Solidarity flourishes the more adverse our external reality gets. Somehow during hardship, as humans we have an innate intuition which draws us closer to each other. Sure, it seems unreal in a time of such consequential conflict in the global society we are constructing, to be talking about fraternal unity. After all, what we are witnessing are the repercussions of a divided world between the rich and the poor and the East and the West. Despite all this, the truth remains that if we observe closely enough there is right now a structural battle being fought which will determine the future of the next generations and our own.
Yes, it is true that there are unjust wars being fought on our behalf without our true consent or educated knowledge; the suffering of innocent people in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and many others which receive far less media attention, will sit on our consciousness for generations.
It is also true, that as westerners we are experiencing the end of an empire, in Karl Marx’s own words, “the empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale swindling it fostered, by the propos it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital… precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made – the disappearance of the empire.”
No doubt, there is relatively more hunger today in the world than there was 100 years ago. If we deem important the International Labour Office's latest annual Global Employment Trends report, which informs us of the fact that “the service sector now provides 42.7 percent of the world's jobs, compared to agriculture's 34.9 per cent” and goes on to say that 39 percent of the global population of working age were unemployed in 2007.
One cannot deny that corporate greed, political fraud and financial theft, are upon us with such catastrophic magnitudes that the average citizen has lost all hope in equality and fairness. Democracy has become the slogan of the powerful to justify their actions before the masses, Christ has been caricatured as the symbol of irrelevance, and our climate and ultimately us, are suffering this calamity. All this is within the grasp of anyone who watches CNN with a bit of intuition and reads between the lines.
What CNN doesn’t reveal is that there has been an increased awakening in humanity and more and more people are saying stop. Everyday that passes sees one more passive citizen becoming an active one, concerned for his rights. One more sleeping soul awakening to defend his or her humanity. As the media reporting continues to reflect the monster which humanity has become, one more individual is drawn, as Freud eloquently described, towards the “shrunken residue of a far more comprehensive, indeed all-embracing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.”
Everyday more and more people are drawn away from George Bush and pulled towards Noam Chomsky, or Naomi Klein. More people want to know what is really happening and more are looking beyond the mainstream. That is due to the audiovisual reports on CNN. The owners of the media assumed we were stupid, they underestimated the power of collective consciousness and without knowing it, have made us repudiate them. We learned to disgust them for their empty promises and wars presented as acts of peace. They presented us peacekeepers dressed up as soldiers and soon we understood. They talked to us about atomic energy and never disarmed, it didn’t takes us long to react. The same happened with those wars on terrorism, soon we understood they were taking away our rights, airports became intolerable, people kept disappearing, our democratic governments were torturing and all this without fair trials.
Until recently, watching CNN used to anger me, I could not cope with the fact that it was one more tentacle of the huge propaganda machine elaborated to misinform the majority, in benefit of a small yet powerful minority. Today I realize that CNN is our closest ally, every image that it shows, every speech that it airs, every conclusion that it draws, calls one more human to civil disobedience. Past acts of civil disobedience regained for us our stolen rights and determined our present, today’s acts are shaping our future.
"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." Leo Tolstoy
-Pablo Ouziel is an activist and a free lance writer based in Spain. His
work has appeared in many progressive media including Znet, Palestine
Chronicle, Thomas Paine¹s Corner and Atlantic Free Press.
I'm glad I came across this article. It strongly states the points, and the Marx quote is unsettlingly prescient. I was going to comment about the assertion that a declining proportion of workers in agriculture is related to the increase in world hunger. This is simply a matter of agriculture becoming more efficient - the total food supply per person could increase or decrease as the industry employs a smaller percentage of workers.
In fact, I was ready to contest your claim that the proportion of hungry people in the population had recently increased! I had known about the progress China and southeast Asia have made feeding their people in the last few decades. I thought the Green Revolution seeped steadily into new territories.
It's a good thing I decided to research it! I went to the page
FAO’S LATEST ESTIMATES signal a setback in the war against hunger. The number of chronically hungry people in developing countries declined by only 19 million between the World Food Summit (WFS) baseline period of 1990–1992 and 1999–2001. This means that the WFS goal of reducing the number of undernourished people by half by the year 2015 can now be reached only if annual reductions can be accelerated to 26 million per year, more than 12 times the pace of 2.1 million per year achieved to date.
Analysis of more recent trends makes the prospects look even bleaker. From 1995–1997 to 1999–2001 the number of undernourished actually increased by 18 million.
* * *
This means that in 2001, the net progress from 1991 was positive. But 2001 was a worse year than 1996. Newer versions of the report are available in pdf form.
I was startled at how the AIDS epidemic affects Africa's food production. This brought a lot of new facts to my attention, and I thank you for writing about the issue and making me interested!
by
Bob Jones (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 14 comments)
on Friday, February 8, 2008 at 7:52:32 PM
1 comments
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