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Online Catalogue : International News
Do you have 10 minutes for India?

Dr. Abdul Kalaam's Speech
I have three visions for India. In 3000 years of our history people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. >From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, and their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.

My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet wee lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self-reliant and self-assured. Isn't this incorrect? 

I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr. Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great opportunity of my life. I see four milestones in my career:

ONE: Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India's first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.

Two: After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.

THREE: The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon.

FOUR: One day an orthopaedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300 gram callipers and took them to the orthopaedic centre. The children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!

Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? We are the first in milk production. We are number one in Remote sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of rice Look at Dr. Sudarshan; he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. 

There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?

Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 years old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is: She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.

Do you have 10 minutes?
Allow me to come back with vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours. YOU say that our government is inefficient. YOU say that our laws are too old. YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage. YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke, the airline is the worst in the world, and mails never reach their destination. YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits. YOU say , say and say. What do YOU do about it? Take a Person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - YOURS. Give him a face - YOURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are. You pay $5 (approx. Rs. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU comeback to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah. YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs. 650) a month to, "see to it that my STD and ISD calls arebilled to someone else." YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 kmph) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, "Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost." YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand. Why don't YOU spit paan on the streets of Tokyo? Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. You can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country why cannot you be the same here in India. Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay Mr. Tinaikar had a pint to make. "Rich people's dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place," he said. "And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels? In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen to that here?" He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place or are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms. We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room protestation and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? "It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry." So who's going to change the system" What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand. Or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf's is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government . Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money. Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too.... I am echoing J. F. Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.

"ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY"

End of speech 
Lets do what India needs from us. Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails. Thank you.
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US chemical warfare legacy

A US appeals court ruled on 1 April that US Vietnam veterans who protracted prostate cancer and diabetes after exposure to Agent Orange were entitled to retroactive disability payments. The defoliant was produced for the US military by pharmaceuticals giants, including Dow and Monsanto. 

However, calls for compensation for Vietnam's one million Agent Orange victims, many of whom suffer from appalling birth defects, were rejected by the US government. The rejection came on the eve of an international conference on the effects of the herbicide held in Hanoi in March. At least 9 million gallons of the defoliant were sprayed over Vietnam between 1962 and 1970. 
A US embassy statement released before the conference said: 'At the time of normalisation, neither compensation nor reparations were granted nor contemplated for the future.' When asked if this state of affairs could change in the future depending on the outcome of more research, the spokesman replied : 'I think the statement speaks for itself.'

MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The Britain Vietnam Friendship Society is campaigning to get the US government to accept its responsibility for the damage caused to the people and the land of Vietnam by its use of Agent Orange. To find out what you can do to help, contact the BVFS secretary Len Aldis on +44 (0) 20 8980 7146, or email him at lenaldis@compuserve.com

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The Conclusive Proof Argument by Barry Trower
 By Barry Trower

Government scientists will often ask for conclusive proof when they are challenged. Yet the fact is, scientifically, conclusive proof is impossible to obtain. Let me explain.

I was at a legal hearing in Torquay representing a community, and the opposing barrister, who was representing the communications industry, said: 'There is no conclusive proof that these microwaves will cause damage.'

I argued: 'If somebody stood up and shot me in this court room there would be three levels of proof.
'You would have everybody as a witness, and that would be accepted in a court of law.

'A pathologist could perform a post mortem and decide that the bullet killed me, and that would be a second level of proof.
'If, however, you wanted conclusive proof that the bullet killed me, you would have to argue that at the split second the bullet went into my body every system in my body was working perfectly.

'There are thousands of reasons why I could drop dead on the spot before the bullet went in.

'Clearly, this is scientifically impossible. There is no such thing as conclusive proof. Yet it is what is demanded by government scientists when their decisions are challenged.

'Conclusive proof has been demanded by scientists defending their decisions after they have said the following are safe: thalidomide; asbestos; smoking; sheep dip; GM foods, and vitamin B6.

'With the above list, it will be recognised that evidence of damage comes only from counting the people who are injured.
'I am arguing scientifically that there is blanket denial by some scientists. The only way to show them they are wrong is to present them with a certain number of bodies.

'When commercial interests are at stake there seems to be a denial of relevant scientific data. The problem with the microwave communications industry is that it does not have to prove it is safe. You have to prove it is not, and that is an entirely different ball game.

'As a scientist, if I develop a new pill I have to run a five- or 10-year clinical trial and convince a board of my peers that it is before I have permission to release the pill onto the market.

'With the telecommunication industry the tables are completely turned around. They do not have to show these instruments are safe. You have to show they are not.'

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Child workers rights violated

ECUADOR - Workers on banana plantations in Ecuador, including children as young as eight, are having their labour rights violated, according to Human Rights Watch.

The report, Tainted Harvestchild labour and obstacles to organising in Ecuador's banana plantations, found that the Ecuadorian national government and the three giant multinational banana companies (which buy around 25 per cent of the country's banana exports) are all failing to enforce necessary codes of conduct and labour standards.

Ecuador exports more bananas than any other country. But its government is failing to enforce international labour standards or even its own national labour code. Adult workers earn on average only US $5.44 a day.

In recent years the big three banana companies - Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte - have made much of their own codes of conduct. However, Human Rights Watch found that the corporations are not enforcing these codes on the producers from whom they buy their bananas. Instead, the report claims, the multinationals have disclaimed 'any obligation to demand respect for workers' rights on the plantations from which they buy their bananas' 

Of the 45 children interviewed for the report, all but four began working in the banana plantations or packing houses between the ages of eight and 13. On average they work for 12 hours a day. The children said they suffered a range of symptoms caused by exposure to dangerous pesticides.

The pesticides are often sprayed from aircraft while the children are still working in the fields. The symptoms include head and stomach aches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, trembling and shaking, burning nostrils and red eyes.

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Environment Poverty

Suggest the environment should come before poverty and you might as well own up to paedophilia. Yet extreme human mise is increasingly caused by man-made ecological catastrophes.

Poverty is the concept most often used to derail environmentalists. UK development minister Clare Short asserts that so long as Third World children live in poverty the environment can never be a priority. Development charities say they will only take the environment seriously if it is coupled with poverty elimination. Even in the UK, consensus dictates that the environment is something to be tackled only after living standards have been raised. But do we really understand who is poor these days?
Any challenge to the poverty-comes-first mantra is greeted with the horror usually saved for paedophiles. But this has as much to do with challenging vested interests as offending humanitarian beliefs. There's a juggernaut of government departments, voluntary organisations and international agencies devoted to obliterating poverty - whether it's found in drought-ridden Africa on London housing estates.

No one wants an avoidable death from starvation on their conscience. But too many assumptions about world poverty go unexamined. Take the UK, where one in three children are said to live in poverty. Really? In a society where no child dies of hunger or has to work, where all have access to free healthcare and education? The Child Poverty Action Group's (CPAG) current campaign speaks volumes: one million children need to be persuaded to overcome inhibitions and claim the free school meals that are their due. These children may be deprived and may be eating a poor diet, but it's an insult to those who are dying of starvation and thirst to call this poverty.
The CPAG's definition of child poverty is: those living in households with incomes below 50 per cent of the national average. Such an income level may be shocking, but it certainly is not 'absolute' poverty her is used to describe lives devoted to subsistence, with nothing left for the pleasures of affluence. In the Third World context, too, 'poverty' is often mobilised to describe not just catastrophic shortages but lives dominated by subsistence.

Yet there is no correlation between human happiness and freedom from a subsistence economy. In Western society, misery, depression and suicidal malais are rampant, and seemingly growing in direct proportion to the distance moved from subsistence level. Conversely, people in poor societies are often far from unhappy. The poverty lobby gasps with horror at these points. There's nothing worse, it says, than a child forced to do chores, to walk miles for water, to look after sick relatives. How would you feel if it was your own child?

Well, my children's generation is growing up with a different kind of poverty: the poverty of affluence. Here, adolescent mental problems are spiralling out of control. Clinics are full of teenagers with eating disorders and depression. An eve increasing number of young men kill themselves. Remote from natural risks, man young people seek out more destructive extreme experiences like drug taking. 

Many dismiss as obscene the suggestion that those with less might actually have more; isn't it a version of the racism inherent in the idea of the happy primitive? No, actually. That was imperialist ignorance. Times have changed. My views result from including the environment in perceptions of need; this changes our understanding of societies. A balanced relationship to the natural world is a blessing still enjoyed by some poorer countries. By contrast, the Wes has catastrophically undermined that relationship, creating disasters like mode food production. Aren't children suffering from BSE, cancer, diabetes and obesity as impoverished as some of their Third World counterparts?

Now we want to cure Third World poverty with Western practices which fuel global discontent and population movement. Only when these solutions have been applied, we are told, can the environment be tackled. But, increasingly man-made environment catastrophes cause extreme human poverty. Only environmentally sensitive solutions will solve hardship in the long term.

It's time for a more truthful look at poverty. And if the poverty lobby wonder how I can see children starving and live with my conscience, I ask in return: how can it peddle sticking-plaster solutions and a view of the world which pretends poverty can be divorced from respect for the environment?

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Foreign Aid??

40 per cent of the world's population are without adequate sanitation. Nearly 6,000 children die every day from diseases like diarrhoea. In the past 10 years diarrhoea has killed more people than all the people lost to armed conflict since World War II. For f11 billion (the amount spent each year by European and US consumers on pet food), the number of people with no sanitation could be halved.

'For the US government to [be increasing its spending by] only double what I am spending is absolutely inadequate.'
Financier George Soros on hearing that the US would boost aid by $5 billion over the next three fiscal years

'It's not a question of how much money will be made available for foreign asistance, or whether it comes in the form of loans or grants. More money tied current policies is likely to do more harm than good - providing incentives to farmers to grow flowers for Europe and the US, rather than beans or maize for people at home. What is required is economic self-determination.' Njoki Njoroge Njeho of 50 Years is Enough

'Everything created since Bretton Woods until today should be reconsidered. A far-sighted vision was missing then. Thus the privileges and interests of the most powerful prevailed. In the face of the deep present crisis, a still worse future is offered where the economic, social and ecological tragedy of an increasingly ungovernable world never be resolved, and where the number of the poor and starving would grow higher. [It is] as if a large part of humanity [is] doomed.' Fidel Castro

The IMF is to extend its premises - tearing down a building on Pennsylvania Avenue, three blocks from the Whitehouse in Washington, and replacing it with a new one at a cost of $250 million to US taxpayers.

'People in developing countries are much healthier and better educated than they were 50 years ago. It shows that the development community has learned from experience - from success and from failure.'
Nicholas Stern, chief economist at the world Bank
'We have so many people in the world living on less than $1 a day, and that does not sound like 50 years of success.' 
Paul O'Neill, US Treasury Secretary

A recent poll showed that 81 per cent of Americans would roll back George Bush's tax cuts to safeguard national security; 84 per cent would do the same to prevent an increase in national debt; 71 per cent to provide senior citizens with prescription drugs; and 63 per cent to protect the environment.

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The Inner Light
 By Dastur Dhalla

Fire in its various manifestations, whether as the fire of the hearth on earth, or the fiery substance in the bowels of the earth, or as the genial glow of the sun in the azure vault of heaven, or the silvery sheen of the crescent moon in the sky, or the flickering brilliancy of the stars in the firmament, or in the form of the life-giving energy distributed in the entire creation, is emblematic of thee, Ahura Mazda.

The fire-temple is the symbol in stone of the Mazdayasnian religion and the athravan, the fire-priest, feeds the consecrated fire with fresh fuel at every watch of the day and night. I shall raise an alter unto thy divine fire burning in my heart and make it thy sanctuary. My own athravan will I be and I will tend the holy fire within, O thou, the supermest Athravan.

When the fire of the hearth in my house calls me to rise on the third part of the night, and exhorts me to cleanse my body and bring fuel to the fire that it may burn bright, dutifully will I do it, and more I will do. With the purity of my mind and the cleanliness of my heart, will I burn incense of the good thoughts of Vohu Manah and the righteousness of Asha, with the full-hearted devotion of Armaiti, on the sacred fire flickering on the altar of my heart and kindle it into a blazing flame. May my soul rise upward unto thee, Ahura Mazda, as the flame on the altar leaps heavenward.

Thy face is hid from my sight. But thou hast said to Zarathushtra that whoso, with pious intent, sees thy light, can see thee. I shall then keep the portals of my inner temple ajar that thou mayest step in when thou dost think me worthy of the vision of the radiance and glory of thy face. As fire consumes frankincense, devotion melts my heart in my adoration for thee and I am buoyed up by the hope that through thy fire and in thy fire will I see thee, with the eyes of faith, Ahura Mazda.

Thou art eternal light, Ahura Mazda. Thy very nature is light. Be thou my light, O Lord of light. I grope in the dark; scatter the darkness. Shed thy guiding light on my darkened path and lead me onward on my way to thy abode of eternal light. Let thy radiance fall upon me that I may live in thy light.

Like the owl that shuns the light, the sinner sees not thy light and, seeing not thy light, he sees not thee. Man veils his eyes when he looks in the face of the brilliant sun. Immeasurably brighter is thy spiritual light than the physical light of the sun. As the rose unfolds its petals to the light of the sun, so help me, Ahura Mazda, to unfold my heart to thy light by my faithful adherence to Asha's righteousness.

On the deep dark ocean of life is the barque of my life moving. Be thou by my side at the helm, I pray. Keep watch over it and guide me to steer the vessel on the waves of thy divine light to land me secure on the yonder shores of thy heavenly regions. 
The light that burns within the temple of my heart flickers and burns low through my carelessness. Forgive my negligence and let it not fade from my soul. Replenish it in thy unfailing kindness and inspire me to tend it with devoted care. Let thy physical light shine over me from above and let thy light spiritual dart into my soul and illumine it from within. May thy light flood my mind and my heart and inspire me to live by thy inner light, O Thou that livest in those lights highest of the high, Ahura Mazda.

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Asha's Universal Order in the Universe
 By Dastur Dhalla

Life upon earth reveals a smooth and graceful and an all round ordered movement. Nature has its seasonal rhythms. Spring and summer, autumn and winter, with their seasonal succession of changes, take their unvarying course. The tides rise and fall punctually. The dawn and morn and noon and evening and night go their uninterrupted daily round. The dying day gives birth to the night. The night hangs its myriad of silvery lamps to lighten the darkness. The dawn breaks to resurrect the day and the day goes the perennial round of its birth. The heavens and their glittering hosts, the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets march at a regulated pace. Immutable are the laws that govern the movements of nature and preserve its unfailing regularity. A stable order ensures the existence of the universe. 

Asha is the upholder of a moral order in the inner world of man. Human life is lived the best when man's relations with his neighbours, his duty towards his fellowmen and towards the heavenly beings are regulated according to Asha's moral order of righteousness.

Help me to establish order in my inner world, Ahura Mazda, thou who art the source of all order and law. May concord and not discord, order and not disorder, righteousness and not wickedness always prevail in my inner world. May Asha Vahishta, Best Righteousness, be the upholder of my life, now and for ever.

The Path of Asha is the Path of Righteousness One alone is the path, it is the Path of Righteousness 
sunshine and life is darkness, life is joy and life is sorrow, life blooms and blossoms and life withers and fades. Life upon earth, O Lord of life, is a blend of contradictions.

Life and suffering are inseparable and the world is a rough enough place to live. Endow me with undaunted courage to weather the storms of life and to scatter the clouds when they darken the horizon of life. When the barque of my soul, sailing the sea of life, glides not smoothly on the stream, but drifts upon the stormy billows of life and is on the brink of breaking under the tumult of life, thou, O Master Mariner, embolden me to steer it skilfully and patiently to the haven of safety.

When danger confronts me in life, strengthen me to face it bravely. Life is an uphill fight; enable me to fight it valiantly and win through it. When the burden of life weighs heavily upon me, strengthen me to bear the yoke patiently and ungrudgingly. Never unduly elated at triumph and never unduly depressed at failure, never unduly joyful when life smiles upon me, help me, Ahura Mazda, ever to live my life with philosophic calm.

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Life is Service
 By Dastur Dhalla

Zarathushtra drew the lowly and lonely, the needy and neglected towards him and embraced them in his sympathetic heart. The noblest of men and women have always been willing servants of society. They have given the best of their time and energy and all to serve their fellow human beings. They have thought little of themselves and much of others. With a total disregard of personal comfort and rest, they have worn out their lives in the service of others. Men and woman, noble and great, there have always been who would willingly sacrifice their lives a hundred Airyaman withholds health from man, Ahura Mazda. Everything is as naught, where health is not.

Man appreciates not things that providence showers upon him unsought and in plenty. He values it at its proper worth, when he loses it awhile. When health fails man, and the body fails to do his bidding, life becomes tasteless and tedious to him and depression of spirits hangs over him. Then on his bed of sickness, he curses his existence and yearns for health.

Keep me healthy and sound in body to the day of my death, Ahura Mazda. When old age creeps on me and my health beings to fail, I will hourly pray unto thee to give me the soundness and strength of the body that once were mine, even as Rustam, the rider of matchless Rakhash, prayed unto thee in the hour of his need to give him back the strength, from the surfeit of which he had suffered in his youth and from which thou hadst relieved him at his prayerful request. 

Health gives liveliness and cheerfulness, superabundant energy and exuberant optimism. Give me soundness and vigour and agility of body to work strenuously for the furtherance of good and to carry on a vigorous warfare against evil. Give me, I beseech a healthy mind to enable me to lead an active and industrious Zoroastrian life in the discharge of my life's duties.

Thirteen long centuries ago, when the Kian Glory fled past our ancestors for ever, when the crown and sceptre of the great Sasanian empire fell, when the fame and fortune of the greatest kingdom of the day left them, when friendless and forlorn they stood and knew no where to turn, thou our eternal friend, stood by them in the darkest days of their need, O Ahura Mazda. Thou didst uphold them and take them beneath thy protecting wings and stay with them in the woeful time thy guiding star to this our land their rock of stay.

Fugitives forlorn they came from distant shores and thou didst sustain them in their plight and cheer them and help them to begin life anew amid strange surroundings. Thou didst inspire them to strenuous, hard work and, never faltering.

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The will to sin is sin
 By Dastur Dhalla

Sinlessness is struggle. It is triumph in the war waged against temptation to sin. The sinful act is a sin indeed, but the very will to sin, the inclination to sin, the intention to sin, is also sin. The will to sin may not be realized, the inclination to sin may not succeed, and the intention to sin may not be put into practice. Some hindrance, some interruption, some fear of detection may arrest or frustrate the commitment of sin, yet the sin has already originated.

Will is the parent of sin. Sin begins with the sinful thought, whether sinful word or sinful deed is its outcome or not. Sin is there as soon as the soul sanctions it and gives consent to it, even if some circumstance prevents its accomplishment. The resolve to sin is as much a sin as a sin in word or deed. The soul sins, when it shows its willingness to sin. The soil of the spirit is already soiled and stained, when it receives the seed of sin in its midst, even when the seed may sprout not and bloom not.

Mithra and Sraosha and Rashnu, thy heavenly judges, Ahura Mazda, judge not appearances and outward results. They hold the soul accountable for the merest contemplation and approval of sin.

Help me to conquer my weakness to succumb to sinful inclination. Strengthen me to suppress the sinful thought when it assails me and, ever vigilant, to crush it the moment it comes creeping to take hold of my heart. Enable me to preserve my soul stainless and pure from the pollution of sinful thought, Ahura Mazda.

Not to sin is better than to expiate sin, I avow, Ahura Mazda. But if I have sinned through weakness of the flesh or ignorance or thoughtlessness or otherwise, I seek thy indulgence towards my human frailty. Teach me to atone for my sin, for atonement stunts the growth of sin and withers it like a tree. 

If I have sinned against thy will, I repent. If I have sinned knowingly or unknowingly, I repent. If I have merely contemplated sin or if I have actually committed it, I repent. If I have sinned in thought or word or deed, I repent. If I have sinned pertaining to this world or the next, I repent. If I have left undone what I should have done or done what I should not have done, of all such sins of omission and commission, I repent. I prostrate myself before thee in penitential prayer.

I plead guilty. I stand condemned before thee. I grieve over my sin. I mourn it. I have erred and I have fallen. I confess. I have given thee cause for offence. My sin has incurred thy condemnation. My sin weighs heavy on my heart. I cry my eyes out and my eyes rain tears. Loud confession with lips and bathing my face with a torrent of tears is of no avail, if my heart is not affected. But my penitence is not of mere words and tears. It comes from the deepest depths of my contrite heart. Deep is the anguish I go through. I cannot exclude the painful memories of my sin from my thoughts. I lay sleepless at night. My penitent heart eats itself away. A wave of remorse and penitence surges through my heart. I pray for the remission of my sin. Hear in thy mercy the cry of my penitent heart, O Merciful Lord.

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I Pray for Forgiveness on my Knees
 By Dastur Dhalla

Sin poisons the spring the spring of my life. It hides the truth from me and deadens my heart to virtue. Sin is the death of my spirit. Let me daily die to sin. I abjure sin. I turn away from it. I for honesty all my life. Honesty is a lovable virtue at all seasons of life. Help me, Ahura Mazda, to be honest in the bright days of my prosperity, as in the dark days of adversity, if ever it assails me. No title is so honorable to its holder, as to be acclaimed honest by all. May I be worthy of this enviable distinction in my life, O Thou most honored on earth as in heaven.

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Happiness unto him who gives happiness unto others
 By Dastur Dhalla

Unquenchable is man's thirst for happiness, Ahura Mazda. In this thine wide world, there is enough room for all to live and food to eat and good things of life to enjoy and be happy. At the gray dawn of history, Zarathushtra gave thy message to mankind that the individual's happiness depended upon the happiness of all, and gave out thy golden rule that happiness came to him who gave happiness to others.

In this world of joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, life would be intolerable if it were not for the sympathy, kindness, and affection of man for man. Unbearable is the burden of life when unaided. It loses its crushing weight when men live in fellowship with their fellow-men and share one another's burden. Life is incomplete when man lives for his own self, oblivious of the happiness of others. Life is best lived when it is lived for others. Thus preached our beloved prophet, the first among thy holy prophets to teach this universal truth.

Thy sainted souls of all time and clime have loved others more than themselves and have held that the greatest pleasure of life consisted in making others happy. They have lived for others, worked for others, spent their lives for others, risked their all for others, endured everything for others, and died for others, that their fellow human beings may be happy.
Give us wisdom, O Wise One, to see that our

Vain and shallow, showy and pretentious is the barbaric display of pomp and position. Real greatness lies in the pure and simple life. Upright simplicity outshines, in true lustre, vulgar ostentation. In his simplicity, man attains to greatness by the virtues of his heart. Life wears sublime majesty in the nobility and innocence of its simplicity.

Let me not practise affectation to seem great. Let me not labour to seem what I am not. Let not people take me for what I truly am not. Let me seem what I am and let the world take me for what I am in my honest simplicity.

Good and great ones of all ages and climes have lived their great lives in simplicity. Help me, O God, to emulate them. Let me dine on frugal meals and let me don simple clothes. Help me to observe austere simplicity in my habits, simplicity of heart, and simplicity of character. Let me love simplicity in all things and let me always live in dignified simplicity, Ahura Mazda.

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Let none nurse intolerance
 By Dastur Dhalla

Intolerance and bigotry and dogmatism are the bitterest enemies of religion upon earth. They make religion a tyrant, a persecutor, a veritable daeva, the demoniac perversion of angelic religion.

The frog croaks that his well is the whole world and the bigot boasts that his is the only inspired and perfect religion. The truth and the whole truth is exclusively garnered in his religion, he avers. His religion is the crown and culmination of all religions, his religion is ordained to be the universal religion of mankind and salvation is possible only through his religion, he adds.

All bigotry is blind and stupid and savage. Sectarian bigotry is as bad as inter-religious bigotry. Bigotry stifles reason and the bigot, in his frenzy, is out to force all to believe what he believes.

All religions come from one and the only God, who makes himself known by many a name. From the same source, like the tributaries of a river, the flow. All religions make man equally good upon earth and with equal safety do they conduct his soul to heaven. One alone is truth and all religions teach this truth, for religion itself is truth.

All open their hearts to the same God. All unbosom their hearts to the same God. All seek refuge in the same God. All concentrate their thoughts on the same God. All seek fellowship with the same God. All yearn to be united unto the same God. All commend their souls into the hands of the same God.

Man has no right to demand that his neighbour shall address God after his pattern and shall pray in his own way and worship according to his liking and sacrifice unto God in the manner he does. 

No thinking man's own idea of God and religion, at all times and in all conditions of life, is ever the same. For everybody's views on religion, then, it is not possible ever to be alike. Monotonous would our world become, if all thought equally and in the same way without ever differing in religious beliefs and practices from one another. Nature shines in her luxuriant glory because of the wide variety of her form and color and beauty. So do there bloom and blossom in the garden of the spirit pervading mankind, foliage and flowers of all shades and grades of devotion and religious emotions. 

Teach me, my God, to see that I have no right to impose my own way of thinking upon others. Teach me to acknowledge and honor the right of all to pray and worship and sacrifice in their own way. Let me not be a purist and regard those as irreligious who regard not formalism. Keep me free from sectarian spirit, and give me strength to root out from my heart bigotry and fanatic zeal. Teach me to discern true religion from religiosity. Fill my mind and heart, Ahura Mazda, with the spirit of toleration.

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Teach Me Elegance And Sweetness Of Manners, Ahura Mazda
 By Dastur Dhalla

Man is mirrored in his manners and his worth is valued according to his manners. A well-bred man is a man of good and gentle manners. It is not birth or rank or wealth that makes a lady or a gentleman. A peasant can be a gentleman, as a peasant-woman can be a lady. Nobility of character dwells equally well in a villa or a chateau, as in a cottage or a garret. Talents and valour, and wealth rise in worth with good manners and good manners from character. This world were paradise, if all who inhabit it were genteel men and genteel women.

Let me not be vulgar and vain, proud and rude. Let me polish the roughness and rudeness of my manners. Let me be courteous un speech and with life sweetened by good manners, let me convey cheer and pleasure and happiness to all whom I meet.

Let me be affable and amiable of disposition. Let my manners be charming and pleasing and natural and spontaneous and simple. Let me bear like a gentleman. Let me behave with propriety of manners and with deference to the feelings of others.

Help me, to maintain unblemished my honor, spotless my reputation, and unscathed the glorious name of my dear community.
Zarathushtra, at the grey dawn of history, was the first gentleman. A gentleman is world's good citizen, thy good man, and a good Zoroastrian, Ahura Mazda.

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Scandal Is A Heinous Sin, Says Zarathushtra
 By Dastur Dhalla

Zarathushtra brands scandal or slander, backbiting or calumny as an inexpiable sin. Scandal creeps and crawls like a loathsome reptile or flies like a winged snake. Upon swift wings does it fly from mouth to mouth. It grows wild like weeds and finds its widest currency. Scandal wallows in mire and swamp and flings mud on all passers-by. Scandal aims at dishonouring innocent persons, robbing them of their good names, wounding their fame, blighting their reputation, blasting their character. Scandal is a mean and mendacious art to bring about the degradation and downfall of the innocent against whom an evil-wishing person has a grudge or to whom he feels dislike.

Scandal accuses, condemns, traduces, maligns, and blasphemes in one breath and is out to murder reputations. Scandal is allied to cowardice. It dares not face its victim. It lirks and skulks in its hovel and assails him at his back and spits its venom on him from behind.

Sharper than the edge of a spear or sword is the dart of scandal. It stabs wounds and lacerates and kills. Scandal singes and sears and scorches and burns. It bites like a serpent and stings like an adder.

Nothing in the world can restrain a slanderous tongue. It spares none. Sage and saint cannot escape it. Virtue and chastity are not secure against its onslaught.

Scandal thrives on human weakness. Foul and filthy in its nature, it finds its place among the graceful and great. Credulous ear is ever eager to believe anything and everything poured into it. The idle tongue of the tale-bearer wags and many a one is ever at hand to lend an easy ear and believe and credit the scandal. There are those that enjoy talking scandal as a means of killing time and find a malicious delight in giving currency to it. Scandal, thus, fills the air in human society, civilized and refined.

Recounting the ghastly spectacle of the vision vouchsafed him of hell, Viraf relates that a backbiter's soul is attacked from the year for such a sinner indulges in secret calumnies at the back of his victim in this world. The tongue of a slanderer, he says, is gnawed by serpents and scorpions and the noxious creatures of inferno.

Teach us to be listless and desf to the tales of calumny they tell. Strengthen our will to refuse them a lodgment in our minds. Foul and stinking is the breath of the scandalmonger. Keep us always free from its contamination. Guard and protect our community from the canker of scandal that eats at its heart, Ahura Mazda.

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Wealth Is A Mirage
 By Dastur Dhalla

Our age has made wealth the end and aim of life. A frenzied struggle is witnessed all around to accumulate wealth. With the unquenchable passion for wealth, people strain every nerve at a breaking point to grasp it.

Thou, Mazda, hast planned plenty for all and poverty for none, but man has reversed this order and made plenty for few and poverty for many. Few have much, when many have little or nothing. Fortune sits on the foreheads of the rich and they share the world between them. They have all that life can give and they never know what it is to want money. They spend money as freely as if it were water.

The luxurious dwellings and sumptuous banquets and fine raiments of the rich mock the mud huts of the poor and their coarse food and tatters and rags. The rich eat the dainties at a banquet, whose cost would provide a feast to a score of poor persons that seldom know two meals a day. The parings of the rich can enrich the poor. Gilded chandeliers brighten their rooms that are warmed by the fire burning on the blazing hearth. They lounge on the green lawn in the cool of the night and spend their summer in the hills or at the watering places. They imbibe sparkling wine filled in golden cups. Fondly they indulge their children in every caprice of theirs. They live a round of incessant gaieties and spend their wealth in revelry. Filled to satiety, they go to bed, while the poor sleep on their empty stomachs.

The foolish among the rich give themselves airs of superiority on the strength of their wealth. They flaunt ostentation and arrogance in the face of the poor. Their proud disdain burn into the hearts of the poor like hot iron. The feasting and enjoyments of the rich in the midst of the worldwide privations and sufferings give provocation. 

But wealth in itself is not happiness and the rich are not always happy because they have wealth. The poor struggle with poverty, the rich with ennui. Time hangs heavily on their hands. Chronic dyspeptic are many among the rich and they know not happiness. Supplied though they are with every possible material want, but with health not their own, they feel themselves more wretched than the poor but healthy of their servants. In the midst of a glut of the good things of life, they experience desolation and emptiness of spirit. In vain do they woo sleep and toss in their beds, while the poor sleep like logs and rise refreshed in the morn.

A parasite is wealth. It is futile and foolish to reckon upon fickle fortune. Like a bird flying from tree to tree, wealth stays not long with any. When death presents its peremptory summons and the heart stops moving and the eyes are closed and the body does not stir and the soul leaves the body, neither does the soul carry the wealth to the nether world, nor does the body bear the rich load to the Tower of Silence, where vultures perch on the walls waiting as rivals to tear and devour the worthless body between themselves.

Teach the rich that are in our midst, Ahura Mazda, that wealth shines where the rich are humble and kind. Man honors not and praises not thy sun for its height and its brilliance, but because of the bounty it bestows and the blessings it showers upon the earth. The rich are not great for their riches, but they are great, when they wisely and generously use their wealth to succour the poor and the needy.

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Superstition Is Based On Baseless Fear
 By Dastur Dhalla

Superstition is the irrational interpretation of life by the savage mind. It is born of ignorance and fear and thrives the most where reason is asleep. The superstitions mind lacks balance. It makes a fool of the wise man.

Superstition bends its knees to gods and demons alike. It is the ignorant handmaid of religion. Religion is based on the reasoned belief in the eternal verities of life. Superstition, on the other hand, is the irrational belief in anything and everything. It is the surfeit of religion.

The mischief wrought by superstition is mostly confined to the ignorant and the people of feeble intelligence. Popular education is destined to give a death-blow to superstition. Yet often does it fail to kill it among persons in whom the superstitious habit of mind is strong and the cave-man within them rules supreme. Many men and women with trained intellects find it difficult to free themselves from superstitious ideas indelibly engraved upon their imagination and superstitious fears implanted in their minds that are nursed upon superstition from infancy. Superstitious regard for lucky and unlucky days, for omens and portents, for signs and apparitions and the like cannot be discarded by them in the daily affairs of life.

Superstition encrusts religion with primitive beliefs of infant humanity and profanes its pristine purity. Religion carries the dead weight of the superstitious accretions.

I am sore afraid in my weakness, from the ghosts of my own imagination, that haunt me and rob me of the peace of my mind. I fear the foes that have no existence outside my imagination. Superstition makes me timid and fatalistic and drives me to bow my head and bend my knees to gods that are no gods. 

Thus have I been disloyal to thee, Ahura Mazda, my only true God. I have been ungrateful to thee; I have lied unto thee. IN my folly have I shown a lack of confidence in thee and thy unfailing power to protect me against all the ills of life. I repent and seek thy forgiveness, O Merciful One.

Direct my faltering feel back to thee. Be thou my strength when weakness and fear oppress me and threaten to overpower me. I am safe under thy protecting wing. I find no rest save in thee. Strengthen my faith in thee. Let my devotion for thee fill my whole being, that I may worship thee and thee alone, Ahura Mazda.

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The Gulf War
 By Noam Chomshy

The Gulf War illustrated the same guiding principles, as we see clearly if we lift the vell of propaganda.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the UN Security Council immediately condemned Iraq and imposed serve sanctions on it. Why was the UN response so prompt and so unprecedently firm? The US government-media alliance had a standard answer.

First, it told us that Iraq's aggression was a unique crime, and thus merited a uniquely harsh reaction. "America stands where it always has-against aggression, against those who would use force to replace the rule of law' -so we were informed by President Bush, the invader of Panama and the only head of state condemned by the World Court for the "unlawful use of force" (in the Court's condemnation of the US attack against Nicaragua). The media and the educated classes dutifully repeated the lines spelled out for them by their Leader, collapsing in awe at the magnificence of his high principles.

Second, these same authorities proclaimed in a litany that the UN was now at last functioning as it was designed to do. They claimed that this was impossible before the end of the Cold War, when the UN was rendered ineffective by Soviet disruption and the shrill anti-Western rhetoric of the Third World.

Neither of these claims can withstand even a moments scrutiny. The US wasn't upholding any high principle in the Gulf, nor was any other state. The reason for the unprecedented response to Saddam Hussein wasn't his brutal aggression-it was because he stepped on the wrong toes.

Saddam Hussein is a murderous gangster-exactly as he was before the Gulf War, when the was our friend and favored trading partner. His invasion of Kuwait was certainly an atrocity, but well within the range of many similar crimes conducted by the US and its allies, and nowhere near as terrible as some. For example, Indonesia's invasion and annexation of East Timor reached near-genocidal proportions, thanks to the decisive support of the US and its allies. Perhaps one-fourth of the 700,000 population were killed, a slaughter exceeding that of Pol Pot, relative to the population, in the same years.

Our ambassador to the UN at the time (and now Senator from New York), Daniel Moynihan, explained his achievements at the UN concerning East Timor: "The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook, This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

The Australian Foreign Minister justified his country's acquiescence to the invasion and annexation of East Timor ( and Australia's participation with Indonesia in robbing Timor's rich oil reserves) by saying simply that "the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force." When Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, his government is sued a ringing declaration that "big countries cannot invade small neighbors and get away with it." No heights of cyncism trouble the equanimity of Western moralists.

As for the UN finally functioning as it was designed to, the facts are clear-but absolutely barred by the guardians of political correctness who control the means years, the UN has been blocked by the great powers, primarily the United States-not the Soviet Union or the Third World. Since 1970, the United States has vetoed far more Security Council resolutions than any other country (Britain is second, France a distant third and the Soviet Union fourth).

Our record in the General Assembly is similar. And the "shrill, anti-Western rhetoric" of the Third World commonly turns out to be a call to observe international law, a pitifully weak barrier against the depredations of the powerful.

The UN was able to respond to Iraq's aggression because-for once-the United States allowed it to. The unprecedented severity of the UN sanctions was the result of intense US pressure and threats. The sanctions had an unusually good chance of working, both because of their harshness and because the usual sanctions-busters-the United States, Britain and France-would have abided by them for a change.

But even after allowing sanctions, the US immediately moved to close off the diplomatic option by dispatching a huge military force to the Gulf, joined by Britain and backed by the family dictatorships that rule the Gulf's oil states, with only nominal participation by others.

A smaller, deterrent force could have been kept in place long enough for the sanctions to have had a significant effect; an army of half a million couldn't. The purpose of the quick military buildup was to ward off the danger that Iraq might be forced out of Kuwait by peaceful means.

Why was a diplomatic resolution so unattractive? Within a few weeks after the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, the basic outlines for a possible political settlement were becoming clear. Security Council resolution 660, calling for simultaneous negotiations of border issues. By midAugust, the National Security Council considered an Iraqi proposal to withdraw from Kuwait in that context.

There appear to have been two issues: first, Iraqi access to the Gulf, which would have entailed a lease or other control over two uninhabited mudflats assigned to Kuwait by Britain in its imperial settlement (which had left Iraq virtually landlocked): second, resolution of a dispute over an oil field that extended two miles into Kuwait over an unsettled border.` 

The US flatly rejected the proposal, or any negotiations. On August 22, without revealing these facts about the Iraqi initiative (which it apparently knew), the New York Times reported that the Bush Administration was determined to block the "diplomatic track" for fear that it might "defuse the crisis" in every much this manner. (The basic facts were published a week later by the Long Island Newsday, but the media largely kept their silence.)

The last known offer before the bombing, released by US officials on January 2, 1991, called for total Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. There were no qualifications about borders, but the offer was made in the context of unspecified agreements on other "linked" issues: weapons of mass destruction in the region and the Israel-Arab conflict.

The latter issues include Israel's illegal occupation of southern Lebanon, in violation of Security Council resolution 425 of March 1978, Which called for its immediate and unconditional withdrawal from the territory it had invaded. The US response was that there would be no diplomacy. The media suppressed the facts, Newsday aside, while lauding Bush's high principles.

The US refused to consider the "linked" issues because it was opposed to diplomacy on all the "linked" issues. This had been made clear months before Iraq's invasion of kuwait, when the US had rejected Iraq's offer of negotiations over weapons of mass destruction. In the offer, Iraq proposed to destroy all such chemical and biological weapons, if other countries in the region also destroyed their weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein was then Bush's friend and ally, so he received a response, which was instructive. Washington said it welcomed Iraq's proposal to destroy its own weapons, but didn't want this linked to "other issues or weapons systems."

There was no mention of the "other weapons systems," and there's a reason for that. Israel not only may have chemical and biological weapons-it's also the only country in the Mideast with nuclear weapons (probably about 200 of them). But "Israeli nuclear weapons" is a phrase that can't be written or uttered by any official US government source. That phrase would raise the question of why all aid to Israel is not illegal, since foreign aid legislation from 1977 bars funds to any country that secretly develops nuclear weapons. 

Independent of Iraq's invasion, the US had also always blocked any "peace process" in the Middle East that included an international conference and recognition of a Palestinian right of self-determination. For 20 years, the US has been virtually alone in this stance. UN votes indicate the regular annual pattern; once again in December 1990, right in the midst of the Gulf crisis, the call for an international conference was voted 144-2 (US and Israel). This had nothing to do with Iraq and Kuwait.

The US also adamantly refused to allow a reversal of Iraq's aggression by the peaceful means prescribed by international law. Instead it preferred to avoid diplomacy and to restrict the conflict to the arena of violence, in which a superpower facing no deterrent is bound to prevail over a Third World adversary.

As already discussed, the US regularly carries out or supports aggression, even in cases far more criminal than Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Only the most dedicated commissar can fail to understand these facts, or the fact that in the rare case when the US happens to oppose some illegal act by a client or ally, it's quite happy with "linkage."

Take the South African occupation of Namibia, declared illegal by the World Court and the UN in the 1960s. The US pursued "quiet diplomacy" and "constructive engagement" for years, brokering a settlement that gave South Africa ample reward (including Namibia's major port) for its aggression and atrocities, with "linkage" extending to the Caribbean and welcomes benefits for international business interests.

The Cuban forces that had defended Namibia's neighbor Angola from South African attack were withdrawn. Much as in Nicaragua after the 1987 "peace accords," the US continued to support the terrorist army backed by the US and its allies (South Africa and Zaire) and is preparing the ground for a 1992 Nicaragua-style "democratic election," where people will go to the polls under threat of economic strangulation and terrorist attack if they vote the wrong way.

Meanwhile, South Africa was looting and destroying Namibia, and using it as abase for violence against its neighbors. In the ReaganBush years (1980-1988) alone, South African violence led to about $60 billion in damage and over a million and a half people killed in the neighboring countries (excluding Namibia and South Africa). But the commissar class was unable to see these facts, and hailed George Bush's amazing display of principle as he opposed "linkage" when someone steps on our toes.

More generally, opposing "linkage" amounts to little more than rejecting diplomacy, which always involves broader issues. In the case of Kuwait, the US position was particularly flimsy. After Saddam Hussein stepped out of line, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq's capacity for aggression be eliminated (a correct position, in contrast to its earlier support for Saddam's aggression and atrocities) and called for a regional settlement guaranteeing security.

Well, that's linkage. The simple fact is that the Us feared that diplomacy might "defuse the crisis," and therefore blocked diplomacy "linkage" at every turn during the build-up to the war.

By refusing diplomacy, the US achieved its major goals in the Gulf. We were concerned of the Middle East incomparable energy resources of the Middle East remain under our control, and that the enormous profits they produce help support the economies of the US and its British client.

The US also reinforced its dominant position, and taught the lesson that the world is to be ruled by force. Those goals having been achieved, Washington proceeded to maintain "stability," barring any threat of democratic change in the Gulf tyrannies and lending tacit support to Saddam Hussein as he crushed the popular uprising of the Shi'ites in the South, a few miles from US lines, and then the Kurds in the North.

But the Bush administration has not yet succeeded in achieving what its spokesman at the New York Times, chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, calls "the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein." This, Friedman writes, would be a return to the happy days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," not to speak of the boss in Washington. The current situation in the Gulf reflects the priorities of the superpower that held all the cards, another truism that must remain invisible to the guardians of the faith.

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War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength
 By Noam Chomshy

The terms of political discourse typically have two meanings. One is the dictionary meaning, and the other is a meaning that is useful for serving power-the doctrinal meaning.

Take democracy. According to the commonsense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different-it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only "spectators of action," not "participants," as leading democratic theorists (in this case, Walter Lippmann) have explained. They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters-like public policy-that are none of their business.

If segments of the public depart from their apathy and begin to organize and enter the public arena, that's not democracy. Rather, it's a crisis of democracy in proper technical usage, a threat that has to be overcome in one or another way: in El Salvador, by death squads-at home, by more subtle and indirect means.

Or take free enterprise, a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich. In fact, in acceptable usage, just about any phrase containing the word "free" is likely to mean something like the opposite of its actual meaning.

Or take defence against aggression, a phrase that's used-predictably-to refer to aggression. When the US attacked South Vietnam in the early 1960s, the liberal hero Adlai stevenson (among others) explained that we were defending South Vietnam against "internal aggression" -that is, the aggression of South Vietnamese peasants against the US air force and a US - run mercenary army, which were driving them out of their homes and into concentration camps where they could be "protected" from the Southern guerrillas. In fact, these peasants willingly supported the guerillas, while the US client regime was an empty shell, as was agreed on all sides.

So magnificently has the doctrinal system risen to its task that to this day, 30 years later, the idea that the US attacked South Vietnam is unmentionable, even unthinkable, in the mainstream. The essential issues of the war are, correspondingly, beyond any possibility of discussion now. The guardians of political correctness (the real PC) can be quite proud of an achievement that would be hard to duplicate in a well-run totalitarian state.

Or take the term peace process. The naive might think that it refers to efforts to seek peace. Under this meaning, we would say that the peace process in the Middle East includes, for example, the offer of a full peace treaty to Israel by President Sadat of Egypt in 1971, along lines advocated by virtually the entire world, including official US policy; the Security Council resolution of January 1976 introduced by the major Arab states with the backing of the PLO, which called for a two-state settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict in the terms of a near-universal international consensus; PLO offers through the 1980s to negotiate with Israel for mutual recognition; and annual votes at the UN General Assembly, most recently in December 1990 (voted 144-2), calling for an international conference on the Israel-Arab problem, etc.

But the sophisticated understand that these efforts do not form part of the peace process. The reason is that in the PC meaning, the term peace process refers to what the US government is doing-in the cases mentioned, this is to block international efforts to seek peace. The cases cited do not fall within the peace process, because the US backed Israel's rejection of Sadat's offer, vetoed the Security Council resolution, opposed negotiations and mutual recognition of the PLO and Israel, and regularly joins with Israel in opposing-thereby, in effect, vetoing-any attempt to move towards a peaceful diplomatic settlement at the UN or elsewhere.

The peace process is restricted to US initiatives, which call for a unilateral US-determined settlement with no recognition of Palestinian national rights. That's the way it works. Those who cannot master these skills must seek another profession.

There are many other examples. Take the term special interest. The well-oiled Republican PR systems of the 1980s regularly accused the Democrats of being the party of the special interests: women, labour, the elderly, the young, farmers-in short, the general population. There was only one sector of the population never listed as a special interest: corporations and business generally. That makes sense. In PC discourse their (special) interests are the national interest, to which all must bow.

The Democrats plaintively retorted that they were not the party of the special interests: they served the national interest too. That was correct, but their problem has been that they lack the single-minded class consciousness of their Republican opponents. The latter are not confused about their role as representatives of the owners and managers of the society, who are fighting a bitter class war against the general population-often adopting vulgar Marxist rhetoric and concepts, resorting to jingoist hysteria, fear and terror, awe of great leaders and the other standard devices of population control. The Democrats are less clear about their allegiances, hence less effective in the propaganda wars.

Finally, take the term conservative, which has come to refer to advocates of a powerful state, which interferes massively in the economy and in social life. They advocate huge state expenditures and a postwar peak of protectionist measures and insurance against market risk, narrowing individual liberties through legislation and court-packing, protecting the Holy State from unwarranted inspection by the irrelevant citizenry-in short, those programs that are the precise opposite of traditional conservatism. Their allegiance is to "the people who own the country" and therefore "ought to govern it," in the words of Founding Father John Jay.

It's really not that hard, once one understands the rules.

To make sense of political discourse, it's necessary ti give a running translation into English, decoding the doublespeak of the media, academic social scientists and the secular priesthood generally. Its function is not obscure: the effect is to make it impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance in a coherent way. We can then be sure that little will be understood about how our society works and what is happening in the world-a major contribution to democracy, in the PC sense of the word.

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Environmental Refugees

By 2050, climate change and environmental degradation could create 150 million environmental refugees. As MARK TOWNSEND reports, it is a problem which the UN and Western governments are doing their best to ignore.

Marat Fomenko casts one final gaze over the bleak landscape. It is littered with fragments of abandoned machinery and the rusted hulks of disused ships. 

Across the plain is Kazakhstan's once famous fishing port of Aralsk, and, beyond that, a huge, dried rubbishstrewn sand pit.
It has been 25 years since Marat could see the receding Aral Sea-once the lifeblood of the region and the fourth biggest lake in the world-from his home.

The former fisherman motions to his wife Malika and their kids. The bags are packed. It is time to finally escape. 
Marat's livelihood literally drained away from the moment the rivers that fed the Aral Sea were diverted to irrigate the pesticide-soaked cotton fields upstream in Uzbekistan.

The Fomenko family are heading to the Kazakh capital of Astana, joining the throng in search of a better life. They will never return to their dying homeland, the vanishing sea of which has triggered ecological disaster and a 30-fold increase in disease.

His son has contracted tuberculosis and Marat hopes the city will offer improved facilities.

Hope is all the Fomenko family have. They and 25 million others worldwide who have been forced to forever abandon their lands through a complex myriad of causes involving flooding, drought, soil erosion, deforestation, earthquakes, nuclear accidents and toxic spills.

These are the planet's environmental refugees. You may not have heard of them. Certainly, they are ignored by the world's politicians. And yet, experts argue, this rapidly swelling band of disparate, disenfranchised and displaced families constitutes one of the biggest crises facing humankind.

They are a huge, forgotten army of people whose numbers, according to conservative estimates, soar by 5,000 a day. Yet they are shunned by the international community, whose policies ensure they are deprived of not only basic rights, but actual recognition.
All corners of the globe are affected. There are vast swathes of land where the environment has become so degraded it can no longer support life. Each region of the world experiences its own specific agonies.

Just over 4,000 miles south of the shrinking Aral, Big Business is playing its part in this unfolding catastrophe.

Deep in Nigeria's Niger Delta lies the deserted home of Karalolo atu. Three years ago Karalolo was forced from her ancestral kingdom of Ogoniland, and, along with thousands of others, she fled to the nearby settlement of port Harcourt. 

Quite simply Karalolo's local environment had collapsed. An alliance between oil giant Shell and corrupt, violent regimes had fuelled a complete breakdown of the fragile delta ecosystem.

Shell's unswerving search for fresh oil reserves had led to hundreds of oil spills. Water systems and soil were left heavily polluted, and precious farmland was rendered unusable.

Mother of four karalolo cannot contemplate going back to her ruined homeland. Although millions of environment refugees are displaced within the same country, the vast majority never return home because in most cases nothing is or can be done to reverse the damage.

Climate change
But the growing nightmare that will transform the surge of environmental refuges into a problem of unimaginable dimensions is, unquestionably, climatechange.

Just ask farmer panni Talake from the tiny island state of tuvalu in the South Pacific. His thatched family home is literally going down in history.

Whereas Marat's problem is a shrinking sea, Paani's is altogether different. For the latter there will soon be nothing left but sea.
Already the lowland coconut plantation farmlands of Tuvalu are being swamped by the rising sea. Nearby islets have vanished forever, while the invisible creep of saltwater contaminates precious drinking supplies and stunts crop growth. Next year Paani and his young family will abandon their homeland and take advantage of a gracious offer of a new start from the government of New Zealand.

Paani has little choice. Within as little as 50 years Tuvalu is projected to slide beneath the encroaching waters-a high-profile victim of the industrial excesses of the West. All that will be left of Tuvalu will be its status as a graphic footnote to mankind's folly in experimenting with the atmosphere.

But what of the millions of others in low-lying countries who may soon join the flow of environmental refugees? Where will they be offered a new start?

Under official predictions, their islands and coastlines will soon start sliding into the planet into a new stratosphere of catastrophes. Ever greater numbers will be forced to scratch harder for a living on less land-land which is already struggling to sustain current demands.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's forecast of a one-metre sea-level rise this century poses one of the largest dilemmas yet to face the human race. The prospect is particularly break given the fact that half the planet's people are already crowed into coastal zones. Some 10 million of these people are at constant risk of flooding.

In Bangladesh alone a one-metre rise would uproot 20 million people. Then there are the vast rice-growing river floodplains of Thailand, Indonesia and India, among others.

Even the rich world must pay a price. There are devastating implications for nations such as Holland and Denmark, with the possibility of huge population shifts and waves of environmental refuges moving onto already cramped lands.

Such massive migration will be accompanied by the stench of sickness. Mosquito-borne diseases are expected to increase 100-fold in temperate regions. Malaria has already quadrupled in the last five years.

Incredibly, politicians have chosen to ignore the impending crisis, refusing to accept the likes of Paani, Marat and Karalolo are the refugees they most unequivocally are.

Even the United Nations High Commissioner far Refugees (UNHCR), established in 1950 in response to the mass-displacement of Europeans in WWII, has conspicuously failed to address the problem. The UNHCR refuses to update its legal framework in line with the planet's rapidly deteriorating environment. As for a tangible solution, forget it

Instead the agency clings onto the politically narrow, outdated definition of refugees, which stipulates that people should only be considered as such if their flight is due to 'a well-founded fear of persecution' on grounds such as race and religion.

But doesn't an environment which has become so degraded that it no longer offers the basic building blocks of life - namely, food and water - persecute?

The upshot is that at least 25 million refugees (though the true total is likely to be far higher) are not afforded basic rights.

These people's plight was similarly glossed over by the UK's Refugee Week in June. Refugee Week preferred to concentrate on Britain's asylum seekers. It overlooked figures from the Red Cross which show that more than half - 58 per cent - of the world's, almost one in evert 250 persons on our planet.

All future trends point to an acute escalation of environmentally-driven human migration. Dr Norman Myers, a visiting fellow at Oxford University, believes that climate change and environmental refugees by 2050.

Klaus Topfer, chief executive of the United Nations Environment Programme, says that the swollen ranks of environmental refugees could double to 50 million in just eight years time. That is an increase of 8,500 a day.

But even Topfer may as well be whispering in the wind.

The politics of environmental refugees
Asylam is a topic that carries the power to make and brake politicians. Just look at the improbable success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. But despite asylum issues dominating both the media and politics, the actual role of the world's degraded environment as a factor in human migration is being conveniently ignored. Thus politicians and media magnates can continue labelling environmental refugees as 'bogus'. So, refugee policy is concocted in seeming oblivion to the problem of environmental refugees, and Western governments are allowed to act as if 10s of millions of legitimate migrants do not exist.

That is why the British Home Secretary David Blunkett's recently-published White Paper on immigration and asylum failed to concern itself with environmental refugees, Blunkett preferred to pander to the whims of Fortress Europe instead. A mature analysis into why people are migrating in the first place never takes place.

It is almost as if the unfolding problem is too big to comprehend. It is easier and cheaper to ditch the 3,500-year-old tradition of affording succour to refugees, and to systematically deny the likes of the Fomenko family the right to a better life.

Wendy Williams, population movement advisor for the International Red Cross, is under no illusion that politicians are purposefully avoiding the repercussions of environmental collapse in order to keep numbers of 'legitimate' refugees down.

'If politicians relaxed migrations laws,' Williams says, 'it would probably be their death knell. We need to raise awareness that these people simply cannot survive off the land anymore, and that they don't want to leave their homes in the first place.'

For all the bluster, Britain's refugee crisis' remains piffling compared to the size of the true environmental problem. If global trends for environmental refugees were applied to the UK, there would be around 250,000 people - the equivalent of the population of Sunderland -thus three times the record number of asylum applicants for a single year in Britain.

Green MEP for London Jean Lambert is one of the few politicians in the West who admits to being intensely worried unveiled a detailed report into the environmental refugee crisis. The report outlined her concerns that a serious debate has yet to commence on the unfolding crisis.

Lambert is flabbergasted that the issue of finding new homes for 10s of millions of people in the near future is not even worthy of peripheral concern.

The UNHER
Just how low a priority the issue is can be illustrated by the fact that the annual budget of the UNHCR is a mere 843m. That is less than the military expenditures of world governments in a single day. It is arguably barely enough to cope with the demands of conventionally 'persecuted' migrants.

Of the UNHCR money, a fraction so tiny it cannot be easily broken down is offered to environmental refugees. There are no publicised plans to increase help to these migrants, even though they constitute the majority of the world's displaced. The British government alone spends almost the same amount - 835m - handling asylum seekers in this country.

The irony is that the developing world continues to be hit hardest by environmental degradation and human -driven climate change. That suffering seems to be in direct disproportion to the developing world's responsibility for climate change. After all, the Us alone spews out 25 per cent of greenhouse gases on behalf of just four per cent of the world's population.

From the terrorised perspective of the Paani family's thatched roof, the US's refusal to cooperate with the Kyoto Protocol must seem grotesquely indifferent to say the least.

Driven from their land
Even when climate change is removed from the frame the picture remains grim. Soaring population growth and devastated, exhausted environments are creating immense suffering and massive migration on their own.

A whistle-stop tour of the world makes disquieting reading.
Mexico, the Ivory Coast and the Phillipines could all lose the bulk of their forests within half a lifetime. In the same short timescale Ethiopia, EI Salvador and Nepal could lose most of their farmland topsoil.

Globally, one in three people face acute water shortages as water use is expected to increase by 40 per cent over the next 20 years. Many of these people will be forced from their homes to seek clean water supplies elsewhere. Countries like Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan will be particularly affected. India's breadbasket - the huge agricultural plains of the punjab - is already more than half eroded.

And almost overnight an abundance of land in countries like Kenya and Costa Rica has been dramatically transformed into acute land shortage through rapid urbanisation.

Each of these factors independently could trigger extraordinary numbers of environmental refugees. And all the time the pressures are growing. In the 15 minutes it takes you to read this article, the world will gain another 2,600 mouths to feed; 97 of every 100 will be born into a country where finances are stretched, food and water is insufficient and where creaking, chaotic cities are groaning under the weight of incoming migrants. These cities are mostly poised on the brink of natural disaster: 40 of the world's 50 fastest-growing cities are stranded within earthquake zones.

Once again we come back to climate change. Four years ago the world saw the birth of the 'super-disaster'. For the first time in history more people were being displaced because of environmental reasons than war. A report from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned that the number of people they had helped after major floods, droughts and earthquakes had increased from 500,000 to five and a half million in just six years. A UN survey estimates that around a third of the world's total land is in the process of becoming infertile. While massive man-made projects like China's Three Gorges dam are driving more than one million people from their homes.

Other studies predict that 100 million of 135 million people living in area of desertification will be displaced in the next 20 years.
These are just some of the complex, alarming web of factors powering this new wave of refugees. It is a complexity that will prove taxing for politicians. But, unless they start attempting to solve it, it will store up even greater problems for the future.
Solutions?
Measures need to be introduced to ensure Paani's fate is not repeated across the world.

Putting the brakes on climate change will only be achieved by reducing greenhouse emissions by 90 per cent (not 10 or 20 per cent) within a decade.

One interesting development that could hold huge ramifications for Western governments is the threat by Paani's prime minister to take legal action against polluter states for greenhouse gas emissions.
But first we need a definition of refugees that includes those displaced for environmental reasons.

Redefining state responsibility for environmental refugees is another must - a tough choice for leaders who must start reacting to the fact that people are being pushed from their homes and not pulled by the bright lights of the West.

Running out of time
The problem is growing daily. An action plan is needed. Finding new homes for 125 million people in a few decades will test even the most committed.

As its stands the world is not prepared to deal with these implications. It is barely aware of the impending crisis. Disaster awaits, only a dramatic upsurge in political will can prevent tens of millions of people from experiencing the same desperate fate as the families of Paani, Matra and Karalolo.

Mark Townsend is an award winning environmental journalist

DROWNING BY NUMBERS : THE CONSEQUENCES OF RISING SEA LEVELS AND SUBSIDENCE
  • In China, the city of Shanghai could be entirely flooded. The government calculates that 30 million of its people could be displaced by global warning.
  • With a forecast of 142 million people inhabiting coastal India by 2050, India's flood-zone refugees could total anything between 20 and 60 million.
  • 2050 Egypt is expected to lose between 12 and 15 per cent of its arable land, with a possible 14 million people being displaced. Egypt already imports well over half its food.
  • Other delta areas at risk include Indonesia, Thailand, Mozambique, Gambia and Senegal.
  • Island states at risk include the maldives, Kiribati, the Marshalls and dozens of Caribbean States. Around 1 million people are likely to have to evacuate permanently.

Source: N. Myers, 'Environmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World', BioScience, Vol 43/11 December 1993.

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Wonder

'I look forward to a renewal of a world of wonder. As children, the truly great moments in our lives were those when we watched the evening sky or wandered across a meadow to wade in a nearby creek - the moments when we were outside playing games or learning the languages of the flowers and trees, the birds, the insects, the butterflies. In this way we learned something of the numinous world present throughout our natural surroundings, the world beyond human explanation, the world that we can express in our mythic stories of spirit presences.

'This was the world of play and delight and laughter, the world of poetry and story-telling, of music and dance freedom. It was the world of heroic tales, of Cinderella, of her slipper and the prince, of Robin Hood - his taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It was a sacred world, a world that could not be bought or sold, could not be made by humans. It was the world that brought us into being, nourished, educated us, guided and healed us, and in the end brought us safely through the turmoil and struggle of this earthly existence into an abiding and serene world beyond what we could find elsewhere.

'The main difficulty in human affairs in these opening years of the 21st century seems to be the loss of our sense of wonder, our sense of the sacred, our sense of play and laughter, our inability to respond to the dawn or sunset, the loss of our vision of the stars. One of the most exquisite words in the human vocabulary is 'wonderful' -the word we use when we speak of those we love or when we describe an exciting moment in our lives. So, now my hope is that the wonder we experienced in childhood will return to quiet our restless souls in this new age of anxiety that has descended upon us.'
THOMAS BERRY, WRITING IN ORION

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Rather Surprising

'Limited access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war, is extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted. And I am sorry to say that, up to and including the moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that, they relish that, and they take refuge in that.' So spoke veteran US news anchorman Dan Rather in an interview with the BBC's newsnight. An amazing turnaround, from a man who, appearing on the David Letterman show on 17 September 2001, was moved to comment: 
'George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions... wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.' It was a different Rather that appeared in chastened mood on Newsnight.' It is an obscene comparison - you know I am not sure I like it,' he commented to the BBC. "But you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck,' he said. 'Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.'

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Washington's illegal biological weapons plan

US Navy and Air Force biotechnology labs are proposing to develop offensive biological weapons, says The Sunshine Project.

The weapons - GM microbes that attack items such as fuel, plastics and asphalt in order to 'degrade the enemy' -would violate both US and international law.

At the same time, the Bush administration is aggressively accusing other countries of developing biological weapons, but ha rejected a legally binding system of UN inspections of suspected biological weapons facilities.

Bush seems impervious to the irony that the strain of anthrax sent through the US mail has been traced to labs owned not by Saddam Hussein but the US military - the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infections Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. 

Meanwhile, the US National Academy of Sciences is refusing to release dozens of reports on GM weapons development, even though the documents are supposed to be public records. (To find out more, visit: www.sunshine-project.org.)

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Biotech subsidies expose free trade myth

The US's one-sided vision of 'free trade' has never been more evident than in its use of the WTO to force open foreign markets, while simultaneously resorting to tax dollars to subsidise its tottering GM crop industry.

The new Farm Security Act will whack up US agricultural subsidies by a massive 80 per cent over the next few years. This will help protect US farmers from the market failure of GM crops. Non-GM farmers like those in Brazil, who have been greatly increasing their market share because of consumer concerns over the GM-contaminated US soy crop, are now expected to have to abandon soy for rice. 

US taxpayers will also have to stump up a 'rapid response' fund of US $6 million per year for five years to compensate US exporters 'harmed by unwarranted and arbitrary trade barriers' due to 'marketing of biotechnology products', food safety, etc. 

In a related move, the Bush administration has requested an increase in the budget of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to 'help developing countries adopt biotechnology'

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International News

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