Atlantic Free Press Book Reviews

Monsoon - The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power- Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:58:01 +0000

by Jim Miles

When I first read Robert Kaplan, it was shortly after 9/11 when a whole library of books became available about U.S. foreign policy and how it should deal with the terrorist threat presented to the U.S. and democracy. At that time, in his work “Warrior Politics” he reasonably recognizes that his perspective is but one of many and none can be truly objective. He recognized the reality of the “American imperium” in terms that imperialism is the “most ordinary and dependable form of protection for ethnic minorities and others under violent assault,” and “an imperial reality already dominates our foreign policy.” Towards the end of the work he quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization,” and follows with his own summation that “the restraining power of our own democracy makes it hard for us to demand and orchestrate authentic transitions everywhere. Only through stealth and anxious foresight can America create a secure international system.”

We have had in the intervening years since that publication a significant decrease in democracy within the U.S. (constitutional issues, international law, and human rights issues such as torture). Indeed if democracy is inimical to mobilization, then democracy needs to be avoided, and its “restraining” power has been greatly diminished (when were the people, the demos, last asked if they wanted the U.S. to go to war?) As for demanding and orchestrating authentic transitions, that has been exposed through global media as being very real, although always with unexpected outcomes - and notice that the “transitions” are not necessarily labelled as democratic, simply transitions. The record over the last decade would also show that stealth has not created a secure international system (secure for whom - the global elites, the corporate bosses?) While stealth has been tried, so has massed military attack - all with expected ‘unexpecteds’ (sort of like Rumsfield’s “known unknowns”).

Monsoon - The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Robert D. Kaplan. Random House, New York, 2010

In short, yes there is an empire, a U.S. empire, it is not democratic, it wants transitions to its own favour, and will try to make it happen either covertly or overtly. Neither is working well, unless one considers that the global elite are becoming richer at the expense of the many. He noted that his personal first hand experience witnessing events in the world was his education and drew him to the classics of philosophy and politics “in the hope of finding explanations for the terrors before my eyes.”

With that as my background to Kaplan’s writing, I thought that reading “Monsoon” would be a rather antagonistic affair, even while trying to keep in mind that this is obviously written from the U.S. perspective however ingrained or not that might be. Fortunately I was pleasantly surprised, not that I was in full agreement with his perspective, but his writing was both informative and entertaining within the recognition of his North American view of the world (with apologies to Mexico). Using a combination of historical background, anecdotal experiences, current interviews, supported by a wide range of travels, “Monsoon” becomes a worthwhile reading experience. It is a similarly engaging style as with Thomas Friedman and Robert Fisk, without the depth of perspective that Fisk delivers, and fortunately without the sometimes rather bizarre conclusions and statements that Friedman manages to come up with.

The theme of the book - no, not global warming - is about U.S. foreign policy and how it has and will relate to the littoral states of the Indian ocean, necessitating the inclusion of China within that discussion as a non-littoral but very involved state. Travelling generally from west to east in the narrative, Kaplan presents historical background, current situations, and personal perspectives with lively and vivid descriptions along with information from interviewing a variety of people along the way. Returning to his statement from above, that he hopes to find “explanations for the terrors before my eyes,” he comes close, very close, but is just moments short of grasping what he is really seeing or saying.

There are areas of context and interpretation that do limit the text. Two of his main sub-themes are Islamic terrorism and democracy, and for both he makes statements that are almost ‘aha’ moments, but then are left hanging without actually making it into deeper connections. Further from apparent awareness, although perhaps lingering constantly in the background, is the very empire which he identified earlier as not being given its due background for the region. Other empires - Portugal, Dutch, British, French, Japanese - are all included for the influence they have had on the region, but little is discussed of U.S. actions, covert and overt, in the region, past or present. In the manner in which his information is presented, it makes little difference to the agreeable nature of the narrative, but it needs to be kept in mind while reading that there is much of the overall general context of the U.S. imperium that is not discussed. Diego Garcia is one of the singular misses, the island nation given to the U.S. military by Britain while the indigenous Chagossians were evicted from the island and not compensated. Ethnic cleansing? Racism? Empire? Certainly far from “the restraining power of our own democracy.”

Where Did The Towers Go? - Evidence Of Directed Free-Energy Technology On 9/11 – Book Review by Eric Larsen Ph.D.

ericlarsen@ericlarsen.net (Eric Larsen) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 05:32:50 +0000

by Eric Larsen Ph.D.

What a complete, unmitigated disaster 9/11 and the ten awful years following it have been—ten years of murder, crime, lawlessness, deceit, stupidity, and blindness that are only now meliorated, at long last, by the publication of Dr. Judy Wood’s unique, revelatory, and unequivocally welcome book, Where Did the Towers Go? The Evidence of Directed Free-Energy Technology on 9/11.

Allow me to make full disclosure now, so that those (and, believe me, there are many) who will choose not to read further can quit right away and save time.

I, me, Eric Larsen, wrote the Foreword to Dr. Wood’s book. I wrote it partly because I have known for many years about Dr. Wood’s research; partly because I have followed the website that Dr. Wood has maintained (http://www.drjudywood.com/); and partly because I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to write that Foreword.

It wasn’t just an opportunity but a high honor. To give an idea of how great an honor it was, here is the first line of what I wrote:

The book you now hold in your hands is the most important book of the twenty-first century.

Let me go further and quote the two sentences also , since the same obligation pertains now as did when I wrote them—the obligation for me to explain why I said so unqualified a thing and what I meant by it. Here’s what I meant, and still do:

Where Did the Towers Go? is a work, assuming that its content and message are properly and fairly heeded, that offers a starting point from which those who genuinely want to do it can begin, first, to rein in and then, perhaps, even end the wanton criminality and destructiveness of a set of American policies that took as their justification and starting point the horrific events of September 11, 2001.

As everyone knows, 9/11 has been “the justification and starting point” for all manner of destruction, loss, crime, and horror. Without 9/11, there would have been no “Patriot Act,” no abuse of FISA and stripping away of privacy rights, no Military Commissions Act of 2006 with its setting aside of Habeas Corpus, no implementation of Northcom and deployment of our own military forces on domestic American soil (for use against who, you might ask?), and no trashing of Bill of Rights and Constitutional guarantees, no programmatic and precedent-setting weakening and eliminating of right and guarantees so that the very concepts of “citizenship” and “freedom” have been emptied out to the point where setting up concentration camps inside the U.S. is now legal and not a one of us would have any recourse whatsoever if it were decided that we should be thrown into a cell in one of them and forgotten forever.[1]

Without 9/11, there would never have been any fake and opportunistic “Global War on Terror,” would never have been Guantanamo as we know it now, never have been official programs of torture or fake demonizing of Islam in order to justify wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, or to justify overt plans for the murder of U.S. citizens living in places like, say, Yemen.

There’s more, much more. The complete list of atrocities, crimes, and inhumanities triggered by or justified by 9/11 could fill whole chapters, even books. By using 9/11 as propaganda—by using it as trigger, excuse, justification, or catalyst—the U.S. has betrayed itself, its principles, and its people, and has made itself the world’s most dangerous enemy of all mankind and also of Earth herself.

How can it conceivably be, given these facts, that we, a nation of people who presumably have minds of our own—how can it be that we have done nothing to stop this hideous parade of monstrosities and horrors? In the Foreword to Dr. Wood’s book, I wrote:

It is now almost a decade since 9/11 took place, and in all that time no unassailable, permanent, or, in pragmatic terms, politically influential progress has been made in determining exactly and irrefutably what took place on that day—or what did not take place.

We—that is, we the potential resistance or opposition to U.S. criminal policy—have been spinning our wheels for a complete decade. There are a lot of reasons for this wheel-spinning, including various programs of very skillful and extraordinarily devious cover-up after cover-up after cover-up of the central question of what did happen on 9/11. For, as long as that central question remains unanswered, or for as long as that question can be caused to remain obfuscated, blurred, muddled-up, in doubt—as long as that situation continues, the wheels will continue to spin and people won’t quite know what to do. Dr. Wood is very well aware of this fact. Her own way of putting it is that before accusing someone of a crime, you’ve got to know what crime they committed. In her Author’s Preface, she writes:

You cannot convict someone of a crime if you don’t even know what crime to charge them with. If you accuse someone of murder using a gun, you’d better be sure the body has a bullet hole in it.

The Plight Of The Palestinians – Book Review by Edward Jayne

edward.jayne@wmich.edu (Edward Jayne) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:52:23 +0000

by Edward Jayne Ph.D.

In his collection of thirty-two articles by almost as many authors, The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, William Cook provides a devastating assessment of Zionist violence against Palestinians. Relentlessly told are one atrocity after another, one act of deception after another, one broken treaty after another, one surprise attack after another, one policy reversal after another--all of which are described with both effective immediacy and an adequate sense of historic context. The articles themselves extend from Francis Boyle's "Israel's Crimes against Palestinians," published in August, 2001, to Ilan Pappe's "The Necessity of Cultural Boycott," published in June, 2009, spanning almost a decade of Israel's sixty-year campaign to force the departure of Palestinians from the West Bank. Cook's long introduction is especially useful in its exploration of events during the late forties when Israel established itself as a Jewish state, the one and only specifically denominational nation in the advanced industrial world. Relevant to Zionist intentions at the time, Cook discusses such matters as the Haganah Oath, the Red House, Catling's Top Secret "Memorandum of the Criminal Investigation Department of July 31, 1947," and the Deir Yassin massacre as well as those of Saliha, Lod, Dawayima, and Abu Shusha. Regrettably, he neglects to mention the Zionist sound trucks that were reported to have circulated among Palestinian villages after the Deir Yassin massacre, warning that the same could happen to them as well.

The single issue that keeps recurring in the articles is whether Israel has been intentionally pursuing the genocidal destruction of Palestinians. The word "genocide" actually occurs in the titles of eight of the articles (one quarter of the total), and the flood of information contained therein--as well as most of the rest of the articles--suggests the choice of the word is in fact reasonable, not hyperbolic. Cook recounts how Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1944 by linking the Greek word "genos," referring to a tribe or race, with the Latin suffix "cide," meaning to kill. Cook also quotes Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonasson's more expansive definition of the word to suggest the destruction of culture, language, religion, political and social institutions as aspects of genocide that may fall short of total annihilation. And in fact the reference to "genocide" throughout the text is not limited to total annihilation but includes other modes of extreme repression, and appropriately so. It seems obvious by now that Zionists do not exactly seek to exterminate Palestinians, merely to get rid of them--i.e., either to "transfer" them to nearby Muslim nations or to sequester them in "cantons" (Ariel Sharon's word) equivalent to American Indian reservations minus the gambling casinos. In the words of Steven Lendman, "slow-motion genocide" would be involved, something presumably better and more "humane" than the Nazi gas chambers, but nevertheless despicable.

Truth About Global Economic Crisis: Book Review by Joel S. Hirschhorn

sprawlkills@starpower.nets (Joel S. Hirschhorn) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:13:40 +0000

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

You want to read The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century, edited by Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, if you meet these criteria: you welcome information and analysis about critically important issues that come from great thinkers outside the mainstream media and publishing world; you can handle brain pain from detailed and brutally honest revelations; you are willing and able to challenge your own biases and preconceptions to let in new explanations of how the world really functions.

If millions of Americans read this book, we would probably see a far stronger uprising against the political establishment that has refused to severely punish the countless guilty people in the financial, banking and mortgage sectors that brought down the US and global economic system.

This book ties together a large number of factors in twenty chapters that reveal just how corrupt the world has become because of the power of plutocratic, wealthy and corporate interests. From Wall Street corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve and other central banks to the US military and NATO, a multitude of threads get woven into a disturbing tapestry of crimes against society that still have not been prosecuted.

This book is truly an instrument of anti-brainwashing. If you are willing to spend serious time reading it, then you surely will become much angrier about the dismal state of the economy that is causing so much pain and suffering to ordinary people worldwide. If you personally have escaped the worst ravages of the economic meltdown, then you will have much more compassion for those severely affected.

The Chosen Peoples - America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:20:26 +0000

by Jim Miles

The Chosen Peoples - America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibowtiz. Simon & Schuster. 2010.

A work on studying chosen peoples needs to be approached with some kind of trepidation when one knows that they themselves are not chosen. If for nothing else, it is impossible to rationally argue against faith in biblical ‘chosenness.’ However, if one accepts the underlying premise that other people believe in their being chosen then the idea of chosenness can be worked with. This appears to be what the authors of this new book “The Chosen Peoples” attempt to examine.

In an historical sense, looking at the way the idea of being chosen affected the decisions and events around the people claiming to be chosen, the authors did a reasonable job. It is much more of an historical overview than a psychological examination of the ramifications that assuming and advocating “divine election” would create. The material covered does provide a slim overview of historical events.

In the Jewish case the mythological biblical events concern the original ‘nation’ of Israel - nation being a term that has several meanings according to its context - and how it develops through the diaspora and on into Zionism and the current problems of Israel/Palestine. In the case of the United States, the historical review starts with the first colonial settlers and their attitudes and actions in relation with the indigenous populations, and then carries forward through several presidencies to the current support of the state of Israel by the U.S. government.

Within these presentation the obvious questions should rise, that “If you are the chosen people, are you acting in a manner in which that divine election was intended? And if not, is there the possibility that the election could be nullified?” The authors put it this way, sort of a half question, “that its [Israel’s] values rested on the people’s commitment to God’s commandments, that the land was theirs only so they might strive to become just?” This is followed by another half question reminding the readers that “Israel’s first two historical sojourns in Zionism ended in exile, with the Lord displeased with His people’s transgressions, their greed and idolatry?”

How To Reverse A Deflation: Helicopter Ben Needs To Drop Some Money On Main Street

ecumei@gmail.com (Eileen Fleming) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 05:54:35 +0000

by Eileen Fleming

The Fed is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went into the coffers of banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies.

In 2002, in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben,” then-Fed Governor Bernanke famously said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent),” he said, “that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Later in the speech he discussed “a money-financed tax cut,” which he said was “essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” You could cure a deflation, said Professor Friedman, simply by dropping money from helicopters.

It seems logical enough. If there is insufficient money in the money supply (deflation), the solution is to put more money into it. But if deflation is so easy to fix, then why has the Fed’s massive attempts to date failed to do the job? At the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole summit on August 27, Chairman Bernanke said he would fight deflation with his whole arsenal, including “quantitative easing” (QE) – purchasing longterm securities with money created on a computer. Yet since 2008, the Fed has added more than $1.2 trillion to “base money” doing just that, and the economy is still in a serious deflationary spiral. In the first quarter of this year, the money supply actually shrank at a record annual rate of 9.6%.

Cullen Roche at The Pragmatic Capitalist has an answer to that puzzle. He says that as currently practiced, quantitative easing (QE) is not really a money drop. It is just an asset swap:

“[T]he Fed doesn’t actually ‘print’ anything when it initiates its QE policy. The Fed simply electronically swaps an asset with the private sector. In most cases it swaps deposits with an interest bearing asset.”

The Fed just swaps Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) for other assets (promissory notes or debt) that can quickly be turned into money. The Fed is merely trading one form of liquidity for another, without raising the overall water level in the pool.

Oceania by Andre Vltchek - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:57:53 +0000

by Jim Miles

Having spent six years travelling and exploring the many regions of the idylicized South Pacific, Andre Vltchek reveals in his latest book, “Oceania,” that it is a region endangered by its encounters with external actions and ideas. While all is not lost yet, and some smaller areas still retain their indigenous subsistent inhabitation of the water and lands, all the islands, atolls, and reefs are highly stressed by many factors, factors that in the confined spaces of an island or atoll, suddenly seem magnified in significance as compared to a larger continental land mass.

Book available at Amazon.com

Vltchek wanders across the entire region - slowly as it were - using the highly constrained and schedules and authoritarian rules of the few airlines that service the area. The airlines are predominantly foreign controlled, and that foreign control is what leads to the majority of the problems in the region. Most of the island groups are nominally independent countries, yet have become ‘re-colonized’ through a variety of modern connivances and rules and regulations imposed from outside, often supported by elites and their cronies within. The themes and ideas covered in the book are familiar to anyone following current world events, but in an area where so much is focussed on such a small land base, the litany of negative events and actions appear almost overwhelming.

Paradise lost (almost)

As I made notes reading through this book, they quickly veered from straight line sequenced notes to a web of interactions wherein one event or rule or regulation affected not only one small area, but interacted with other events and rules creating a spider web of reinforcing - and controlling - intentions. Those intentions, in their simplest expression, is to control the resources of the area (fishing, mining, agriculture), to control the geopolitical access and rights of the region (the political machinations of the China/Taiwan game, UN voting preferences on international issues, western countries that support various elite groups), and to control information concerning the region and the subjugation it suffers from these foreign and elitist groups.

Environmental disasters

Generally I place all current events under three very general headings, all of which are necessarily related and intertwined with each other: the environment, the economy, and the military /political.

The environment in the region is generally known as an idyllic tropical get-away, with some concern about the rising ocean waters that affect Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati, with the former receiving the most media attention. As if losing three nations and their distinct indigenous cultures is not enough, environmental concerns arise in all of the islands for similar and other reasons.

Vltchek discusses logging on the larger islands and the resulting chemical contamination of fresh and salt waters. That necessarily ties over into the economy as the logs are exported, leaving the concerned area with a devastated forest, little in the way of economic development as the earnings go to the elites but mostly to the overseas corporations that operate in the area. The economy then has an impact on the human economy as crime, prostitution, disease, tend to become norms in an area in which the indigenous culture no longer offers a valid means in which to maintain a living.

Another environmental/economic factor stemming from the above is that of agriculture. This broad topic covers everything from rising obesity, diabetes, illnesses, pollution from garbage dumps, to insecticides and herbicides used in palm oil plantations. Land ownership becomes an issue as the corporations run rampant over areas that may have formerly been communal but now are claimed by the elites and their cronies who then profit from their use for other than subsistence agricultural purposes.

Toward a New Public Diplomacy - Redirecting U.S. Foreign Policy. Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 06:08:46 +0000

by Jim Miles

Toward a New Public Diplomacy - Redirecting U.S. Foreign Policy. Ed. Philip Seib. Palgrave MacMillan, New York. 2009.

This collection of essays could be summed up in one word: image. Other words used throughout the text range from the more benign terms of “perception” and “communication tactics” through to the harder terms of “propaganda,” the military “strategic communications” and the rather laborious military phrase of “coordinated information dissemination.” At its base however it wall returns to the one word, image.

Image as opposed to actions, in that U.S. public diplomacy rarely if ever admits to mistakes in the grand purpose of the U.S. and will only do so under limited circumstances when media exposure catches their actions at cross purposes with their purported rhetorical ideology. The underlying assumption of all authors, some more boldly stated than others, is that the U.S. is right, it is good, and therefore we do not need to change our actions, what we need to adjust is our image.

Toward a New Public Diplomacy
is divided into roughly three sections. The first looks at the case for public diplomacy. The second examines three different view points from the outside looking in (essentially all three give ‘fails’). Finally, there are five essays on what the future should hold for U.S. public diplomacy - none of which mention the essential factor that the U.S. is a highly militarized society occupying several countries with military bases in over 150 countries at a huge cost to the U.S. economy.
Soft Power

The book attempts to make the case for “soft power”, all those things that are non-military that can “establish the legitimacy of American action,” partly because “The current struggle against terrorism is a struggle to win hearts and minds.” The assumptions supporting all these arguments are the over-used phrases about “our democracy and our political system generally,” including the neo-liberal free market capitalism as a large part of that system. The first chapter on soft power ends with the statement that the “natural soft power advantages America enjoys can be of great benefit to the national interest.” Not the Iraqi national interest… nor Afghanistan… Pakistan… Mexico… any country in Latin America… in other words, the U.S. “national interest” is seldom one that serves other countries well, in spite of the jargon, in spite of the rhetoric, in spite of the image, in spite of the attempts to use soft power in the face of hugely militarized foreign geopolitical policy.

The second chapter provides a rather boring history of attempts by Various U.S. agencies/departments to organize public diplomacy. If this is the stuff of U.S. academia and its insights into foreign policy, it is no wonder U.S. diplomacy is so dismal.

Legacies of colonialism and more

In chapter three, “The Lessons of Al Hurra Television,” the U.S. sponsored Arab language TV station, the general commentary is on its failure. Within the discussion is the statement that the station “may have further strengthened perceptions, of the United States as an arrogant, disrespectful and bullying nation.” Or perhaps the realities on the ground, of the extensive use of pre-emptive hard force, military force, and occupation, and torture, and murder and all those other things that go along with the military might have had some influence. Or perhaps the rest of the world is not as ignorant as the U.S. assumes they are, and are quite aware of the U.S. interests in oil, containment of Russia and China, and the harvesting of the wealth of the world for their own purposes.

The U.S. assumes ignorance in viewers/recipients of U.S. propaganda when their own population is highly ignorant of world geography, cultural, and political issues. The author recognizes this somewhat saying, “Arab anti-American sentiment and opposition to U.S. policies in the region stem from a number of historical factors, including the legacies of European colonialism, as well as some important substantive disagreements about the purpose and effect of U.S. policy, not a lack of access to information.” [italics added]

That legacy includes the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government, the support of the Shah and his SAVAK inquisitors, the unparallel support given to Saudi Arabia for its oil in counterpoint to its multi-billion dollar support of Israel in its occupation of Palestinian land. I would imagine that the “important substantive disagreements” would include the sanctions on Iraq/Iran, the occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the drone attacks on Pakistan and the many covert government and private actions that are spread throughout the Middle East.

Fail

The three essays looking at U.S. public diplomacy from the outside can be summed up in one word: fail. The views arrive from Russia, Egypt, and China.

Russia is identified as a lost opportunity, lost after the dismantling of the Soviet empire. The author recognizes that “The convergence of business and public diplomacy activity can be successful because today’s global business is deeply engaged in global politics and international affairs.” All too true, both for Russia and the rest of the world.

What is not discussed in this essay is the huge impact the IMF interests had on an unstructured post-Soviet economy and how all the rhetoric of free markets and globalization robbed much of the wealth of Russia into the hands of a few powerful oligarchs as well as western financial interests. Further, throughout all the essays, there is little recognition that along with the military hardware that the U.S. throws around the globe, there is also a lot of influence, hard influence on the politics and financial well being of many countries under the negative influence of IMF/World Bank/WTO/OECD regulations under supranational corporate power. Not all of that is U.S. power, but the initiatives come from the Washington consensus and most other countries fall into line behind their leadership. Otherwise, even more invasive hard power is used, covert or overt.

Palestine Betrayed - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:05:21 +0000

by Jim Miles

Palestine Betrayed. Efraim Karsh. Yale University Press, London, 2010.

Was Palestine betrayed? Of course it was, by the British, the United States, France, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the remnants of the Ottoman empire, all of the regional Arab countries, and by certain elites and powerful of Palestine itself. Efraim Karsh makes the latter two the main if not the sole responsible for the nakba - the disaster - that occurred in 1947-48 with the announced partition of Palestine followed by the declaration of the state of Israel. “Palestine Betrayed,” as portrayed by Karsh, is the story of the connivances of the Arab leaders in the region along with the elites of Palestine while the Jewish population continually offered peace and coexistence with their brethren and encouraged them to stay in their villages and towns to become partners in the new state enterprise.

Karsh is both right…

Karsh is right in that, yes, the Palestinians were in essence betrayed by the Arab leaders at the time more concerned about their own scenarios and power bases than that of a nascent Palestinian nationality. Further he is correct in that some of the local Palestinian leadership - or what remained of it after the British military violently dealt with them in the previous ‘Arab revolt’ - told the people of the towns and villages to evacuate and retreat away from the advancing Jewish forces. He presents many quotes from Jewish leaders, Ben Gurion in particular, that attempt to show that the Jewish people wished to live in peaceful coexistence with their Arab neighbours.

…and horribly wrong.

His approach and methodology of trying to reconstruct the arguments around the nakba are horribly wrong in several ways.

In the introduction he writes, “It is understandable for leaders and politicians, culpable for their nation’s greatest ever disaster, to revert to hyperbole and lies in their quest for personal and collective exoneration, it is inexcusable for future generations of scholars and intellectuals to substitute propaganda for incontrovertible facts.” In other words, “These politicized historians have turned the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, with the aggressors transformed in hapless victims and vice versa.”

His main historical criticism is directed at the “new historians” - who have “total unfamiliarity…with the Arab world…and their condescending treatment of the Palestinians as passive objects.” He says that, “rather than unearth new facts or offer novel interpretations”, they have “recycled the standard Palestinian Arab narrative of the conflict.” Karsh then continues to announce that “the recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British mandate and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writer and ignored or distorted by the “new historians.”

The result is that the new documents reveal “that there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation….that the claim of premeditated dispossession is not only baseless but the inverse of the truth,” and that it was the Arab leaders “against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival.”

“It is to reclaim this historical truth that this book has been written.” Karsh succeeds, and he fails.

If the reader is unfamiliar with any other writings on Israel, the “new historians” that Karsh so disparages (and to the uninitiated, the new historians are predominantly if not solely Israeli academics), and if the reader is unfamiliar with the larger historical contexts of the world’s empires during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century and their impacts within the Middle East, the reclamation of historical truth works. That is, it does present a picture of a peaceful Jewish population betrayed by a greedy, backwards, ineffective, and self-serving Arab leadership.

The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century - Book Review by Kellia Ramares

byrnesblogger1@gmail.com (Kellia Ramares) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:35:53 +0000

by Kéllia Ramares

Orthodox economic theory does not acknowledge the amply documented fact that financial actors can not only influence but actually manipulate the market, make it move in a particular direction…. Economic theory does not address the structural causes of economic collapse…. We are not dealing with a cyclical process; what is at stake is a major dislocation in the financial, trading and productive structures of the global economy.

--Michel Chossudovsky, The Global Economic Crisis, p16 (emphasis in original).

Earlier this summer, I was invited to attend a brown bag lunch in Berkeley, California, hosted by the Sustainable Economies Law Center. SELC helps urban farmers, worker-owned co-ops, and other social enterprises sort through legal gray areas. The lunch was a discussion about money that had a diverse group of participants who wished to do various things such as “reboot” the financial system, promote individual investments in local food systems (Slow Money Alliance) or abolish monetary systems altogether (The End of Money, my contribution to the discussion). Although most of the discussion was focused on the future, one man was concerned with teaching people how the current system worked.

As he made his point, I drew from my bag a copy of The Global Economic Crisis, and soon was telling the group that this book would do just what that gentleman had just said needed to be done.

But this is not a ordinary book on financial literacy that will tell people about the differences between banks and credit unions, the role credit scores play in our personal lives, or how to access small business financing. This book is a compilation of essays by some of the most socially conscious political and economic minds of our time, including James Petras, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, and the author of more than 60 books published in 29 languages, Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology at California State University—Sonoma and director of the Project Censored Awards program, Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California—Berkeley, and renowned researcher of the New World Order, Ellen Brown, author of the best selling book Web of Debt, which examines the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, and Mike Whitney, an independent writer in Washington State who analyzes the inner workings of Wall Street.

The Global Economic Crisis describes the big picture, the global macroeconomics that translate into high unemployment, massive foreclosures, drastic cuts in local governmental services, and bankruptcy for millions of individuals, and businesses large and small, worldwide. And the understanding of economics at the global level, not how to open a checking account or how to shop for an auto loan, is the financial literacy the public needs most.

Start-Up Nation - The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:57:53 +0000

by Jim Miles

Start-Up Nation - The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Dan Senor and Saul Singer. Council of Foreign Relations Book, McClelland & Stewart. 2009.

There are no Palestinians….

Israel is an amazing place as one puts together the implications from Start-Up Nation. It is a fount of free enterprise can-do entrepreneurial spirit. There are no resistances, although something called an Intifada concerned the authors somewhat, without being specified as to what it is/was. There are no freedom fighters nor insurgents, no guerrillas nor rebellions. For that matter there are no Palestinians as the word has been expunged from the authors’ vocabulary completely (unless it was in a boring anecdotal section that I skim read and missed - not likely). Israel, except for a few wandering Arabs, was “largely a barren wasteland.”

The only people - other than Jews, Zionists, and various other national entrepreneurs - to people this book are the terrorists, obviously dealt with very effectively by somebody within the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The authors use the media presumption that anyone against the state of Israel must be a terrorist and they are there for seemingly no reason at all, other than that ‘they are against us and hate us for what we are,’ an attitude one could expect from writers with Council on Foreign Relations background. Without these contextual placements, this work fails completely. Even accepting these contextual failures, the ‘miracle’ that is Israel is not very miraculous at all, but is based on what are normal means of establishing national wealth.

Questions

I knew before I read the book that I expected certain elements to be addressed in order for it to be a complete contextual presentation on this supposed miracle. The questions I asked, and that I wrote on the front fly-leaf of the book before reading even the cover flap were:

Does the book discuss the U.S. foreign aid of about $3 billion dollars annually and an etimated 114 billion dollars since inception?

Does it mention the historical period before the war, before the UN Resolution, and immediately following the declaration of the state of Israel, when financial support from the U.K. and the U.S. had already become common place?

Is there a discussion of the occupation and settlements of prime agricultural land and the control of natural resources (the most important being water)?

Is there any effect of the hostage population of Palestinians in creating cheap labour markets and a captive sales market?

Is the technology trade with the U.S. discussed, and in its entirety of state of the art military technology and not just the run of the mill, out of date stuff sold to other countries?

….and answers.

Well no, there are no answers to these questions, except for the one on U.S. technology imports, answered only partially and perhaps inadvertently in a single line in the concluding section of the work. Shimon Peres is cited as saying, “Every technology that arrives in Israel from America, it comes to the army and in five minutes, they change it.” The technology Israel receives is state of the art technology in military and security hardware and software.

Letters from Palestine - Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the power of Nonviolence - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:37:58 +0000

by Jim Miles

Letters from Palestine - Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah

Kenneth Ring’s writing on Palestine has already received just praise, as it is another in a series of recently published works that cry from the heart of Palestine.[1] And while I have read many other books on Palestine, “Letters from Palestine”, as with others that are set within a personal context, brings forth the undying hope and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of severe hostility from Israel and a careless disregard from most of the western media and governments. What come through uniquely from this work is that of hope combined with youthfulness, that the Palestinian story will surely go on and on as long as there are Palestinians to relate it.

The injustices perpetrated by the Zionists of Israel, supported by the awkward and embarrassing sycophantic participation of the U.S. government (read also military and corporations), cannot endure forever. It is from these letters from Palestine that spring the message that the Palestinians will not grow old and die off and there will be no one left to remember that there was a Palestine. There is life, there is hope, there is memory.

What really impressed me as I read was the general youthfulness of the writers, second and third generation refugees and residents who carried the memories forward. Not just memories of their own horrible experiences but the memories of their parents and their parents before them. Combined with that youthfulness is an eagerness for education, recognizing that education is a means to escape the misery of the occupation, to better one’s own life, but also to contribute back to their people, their ancestors, and the land they lived and worked on over thousands of years, “Palestine lives in its children.”

Dear America

Most ‘Americans’, if one truly includes the Americas of the central and southern geographies are well aware of the violent nature and ill intentions of governments backed by the government of the United States. They are also well aware of the manner in which the United States ignores international law in any area that gets in the way of its ideological desires. Further, they are aware of the covert, subversive, and torturous methods that they promulgate in order to achieve their ends.

War Without Context: Restrepo and the Korengal Valley - Film Review by Hannah Gurman

hrg2@nyu.edu (Hannah Gurman) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 05:12:19 +0000

by Hannah Gurman Ph.D.

“The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Sebastian Junger’s documentary, Restrepo, which premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York last Friday and opens commercially on June 25, has been racking up the superlatives. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The New York Times surmised it just might be the “most frightening” of the many recent films that takes a hard-nosed look at the daily experience of war. And according to Slug Magazine, Restrepo “may be the finest documentary created about war in our time”.

The film, which traces the second battalion in the Korengal Valley over the course of their deployment in 2006-2007, gives us the raw experience of war in this dangerous region of Afghanistan. We hear the snap snap and see the smoke of the machine guns and rocket fire during the daily firefights. We feel the loss of “Doc” Restrepo, who bled out on the helicopter after being shot in the legs in the first months of the mission, but whose death did not prevent the group from penetrating deeper into the steep mountainside to build an operating base named after the fallen. We witness and vicariously feel the shock of being ambushed on the mission to keep pushing the boundary farther and, in the midst of battle, we see the young men turn behind them, where the body of their friend, who has just caught enemy fire, lies. We are with the men in quieter moments too, playing the guitar, dancing arm in arm to the tune of “Touch Me,” and joking about their sex lives. Basically being “normal guys.”

These scenes are powerful and worth documenting. In a time when most Americans are so divorced from the experience or sacrifice of war, Restrepo drives these realities home. Individually and collectively, the men in the film have an important story to tell—from Captain Dan Kearney, the no-holds-barred leader who needs to keep the mission and his soldiers moving forward, to specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin who reflects fondly on his hippie pacifist upbringing as he fires a machine gun across the valley into the opposite ridge.

As illuminating as the American soldier’s perspective may be, it is only one vantage point onto the experience of war. Especially when it comes to feature films, this angle generally gets more emphasis than any other, partly because it makes for good drama and partly because of relative institutional, cultural, and logistical ease. Embedded journalism and film have so dominated our window onto the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, that they threaten to marginalize the larger context of these wars.

The Korengal valley, or “valley of death,” as it has been dubbed by Americans, is a small region in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. Most of the fighting occurred around its population cluster, which consists of a handful of villages and several hundred houses. The remoteness of the valley lends itself to a sense of Korengal as a timeless region in “the middle of nowhere” and “away from everything.” This, combined with the heavy fighting and high casualties in the region, has made Korengal the subject of many a returning soldier’s nightmares. As Michael Cummings recounts in his blog about the war, “In my dream, I had returned to the Korengal Valley, later nicknamed the "Valley of Death." I only spent a couple months in the Korengal, but it felt much longer. The place haunted me before I arrived in Afghanistan; it still haunts me.”

Like the river in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Kubrick’s Apocalypse Now, the valley is not so much a place in itself. Rather, it represents the deepest and darkest recesses of the soldier’s emotional experience. As the soldier gets deeper and deeper into the terrain, he digs deeper and deeper into his own psyche. The soldiers in Restrepo rarely see the man firing gunshots and rockets at them. To the extent that he exists, the actual human enemy, as timeless as the rocks that shape this terrain, is merely an outgrowth of the valley itself. Here, in this alien terrain, the soldier faces war pure and simple.

Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:50:01 +0000

by Jim Miles

Quicksand - America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East. Geoffrey Wawro. Penguin Press, New York, 2010.

From first impression to last impression this book, like its title Quicksand, is deceptive. Even the first physical impression, the physical structure of the book itself - its glossy pages and high quality binding - is designed to impress the reader. Initially the history is written powerfully and revealingly, highlighting information that I have not encountered within other histories of U.S. imperial adventures in the Middle East.

However as the story unfolds, particularly in the final third of the book, a different sense akin to déjà vu surfaces, as the history becomes more of a current events crisis without the in-depth analysis and critique that should have accompanied it. The end result is that instead of discussing the general Middle East geopolitical context and the power of the Israeli lobby within the U.S. - not to mention the lack of global context within the over-riding imperial intent of the United States since its inception - and there are many texts that support that analysis - the history ends leaving a feeling that, well, yes, the U.S. has made some mistakes in their relationships in the Middle East, but their intentions were good.

As well, the book ends with the Iraq war and only the briefest of mention of post Iraq war events (of course the war continues, a downgraded insurgency struggle) that should have been covered in a work with a 2010 publication date. The final section “Conclusion” provides very little in the way of substantive answers and only reinforces the déjà vu sensation of too little analysis of supposedly good intentions.

Conclusion

The last impression of the work is of a poorly analysed position, or more correctly, one viewed through the rose coloured lenses of U.S. beneficence and magnanimity towards the world in general. It begins by reviewing the Iranian situation, using language with either an obvious bias or an obvious ignorance - perhaps both - as the “Iranian security forces are taking their cues from the shah and SAVAK; because the shah was so gentle, he fell.” Oh…really!?? From that interesting and singular interpretation, Wawro then goes briefly into Iran’s nuclear program and “Iran’s curious animosity toward Israel,” as it makes “Israeli pre-emption or massive retaliation inevitable.” Yet there is no reminder at this point of U.S. machinations in the region, nor the U.S.’s strange ‘alliance’ with Israel, nor the double standard that allows Israel to have all the nuclear power in the region outside of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) while Iran is working legally within the NPT.

Then there is a quick turn to the AfPak war where “polls reveal (at last!) that al-Queda and the Taliban are unpopular,” without revealing the polls in Pakistan that the U.S. influence and presence are well below ‘unpopular’ and considered by the vast majority to be at the root of many of the regions problems.

Beyond Fundamentalism - Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:32:13 +0000

by Jim Miles

Beyond Fundamentalism - Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. Reza Aslan. Random House, New York.

I first encountered Reza Aslan on the Jon Stewart Show and was somewhat perturbed by his interview - unfortunately I have not been able to retrieve that reference on the internet, but it did intrigue me and led me to purchasing his book Beyond Fundamentalism. More than likely that was what his intentions originally were for, to promote purchase and readership of his latest book, originally published as “How to Win a Cosmic War.”

At first appearances the writing seemed highly sensationalized, presenting definitions about the differences between holy wars and ‘cosmic’ wars as if there was a substantial difference between the two. That a “cosmic war is a religious war,” does not seem to offer much differentiation to that of a holy war. That cosmic warriors “are fighting a war of the imagination,” seems all too obvious, either from a secular perspective without a god, or from a religious perspective in which the image and reality of god are often described as unknown realities to mere humans.

However, as the introduction develops it becomes more grounded in reality than philosophy, and discusses the 9/11 attacks as being a “declaration of war” for a “war already in progress…raging between the forces of good and evil…It was an invitation that America’s own cosmic warriors were more than willing to accept.” Aslan accepts the validity of the Muslim grievances, that the “Palestinians really are suffering under Israeli occupation. Arab dictators are in fact propped up by U.S. policies. The Muslim world truly does have reason to feel under attack….” His ultimate statement, one that unfortunately is not reiterated in the rest of the book, is “there is only one way to win a cosmic war: refuse to fight in it.”

Jihadists and Judaism.

The concept of jihad is presented in the first chapter, its various attributes and definitions concerning lesser and greater jihad, leads into a discussion of the development of the “near enemy” and the “far enemy.”

Following that, Aslan very briefly discusses the development of Jewish fundamentalism and the Zionist movement originating in nineteenth century Europe where the rise of nationalism coincided with the rise of anti-Semitism, where the Jews represented an “alien culture” that had “yet to sufficiently assimilate into European society.” Aslan does not identify that Zionism also developed in this milieu of proto-nationalism and Christian identity of the Jews as the ‘other’, outcasts from their society.

His brief history is generally accurate and leads to a concluding statement that “There remains today no more potent symbol of injustice in the Muslim imagination than the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.” He emphasizes however that the real grievance for the jihadists is between the forces of good and evil, to be enjoined by “all Muslims, Jews, and Christians - three faith communities with long and deeply ingrained traditions of cosmic warfare.”

My Stroke of Insight - A brain scientist's personal journey - Book Review by Kéllia Ramares

byrnesblogger1@gmail.com (Kellia Ramares) — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:56:06 +0000

by Kéllia Ramares

My Stroke of Insight - A brain scientist's personal journey - by Jill Bolte Taylor PhD

I have heard doctors say, “If you don't have your abilities back by six months after your stroke, then you won't get them back!” Believe me, this is not true. I noticed significant improvement in my brain's ability to learn and function for eight full years post-stroke, at which point I decided my mind and body were totally recovered.

- Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, p. 116.

This short book is the amazing first person account of Dr. Taylor's stroke and eight-year path of recovery. In December of 1996, the then-37-year-old neuroanatomist suffered a hemorrhagic stroke from an arteriovenous malformation, a congenital disorder. The hemorrhage flooded the left hemisphere of her brain with blood and created a golfball-sized clot that had to be removed surgically. The stroke left her without the faculties of language, calculation and memory, basically returning her to an infantile state.

The book begins with a short description of her early years, including her brother's diagnosis of schizophrenia, which first got her interested in the workings of the brain. She goes on to describe her education and her associations with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) and Harvard University's Brain Bank, a facility that dispenses donated brain tissue to researchers. It was the combination of Dr. Taylor's background in brain science and the fact that the stroke did not render her unconscious that she was able to later record both her brain trauma and its immediate aftermath.

Just before the chapters describing her ordeal, Dr. Taylor presents two chapters of basic brain anatomy to help people understand the various functions of the brain and how they were impaired by her stroke. These chapters are easy and interesting for a layperson to read and although they may be skipped, they shouldn't be. She then describes what happened the morning of the stroke, when she realized what was happening and tried to get help as her cognitive functions were deteriorating.

I learned from reading those chapters two big things: the first was how important it is to be able to reach other people in an emergency. (Dr. Taylor was single and the circumstances of her illness had deprived her of the awareness that her landlady was home, or that 911 could be called for an ambulance). The second was what a shameful excuse for a health care system we have in the United States. As she struggled to get help during this life threatening emergency, Dr. Taylor also worried about where she would get care and how much it would cost:

[E]ven in this discombobulated state, I felt a nagging obligation to contact my doctor. It was obvious that I would need emergency treatment that would probably be very expensive, and what a sad commentary that even in this disjointed mentality, I knew enough to be worried that my HMO might not cover my costs in the event that I went to the wrong health center for care. (her emphasis) p. 58.

Unfortunately, after having raised this important issue, Dr. Taylor does not resolve it. We never find out to what extent her HMO covered her.

Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World - Book Review by David Swanson

david@david-swanson.org (David Swanson) — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:34:05 +0000

by David Swanson

Tad Daley writes, in his new book, "Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World," that he would like his book to have the impact of "Common Sense," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "The Jungle." Yeah, buddy, what author wouldn't? But Daley has a unique argument for the moral necessity of sharing his goal and promoting either his book or others like it: our only alternative is the annihilation of all life on earth.

By the time you've read this book, you will in fact be persuaded that if others do not grasp its central points, not just tyranny or slavery or unsafe workplaces will continue, but all trace of humanity and every other life form in the world will be eliminated.

One of those central points is this: we can either eliminate all nuclear weapons or we can watch them proliferate. There's no middle way. We can either have no nuclear weapons states, or we can have many. This is not a moral or a logical point, but a practical observation backed up with enough specifics to convince you of its certainty. As long as some states have nuclear weapons others will desire them, and the more that have them the more easily they will spread to others still. The number of nuclear states has jumped from six to nine since the end of the Cold War, and more are likely.

A second central point is that if nuclear weapons continue to exist, there will very likely be a nuclear catastrophe, and the more the weapons have proliferated, the sooner it will come. Once Daley recounts some of the incidents (there have been hundreds) that have nearly destroyed our world through accident, confusion, misunderstanding, and extremely irrational machismo, you will be amazed that you are currently alive and that anyone else is. And then you'll want to eliminate the chance of such a tragedy playing out in the future, not increase it to the point of near certainty, which is what proliferation does. And when you add in the quite real and increasing possibility of non-state terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons, the danger grows dramatically -- and is only increased by the policies of nuclear states that react to terrorism in ways that seem designed to recruit more terrorists.

Tales of the Taliban in their own words - My life with the Taliban - Book Review by Ehsan Azari Ph.D.

eazari@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (Ehsan Azari) — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:11:13 +0000

by Ehsan Azari Ph.D.

My life with the Taliban
By Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, Australia

Like genies of the tales of the Arabian Nights they sprang forth from the wasteland of the post-Russian Afghan civil war. Early one morning in the autumn of 1994 about forty long-bearded mullahs gathered in a tiny mosque in Sangisar of Kandahar known as the White Mosque to found a new religious movement. They had no car or money. An old and noisy Russian motorbike with no exhaust-pipe was their only means of transport. The bike was nicknamed ‘Tank of Islam’ as a reward for its service. Then an unknown man barged into their checkpoint and donated a sack filled with 90 million Afghanis (about A$2 million). “I have donated this money for the sake of God alone. I don’t need anyone to know about it,” this man insisted, “there is no need for a receipt, or for my name to be known.” The following evening the BBC spread the word around the world about the birth of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

With the rise of the Taliban in deeply conservative rural Afghanistan the world’s political map suddenly has changed. The fire-brand religious movement soon began roaming about in swarms, flogging women in bazaars, burning schools, killing musicians, destroying TV sets, cameras and tape recorders. They unleashed a reign of fear in most of the country. The Taliban regime fell in a few weeks, when in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001. But in less than one year, the Taliban re-incarnated into an insurgency that is now tenaciously fighting Western and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

This messianic religious movement blended a puritanical spiritual belief with fanatical devotion and thus turned religion into a violent ideology closed in on itself, which has so far failed to find a normal and acceptable presence in the world today. But Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef sets out to present a counter-narrative about the Taliban in his autobiographical book, My Life with the Taliban. The ex-Taliban ambassador in Pakistan remains unrepentant for working with the Taliban after spending four years in Guantánamo Bay, even though he now is living in Kabul far from Taliban. “I was a Talib (singular of plural Taliban), I am a Talib and I will always be a Talib”.

Zaeef (Arabic word meaning weak and humble) trawls through his past, picking up stories from his childhood, his life in the Islamic maddrassas (Islamic schools), his schooling in the Pakistani spy agency ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence), his participation in anti-Russian Jihad, his life during the rise and fall of the Taliban and beyond.

Proving Election Fraud - Book Review by Michael Collins

michaelcollins@electionfraudnews.com (Michael Collins) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 06:41:18 +0000

by Michael Collins

Stock deals are rigged for insiders. Big money runs Congress. And we've gone to war based on a series of calculated lies.

Are you willing to accept the fact that our elections are subject to the same type of corruption?

If you are, then Proving Election Fraud by Richard Charnin pulls back the curtain and exposes the pattern of election fraud over the past four decades. It's not a mystery when your look at the numbers and check them against multiple public sources. The information is all there - if the experts care to look.

Charnin is the widely known internet poster using the name TruthIsAll. He was the first to discover the glaring discrepancies in the 2004 election results shortly after the polls closed. His internet posts on the mathematical impossibility of a Bush victory were critical in fueling the doubts about that election and those that followed.

His many posts are the basis for a consistent narrative and argument using a clearly outlined and heavily quantified analysis. The result is a wealth of information about how elections really work and a methodology (the True Vote Model) that allows the interested reader to check the official results of any national or state election.

Charnin's straightforward style fits his subject matter. For example, early on he makes a powerful point, one of many that appear throughout the book:

"Simple mathematics proves that the 1968, 1988, 2004 and 2008 elections were fraudulent. The returning voter mix required for the Final Exit Poll to match the recorded vote was not just implausible -- it was impossible. In each election, more voters from the prior election returned to vote than were alive. The fact that they were returning Nixon, Bush 1 and Bush 2 voters cannot just be a coincidence. The statistical anomaly has no rational explanation other than election fraud." (p.52)

When the official victory margin includes dead voters and excludes uncounted votes, it's more than reasonable to assume election fraud.

How does Charnin know this? He took the time to correlate pre-election polls, historical (Census) votes cast and recorded, voter mortality, returning voter turnout and national exit poll vote shares. Using this basic information, he calculates the True Vote for each presidential election since 1968. And he debunks the arguments designed to convince us that Bush actually won while the exit polls "behaved badly," including "reluctant Bush responder," "swing/red shift," and "false recall."

Belén Fernández "Coffee with Hezbollah" - Book Review by Mary Rizzo

humdrum2@libero.it (Mary Rizzo) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:16:12 +0000

by Mary Rizzo

You can purchase Coffee with Hezbollah through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Hezbollah-Belen-Fernandez/dp/0982531478

Before reading the wonderful book by Belén Fernández “Coffee with Hezbollah”, I never would have imagined it possible to read about the post-destruction aftermath of Lebanon and smile at the same time. The pretext alone, a hitchhiking trip from Turkey to southern Lebanon simply “feels” dramatic, especially when the memory of Brides on Tour, was still fresh. Would two young, attractive, independent women meet a better fate than the raped and assassinated Pippa Bacca, travelling in the same way, with each new step being not only a test of their own wits and good fortune, but also a constant surrender to trust in a world wracked by its encounter with the ultimate violence?

Belén and her friend and travelling partner Amelia Opalinska were on the road in much the same way as Che Guevara and Alberto Granata, and it’s not incidental that they recount moments from their adventures in Latin America and Cuba in “Coffee with Hezbollah”. In a similar way to the historically relevant on the road experiences of the revolutionary, conversations described and rapid changes in plan (or even in mood) allowed the reader to feel a sincere interest in the persons they encountered as well as a way to describe the larger paradigm of Lebanon. The people who populate this book, with their idiosyncrasies, their habits, beliefs and expressions, are part of the story, an exchange that appears to these eyes only slightly hampered by needing to resort to “pidgin English” (however, the fact that many of these people spoke some English at all is testament to their desire to reach out to the world). Nevertheless, each conversation and encounter left up to fate brought a new insight, a new interpretation of a fragmented reality.

Reading this book, I often reminded myself that this endeavour, simple on the surface of things, is actually quite complicated if one is a creature of habit or seeks a modicum of security. I kept thinking, “how brave they are,” and “I’d never let my daughter do that,” much in the way Belén describes her own family, Americans who admire the great revolutionary spirit of they find in many people’s struggles. Her parents would boast about this exciting feat to their friends, but exhibit particular paternal worry to her. There is indeed a dynamic of the contradictions, the paradox of wanting something and also wanting something entirely different that the author detects in many of those she describes. It is a description of compassion and love that never, even for five seconds, sinks into banal sentimentalism. There is one moment in the book, where actually, the tragedy of what evil has hit the innocent Lebanese people is all brought home in an admirable piece of narrative journalism. It is an encounter with a family in the south of Lebanon where only the strongest readers might be able to hold back the tears. It is an encounter with Maryam, a young girl whose family could have been “evacuated” with others escaping the bombing raids of Israel, but chose to remain because the elderly members would not be allowed to join them. It is an encounter of such exquisite beauty, innocence, sadness and love that it was well on its way to breaking my heart. Yet, the manner in which this story is told does not tip the hat to cheap emotion, but captures the essence of the kind of suffering, and the “love of life” that is never abandoned by the Lebanese people.

And, as artfully as the drama of this story was told, the author throws us a life-saver and the bittersweet irony of a post-war survival period, with its fears, hopes, black humour and tedium have us back in the passenger seat, waiting to see the next thing, with a few expectations, but not many demands made. In Italy, they would say, “very easy”, and this way of going with the flow of things, looking at the surface but also below it and not imposing one’s own literal or figurative baggage on those who let you hop a ride, keep the unexpected always close at hand, making for absolutely entertaining reading.

My Father Was A Freedom Fighter - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:31:13 +0000

by Jim Miles

My Father Was A Freedom Fighter - Gaza’s Untold Story. Ramzy Baroud. Pluto Press, London, 2010.

Ramzy Baroud has written what should become an icon of historical-cultural writing for the people of Palestine. My Father Was a Freedom Fighter is an amazingly powerful and wonderfully well written tapestry of the modern history of Palestine, combining a family history focussed on the individual of Ramzy’s father Mohammed with the overall history of the Jewish-Zionist/Palestinian-Arabic conflict in the area. The latter evolves at two levels: the first as was most visibly seen and understood by Mohammed Ramzy; the second encompasses the larger view of the ‘near’ Middle East as revealed by historical records.

It is a highly emotional read, ranging from bitterness and anger to outright laughter - and books seldom if ever make me laugh. The bitterness and anger is obvious from Mohammed’s personal history of dispossession, poverty, the anxiety for his family and the losses they suffered and endured. It carries over into the larger geopolitical scene where the callousness of the Arabic elites and the Israeli military and political system strikes hard against the resident and dispossessed populations. The humour comes suddenly, revealing the essential spirit of the Baroud family and the people of Gaza in general in face of the violence perpetrated against them on a daily basis. The humour is both subtle and obvious, a combination of the macabre pathos of the situation combined with the undying spirit and resilience of the Palestinian people and Gazans in particular. Simply existing in the face of the imposed hardships becomes a supreme act of defiance in itself.

The Baroud family lived in Beit Daras, a small village north of Gaza, west of Jerusalem, just south of Jaffa. It provided a peaceful and comfortable living for the families that lived there not without the usual travails of life in general. When Mohammed was nine years old, “the Zionist military campaign to take over Palestine rolled into action. No one…was to foresee the atrocities that followed: the uneven war, the dispossession, the massacres, the betrayal, and the lifelong suffering.” Through all this, while everyone suffered, the “children hardly understood why their lives would be forever altered.”

From the brief historical introduction that leads up to that point, the story proceeds through the events that devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is a family story, of births, deaths, murders, weddings, love, humour, arguments, anger, and frustration. The story of Mohammed is as unique as his personality that is revealed through the actions he undertakes in order to try and survive, to one day be able to return to the village and home that he had known as a child, a village that was destroyed after a strong yet hopeless resistance against the attacking Zionist military.

The story is also a history of the Palestinian people in general, all of whom suffered similar fates of dispossession and the imposed military law of the Israelis people. The two aspects cannot be separated, one intertwined with the other. Nor is one story larger than the other as the life of Mohammed is an integral part of the overall fabric of Palestine - to follow that one thread is to be woven deeply into the anxieties, frustrations, anger, fear, loves, and humour of the larger view.

Voice of the Hawk Elder by Seneca Wisdomkeeper Edna Gordon - Book Review by Harvey Arden

harveyarden@starpower.net (Harvey Arden) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 03:24:28 +0000

by Harvey Arden

Voice of the Hawk Elder by Seneca Wisdomkeeper Edna Gordon - We need changes in this world, really big changes. I'm prayin' they'll be peaceable changes, not violent and bloody ones. I'd like to see a peaceable revolution, a revolution of broomsticks instead of guns.Call it a Broomstick Revolution. That's right. The People pick up their broomsticks and march together and Sweep Injustice Out! Make a clean sweep, a big cleanin' like's never been seen before. Broomsticks against Injustice. Now that'll be the day! We'll take our broomsticks and we'll sweep Leonard Peltier right out o' prison, along with all the other innocents. Yep—a Broomstick Revolution! That's what we need!

"Welcome to my umbrella tree," says Hawk Elder Edna Gordon, seating herself opposite me at her well-weathered backyard picnic-table, gesturing with a wide sweep of her hand at the rich tapestry of overhanging branches arching all the way to the ground around us, creating a kind of natural gazebo.

She nods at the tree as at a cherished old friend, and nods at me, her visitor.

"This old tree's the whole of Creation, you know, if you got eyes to see…," she says, and her throaty voice trails away thoughtfully.

I look upward into the drooping canopy of heavily leafed branches all but encasing us.

"Like a house of leaves," I say.

"More'n that," she says, "…the whole Creation's right here in this tree, if you can see it… You're sittin' right inside o' Creation itself! Don't you see it? Can't you feel it?"

I put the palm of my hand on the rough bark of the trunk.

"I …I can feel it, I think," I say.

"Your hand on the tree, that's Life on Life," Edna says. "This Umbrella tree here's at the center of the Universe! And so are we!"

Certainly, when you're with a visionary like Edna Gordon, the Universe, the Creation itself, occupies not the background of your consciousness but the foreground. She's continually reminding me—and all of us—of the oft-forgotten fact that We Exist! that the World, the Universe, the very Creation itself is here and now with us at every magical instant—and that it's our privilege, our joy, and our duty as living beings to realize this in every conscious moment, to see it, to appreciate it, to be ever-thankful and ever-marveling at all of this unthinkable vastness and infinite particularity around us and within us. She insists that we see—and, yes, feel--this miracle that we ourselves are an integral, even essential part of this Mystery beyond all mysteries.

Behind the Wall - Life, Love, and Struggle in Palestine. Rich Wiles - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:58:53 +0000

by Jim Miles

“Do you know what amazes me more than all else? The impotence of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in the world: the spirit and the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte

“The IOF may have the firepower to end lives, but it seems it cannot break the spirit.”

“If Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon, or Ehud Olmert really ever believed the refugees could be forgotten or silenced, they were badly mistaken. If they ever thought memory would die or pass with time, they were wrong. If they hoped that future generations would lie down in submission and dutifully accept all the wrongs that have been perpetuated against them without struggling for their rights, they should have thought again.”

- Rich Wiles from Behind the Wall

Behind the Wall - Life, Love, and Struggle in Palestine. Rich Wiles. Potomac Books, Washington, D.C. 2010.

Rich Wiles’ Behind the Wall is an amazingly powerful read, relating the stories of the people of Palestine and their suffering and struggle against the occupiers of their territory. It relates the great pathos and the brief joys of life lived under dispossession and oppression. Above all, it is the story of the Palestinian sumoud - steadfastness - when confronted with ongoing everyday repression and hostility.

It is a story also seen mainly through the eyes of the children, second and third generations growing up in refugee camps. It is the children who have grasped and understood the dreams of return of their parents, reinforced daily by the confined and fearful existence they are forced to live under occupation. Children who have been imprisoned, tortured, murdered, denied their health, their education, denied the simple pleasures of seeing green fields lying under open blue sky.

The Bases of Empire - The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:46:54 +0000

by Jim Miles

The Bases of Empire - The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts. Ed. Catherine Lutz. New York University Press, 2009.

A book that detailed all the military posts around the world would be encyclopaedic in size and nature, for in order to be comprehensive to cover all the bases and all the impacts and affects on human culture and demographics would require a vast array of information. Thankfully that information can be obtained from choosing prime examples of military exploitation as found in The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Lutz’s intention is “to describe both the worldwide network of U.S military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries’ security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.”

The truly secure position from those whose lives have been so occupied with the invasive bases would be to eliminate the bases altogether, limiting them to the U.S. ‘homeland’ - but even that has problems as Puerto Rico and Hawaii, both are contested territories (as many sites within the ‘homeland’ probably are). The conditions presented and argued in this book provide excellent examples of the overbearing presence of U.S. military might around the world. The various authors hold mainly academic positions, but regardless all are actively involved in illuminating and clarifying the intents and purposes of military occupation.

Empire

Up until the Bush II administration the denial machine still actively denied the U.S. its rightful position among the empires of global history. Those that did accept empire usually did so with the qualifier of it being an “accidental” empire, with its main purpose being to save the people, spread democracy, and civilize/Christianize the natives. Empire is denied for various reasons, the main factor argued in is that the U.S. has no colonies and does not have an empirical land base with which to operate within. Lutz provides a very clear definition of empire as when a countries “policies aim to assert and maintain dominance of other regions. Those policies succeed when wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center.”

This highlights two features of the U.S. empire. First, that while it does not have colonies it does have many - hundreds, eight or nine, approaching or exceeding a thousand depending on sources - bases that dominate most of the world. The wealth extracted is not so much redistributed to a physical center as Rome, Paris, London as in older empires, but is redistributed to a more amorphous corporate base encompassing the U.S. and the European Union. It can be argued as well that both the U.S. and EU have their own internal arrangements of ‘heartland’ and ‘hinterland’.

Three Kings - The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East After World War II - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:34:03 +0000

by Jim Miles

Three Kings - The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East After World War II. Lloyd C. Gardner. New Press, N.Y., 2009.

This concisely written and well documented work covers the “Truman Doctrine…the essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II…the ideological foundation for the “imperial presidency.” Lloyd Gardner focuses his analysis on the Middle East, although the imperial trends expanded globally through the Americas and on into Asia as the old empires faded and the U.S. took their place. More specifically it is a study of “U.S. maneuvers to replace the British in the region of signal importance, the Middle East.” The signal importance of the region contains two factors: oil, the regional resource that enticed the British into the area in the first place; and ‘international communism’ and the rhetorically inflated fears of a grand international conspiracy to attack and dominate the world.

Palestine

When I first started my readings on current events as related to 9/11, the attack on Afghanistan and then on Iraq, it soon became clear that Palestine was symbolically at the heart of the problems in the Middle East. Beyond that, it is also at the heart of other problems involving human rights, international law, the U.S. government, and corporate power among others. The Second World War ended with the violent remainders of various empires imploding on themselves, most significantly the British Empire collapsed in India and the Middle East. Right from the outset, the Palestinian situation was identified as a “major stumbling block” to U.S. imperial ambitions as “Of all the political problems which call for solution in this area the Palestine question is probably the most important and urgent at the present time.”

Unfortunately it remains the most important and urgent - with apologies to the peoples of the occupied countries of Iraq and Afghanistan and the increasing subversive problems in Pakistan - as it represents the worst of U.S. foreign policy dominated by the Israeli state operating outside of the majority of international protocols and laws. Oil of course was the main imperial consideration and the people of Palestine were incidental to that, but the other Arab states were very much involved with the Palestinian problem. Before Truman entered the picture, Roosevelt recognized that Palestine “was the single most dangerous question they faced in trying to secure an American presence in the Middle East after the war.”

Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:12:30 +0000

by Jim Miles

Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations - Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System. Paul Blustein. Public Affairs (Perseus Books).New York, 2009.

Since its arrival in public awareness - at least for the public that follows ideas related to international trade, not many in our star studded frivolous media world - I have been antagonistic to the WTO. Reading this work by Paul Blustein was a self appointed task to read the opposition’s own ideas and how they are formulated.

Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" Book Review by Stephen Lendman

lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net (Stephen Lendman) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:39:59 +0000

by Stephen Lendman

Lynn is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of "Too Big to Fail" about the dangers of monopoly capitalism.

He expands on the threat in his newest book titled, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction," explaining today's peril given the power of predatory giants.

They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.

Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tryannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked "weapons of mass destruction."

In "Cornered," Lynn explains the danger and urgency to address it. Our lives and futures depend on it.

It might have been different had Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prevailed over John Adams and Alexander Hamilton in crafting America's Bill of Rights. They wanted 12, not 10, including "freedom from a permanent military (and) monopolies in commerce."

Imagine the possibilities had they prevailed, or if early leaders agreed with Jefferson in 1816, seven years after his presidency, saying in a letter to a friend:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

The Israel-Palestine Conflict - Contested Histories - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:38:57 +0000

by Jim Miles

The Israel-Palestine Conflict - Contested Histories. Neil Caplan. Wiley-Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons), Malden, MA. 2010.

There are obviously multiple stories concerning any act or incident, and any series of acts or incidents, until the overall view becomes large enough that they are distilled into a national or international narrative. These national narratives often serve as rationalizations of not so much the particular occurrence of any given event, but the reasons behind the event, with the reasons stretching from a basic cause and effect (he hit me back first) to the more irrational rationalizations of cosmic mythology.

The Israel-Palestine Conflict
attempts to work history within a discussion of how the two narratives of Israel and Palestine conflict with each other. As such, it serves more as a university level text with some history, some philosophy of history, some discussion of different perspectives taken by writers without satisfying any of these. For himself, Neil Caplan says he has worked generally from English language “accounts of what happened from people who were actually present when it happened.” He sees himself in the genre of the “sometimes criticized…ivory tower intellectuals…content to provide useful and credible raw material, leaving it to other academics and commentators to explore and exploit. They prefer to keep a low profile and not venture into public debates or take stands on controversial issues.”

For those of you who have read my work, you can see that is not the tack that I would advocate - and advocacy for me is the very essence of scholarly work, an advocacy that may change positions from time to time as new material is presented, but always advocating for basic humanitarian and common sense positions. Yes, we all have “fallible perceptions” but that should not stop us from advocating as long as we are willing and able to change when presented with new information and insights. At times it should lead us into a position of challenging, ‘going fishing’, to see what kind of results arise from a certain turn of phrase or juxtaposition of ideas in order that some kind of feedback creates further understanding. Caplan recognizes the need to “revise frequently with sensitivity to subtleties of wording and tone,” not to challenge and advocate, however, but to not affront anyone.

As Caplan recognizes, no account is neutral, no account truly allows “letting the facts speak for themselves” as the very choice of facts in itself limits perceptions of what is happening. Tangle that up with ongoing national biases and the fallibility of human memory and the task becomes very difficult. This accounting succeeds to a certain degree in its goal of following the two contrasting ideologies between the Israeli perspective and the Palestinian perspective, but it does have some difficulties.

Israel and Palestine - Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations - Book Review by Jim Miles

jmiles50@telus.net (Jim Miles) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:42:14 +0000

by Jim Miles

Israel and Palestine - Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. Avi Shlaim. Verso, London, 2009.

This is a thought provoking if not fully developed work on the ongoing situation in Palestine/Israel. Avi Shlaim has compiled a set of his writings from previous publications that in a broad way cover the events of the region, with a brief look at the Balfour Declaration before jumping forward to look at the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and its resulting sequence of events.

Avi Shlaim self professes to be of the school of revisionist historians and his writing fully supports that claim. Throughout the writing one of the themes is the Israeli use of military power to solve its problems, a solution much preferred to negotiations and compromise. A corollary of this is that when negotiations were used, they were mainly as a mask to delay a solution while the ongoing status quo built more settlements and evicted more Palestinians from their homes and farms, especially after the 1967 war.

Another thematic reminder that reiterates throughout the work is that of the asymmetric power - mainly military - that reinforces the previous idea, but also adds the knowledge that there is no balance in the situation, that Israel holds all the power, to the point that “a voluntary agreement between the parties is simply unattainable;” and as seen within the Oslo agreement the Palestinians would have been “subject to the provisions of Israeli law…and military orders… rather than international law.”

Film Review: Avatar, A Humanist Call From Mt. Hollywood By Gilad Atzmon

giladatzmon@mac.com (Gilad Atzmon) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:23:26 +0000

by Gilad Atzmon

Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Wolfowitz, Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the 1948 Human Right Declaration). It throws a very dark light on our murderous tendencies towards other people, their belief and rituals. But it doesn’t just stop there. In the same breath, very much like German Leben philosophers (1), it praises the power of nature and the attempt to bond in harmony with soil, the forest and the wildlife. It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than impose ourselves on it. Very much like German Idealists and early Romanticists, it raises questions to do with essence, existence and the absolute. It celebrates the true meaning of life and livelihood.

It is pretty astonishing and cheering to discover Hollywood paving the way to the victorious return of German philosophical thought.

To view trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyDQoXEBkGw

The year is 2154 and the RDA corporation is mining planet Pandora digging for Unobtanium, a unique mineral that defies gravity and sells for top cash. Pandora is a remote planet inhabited by the Na’vi, a species that shares some human features. Like humans the Na’vi have their own developed language and high culture. Yet unlike westerners they integrate with their surrounding reality searching for harmony in nature rather than looking for a means to exploit it. The Na’vi are a few feet taller than humans, they are extremely strong, they also possess a long impressive tail and a long plait with a unique bond at its end that operate as an organic USB connection. The bond allows the Na’vi to form a mental and spiritual union with their surrounding organic reality. The Na’vi cherish their planet, they look after it. They also worship a mother goddess called Eywa, who encompasses the integrated spiritual and physical centre of their universe and it’s past.

In order to penetrate into the Na’vi, human scientists genetically engineered human-na’vi hybrid bodies called Avatars. Like in all Western interventionalist and colonial wars, the foreign invader insists on convincing itself that it can create some false needs amongst the indigenous population. The RDA corporation takes pride in its attempt ‘to bring culture to Pandora’. The Avatars are there to communicate with the Na’vi. They are there to teach them English and Western values. They are there to maintain order so that the Na’vi fail to notice that their soil is raped and robbed by the Humans. But as we soon learn, such an attempt is in vein. The Humans have nothing to offer which the Na’vi are willing to take.