The reliably astute George Monbiot stepped up recently to clearly document the argument that Israel’s attack was far from being the expedient defensive reflex we’ve been told it was by “the news”. But his subsequent account of the motives behind it—highlighting neo-conservative American strategies for the Middle East and the domination of Israeli politics by military figures—may be just part of the story.

Via Peak Energy, I came across an excellent post from The Anthropik Network that makes a clear case for these premeditated attacks being strongly motivated by Israel’s ongoing need for clean water sources. Specifically, the motive seems to be to gain access to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, which flows south through Lebanon parallel to the Syrian border, and makes a near-right-angle westward bend about 4 km from the Israeli border. Anthropik contributor Jason Godesky outlines the long history of interest in capturing this valuable ecological resource that Israel has had, together with the ongoing water supply problems Israel has had that make another Litani push very likely.

Perhaps the most revealing fact he quotes regards the vastly disproportionate distribution of water in the region:

At present, Israelis receive five times as much water per person as Palestinians. In Gaza, the disparity is even more striking, with settlers getting seven times as much water as their Palestinian neighbors. Stated differently, on average, Israelis get 92.5 gallons per person per day, while Palestinians in the West Bank get 18.5 gallons per person per day. The minimum quantity of water recommended by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization for household and urban use alone is 26.4 gallons per person per day.

Godesky seems to take a “cultural materialist” view on matters, noting that while religion is frequently cited as the source of conflict, more often it is just an excuse used to take action necessitated by more worldly concerns: usually, land and resources. I tend more towards a kind of “chicken-and-egg” approach, and find such reductionism useful to a point, but only to a point. Any reduction begs a question, and while worldly action demands that we stop asking questions, pick a side, and do something, writing is a space where we can keep asking questions. Like, why the gross disparity in allocation of water? Sure, plain old greed and perceived superior worthiness weigh in heavily. Though I do wonder about more emotional and spiritual motives, such as those embedded in the Lord’s images in the Torah:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…

Exodus 3:8

It’s too painful now, I suppose, to hear the Lord saying, “Sorry, maybe I forgot to mention the fact that there’s bugger all water.” Israel’s done wonderful things with the little water there is, but at the expense of its neighbours, and probably for the most part thanks to the economic subsidies it receives from the USA, and the precarious energetic subsidies it (and the rest of us) receives from fossil fuels.

In any case, it’s clear that Israel is correct in saying that it’s fighting for its existence; it’s just severely misguided, in the public arena at least, about the threat it faces.

Without the Litani, Israel’s water crisis will deepen; the very survival of Israel is at stake. Either Israel will seize the Litani, or it will perish. Historically, Hizb’allah has been primarily a nuisance to Israel, but never a genuine threat to its survival, unlike Israel’s lack of access to the Litani.

Jason Godesky

This adherence to an image from the Torah, to the concretized vision of a Promised Land abundant in actual resources, surely gives pause to anyone serious about Judaism’s injunctions against idolatry. By “serious about”, I mean serious enough to not take the injunctions wholly literally, at face value (an act of idolatry in itself, I suppose). Douglas Rushkoff is deeply serious in this sense, and critiques the literalism of Zionism in his excellent book Nothing Sacred:

Biblical warnings against the false gods of state abound. The first thing God says to Abraham in Genesis (12:1) is, “Get thee out of thy country.” The sad irony underlying the current Jewish obsession with territory is that the religion itself was founded on the disengagement from the land. As twentieth-century reformer and social activist Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains in his many books on the subject, “Judaism must be a religion which sanctifies time more than space.” For example, after escaping Egypt, the Torah’s Israelites spend forty years in the desert. They are not wandering aimlessly, but following a cloud of smoke as it moves back and forth across the flat earth. Wherever the cloud stops, the Israelites place their holy ark. This becomes the new Holy Land for a moment; then the cloud moves on. The Israelites must endure this process for four decades. Why? To learn, before they get to Canaan, that the Promised Land has nothing to do with a specific place. In stark contrast with the pagan, land-based religions from which Judaism was created to distinguish itself, for the Israelites sanctity is in the moment. (p. 166)

In a world where millennia of monotheism have severed us psychologically from natural matrix that sustains us, leaving us belatedly flailing in the ecological corner we’ve painted ourselves into, we have much to recover in re-absorbing the pagan impulse to divine deeper relationships to the biosphere. But in a world also facing severe instability, with populations shifting rapidly even before we face the surely huge upheavals implicit in climate change, we may have a lot to learn from Judaism’s rootless roots. Perhaps we can find primal common ground between pagan rootedness and the flexibility of Jewish “disengagement from the land” in the roving animism of hunter-gatherer societies. Not, of course, as another idealized model or goal; but as a source of inspiration among the many ways we have adapted, as we face the future’s essentially opaque and ever-shifting demands.

Via the Peak Energy blog, I just stumbled upon an absolute gem: Rob Newman’s History of Oil. Newman zips through oil-related global geopolitics, from the first Mesopotamian oil strike to Peak Oil and beyond, in a vaudeville style that’s hugely engaging. This TV adaptation has some brilliantly done additions, too (watch out for the graph plotting Middle Eastern politics against children’s TV from the 1970s).

It’s probably because I arrived at it via a serious energy blog that I saw it as being as much about learning history as having a good laugh. That said, it’s occasionally side-splitting—especially the inspired vision of Tony Blair as Goebbels. The overall effect, though, reminds me of Michael Moore’s genuine bewilderment at the fact that he’d ended up doing what he saw as the job of journalists: informing people about the important facts of the world situation. Newman’s show is worth at least ten times its duration in TV “news”.

Watch it now.

Oxford’s tireless chroniclers of the hypocrisies and hidden realities of big business, Corporate Watch, have recently released a first-of-its-kind report on the extent of the role of UK companies in Iraq since 2003: Corporate Carve-Up.

Naturally, UK involvement is dwarfed next to American involvement. As David Whyte says in his foreword, “If US business is the dominant predator here, then British business is the scavenger.” This report presents up-to-date details of UK companies contracted to reap the benefits of reconstructing Iraq in the wake of the British army helping to deconstruct it. A brief analysis of the economic context to this process is given, together with listings of conferences and events that show how the occupying governments and the transitionary authorities they installed in Iraq have opened all the doors to the victors’ business interests.

Particularly revealing is the look at the private security business; even though US giants like Halliburton and Bechtel dominate the general reconstruction market, UK private security and military operations “are easily neck and neck with their US counterparts”. Chief among these is Aegis, a company who won the “three-year $430m Pentagon contract to coordinate the top military/security companies in Iraq”. As for Halliburton and many others, the Iraq war has been a boom time for Aegis, whose turnover “has gone from £554,000 in 2003 to £62m in 2005; three quarters of this is from work in Iraq.” The implicit “revolving door relationship between regular and private military” belies the Foreign Office’s guidelines for dealing with private security companies, providing a specific example of the general complex web of interwoven interests between state actions and private wealth.

In a complex world, we all have images, stories or myths that underpin our rational thinking, helping to give manageable shape to the welter of information about the world around us. More and more contemporary cognitive research is confirming and explaining this fact, giving a more grounded basis for the brilliant but inevitably imperfect initial psychological forays of Carl Jung. But Jung’s advice holds; while it’s impossible to rid ourselves of these background images, we can become more conscious of them, and allow that consciousness to help us guard against possession by them. Bringing them to consciousness isn’t just a prelude to rubbishing them and thus being “free” and rational—such is the naive way that leads to their replacement by other, now wholly unconscious, and thus more perilous images.

Regarding the operations of large-scale power in the world, my own image is one that sees formerly obvious, overt impositions of power by the few over the many becoming ever-more complexified and inscrutable. Feudalism and monarchic dictatorship is challenged by libertarian revolutions and ideologies, but there is never a clear-cut overturning of the structures of power. More often than not, entrenched power moves defensively to become more amorphous, less susceptible to direct investigation and attack. My image, then, is a kind of “hyper Hydra”: worldly power as a beast that at first responds to decapitation by growing more heads than it had before, but eventually responds by sinking back into its lake home, leaving the swords of attack to slash vainly through the waves. An unexpectedly Taoist aspect to power—behind the hard, hollow puppets presented for us to rail against.

The idea that greed and need for oil is the ultimate motive behind the invasion of Iraq is popular, but rarely taken seriously in mainstream media. It’s an important truth, laying bare some of the basic aspects of the current global crisis. But there are other factors, and they’ve nothing to do with benevolence or WMDs. As we have come to equate justice and freedom with democracy, and democracy with free-market capitalism, we’ve lost sight of the rapaciousness of the hydra beneath the watery feel-good visions of humanitarian rhetoric. Our culture’s economic doctrines and dogmas work to wrap old-fashioned plundering in slippery notions of “progress” and “development”.

While the world remains inherently complex, navigating it frequently involves moves to drag its more basic underlying aspects into view, to spark revelations that can help guide us through. Corporate Carve-Up is a small but revealing contribution to the project of pulling the Hydra to the surface.

After so many years of compromise, expedient lies and unchecked arrogance, Tony Blair seems to have utterly cracked in the wake of extremist Muslim terrorism landing, inevitably, on his doorstep. He hasn’t cracked in the theatrical way that we usually associate with going insane (that might affect his polls). But if we take a moment to feel our way into his mental processes (wearing very thick gloves of course), we can sense the frighteningly hermetic isolation of individual psyche from collective reality that speaks of schizophrenia’s catastrophic split.

Public discussion on the crucial issues here is crippled, as ever, by basic logical errors. We conflate the condoning of terrorism with understanding terrorism. As anyone will agree (in any other context), understanding a problem is pretty much a prerequisite to solving it; therefore, in this simple, scared way of thinking, our fear of capitulation to the forces of barbarism instantly scuppers any chance of moving past this dark phase of history.

Keenly aware of his tottering reputation as Iraqi civilian bodies pile up, with the glaring absence of Hussein’s WMD’s as a damning backdrop, Blair has refused the opportunity for sanity and rationality. As British civilian blood is spilt, on British soil, perhaps people’s sympathy with what is occurring in Iraq (and elsewhere) peaks. Now would have been the time to take stock, to come clean, to appeal for hard-nosed analysis and comprehension of the situation we’re in.

Instead:

Of course these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse, they will use Afghanistan. September 11 of course happened before both of those things, and then the excuse was American policy, or Israel. They will always have their reasons for acting, but we have got to be really careful of almost giving into the sort of perverted and twisted logic with which they argue. [...] And you know there is a kind of insidious way of the way that this is looked at where people say yes we entirely abhor the methods of these terrorists, but nonetheless we sort of understand what they are saying about American foreign policy, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or Palestine. No, let us be absolutely clear about this, the legitimate voice of Afghanistan is the man beside me who was elected, not al Queda or the Taliban. The legitimate voice of Iraq is the Prime Minister who was appointed after a democratic election, it is not the Jihadists who are killing innocent people in Iraq. The legitimate voice of the Palestinians is Mahmoud Abbas, the President elected by the Palestinians, it is not terrorists. And therefore I think when people talk about the links between whether it is Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Palestine in what has happened, of course these people will use these things as an excuse, but let’s be absolutely clear, if it wasn’t that it would be something else, and nothing, but nothing, justifies what they are doing.

Press conference with Tony Blair and Hamid Karzai, 19 July 2005

So basically, these terrorist guys are just doing it because they’re “evil”, and they use various conflicts involving Muslims around the world as an excuse to get their nefarious kicks blowing people up. Don’t you understand? Even if the entire history of the Christian West’s relations to Islam had been one big jovial knees-up, these guys would be killing themselves and dozens of others in the name of the oppression of squirrels, or something.

Note Blair’s final point: “nothing justifies what they are doing”. Justification and comprehension are conflated, and any attempt at either is booted out the door with a tone of condemnation that no one dare argue with. He even tries to rationally take apart the “we don’t condone them, but I can see where they’re coming from” perspective. But any pretence at rationality is washed away in a tide of bland, forceful democratic rhetoric. The underlying attitude is: “Now no-one can criticise our foreign policy, because some people who claim to be its opponents are vicious bastards.”

In claiming no connection between the London bombings and Iraq, Blair has chronically deepened the hole he’s been digging for himself. Pointing out that 9/11 happened before Afghanistan and Iraq is nonsensical, reducing terrorism to some simplistic reaction to single events. Of course the London bombings may well have happened if Blair hadn’t waded in with Bush to decimate the cradle of civilisation; but I don’t think doing so lightened these guys up. Also, how we should proceed from here in Iraq is a distinct question from, “Why did these bombings happen?”

What is this defensiveness that can’t separate these questions out? Blair should at least be up there saying, “OK, folks, we’re running about in the Middle East trying to convert this country to democracy by force, plunging this volatile area into bloody chaos. On top of our history there, I think it’s safe to say there’s going to be some mad bastards trying to lash out at us by blowing some of you to smithereens. I really don’t want you to get blown up, but I thought I’d warn you. You all voted me in so I assume you’re behind this Iraq thing and are prepared to face the consequences. Sleep tight.” But no, reality is too much to bear for Tony now. So, just as any opposition to oppressive, militaristic Zionism is conflated with anti-Semitism, anyone trying to place these “al Qaeda-style” attacks in their historical and global context is obviously trying to justify suicide attacks.

These terrorists, says the New World Order, aren’t historical, they have no context; they’re just evil, leaking into the world without connections to our real conflicts and international resentments. On such terms are holy wars fought. Bush and Blair’s crusade against jihadism is just the other side of the same coin. Christianity and Islam are reduced by our leaders, these hollow earth-denying capitalists with no vision of a viable future, and terrorists to their basest roots in human fear and rage. People will keep dying violent deaths until we truly divine the connections at work here.

You’ve studied philosophy; you know how much serious time is spent proving the reality of the external world. Imagine having to prove what every animal knows! You know that our main tradition says the world has no qualities whatsoever – no color, no taste, no texture, no temperature – and some of that tradition even denies its existence if we aren’t there to perceive it. Ascetic world denial, world destruction going on every day in our philosophy classes. Terrorism and nihilism are already in our Western worldview, so the terrorists are the incarnation of the nihilism inherent to our system of thinking.

James Hillman

by Gyrus

On September 11th 2001, I was on a walking holiday around the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland. I became aware of the attack on the World Trade Centre when I walked into a net café in Dingle, where some American tourists had just found out. They were gobsmacked. I was a little bemused, and just went to check my email. I overheard someone say that the buildings had collapsed, but they thought they had been evacuated. So hey, we lost some skyscrapers, I thought.

Then I started to realise the impact this would have on the world. The carte blanche that would almost certainly be given to the Bush administration to increase anti-terrorist (and anti-anything-else-we-don’t-like) surveillance and military measures. The tightening grip of fear and prejudice. I felt sad and angry. Then the American girl sat next to me burst out crying. I thought it was a curious over-reaction, maybe the American illusion of total cocoon-like safety being shattered. Then I remembered a friend who was on holiday in New York. As I trawled through the news sites that weren’t experiencing a meltdown, I realised that the Twin Towers were a tourist attraction, and that no, the buildings weren’t fully evacuated. Many, an unknown number, had just been killed. I felt unnerved and queasy, and had to go for a walk.

Of course, when I passed a pub with CNN on the TV, I was instantly drawn inside—for a pint to ground me as well as to see what had happened. My heart sank and jaw dropped as I watched the repeated footage of the second plane hitting, the towers collapsing, the distress, panic and disbelief. I thought of my friend, too. I felt burning anger towards the perpetrators.

Days later, in an article on Osama bin Laden in The Guardian, I read how his training programme "brainwashed" prospective recruits:

Many al-Qaida trainees saw videos of such [Stinger] missiles and other weaponry daily as part of their training routine. Showing hundreds of hours of Muslims in dire straits – Palestinians on the West Bank, Bosnians being shot by Serbs, Chechens under attack from the Russian army and (most of all) dying Iraqi children – was part of al-Qaida’s Ipcress-file style induction strategy.

So I thought to myself: What’s the real difference between CNN and al-Qaida training videos?

Both are voluntary (I’ve not heard of al-Qaida press-ganging recruits, however extreme they are). Both utilise repetition to emphasise a perspective. But one is consciously seen as an initiation into the dedicated service of a specific cause, while the other is… "the news".

Admittedly, however subtly Western media manufactures consent for its cause, there’s a lot more flexibility and freedom in the expression of different viewpoints compared to the lines of communication among extreme fundamentalist Muslim groups. Were the emotions triggered in me by the events just a subtle form of "brainwashing"? I don’t think so. My personal connection to the situation in New York—my friend there—was bound to make it more affecting than people I don’t and may never know being bombed in the Middle East and central Asia.

That’s callous. You mean you don’t care about all those men, women and children just because you don’t know them?

Yes and no. As a compassionate person, my heart goes out to everyone who dies or suffers needlessly. But it’s a human heart. And that means, besides being able to empathise, it is also limited. If I felt deeply unnerved and queasy every time people were killed in the world, I wouldn’t be able to function. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I don’t sit down and decide who I’m going to feel for—I just feel when I do.

I believe that absolute, universal compassion exists. I’ve felt it, from time to time. It’s crushing, liberating and vast. But most of the time I live in the relative world, where my sympathies hover closer to home most of the time.

However, it wasn’t just my friend—I felt for, and cried for, the rest of the people in the WTC.

Come on! You know most of those people in there were capitalist scum. Their lives, supporting America’s commercial, cultural and military dominance of the world, cause untold suffering. They had it coming. They were a lot less innocent than the people in Palestine being bombed by Israel, or the Iraqi children being starved to death by US sanctions.

Sure, many of the people in the WTC led the kind of lives that often make me sick and angry. But I don’t think they should die for what they do. I don’t think mass murderers should die for what they do, let alone greedy people. I may have had some emotional conflict over this if my friend had died in New York, but such are my beliefs.

If you believe in violent revolution against global capitalism, I disagree with you. I don’t think it’ll go away if we ask politely, but I do think it’ll bomb us the fuck out of existence if we try to do the same to it. It has bigger guns. We need to try something else.

If you don’t believe in violent revolution, but do utterly oppose global capitalist hegemony, and when the WTC collapsed with thousands of people inside, you joked about it, or felt a righteous sense of "about time", I think you’re a fucking cowardly hypocrite. You won’t take on the massive risks involved in opposing this system violently, but are prepared to bask in the aftermath when someone else does. Fuck you.

The WTC was destroyed in a well-timed attack designed to create a shocking media spectacle, because of its scale and concomitant symbolic value, representing US commercial might. For so many people with anti-capitalist or anti-American feelings—not terrorists but peaceful, mostly decent people—the success of this focus on symbolism was such that this is all they saw. An American icon crashing to the ground. It’s all I saw before I realised it hadn’t been evacuated in time. But even knowing, intellectually, that thousands had died, many people still only saw a symbolic, if violent, attack on American values—the bully that we all know America is getting its comeuppance. Why did so many people not feel anything for the people who died?

Because they were all affluent fuckers who have been isolated from the suffering they cause! It was time they faced their karma.

Well, I don’t believe that if every rich person in the world was killed anything would be solved. There’s plenty of greedy, hateful, uncaring people who aren’t skilled, intelligent or lucky enough to be wealthy. And—shock horror!—there are people who are wealthy who aren’t evil, and whose death would be a cause for sympathy if they hadn’t been as dehumanised as most Third World Muslims are. Besides, as I said before, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Let alone a vast, indiscriminate one without judge or jury. Isn’t that—despite the manipulative, unthinking use of the word by the media—barbaric? Just because they hate US dominance too, when did we start becoming apologists for barbaric religious fundamentalism? Did I miss a meeting?

One of my best friends has devoted most of the past 6 years of his life to political activism, fighting tirelessly and without compromise for the environment, for human rights, for civil liberties, for peace. When I first met him, he was working in a bank to pay off debts. If he’d lived in New York instead of Leeds, he could well have been in the WTC that morning. And the world would have lost one of the best souls I know.

I know that no intelligent people need it explaining to them. The vast symbolism of this attack hides its indiscriminate violence. Good people died. If you’re so hung up on money, what about the janitors, cleaners, waitresses, cooks, temping staff? What about the firemen? Over 300 firemen died trying to save lives. Did you manage to smother awareness of their inconceivable bravery and selflessness as well, as your political beliefs obliterated your human connection to the deaths involved in this catastrophe?

And of course, the number of deaths here are so large that the 200 or so passengers and crew in the hijacked aircraft are not even worth bothering about. Who cares, if America’s finally reaping what it’s sown?

But this may be the only way that America’s going to be woken up to the suffering it causes.

Perhaps. As you may have guessed, I oppose violence such as this. But it’s certainly made many people more aware of certain things. It’s given me, for one, a burning desire to learn as much as I can about what America actually has done, and what the situation really is in the Middle East and central Asia, beyond the media—mainstream and underground—I happen to have consumed.

But as it stands now—22nd September 2001—the main upshot of the terrorist action is to have united American people behind their barely-elected, widely criticised chimp of a President in a way I would never have thought possible. One woman’s reaction to Bush’s recent speech to Congress was—spoken through near-tears—"I don’t think he understands the words he’s using, and I’m embarrassed that he’s our President." Of course there are Americans who realise its government’s evils as much as anyone. (Some of them probably died last Tuesday.) But they have now been marginalised like never before. And internationally, it’s the same story. Many countries are bravely trying to moderate America’s response to the attacks, but the US currently has more support in the international community than it ever hoped for.

You were saying something about America "waking up"?

What I don’t get is why you’re so broken up about the victims in this attack. I’m sure you’ve heard about the violence in in the Middle East, the starving babies in Iran and the war-ravaged people facing famine in Afghanistan. Haven’t you just been conditioned all your life by the media, which dehumanises these "strange foreigners" and never, ever goes into as much depth about their suffering as it does about suffering in the West, when it happens on this scale?

Yes.

What? After all the time you’ve spent analysing the mechanisms of psychological conditioning, studying the methods of applying it in the media, trying to inoculate yourself against its insidious influence? You admit that all your emotions about this are just conditioned responses?

Not just conditioned responses. It’s not as simple as that. We’re all conditioned. Just because you’ve read or heard some things about "conditioning"—which inevitably focus on the negative aspects, its abuses in the hands of media manipulators, advertisers and politicians—you think it’s something that you can get rid of and be "free".

To me, culture itself is a form of conditioning. I feel empathy more closely with people I share cultural common ground with than I do with people from other cultures. This is natural. The dark side of it leads to bigotry, racism and needless prejudice and violence. None of this detracts from this basic fact of human emotions enmeshed in culture. I had much more common ground with a lot of the people who died than I do with anyone from the Third World. This is because of where I was born, not prejudice or racism.

However, I think my reaction had a lot more to do with the amount of media coverage I consumed in the attack’s wake. I was on my own in rural Ireland, and the immediacy and scale of these events made me hungry for understanding. I watched the TV in pubs for the first two days, then bought the papers every day for the following week. I read the analysis and commentary, but also read the first-hand reports of the scene in New York.

There is an element of "rubber-necking". For a start, the dramatic footage of the second plane crash and the crumbling towers contained a flicker of a thrill. Anyone who relished the perverse plane-crash fantasy in Fight Club (not to mention the final sequence) can understand this. Then there’s the morbid curiosity of the details of the aftermath.

But there’s also an attempt to grasp what had happened. Yes, we’ve been relatively cocooned in the West. Despite the IRA and psychotic nail-bombers here in London, September 11th ushered in a new awareness of danger and fear in Western cities. I wanted to understand this.

Now, had there been a week of media saturation as intense as this in the wake of an especially tragic incident in the Middle East or Afghanistan, my lack of cultural common ground with the victims would no doubt have melted away in the face of the raw pain and suffering. But this doesn’t happen, and probably will never happen. Our connection to anything outside our immediate physical environment is through media. The suffering of the Third World is, with a few notable exceptions, criminally under-documented in our media. Even the mass of coverage in non-mainstream sources just can’t compete with the sheer weight and impact of repetitious TV and newspaper reporting.

So what to do? Involving yourself with more non-mainstream media—creating as much, if possible, as consuming—is a natural step. Limiting your intake of mainstream media to that which gives you the information you want should also be considered.

But, besides being aware of how the media distorts and conditions, I’m also aware of how it desensitises. Surely, as much as my reactions were inevitably conditioned, the reactions of people who just restated their political beliefs about America, without expressing sympathy for the dead, were a sad result of desensitisation. And perhaps also conditioning—reflexive, knee-jerk "anti-Bad Things" righteousness.

(Even if some of the people I’m blindly referring to here have tangibly suffered at the hands of US foreign policy, is there an excuse for ignoring American people’s suffering at the hands of vengeful terrorists? If America’s so fucking blind, how has it managed to produce people who, having just lost loved ones to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, have the immediate compassion and insight to plead against violent retribution?)

By consuming the media that I did, and opening myself to its impact, I chose to be conditioned into feeling some of the distress that people in Manhattan felt. I also choose, whenever I connect to any human disaster through the media, to open myself to its impact, as much as I can bear. I refuse to allow the overwhelming amount of human misery around us, and the overwhelming amount of media coverage of it, to blunt my basic human responses to suffering. And I know I would be truly fucked if I allowed my political beliefs to blunt them. To say, "The government of those people is evil, therefore I shut off my emotional connection to their pain." That seems to be a very dangerous path to follow.

You’re kind of glossing over the fact that these people elected their evil government.

Fact? Do you know how many people who died voted for Bush? Just as America dehumanises fundamentalist Muslims—barbaric or not—these hijackers surely had dehumanised their victims—government supporters or not—to the point where they were able to kill them. Should we also dehumanise them in the name of "democracy" (a process that, as we all know, became shakier than ever during the election that put Bush in power), in order to shrug our shoulders at their deaths? Likewise, we should guard against homogenising the millions of Afghanis currently under threat—thanks to their unelected leaders—into an obscure mass, whose suffering in the name of bagging bin Laden is seen as "justifiable retribution".

Communications media can open us to the experiences of people across the world. They can distort and manipulate our perceptions along the way. They can be actively used to effect such distortions. But, short of everyone suddenly becoming as courageous and mobile as frontline journalists, they are the channels of knowledge that keep self-awareness alive in this deeply dysfunctional, but potentially fruitful and precious global community.

Most of us are conscious of the mazes of self-deception and illusion that often have to be navigated when you’re a self-aware being. This is never an argument for less self-awareness, except for the alcoholic or junkie. Only more self-awareness will lead us forward. As a species, that means more media. Not more for its own sake, but more intensely active and involving media. Not immersive world-denying Virtual Reality, but collaborative, self-critical and life-affirming media. Honing and refining our critical faculties is crucial in this process. Equally crucial, though, is retaining the capacity for human response—allowing ourselves to be affected. Anything else will feed an encroaching numbness, and we won’t even feel the death of the future of Homo sapiens.

Postscript

I gradually discovered the world of blogging alongside the invasion and occupation of Iraq this year, and a positive outcome of this conjunction has been, I feel, discovering native bloggers from the country in question. There are quite a few, in fact; I’ve ended up reading Baghdad Burning, a wonderfully written journal that gives fascinating insights into life in Baghdad, from the daily fear of violence to local recipes and customs. An essential counterpoint to media coverage, and definitely an effective way of nurturing human sympathies across cultures, grassroots expressions from "over there" that go well beyond the news-centric conception of "coverage" are a hugely encouraging phenomenon. There is of course the danger of the divide ceasing to be across geographic and/or cultural lines, but across the lines created by media literacy and access. I say, stay aware of this danger, and use this awareness to constantly endeavour to increase media literacy and access. Gyrus, 29/11/2003

The excellent blog Baghdad Burning, an essential complement/antidote to media coverage, reports the distress being felt in Iraq at the UN withdrawal:

My heart sinks every time the UN pulls out because that was how we used to gauge the political situation in the past: the UN is pulling out—we’re getting bombed.

The same post lead me to two shocking and unsurprising pieces, both shedding light on how the connective threads between the Bush administration, Zionist law firms and Iraq’s governing council are facilitating the bureaucratic side of Iraq’s occupation (mostly it’s just the mediagenic spilt blood that’s reported). One is a Guardian piece on Iraqi International Law Group, a law consultancy run by Salem Chalabi, nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. The other is a concise look at Bush right-hand man Joe M. Allbaugh’s company, New Bridge Strategies, LLC.

And the same blog sent me on a strange tangent… Did you know that the SARS virus may have arrived here on a comet?

But never fear! This wasn’t some party-pooping blasphemer trying to point out that the last orders bell at the World’s End is about to toll. The story was actually looking at what the (currently) oil-rich Middle East might do to keep it’s good ol’ economic growth festering along, once the oil’s run out. Thus, we were treated to an inside glimpse into the sleek Dubai Internet City, a booming industry hub that’s capitalising on the fact that non-western tech markets aren’t suffering from the after-effects of the dot-com bubble bursting. Did you know that some Arabian mobile phone markets are only at around 10% penetration? This rise in consumer demand, presumably together with ample local skills and investment from foreign corporations, surely points to a thriving Middle East, even when its supplies of oil run dry.

Except… What the fuck will power these technologies?

Somewhere in the background, I’m sure, is the casual assumption that by that time we’ll have completely replaced our dependence on oil as an energy source with something else. It’s scary, though, how casual this assumption is; how restricted our collective awareness of the uniqueness of oil, an irreplaceable planetary store of accumulated solar energy, is; how blithely we’re entrusting our species’ future to technologies which don’t exist yet and show no sign of existing in the near future…

We think: "Yes! Shiny new things!" We fail to see that, to keep more than a couple of billion people going (and we’re at six billion and counting), we need that archaic, finite black stuff from deep beneath the earth.

I recall seeing some US Democrat being interviewed on CNN, an almost hurt expression barely buried in her face, voicing her growing suspicions that (wait for it) the Bush administration—no, really, brace yourself, take a seat and a good, deep breath—may have been less than honest in its appraisal of Iraq’s "weapons of mass destruction"! Or—God rise up from your shame and help us—they could have been outright lying.

I remember thinking about this woman’s position in the world. A large part of her job is to keep a close eye on what them there Republicans are up to in the White House, and to bloody well harangue them if they look like they might be veering off the straight and narrow. As far as I’m concerned, everyone in such a position who stands up now and acts like a betrayed little kid, feigning (I charitably assume) puzzlement at why a fraudulent oil industry dweeb might lie about motivations for attacking a country with vast oil reserves in a world heading for irreversible energy shortages—they should, at the very least, stand down in shame. At best, they should self-destruct in recompense by using what’s left of their power to expose as much of the rot in their profession as possible.

But in the end, it’s not just the politicians. There are the unquestioning masses, too, distracted by comfort or strife, barely able to admit to themselves how far out of control this world is. Why else would anyone believe the words of those who say they’re in control?