10 Ways the Global Cabal is Controlling You: Part One

By Christina Sarich
July 6, 2015
Collective Evolution

 

(Picture courtesy of deesillustration.com)

(This article is part of a three-part series, watch for part two coming soon!)

The world is under the control of a nefarious order, whether you call them the cabal, the Illuminati, the Order of 33, the geopolitical plutocratic elite, the Bilderberg Group, or some other name, but just how far reaching are their tentacles? It may surprise you how much you don’t know, but then again, their plan was designed so that you would never realize just how far their power truly extends.

Each ‘leg’ of the cabal is dependent upon the others to remain viable. If we were to remove one leg from the cabal table, it would no longer stand. Fortunately, there are individuals who aim to do just that, but first, it is important to know how these groups think, and it isn’t pretty.

Financial

You don’t achieve absolute world dominance without controlling the purse strings. Zerohedge has pointed out that there are really only ten companies which control almost everything you purchase. You are given the illusion of choice, but each of these companies is connected to just a few criminal families in a nepotistic manner.

As an example of how the corporate square-dance, or should I say, circle-jerk, really works, there is ample evidence in these few companies: Yum Brands owns KFC and Taco Bell, and they only sell Pepsi products. Proctor & Gamble owns so many brands it would be impractical to list them all – but they make everything from toothpaste to high-end fashion. You might know Nestle for making chocolate, but they also believe that water should be privatized, and they own 8,000 brands, at least some of which you have likely purchased.

Think that Monsanto is a really big, nasty company? It is a nasty corporation, but it isn’t that big. They’re just one of the puppet fronts for Vanguard Mutual Funds. The biggest shareholder in Monsanto, the biggest in Halliburton, the second biggest in Facebook, the third biggest in Whole Foods, the second biggest in Hain Celestial Foods, and the biggest shareholder in the largest defence corporation in America, Lockheed Martin, is also the Vanguard Group.

Then we get to some even better intel. Dick Cheney, the same man who practically shoved us over a cliff into a war with Iraq, was the head of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Cheney also had between 18 and 87 million shares in the Vanguard Fund. His is only one example of government fraud to the 1,000^th degree. Who owned an incredible number of shares of Halliburton? Deutsche Bank – which brings us to financial control part deux.

You remember the bank bailouts. That money went to just a few folks who were already über-rich. The banks tried to blame it on mortgage defaults, but they planned the whole thing from beginning to end. It was just another pump and dump scheme like the IT bubble, and all other bubbles that came before it, and the one they are trying to float even now by messing with interest rates.

Next up, at the top of this convoluted hierarchy is the Federal Reserve and Fractional Banking System. This includes the World Bank and IMF. A Swiss study published in PLOS ONE details how just a handful of banks and financial institutions exert massive control on the entire world. According to the study, there is a “super-entity” of just 147 very tightly knit mega-corporations that control 40 percent of the entire global economy.”

Finally, there are just four companies that control 147 other companies that own – well, just about everything:

McGraw-Hill, owns Standard & Poor’s, as well as Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world’s money.

Should you think your money is safe if it is in tangible assets, there’s the gold-rigging. JP Morgan, Goldman Sach’s, Barclay’s, Deutsch Bank, SoGen and UBS are all in hot water for rigging the gold and silver markets.

Essentially, name a market, and it is controlled by the cabal. It doesn’t matter if you are trading securities, or pigskins – they’re controlling who has money and who doesn’t.

That is until, hopefully, the Asia Pacific Bank starts calling the shots, and bleeds the cabal of all their funny money created with fractional banking, or quantitative easing, and fiat currencies, which is essentially the act of printing money out of thin air.

Political

You also cannot dominate the world without political clout and power. In the US an expertly crafted two-party system dominates the political arena. Here, we fight on Astroturf, where the arguments over political issues are prescripted and very much like a reality show. Each side thinks that the grass is greener on their own side, but they are meant to oppose each other only to the degree that Americans stay emotionally engaged in the same wedge issues each and every ‘election’ period, while true issues and any viable third party is left out in the cold. This is carried out with exacting precision, and more financial control. Elections are rigged, as evinced by the Florida recount, which allowed George Bush to take office and lobbyists control the Congress and House of Representatives. The illusion of choice is perpetuated so that you believe you have a ‘say’ when, in reality, you have none. The same ‘divide and conquer’ tactics that are used to stir upheaval in other countries are used at home. If you still think that voting Democrat or Republican makes a difference, then the Cabal is still controlling you.

Furthermore, the US has been infiltrated by some nasty individuals who have plans to take over the entire world. As Preston James, PhD from Veteran’s Today puts it:

The curtain is now being pulled back to fully expose the Khazarian Mafia and its evil plan to tyrannize the whole world, to eradicate all Abrahamic religions, and allow only their Babylonian Talmudism, also known as Luciferianism, Satanism, or ancient Ball worship.

Emotional

What better way to create a world of slaves than by controlling their emotions? The cabal uses money and political power to polarize the masses, but they get to us through our emotional state. They use the differences in our beliefs systems to create anger and hostility. They use our own egoic tendencies to focus on ‘an other’ to create strife and war. Instead of live, and peacefully, let live, we micro-manage others’ lives without taking care of our own faults. Images are continuously churned out by a cabal-owned media (see part two) that would make us feel anxiety, and doubt our spiritual connectedness to one another, let alone to the Universe at large. Think of how you felt when the World Trade buildings went down. They seized all that negative emotion to take your most basic rights from you. They benefited your fear. Our emotions are played like a violin string by the cabal.

A large part of the Campbellian journey, described in Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, A Hero’s Journey, is to overcome the ‘story’ we have about ourselves – that is all the ego really is. The false ideas that we are what we HAVE or that we are what we DO are kept in place by the cabal, but only as we allow this to happen. The ego will keep us looking for who we truly are on the outside (or who we are not – “I’m nothing like THOSE people!”) instead of looking within.

If you aren’t familiar with Campbell’s work, I highly recommend it as a means to understanding yourself, so that the cabal, and any other opportunistic energies, don’t have the ability to control you and your emotions. Do any of these monomyths or roles sound familiar, as Campbell described the journey we all take to rise above ego?

The Call to Adventure

Refusal to Answer the Call

Acceptance of the Call

Supernatural Aid

Crossing of the First Threshold

Entering the Belly of the Whale

The Initiation

The Road of Trials

Meeting with the Goddess (Feminine Energy)

Woman as Temptress

Atonement with the Father

Apotheosis

The Ultimate Boon

Return (with New Knowledge of the Self)

Refusal of the Return

Magic Flight

Rescue from the Without

Crossing the Return Threshold

Master of the Two Worlds (Material and Immaterial or Spiritual)

Freedom to Live

We only arrive at the ‘freedom to live’ when we eradicate the influence of the cabal, or the inflated, nasty, dark, egoic nature which thinks of nothing but preserving itself, with no care for the rest of the world or its inhabitants. If you look around, this is exactly the phase of the hero’s journey we are in now – quite literally the belly of the whale. Corporations have absolutely pillaged the earth, and war has killed far too many to call it paradise.

Stay tuned for part two. . .

Global economic impact of violence reached $14.3 trillion in 2014

By Evan Blake
June 23, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

The economic impact of violence on the global economy in 2014 measured a staggering $14.3 trillion, or 13.4 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP), equivalent to the combined economic output of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.

This represents a spending increase of $1.9 trillion, or 15.3 percent, since 2008, according to the annual Global Peace Index (GPI) report, compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think tank. The report defines the economic impact of violence as the “flow on effects on the world economy and the opportunity cost due to the misallocation of resources into non-productive areas associated with violence.”

Most of the total expenditure stems from deaths and displacement due to internal conflict, military spending, GDP losses from conflict, increasing homicide and violent crime rates, and spending on internal security officers, including police.

In total, more than $3 trillion was poured into military spending in 2014, with the US accounting for over $1.3 trillion alone. The study found that expenses related to the military, internal police forces and homicides combined to have the highest impact on costs, accounting for 68.3 percent of the total.

The costs needed to support refugees and internally displaced people have increased by 267 percent since 2008, to $128 billion, as the total number of displaced people reached 59.5 million in 2014, the highest level since World War II. Still, UN peacekeeping costs account for less than 0.17 percent of total violence containment expenditure.

The three most prominent targets of American imperialism in the recent period, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, have seen a substantial portion of their resources squandered on war. The US-stoked civil war in Syria, which has ravaged the country for four years, is estimated to have absorbed 42 percent of the country’s GDP in 2014, while Afghanistan spent 31 percent of its GDP on military and police expenditures, and Iraq spent 30 percent in 2014.

The GPI report ranks the nations of the world according to their “level of peacefulness,” based on 23 different qualitative and quantitative measurements from 162 states, covering 99.6 percent of the world’s population. Since the first report in 2008, the divide between the most and least “peaceful” countries and regions has steadily deepened, as US-led imperialism has plunged large parts of the world into deepening violence.

Syria again ranked on these terms as the least peaceful country in the world, while Libya experienced the most severe decline, according to the ranking system. Ukraine saw the second biggest decline, due to the eruption of fighting between pro-Russian separatist forces and NATO-backed fascist militias in east Ukraine.

The Middle East and North Africa region saw the most marked decline in average rankings, while Europe as a whole continued to see increases in peacefulness, as Iceland was again ranked the most peaceful, followed by Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Australia and the Czech Republic.

The US was ranked at 94th place, between Peru and Saudi Arabia. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Central African Republic, in that order, were the bottom five countries in the index.

Significantly, the report found that deaths caused by terrorism increased by 61 percent from 2012-13 and have more than doubled since 2008, resulting in 17,958 people being killed in terrorist attacks in 2013. Of those deaths, 82 percent occurred in just five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.

These figures once again expose the essential truth that the so-called War on Terror has in fact empowered terrorist organizations in those countries that have been targeted by American imperialism. Despite the constant invocation of “national security” as the centerpiece of the war, the vast majority of terrorist attacks take place outside the advanced capitalist countries.

While much of the data compiled in the report is useful in portraying the immense scale of the costs of imperialist war and internal political repression, the GPI rankings system is flawed and the authors themselves present a rose-tinted view of the current geopolitical situation. At one point, the report declares that, “Over the last sixty years, the world has become more peaceful. There has been a marked and consistent downturn in levels of violence and conflict since the end of the Second World War.”

Later, however, the report notes that the intensity of military conflict has increased dramatically in recent years, with 180,000 people killed in 2014 alone, a nearly fourfold increase from 49,000 in 2010. However, it glosses over the present threat of a major conflict between nuclear-armed powers and covers up of the machinations of the US-led imperialist order, effectively playing into the hands of the forces spearheading the drive to war.

Regarding the potential for such a global conflict arising from the ongoing disputes in the South China Sea, which are being driven through the US “pivot to Asia” directed against China, the authors write: “Although the likelihood of further military skirmishes in the disputed waters is high, a large-scale military engagement remains unlikely.”

In their overview of the crisis in Ukraine, the line of the US State Department comes through clearly: “The conflict began with Russia’s military takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula following the overthrow of the government of Viktor Yanukovych in late February. From April it extended to the Ukrainian mainland, when separatist militias—made up of some locals, as well as mercenaries linked to the ousted regime, local criminal gangs and Russian nationalist volunteers—began to seize urban centres across south-east Ukraine, backed heavily by Russian weapons, intelligence and finance, with regular Russian troops intervening directly if necessary to prevent a separatist defeat.”

There is no mention whatsoever of the role played by the US, which backed far-right nationalist and outright fascistic organizations such as Svoboda and the Right Sector to overthrow Yanukovych, and hand-picked the emergent government with puppets like Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and billionaire oligarch President Petro Poroshenko.

Above all, the worldwide escalation in military spending and domestic policing indicate the advanced stage of the buildup to a new world war involving the major imperialist powers.

On Brink of ‘Sixth Great Extinction,’ Humanity Must Conserve or Die

‘We are sawing off the limb we are sitting on.’

By Nadia Prupis
June 23, 2015
Common Dreams

 

Humans must commit to an intensified conservation effort to prevent the extinction of hundreds of species—including our own. (Photo: Cheryl/flickr/cc)

It’s official: the planet is entering a “sixth great extinction” that even the most conservative estimates show is killing off species at rates far higher than the previous five mass die-offs—and humanity is both at fault…and at risk.

A joint study by scientists from several North American universities published last week in Science found that the rate of extinction for species in the 20th century was up to 100 times higher than it would have been without impacts of human activity, such as climate change, deforestation, and pollution.

Moreover, if those rates are allowed to continue, “life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” said lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autónoma de México.

“[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,” said co-author, Paul Ehrlich, the Bing professor of population studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead.”

Scientists have long agreed that extinction rates have reached unparalleled levels since the last mass extinction, when the dinosaurs were killed off 65 million years ago, likely by a meteor crashing into Earth. For years, conservation groups have warned of increasing extinction risks faced by mammals, birds, and amphibians, which Harvard University ecologist Edward O. Wilson in 2010 called “the backbone of biodiversity.”

But Friday’s study shows “even with extremely conservative estimates, species are disappearing up to about 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions, known as the background rate.”

The Stanford Report elaborated:

Focusing on vertebrates, the group for which the most reliable modern and fossil data exist, the researchers asked whether even the lowest estimates of the difference between background and contemporary extinction rates still justify the conclusion that people are precipitating “a global spasm of biodiversity loss.” The answer: a definitive yes.

…As species disappear, so do crucial ecosystem services such as honeybees’ crop pollination and wetlands’ water purification. At the current rate of species loss, people will lose many biodiversity benefits within three generations, the study’s authors write. “We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on,” Ehrlich said.

“We were very surprised to see how bad it is,” Ceballos told the Guardian on Friday. “This is very depressing because we used the most conservative rates, and even then they are much higher than the normal extinction rate, really indicating we are having a massive loss of the species.”

“It’s really signalling we’ve entered a sixth extinction and it’s driven by man,” Ceballos said.

Avoiding a “true” sixth mass extinction, the researchers concluded, “will require rapid, greatly intensified efforts to conserve already threatened species, and to alleviate pressures on their populations—notably habitat loss, over-exploitation for economic gain and climate change. All of these are related to human population size and growth, which increases consumption (especially among the rich), and economic inequity.”

There is still time to take fast action to conserve species, ecosystems, and populations—but that window is rapidly closing, the researchers warned.

3-minute video: Tell the truth now, or be ridiculed/ridiculous after ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ trance breaks

By Carl Herman
June 12, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

hat tip: TheSOTTReport (and here)

3-minute video, Still You Believe by Osama and the Bin Ladens:

The Emperor’s New Clothes is the story of current wars and central “monetary” policy: “official” stories easily and completely refuted by anyone caring to look at the facts. All three are tragic-comedies because even children see the truth with just a few moments of attention.

This was the theme of a conference paper; full professional explanation and documentation here.

In The Emperor’s New Clothes story, upon public initial conversations of the facts, the emperor continues the pretense, along with “officials.” However, the illusion is shattered within moments as the “whole town” began speaking about what was clear for everyone upon minimal attention.

Earth will either have lawful arrests of .01% War Criminals or World War 3. These War Criminals center in the US, UK, and Israel, with UN complicit silence in Orwellian opposite of their Charter.

The outcome we have depends on how many humans choose to state obvious truths of unlawful wars, bankster looting, and corporate media lying to “cover” these crimes (among ~100 crucial areas of concern).

Look into your future, please, to confirm one of two general outcomes:

1. You participate to upgrade from Earth’s Emperor’s New Clothes status. Whether we win or not is out of our hands.
2. Your response to this call is weak; humanity either wins or loses.

For you, personally, again please confirm your general status after each outcome:

1. All are proud of your actions, including your family and you. This party and future take place on Earth if we win, and in some other dimension if our numbers are insufficient.
2. None are proud of your actions, including your family and you. You will feel ridiculous on Earth if we win, and ashamed in some other dimension if we lose Earth to these .01% literal psychopaths.

Choose wisely.

**

Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.

**

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

Seizing an alternative: Recognizing ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ as THE STORY of today (1 of 7)

By Carl Herman
May 31, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

The following is my paper for the Claremont Colleges’ conference, Seizing an Alternative Toward an Ecological Civilization, with open registration to the public on June 4-7, 2015.

 

 

 

 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/5412622

Paper title:

‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ political collapse: Seizing an alternative to OBVIOUS unlawful wars, bankster looting, lying corporate media

I’ve divided the paper into sections:

Recognizing The Emperor’s New Clothes as THE STORY of today (1 of 7)

Obviously unlawful US/UK wars of the present (2 of 7)

Obviously unlawful Israel wars on Gaza (3 of 7)

War lies to hide obviously unlawful wars: propaganda as usual (4 of 7)

Bankster looting: fundamental fraud that “debt” is “money” (5 of 7)

Lying corporate media: required propaganda trying to hide naked empire (6 of 7)

Integrity for the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (7 of 7)

This section is: Recognizing The Emperor’s New Clothes as THE STORY of today (1 of 7)

**

Summary: Historical oligarchs typically control government (to dictate policy), what is used for money (to enrich themselves and pay minions), and media (to spin public opinion from damning facts). 21st Century humans are awakening to Emperor’s New Clothes’ obvious facts in these three areas to recognize Earth’s oligarchs in the present. First: we are recognizing current US/UK/Israel wars are not even close to lawful, and that “reasons” for wars are now officially disclosed as lies known to be lies as they were told. Second: the US does not create money, but its Orwellian opposite: debt created by banks. This system is like adding negative numbers forever; causing unpayable debt. Calling “debt” as “money,” and pretending escalating public debt is somehow “good,” is massive and fundamental fraud. Third: corporate media “covers” these crimes to hide the Emperor’s New Clothes obvious from public discovery. Our world in 2015 is in dramatic contest between these factors of political collapse versus an awakening public demanding obvious solutions for peace, debt-free money, and comprehensive factual reporting. The outcome whether humanity will seize an alternative for ecological civilization depends on the overall integrity of humanity to address obvious facts of our condition, and demand solutions.

**

Introduction:

The Emperor’s New Clothes is the story of current wars and central “monetary” policy: “official” stories easily and completely refuted by anyone caring to look at the facts. All three are tragic-comedies because even children see the truth with just a few moments of attention.

Addressing three topics for one academic paper may seem ambitious, and that said, here’s what I see:

1. War law is crystal-clear in letter and intent, yet continuously violated in Wars of Aggression by former imperial nations with impunity.
2. These powers create what we use for money as debt, with mathematic consequences like adding negative numbers forever: aggregate debt becomes tragic-comic. “Debt” is called its opposite, “money,” with impunity.
3. These deceptions and failure to address obvious solutions are only possible from public discovery through continuous propaganda from “officials” and corporate media.

Historic oligarchies usually control government (to dictate policy; often war to steal valuable resources), what is used for money (to enrich themselves and pay minions), and media (to control spin to shape public opinion). Therefore, connecting all three elements in our world of the present, that are again obvious and immediate when pointed-out, will contribute to our awakening and realization of obvious solutions.

Our analogy of The Emperor’s New Clothes has government officials, messengers (corporate media), and many in the public claim that political leadership is “covered” by the noblest of appearances, and those who fail to perceive this are either “unfit for his position” or “hopelessly stupid.” The game-changing central fact, of course, is that the emperor is naked and not even close to wearing clothes.

These naked facts are easily explained, objectively observed, and proved for anyone caring to look. Indeed, a child points it all out with easy confidence, irrefutable accuracy, and proves the “official story” has zero credibility for any objective observer.

In the story, upon public initial conversations of the facts, the emperor continues the pretense, along with “officials.” However, the illusion is shattered within moments as the “whole town” began speaking about what was clear for everyone upon minimal attention.

If we had to document the facts that refute the official story, we would probably define a few key terms:

• clothes: material for the human body to be worn for adornment and coverage.
• wear: in context of clothing, to have clothes intentionally placed on one’s body. This is opposed to having clothes in one’s closet or dresser not on one’s body.

With just a little work, we refute the “official story,” and use the facts to make ridiculous any argument in support of this official story.

And importantly, if we did have to document our evidence even though clear to a child’s examination within moments, it would take some time to write and read, just as our arguments will take with current unlawful wars, bankster looting, and corporate media lying to “cover” these obvious crimes.

And this said, if it were true that wars, bank looting, and corporate media lying are just as easy to prove as in the Emperor’s New Clothes, wouldn’t you want to invest the time to clearly see for yourself, and wouldn’t you want such destructive farce seen for what it is by the wider community?

11 Thought Provoking Images Show What Humans Are Really Doing To The Planet

By Arjun Walia
May 28, 2015
Collective Evolution

 

Go to school, get a job, pay your bills, and try to put yourself in a position to earn enough money to be able to live – this is our current human experience. But while we’re busy focusing on how survive, our planet is being trashed at an exponential rate.

Is it possible to create a human experience where we don’t destroy the planet? Is it possible for everybody to have their basic necessities met without the use of money? Is it possible to create a “system” where money is not even needed? We believe so, but there still seems to be a harsh resistance to this type of thinking, despite the tremendous amount of options that exist to change our world.

For example, we could use hemp and other biodegradable non-toxic ingredients to manufacture our products – products that don’t harm the environment, but actually help to heal it. No more plastic, no more deforestation. Hemp can also be used to generate energy and boasts over 50,000 other uses, but this crop is still illegal in many places.

Again, hemp is just one small example out of many with big implications. There exist a number of problems that urgently need to be addressed, and the fact that a handful of corporations pretty much own the entire planet and all its resources doesn’t help, but things are changing, there is still good out there. Imagine if these corporations came together and pooled all of their resources to change the world. What a difference that would make. We need a shift in consciousness to save the planet, a network that is not driven by greed, fear, and ego, but one that is driven by a common goal: the betterment of our planet and the well-being of all life on Earth.

This is absolutely possible to achieve, and sometimes I feel that because this is such a simple idea in essence, people don’t believe it. It’s not uncommon for many to refer to economics, business, finance, the very system that enslaves us; it’s hard for many to imagine a world without money or to understand how that world would even function in practice. I believe this simply comes from an ignorance of solutions that are out there and the way our world works in general. Self-education is the key to making change happen.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again, working in this field for a number of years now and being interested in it for even longer, the progress we’ve made as a human race is astounding. Anybody who pays attention to this type of thing can clearly see that. At the same time, we have a long way to go, and there are many steps for the human race to take, but we are indeed heading in the right direction.

These are just a few pictures to get you thinking, and they’ve been floating around the internet for a while. We apologize if you’ve already seen them, but we definitely wanted to archive them on our website as they do provide some valuable food for thought.

 

 

Global tensions surge as NATO, Russia hold rival military exercises

By Alex Lantier
May 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Militaries throughout Eurasia and North America are on high alert as NATO and Russian forces hold rival military exercises within Russia and along its borders.

Moscow responded to the beginning of large-scale, two-week-long air exercises by the NATO powers in the Arctic on Monday by launching its own air defense maneuvers. Roughly 250 Russian aircraft and 12,000 servicemen were mobilized in the Urals and western Siberia as 100 NATO aircraft and 4,000 servicemen from Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States operated in the Arctic.

NATO’s Arctic exercises, code-named Arctic Challenge, will continue until June 4. The day after, the annual exercises held by NATO in the Baltic Sea region will begin, bringing 4,500 troops from 17 NATO member-states to Russia’s northwestern border.

The Russian Defense Ministry called its operations a “massive surprise inspection” of Russian air defense capabilities. According to Russian media, the maneuvers are meant to train Russian forces to respond to large-scale air attacks from abroad. Beginning last Monday and running until Thursday, their purpose is to prepare the Russian armed forces for a larger military drill, Center 2015, to be held in September.

Yesterday, 10 Russian warships supported by naval aircraft carried out exercises in the Barents Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean largely consisting of Russian territorial waters.

Meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday in Washington, President Obama denounced Russia for holding its military drills, calling the Kremlin’s posture “increasingly aggressive.”

Stoltenberg, for his part, criticized Russia for not being “more transparent” in holding its military exercises. “We urge the Russians not to… do these kinds of snap exercises,” he told CBS News. “Every nation has a right to exercise its forces, also Russia,” he continued, “but they should do it in a more transparent and predictable way in order to avoid any misunderstandings.”

The denunciations from Obama and Stoltenberg are hypocritical and absurd. It is NATO, not Russia, that is driving the explosive military standoff around Russia’s borders. Having provoked a military crisis by toppling a pro-Russian Ukrainian regime in Kiev in a far-right putsch last year, then launching a proxy war against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, NATO is now methodically surrounding Russia with hostile military exercises.

According to Russia’s envoy to the NATO alliance, Aleksandr Grushko, the number of NATO exercises close to the Russian border has doubled over the past year, to over 3,000. NATO is also doubling to 30,000 men the size of its European rapid reaction force, which is designed to quickly prepare for combat with Russia in Eastern Europe.

Britain is sending its biggest warship, the HMS Ocean, to the Baltic Sea this week to deploy a unit of Royal Marines in Poland and join naval drills off Russia’s coast at Kaliningrad.

US and Canadian airmen and military aircraft are jointly carrying out NORAD’s annual “Amalgam Dart” exercises in the Arctic. These are billed as operations to train NORAD forces to detect and respond to potentially hostile flights into North America from across the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole—that is, from Russia.

In recent weeks, US forces have also held joint military exercises with Romania and Bulgaria in the Balkans, and with Georgia in the Caucasus. Last month, US troops began training fighters from far-right militias inside Ukraine itself for combat against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

With international tensions at the breaking point, NATO’s decision to hold multiple military exercises on Russia’s periphery is utterly reckless. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that early in the Ukraine crisis he had placed the Russian military, including its nuclear forces, on alert.

A report last November by the European Leadership Network (ELN) think tank in London found that since the February 2014 putsch in Kiev, 40 “near miss” incidents had almost led to military clashes between Russian and NATO forces. That danger has since been heightened, with armies across Europe on a hair trigger, and thousands of NATO aircraft and military units surrounding Russia. A few collisions or miscalculations could lead to a clash with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Russia and China recently concluded their first joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, operating out of the Crimean port of Sevastopol, a region of Ukraine that chose to rejoin Russia after the Kiev putsch in a move that was denounced by the NATO powers. Russian and Chinese warships carried out multiple operations, including live-fire exercises, in the eastern Mediterranean. For the Chinese navy, this exercise was by far the most far removed from its home base in China it has ever held.

The holding of military exercises preparing for large-scale conflict demonstrates that the major capitalist powers, above all Washington and its imperialist allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, are gearing up for a Third World War. This is the outcome of decades of US-led wars in the Middle East and Central Asia that followed the dissolution of the USSR, and more recently the Ukraine crisis and Washington’s anti-Chinese “pivot to Asia.”

As wars surge across the Middle East in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and the standoff escalates between the United States and China in the South China Sea, NATO’s confrontation with Russia completes the picture of a Eurasian landmass beset by bloodshed and the imminent danger of war. Under the pressure of a crisis of global capitalism, masses of workers worldwide are being dragged into a horrendous conflict in which they have no interest, and which is developing largely behind their backs.

The critical task facing the international working class is to mobilize itself politically in struggle against capitalism and war. It cannot give any support to the maneuvers of the Putin regime in Moscow or its Chinese counterpart, collections of corrupt business oligarchs which emerged from the restoration of capitalism and which are incapable of appealing to anti-war sentiment in the working class. They oscillate between attempts to work out a deal with imperialism and military bluster that only increases political and military tensions.

The Global Elite’s Crimes Against Humanity

The Subversion of Life, Liberty and Happiness

By Colin Todhunter
May 26, 2015
Counter Punch

 

For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in the pursuit of external pleasure. Others, from Antisthenes to Buddha, have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then there are those like Schopenhauer who seem to think that we can only be occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world: life only oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.

Happiness is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a state of well-being and contentment: a pleasurable or satisfying experience.”

For some, happiness runs much deeper than merely being content. Aristotle held that being virtuous was only one aspect of happiness. In the absence of say wealth and intelligence, virtue could only bring about a form of contentment.

But sometimes that’s not enough. Certain people strive to achieve an ongoing state of bliss, of feeling at one with the universe and everything in it. Through years of meditation, self-reflective practice or consciousness development, they can learn to transcend the illusion of existence and live life on a higher reality. A case of ignoring reality while striving to live out an illusion?

However, let’s not get too caught up in cynicism here. Illusion is all around us – both on a personal level and on a wider political level. The type of society we live in has a huge bearing on happiness or well-being.

From Bernays to Albright: ‘their’ happiness, our misery

Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.

Western governments set out to con ordinary working folk by bringing us war in the name of peace, austerity in order to achieve prosperity and suffering to eventually make us happy. Is there any room for truth? Politicians never like to tell the public the truth. The feel-bad factor is never a vote winner. Best to keep the public in the dark and rely on positive spin. If people knew the truth, they just wouldn’t be happy.

And selling the feel-good factor is all pervasive. In this age of irretrievable materialism, the route to happiness is more goods, better goods, newer goods. A never-ending smorgasbord of commodities to be craved for. In league with private corporations, governments have learnt to play on our desires to create a one-dimensional type of happiness based on consumerism.

In part, Edward Bernays is responsible for this. The father of modern public relations and propaganda, he was expert in manipulating human perceptions of pain and pleasure, misery and happiness. Tap into or shape people’s desires in a certain way, and you can sell virtually any notion of happiness (or reality), regardless of how bogus it may be.

Whether it was whipping up mass fear in the US about the bogeyman of communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming goods, Bernays and the advertising industry, which took its cue from him, were able to marry misery and happiness together – if you do not buy into consumer capitalism, the alternative will be misery; if you do not buy this or that product, life will be terrible; if you do not join in the celebration of capitalism, those awful Soviets will take over and impose a fundamentally unhappy system of equality on each and every one of us.

Under US capitalism, the lie was that everyone would all live happily ever after because of, not in spite of, gross inequality, massive privileges and disadvantages and exploitation of labour, which all went under the notion of meritocracy and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

Bernays’ propaganda techniques set the stage for con-trick of ‘liberal democracy’.

The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be manufactured out of thin air and, from Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam to Iraq wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending misery they would inflict on the US and on far away countries and lies about the government delivering us from impending doom.

Of course, it is best to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons to ensure no one imposes their miserable regimes or awful ways of life on us. And to prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the threat of nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV. Even the very real danger of near-instant annihilation of the species is shoved to one side for the sake of a feel-good culture.

And the best way to instill that feeling is to have us endlessly treading around a wheel in a cage. Millions are locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of happiness. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of chasing the dream. Addicted to the belief that there is a point to it all, where happiness is achieved by acquisitive materialism.

But, to paraphrase a sentiment from Buddhism: someone, somewhere, may well be suffering on our behalf for this happiness, this hedonism. There is no ‘may be’ about it.

So much blood has been spilled by those unfortunate enough to have been born in certain parts of the world on behalf of people in other parts of the world who deem the need to possess resources to be more worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab them. Recall Madelaine Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth paying for furthering the geo-political interests of US corporations. And yes, a drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there, and those boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.

In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom and happiness (or the pursuit of it) is central, albeit built on the misery of others.

‘Life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’ have become debased. Fed to the masses, happiness has been confused with excessive individualism and the never-ending pursuit of material goods. It became hijacked by the likes of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle), he knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get people hooked on indulging in certain behaviour, even if ultimately they don’t really want or need those consumer products, those ‘false needs’, they strive to acquire. Getting them hooked is what really counts.

You have no time to think about the disillusionment because you are all too busy buying the next quick-fix for happiness product. It’s called retail ‘therapy’ for good reason. A therapy that has no long-term benefit. It’s a feel-bad, feel-good then feel bad again spiral.

But who needs this form of ‘happiness’, this type of ‘liberty’, ultimately underpinned by an Albright-esque view of life and death? No one. Yet the masses are encouraged to swallow the lies. The propaganda is pervasive.

Look no further than all those feel-good Hollywood trash films, passed off as ‘blockbusters’, that gloss over or usually ignore all the mundane, miserable aspects of life in working class ‘America’. Little wonder half the world seems to want to live in the US. The need to portray a bogus notion of happiness has served to kick reality into touch. The Hollywood propaganda machine has seen to that.

The ‘wealth creators’ and their crimes against humanity

The great ‘American Dream’ was built on craving and propaganda. It was built on stripping the environment bare, on the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, perpetual war and misery and suffering. The sociologist C.Wright Mills noted the existence of a post-war power elite in the US back in 1956. An integrated power elite of big corporations, the military and the political establishment. Fast forward 57 years and it is responsible for a body count of ten million dead and counting, a statistic, a dirty secret that Hollywood will never tell. Ten million slaughtered in US-backed wars and by death squads, covert ops and destabilisations (see this). Drug-running and the exporting of terror and murder, glorified by countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom and democracy.

The system in place exists to benefit not the majority, but small a minority of just 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to David Rothkopf. These are the extremely wealthy of the world who have cemented their position on the back of their ancestors and hundreds of years of capitalism. These are the people setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations. These billionaires, this transnational capitalist class, dictate global economic policies and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people. Although they are having a bit of difficulty in kick-starting it right now, with their see-through lies and hypocrisy, Syria is a case in point.

Their crimes against humanity are never mentioned as such. Instead, these people are called ‘wealth creators’. They are the self-anointed role models and captains of industry. The high flyers who have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from them, or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance, to snatch control away from this criminal class, have been brutally suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations to any government pursuing a socialist alternative, this class has used intelligence agencies or military might to attempt to subvert or annihilate any opposition.

From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed at best or spied upon, tortured and killed at worst in order to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really is, the type of society necessary to establish it – based on communality and economic equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it. Socialism is not a dirty word.

Various well-being surveys indicate that happier societies invest heavily in health, welfare and education, are more equal and live within the limits imposed by the environment. Many less wealthy countries (and wealthy) do well in such surveys because cultural priority is placed on family and friends, on social capital rather than financial capital, on social equity rather than corporate power. It’s no coincidence that people in places like Britain and the US appear to be less happy than they were 40 years ago.

Karl Marx knew that self-actualisation was to be truly achieved in a society that makes it possible for someone to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as he has a mind. Being ‘happy’ is state of being, a state of worthwhile endeavour freely chosen and not imposed. It is not achieved through the pursuit of an ultimate unattainable elusive goal on a never ending treadmill of drudgery, a never ending treadmill of control. Not a fixed end point to be achieved by possessing a hundred latest, cutting edge consumer gadgets and indulging in the individualised competition of conspicuous consumption that proclaims ‘look at me, I’m better than you, I’m elevated from the crowd’. And by elevating oneself in such a way, the gregarious human animal is cut off from the wider group and may ultimately become rather unhappy.

And yet it is ordinary working class men (and women) who sign up to join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. Such people have however always been adept in manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or justify their exploitation.

In his book ‘A People’s History of England’, The Marxist academic AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain

Such a travesty then, that today, ordinary people are denied economic opportunities because this class has sold their jobs to the lowest bidder in India, China or elsewhere. This class and its ‘think tanks’ were determined to shatter the post-war Keynesian consensus based on a robust welfare state and government intervention in the economy to help secure full employment. Any notions of ‘fairness’ and the benefits to be derived from the welfare state were to be substituted for positive notions about the free market and individual responsibility in order to justify the real intention of shifting the balance of power towards elite interests.

With workers’ wages having been depressed over a period of decades, demand having thus been propped up by debt and bankers demanding to be bailed out, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.

And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this? To vote for ‘their’ politicians, to join in a media circus to celebrate the birth of another royal parasite, to support their killing in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere?

Yes, we are supposed to back them and take in the poisonous lie that ‘we are all in it together’. And ordinary young men (and women) are supposed to sign up to fight their wars.

The working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight again. For what? Austerity, powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Black Rock, Boeing and the rest.

The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped abroad. For those who benefitted, the US can go to hell in a handbasket, and it has. Meanwhile, for them, record profits ensue. It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism which merely tear them down.

In places like India, it cuts both ways. ‘Free’ trade and a state enforced militarism that both result in countless deaths and the forced removals of hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest folk from their lands and villages for the benefit of powerful corporations and a bogus notion of development. “I love my India” well-off ordinary urban dwellers often say. Patriotism has always been a distraction, a tool to be ignited by the oppressors at will among the masses.

As societies become hollowed out, with empty echoes of patriotism ringing out, they increasingly resemble boxes. The only thing inside however is a giant, brutal mechanical hand. There is nothing else apart from it. And it’s only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever dares to tear it open and shed light into the box. If successful, they will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies. The social control based on the subversion of life, liberty and happiness.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher based in the UK and India.

 

Nuclear Weapons: Making Us Feel Secure by “Threatening Armageddon”

“We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival” – Jonathan Schell (American author)

By Jim McClus
May 26, 2015
Global Research

 

The terrifying film ‘The man who saved the world’ has been showing in London. Stanislaw Petrov, who appears himself in the film, was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Russian early warning system when the electronic alarms blared deafeningly and insistently in his command centre. All checks confirmed that there was no malfunction. They confirmed a nuclear attack from the US was on its way. It was not possible to wait for radar confirmation of the incoming ballistic missiles because by that time it would be too late to retaliate. Petrov knew that if he reported the alarm to the high command they would immediately order a retaliatory strike¹ initiating a global nuclear war and the end of most of the human race. On his own imitative he decided that he did not trust the computers and did nothing.

The author Steve Taylor, in his book ‘The Fall’, expresses the view that the human race became, to a significant degree, insane about six thousand years ago when we introduced warfare as a way of ‘solving’ disputes. It is difficult to deny that it is insane to set up a system in which it is down to the humanity of one man to save the planet. The insanity is compounded when we realise that, rather than learning from the past, we have perpetuated the same mad system. We even call it MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).

Over a thousand nuclear weapons are held, right now, ready for launch at the press of a button. Missiles travel at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour so we are entirely dependent on computers to warn of an attack. We know that computers malfunction. But those manning the early warning centres are rigorously trained to follow orders to the letter. They have a protocol and they are trained to follow it robotically. It seems most unlikely that the next time the alarms go off there will be a Stanislaw Petrov present with the immense courage to go against his training. Putting his humanity first under enormous pressure to obey orders was heroism of the highest order. This was recognised when he was honoured at the United Nations and it is reiterated by Kevin Costner in the film (Stanislaw Petrov is a fan of Costner and Costner is a fan of Petrov so they met when Petrov visited the US). Introducing Stanislaw to his film crew Kostner said ‘I act heroes. Here is the real thing’.

There will be a next time. Unbelievably, in spite of this terrifying experience, we continue to perpetuate the same arrangement; with missiles ready for immediate launch at the press of a button and the only way of deciding to do this is on the basis of incoming electronic signals from a system which we know cannot be trusted!

The threat is escalating

The more nuclear weapons states there are the more likely that the weapons will be launched by accident or malfunction. The number has been escalating since the US used nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945. Already there are nine; US, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Inevitably the leaders of other states want them. The leaders think it gives them status. According to a Sunday Times report Saudi Arabia has given Pakistan billions of dollars in subsidized oil, while the latter has unofficially agreed to supply the Gulf state with nuclear warheads². An anonymous British military official told the Sunday Times “The fear is that other Middle Eastern powers — Turkey and Egypt — may feel compelled to do the same and we will see a new, even more dangerous, arms race”²

Yet not all states want to take the nuclear path. A wide range of countries capable of building nuclear weapons, including many living in actual or potential “conflict zones,” have elected not to pursue this option, including Japan and South Korea. Countries such as South Africa and Ukraine have dismantled existing arsenals.

Deterrence

The logic of the deterrence concept leads to more and more states wanting nuclear weapons. If one state needs a deterrent then, of course, other states need a deterrent. It also leads to the ones which have these weapons upgrading and extending them since it is thought that the more in number and the more in destructive power your arsenal is the more it will be an effective deterrent.

Apart from the appalling risks from malicious and inadvertent use, misunderstandings and terrorist attacks, there are major safety risks. A recent Whistleblower, a Royal Navy submariner, William McNeilly, exposed the safety risks in an 18 page report and says the Trident deterrent is a ‘Disaster Waiting To Happen’. He tells us “ We are so close to a nuclear disaster it is shocking, and yet everybody is accepting the risk to the public.” He also tells us that poor security checks could leave the door open for the “worst terrorist attack the UK and world has ever seen”.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty 

In an attempt to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to get rid of the existing ones The Nuclear Non proliferation Treaty (NPT) was drawn up and came into force in 1970.

The NPT is an international treaty of which a primary goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons. A treaty review conference is held every five years and this year it extended from 27^th April to 22^nd May. This treaty is the only binding international commitment to the goal of nuclear disarmament of all states. 190 states are now party to the treaty. Four UN member states have never joined the NPT: India, Israel, Pakistan and South Sudan.

Nuclear states who are signatories to the treaty undertake to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals. The UK has been legally bound by the treaty since 1970. In spite of this the signatories to the Treaty, including the UK, essentialy ignore the obligation they have incurred.

In view of the refusal of the nuclear states to disarm the matter was taken to the International court of justice for an Advisory Opinion on the obligations of the states which have signed up to the treaty. Their opinion was unequivocal. They declared ‘There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control’. Can’t be much clearer than that.

Never mind. In terms of getting the nuclear states to honour their obligations to humanity and their treaties, the recent NPT Review Conference has been another disastrous failure. It contains no meaningful commitments on nuclear disarmament. Our leaders are following their own power/influence focussed agenda and are ignoring the wishes and wellbeing of the people just as they did with the Iraq war.

The primary nuclear weapons states, all founder members of the United Nations Security (!) Council, are doing the exact opposite of ridding us of this curse. They are all rebuilding their nuclear arsenals; US, Russian, China, UK and France. The determination of the main ‘Security’ Council state leaders to ignore the wishes and real security of peoples of the world has become clear as a result of the 2015 NPT Conference. The leaders of these states are parking their humanity and putting their power politics before the safety of the people. The enormity of this crime is arguably even greater than that of Blair and Bush in starting the Iraq war.

It is even more clear now, after this conference, that the non-nuclear weapons states must make nuclear weapons illegal without the participation of the nuclear weapons states. And this is what they are doing.

A crime against humanity

There are 193 states in the United Nations. So there are 184 states which do not have nuclear weapons. Realising the intransigence of the nuclear states many of the non-nuclear states decided on another approach to having them banned. The existence of nuclear weapons threatens the commission of crimes against humanity. They are weapons for committing genocidal-scale attacks on civilian populations. There have now been three conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons (in Oslo, Nayarit and Vienna). At these the non nuclear and less wealthy states were able to have a much greater impact than at the NPT conferences which were dominated by the nuclear states 159 states supported a joint statement on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons arguing that nuclear weapons have catastrophic humanitarian consequences and must never be used again under any circumstances. These states have affirmed that elimination is the only way to prevent use.

Having nuclear weapons is, of itself, a crime against humanity. It implies the willingness to use them ‘if our vital interests are threatened’ as ex-Prime Minister Blair put it in his 2006 White Paper, ‘The future of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent’. It is also criminal because it puts us all at totally unnecessary risk. As President John F Kennedy put it:

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

This is as true now as it was when he declared it.

The Humanitarian Pledge

The non-nuclear states are putting the interests of humanity before power in the teeth of opposition from the nuclear states.

Consequently the major outcome of the 2015 NPT is the Humanitarian Pledge which has over 100 endorsements³by states round the planet. It was proposed by the Austrian government and includes the pledge to join efforts to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks. 

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) tells us,

‘Based on the evidence of the humanitarian impacts from any nuclear weapon detonation and an acknowledgment of the increasing risk of use of nuclear weapons, the humanitarian pledge reflects a fundamental shift in the international discourse on nuclear disarmament over the past five years…
The wide and growing international support for this historic pledge sends a signal that a majority of the world’s governments are ready to move forward with the prohibition of nuclear weapons, even if the nuclear weapon states are not ready to participate.’

The executive Director of ICAN, Beatrice Fihn, said from the conference,

“Regardless of what has happened here today, the humanitarian pledge must be the basis for the negotiations of a new treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. It has been made clear that the nuclear weapon states are not interested in making any new commitments to disarmament, so now it is up to the rest of the world to start a process to prohibit nuclear weapons by the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

What citizens must do 

600 million people demonstrated round the world to stop the Iraq War. But the war happened. Blair and Bush were determined that it would. The leaders had their own agenda. The lust to kill won out. It has been said that one of the reasons that this massive demonstration was not successful is because it only happened once. Stopping the rabid militarists and MAD yielders of nuclear weapons will require massive people-power. And protesting will have to be relentless; it must persist until the goal is achieved. Mass demonstrations cannot happen everyday but they could happen once a month. They can be supplemented by vigils, acts of civil disobedience, bombarding the media with letters and articles promoting the passion of the people for peace. We are many and they are few.

Notes

1.       Even if the computers were correct it would be an act of insanity to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack. Why incinerate more millions because some are doomed?

2.       http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41890.htm

3.       http://www.ican.org

Short Animation Keeps It Simple And Clear: This Is How You Can Change The World

By Arjun Walia
May 24, 2015
Collective Evolution

 

The clip below is from Dirt The Movie, and it features Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmental and political activist who tells an inspiring tale of doing the best you can under seemingly insurmountable odds.

With so much new information coming to light, we’ve all asked ourselves the same question: “What can we do to effect change?” Whether it’s the prevention of war or deforestation to the spraying of pesticides on our foods, there seem to be hundreds, if not thousands, of areas where people would like to see change occur. This can be frustrating sometimes, because the solutions to these problems are already at hand. The problem lies within humanity itself and the way we treat each other. We create invisible barriers between us that make it impossible to work together and fix things, and at the same time there are those with tremendous power pulling strings behind the scenes, making it more difficult to even try to implement these solutions. Regardless of what issue we’re talking about, the list of available solutions is quite long, and we’ve provided countless examples of this on our website.

So many people are starting to see all of this information and ponder the question, “What can I do about it?” The answer is simple, be like this hummingbird.

Are The Odds Of Changing The World Really Unlikely? No!

Are the chances of changing the world really as slight as they seem? To be honest, no, and we are only starting to witness just how much of an impact we can have as one human race if we come together in a peaceful manner to bring attention to what is clearly important. The problem is not our inability to create and implement new ideas; our potential as a human race is huge. The problem is our consciousness and that “thing” within our thinking minds that prevents us all from coming together to create change.

One great example of this is the current worldwide resistance against Monsanto, which has gained a tremendous amount of support and attention from millions of people all over the world. Because mainstream media does not often present both sides of the coin, alternative media networks and citizens utilizing social media are sharing all of the research and information that is being underreported and even blatantly ignored. Enough countries have completely banned GMOs and the pesticides that go with them which only illustrated the point further.

It all starts with awareness. We cannot stop a problem unless we become aware of it first, and once we are aware of it, no matter how shocking and scary it can be to face it, we have to accept it and then take action. It does no good to turn a blind eye to something that clearly needs our attention.

So the next time you find yourself asking what you can do about an issue you feel passionately about, remember that all you need to do is start somewhere. It’s not easy – there are many people out there who would like to make a difference but feel uncomfortable because they feel the impact they are making is not great enough – but regardless of whether you can help millions of people or just one, every good deed and act of kindness changes the world. Granted, there are no doubt issues that deserve the serious attention of the whole human race, but global change is created in multiple ways. Another great way is to start with yourself, the person in the mirror.

If the intent in your heart is to make change, then be the change yourself. Start somewhere. Start anywhere. Just start.