Chris Hedges at The Earth at Risk Conference 2014
Published on Nov 24, 201 4 • Interview with Chris Hedges at The Earth at Risk 2014 Conference and the moral imperative of resistance thru non-violent direct action and mass movements of sustained civil disobedience.
Why we should give everyone a basic income | Rutger Bregman | TEDxMaastricht
Published on Oct 21, 2014 • This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
Rutger Bregman (1988} studied at Utrecht University and the University of California in Los Angeles, majoring in History. In September 2013 Bregman joined the online journalism platform De Correspondent. His article on basic income was nominated for the European Press Prize and was published by The Washington Post.
In September 2013 Bregman joined the online journalism platform ‘De Correspondent’. His article on basic income was nominated for the European Press Prize and was subsequently also published by the American newspaper The Washington Post. In September 2014 his newest book ‘Gratis geld voor iedereen En nog vijf grote ideeen die de wereld kunnen veranderen’ came out.
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It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.
Bajid Kandala refugee cam, Iraq
The era opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece and beyond. What is happening in this region provides painful lessons on the depths to which the species can descend.
The land of the Tigris and Euphrates has been the scene of unspeakable horrors in recent years. The George W. Bush-Tony Blair aggression in 2003, which many Iraqis compared to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, was yet another lethal blow. It destroyed much of what survived the Bill Clinton-driven UN sanctions on Iraq, condemned as “genocidal” by the distinguished diplomats Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who administered them before resigning in protest. Halliday and von Sponeck's devastating reports received the usual treatment accorded to unwanted facts.
One dreadful consequence of the US-UK invasion is depicted in a New York Times “visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria”: the radical change of Baghdad from mixed neighborhoods in 2003 to today's sectarian enclaves trapped in bitter hatred. The conflicts ignited by the invasion have spread beyond and are now tearing the entire region to shreds.
Much of the Tigris-Euphrates area is in the hands of ISIS and its self-proclaimed Islamic State, a grim caricature of the extremist form of radical Islam that has its home in Saudi Arabia. Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent and one of the best-informed analysts of ISIS, describes it as “a very horrible, in many ways fascist organization, very sectarian, kills anybody who doesn't believe in their particular rigorous brand of Islam.”
Cockburn also points out the contradiction in the Western reaction to the emergence of ISIS: efforts to stem its advance in Iraq along with others to undermine the group's major opponent in Syria, the brutal Bashar Assad regime. Meanwhile a major barrier to the spread of the ISIS plague to Lebanon is Hezbollah, a hated enemy of the US and its Israeli ally. And to complicate the situation further, the US and Iran now share a justified concern about the rise of the Islamic State, as do others in this highly conflicted region.
Egypt has plunged into some of its darkest days under a military dictatorship that continues to receive US support. Egypt's fate was not written in the stars. For centuries, alternative paths have been quite feasible, and not infrequently, a heavy imperial hand has barred the way.
After the renewed horrors of the past few weeks it should be unnecessary to comment on what emanates from Jerusalem, in remote history considered a moral center.
Eighty years ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain their wealth and power.
The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.
The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains.
The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore.
One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.
The IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.
A day before its summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.
One of the most feared consequences of anthropogenic global warming is the thawing of permafrost regions. A study in Science magazine warns that “even slightly warmer temperatures [less than anticipated in coming years] could start melting permafrost, which in turn threatens to trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice,” with possible “fatal consequences” for the global climate.
Arundhati Roy suggests that the “most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times” is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing “thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate” in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.
Sad species. Poor Owl.
© 2014 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
25 Aug 2014
Nothing good. But let us have a look at it in the standard peace studies way: Diagnosis-analyzing, Prognosis- forecasting, and Therapy–remedies, even solutions.
Johan Galtung
“Israel-Palestine” is the discourse Tel Aviv-Washington prefers. They have all the strong cards: overwhelming military power, political veto in the United Nations Security Council, the economic upper hand in interlocking economies–not just oil cash from Saudi Arabia-Qatar–and the idea of working for a solution with Washington as “mediator”–only USA can bring the two together, gently or roughly–toward a sustainable peace.
It is needed a great distance from reality to believe in that spin. USA and Israel are interlocked by a much deeper tie: they came into being in the same way; flagging a divine mandate for a land without a people for a people without a land. Goes one goes the other.
Palestine is also part of something much bigger than itself: the Arab people with its tortured history of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism, and the religion of Islam. Two nationalisms, carried by Fatah and Hamas in Palestine, both potentially giving rise to a much bigger state, Arabia (not only Saudi), and to a region, the Islamic Umma, beyond an organization of the Islamic Community (of states).
USA is co-responsible for the current Israeli genocide in Gaza and seen as such by most of the world. Hate one hate the other.
Israeli expansion implies conflict with neighbors and their neighbors into the Arab-Muslim worlds. Your problems are my problems say the USA. So far. But one layer deeper is the US hyphenation of Judaism and Christianity to Judaeo-Christianity, leaving out the third Abrahamic religion. The stark reality is three religions hating and killing each other through millennia–but the hyphen, like in Israel-USA, calls for an alliance of 2 against 1. A political program.
Add to this the three imperialisms suffered by the Arab nation. Four centuries Ottoman Empire; four decades English-French imperialism from Sykes-Picot to Nasser; US-Israeli imperialism to make the Middle East region safe for Israel and democracy. However, democracy is rule by the consent of the ruled, not colonialism-imperialism by the consent–so far–of the demos in the rulers, USA and Israel.
The collisions are massive, involving ever more of the huge Muslim part of the world beyond the Arab part. How will this evolve?
More fear, more hatred; more terrorism, more state terrorism. USA-Israel will probably keep the military superiority for some time. But much else is happening. Both are heading downhill in the sense of losing the support they had. USA is losing its world hegemony–even within NATO where Germany de facto is siding more with Russia than with the USA over Ukraine–and Israel by its fall from the moral high grounds into the immoral abyss even among the many deeply touched by the shoa. Israel aggravates its own situation by gluing the etiquette “anti-Semitic” to its increasingly numerous and powerful critics.
But where are the Arab and Muslim worlds heading? Not downhill.
The Ottoman Empire was a relatively benign Sunni “family of nations” with a caliphate also centered in Istanbul. No effort to recreate an Arabia ruled by Turkey is acceptable to the Arab nation. But also unacceptable is Sykes-Picot Western colonialism with four colonies or “mandates”; Iraq-Palestine, Syria-Lebanon. Blindness, ignorance or stupidity is needed to be surprised at the Islamic State (IS). Sykes-Picot could not stand, but the US invasion from 2003 reified those artificial creations, one of them in the meantime divided by the UK into Israel-rump Palestine-Jordan. IS was highly predictable: extremist brutality bred by oppression, and a vision: An ottoman empire with a caliphate without a special role for Turkey.
Without Sykes-Picot no Balfour, without Balfour no Israel. The Ottoman Empire had no Israel. A problem of USA-Israel’s own making.
Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books 21 Aug 2014 points to a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq, with a population beyond Denmark, quickly conquered, heading for Baghdad and Damascus–the capitals of two major Islamic dynasties. Assad may fall, so may al-Maliki’s successor(s). Al Qaeda will join IS. Their problem is Iran and the Kurds, possibly with US-engineered wars that may unravel as such. We will soon see. Imagine IS conquering Baghdad, what happens to the megalomaniac US embassy? IS uses Saddam Hussein assets like the Tikrit clan and his military. But Saddam reified Sykes-Picot as Iraq’s ruler installed by the USA till he turned against them in 1988 in the Arab-Persian Gulf.
Anyhow, stop the present IS and a new will emerge out of the same Arab nation holism and dialectic; much stronger forces in the longer run than USA-Israel on a downhill slope with the USA possibly heading for racist fascism at home and abroad. But how about Islam?
Two major factors in its favor. The counter-cyclical pendulum between Christian and Islamic dominance–up for one means down for the other being so similar–is moving from the Christian-secular toward the Islamic pole. One factor is Islam’s message of togetherness and sharing, very attractive to the victims of egocentrism, greed and inequality in the Western world. Add to that something similar to the IS factor: the long term move toward an Islamic umma, not a state system ruled by kings-emirs-sultans, even against theshahada.
And who created so much of that state system? The West, through its colonialism. What we witness today is not only IS but all over Muslim youth trying to be the umma, uniting across even colonial borders, between Iraq and Syria–like the Tutsi bridge between anglophone, francophone and afrophone Africa. Be the future you want.
Solutions beyond USA-Israel going down and the Arab-Muslim worlds up? Yes: dialogue, searching together for how all four could become masters in their own house and only that. The challenge of the century.
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Johan Galtung, a professor of peace studies, dr hc mult, is rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University-TPU. He is author of over 150 books on peace and related issues, including ‘50 Years-100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives,’ published by the TRANSCEND University Press-TUP.
Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS, is included. Thank you.
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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 August 2014.
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