Gideon Polya, “New Year’s Resolutions. What you can do to save the Planet”, MWC News, submitted 1 January 2008.
New Year’s Resolutions. What you can do to save the Planet
Well it is now the end of 2007, a year in which according to UNICEF (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) 0.5 million infants perished in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories - 90% avoidably, largely due to US Alliance war crimes and a carnage that is resolutely IGNORED by the Mainstream media and politicians of the complicit Western Murdochracies. 2008 promises more of the same, a year in which the major threats to humanity – (a) nuclear weapons, (b) global warming and (c) poverty – will persist and indeed become more serious (see “US nuclear, greenhouse & poverty threats. “Apocalypse Now” painting” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17652/42/ ).
However the good news is that you CAN do something about it – and if you don’t succeed then at least you TRIED and can feel GOOD in yourself when you finally move to the refrigerated room in your nuclear fallout shelter and open up the very last can of spam.
Before listing some suggested New Year’s Resolutions it is useful to delineate some key general principles.
Rational responses to threats or risks require truth, reason and informed action. To flesh this out briefly, rational risk management requires successive processes of (a) correct information, (b) scientific analysis involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses and then (c) systemic change to minimize risk. Unfortunately we are in a mess now because the climate criminal, war criminal Bush-ite imperialists of the lying Western Murdochracies have perverted this rational process by substituting (a) lies, obfuscations, censorship, intimidation and self-censorship, (b) anti-science spin involving selective use of asserted facts to support partisan positions that are typically of benefit to wealthy vested interests and (c) blame and shame that are good politics but which leave the continuing risk unaddressed..
Decent folk believe that “thou shalt not kill”, “thou shalt not kill children”, “love thy neighbour as thyself”, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Decent folk take the fundamental message of the Holocaust as “zero tolerance for racism and human right abuses”.
However the Bush-ites believe and act otherwise. The Racist Bush-ite Americans and their Bush-ite allies around the world (most notoriously their racist, democratic imperialist, democratic Nazi Anglo-Celtic and Racist Zionist Apartheider allies) daily violate the key injunction “all men are created equal” in the American Declaration of Independence by threats, wars, invasions, occupations, gross human rights abuse, ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass infanticide, mass paedocide and mass murder. These abuses are currently applied to subject non-European countries under US or US surrogate occupation from Haiti to Afghanistan, specifically Haiti, Somalia, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
To summarize these key principles in the context of New Year’s Resolutions, we must ACT to oppose untruth, un-reason, racism, violence and both active and passive killing of our fellow human beings by perverted Bush-ite psychopaths. The fundamental imperative comes from the huge humanitarian suffering: post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories presently total 0.3 million, 1.5-2 million and 3-6 million, respectively; the post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees total 7 million, 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively (for the latest detailed analyses see articles on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ).
To quantitatively summarize the acute BIG PICTURE problems we face:
(a) nuclear weapons threaten to kill all 6.5 billion of us;
(b) global warming may kill some 6 billion of us this century if the dire prediction of outstanding atmosphere researcher Professor James Lovelock FRS are correct (see: http://green-blog.org/2007/11/02/more-than-6-billion-people-will-perish-by-the-end-of-the-century/ ); and
(c) poverty already kills about 16 million people annually, mostly in the Developing World, and through deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease. Even if things remain the same, 1.6 billion Third Worlders will perish avoidably in the coming century but global warming, decreased agricultural production, decreased fisheries, degraded land, drought, phytoplankton destruction, sea level rises, storm surge inundation of mega-deltas, increasing food prices through obscene grain re-direction to biofuel and meat production all promise catastrophe this century and indeed in the COMING DECADES.
WE MUST ALL ACT NOW.
So, faced with this daunting Apocalyptic scenario, what can little you and me do about it? The answer: LOTS! Here is my list of things WE can do NOW to help stave off disaster (I won’t rationalize these proposals in detail because the rationales should be self-evident from the background principles outlined above).
1. Boycott the lying, racist, holocaust-ignoring, holocaust-denying, Bush-ite Mainstream media of the Western Murdochracies.
2. Boycott the Murdoch Empire in particular because it is a major and discrete part of the problem and we would like to know whether we are getting somewhere in our boycott of the Mainstream media in general in the Western Murdochracies.
3. Patronize and publicize the typically FREE, truthful and rational Alternative media (such as MWC News, Straight Goods, the New Statesman, Countercurrents, Democracy Now, Counterpunch etc etc).
4. Boycott avoidable purchase of goods and services from people, corporations and countries involved in the assault on truth, reason, the Muslim world, the environment, and indeed the Planetary biosphere as a whole (the major war criminal culprits are the US, US Alliance countries and Apartheid Israel and its intrinsically traitorous Racist Zionist lobbies in the Western Murdochracies; and the major developed world climate criminal countries in terms of annual per capita CO2 pollution are the US, Canada and Australia).
5. Dump the US dollar – follow the advice of CONSERVATIVE Father of Reaganomics but decent humanitarian, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, who urges us to stop the Bush Wars by dumping the US dollar (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02122007.html ).
6. Practice and advocate energy efficiency and a return to economies based on need rather than propagandized desire (a point raised in Al Gore’s seminal book “The Assault on Reason”).
7. Practice and demand zero tolerance for spin, lying, racism, bigotry, and imposition of irrational religious beliefs on children and on society.
8. Demand an exposure and clean-up of our societies following the demand for the “de-Nazification” of Bush America by outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros (see MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12714/26/ ).
9. Demand urgent application of national and international law in relation to violation of our common environment, gross human rights abuse, mass murder, war-mongering and war crimes.
10. Demand and support high efficiency, renewable, non-polluting energy provision – the science, technology and economics all say keep the fossil fuels and uranium in the ground (e.g. see “Solar Energy and the End of War” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18667/42/ ).
11. Tell EVERYONE, and CHILDREN in particular, about what is happening – the active and passive mass murder of children in the US-occupied territories around the world and the climate genocidal threat to the whole Planet by the SAME evil, Bush-ite or neo-Bush-ite war criminals and climate criminals.
12. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Speak out collectively or as an individual - inform others of the World’s path to disaster, write to the Alternative media, the Mainstream media, politicians, and interest groups and make it abundantly clear that you will not tolerate the horrendous, continuing and prospective abuses of humanity and in particular of CHILDREN.
Have a very happy and productive New Year