Isobel Blackthorn's Blog, page 49

Order in a New World

 

If I ruled the country the first thing I would do is sack every CEO, deny them access to their wealth and property and make them work for the dole while applying for 40 jobs a week outside of the corporate and public service sectors. With no rental history they would be couch surfing (if they find themselves with any remaining friends). And for the first six months, with no welfare at all, they would be relying on charities for handouts.

Then, when they are caught stealing or dumpster diving, I would send them to jail for a mandatory term, where they would be required to work full-time for nothing and following the example of my American counterparts, if they complain their sentence would increase.

If the CEOs happen to be of middle eastern descent and they are caught doing anything suspicious (such as praying in a Mosque) then they would have their Australian citizenship revoked and they would be put in detention for an indefinite period.

Of course my counterparts would be hard at work implementing the same policies and our shores would be inundated with CEO boat arrivals. These CEOs would be immediately dispatched to Nauru and promptly forgotten.

No, I wouldn’t do any of it. I would be a despot if I did.

The whole world as we know it now.

Waking at four every morning seems to provide me with a reflective perspective on life, as if the pre-dawn hours are meant for contemplation. While the world around me sleeps and only the cock crows prematurely, I can think. And my thoughts have settled today on the will-to-empire. For it occurs to me that humanity has now entered a new era, certainly the new age has dawned but not on a lovely sunny day, more on a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This morning I realised that the limits of empire are always the whole perceivable world. Empire will always expand as far as it can reach, as far as what is known. The whole world for the Incans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Egyptians or the Ancient Greeks was most likely smaller than that conceived of by the Romans, the Chinese or the Ottomans.  The Spanish world was larger still, thanks to the invention, by the Portuguese, of the ocean faring caravel. Then at last the British Empire came along and took control of far off distant lands. The British saw the whole world and wanted it.  But even the British had to concede that there were rival nations and empires competing for territory. Britain could not rule the whole world in its entirety even if it managed to gain and maintain supreme power across a vast spread of nations for around four hundred years.

Empire is always contested. There will always be nations who are non-compliant and nations with a will-to-empire of their own. So where there is empire there will also be war. And there will always be human suffering.

One empire supplants another. As one empire falls another rises to take its place. And humanity has not transcended the dynamic. But it seems too many of us are incapable or unwilling to face the reality of empire, the consequences of empire, the sheer destructive stupidity of empire. And so we are doomed to repetition.

After WWII and upon the invention of the Cold War it appeared there were two competing Superpowers on the world stage, America and Russia, with a third, China, in wings waiting for its big chance. Today this appears no longer the case. While China and Russia will continually contest and seek to undermine the power of America, it is America that is the single Superpower of our age. It has attained Empire status and is on a quest for complete global domination by any means. In keeping with the aims, objectives and methods of  empire, the domination it seeks is economic, the means used are both ideological and military (There is perhaps only one difference between the American empire and the empires of the past. It is formed of corporate rather than state (whether born of government or monarchy) interests).  And today we witness the consequences of American Imperialism’s will-to empire in conflict with those who oppose it in Iraq, in Palestine, in the Ukraine.

So far I don’t think I have mentioned anything that is not obvious and not the point I seek to make here. What hit me this morning is that Empire has a tendency to run its course. It has a lifespan generally of hundreds of years. In other words, this is only the beginning of the American empire, we are still in the early stages of its life. Even if I track the genesis of the American empire to the beginnings of the Cold War, decades, not centuries, have since passed.

I think of empire as humanity’s greatest evil. I think when empire is the grail in the hearts of humankind, the suffering of others is guaranteed.

Empire always fails. Empire seems always to self-destruct as if its expansionism were a bubble that will finally burst. I fear, however, that we have a very long way to go along the trajectory of the current empire. And there is every chance that when this empire does self-destruct it will bring us all down with it.

Meanwhile, since things are business as usual,  since this empire will go on and on and on, then so will I. I shall continue to wake at four and have my say.

Totalitarianism is wearing a new coat.

It might seem extreme to talk of totalitarianism in the same breath as America. Totalitarianism belongs to the twentieth century, to Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. It smacks of despots wielding absolute power through state control. America is nothing of the sort. America is a democracy. Or is it?

When I think of what occurs in the world today, what has gone down since 9/11 2001, that pivotal day that changed America, I begin to wonder. The aftermath of 9/11 saw the formation of the Patriot Act (an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), and Homeland Security. It was used to justify a war on terror of epic proportions.  It justified war in Afghanistan and the preemptive war in Iraq.  Consequently it has led to the starvation of the welfare state, funds siphoned into a ballooning defence budget instead (and this prior to the GFC). And now, under the reign of Barack I, sees the foisting of Free Trade Partnerships upon other nations left and right, effectively diminishing their own democratic autonomy.

In the light of these actions, that America is a Superpower seems undeniable. That its power elite regard it as the one and only Superpower sanctified by a right-wing Christian god ought to be of grave concern. That its power elite consists not of a government democratically elected and held in check by a supreme court and a constitution, but of self-appointed corporate leaders managing democracy in order to further their economic interests, the door between politics and the econom perpetually revolving. In Democracy Inc, Sheldon S. Wolin goes further. ”Stated more strongly, the condition for the ascendance of Superpower is the weakening or irrelevance of democracy and constitutionalism – except as mystifications enabling Superpower to fake a lineage that gives it legitimacy.” (Princeton University Press 2010, p101). One example of the corruption of democracy is the manipulation of votes in Florida that brought George II to the Presidency in 2000.

Wolin argues the case for inverted totalitarianism as a way to describe the American Superpower of today. A totalitarianism that, unlike its forbears, functions behind the scenes, exploits authority and resources of the state and ”gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power [such as evangelical religions], and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of private governance represented by the modern business corporation.” ibid, xxi

America is now under inverted totalitarian rule. Why inverted? Because as Wolin states, inversion is present when a system, such as a democracy, ”produces a number of significant actions ordinarily associated with its antithesis.” (ibid, p 46). In other words, democracy has become its own other, the very system it opposes, totalitarianism. A system where economics, not politics is supreme (ibid, p 58).

As if that were not bad enough – awful for many Americans – the managed democracy template of this newly emerging Superpower form of governance is being imposed on nations around the world in the guise of a neoliberalist (aka neoconservative) ideology. Hence in Australia we now have an utterly arbitrary emasculation of our welfare state. We are busy signing off on free trade agreements. Our governments are enhancing our surveillance laws, restricting the freedoms of our citizenry, instituting change upon change that benefits the corporations alone while making every effort to maintain a acquiescent citizenry through creating a culture of fear (from bikies to homegrown terror suspects radicalised post-Syria) and especially through the demonising of asylum seekers who come to our shores by boat, thus justifying incarcerating them in concentration camps offshore while fostering xenophobia and racial hatred in the rest of us.

Superpower has the whole world in its sights. It is driven by a lust for a fully expanded empire. Hence post-Iraq we now have a thoroughly destabilised Middle East, with absolute chaos in Libya, bloodshed and despair in Syria, in Iraq, in Palestine and now also in Ukraine, anywhere and everywhere that poses a threat to the economic interests of the new Godhead Superpower, or can be construed a source of terrorist threat, this latter set up to scare the citizenry into submission while furthering yet more economic interests.

That a power elite has emerged on the world stage with such overwhelming reach, that can control the workings of its host government of America, is not lost on vast numbers of us. Books are written, banners waived, petitions signed, memes created and facebook pages accrue thousands of Likes. But what will it take to counter such power as exists in the inverted totalitarian state of America? Can it be transformed or must it be destroyed? Will it self-destruct? If so, will it bring the rest of us down with it? Or can those at the helm be swayed before it is all too late?

Perhaps what is needed in America are a thousand Martin Luther Kings, but no doubt they are all locked in jail along with their African-American comrades. What is needed are a million grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a hundred million Indignados,  a billion Occupiers.  This is what we need. We do have power. But only if we use it.

In a social democracy welfare is a right.

 

Another critical piece showing that the Abbott government’s reforms to Newstart and Youth Allowance will simply not work can be found here in The Saturday Paper,

Welfare changes ‘more about prejudice than policy': Hewson

In the article, Mike Seccombe highlights former Liberal party leader John Hewson’s comment that our incumbents are driven not by a sense of humanity but by ideology. I agree with Hewson that these reforms reveal not a measured rational response to current economic conditions, but insanity. The insanity of repeating a process proven to be ineffective and counter-productive in negative ways.

Since the New Deal was instituted by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, since the Beveridge Report helped found the welfare state in the UK in 1942, and since welfare provision initiatives taken in the 1940s in Australia, citizenry in these three nations has benefited enormously through policies designed to assist the most vulnerable.  In the guise of bringing-the-budget-into-surplus austerity, and following trends in America and the United Kingdom, we are witnessing the driving forward of policies tantamount to a violent attack on what had for many decades been taken to be the very essence of good democracy.

I am rather tired of our current government behaving like a steamroller. I feel squashed flat under the weight of its endless cuts, its ruthless policies towards the most vulnerable in our society. A government deaf to our persistent calls for this draconian process to stop. We campaign, petition and take to the streets in our tens of thousands over and again. We are fighting on so many fronts and we are ignored. This is not what social democracy should look like. Citizens should have a whole lot more power and influence than just that of dropping a bit of paper in a ballot box. We want our voices to be heard, our calls answered.  Not this endless crushing, this ruthless oppression, this almost dictatorial governance hostile to all social spending.

Yet it is incumbent upon us to fight for whatever remains. To not be disheartened into inactivity, not acquiesce, not allow ourselves to lose hope and fall into passive despair, for to do so is to not only admit defeat but to allow ourselves to become complicit in the very system we oppose.

Hard Attitudes for Hard Times

 

Despite the grandiose speeches and the spin, across western democracies post-GFC austerity seems to have little to do with reducing government debt and everything to do with controlling populations largely through the expansion and oppression of the underclass – the dalits of western civilisation – the guts sucked from the welfare system leaving a wizened carcass of a once plump beast. Welfare services are corporatised, sold off to the lowest bidder whose sole concern is profit. Corporations or quasi-corporate ngos with minimal or no expertise are given tenders for aged care, counselling, women’s refuges and so on. While Australia’s Abbott government’s Benefit reforms will render destitute millions of Australia’s most vulnerable.

All the while the politico-media complex tells the noble-washed of the middle and still-working classes that the underclass are slobbering wretches with unworthy motives, scammers, scoundrels, cheats and the bone idle, pathetic wretches of Dickensian proportions whose begging hands should be promptly severed. After all, why would a decent voter wish to carry such a burden? Best to lock the worst of them up in the newly revamped and much expanded prison service, run naturally by corporations with a now established if troubled history in the industry. Once incarcerated inmates can then work for a pittance or no renumeration at all, and while the noble tax payer pays the government to pay the corporation, the corporation extracts profits from its prisoners’ labour. A perfect solution and a perfect deterrent should any other member of the underclass wish to question the system.

We are I think witnessing the rapid expansion of an underworld within an overworld, and those either unaffected, affected in beneficial ways, or who respond fatalistically and passively to avoid falling into the underworld, will support the new status quo, happy to buy the spin,  happy to scapegoat the the marginalised, the outcasts, the poor. In case the noble-washed should ever waver, a back-up plan is already in place – the cruel treatment of asylum seekers and the attendant carefully crafted propaganda. Every ideological campaign needs a scapegoat through which to harden attitudes that can then be manipulated and directed towards other groups. That the nationalistic ideology is a complete lie invoked to mask the fundamentally globalist agenda unfolding in every country the world over is of great concern. Nationalism is contagious, and in its worst and most fragmented and divisive forms leads to war. War that inevitably creates an exodus of asylum seekers in its wake. A perfect situation perhaps for the structural changes essential for the globalist project to succeed.

Nationalism has the added benefit of parochialising the vision of the masses so they are incapable of reaching any sort of understanding of matters global.

As for the those with just hearts, our governments have plans for us too. Currently in Australia Attorney General, George Brandis has plans afoot to further strengthen surveillance and terror laws on the pretext of protecting citizens from radically infused returnees from Syria – born-again jihadists with malicious intentions. While it may be true that one or two do pose a threat to Australian society, surely ASIO and the AFP can handle them? Isn’t that what they are trained and paid to do? I believe something much more sinister is at work, exemplified by Josh Allen’s piece in the New Internationalist, ‘Anti-extremism’ government programme targets student activist. Allen highlights yet again how anti-terror legislation is used to monitor and harrass activists of all stripes.

As Arundhati Roy states in many of her essays concerning big dams in India, the primary targets of the neoliberalism are always the poor and activists. Terrorism while real, is thus used as a weapon by the politico-media complex against its own people. Australia treads the same path.

I fear that under austerity the underclass are fast becoming ”asylum seekers” in their own nation, activists that seek to support them and hold corporations and their puppet governments to account are rapidly gagged, while the noble-washed conduct their affairs unaware that an even greater harm has befallen them, their hearts, perhaps once soft and kind, now sinewy and beating a callous pulse.

Dystopia is here in all but name.

There was a time when I believed wholeheartedly in the possibility that humanity would transcend its divisions and polarities, with all the attendant hatreds and racism and sexism; that consciousness would expand collectively and that we would embrace unity in diversity and be good neighbours within and across borders. That, I suppose, was my utopian phase. Now I consider it delusional. For there can be no disillusionment without a pre-existing illusion and this is precisely how I now feel. That while the narrative of a bright new age of alternative possibilities and ways of living was advanced in certain circles and within universities (Social Ecology, Permaculture just two examples),  and seekers of spiritual growth were out with their shopping baskets shoring up their own egos (authentic spirituality a noble and exceptionally difficult quest along a potholed road – see Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism), a different sort of new age was already drawing a blanket of darkness over the slumbering masses – dystopia.

One aspect of our dystopian reality is war.

It can’t be stated often enough – the  US Empire’s war strategy is to fund some separatist group (foster, create, invigorate, train) to stoke civil war. It is not a new technique. They were doing it in Afghanistan in the 70s and of course further back in Central and South America. I would say that since the end of WWII the US power elite has forged ahead with its own devious expansionist tactics designed to impose its own corporatist agenda (it might even be said that neoliberalism itself is an economic model and an ideology duly harnessed for the same purposes).

Today I rely on an article, written by Bill van Auken for the World Socialist Web Site. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/07/23/pers-j23.html It was the following quote that prompted today’s blog piece.

”More to the point, the political substance of the charge against Putin—that he is responsible for the disaster [MH17] because he failed to quell the uprising in eastern Ukraine—is far more relevant to the actions of Washington itself. After all, the Obama administration has politically supported, funded and armed Islamist insurgents in Syria, stoking a civil war that has produced human tragedy on a far wider scale, with over 100,000 Syrians dead and an entire country in ruins. It pursued a similar war for regime-change in Libya, backed by NATO bombings, that killed 50,000 Libyans and has yielded similarly catastrophic consequences.

Nor is the same moral standard applied to the US, which supplies Israel with billions of dollars in military aid every year, when it comes to Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians.”

There are no moral standards in dystopia, except when imposed upon outsiders to serve some purpose of the power elite. Which of course leads to blatant hypocrisies such as depicted above.

There are times I wish I could slip on the veil of make believe and exist in a la la land of my own construction. Or turn my back on reality, shrink my awareness until all I see are the simple day to day circumstances of my own life, but I can’t. I can’t focus my awareness solely on fostering positive life-giving alternatives even as I do strive to live an ethical, small footprint life. Instead, I shall continue to go about naming spades. Why? – Because someone has to.

Stabbed in the Heart – Feminism and the Demise of Women’s Refuges in New South Wales

 Second wave feminism has its symbolic roots in the women’s peace camps at Greenham Common in the 1980s.

 

Women gave up their ordinary lives to camp out in appalling conditions to protest against nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. What took place in the camps were not only protests such as Embrace the Base depicted above. Through their very existence, the source of inspiration for women around the world, came the reinvigoration of a feminist discourse concerning the manner in which patriarchy condones and reveres violence, particularly violence against women. Greenham common peace camps were a symbol of women’s empowerment. Women’s refuges, which have their genesis in the 1970s (the first women’s refuge was opened in 1971 in Chiswick, UK), along with rape crisis centres took on fresh significance as the front line of the women’s movement, supporting women fleeing violence. Women”s refuges have been a front line service ever since. And now, in the new age of neoliberalism women’s refuges are being shut down.

The title of Wendy Bacon’s article in New Matilda ‘ – The Gutting and Gagging of Feminist Women’s Refuges in NSW – gets straight to the heart of the matter.  ”More than 25 feminist women’s refuges in NSW have lost their government funding,” she says, ”with their buildings being handed over to religious or other charities. Many shelters will no longer focus on providing specialist services for domestic violence victims. And the attack on services for Aboriginal communities has been especially savage.’

Outsourcing to the lowest bidder is a rationale that is as much ideological as it is economic. Services run for decades by dedicated women fully conversant with the feminist discourse on domestic violence, with a deep understanding of and empathy for victims, will now be provided by charities such as Mission Australia or The Samaritans, charities whose business model is little different from that of a corporation such as Serco or Transfield dedicated to securing government tenders in the service sector.

Having spent time in three women’s refuges so far, and through the services and resources they provide or are linked to, received ongoing support, I can say that the closure of women’s refuges is a much bigger loss than simply losing safe havens. Along with the bricks and mortar, what is being closed down or re-packaged under the auspices of corporate-style ngos  is feminist discourse itself and the insights this discourse provides. We are witnessing the decimation of the very language of domestic violence, language critical of abuse from physical to verbal and emotional, an understanding of the damage that is done to women and children, the bringing to light of the injustices of domestic violence. We are also seeing the demise or sidelining of the support and campaigning of feminists behind the scenes on behalf of victims – from court support, transport, help with re-housing, counselling to financial assistance. The closure of women’s refuges is the gagging of feminism itself.

Why is this happening? I contend because feminism is dangerous. Feminism threatens to undermine corporate-led neoliberal ideology. Feminism must be hollowed out and re-packaged corporate-style, as is happening with the Beyonce-led Gucci funded campaign Chime for Change, launched in 2013 at a TEDx Women luncheon in California.

I visited the Greenham peace camps many times. I joined in the protests. I was young then and had yet to comprehend the devastating personal consequences of domestic violence. Now I do know. Which is why I can’t sit back and say nothing while the heart of the women’s movement is being slaughtered and Gucci places itself at the helm.

MH17 Should be Raising Questions Concerning the Nature of Contemporary Warfare

 

 

      While the Australian media is almost exclusively obsessed with the deaths of our own (notably broken down into 28 citizens and 8 permanent residents) and the adequacy of our government’s responses on the world stage, turning a global event into a navel-gazing exercise that serves to boost our knee-jerk xenophobia and parochialism and contributing nothing  of substance that can enable us to contextualise the downing of MH17, other writers from around the globe are striving to provide in-depth analyses of the situation on the ground in the Ukraine. One article that provides some insight into the situation is journalist Wayne Madsen’s piece in Libya 360.

Madsen suggests that one possible if not likely suspect in the downing of MH17 is Ukrainian oligarch Ihol Kolomoisky. Of course evidence cannot be conflated with contextualisation and it is the latter that forms the substance of the piece. However, in-so-doing, Madsen alerts me to a matter of far greater concern than the whodunnit drama surrounding this latest atrocity. As Mary Kaldor so persuasively argues in New and Old Wars, contemporary warfare is no longer fought between nation states. What has emerged in the last few decades are wars fought within borders, wars that echo the civil wars of old where a group of separatists rose up in Che Guevara fashion to oust a government. Yet in a new war scenario, as seen too in Iraq and Syria, there is likely to be not one, but several if not many separatist factions (funded by overseas government and private interests), fighting amongst themselves as much as against the perceived state enemy. As Kaldor explains, these factions are comprised of  regular military personnel, private militias, foreign mercenaries and local criminals and thugs. Each faction primarily concerned with seizing control of a city or town, terrorising its people, killing undesirables (intellectuals and humanitarian types) and engaging in ethnic cleansing.

Of course war has always been big business. Financiers of war (banks) make huge profits. But it used to be that banks loaned their funds to governments of nation states. These days another scenario exists in which banks finance corporations who then fund the private militias  -themselves corporatised, and as this link shows, there is an alarming number of service providers. For example, Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky raised his own mercenary army, an army whose primary purpose is to serve the interests of Ukrainian gas and oil company Burisma Holdings.  This example points to the emergence of a chillingly feudal scenario, echoing the age of pirates and privateers, as if time itself were in retrograde, catapulting humanity back about 400 years, on a trajectory that will surely down not just an international flight but democracy itself.

Which is why I get annoyed with Australian media, so annoyed that I have set aside the time it has taken me to write this blog piece.

Globalism, Empire and the Rise of Nationalisms

 

 

  With war in Ukraine and the Middle East I wake up each morning thankful for happenstance that finds me where I am.

In an age of global neoliberalist empire where the free market reigns, dollar-profit-bottom-line its beating heart, little wonder that much of what passes for catastrophe caused by others is far more likely to have been either created or constructed-after-the-fact in order to further the cause of empire and diminish apparent external threats. Enemies are everywhere, shape-shifting, one moment China, another Russia, or Iraq, or Syria…  The biggest threat to globalist America may now be the counter-globalist BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) who have have gone so far as to create their own development bank, challenging the autonomy of the World Bank and IMF. Which may account for both the West’s (the US and its cronies) dogged demonisation of Putin and the military build up against China, including the recent militarisation of Japan, the American empire having stepped behind those nations (including Philippines and Japan) in territorial disputes over tiny islands in the East and South China Seas.

Empires generally stop at nothing to retain their power. Defeat an insufferable humiliation, they will fight to the last man, they will connive and contrive every means to retain or appear to retain their power. It may be the case that the emergence of BRICs will require a sharing of global power. It may be that BRICs will surpass America and become the one dominating power. Meanwhile the rest of humanity, pawns in this elite game played mostly by and on behalf of the banks, will continue to suffer in various ways.

Setting aside all advances of theory and discovery, the key difference between the empire today and the empires of old is that technology has made it possible for so many of us to be aware and informed. We know straight away the atrocities, the displacements, all the human tragedies occurring in the name of empire. We bear witness to the rising of nationalisms the world over, as groups within nations struggle for autonomy, for identity. And we see the bloodthirsty, the basest, of all humanity given freedom to enact cruelty upon cruelty. Indeed, such types are paid for their services. Yet they are no different from their employers who  unleash upon the planet wave after wave of destruction.

I often think the problem humanity faces is one of power, not awareness. That many are manipulated by propaganda, swayed by mainstream media this way and that is not the fundamental battleground. In my view humanity faces a crisis of will. The will to human and planetary betterment (with all its connotations of inclusion, empowerment, sustainability, humanitarianism and so on) versus the will-to-power itself. This latter a corruption, for the power sought is selfish, acquisitive, greedy and destructive.

We are governed by greybeards with arthritic minds. Greybeards cultivating a new wave of technophiliacs whose principal reality is virtual, empathy quotient minimal; compulsive and reckless gamblers with sharp minds for finance and a marked lack of moral fibre; and spin doctors who like nothing more than to rip the conceptual ground from beneath our feet through the hollowing out of meaningful and significant terms such as the notion of empowerment itself.

I do not believe for one moment that a BRIC empire would be any different from the American empire we now endure.

In the face of this reality, unlike those who respond to empiric globalisation through group closure (and inevitable xenophobia) and violence of nationalism (often fascist), my instinct has often been to flee to the hills, live out a life inspired by ideas expressed by Epicurus or Voltaire. Finding myself in just such a place I am thankful for my own circumstances. Yet there is no escape. I am doomed to suffer the suffering of others. And like millions of us the world over, that suffering turns my head back to face the beast.

An Assault on the Downing of MH 17

 

 

 

I had to watch the news last night, on SBS and ABC. And of course I endured the tedious repetition, the over-dwelling on the usual crisis dimensions from the flowers and the tears to the stock phrases of politicians. And I felt sorry for Putin. Not because I am suckered in by his hang dog looks on camera, but because he has been made the fall guy in such a direct and ruthless manner. The West hailing in the process the old Cold War ideology of big bad Russia (with the attendant sub-text of big bad communism).

I abhor hypocrisy. Since when does the West point a finger at itself? Since when does the United Nations condemn it’s nursing mother America for supplying weapons that kill innocents?

There is every chance that MH17 was shot down by the ultra-right wing Ukrainian government. Every chance that this single atrocious act was orchestrated by an inner circle (possibly with ties to Uncle Sam) in order to elevate tensions, justify all manner of sanctions and retaliations, garner support from a wavering Europe and of course further demonise and ostracise Russia.

Last night I knew I was being indoctrinated by mainstream news. Even the matter of access to the crash site, apparently thwarted by separatist militia, was no doubt a construction of circumstances. Mainstream media was on this occasion so unashamedly predatory and melodramatic, squeezing every last drop of  milk from the udder of catastrophe, that I stood up and went to do the dishes.

Peace be upon those two-hundred and ninety-eight who lost their lives and those who are suffering their loss.

Peace be upon the millions of innocents in Iraq, in Syria, in Gaza, in Sudan, in the Congo, in the Central African Republic, their dead and maimed and the families who mourn, peace be upon the displaced and those huddled in border camps, and peace be upon all those who seek a return to their peace…