Isobel Blackthorn's Blog, page 48

Calling on the sickle to save us

 In Ancient Greek mythology it was the Titan Cronus who overthrew Uranus by castrating him with a sickle. A sickle given him by his mother Gaia to rescue his youngest brothers who had been kept in darkness. Cronus then ruled the world instead, his reign the so-called Golden Age. Nevertheless it was an age of dictatorship, of total rule, one reflected today in the emergence of an insidious totalitarianism at root in corporate globalisation, in which democracies are managed by power elites with corporate interests at heart. Where far-right religions, corporations and governments merge to form a single power elite. Where all social and welfare services are run by private enterprise, from debt collecting, prisons, probation services, detention centres, care homes, counselling services, schools, utilities, transport services – just about everything you can think of run for profit not for us. The taxpayer no longer pays for government to provide all the elements of social democracy. Instead the tax payer lines the corporate purse. To prevent dissent this elite makes every effort to opiatise the people by any means, from anti-depressants, through the use of media to spin propaganda, to the atomising of lives through ideological manipulations so that all that  matters to us is the small world we live in, our family, our work, our neighbourhood.  Then through education to the inculcation of false beliefs as absolute truths, such as the notion of the selfish gene. And through the glamour of celebrity and promotion of narcissism at every turn. As well we are enslaved by high mortgage debt and lowering wages as we watch our rights to complain erode. Trapped and powerless, we acquiesce. Failing that, and for those free thinkers among us, the security and surveillance measures are there to the ready. It seems the power elite have things all figured out.

To save those compassionate souls among us from complete meltdown, this is assuaged by a veneer of humanitarianism. The charitable impulse most of us feel is hijacked by quasi-corporate ngos, providing us with a sense of doing small things to make a difference, giving us feelings of well-being and goodness, and an illusory sense of power and influence. We can donate, sponsor a child, watch the awesome efforts of Save the Children or the Red Cross with our credit card in hand. We can accentuate the positive, focus on the rhetoric of the United Nations and feel ennobled to be part of a world that truly cares, never seeing the complicity, inevitable and sad, of the corporations and the humanitarian organisations, some (but not all) natural disasters aside,  often responding to situations created either through structure or agency by the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Sometimes a corporation itself will make an overt humanitarian move, such as Gucci with its Chime For Change campaign to empower women around the world. Not to mention the philanthropy and generous donations and funding of worthy causes, such as displayed by the Bill Gates Foundation.

Adopting a simple theosophical view, for all the technological advances of our times, the present globalised world seems to me the consequence and the cause of a devolution of consciousness, a wrong orientation, as if humanity is in retrograde motion, the bulk of us concerned primarily with material achievements and narrow selfish satisfactions.

Whether or not the word totalitarianism is used, there exist many across the world responding to its reach, resisting its impositions, struggling to wrest free. There are two distinct means by which people seek autonomy, one cold-hearted and destructive and on the devolution fast track, the other aware, warm-hearted and constructive and both constrained by the resistant pull of devolution and doomed therefore to struggle and suffer. Both approaches make use of the sickle, that communist symbol of the peasantry.

The destructive response to globalisation is a sickle-abusing power grab. Here disenfranchised factional or nationalist groups arm themselves with ideological and military weaponry and go on the rampage. Their resistance is instinctive, their sense of injustice whipping up rage and desires for revenge that are both delusional and psychotic, laying waste to city upon city, community upon community, destroying that which if they stopped and thought rationally for long enough they would realise they are seeking to protect. Destructive groups play into the hands of the corporate totalitarians. While groups such as IS may believe they are taking back power rightfully theirs, they are unwittingly serving the agenda of the power elite, a power elite that sets about fostering these very factional nationalistic groups for its own purposes. It is ironic that extreme outraged calls for some sort of justice are simply doing the work of the totalitarians, providing failed state upon failed state whilst justifying increases in security and surveillance measures in the so-called free democratic west. These wanton destroyers are unwittingly complicit in the agenda of the War on Terror, a mob of blood-lusting brutes sent forth on a killing frenzy, creating more carnage than all the Hollywood blockbusters combined.

While apparently lacking in the drama, almost the heroism of the destructive response, I believe there is only one constructive solution available to us and one we must pursue with vigour. It is the path of the people’s collective.  It involves cooperation, goodwill, egalitarianism and a will to transcend personality differences for the good of the whole. Yet also a need for courage, resilience and perseverance. Constructive acts that seek to demonstrate to the super rich and powerful, that we are not taking their shit any more. That we will fight, we will campaign, we will protest Occupy style, and we too, will carry a sickle in our hands.

The sickle is a tool for harvest, for the constructive response to our times must be one aligned with the land and must be focused on local economies. Whether it be the Permaculture inspired Transition Towns, the creation in Bristol of the Bristol Pound, or the people’s collective of Marinaleda, we need to celebrate each move in the direction of constructive responses to global power that seek change outside the corporate-city walls. Snip the ties that bind us at every turn to the global corporate machine. Reclaim what is rightfully ours – our autonomy. The sickle will save us, if we use it as a tool to empower and not destroy. And perhaps in pushing against the wheel as it turns in retrograde, at least apply a brake.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: dystopia, globalisation, neoliberalism, New Age, Power, social democracy, United Nations

Downhill to Galilee

 BREAKING NEWS FROM THE GREENS: The Abbott Government has just approved Australia’s LARGEST coal mine, two weeks after abolishing the country’s first climate laws. They just don’t get climate change. The coal from Adani’s Carmichael mine would be equivalent to almost one quarter of Australia’s total emissions – a climate disaster! This mega mine would also destroy 20,000 ha of native bushland, use 12 billion litres of Queensland’s groundwater per year and threaten the endangered black-throated finch with extinction. No vision, no heart, definitely no science.

My response is of course Abbott approved the mine. The Galilee Basin has been doomed from the first. He’ll do anything to appease the Mining Giants. And with Palmer so placed in parliament holding the balance of power in the Senate, this approval was inevitable all along. Everything else is window dressing compared to this. Even if that window dressing is vile in itself (asylum seeker policy, the budget and so on). You can change a social policy. You can’t undredge a port, or unmine a mine. And I say to any doubters who wonder how the land and the Great Barrier Reef  feel about it, go ask the Appalachians where over 500 peaks have been blasted to smithereens to access the coal beneath. To say nothing of the Canadian tar sands.

How is it possible to be optimistic when things like this just keep on happening? To my mind the only answer is to squeeze shut your eyes. And if you do that, then you are as much a part of the problem for doing nothing about it. I never want to come across as a dour and grumpy old crone, but I really am struggling to shake the heavy off my heart.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Laying bare the consequences of trauma

  I find it a struggle to engage with the plight of asylum-seeker children held in detention. Of no help to me, the wide acknowledgement that such incarceration is detrimental to their mental health with long-lasting if not permanent consequences. Trauma, we hear, leads to problems with anxiety and depression, at times even to suicide. The term PTSD floats about as some sort of embarrassment. So I thought I would provide a portrait of the consequences of trauma, one that reaches far beyond a overly generalised binary description of anxiety on the one hand and depression on the other. Before I continue I will disclaim any professional psychological knowledge or training.

I am providing here what may happen to the mind of a child through the lens of the mind of the adult.

Sustained trauma is a slow bomb that fragments the mind, sending sub-selves scattering off in all directions. Leaving at the core where once there existed the wellbeing and the joy the bomb obliterated, a knot of ugly fear. A state of permanent alert, poised for flight should fight get too hard, always on guard, startled by the smallest flash or flutter. With alert comes stress, that sense of pressure, weight and effort. This alert stressed state becomes the norm, colouring reality with endless tension and negative thoughts that at times verge on paranoia. Suspicious, wary, drained, you retreat within your life and within yourself. Sometimes you may stare for hours at walls. You have no idea you are in a trance, any more than you are aware that you zone out or go numb from time to time, respite from the vigilance of your ordinary waking state. Memories intrude, lodging themselves in the front room of your mind, haunting you, dragging you back.  Inside your new boxed up self, you can see you are not alone. That there are other selves in the box with you but you scarcely know who they are. And there are times, other times, when one of these selves crashes the scene, takes over the psyche and interprets the world without and the world within. One scene-crasher may be absurdly optimistic, filled with inflated hopes and unattainable plans. Another may be pessimistic, filling the box you inhabit with black.

Over time and with much effort a little co-consciousness may be achieved and you might foster some coherence. But you know you are faulty. You are never sure who is driving you. And so you lose the ability to self-trust. So unpredictable and so draining is this relentless flux that you retreat from the world, preferring a life of little stimulation, avoiding the triggers that launch the extremes.

Here is an extract from a piece I wrote  in 2009. A piece that was cast aside dismissively by someone who had no idea how cruel he was being. I post here to illuminate, not entertain. I am not a poet and I would not claim this as poetry. It is simply a portrait.

 

Queen of the Shit Pile

 

No not funny, I’m not laughing,

Shall I cry instead?

But  I can’t.

I can’t sleep

I can’t concentrate

I can’t relax real well

I can’t remember

I can’t cope

I get confused

I get tired

I get panicked

I’m edgy on edge

I fear, I shock

I don’t want to go outside

I don’t want to be inside

I don’t want company

I don’t want to be alone

I don’t want the fear

I don’t want the stress

I don’t want to keep crying

And bleeding inside.

 

I want to get past this

I want to be well for once

For once free

Of uncertainty

Of insecurity

But then who will save me

From bullies and thugs and fat controllers and evil deniers of truth?

 

Most of all I want to be free

Of my inability to cope

With being in the world

With the world

With all its rough and tumble.

 

I want to feel normal, whatever that might be

And not like a pin cushion,

A tiny advising word

An ambiguity

A rejection of me in my entirety.

A needle prick

A knife stab

And I’m pricked and stabbed all over

Crucified by the crushing

The loneliness of trauma

That severance of belonging

An isolation so painful

It is like dying every day.

 

Unable to cope:-

With public spaces

With queues and waiting

With crowds and audiences

With bureacracies and bosses

With supermarket aisles and driving

Especially with driving.

 

I get so far, and then I have to stop

There is so much I cannot do

So much that confronts me

With myself.

 

I know I hold my breath

I tell myself to breathe

I calm down

It will be all right.

Keep me waiting long

And I feel trapped

Suffocated

Overwhelmed

And I need to get away.

Mouth dry

Vision blurred

Confusion

I tremble and sweat.

 

I try not to sound hysterical

In public where all can hear.

But  I am angry

And I want the world to know

The inside of my prison.

 

Yes it’s time to leave the box

Time to lift the veil

Time to expose to the world

One damaged life in raw relief.

 

No, I haven’t been to war

I have never seen the carnage

And I do not have the luxury

Of a memory

Of before.

 

But isn’t she lovely

So soft and sweet

Caring, compassionate and giving

Understanding and insightful

An inspiration, truly.

Ha! A self-composed veneer

Beneath I am an animal

A timid fawn

With huge eyes cautious

Cunning like a rat

With the survival skills of a cockroach

An adept at gutter-living

Safe in the underworld

Where the rejects live.

 

I know the alcoholics

And the drug addicts in every form

I know the schitzophrenics, the paranoid

The manics and depressives

The socio and psycho paths

The victims and abusers

The oppressors and oppressed

The criminals

The ex-cons

The losers, the dejected.

I know them on the inside

I see inside their souls

I feel their wounds, their pain, their grief

I understand their anguished anger

I feel safe and recognised beside them

At home in the hardship

Protected and secure.

 

A reject on the shit pile I belong

Soiled goods on the sale rack

A marked-down marked-down going cheap.

 

We didn’t know!

We thought she would get fixed

We had no idea she was not fixable

That the damage was that deep.

We thought a little rationalising

A touch of thought control

Some relaxation exercises

Would do the trick for her.

 

Alas it is an illness

For which there is no cure

Her human right to wholeness

Shredded at her core

A wound that rents asunder

Scattered chips and bits in pieces

The matrix of a human.

 

Wierdly, I am psychic

I can read the Book of Life

It is my cross, my burden

That I can penetrate beneath the veil

That I can read you like a script

That I sense the evil in the living dead

And see fractured hearts alive.

 

Hope and ambition have willed me on my way

And a love I see so far from goodness

A love intensely magnifying

If ever I can touch it.

 

Yes I’m lucky I’m so nervous

So strung out highly strung

It keeps me wily

And I’m told that I am strong

But they know not of my addictions

Modest, I agree

It’s fortunate I’m now so sensitive

Or I’d binge like I did wretchedly,

 

Now I live each day, pleasantly

Moderate in my indulgences

That replace the love

I can’t receive.

I bereft my self of need.

Instead I have compulsions

Bizarre little rituals of must

Fulfilling a fatiguing need for order

To create chaos.

Insisting things are done this way

Then forgetting what I’ve said.

And I despair

Of the wasted time I spend staring into nothing

Haunted.

 

Yes, I display myself wide open

For all to hear and stare

But don’t ask any questions

And please

Don’t come too near.

 

Today I am shameless

I tell it as it is

Blunt, direct and candid.

And if I shake

So be it

And if I cry

Hand me a tissue

And if I run away, say

‘God, she’s brave to have been here

We’ll keep an open door for her return.’

 

I am my major life work

My crowning glory

Of achievement and success

Currently at work still

On that project of the self.

It began as a paragraph

A vignette, a cartoon strip

And it grew into an epic

Of encyclopedic length.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: ptsd, trauma

Let James Foley rest in peace

  Back in 1998 when I was completing a Bachelor of Teaching at the University of Tasmania I encountered a pedagogical technique called, Critical Literacy. The idea was that students would learn to read a text in a way that ”promotes a deeper understanding of socially constructed concepts, such as power, inequality or injustice in human relationships,’ questioning the attitudes embedded within. Typically our practice lessons would have us analysing cereal boxes and television advertisements. I am not a teacher and have little idea of how far critical literacy has been taken into the classroom and how effective it has been as a pedagogical approach. I am aware, however, of the emphasis in the English curriculum on the exploration and the utlilisation of persuasive language. Again students are invited both to develop and display their skills at persuasive writing, and to critique the persuasive language techniques of other writing, typically speeches and opinion pieces.

Perhaps of value in every classroom would be the facilitation of discussion groups based on a series of questions that form the Good Thinker’s Tool Kit, known as WRAITEC. What do you/we mean by…?; Reasons (an opinion must have reasons); Assumptions (that underlie the thing); Inferences (If…Then…;Implications); Truth (is it true?); Examples and Evidence; Counterexamples.

All these approaches have merit and potential. Yet I doubt that space in the classroom would be found for a thorough media analysis of the beheading of US journalist  James Foley by the Islamic State aka ISIS and ISIL. What teacher would be brave enough to tackle that?! Juxtaposing the video footage put out by IS itself, with the use made of it by  the mainstream news media of the West.

Yet it is vital that we are invited to consider the socially constructed nature of media reality in these most brutal situations. That we recognise that issues of power and control are at work. We must hone the tools to see that everywhere from the tabloid’s front page, the ABC news headlines, and the IS video itself we are not presented with truth or reality but with another attempt at persuasion, an effort to shock. That if we are to arrive at anything close to the real story we must ask many questions, challenge the authorised version of events, right down to the order in which events are presented. Ever since the BBC was found to have re-ordered footage of a protest at a coal mine in the 1980s to persuade the viewer that the police charged into the crowd after the crowd had turned aggressive and not, as it was later shown, that the police charged and the crowd retaliated in response, I have been suspicious of all news presentations.

I am not of course disputing the ruthless swipe of the blade. Here are a few links. In each, use has been made of the IS footage. A critical literacy approach to this film would be of much value, exploring camera angles, lighting, colour and so on. But frankly, I can’t even look at them.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/islamic-state-beheads-us-journalist-james-foley-claim-20140820-1061oz.html

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/us-confirms-american-journalist-james-foley-beheaded/story-e6frg6so-1227031191130

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2014/aug/20/iraq-crisis-outrage-over-isis-beheading-of-us-journalist-james-foley-live-updates

I do not doubt that  James Foley was beheaded, or that he was beheaded by IS. Yet I cannot help asking whether the US sat on its hands, happy to use this man’s tragic death to whip up outrage to justify what is to follow. I cannot help but observe the manner in which here in Australia the Abbott government has pounced on the beheading to further sanction the implementation of even tighter surveillance and security laws. I can’t help noticing that every time there is a desire by government to ramp up surveillance and security of citizenry, some vile act of so-called terrorism is thrust at us via our television screens. Even the use of the words ”terror” and ”terrorists” require a deep, thorough critique, since surely those protesting in Ferguson ”Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” style are angry because terrified of their militarised police?

There are other questions that might be asked. Ones not present in the three techniques referred to above:- What is the rest of it? What am I not being shown? What exists behind the scenes, out of view, obscured, obfuscated, denied? Answers may be speculative but nevertheless such questioning helps to shape an inquiry by looking not only at what is presented but what has been left out. The obvious question then becomes Why? or For what purpose? Which can easily be answered by a return to critical literacy.

For example, I can’t help reminding myself that IS is a construction, a creation that emerged from and was fostered by those who created the initial conditions for this very emergence – the US and it’s allies including Saudi Arabia. I might further point to US foreign policy and its strategy to destabilise the Middle East to help contextualise this awful beheading.

It is not the beheading of James Foley that is at the heart of the issue of media and government presentations of reality. It is the manipulation of our emotions, particularly revulsion and fear. The James Foley beheading is not a sensation and should not be treated in a sensationalist manner. Every high school student could do with engaging with this point.  And perhaps then we may let James Foley rest in peace.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: James Foley, persuasive language, persuasive writing

Absolute Power begets Absolute Nutters: Ideas are more dangerous than guns.

I have known since the eighties when I learned of Ronald Reagan’s association with The Rapture that there exists a section of the power Elite who hold dear some whacky ideas. It occurred to me last night that it is entirely possible if not probable that there are prime movers within this Elite who believe in something more sinister still than fundamentalist Christian beliefs in an end-time event and second-coming of The Christ, a ludicrous set of beliefs based on Scripture taken as literal truth.

I surmise that these prime movers ascribe not to religious but esoteric thought. A likely source, adherents to the philosophy of Leo Strauss, whose works are promulgated at the University of Chicago. Adherents to Strauss believe that in the writings of great thinkers there is an overt or exoteric meaning obvious to all, and a more subtle, hidden, esoteric meaning contained within and accessible to an intellectual few. The truth is to be found at this tacit heart of great writing, there to be perceived by the few whose job it is to communicate between each other in a manner that conveys the same duplicity of exoteric and esoteric meanings. (See Sheldon S Wolin’s Democracy Inc for an indepth discussion on Strauss and the nature of America’s power elite.)

The Straussean method in itself armours those of privilege and power with an exclusive mode of thinking. As well, predisposing those adherents towards an esoteric worldview. Esotericism and Power Elites are common bedfellows. One well-known example is that of Hitler’s association with Munich’s Thule Society (however tenuous), and his later adherence to a form of Theosophical thinking, the most contemporary form of Western Esotericism. See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s ”Hitler’s Priestess.” A pdf can be downloaded here  http://www.fatuma.net/text/SavitriDevi-the%20Hindu-AryanMythandNeo-Nazism.pdf

As part of its esoteric cosmology, it is proposed in Theosophical texts that the dominant root race on the planet today is the fifth or Aryan root race. The fourth root race were the Atlanteans, and it is said that there are among us those with an Atlantean consciousness. The third, scarcely human, was the Lemurian root race. Again, there are said to be Lemurians among us today, animal-humans, desire driven types whose primary concerns are sadism and sex.

Theosophical thinking then goes on to explain that when the Lemurian form was considered too restrictive for the purposes of an overarching spiritual evolution, the race was annihilated in a cataclysm of fire.

A similar situation occurred in the Atlantean root race. It is said that a flood of biblical proportions drowned the race after it was decided by the spiritual overlords of the planet that the Atlanteans had become too greedy, too enamoured with gold and riches.

Who are these spiritual overlords? The so-called Masters of the Wisdom, or Spiritual Hierarchy? According to Theosophy, they are an Elite whose own spiritual evolution is far advanced.

Place into this Theosophical worldview ordinary human beings with exceptionally inflated egos, delusional ambitions and megalomania, along with the propensity for a psychotic adherence to an occult belief system taken as absolute truth and a moral conscience and a capacity for empathy that are  non-existent. These nutters are incapable of seeing anything from another point of view. They are, in fact, the ones whose awareness is constrained, whose spiritual growth is in retrograde, the disconnect between their minds and hearts absolute.

And it is these types who are bringing the entire planet to destruction. They are the warmongers. The earth rapists. The puppet masters.

It seems plausible that these fruit-looped despots actually believe that they themselves, having passed through numerous initiations into an esoteric Elect, ARE the spiritual hierarchy overseeing the spiritual evolution of the planet and all who exist on it. And that just as the Lemurian and Atlantean root races before us faced annihilation because they were purported to be no longer adequate forms of existence for this higher purpose, we the supposed Aryan root race may have been deemed by this Elect similarly inadequate and therefore must face the same termination.

In my view, the entire notion of root races is a falsehood, yet one that carries metaphoric and explanatory power. There is a moral message in the destruction of those who refuse to transcend their selfish desires. However, in the left hand of that which can only be deemed anti-life and therefore evil, all thoughtforms become twisted and inverted and used to justify destructive ends.

I am postulating here, that squatting low in the sticky palm of this left hand, are a high-brow Elect. I make no claim to truth here. This is pure speculation. Entertaining perhaps. Founded on an awareness acquired through doctoral research and my own esoteric bent. I hope with all sincerity that I’m wrong.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: esoteric meaning, Leo Strauss, Ronald Reagan, the power Elite

Who cares about the Yazidis?

 

Today I have a convergence of pain at the nape of my neck. I could blame it on a lot of things. Maybe it’s a convergence of a lot of things. Puts me in a grim frame of mind. I have to take care as I don’t trust my perceptions when I’m in this much pain. Life takes on a dull hue, everywhere I turn there is something to feel bleak about, and my own past tends to come at me like a manic bookseller presenting one novel-length chapter after another, each as harrowing as the last.

Frankly, I prefer to dwell on mountains. One particular mountain. A mountain  far far away…

Will someone tell me again the root causes of this new manifestation of horror that is ISIL or ISIS or IS? Would someone care to remind me who funded this mob, who fed them ideas, who armed them?  Hasn’t the engineering of failed states in the Middle East been the foreign policy of America for decades? There must be hundreds of articles to this effect online by now. Here’s one. – http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rise-of-ISIS-West-Saudi-by-GIlbert-Mercier-Al-Qaeda_Iraq_Isil-140809-410.html

And it can’t possibly be just me that is noticing how the US and its allies have chosen a minimalist approach to  abating the carnage in Iraq while inflating the terror threat bubble in their own lands? A bubble that is pumped up whenever the power Elite decide to roll out stronger surveillance and security measures. It appears to me that as far as Obama and Cameron and Abbott are concerned, the very worst outcome of this present brutality in the Middle East is the apparently profoundly grave potential for the radicalisation of western citizenry who have heeded the call to arms. Not, it would seem, the mass murder of Yazidi Kurds.

I’m especially sickened by this latest round of persecutions, the Yazidis persecuted this time not for adhering to a faith conveniently misunderstood by non-believers for the purposes of scapegoating – for the power Elites down the ages have always employed the scapegoat technique – I seriously doubt that ISIS members have the education and sophistication to argue matters theological. The Yazidis simply believe something that is not Islam. Not any Islam. The extreme version, fundamentalist, corrupted. Simple as that.

Who are the Yazidis? I don’t think Mr Superman America cares. I think Mr Superman America cares more about dams and pipelines. And homeland security.

Why is it that my pain in the neck has suddenly worsened?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Spiders in scandals

I am developing an aversion to spiders. There is something  disturbing in that.

Consumed by an oil spill caught in a slow-moving storm

Sending wave upon wave of sticky defilement on virgin shores.

Moral outrage  it is good, it is just, it is true.

And manipulated.

Obfuscating outrages conjured by those in charge.

Whose violations are devastating my soul.

What happenstance conspired to cause the use of  the betrayals of the young?

Betrayals by oily spiders spotlighted on rocks.

Where lurk the web spinners with their shiny black backs?

I am developing an aversion to spiders. There is something  disturbing in that.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: aversion, oil spill, spiders

Waking up to the Third World

 

 Back in the 1980s I enrolled in a course as part of my undergraduate degree with the Open University (UK) entitled Third World Studies. I was twenty-four and full of awe and amazement and outrage as I learnt about India’s Green Revolution, issues for the Tuareg of Niger, and of the economies of the newly-industrialised countries (NICs) of south-east Asia. I learnt about the problems created for poor economies by big business. I learnt about the IMF and the World Bank. I studied the socialism of government’s in Tanzania and Mozambique. I read novels by Buchi Emecheta and the poetry of Louise Bennett. The course was multi-disciplinary (perhaps the first of its kind) and all-encompassing, or so I thought.

Now I am reading Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, 2012) I realise that the course title Third World Studies was a misnomer. The title created the illusion that there was a First World, perhaps a Second World (Russia) and a Third or Poor to Very Poor World. Other notions have come along since, such as North and South, notions that also perpetuate the illusion. For upon reading Hedge’s text, it has struck me squarely that apparent third world conditions (slavery, corruption, severe inequality) have always existed and persist in America today.

Being from Australia it is fairly easy to say that our indigenous Australians have been condemned to exist as impoverished others in their own land, conditions normally associated with the very poorest of the poor in the ”Third World.” John Pilger’s Utopia suffices as an introduction to that view. Perhaps I have for too many decades been naive, or perhaps somewhat in the dark as regards poverty in America. I have known about low wages, trailer parks, food stamps, the state of Detroit, African American and Hispanic and Mexican poverty. I have known of the ludicrously high incarceration rate in America, mostly of African American men. And I knew, vaguely, that America’s First People are horribly oppressed and marginalised. I knew all of this, but only vaguely. I knew about the voracious appetite of American corporations too, of their corruption of democracy and the judiciary, and the casino-style hustlers in the world of American finance.

What I have not known, not contemplated, not engaged with so deeply it  turns my stomach and makes me want to holler with outrage and weep for the suffering – tears I had spilled decades earlier for many an African nation – Hedges portrays with unrelenting honesty. A laying bare of America’s underbelly, from the native Americans of Pine Ridge, the enormous widespread and utterly unjust suffering of the poor of Camden, the  devastation of the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia (500 mountains so far bombed into oblivion to extract their coal), and the Mexican slave workers in tomato fields in Immokalee, Florida.

That the American Elite (corporations in cahoots with duly corrupted and compliant political and judicial systems) can so devastate its own nation in such a ruthless manner, bodes so ill for the rest of us, for this is the package it persists in exporting to the rest of the world in the guise of development.

As I have indicated above, I have long known the dreadful environmental and social consequences of Big Mining. The struggles of the working classes and the poor around the world are so often bound up with the mining giants, along with the oil and gas giants. If not, they are bound up in agribusiness. It is a case of same old same old.

So when I read calls from the apparently awake  for others to wake up, I ask myself of the islanders of Bougainville – Are they awake? – Yes, I have to say yes they are. What of Papua New Guinea? – Are the people there awake to the shenanigans of corporate greed? – In large part I would say they are? What of the dalits of India whose valleys are being flooded by Big Dams? Are they awake? – I would say most definitely, judging by their protests.

What of the native Americans at Pine Ridge? Are they awake? Yes, I have to say mostly yes, for the alcoholism, the drug addiction, the suicides, the violence, surely they are a recognition of and a response to the consuming misery they are forced to endure. They are awake, to a nightmare.

So I ask of those who make the awake call, wake up who exactly? The privileged middle classes struggling to maintain expensive lifestyles and fat mortgages? Do they slumber? Or are they imprisoned by the system too, riven with fear of losing everything in an economic and social climate of uncertainty.

Sure there are those who are not so much asleep as rendered catatonic by consumerism with all its glamour, sure there are those whose hearts are riven by hatred and bigotry, those  prejudiced against the many who are not themselves. I don’t think there is much to be done about them, or at least, I don’t have a solution. All I know is that those who are catatonic and those who hate will most likely never ”wake up.”

There are enough of us around the globe who know more or less exactly what is going on. There are definitely enough of us who are awake to make a difference if and only if, we all decide to do something, to realise that what we face in the world today is a state of emergency akin to that of a world war, and we must resist at every turn.

I am a non-violent person. Which was why I was shocked when I woke this morning to the thought that someone should drop something big and heavy on Bohemia Grove at an opportune moment. Then I thought, no, that would make little difference. But I do know that we must make great personal sacrifices if we are to stave off the march of the corporations. We must preoccupy ourselves with the spirit of Occupy. And if ever there was a book to rouse the heart to action, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is it.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: America, American empire, Buchi Emecheta, Chris Hedges, empire, globalisation, government, nature of humanity, poverty, Third World Studies, World Bank

War on Feminism – Women’s Refuges under attack

 It has come as no surprise that women’s refuges are under corporate attack. It was only a matter of time before the ideological warriors of the new corporate regime would put in their sights frontline services catering for women fleeing domestic violence. Currently in the UK we witness the broadscale closure of women’s refuges that have been providing women and their children an essential service for decades. It also came as no surprise to read in her piece, There Is No Such Thing as a ”More Efficient Alternative” to Refuges Polly Neate’s insightful critique of  that great universal leveller ”efficiency” as the declared motive for the closure of women’s refuges. In my view, this  is not only another devastating cut to an essential social service, it is the undermining of a significant power base of the feminist movement.

In his book Profits of Doom, Antony Loewenstein uses the phrase ”vulture capitalism” to describe the carrion qualities of the private military and reconstruction industries involved in both war and disaster, and to refer to corporations such as Serco, G4S and Transfield who circle around governments waiting to snap up then pick to the bone outsourced services from roads and railways to courts, prisons and detention centres. A visit to their own website will quickly show the reach of such carrion corporations (sSee http://www.serco-ap.com.au/).

In my view the concept of vulture capitalism, while providing much insight into the nature of capitalism in our times, does not reach far enough into the belly of the beast, for a vulture is a bird of instinct, following its natural animal will and while laden with menacing symbology is but an outward aspect of a deeper, more malevolent will. The will of the power Elite (that ultra-exclusive club of the intellectual few – see Sheldon S Wolin, Democracy Inc, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp 159-183) that sends forth the vultures to undermine social democracy at every turn.

There are other ambassadors of change, other sorts of birds sent forth, ravens perhaps operating in tandem with the corporate vultures – Non-government organisations. NGOs seem well-placed to step in and run a raft of social services. Utilising an identical model of asset-stripping, down-sizing and streamlining found in the corporate model, many such organisations operate under the guise of a religious denomination and therefore carry a sanctified patriarchal ideology (for example – Salvation Army, Mission Australia). Such organisations now find themselves, and no doubt with private relish, at the vanguard of  the new and covert war on feminism.

Why a war on feminism? Because feminists are a two-fold threat to the new corporate world of inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy. First feminism contests the patriarchal underpinnings of the dominant or hegemonic ideology of capitalism and second, feminists have been at the forefront of countless social reforms based on fairness, justice and equality that have seen the betterment not only of women and children but also men.

I wrote a letter to my local newspaper this week that illustrates the shadowy processes and the ruthless intent embedded in this latest attack on both feminism and social democracy.

Dear Editor, I attended a rally to save the Bega Women’s Refuge on Monday 4th August and was heartened by the large turnout, all concerned about the refuge’s future and hopeful that common sense would prevail over the fiasco that was the tendering process. So of course I was incredulous when I learnt that SEWACS (South East Women’s and Children’s Services) had been ‘’accidentally’’ undercut by Mission Australia’s tender. I understand that Mission Australia, who won the tender to run homelessness services in the Bega Valley under the new ‘Going Home Staying Home’ rollout of the New South Wales State government, have now been given additional funding to take over the women’s refuge, which they apparently had not realised was part of the package until after their tender was approved.  This despite the fact that SEWACS have been running the refuge and attendant specialist services for women escaping domestic violence in the Bega Valley for thirty years. In my view, the decision to grant Mission Australia this service is unfair and procedurally dubious; there was a lack of transparency and honesty in the process that effectively sidelined SEWACS due to an administrative oversight. In my view, if the Bega Women’s Refuge must be put up for tender then it should at least be done in a fair and proper manner.

I fear that with corporate religious organisation Mission Australia in charge, the refuge will no longer be a place of sanctuary where women fleeing domestic violence feel safe and supported.  I would take the side of any aboriginal woman choosing not to pass through the refuge door, filled with mistrust after the legacy of the Stolen Generation. I too, would be filled with mistrust. I have no idea the narrative or the procedures that Mission Australia would seek to impose on women fleeing violence but I do know that the one provided by SEWACS empowers women.

Yours faithfully,

But we need not fear that women’s empowerment has been disregarded by the corporate Elite, for Gucci has taken up the baton with its Chime for Change campaign, fronted by Beyonce Knowles, Frida Giannini and Salma Hayek Pinault. While I growl like a crossed crone of the old guard at this recent appropriation of feminist discourse,  I realise Chime for Change represents another fight altogether, a  fight on the ground of popular culture and therefore I call upon my young feminist sisters to contest this latest sham while I mourn the loss of society’s most significant feminist-inspired institution.

Changing the whole system

 I might have titled this piece Big Brother. It would have been in keeping with last night’s 7.30 Report on the ABC. A title that would have mocked Tony Abbott’s, ”Team Australia,” his speech masters clearly seeing merit in the co-opting of the language of sport for the purposes of reinforcing a Nationalist ideology. And in Strengthening the Surveillance State,  Louise O’Shea certainly supports the observation that the most recent amendments proposed by the Australian government do indeed carry the big brother connotation. According to O’Shea, ”The National Security Amendment Bill (No. 1), introduced into Parliament in July, has so far caused little public outcry. It appears set to pass with virtually no serious opposition either from the political establishment or the liberal media. Yet the proposed changes constitute the most significant modification to Australia’s anti-terrorism laws in nearly a decade. They provide sweeping new powers to ASIO to spy on the public, act with impunity, collaborate with corporate interests and jail whistleblowers and those who support them.”

In this piece I find most disturbing of all the collusion of the Labor party, the political establishment and the liberal media. Yet again I ask myself when will people realise we no longer live in an authentic democratic society? That what should be preoccupying the concerned citizenry isn’t the latest debacle from Abbott and his cronies at all, it is the implementation of a new wave of structural reforms that have already swept through America and Europe. This is not about Labor or Liberal (in my view they are both on the same side), it is about a paradigmatic shift away from social democracy, one that effectively inaugurates what Sheldon S Wolin (Professor of Politics and Princeton University) calls ‘‘inverted totalitarianism.” In other words, it is  a whole system change.

While we grapple with the old paradigm, the Elite is forging ahead with its implementation of the new. We are sounding like chattering monkeys, nit-picking the latest outpouring of scandalous revelation, from the fact that the Budget disadvantages low income earners (something I consider to have been transparent from the first), or that Bob Hawke had the audacity to recommend to indigenous Australians that they store nuclear waste on their land. Here we are, bickering and bemoaning  amongst ourselves over the multitude of injustices that are befalling us. In other words our thinking is locked in the old paradigm, which is exactly where those advancing the new paradigm want to keep us.

The closest those of us concerned for human and planetary betterment have come in our thinking towards an understanding of this new paradigm of inverted totalitarianism is, seemingly counter-intuitively, to be found in complexity science, ecology, social ecology and the very notion of paradigm shift inspired by  Thomas Kuhn. That the power Elite have also cottoned on to complex systems theory should come as no surprise. That complexity thinking is already firmly established within organisational management of corporations should also be of no surprise. That the sharpest intellects of the world, groomed through the private education system all the way through academia to work in the Elite’s own think tanks, are also no doubt working with whole systems theory, the most esoteric of scientific models applied in the fields of economics and the social sciences and driving this new wave of change across the globe should also be acknowledged. I contend that whole system change is the engine driving the ideology (rolled out like a red carpet) that is in turn informing the new raft of reforms. Reforms designed to weaken the power of the citzenry through fear and uncertainty, achieved partly through removing support for society’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged and (among a range of other means) partly through the new surveillance laws cited above, implemented under the guise of a looming terror threat.

What is wrong with models of whole systems theory? A full answer is beyond the scope of this blog. Instead, here is a brief critique of whole systems theory as utilised by the corporate world: Primarily that whole systems change models are based upon a set of abstract descriptors divorced from the reality most of us live in. These descriptors are of profound ideological import, typically using language that is cool and clinical (successful corporate evolution will maintain a high level of cohesion to minimise entropy); these models legitimate the corporation as a given, they therefore provide no critique of the new corporate system. If we want to know what the brave new world looks like, we need look no further. For example, even when those using systems theory to ostensibly advance socially beneficial change, such change has been subsumed beneath the new corporate ideology. As is evident in the following quote by Satsuko VanAntwerp of MaRS. ”Where are the key constraints that stop change from happening? Frances advocates moving up through scale to find the leverage points that have an impact on changing the rules and relationships that govern the system in the first place. For example, with regards to youth offenders she [Frances] says  innovation in government ministries may make more of an impact than a program or initiative on the ground.”

Yet paradoxically whole systems change may offer our best hope for human and planetary betterment such as can be found in Understanding Whole Systems Change by Andrew Gaines. One that at least contests the new world of inverted totalitarianism on its own ground, from within the lexicon of complexity thinking, rather than through the lens of the old paradigm that overshadows the rest of us like a ghost, an old paradigm that is I suspect strategically employed by the ideology web-spinners to impede any gains we might make in fostering genuine change.

 

Websites pertaining to whole systems change are abundant. Here are a couple of examples.

http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/uploads/Getting%20Smart%20about%20System%20Change.pdf

http://tnlp.valuescentre.com/pages/leading-an-organisation/external-cohesion/whole-system-change.php

 http://www.johnniemoore.com/Whole%20Systems%20Change.pdf