FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds was described as “the most gagged person in the history of the United States” by the American Civil Liberties Union. This week, Nafeez mosaddeq Ahmed released an article about her story which has gone viral. You can read the article HERE

In this podcast we discuss her case and feature a long in depth skype- chat between  Sibel Edmonds & Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. This is part one of a two part special hosted and edited by Dean Puckett  deaddeanfilms.co.uk . Find more from Sibel at boilingfrogspost.com & find Nafeez’s articles and work at http://www.nafeezahmed.com. This podcast is brought to you by the team that made ‘The Crisis of Civilization http://crisisofcivilization.com/

Author: Dr Nafeez Ahmed

An abridged version of this article appears at the HUFFINGTON POST

As a participant in BBC Newsnight special, “Iraq – 10 Years On”, I found myself feeling slightly miffed at the lack of real debate on the crucial issues.

On the one hand, Newsnight presented a number of narratives of the war and its aftermath as ‘fact’, which are deeply questionable. On the other, there were no serious, factually-grounded criticisms of the war, despite a diverse panel which included people who did not support it.

As author of a major book on the war and its historical context, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq, as well as co-author of a new report, Executive Decisions: How British Intelligence was Hijacked for the Iraq War, I consider myself to be reasonably informed. Yet BBC Newsnight failed almost entirely to bring any of these issues to light.

What follows is my Newsnight-inspired Iraq War Myth-Busting exercise, based on what was, and wasn’t, discussed on the show.

MYTH 1. Sectarian violence has increased in postwar Iraq because sectarianism has always existed in Iraq, and the removal of Saddam allowed it to erupt

One of the first Newsnight bloopers started with a short introductory clip from John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor. Amongst other things, Simpson talked about the rise of sectarian Sunni-Shi’a violence in postwar Iraq, and argued that while Saddam’s regime had clamped down on sectarian divisions, regime change effectively unleashed those previously suppressed divisions and allowed them to worsen.

This was the first of many oversimplifications about the escalation of sectarian violence in Iraq. The reality, as pointed out on the show by my colleague in the audience, anthropologist Professor Nadje al-Ali, is that prior to the war, generic sectarian antagonism was unheard of in Iraqi society. Although Saddam’s regime was unequivocally sectarian in its own violence against Shi’as and Kurds, as a mechanism of shoring up the Ba’athist regime, Iraqis did not largely identify in sectarian terms. As one Iraqi blogger living in Baghdad noted:

“I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq)… They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there. I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.”

Missing from the BBC Newsnight discussion was the fact that the Bush administration planned from the outset to dominate Iraq by pursuing the de facto ethnic partition of the country into three autonomous cantons. The private US intelligence firm, Stratfor, reported that the US was “working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.” The plan was “authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney” as well as “Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz”, and was first discussed at “an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July” 2002. Under this plan, the central and largest part of Iraq populated largely by Sunnis would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shi’a region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third canton, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait.

Ultimately, of course, the specific detail of this plan did not come to fruition – but the ‘divide-and-rule’ imperial thinking behind the plan was implemented. As one US Joint Special Operations University report documented, “US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level.” This included disseminating and propagating al-Qaeda jihadi activities by “US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists” to fuel “factional fighting” and “to set insurgents battling insurgents.”

Pakistani defence sources thus reported in early 2005 that the Pentagon had “resolved to arm small militias backed by US troops and entrenched in the population,” consisting of “former members of the Ba’ath Party” – linked up with al-Qaeda insurgents – to “head off” the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement.” Almost simultaneously, the Pentagon began preparing its ‘Salvador option’ to sponsor Shi’ite death squads to “target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers” – a policy developed under the interim government of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Ironically, the same Allawi also made an appearance on Newsnight via Baghdad, rightly criticising the current government for failing to incorporate an inclusive, non-sectarian political process. But Newsnight didn’t bother to ask him about his role in engendering the very sectarian violence he now criticises by sponsoring death squads.

MYTH 2. We went to war in Iraq based on a legitimate parliamentary process, even if lots of people demonstrated against it – most Brits approved the war according to polls

When an audience member asked why the British government still went to war despite the millions of people who protested against it, Independent columnist John Rentoul argued that the war was in fact an example of proper democratic process – because ultimately the MPs voted for it. He pointed out that we don’t run democracies based on “mob rule” – i.e. just because people protesting in the street don’t want something – but on the basis of consensual parliamentary procedures. To this, host Kirsty Wark added that 54% supported the war according to opinion polls at the time.

Really?

In mid-March, before the war, “just 26% of the public was saying in mid-March that they approved of British involvement without a ‘smoking gun’ and a second UN vote, while 63% disapproved.” It was only once the bombs began to drop that public opinion drifted slightly in favour of the war. Where did Kirsty Wark’s 54% figure come from?

Disingenuously, it comes from an ICM poll which “found a persistent majority against the war, reaching a low point of 29% support (and 52% oppose) in February. Support then rose to 38% in the final pre-invasion poll (14-16 March, the same weekend as MORI’s) and jumped to 54% just a week later, with the war only a few days old.”

Kirsty’s 54% claim applies after the war – before the war, the majority of the British public was overwhelmingly opposed to the invasion, a fact which was not reflected in the parliamentary process.

And of course, since then, opposition to the war continued to grow dramatically.

MYTH 3: The Iraq War was, at worst, a colossal cock-up, simply because we didn’t have good intel on the ground about WMDs etc. So we didn’t really go to war on the basis of a lie, we went to war because our intel was wrong.

As I tried to point out in my brief intervention on the show, this whole debate about whether the public approved the war or not to some extent misses the point – which is that the Iraq War was ignited on the basis of false claims about Saddam’s WMD. Those false claims were promulgated by senior American and British officials precisely to manipulate public opinion, and pressurise the political system into a pre-made decision to go to war, irrespective of the UN, irrespective of international law, and irrespective of whether WMD really existed.

It’s this fact which ultimately brings to light the extent to which our political system, certainly when it comes to foreign policy decisions, is broken, and has yet to be repaired. The historical record confirms that all the intelligence available to British and American security services, including information passed on through the UN weapons inspections process throughout the 1990s, confirmed unequivocally that Saddam had no functioning WMDs of any kind.

Amongst the intelligence available to the allies was the testimony of defector General Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and head of Iraq’s WMD programmes. He provided crates of documents to UN weapons inspectors, as well as authoritative testimony on the precise nature of the WMD programmes that Saddam had embarked on in preceding years. He was even cited by senior officials as the key witness on the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD’s. What these same officials conveniently omitted to mention is that Gen. Kamel had also confirmed to UN inspectors in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and banned missiles, in 1991, shortly before the Gulf War – exactly as Saddam had claimed. Yet such intelligence was ignored and suppressed.

MYTH 4: The decision to go to war was based on a legitimate parliamentary process, legal advice from the Attorney General, as well as consultations with the UN.

In reality, the decision to go to war was made jointly by senior American and British officials prior to any democratic process, behind closed doors, and irrespective of evidence or international law. This is confirmed by a range of declassified official documents.

A leaked policy options paper drafted by officials in the Cabinet Office’s Overseas and Defence Secretariat (8th March 2002), records that:

“The only certain means to remove Saddam is to invade and impose a new government… [No legal justification] currently exists. This makes moving quickly to invade legally very difficult. We should therefore consider a staged approach.”

Two “policy options” are considered in the paper: “a toughening of the existing containment policy, facilitated by 11 September” and “regime change by military means.” Under the heading, ”Toughening Containment’, a plan is set out to “put real pressure on Saddam…to lash out”, and “to make clear (without overtly exposing regime change) [the] view that Iraq would be better off without Saddam.” A strategy is described as follows:

“Our aim would be to tell Saddam to admit inspectors or face the risk of military action… If they found significant evidence of WMD, were expelled or, in face of an ultimatum, not re-admitted in the first place… this could provide legal justification for large scale military action.”

The document notes the imperative “to first consider what sort of Iraq we want” – namely “a pro-Western regime”. The paper then concludes that: “The use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option.” Iraq’s “refusal to admit UN weapons inspectors, or their submission and likely frustration” would provide the “justification for military action.”
The paper thus effectively outlines a ‘staged approach’ to achieving a pre-determined policy of regime change.

In this context, the focus is not on meaningful diplomacy to achieve a real peaceful resolution, but to manufacture a crisis by tripping up Saddam. In an email dated 18th March 2002, Christopher Meyer, British Ambassador to Washington, reassured the British Foreign Policy Adviser that when he’d met with US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, “I stuck closely to the script you used with Condi Rice last week…I went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UNSCR’s.”

Peter Ricketts, the Political Director of the Foreign Office wrote to Jack Straw on 22nd March:

“To get public and Parliamentary support for military operations, we have to be convincing… ‘regime change’, does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam. Much better, as you have suggested, to make the objective ending the threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD…This is at once easier to justify in terms of international law.”

The memorandum of a meeting on the 23rd July 2002 between key members of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister and the heads of MI6 and the JIC, amongst others – the notorious Downing Street memo – concludes by urging those present to “work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action.”

The “UN route” was, in other words, conceptualised as a public relations tool to drum up support for a war that had already been decided. But the decision to go to war had nothing to do with the evidence available. In leaked UK government memoranda between March and July 2002, references are repeatedly made to “poor” intelligence about WMD, and the “thin” case for war that it presented. Indeed, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, confirms that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of regime change, “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”

Senior intelligence officers in MI6 and the CIA also confirmed that intelligence was being deliberately politicised to support “the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn.” One MI6 officer says: “You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence. Yet that is what the PM is doing.” A CIA official concurs: “We’ve gone from a zero position, where presidents refused to cite detailed intel as a source, to the point now where partisan material is being officially attributed to these agencies.”

It should not come as a surprise then, either, that the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith also came under immense political pressure to change his original legal advice that the Iraq War would be illegal without UN Security Council approval – while Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was simultaneously trying to ignore the advice of FCO lawyers to the same effect. The eventually successful pressure on Goldsmith to give “unequivocal” advice that would support the legality of the invasion was used to hammer out the chorus of legal opinion from Whitehall’s own lawyers that the war would be illegal – and to drum up parliamentary and public support.

MYTH 5: Even if the WMD issue was not really the issue, we went to war to get rid of a brutal dictator who had killed tens of thousands of people with chemical weapons.

During the show, Tony Blair talked about how, personally, he went to war in Iraq because he wanted to rid the world of a brutal dictator who was a threat to regional peace, stability, and democracy. He even cited the gassings of the Kurds, and the Iran-Iraq War in the 70s, as examples of his brutality. Great that he’s now being a little bit more honest about his motives for dragging the UK into this war – that WMD’s were never really the issue, but merely a way of manufacturing consent for a pre-made decision.

Disregarding this, though, Blair’s imperial hubris overlooked the fact that Saddam was installed and supported by the CIA and MI6; and his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and Shi’as were pursued with the support of the British and Americans, who supplied hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons – including chemical and biological weapons – to the dictator. As one Reagan administration official put it, “Saddam Hussein is a bastard. But he’s our bastard.”

So why did we go to war in Iraq in 2003? According to the infamous Project for a New American Century document endorsed by senior Bush administration officials as far back as 1997, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification” for the US “to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

So Saddam’s WMD was not really the issue – and neither was Saddam himself.
The real issue is candidly described in a 2001 report on “energy security” – commissioned by then US Vice-President Dick Cheney – published by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. It warned of an impending global energy crisis that would increase “US and global vulnerability to disruption”, and leave the US facing “unprecedented energy price volatility.” The main source of disruption is “Middle East tension”, in particular, the threat posed by Iraq. In 2000, Iraq had “effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.” There is a “possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time” in order to damage prices.

“Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader… and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”

The Iraq War was only partly, however, about big profits for Anglo-American oil conglomerates – that would be a bonus (one which in the end has largely failed to materialise – not for want of trying though). The real goal, as investigative journalist Greg Muttitt has documented citing declassified Foreign Office files from 2003 on wards, was stabilising global energy supplies as a whole by ensuring the free flow of Iraqi oil to world markets – benefits to US and UK companies were a secondary goal:

“The most important strategic interest lay in expanding global energy supplies, through foreign investment, in some of the world’s largest oil reserves – in particular Iraq. This meshed neatly with the secondary aim of securing contracts for their companies. Note that the strategy documents released here tend to refer to ‘British and global energy supplies.’ British energy security is to be obtained by there being ample global supplies – it is not about the specific flow.”

This primary goal – mobilising Iraqi oil production to sustain global oil flows and moderate global oil prices has, so far, been fairly successful according to the International Energy Agency – though obstacles remain (not least due to ongoing instability and internal terrorism).

MYTH 6: We didn’t plan for the aftermath of the Iraq War because of hubris, incompetence and general stupidity

Toward the end of the show, we heard from Colonel Tim Collins as well as various BBC personalities that the British and Americans did not plan for what would happen after the war -a grave and regrettable mistake that has cost Iraqi lives, but which was entirely unintended.

This is only partly true. The reality is that the British and American governments planned extensively for the aftermath of the war – it just so happens that those plans did not consider the humanitarian and societal connotations of the invasion to be of any significance. In fact, extensive and detailed plans were drawn-up for postwar reconstruction, all of which were focused overwhelmingly on maintaining the authoritarian structures of Saddam’s brutal regime after his removal, while upgrading Iraq’s oil infrastructure to benefit foreign investors.

“Outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won’t be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life”, reported the New York Times. “Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don’t have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power.”

Furthermore, why didn’t Newsnight draw on the evidence of its own previous reporter, US investigative journalist Greg Palast? Palast obtained a February 2003 State Department document, “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth,” which in 101-pages, detailed plans for a complete rewrite of Iraq’s “policies, laws and regulations”, based on low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges, “all state enterprises” to foreign investors. The document also stipulated that Iraq would “privatize” its “oil and supporting industries”, and set out “a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.”

In fact, a series of news reports confirmed how the State Department had set up 17 separate working groups to work out the post-war plan. “Britain and America have been working for months on detailed proposals on how to rebuild Iraq after President Saddam”, reported The Independent. “In the initial aftermath of any war, Iraq would be governed by a senior US military officer… with a civilian administrator”, which would “initially impose martial law,” while Iraqis would be relegated to the sidelines as “advisers” to the US administration. The Washington Post pointed to extensive “blueprints for Iraq’s future… outlin[ing] a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country”, particularly control of Iraq’s oil reserves. US officials said that foreign troops would “likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of US troops there for years to come”, in “defence of the country’s oil fields.”

Myth 7: The number of people who died as a consequence of the war is disputed, and will always be disputed – could be anything from a hundred thousand to over half a million – but who knows?

Kirsty Wark characterised the number of Iraq War civilian casualties as an inherently “disputed” matter with no real resolution in sight. But this just isn’t true.

There are serious, scientific, peer-reviewed estimates of the death toll tending toward higher numbers- and then there are speculative estimates which are invariably lower – such as those produced by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, or even worse, the Iraq Body Count project, which are based on trying to cross-reference media reports alone.

The most rigorous epidemiological study of the Iraqi civilian death toll was published in the leading peer-reviewed British medical journal Lancet, and undertaken by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. It estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war, employing standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community.

According to the BBC itself, the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”; and advised ministers henceforth not to criticise the study in public. So the MoD has privately endorsed the 655,000 figure – but BBC Newsnight wants to pretend the lower figures are still valid.

Indeed, Lancet’s figures have been empirically verified. The British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005, visited several locations in Iraq at random and discovered local reports of 4 to 5 times more deaths than those conventionally acknowledged . Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that the Iraqi civilian death toll since the invasion was 1.2 million.

That figure, of course, wasn’t even mentioned on Newsnight as a possibility.

Conclusions

Throughout, Newsnight ignored the now well-documented fact that the war was conceived for a set of narrow strategic goals which did not genuinely have the interests of the Iraqi people at heart.

What we should have been discussing on Newsnight is the implications of having an intelligence system that was so easily politicised, such that fraudulent ‘intel’ was cherry-picked to justify an illegal war. Resultantly, Whitehall was co-opted and manipulated by a narrow political class for a pre-conceived military agenda.

Despite the facts being widely and easily available in the public record, Newsnight’s programme on the 10 year anniversary of the war obfuscated them to such an extent that the real, serious questions were largely overlooked.

Ten years on, we need to be thinking about how British democratic institutions were hijacked for a self-serving geopolitical strategy invented by a tiny group of American neoconservative politicians; and how, therefore, we might ensure that appropriate reforms of our political, parliamentary and intelligence processes can prevent such a situation from re-occurring.

Instead, Newsnight’s Iraq War special devolved into a banal non-debate, skirting around the real issues, and failing to even acknowledge the critical facts already brought to light by decent US and British journalism.

But then, given all the recent hullabaloo at the BBC, should we be surprised?

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed take us on a journey crammed with apparently discouraging facts about the state of our world today, but he manages to answer the question:
“How can the world move from a paradigm ruled by a few, who have had constant growth as the major goal, to a paradigm with community cooperation guiding the creation of a prosperous society for all?”
in a way that makes you want to start acting today. (Filmed at TEDxHornstull)

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a bestselling author, international security analyst and consultant. He is Chief Research Officer at Unitas Communications and founder and president of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD). He also wrote and produced the documentary feature film The Crisis of Civilization

TRANSCRIPT:

The New Paradigm: Change through Cooperation
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Humanity faces a momentous period of transition. Modern civilization is not only in crisis. It confronts a multiplicity of overlapping global crises that are potentially terminal.
We’re all aware of the devastating findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose worst case scenario, is that on a business-as-usual trajectory, global average temperatures will rise by 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, creating an uninhabitable planet. We now know that this was far too conservative. The IPCC didn’t sufficiently account for the interconnected complexity of different ecosystems.
Arctic sea ice coverage is now at the lowest level it’s been for a million years. It will likely disappear in the summer by 2015. The loss of summer sea ice is linked to the accelerating melt of permafrost, releasing the vast underground stores of methane – about 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. The process is happening much faster than anticipated. Methane concentrations in the Arctic now average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years.
If this reaches a tipping point, we could trigger a process of unstoppable runaway warming, and we could see a rise of 8-10 degrees Celsius, by the end of this century.
Scientists also link the Arctic melt to our increasingly extreme weather. It will mean more colder, stormier winters in the UK and northern Europe. This, in turn, will damage British and European agriculture. With four-fifths of the United States in drought, prolonged droughts in Russia and Africa, and a lighter monsoon in India – all due to climate change – we’re already seeing a global food supply crash that will precipitate dramatic food price spikes. This alone will lead to unprecedented food riots in poor countries around the world.
By mid-century, if we fail to act, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to global warming. Imagine what this would look like when we factor in the role of energy depletion. In 2010 the International Energy Agency acknowledged that world conventional oil production had most likely peaked in 2006. Future production, relying increasingly on unconventional sources like tar sands, oil shale and shale gas, will be increasingly expensive. But industry hype has promised to reduce these costs dramatically with new drilling technologies, namely fracking. But this just isn’t true. Despite the US having increased its total oil supply by up to 2.1 million barrels per day since 2005 – world crude oil production overall has remained largely flat since that very year.
Writing in the journal Science, Sir David King, the former UK government chief scientist, confirms that unconventional oil and gas won’t be able to produce sufficiently cheap liquid fuels at the same rate as that of conventional oil. Production rates at shale wells drop off by 60 to 90 per cent within their first year of operation. Sir King also argues that oil companies have overestimated the size of world oil reserves by about a third. To make matters worse, a typical frack job uses about 4.5 million gallons of water – what New York City consumes in seven minutes. As climate change intensifies drought, it will make fracking more costly and unsustainable.
The problem is that every major point in industrial food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels – on-site machinery; production of artificial fertilisers; processing, packaging, transport and storage. Ten per cent of energy consumed yearly in the United States is used by the food industry. So as oil becomes more expensive, this will place massive strain on industrial food production.
And it won’t just be food. By 2030, on our current course, climate change alone will lead to deaths worldwide of over 100 million people, and a 3.2 per cent reduction in global GDP. What happens when we factor in the impact of peak oil? A study this year in the leading journal, Energy, concluded that “world oil supply has not increased” since 2005, that this was “a primary cause of the recession”, and that the “expected impact of reduced oil supply” will mean the “financial crisis may eventually worsen.” What happens when we factor in the interconnected feedback effects of water scarcity, food riots, civil breakdown, state failure, mass migrations? The costs will be amplified tremendously.
This is because the growth that we’ve pursued over the last decades has been tied, inextricably, to the systematic expansion of debt. Although total world GDP is around $70 trillion, global external debt is at $69 trillion, and global public debt is at 64 per cent of global GDP. Meanwhile, the total size of global derivatives trading – the debt-based speculation which got us into this mess – has risen from $1,000 trillion in 2008, to now $1,200 trillion; a number with no relation to the real-economy. It’s no coincidence that debt and derivatives have both intensified, because the speculative investments designed to benefit the 1 per cent are being bailed out by the 99. So it’s only a matter of time before accelerating costs catch up with unsustainable debt.
It’s time to wake up to the fact that the conventional economic model has run out of steam. Having outlasted its welcome, it’s now leading us along a path to self-destruction. The heart of the problem is the skewered structure of our current form of capitalism, which makes endless material growth at any cost a seemingly rational imperative.
What is this structure? It comes down to who owns the Earth. Today’s capitalism is based on a completely unnatural condition where approximately 1-5 per cent of the world’s population, owns the entirety of the planet’s productive resources, as well as the technologies of production and distribution. This is the outcome of centuries of colonisation, imperialism and globalisation, which has centralised control of the earth’s resources and raw materials into the hands of a few.
With the entire planet subjected to the unrestrained logic of endless growth, we’re witnessing the accelerated degradation of our natural environment, our resource base, our economic and financial system, as well as our material and psychological well-being. These are not separate crises. They are interconnected symptoms of a global Crisis of Civilization.
So how can we respond? We must first awaken to the reality that this is not the end, but the beginning. We are witnessing the collapse of the old paradigm, which hell-bent on planetary suicide, isn’t working. By the end of this century, whatever happens, civilization in its current form will not exist. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this. What will we choose to take its place?
As a species, we are on the cusp of an evolutionary choice. Standing at the dawn of this perfect storm, we find ourselves at the beginning of a process of civilizational transition. As the old paradigm dies, a new paradigm is born. And many people around the world are already making the evolutionary choice to step away from the old, and embrace the new.
Already, local communities and grassroots activists are co-creating this new paradigm as I speak, from the ground up. In Greece, locals in Athens gave up their salaries to form an eco-village, producing their own food, building sustainable houses, and decreasing reliance on money. As austerity wipes out jobs and businesses, the eco-village has become a citizen’s hub, giving advice and running workshops on independent living. In the UK, there are 43 communities producing renewable energy through co-operative ownership structures. These projects are established and run by local residents, who collectively invest their own time and money to install local wind turbines, solar panels, and hydro-electric power. The Borough of Woking in Surrey, for instance, produces 135 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources, selling energy to the national grid, and earning revenue that feeds back into the local economy. In 2008, 200,000 US households were living off grid – sourcing their own water, generating their own electricity, and managing their own waste disposal. By 2010, this had jumped to 750,000, and is now rising by about 10 per cent a year. Across the Western world, there are now 380 Transition Towns, whose citizens are actively collaborating to make urban life resilient to fossil fuel depletion and climate change.
The new paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human – values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment.
These grassroots endeavours are pointing us toward a vision in which people reverse their irrational investments in counterproductive conflict. Over the last decade, under the old paradigm, we’ve steadily increased world military spending by about 4.5 per cent annually. In 2011, world military spending totalled $1.74 trillion – rising 0.3 per cent from the preceding year – flattening only due to the financial crisis. Imagine what we could achieve if we transferred such absurdly huge expenditures on war-preparations for the nation, into development concerns for the species. Study after study proves that we could successfully transition to a 100% global renewable energy infrastructure, within the next 30 years. The costs of this transition would be no more than 1 per cent of the annual national budgets of all world governments.
This implies not just sending home armed forces, reducing unnecessary weapons production, and curtailing the influence of the military-industrial complex. We must convert that very industrial capacity by re-training our workers in the defence industries, and re-employing them in the new industries of sustainable peace that can underpin post-carbon civilization.
This will generate a new sustainable form of prosperity. Even by today’s completely inadequate levels of investment, by 2020, some 2.8 million people in Europe will be employed in the renewable energy sector, boosting Europe’s GDP by some 0.24 per cent. Imagine what we could achieve if hundreds of millions of households across Europe came together in their communities to invest their collective resources into each becoming owners and producers of energy? The new energy paradigm is not about corporate-dominated mega-projects, but about empowering small businesses and communities. Up to 70 per cent of energy is lost in transmission over large distances. So there’s potential for huge efficiency gains when power is produced and consumed closer to the source. This model, where households, communities and towns become producers and consumers of clean energy, is being successfully scaled-up in Germany, where 20 per cent of the country’s electricity comes from renewables, and 51 per cent of distributed energy generation is owned by individuals, not utility companies.
This new paradigm also applies to food. On the one hand, we need to put an end to the wasteful practices of the industrial food system, by which one third of global food production is lost or wasted every year. On the other, we must shift away from resource-intensive forms of traditional corporate-dominated agriculture. In many cases, we will find that smaller-scale forms of organic farming which are more labour intensive, though less energy and water intensive, can be more sustainable than current industrial practices. Communal organic farming offers immense potential not only for employment, but also for households to become local owners and producers in the existing food supply chain. In poorer countries, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food finds that small-scale organic methods could double food production. And a recent University of Michigan study concludes that no-pesticide, local forms of organic agriculture without artificial fertilisers, could theoretically be scaled up to sustain high nutritional requirements for the entire global population.
This new paradigm of distributed clean energy production, decentralised farming, and participatory economic cooperation, offers a model of development free from the imperative of endless growth for its own sake; and it leads us directly to a new model of democracy, based not on large-scale, hierarchical-control, but on the wholesale decentralisation of power, towards smaller, local ownership and decision-making.
In the new paradigm, households and communities become owners of capital, in their increasing appropriation of the means to produce energy, food and water at a local level. Economic democratisation drives political empowerment, by ensuring that critical decisions about production and distribution of wealth take place in communities, by communities. But participatory enterprise requires commensurate mechanisms of monetary exchange which are equitable and transparent, free from the fantasies and injustices of the conventional model. In the new paradigm, neither money nor credit will be tied to the generation of debt. Banks will be community-owned institutions fully accountable to their depositors; and whirlwind speculation on financial fictions will be replaced by equitable investment schemes in which banks share risks with their customers, and divide returns fairly. The new currency will not be a form of debt-money, but, if anything, will be linked more closely to real-world assets.
But equally, the very notions of growth, progress, and happiness will be redefined. We now know, thanks to research by the likes of psychologist Oliver James and epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, that material prosperity in the West has not only failed to make us happy, it has proliferated mental illnesses, and widened social inequalities, which are scientifically linked to a prevalence of crime, violence, drug abuse, teenage births, obesity, and other symptoms of social malaise. This doesn’t mean that material progress is irrelevant – but that when it becomes the overriding force of society, it is dysfunctional. So we must accept that the old paradigm of unlimited material acquisition is in its death throes – and that the new paradigm of community cooperation is far more in tune with both human nature, and the natural order. This new paradigm may well still be nascent, like small seeds, planted in disparate places. But as the Crisis of Civilization accelerates over the next decades, communities everywhere will become increasingly angry and disillusioned with what went before. And in that disillusionment with the old paradigm, the seeds we’re planting today will blossom and offer a vision of hope that will be irresistible tomorrow.
There’s only one question that remains. Are you going to hold fast with the grip of death to the old paradigm, or will you embrace life to become an agent of the new paradigm of community cooperation?

August 31st, 2012

Author: Dr Nafeez Ahmed

In Channel 4′s Islam: the Untold Story, aired 28 August, British writer Tom Holland – garbed Indiana Jones-style in billowing shirt and trusty hat – treks across the Arabian desert, talking to local Bedouins, and inspecting historical artefacts to investigate the origins of Islam. Muhammed, he concludes, probably never came from Mecca, but from Transjordania; the Qur’an and its teachings are largely borrowed from local religious traditions, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism; and it is questionable whether ‘Islam’ ever really existed as a distinctive, coherent faith during Muhammed’s reign. Rather, the religion of Islam was an innovation of the Arab empires, cynically manufactured to legitamise its expansion by conquest over much of what we now know as the Middle East.

To vindicate this thesis – based largely on his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword – Holland interviews a handful of sceptical Western scholars of Islam. But his narrative is replete with elementary, often laughable, errors. Perhaps the most glaring is his insistence that Mecca is only mentioned once, ambiguously, in the Qur’an – evidence for Holland that the Prophet never came from Mecca. But this is a strange inaccuracy, for the Qur’an mentions Mecca clearly: “And He it is Who held back their hands from you and your hands from them in the valley of Mecca after He had given you victory over them.” (48:24) He then makes much of the Qur’an’s references to “Becca”, as if this must be a completely different place, oblivious to the fact that in South Arabic, the language used in the south of the Arabian peninsula during the time of Muhammed, the sounds b and m were interchangeable – as documented in 1973 by Princeton University Arabist, professor Philip Hitti.

Holland also argues that the Qur’an’s frequent references to vines and olives points to the existence of an agricultural society. Mecca was barren and lacked agriculture; therefore, hey presto!, Muhammed’s message originated elsewhere. The inference is truly bizarre: neighbouring Medina, where Muhammed emigrated fleeing persecution in Mecca – and where he continued to receive a large bulk of the revelations of the Qur’an – was a thriving “agricultural settlement, with widely scattered palm groves and armed farmsteads.”

Holland’s other pillar of evidence is equally meaningless. Holland visits the site of Sodom, and highlights the Qur’an’s statement that its readers “pass by them in the morning and at night” (47:133-8) Flabbergasted, Holland asks: “What is it doing here – a thousand kilometres from Mecca?” That the Meccans were frequent travelling traders who would have routinely passed through this area – as widely documented by scholars such as William Montgomery Watt in the Encyclopedia of Islam (2008) and Ira Lapidus in his Cambridge University study (1988) – appears to be lost on Holland.

Holland’s lack of familiarity with the wider literature in Western scholarship on Islam is thus painfully obvious to serious historians. Early on, Holland speaks of the study of history in Western universities as based on “scepticism and doubt” – in contrast, presumably, to Muslim historians, who simply shape ‘facts’ to fit their faith. The problem is that even though Holland looks dapper in his Indiana outfit, he is not really a historian – and in his latest work, it shows.

Although for the last nine years Holland has written popular history, the bulk of his writing is fiction – including titles such as The Vampyre (1995), Supping with Panthers (1996), The Sleeper in the Sands (1998), and The Bone Hunter (2001). Yet he has no qualifications in history, and cannot even speak Arabic – which is why he employed a Syriac and Arabic-speaking researcher.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find him – in true Indy-style – adopting a 1930s colonial mindset early on, informing viewers that: “To the ancients, the Arabs were regarded as notorious savages.” As if to hit this point home, the only people he finds to endorse orthodox accounts of Islam’s origins are Bedouin Arabs living in the desert. At one symbolic point, Holland prays amongst them, then suddenly – for no apparent reason – extracts himself from the congregation in the middle of the prayer only to peer, wonderingly, around him, as if to underscore the questionable origins of one of Islam’s most sacred rituals.

Strangely, the only other Muslim who makes an appearance to represent the ‘canonical’ view of Islam’s origins is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. Troubled by what he conceives as gaps in the historical record, and inconsistencies between the scriptural account and hard evidence on the ground, Holland is confidently informed by Nasr that such an absence of evidence is irrelevant for Muslims who recognise the limits of reason in the face of transcendental realities.

But Channel 4′s sole selection of Nasr as representative of the orthodox historical account is disingenuous. Although he is a renowned philosopher specialising in comparative religion, Islamic esoterism, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, Nasr has contributed little on the minutiae of Islamic history. Through such selective production values and imagery, the film strikes a stark contrast between Western logic and Muslim belief. Muslims are portrayed as steeped in a strange, backward irrationality – out of touch with the modern world with its newfangled, super-scientific methods of historical analysis, and immune to the impact of reason when it comes to longstanding beliefs.

What Channel 4 viewers aren’t told is that the theories Holland regurgitates are not only heavily contested in the wider Western scholarly community, they were almost completely discarded some decades ago. One of their core proponents, Patricia Crone, makes a regular talking-head appearance in the film (as well as being heavily referenced in Holland’s book among others). Holland essentially resurrects their ideas – published back in the 1970s – with unnerving gullibility, accentuating the “black hole” of evidence on early Islam where one should expect abundance.

But, unbeknownst to Channel 4 researchers, he is simply wrong. Petra Sijpestein, Professor of Arabic at Leiden University, remarks: “In the writings of 12 years after the death of Muhammad, Muslims are referred to as a separate religious group, first using the term muhajiroun, migrants who had left hearth and home with a purpose, or Saracens, descendents of Sarah and Abraham. And from around 730AD, terms like Islam, Muslims and specific religious customs such as zakat (charity) were already being practiced and described.”

Yet Holland is a man on a mission. Uncritically parroting the Crone thesis that “there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century” – he infers that the Arab empires self-servingly concocted Islam as a radically distinct faith. For one thing, there are numerous Qur’anic manuscripts from the first century of hijra, which possess no significant textual deviations. But worse, apart from the fact that Islam has never presented itself as an entirely new religion (rather as a continuation and confirmation of the Jewish and Christian traditions), this theory has almost no currency at all in the very Western universities that Holland claims to admire.

As noted by the late Robert Seargeant, Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, Crone’s argument “is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a ‘leg pull’, pure ‘spoof’.” No wonder that the theory of a “reconstructable past” which “relies only on sources outside of Islam”, has “been almost universally rejected” according to Gordon Newsby, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University. This is because, says David Waines, an Islamic Studies professor at Lancaster University, it is “far too tentative and conjectural (and possibly contradictory).”

Serious debate on Islamic historiography is welcome – including re-evaluation of hadith (oral traditions of the Prophet), and re-assessing regressive elements of ‘Shari’ah Law‘ belonging to the cultural conventions of Arab dynasties. Channel 4‘s film distracts from this urgent task by popularising outmoded anti-Arab theories, long ago dismissed by most serious Western academic institutions as Eurocentric Orientalist fictions.

Yours Dean Puckett

Unused Animations

Climate Change – (deleted)

This sequence was dropped because I felt that the rudamentary explaination of what climate change is, was such common knowledge that we could move past it and get into the knitty gritty a bit faster.

Quantative easing (Deleted scene)

Both the Quantative easing and Post Industrial Economy scenes were cut to shorten the Economy section of the film which is by far the longest section and was threatening to out-weigh the film. Its a shame about the Quantative easing scene as it was one of my favorite uses of the archive.

Post Industrial Economy (Deleted scene)

The Problem of Growth (Deleted scene)

Cut as Nafeez’s statements about growth were getting repetitive.

Part 2 of the DVD extras coming soon including extra interviews with Nafeez and a remix film  that I made about the further adventures of ‘Safety Woman’ titled ‘Guardiana and the Atomic Mist’ !

AWARE, ALERT, ALIVE!

Here is the introduction to the chapter by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed:

What is climate change? Is it a product of natural cyclical variations in the Earth’s ecological systems, or is it a consequence of human activities? What are the implications of climate change for the international system? How serious are the ramifications of climate change for the continuity of modern industrial civilization? This chapter begins by confronting the major public-media debates regarding the causality of climate change, reviewing the main arguments that challenge the idea that contemporary global warming is due to fossil fuel emissions and therefore human-induced (anthropogenic). The relevant scientific literature is explored to discern whether we can be sure that climate change is happening, and why.

I then explore the implications of climate change for national security, finding that a variety of Western security agencies recognize that climate change will drastically alter the global security landscape for the foreseeable future without significant preventive action. The focus of this analysis is not to list the specific conflicts that might arise (an exercise performed frequently elsewhere),ⁱ but to assess the overarching ramifications of global warming for the ability of modern industrial civilization in its current form to survive. The analysis then extends to a critical examination of the conventional narrative of the rate of global warming as described by the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and as generally endorsed by Western states. I argue that cutting-edge scientific research provides compelling evidence that the current rate of global warming is far faster, and bigger, than the UN models predicted. Integrating the impact of positive feedbacks in the Earth’s climate systems, suggests the probability of a worst-case climate scenario well before the end of the 21^st century – unless significant preventive and mitigating actions are taken.

But such actions must go far beyond the mere question of reducing emissions. Emissions reductions have largely been addressed in a socio-political and economic vacuum, divorced from the real-world systemic changes required to drastically reduce energy consumption in general, and utilise cleaner and more energy-efficient technologies based on renewable energies in particular. Yet this inattention to the global systemic origins of the ecological crisis is part of a long-term trend, evidenced by the fact that policymakers have largely ignored several decades of dire warnings issued by the world’s leading climate and environmental scientists. Therefore, for civilization to survive beyond the 21^st century will require fundamental global systemic change at the very heart of modern industrial social relations. Only in the context of such systemic change can the prospect of a post-carbon civilization that is no longer dependent on the unrelenting exploitation of hydrocarbon energies be realized.

We have some very exciting and unusual news for you this month.

Those of you who have seen the film will remember the last section where the little animated people climb through the fence to transform the Growth Monster’s hill and dance in the sunshine…

Well, this weekend we’ll actually be doing all that and more!

The makers of The Crisis of Civilization will very soon be embarking on a project to draw attention to the monopoly of land ownership in the UK -  by occupying and cultivating a piece of disused land owned by the Crown Estate near Windsor. Inspired by the Diggers of 1649 (but updated for the current day), we plan to grow our own food, make shelters and live sustainably: to show an alternative to our system of crisis. We call for the right for everyone to be able to use the disused land to live on, free from the yoke of debt and rent.

If you share our vision, and you are willing to work to achieve it, we welcome you to join us.

The group will be walking from Syon Lane Community Allotment in West London (immediately adjacent to Syon Lane Station) on Saturday 9th May at 1pm and will camp on route for one night before arriving at the site on the 10th May.

Details can be found on the website http://diggers2012.wordpress.com/ or by emailing diggers2012@yahoo.co.uk

Alternatively you can call or text the following numbers: 07963 475 195 / 07905 283 114 to find out more.

Happy May Day to everyone! We’ll be out and about with the film again this month; so if there’s a screening near you, make sure you come along – everyone welcome, so spread the word and bring your friends and family too.

More dates will be added here as and when we have confirmed them, so keep checking back for the latest information! For a regularly updated list of all our upcoming events for May 2012 and beyond, visit our Screenings page.

3rd May – New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival:

Sanford Housing Co-Op, Sanford Walk, New Cross, SE14 6NB (off Sanford Street/Cold Blow Lane) at 8pm – FREE!

Map: Here

10th May – Grow Heathrow:

Vineries Close, Sipson, West Drayton, UB7 0JG at 8pm – FREE! (Donations welcome)

Map: Here

24th May – Ghent, Belgium:

Van Monkhovenstraat 48, Ghent, Belgium at 6pm – FREE! (+Q&A and band)

25th May – Crossroads Festival, Austria:

Forum Stadtpark, Stadtpark 1, 8010 Graz, Austria at 9pm

Map: Here

30th May – Transition Chelmsford/Altogether Now:

Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford Campus, Bishop Hall Lane, Chelmsford, CM1 1SQ at 7pm – FREE!

Please email rachel.moss@anglia.ac.uk or telephone Rachel on 0845 196 4723 to book and for more info on this screening.

Map: Here

30th May – International Human Rights Film Festival, Argentina:

ROJAS Cultural Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina at 10pm

For more information about this festival (in Spanish), please visit their website.

If you’re interested in putting on a screening of The Crisis of Civilization in your area, we’d love to hear from you! You can find out more about what’s involved in screening the film here, and get in touch with us on our Contact page for further information. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Author: Dr. Nafeez Ahmed

The brazen terrorist assault on Kabul on April 16 was the biggest attack on the Afghan capitalin the last decade. For some 18 hours, strategically perched Taliban militants linked to the Haqqani network fired on government buildings, embassies, and foreign military bases. A total of 51 people died, including 36 militants. Some 74 were wounded in Kabul along with three neighboring provinces where government and military targets came under synchronized attack.

As evidence has mounted that the militants were trained and equipped across the border in Pakistan — where the Haqqani network has its core strongholds — questions have emerged over U.S.-Pakistani efforts to repair their already strained relations. U.S. intelligence officials have frequently accused the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the rebel network’s operations in Afghanistan.

Monday’s attacks followed hot on the heels of a unanimously approved Pakistani parliamentary resolution calling for specific conditions on security cooperation with U.S. agencies. The sweeping demands include an end to drone strikes in Pakistan, cessation of all unilateral overt and covert U.S. incursions, a ban on U.S. intelligence operations, an indefinite suspension of visas to private U.S. security contractors, and an unconditional U.S. apology for NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.

How many of these conditions, if any, the United States would be willing to accept is unclear, although U.S. officials have taken pains to indicate their eagerness to renew relations. So far, rather than pointing fingers, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed the need for “shared responsibility for robust action” — which only underscores how critical the United States considers cooperation with Pakistan to be for regional security.

Missing the Point

Indeed, the Taliban’s success in carrying out these attacks at such a sensitive time highlights the urgency of the Pakistan problem, particularly as NATO prepares for the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2014. Yet so far the international debate has focused inordinately on troop numbers in Afghanistan, rather than on the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that cultivate radicalization.

This mistaken focus characterizes the whole nature of the international approach to the region, which has alienated large sectors of local populations with its overemphasis on militarization. As acknowledged in a report last year by the UK parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, the NATO surge has “created more insecurity and led to more civilian casualties.”

In Pakistan, particularly in the rebel sanctuaries in the northern frontier provinces, the drone attacks have had a similar effect, angering locals and driving civilians into the arms of militants. As Daniel Bryman of the Brookings Institution observes, the ratio of combatants to civilians killed by the drone strikes is about 10 to one. A far longer-term game, he argues, is needed.

Intractable as the crisis may appear, long-term solutions do exist. One of the most effective in Pakistan is the Rural Support Programs Network (RSPN). As Pakistan’s largest NGO, the RSPN has run quietly for nearly 30 years, with a staggering success rate. It has mobilized over 4 million Pakistani households through local community organizations, provided skills training to nearly 3 million, and reached approximately 30 million people with its work.

The secret of the RSPN’s success is deceptively simple. The poor are mobilized to establish local community organizations where citizens are involved in every aspect of decision-making — designing and selecting projects, managing them, and monitoring expenditures. The program thus empowers villagers to see themselves as citizens with the skills, tools, and acumen to work together in managing the disbursement of government funds to lift themselves out of poverty.

In the northwest frontier province of Chitral, for instance, local micro-scale hydroelectricity projects now supply power to over half the population. Elsewhere, RSPN has empowered locals to establish 1,449 community schools, whose pupils out-perform their peers from government schools, and enrolled 681,000 women in community activism — the largest outreach to poor rural women of any Pakistani organisation. In the areas where RSPN projects are consolidated, militancy is non-existent,  simply because local communities are actively engaged in their own development. Rather than requiring external force to police such communities, local civil cociety organizations (CSOs), established with the support of the RSPN, act as a bulwark against those calling for violence.

Real Resilience

Despite resounding endorsements from independent evaluations commissioned by a range of agencies such as the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development, the RSPN has seen its levels of international aid slashed in recent years, — precisely when this sort of pioneering rural development ought to be scaled up across both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Currently, development aid is a tiny fraction of what the United States and NATO spend in the AfPak region, which is overwhelmingly dominated by military expenditures.

As the countdown to the Afghan withdrawal continues, the U.S. and UK governments should learn the lessons of imperial hubris. If we truly want stability in the region, we must draw on proven models like that of RSPN, which empower civil society from the ground up. Paradoxically, our obsession with security has undermined itself. We need to focus more on building the capacity of communities to empower themselves. This is the only way, in the long-term, to create real resilience to radicalization.

The festival describes its overarching aim as working towards “a change in our relationship with the planet, the beings with whom we coexist with, its natural resources and among ourselves”. The organisers see film as an important part of this aim; noting that it can be used “as a vehicle of transformation, as a promoter of a culture oriented towards environmental conservation”.

With that in mind, this year’s festival features:

[M]ore than 40 national and international titles that explore different perspectives, divided into six different sections ranging from documentary to fiction, from animation to [the] experimental field.

And this includes three screenings of The Crisis of Civilization! If you’re going to be at the Cinema Planeta festival, you can see the film on these dates:

Thursday 19th April: Sala Gabriel Figueroa, Cine Morelos at 4pm

Saturday 21st April: Sala 1, Cinemex Diana at 8pm

Sunday 22nd April: Sala Gabriel Figueroa, Cine Morelos at 1pm