Penguin: The Heart of Darkness is Empire

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Book Lists, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy
Who, Me?

Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott – review

The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history

Richard Drayton

Guardian, 7 December 2011

Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government

“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.

Amazon Page

Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.

Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.

. . . . . . .

What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.

Read full review.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Class War (Global)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Corporate & Transnational Crime

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Karl Marx, Libertarians, & OWS: End STATE Power RECAP

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Book Lists, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Karl Marx

Phi Beta Iota:  Keep an open mind. This is deeply serious and directly relevant to understanding the convergence of the honest right, the honest left, and OccupyWallStreet.

Don DeBar (aligned with Cynthia McKinney) sends:

Zinoviev on Lenin and the (1905) Petrograd Soviet

What Lenin meant to convey was that the Soviets were not the ordinary class organisation, whose purpose, according to the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionists, was to fight only for the economic demands of the working class within the framework of bourgeois society. In his opinion such Soviets would be doomed in advance. In fact, no Soviets were needed for such a purpose. In his view, the Soviets were organisations for the seizure of state power, and for transforming the workers into the ruling class. That is why he again and again told the Petrograd workers in the course of 1916: ‘Ask yourselves a thousand times whether you are prepared, whether you are strong enough; measure your cloth nine times before you cut. To organise Soviets means to declare a war to a finish, to declare civil war upon the bourgeoisie, to begin the proletarian revolution.’

The OWS formations carry such potential, albeit (likewise) in an embryonic state. Their internal democratic structures are the key to this, and that is the part that should be replicated. As assemblies of people are constituted among more and more communities (and the accomplishment of this is extremely important to insuring that the internal democracy of each group is replicated in the aggregation of all such groups, in whatever form that ultimately takes, should it develop that far), both the possibility of coordinate mass action and the potentiality of an alternative political structure that represents all segments of the population emerges. The lesson from Lenin as applied to OWS is to recognize both the positive and negative potential that it represents and to both engage it and shape it to fit the needs of all communities. In the United States in particular, given the historically dominant role of racism in the social order, that means ensuring that the construct that is springing into existence before our eyes is made to become responsive to the direction of the traditionally oppressed communities, particularly communities of color.

Assuming that the most important task is to address the racist nature of this society and to prevent this from being replicated in whatever emerges from the present activities, it would seem that, as the best defense is a good offense, the oppressed communities here (and elsewhere, as this is becoming a global phenomenon) must organize as never before, and in a way that is compatible – in form and substance – with the present model, and which will thus insure that the voices and self-determined interests of these communities will find full expression.

See Also:

Nafee Mosaddeq Ahmed,  A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It

Thomas DiLorenzo,  The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War 

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics – Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Robert Higgs,  Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society

Hans-Herman Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order 

Mike Huckabee, Simple Government

Jörg Guido Hülsmann,  Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism

Ron Paul, Liberty Defined–50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom

Daniel Pinchbeck, Ken Jordan, et al, What Comes After Money?  Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community

Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard

Murray Rothbard,  A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II

Robert Scheer, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (Full Text Online for Google Translate))

2008 Paradigms of Failure ELECTION 2008 – Lipstick on the Pig (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

2008 The Substance of Governance ELECTION 2008 Lipstick on the Pig (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

2008 Legitimate Grievances (US Citizens versus US Government) ELECTION 2008 – Lipstick on the Pig (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

2011: Commercial Intelligence and Competitive Strategy in International Markets – Context and Challenge Inteligencia Empresarial y Estrategia Competitiva en Mercados Internacional – Contexto y Desafio

John Robb: Economic Reality & Political Treason

Robert Steele: Citizen in Search of Integrity (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Robert Steele: Electoral Reform in a Box (DIY Kit)

Robert Steele: OccupyWallStreet Message and Method

Robert Steele on Russia TV: Occupy Wall Street, Electoral Reform, and Possible Need for a Nation-Wide General Strike to Force Matter by 4 July 2012

Reference: Steele at Huffington Post on Books

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth I (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth II (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

What’s Wrong with America? Let Me List the Books….

More from Dan DeBar:  My thinking on this is not fully developed, but, if you can spare 58 minutes and suffer some of the fits-and-starts of my thought process in the process, I did go into some depth in this video –  – which starts off a bit slow, but eventually gets across a good picture of my thinking on the matter.  As I felt I got deflected somewhat by the host from my main point – that of the centrality of the issue of racism to any solution of the problems being articulated by, or serving as the catalyst for, the OWS “movement” – I fleshed that out a bit more in this video.

Owl: Financial Terrorism in USA Against USA by Wall Street and 400 Specifically Named Most Wealthy

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, True Cost, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Who? Who?

EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion

Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”

Release Date: 9.28.11

Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report

EXTRACTS

The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.

Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.

Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.

In 2005, 25.7 million Americans needed food stamps, currently 45.8 million people rely on them.

…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.

Continue reading “Owl: Financial Terrorism in USA Against USA by Wall Street and 400 Specifically Named Most Wealthy”

DefDog: PSYOP Reading List for Citizens

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Book Lists, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of War
DefDog

FYI……some good insight…..it is in the very fabric of society….

Towards a Psychological Operations Reading List

Skilluminati Research, 7 September 2011

Defining Psychological Operations is straightforward enough, but
determining where exactly it ends is extremely tricky. The US Department of Defense has infiltrated institutions around the world, they expend billions every year on domestic and foreign propaganda, yet they still only represent a single slice of the spectrum. Intelligence agencies, private think tanks and public corporations are all competing for attentional bandwidth, too. PSYOPS has become ubiquitous, metastasized into Standard Operating Procedure for the entire edifice of Western Culture. Our news and our entertainment, scientific studies, history books, political campaigns and activist movements are all just sponsored messages and paid promotions. From advertisements to astroturfing, everyone's got “desired effects” and everyone's got a “target audience” now.

Read list in context (commentary by the editors).

Phi Beta Iota:  PSYOP succeed when education fails.  Education fails and PSYOP succeed when integrity fails.  This ultimately boils down to Philosophy and the Social Problem (Will Durant, 2008 x 1916).

Below the line:  structured and expanded list with links.

Continue reading “DefDog: PSYOP Reading List for Citizens”

John Robb: Free Online Open Source Education + RECAP

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process
John Robb

JOURNAL: Open Source Education

A couple of years back I asked (in the article “Industrial Education” which is worth a read):

“An Ivy League Education for less than $20 a month.  Why not?”

At the time there were only a smattering of course materials online.  That's changing.  It's coming.  Here's an example of a class that signed up 56,000 people in two weeks.

Free Online Class on Artificial Intelligence

Another example of a highly scalable education product: Codecademy

The way to repair and revitalize modern civilization is on the horizon.  It follows a simple dictum:

Localize production.  Virtualize everything else. 

With the above, we see the virtualization of formal education (books were the first wave).

Some other thoughts on this:

  • It can drop costs by 3 orders of magnitude.  $20 a year instead of $20,000.
  • It means that the best instructors teach almost everyone.  Why not the best?

Phi Beta Iota:  There is actually a much larger variant of free online education, and that it the YouTube 2-5 minute micro-class revolution, in which citizen experts create concise lectures on single specific micro-knowledge, for example, a type of algebra problem, or mixing hydoponic solutions, etcetera.

Free Online & RECAP Links Below the Line

Continue reading “John Robb: Free Online Open Source Education + RECAP”

Steven Aftergood: Open Source Intelligence Act III

Advanced Cyber/IO, Book Lists, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Defense Science Board, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Mobile, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Serious Games, Threats, Topics (All Other)
Steven Aftergood

Phi Beta Iota:  Act I was 1988-1993.  Act II was 1993-2011.  Act III began with the publication of NO MORE SECRETS with a Foreword by Senator Gary Hart (D-CO).

Below the line in full (or click on links to originals):

OPEN UP OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

 

Continue reading “Steven Aftergood: Open Source Intelligence Act III”

Koko: Books on Complexity and Resilience

Book Lists
Koko

There is a convergence among literatures, with complexity and resilience now bringing forth Ecological Economics, concepts of agile social response, and our favorite, Engineering Resilience, a multi-disciplinary mind-set most engineers are simply not up to (nor politicians, bureaucrats, etcetera).

Adapting Institutions: Governance, Complexity and Social-Ecological Resilience (Emily Boyd, Carl Folke (eds), 2011)

Viability and Resilience of Complex Systems: Concepts, Methods and Case Studies from Ecology and Society (Guillaume Deffuant, Nigel Gilbert (eds), 2011)

Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems (Graeme Cumming, 2011)

What Kind of Information Society? Governance, Virtuality, Surveillance, Sustainability, Resilience (Jacques Berleur, Magda David Hercheul, Lorenz M. Hilty (eds), 2010)

Continue reading “Koko: Books on Complexity and Resilience”