Excellent animated intro to Peak Oil by Dermot O’Connor, sometime blogger at idleworm, in case you’ve been living under a rock (or more likely relying on the corporate media to inform you) for the last ten years or have friends and family in a similarly deplorable state of ignorance (although consider Dmitry Orlov’s health warning: ‘when introducing this to people, please remind them that they will need a couple of years to come to terms with this, and should try to not panic in the meantime’) – ‘There’s No Tomorow‘:
Beautiful, inspirational vid exploring the work of Charles Eisenstein, directed by Ian MacKenzie – ‘Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Community In An Age Of Transition‘:
Excellent, subversive talk by Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan turned whistleblower, at the Berlin Freedom of Expression Forum. Ironically it appears this talk was censored – ‘removed by the user’ – while all the other videos from the conference stayed up. If you want to know what I think about recent politics he just about sums it up, speaking authoritatively from his own personal experience. The talk is titled ‘Realism or Hypocrisy? – Western Diplomacy and Freedom of Expression’:
You could also check out the latest output on Matt Carr’s excellent blog, ‘Infernal Machine‘ (sample quote: ‘the attitude of both governments to the ‘Arab Spring’ has not been driven by a concern for ‘the human rights and dignity of all people’, but by an opportunistic attempt to turn the upheavals of the last year or so to their strategic advantage’) or the ever-brilliant Media Lens, whose message board I still follow compulsively. I still can’t bear to get into this filthy stuff again, despite telling John-‘bomb Iran‘-and-now-‘take out Syria‘-McCain to ‘fuck off’ in rather heated tones while watching C4 news last night with my family. I’ll just say that I knew the R2P, humanitarian intervention stuff was bollocks and that it would only end up harming the people it ostensibly set out to help, having looked at the history of the CIA and NED involvement in other ‘noble causes’ from Tibet to Burma to Zimbabwe to South Africa. Check it out:
The CIA cooked up a fresh operation in Mustang, a remote corner of Nepal that juts into Tibet. Nearly two thousand Tibetans gathered here to continue their fight for freedom. A year later, the CIA made its first arms drop in Mustang. Organised on the lines of a modern army, the guerrillas were led by Bapa Yeshe, a former monk.
‘As soon as we received the aid, the Americans started scolding us like children. They said that we had to go into Tibet immediately. Sometimes I wished they hadn’t sent us the arms at all,’ says Yeshe. The Mustang guerrillas conducted cross-border raids into Tibet. The CIA made two more arms drops to the Mustang force, the last in May 1965. Then, in early 1969, the agency abruptly cut off all support. The CIA explained that one of the main conditions the Chinese had set for establishing diplomatic relations with the US was to stop all connections and all assistance to the Tibetans. Says Roger McCarthy, an ex-CIA man, ‘It still smarts that we pulled out in the manner we did.’
Thinley Paljor, a surviving resistance fighter, was among the thousands shattered by this volte-face. ‘We felt deceived, we felt our usefulness to the CIA is finished. They were only thinking short-term for their own personal gain, not for the long-term interests of the Tibetan people.’ In 1974, armtwisted by the Chinese, the Nepalese government sent troops to Mustang to demand the surrender of the guerrillas. Fearing a bloody confrontation, the Dalai Lama sent the resistance fighters a taped message, asking them to surrender. They did so, reluctantly. Some committed suicide soon afterwards.
Today, the survivors of the Mustang resistance force live in two refugee settlements in Nepal, where they eke out a living spinning wool and weaving carpets. ‘The film is for the younger Tibetans, who are unaware of the resistance, as well as for Americans, who don’t know how their own government used and betrayed the resistance,’ says [film maker] Tenzing. (link)
They only care™ when it pays them to care™, and we’re fools if we go along with it uncritically. Ask: why don’t you hear impassioned pleas for the defense of ‘freedom fighters’ in Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen, Afghanistan…etc?
Anyway, that’s already more than I intended to write. I’ll go drink some nice, soothing chamomile tea now.
Frequently Found Growing On Disturbed Ground 