Dear J-M,
many thanks for your thoughts, and for the presentation of the
radioactivity and waste problems of the nuclear power industry by
Marie-Christine Gamberini from Friends of the Earth!
You ended your message with this sentence: Il faut articuler les deux :
l'informationnel et le politique. (One has to articulate both The
Informational and The Political)
Evidemment, but the transformation of The Informational is about to
transform The Political in a way which is comparable to what happened during
the 15th century with the breakthrough of the movable type and the printing
press.
The global spread of internet use, still a relatively young development,
leads to new forms of social and political praxis. This email message, which I
am writing to you and copying to a public webpage (blog), is an example.
Instantly public coordination of thoughts and actions between persons living in
different corners of Europe has only become possible after, say, 2001 (to
choose an ominous year), with email, blogs and wikis. Still more recently, it
has become a part of our everyday life. The likes of Sarkozy, Blair, Merkel and
Vanhanen (Vanhanen is the prime minister of my country, Finland) are losing, or
have to a big extent already lost, their control over the framework(s) of our
communication and action. The interesting political problem now is , of course,
to determine how big that extent is. Through the internet we, the people, are
each day gaining a little bit more control over them, the modern princes.
The present political structure is utterly obsolete and extremely
destructive; its ideology inherently militaristic and racist. The leaders of
the national governments more often than not appear as dangerous criminals.
Their biggest crime is to incessantly threaten mankind with extermination.
Obviously, their everlasting "modernization" of the existing nuclear weapons
systems, their ongoing armaments in outher space and missile defense
installations, are crimes against humanity.
While they continue to waste our planet's resources on their private,
Nationalist bads (as opposed to the global public goods we all need), these
hypocrites speak about solving the climate crisis.
Yet their present political system, which consists of 191 mutually competing
and more or less militant (militaristic) "sovereign" National States with the
trillion-dollars-yearly-military-budget United States of America on top, is the
biggest single obstacle to ecological, non-wasteful and CO2-emissions reducing
solutions.
What can we do? We can think globally, but we can only act locally as well
as, hopefully, regionally. In the immediate present, European action is key,
because Europe is a particularly weak link in the global chain of power. Here,
the false consciousness may still give away to reason, as we have seen in the
European Nuclear Disarmament movements of the 1980s.
The conditions are at hand for a very large assembly of ourselves, the
peoples of Europe, against the Berlusconis!
The European Union must become a real European Union, founded on disarmament
and international cooperation instead of NATO and market fundamentalism. The
vision of the "Manifesto For a Free and United Europe", written by the Ernesto
Rossi and Altiero Spinelli on the prison island of Ventotene, must finally
become reality, let be that the context of 2009 differs wildly from 1941, when
the Ventotene manifesto was written.
The French and British nuclear weapons systems are the top of the iceberg.
Those who point out that the American and Russian warheads are counted by the
thousands, while the British and French ones are only counted by the tens or
hundreds, are numb. They have let themselves to be brainwashed by the Game of
Disarmament (as Alva Myrdal bitterly called her 1976 book about the disarmament
negotiations in the UN); the cynical, multilateral business of arms
control.
The 60 new M51 missiles, which are presently being produced for the French
nuclear submarines by EADS Astrium (EADS Astrium is an aerospace subsidiary of
the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company EADS, based in Portsmouth and
Stevenage, England; their factories and subcontractors are spread over the EU
and the world) could alone destroy our planet, as each missile will carry six
independently targetable TN 75 thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
To start with: let's get rid of these remnants of the European colonial
Empires, the "independent" French and British nuclear arms. The rest will
follow suit. The necessary rethinking and refoundation of democracy, security,
our models of production and consumption, will become possible once we agree to
European unification on the basis of European nuclear disarmament. We need to
gradually phase out the nuclear power stations as well, because they produce
ever growing heaps of radioactive waste and plutonium. As everybody knows, we
have to invest in renewable energy sources like wind-, solar and geothermal
energy. Moreover, the present financial-economic-political crisis cannot and
will not end without breaking the system of the militaristic national states.
In order to create a stable secure financial system, we need, first and
foremostly, to break out of the permanent war economy.
Europe must be founded as a democratic state on the abolition of its own
nuclear weapons systems and a gradual phasing out of its nuclear power plants.
Through its denuclearisation, Europe will acquire a new identity and become the
bearer of the emerging political system, which is based on the new internet of
mankind. The internet is the new global Informational Power, which can check
and balance the previously existing national Executive, Legislative and
Judicial state powers. It does not need a chairman or a decision-making body,
because it is self-regulating, cybernetical. It is an extension of our literacy
and library. Its governing principle is the ethic of the public librarian: to
deliver all information to all without delay.
Whether it happens in Europe or elsewhere, "We, the People" of the internet
will finally break the obsolete and criminal political structures of today. The
most probable alternatives are either world war and utter destruction, or a
Neo-Fascist American world dictatorship. The latter is still a possible outcome
even if the unusually positive figure of president Obama dominates the picture
for the time being.
All the best.
Mikael