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Sunday 21 February 2010

9/11 information ethics

By Mikael on Sunday 21 February 2010, 10:03

Peter Barber is the deputy comment editor of Financial Times (London). On June, 7, 2008, Mr Barber published the article "The Truth is Out There", which is a report on on the 9/11 Truth Movement. Senior medical librarian Elizabeth Woodworth's "evidence-based response", together with Mr Barber's article in annex, appeared in Global Research (Toronto) on June 11, 2008. I found this example of a 'thesis' and an 'antithesis' on a blog called "Campaign for Cooperation in Space" and tried to enter some comments of my own there. However, the comments section of the blog (more precisely, to the entry http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/911/2008/06/globalresearchc.html) said: "We're sorry, we cannot accept this data". Below, please find the comments I wanted to add:

A comment by a foreigner who does not speak English at home

I think it is a bit unfair to call Barber's article an 'ad hominem approach to a critically serious matter'. Journalism, after all, is not science; and the journalist must be allowed to spice his stories with details of human interest, lest the reader be bored to falling asleep. So when, for instance, Mr Barber mentions Dr Griffin's dogs, it is not yet to be classified as an attack on the venerated philosopher's personal integrity.

Mr Barber, on the other hand, although his report on the 9 / 11 TM is unusually sharp and meticulous, fails to mention the identity of the person, or group, which he calls 'the author of one of the most rigorous of the websites that aim to debunk the conspiracy theories, Debunking911.com', with whom he, as he reveals in his article, has been in contact by email. A journalist of course has, and should have, the right not to reval his sources, but is it allright to expose the intellectuals of the 9 / 11 TM in public while letting their 'debunkers' remain in anonymity? The 'author of Debunking911.com' should indeed tell who he is on his website, but, as far as I can see (I hope to be corrected, if I am wrong), he does not do that.

As already noted above, Mr Barber's article is not (at least not in my view) attacking any individual person in an unjust way, but he comes close to making the members of the public who lend an ear to 9 / 11 truthers collectively responsible for unforgivable naivety, or stupidity: 'they believe that the key to the mystery is hidden somewhere within the pictures', he states, although it becomes clear from his own article that the intellectual aim of the 9 / 11 TM is, precisely, to penetrate beyond the false appearances, that is, 'the pictures'.

'Gage, who had worked himself into a fever, exhorted the audience to stand up and be counted', Barber reports from an event with the architect Richard Gage as main speaker. Well, I was not there in San Francisco to listen to Gage, but still I wonder if this assembly of the truthers' community really was like a prayer night meeting of some evangelical free church.

These comments notwithstanding, I find that the writings by Elizabeth Woodworth* and Peter Barber on the 9/11 Truth Movement both provide much food for thought, to say the least. Therefore, I for one have put both on my list of recommended readings on the difficult subject of information ethics.

Mikael Böök

Lovisa, Finland

www.kaapeli.fi/book; blog.spinellisfootsteps.info

  • See also:

Elizabeth Woodworth: The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9 /11 Truth Movement Reflections on a Recent Evaluation of Dr. David Ray Griffin http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16505

Elizabeth Woodworth: The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Part II: A Survey of Attitude Change in 2009-2010 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17624

no comment

Saturday 30 January 2010

Enough of Blair, Bush and Berlusconi! Long live the 911 Truth Movement!

By Mikael on Saturday 30 January 2010, 09:02

W,

you wrote:

It might be my imagination but I have been sensing a despondency or at least a lack of optimism in your e-mails.

We must try to be beyond optimism and pessimism, like in the famous Romain Rolland quote (a favourite of Gramsci's):'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will'. Ernst Bloch's Prinzip Hoffnung points in the same direction.

And Gandhi said something like this: what we do probably completely lacks significance, but it is very important that we do it anyway.

So let's hope that the Spinelli component is gaining strength from day to day. Let me give you some examples: only recently, there appreared a first scholarly biography of the man (the one by Graglia). And, by the way, yourself and myself also illustrate the growing importance of Spinelli : only 5 years ago, I had hardly heard about the guy; by now I have already managed to spread the word abt his Ventotene manifesto and 1984 draft constitution to several friends and foes, via email, www and printed articles. And then, look at all those, young and old, intellectuals and activists, who are soooo bitterly anti-EU. The time is approaching when they are bound to (re)discover Spinelli...

Finally, let's not forget that Spinelli is dead and that we must try to supersede him. He certainly had an inkling about 'the atomic age', yes, when we compare him with the contemporary zombies of Paris, Berlin, London and Brussels:

Contemple-les, mon âme; ils sont vraiment affreux! - Baudelaire

But Spinelli did not yet know of the nanotech, biotech and robotics based weapons systems of the 2010s; nor did he, on the other hand, have any first hand experience of the new superpower of the cyberlibrary, which is now offered to us.

And then, W, you also wrote:

I have been wondering what solutions might be possible.

You commented, perhaps not without irony, that people (read: myself) would not be ready to change their attitude. On the contrary, people (including myslf) will not be die-hard if you manage to document your view in a convincing manner. However, in the case of the 'chemtrails', what you have said so far leads me to ask: would you be ready to part from the truth, if that would help to mobilize the people for our goals?

No, lying must be condemned in politics, even when no other "solution" seems available. Enough of Blair, Bush and Berlusconi! Long live the 911 Truth Movement!

All the best.

- Mika

PS Do you need more grounds for hope? Here comes:

""What the election and the global embrace of Obama's brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change - that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.

Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when independent social movements build the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by capitalizing on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are - to borrow an old Coke slogan - the real thing. As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

Quoted from Naomi Klein's new preface to the 10th anniversary edition of her book No Logo which has been published a week ago.

no comment

Saturday 2 January 2010

A Comment on the Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade

By Mikael on Saturday 2 January 2010, 11:04

Yesterday, Robert Freeman listed "The Real Top Stories of the Past Decade". The stories are:

# The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election. # Bush knew of 9/11 long before it actually happened. # Iraq was all premised on lies, yet we're still there. # The Global War on Terror. # The fact that 2/3 of all economic growth went to top 1%. # The Neo-Feudalization of the American economy. # The surrender of civil liberties. # The failure of "the free market" to sustain prosperity. # The collapse of the media. # The meaninglessness of elections.

Freeman ends his article with the question: "Did I tell you about the big move to locally-grown produce?" Below, I copy my response.

Hello Robert,

and Happy New Year. No, you did not tell about the big move to locally-grown produce. Do you mean people have begun to turn themselves into small farmers? Last year, I heard something similar from a young traveller to Philadelphia (USA). Hopefully, there is a real trend towards local food production and self-subsistence. It would be interesting to hear more about it.

Agreed, your top stories are more real than those which have been poured out by the media. And not only by the media. The intellectuals alike have preferred to close their eyes to the truth that the Bush government knew about 9/11 in advance and did nothing to stop it. The people has been manipulated by the media, and betrayed by the intellectuals.

According to you, Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. Not everything, I would say. Did he not fight for the domestic health care reform? Did he not change the tone of the foreign policy?

If Obama were a new Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, he would be less US-centric than his predecessors. But Obama is not ahimsa. Nor is he free.

When I read your stories, Robert, I conclude that your perspective, too, is US-centric. "Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country", you write. Why do you isolate your decade in your country from our decade in our countries? Anyway, I wish you a good start of the new lustrum. Let's help each other (and Obama) to avoid the catastrophe.

- Mikael

no comment

Tuesday 15 December 2009

The damage done to his psyche

By Mikael on Tuesday 15 December 2009, 22:43

“It is a shadow underneath everything” (Robert Jay Lifton, in ''The Planet'')

"I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people." (Barack Obama, in his Nobel Speech)

"Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms." (Obama, in the Nobel Speech)

"He reserves the right to act unilaterally, to intervene militarily, to make exceptions, to lead the world. Multilateralism when we can, Bill Clinton declared, unilateralism when we must: This, too, is the Obama doctrine. There is some wiggle room as we saw in his speeches in Cairo and Prague. But, as the brilliant style and problematic content of his Nobel speech demonstrated, he remains an exceptional politician working in an exceptionalist tradition. " (John Feffer on Obama, in World Beat)

A thin layer of snow covers the newly formed ice on the little bay of the Gulf of Finland. As the weather grows colder and the days become shorter (although the snow already gives more light), I meditate on the saying: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul. τί γὰρ ὠφελεῖ ἄνθρωπον κερδῆσαι τὸν κόσμον ὅλον καὶ ζημιωθῆναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ.

Underneath everything President Obama does and says is a shadow. The shadow is cast by the damage done to his psyche. Some people believe that the Norwegian newspaper just spread another urban legend when it published an article on the nuclear briefcase, which the President's aide brought to Oslo. But no, the world is really all that is the case. At the climate conference in Copenhagen, somebody should tell the President that he carries a global warmer in his luggage.

Multilateralism is fine, like in multilateral nuclear disarmament. Unilateral nuclear disarmament would also be very OK, to start with.

no comment

Monday 14 December 2009

SWIFT Action Needed

By Mikael on Monday 14 December 2009, 15:59

Yesterday, I invited a number of people to join the Facebook-group "Keep our banking data private - no automatic SWIFT data transfer to the US!". I added that it would be a different story if all those SWIFT data were available from the public library. One of my Facebook-friends replied:

Mikael I have so little money in the bank that this is not a group I would spontaneously join unless someone could provide me with pretty persuasive reasons why I should.

As an introduction to the issue, I suggested to read the article in Der Spiegel, 27 November :

"As part of the war on terror, American intelligence services have been monitoring European bank transactions since 2001. When the EU found out about it in 2006, they were outraged. But now it looks like the bloc will agree to a controversial deal that will allow the covert data transfer to continue".

At the beginning of this millennium, Ernest Backes and Denis Robert published an inquiry into the activities of Clearstream in Luxemburg. The book also contains interesting facts and thoughts about SWIFT, and about banking in general (se Robert & Backes: Révélation$ (Les Arènes, Paris 2001) this book was followed by La Boîte noire (2002), and other books by Denis Robert). Perhaps because I have worked with computer-mediated communication since the middle of the 1980s, Révélation$ made a stronger impression on me than on many others. The story which was told by Backes and Robert bears witness on the extent to which the world's financial system has become a software project. And this, in turn, gave the sociologist and librarian in me some food for thought.

As the banks increasingly become digital information management centers, how shall we distinguish between what is called "a database", or a "data bank" (a collection of databases) and what we intend with an "archive" or a "library" ? The digitalization of money and financial securities (documents concerning property and ownership) makes it necessary to re-think not only our concepts of 'bank' and 'library', but also the relation between these two old institutions. In the so called information society, who are to be the guardians of information: The private bankers or the public librarians? Or the secret intelligence agents of the USA?

In ATTAC, we call for regulation of the financial system, and for greater transparency. We need to remember, however, that the lack of transparency is not absolute. What the citizens, their political representatives, and the reporters of the financial press do not know, is indeed knowable and known by certain book-keepers and the CIA. The management of the financial data with fast computers and sophisticated software actually raises the financial transparency to an unprecedented level - for those who have access to the "collected works" of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

The questions concerning the availability of, and the access to, the huge financial libraries of SWIFT and Clearstream is undoubtedly of immense social and political importance. These questions are closely related to our proposals on financial transactions taxation to aid the Citizen. In order to collect the tax properly, many loopholes must be filled, and the tax havens abolished. This can only be achieved if SWIFT, Clearstream and other central financial archives are controlled by the peoples. The private, digital, financial libraries should be turned into public ones. The transition from transparency for the few to transparency for everybody will no doubt require a thorough public debate and much democratic decision-making.

The de facto spying on the SWIFT books by the CIA has been known for some time, more precisely since the Bush administration loudly bragged about it in June 2006. What is at stake in the "SWIFT agreement" between the EU and the US, is not primarily if the CIA has or does not have access, but whether that agency shall henceforward be allowed that access by European law-makers.

The distinction between what is actually done, and what is done legally and thus with explicit consent from the representatives of the people, is by no means unimportant. Do we continue our fight to change our government and its malpractice? Or do we give up and give away the rights we are granted by our basic laws? On 1 December this year, the European constitution changed a little in this respect when the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force. The European Parliament should now greater power to stop the "SWIFT agreement" than previously, if there is a will to do it.

I enclose a couple of passages from the well-informed "Brussels blogger" 26 November 2009:

"SWIFT is now moving all its data centers outside the EU and the US, to Switzerland. In order to continue allowing the US authorities accessing all banking data a high level agreement between the EU and the USA is currently being negotiated. It is likely to be agreed on in the EU council of minister meeting next Monday, 30 November 2009.

The move of SWIFT the data server to Switzerland would be an excellent opportunity to stop the nearly unlimited access of US authorities on EU bank transactions. But EU justice and interior minister are apparently keen agree a deal as soon as possible, on 30 November. Why 30 November? Because one day later, on 1 December 2009, the EU's Lisbon Treaty will be in force and would allow the European Parliament to play a major role in the negotiations of the deal with the USA. A deal one day before will be a slap in the face of democracy in the EU.

SWIFT handles 15 mio bank transactions daily for more than 9000 banks worldwide. Nearly every transnational bank transaction within the EU is recorded in the SWIFT data centers, including amount, sender, recipient, and transaction comments. The agreement will even allow to transmit "other personal data". "

See also the press release from the Council of the EU, Nov 2009, which says:

By the end of 2009, SWIFT will implement its new "systems architecture". For this purpose SWIFT will retain its existing EU-based and U.S. servers and will bring into operation a new operating centre in Switzerland. The net effect of this new arrangement is that a significant volume of the data which are currently received by the U.S. Treasury Department under the TFTP will no longer be stored in the United States. In order to ensure that the TFTP continues to produce the above- mentioned EU - and wider global – security benefits, it is necessary to put in place an international agreement that allows for data needed for the TFTP to continue to be made available to the U.S. Treasury Department. This is why in July of this year the 27 Member States of the European Union unanimously gave the EU Presidency a mandate to negotiate an agreement with the United States to ensure the transfer of the data and thereby the continuation of the TFTP. In July, it was not known when or indeed whether the Lisbon Treaty would come into force. Accordingly, the mandate is based on the legal mechanism of the EU Treaty which will cease to exist on 1 December when the Lisbon Treaty enters into force. To ensure that the European Parliament is able to exercise its new powers under the new Treaty in this regard, the envisaged Agreement is for a maximum duration of 9 months. The Commission will come forward with a new proposed mandate in early 2010 for a subsequent agreement based on the Lisbon Treaty. In the meantime, an interim agreement is needed to ensure that there is no lapse in TFTP coverage that would deprive the EU of important information related to terrorist attacks or investigations.

TFTP = the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme of the the United States Department of the Treasury

no comment

Friday 11 December 2009

On the declaration of Klimaforum09

By Mikael on Friday 11 December 2009, 10:03

The final version of the declaration (which is now up at the site of Klimaforum09) is better than the second draft in several regards. To begin with, the document is slimmer and more readable than the previous one. After what I wrote above (here) I am also especially happy to note that a whole paragraph has been included on the necessity to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, to take on the military-industrial complex. The latter is now explicitly mentioned in the text! Yet the declaration still does not point out that the WMD must be abolished because of the fatal effects their use could have on the climate; still less does it direct our movement towards local and regional campaigns for unilateral nuclear disarmament, which, by the way, would not be "pacifism", or any other "-ism", but would show elementary respect for life and mother earth. This hole in the text is is a measure of its overall lack of seriousness. It means that the movement for "climate justice" still has to become aware of the fact that WMD are at least as serious a threat aginst the climate as the AGW. (just give a thought about the global "nuclear winter", which probably would be the inevitable consequence even of a regional "nuclear exchange" between any of the states which maintain NW, or have access to the "buttons" which could launch them.)

However, as one who follows the Klimaforum09 only from my home I wish to end this comment with congratulations to you who are in Copenhagen for having produced this common written statement. As a promoter of the initiative "Capodistrias-Spinelli-Europe", I also felt that I want to sign this declaration, and so I have done.

Recommended: Read the Declaration of Klimaforum09 now at http://www.klimaforum09.org/Declaration. You may want to sign it there, too.

no comment

Thursday 10 December 2009

A serious comment on the draft declaration

By Mikael on Thursday 10 December 2009, 01:04

These are my comments on the second draft of the declaration of the ongoing Klimaforum09 in Copenhagen. (A preliminary version of the comment is also found here..)

I would like to sign the declaration as an individual, and I will probably do so, although I think this declaration is far from saying what needs to be said right now.

Yes, a system change is needed, and each of the dozen or so proposed "Concrete steps towards a sustainable transition" is desirable. However, the word 'military' occurs only once in the draft text. Are its authors at all considering what the realities behind that word mean to the climate and the global warming in addition to what it does to the peoples? What 'system change', or 'transition', can we hope for if we do not take on the world's military-industrial complex?

It would certainly be more politically effective to ask the negotiators at the COP15 to agree on a convention on nuclear disarmament than to require them to look for "a bright future beyond Capitalism" (I refer here to the text on poster for the demonstration 12 December). Hell, the nuclear weapons are precisely what has kept and continues to keep the global economic and political Capitalist system together ever since 1945. A break with Capitalism requires first of all a break with the WMD-powered great power syndrome. Each one of them - USA, Russia, China, France, UK and India (and maybe even Israel or Pakistan) - could actually initiate the necessary 'transition' and 'system change' just by unilaterally, without waiting for the others, abolishing their own WMD. The WMD are entirely human generated, their existence and development are totally dependent on our will. So what is more likely: that we get rid of the WMD, or that we stop the global warming? And then: how can we be so naive as to believe that we can stop the global warming without getting rid of the WMD, which are the wrongest of all our wrong habits?

The CO2 emissions from all fossil fuel burning are, of course, also very wrong. Between 2003 and 2007 the war in Iraq alone was responsible for "at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent"; this "equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US" (quoted from the report "A Climate of War. The war in Iraq and global warming".) But the threat of nuclear war and of the climate change which be caused by the "nuclear winter" after the nuclear war has not gone away although the consciousness about the dangers of man-made global warming may have increased. The new genetics, robotics and nanotech based weapons systems which are underway may be still worse than the existing nuclear weapons and space war systems. However, the latter are already bad enough, aren't they?

How can those of us who live in Europe even imagine that the EU will reduce its CO2 emissions with one or another percentage, but at the same time let some of its members go on modernizing their submarine-launched missiles and 'Oceanic' warheads, while others make SOFA agreements with the USA about new military bases and missile defense systems?

What our European politicians say (1) is that our values are so high and our way of life is so superior that they have the right to wipe out as many millions of human beings as they like if needs be. Now that the Cold War between the USA and the USSR has ended, the European WMD are in fact exclusively directed towards the peoples of the global South. They are the purest expression of the European racism and imperialism. As long as those multi-billion (euro) European WMD, dual-purpose space industries (the EADS company, for instance) and missile defense systems continue to be maintained and modernized, we shall hardly be believed, or be able to believe in ourselves, when we speak of "climate justice"!

"All these social, political, economic and ecological issues are closely interrelated. A coherent strategy must therefore address them all, which indeed is the central idea behind the concept of sustainable transition", the draft declaration says. And rightly so.

Therefore, it is also necessary to speak about Europe, and the need to create a real European Union, which is based on the denuclearization of Europe. The European citizens must make a real contribution to the climate (both in the environmental and in the political sense of the word) namely, through unilateral nuclear disarmament. That might eventually kick off the sustainable transition and paradigm shift we are all dreaming of. That would indeed be a real revolution of the particular system of thought, which is criticized in the draft declaration. So, let us reform our "economic man"; however, that will most probably take quite some time. Therefore, as a preliminary step, let's at least strip him of his atomic bombs, which should be possible to achieve within a couple of years.

I am born in a European country, and I live in the part of the world which is called Europe. Therefore, I have to take a particular responsibility for the European nuclear disarmament; this is comparable to the duty in the preceding period of history to combat dictators like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. To some individuals it has been obvious ever since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945 that nuclear disarmament must be a primary task. For others, including the present writer, it took a longer time to understand. I wonder what Lady Ashton, the new foreign minister of the EU, thinks of the matter in these days. "CND was an organisation that democratically marched for what it believed in", she is reported to have said, recently, when she was accused by some British reactionaries for having functioned as the treasurer of the said movement at the beginning av the 1980s. Does Lady Ashton still believe in the necessity to campaign for nuclear disarmament? Or has she betrayed herself and us all?

I hope that Don't Nuke the Climate! will become the slogan which unites all of us who long for another political and economic system.

Greetings from Finland,

- Mikael

Reference:

(1) Cf, for instance, “THE UNITED KINGDOM’S NUCLEAR DETERRENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY”. SPEECH BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENCE. KING’S COLLEGE LONDON. 25 January 2007. (http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2007/01/25/Nucleardeterrentspeech.doc)

Mikael Böök * book -at- kaapeli.fi * gsm +358(0)-44 5511 324 * http://www.kaapeli.fi/book/ * http://blogi.kaapeli.fi/book/ * http://blog.spinellisfootsteps.info/

no comment

Monday 23 November 2009

No Federation without Denuclearization

By Mikael on Monday 23 November 2009, 20:51


Part of a Conference organized 21 November 2009 by Radicali italiani in the library of the Italian Senate on "The Legacy of the Manifesto of Ventotene. Federalisms, confederalisms, autonomy, or independence: can the Nation State provide a viable model to ascertain individual rights? The case of China and Indochina, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
This video shows the speech at a roundtable by the keeper of this blog. On the first frames: Marco Pannella, former European Pariamentarian.
Watch the introductions by Sen. Emma Bonino and Prof. Giuliano Amato, and the roundtables at
www.radioradicale.it/scheda/291509 - Italian version
www.radioradicale.it/scheda/291640/leredita-del-manifesto-di-ventotene-e-seconda-giornata-del-consiglio-generale-del-partito-radicale-nonviol - English version

no comment

Friday 13 November 2009

What Europe should mean. Two letters to an Australian.

By Mikael on Friday 13 November 2009, 09:29

Letter to W. 12 November

Dear W.,

I am not fond of 'Pan-European', because Europe has gone everywhere on this planet, and 'pan' also means everywhere. Therefore, to say 'Pan-European' is like saying everywhere-everywhere.

On the other hand, it is like M.K.Gandhi famously said: Europe would be a good idea, but it has not yet been put into practice. The respect for the individual human being, for instance - it may be typical today to speak about it, but still it is not typical.

Now, I am not reproaching you personally, but the Europeans did not respect the original inhabitants of your Continent.. 'Killing the brutes' has been the typically European practice. It has to come to an end.

You speak European languages, and the habits of your mind have always been European. So it is with myself, a Finn; because my country, too, has been europeanized. Even our bodies are European. But they would not need to be, because 'European' is not a bodily feature. 'European' is a spiritual thing. The European spirit has by now conquered the whole world through the British, French, Dutch, Belgian etcetera colonial Empires and the more recent American business Empire, with its 1000 military bases outside the USA. The European spirit even rules in China, through Marxism-Leninism, which is the synthesis of Classical German Pilosophy, English Political Economy, and French Enlightened Utopianism, plus some Asian Despotism. What could be more European than that combination? The teachings of Jesus Christ, perhaps (if they would be followed), but was not Jesus a Jew, or an Arab, rather than a European?

My conclusion is that, because 'Europe' is both everywhere and nowhere, it means everything and nothing. Europe is a contradiction, which it is up to us to solve.

Therefore, let Europe mean denuclearization. Not as an ideal, nor as a geographical area, but as the unilateral realization of the good idea, of which Gandhi sarcastically reminded us.

- Mikael

Letter to W. 13 November

Dear W.,

my previous letter was one-sided. Of course, we also must think of Europe as a geographical area, which you can leave and to which you can return, for instance, from Australia. But I wanted to underline the omnipresence of Europe in the philosophical sense. Philosophically speaking, Europe is everywhere, and there is no return to the time when it was limited to a certain geographical area.

Secondly, that "pan-Europe" has reached another point of no return, where it has to change or perish. From being 'nuclearized' it must become 'denuclearized'. To achieve that metamorphosis is the challenge of our time. Neither the global warming, nor mass starvation nor the emerging GNR-technologies (genetcis, nanotech, robotics) and the potential new GNR-based WMD, will make that challenge go away. On the contrary: the transformation from 'nuclearized' to 'denuclearized' is necessary precisely to stop the global warming, to organize the production and distribution of food for all, and to steer the technological development towards peaceful and beneficial purposes. And it has to start somewhere.

As you quoted: "How can you sleep when the beds are burning?"

Yours,

 - Mikael

no comment

Sunday 8 November 2009

No Taxation without Denuclearization

By Mikael on Sunday 8 November 2009, 15:07

(The writer of this article is attending an international NGO Conference in Stockholm on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation. See www.nucleardisarmament.se. The goal of the conference is to gather the International Movement against Nuclear Weapons and to facilitate coordination of strategies that will lead to a successful NPT Review Conference in 2010.)

Today's news is that Gordon Brown has proposed a global tax on financial transactions at the meeting of the finance Ministers of the G20.

They call it the Bank Tax, which may be OK, considering that Brown goes further than Nobel economist James Tobin in his original proposal at the beginning of the 1970ies. When the US abandoned the gold standard and let the dollar float against the other currencies, Tobin suggested a 0,5-1 percent tax on the trade in money. The rate of the tax which Brown now proposes would be just a fraction of 1 % (perhaps 0,001 % , or even 0,0001 %), but it would also cover the so called derivatives business in addition to the buying and selling of money.

What are the derivatives? In his movie Capitalism - A Love Story, Michael Moore has a scene where a Wall Street banker tries to explain the matter to a man from the street. The more the banker explains, the bigger the confusion and disbelief of the listener.

The Bank for International Settlements in Basel (BIS), which produces the statistics about the global trade in currencies and derivatives, describes derivatives as 'OTC foreign exchange and interest rate contracts'. The BIS estimates that the daily turnover of the trade in derivatives was $4.2 trillion in April 2007, while that in traditional foreign exchange markets amounted to $3.2 trillion. (1 trillion = 1000 billion = 1 million million.)

What these staggering figures mean is that even a very minimal "bank tax" could raise a yearly revenue of tens of billions of dollars.

But here we meet the fundamental problem of the global tax proposals of Gordon Brown and the other G8 leadres. The crux of the matter is that global taxation requires global representation.

The old slogan "No Taxation Without Representation" is still valid today, more than 250 years after the British colonists first used it in the 13 American colonies.

Who shall have the right to decide about the tax rate? The global taxation may raise tens, maybe hundreds of billions in revenue. Where and how to invest these billions? Who are to decide? Will it be a consortium of bankers led by Gordon Brown?

It seems that the "bank tax" will be more or less just that. It will be a tax that is implemented not only by the bankers, but also for the bankers. The tax management will most probably be trusted to The International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Freely, the IMF takes its decisions by vote. There are 2,216,193 votes in total. Of these, the USA has 371,743 (17%), the twent-seven EU countries have 710,786 votes (32%), Japan has 133,378 (6%) and Canada has 63,942 (3%). Major decisions require an 85% supermajority. Therefore, both the USA or the EU (on the condition that the European countries reach agreement among themselves) have voting power enough to block any important decision.

What could be more important in our global political economy than global taxation and the redistribution of the global tax revenue?

The question should probably be put in a slightly different way. Why can we not have a new Financial Transaction Tax Organization (FTTO), where decisions can be taken in a democratic way by representatives of all the nations who, each one, have one vote, and where also the organizations of the civil society can have a representation? (1)

The reason is our obsolete world political system. People now have have begun to understand that the common ecological problems, such as the climate crisis, require global political solutions. Humanity now also, for the first time, has an Internet, which may be a necessary precondition for a common human understanding, and, therefore, of the common solutions.

Since 1945, the world political system has been dominated by powers who build and maintain weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The WMD has stood in the way of the development of the United Nations. They are still one major obstacle to global democratization, and to the necessary global redistribution of common gods and public services. Therefore, we must tell Gordon Brown and the the other leaders of the triad of North America , Europe and Japan, which dominates the world of finance and the IMF: No Global Taxation Without Denuclearization.

Denuclearization means, firstly, the abolition of the WMD. Gordon Brown and the UK could start by abolisihing the Trident missiles, painting the nuclear submarines yellow and turning them into a Museum. France is also well placed to take the lead in this. In my view, contrary to what we constantly hear being repeated in the media and by the official experts on nuclear disarmament (2), as well as, unfortunately, by the present political leaders of the EU-countries, neither the United States nor Russia are very likely to lead the world in the right direction. (When presidents Obama and Medvedev put forward visions of a world without WMD, then we, who are not Americans or Russians, should of course be happy and support them, anyway.)

Whoever wants to take the lead should abolish his WMD, unilaterally. Unless at least one of the present nuclear states decides to break the link between its kind of power and its own WMD, the process leading the goal we all want to see reached, the agreement and implementation of a global nuclear disarmament convention, will probably never take off.

Denuclearization, it must be added, is not only about abolishing the existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Firstly, the production and proliferation of new robotics, genetics and nanotech WMD now also has to be prevented (3). These new, and all future WMD must be included in our vision of a denuclearized world.

Secondly, no new nuclear power plants must be buils, and the existing ones must be dismantled. For heavens sake, from where does all the plutonium come, for the bombs and the proliferation of the bombs? Here, again, the denuclearization initiative could, and should, come from Europe.

To sum up: Don't Nuke the Climate! No Global Taxation Without European Denuclearization!

References:

(1) (Political scientists and lawyers have indeed drafted treaties on global transaction taxes, with proposals concerning democratic tax management; see e.g. www.nigd.org/ctt.

(2) See, for instance, the 60 Recommendations by the WMD Commission in the report "Weapons of Terror".

(3) See the article "Will the Future Need Us?" by the computer scientist Bill Joy, in Wired 4:2000.

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Wednesday 28 October 2009

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson

By Mikael on Wednesday 28 October 2009, 09:45

Mary Robinson has by now made clear that she will not be available for nomination to the post as the President of the European Council. This probably means that the possibility to have her as the first President of the EU is gone. The reason, The Irish Times reports , is that she had become focused on climate change and its negative impacts on the developing world.

Anyway, let's hope that Mrs. Robinson helps to mobilize the opinion for the denuclearisation of Europe, and a Europe which defends human rights, because these goals should not be incompatible with her fight against the negative impact of the climate change. Take, for instance, the story of the lost ships with radioactive waste in the Mediterranean, and the findings of UNEP on the cost of Somalia in their report about the effects of the tsunami 2006. These crimes of the Italian and European (?) 'ecomafia' remain upublished by the main media, and, what is more, unpunished.

Or, consider the recent news about the 8-39 kilograms (!) of plutonium, which was found at Cadarache (France). In 2005, it should be remembered, Cadarache was chosen, in 2005, to become "the home for an experimental $13 billion nuclear fusion project scientists say will produce a boundless source of clean and cheap energy".

Well, Don't Nuke the Climate!

Quotation of the day:

"When the United States adopted torture as a weapon in its 'war on terror,' it was a turn to methods that shock the conscience, and when discovered, officials and their media surrogates went to great lengths to gain public acquiescence for their policies, It was not the first time the country betrayed its highest ideals, nor the first time U.S. citizens were led to deny that any betrayal had occurred. The United States had gone down the same road in 1945, when it used nuclear weapons to destroy two Japanese cities. One case involved the product of intensive scientific research, the other methods dating back hundreds of years, if not to prehistory. But in the way the U.S. government made and justified these fateful decisions, the two stories contain many disturbing parallels." -- Jon Reinsch

one comment

Thursday 15 October 2009

The Nobel Prize is a challenge to Obama to raise his game...

By Mikael on Thursday 15 October 2009, 10:49

The Nobel Prize is a challenge to Obama to raise his game, match action to rhetoric, and meet this great challenge facing the United States in the world. It will require ending the war in Afghanistan and taking leadership at Copenhagen on climate change. It will require eliminating nuclear weapons rather than just talking about how nice it would be to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama can't do this by himself. Jefferson didn't write that "I hold these truths to be self-evident." Lincoln did not write the "better angels of my nature." The Nobel Prize is the collective achievement of the American people for repudiating the Bush years and making the words of the Declaration of Independence come that much closer to reality.

writes John Feffer in World Beat Tuesday, October 13, 2009. He contiunes:

Now, let's all prove that we deserve it.

All? Yes, all!

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Wednesday 14 October 2009

Mary Robinson for the EU Presidency

By Mikael on Wednesday 14 October 2009, 10:04

Dear friends,

Mary Robinson, the former president of the republic of Ireland, has been mentioned among those who could have a chance to become EU President.
Many Europeans surely like the thought. That President Obama of the USA also holds Mrs Robinson in high esteem became clear recently, when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson. Of course, there are also those who would rather see a Tony Blair, a Claude Juncker or a Paavo Lipponen as the first President of the European Council.

One who probably would NOT be happy if Mary Robinson were nominated, is John Bolton, the senior US diplomate. Commenting on Pres. Obama's Freedom Medalist, Mr Bolton writes:

"In fact, Ms. Robinson wanted U.N. control over NATO's actions: "It surely must be right for the Security Council . . . to have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations." One wonders if this is also Mr. Obama's view, given the enormous consequences for U.S. national security."

Mr Bolton also reproaches Mrs Robinson in the following way:

"This February [2009] asked whether former President George W. Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes, Ms. Robinson answered that it was "premature," until a "process" such as an "independent inquiry" was established: "[T]hen the decision can be taken as to whether anybody will be held accountable." In particular, she objected to the Bush administration's "war paradigm" for dealing with terrorism, saying we actually "need to reinforce the criminal justice system." Asked about Mr. Obama's statements on "moving forward," Ms. Robinson responded that "one of the ways of looking forward is to have the courage to say we must inquire."

How come that to my ears, this almost sounds like an argument in favor of Mrs Robinson! If you also think and feel like myself on this issue, then you may, for instance, want to sign the petition Mary Robinson for the EU Presidency

and / or

to join the Facebook group "Mary Robinson for President of the European Council"

Cheers,

Mikael

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Monday 21 September 2009

When A Fake European Union Discusses a Fake Tobin Tax

By Mikael on Monday 21 September 2009, 09:29

The EU governments have been discussing a plan to put some kind of financial transactions tax on the agenda for the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh on 24th-25th September.

James Tobin, who in the 1970s advanced the concept of a global tax on currency transactions, himself thought of it as sand to be thrown in the wheels of the runaway financial system that had resulted from the abandonment of the gold standard (1971). Tobin hoped that the currency transactions tax (CTT) would stabilize the system and save it from crisis. Now, when the governments are coming round to Tobin's idea, the crisis is already a fact. At this stage, then, the CTT is about covering the costs of the crisis, as former Lehman-banker Sony Kapoor puts it in his fascinating interview with The Real News Network.

Officially, the governments are looking at the CTT as an innovative means for obtaining development finance. Precisely how the tax revenue would be used for the benefit of the development of developing countries, we do not yet know. Perhaps, it could be used to finance the Millennium Development Goals of the UN.

According to Bernard Kouchner, the French minister of foreign affairs, the rate of tax could be set at 0,005 %, in which case the expected revenue would amount to 20-30 billion dollars per year. Kouchner's proposal is actually more than a CTT, in the sense that the international trade in assets and derivatives would also be taxed. It would, in other words, be a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT).

A number of European government ministers and heads of states, including Sarkozy, Merkel and Barroso, have stated willingness to support on FTT of the kind Kouchner has proposed.

For their part, leaders of the Association to Tax financial Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC) have pointed out (although perhaps not with the desired clarity) that Tobin's original tax-rate was 0,5-1 %, and thus 100-200 times higher than Kouchner's. While Tobin actually wanted the CTT to intervene in the speculative movements of capital, Kouchner &Co definitely wish to let these movements continue unhampered. Ironically, James Tobin paid very little attention to the tax revenue, because he was after stability, not 'development finance'. On the other hand, the money trade has grown with two orders of magnitude since Tobin's time, as has, of course, the potential revenue from a global "Tobin Tax". In the present situation, therefore, the proposal to use a FTT to "aid the citizen" of the South, might well be feasible.

The French ATTAC leaders Aurelie Trouvé and Jean-Marie Harribey stated last Friday, that the EU governments are deliberately putting forward a proposal that they know will not be accepted by the US government. (Note also that Mr Reinfeld, the leader of the Swedish EU presidency, and Mr Juncker of Luxemburg, have given the thumbs down to the FTT proposal.) For ATTAC a FTT could anyway only be a first step towards genuine regulation of the financial markets, to be completed by measures to close down tax havens and forbid the speculative trade with complex derivatives and contaminated assets.

But nobody, even within the ATTAC movement, now seems to remember the precise and politically mature model Treaty on Global Currency Transactions Tax that Finnish political scientist Heikki Patomäki and Belgian lawyer Denys Lieven presented at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre 2002. Under this proposal the governments who want a CTT or FTT would form a new CTT Organisation, if necessary independent of the USA. It would be possible to do so already if these countries accounted for 20 % of the global financial markets. The CTTO would have democratic decision-making bodies for the decisions about the tax-rate and the use of the revenue. The European Union alone would not be capable of setting this up; but several countries of the Global South would probably be willing to join. (The Draft Treaty on Global CTT is available online ,in a number of languagues, at http://www.nigd.org/ctt.)

The issue of the CTT and/or FTT obviously leads back to the question of the European Union. What we have today is a fake union, divided on most strategic issues and therefore also incapable of making a worthy contribution to rectifying the world's financial system. A genuinely independent EU would certainly be able to help, and the USA would have to follow, because the USA has exhausted its capacity to provide world leadership. It is still a military giant, but a giant with feet of clay. Hopefully the day is drawing closer when the peoples of Europe decide to put away the 'nuclear umbrella' and  start the process of nuclear abolition on their own. When that day comes Europeans will at long last acquire the ability to form a real Union and, therefore, also to contribute to the building of a new financial architecture.

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Sunday 6 September 2009

Put an end to 'the refusal of consciousness' (contd.)

By Mikael on Sunday 6 September 2009, 13:01

It is necessary to strive towards a Nuclear Weapons Convention * However, I do not believe that the process of nuclear disarmament will ever start with a NWC. An NWC will, hopefully, come in the middle of the process, and will enhance the pressure on states which risk being the sole nuclear states left on the globe. (It is considered, for instance, that Israel does not support a NWC. )

Thus I am not trying to say that those who work towards a NWC are mistaken or misguided, but I continue to maintain the view that general nuclear abolition must start to happen somewhere, to begin with, and then spread from there to other places. That 'somewhere', for us who live in Europe, must be our country and ourselves. We also need to understand that European Nuclear Disarmament and European Union presuppose each other.

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Tuesday 11 August 2009

Put an end to 'the refusal of consciousness'

By Mikael on Tuesday 11 August 2009, 02:34

(This is a copy of my comment to Mary Kaldor's article Dismantling the global nuclear infrastructure in Open Democracy. )

The link between nuclear weapons and great power status can be broken in Europe, by the peoples of Europe. We need a pro-European movement for European Nuclear Disarmament. Pro-European means being in favour of establishing a democratic European state - a real European Union.

Some of the so called fathers of the European Union envisaged such a state, among them Altiero Spinelli and others in the Manifesto of Ventotene (1941) and in the Treaty Establishing the European Union (approved by a great majority in the European Parliament in February 1984, but scrapped by Mrs Thatcher &Co). Mary Kaldor, with her vision of European Nuclear Disarmament, might one day be called a mother of the EU, if we manage to turn the denuclearization into the constitutional issue it deserves to be.

In short: The criminalization of nuclear weapons needs to be inscribed in the basic treaty (the constitution) of the EU. Henceforward, this new great power, the EU, should be identified by its denuclearization.

We should occupy ourselves with things that can be changed. Nuclear weapons definitely belong to this category. Abolishing them is a concrete and limited goal, dependent on our will. It is certainly more difficult to take control over the earth's climate to change it in a certain direction, than to deconstruct the nuclear weapons area by area, starting here in Europe. (It is our duty to get rid of our nuclear weapons, anyway, because it is a prerequisite of the good life.) Besides, it is absolutely contradictory and hypocritical to order new nuclear missiles and invest billions in missile defense on the one hand, and to pretend to tackle the climate crisis, on the other hand. It is a terrible example of what has aptly been called ' refusal of consciousness'. The party is over, as a wise person wrote about the general situation already in 1975. In 2009 it is already too late to say so, because by now now even the orgies of the Nachspiel* have come to their end.

What can be done now, at this moment?

1. The Lisbon Treaty does not criminalize the new French M51-missiles with their new 'oceanic' nuclear warheads; nor does it forbid the British Trident modernization program. It breaks no link between nuclear weapons and the great power status, nor does it decouple the EU from the nuclear weapons of the USA,or the nuclear strategy of NATO. Now is the time for all Europeans to support the NO to Lisbon Campaign of the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA).

2. Another thing to do is to see to it that the issue of the European (and not only the North East Asian, or Middle East) nuclear free zone is on the agenda, in the public consciousness, at least, when the leaders of the security council member states will be discussing the nuclear issues, at the request of president Obama, on 24 September.

"We need a new generation of politicians, diplomats and citizens who fully understand what has happened in today's world, where nuclear weapons are fast becoming a metaphor for military power in general." Again, Mary Kaldor hits the nail on the head. Hopefully her words come through to my foreign minister, young Alexander Stubb. Greetings from Finland.

- Mikael Böök

____________

* Nachspiel, from German, meaning "after play", and is a kind of party after the party. Involves the people who don't want to go home after the bars close, bad alcohol (usually some leftovers from the foreplay) and a guitar-playing guy on the couch. After an hour or two it involves puking, complaints from the neighbours and drunk people sleeping around the apartment (cf the definition(s) of Nachspiel at  Urbandictionary.com).

one comment

Monday 3 August 2009

"Skype and ICQ Face Ban in Russia"

By Mikael on Monday 3 August 2009, 07:31

This morning, my buddy M posted an item about Skype and ICQ Face Ban in Russia:

When the Russian state initiates an executive order to inspect citizens' mail (EDM, July 21), it is the regime's idea of business as usual. However, when big business initiates harsh legislation to ban foreign competition and invokes national security as the rationale, it might seem rather an unusual business practice elsewhere, except in Russia. On July 21, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), the country's main big business lobbyist, colloquially known as the "Oligarchs' Trade Union," proposed a crack down on internet service providers (ISP's). More specifically, the RSPP made a strong case for the Russian state to crackdown on telephone calls made through ISP's such as Skype and Zebra Telecom, or ban them altogether, since they cannot be wiretapped (www.rspp.ru, July 21).

this news about Skype and ICQ in Russia is in its own way typical (of much news today) in that it may be quite difficult to establish what it means.

Russian telecom companies fight their competitions? But is that news? Competitors and the state join forces to restrict free speech? Maybe, but to what extent are Skype and/or ICQ free? Are they free because they cannot be wiretapped?

Can Skype and/or ICQ not be wiretapped? ''Skype, the Internet calling service recently acquired by eBay Inc., provides free voice calls and instant messaging between users. Unlike other Internet voice services, Skype calls are encrypted - encoded using complex mathematical operations. That apparently makes them impossible to snoop on, though the company leaves the issue somewhat open to question'', the Associated Press reported back in 2006. But how about the owners of Skype, do they not have access to the encryption algorithms? The one who encrypts is also the one who decrypts, and does not function in a political vacuum, either. ''Surveillance is a practice often shrouded in secrecy. Although many people may be vaguely aware that governments and corporations regularly engage in surveillance (indeed, often in collusion) it is a practice that is difficult to identify and document directly. Not surprisingly, therefore, surveillance practices are often the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories. Our lives today are surrounded by mediated communications, serviced by third parties and private entities, sent through channels that pass through multiple political jurisdictions, each step of which offers an opportunity for surveillance. Can we rely on the assurances of the service providers and technology companies who tell us they are secure and private? Should we trust the assurances of a well-known global brand?'' (Quoted from the Foreword to Warfare Monitor/ONI Asia joint report,__ Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform__, by Nart Villeneuve, the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto).

I, who write this message, am in no way an expert. I am actually only very briefly and rapidly looking into the nature of this news between my first and second cup of coffee on a beautiful morning in August, probably because the news is about Russia. Russia's border is only ca 100 km away from my home. Yet, after my second cup, I may already forget about the whole thing. Have a nice day, - M

no comment

Saturday 11 July 2009

Support the new Irish "No to Lisbon" campaign!

By Mikael on Saturday 11 July 2009, 19:07

An appeal to SUPPORT THE NEW IRISH "NO TO LISBON" CAMPAIGN  is circulating  through Susan George and others. I have just forwarded it to the board of Attac Finland with a wish that it be translated into Finnish, too (glad to see that a translation into Swedish, my first language, has already been done).

Although I support the campaign against the Lisbon treaty, I stay convinced that our YES TO EU must be clear and loud. Hence it feels good to read the two sentences at the end of the appeal: "We share the same vision of a Europe where the economy works to serve the needs of ordinary citizens - not corporate power or military ambitions. We seek a peaceful, social, democratic, demilitarised and ecological Europe."

However, the vision of a peaceful and democratic Europe was already found in the manifesto of Ventotene from 1941 and in the draft treaty from 1984, which introduced the concept of "European Union" and was approved by the elected European Parliament, but rejected by the ruling European elites. We should say so, and use the original Spinellian idea as a weapon against the Neoliberal idea of the EU. Otherwise, we cannot break the hegemony of the Neoliberals and take the lead.

To demand the "demilitarisation" of Europe, on the other hand, is not realistic. The EU has to constitute itself independently of the other powers; its military status could hardly be that of "a demilitarized zone" guaranteed by international treaty, like the Åland islands. But a European conscription army for territorial defence, in some respects resembling the Swiss army, is a realistic alternative to the European military forces envisaged by the Lisbon treaty, which in reality would subordinate them to NATO and the USA, and which engages them in perpetual wars of the West against the rest.

Therefore, I would have written 'denuclearised' instead of 'demilitarised'. In a world situation where nuclear weapons are proliferating and the nuclear powers play their bilateral and multilateral arms control games while they all, without exception, maintain and modernize their own WMD, it must be our top priority to revive the movement for unilateral European nuclear disarmament. Europe must be the exception!

The "ecological Europe", finally, implies a decision to successively dismantle the nuclear power stations. Attac has already adopted that anti-nuclear position, I think, and Ireland has no nuclear power plants. "The last thing any country needs, let alone a beautiful place like Ireland, is Nuclear Power", I read (on a website called "The good life - self-reliance in an uncertain world"; see http://the-goodlife.blogspot.com/2007/03/nuclear-power-in-ireland.html). So the Lisbon treaty should promise to keep Ireland nuclear-free. Does it?

one comment

Monday 6 July 2009

Global Zero

By Mikael on Monday 6 July 2009, 12:42



Dear F.,

I signed the Avaaz petition for Global Zero, although without enthusiasm. Yes, I believe in the good will of Queen Noor. But I don't believe in interstate negotiations on nuclear disarmament -- 'the disarmament game', as Alva Myrdal called it in the title of her 1976 book. The more realistic way, in my opinion, is unilateral nuclear abolition. Bertrand Russell, at least, would have agreed. (I just re-read his 17 February 1961 article in "The New Statesman", in which he called for massive civil disobedience against the nuclear rulers.) Probably also Tony Benn is of the same opinion, and perhaps yourself, too, when you take a close look at the matter.

The nuclear rulers are hypocrites. Not only are they usual fools, like we all are. They are worse, because the nuclear power, both in the political and the physical sense, is irreconcilable with truth and democracy. Their nuclear power is dictatorship and catastrophe, and they know it.

When I let such a judgment flow out from my keyboard, I always feel that it is necessary to exemplify. This time, I would like to point to Mr Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs who, at the opening plenary of the 2009 meeting of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, said:

"In recent times, nuclear energy has become more and more important. The "nuclear renaissance" is not just a trend, it is a fact of life. For several reasons more and more countries want to use, develop or import nuclear energy. Diversification of the energy mix, reduction of CO2 emissions and a general increasing demand for energy are all valid reasons to invest into nuclear energy. The Dutch government regards nuclear energy as one of the available instruments to combat climate change and reinforce energy security. A decision on the future of nuclear energy in the Netherlands is presently being prepared. Many developing countries see nuclear energy as an important way to deal with their fast growing energy needs. Worldwide, 45 new nuclear power plants are under construction. Of course, we have to make sure that non-proliferation standards and safeguards like the Additional Protocol are respected. Great powers and safeguards like the Additional Protocol are respected. Great powers and possibilities come with great responsibilities."


This statement should be read together with the final paragraph of the chapter on nuclear energy in E.F.Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful. Economics As If People Mattered" (1973):

"No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all." -- E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful


How is your website going? You know, our web might become our salvation, if we can avoid that it becomes the Spider's web. Just consider how utterly obsolete the system of "sovereign" national states, with all their WMD, has become in this era of the World Wide Web.

All the best.

- Mika

3 comments

Sunday 14 June 2009

Le taux d'abstention

By Mikael on Sunday 14 June 2009, 10:28

Le taux d'abstention restera élevé jusqu'à l'émergence d'un parti spinellien qui est déterminé à abolir le complexe militaro-industriel transatlantique.

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