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28 October 2012

Every Seven Years You Change


Every Seven Years You Change
TONY CRISP
Most cells in your body is renewed over a period of time.
Does your personality change, too?

0-7 Years – 7-14 Years – 14-21 Years – 21-28 Years – 28-35 Years –35-42 Years 42-49 Years – 49-56 Years – 56-63 Years – 63-70 Years– 70-77 Years – 77-84 Years

ARE you the same person now that you were fifteen years ago? In fact, are you the same person you were just seven years ago? Most of us have heard the old saying that every cell in the body is changed over a period of seven years; but recent investigation has uncovered facts of far more significance to us as human beings. This concerns the emotional, physical and mental changes that seem to occur in approximate seven-year intervals. Of course there are no fixed boundaries and so one may achieve these levels of maturity at any period of our life. so what follows are simply the general changes you may find.

Rudolph Steiner, the great teacher of Anthroposophy said that the seven-year cycles continue throughout life, and are of the utmost importance to doctors, teachers, psychiatrists and the social sciences. Without some smattering of these changes it is difficult for anyone to understand the relationship of any given individual with his or her environment. So I have tried to summarise what Steiner and others have said about the cycles.

One of the great paradoxes of our lives are that we constantly go through such enormous such massive changes every day. Daily we pass through an extraordinary change that we often take so much for granted we miss the wonder of it. The change occurs between sleeping and waking. For most of us being awake is when we most fully feel ourselves. Compared with this sleeping is a period during which we lose any focused awareness of being an individual, and we sink into what is generally called unconsciousness — the lack of personal awareness.

This swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. Sleeping and waking are the polarities, the North and South Poles of what we can confront. In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. But there is an enormous difference between waking experience and the experience of dreamless sleep. Yes, one can have an experience of what is considered deep unconsciousness. In waking we have a sensation of time, of being in a locality, of separateness and even isolation. But at the other end of that polarity we have a sense of timelessness and non-locality. What was a sense of self merges into an ocean of awareness.

0-7 years

One of the most important of these cycles is the first, from birth to seven years of age. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the beginning of everything, the foundation upon which the later structure will be built. Birth gives individual life to an infant body. Even at birth, this small being already has its given potential of intelligence, creativity and personality. But this potential has to come to terms with its environment, which includes its own body. In a human being we cannot have awareness without consciousness; we cannot have thinking without the tools of thought such as language, concepts or ideas. So during our early years we are largely moved by the instincts of hunger, need for love, protection and support, along with pain and the impact of our environment. All this while we build up the inner, mental structures that in later years will allow us to think, to feel, and to be aware of ourselves as an individual.

One of the most important of these inputs is that of the unconscious behavioural responses we learn. From the moment you are born, perhaps even prior to that, you are learning, or there are pressed upon you, responses to what you are experiencing. The culture you are born into is a huge ready-made set of behavioural responses. For instance, an Australian aborigine would easily respond to a huge living grub/caterpillar by eating it. This would be a very difficult behavioural response for most Northern Europeans or Americans. As babies we learnt everything from whether you respond to opportunity with fear or eagerness; to love with fear of warmth; to food as a glutton or with healthy appetite.

At birth there is a very different physical and glandular system than in later years. For a start the sexual organs have not developed, meaning responses to sex and sensation are very global. Also the thymus is very large and in later years becomes smaller. It has been said this, in these early years, gives the child a very primitive response to truth, right and wrong, and what later become moral codes. So the child only slowly develops any real sense of social morality.
But something so mysterious happens to us during this first seven years that once done it can never be undone. The Roman Catholic Church recognises this by saying that if they can have the first seven years of a child’s life, that is all they need to insure a lifelong influence. Napoleon also observed that as the twig is bent, so the tree will grow. This is borne out by seeing the cases of children who have been lost and brought up by animals during these formative years. Even with the best tuition they never learn to become a self aware personality as we know it. Time is a mystery to them, and even though their brain size and function is normal, they never approach the usual capabilities that education gives to modern women and men. So, in the first cycle we pass through an incredible process of learning. This includes motor movements, speech, relationship to ourselves and to our environment. And that means learning a vast amount about what is useful, entertaining or harmful; about what responses we get from others, and developing habits of response that may be difficult to change in later years. We learn a sense of personal awareness and move toward becoming an individual. In other words, we learn to say “I” and know what we mean.

The learning of language is like a powerful computer program that gives us the ability to develop an identity and self awareness. This is shown again by children reared by animals. Language also adds limitations which we can overcome if we recognise them.

Steiner also says that during this first stage of development the developing inner forces are working to transform the body of the child from one that was inherited from the parents, to one that represents the full personality of the child.
Something often overlooked about the stages of growth are ones emotional age.
From age zero we are completely dependent upon the loved person for our needs, physical, emotional and social. Great anger, jealousy or pain are felt if the loved one relates to anyone else, is lost, or threatens to leave. If we do not mature beyond this emotional age, in adulthood this enormous feeling reaction may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of the partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically. In the infant and toddler there is a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult with this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. This is sometimes felt as a need to have the loved person want you as much, or as desperately, as you want/need them. Possibly the greatest fear, one that can trigger great anger or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat or fear of being abandoned.

7-14 years

The second cycle, from seven to fourteen, continues this growth. The concepts and association of ideas and emotions that began in the first cycle begin to be discovered by the child. The physical changes also prepare the growing personality for the next stage. The thymus gland decreases rapidly in size, allowing the development of a sense of right and wrong, and social responsibility. A sign of this physical and psychological growth is the losing of the milk teeth and the emergence of our adult teeth. This marks an entrance into a new maturity.
The child has learned, with the advent of its concepts and developing emotions, to create an inner world of its own. It is a world of heroes, danger and vivid imagination. As the thymus fades, and the sexual organs develop, the personality glides into the turbulent world of puberty and adolescence.

Sometimes it is already evident, even from the preceding cycle, the direction of interest and activity the child will take in maturity. Although for the very observant this might be seen in very early years, it becomes more evident as one approaches puberty.

In all a time of inner expansion. You begin to experience and test abilities in the broader sense of the outside world. You may learn to share and interact, controlling earlier instincts in favour of group dynamics. The habits learned in the first period are now part of the character of the growing child.

14-21 years

This is the third cycle, from fourteen to twenty-one. During it we become conscious of ourselves in a new way, and with a different relationship to life. One might say we become “self conscious.” The emotional range expands in all directions, and with this a new appreciation of music, art, literature and people begins. It is found for instance that at puberty the ability to distinguish subtler tones of colour and sound develops. Besides this the person might go through the difficult struggle of breaking away from home life and/or parental influence. It naturally produces conflict as the person learns some degree of independence. Also, the opposite sex, or sex as a urgent impulse, usually becomes all important as the new emotions pour in upon our personality.

Because of the new range of feelings, many youths experience a different relationship to religion and life’s mysteries. All this, as one approaches twenty-one, produces an individual with some sense of social and individual responsibility, or if not that the beginning or a sense of a direction or life purpose. This might not be recognised as such at the time. But it is a time of searching for life purpose, independence, a realization of choices plus a testing of social and personal limitations as well as an awareness of a burgeoning sexuality. As this is a traumatic period of life for most of us, it is also likely to be a time of many unforgettable dreams.

The period is a time of adding maturity, dignity and poise to the person. If these changes have not occurred by twenty-one, then the person has in some way not covered necessary aspects of development, and both psychology and the law recognises that they are lacking maturity.

This period is one of great and sweeping changes, physically, emotionally, morally and mentally. Such enormous changes often do not occur without an experience of loss. In this case the world of childhood is fading, or it might even be torn away, leaving scars.

It is also a time when many new features of the personality have their beginning, i.e. the religious sense, appreciation of the beautiful, etc. Although such things have their beginnings here, they sometimes remain undeveloped until later years. Because of these changes, and because such a lot is being revealed in these years, it is obvious why so much thought should be given to early marriage. Because of one’s changing viewpoint, the particular partner one would choose at seventeen or eighteen, is likely to be different to the partner chosen at twenty-one and beyond.

The emotional development at this age is possibly seen as initial uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact. It often involves desire to explore many relationships, unless there are forces of introversion or personal and social uncertainty at work. We are still finding out what our boundaries and needs are, and the sexual drive as at full flood.. Any partner we have at this time may be loved for ones own needs – rather than out of recognition of who the other person is. Great romantic feelings and spontaneous love which are often difficult to maintain in face of difficulties.

21-28 years

The cycle that follows from twenty-one to twenty-eight, can more or less be called a process of enlargement and refinement. It is the period that we mentally and emotionally enter into adulthood. We start to build the foundations of our careers and intimate relationships with a driving energy that we hope will gain us entry and respect in the larger world.

One of the most marked features is the developing sense of discrimination. The faculties of insight, intuition, judgement and understanding begin to come to the fore. The personality softens and begins to mellow. The sparks of interest that were awakened in the previous cycles begin to be developed along more definite lines. The abilities of the last cycle also flourish. The adult emotional age may begin to emerges if one has successfully grown through the previous levels. This shows as a growing sense of recognising needs of ones partner yet not denying ones own. It is followed by an ability to be something for the partners sake without losing ones own independence or will. One becomes more aware of the issues that colour or influence relationship, and meeting them in cooperation with others. Independence and connection can appear together instead of opposite ends of a spectrum. You move toward becoming caring sexual partners through discovering each others needs and vulnerability.

In this period you will begin to confront the issue that you were either born with, or arose through the challenges and pains of your infancy and childhood. These usually show as the way you handle intimate relationships, whether you can really meet in partnership with the opposite sex, and how you respond to the external world, its challenges and opportunities.

At this time what is revealed may not be addressed as a personal problem or issues to be healed or re-evaluated. They will be faced more directly later if they are not dealt with now.

28-35 years

The changes become more subtle as the years pass. The next cycle from twenty eight to thirty-five, for instance, is one where the creative process of mind becomes most active. Researchers and inventors seem to make their greatest advances during these years. It is interesting to note that physical science finds evidence of the reason for this in the fact that the association centres of the brain come to their peak efficiency at about thirty-five years of age.

This is even more interesting when we see that most of the great religious teachers and philosophers came to some vital experience at thirty-five. Jesus, Buddha, Paul, Dante and Jacob Behmen were all in the region of thirty-five at the point of their greatest insights. It would seem then, that if there is an inspirational influence at work in the life, it would possibly reach its peak during these years in and around thirty-five.

Here we take stock of ourselves and the emotional influences that have shaped our personality. We begin to determine what is us and what traits we have been pressured by family, peers or society to adopt.

35-42 years

From the thirty-fifth to the forty-second year, depending upon one’s personality and what one’s circumstances allow, one begins to feel a new restlessness. In some degree a desire to share whatever one has gained through life with others comes to the surface. Thus we find many successful business men building libraries, or aiding colleges and the arts at this period in their life. What has been developed or realised can be taken to greater subtlety during this period. This is almost like unfolding something, perhaps similar to the way a flower unfolds a bud that has been developing in earlier phases of its growth.

This is when we reassess the results of what we are doing externally in our life. Our relationships, careers, habits and the ways we interact are all put under scrutiny and modified or changed. It’s a time of facing up to what does and what doesn’t satisfy us.

You may reach heights or realisation and creativity not touched previously. The profound breakthrough of ones innate genius that emerges around this time will no doubt be expressed in some degree. However, whatever is attained or realised will be enlarged and synthesised in later periods.

42-49 years

In the next cycle from forty-two until forty-nine a major change usually takes place. It is as if one takes all of one’s life experience up till this age and begins to digest it, and extract from it new ideals and a new direction in life. There is often tremendous unrest in this period and that following it. The unlived aspects of life cry out to be recognised and allowed. The desire to make a mark in life if it has not already been achieved presses for action here.

At this point it appears to many of us that we have reached the mid point of our life and from here on there will be a decline. Even if this is not so it is often felt very strongly and acted upon in one way of another. People change partners, life directions, and even attempt major personal changes, although these latter may have begun in the last cycle.

Also, the emotional age and the maturing of love may at last show signs of an unconditional love. If this is not appearing in small degree, it might be one is still locked in earlier ages. Strangely, many of us maintain the emotional age of a child right into mature years, feeling all the fear of abandonment, jealousy and possessiveness of our childhood. Many divorces and new directions appear around this period.

In these years we move from old stereotypical roles with a new found confidence in our individuality. We are prepared to please our self, rather than society and gain a real understanding of our uniqueness, accompanied by a sense of urgency to express our true self before it gets too late.

I put the following dreams in to illustrate some of  what is met in this and perhaps the next period.

“Last night I had a dream which shook me somewhat, and I wonder what you make of it. I am a mature 40 year -old, don’t normally dream, and am not unduly fanciful, but this dream has really shaken me. It felt like death. In the dream, my husband and I are at some sort of social club. The people there are ex-workmates of mine and I am having a wonderful time and am very popular. My husband is enjoying my enjoyment. Then he and I are travelling down a country lane in an open horse-drawn carriage. It is very dark and is in the area we used to live in. We come to a hump-backed-bridge, and as we arrive at the brow of the bridge a voice says, ‘Fair lady, come to me.’ My body is suddenly lying flat and starts to rise. I float and everything is black, warm and peaceful. Then great fear comes over me and I cry out my husband’s name over and over. I get colder and slip in and out of the blackness. Then I start to wake up. It takes a tremendous effort, as my body is very heavy. I am extremely cold and absolutely terrified, with a feeling of horror. There seems to be something evil here. I force myself to get up in the dark and go downstairs. Even with the light on I feel the presence of great evil.”

The first part of this woman’s dream and what she says of herself shows her as an outgoing person, with a happy disposition. She likes people, and they like her; she is probably good looking, and healthy. She feels herself successful at what she has worked, and has left having acquired friends. The relationship she has with her husband is also depicted as one in which pleasure can be allowed within caring independence. Her dream image of herself is therefore created out of her own confidence. Dreams frequently summarise the quality of ones life and the ‘story so far’ in their first scene.

The second scene is made up of several parts – the journey, the woman’s relationship with her husband, the force of nature symbolised by the horses and the countryside, and the unknown seen as the bridge and the voice. To understand what this reveals of the dreamer, look at the vital clues: what she has said about herself and what she felt in the dream. If you strip away images to see what attitudes or emotions are exposed, you can see the forces behind the dream plot. The most poignant statement she makes is in saying, “It felt like death.”


But the dream’s beauty, its depth and drama, are in the voice, and in the discovery of how death ‘feels’. They tell us something about women’s inner lives, PLURAL. They reveal how, in her prime, a woman confronts change and the view of death in a way few men do. “Fair lady” the voice of change calls, “come to me.” And it beckons the dreamer towards a hefty mid-life crisis, asking her to exchange her sexual peak, her firm body, her fertility, for the different perspective of post-menopause.

Many women – men too of course – gain their sense of value as a person from their ‘attractiveness’. Losing whatever it is that makes them sexually desirable and socially popular – or fearing that they are losing it – will lead to a significant change in their way of life and their feelings about themselves. This is what makes the dreamer call for her husband. This is what produces the feeling of isolation and terror. A woman needs reassurance and love at this point in her life. She may behave indecisively and deflect the advances of her man through a lack of self-esteem.

Fortunately the human personality is resilient. Even though we are reared to identify ourselves with what our body looks like, what it can do, what sex it is, what age it is, and how others react to it, we CAN grow to mature independence without constant reassurance.

Some people create these nocturnal horror movies when leaving school or sitting exams. But middle age is just another phase of life, with as much potential for growth and love as any other phase – and as much room for failure. This woman fears what she imagines middle age will do to her. The dream isn’t an intuition of her future.

Here is a dream from a man in the same age period.

I recently reached my fortieth birthday and dreamt I was walking uphill. It was quite tough going. When I got to the top I saw the road on the other side was very steep. I felt frightened of going down it. I looked around and saw that the top of the hill stretched away on each side, so there was plenty of space, like a plateau. I realise that I can walk around and there is no hurry to go down the hill. – John H. London.

I commented on this dream by saying that before you actually got to middle age you obviously had the idea that it leads directly to a fast decline – going down hill. Your dream corrects this by showing that in fact you have worked hard to climb to a plateau of ability and possibilities that you can now explore. Each portion of life has its rewards, and in fact you depict this period of your life as more relaxed than the first half.

To balance this view a little, if there are still past difficulties to be faced, these will certainly present themselves. But a drive in many people is in some way to actualise themselves, to express themselves in a satisfying way. If we use the analogy of a plant, it is as if they have grown and reached full stature, but for some reason have not flowered and spread seeds. They have not produced fruit.
There is no one way in which people feel or seek this fruition prior to death. But it does become an imperative for many. It may involve receiving or giving love. It might be a need for expressing in one of the arts, or simply in breaking away from habits and roaming the world. The next dream illustrates this theme.
I flew over a farmyard and a large pig saw me and began to chase me as a dog might, but with the sense that he/she wanted to eat me. She chased me snapping and leaping into the air trying to ‘get’ me. I felt a bit apprehensive at times that she would get my leg. This lowered my confidence in flying and I began to worry about altitude, and flew over a barbed wire fence and the pig and her young could not follow. I flew low over small trees that were just coming into leaf. They were beautiful soft green leaves. I knew it was autumn and the leaves were only just coming out because it had been a cloudy, overcast summer. I felt the leaves would have time to mature because the sun would be out in the autumn, and the trees would not die.

The dreamer was in his fifties at the time of the dream, and had distinct feelings of something missing from his life. He felt very clearly that the late autumn expressed how he felt, that the best of his life, his fruition had not yet occurred. This was because ‘it had been a cloudy, overcast summer.’ By this he meant his life had so many difficulties, he had not had a chance to ‘flower’. But the dream promised there was still time. In fact ‘he actualised’ so much from there on.
And here is another dream example showing the same thing.

I am in a bicycle race with many other people. I came to a very long hill. It is difficult and I have to push my bicycle. It takes me until midday. When at the top I meet a lot of family. Then I cycle on, realising that because the road is flat, I can go much further before nightfall than I covered in the morning.

The man was in his late forties at the time of the dream. It shows him feeling as if the first half of his life has been a long difficult climb. His assessment or intuition of the second half of his life is that it will achieve much more, or cover more ground and he will have more human and warm relationships, represented by his family. The bicycle represents his personal efforts to deal with life and his place in the human race; and as it suggests, he can go much further before nightfall – death – than he achieved in the morning of his life.

49-56 years

In this, and the next cycle from forty-nine to fifty-six, and the periods that follow, the physical changes bring about a mental or spiritual climax. The decline of physical prowess and vitality, forces the person to direct their attention inwards more frequently. Any problems of our personality, such as maladjustment and our repressions, will undoubtedly become more urgent in these years. This reacts upon one’s marriage and professional life alike. The problem is that we have to learn to live with ourselves in a new way. We slowly have to adapt to our new-old body, and habits of long-standing do not die easily.

This is when we take an inventory of our life. It’s a time of spiritual questioning and review of our life purpose. If we haven’t successfully understood who we are by this stage and achieved our goals, then depression, moodiness and turmoil will plague both our waking life and our dreams.


56-63 years

This period is often a time of inner tranquility and acceptance. At peace with oneself and more accepting of where we are and what we have achieved marks this period. But many things that were lying unlived within you might arise at this time, either as a form of unrest, or as directly living out those things that duty or work – or even self restraints – kept you from doing or being.

Usually your life situation begins to change in this stage. There is the start of a great shift and adjustment, both in terms of external activities, but also in how you deal with and feel about relationships. Part of the difficulty is that you have lived a long life as a younger person, and the old ways of dealing with things is often difficult to let go of as things change. The opportunity to experiment more fully in life helps you to reassess yourself and what new way of relating and being suits you or is satisfying.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung and others such as Nietzsche developed a whole theory about this period of life that he called Individuation. Perhaps the influence of this began in the last periods during the forties, but becomes more marked now. As an individual we may come to recognise that our make-up is formed out of the collective experience of our family and the culture we have been exposed to. The question, “Who am I,” leads us to look more fully into what makes us who we are. This awareness and the insight gained from it transforms us. The change is that of becoming more fully independent of the forces that formed us. This means we create something new of who we are, and perhaps leave something of this new self in the world by what we do, create or live. Not every one undertakes this diving into the depths of self to discover ones core being.
To quote from the website Soul-Guidance, “Individuation means that one becomes a person, an individual, a totally integrated personality. It is a process of self realization during which one integrates those contents of the psyche that have the ability to become conscious. It is a search for totality. It is an experience that could be formulated as the discovery of the divine in yourself, or the discovery of the totality of your Self. This does not always happen without pain, but it is necessary to accept many things that normally we would shy away from. Once a person has accepted the contents of his unconsciousness and has reached the goal of the individuation process, he is conscious of his relationships with everything that lives, with the entire cosmos.”

63-70 years

Now we have deeper acceptance and understanding of the people in our life. We appreciate the differences between us and our friends and look to the good rather than the bad in people. This is a period where our accumulated experience seeks new creative outlets.

A particularly noticeable process that occurs here is a conscious or unconscious sifting of life experience and moving toward what is the essence and best of what one has been and learned from the years and experiences. Sometimes, if you can actually be aware of and work with this process, it leads to a sense of being lost or uncertain. By this is meant that for most of us external needs have dictated the direction of much that we have done or was needed of us. Now a great deal of this external pressure is removed. With its loss you realise that a great many choices or directions are open to you. It is like standing at cross roads with many directions. Which one do you want to take? Often it needs you to stand and observe before any direction from your own core wishes emerges. If during your life you have never worked at dealing with the difficulties and weaknesses or pains innate in you, then this period can lead to great confusion and the meeting of many shadows that you may not yet have developed the skills to deal with previously.

This is also a time in life when natural inner processes can lead you to a greater awareness of what lies beyond death. Things fall away naturally if you let them. A greater detachment from things of the world arises and this in itself is a foretaste of death in which you can let go of all that you have held on to.

70-77 years

Of course there are no fixed boundaries and so one may achieve this level of maturity at another period. But if the issues met in the previous cycle have been dealt with, then there is a new awareness of the subtle sides of life, and a changed relationship with those you love or come in contact with. There is a greater unconditional love and acceptance. By this is meant that awareness of the depths and subtleties of ones own self are known more fully. If you are a person who has an active inner life, it can happen that the huge harvest of gathered life experience that was sifted and synthesised into clearer and more streamlined, or simpler concepts and meanings, is now expressed in your life and dealings with others. You may not be as powerful and active in the outer world, but you are gaining strength and effectiveness on people’s inner life if you are still healthy.
But such changes, as always, depend upon how well you have dealt with the problems, trauma as ability to grow during your life. If these are met, then this letter is an excellent example.

Hi Tony- You probably won’t remember me, I used to come to Combe Martin in the 1980s on Richard and Juliana’s Intensives Psychotherapy workshops… I remember fondly how we all enjoyed your and Hy’s wonderful cooking!
Just wanted to say that as I approach old age (nearly 70), welcome changes are happening. Firstly, I’m accessing information I never knew I had, mainly evident in my enthusiasm for University Challenge on TV where I will often find the correct answers to questions on disparate subjects, they just seem to pop out of my head without consciously thinking which, in addition to surprising me, are sometimes not even guessed correctly by any of the eight panellists!
Secondly, synchronous-type occurrences are becoming more frequent. Things such as suddenly thinking of a friend I’ve not thought about for maybe weeks, only to have him or her then call or text me less than a minute later!
Also, the wider, world view you write of is becoming stronger in me, where I get a (intuitive) sense of the world at large, a strong feeling for the multitude and mass of humanity, and principally its collective suffering, which is a much more expansive experience than previously I’ve had most of my life ie my own small world and its restricted boundaries.

I’ve enjoyed, as I get older, the growth of my intuition, and celebrate its development in contrast to left-hemisphere mental (?) attributes such as intellect, objectivity, etc. I’m both fascinated and pleased to find your writings on these subjects, and more, on your website. It feels appropriate that I have come across your site at this time in my life.

Thanks for sharing all your wisdom on the site.
Best wishes. P

77-84 years onwards

During the three preceding periods a new self was developed. This emerged out of a summary and synthesis or all that you had lived. Perhaps, if you gave attention to your inner life, doorways of perception were opened through which you saw how your present life is a continuum of the long past, of ancestors and other influences. From this new self and widened perceptions you are acting and living in the world in a different way. The essence of the purpose, love and ideas you lived by is given new expression.

As we have seen, the various physical changes have interacted with the spark of awareness lit at birth, causing changes in consciousness and attitude. Might we not speculate then, by saying that the biggest physical change of all-death – may be but a pre-requisite for yet another cycle of life; an initiation into an entirely new type of awareness? In fact it can happen that from the last cycle onwards, if you dare to experience your inner life reasonably fully, you will already have experienced what naked awareness is like, or have penetrated what is called death in some way.

26 October 2012

Sunni Baru [Emperor of Songhai 1492-1493]: An Afrocentric Reevaluation

SUNNI BARU [EMPEROR OF SONGHAI 1492-1493] WAS THE SON AND ROYAL HEIR OF SUNNI ALI BER [EMPEROR OF SONGHAI 1464-1492] 

UPON HIS ASCENSION TO THE THRONE, SUNNI BARU REFUSED TO CONVERT TO ISLAM [AS INFLUENTIAL MUSLIMS AT COURT WANTED HIM TO] AND SIDED WITH THE FACTION OF THE PROTECTORS AND PRESERVERS OF THE AFRIKAN WAY IN THE IMPERIAL COURT OF SONGHAI. THE ELDERS WHO WERE PRESERVERS AND PROTECTORS 
OF AFRIKAN SPIRITUAL TRADITIONS AND AS SUCH GUARDIANS OF THE CULTURE WERE ALARMED AT THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF THE FOREIGN ANTI-AFRIKAN PROSYLETIZING RELIGION OF ISLAM AMONG THE ELITE AND AT ITS RELIGIOUS POLICY OF HOSTILITY AND INTOLERANCE TOWARDS AFRIKAN SPIRITUALITY, AFRIKAN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND AFRIKAN CULTURE. THE ELEVATION OF ISLAM TO A POSITION OF HEGEMONY THROUGH INFLUENTIAL PERSONAGES THROUGHOUT THE EMPIRE WOULD SIGNAL A DEVASTATING ASSAULT ON THE AFRIKAN WAY OF LIFE, WHICH THE ELDERS AS GUARDIANS OF THE WAY ARE DUTY BOUND BY THE ANCESTORS TO PROTECT AND PRESERVE.

SUNNI ALI BER HAD MAINTAINED A POLICY OF PARTICIPATING IN MUSLIM RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND AFRIKAN TRADITIONAL SPIRITUAL SYSTEMS. UPON HIS TRANSITION THE MUSLIM FACTION SOUGHT TO COMPLETE THE EXPANSIONIST MOVES OF THE ISLAMIC RELIGION IN ITS 'WAR' AGAINST THE BALANCED AFRIKAN TRADITIONAL SPIRITUAL SYSTEM [PRIESTESS AND PRIESTS, GODDESSES AND GODS, RESPECT FOR THE AFRIKAN ANCESTORS, ALL ANATHEMA TO THE INTOLERANT EXPANSIONIST RELIGION OF ISLAM.] THIS WAS THE TENUOUS SITUATION SURROUNDING SUNNI BARU'S ASCENSION TO THE THRONE OF SONGHAI. ON THE ONE HAND THERE WERE THOSE WHO SOUGHT TO PROTECT THE AFRIKAN WAY AND ON THE OTHER THERE WAS A RELIGION THAT HAD CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED ITS HOSTILITY AND HATRED TO ALL THINGS AFRIKAN.

WHEN SUNNI BARU SIDED WITH THE WAYS OF THE ANCESTORS AND REFUSED TO CONVERT TO ISLAM AND DENOUNCE THE WAYS OF THE ANCESTORS, ASKIA MUHAMMAD A GENERAL IN THE ARMY SAW HIS CHANCE TO LEAD A REBELLION AND SEIZE POWER. [IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT ACCORDING TO THE AFRIKAN HISTORICAL RECORD, ASKIA MURDERED SUNNI ALI BER THE FATHER OF SUNNI BARU AND THE FOUNDER OF THE EMPIRE] ASKIA WITH HIS POSITION AS GENERAL HAD THE SUPPORT OF A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE ARMY AND WAS PERHAPS THE MOST ABLE OF GENERALS THEN IN THE ARMY. HE ALSO GATHERED THE MUSLIM FACTION WHICH THOUGH SMALL HELD INFLUENTIAL POSITIONS IN THE EMPIRE AND LAUNCHED A REBELLION AGAINST SUNNI BARU THE LEGITIMATE RULER UNDER THE BANNER OF ISLAM.

AFTER DEFEATING SUNNI BARU IN 1493, ASKIA MUHAMMAD THEN SPENT THE NEXT DECADE EXECUTING ALL MEMBERS OF THE SUNNI BLOOD LINE, AND THE ENTIRE ZA BLOODLINE WHICH PRECEDED THE SUNNI AS RULERS OF SONGHAI.

ASKIA MUHAMMAD THEN IN AN EFFORT TO STRENGTHEN HIS POSITION GIVEN THE FACT THAT HE WAS A USURPER AND HAD NO LEGITIMATE CLAIM TO THE THRONE [WHICH WAS KEY IN THE AFRIKAN KINSHIP SYSTEM OF POLITICAL ECONOMY] CHOSE TO BASE THE LEGITIMACY OF HIS RULE IN ISLAM AND CULTIVATED ISLAMIC SUPPORT DOMESTICALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY.


THIS PERSPECTIVE ON SUNNI BARU WHICH IS ONLY A SYNOPSIS DOES NOT COME FROM ANY NEW EVIDENCE BUT FROM A CLOSE READING AND RE-INTERPRETATION OF EXTANT WRITTEN DOCUMENTS AND CULTURAL DATA.

FOR THOSE WHO ARE PRESERVERS AND PROTECTORS OF THE AFRIKAN WAY, WHO FOLLOW A PATH OF RE-AFRIKANIZATION, WHO SEEK THE REBIRTH OF AFRIKAN SPIRITUAL PLURALITY, THE ELEVATION OF AFRIKAN POLITICAL-ECONOMIC POWER, THERE MUST BE A RE-EVALUATION OF THE HISTORICAL RECORD AND AN ACCORDANCE OF RECOGNITION AND A PLACE OF HONOR FOR PROTECTORS OF THE WAY SUCH AS SUNNI BARU.

14 October 2012

The US presidential debates' illusion of political choice


The US presidential debates' illusion of political choice

The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed

Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian, Thursday 4 October 2012 20.20 BST




Wednesday night's debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America's presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country.
In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.

But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation's most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.

Most of what matters in American political life is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation on earth by far, including countries with far greater populations. As the New York Times reported in April 2008: "The United States has less than 5% of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."

Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University has observed that these policies have turned the US into "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history". The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik called this mass incarceration "perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850".

Even worse, these policies are applied, and arguably designed, with mass racial disparities. One in every four African-American men is likely to be imprisoned. Black and Latino drug users are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at far higher rates than whites, even though usage among all groups is relatively equal.
The human cost of this sprawling penal state is obviously horrific: families are broken up, communities are decimated, and those jailed are rendered all but unemployable upon release. But the financial costs are just as devastating. California now spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education, a warped trend repeated around the country.

Yet none of these issues will even be mentioned, let alone debated, by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That is because they have no discernible differences when it comes to any of the underlying policies, including America's relentless fixation on treating drug usage as a criminal, rather than health, problem. The oppressive system that now imprisons 1.8 million Americans, and that will imprison millions more over their lifetime, is therefore completely ignored during the only process when most Americans are politically engaged.

This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama's dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.

A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department's refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

On still other vital issues, such as America's steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran, the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement "reform", all but the most centrist positions are off limits.

The harm from this process is not merely the loss of what could be a valuable opportunity to engage in a real national debate. Worse, it is propagandistic: by emphasising the few issues on which there is real disagreement between the parties, the election process ends up sustaining the appearance that there is far more difference between the two parties, and far more choice for citizens, than is really offered by America's political system.

One way to solve this problem would be to allow credible third-party candidates into the presidential debates and to give them more media coverage. Doing so would highlight just how similar Democrats and Republicans have become, and what little choice American voters actually have on many of the most consequential policies. That is exactly why the two major parties work so feverishly to ensure the exclusion of those candidates: it is precisely the deceitful perception of real choice that they are most eager to maintain.
• This is an op-ed I wrote to appear in the Guardian newspaper

Dividing the spoils: A primer on the NATO and G8 summits



Dividing the spoils: A primer on the NATO and G8 summits

By ERIC RUDER

IN MID-MAY, Chicago will host an unprecedented gathering of the global 1%. The heads of state from the Group of Eight (G8) club of powerful governments will meet side by side with the world’s most powerful military alliance, in the heart of a major American city.

Not since 1977 in London has the G8 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in the same city. Not since its 2001 meeting in Genoa, Italy drew some 200,000 protesters and Italian police killed demonstrator Carlo Giuliani has the G8 dared to meet in an area accessible to protesters, preferring instead remote locations that could be sealed off from the rest of the world.

And not since the eruption of international resistance—from revolutionary struggles throughout the Arab world to the revolt against austerity in Europe and the upsurge of the Occupy movement in the United States—have so many people taken to the streets in a single year to protest precisely the agenda that NATO and the G8 will be trying to advance when they meet in Chicago from May 19 to 21.

Collectively, the NATO and G8 countries command a massive proportion of the world’s economic resources while wielding sufficient military force to simultaneously pursue multiple wars and occupations. As a result, NATO and the G8 together shape the terrain that every person interested in social justice must contend with. That’s because every dollar that they earmark for bank bailouts and bombing runs is a dollar siphoned away from meeting human needs.

Already, activists—from Chicago, across the United States, and around the world—are planning events of all sorts to raise their voices in dissent. There will be marches against NATO’s plans for militarization; there will be actions to oppose the G8’s program of privatization and austerity; and there will be a People’s Summit on May 12–13 to put forward an alternative vision of a world characterized by peace and equality instead of war and want.

But the enforcers for the global 1% are also preparing—for repression. Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel is bending Chicago’s laws without regard to the rights of protest and free speech,1 and law enforcement officials are planning a militarized state of siege, complete with snipers,2 in an effort to squash dissent. Ironically, despite all the violence and misery imposed by these illegitimate and unrepresentative bodies, officials in Chicago have again and again filled the media with the false claim that those committed to exercising their First Amendment rights to assembly and protest to get their voices heard are the “violent” ones.

NATO and the Cold War

NATO has transformed itself in the years since it was founded as the needs and interests of the West’s industrialized countries have evolved. NATO was founded in 1949 in the ruins of the Second World War, and until 1999, the alliance never once engaged in an open military conflict. During the Cold War years, NATO—under firm US leadership—served as the West’s umbrella of “mutual self-defense,” which was mirrored by the Soviet Union’s bloc of Warsaw Pact countries. NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, stated NATO’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” At the height of its powers, the United States looked to draw together its allies for the stand off with the Soviet Union, but also to provide a counterbalance to a possible German resurgence.

Thus NATO served as a means to justify the United States’ sprawling “empire of bases”3 (or at least those that sprang up across Europe). Some of NATO’s defenders talk wistfully of NATO’s “success” at deterring “Soviet aggression” and credit it with “preserving the peace” during the Cold War. But the Cold War era saw a massive arms race, the threat of nuclear war, and various “hot wars” along the dividing line between the imperial superpowers (Korea, Vietnam, and various places in Central America and the Horn of Africa).

The doctrine of “mutual assured destruction”—with the descriptively accurate acronym MAD—lent the arms race the veneer of rationality. The idea was that each superpower could deter the other from launching an offensive nuclear strike because the threat of a retaliatory strike would guarantee the annihilation of whichever side launched the first strike. Thus the United States and the Soviet Union embarked upon a nuclear arms race that produced enough weapons to destroy the world many times over, and on several occasions the superpowers came to the brink of conflict (the best known episode is the 1962 Cuban missile crisis) before pulling back from the edge. Generations of people around the world thus grew up in a constant state of anxiety about whether American and Soviet political leaders were MAD enough to kill us all. Dr. Strangelove, anyone?

The other element of NATO’s Cold War strategy was to prepare for a possible ground invasion of Europe by Soviet forces. To that end, American and British spy agencies worked with NATO to train networks of paramilitary forces in country after country throughout Europe. The full extent of these networks wasn’t really known until the end of the Cold War when in 1990 Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to acknowledge the existence of such a network, code-named Operation Gladio (which means sword), on Italian soil. But NATO’s “secret armies” didn’t confine themselves to preparing to meet Soviet soldiers in Western Europe. According to Daniele Ganser’s book NATO’s Secret Armies:
The notion of the project in the intelligence services undoubtedly began as an effort to create forces that would remain quiescent until war brought them into play. Instead, in country after country we find the same groups of individuals or cells originally activated for the wartime function beginning to exercise their strength in peacetime political processes. Sometimes these efforts involved violence, even terrorism, and sometimes the terrorists made use of the very equipment furnished to them for their Cold War function.4
Thus, NATO also engaged in a covert war against domestic left-wing forces, carrying out a war on democracy in the very countries that NATO was supposed to protect from “anti-democratic” threats. In the words of historian Michael Parenti:
[T]hese secret units were involved in terrorist attacks against the left. They helped prop up a fascist regime in Portugal, participated in the Turkish military coups of 1971 and 1980, and the 1967 coup in Greece. They drew up plans to assassinate social democratic leaders in Germany, and stage “preemptive” attacks against social and communist organizations in Greece and Italy. They formed secret communication networks and drew up detention lists of political opponents to be rounded up in various countries.5
NATO beyond the Cold War

According to its own “self-defense” mandate, NATO should have been disbanded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. A 1950 State Department paper, NSC 68, which outlined a strategy of military containment of the USSR, also indicated that the permanent maintenance of military superiority was “a policy which the United States would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet Union.”6 Accordingly, the United States sought to enlarge NATO in order to press its advantage in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse by incorporating countries formerly part of the Eastern bloc. NATO has also embarked upon a broad expansion and reorientation of its operations and since 1999 has invaded three countries—Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya.

As Rick Rozoff details in his Stop NATO blog:
With the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe from 1999-2009, the US-led military alliance has grown by 75 percent, from 16 to 28 members. By 2009 all former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact member states had been incorporated into NATO, the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) being absorbed with its merger into the Federal Republic in 1990. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999 and Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia in 2004.
This is just the beginning, if NATO’s war planners have their way. NATO is also pursuing a military partnership with the African Union, which represents fifty-three member nations. According to a Kenyan news account of the negotiations, “the stated aim is to counter global security threats and specifically threats against Africa, [though] some observers read the pact as aiming to counter Chinese expansion in Africa.”7 Thus, NATO’s addition of more than fifty African nations to the military alliance is yet another reprise of its Cold War objective of advancing the interests of the United States against its global competitors.

Though NATO insists that such expansions help to guarantee “security” and “stability,” the drive to enlarge NATO’s reach has already led to new military confrontations. The 2008 military conflict in Georgia, for example, was portrayed in the mainstream media as a case of Russian aggression against one of its former republics. But this only captures one aspect of what took place. As Lee Sustar wrote in 2008:
Certainly, Russia’s aim to dominate Georgia—which fell under Moscow’s control in the late 18th century and was formally annexed in 1801—is imperial in nature. But it’s revealing that after selling the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as exercises in “promoting democracy,” the corporate media is finally willing to characterize a great power’s expansionist military moves as “imperialist.”

What’s missing from the mainstream account of the Russia-Georgia war is the role of US imperialism, which has sought to incorporate Georgia into NATO as part of an arc of US military outposts and alliances stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia. And while the Western press publishes accounts of civilians terrorized by Russia’s military, far less attention is given to the vicious attack of the Georgian military—trained by the US—on the disputed South Ossetia region.8
Today, NATO countries collectively account for more than 70 percent of world military spending, the US alone for nearly half—raising the obvious question: From what is NATO defending itself? After “testing” NATO’s military capabilities in the 1999 war on Yugoslavia (which incidentally killed more civilians than the Serbian ground offensive it was meant to stop),9 the United States has thrust NATO into more offensive operations designed to contain Russia and China.

A “good year” for NATO

In late December 2011, Admiral James Stavridis, commander of the US European Command, declared, “As I look back on 2011, I think we had a reasonably good year in the operational sense.”10

This assessment is far too rosy. In late November 2011, NATO air strikes killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers, supposed allies of NATO in its war on Afghanistan—triggering rage across Pakistan, further straining US-Pakistani relations, and prompting Pakistan’s closure of NATO’s critical supply routes to landlocked Afghanistan.11 More than two months later, those supply lines remained closed, and according to the Pentagon, the United States was forced to spend $104 million per month (up from $17 million) to keep supplies flowing to NATO forces (the overwhelming majority of whom are US troops).12

Stavridis glides over these strained relations so he can focus on the alleged successes of NATO’s operations in Afghanistan. He reports that roughly 50 percent of Afghanistan has been returned to the control of Afghan security forces with NATO troops there playing merely “a support, mentorship, and training role.” Given that this is the longest war in US history, and that the United States set out to transform Afghanistan into a stable client regime, this hardly seems the most positive result.

The US plan to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2013 and hand over control to Afghan security forces (announced with much fanfare by US defense secretary Leon Panetta in early 2012) seems unlikely to succeed—as so many other “turning points” and “milestones” announced by US war planners over the years have similarly failed to materialize. The main problem, according to the military intelligence firm Stratfor, is that while the United States and NATO have fought the Taliban to a stalemate, they can’t militarily defeat the Taliban nor can they rely on Afghan troops to do so:
The Afghan military must recruit troops, and some of the most eager volunteers will be Taliban operatives. These operatives will be indistinguishable from anti-Taliban soldiers, and their presence will have two consequences. First, the intelligence they will provide the Taliban will cause the Afghan army offensive to fail. Second, shrewd use of these operatives will undermine the cohesion and morale of the Afghan forces. Surprise is crucial in locating, engaging and destroying a guerrilla force. Afghan security forces will face the same problem the South Vietnamese army did; namely, they will lack the element of surprise and at least some of their units will be unreliable. Accordingly, the US strategy of using the stalemate to construct a capable military force accordingly looks unlikely to succeed even leaving aside the issue of the fragmentation of the Afghan nation and the Karzai government’s internal problems.13
The Vietnam analogy—though not perfect, since the United States still manages to hold on to Afghanistan—is also useful in another sense. The same US counterinsurgency strategy that failed to “win hearts and minds” in Vietnam has also failed in Afghanistan. As the New York Times reports,
The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate—a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation….

Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall. “There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents,” Sergeant Major Hall told troops during the videoconference.14
In early February 2012, an 84-page report authored by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis was making the rounds among Washington lawmakers when it was leaked toRolling Stone magazine. Lt. Davis’ report explained in devastating detail that the March 2011 congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, then the top commander in Afghanistan, heralding the success of Obama’s troop surge to Afghanistan was either "misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate.” Contrary to the impression given by Petraeus, the number of insurgent attacks, improvised explosive devices, and US casualties in 2011 were respectively 82 percent, 113 percent and 164 percent higher than in 2009, the last year before Obama’s troop surge. The number of US dead and wounded skyrocketed during those years from 1,764 to 4,662. “Even a cursory observation of key classified reports and metrics,” Davis concludes, “leads overwhelmingly to the conclusion that over the past two years, despite the surge of 30,000 American soldiers, the insurgent force has gained strength.”15

As the dominant force within NATO, the United States bears the chief responsibility for the carnage caused by NATO’s war, and the scale of the carnage is substantial—more than 10,000 Afghan civilians killed since 2007, nearly 3,000 NATO troops dead, and a price tag approaching half a trillion dollars for US taxpayers alone. But despite the enormous human and economic toll, the US foreign policy establishment remains preoccupied with “victory” in Afghanistan because of the compulsion to counter the growing influence of China as an economic and political force in the region. In addition to Afghanistan’s location in the heart of Asia, it’s also at a strategic crossroads for the construction of a pipeline to transport valuable energy resources from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean (while, of course, avoiding Iran). This is one of the reasons that the United States first hoped to negotiate with the Taliban after it came to power in 1996 and then, after September 11, seized on the ideal justification to use force to accomplish the same goal.16

Then there was NATO’s seven-month strafing of Libya with 26,000 air sorties that destroyed some 6,000 targets.17 NATO’s own rationale for its military campaign was first to prevent a massacre in Misrata, which quickly morphed into removing the brutal dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi. The real reason was to give Western powers a foothold in the region that would allow them to make a grab for Libya’s prized oil resources, as well as provide them leverage in the unfolding events of the Arab Spring.18 The NATO invasion also exposed the hypocrisy of Western leaders, including the Bush and Obama administrations, which had both enjoyed friendly relations with Qaddafi as an ally in the “war on terror” until just weeks before the NATO bombing began.19

To summarize, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has looked to expand NATO’s role as global policeman, considering it to be more strategically valuable as a means to expand its dominance in the world. “NATO has left Western Europe a long time ago,” writes Asia Times analyst Pepe Escobar.
[T]oo small, too provincial. It’s already in Central and South Asia as well as Northeast Africa, interlinked with the Pentagon’s AFRICOM…. Way beyond the Afghan killing fields, NATO is fast becoming a huge “forward operating base” for policing the Middle East, Africa, Asia and even the South Atlantic, where the Pentagon reactivated the Fourth Fleet.20
G8: The global 1%

The group of powerful countries that became the G8 got its start in 1975 in the context of a world oil crisis and global recession. Since then, the G8 heads of state have met annually to spread the gospel of neoliberalism, prying open markets, privatizing lucrative state-owned industries, and designating what they consider “intrusive” environmental safeguards and workers’ rights as “trade barriers.” The G8 countries, which contain 15 percent of the world’s population but account for more than half of global nominal GDP, find themselves at the top of the global capitalist food chain, and their agenda is to make sure they stay there.

Today, with the eurozone teetering on the edge of solvency and a global economic downturn that has created stubbornly high unemployment rates throughout the industrialized world, the G8 countries are frantically seeking ways out of the economic crisis that began in 2008. Their solutions are based on trying to offload the costs of the crisis—in particular, the budget deficits caused by trillions of dollars in bailouts to the world’s largest financial institutions—onto the 99 percent. This means cutting social services like health care and anti-poverty programs, attacking the living standards of public-sector workers, raising the retirement age, and privatizing state industries.

The annual G8 summit is therefore a forum for discussions about how the G8 countries plan to use their international financial institutions—such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization—to allow for the greatest possible freedoms for multinational corporations while imposing discipline on any nations that don’t accept free markets and neoliberal orthodoxy. Greece is merely the latest country to receive a “lifeline” of loans and incentives that “saves” the national economy from financial ruin—by plunging the 99 percent into poverty, devaluing the life savings of millions of people, and cutting wages.

The heads of state of the world’s eight most powerful countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and Canada (included in 1976 at the insistence of the United States)—make sweeping decisions that affect the entire world. The G8’s summits have become annually rehearsed charades in which the world’s wealthiest nations pledge a tiny fraction of the resources they have plundered from the rest of the world to address poverty, famine, and disease in poorer countries. At 2011’s G8 summit in the French resort town of Deauville, British prime minister David Cameron explained what he describes as the G8’s image problem by saying, “I think what people think back home about these summits is a bunch of people in suits get together make some promises, particularly to the world’s poorest, and then they go in and have a big lunch and forget about the promises.”21 But the image problem exists not because it’s an image problem, but a well-deserved reputation.

The issue of agriculture subsidies, for example, is a case in point. While G8 countries give generous subsidies to their own agricultural sectors, which are dominated by a handful of megacorporations, they maintain tariffs and other barriers to the importation of agricultural products from the less developed world. This maintains a lopsided economic arrangement in which artificially cheap agricultural products from the rich countries drive local producers in the less developed countries out of business and undermines food self-sufficiency in the rest of the world. According to journalist Julio Godoy:
Perhaps the most important issue for African development, one that few have mentioned, is the need to reduce the subsidies that most G8 countries shell out to their farmers and the trade barriers that protect their own markets, which numerous studies show contributed heavily in the past two decades to undermining development in Africa and other poor regions of the world.

This is not something unknown to politicians and analysts in the G8 capitals. Already in 2005, the United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR), which had the premonitory title “International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world,” said it quite clearly: “The basic problem to be addressed in the World Trade Organization negotiations on agriculture can be summarized in three words: rich country subsidies.”

The document went on: “In the last round of world trade negotiations (launched in Doha, Qatar in 2001) rich countries promised to cut agricultural subsidies.” But, as the UNHDR remarked, since then, subsidies for agriculture in the G8 countries have steadily grown. The world’s richest countries spent just over one billion dollars for the year 2005 on aid for agriculture in poor countries, and just under one billion dollars each day of that year for various subsidies of agricultural overproduction at home. “A less appropriate ordering of priorities is difficult to imagine,” concluded the U.N. report (emphasis mine).22
To state this using hard numbers, the average European cow received $2.50 in government subsidies per day in 2002 and the average Japanese cow clocked $7.50 per day, while 75 percent of people in Africa were living on less than $2 per day. American subsidies to its cotton growers amounted to $3.9 billion in 2002 alone, which was three times US foreign aid to Africa that year.23

The 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, was celebrated by international celebrities such as U2’s Bono as a breakthrough because of the pledge to provide Africa with $50 billion in additional aid by 2010.24 But the legitimacy that Bono’s support lent the G8 wasn’t deserved—then or now. In the words of Canadian politician Stephen Lewis, who served a term as a UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, “Bono and company do their best to flatter the contributions of the G8, but even they are forced to say that the increases from 2005 to 2010 ‘have fallen far short of what was promised.’”25 By 2011, according to the G8’s own accountability report, G8 countries were already behind by $19 billion on their 2005 pledges. But that didn’t stop them from promising even more at their 2011 summit. “It seems unrealistic for the G8 countries to commit to such huge amounts when there is still a deficit of about $19 billion from previous summits,” Egyptian activist Ragia Omran told reporters.26 In 2007, Oxfam predicted that a $30 billion funding shortfall would lead to the deaths of 5 million people, disproportionately children.27 It should be remembered that this figure of $30 billion does not represent even .01 percent of the combined GDP of the G8 countries.

In the conclusion to the 2004 book Fatal Indifference: The G8, Africa and Global Health, the authors explain that not only have the G8 countries broken their promises to the less-developed world, but it can’t be assumed that their promises were in the best interests of the less-developed world in the first place. There’s a simple reason for this.
The current development policy model appears to be one that promotes growth only in ways that are (a) consistent with the financial interests of the industrialized world, and (b) require minimal or no redistribution of income and wealth from the rich world to the poor. Certainly, that is the message conveyed by the long-term decline in ODA [official development assistance] flows from the G8 countries, even as their wealth has greatly increased.28
Why oppose NATO and the G8?

According to Forbes magazine, 2011 was a year to celebrate for the world’s ultra-rich because both the total number of billionaires and their combined wealth shattered the previous record.29 The combined wealth of the world’s 1,210 billionaires amounted to $4.5 trillion in 2011. To get some idea of the scale of this number and how it relates to the vast expanse of unmet human needs, $5.5 trillion could eliminate extreme poverty around the world, end world hunger, provide access to potable water for everyone, and end the HIV/AIDS crisis—for the next 20 years. In other words, redistributing the wealth of the world’s richest 1,210 people could eradicate the world’s most pressing inequalities.

Some 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. For them, there’s no such thing as stability, only a daily and terrifying instability. For the AIDS-ravaged continent of Africa, orphaned children wonder where their next meal will come from. For the campesinos throughout Central America trying to feed their families, each day raises the question of whether to stay on the land or join the urban poor in one or another megalopolis where begging may provide more nutrition than tilling the land. And for the people of Afghanistan, the daily thrum of unmanned drones flying overhead poses the question, “Will today be the day that a bomb falls on me?”
NATO and the G8 stand as the ultimate guardians of a broken economic and political order that sustains such gargantuan inequalities—and marching against them is an opportunity to point out how they do this, but also to draw attention to the larger problems of the system of global capitalism.

Nearly a decade ago, global justice campaigner George Monbiot challenged the “democracy hypocrisy” of the G8 heads of state for their double standards. “[The G8 countries] leave the rest of the world out of their deliberations,” wrote Monbiot in his book The Age of Consent. “We are left to shout abuse…. They reduce us, in other words, to the mob, and then revile the thing they have created…. They, the tiniest and most unrepresentative of the world’s minorities, assert a popular mandate they do not possess, then accuse us of illegitimacy.”30

Nothing could be more legitimate than standing with the rest of humanity against the global 1%. So whether you are concerned about better public education or the crisis of housing foreclosures and evictions, whether you are driven by the growing climate crisis or the scourge of war, you have a reason to come to Chicago in May and be a part of a mass mobilization to oppose the G8 and NATO.

1      Brit Schulte and Caitlin Sheehan, “Emanuel gets his clampdown,” Socialist Worker, January 23, 2012.

2      Shia Kapos, “Trained marksmen will be watching NATO/G8 dignitaries, protesters,” Crain’s Chicago Business blog, January 9, 2012.

3      Chalmers Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases,” TomDispatch.com, January 15, 2004.

4      Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005).

5      Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), 143.

6      Quoted in Lance Selfa, “From Cold War to Kosovo,” International Socialist Review 8, Summer 1999.

7      Cited by Rick Rozoff, “Africa: Global NATO seeks to recruit 50 new military partners,” Stop NATO blog, February 20, 2011, http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/africa-global-nato-seeks-to-recruit-50-new-military-partners/.
8      Lee Sustar, “How imperial rivalries stoked war in Georgia,” Socialist Worker, August 12, 2008.

9      See “New Masters of the Balkans,” International Socialist Review 8, Summer 1999; and Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

10     James Stavridis, “NATO in 2011: Five key events,” December 19, 2011, http://www.aco.nato.int/saceur/NATO-in-2011-Five-Key-Events.aspx.

11     Salman Masood and Eric Schmitt, “Tensions flare between US and Pakistan after strike,” New York Times, November 26, 2011.

12     Luis Martinez, “NATO supplies to Afghanistan keep flowing, but at a price,” ABC News National Security blog, January 20, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/nato-supplies-to-afghanistan-keep-flowing-but-at-a-price/.

13     George Friedman, “Afghanistan: Moving toward a distant endgame,” Stratfor.com, February 7, 2012.

14     Richard Oppel Jr., “Tighter rules fail to stem deaths of innocent Afghans at checkpoints,” New York Times, March 26, 2010.

15     Gareth Porter, “Army officer's leaked report rips Afghan war success story,” Inter Press Service news agency, February 11, 2011.

16     Eric Ruder, “Why Washington wanted this war,” Socialist Worker, September 6, 2002. For a more in-depth discussion of US war aims in Afghanistan in the Obama era, see David Whitehouse, “Afghanistan: Sinking Deeper,” International Socialist Review 69, January-February 2010.

17     Stavridis.

18     Alan Maass and Lance Selfa, “Washington celebrates Qaddafi’s death,” Socialist Worker, October 24, 2011.

19     This episode also exposed the hypocrisy of Qaddafi’s defenders who downplayed his regime’s collaboration with the United States. See Maass and Selfa.

20     Pepe Escobar, “Welcome to NATOstan,” Asia Times, November 20, 2010.

21     Geert De Clercq, “NGOs blast G8 for broken promises, hollow words,” Reuters, May 27, 2011.

22     Julio Godoy, “G8-AFRICA: Farm subsidies a taboo subject?” Inter Press Service news agency, May 30, 2007.

23     Kwesi Kwaa Prah, “Catch as Catch Can: Obstacles to Sustainable Development in Africa,” in Sustainable Development in Africa: A Multifaceted Challenge, ed. Okechukwu Ukaga and Osita G. Afoaku, (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2005), 17.

24     Geert De Clercq, “NGOs blast G8.”

25     Stephen Lewis, “The G8 and G20, roken promises on global AIDS,” Reproductive Health Reality Check, June 23, 2010.

26     Geert De Clercq, “NGOs blast G8.”

27     “G8 broken promises could cost five million lives warns Oxfam,” Oxfam statement, May 11, 2007.

28     Ronald Labonte, Ted Schrecker, David Sanders, and Wilma Meeus, Fatal Indifference: The G8, Africa and Global Health (Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, 2004), 211.

29     “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, September 3, 2011.

30     George Monbiot, Age of Consent (London: Flamingo, 2003)