Goodbye to the queen, goodbye to the fairy tale

I don’t know that the 10 days of pomp and pageantry that attended the death of Queen Elizabeth is going to do the reign of King Charles much good. Unless of course the funeral was meant to signal, truly, the end of an era and the start of serious downsizing and decolonizing complete with apologies and reparations and repatriation of looted wealth. In which case it was an impressively extravagant show of love and respect, even, a well-deserved last-hurrah for a queen who did a stupendous job selling white supremacy to the world. Otherwise, if it’s going to be business as usual under Charles, then the recent ostentatious display of vast wealth is grist for the mill of anti-monarchists of all colors and stripes in a world where the happy rich are obscenely few and the oppressed poor are obscenely many.

Read Chris Hedges’ Sept 12 essay, Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History. https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-monarchs-belong-in-the-dustbin-of-history

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the UK saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

… In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. Her Majesty’s Government inherited staggering wealth from the $45 trillion Great Britain looted from India, wealth accumulated by violently crushing a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine….  

And watch the Sept 14 video of Double Down News, The Dark Side of British History You Weren’t Taught in School @GeorgeMonbiot

the text.

MONBIOT. In Britain we present the colonial project as being about teaching the natives table manners and double-entry bookkeeping. In India the British manufactured a famine in the 1870s out of nothing. There were food surpluses, massive amounts of food, but the governor Lord Lytton insisted this food be exported wholesale to Britain. The ensuing starvation killed at least 12 million people, possibly as much as 29 million people.  All relief works were banned except for hard labour in labour camps, where the inmates received the same rations as the inmates of Buchenwald and where there was a 94% death rate per year.

This was all done in the name of liberal free-market capitalism; of course, the British did something similar in Ireland. In Kenya soon after the Second World War there was an uprising, by the Kikuyu people who wanted their land back. The Kikuyu were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. Almost the entire population of over a million people. People were systematically tortured to death. They invented a new kind of pliers, whose purpose was first to crush men’s testicles and then to cut them off. They raped women with bayonets, they raped men similarly. A favored technique was to Ram sand up the rectum with a stick. Sometimes they were rolled up in barbed wire, and kicked around the compound until they bled to death.

Some of the British soldiers boasted about this; this is within living memory. The Colonial Secretary lied about it, the papers documenting it were burnt. The impact of the rich and powerful Nations has been so phenomenally murderous and destructive that it is being completely airbrushed from our national consciousness.

In order to justify the land grabbing colonial projects, you had to create an ideology: we the Europeans or the Americans, have come to rescue the rest of the world from its depravity and backwardness. But in order to do that you have to be able to demonstrate that the rest of the world is depraved and backward. From this arose the racism that is still with us today. It was a necessary component of the colonial project.

Some people might claim; well, okay, we broke a few eggs to make this omelet.  As if all those human beings were eggs! But look at the omelet, isn’t it fantastic! Look we’ve made this fantastic omelet! Forget about all that unpleasant stuff and let’s just celebrate where we are.

Where we are is a continuation of the project: we commodified people’s land, and people’s labour, and turned it into our property. We’re also destroying the rest of the living world alongside it.

We don’t have to be like this. We are the same human beings as anybody else. We’re all part of the same big human family. We just have to recognize that, accept that.

Of course within Western countries there are plenty of brilliant people, resisting colonization within our own countries, and external colonization of other people’s countries. These are the voices which must come to the fore, those who emphasize altruism and kindness and generosity, and empathy for others. Those who recognize that skin color and any other difference of language, of religion, of background is completely irrelevant, by comparison to what we share, which is our humanity.

 

The Debate: Presidential vs Parliamentary

MARENG WINNIE MONSOD. … As I see it, the advocates for a parliamentary-federal over our present presidential-unitary form of government are going to get their way by hook or by crook.

By crook:  use the “restrictive” economic provisions of the Constitution as an excuse for calling for a Constituent Assembly to remove the restrictions.  Why is this considered by crook?  Because once a Constituent Assembly is called  (that’s our legislators), there is nothing that can stop them from discussing and changing the entire constitution. The result:  disaster for the Philippines

By hook:  calling for a constitutional convention with representatives from each electoral district, probably with the condition that these representatives are not sitting politicians but are “independent” minded.  Unfortunately, this will not stop the political dynasties from choosing either from their families or their friends or dummies to run for this convention.  The result: disaster for the Philippines.

Read Part I: The Historical Background https://marengwinniemonsod.ph/2022/09/17/the-debate-presidential-vs-parliamentary/

Red is a spectrum

ANTONIO CONTRERAS

… To be left or right is determined by someone’s view of the economy. Being on the left means believing that globalization should primarily serve humanity instead of the interests of global corporations, that corporate interests should be regulated to protect the environment because they wouldn’t do so if they are left alone, and that corporations should have social responsibility and should not be fixated on profits only. A leftist believes in economic regulation and in protecting the marginalized, even if it means interfering with the operations of the free market. Hence, leftists believe in minimum wages and price controls. They believe in taxing the rich more, and using taxes to finance social programs that would even include investing in the arts. While some leftists are socially authoritarian, most leftists are socially libertarian. They adhere to individual freedom, and would support divorce, same-sex marriages and abortion. They oppose the death penalty.

Being an activist for these causes, and questioning state authority, when done peacefully and under the ambit of laws, should not and cannot be considered as dangerous to the Republic. Under these rubrics, I am personally a leftist who is also a social libertarian. My score in the political compass test is a minus 6.88, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly leftist, and a minus 7.23, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly libertarian. I am not even a centrist by all accounts.

There has been too much confusion in the way popular and ordinary discourse has branded the left as essentially communist, and then further committing an egregious error of associating communism only with the armed left. Some even go to the extent of associating the left in general, and communism in particular, with authoritarian regimes. This is the ground from where red-tagging emerges as a pejorative, where liberal-progressives who espouse leftist and libertarian beliefs end up being lumped together with Marxist, Leninist and Maoist rebels, and worse, terrorists.

This corruption of political labels and categories has to end. Being leftist is different from being an armed rebel, in the same manner that being an activist does not necessarily mean that one has taken up arms to topple the government. Likewise, it is a fallacy to contrast communism with democracy, considering that there are communist and socialist parties that compete in democratic elections in countries like India.

The ideal response to red-tagging is to clarify that not all kinds of red should be tagged as enemies of the state. Environmental activists who propose green economies tend to be leftist in orientation, and so are feminists and gay activists. Organized labor unions tend to be leftist in orientation. The hatred being espoused by many diehard Duterte supporters and Marcos loyalists toward liberal activists, that even translate to their dislike of the US Democrats, is misplaced simply because they are premised on fallacious imaging and assumptions. There are many good people who are fighting for socially relevant causes that under these misinformed rubrics would fall in the category of enemies of the state. A cursorial look at history would reveal that practically all major social benefits that people now enjoy, from wage protection to social amelioration policies, are largely the result of leftist and progressive activism. These include giving ayuda (financial assistance) and educational assistance.

… The solution to political violence is not red-tagging but to make sure that the interests of the marginalized are served by legitimate institutions of the state. And the better response to red-tagging is to show that some types of red are, in fact, essential in achieving that end.

Climate deniers’ claims: Separating reality from idiocy

BEN KRITZ

THE so-called World Climate Declaration that is supposed to be such a “savage blow” against the “political orthodoxy” of anthropogenic climate change is more like a wet noodle than a whip when it comes to the actual arguments it presents. It bases its assertion that “there is no climate emergency” on five claims, all of which have been repeatedly debunked for years as they are either misrepresentations of scientific findings, outright lies, and in one case, lunacy of a depth that would make Velikovsky look sane.

As I said in my previous column, there is no debate about climate change; the basic premise has already been accepted and made part of the governing policy of the entire world because there is a vast amount of evidence to support it. There may be debate, and there probably should be, about the best ways to respond to the climate crisis, but the question of whether or not there is a crisis has long since been answered. That raises another question, however: Why should anyone continue to try to convince a tiny, malcontented minority that refuses to even read the scientific data lest it threaten their ideology with uncertainty?

It is a fair question, and one that I mentally review every time I take up this subject, especially after reading, and in a few cases responding to the flood of offended comments from climate deniers that inevitably follows. Honestly, I do not expect to “convert” anyone, because I do not believe that it is within the power of human argument to actually do that, at least when it comes to the topic of climate change — it is a bit like trying to convince a deeply religious person that his God doesn’t exist.

Fortunately, Earth itself will — in that Darwinian way nature works — sort out the climate deniers without help from me or anyone else. There will inevitably come a time when every climate denier will experience the effects of what Man has wrought on the environment firsthand, and that experience will either compel them to get with the program, or remove them from the human equation entirely. In the meantime, the real point of taking them to ask for creating and spreading disinformation is to prevent them from encouraging people to harm themselves and their communities. Practices and policies that lead to a cleaner, healthier environment are good and improve our quality of life, whether there’s a specific reason for them or not; exhorting people to resist those practices and policies is simply malicious, sociopathic demagogy.

So, not for the first time and almost certainly not the last, let us take a closer look at the spurious arguments made in defense of the assertion that “there is no climate emergency”:

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

This is certainly true, and no climate scientist has ever suggested otherwise; in fact, a large part of what makes climate research so complex is the challenge of accurately identifying natural cycles so that the human impact on them can be likewise accurately determined. Over Earth’s long history, there have been periods of global warming and cooling, many of which were characterized by significant increases or decreases in greenhouse gases. What the climate deniers leave out, however, is that those historic increases in CO2 and methane led to serious environmental disruptions, including mass extinctions. Far from being evidence that human emissions are inconsequential, the environmental record is even more proof that massive increases in greenhouse gases are lethal to life on Earth.

Warming is far slower than predicted

This assertion is simply a lie. Several research studies already published over the past couple of years, along with ongoing research — which is being continuously conducted for the very purpose of determining whether climate models are accurate or not — show that the warming of the planet has tightly tracked model predictions, dating all the way back to even the comparatively crude models of the 1970s.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

As the previous assertion is false, so is this one. Climate policy may differ from place to place, and thus be more or less effective, but it is all based on the same set of accurate data.

More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet

This is the most ridiculous of the claims made in the so-called World Climate Declaration. Plants do indeed need CO2, but more CO2 in the atmosphere does not create more plants. As the world’s forest cover disappears at an accelerating rate, the amount of CO2 that plant life can absorb from the atmosphere is constantly decreasing, while the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by human activity increases — to the point that there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years, with far less plant life to absorb it.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

The best answer to this assertion is “yes and no” because this is the aspect of climate science that is the most complicated and bears the largest degree of uncertainty. While scientists have nailed down broad climate trends — increasing CO2 levels, increasing sea and atmospheric temperatures — and certain broad effects, such as overall increase in the global average temperature and sea level, the models are not as accurate for predicting short-term, regional effects. It is a matter of scale; a model built on a dataset that encompasses the entire globe over a timescale of millennia has limitations if applied to a specific country or region for a period of decades or years.

Nonetheless, some specific, real-time effects have been accurately connected to the warming of the planet over the past 250 to 300 years since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Global warming has established a hotter baseline for summer temperatures, which dramatically increases the odds of more frequent, more extreme, and longer-lasting heat waves, which in turn increase the likelihood of more frequent and extreme weather events — including more extreme winter weather, due to the pole-ward shift of warmer sea and atmospheric temperatures altering weather patterns.

ben.kritz@manilatimes.net