Though choosing and upholding a single piece from all of last year would be too difficult from such a fertile field of good writing, I recently revisited this short article penned by author, historian and travel writer William Dalrymple in October, ‘A lesson in humility for the smug West’, one of my picks from 2007. This piece represents one of the central themes and messages of his work, that of fruitful cross-fertilisation and interdependency between ‘civilisations.’

A list of selected articles from Dalrymple is appended.

A lesson in humility for the smug West

Many of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world

William Dalrymple | The Times | 14 October 2007

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together. Read the rest of this entry »

Click here for slide show

Decidedly Eurocentric with only one Asian and one North American city. Oh, my bold and brassy city is #7. The public transport system could do with improvement (I commute every day), but all in all, its a good place to live.

4 short videos from APEC 2007 follow. H/T Green Left Weekly

The High School Walkout Against Bush; US Marine (7.36)


Bush, Howard, USA! How Many Kids Have You Killed Today! (1.36)

Read the rest of this entry »

Updated: 2 additional videos from The Chaser and Bums Not Bombs - see also Green Left Weekly for a collection of videos; for less than sanguine write-ups about police powers and provocations during the protests see Adele Horin and Richard Neville.

Yes, APEC is in town. Sydney’s central business district has gone into full lock-down, with a surfeit of security and a 5.5-kilometre steel-and-concrete fence (pictured) inside the APEC fortress within the CBD for the week.

There is now the full contingent of 21 APEC heads of state in Sydney for the annual leaders’ meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Putin’s in town — the first currently serving leader from Russia ever to visit; Bush has been here since Tuesday after his unannounced stopover in Iraq, about which he delusionally reported “We’re kicking ass“; Harper (Canada), Bachelet (Chile), Jintao (China), and Abe (Japan) are also among the 21 world leaders.

A very brief backgrounder: APEC has been called ‘four adjectives in search of a noun’ — it encompasses an enormously diverse region in terms of population, wealth and culture, with APEC member countries representing half the world’s population and about half of world GDP (see APEC membership map, right). The APEC forum is obviously important for Australian commerce: 70% of Australia’s trade is with APEC member states and 8 out of 10 Australia’s top ten trading partners are APEC members.

APEC 2007 is a forum for trade, energy, security and other issues. It is neither a binding agreement such as NAFTA nor is it an international body with the right to adjudicate claims between members and impose sanctions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the neoliberal river for which APEC seems to be a tributary. So far, APEC seems to demonstrate that bilateralism is the new multilateralism, with a few key deals stitched up during the summit: Australia is to sell uranium to Russia, and Russia will sell $1.5 billion worth of submarines and arms to Indonesia.

Locally, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard hopes this forum will boost his flagging electoral chances which are at an all-time low, yet hob-nobbing with his friend Dubya isn’t doing him much good so far. Meanwhile, Australian Labor Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd is impressing China’s President Hu Jintao with his fluent Mandarin.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the protests, street theatre and satirical stunts during APEC 2007 thus far:

Bums Not Bombs: APEC’s 21 Bum Salute

As co-organiser Will Saunders told the crowd: “There’s many ways of making a point, this just happens to be the Australian way. Just because you feel strongly about an issue doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it.” Saunders first came to public attention in March 2003 during the lead up to the Iraq war, part of a duo who painted ‘No War’ in bright red letters on the main sail of the Sydney Opera House.

Ahead of the major protest planned for Saturday where several thousand are expected to converge, a few hundred high school students — and even some of their parents — took to the streets mid-week.

High-school Student Walkout Against Bush

(round-up of news coverage 5 September)

The Chaser (CNNN) Pranks

The Chaser team are a group of satirists who have a television program, Chaser’s War on Everything, with Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC. They have proved to be APEC’s most effective court jesters, impersonating the Canadian delegation and employing a faux motorcade that actually breached security yesterday. The Chaser’s Chris Taylor said there was “no particular reason” they had chosen Canadian flags. “We just thought they’d be a country who the cops wouldn’t scrutinise too closely, and who feasibly would only have three cars in their motorcade - as opposed to the 20 or so gas-guzzlers that Bush has brought with him.” Another of the Chasers, Chas Licciardello, staged a stunt dressed as Osama Bin Laden:

Read the rest of this entry »

The local Sydney council of Marrickville has now entered into a Sister City relationship with Bethlehem, occupied Palestinian city and birthplace of Christ.The Mayor of Bethlehem, Dr Victor Batarseh and a delegation from Bethlehem are currently in Sydney to seal the deal and it was a pleasure to help welcome them with Sydney’s Palestinian community and many others in the general Middle East community here. (Next campaign: twinning Hebron with Leichhardt –thanks Alex).

In addition to the links below, the excellent Coalition for Peace and Justice in Palestine (CJPP) Sydney has more on the Sister Cities campaign.

Relevant local links:

• Rashell Habib, Marrickville and Bethlehem sisters to sign, Inner West Courier, 21 Aug 2007
• Peter Manning, Impoverished Bethlehem needs all the support it can get, SMH Letters, 20 June 2007
• Sunanda Creagh, O little town of Marrickville what a fuss you’ve caused, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Jun 2007

Bethlehem-specific and -related posts:

• Bush and Blair banned from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity
• Christmas in Bethlehem
• Occupation affecting Christians, too
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism

Organisations

• Open Bethlehem
• Twinning with Palestine Network — International Page

Why are creating these people-to-people, community-to-community ties so important? They constitute direct links of friendship and solidarity and an opportunity to establish multiple cultural, civil and economic ties between towns that can often be independent of federal government policy.

And these exchanges are especially needed now. Bethlehem now has several — over 30 — such twinning arrangements around the world, in no small part due to its dedicated advocates impassioned about saving this beleaguered holy city. While Christians, Muslims and Jews have coexisted for centuries in Palestine, occupied Bethlehem is being subject to strangulation by the Israeli government: two thirds of the population in Bethlehem lives below the poverty line and unemployment is higher than 60%.

Last Christmas I noted the Mayor of Bethlehem’s words in his traditional Christmas season press conference, in which he said that

the birthplace of Jesus Christ is in its worst economic, political and tourist conditions in those 2,000 years. The dire situation is due to the procedures and practices of the occupation that continues to increase in severity in and around the city.

The so-called security fence on our land has forced large numbers of people to leave their homes and move. The conditions are so deplorable that the practices are clearly intended to vacate the land of its people. Read the rest of this entry »

3.23 (H/T: Ressentiment)

The satirical culture-jammers The Yes Men interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal (20 July 2007). I don’t know how they can keep a straight face in their hilarious impersonation escapades (probably because what they parody—neoliberal globalisation— is its own caricature!) but their work is much appreciated, especially as the humour actually works to bring truths to the fore. See also Homey’s recent profile on these funny tricksters.

Part One (9.40)

Part Two (8.30)

Some time-pressed recent links I found of interest rather than write-up(s) as I take some time out.

Like many people, I have experimented with social bookmarking sites (Reddit, Newsvine, Clipmarks, Delicious, Digg etc) that are very useful in collecting and organising your bookmarked links, though they do seem to be predicated upon the links being permanently live — if you also use primary news sources such as press agencies (Reuters, AP), you’ll know that often valuable articles are not archived and URL links lapse.

So a year ago, I started up a group-list, commonly used for notification and/ or as fora for discussion, simply for the purposes of archiving articles. The articles are all full-text contemporary political pieces I find valuable and/or interesting and send to the list where they can be archived and accessed anytime, anywhere, by members. My fellow members are free to add to and access articles in this shared archive. I’m going to open it up for subscription for a short time for those who may be interested in the types of issues Peoples Geography covers. As it can be a high volume list, I encourage people to choose the Daily Digest or No Email option which I myself choose (lets you access all articles online rather than receiving them individually by email online). Click here if you happen to be interested in joining.

Australia

Two issues have marked media coverage: Defence Minister Brendan Nelson’s admission that the war on Iraq was, in part, about oil, and the federal government’s heavy-handed approach sending in the military to remote indigenous communities using child protection as a justification.

• ABC News (Australia), Iraq deployment linked to oil: Nelson, 5 July
• Adrian Newstead, Paternalism, Petrol and Paedophilia, HomePage Daily, nd
• Dave on Fire, Apartheid Down Under - Welfare, Not Warfare, 26 June
• Peter Robson, Indigenous communities reject Howard’s racist hypocrisy, GLW, 29 June
• The Orstrahyun, Howard Hits Iraq Oil Slick As Truth Becomes A WMD/ Murdoch’s Media Rewrites Stories After Furious Calls From Prime Minister’s Office, 7 July
• James Sturcke, Oil a factor in Iraq conflict, says Australian defence minister, Guardian, 5 July

Economy

• Monte Asbury, (On Kiva): I helped Grace’s business!, 4th July
• Catherine Austin Fitts, The American Tapeworm (Overcoming Tapeworm Economics)
• Mike Whitney, Another Great Depression?: The Fed’s Role in the Bear Stearns Hedge Funds Meltdown, Global Research, 1 July

Iran

• Al Alam, Iran, Iraq to Build Joint Power Plant
• IRIN, Iran, Venezuela to establish joint oil company, Payvand, 3 July

Iraq

• Pepe Escobar, Iraq, the new Israel, Asia Times, 6 July
• 24 Steps to Liberty, “Soft Partition” of Iraq!, 7 July
• David Bacon, Iraqi Oil: A Benchmark or a Giveaway? Why Iraqi oil workers oppose the much-vaunted oil law, The American Prospect, 6 July
• Sarah Baxter, Powell tried to talk Bush out of war, Sunday Times, 8 July:
  THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another valuable and urgent piece on Somalia with thanks to Amina Mire for sending it. She writes about the underexamined role of China’s scramble for Africa’s natural resources, in addition to African Union (AU) troops in Somalia serving as a mercenary army in service to foreign forces determined to “gain ownership over Somalia’s unexplored natural resources and install a puppet US friendly regime”.

“A Prayer of Shame:” In Somalia, It’s The Blood Money, Stupid!

Africa’s Leaders Are Shoulder to Shoulder and Hips on Hands with Meles Zinawi..1 Read the rest of this entry »

Busy painting and moving furniture this weekend so time affords me only pointing to these good recent reads, excerpted here but well worth reading in full. Interestingly, both the first two articles compare the instability in the region with Europe in 1914, and point to lessons and opportunities Israel has missed.

• Alastair Crooke, Our Second Biggest Mistake in the Middle East, London Review of Books (Vol. 29 No. 13, 5 July 2007)

EXCERPT: When all parties begin to see conflict as inevitable, then the ‘inevitable’ becomes self-fulfilling. Americans are fond of comparing the situation in the region to the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism; but perhaps Europe in 1914 is a better metaphor: the situation is such that some small, unexpected autonomous event might trigger a sequence of events that even the great powers of the region could find it beyond their ability to control. In the past, after all, a car accident (in the case of the first intifada) and a cinema fire (triggering the Iranian revolution) have unleashed consequences that no one could have foreseen.

• Patrick Seale, Israel Seems Determined to Dig its own Grave, Al-Hayat (22 June 2007)

What would it take to persuade Israel to rethink its attitude towards its Arab neighbours - and primarily towards the Palestinians? The Hamas victory in Gaza is surely a clear signal that an Israeli change of direction is urgently needed.

All Israel’s efforts to break the democratically-elected Hamas government have failed. Its policies of boycott, siege and starvation, of bombing and shelling, of extra-judicial murder, of withholding tax revenues, of the systematic destruction of Palestinian institutions have served only to create a time-bomb of hunger, despair and defiance on Israel’s flank.

Yet Israel appears to have learned nothing. Instead of seeking peace with the Arabs - instead of seizing their outstretched hand - it persists in rejecting all peace overtures, preferring to rely on force and still more force, and on its ability to manipulate its American ally. READ THE REST HERE

and a ray of hope in the act of conscience of an orthodox American Jew, donating money towards rebuilding Palestinian and Bedouin homes destroyed by the apartheid state:

• Tovah Lazaroff, American Jew finances anti-demolition campaign, J-Post (12 June 2007)

An Orthodox American Jew has donated $1.5 million to fund a campaign against the demolition of Palestinian and Beduin homes throughout Israel and the territories, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions announced on Monday.

The committee plans to use those funds to rebuild as many as 300 Palestinians homes it expects to be demolished this year either by the Interior Ministry, the Jerusalem Municipality or the Civil Administration.

Thanks to Agent 99 for pointing out the updated link, the first location of which had lapsed (also updated on audio page). I’ve taken the opportunity to upload this talk again by Johan Galtung which I attended last year. His hybrid-but-mostly-Norwegian accent may make him sound like Inspector Clousseau as our friend notes, but his reflections are always worthwhile and enriching. (RT 81 m)

Galtung talks about enacting a positive peace through meaningful dialogue, about spiritual syncretism and an alliance of civilisations, with reference to the Danish cartoon controversy and other topical conflicts. This elder spokesman and founder of peace studies delivered this address at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas on the 31 March 2006.

Original .mp3 url

Relevant links:

• TRANSCEND Peace and Development Network
• International Peace Research Institute
• Wiki entry Johan Galtung
  

Further links: Conflict transformation

• Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation
• Beyond Intractability
• Conflict Resolution Information
• Peace Library Sri Linka and conflict related
• Transnational Perspectives

The Melbourne Age has compiled an interesting Top Ten Digital Cities List, and 6 of the ‘tech capitals’ of the world are in Asia.

The top 10 digital cities are ranked according to the following criteria: Broadband speed, cost and availability; Wireless internet access; Technology adoption; Government support for technology; Education and technology culture and Future potential. Arjun Ramachandran writes:

Asian cities scored well on broadband speed and availability, mainly because they have concentrated populations in a small land area. Seoul’s excellent wireless coverage, along with government programs such as Seoul Digital City, gave the city top billing.

Stockholm, San Francisco and Silicon Valley lack the affordability of fast broadband in Asian cities but enjoy high levels of education and a culture in favour of technology. In New York, a leading financial hub, access to wireless hotspots is also exceedingly good.

Tallinn and Beijing are cities to watch. Tallinn’s government already leads the way in e-government, while Beijing continues to roll out technology through the city ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Upon completion, New Songdo will likely be the ultimate digital city. Even as a work in progress, it makes the list.

© Benjamin Heine

TOP 10 DIGITAL CITIES

1. Seoul, Korea

2. Singapore

3. Tokyo, Japan

4. Hong Kong

5. Stockholm, Sweden

6. San Francisco and Silicon Valley, USA

7. Tallinn, Estonia

8. New York, USA

9. Beijing, China

10. New Songdo City

New Songdo City?, I hear you ask. As well you might — New Songdo City is a $31 billion city-in-the-making 60 km south of Seoul. Due for completion in 2010, it is an ambitious development on 600 hectares of reclaimed land that will be one of the world’s first cities in which all information systems are linked. One wonders: where do the Luddites go?

Read the Age article for more.

Conversely, also check out this interesting and important overview article on the global Digital Divide featured at Ben’s place

Another dispatch of humorous truths from political humorist Steve Bhaerman, aka Swami Beyondananda, who starts by asking why CNN International and CNN America are so different.

• Swami’s OmPage; Related posts

The Tower of Babble

Having spent two weeks in Europe now with four more weeks to go, I see many contrasts between here and the U.S.A. As we flew into Frankfurt, then Paris and then Vienna we saw green fields and thick forests right up to the outskirts of the city. On a bus ride through Slovenia on the way from Croatia to Italy, we saw vast expanses of land not “for” anything, but just “there.”

In Vienna, everyone takes public transit, not just the poor folks with no alternative. As one our new friends told us, “I have the luxury of not owning an automobile.” There seems to be little of the age segregation that we find in the States. Old people hobble along through the streets where they might well have spent their youth. In Venice, even dogs have a particular European “attitude.” On leashes or walking free, they make their way through the narrow streets going about their business, unmindful of the crowds and seeming to crave no attention.

But perhaps the biggest contrast — and the one most relevant to the challenges we face in America — is the news. CNN Worldwide and CNN America broadcast two different stories. While America is fed “babblum” about the latest narcissistic misadventures of Paris Hilton, the same CNN shows Europeans the demonstrations at the G8 meetings. While the U.S. media prattles about which of the Presidential candidates is doing a better job manipulating public opinion, CNN World is doing features about peak oil and climate change. The American media shows talking heads rationalizing the latest surge in Iraq. CNN World shows dead Iraqi civilians.

First question: Are you outraged by this? Second question: If not, why not?

My sad conclusion is this: The one major difference between Soviet Russia and America today is Russian citizens knew Pravda was lying to them. The free press our Founding Fathers fought for as necessary for an informed citizenry has been replaced with a Tower of Babble.

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW! Transcript appended, with great thanks to Dean.

An inspirational short address by Irish Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire to the EU Parliament’s “50 years of the EU: Nobel Prize winners celebrate at the European Parliament” event earlier this month.

Having just returned from Palestine after participating in peaceful civil protest, the co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize speaks on her role in non-violent activism in Palestine with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, Europe’s responsibility to promote peace by recognising the Palestinian government; and supporting Gorbachev’s Charter for a World Without Violence.

She takes the EU to task directly for not recognising the democratically elected choice of Hamas.

Thanks to righthand for the links. RT: 5:34. This audio snippet is also available at the originudio al url via the EU Parliament site here. The transcript follows after the ‘More’ break.

Read the rest of this entry »