- WHAT ECONOMISTS CAN LEARN FROM EVOLUTIONARY THEORISTS (A talk given to the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy) Paul Krugman Nov. 1996 Good morning. I am both honored and a bit nervous to be speaking to a group devoted to the idea of evolutionary political economy. As you probably know, I am not exactly an evolutionary economist. I like to think that I am more open-minded about alternative approaches to economics than most, but I am basically a maximization-and-equilibrium kind of guy. Indeed, I am quite fanatical about defending the relevance of standard economic models in many situations. Why, then, am I here? Well, partly because my research work has taken me to some of the edges of the neoclassical paradigm. When you are concerned, as I have been, with situations in which increasing returns are crucial, you must drop the assumption of perfect competition; you are also forced to abandon the belief that market outcomes are necessarily optimal, or indeed that the market can be said to maximize anything. You can still believe in maximizing individuals and some kind of equilibrium, but the complexity of the situations in which your imaginary agents find themselves often obliges you - and presumably them - to represent their behavior by some kind of ad hoc rule rather than as the outcome of a carefully specified maximum problem. And you are often driven by sheer force of modeling necessity to think of the economy as having at least vaguely "evolutionary" dynamics, in which initial conditions and accidents along the way may determine where you end up. Some of you may have read my work on economic geography; I only found out after I had worked on the models for some time that I was using "replicator dynamics" to discuss the problem of economic change. But there is another reason I am here. I am an economist, but I am also what we might call an evolution groupie. That is, I spend a great deal of time reading what evolutionary biologists write - not only the more popular volumes but the textbooks and, most recently, some of the professional articles. I have even tried to talk to some of the biologists, which in this age of narrow specialization is a major effort. My interest in evolution is partly a recreation; but it is also true that I find in evolutionary biology a useful vantage point from which to view my own specialty in a new perspective. In a way, the point is that both the parallels and the differences between economics and evolutionary biology help me at least to understand what I am doing when I do economics - to get, to be pompous about it, a new perspective on the epistemology of the two fields. I am sure that I am not unique either in my interest in biology or in my feeling that we economists have something to learn from it. Indeed, I am sure that many people in this room know far more about evolutionary theory than I do. But I may have one special distinction. Most economists who try to apply evolutionary concepts start from some deep dissatisfaction with economics as it is. I won't say that I am entirely happy with the state of economics. But let us be honest: I have done very well within the world of conventional economics. I have pushed the envelope, but not broken it, and have received very widespread acceptance for my ideas. What this means is that I may have more sympathy for standard economics than most of you. My criticisms are those of someone who loves the field and has seen that affection repaid. I don't know if that makes me morally better or worse than someone who criticizes from outside, but anyway it makes me different. Anyway, enough preliminaries. Sister fields If you are familiar with economics and start reading evolutionary biology in earnest - and presumably vice versa - you quickly realize that these are sister fields. They actually have a remarkable amount in common, not only in terms of the kind of questions they ask and the methods they use, but in terms of the way they relate to and are perceived by the rest of the world. To begin with, there is the similarity in the basic approach. Let me give you my own personal definition of the basic method of economic theory. To me, it seems that what we know as economics is the study of those phenomena that can be understood as emerging from the interactions among intelligent, self-interested individuals. Notice that there are really four parts to this definition. Let's read from right to left. 1. Economics is about what individuals do: not classes, not "correlations of forces", but individual actors. This is not to deny the relevance of higher levels of analysis, but they must be grounded in individual behavior. Methodological individualism is of the essence. 2. The individuals are self-interested. There is nothing in economics that inherently prevents us from allowing people to derive satisfaction from others' consumption, but the predictive power of economic theory comes from the presumption that normally people care about themselves. 3. The individuals are intelligent: obvious opportunities for gain are not neglected. Hundred-dollar bills do not lie unattended in the street for very long. 4. We are concerned with the interaction of such individuals: Most interesting economic theory, from supply and demand on, is about "invisible hand" processes in which the collective outcome is not what individuals intended. OK, that's what economics is about. What is evolutionary theory about? The answer, basically, is that evolutionists share three of the four concerns. Their field is about the interaction of self-interested individuals - who are often thought of as organisms "trying" to leave as many offspring as possible, but which are in some circumstances best thought of as genes "trying" to propagate as many copies of themselves as possible. The main difference between evolutionary theory and economics is that while economists routinely suppose that the agents in their models are very smart about finding the best strategy - and an economist is always defensive about any model in which agents are assumed to act with less than perfect rationality - evolutionists have no qualms about assuming myopic behavior. Indeed, myopia is of the essence of their view. I'll talk later about what difference this makes. My point right now is that because the basic methods are similar if not identical, economics and evolutionary theory are surprisingly similar. It is often asserted that economic theory draws its inspiration from physics, and that it should become more like biology. If that's what you think, you should do two things. First, read a text on evoluationary theory, like John Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics. You will be startled at how much it looks like a textbook on microeconomics. Second, try to explain a simple economic concept, like supply and demand, to a physicist. You will discover that our whole style of thinking, of building up aggregative stories from individual decisions, is not at all the way they think. So there is a close affinity in method and indeed of intellectual style between economics and evolution. But there is another interesting parallel: both economics and evolution are model-oriented, algebra-heavy subjects that are the subject of intense interest from people who cannot stand algebra. And as a result in each case it is very important to distinguish between the field as it is perceived by outsiders (and portrayed in popular books) and what it is really like. We all know that economics is a field in which the most famous authors are often people who are regarded, with good reason, as not even worth arguing with by almost everyone in the profession. Do you remember that global best-seller The Coming Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra? And I guess it is no secret that even John Kenneth Galbraith, still the public's idea of a great economist, looks to most serious economists like an intellectual dilettante who lacks the patience for hard thinking. Well, the same is true in evolution. I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks"). What is rare in the evolutionary economics literature, at least as far as I can tell, is references to the theorists the practitioners themselves regard as great men - to people like George Williams, William Hamilton, or John Maynard Smith. This is serious, because if you think that Gould's ideas represent the cutting edge of evolutionary theory (as I myself did until about a year and a half ago), you have an almost completely misguided view of where the field is and even of what the issues are. This is important, because it is at least my impression that what economists who like to use "evolutionary" concepts expect from evolution is often based on what they imagine evolutionary theory to be like, not on what it is actually like. And conversely, you learn a lot about why conventional economics looks the way it does by seeing how evolutionary theorists have been driven to some of the same positions. To explain these rather cryptic remarks, let me talk briefly about what - it seems to me, but I am happy to be corrected - economists think an evolutionary approach can give us, then about what evolutionists seem to be saying in practice. What evolutionary economists want I don't think that there are many economists, even among the unconventionally minded, who would quarrel seriously with my basic definition of economics as concerning the interactions among intelligent, self-interested individuals. I guess a Marxist would have problems with the whole idea of methodological individualism, and a Galbraithian would have problems with the idea that self-interest can be defined without taking into account the ability of advertisers and so forth to shape preferences. But such quarrels apart I would guess that we do not have much difference with the basic statement. Where the dissatisfaction sets in is with how we implement the first two terms in my four-part program.Yes, of course economics is about interaction, and the agents are intelligent; but exactly how intelligent are they, and what is the nature of the their interaction? For there is no question that conventional economics has gone beyond the general ideas of intelligence and interaction to a much harder-edged, extreme formulation. At least since Paul Samuelson published Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1947, the overwhelming thrust of conventional theory has been to say that agents are not only intelligent, they maximize - that is, they chose the best of all feasible alternatives. And when they interact, we assume that what they do is achieve an equilibrium, in which each individual is doing the best he can given what all the others are doing. Now anyone who looks at the world knows that these are extreme and unrealistic assumptions. I just had some work done on my house; it is painfully obvious, looking at the final bill, that I did not maximize - I did not engage in optimal search for a contractor. In trying to find someone to do the remaining work, I have discovered that local wages and prices have not caught up with the economic boom in Massachusetts, so that it is extremely hard to find anyone to do carpentry or plumbing - the market is definitely not in equilibrium. So can't we get away from the maximization-and-equilibrium approach to something more realistic? Well, as I understand it that is what evolutionary economics is all about. In particular, evolution-minded economists seem to want the following: 1. They want to get away from the idea that individuals maximize. Instead, they want to represent decisions as the result of some process of groping through alternatives, a process in which it may take a long time to get to a maximum - and in which the maximum you find may well be local rather than global. 2. They want to get away from the notion of equilibrium. In particular, they want to have an approach in which things are always in disequilibrium, in which the economy is always evolving. Latterly there have also been some economists who want to merge evolutionary ideas with the Schumpeterian notion that the economy proceeds via waves of "creative destruction". Now as I understand it evolutionary economists basically believe that an evolutionary approach will satisfy these desires. After all, real organisms often look to the discerning eye like works in progress - they are full of features that fall short of what would adapt them perfectly to their environment, that is, they have not really maximized their fitness. And they also often seem to be stuck on local maxima: dolphins may look like fish, but they still need to surface for air. Meanwhile, what is evolution but a process of continual change, which has taken us from microbes to man? And if you are a reader of Gould and his acolytes, you have the sense that evolution proceeds through spasms of sudden change that seem positively Schumpeterian in their drama. So the attractiveness of an evolutionary metaphor - especially if you believe that economics has gotten off on the wrong track by basing itself on physics - is understandable. But before we get too carried away with the prospects for an evolutionary revolution, we had better look at what the evolutionists themselves really do. What evolutionary theory is really like To read the real thing in evolution - to read, say,  John Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games, or William Hamilton's new book of collected papers, Narrow Roads in Gene Land, is a startling experience to someone whose previous idea of evolution comes from magazine articles and popular books. The field does not look at all like the stories. What it does look like, to a remarkable degree, is - dare I say it? - neoclassical economics. And it offers very little comfort to those who want a refuge from the harsh discipline of maximization and equilibrium. Consider first the question of maximization. Clearly it is a crucial point about evolution that it must proceed by small steps, which means that maxima must be approached only gradually and that you could easily be trapped on a merely local maximum. But do these observations actually play a large role in evolutionary theory? No, not really. Look, for example, at William Hamilton's deeply influential paper "The genetical basis of social behavior". In the first part of that paper he introduces a model of population dynamics and shows that a gene will tend to spread if it enhances not an organism's individual fitness, but its "inclusive fitness": a weighted sum of the fitness of all the individual's relatives, with the weights proportional to their closeness of relationship. (An alternative way to think of this is to think of the gene spreading if it is good for its own fitness, never mind the organisms it lives in; this is the theme of Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene). Now Hamilton's derivation concerns process - it is a dynamic story about which direction the next small step will proceed in. But when it comes to the second part, in which he uses the idea to discuss the real world - why birds expose themselves to predators by warning their neighbors, why insects have such massively organized societies - he simply assumes that what we actually see can be viewed as the culmination of that process, that the creatures we see have already maximized. In short, even though evolution is necessarily a process of small changes, evolutionary theorists normally take the shortcut of assuming that the process gets you to the maximum, and pay surprisingly little attention to the dynamics along the way. What about the possibility of being trapped on local maxima? Well, this is a big concern for some theorists, like the Santa Fe Institute's Stuart Kauffman - but Kauffman is not a central player in the field. The general attitude of evolutionary theorists seems to be that Nature can often find surprising pathways to places you would have thought unreachable by small steps; that over a few hundred thousand generations a slightly light-sensitive patch of skin can become an eye that appears to be perfectly designed, or a jaw-bone can migrate around and become a piece of exquisitively sensitive sound-detection equipment. This is the theme of Richard Dawkins's new book Climbing Mount Improbable. It is also, if I understand it, the point of what philospher Daniel Dennnet calls Leslie Orgel's Second Law: "Evolution is smarter than you are". (Alternative version, according to Dennett: Evolution is smarter than Leslie Orgel). In practice, then, evolutionary theorists generally end up assuming that organisms (or genes, when that is the more useful perspective) do maximize; the process, the necessary caveat that they must get wherever they are going by small steps, gets put to one side. What about equilibrium? To outsiders, it appears that evolutionary theory must be a theory of continuing, progressive change. Indeed, Stephen Jay Gould's latest book is an argument against the supposed orthodoxy that evolution must be a matter of continuing progress toward ever-higher levels of complexity. But who defends that orthodoxy? The really amazing thing I have found when reading evolutionary theory is how little they talk about evolution as an ongoing process. Instead, they tend to try to explain what we see as the result of a finished process, in which each species has adapted fully to its environment - an environment that includes both other members of its own species and members of other species. It is revealing that the title of the classic book by George Williams that is often credited with a seminal role in modern evolutionary theory - a book that essentially established the principle that social behavior should be explained in terms of the self-interest of genes - is Adaptation and Natural Selection. "Evolution" isn't in the title, and certainly isn't in the text if it is taken to mean some kind of inexorable drive toward greater perfection. The working assumption of Williams and most other evolutionary theorists, at least as far as I can tell, is that we should model the natural world not as being on the way but as being already there. The most telling example of this preference is the widespread use of John Maynard Smith's concept of "evolutionarily stable strategies". An ESS is the best strategy for an organism to follow given the strategies that all others are following - the strategy that maximizes fitness given that everyone else is maximizing fitness, with each taking the others' strategies into account. Does this sound familiar? It should: the concept of an ESS is virtually indistinguishable from an economist's concept of equilibrium. And by the way: Maynard Smith's textbook is explicitly skeptical of claims that evolution is necessarily an ongoing process, let alone that it need have any particular direction. Not only do the models normally settle down to an equilibrium; so do experiments, for example with RNA evolution. And any evolutionist has got to be aware that life appears to have stayed happily single-celled for several billion years before something led to the next big step. Now you can understand why I say that a textbook in evolution reads so much like a textbook in microeconomics. At a deep level, they share the same method: explain behavior in terms of an equilibrium among maximizing individuals. But why does evolutionary theory in practice fail to take advantage, if we can call it that, either of the myopia or of the dynamics inherent in any evolutionary story? Why evolutionists don't do evolution What I have argued to this point is that even though evolution is a theory of gradual change, of myopic dynamics, in practice most evolutionary theory focusses on the presumed end result of such dynamics: an equilibrium in which individuals maximize their fitness given what other individuals do. Why should the theory have taken this turn? The answer is surely the ever-present need to simplify, to make models that are comprehensible. The fact is that maximization and equilibrium are astonishingly powerful ways to cut through what might otherwise be forbidding complexity - and evolutionary theorists have, entirely correctly, been willing to adopt the useful fiction that individuals are at their maxima and that the system is in equilibrium. Let me give you an example. William Hamilton's wonderfully named paper "Geometry for the Selfish Herd" imagines a group of frogs sitting at the edge of a circular pond, from which a snake may emerge - and he supposes that the snake will grab and eat the nearest frog. Where will the frogs sit? To compress his argument, Hamilton points out that if there are two groups of frogs around the pool, each group has an equal chance of being targeted, and so does each frog within each group - which means that the chance of being eaten is less if you are a frog in the larger group. Thus if you are a frog trying to maximize your choice of survival, you will want to be part of the larger group; and the equilibrium must involve clumping of all the frogs as close together as possible. Notice what is missing from this analysis. Hamilton does not talk about the evolutionary dynamics by which frogs might acquire a sit-with-the-other-frogs instinct; he does not take us through the intermediate steps along the evolutionary path in which frogs had not yet completely "realized" that they should stay with the herd. Why not? Because to do so would involve him in enormous complications that are basically irrelevant to his point, whereas - ahem - leapfrogging straight over these difficulties to look at the equilibrium in which all frogs maximize their chances given what the other frogs do is a very parsimonious, sharp-edged way of gaining insight. Now some people would say that this kind of creation of useful fictions is a thing of the past, because now we can study complex dynamics using computer simulations. But anyone who has tried that sort of thing - and I have, at great length - eventually comes to realize just what a wonderful tool paper-and-pencil analysis based on maximization and equilibrium really is. By all means let us use simulation to push out the boundaries of our understanding; but just running a lot of simulations and seeing what happens is a frustrating and finally unproductive exercise unless you can somehow create a "model of the model" that lets you understand what is going on. I could multiply examples here, but I think the point is clear. Evolutionary theorists, even though they have a framework that fundamentally tells them that you cannot safely assume maximization-and-equilibrium, make use of maximization and equilibrium as modelling devices - as useful fictions about the world that allow them to cut through the complexities. And evolutionists have found these fictions so useful that they dominate analysis in evolution almost as completely as the same fictions dominate economic theory. What is neoclassical economics? I just said that these fictions dominate economics. But the question in economics is whether we understand that they are fictions, rather than deep-seated truths. For there, perhaps, is where economists have something to learn from evolutionists. In economics we often use the term "neoclassical" either as a way to praise or to damn our opponents. Personally, I consider myself a proud neoclassicist. By this I clearly don't mean that I believe in perfect competition all the way. What I mean is that I prefer, when I can, to make sense of the world using models in which individuals maximize and the interaction of these individuals can be summarized by some concept of equilibrium. The reason I like that kind of model is not that I believe it to be literally true, but that I am intensely aware of the power of maximization-and-equilibrium to organize one's thinking - and I have seen the propensity of those who try to do economics without those organizing devices to produce sheer nonsense when they imagine they are freeing themselves from some confining orthodoxy. That said, there are indeed economists who regard maximization and equilibrium as more than useful fictions. They regard them either as literal truths - which I find a bit hard to understand given the reality of daily experience - or as principles so central to economics that one dare not bend them even a little, no matter how useful it might seem to do so. To be fair, there is some justification in the insistence of some economists on pushing very hard on the principles of equilibrium and in particular of maxmization. After all, people are smarter than genes. If I offer a model in which people seem to be passing up some opportunity for gain, you may justifiably ask me why they don't just take it. And unlike the case of genes, the argument that the alternative is quite different from what my imagined agent is currently doing is not necessarily a very good one: in the real world people do sometimes respond to opportunities by changing their behavior drastically. In biology purely local change is a sacred principle; in economics it has no comparable justification. And yet I think that despite the differences, it would be better if economists were more self-aware - if they understood that their use of maximization-and-equilibrium, like that of evolutionary biologists, is a useful fiction rather than a principle to be defended at all costs. If we were more modest about what we think our modeling strategy is doing, we might free ourselves to accommodate more of the world in our analysis. And so let me conclude this talk by giving two examples of how a more relaxed, "evolution"-style approach to economics might help us out. Two economic examples As you know, one of my areas of research has been the study of economic geography. Perhaps the most basic insight in these models has been the possibility of a cumulative process of agglomeration. Suppose that there are two regions, and one region starts with a slightly larger concentration of industry. This concentration of industry will provide larger markets and better sources of supply for producers than in the other region, perhaps inducing more producers to locate in that region, further reinforcing its advantage, and so on. It's a good story, and I am quite sure that in some sense it is correct. Yet when I and my students try to present this work, we often run into a surprising difficulty: theorists get very upset about the dynamics. Why, they ask, don't individuals correctly anticipate the future location of industry? How can you have such a model without forward-looking agents and rational expectations? Now the fact is that when you try to do rational expectations in such models they become vastly more difficult, and the basic point becomes obscured. In short, here is a situation in which going all the way to full maximizing behavior - and trying to avoid the disequilibrium, evolutionary dynamics I assume - makes life harder, not easier. It seems to me, at least, that this is a situation where economists would do a better job if they understood that maximization is a metaphor to be used only to the extent that it helps understanding. And when I run into this sort of critique I am envious of evolutionary theorists who do models like, say, the Fisher theory of runaway sexual selection, and can use myopic, disequilibrium dynamics without apology. (If you don't know that model, it works like this: suppose that there is one gene that makes peahens - that's the female of peacock - like males with big tails, and another that causes males to have big tails. If there is a preponderance of females that carries this gene, then males with big tails will have more offspring even if they have less chance of surviving because of their visibility to predators. But because a male with a big tail is likely to be the son of a female who likes big tails, this success will also tend to spread the gene for big-tail preference .... The resemblance to agglomeration is obvious- isn't it?) Another issue: consider the question of whether and how monetary policy has real effects. In the end this comes down to whether prices are sticky in nominal terms. In my view there is overwhelming evidence that they are. But many economists reject such evidence on principle: a rational price-setter ought not to have money illusion, therefore it is bad economics to assume that they do. If neo-Keynesians like me suggest that a bit of bounded rationality would do the trick, the answer is that bounded rationality is too open-ended a concept, and can be used to rationalize too many different behaviors. And yet in evolution the idea that there are limits to the precision of maximization is adopted cheerfully. When a bird sees a predator, it issues a warning cry that puts itself at risk but may save its neighbors; the reason this behavior "works", we believe, is that many of those neighbors are likely to be relatives, and thus the bird may enhance its "inclusive fitness". But why doesn't the bird issue a warning only its relatives can hear? Well, we just suppose that isn't possible. In short, I believe that economics would be a more productive field if we learned something important from evolutionists: that models are metaphors, and that we should use them, not the other way around. one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist --------------------------- Why I am not a Primitivist by Jason McQuinn The life ways of gatherer-hunter communities have become a central focus of study for many anarchists in recent years, for several good reasons. First of all, and most obviously, if we are to look at actually-existing anarchist societies, the prehistory of the species seems to have been a golden age of anarchy, community, human autonomy and freedom. Various forms of the state, enclosures of the social commons, and accumulations of dead labor (capital) have been the axiomatic organizing principles of civilized societies from the dawn of history. But, from all available evidence, they seem to have been entirely absent in the vast prehistory of the human species. The development of civilization has been the flipside of the steady erosion of both personal and communal autonomy and power within precivilized, anarchic societies and the remnant life ways still surviving from them. Furthermore, in the last several decades within the fields of anthropology and archeology there has been an explicit and (in its implications) quite radical revaluation of the social life of these noncivilized, gatherer-hunter and horticultural societies, both prehistoric and contemporary. This revaluation has led, as many anarchist writers have pointed out (especially John Zerzan, David Watson [aka George Bradford, etc.] and Bob Black), to a greater understanding and appreciation for several key aspects of life in these societies: their emphasis on personal and community autonomy (entailing their refusal of non-reciprocal power to their head-men or chiefs), their relative lack of deadly warfare, their elegance of technique and tool-kit, their anti-work ethos (refusal to accumulate unnecessary surplus, refusal to be tied down to permanent settlements), and their emphasis on communal sharing, sensuality, celebration and play. The rise of ecological critiques and the revaluation of nature in the last decades of the twentieth century have entailed for many a search through history for examples of ecologically sustainable societies--societies which didn't despoil the wilderness, massacre the wildlife and exploit all of the natural resources in sight. Unsurprisingly, any genuine search for ecological communities and cultures predominantly turns up hunter and gatherer societies which have never (outside of situations where they were pressured by encroaching civilizations) developed any compelling needs to build surplus accumulations of food or goods, nor to ignore or despoil their animal kin or natural surroundings. Their long-term stability and the elegance of their adaptations to their natural environments make hunting and gathering societies the sustainable society and sustainable economy par excellence. Additionally, the cumulative failures of both the revolutionary social movements of the last several centuries and the continuing march of capital and technology in reshaping the world have called into question as never before the illusory ideology of progress that underpins modern civilization (as well as most oppositional movements). A progress that has promised inevitable, incremental improvements in our individual lives and the lives of all humanity (if only we keep the faith and continue supporting capitalist technological development) has been proven increasingly hollow. It has become harder and harder to maintain the lie that life now is qualitatively better than in all previous epochs. Even those who most want to fool themselves (those on the margins of capitalist privilege, power and wealth) must face increasing doubts about their rationality and their ethical values, not to mention their sanity, in a world of global warming, mass extinctions, epidemic oil and toxic chemical spills, global pollution, massive clearing of rain forests, endemic Third World malnutrition and recurrent famine. All amidst an increasing polarization between an international elite of the superrich and vast masses of the powerless, landless and poor. In addition, it has become increasingly questionable whether the multiple pleasures of electric heat, chlorinated water, hydrocarbon-powered transport and electronic entertainment will ever outweigh the insidious costs of industrial enslavement, programmed leisure and our seeming reduction to objects of a scientific experiment to determine at what point we will finally lose all trace of our humanity. The development of contemporary primitivist theories (and especially anarcho-primitivism) might thus seem to be an easy, logical and inevitable step from these foundations, although this would be to overlook other alternatives equally rooted in resistance culture. At the least, primitivism, as a multifaceted and still-developing response to the epochal crises now facing humanity, deserves our serious evaluation. It is certainly one of the several possible responses which does attempt to make sense of our current predicament in order to suggest a way out. Yet, at the same time there remain many problems with primitivist positions that have been expressed thus far. As well as potentially serious problems with the very concept of primitivism itself as a mode of theory and practice. It may make sense to examine some of the sources of primitivism first in order to identify and develop a few of its most obvious difficulties and suggest some solutions. Primitivist strands There are several strands of development which seem to have more or less coalesced to form the current primitivist mélange of theories and practices, at least within North America (I'm not as familiar with British primitivism). But two or three strands stand out as the most influential and important: (1) the strand growing out of Detroit's anarcho-Marxist Black & Red and the anarchists contributing to the Fifth Estate, including for awhile (2) John Zerzan, although he and the FE eventually parted ways over disagreements about the status and interpretation of agriculture, culture and domestication. Thirdly (3) some activists coming out of the Earth First! milieu, often influenced by deep ecologists, promote a "Back to the Pleistocene" perspective (the Pleistocene, being the geologic period during which the human species emerged). Fredy Perlman and the Fifth Estate Although there have been hints of radical primitivism within--and even before the advent of--the modern anarchist movement, contemporary primitivism owes most to Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Black & Red collective through which his work was published, beginning in the 1960s. Most influential of all has been his visionary reconstruction of the origins and development of civilization, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan published in 1983. In this work, Perlman suggested that civilization originated due to the relatively harsh living conditions (in one place and time) which were seen by the tribal elite to require the development of a system of public waterways. The successful building of this system of public waterways required the actions of many individuals in the manner of a social machine under the direction of the tribal elite. And the social machine that was born became the first Leviathan, the first civilization, which grew and reproduced through wars, enslavement and the creation of ever greater social machinery. The situation we now face is a world in which the progeny of that original civilization have now successfully taken over the globe and conquered nearly all human communities. But, as Perlman points out, though almost all humanity is now trapped within civilizations, within Leviathans, there is still resistance. And, in fact, the development of civilizations from their beginnings on has always faced resistance from every non-civilized, free human community. History is the story of early civilizations destroying the relatively freer communities around them, incorporating them or exterminating them, and the succeeding story of civilizations wrestling with each other, civilizations exterminating, incorporating or subjugating other civilizations, up to the present day. Yet resistance is still possible, and we can all trace our ancestral lineages to people who were once stateless, moneyless and in some profound sense more free. Fredy Perlman's vision was taken up and elaborated upon by others involved in the Fifth Estate newspaper project, most notably, David Watson, who has written under a number of pseudonyms, including George Bradford. The Fifth Estate was itself an underground newspaper in the '60s, which evolved into a revolutionary anarchist newspaper in the mid-'70s, and then into an anarcho-primitivist project later in the '80s. Though the Fifth Estate has recently backed away from some of the more radical implications of its earlier stances, it remains one of the major strands of the contemporary primitivist milieu. And although Watson's work is clearly based on Perlman's, he has also added his own concerns, including the further development of Lewis Mumford's critique of technology and the "megamachine," a defense of primitive spirituality and shamanism, and the call for a new, genuine social ecology (which will avoid the errors of Murray Bookchin's naturalism, rationalism, and post-scarcity, techno-urbanism). Watson's work can now be evaluated in a new collection of his most significant Fifth Estate writings of the 1980s titled Against the Megamachine (1998). But he's also the author of two previous books: How Deep is Deep Ecology (1989, written under the name of George Bradford) and Beyond Bookchin: A Preface to Any Future Social Ecology (1996). John Zerzan John Zerzan, probably now the most well-known torch-bearer for primitivism in North America, started questioning the origins of social alienation in a series of essays also published in the Fifth Estate throughout the '80s. These essays eventually found their way into his collection Elements of Refusal (1988, and a second edition in 1999). They included extreme critiques of central aspects of human culture--time, language, number and art--and an influential critique of agriculture, the watershed change in human society which Zerzan calls "the basis of civilization." (1999, p.73) However, while these "origins" essays, as they are often called, were published in the Fifth Estate, they were not always welcomed. And, in fact, each issue of FE in which they appeared usually included commentaries rejecting his conclusions in no uncertain terms. Eventually, when the Fifth Estate collective tired of publishing his originary essays, and when Zerzan was finding it harder and harder to endure the FE's obvious distaste for his line of investigation, Zerzan turned to other venues for publication, including this magazine, Anarchy, Michael William's short-lived Demolition Derby, and ultimately England's Green Anarchist as well, among others. A second collection of his essays, Future Primitive and Other Essays, was co-published by Anarchy/C.A.L. Press in association with Autonomedia in 1994. And, additionally, he has edited two important primitivist anthologies, Questioning Technology (co-edited by Alice Carnes, 1988, with a second edition published in 1991) and most recently Against Civilization (1999). John Zerzan may be most notorious for the blunt, no-nonsense conclusions of his originary critiques. In these essays, and in his subsequent writings--which will be familiar to readers of Anarchy magazine, he ultimately rejects all symbolic culture as alienation and a fall from a pre-civilized, pre-domesticated, pre-division-of-labor, primitive state of human nature. He has also become notorious in some circles for his embrace of the Unabomber, to whom he dedicated the second edition of Elements of Refusal, indicating for those who might have been unsure, that he really is serious about his critiques and our need to develop a fundamentally critical, uncompromising practice. Earth First! and Deep Ecology The primitivist strand developing from the Earth First! direct-action "in the defense of Mother Earth" milieu is heavily entwined with the formulation of deep ecology by Arne Naess, Bill Devall and George Sessions, among others. In this strand the Earth First! direct action community (largely based in the western US, and largely anarchist) seems to have found itself in search of a philosophical foundation appropriate to its non-urban defense of wilderness and human wildness--and found some irresistible ammunition, if not a coherent theory, in deep ecology. Earth First! as a substantially, but certainly not completely, informal organization had its own origins in the nativist eco-anarchism of Edward Abbey (whose nature writings--like Desert Solitaire--and novel The Monkey Wrench Gang were hugely influential) and the nativist radical environmentalism of David Foreman and friends. In fact, the original Earth First! often maintained an explicitly anti-immigration, North-American-wilderness-for-U.S.-&-Canadian-citizens-only approach to saving whatever wilderness could still be saved from the increasing human depredation of mining, road-building, clear cutting, agricultural exploitation, grazing and tourism in the service of contemporary mass consumer society--without ever feeling compelled to develop any critical social theory. However, once Earth First! expanded out of the southwest U.S. and became the focus of a widespread direct action movement it became clear that most of the people joining the blockades, marches, banner-hangings and lock-downs were more than a little influenced by the decidedly non-nativist social movements of the 1960s and '70s (the civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist and anarchist movements, etc.). The contradictions between the rank-and-file and the informal leadership in control of the Earth First! journal came to a head with the resignation of Foreman and his subsequent inauguration of the Wild Earth journal with its focus on a conservation biology perspective more to his liking. The new Earth First! leadership (and the new journal collectives since Foreman's departure) reflect the actual diversity of the activists now involved in the entire Earth First! milieu--an eclectic mix of liberal/reformist environmentalists, eco-leftists (and even eco-syndicalists affiliated with the IWW), some greens, a variety of eco-anarchists and many deep ecologists. But regardless of this diversity, it is clear that deep ecology may well have the most widespread influence within the EF! milieu as a whole, including those who consider themselves to be primitivists. This seems to be mostly because Earth First! is primarily a direct action movement in defense of non-human Nature, and clearly not a socially-oriented movement, despite the often radical social commitments of many of the participants. Deep ecology provides the theoretical justification for the kind of Nature-first, society-later (if at all) attitude often prevalent in EF! It substitutes a specially constructed biocentric or eco-centric vision ("the perspective of a unified natural world" as Lone Wolf Circles puts it) for the supposed anthropocentric perspectives which privilege human values and goals in most other philosophies. And it offers a nature philosophy that merges with nature spirituality, which together help justify an eco-primitivist perspective for many activists who wish to see a huge reduction in human population and a scaling-down or elimination of industrial technology in order to reduce or remove the increasing destruction of the natural world by modern industrial society. Although the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (no primitivist himself) is usually credited with the creation of deep ecology, the book which originally made it's name in North America was Bill Devall and George Session's Deep Ecology (1986). Arne Naess' book, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, appeared in 1990, while George Sessions contributed Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century in 1994. Which Primitivism? As is obvious from this brief overview (which necessarily leaves out discussion of many details as well as other important participants and influences), the strands of the primitivist milieu are not just diverse, but often in important ways incompatible. To identify with primitivism can mean very different things to those influenced by Fredy Perlman or David Watson, John Zerzan or Arne Naess. Fredy Perlman poetically commemorates the song and dance of primitive communities, their immersion in nature and kinship with other species. For David Watson, primitivism first of all implies a celebration of the sustainable, preindustrial (though not necessarily pre-agricultural) life ways of many peoples, which he believes are most-importantly centered on tribal cultures (especially tribal religions) and convivial tools and techniques. For John Zerzan, primitivism is first and foremost a stance demanding an end to all possible symbolic alienations and all division of labor in order that we experience the world as a reclaimed unity of experience without need for religion, art or other symbolic compensations. While for those influenced by deep ecology, primitivism means a return to a preindustrial world inhabited by a small human population able to live not only in harmony with nature, but above all with a minimal impact on all other animal and plant (and even bacterial) species. Primitivism as ideology Although I appreciate and respect the insights of most primitivist currents, there are obvious problems with the formulation of any critical theory primarily focusing around a primitivist identity (or any other positively conceived identity). As Bob Black has contended: "The communist-anarchist hunter-gatherers (for that is what, to be precise, they are), past and present, are important. Not (necessarily) for their successful habitat-specific adaptations since these are, by definition, not generalizable. But because they demonstrate that life once was, that life can be, radically different. The point is not to recreate that way of life (although there may be some occasions to do that) but to appreciate that, if a life-way so utterly contradictory to ours is feasible, which indeed has a million-year track record, then maybe other life-ways contradictory to ours are feasible" (Bob Black, "Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder," published in Green Anarchist & on the web at: www.primitivism.com). If it was obvious that primitivism always implied this type of open-ended, non-ideological stance, a primitivist identity would be much less problematic. Unfortunately, for most primitivists an idealized, hypostatized vision of primal societies tends to irresistibly displace the essential centrality of critical self-theory, whatever their occasional protestations to the contrary. The locus of critique quickly moves from the critical self-understanding of the social and natural world to the adoption of a preconceived ideal against which that world (and one's own life) is measured, an archetypally ideological stance. This nearly irresistible susceptibility to idealization is primitivism's greatest weakness. This becomes especially clear when attempts are made to pin down the exact meaning of the primitive. In a vitally important sense there are no contemporary "primitive" societies and there is not even any single, identifiable, archetypal "primitive" society. Although this is acknowledged even by most primitivists, its importance is not always understood. All societies now (and historically) in existence have their own histories and are contemporary societies in a most important sense, that they exist in the same world--even if far from the centers of power and wealth--as nation-states, multinational corporations and global commodity exchange. And even ancient societies which existed before the advent of agriculture and civilization in all likelihood adapted many unimaginably diverse and innovative life ways over the course of their existence. But, beyond some basic speculations, we can simply never know what these life ways were, much less, which were the most authentically primitive. While this doesn't mean that we can't learn from the life ways of contemporary hunters and gatherers--or horitculturalists, nomadic herders, and even subsistence agricultural communities, it does mean that there is no point in picking any one form of life as an ideal to be uncritically emulated, nor of hypostatizing an archetypal primitive ideal based on speculations always about what might have been. Neither back nor forward, but wherever we choose to go As all critics of primitivism never tire of pointing out, we can't simply go back in time. Though this is not because (as most critics believe) that social and technical "progress" is irreversible, nor because modern civilization is unavoidable. There are many historical examples of both resistance to social and technical innovations, and devolutions to what are usually considered (by the believers in Progress) not just simpler, but inferior or backward, life ways. Most importantly, we can't go back in the sense that wherever we go as a society, we have to make our departure from where we are right now. We are all caught up in an historical social process which constrains our options. As Marxists typically put it, the present material conditions of production and social relations of production largely determine the possibilities for social change. Although anarchists are increasingly (and correctly) critical of the productivist assumptions behind this type of formulation, it remains more generally true that existing conditions of social life (in all their material and cultural dimensions) do have an inertia that makes any thoughts of a "return" to previously existing (or more likely imagined) life ways extremely problematic. But neither do we necessarily need to go forward into the future that capital and the state are preparing for us. As we are learning from history, their progress has never been our progress--conceived as any substantial diminution of social alienation, domestication or even exploitation. Rather, we might do much better to dispense with the standard timelier of all philosophies of history in order to finally go our own way. Only without the unnecessary, always ideological, constraints imposed by any directional interpretations of history, are we finally free to become whatever we will, rather than what some conception of progress (or of return) tells us we need to be. This doesn't mean that we can ever just ignore what we, as a global society, are right now. But it does mean that ultimately no ideology can contain or define the social revolutionary impulse without falsifying it. The vitality of this critical impulse has an existence prior to any theorizing in each and every contradiction between our immediate desires for unitary, non-alienated lives and all of the current social relations, roles and institutions which prevent these desires from being realized. Critiques of Civilization, Progress, Technology Much more important for us than the revaluation of what are called primitive societies and life ways is the critical examination of the society within which we live right now and the ways which it systematically alienates our life-activities and denies our desires for a more unitary and satisfying way of life. And this must always be foremost a process of negation, an imminent critique of our lives from within rather than from without. Ideological critiques, while containing a negative component, always remain centered outside of our lives around some sort of positive ideal to which we must eventually conform. The power of their (oversimplified) social criticisms is gained at the expense of denying the necessary centrality of our own lives and our own perspectives to any genuine critique of our social alienation. The primitivist milieu has developed and popularized critiques of civilization, progress and technology and that is its most important strength. I don't consider myself a primitivist because of what I see as the inherently ideological thrust of any theory which idealizes a particular form of life (whether or not it has ever actually existed). But this does not mean that I am any less critical of civilization, progress or technology. Rather, I see these critiques as essential to the renewal and further radicalization of any genuine attempts at general contemporary social critique. Primitivism as an ideology is stuck in an unenviable position ultimately demanding the construction of a complex form of society (however much disputed in particulars) that obviously requires not only massive social transformations, technical changes and population dislocations, but the relatively quick abandonment of at least 10,000 years of civilized development. It is an understatement to say that this poses enormous risks for our survival as individuals, and even, conceivably, as a species (due to the primarily to potential threats of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare that could be unleashed). Yet primitivism can at best offer only indeterminate promises of highly speculative results, even under the most favorably imaginable circumstances: the eventual, worldwide demoralization and capitulation of the most powerful ruling classes, without too many significant civil wars fought by factions attempting to restore the collapsing old order in part or in total. Thus primitivism, at least in this form, is never likely to command the support of more than a relatively small milieu of marginal malcontents, even under conditions of substantial social collapse. But the critique of civilization doesn't have to mean the ideological rejection of every historical social development over the course of the last 10 or 20,000 years. The critique of progress doesn't mean that we need to return to a previous way of life or set about constructing some preconceived, idealized state of non-civilization. The critique of technology doesn't mean that we can't successfully work to eliminate only the most egregious forms of technological production, consumption and control first, while leaving the less intensive, less socially- and ecologically-destructive forms of technology for later transformation or elimination (while also, of course, attempting to minimize their alienating effects). What all this does mean is that it can be much more powerful to formulate a revolutionary position that won't lend itself so readily to degeneration into ideology. And that primitivism, shorn of all its ideological proclivities, is better off with another name. What should a social revolutionary perspective be called which includes critiques of civilization, progress and technology, all integrated with critiques of alienation, ideology, morality and religion? I can't say that there is any formulation that won't also have significant potential for degeneration into ideology. But I doubt that we would do worse than "primitivism." I will likely continue to identify most with the simple label of "anarchist," trusting in part that over time the most valid critiques now identified closely with primitivism will be increasingly incorporated into and identified closely with the anarchist milieu, both within anarchist theory and anarchist practice. Anarcho-leftists won't like this process. And neither will anarcho-liberals and others. But the critique of civilization is here to stay, along with its corollary critiques of progress and technology. The continued deepening of worldwide social crises resulting from the unceasing developments of capital, technology and state will not allow those anarchists still resistant to the deepening of critique to ignore the implications of these crises forever. We now stand at the beginning of a new century. Many would say we're no closer to anarchy now than we were a two centuries ago in the times of Godwin, Courderoy or Proudhon. Many more might say that we are increasingly further away. Or are we? If we can formulate a more powerful critique, more resistant to the temptations of ideology; and if we can develop a more radical and intransigent, yet open-ended practice, perhaps we still have a fighting chance to influence the inevitable revolutions still to come.  ---------------- 134966 "hippies" need to raid their trust funds and buy a clue!!! (english) by Jonah Goldburg 7:51am Thu Feb 14 '02 (Modified on 9:22pm Thu Feb 14 '02) What protesters don't "get" Jonah Goldberg February 14, 2002 What protesters don't get A couple weeks ago, I wrote a column criticizing anti-globalization protestors as a bunch of kids "with open-toed shoes and closed minds." Ever since, I've been deluged with angry e-mails, mostly from college kids, calling me a "racist," a "corporate stooge," an "ignorant and insensitive jerk" and a -- shudder -- "Republican." (Of course, to these kids, "Republican" is just shorthand for "racist, corporate stooge" so they're really just repeating themselves.) Their basic objection, it seems, is that I just don't "get it." OK, so let's establish what "it" is. One angry fellow suggested that I dismiss protestors because I am in the pay of some nefarious multinational corporation (as is, apparently, the rest of the dismissive media). He explained, "The basic purpose of these protests is to abolish international banking institutions and large corporations that do more to prevent democracy than to promote it. These institutions believe in a monarch-like, profit-over-people, closed-door decision making, which only fulfills the greed of corporate executives and wealth-seeking shareholders." Of course, this is just one guy, but having read quite a bit of the anti-globalization movement's literature, it's a pretty good starting point. His letter's one oversight is that it doesn't mention the environment or sweatshops and child labor explicitly, but let's just stipulate that all that stuff is implied. So, first of all, let me say I do get it. And, let me also say, this is childish bunk. For example, if multinational corporations threaten democracy, how come the number of democracies grew simultaneously with the rise of the multinational corporation? It's hard to pinpoint an exact date for when the "multinational corporation" or "globalization" began, but over the last 30 years we've been told that democracy is increasingly threatened by these diabolical forces. The funny thing is, the number of democracies has been rising, with occasional fluctuations, pretty much nonstop. According to Freedom House, the widely revered nonpartisan human rights monitor, the 20th century was "Democracy's Century." According to a study by the same name (you can find it at http://www.freedomhouse.org/reports/century.html), in 1900, there were no countries "which could be judged as electoral democracies by the standard of universal suffrage for competitive multiparty elections." There were 25 countries, the United States among them, with restricted democratic practices, accounting for 12.4 percent of the world's population. By mid-century, "there were 22 democracies accounting for 31 percent of the world population," according to the study. Another 21 states had the basics of a democratic system, accounting for 11.9 percent of the world's population. Since then, remember, horrible multinational corporations have exploded and "undemocratic" international banking schemes have flourished. Nevertheless, Freedom House reports that "electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 62.5 percent of the world's population." Moreover, the pace of change increased the most as the United States signed things like GATT, the WTO, NAFTA and all those evil unaccountable monstrosities. From the end of the 1980s to the year 2000, the number of democracies nearly doubled. Now, there is a difference between democracy and freedom. Some of these nations may have elections, but the rule of law may not have been fully established yet (a point Freedom House insists on making). And there is certainly much work to be done around the globe. However, it is impossible to deny that democracy has marched in near lockstep with the spread of trade, capitalism and, yes, the multinational corporation. This only makes sense for a number of reasons. I'll give you two: contracts and the middle class. Corporations, it's true, do not much care about democracy. But they care passionately about contracts. Unfree nations are notorious for breaking their word. Communist and authoritarian regimes have a bad habit of seizing the assets of foreign companies. Understandably, this scares away foreign investment -- and encourages those few corporations willing to deal with a corrupt nation to get in and get out as quickly as possible, which tends to be bad for the environment, the people and just about everybody but the corrupt rulers. Agreements like NAFTA and the WTO force nations to respect contracts, which encourages responsible investment and, hence, economic growth. And, you see, economic growth creates a middle class, and a middle class, eventually, demands democracy. That is the story of the 20th century and, God willing, it will be the story of the 21st. Prosperity brings with it a certain logic of social organization. Without exception, the wealthier a society becomes, particularly after industrialization, the more likely it will be to protect its environment (America's is considerably better than it was 100 years ago), the health of its people (life expectancy continues to soar) and, most importantly, the rights of its people. I "get" what the college kids are saying just fine. I just wish they got that what they're saying is that they want the world to be poorer, more polluted and less democratic. add your own comments ------------------ Jonah, you're a genius! (english) by Jason 8:06am Thu Feb 14 '02 Dude, I am copying this and will use it verbally assault ever piece of shit I ever come across. That is the most intelligent thing I ever read on this bored. Kudos! ------------------ Going for the GoldBUG up your Arse (english) by Morbid;s Cold Bite 8:20am Thu Feb 14 '02 Since you've read a lot of others crap against you! We will keep it short and unsweet! Bottom line dude! You and your post are full of fucking shit! ------------------ No you don't (english) by Mike 8:21am Thu Feb 14 '02 stepbystepfarm@shaysnet.com No, you don't "get it" Jonah, you don't get what they are really saying. What you "get" is that what they are saying WOULD mean what you say it really means (ie: "want the world to be poorer, more polluted, less democratic") IF (very big IF) they believed the same as you do -- about almost everything from what being free means, what being well off means, what causes pollution, etc.). But you KNOW that isn't true. You KNOW that they do NOT start from the same premises that you do. Now I'm not going to argue against your fundamental assumptions, but you are going to have to do a whole lot better with your logic if you hope to convince anybody. You argue: "Democracy increased at the same time as Corporate Capitalism increased THEREFOR Corporate Capitalism fosters democracy" That's logic? Try a couple substitutions please. "Democracy increased at the same time the planet became grossly overpopulated --- became grossly polluted ---- suffered great losses of the remaining bits of wild nature ---- that the bulk of all fossile resources were used up (etc. etc. etc. and we could stick in some silly ones too) From the fact that these also were contemporaneous you want to argue causality? "Overpopluation fosters democracy" "Pollution fosters democracy" "Environmental destruction fosters democracy" "Depleting planetary resources fosters democracy" ------------------ "getting" Jonah Goldberg (english) by poo 8:21am Thu Feb 14 '02 All of us say things, from time to time, that some people find offensive. No one knows this better than NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg, who has been the public spokesman for the firing. In a May 3, 2000 column entitled "A Continent Bleeds," Goldberg called for a military "crusade" to "bring civilization" to Africa. "I think it’s time we revisited the notion of a new kind of Colonialism…,"

he wrote. "I mean going in — guns blazing if necessary... The United States should mount a serious effort to bring civilization (yes, "Civilization") to those parts of Africa that are in Hobbesian despair." Goldberg did not retract his recommendation later, despite an orgy of predictable outrage from obvious sources. http://www.frontpagemag.com/  horowitzsnotepad/2001/hn10-03-01.htm ------------------ response to jonah (english) by hadryan 8:35am Thu Feb 14 '02 first of all, MCB, telling someone that their post is "full of fucking shit" is about the least productive approach there is, it simply discredits any opposition without offering an alternative. please stop and inform yourself so you can help people more fully understand. ok, that aside, i move on to jonah. i must say that you make very good points concerning the spread of democracy and the creation of a middle class, but what we so often see are the multi-national corporations operating in tax-free import/export zones that bring no capitol to the people (save their 20usd/month), and only bring money to the irresponsible leaders. i find nothing wrong with a company operating overseas to spread it's market, what i don't like is when it's to exploit environmental laws, lax human rights protection, and lower minimum wages. unfortunately, in the many of the cases, these are the main reasons transnationals operate the way they do. there is no stopping the 'globalization' of mankind, it is definitely upon us and we had better get used to it, but the economic model of globalization that has been setup by the rich western countries is simply exploiting the poorer countries labor and pretending that they are bringing economic prosperity as well. unfortunately, this is not happening. we must promote an alternative vision of this "planetization of mankind", one with global labor rights and tax systems similar to those promoted by ATTAC. then we will be promoting democracy, prosperity, and human rights for all, not just those who create the system so as to benefit from it. peace. ------------------ The wonderful world of debate. (english) by Dave 8:37am Thu Feb 14 '02 adamsdave32@hotmail.com Before I say anything else I would like to give a round of applause to Jonah and those debating him. Open, productive and peaceful debate make me smile ear to ear. Second, to Jonah, I take part in protests and follow many of the same ideals you are debating, but don't call me a "hippie", or for that matter hang any other stereotypical label upon me. Now my point finally. Jonah, define "Democracy". How many of these so called "democracies" where put in place by corporate-sponsored, CIA rigged "elections". Ask the citizens of Haiti about their "Democracy". Like many other things in life, just becasue something bares a certain label doesn't mean that is what it really is. Peace. ------------------ Jonah, I appreciate the effort (english) by Kelly 8:39am Thu Feb 14 '02 First of all, it is horribly sterotypical of you to assume that everyone who visits or posts on this web site is in "College". In fact, even to assume that people who share these opinions about the world and the course it is taking, are in college is wrong. Most protesters I've met, whether it's been in Quebec City, or Toronto, have at least been over the age of 35, infact there was a huge, huge number of people obviously over the age of 50! There is no age limit to caring about the planet and the people in it. Secondly, thank you for being less of a dumbass then buddy Jason. This guy needs to be forcefully drowned in a pool of his own vomit. Lastly, if you, or people like you, want to believe that the course this planet is taking is right, there's nothing anyone's going to do to convince you otherwise. You can come up with statistics, we can come out with statistics, we can drown eachother in statistics and neither of us will change out opinions. The only hope this planet has...and I mean this in all honesty...is that one day people with your ideals will die. Thank God, that the number of people who intolerant with the injustices that are going on in our countries (Canada and the US)and the rest of the world, are growing. As Darwin said, it is survival of the fittest, your mentality will die, die and be remembered as the Dark Ages of the 21st Century. Now, feel free to drown yourself in your own vomit. ------------------ flawed logic (english) by buffo 8:48am Thu Feb 14 '02 There is one glaring hole in this guys logic. "For example, if multinational corporations threaten democracy, how come the number of democracies grew simultaneously with the rise of the multinational corporation? It's hard to pinpoint an exact date for when the "multinational corporation" or "globalization" began, but over the last 30 years we've been told that democracy is increasingly threatened by these diabolical forces. The funny thing is, the number of democracies has been rising, with occasional fluctuations, pretty much nonstop." The thing is that democracy has increased in the countries that has least contact with multinational corporations. If you could show that democracy has increased in the countries with the strongest corporations over the last decades, you would have a point. But the truth is the exact opposite. What we see in the developed world, is that former freedoms, like freedom of expression, religious freedom, fair use etc are slowly being taken away, so that the multinationals can earn more money. We are not heading towards more democracy, we are heading towards corporate feudalism.------------------ globalization (english) by bqe 8:49am Thu Feb 14 '02 Democracy & Capitalism raise the standard of living. ------------------ Buffo.. (english) by bqe 9:07am Thu Feb 14 '02 "What we see in the developed world, is that former freedoms, like freedom of expression, religious freedom, fair use etc are slowly being taken away, so that the multinationals can earn more money. We are not heading towards more democracy, we are heading towards corporate feudalism" I'm 24 and I live in the US.. never had anyone tell me I can't speak my mind. I worship whatever god I want. I listen to whatever music I want. They taught me evolution in school and I didn't have to pledge my allegiance to the flag.... so what are you talking about? I would agree that there's too much corporate-government incest in DC, but I don't believe we're being overtly oppressed. As a nation we have some messed up consumer issues and the current nation-building mentality of the administration is troubling, but the core freedoms are there. ------------------ Cree Prophecy (english) by Kelly 9:12am Thu Feb 14 '02 Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the lsst fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten. Cree Prophecy To the angry young Republican (english) by Colateral damage 9:14am Thu Feb 14 '02 Where did you get your information the WTO or the IMF website? To be blunt it is a load of republican crap, go to Argentina, Capitalism has really improved the people's lives there. ------------------ Jonah, your a genius!!! (english) by T-Bone 9:16am Thu Feb 14 '02 Jonah, your article was well written and easy to read. I complement you on your writing style. I still feel, though, that you really don't get it at all. Vague comparisons about the rise of democracies along side of capitalist expansion aren't proof that the "kids" have it wrong. Your understanding of history is blatantly lopsided and simplistic. Like most neo-liberals, you attribute to the market a near deity like status. You explain that capitalism has engendered democracy somehow without any explanation as to how this happens, beyond "magically" creating a middle class that by intrinsic nature thirsts for democracy. Your mysticism regarding the holy power of the market epitomizes the current shabby state of our intellectual culture. Markets are a way to echange goods, nothing more. They are not engines of progress, though I agree they can have progressive aspects. I don't think anyone on this web site would argue that capitalism is entirely lacking of progressive aspects. It certainly beats feudalism, for instance. Or theocracy, for that matter. But is it the end all of human systems? Is it really all that democratic? It is not. Just one quick example. Here in the United States an important part of our constitution is the Bill of Rights. (now very much degraded) Ask yourself: How many freedoms promised in the Bill of Rights apply while at work? The answer of course, is none. A major contradiction in your free-market philosophy is that the rights of property often outweigh the rights of people. Another example of this: take a dollar bill out of your pocket. Look at it. Then think about how that inanimate object has more freedom of movement than you do. If that dollar is embodied as capital, it can cross borders without restriction, something we puny humans certainly cannot. And if that dollar is capitalized to create a profit, it usually has more rights than say people who are resisting the privatizing of say water rights, because by fighting against privatization of water you are "violating" the right of that dollar to create profit. How absurd. But this is precisely the philosophy of neo-liberalism, a profound anti-humanism that contradicts itself at every step. As humanity crawled out from the darkness of an oppressive religous fog, we quickly replaced it with the bright haze of market worship, commidifying our very thought in the process, selling for a false prosperity all notions of human dignity and human sovereignty. Neo-liberalism claims to lifting all boats is a rather sad rationalization when compared to actual reality. It instead elevates an already super-priviledged few over the rest of the globe, and institutionalizes poverty and inequality on a scale that would have made the fattest roman patrician blush with shame. ------------------ Re: (english) by Baghdad 9:16am Thu Feb 14 '02 You are assumming that since democracy (if you call pulling a lever in a booth every 4 years democracy) and multinational corporations came into prominence that the 2 are inextricably linked. What you need to do is provide some data linking the 2 to each other. You also try to link the increase in trade to better living conditions, which is clearly proven false when you actually look to past incidents- expanding of trade routes in Asia led to colonialism there, discovery of the Americas to colonialism and genocide here, and there is no way that you could say that the expansion of the slave trade did anything for freedom or democracy. What did spark those increases in democracy were people not corporations, fighting back against those that would treat them as less than human. "Corporations, it's true, do not much care about democracy" "Communist and authoritarian regimes have a bad habit of seizing the assets of foreign companies" Yes they do sieze the assets, but corporations still for some reason do business with these countries, and to a very considerable extent. Why? Because before these countries sieze the assets the political climate is absolutly perfect for them to do business with: Authoritarian regimes who can kill trade unionists, refuse environmental standards and basically act as a puppet government for these corporations in order to get a piece of the pie. And then yes they do have a habit of siezing assets- then oops, its off to war again, look at the Iraq, Panama, and any other of a hundred incidents to see, then we just go and put another set of dictators in to work for the corporations (exactly what will happen in Afghanistan). "Now, there is a difference between democracy and freedom" No there isn't. Democracy is freedom. At the very basics democracy is the right to choose, the 2 are inextricably linked, is you do not have one you do not have the other. If these countries are not democracies they are not free, even in the slightest sense. Even in a representative democracy (as opposed to the anarchist ideal of the direct, participatory democracy) you are only as free as you have direct control over the decisions that are being made that affect you (which in most of these countries is very little). 'Freedom House reports that "electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 62.5 percent of the world's population."' Now look at the other 37.5 percent, that live in dictatorships and such and see the involvment the corporations have in these nations: http://www.guerrillanews.com/cocakarma/ and in your own words "Corporations, it's true, do not much care about democracy" Thanks for proving your own point wrong. ------------------ this "Goldberg" guy (english) by google 9:20am Thu Feb 14 '02 is married to Jessica Gavora, a former speechwriter for former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, and now Ashcroft's chief speechwriter and policy advisor. I offer this just to shed some light on where he's "comming from", as the kids say. ------------------ Response to BQE (english) by maldoror 9:35am Thu Feb 14 '02 You say that capitalism increases the standard of living. Setting aside the obvious flaws in your simplified construction as outlined and refuted by posters above, I posit this question: With all the rampant economic injustices implemented by our 21st century update of a deeply-flawed 19th centuy colonial-industrialist capitalism, has standard of living become more important than the standard of LIFE? Living = mere subsistence. Life = fulfillment. Ask yourself, is exploitative factory labor fulfilling? Does it build human consciousness? Your answer might be: it requires time to develop these things (higher education, social support programs, labor unions, etc.) and globalization is just a good first step. It will allow these nations to eventually develop. I answer this with another question: then what? What educated person will make your shoes for thirty cents a day so that you can get them for "rock bottom" prices at the local Labor Day sale? Global capitalism will not correct itself as so many pundits seem to claim. It will only find new ways to exploit cheap labor unless it is severely restrained by labor laws and tariffs, which WTO severely undermines. Global trade is just putting a new face on an old monster - exploitation. ------------------ Freedom (and pseudo-freedom) (english) by Beery 9:37am Thu Feb 14 '02 "I'm 24 and I live in the US.. never had anyone tell me I can't speak my mind." Really? Then you haven't tried saying anything unpopular. Try going to New York and saying that 9-11 was the natural progression of US foreign policy, and then come back on here and tell me about freedom of speech. "I worship whatever god I want." Try Wicca, or (these days) Islam. I suppose you never heard of the Wiccan student in (I think it was) Oklahoma who was expelled for - get this - putting a spell on a teacher and making him ill. This was not in 1690 - this was 1999. They didn't accuse her merely of being a witch - they accused her of casting real spells (that means that the SCHOOLTEACHERS believed that the physical world can be altered by incantations). "I listen to whatever music I want." How would you know??? You only get to hear what record companies let you listen to. "They taught me evolution in school" Proving only that you don't live in Kansas. "and I didn't have to pledge my allegiance to the flag" Oooh, that's a biggie - well then, I guess that democracy is safe. We don't have to pledge allegiance to a piece of fabric. Wow! It just shows how far down the road of conservatism we've gone when someone cites this as an example of how many freedoms we still have. ".... so what are you talking about? " All of the above. If you still don't know, you'll most likely never get it. ------------------ Hippies (english) by Beery 9:54am Thu Feb 14 '02 ""hippies" need to raid their trust funds and buy a clue!!! " This is the same sort of propaganda that asserts that all activists are spoiled student agitators from rich families. It is complete rubbish. I am probably fairly typical for an activist (if there is such a thing as a typical activist). I'm 39 years old, from a working class background. I started work at 16. I never had a trust fund and couldn't afford to go to college. This idea that we're all spoiled brats just shows your ignorance. ------------------ Debating Points (english) by Shevac 10:06am Thu Feb 14 '02 "For example, if multinational corporations threaten democracy, how come the number of democracies grew simultaneously with the rise of the multinational corporation? It's hard to pinpoint an exact date for when the "multinational corporation" or "globalization" began, but over the last 30 years we've been told that democracy is increasingly threatened by these diabolical forces. The funny thing is, the number of democracies has been rising, with occasional fluctuations, pretty much nonstop." Well, to start with, lets define some terms... like say "democracy". I personally cannot name one functioning "democracy" in the world today. For instance, the US is not a "democracy", its a representative republic. I tend to define "democracy" as direct government by the people. If you knew anything about this movement, you'd have seen democracy in action in the meetings that make decisions for this movement. A small town where a town-hall meeting makes decisions for a town would be another example. When I went to look up democracy on the internet, it seems that the definition has been stretched since the days I took political science in the late 70's. Now it been stretched to governments where power ultimately resides with the people. So the definition now covers governments like the US. However, this creates a huge grey area based on how firmly power is rooted in the people. So the argument of what exactly makes a "democracy" becomes a part of the discussion launched by the statement from this article. For instance, is a "democracy" a system where the people get a very limited say in their government by voting once every few years? Is it still a "democracy" if the people have limited say over which candidates are presented on the ballot? For example, the Soviet Union used to have elections, and most dictators have usually been "elected" at some point. So the openness and the honesty of the election process has to somehow contribute to whether a country is a "democracy". I personally would say there is very limited evidence that the US is a democracy. Take the current election system. In the last Presidential election, there were two candidates presented to the American people to choose from. The system that selected these candidates was designed to limit popular imput and to strengthen the hands of those with power and money in chosing the candidates. If you look closely at the nominating systems in place for American Presidential candidates, you'll see a lot of very non-Democratic principles involved. Some are direct, like "super-delegates" to the convention to make sure the party power-brokers have a pre-selected large voting block, some are more indirect like a primary schedule that forces the candidates to campaign in multiple states in a week, thus forcing the candidates to rely on money and existing power systems to secure the nomination. The end result was a system whereby it was well known that Gore and Bush would be the candidates for President long before the charade of primary elections was held. Other candidates are blocked from appearing on the ballots in many areas, or it takes an extreme committment of resources to get on the ballot. So while Gore and Bush were automatically on the ballot and could focus on campaigning, the other candidates were having to collect large numbers of petition signatures and file lawsuits to attempt to even get their name on the ballot. Beyond this, only Gore and Bush were allowed to speak to the American people. Other candidates were barred from participating in Presidential candidate debates, and the media generally refused to present the views of the other candidates in anywhere near amounts which they devoted to presenting the views of the two official candidates. And that's the Presidential elections. How democratic is a system of governement where huge percentages of the representatives run either unopposed or in "safe" districts where the vote has been gerrymandered such that they can safely win every election. And this doesn't even get into the systems of voting, the systematic exclusion of minority populations from the voting roles, the use of inaccurate voting equipment that throws out 3% to 5% of the vote in minority precincts, potential fraud in the vote counting systems, the gaming of the vote counting system by partisan elected officials to make sure that the vote goes the way they wanted, the fraudulent filing of late absentee voter ballots, etc, etc, etc. So, there seems to be a very real question as to whether the United States is a "democracy". Does power rest with the people of the United States? Given that the overwhelming opinion of Americans at the time of the last election was that they wanted neither Gore nor Bush as President, it seems somewhat dubious to claim that the US is a "democracy". If the US fails the "democracy" test, then how many others do as well. I see "President Musharraf" visiting the White House. Funny, he was "General Musharraf" up to not long before 9-11. He's never been elected, and he's a General who took power in a military coup about two years ago. Don't count Pakistan as a Democracy. How many countries in the world are there that have truly "Democratic" systems for ruling their country? I know of none that practice true democracy as I would define it. There are really precious few others where the people are allowed to run whatever candidates for elections, openly support candidates without fear and intimidation, where candidates are allowed to speak to the electorate on a free and equal basis, where the elections are frequent enough to make elected representatives accountable to citizens, where citizens have tools like recall or the ability to pass legislation by petitioning to get it on a ballot in order to control the actions of elected officials after they gain office. Most of the so-called "democracies" of the world would never be called a democracy after a close examination. Typically its a government where a ruling elite is using some rigged and phony elections to put a veneer of democracy over their oligarchical rule. They may change the face of the "president" every eight to ten years, but the power to rule rests with the elite. And even with the new "stretched" definition of democracy that I see listed today, the power to rule needs to rest with the citizens in order for a country to be a democracy. Its when you take a close look at what really constitutes a Democracy that you can then proceed onto the step of saying the the rise in power of the multi-national corporation has been counter the notion of "democratic" government. To use just one example, look at the notion of the "trade agreements" that are enacted. A small group of representatives signs a trade agreement such that all the sovereign powers of the nation are ceded over to some internation arbitration board composed entirely of corporate trade experts. These trade agreements are highly sought after by the multi-national corporations, because they shield the corporation from having to deal with local movements demanding that the operations of the corporation protect the local environment or treat local workers fairly. These trade agreements are signed by "representatives" who are elected with the money and the support of the corporations in a rigged elections system designed such that any candidate running without the corporate money and support cannot win. In the US, they even went so far as to pass things like the GATT agreement during a "lame-duck" session of Congress. Many of the "representatives" voting in favor of the bill had already been voted out of office at the time the GATT (WTO) was approved. Thus they were free to take whatever corporate bribes they wanted, and were untouchable from the voters who largely opposed the formation of the WTO. So, how does that picture fit with the above discussion of what really makes a "democracy". Start to look closely at these things, instead of just throwing words like "democracy" around, and you see that true democracy and the rule of the multi-national corporations cannot coexist. Eventually you are going to be on one side or the other, and I'm with the people. One last point that I'd disagree with the original article on. I would not say that the growth of the power and influence of the multi-national corporation has helped with the growth of the middle class. In fact, it has done largely the opposite in the last few decades. The destruction of unions and the shipping of unionized jobs to sweatshops overseas has pretty much destroyed working class access to middle class living. Forty years ago, one worker in an unionized manufacturing job could support a family, buy a house, take vacations, send children to university etc. Nowadays, two workers working full time have a very hard time doing the same. Some of this is masked by debt. I think you would find that many families that might appear to be middle class these days are actually much deeper in debt than their equivalents in the 1950s and 1960s. The appearence of middle class living is still there to some degree, but its an appearence that's built on the phony foundation of debt. Also, a couple of decades ago, many of the middle class in many communities would have been the proprietors of the local buisnesses. The trend of the last few decades has been to destroy these businesses by having large corporations move into areas and drive them out of business. Not too long ago, the local grocery store, the local gas stations, the local banks, the local hardware stores, the shops on main street, etc were all owned by local members of the community. Nowadays, Kroger, Walmart, Bank of America, Exxon, etc have moved into communities, either bought or driven out of business the locally owned businesses and now dominate the market in most areas. Again, the appearence of some prosperity and middle class living remains. But the economic engine that used to create that middle class prosperity has either been sold or destroyed. So there are many who might appear wealthy today as they still have the proceeds of selling their grocery store to the big chain (if they were that fortunate), or who may still have wealth and savings from their days as a proprietor, but the engine that creates more wealth has either been sold or destroyed. Litterally, the goose that was laying golden eggs is gone from most communities, and the geeze have been consolodated into corporate hq. ------------------ shevac (english) by junglejaws 9:22pm Thu Feb 14 '02 true, every word of it ------------------------------- 134923 CAN AMERICA BE DEFEATED? (english) by MS 6:25am Thu Feb 14 '02 (Modified on 10:19am Thu Feb 14 '02) From The Guardian this morning. Can the US be defeated? America's global power has no historical precedent, but its room for manoeuvre is limited Seumas Milne Thursday February 14, 2002 The Guardian Those who have argued that America's war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had "better get their house in order" or face what he called the "justice of this nation", it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all. Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the "full spectrum dominance" the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients. With his declaration of war against this absurdly named "axis of evil", Bush has abandoned whatever remaining moral high ground the US held onto in the wake of September 11. He has dispensed with the united front against terror, which had just about survived the onslaught on Afghanistan. And he has made fools of those, particularly in Europe, who had convinced themselves that America's need for international support would coax the US Republican right out of its unilateralist laager. Nothing of the kind has happened. When the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer plaintively insists that "alliance partners are not satellites" and the EU's international affairs commissioner Chris Patten fulminates at Bush's "absolutist and simplistic" stance, they are swatted away. Even Jack Straw, foreign minister of a government that prides itself on its clout in Washington, was slapped down for his hopeful suggestion that talk of an axis of evil was strictly for domestic consumption. Allied governments who question US policy towards Iraq, Israel or national missile defence are increasingly treated as the "vassal states" the French president Jacques Chirac has said they risk becoming. Now Colin Powell, regarded as the last voice of reason in the White House, has warned Europeans to respect the "principled leadership" of the US even if they disagree with it. By openly arrogating to itself the prerogative of such leadership - and dispensing with any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other multilateral bodies - the US is effectively challenging what has until now passed for at least formal equality between nations. But it is only reflecting reality. The extent of America's power is unprecedented in human history. The latest increases will take its military spending to 40% of the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next 19 states put together. No previous military empire - from the Roman to the British - had anything like this preponderance, let alone America's global reach. US officials are generally a good deal more frank about the situation than their supporters abroad. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon described US strategy as "benevolent domination" (though whether those who have recently been on the receiving end of US military power, from the Middle East to Latin America, would see it that way seems doubtful). A report for the US Space Command last year, overseen by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodised about the "synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority" that would come with missile defence and other projects to militarise space. This would "protect US interests and investment" in an era when globalisation was likely to produce a further "widening between haves and have-nots". It would give the US an "extraordinary military advantage". In fact, it would only increase further what became an overwhelming military advantage a decade ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the experience of Bush's war on Afghanistan has rammed home the lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that such a gigantic disproportion of international power is a threat to the principles of self- determination the US claims to stand for on a global scale. A state with less than one 20th of the earth's population is able to dictate to the other 95% and order their affairs in its own interests, both through military and economic pressure. The issue is not one of "anti-Americanism" or wounded national pride (curiously, those politicians around the world who prattle most about patriotism are also usually the most slavish towards US power), but of democracy. This is an international order which, as the September 11 attacks demonstrated, will not be tolerated and will generate conflict. Many doubt that such conflict can amount to anything more than fleabites on an elephant, which has demonstrated its ability to crush any serious challenger, and have come to believe US global domination is here for good. That ignores the political and economic dimensions (including in the US itself), as well as the problems of fighting asymmetric wars on many fronts. In economic terms, the US has actually been in decline relative to the rest of the world since it accounted for half the world's output after the second world war. In the past few years its share has bounced back to nearly 30% on some measures, partly because of the Soviet implosion and Japanese stagnation, and partly because of America's own long boom. But in the medium term, the strain of military overstretch is likely to make itself felt. More immediately, the US could face regional challenges, perhaps from China or Russia, which it would surely balk at pushing to military conflict. Then there is the likelihood of social eruptions in client states like Saudi Arabia which no amount of military technology will be able to see off. America's greatest defeat was, it should not beforgotten, inflicted by a peasant army in Vietnam. US room for manoeuvre may well prove more limited than might appear. When it comes to some of America's richer and more powerful allies, the opposite is often the case: they can go their own way and get away with it. The Foreign Office minister Peter Hain argued at the weekend that being a steadfast ally of the US didn't mean being a patsy, pointing as evidence to the fact that Britain was able to maintain diplomatic relations with two out of three of President Bush's axis of evil states. The test of his claim will come when the US government turns its rhetoric into action and demands British support for a full-scale assault on Iraq (as yesterday's Washington drumbeat suggests could be only months away), or the use of the Fylingdales base in Yorkshire for its missile defence plans. Tony Blair has demonstrated none of the limited independence shown by earlier Labour prime ministers, such as Harold Wilson, and all the signs are that he will once again agree to whatever he is asked to do on Britain's behalf. If he is going to stand up to the global behemoth, he's going to need some serious encouragement - both inside and outside parliament. add your own comments ---------------------- if (english) by junglejaws 6:54am Thu Feb 14 '02 if blair can't do that, then get him the hell out of office. britain needs more "stuff" then what he has. ---------------------- US must be destroyed (english) by Zbigniew Brzezinski 7:32am Thu Feb 14 '02 Not only can it be destroyed - it must be destroyed. 911 has demonstrated that the resources of the evil empire America can be used on itself. And any sensible spectator throughout the world has seen how Americans actually aren't united at all - We are feeding on each other. Our leadership only reaps and rapes the people of the world. There must be an organized "Strike back at America day" throughout the world. Countries who the United States fuck over on a regular basis must unite and make geurilla strikes at US interests. If this first Strike at America day proves fruitfull, more and more can be organized, and there is simply not enough people in the United States and not enough money to defend 50 or 60 war fronts at a time. Only this way will America be stopped and the people of the world can breath a sigh of relief and the earth can rest from the onslaught. ORGANIZE THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL STRIKE AT AMERICAN INTERESTS DAY Zbigniew Brzezinski ---------------------- it begins (english) by luther blissett 8:30am Thu Feb 14 '02 look at whats heppening in argentina with neighbourhood councils. they are on their way to defeating the us in argentina. just wait until the rest of world sees how well it works. the beginning of a syndicalist world? ---------------------- Europe - Get to work! (english) by US Citizen 8:54am Thu Feb 14 '02 An excellent article. But is Europe and other states the US considers "non-rogue" states such as Japan and India going to do anything effective about it?? Please understand me. At this time, there is NO effective domestic opposition to this imperial jugernaut. Republicans and Democrats, workers, coordinators and capital; all are supporting this stupendous war machine. Just like Hitler and his "Jewish and Bolshevic threat", most US citizens completely believe the preposterous notion that we (the US) are, or soon will be, physically threatened by these tiny nations. To be sure, for many, this frightening "threat" consists of not being able to afford fueling their 2.5 ton SUV's, and maybe having to move within 30km of their workplaces, even God forbid, use the bus, but this is just more madness just the same. Only action from Europe has a chance to reign the beast in. For starters, inform evil uncle Sam that no base agreements will be renewed. Provide NO cooperation with furnishing SDI sites. Do not allow military overflights by any non- Eurpoean nation in your sovereign airspace. Any other ideas welcome. - US Citizen ---------------------- North Koreans, Iraqis etc under your beds!!!! (english) by Paranoid Inc. US patent 9:37am Thu Feb 14 '02 WOW!!!!!! $45billions to spend killing people!!!!! We have to find a lot of enemies to kill!!!! Happy days are heeeere again!!!! I have hit that Paranoia button. Yes, I am finding enemies, more enemies, enemies everywhere...!!!! Ain't life fun???!!!! ---------------------- And why do we still have smaller countries? (english) by taliver 9:39am Thu Feb 14 '02 Do you people actually believe that the world would be a wonderful Utopia if only the US didn't get involved outside its borders? Do you really think that everyone on the face of the planet simply wants to live peacefully with no other motives, except for the Americans? If the US had not existed from 1950 onward, I'm sure Europe would be a much cleaner and peaceful place, with everyone taken care of by a wonderful Communist government. I'm sure that if the US didn't exist today, that no middle eat country would ever desire to build an army and take over all of is neighbors, killing the ethnicly different populations. No-- that would never happen without the US's help. Yes, thise two previous paragraphs were meant to be sarcastic. Look around at the real world. It's full of very evil (greedy/egotistical) people who don't care if the US is there or not. Look at Africa-- here's a country we've by and large stayed out of, and look at its condition -- deplorable. So, thank America that you have a web to write on, and that no one is knocking on your door for writing on it, you sanctimonious assholes. ---------------------- Capitalism and Freedom (english) by Beery 10:15am Thu Feb 14 '02 "Look around at the real world. It's full of very evil (greedy/egotistical) people who don't care if the US is there or not. Look at Africa-- here's a country we've by and large stayed out of, and look at its condition -- deplorable." I'm sorry, but this is just the sort of tunnel vision I've come to expect from the reactionary element here. You claim the US has 'stayed out of Africa'. How can you say that while keeping a straight face. We were in Somalia militarily. We've run agents through any number of African countries. Our government was complicit in the assassination of Lumumba in the Congo and various other political assassinations. In north Africa, US involvement has been ongoing since the early 1800s. It's true, however, that Africa has been relatively unaffected by US influence, but that's by no means saying that Africa has been free to develop at its own pace. Major negative influence has been felt from the other colonialist powers of Europe long before the US got involved, and many still exert influence there now. For a good example of what specifically American influence can have on a continent, let's look at South America. Here's one continent that should clearly have benefitted from the vast and weighty US influence that has been brought to bear over the last hundred years. One would think that this area would be a shining light of democracy and freedom. I wonder why it isn't? Could it be that America exploits these countries as fodder for a capitalist system that is fundamentally unfair and top heavy? No - surely not. After all, capitalism goes hand in hand with liberty. The free market will set you free. Yeah, right. ---------------------- Utopia (english) by Beery 10:19am Thu Feb 14 '02 "Do you people actually believe that the world would be a wonderful Utopia if only the US didn't get involved outside its borders?" No, of course not. But it would be a lot closer to Utopia if only America WOULD intervene for good instead of for profit or revenge. ------------------------------------- A few days ago writer and sometimes partner of Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, posted a note on Hancock's web site concerning the September 11th attacks and the various "coincidences" around that date. Many of these we had already noted in our own story on the subject, "Who's the Enemy, Really?", but since Bauval added a few new twists to the tale, we decided to reprint the post and include a link to the original. We have continued to watch with some amusement as Bauval and Hancock continue to parse words and dance around the obvious connections between various Masonic/Templar mysteries and many prominent modern day figures and events. They continue to deny the obvious, refusing to make the same kinds of connections in modern day events that they so willing assert into interpretations of ancient events and historical figures. It is our opinion that neither will ever truly figure out the truth of they have uncovered unless they are willing to think the unthinkable. Still, some of these recent statements have added useful information to the debate, and for that reason we will continue to cite their work where it is applicable and encourage them to expand the basis of their belief systems. C'mon guys, you're almost there ... From: http://www.grahamhancock.com/  phorum/read.php?f=1&i=75176&t=75176 SATAN’S CALLING CARD SEPTEMBER 11: A DATE TO REMEMBER. By Robert G. Bauval Time and Place Historical events are fixed by the time and place they occurred. And this, as we all know, is expressed in a calendar date and the name of location. On face value, this appears obvious enough. After all, I was born on the 5th March 1948 in the city of Alexandria, as officially recorded on my birth certificate. No discussion, period. Ah, but what about much earlier historical events such as, say, the famous battle of Kadesh between the army of Ramses II and the Hittites, as depicted on the pylon walls of the Rameseum near the city of Luxor in Upper Egypt? In this case there are as many ‘dates’ ranging from c.1280 BC to c. 1298 BC depending which textbook you pick up. Even the exact location of this battle is a matter of some contention, and there are disagreement as to whether the battle was a ‘victory’ or a ‘defeat disguised as a victory’ for Ramses II. But there is worse. When it comes to such popular historical events such as, for example, the Biblical Exodus, well, forget it. Historians can’t even agree if it happened at all, let alone give us an exact date or the exact route taken by the Jews. The problem with historical events such as these is that they are ‘dated’ i.e. recorded, on different calendar systems or by the ‘reigns’ of such and such a kings and suchlike methods, presenting a nightmarish confusion for the chronologist. As for the location’s name, that, too, is given in different languages often leading to totally wrong conclusions. Think of the Arc of the Covenant or Noah’s Ark and you’ll get the picture. There is, too, the possibility that certain locations are, in a sense, chosen for symbolic reasons. Think of the terrorist attacks on the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which were almost certainly masterminded by Ossama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation. In the minds of the terrorists these bombings were, of course, attacks on the ‘United States’ and thus, in a sense, projected elsewhere to geographical locations either arbitrarily or for strategic convenience. But wait, this surely does not apply to the 11th September attacks on American soil? These attacks were clearly aimed at the United States. Well, yes…and no. Let’s look at this more closely. Firstly the 11th September of the year 2001 AD (Anno Domini) is based on the Gregorian calendar. For the Islamic calendar this date fell on the 23rd Jumaada Al Thani of the year 1422 A.H. (Anno Hegira); for the Ethiopian calendar it was the 1st Meskerem of the year 7501; in the Coptic (Christian Egyptian) calendar it was the 1st Thout of the year 1725, and according to the Jewish calendar it was the 23rd Elul of the year 5761. Confused? There’s more. The Ethiopian 1st Meskerem and the Coptic 1st Thout are the New Year’s Day for both these calendars. The Ethiopian and Coptic ‘New Year’, in fact, always fall on the 11th September of the Gregorian calendar (except on leap years, where an extra day is added). But check this. In the year 1999 of the Gregorian calendar, the “11th September” marked not only the Coptic and Ethiopian ‘New Year’ and also the Jewish New Year (which fell on 1st Tishri 5760). This is because the Jewish ‘New Year’, which is a bit like the Christian Easter, is not fixed by changes because of the complex way it is determined such as the sighting of the new moon and also that it must not fall on certain days of the week. The Jewish ‘New Year’ can fall anywhere between the first week of September and the first week of October and, statistically, more than often somewhere in the middle like, for example near or on 11th September. The historical roots of all these ancient calendars are to be found mostly in ancient Egyptian going as far back as 3000 BC. The ancient Egyptian civic calendar, probably established in the forth millennium BC, was made up of 12 months of 30 days with each month having 3 ‘weeks’ of ten days called Decans. But to keep up with the (approximate) solar year of 365 days, the Egyptians also added 5 extra or epagomenal days, known as the Birth of the Neters (divine principles or ‘gods’), which included the celebrated mythological couple, Osiris and Isis. The ‘Beginning of the Year’ or New Year’s Day of the Egyptians was marked by the first dawn rising of Sirius, a star sacred to the goddess Isis, which originally occurred on the day of the summer solstice i.e. on the 21st June Gregorian. This special day was called 1st day of the 1st month of Thoth. But because of the ¼ day difference as well as a small variance the sidereal year and the tropical year, this after all man-made calendar slowly ‘drifted’ away from both the heliacal rising of Sirius and the summer solstice, such that by the early Christian times the 1st of the month of Thoth had drifted to the 11th September Gregorian, which is why the Egyptian-Coptic ‘New Year’ i.e. 1st of Thoot, starts on that date. Fine so far. But what does all this have to have with the 11th September attacks? Peace Treaty In September 1999 a long-awaited peace treaty, known as WYE II, was signed between the PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The signature, which had taken place on the 4th September 1999 at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sham El Sheikh, was, in fact to become officially effective seven days later i.e. on the 11 September 1999. The actual wording on the Wye II treaty reads "This Memorandum will enter into force one week from the date of its signature. Made and signed in Sharm El Sheikh, this Fourth day of September 1999." The WYEE II agreement was so named because it followed the so-called Wye I negotiations that begun on the 9th and 10th September 1993 by an secret exchange of private letters between PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. These letters revealed that the two bitter enemies had, in fact, been engaged for many months in secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway. In Rabin's letter it is confirmed that the PLO, which so far had been unofficially represented in the Palestinian Delegation established under the so-called Madrid formula, was to be recognised by Israel as the only representative of the Palestinian people. Rabin's official recognition, which is dated 10th September 1993, came in reply to a letter from Arafat dated 9th September 1993, in which the PLO also recognised the State of Israel and further pledged to delete certain articles in the old PLO Charter which had denied the existence of Israel. These negotiations ended in the so-called ‘Declaration of Principles’ signed on the 13th September 1993, and finally led to the WYE II peace treaty that came into effect on the 11th September 1999. To many radical Islamic fundamentalists and, to be fair, to many radical Jewish fundamentalists, the peace treaty was seen as a terrible betrayal of the worse possible kind and it probably was the main cause of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Not surprisingly, many regarded the date of “11th September” as the 'Day of Infamy' when their historical religious cause was finally sold out by Arafat and Barak. Ironically, this ‘Day of Infamy’ also happened to be in the year 1999, when the ‘New Year’ of the Jews and also the ‘New Year’ of the Egyptian Copts fell on the 11th September. The Jewish ‘New Year’ is generally known as Rosh Hashanah (which means ‘Beginning of the Year’), but itt is also called Yom Hadin (the Day of Judgement); Yom Hazikaron (the Day of Memorial) and is thought of as ‘The Day of Penitence’ when starts a period of ‘ten days of penitence’ leading to Yom Kippur (Passover) ‘The Day of Atonement’. But the Jewish ‘New Year’ has a much deeper meaning to orthodox Jews. It is associated to the Messianic Age, and many Jews today actually believe that it will be on that ‘Feast of Trumpets’ that their long awaited Messiah will come and make his appearance on the ‘Temple’ at Jerusalem. This day, it is said, will be the ‘ultimate redemption’ of Israel. Curiously, in recent years fundamental Christians have also associated the 11th September with the Second Coming of Christ, probably to conform with the ‘Rosh Hashanah’ Judaic prophecies but also, apparently, because some believe the true ‘star of Bethlehem’ appeared to the Magi on the 11th September 3 BC in the east, when a bright light was seen at the conjunction of the ‘star of kings’, Regulus, and the ‘planet of kings’, Jupiter, and when the sun, Venus and Mercury were in Virgo. Pentagon, Pillars and the Temple of Jerusalem Eerily, the date of September 11 is also actually incorporated in the construction history of the US Pentagon, one of the terrorists’ most coveted targets in 2001. Any self-respecting employees of the US Pentagon will quickly tell you these days that ‘ground breaking’ ceremony took place on 11th September 1941 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This ‘dual’ dating tag that is now forever locked in the annals of the US Pentagon is too much of a coincidence to be simply ignored. Could the terrorists have intended to draw attention to the year 1941 or, more specifically, to the year 1941 and something to do with President Roosevelt? But why? Let’s take a closer look. 1941 was, of course, the year that the US entered World War II. September 11, 2001 is an attempt to drawn the United States into a ‘World War III’. So far, there seems to be some ‘sense’ in making this link. But how does President Roosevelt himself fit in this ‘message’? What has Roosevelt got to do with the present PLO-Israeli conflict? Roosevelt was sworn in on the 4th March 1933 as the 32nd President of the United States. Coincidence would have it that he was also a 32nd Degree Freemason of the Scottish Rite. His Vice-President was Harry Truman, who was a 33rd Degree Freemason. In 1945 Truman became America’s 33rd President. But so what? Surely these are just coincidences? Perhaps; but, perhaps they are not seen as ‘coincidences’ by Anti-Masons and religious fundamentalists in view of what these two man participated in ‘creating’: the modern State of Israel. In this respect, the “32nd and 33rd degrees’ bear a curious relevance to all this. Let us see why. The Scottish Rite, which belongs to an elite branch of Freemasonry known as the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree, was founded in 1801 at the city of Charleston in South Carolina. Its origins are obscure, but it is generally agreed by Masonic historians that it started in the 1740s in the city of Bordeaux, France and brought to the American Colonies soon after. The idea was to link the normal or ‘craft’ Freemasonry with the elitist medieval order of the Knights Templar, a powerful political and financial organisation that originally was formed to protect the Holy Land --and especially Jerusalem-- from the Muslims. The Knights Templar, in fact, got their evocative name from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where had once stood Solomon’s Temple, and where these Christian knights had established their first camp during the Crusades. Jerusalem had been wrenched from the Muslims in the 11th century AD, and was the ‘Kingdom of Jerusalem’ was placed under the protection the Christian knights, mostly Knights Templar, who had sworn solemn oath to protect it. But in 1187 AD the Holy Land was lost again to the Muslims, when the army of Saladin crushed a Knights Templar’s army at the battle of Hattin on the 4th July. The Kingdom of Jerusalem eventually surrendered to Saladin on the 2nd October 1187, and from this time onwards, it remained in Muslim hands until modern times. Not surprising then, the rituals of Scottish rite Freemasonry are Judeo-Christian and those of the top degrees between the 30th and the 33rd are intensely ‘Templar’ in as such as they advocate the symbolic ‘rebuilding’ of the Temple of Solomon. Today, where once stood this much-fantasised Temple of Solomon, are to be seen the Mosque of Omar and the Mosque of Al Aqsa, two very sacred Muslim shrines and where the Prophet Mohamad is beleived to have ascended to heaven. To put it mildly, the Temple Mound in Jerusalem is Islam’s most venerated place, some saying even more sacred than the Kaaba at Makka. By a terrible twist of fate it is also the most haloed place in Judeo-Christian tradition and, mostly, to neo-Templar secret societies such as the Scottish Rite. Central to the Scottish Rite rituals are the so-called Masonic ‘Tracing Boards’, which are usually cloths placed on the floor of the lodge on which can be seen symbols representing the Temple of Solomon, usually two tall pillars, called Jachin and Boaz, and in the centre a five-pointed star, pentagon known as the ‘Blazing Star’. The ‘Blazing Star’ is identified s ‘Lucifer’, but not in the malevolent sense that this name generally has today, but to the classical ‘Lucce-Ferre’ or ‘Morning Star’ of the Romans i.e. Venus, which in the Bible is associated to Messianic events. But it can easily be seen how, to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Al Qaeda, such and elitist and secret society in America might be perceived as ‘Satanic’, hence the crude name allocated by radical Arabs of ‘Great Satan’ to describing the United States and it leaders. But to be fair, all this is not altogether surprising. In 1881, for instance, a huge scam was mounted against the Scottish Rite Freemasons of Charleston by a French author called Leo Taxil, who ‘exposed’ the ‘Satanic’ rituals of this fraternity and named many senior politicians and clerics as being involved. The ‘Leo Taxil Hoax’, as it is know in Masonic circles, caused much bad press for the Masons, and brought a wave of anti-Masonic attacks from the general public and the Church. Now the 32 degree rituals of the Scottish Rite (the 33rd is a title an not a ritual) are said to be related to the 32 Paths of Wisdom of the Sephiroth or Tree of Life found in the Judeo-Christian Kabala. The Kabala is a mystical system of learning or initiation based on the idea that the Holy Scriptures, such as the Torah, the Talmud and the Old Testament, are somehow encoded in the ‘language of God’ the key of which (Kabala) was handed to Moses and passed on to the Jewish sages and Rabbis. Apparently the secrets of the Kabala are in the mystical understanding of the 22 letters of the Jewish alphabet. These letters, which are seen as ‘paths’ or ‘roads’, link up the 10 ‘emanations of God’ that make up the Sephiroth, and thus together make up the 32 Paths. The same idea, interestingly enough, is also found in the modern esoteric Tarot Cards which was invented by a Scottish Rite Freemason, Court de Gebelin. Even more interestingly, the 31th, 32nd and 33rd degrees, which are the most crucial to the ‘rebuilding’ of the Temple of Solomon, also are found in the actual geographical latitudes or parallels that encompass the modern State of Israel. The 32 parallel passes, in fact, just a little south of the city of Jerusalem. It has often been remarked that the ‘Mother Lodge’ of the Scottish rite Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree was fixed at the city of Charleston in South Carolina because the 33rd degree parallel passes almost right through it. Also on some certificates of the Scottish Rite 33rd degree, the actual geographical latitude in degrees of the issuing lodge is given alongside the name and location of the lodge, indicating some sort of mystical connection between this ritual and the geographical location of the lodge. One can easily see, therefore, how radical fundamentalists might perceive the creation of the State of Israel which was encouraged by F.D. Roosevelt and ‘recognised’ in the 14th May 1948 by Harry Truman. Many ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States were, in fact, Freemasons. A year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous of the signatories, was sent to Paris to obtain funds and military support for the American War of Independence against the British. Franklin, too, was a Freemason, and he immediately joined the famous and very influential Nine sisters Lodge in Paris. Also members of this lodge are said to have been the famous hero the marquis de Lafayette, the future US President Thomas Jefferson, and the future leaders of the French Revolution, Danton and Marat. Also at the Nine Sisters lodge were registered the inventor of the Tarot cards Court de Gebelin, the celebrated astronomer, Gerome de Lalande, and the mathematician, Gaspard Monge. Interestingly, the last two were largely responsible for the creation of a new ‘Republican’ calendar based on 12 months of 30 days, with each months divided into three ‘decanis’ or ‘weeks’ of ten day, giving a total of 360 days. Five extra days, known as the ‘5 days of virtues’, were then added to make up 365 days of the solar year. This calendar was almost certainly based on the ancient Egyptian prototype and was probably masterminded at the Nine Sisters lodge. It was at that time that Court de Gebelin made the link between the ‘Blazing Star’ of the Freemasons with the five-pointed star symbol of Sirius, the ‘star of Isis’ (on which the original ancient Egyptian calendar was based). More intriguing, Court de Gebelin identified this star to the Tarot card No. 17, known as ‘The Star’, which depicts a woman wearing a large star on her head. Court de Gebelin, as well as other scholars at the time, knew very that at the Egyptian calendar had originally been fixed on the first dawn rising of Sirius i.e. the ancient Egyptian ‘New Year’, which takes place at the summer solstice, 21 June on the Gregorian calendar. But at the time of Gebelin’s ‘discovery’, the Gregorian calendar had only recently been introduced to replace the old Julian calendar established by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The conversion of the Julian calendar into the Gregorian calendar had, in fact, been imposed by Pope Gregory XII in 1582 but had not been adopted until 1752 in the American colonies. According to the old Julian calendar the 21 June was no longer the summer solstice but, instead, fell on the 4th July of the new Gregorian calendar. It was then customary during those early transitory years of the two calendars to include both the Julian and the Gregorian date on official documents. Interestingly, Freemasons consider their own ‘New Year’ to begin at the summer solstice, which in the old Julian calendar would be the ‘4th July’. Was the Declaration of Independence signed on that date for ‘Masonic’ reasons? Who knows. Shangri La It has been seriously suggested by the US Pentagon that one of the aborted targets of the 11th September 2001 attacks may have been Camp David, in Maryland. ‘Camp David’ is, to say the least, very evocative of ‘Camp Temple Solomon’ of the original Knights Templar. And to the Arabs ‘Camp David’ is, above all else, the place where the Egyptian President. Anwar Al Sadat, signed the first peace treaty with Israel with Prime Minister Menahim Begin on the 17th September 1978. The original name of Camp David was, in fact, Shangri La, and was first established by President F.D. Roosevelt in 1941-2. It was subsequently renamed ‘Camp David’ during the administration of President Eisenhower in 1953, apparently after his grandson, David Eisenhower. Camp David is the traditional place of retreat of US presidents since F.D. Roosevelt created the ‘camp’ and where many of had come to ‘see the whole world very clearly during times of conflict and strife.’ To Arab and especially Egyptian fundamentalists, however, Camp David is thought of as the place where Sadat ‘betrayed’ the Muslim people. So much was Sadat’s action vilified by the fundamentalists, that it caused him his life in 1981. Camp David was, quite obviously, a very hot target for 11th September terrorists. But could there have been an undetected ‘fifth’ target other than the twin towers of the WTC, the Pentagon and the aborted Camp David targets? And if so, what would the terrorists have selected? Again, we must resort to the same symbolic ‘language’ made up from the strange Kabalistic-Judeo-Christian-Templar brew that appears to be the trade mark of the 11th September attacks. The Woman with the Star We have seen how the so-called 32 Paths or ‘degrees’ of enlightenment were associated with the ‘rebuilding’ of ‘Solomon’s Temple’ as well as with the idea of the Masonic ‘Blazing Star’ or pentagon. We have seen how this ‘star’ was also linked to the Egyptian five-pointed symbol of Sirius, especially in the Tarot card called the ‘Star’ and represented by a woman wearing a seven-pointed star on her head. Often the Kabalistic Sephiroth or Tree of Life, with it’s distinct 22 ‘paths’ and 10 ‘emanations’ is also shown next to the woman with the star. ‘The Star’ is card numbered 17 and is preceded by cards 16, known as ‘The Tower’, and then card 15 known as ‘The Devil’. ‘The Tower’ card, which is thus in the middle of this series, depicts a gruesome scene showing a very tall building whose top part has been struck by lightning and has caught fire, and with people falling off the building. Often next to this burning tower is shown the Sephiroth. Card 15, ‘The Devil’, shown the ‘goat of Mendes’ (Satan) fronted by a five-pointed star or pentagon. In view of the striking imagery of these series of Tarot cards to the actual targets of 11th September, as well as the connection of the Tarot to the Scottish Rite, we cannot be blamed to wonder if the terrorists had the Tarot in mind when they planned the attacks? For when we project these Tarot images on the actual geographical landscape of the 11th September attacks, we can easily identify two of the target areas: the ‘Tower’ with the WTC, and the ‘Pentagon’ (Devil), the latter the ‘Great Satan’ of the terrorists, with the US Pentagon. But if we are reading this grusome ‘message’ correctly, there should also be the ‘women with the star’ in this scheme, and more precisely somewhere on the ‘other side’ of the WTC towers. And when we look for her, there she is: the Statue of Liberty, a ‘women’ wearing a tiara or crown in the form of a ‘star’. Less known to the general public is that the cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty was placed in a solemn ceremony in 1884 organised by the Masonic lodges of New York. Again, if we are reading the ‘message’ correctly, there should be some association between the Statue of Liberty and the ‘Blazing Star’ or Tarot ‘Star’. We recall that the latter were identified to Sirius, the star sacred to the Egyptian goddess Isis. But how could there possibly be a connection with this Egyptian icon and the Statue of Liberty? Odd enough, there is. For the Statue of Liberty, which was designed by the French sculptor Bartholdi and actually built by the French Engineer, Gustave Eiffel (both well-known Freemasons), was not originally a ‘Statue of Liberty’ at all, but first planned by Bartholdi for the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1867. Bartholdi, like many French Freemasons of his time, was deeply steeped in ‘Egyptian’ rituals, and it has often been said that he conceived the original statue as an effigy of the goddess Isis, and only later converted it to a ‘Statue of Liberty’ for New York harbour when it was rejected for the Suez Canal. The ‘star’ on the head of the Statue of Liberty might, therefore, be seen as the star of Isis, Sirius, who rising marked the ‘New Year’ of the ancient Egyptian calender and which now had ‘drifted’ to the “11th September” of the Coptic-Egyptian calendar …and by a fluke of destiny to the ‘Date of Infamy’ of PLO-Israeli peace treaty when it coincided with the Jewish and Coptic ‘New Years’. Bearing in mind that Anwar Al Sadat was attempting to bring together the three major religion, Islam, Christianity (Copts) and Judaism, this date now takes a particular sinister meaning in the wake of the terrible 11th September attacks. But could the terrorists have known all this? Mystical Kabala has been practiced by Muslim mystics for centuries. As for Knights Templar mysticism, these are said to have originally derived from the contact of the Christian knights with Muslim sages and Sufi mystics during the Crudades and even after. In short, for any self-respecting Muslim mystic like many found in organisation such as Al Qaeda, all this is, quite clearly, is kids’ stuff. The question is: who’s talking to whom?… Far fetched? But so was the 11th September attack. Only ‘Time’ will tell.

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