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One War To Rule Them All - Michael Hallam.

In 2002 the governments of the world held their second international conference on the environment in Johannesburg. This followed the first Global Summit in Rio de Janeiro ten years earlier. Whilst the real gains in Rio were slight the event was significant in that for the first time the nations of the world formally admitted that we face a global environmental crisis of our own making. After 1992, whilst practical action was slow, there was at least a public acknowledgement that the environmental degradation caused by human activity must be eventually tacked. In 2002 all of the hopes of the last decade seemed to be dashed. The worlds environmental and NGO community watched from the sidelines (most of them were denied entry to the summit) as the corporate world systematically sought to undermine every proposal for environmental regulation and have it replaced by their own agenda. In the words of many prominent environmental players the 2002 Johannesburg Summit had demonstrated one thing, that national governments were no longer in control of the sustainable development agenda and that through such processes as the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) it was the corporate world which was increasingly dictating the direction in which the world would go.

This silent takeover of democracy by the world’s most powerful corporations during the 1990’s has led to an acceleration of the strip-mining of our natural and social capital through the process of ‘globalisation’. Whilst purporting to be for the maximum benefit of all, in practice this process does the opposite and benefits only a few at the expense of the many.

In 2000 the American corporations were powerful enough to have their own appointees ‘elected’ to the highest political office in the world and since that time the agenda of the US government and that of the forces working though the corporations has been identical.

The tricks of the trade in human psychological manipulation have long been at the service of these powers through advertising, public relations firms and the media, and so it is with seamless ease that they shift from informing us that ‘Coke is Best’ to informing us that perpetual war is the price of perpetual peace and that human rights must be suspended in order to promote democracy.

This Alice in Wonderland logic was most successfully developed and applied by Joseph Stalin. It was he who perfected the art of pronouncing black to be white, whilst keeping a straight face, and who inspired George Orwell to write both Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farm, in particular, is a modern parable of the black art of manipulating and intimidating human thinking, and anyone who has read it will not be taken in by the words and phrases spoken by the American and British Governments over the last few months. Thus our own John Prescott can blithely pronounce that we must go to war because the French Government is opposed to the war!

The hope is that by re-spinning the news today, and offering us yet another new electrical consumer toy, we will forget what we remember of yesterday and accept the most recent re-writing of history. The number of contradictions between the way things are portrayed and the way they are is now so manifest that we barely recognise them anymore.

Luckily, there does seem to have been a miscalculation in the war planning. The sheer number of ordinary people throughout the world who have acquired the capacity to see through the lies and are not buying the war seems far greater than anticipated. There is another revolution taking place in the world, a human revolution. The consciousness of humanity is changing. When the image of the earth was taken from outer space we realised, as a concrete fact, the beauty and vulnerability of our small finite world. That the world has boundaries and that what goes around comes around means that if we throw our rubbish into our neighbour’s garden then sooner or later it is going to come back.

But this change is far more profound than that. An increasing number of people talk about a new deepening of consciousness in which the interconnectivity between people, things and events becomes at least as important as our ability to analytically and systematically take living things to pieces. We re-assemble nature in our own image but unfortunately our self-image is incomplete, for we are more than just the sum of our material parts. Our current material, space-bound, technology-dependent science has become adept at describing the processes of decay but it is yet to describe what life is.

Having reached and exceeded its natural and healthy limitations this one-sided science, along with much of the technology accompanying it has become degenerate and is in decline. The fossil fuels which power this technological version of nature are beginning to run out and the self-awarded licence for America to wage open ended war is the desperate act of a power that knows it has no future if humankind is to evolve in a healthy and sustainable way.

So when we protest against this war we must begin to recognise the true scope and depth of this war. We must not allow our thinking to be compartmentalised into accepting the associations that are made on our behalf. We must make all the connections between the war against Iraq, or whichever country is picked next, the war against nature and the war against human rights in the name of a one-sided economics, and we must voice these connections on every opportunity we get.

When Ghandi opposed the British military occupation of India he made the connection between the wearing of British made cloth and the poverty of rural Indians, and organised the first mass consumer boycott in history. He made the connection between the development of a sustainable local economy and the resisting of tyranny. Resisting elite globalisation, the wholesale destruction of nature and the removal of hard won human rights along with the struggle of local people the world over to avoid the impoverishment forced upon them by corrupt authorities and the opposition to physical warfare are all aspects of the same war.

We must all become our own Ghandi’s, we must make the connections and we must be prepared to act only for the good, and to speak the truth as we experience it, in defiance of all pressure to do otherwise.

Michael Hallam

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