The Staggering Hypocrisy of the Western Mind

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with its 225,000 or more deaths in 11 countries, shocked the world; so, in recent weeks, has the devastation wrought by a powerful cyclone (and tidal surge) that hit the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It resulted in at least 78,000 deaths (with another 56,000 reported missing) and a display of recalcitrance on the part of a military junta focused on its own security while its people perish. Similarly, a devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province that hit 7.9 on the Richter scale and whose tremors were felt 1,000 miles away has swept into the news. Its casualty count has already reached 51,000 with unknown numbers of Chinese still buried in rubble or cut off in rural areas and so, as yet, untallied, and an estimated five million people homeless.

These are staggering natural disasters, hard even to take in, and yet it’s a reasonable question whether, in terms of damage, any of them measure up to the ongoing human-made (or rather Bush administration-made) disaster in Iraq. Worse yet, unlike a natural disaster, the Iraqi catastrophe seems to be without end. No one can even guess when it might be said of that country that an era of reconstruction or rebuilding is about to begin. Instead, the damage only grows week by miserable week and yet, as has often been true in the last year, Iraq continues to have trouble even cracking the top ten stories in U.S. news coverage.

River of Resistance, by Michael Schwartz and Tom Engelhardt

This piece sums up an idea that was on mind for some time. The ability to disassociate to this extent is really astonishing, even Tom Engelhardt is disassociating himself from what is happening in Iraq, blaming instead the Bush administration.

Weekly Lesson (14)

“For [the English] appear to constitute that people in Europe which, limited to the understanding of actuality, is destined, like the class of shopkeepers and workmen in the State, to live always immersed in matter, and to have actuality but not reason as object.” 

-Hegel’s History of Philosophy, Bacon.

Sovereign Credit is State Usury

Introduction

This post was supposed to be the last section in a post about usury (interest-paying debt), but it developed and expanded beyond the limits of a section; so I decided to go ahead and finish it as a stand-alone post. The last section, the current post, was to discuss the thesis of using state usury in the form of sovereign credit to develop the internal market of a country. In particular it discusses Henry C. K. Liu’s article Nazism and the German Economic Miracle, which advocates using sovereign credit to develop the internal market as the Germans had done in the thirties of the last century.

Nazi Germany provided another example of successful inter-war economic planning.

Henry C. K. Liu, Nazism and the German Economic Miracle

Due to the particular history of this post it will be helpful to sum up the conclusions of the original post, which this one takes as given; it is enough to state the following points:

Weekly Lesson (13)

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

-Marx, Capital—Preface to the French Edition.