              
Click to access previous journals2005 JournalApril 20 - '10 reasons why the USA the most dangerous nation on earth and 3 reasons for hope.'March 3 - 'Sex in the Stroke Ward'2004 journalDecember 16 - 'To do with Ghengis Kahn?'eceDecember 6 - 'The Bad Santa'November 15 - 'The Future of Fascism'October 14 - 'The Future of Dissent'September 29 - 'The Future of Freedom'August 30 - 'Why the future haunts John Howard'August 9 - 'The Future of Death - body, mind, soul, a people, a Parliament'July 8 'The politics of consciousness'May 31 'Who killed Nick Berg - extended version'April 19 'An existential vacuum armed to the teeth'April 1 'What lies ahead'March 9 'The knock on the PM's door at midnight'February 13 'Netizens of the world unite'February 3 'Hey Ho from the world social forum'2003 journalsDecember 16 'The three hit men from the west'November 17 'How Iraq is re-shaping the future'October 30 'How to rescue the future'September 25 'The mass production of serial killers'September 5 'Poor fellah my planet'August 7 'Slam Bam thank you frisco'July 10 'From PornoPopϨ ro agit prop, the coming age of social justce.June 16 'The doors of deception, a death metal soundtrack'May 26 'Murdering the matrix, marketing missiles, marrying machines'May 8 'Smile, you're on combat camera'April 12 'Proud to be a peacenik'April 1 'Forty years ago today'March 27 'Uncle Sam's underwear'February 26 'The art of war, the poetry of freedom, a jittery pope'February 12 'Why the warhorses stomp and snort'January 28 'Getin' ready for a good ol' Texan Barbecue'2002 journalsDecember 29 'Maybe Dr Evil isn't who you think'November 4 Balaclavas, shock-jocks & Lean Cuisine for the ConscienceOctober 21 Sick of the Sound of My Own VoiceSeptember 23 The Divine Right of US CitizensAugust 22 The cook, the wife, two dogs, the CIA, a mobile, a MassacreAugust 17 32 Revelations about the War that Never EndsAugust 2 Fuming Fathers & Pedophile BishopsJune 26 Pre-emptive strikes, bad acid & collective guiltJune 10 Lock Up Your DaughtersMay 30 High Tea with the Black DwarfMay 24 Refugee Blues & wild accusationsMay 22 Back Among the Gum Trees in Fortress OzApril 10 Beyond Good and EvilApril 1 Bloody Easter, Joyful NationFebruary 26 The 14 wiley whoppers of Philip RuddockJanuary 31 Making the world a better place for arms dealers, millionaires and screwed up weirdos2001 journalsDecember 29 Ruddock - WantedDecember 28 Hi - Christmas and New Year MessageDecember 23 Good & Evil, Beyond Rich & Poor, the legacy of Islam's Holy KillerNovember 23 For Truth, Lies, Paranoia, Cruelty & the Truth that can't be Silenced.November 7 Eek - Censorship is back!... Or am I paranoid?October 25 Death of global consciousness, the decline of CNN, the brutality of warlords, East & WestOctober 13 Citizens!.. A new awakening or the same Old TestamentOctober 1 But what would you do if you were George Bush?August 12 A bull with future shock |
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Journal of a Futurist - 20 April 2005
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This is odd, seeing there had been numerous confirmed reports of families slaughtered at check points, bombed at outdoor markets and exterminated at wedding parties (in both Iraq and Afghanistan). Even today, three years after the US invasion, Iraqi children are dying limbless in hospitals without aspirin. Civilians are still being beaten and shot, sometimes while at prayer. Documents recently obtained – not by the media - but by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), include detailed accounts of brutal beatings, "exercise until exhaustion," and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the f**k out of" Iraqis. According to the ACLU, “torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq has been routine and such treatment was considered an acceptable practice by U.S. forces”. Teenagers were beaten until their jaws broke, often while blindfolded, zipcuffed or sandbagged. An unknown number of prisoners died and were buried without autopsies. Anal probes were routine. It was a military version of the Hellfire Club. Iraqi scientists were tortured to reveal the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction, the absence of which was already known to those who authorised the torture.
A secret network of US jails and military bases encircles the world, to which hordes of hooded captives are ferried back and forth night and day, rarely knowing where they are or what they’ve done. The hub of this global gulag, according to The Guardian (19/ March/05) is Afghanistan, “one huge jail”, where the country’s the human rights commission has logged over 800 allegations of serious abuses committed against detainees by US troops. The Guardian’s lengthy report makes grim reading. Deaths during interrogation, improvised tortures, such as naked prisoners chained to stone floors in icy conditions, unmarked graves, and the enforcement of homosexual intercourse among the inmates by female guards. According to Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog, Human Rights First ,"The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand,"
The day before obliterating Nagasaki, the allies signed the London Agreement, which made crimes against humanity punishable in an international court. Awkwardly, the fourth Hague Convention of 1907, had banned the bombardment of civilians. However, the American war crimes prosecutor, Telford Taylor, decided that since air bombardment had become a “recognised part of modern warfare”, such acts had become “customary law”. As historian Sven Linqvist points out: rather than ruling that the allies – “especially the allies” – had committed this kind of war crime, “the American prosecutor declared the law had been rendered invalid by the actions of the allies”. (See A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, Granta Books, London, 2001)
In 1963 President Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled how he had opposed dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. He told the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that he was against it on two counts. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” His gut reaction was right. The chain reaction unleashed by the splitting of the atom, has been replicated on earth by the chain reaction of nations conspiring to acquire bomb. Should a nuclear bomb ever strike another city, the responsibility will be rightly sourced to those who chose to incinerate Hiroshima.
Aerial bombardment of civilians is still standard US practice, often involving the use of weapons outlawed by the 1977 Geneva Protocols. The US employed chemical weapons in Korea, napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in the first Gulf war, cluster bombs in Kabul, vacuum bombs in Tora Bora, phosphorous bombs in Falluja and most of the above various parts of the Iraq and Afghanistan. On the way are nuclear tipped bunker busters. Taken all for all, despite the best intentions of its citizens, the US Government has committed more acts of airborne terror than all the other nations of earth put together.
Neither mounting statistics of deformities, nor heartrending documentary images of disfigured Iraqi babies, has altered Pentagon policy, despite the risks to its own troops. The department of defence admitted in 1998 that its own investigation into the “potential health hazards of uranium point to serious deficiencies of what our troops understand about the health effect DU posed on the battlefield ”. A UN subcommission on human rights has condemned uranium munitions as weapons of indiscriminate destruction. What does this say about the morality of a military which uses such weapons, knowing they are capable of deforming the future unborn?
“Americans believe these lies not because they are stupid”, notes Amy Goodman, host of New York’s independent TV news show "Democracy Now, “but because they are good media consumers. Our media have become an echo chamber for those in power”. Instead of challenging the fraudulent claims of the Bush administration, the US media have become a megaphone for government propaganda, a cheer leader in the Terror Wars, a sanitising filter of everyday horrors. Six huge corporations control all the major media outlets. As Goodman points out, the lack of diversity in ownership helps explain the lack of diversity in the news.
The difference between the April 1937 bombing of Guernica and the 2004 razing of Falluja, is that the latter was more bloody minded, lasted much longer and has not yet produced a Picasso to capture the world’s conscience. The Falluja attack began with US forces storming the General Hospital, menacing doctors, dragging away patients, putting snipers on the roof and blocking attempts to help the city’s wounded - all in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. And where was the media? In bed with the marines, which is why they’re referred to on the web as “presstitutes”.
Of the enormous numbers of women and children killed in Iraq since the invasion, the media have taken it upon themselves to self censor the images of human wreckage. Night after night our TV screens are filled with images of actors getting sliced and diced, but the false God of patriotism blocks the truth of what the world’s most expensive weapons are doing to the people we claim to be liberating.
Like it or not, global survival depends on a mainstream mind-shift. While this is understood by many US citizens, the White House is still groping in the dark, dreaming of endless oil, space wars, and the Return of Christ.
It is reminiscent of the era when the Vatican burnt alive those who maintained the Earth was not the center of the universe. How long will it take our leaders to realise the ground has again shifted, that nature has no political borders, that fossil fuels are finite, the weather is getting wilder, the consumer society is getting ridiculous, and even the rich are depressed. Today’s mindshift is both philosophical and practical, as we move away from a system based on extraction to one of restoration; from a lifestyle of waste to one of sustainability. This is the dawning of eco literacy; the emerging of a whole earth awareness that will jolt nations to see themselves as social units in a global family. A time when the national interest can no longer subvert the wider interest of global renewal.
In such matters, everyday citizens are far ahead of those who govern in their name. After the Boxing Day tsunamis, when both Canberra and the White House made offers of financial help publicly condemned as “stingy”, it was citizens who first emptied their wallets, shaming the politicians into upping their offers and preening before the media, to crow about their “generosity”, (which no truly generous person does.) Since the tsunami devastations, it is high schools which have been leading the way, with students and teachers from NSW raising over $1 million to date, in a spontaneous outburst of citizen diplomacy.
Washing its hands of Kyoto was a dumb move for America and Australia, whatever the protocol’s shortcomings. This is a vital mechanism of global co-operation. The American way of life is no longer not negotiable. The solutions are blowing in the wind, rising with the tide, soaring through solar panels. One day, shopping will cease to be the primary source of human fulfilment.
3 REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
- The
flair and persistence of domestic dissent. Despite its anaemic trickle
into the mainstream, free speech is alive and frothing in a myriad of
tributaries. On the net, in thoughtful glossies, at concerts, in cafes,
in Flash art, at public meetings, at poetry slams, in small town
newspapers, even on military blogs, in docos, in ginger-group emails
& on alternative radio and TV, such as the above mentioned
Democracy Now. Today’s alternative media thrive on foreign news
sources, which offer a counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand corporate
staples and, perhaps for the first time in decades, reveal the sad
standing in which the US Government is widely held. It was the web
audiences who first learned, via the surge of links to Der Spiegel,
that the first glimpse of the US President on the big screens at the
Pope’s funeral, was greeted with an outburst of “deafening” catcalls.
The blogs reap the reward of mainstream mendacity. From the first thud of the war drums, radical bloggers ridiculed the official reasons for invading Iraq and the manipulation of public hysteria. Long before Colin Powell addressed the UN with his bogus charts and anthrax props, such claims had been discredited. During the siege of Falluja, it was the bloggers who linked to the street lined images of child corpses and eye witness accounts of US atrocities, including the influential whatreallyhappened.com. In April, Rupert Murdoch confessed he had been wrong about “this thing called the digital revolution”, which didn’t “limp away”, as he hoped. But now comes the scary bit. Murdoch plans to “grasps this huge opportunity”, and expand his reach!
- The revival of Protest music. This had completely passed me by, until a tip-off from extreme blogger, John Kaminski.
Much of it is inspiring, embracing many genres, and every bit as
revolutionary as the soundtrack of the years spanning the Civil Rights
movement and the counter culture. The daughters of George Bush have
reportedly presented their dad with an I-Pod. Here are suggestions for
his playlist (all available online, if you know where to look):
Falluja, by David Rovics; What Would You Do, Sonic Jihad; Know Your
Enemy, Dead Prez; It’s a Rich Man’s War, Steve Earle; To Kill the
Child, Roger Waters; We Can’t Make it Here; James McMurtry; Self
Evident, Ani Di Franco; Bomb the World, Michael Franti, who sums it all
up: “We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.”
- The
growing legion of truth seekers. These are the freedom fighters of the
information age, the foot soldiers of the NGO’s, the anonymous
cyber-mice who ferret out and post “lost” Government documents, as well
as the few remaining investigative journalists who put truth telling
before flag waving, as well as - yes! – conspiracy theorists, maligned
by coincidence theorists and others partial to official sources. While
some “alternative” scenarios put forward to account for 9/11 seem
delusional, that doesn’t vindicate the version insisted upon by the
White House, or its hand picked commission, where George Bush &
Dick Cheney were allowed to testify in secret, together and not under
oath. The Bush administration received ‘dozens of urgent, credible
warnings that the attacks were coming’, including a Presidential Daily
Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in
U.S" , reporting "patterns of suspicious activity in this country
consistent with preparations for hijackings." Nothing was done. Even
today, it is still not known who really hijacked the planes. For more
on this, and numerous other anomalies, you may profit from a sceptical
tour of the waterfront with Steven T. Jones in the March 05 San Francisco Bay Guardian.
You might even agree that 9/11’s most bizarre conspiracy theory of all is the one put forward by the White House. Anyway, thank God for free speech, even in its diminished version, which is all that’s left between us and Orwell’s 1984.
According to a recent US poll, almost 50% of New York City residents believe “some U.S. officials knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around 9/11/01 and that they consciously failed to act”, which brings to mind the Reichstag fire. In the event, we may never know who struck the first match, but the whole world will go on feeling the heat for years to come. Thanks to the New Yorker, I have learned the 73rd hexagram of the I-Ching is interpreted such: “Two towers fall. When smoke fills people’s eyes, they can be led anywhere.” Only when the Government and the media are returned to the people, will the smoke will be blown away.
www.richardneville.com
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Update 21 March 2005
