| Saving the World at Earth Summit 2012 (Part 2) | | Tuesday, February 16, 2010 | | If the “Earth Summit” convened by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 is to save the world from sliding into certain environmental disaster, it must address the rapacious ecological impact of giant corporations.
How to do that when corporations control the world economy and have enormous influence on the policies of governments?
To know what must be done we have to understand how.. | | Read More |
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| Can 2012 Earth Summit Save The World? (Part 1) | | Monday, February 8, 2010 | | [News: The UN General Assembly has called for a new "Earth Summit" in 2012.]
Five decades after biologist Rachel Carson’s best-selling book “Silent Spring” rang the alarm about environmental pollution, world leaders will gather for the fourth time to deal with the rapidly worsening problem.
Their previous meetings achieved limited but important goals; in 2012 they have an opportunity – if they.. | | Read More |
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| Is Britain Now America’s Worst Enemy? | | Monday, February 1, 2010 | | Most people think of Britain as America’s closest ally, but it’s time to jettison that idea. The two primary factors that shaped their “special relationship” in the aftermath of World War II -- the Cold War and the need to arrange a stable transatlantic transfer of power -- are now irrelevant. As one of Britain’s cold blooded politicians put it two centuries ago, the country has no permanent.. | | Read More |
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Hind Swaraj II: Reviving Gandhi
What every Indian should know
by Bhaskar Menon
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Essay I
A 100 years after Mahatma Gandhi wrote his seminal work Hind Swaraj, we review what every Indian should know about his ideas and concepts and how they relate to the state of the world and our place in it. This first essay argues that reiviving Gandhi’s political legacy is the only way to escape the current deepening global crisis.
On 13 November 1909, a few weeks after his 40th birthday Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi boarded the S.S. Kildonan Castle to return to South Africa from Britain. He had been in London for more than four months, lobbying parliament entirely without success to protect the rights of Indians as it authorized a blatantly White supremacist constitution for the new Union of South Africa... Read More
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Essay II |
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India has assimilated many invasive cultures in its millennial history, always through a visceral, multi-generational and largely unconscious process. Our current situation calls for more because Britain’s uniquely manipulative political elite continues to exert a deeply destructive influence on our national life. To counter it we must understand how we have been manipulated.
BRITAIN'S LONG MANIPULATION OF INDIA
Part I
Mahatma Gandhi was one of a hundred Heroes and Icons TIME magazine celebrated in a special issue marking the end of the 20th century. An article by India-born British novelist Salman Rushdie explained his place in history. Rushdie began his piece with a riff on the Apple Corporation’s “Think Different” advertising campaign. “A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full colour, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to Think Different. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple.” Gandhi today is “up for grabs” Rushdie declared. “He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.“ As if to validate that last phrase he then served up the following reprise of colonial era British propaganda: Read More
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| Sidelight to History: Mother Theresa |
Mother Theresa's Letter
click to enlarge |
As a young reporter in Calcutta I was assigned to write about Mother Theresa and spent several days following her around the city, from early morning prayers at the Mother House on Lower Circular Road, to Nirmal Hriday, the house for the dying destitute she ran in one corner of Kalighat Temple, to the home for unwed mothers and abandoned children, to the rural refuge for lepers. It was the first time I really looked at the plight of the poor of Calcutta, and it left me shaken – and vastly impressed with the work she was doing. (There was already talk about her performing miracles but when I asked about them she waved the question away and directed my attention elsewhere.) |
A few years later I was working for the United Nations, and had the bright idea of inviting Mother to speak at the UN at the first observance of International Women’s Day (7 March). She declined the invitation, saying in a handwritten note torn from a notebook that she would be a “misfit” at the UN. Without thinking, I showed the note to a colleague from the secretariat, a priest who had been seconded by the Vatican to help with the first World Population conference (Bucharest 1972); it was only when he asked if he could make a copy that I began to consider the consequences.
In the years that followed Mother attended a number of events at the UN, and each time I saw her it was with regret; she had been entirely right in wanting to avoid the place. Her simplicity did not fit. It made people uncomfortable. No one seemed to know what to say to her. She herself was strained, and each time hurried away as soon after speaking as she was able to do without giving offense. Needless to say, she was a huge irritant to those espousing birth control as essential to development.
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| Inside the United Nations |
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Reform efforts at the United Nations have gone into a newly optimistic mode since the Obama administration signalled its intention to seriously engage in multilateral diplomacy. But nothing will happen unless there is a radical change of focus and approach. For instance, Mr. Obama's chairing of the Security Council in September 2009 as it adopted a far-reaching resolution on disarmament was nothing more than theatre: a strong resolution on disarmament is useless for it cannot be implemented in the world as it is today. If we want disarmament, development and peace the changes at the UN will have to be at a quantum level: we will have to jump to a different order of international cooperation.
To make the argument that incremental changes cannot reform the Organization, we sent a Discussion Paper to the First International Congress of the World Alliance to Transform the United Nations (WATUN) held in September 2009 in Mexico City. Read it and send us your comments; this is a topic on which we need to get a global conversation going.
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| Books, Reports & Stuff |
| The 2009 Human Development Report (HDR) from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) marks a major shift in approach in the annual series that began publication in 1990. Ever since Pakistan’s Mahbub al-Haq initiated the series, it has presented different aspects of the great divide separating industrially developed and developing countries, focusing attention on the available information as dramatically as possible... Read More |
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UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon
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Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (the last name is Ban), is the eighth man to be Secretary-General of the United Nations.
His selection for the post was evidently the result of an effort by the Bush administration to find a successor for Kofi Annan who would not challenge Washington. So far he has not done that – or much of anything else. How he will fare as the Obama administration revs up use of the UN remains to be seen.
Former Secretary Generals
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