A Thousand Suns [trailer]

A Thousand Suns tells the story of the Gamo Highlands of the African Rift Valley and the unique worldview held by the people of the region. This isolated area has remained remarkably intact both biologically and culturally. It is one of the most densely populated rural regions of Africa yet its people have been farming sustainably for 10,000 years. Shot in Ethiopia, New York and Kenya, the film explores two interrelated threats to the Gamo Highlands: 1) the evangelistic aspirations of the protestant church that are destroying the Gamos indigenous spirituality and governance systems; and 2) the efforts of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a Western aid organization which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars bringing chemical pesticides, fertilizers and‚ improved seeds to the continent. Through these external forces we gain insight into the modern worlds untenable sense of separation from and superiority over nature. And we see how the interconnected worldview of the Gamo people is fundamental in achieving long-term sustainability, both in the region and beyond.


see: The Economics of Indigenous Freedom

Operation Gladio: Template for the War on Terror

...“Goldman was labeled “the most dangerous woman in the world,” occupying the same place in the American consciousness as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do today. People cursed her on the street. Parents invoked her name when disciplining their children-behave, or Emma Goldman will get you. Even after she was cleared, no one in New York City would rent her an apartment.”

Eventually came the sedition laws, the more honestly named forebears of today's “Patriot Acts”. Many anarchists were deported, others imprisoned, others killed, and the movement basically fizzled out (in the US, anyway).

Until today.

So what's the lesson of all this?

Well, obviously we already know quite well what the lesson is, as did the anarchists of the period, who “by the turn of the century…had turned their efforts towards building revolutionary unions. Mass workers unions were built in France, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and many other countries. A minority had gone down a cul-de-sac but were now out of it, and a lot wiser too.”

Thing is, anarchists weren't the only ones discovering that terrorism, far from being a successful tactic condusive to popular upheaval, is actually a boon to the state. The state itself, and its minions, were also picking up a few tricks.

The following is an excerpt from a much longer post I made on GNN1, which Darios reproduced in full over at Upwingers, about the so-called “Strategy of Tension”.

It deals with Operation Gladio. Unlike the majority of suspected false flag operations, it is extremely well documented and can therefore serve as a crash-course in the study of state-sponsored terrorism.

As I will outline in the follow-up, there are extraordinary similarities between Gladio and the “War on Terra”, not the least of which is that many neocons – top policy makers who are now at the helm of battleship Amerika (Kissinger, for instance) – were actually involved in the conspiracy.

One more note on anarchists and terrorism: about a year ago I happened to catch a blurb on the evening news about an alleged letter bomb sent to the head of the EU. According to the report, “anarchists” were the suspected culprits. There was no information made available as to why people with anarchist beliefs were believed to be responsible.

Presumably, a note of some sort.

If we pretend, as the majority of prominent “leftist” intellectuals and journalists do, that false flag operations don't exist, we are only setting ourselves up for another catastrophe. We cannot afford to go on burying our heads in the sand.

So when anarchist Bin Laden decides to blow something up and place the rest of us in the crosshairs, remember the word “Gladio”. First they came for the Muslims…

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The First World War: The origin of real Terrorism and the beginning of ongoing Oil War

by Yamin Zakaria

The cessation of hostilities was declared on the 11th hour, the 11th day of the 11th month on the Western Front, between the Allies of World War I (WWI) and Germany. Today, the nation commemorates the 2.5 Million dead with a two-minute silence, a war that took approximately 20 Million lives in total.

Despite the enormous loss, and after almost one hundred years, there is little reflection on the causes of this war, hardly any discussion on this point, and the lessons to be learnt from it. They say historians to date cannot agree on the causes. The history books in schools and colleges point to the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire by the Serb nationalists as the trigger for WWI.

Nations did not mobilise their forces and wage costly wars due to the assassination of one man. The war was not one of good versus evil, tyranny versus freedom, but simply a struggle for material resources. It was a war over territory, colony, inflamed by nationalism and historical feuds. The war was simply a global clash of empires.

Once the war was triggered, the central powers (German Empire, Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) on one side faced the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia). This conflict was marked by the introduction of air raids and poison gas, a prelude to the birth of state-terrorism. In the early 1920s, the British used chemical weapons on the Kurds in Iraq, under the direction of Winston Churchill long before Saddam Hussein. During the next global war, these methods involving air raids, chemical weapons and explosives were developed and deployed on a larger scale on the civilian population. This is the origin of real terrorism.

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