May 19, 2004

We'll all float on anyway

It’s been a quiet month, I know — the reasons for that have been many. Partly, it’s been disillusionment with writing, combined with an insane workload and far too much drinking for a responsible young boy. There was also something about me realising the dangerous power words can wield, even if they weren’t meant for those who they hurt. I needed to take some time away and think about how a tool such as this is really best used. Upshot = inevitable. Result: introspection mostly out, moping to a minimum, discipline and a bit of stupidity back in. The new, improved, and altogether less indulgent Patrick’s Journal! Besides, you’ve all stopped reading so I can say what I please. Ah hah, hello empty auditorium, I’ve missed you well!

Burning hands and exit strategies

I was standing on a cold street corner this evening holding a candle, letting the wax drip down and burn my hand. Holding vigil with fellow Amnesty types to say that torture, under any circumstances, is the most unacceptable cost of war. And to remind those commuters on their way to the train station that we must never forget that war does have costs beyond dollars, and they are all too human. You wonder what difference such a small gesture as standing freezing on a corner outside a church can make, but it is better, don’t you think, to light a small flame on an insignificant street corner in an insignificant city than to go home early, turn on the television and curse the darkness the news radiates?

The last month has brought shock, horror and condemnation for a Western strategy descending yet another step deeper into hell. Are we all supposed to now say “I told you so”? Or is it time to stop worrying about how things should have worked and instead shift to the very real problems ahead? The Nation, where I often turn for reassurance that an American culture of dissent actually exists, contained some of the most beautifully articulated and compelling arguments against war, and has done for the better part of two years now. But looking forward, even the most fervent intellects of the left recognise that we must find a humane exit strategy to leave Iraq in less of a mess than we found it. Now that we’re there, as guiltily reassuring as it is to see the ringleaders crumble under the weight of their own lies, we really have to hope they start making the right calls. Iraq can’t be left in the mess we’ve created. Opposition is now useless, but as The Nation’s hastily convened forum of some of the biggest heavyweights in the debate (Schell, Zinn, Chomsky, etc) shows, it’s about time for some proposition. How, in practical terms, do we clean up this mess?

What, you wanted an answer? Go ask Chomsky…

Supersized courtroom battles

As bleak as the outlook continues to be, and as much as it feels like we’re only just in that ominous lull in the middle of a Montreal post-rock number, just before the guitars distort into apocalypse and the world threatens to fall in on itself (you know, the bit where you know you’re not safe at all but can lull yourself into a fall sense of security? And then, BADOOM! Riffage from hell) I thought it was worth turning to a positive development in an older and slightly more innocent war: the war on the multinationals. Remember McLibel? A postman and a gardener from darkest London photocopied some anti-arches flyers and handed them out at the front of the restaurants. Some friendly corporate lawyers with a taste for quarterpounders (hold the pickles) took exception, and slapped a libel suit on them. Rather than ceasing and desisting, they jumped right in and became notorious as the defendants in the UK’s longest running libel trial. Upshot? Years of corporate intrigue, spies, questioning of the very core of the British justice system. And, despite having little legal support, they proved about half of the claims their flyers made and it became legal fact that, f’rinstance, McD’s exploit children, pay low wages and are culpably responsible for animal cruelty. So it’s not libel for me to say that. And it also led to the launch of the McSpotlight website, which, many years ago, first started me down the path of responsible consumerism. Or at least, I thought, I’d never eat another McNugget. No matter how much that Hamburgler may try and tempt me.

Anyway, yes, old news — I’d suggest if you want to know more about the case itself, Franny Armstrong’s McLibel doco is worth seeking out. There’s also a great book written by Guardian environmental journalist John Vidal which documents the trial in painstaking detail, but I leant my copy to a lecturer at university and never saw it again. She did say it was for consideration for high school curriculum material, so I hope it went towards the greater good! The reason I write about it now, though, is that Helen and Dave have had their appeals in the case (they only half won, and still had to pay super-sized damages) admitted into the European court. The court has ruled that their argument of an unfair trial, and the general imbalance of the proceedings, at least is a case worth hearing. The ramifications are potentially huge if they are successful, particularly in their argument that a multinational corporation should have no right to sue for libel, as it is not in the public interest. Multinationals, they argue, should be subject to the same public scrutiny as governments. After all, they’re just as powerful.

Given that when cases get accepted into the European court, there’s at least a good chance of winning, and you’ve already proved your argument is at least worth consideration, the ripples of McLibel may yet spread further than McDonald’s ever feared, or Helen and Dave ever dreamed.

—

So, yeah, anyway, lookit! I’m making words again! More to follow, anon…

Posted by patrick at 09:12 PM

April 06, 2004

On circles of hell, and the politics within them.

It took ten years for the west to finally acknowledge its part in the greatest, and most atrocious, failure of humanity in the modern era, and one of the worst blots on any history we could ever write. We’re finally far enough away from Rwanda, in space and time, to throw out the mea culpas, and acknowledge just what horrors human can do unto human, with machete and with blind eye. It’s safer at this distance.

David Corn, The Nation’s Washington editor and notedly vehement critic of Bush, sets up Rwanda as Clinton’s greatest failure. When apologising to the surviving people of Rwanda (in a visit to its airport in 1998), he claimed that America, and the world, did not fully know or appreciate the extent of the atrocity. That, a cop-out on an African airstrip with Air Force One’s engines still running, is, for Corn, the biggest lie the impeached president ever told. We know now that the Americans, prior to the start of the genocide, requested a total withdrawal of troops, before agreeing to merely a heavy reduction. Americans, they said, were at unnecessary risk. Somalia was still filthy in memory, Black Hawks and the pits of hell. Africa could safely burn to the ground and beneath before they would go back there again.

Kofi Annan has taken personal responsibility, accepting that he could and should have done more as then head of UN peacekeeping forces. “The international community is guilty of sins of omission,” he said. “The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret.” He said the same thing five years ago after the UN’s initial internal inquiry (one which was mostly refreshingly honest). He also said “[o]f all my aims as Secretary-General, there is none to which I feel more deeply committed than that of enabling the United Nations never again to fail in protecting a civilian population from genocide or mass slaughter.”

Most of the bitter regret in the last ten years has been carried publically on the shoulders of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of UN forces in Rwanda at the time. I’ve read some harrowing interviews with the man, destroyed by international inaction and willing ignorance of the pleas for assistance he sent when the first rumblings of weapons stockpiling and warfare were emerging. This is not an unusual quote:

Not one country on Earth came to stop this thing. The Western world provided me with nothing. I asked for satellite photos so I could see where the mass movement of people were occurring. They were herding people before they killed them. But I got nothing. In 100 days, 800,000 people were killed, 300,000 of them children. That’s not counting 500,000 that got hacked a few times, maybe had a leg chopped off, but survived. There were more people killed, wounded, displaced or refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than there were in the whole eight or nine years of the Yugoslav campaign. And the West poured 60,000 troops into the Balkans [to stop the] ethnic cleansing [there].

This Amnesty article documents the full travesty of military and geopolitical bureaucracy (along with delighful factoids such as the mission having only one satellite telephone):

As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn’t even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.

The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.

With a few thousand troops (mainly Bhangladeshi and Ghanaian), orders to withdraw that came directly from Boutros Ghali, and millions screaming in terror, the UN forces did what little they could, but what they could was nothing against a final solution, sanctioned by government and tribe. Dallaire, convinced his personal weaknesses were the reason his mission was going to hell, suffered a total breakdown and was, years later, found drunk on a park bench in Canada and out of the military. What he only later realised was he was witnessing firsthand the moment that the United Nations became irrelevant, not through politics and not through progress, but through racism and the atrocity of indifference. It had failed in its charter, it had little reason to exist.

In the ten years since, that irrelevance has spread like a cancer—powerful nations ignore it and weak nations to distrust it. Rich ones buy it, poor ones borrow. Heard this one before?

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…

The United Nations has called for a minute’s silence today (April 7) to remember the 800,000 who died. A minute’s silence will not prevent another Rwanda. The Canadian foreign minister admits that his nation and others lack the political will to put in place measures to react against genocide. But today is a day to reflect. One might suggest that, for most every one of us, that usually involves holding up a mirror.

We all know the equations, about how little we care about 16,000 Indians in Bhopal, and how much more we care about a couple of thousand Americans. Or even a couple. And how a nation mourns a cricketer more than even that. When you stack any of it against Rwanda, how can it be possible to reconcile just how many people died with just how little you’ve even thought of it in the ensuing years? (This you is an accusatory second-person self, by the way, don’t be offended, I know you’ve got a room full of Remember Rwanda posters). That’s what I’ll be wondering, in the minute’s silence I’ll forget to have.

Posted by patrick at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 29, 2004

The Breakfast Zoo

Woke up with fuzzy head this morning to a very highbrow debate on Radio National between George Monbiot, Christopher Hitchens and Lewis Lapham on the death of the Left. Three fundamentally different heavyweights of the global left, who all agree that their side of the political fence has been aimlessly meandering for a long time now (in Hitchens’ case, he’s crossed the floor). Of course, being half asleep and drifting in and out of consciousness, I started to imagine the three of them as a radio morning crew. Imagine Hitchens and Monbiot fighting over who gets control of the wacky noise button. Prank calls to Ariel Sharon. Hey, we got yo’ Left Bank over here! zinged! Meanwhile, Lapham plays the magazine-editor straight guy, asking Monbiot how many anarchists it takes to change a light bulb and spinning all the latest hits of the left (all the Billy Bragg you could dream of). I’d wake up to that.

Of course, they could have Dubya on as a special guest, seeing how he seems to have spent the week refining his comedy routine. Totally frickin’ hilarious, George. There’s a career for you in the Borscht Belt yet. It’s about as funny as banning terrorists from writing books. You know what would be a really great idea? Let’s ban terrorists from reading. Suspected terrorists, too. If we keep knowledge away, they’ll never realise how angry they are. I know a great place where we can start a bonfire. Get the temperature up to 451 Fahrenheit real quick-like. We can use fridge magnets for fuel.

Ahh, non-stop hits. I love the breakfast zoo. Boing!

Posted by patrick at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2004

Because you are listening.

And just as a postscript to that last little bit of Iraqi exhaustion, this bit of revisionism (courtesy of Tom Engelhardt’s excellent TomDispatch) was too good to resist.

“Q: But also it’s been without finding those stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that you told everybody were there.

“Wolfowitz: Sorry. We never said there were stockpiles. What we said was that after 12 years and 17 UN resolutions, 12 years of this regime defying the United Nations and at a very high price to his regime which suggests he had something to hide and we found some of what he was hiding, that it was time to come clean. There was the unanimous resolution of the Security Council that said it’s time to come clean.”

Uh huh. As that linked page says, never having said it means never having to say you’re sorry (that article is also interesting in its rare American mention of the worries of “staunch, if seldom noticed” coalition ally John Howard).

Would it be a cliché to invoke the Ministry of Truth right now? Yeah, guess it would.

Posted by patrick at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

Reno Dakota, I'm no Nino Rota

Democrat Henry Waxman has compiled a searchable database of 237 misleading statements made by the Bush junta regarding Iraq and accompanying flotsam. You can search by speaker, topic and date. And not just the stuff that turned out to be “kinda not true”, either—it “contains statements made by the five officials that were misleading at the time they were made. The database does not include statements that appear in hindsight to be erroneous but were accurate reflections of the views of intelligence officials at the time they were made.” It is one thing to know you were lied to, but to have it presented in such hierarchies of organised nonsense only goes one step further to destroying my faith in humanity. They’ve gotta be reptiles, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

And if you want to see where the reptiles massage their cashflows? warprofiteers.com will steer you in some scary directions, tracking the voracious appetite of the military-industrial complex as it storms through the wreckage of the war. Truth, it seems, can’t hide from an activist with a database: “Halliburton is hiring temps to work in Iraq: $100 a month for locals, $300 for Indians and $8,000 for Texans.” Good old Halliburton.

And why are the Magnetic Fields so repeatedly entering my sphere of thought these last few weeks? I swear, for a band who haven’t released a proper album (or three-disc sprawling epic) in five years, they are everywhere. I stumbled across a fun article in The Believer (my most favourite lit journal) about the dilemmas of creating a perfect mix of 69 Love Songs. We’ve all tried, but almost none of them can be left off, even the throwaways — can you imagine the album without “Love is like a bottle of gin” (home of the best simile play in all rock history) or “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”? But, rejoice, they have a new album, i, out in early May. Something tells me Stephen Merritt couldn’t give a shit about the pressure of following that album up, but I don’t envy him.

Yesterday was spent in the depths of The Decemberists’ epic 20-minute song-cycle The Tain. In anybody else’s hands, an indie-rock adaptation of Táin Bó Cúalnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley)—the central poem of the Ulster cycle and one of Ireland’s founding myths—would come across as pretentious concept wank. But somehow, shifting between serious riffage and jaunty folk, this story of the fight for the most famous bull in Ireland, and its seventeen year-old warrior hero Cuchulain (or Setanta), managed to be both hypnotising and ancient in its sound. Most bizarrely brilliant thing I’ve heard this year — if I had to pick one skinny white-boy Seattle indie band to travel back in time and become Irish warrior heroes, I guess I know who it’d be.

Posted by patrick at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2004

Window seats on bullet trains

worldmap

When you think you’re well travelled, killing a few seconds on this rather funky map generator can do a very good job of showing just how, well, Western your airport-hopping has been. See how my journey is like a big red diagonal line through all the easy parts of the world? Except of course for hopping over that scary middle bit (there may have been an airport here and there but I decided not to count those). The website said I had visited 8% of the world’s countries. Next on my list is Sealand. I always wanted to live on an oil-rig.

For somebody who has grown up with the stench of oil dripping from filthy laundry, surrounded by roustabouts and crane operators (otherwise known as family), I’ve spent surprisingly little time on rigs. When I was young, I used to visit my dad on his rig when it would come in to dock for repairs. They are such awesome constructions. Mostly I remember giant burgers in the cafeteria and soft-serve ice cream from burly chefs with tattoos, but also there were the snaking metal corridors of the living quarters, all rivets and drab paint. Piping running in every direction, cranes swinging all around. A control room full of radio gear and machines making eight different kinds of ‘bing!’. I wonder if the residents of Sealand live on giant burgers and soft-serve ice cream. One thing that would suck is you couldn’t watch DVDs — they all seem to explicitly forbid viewing on oil rigs. Perhaps they worry that a few soft-focus sex scenes might excite a vessel-load of frisky workermen a little too much and they’ll not notice a gas pipe that hasn’t been sealed properly.

Speaking of another red country on my little map there, Franny Armstrong’s Drowned Out (the story of the Sardar Sarovar dam project) is on SBS on Tuesday night, renamed as The Dammed. It is an utterly horrid, rivetting documentary that caused me to rethink much of what I held as important in my own work. And, along with Arundhati Roy’s The Algebra of Infinite Justice, caused me to rethink much of what I hoped was true of India — a country where I first set foot, funnily enough, because of their burgeoning need for oil and desire to sell their soul to multinational industrial giants. My dad worked for one of them.

In conjunction with the increasing trend for handing over state-owned water facilities to private companies (in what a Mother Jones article claims is a US$200 billiion a year business), water is shaping up to be the next battleground for corporate justice and human rights. Fortune called it the oil of the 21st century. Like oil, the big players are already in place (Suez, Vivendi, RWE/Thames Water and Bechtel), and the riots and deaths in South American countries are now matter-of-fact.

I’ve been fascinated by the confluence of things in the story of the Narmada — spirituality, indigenous land rights, fascist nationalism, corporate rape, and a chain of tragedy that leads from the inner sanctums of the World Bank to the villages of Jalsindhi where the Adivasi people stand, the water to their waists, asking their river why it has forsaken them. Wondering where the gods go when the trees they’ve lived in are now six feet below the surface. Somewhere in there is the PhD I’m actually going to write. It’s about water, and how its politics and spirituality shape culture so fundamentally. The dams, the Indian bureaucrats say, are the temples of modern India. The gods that are worshipped there are the new ones, the useful ones, the ones that have no truck with aspecting as elephants and would much rather wear a fetching pair of Patrick Cox loafers and travel around on a Segway. They’ve actually been around for a long time, those gods, we’ve just given them new names and allowed them to keep coming back, under the illusion of Progress. But those temples that worship them spread beyond India, and the dam craze continues to spread throughout the IMF’s pet countries.

Posted by patrick at 10:13 AM | Comments (1)

February 25, 2004

The World Won't End

It can be a funny experiment to not shave for a couple of weeks — those random threats of beardliness make one appear a little absurd. Still, all it takes is a random Kings of Leon promo doco to show up on the television to make you realise just how unbeardly you truly are. That is facial hair.

This is about the time of night, after the kind of night, where I’d usually be wrapped up in a Jason Molina nightmare, nodding sagely to lyrics of tortured love and pained departure. Yes, Jason, that’s exactly right. Uh huh. With the animals and all. But this evening is more of a ‘fuck it’ kind of night, one where I refuse to feel sad or painful so will feel happy instead; I will listen to the Pernice Brothers, and I will listen to them loud. And I will ignore the lyrics of suicide and breakup and tortured love and pained departure and just listen to those fucking harmonies soaring into the night. My head prefers a harmony, and more invigorating kinds of sadness. Dreams will be of smiles, not of tears. High notes and choruses to die for. I think after this, it’ll be time for The Shins. But for now, a night on Scud Mountain is everything a boy could need.

To my great delight, Waiting for Fidel just showed up on the ABC. A couple of years ago, I tried to track down this film by every means necessary, and ended up getting a copy shipped to the Canadian embassy in London. It was an early missive in my discovery of home, and my need to find out more about the bizarre life of the man who defined Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood. Waiting for Fidel is an extraordinary documentary about the journey of Smallwood, Newfoundland Television magnate Geoff Sterling and filmmaker Michael Rubbo travelling to Cuba to meet Castro in the early 1970s.

Smallwood knew a little something about running a big-S Socialist rule over a tiny island population for what seemed like forever, and the man positively drips with excitement at the prospect of picking the brains of his idol. The rather Beckett-esque title probably gives you a hint that the film isn’t so much about Fidel in the end, or even about the modern Cuba it provides so many glimpses of, but about Newfoundland, and about a man and his political idealism. I will always remember my father’s description of his indebtedness to this strange old man who gave him his first job in the oil industry, dragging him from fishing village poverty for no reason other than the goodness of his heart and his belief in my dad’s work ethic. Yeah, I know, he probably made it up. But it sounded nice — I imagine a version of my father younger than me now, no more than a kid, sitting in a big oak-covered room filled with books of Marx and Althusser, and perhaps even a few unusual volumes of South American revolution, pleading for a job on the Churchill Falls projects. I imagine a portly old man with thick round glasses shouting ‘ahh jeez boy, you wants a job? you’re a good fella, i’ll gets ya a job’ in thickest impenetrable Newfie. It’s a romantic vision, which smells slightly of salt beef and pease pudding, as all Newfoundland visions do.

Smallwood was a staunch confederate (not a popular position for traditional Newfoundlanders prior to their donning the maple leaf in 1949) and an even stauncher socialist, modelling the country in the shape of an idealistic political dream he had for the twenty three years he was at the helm. He was a protege of the Fishermen’s Protective Union and a key mover in the development of the province’s labour movements of the 1920s. Newfoundland, when it had fish, was if anything a more savagely political and unionist outpost than it now is in the depths of uncertainty and redefinition. He freely admits in Waiting for Fidel that his ideas for the province’s university, MUN, came from the socialist models of Cuba. Constantly trying new ill-fitting suits and phrasing and rephrasing the questions he might ask, he is somewhat like a twelve year-old set to meet Justin Timberlake (or, well, you know what I mean — maybe we can be more highbrow and say he’s like David Foster Wallace getting ready to meet Thomas Pynchon, yeah?).

If you mention Joey’s name to the old folks of Newfoundland these days, you’ll see that odd kind of affectionate, nostalgic headshake which most people reserve for that odd uncle in the family who you can never quite pin down, or trust, but know you have to love like a member of the family anyway. You remember the good times, but you just wish he would have seen sense a bit more often. Joey made modern Newfoundland, but they know that modern Newfoundland isn’t, at times, that much to have made.

His obsession with connecting rural Newfoundland with the urban led to painful resettlements, unforgettably illustrated by pictures of families towing their houses across the water by boat, forced to leave the islands their families had called home for hundreds of years. My mother left such an island in the early 1960s, just before the government forced everybody else off, closing down education and critical services too expensive to ship out through the bays. Floating through Placentia Bay in a three person skiff a couple of years ago, past countless islands full of vague remnants of civilisation but populated only by moose, I wondered if Joey had ever done the same thing. I wondered if he’d set foot on those empty islands and seen the concrete doorsteps that so fervently bore his impression.

Posted by patrick at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2004

I said kiss me you're beautiful, these are truly the last days

A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It’s like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant
— Bill Hicks

Yeah, you know this already, but it’s just too much of a defining moment in movie merchandising history to let slide: the Passion of the Christ souvenir nail. For those Christians who don’t think the cross says enough, who never quite got Bill Hicks’ point, perhaps a nail pendant with “Isaiah 53:5” inscribed on its side will (ahem) hammer home your devotion.

And so the Observer has gotten its hands on a Pentagon report to the Bush junta on climate change. They call it secret, but it’s not really that (a few folks on mailing lists have been piping up and saying its merely a reworked version of information its co-author Peter Schwartz published in book form last year), but it makes for scary reading, as scenario papers always do. Try this for apocalyptic…

  • Future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology or national honour.
  • By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands inhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.
  • Deaths from war and famine run into the millions until the planet’s population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope.
  • Riots and internal conflict tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia.
  • Access to water becomes a major battleground. The Nile, Danube and Amazon are all mentioned as being high risk.
  • A ‘significant drop’ in the planet’s ability to sustain its present population will become apparent over the next 20 years.
  • Rich areas like the US and Europe would become ‘virtual fortresses’ to prevent millions of migrants from entering after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops. Waves of boatpeople pose significant problems.
  • Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt and North Korea. Israel, China, India and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
  • By 2010 the US and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90F. Climate becomes an ‘economic nuisance’ as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.

It goes on, and it seems this scenario plays out with the world struggling to deal with the Scandinavian refugee crisis, and a planet ruled by war. But where the military hawks in the administration predict a planet ruled by war only until the Pax Americana is in place, this is a resigned, scared kind of prediction of a planet thrown off its rails by a climate change problem a president won’t even acknowledge. As this article in Fortune suggests, climate change is no longer a problem for our children, a feelgood slogan to sew on wallets and posters, about keeping the planet for “our children’s children”. Humanity is selfish — we don’t give a shit about our children’s children. Much of the science in global warming over the past ten years has pointed to a much more chilling fact — for those of us in our twenties, this isn’t a concern about protecting the planet for posterity — it’s about protecting it so it’s still around to provide a comfortable stage for our mid-life crises.

Sure, it’s only scenario work, and one has to take with a pinch of salt something written by a futurist closely associated with Ayn Rand, but there has to be a reason the report has been suppressed for four months by the White House. Could it be because it slapped them in the face and woke them up to a world in which climate change is as immediate a threat as terror? The sea is rising, every day, and every millimetre it rises is a millimetre closer to the kind of future Schwartz and Randall warn of. The planet is taking a long slow Four Wheel Drive ride into an unprecedented age, and America is the soccer mom at the wheel.

Posted by patrick at 07:42 AM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2004

Perspective

You spend the ungodly early hours of the morning writing about hope for a world beyond empire, beyond greed, beyond humanity’s frailty. Then you head downstairs, open the paper, and read a front page article in which Angry Perth Housewife says a day without air-conditioning is Like Living In A Third World Country.

Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s like.

Posted by patrick at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)

Frying Pan Park

We writers love things like air conditioning bans and heatwaves. They provide great metaphorical backdrop for all kinds of stories of adversity and change — coming of age and sweating out the pain, that kind of thing. I was going to write something along those lines, but yesterday ended up being mostly about Empire…

Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
— Arundhati Roy, The New American Century

I escaped the heat last night to attend a lecture by Professor Johan Galtung on models of social globalisation. Although I have heard his arguments before (strikingly similar although less to the old left than George Monbiot’s), his was an articulate overview of the problems of giving power to the people of the world when the people of the world have such fundamentally (nation-driven) different attitudes to those outside of their sphere — how can one find a system of rights, needs and duties that works for a buddhist as well as it does for a hindu, and for a westerner as well as it does somebody from China? My Moleskine is full of bizarre notes of spheres and circles of evil and triangular systems of communication where the United States replaces Moses and the UN goes for God, while the unwashed masses sit at the third corner unsure of the constantly shifting presences on the opposite sides.

The momentum amongst the world’s powerbrokers for a world people’s forum is certainly building — the idea is not going away. Events like the World Social Forum are perhaps the early signs of this. Galtung suggests splitting the UN into three assemblies — an assembly of nation states, an assembly of multinational corporates, and an assembly of the world’s people (one representative for every million in a country). Each assembly would be answerable to the others, although eventually the first would pale into insignificance. George Monbiot problematises the idea of a people’s world parliament by asking who exactly would define it — how can we give a voice to the world’s people by putting it in a structure they haven’t asked for? Like human rights that forget to mention sleep, a system bestowed by French lawyers is never going to be representative. Would a global parliament be any more representative than the national? Would it reflect the grassroots and community organisations underneath? Why should it? Who’s to say that the altruistic would be elected? I’m going to come back to this one, as it is an idea that isn’t going away.

Yesterday also brought a searing article/call to arms from Arundhati Roy in The Nation. It is fine to talk about systems of civil governance such as Galtung’s and Monbiot’s, but the more pressing concern is getting there. She lays down the line between the Project for the New American Century and the participants of the World Social Forum, and concedes they must be at war. The war against empire is rising in the blood of the world our most dangerous, hegemonic and well-armed superpower ever is seeking to mould in its image. Cancun was the start of something happening on a global scale that first manifested on a civic scale with Seattle — they said it had gone away post 9-11, but in fact the protest had moved up to the debating rooms and chambers of international politics. Enron and friends have done more than enough to make the case for the protesters, but as Roy points out, it’s only just the beginning:

At the World Social Forum some of the best minds in the world come together to exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we’re fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi’s salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow nonviolent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater. It is a very precious weapon that must be constantly honed and reimagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don’t stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the bestseller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It’s not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it’s important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an overarching preordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

And here I sit, complaining about the heat, dreaming dreams of a girl I made walk away, not sleeping, staring at a cigarette packet, wondering just what my place in all of this is. Is it to sit in well-appointed lecture theatres listening to Norwegian laureates and read mountains of books and write about it here, maybe occasionally hoisting a banner on a weekend protest or doing some token fundraising for Amnesty? Or is it time to actually try and figure out a way to contribute to the world, not to protest against what is wrong with it? I think the answer is clear, even if the question is a little hazy.

I did like this from Roy, also:

The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of “turkey pardoning” in the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they’ll even speak English!)

That’s how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys—the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself)—are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they’re for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO—so who can accuse those organizations of being antiturkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee—so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There’s a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

Posted by patrick at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2004

You won't let those robots eat me

I’ve been drafting and redrafting all kinds of entries in here in the last few days, mostly about exhaustion, and tiredness, and how much I wish I didn’t hurt people. Also, I occasionally accused myself of living in a Dawson’s Creek episode. And thought about living in the hamlet of Regretsville, where there’s only me and a shifty shopkeeper to keep an eye on the traffic that passes through.

I went for a long walk in the sun the other day, with Grandaddy in the ears. It was meant to make me feel better. Instead I just felt horrid, and angry at the man singing beautiful melancholy exhaustion at me. I was going to throw the lyrics to “I’m on Standby” up here, and probably still will - they crinkled my lip at the corner, anyway.

But yesterday was the Big Day Out, and nothing shakes the cotton wool out of one’s head quite like the Flaming Lips. I’d say words fail me, but the fact that I’m going to keep writing proves that a lie. I simply have not seen a gig as amazing, marvellous and fucking fantastic as that since Radiohead at Glastonbury 97. That was 80,000 people standing in a field witnessing the end of britpop, the birth of something new, the night sky not big enough to hold the weight of the performance. It was the sound of a new Britain, and the roar of pre-millennial tension. It was OK Computer, as it was meant to be. It was music as I’d never seen or heard it. This, on the other hand, was dancing people in animal costumes, giant blow-up bouncy balloons, clips from 90210 and a singing nun hand puppet. And singalongs to “She Don’t Use Jelly”. And it was just as beautiful. The Lips’ show is about how much damn fun life can be, how tragedy is all part of the comedy, futility can be uplifting, and although humanity is a great weight to bear, it’s still one we should delight in bearing. Either that or Wayne Coyne’s just an acid-addled genius who loves hurling flamesticks and glitter around. It’s a fucking show, and sometimes that’s what the music is about (something somebody should have pointed out to The Strokes). I actually waved my hands in the air during “Yoshimi” - I ain’t done that since I was 16. But then, I’ve never had a performer wearing novelty giant fist gloves encouraging me to do so. Wipe this smile off my face. Go on, I dare you.

Randomness I’ve meant to post but haven’t. Awesome film geek concept: Movieoke. Although I’m sure most people hop up and do their best De Niro and Brando impersonations, and I read in the paper about a particularly ‘interesting’ Dirty Dancing performance, I can’t help but think how great it would be for somebody to have a shot at Christopher Walken’s speech from Pulp Fiction. Or for a real laugh, Olivier in Henry V: once more to the bar, dear friends, once more.

I also think it’s about time we started getting angry at Monsanto again. And although this isn’t the worst or most despicably evil thing our genetically modified multinational (with added resistance to nasty PR spin) has done, it’s a timely reminder of just how absurd the gene patent regime is. The patenting by private corporations of the genetic makeup of a wheat created over hundreds of years by resourceful farmers could not possibly be considered good science, even if we were to set the ethics aside for a minute. Which we’re not to do — I mean, come on, theoretically they could charge royalties on every chapati bread sold in the world. But, as the article says, a Texan company has held a patent on basmati rice since 1997, and “the number of patents relating to rice issued every year in the US has risen from less than 100 in the mid-1990s to more than 600 in 2000.” I guess they were trying to get into the rice market before the Year of Rice, when grains were “in” and stocks would go through the roof. I best stop talking about it before I get angry, though — not in the mood for eloquent ranting and informed research, so naive posturing and lazy linking it is for this evening.

Posted by patrick at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2003

This is our punk rock

To Sarah (I’m guessing blah@blah.com isn’t your real address), you can find Moleskines at Luxxe on King Street, they’re near the counter and are as overpriced as everything else in that shop. Pick up a few novelty gifts while you’re at it. And I shall endeavour to keep writing - sometimes I wish I could stop. Does seem I’ve left the blog a little lonely for a week or so though, eh?

There’s nothing more certain to stoke the flames of a tired heart than four solid hours of Jello Biafra. I may be entirely broke and too exhausted to be spending evenings in the presence of aging punks but it was fantastic to finally see Biafra in the flesh, at a time when the world needs his anger more than ever. To see a man who has managed to live his life to this point and maintain his integrity, while his former Dead Kennedys bandmates have moved into the comfortable visitor’s quarters at the mansion of The Man, reminded me of something about the vital things in life.

I’ve always thought the most revolutionary act you can commit in your everyday life, in an ongoing sense, is simply to live an ethical existence and question every decision you ever make. I’ve tried to do that—sure, many of the decisions have been wrong, but I know I’m 25 and can still sleep comfortably knowing I’m not letting the world run away with me. I know that the world is falling into a reptilian nightmare where movie celebrities and oil executives grease palms and take over countries, where dams drown millions in third world countries for the sake of industry and we’re about to sign our culture over to the yanqui machine for a few bucks of trade. I know these things. I know I feel small. But I know every day I can keep chipping away, in my way, in my life, and ask questions. Change the odd mind. Donate the odd hour of work here and there for causes in exchange for good will, not dollars. I see somebody like Biafra on stage and think, man, he’s just an angry guy, but in some tiny way, over the last twenty years his anger has changed the world. And he may be broke and begging for money in his shoe, but his rage is maintained, and he still fights. He’s not tired. I hope I never get tired.

That sounds like the dreaming of an optimistic kid, but why the hell do we have to get cynical as we get older? Can’t our hope grow and blossom as we learn more and pick up the skills we can use in the fight? There’s so much still to fight for. Our inner punk still knows that. The inner punk needs to be listened to.

Regular service will now resume…

Posted by patrick at 06:29 PM | Comments (1)

October 08, 2003

Black Box Recorder

Disasters always lodge in the mind so firmly. I can define my childhood more by memories of explosions, ship sinkings and oil slicks than I can by visits to the park or goals scored in soccer. You just have to say Zeebrugge or Challenger and my memories trigger more vividly than any smell might cause.

1988 was a big year for disaster in Scotland. The July explosion of the Piper Alpha brought more mourning than was bearable to Aberdeenside, with countless tales of 18 year old friends of friends, on their first holiday shifts, taken by the flames. They weren’t even supposed to be there. They were relieving for a mate. Taken by the cost-cutting and poor procedure. I remember the worry on my dad’s face. I remember how worried I was next time he went offshore.

I remember Flight 103 almost as clearly, or just Lockerbie as we Scots came to know it. December 21, 1988. Bombs. Explosions. Black box recorders. Tinsel-strewn wreckage. Bodies under Christmas trees. A town and a jet-plane, and more than anything a crater. I remember the scorched earth. Driving through Lockerbie for years after, I would keep my eye out for that scar in the hillside, as I’m sure everybody else on that road did. It’s that same feeling I would later get for Dunblane, staring out through bus windows on the way to places less sleepy and less innocent - a town that knows you’re looking at it, knows it’s being watched, and wants nothing more in the world than for you to please just look away.

The eventual turning of fingers towards Libyan agents in the search for answers at Lockerbie saw Reagan’s favourite rogue state enter into a new period of isolation, cast out and pilloried as the brutal and dangerous state that it no doubt was. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was found guilty of plotting the attack by a Scottish court in the Hague. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted.

Fifteen years after those 270 deaths, 259 on board and 11 in the town, Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi, Reagan’s favourite rogue, finds his philosophy of the third universal theory at breaking point. Qadhafi may still take great pleasure in pillorying Reagan in contemporary speeches, laughing about a man who now “walks around on all fours”, but it seems he has realised just how much eighties humour has dated. A fine brutal despot he may have been, but John Hughes he wasn’t. So they’ve ponied up US $2.7 billion in compensation for the bombing. That $2.7billion is made up of 10 million to the families of each and every victim. Mea culpa? Not really…

Despite signing a letter to the UN admitting responsibility, Libya openly maintain they had nothing to do with Lockerbie, but have resigned themselves to the world holding to the Hague’s verdict. And they want in from the cold. They want a piece of the new global pie. In the scheme of things, a few billion dollars isn’t that much. It’s not compensation, Qadhafi says. It’s an entry fee. The socialist/Muslim third universal theory prided itself on adaptability. Now they’ve applied for membership to the WTO. Sanctions aren’t helpful when you need to hop on the free trade bandwagon.

The reinvention of Qadhafi over the past few years has been fascinating to watch, as he has moulded himself into the “rightful” leader of a united Africa. Forget that that union has horribly failed, that Libyan unemployment sits somewhere around 30 per cent, that for all intents and purposes LIbya still tolerates no dissent. Did the de-despotisation of Iraq have anything to do with Qadhafi’s suddenly open wallet/heart? After all, once Saddam’s gone, the Colonel has to be the most well known (beatable) dictator that the yanqui machine could turn its crosshairs on. “Yep,” says Libya. “You scared us. Would you like to buy our oil?”

Why does that three letter word always enter into these things? Libya has oil. Of course it does. Abundances of. Gushing geysers of. Just ripe for the buying of. For the multinational reaping of. Over half a billion barrels of reserve. One of the last great patches of murky black goodness on the planet. There was a time when Qadhafi wanted to lead the world in a global revolution, Green Book in hand, People’s Committees behind him, Semtex in his briefcase. Now, he beckons Shell and Mobil in with a warm embrace and a weighty invoice. For the good of the people. As Billy Bragg so eloquently summed up the recent Gulf War II, “don’t give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil / It’s all about the price of oil”.

Tripoli’s ready to be part of the West. Forget that rogue stuff. “That was the old us. Mr Double U, we may laugh at your forefathers, but don’t you remember when we used to work for you? Hey, cut an old employee a break… No, that’s not nerve gas. Keep looking at where your WMDs aren’t, over in Iraq. We’re responsible citizens. We have modern attitudes on women, Mr Qadhafi even allows them to be his bodyguards, so long as their nail varnish is just so. Go on. We’ll even drop our claims against you for those brutal air raids in 1986 that killed so many innocents.” (and don’t you like how we can hyperlink while we speak?)

So they’ve forked over the terrorist tax. Crept comfortably around the possibility of regime change. Put a gleaming smile on their wacky rogue ways. 10 millions dollars a death. For a brave new world of globalised trade. The Colonel, beneath his socialist surface, must be licking his lips at the bargain.

But did they do it?

The evidence that convicted Megrahi was flimsy. Skeletal, even. Most of it has since been disproven. Only one of the two accused was convicted. The court documents express severe doubt as to the reliability of the evidence. In the end, it all came down to a Maltese shopkeeper who claimed to have remembered the purchaser of the clothing fragments found in the bomb suitcase. His identification was unsure, and Megrahi’s photo had been in the paper for years at the time. The 36-year old accused was also clearly not the 50-year old the shopkeeper initially claimed to recall.

The counter-theory to Megrahi’s documented suspicious behaviour is quite believable - it’s something like “yeah, he was a secret agent, of course he had suspicious movements around Europe”. Apparently he was trying to buy parts for the sanctioned Libya Airlines on the black market. It’s all circumstance and conjecture, of course, but it is also reasonable doubt. And there were solid theories linking Palestine, Iran, Syria and other equally rogue states to Flight 103. Washington held fast to the “gotta be someone in the Middle East” dictum until Gulf War I, when those players were needed on side and GHW Bush decided to point the wagging finger of blame down Africa way. More solid evidence linking the Palestinian breakaway group PFLP-GC to the attack was swept under the policy carpet. Even Arafat and the PLO thought it was coming from their neck of the woods. The more believable theories are full of solid mess that leads back to the Lebanon and Oliver North and the Contras, but it’s too murky to delve into here — deep black lies has some good background, but William Blum’s essay in Everything You Know Is Wrong is probably a better source. Drug running, the DEA, heroin and double crosses come into play, of course. Those two will bring you back to more authoritative sources than here, also, despite their nature as underground publications. I’m just a lazy blog, so I don’t have to worry about such things.

Even many of the prosecutors in the Hague trials now express their doubt that the verdict was correct. Many families of Lockerbie victims feel the guilty verdict to be a token gesture, beyond the truth they’ll likely never get to. There are rumblings that the courts may look at the case again. There’s no evidence to say Megrahi didn’t do it, and he may very well have. But the case against the PFLP-GC seems infinitely more compelling from this lay person’s perspective. Guess that’s why I’m not a judge in the Hague.

But Qadhafi cares not. He’s got a way to buy himself back into the world with a shrug of the shoulders, a “hey, what can we do, it’s all so long ago” attitude, and barrel loads of oil for sale. Would you like to buy them, worldly citizen?

Bah. You see what happens when you watch Dateline instead of going out?

I remember the Christmas carols more clearly than anything. The Lockerbie townsfolk, standing in the rubble of their town and singing. In fiction, it would have been schmaltz. But in memory, it’s stirring.

Posted by patrick at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2003

Economists, eh?

Economists, eh? Such an ability to look at things in such cold ways

“It is cheaper to bring the troops back than it was to send them over, as they are leaving a lot of materials behind”. (Access Economics ‘expert’ on Radio National just now)

Yes, embedded in buildings and corpses, I do believe… Saves on freight.

Posted by patrick at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2003

movements

Despite my internet connection today being treacle, going to post a few links relevant to the current weekend of anti-war activity (the Perth protest, by the way, seemed to have far more than the 10,000 generally being reported in the media - I’ve not seen anything like it in this city).

Posted by patrick at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2003

Sweet bell of liberty

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. After all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Hermann Goering.
before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg.

Posted by patrick at 06:24 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2003

...and I feel fine

If these are the men about to save the world for us, may something please have mercy on our souls:

Posted by patrick at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2003

Capital work

Sometimes, people do things you just don’t expect.

An American politican, a Republican no less, and: “The Legislature couldn’t reform it, lawmakers won’t repeal it, but I will not stand for it - I must act.”

Posted by patrick at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2003

Heller would be proud

So if I am reading this right, the UN is asking the US to please please tell it where it thinks all the weapons are in Iraq, and the US is reticent in giving this information because Iraq might find out.
I guess we wouldn’t want Iraq knowing where its weapons are. Secrecy is paramount.

Posted by patrick at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2003

Onward yanqui soldiers, marching as to war

Who woulda thought Colin Powell would be a man worth respecting? A man who seems to be the only person left in the US administration not jumping up and down about the puppet’s march to war? And the reason why? As The Nation puts it

Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the one proven warrior in the Bush White House who seems to understand that peace is worth fighting for and that diplomatic finesse is not a sign of weakness; war is.
Were it not for Powell, the chicken hawks in the Administration—warmongers who have not themselves experienced battle—already would have us invading Iraq without giving U.N. inspectors a chance.

It is far too easy to think war is the answer when you’ve never been there. Not that I ever have, and (hopefully) never will. But this war on abstract concepts we are fighting, this war on ‘terror’, this war on ‘evil’, has no end. Because you can’t destroy terror, you can’t destroy evil. And now the puppet’s bluff has been called by North Korea emerging with a real “nucular” threat at a time when they are struggling to find signs of any threat inside Evil Iraq.
Again from The Nation:

A starving dictatorship’s clumsy blackmail attempts at least make some twisted sense in that the Bush Administration has refused, from its very first days, to even discuss North Korea’s persistent request for a nonaggression pact with the United States. The Administration plan is to isolate this paranoid excuse for a nation, as if it isn’t already the most isolated place on Earth.
If we can’t make peace with an utterly defeated nation like North Korea, we’re in trouble. From Columbine to Weimar Germany, humiliating those with nothing to lose is always a recipe for disaster.
South Korea and Japan understand this, and both countries are making major moves in an attempt to bring the North Koreans back into the world community. The United States, which unleashed the nuclear monster and is still the only nation to have used this deadliest weapon of mass destruction against innocent civilians, should also understand why other nations want one.

Ahhh, yes… the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two words which signify one thing: the greatest atrocity ever committed in the history of humanity. Words like ‘evil’ and ‘terror’ cease to have meaning of any significance when placed alongside what the Americans started in 1945. And with the policies of terror they have themselves dictated ever since. But things are changing. The neo-Roman Empire is weakening, its own arrogance perhaps its undoing.
The world finds itself in an interesting and delicate place this week, but the tides seem to be slowly shifting. The nonsense of this Iraqi adventure is becoming clearer to the people of the world, and the ‘Axis of Good’ may have pushed things one step too far in their Asian redecoration agenda.
Will I eat my words if Saddam proves to be the incarnation of evil and goes on a world domination rampage? I don’t think so. Attempted daddy-murdering Saddam’s deathwishes, amidst ten years of daily bombing and brutal sanctions, are not the point of geopolitics when played fairly. There is the argument that nobody listened to Churchill in the late 30s when he was jumping up and down about the rise of fascism in Germany, but would acting any earlier have prevented the cataclysmic events of the following years? Or just hastened them?

I used to play a game on my Amiga in the late 80s called Balance of Power. You got to choose to play either Russia or the US (there still being the remnants of a second superpower at the time), and the object of the game was not to dominate the world a la Risk, but simply to play your politics calmly and survive until 1997 without nuclear war erupting. This was done through funding insurgent forces in south american countries, propagandising elections around the world, providing food drops on African savannahs and sometimes just sending troops into countries proving too difficult to deal with. At the end of each month, you were presented with a list of things your other superpower had done during the month (such as fund suicide bombers in Israel) and had to decide whether or not to challenge these actions. In the end, it came down to a battle of stubborn will between yourself and the other country, a case of who is right and who is wrong, egged along by a group of advisers with questionable motives, as fingers twitch anxiously over the button. And you know what? I don’t know anybody who ever played Balance of Power and made it to 1997 without the world falling into a horrible nuclear winter. Worth dying just for the priceless game over screen. No explosions, no rewards. Just a cold, hard lesson in the harsh realities of the world. I was freakin’ twelve!

Phew, there’s that then. Just wanted to get some stuff in here other than my own current angsts. And my daily Reuters email just arrived in my inbox and made me angry.

Posted by patrick at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)