Article
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
Further material can be found at http://www.threefolding.com