The Challenge * Original Declaration * Example of Changes * Why This is Necessary
Subject: a sick society body politick and environment ie nature
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 14:30:02 -0400
From: Alexander Jablanczy <aljablan@sympatico.ca>There is so much wrong that one does not know where to begin.
But there is a clear and necessary connexion betwixt the dearth of democracy oppression by multinational globalisers and destrution of nature and a natural way of life and extermination of our fellow creatures and the threat to our own future.
There are three great legacies which the British people trasmitted to America.
I wont deal in detail with the third here, viz. the English language except to say that as a medium of communication it's adequate but as a homongeniser of cultures it is not.
The first is obviously Magna Carta, habeas corpus and the concept of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. The separation of powers is more the product of the French Enlightenment Montesquieu The Spirit of Laws, executive legislative and judiciary etc.
When ex pres Clinton went to Peking and lectured the Chinese a civilisation of 5 thousand years he quite ignorantly and parochially attributed the concept of democracy to America which is as we have and shall see is balderdash.
Democracy quite aside from the details of political system and structure of governance which we have seen are British and French as an idea and ideal is exclusively an Athenian Greek invention. More important much more important than any other contribution.
The idea that there is no God ordained or force acquired elite gang of thugs who rule over the rest of us is exclusively Athenian. Read Pericles funeral oration over the Athenian dead at Marathon. Those sentences are by far the most important ideas that man ever penned and that includes everything else even the Bible and the document at issue here..
It is not taught in civics classes nor in history nor required of immigrants. Yet everything else is an aftethought compared to it.
The key phrases are he whose business is not our business has no business with us that is we require everyone to take part in the business of governing ourselves, ie you cannot withdraw but must take part in public discourse and take take responsibility for our decisions because they are your decisions. He further states that this power and responsibility belongs EQUALLY to all Athenian citizens whether rich or poor.
Although Athens and Rome were slave owning societies as was and is America once the slaves were manumitted and acquired Roman citizenship they were equal. This was the next stage in evolution of democracy. This is where the signers of the Declaration got the bit about the British king not permitting naturalisation of foreigners.
It took another century to arrive at the concept of freeing the slaves. However it was a sham manumission. To manumit excusively in the political and legal sense and of course even that was incomplete until the civil rights marches another century later, to manumit in the legal and political sphere without emancipation in the economic and educational sphere is a travesty an outrage and a fatuous excercise. Hence the slave rebellion misnamed crime in the streets and inner city problems.
In Roman comedy the freedman was a stock character. They knew their Greek slaves were superior to them in culture as they used them as paidegogues pedagogues child leaders educators. US kids get their education from rap songs, plus ca change.
No one mugs anyone if they have an income of say 40 grand and a PhD. But if they are illiterate and have no income they will.
Even without the race question and the uresolved manumission of the slaves the US is a sham democracy as is the UK Canada et al. Only half vote, not because of apathy but because they deem it useless or managed, manipulated.
So even a 100% success would lack legitimacy. The will of the people is a plague on both your houses I am afraid. So Dubya gets elected by 22% of the populace and witness the grin on the mug of Tony Blair rejoicing at his landslide of hang onto yr baseball caps of also 22%. Wow. This get eerie. Chretien also rules in Canada with a massive majority of seats with 22% support. Pericles would cringe and weep but Machiavelli and Lenin rejoice and leap for joy.
And of course these were highly manipulated and passive votes not the product of active assent and enthusiastic support. Anybody who thinks we live in democracies is delusional. As are those who thinks that pollution is good for business.
Which brings us finally to the corrolary colloraly issue. Freedom democracy security from our fellow man implies from our fellow man's activities.
No one has the right to endanger my life and health because of his activities. I would extend and not limit the topic at issue to pollution as important as that is. But include the horrors of genetic engineering, genetically modified foods, cloning, that is all the new untried untested, inadequately researched, unnecessary, dangerous novel bio technologies.
This is of course the second British legacy, the industrial revolution. Manipulate degrade denature pervert nature and natural processes. It is not a coincidence that mad cow disease vCJD foot and mouth disease reared their ugly head in the UK, it was inevitable and foreordained given their lunatic feeding of animal products to herbivores, sheep brain fed to cattle.
I expect and predict that the genetically modified soybeans ubiquitous in nearly all foods will cause something like thalidomide phocomelia, DES vaginal cancer in daughters of pregnant women, and other pharmaceutical horrors. Hormones in milk will induce or promote cancers, antibiotics in animal feeds lethal allergic reactions and antibiotic resistant superbugs. We already have a horrific epidemic nay pandemic of asthma due to pollution but possibly air conditioning and obligate vaccuum cleaning of generalcarpets.
Homo technologicus is well on the way of destroying itself.
He who doesnt know history is condemned to repeat it. The Athenians were no angels. They clear cut their forests and ended up with denuded hills and mountains and were reduced to building in marble their temples which of course survive. The similar structures of the Haida and the other west coast Indians didnt except for the odd totem pole as they hadnt yet managed to reach the development of the Greeks. Maybe there is also no marble in the Rockies.
So the Greeks ended up with marble statuary and temples and goats finished the job of eating the last vestiges of vegetation, and the sheep. Hence the tragedy and the pastoral. Goat song and shepherd song. Without crops on eroded hills they had to get militaristic and acquire an empire to feed their population and get lumber for the Athenian fleet.
This is world history from an ecological angle. Now you can predict both the cause of expansion and the demise of the Roman Empire and the British and the French and the Spanish and the American. Exhaust and destroy your home base, be compelled to expand subjugate other societies and territories ie ecosystems.
Slash and burn agriculture. Slash and burn forestry. Enclosure movement Latifundia. The Romans destroyed their rural farm population, employing slaves instead hence class system, proletarianisation of the now unemployed former farmers into the magalopolis, the Brits added to this employment in the form of the semi slave labour of the textile mills and mines, sheep again in depopulated forest cleared countryside to supply wool for the mills. The Yankee contribution to this was the consumer society, make unnecessary goods to employ workers.
But the same problem, latifundia, enclosure, agribusiness. All entails destruction and depopulation of the rural land base and the free peasantry into urbanised proletariate. panem et circenses bread and circuses royal scandals professional sports hamburger and soy protein. Sacred beef adulterated with hormones antibiotics and strange organisms. Soon artificial genomes.
So America is not the teacher of mankind as Athens claimed to be. It hasn't even reached the stage of development of the Roman Empire which at least managed to solve the problem of slavery. Individually, though not in a mass emancipation, which failed in America.
China Russia India Arabia and the rest of the word for all their great civilisations and cultures have never developed the Athenia Roman Republican Rennaissance Italian French British American idea that men are equal. Of course this has the religious sanction of Stoicism and Christianity especially of the Protestant variety. Catholicism is infested by hierarchical caesaropapism, but does not have the economic curse of the elect class distinction. Structurally Protestantism is more democratic, but economically Catholicism is more egalitarian. There were no Protestant mendican orders. There was no Reformation in Judaism Hinduism Mohammedanism nor even in Eastern Orthodoxy. Hence the descendants of the Athenians and of course the Russians are fundamentally deprived of the notions of freedom of thought, religion, self governance, pluralism, egalitarianism, the veritable capstones of western public life.
Without these we are not free men but slaves. Such is the curse of slavery it enslaves us all. The billonaire quivering in his computerised no go fortress as our y clept democratic leaders in Genoa are even more slaves than the hapless demonstrators behind the wall of steel wall of shame a movable Berlin wall separating the rulers from the ruled.
Democracy anyone? Gimme a break.
Until we have proportional representation, ie if 10% voted green then 10%of all seats in all houses goes for greens.
If 1% voted nazi and % voted commie then they get that many seats period. And if 20% vote flat earth or levitation pary, tough, then that's what they get. In UK USA or Canada or anywhere else. Otherwise don't lie to me about democracy.
And if 99% of the population are against cloning humans then that's it.
And if 80% demand ucontaminated food, then that's what they get.
I am not holding my breath.
Alexander JablanczyThe Challenge * Original Declaration * Example of Changes * Why This is Necessary