Why The Western Alliance Is Ending

Eric Zuesse

World leaders — heads of state especially — tend to be tactful people, whatever else might be said about them. When they discover that one of their number happens to be incredibly arrogant and psychopathic (and some leading psychopaths are skilled charmers; they're not necessarily blatant about their aggressive intents like Hitler was), they don't generally publicize the discovery of this unpleasant fact, because doing so would be worse than tactless: it would be downright stupid — it would jeopardize lots of the interdependencies that nations have with one-another. It would be counterproductive.

A good example of how they receive such negative information about one-another was provided by a telephone conversation on 26 February 2014 that was between Catherine Ashton, the EU's Foreign Affairs chief, and her investigator, Urmas Paet, Estonia's Foreign Minister, whom she had sent to Kiev when Ukraine's democratically elected (though corrupt, as were all of his predecessors) President, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in a very bloody sequence of events during January and February of 2014, and the question she needed an answer to now was whether this had been a revolution (authentically resulting from the Ukrainian public), or instead a coup (organized top-down, by “someone from the new coalition,” meaning a person who was on the side of the coalition against Yanukovych, the coalition that now controlled the Government). In other words: As the EU's Foreign Affairs chief, Ashton needed to know whether the pro-EU coalition in Ukraine, who now were in control there, were in power because the Ukrainian public wanted them to be, or instead because they had seized power through those violent and, as yet, hard-to-understand, clashes, which might possibly have been orchestrated by “someone from the new coalition.”

That “coalition” were the leaders who had hoped that Yanukovych would seek to bring Ukraine into the EU. Just a few months earlier, Yanukovych had decided not to do that, but instead to continue Ukraine's 1,200-year relationship with Russia. (Kiev was known as “the cradle of Russian civilization,” and the origin of the Rus people — those were the relocated Norsemen who had moved east and settled there (which is why so many Slavs are blond and why Hitler was an incredible bigot for worshipping the Norsemen while he despised the Slavs). It was a choice between Europe to the west, or Russia to the east; and Yanukovych had chosen to retain Ukraine's ties to Russia. Ukraine is the main transit-route for Russian gas going into Europe, and received fees from Russia for that; Yanukovych chose to continue this; and he received, from Russia's Gazprom company, steep discounts on Ukraine's own gas-needs, as a further inducement for continuing that relationship. Polls of Ukrainians showed Ukrainians to be sharply divided about the issue, with western Ukraine strongly favoring to join the EU, and eastern Ukraine equally strongly favoring to stay with Russia. (For example, see this poll.)

Here is that phone-conversation, between Ashton and Paet, annotated by me to explain what they were referring to, and accompanied with a link to the phone-conversation itself, so that you can hear it if you wish.

As you can see (and hear) from that, Ashton was shocked to learn that it had been a coup that brought down Yanukovych, but she continued right on with the conversation, to other business, as if to indicate, “Well, let's take care of less-disturbing matters, now." It was clear from the conversation, up to that point, that Paet regretted needing to inform Ashton that the pro-EU side was actually controlled by some scoundrel (as yet unknown), and it's clear that Ashton was shocked to hear this; but, as Ashton made evident from her response, she didn't want to discuss this matter any further. These were two seasoned diplomats, and they both understood that there was nothing they could do about water already "under the bridge," and on its way. But both of them realized, now, that its way was anything but democratic. This was useful information for Ashton to have, in her professional capacity for the EU.

She probably entertained a strong suspicion, even then, however, as to who was actually behind this coup (as she had only now learned it to have been). A few weeks before that phone-conversation, this youtube recording of yet another phone-conversation, in which Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, blurted to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, her infamous “F—k the EU” statement (which, of course, was also an insult to Ashton personally), included also Nuland's instruction to Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev, to get Arseniy Yatsenyuk appointed to run the post-coup Ukrainian Government (1:10 on the video): “I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience; he's the guy, you know, who, what he needs is Klitch and Tyahnybok on the outside, he needs to be talking to them four times a week.” To which, Pyatt promptly said “Yeah, I think that's right. Okay.” He had his assignment. 

This assignment ended up being fulfilled on 26 February 2014, just four days after the February 22nd coup. 

Coincidentally, on the very same day when Ashton heard Paet tell her that it had been a coup, “Yats” publicly received the appointment to run Ukraine's Government, but not as Ukraine's President (since the previous one had just been overthrown and such an immediate and non-democratic replacement of him would have been too obviously a coup), but instead as Ukraine's other top post: Prime Minister. Obama wanted Yats's sponsor, Yulia Tymoshenko, to win the election to replace Yanukovych as President, when that post was put up for a vote in only the northeastern half of Ukraine, the half that favored the EU and the U.S. over Russia. (It's one of the reasons he had insisted she be released from prison from her corruption-conviction, immediately at the coup.) But she turned out to be too extreme in her Russia-hatred to be able to win even in just the northeast (the anti-Russian part of Ukraine); and, so, Obama had to settle for the slightly less racist-fascist anti-Russian, Petro Poroshenko, when he won on May 25th, and the Presidency was now downgraded to little more than a figurehead status.

Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, knew everything that was going on: for examples, both of those phone-conversations had been posted to youtube after having been recorded by Russian intelligence. So: he took the action that he needed to take in order to enable the residents of Crimea, where Russia had had its main naval base since 1783, to vote on whether to rejoin Russia, of which they had been a part until the Soviet dictator Khrushchev donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — a move that was extremely unpopoular in Crimea. Putin enabled them to hold a plebiscite in Crimea on 16 March 2014, which was declared by international observers to be free and fair; and the result was 96% to rejoin Russia — virtually the same percentage that was shown in opinion-polls of Crimeans.

U.S. President Obama wanted to punish Putin for taking this defensive measure against U.S. aggression — against the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine. At first, the EU went along with the weakest sanctions that Obama pushed for against Russia, and they held out for as long as they could to delay the serious ones, until 17 July 2014, when the Obama regime in Ukraine sent up at least one fighter-jet and downed the MH17 Malaysian airliner over Ukraine's conflict-zone and blamed it on pro-Russian separatists who had been bombed for months by the Ukrainian regime — the legend was that they had fired a “Buk” missile-launcher at the MH17 mistaking it for being one of Ukraine's bombers. Not knowing that this had been yet another set-up job by the Obama-team, the EU now consented to join really stiff sanctions against Russia — on the theory that the downing wouldn't have happened if Russia had not helped the separatists to do it.

But, then, EU leaders came to know that Obama had been behind this atrocity too.

What had started with Nuland's “F—k the EU” was now the EU's complicity with the racist-fascist, or ideologically nazi, anti-Russian coup-imposed Government that she and her boss Obama had placed into power in Ukraine. A lot of influential people in Europe aren't as accepting of nazism as Obama quite evidently is.

When it became clear — after two successive invasions of the resisting Ukrainian region, Donbass, both of which invasions failed to do anything other than to destroy the region that Ukraine claimed to be protecting against ‘Terrorists' via Ukraine's ‘Anti Terrorist Operation' or ‘ATO' for short — that assisting any further with America's take-over of Ukraine would be not only war-criminal, but likely to lose, they started falling away from the entire effort.

Critically important in this regard was a 21 November 2014 vote in the U.N. on whether to condemn racist fascism, and especially to condemn Nazi Germany's World War II Holocaust against mainly Jews. Far-right racist nationalism has been booming recently; and, so, when the United States was one of only three countries — the U.S., Ukraine, and Canada — to vote against this resolution, almost the entire world was shocked. 

Clearly, now, President Obama, despite his liberal rhetoric, is far to the right of the vast majority of world-leaders, and is an insult to the memory of the U.S. troops who died fighting Hitler in World War II. 

Among the first to abandon Obama on this, right on Christmas Eve, was Viktor Orban, Hungary's leader, who was outraged at Obama's treatment of Hungary as if it were a vassal-state of the U.S. Empire.

Then, on 3 January 2015, Milos Zeman, the Czech head-of-state, joined with Orban in that.

Those countries had experienced Hitler's horrors first-hand, and they don't like nazis, not even ones (such as Obama) who speak liberal platitudes and have dark skins (and so arent' a fit for the nazi stereotype — but only for the Big Lie extremity of nazism).

And, now, it seems to be the majority of the EU who are resisting Obama's contemptuous treatment of every other nation than his or her own.

Then, on March 12th, Iceland terminated its candidacy for joining the EU. The EU's rightward bend toward the U.S. seems to have been a big turn-off to Icelanders — they won't touch even the EU.

On March 13th, Ukraine's figurehead President announced that he had reached agreement with “a series of the EU countries on the supply of armament”; and, the next day, Russian Television reported that 11 of the 28 EU member-nations had agreed to supply Ukraine with weapons. 17 refused Ukraine's request for arms. 

Then, on March 17th, washingtonsblog bannered, “Major American Allies Ignore U.S. Pleas and Join China's Alternative Bank” and reported that UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, France, Germany, and Italy, had all agreed to join China's newly-forming international-development bank competitor to Washington's IMF and World Bank. China, ever since the U.S. had started its Ukrainian proxy-war against Russia, has sided with Russia, against that war; and what this international conflict is really about is the continuance of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve-currency: Russia, China, and the rest of the BRIC countries — the rising developing economies — are seeking to replace the dollar-monopoly.

The Obama Administration has been twisting arms all over the world to try to block nations from signing onto China's new world bank; and Obama's getting rebuffed by all these nations, many of which have been traditional U.S. allies, is a historic turn away from the American Empire that he is trying to ram down everyone's throat.

And, on March 20th, zerohedge bannered, "US ‘Isolated' As Key Ally Japan Considers Joining China-Led Bank.” If this happens, then the American Empire will be all but over.

When President Bill Clinton virtually spat upon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's historical heritage by joining with the Republicans' war against Russia and inviting as many former Soviet-bloc nations into the U.S.'s now anti-Russian (no longer anti-communist;communism was gone) military alliance, NATO, as possible, and he even terminated the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act requirements that had blocked the big banks from gambling with taxpayers' money and from their keeping only the winnings and transferring onto the Government the losses when their bets go bad, Clinton started what Obama is now trying to culminate; and, finally, at long last, the world-at-large is clearly telling this anti-FDR, aggressively imperialist, U.S.A., to just shove its fascism down its toilet. More and more nations are saying, in effect: Good-bye, Uncle Sam; you're not the nation you were during World War Two; you've instead become the global enemy; you've turned and become fascist yourself.

Among the few parts of Obama's international rhetoric that are not fake, and that (because they are part of his anti-Russian propaganda campaign) express his actual fascist imperialist views — and which are increasingly being rejected — are these:

Bragging about his foreign policy, including his killing the Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi: “Wherever we have been involved over the last several years, I think the outcome has been better because of American leadership. … We are hugely influential; we're the one indispensable nation. But when it comes to nation-building, when it comes to what is going to be a generational project in a place like Libya or a place like Syria or a place like Iraq, we can help, but we can't do it for them.” [He pretends the U.S. is a big international charity.]

Telling West Point cadets that Russia and the other BRICs are enemies: “When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men [that's actually his own regime's thugs] occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.)  So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed [he misspelled ‘past'] and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … America's willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos.” [Development of underdeveloped countries is ‘chaos,' to him. Wow!]

To Wall Street's CEOs, gathered in the White House: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. [The public are here analogized to the KKK; and the banksters are instead being portrayed as the Blacks whom the KKK are trying to lynch] … I want to help. … I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you [against the ‘pitchforks'].”

Lies denigrating Russia and Putin: “Immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. … The life expectancy of theRussian male is around 60 years old. … The population is shrinking.”

His obsession to conquer Russia, as I reported it on 12 February 2015: "U.S. President Barack Obama's just-issued National Security Strategy 2015 uses the term ‘aggression' precisely 18 times, all but one of which are either explicitly, or else possibly, referring to Russia, as allegedly doing the alleged ‘aggression' — never the U.S., and on only one occasion is he identifying North Korea with that term of opprobrium. Presumably, he thinks that Russia is by far the most ‘aggressive' country. 

After the bloody coup that replaced Ukraine's democratically elected President by a nazi regime a year ago; and after that regime, serving Obama's need for hiked EU sanctaions against Russia, shot down the MH17 Malaysian airliner on 17 July 2014 and slaughtered those 298 innocent people and blamed it all on Russian-supported separatists, all in order to further Obama's bloody designs, he now has the gall to accuse Putin of “aggression” for defending the residents of Crimea from the nazi regime that Obama had installed. 

And there's so much other icing on this bloody cake. For example, Russia's Sputnik News headlined on March 20th, "South Stream: Life After Death?” and reported that the Obama regime was caught trying to instigate a coup to overthrow the current leader of Macedonia, who is balking against increasing sanctions on Russia, and who wants Macedonia to host a new pipeline for Russian gas into Europe. 

And Sputnik News headlined the very next day, March 21st, “New OSCE Report on Ukraine Says Ukrainian Forces Obstruct Monitors' Movement,” and reported that, "OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission said on Saturday it was denied access to an east Ukrainian territory controlled by Ukrainian armed forces.” Obama is re-arming his Ukrainian stooge-regime for yet a third attempt at exterminating the residents of the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man he overthrew.

Obama and his stooges apparently think that they can get away with everything. And Republicans in the U.S. Congress complain not that he's doing this, but instead that he's not giving Ukraine enough weapons to do it.

And, all of this happened after Gallup international had polled 67,000 people in 65 countries in 2013 (and never again) on “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?” and found that the U.S. crushed the ‘competition' on that, with three times as many repondents identifying the U.S. as compared to the #2 nation, which was Pakistan. Russia wasn't even listed in the news-reports (and the poll itself wasn't made public), because the news-reports listed only the top six-mentioned nations, and Russia wasn't among them. No doubt, this was one reason why Gallup yanked the question from their polling during 2014, especially after all of the international mayhem (including the coup in Ukraine) that the U.S. perpetrated last year.

So: EU leaders are finally getting the message — and even Japan and Australia are.

When George W. Bush put together a coalition of English-speaking countries to invade Iraq in 2003, nuclear weapons (other than the depleted uranium that we showered down upon Iraqis) weren't an issue. Now, they definitely are. And, more and more, the world's leaders are trying to dispense with “the one indispensable nation,” so that they (and everyone) won't be dispensed with, themselves.

It's well-known that only aristocrats profit from wars. And O'Bomba represents them just as much as his Republican ‘opposition' do. But, now, even the aristocrats in other nations are increasingly abandoning him. All he evidently still has going for him is liberal and Democratic fools in the United States, who haven't yet figured out that he's a Manchurian candidate, Trojan horse, ‘Democrat,' who (like the Clintons) would have FDR twisting in his grave if only he saw this. Fortunately, Roosevelt isn't around to see it.

President O'Bomba might become even more isolated internationally than he is at home, where there are enough liberal fools to keep him barely aloft, and enough conservative fools to keep alive the myth that he's a Marxist Muslim. 

The U.S. has become a nut-hatchery, and the foreigners (especially the leaders in the ‘dispensable' countries) are beginning to notice. Even America's former friends are no longer amused.

Only Less Will Do

Richard Heinberg

When I’m not writing books or essays on environmental issues, or sleeping or eating, you’re likely to find me playing the violin. This has been an obsessive activity for me since I was a boy, and seems to deliver ever more satisfaction as time passes. Making and operating the little wooden box that is a violin is essentially a pre-industrial activity: nearly all its parts are from renewable sources (wood, horsetail, sheepgut), and playing it requires no electricity or gasoline. Violin playing therefore constitutes an ecologically benign hobby, right?

It probably was, a couple of centuries ago; now, not so much. You see, most violin bows are made from pernambuco, a Brazilian hardwood that’s endangered because too many bows have already been made from it. Ebony, too, is over-harvested; it’s used for making fingerboards, tuning pegs, and bow parts. Some fancy older violin bows are even decorated with tortoiseshell, ivory, and whalebone. And while maple and spruce (the main woods from which violins are constructed) are not endangered, whole forests are being cut in China to meet the burgeoning global demand for student instruments. Modern strings (most of which are made using petroleum derivatives) are often wound with nonrenewable silver or aluminum, and almost nobody tries to recycle them.
You see, the real problem with violins is one of scale. If there were only a few thousand violinists in the world, making and playing fiddles would have negligible environmental impact. But multiply these activities by tens of millions and the results are deforestation and species extinctions.

Yes, efforts are being made to make violin playing more sustainable. Brazil is protecting its remaining pernambuco forests, and many bow makers seek out “sustainably harvested” wood. Bow makers are also replacing elephant ivory with steer bone or synthetic materials, and the shafts of many bows are now made from carbon fiber. Tortoiseshell and whalebone are off limits for new bows, and synthetic replacements for these materials are available. One company offers to recycle the silver in old violin strings. All of this helps. But if the number of violinists continues to increase, these gains will sooner or later be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the demand for everything from glue to rosin.

Violin playing is a fairly specialized, unusual activity. But the basic problem I’ve outlined is endemic to just about every human pursuit, from eating breakfast in the morning to watching television before bedtime. In the quest to make human society sustainable, the problem of scale crops up absolutely everywhere. We can make a particular activity more energy-efficient and benign (for example, we can increase the fuel economy of our cars), but the improvement tends to be overwhelmed by changes in scale (economic expansion and population growth lead to an increase in the number of cars on the road, and to the size of the average vehicle, and hence to higher total fuel consumption).

Almost nobody likes to hear about the role of scale in our global environmental crisis. That’s because if growth is our problem, then the only real solution is to shrink the economy and reduce population. Back in the 1970s, many environmentalists recommended exactly that remedy, but then came the Reagan backlash—a political juggernaut promising endless economic expansion if only we allowed markets to work freely. Many environmentalists recalibrated their message, and the “bright green” movement was born, claiming that efficiency improvements would enable humans to eat their cake (grow the economy) and have it too (protect the planet for the sake of future generations).

Yet here we are, decades after the eclipse of old-style, conservation-centered environmentalism, and despite all sorts of recycling programs, environmental regulations, and energy efficiency improvements, the global ecosystem is approaching collapse at ever-greater speed.

Population has grown from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 7.1 billion in 2013. Per capita consumption of energy has grown from less than 70 gigajoules to nearly 80 GJ per year. Total energy use has expanded from 300 exajoules to 550 EJ annually. We’ve used all that energy to extract raw materials (timber, fish, minerals), to expand food production (converting forests to farmland or rangeland, using immense amounts of freshwater for irrigation, applying fertilizers and pesticides). And we see the results: the world’s oceans are dying; species are going extinct at a thousand times the natural rate; and the global climate is careening toward chaos as multiple self-reinforcing feedback processes (including polar melting and methane release) kick into gear.

The environmental movement has responded to that last development by adopting a laser-like focus on reducing carbon emissions. Which is certainly understandable, since global warming constitutes the most pervasive and potentially deadly ecological threat in all of human history. But the proponents of “green growth,” who tend to dominate environmental discussions (sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly), tell us the solution is simply to switch energy sources and trade carbon credits; if we do those simple and easy things, we can continue to expand population and per-capita consumption with no worries.

In reality, entirely switching our energy sources will not be easy, as I have explained in a lengthy recent essay. And while climate change is the mega-crisis of our time, carbon is not our only nemesis. If global warming threatens to undermine civilization, so do topsoil, freshwater, and mineral depletion. These may just take a little longer.

The math of compound growth leads to absurdities (one human for every square meter of land surface by the year 2750 at our current rate of population increase) and to tragedy. If confronted by this simple math, bright greens will say, “Well yes, ultimately there are limits to population and consumption growth. But we just have to grow some more now, in order to deal with the problem of economic inequality and to make sure we don’t trample on people’s reproductive rights; later, once everyone in the world has enough, we’ll talk about leveling off. For now, substitution and efficiency will take care of all our environmental problems.”

Maybe the bright greens (or should I say, pseudo-greens?) are right in saying that “less” is a message that just doesn’t sell. But offering comforting non-solutions to our collective predicament accomplishes nothing. Maybe the de-growth prescription is destined to fail at altering civilization’s overall trajectory and it is too late to avoid a serious collision with natural limits. Why, then, continue talking about those limits and advocating human self-restraint? I can think of two good reasons. The first is, limits are real. When we decline to talk about what is real simply because it’s uncomfortable to do so, we seal our own fate. I, for one, refuse to drink that particular batch of Kool-Aid. The second and more important reason: If we can’t entirely avoid the collision, let us at least learn from it—and let’s do so as quickly as possible.

All traditional indigenous human societies eventually learned self-restraint, if they stayed in one place long enough. They discovered through trial and error that exceeding their land’s carrying capacity resulted in dire consequences. That’s why traditional peoples appear to us moderns as intuitive ecologists: having been hammered repeatedly by resource depletion, habitat destruction, overpopulation, and resulting famines, they eventually realized that the only way to avoid getting hammered yet again was to respect nature’s limits by restraining reproduction and protecting other forms of life. We’ve forgotten that lesson, because our civilization was built by people who successfully conquered, colonized, then moved elsewhere to do the same thing yet again; and because we are enjoying a one-time gift of fossil fuels that empower us to do things no previous society ever dreamed of. We’ve come to believe in our own omnipotence, exceptionalism, and invincibility. But we’ve now run out of new places to conquer, and the best of the fossil fuels are used up.

As we collide with Earth’s limits, many people’s first reflex response will be to try to find someone to blame. The result could be wars and witch-hunts. But social and international conflict will only deepen our misery. One thing that could help would be the widely disseminated knowledge that our predicament is mostly the result of increasing human numbers and increasing appetites confronting disappearing resources, and that only cooperative self-limitation will avert a fight to the bitter end. We can learn; history shows that. But in this instance we need to learn fast.

So I keep plugging away with the same old message in as many different ways as I can, updating it as events unfold. And I play my violin—with a carbon fiber bow.

Support Richard's work by buying his new book Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels or making a donation.

The "Naturalness" Of The Commons

David de Ugarte

Las Indias

When you live in a community, you see how it’s the most natural and spontaneous thing in the world that everything is shared, that everything must strengthen everyone to work… and precisely because of that, it never seems like a big thing, it doesn’t seem to have a special value, it’s “spontaneous,” “normal.” But when you go to the everyday institutions of society — the businesses, the communities of neighbors, the administration — it’s hard to find an iota of everything that you take for granted, and you wonder if it really is as “natural” as it seemed to you.

But if we think about it a bit, that “naturalness” is quite present in our culture. All languages have a specific word for communal work: in Spanish, using the Asturian word, we call it “andecha;” in Portuguese, “mutirão;” in Euskera [Basque], “auzolan;” in Russian, “toloka;” in Finnish, “talkoot;” in Norwegian, “dugnad“… And also for community property: the traditional peasant common lands and associations of fishers, or “procomún,” as it begins to be called in the fifteenth century in Spain, is equivalent to the Japanese “iriai,” or the English “commons.”

That’s because agricultural and hunting commons are the original form of ownership and work, long prior to State property and private property… and for the time being, the most persistent: commons institutions remained vigorous throughout the world up through the Middle Ages and resisted Modernity with relative strength until the “amortization” of nineteenth-century liberalism forced them to evolve into modern cooperativism. But don’t be fooled: even today, there are large European regions, like Galicia, where more of the 25% of the territory is made up of common lands. We have always been surrounded by the commons and by community values. Our culture kept more than just the formula for us.

If it wasn’t enough to observe the survival of large expanses of communal land and herds on all continents, it must be said that in all of our community experience we’ve never found a single case where problems arise because someone had consumption patterns such that endangered common resources. In community life, there are problems and conflicts, but in our experience, that’s not one of them, and if it does happen somewhere, it certainly isn’t frequent or relevant.

The “Tragedy of the Commons”

And “The Tragedy of the Commons” has a trap. It is a theoretical model created in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, an neo-Malthusian ecologist, a forerunner of what would later be called “degrowth,” obsessed with what he believed to be an “excess of population.” Hardin starts with a definition of the behavior of individuals according to which they would look only at their short-term interests, but would be blind both to the social result (which is to say, the impact their actions would have on the sum of individual results) and on their own total results over time. The model also means that the commons in question is not reproducible (with free software, this is not applicable, because it doesn’t run out when we use it more).

With these initial restrictions, according to which people would literally behave as if there was no tomorrow and there were no other people — surprise, surprise! — the result is that the shared resource runs out. The results were implicit in the conditions of the game, and the result is the one that was desired: the “demonstration” that the reality that surrounds us doesn’t exist, because it is “irrational.”

This is a very different path from the one followed by the classical economists and Marx himself. They had not used an abstract and self-reinforcing model, but had had to explain and model why existed commons in a good part of the arable lands in Europe and, above all, why the peasants didn’t want privatize them. The history of the nineteenth century in large countries like Russia, Spain or Italy is the story of governments like that of the Spanish minister Madoz, trying privatize the commons by force, with little success. It was a drama for the liberals of the times, who thought that without individual property rights, the countryside would never become technological, nor would enough labor flow to the cities to make industry viable. It was a theoretical problem for Marx, who was continuously asked by those in Russia what to do with the countless peasant commons there, and whether they could evolve “directly” to an economy of abundance without going through privatization.

But, by 1968, when Hardin writes “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the commons is no longer a political problem. It is simply a settled reality that economic theory could explain easily, without the need to include internal regulations or external, whether with game theory, modeling the commons as Nash equilibria, or even with neoclassical theory, including the way that would make Gary Becker famous, models of long-term rationality.

Only in the Anglo-Saxon world, where the nineteenth-century amortizations were really effective and put an end to common ownership of the land, could Hardin’s story come to be “common knowledge,” because by 1968, nobody in the USA or Great Britain co-existed with common lands and shared usage. But in reality, these were part of the everyday geography of millions of inhabitants where neither had the liberal revolution ever totally triumphed in its agrarian policies, nor had Soviet or Chinese socialism been imposed — a large area which included, on a continuum, places as disparate as Indochina, Galicia, Mexico, la Araucania [Chile], or South Africa.

The self-interested sanctification of Elinor Ostrom

However, in 2009 the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Economics to a political scientist, Elinor Ostrom,for having “challenged conventional wisdom [sic] by demonstrating how local property can be managed by a local commons without regulation by central authority or privatization.” Ostrom soon became a sort of patron saint to all those in universities who were interested in the community experience in general and the commons in particular. The central idea they took from her work is that the management of the commons requires a complex set of norms and equilibria that remain “artificial,” products of a very sophisticated social construct.

This is true, but their political-academic claim is not disinterested: when a social organization is described as “artificial” and “sophisticated,” it is implicitly being argued that it is necessary to have “special,” academic, or “technical” knowledge to make it work. Ostrom thus became excuse to argue the guardianship of groups of theoreticians and academics over the social process, with their consequent industry of advanced degrees, courses, and seminars for training “specialists.”

Reality is stubborn

But 2009 was also the first real year of crisis in Europe. Millions of people were left without work. In countries like Greece, Spain or Portugal, thousands and thousands of families lost their houses. Spontaneously, the social network — first, families, and then, communities — started to reorganize for survival. Hundreds of small “communes” appeared, houses that were shared between families that had been left without regular income, in which everything that that was obtained went into a common fund. Nobody needed design or certify a sophisticated set of rules. While it was a precarious response to an emergency situation, the “naturalness” of the process is noteworthy. The model already was there, in the cultural inheritance and in the traditions of the working classes.

And that’s really the key: the community is, in point of fact, a sophisticated cultural construction. And what’s more, so are the traditions of sharing that are profoundly embedded in popular culture. When an egalitarian community is born, when we create a new commons to be shared, we’re not starting from zero. We are putting “into production” all that code, all that community rationality that we inherited from the learned reactions and way of managing common belongings in our families. That is why we experience it as “spontaneous,” why it feels “natural,” and why it appears again and again in such different environments all over the world. Our “rationality” is definitively not what Hardin and the neo-Malthusian theoreticians of degrowth attributed to us when they presented the irrational destruction of non-renewable resources as a product of our “nature” and not as the result of over-scaled corporations dedicated to looking for rents at all costs.

No, to understand the shared economy, to work together to manage the needs of all in a community economy, we don’t need great treaties or consultation with university technicians. We just need to go back home.

Israel vs. Judaism

Norman Pollack

[When I say “humanism hangs in the balance” I mean that Judaism today is in danger of losing its moral-ethical-universal foundations by the stand it takes toward Israel’s policies and historical record of ethnic cleansing, well-antedating Netanyahu, what already regrettably seems or appears to be a losing battle. Israel has the potential both of destroying itself and bringing Judaism down with it in what I believe is a paroxysm of hatred and paranoia of overcompensating conquest. As the reader will see, I am rooting with all my heart for Judaism, which I proudly affirm against the baseness of contemporary Israel.]

Analysis of Israel’s election which declares Netanyahu freer to seek less doctrinaire policies, greater mobility to pursue peace, is absurd and duplicitous. His statement about resisting a two-state solution condemns Israel–and his leadership–to the opprobrium of humankind, with the grisly attack on Gaza itself marking both as engaging in WAR CRIMES. Yet by his election, the Israeli people–knowing Netanyahu’s declaration rejecting a two-state solution, and his further allusion to racism by disparaging Arab-Israeli citizens’ electoral activity–have shown to the world an uncompromising, xenophobic, militaristic people unworthy of Judaism and the Torah. (The presumed recantation, walking back on the two-state solution, is a cunning change-of-heart filled with caveats, expressed and implied, which fully negates a meaningful accommodation or approach to peace. Simply, Andrea Mitchell in her interview caught him with his pants down.)

What a denigration of the memory of the Holocaust, this Nazi-like bludgeoning of the Palestinians. Have Israelis abandoned all conscience? Sunk into a self-serving mode of denial? Believed it possible that through sheer power and force they could assert dominance in face of the moral law? What is happening to my beloved Judaism? To the teachings about welcoming the stranger, about reaching out to the dispossessed? Judaism is DISGRACED by Israel’s policies of internal colonialism and contempt for the treatment of fellow humans.

Anti-Semitism will rise in Europe and the rest of the world because of Israel’s conduct, a burden on world Jewry because of the falsification of Jewish values and time-honored record of siding with the innocent, the deprived, the underdog. Netanyahu at the Wailing Wall (as shown in photographs after his victory) is an act of impiety. Consider, would Einstein have shelled or bombed UN schools/shelters in Gaza that were crowded with people thinking they were safe and escaping the onslaught? Would Schwerner and Goodman have shelled or bombed hospitals, the injured lining the corridors? Would Aaron Copland and Ben Shawn have shelled or bombed water treatment plants and electrical grids? Would and did the IDF and Netanyahu do these despicable acts, the more despicable because the Israeli population looked on and in many cases applauded? [My description in an earlier CP article of the residents of Siderot, who gathered on the hillside through the night in festive mood cheering as Israeli artillery shelling rocked the Gaza countryside, the while munching and drinking, some on sofas dragged out for the occasion to have a better view.]

Why any further pretence of Israel as a democratic nation? In the campaign itself, there is seldom the mention of Gaza, and that—confirming the near-universality of complicity in war crimes—including Herzog and Livni. Protesting high rents may define the “Left” in Israel, but a Left fully acquiescent in mass killing, walls, blockades, discrimination; hence, a Left in name only, shorn of all connection to the universality of humankind. For Israelis, Gazans are cannon fodder or a lower species (a willful distortion of the Chosen-People notion which, because of assumed superiority, encourages the ethos and cult of militarism found in Israel). Here I’m reminded of Sartre’s “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” one who possesses the durability of stone—a hardness of soul and heart allowing nothing to penetrate. As with Netanyahu, we see now the theory and practice of cruelty emblematic of a whole people; for it is difficult to say whether he eggs them on, or they he. Sartre’s Anti-Semite could readily be applied as a collective portrayal of Israelis.

***

Let’s go back to the day after the election, Jodi Rudoren’s New York Times article, “Win Sets Netanyahu on Path to Remake Israeli Government,” (Mar. 18), in which, despite evidence to the contrary, she offers the prospect of his having a freer hand to move toward the Center: “Israelis emboldened [him] with a clear mandate in balloting on Tuesday, paving the way for him to lead a right-leaning and religious coalition that could be far easier to control, since his own party holds many more seats now…. While the new coalition will almost certainly be more purely conservative, it is also more narrowly tailored, potentially freeing its leader of the constraints that often guided his last government.” Nominally moving rightward, he “also has gotten rid of extremists in his own party, Likud, and shrunk the Jewish Home party, which he often placated over the last two years by expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank.” For the coalition to be “more narrowly tailored” suggests eliminating fanaticism for what is “more purely conservative,” in this case, in the words of Uzi Arad, his former national security adviser, “more ‘tough pragmatism’ than ‘stiff defiance.’” I find it otherwise, not only in the complexion of his coalition partners, including ultra-Orthodox parties, but his continued mobilization of opposition, if not worse, to Iran, and, domestically, everything from settlement construction to regional displays of toughness (e.g., once more, Gaza) to the precepts of market fundamentalism in shaping Israel’s economy.

My New York Times Comment on the Rudoren article, March 19, follows:

Analysis of Israel’s election which declares Netanyahu freer to seek less doctrinaire policies, greater mobility to pursue peace, is absurd and duplicitous. His statement about resisting a two-state solution condemns Israel–and his leadership–to the opprobrium of humankind, with the grisly attack on Gaza itself marking both as engaging in WAR CRIMES. Yet by his election, the Israeli people–knowing Netanyahu’s declaration rejecting a two-state solution, and his further allusion to racism by disparaging Arab-Israeli citizens’ electoral activity–have shown to the world an uncompromising, xenophobic, militaristic people unworthy of Judaism and the Torah.

What a denigration of the memory of the Holocaust, this Nazi-like bludgeoning of the Palestinians. Have Israelis abandoned all conscience? sunk into a self-serving mode of denial? believed it possible that through sheer power and force they could assert dominance in face of the moral law? What is happening to my beloved Judaism? to the teachings about welcoming the stranger, about reaching out to the dispossessed? Judaism is DISGRACED by Israel’s policies of internal colonialism and contempt for the treatment of fellow humans.

Anti-Semitism will rise in Europe and the rest of the world because of Israel’s conduct, a burden on world Jewry because of the falsification of Jewish values and time-honored record of siding with the innocent, the deprived, the underdog. Netanyahu at the Wailing Wall is an act of impiety

***

Update: consider Jason Horowitz’s NYT article, “Do the Democrats and Israel Have a Future Together?,” (March 21), which reveals domestic forces of Reaction in full-court-press propaganda mode to bring the Democrats into line in support of Israel. Perhaps the whole topic is artificial if not ill-considered given the overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel in America regardless of particular political leadership on either side. Tempest in a tea pot? Probably, because Israel stands in the eyes of America’s political, military, and intelligence communities as code for a still deeper affiliation or attachment, spearhead for US global hegemony, not unlike Britain and NATO, in strategic importance for America’s whole counterrevolutionary agenda (rapidly extended now to the Far East through Pacific-First and the Trans-Pacific Partnership) to secure ideological dominance, the protection of oil supplies, and effective resistance to Left-movements for social change. Israel and America, bedfellows eternal, as the covers of militarism are neatly tucked in.

Horowitz has a stellar cast of notables seeking to patch up differences—Elliott Abrams (Bush adviser on the Middle East, and as I recall, back further, architect of repression in Latin America), Ann Lewis, (close to both Clintons), Malcolm Hoenlein (Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations), for starters, AIPAC, and crème de la crème, Pastor Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI), not to be gainsaid in organizing pressures on Israel’s behalf—a blue-ribbon effort by shock troops to influence US policy. Add John Boehner, Michele Bachman, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham to the foregoing mix and one has a revelatory look at, more than a Netanyahu cheering section, what constitutes Israel’s appeal for Americans: surely not the religious principles and faith of Judaism per se, but the retrograde policies of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and the application of force to resolve all problems and reduce all tensions.

Horowitz writes, “While a deepening polarization among American Jews about Netanyahu [I’m skeptical of this] puts Obama’s potential successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a politically uncomfortable position, it is the transformation of Israel into a partisan issue that fills Democratic Jewish officials with dread.” This shouldn’t (mine), but for safety sake we see college campuses targeted, “trips of movie stars to Israel,” the usual, even African-Americans and Hispanics, an important part of the party base, enlisted in the cause, Republicans meanwhile active in pushing for a political realignment, as in Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, to bring Jews still further into their ranks. I will skip over the activities of Ron Dermer, a one-man dynamo, as Israel’s US ambassador, or Sheldon Adelson himself, a one-man Las Vegas version of Fort Knox, except to mention the former’s statement, popular no doubt in its sentiments for CP readers, but for me reeking in duplicity in one respect—the use of cultural issues to obfuscate the need for first addressing the more fundamental class and structural issues relevant to the democratization process as the vital context for then realizing rights dear to all of us. Horowitz quotes Dermer in what I take to be cynicism of the first water—forget Gaza, forget repression of internal dissent, forget support of dictators as standard procedure, none matters when you look at Israel’s civil liberties record (which I find wanting): ”’I think the progressive case for Israel is an easy case to make,’” Dermer stated, “’We’re the only country that’s had a chief justice of the Supreme Court, a speaker of the Knesset and a prime minister who were women. You have gay rights in Israel…. And then you have respect for minority rights in Israel.’” I’m not buying. Tell it to those living for decades under Israel’s iron heel. Tell it to the children who survived the saturated bombing and shelling of Gaza blinded or with limbs missing. Tell it to the young men who have been unemployed and socially humiliated. But don’t, Israelis, tell it to yourselves, because in your state of profound denial, you won’t believe that others have been hurt by your actions.

My New York Times Comment on the Horowitz article, same date, follows:

Hora circles and singing Hebrew anthems will not cover over the war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza, nor its ethnic cleansing in general. Why is it Israel has the most favorable support in America from extreme right-wing groups? As for liberal Democrats, support there confirms the bipartisan consensus on war, intervention, drone assassination. A liberal Democrat is a Republican in everything but name.
I grieve for Judaism. It was not always thus. Like Dermer I was raised in Miami Beach but decades earlier, my parents hardworking successful Lincoln Road merchants from Minsk (Mom) and Pinsk (Dad). I was deeply proud, as a young radical, of my Jewish heritage.

Why not! Jews from say 1900-60 stood in the forefront of humanistic philosophy and learning, interpreted Torah in universal terms favoring welcoming the stranger and helping the underdog. In the arts, Jews were in the forefront of music, art, literature. I mourned the execution of the Rosenbergs, and like many other young Jews I threw myself wholeheartedly into the civil rights struggle (yes picketing Woolworth’s in Harvard Square to Mississippi Freedom Summer and Selma) and antiwar movement.

World Jewry today led by the example of Israel forfeits its Jewishness via slavish devotion to a Militaristic State which oppresses the proverbial Other. Adelson speaks for many–but not me. Let the charade of Israeli democracy go on. God knows better. God, oddly, has always been for the victims, not the oppressors.

The Consequences of Netanyahu’s Victory

Lawrence Davidson

Elections are public windows onto national hopes and concerns, and this was certainly the case with the March 2015 voting in Israel. You just have to look through that window with analytical eyes to assess those national yearnings in their essential details.

At first glance the campaigning suggested that most Israelis were focused on economics. This would not be unusual. Just about all democratic elections are fought over bread and butter issues, and Israel has evolved into a society that is harshly divided between haves and have-nots. However, as it turned out, this campaign theme could not have been of primary importance. This is so because the man who symbolizes the dysfunctional economic status quo, Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Bibi), actually won the election. Indeed his hard-right Likud Party improved its position in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, from 19 to 30 seats. Obviously, something else was motivating the Israeli voter. What was it?

The answer to that question is fear – or, in Israeli terms, the issue of security. Netanyahu stoked this fear with warnings of a massive Arab Israeli turnout and other examples of racist-tinged propaganda, and this led many Israeli Jews to decide, in the privacy of the voting booth, that they were more afraid of Palestinians than of poverty. At the same time most of these voters refused to face the fact that much of this fear is self-induced. Israel has evolved into one of the most racist countries on earth and at the heart of its racism is the ideologically driven desire for a state reserved primarily for Jews. To accomplish this, Israel as a nation has dispossessed and oppressed the Palestinians. This practice has prevailed for so long that 60 percent of Israeli Jews cannot envision an end to the resulting struggle. So fear of Palestinian resistance, with its implied threat of destruction, or at least transformation, of the Jewish state has always been their ultimate security issue.

It would seem that concern over security and its attendant fear caused enough Israelis, who would have otherwise voted their pocketbooks, to vote instead for the “no Palestinian state on my watch,” free-marketeer Bibi Netanyahu. And that allowed his Likud Party to win.

Consequences for the Israeli People

Given that so many Israeli Jews voted for Netanyahu’s Likud Party or one of the parties allied to it, what can they look for as a result? Well, they can hope against hope for their longed-for security. However, objectively speaking, this expectation is foolhardy. This will be Netanyahu’s fourth term as prime minister and Israel is still the least safe place on the planet for Jews. In addition, thanks to Netanyahu’s policies, life for Jews outside of Israel is less, rather than more, secure. In other words, those who voted for Likud or its allies looking for security seriously misjudged the situation. Indeed, they seem to be unable to understand what is really required for Israel’s security – namely, a just peace with the Palestinians – or how Netanyahu has already and soon will further negatively impact this issue.

Also, Netanyahu has adopted positions and policies which, if pressed forward (as they now surely will be), can only rebound negatively on Israel in the international arena. These positions and policies include Netanyahu’s refusal to seriously negotiate with the Palestinians, his now open rejection of a Palestinian state (despite his cynical post-election reversal on this point), the speeding up of illegal settlement activity, ever more violent oppressive occupation, theft of Palestinian tax revenue, and the utter impoverishment of the Gaza Strip. Over time these policies have upset most of the governments of the Western world (an exception being the U.S. Congress), and that feeling may now grow and make more likely stronger reactions both from the Europeans, the United Nations, and the White House as well.

Israel’s voters can also look forward to an emboldened Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel movement, which will no doubt pick up supporters as a result of Netanyahu’s reelection. Then there is the allegation of Israeli war crimes now being considered by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Bibi’s return to power will ensure that this process continues, possibly resulting in indictments against a significant proportion of the Israeli chain of command, including the reelected Benjamin Netanyahu.

Finally, many Israelis can expect to stay poor under Netanyahu’s free market policies.

Consequences for the Palestinians

In the near run things may not change much for the Palestinians. With Netanyahu reelected, any Israeli talk of compromise, if it is articulated at all, will be recognized as empty propaganda. We can speculate that if Likud’s strongest rival, the Zionist Union headed by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, had won the recent election, they would perhaps have muddied the waters for the Palestinians – perhaps reopening “negotiations” with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian National Authority, probably then causing the latter to put on hold Palestinian charges of Israeli war crimes at the ICC, and then tempting the aging Abbas with some form of Bantustan. That is the very best the Palestinians could have gotten from any Zionist government. It is realization of this hard fact that many Palestinians and their supporters would rather see Netanyahu in charge: the issues then at least remain crystal clear rather than fogged over by false hopes.

On the bright side of the equation the united Arab List did very well in the recent election and garnered 14 seats. This makes the Israeli Arab coalition the third largest bloc in the Knesset and thus a potential major opposition voice. Arab Israeli leaders will now demand seats on parliamentary committees. They will almost certainly be ignored or, at best, relegated to unimportant places. This will only disillusion many Arab Israelis about politics in general and cause them to look for other avenues to express their longstanding dissatisfaction. For the rest of the world, their poor treatment will become more obvious and Israel’s claim to democratic status all the less persuasive.

Consequences for the United States

The sad truth is that the present leaders of the mainstream Jewish community in the U.S. have long favored the Likud leadership in Israel. Some of these Jewish leaders believe that tough-minded Likudniks are the best hedge against the

“inevitable” next Holocaust, while others will back whoever is in charge because they are ideologically fixated on Israel as their cause celebre. Thus, all of them are no doubt pleased with Netanyahu’s return to power. This is also the case for the U.S.’s Christian Zionists who are motivated by religious delusions about what it takes to bring about the Second Coming of their preferred god. It is a mistake to see these attitudes as generational. In both cases they will be with us for a long time. For all these people, Netanyahu’s reelection means business as usual.

The consequences of Netanyahu’s victory for liberal American Jews and their organizations – J Street, the American branch of Peace Now, and the like – is really problematic. If they can hold onto their membership, they might press on despite all. On the other hand, many liberal Jews might just give up and become quiet, which of course is what the hard-line Zionists want. But it is also likely that liberal Zionist organizations will lose members to more relevant and outspoken organizations such as Jewish Voices For Peace. That would be a move in a progressive, and realistic, direction.

Then there are the Republican Party officials. Their comfort level with the Bibi and his Likudniks is a matter of style and character. Take a man like John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and match him in terms of personality and ethics to Benjamin Netanyahu. What you have is a compatible fit: two utterly unprincipled politicians who may in fact really like each other.

President Obama, and no doubt many other Democrats, would have preferred Netanyahu’s political demise and replacement with a Herzog-Livni coalition. Obama wants Zionists willing to at least put on a front of flexibility. These are the kind of folks he would feel comfortable working with, and given such partners, he would help them pressure the Palestinians into a Bantustan. He won’t get that now and so we are all spared the farce of further “peace talks.”

Finally, there is Netanyahu’s obsession with the Iran question and U.S. negotiations with that country. Bibi will no doubt feel emboldened by his electoral victory, and once he forms his coalition and consolidates power, the White House can expect him to resume his nagging and nay-saying ways on this issue. Once the deal with Iran is struck (and I think it will be), one can anticipate Netanyahu’s collusion with the Republicans to undermine and, if they can, ultimately sabotage President Obama’s one notable contribution to a more peaceful and stable world.

Conclusion

Undermining peace, promoting oppression, assuring poverty, fostering racism, playing on people’s fears and interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries – none of this can be good for the rest of us. Clearly, Benjamin Netanyahu is bad news for the world at large. He is the political world’s analogue to global warming – the more active he is, the more toxic the environment becomes.

In the long run the Palestinians may be the only ones who benefit from the Israel’s March 2015 elections. The now guaranteed continued alienation from Israel of a good part of the Western world will work to their benefit over time. Netanyahu would dismiss this possibility as irrelevant, for he is certain that Israeli power wins out in the end. But then there are different types of power: just ask the men who once ran South Africa’s for-whites-only society.

On the other hand, the biggest losers are the Jews. The fact that the behavior of Netanyahu and his allies is repeatedly endorsed by a significant number of Jews inside and outside of Israel confirms that, except for the Holocaust, Zionism is the worst thing to happen to Jews and Judaism in the modern era. It has tied a people and a religion to a racist political ideology that is a variant on the criminal practice of apartheid.

Given that sort of culture, the worst rises to the top and, sure enough, that is what is happening in Israel.

Cyber Armageddon is a Myth

Bill Blunden

Over the past several years mainstream news outlets have conveyed a litany of cyber doomsday scenarios on behalf of ostensibly credible public officials. Breathless intimations of the End Times. The stuff of Hollywood screenplays. However a recent statement by the U.S. intelligence community pours a bucket of cold water over all of this. Yes, Virginia, It turns out that all the talk of cyber Armageddon was a load of bunkum. An elaborate propaganda campaign which only serves as a pretext to sacrifice our civil liberties and channel an ocean of cash to the defense industry.

Looking back the parade of scare stories is hard to miss. For example, in late 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.” Former White House cyber-security official Paul B. Kurtz likewise spoke of a threat which he referred to as a “cyber Katrina.” Former NSA director Mike McConnell claimed that a veritable Cyberwar was on and chided the public “are we going to wait for the cyber equivalent of the collapse of the World Trade Centers?” Yet another NSA director, Keith Alexander, described cyberattacks as constituting “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” And finally, Vanity Fair magazine published a hyperbolic article entitled “A Declaration of Cyberwar” wherein the NSA’s Stuxnet attack against Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities was likened to a cyber “Hiroshima.”

Yet the 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. intelligence community submitted recently to the Senate Armed Services Committee has explicitly conceded that the risk of “cyber Armageddon” is at best “remote.” In other words, it’s entirely safe to ignore the hyperbolic bluster of the Cult of Cyberwar. Despite what we’ve been told the Emperor is naked.

What society has witnessed is what’s known in the public relations business as threat inflation. It’s a messaging tool that’s grounded in human emotion. Faced with ominous prophecies by trusted public servants the average person seldom pauses to consider the likelihood of ulterior motives or perform a formal quantitative risk assessment. Most people tacitly cede to the speakers’ authority —given that most speakers are, or were, high-ranking officials— and accept their graphic worst-case scenarios at face value.

The American public saw threat inflation back in the 1950s when American leadership hyperventilated over the imaginary Missile Gap. We saw it once again before the invasion of Iraq when President Bush spoke of a nuclear “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” And after reading through the various cyber metaphors described earlier it’s hard not to recognize the fingerprints of threat inflation at work.

The goal of threat inflation is to stir up anxiety, to foment a profound sense of apprehension so that the public is receptive to marketing pitches emerging from the defense industry. Studies conducted by accredited research psychologists demonstrate that anxious people will choose to be safe rather than sorry. In the throes of an alleged crisis, anxious people aren’t necessarily particular about the solution as long as it’s presented as a remedial measure; they don’t care much about the ultimate cost or the civil liberties they relinquish. They’re willing to pay a steep price to feel safe again.

So it is that American intelligence services have raised a global panopticon and in doing so engaged in clandestine subversion programs that span entire sectors of the economy. Speaking to the public our leaders justify mass surveillance in terms of protecting the American public against terrorists. Speaking to each other intelligence officers disparage iPhone users as ‘zombies’ who pay for their own monitoring. This sharp contrast underscores an insight provided by whistleblower Ed Snowden in an open letter to Brazil. In particular Snowden stated that “These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”

This process, of capitalizing on deftly manufactured emotional responses, has been called securitization and it puts the economic and political imperatives of corporate interests before our own. An allegedly existential threat like cyber Armageddon can presumably justify any cost in the throes of a crisis mentality. This is exactly what powerful groups are betting on.

But just because there are several types of insurance doesn't mean consumers should go out and buy all of them. Prudent buyers won’t pay any price to be safe, they purchase coverage strategically. There are prices that clear-headed people won’t pay. Something to remember when the term “national security” appears in public debate.

Nepal Leading Tobacco Control In South Asia

Bobby Ramakant

(CNS): South Asian region has very high levels of tobacco use, and thus not surprisingly, rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other tobacco related illnesses rage high. Nepal is in spotlight in South Asian region by demonstrating high commitment to tobacco control and also acting on the ground! Recognizing Nepal's leadership, the country was awarded the prestigious 'Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control' at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH 2015).

Nepal received the Bloomberg award for advancing ahead with biggest-ever pictorial graphic health warnings on all tobacco packs from 15th May 2015. Beginning May 15, 2015, picture and text warnings must be placed on 90 percent of the front and back of all tobacco product packaging, among other strong measures for effective tobacco control.

"Nepal Ministry of Health and Population had passed the comprehensive law comprised of large graphic health warnings, bans on tobacco advertising and sponsorships, and a smoke-free law all while facing immense pressure from the tobacco industry. During the process of passing the law and after its passing, the Ministry of Health faced 16 court cases filed by the tobacco industry but won with currently two appeals pending. Nepal is a leader in the South East Asia region for its tobacco control efforts" said Dr Tara Singh Bam, a noted expert with the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union).

Firewall health policy from tobacco industry

Another leadership Nepal has demonstrated not only in South Asian region but also for countries globally is by incorporating provisions in line with the Article 5.3 of the global tobacco treaty (formally called WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control - FCTC). This FCTC Article 5.3, is based upon the principle that there is a direct and irreconcilable conflict of interest between tobacco industry and public health policy.

Dr Tara Singh Bam said: As implementation of domestic tobacco control laws and global tobacco treaty is advancing, tobacco industry is indeed facing the heat. Not surprising, that the industry has sued governments when they have attempted to implement life-saving tobacco control measures. Nepal is no exception. With more than 11 law suits filed by the industry and its allies against the Nepalese government’s move to strictly enforce tobacco control laws, the Supreme Court decision favouring the government is a beacon of hope.

It is important to underline that domestic policy to safeguard public health policy from tobacco industry interference was drafted not just by Ministry of Health and Population but by more than 15 ministries in Nepal in a series of consultative drafting sessions. "Tobacco control is a multi-sectoral response so we need to effectively coordinate with other ministries also, such as: Ministries of Information and Communication, Agriculture, Education, Finance (both departments of customs and inland revenue), youth and sports, Home Affairs, Health and Population, among others. We need to frequently meet these ministries to effectively implement tobacco control law” emphasized Dr Bam. Now stronger tobacco control policies will come into effect from 15th May 2015 in Nepal.

"We need WHO FCTC Article 5.3 to protect the current achievements that Nepal has made on tobacco control. We must not lose the gains made in public health and succumb to industry interference. Domestic policies in lines of WHO FCTC Article 5.3 will ensure that we continue to effectively implement and enforce the current domestic tobacco control law in Nepal" stressed Dr Bam.

Smoking and smokeless tobacco banned in public

Nepal has taken a major leap by banning use of smoking forms of tobacco as well as of smokeless tobacco forms in public places. “Tobacco Control and Regulatory Act 2011 bans use of all forms of tobacco (both smoking and smokeless tobacco use) at public places. Public places include public transports also” said Dr Bam to Citizen News Service (CNS).

Let's hope Nepal's strong commitment to tobacco control despite industry pressure will mobilize other nations in the South Asian region and globally to accelerate implementation of gold standard tobacco control measures on the ground.

Documenting Hate And Communal Violence Under The Modi Regime

John Dayal

The rape of a 70 year old Nun in West Bengal in an attack on a convent and school in February 2015 sent shockwaves throughout India, and the world. “Protect not just Cows, but human beings also,” said Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, President of the Catholic Bishops Conference. At least 43deaths in over 600 cases of violence, 149 targeting Christians and the rest Muslims, have taken place in 2014 in India till March this year, marking 300 days of the National Development Alliance government of Mr. Narendra Modi. The number of dead is other than the 108 killed in Assam in attacks by armed tribal political groups on Muslims. Desecration and destruction of churches, assault on pastors, illegal police detention of church workers, and denial of Constitutional rights of Freedom of Faith aggravate the coercion and terror unleashed in campaigns of Ghar Wapsiand cries of Love Jihad. Since May 2014, there has been a marked shift in public discourse. There has been a relentless foregrounding of communal identities, a ceaseless attempt to create a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The BJP leaders guaranteed to abuse, ridicule and threaten minorities.

Hate statements by Union and state ministers, threats by Members of Parliament, state politicians, and cadres in saffron caps or Khaki shorts resonate through the landscape. But most cases go unreported, unrecorded by police.

The Prime Minister refuses to reprimand his Cabinet colleagues, restrain the members of his party members or silence the Sangh Parivar which claims to have propelled him to power in New Delhi. Mr. Modi calls for a ten-year moratorium on communal and caste violence. His government soon declares Christmas to be a “Good Governance Day” in honour of the BJP leader and former Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee. There are fears at a severe whittling down of the 15 Point Programme for Minorities, a lifeline for many severely economic backward communities, and specially their youth seeking higher education and professional training. Anyway, Mr. Modi’s “assurance” to religious minorities is challenged and countered by Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the powerful Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, who asserts, repeatedly, that every Indian is a Hindu, and minorities will have to learn their place in
the country.Speaking at the 50th Anniversary of foundation of its religious wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Sarsanghchalak bluntly stated that “Hindutva is the identity of India and it has the capacity to swallow other identities. We just need to restore those capacities.” In Cuttack, he asserted that India is a Hindu state and "citizens of Hindustan should be known as Hindus". Sadhvi Prachi, a central minister, Members of Parliament Sakshi Maharaj and Adityanath are among those urging measures to check Muslims, including encouraging Hindu women to have from four to ten children each. In Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and other states, the terror, physical violence and social ostracizing of Dalit and Tribal Christians, in particular, continues.

The 300 days have also seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rightsorganizations and Rights Defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and the systems if the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act and the Passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, Fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. This report is focused on issues of communally targeted violence and the politics of hate and divisiveness that emanates from a thesis of religious nationalism.

Read the FULL REPORT - 300 DAYS HERE

The Maharashra Beef Ban Is Unconstitutional

Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights

As if the 1976 Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act banning the slaughter of cows, including the male and female calf of the cow, enacted by the Shankarrao Chavan-led Congress government during the Emergency was not enough, the Devendra Fadnavis-led Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government is elated that the 1995 Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, enacted by a previous BJP-Sena led by Manohar Joshi, that extends the ban to include slaughter of bulls and bullocks, has now received presidential assent. Despite the BJP’s claims justifying the ban on agro-economic grounds, among others, the driving force behind the prohibition is the ideology of Hindutva, presented as “a way of life” rooted in the central beliefs of neo-Vedantic Hinduism, of which cow slaughter and beef eating are supposedly anathema.

All such anti-cow slaughter laws enacted by state governments in independent India claim to derive their inspiration from Article 48 of the Indian Constitution, but this Directive Principle of State Policy includes only those bovines presently or potentially capable of yielding milk or doing work as draught cattle, and does not extend to cattle which may have been milch or draught cattle but have since ceased to be so. The Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) holds that extending the ban to non-milch and non-draught cattle leads to resource waste (e.g., of cattle feed, etc that preservation of useless cattle entails, besides their being left to a slow death) and deprives many people of their livelihood and staple food. The loss of livelihood extends to those who are engaged in the animal husbandry business, including trade and commerce thereof, as also butchers and other workers at the abattoirs, those who skin the carcasses of cattle (mainly dalits), hide merchants, workers and owners of cold storages stocking and restaurants serving beef, etc. Moreover, the ban will deprive many Hindus (i.e., mainly the so-called lower castes), dalits, tribals, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and others of the little animal protein food that is within their means to consume once or twice a week.

The BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari, besides mentioning Hindu religious faith, justified the ban in terms of adherence to the Gandhian principle of ahiṃsā (non-violence) and of supporting the state’s agro-economy. The fact however remains that as far as the gowalas and other practitioners of agriculture and animal husbandry, mostly Hindus, are concerned, as soon as the cow goes dry or the bullock is no longer able to act as a draught animal, and is consequently uneconomical to maintain, they sell it and it invariably lands in an abattoir for slaughter. And, as regards ahiṃsā, doesn’t this principle apply to all living beings, and therefore, logically, why only to cows and bulls? And, of course, killing human beings in revenge for having killed cows or bulls is no sign of ahiṃsā. So, while the cow supposedly engenders ahiṃsā, violence is unleashed against the Other in the guise of the holy cow’s protection.

What makes the cow and the bull sacred to the highest degree? In his book The Myth of the Holy Cow (New York: Verso, 2002), the eminent historian D J Jha documents in copious detail — from the Vedas among other sources — the fact that in ancient India, “Hindus” ate beef. Babasaheb Ambedkar in his Riddles of Hinduism variously established that not only Hindus but Brahmins themselves ate cow meat. The historian D.D. Kosambi writes in his work The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India (1964), “A modern orthodox Hindu would place beef-eating on the same level as cannibalism, whereas Vedic Brahmins had fattened upon a steady diet of sacrificed beef.” The Hindutvavadins have, however, been spreading the falsehood that it was only with the Muslim conquest that cows were first slaughtered in India. But, as Professor Jha puts it: “Self-styled custodians of non-existent ‘monolithic’ Hinduism assert that eating of beef was first introduced in India by the followers of Islam who came from outside and are foreigners in this country, little realizing that their Vedic ancestors were also foreigners who ate the flesh of the cow and various other animals” (page 20).

The CPDR holds that the Maharashtra Animal Protection (Amendment) Act, 1995 is not in consonance with Article 48 when this is viewed in conjunction with the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. This Act is not even based on Hindu religious faith. Contrary to Hinduism, which is a conglomerate of beliefs and faiths aimed at achieving spiritual salvation, the ideology of the majority in the Maharashtra Assembly that enacted this law in 1995 is that of Hindutva, which is aimed at attaining political power, and is the Indian variant of Nazism. The Act is aimed at depriving the Other of her livelihood and way of life, which must be condemned by all those who stand for pluralism, secularism and democratic rights.

Pakistan: Transcending The Us Versus Them Paradigm

Maryam Sakeenah

My parents chose to send me to a Christian missionary school- a decision I have always been grateful to them for. The Convent’s ‘Character Building’ programme instilled in me values which, owing to the essential kinship of the Abrahamic faiths, facilitated my appreciation and practice of my own faith as a Muslim later in life.

Incidentally, all serving staff in my household happens to be Christian. In Ramazan they prepare the Iftar, and at Christmas and Easter we give them an extra something to partake of the family festivity. Through all my extensive and longstanding interaction with Christian friends, colleagues, subordinates, there is no unpleasant or uncomfortable memory I have. And I know I am no exception.

In fact, when I condoled with my Christian domestic help about the unfortunate recent events targeting churches in Lahore, I sensed in their comments the same sentiment I have gleaned from my experience as a Pakistani Muslim. ‘We have been brothers and sister living together for decades- there was never a problem. And now some unknown enemies wanting this country’s destruction want to create hate. We have nothing against each other- Muslims too are under attack from the same people. We need to be together’, said my illiterate Christian kitchen helper- (in simple English translation).

There was an understanding even within these unlettered members of a less privileged minority community that something had gone wrong in recent years; that violent religious hate was not the ethos of this land; and that there was a common enemy out there whose triumph was in sowing discord and hate between the two communities.

And yet ironically I find a complete absence of this simple understanding in the opinions of vociferous social media commentators both from the secular-liberal and conservative perspectives. In fact, the polarity in their views is striking whenever I browse through my newsfeed. While sadness over the attack on the churches was palpable among all shades of opinion, there was a callous lack of sympathy for the innocent Muslim victims of the post-bombing mob-lynching by Christians, and a brazen attempt to paint the ensuing violence by Christian mobsters as ‘but natural.’ This selective sympathy shows our own deeply rooted prejudices. On the other extreme there are outrageous calls for indiscriminate reprisal against the Christian community of Youhannabad where the lynchings happened.

The problem with the narrative that emerges from these polarized, clashing perspectives is that it sees the recent events through the blood-stained lens of ‘Us versus Them’; as a ‘Christian versus Muslim’ issue which is both inaccurate as well as dangerous. In fact, the terrible mob violence that occurred in the wake of the church bombing was also a tragic result of dangerously viewing the attack on the church as ‘Muslim’ violence against ‘Christian’ victims. More accurately, it was violence by an extremist militant minority group for whom all who do not share their violent ideology are potential targets. This is why the anger was directed at Muslims who had been engaged in routine business in the Christian locality. The two innocents picked for the barbaric lynching were lighter skinned (a characteristic of the Pashtuns) and at least one of them bearded. The mob violence was hence fired by ethno-religious stereotyping and the blind hate born of such prejudices.

In response to the ensuing violence by the Youhannabad locals there is brewing anger amidst neighbouring Muslim communities which sets the stage for potential clashes waiting in the wing. In the climate of fear and anger many families in Youhannabad are planning to relocate or have done so already. This is the triumph of the real enemy as it fulfils the malevolent agenda perfectly. The victory of the enemy is when its victim turns into a savage perpetrator like itself, continuing the cycle of violence.

Violent incidents targeting the Christian community in Pakistan in the recent past certainly fuel the anger by creating genuine and understandable grievances. However, it has to be understood that such targeting of the Christian community has always been resented and rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population of this country; and that the extremists involved in terror attacks on Christians are a fringe element rejected by the mainstream public opinion. Terrorist outfits are all out to exact vengeance that spares none- mosque, imambargah, church- Muslim, Christian, Shiite- all are fellow sufferers in this great calamity that has gripped us as the terrible cost of owning the US’s Great War on Terror.

The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan’s Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate.

What is required in the wake of this frenzied violence is a communal introspection by both communities. The Christian community needs to examine why its young members descended into such rank savagery, and must take responsibility to curtail simmering violence that utterly betrays the Christian spirit of forbearance and compassion. The Muslim community must also engage in a serious endeavour to root out the ire and vengeful streak building up in its ranks in this charged atmosphere.

The pulpit and the minbar both must take up their vital roles to defeat this false ‘Us versus Them’ narrative. Both religions contain voluminous and powerful content on tolerance and compassion which needs to resonate to drown this madness in the name of faith. Faith must be the healing, the mending and the force inspiring peacemaking. The Quran questions the validity of a faith that justifies and inspires evil. "Say: "Worst indeed is that which your faith enjoins on you- if you indeed are believers." (2:93) It reminds us with a vital message that has never been as relevant as it is today. “Let not the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just: that is nearer to piety... Verily, Allah is Well-Acquainted with what you do.” (5:8)

In the midst of this senseless melee of wrathful hate, the words of Islam’s blessed Prophet (PBUH) for his Christian citizenry from Najran become a beautiful encore played to a deaf audience.

"This is a message from [Prophet] Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.
Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.
No compulsion [in religion] is to be on them.
Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries.
No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses.
Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate...
...Their Churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.
No one of the nation (of Muslims) is to disobey this covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)." (Text of the Charter of Privileges, Treaty of Najran)