Part one Turn on the news today, pick up a paper, visit your favourite news and view sites and you will see the same storeys from every possible angle. Doom and gloom, death and destruction. Wars internal and external, religious and ethnic. The death toll mounts day by day and all we hear is old problems come back and new problems arriving to join them. It sometimes seems as if they can be no such thing as peace anywhere. Here in the old west, in civilised France the anti Semites are running riot, smashing shops and homes they think are Jewish without regard for the fact that most Jews in France have nothing to do with Israel. All that matters is that they are dirty Jews and need to be driven out. The same is said of Arabs in other places and is said of Christians in more distant lands. All this hatred based on which version of which interpretation of a make believe beings teachings they read. We constantly hear about the actions and atrocities of some terrorist group or another, most of the over one hundred named groups are active in parts of the world that we do not hear about but just look back over the last few weeks of news to hear of ISIS, Al Queda, the Taliban, Hamas, Boko Haram, Hizballah just to pick a few. In Europe we have what has just been declared a Civil war in the Ukraine by the International Red Cross. Recent European, African and Middle Eastern history is full of civil wars and separatist groups fighting to form their own land or to reclaim their old land. All this death and destruction. Who is to blame, who is causing it all. Well sadly, in many of these cases, the people to blame are us. Or more correctly our nations. The old Imperial powers, the new Imperial powers, the victors of the last few wars. The current government, the last one or governments from the last century or two. But the same people with the same arrogance and the same Imperial designs. A bunch of European types (Including the US here) from the tradition Western Imperial powers of Britain, Germany. France, Italy, even little Belgium got in on the act. Then add Russia and the US and we had a veritable host of Empires deciding that they knew best and making the rest of the world do what they were told or an Imperial military force would be round for a visit. They redrew maps and forced tribes that hated each other to become part of new nations while tearing apart old nations. Then when the locals got uppity the army went in or more recently to spare the cost of western lives select groups of locals were armed and used to fight proxy wars. Let us take a look at the history of one of these ‘Terrorist’ groups or organisations that are in the news this week. HAMAS. Its full name is al-Harakat al-Muqawwama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Today as I write this Gaza is a war zone, rockets, bombs and shells passing each other in the air as they fly in or out. The Israeli military pounding the region while Hamas launches rockets back at civilian areas. Both sides trying to smash and kill but it’s a rather one sided fight. Today Hamas is widely regarded as a terrorist organisation, they didn’t start life that way. They started life as a small charitable group helping people in need. The Muslim Brotherhood originally expressed an ideology of charitable support for believers and it was to support this that Hamas came into being as an organisation known as Al-Mujamma al Islami,. It was founded in the 70s and was, in fact, registered in Israel as a charitable group by its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. His intention was to unite Palestinians through religion rather than nationalism, by using Islam to bring them together. In this he was almost the opposite of the politically active, secular and left wing Palestine Liberation Organisation which was strongly (and violently) agitating for a Palestinian state. The idea that Islam would be heavily involved in politics was generally considered ridiculous at the time, very few nations world wide had religious governments, in fact among the Israeli and Western powers the idea of ‘Political Islam’. that is a religious movement also becoming a political one, was of little concern and in fact something of a joke. Sheikh Yassin led his organisation to build schools and mosques, libraries and a university. They cleaned streets, organised rubbish removal and provided support such as tents, food and clothing for refugees. At the same time they were working to maintain the cultural and educational infrastructure they were also creating a widespread and influential religious infrastructure through the mosques and followers of Islam they were bringing together. Now at this time the primary Palestinian political organisations were the PLO and Fatah. Both were being hit hard by the Israelis and both were struggling to maintain control of Gaza and the West Bank. In fact Sheikh Yassin and his followers were pretty much doing the work that the two political groups were failing at. As a result the influence of the sheikh grew while that of the other two began to fall. Seeing a chance to further weaken the PLO and Fatah the west and Israel began to provide significant funding to the sheikh. Both openly and according to a number of US intelligence releases covertly, the west along with several of the oil states funnelled millions of dollars to this charitable organisation. Quickly they became the people to go to for help in Gaza and the west bank. If you needed help or support, food or just your electricity and plumbing fixed you went to the sheikh and his people. With this funding they rapidly grew in power and influence and became far more prominent as a result. They came to be a viable rival to the PLO and Fatah and Israel along with the west continued to send them money. Due to this funding the secular political groups lost power and the religious political group gained in power. People began to notice, political Islam was working, and they certainly had more money and power and weren't being attacked by Israel all the time. What was happening was that politics was polarising between a religious politic group and a secular political group and it was Israeli and western power and money that was making it happen. With the fall of the Shah and the rise of Iran as a Theocracy political Islam suddenly noticed that religion could run a country. The effect of this rippled across the middle east Sheikh Yassin was arrested in 1984; a cache of weapons was discovered and linked to him and his movement. It seemed they had been arming themselves. However they told the Israelis that the weapons were for use against the PLO and Fatah in the increasingly violent fight for power between the groups. The Sheikh was released a year later, and in the meantime there were numerous reports of Israeli security forces turning a blind eye to attacks launched by the sheikh’s followers, even according to some reports allowing groups of them to pass checkpoints so they could attack PLO or Fatah strongholds. The result of this was that support for the PLO and Fatah continued to fall and support for the Islamic movement grew stronger. Things change in 1987 with the first intifada. Here the Sheikh and his allies declared the formation of a military wing of his organisation, Hamas. The organisations charter released later was highly anti Semitic and praised Jihad or holy war. After Hamas carried out its first attack the sheikh was arrested again, this time sentenced to life. However he was released some years later, the official reason was given as humanitarian grounds. Just before Sheikh Yassin was released the Oslo accords had been signed and a significant international effort was underway to bring peace to the region. Israel is on record as being reluctant to participate in this but a significant number of Palestinians said they were against terrorist attacks and wanted peace. The PLO was involved in these negotiations toward peace, Hamas openly refused any attempt to end the fighting and stated it would not accept the existence of Israel. Just before the Oslo accords were to be signed Hamas struck, a wave of attacks against civilian targets. Arafat looked either deceitful or weak. There are rumours that even at this stage Israel was still supporting the sheikh to further undermine the PLO. In the face of these attacks negotiations failed. A right wing militant government was voted into power in Israel and the sheikh was released from prison and exiled to begin his tour of the middle east, a triumphant parade of countries that greatly increased in influence, bought in large numbers of new supporters and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations that flowed into Gaze unrestricted by the new Israeli government. Over the remaining years to today Hamas has defeated and driven out Fatah, the PLO which became the Palestinian Authority has steadily become all but powerless, and then there is Hamas. Where the PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist as a nation, Hamas declares they will drive the Jews into the sea and destroy the nation. Where the PA is secular and favours no religion Hamas is blatantly Islamic and openly uses religion and fanatical Muslims to launch its attacks. What had been the great threat to Israel now accepts that Israel has a right to exist and live in peace while the organisation that Israel grew from a small charity into a major power in the region to weaken the PLO now stands as the main enemy. Even now we see a complex political situation where Israel is its own worst enemy. The PLO, now the PA, uses negotiation and not violence; many agreements are made and yet very little seems to happen. The PA talk and make agreements, people watch as one by one those agreements fail and fall away. So the PA is seen as weak and powerless and people turn away from it and to the likes of Hamas. Hamas is involved in a bloody campaign of death and destruction. They became the defacto government when the PA and Fatah were all but driven from Gaza. They are fighting their ongoing campaign to destroy Israel, an impossibility for them, they cannot possibly achieve this aim, all they can do is threaten and kill civilians. But by continuing to launch such attacks Hamas creates the justification Israel needs to act. No nation can stand back and do nothing while its civilian population is under attack, no western nation would sit back and allow such attacks. So Israel can justify its attacks and so civilians on both sides continue to die. Every rocket launched one way justifies a bomb or shell launched the other way. Every death on either side justifies a death on the other side. Every failed talks or broken deal simply makes any other deals or talks less likely and in the mean time millions of civilians on both sides of the border live in fear. Why negotiate when any brokered arrangement will not be fully honoured or will be ignored latter on. So the violence continues, Hamas, the organisation bought to power by Israel, now blindly launching its fanatical attacks and in doing so justifying Israeli retaliation. Hamas exists today to fight against Israeli oppression of Gaza and is kept in power by the continuation of such things as the blockade. Hatred and fear feeding on hatred and fear. Hamas uses violence to demand the end to the blockade. Israel will not accept the demands of 'Terrorists' and so the blockade will not be lifted when to do so would look like a Hamas victory. Round and round and round it goes, a self sustaining circle of violence that neither government seems willing to break. Each justifies itself by the existence of the other and so remains in power. Politics. While men, woman and children hide in shelters or crouch in the rubble of their homes. Just politics, nothing to see here, move along citizen. There is a saying about having to lie in the bed you made. For the men and woman who are trying to survive here, for the children who are growing up in the ruins, playing in the streets and watching the bombs or rockets fall, they did not make this bed. Politics did. But it’s not the politicians that have to live there. |
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Cost of Britain's involvement in Iraq the war and the subsequent peace keeping operations:
Dead young men and women who signed up to defend Britain not die needlessly in some dust ball third world nation. March 2003 to July 2009: 179. Wounded and sent home to inadequate care, support and being kicked off benefits by ATOS, same period: 5970. Financial cost, not including overseas aid, salaries of soldiers or use of existing military assets that were sent to Iraq. £9,240,000,000. End result. Iraq government now losing control of the country and facing collapse. Army units expensively trained and equipped by US and UK throwing away weapons and running for it trying to catch up to officers who fled first. Islamic extremists, the same groups that we were talking about supporting against Assad not so long ago are overthrowing democratic rule and imposing strict theocracy and religious law. They are gaining huge stockpiles of modern western weapons left in the dust by fleeing Iraqi military units including vehicles, heavy weapons and some reports of other items such as anti tank or anti aircraft weapons. Not to mention uncountable quantities of money. Reports come in today that the Iraqi government set in place by so much cost in lives and coin by us, the UK and the US, is facing collapse in the face of a large and capable force of Islamic groups. Hundreds of thousands either fleeing or trying to, a huge and building refugee crisis to add to the millions already in trouble across the border in Syria. I consider the failure of western efforts to set up a western democracy on a nation with no tradition of such. The expectation seen through the rose tinted glasses of our political classes that a few years and the same corruption that is the norm here in the UK and a full blown democracy will spring forth. Ignoring the fact that British democracy formed over hundreds of years and took a war and a great deal of bloodshed. I am also thankful that for once sense prevailed and the UK and Western World did not jump in with another bombing campaign to topple Assad and arm his enemies. How much worse would things be now if the whole of Syria was arming and standing with these forces. I am thankful that as much as the west tried to do to Egypt what it did to Iraq it was not able to do. Iraq is falling apart, the west went in and meddled in the old fashioned way of Empire but without bothering to do what the Empire did which was stick around afterwards and tidy up. Instead they wrecked the old system, celebrated a job well done and walked away. Now we have the map of Northern Iraq and Syria becoming a new extremely Islamic state and the rest or Iraq may well be joining it the as soon as the rest of the political and military leadership has run away. I don't blame soldiers for not wanting to fight when they see their leaders turn tail and flee at the first sign of trouble. Finally and yes some of you may well consider this controversial. If you do, Tough. Had the west succeeded in Egypt with its attempts to force a Muslim brotherhood government after the movement to kick them out, then the Sunni and Pro Al Q Muslim brotherhood would be siding with the Sunni and Pro Al Q Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) to turn the entire middle east into a war zone. Egypt under a secular government is still the last and only real hope for peace in the middle East, it is the one power than can hold and it is the one nation that will guarantee widespread and murderous religious war across the whole region if it falls to religious rule. Yet it is the nation that mere months ago the West was trying to condemn to the hell of a strongly religious government with the persecution of minorities and other religions and war against any other group or nation that did not share its beliefs. Again and again the West has meddled and again and again such actions have made the situation worse. Will our politicians learn the lesson. I doubt it. Is this what we are going to leave behind us in Afghanistan. Pakistan is already dealing with attacks against its major airports and cities. Libya is a wasteland of Waring gangs. Syria is a single vast war zone. The middle east is a powder keg that is sparking and fizzing and looking more and more likely to explode. The response of our leaders. Take the soldiers who have been worn out by year after year of constant war and sack them, dump the casualties of those years in the gutter. Run down our armed forces and then rely on reserve units and part time volunteers who are refusing to have anything to do with the nation reserve force. Our armed forces are reduced to a hollow shell as the storm that has been created by Western warmongering and stupidity final begins to arrive. I see the lights of civilisation going out again and it’s not just the electricity shortage causing it. What with World Women’s day not so long ago there seem to have been a number of stories doing the
rounds that say that as we steadily go forward into the 21st century the position of women and girls, their rights and freedoms, are going backwards. In Iraq we are watching a draft law make its way through the system towards becoming a law, this draft would make it legal for girls as young as nine to be married and subject to the legal requirements of a wife including sex. This same law also set a legal condition that a wife has no right to refuse her husband’s requirement to have sex; in short a woman no longer has the right to say no. Legal rape! It reaffirms women’s position as property and makes any children the automatic property of the father if they are two or older. A woman would need her husband’s permission to leave their house. This law is being presented by Iraq’s Justice Minister no less, the draft law was endorsed by a large majority of the countries council of ministers and both the Justice Minister and his political party are allied to the Prime Minister. There is a lot of opposition to this law and it is generally thought that it will not pass, unless the fractious Iraqi political system reaches the point where the Prime Minister needs the votes and support of those who are pushing this law forward. At present there is no sign the Prime Minister needs those votes but he is a politician which means this could come up for a vote at any time with the support of numerous religious groups and political parties as part of a horse trade. Then we have had the stories about Jewish women who are unable to divorce because under orthodox Jewish Law a woman needs the permission of her Husband to divorce, the husband can, of course, divorce whenever he wants to. So yet another of those Abrahamic religions treating women as property and denying them the same rights and freedoms as men. Then we have the UK Law society deciding to push along the matter of women being second class people by endorsing Sharia compliant wills and legal agreements. This may seem a small thing but these are the same Lawyers who are charged with upholding British Law and these are the same people that would be called upon to represent those wishing to contest such wills. For those who missed the stories such wills include gender discrimination since female heirs will receive no more than half of the amount that male heirs receive, it blocks any wife or husband from inheriting if the marriage was performed in any non Islamic venue and removes adopted children or children born to couples who are not married under Islamic law from inheriting completely. Given that British and English Law holds that children of parents married in a church, synagogue or by civil service are in fact the legal children and have a right to inherit this leads to the situation where the Islamic family of a person can block that persons own spouse and children from inheriting on the grounds that the person was born into a Muslim family and is therefore a Muslim and that their non Muslim marriage and offspring are not entitled to anything. Nothing like enshrining religiously based discrimination into British law endorsed by no less an organisation than the Law Society. Bring back the Dark Ages so our Lawyers and religious types can really oppress women. So yet again women are being treated as second class people or excluded completely on the grounds that they are married under British Law which becomes MEANINGLESS IN BRITAIN thanks to our own lawyers. There is a reason why it is often said that to start the revolution first shoot all the lawyers. The female half of humanity is even being oppressed before they are born, or more correctly they are not being born. Thanks to modern medical technology the sex of babies can be determined before birth and something like a THIRD of the world’s population practices some form of female focused abortion. This is sometimes illegal and sometimes ignored but happens not just amongst the most backward of nations, it happens in Europe and here in the UK. In china as a result of the one child laws millions of girls have been aborted, the result of this is that estimates are that 48.2% of the Chinese population is now female and 51.8% is male. (UN world development Programme) Those numbers are close but when you consider the total population of china they become terrifying. As of the Chinese state census of 2013 the total population was 1.385 billion. These means that the slight percentage difference above equates to 717 million men and 668 million women. There are almost 50 million more males than females. This includes children but still represents 40 million adults and today’s children will be tomorrow’s men growing up in a world where there will be no wives or girlfriends for them. By 2020 this is estimated to be 70 million, a gender imbalance larger than the entire population of the UK. India has embraced medical technology to abort unwanted females rather than allowing newborn girls to die in some way. The numbers of births over the last 30 years in India now stands at 48.3% female and 51.7% male. Given the 2012 state census put India’s population at 1.252 Billion, that is 647 million males and 605 million females, a gender imbalance of 42 million, this number continues to grow larger year by year. Historically such high imbalances of males leads to violence. Women who already lack the rights of men become not just property but limited and therefore valuable property. India already suffers from a rape epidemic. Millions of men in India and China face a life without a wife or female partner, in many cases there is a significant rise in sex slavery, the importing of girls who are forced into prostitution. This happens not just in these two countries. The gender imbalance in birthrights is utterly insane when you look at some Middle Eastern countries and even here in the UK we have media organisations running undercover operations to find medical professionals who are willing to perform gender based abortions for no medical reasons. All too often these stories find many doctors, nurses or medical establishments more than happy to abort females and turn a blind eye in return for money. One very tiny piece of good news. At long last the Crown Prosecution Service has managed to find its backside with both hands and a road map and is now preparing to bring criminal charges against a doctor for performing FGM. Sixty thousand plus victims of this terrible form of child abuse and we finally have one doctor facing court. This is not to say he will be found guilty or that there will be a meaningful punishment that will serve as notice that the UK is serious about stopping this abuse happening. If found guilty he will still be able to appeal and given that the CPS has taken 30 years to bring the first case before a Judge I am not confident that they will be pushing for harsh punishment. But it is a step, a tiny step but still a step in the right direction. A doctor, a man who should have taken an oath to do no harm, abusing and mutilating young girls. I will wait to see what happens but it would be nice to have this piece of scum struck off and dropped into a deep dark hole for a very long time. Then the CPS can start rounding up the hundreds of other doctors, nurses and such who are actively involved in this mutilation year after year. I would like to live in a country where such child abusers and mutilators actually feared the punishment they would receive for the crimes they commit against the young and helpless. I would like to live in a country where it is ability, skill or experience that is used to determine a person’s worth not gender or race. I would like to live in a country where civilised and secular laws protect every man, woman and child from the abuses of Religions. I would like to see that as we travel into the 21st century we can set aside such Dark Age concepts as considering women to be less important or to be undeserving of rights and freedoms given to men. But I’m not holding my breath. Part Two
Part one is HERE Nation: A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular region. A cultural and/or ethnic identity. State: An area or territory considered as an organized political community under one government. A geopolitical Identity. The Ukraine for example Nation State: A state formed of nations. The United Kingdom for example or any historic Empire made up of multiple nations. By International law, by the definition of self determination from the UN and by the carefully crafted vagueness loved by Lawyers everywhere it is not possible to legally try to separate yourself from a state you do not wish to be a part of except by violence or threat or violence. The UN and existing governments have worked long and hard to keep the world as it was when the UN was founded. The right of self determination is all too often inconvenient or an open threat to those in power and the more divided the State is the more of a threat it represents. Which is why for an ethnic or cultural region to try to separate itself from a state it does not wish to be part of is illegal. Only with the permission of the National or State government is it possible to gain self determination, democracy at a local level has no part of the process. The will of the people involved is irrelevant, only the state can act, only the government can do anything. Governments for the most part exist to keep themselves in power. An individual, a political party or a religious or cultural group seeking to keep control. Much of what a government does is focused on keeping the reins of power, be it by force in the more totalitarian regimes or by concentrated support and wealth in areas that will guarantee votes in the more liberal democracies. So when a State is faced with regions or peoples within its borders calling for independence the result is all too often the same. An iron shod boot or propaganda through the media. Very few governments are prepared to accept a loss of power and territory that comes with part of a country becoming independent. Real or not the loss of power and status is unacceptable to the ruling classes and they act to prevent it. Sometimes by asking what problems the would be independents have and looking to solve them to keep them happy and part of the country. Sometimes by stepping in and trying to block the independence movement by whatever methods are acceptable and often a few that are on the line between legal and criminal. The loss of the Scottish MPs from Parliament would make the Tories almost permanently the majority in the house and yet they oppose Scottish independence because they would lose power, influence and wealth. No one is seriously talking about how to allocate shared assets, Faslane cannot be lost to the UK and yet neither side are talking about what would happen to this great naval facility in the event the vote is Yes. There are no plans being set out. In a way no one seems to be taking the situation seriously enough to prepare for a yes vote. Odd that. We find ourselves in the post industrial age or more relevantly the information age. Today anyone with the technology can film events and broadcast them online and countless millions of people around the world who find themselves trapped within States or countries not of their choosing can see that there are others in the same situation. Today anyone with a smart phone, and there are an estimated one and a half billion out there, can act as a broadcast journalist, a historian, the leader or member of a widespread group that share views or ideals or in fact any cooperative and communicative venture that in the past required vast resources. Those rumours that the government is cracking down again or denying rights to one group or another, here is the film. All those friends and relatives that you have not been able to meet or talk to for decades because someone created a border between you, here they are to see, talk to and make plans with. There is a reason why the more totalitarian regimes are cracking down on social media and trying to jam smart phones as soon as they start to crush dissent and attempts at democracy or self determination. The power of communication is hard to quantify but it can bring down governments and States and create new Nations. That makes it feared and rightly so by the leaders of the worlds States. A single person or a small group of people have very little power on a national scale. They are easy to ignore or repress and there is little that they can do to change their situation. But when they can communicate with each other, when they find that they are not just a few people but thousands of people, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and then they become able to make changes and work together. Millions of people live their lives as part of a global community, doing business with the world, having friends and contacts around the world, buying and selling across the world. Such people growing up as part of the global community more and more come to ask themselves why they are being trapped within lines drawn on a map when they live their lives across the whole world. Such questions threaten the very existence of governments who cling so tightly to those lines on a map without understanding that nations and governments can be part of the world and still be nations These are the people and the questions that strike fear into the hearts of governments everywhere. When small Nations try to separate themselves from larger states they often find themselves fighting opposition not just from the government trying to keep them under its power, but also from international organisations, companies and other Nations or States. Most of the time this is for greed or for political self interest on the part of the external organisation. States and Nations that contain their own restive populations can hardly be seen to be supporting breakaway groups in other countries in case their own breakaway groups get ideas. Multinational corporations fearing and condemning the separation of a new small nation from the grip of a larger State face the loss of cosy and often exploitive trade agreements made by friends in the State government. Indeed many groups want freedom and independence to escape economic exploitation at the hands of their State Government or its allied Corporations. The web of trade agreements and deals in place across the world is mind bogglingly complex and completely unnecessary. It exists to maximise profits of the corporations and countries that take advantage of rules designed to prevent some from competing while allowing others to exploit situations and use money to enslave populations. New nations could add to the complexity or they could create the impetus to tear down the whole mess and create a new global set of rules governing trade, simple and fair to all. Simple fair trade rules, hardly something the profit minded corporations of the world are interested in. We see much of this in the current campaign for Scottish independence. The UK Government is lining up to say how bad it will be, to highlight all the negative points and to emphasise how it will be a complete disaster and not a single one of them seems to be attempting to work out a solution. A number of corporations that have been happy up till now to operate in dozens of countries around the world are saying they could not do business in an independent Scotland. Even the SNP themselves are conspiring against a democratic self determination by doing a fairly inept job of actually planning for independence. It’s not as if the UK government will close the border roads and put up passport offices, or are they that petty. Will there be a wall, wire fences and mine fields? Will Scottish citizens have their UK passports taken from them and be made to walk through the “Other” gate at airports. The EU is just as bad. In what way does a Scottish Parliament suddenly cease to be head of a nation that does business in Europe if the vote is in favour of independence? Why do all of the free trade agreements that are already in force and understood cease to apply? Is Scotland going to somehow fall off the European continent? What is the difference between Scotland as it is now and one that is a sovereign nation bound by treaties of mutual self interest to the United Kingdom? Aside from the Bureaucracy there is none but it sets a terrible example to every other region of Europe that w ants independence and this is the problem as far as the Eurocrats and governments see it. But for all this Scotland with its own Parliament is more independent now than England is, there are no regional assemblies in England, we have no English Parliament to match those in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, we have no parliament representing London which by wealth and population is larger than Scotland and Wales together. What we have is the British Parliament. Ash Kashaul durbatulûk. One Parliament to rule them all. Self determination as enshrined by international law has nothing to do with self, it is the determination of a nation or state to determine its form of government. It should more correctly be called State Determination. True freedom to determine your own status is a right denied to all too many, even here in the UK had the Government decided it did not want to allow Scotland to hold that vote then the SNP would be in violation of the same international law that the Crimea is being blamed for violating. The states and Nations of the world are fighting to keep themselves in power, the people of the world are struggling to find their voices and to claim for themselves the right to determine who they are. Modern technology brings communication which brings cooperation. The more we talk and claim our voices the stronger democracy becomes. Democracy does not mean an end to nations, people who want to be in a nation should be free to do so. What this means is an end to the tyranny of lines drawn on maps, the gentle or harsh tyrrany of governments claiming that because you live on one side or another of those simple little lines drawn on paper that they control you. Nations are no more than the voices of a people speaking together. States are a construction forced on people who were all to often given no choice. We even need nations as protection from the great corporations that so ruthlessly exploit peoples and regions for their own profit until such time as the world community itself acts to crush the greedy multi nationals. But they should be nations we chose to be a part of, nations of the wiling not the trapped. Some words of wisdom to end with “Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness”. Charlie Chaplin the Great Dictator. Part One
Nation: A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular region. A cultural and/or ethnic identity. State: An area or territory considered as an organized political community under one government. A geopolitical Identity. The Ukraine for example Nation State: A state formed of nations. The United Kingdom for example or any historic Empire made up of multiple nations. Although most of us never think about it the countries we live in are the product of someone else at some point in history drawing lines on maps. Down here in Deepest Summerset prior to the arrival of the Romans this was the land of the Durotriges and all over the country were other tribal groups. Then those roman quill pushers tried to make us all one happy part of the greater Roman Empire. After that the country separated in to larger but still separate regions such as Wessex and Mercia. Germanics, Scandinavians, half of Europe wandered over to raid or to settle down after conquering the locals. Then the Normans turned up in 1066, by 1130 they controlled not only all of England and a lot of Wales but they had added parts of Southern and Easter Scotland and by 1169 they added significant sections of Ireland as well. Later kings added more and more until the United Kingdom was, well, all of the ancient Kingdoms United under a single ruler by force of arms. Since then we have had the occasional internal war about who rules the United Kingdom but we have been the UK for so long that few these days even think about the fact that we live in a disparate set of regions conquered by force and now ruled by a single government. However for a great many States around the world this is not the case. The 19th and 20th centuries were busy times for map makers. Due to Imperial dictate, wars, conquests, collapsing rule and a variety of other reasons nations and states rose and fell all over the world. The European empires and the aftermath of the two World Wars created perhaps the largest number of changes Very few of these States wanted to be unified as such; they were forced into being by more powerful Nations or States drawing lines on maps and forcing them to abide by the new borders. This left ethnic and cultural groups split between new borders and groups that had nothing in common or even great animosity for each other now making up a new State that forced them to be neighbours. In the 1990s when the Soviet Empire broke apart a number of nations and States found themselves under their own control and with borders that often encompassed large numbers of people who did not want to be ruled by someone far away or nothing to do with them. Czechoslovakia for example later broke apart into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Yugoslavia separated in to six smaller Nations or States, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo and the republic of Macedonia. This gives you an idea of just how many separate groups had been packed together inside the borders of one country as a result of the world wars or Imperial powers. But as the problems over the last two decades within many of those countries shows, they contain yet smaller groups who are not happy with the way things are in the State that rules them. Which brings us to the Ukraine and the Crimea. The Crimea has been Russian for longer than some European countries have existed, Catherine the Great took the region in 1783 as part of greater Russia. By comparison Belgium, that country that forms the heart and capital of the EU came into existence in 1839 and then only after being the southern Netherlands then conquered by France or Austria then France then becoming part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands then becoming Belgium after the Belgian Revolution in 1839. Think about the significance of that, the Crimea has been Russian longer than Belgium has existed and still the EU and NATO are engaged in a land grab to claim the Ukraine and its resources. By the Way why is NATO trying to set up on Russia’s borders, how can Putin not see that as a blatant provocation. Oh it’s to protect the Ukraine from Russia, does it not occur to people that Putin is acting to protect Russia and the Crimea from NATO by taking over chunks of the Ukraine. The significant Russian majority combined with many non Russians deciding to boycott the vote meant that over 90% of the votes were to join Russia and as such the Ukraine is no more. It will take months, perhaps a couple of years but from yesterday the state called Ukraine will never be the same and it is possible that a year or two from now may not even exist. The regions bordering Russia in the eastern Ukraine are already talking about holding similar votes to join Russia; they also contain large numbers of Russian speakers and Russian citizens. To the west there are many who have family and friends in Poland, a country they were part of until Hitler and Stalin carved up the east of Europe by drawing lines on maps. Why should people who were born in Poland then found themselves conquered by Russia, forced to become part of the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact them left to become a country called the Ukraine not be allowed to rejoin Poland if they consider that country to be their ancestral home. The West had basically treated this whole situation in an appalling manner. Any attempt to stand up to Putin has been wasted in pointless threats, empty gestures and a general demonstration of incompetence. The west has tried to bully their way through this and have been proved to be toothless which means that for the future Putin is essentially free to do as he wants safe in the knowledge that the West will do nothing. This is perhaps the biggest downside of this whole affair. So many Leaders, so much hot air, so many paper tigers. The West has demonstrated that unless you are a third world power like Libya then you can do what you want because the West cannot or will not do anything about it. The world has become a more dangerous place as a result of this. But I feel there is a good side as well, this is a promising start and sets a precedent that will, hopefully, lead to the further spread of democracy and self determination. Not the watered down version that the UN supports but all people having the democratic ability to determine who they are, where they are and of which nation they wish to be a part of. The ability of an ethnic, cultural or regional group to decide for themselves who they want to be by the vote of the majority of that group not constrained by the majority of a country they do not wish to be part of. Russia has, by acting so quickly and forcefully set a precedent. The West has by failing to act or by acting in such a weak and helpless manner also set a precedent. Without resorting to armed uprising and a blood bath. Without thousands of civilian deaths. A regional people who consider themselves to be citizens of a nation they were separated from by lines on a map have voted to redraw the map. The West said it was illegal and then did nothing of consequence. So the case is made, the precedent has been set. Other ethnic or cultural groups who want to determine their own fate free from the rule or a government imposed upon them by lines on a map can stand up and vote. Many will not have the strength to stand along and the West will call them criminals for illegally trying to be a democracy. But the fact that some try and succeed will inspire others to try and if they succeed then yet more will be inspired. There are many states along Russia’s southern borders or eastern regions who will be watching the events in the Crimea with interest, as will many across the world who want the right to self determination at the personal level not the state level. It will take a while and many will fail but what I see here is 21st century democracy in action. People making their own choices and communicating those choices to the world. In the West many condem this vote as being at the point of a gun and therefore not a valid vote, the sad truth is that it was only under the cover of guns that such a vote was possible. While Russia had behaved badly here so have NATO and the EU. There are no good guys in this situation. The Ukraine is being carved up between the two European great powers, one to the West and one to the East. There are many losers in this. But perhaps, just perhaps one of the winners will be democracy. Disclaimer. These thoughts and opinions are mine and mine alone. I have no secret information or sources, I have my eyes, my thoughts and the same information that the rest of the world has. It’s not my fault if the world’s governments are too ignorant to remember history or know what is going on. The Russian reaction to current events in the Ukraine seem to have been something of a surprise to the West and its leadership. In the US Obama is saying this and then saying that and his number two is making threats about trade. In Europe we have Merkel saying Putin is “Out of Touch with Reality”. In the UK our own Hague is promising "significant diplomatic and economic costs". Governments everywhere are saying one thing to one reporter and then seen to be saying another to someone else (thank you whoever took that picture of the UKs response on the open page). Russia’s armed action seems to have surprised everyone, but why is this the case. It seems to me that, when seen from the Russian point of view and in particular from the point of view of one Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin a sixteen year veteran of the KGB, that for years now the West has been deliberately involved in a hostile campaign to expand against Russia. In the aftermath of the Second World War the Soviet Bear was crouched along the eastern border of Europe with a great many tanks and guns. To counter this an Alliance of Western powers came into being specifically to defend against the Russian Empire as was (Soviet Union). This alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, existed to coordinate a military response against any war against the then Soviet Union. With the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia found itself without its central and eastern European empire and NATO found itself without a purpose. So in order to keep itself in existence NATO repurposed itself into a defensive alliance against threats of military action against Europe and this is where the mess started in 1990/91. German Unification bought the united Germany into NATO. This was done with Russian agreement but was accompanied by an agreement between NATO and Russia that there would be a military reduction across Europe and that NATO would not station non German Troops, weapons or Nuclear warheads in the east. It has been argued since that this was a commitment by NATO to NOT expand eastwards, the US state department have said that this was not the case and that this was not part of the agreement but Russian President Gorbachev has said that he understood that such a commitment HAD been made and that NATO would not expand beyond the borders of Germany. Miscommunication and confusion. The KGB and Russian government would certainly have been aware that Gorbachev believed he had been promised NATO would not expand eastwards so when NATO began to do just that there would have been concern in the halls of the Kremlin. Over the course of the next decade or so NATO added those traditional Western European nations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to the military alliance. This is what NATO looks like today, the Orange bit is the Ukraine. Thats a lot of green and it is expanding to surround Russia, hardly likely to reasure an old KGB colonel. In 1993 NATO deployed military forces into Bosnia, at first it was military aircraft to enforce a no fly zone
but this was quickly followed by ground forces. Although this was technically a UN action the military forces were provided by NATO. Things quickly escalated with NATO shooting down Bosnian aircraft and then the Bosnians shooting down a British Harrier. Bombing of ground targets followed. This action resulted in tens of thousands of NATO troops and hundreds of armoured vehicles on the ground in what was once Yugoslavia, well to the East of Germany and in clear violation of the Russian understanding of the reunification of Germany agreement. In 1999 the events in Kosovo became so bad that the UN again decided to take action. They called on NATO for military forces. This started with a month’s long bombing campaign that aside from causing a number of civilian casualties also managed to hit the Chinese embassy. Ground forces arrived as part of the peace keeping forces and along the way NATO deployed troops in Albania and then moved into Macedonia under the pretext of disarming Albanian militias in that country. While this was a UN mandated mission it was carried out by NATO and there are numerous reports from the time that NATO refused to allow the UN to control airstrikes and military action on the grounds that the UN security council and specifically China and Russia would not allow military strikes against targets in the former Yugoslavia and to allow them to do so now would set the precedent that they could then exert authority over NATO military actions undertaken by the UN at a later date. Or to look at this from the Russian point of view NATO used the UN as an excuse to start a war and then refused to allow the UN any control over how that war was fought. NATO aircraft and troops attacking a pro Russian nation far to the east of Germany in clear violation of the Russian understanding of the reunification of Germany agreement. In 2004 the Baltic Air Policing mission came into effect with the establishment of NATO quick reaction alert fighters being stationed at airbases in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These fighters are part of the post 9/11 response to airborne terrorist threats against cities and NATO provides modern fighter aircraft drawn from its main nations to support those members of NATO that lackde modern front line interceptors. However this puts western military aircraft and troops far to the east of Germany which IS a direct violation of that 1990/91 agreement and in the case of these three Baltic nations puts them directly on Russia’s border. Also in 2004 as a result of the Istanbul Summit NATO began the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative which put defence and military cooperation agreements in place with several gulf state nations. Again to Russian eyes NATO was expanding and forming military alliances far beyond the Borders of Western Europe. With specific regard to the Ukraine, in 1995 the Ukraine entered NATO’s partnership for peace program. Shortly after this polls reported that as many as 40% of the population were in favour of joining NATO though the Pro NATO people seem to have been concentrated in the West as I have heard of other polls more slanted to the Russian speaking and eastern regions of the Ukraine reported than more than twice as many people in those areas saw NATO as a threat than wanted to be part of NATO. In 2008 both the Ukraine and Georgia were both told they would eventually become members of NATO. Both of these nations have long borders with Russia, significant Russian speaking populations and both are, to Russian eyes, a very long way east of Germany. The Ukraine was being lined up for NATO membership though this was an on again off again situation until 2010 when, after a vote in the Kiev parliament the Ukraine passed into Law a bill forbidding membership of any military alliance but allowing for cooperation with military alliances such as NATO. This year with the overthrow of the Yanukovich regime and the rise of the western opposition parties to power NATO membership is back on the agenda. So what does this mean from the Russian point of view, why has Putin responded in the way that he has. Russian troops went into Georgia in 2008 and are still there now so there is a clear precedent of how Russia would respond. Russia has made no secret of the fact that it is not happy with NATO’s continued expansion eastwards and yet NATO has again and again moved closer to Russia itself. In the eyes of Russia a military alliance that existed to fight against Russia has now expanded to the Russian borders and is trying to take over countries that are not only a significant part of Russian history but also contain large Russian populations and Russian assets. The EU is seen as the economic arm of NATO in the same way that NATO is the military might of the EU in many parts of the world such as Russia. Just as NATO has steadily moved itself closer and closer to its old enemy so has the EU moved its economic control closer and closer. Again and again and again NATO and the EU have poked the sleeping Bear, often in it past it has done nothing but grumble so they have ignored it. Because the Bear did not charge out and fight them NATO and the EU seem to have thought it was too old and toothless to respond and so continued to poke it, at first with long sticks but recently with shorter and shorter ones. Now the EU and Nato have reached the Ukraine and the Crimea and they are poking the bear with very short sticks indeed. The Bear is growling and showing its claws and suddenly everyone is surprised and blaming the Bear for being aggressive. In the eyes of Russia and Putin the west has advanced its anti Russian alliance to the very doorstep and is now directly threatening Russia and what remains of the Russian empire. To be honest here I think the Russian response is more restrained than could have been expected and the continued efforts by the US, EU and NATO to stir the pot and keep poking the old Bear are likely to trigger a far more aggressive response. As anyone with the slightest experience of angry dogs or bears will tell you. When faced with one back off till it calms down, only an utter fool would continue to poke it with sticks after they had made it angry in the first place. So what does that make our leaders? This morning before I had finished my first mug of coffee I was checking my emails and messages.
There was one from my old friend Hoz Shafiei, a man I will add who keeps encouraging me to get into trouble . He asked why my Twitter account was private. News to me. On checking I found a page of details which boiled down to this: Your account (@jfwking) is currently suspended. For more information, please visit Suspended Accounts. Following is a way to receive information in your timeline, from a person, company, or organization. However, a disproportionately large number of the users you followed have blocked your account or reported your account as spam. For more information about following best practices, please review the Following limits and best practices. This left me puzzled, had I posted something that had been found so offensive that a large number of people had blocked me or reported me. While I may be blunt and the truth or my opinions may be unwelcome to some I am seldom rude nor do I post obscenities. So what was going on? In order to get my twitter account back I had to tick various boxes to say that I would abide by the Twitter rules and codes of conduct and not do it again. Though at this stage I had no idea what it was I had done and still don't. Boxes ticked, hoops jumped through and account back. With no followers or followings. This was before I had even finished my first mug of coffee so I really didn’t need this in the morning. By the way how did humanity function before coffee? After much checking and poking around I found that I still had followers and followings, I had lost two followings in total. Yesterday I was following 377 people, this morning it was 375, so a grand total of two people had stopped me from following them. Though while going through the backlog of tweets I added several more followings. I cannot see who these two were or why they blocked me from following them. In terms of people following me I had lost one. Rachel Reeves MP was following me yesterday and was not this morning. No idea why she followed and then unfollowed, perhaps she took the time to read my blog and didn’t like my view on things. Again there was no mention of why she was gone. But as far as I can see a grand total of two people blocked from following them me out of well over three hundred. Does that constitute a “disproportionately large number of the users you followed”? How do just two people get my twitter account shut down? Aside from the annoyance this raises in my mind a rather important point about just how un-free the freedom of speech is on social media. I have avoided Twitter, I find the limit of such small posts annoying, I like to say something not be forced to crush my words together to fit a tiny character limit. You cannot have a meaningful exchange of ideas on Twitter. Still I have been persuaded to be more active there. One day when they come for me with a lynch mob there will be a second spot on the platform for Hoz who keeps persuading me to do these things. Now in the last few days I have been posting about the situation in the Ukraine and the limp and toothless response from the western world to events there. I have also commented on the growth of food bank use and the fact that the government has stopped releasing statistics. Nothing here that I have not said in my blog posts and yet Twitter shuts me down. Twitter is called a social media. A digital method of interaction where people can communicate without regard to boundaries or borders. Where people can exchange views and opinions around the world. It along with others such as facebook, forums, chat groups etc have become the information age way that people communicate, it has replaced phone calls, letters or painting on the walls of caves. It is seen as a part of life, something that is routine, something always available. Yet as the result of something I had no control over, something a handful of others seem to have objected to, I found myself shut out. Not only could I not see what others were saying but they could not see what I had said. A single click, a single digital tick in a digital box and I was no longer part of the crowd of people talking to each other. Just like that and my voice is silenced. If you think about it Social Media in all of its many forms is not free speech, it is tolerated speech. We are allowed to talk to each other across a digital medium, our speech is permitted by those who control the medium by which we speak. One transgression, one mistake, annoy the wrong person and you are silenced as effectively as any secret police in the most repressive tyrannies can manage. People liken Social Media to the world standing together in a great open area and being able to talk. It is nothing like this. Instead it is people in little boxes who are allowed to talk to people in other little boxes. If something goes wrong or if you are shut down then you can talk to those people who are close by or those you know on another network but the world no longer hears you. Twitter, Facebook and others like them have a huge impact on people’s lives online. They are the way by which millions of people have a voice in the world. Often these are people who would otherwise not be heard. Those living in repressive countries or under regimes that do not tolerate free speech for example. People who wish to be heard but who have no off line way of doing so. The internet gives them a voice. It allows them to speak to others, to tell the truth, to report on what is happening in places where our media do not go. In this way the silent may speak. But in this way those who speak may also be silenced. Shutting me down is a very minor thing, but if it is so easy to do to me what hope do those people have who are resisting genuine tyranny and evil. If peoples online voices are really so easy to stop what hope is there of free speech in the digital world? Twitter has a responsibility to block illegal speech, thousands will shout and complain about twitter posts that cross the line of legal or socially acceptable content. But at the same time Twitter is the place where so many can meet in safety and talk in freedom. The powers behind Twitter have created a modern digital city, filled with talking people. They have a responsibility to protect those people from harmful posts. But do they not also have a responsibility to protect the freedom of those people to speak? I am back on Twitter, but how many others are still silent because someone, somewhere did not like what they had to say? Only someone completely lacking in anything approaching sanity would hope for a war between
NATO and Russia. At this stage of events the Ukraine is split and while it may take a while for people to accept this fact it is a done deal. Politicians will talk and bluster. Obama will offer warnings. The EU may threaten. Then the bear will laugh, the Gas pipe lines will suffer a temporary problem, Russian tanks will be seen at the border and this whole situation will be quietly forgotten. Those calling for military action. What exactly do they expect to happen. The UK has all but destroyed its own ability to fight two major campaigns at one and the British army and military logistics capabilities are trapped in the tar pit that is afghanistan . The Royal navy is hardly a military threat to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The rest of Europe. Not much better off. Sending troops into the Ukraine with the possibility of exchanging fire with the Russian army will in days return us to the cold war. Most people no longer remember the fears of Soviet tanks rolling across Germany. Many today never looked across the Fulda gap or stood guard along the barbed wire and mine fields that cut Europe in half. Most today do not remember the very real fear of nuclear weapons hitting our cities. To those who say this will never reach the point where nuclear weapons become a possibility I say this, are you so divorced from reality that you are prepared to start a war and then hope that President Putin is going to be restrained and sensible when it comes to NATO fighting on Russia's border. The Ukrainian army has zero chance of winning against Russia and it is likely that significant sections of their armed forces will rebel or refuse to fight. This is not a situation that can be won by military force. The other Eastern European nations are hardly likely to take sides here, they have clear recent memories of what happens to those who side with the West against Russia, Obama throws them under a Bus. So military support would need to be moved from Western Europe. By ship, fighting the Black Sea fleet all the way. By air against the Russia air force from its large airfields just across the border. By road, that will take weeks. Who does the west send? Well that would be the Italians, the Spanish and the other minor NATO and EU nations. Sending in the US or the UK (widely regarded in Russia and other places as US lapdogs) will be labelled as a return of the Imperial powers and reports of Afghanistan will be on Russian news 24/7 in propoganda broadcasts. Worst case would be the Germans. Even a rumour that Nato is mobilising the German army will hand Putin a huge PR victory and he will take every advantage of such news to stir up the hornets’ nest, in Russia and the Eastern Ukraine they are already calling the Westerners Fascists. The merest possibility that the Germans are coming to support the Western Ukrainianss will probably start fighting across the Ukraine as soon as the rumour arrives. Only someone utterly ignorant of history would think of sending an army that contained the Germans across the Ukraine to fight the Russians. I have seen reports that the Russian economy is not able to fight NATO and the US. The Russian armed forces are poorly equipped and NATO has better toys. That direct fighting between the two forces would lead to inevitable NATO victory so troops should be moved to threaten Putin and make him back down. This is madness. Modern wars between major powers will be short brutal affairs. Historic multiyear wars and long campaigns are last century. It is not possible to supply a modern military force in such a way as to replace the losses caused by fighting another modern major force. Any fighting between first line powers will become a war of attrition both as military forces are decimated and as civilian infrastructure collapses. Russia has the will to fight on with huge losses, Putin’s control of PR and his mastery of soft power will have the Russian people behind him from the get go. Do you not wonder why the western Ukrainians are being called “Fascists”. The Germans Are Coming is a very real memory for millions in Russia and even those born since then have been fed the tales of parents and grandparents along with government propaganda. The west has no such advantage and as the gas supplies stop all too many in the west will, quite rightly, want to know why this war started. As western economies go into free fall the citizens of the EU are going to want to know why suddenly they are jobless, broke and going hungry even before a single bomb falls. The EU would not survive such a war. Russia’s neighbours in the EU would be given a stark choice, leave the EU or be crushed. The EU is a bureaucratic alliance not a military pact, NATO was primarily a defensive organisation designed to support the US military. Without the US NATO is not able to fight Russia alone and fear that the US and Obama will back off will make the Western European NATO members very reluctant to do anything other than talk. The EU would shed members immediately and its already shaky economy would not survive the real or imagined economic damage an outbreak of fighting with Russia would cause. The Euro would end up in free fall and EU governments would end up printing money to try and protect their currency. This situation cannot be resolved by fighting. If it comes to military force then the West has lost already and so has the Ukraine. No one will come out of this well, all it will take is a single shot, a single dead NATO or Russian soldier killed by the other side and nearby units returning fire. If you put armies in a position where a single shot can start a war then that war will happen, tens of thousands of men facing each other across the sights of their weapons. There will be a shot, there is always a shot. In a year when we are staging memorials and ceremonies to mark the beginning of the First World War, an event started by a single shot fired in Eastern Europe, are we really going to put ourselves back into a position where a single shot in Eastern Europe can start the Third World War? I seriously hope not. Firstly watch this video. The last three minutes are the important bit but please watch it all, its not long. Six generations ago the distribution of wealth was between a land rich nobility, cash rich industrialists,
moderate to well off professional class and dirt poor working class. Victorian industry bought down many of the inherited land owners and raised up the industrialists while creating more need for professionals but also crushing the working class under industrialisation. The 20th century saw the widespread loss of noble inherited wealth as they died off, were wiped out by taxes or repair bills and married into rich industrialist families. The industrialists continued to grow in wealth and power and steadily the influence of Title and old wealth faded as new and very real wealth came to prominence. The plight of the working class was improved by minimum wages and by mass production lowering costs, the middle class were fairly comfortable. Then we come to the post industrial age and the twenty first century. Here we find ourselves in a different situation. Robotics are replacing workers, wealth generation has become trapped in the grasp of those who are wealthy. We no longer have middle class and working class, this is a state of mind amongst people who still think in a last century mind set. What we have a slight differences in income levels, the slightly better off have nicer things but the entire group sits either side of the average income and none of them have anything approaching the ability or influence to change the situation. In many ways our mindset as a society is still set in the last century, the Information age has raced on and keeps advancing so quickly that it is difficult for an entrenched mindset to keep up. Governments therefore are unable to keep pace for the most part allowing multinational companies to expand without restraint. Week by week we hear stories of MPs or Ministers caught taking bribes in order to offer advice or to introduce a bill that favours one industry or another and yet very little is ever done to punish such crimes or to prevent them happening again. Changes to employment contracts that would have been burned to ash two generations ago such as zero hours which blatantly favour the employer and deeply harm the employees are becoming more commonplace and with them comes a further weakening of influence and freedom. The overall distribution of wealth concentrates power and influence in a limited number of hands, 80% of the population have little or no disposable income compared to total income which limits their ability to spend where they want. Rather they pay the bills, the mortgage, the petrol and food costs and then more often than not just buy the latest popular gadget. We are seeing this in the UK, people more and more find that they must spend their money paying certain bills and certain companies; they are being reduced to sources of income, money farms. Those people and companies with the money or power pull strings, offer bribes, arrange for generous jobs when an MP or Minister retires and so are able to influence things to suit themselves regardless of the impact on the population at large. A Google spokesman says politicians are failing the people, true enough but at the same time that he says this Google along with all the other tech multi nationals are avoiding taxes and doing whatever they can to keep costs down often at ruinous cost to their work force. By restricting the wealth to a limited number of people you achieve several things. Firstly you distort the entire nature of the economy. Spending a million pounds on a super car generates some profit for one Car Company and pays a few employees; spending a million pounds buying a number of new cars and used cars provides transport for many families, income for a number of companies and puts that money into circulation. As the two new classes of Unemployable and Employed are starved of spending money the income of organisations dependent on them falls and those organisations and companies are forced out of the great game of power. Only those rich enough to own or influence governments of those that supply something that people MUST buy continue to win. Secondly you encourage graft and corruption. British MPs being a prime example. Thirdly as you reduce most of your workforce to near destitution you turn them into little more than modern slaves, unable to resist or refuse because they simply cannot afford to complain. Fourth you weaken democracy, the voice of the general population has far less power because they have far less influence. Voting with their feet doesn’t work if people no longer have another choice to walk to. Money buys influence, influence brings propaganda, propaganda brings control. The independently wealthy are the next new class, it doesn’t matter where the money comes from or who they are, what they do or when they do it. They have enough money to be independent, this lot used to be called rich, now they don’t even fit onto the same graph. Then there is the super rich, people with more money than some nations make. Companies or individuals, as they become more powerful that governments the voices of the voters become weaker and weaker. Shareholders become the new voters but how many of them are rich enough to own enough shares to influence the big companies, which would be the super rich again. Governments are intrinsically linked to nations, corporations have a head office somewhere the taxes are low. Governments are still tied to voters to a degree, they still stand for elections and face problems if a united population turns against them. This leads to the next problem, united we stand, divided we are slaves. People suffer, people have little or no disposable income, jobs are hard to find and unstable when found, the employed become unemployed overnight with a text. The unemployable grow every year as technology changes and they cannot. People fear, they are no longer in control of their lives and this breeds anger. Sadly rather than turning this anger on the governments and organisations responsible for turning them into wage slaves and tax cattle they are instead turned by propaganda and lies to hate other groups. The outsider, the different, ethnic or religious, language or nation of origin. Separate people, give them a target for their anger and you create hatred, you distract the victims to take it out on other victims. In many ways we are heading back to a Dickensian mindset and society. Where technology has reduced the non wealthy to chattels and elevated those who own the technology to the new nobility and gentry. The wealth divide is in fact heading back to the point where middle ages kings and lords had money and the majority of the population did not touch a coin from year to year, simply bartering their humble goods to meet their simple needs. I have no problems with people being rich, the problem comes when such a vast percentage of available wealth is held by a tiny number who keep themselves wealthy by restricting the amount of money allowed to exist. This prevents others from climbing even the lowest rungs of the wealth ladder. To a King in the middle ages or dark ages the peasants were a threat to his power, keep them poor, keep them helpless and under control and he can rule them as he wishes. The problem comes when we stand in the 21st century and find ourselves looking at the same situation. When those who are democratically called to represent the people and to act in the best interests of the electorate become nothing more than agents for the super rich and the super powerful then you reduce people to resources. Is the rise of the Global Super Wealthy a problem? Is reducing people to wage slaves and tax cattle a problem? What do you think? |
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