeting river levels. Two hundred Kansas farms were ordered to halt irrigation last week. The southern half of the Mississippi River is so low that cargo barges have been running aground.

Some counties in the federal disaster area have recorded rainfalls 10 inches below annual averages. In a statement posted on the USDA web site, meteorologist Brad Rippey said the dry spell and temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit will continue for most of the corn belt through the week, and projected “hotter- and drier-than-normal weather pattern to persist nearly nationwide.”

“I’m about an hour south of Omaha in Nebraska, and this week will end the corn crop for 2012,” Agriculture.com Marketing Talk contributor and farmer “Highyields” said. “South of me about 10 days ago, they got a shot of rain but it was a small area. We haven’t had any rain since the first half of June… Soybeans are hanging out but you can still see a mouse running down the row.”

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” University of Arizona geosciences and atmospheric sciences professor Jonathan Overpeck told the Associated Press July 5. “This extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” Since the beginning of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has logged more than 40,000 high temperature records.

A parallel disaster is gripping the grain belt of southern Russia, the world’s third largest wheat exporter. At a press conference July 16, Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fedorov forecast a 22 percent year-over-year decline in the wheat harvest. A mild winter, followed by a spring drought, then torrential rains, have battered the entire region. The Ukraine has not publicly released an estimate on its wheat crop, but the International Grains Council has said that the country’s harvest could be halved from its initial projections.

US officials are seeking to downplay the risk of food inflation. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, said that while commodity prices would rise, “it will have a marginal impact on food prices… The impact of a drought probably will not likely be seen in the grocery aisles until 2013.”

Seizing on the disaster, speculators worldwide have flocked to grain futures. Following Russia’s downward revision Monday, wheat futures surged by 3.1 percent to $8.74 a bushel, up 34 percent for the year. The same day, prices for corn due for December delivery climbed five percent to $7.89 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade. This is near the record of $7.9925 set during the 2008 food crisis. Soybeans for November delivery are currently trading as high as $16.07 a bushel, also the highest since the summer of 2008.

The price spikes that year, caused by the confluence of extreme weather and the influx into commodities markets of hedge funds and other speculators escaping the financial meltdown, pushed at least 100 million people into dire poverty. Within a year, a record one billion people—one in six of the earth’s inhabitants—suffered from hunger. The crisis triggered riots in more than 30 countries and contributed to the upheavals in the Middle East that culminated in the Arab Spring of last year.

By Naomi Spencer

18 July, 2012

@ WSWS.org

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and Australian and world hero for exposing US war crimes and US global subversion, has sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London under threat of transfer to Sweden and thence rendition to torture and possible death in the US . Julian Assange had failed in his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face interrogation over sex-related complaints that have not resulted in any charges so far.

The Ecuadorian Embassy is permitting Julian Assange to stay at the Embassy under their protection while his request is considered. Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam has slammed the Governments  failure to stand up for Julian Assange.

Similarly, the conservative  Australian Coalition Opposition spokesperson for foreign affairs Senator Julie Bishop,  has questioned the Australian Labor Government’s inconsistency in intervening  in such cases. Thus the Australian Foreign Minister has personally flown to Libya in an attempt to secure the release of Australian mother and International Criminal Court lawyer Melinda Taylor. However the Australian Government merely offers the formality of consular assistance to Assange.

The Australian Labor Government  is a slavish lackey of the US and offers a dishonest choice of words over the Assange affair, stating that they have not been “advised” by the US Government about any US legal action against Assange. However the ABC (the Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) recently broadcast a program about the ongoing US torture of US whistleblower Bradley Manning. This ABC Four Corners TV program identifies that  “This Washington courthouse is where, it’s believed, a Grand Jury has been sitting in secret, preparing a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, which will allow his extradition to America , and a trial for espionage. Australia ‘s Government refuses to confirm this” and reveals an “email, from [US Government-linked company] Stratfor’s Vice-President Fred Burton, [which] says: “Not for publication – We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Please protect.” (ABC TV Four Corners, “Wikileaks – the forgotten man”, 18 June 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/06/14/3525291.htm ).

Julian Assange’s mother Christine Assange has commented thus on his seeking political asylum: “This is the last desperate effort because he is a political prisoner, but I hope the Ecuador government gives him asylum. As we speak I have got no doubt the Americans are intimidating Ecuador right now to try and back off. I’m hoping that they’ll hold firm knowing that the world’s people want this to happen” (ABC News, “Desperate” Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador ”, 20 June 2912: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-20/assange-seeks-asylum-in-ecuador/4080674 ).

Assange’s bid for diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy was evidently based on an expectation of Ecuadorian sympathy. Thus when Julian Assange, while under house arrest in the UK, interviewed Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on his show, “The World Tomorrow” on “Russia Today”, Correa made clear his sympathy for Assange and Wikileaks and his opposition to US bullying (in 2011  Ecuador expelled the US Ambassador Heather Hodges after particular cables were released by Wikileaks). President Correa ended the interview by saying: “Cheer up. Welcome to the club of the persecuted” to which Julian Assange replied, “Thank you. Take care. Don’t get assassinated” (see “Assange interview with Ecuador leader shows rapport”, LA Times, 20 June 2012: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/assange-interview-with-ecuador-leader-shows-rapport-video.html ). The warning was serious when one considers the appalling US record of killing national leaders it does not like,  notably in Latin America .

A succinct history of Ecuador is as follows (updated from Chapter 5, “Latin America and the Caribbean – from European invasion, genocide and slavery to US hegemony” in Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since1950”, now available for free perusal on the web:http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/chapter-5-latin-america-and-caribbean.html ) : pre-colonial sophisticated Inca empire; 1532, invasion by Spanish conquistador Pizarro; 1594, conquests by Spanish conquistador Benalcazar; 16th – 18th century, brutal enslavement and decimation of Indians; 1822, Spain defeated and Ecuador became part of Bolivar’s Greater Colombia; 1830, Ecuador seceded and became an independent entity; 1895, liberal revolution; 1944, further revolution; 1941, 1981 and 1995 border wars with Peru; 1950s and 1960s, increasing US-backed repression and malignant US involvement (hegemony, militarization, “running” leaders, secretly bombing churches to excite anti-communist sentiment); 1970s, oil industry commenced with subsequent massive environmental and social damage; April 29, 1979, under a new constitution. Jaime Roldós Aguilera was elected president but was killed (many believe assassinated) in a plane crash in 1981; 1981, 1995 Ecuador-Peru wars; 1999, Ecuador-Peru peace; 2000, military coup and revolution involving Colonel Gutiérrez, US-backed conservative Vice President Gustavo Noboa installed by military and Colonel Gutiérrez jailed ; democracy subsequently restored; 2003, Gutiérrez elected (6th president in 10 years); 2005, removal of President Lucio Gutiérrez from office by Congress, replaced by Vice President Alfredo Palacio; 2006, Rafael Correa elected president.

William Blum provides a succinct summary of US involvement after  the 2000 revolution and military coup in his book “ Rogue State . A guide to the World’s only superpower”. US occupation or hegemony kills poor people. Thus 1950-2005 excess mortality from deprivation (avoidable mortality, avoidable death, excess death, deaths that did not have to happen) totaled 1.3 billion for the World, 1.2 billion for the non-European world, 82 million in countries occupied at some point by the US in the post-1945 era,  and 1.4 million for US-dominated Ecuador. An even more succinct summary of post-1950 Ecuador circumstances considers US involvement, excess mortality and under-5 infant mortality:  foreign occupation: Spain (within the pre-1950 era); none (post-1950); post-1950 foreign military presence: US (hegemony and military training); post-1950 excess mortality/2005 population = 1.404m/13.379m = 10.5%; post-1950 under-5 infant mortality/2005 population = 1.426m/13.379m = 10.7% (see Chapter 5, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since1950”: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/chapter-5-latin-america-and-caribbean.html ).

Many believe that the US assassinated Ecuador President Jaime Roldós Aguilera in 1981 for being “uncooperative” (see “ Ecuador ”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuador ). John Perkins, author of “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”: “Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization… And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes , people who today and at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies… And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main, a consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that’s the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of that organization as its chief economist… So if we’re caught doing something, if we’re caught bribing or corrupting local officials in some country, it’s blamed on private industry, not on the US government… Jaime Roldos was an amazing man. After many years of military dictators in Ecuador , US puppet dictators, there was a democratic election, and one man, Jaime Roldos, ran on a platform that said Ecuadorian resources ought to be used to help the Ecuadorian people, and specifically oil, which at that time was just coming in. This was in the late ’70s. And I was sent to Ecuador , and I was also sent at the same time to Panama to work with Omar Torrijos, to bring these men around, to corrupt them, basically, to change their minds… On and on, we can list all these presidents that we’ve either overthrown or assassinated because they didn’t play our game. But Jaime would not come around, Jaime Roldos. He stayed uncorruptible, as did Omar Torrijos… And sure enough — it was interesting that Jaime Roldos’s plane crashed in May, and Torrijos said — got his family together and said, “I’m probably next, but I’m ready to go. We’ve now got the Canal turned over.” He had signed a treaty with Jimmy Carter to get the Canal in Panamanian hands. He said, “I’ve accomplished my job, and I’m ready to go now.” And he had a dream about being in a plane that hit a mountain. And within two months after it happened to Roldos, it happened to Torrijos also” (see John Perkins on “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”:, Democracy Now, 5 June 2007:http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/5/john_perkins_on_the_secret_history ).

A powerful insight into how the US subverts, perverts and terrorizes countries in Latin America and around the world was given by Phillip Agee in his book “Inside the Company. CIA Diary”. Agee was posted to Ecuador where his job in the US Embassy was to “run” leading trade union and political figures who were “on the books” as CIA “assets”. It was immediately obvious to any informed and perceptive Australian readers who the corresponding US Australian “assets” were – and of course once you surmised such involvement the subsequent reported behaviour of these individuals could be seen quite clearly as “fitting the mould”. Indeed recent Wikileaks releases revealed that several Labor politicians were US “assets” who regularly  reported internal Labor Government discussions to the US Embassy in Canberra .

However a colleague of Phillip Agee in Ecuador had a much more exciting time running right wing terrorists involved in bombing Catholic Churches so that these atrocities would be blamed on socialists. In the 21st century  the US Government was almost certainly involved in the 9-11 atrocity and the explosive demolition of 3 World Trade Centre buildings (see “Experts; US did 9-11”:https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ ) , these atrocities being blamed on Muslim “men in caves”, with uncritical Mainstream media permitting the subsequent War on Terror that has egregiously constrained civil liberties and caused the deaths of about 9 million people so far from violence or war-imposed deprivation, the breakdown being 2.7 million (Iraq), 5.6 million (Afghanistan), 1.1 million (Somalia), and 0.1 million (Libya) (see “Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide”:https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ). Al Qaeda was initially funded by the US and it is clear that Muslim-origin non-state terrorists have been huge assets for genocidal US imperialism. Phillip Agee resigned from the CIA out of repugnance for US torture and killing of dissidents  in Latin America, the fate that is likely to be that of Julian Assange unless the Ecuadorians can resist US pressure and rescue him.

By Dr Gideon Polya

21 June, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010:http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see:http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others:http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see:http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ andhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

The recently published report by an Israeli judge concluding that Israel is not in fact occupying the Palestinian territories – despite a well-established international consensus to the contrary – has provoked mostly incredulity or mirth in Israel and abroad.

Leftwing websites in Israel used comically captioned photographs to highlight Justice Edmond Levy’s preposterous finding. One shows an Israeli soldier pressing the barrel of a rifle to the forehead of a Palestinian pinned to the ground, saying: “You see – I told you there’s no occupation.”

Even Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, seemed a little discomfited by the coverage last week. He was handed the report more than a fortnight earlier but was apparently reluctant to make it public.

Downplaying the Levy report’s significance may prove unwise, however. If Netanyahu is embarrassed, it is only because of the timing of the report’s publication rather than its substance.

It was, after all, the Israeli prime minister himself who established the committee earlier this year to assess the legality of the Jewish settlers’ “outposts”, ostensibly unauthorised by the government, that have spread like wild seeds across the West Bank.

He hand-picked its three members, all diehard supporters of the settlements, and received the verdict he expected – that the settlements are legal. Certainly, Levy’s opinion should have come as no surprise. In 2005 he was the only Supreme Court judge to oppose the government’s decision to withdraw the settlers from Gaza.

Legal commentators too have been dismissive of the report. They have concentrated more on Levy’s dubious reasoning than on the report’s political significance.

They have noted that Theodor Meron, the foreign ministry’s legal adviser in 1967, expressly warned the government in the wake of the Six-Day War that settling civilians in the newly seized territory was a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Experts have also pointed to the difficulties Israel will face if it adopts Levy’s position.

Under international law, Israel’s rule in the West Bank and Gaza is considered “belligerent occupation” and, therefore, its actions must be justified by military necessity only. If there is no occupation, Israel has no military grounds to hold on to the territories. In that case, it must either return the land to the Palestinians, and move out the settlers, or defy international law by annexing the territories, as it did earlier with East Jerusalem, and establish a state of Greater Israel.

Annexation, however, poses its own dangers. Israel must either offer the Palestinians citizenship and wait for a non-Jewish majority to emerge in Greater Israel; or deny them citizenship and face pariah status as an apartheid state.

Just such concerns were raised on Sunday by 40 Jewish leaders in the United States, who called on Netanyahu to reject Levy’s “legal maneuverings” that, they said, threatened Israel’s “future as a Jewish and democratic state”.

But from Israel’s point of view, there may, in fact, be a way out of this conundrum.

In a 2003 interview, one of the other Levy committee members, Alan Baker, a settler who advised the foreign ministry for many years, explained Israel’s heterodox interpretation of the Oslo accords, signed a decade earlier.

The agreements were not, as most assumed, the basis for the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories, but a route to establish the legitimacy of the settlements. “We are no longer an occupying power, but we are instead present in the territories with their [the Palestinians’] consent and subject to the outcome of negotiations.”

On this view, the Oslo accords redesignated the 62 per cent of the West Bank assigned to Israel’s control – so-called Area C – from “occupied” to “disputed” territory. That explains why every Israeli administration since the mid-1990s has indulged in an orgy of settlement-building there.

According to Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the Levy report is preparing the legal ground for Israel’s annexation of Area C. His disquiet is shared by others.

Recent European Union reports have used unprecedented language to criticise Israel for the “forced transfer” – diplomat-speak for ethnic cleansing – of Palestinians out of Area C into the West Bank’s cities, which fall under Palestinian control.

The EU notes that the numbers of Palestinians in Area C has shrunk dramatically under Israeli rule to fewer than 150,000, or no more than 6 per cent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Settlers now outnumber Palestinians more than two-to-one in Area C.

Israel could annex nearly two-thirds of the West Bank and still safely confer citizenship on Palestinians there. Adding 150,000 to the existing 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fifth of the population, would not erode the Jewish majority’s dominance.

If Netanyahu is hesitant, it is only because the time is not yet ripe for implementation. But over the weekend, there were indications of Israel’s next moves to strengthen its hold on Area C.

It was reported that Israel’s immigration police, which have been traditionally restricted to operating inside Israel, have been authorised to enter the West Bank and expel foreign activists. The new powers were on show the same day as foreigners, including a New York Times reporter, were arrested at one of the regular protests against the separation wall being built on Palestinian land. Such demonstrations are the chief expression of resistance to Israel’s takeover of Palestinian territory in Area C.

And on Sunday it emerged that Israel had begun a campaign against OCHA, the UN agency that focuses on humanitarian harm done to Palestinians from Israeli military and settlement activity, most of it in Area C. Israel has demanded details of where OCHA’s staff work and what projects it is planning, and is threatening to withdraw staff visas, apparently in the hope of limiting its activities in Area C.

There is a problem, nonetheless. If Israel takes Area C, it needs someone else responsible for the other 38 per cent of the West Bank – little more than 8 per cent of historic Palestine – to “fill the vacuum”, as Israeli commentators phrased it last week.

The obvious candidate is the Palestinian Authority, the Ramallah government-in-waiting led by Mahmoud Abbas. Its police forces already act as a security contractor for Israel, keeping in check Palestinians in the parts of the West Bank outside Area C. Also, as a recipient of endless international aid, the PA usefully removes the financial burden of the occupation from Israel.

But the PA’s weakness is evident on all fronts: it has lost credibility with ordinary Palestinians, it is impotent in international forums, and it is mired in financial crisis. In the long term, it looks doomed.

For the time being, though, Israel seems keen to keep the PA in place. Last month, for example, it was revealed that Israel had tried – even if unsuccessfully – to bail out the PA by requesting a $100 million loan from the International Monetary Fund on the PA’s behalf.

If the PA refuses to, or cannot, take on these remaining fragments of the West Bank, Israel may simply opt to turn back the clock and once again cultivate weak and isolated local leaders for each Palestinian city.

The question is whether the international community can first be made to swallow Levy’s absurd conclusion.

By Jonathan Cook

18 July, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net

Special Report: Need for oil routes buys time, claims key Damascus figure

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria may last far longer than his opponents believe – and with the tacit acceptance of Western leaders anxious to secure new oil routes to Europe via Syria before the fall of the regime. According to a source intimately involved in the possible transition from Baath party power, the Americans, Russians and Europeans are also putting together an agreement that would permit Assad to remain leader of Syria for at least another two years in return for political concessions to Iran and Saudi Arabia in both Lebanon and Iraq.

For its part, Russia would be assured of its continued military base at Tartous in Syria and a relationship with whatever government in Damascus eventually emerges with the support of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russia’s recent concession – that Assad may not be essential in any future Syrian power structure – is part of a new understanding in the West which may accept Assad’s presidency in return for an agreement that prevents a further decline into civil war.

Information from Syria suggests that Assad’s army is now “taking a beating” from armed rebels, who include Islamist as well as nationalist forces; at least 6,000 soldiers are now believed to have been murdered or killed in action since the rebellion against Assad began 17 months ago. There are even unconfirmed reports that during any one week up to a thousand Syrian fighters are under training by mercenaries in Jordan at a base used by Western authorities for personnel seeking ‘anti-terrorist’ security exercises.

The US-Russian negotiations – easy to deny, and somewhat cynically hidden behind the current mutual accusations of Hillary Clinton and her Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov – would mean that the superpowers would acknowledge Iran’s influence over Iraq and its relationship with its Hezballah allies in Lebanon, while Saudi Arabia – and Qatar – would be encouraged to guarantee Sunni Muslim rights in Lebanon and in Iraq. Baghdad’s emergence as a centre of Shia power has caused much anguish in Saudi Arabia whose support for the Sunni minority in Iraq has hitherto led only to political division.

But the real object of talks between the world powers revolves around the West’s determination to secure oil and particularly gas from the Gulf states without relying upon supplies from Moscow. “Russia can turn off the spigot to Europe whenever it wants – and this gives it tremendous political power,” the source says. “We are talking about two fundamental oil routes to the West – one from Qatar and Saudi Arabia via Jordan and Syria and the Mediterranean to Europe, another from Iran via Shia southern Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean and on to Europe. This is what matters. This is why they will be prepared to let Assad last for another two years, if necessary. They would be perfectly content with that. And Russia will have a place in the new Syria.”

Diplomats who are still discussing these plans should, of course, be treated with some scepticism. It is one thing to hear political leaders excoriating the Syrian regime for its abuse of human rights and massacres – quite another to realise that Western diplomats are quite prepared to put this to one side for the proverbial ‘bigger picture’ which, as usual in the Middle East, means oil and gas supplies. They are prepared to tolerate Assad’s presence until the end of the crisis, rather than insisting his departure is the start of the end. The Americans apparently say the same. Now Russia believes that stability is more important than Assad himself.

It is clear that Bashar al-Assad should have gone ahead with extensive reforms when his father Hafez died in 2000. At that stage, according to Syrian officials, Syria’s economy was in a far better state than Greece is today. And the saner voices influencing Assad’s leadership were slowly deprived of their power. One official close to the president called him during the height of last year’s fighting to say that “Homs is burning”. Assad’s reaction was to refuse all personal conversation with the official in future, insisting on only SMS messages. “Assad no longer has personal power over all that happens in Syria,” the informant says. “It’s not because he doesn’t want to – there’s just too much going on all over the country for one man to keep in touch with it all.”

What Assad is still hoping for, according to Arab military veterans, is a solution a-l’Algerie. After the cancellation of democratic elections in Algeria, its army and generals – ‘le pouvoir’ to Algerians – fought a merciless war against rebels and Islamist guerrillas across the country throughout the 1990s, using torture and massacre to retain government power but leaving an estimated 200,000 dead among their own people.

Amid this crisis, the Algerian military actually sent a delegation to Damascus to learn from Hafez el-Assad’s Syrian army how it destroyed the Islamist rebellion in Hama – at a cost of up to 20,000 dead – in 1982. The Algerian civil war – remarkably similar to that now afflicting Assad’s regime – displayed many of the characteristics of the current tragedy in Syria: babies with their throats cut, families slaughtered by mysterious semi-military ‘armed groups’, whole towns shelled by government forces.

And, much more interesting to Assad’s men, the West continued to support the Algerian regime with weapons and political encouragement throughout the 1990s while huffing and puffing about human rights. Algeria’s oil and gas reserves proved more important than civilian deaths – just as the Damascus regime now hopes to rely upon the West’s desire for via-Syria oil and gas to tolerate further killings. Syrians say that Jamil Hassan, the head of Air Force intelligence in Syria is now the ‘killer’ leader for the regime – not so much Bashar’s brother Maher whose 4th Division is perhaps being given too much credit for suppressing the revolt. It has certainly failed to crush it.

The West, meanwhile has to deal with Syria’s contact man, Mohamed Nassif, perhaps Assad’s closest political adviser. The question remains, however, as to whether Bashar al-Assad – however much he fails to control military events on the ground – really grasps the epic political importance of what is going on in his country. Prior to the rebellion, European and Turkish leaders were astonished to hear from him that Sunni forces in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli were trying “to create a Salafist state” that would threaten Syria. How this extraordinary assertion – based, presumably on the tittle-tattle of an intelligence agent – could have formulated itself in Assad’s mind, remained a mystery.

By Robert Fisk

29 June 2012

@ The Independent