Interview with Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is a Swiss public intellectual, author, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur living in the United Kingdom. He has written several books on literature, philosophy, art, travel and architecture. In August 2008, he established a new educational enterprise in London called “The School of Life”. Among his prominent books are “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, “The Consolations of Philosophy” and “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”.

De Botton is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The title was awarded to him in recognition of his services to art and architecture. His books are translated into several languages and are among the best-selling works of literature in so many countries, including Iran. What follows is the complete text of an in-depth interview with Alain de Botton where we discussed a variety of topics and issues concerning philosophy, art, literature, travel and architecture.

Kourosh Ziabari: Dear Alain; I’m the second Iranian journalist who conducts an interview with you. How’s your feeling about that?

Alain de Botton: I’m delighted to hear from Iranian journalists and readers. In most countries, one signs an agreement with a publisher to sell a book and therefore there is an immediate and direct connection with a country and its readers. However, with Iran, it didn’t happen like this for me. One day, from the blue, I received an email from my translator and she offered to send me a few copies of my books in Persian. This felt like a great surprise and honor. I know a lot about Iran, Its architecture, its history, its landscape, but I have never visited, so knowing that my books are read in the country helped to solidify a connection which is very vivid in my imagination already.

KZ: “How Proust Can Change Your Life” is your most widely-read book in Iran. Many Iranian booklovers with an inclination toward philosophy have read both Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and your book on Proust’s work, as well. You published this book 13 years ago. If you had to rewrite or revise your book, what would you change, append or remove? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this book in your own view?

AB: I continue to be rather happy with this book. It is short, so it doesn’t say everything one could say about Proust, but it tries to say what is most important. I imagine it like a conversation with an imaginary friend who asks me ‘Why should this book matter? Why should I bother with it when life is short and I am so busy?’ So my book is my answer. It attempts in clear and non-academic language to convey the importance of one of the most intelligent and sensitive writers in the history of humanity. A man like Marcel Proust comes along once every 300 years or so… not more.

KZ: You admire Marcel Proust for what is believed to be his “simple and straightforward” language. What are the features of such a language? What makes a piece of writing simple and appealing to an ordinary reader? According to your response to one of Mr. Kamali Dehghan’s questions, they’re only the idiots and stupid people who seem complicated; the genius, intelligent man is simple and straightforward. Why do you think so?

AB: There can of course be pleasure in complex pieces of language: some very beautiful poetry is very complicated. Nevertheless, I especially admire clarity and logic, where one feels that a very complex thought has been understood so profoundly that it has been distilled into a perfect clear jewel. For example, consider this aphorism by La Rochefoucauld: ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others’. This thought contains years of experience, one could write an entire book on this, and yet he has condensed it into one beautiful, brilliant sentence. Marcel Proust does this too – one finds one’s own thoughts in his work, but in a way that teaches us more about ourselves than we ever knew on our own.

KZ: You started your literary career at a young age and published your first book when you were 23. How did writing in the youth days contribute to your future career as a professional writer?

AB: Sometimes I wish I had started writing later, but I felt ready at 23, and I wrote the book that I still perhaps love best, Essays in Love. I felt so unhappy about love; it was as if I had no choice but to write. I felt the full agony of late adolescent unrequited love. Many works of literature have arisen from such feelings. They are among the most powerful we have.

KZ: Tell us a little about your School of Life. How did the idea of establishing this enterprise come about? What activities are usually carried out in the school? How and for what purposes do you connect people together in this school?

AB: If you went to any university in the modern world and said that you had come to study ‘how to live’, you would be politely shown the door, if not the way to an asylum. Universities see it as their job to train you either in a specific career, e.g. law, medicine, or to give you a grounding in ‘the humanities’, but for no identifiable reason, beyond the vague and unexamined notion that three years studying the classics or reading Middlemarch may be a good idea.

The contemporary university is an uncomfortable amalgamation of ambitions once held by a variety of educational institutions. It owes debts to the philosophical schools of Ancient Greece and Rome, to the monasteries of the Middle Ages, to the theological colleges of Paris, Padua and Bologna and to the research laboratories of early modern science. One of the legacies of this heterogeneous background is that academics in the humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science and unable to find a sensible way of assessing the value of a novel or a history book.

The chief problem for anyone in a history or an English department today is that science has been too successful. Science can make your car work, fix your liver, send spaceships to Mars and turn sunlight into electricity. In other words, science is to be valued because it gives us control over our fate, whereas in W. H. Auden’s defiant words, “poetry makes nothing happen”. Auden’s stance may be a heroic rallying cry for the freelance poet, but it becomes more alarming as a job description for a young academic who has just completed a doctorate on Biblical references in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s later verse.

The response of humanities departments to their status anxiety has been to mimic their colleagues in physics or astronomy, in a move that has had short-term gains, but is in danger of asphyxiating their subjects in the long run. Academics in the arts have decided that they, too, should be viewed as ‘researchers’ and that their principal value should come from their capacity to discover new things, like chemists might uncover new molecular structures. There are clearly occasions when scholars do make genuine discoveries which can be compared to breakthroughs in science, but it surely represents a distortion of the value of the arts as a whole to make their value entirely dependent on factual, verifiable criteria.

To do so is to behave like a man who has fallen deeply in love and asks his companion if he might act on his emotions by measuring the distance between her elbow and her shoulder blade. In the modern academy, an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a 14th-century Florentine painter, typically ends up answering his emotions by writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto.

It was in the 16th century that the greatest anti-academic scholar of the West launched his attack on the bias of universities. Michel de Montaigne, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the great texts, nevertheless deplored the way in which academics tended to privilege learning over wisdom. “I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology. We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’”

It was because of my time at Cambridge that I started to dream of an ideal new sort of institution which could welcome Montaigne, or indeed Nietzsche, Goethe or Kierkegaard, a University of Life that would give students the tools to master their lives through the study of culture rather than using culture for the sake of passing an exam.

This ideal University of Life would draw on traditional areas of knowledge (history, art, literature) but would angle its material towards active concerns, how to choose a career, conduct a relationship, sack someone and get ready to die. The university would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would be calculatedly vulgar. Rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering 19th-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, but they would have learnt it under a very different set of headings.

On the menu of my ideal university, you wouldn’t find subjects like ‘philosophy’ and ‘history’. Instead, you would find courses in ‘death’, ‘marriage’, ‘choosing a career’, ‘ambition’, and ‘child rearing’. Too often, these head-on assaults on the great questions are abandoned to the second-rate efforts of gurus and motivational speakers.

So I came to feel it was high time for serious culture to reappropriate them and to consider them with all the rigour and seriousness currently too often lavished on topics of minor relevance.

That’s why, in early 2009, some colleagues and I came together to start a little educational institution in London that we’ve called The School of Life (www.theschooloflife.com). The idea was to offer instruction in the great questions of life in a way that would be intelligent, imaginative, revolutionary and playful. At the school, you can sign up for courses in politics, work, family, love – or indeed, talk to a therapist, learn how to garden in the city or go on a communal meal for strangers. The spirit of the place is anarchic and yet serious at heart. We’re throwing down a gauntlet to traditional education, trying to reinvent how learning gets done. There are similarities with what I have tried to do in some of my books, though here we’re attempting to demonstrate, rather than simply describe, the advantages of the examined life.

We have had a very successful first year, which suggests to me the depth of frustration that many ordinary people feel for the pedagogic approach of traditional universities.

KZ: You serve in the Living Architecture organization as the Creative Director. You’ve also been appointed the honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in recognition of your services to architecture. How is your professional career as a literary author related to your admiration for sublime, transcendent architecture? How do you make a connection between architecture and literature?

AB: Is it serious to worry about design and architecture? To think hard about the shape of the bathroom taps, the color of the bedspread and the dimensions of the window frames?

A long intellectual tradition suggests it isn’t quite. A whiff of trivia and self-indulgence floats over the topic. It seems like something best handled by the flamboyant presenters of early evening TV shows. A thought-provoking number of the world’s most intelligent people have always disdained any interest in the appearance of buildings, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead. The Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus is said to have demanded of a heart-broken friend whose house had burnt to the ground, ‘If you really understand what governs the universe, how can you yearn for bits of stone and pretty rock?’ It is unclear how much longer the friendship lasted.

And yet determined efforts to scorn design have also long been matched by equally persistent attempts to mould the material world to graceful ends. People have strained their backs carving flowers into their roof beams and their eyesight embroidering animals onto their tablecloths. They have given up weekends to hide unsightly cables behind ledges. They have thought carefully about appropriate kitchen work-surfaces. They have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street.

We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to the appearance of houses and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations. I personally side with the view that it does (unfortunately as it’s expensive) matter what things look like: an ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-coloured limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us. Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better and for worse, different people in different places – and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

Our sensitivity to our surroundings can be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.

Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. In a house strangled by three motorways, or in a wasteland of rundown tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. We may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need – but are at constant risk of forgetting we need – within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

In turn, those places whose outlook match and legitimate our own, we tend to honor with the term ‘home’. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognize its harmony with our own prized internal song. As the French writer Stendhal put it, ‘What we find beautiful is the promise of happiness’.

It is the world’s great religions that have perhaps given most thought to the role played by our environment in determining our identity and so – while seldom constructing places where we might fall asleep – have shown the greatest sympathy for our need for a home. The very principle of religious architecture has its origins in the notion that where we are critically determines what we are able to believe in. To defenders of religious architecture, however convinced we are at an intellectual level of our commitments to a creed, we will only remain reliably devoted to it when it is continually affirmed by our buildings. We may be nearer or further away from God on account of whether we’re in a church, a mosque – or a supermarket. We can’t be good, faithful people anywhere.

Ordinary, domestic architecture can be said to have just as much of an influence on our characters as religious buildings. What we call a beautiful house is one that rebalances our misshapen natures and encourages emotions which we are in danger of losing sight of. For example, an anxious person may be deeply moved by a white empty minimalist house. Or a business executive who spends her life shuttling between airports and steel and glass conference centers may feel an intense attraction to a simple rustic cottage – which can put her in touch with sides of her personality that are denied to her in the ordinary press of her days. We call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.

It is sometimes thought exaggerated to judge people on their tastes in design. It can hardly seem appropriate to pass judgment on the basis of a choice of wallpaper. But the more seriously we take architecture, the more we can come to argue that it is in fact logical to base sympathy for someone on their visual tastes. For visual taste is never just simply a visual matter. It’s indicative of a view of life. Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports. We can, for example, feel two distinct conceptions of fulfillment emanating from a plain crockery set on the one hand and an ornate flower-encrusted one on the other – an invitation to a democratic graceful sensibility in the former case, to a more nostalgic, country-bound disposition in the latter.

In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of particular visions of happiness.

To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life. Similarly, buildings will strike us as offensive not because they violate a private and mysterious visual preference but because they conflict with our understanding of the rightful sense of existence.

No wonder then that our discussions of architecture and design have a tendency to be so heated. Arguments about what is beautiful are at heart arguments about the values we want to live by; rather than merely struggling about how we want things to look.

Because of my feelings towards architecture, last year, I began a new organization called Living Architecture; we build beautiful modern houses around Britain that people can rent for a holiday. It is a combination of an artistic firm and a holiday company. I love to combine business and art in this way. It is an immensely fulfilling project. www.living-architecture.co.uk

KZ: As you know, ancient Persian architecture and Islamic architecture are two of the most prominent schools of architecture in the world. In Iran, you can find the most glorious and magnificent instances of inspirational architecture. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve dedicated one part of your documentary film “The Architecture of Happiness” to the Islamic architecture. Tell us about your familiarity with the Persian and Islamic architecture. Which elements are the most striking and eminent features of Persian and Islamic architecture in your view?

For the modern world, what Persian architecture shows most of all are the possibilities of decoration. For 100 years, decoration became taboo in the secular west. All buildings had to be plain, white or grey – but with nothing on them. Persian architecture reminds us that a building can also be a jewel, or as something as bright and intricate as a piece of lace. This kind of architecture speaks of delight, of transcending the ordinary, of touching something that makes us awed and humble. All this we need to relearn and remember – and buildings should help us to do this.

KZ: In your book “The Art of Travel”, you’ve elaborately discussed the delicacies and subtleties of traveling and presented guidelines on how to make one’s travels more enjoyable and fruitful. How may countries have you traveled to? How do you make a travel enjoyable for yourself? May I ask you to give us some clues on how to employ the “art of travel” in order to turn our exhausting, arduous voyages into pleasurable and interesting trips?

I think we need to recognize that traveling is not only difficult practically; it is also a psychological experience. At its best, travel should change our souls, should make us into better, wiser people. However, only too often, it is ruined by our lack of expectation. Religious pilgrimages show the way: pilgrims use travel for inner transformation. This is always the way one should do it.

KZ: You spent one week at the Heathrow Airport and talked to the airline staff, senior executives and travelers about their attitudes and viewpoints about the time which they spend there. The result of this one-week research became your instructive book “A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary”. Unquestionably, Heathrow Airport is a unique and unrivaled venue in Europe. What did you extract from your researches, interviews and observations there?

AB: There are not too many books about airports in the world, given how central airports are to our experiences. Very often, when airports are written about, they are covered in the context of disasters. The airport becomes significant when there is a tragedy, a plane crashes, or else when there is an appalling strike, a snowstorm, some kind of disruption. I was resolutely against focusing on these extraordinary events. What interested me was to describe the ordinary, precisely because it is so very unusual and special.

The real problem with airports is that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane and because it’s so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings. And yet airports definitely reward a second look. They are the imaginative centers of the modern world. It’s here you should go to find, in a concrete form, all the themes of modernity that one otherwise finds only in an abstract forms in the media. Here you see globalization, environmental destruction, runaway consumerism, family breakdown, the modern sublime etc. in action.

Airports are so fascinating because they are places where high technology meets consumer culture, where we feel in the presence of the giant collective mind of the modern world. So often, we are in environments which haven’t changed much since the 19th century; suddenly at the airport, we see the promises of modernity: the promise of speed, transformation, infernal bureaucracy and nightmarish loss of individuality. It is a mixture of horror and beauty, which as an artist one can celebrate and lament.

Airports are a mixture of horror and beauty. The sight of an aircraft taking off to the skies is an intensely moving and amazing scene, not only for small boys, but for grown ups too. Boy’s dreams are often the right ones. The question is why men are not allowed to exploit the dreams of boys, why we have to put those dreams away. As I get older, I try more and more to do the sort of things I liked when I was 8. Boys are quite right to be excited by technology, like the Airbus A380 or the new Rolls Royce Trent engine, which is as fine a human document of human creativity as a cathedral.

Airports help to put us in touch with the idea of alternatives, they relativize us. They make us think that right now, be it at 10am or 3pm, somewhere on the other side of the globe, very different things are happening. They do that very basic task of the places of travel; jolt us into remembering that the world is stranger, more exciting, more various than we imagine it when we are in familiar surroundings, and in danger of boredom and routine.

KZ: While looking through your books, I came across to an interesting point and that was the diversity and variability of your works. You have not limited yourself to a certain dogma in writing. You have produced works on philosophy, literature, architecture, travel, social class etc. We don’t have so many notable authors with such a diverse background. It might be an attractive mission to be able to explore so many fields of study simultaneously. Isn’t it?

AB: We live in a very specialized the world: the engineer must only do engineering etc. The same has become true of writing. Yet I am a naturally restless soul, always curious about things, and the questions that haunt me exist in so many different spheres. The question of meaning, happiness, fulfillment, love… these topics are everywhere, in airports, in love stories, in architecture…

KZ: As a Western author, what are in your view, the most challenging predicaments of the Western society? In the oriental communities, especially in Iran, there’s a common perception that the foundations of morality are becoming shaky in the West. As evidence, we can cite the dissolution of the foundation of traditional family in the West. Do you agree with me that at the same as experiencing technological, industrial, political and economic advancements, the Western societies are undergoing a cultural, moral setback?

AB: It is certainly true that the West is experiencing some very serious problems in the area of morality and community. We are having a hard time finding replacement for a religious structure. The rational Enlightenment thought that guides the West has paid too little attention to the emotional needs of man. It has always called for freedom, very important, but we also need guidance and a sense of belonging. I have just finished a book about religion, arguing that even atheists need to learn things from religion, and in it, I make many of the points you hint at.

KZ: In your “The Consolations of Philosophy”, you’ve tried to reconcile philosophy with the daily life. Your effort has been focused on employing philosophy to appease the pains of mankind. How is it possible for the intricate, complex concepts of philosophy to find solutions for the daily problems of the humankind? Does the philosophy of the six philosophers which you’ve presented in your book address the problems of humanity in one way or the other?

AB: Philosophy is something that, alongside religion, should guide us in our everyday lives. At many moments of our lives, we need assistance of a psychological kind, either someone to explain what we are feeling, or to put a feeling in context, to make us feel less strange to ourselves.

KZ: Our world is witness to a growing wave of violence, inhumanity and atrocity absorbing different countries. Discrimination against the minorities, repressive regimes which violate the human rights and restrict the natural freedoms of their own citizens, bloody wars and battles which are fought in the four corners of the world and the imperialistic powers which are looking to expand their dominance over the subjugated nations constitute the major concerns of the international community today. Are these problems solvable in short run? Does philosophy provide solutions to these problems?

AB: I very much believe that writers should be engaged in the problems of our world. They should not retreat into the domestic, or only consider abstract intellectual questions. Of course, it is easy to despair, to feel that one person can never do very much. But history shows a number of writers in every age who manage subtly to influence things, who awaken their countrymen, who frighten those who are corrupt, who say things that need to be said, who do with words what could not be done with guns and prisons. So yes, I remain hopeful that writing can in its own small way alleviate the human condition.

KZ: For my final question, let me ask you about your general perception of Iran. Although the country which you reside in and the country which I belong to are at odds, literature can bridge the gaps between us. What is your special message for the Iranian readers of this interview?

AB: I would like to say to them firstly how very honored I feel that they read my work. I know that it is a great commitment and investment, and I am deeply grateful. Also, I would like to say that though our two countries are at odds, the ordinary people of the UK, like the ordinary people of Iran, have no dispute with one another at all – we are all at heart vulnerable creatures in need of forgiveness and understanding. In a modest way, books can help to build bridges, and I would be greatly pleased if my own books  helped Iranian readers to feel that there is someone a little like them living in another country far away. I sincerely believe in the international family of mankind, and that literature has a role to play in reminding us of it.

Interview with Erri De Luca

Erri De Luca is an internationally-renowned Italian poet and writer. “Corriere della Sera” literature critic Giorgio De Rienzo has called him “the writer of the decade”. He started writing since he was 20; however, his first book was published in 1989, when he was 39 years old. Upon graduating from high school in 1968, he joined the newly-established far-left, extra-parliamentary organization of Lotta Continua. The political activities of the organization were terminated early in 1976. Erri De Luca speaks several languages, including English, French, Hebrew and Yiddish.

He is the author of several books including “Montedidio” which has won him The Prix Femina award. Erri De Luca has translated several books of Bible into Italian, including Exodus, Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Ruth. His works have been translated and published in various countries such as Spain, Iran, Portugal, Germany, Holland, USA, Brazil, Poland, Norway, Danmark, Romania, Greece and Lithuania.

De Luca joined me in an exclusive interview and answered my questions on his works and his views on literature, culture, politics and society.

Kourosh Ziabari: What made you interested in literature for the first time? You published your first novel when you were 39; however, you had experienced various professions and jobs before that. You experienced carpentry, masonry and apprenticeship and then moved to writing. What were the first motives which moved you towards literature?

Erri De Luca: I owe my approach to my father’s library. I spent my childhood in a small room with books to the ceiling, I slept surrounded by books. I’ve been reading and writing since I was a kid, books have been the best company. I published my first book late because I wasn’t looking for a publisher. I wrote and write personal stories, always with me telling the story and I thought these would never interest anybody else.

KZ: Our world is filled with materialistic approaches to life. Morality is losing its place in the interpersonal relationships. People disregard the principles of honesty and decency very easily. Is this world compatible with the ideal world which you have portrayed for yourself?

EDL: I’m used to sit at table for lunch where one eats the fruit of one’s work. At these tables, which are the majority on the planet, my principles are not ideals but daily practice.

KZ: Naples is the prominent setting of your novel. Its people speak a variety of Italian language which is even unintelligible to a number of Italians. What’s the significance of Naples for you? How do you seek your desires and ambitions in this ancient city?

EDL: Naples is my place of origin and  Napolitan my mother tongue. Italian came later, with books and conversations with my father, who wanted to teach me perfect Italian. In Naples, I had my sentimental education – not to love, but to the sentiments of compassion, anger and shame which are the fundaments of any human being. Naples is not a birth town, but it is a “cause town” and I am one of its effects.

KZ: You speak several languages including French, English, Hebrew and Yiddish. How is the sense of being a multilingual writer? Jock London believes that every book is a gateway to a new world. Do you agree that every language is also a gateway to a new world? With several languages which you know, do you usually feel that you live in different worlds?

EDL: I learnt languages to read them rather than to speak them. My desire was to follow the authors of pages which touched me in their vocabulary and their combination of syllables. Thus I find a personal extract, a glass [of wine] and I go directly to the source. The world which attracts me is that of an author rather than of a people. That’s why I’m not interested in geographically visiting countries whose language I know. I can read in Russian out of love for its poets and writers but I have no desire to find myself in Odessa or Moscow. With the languages I have learnt I have no need to move from where I am.

KZ: Some people believe that the Iranians and Italians are very similar to each other. They say that among the European citizens, Italians are the most similar to Iranians. This similarity can be found in the appearance, social interactions, character and dispositions. Have you ever noticed any similarity between the people of Italy with the oriental nations?

EDL: I find common ground with all people with feet in the Mediterranean Sea. I recognize all trees, goats, dry walls and wrinkled faces. For thousands of years we have mixed, via invasions, immigration, epidemics, wars. Iran and the East are a key premise of our civilization, the first layer, the first seed of our bread.

KZ: Iran and Italy are home to two of the most important ancient civilizations in the world; Persian Empire and Roman Empire. Although the political developments have separated the two countries, how can the cultural ties serve to bring the two nations together and benefit them mutually?

EDL: Iran is the most important country in world politics today. Iranians must know that their decisions with respect to pacific development will be decisive for the next decade. Iran is today, even more than in the past, on the front lines of history. Everything that happens in your country will affect the four corners of the horizon [the rest of the world]

KZ: An Iranian critic of your novel has said that the bitter comedy of your novel “Montedidio” is inspired by Italo Calvino. What do you think about it? Has Calvino ever inspired you in your writings?

EDL: I am not a reader fascinated by Calvino or by 20th century Italian literature in general. I know I owe much to Napolitan literature, its theater, its songs, and to other foreign litteratures which educated me in my youth thanks to my father’s choices and tastes.

KZ: In your short story “The Trench”, you’ve tried to show the difficulty of earning a living and portrayed the complexities a low-ranking laborer faces in dealing with a low-rate job. In one part of your story, the protagonist states: “why in the world should a human being have to earn bread for his children with a noose around his neck? For me it was a question of pride, but for him it was only bread, and still he had to soak it in that salty water of ours, which tasted so much like tears.” I think it’s the essence of your story. What’s your own idea? Why is our life intertwined with difficulties and complexities so inextricably?

EDL: I write stories of my life and the one you bring up is simply a tale of a slice of experience on a construction site in France. Nothing to add, maybe something to take out. My life shares with the majority of other lifes, anonymous and normal. The fact that I am able to write stories does not change that biographic fact. I am someone from the ground floor and my stories are the same.

KZ: Have you ever had the ambition of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature? What do you think about this award? Has it been always awarded to those who deserved it?

EDL: Often, the Academy has rewarded names unknown to me and I was able to discover them thanks to these choices. So I enjoy their literary tastes, most of the time. For my part, I don’t think that I am under consideration for the Academy.

KZ: Dario Fo was the last Italian writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. What do you think of him and his works?

EDL: Dario Fo is an international personality, one of the few Italian personas appreciated worldwide, and he deserves the honor conferred by the prize.

KZ: How much time do you dedicate to studying the world’s literature? How many books do you read in a year? Do you have a special criterion for the geographical distribution of the writers of whom you read novels and literary works? How much time do you spend on reading Italian literature?

EDL: During the day, the time to read and write is squeezed in a small space. I read old works, poetry from all over the world and I don’t follow Italian literature.

KZ: Are you among those thinkers who believe that artistic work is solely produced for the sake of pleasure, or the art itself? What’s the ultimate objective of art? Is it aimed at entertaining the addressee? Is it aimed at creating cosmetic beauty? Which sort of literature do you prefer; a literary work which is created for pleasure or a literary work which is admired for its moral points?

EDL: Literature is for me the best dialogue. I prefer it to any other art form. It should keep its reader company, save him time, be worth the time spent with a book. Literature’s sole responsibility is to create desire to reopen the book. In difficult circumstances, under dictatorships, it can also have the responsibility to save speech. In jail, a book is a fortune and a huger capital for resistance.

KZ: And my final question. What’s your recommendation for those who want to become professional readers of literature? What are the best ways for comprehending the essence of a literary work, whether it’s in the form of poetry or prose? How can a good reader relate to the core of what the writer intends to convey?

EDL: A book is always half of the trip from a writer and a reader, who must complete the work by mixing it with his/her life, moods and needs. A book is a meeting, with no utilization guide, and thus always different, failure or success. Every book is ultimately led by its reader, linked to his/her experience, friendly to his/her human adventure to enrich it. No formula and no advice – “have a nice ride reader” is what I tell myself when I open a page and begin to read.

Fuck the New York Times and Fuck “Permitted” Marches

On September 26, 2009, the New York Times deemed it fit to run an article called “Thousands Hold Peaceful March at G-20 Summit,” in which propagandist Ian Urbina informed us of “several thousand demonstrators” converging on downtown Pittsburgh in light of that city’s hosting of the Group of 20 (G-20) meeting. Urbina called it a “peaceful and permitted march.” The demonstrators, he said, were “calling for solutions to a range of problems that they attributed to the economic policies of the world leaders.” Later, he told of speakers urging demonstrators to “fight for an array of social issues they felt had been largely ignored in global economic policy.”

“They attributed” and “they felt.”

Okay, in a rare case of actual objectivity, Urbina was careful to clarify that not everyone agrees with the protesters. However, that’s where the any attempt at journalism ended. If Urbina were capable of even an iota of independent thought, he’d have found out why demonstrators feel and attribute what they feel and attribute. But…it’s so much easier to just describe what they looked liked.

Some wore fatigues, some chimed cymbals, one played a French horn, 400 “self-described anarchists” were clad in black, and dig this: one very radical group even “held aloft with bamboo poles a giant fabric replica of a dove.” None of these dissidents, Urbina reminded us, ever got closer than the steps of the city-county building, blocks from where the G-20 meeting was being held.

Ain’t dissent neat? Surely peace and justice will be upon us soon.

When telling his loyal readers about a group called “Students for Justice in Palestine” and what they were calling for, propagandist Urbina was extra-cautious to use quotation marks: “the Israeli occupation.” A practicing journalist might have at least used a search engine to include some context from United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which refers to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

Unburdened by such rudimentary journalistic standards, Urbina goes on to end his report by quoting a 20-year-old student from Duquesne University, who was somehow “optimistic that it would be hard to ignore thousands in the street.” As the student explained: “They will listen to a certain degree. They might not necessarily do anything.”

Take home message: Fuck the New York Times and fuck peaceful and permitted marches that won’t necessarily do anything.

Poverty draft?

You take a black kid, Hispanic kid, Italian kid, and a kid of undefined ethnicity…and let’s say each of them—surprise, surprise—has meager pecuniary prospects. You know, the whole “economic downturn” thing everyone is yapping about.

So…the undefined guy weighs his options and promptly enlists in the United States Marine Corps. The few, the proud, and all that.

Everyone—and I mean, everyone—in his immediate circle applauds this decision. Not only will undefined guy pull himself out of financial hardship, they reason (sic), but he also gets to “serve his country.” Bravo…

Meanwhile, the poor black kid weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in the Crips.

The poverty-stricken Hispanic weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in Latin Kings.

The uneducated Italian kid weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in the Mafia.

Like the “heroes” in the military, these three kids are also facing a stark choice—being poor or choosing a uniform and gun—but no one hangs yellow ribbons for them, no one makes excuses them when they kill innocents.

No one argues when these kids are called “criminals.”

Why?

Well, there’s one colossal difference between them and the men and women who volunteer to join the US military and get paid to wage illegal and immoral war:

Even though the US military is far more dangerous than any street gang or Mafia family, the US military is considered legal.

Western Media Persists in Propaganda About Iraq’s Purported WMD

The mainstream media is reporting that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein told his FBI interrogators after his capture that he lied about having weapons of mass destruction (WMD) because he feared Iran. But there’s just one problem with this claim: Saddam Hussein never claimed to have WMD, but , as everybody knows, repeatedly denied that this was so.

This propaganda line had its origins early on following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. David Kay, who early on headed up the CIA’s effort to find WMD, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), suggested at the time that Saddam had “bluffed” about having WMD in order to deter Iran.

The deception served to absolve the Bush administration of responsibility for having lied about the “threat” by making it seem as though it was reasonable to arrive at that conclusion since Saddam had claimed to possess WMD, even though he did not.

In actual fact, however, far from admitting possession, Iraq repeatedly denied having WMD in the months and years leading up to the invasion.

The “Saddam ‘bluffed’” claim, though, has lived on. It reared its ugly head again in January 2008 when Saddam’s interrogator, FBI agent George Piro, was interviewed for CBS 60 Minutes. Piro explained that he told Saddam he liked his poetry, and Saddam boasted that he wrote all his own speeches, too. Piro saw an opportunity and said he assumed some of his speeches had been written by someone else, because they had a different style. Piro recalled telling Saddam, “And in June 2000 you gave a speech in which you said Iraq would not disarm until others in the region did. A rifle for a rifle, a stick for a stick, a stone for a stone”.

The 60 Minutes report here inserted, “That June 2000 speech was about weapons of mass destruction.” And the interviewer, Scott Pelley, asked Piro why Saddam would put his nation at risk “to maintain this charade” of having WMD. Piro replied, “It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq.”

The George Washington University National Security Archive released the FBI summaries of Saddam’s interrogation received through a Freedom of Information Act request this week, and the “Saddam ‘bluffed’” claim is again making the headlines.

The Associated Press reports, “The documents also confirm previous reports that Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – the main U.S. rationale behind the war – because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.”

The USA Today blog “On Deadline” similarly reports, “Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, in 20 formal interviews and at least five casual conversations with the FBI, said he was bluffing publicly about having weapons of mass destruction because he feared showing weakness to Iran, according to newly released FBI summaries.”

The Christian Science Monitor’s “global news blog” , under a headline reading “Why Saddam Hussein lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction“, states that “Saddam Hussein encouraged the perception that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) because he was afraid of appearing weak in Iran’s eyes, according to nearly two dozen declassified transcripts of an FBI agent’s conversations with the former Iraqi dictator released Wednesday.”

A London Telegraph headline reads “Saddam Hussein ‘lied about WMDs to protect Iraq from Iran‘”. The article states, “Saddam Hussein told the FBI that he misled the world into believing Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, according to declassified interview transcripts.”

The Israeli daily Haaretz carries a Reuters report headlined “FBI: Saddam told us he lied about having nukes to deter Iran“, which states that “Saddam Hussein believed Iran was a significant threat to Iraq and left open the possibility that he had weapons of mass destruction rather than appear vulnerable, according to declassified FBI documents on interrogations of the former Iraqi leader.”

The only quote from the documents used to support the assertion that Saddam “lied” about having WMD is a statement in the interrogation summaries that reads, “Hussein believed that Iraq could not appear weak to its enemies, especially Iran.”

But that statement says nothing about WMD.

The entire relevant section from the released summary of a June 11, 2004 interrogation reads: “SSA Piro then asked Hussein if he wrote his own speeches and they come from the heart, then what was the meaning of his June 2000 speech. Hussein replied this speech was meant to serve a regional and operational purpose. Regionally, the speech was meant to respond to Iraq’s regional threat. Hussein believed that Iraq could not appear weak to its enemies, especially Iran. Iraq was being threatened by others in the region and must appear able to defend itself.”

The only reference to WMD comes in the next sentence, which belies the assertion that the documents show Saddam “lied” about having WMD: “Operationally, Hussein was demonstrating Iraq’s compliance with the United Nations (UN) in its destruction of its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)” (emphasis added).

The reference to Saddam’s June 2000 speech is also important. First, this was well before the move had begun under the Bush administration to implement regime change, an effort that began in earnest in 2002. U.N. inspectors returned under a resolution passed in November 2002.

Second, while 60 Minutes asserted that this speech “was about weapons of mass destruction”, this is merely a widely propagated and dubious interpretation. In that speech, Hussein noted that the U.S. has “used the United Nations as a cover” to “issue resolutions” against Iraq before saying, “However, we must protect our country because we will not give them Iraq. We do not like to collect weapons for the sake of collecting weapons. But we consider the provision of the necessary means to protect our country an ethical and moral responsibility that every Iraqi man and woman must shoulder.”

Hussein continued on to say that Iraq would be “most enthusiastic” to limit weapons. “We told President Husni Mubarak: You can go ahead and announce that the Arabs are prepared to join any treaty to rid the region of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. We told him: This does not mean only ballistic missiles, which are no more than artillery of a longer range”. His condition was “that the Zionist entity”, Israel, “is the first to sign such a treaty.”

The “weapons” Saddam was referring to were not WMD, but Iraq’s conventional weapons, including its ballistic missiles. Long-range ballistic missiles were proscribed for Iraq under U.N. resolutions. Saddam referred not to biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in his speech, but to ballistic missiles and other conventional arms.

Hussein continued, clearly demonstrating that the “weapons” he was referring to were not WMD, but the conventional arms of Iraq’s military forces. “If the world tells us to abandon all our weapons and keep only swords,” Hussein said, “we will do that. We will destroy all the weapons, if the destroy their weapons. But if they keep a rifle and then tell me that I have the right to possess only a sword, then we would say no.”

The claim that Hussein was declaring in this speech to possess WMD is simply false, dependent entirely upon the dubious interpretation that his talk of rifles and swords was a metaphor for “anthrax” or “mustard gas”, and willfully ignorant of the fact that the only “so-called weapons of mass destruction” Saddam actually claimed to have in this speech were conventional ballistic missiles forbidden under U.N. resolutions, and not WMD.

The bottom line: It wasn’t Saddam Hussein, who lied about Iraq having WMD; it was the U.S. government.

The Obama/Soros Plan To Destroy America

OBAMA’S MAIN ‘PUPPETEER’ IS THE HUNGARIAN BORN JEW – GEORGE SOROS. With his financial ability in the billions of dollars to back whatever cause he chooses and his powerful control of the media, Soros has the means to engineer the political and economic destinies of entire nations. Indeed, Soros has already implemented his global agenda in both Georgia and Kosovo.

The latest “cause” backed by Soros is the Obama presidency. Known as Obama’s “money man,” Soros’s involvement with Obama’s national political career began in 2005 with Soros fundraising for Obama’s campaign for US Senate and continued through the 2007 Presidential campaign launch with huge fundraising operations managed by Soros.

Soros, a proponent of the “hard left,” has also been funneling money into the Democratic Party and to its candidates with the intent on building a slate of Senators and Representatives with socialist leanings. “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman, Christine Iverson, “and he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

Through his Open Society Institute, Soros has contributed to left wing socialist groups such as, Human Rights Watch, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, The New American Foundation, ACORN, MoveOn, and his own, Center For American Progress, of which, Obama recently appointed its senior fellow, Todd Stern, as his ‘Climate Czar.’ Stern, a Zionist Jew, is the chief architect of the socialist-inspired Climate Change Bill, just passed by Congress.

George Soros now has a superhighway to Change – ‘Socialist Change.’ We are already beginning to see the largest growth in government in the history of America. Hell-bent on destroying the American dollar and installing a global currency, Soros has got his bought-and-paid-for White House stooge now installing his socialist agenda.

FOR IN HIS FIRST 100 DAYS as president, Obama has passed a flurry of deficit-deepening legislations such as the Stimulus Bill, the Equal Pay Bill, the Global Poverty Bill, the Tobacco Bill, the Climate Change Bill, and his upcoming Health Reform Bill. These will bring an already bankrupt America into a deficit of $2 trillion dollars including interest on the debt, paid to the Zionist Jews who own the Federal Reserve Bank. Obama’s next plan is to pass a UN sponsored Bill which will force Americans to pay a global tax. View Entire Story Here & Here.

And who will be the ruling elite of the socialist American state now in the making? Wealthy and powerful Jews – like George Soros – who have eliminated all capitalist power blocs that would oppose them. And with Obama’s creeping socialism becoming more and more apparent, George Soros emerges as the chief mogul behind Obama’s Marxist policies.

OBAMA’S CHILDHOOD MENTOR WAS THE MARXIST, Frank Marshall Davis, a black communist writer.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama admits developing a close relationship, “almost like a son,” with Davis in 1977, whom he repeatedly refers to as “Frank.” Writing about attending “socialist conferences” and coming into contact with Marxist literature, Obama reminisces of listening to Frank’s “poetry” and getting advice on his career path.

One particular piece of Marxist literature, Rules for Radicals, penned by the Chicago Marxist Jew, Saul Alinsky, had oft been quoted by Obama in campaign speeches during his run for a State Senate seat in Illinois in 1996.

Obama’s embrace of the ideology of Saul Alinsky began when he was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoirs, Dreams From My Father, was searching for a genuine African-American community.

White leftists of the Developing Communities Project of Chicago were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago. Obama answered their Help-Wanted ad and soon took up a paid position as a community organizer. The Developing Communities Project was built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”

“The agitator’s job,” according to Alinsky, “is first to bring folks to the realization that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments and greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they think they deserve.”

As a confirmed atheist, Alinsky saw an opportunity to cynically spread his socialist ideology in already-formed church communities as being the perfect springboards for agitation and creating bonds for their demands.

WHEN OBAMA FIRST UNDERTOOK HIS AGITATION WORK, he was un-churched. But to fulfill the Alinsky manifesto, Obama joined a huge black nationalist church, whose pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, (whom Obama called his spiritual mentor), preached a “black” gospel. Denouncing white supremacy and decrying black inferiority, Wright would intone from the pulpit: “GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S**T!” View Entire Story Here & Here.

In 1996, Obama received the endorsement of the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for an Illinois State Senate seat. Later, the Chicago DSA newsletter reported that Obama, as a State Senator, showed up to eulogize the Jew, Saul Mendelson, one of the “champions” of “Chicago’s democratic left.”

The Democratic Socialists of America is the principal US affiliate of the Socialist International, which enjoys a “consultative status” with the United Nations. This international connection is significant because two of Obama’s recent legislations, The Global Poverty Act, and The Climate Change Bill, are both pieces of the UN’s socialist agenda to siphon the wealth of Western nations to Third World Muslim countries and ultimately, to implement its plan for a socialist World Government.

SOROS WAS BORN OF JEWISH PARENTS IN BUDAPEST IN 1930 as Gyorgy Schwartz. When young Gyorgy Schwartz enrolled at the Fabian socialist London School of Economics in 1949 he changed his surname to Soros. At the London School of Economics he became friends with Marxist philosopher Sir Karl Popper, founder of the Association of Socialist School Students and author of the 1945 book, The Open Society And Its Enemies.

In 1956, in an “open society” of America, of which Soros now wishes to expand into a “borderless society,” young George Soros arrived on Wall Street with $5,000 and quickly demonstrated a Jewish “knack” for investing other people’s money.

Soros soon came to be called “the greatest money manager in the world” by satisfied clients of his multi-billionaire international hedge fund called the Quantum Fund. Today, Forbes Magazine ranks him the 28th richest person in the United States, with an estimated fortune worth $7 billion.

In 1993, Soros established the US branch of his Open Society Institute as a “tax-free” foundation to support his socialist foundations in Central and Eastern Europe. The President of the Open Society Institute is the Jew, Aryeh Neier, who as Director of the Socialist League For Industrial Democracy, personally created the radical group Students For A Democratic Society in 1959.

Though he likes to be considered a “stateless statesman,” Soros, in fact, is more accurately described as the “Godfather of World Socialism.” For through his Open Society Institute, Soros funds an army of socialist organizations that advocate abortion, open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, a global currency, prevention of global warming, and a world poverty tax. View Entire Story Here.

Again, two of Obama’s recent legislations, The Global Poverty Act, and The Climate Change Bill, are both pieces which are consonant with the George Soros agenda.

OBAMA’S SOCIALIST CONNECTIONS EXPLAINS WHY he has libertine views on sexual matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

One of Obama’s first actions in office was to issue an executive order authorizing federal funds for pro-abortion groups that operate globally. Obama supports the Freedom of Choice Act, which would make abortion an entitlement that the government could not limit.

This falls in line with the socialist agenda of George Soros, the “puppeteer” pulling the strings of his “puppet,” Barack Obama. Among Soros’s demands are to make abortions freely available and to legalize gay marriages. Soros also demands full rights for illegal aliens and felons, as well as the legalization of euthanasia for the “infirm.” And, oh yes, Soros demands the end of US global supremacy through a borderless society.

Unless we wake up soon, our “infirm” nation will soon be put to an eternal sleep by Barack Obama & George Soros, SOCIALISTS, who now run a Marxist White House

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=411

Activism 1010

Okay, short attention span crowd: Grab your remote (or mouse) and get ready to click, click, click…

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.”

- Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

Click…

William Burroughs once wrote about how we humans-like the bull in a bullfight-tend to focus on the elusive red cape instead of the matador. Indeed, we are all-too-easily distracted from real targets by an attractive image or illusion.

Of course, some bulls see right through the red cape, uh, bullshit…and quite justifiably introduce the matador to the business end of their horns. Before you mistake that for a lesson and/or inspiration, don’t forget that such bulls are promptly killed while the matador is mourned as a brave hero.

Here’s my question: If every bull in every bullfight were to gore every matador, how long would it be before bullfights were a thing of the past?

Click…

Malcolm X sez:

“It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

Click…

In the late 1960s-thanks to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW)-deciding whether or not to buy grapes became a political act. Three years after its establishment in 1962, the UFW struck against grape growers around Delano, California…a long, bitter, and frustrating struggle that appeared impossible to resolve until Chavez promoted the idea of a national boycott. Trusting in the average person’s ability to connect with those in need, Chavez and the UFW brought their plight-and a lesson in social justice-into homes from coast-to-coast and Americans responded.

“By 1970, the grape boycott was an unqualified success,” writes Marc Grossman of Stone Soup. “Bowing to pressure from the boycott, grape growers at long last signed union contracts, granting workers human dignity and a more livable wage.”

Through hunger strikes, imprisonment, abject poverty for himself and his large family, racist and corrupt judges, exposure to dangerous pesticides, and even assassination plots, Chavez remained true to the cause…even if meant, uh…”stretching” the non-violent methods he espoused:

Once in 1966, when Teamster goons began to rough up Chavez’s picketeers, a bit of labor solidarity solved the problem. William Kircher, the AFL-CIO director of organization, called Paul Hall, president of the International Seafarers Union.

“Within hours,” writes David Goodwin in Cesar Chavez: Hope for the People, “Hall sent a carload of the biggest sailors that had ever put to sea to march with the strikers on the picket lines…There followed afterward no further physical harassment.”

Click…

To me, the following quote reads like a poem…so that’s how I’ll present it:

You’ve got to learn

that when you push people around,

some people push back.

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

- Ward Churchill

Click…

When early American revolutionaries chanted, “Give me liberty or give me death” and complained of having but one life to give for their country, they became the heroes of our history textbooks. But, thanks to the power of the U.S. media and education industries, the Puerto Rican nationalists who dedicated their lives to independence are known as criminals, fanatics, and assassins.

On March 1, 1954, in the gallery of the House of Representatives, Congressman Charles A. Halleck rose to discuss with his colleagues the issue of Puerto Rico. At that moment, Lolita Lebrón alongside three fellow freedom fighters, having purchased a one-way train ticket from New York (they expected to be killed) unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and shouted “Free Puerto Rico!” before firing eight shots at the roof. Her three male co-conspirators aimed their machine guns at the legislators. Andrés Figueroa’s gun jammed, but shots fired by Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irving Flores injured five congressmen.

“I know that the shots I fired neither killed nor wounded anymore,” Lebrón stated afterwards. With the attack being viewed through the sensationalizing prism of American tabloid journalism, this did not matter. She and her nationalist cohorts became prisoners of war for the next twenty-five years.

Why prisoners of war? To answer that, we must recall that since July 25, 1898, when the United States illegally invaded its tropical neighbor under the auspices of the Spanish-American War, the island has been maintained as a colony. In other words, the planet’s oldest colony is being held by its oldest representative democracy-with U.S. citizenship imposed without the consent or approval of the indigenous population in 1917. It is from this geopolitical paradox that the Puerto Rican independence movement sprang forth.

This movement is based firmly on international law, which authorizes “anti-colonial combatants” the right to armed struggle to throw off the yoke of imperialism and gain independence. UN General Assembly Resolution 33/24 of December 1978 recognizes “the legitimacy of the struggle of people’s for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination and foreign occupation by all means available, particularly armed struggle.”

Prison did not dampen Lebrón’s revolutionary spirit as she attended demonstrations and spoke out to help win the long battle to evict the US Navy from the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003.

Click…

Emma Goldman sez:

“No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.”

Click…

In her excellent 1995 book, Bridge of Courage, Jennifer Harbury quotes a Guatemalan freedom fighter named Gabriel, responding to a plea to embrace non-violent resistance: “In my country child malnutrition is close to 85 percent,” he explains. “Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no industry in our country-you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances… Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here. There was a peaceful movement for progress here, once. They were crushed. We were crushed. For Gandhi’s method to work, there must be a government capable of shame. We lack that here.”

Click…

Huey P. Newton sez:

“In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers … an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism, which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could stand without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our problem is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of the necessity for international alliance to deal with the problem … Such alliance will advance the struggle toward the final act of dealing with American imperialism. To end this oppression we must liberate the developing nations … As one nation is liberated elsewhere, it gives us a better chance to be free.”

(Excerpted from an October 29, 1970 letter to the National Front for Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam)

Click…

Arundhati Roy sez:

“People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.”

Click…

In his book Endgame, Derrick Jensen tells of a discussion he had with a longtime activist. “She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon,” Jensen writes. All too predictably, the dedicated demonstrators assembled to protest the toxic spraying were, “like clockwork,” ignored by the helicopter pilots. Both humans and landscape ended up thoroughly doused with Agent Orange-time and time again. The protest campaign obviously had no effect, so a different approach was taken. “A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills,” the activist told Jensen, “and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses’

“You know what happened next?” she asked.

“I think I do,” Jensen responded.

“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”

Click…

MLK sez:

“When you’re right, you can never be too radical.”

Sail along silver girl: It’s Palestine’s time to shine?

Yes, I’m quoting Simon and Garfunkel. “Like a bridge over troubled waters….” And this song somehow reminds me of all the people in both Israel and Palestine who are laying down their lives in nonviolent protest against the injustices that Palestinians — both Muslim and Christian — have had to endure for the past 61 years. And it’s getting harder and harder to ignore these injustices — it’s been over four months since the slaughter at Gaza and still nothing has changed there, the cities still lie in ruin and still no aid is getting through.

And every day it is getting harder and harder to be a bridge over these troubled waters, to put one’s body on the line and lay down in nonviolent protest against the growing arsenal of death machines that just keep coming and coming and coming at Palestinians — simply because they were unlucky enough to be born in the shade of the ancient olive groves of Palestine .

Unlike Paul Simon’s silver girl, Palestine’s time has obviously not come.

If you look at a map of Palestine today, you will see only a few splattered ink blots and odd spaces depicting the present-day shtetls that are all that is left of a once-thriving civilization that has existed in Palestine for thousands of years. Troubled waters indeed.

Israeli neo-cons spend approximately seven million dollars of American taxpayers’ money a day in order to play-act at being Cossacks and raid Palestinian shtetls, using white phosphorus bombs and F-16s and tanks instead of swords and horses. And the Palestinians fight back — by making the best olive oil in the world.

“All your dreams are on their way. See how they shine.”

White phosphorus in the night sky over Gaza does shine and shine and shine. White phosphorus exploding in the moonlight over Gaza is a beautiful sight — like fireworks on the Fourth of July — as it rains down death upon the sleeping orchards below.

“When darkness comes — and pain is all around….”

Europe and America stood silently by when six million Jews and gypsies and protesters against injustice were slaughtered during the Nazi Holocaust. And now Europe and America also stand silent as a smaller, more intimate holocaust takes place over in Palestine — not like the one that took place in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but more intimate, like Cossacks riding through shtetls on horses breathing fire — white phosphorus fire.

Europe and America are sending aid to the dying people of Gaza — and it is sitting and rotting in huge cinderblock warehouses in Israel. Americans and Europeans are happy — they’ve done their part. They’ve given their money. They’ve brought the poor Palestinians medical supplies and baby formula and beans and flour and rice. And the food and the humanitarian supplies just sit in these warehouses in Israel and never get to Gaza. And the Israelis also are happy because they get to employ Israelis to mind the warehouses and receive monies for housing the aid workers and be all smug. “I will ease your mind.” And the consciences of Americans and Europeans ARE eased. They have managed to appear to be doing something about this new, intimate holocaust — but without really doing anything.

All I can say now to the people of Palestine — and the people of Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and America too — “All your dreams are on their way” — and mine are too.

If I had my way, if all my wishes would come true, I will comfort you. “When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all. I’m on your side…”

I’m on the side of everyone who longs for a better life for their family and who wants their children safe and who decries Cossack raids and concentration camps and man’s inhumanity to man everywhere that it occurs — be it in Israel or the West Bank or the Congo or even in America. But I must admit that I have a special place in my heart for the people of Palestine.

“Sail along silver girl.”

Here are the facts behind the poetry.

According to the Palestine Chronicle, “Israel and Egypt continue to enforce a deadly blockade on Gaza despite international condemnation. Gaza still awaits an international aid package for reconstruction nearly three months after Israel’s 23-day attack on the besieged coastal sliver.” Nothing is happening to help the Palestinians? Nothing?

“John Ging, Head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, says none of the USD 4.5 billion package of reconstruction aid pledged in March has reached the impoverished region because of border restrictions. ‘There is no prospect of recovery or reconstruction until we can get access for construction materials,’ Ging told a news briefing during a visit to the EU headquarters in Brussels.” NONE of it is getting through?

“‘Billions of dollars were pledged for recovery and reconstruction and yet none of that can actually connect with those whose lives were destroyed,’ [Ging] added. Israel continues to enforce its 21-month blockade of the Palestinian territory despite international outcries. This is while Egypt has also restricted crossings at its border with Gaza.”

Nothing?

“Furthermore, Ging called on the international community to explore avenues in an attempt to come up with a productive and promising solution to the issue of border crossings and provide more access to goods and services for Gazans. ‘Today the money is out there in pledges and the people of Gaza continue to subsist in the rubble of their former lives and the attention of the world has sadly moved on, which compounds the despair that people feel,’ he commented.”

Gaza, all your dreams ARE on their way — they are on their way to a bunch of gigantic Israeli warehouses, where they will sit and rot forever.

“Three weeks of Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion resulted in the death of over 1,500 Palestinians and the injury of about 5,450 people in the Gaza Strip. Most of the victims were civilians. The carnage also inflicted more than USD 1.6 billion of damage on Gaza’s economy.”

Pawns with Lawns

The single most irrigated crop in the United States is…(drum roll please) lawn. Yep, 40 million acres of lawn exist across the Land of Denial and Americans collectively spend about $40 billion on seed, sod, and chemicals each year. And then there’s all that water. If you include golf courses, lawns in America cover an area roughly the size of New York State and require 238 gallons of (usually drinking-quality) water per person, per day. According to the EPA, nearly a third of all residential water use in the US goes toward what is euphemistically known as “landscaping.”

We have become a nation of pawns with lawns. Food comes from the drive-thru, entertainment is televised, the concept of play exists on hand-held computers, democracy is a reality show every four years, and that tiny parcel of land we allegedly share with some bailed out bank is inevitably set aside to be a lawn.

As described by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, when it comes to lawns, social and ecological factors often work in coordination. “Perfection became a commodity of post-World War II prefabricated housing such as Levittown, NY, in the late 1940s,” writes Steinberg. “Mowing became a priority of the bylaws of such communities.”

Lawn mowers produce several types of pollutants, including ozone precursors, carbon dioxide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (classified as probable carcinogens by the CDC). In fact, operating a typical gasoline mower produces as much polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as driving a car roughly 95 miles. Since some folks are legally required to maintain a lawn (more about that shortly), here’s a suggestion or two: human-powered mowers or try using your bicycle.

Besides the air and noise pollution of mechanized mowers, there’s another form of toxicity directly related to America’s lawn addiction. “Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland,” writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community. “These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.”

“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,” wrote Rachel Carson almost five decades ago, “it is surely because our forefathers…could conceive of no such problem.”

We now produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did when Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. The EPA considers 30% of all insecticides, 60% of all herbicides, and 90% of all fungicides to be carcinogenic, yet Americans spend about $7 billion on 21,000 different pesticide products each year. “Prior to World War II, annual worldwide use of pesticides ran right around zero,” says author Derrick Jensen. “By now it’s 500 billion tons, increasing every year.” As a result, about 860 Americans suffer from pesticide poisoning every single day; that’s almost 315,000 cases per year.

As mentioned above, maintaining a noxious and unproductive lawn isn’t just a simple case of one-size-fits-all conformity in the face all logic and evidence; it’s often the law.

In October 2008, for example, Joseph Prudente of Beacon Woods, Florida, was sentenced to jail for failing to sod his lawn as required by the local homeowner covenants. Before you label Mr. Prudente a modern day insurrectionist, take note that the reason he failed to live up to his suburban obligation was predictable: he couldn’t afford to replace his sprinklers when they broke. “It’s a sad situation,” said Bob Ryan, Beacon Woods Homeowners Association board president. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”

I’m guessing Mr. Ryan has never heard of Food Not Lawns.

Imagine, as the folks at Food Not Lawns do, each house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic “Victory” garden from which the family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their own. Or perhaps you’d like to imagine them engaging in some green graffiti and/or seed bombing.

(For the uninitiated, seed bombs are “compressed balls of soil and compost that have been impregnated with wildflower seeds. Jettisoned onto barren, abandoned, or otherwise inhospitable land, including construction sites and abandoned lots.” Liz Christy-who started the “Green Guerillas” in 1973-coined the alternative term, seed grenades. Smaller versions are commonly called seed balls. No matter what you call them, seed bombs are part of the ever-increasing international trend of guerilla gardening and you can find kindred spirits here.)

“The vast expanse of forever-green American lawn is not only the most resource intensive agricultural crop in the world,” writes Tobias Policha in Green Anarchy, “but also an obscene icon to our arrogant privilege and total alienation from a life in harmony with nature.”

The sterile lawn-complete with its requisite sprinkler, chemical cocktail, bug zapper, and “keep off the grass” sign-is an ideal symbol for America’s cookie cutter culture. Lawns, writes Ted Steinberg, are “an instrument of planned homogeneity.” He asks: “What better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”

To which we must reply: Fuck homogeneity and fuck conformity.

Why don’t more people step away from the coast-to-coast mall mentality? Once reason is the looming Green Scare, a term which refers to “the federal government’s expanding prosecution efforts against animal liberation and ecological activists, drawing parallels to the “Red Scares” of the 1910′s and 1950s.”

The answer to this tactic, as always, is more solidarity. More of us need to embrace ideas like dumpster diving, off the grid living, wwoofing, billboard liberation, monkey wrenching, radical love, bartering, freeganism, veganism, transition towns, and other forms of the DIY ethic. We need organic vegetable gardens, not lawns. We need two wheels, not four. We need food not bombs. We need immediate courageous collective direct action, not “hope and change.” We need comrades, not pawns with lawns. And we need it all now.

Obama Exploits Liberal Denial

By now, we should expect the soft Left (and more than a few radicals) to gleefully guzzle the Democrat Kool Aid every four years. In 2004, it was Anybody-But-Bush. This year, it was Attack of the Obamatrons. Hey, when you’re a liberal, harboring multiple delusions comes with the territory, e.g.

* Sooner or later, the Democratic Party is gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country

* No matter what we think of war, we must always support the troops because sooner or later, the men and women in uniform are gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country

* There’s a mysterious mass of Americans out there—just sitting on the proverbial fence as they wait for us to convince them we are right so they can wake up and help us “take back” the country

* There was once a time when the people actually “had” the country

During presidential election years, of course, the most contemptible liberal lie is this: We shouldn’t vote for the third party candidates who actually represent our deeply held values because (drum roll please) they can’t win. It should be obvious that the only reason a third party candidate “can’t win” is because almost everyone who claims to be progressive votes for a Democrat instead.

This self-fulfilling prophecy comes courtesy of the same folks who apparently believe that marching with giant puppets might help end a war.

The same folks who apparently believe that holding a candlelight vigil might help end hate crimes.

The same folks who apparently believe that a giant rock concert might help end global warming.

The same folks who apparently believe that adhering to state sanctioned free speech zones is a legitimate method of expressing dissent.

I could go on but I’d rather ask this simple question: Why is anyone still trusting the entrenched Left on anything? Thanks to their archaic tactics and dogma, we now face four years of genuflecting before the Pope of Hope as he blatantly spits on every effort toward peace, justice, and solidarity.

It’s gotten to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if Lord Obama announced that he’s decided to keep Dick Cheney on as vice president…you know, in the name of bipartisanship and all. What would be most amusing is how quickly 90% of those on the Left would find a way to justify it (and call me “cynical” for not being stoked).

To paraphrase a certain Mr. Diderot, the planet will never be free (or detoxified) until the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last liberal.

Mickey Z is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Mickey Z. is a self-educated writer, personal trainer, martial artist, and vegan who lectures on US foreign policy at MIT in his spare time. He has appeared in martial arts films and was known as the Underground Poet for hanging his poetry in the NYC subway. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “CPR for Dummies” and “No Innocent Bystanders”. He lives with his wife Michele in New York City. You can contact him at: info@mickeyz.net. Visit him on the web at Mickeyz.net

News Flash: Obama hypnotizes Zinn

Let’s say the New York Times hired a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the newspaper and this popular man promised change. And let’s say I wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what I hoped he’d do. For example: reduce the business section to a page, add a labor section, start covering people’s movements and protests, refuse advertising dollars from corporations that pollute, and hire me to run the op-ed page. Justifiably, I’d be called delusional and I’d be ridiculed for even suggesting such insane expectations.

Let’s say Perdue hired a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the company and this popular man promised change. And let’s say I wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what I hoped he’d do. For example: renounce the chicken slaughter business, shift operations to selling organic, locally-grown vegan food, and donate vast amounts of money to farm sanctuaries. Justifiably, I’d be called delusional and I’d be ridiculed for even suggesting such insane expectations.

Let’s say America elected a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the country and this popular man promised change. And let’s say Howard Zinn wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what he hoped he’d do. For example: “announce the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan” and “renounce the Bush doctrine of preventive war as well as the Carter doctrine of military action to control Mideast oil.” Also: “radically change the direction of U.S. foreign policy, declare that the U.S. is a peace loving country which will not intervene militarily in other parts of the world, and start dismantling the military bases we have in over a hundred countries. Also he must begin meeting with Medvedev, the Russian leader, to reach agreement on the dismantling of the nuclear arsenals, in keeping with the Nuclear Anti-Proliferation Treaty.” Then raise taxes on the rich and combine that windfall with the hundreds of billions of dollars freed from the military budget to “give free health care to everyone (and) put millions of people to work” and thus “transform” the United States and “make it a good neighbor to the world.”

Well, Howard Zinn has written such an article (“Obama’s Historic Victory,” Nov. 12, 2008) but is anyone calling him delusional and ridiculing him for even suggesting such insane expectations? The tens of thousands of readers who look to Zinn as a trusted voice of wisdom and reason are being dangerously misled by an article that omits the reality that every indication points to Barack Obama doing the exact opposite of what Zinn writes. Zinn knows as well as anyone that not an iota of evidence exists that Obama would do anything approaching what is described above. For a man of Zinn’s stature on the Left to even hint of such a possibility is a shockingly irresponsible act and one that only contributes to the misguided perception that Obama’s election is somehow a victory for the progressive Left.

Mickey Z is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Mickey Z. is a self-educated writer, personal trainer, martial artist, and vegan who lectures on US foreign policy at MIT in his spare time. He has appeared in martial arts films and was known as the Underground Poet for hanging his poetry in the NYC subway. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “CPR for Dummies” and “No Innocent Bystanders”. He lives with his wife Michele in New York City. You can contact him at: info@mickeyz.net. Visit him on the web at Mickeyz.net

A Song for Obama

In my younger days, I considered the Village Voice to be required reading. But—like The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, and so many other once useful publications—I no longer find the Voice to be relevant or remotely radical. However, it’s free in NYC and I ride the subways. Thus, I’ll sometimes grab a copy to peruse as I navigate the subterranean tunnels of transportation.

I end up regretting this move…every single time.

As I thumbed through the Nov. 12-18 issue, I came across a loathsome illustration of denial masquerading as a music article. “The Pleasant Dilemma of Hamell on Trial: A post-Obama protest singer deals with victory,” by Rob Harvilla was ostensibly about protest (sic) singer Ed Hamell (a.k.a. “Hamell on Trial”) and others of his liberal ilk but ended up as yet another paean to the beloved Pope of Hope.

Harvilla describes folk singers like Hamell as “seething, cynical, sarcastic, permanently embittered, militantly radicalized leftist.” (For the myopic Harvilla “militantly radical” simply means you hate Republicans and launch crude insults at people like Ann Coulter.)

Such performers, Harvilla declares, have found the days following Obama’s election to be “jubilant but deeply confusing times, the exhilaration of We Did It now undercut by the bewilderment of What Do We Do Now?” He offers this option: “stop bitching” as he thanks god Hamell no longer has to waste his “vast” talent “just bitching about the Republicans.”

Ed Hamell, for his part, displays his staggeringly profound grasp on global politics by adding: “If he (Obama) turns all this around and I don’t have to sing about it anymore, then good. I got plenty of other problems.”

Plenty of other problems indeed…but first: What is “all this” and how might the Chairman of Change turn it all around? If all this means the illegal war against Iraq that began on August 6, 1990—when the murderous UN sanctions were first imposed—and continues to this day, Obama has articulated a vague plan to turn it around: shuffle off some “combat troops” to rain hell upon Afghanistan (and perhaps Pakistan and Iran) and leave behind tens of thousands of US soldiers, the largest embassy the world has ever seen, and legions of private mercenaries.

Yeah, I guess there’ll be absolutely no reason for Ed Hamell to write a new protest song when Lord Obama maintains the death penalty, the PATRIOT Act, the fence on the US-Mexican border, and the subsidizing of Israeli war crimes. Gays can’t marry, single-payer is doomed, and the third term of the Clinton administration looms…but Hamell and his militant ilk can “stop bitching” now. For posers like them, all this doesn’t seem to include the reality that blacks make up roughly 12% of the American population but constitute 40% of the death row population. It doesn’t include an obscene military budget, corporate personhood, structural adjustment programs, and NAFTA.

The Obamatrons are not pushing their hero to end any of the following either: the bogus war on a tactic, corporate welfare, homelessness, sweatshops, factory farming, strip mining, deforestation, or giving away control of public airwaves, public land, and public pensions. Ninety percent of the ocean’s large fish are gone but somehow these are “jubilant” times for those deluded denizens of the Left ready to “stop bitching.”

They’d rather bask in the toxic glow of fantasy—choosing to believe their work is done because a mainstream politician who raised $640 million is gonna turn “all this” around. These folks have tainted the very concept of radical activism and deserve nothing but our contempt.

With 200,000 acres of rainforest destroyed every 24 hours, our work cannot be viewed as anywhere close to done. Or, to borrow from Eugene V. Debs, “while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Mickey Z is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Mickey Z. is a self-educated writer, personal trainer, martial artist, and vegan who lectures on US foreign policy at MIT in his spare time. He has appeared in martial arts films and was known as the Underground Poet for hanging his poetry in the NYC subway. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “CPR for Dummies” and “No Innocent Bystanders”. He lives with his wife Michele in New York City. You can contact him at: info@mickeyz.net. Visit him on the web at Mickeyz.net

Planet Eaters

Chain Reactions, Black Holes, Climate Change and Existentialist Philosophy…

“Dear Caesar

Keep Burning, raping, killing

But please, please

Spare us your obscene poetry

And ugly music “

From Seneca’s last letter to Nero

Prologue

According to Albert Speer, German physicists, apprising Hitler of the possible development of an atom bomb in the spring of 1942, noted a reservation by Werner Heisenberg about a potential conflagration of the atmosphere: “Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.” The same awesome possibility, fusion of atmospheric nitrogen and oceanic hydrogen, turning the planet into a chain-reacting bomb, was considered a few months later by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, Hans Bethe and other physicists. New calculations indicated atmospheric conflagration was unlikely. The trinity nuclear test in the New Mexico desert went ahead.

A critical parameter in Drake’s Equation, which seeks to estimate the number of planets that host civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, is L — the longevity of technological societies measured from the time radio telescopes are invented in an attempt to communicate with other planets. Estimates of L range between a minimum of 70 years and 10,000 years, but even for the more optimistic longevity scenario, only 2.31 such planets would exist in the galaxy at the present time.

It is another question whether an intelligent species exists in this, or any other galaxy, which has brought about a mass extinction of species on the scale initiated by Homo sapiens since the mid-18th century.

The history of Earth includes five major mass extinctions which define the ends of several periods, including the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Each of these events has been triggered by extraterrestrial impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or methane release and related greenhouse events. Yet, with the exception of the role of methanogenic bacteria in relation to methane eruptions in the past, the Sixth mass extinction is a novelty: For the first time in its history, the biosphere is in crisis through biological forcing by an advanced form of life, namely the activity of a technological carbon-emitting species.

The sharp glacial-interglacial oscillations of the Pleistocene (1.8 million years ago to 10,000 years ago), with rapid mean global temperature changes by up to 5 degrees Celsius over short periods of centuries and, in some instances, a few years (cf. Steffensen et al., Science Express, 19 June, 2008), culminated in an extreme adaptability of Homo. Of all the life forms on Earth, only this genus mastered fire, proceeding to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum, split the atom and travel to other planets—cultural change overtaking biological change.

Possessed by a conscious fear of death, craving God-like immortality and omniscience, Homo developed the absurd faculty to simultaneously create and destroy, culminating with the demise of the atmospheric conditions that allowed its flourishing in the first place. The biological root factors which underlie the transformation of tribal warriors into button-pushing automatons capable of triggering global warming or a nuclear winter remain inexplicable.

Inherent in the enigma are little-understood top-to-base mechanisms, explored among others by George Ellis, who states: “although the laws of physics explain much of the world around us, we still do not have a realistic description of causality in truly complex hierarchical structures.” (“Physics, complexity and causality”, Nature, 435: 743, June 2005):

Sixty-five million years ago, huge asteroids hit the Earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs and vacating habitats for the flourishing of mammals. Fifty-five million years ago, in the wake of a rise of atmospheric CO2 to levels near-1000 parts per million, the monkeys made appearance. Thirty-four million years ago, weathering of the rising Himalayan and Alpine ranges sequestered CO2, Earth began to cool, ice sheets formed and conditions on land became suitable for large, warm blooded mammals.

Three million years ago, in the mid-Pliocene, when temperatures rose by 2- 3o C and sea levels by 25+/-12 metres, accentuation of climate oscillations were followed by the appearance of Homo erectus. The mastering of fire and, later, stabilization of the climate between about 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, saw the Neolithic and urban civilization take hold. Processes during this period, termed the Anthropocoene (cf. Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, Ambio, 36, 614-621, 2007), led to deforestation and the demise of an estimated twenty thousand to two million species during the 20th century, ever increasing carbon pollution, acidification of the hydrosphere and radioactive contamination.

Acting as the lungs of the biosphere, the Earth’s atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich carbon-constrained composition over hundreds of millions of years, allowing emergence of breathing animals. Planetcide results from the anthropogenic release into the atmosphere to date of more than 300 Gigatons of carbon (GtC), the product of ancient biospheres stored by plants and animals, threatening to return Earth to conditions which preceded the emergence of large mammals on land.

Planetcide emerged from around pre-historic camp fires, from deep recesses of the mind, the imagination of individuals trying to survive adversity. Atavistic fear of death leads to a yearning for god-like immortality. Once the Holocene climate stabilized and excess food was produced, fear and its counterpart, aggression, grew out of control, generating pyramids dedicated to the idea of infinite immorality and sweeping murderous orgies, called “war”, designed to conquer death and appease the Gods.

War is a synonym for ritual sacrifice of the young. From infanticide by rival warlord baboons to the butchering of young children on Aztec altars to the generational sacrifice of WWI, youths follow leaders blindly to the death, women condemn defeated gladiators, fundamental priests promote ignorance, misery and crusades, breeding grounds for believers. Hijacking the image of Christ, a messenger of justice and peace, they promote a self-fulfilling Armageddon: “Hallelujah the rupture is coming,” while other see their future on space ships and barren planets.

With estimated profitable carbon reserves in excess of 5000 GtC, further emissions could take the atmosphere out of the ice ages back to Mesozoic-like greenhouse conditions, a state during which large parts of the continents were inundated by the sea. Most likely to survive would be the grasses, insects and birds, descendants of the fated dinosaurs. A new evolutionary cycle would commence. Homo sapiens will survive. Their endurance through the extreme climate upheavals of the glacial-interglacial periods has equipped humans to withstand the most challenging conditions.

The Sixth mass extinction does not rise exclusively from global warming, and can be brought about, separately or in combination, by design or accident, through the probability of a global nuclear cataclysm. As time goes on, a possibility becomes a probability becomes a certainty, an increasingly likely prospect on a warming planet burdened by resource wars. Following trials on the inhabitants of two Japanese cities, with time, the Damocles sword of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) strategy can only fall. The hapless inhabitants of planet Earth are given no choice between progressive global warming and the coup-de-grace of a nuclear winter.

Further experiments with the fate of Earth are underway. Once the Hadron Collider has been deemed “safe,” pending further science fiction-like experiments yet to be dreamt by ethics-free scientists, Earth may not become a black hole. Unfortunately little doubt exists regarding the consequences of the continuing use of the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, as open sewer for carbon gases.

As stated by the renown oceanographer Wallace Broecker in 1986, “The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic experiment. We play Russian roulette with climate and no one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun.” If the Nazi’s constructed gas chambers for millions of victims, ongoing climate change threatens to turn the entire Planet into an open oven on the strength of a Faustian Bargain.

From the Romans to the third Reich, the barbarism of empires surpasses that of small marauding tribes. In the name of “freedom,” they never cease to bomb peasant populations in their small fields. Only among the wretched of the Earth is true charity common, where empathy is learnt through their own suffering.

Planetcide challenges every faith, ideal and social system humans ever held. Individuals are crushed, as in H. G. Wells War of the Worlds, when cells rebelling against the insanity of a murderous global Martian society are destroyed by the parent organism.

Planetcide is a child of Orwellian “Newspeak”, where modern societies, underpinned by subterranean drug rings, weapon smuggling networks and intelligence agencies, poison their young’s minds with commercial and political lies, a propaganda machine Joseph Goebbles would envy.

Nature is full of examples of parasites, viruses destroying their host, sea anemones seducing their prey, but Homo sapiens has perfected untruths to a form of fine art. Defying the scientific method and the peer review system, so-called “sceptics”, lured by ego and money, serve as mouthpieces of air-poisoning lobbies, which have already delayed humanity’s desperate attempt at mitigating the fast deteriorating state of the atmosphere by more than twenty years.

Having lost the sense of reverence possessed toward the Earth by prehistoric humans, there is no evidence that civilization is about to adopt Carl Sagan’s sentiment: “For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: star stuff pondering the stars: organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for the Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.” (Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980)

Humans live in a realm of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts (Janus: A summing up, Arthur Koestler, 1978). They wake up for a brief moment from an infinite universal slumber to witness a world as cruel as it is beautiful, a biosphere dominated by the food chain. An inverse relation may exist between the level of consciousness achieved by a species and its longevity, once it creates machines and processes that it can not control. If looking into the sun may result in blindness, so, according to as yet little-understood laws of entropy, the deep insights into nature that humans have achieved may bear a terrible price.

Existentialist philosophy allows a perspective into, and a way of coping with, all that defies rational contemplation. Ethical and cultural assumptions of free will rarely govern the behavior of societies or nations, let alone an entire species.

And although the planet may not shed a tear for the demise of technological civilization, hope, on the individual scale, is still possible in the sense of existentialist philosophy. Going through their black night of the soul, members of the species may be rewarded by the emergence of a conscious dignity devoid of illusions, grateful for the glimpse at the universe for which humans are privileged by the fleeting moment:

“Having pushed a boulder up the mountain all day, turning toward the setting sun, we must consider Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942)

Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University.

Emily Spence, environmental and social policy writer, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Emily Spence is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at: ehspence@aol.com

India: The First Victim

India is as warm and comfortable as ever. Over thirty years have passed since I roamed around in her cities and temples as a young long-haired white-cotton-trousered journalist cub, but coming back is easy. Things on the ground have not changed much – but they have changed.

It is the same dense, busy crowd in Old Delhi, but the terrible poverty and hunger has disappeared or been pushed away. There are beggars, but they appear to be Gypsy professionals who reputedly fly to summer vacation sites for their short season, rather than disaster-stricken Bihar peasants, who ask for our charity.

It is the same immense green lawns of the British-built New Delhi, but now they are frequented by middle class families picnicking in their Sunday garb.

Centuries-old Mughal gardens are bristling with visiting ladies clad in exquisite polychrome saris and with striped pyjama-fashion grey squirrels, but the palaces are in good repair and visitors do not feel threatened by their imminent collapse.

The smell of curry and baking bread still sojourns with that of jasmine and mango, but the once prevalent smell of Indian tobacco (I was almost arrested for smoking their fags in Europe) has practically disappeared. Indians are almost saints: they do not smoke, do not drink alcohol and they rarely eat meat.

They are modest shoppers and modest dressers, though now there are decent western-style shops. The feet of Indians are still bare, but clean and pedicured. There are many jobless, but whoever has a job manages well even on a low salary. Now even lower middle class families have servants, as in 19th century Europe, and not just temporary help – real servants with separate duties: cooks, drivers, cleaners, errand boys. Cars and bikes have multiplied a hundred times in the past thirty years, but they still incessantly honk their horns.

Their sergeant-majors still boast the most fearsome moustaches and sideburns, but now they have nuclear weapons to boast about too. Next time, when imperial soldiers advance to India thinking “Whatever happens, we have got // The Maxim gun, and they have not”, they will be mistaken. India now has an impressive army with a goodly amount of arms; they have launched a few satellites and are on the way to becoming a power in space.

Indian Pundits

With their nuclear armory and modest affluence, Indians are being heard today in the West – better than they were in the days of poverty, hunger and weakness. “The Wisdom of a poor man is despised”, says the Writ. Now we pay attention to Indian political thinkers, not only to the gurus. I had the honour to meet a few of the like-minded people in India. We publish Indian writers here. Among them, there is Ambassador Gajendra Singh, a man with first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, Turkey and East Europe. Another one is J C Kapur, whose text delivered in St Petersburg University is published here as well. We have also published Ambassador Bhadrakumar and Satya Sagar. Come Carpentier, a French expatriate living in India, Lille Singh, an Indian expatriate in New York, Syed Zaidi of Delhi — all participate in our deliberations. We also publish and cherish the essays of Arundhati Roy and other Indian thinkers.

It is not that India needs much of an army; but nukes and missiles are a modern way to prove a country’s virility. That is why the US and Israel are so stubbornly fighting against other countries having them – they want to be the only males in the harem with a few eunuchs on the side. They are trying to take Indian nukes under their control, too – and some say that the last India-US agreement is nothing less than a capitulation. I am not so sure: the Indian leaders have not acquiesced in the US drive against Iran, and this is an important criterion. President Ahmadinejad was better received in Delhi than President Bush. Another reason is the old tie: Persian was to India what French was to the rest of Europe, the language of civilization and poetry.

Instinctively India, historically its first victim, can’t support the Empire against Iran. Today this Empire covers much of the unipolar world; it subdued Germany and Japan in two world wars, Moscow submitted in 1991, and since 2003, the Arab world is also cowed. But it began as a small trading post in East India. The British were the first carriers of modern Empire, and India was subdued by them centuries ago. We say “the British Empire, the American Empire”, but actually these countries were and are rather carriers of the Empire than her owners. The Empire is an independent parasite, the Alien, feeding on many nations including its proud carrier and enforcer. Gladstone was right in his argument against Disraeli: empire is not good for the mother country. Now, worn-out Britain is a junior partner in the enterprise; its head offices have moved from London to Washington and New York.

India was the laboratory for imperial devices. A long time before Baghdad was looted by the Americans, British troops in 1799 conquered and looted Seringapatam, the fortress capital of Mysore, and killed (beside tens of thousands of natives) Sultan Tipu, who twice defeated the Brits and who had nearly reverted the crawling colonization of India. The Sultan was described as an “infamous tyrant, usurper and ruler of the most perfect despotism in the world”, the same title later ascribed to Saddam Hussein. All the horrors of occupation ever experienced by the enemies of the Empire were visited on Delhi in 1857, when British troops slaughtered millions of Indians in what was probably the greatest holocaust the world had ever known up to that time.

Still, Indians nurse no ill feelings towards the Brits. They fought and died by their tens of thousands for England in the WWI and WWII. Now they are proud to be part of the Commonwealth, happily speak English, shop on Oxford Street and visit their relatives in Earls Court. The old-timers miss the British days (perhaps it is the time of their youth they miss). Captain Nemo with his dream of vengeance was, after all, invented by the French writer Jules Verne, not by an Indian. Indians are not vengeful by nature. English is also the lingua franca of this huge country and, by default, the language of many wonderful Indian writers, from Arundhati Roy to Salman Rushdie, who would be unknown outside of their provinces. Thanks to the ubiquity of English, India is the preferred country for outsourcing, and this has provided it with considerable income.

The new Indian affluence is thinly spread. There were always rich Indians, and that’s why there were always so many poor Indians. Even for outsourcing and similar crumb-sharing schemes, Indians pay a high price: Western companies have made huge inroads into the Indian economy. The courts do not defend ordinary Indians against the multinationals. They could take a leaf from the Canadians, who ruled in favour of a farmer against Monsanto in 2008. The countryside remains very poor, but the country is so huge, and there are so many people, that the lower middle class is quite numerous, and even they have servants aplenty.

Until recently, the Empire placed its bet on Pakistan — now India has become stronger and more attractive. This is a fateful hour – if India should once again become its crown jewel, the Empire would engulf China and undermine South East Asia. The US continues flirting with India, offering American weaponry while demanding that it toe the line on Iran and China, and some forces in India are ready to embrace the Americans. It is therefore all the more important to keep India friendly to China, to Russia, to Iran and the Muslim world.

The bottom line is that India today is not as strongly anti-imperialist as she was in the days of Nehru and his friendship with Nasser, Tito and Fidel, but she has not switched sides completely, either. She is rather biding her time, playing cricket.

Despite the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, fueled (and paid for) by second-generation Indian Americans and by the US State Department, India is not a natural enemy to the Muslim world. It’s the other way around: sixty years after the Partition, North India (including Delhi) has a distinctly Muslim flavour. If Pakistan had not been created, Islam would probably predominate in India. The founders of Pakistan had a strange idea that the Hindus would seek revenge on their former masters; as a result, some space was vacated, leaving room for a Hindu revival. This revival is not entirely natural, as revivals go: they built in Delhi a vast, bright and garish complex of Hindu temples. The statues of Hindu gods, terrifying and bewildering when venerable and old, give the impression of a kind of Disneyland when shining and new. Films like Ramayana have filled in the chasm between the sacred and profane, and one is left wondering: are these the statues of gods or of movie characters? This is not to say that the Hindu religion is dead: there are millions of small shrines on every corner, and all passers-by do their obeisance. These small shrines are islands of calm in the turbulent world, and surely they are greatly needed and appreciated.

However, the mosques in the Indian capital are still much more impressive than the Hindu temples. Everything pre-British is Muslim-built, as for a thousand years, ever since Mahmud of Ghazna, the rulers of Hindustan have been Muslims. The warlike neighbours of pacific Indians, – Afghanis, Central Asians, Persians and Turks conquered North India and colonized it. They were quite tolerant and friendly to their non-Muslim subjects, giving the lie to modern claims that Muslims are harsh rulers when it comes to infidels. Judging by Indian films, they lived well together in mutual respect. Not that I consider Indian films an authority on history, but surely they express some popular feeling on the subject.

The invaders of the 16th century became fully subsumed in India. Hindus and Muslims venerate the same tombs of the same saints and celebrate the same feasts. I tried to provoke my Muslim Indian friends by asking them: “Aren’t you upset by seeing Indian idols? Shouldn’t one remove them?” But they did not even understand the thought: “They worship one way, we worship other way; God is anyway one and the same for all of us”, they replied. Many native Indians embraced Islam, and eventually Islam became as Indian as Hinduism or Buddhism.

Subsuming Colonizers

The British could have followed in the steps of Muslim incomers to become subsumed ex-colonizers, and William Dalrymple, a sensitive and knowledgeable author, wrote at length in his White Mughals: from the days of Clive and to 1820s, the Brits tended to conform to the local habits. They went native, married local women, many of them converted to Islam or, to a lesser extent, to Hinduism, and thus they formed a part of the Indian upper classes. The change came later, when the British women were brought in. They formed a fighting sorority and excluded the Indian wives and their children from society interaction. Since then, fearing ostracism, the British Indians separated themselves from native Indian society, and their children of Indian women could not rise up in the world. Instead of conforming to India, and gently adjusting to her ways, they tried to erase her culture and reshape her. Instead of slowly becoming Indians, they became enemies of India. Rudyard Kipling, India born and bred, proved it by his Kim: all his knowledge of India may serve only the Intelligence Service.

This weather change from absorption and integration to separation did not happen just because of English ladies’ malice. The communications between India and England rapidly improved, so the ties between the settlers and their mother country could be maintained. If the communications were poor and difficult, or artificially severed, the settlers would be integrated. In case of Israel/Palestine, if the ties between the Israelis and their “mother country”, the World Jewry, were severed, the Israelis would be easily absorbed in Palestine.

It is true for other ex-colonial states, as well. Settlers and their children are valuable asset, and it would be mistake to get rid of them. Due to colonial injustice, they are better trained and have important and useful professions. This injustice can’t be corrected by mass expulsion or by mass flight. Algeria is a good example: the French departed, taking with them practically all educated Algerians and leaving the country without teachers and doctors. On the other hand, Spain was forced to give up its possessions in America, but Spanish settlers remained, and guaranteed continuity. Africa suffered much because of this traumatic decolonisation. White settlers left in droves, and the newly independent countries had to invite experts instead of using people familiar with local reality. Thus, colonists-settlers should be subsumed, rather than expelled.

Kashmir

Kashmir, a chain of pleasant green mountain valleys was the most cherished patrimony of the Great Mughals, who embellished it with palaces and gardens. Here the Muslims and Hindus lived together in peace and harmony. However, the Empire did not will it. At first, there was a Hindu-Muslim conflagration which resulted in the Partition. Still, the Hindu refugees quickly came back to the Valley after the battles were over. Peace had returned, but not for long. The American meddling in Afghanistan in 1970s-80s had undermined stability. The Americans created Islamist insurgency to embroil the Russians in the fire of guerrilla war in neighbouring Afghanistan. Sparks of the insurgency ignited fire in North India, and soon the villages and towns were engulfed by fratricidal struggle. The Hindus were forced to leave Kashmir and move to Jammu and other places; many Muslims had left too, rather than being forced to serve the firebrand insurgents. Their empty, ruined or burned down houses still stick out in Srinagar and elsewhere, though many of the properties were sold for a song during the insurgency.

This was a tragic development. Kashmiris – Muslims and Pandits (as local Hindus are called) are ethnically and linguistically the same people, they have the same family names. My host in the Valley, Ustad Bashir Butt, told me of their affinities and of good neighbourhood relations. He is a devout Muslim, but there are Pandit Butts as well, sharing the same ancestry. Butts saved lives of their Pandit neighbours during the militants’ raids, though mainly they were preoccupied with staying alive. Disappearance of the Pandits is a tragedy for them, and for all Kashmiris.

This sad situation is relevant for Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were forcibly expelled by the Jewish militants in 1948, and since then they are not allowed to come back. But will they if they can? I am on record of being in full support of al-Awda, of Palestinian refugees’ right of return, but I do not know whether many ex-Palestinians would like to come back. The Pandits of Kashmir may come back, after all, India is not a Muslim fundamentalist state, and Hindu parties are close to power. They may, but they do not come – even from nearby Jammu. They say they have nothing to go back to: their houses are burned or taken over. The Pandits are not an exception. Though it is not easy, the German exiles may come back to Sudetenland in Czech Republic and to Poland; but somehow they do not. They come for a visit, but do not stay there for long. It can be the case in Palestine, too.

Now Kashmir is calm and pleasant to visit. Militancy died out, but not many potential Western tourists know of it, and you may now enjoy summer in Srinagar for knock-down prices. There are newly prosperous Indian tourists from Bombay and Delhi, but Western tourists are rare. This is the best time to go to Srinagar, the valley’s summer capital.

A delightful place, to be sure, this town on the Dal Lake, in the shade of mighty Himalayas. It is often compared with Venice, but our Italian friend, who is a permanent resident there, corrected the image: Srinagar may become Venice, but meanwhile it is a Venice of AD 500. The canals and lagoons of the city are not yet fixed and built up and polished to perfection. Imagine the Grande Canale with fishermen’s huts instead of majestic palaces, the Piazza di San Marco covered with cucumber gardens and Rialto full of water lilies instead of pizza stands, and you’ll get the image of Srinagar.

The lake is covered with grass, and this grass is collected by local peasants who roam the lake on their small boats. The grass is used as fertilizer in their tiny gardens which produce amazing harvests. They build floating gardens, and cultivate every bit of land; the plentiful canals dissect the islands, so it is difficult to decide whether you view an island crossed by canals or a part of lake with floating gardens. These grass-collecting boats compete with local gondolas “shikaras” carrying tourists and sightseers and doing taxi job. The scene of this pre-Venice lagoon is very lively and quite unique.

Around the lake, there are magnificent formal gardens laid by the Mughals, and the mountains are nearby for trekking or fishing. The town is also a charming place, especially the house of British representative now turned into emporium of local arts and crafts. There is a strange place often described as “Jesus Tomb”. A local legend says that Jesus after resurrection moved to Srinagar and lived here, happily married, until his death. Perhaps it is the burial place of an early Christian preacher or an apostle. I have brought there the candles lit at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and left them at this sanctuary.

In the days of the Raj, the English colonial administrators loved to spend summer in Srinagar and other hill stations, but the Raja did not allow them to buy land for the houses they wanted. As a solution, the Brits turned to build luxurious houseboats, small floating palaces and villas. After Independence, they were gone, and the houseboats were extremely popular place for hippies and other travellers in 1970s and 80s. By the end of 80s, civil war was raging, and the hippies moved to Goa, but the houseboats remained.

The best houseboats in Srinagar are Clermont boats of Butt. They are all traditional yet thoroughly modernized, equipped with best carpets, handmade furniture of valuable trees and embroidery. What’s more, they are moored at a distance from the town, in a Mughal garden Naseem Bagh with its 400-year old chinar trees planted by Akbar or more probably by his art loving son Jahangir. There are only three boats, and they are usually taken by dignitaries and diplomats. Yehudi Menuhin stayed there, so did Harrison the Beatle, a Rockefeller and even yours truly. One can easily find a cheaper place, but this is the best, ultimate in privacy and Raj-style opulence. The place is run by two Butt brothers, very pleasant and hospitable men. Contact Bashir Butt, refer to us and get a discount!

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war.

After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia.

In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

Email at: info@israelshamir.net

In Defense of Prejudice

Israel Shamir answers ADL complaint…

Beyond the Golden Gate, on a sandy shore of the cold North Pacific, spayed by black rocks and frequented by Sirens, lies Marin County. In this most delightful part of California, the Sirens do not ravish seamen; well-nourished mammals (also called manatees or sea-cows) peacefully flock on the beach, near equally peaceful and tranquil humans. They (humans, not sea-cows) are pleasant, blond and suntanned, given to yachting, white wine and Sufi poetry; or so it seemed to me after a fly-through visit. The comfortable life does not make the residents sluggish and placid, probably due to relatively bracing climate: Marine County is the home to this rare breed, the American radical. There are more of our readers and friends there than in the whole city of New York.

More than once I found myself mumbling: Northern California and its people are too good for the United States. The border should be drawn at Monterey. Let the Yanks keep the urban spread of LA with its toothy lawyers, their broad-backed spouses, the steroid instructors and silicon starlets who provide their relief. Northern California should be hitched to a few large whales and moved to the Atlantic shore of Europe, somewhere next to Normandy. Not in vain did this strip of land belong to Russia for a while, and it retains some of the Russian soulfulness, though it faces the Pacific rather than the Baltic.

Their local paper, the Coastal Post, is mind-bogglingly free from subservience to the Lobby. So free that they ran my piece Carter and Swarm, in defense of President Jimmy Carter after he crossed the line and the Lobby served him the black mark and threatened him with prosecution under a quaint law of 1799. The ferocious Jewish political police, the ADL, attacked the paper and me “objecting to unsubstantiated perpetuation of stereotypes of a malicious cabal of Jews “pushing for war,” as well as Shamir’s stereotype of “Jewish media-lords” that “clinch the party line.”

Here is my reply to the ADL’s attack:

In Defense of Prejudice

Stereotypes and prejudice are a legitimate part of our life. They are here to make our life easier. If you walk the dark streets of an urban ghetto and notice a gang of male teenagers without a single woman among them, your prejudice tells you to make a prudent detour. If a tramp in rags proposes to sell you a gold watch, your prejudice advises you to avoid the deal. If a charming stranger is eager to get bedded, your prejudice calls you to use a condom – or run away. ADL correctly states that there is a stereotype of a “malicious cabal of Jews” who are “pushing for war,” as well as that of “Jewish media-lords” that “clinch the party line.”

A stereotype, or prejudice, usually is a result of many unpleasant experiences by persons who did not heed them. Ghetto teenagers may beat you up, the tramp is likely to unload hot goods, a brazen hussy may supply you with the clap. And organized Jewry did push for World War Two, for the Iraq War, and now for the war with Iran and Syria, while supporting apartheid in Israel. American mainstream media from The New York Times and Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times has Jewish owners and sticks to the party line.

Prejudice makes life difficult for stereotyped persons, and this is sometimes unfair: the tramp may be a rightful heir and owner of the golden watch, a charming stranger may be a chaste creature swept away by your wit and looks, the teenagers may discuss Plato’s Cave, while a publicity-shy Israel Taub, an octogenarian scion of a great Hassidic dynasty, a Jewish prince, of sorts, spends his personal fortune rebuilding Palestinian houses destroyed by Israeli soldiers. Together with a Palestinian prince Nashashibi and a WASP Professor McGowan he erected a memorial to the victims of the Zionist-perpetrated Deir Yassin Massacre. For him, Jimmy Carter is right, while AIPAC is even worse than the Israeli destroyers. Still, such men are rather the exception to the rule, and in chance encounters, a prudent man will hope for best and expect the worst.

A person unhappy with a stereotype or with prejudice may fight it. There is a good, hard way to fight a stereotype you dislike: act contrary to the stereotype. At the end of 19th century, Asians were stereotyped as weaklings and walkovers, doomed to submit to the White Man’s Destiny. The Japanese did not like the stereotype, pulled up their socks and sank the Russian Navy, before doing the same trick to the American one. In 1950s, Japanese goods were stereotyped as ‘shoddy’. They did not complain, but worked harder and by the 1980s, Japan-made cars became a byword of quality.

Indeed, prejudice may be defeated. If you are a ghetto dweller, be stranger-friendly and make your ghetto a nice place to visit, proving that prejudice is baseless. This was done by the Chinese who suffered from terrible prejudice in the beginning of 20th century. They got together, eliminated petty crime, and now their ghetto, Chinatown, is a delightful place to come for a stroll or for a dinner out. Prejudice against the Chinese died out, or rather got limited to Mia Farrow.

The Jews fought against prejudice a few times and won every time. In the 18th century they were considered illiterate and to be living in the Dark Ages. In the 19th century they were considered unmanly. Each time, they listened to the received wisdom of stereotype and acted to correct their behavior. They can do it now again. They may engage in work conducive to the general benefit, shy away from stock markets and banks, give Christmas presents, demand “troops out of Iraq, no aid to apartheid Israel”, be friendly to their non-Jewish neighbors. Do not demonise nor threaten with legal action everybody who does not agree with you. Do not turn the media into your private reserve. Try this, and an old stereotype will wither and vanish. Actually, Zionism came into being as an idea of fighting the stereotyping of Jews by turning Jewish money and media men into peasants and soldiers. This was partly successful, but the old habits die hard.

The ADL and their wealthy Jewish supporters went by an easier way: sticking to stereotypes and intimidating those who notice their relevance. Together, they fit stereotype to a tee: they are warmongering (against Iraq and now Iran), interfering with free speech (see their attack on Carter), protecting of thieves (remember Marc Rich?), spying on dissidents (as in the Blankfort case in California), abusing the legal system (by suing their ideological opponents), acting as a cabal (defending and hiding Israeli crimes). And they still dare to speak of “unsubstantiated perpetuation of stereotypes”! Next we may expect a Spaghetteria fighting the stereotype of Italians eagerly devouring spaghetti.

Jews are usually quite happy applying stereotypes and prejudice, that is if they apply it to somebody else. Michael Kinsley, a star of Jewish punditry (Harvard, Oxford, LA Times, Slate, CNN, New Republic, Time, Economist, Harper) blessed stereotyping of Arabs: “When thugs menace someone because he looks Arabic, that’s racism [because it is done by others - ISH]. When airport security officials single out Arabic-looking men for a more intrusive inspection, that’s something else [because it is done under control of a good Jew, Mr Chertoff – ISH] , for the airport security folks have a rational reason for what they do. An Arab-looking man heading toward a plane is statistically more likely to be a terrorist. That likelihood is infinitesimal, but the whole airport rigmarole is based on infinitesimal chances.”

Well, the whole life rigmarole is based on small chances, but the chances that your average Jewish pundit will be violently anti-Arab, pro-war, against Iran and generally will stick to their party line are not small at all. They are better than winning in rouge et noir. There are exceptions, but they are aware that they are exceptional. The stereotyping of Jews is quite justifiable, and only their behavior change will change it.

The ADL serves as a bad example to other groups. Instead of working harder or changing behavior, they copycat Jews and moan about prejudice. If the Japanese would do that, they still would be producing shoddy cars, but the hate laws would forbid us to mention it. Hate laws and political correctness may hush up a problem but never solve it.

I know of it first-hand: my own Russian community had a bad image problem in admittedly prejudiced Israel. Instead of whining, the Russians created their own theater, now arguably the best in Israel, promoted their own newspapers and political parties, and eventually asserted its place. Granted, they were helped a lot by Putin’s Russia which reasserted Russian pride. In California, I’ve met the Black Muslims, well-spoken and well-dressed men and women, who are respected without appealing to hate laws. They remind me of the youngish senator Barak Obama, another leader who does not need anybody’s condescension or defense.

People should be equal in law, this goes without saying. But stereotyping and prejudice usually correspond to reality, and they will change with the change of reality.

The ADL is not a means of prevention of the stereotype, but an important reason for its perpetuation. With their army of lawyers, their seemingly unlimited resources and their access to power they may forbid every related public expression of people’s feelings. But they can not forbid the feelings, and suppressed feelings will burst out sooner or later with greater, devastating force.

They are repeating the error of Soviet days: the Party had banned criticism, people suppressed their feelings, and their outburst swept away the Party rule. The democratic regimes allowed for free speech and criticism because this provided an outlet for people’s feelings and moderated the need for violent revolution. Now, with their supreme power of censorship and intimidation, organized Jewry has almost recovered the ground lost by the Party.

If all three major-party contenders for the Presidency of the Republic go, hat in hand, to proclaim their fealty to AIPAC, if a former President is unable to express his views without being brutally abused by the ADL, America may need a revolution in order to regain its freedom to express its feelings, unless the whining lot of ADL activists is somehow reined in first.

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war.

After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia.

In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

Email at: info@israelshamir.net

On Rejecting “The System”

In the natural world, a mother bear, during a particularly harsh winter in which it is hard to capture prey, will often eat one of her cubs. It will nearly always be the runt unless the larger one is sickly. If she is still hungry and unable to locate food from other species later that same winter, she will consume the remaining one. Thereby she will guarantee her survival as the alternative would be all three bears dying — the helpless cubs unable to live on their own and herself. However, she, by using her offspring for nourishment, will help ensure that she can carry on to produce further offspring in, hopefully, more auspicious circumstances. By such a manner, her species manages to endure.

All considered, life in the natural world, although often brutal, is neither moral, nor immoral. No animal sits around in a circle of his peers debating the relative rightness or wrongness of the act of eating one’s own progeny, nor the ones of other species. At the same time, humans, in certain groups, can also forego ethical underpinnings in their actions.

For example, the Nazis, in a calculated fashion, rounded up children and adults from supposedly undesirably ethnic groups for systematic slaughter. So did European invaders with indigenous people in the Americas. So did Pol Pot in Southeast Asia and so did ancient Romans. There is nothing new in this regard. This sort of behavior has been occurring for times immemorial amongst humankind. So has cannibalism when life gets tough…

As the author Peter Goodchild shared with me, “I sometimes think about a book called The Siege of Leningrad. The healthy people walking the streets were the butchers. But the meat they had to offer wasn’t beef, and it wasn’t pork, and it wasn’t lamb. You figure out the rest.”

Then, too, humans periodically face the types of decisions as did the pioneers at Donner Pass [1] — a walk in the park in some ways compared to the Leningrad events in that there was no deliberate murder involved. As such, much of the difference between the two events hinges on intention and deliberate proactive choices rather than a passive stance to simply make do as had the survivors at Donner Pass. Meanwhile, the aggression inherent in deliberate slaughter of one’s own kind reminds about how well “laws of the jungle” still are extant amongst people unless we are well taught that life, itself, has value beyond self-serving sorts.

Meanwhile, not all people, who are at risk for starvation, resort to dire unconscionable actions. Oddly, we sometimes even see quite the opposite type of behavior wherein underfed people consciously try to share whatever little they have with others. Perhaps surprisingly, such demonstrations are not rare.

As Garda Ghista, the editor of World Prout Assembly, suggests, “One day I had gone with my auto rickshaw driver to the slums, to take photos of the very poorest people, the poorest of the poor who had nothing — no home, no anything. It was to raise funds for a service project, a children’s home, and I needed the photos for the flyer. So we would stop, for example, on a bridge where, on a ten by twenty foot piece of land along the bridge, some cloths were stretched across two poles, and people were living under them. There was no running water in sight. There was no anything. but, when I stepped out of the rickshaw and took out my camera, all these homeless, water-less, nearly foodless, nearly clothes-less people started moving towards me, with utter joy on their faces.

“I simply could not take the picture. I needed photos of miserable looking people in desperate poverty. They just didn’t look miserable. None of them did. It happened time and again, as when my rickshaw drove past the rock quarries where women with axes hammer at granite rock for ten to twelve hours a day, backbreaking labor – but again, when they saw me and the camera, they moved slowly toward me smiling.

“There is an NGO called Transparency International which rates corruption levels in countries. Bangladesh was coming out number one every year. (I haven’t checked recently.) At the same time, an institute in Great Britain assessed “happiness” levels of populations, and determined that the people of Bangladesh were the happiest in the world.

“We Westerners do not understand all the love that exists in people there – whole families sleeping in one room. It is not a hardship for them. It is the only way to be. It is about staying close and intimate. To them, the way we stick each baby in a separate room is something primitive and backward.

“Here so many Americans forgot how to talk – maybe due to watching so much TV. Even the TV programs and movies have such low levels of conversation. In contrast, go to India or Middle Eastern countries and speaking in poetry is something natural to the people. It is, also, loved and respected.

“When I worked in a college in the Middle East, the students (local Bedu) would sometimes come to my desk to make a phone call. Who would they phone? Again and again, it would be their mothers.

“We, here in the US, can hardly imagine the closeness of the families and the other more extended groups found in third world countries. When my Bedu friends took me to the desert, we used to sit on the ground, and the father would immediately go and milk the camel and bring me a huge bowl of fresh camel’s milk. Simultaneously, the mother (of my student) would cut up fruit and put it in my mouth.

“Does it happen here in the US? …and in India, when I visited a family there and at dinner said that I am full, then that mother took the spoon and began feeding me spoon by spoon, putting the spoon in my mouth, ignoring my protestations. Will it happen here? So who is more civilized and who is more happy? I never saw such love, hospitality and happiness as I saw in the Middle East and South Asia. For this very reason, what the American Empire has done to my friends there is painful beyond measure.”

My response to this is that, when people need each other to survive, they tend to act more kindly to everyone else, including outsiders. Indeed, they are especially generous towards those who serve their interests as does a teacher for their son.

Conversely, they tend to develop a state of anomy, callousness, apathy, contempt and disregard in relation to the welfare of others when it is not in one’s own interest to support them. This second state, one of almost complete alienation and independence rather than interdependence, has been shown time and again in various situations.

One of the most notorious episodes involved the murder of Kitty Genovese in NYC [2]. In addition, the Kitty Genovese incident would seem to indicate that the more people that exist concentrated together, the less likely that individual worth has much merit. Congestion studies amongst many species bear this out as does, in general, crime rates in crowded VS uncrowded regions when variables such as socioeconomic class are factored into the mix [3].

The implications relative to urban settings and overpopulation, in general, are clear. As Larry Winn states, “Imagine a group of humans, indeterminate in number, confined in a place of fixed dimensions, wanting for nothing. They have plenty to eat, plenty of water, plenty of places to live, and only the dimmest sort of apprehension of a larger world. They might even think of “the outside” as a kind of malicious fiction perpetrated by malcontents. It’s a circumstance not unlike the one “sustainable development” is supposed to create for us. Also, not unlike the universes of John Calhoun’s rats. [4]”

He goes on to conclude in the same article, “…the rats in Calhoun’s experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and cannibalism. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females – the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment – were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue.”

At the same time, one could only barely suppose that such happenings as Kitty Genovese’s type or as Larry Winn’s description would have a high rate of prevalent to transpire in a small remote villages wherein personal relations are more all inclusive, intimate, relevant and indispensable for maintenance of optimal social welfare. With less people in a community, there tends to exist stronger intact ties across the board –even with strangers, who are merely passing through the environs.

In addition, I predict that, with material affluence on the increase in Bangladesh and elsewhere due to globalization of industries, many people there will become more like much of the US population — self-absorbed, largely indifferent to the welfare of the poor, insular, impressed by wealth and signs of wealth (as exhibited by Hollywood starlets and major sports figures), driven to get as much for themselves and their families at the exclusion of others as could be possible, etc. This is largely because cultural values are predicated on whatever serves to maximally support life in a particular set of circumstances.

In other words, people will more readily commune with each other and share if these sorts of behaviors foster their own well-being. If taking as much for oneself with disregard for others does it, then this model, instead, will be the one habitually learned and supported by the public at large. (Just as “necessity is the mother of invention,” it is also the mother of behavioral patterns developing one way VS. another.)

As such, people tend to work together to get water, feed each other, and provide for other material needs in these societies wherein it is necessary for many people to work together as a precondition to fulfill common aims (without which doing they would all die). Opposed to this are the conditions wherein success is primarily and almost exclusively tied to personal fiscal gain rather than mutual philanthropy.

With this alternative in place, there is little loyalty to companions, employees, nor employers. Instead, the overriding concern is simply advancement of one’s own profit and this aim, alone. Hoarding behaviors will, then, be on the rise, too. At the same time, the gap between the haves and have-nots will, also, enlarge. All the while, people will be seen not as having much merit in and of themselves as they will largely be viewed as expendable commodities — as means to an end to add to one’s own financial and other assets.

This being the case, the number of millionaires in the world swelled to 8.7 million. Meanwhile, is there any mystery about whatever most of them are trying to do rather than spread their wealth in service to humanity or improvement of the natural environment? No. Instead of promoting widespread benefits, they are, for the most part, striving to become billionaires (called “kleptocrats” in a related Wikipedia citation below as they are thievishly parasitic on the body politic).

Indeed, many are wildly successful in achieving this objective. ‘The number of billionaires around the world rose by 102 to a record 793… and their combined wealth grew 18 percent to $2.6 trillion, according to “Forbes” magazine’s 2006 rankings of the world’s richest people [5].’ In addition, their group has been expanding steadily. All the while they, also, command vast stores of resources (obtained through their purchasing power), manipulate their governments (through lobbies and other means) and control others (via military might and other kinds) to keep everything solidly behind their acts of racking in ever more dollars and possessions, including huge tracts of land and factories, for themselves.

The flip side to this situation is that US jobs are disappearing overseas to second and third world countries in which the populations are paid measly salaries of ~ a dollar a day for their hard work. Moreover, these laborers will get fired if they dare to complain about their income, work conditions, or other aspects of their jobs. Furthermore, they are, for the most part, easily replaced as there often exists the condition of large unemployment in their locations. Therefore, they’d better, meekly and gratefully, do as they’re told by management.

Meanwhile, the goods that they produce are sold to eager consumers in first world countries, consumers whose own economies are crumbling due to a growing deficit of work at reasonable wages. For example, one in five Americans now lives on less than seven dollars a day according to fairly recent US census figures [6]. All the same, it is primarily the near poor, who give the most to charities — not the middle and upper classes. It is because they are almost poverty struck and know the degree that being so can be horrendously grim to the point of being even life threatening.

All of the above in consideration, it might be easy to conclude that capitalism, itself, is antithetical to altruism and benevolent regard for life as its economic program is based on buying low (i.e., raw products, human labor, etc.) and selling high to get ahead FOR ONESELF. As such, there is no mutual regard or tender support for others as this way to go forward is, essentially, carried out by progressively taking greater advantage of others, including other species that are used to make products. At the same time, these predatory conditions are especially evident in countries, like the US, governed by plutocratic corpocracies.

One needn’t even look at cities, like New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina or Detroit in relation to GM plant closings, to see the damage done by such malevolent business and government structures. Any public school in a ghetto, a crowded homeless shelter, hoards of street people in every major urban environment (80,000 in LA alone of whom ~ 1/2 are mentally ill), overwrought food banks strung out across the land, the rate of home foreclosures, the depreciation of the country’s currency and myriad other indicators can amply serve in and by themselves as proof.

So what are we to do in the face of such daunting circumstances? Is the best way to proceed in such a rapacious backdrop to simply claw one’s own way to the top of the economic ladder, scratch out the competition and forget about everyone else left behind? Should we just shrug our shoulders and passively go along with the damaging industrial and governmental plans that are in place because that is all that we know? Certainly not!

In terms of the way to proceed given the conditions that we have in our societies and our personal lives in connection to the social order, I often go back to a comment that E. O. Wilson made to me when I asked him, around fifteen years ago, about the most important action that we could undertake to stymie environmental collapse. His reply was simple. It was that we must educate as many others as possible to the truths regarding the happenings. This, in his opinion at the time, would ultimately provide the best assurance of improvements across the board. In addition, his viewpoint would seem to apply to other areas of concern besides environmental ones.

At the same time, I realize that I, individually and in group efforts, must always resist corrupt authority and any wrongful control (i.e., arising from my dependence on repugnant transnational corporations like Exxon, Monsanto, Bayer and so many others) as best as possible. Yes, many of us are cogs in the wheel (a reference to Mordechai Vanunu’s “I’M YOUR SPY” at vanunu.org) as we are well integrated into and play a role in destructive systems on which we are reliant for our livelihoods, life maintaining goods and services, etc. So, we keep the status quo (including their affiliated big corporations and political arrangements) as is on an ongoing basis.

However, we can, as Peter Goodchild writes in his essays and many others suggest, get out of it all as much as possible, wean ourselves from some damaging behaviors and develop better methods of self-sufficiency. In other words, we can minimize our involvement with whatever it is that we abhor. We can also always make a point to deliberately stand up for whatever is right when given a reasonable opportunity to do so. There are plenty of ways available through volunteer activities, letter writing campaigns and other forms of protest.

Nonetheless, I realize that I. F. Stone’s comment (located below) is probably dead-on correct for a wide array of goals that many people would want to support towards creating a constructive future. Yet, in the end, it all boils down to a matter of conscience. As such, one has to do whatever one does simply because it does seem right and because there is no better alternative even when the outcomes AREN’T likely to be the sorts that one would ideally wish to have transpire. Then again, getting overly concerned about results in endeavors can take one’s attention away from any hard struggle towards betterment, itself. So, one deliberately has to maintain focus on the beneficial action, whatever it comprises, regardless of any other factors.

So, yes, we’re “stuck” in some ways because we need oil, drugs, food (of which the majority is GM), clothing (often made by poorly paid laborers), etc. This being the case, though, does not excuse us one iota, I would think, from doing whatever we can, even if small and seemingly inconsequential, to improve the way that we go about our lives.

Even if imperfect at it, we owe it to ourselves and each other to strive to create a better world as best as we can given our underlying circumstances. Then, who knows? Maybe at a certain point, we can, as Stone implies, reach a point in the far ahead times where some benefit has accrued on account of our seminal action. Maybe we can be one of the snowflakes that provides the weight to reach that final tipping point: The NAA Voice, www.naaweb.org/TheNAAVoice/TheNAAVoice121406.htm.

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” -I. F. Stone

[1] For details, please refer to: Donner Party – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party).
[2] To learn more about this incident, please see: Kitty Genovese@Everything2.com (everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=132928), Bystander effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect), Kitty Genovese – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese), Thirty-Eight Saw Murder
(www.selu.edu/Academics/Faculty/scraig/ gansberg.h) and A Picture History of Kew Gardens, NY – Kitty Genovese – The … (www.oldkewgardens.com/ss-nytimes-3.html).
[3] An overview of this topic is supplied at: The Real Picture of Land-Use Density and Crime: A GIS Applic… (http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professional/papers/PAP508/p508.htm).
[4] A description of John Calhoun’s findings, along with their implications, is located at: Universe 25 (www.suite101.com/article.cfm/frontier_theory/100).
[5] Data on wealth can be found at: FOXNews.com – Number of Billionaires Up to Record 793 – Busi… (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,187400,00.html), Number of billionaires grows, Gates stays on top – Mar. 9, 2… (http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/news/newsmakers/billionaires_forbes/index.htm),
Billionaire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire), Number of Billionaires (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml) and Number of Millionaires in the World Swells to 8.7 Million | … (mostlywater.org/node/7492).
[6] Related information can be found at: Thomas Paine’s Corner: American Dream Now a Nightmare for Mi… (civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2007/04/american-d) and Some Statistics on Poverty in America (www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp).

Emily Spence is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at: ehspence@aol.com

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