Putin: EU [Islam Lebensraum Hijrah] Refugee Crisis Absolutely Expected
Cracker Lebensraum Colonization Dots: Multinational's cultural Imperialist Importation of Migrant-Refugee cheap labour
"As I write this, I am reminded of how we often forget what the primitive person had to work with for tools; namely wood, bone and stone implements. It is amazing how quickly one can destroy and travel down the wrong path with the white man's axe, shovel and saw." -- Brent Ladd, Realities of Going Primitive
'Energy consumption is the foundation of industrial development; since in the industrial paradigm or worldview energy use is equivalent to development; where 'development' refers [not to the individual's or society's character, or values development; but] solely to the individual and societies economic -- resource use -- development. How much of societies resources s/he consumes. The power generated by muscles and motors is ultimately and necessarily dissipated by rubbing against the resources in the environment. This is why the GNP of a country should be roughly proportional to the amount of fuel burned in that country. Increased efficiency leads to more energy use. Since the earth’s non-renewable resources are finite, and its renewable resources can only be exploited on a finite level equivalent to carrying capacity regeneration; this trend cannot continue.' -- The constructal law of design and evolution in nature: Adrian Bejan.
EU Refugee crisis absolutely expected - Putin: "If Putin had wanted to better understand this idea of natural resources and national security, he would have looked for specialists on the issue. He would naturally have come across the leading specialist on the subject, a geologist and director of the prestigious St. Petersburg Mining Institute, Vladimir Stefanovich Litvinenko. Litvinenko informs Putin that the world is running out of resources, and makes a point that we, Russians, cannot waste our own resources; and as we tap them, we should ensure they are continuously replaced or otherwise we are going to quickly deplete them." -- Russia Today: EU Crisis Absolutely Expected - Putin; Brookins Inst: The Mystery of Vladimir Putin's [Peak NNR] Dissertation
"As [the Peak NNR: Non-renewable Natural Resources] scenario unfolds, increasingly large segments of humanity will become aware of the fact that NNRs enable our industrialized way of life, and that ever-increasing NNR scarcity is the fundamental cause underlying our continuously declining economic output (GDP) and societal wellbeing levels, both domestically (US) and, by that time, globally as well. Historically prevalent public attitudes of generosity and forbearance, which were made possible by abundant and cheap NNRs during our epoch of “continuously more and more”, will be displaced by public intolerance: * Childbirth will be condemned rather than celebrated; * All immigration will be outlawed; * Traditionally unquestioned resource uses—from “social entitlements” and universally accessible healthcare, to professional sports and cosmetics—will be considered “unfair” or “wasteful”, and ultimately eliminated; and * “Excessive wealth” will be appropriated for “the public good”. Previously sporadic social unrest and resource wars will degenerate—seemingly instantaneously—into full fledged conflicts among nations, classes, and ultimately individuals for remaining natural resources and real wealth. It will become universally understood that the only way to “stay even” within a continuously contracting operating environment—much less to improve one’s lot—is to take from somebody else. Life will become a “negative sum game” within the “shrinking pie” of “continuously less and less”. Social institutions will dissolve; law and order will cease to exist; and chaos will fill the void— nations will collapse." - Chris Clugston: Peak NNR: Scarcity: Humanity’s Last Chapter
Russia Today: Germany is ‘exploiting’ refugee suffering to recruit cheap labour ‘slaves’ via mass immigration – Marine Le Pen:
Callers Challenge BBC presenter Stephen Nolan over his emotional blackmail biased coverage of Migrant crisis. Recorded over the weekend of the 5th and 6th of September 2015. (10:05) |
As Germany welcomes thousands of refugees, with industries seeking ways to integrate newcomers into country’s workforce, Berlin’s move to temporarily bypass EU-wide regulations has met strong criticism from France’s Marine Le Pen who accused Germany of recruiting “slaves.”
EU refugee & migrant influx
The German drive to open its doors to refugees, as well as debated plans to resettle asylum seekers across the EU has been met with strong criticism from a number of politicians, including the leader of right-wing French party National Front, Marine Le Pen who accused Germany of imposing its immigration policy on the EU.
“Germany probably thinks its population is moribund, and it is probably seeking to lower wages and continue to recruit slaves through mass immigration,” Marine Le Pen said in Marseille, refusing to admit that pure benevolence was Germany’s only motive.
Le Pen criticised European politicians for “exploiting the suffering of these poor people who cross the Mediterranean Sea.”
“They are exploiting the death of the unfortunate in these trips organized by mafia, they show pictures, they exhibit the death of a child without any dignity just to blame the European consciences and make them accept the current situation,” the National Front leader said.
Arthur Kemp: Lie of Apartheid; Afrikaners Downfall: Reliance on Cheap Labour
It is one of the many bitter ironies about South Africa that the policy of apartheid—to which Afrikaners clung for decades as their only hope and salvation from Third World domination—was in fact an impracticable and unworkable system which led directly to the Afrikaners’ demise as a political force in that country.
The politicians—the National Party—who fostered apartheid are the primary criminals in this tragedy, holding out a false illusory hope to the Afrikaners, and then when the inevitable became just that, changed track and gave in, abandoning their followers to African National Congress (ANC) rule as callously as they had earlier lied to them.
For apartheid—in reality forced social segregation—was nothing but an illusion, a twisted distortion of the demographic reality of South Africa, not to mention the truth that it was ultimately, morally repugnant as well. The conservative white South African politicians never understood what the driving force of political power is: namely, physical occupation. Political power comes from physical occupation: not historical rights, not title deeds, not moral rights—only occupation. Those people who occupy a territory determine the nature of the society in that region.
If the society which has produced a particular civilization stays intact as a racially homogeneous unit, then that civilization remains active. If, however, the society within any particular given area changes its racial makeup—through invasion, immigration, or any decline in numbers—then the civilization which that society has produced will disappear with them, to be replaced by a new civilization reflecting the new inhabitants of that territory.
History teaches us that there are two main reasons for a change in the racial makeup of any society: either military occupation, or the use of alien labor. The American Indians serve as a textbook example of the “military occupation” case study, as detailed above, while South Africa serves as a textbook example of the “use of alien labor” case study. When a change occurs through the use of alien labor, the following process occurs: * The dominant society imports (usually racially) foreign labor to do the menial work in that society. * These racial aliens then become established, and settle down and multiply in numbers by drawing upon the society’s structures (in white countries, their science, healthcare, technology, etc.). * They finally dominate that society by their sheer numbers.
It is, simply put, a demographic reality: those who occupy a land determine the nature of that society. And so it was—and is—with South Africa, where population figures reveal precisely how the use of alien labor by the Afrikaners dispossessed them of their fatherland.
In South Africa, almost every white household had (and still has) one or more black servants. It is said, in fact, that the definition of a white South African is “someone who would rather be murdered in their bed than make it.”
From the above, it is clear that the use of nonwhite labor was the direct cause of the downfall of apartheid and white rule in South Africa. Afrikaners lost control of the country because of their lack of understanding of demographics, and not due to farfetched “conspiracies” or “betrayals,” as many would like to believe. This occupation took place because white South Africa failed to understand that if they employed black labor, those blacks would inevitably form the majority in that society, and ultimately—and rightly—demand political power.
The only way that Afrikaners can be spared the fate of all First World minorities in Africa, is for them to abandon their dependence on nonwhite labor, accept that their salvation lies in a smaller territory, and congregate in that smaller territory where they will form an outright demographic majority.
Hijrah: Breed & Conquer Idiot Compassion Europe
Abdullah Kurdi, the barber father of drowned toddler Aylan Kurdi had FREE housing in Turkey | Transit Trash: Locals Angry over Migrants Trash | Why refugees choose Germany | Polish MP: Janusz Korwin-Mikke: “Europe is being flooded with human garbage that does not want to work” | Lebanese Minister of Tourism calls Palestinian Refugees 'human garbage':
4 million Muslims pretend to escape 30,000 ISIS fighters who are not even near their towns, cities and even countries. This kind of mass-migration fraud is a medieval war strategy and it’s called Hijrah. It’s part of jihad.
Ok, so let’s pretend that they are victims of war and need to escape. Very easy to resolve. Pressure the 49 Islamic countries around the world to take them all in. Block them from all and total entry into the West. If the Islamic countries don’t take them in – put trade sanctions on them. Watch and see how quickly this mass-migration flood will come to an end when the Muslims realize that they can’t get their Hijrah-jihad to work.
Abdullah Kurdi’s story is made-up. But his lies are now being used and rewarded by the media in full blown propaganda, while pressuring policies to force Europe to take in more economic migrants who have never experienced a war zone. The dead toddler pornography is a dream-come true PR campaign serving ISIS and their overwhelming Muslim supporters.
Abdullah was never on that boat to watch his wife and children drown. That’s why he was the only survivor. The first time he learned of their death was from the hospital after the photos of his young son was circulating in the media. This was an attempt to send his wife and children into Europe before his own arrival to apply for refugee status as a lone woman with children, while they never even lived in a war zone.
Polish MP: Janusz Korwin-Mikke: “Europe is being flooded with human garbage that does not want to work”. “In Poland, we have always welcomed immigrants who want to work. The current flood of Muslim ‘migrants’ are only coming for the free handouts.”
Beirut slams the door on its `human garbage': The Lebanese Minister of Tourism called them "human garbage", the wave of Palestinian refugees who were supposedly set to flood back to Lebanon from Libya. How Lebanon took its chance to get rid of refugees; `Now Arafat can say: Look what I'm doing for you, and look how the other Arabs treat you'. In the course of only two days, the Beirut authorities reduced the Palestinian refugee population in Beirut by almost a third, courtesy of Colonel Gaddafi.
Creeping Sharia/Times of Israel: Breed & Conquer Europe:
Speaking at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhammad Ayed stated that European countries were not rolling out the red carpet for migrants because they were compassionate, but because Europe was in dire need of a new source of labor. Europe has become old and decrepit and needs human reinforcement….they are not motivated by compassion for the Levant, its people and its refugees. Soon, we will trample them underfoot, Allah willing. Throughout Europe, all the hearts are enthused with hatred toward Muslims. They wish that we were dead, but they have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in our midst. We will give them fertility! We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries! Whether you like it or not, Americans, Italians, Germans and the French will be forced to take the “refugees”. We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming Caliphate. We will say to you: these are our sons. Send them, or we will send our armies to you.”
Occidental Observer: Pulling Our Heart Strings to Bring Us Down: How the Enemy within uses Empathy Against Us:
Those in the host countries who must move over for these migrants, or see their social safety net collapse from the burden, or face future job displacement from cheap labour, are left unseen by the cameras. There is no human face attached to their plight. The only images of them that we are permitted to see are those of angry demonstrators — spiced up with a few neo-Nazis for good measure — shouting outside of migrant reception areas. Nothing like tarring legitimate outrage with the Nazi brush to discredit their grievances.
State media and its clones have a game plan: The discussion must not be allowed to stray into the cold territory of numbers, resources, or likely long-term effects. Viewers must not be confronted with the reality that Europe simply does not have the capacity to accommodate the numbers of people who seek sanctuary and residence within its borders. Or that so-called “rich” countries like Canada and the United States, propped up by fiat currency and a bubble of purchasing power, cannot accept the hundreds of millions, and possibly billions of migrants who are anxious to flee poverty, famine or war. In short, viewers must not be allowed to understand the concept of limits.
Soulseeds: Mindful Compassion and Idiot Compassion:
When you try to help someone when they don’t want your help, or because you are really trying to help yourself, this may be idiot compassion. Its often the distinction between charity (giving TO someone) and empowerment (helping people help themselves) .. The Zen story about compassion with a rolled up umbrella makes the point. A woman was in India, riding with a friend in a rickshaw when they were attacked by a crazed man. He did no harm other than to frighten the women. However the woman was upset and asked her Zen teacher what the appropriate response to her attacker would be. The teacher said very simply, “You should have very mindfully and with great compassion whacked the attacker over the head with your umbrella.”
Multinational Compulsive Developmentism Cultural Imperialism
Slavoj Zizek: Ethical Consumption Farcical Tragedy:
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism: “It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering, than it is to have sympathy with thought. People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, ugliness, and starvation. It is inevitable they would be strongly moved by this. Accordingly with admirable, but misdirected intentions, they very sentimentally set themselves the task of remedying the problems they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it. Indeed, they are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, by keeping the poor alive, or in the case of an advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution, it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. It is the altruistic virtues which have prevented the carrying out of this aim. The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves. In doing so they prevented the core of the system to be realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it. Charity degrades and demoralizes.
Telegraph: Tim Cook: 'Our hearts go out to these refugees': Exclusive: Apple chief executive Tim Cook has launched a empassioned plea to help refugees seeking help across Europe | Addict Info: McDonalds Organizes Massive Multi-Corporation Food Drive to Help Middle Eastern Refugees :
"Apple is making a substantial donation to relief agencies which provide humanitarian aid to refugees in Europe and around the Mediterranean." Croatia is the latest country to seal border crossings with Serbia, closing seven of eight crossings after 11,000 migrants crossed into the country within 48 hours. Cook added that Apple customers could support the agencies by donating through the Red Cross iOS app, and that employees donations to the campaign will be matched by the company, two-for-one.
McDonald’s, the company that refuses to pay their employees a living wage, has announced that they are leading a campaign to raise money for the United Nation’s World Food Program. Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s new chief executive, has also convinced other multibillion dollar companies such as Facebook, Dreamworks Animation and Mastercard, to help them.
The group of corporations sponsored a 30-minute promo for the Food Program and it will air in 38 countries and be promoted on digital platforms on Monday, the U.N. Peace Day. The ad, which is narrated by Liam Neeson, doesn’t make any mention of the companies that sponsored it.
IGN: We Have Met the Enemy; It is Us: “Feeding the World's Hungry Millions: How It Will Mean Billions for U.S. Business.”
Food for Peace / [Food Aid to Enable Our own Colonization by Immigration]: Following World War II, U.S. agricultural surpluses reached alarming levels, and storage of excess grain cost the government millions of dollars per year--even as the food deteriorated and became inedible. A solution had to be found, and in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development Assistance Act into law.
The program, known as Public Law 480, benefited the U.S. by decreasing food surpluses and by creating new markets for its agricultural products....
Living in a Lifeboat: ..... Our experience with Public Law 480 clearly reveals the answer. This was the law that moved billions of dollars worth of U.S. grain to food-short, population-long countries during the past two decades. When P. L. 480 first came into being, a headline in the business magazine Forbes (Paddock and Paddock 1970) revealed the power behind it: "Feeding the World's Hungry Millions: How It Will Mean Billions for U.S. Business."
And indeed it did. In the years 1960 to 1970 a total of $7.9 billion was spent on the "Food for Peace" program, as P. L. 480 was called. During the years 1948 to 1970 an additional $49.9 billion were extracted from American taxpayers to pay for other economic aid programs, some of which went for food and food-producing machinery. (This figure does not include military aid.) That P. L. 480 was a give-away program was concealed. Recipient countries went through the motions of paying for P. L. 480 food -with IOUs. In December 1973 the charade was brought to an end as far as India was concerned when the United States "forgave" India's $3.2 billion debt (Anonymous 1974). Public announcement of the cancellation of the debt was delayed for two months; one wonders why.
"Famine-1975!" (Paddock and Paddock 1970) is one of the few publications that points out the commercial roots of this humanitarian attempt. Though all U.S. taxpayers lost by P. L. 480, special interest groups gained handsomely. Farmers benefited because they were not asked to contribute the grain -it was bought from them by the taxpayers. Besides the direct benefit there was the indirect effect of increasing demand and thus raising prices of farm products generally. The manufacturers of farm machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides benefited by the farmers extra efforts to grow more food. Grain elevators profited from storing the grain for varying lengths of time. Railroads made money hauling it to port, and shipping lines by carrying it overseas. Moreover, once the machinery for P. L. 480 was established, an immense bureaucracy had a vested interest in its continuance regardless of its merits.
Very little was ever heard of these selfish interests when P. L. 480 was defended in public. The emphasis was always on its humanitarian effects. The combination of multiple and relatively silent selfish interests with highly vocal humanitarian apologists constitutes a powerful lobby for extracting money from taxpayers. Foreign aid has become a habit that can apparently survive in the absence of any known justification.
Provoking Divide and Conquer the Proles Ethnic Conflict:
"Without a pressure release valve, as open racism once provided, an explosion of epic proportions at some time in the future is guaranteed. There will be a race war, the initial skirmishes of which already are being fought in America's streets, that will bring an altogether new meaning to the concepts of race war and genocide, courtesy of those who claim to abhor racism." — Attorney for the Damned: Edgar Steele; Defensive Racism
Guardian: Germany's response to the refugee crisis is admirable. But I fear it cannot last:
The Coming War in France (04:44) |
These days Willkommenskultur is used to encourage help for the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming to Germany. And thousands of Germans have pitched in; they take food and clothes to the camps, take refugees to meetings with the authorities in their own cars, pay their fares, foot their medical bills, teach German, translate forms, share couches and bikes, act as nannies, open up soccer clubs, schools and kindergartens for refugee kids, and go on demonstrations against rightwing attacks across the country.
Those with a particularly sensitive ear may detect an air of passive aggression in the manner in which Germans seek to highlight their goodness these days. The public mood is so empathically pro-refugee, you’d feel guilty if you didn’t at least do the bare minimum, such as offer your spare bed to a Syrian. It’s as if a year after the World Cup triumph in Rio, Germans desperately want to be world champions again – this time as the globe’s most welcoming country for refugees.
Maybe my fears are as arbitrary as the resentments of rightwing Germans who demonstrate in front of refugee shelters in Dresden or Heidenau. But when I listen to the “good Germans”, I often ask myself: what is going to happen, when the new refugees demand more than a tent, a bottle of water and a slice of bread? How will German society deal with this next turning point? What if it turns out that not every refugee has the skills to equip them for the “made in Germany” brand?
Mirror: 9000 former British soldiers homeless:
Up to 9,000 British heroes who served Queen and country are homeless after leaving the military, a Sunday Mirror investigation reveals today. Shockingly, ex-service personnel account for one in 10 rough sleepers across the UK. And charities have warned that the problem of homelessness among former soldiers, sailors and airmen is a “ticking time bomb” which will only get worse if urgent action isn’t taken. Yesterday Simon Weston OBE, who suffered serious burns in the Falklands War, accused the Government of “betraying” veterans after learning of the disturbing numbers without a home. “A huge amount of rhetoric comes from politicians, but they never actually do anything,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s a betrayal.”
The Sunday Mirror this week heard harrowing stories from veterans who fought on the front line but now sleep in doorways, graveyards and parks, begging from the passers-by whose freedom they defended. Many are having to cope with the devastating affects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has led to a cycle of family break-up, addictions to drugs or alcohol and homelessness. The Army has reduced the number of soldiers by 11,500 in the past three years. A total of 20,000 are due to be axed by 2017. The RAF and Royal Navy are each shedding 5,000 airmen and sailors.
“What we were finding, particularly with rough sleepers, was that a high proportion were ex-services personnel,” he said. “It’s that lack of regime – they come out and it all goes. There’s no work and it results in all sorts of issues.”
A report by homeless charity Crisis found that 500 people sleeping rough in London this year had been in the armed forces, compared with 330 the previous year. In 2010-11 there were just 77. The charity estimates that as many as one in 10 homeless people in parts of the UK are former service personnel. Incredibly, the numbers have soared since the Government outlined its duty to serving and former personnel when the Armed Forces Covenant was enshrined in law in 2011. It says they “should have priority status in applying for government-sponsored affordable housing schemes, and service leavers should retain this status for a period of discharge”. The covenant adds: “Support should be available for all service personnel in order to assist their transition from service to civilian life. “Provision should include training, education, appropriate health care referral and job-finding preparation and assistance. It should also include information, advice and guidance on such matters as housing and financial management.”
Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said ministers should care for ex-personnel “unstintingly”. He said: “The vast majority of servicemen make a good transition back into civilian life. Some do not and sometimes this is due to the life they led in the service of their country. Those who are physically or mentally damaged by their experiences fighting for us deserve our support in return. The Government must look after them unstintingly, because whatever the cost to the taxpayer, it will be less than the debt we owe them.”
Labour MP Madeleine Moon, who sits on the Defence Select Committee, said: “The Military Covenant promises priority accommodation for ex-service personnel. The problem is most local authorities and housing associations are desperately short of accommodation. The two are colliding, and this is something we have to resolve.”
Meanwhile.... Economic Migrants have little problems finding council housing...
Somali family on benefits handed keys to £2million luxury council home | Muslim Welfare 'refugees' trash the £1.25 million home they are living in for free and laugh about it | DM: Ten Families costing state £1 million in state handouts | Before ISIS Fighters; Now Lebensraum Hijrah EU Refugees | ISIS recruits defecting upset they have not received promised luxury goods cars they were promised:
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I don't know how we got so lucky!' Somali family on benefits handed keys to £2million luxury 'council' home a stone's throw from where Tony Blair used to live. Builders did £100,000 renovations in 2011, creating two new bedrooms. Private rent could cost £6,000 a month - but welfare family pay £1,000 a month. Neighbours' fury over recent deliveries of new carpets and televisions.
A family of Somali benefits claimants living in a £2million home courtesy of the taxpayer admitted they couldn’t believe their luck yesterday. To the anger of neighbours, the family of ten are allowed to live in a six-bedroom end-of-terrace Georgian townhouse in one of London’s most fashionable areas, populated by high-flying lawyers and stockbrokers. The family use housing benefits to pay a heavily discounted rent for the four-storey house in Islington – close to Tony Blair’s former home – which boasts a variety of period features, including chandeliers and wood flooring.
Ten families in England are sharing an astonishing $1.5 million a year in housing benefits, it emerged last night. Five of the families are receiving the maximum payment of $3,2,00 per week. It is the first proof that George Osborne was correct when he claimed some households were receiving sums in excess of $158,000 a year.
Last night, the Chancellor told the Daily Mail: ‘It is precisely this kind of shocking waste of public money under the previous Labour government that led to Britain’s debt problems. ‘We are bringing an end to this by putting a cap on the total amount of benefit that a family can receive so the days of $158,000 housing benefit claims are gone.’
The Coalition triggered a furious reaction last year when it unveiled plans to cut the top rate of housing benefit to $635 a week. Chris Bryant, the Labour justice spokesman, said the cuts would lead to ‘social cleansing’, with 200,000 people forced out of the capital.
Economic Collapse -- Psychological NeoConservative Conversion -- Effect on Middle Class
"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges for fears of being called a racist." -- Amended quote of Irving Kristol
Caroll Quigley: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time:
The growth of commercial capitalism... industrial capitalism .. financial and monopoly capitalism... gave rise to a change from a two class society to a middle-class society. Under industrial capitalism and the early part of financial capitalism, society began to develop into a polarized two-class society in which an entrenched bourgeoisie stood opposed to a mass proletariat. .. In Germany, Poland, Hungary and Russia where the inflation went so far that the monetary unit became completely valueless by 1924, the middle classes were largely destroyed, and their members were driven to desperation or at least to an almost psychopathic hatred of the form of government or the social class that they believed to be responsible for their plight.... The inflation was not injurious to the influential groups in German society, although it was generally ruinous to the middle classes, and thus encouraged extremist elements. Those groups whose property was in real wealth, either in land or in industrial planet, were benefited by the inflation which increased the value of their properties and wiped away their debts (chiefly mortgages and industrial bonds). ... In this [Weimar inflation] polarization of the political spectrum it was the middle classes which became unanchored, driven by desperation and panic...
Some of the more intractable difficulties of newly decolonized areas are psychological, especially as these difficulties are hard to identify and often provide almost insuperable obstacles to development programs, especially to those directed along Western lines. It is, for example, not usually recognized that the whole economic expansion of Western society rests upon a number of psychological attitudes that are prerequisites to the system as we have it but are not often stated explicitly. Two of these may be identified as (1) future preferences and (2) infinitely expandable material demand. In a sense these are contradictory, since the former implies that Western economic man will make almost any sacrifice in the present for the sake of some hypothetical benefit in the future, while the latter implies almost insatiable material demand in the present. Nonetheless, both are essential features of the overwhelming Western economic system.
Future preference came out of the Christian outlook of the West and especially the Puritan tradition, which was prepared to accept almost any kind of sacrifice and self-discipline in the temporal world for the sake of future salvation. The process of secularization of Western society since the 17th century shifted that future benefit from eternity to this temporal world but did not otherwise disturb the pattern of future preference and self-discipline. In fact these became the chief psychological attributes of the middle class that made the Industrial Revolution and the great economic expansion of the West. They made people willing to undergo long periods of sacrifice for personal training and to restrict their enjoyment of income for the sake of higher training and for capital accumulation. ... The mass production of this new industrial system was able to continue and to accelerate to the fantastic rate of the twentieth century because Western man placed no limits on his ambition to create a secularized earthly paradise. ... Today the average middle class family of suburbia has a schedule of future material demands which is limitless.. second car, third car, basement reconstruction, patio, swimming pool, summer residents, larger boat. And so it goes, an endless expansion of insatiable demands spurred on by skilled advertising, the whole keeping the wheels of industry turning, and the purchasing power of the community racing around in an accelerating cycle. .. Without these two attitudes it will be very difficult for underdeveloped nations to follow along the Western path of development....
The character of any society is determined less by what it is actually like than by the picture it has of itself and of what it aspires to be. ... Wealth, power, prestige, and respect were all obtained by the same standard, based on money. this in turn was based on a pervasive emotional insecurity that sought relief in the ownership and control of material possessions.
A thousand years ago, Europe had a two-class society in which a small upper class of nobles and upper clergy were supported by a great mass of peasants. The nobles defended this world, and the clergy opened the way to the next world, while the peasants provided the food and other material needs for the whole society. All three had security in their social relationships in that they occupied positions of social status that satisfied their psychic needs for companionship, economic security, a foreseeable future, and the purpose of their efforts. Members of both classes had little anxiety about the loss of these things by any likely outcome of events and all thus had emotional security.
This was modified with the new middle class bourgeoisie (after bourg meaning town). The two older established classes were almost completely rural and intimately associated with the land, economically, socially and spiritually. The permanence of the land and the intimate connection of the land with the most basic of human needs, especially food, amplified the emotional security associated with the older classes.
The new middle class of bourgeoisie who grew up between the two older classes had none of these things. They were commercial peoples concerned with the exchange of goods, mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status. The new middle class had no status in a society based on status; they had no security or permanence in a society that placed the highest value on these qualities. The flow of the necessities of life, notably food, to the new town dwellers was precarious, so that some of their earliest and most emphatic actions were taken to ensure the flow of such goods from the surrounding country to the town. All the things the bourgeois did were new things, all were precarious, and insecurity, and their whole lives were lived without the status, permanence and security of the society of the day most highly valued. ... For these and other reasons psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook. It still is. The only remedy for this insecurity of the middle class seemed to it to be the accumulation of more possessions that could be a demonstration to the world of the individuals importance and power. In this way, for the middle class, the general goal of medieval man to seek future salvation in the hereafter was secularized to an effort to seek future security in this world by acquisition of wealth and its accompanying power and social prestige. But the social prestige from wealth was most available among fellow bourgeoisie, rather than among nobles and peasants. Thus the opinions of one's fellow bourgeoisie, by wealth and by conformity to bourgeois values, became the motivating drives of the middle classes, creating was has been called the "acquisitive society."
In that society... credit became more important than intrinsic personal qualities, and credit was based on the appearances of things, especially the appearances of the external material accessories of life. The facts of a man's personal qualities -- such as kindness, affection, thoughtfulness, generosity, personal insight, and such were increasingly irrelevant or even adverse to the middle-class evaluation of a man. Instead, the middle class evaluation rested rather on nonpersonal attributes and on external accessories. Where personal qualities were admired, they were those that contributed to acquisition.
... At the basis of this middle class character is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition.
the petty bourgeousie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and pressures, but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a result of these things they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any Radical Right, fascist or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to regard their white-collar status as the chief value in life, and live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party's supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.
Under Economic Nationalism ... Self-sufficiency, even if it involved a lower standard of living, was held preferable to international division of labour, on the grounds that political security was more important than a high -- and insecure -- standard of living.
The puritan point of view about human nature was that the world and the flesh are positive evils and that man, in at least his physical part of his nature, is essentially evil. As a consequence he must be disciplined totally to prevent him from destroying himself and the world. .. The Puritan point of view led directly to mercantalism, which regarded political-economic life as a struggle to the death in a world where there was not sufficient wealth or space for different groups. To them wealth was limited to a fixed amount in a world as a whole, and one mans gain was someone else's loss. That meant that the basic struggles of this world were irreconcilable and must be fought to a finish. This was part of the Puritan belief that nature was evil and that a state of nature was a jungle of violent conflicts.
Globe Tribune: Gerald Celente Predicts Mass Expulsion Ethnic Cleansing of Muslim Immigrants to Europe:
Trend forecaster Gerald Celente made a chilling prediction to De Pers for the year 2012, that the hatred of Muslims in Europe, will culminate in full scale ethnic cleansing.
“Muslims in Europe, pack your bags and flee. You’re not safe anymore! Ethnic cleansing happened a few years ago with the incredible displacement of millions of people. I predicted twenty years ago that the history of Europe is our near future. The next round of ethnic cleansing will be fueled by the perception that Muslims are causing all of Europe’s problems, from unemployment to crime and urban filth.”
“Muslims want to destroy Western culture and state,according to popular perception. This perception is a driving force in almost all European countries,in both their domestic and their foreign politics. In Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Flanders, Wallonia, France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland, Islamophobia is now unstoppable. ”
“The turnout for this agenda will be fueled by recession and then with the demise of democracy. New right-wing, populist governments will put in place two legal systems, one for the native population,and a second, more restrictive legal system for immigrant . It began in the autumn of 2010 when France adopted a burqa ban. Other countries soon followed, with the overwhelming approval of non-Muslims.”
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“Only the cosmopolitan elites opposed, this agenda. Very few people in the old leadership heard what people were saying, and very few new leaders want to make the same mistakes as the old guard. The parties that have ruled until now lost the trust of the people by ignoring their concerns. Even when the people rallied en masse behind the “new, strong men,” the old guard remained arrogant and inaccessible, and refused to admit that their political creed had become discredited and disproven.
“The mainstream political parties refused to address the question of the difficulties created by the massive influx of immigrants to Europe. This question is entirely legitimate. How can a country absorb more immigrants if it can not provide for its own people?
“This is not the country I once knew!” cried the new leaders of right wing parties. And: “Get rid of the rules of the EU, which has received far too much power. We need to take control ourselves, decide where we spend our money and who may live in our country. ”
“This was what people wanted to hear. Finally came politicians who spoke the truth rather than secure their positions by “going with the flow”. Who took this new political leadership seriously, who understood that their country was not the same as before,with the old political clique and the same flow of immigrants as before?” In France, Holland, Denmark and other places my warnings were dismissed.. “History does not repeat itself, do not be ridiculous. People laughed at me, like when I predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the mortgage crisis. I’ll say tomorrow what I have said before. “I told you so.”
Poster found in Wetherspoons telling Muslims to 'Get the Fuck out of Our Countries':
A customer was shocked to find an Islamaphobic poster in his local J.D. Wetherspoon pub recently. The man had entered the Moon on the Square pub in Feltham, Middlesex when he saw the poster on a customer noticeboard telling Muslim’s to ‘get the f**k out of our countries’.
The poster featured a drawing of WWI leader Lord Kitchener and read as:
‘MUSLIMS. Are you unhappy with our countries? Are you offended by our culture? Would you prefer to live under sharia law? ‘Then we have a simple solution for you. ‘Get the f**k out of our countries and go back to the monstrous s***tholes you came from. You can live under Muslim rule there and enjoy it as much as you like.’
Slavoy Zizek; Multiculturalism: The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism [PDF]: Multinational Capitalists Colonize the West with imported cheap labour third world immigrants and subsequent enforced political correct multiculturalist legalism to silence alleged 'racists':
Multiculturalism: How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of Nation State in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps, this relationship is best designated as ‘auto-colonization’: with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company as it were cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origins as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what disturbs so much the patriotically oriented right-wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have towards the French or American local population exactly the same attitude as towards the population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn? Today’s global capitalism is thus again a kind of ‘negation of negation’, after national capitalism and its internationalist/colonialist phase. At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a Nation-State, with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign Nation-States); what follows is the relationship of colonization in which the colonizing country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization in which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics.
Matti Sarmela: What is Cultural Imperialism?[PDF]:
The industrialized west has adopted a common technological culture that satisfies international standards and that has made possible the realization of the imperialists' centuries-old dream of yoking the entire world's resources with a systematic global production process. This megalomania has given birth to the super-culture, which prides itself on building the largest reservoir in the world, the largest atomic power station and the longest conveyor-belt. Western culture is a monument to its own planners, executive directors, party leaders and developmentalists, a culture evaluated statistically in terms of size, productivity, and material objects, development trends and consumer indices. In this culture the man in the street has increasingly less value collectively or culturally, as a worker or as a consumer. The high standard of living of western society has delivered nations from the tyrannies of nature and submitted them to the tyrannies of man. Primitive societies had nothing of value to offer in the creation of this new society that worshipped development – in the spectrum of human ways of life, the two stand irreconcilably at opposite poles.
Cultural identity is perhaps generally understood to mean the concept of reality held by a member of a particular culture, the way in which he comprehends and motivates his own socio-cultural existence. A vital part of cultural identification is therefore the community's concept of the purpose or meaning of life around which the individual organizes his own existence. In this respect global cultural change has meant the disappearance of any generally held concept of the meaning of life and the emergence of numerous substitutes. The sense of regional identity has been submerged in that of national identity, which was perhaps latent anyway. More significantly, the individual has come to identify himself with the culture represented by groups sharing the same profession, interests or ideals. The pivotal point of cultural existence for a member of an urban culture offering multifarious possibilities and possessing multifarious values is a material or ideological objective: a house or property of some other sort, a professional career, a position of influence in a political or religious group or in some other organization. A member of industrialized society may identify himself with his objective, provided that this seems sufficiently worthwhile in the long-term and allows him to make full use of his potentialities. But for a far greater number, who are just factory fodder, the meaning of life lies in identification with the consumer society.
Mass identity is identification with the industrial mass production society as a consumer of the technological products of a specialized metropolitan culture. The meaning of life is to be found in egocentric, new experiences, in taking advantage of all the technically maximal entertainments and stimuli offered by the professionals: restaurants, sport, television, or so-called creative hobbies and art-forms, or the new technological challenges – parachuting, slalom and motor racing. Existential experiences provided by specialized departments of the welfare/warfare state are the be-all and end-all of human existence.
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| Imperialism -- whether economic, cultural, religious, political or military -- can only be avoided if the ecosystem is governed based upon an Ecology of Peace social contract; that restricts all the beings therein to procreate and consume below ecological carrying capacity limits; to thereby avoid infringing into the next cultures territory. -- Military Gospel according to Homer Lea |
Totalitarian Agriculture, Population Growth, Desertification, Resource Wars and Economic Migrations
"The ultimate direct impact of desertification is the complete loss of carrying capacity of an already fragile biome, and the primary indirect effect is the migration of people previously supported by that area. ... Environmental degradation and environmental resource scarcity are of such a magnitude that they can become, if they are not already, an issue of national security (military and non-military) for the United States." -- Understanding International Environmental Security: A Strategic Military Perspective; by Colonel W. Chris King - November 2000; US Army Environmental Policy Institute -- Military Gospel According to Homer Lea
Primitive Technology: Was Agriculture [the source of land degradation] a Good Idea, or an Act of Desperation?
Daniel Quinn: Totalitarian Agriculture. (04:18) |
One of the attributes of modern western thought is the firm conviction that whatever it is doing now must be better than what it was doing before - that all change is progress. We are so convinced of this that we assume that if there are other planets with intelligent life, they are trying to get in touch with us using the same technologies that we recognize ourselves. In the book Making Silent Stones Speak, after reviewing the evidence for the evolution of stone tools and technology, Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth end with the question - why aren't we hearing from other civilized worlds in the universe? They wonder if it is because intelligent life, once it reaches the level of technology that allows it to send messages into outer space, invariably destroys itself. The question unasked is - whether intelligent life can make choices that lead to other, non-destructive technologies either before it self-destructs or after? In looking back over the history of human social evolution, the critical change that seems to have taken us from positive adaptation to self-destructive reaction came with the advent of agriculture. The rest of this piece will take a brief and over simplified look at the development of agriculture, the 'domestication' of various plants and animals and the affect of all this on human health and happiness.
First, let's consider domestication of animals, thought to have occurred around 20,000 years ago with the appearance of dogs within human habitations. .. Recent discoveries, including a dog skeleton of 100,000 years antiquity and not in human context, have suggested a different scenario. Picture a scene in Stone Age Europe. The cave dwelling humans spread from their permanent village to hunt. The hunted learn to avoid the area close to the cave as a danger zone, but the level of avoidance is determined by genetic factors that control the fear response. The animals with the least fear live closest to the danger. Because they tend to interact with each other, the genetic tendency is increased. Coincidentally, the same gene that controls the fear response controls other factors including coloration and breading cycles. Less fearful animals will breed more often and be more solid colors than the 'normal' animals. Thus reduced fear made these prey species more easily hunted, and in most cases led to their elimination, but in some cases, and it only took one, the members of the hunting community saw value in this close to home population and treated it as insurance against a poor hunt. They knew they could get something on the way home. Over time, this population of hunters and prey formed a relationship in which the hunters began to protect this segment of the hunted until they became isolated from their peers and bred exclusively within - creating the domestic livestock we have today. It may well have been a mutual proposition developing over a long period of time until the two species became dependent on each other for survival. Different animals in different environments and providing different products each went through this process, eventually moving with their human allies into many new places around the world.
The history of plant cultivation followed a different path. Hunter/gatherer societies gradually became so efficient at utilizing the local resources for food that they began to settle in semi-permanent villages. In doing so, they also became more dependent on trade for special materials not found close to home. Food plants were tended where they grew by selective burning and harvesting methods. (This has been documented for California in the book Before the Wilderness.) In some areas, a few plants were grown from imported seeds to eliminate the need to trade for them. In central California it was tobacco, in Peru it was cotton and gourds, all essentially non-food items. The Peruvian gourd growers latter began irrigating these crops, then irrigating their wild food plants, and then latter, irrigating imported corn and potatoes. What led to the change from wild to cultivated food and what were the social and health repercussions? Answers can be found at a site on the Illinois River called Koster (after the local farmer).
The Koster site had been occupied for an extended period, so that archaeologists led by Stuart Streuver, were able to find evidence from early hunter/gatherer times around 7500 BC to full scale farming times at 1200 AD. They found many things, but the most intriguing to me was the discovery that they became settled in permanent villages well before they became farmers, It was also during this time that they appear to have been the healthiest and most culturally stable. Evidence of their diets showed a dependency on a variety of nuts, seeds and tubers as well as fish and game, each seasonally abundant. At the same time, there was limited gardening of specialty crops. Sounds good to me, so what happened? Apparently the good times led to population growth, which led to overuse and decline of the wild foods, which led to using progressively less desirable species, which led to increased gardening and ultimately wholesale farming. Once farmers, their bones show increased stress and poorer nutrition, with decreased life-span and increased warfare. An additional social consequence of agriculture was the consolidation of the political/religious structure.
Hunter/gatherers tend to be egalitarian, with each family or clan in control of themselves, cultivating personal relationships with a variety of spirits/gods to keep everything healthy. Farming led to monocultures with fewer and more powerful gods, a priestly class to bring rain and protect the crops, and eventually god-kings with the divine right to rule, and control irrigation, passed down from above. This is the pattern of the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Great Sun of the Natchez, the leaders of the Inca, Maya and Aztec, and the Louis' of France. We call that progress because those guys got to write the histories.
There were places however where people stayed in the optimized hunter/gatherer mode sometimes called collecting. In most of Califomia food was abundant, yet population seems to have stayed stable in both numbers and life style. Was there some other factor controlling population? Perhaps there was insufficient firewood in the valleys and insufficient farmable land in the hills. Perhaps they developed social customs that reduced the birth rate. Perhaps they would have become farmers in time. Many areas show different combinations of gardening, hunting and gathering depending on their environment, so perhaps farming has always had limited potential. The result however, was that farmers ended up with big families with time on their hands for extended periods when a few could manage the growing crops. This labor force became both the cause of and the resource for empire building in both the construction of monuments and the creation of armies. Thus farm-based empires were able to conquer even the most successful collectors appearing to be more successful, at least in the short run.
In the long run, they have one big problem - crops fail, and they have put all their eggs in one market basket. Crops fail for three basic reasons - drought, soil depletion and bugs. Whole religions were based on controlling water. Conquest temporarily solved soil depletion problems. We're still fighting the bugs. (Hunter/gatherers eat the bugs.) As a result, the Greeks turned the Cedars of Lebanon into goat pasture, and the Romans did the same to North Africa and other parts of the Mediterranean. To overcome this flaw, the Ceasars sent armies to conquer everybody who might be able to send food to Rome.
In looking to the past, it seems clear that groups were most stable when they combined some gardening with collecting for an economy that was varied and adaptable to climatic change. A smallish population which is family or clan based also seems to be the most suitable for long term survival. At present, civilization is carrying on the experiment started by all the failed civilizations before to see if we can keep endlessly finding new resources to replace those we use up. The race is on to find renewable fuels, sustainable agriculture, a defense against disease and a rising population of angry inhabitants. If this current experiment should also fail, perhaps we (if we still exist) can start over and do things on a smaller, more personal scale learning from history (and pre-history). Then we may stop worrying about other civilizations on other planets and why they aren't contacting us and be glad the Society of Primitive Technology preserved knowledge from the past.
Tackle Climate Change or Face Resource Wars:
The Invasion: A Race War is Coming (05:39) |
Lord Ashdown: Refugee crisis is a ‘rehearsal’ for a vast humanitarian disaster that will soon unfold if we fail to act on global warming. The former leader of one of the UK’s main political parties says the world will undergo more resource wars and huge movements of desperate people unless it tackles climate change effectively.
Lord Ashdown, who was leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats for 11 years, describes the present flight of refugees from Syria and other conflict areas as a “rehearsal” for the vast humanitarian disaster he believes will soon unfold. In a recent BBC interview on the Syrian refugee crisis, he said: “This is the beginnings of the future. It’s not going to go away. “The numbers we now have of refugees fleeing battle zones are going to be diminished into almost nothing when we see the mass movement of populations caused by global warming.”
He said evidence of the impacts of climate change was plain to see: “You need only to fly over some of the areas that are being affected – like the Naga Hills on the border of India and Burma, or vast areas of the Ganges delta – to see clearly what’s happening.”
Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi writer and novelist, says that 50,000 people migrate every month to Dhaka, the capital city, because rising sea levels are making their villages uninhabitable and their arable land impossible to cultivate. In both the UK and the US, military leaders are aware of the growing threat from climate change and expect to be ordered to react to its effects.
Ashdown said: “If governments do not act, then wars over land and resources − which is what the second Iraq war was − will become more common.”
As long ago as 2003, a report prepared for the US Department of Defense warned that global climate change is more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than a gradual and manageable rise in average temperatures.
Such events, the report said, could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, intense storms and hurricanes, and continent-wide “dustbowl” effects, which could lead to wars for access to food, water, habitable land and energy supplies. “Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today,” the report said.
Ashdown foresees a direct and controversial role for military forces in the near future − not simply in fighting these wars, but also in controlling refugee flows. Asked whether he thought the UK’s armed forces would be ordered to defend the country’s borders, or to stop refugees leaving their countries of origin, or simply to play a humanitarian role, he replied: “All of those.” He went on: “The idea of Open Europe is now under threat. We have to discuss how we can manage the future.”
Asked what his priorities would be for a government facing mass migration of this sort, Lord Ashdown replied: “Once the crisis is upon you, it’s too late to start working out your priorities. “This is about forethought, the need to look ahead. And you can’t approach it on a purely British basis. It has to be an international effort consistent with our principles.”
Reuters | Guardian: ELD Report estimates land degradation - desertification costs world $10 trillion every year, will drive estimated 50 million people to migrate in next 10 years:
ELD: Economics of Land Degradation Initiative report: The Value of Land estimates that land degradation is costing the world as much as $10.6tn every year, equivalent to 17% of global gross domestic product; not only from lost agricultural production and diminished livelihoods, but also from the lost value of ecosystem services formerly provided by the land, including water filtration, erosion prevention, nutrient cycling and the provision of clean air. Arable land that is moderately or severely degraded, results in desertification, which is having a profound effect on migration. The report cites Karmenu Vella, European commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, who says that land degradation and desertification is forcing hundreds of thousands to move from their homes. A study by UNCCD: UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification, found that the process may drive an estimated 50 million people from their homes in the next 10 years.
Key Findings: * Land cover changes since year 2000 are responsible for half to 75% of the lost ecosystem services value. * The value of lost ecosystem services due to land degradation averages US $43,400 to $72,000 per square km, some US $870 to $1,450 per person, globally each year. * The percentage of Earth's land stricken by serious drought doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s. * One third of the world is vulnerable to land degradation; one third of Africa is threatened by desertification. * A future focused on a shift to sustainability will see the greatest increase in ecosystem service values.
Smithsonian: Is a Lack of Water to Blame for the Conflict in Syria?; PNAS: Report: A 2006 drought pushed Syrian farmers to migrate to urban centers, setting the stage for massive uprisings | USDA: SYRIA: Wheat Production in 2008/09 Declines Owing to Season-Long Drought | Middle East Resource Wars:
The world’s earliest documented water war happened 4,500 years ago, when the armies of Lagash and Umma, city-states near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, battled with spears and chariots after Umma’s king drained an irrigation canal leading from the Tigris. “Enannatum, ruler of Lagash, went into battle,” reads an account carved into an ancient stone cylinder, and “left behind 60 soldiers [dead] on the bank of the canal.”
Water loss documented by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a pair of satellites operated by NASA and Germany’s aerospace center, suggests water-related conflict could be brewing on the riverbank again. GRACE measured groundwater usage between 2003 and 2009 and found that the Tigris-Euphrates Basin—comprising Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran—is losing water faster than any other place in the world except northern India. During those six years, 117 million acre-feet of stored freshwater vanished from the region as a result of dwindling rainfall and poor water management policies. That’s equal to all the water in the Dead Sea. GRACE’s director, Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, calls the data “alarming.”
While the scientists captured dropping water levels, political experts have observed rising tensions. In Iraq, the absence of a strong government since 2003, drought and shrinking aquifers have led to a recent spate of assassinations of irrigation department officials and clashes between rural clans. Some experts say that these local feuds could escalate into full-scale armed conflicts.
In Syria, a devastating drought beginning in 2006 forced many farmers to abandon their fields and migrate to urban centers. There’s some evidence that the migration fueled the civil war there, in which 80,000 people have died. “You had a lot of angry, unemployed men helping to trigger a revolution,” says Aaron Wolf, a water management expert at Oregon State University, who frequently visits the Middle East.
“The Middle East is facing its worst drought in decades. For three summers, the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon....Experts say the climate warming in the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is contributing to the water shortage and helping to create a new phenomenon – water refugees....More than 160 villages are abandoned in Syria alone. According to a United Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tens near the big cities, looking for any kind of work.” - Deborah Amos, NPR; 7 January 2010
Think Progress: Worried About Refugees? Just Wait Until We Dust-Bowlify Mexico And Central America:
... The unprecedented multi-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war is mild compared to the multi-decade megadroughts that unrestricted carbon pollution will make commonplace in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and Central America, according to many recent studies.
Given the current political debate over immigration policy, it’s worth asking two questions. First: if the United States, through our role as the greatest cumulative carbon polluter in history, plays a central role in rendering large parts of Mexico and Central America virtually uninhabitable, where will the refugees go? And second: will we have some moral obligation to change our immigration policy?
If we don’t take far stronger action on climate change, then here is what a 2015 NASA study projected the normal climate of North America will look like. The darkest areas have soil moisture comparable to that seen during the 1930s Dust Bowl.
Just the last 12 months have seen headlines like these: “Worst drought in 40 years puts more than 2 million people in Central America at risk” and “Drought Reduces Mexico’s Agricultural Production by 40%.” Of course you probably haven’t seen those stories, since most major U.S. media outlets have been too busy covering brutal droughts right here at home.
Progressive Leftists: Addicted to Industrialization; Activist Cannon Fodder -- Pacification of Indigenous Peoples -- Pawns of Fortune 500 Resource Imperialists
Al Jazeera: From Africa's Palms:
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In Cameroon, not many smallholders living off the forest would sacrifice what they have -- where all their food and residential needs are provided them for free by the forest -- for a job in an American palm oil plant..
Trying to clear a path through the confusion is Macnight Ngwese from the Centre for Environment & Development (CED). He is leading a mapping programme in collaboration with local NGOs, SEFE and Nature Cameroon. They have been providing villagers with GPS devices to log their land and forest use. This information is vital in a grassroots battle to protect rights and livelihoods in one of the country's most remote areas.
We stop en route and Macnight unrolls one of his large maps, a patch of diagonal lines cover most of the document. That patch, he says, is the proposed plantation area. Macnight locates where we are and where we are going. Surrounding us on the map are a couple of key symbols. He points to one and says, "that is one of the few fishing spots in the area."
This map was created using data compiled from several villages in the area. Macnight continues,"what is instantly clear from the first set of results is that each community has a very large area of land use. People travel deep into the forest to collect herbs and spices, fish in rivers miles from their home, and hunt for food in similar pockets to neighbouring communities."
Not Primitive:
“It’s crazy when these outsiders come and teach us development. Is development possible by destroying the environment that provides us food, water and dignity? You have to pay to take a bath, for food, and even to drink water. In our land, we don’t have to buy water like you, and we can eat anywhere for free.” - Lodu Sikaka, Dongria Kondh
“Life expectancy now is around 60 to 65 years. Before it was 80 to 90 years. It’s because before [our access to our forest was restricted] we ate tubers, fruits, and other forest products, whereas now the Soliga diet is bad.” – Madegowda, Soliga
“You take us to be poor, but we’re not. We produce many kinds of grains with our own efforts, and we don’t need money.” – Baba Mahriya, Bhil
“We don’t want to go to the city and we don’t want to buy food. We get it free here.” – Malari Pusaka, Dongria Kondh
Tribal people are not 'backwards', they haven't been 'left behind'. They choose to live on their land, in their own ways .
Studies have shown that tribal people on their own land are some of the happiest in the world – the nomadic Maasai tribe were found to be just as happy as the world’s richest billionaires. Despite often being described as ‘primitive’ and ‘poor’, a study of the hunter-gatherer Jarawa tribe’s nutrition and health found that the Jarawa, who remain self-sufficient on their own land, have ‘optimum nutritional status’. They have a detailed knowledge of more than 150 plant and 350 animal species. However, their neighbours, the Great Andamanese, were brought into the ‘mainstream’ by the British and robbed of their land. They were decimated by disease and are now completely dependent on the government. Alcoholism and diseases such as TB are rife.
John Zerzan: Pretensions of Modernity | Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of Gender:
“Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other — outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.”
Primitivist John Zerzan argues that the primary motive of the ‘left’ is to co-opt indigenous cultures into becoming industrialized cultures, where their members become workers and consumers in the industrialized ratrace. The problem with the left, is their addiction to industrial progress, industrialization and domestication, and their cooptation of indigenous and non-industrialized cultures, on behalf of international corporations. Primitivists do not endorse industrialization or industrialization’s cooptation of indigenous cultures; whereas the left are fully engaged in the cooptation of indigenous people’s into becoming workers and consumers, and not to be indigenous agrarian and outside of industrialization. Primitivists perceive indigenous cultures as cultures which still have community face to face, and an authentic community and cultural life, in touch with the land. Primitivists believe we cannot all of a sudden become primitives and return to a relocalized and non-industrialized way of life, but overtime we can do so; and if we do not do so, the collapse of industrial civilization shall either exterminate us, or force us to do so.
EcoAction: Realities of Going Primitive:
Turtle Island: Families Learning Primitive and Natural Living Low Tech Skills Together (04:18) |
Having been through what I have in the past several years, I have developed some sense of what is going down in the world. I believe there are many wonderful human beings that are depressed, devastated, and overwhelmed by the crazed society that surrounds them. Their true desire is to live as close to the land as possible. Perhaps no one else knows that they feel this way and they tell no one for fear of rejection and ridicule. So their secret consumes their thoughts and dreams and they continue going through the motions of crazed society, living the way they really want to only in their heads. I know what this is like and maybe some of you reading this also know. Also, I hope readers can learn from mistakes I have made. I refuse to write a flowery, buttered-up story of living native, but I will say that the joys, rewards and freedom I have experienced are well worth any hardships encountered. So, this is not a blueprint for going primitive, just the human side of my attempt thus far.
So, what is it like to live a primitive lifeway, sleeping in a conical birchbark lodge, wearing deer skin clothing, making and using tools, traps and weapons to supply meat, and all of the other multifarious aspects of wilderness living? In the following pages, I will detail my experience of living close to earth. Again, it will not be a flowery account, but rather one that is full of compromises and hardships, but also of rewards and joys.
I do not claim to know everything about primitive living or survival, and I have not lived in this way long enough to be 100% proficient and self-sufficient. However, I have learned much and want to share what I have learned. Primarily, I want to discuss the many unexpected mysteries one has to figure out and learn before progressing further. I have called my quest the journey from civilized chaos to primitive paradise.
Food variety is fairly limited in the primitive diet. That does not mean it isn't a good diet. Studies of pre-contact primitive peoples the world over have found that these "limited" diets meet every body requirement. In the book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price, it was concluded that these primitives had unbelievable endurance, erect postures and cheerful personalities. They were found to have excellent bone structure and well developed jaw and teeth free from decay. In case after case, Price found no incidence of cancer, ulcers, tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, high blood pressure, muscular dystrophy or sclerosis or cerebral palsy.
Price also spoke of these primitive societies having no psychiatrists, no crime, no prisons, no mental illness, alcoholism or drug addiction. Every baby was nursed by its mother, and there were no neglected children. In other words, physical health went hand in hand with mental and emotional health.
I want to emphasize that this transition takes lots of time, time to learn skills, time to heal from living in modern society, time to deal with insecurities, time to adjust to a major lifestyle change.
There is simply no cultural circle in place to help those of us pursuing the "wilderness way." We have few, if any, elders to learn from. We have been schooled and prepped from birth for the helter-skelter business world, not the aboriginal world of gatherer-hunter. I have had to refrain from being so critical of myself to avoid becoming discouraged and be accepting and as patient as possible.
I hope this lets the reader know that there isn't a ready-made primitive way of life waiting once jobs are left and houses are sold, etc., What has been encouraging for me, is the knowledge that every one's ancestor's (99%+) were hunter-gatherers. This is our true heritage.
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