A NEW WORLD: NOT FOR THE BETTER

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The crowds stormed the Bastille in 1789. And more recently the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. These were symbolic turning points. The underlying processes were well established.

The assumption is that history represents progress. That, for example, the dialectic whether rational or material weaves its’ way inextricably between contradiction and synthesis, often crushing irrelevant human beings in the process, strikes me as a religious view.

But what is to be made of how the world now works? We might step back into a previous era, and just hear and see what was said then. Here is John Kennedy, via War In Context, addressing before the American Newspaper Publishers Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961:

Could that be the United States? That was a simpler time of the Cold War. Now the USA, and by extension much of the world, is dominated by the new Gilded Age, which as Andy Kroll suggests did not begin with Reagan but with Jimmy Carter. And then there is that internet thing in its latest guise of Wikileaks putting lives at risk and pouring blood over the keyboards of the dissemination of confidential information. But, thank the heavens and all that is right, there is retribution and righteousness in the wings and on the way primed to step onto the stage.

Philip Shenon writes, via War in Context:

American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistleblowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: the Russian government.

National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.

“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” a U.S. law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. “The Russians play by different rules.” He said that if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, “the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.”

Violence, the method of the power, will find a way to straighten the path that humanity treads as the environment is trashed and global warming continues unabated.