A study contracted by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was released this month discussing the effects of globalization on poverty
I read the report (it's not very long, folks). A few points that struck me:
The report was produced by a private consultancy the Center for International Economics which specialises in this kind of thing. They've done lots of stuff about international trade for the World Bank etc, and are pretty keen on "free" trade.
Most of the figures are based on measuring income in "purchasing power" rather than in "real money". The idea is to take into account the different costs of "basic" commodities in different countries. These tend to be cheaper in poor countries, but conversely high-tech goods and particularly services are more expensive. Of course poor countries only "need" basic commodities don't they? But if the value of the luxury goods is underestimated then this tends to exaggerate the wealth of people in poor countries as opposed to those in wealthy countries.
There was no mention of labour conditions, that I could see. Are the people in poor countries being exploited more? There was no mention that I could see of levels of national debt, either. Are these countries being driven into debt-slavery? Some of these larger issues need to be dealt with because they relate to the sustainability of the process. Now that the boom is over, and poor countries are in crisis all over, is the situation going to reverse?
The graphs showing decrease in inequality excluded Russia because of "unavailability of data", which is a shame since Russia is precisely the country which has had the most mind-boggling increase in inequality in history, over the last decade.
>blockquote>The third world debt problem couldn't be because kleptomaniac leaders stole a good portion of the money and wasted a large portion of the rest could it? No, that would imply that it's at least partially their own fault. Cancelling debts makes it harder to borrow in future and encourages the 3rd world government thieves to keep right on stealing because if they mismanage things badly enough, fraternal, compassionate first worlders will just cancel their debts again in order to help those suffering 3rd world people. These wouldn't be the same klepto leaders installed and supported for decades by the leaders of the "free world", the World Bank, IMF, etc. would they? Oh yes, now that you mention it... they would.
I think it's pretty tough to foist these bastard terrorist exploiters (e.g. Suharto, or the Argentine generals, or Mobutu) onto some poor country, lend them mega-bucks, then when the bastards finally get the arse you blame the poor citizens of that country for having had the misfortune to be innocent bystanders while all this corruption was going on.
Forgive the debt! I reckon Fidel Castro is dead right on this topic, do you know why? Because the debt is literally unpayable. The debt is so high, that the most indebted countries can't even afford to pay the interest on it. They have no prospect of developing their economy fast enough to catch up with the runaway compound interest. Under those circumstances the debt can only grow indefinitely, or else be forgiven, either voluntarily, or by default.
Since the debt was foisted on them first by colonialist exploitation, and then neo-colonial exploitation, and there is no prospect of it ever being paid off, what's the difference between this and the kind of "tribute"-based exploitation practiced by the ancient Roman empire? Bugger-all IMHO.
You can't take government out of the picture. The process of "capitalist globalisation" is backed by governments, and in fact it utterly relies on the actions of governments.
There's been a few mentions of Indonesia, a pioneer in this process. It started with a coup and a massacre of hundreds of thousands of people (at least; some of the generals responsible claimed to have killed up to 3 million). The entire population was terrorised by the new military government, in order to improve the climate for foreign investment. They did it for the benefit of foreign capital, with help from the US government (the CIA provided lists of the people who had to be killed, for instance), and from the UK government (also a big supplier of weapons to the Indonesian fascists).
Why is this? I'll tell you why: it's because all these governments are run precisely by the same big corporations. The US government for instance is not some kind of independent thing that could be disconnected from big business. It is big business. And big business need it to make their super-profits. The real problem is the enormous power of big business, that can take over countries like Indonesia and the United States, and run them for the benefit of a few shareholders. So you can't say "big business is ok, if only we could get the government out of the picture", because that's like saying "McDonalds is OK, if only they didn't serve hamburgers" or "OPEC is OK, if only they didn't jack up the price of oil", or "Global warming would be nothing to worry about if we could only stop the sea-level rising"
Communist tyranies and liberal democracies are not morally equivalent. Your implication that acts committed in defense of freedom and those committed to spread communism should be judged equally is ethically abhorent. Communism murders and enslaves, democracy promotes life and frees. Reciprocal acts committed with disimilar motive are not objectively equal.
So you are seriously supposing that when anti-communists kill lots of innocents that's ok? I'm sure that'd be a huge consolation to those millions of dead Vietnamese. In heaven now, they can think to themselves "phew! at least we were imprisoned in concentration camps, poisoned, bombed or burnt to death in the name of freedom and the promotion of life!".
I didn't imply you were a wanker because you contradicted me, but because of your bullshit attitude that mass murder of communists, or mass murder by anti-communists is ok because it "promotes life" or some such double-think, and that citizens of so-called "liberal democracies" have a right to commit these crimes, as if the crimes against the people of Vietnam, for instance, were at all the work of "liberals" or "democrats" in any real (non-weaselly) sense.
I think you've blown all your credibility by implying I'm a weasel, but despite that, I refuse to accept that when the armed forces of a powerful country commit a terrorist act, that it doesn't count as terrorism simply because the people were in uniform, and get a medal for doing what they do. Crimes committed in war are crimes just as much as in peace-time, didn't you know? I know that the US State Dept likes to define terrorism to exclude the actions of states, but I think the reason they prefer this definition over the dictionary definition is that it means that the US government's own crimes can by definition never be terrorist.
Plus, I didn't imply you didn't get out much because you contradicted me, but because you seemed ignorant of the horrendous terrorist acts committed by Americans (and others) against innocent people in the name of anti-communism. Don't you remember "we had to destroy the village in order to save it"? Perhaps you simply don't know of the terrorist actions committed by yankee troops in Vietnam ("bombing it back to the stone age" was a popular slogan at the time, remember?), perhaps you're too young to know what happened, or just too brainwashed. That might explain your problem with sarcasm, too.
The United States in Vietnam and in Cuba sought to contain this menace. Your perverse labelling of these American actions as "misdeeds" reveals a consistant sympathy for the perpetratrors of mass murder. Your inclination to blame the victims of terrorist attacks for failing to understand the fanatical thinking of their killers supports that interpretation.
So when communists kill lots of people it's murder, but when (anti-communist) Americans kill people, even millions of people, you can't even bring yourself to consider it a "misdeed"!!! Get real, comrade!! Stop for ONE SECOND and consider how anyone who is not an American would see this attitude? You're the irrational one, here, my friend. Or perhaps you hadn't heard of the millions killed in the Vietnam war (or as the Vietnamese call it, the "American war"). Of course, those poor dead Vietnamese should've been grateful that the US army had protected them from those nasty communists, namely themselves.
The conduct of American foreign and domestic policy has indeed been flawed, notwithstanding your inability to name any of those flaws. Yet the flaws constitute a basis for anti-american hostilities in only the minds of demented fanatics.
So... the US invades or bombs country X (where X is any of a long list already posted in this thread), killing innocent people, naturally in a regretful, but ulimately "flawed" way. Then, if any of the orphans or widows of country X feel aggrieved enough to retaliate, that makes them demented fanatics!!! Get your hand off your dick and try to get out a bit more, is my friendly advice to you.
Republic is indeed a Roman word "res publica" is the people's thing. But the term "republic" as it's used today in America seems to me to mean "the rule of the propertied class", i.e. the guarantee of the "rights" of corporations.
Democracy comes from Greek where it meant the rule of the mass of the poor (not "everyone equally" as it used by many people today). Aristotle was quite clear about it, and he would in fact have characterised elections and "representative democracy" as a kind of "artistocracy", since it is a system of rule of the "best" (in this case the most electable) people. Democracy, by contrast, was more like what we would call "mob rule" - the rule of the majority, which was then, as now, the poor, not the likes of GW, Cheney, Rice, etc. The Greek democracy was direct, or office-holders were appointed by lottery rather than election. This indeed makes office-holders more representative than elections would. IMHO this kind of system would be a vast improvement over the electoral "democracy" of the US and other "Western democracies".
I think that the goal is very simple and very clear: stop terrorism.
That's what the government will tell you, but what evidence is there that it's true? I seriously doubt it... are the increased wire-tapping powers given to the police going to bring in Osama bin Laden and his friends? Are they going to stop people sending anthrax viruses through the mail? I don't see it myself.
I've had a read through this law and it seems to me that it's no way tough enough to do what it claims. To seriously crack down on terrorists in the US would require far more than this bill - it would require a full-on police state. Perhaps that's coming though, and this is only the precursor; a kind of warm-up for the main event.
In any case, so long as the US government's foreign policy supports terror against enemies (of the US government), any repression inside the US will be treating symptoms rather than causes.
In my view, the main point is the occupation of the middle-east oil-zone, starting with Afghanistan, then Iraq, Iran, etc. etc.
The domestic "crack-down" can help firstly by promoting war hysteria / jingoistic patriotism, and then by monitoring and actively suppressing dissent against the foreign policy "adventure" in the middle-east.
Re:Palestinians not the only terrorists
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A New Kind of War
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I'm sorry but you're changing your story now. You originally said that terrorist attacks were carried out "exclusively by palestinians". And all I said was that this was not true, and by way of explanation I mentioned that Lebanese militia, Israeli military, and Jewish settlers had all committed terrorist attacks.
Now you're claiming I'm lying and being hostile, but I don't think that's true either. I'm not trying to antagonise you but please make the effort to read what I actually said before you flame me.
When the Israeli army shells buildings in urban areas to destroy police stations for instance, bulldozes houses, or fires missiles into vehicles, or something, "regretfully" killing a few civilians here and there in the way of collateral damage, you don't regard this as a form of terrorism? That strikes me as very strange. I'd like to know what definition you would give to the word. I think that demolishing police stations as an example of "restraint" is frankly laughable.
As for your comment about the Hezbollah not attacking palestinians, that certainly is true, but I never claimed they had. AFAIK the Hezbollah is an anti-Zionist militia, set up to oppose the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, hence unlikely to attack palestinians. But it has committed acts of terror inside Israel, so it's a valid example.
Sixteen Palestinians have so far been killed since 28 September 2000, by Israeli settlers; eight were shot to death, three were killed in hit-and-run incidents, two were tortured to death, two were killed recently when settlers fired at their car causing it to hit a lamppost, and one was killed by a rock hurled by a settler.
So I don't believe I'm out of line in asking you to "get your facts straight" when you say that the Palestinians "exclusively" are the terrorists. If you have respect for the truth you should realise that the Israeli side is also responsible for some acts of terror. This is quite apart from the ongoing occupation of Arab lands which is illegal under international law, and condemned by the United Nations - this occupation is the root cause of the terror
Propaganda war - "moral crusade" is a smokescreen
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That doesn't help, actually, because we COULD have cared about what our government's policies are: we simply choose not to. Again: we judged the efforts of looking into it to be too costly compared to the benefits. This doesn't let us off the hook, however: because we are as responsible for choosing to be ignorant as we are of choosing
I'm not convinced by your argument - I think most Americans choose not to investigate what the US Empire is really like because they have no idea that it even exists. Just as an example - how many Americans realise, for instance, that America makes more financially from the immigration of highly-educated foreigners (doctors, etc) than it spends on foreign aid? How many people know that the "free trade" rules that the US govt is so keen on don't include agricultural products where the US can't compete with the third world? How many realise that the longest-ever economic boom in the US was fueled by an enormous (largest in history) outflow of capital from the ex-USSR? As an aside, the USA's oil-dependence has taken a political knock because of the greenhouse effect; the US govt are trying to deny it, but the entire rest of the world are lined up against it, and the pro-US media viewpoints have cracked enough so that many Americans have realised what's going on there, that the US boom implies doom for low-lying countries.
I think most Americans are unaware of the ways their economy siphons wealth off other countries, so they tend to see foreign relations in more ideological terms, in terms of "western values" etc. They probably think that the US is some kind of inspiration to the world in terms of human rights etc, a "shining beacon atop a hill" or whatever, and that US military involvement in other peoples' countries is a huge favour that the US military is doing for those countries out of the goodness of Colin Powell's heart. There was an article on this thread decrying the lack of gratitude for the US protecting Saudi Arabia, but the truth is that US troops are really there to protect the oil. If the US could have got the Saudi oil more easily by letting it fall into Saddam Hussein's hands then that's what would've happened (this is what happened with Indonesia's invasion of East Timor isn't it?). It's the oil that counts - it's the material interest of the very rich people who own most of the US economy that are driving that foreign policy.
I'm not excusing these terrorist acts, but I want to point out that they are part of a kind of "national liberation struggle" to overthrow the US/Israeli military dominance of the middle east. Their ideology is religious, and their tactics are terrorist, but they share their anti-imperial orientation with plenty of other groups, nationalists, communists, etc, around the world.
The important thing (and this is where it gets back to the topic of this thread) is that the US govt is going to be waging a propaganda war inside the US precisely to obscure that material basis for the war (oil) and to make the whole thing out to have purely religious justification. I think the religious angle is one of the most significant new features of the "new kind of war". After all, people will sign up for a "moral crusade" for "western values" when they might no be so keen to support a war for "continued occupation of the oil-producing zone".
The US State Department defines Terrorism pretty clearly:
The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.
Funny how the US State Department defines terrorism precisely in a way which excludes themselves.
For instance, there's the famous incident in which a US fighter jet blew up an international passenger train as it was crossing a bridge in Yugoslavia, killing the innocent civilians on board. (Of course, it was an "accident" because the terrorists didn't know that the rail line was actually in use by trains, hey give them a break!) Otherwise there was the bombing of the RTS TV studio in Belgrade, where a few people (make-up artists, etc) were killed, precisely in order to influence an audience (a TV audience!) Or the bombing of a large office building where the Socialist Party of Serbia was based. Of course, innocent people with no connection to the Socialist Party also had offices in that building... as the US military well knew.
But were those responsible for these serious war-crimes actually terrorists? There was some controversy about it, but the Western media was pretty well unanimous that these actions were all OK. I can see now that (according to the US State Dept) they weren't even terrorist acts, because they were performed openly, not clandestinely, and by a coalition of nation-states, not "subnational groups".
USA is an Imperial Oligarchy, not a Democracy
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A side note: The one morbid effect our democracy might have on Bin Laden would be to lead him to conclude that all Americans are ultimately responsible for what our government does, since it's power ultimately rests in us. That this rationalization might be how he or his cells justified attacking civilians is an almost chilling thought. There is nothing per se wrong with this reasoning: we are responsible for our government. But to think that such a previously glorious and wonderful fact could be employed in such a sick, blowback fashion, is deeply deeply saddening.
If the US were a democracy, then its people would be responsible for the crimes of its government, surely?
But actually the US is not a democracy, so the point doesn't arise.
I was in the US myself earlier this year and I could see that the US people in general know very little about their government's involvement in the rest of the world. Without knowledge, Americans can have no control over that foreign policy. If they knew what their government was really up to they might be able to put a stop to it. That would be democratic.
It seems to me that the important thing for Americans is to actually study the US Empire - its structure, its economic basis, its operations, its strategy and tactics. Find out why the US is hated - not because it's "democratic" (because it's not; it's run by a tiny wealthy elite), but because it's the centre of a vast empire that sucks wealth from poor people all over the globe, restricts their rights and freedoms, and generally subordinates their interests to the interests of the wealthy elite. Because its military forces are the largest terrorist organisation in the history of the world. Because it operates without any restraint, bombing and invading other countries with impunity.
Palestinians not the only terrorists
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The Israeli army has also shelled and bombed a lot of Palestine - the locals seem to regard this as terrorism, as well they might. Also Israeli settlers living in confiscated land have shot a number of Palestinians. Plus a lot of terror attacks have been carried out by Lebanese militants, firing rockets over the northern border, etc. Are the Palestinians to blame there too? Get your facts straight.
>Clearly you have had your history fed to you
>by spoon, or else by a Marxist.
Perhaps being a Marxist is a bit like reading history with a spoon, I really don't know, but I have read some books about the lifestyle of people in the medieval and industrial capitalist England, and I got the distinct impression that the industrial revolution actually made a lot of the poorest people even poorer.
Sure, a century or 2 later things are a bit different, but at the time, thousands of poor peasants were displaced and forced into the cities to work in appalling conditions for virtually nothing. As agricultural workers they were made redundant by new agri-technologies. Many of these early industrial workers (including young children) were worked literally to death in a few years. There was wide-spread starvation. In short, their quality of life (never that high) turned to shit. At least as serfs they were sufficiently valuable to their masters to be kept alive, but as cheap industrial labour to the industrialists they were expendable.
Maybe the industrial revolution was a "good thing" but that doesn't mean it was all sweetness and light at the time. On the contrary it was accompanied by unprecedented exploitation, widespread civil unrest, and police repression. Don't be surprised when these same things happen today as a result of the "IT revolution". What the poor and working people of the world need is a political revolution so as to turn the new technologies to the benefit of the majority, rather than a few rich Yanks (present company excluded of course;-)
Your argument implies that the new genes are neatly spliced into place without any cause for concern, but actually the splicing technology itself is not as neat and tidy. Often viruses are used as a means to introduce the foreign gene, for instance, and the result is that though a gene is spliced in, that's not necessarily the only change made to the organism's genome.
The problem with this argument is that the farm on which the plants are growing is nothing like a natural ecosystem anymore.
The problem with THIS argument is that it attempts to justify one mistake by saying its no worse than another.
The "Western" (and esp. US) system of agriculture, based, as it is, on petrochemicals, monoculture, and pesticides, is seriously flawed in a number of ways, but adding GMOs as a way of combating some of its weaknesses is short-sighted in the extreme.
Far better would be to actually establish an agriculture based on something much more like natural ecosystems, with some actual biodiversity, and then some of the "good reasons" for introducing GMOs wouldn't look so shit-hot after all.
This kind of agriculture would really be a kind of "knowledge-based" agriculture. This is where IT could play a big role, in directly managing the farms, much moreso than these centralised biotech monopolies in their ivory towers playing with genes.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the report (it's not very long, folks). A few points that struck me:
>blockquote>The third world debt problem couldn't be because kleptomaniac leaders stole a good portion of the money and wasted a large portion of the rest could it? No, that would imply that it's at least partially their own fault. Cancelling debts makes it harder to borrow in future and encourages the 3rd world government thieves to keep right on stealing because if they mismanage things badly enough, fraternal, compassionate first worlders will just cancel their debts again in order to help those suffering 3rd world people. These wouldn't be the same klepto leaders installed and supported for decades by the leaders of the "free world", the World Bank, IMF, etc. would they? Oh yes, now that you mention it ... they would.
I think it's pretty tough to foist these bastard terrorist exploiters (e.g. Suharto, or the Argentine generals, or Mobutu) onto some poor country, lend them mega-bucks, then when the bastards finally get the arse you blame the poor citizens of that country for having had the misfortune to be innocent bystanders while all this corruption was going on.
Forgive the debt! I reckon Fidel Castro is dead right on this topic, do you know why? Because the debt is literally unpayable. The debt is so high, that the most indebted countries can't even afford to pay the interest on it. They have no prospect of developing their economy fast enough to catch up with the runaway compound interest. Under those circumstances the debt can only grow indefinitely, or else be forgiven, either voluntarily, or by default.
Since the debt was foisted on them first by colonialist exploitation, and then neo-colonial exploitation, and there is no prospect of it ever being paid off, what's the difference between this and the kind of "tribute"-based exploitation practiced by the ancient Roman empire? Bugger-all IMHO.
You can't take government out of the picture. The process of "capitalist globalisation" is backed by governments, and in fact it utterly relies on the actions of governments.
There's been a few mentions of Indonesia, a pioneer in this process. It started with a coup and a massacre of hundreds of thousands of people (at least; some of the generals responsible claimed to have killed up to 3 million). The entire population was terrorised by the new military government, in order to improve the climate for foreign investment. They did it for the benefit of foreign capital, with help from the US government (the CIA provided lists of the people who had to be killed, for instance), and from the UK government (also a big supplier of weapons to the Indonesian fascists).
Why is this? I'll tell you why: it's because all these governments are run precisely by the same big corporations. The US government for instance is not some kind of independent thing that could be disconnected from big business. It is big business. And big business need it to make their super-profits. The real problem is the enormous power of big business, that can take over countries like Indonesia and the United States, and run them for the benefit of a few shareholders. So you can't say "big business is ok, if only we could get the government out of the picture", because that's like saying "McDonalds is OK, if only they didn't serve hamburgers" or "OPEC is OK, if only they didn't jack up the price of oil", or "Global warming would be nothing to worry about if we could only stop the sea-level rising"
I didn't imply you were a wanker because you contradicted me, but because of your bullshit attitude that mass murder of communists, or mass murder by anti-communists is ok because it "promotes life" or some such double-think, and that citizens of so-called "liberal democracies" have a right to commit these crimes, as if the crimes against the people of Vietnam, for instance, were at all the work of "liberals" or "democrats" in any real (non-weaselly) sense.
I think you've blown all your credibility by implying I'm a weasel, but despite that, I refuse to accept that when the armed forces of a powerful country commit a terrorist act, that it doesn't count as terrorism simply because the people were in uniform, and get a medal for doing what they do. Crimes committed in war are crimes just as much as in peace-time, didn't you know? I know that the US State Dept likes to define terrorism to exclude the actions of states, but I think the reason they prefer this definition over the dictionary definition is that it means that the US government's own crimes can by definition never be terrorist.
Plus, I didn't imply you didn't get out much because you contradicted me, but because you seemed ignorant of the horrendous terrorist acts committed by Americans (and others) against innocent people in the name of anti-communism. Don't you remember "we had to destroy the village in order to save it"? Perhaps you simply don't know of the terrorist actions committed by yankee troops in Vietnam ("bombing it back to the stone age" was a popular slogan at the time, remember?), perhaps you're too young to know what happened, or just too brainwashed. That might explain your problem with sarcasm, too.
So when communists kill lots of people it's murder, but when (anti-communist) Americans kill people, even millions of people, you can't even bring yourself to consider it a "misdeed"!!! Get real, comrade!! Stop for ONE SECOND and consider how anyone who is not an American would see this attitude? You're the irrational one, here, my friend. Or perhaps you hadn't heard of the millions killed in the Vietnam war (or as the Vietnamese call it, the "American war"). Of course, those poor dead Vietnamese should've been grateful that the US army had protected them from those nasty communists, namely themselves.
So
Republic is indeed a Roman word "res publica" is the people's thing. But the term "republic" as it's used today in America seems to me to mean "the rule of the propertied class", i.e. the guarantee of the "rights" of corporations.
Democracy comes from Greek where it meant the rule of the mass of the poor (not "everyone equally" as it used by many people today). Aristotle was quite clear about it, and he would in fact have characterised elections and "representative democracy" as a kind of "artistocracy", since it is a system of rule of the "best" (in this case the most electable) people. Democracy, by contrast, was more like what we would call "mob rule" - the rule of the majority, which was then, as now, the poor, not the likes of GW, Cheney, Rice, etc. The Greek democracy was direct, or office-holders were appointed by lottery rather than election. This indeed makes office-holders more representative than elections would. IMHO this kind of system would be a vast improvement over the electoral "democracy" of the US and other "Western democracies".
I think that the goal is very simple and very clear: stop terrorism.
... are the increased wire-tapping powers given to the police going to bring in Osama bin Laden and his friends? Are they going to stop people sending anthrax viruses through the mail? I don't see it myself.
That's what the government will tell you, but what evidence is there that it's true? I seriously doubt it
I've had a read through this law and it seems to me that it's no way tough enough to do what it claims. To seriously crack down on terrorists in the US would require far more than this bill - it would require a full-on police state. Perhaps that's coming though, and this is only the precursor; a kind of warm-up for the main event.
In any case, so long as the US government's foreign policy supports terror against enemies (of the US government), any repression inside the US will be treating symptoms rather than causes.
In my view, the main point is the occupation of the middle-east oil-zone, starting with Afghanistan, then Iraq, Iran, etc. etc.
The domestic "crack-down" can help firstly by promoting war hysteria / jingoistic patriotism, and then by monitoring and actively suppressing dissent against the foreign policy "adventure" in the middle-east.
Now you're claiming I'm lying and being hostile, but I don't think that's true either. I'm not trying to antagonise you but please make the effort to read what I actually said before you flame me.
When the Israeli army shells buildings in urban areas to destroy police stations for instance, bulldozes houses, or fires missiles into vehicles, or something, "regretfully" killing a few civilians here and there in the way of collateral damage, you don't regard this as a form of terrorism? That strikes me as very strange. I'd like to know what definition you would give to the word. I think that demolishing police stations as an example of "restraint" is frankly laughable.
As for your comment about the Hezbollah not attacking palestinians, that certainly is true, but I never claimed they had. AFAIK the Hezbollah is an anti-Zionist militia, set up to oppose the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, hence unlikely to attack palestinians. But it has committed acts of terror inside Israel, so it's a valid example.
As for the settlers committing acts of terror, I maintain that that is true; I think the single episode you're thinking of was probably the settler Barouch Goldstein who killed 29 people in 1994, but this (though a creditable massacre for one terrorist) is not the only case according to Human Rights Watch, and the The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights & the Environment.
So I don't believe I'm out of line in asking you to "get your facts straight" when you say that the Palestinians "exclusively" are the terrorists. If you have respect for the truth you should realise that the Israeli side is also responsible for some acts of terror. This is quite apart from the ongoing occupation of Arab lands which is illegal under international law, and condemned by the United Nations - this occupation is the root cause of the terror
I think most Americans are unaware of the ways their economy siphons wealth off other countries, so they tend to see foreign relations in more ideological terms, in terms of "western values" etc. They probably think that the US is some kind of inspiration to the world in terms of human rights etc, a "shining beacon atop a hill" or whatever, and that US military involvement in other peoples' countries is a huge favour that the US military is doing for those countries out of the goodness of Colin Powell's heart. There was an article on this thread decrying the lack of gratitude for the US protecting Saudi Arabia, but the truth is that US troops are really there to protect the oil. If the US could have got the Saudi oil more easily by letting it fall into Saddam Hussein's hands then that's what would've happened (this is what happened with Indonesia's invasion of East Timor isn't it?). It's the oil that counts - it's the material interest of the very rich people who own most of the US economy that are driving that foreign policy.
I'm not excusing these terrorist acts, but I want to point out that they are part of a kind of "national liberation struggle" to overthrow the US/Israeli military dominance of the middle east. Their ideology is religious, and their tactics are terrorist, but they share their anti-imperial orientation with plenty of other groups, nationalists, communists, etc, around the world.
The important thing (and this is where it gets back to the topic of this thread) is that the US govt is going to be waging a propaganda war inside the US precisely to obscure that material basis for the war (oil) and to make the whole thing out to have purely religious justification. I think the religious angle is one of the most significant new features of the "new kind of war". After all, people will sign up for a "moral crusade" for "western values" when they might no be so keen to support a war for "continued occupation of the oil-producing zone".
Funny how the US State Department defines terrorism precisely in a way which excludes themselves.
For instance, there's the famous incident in which a US fighter jet blew up an international passenger train as it was crossing a bridge in Yugoslavia, killing the innocent civilians on board. (Of course, it was an "accident" because the terrorists didn't know that the rail line was actually in use by trains, hey give them a break!) Otherwise there was the bombing of the RTS TV studio in Belgrade, where a few people (make-up artists, etc) were killed, precisely in order to influence an audience (a TV audience!) Or the bombing of a large office building where the Socialist Party of Serbia was based. Of course, innocent people with no connection to the Socialist Party also had offices in that building
But were those responsible for these serious war-crimes actually terrorists? There was some controversy about it, but the Western media was pretty well unanimous that these actions were all OK. I can see now that (according to the US State Dept) they weren't even terrorist acts, because they were performed openly, not clandestinely, and by a coalition of nation-states, not "subnational groups".
If the US were a democracy, then its people would be responsible for the crimes of its government, surely?
But actually the US is not a democracy, so the point doesn't arise.
I was in the US myself earlier this year and I could see that the US people in general know very little about their government's involvement in the rest of the world. Without knowledge, Americans can have no control over that foreign policy. If they knew what their government was really up to they might be able to put a stop to it. That would be democratic.
It seems to me that the important thing for Americans is to actually study the US Empire - its structure, its economic basis, its operations, its strategy and tactics. Find out why the US is hated - not because it's "democratic" (because it's not; it's run by a tiny wealthy elite), but because it's the centre of a vast empire that sucks wealth from poor people all over the globe, restricts their rights and freedoms, and generally subordinates their interests to the interests of the wealthy elite. Because its military forces are the largest terrorist organisation in the history of the world. Because it operates without any restraint, bombing and invading other countries with impunity.
The Israeli army has also shelled and bombed a lot of Palestine - the locals seem to regard this as terrorism, as well they might. Also Israeli settlers living in confiscated land have shot a number of Palestinians. Plus a lot of terror attacks have been carried out by Lebanese militants, firing rockets over the northern border, etc. Are the Palestinians to blame there too? Get your facts straight.
>Clearly you have had your history fed to you
;-)
>by spoon, or else by a Marxist.
Perhaps being a Marxist is a bit like reading history with a spoon, I really don't know, but I have read some books about the lifestyle of people in the medieval and industrial capitalist England, and I got the distinct impression that the industrial revolution actually made a lot of the poorest people even poorer.
Sure, a century or 2 later things are a bit different, but at the time, thousands of poor peasants were displaced and forced into the cities to work in appalling conditions for virtually nothing. As agricultural workers they were made redundant by new agri-technologies. Many of these early industrial workers (including young children) were worked literally to death in a few years. There was wide-spread starvation. In short, their quality of life (never that high) turned to shit. At least as serfs they were sufficiently valuable to their masters to be kept alive, but as cheap industrial labour to the industrialists they were expendable.
Maybe the industrial revolution was a "good thing" but that doesn't mean it was all sweetness and light at the time. On the contrary it was accompanied by unprecedented exploitation, widespread civil unrest, and police repression. Don't be surprised when these same things happen today as a result of the "IT revolution". What the poor and working people of the world need is a political revolution so as to turn the new technologies to the benefit of the majority, rather than a few rich Yanks (present company excluded of course
I'd like to see them try this when China joins the WTO. ;-)
Well, no actually, there's more to it than that.
Your argument implies that the new genes are neatly spliced into place without any cause for concern, but actually the splicing technology itself is not as neat and tidy. Often viruses are used as a means to introduce the foreign gene, for instance, and the result is that though a gene is spliced in, that's not necessarily the only change made to the organism's genome.
The problem with this argument is that the farm on which the plants are growing is nothing like a natural ecosystem anymore.
The problem with THIS argument is that it attempts to justify one mistake by saying its no worse than another.
The "Western" (and esp. US) system of agriculture, based, as it is, on petrochemicals, monoculture, and pesticides, is seriously flawed in a number of ways, but adding GMOs as a way of combating some of its weaknesses is short-sighted in the extreme.
Far better would be to actually establish an agriculture based on something much more like natural ecosystems, with some actual biodiversity, and then some of the "good reasons" for introducing GMOs wouldn't look so shit-hot after all.
This kind of agriculture would really be a kind of "knowledge-based" agriculture. This is where IT could play a big role, in directly managing the farms, much moreso than these centralised biotech monopolies in their ivory towers playing with genes.