 Tuesday, February 26, 2002
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Tom is a writer I recently encountered at the Alas Babylon yahoo group. He posts just using his first name so don't know much about him other than he writes interesting things.
Then everything includes itself in power
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf
So doubly seconded with will and power
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up itself.
-William Shakespeare
The Bush-Putin Axis
Tom
Alas Babylon
It is all beginning to fall into place, and it is unnerving, but it makes perfect sense in strict, Machiavellian game-theory logic. BRRR!
Consider: Last year, when Vladimir Putin visited Bush, everyone ridiculed Bush's apparent naivite for claiming that he had found a "soul mate" in Putin.
Well, he has.
Bush and Putin have a lot in common: they both despise democracy and human rights, they both have a predilection for military force, and they both have roots in the "secret police" of their respective countries--the CIA and the KGB. Both also are contemptuous of environmental protection as well.
But consider further: Putin has everything to gain, and nothing to lose, from entering into an alliance with Bush. And vice versa. Putin's country is in economic freefall; his southern flank is full of militant muslim guerrillas; and he desperately needs the infusion of capital that US oil interests could readily supply in return to access to the Caspian Basin--one of the last three huge oil reserves left on the planet (along with Iraq and Saudi Arabia).
And the Bush Regime--already a front for Big Oil--craves total control of all three oil reserves, so that Americans can continue to buy SUVs while we dominate the world oil market and export scarcity to the rest of the world.
So this is why Putin has given Bush permission for the US military to build staging bases in Uzbek and Armenia, and why he looked the other way when Bush canned the ABM treaty, despite strenuous Russian objections in the past. It is why Bush has procured Russian cooperation and support in an attack on Iraq--to remove another obstacle to total domination of the most plentiful oil fields. It is also why Bush has abandoned the policy prohibiting the use of nukes on non-nuclear nations--what better way to terrorize them into submission to the Big Two (Bush and Putin) with their combined nuclear arsenals? And what better way for Putin to gain US support in safeguarding and upgrading its own nuclear arsenal?
As I say, it all makes perfect sense in Machiavellian logic. It simply means that the Oil industry now controls both Russia and the US, and will soon control Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Caspian basin; then it will take out Iran and North Korea in order to keep China--the only remaining threat to US-Russian world domination--at bay. Afghanistan was subdued first because (1) it is already devastated, and made easy pickings for a quick (proclaimed) victory; (2) it stands right in the path of an oil pipeline from the Caspian Basin to the Persian gulf--something Russia never would have tolerated if their nation had not been flat broke and needed the oil revenue.
This is the hidden agenda behind the so-called "War on Terrorism."
Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower
a book review by Tom
Alas Babylon
I would like to recommend, for those interested, a dystopic novel of an energy-starved, corporate-dominated near future that I found quite interesting, realistic, and inspiring: Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower"
The plot involves a young teenage girl, Lauren, who lives in a gated suburb of LA in 2525. Social order is disintegrating all around, but her family and neighbors are hanging on to their suburban lives by an ever-dwindling thread--for around the walled-in suburb, random gang violence and starvation reign supreme.
Then the unthinkable but inevitable happens: the wall is breached, and a mob of drug-crazed punks invades the suburban enclave of fragile order, burning down all the houses and killing everyone they find--but Lauren and two of her neighbors, Harry and Zahra, manage to escape--in part, since Lauren has shown pragmatic foresight in planning for this eventuality, by packing a backpack with basic necessities (including weapons) for survival in the crazy, disintegrating world outside.
The three of them then join a vast swarm of impoverished refugees walking north on the all-but-empty California freeways, in desperate hopes of finding a place to live and a job in northern California, the Northwest, or Canada, where the weather is cooler, land and jobs (presumably) more plentiful, and population less dense. This swarm of refugees all prey on one another to survive, shooting and stealing as they go, some even resorting to cannibalism, and dodging the few armed trucks that still drive by.
Here is where the book gets very interesting. Lauren is a strong minded character who starts recording a series of sustaining maxims, in free verse, in a little diary she calls "Earthseed: The Book of the Living." Through these maxims, she becomes the leader of a kind of sangha, a group dedicated to practicing her maxims. (The maxims themselves appear at the start of each chapter).
The maxims themselves constitute, in my view, a very creative blend of engaged Buddhism and survivalism. Their major "theological" premise is as follows:
All that you touch,
you Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth is
Change.
God is
Change.
This is, of course, the first of the Three Dharma Seals of Buddhism:
Impermanence. Lauren's "God" is neither benign or malignant, but simply Change itself--As she says in another verse,
A victim of God may
Through learning adaptation
Become a partner of God...
Or a victim of God may
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God's victim,
God's plaything,
God's prey.
As a consequence, Lauren and her group practice an ethos which combines compassion (since "Kindness Eases Change") with hardheaded practicality. She is willing to kill--but only when it is her only alternative to being killed; never out of simple predation. And when her group encounters other refugees, they first demonstrate their own good will, and develop ways for the strangers to establish their trustworthiness, and then they welcome them in--and as their nomadic community grows larger, they protect each other more efficiently from the human predators all around them, and they collaborate to buy or find food and supplies as they go. Finally, of course, after long struggles and hardships, they reach some rural land in northern California, owned by the (now slaughtered) sister of one of the group members (who becomes Lauren's husband), and there they finally establish their "Earthseed" ecovillage.
My favorite of the verses--which is the embodiment of Lauren's emerging ethic for dealing effectively with a chaotic world, is as follows:
Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you,
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear,
Will teach you--
If you will learn.
God is your first
And your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher:
subtle,
demanding,
Learn or die.
To which I can only say, "Amen."
I recommend the book, as a potentially useful guidebook to our chaotic future.
P.S. Don't bother with her sequel ("Parable of the Talents") for there, Octavia Butler ultimately shies away from the relentless apocalyptic vision of "Sower," and ends up portraying a world more or less restored to normal, as if the oil crisis were somehow temporary.
TKW-> Not necessarily a bad thing if she suggests a plausible mechanism for overcoming the Fossil Fuel Depetion-Over Population Crisis.
