Speculations on a Sustainable Political Economy from a Human Ecology Perspective

I wrote a short (20,000 word) thesis to complete a B Litt degree in Human Ecology (in the Dept of Geography) at the Australian National University in the early 1990s. After many delays it was written and submitted, as best I can recall, in 1992.

The title of the thesis is Speculations on a Sustainable Political Economy from a Human Ecology Perspective

One of the examiners at the time suggested it could be re-worked for more general publication – but my life moved rapidly in a different direction and I never attempted to do so.

To be suitable for publication now it would need considerable editing and updating. Nevertheless I believe the basic ideas I articulated then have stood the test of time. I haven’t substantially changed my mind about them. The document may be of some interest to others so I’m now making it available online.

It was the product of a younger man trying to understand – and change – the world.

The Abstract, written at the time, summarises the basic argument of my 1992 thesis:

This generation is confronted by a social and ecological crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Modem humanity’s chronically unsustainable way of life jeopardises the future well-being – possibly the survival- of our species, and the health of our planetary environment. Unprecedented changes are needed to resolve this crisis, including active management of humanity’s global economy to facilitate maximisation of human welfare constrained by ecological guidelines designed to maximise prospects for long-term sustainablility. This in tum necessitates conscious transformation of the political framework within which we manage our affairs, including the formation of a supreme, democratic global polity.

I now appreciate much better forces that might resist such changes and the extent to which they go to pursue an alternative agenda.

In the early 1990s, I thought it likely the main opposition to instituting democratic globalism would come from nationalists determined to cling onto the past – as well, perhaps, as transnational companies seeking to continue to perpetuate the unfair advantages they gain from trading within the anarchic conditions of inadequately administered inter-national relations.

I now believe there’s a greater threat of which at the time I was largely unaware. I refer to the (hypothesised) attempt by a cryptocratic plutocracy to impose its own, autocratic and highly undemocratic form of globalism on the world.

In Anglo-Australian culture two decades ago “globalism” was regarded mainly as an idealistic curiosity. Today the view then held by only a few – that globalism is actually an evil plot – now seems much more common and plausible.

There’s a reason it seems more plausible. Some form of malevolent cryprocracy clearly exists – and has been pushing with ever-increasing tempo, over the last two decades, to re-fashion western civilisation into a rapacious, militarised and duplicitous enforcer of its own partisan agenda.

After 9/11, this has been ever more impossible for honest, courageous and engaged intellects to deny. There truly IS a powerful push to develop a global polity – but from what we can glean, the intentions and modus operandi of those behind it are malevolent, immoral and utterly unacceptable to humanity as a whole.

Should we conclude that establishing global political union has become undesirable – as well as not feasible or premature (the common refrains 20 years ago)?

I think not. The need to establish a global political movement that can bring to fruition what Phillip Allott describes as ‘Eunomia’ is ever-more pressing.

What’s very exciting and offers grounds for optimism is the extraordinarily rapid progress made over the last two decades in information technology and telecommunications. We now have the technology to complement the ideal. We can make our human world more intelligent – quickly and in an ecologically affordable way.

The key goal now is to also make it healthy (whole) and wise.

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Note: The document (my old thesis) has recently been digitised from printed copy prepared at the time.

I haven’t tidied up the PDF document generated automatically via the use of optical charatcer recognition software (OCR) – so it does contain typos over and above any perfections in the original.

To make ot easier for readers to find what may interest them in the document, I’ve reproduced below the List of Contents page with original page numbers:

LIST OF CONTENTS

LIST OF DIAGRAMS – p.6
ABSTRACT – p.7
INTRODUCTION – p.8
CHAPTER 1 …… THE MODERN CRISIS FROM A HUMAN ECOLOGY PERSPECTIVE – p.11
Cultural Adaptation to the ‘Modem Crisis’ – p.12
The New Environmentalism – p.14
CHAPTER 2 …… THE IDEA OF SUSTAINABILITY – p.19
Sustainability – p.19
From Stockholm to WCED – p.21
Eco!ogy’s Radica! Currents – p.23
CHAPTER 3 …… RE-UNITING ECOS – p.28
The Growth of Environmental Economics -p.28
Towards Eco-Development… – p.33
CHAPTER 4 …… SPECULATIONS ON A SUSTAINABLE POLITICAL ECONOMY – p.39
The Implications of the WCED – p.40
Economic Globalisation – p.41
Building a Global Community – p.45
CONCLUSION – p.51
APPENDIX A The ‘BiohistoricaI’ Conceptual Framework – p.52
APPENDIX B The Terms ‘Polity’, ‘Economy’ and ‘Political Economy’ – p.58
BIBLIOGRAPHY – p.60

Submission to the Australian Media Inquiry

October 31st 2011

NOW WITH ADDED POSTSCRIPT!!!

1/ When several NATO nations began their unprovoked military attack on Libya earlier this year, commencing an 8-month assault that reduced what was formerly Africa’s most prosperous nation (according to UNDP Human Development Index statistics) to chaos, rubble and rotting bodies, they focused on one small part of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 to justify their ‘intervention’: “..to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”.

In similar fashion, most of my submission is directed to one small part of the terms of reference of this inquiry, namely that part of item (d) which says: “Any related issues…in the public interest.”

2/ I do not pretend to have detailed knowledge of the workings of media regulation in Australia and my submission is about broad principles, not legal detail.

3/ I do have a lifelong interest in the media, I’ve been an avid ‘consumer’ of news and information via the media since the 1960s. I was an early adopter in using the internet to source news information. I currently use the internet as well as mass media to absorb, query, debate and output ideas on many issues I regard as important – environmental, political, historical, cultural, ethical etc.

4/ For many decades, going back to the time when newspapers, magazines, TV and radio were the major elements of the mass media, I’ve had concerns about deep in-built bias in the western mass media.

The Potential for Media Diversification

5/ In Britain of the 1830s, sharp reductions in Newspaper Stamp and Paper Duties, along with rising literacy, helped trigger a boom in newspaper production combined with an increase in diversity. Many small independent publications began serving local communities, towns and cities. Opinions and perspectives were diverse.

Yet within a century or so, the economic centrality of advertising revenue to newspaper viability led to substantial consolidation in the number of publications and the rise of a few dominant national papers.

6/ During the 20th centuries new media electronic technologies were introduced – first radio, then TV and finally the internet. Each of these media, like newspapers before them, had the potential to provide for greater diversity of viewpoint. But there have always been countervailing tendencies at play favouring consolidation as opposed to diversification.

7/ In Australia as elsewhere, successive Governments have effectively favoured some media interests over others, sometimes with the benign intent of fostering media talent, creativity and high quality output – and occasionally with less laudable motives.

The most obvious ‘favouritism’ has been in the government’s establishment and funding of the ABC – Australia’s publicly-funded broadcaster, modelled to a significant extent on Britain’s BBC.

There have been powerful reasons for funding major public broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS in this country. Throughout most of the last few decades, I’ve been a strong supporter of this, seeing the output of these organisations as an important counter-balance to the partisan agendas of privately-owned corporate media. But my support has waned in recent years. I’m now deeply concerned about what I regard as quite egregious bias within this nation’s public broadcasters – so appalling they court a major loss of public support.

8/ Government has also played a significant role, over the years, in favouring and nurturing certain private media corporations – especially Newscorp and the three main TV networks. The decision to allocate digital bandwidth to these TV companies without offering this bandwidth out to public tender is a stark example of this favouritism.

9/ The case of Newscorp, which has some 70% share of the Australian daily newspaper market as well as extensive online, cable & satellite TV interests in Australia, is in a class of its own.

It was a grotesque mistake and failure, on the part of those earlier governments responsible, to allow one media corporation so much dominance in the newspaper market. I know of no other major western democracy where a single company exercises such disproportionate influence. It is questionable whether real democracy is possible in a nation where one media owner can, at will, cause such havoc for any politician who stands against them or the policies they favour most crucially. Any democracy that took itself seriously would break-up such a media Empire so no single private corproate interest had anything resembling Newscorp’s current dominance.

10/ I live in Far North Queensland. In this region, Newscorp dominance of the print media is almost absolute. Newscorp produces almost my entire range of local, regional, adjacent and state newspapers.. a picture completed by The Australian, Newscorp’s national paper. This is akin to the centralisation of editorial control in the former USSR.

11/ Some years ago, during a Queensland State election, I tried to get the local ABC in Cairns to take interest in a major regional planning issue which the Premier had raised personally in a speech while visiting. As a rep of a local environment group, we had a response to the Premier’s announcement. I was told it was a good story, but the ABC would run it after the election. Pointing out it was an election story, I was then told that it wasn’t in the newspapers. “Up here”, I was informed “news needs to be in the newspapers…”

12/ The public myth is of a fiercely competitive media environment, in which journalists vie to rush out the truth to the public. This process doubtless operates to some extent.

Of equal if not greater importance, I think, is the tendency of journalists – across institutions and companies and even including paid free-lancers – to form consensus about news value, both positive and negative. Competition drives the news process – but collegiate conformity sets its boundaries. The example I cited above was one small case from my own region. There are far more important examples where the mass media, en bloc, has utterly failed to provide fair and honest coverage of credible, evidence-based perspectives on very important issues – to an extent that merits the term censorship.

13/ Even if the NBN is not completed as per the current government’s intentions, in coming years high-speed broadband will become ubiquitous. If NBN standards are met soon, new media players will soon have the potential to bring a renaissance of genuine diversity and creativity to the Australian media. This is very much in the public interest.

14/ Production of quality video material – once the preserve of ad agencies and film & TV studios – is being democratized. Combined with NBN-type telecommunications infrastructure, this makes it possible for small groups of collaborators – or individuals – to run their own ‘shows’, which can accessed online directly and may also be aggregated within websites or featured on ‘channels’. In a media landscape like this, the old TV networks become obsolete. There will be the opportunity for many ‘channels’ of pre-arranged programming. It will also be possible to use no ‘channels’ at all , drawing on personally specified feeds of news, topic-specific information and entertainment.

15/ It may help to give a hypothetical example. Imagine a day in the life of a Mr Gummidge, c 2030. Let’s imagine Mr Gummidge (Wurzel to his friends) is a fruit farmer. He’s studying jam-making in his spare time. He’s interested in local politics and he likes soccer.

Wurzel gets up and flicks on the screen. It brings up a simple, personalised menu. He says “soccer”: a summary of the latest results appears, supplied via his favourite sports info-service. He spends a few minutes watching the highlights of a couple of games. Mr Gummidge sips his herbal tea and moves onto business. He visits the channel maintained by fellow fruit farmers in Queensland. There are three such channels in operation at present, reflecting different interests and personal networks. He likes the channel that focuses on exotic tropical fruit. Moving seamlessly between viewing the highlights of the channel and messaging fellow participants, he learns, queries and communicates with a dozen or so industry colleagues in 40 minutes. He’s now abreast of the latest discussions in his industry. He decides to talk directly to one colleague who shows up as available. The two friends video link for a few minutes. Then Gummidge goes out to check on his lychees. He comes in for lunch. Feeling out of touch with local politics, he scans the headlines of a couple of local channels compiled by volunteer enthusiasts. He sends off a vid-comment about the Mayor. He manages to keep it polite. Next he settles down to the online jam tutorial. He bought this one from Hungary. They really know about jam there! In the evening, he decides to veg out and watch a movie. Will he see what the commercials channels are pushing right now? Nah! He’d rather watch the movie a friend told him about. Mr Gummidge checks the world news headlines on his favourite global service, flicks off the screen and heads to bed.

16/ The point about this hypothetical illustration is that in the media world of Mr Gummidge, an average kind of Ozzie 20 years in the future, major national media companies (including the ‘public broadcasters’) have little role to play. He gets news from people he most trusts, specific to each field he’s interested in. He chooses his own entertainment directly (unless he really wants to veg out!). He likes soccer – so he uses a soccer info service run by soccer enthusiasts like him. Likewise for his specific work-related interests. Channel 9? The ABC? The Australian newspaper? Who needs them?

17/ Major media interests are naturally not keen on this development. They are probably not the only vested interests to view this new opportunity with trepidation, can be expected to fight against the shift to democratisation and diversification of media – and will probably cloak their real agenda in disguise.

18/ To those in the public such as myself, deeply dissatisfied with our current mass media, democratisation and diversification of media is a very exciting prospect. The potential convergence of ‘websites’ with ‘channels’ means information power being shared more equitably. The old model of journalist and reader is utterly one-sided. In the new media era, every individual is (potentially) a sharer of information. Every small group can (potentially) run a media channel.

19/ In addition to affordable and ubiquitous hardware/technology, what are other pre-requisites for such a change? Answering this question may also reveal how vested interests are most likely to try to disrupt, slow and divert this trend.

20/ One prerequisite is net neutrality. This is essential and should be enshrined in law. All media providers should face a level playing field. In effect, they should be able to narrow cast via the internet at zero cost to themselves (as at present). There must be no preferential speeds or access.

21/ The second prerequisite is an appropriately hands-off censorship regime. The internet must be regarded more like the post or email and less like TV or radio. No-one is forced to watch anything on the internet. People choose to visit sites. They are not stuck with a choice of five channels – or even 50. They have – in effect – millions of channels. That choice will grow. Censorship along the lines of TV or radio is impossible and the effort should be abandoned. Ideally, Australia should legislate an equivalent of the US First Amendment. We need a basic guarantee of free speech, especially (but not only) on the internet.

22/ The third prerequisite is a level playing field for public funding and support. There is no need or basis for preferentially assisting existing major broadcasters. If that means the major national TV networks disappear, so be it. The market in the commercial media industry should not be distorted. If the old networks can adjust to genuine open competition and retain viewers, good for them. There should receive no public assistance.

23/ Ongoing support for public broadcasting – notably the ABC – is a separate issue. Broadly speaking, I believe some public subsidy of media and journalism is justifiable and necessary – just as we subsidise the arts, sport and other cultural activity.

However, current arrangements are very unsatisfactory; reform is needed

The Need for Truthfulness in Media

24/ The politics of this century, now more than a decade old, has been dominated by one event: the shocking attacks in America on September 11th 2001. This was quickly cited as the basis for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Even in far-way Australia, the impact of the 9/11 attacks have been dramatic. Our intelligence agencies have grown like mushrooms; ASIO alone has a budget in 2011 that roughly an order of magnitude higher than a decade before. Some 30 pieces of legislation were, at various times, rushed through Parliament in the years following 9/11 – all supposedly to meet the ‘terrorist threat’. Since then, all talk of a post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ has vanished as the Australian military has also grown rapidly. Then there’s the continuing presence of Australian troops in Afghanistan…

25/ Under these circumstances, with the stakes so enormously high, the public reasonably expects professional journalists to wade through the detail, then disseminate and debate the truth as they see it, in an attempt to best establish what the truth is. We do not expect every journalist to cover every topic; we certainly don’t expect all journalists to agree. We DO expect robust debate that covers EVERY reason-based perspective. In short, we expect that just as medics take the Hippocratic Oath, journalists promote the Socratic principles of fair, rational and open debate in which TRUTH is the goal.

26/ A substantial international body of scholars have, over the years, developed peer-reviewed ‘demolitions’ of the official 9/11 narrative. Scholars such as David Ray Griffin and Graeme MacQueen has written damning material showing the complete impossibility and absurdity of the official narrative. The implication of their work is clearly that 9/11 was a false flag operation, carried out by insiders, not a gang of Arab hijackers. If that’s correct, the entire ‘War on Terror’ (including the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan) has been carried out on a false pretext.

27/ I do not expect the ABC to agree with these scholars. I don’t expect these scholars be given free airtime to expound their views unquestioned on the public airwaves in Australia.
I DO expect that the ABC interviews them and covers their perspective, in news and current affairs, with seriousness and intellectual rigor.

28/ The reality has been the complete opposite. As far as I’m aware, the ABC has given no coverage at all the Engineers & Architects for 9/11 Truth or other highly credible parts of the 9/11 Truth phenomenon. This amounts to censorship. With a handful of exceptions there has been no fair coverage of the 9/11 Truth movement via the ABC (there was, for instance, one article in the Drum c. 2008 (comments closed quickly and that was it – although there were a LOT of comments)

29/ It may be the view of the Australian Prime Minister that 9/11 has been fully explained and any suggestions the official story is untrue are “stupid and wrong ”. The ABC Board may hold a similar view; So may ABC staff.

Nonetheless, the ABC has no right to exclude this topic from that very substantial part of the national discourse which it controls. To do so is censorship. It is especially obnoxious when, from time to time, ABC staff abuse their position by denigrate the 9/11 truth movement – whose most prominent spokespeople they will neither interview nor debate.

30/ 9/11 is by no means the only topic subject to heavy censorship by the ABC.
Here are just a few more examples where the ABC either provides no coverage at all or entirely one-sided coverage:

• World War Two and what is commonly labelled ‘The Holocaust’ (UTTERLY ONE-SIDED)
• Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty (NOT MENTIONED AT ALL)
• the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre (UTTERLY ONE-SIDED)
• the London bombings of July 7th 2005 (UTTERLY ONE-SIDED)

This is by no means an exhaustive list. In each case, many ‘inconvenient facts’ contradict the official narratives. In each case, ABC coverage is entirely one-sided (in the case of the USS Liberty attack, there’s no mention at all of the topic on the ABC website – except in comments from the public to articles that don’t mention it!)

31/ Each of these topics is of considerable political relevance to Australians. The Port Arthur massacre took place inside Australia. The London bombings were the trigger for a raft of additional ‘anti-Terrorist legislation’ rushed through the Australian parliament in late 2005. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty – a likely example of a false flag operation gone wrong – provides essential historical context for understanding contemporary events. ‘The Holocaust’ is such a central cultural icon of our time it has even been subjected to attempts to enforce heterodoxy via the courts, using the mechanism of Human Rights legislation (in true Orwellian fashion!)

32/ The relevance of these topics is clear. The one-sidedness of the ABC’s coverage (the same applies to SBS) is stark. The question arises: is this acceptable behaviour on the part of the ABC? In my view it’s not. Our publicly funded broadcasters behave as though they have taken sides on these subjects – and actually wish to exclude critics and heterodox opinions, however credible and factually supported, from public discourse. That’s not acceptable.

33/ The ABC’s Charter at present, provides no requirement that the organisation tells the truth or reports in a balanced manner (at least in aggregate, over time). Consideration should be given to remedying this.

However, change is clearly needed in the personnel and culture of our public broadcasters. A number of people in the ABC – from Board level down – seem to have a strong commitment to keeping credible critical perspectives on several important topics (such as those listed above) under wraps. There are two obvious probable motivations (1) they are within, or allied with, the Zionist movement (2) they are within, or allied to, ‘intelligence agencies’, whether Australian (eg ASIO) or overseas (eg Mossad, CIA, MI6). These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Without personnel change to open up the ABC to a wider range of perspectives – and without cultural change so awkward question are routinely asked, not set aside – tinkering with the Charter will be of little value. BOTH are needed.

34/ In the longer-term – looking decades ahead and taking into account trends towards convergence and diversification already discussed – substantial funding for one or two public media organisations may well become an anomaly. Signs of this are emerging already.

Why, for instance, should ‘The Drum’ website receive public subsidy, when other major Australian news websites do not? If the goal is to provide for a wider diversity of views that don’t get covered on commercial or private websites, there might be a case for it. But as I’ve argued, that’s simply not the case. In relation to some of the most crucial issues of our time, the ABC censors opinion just as rigorously (if not more) than Australia’s privately owned mainstream media.

35/ A likely response to criticism of this type – and a response I’ve received when making this type of argument in the past – is that organisations such as the ABC cannot possibly cover every side of every argument and must necessarily make editorial choices, including the effective exclusion of some ideas that simply don’t merit a wide audience.

It’s a reasonable point. What’s unreasonable is its misapplication to justify the exclusion of perspectives that clearly have credibility. If, for instance, one university professor – and one alone – was to suggest the three WTC towers that collapsed on 9/11 were probably brought down by controlled demolition, a major media group like the ABC might reasonably not report the heterodox claim. When more than 1,600 qualified engineers and architects say this, it is clearly not a perspective that should be sidelined and ignored on the grounds that it’s marginal. Such a large body of informed opinion merits coverage. The ABC has no right to deny fair coverage.

36/ The bias of the Australian mass media – including our public broadcasters – has been egregious in relation to the succession of wars promoted by the USA in recent years.
Sceptical views about the real origins of the Afghanistan War go unreported, as previously mentioned. In the run up to the 2003 Iraq Invasion, some scepticism was voiced via the ABC, but in most of the private mass media the stampede to support invasion was thunderous. Newscorp often argues its editors have independent editorial control, but I’m unaware of a single editor of any of the hundreds of Murdoch-owned newspapers in Australia who took a different view on the Iraq War and failed to support the invasion. This is group-think on a mammoth scale.

37/ The attack on Libya this year provides an instance of media group-think within the Australian mass media more absolute even than the 2003 Iraq War. In this case not only has the Newscorp-dominated private mass media covered only one side of the debate. The ABC has done so too. An analysis of coverage on any of the ABC’s major news and current affairs channels would show that anti-war voices – and/or voices supporting the previous Libyan Government – have been excluded from the Australian mass media coverage and generally ridiculed. A similar comment applies to the attempts currently underway to launch a ‘regime change’ process against Syria.

38/ In recent years, on numerous occasion, I have complained to the ABC – usually via direct contact with journalists or programs – about matters discussed above. It has been a tiresome experience. Not once has anyone in the organisation shown any sign of wanting to grapple with the issues. In private conversations with journalists I know personally, the message has been clear: these issues are too hot for them to handle; they’re unwilling to go out on a limb, risking reputation and career.

It’s my strong impression that the media – including publicly funded mass media – has become first and foremost a mechanism for controlling public opinion; its role as an information provider has become subordinated to this primary, unstated goal, the principal beneficiaries of which are the mainstream Jewish/Zionist Lobby, western intelligence agencies and the western military-security complex. Each of these powerful partisan interests has effectively been shielded from proper scrutiny in our mass media. This is completely unacceptable.

39/ One possible defence for the ABC & SBS is to claim that its workings, subtle biases and output is in line with comparable overseas organisations such as the BBC. There is some truth in this. Indeed, one often gets the feeling the ABC largely takes its cues from the BBC. It often runs documentaries from the BBC on controversial topics such as war and terrorism, seemingly happy to shelter under the skirts of its larger and most famous sibling.

Yet nothing in any Australian laws or guidelines, as far as I’m aware, requires Australia to apply the age-old cultural cringe in this way. The BBC is not a model of perfection for Australian public media to follow blindly. The BBC suffers from many of the same problems as the ABC. It has parallel biases and needs similar remedies. It’s Board – like the Board of the ABC – is not properly reflective of the diversity of views in the society as a whole. Both the BBC and ABC Board can reasonably be accused of Zionist bias. The fact that the BBC shows this type of bias is NOT a reason for Australia to follow.

40/ The growth of modern telecommunications – and in particular the internet – is often compared to the development of a species-wide brain.

This is truly a crucial developmental stage for Australia – and for humanity as a whole.

We need to ensure our communications – especially broadcast and mass media – are not subject to domination by special interest groups and unaccountable lobbies that operate largely in secrecy. We need our media to serve the public as a whole – not the other way round.

We need our mass media to foster truthfulness and rational awareness – not to create false notions that some views (however well-founded) are beyond the pale and may be safely disregarded by politicians and the public simply because we never hear them articulated on our TV screens.
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References

Newspaper evolution: an earlier examples of trends to more – and eventually less – media diversity:
http://uclan.academia.edu/AndrewHobbs/Papers/105566/When_the_provincial_press_was_the_national_press_c.1836-1900_

Australia’s Great Parliamentary debate about 9/11 (Not!)
http://sydwalker.info/blog/2010/10/22/australias-afghanistan-debate-9-11-and-kevin-bracken/

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (the major website of the 9/11 Truth Movement)
http://www.ae911truth.org

Hereward Fenton’s May 2008 article in The Drum about 9/11 – the ABC’s (one) exception that proves the rule?
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/31852.html

Port Arthur (grounds for concern excluded from discussion in the Australian mass media)
http://sydwalker.info/blog/2010/12/17/are-the-port-arthur-killers-still-out-there/

The Hoax of the 2oth Century (no Australian mass media interview with Professor Arthur Butz in more than three decades. Why not?)
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres3/HoaxV2.pdf

July 7th 2005 London Bombings (at least there was eventually an inquest in this case – unlike Port Arthur or 9/11!).
http://77inquests.blogspot.com/

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POSTSCRIPT 17th November 2011

Hush! The agenda is showing!

As of today the ‘Independent Media Inquiry Consultation Page‘ doesn’t list the above submission, nor have I received any acknowledgement my submission was even received (although it was sent by email without bounce-back).

The Inquiry is now towards the end of its second (and final?) week of hearings.  These hearings are not televised; apparently Chairman Ray Finkelstein QC banned cameras from the proceedings.

By now, this Inquiry has all the credibility of a Medieval Guild investigating itself. Public input appears welcome – as long as we all agree with the “experts”.

Every now and again a media academic, analyst or “journalist” tweets via the #MediaInquiry hashtag about concerns the media is losing public credibility…

Truly, this would be a brilliant satire on the pomposity of latter-day Pharisees, worthy of Johnathan Swift,  Franz Kafka or Eric Blair.

Such a shame it’s real life…

The brave man whose tweets I reported yesterday has tweeted since.

He returned to Twitter to post updates from the front line fight in Tripoli, describing first hand the reality of the sordid war western taxpayers have funded.

I respect his brave decision to fight and defend his values and culture, but I’m appalled western societies have put him in this cruel dilemma.

CEASE-FIRE NOW!

@LibyanLiberal tweets 25th August 2011

According to Libyan Government spokesperson Moussa Ibrahim, speaking at a press conference in Tripoli on 21st Ausgust, Tripoli experienced a bloodbath over the previous 24 hours.

He reported some 1,200 people had been killed; several thousands injured. Many no doubt were combatants, but it’s worth remembering they are people too – on both sides. This is carnage!

It’s not over, either. In fact, the bloodbath in Tripoli may just be beginning.

Horrifying Casualties

I had to switch my TV off a while yesterday in sheer disgust. I’d been listening to CNN, Al Jazeera, Fox, Sky.. for hours on end . Not ONCE did I notice a single commentator or talking head mention casualties.

Yet the courageous independent journalist Theirry Meyssan told us a day ago the hospitals are saturated. Today come’s gruesome footage, courtesy of Alex Crawford at Sky News. Has there been a squeak of angst out of ‘human rights groups’ such as Amnesty or Human Rights Watch – when ONE DAY yields casualty figures almost as bad as a MONTH of Israel’s savagery in Gaza, January 2009? If there has, I haven’t noticed.

Preventing large numbers of casualties, lest we forget, was the purported reason for NATO intervention in the first place. What a travesty! The liars at the UN who pulled off this stunt must never again be trusted. The responsible people in the USA, Britain and France are war criminals, thieves and maniacs. If anyone on the planet belongs behind bars, they do.

To imagine the terror people in Tripoli – and elsewhere in Libya – must be experiencing is as saddening as the lack of mobilization of the international peace movement, which barely seems to exist in any coherent form.

“Tripoli is 95% in rebel hands” Fox News reported at one point in what was a long night of viewing a day ago. Yet oddly, that 95% didn’t seem to include the Rixos Hotel, where foreign journalists have been based. It still doesn’t. A curious omission, especially as by all reports beleaguered hacks inside have been doing it tough. In fact, in recent days, life at the Rixos has been very tough – especially for genuine independent journalists to whom the world owes a debt of gratitude.

Sky News showed a crowd celebrating in Green Square, Tripoli on the 21st (Libya time). Yet a few hours later, a tweeter who claims to be in Tripoli stated all was quiet in the vicinity of the square. There has been some speculation Sky’s footage was faked completely (for days rumours have been circulating about a stage set replica of Green Square, built somewhere in Qatar). Or it may have been a temporary feat. Reports on TV yesterday suggest the ‘rebels’ have now retreated from Green Square.

Saif al Ghadafi: alive, well & free in Tripoli, AFTER the idiotic ICC said he was "in custody"

There have been reports of the capture of Ghadafi’s sons, of Ghadafi himself and of his death (complete with gruesome photo), reports of many Government and army defectors, tales of public celebrations once the rebels arrived… and on and on. None of these have been fully authenticated. Some have already been disproved. Believe the mainstream media and you have no doubt: the war is over, Ghadafi has lost. Game over! The political talking heads express no doubt. They’re committed to their necks: Obama, Cameron – even Julia Gillard chimed to welcome Ghadafi’s demise.

None of them mentioned the humanitarian crisis, as far as I’m aware. Nor are they exactly pursued with questions about that by ‘journalists’.

Tripoli’s nightmare has been packaged as Tripoli’s liberation by the media; politicians play their roles with quotable, optimistic cliches.

An Alternative Narrative

In addition to the largely overlooked humanitarian disaster, there is also a persistent, quite different narrative coming from non-standard sources. As best I can, I’ll piece together what I think may be a plausible alternative explanation of what’s happening in Libya at the moment. Since I began writing this, I’ve seen one attempt already to do something similar: I recommend Libya: Swimming against the Tide of NATO’s Media Propaganda by Joost van den Heuvel.

I’ll make a basic cases around three propositions:

Second, the ‘rebels’, backed by NATO air-power, training and provisions, can and have made advances into territory, including many areas where they lack support and which they cannot hold long-term. Typically, over the last few months, they’ve retreat after some time and Government forces regain control, as long as NATO bombing subsides. Then the cycle starts again. That type of see-sawing has been going in in many parts of Libya since mid-March.

Third, until two days ago, Tripoli had been safe from ground attacks (it had, of course, been hammered with NATO bombing for months on end). Now that’s changed…

Instead of blasting their way into Tripoli in one big push along main roads, NATO assisted the ‘rebels’ in at least two ways:

(a) it’s reported they gave bombing signals to trigger simultaneous attacks by sleeper insurgents within Tripoli and

(b) it’s confirmed they assisted insurgents land from the sea. They arrived once the Government armed forces were distracted by snipers and other rogue elements in the city.  Taking advantage of the general confusion, there was also an influx of insurgents from the west. The handful of frontline but “embedded” journalists on the rebel side presumably came with them and were able to report, however briefly, that the centre of Tripoli was in ‘rebel’ hands.

This alternative explanation of events suggests the Government is still supported by the mass of Tripoli’s citizens (and the majority of Libyans as a whole). The Government forces, supported by tens of thousands of volunteers, are therefore likely to retake control of Tripoli and flush out rebel insurgents There are reports they have already succeeded to a significant extent in doing so. Although the mass media today is saying 80% of Tripoli in in rebel control, that’s trom the same “reliable sources” that reported on the capture of Saif Ghadafi when he was, in reality, not captured at all.

Of course, if more insurgents arrive – whether by land or in more NATO-asssisted stunts by sea or air – there will be more resistance, more killing. The thousands of dead could multiply. A few thousand wounded could become tens of thousands.

Mossa Ibrahim's statement 23rd August 2011

If this narrative is correct, the mass media has been engaged in selling a spectacular lie – no less of an orchestrated psy-op than 9-11.

That may seem hard to credit – yet so much of the media’s narrative that changes almost by the hour, and there’s so much that really doesn’t make sense. We saw the remarkable size of pro-Ghadafi rallies in Tripoli a few weeks ago. Why would all those supporters suddenly change their minds, as the media suggests, and welcome insurgents into their city?

The truth, I suspect, is that most of them haven’t. In that case, given many civilians are armed, they will take their city back, if they haven’t already done so.

If this western-promoted assault on Tripoli persists, carnage on an unthinkable scale is possible. Dr Ibrahim warned us eleoquently at his press conference on the 21st. The world community must heed that warning. NATO’s criminal actions – aided and abetted by the mass media – is destroying what was before the most prosperous nation in Africa.  Now blood is flowing fast.

The unstoppable force of NATO is pushing its way, albeit shackled a tiny bit by a pesky UN resolution it goes out of its ways to misinterpret anyway. But it’s meeting an immovable rock – the resilient determination of most Libyans to remain independent.

So far, little more than a day after insurgents first appeared in Tripoli, it looks like the attempt to shift the immovable object will founder – unless the carnage is so great that life simply falls apart for residents of Tripoli. That might require thousands, even tens of thousands more casualties. Is this not a case for real “humanitarian intervention”?

For God’s sake, let’s get real! We need a general ceasefire NOW, including a complete stop to bombing!

This is NOT a game! The ‘pieces’ are real human beings.

Wargames

The war was originally billed as a quick knock out; its proved to be a gruelling 15-round slug-out.

“Humanitarian intervention” has morphed into what may become one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our era.

Someone has been – someone is – playing war games. They seem to see this as a game. Maybe a little ‘game theory’ is of use to those of us who are repelled by their murderous schemes and want to resist them.

Gaddafi plays chess, rather well

Ghadafi, by all accounts, is no mean chess player. He has indeed proved a cunning, tenacious adversary and a tower of strength for his people, along with his colleagues. I know only a few of them via the media:  I’m impressed by the very decent sounding PM (at a glance, I’d trust him more than my own Prime Minister) and the valiant Moussa Ibrahim, a truly superb spokesman for his country.

But this war is not really like chess. A game of chess presupposes two equal sides and pieces of comparable power. That’s not the case in this utterly one-sided contest, in which, for instance, the only British soldier killed so far was victim of a car crash while driving through Italy.

Yes, there have been moments that brought chess to mind. I’ve thought sometimes Ghadafi conceded pawns to get bigger gains. Here’s an example. When Ghadafi first began speaking about Al Qaeda, back in February, I couldn’t understand why. Asked about Al Queda last year, Ghadafi laughed off the subject and said it was essentially a western propaganda invention. Yet in February, with his Government under attack, he began using the expression. Why?

The reason,I think, is he understood the usefulness of what the advertising industry calls branding. The “Al Qaida” connections of some of the rebels goes down well in western mainstream society. That meme gets a run.

Unfortunately, by using the term ‘Al Qaida’ we’re also allowing the psy-ops orchestrators to successfully get away with creating universal acceptance of a ‘brand’ which they invented and control. They issue its press releases and release its videos. Hello 1984?

I’m sure Ghadafi would have been aware of that – but in chess the loss of minor pieces is often a strategic necessity. Ghadafi and his colleagues have had more pressing concerns at the time and since, not least of which has been survival.

When the war began, it seemed to me more like judo than anything else. The weight of the loser (most people around the world) was used against us. “Public opinion” flung itself into supporting the ‘UN intervention’ and the “NATO mission”, all for what seemed at the time like the best of reasons such as saving lives. We now now (or should do) just how bogus those reasons were. But back then, Arab Spring euphoria was intense. So it was that many decent people flung Libya over the cliff and into war, war which has proven far more protracted and bloody than was ever suggested at the time of the cunningly hustled UN resolutions.

Even if NATO’s flag flies over Green Square tomorrow, this cannot be proclaimed in any sense a success. The west has shown its fangs. We are now widely recognized as a monster. That’s not good for peace and harmony on this planet. Libya’s destruction is no “success”.

But wait a moment… the war is still happening.

The game isn’t over!

As of now, there’s no comfirmation Ghafdafi has been killed or captured. Nor is there decisive refutation of the proposition that the Government still controls most of Tripoli. A coupe of hours ago, Saif Al-Islam, whose capture was announced in the early hours of the assault on tripoli, turned up at the Rixos and chatted with journalists. He told them the government is winning and the rebels will be defeated. He says the rebels who’ve entered the city have fallen into a trap.

As long as a game of chess is still going, stalemate is still a possible outcome. That could happen – if casultaties create an international surge of protest. And that’s why, I suspect, minimising the casualties is currently so important. The last thing the NATO thugs want is the UN breathing down their necks.

I noticed media war shills are already starting to put about the talking point that blames the Libya Government for any humanitarian disaster and suggests any further loss of life would be sufficient pretext for invasion by western “peace-keepers”.

There’s another very fine board game called Go. It’s a Japanese game, which I think is comparable to chess in the way animals are comparable with plants. Both are living organisms – but whereas animals move, plants move out, spread, entangle and occasionally extinguish each other. In Go, pieces are put down, one by one, by each of the two players, onto a square lattice. They don;t move – but they form patterns. The object is to capture opponents’ pieces by surrounding them. Sometimes small areas can be captured – but are themselves surrounded later. Towards the end of the game, remarkable apparent reverses of fortune are possible.

Go: whose tipping point?

Go seems to me a more apt metaphor for the current events in Libya. According to the mainstream media narrative, the game of Go in Libya in at its last stage. The winner – NATO – is about to win, if it hasn’t actually won already.

But in Go, the reverse scan happen too. And there’s another thing. Go games can be played on larger and larger matrices. Small games can become part of bigger games (anyone remember August 1914?) For that reason, suddenly help can come from unexpected quarters.

The decision by Tunisia, two days ago, to recognize the TNC as Libya’s sole legitimate Government was doubtless made under extreme duress. One can rail against the duplicity of Tunisia, but winners are grinners, as the saying goes. That seems to seal independent Libya’s fate long-term.

On the other hand, the importance of overwhelming tribal support for the Ghadafi Government, as affirmed several months ago, cannot be underestimated. The tribal character of Libyan society is an element lacking in the west and western commentators refer to it only as a dark force. From their perspective, undoubtedly it is. As well as the political council style of mass participation in Ghadafi’s Libya, the tribes and their militias may pull surprises.

How to flip over the advantage from outside the Libyan board? Where’s the global tipping point?

Hugo Chavez pointed to one very fruitful possibility. He’s pulling Veneuela’s funds out of the west, including all its gold. It’ll be interesting to see whether he gets it, or if this is also viewed as a casus belli by Washington’s maniacs. But what do they do if Russia and China follow suit and start to use their reserves aggressively? World stock-markets were already plummeting last week. Western leaders are not unconstrained. They have a day job, as well as moonlighting as war mongers.

Russia, China, India, South Africa – and the all the nations on earth outside the west need to understand something. It’s appreciated you don’t want to start a world war or anything suicidal like that – and that you have to share the planet at present with a hyper-militarised USA and its poodle States. That can’t be easy. They bully, you respond with smiles and polite coughs. They demand Libya as “theirs”. You grumble but reluctantly move aside and let them throttle the small kid.

I can understand that other inducements (trade, oil prices) may also have helped bribe China and Russia into not vetoing UNSCR 1970 or 1973. I have heard about ‘real politik’.

However, if by now you don’t realise that you are dealing with maniacs, you surely never will. Broad solidarity is the way to resist Empire. The more territory Empire captures, the more people whose political and social cohesion it destroys, the more it thrives and the more dangerous it becomes to its remaining adversaries.

Black and white

In this great global game of Go, in which the Libyan ‘theatre’ is just one part of a much larger board, ultimately all pieces in combat are either white or black. Neutrality is possible – but grey piece are not immune from being swallowed up too.

In the real great game, what does “black v white” really signify?

Some people might see it as a contest between “The West” and “the Rest”, or “Black v White”, “North v South”, “Christianity v Islam”, “Capitalism v Socialism”, “Corporations v the people”.

There’s doubtless case to be made for all, but none of these divisions in humanity seem to me to be genuine, catastrophic fissure lines that are inexorably pushing us to war. None of them explain what’s driving the Libya War – and all the rest of the devastating, invasive, illegal wars of our time.

What is ultimately driving this ‘war game’?

Even more than the gigantic, bloated vested interest of the military and security state itself (especially in the USA), what’s driving the active, military push to radically realign certain pieces on the board (nations) is Zionism.

In the case of Libya, there’s no evidence western military forces or even weapons manufacturers actively pushed for the war. Oil and resource companies were likely to have preferred stable commercial relationships – not the chaos to come, if royalties do end up being somewhat lower. It’s true jackals like Haliburton will probably profit out of this war as they’ve done from others. But those vested interests, powerful as they are, aren’t big enough to push Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy into war. I doubt even the “intelligence agencies” could do that, although they’ve doubtless played a key role.

Public opinion in the west has always been very luke-warm about this war. Most Christians and Muslims don’t support NATO bombing (though some do!)  The people who support NATO intervention, overwhelmingly, do so because they’ve been grossly misinformed by the mass media. There has been no authentic “push” from below in the electorates of the warrior nations.

No, Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy started this war and hustled to get it approved by the UNSC because their Zionist controllers told them to do it. That’s where the push came from. That’s how they KNEW the media would help, not hinder.

"End of Zionism equals peace" - wot 'he said!

Whether Obama and Sarkozy have “intelligence” connections in their backgrounds, they operate now as agents of a foreign power. So does Cameron. Do does Julia Gillard in Australia, for that matter. That power is Zion: the alpha and omega of the drumbeat for war. If Zionists’s didn’t want a war in which the west is involved, it wouldn’t happen.

At the moment, there’s still lots of the global board that’s anti-Zionist territory to a greater or lesser degree. Those nations are all potential targets.

Game theory suggests that unless the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Africans – and indeed most people on earth – want to join the west and middle east in becoming either vassals or victims of Zionism, they must start showing SOLIDARITY with opponents of the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known.

We should hang together, lest we hang separately. United we’re strong. Divided we can be picked off, easily, one by one – especially if we allow our own divisions to be exploited.

Plain-dwelling herbivores learnt these basic truths long ago.

When will humanity catch up?

__________________

Mahdi Nazemroaya from Tripoli, early 22nd August

Some more recent reports from Tripoli by independent media:

• Rebels rename Green Square into Martyrs’ Square - Thierry Meyssan in Tripoli interviewed by Russia Today 22nd August
• Journalists trapped in looted hotel, bombing heard - Mahdi Nazemroaya in Tripoli interviewed by Russia Today 22nd August
• NATO not winning’: Gunfire heard during Tripoli live report- Mahdi Nazemroaya in Tripoli interviewed by Russia Today 22nd August
• Rebels enter Tripoli as Gaddafi urges Libyans to take up arms – Lizzie Phelan in Tripoli interviewed by Russia Today 21st August