More on LSD. It's inventor, Albert Hoffman, has just died at the impressive age of 102. He made a substantial contribution to the history of consciousness, providing a way to mass produce something that turned out to be extremely beneficial for a lot of people to be taking in sync at a particular point in history. The rapidly increasing living standard in countries where the use of LSD exploded made all sorts things possible that probably would have been missed were it not for Mr. Natural.... or they just wouldn't have happened (i mean, what's an acid test without the acid?)

i can't say how many times i've used this drug - 'many' would definitely cover it - i had a chemistry teacher who believed it was helpful for students in visualizing electron orbits and molecular structures... it certainly does pique (peak?) one's visual abilities. i think the main achievement of the psychedelic movement was that a lot of dots were connected over space and time, maybe just in time, since these connections laid the foundations for so much of the environmental work that's managed to keep us one step ahead of total crash and burn. Nowadays, it seems like LSD is one of many designer drugs, no longer carrying much weight as an extreme experience. The cultural-consciousness element has become blaisé. "It's work here is done?" No, that can't be right. There's always got to be room for more space.

Grateful Dead Archives

Tegnap este, a Morcheeba koncertbe mentem és nagyon, nagyon jól volt!! After the show, a friend celebrating his 19^th birthday sent me this text message: hope you too had something like orgasm there! No kidding. Ross Godfrey’s guitar playing is right up there with the best of the lyrical guitarists of our age and their new French vocalist was excellent, a perfect fit for Morcheeba's swooning, bluesy tunage. The ticket cost more than i paid to see the Rolling Stones last summer, but no complaints. It’s probably about as close as i’ll come on this continent to a traditional Bay Area musical experience, which is to say that i came out in a different – much improved - state of consciousness than i had going in. “What more is there?” asks the closeted rock & roll junkie, the languishing deadhead, the misplaced citizen leaning towards misanthropy.

What more? Indeed, there are always the archives…. tangible proof that the power of good music never stops. Last week, the Grateful Dead announced they are gifting their archives to my alma mater, the University of California, Santa Cruz. i’ve always been proud to be a UCSC grad, but perhaps never moreso than now, when they’re about to become Dead Central. i’ll be damned. A pedestal of my own counter-culture foundations is being enshrined for research posterity, it’s an exciting thing to have happen. For those of similar persuasion, or who otherwise might be curious about why i’m going all gaga over the folder files maintained by what’s still called a 1960s rock band, it appears that the press conference (which i watched live on iclips) will go up on the Dead’s website soon – check here for it. The press conference was actually hilarious, with questions like “How will my girlfriend find her ticket order envelopes?” and “Bobby, will you be archiving a pair of your cut-off shorts?” For more info about the archive, check here at UCSC’s Special Collections,

The librarians said they’re already getting requests for loaning the material, so even though the band themselves have stopped touring, their wild collection of art and sundry will continue to travel North America. Hopefully beyond, as well. It’s fun to think of people lining up outside Moscow’s Pushkin Museum for an exhibit called The Grateful Dead: LSD and American Anarchist Experience. Just think of the changes in consciousness that could bring about – mind-boggling possibilities. Or maybe it’s too late for the “dead phenomenon” to have that kind of impact, since it’s one of those “you just had to be there” kind of things? Yet i’ve got this friend here, a Brit, always quizzing me about shows and personages, etc. lamenting the fact that he missed it all… but on a deeper level, he’s totally got it, even though he never experienced a live show. The magic is in the mystery unfolding, i guess. For those of us who drove from Santa Cruz all over California to share in that particular bit of magic, this recent news leaves us with nothing else to do but smile, smile, smile.

Foot-in-Mouth Footprints

There’s been down time recently, my mind’s been scattered, looking for a holdfast. If you read Spanish, then you know i’ve just come out of crisis mode over acquiring a Hungarian visa. The good news is that they did bestow one upon me, so finally getting the Magyar Lite experience: pay into the system and have an insurance card, but not be expected to eat fish soup on Christmas eve. The bad news is that the delay generated a fair amount of panic. If you’ve ever been in an about-to-be-deported situation you’ll understand immediately the madness it generated: impossible to make any plans for the here and now (emphasis on HERE), and even more difficult devising a contingency plan for some other country in which i have neither home nor job, possibly no friends. i found myself stuck in a conundrum of not being able to treat anything too rigorously, yet knowing full well that a pending deportation requires great seriousness, presence of mind. A period of unrelenting self-management schizophrenia which i probably would have dealt with better under a therapist’s nose, but it’s over now and i’m again listening to something besides Blues. Following 2 years of total border insecurity working in the West Bank, my energy for coping with impermanence has been completely expended, and i really do mean completely.

Circumventing absolute self-absorption – or maybe just trying to keep things in morbid perspective - as Arlo Guthrie said, when you see someone who’s got it worse than you, it makes you feel better - ??? - i’ve been reading about fuel poverty in Europe and food scarcity around the globe. For the past while, i’ve been on a mission to rid my diet of carbohydrates and suddenly, in at least 30 countries, people are rioting or at least starting to freak out over dwindling wheat and rice stocks. (There’s material for an adbusters graphic in there somewhere: diet-crazed gringo snobbishly passing over what the starving world depends on for calories.) That this is all happening in the framework of meeting energy needs only makes it more difficult to digest (that idiom too offensive?). A sound understanding of how the food scarcity problem could be dealt with also means understanding the energy industry, how best to meet the world's ever-increasing energy needs.

i’ve been finding this impossible to write about. Food is so personal and cultural and preferential - by which i mean that some people have access to lots of it while others nearly none. Not long ago, but before the “food crisis” hit the mainstream headlines, i was standing in line at my little neighborhood delicatessen, which is a bit pricy because they carry a lot of organic produce and what Hungarians tend to call specialty foods: chutneys, Thai sauces, 30 kinds of French mustard and all those delicioso Italian spreads that are 30% olive oil. Ahead of me in line was an American-Israeli woman holding a wad of 10.000 forint bills, buying nearly one of everything, and asking about the little square designer sausages in the counter case. She spoke no Hungarian, so i offered to help translate: are the sausages spicy? Then she asked about the price and mentioned that they were for her dog. “You’re buying those sausages for your DOG?” Of course, she wasn’t prepared for that, and nervously explained that she was training him and wanted something really special to reward good behavior. Immediately i apologized, saying it was out of line for me to pass judgment. What came out was simply my immediate, uncensored gut response to someone spending so much on something for a pet that i would only get for a special occasion and even then, only if i was feeling flush. Was my reaction thus borne out of jealousy that some dog has easier access to good food than i do? i don’t think so, but….

This is what i mean about it being difficult to talk or write about food. For myself, very aware of the many homeless and underfed people in this beautiful, rich capital city, just as i was in San Francisco, CA, and coming recently from Palestine, where food availability fluctuates and prices are relatively high for basic staples, the idea of a wealthy person buying a specialty food item for a pet seemed wrong somehow. Not exactly selfish, but unthinking. Yet, i also understand that someone who has the money to buy whatever she wants for whatever purpose she has in mind has the right to get fancy foods for her dog. i’m not against dogs being well-fed and i knew that she was looking at me and thinking if i really cared about unequal food distribution, i should start by streamlining my own diet - fair enough. So, in this one impromptu, ridiculous interaction, all or at least some of the hypocritical aspects of me or someone like me writing about food were crystallized.

Whatever one person says about another’s dietary choices, eating habits, restaurant preferences, etc. is immediately going to have to be self-reflective, and who among us is above reproach? i like a good bottle of vino as much as anyone, i’m willing to pay for it and if you come to my house, i’ll gladly share it with you so we can engage in bad scarcity-era behavior together. Or is that really bad behavior? Arguably, it is better to have fewer high quality foods than a lot of low quality (and often high calorie) stuff on the kitchen shelf. So i walk out of the wine shop and pass a dirty homeless woman ogling me with that gaunt seriously deprived look the homeless tend to have, i say i can’t give her any money but she knows very well what’s in the slim paper bag i’m holding… yes, guilty as charged.

i’ll end this by pointing readers to a new interactive feature at Global Footprint (open "Your Footprint" link), in which you enter information about your lifestyle and obtain an assessment of how many earths are required to provide you with the resources needed to sustain it. My own results were 1.9 Earths, but of course that’s based on how i’m living now and doesn’t include all the resources i’ve expended driving all over the US, or flying all over the world. Still, it’s an effective awareness-raising tool and left me committed to being less lazy when it comes to carting my plastic to the nearest recycling depot, about a kilometer away. The reduction in resources from vegetarian diets was also substantial, so i’m going to finish up the prociutto now in my fridge and try to steer clear of meat in the future. Or maybe i’ll get a dog before the year’s over, and feed it tasty food meant for humans so that i can just say i’m sharing my dog’s food, rather than buying meat for myself. Certainly nobody cares about the canine footprint.

No más ilegal

Amigas y amigos, por fin tengo una entidad legal! Los húngaros me dieron la visada, aunque ya trabaja ilegalmente y me he quedado aquí por tantos meses (claro, muy ilegal). Las reglas han cambiado bastante entre el tiempo cuando presenté mis papeles y el día de decisión. Ahora, mucho mas difícil, me dijeron que estuve la ultíma persona permitida quedarse con este visa de trabajo sobre las reglas antiguas. Que suerte, no? Parezco que acabo de surgir de una canción de Manu Chao. En poco tiempo, tendré un numero de seguridad social, lo cual se usa tambien para el seguro médico. Increíble contemplar... seguro médico.... aaiiiyyyyeeee!!!! Quien pensaba que la residencia en Centro Europa sea más comodable que la de EEUU en el siglo 21?

Bueno, habian muchas personas ayudandome con la burocracía "detrás de la cortina" y aunque no sé exactamente lo que han hecho ellas, estoy seguro que eso fue responsable para el resulto positivo.... quizás mi kharma subió otra vez, pero eso.... pues, no lo creo, a menos que me dices fue el kharma de mis queridos amigos húngaros.

Earth Day Critical Mass

A few photos from Sunday's Critical Mass ride in Budapest. No telling how many thousands of people participated... they were still pouring up Andrassy into the park when i left, so i'm guessing around 50.000. The message, as they say, is in the medium. In the bridge span shot , you can see (a little) that the entire bridge is full of bikers, as was the bridge that i was on when taking the photo. Lots of kids, lots of rollerbladers and a respectable contingent of unicyclists. At the appointed time - even though so many were still on their way in or hadn't even reached the park - the traditional 'wheels in the air' group hug. Nice event, too bad it doesn't happen every month. As one rider explained to me, 'then it wouldn't be as big,' which in magyar terms i suppose means not as significant (somehow) although coming from the city where the critical mass movement originated, i tend to think otherwise. In case your wondering why so many people were dressed in green, the British Council had an Earth Day event in the park that afternoon and were giving out t-shirts.... what i really wanted was a Critical Mass shirt, evidently you have to be a traffic cop or just a really kool guy to get one of those.

Revised data: Just read in a newspaper the official count was 80.000 - wow! Hopefully this will lead to more bike lanes in the city :-)

Bruno Manser's 10.000 photos of the Sarawak (in Borneo) are going up on the web tomorrow. Here's the link!

Escape From Stepford

Check out this photo montage and answer truthfully: which of the three candidates looks like a grounded human being? Hillary appears about to topple over she's smiling so hard, and Colonel McCain clearly has never adjusted to being out of uniform, no wonder he wants to stay in Iraq forever. Easily imagined pacing the oval office in army fatigues. i don't want anyone calling either of them at 03:00 to ask, "Up for pushing an encrypted button?" Saw a clip of HRC speaking in Pennsylvania and she really seemed to be losing it, desperate to discredit Obama.

He's not ideal but i think the world doesn't need ideal so much as we need competence. i'll still recommend voting for Cynthia McKinney/Greens because building a viable 3rd party is part of the process that needs to happen, plus the greens in the US have a pretty good platform and some great -key word: competent - people. Cynthia is an awesome woman! That said, Obama's looking rather presidential here and seems to be having a real conversation. i'd encourage Mrs. Clinton to go back to Stepford, while John McCain maybe needs to be caged and isolated.

Ninguna pequeña ironía, al mismo tiempo en el cual escribía ayer sobre la destruccíon de casas en Palestina, recibí una llamada que me informó hoy sea el día de decisión: los húngaros van a estampar mi pasaporte con un visado de trabajo o van a deportarme. (Si la decisión sea buena, todavía tendré que moverme del piso en mayo, porque van a destruir el edificio en que vivo para construír un hotel!) Ahora, bastante temprano, eschuco a Wandering Star (de Portishead) y me pregunto, ´si ellos me deporten, a donde voy?´ Ninguna ídea. Parezco que acabo de llegar (bueno, ya es más que medio año, sino para relocarse de nuevo, en otro lugar, se necesita tiempo). Posiblemente mañana voy a salir. ¿A los EEUU? Espero que no...no sé si me darán opciones. Y que voy a hacer con mis pocas cajas? Cuales zapatos traigo conmigo a la vida siguiente? Cuales libros? Por cuanto tiempo hay que quedarme afuera del país, hasta que pueda regresar para recojer mis posesiones? Como ya dije, ninguna pequeña ironía con todo esto. A los menos, puedo consolarme recordano que ante todo que ha pasado a los palestinos, todavía sobreviven...

A Place Not Called Hope

Here's a splice of the latest update from Palestine Solidarity network:

Al-Aqaba is a very small village in the Jordan Valley, southeast of Jenin, that, from 1967 until 2003 served as military training grounds for the Israeli Army. Israeli soldiers used to conduct their trainings using the villagers (for example, practicing detaining people, invading homes in the middle of the night, etc.) In 2002, the Village of Aqaba won an important legal victory, obtaining an Israeli Supreme Court decision calling on the Israeli military to close its training grounds in Al-Aqaba. In June of 2003, the army finally pulled back and some villagers, who had previously left the village because of the unbearable living situation (since 1967, al-Aqaba's population decreased by 85%, dropping from around 2000 individuals to approximately 300), started coming back. With the help of international supporters, the village built a kindergarten (130 kindergarteners and 70 elementary school students currently attend school there) and other structures, including a small sewing factory to employ local village women. Now the Israeli government seeks to destroy this village, issuing demolition orders for 35 structures, including the kindergarten, sewing factory, the mosque, medical center, and homes built by returning villagers, claiming that they were built illegally.

For all the Clinton supporters out there who might possibly read this, and i suppose the Obama fans as well, this is precisely the kind of act on the part of an occupier that drives people to extremes. Coincidentally, i want to note that this is likely the same mosque an israeli soldier committed suicide in a year or so ago: the demoralized foot soldier also depleted of dignity, hope. i lived not far from al-Aqaaba for two years, and know well that the majority of its inhabitants are farmers or have small businesses. What purpose do these demolitions serve? i'll ask it again: what is the purpose??? Either the democratic candidates do not understand what Israel is doing - and thus, they continue to support it unconditionally - or they understand well and are comfortable with the program. Remember back when Bill and Hillary carried on about Hope and hope? Welcome to Palestine, where we deal with the illogical and immoral counterpoint to hope as either physical or theosophical concept.

Picture A ................................................................... Picture B

A or B? Imagine that you were going to change the world. Which image would you choose to illustrate your vision?

Story in this morning's Guardian about an exhibit at the British Museum that is to detail the destruction of Babylon by US coalition forces. In the world inhabited by archaeologists, every bucketful of sand is of potential historical value and therefore should never be used to fill sandbags (!) or in any other way be disturbed. Along come some guys from Kentucky or wherever in their tanks, tearing up ancient processional avenues and knocking down mud brick walls. This is an ongoing tragedy that began with the wholesale looting of the Iraqi National Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion and sadly, continues all over the country. Too depressing to contemplate on a Monday morning... i'd rather hear about Charlton Heston's star-studded cremation, which has got to mean that he's not going to be interred holding a gun. What betrayal of historical import is that?

More Gloss

See what i meant about China and the terrorist label?

A separate report on Reuters said the crackdown was on two East Turkestan "terrorist" groups. A government spokesman told Reuters: "At the end of last year an overseas East Turkestan terrorist group issued an order requesting its members to enter the country to be ready to launch terrorist attacks at the Beijing Olympics. (Guardian)

The story goes on to note:

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International say Beijing often uses alleged terrorism as an excuse to violently repress any activism for independence in the region, whether violent or peaceful.

i can't be the only person who sees this as both a diversion from the Tibet torch relay protests and a justification for preparing everyone - including and perhaps especially, journalists - for high security summer fun in Beijing.

A student asked this morning what i thought about the protests - i support them, absolutely - and we had a brief discussion about politics and sports. It's nice to think that politics can be kept out of sports, but as far as i can tell, this argument is usually made by those who don't want their own bad political positions and/or systems to be questioned, e.g. the Israeli govt, the USSR, the apartheid South African govt. My father is a huge basketball fan, and even back in the 60s i can remember him talking about racial discrimination on the court (Dr. J was his big hero, so i'm glad to say the tenor of his rants was always pro integration). Politically-embroiled olympic games are hardly new. Hungarians, in fact, will be among the first to declare this an ineluctable reality, referring to the famous Hungarian-Russian water polo match at the 1956 Olympiad in Melbourne. All i can say to complaining Chinese at this juncture is "get over it" and think about why this global resurgence of Tibetans' human rights support is happening. Suppressing the voices of our Tibetan brothers and sisters, as well as their supporters, is not the right solution to this equation.

One of the strange things about logging into the net from here is that the majority of ads on many sites are strictly in Hungarian - except when they're in Spanish; skype usually opens up in Romanian; google does this random thing where i sometimes get a French search engine, sometimes German, most often Hungarian; and youtube once offered me the most viewed videos in Japan - go figure. Nothing like an eclectic experience to start one's day, eh? (for those who appreciate Canadian question tags). In those moments - and they do occur - when i feel nostalgic for some homegrown american culture and deadnet doesn't want to load, i have to look elsewhere, though sometimes net offerings just cough things up somewhat randomly.... or a friend will offer advice. Here's a truly astonishing clip by Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir covering Sweet Home Alabama.

Transit strike in Budapest today, as well as on metropolitan commuter trains. What happens? More people drive. This is already a really stupid choice for all kinds of non-strike-related reasons; if someone wants to support transit workers having fair, sane working conditions as part of supporting a better public transit system OVERALL, riding a bike during the strike is a much better option.

The More Things Change....

On devine les arguments: «le monde a changé»; «nous ne sommes plus comme de Gaulle au temps de la guerre froide entre les deux blocs américain et soviétique». Raison de plus! Dans un monde unipolaire, il est plus urgent que jamais de garder ses distances. Le caractère obsessionnel de la peur de l’Iran n’est pas moins stupide que l’anticommunisme des années 1950-1970. Denis Sieffert, on Sarkozy’s collusions with Brown/Bush in Bucharest

Coming at this a few days late, so be it…. a small token of after-the-fact solidarity from a veteran of the anti-NATO continuum (graphic from Prague 2002). Once again, a story the international media neglected to cover was the high level of policing in Bucharest, raid of the anti-NATO convergence center, and turning potentially disruptive people back at the Romanian border. There are accounts of what went down here and here, where there are also some pics and rather curious videos. One thing i found particularly interesting – if not surprising - was the state-media collaboration prior to the NATO summit:

“The local corporate media has also been in a frenzy about "dangerous anarchists" who are going to descend on the city and break store windows. One TV news report on Realitatea TV yesterday morning encouraged viewers to throw rocks at any demonstrators that they see on the streets.”

Really, what is there to say about this? It’s a strange equation: stop civil unrest by encouraging civil unrest. Isn’t state-sanctioned stoning of people who aren’t with the program the precise lack of freedom the West is wasting so much oil and so many lives to protect us against? The sad thing is that in Romania, more than a few individuals likely considered such advice to be prudent. i’m reminded of a wonderful book by Mircea Eliade, The Old Man and the Bureaucrats, in which he draws out the gross self-contradictions of the Romanian surveillance systems under communism: the only way the old man can subvert the political machine is by telling them stories that are equally nonlinear and nonsensical.

Yet the dictatorial history is a past ideally left behind. Now reincarnated into a democratic state and member of the EU, this is what we get:

“Gandul [a Romanian newspaper] focuses on the 30,000 intelligence officers from everywhere in the world who arrived in Bucharest in order to ensure the security during the summit. "Eyes in the skies", underground monitoring and ground checks take place everywhere.”

Elsewhere i found the number of so-called security personnel to be only 27,000, and ok, the robocops aren’t all Romanian and Genoa back in 2001 was worse (there were also 1000s more demonstrators), but no matter. People in Eastern Europe who have long-term memories and discuss life in the region during the communist era tend to concur that Romania’s Securitat shared the anti-honor of being most ubiquitous and unwieldy with East Germany’s Stasi (for those unfamiliar with all this: the Stasi were hardcore iron curtain bad guys). i’ve read that 1 in 3 people were informers and nobody trusted anybody else, understandably. So, when you think about it, throwing rocks at dissidents and having hoards of police around to back you up is maybe a familiar, easily re-accessed drill for the average Romanian of 40+ years. It’s not my intent to disparage the Romanian people here; rather, i’m just wondering how much they realize that hosting these summits brings long-term upgrades to their own state security apparatus which might come back to bite them? Personally, i don’t believe there’s any coincidence between the historical legacy of “shut up or we’ll shoot you” and the newly formed “security” relationships the US has been pursuing with any of the former Warsaw Pact states – or the eagerness with which these new NATO members revitalize their old habits of command and control.

Romania, let’s remember, has been playing host to extraordinarily renditioned prisoners and is now the CEE HQ for Northrup Grumman. They also just signed a contract with Lockheed Martin for 17 Multi-Mission Surveillance Radar systems, which “can easily be transported by air, sea, truck or rail and can be deployed in less than 60 minutes.” That’s a far amount of mobile hardware for a country that currently has no threatening enemies, nor any wars on its borders. Of course, these kinds of deals are promoted as job creators, but that’s standard fare and anyway, we all know what it really means. The US has been using their Black Sea ports for refueling and troop transport, and has a commanding presence at Romanian military bases. Romania was promised enormous amounts of Iraq reconstruction money (although it’s hard to unearth how much of that actually became a reality) and all sorts of propaganda was generated to explain to “they, the people” why working with the US on Project Iraqi Freedom made so much sense. The point i want to make here is that the US is using this country big time to manage its military activities in the Middle East, and it’s certainly in US interests to make sure that Romania is secure in every aspect that term can encompass.

As something of an aside, it seems to me that the tension between Russia and NATO now is not because one or the other feels particularly threatened in standard “let’s have another Great War in Europe” fashion. There’s far too much interdependency now between the EU and Russian Federation for that, and it’s just hard to imagine either party initiating such a war. What is much more likely, imho, is that Russia sees a serious conflict unfolding between itself and the US in the Middle East/Central Asia, and US military bases in Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, et al. thus present a significant, combined problem. It’s impossible to get closer to the Mideast battleground without getting closer to the Russian bear, and naturally the bear is going to growl at you when you threaten its territorial domain. What i'm seeing in all this is that the US is using the newest NATO bloc, the countries that are easily manipulated by a combination of dollars and fear (tho one wonders how anyone can drool over dollars these days), to back up American presence in the world's main oil & gas belt.

After W left Bucharest he went on to Croatia, where more of his freedom and security blather was spewed onto the feet of Balkan leaders. There, protesters were not so actively contained: "Croatian television reported protesters had tried to hand Bush a huge postcard with pictures of Croatian towns and resorts reading 'Please, don't come back.' " Unfortunately for the Balkans, it seems likely that whomever moves into the White House in 2009 is going to continue the current policy of subjugating real freedom and security on the peninsula in the cause of US strategic imperatives. Welcome to NATO: please remember to check your independence in at the door.

The Terror Gloss

There are times when social constructs have to attain the level of absolutely absurd extreme before we can see that the absurdity actually exists at a much lower level of the idiocracy chain, and the latest swipe of the terrorist wand is definitely one of those times. When the Dalai Lama is declared a terrorist – Dharamsala Nancy the new Hanoi Jane? – even those people who accept the axis of Islamic evil concept have got to be experiencing lexical dissonance. The Dalai Lama orchestrating a terrorist plot? What spin doctor came up with that notion? Ah yes, the ever-ameobic Chinese government, always embracing the best of what works in the West. But i’m not blaming the Chinese. This is what the W Dick junta has done to the world - their lasting impact, cause célèbre, Chernobylesque meltdown in the sphere of global syllogisms. As it now stands, anyone anywhere who uses violence in charged political atmospheres – or is affiliated with those who do - is branded a terrorist; all acts of dissent that the state (or a corporate entity) doesn’t like become acts of terrorism. China is merely following the US lead, and it becomes harder for the US to publicly criticize them without drawing further attention to its unabashed hypocrisy.

In the old days we had terms like insurrection – revolt – war – occasionally, the crazed rantings of a recent widower or war veteran. Then guerilla wars became “low intensity conflicts,” regionalized with huge imparities, evolving finally into privatized occupation and militarily weeding out evil-doers (itself a twist of “enemy;” is it obvious, the extent to which the West is also highly theocratized?) This is a new New World Order, and woe especially to those whose acts remain somewhat unpredictable, making the state look weak and feel weak. Instilling fear is a mandatory counter measure, leading people to want their big strong uncle to keep them safe: whatever it takes, just do it. This is all about spin at a gross Orwellian magnitude, but it has far more serious consequences than generating middle class suburban paranoia. Countries are being destroyed, cultures are being exterminated, increasingly far and wide as part of a “global war on terror.” War seems to be what globalization is ultimately all about, or at least where its strands are most strongly knotted together. As the safe havens between war zones shrink, arms deals are cut which would have been unlikely or unpermitted a decade ago. Slap a “war on terror” tag on the package and it’s a go. War has always been big business, and terror is proving to be bigger business – the shock doctrine is just part of it.

On any given day that i can tolerate a few minutes of seeing what Little Bush is up to, or Ehud Olmert, or (at the more pathetic end) Musharraf, i am struck again and again by the use of “terror” to justify any level of violence the state apparatus chooses to employ. US soldiers from Iraq speak about how rules of engagement essentially devolved to the point where anything moving was a valid target. Indiscriminate killing – is that not murder? (Is that not terrorism?) In Palestine, same situation. The IDF doesn’t even bother with the whole collateral damage label since all Palestinians are current or future terrorists. The arbitrariness of harassment is maddening, and the soldiers as well as vigilantes operate with total immunity. The US wants to bomb targets in Pakistan, they bomb Pakistan. Israel wants to bomb civilians in Lebanon, they bomb civilians in Lebanon. Columbia wants to eliminate the FARC, they ignore borders and shoot to kill. You can do whatever you want, or pay someone else to do it, with one very crucial provision: do not, under any circumstances, allow the enemy to organize a real army, with colonels and uniforms, marching into battle under a unifying banner, because then you’ll be forced to drop ‘terrrorism’ from the slogan, it will just be war and there will have to be limits, and maybe conscription (in the US, at least), and the whole presentation would have to change.

At the heart of the current public relations campaign is the premise that suicide bombers, RPG-toters, and their various counterparts worldwide are in the fight for the mere existential thrill of killing people and wreaking general havoc. While the latter is in fact probably true, the over-arching problem is that by focusing on terrorism, states are able to ignore the political issues that underlie the resistance movements. Israel mastered this tactic early on, leading the world to assume that once Palestinians ditched the suicide bombings and stone throwing, they might get their independence, or at least Israel wouldn’t have to constantly be punishing them. Putin used the same tactic with Chechnya, Bush continues to slog it out on this premise in Iraq and, along with the rest of NATO, in Afghanistan. Now China has attempted to justify its violence against Tibetans by construing monks as suicide terrorists, shifting the question away from why they are persecuted to why they must be even more aggressively occupied and controlled. It’s effective spin in this age of fear and retribution. In the “have your say” comment boards about Tibet, Chinese contributors say over and over that terrorism is not the way for Tibetans to put forward their cause. The ultimate irony is that the longer legitimate political and cultural rights are repressed or ignored, the closer people move towards taking unpredictable, violent action. To paraphrase Sartre, we don’t get a war without wanting a war, and people get the war they want.

Which brings us back to the absurdity of Jiabao’s government labeling the Dalai Lama a terrorist. Whatever his political shortcomings, the Tibetan leader-in-exile has repeatedly offered to negotiate the establishment of a culturally autonomous region within China, under which Tibetans would control selecting their leaders and basically managing their territory according to their own traditions, while China would be able to continue exploiting the natural resources, secure the borders, et al. One assumes this would allow Han Chinese who’ve moved into Tibet to continue living there, so long as the PLA is not around enforcing cultural genocide. However, since nearly all governments tow the line that there is no negotiating with terrorists, this new classification of Tibetan resisters as suicide attackers serves to undermine negotiations, with public support for doing so. China – like Israel, Russia and the US – has huge military resources and theoretically doesn’t have to put up with anybody who burns their flag. Yet, it’s one thing to not negotiate with a bunch of kuffiya-wearing desperados who’ve hijacked a plane, another entirely to not negotiate with an entire people. The options that leaves us are exactly two: extermination or perpetual war.

This is the essence of why the terminology is so blatantly idiotic and corrupt: political conflict is not about methodology; it’s about greed and sometimes, ideology. Just today, Bush in Bucharest told his NATO comrades that they must “fight to the finish” against Afghani extremists. This was in the context of pushing missile defense systems in South Asia and expanding NATO. The rest of the EU leaders joined in at the refrain: death to the Taliban or bust. On other words, we’ll just annihilate the farmers, herders and religious illiterates in Afghanistan and then all will be well with the world. Guess again. That Bush is trying to get NATO to commit more resources, and intensify the fight, has only got to mean that from their standpoint, the situation is going backwards not forward. Stronger methods are required. In other words, the terrorists in Afghanistan are calling the shots? If that’s the case, the only way to resolve it is to fight terror with terror, and therein lies the rub.

There is no moral high ground here, as any Iraqi exile will tell you – terror, by definition, is determined as such by those at the receiving end of it. i’m no fan of Osama bin Laden, but let’s be real about what these Afghan “extremists” want and why they haven’t put down their toys yet: i guarantee they are not fighting to protect Osama or whichever crazed mullah is in command at the moment. The US/NATO position that in the war against terror there are no constraints is a license for everyone involved to use whatever means of battle they choose. That US forces cannot succeed in a guerrilla war is not the guerrillas’ fault. Nor is it the Tibetans’ fault that the Chinese cannot get the world to forget about their violent occupation of Tibet. Painting these resistance movements over with lacquers of terrorist fanaticism ultimately lays bare the inability of governments to deal effectively with the political conflicts they, themselves, have initiated and subsequently perpetuated. (To be clear, i do not use “effectively” here to mean success of the invaders; effective ending of a conflict means negotiating conditions that are just, and respect the aggrieved parties, i.e. the unsuccessfully conquered.) It also keeps the battle going, the war profiteering on track, likewise the endless death and destruction. We can call this a fight against terrorism, but really it’s a fight against fighting back, and to pretend anything else is to side with the well-manicured terrorist spin doctors, those people who appreciate the finer aspects of gloss.