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These are regular editorials
produced alongside the corresponding issues on Nonviolent
News. |
Also in this editorial:
The world is often assumed to be a certain way because it
was ‘always’ so or because that is how it should
be ordered. And when it gets out of the perceived necessary
order then military intervention may be considered necessary
to correct that ‘disorder’. This is a little part
of what has been happening with Iraq which obviously had massive
problems under Saddam Hussein (who at one stage was a superpower’s
choice of regime and bolstered with armaments). The irony
of the current situation is that it is in many ways worse
than the latter years of Saddam Hussein’s regime when
his room for manoeuvre was severely curtailed, and in some
ways less opportunities exist now for creating a democratic
and positive state in the future because sectarianism has
become well and truly entrenched.
The USA has considered ‘the Americas’
its fiefdom since the mid-nineteenth century when the former
colony became sufficiently strong to be able to exert control
well outside its borders. This developed from the ‘Monroe
Doctrine’ rejection of European control in the Americas,
reasonable enough, into the statement by Theodore Roosevelt
in 1904, that the USA was ‘an international police power’
for the Americas – but what went on hardly could be
considered ‘policing’. The chronicle of late-nineteenth
and twentieth century history in Central and Latin America
is intimately connected with the US’s efforts, much
of it through military coups and plotting, to control that
whole swathe of the world. Cuba since 1959 has had its deficiencies
in relation to human rights and political freedoms but has
been a beacon of rectitude compared to some of the right wing
and fascist regimes which the USA either supported or brought
into being through coups; the Pinochet regime in Chile, the
creation of that other ‘9/11’, is just one example
among many. And yet it was Cuba which was victimised by the
USA, and continues to be so.
Latin America has gradually become broadly democratic
and more recently some countries have moved leftward including
Venezuela and Bolivia (where the president recently announced
plans to nationalise gas fields). This is a positive indication
of the region freeing itself from past legacies and taking
control of some of the resources which rightly belong to the
people there and not to multinational corporations. The hope
must be that at this stage the USA is powerless, though plotting,
coups, and economic or political pressure, to engineer the
overthrow of these regimes. But, given past history we should
also not underestimate what the USA may be capable of in regard
to what it considers its own backyard (but is in reality much
larger in area, and more populous, than the USA itself, and
should not be considered anyone’s backyard except those
who live there). The USA knew in advance of the 2002 plot
to overthrow President Chávez in Venezuela and welcomed
it when it happened.
Venezuela is in the position, unlike most others
in the region, or being a major oil exporter. Chávez
has been trying to make a major difference to the health and
wellbeing of the poor in his country using primarily the wealth
that exporting around $20 billion of oil a year permits. The
new left governments in Latin America do not accept the old
neo-liberal arguments about what it is permissible for the
state to do and control in the economy; the oil industry may
have been nationalised in Venezuela in 1976 but it is only
under Chávez that it has been used so radically.
The EU, meanwhile, has directives which determine
competition and effective denationalisation of enterprises
which might more sensibly be kept as one. Who can argue, in
Ireland or the UK, for example, that improvements are needed
in postal services? But the idea that the remedy is to open
it to competition is arrant nonsense since this merely allows
private enterprise to cream off the profitable bits and leave
the state or semi-state provider with less profits, rising
costs and rising prices for consumers when it is obliged to
service all the unprofitable parts of the enterprise –
a lose/lose scenario all around. Meanwhile public-private
finance initiatives clearly increase costs and put that cost
onto the citizen of tomorrow – while putting money into
the pockets of those who already have wealth.
Perhaps Europe will, in the future, be able
to learn from the Latin American experience .We certainly
hope so, for the sake of both continents and of North America
as well, who may realise that there are different ways of
doing things in the economic sphere. And even greater learning
will need to come in rich countries with the realisation that
economic growth has to stop for urgent ecological reasons
– and if the cake is not going to keep getting bigger
then the only possibility is for it to be more fairly distributed.
That will put into question and imperil the very existence
of ‘consumer society’ and at that point things
will become very interesting……
Eco-Awareness Eco-Awareness
Larry Speight brings us his monthly column:
“We’ve all been brainwashed by large
corporations to believe that the solution to feeling sad or
down or angry or upset is to buy something. That’ a
myth they’ve created, and it’s been internalized
by many of us and it’s going to take sometime to break.
Now is a good time to start.
(Robert Greenwood)
Carol Allen, Drop the shop, Red Pepper, May
2006
As part of the induction course of my new job
as an Environmental Education Officer with Bryson Charitable
Group I visited their Recycling Depot in Mulusk just outside
Belfast. There in different storage areas were house-high
stacks of paper, glass bottles separated into different colours,
and bales of crushed plastic bottles, cardboard, aluminium
and steel cans. The plastic is sent to China, the paper to
Wales, and the glass to County Fermanagh, all to be turned
into new products. The recycling centre is hailed as the largest
in Ireland, processing on average 20 tons of material a day.
This is a significant amount, but minuscule compared to the
tens of thousands of tons of waste we produce each day, most
of which ends up in increasingly scarce landfill sites. Turning
away from the noisy blue crusher I looked at the details on
the concrete floor, newspaper titles caught my eye. There
were crumpled and smudged copies of The Sunday Tribune, The
Sun, The Belfast Telegraph, The Irish News and colour supplements,
all of them carrying advertisements, stories and photographs
encouraging us to buy, to take part in the near universal-wide
experience of shopping, without a hint of the inevitable consequences,
one of which lay at my feet.
Ecologically praise worthy as reduce,
reuse and recycle is, the only remedy to the problem of ‘waste’,
and all which that means in terms of global warming, the extinction
of species, the ruin of landscapes, economic injustice, ill-health
and wasted lives, is the production and use of commodities
in closed systems that mimic those of nonhuman nature. Here
there is no such thing as waste, rubbish, the unwanted, as
everything is part of a life – death – life circle
of energy transformation. The remedy of mimicking the natural
world requires that we reconstitute our economic system, which
means that we rethink the purpose of our daily existence,
what self-realization means, as well as getting to know, respect
and feel affinity with nonhuman nature. For our society, which
is underpinned by a consume and dispose off mindset, and in
which there is little awareness of ecological processes, what
is required of us is nothing less than revolutionary. Let
the revolution begin! We all can be agents of positive change.
Beginning with our selves, our eco-sensitive behaviour will
become like ripples in a pond.
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