Ishikawa Sayuri - Amagi Goe 56th Kouhaku
Short PV
ISHIKAWA SAYURI - AMAGIGOE
ISHIKAWA SAYURI - BYAKKO-TAI
Have a Dream Anytime
Misc:
Nana Mizuki singing Amagi Goe
Her PV for Brillian Star
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Mari Iijima vids
Mari Iijima Do You Remember Love - Ai Oboete Imasuka-
Mari Iijima (Lynn Minmay) Interview
An older live performance of Ai Oboete Imasuka
Mari Iijima (Lynn Minmay) Interview
An older live performance of Ai Oboete Imasuka
Gen Y's free and easy life
Gen Y's free and easy life
Written by Luison Lassala
see also his Six decisions which change a teen's life forever
Written by Luison Lassala
see also his Six decisions which change a teen's life forever
Regent Restates Vatican's Anti-Masonry Position
Regent Restates Vatican's Anti-Masonry Position
Says Its Philosophies Are Incompatible With Church
ROME, MARCH 2, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The Church has not changed its ruling on Catholic membership in the Masons, said the regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary.
Bishop Gianfranco Girotti made this statement Thursday at a conference on the topic of Freemasonry held at the St. Bonaventure Pontifical Theological Faculty.
The bishop presided over the congress held in cooperation with the Socio-Religious Research and Information Group of Italy. Officials of Masonic associations and grand masters also took part in the meeting.
Bishop Girotti reminded his listeners that the Church has always criticized the concepts and philosophy of Freemasonry, considering them incompatible with the Catholic faith.
He mentioned the last official reference document, "Declaration on Masonic Associations," which was signed by the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on Nov. 26, 1983.
The text states that since the principles of Masonic associations "have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church," membership in them, therefore, "remains forbidden."
"The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive holy Communion," adds the declaration signed by Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Benedict XVI.
Father Zbigniew Suchecki, an expert in the subject, quoted number 1374 of the Code of Canon Law, which reads: "Whoever is inscribed in an association that plots against the Church must be punished with a just penalty; whoever promotes or directs that association, must be banned."
"Masonry's attempts to express divine truths are based on relativism and do not agree with the principles of the Christian faith," said the Conventual Franciscan.
Bishop Girotti made reference to the statements of some priests who have declared publicly their membership in Masonry and called for the intervention of "their direct superiors," not excluding the possibility that "measures of a canonical character might come from the Holy See."
Women Bring Sexy Back to K-Pop
Women Bring Sexy Back to K-Pop
photo
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Justin Timberlake may be singing ``I'm bringing sexy back,'' but in the K-pop scene, it seems the ``sexy'' concept is still alive and kicking. Sultry pop stars led by Lee Hyo-lee and Ivy, as well as newcomers like Seo In-young have released new albums and music videos, designed to send the pulses of the male population racing.
While this sexy image helps attract attention, it also distracts people from determining if these singers are popular because of their good looks or real talent.
Recently, the stars' skimpy costumes and racy music videos may have proven too much for some audiences, creating a backlash against sexy singers.
Lee is widely credited with starting the sexy trend and is still undeniably one of the most popular stars for commercials. She has recently generated publicity with a racy photo spread appearing on W magazine and the Calvin Klein ad campaign, but it seems this has only distracted from her music.
Lee's new digital album received mixed reviews from fans, although her single ``Toc Toc Toc'' is racing up the charts. Lee may be trying to soften her image, but it seems fans still want her to stay sexy.
Another pop singer who became known for her sizzling dance moves is Ivy, who scored a hit with the single ``A-ha'' last year. Ivy seems to be distancing herself from the sexy image during promotions for her second album, ``A Sweet Moment.''
At a recent music show, Ivy performed ``Temptation Sonata" wearing a conservative but feminine suit, in sharp contrast to the hot pants she wore when she performed ``A-ha" last year.
With the image shift, Ivy seems to be focusing more on the music, rather than using her sex appeal to gain fans.
However, it is newcomer Seo who is generating the most controversy for her barely-there costumes and hot dance performances. A former member of the girl group Jewelry, Seo has just released her first solo album ``Elly Is So Hot.''
Her skimpy costumes have prompted three Korean broadcasting stations KBS, MBC and SBS to ask her to tone down her costumes for TV shows. Her costumes are one-piece outfits featuring cut outs that expose parts of her stomach and pelvis.
If this wasn't enough, Seo has also released a series of racy photos available for mobile phone downloads.
Other female singers are still expected to push through with the ``sexy'' concept by releasing dance tracks which allow them to show off their seductive dancing.
Chae Yeon is also planning to release her fourth album later this month. Her management agency Medialine said the title track of the album is a dance track, similar to her earlier song ``Two of Us,'' and will have a Latin dance version and electronic house version.
Mina, who is best known as the 2002 World Cup girl, will also come out with her fourth album in April. She has worked with Uptown member Jung Yun-joon on writing the title track, which is said to be similar to Lee's hit ``10 Minutes.''
Clyde Wilson, Helping America
Helping America
Now I think I know what most people mean by America and what the Red Cross is appealing to. It is not a “proposition,” or an idea of any kind, and it is certainly not what most of mankind has recognised as loyalty to one’s people. It is a feeling. The feeling of belonging to and being personally empowered by an imagined virtuous collectivity that has only a vague and insubstantial connection to the actual physical United States, its history, and its people. (It helps, of course, that the costs of “American” virtue are seldom to be personally borne.)
This is perhaps the best civic morale that can be hoped for in a country that gave up all possibility of cultural substance a century or more ago when it accepted by default that the essence of “America” is material abundance into which all comers may be uncritically absorbed. That is, “America” signifies nothing really worthy of love and sacrifice.
And this perhaps helps explain why Americans at large have no political power or even political consciousness, but are helpless victims of government actions. Political power is sought and acheived by those with concrete economic interests—government contractors, creditors, employees, grant recipients, bankers, traders, and every profitable interest. Political power is also sought and acheived by minority groups who represent a genuine human identity. Meanwhile, the great mass, befuddled by the daydream of “America,” are scarcely aware that they have any interests to protect.
This feeling for “America” is not entirely a bad thing. But the trouble with a patriotism that lacks any blood and soil and belief and tangible, living reference point is that it is infinitely malleable by evildoers in power.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Thomas Fleming, If Pigs Could Fly
If Pigs Could Fly
by Thomas Fleming
by Thomas Fleming
In reflecting on ancient history, I pointed out that some of the conflicts—for example, that between Iraq and Iran—go back thousands of years, while others originated in the Islamic subjugation of the Christian Middle East, and still others were engendered by Ottoman oppression and the intervention of Western powers. The basic point, expanded and adumbrated in the succeeding three years, was that historical antagonisms would rule out any purely military solution and make even a political-economic solution (massive aid, rebuilding of infrastructure, establishment of a stable puppet regime) a very difficult proposition.
Don Rumsfeld is anything but stupid, but I was never foolish enough to believe that we could have changed his mind if only he would listen to us for a day, a week, a month, a year. Like most Americans, he is ignorant of history and impatient with any evidence or argument that stands between him and the accomplishment of his goals. If he knows any ancient history, it would be the propaganda spooned out by Edith Hamilton and the Durants. Our leaders hate history, because it tells them that our empire, as much as any other, is bound by laws we refuse to recognize.
Three years ago, we were arguing that, right or wrong, the Bush administration did not have a ghost of a chance of ruling Iraq. When the invasion was finally launched according to schedule, I was frequently invited to appear on local television and radio shows. When asked what our next move should be, I always said the same thing, no matter what the event we were discussing: the fall of Baghdad, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the staged elections. Declare victory and get out. But what about achieving real victory? I could only answer with Pilate: “What is victory?” That is the question to ask President Bush today, when he is still claiming that victory is within our reach, but it was also the question that Congress should have been asking in early 2003.Here at Chronicles, it was Michael Stenton, wised up by Britain’s failures in the Middle East, who realized even before the invasion that we had no “existing grand project,” only political nonsense concocted to fill the strategic void. First, we were told the fable of WMDs, which few of our editors believed for even a moment. When the propaganda moved away from Iraq as a threat to our (or, rather, Israel’s) security to Iraq as an opportunity to build a democratic-capitalist showplace in the Islamic world, I was not alone in understanding what this meant. Our leaders and their advisors not only did not have a plan for victory, much less an exit strategy: They have never taken the trouble to define what victory might mean.
Victory over an enemy can take many forms. At the lowest level, the repulse of an invader—by force of arms or by bribes—is a victory. But, if the enemy is an enduring threat, something more than a mere defeat in the field might be required. Some enemies have to be thrashed so vigorously they will forego aggression for at least a generation. For tougher customers—or more attractive targets—nothing less than occupation and annexation will do. Taking a page or two out of Roman history, it is easy to see why the Romans decided to finish off Carthage and why they annexed the Macedonian kingdoms. Caesar’s exploits in Gaul and Britain are harder to understand, except as means to making Caesar the dictator he became. Eventually, Gaul proved to be a valuable addition to the empire, but what was the point to the adventures of Varus, Drusus, and Germanicus across the Rhine? Not much, apparently, since Augustus and Tiberius squelched them.
In her wars, the United States has a mixed record. It is easy to justify our entrance into World War II as a necessity: No matter how culpable FDR might have been, we were, after all, attacked. In Korea, we were trying to contain the spread of an enemy ideology. The Mexican War is more complex: Both sides were provocative, and Mexico’s corrupt political system made the American land grab almost inevitable. The acquisition of so much territory, whether as the fruits of victory or the big steal, was an unquestionable advantage to the American people.
Other wars are murkier. We had no business in the Philippines, where we slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians and gained little advantage. The Vietnam War, if we had fought to win, might have been a success, but we had not taken the trouble to define victory. Instead of defending our pro-Western Christian ally, President Diem, we backed the Buddhists, and, instead of taking the gloves off and pounding North Vietnam into submission, we allowed Robert McNamara to play war games that cost us the lives of more than 58,000 men and damaged our prestige for over a decade.
The only lesson Donald Rumsfeld learned from Vietnam was that McNamara had been insufficiently ruthless. As a technocrat, he could never understand that it is dangerous to entrust the management of a war to arrogant technocrats who have no combat experience. McNamara had been a whiz at analyzing U.S. bombing campaigns in World War II, and, when he applied his “science” in Vietnam, he ensured our defeat. Rumsfeld’s obsession with military technology and his consequent neglect of the house-to-house reality of the fighting in Iraq doomed our campaign to failure.
Although quite different men in so many ways, McNamara and Rumsfeld share one great weakness: a contempt for the human factor. Their blindness is something more than mere weakness. The grand illusion of our time is that moral problems—drunkenness, lechery, gluttony, violence—can be solved by technical means. To cure a vice, all that is needed is a 12-step program, and, for more widespread problems such as poverty, famine, and war, we need scientifically designed campaigns. It is easy to forget, sitting in the office of the secretary of defense, Forrest’s great dictum that “war means fighting, and fighting means killing.” Short of wholesale extermination, there is no technical solution to suicide bombers in Baghdad.
The kindest judgment on the thinking that produced the debacle in Iraq is that it was Quixotic, that the President and his advisors shared the impossible dream of remaking the Arab world in the American image. They did not pause to ask themselves why, if the people of Iraq wanted democratic self-government, they had saddled themselves with tyranny for 5,000 years. It was, to put it in the suitable language of nursery rhymes, a policy of “ifs and ans.” If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers, and, if elections and constitutions produced peaceful democracies, there’d be no work for soldiers. But, to borrow another bit from Mother Goose, if Iraqi pigs could fly, they’d be dropping bombs on American soldiers. It is time for our foreign-policy planners to abandon the nursery and face the real world.
If we had given up the impossible dream of converting Iraq into an oil-rich Switzerland, what might victory have meant? George Bush Senior was content to humiliate Saddam’s army and to keep his country weak and poor. Presumably, George Bush Junior’s neoconservative advisors were hoping for a quasidemocratic Jordan or Turkey, states that find profit in their alliance with the United States and in their cooperative relations with Israel. Something like that might have been possible in the early days, when many Iraqis were grateful for the overthrow of Saddam’s government. Now, they all hate our guts, including Iraqi politicians whose very survival depends on the U.S.-military presence. We have taught not just Muslims but the entire world that we are a dangerous and reckless country, and the evil presidents of Iran and North Korea are not the only leaders who have concluded that national survival lies in the development of a nuclear arsenal.
Daniel McCarthy reviews Radicals for Capitalism
for American Conservative
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Brian Doherty, PublicAffairs, 741 pages
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Brian Doherty, PublicAffairs, 741 pages
Vatican to take action against Jon Sobrino, S.J.?
VATICAN-SOBRINO Mar-12-2007 (240 words) xxxi
Vatican to take action against liberation theologian, sources say
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican was expected to take disciplinary action against Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino, a leading proponent of liberation theology, sources in Rome said.
Spanish media reported that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would ban Father Sobrino from teaching or publishing books.
Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador, where Father Sobrino resides and teaches, was quoted as saying March 11 that the Vatican would announce that Father Sobrino's views were not wholly in line with church doctrine, and that he would be forbidden to teach theology in any Catholic institution until he revised his conclusions.
A Jesuit spokesman in Rome, Father Jose M. de Vera, would not confirm those reports, but said the Vatican was expected to issue a declaration on Father Sobrino in mid-March.
Father de Vera said the doctrinal review of Father Sobrino's work began several years ago, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI -- was prefect of the congregation.
Father de Vera said one of the major issues under review was Father Sobrino's treatment of the divinity of Christ in his understanding of the theology of the incarnation.
Father Sobrino, 69, was born in Spain and has lived most of his life in El Salvador, where he has taught at the Jesuit-run Central American University.
John Birch Society
Its website.
their e-zine, The New American.
wiki
The group has a certain reputation, but I do not know if it is justified--what conservative would disagree with their stated principles? Then again, SourceWatch points to the conspiracy mentality of some of its members. There are criticisms from former members as well, which makes one wonder about the people in the group. Given the controversy surrounding the group, would it be an ally or an obstacle? Better to work for the conversion of hearts through Christ, and not to put too much hope in movements, but to build up community where one can.
their e-zine, The New American.
wiki
The group has a certain reputation, but I do not know if it is justified--what conservative would disagree with their stated principles? Then again, SourceWatch points to the conspiracy mentality of some of its members. There are criticisms from former members as well, which makes one wonder about the people in the group. Given the controversy surrounding the group, would it be an ally or an obstacle? Better to work for the conversion of hearts through Christ, and not to put too much hope in movements, but to build up community where one can.
Suburbia Project: The Responses
Suburbia Project: The Responses
Suburbia Project
Suburbia Project
Read the Responses
The Psychology of Previous Investment, by James Howard Kunstler: The conditions of the permanent global energy crisis we face will create a lot of economic losers, and they are going to be very angry over the loss of their entitlements.
Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens, by Derrick Jensen: This culture is killing the planet. It must be stopped. We evidently do not have the courage to stop it ourselves. The natural world will stop it for us.
The Primacy of Ecology, by Richard Register: Nature and agriculture must work its way back into what presently is a massive, disastrous design mistake fueled by weakness, laziness, greed on ego as well as gasoline.
The Simpler Way, by Ted Trainer: Above all, the basic feature of the new suburbs and towns must be their highly self-sufficient local economies.
Stop Catering to Cars, by Al Cormier: Al Cormier lists a number of strategies for municipal and/or provincial governments to help suburbs prepare for the end of cheap energy.
Self-Reliant Suburbs, by Dan Chiras: The suburbs could be the raw material for a sustainable revolution.
Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability, by David Holmgren: As we in Australia take the first hesitant steps beyond 'rugged individualism' and begin to re-learn the skills needed to govern ourselves in community, the private-within-commons system tends to sit more comfortably with many.
Saving the Suburbs, by Paris Rutherford: The challenge of reinventing the suburbs is difficult for even the most enterprising town leaders.
Some Ha Ji Won videos, Pt 1
Commencement
Song Talks MV
Stuff related to the movie The Duelist:
HIFF Vblog- Opening Night 2006 with Ji-won Ha
Ha Ji-won at HIFF Duelist Premiere (KBFD)
OST
2006 Baek Sang Awards -- winning an award for Hwang Jin Yi...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCfMYC6Mfd0
KBS Enews
Newest Commercial Shoot
Soup
Song Talks MV
Stuff related to the movie The Duelist:
HIFF Vblog- Opening Night 2006 with Ji-won Ha
Ha Ji-won at HIFF Duelist Premiere (KBFD)
OST
2006 Baek Sang Awards -- winning an award for Hwang Jin Yi...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCfMYC6Mfd0
KBS Enews
Newest Commercial Shoot
Soup
Compromise, Hell!
Compromise, Hell!
Wendell Berry
Economic WMDs are being used against our own people in a version of "freedom" that makes greed the dominant economic virtue.
Wendell Berry
Economic WMDs are being used against our own people in a version of "freedom" that makes greed the dominant economic virtue.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY -- I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes -- the farms and ranches and working forests -- and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work.
It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.
Photograph | Bradley Simmons/Picturequest
Photograph | Charles E. Rotkin/CORBIS
Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of "reclamation," strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land's future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God's property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?
In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed -- in fact we have officially encouraged -- the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, the people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?
But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.
Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every part of our country. You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there.
What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places -- that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities.
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
We citizens have a large responsibility for our delusion and our destructiveness, and I don't want to minimize that. But I don't want to minimize, either, the large responsibility that is borne by government.
It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.
Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.
We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.
Because as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions, we need our state and national governments to protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.
Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone justify, a government's willingness to allow the human sources of necessary goods to be destroyed by the "freedom" of this corporate anarchy. It is equally impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even subsidize, the destruction of the land and the land's productivity. Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well. The governmental obligation to protect these economic resources, inseparably human and natural, is the same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders. In result, there is no difference between a domestic threat to the sources of our life and a foreign one.
It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be slaughtered all at once.
The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the Earth, then eventually we will destroy it all.
Photograph | Michael Grinley
Photograph | Ken Collinst
So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions.
We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food, and raw materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far.
We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by "bringing in industry." Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by "tax incentives" and other squanderings of the people's money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.
We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land -- for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country's defense, become the agents of our country's destroyers, compromising on its ruin.
And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, Joe Begley of Blackey: "Compromise, hell!"
Martin van Creveld, The Fate of the State
from DNI
The Fate of the State
MARTIN VAN CREVELD
© 1996 Martin van Creveld
Published with permission of the author.
The State, which since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been the most important and most characteristic of all modern institutions, is dying. Wherever we look, existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart; wherever we look, organizations that are not states are taking their place. On the international level, we are moving away from a system of separate, sovereign, states toward less distinct, more hierarchical, and in many ways more complex structures. Inside their borders, it seems that many states will soon no longer be able to protect the political, military, economic, social, and cultural life of their citizens. These developments may lead to upheavals as profound as those that took humanity out of the Middle Ages and into the Modern World. Whether the direction of change is desirable, as some hope, or undesirable, as others fear, remains to be seen.
In this article the state of the state will be discussed under five headings. Part I looks at the state's declining ability to fight other states. Part II outlines the rise and fall of the welfare state. Part III examines the effects of modern technology, economics, and the media. Part IV focuses on the state's ability to maintain public order. Finally, Part V is an attempt to tie all the threads together and to see where we are headed.
Part I. The Declining Ability to Fight
The principal function of the state, as that of all previous forms of government, has always been to fight other states, whether defensively in an attempt to defend its interests or offensively to extend them. Usually a state that was unable to do this was doomed to disappear. The best it could hope for was to lead a sort of shadowy existence under the protection of some other state, as Lebanon, for example, does under Syrian tutelage; even that existence was likely to be temporary.
Conversely, the need to fight other states has played a critical role in the development of the state's most important institutions.[1] This includes the government bureaucracy, whose original function was to levy taxes for the purpose of waging war; the note-issuing state bank, an early 18th-century invention designed specifically to help pay for Britain's military effort during the wars against Louis XIV; and of course the regular armed forces. In most states, the latter continued to take up the lion's share of expenditure until well into the 19th century.[2]
Driven largely by the need to fight other states, the power of the state expanded from 1700 on. The number of bureaucrats (the word itself is an 18th-century neologism) multiplied, and the amount of statistical information at their disposal increased, as did the share of GDP that was extracted by government. Technology drove war, and war, technology. International competition intensified until, during the second half of the 19th century, it reached the point where much of the world had been turned into an armed camp. Each of the so-called great powers was looking anxiously over its shoulder at all the rest to see which one was the most threatening, and which one, being less so for the moment, could be drawn into an alliance.
Most important of all, the French Revolution led to the nationalization of the masses and, with that, to a drastic change in the role of the state in the popular consciousness. Hobbes, Locke, and many of their 18th-century successors saw the state simply as an instrument for maintaining public order and permitting a civilized life; to quote a rhyme by Alexander Pope: "Over government fools contest/What is best administered is best." Now it became an end unto itself, an earthly god in whose honor festivals were celebrated, monuments erected, and hymns composed and sung.[3] It was a vengeful god who, according to his greatest prophet, Georg Hegel,[4] fed on blood and periodically demanded the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands if not millions—for their own highest good, needless to say. In retrospect, nothing in the history of the modern state is more astonishing than the willingness, occasionally even eagerness, of people to fight for it and lay down their lives for it.
The climax of these developments was reached during the years of total war between 1914 and 1945. Acting in the name of the need to protect or extend something known as the national interest, states conscripted their populations and fought each other on an unprecedented scale and with an unprecedented ferocity. Nor was it merely a question of soldiers killing each other in the field. At the grand strategic level, both 1914-18 and 1939-45 were conducted by attrition; this gave states time to mobilize not only troops but civilians (including women and children) as well, putting them to work in fields and factories. Under the direction of such figures as Walter Rathenau in Germany, David Lloyd George in Britain, Georges Clemenceau in France, and Bernard Baruch in the United States, the state assumed control over finance, raw materials, transportation, labor (including professional qualifications and wages), and even the calorie intake of their citizens. Most of these controls were demolished after 1918, only to be reinstituted on an even greater scale after 1939.
Thanks to the unprecedented mobilization of demographic, economic, industrial, technological, and scientific resources, the two World Wars together, and each separately, dwarfed all the armed conflicts that had taken place in the past. More important to our purpose, mobilization warfare accelerated—if it did not create—technological progress.[5] All through World War II in particular, tens of thousands of scientists were engaged in research and development, producing devices that ranged from radar to the electronic computer and from the jet engine to the first ballistic missiles. The climax arrived on 6 August 1945 when the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, killing an estimated 75,000 people.
At first, nuclear weapons were thought to have put unprecedented military power in the hands of the state; after a few years, though, it began to be realized that they did not so much serve the objectives of war as put an end to it.[6] As the power of nuclear weapons grew—from 20,000 kilotons in 1945 to 58 megatons in 1961—and their numbers increased, wherever they made their appearance large-scale interstate war came to a halt. First the superpowers; then their close allies in NATO and the Warsaw Pact; then the USSR and China; then China and India; then India and Pakistan; then Israel and its Arab neighbors. Much as they hated each other, they each in turn saw themselves with their horns locked and unable to fight each other in earnest.[7]
Without exception, what large-scale interstate wars have taken place since 1945 have been waged either between or against third- and fourth-rate military powers. The Korean War, which originally was simply a civil war between the two parts of a country split into half; the five (or six depending on the way one counts) Arab-Israeli wars; the three Indian-Pakistani wars; the Chinese-Indian War; the Chinese-Vietnamese War; the Falklands War, so small that it is often referred to as a campaign; the Iran-Iraq War; the Gulf War; and most recently, the war between Ecuador and Peru—all these serve to prove the point. Since 1945 no two first-rate states, meaning such as were armed with nuclear weapons, have fought each other; by some accounts they have not even come close to fighting each other.[8
Even more striking than the marginalization of the belligerents was the declining scale on which war was waged. Though the world's population has almost tripled since 1945, and though its ability to produce goods and services has increased many times over, both the size of armed forces and the number of the major weapon systems with which they are provided now amount to only a fraction of what they were in 1945. For example, the forces mobilized by the coalition in the Gulf were just one-seventh of the size of those deployed by Germany for its invasion of Russia in 1941. In most places the shrinking process is still under way. Not a day passes without some new cuts being announced. And in the face of the potential for nuclear destruction, there is not much chance of the mass forces of World War II being rebuilt in any kind of foreseeable future.
Part II. The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State
As the state lost its ability to expand at its neighbors' expense—a handicap confirmed by the Charter of the United Nations, which, as the most subscribed-to document in history, prohibits using force to annex territory—it turned its energies inward. It lies in the nature of a bureaucratic construct that it should seek to control and regulate everything; in so doing it created the welfare state.
The beginning of the story is in the period 1789 to 1830. First came the French Revolution, which, exported across the length and width of Europe, broke up the ancient feudal and ecclesiastic institutions; by atomizing society, it put the state in a much stronger position than ever before. Next came the industrial revolution. Starting in Britain, it brought with it economic freedom, unbridled capitalism (including its worst manifestations—a total lack of planning, widespread poverty, and inhumane exploitation), and the invisible hand. The influence of such figures as Adam Smith and Friedrich List caused one nation after another to dismantle internal and external economic controls and switch to free trade; with the Manchester School firmly in control, during the first half of the century the motto was laissez faire.
After 1850 or so, the prevailing mood began to change. One reason for this was a number of inquiries, some of them official, that were launched into the state of the working class and that brought to light the often shocking conditions in which working people lived.[9] Another was the military competition mentioned in the previous section; with the most important states increasingly dependent on mass armies consisting of conscripts and reservists, their rulers felt they could no longer afford to neglect the populations that provided those armies. Finally there was the steady, if often stormy, movement toward democratization and the rise in many countries of socialist parties. The former made it necessary, in the words of one English parliamentarian, "to educate our masters." The latter attracted a growing number of voters and openly threatened violent revolution unless something was done to improve the lot of the masses.
Be the exact reasons what they may, the first Factory Acts were passed in Britain during the 1840s over howls of protests by the owners and their spokesmen. The laws' purpose was to put limits on working hours—initially those of women and children—and to institute at least some safety controls. Imitated by many countries, originally the new laws only applied to a few industries considered particularly dangerous, such as mining. Later they were extended to others such as textile and metalworking plants. Among the last to be reached were agriculture, domestic service, and small-scale light industry, particularly in the form of sweatshops. These were affected, to the extent that they were affected at all, only during the early years of the 20th century.
Once the state had begun to supervise the conditions of labor—including the establishment of labor exchanges, another early 20th-century development—it soon sought to do the same for education and public health. The pioneer in the former field was Prussia; following beginnings made in the reign of Frederick the Great, something like universal—although, as yet, not free—elementary education was achieved in the years after 1815 when Prussia became a much-imitated model and educators from all over the world flocked to see how it was done.[10] In the rest of Europe the real push was provided by the war of 1870-71. The French in particular looked for an explanation; unable to agree on the causes of the defeat, in the end they pointed a finger at the schoolmaster. Around 1900 the "utopian vision"—the phrase used by the British Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb—of universal elementary education had been achieved in all the most advanced countries.
Advances in public health were made necessary by urban growth and were initially decentralized. In Britain, Germany, and to a growing extent the United States, laws were enacted that entrusted the task of providing better sanitation, better disease controls, to local authorities and municipalities; they also took over from the church and private charitable organizations by providing at least some hospitals for the indigenous ill. In the most advanced countries, ministries of health were established during the first two decades after 1900. Their task was to supervise those countries' entire health systems, including both medical practice and training; in addition, many of them also provided various programs, such as inoculation and prenatal care, that were compulsory, free, or both.
Like state-run education, state-run welfare was originally a German invention.[11] The 1880s found Bismarck worried about the progress of the Social Democratic Party. This caused him to institute the so-called "Revolution from above" and the world's first schemes for unemployment, accident, sickness, and old age insurance. Between 1890 and 1914 his example was followed by others through much of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Seen from this point of view, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was anything but an anomaly; instead it was simply an attempt to grab one particularly backward country by the neck, institute universal welfare at a single stroke, and extend state control to the point where civil society itself almost ceased to exist. Only the United States, with its tradition of free enterprise and rugged individualism, resisted the trend and, as a result, found itself lagging behind. In the land of the dollar it took the Great Depression and 13 million unemployed to make first the New Deal and then social security during the 1930s.
Still, what really made the modern welfare state was World War II. As had already been the case during World War I, governments took responsibility for running many aspects of their citizens' lives, including even the number of inches of hot water they were allowed to put in their tubs; but this time they did so with no intention of giving up their power after the war had ended. In one developed country after another, extensive health programs covering the entire population—as under the British National Health System which served as the model for many others—were established. To this were added a vast variety of ancillary programs, such as free or subsidized meals for children and the elderly, cheap housing, vocational training and retraining, and education. The latter often led to free education up to, and in some instances including, the university level.
These developments led to a huge increase in the number of bureaucrats per population and per square mile.[12] By the end of the 1950s the number of ministries, which during the state's formative years in the 17th and 18th centuries had usually stood at four, had risen to something nearer 20 in most countries. To the minister of justice, the minister of foreign affairs, the minister of war, and the minister of the treasury (sometimes, a first or prime minister as well), were added ministers for interior affairs, police, agriculture, transportation, communications, education, health, labor, welfare, trade and industry, aviation, energy, and tourism. Some countries thought it necessary to have a special minister responsible for the infrastructure. Others considered they could not do without one for sport and leisure, whereas during the 1970s and 1980s many cabinets came to include a portfolio for ecological matters and women's affairs.
To pay for these programs and these ministries, it became necessary to raise taxes—particularly direct ones—until, in countries such as Britain and Sweden, marginal rates of income tax could reach 90 percent and more. Taxation, though, was only part of the solution. The nationalization of industry had been demanded by socialist parties ever since the time of the Communist Manifesto. The way ahead had been shown in Britain by the creation of the Electricity Board in 1926; next, France during the premiership of Legon Blum (1936-37) nationalized its arms industry. Following World War II, in one European country after another entire sectors of the economy were taken out of private hands and put into those of the state.[13] The exact identity of the industries in question varied. Often they included mass transportation such as sea, air, and rail; telecommunications, energy, banking, insurance, mining (particularly for coal and oil), and critical branches of manufacturing such as steel, shipbuilding, aviation, and military equipment. Initially it was hoped that the profits of these industries would be made to work for the community at large rather than for their shareholders alone. In practice it did not take long before many of them, run on electoral principles rather than business ones, turned into albatrosses that were grossly overstaffed, incurred enormous losses, demanded vast subsidies, and hung like chains around the state's neck.[14]
In retrospect, the turning point in the history of nationalization and the welfare state came during the second half of the 1970s. Until then the trend toward greater state control had been increasing steadily. Even in the United States, always a latercomer in such matters, "big government" made its debut during the 1950s; in the 1960s the Kennedy and Johnson administrations declared "war on poverty" and presided over a vast expansion of various social programs.[15] Then, in one country after another a reaction set in. It was motivated partly by the immense losses attributable to many nationalized industries; partly by the drastic increase in unemployment—and consequently in the cost of insuring against it—brought about by the oil crisis; and partly by the desire to cut the burden of taxes, which was regarded as stifling economic enterprise. On top of all this the welfare state had become a victim of its own success. The more it sought to help disadvantaged groups such as the aged or single parents, the larger the number of those who claimed the benefit of its services and the greater also the addition to the national debt.[16]
By this time the naive belief in the virtues of an "impartial" state bureaucracy that had inspired political scientists from Hegel to Max Weber[17] was long since dead. Instead of representing rationality, bureaucracy was coming to be seen as its antithesis; instead of being an instrument of social progress, it was now perceived as an obstacle to change of any kind.[18] During the late 1970s there emerged a number of political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan whose goal, loudly professed, was to roll back the power of the state. "Standing on one's own feet" and "getting government off our backs" became the rallying cries under which some of the most important states set out to dismantle themselves; even though, in many places, progress—if that is the correct term—was greater in words than in deeds.
All through the 1980s the movement back to the 19th century gathered momentum. Late in the decade it was given a tremendous boost by the collapse of the USSR. For 70 years, communism had provided an alternative model in which the state, for all its manifold and perceived shortcomings, claimed to have eliminated the worst forms of poverty and promised security from the cradle to the grave; now the system's sudden demise left East Bloc states naked and their respective civil societies poorer than ever. Not only was laissez faire capitalism able to reemerge as the only way toward a better future, but it no longer felt obliged to apologize for its seamier sides, such as gross inequality, ever-present insecurity for both employers and employees, and the colossal waste resulting from the business cycle on the one hand and unplanned development on the other. To the contrary, many of the advocates of the new supply-side economics regarded those features as potentially useful tools toward the all-important goals of low inflation and steady economic growth.
As the last years of the century approached, not even those countries that were loudest in their praise of capitalism had made significant progress in reducing their bureaucracies, much less in cutting taxes as a percentage of GDP.[19] On the other hand, in virtually all countries some of the juicier morsels of the economy had been sold off and others deregulated, to say nothing of the cuts that, with or without the aid of inflation, were effected in the real value of numerous social programs including, not least, the quality of education. The homeless people appearing on the streets of cities everywhere offered visible proof of the fact that the post-World War II trend toward a narrowing of social gaps had been reversed; it became a matter of policy for the state to take more and more but give less and less. No wonder that loyalty to it—as manifested most clearly in the willingness to do conscript service and fight if necessary—declined.[20] In the United States under the Carter Administration, even the attempt to register young males for an eventual call-up met with opposition.
Part III. Modern Technology, Economics, and the Media
Meanwhile, and often going almost unnoticed, technology also had performed an about-face. The role played by print in the establishment of the state cannot be overestimated; after all, where would any government be without forms? Next, the telegraph and the railways enabled states to bring their populations under control and to cast their networks over entire countries, even continents.[21] Nor were rulers satisfied when the time it took to travel from the capital to the provinces (for example, from Paris to Bordeaux or Toulouse) was reduced from weeks to days or hours. The role of technologies such as telephones, teleprinters, computers (first put to use in calculating the results of the US census), highways, and other systems of transportation and communication was even greater than that of their predecessors. Without them it would have been impossible for the state to contemplate the task that it had undertaken since the beginning of the 19th century: to impose its control over every part of society from the highest to the lowest and almost regardless of distance and geographical location.
From the beginning, though, much of modern technology bore a Janus face. On the one hand it gave governments the tools with which to dominate their countries and populations as never before. On the other it tended to transcend national borders, crossing them and turning them into obstacles to domination. This was because, unlike its pre-1800 predecessors, much of modern technology can operate only when, and to the extent that, it is grouped into systems. A plough, a hammer, a musket, or a ship can do its job even in the absence of others of its kind; but an individual railway station—or a telegraph apparatus, or a telephone—is simply useless on its own. In such systems what matters is the network of tracks, or wires, or switchboards, that connects each unit with countless others. Even more crucial is the central directing hand which, sorting out routes and priorities, enables them to communicate with each other at will, in an orderly manner and without mutual interference.
As the history of both telegraphs and railways shows, most of the early technological systems were launched by private entrepreneurs. However, in most countries the demand for economic efficiency or military effectiveness soon caused them to be taken over by governments. Either this was done by way of outright ownership, through nationalization and the establishment of a state monopoly, or else by means of regulations designed to ensure that they would be available in wartime. Still, there were limits to the extent that governments could control this technology without at the same time reducing its cost-effectiveness. A railway net designed exclusively for meeting the needs of a single country—such as the broad-gauged one constructed by Imperial Russia and later passed to the USSR—provided some protection against invasion but also acted as a barrier to Russian trade with other countries. The same applies to various attempts to build autonomous electricity grids, highway systems, or telephone networks, to say nothing of fax machines and computers.
In theory each state was free to exercise its sovereignty and build its own networks, ignoring those of its neighbors and refusing to integrate with them. In practice it could do so only by incurring a tremendous technological and economic cost. The current plight of North Korea is a perfect case in point; the price of isolation was inefficiency and an inability to maximize the benefits of precisely those technologies that have developed most rapidly since 1945—communication (including data processing) and transportation. Conversely, in order to enjoy those benefits, states had to integrate their networks with those of their neighbors. What is more, it was necessary for them to join the international bodies whose task was to regulate the new technologies on behalf of all. The first such body was the International Railway Committee, which traces its origins to the 1860s. A century later they numbered in the hundreds, and the only way for any state to avoid becoming entangled in their coils was to doom itself to something like a pre-industrial existence.
These technological developments brought about a decisive change in the nature of the global economy.[22] The interwar period had been characterized by attempts to build self-contained empires; now, the most successful states were those which, like Germany and Japan and South Korea, were most integrated into the world market. By and large the more one exported and imported—in other words, maximized one's comparative advantage—the greater one's economic success. As more and more stock exchanges were opened to foreign investors and capital, a greater and greater percentage of a state's assets, and those of its citizens, was likely to be located beyond its borders. Conversely, inside those borders more and more wealth was likely to be controlled by persons and corporations based elsewhere. During the 1980s economic statistics began to recognize the change by separating GNP from GDP. Generally the gap between the two provided a good index for the economic performance of any particular country; for example, 40 percent of all Japanese goods are now being produced outside Japan.
Another blow to state control implicit in the shift toward a global economy was that governments gradually lost their grip over their own currencies. If a nation was to participate in international trade, its currency had to be convertible, as free as possible from administrative controls. But freedom from administrative controls put it at the mercy of the international market. Gone were the days when, as during the period 1914-1939, most governments tried to create closed monetary systems and lay down the value of their currencies by fiat. Gone, too, were the Bretton Woods agreements which lasted from 1944 to 1971 and which pegged the various currencies to a US dollar which was itself pegged to gold.[23] Governments did not lose all influence over their currencies; they still controlled the money supply as well as interest rates. Nevertheless, the values of these currencies became subject to wild fluctuations that were often beyond the power of central banks, or even combinations of central banks, to regulate. Their inability to do so put a premium on hedging, on holding at least some of one's assets in foreign currency. The merry-go-round leading to less and less government control continued.
Finally, the unprecedented development of electronic information services seems to mark another step toward the coming collapse of the state. Traditionally no state has ever been able to completely control the thoughts of all its citizens; to the credit of the more liberally-minded among them, it must be added that they never even tried. Though the invention of print greatly increased the amount of information that could be produced, the ability to move that information across international borders remained limited by the need to physically transport paper, as well as by language barriers. The first of these problems was solved by the invention of radio. The introduction of television, which relies on pictures instead of words, to a large extent eliminated the second. During the 1980s cable and satellite TV, as well as videotape, became widely available and capable of providing near-instant coverage of events on a global scale. With the advent of computer networks and the consequent democratization of access to information, the battle between freedom and control was irretrievably lost by the latter, much to the regret of numerous governments.
Though the role of the various information services in the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc cannot be measured, it was certainly very large.[24] Indeed, even as these lines are being written, the future of Russia and its fellow republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States will be determined partly by the way the media will represent developments inside them. Conversely, states such as China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are imitating the late East Germany, doing what they can to prevent their populations from being corrupted by these developments. The social, economic, and technological price that these states pay for their self-enforced isolation is considerable. In the long run, their struggle almost certainly will be hopeless.
Part IV. Maintaining Public Order
As governments surrender or lose their hold over many aspects of the media, the economy, and technology, and as public ownership as well as welfare programs stagnate or retreat, one of the principal functions still remaining to the state is to protect its own integrity against internal disorder. Thus the question that must be asked is whether they have been successful in this task; is it being mastered, and can they be expected to accomplish it in the future?
So far this article has concentrated on the developed countries. However, at this point it is useful to invert the order, starting our survey with undeveloped ones. It is a characteristic of many traditional societies that the right to resort to violence, instead of being monopolized by an all-powerful state, is diffused in the hands of family heads, tribal chieftains, feudal noblemen, and the like, each of whom is responsible for policing his own subjects and for fighting off challenges by the rest. Conversely, the extent to which so-called Third World countries have succeeded in demolishing other organizations and concentrating violence in their own hands is one very good index of their progress toward modernization.
To look at many developing countries today, that progress has been either slow or nonexistent. As a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly has pointed out,[25] in much of sub-Saharan Africa the state has already collapsed, often before it was able to properly establish itself. Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, the Sudan, and Zaire all have been torn by civil war or, at the very least, disorder on a scale that approximates it. On the Mediterranean littoral the position of Egypt and Algeria is scarcely better, confronted as those states are by the formidable challenge of Islamic fundamentalism, which in recent years has led to the deaths of thousands and which shows no sign of abating. Meanwhile, in the southern extremity of the continent, it is touch and go whether South Africa will be able to make progress toward a peaceful multiracial society or be torn apart by the war of all against all.
From Japan to Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, some Asian states have been enormously successful in maintaining internal order and protecting the lives and property of their residents. Not so others such as Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, India, Iran, Iraq, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and, most recently, Pakistan; all of these are now confronted with a loss of control that ranges from riots and clashes between opposing gangs to full-scale civil war. China, too, is not immune. It is true that the coastal regions are making unprecedented economic progress; however, Beijing does not seem to be capable of dealing either with the 30-year-old Tibetan uprising or with the challenge of Muslim separatists in the undeveloped far west of the country. Against this background much of the Chinese leaders' opposition to liberalization may be attributed to the fear—which is certainly not unfounded—that the outcome may be anarchy of the kind that all but destroyed China between 1911 and 1949.[26]
Finally, in Latin America the ability of the state to guarantee internal law and order has, given the lack of a proper technological infrastructure and the immense gaps between rich and poor, always been in doubt. While some parts of the continent, such as Chile, are making good progress toward modernization, many others are clearly lagging behind and may be becoming less orderly rather than more. To adduce just two examples that have made headlines during the last few months, the government of Mexico has lost control over the southern part of the country, whereas that of Brazil is even now using the army in an attempt to reconquer its own former capital of Rio de Janeiro. In still other places it is the druglords who exercise de facto power. In countries where repeated assassinations of public officials take place, there can be no expectation for the rule of law or the kind of stability necessary for economic growth.
What makes these facts all the more disturbing is that, so far from remaining limited to Third World countries, the disorder seems to be spreading. The chaos that overtook Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Moldavia, Tajikistan, and Yugoslavia following the collapse of communist rule is well known; current conditions in these countries resemble those of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) more than they do anything that we would expect from a well-ordered modern state. Nor, to judge by the experience of Spain in the Basque country and of Britain in Northern Ireland (to say nothing of the recent Tokyo poison gas attack and the Oklahoma City bombing), does it appear that First World countries are in principle immune to threats of this kind. Many of them are challenged by organizations which, whatever their goals, are capable of commanding fanatical loyalties and unleashing them against the state; these organizations, incidentally, often take better care of their members than the state does.
Attempting to deal with nongovernmental organizations resorting to violence, many modern states have found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand their most important weapons and weapon systems—including not just nuclear ones but most conventional ones as well—are clearly too powerful and indiscriminate to be of much use against those groups. On the other hand, should they use the terrorists' own methods against them, there exists the clear danger that they will turn into terrorists themselves. Under these circumstances many First World governments have chosen to diddle. They counter the challenge without much resolution and pretend that since the number of casualties is often smaller than that which results from ordinary motor traffic, the problem is merely a nuisance. Others have given way and decentralized, as Spain did in the case of Catalonia; or else they are even now preparing to share control over some of their provinces with others, as are the British in Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, from the White House to 10 Downing Street, the residences of presidents and prime ministers as well as entire government quarters have been transformed into fortresses. Private security has turned into a growth industry par excellence; in the United States alone it is said to employ 1.6 million people (as many as the number of active troops) and to cost $52 billion a year, far more than all US police departments combined.[27] Feeling themselves exposed, more and more individuals and corporations are either renting protection or setting up their own. While one does not want to exaggerate the problem, unquestionably all of this is symptomatic of the state's faltering ability to hold on to its monopoly over violence—or, in plain words, to protect its citizens' lives and property.
Part V. The Outlook
At a time when new states are being born almost daily, paradoxically the fate of the state appears sealed. The growth in numbers may itself be a sign of decay; what everybody has is worth little or nothing. Furthermore, far from safeguarding their hard-won sovereignty, most new states do not even wait until they have been properly established before they start looking for ways to integrate with their neighbors. A good example is provided by that unique political construct, the Commonwealth of Independent States. Another is the eventual Palestinian state. Its leaders are even now talking of cooperation with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt—in fact with anyone who can help them transcend the limits of their own people's small size.
Contrary to the fears of George Orwell in 1984, modern technology, in the form of nuclear weapons on the one hand and unprecedented means for communication and transportation on the other, has not resulted in the establishment of unshakable totalitarian dictatorships. Instead of thought control we have CNN and, which many regimes consider almost as dangerous, Aaron Spelling; instead of unpersons, Amnesty International. The net effect has been to make governments lose power in favor of organizations that are not sovereign and are not states.
Some of these organizations stand above the state—for example, the European Common Market, the West European Union, and, above all, the United Nations, which since the Gulf War has begun to play a role akin to that of the medieval popes in authorizing or prohibiting a state from waging international war. Others are of a completely different kind, such as international bodies, multinational corporations, the media, and various terrorist organizations some of which can barely be told apart from gangs of ordinary criminals. What they all have in common is that they either assume some of the functions of the state or manage to escape its control. All also have this in common: being either much larger than states or without geographical borders, they are better positioned to take advantage of recent developments in transportation and communications. The result is that their power seems to be growing while that of the state declines.
To sum up, the 300-year period that opened at Westphalia and during which the state was the most important organization in which people lived—first in Europe, then in other places—is coming to an end. Nobody knows the significance of the transition from a system of sovereign, territorial, legally equal states to one that takes greater cognizance of the new realities; it is likely to be eventful and, as is already the case in many places, quite possibly bloody. Still, it is worth recalling that the state's most remarkable products to date have been Hiroshima and Auschwitz; the former could never have been built by any organization but a state (and the most powerful one, at that), whereas the latter was above all an exercise in bureaucratic management.[28] Whatever the future may bring, it cannot be much worse than the past. For those who regret and fear the passing away of the world with which we are familiar, let that be their consolation.
NOTES
1. Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994).
2. For some figures see P. Flora, ed., State, Economy and Society in Western Europe, 1875-1975 (London: 1983) vol. 1, part iv, p. 441: also Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 153.
3. See, e.g., George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: H. Fertig, 1975); also E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif.: 1976).
4. See Steven B. Smith, "Hegel's Views on War, the State, and International Relations," American Political Science Review, 77 (September 1983), 624-32.
5. See above all Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949).
6. One of the first to perceive that nuclear weapons would limit war was Bernard Brodie in The Absolute Weapon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ., 1946). The best discussion of nuclear doctrine from 1945 to the Reagan years—when attention shifted to disarmament—is Lawrence Friedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).
7. For the way nuclear weapons limited interstate war, first between major powers and then increasingly among the rest, see Martin van Creveld, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1993).
8. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: the Political History of the Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 616.
9. The most famous inquiry, albeit a non-official one, was Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (St. Albans: 1972; originally published 1844).
10. For the rise of the public education system in Germany, see K. A. Schleunes, Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria, 1750-1900 (Oxford: 1989); for an international perspective on its role in building the modern state P. Flora, "Die Bildungsentwicklung im Prozess der Staaten und Nationenbildung," in P. C. Ludz, ed., Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte (Opladen: 1972).
11. See P. Flora and A. J. Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick: 1981); M. Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State (London: Batsford, 1974); and E. Berkowitz and K. McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of the Twentieth Century Reform (Lawrence, Kans.: 1988).
12. For example, France in 1610 had some 25,000 officials, one per 80 in the population. The United States in 1972 had one in 13, a sixfold increase, most of it taking place after 1870.
13. For the state of Britain's nationalized industries during the 1960s, see Graham L. Reid and Kevin Allen, Nationalized Industries (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1970; also, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970).
14. For the British side of the story, see R. Kelf-Cohen, British Nationalisation 1945-1973 (London: Macmillan, 1973).
15. For the creation of the American welfare state, see Roger A. Freeman, The Growth of American Government: A Morphology of the Welfare State (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1975); also N. and B. Gilbert, The Enabling State: Modern Welfare Capitalism in America (New York: 1989).
16. The crisis of the welfare state is discussed, for example, in John Logue, "Will Success Spoil the Welfare State?" Dissent (Winter 1985). C. Leaman, The Collapse of Welfare Reform: Political Institution, Policy and the Poor in Britain and the US (Lanham, 1986).
17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: 1952; originally published 1821), pp. 188f; Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittiche (New York: 1976; originally published 1923), pp. 48ff.
18. In the United States, attacks on bureaucracy started with the Hoover Commission Report (Washington, D.C., 1949) and proceeded through J. Landis's Report on the Regulatory Agencies to the President Elect, US (Washington D.C., 1960). However, so long as prosperity lasted little was done.
19. For some comparative figures on various countries see Economist, 4 September 1993, p. 103.
20. In the Gulf, US strategy was almost entirely dictated by the need to avoid casualties: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: the Inside Story of the Conflict of the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), passim.
21. See H. Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: 1975).
22. For a good introduction to these problems see Beth V. and Robert M. Yarbrough, The World Economy, Trade and Finance (3d ed.; Fort Worth, Tex.: 1994).
23. For the origins, rise, and fall of the Bretton Woods system see M. D. Bordo and B. Eichengreen, eds., A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for International Monetary Reform (Chicago: 1993),
24. Exclusive of East Germany—where 15 million people regularly watched West German television—Western radio stations such as RFE, VOA, BBC, and DW claimed to have almost 100 million regular listeners in 1989.
25. R. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 44-76.
26. Interestingly enough, the language of warlordism is already making a comeback; see A. Waldon, "The Warlord: Twentieth Century Chinese Understanding of Violence, Militarism and Imperialism," American Historical Review, 96 (October 1991), 1073-1100.
27. Figures from B. Jenkins, "Thoroughly Modern Sabotage," Worldlink (March-April 1995), 16. For two works on the origins and nature of private security in the United Kingdom see N. South, Policing for Profit; The Private Security Sector (London: 1982); and I. Will, The Big Brother Society (London: 1983).
28. For the effort involved in building the bomb see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); for the Holocaust as an exercise in bureaucracy above all, Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).
Dr. Martin van Creveld is a professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and has been a Fellow of War Studies at Kings College, Cambridge. During the 1991-92 school year, he taught at the US Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. He is the author of many books, including Fighting Power: German and U.S. Performance, 1939-1945; Technology and War; Command in War; Supplying War; The Training of Officers: From Military Professionalism to Irrelevance; The Transformation of War; Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict; and Air Power and Maneuver Warfare.
Sacramentum Caritatis
the Apostolic Exhortation (in Latin)
NLM highlights and reflections
First observations by Fr. Zuhlsdorf
New Catholic's first impression at Rorate Caeli
Stuff by Amy Welborn here, here, and here
NLM highlights and reflections
First observations by Fr. Zuhlsdorf
New Catholic's first impression at Rorate Caeli
Stuff by Amy Welborn here, here, and here
Peter Hitchens defends Prince Charles
with respect to what is defensible, and gives a nod to crunchy conservatism here.
Monday, March 12, 2007
What have we done to our daughters?
Are You There God? It's Me, Monica
How nice girls got so casual about oral sex
by Caitlin Flanagan
via Godspy
How nice girls got so casual about oral sex
by Caitlin Flanagan
via Godspy
Dr. Ron Paul declares
Mr. Larison has links. As far as I can tell, 0 coverage from the MSM.
Mr. Lew Rockwell refers us to a comparison between Dr. Paul and Mr. Chuck Hagel.
Mr. Laurence Vance points us to this excerpt from an interview.
Mr. Lew Rockwell refers us to a comparison between Dr. Paul and Mr. Chuck Hagel.
Mr. Laurence Vance points us to this excerpt from an interview.
Continuity of family for Sustainable Culture
Continuity of family for Sustainable Culture
by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #123 - March 4, 2006
The growing interest in sustainable living is partly attributable to preparing for petrocollapse and a subsequent lower-energy society. Even without the certainty of global oil extraction peaking now (or very soon), quite a few back-to-the-land hippies have for decades emphasized "Earth skills," communal living, and other forms of living lightly on our ecologically stressed planet.
More than ever, thanks to the "peak oil craze," all sorts of people who are concerned about resource depletion and climate change are establishing or strengthening networks and developing useful skills. The most oft-discussed topic may be the design of food-gardens and farms that use a minimum of outside inputs.
In Eugene, Oregon last month, I attended a Permaculture slide-show of a depaved, sun-optimized garden home I visited. The property owner Jan Spencer speaks and writes about his workshops under the title "Culture Change Series." Getting new adherents for such activities has always been the challenge. But Spencer has noticed that the peace & justice movement is getting more interested in life-style change, the longer war-over-oil drags on and Peak Oil becomes common parlance.
Criticism of the government mounts, and the focus is not limited to policies. The entire system, including corporate economics, is increasingly questioned as folks acknowledge alarming climate change and never-ending militarism. Yet, activists still should court the conscious public servant and politician – especially the local ones – just in case an awakening or small victory is possible. Meanwhile, attaining food security and a reliable community beyond the nuclear family are surging, whether as goals or worries.
In the short term, we find it hard as ever to "live the change we want to see," as paying our bills and debts takes up most of our days. So it remains a tiny but growing segment of the U.S. population that thinks and acts toward long-term survival and a better life. In the back of many peoples' minds, they think a massive crisis like a "national New Orleans" won't happen in their lifetime, so it doesn't have an in-your-face priority. Or maybe the wealthier folk have "too much to lose" to start living less wastefully. Getting to a sustainable culture – safely, if possible – may be costly, but is priceless. But are we really doing all we can to get there? How healthy are our family-relations and our minds, when it comes to assuring continuity of house-holding and bridging generations?
Where's Grandma?
One little-discussed topic for the sustainability movement is the continuity of families. Protecting generations and family lines comes down to security of one's family home. If family members lose contact either by distance, enmity or death, it is like one's leg being cut off. When people lose their home, especially if they have depended on the surrounding land, this "collateral damage" or economic oppression (or other form of theft) can guarantee the breakdown or dissolution of family simply due to members being no longer able to stay together.
One of the main characteristics of advanced Western Civilization is the loss of homeland, the jump in individual homelessness, and much moving away from the family home, for those of us who had one to begin with. (See Culture Change magazine Issue 19, "Family Cohesion Challenged by Sprawl and Greed") One factor is population growth and the loss of common land and open space. But materialism, greed, individualism, and violence may have done the most to uproot people. The Enclosure in the late Middle Ages in Britain comes to mind.
Sustainable living as discussed today often mentions a "sense of place." There have been books, often spiritual and nature-oriented, on sense of place and the importance of one's home. It is often taken for granted that families will be staying together in eco-villages, for example. But just as often these intentional communities are full of individual joiners and people without much family cohesion. How many times have extended families moved into communes or into other collectives? They didn't need to, because they already had community.
Yet, as large cities become increasingly vulnerable to petrocollapse or even turn into giant concentration camps, large, close families are also seeing the need to probably relocate to rural areas or to emigrate. Access to land isn't thought of by many of today's consumers who bleat for their next dose of fast-food.
Whether we are ensconced in a low-populated place that naturally supplies its own food or are urban dwellers, rich or poor but still over-dependent on petroleum, an essential element of survival is having one's blood relations at hand. Perhaps the only country in the world that would question this is the U.S., where people farm out the youngest and oldest members of their families to be cared for by strangers. Additionally, the U.S. also has much domestic abuse, so people are glad to stay away from one's relatives. Substitute-families are formed, as friends nurture each other and can share values not shared back home. A fine example of city-living solidarity among random friends is the story in the musical Rent, although it was typical that the characters had no consciousness on the unsustainability of consuming.
However, if Grandma, for example, isn't there with her children and grandchildren, this equates to a makeshift home at best. It is true that a new home may be established, with hope, competence, love, and a semblance of security. But why is Grandma gone, assuming she is alive?
It is Grandma's and Grandpa's stories, not their possessions, which need to be valued most. This is the way we evolved and learned so as to survive and develop. For those who don't feel a love bond between family generations, one can at least admit that elders often possess vital information for sustainability – even if traditions are scoffed at by the most modern among us. Few U.S. mainstreamers are taking the time to learn from elders, but respect and warmth for the old ones may return – mostly because, unfortunately, necessity will require it.
It is almost a given that nursing homes are unfortunate and best avoided, although many who agree with that statement still go that route. But just as often the grandparents and great-grandparents are alive, but are elsewhere and may or may not be institutionalized. And, of course, some are lost – as soldiers, miners or victims of industrial poisoning/disease.
Come together
A big family means more protection for the members, if many are together making a household. This does not mean people need to have more children, at least in this overpopulated age. What has to happen is people coming together.
Coming together is culture change. John Lennon, an exponent of culture change, had a hit song with the Beatles called Come Together. Some listeners may have thought old John was just referring to sex. Be that as it may, people have to get together and support each other, the community, or the tribe. The family has been the prerequisite for larger social "organization" (organism, preferably). The nation-state is a relatively recent form of organization, and it may not endure strongly after petrocollapse.
Coming together as a planet – i.e., virtually all people feeling more or less the same – may yet happen, as may have happened in the not too distant past. This will be possible again when greed is checked by "new" culture. As long as someone can amass wealth, it is at someone's expense. This is why certain practices and institutions must go. In the Spanish Republic in Barcelona, landlords were publicly educated in not being allowed to continue exacting any rents.
A beautiful story about both the family-factor in continuity, and about the survival-ramifications of greed, is a 1963 book by Hal Borland. In When the Legends Die, a Ute family in the Southwest U.S. is forced through conflict to escape capitalistic enslavement by returning to wild nature. The reader wants to see the triumph of the heroes living in the wilderness because of the author's gift of evoking the universal yearning for oneness with other creatures and the seasons.
In Primal Tears, a new book by Kelpie Wilson, the story surrounds a cross-species character who is half human and half bonobo. A major theme of this lively tale is continuity of family through closeness despite a species difference. The book cleverly advocates environmental protection and animal rights, using as its main setting the mountainous Siskiyou-Kalmiopsis wilderness region in Oregon and California. It is clear from the first pages that the story's family needs healthy nature and a secure home for continuity, although the absence of large, extended family is remedied by very close friendships.
A healthy mind is not a given
In these stories and in our hopes and efforts, it is assumed that people are basically healthy and sane. Alas, a poisonous and harsh culture has compromised or ruined millions of minds and souls, including some of those who might like to form community. Many folks are mentally ill, helping to separate themselves from family they need. Petrochemical drugs, bad food, the sedentary lifestyle, isolation, and alienation from nature all contribute to mental instability.
There is lack of clarity in cause and effect: Are people ill due to the culture? Will their health and social contribution improve when they land in a more natural setting? Or is it more a matter of these crazy people – many of whom function effectively by most measures, including politically – being the big obstacle to a "new" sustainable culture?
Some insane people are not diagnosed as such, but they are destructive to themselves and others. In U.S. society, among friends there may be much less emotional baggage compared to family situations. But among friends especially in urban areas, there is plenty of needless friction, perhaps stress, or superficiality due to busyness. Uptight or disturbed people in the today's troubled U.S. often bother, badger, criticize and abuse their loved ones the most. This may result in absent loved ones. How can there then be continuity or a sustainable blood line? Although the accepted mainstream American story does not feature tragic loss and dislocation, it happens often – especially with poor minorities.
It happens for educated, wealthy whites too, when the stakes are high. An example is my mother Mesa Lundberg’s loss of both home and freedom, separating her from family and comforting surroundings in her older age. Mesa is the widow of “the Oil Guru” Dan Lundberg, who started Lundberg Survey Incorporated, a firm I ran for a time that enriched her. The overall reason for this great-grandma’s involuntary absence from her family today is the overarching culture of materialism. But illness of various kinds, manifested as selfish actions by various people in and out of the family, has struck this family hard. This has resulted in fragmentation of the family and doubt for its future. Falsely labeled as incapacitated, Mesa has value as a wise elder who retains knowledge regarding her connections to the soil, for example.
Conclusion
Perhaps these dilemmas can be largely solved when people are forced toward cooperation through the sudden, clear need to obtain sustenance from subsistence farming, gathering and hunting. No doubt the mental and "spiritual" health of a population finding its way in this historic transition will be attended to as best we can. As to issues relating to justice, people must be treated well by respecting their self-determination as it relates to common interests. And, basic human rights must rest on the continuity of family in a healthy and healthful environment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)