HOW THEY EAT OUR WORLD
“[we are living] in thrall to graft, greed, folly and privately educated narcissists”, from The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis by Richard Whatmore
Phillippe Sands wrote an article for the Guardian last week asking, “From Gaza to Ukraine, what would the pioneers of human rights think of our world today?” He referred to not agreeing with much that Aung San Suu Kyi had to say, with whom he was present at a conference, but for this: “International law may well be our only global value system.”
Mr. Sands recommended the following (hugely condensed) four points:
“One: protect what rights we have…
Two: build on accountability for all…
Three: move beyond the rights of the human and embrace the rights of nature as well…
Four: act on the continuing effects of historic wrongdoing (i.e. slavery and genocides), as crimes against humanity.”
I presume he means that rational, progressive, humanitarians will naturally pursue these objectives when, where and how they can.
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We have far more then mutually acceptable international laws to embrace as a country, as a region and as a species. The reason I continually return to these themes is to help normal (non-expert, non-academic, non-intellectual) people to discover a way out of a sense of helplessness and away from the anti-intellectual wilderness encouraged by all the cultural and media outputs which surround and influence us. The primary function of these is to seduce us into uncritically accepting what we have come to consider as truth.
I am neither an academic nor a practicing intellectual. What I and many of us in Britain know, perhaps instinctively, is that in this unembarrassedly post-imperial nation we are “in thrall to graft, greed, folly and privately educated narcissists, not to mention deference to royal nonentities”. from The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis by Richard Whatmore
What I do know and can see I try to provide readers a torch to see into the shadowy land of truth so they too can get a view of what is actually restraining their lives. To my mind, there is no question that we are all empowered and live a more complete life when we are able to intellectually engage in the world around us. You only need say, “I too can read this and think about that more clearly”.
Following are the main areas of concern we must confront and a few suggestions to pro-actively engage.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Now, just post Cop 28, what do we know?
That when one pits rationality, reason, love for the survival of this amazing planet and for other human beings and other species, against the fossil-fuel driven world economy, there is little chance that the former will win the argument. The multi-billionaires will continue to seek and invest in prospecting, in pumping and digging up more carbon because? Because it serves their narrow unimaginative psychopathic lust for wealth and more wealth. They drip in greed and avarice. They directly and indirectly carry responsibility for the deaths of nature, species and people.
Every 6 months on rotation one of these corporations should be focused upon, blockaded in wholesale and retail trade, morally challenged, embarrassed and their board members and management teams belittled. Alternative ad campaigns should be run against that which would embarrass a non-psychopathic person. Every bank, insurances company and hedge fund that invests and finances them should also be abused with disinvestment and humour.
CORRUPTION
I am continually astounded by the depth, blatancy and shoulder-shrugging acceptance of this increasingly widespread plague not only in the developing world but as well in the so called ‘developed’ world. There are three elements of it I find odious.
• it is almost always stealing from the already poor.
•it is so often about how legal experts, corporate lobbyists, stockbrokers, commodities buyers and especially politicians (supposed lawmakers, supposed representatives of the people) steal from those who have entrusted them with their wealth, taxes, and oversight.
• and finally, how their self-justifying moral depravity reduces values and standards of acceptable actions across society (rape, robbery, uncaring, unkindness, cruelty, depravity, racism, anti LGBTQ violence, and so on a list as long as human history) as they lead disappointed, cheated people into the graveyards of fascism and become exemplars of moral depravity for our young.
Continually we need to demand that our representatives represent us and not their class, political party and corporate best interests. Find a local political cartoonist who will continually demean the rogue politicians for their decisions, who will insult them in very precise ways, remembering that all we do should be from the most profound levels of our moral clarity. We must not become them to defeat them. We need to demand that they come before us in an open forum, conducted in a fair way to allow them to explain what otherwise may seem like they are treasonous to our bond with them – that they only represent our best interests and needs and those must be completely spelled out and not assumed. We must together compare our value systems.
ELECTION FRAUDS
These are another form of corruption ,a way for the ruling wealthy and powerful to maintain control over their own country’s government’s, therefore over their own and corporate tax burdens, over health and safety and banking restraints which reduce profitability, spending on the welfare state and on the military, etc. always with the eye to maximising profits regardless of the people’s wellbeing. Through stuffing or losing votes, via voter registration denial or by boundary manipulations, and by using dark money to they can make it appear as if their candidates have legally gained office.
The Americans use the military to command or quell recalcitrant governments and politicians via sponsoring internal agitation, corruption and election manipulations, all to serve the contracts of the wealthy mining, agricultural and industrial interests. A prime and tragic example is when the American Secretary of State, Kissinger and President Nixon decided it was best to irradicate Chile’s socialist government of Salvador Allende so that American corporate capitalist investments would be saved from being taken over by leftist states throughout Latin America.
PRESS FREEDOM
Meaning freedom of speech and thought only semi-constrained by governments defined by law, and not by political parties nor dominated by a particular class, political or economic sector. The very notion of these freedoms to be allowed to think what one wishes to think and to be able to say those things in a forum where they are not threatened because of their beliefs, is central to a true democracy.
We must always be aware that the forum needs to be protected from those who are the racist, fascist, sexist hate mongering destructive individuals and groups who argue for oppression, inequality and violence against others. It is senseless to allow a political cancer into one’s own body-politic. For instance, Trump’s stream of invectives and lies should not be allowed to constantly make the headlines, or at least unanswered and allowed to stand. We have recently seen how Rudi Giuliani’s disgusting slanders of two innocent election workers have been halted by a court case that recognised his abuse of power and so-called free speech.
This pointed out something that needs to be a part of this discussion: that according to the British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, there are two kinds of freedom. Positive Freedom is a condition in which one may do anything constrained only by market forces, this questionable bedrock of all that is logical and fair. And there is Negative Freedom in which the less wealthy and less powerful are protected by state laws, as in the case of Giuliani against the women. It is this culturing of a delicate set of human rights, including free speech, that allows for a complex society of conflicting needs and aims to be able to maintain a true, deep, kind and compassionate freedom with few abuses.
We, as citizens, must be continually alert and willing to rise against continual right-wing legal and political attacks on Negative Freedom to be certain EVERYONE is treated with fairness and justice and provided equal opportunities. No injustice, no matter how seemingly insignificant, should be allowed to pass unchallenged.
WARRING CONFLICTS
There are numerous economic and political reasons for the outbreak of conflicts ranging from territorial disputes and regional tensions to corruption and shrinking resources due to climate change. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Global Conflict Tracker, there are currently 32 ongoing conflicts worldwide. Since January 2023, over 238,000 have died in global warring conflicts. Beneath these demands for raw materials and territory are those same demands which serves the narrow unimaginative psychopathic lust for wealth and more wealth of the rich and their minions in various corporate arenas (oil, armaments, medical, reconstruction etc) where billions are made in times of crisis.
We need to ask ourselves serious questions about our real values and therefore about our morality. To truly confront ones elected representatives about sending our children to kill other people’s children, we need to know of and see the proofs and have them investigated by objective scholars, journalists, lawyers and other experts. When we resist, we need to be committed to weeks of surrounding the essential government and private corporate buildings. We need to say it does not matter that people being bombed into oblivion are of a different skin pigment or of a different culture or religious belief. We need people with wisdom to speak at meetings continually; we must hear the other side.
CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS AND THE CREATION OF REFUGEES AND MIGRATIONS
At least a quarter of the entire global population now lives in conflict-affected areas. Some of the worst affected places are Ethiopia's Tigray region, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan and of course at this moment, Ukraine and Gaza.
In Christina Lamb’s book Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, she argues: “War rape is met with tacit acceptance and committed with impunity as military and political leaders shrug it off as a sideshow or it was denied to have ever happened.”
The 10 most conflict-affected countries have lost, on average, 41% of their GDP. In addition to the human suffering, social unrest, and damage to infrastructure, the burden of war also damages conflict-affected countries’ economies.
Presently conflict drives 80% of humanitarian needs. In 2016, the cost of conflict globally stood at an astonishing $14 trillion. That’s enough to end world hunger 42 times over.
In BEZHIN MEADOW, an unfinished film by the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, a child says to his elderly grandpa who is churning butter, “look grandpa, the cream is rising to the top”. The grandpa turns to the child and says, “no, son, it’s the scum that rises to the top”. Whenever I think of this Tory government, I’m reminded or that story.