On 17th March 2011, parliament question time……

JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) to the Minister of Corrections: What progress has been made toward the Government’s commitment to encourage private sector investment in the New Zealand corrections system?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Corrections) : I am very pleased to report that three private sector consortia have been invited to tender for the provision of a new men’s prison at Wiri through a public-private partnership. The new facility will ensure that there are enough beds to cope with the forecast growth in prisoner numbers and the need to replace ageing prisons. The three consortia are led by experienced international prison management companies and each one includes a major New Zealand construction partner. A number of other New Zealand firms are members of, and advisers to, the consortia. It is expected that a final contract with the successful consortium will be in place by July 2012.

Jacqui Dean: What benefits will the new prison bring to the local community and to the wider region?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: The 960-bed prison is a major project for the Auckland region and will bring significant economic benefits to the local community. It is expected that the development will inject approximately $1.2 billion into the region’s economy over the next 30 years. The construction and ongoing operation of the prison is expected to sustain 1,900 jobs and inject approximately $100 million in wages and salaries into the construction sector.

Business leaders are optimistic that a government signal of plans to sell shares in several state-owned enterprises, while keeping a control of them, will be acceptable to voters.

It’s not difficult to understand how New Zealand’s politicians can be stupid for they’ve created conflict that corners themselves. Rightwing is for personal greed, private investment into anything one can make money from while left wing is usually for unions and human rights, yet in this case they conflict because it’s men’s prisons we are talking about and while their feminist groups want men in prisons for long periods, their cultural groups want men doing programs and to stay less time in prison.

El Diario-La Prensa from Global Research, writes a neat piece on March 10, 2008.

The article is well worth reading as it shows how this multimillion dollar business is the fastest growing in America, and like finding a ‘pot of gold’ for investors. Turning prisons into business has allowed tycoons to almost monopolise other industries through slave like human resource, and with politicians expanding laws to criminalise men daily, and women’s groups alongside other interest groups lobbying for longer sentences, …. the prison industry is constantly feed for growth.

Like America, New Zealand has adopted 3 strikes and you’re out. The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.

Go and enjoy!

Many reasons have been put forward for John Howard’s failure to win the 2007 election—negative reaction to WorkChoices, his refusal to abdicate in favour of Peter Costello, even a sense that he had just been in power too long—but there was another issue which suffused the Opposition campaign and which played a major part in persuading voters: climate change, in particular the recent drought. John Howard may be the first leader in the modern world to be voted out of office partly because he failed to make it rain.

Howard, however, may not be the last leader to be deposed over this issue, for the last few years have seen the surprise reappearance of a belief which was thought to have been extinct for centuries: the belief that human beings can control the weather.

To our hunter-gatherer and planter-herder ancestors the notion that humans could influence the elements seemed reasonable. To them it was clear that the wind, the rain, the phases of the moon, the movement of herds and the rebirth of the world in spring were controlled by otherworldly spirits. Placating these entities was the job of the tribal witch doctor or shaman, who knew how to appease them with prayer, dance, song and sacrifice. As humans became more dependent on agriculture, dependence on water increased correspondingly: failure of the spring rains to fall or the sacred river to flood was attributed to the displeasure of the governing deity, and appeasements had to be offered, sometimes in the form of human sacrifice. If the shaman failed to mollify the recalcitrant god, that sacrifice might well be him.

As magic evolved into religion and shamans into priests, natural catastrophes were linked less to the capriciousness of the gods and more to the observance, or lack thereof, of divine commandments. Droughts, hurricanes and floods were characterised as punishments for human immorality. According to the central narrative of Judaic faith, the Old Testament, the history of the human race was a series of reprisals for transgressions against God’s law. Central to that narrative is the story of Creation, in which God brings forth the world as a perfect work: complete, unified and unchanging. As custodians of this untainted paradise he introduces two humans who forfeit their state of bliss by eating the fruit of the Forbidden Tree (variously interpreted as a symbol of knowledge, sex or self-determination) and are cast out of Eden to toil by the sweat of their brows. Despite this, humans continue to sin and are punished again with a great flood and occasional surgical strikes of fire and brimstone.

The notion that natural calamities were punishment for collective human sin was to last for the next 2000 years. The Black Death, which killed around a third of Europe, was blamed on a range of causes including the machinations of Jews and witches, but was principally seen as a punishment for the general sinfulness of the times. The idea of an irredeemably corrupted world was even borne out by non-biblical sources. To medieval scholars, the ancient Greeks seemed to have dwelt in a golden age which decayed into a silver age and then an iron age: contemporary humans were but a degenerate vestige of the physical and intellectual giants who once strode the earth. The inevitable conclusion of this decline would be the Apocalypse—Judgment Day, when history would end and God would make his final disposition of all people who had ever lived.

Then, almost overnight, the belief that natural phenomena were the result of sorcery or divine punishment crumbled with the advent of the scientific revolution. In little more than 400 years—an extraordinarily brief time in the total span of civilisation—the old beliefs in spirits, possessions, spells, curses, hexes, charms and God’s wrath, were replaced by medicine, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geology and physics. Finally, the notion of decline itself was reversed by Darwin, whose Origin of Species recast humans, not as degraded leftovers, but the heroic species that had dragged itself out of the primeval sludge, up through the stages of fish, reptile and mammal to become Nature’s masterpiece.

But the old narratives were only biding their time, waiting for their moment to re-emerge, patiently weaving the new threads of science into their tapestry.

Even in the midst of the Enlightenment, the discovery of seemingly idyllic societies in the South Pacific rekindled the idea, among philosophers such as Rousseau, that the original human state had been one of innocence and peace and that that blissful state had been corrupted by civilisation, industry and organised religion. Anthropology seemed almost to have provided scientific proof for the Eden story.

Later, in the 1950s, just as science was celebrating some of its greatest victories—over polio, the atomic nucleus and space—Rachel Carson alerted the world to the lethal consequences of DDT and other chemicals in the food chainin Silent Spring. This book was to be the first of many revelations about the damage being wrought by humans on natural systems. At first this damage was seen as a set of individual problems needing to be dealt with urgently but separately. In the 1960s, however, there was an attempt to link all these instances into a single global syndrome.

Permeating most of the alternative philosophies which characterised the New Age culture of the 1960s and 1970s was a love of all things “natural”. The hippie movement embodied the sacredness of the Earth in the person of Gaia, the earth goddess, whose “feminine” nature was a seen as a countermeasure to the destructive “masculine” worlds of science, business and organised religion. This characterisation of the Earth as pagan goddess was too mythical and mystical to appeal to most of the community but its underlying concept, the idea of the world as a single entity, one gigantic global, interdependent ecosystem, eventually began to take hold. Whereas problems such as disappearing fish stocks, soil salinity, animal extinctions and industrial emissions had been regarded as economic, agricultural, conservation or pollution issues, suddenly these were being grouped and linked under the umbrella term “environmental” problems.

Even though the word environment simply means “neighbourhood” or your immediate surroundings, and could refer to the street you live in or the people you live among, the term now became synonymous with “the natural world” and soon came to replace the word nature, with its old-fashioned connotations of botany and bird-watching. It was further enhanced by the use of the singular. What had previously been a series of separate environments—grassland, jungle, forest and desert—were suddenly all part of a single global system: the Environment—a step up, not unlike the transition from “gods” to the monotheistic “God” in the ancient world.

One of the main effects of the change in terminology was to create a sense of global, as opposed to local, responsibility—which is to say guilt. Prior to mono-environmental unification it was easy to regard environmental problems as someone else’s. Salinity and loss of topsoil were happening in the country and were the fault of farmers. The loss of the Amazon rainforest and the tigers was due to Brazilians and Indians pursuing modern agricultural methods. To the average commuter, these problems, while regrettable, were not seen as in any way their fault. Now, under the new doctrine of the Environment, with its concept of a global ecology, people living in Sydney are not only in some small way individually responsible for the extinction of frogs in Peru, they are also in some small way adversely affected by it. We are now all responsible for the fate of the Brazilian rainforest and the Greenland icecap even if we live ten thousand kilometres away because, according to Environmental catechism, “we all share the Earth”, and because of “globalisation”, Western “consumerism” is inextricably linked, economically and morally, to degradation of the Environment in the developing nations and the wilderness areas of the Earth.

There was still, however, a certain lingering remoteness about environmental problems, and with material prosperity continuing to increase in the Western world and in the developing nations, it must have seemed an almost insurmountable challenge to convince the general public that the world was really facing any real threat.

The turning point came in the 1990s, when an obscure and tentative theory from the earlier part of the century was suddenly claimed to be turning into a reality. The theory was that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases could lead to a rise in atmospheric temperature—the Greenhouse Effect. Burning wood for cooking and coal for power generation was known to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so scientists began looking at meteorological records and, lo and behold! they found a slight increase in average temperatures worldwide—between 0.4 and 0.8 of a degree—over the twentieth century. This half-a-degree increase was scarcely statistically significant—it was smaller than the errors inherent in sampling the data, in addition to which the methods of collecting the data changed over the period—but it was enough to get the ball rolling.

The next stage was to look for physical evidence: and again they found it. Many of the glaciers (though not all) in Europe, Greenland and Canada appeared to be melting. Of course, the glaciers had been melting steadily for the last 10,000 years since the last ice age when they entirely covered Canada and Northern Europe; however, it appeared that the rate of melting was increasing. It was also noted that the Arctic sea ice was retreating from the winter extents it had maintained for the last few centuries.

Most geologists and climatologists are aware that atmospheric temperatures, glaciation and precipitation are complicated phenomena, influenced by a large range of factors including the distance of the earth from the sun, solar radiation, the extent and type of vegetation on the earth’s surface, ocean currents, clouds and atmospheric particles, even the reflectance of certain “blooms” of oceanic micro-organisms. For some scientists, however, the rough correlation between carbon dioxide production and temperature—and it was only rough—was conclusive: anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide was warming the planet.

This then led to speculation as to what might happen as a result. The first prediction was that the polar caps could melt, covering the whole globe with water. (A puzzling prediction, given that there have been times when the Earth’s polar caps have been almost nonexistent and yet the continents have mostly remained above water.) Other predictions were that the increased heat energy would lead to destructive weather patterns, including droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and tidal waves. It was even, paradoxically, predicted that warming could cause another ice age. These scenarios were, of course, speculation, as predictions always are, but they made great copy for the popular science magazines and frightened governments enough to start putting more money—a lot more money—into research.

What is interesting about the debate—what sets is apart from almost every other scientific investigation in the last two centuries—is that within no more than a few years, several people announced that the issue was no longer a debate at all. Despite the fact that climate scientists were still analysing data, revising models and indeed revising modelling methods, it was proclaimed publicly that there was no longer any doubt; the issue was resolved; it had been proved beyond a doubt that the world was getting warmer, humans were to blame, and the world was facing a major catastrophe as a result.

Whatever the complexities of climate and climate science, one thing is clear: there was a specific point where the theory of global warming ceased to be a scientific hypothesis to be tested over time and became an incontrovertible article of dogma. Indeed it became the critical article of faith that would finally lock all the various environmental issues together in one overarching doctrine and bestow incalculable gravitas on the religion of Environmentalism, finally establishing it as the official religion of Western society.

Just in case this seems to be a wildly rhetorical characterisation, consider the follow features that Environmentalism shares with religions in general.

Symbolism and Ritual. Religion relies heavily on ceremonies which have no measurable result but provide emotional gratification, unify the religious community and reinforce belief. In ancient societies one of the most important symbolic actions was sacrifice: the killing and burning of animals, sometimes people, on the altar to appease a supernatural entity.

Australia is currently preparing to cut its carbon emissions, even though this will have no effect on global carbon dioxide levels. Australia produces only about 1 per cent of the carbon dioxide emitted worldwide, less than the amount by which China’s emissions increase annually. In other words Australia is preparing to make a purely symbolic sacrifice which will have no practical effect but will reinforce in the population the sense that they are doing “something to help”—even though it is in fact doing nothing.

Of course, religious believers do not regard rituals as merely symbolic: observances such as prayer, communion, confession and the last rites are believed to have real world results. Similarly, when bushfires burnt out several Canberra suburbs in 2003, New South Wales Premier Bob Carr said that the reason for the disaster was that John Howard had refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. The implication was that simply the act of signing the Protocol would have changed Australia’s climate even before the policies set out in it had been implemented.

Martyrdom. The other justification for Australia’s imposition of emissions reduction policies is that it will inspire other countries to do the same—an idea that is without any foundation whatsoever. This is a relic of religious martyrdom myths—stories in which devout believers are cruelly tortured and slain but never recant their faith. In these stories not only are the martyrs rewarded with special privileges in heaven, but witnesses to the persecution are so impressed by the bravery and piety of the martyrs that they are inspired to join the faith. Despite the church’s special regard for martyrs, there is no evidence that their deaths ever increased recruitment, and it is far more probable that seeing Christians eaten by lions acted precisely as it was meant to—as a deterrent. In the same vein, if Australia adopts emissions reductions and suffers economic damage as result, it may well act as a disincentive to other countries.

Damnation and Redemption. Environmentalists preach that people can only prevent global catastrophe by changing their behaviour. Given that there is at least some likelihood that the industrial nations will not reduce emissions in any substantial way, there is presumably some likelihood that a warmer earth is inevitable, regardless of all efforts to prevent it. This would suggest that we should have a back-up strategy to deal with a warmer world if attempts to reverse warming fail—for example being prepared to move some cities, build sea walls and water pipelines, develop new crops. Strangely however (or perhaps not strangely at all) environmentalists are reluctant to discuss adaptive rather than preventive strategies. The rhetoric is that we have no alternative, we must reduce fossil fuel consumption or else we face disaster.

This is an odd position since, given the immensity of the challenge to reduce energy consumption, it is not inconceivable that it might be ultimately cheaper for the world to adapt to warmer climates rather than to try and obviate them—especially when even the best efforts might fail. Environmentalists, however, refuse to even countenance the idea of adaptation.

The reason is simple: Environmentalists fear that if people start discussing ways to adapt to climate change, especially if they start to think that it might be easier to adapt than reduce, the sense of urgency will abate and people will start to wonder if they might be able to get through the crisis without changing their behaviour at all.

The most nightmarish prospect for Environment-alists would be for economists to start arguing that we will need to dig more coal and pump more oil in order to source the energy needed to adapt to climate change—move cities, bring water to cities, build dykes, relocate industry and agriculture and so on. It is therefore a vital part of the Environmentalist campaign to insist that there is not, and can never be, any way to cope with or survive climate change. Like the medieval concept of Hell, climate change is portrayed as involving supernatural levels of suffering with no possibility of escape or parole. Its consequences are exaggerated without limit, despite having no empirical evidence, to include worldwide devastation, killer storms, global famine, floods, epidemics of disease and other disasters of—dare I say it—biblical proportions.

At the same time, while fiercely maintaining that adaptation can never be an option, Environmentalists are equally eager to reinforce that, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem, the problem can be solved if we all get together and reduce emissions. This is because the whole purpose of the climate change campaign is not to find ways to deal with the change, but to frighten people into changing their behaviours. Like the church, they know it is important for people not to reach the point where they give up hope and say, “I’m damned anyway, so I might as well enjoy being a sinner.” Just as the church preached the horrors of Hell while at the same time maintaining that it was never too late to be saved, Environmentalism teaches that, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem, we can still be saved if we repent and follow the path of righteousness.

The Persecution of Heretics. There are of course a large number of scientists—senior scientists at professorial levels—who insist that the climate change panic is irrational and unscientific. These scientists’ dissenting opinions are rarely published and, when they are, go unheeded by governments and the press. One reason for this is, of course, that calls to “Let’s just keep quietly analysing the data” have nowhere near the dramatic appeal as “Climate threat worse than first imagined!” stories. The other, more worrying, reason is that on the topic of climate change, many Environmentalists have moved from being concerned to being militant, and expressing outright rage at anyone who questions the “reality” of climate change. Scientific sceptics are now being labelled as “climate change deniers” by zealots and are rapidly being accorded the same status as Holocaust deniers with similar threats of ostracism and career curtailment. There have even been calls to prosecute and jail people who deny the “reality” of climate change.

The Creation of Demons. Christianity has Satan and his minions; Environmentalism has the oil companies and the coal miners. These are the devils that bring woe into the world, who tempt weak humans into sin by offering them cars, trucks, planes and central heating in snowbound winters. The power of the fossil fuel demons is vast and they are always working to undermine the saintly work of the Environmentalists. Scientists who question the climate change hypothesis are “spokespersons for the energy companies” or “in the pocket of Big Oil”: in other words they are the tools of Satan.

Creationism. In order to illustrate a decline or decay in the world it is first necessary to explain how the world “ought” to be. In the Judeo-Christian mythology the perfect uncorrupted world was the Garden of Eden. For Environmentalists it was the world prior to European exploration. As with Creationism, Environmentalist mythology posits a world which was created with all the animals, plants and people assigned to various places on the globe. Each species was settled in its own rightful niche where it lived in symbiotic harmony with other creatures in that ecological system. Ecology in fact becomes a form of “intelligent design” where perfect biological systems are formed with intricately balanced relationships between biota and terrain. In the Environmentalist narrative, those perfect worlds were disrupted when people—that is, Europeans—invaded other countries bringing their dogs, cats, rabbits, foxes, sparrows and weeds with them.

(Interestingly, indigenous peoples are not regarded as invaders, even though they arrived in their various habitats long after the ecological systems had formed and subsequently had some impact on those systems, because they have been granted the role of “custodians” of the land. They are the Adam and Eve in this modern-day Eden myth.)

In Australia “imported” species are detested because they compete with and overtake “native species” (even though, technically, any animal born in Australia is “native”). Drastic zoning laws in some areas prohibit the ownership of cats and dogs, and the plagues of rabbits and cane toads have been treated as national emergencies. This concern for the loss of “native” habitats to species that “don’t belong”—a description sometimes extended to Europeans themselves—is based on the Enviro-Creationist notion that the ecological systems of the world are static systems that must be preserved. The reality is that all ecological systems are in a state of constant flux, and always have been, as new species are introduced, or become extinct through geological change, climatic change, airborne seeds, migration of animals and the transmission of diseases.

Much is made of the loss of species, and yet millions of species have disappeared since life began on Earth, and millions more will evolve in the millennia to come. At times, not only entire genera, but whole orders of living things have been lost, and yet life goes on. As long as ecological niches—which is to say opportunities for life—exist, phenotypes will evolve to fill those niches. Speciation, which is nothing more than genetic differentiation caused by selection factors, is an ongoing process and yet Environmentalists speak as if evolution and speciation are something that only happened in the past.

The Creation of a Priesthood. Scientists, so long under a cloud because of their association with bombs, herbicides and insecticides, have redeemed themselves by alerting us to the damage that we (strangely not they) have inflicted on the globe. In the climate change crisis they have emerged, for once, as the good guys in the eyes of the new Green middle class. After decades of being seen as the pawns of big business and the military-industrial complex, scientists are now seen as the revealers of truth, the interpreters of opaque data and trusted authorities on the interpretation of complex systems. They are even accorded the power of prophesy as they confidently predict the climate fifty, even a hundred years in the future.

As with the medieval priests and sacred scriptures, scientists deliver sermons based on data the congregation rarely gets to see. Medieval bibles were written in Latin and chained to the pulpits and were thus inaccessible to the lay person. Peasants had no idea what scripture actually said and had to trust their priests to read it and interpret it correctly. Opportunities for priests to expound their own religious and political prejudices were obviously abundant. Similarly today, the lay person has no way of telling whether researchers are interpreting the data correctly or honestly and must take the word of the scientists on faith. This is a dangerous situation.

How many people, for example, realise that the predictions of climate change are based on “models”, that is to say simulations—of weather systems and ocean currents running on computers? These models are based on algorithms (AlGore-ithms?)—mathematical formulae—that attempt to emulate real natural processes.

The great meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who died a few months ago, showed that, because climate is a chaotic system, no mathematical model can ever predict long-term outcomes because even the most microscopic variations in input data can produce wildly different outcomes in the computation results. And yet some people accept that climate modellers with computers can predict temperatures forty years from now.

Messiahs and Saints. At the top of any hierarchy are those with a direct line to God. In this case it is the celebrity scientists and economists such as Tim Flannery, Nicholas Stern and now Ross Garnaut, who write books and bring down massive reports (the Gospels) predicting the fate of the earth. Is there a Messiah of climate change? Of course: Al Gore, who has toured the planet exhorting sinners to repent before it is too late and follow the teachings of Gaia. Gore, of course, brilliantly used the favourite medium of the modern world to spread his message—a movie—even though movies, while emotionally powerful, are quite inadequate at dealing with large amounts of complex information. Gore of course was not concerned with scientific complexity but with making an emotional impact.

Integration into Education. Christianity reproduced itself for centuries by setting up schools and integrating itself into the daily instruction of students. Today school teachers relentlessly hammer home the importance of caring for the environment and organise activities to teach kids to think and act “Green”. Global warming is taught as a scientific fact and the destruction of the planet as an article of faith. At the recent 2020 Summit in Canberra, a group of school students were seen holding placards demanding that politicians give them a “guarantee” that they will have a “stable” climate during their lifetimes. Given that climates have never been stable systems, it’s a tall order.

Integration into Everyday Life. In a devout Christian or Islamic society, daily life is punctuated by religious observances and iconography. Religious symbols are ever-present on walls, on buildings, in jewellery, or on printed material and prayers, incantations and imprecations uttered during the day. Today “Green” awareness is omnipresent, and there is a national campaign to make everyone aware of (and guilty about) their “carbon footprint”. Gas and electricity bills tell us obligingly how much pollution we have been responsible for today, and product labels and commercials advertise cars, detergents and even insurance as “environmentally friendly”. There is even a shampoo commercial that claims, because the shampoo is made from vegetables instead of crude oil, it will help save the environment. How is never explained.

Crusades. As noted above, magical practices and religious organisations came about primarily through anxiety: anxiety that the rain might not fall, the river might not flood, the cows might not calve or the corn not ripen. Anxiety has been harnessed by shamans and priests for thousands of years to manipulate people into performing rituals, making sacrifices and, most importantly, supporting a priesthood to protect them against impending disasters. It can also be used as a cause to wage war.

In Australia climate change has been adopted as a cause by politicians anxious to find something to rally voters to their party. Formerly, threats such as communist infiltration, invasion from China and skyrocketing crime statistics have been used to fuel political campaigns. Today, aspiring leaders, having few other social issues to exploit in this luckiest of lucky countries, have turned to the threat of climate change, a threat just as imaginary as the aforementioned ones. Climate change, however, is the best ever issue to exploit for political purposes because of the inherently chaotic nature of weather. Rarely has a month ever gone by without a flood, tornado, drought, heat wave, blizzard, hurricane or hailstorm occurring somewhere in the world, so there is always some event that seems to confirm that the world’s weather is changing for the worse. And the beauty of meteorological data is that, as with cricket scores, almost every event can be characterised in some way as “unprecedented” or “record breaking” by just selecting the right parameters.

It is easy to tell when an issue is being used for political purposes because it will not be treated as matter for policy but as justification for a Crusade. The Rudd government, for example, could have addressed the climate change issue by calmly setting out a ten-year plan to reduce emissions. It could have been a plan that balanced disincentives with incentives. It could have been based on the premises that Australia would neither advance faster than the rest of the world nor more slowly; that there would be regular reviews and check points; that old technologies would not be abandoned before new technologies were available and proved viable; that households would be rewarded for saving energy rather than punished for using it; that preparations would be made to deal with the results of climate change in case it occurred anyway; that Australia would assist the rest of the world not by setting an example but by developing technologies that would not only generate cleaner power but also revenue.

The government, however, chose not to lay out a long-term, balanced plan. Rather it chose to mount a Crusade—a Crusade as valiant and quixotic as any medieval holy war with the Hero-King, banners waving and armour gleaming, leading his cavalry forth, warning that martyrdom and sacrifice will be required but it will be for a good cause and will be rewarded in Heaven, and exhorting the ever-beleaguered peasantry to empty the meagre contents of their purses for the holy cause.

Environmentalism has, in a mere fifty years, attained the hegemony, political influence and moral authority formerly accorded to the church. We have come the full circle to a pre-Enlightenment society, ruled by an officially sanctioned religion that is as dogmatic, inquisitorial and eschatological as medieval Christianity, where environmental scientists are the clergy, Green is the colour of purity and the central icon is not Jesus suffering on a cross but the image of a tortured planet dying for our sins.

Ian McFadyen is a film and television writer, actor, producer and director. He has also written a book on cognitive psychology, Mind Wars.

Quadrant online

“Young men are fitter to invent than to judge,” said Francis Bacon, “fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business.” In a world of “settled business” largely run by corrupt old men, where the status quo is at a premium in money as in politics, it is easy to lose sight of the value of youth, with its freshness, its optimism, and its innocent ambitions. Youth is the time when dreams are forged and nurtured, when newly minted minds struggle to make sense of the way things are, and dare to dream of how to make them better.

On those odd occasions when the stream of history is diverted, it is usually youth that dig the new channel. Jesus of Nazareth was 30 when he began his brief ministry that ended under the iron heel of the Judaeo-Roman state, but transformed human civilization forever. Most of his apostolic followers were also young men, able to abide then-revolutionary doctrines and to endure the physical hardships of missionary labor and persecution. Siddartha Gautama, who would become the Buddha, was roughly the same age when he grew dissatisfied with a life of princely dissipation, and sought enlightenment through austerity. Most religious reformers, heretics, and innovators throughout history have been young, restless souls dissatisfied with religious establishments that they regarded as ossified or otherwise in need of reform.

In the realm of military history, Alexander of Macedon was just 20 when he embarked upon his meteoric conquests that completely changed the map of Asia, and left in place a political and cultural legacy, from Asia Minor to the Indus River, that endured for centuries. Joan of Arc was in her teens when the voice of God spoke to her and told her to liberate France from the English invader. “I am not afraid…. I was born to do this,” she told skeptics in the military and clergy. When they finally blessed her enterprise, she promptly led the French armies to miraculous victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, and several other cities, showing her countrymen before her own capture and eventual execution that victory over the entrenched English invaders was possible.

Because of our veneration for them, it is easy to forget that most of the American Founding Fathers, Washington, Franklin, and Adams excepted, were under 40 when the Revolutionary War broke out. Thomas Jefferson was a mere 33 when he penned the Declaration of Independence, and Alexander Hamilton was in his very early twenties when he became General Washington’s aide-de-camp. Subsequent generations of pioneers who moved the frontier westward–both saints and sinners–were generally young, restless individualists seeking fortunes that had eluded them in the settled, static east. And lest we forget, the overwhelming majority of those who fought in the great wars that, for better or worse, have shaped our history–the War Between the States, the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam–were very young men, fighting and dying at an age when most youth are thinking of senior proms and college entrance exams.

Closer to our own time, it is youth who have given us the defining event of our era–the ongoing high-tech revolution that has transformed every aspect of our lives in ways that people only a few decades ago could scarcely have imagined. Everywhere that changes are underway, from politics to art to technology, the energies and imagination of youth are enlisted.

Where middle age desires predictability and old age craves security, youth, above all else, is hungry for freedom. This is the reason that youth are the backbone of the movement inaugurated by Congressman Ron Paul, which started as a quiet presidential campaign, mushroomed into an Internet and media phenomenon, and is now fueling a movement to elect other statesmen like Ron Paul to state and national office. College students in droves organized rallies of staggering proportions to receive Dr. Paul, while countless other innovators, many (though not all) of them young, peppered the Internet with imaginative and stirring Ron Paul video promotionals, clever slogans and logos, and even songs. Dr. Paul himself has been promoting freedom for decades; all of a sudden, America’s youth are listening.

But the same energies that prompt youth to become freedom-seekers are, unfortunately, easily misdirected. Sensing that all was not right with the domestic political turmoil and with a debilitating war being fought on the other side of the world, the youth of the ’60s, the first wave of the Baby Boomer generation, rebelled in the name of freedom–and ended up wreaking havoc. In retrospect, all the youth-driven ferment of the ’60s and ’70s accomplished little more than legitimizing revolution of the wrong sort, degrading the cause of liberty into a sordid pageant of libertinism and, in the longer run, strengthening the very institutions of corrupt, outsized government that they had resisted.

The turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s left footprints that are still very visible today. The abandonment of sexual restraint and the degradation of modes of entertainment are still very much in evidence, as are the drug culture and the repudiation of parental authority. Moreover, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomer counterculture found expression in a welter of new federal programs designed to give Baby Boomers cradle-to-grave security at the expense of American taxpayers. As humorist (and Boomer) Dave Barry put it, “I care about our young people, and I wish them great success, because they are our Hope for the Future, and some day, when my generation retires, they will have to pay us trillions of dollars in Social Security.”

In the last 10 years or so, however, something of a counter-revolution has begun to take hold, of which the Ron Paul phenomenon is but the latest manifestation. What is happening is not hard to diagnose: the children of the ’60s and ’70s rebels are growing up, and many of them do not like the Brave New World their parents’ generation has foisted on them. Many of them correctly perceive the web of so-called entitlements, like Social Security, Medicare, and sundry other “safety nets,” to be a vast pyramid scheme designed to enrich the old at the expense of the young. Many youth expect Social Security to be insolvent or drastically reduced by the time they reach retirement age, and resent being taxed heavily to support programs from which they are unlikely to benefit.

The once-vaunted “sexual revolution” is also getting a second look, as today’s younger generation watch their parents, who never learned in their youth the restraint and commitment necessary to sustain long-term relationships, fail to hold marriages and families together. A pandemic of new venereal diseases like AIDS has also cast “the new morality” in a different light.

All of these things youth are seeing and discussing among themselves in their blogs, chat rooms, and websites. But although many are trying not to repeat their parents’ mistakes, many more continue to succumb to the cultural riptide of drugs, promiscuity, and aimlessness.

What is needed, if the energies of youth are to be properly directed, is education. The Founding Fathers had their preceptors, like George Wythe, who instilled in them the doctrines of liberty, and subsequent generations were the beneficiaries of a small-town, one-room-schoolhouse, family-centered culture that both furnished a proper education and instilled values that perpetuated and strengthened our civilization. Today’s youth will be no less susceptible to refinement and enlightenment if they are given proper educations in their formative years.

Fortunately, a revolution in education is already underway, and it has nothing to do (fortunately?) with outcome-based education, federal grants, or the PTA. The home-schooling phenomenon, still accounting for the education of only a small minority of America’s youth, has already wrought tremendous changes on the cultural landscape. An entire generation of home-schooled children is being educated free of the socialist and secularist bias that taints the public-school curricula. Most home-schoolers are learning at their parents’ feet about limited government, our Western cultural heritage, and politically incorrect American history–topics that are forbidden, for the most part, in government schools. What victims of public education, like yours truly, had to learn painstakingly, as self-taught adults, home-schooled youth can learn when their minds are in the full flower of youth. Many of them go on to become productive, well-educated citizens with a proper perspective on freedom complementing high moral standards and firm religious convictions.

For those who were not home-schooled, the Internet is brimming with websites and organizations promoting liberty, decency, and character. Besides the aforementioned Ron Paul movement, organizations like the John Birch Society and the Von Mises Institute use the web to educate and inform, while myriads of churches use the Internet for outreach and inspiration.

In a word, the Internet has shattered the controls the so-called “gatekeepers” used to exert on the dissemination of information, while legal reforms have broken the government-school education monopoly. The surprising success of the Ron Paul campaign and the rise of home schooling are only the beginning. The future, in this author’s opinion, will continue to see more and more movement away from subversive, collectivized public education. The religious awakening that has been underway since at least the ’80s will continue to gain momentum, posing an ever-stronger challenge to the militant secularism that, a generation ago, bid fair to tear our civilization apart.

A challenge is building to the bloated Beltway behemoth that, for far too long, has sought to overthrow limited government and reconfigure American culture into the bargain. As Congressman Ron Paul himself recently observed, “There’s something going on in this country, and it’s big.”

That something may well be our last, best hope for the future: America’s youth are waking up.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/

The era of pre-birth genetic screening of babies has commenced. Doctors at University College in London have produced what they called the “world’s first breast cancer gene-free baby” by screening a baby for the BRCA1 gene, which they claim causes breast cancer. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/78196…)

That announcement is saturated with so many medical myths, it’s difficult to know where to begin. For starters, the idea that the BRCA1 gene causes cancer is pure hogwash. There’s no such thing as a gene that causes cancer by itself. The truth is that environmental factors such as exposure to cancer-causing chemicals in foods, medicines, personal care products, pesticides or other industrial chemicals causes the expression of the cancer gene. Without all that toxic chemical exposure, the gene never gets expressed in the first place.

And it gets even better: You can eat raw broccoli sprouts or other cruciferous vegetables and suppress the BRCA1 gene so that you never grow cancer tumors at all. Thus, the patient has complete control over the expression of their genes based on their diet and environment, and there are literally hundreds of different foods that have an anti-cancer effect: Cruciferous vegetables, onions, garlic, red wine, green tea, raw cacao, omega-3 oils, and of course a whole universe of anti-cancer herbs and superfoods.

This doesn’t even mention the effects of vitamin D and exercise on the BRCA1 gene, both of which also suppress cancer.

But modern medicine — which is largely based on marketing-motivated quackery — wants women to believe they have no control over breast cancer and that it all comes down to your genes, not your choices. That’s the little trap they set for women, stripping them of their power and condemning them to a lifetime of medical “treatment” that just happens to earn outrageous profits for the drug companies.

Welcome to the new era of eugenics

So now we have a new era being unleashed where babies born with the BRCA1 gene are going to be considered “defective” while babies born without the gene will be considered “superior.”

Article continues….

You are asked to contact your network and pass the word on.

Do you think about whether you are doing the right thing? Do you put effort into finding out the political details behind the protest? Or do you just follow the sheep believing that someone, somewhere knows what there doing?

Have you ever considered it possible that no-one knows what they are doing? Have you ever considered that one person in the UN decides to pick a side for some unknown political reason and then all of a sudden agents are sent out and they contact their agents and so on until it comes to you?

Protests ripple across Europe

About 30,000 people marched through Paris, the interior ministry said, and more than 90,000 joined protests in more than 120 towns and cities elsewhere in France.

In the capital, thousands of French men and women of Arab origin carrying Palestinian banners joined forces with left-wing militants amid cries of “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greater) and “Israel murderer.”

Protesters smashed a bus shelter and a telephone box in central Paris, and bottles were later thrown at riot police and shop windows smashed.

Police fired teargas after mobs overturned motor scooters and set them on fire.

A march in the southern city of Nice descended into violence. Seven police were hurt and 11 rioters arrested as youths broke off from a 2,500-strong crowd of protesters and smashed shop windows.

Demonstrations took place on the streets of other European cities including Athens, Berlin, Budapest, Oslo, Sarajevo and Stockholm.

In Sarajevo, peace activist Svetlana Broz told a 1,000-strong pro-Palestinian demonstration that the city knew better than others “what happens when the world remains silent at a time when innocent civilians suffer”, referring to the bloody siege of the city in the 1992-95 war in the former Yugoslavia.

Police in Oslo fired teargas after a small group among a crowd of 2,000 pelted them with stones, and up to 5,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm to call for an end to the military campaign.

More than 6,000 people gathered for a peaceful rally in Berlin, with similar shows of support for the Palestinians in Munich and Cologne.

In western Germany, some 10,000 people, largely from the ethnic Turkish community, protested in Duisburg. Police briefly intervened when demonstrators threw snowballs at a window bearing two Israeli flags.

Innsbruck in western Austria staged a peaceful protest of 3,500 people waving banners saying “Stop Israeli terror” and 7,000 protesters turned out in Bern, Switzerland.

In Athens, more than 2,000 people took part in a protest staged by left-wing groups and thousands demonstrated in Milan and Turin.

A rally is planned in Madrid on Sunday, while a pro-Israeli demonstration is scheduled to take place in London.

more

Comment made by ChrissyUSA

As Israel persists in its military efforts — by ground, air and sea — to protect its citizens from deadly Hamas rockets, and as protests against Israel increase around the world, the success of the abominable Hamas double war crime strategy becomes evident. The strategy is as simple as it is cynical: Provoke Israel by playing Russian roulette with its children, firing rockets at kindergartens, playgrounds and hospitals; hide behind its own civilians when firing at Israeli civilians; refuse to build bunkers for its own civilians; have TV cameras ready to transmit every image of dead Palestinians, especially children; exaggerate the number of civilians killed by including as “children” Hamas fighters who are 16 or 17 years old and as “women,” female terrorists.

Hamas itself has a name for this. They call it “the CNN strategy” (this is not to criticize CNN or any other objective news source for doing its job; it is to criticize Hamas for exploiting the freedom of press which it forbids in Gaza). The CNN strategy is working because decent people all over the world are naturally sickened by images of dead and injured children. When they see such images repeatedly flashed across TV screens, they tend to react emotionally. Rather than asking why these children are dying and who is to blame for putting them in harm’s way, average viewers, regardless of their political or ideological perspective, want to see the killing stopped. They blame those whose weapons directly caused the deaths, rather than those who provoked the violence by deliberately targeting civilians.

They forget the usual rules of morality and law. For example, when a murderer takes a hostage and fires from behind his human shield, and a policeman, in an effort to stop the shooting accidentally kills the hostage, the law of every country holds the hostage taker guilty of murder even though the policeman fired the fatal shot.

The same is true of the law of war. The use of human shields, in the way Hamas uses the civilian population of Gaza, is a war crime — as is its firing of rockets at Israeli civilians. Every human shield that is killed by Israeli self-defence measures is the responsibility of Hamas, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the media coverage.

The CNN strategy seems to work better, at least in some parts of the world, against Israel that it would against other nations. There is much more protest — and fury — directed against Israel when it inadvertently kills approximately 100 civilians in a just war of self-defence, than against Arab and Muslim nations and groups that deliberately kill far more civilians for no legitimate reason.

It isn’t the nature of the victims, since more Arabs and Muslim civilians are killed every day in Africa and the Middle East by Arab and Muslim governments and groups with little or no protests.
(For example, on the first day of Israel’s ground attack, approximately 30 Palestinians, almost all Hamas combatants, were killed. On the same day an Islamic suicide bomber blew herself up in a mosque in Iraq, killing 40 innocent Muslims. No protests. Little media coverage.) It isn’t the nature of the killings, since Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid killing civilians — if for no other reason than that it hurts its cause — while Hamas does everything in its power to force Israel to kill Palestinian civilians by firing its missiles from densely populated civilian areas and refusing to build shelters for its civilians.

It isn’t the nature of the conflict, either, because Israel is fighting a limited war of self-defence designed to protect its own civilians from rocket attacks, while most of those killed by Arabs and Muslims are killed in genocidal and tribal warfare with no legitimate aim.

The world simply doesn’t seem to care when Arabs and Muslims kill large numbers of other Arabs and Muslims, but a qualitatively different standard applies when the Jewish state kills even a relatively small number of Muslims and Arabs in a war of self-defence.

The international community doesn’t even seem to care when Palestinian children are killed by rocket fire — unless it is from Israeli rockets. The day before the recent outbreak, Hamas fired an anti-personnel rocket at Israeli civilians, but the rocket fell short of its target and killed two Palestinian girls. Yet there was virtually no coverage and absolutely no protests against these “collateral” civilian deaths. Hamas refused to allow TV cameras to show these dead Palestinian children.

Nor have there been protests against the cold-blooded murders by Hamas and its supporters of dozens of Palestinian civilians who allegedly “collaborated” with Israel.
Indeed, Hamas and Fatah have killed far more Palestinian civilians over the past several

years than have the Israelis, but you wouldn’t know that from the media, the United Nations or protesters who focus selectively on only those deaths caused by Israeli military actions.

The protesters who filled the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco were nowhere to be seen when hundreds of Jewish children were murdered by Palestinian terrorists over the years.

Moreover, the number of civilians killed by Israel is almost always exaggerated. First, it is widely assumed that if a victim is a “child” or a “woman,” he or she is necessarily a civilian. Consider the following report in Thursday’s New York Times: “Hospital officials in Gaza said that of the more than 390 people killed by Israeli fighter planes since Saturday, 38 were children and 25 women.
” Some of these children and women were certainly civilians, but others were equally certainly combatants:

Hamas often uses 14-, 15-, 16-and 17-year-olds, as well as women, as terrorists. Israel is entitled under international law to treat these children and women as the combatants they have become. Hamas cannot, out of one side of its mouth, boast that it recruits children and women to become terrorists, and then, out of the other side of its mouth, complain when Israel takes it at its word. The media should look closely and critically at the number of claimed civilian victims before accepting self-serving and self-contradictory exaggerations.

By any objective count, the number of genuinely innocent civilians killed by the Israeli Air Force in Gaza is lower than the collateral deaths caused by any nation in a comparable situation. Hamas does everything in its power to provoke Israel into killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible, in order to generate condemnation against the Jewish state. It has gone so far as firing rockets from Palestinian schoolyards and hiding its terrorists in Palestinian maternity wards.

Lest there be any doubt about the willingness of Hamas officials to expose their families to martyrdom, remember that the Hamas terrorist leader recently killed in an Israeli air attack sent his own son to be a suicide bomber. He also refused to allow his family to leave the house, even after learning that he and his house has been placed on the a of Israeli military targets.

The reality is that the elected and de facto government of Gaza has declared war against Israel. Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, it has committed an “armed attack” against the Jewish state. The Hamas charter calls for Israel’s total destruction. Under international law, Israel is entitled to take whatever military action is necessary to repel that attack and stop the rockets.

It must seek to minimize civilian deaths consistent with the legitimate military goal, and it is doing precisely that, despite Hamas’s efforts to maximize civilian deaths on both sides.

Hamas chidlren

No successful society shows a spontaneous tendency towards multiculturalism or multi racialism. Successful and enduring societies show a high degree of homogeneity. Those who support multiculturalism either do not know this, or, what is more likely, realise that if they are to transform Western society into strictly regulated, racial-feminist bureaucracies they must first undermine these societies.
This transformation is as radical and revolutionary as the project to establish Communism in the Soviet Union was. Just as every aspect of life had to be brought under political control in order for the commissars to impose their vision of society, the multiculturalists hope to control and dominate every aspect of our lives. Unlike the hard tyranny of the Soviets, theirs is a softer, gentler tyranny but one with which they hope to bind us as tightly as a prisoner in the gulag. Today’s “political correctness” is the direct descendant of Communist terror and brainwashing.

Unlike the obviously alien implantation that was Communism, what makes multiculturalism particularly insidious and difficult to combat is that it usurps the moral and intellectual infrastructure of the West. Although it claims to champion the deepest held beliefs of the West, it is in fact a perversion and systematic undermining of the very idea of the West.

What we call “political correctness” actually dates back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s (politicbeskaya pravil ‘nost’ in Russian), and was the extension of political control in education, psychiatry, ethics, and behaviour. It was an essential component of the attempt to make sure that all aspects of life were consistent with ideological orthodoxy which is the distinctive feature of all totalitarianism. In the post-Stalin period, political correctness even meant that dissent was seen as a symptom of mental illness, for which the only treatment was incarceration.

As Mao Tse-Tung, the Great Helmsman, put it, “Not to have a correct political orientation is like not having a soul.” Mao’s little red book is full of exhortations to follow the correct path of Communist thought and by the late 1980s Maoist political correctness was well established in American universities. The final stage of development, which we are witnessing now, is the result of cross-fertilisation with all the other “isms”–anti-racism, feminism, structuralism, and post-modernism, which now dominate university curricula. The result is a new and virulent strain of totalitarianism, whose parallels to the Communist era are obvious. Today’s dogmas have led to rigid requirements of language, thought, and behaviour, and violators are treated as if they were mentally unbalanced, just as Soviet dissidents were.

Some have argued that it is unfair to describe Stalin’s regime as “totalitarian,” pointing out that one man, no matter how ruthlessly he exercised power, could not control the functions of the state. But, in fact, he didn’t have to. Totalitarianism was much more than state terror, censorship, and concentrations camps; it was a state of mind in which the very thought of having a private opinion or point of view had been destroyed. The totalitarian propagandist forces people to believe that slavery is freedom, squalor is bounty, ignorance is knowledge and that a rigidly closed society is the most open in the world. And once enough people are made to think this way it is functionally totalitarian even if a single dictator does not personally control everything.

Today, of course, we are made to believe that diversity is strength, perversity is virtue, success is oppression, and that relentlessly repeating these ideas over and over is tolerance and diversity. Indeed the multicultural revolution works subversion everywhere, just as communist revolutions did. Judicial activism undermines the rule of law, “tolerance” weakens the condition that makes real tolerance possible; universities which should be havens of free enquiry practice censorship that rivals that of the Soviets.

At the same time we find a relentless drive for equality: the Bible, Shakespeare, and “rap” music are just texts with “equally valid perspectives.” Deviant and criminal behaviour are an “alternative life style.” Today Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment would have been repackaged as Crime and Counselling.
In the Communist era, the totalitarian state was built on violence. The purpose of the 1930s and the Great Terror (which was Mao’s model for the Cultural Revolution) uses violence against “class enemies” to compel loyalty. Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s, collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Horror of Sorrowing (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was “not one of them was guilty of anything, but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” Stigmatising entire institutions and groups makes it much easier to carry out wholesale change.

This, of course, is the beauty of “racism” and “sexism” for today’s culture attackers–sin can be extended far beyond individuals to include institutions, literature, language, history, laws, customs, entire civilisations. The charge of “institutional racism” is no different than declaring an entire economic class an enemy of the people. “Racism” and “sexism” are multiculturalism’s assault weapons, its Big Ideas, just as class warfare was for Communists, and the effects are the same. If a crime can be collectivised, all can be guilty because they belong to the wrong group. When young whites are victims of racial preferences they are today’s version of the Russian peasants. Even if they themselves have never oppressed anyone, they “belong to the race that is guilty of everything.”

The purpose of these multicultural campaigns is to destroy the self. The mouth moves, the right gestures follow, but they are the mouth and gestures of a zombie, the new Soviet man or today, PC-Man. Once enough people have been conditioned this way, violence is no longer necessary; we reach steady-state totalitarianism, in which the vast majority know what is expected of them and play their allotted roles.

The Russian experiment with revolution and totalitarian social engineering has been chronicled by two of that country’s greatest writers, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn. They brilliantly dissect the methods and psychology of totalitarian control. Dostoyevsky’s The Devils has no equal as a penetrating and disturbing analysis of the revolutionary and totalitarian mind. The “devils” are radical students of the middle and upper classes flirting with something they do not understand. The ruling class seeks to ingratiate itself with them. The universities have essentially declared war on society at large. The great cry of the student radicals is freedom, freedom, from the established norms of society, freedom from manners, freedom from inequality, freedom from the past.

Russia’s descent into vice and insanity is a powerful warning of when a nation declares war on the past in the hope of building a terrestrial paradise. Dostoyevsky did not live to see the abominations he predicted, but Solzhenitsyn experienced them first-hand. The Gulag Archipelago and August 1914 can be seen as histories of ideas, as attempts to account for the dreadful fate that befell Russia after 1917.

Solzhenitsyn identifies education, and the way teachers saw their duty as instilling hostility in all forms of traditional authority, as the major factors that explain why Russia’s youth was seduced by revolutionary ideas. In the West during the 1960s and 1970s–which collectively can be called “the 60s”–we hear a powerful echo of the mental capitulation of Russia that took place in the 1870s and continued through the revolution.

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational enquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favourite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists, and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are oppressed. They see truth more clearly than the white heterosexual men who “oppress” them. This is a perfect mirror image of the Marxist proletariat’s moral and intellectual superiority over the bourgeoisie. Today, “oppression” confers a “privileged perspective” that is essentially infallible. To borrow an expression from Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, blacks and feminists are “case hardened against logical argument” as Communist true believers are.

Indeed, feminists and anti-racist activists openly reject objective truth. Confident that they have intimidated their opposition, feminists are able to make all kinds of demands on the assumption that men and women are equal in every way. When outcomes do not match that belief, this is only more evidence of white-male devilry.

One of the most depressing sights in the West today, particularly in the Universities and the media, is the readiness to treat feminism as a major contribution to knowledge and to submit to its absurdities. Remarkably, this requires no physical violence. It is the desire to be accepted that makes people truckle to these middle-class, would-be revolutionaries. Peter Verkovensky, who orchestrates murder and mayhem in The Devils, expresses it with admirable contempt: “All I have to do is raise my voice and tell them that they are not sufficiently liberal.” The race hustlers, of course, play the same game. Accuse [an early 21st century] liberal of “racism” and “sexism” and watch him fall apart in an orgy of self-flagellation and Marxist self-criticism. Even “conservatives” wilt at the sound of those words.

Ancient liberties and assumptions of innocence mean nothing

by John Fonte

Nearly a year before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wire service stories gave us a preview of the transnational politics of the future. It was reported on October 24, 2000, that in preparation for the UN Conference Against Racism, about fifty American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sent a formal letter to UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson calling on the UN “to hold the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination” that “men and women of color face at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system.”

The NGOs included the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Amnesty International-

U.S.A. (AI-U.S.A.), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Arab-American Institute, National Council of Churches, American Friends Service Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the International Human Rights Law Group, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, and others. Their spokesman, Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that the NGOs’ demands “had been repeatedly raised with federal and state officials [in the United States] but to little effect. . . . In frustration
we now turn to the United Nations.” In other words, the NGOs, unable to enact the policies they favored through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy-the Congress, state governments, state courts, the federal executive branch, or even the federal courts-felt it necessary to appeal to authority outside of American democracy and beyond its Constitution. In the two weeks before September 11, from August 31 to September 7, 2001, the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa. The American NGOs listed above attended the conference with financial support from the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations. At the conference the NGOs worked with delegates from African states that supported “reparations” from Western nations as compensation for the transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. American NGOs provided research assistance and helped develop reparations resolutions that condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger traffic in African slaves that were sent to the Islamic lands of the Middle East. In addition, the NGOs endorsed a series of demands, including:

• U.S. acknowledgment of “the breadth and pervasiveness of institutional racism” that
• “permeates every institution at every level.”
• A declaration that “racial bias corrupts every stage of the [U.S.] criminal justice process,
• from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial, and sentencing.”
• Support and expansion of federal and state hate crimes legislation.
• Condemnation of opposition to affirmative action measures.
• U.S. recognition of an adequate standard of living as a “right, not privilege.”
• A statement deploring “denial of economic rights” in the United States.
• Promotion of multilingualism instead of “discriminatory” English-language acquisition
• emphasis in U.S. schools.
• Denunciation of free market capitalism as a fundamentally flawed system.”

Most importantly, the NGOs insisted that the United States ratify all major UN human rights treaties and drop legal reservations to treaties already ratified.

For example, in 1994 the United States ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but attached reservations declaring that it did not accept treaty requirements “incompatible with the Constitution.” The official State Department reservations memorandum specifically notes that the CERD’s restrictions on free speech and freedom of assembly are incompatible with the First Amendment. Yet leading NGOs including the HRW and AI-U.S.A. demand that the United States drop all reservations and “comply” with the CERD treaty.

On August 6, 2001, Reuters reported that the United States had presented its first explanation of how it was implementing the CERD treaty to a UN committee. An NGO representative from the Center for Constitutional Rights reportedly said that “Almost every member of the UN committee raised the question of why there are vast racial disparities . . . in every aspect of American life-education, housing, health, welfare, criminal justice.” A representative from HRW declared that the United States offered “no remedies” for these disparities, but “simply restated” its position by supporting equality of opportunity and indicating “no willingness to comply” with CERD. (This would presumably mean the enactment of policies resulting in statistical equality of condition for racial and ethnic minorities in education, housing, health, welfare, criminal justice and the like.)

Indeed, to comply with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the United States would have to turn its political and economic system, together with their underlying principles, upside down-abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority rule-since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the American electorate.

The NGOs at the Durban conference exemplify a new challenge to liberal democracy and its traditional home, the liberal democratic nation-state. These have always been self-governing representative systems comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under law and together form a people within a democratic nation-state. Thus, liberal democracy means individual rights, democratic representation (with some form of majority rule) and national citizenship. Yet, as the vignettes of the Durban conference (and myriad other conflicts of the past four decades) demonstrate, all of these principles, along with the very idea of the liberal democratic nation-state, are contested today in the West, suggesting that we have not reached the “end of history” in the ideological sense delineated by Francis Fukuyama in his ground breaking 1989 essay.

Post-September 11

Three weeks after the September 11 attacks, Fukuyama stated in an article in the Wall Street Journal that his “end of history” thesis remained valid twelve years after he first presented it, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s core argument was that after the defeat of communism and National Socialism, no serious ideological competitor to Western-style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the evolutionary process. To be sure, there will be wars and terrorism, but no alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously challenge the ideas and values of Western liberal democracy as the “dominant organizing principles” around the world.

Fukuyama correctly points out that non-democratic rival ideologies such as radical Islam and “Asian values” have little appeal outside their own cultural areas, but these areas are themselves vulnerable to penetration by Western democratic ideas. The September 11 attacks notwithstanding, “we remain at the end of history,” Fukuyama insists, “because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic West.” There is nothing beyond liberal democracy “towards which we could expect to evolve.” Fukuyama concludes by stating that there will be challenges from those who resist progress, “but time and resources are on the side of modernity.”

Indeed, but is “modernity” on the side of liberal democracy? Fukuyama is probably right that the current crisis with the forces of radical Islam will be overcome, and that, at the end of the day, there will be no serious ideological challenge originating outside of Western civilization. However, the activities of the NGOs suggest that there already is an alternative ideology to liberal democracy within the West that for decades has been steadily, and almost imperceptibly, evolving.

Thus, it is entirely possible that modernity.thirty or forty years hence.will witness not the final triumph of liberal democracy, but a new challenge to it in the form of a new transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context of the American republic, post-Constitutional and post-American. I will call this alternative ideology “transnational progressivism.” This ideology constitutes a universal and modern world view that challenges in theory and practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular. The aftermath of September 11 provides the possibility of a resurgence by the forces of traditional nation-centered liberal democracy. But before addressing this possibility, it is necessary to examine in detail the theory and practice of “transnational progressivism.”

Transnational Progressivism

The key concepts of transnational progressivism could be described as follows:

(1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen. The key political unit is not the individual citizen, who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. This emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a deemphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence of ascriptive categories, joining with others beyond the confines of social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive nation.

(2) A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims. Influenced (however indirectly) by the Hegelian Marxist thinking associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Central European theorists known as the Frankfurt School, global progressives posit that throughout human history there are essentially two types of groups: the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the marginalized. In the United States, oppressor groups would variously include white males, heterosexuals, and Anglos, whereas victim groups would include blacks, gays, Latinos (including obviously many immigrants), and women.

Multicultural ideologists have incorporated this essentially Hegelian Marxist “privileged vs. marginalized” dichotomy into their theoretical framework. As political philosopher James Ceaser puts it, multiculturalism is not “multi” or concerned with many groups, but “binary,” concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and “the Other” (good) or the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, in global progressive ideology, “equity” and “social justice” mean strengthening the position of the victim groups and weakening the position of oppressors-hence preferences for certain groups are justified. Accordingly, equality under law is replaced by legal preferences for traditionally victimized groups. In 1999, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission extended antidiscrimination protection under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to illegal immigrants.

(3) Group proportionalism as the goal of “fairness.” Transnational progressivism assumes that “victim” groups should be represented in all professions roughly proportionate to their percentage of the population or, at least, of the local work force. Thus, if women make up 52 percent and Latinos make up 10 percent of the population, then 52 percent of all corporate executives, physicians, and insurance salesmen should be women and 10 percent should be Latinos. If not, there is a problem of “underrepresentation” or imbalance that must be rectified by government and civil society. Thomas Sowell recently wrote-as he has for several decades-that many Western intellectuals perpetually promote some version of “cosmic justice” or form of
equality of result.8 The “group proportionalism” paradigm is pervasive in Western society: even the U.S. Park Service is concerned because 85 percent of all visitors to the nation’s parks are white, although whites make up only 74 percent of the population. Therefore, the Park Service announced in 1998 that it was working on this “problem.”

(4) The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups. Transnational progressives in the United States (and elsewhere) insist that it is not enough to have proportional representation of minorities (including immigrants, legal and illegal) at all levels in major institutions of society (corporations, places of worship, universities, armed forces) if these institutions continue to reflect a “white Anglo male culture and world view.” Ethnic and linguistic minorities have different ways of viewing the world, they say, and these minorities’ values and cultures must be respected and represented within these institutions. At a 1998 U.S. Department of Education conference promoting bilingual education, SUNY professor Joel Spring declared, “We must use multiculturalism and multilingualism to change the dominant culture of the United States.” He noted, for example, that unlike Anglo culture, Latino culture is “warm” and would not promote harsh disciplinary measures in the schools.

(5) The Demographic Imperative. The demographic imperative tells us that major demographic changes are occurring in the United States as millions of new immigrants from non-Western cultures and their children enter American life in record numbers. At the same time, the global interdependence of the world’s peoples and the transnational connections among them will increase. All of these changes render the traditional paradigm of American nationhood obsolete. That traditional paradigm based on individual rights, majority rule, national sovereignty, citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants into an existing American civic culture is too narrow and must be changed into a system that promotes “diversity,” defined, in the end, as group proportionalism.

(6) The redefinition of democracy and “democratic ideals.” Since Fukayama’s treatise, transnational progressives have been altering the definition of “democracy,” from that of a system of majority rule among equal citizens to one of power sharing among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. For example, Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1995 that it is “undemocratic” for California to exclude noncitizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting. Former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) general counsel Alexander Aleinikoff, declaring that “[we] live in a post-assimilationist age,” asserted that majority preferences simply “reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups” (as opposed to the norms and cultures of “feminists and people of color”).11 James Banks, one of American education’s leading textbook writers, noted in 1994 that “to create an authentic
democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power.”12 In effect, Banks said, existing American liberal democracy is not quite authentic; real democracy is yet to be created. It will come when the different “peoples” or groups that live within America “share power” as groups.

(7) Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols. Transnational progressives have focused on traditional narratives and national symbols of Western democratic nation-states, questioning union and nationhood itself. In October 2000, the British government- sponsored Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain issued a report that denounced the concept of “Britishness” as having “systemic . . . racist connotations.” The Commission, chaired by Labour life peer Lord Parekh, declared that instead of defining itself as a nation, the UK should be considered a “community of communities.” One member of the Commission explained that the members found the concepts of “Britain” and “nation” troubling. The purpose of the Commission’s report, according to the chairman Professor Parekh, was to “shape and restructure the consciousness of our citizens.” The report declared that Britain should be formally
“recognized as a multi-cultural society” whose history needed to be “revised, rethought, or jettisoned.”

In the United States in the mid-1990s, the proposed “National History Standards,” reflecting the marked influence of multiculturalism among historians in the nation’s universities, recommended altering the traditional narrative of the United States. Instead of emphasizing the story of European settlers, American civilization would be redefined as a “convergence” of three civilizations-Amerindian, West African, and European-the bases of a hybrid American multi culture. Even though the National History Standards were ultimately rejected, this core multicultural concept that that United States is not primarily the creation of Western civilization, but the result of a “Great Convergence” of “three worlds” has become the dominant paradigm in American public schools.

In Israel, adversary intellectuals have attacked the Zionist narrative. A “post-Zionist” intelligentsia has proposed that Israel consider itself multicultural and deconstruct its identity as a Jewish state. Tom Bethell has pointed out that in the mid-1990s the official appointed to revise Israel’s history curriculum used media interviews to compare the Israeli armed forces to the SS and Orthodox Jewish youth to the Hitler Youth. A new code of ethics for the Israel Defense Forces eliminated all references to the “land of Israel,” the “Jewish state,” and the “Jewish people,” and, instead, referred only to “democracy.” Even Israeli foreign minister Simon Peres sounded the post-Zionist trumpet in his 1993 book, The New Middle East, where he wrote that “we do not need to reinforce sovereignty, but rather to strengthen the position of humankind.” He
called for an “ultranational identity,” saying that “particularist nationalism is fading and the idea of a ‘citizen of the world’ is taking hold. . . . Our ultimate goal is the creation of a regional community of nations, with a common market and elected centralized bodies,” a type of Middle Eastern EU.

(8) Promotion of the concept of post national citizenship. “Can advocates of post national citizenship ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept of citizenship from the nation-state in prevailing political thought?” asks Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak. An increasing number of international law professors throughout the West are arguing that citizenship should be denationalized. Invoking concepts such as inclusion, social justice, democratic engagement, and human rights, they argue for transnational citizenship, postnational citizenship, or sometimes global citizenship embedded in international human rights accords and “evolving” forms of transnational arrangements.

These theorists insist that national citizenship should not be “privileged” at the expense of postnational, multiple, and pluralized forms of citizenship identities. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, under the leadership of its president, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, has published a series of books in the past few years “challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership” in nation-states and “rethinking the meaning of citizenship.”16 Although couched in the ostensibly neutral language of social science, these essays from scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, as well as the United States, argue for new, transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.

(9) The idea of transnationalism as a major conceptual tool. The theory of transnationalism promises to be for the first decade of the twenty-first century what multiculturalism was for the last decade of the twentieth century. In a certain sense, transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology-it is multiculturalism with a global face. Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what
should be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires some form of transnational “global governance” because they believe that the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future. Academic and public policy conferences today are filled with discussions of “transnational organizations,” “transnational actors,” “transnational migrants,” “transnational jurisprudence,” and “transnational citizenship,” just as in the 1990s they were replete with references to multiculturalism in education, citizenship, literature, and law.

Many of the same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, at its August 1999 annual conference, “Transitions in World Societies,” the same American Sociological Association (ASA) that promoted multiculturalism from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s featured transnationalism. Indeed, the ASA’s then-president, Professor Alejandro Portes of Princeton University, argued that transnationalism is the wave of the future. He insisted that transnationalism, combined with large-scale immigration, would redefine the meaning of American citizenship. University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has suggested that the United States is in transition from being a “land of immigrants” to “one node in a postnational network of diasporas.”

It is clear that arguments over globalization will dominate much of early twenty-first century public debate. The promotion of transnationalism as both an empirical and normative concept is an attempt to shape this crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. The adherents of transnationalism create a dichotomy. They imply that one is either in step with globalization, and thus with transnationalism and forward-looking thinking, or one is a backward antiglobalist.

Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy-that the critical argument is not between globalists and antiglobalists, but instead over the form Western global engagement should take in the coming decades: will it be transnationalist or internationalist?

Transnational Progressivism’s Social Base: A Post-National Intelligentsia

The social base of transnational progressivism could be labeled a rising postnational intelligentsia, the leaders of which include many international law professors at prestigious Western universities, NGO activists, foundation officers, UN bureaucrats, EU administrators, corporation executives, and practicing politicians throughout the West. The postnational intelligentsia is an eclectic group but it would include an identifiable group of thinkers and actors.

•
British “third way” theorist Anthony Giddens, who declared that he is “in favor of pioneering some quasi-utopian transnational forms of democracy” and “is strongly opposed to the idea that social justice is just equality of opportunity.” Giddens writes that “the shortcomings of liberal democracy suggest the need to further more radical forms of democratization.” Instead of liberal democracy, Giddens, using the language of Juergen Habermas, posits a “dialogic democracy” with an emphasis on “life politics,” especially “new social movements, such as those concerned with feminism, ecology, peace, or human rights.”
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Italian Marxist theorist Toni Negri (who clearly knows his Gramsci) and Duke University Literature Professor Michael Hardt, the authors of the best-selling book Empire, lauded by the New York Times as the “next big idea.” In Empire, Negri (a jailed former associate of the terrorist Italian Red Brigades) and Hardt (his former student) using Marxist concepts such as the “multitudes” i.e., “the masses” vs. the Empire attack the power of global corporations and, without being overly specific, call for a new form of “global” or transnational democracy.
•
University of Chicago philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum, who called for reinvigorating the concept of “global citizenship” and denounced patriotism as “indistinguishable from jingoism” in a debate several years back that set off a wide ranging discussion among American academics on the meaning of patriotism, citizenship, and the nation-state.
•
Strobe Talbot, former under secretary of state, who wrote when he was an editor of Time magazine in the early 1990’s that he was optimistic that by the end of the twenty-first century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a single global authority. . . . All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.” He characterizes the devolution of national sovereignty “upward toward supranational bodies” and “downward toward” autonomous units is a “basically positive phenomenon.” Complementary to this general (and diffuse) sentiment for new transnational forms of governance is the concrete day-to-day practical work of the NGOs that seek to bring the transnational vision to fruition. When social movements such as the ideologies of “transnationalism” and “global governance” are depicted as the result of “social forces” or the “movement of history,” a certain
impersonal inevitability is implied. However, in the twentieth century the Bolshevik Revolution, the National Socialist Revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, the Gaullist national reconstruction in France, and the creation of the EU and its predecessor organizations were not inevitable, but were the result of the exercise of political will by elites who mobilized their strength and defeated opponents.

Similarly, “transnationalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “global governance,” like “diversity,” are ideological tools championed by activist elites, not “forces of history.” The success or failure of these values-loaded concepts will ultimately depend upon the political will and effectiveness of these elites.

Facing popular resistance on issue after issue, a wide range of American NGOs seek to bypass the normal democratic process to achieve their political ends by extra- or post- constitutional means, demanding that the United States:

• • join the International Criminal Court;
  • ratify the UN Convention on Women’s Rights;
  • drop reservations to the UN treaty against racial discrimination;
  • reduce border policing;
  • implement affirmative action legislation;
  • follow international norms on capital punishment;
  • accept the Kyoto Treaty on global warming;
  • expand the legal rights of non-citizens in constitutional regimes.

Human Rights Activists

A good part of the energy for transnational progressivism is provided by human rights activists, who consistently evoke “evolving norms of international law” in pursuing their goals. The main legal conflict between traditional American liberal democrats and transnational progressives is ultimately the question of whether the U.S. Constitution trumps international law or vice versa. “International law” here refers to what experts including John Bolton, Jeremy Rabkin, Jack Goldsmith, Lee Casey, and David Rivkin have called the “new international law,” which differs from traditional concepts of the “Law of Nations.”

Before the mid-twentieth century, traditional international law usually referred to relations among nation-states: it was “international” in the real sense of the term. Since that time the “new international law” has increasingly penetrated the sovereignty of democratic nation-states. It is, therefore, in reality, “transnational law.” Human rights activists work to establish norms for this “new international (i.e. transnational) law,” and then attempt to bring the United States into conformity with a legal regime whose reach often extends beyond democratic politics and the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.

Transnational progressives (including American and non-American NGOs and UN officials) excoriate American political, legal, and administrative practices in virulent language, as if the American liberal democratic nation-state was an illegitimate authoritarian regime. Thus, AI-U.S.A. charged the United States in a 1998 report with “a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations,” stating that “racism and discrimination contribute to the denial of the fundamental rights of countless men, women, and children” in the United States. Moreover, police brutality is “entrenched and nation-wide”; the United States is the “world leader in high tech repression”; and it is time for the United States to face up to its “hypocrisy.” The report discussed “a national background of economic and racial injustice, a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiments” and stated that “human rights violations in the U.S. occur in rural communities and urban communities from coast to coast.” The United States had long “abdicated its duty” to lead the world in promoting human rights.23 Therefore, avowed William Schultz, the executive director of AI-U.S.A., “it was no wonder the United States was ousted from the [UN] Human Rights Commission.”

While AI-U.S.A. called on the UN to condemn “institutionalized cruelty” in the United States, HRW issued a 450-page report excoriating all types of “human rights violations.” For example, HRW declared that “criminal justice polices” display a “disproportionate impact on African-Americans. . . . Although they comprised about 12 percent of the national adult population, they comprised 49.9 percent of the prison population.” Overall, HRW affirmed that the United States was guilty of “serious human rights violations” including “rampant” police brutality and “harassment of gay adults in the military paralleled by the harassment of students perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered” in public schools. These students “experienced” school “as a place that accepted intolerance, hatred, ostracization, and violence
against youth who were perceived as different.” HRW also attacked the “curtailment of internationally-recognized rights” for (illegal) immigrants and complained that “the U.S. Border
Patrol continued to grow at an alarming pace, doubling since 1993, when there were roughly 4,000 agents, to. . . . approximately 8,000 agents.” UN special investigators examined U.S. “human rights violations” in 1990s. The first thing these investigators did was meet with an array of American NGOs. In their reports, the UN officials quoted freely from American NGO documents. UN investigator Maurice Glélé of Benin wrote that, “racism existed in the U.S. with sociological inertia, structural obstacles, and individual resistance.” Glélé visited the U.S. State Department and found that discrimination complaints by African American State Department employees “had dragged on since 1986.”

Meanwhile, the report stated, the “State Department remains a very white institution.” The UN investigator further wrote that “the fate of the majority of Blacks is one of poverty, sickness, illiteracy, drugs, and crime in response to the social cul-de-sac in which they find themselves.” Rahhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women found that the United States is “criminalizing” a large segment of its population, a group that is “composed of poor persons of color and increasingly female.”

Bacre Waly Ndiaye, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudical, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, like other UN investigators, consulted representatives of American NGOs including the ACLU, American Friends Service Committee, AI-U.S.A., the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HRW, and the International Human Rights Law Group. Ndiaye’s report found “a significant degree of unfairness and arbitrariness” in the application of the death penalty,” based on racial data showing that 41 percent of death penalty inmates are African-American, 47 percent white, 7 percent Hispanic, and 1.5 percent American Indian.

Anti-Assimilation on the Home Front

As noted earlier, the 2001 UN Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia held in Durban represents a classic case study of how American NGOs promote transnational progressivism. It is revealing that the language of almost all the UN treaties that ignore the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution (including the International Criminal Court (ICC), the

Convention on Women’s Rights, the Convention on Children’s Rights) were written by American and other Western NGOs. In other words, the documents were written by a Western post national intelligentsia aided by a “Westernistic” or “Westernized” coterie of Third World intellectuals (e.g., Nobel laureate Kofi Annan.)

It is significant, but little noticed, that many of same NGOs (HRW, AI-U.S.A.) and international law professors who have advocated transnational legal concepts at UN meetings and in international forums are active in U.S. immigration and naturalization law. On this front the transnational progressives have pursued two objectives: (1) eliminating all distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and (2) vigorously opposing attempts to assimilate immigrants into the “dominant” Anglo culture.

Thus, when discussing immigration/assimilation issues, Louis Henkin, one of the most prominent scholars of international law, attacks “archaic notions of sovereignty” and calls for largely eliminating “the difference between a citizen and a non-citizen permanent resident” in all federal laws. Washington University international law professor Stephen Legomsky argues that dual nationals (who are American citizens) should not be required to give “greater weight to U.S. interests, in the event of a conflict” between the United States and the other country in which the American citizen is also a national.

Two leading law professors (Peter Spiro from Hofstra, who has written extensively in support of NGOs, and Peter Schuck from Yale) question the requirement that immigrants seeking American citizenship “renounce ‘all allegiance and fidelity’ to their old nations.” In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they suggested dropping this “renunciation clause” from the Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance. They also question the concept of the hyphenated American, offering the model of “ampersand” American. Thus, instead of thinking of traditional Mexican-Americans who are loyal citizens but proud of his ethnic roots, they do not object to immigrants (or migrants) who are both “Mexican and American,” who retain “loyalties” to their “original homeland” and vote in both countries.

University Professor Robert Bach authored a major Ford Foundation report on new and “established residents” (the word “citizen” was assiduously avoided) that advocated the “maintenance” of ethnic immigrant identities, supported “non-citizen voting,” and attacked assimilation (suggesting that homogeneity, not diversity, “may” be the “problem in America”). Bach later left the Ford Foundation and became deputy director for policy at the INS in the Clinton administration, where he joined forces with then INS general counsel Alexander Alienikoff to promote a pro-multicultural, anti-assimilation federal policy. Alienikoff, a former (and current) immigration law professor, has openly and vigorously advocated a “politics” that “moves us beyond assimilation.”

It is well established (through Congressional investigations and investigative reporting) that the financial backing for this anti-assimilationist campaign has come primarily from the Ford Foundation, which in the 1970s made a conscious decision to fund a Latino rights movement based on advocacy-litigation and group rights. On this front, the global progressives have been aided- if not always consciously, certainly in objective terms-by a “transnational right.” It was a determined group of transnational and libertarian-leaning conservative senators and congressmen that prevented the Immigration Reform legislation of 1996 from limiting unskilled immigration. The same group worked with progressives in the late 1990s to successfully block the implementation of a computerized plan to track the movement of foreign nationals in and out of the United States; thereby, in George Will’s apt phrase putting “commerce over country.” Whatever their ideological, commercial, or political motives, the constant demand for “open
borders” and “free movement of people” (not simply free trade, which is a different matter all together) by certain editorialists, commentators, lobbyists, and activists on the libertarian and transnational right has strengthened the anti-assimilationist agenda of the global progressives.

The EU as a Stronghold of Transnational Progressivism

Whereas ideologically driven NGOs represent a subnational challenge to the values and policies of the liberal-democratic nation-state, the EU is a large supranational macro-organization that to a considerable extent embodies transnational progressivism, both in governmental form and in substantive policies. The governmental structure of the EU is post-democratic. Technically power in the EU resides in three bodies: the Council of the EU composed of one cabinet-level representative from each of the member-states; the European Parliament elected by citizens in the member-states; and the European Commission (EC), the EU’s executive body.

As Washington lawyers, Lee Casey and David Rivkin have noted, “In theory, the European Commission is accountable to both the council and European Parliament. However, neither the council nor the European Parliament initiate policymaking. Their power is mostly a negative one, the ability to withhold approval of policies formulated and adopted by the European Commission, and even this checking function is exercised infrequently.” Thus, Casey and Rivkin state, “Without doubt, the European Commission is the most powerful EU institution” and “the true source of its policy and legislative initiatives.” Besides initiating legislation, the EC implements common policy and controls a large bureaucracy. It is composed of a rotating presidency and nineteen commissioners chosen by the member-states and approved by the European Parliament. It is unelected and, for the most part, unaccountable.

A white paper issued by the EC suggests that this unaccountability is one reason for its success: “The original and essential source of the success of European integration is that the EU’s executive body, the Commission, is supranational and independent from national, sectoral, or other influences.” This recognizable “democracy deficit” represents a moral challenge to EU legitimacy.

The substantive polices advanced by EU leaders both in the Commission and the ECJ are based on the global progressive ideology of group rights discussed earlier that promotes victim groups over “privileged” groups and eschews the liberal principle of treating citizens equally as individuals. Thus, statutes on “hate speech,” “hate crimes,” “comparable worth” for women’s pay, and group preferences are considerably more “progressive” in the EU than in the United States. At the same time, European courts have overruled national parliaments and public opinion in nation-states by compelling the British to incorporate gays and the Germans to incorporate women in combat units in their respective military services.

A group of what Undersecretary of State John Bolton has referred to as “Americanist” (as opposed to “Globalist”) thinkers has emphasized the divergence of America’s liberal philosophy from the EU’s. In the June/July 2001 Policy Review, Lee Casey and David Rivkin, argued this position forcefully:
From the perspective of U.S. philosophical and constitutional traditions, the key question in determining whether any particular model of government is a democracy is whether the governed choose their governors.
. . . Unfortunately, the reemergence [in Europe] of a pre-Enlightenment pan-European ideology that denies the ultimate authority of the nation-state, as well as the transfer of policymaking authority from the governed and their elected representatives to a professional bureaucracy, as is evident in the EU’s leading institutions, suggests a dramatic divergence from the basic principle of popular sovereignty once shared both by Europe’s democracies and the United States.

In the world of practical international politics, in the period immediately prior to the events of September 11, the EU clearly stood in opposition to the United States on some of the most important strategic global issues, including the ICC, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, and policy towards missile defense, Iran, Iraq, Israel, China, Cuba, North Korea, and the death penalty. On most of these issues, transnational progressives in the United States-including many practicing politicians-supported the EU position and attempted to leverage this transnational influence in the domestic debate. At the same, the position of the Bush administration on many of these issues has support from elements in Europe, certainly from members of the British political class and public, and undoubtedly from some segments of the Continental European populace as well (on the death penalty, for example).

Even since the September 11 attacks, many Europeans have continued to snipe at American policies and place themselves in opposition to American interests in the war on terrorism. Within a month of September 11, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon called the planned military tribunals “simply illegal.” In December 2001 the European Parliament condemned the U.S. Patriot Act (the bipartisan antiterrorist legislation that passed the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly) as “contrary to the principles” of human rights because the legislation “discriminates” against noncitizens. Time and again, leading European politicians have made a point of insisting that they oppose extraditing terrorist suspects to the United States if those terrorists would be subjected to the death penalty.

Interestingly, both conservative realists and neoconservative pro-democracy advocates have argued that some EU, UN, and NGO thinking threatens to limit both American democracy at home and American power overseas. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick puts it, “foreign governments and their leaders, and more than a few activists here at home, seek to constrain and control American power by means of elaborate multilateral processes, global arrangements, and UN treaties that limit both our capacity to govern ourselves and act abroad.”

Conclusion

Scholars, publicists, and many others in the Western world-and especially in the United States, original home of constitutional democracy-have for the past several decades been arguing furiously over the most fundamental political ideas. Talk of a “culture war,” however, is somewhat misleading, because the arguments over transnational vs. national citizenship, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, and global governance vs. national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and philosophical, in that they pose such Aristotelian questions as “What kind of government is best?” and “What is citizenship?”

In America, there is an elemental argument about whether to preserve, improve, and transmit the American regime to future generations or to transform it into a new and different type of polity. In the terms of contemporary political science we are arguing about “regime maintenance” vs. “regime transformation.”

In the final analysis, the challenge from transnational progressivism to traditional American concepts of citizenship, patriotism, assimilation, and at the most basic level, to the meaning of democracy itself, is fundamental. It is a challenge to American liberal democracy. If our system is based not on individual rights, but on group consciousness; not on equality of citizenship, but on group preferences for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) and for certain categories of citizens; not on majority rule within constitutional limits, but on power-sharing by different ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups; not on constitutional law, but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming Americans, but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then the regime will cease to be “constitutional,” “liberal,” “democratic,” and “American,” in the understood sense of those terms, but will become in reality a new hybrid system that is “post-constitutional,” “post-liberal,” “post-democratic,” and “post-American.”

This intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism began in the mid to late twentieth century; it accelerated after the Cold War and should continue well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 until the attacks on the heart of the American republic on September 11, 2001, the transnational progressives were on the offensive.

Since September 11, however, the forces supporting the liberal-democratic nation state have rallied. Clearly, in the post-Sept. 11 milieu there is a window of opportunity for those who favor a reaffirmation of the traditional norms of liberal-democratic patriotism. The political will to seize this opportunity is unclear. Key areas to watch include official government policy statements for the use of force and the conduct of war; the use and non-use of international law; assimilation-immigration policy; border control; civic education in the public schools; and the state of the patriotic narrative in popular culture.

Fourth Dimension?

I suggest that we add a fourth dimension to a conceptual framework of international politics. Three dimensions are currently recognizable. First, there is traditional realpolitik, the competition and conflict among nation-states (and supranational states such as the EU). Second is the competition of civilizations conceptualized by Samuel Huntington. Third, there is the conflict between the democratic world and the undemocratic world. I am suggesting a fourth dimension, the conflict within the democratic zone (and particularly within the West) between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism, between democrats and post-democrats.

At one level, the fourth dimension amounts to a struggle between the American/Anglo-American and the continental European models of governance-of what Western civilization ought to be. The latter travels the road to a form of bureaucratic collectivism, the former emphasizes the sometimes conflicting values of civic republicanism and the liberal values of openness and individuality within a market-driven milieu. As John O’Sullivan and others have pointed out, there are Europeans who support an entrepreneurial, liberal, Anglo-American style regime, and there are many Americans (particularly among elites) who favor a more collectivist continental European approach.

The conflicts and tensions within each of these four dimensions of international politics are unfolding simultaneously and affected by each other, and so they all belong in a prehensive understanding of the world of the twenty-first century. In hindsight, Fukuyama may have been wrong to suggest that liberal democracy is inevitably the final form of political governance, the evolutionary endpoint of political philosophy, because it has become unclear that liberal democracy can withstand its present internal challenges. Despite military and ideological triumphs over national socialism and communism, powerful antidemocratic forces that were in a sense Western ideological heresies, Western liberal democracy will continue to face an ideological-metaphysical challenge from powerful post-liberal democratic forces, whose origins are Western, but, which could, in James Kurth’s word, be described as “post-Western.”

The Restructuring of War

As we see it, there are several constants in the so-called world wars, in the First World War, in the Second, and in what we call the Third and Fourth. One of these constants is the conquest of territories and their reorganization. If you consult a map of the world you can see that there were changes at the end of all of the world wars, not only in the conquest of territories, but in the forms of organization. After the First World War, there was a new world map, after the Second World War, there was another world map. At the end of what we venture to call the “Third World War,” and which others call the Cold War, a conquest of territories and a reorganization took place. It can, broadly speaking, be situated in the late 80′s, with the collapse of the socialist camp of the Soviet Union, and, by the early 90′s, what we call the Fourth World War can be discerned. Another constant is the destruction of the enemy. Such was the case with nazism in the second World War, and, in the Third, with all that had been known as the USSR and the socialist camp as an option to the capitalist world. The third constant is the administration of conquest. At the moment at which the conquest of territories is achieved, it is necessary to administer them, so that the winnings can be disbursed to the force which won. We use the term ‘conquest” quite a bit, because we are experts in this. Those States, which previously called themselves national, have always tried to conquer the Indian peoples. Despite those constants, there are a series of variables which change from one world war to another: strategy, the actors, or the parties, the armaments used and, lastly, the tactics.

Although the latter change, the former are present and can be applied in order to understand one war and another. The Third World War, or the Cold War, lasted from 1946 (or, if you wish, from the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) until 1985-1990. It was a large world war made up of many local wars. As in all the others, at the end there was a conquest of territories which destroyed an enemy.

Second act, it moved to the administration of the conquest and the reorganization of territories. The actors in this world war were: one, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective satellites; two, the majority of the European countries; three, Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia and Oceana. The peripheral countries revolved around the US or the USSR, as it suited them. After the superpowers and the peripherals were the spectators and victims, or, that is, the rest of the world. The two superpowers did not always fight face to face. They often did so through other countries. While the large industrialized nations joined with one of the two blocs, the rest of the countries and of the population appeared as spectators or as victims. What characterized this war was: one, the arms orientation and, two, local wars. In the nuclear war, the two superpowers competed in order to see how many times they could destroy the world. The method of convincing the enemy was to present it with a very large force. At the same time, local wars were taking place everywhere in which the superpowers were involved. The result, as we all know, was the defeat and destruction of the USSR, and the victory of the US, around which the great majority of countries have now come together. This is when what we call the “Fourth World War” broke out. And here a problem arose. The product of the previous war should have been a unipolar world – one single nation which dominated a world where there were no rivals – but, in order to make itself effective, this unipolar world would have to reach what is known as “globalization.” The world must be conceived as a large conquered territory with an enemy destroyed. It was necessary to administer this new world, and, therefore, to globalize it. They turned, then, to information technology, which, in the development of humanity, is as important as the invention of the steam engine. Computers allow one to be anywhere simultaneously. There are no longer any borders or constraints of time or geography.

It is thanks to computers that the process of globalization began. Separations, differences, Nation States, all eroded, and the world became what is called, realistically, the global village. The concept on which globalization is based is what we call “neoliberalism,” a new religion which is going to permit this process to be carried out. With this Fourth World War, once again, territories are being conquered, enemies are being destroyed and the conquest of these territories is being administered.

The problem is, what territories are being conquered and reorganized, and who is the enemy? Given that the previous enemy has disappeared, we are saying that humanity is now the enemy. The Fourth World War is destroying humanity as globalization is universalizing the market, and everything human which opposes the logic of the market is an enemy and must be destroyed. In this sense, we are all the enemy to be vanquished: indigenous, non-indigenous, human rights observers, teachers, intellectuals, artists. Anyone who believes themselves to be free and is not. This Fourth World War uses what we call “destruction.” Territories are destroyed and depopulated. At the point at which war is waged, land must be destroyed, turned into desert. Not out of a zeal for destruction, but in order to rebuild and reorder it. What is the primary problem confronted by this unipolar world in globalizing itself? Nation States, resistances, cultures, each nation’s means of relating, that which makes them different. How is it possible for the village to be global and for everyone to be equal if there are so many differences? When we say that it is necessary to destroy Nation States and to turn them into deserts, it does not mean doing away with the people, but with the peoples’ ways of being. After destroying, one must rebuild. Rebuild the territories and give them another place. The place which the laws of the market determine. This is what is driving globalization. The first obstacle is the Nation States: they must be attacked and destroyed. Everything which makes a State “national” must be destroyed: language, culture, economy, its political life and its social fabric. If national languages are no longer of use, they must be destroyed, and a new language must be promoted. Contrary to what one might think, it is not English, but computers. All languages must be made the same, translated into computer language, even English. All cultural aspects that make a French person French, an Italian Italian, a Dane Danish, a Mexican Mexican, must be destroyed, because they are barriers which prevent them from entering the globalized market. It is no longer a question of making one market for the French, and another for the English or the Italians. There must be one single market, in which the same person can consume the same product in any part of the world, and where the same person acts like a citizen of the world, and no longer as a citizen of a Nation State. That means that cultural history, the history of tradition, clashes with this process and is the enemy of the Fourth World War. This is especially serious in Europe where there are nations with great traditions. The cultural framework of the French, the Italians, the English, the Germans, the Spanish, etcetera – everything which cannot be translated into computer and market terms – are an impediment to this globalization. Goods are now going to circulate through information channels, and everything else must be destroyed or set aside. Nation States have their own economic structures and what is called “national bourgeoisie” – capitalists with national headquarters and with national profits. This can no longer exist: if the economy is decided at a global level, the economic policies of Nation States which try to protect capital are an enemy which must be defeated. The Free Trade Treaty, and the one which led to the European Union, the Euro, are symptoms that the economy is being globalized, although in the beginning it was about regional globalization, like in the case of Europe. Nation States construct their political relationships, but now political relationships are of no use. I am not characterizing them as good or bad. The problem is that these political relationships are an impediment to the realization of the laws of the market. The national political class is old, it is no longer useful, it has to be changed. They try to remember, they try to remember, even if it is the name of one single statesman in Europe. They simply cannot. The most important figures in the Europe of the Euro are people like the president of the Bundesbank, a banker. What he says is going to determine the policies of the different presidents or prime ministers inflicted on the countries of Europe. If the social fabric is broken, the old relationships of solidarity which make coexistence possible in a Nation State also break down. That is why campaigns against homosexuals and lesbians, against immigrants, or the campaigns of xenophobia, are encouraged. Everything which previously maintained a certain equilibrium has to be broken at the point at which this world war attacks a Nation State and transforms it into something else. It is about homogenizing, of making everyone equal, and of hegemonizing a lifestyle. It is global life. Its greatest diversion should be the computer, its work should be the computer, its value as a human being should be the number of credit cards, one’s purchasing capacity, one’s productive capacity. The case of the teachers is quite clear. The one who has the most knowledge or who is the wisest is no longer valuable. Now the one who produces the most research is valuable, and that is how his salary, his grants, his place in the university, are decided. This has a lot to do with the United States model. It also so happens, however, that this Fourth World War produces an opposite effect, which we call “fragmentation.” The world is, paradoxically, not becoming one, it is breaking up into many pieces. Although it is assumed that the citizen is being made equal, differences as differences are emerging: homosexuals and lesbians, young people, immigrants. Nation States are functioning as a large State, the anonymous State-land-society which divides us into many pieces. If you look at a world map of this period – the end of the Third World War – and analyze the last eight years, a restructuring took place, most especially – but not only – in Europe. Where there was once one nation, now there are many nations.

The world map has been fragmented. This is the paradoxical effect that is taking place because of this Fourth World War. Instead of being globalized, the world is fragmenting, and, instead of this mechanism hegemonizing and homogenizing, more and more differences are appearing. Globalization and neoliberalism are making the world an archipelago. And it must be given a market logic. These fragments must be organized into a common denominator. It is what we call “financial bomb.” At the same time that differences appear, the differences are multiplied. Each young person has his group, his way of thinking, such as punks and skinheads. All of which are in every country. Now the different are not only different, but their differences are multiplied and they seek their own identity. The Fourth World War is obviously not offering them a mirror that allows them to see themselves with a common denominator. It is offering them a broken mirror. As long as it has control of the archipelago – of human beings – the powers are not going to be very upset. The world is breaking into many pieces, large and small. There are no longer continents in the sense that I would be a European, African or American. What the globalization of neoliberalism is offering is a network built by financial capital, or, if you would prefer, by financial powers. If there is a crisis in this node, the rest of the network will cushion the effects. If there is prosperity in a country, it does not produce the effect of prosperity in other countries. It is, thus, a network which does not function. What they told us about the size of the world was a lie, a speech repeated by the leaders of Latin America, whether Menem, Fujimori, Zedillo, or others leaders of compromised moral character. In fact what is happening is that the network has made Nation States much more vulnerable. It is useless for a country to struggle to construct an equilibrium and its own destiny as a nation. Everything depends on what happens in a bank in Japan, or what the mafia in Russia or a speculator in Sydney does. In one way or another, Nation States are not saved, they are permanently condemned. When a Nation State agrees to join this network – because there is no other choice, because they force it, or out of conviction – it is signing its death certificate. In short, what this great market wants is to turn all of these islands into commercial centers, not nations. One can go from one country to another and find the same products. There is no longer any difference. In Paris or in San Cristóbal de las Casas you can consume the same thing. If you are in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, you can simultaneously be in Paris getting the news. It is the end of Nation States. And not just that: it is the end of the human beings who make them up. What matters is the law of the market, and that is what establishes how much you produce, how much you are worth, how much you buy, how much you are worth. Dignity, resistance, solidarity all disturb. Everything which prevents a human being from turning into a producing and purchasing machine is an enemy, and it must be destroyed. That is why we are saying that the human species is the enemy for the Fourth World War. It is not destroying it physically, but it is destroying its humanness. Paradoxically, by destroying Nation States, dignity, resistance and solidarity are built anew. There are no ties stronger, more solid, than those which exist between different groups: between homosexuals, between lesbians, between young people, between migrants.

This war, then, goes on to also attack those who are different. That is what those campaigns are owing to, so strong in Europe and in the United States, against the different, because they are dark, speak another language or have another culture. The means of cultivating xenophobia in what remains of the Nation States is to make threats: “These Turkish migrants want to take away your job.” “These Mexican immigrants came to rape, they came to steal, they came to sow bad habits.” Nation States – or the few of them that remain – delegate to those new citizens of the world – computers – the role of getting rid of those immigrants. And that is when groups like the Ku Klux Klan proliferate, or persons of such probity as Berlusconi reach power. They all build their campaigns based on xenophobia. Hate for the different, persecution against anything that is different, is worldwide. But the resistance of anything that is different is also worldwide. Faced with that aggression, these differences are multiplied, they are solidified. This is how it is, I am not going to characterize it as good or bad, that is how it is happening. The War Is Not Only Military In strictly military terms, the Third World War had its logic. It was, in the first place, a conventional war, conceptualized in such a way that, if I put in soldiers, and you put in soldiers, we confront each other, and whoever is left alive wins. This took place in a specific territory which, in the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, forces, and the Warsaw Pact, was Europe. Starting from a conventional war, between armies, a military and weapons oriented path was established. We are going to look at the details a bit more. This [he shows a rifle], for example, is a semi-automatic weapon, and it’s called an AR-15 automatic rifle. They manufactured it for the Vietnam conflict, and it can be taken apart very easily [he disarms it], there it is. When they made it, the Americans were thinking about a conventional war scenario, that is, large military contingents which confronted each other. “We’ll collect a lot of soldiers, we’ll advance, and in the end someone will have to be left.” At the same time, the Warsaw Pact was developing the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, which is commonly called the AK-47, a weapon with a lot of firing volume at short range, up to 400 meters. The Soviet concept involved large waves of troops: a mountain of soldiers would advance, firing, and, if they died, a second and a third wave would arrive. The one who had the most soldiers would win. The Americans then thought: “The old Garand rifle from the Second World War isn’t of any use anymore. Now we need a weapon that has a lot of short-range firing power.” They took out the AR-15 and tested it in Vietnam. The problem was that it broke down, it didn’t work. When they attacked the Viet Cong, the mechanism remained open, and when they fired it went “click.” And it wasn’t a camera, it was a weapon. They tried to solve the problem with an M16-A1 model. Here the trick is in the bullets, which are called two different things. One, the civilian, 2.223 of an inch – can be bought in any store in the United States. The other – 5.56 millimeter – is for the exclusive use of NATO. This is a very fast bullet and it has a trick to it. In war, the objective is to see that the enemy has losses, not deaths, and an army considers itself to have casualties when a soldier can no longer fight. The Geneva Convention – an agreement to humanize war – forbids expanding bullets, because at the point at which it enters it destroys more, and it’s a lot more lethal than a hard tipped bullet. “Given that the idea is to increase the number of wounded and decrease the number of dead,” – they said – “we are prohibiting expansive bullets.” A shot from a hard bullet leaves you useless, you’re a casualty now, it doesn’t kill you unless it reaches a vital organ. In order to fulfill the Geneva Convention and to dupe them, the Americans created the soft tip bullet which, when it enters the human body, bends and turns. The entrance hole is one size, and the exit hole is much bigger. This bullet is worse than the expanding one, and it doesn’t violate conventions. Nonetheless, if it gets you in the arm…it will blow you up. A 162 bullet goes through you and leaves you wounded, but this one destroys you. Coincidentally, the Mexican government has just bought 16,000 of these bullets. That is, weapons are created for precise scenarios. We are going to assume they don’t want to use the nuclear bomb. What are they going to use? Many soldiers against many soldiers. And so the NATO and Warsaw Pact conventional war doctrines were created. The second option was a localized nuclear war, a war with nuclear weapons, but only in some places and not in others. There was an agreement between the two superpowers to not attack each other in their own lands, and to fight only on neutral ground. It remains to be said that that this ground was Europe. That’s where the bombs were going to fall and one would see who would be left alive in Western Europe and what was then called Eastern Europe.

The last option of the Third World War was total nuclear war, which was a huge business, the business of the century. The logic of nuclear war is that there would be no winner. It doesn’t matter who fired first, no matter how quickly he fired, the other would be able to fire also. The destruction was mutual, and, from the beginning, this option was simply renounced. The nature of it came to be what is called in military diplomatic terms, “deterrence.” So that the Soviets wouldn’t use nuclear weapons, the Americans developed many nuclear weapons, and, so that they wouldn’t use nuclear weapons, the Soviets developed many nuclear weapons, and so on. They called it IBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), and they were the rockets that went from Russia to the United States and from the United States to Russia. They cost a fortune, and now they’re not useful for anything. There were also other nuclear weapons for local use which were the ones they were going to use in Europe in the case of a localized nuclear war. When this phase began, in 1945, there was a war to be fought because Europe was divided in two. The military strategy – we are speaking of the purely military aspects – was the following: a few forward positions in front of the enemy line, a line of permanent logistics, and the mother country, called the United States or the Soviet Union. The logistical line supplied the forward positions. Large airplanes that were in the air 24 hours a day, the B-52 Fortress, carried the nuclear bombs, and they never had to land. And there were the pacts. The NATO Pact, the Warsaw Pact and the SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organization) Pact, which is like the NATO of the Asian countries. The model was put into play in local wars. Everything had a logic, and it was logical to fight in Vietnam, which was an agreed scenario. The local armies and insurgents were in the role of the forward positions. In the role of permanent logistics were the lines of clandestine or legal arms sales, and, in the role of the mother countries, the two superpowers. And there was also an agreement about the places where they had to remain as spectators. The clearest examples of these local wars are the dictatorships of Latin America, the conflicts in Asia, especially Vietnam, and the wars in Africa. These apparently had absolutely no logic whatsoever, since the majority of the time what was going on wasn’t understood. But what was happening was part of this outline of conventional war. It was during this period – and that is important – that the concept of “total war” was being developed. Elements which are no longer military enter into military doctrine. For example, in Vietnam, from the Tet offensive (1968) until the fall of Saigon (1975), the media again became a very important battle front. And so, the idea began to develop in the military that military power was not enough. It was necessary to incorporate others, such as the media. And also that the enemy could be attacked with economic measures, with political measures and with diplomacy, which is the game of the United Nations and of international organizations. Some countries create sabotage in order to secure the condemnation or censuring of others, which is called “diplomatic war.” All these wars followed the domino theory. It sounds ridiculous, but they were like two rivals playing dominoes with the rest of the population. One of the opponents would put down a piece, and the other would try to put his down in order to cut off the follow-up. It is the theory of that illustrious individual by the name of Kissinger, the Secretary of State for the United States government during the Vietnam era, who said: “We cannot abandon Vietnam because it would mean giving up the game of dominoes in Southeast Asia to the others.” And that is why they did what they did in Vietnam. It was also about trying to regain the logic of the Second World War. For most of the population, it [the Second World War] had been heroic. There was the image of the Marines liberating France from the dictatorship, liberating Italy from the Duce, liberating Germany from the military, the red army entering from all sides. The Second World War was supposedly waged in order to eliminate a danger for all humanity, that of national socialism. Thus the local wars attempted, one way or another, to regain the ideology of “we are acting in the defense of the free world.” But now Moscow was in the role of national socialism. And Moscow, for its part, did the same thing: both superpowers tried to use the argument of “democracy” and the “free world”, as each of them conceived it. Afterwards came the Fourth World War, which destroyed everything from before, because the world is no longer the same, and the same strategy cannot be applied. The concept of “total war” was developed further: it is not only a war on all fronts, it is a war which can be anywhere, a total war in which the entire world is at stake. “Total war” means: at any moment, in any place, under any circumstances. The idea of fighting for one place in particular no longer exists. Now the fight can take place at any moment.

There is no longer the concept of escalation of the conflict with threats, the taking of positions and attempts to reposition oneself. At any moment and in any circumstances, a conflict can arise. It can be domestic problem, it can be a dictator and everything which the last wars of the last five years have been, from Kosovo to the Persian Gulf War. The entire military routine of the Cold War has, thus, been destroyed. It is not possible to make war, in the Fourth World War, under the criteria of the Third, because now I have to fight any place, I don’t know where I’m going to have to fight, nor do I know when, I have to act rapidly, I don’t even know what circumstances I’m going to have to prosecute this war. In order to resolve the problem, the military first developed the “rapid deployment” war. An example would be the Persian Gulf War, a war which involved a great accumulation of military force in a short period of time, a large military action in a short period of time, the conquering of territories and withdrawal. The invasion of Panama would be another example of rapid deployment. There is, in fact, a NATO contingent which is called “rapid intervention force.” Rapid deployment is a large mass of military force which throws itself against the enemy and which makes no distinction between a children’s hospital and a chemical weapons factory. That is what happened in Iraq: the smart bombs were quite stupid, they made no distinctions. And that’s where they remained, because they realized that this is quite expensive, and it contributes very little. In Iraq they made an entire deployment, but there was no conquest of territory. There were the problems of the local protests, there were the international human rights observers. They had to withdraw. Vietnam had already taught them that, in these instances, it is not prudent to insist: “No, we can’t do this now,” they said. They then moved on to the strategy of “projection of force.” “Better to have forward positions in North American military bases all over the world, accumulating a great continental force which, in a matter of hours or days, will have the capacity to put in military units any place in the world.” And they can, in fact, put in a division of four or five thousand men in the most distant point in the planet in four days, and more, constantly more. But the projection of force has the problem of being based on local soldiers, or, rather, on US soldiers. They believe that, if the conflict is not resolved rapidly, the body bags, the dead, will begin arriving, like in Vietnam, and this could provoke many domestic protests in North America, or in whichever country. In order to avoid those problems, they abandoned the projection of force, making – let us be clear – mercantile calculations. They did not make calculations about the destruction of the human forces, or the natural ones, but of publicity and image. And so the war of projection was abandoned, and they went on to a model of war with local soldiers, more international help, more of a supranational body. Now it was not about sending soldiers, but of fighting by means of the soldiers who were there, helping them according to the basis of the conflict, and not using the model of a nation which declares war, but of a supranational body like the UN or NATO. The ones doing the dirty work are the local soldiers, and the ones in the newspapers are the Americans and the international support. This is the model.

Protesting no longer works: it is not a war of the United States government. It’s a war by NATO, and, besides, NATO is merely doing the favor of helping the UN. Throughout the entire world, the restructuring of armies is so that they can confront a local conflict with international support under supranational cover, and under the disguise of humanitarian war. It has to do with saving the population from a genocide by killing it. And that is what happened in Kosovo. Milosevich waged a war against humanity: “If we confront Milosevich, we are defending humanity.” That is the argument the NATO generals used and which brought so many problems to the European left: opposing NATO bombings implied supporting Milosevich, better, then, to support the NATO bombings. And Milosevich, you know, was armed by the United States. The military conception – which is what is now at play – is that the entirety of the world – whether Sri Lanka or any other country, the most distant one can think of – is now the backyard, because the globalized world produces simultaneity. And that is the problem: in this globalized world, anything that happens any place affects the new international order. The world is no longer the world, it’s a village, and everything is very close. Therefore the great policemen of the world – especially the United States – have the right to intervene anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances. They can consider anything as a threat to their domestic security. They can easily decide that the indigenous uprising in Chiapas threatens the domestic security of North America, or the Tamils in Sri Lanka, or whatever you want. Any movement – and not necessarily armed – anyplace can be considered a threat to domestic security. What is that has happened? The old strategies and old concepts of making war have collapsed. Let us see. “Theatre of operations” is the military term for indicating the place where the war is going to occur. In the Third World War, Europe was the theatre of operations. Now it is not known where it is going to break out, it could be any place, it is no longer certain that it is going to be in Europe. Military doctrine moves from what is called “system” to what they call “versatility.” “I have to be ready to do anything at any moment. A plan is no longer sufficient: now I need many plans, not just to construct a response to particular incidents, but to construct many military responses to specific incidents.” This is where information technology intervenes. This change leads to moving from the systematic, the inflexible, the rigid, to the versatile, to that which can change from one moment to the next. And that is going to define the entire new military doctrine of armies, of military corps and of soldiers. This will be one element in the Fourth World War. The other will be the movement from “containment strategy” to that of “drawing out” or “extension”: now it is not just about conquering territory, containing the enemy, now it is about prolonging the conflict to what they call “non-war acts.” In the case of Chiapas, this has to do with taking out and putting in governments and municipal presidents, with human rights, with the media, etcetera. Included in the new military conception is an intensification of the conquest of territory. This means that it is necessary to not only be concerned about the EZLN and its military force, but also about the church, the NGOs, international observers, the press, civilians, etcetera. There are no longer civilians and neutrals. The entire world is part of the conflict. This implies that national armies are of no use, because they no longer have to defend Nation States. If there are no Nation States, what are they going to defend? Under the new doctrine, national armies go on to play the role of local police. The case of Mexico is quite clear: the Mexican Army is doing more and more police work, like the fight against drug trafficking, or this new body against organized crime which is called the Federal Preventative Police and which is made up of military personnel. It is about national armies turning into local police in the manner of a US comic book: a Super Cop, a Super Police. When the army in the former Yugoslavia was reorganized, it had to turn into a local police force, and NATO is going to be its Super Cop, its senior partner in political terms. The star is the supranational body, in this case NATO or the US army, and the extras are the local armies. But national armies were built on the basis of a doctrine of “national security.” If there are enemies or dangers to the security of a nation, their work is to maintain security, sometimes against an external enemy, sometimes against destabilizing domestic enemies. This is the doctrine of the Third World War or Cold War. Under these assumptions, national armies develop a national conscious which now makes it difficult to turn them into police friends of the Super Police. Thus the doctrine of national security must now be transformed into “national stability.” The point is no longer defending the nation. Since the main enemy of national stability is drug trafficking, and drug trafficking is international, national armies which operate under the banner of national stability accept international aid or international interference from other countries. The problem of again reordering national armies exists at the world level. Now we go down to America, and from there to Latin America. The process is a bit similar to that which took place in Europe and which was seen in the Kosovo war with NATO. In the case of Latin America, there is the Organization of American States, the OAS, with the Hemispheric Defense System. According to the former president of Argentina, Menem, all the countries of Latin America are threatened and we need to unite, destroying the national consciences of the armies, and to make a great army under the doctrine of a hemispheric defense system, using the argument of drug trafficking. Given that what is at stake is versatility – or the capacity to make war at any moment, in any place and under any circumstances – rehearsals begin. The few bastions of national defense which still exist must be destroyed by this hemispheric system. If it was Kosovo in Europe, in Latin America it is Colombia and Chiapas. How is this system of hemispheric defense constructed? In two ways. In Colombia, where the threat of drug trafficking is present, the government is asking for everyone’s help: “We have to intervene because drug trafficking not only affects Colombia, but the entire continent.” In the case of Chiapas, the concept of total war is applied. Everyone is a part, there are no neutrals, you are either an ally or you are an enemy. The New Conquest In the fragmentation process – turning the entire world into an archipelago – financial power wants to build a new shopping center which will have tourism and natural resources in Chiapas, Belize and Guatemala. Apart from being full of oil and uranium, the problem is that it is full of indigenous. And the indigenous, in addition to not speaking Spanish, do not want credit cards, they do not produce, they are involved in planting maize, beans, chile, coffee, and they think about dancing to a marimba rather than using a computer. They are neither consumers nor producers. They are superfluous. And everything that is superfluous is expendable. But they do not want to go, and they do not want to stop being indigenous. There is more: their struggle is not to take over power. There struggle is to be recognized as Indian peoples, that their right to exist is recognized, without having to turn into other people. But the problem is that here, in the land that is at war, in zapatista territory, are the main indigenous cultures, there are the languages and the largest oil deposits. There are the seven Indian peoples who participate in the EZLN, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, Zoque, Mam and mestizos. This is the map of Chiapas: communities with an indigenous population and with oil, uranium and precious wood. For neoliberalism everything is merchandise, it is sold, it is exploited. And these indigenous come to say no, that the land is mother, it is the depository of culture, that history lives here, and the dead live here. Absolutely absurd things that cannot be entered on any computer and which are not listed on a stock exchange. And there is no way to convince them to be good, to learn to think right, they simply do not want to. They even rose up in arms. This is why – we say – that the Mexican government does not want to make peace: it is because they want to do away with this enemy and turn this land to desert, afterwards reorganizing it and setting it to operate as a huge shopping center, a Mall in the Mexican Southeast.

The EZLN supports the Indian peoples, and is, in this way, an enemy, but not the main one. It is not enough to sort things out with the EZLN, even worse if sorting things out with the EZLN means renouncing this land, because that will mean peace in Chiapas, it will mean renouncing the conquest of a land rich in oil, in precious woods and uranium. This is why they have not done so and are not going to do so.

http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/fourth.html

Why the Y Gen Wants What We All Want – Fun and a Whole Lot More…

Dr Kathryn Owler

Commentary on ‘the Y Gen’ is becoming more common in management and employment circles. The Y Gen are seen to be a unique and challenging segment of the work-force. Given the tight labor market, employers understandably want to know how to recruit, manage and retain Y Gen talent. In this article I take a look at what makes Y Gen employees so ‘different’. I also investigate how responding to what Y Gen want, might find management favor with employees across the board!

Who are Gen Y?

The term ‘Y Gen’ refers to those individuals born between1980-1995. The Y Gen grew up under certain unique conditions. They are used to stimulation, change, choice and prosperity and are a highly optimistic bunch. Gen Y have been described as the stimuli junky generation, stimulated since they were toddlers. They just don’t know how to be still! They live for change, as they don’t know a world without it. Some have referred to the Y Gen as the “why?” generation. This generation wants to know the “why” behind everything. They have been submitted to so much information over their life-time: on TV, advertising, the internet, that they have to sift through. “Why?” becomes a sensible part of the sifting process.

The Y Gen are an extremely practical generation. They are socially and culturally aware, but not just ‘aware’: they are most likely to actually do something about what they believe in, be it environment destruction, racial discrimination and so on. Financially, the Y Gen are used to having been provided for. Middle-class baby-boomer parents were often working and what time they lost with parents, was often compensated for in material possessions and with money for entertainment.

A great deal of Y Gen’s have had to live through the challenge of parental divorce. They are not phased by challenge. They are also very interested in personal development. They crave independence in decision making, while enjoying an unprecedented financial dependence on their baby-boomer parents, well past school leaver age.

The description above is designed to paint a broad picture of what makes the Y Gen who they are. This generation poses some unique challenges for management.

What the Y Gen want from work

In his book, Generation Y: Thriving & surviving with generation Y at work, Australian Y Gen Paul Sheehan, outlines what the Y Gen want at work. Simply put, Gen Y have higher standards for how they should be treated at work. It therefore takes much more to keep them satisfied. It pays for employers to take this seriously, as otherwise Y Gen will simply talk with their feet!

What the Y Gen Want From a Job
• Purpose & meaning
• Responsibility – that is real responsibility
• Promotional opportunity
• New challenges & experiences
• Fair compensation – they expect the big $ by right!
• Increased employability
• Individuality & creativity
• Personal development opportunities!

What the Y Gen Want From a Workplace
• Flexibility – they are lifestyle centred
• Ethical
• Fun
• Belong and be engaged – to feel as if they belong
• Modern and edgy – workplace & operations
• Passion & optimism

What the Y Gen Want From a Boss
• Empowerment – the resources to do the job well
• Mentored not directed
• Fairness
• Recognition – thanks for a job well done
• Personal connection
• Involved & valued
• Competency

These characteristics represent both challenges and a range of opportunities for business. The key is to try and understand that the Y Gen are different. They will not just stay in a job out of a sense of organization loyalty. Some of the benefits Sheehan lists of working with the Y Gen include their not being phased by challenge, a focus on belonging, being open to new technologies and better ways of doing things, being extremely practical, and, importantly, prepared to take action.

Motivating & retaining Gen Y

In his book, Sheehan includes a lot of suggestions for how to motivate and retain Gen Y staff. These include providing good supervision/management, variety, fun, purpose and genuine support at work.

However, none of this is something that any employee would sniff at! Indeed, Sheehan believes that the desires of Gen Y are actually those of all workers at some level. Many baby-boomers (born 1946-64) for instance are opting out of the ‘rat race’ for a better quality of life, while many Gen X’s (1965-79) are leaving to start their own businesses. As Sheehan says, ‘If you, as an organization, were to become more Generation Y friendly, you would by default become more employee friendly. You would clearly be an employer of choice. This is because Generation Y want the same things we all want from a job, the only difference being that they expect it. Or, more frequently, they demand it’.

Y Gen and Fun at Work

One of the things that Sheehan explains the Y Gen want from work is a fun environment, where they feel valued as an individual. The Y Gen are extremely social. They want to be included and feel that they belong. Their youthful mindset generates a more playful attitude and makes the workplace more enjoyable. They may however need guided as to the difference between work and play.

Sheehan argues that all managers of the Generation Y should be allocated a ‘Play Budget’: ‘Money devoted to activities like a group social event, an inclusive (versus exclusive) competition, or even a surprise tray of doughnuts on a Monday morning.’ Ask the employees themselves what you think the budget should be spent on – this makes your decisions more effective. The improvement in morale and staff satisfaction, will contribute to productivity – that’s a no brainer!

The desire for ‘fun at work’ is certainly backed up by recent research. In both 2005 and 2006, The N.Z. Best Places to Work Survey, of almost 250 organisations, highlighted fun as a key driver, particularly for those in ‘Generation Y. While ‘Generation X’ and the ‘baby-boomers’ value fun at work, for these employees gaining a sense of purpose through achievement and belonging at work were perhaps more important. Nevertheless, published findings argue that respondents were adamant that fun at work plays an important role, placing a strong emphasis on celebration.

Conclusion

The Y/Why Gen are certainly a new breed, with a new attitude. However, what they want from work is perhaps not new. It does reflect what all employees would probably rather love to have! As Sheehan argues, the difference is that the Y Gen are expecting all the goodies! This is why employers are struggling to find ways to attract and retain Y Gen staff. However, as they are the staff of the future, doing so must be seen as inevitable. And, maybe we will all be better off as a result!

http://tinyurl.com/5c6usp

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©2007 JoyWorkz Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

P.S. This article has drawn in the main on the Henry and Sheehan sources

References

Henry, Avril. 2007. Inspiring Tomorrow’s Leaders Today: Breaking Down Generation Barriers.

Sheehan, Peter. 2005. Generation Y: Thriving & surviving with generation Y at work. Victoria: Hardie Grant Books.

Unlimited Magazine. (2005, March). The 20 Best Places to Work, 50-60.

Unlimited Magazine. (2007, March). Best Places to Work in New Zealand. Retrieved October 23, 2007, from http://unlimited.co.nz

So what does John Perkins do now?

About DREAM CHANGE

DREAM CHANGE (DC) is a world wide grass roots movement of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds dedicated to shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community. The objective of inspiring earth-honoring changes in consciousness is accomplished through programs that educate and foster environmental and social balance. DC was originated to encourage new ways of living.

DREAM CHANGE grew out of meetings held in indigenous communities in the early 1990′s, initiated by author and environmentalist, John Perkins.