André Martins de Barros

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GEOGRAPHY
Journal of a Futurist, 17 October 2006

Those who devote their lives to amassing power and/or wealth are often surprised by the impact of seminal events long foreseen by chattering do-gooders. Having done much to promote global warming over the years, while denying its existence, Rupert Murdoch and John Howard are finally feeling the heat. They now “accept the science” of climate change. It’s a U-turn that is confusing their minions. In a stirring editorial in The Australian (Oct 4), bitterly attacking the descent of education into the “swamps of post modernism”, the Queensland curriculum is singled out for teaching “social justice, sustainability, peace and environmental justice".

Even the discipline of geography is “polluted” with such “nebulous concepts as social justice and ecological sustainability”. Worse, “students are encouraged to translate their lesson plans into political activism.” Really? Where are today’s activists? Don’t look to the left, silly, turn right. Today’s hard core activists are the Howard appointees on the boards of the ABC and other government bodies, the Murdoch columnists, the privately funded think tank wankers, etc, who are shrinking the horizons of public debate. In future, TV satire will need to be “even handed”, with a new ABC committee obliged to put the jokes through a blender. We can look forward to Ali G Borat’s next appearance being “balanced” by a statement from the dictator of Kazakhstan. As Adele Horin put it in the Sydney Morning Herald (Oct 7): “The Howard Government is in fact ideologically combative to a startling degree, forcing dissenters to toe the line through fear, funding partnerships and confidentiality clauses in contract.

Meanwhile, back in the educational bunker, Murdoch’s editorial slammed the South Australian curriculum for “describing water as a finite resource … despite there being a more-or-less stable amount of the stuff on the planet”. (I’m not making this up). Never mind that a drought is ruining the livelihood of farmers and scorching the political landscape. On the day this rant appeared, which parrots the views of John Howard, a study from the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research was released at the Conservative party conference in Bournemouth, stating that “extreme drought, in which agriculture is effectively impossible, will affect nearly a third of the planet … threatening the lives of millions”. Christian Aid describes the report as “terrifying … a death sentence for many millions of people. It will mean huge migration off the land at levels we have not seen before, and at levels poor countries cannot cope with. It will mean huge conflict." Whatever the accuracy of this report, it seems reasonable for geography teachers to explore human rights and ecological sustainability without it being branded "political indoctrination". But the age of reason is over.

Borat in Cannes

Gary Cooper in Poland

WILD JUSTICE:
An open letter to President Bush

Dear George,

While not a supporter of you or your catastrophic agenda, I have no wish for you to suffer the same of fate of President John F Kennedy. In the last few days, millions of world citizens have seen the latest tabulation of horror inflicted on Iraq. 655,000 are a lot of corpses, George, far exceeding the rate achieved by Saddam Hussein. Added to this are a massive number of the disfigured, the orphaned and the destitute; the wreckage of infrastructure, the collapse of tertiary education. You have often invoked the “yearning of Iraqis to be free”, but what they want most is to be free of your troops.

Think about it - over 500 Iraqis killed every day, a third of which are directly due to actions by coalition forces. The rest of the violent deaths are a consequence of the occupation. Instead of reacting with compassion to the report in The Lancet, you dismissed it as a “discredited guess”, despite the widely accepted methodology. 655,00 dead! Too much blood, too little oil. It’s beginning to look like genocide, George, which is why thousands of Iraqis are fleeing the country. A White House induced diaspora. How do the new minted exiles feel about you? How can the loss of a homeland be compensated? Saddam today is on trial for his crimes. Tomorrow, the man in the dock could be you. Yet this is unlikely, because your administration has bent the law into providing immunity. The question arises, how will the victims of your policies gain restitution?

FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE

There is also the matter of malicious deception relating to the impact of human behavior on the health of the planet. Just as you downplay mortality rates in Iraq, so your administration has long censored the findings of scientists on climate threats. Even while hurricane Katrina was raging, US government websites were claiming that its intensity was unrelated to global warming – a big silly lie. Your prolonged obfuscation has led to such a lack of preparedness in America, that much heartbreak is still to come. The weather is blind to political boundaries, George, but you wont even sign Kyoto, which, for all its flaws, is a vital step in achieving a collaborative plan to rescue the future of the human race. In several parts of the world, including the west coast of Alaska, citizens are abandoning their homes as the coast subsides. How will the victims of global warming seek restitution?

André Martins de Barros

America has always prided itself on being a nation of laws, but look at what you’ve done. The US is now a nation of outlaws. You’ve watched High Noon a hundred times, but you’ve mixed up the role models. The job of the sheriff is to uphold the law, George, not to trash it. You aspired to be Garry Cooper, the noble lone hero, and ended up as one of the villains, hell bent on pillage and carnage. You’ve managed to retroactively legitimize your gang’s criminality, including kidnaps, torture, false imprisonment, “pre-emptive” invasions. Your threats against North Korea and Iran have accelerated the nuclear arms race.

FAREWELL HABEAS CORPUS

Your Dr Strangelove plan to get UN endorsement for a military strike against Pyongyang had to be “headed off at the pass” by – of all countries - China and Russia, which shows how out of kilter with the rest of the world you have taken America. But then America isn’t really America anymore, is it, now that you’ve dumped Habeas Corpus. Ask yourself George, would Garry Cooper have allowed the clock be turned back to a pre Magna Carter tyranny?

So here’s the rub. All over the world a lot of people from all walks of life and of all political persuasions are mightily pissed off with George Bush. Many thousands of such people have lost their livelihood and/or their loved ones through the breathtaking cruelties unleashed by your meddling – how do they achieve restitution? Should their thoughts drift to the Middle East, the festering catalyst of today’s geopolitics, they will get riled up all over again, as images of Lebanon’s skyline flash in their minds. The world recalls how you rushed extra munitions to Israel while stalling the UN peace initiative. (As I write, another child in Lebanon is blown up by a US made cluster bomb; one of a million dropped shortly before the cease fire). Puzzling over their options, the numerous victims embittered by your hypocrisy will think of Palestine, and how you urged its citizens to adopt democracy. When they did, and the choice was not to your liking, funding was cut. The UN estimates that 75% of people in Gaza are living in poverty; the majority of children are malnourished, few have access to clean water, dysentery is rife. Several times a night Israeli jets break the sound barrier at low altitudes, creating sonic booms and “widespread distress”. (This treatment is reminiscent of the high decibel sleep elimination dished out to your POWs). Another product of the war on terror is State sadism.

Future War, Jody Harmon

“MURDER IS A HABIT”
(Agatha Christie)

Where is all this leading?

The “peace, justice & freedom” platitudes of Western leaders are not worth the air on which they are born. It is only by the deeds of their rulers that citizens discover what has been hatched in the dead of night. One action in particular stands out. It happens occasionally to a remote village in Pakistan and more often in Iraq or Afghanistan (now too descended to anarchy). Our leaders have resurrected a medieval solution-achieving technique and invested it with an aura of legality. It is used almost every day on inhabitants of Gaza Strip. Its use does not require the presentation of evidence. It can be applied to wheelchair bound clerics, inconvenient witnesses and pesky journalists. On a remote screen, often in Florida, a suspect is lined up in the crosshairs, a button is pressed. A media release follows: “We regret collaterally damaging the target’s mother, his seven children and members of his extended family, but it was their choice to associate with a terrorist, who unfortunately wasn’t at home when our missile flattened the village”. End of story.

So this is the problem, George. Spread far and wide across the globe are thousands of people with a grudge to settle. Now embodied in the psychic legislature of the 21st Century is the tried and tested technique of assassination. Its serial utilization by governments is a curse on the world, and provides the inspiration of imitation to all the disempowered people on earth, the ones who are wounded in hatred and bad at forgiving. So keep away from Dallas, George, and from everywhere else on the globe touched by your madness. You enemies have plenty of time to kill.

Sincerely, RN

PS: To mitigate this threat, I suggest you:

withdraw your troops from the war zones (in co-operation with a UN peace keeping strategy),

work with the rest of the world in reducing toxic emissions and re-invigorating eco systems,

restore civil liberties in your own land and,

throw yourself at the mercy of the international criminal court, along with your associates.

“Religion Theory”, JULZ

ON A PERSONAL NOTE

Some of you complain that the time span between updates is too long, as is the word count. “Send it in smaller batches more often”, comes the cry, which would be fine if I didn’t have a day job. As change accelerates, there is so much to be say and less time to say it. You get the sense of a global quickening, but it could be blood pressure. However, I don’t wish to bore you to tears, so I’ll take the feedback into account.

POST SCRIPT - Why the word genocide
isn’t so far fetched.

There is no legitimate, scientific basis for rejecting the findings of this survey carried out under the auspices of John Hopkins, one of the leading US universities. Under the direction of epidemiologists at the college’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, Iraqi interviewers visited thousands of Iraqi families throughout the war-torn country. The sample size was huge: 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in a country of 26 million people. By comparison, the CBS-New York Times poll, whose findings receive regular front-page coverage in the Times, uses a sample of 800 to 2,000 people in a country of 300 million…

The US government and the American media generally have labeled the killings in Darfur as genocide. According to the Hopkins study, the Iraq war has taken three times as many lives as the bloodbath in Sudan, a country whose population is roughly equal to Iraq’s. The Bush administration is thus implicated in a crime which approaches those of the Nazis. Indeed, if Americans were dying at the rate that Iraqis have died over the past three years, the death toll would be 7.5 million….

[Why is the New York Times] choosing to cover up a serious and meticulously documented report on the worst human rights violation of the twenty-first century: the US war in Iraq?

FULL STORY: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/kell-o16.shtml

“Pollution et renaissance”, André Martins de Barros

Send this story to a friend

POOR, POOR PITIFUL OZ
Journal of a Futurist, 27 September 2006

When the Prime Minister of Hungary, Ferenc Gyurcsany, was caught telling the truth to his party about the lies he had told the electorate, and how he had "screwed up", citizens demonstrated outside Parliament and stormed state TV. When Australia’s John Howard was caught falsely accusing refugees in a leaky boat of "throwing their children overboard", he was voted back into office.

Gyurcsany admitted that "fucking Hungary" had only managed to keep its economy afloat thanks to good luck, an "abundance of cash in the economy and hundreds of tricks", which pretty much coincides with what the former governor of the Reserve Bank stated about Australia’s fiscal management. But the Prime Minister is still top of the pops.

It is said that a leader who thinks of the next election is a politician, but a leader who thinks of the next generation is a statesman. By that criterion, it is no mystery where history will place John Howard. The key threats facing Australia today, including environmental degradation, the rise of militarism and the decline of free speech, are rooted in a decade of toxic federal governance. Instead of storming TV, the views of voters are shaped by it and the shock-jocks.

SCRIBBLERS WITH FORKED TONGUES

Once we were larrikins with a taste of defiance; now we are lapdogs with a thirst for conformity. On the matter of values, John Howard and opposition leader Kim Beazley are joined at the hip. In Oz 2006, to be a "civil libertarian" is to invite abuse, while to dismiss human rights as "no longer sacrosanct", or to deny inconvenient facts about global warming or indigenous history, is to attract government patronage. Once we had bush poets, mocking the pompous; now we have scribblers, licking the hands of their feeders.

Puffed-up politicians on both sides of the House seek from new arrivals a pledge of citizenship that endorses "Australian values" at a time when our values are tangled in a global tumble-dryer. That a government should demand such endorsement is itself a violation of a core Australian value - the freedom to think what we please. To think, for example, that numerous values exemplified by our Prime Minister are crap. Like truth avoidance, flag fetishism, excessive secrecy, anti-intellectualism, witch-hunting the whistleblowers, appeasement of George Bush, boasting about this country's generosity, whitewashing black history, bribing Saddam Hussein to buy our wheat then bombing his people, toleration of US torture and its treatment of Guantanamo inmate David Hicks, to name a few.

The stature of Australia has not only been diminished in the eyes of the world, but this country now faces a future laced with nasty shocks. By branding the intelligentsia as a loudmouth latte-slurping "elite", and turning a deaf ear to the findings of scientists, Howard finds himself surprised by the arrival of climate change. Despite over a decade of warnings, this country is woefully unprepared. Leaders of developing nations are becoming enraged by our indifference to the impact of emissions on their citizens. A statesman would recognise that the fate of the earth is a shared responsibility, but we have turned our backs on potential climate refugees from waterlogged Tuvalu. Isn't it about time John Howard was asked to sign a pledge of global citizenship?

Families visiting California’s Disneyland on a holiday weekend saw a
life-size Guantanamo bay inmate standing inside the
Rocky Mountain Railroad. Artist: Banksy.

EXTENDING THE EXCESSES OF BIG BROTHER

Callous obstinacy was also on display in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, where propaganda was put above truth. The jolly hordes of peaceful protesters in Sydney and Melbourne were branded a "mob", and those who tried to alert the nation to the manipulations of intelligence and the subsequent outbreaks of torture were gagged or slandered. The result is continuing carnage, with the fingerprints of our leaders on the corpses. In the "war on terror", Australia's fair-go reputation was traded for "future security", cheap tanks and a White House banquet.

Unaccompanied child refugees from war zones are denied basic rights by the Department of Immigration, itself a hotbed of black values, including the silencing of the right to be heard. The horrors are documented in the study Seeking Asylum Alone, by Mary Crock, who has concluded that in comparison with other advanced nations, Australia's capacity to mistreat children stands out "like a sore thumb". Seven escapees from the Burmese dictatorship have been dumped on the isle of Nauru. Is cruelty an Australian value?

Freedom of information has been re-constituted into a new value, the freedom from information. Any document with the potential of "embarrassing" the Government is quarantined from public scrutiny. Academic Johan Lidberg compared the effectiveness of our Freedom of Information Act with the ones operating in Sweden, America, South Africa and Thailand, and found that ours was the worst, having "deteriorated into dysfunctionality". When Flinders University sociologist Riaz Hassan was awarded a grant to study the incubation of suicide bombers, he planned to enrich his research by interviewing leaders of terror groups. Hassan dropped the idea when Attorney-General Philip Ruddock threatened legal consequences. Not content with extinguishing habeas corpus and shrinking civil liberties, Ruddock plans to curb the excesses of Big Brother; that is, the TV show, not the excesses of his own office.

Bansky

THE DECLINE OF DEFIANCE

There was a time when Aussies scorned officialdom. The boys from the farms and the factories who swarmed to the front line in the First World War, including those who landed at Gallipoli, were renowned for their disregard of red tape and for pricking the pomp of superiors. Rebellion was in their genes. In the camps on the outskirts of Australian cities, and during their journey to the other side of the world, the diggers were irreverent as well as brave.

The huge anti-war moratoriums of the Vietnam era also displayed a sharp defiance for delusions of big-wigs, the like of which has failed to be re-ignited, despite the provocations of today's smug autocrats. Perhaps the penny will eventually drop. Sport and shopping cannot keep this country under sedation forever.

The first cause of today's global terror mess is a matter of opinion. Some are using the "Muslim riots" to ramp up support for yet another war against what George Bush this week told the UN are "the enemies of humanity". (The war against germs?)

LIGHTING FREEDOM WITH A
MILLION CLUSTER BOMBS

It is true that Muslims have carried out numerous acts of terror in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and, most prominently, the United States. It is also true that Christian states have bombed untold thousands of Muslim civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan (even some in Pakistan), as well as condoning the ravaging of Lebanon and supplying Israel with illegal weapons.

How would you feel if "over a million cluster bombs" had been fired into your city? Since the end of June, more than 37 children in Gaza have been killed in operations mounted by Israel. In short, the wild reaction to the Pope's theological musings was not just about the Pope.

The Rapture

Meanwhile, the neo-cons backtrack though history to prove that "Islamic terror" long pre-dated September 11, 2001, so you're not allowed to blame the pre-emptive strike on Iraq for destabilising the world. Muslim mayhem actually "began in Iran 1979 with the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini", according to an editorial in The Australian, slyly stoking the fire for a future invasion, and implying that the populist cleric had leapt out of Aladdin's lamp, scimitar between his teeth.

In fact, the "revolution" was pre-ordained in 1953, after the CIA ousted the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, for his un-American aspiration to nationalise oil. Washington installed a puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran, who founded the feared secret police, SAVAK, while his wife hosted lavish international film festivals, flying in Hollywood celebrities to speak well of tyranny. By imposing the shah on the Persians for all those years, the West must surely accept some responsibility for the rebirth of radical Islam and all that's followed.

"Both the right and the left cultivate a politics of fear," writes, Kevin Clements, a Brisbane-based professor of peace and conflict studies, "where citizens are infantilised and we have become both politically and socially paralysed."

Today's TV politics is unable to provide perspective, history, meaning or foresight. For that, you need a statesman.

Bansky

BRASS BANDS, TALL STORIES,
SHOW TRIALS

The world is heating up, both climactically and militarily, and yet those leaders who are most responsible for underplaying global warming and overplaying the response to 9/11 are the least likely to look in the mirror and tell the truth - either to the voters or themselves.

While some pro-war enthusiasts have admitted their blunder, those politicians who led the charge seem incapable of candour. To accept that their actions have multiplied the instances of worldwide terror and so contributed to many thousands of civilian deaths and maimings.

Perhaps this country's mad, authoritarian lurch to the right is an unconscious attempt by those at the top to suppress their inner shame. To distract themselves with propaganda, brass bands, tall stories of war-zone reconstruction, terror laws, show trials, fear-mongering and boasting. Having lit the match, they are surrounded by fire, and are desperately seeking scapegoats. Is it beyond their capacity to accept that they might be the arsonists?

POST SCRIPT

The above was published last weekend in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper.

The strangest news flashed by on airport screens and in snotty hotels, during last week’s trip to Queenstown, New Zealand where I went to address a conference of Chief Financial Officers on the perils of Neanderthal leadership. The location was serene. Queenstown is Swiss Alps meets Kathmandu minus the teeming millions; minus the teeming hundreds even, as Kiwis seem to be deserting their paradise. Occasionally you see a swarthy local on a bicycle, but most are tourists in search of death defying adventures or the set of Lord of the Rings. The conference hall was a drab box on the edge of a crystal lake surrounded by snow capped peaks obscured from the delegates by bad design – no windows. Despite this architectural disconnect, respect for the environment featured heavily on the conference agenda. About ten years ago, if you suggested to CFO’s that what they term “growth” is often the destruction of natural capital counted as income, you’d be branded a loony. Now global banks aspire to be carbon neutral and fund managers are inching towards ethical investment. Yet what happened last week went further. The notion of rescuing the future seemed to reach critical mass.

California sued the world’s six largest automakers for creating a public nuisance by selling vehicles that spew out pollution. Virgin Group’s Richard Branson suddenly announced his commitment to spend three billion dollars on reversing global warming, promising all future profits from airline and train businesses will be invested in renewable energy. Branson named Ted Turner and Al Gore as eco mentors. A delightful unintended consequence of Al Gore losing his bid for the White House is that he is trying to win a reprieve for earth. Could a Powerpoint be mightier than a presidency?

The other “quickening” in the geopolitical slipstream is the rising tide of disparate voices exposing the frailties of the White House. Star billing surely goes to vaudevillian Hugo Chavez sniffing sulphur on the floor of the UN, brandishing a Noam Chomsky tome and equating Bush with Beelzebub. This footage will be still ringing laughs from our grandchildren, unless the icecaps melt. CNN was beside itself with indignation. Its newsreaders hit back with cutting slices of autocue, such as “in President Chavez’s homeland half the people are starving”, as in New Orleans. Unlike his Washington counterpart, Chavez is trying to do something about it. CNN offered no evaluation the speech or reported the reaction of UN delegates - a prolonged standing ovation.

This was capped by the revelation that former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage had blackmailed Pakistan’s dictator into supporting US foreign policy with threats to blast his country to rubble. General Musharraf was “so angered” by these threats, he “wargamed” a way of withstanding a US attack. In the end, he says he put the “interests of the nation first”. (So what did the charming bloodcurdling Armitage say to said to Tony Blair?). Finally came the “revelation” of the bleeding obvious from 16 US spy agencies, that global “terrorism is spreading and adapting” in response to the shortfall of the Bush brain. No kidding. This was predicted here in April 10, 2002.

“The wounded Goliath is on a rampage - armed to the teeth, adored by the polls, unfettered by law, answering to no-one and licensed to kill. Western nations fall in behind the furious avenger, beguiled by the notion of civilisation protecting itself, striding forth with the flame of freedom. Our commentators applaud. The "axis of evil" speech is hailed by The Australian's foreign editor as a "key defining document of the new era" in which George W. Bush guides us beyond the "magnificent" Cold War strategy of deterrence to the brave new magnificence of "pre-emption", where the US upholds democracy, topples tyrannies and makes the world a better place.

Bush's "new kind" of war in the name of freedom is actually an old kind of imperial excursion to extend America's grip on the wealth of the world. A wealth which belongs to everyone. But instead of a misnamed bombing spree, which incubates terror, what the world needs most is an ongoing, unconditional fairness revolution to eradicate the roots of rage”. This will never happen under the current administration.

Torture Tours

George Bush and the CIA have confirmed the authenticity of this site's WORLD TORTURE TOURS, launched back in August 2005.

George Bush has finally admitted the USA runs secret prisons abroad where suspects are put through "tough... necessary ... alternative" interrogation methods, which he won't reveal. But we did, over a year ago, in our WORLD TORTURE TOUR travel guide, where we showcased a range of alternative techniques to hurry up the spread of freedom, including shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation, “fear-up, pride down”, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, dog terror, starvation, hypothermia, anal rape and genital mutilation... All in the name of freedom. Check out the original WORLD TORTURE TOUR, and play the pain game with the CIA.