China the Silk Route and the Internet:The East West Connection

Chapter 2

China 中国 the Silk Route and the Internet

Gaia’s Mind

For a brain to work patterns of thought and memory have to exist. We now examine what some of these look like on the planet without exploring in detail how or why they came into being. Such patterns exist where there is an interconnected group of human beings working to some common view of purpose.

Such interconnectivity has always existed locally: in a family, in a village, in a culture, in a society and in enterprise whither it part of the bureaucracy or commerce. All these work precisely because they form patterns based on shared interest and understanding of how the thoughts and actions of others mesh with those of one’s self. That is how they function. This is why humanity through speech and writing has a mechanism for constructing communal visions of the world unavailable to most other animals.

Of course we share with other animals a huge capacity for non-verbal communication and the significance of that for engagement in some forms of co-ordinated activity should not be forgotten. When an impala or a wildebeest senses danger and starts to run all follow its action.

It is also true that even with the old physical limitation to inter human communication that global thoughts did arise. They formed very slowly and imperfectly over many years if not decades or centuries of time. Their formation was restricted to the speed at which people could walk and the extent to which they could learn and understand another’s language. However, planet wide thinking did occur. Most importantly it occurred along the great data bus of medieval times the Silk Road that connected China to the West.

Over this route merchants moved goods, silk, tea, spices, gold, silver etc to be used in exchange motivated by the surplus that could be raised sufficient to justify the merchants efforts in effecting the connection. As a bi-product of this trade information, knowledge and know how would permeate from East to West slowly and imperfectly. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder passed this way.

Most of the activity our brains engage in modulate processes that enable us to exist and survive i.e. acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire and distribute oxygen around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this breathing in air, separating out the oxygen that is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives ending by breathing out, carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide being then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breath to complete the cycle from Gaia’s perspective

Similarly our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We ingest this and the
brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use together with
oxygen to create the energy needed for muscle to function. The unused ingested material is
excreted out into the environment where it is re-cycled as water and nitrogenous material to be
used as food for plants.

China on the Way?: 中国 路

中国 路

The current modern age pulsates with potential and buzzes with excitement. The engine driving this is China 中国 . In a very short space of time China consciousness has exploded onto the world stage. To me this seems to have occured in the last two years. In that period I have chosen to live in Australia. Here the North East Asian influence is palpable.

Of course this is nonesense. In global terms China has never been unimportant. It was easily the largest economy in the world well into the 19th Century. It was only temporarily displaced by the UK in the 19th and the US in the 20th centuries.

Such a country, powerful for over two millenium, understandably grew complacent in its political economic self perception. It had a uniquely effective source of power in its soil and its means to exploit it. China was beautifully crafted philisophically and adminstratively to be dominant in the agricultural age.

Such a well adapterd agricultural country and regime clearly had severe adjustment difficulty when the source of wealth and power shifted to that derivable from science and entrepreneurial enterprise, the industrial revolution. In consequence, in the modern era, China's comparative wealth and power declined rapidly. China has spent most of the last century adjusting to the political economic reality of modernism. It is no longer wrong footed with that. Its successfully efforts to catch up on modernism are very impressive. They are doing so at the fastest rate of any country in history. This is the engine driving the current global economy.

However the rest of us are already beginning to live in a post-modern age. It is not yet evident that China truly understands this The basis of political economic power is shifting again. this shift is a way from the machine driven industrial base of the moderism on which capitalism was built to the shifting values of the post modern age based on the creation and distribution of knowledge and perception. The Chineses are not alone in such myopia. It also seems to be a disease of the country that came to dominate the modern era, the USA, which do its own disadvantage lloks far too much inwards to its own huge domestic market of 300mill+ and stable and largely ignores the global market place of 6.5million + and growing.

One family in the US has notably avoided this general myopia the Bush family. They were quickly onto the outword looking post modern game. George Bush senior became the US government's first official representative in China. As such he established deep and lasting relationships between his family and the up and coming leadership of erly 21st Century China.

Few other Americans even acknowledge much beyond the existence of a world outside the USA. 9/11 may have changed that perceptualy but paradoxically, apart from the military, even fewer American's now make the connections the Bush family recognised are essential for success in the New Age. Most American's have found that "they" don't like us and avoid travelling to where "they" are, the rest of the planet.

The Bush family is not only well connected in China. They also connect in that other area of the world signicant to the post modern survival of humnaity, the Middle East. Many years ago they connected into Saudi Arabia, not least to the Bin Laden family. This is to be expected of Texas Oilmen. In fact this is far more to be expected than the Chinese connection. This American family have demonstrated the pay-off from such outreach. It is to be hoped that more and more Americans will get the message. Unfortunately at the moment they do not. If they do not they will be left behind like China but for a different reason.

China is myopic abut post modernism because they see wealth in industrial capitialistic terms and post moderism is politically scary anarchy. The US is myopic about the consequences of post moderism for while a lot of americans are engaged with it their engagement is limited to a field of view determined by the geopolitical boundaries of the USA or even of their own state within it. American's are the children of the world but when looking out from their own situation frequently see themselves in a mirror and believe that to be the rest of the planet.

It is sad that global US connectivity is not more widepread. Such connectivity could presage fruitful, happy, significant wider and deeper satisfying and lucrative relationships. If more US players could learn from the Bush family and choose to put down deeper global roots out future world could be better faster. If Americans would participate with the rest of us to establish strong bases of operation in and between the three most significant geographical regions and philsophical forms of our "Post-modern Age" all our lives would be better faster:-

• China and North East Asian communality
,

• US and North Atlantic libertarian individualism


• the Middle East and Islams balanced marriage between communal responsibity and individual rights and freedom before the power of the universe.

It is evident that the Middle East is reaching out to the rest of the planet as the rest of the planet reaches into it. The wealth generated by its mastery of the planets store of energy is being used to establish global connectivity fromthe Gulf to the Resst of the Planet. Those leading in Middle East know that their current basis of wealth is short term. They are acting to be well placed at the maturity of the Post Modern Era.

China is similarly reaching out but seems to do so in what is a largely passe manner. China is becoming ever more effective at identifying and accessing the natural physical resources needed to dominate in a modernising industrial age. In this their current behaviour emulates that of the UK in the 19th and the US and Europe in the 20th Century. The problem for China is that we are at the beginning of the Post Modern Age. How can a communitarian industrial China jump start itself into such and era? Virtual not physical resources now pave the Way 路 to economic and political power and it is important to us all that China becomes fully engaged in sharing that power with the rest of us.

Terrorism and Corporate Social Responsibility

Globalization brings with it new threats to human security.

States were the traditional providers of security. Globalization and the ICT infrastructure supporting it undermines the geo-political boundaries defining a traditional state area of competence. States now outsource much of their own delivery systems and infrastructure to commercial corporations. For commercial reasons these in turn source their own requirements through using a network of commercial organizations that often span the planet.

Threats to this system whither from terrorism or other sources no longer occur at a border set by a state. Even the infrastructure that seems to be within a jurisdiction is interpentrated by reliance on the global commercial network described. Internal ICT infrastructure now tends to be commercially owned. if it is on eoften finds its integrity depends on a global network of corporate commercial interconnectivity.

This raises three issues for present day Corporate Social Responsibility

First to what extent should a global corporate network use its own resources to assist any one state with data and access to the information that state feels it needs to ensure its own and its citizens security?

Second does any one corporation in such a global network of interconnectivity really know for the risks it is exposing its shareholders, employees and customers to when it outsources in such a manner?

Third in the global environment the jurisdiction of states and individuals no longer runs. The actors are all corporate, NGOs, commercial companies and semi-public international bodies and agencies. Is it legitimate for such corporate bodies to accept coporate social resposibility for their mutual security from terrorism etc when the resources they have access to have been provided to pursue partial not global social interests?

These are serious questions which do not seems as yet to be being addressed publicly by global corporations and theri stakeholders.

AT&T has been accused of being a participant with the Bush administration in the currently questioned intrusions into the privacy of US citizens and ofcourse the US Congress has recently inquired into the co-operation of CISCO Systems, Google, Microsoft etc with the security services of the government in China. At current rates of expansion in its ICT infrastructure China will soon be a bigger customer of these corporations than the US. While currently their national and corporate responsibilities may provide clarity as to where their loyalties commercially and nationally should lie. More ambiguity will clearly soon exist in defining the relationship between their corporate responsibility and theircorporate social responsibility

It is now clearly part of a corporations responsibility to manage the risks to which it exposes its various stakeholders but how can that be assessed in the world we describe. A telephone call or internet message will be automatically routed over the self organizing global network of communications in many different ways even perhaps in the course of one dialogue. Whose responsibility is the security of such a connection? If a corporation outsources its customers service calls to an other coporation in an other country how does it know for certain that the information such systems will inevitably generate, as to the quality and costs of their operation, do not leak to a competitor or a cyber terrorist interest in damaging them as a symbol of the state they emananate from?

Should coporate bodies not now be fully recognised as the indepedent intities they no dout are whither their origins are political, commercial or not for profit and act together in corporate society to protect each other from predation. To an extent this is happening but generally this rle is bein abrigated because such security is often seen by senior executives as the responsibility of the states they pay taxes to and not the coporations themselves.

This may be true but the danger does not exist geo-politically but in the global cyber infrastrucure on which they and us increasingly rely. Who polices those commons? Who can police those commons other than new social entities created by the corporate entities of which it is comprised? As yet only limited evidence exists sugesting that corporations see it is legitimate to act together collectively in the manner suggested here and proposed by ourselves in an organisation we as of now have chosen to call S.A.V.E (Security Advance Via Enterprise)

Islam and Our Common Human Future

Islam and Our Common Human Future

I am not a Muslim as normally understood. However my heart was filled with hope when I heard Amr Khaled talk the other day on the BBC World Service.

It was a joy to hear positive, constructive caring thoughts emanating from what many fear is the negative, nihilistic, uncaring parts of the world as created by many declared followers of the man they see as God’s last great prophet. From what we know of Mohammed’s life and work he was a positive, constructive caring human being. He never allowed rules, even his own, to stand in the way of his compassion. His caring sense of the justice he knew God wished for those willing to follow him out of the love warmth and devotion they felt for their caring, compassionate, merciful God was always evident.

Student’s (Taliban) of God and the Prophet may fear him. One should perhaps ask how could they fear such a God? They clearly feel that it is only by their own strict adherence, and their willingness to enforce that on others, to their understanding of God’s law that they can hope through their own lack of compassion to access God's mercy. This is a strange aspiration give the Prophet's and God's own compassion and mercy.

Language, and humanity's capacity to understand it, is always limited. We do not only communicate in words. Our bodies and our unarticulated feelings also speak for us. Thi sis true even when the words we use are those originally spoken by God in Arabic then recorded for us by the Prophet in the Qu'ran. Human beings are demonstrably capable of misinterpreting each other when speaking to their brother or sister how can we expect them to be any better at interpreting God's meaning.

How can any of us have the arrogance to believe that in our ill educated flawed minds ,especially when using Arabic as our second language, we can grasp God’s true intent. We may do so but not through mere consideration of the words and phrases God chose to utter. In them are decriptions of the object of our devotion and a guide to God’s hopes for our action but how can our own or other’s interpretations of these be anything but flawed.

The emotional content of God’s, and his Prophet’s, messages to humanity are clear in the Qu'ran and the Haddith but not just in the words. One can not read these in isolation from their intent. God’s message is surely for each man to help heal the schisms between God’s children. We are expectd to do so by exemplifying for others, in the goodness of one’s own life, the path others they can follow to find the unity God seeks for humanity. The rules God and the Haddith suggest for those who come to accept God’s hope for his people on his Way are merely means by which God’s followers can express for others the closeness they feel to the at-one-ment that is God’s will.

These intents are manifest in rules God suggests would support human at-one-ness: all humanity should pray at the same time in the same direction with the same purpose every day; at least for part of the year, Ramadan, all men should live as the very poorest so we can truly feel this at-one-ness; differences between men and women that engage lust rather than love and mutual care should be de-emphasised, so that men and women meet as human beings not only objects of sexual desire, etc.

The emotional intelligence and spiritual love through which each of us chooses to approach their understanding of God’s will is sureyy far more important than rigid adherence to ones own or any other human beings limited capacity to understand the will of God as expressed in words in an unfamiliar language

God the merciful, compassionate and all powerful surely understands the validity of our emotions and knows the truth of our love for him and others. God does not need recourse to our spoken or thought words nor on our limited capacity to understand what he deems as right or wrong. How therefore can any of us presume to judge anything right or wrong on God’s behalf.

We may collectively feel we need social order. The pursuit of this is however in our selfish human interest in security. This is not necessarily co-incident with God’s will. It is dangerous for anyone to be arrogant enough to presume it so.

Until 1400, and the closing of the Gate’s of Ishtehad, the Ummah of Islam, scattered along the ancient "Silk Route" that linked East to West, contained within its bounds the most tolerant (Islam forbids compunction in belief) haven (highly protective of individual liberty) on the planet for scholars artists and creative thinkers to relax, mature and grow. If these Gate’s could now be re-opened as Amr Kkaled seems to wish, then Islam might find its Way to the "The Global Silk Road" the Internet. The potential of this to unite mankind commercially, creatively and emotionally is considerable and on fullfilment would unite mankind in a manner consistent with God’s intent as expressed in the Qu'ran.

If this is God’s purpose for me, and the Qu'ran and the Prophet say it is, then I to am a Muslim and more and more of us would be willing so to declare themselves so whither they profess as Christians, Jews, Sikh, Hindus, Taoists or agnostics. Could current Islamic Christian or Jewish believers accept this? I fear not.

Immigration and Outsourcing & Neo-Con Mercantilism

Immigration and Outsourcing
North Americans conservatives seem to have lost the plot a little. Neo-conservative "free traders"(?) seem now to advocate mercantilism.

Let us consider their and other's perspectives on illegal immigration, jobs and other factors in apparent conflict with the USA's economic interest. Outside the Garden of Eden or Nirvana such views are to be expected. But are they wise?

Why should American, or for that matter European workers such as the French, fear outsourcing using the Internet or high levels of immigration? In the "Integral Economic Age", at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius knowledge is increasingly the main source of value and values not physical assets. Immigration or outsourcing as threats are simply not an issue in this era.

Economics as the science of ultimate scarcity has now ceased to exist. If the primary resource is now knowledge this, unlike capital and land, is potentially infinite in extent. Its only limit is the rate at which you are able to create it. If this is sufficiently high then scarcity will disappear as an issue.

Knowledge jobs outsourced to India and physical jobs to China do increase the wealth of the Indians and the Chinese. However this is not necessarily at the expense of the Americans. This is old economic thinking based on the idea of resources being ultimately scarce. The Chinese and Indian middle classes together will, on relatively short time scales, be as large and as rich as the whole US population. This creates an even bigger market for the imaginative goods free thinking American are so demonstrably capably, above all others, of creating.

Creative well living Americans, who have lost their jobs elsewhere, can move to supplying the planet's need for ideas on what such goods and services can be and in doing so they can well do without devoting themselves to the business of servicing each other. That is now done increasingly effectively by Central and South American Spanish speakers.

The USA has the know how, experience and systems to continue to lead the world in creativity if it chooses to allow itself to do so. Nowhere else on the planet does one find so many new jobs generated so fast as when Americans create better:-


1. more comfortable holidays, cultural events and entertainment. It is to die for;

2. ever more effective ways to organize production and distribution

3. understanding among more and more people at an ever increasing rate.


These things together mean that jobs lost to the needy in India, China, Indonesia and the Spanish speaking world (including illegal but useful immigrants into the US from Central America) only create more and more better jobs for Americans. The emerging knowledge economy is truly WIN WIN WIN.

This is truly a return to the Garden of Eden. Hunter gathers then had only to reach up and grab the fruits from any tree bar one, the tree of knowledge. In choosing to take from that mankind, among other things, became aware of property, the idea that one could own a part of a physically limited universe. One could fence it off and own land to cultivate things on or own machines to make things rather accepting the universe's bounty as free to all.

"Don't Fence Me In" and Free Range are not new issues for Americans. Many took part and died in the range wars that ensued from such sentiment over land in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The space to be fought for now is not free range land in the big horizons of the American West but free ranging ideas in the infinite vista of cyberspace.

The Chinese are indeed already trying to fence that using Internet tools. This was evident in the recent Congressional hearings on the actions of Google, Cisco and others in helping the Chinese government draw boundaries in that cyberspace. To the extent it is possible for thme to succeeed in doing so they can only harm themselves. They will fence themselves and their thinkers off from the cutting edge of emerging technology. This still comes in the main from the USA. Provided the Americans do not continue to shoot themelves in the foot technologically with overly protective policy on IPR and restrictive self defeating policies on immigration it can continue to do so.

Controlling the free movement of the new key resource, knowledge, as embedded in people and the ether, is now virtually impossible. Keeping people out in our post-modern age only harms oneself. At the bottom end of the job market it leaves necessary jobs undone, done badly or worse still less productively by people who would be better employed on creative knowledge generating tasks. At the top end of the market such exclusion ensures that the best most innovative ideas will be generated elsewhere.

This is likely to be the case anyway as the creative thrust essential to the New Age is likely to be situated in many not one country. US past concern to protect its defence industrial base ensured that much modern ICT was developed other than in the USA. Current immigration policy, never mind that proposed by neo-con mercantilists will ensure that the worlds brightest and best no longer find there way into the US for their education and post doctoral research. Already they are going in droves to the UK, Australia, Canada and Europe or even increasingly to their own region - nuclear scientists and engineers at home in Iran for example (see our post yesterday).

"The Global Silk Road" predicts the decreasing relative political economic power of both the US and China. Each will grow in absolute terms one more slowly, the other rapidly, but they will both steadily lose out in relative terms. On the other hand those nations who use English as the lingua franca of business and are too small to have a domestic market big enough to support modern technology - Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, etc. will grow collectively in economic power.

Such places have to operate in the global market of 6.5million poor not their domestic ones of a few tens of million relatively rich. The domestic US market of 300 million relatively rich is temptingly too easy for US suppliers of ideas. The Chinese market of 1.5billion poor, with an increasingly substantial and well off embedded middle class, is similarly likely in the end to tempt Chinese entrepreneurs away from the global market place.

Knowledge products have significant upfront costs in creating them but even a $650million cost spread over a global population of 6.500 million is 10cents a copy. The is a product for all the poor not just some of ones local rich.

方式 from Fear is 方式 to IT

Abuse
It happens. Generally it works unimpeaded. We fear rejection far far more than we ever fear it. Selfish uncarying acts, cruel words and the fist and boot of lovers, husbands, bosses parents and other such jailors hurt, yet we stay and take them.

Our Tragedy
These prisons are of our own construction. Real jailors have bars, locks and keys but bosses, spouses, lovers and parents do not need such devices. We are imprisoned by what seems nothing but is everything, our abject fear of rejection.

Why should this be? Why has it evolved? What is its function? It surely has one. Why would we choose to maintain such a thing especially as it leads us to fear what we may love when it brings such huge hurt into lives and conditions our behaviour every second of the day.

Modern Heros
Not only do we willing accept our many prisons but we also indulge ourselves in higher order levels of abuse of which often we are not even aware. As the mass of us scurry around constructing strategems to avoid rejection some many salesman drive through this fear and sally forth to embrace the rejection integral to their livelihood.

Salesman are looked down upon by many. They often sell only becasue they fear their boss and job loss more than they fear their myriad rejections. Sales people are the heros of our age, the bravest of the brave driven by their own fear of rejection perhaps but still sallying forth daily on to confront and overcome our deepest first level fear to find then embrace the customer.

We find their offer joy. We know on entry to the salesroom, with money in our pocket,. that we will find no rejection. If rejection comes it will be by us not them. What power. We have the blissful certainty of acceptance. They a high probability of rejection and we despize them?
the best of them do not care because they earn more than the reat of us can even imagine but the average Joe dies in his soul if not necessarily in his outward spirit - "Death of a Salesman"

Rejection and Abuse
If rejection is so horrific ought one not we begin to consider whither on the evidence facing us that rejection is more profound in its abuse than abuse itself. To mark out your being, property and feelings as non available to others, rejection, is clearly something we all fear. Is a violent response to such rejection to be labeled as unacceptable while the rejection itself acceptable?

Only through the generation of a general expectation of non-judgemental, foregiveness and giving could our deep rooted fear of rejection be eliminated and with it the abuse with which it is associated. Unfortunately we are rejected because their is something we can be threatened with exclusion from, someone elses life, care, property or body. All such exculusions are a threat to human at oneness. Our egos seem require us each to feel we have individual meaning but our survival requires us to care for each other in either in a direct personal social manner or an the indirect personable market manner of the salesman.

The solution proposed to the dilemma of abuse would thus seem unworkable. It would require an egoless humanity, giving freely of love and property. Is this posssible is it likely. The world described has been advocated throughout human existence by many great human beings. Yet it only fitfully splutters into life for short periods of time generally for part of their lifetime before dying back or being overwhelmed by the exclusive distortions their disciples seem to invariably inject into the original inclusie vision. We are even capable of carrying these exclusive distortions to the level at which we actively practice them with dividing walls, gas chambers, ethnic cleansing, th ekilling fields of Gambodia or the macheties of Rwanda. To wish for, believe in or advocate free love and giving does not make it so. Exclusiveness and so rejection and the abuses this then engenders seem endemic and cannot be wished or preached away.

Hope
It may not be ished away but just perhaps it could be evolved away and this might just be the age when it could be.

We are at the dawn of an era where value is ceasing to be driven by the owenership of property in natural resources human effort or machines. Knowledge is the newest driver of cost and value and knowledge has charateristics setting it apart from its predecessors.

First it is extremely difficult to put boundaries around. Were does one persons idea or vision start and an others begin?

Second to be useful it has to be broadcast so that anyone can access it.

Third when broadcast if one person takes and uses a bit of it for themselves this does not lessen what is availabe for others.

Here we have a productive resource which has as its essence a difficulty to exert exclusiveness over, a need to be shared and put out their to be usefull and that once made available can never subsequently be used up. So when it exists rejection from it is difficult and actually pointless. The problem is that it does consume other resources, food, shelter, transport, etc to bring it into being in the first place. This can and is being achieved as we speak and describing the proceesses involved is the prime purpose of our book, "The Global.Silk Road". For present purposes let us assume it can be done. If it can then, physical property, the reason for much rejection and the abuse that accompanies it will be gone.

Greater Hope
This new economic age has been called by some network capitalism but this is a misnomer. Capital is a very small part if any of the story. A new word needs to be coined as this age most definitely is not built on capital (machines) but on knowledge (human creativity) . Napoleon Hill wrote what on emust now see as a prophetic book about this called "Think and Grow Rich". What we conceive of and believe in as human beings has a wonderful tendency to come to be. This took millenium, then centuries then decades and now modern technology has gone this down to a few years at most.

However eliminating concern about rejection from our physical needs goes only a little way to eliminate our emotional and spiritual needs. This is true but a growing global socio- economic phenomena is spontaneously coming into being that even addresses that. It is variously called network marketing (NM) or multi-level marketing (MLM). This has a number of features pertinent to our tale. It aims to free people from employment so they can have no boss to threaten to reject or bully them. Second it requries them to be salespeople at the very least in sight of those they no and love. To be effective in this individual participants have to learn to overcome their fearof rejection by others. All (NM) systems make some effort at this but the very best are excellent at providing the support people need to break through the barrier to their progress set by their own fear of rejection.

You can, we all can, learn not to fear rejection and when we do not fear it rejection is no longer soemthing we have to deal with because for us it never occurs. If more and more of us get to be that way even the idea of rejection the possibility fades from view. We will know that whomsover we approach they will repond gladly to our connection and while perhaps not yet ready for what we have to offer will give of themselves to each and every one who approaches them.

This leaves free love as a consumation still to be wished for by many although their is some evidence that in the present younger generation sexual love is not something one has to be excluded from and that rejection in its pursuit is less likely. However the emotional connection is as as if not more important to the young than the rest of us. So I think sexual love completely free of the fear of rejection is not yet upon us so in this sphere at least we have perhaps still got to wish for something that may not be consummated.

Even there we should not despair because if someone can think then speak the concept then like "Think and Grow Rich" I am sure we can, "Think and Grow Love", and some few thoughtful caring people already have. With the right dynamics we can all be rich and love and be loved and abuse will then be gone from, "The Way" 陶

Outing Ignorance Together With Islam

Condoleeza Rice recently advocated democracy as a long term solution in the Middle East. Liberal democracy has to be distinguished from democracy. It respects minorities. The state leaves them be. It protects them. Muslims do not believe the USA walks the talk on this one. There are 1billion Muslims, and growing. They cannot be ignored. Many are now US and EU citizens and voters.

Effort is required now to make them feel part of the same human family as the rest of us. We have not made this effort. However until very recently Christians and Jews lived secure and comfortable lives in the Islamic Middle East. Some still do.

However most Muslims believe that Christians have always agressively blocked their good intentions. The Koran makes Christians, Jews and Muslims, one under God. The Koran tells Muslims that the “Way” to the end of religious schism is unity under the one all powerful God. The Prophet guided by this acted to be inclusive. He was rejected and attacked.

Christians should remember that Catholics and the Orthodox were massacring each other in the Balkans well before the existance of Islam.

Islam tries to show that by living the will of the one true God peace would reign. Unlike Christian’s they should not prozletise only model in themselves God’s desire for man’s behaviour. They tried this from the 6th -13th centuries. They were aggressively attacked by Christians among others. Their response, as is fundementally directed in the Koran, was aggressive defense. However Muslim’s are obligated to treat for peace if the enemy wishes. Unprovoked attack is expressly forbidden by God.

In the end they lost. Their leaders responded by seeking to be closer to God’s will so he would protect them. In the 14th Century they returned to fundamentals. They closed the Gates of Ishtehad and closed in ignorance to the Ummah. These virtual gates when open allowed the free interpretation of any aspect of the universe unexplained by the Koran or the Haddith of the Prophet. Till then scholarship banned elsewhere flourished under Islam. Scholars were aggressively persecuted or diverted to trivia in the West, Europe, and in the East, China but not in Central Asia, Moorish Spain or the Middle East.

This Islamic suppression of scholarship had an unintended consequence. Scholars fled West to create the Renaissance. A consequence of this was that Western Europe and so America became economically and militarily powerful and to be feared to an extent inconceivable in the 14th Century.

Left festering in Central Asia and the Middle East suppressed Islamic beliefs grew in ignorance unnurtured by scholarship. We now reap the harvest then sowed for our brutal suppression of Islamic aspirations.

To address current problems we could work to assist Islam see itself as at one with us in outing ignorance, as God’s united people seeking to understand better our common universe. Many thoughtful caring people in the West and Islam believe this is possible. An alientated ignorant Islamic community could act in a mutually destructive manner, a potentially global suicide bomb. For them this might be preferable to continuing the humiliation they feel when honestly attempting in ignorance to do good so as to demonstrate to us the vale of loving and being loved of God.

Israel, supported with billions of US tax payers dollars, is their symbol of their continuing humiliation by godless Western decadence. They see the US and EU as the Sodom and Gomorrah of our New Age. It is perhaps noteworthy that there are American’s who share this perception , the so called “Moral Majority” of fundamentalist US Christians.

However if offered our respect and understanding that their only wish is to demostrate not impose God’s Way then surely we can allow them to do so and work with them to do so. A start would be to encourage Islam to re-open the Gates of Ishtehad as a new joint investment in our humanity. We could then recognise the New Age as an an evolution of God’s universe which we could seek to understand to mutual benfit.

How could we harm each other then? What would God’s point be in it? We would all gain, physically intellectually and spiritually from such an advent. To achieve this we do not have to use force or even imperatives such as should or must etc it will simply happen.

It is our lack of knowledge that brings anger, then judgement and then self righteousness and then hate and then an implacable determination to expunge such an evil from our world. This is in humanity. It cannot be wished away by labelling it as evil and that it must stop.

Really, really decent people in the USA, Israel, Palestine, Iran and China allow “evil” to happen all the time. Good caring, loving, opinions and hopes cannot eliminate this. The only thing that could is unconstrained plenty. This could come from unconstained knowledge creation and distribution. Our at-one-ment is then an inevitable consequence not an aspiration.

When working and living in Kuwait I used to sit with a Kuwaiti friends's little kids on Saturday morning watching Iranian television. We watched a religious cartoon early on this Muslim holy day. It had jolly friendly little Smurf like cartoon characters in it.These critters extolled the virtues of learning about the power of God's universe. These children were told it was their right and duty to God to work to understand it. After every sequence, of this Arabic religious Sesame Street, the little Smurfs would say God is Great, God is Good. The sage presenting the program an old Imam would repeat this. The program ended with a picture of a slowly expanding, entirely beautiful, mushroom cloud, a nuclear explosion. A true picture of the power in our universe.

Should this vision be seen as a threat or a portend of salvation? Lovelock, with me, recently suggested the latter. Why not work to support Iran’s declared intend to understand how to access this power for good. The laternative is to alienate them in a corner with access to a power they could so easily feel the need to use aggressively in their defense.

The Truth About the British in Basra

Those who gain power write the history, newspapers bolster the beliefs of those who chose to read them and we all see the world as we wish to see it.

I am motivated to write this as a long time civilian servant of the British Army. I need to reflect on events as reported upon in Iraq. I hear and see with sadness the abuse our soldiers are receive as a result of doing their duty. They serve the British Government’s decision to commit them to Southern Iraq. Recent events in Basra seem reminiscent of Northern Ireland.

There, originally the British Army was committed to protect the Catholic Northern Irish from abuse by their protestant, fellow citizens of the Province of Ulster. In the end they found themselves in a bitter bloody but ultimately successful hearts and minds campaign to overcome the IRA’s claim to represent the interests of Catholic Republican Northern Ireland. In doing this they became an object of some opprobrium to extremist Ulster Protestants.

Hindu and Muslim Indians, Palestinians and Israelis, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Catholic and Protestant Ulsterman and Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim Bosnians and now Shi-ite and Sunni Muslims: It always has been the British Army's lot to fight in “Small Wars”: first as a colonial power, then as a de-colonising ex power and now as part of an evolving global police force. in these bloody events they have seen themselves rightly as the even handed disinterested harbinger of peaceful co-existence. I know them. They are extremely good at this but that is from my perspective. To the various categories of inhabitants of India, Palestine, Cyprus, the Former Yugoslavia and now Iraq the British Army is anything but even handed. It cleary works far too effectively to serve the interests of the otherside which is clearly their own and they do not know, or speak ,the truth.

Such beliefs, including my own, are palpable to those who hold them. The urbane suave well educated Serb of whom I previously wrote hated British even handedness. It clearly stood in the way of the only sensible sane solution which was clearly the total extermination of every Catholics and Muslims in the Balkans.

In the face of his unflinching unabashed certainty and my own in the integrity and honesty of the British Army in doing its duty one must realise that whatever the history books say, or what the newspapers report or what we feel with certainty is the truth whither we be Catholic, Prod, Sunni, Shi-ite or Brit we all lie to ourselves in our own interest.

The only sane response is that of the trained disciplined actions, if not beliefs, of the British Army i.e. to act to forgive and forget the culpability we perceive in others in case that when faced with the judgment of eternity we might be wrong.

How do we now justify the reason behind the British conquest that led to the acquistion of Hong Kong - the right of free trading Englishmen to sell opium to the Chinese. The truth is always in the eye of the beholder.