HOUSE OF PAINE blog

While a report by a highly respected Israeli think tank has been widely condemned [1] for advocating that the Israeli government use its intelligence services to attack and sabotage non-violent human rights advocates, the report is worth detailed study because it is chock full of admissions of illegitimate features of the Israeli government it desperately seeks to protect.

The report, “Building a Political Firewall Against Israel’s Delegitimization,” is the product of a year of research by a team of Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute [2] investigators and includes contributions from more than 100 individuals in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the Israeli government did not commission the report, Reut officials gave a PowerPoint presentation, “The Challenge of Delegitimacy to Israel’s National Security,” to the Israeli Cabinet in February 2010 and to a large conference of Israeli government officials in March 2010.

The report describes the “new strategic threat” created by the human rights activists’ “fundamental delegitimization” of the Israeli government.

But the report also:

Validates two of the three demands of the rapidly growing Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign: for ending the occupation and for equal rights for all Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel

Admits the concern that Israel will become a pariah state if it fails to end the occupation and provide equal rights

Asserts that “earnest and consistent commitment to ending occupation” and “to the equality and integration of its Arab citizens” are critical to combating delegitimization

Notwithstanding the previous points, asserts that the demand for equal rights is one that “unbundles Israel’s elimination,” and therefore, actually providing equal rights is incompatible with the Israeli government’s continued existence

Admits that the Israeli government requires the ability to continue unilaterally launching “harsh” militarily attacks

Admits that the delegitimization crisis is “crippling” the Israeli government’s freedom to launch such military attacks

Admits the crucial importance for the Israeli government to overcome that crisis to restore its unbridled freedom to act militarily

Admits that in the past the Israeli government was successful at using peace moves to obtain the legitimacy it needed for its next war

Admits that its widely publicized withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 were not effective to achieve legitimacy for its attack on Lebanon in 2006 or its most recent massive attack on Gaza

Admits that the failure of those peace moves to achieve legitimacy for the attack on Gaza had consequences that accelerated the delegitimization. Admits that “following Operation Cast Lead,” the intense criticism of the government “was expressed in the Goldstone report and in legal proceedings against IDF officers and Israeli politicians.” Admits that the legal proceedings restricted Israel military and political leaders’ freedom to travel “due to application of universal legal jurisdiction.”

Admits that “the Jewish world is growing more distant from Israel” and that “criticism of Israel is more prevalent within the Jewish world than in the past”

Admits that “too few of our people … are able to effectively respond to Palestinian claims or to campaigns which seek to de-legitimize the moral basis for Israel”

Admits that the so-called “delegitimizers” are a loose network of non-violent activists who “punch above their weight”

(Read the article)

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George Bush hasn’t suffered at all over the monumental suffering, death, and horror he has caused…no matter how many American soldiers have died on a given day in Iraq (averaging well over two every day), he is always seen with a big smile on his face that same or next day.

Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, 2008

Ramsey Clark will arrive in the Canadian oil-patch city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, this coming June 6th and 7th, mounting pressure on Judge Manfred Delong, who is presiding over the sentencing process in an epochal trial which some have dubbed: “The trial of Splitting the Sky versus George W. Bush.” Splitting the Sky (STS) on the advice of legal experts Ramsey Clark, Gale Davidson and Anthony J. Hall attempted a citizen’s arrest on George W. Bush on March 17, 2009 when the former US president was addressing an audience of business people at the TELUS Convention Centre in the downtown of Calgary.[2] In his March 2010 trial STS invoked the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes legislation, which was enacted by the Canadian parliament in 2000, to submit to the court that he was implementing the law by seeking to apprehend Bush, and was unjustly arrested by police who were in effect “aiding and abetting a credibly accused war criminal.” Former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney came to Calgary to attempt to testify in the March trial but was prevented from doing so as the judge shut down the trial earlier than anticipated. Instead McKinney spoke at the University of Calgary in support of Splitting the Sky.[3] It is hoped by supporters of justice that the arrival of Ramsey Clark in Calgary will help to publicize this unprecedented case in Canadian legal history, the knowledge of which the state and their media accomplices have made a concerted effort to suppress and censor from the public domain.

Ramsey Clark has a long history of being a thorn in the side of those political elites who would seek to apply the law expediently rather than unanimously. Born in Dallas, Texas, the son of prominent jurist Tom C. Clark, Ramsey Clark witnessed as a young man the Nuremberg trials following World War II. Clark would go on to graduate from the University of Chicago law school and become Attorney General of the United States under the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Clark worked tirelessly throughout his career as an outspoken Civil Rights attorney advocating for many prominent activists and political dissidents. After the 1971 Attica Prison debacle Clark replaced William Kunstler as Splitting the Sky’s legal advocate. STS’s charges were acquitted as a result of Clark’s relentless advocacy.

Clark took his human rights advocacy from the domestic realm to the international arena when he made a provocative visit to North Vietnam in 1972 as a protest against the illegal bombing of Hanoi by the US military. Clark’s pro-human rights and anti-war stances led him to become the attorney for a number of political nemeses of the military-industrial-complex. Clark’s clients included American Indian prisoner Leonard Peltier, members of the PLO, Camilo Mejia the US soldier who deserted his post in March 2004 in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq, Slobodan Milosevic former president of Serbia, and Saddam Hussein former president of Iraq, to name a few. Clark has been particularly critical of those seeking to impose “victors justice” upon the vanquished opponents of Anglo-American expansionism. Of the “trial” of Saddam Hussein he stated: “it failed to respect basic human rights and was illegal because it was formed as a consequence of the United States’ illegal invasion,” going on to call for an “absolutely fair” trial for the deposed Iraqi leader.[4]

In recent history, Clark was unflinching in his attempts to have George W. Bush impeached. In 2002, Clark founded “VoteToImpeach” an organization whose ostensible goal was to see members of the Bush administration brought before a court of law for their misdeeds. The Independent reported: “Clark said there is a website, www.votetoimpeach.org, dedicated to collecting signatures of U.S. Citizens who want President George W. Bush impeached, and that approximately 150,000 have signed to impeach.”[5] Clark also helped found the protest organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).

On April 3, 2010 Clark was elected at a meeting of over 150 lawyers, legal scholars and human rights campaigners, to be the chairperson of a new international campaign to investigate the alleged crimes against humanity committed by the Bush regime. Global Research reported: “Ramsey Clark emphasized that it is the imperative responsibility of the American people to relentlessly pursue this investigation, and to seek prosecution and indictment inside of the United States…Ramsey Clark made the point that all the war crimes and crimes against humanity flow from the commission of the most supreme crimes which he identified as the Crimes against Peace. This was the finding at the Nuremberg trial, and it is enshrined in the Nuremberg Principles.”[6] Clark’s reference to precedents set at Nuremberg, a German city once infamous for its right-wing extremism, encourages those of us who would like to see Calgary’s image in the world evolve from one of Harperite cowboys and vulture-capitalists into a city where law enforcement agencies set precedents in human rights jurisprudence and international law with the support of the polity’s residents. Perhaps such a paradigm shift would ignite a necessary atonement for the state-endorsed despoliation of the Indigenous Peoples of the region’s ancestral resources, lands and waters which has been unpardonably gifted to mainly Texas-based oil and gas conglomerates.

How Judge Manfred Delong will be influenced by Clark’s arrival in Calgary is yet to be seen. Will Judge Delong compound the Culture of Impunity afforded to credibly accused war criminals emanating from Anglo-America – which the Harper-minority government and their equivalents around the world have supported – by “setting an example” and sentencing STS to spend two-more years of his life behind bars and burdening him with a fine of up to $5000? Or will he realize the broader implications of this trial and dismiss the case before the court that STS “obstructed a police officer”?

Certainly it will be important that citizens of Calgary who are able to attend Clark’s upcoming lecture at the University of Calgary to show solidarity with this Peoples’ Process and attend. The more citizens who mobilize in solidarity with STS the less able the state and their media accomplices will be to sweep the profound juridical questions being raised by STS, Clark and others, under the carpet. The proceedings are as follows:

Ramsey Clark arrives in Calgary, June 6, 2010. He will speak at the University of Calgary Murray Fraser Hall Room 164, 4pm – 6.30pm.

The sentencing of Splitting the Sky commences on June 7, 2010 at the Calgary Courts Centre.

Joshua Blakeney is Media Coordinator of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge

Notes

[1] Vincent Bugliosi, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” 2008. excerpt quoted: http://www.prosecutionofbush.com/excerpt3p1.php

[2] Anthony Hall, “Bush League Justice: Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta to be Tried for International Crimes?” Voltairenet. March 9, 2009. http://www.voltairenet.org/article159233.html and Gail Davidson, “Barring Bush From Canada: Time for the Law to Step in.” Global Research.ca http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15733

[3] Anthony Hall, “Cynthia McKinney Meets Splitting the Sky.” Global Research.ca. March 14, 2010. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18115

[4] “Chaos Mars Saddam Court Hearing.” BBC News. Monday, 5 December 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4498102.stm

[5] Josh Davidson, “Ramsey Clark Speaks Out Against War at College.” The Independent. March 19, 2003. http://independent.gmnews.com/news/2003-03-19/Front_page/013.html

[6] “Ramsey Clark Chosen to Head Commission to Investigate Bush Crimes.” Global Research.ca. April 14, 2010. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18610

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OBFUSCATION 1: Israelis and Zionists never target Jews

REALITY
“about 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, mostly because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs [referring to the bombings done at Synagogues and other areas of Jewish public concentration]” Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew in his book: Ben Gurion’s Scandals (Flushing: Glilit Pub. Co., 1995).

On November 25, 1940, Zionists attacked with explosives in Haifa Harbor the S.S. Patria carrying illegal Jewish immigrants. The attack was meant to embarrass the British and was also a result of rivalry among Zionist groups. In that incident 268 Jewish immigrants drowned. See these books for details on many more of these issues.

-The Transfer Agreement (Edwin Black)
-Original Sins (Benjamin Beit-Hallami)
-Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (Dr. Marc H. Ellis)
-Ben-Gurions Scandals (Noam Giladi)
-Unholy Alliance (Marc H. Ellis)
-Ending Auschwitz (Marc H. Ellis)
-Selected essays in the compendium “Walking the Red Line” (ed. Deena Hurwitz). For example, the essay “Living Comfortably with —-Taboos” by Rabbi Gary Nitzan-Ginzberg, asserts that many aspects of Zionism in theory and as practiced can be categorized as racist.
-The Seventh Million (Tom Segev)
-The Holocaust Industry (Norman Finkelstein)- Perfidy (Ben Hecht)
-The Holocaust Victims Accuse (Neturei Karta)
-Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (Shabbtai Teveth)
-Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lenni Brenner)
-51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (Lenni Brenner)

OBFUSCATION 2: “We don’t start wars: This war was forced on us. Arafat is responsible for all. He made his strategic decision of terrorism to reach diplomatic achievements by murdering. In this, he chose terrorism.” Ariel Sharon, December 2, 2001

REALITY
In a Los Angeles Times column published October 13, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote:
“The preponderance of responsibility lies with Israel and with an international media that continue to obscure the basic realities facing the Palestinian people, and continue to treat the death of Israeli soldiers enforcing a brutal occupation as somehow more outrageous and barbarous than the killing of many times as many Palestinian teenagers who were resisting the occupation.”
See also http://al-awda.org/media/myths.html

OBFUSCATION 3: Zionism is a rational discourse in a world of turmoil

REALITY
” You would like me to look at it objectively. Objectively, I agree: we are only breeding more hatred and violence. You want me to imagine how I would feel if I were a Palestinian. I suppose that if I were, I might want to kill Israelis myself. But I am not objective and I am not a Palestinian. It’s not that the lives of Palestinians don’t matter to me. But Israeli lives matter more. I know this doesn’t sound terribly enlightened. And it certainly doesn’t lead to any of the political solutions that we both know are necessary if this horror is going to end.” Hillel Halkin ,?Objectivity is morally overrated?, Jerusalem Post, 14 November 2002. Also on the web at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1037248935749

OBFUSCATION 4: Israel is a state like any other state

REALITY
“The Jewish State cannot exist without a special ideological content. We cannot exist for long like any other state whose main interests is to insure the welfare of its citizens.” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, New York Times, 14 July 1992

A 1975 resolution of the Organization of African Unity stated that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being.”

“In Israel for example, several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during the Second World War, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel’s laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations. Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return for instance provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in areas such as education, public housing, health, and employment.” A report on “Racism and the Administration of Justice”, Amnesty International (2001), also found at
http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf.

OBFUSCATION 5: Israeli leaders tell the truth when speaking about the Israeli Palestinian Conflict

REALITY
Binyamin Netanyahu, a leader of the Likud Party and an ex-prime minister of Israel had an interesting advice to Israelis. He was giving a speech to dozen’s of Likud Party members in Eilat. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “…giving his audience a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers [Netanyahu said]: ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.’ ”

OBFUSCATION 6: Israel is a reliable ally and a true friend of the US

REALITY
Time and time again, Israel has been shown to be a strategic liability for America and counter to America’s national interest. By being associated with Israel’s actions, America’s standing in the entire Muslim world is damaged.

Israel routinely spies on the United States and carries out espionage and political assassinations on the soil of America’s allies.

And on June 8, 1967, with no other combat taking place nearby, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats repeatedly attacked the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai coast, killing American sailors and wounding 171. Though Israel insists the attack was an accident, abundant evidence has surfaced that Israel deliberately attacked the ship, fearing it would monitor Israeli preparations for an attack on the Golan Heights the next day. In 1991, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak discovered that the US embassy in Beirut had intercepted Israeli radio traffic in which an Israeli pilot reported: “It’s an American ship.” The Israeli command ignored the report and ordered the pilot to press the attack.

Even in commercial areas important to a few in the US, Israel has become a major competitor of the US by selling American technology given free to Israel to others (this includes military and military related high tech sales which are now Israel’s biggest exports).

Research has also shown that Israel’s cost to US taxpayers ranged from a few hundred billion dollars to nearly $4 Trillion.

OBFUSCATION 7: Israel seeks peace based on International law

REALITY
” It seems almost inevitable that the United States will initiate new peace efforts, but it is unlikely that real progress can be made on any of these issues as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations. There are many questions as we continue to seek an end to violence in the Middle East, but there is no way to escape the vital one: Land or peace?” President Jimmy Carter, Washington Post, November 26, 2000

Israel is currently in violation of 69 UN Security Council resolutions and countless UN General Assembly resolutions.

OBFUSCATION 8: Zionism was a rational response to anti-Semitism of Europe

REALITY
Zionism and Nazism were twins in their narrow nationalism and even collaborated against the public. The Zionists thus found no reason not to collaborate with the Nazis in the mid-thirties to rid Europe of its Jews. The details of this transfer agreement were given by Edwin Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1984). After commencement of attacks on Jews under German control, the British, in the hope of easing the pressure for increased immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of Jewish children be admitted directly into Britain. Ben-Gurion, the recognized leader of labor Zionism at the time was absolutely against the plan, telling a meeting of Labour Zionist leaders on 7 Dec. 1938:

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel” Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (Zed Books, 1984). cites as reference no. 23: Yoav Gelber, ‘ Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)’ Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 199.

Below are two other relevant quotes.

“It is inconceivable from a physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood over several generations can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a Frenchman. A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish … And a man whose body is Jewish can not possibly mold within himself the spirit of a Frenchman … It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own” Vladimir Jabotinsky (ideological father of Sharon’s Likud party), ‘A Letter on Autonomy, 1904′, reprinted in Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (New Jersey: Barricade, 2002) p. 10.

“Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people, which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans. And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the ZIONISTS (emphasis in original)” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, reissue edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 56.

OBFUSCATION 9: Zionists tried to accomodate the native people in their colonization efforts

REALITY
” Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population ? an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.” Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs” First published in Russian under the title “O Zheleznoi Stene” in Rasswyet,” November 4, 1923. Translated by Lenni Brenner. It can be downloaded at http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Golda Meir statement to the Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 3 November 2000:

“Terrible things were done [even] after the War of Independence, too; for example, in the town of Majdal in 1950. …Some 10,000 Palestinians lived in Majdal before the war ….In 1949, Yigal Allon demanded “to transfer all the Arab inhabitants.” Ben-Gurion objected. An inter-ministerial committee for the “transfer of Arabs from place to place” — yes, we had one of those as well — decided to thin out the population somewhat; another ministerial committee — “on abandoned property” — decided to settle Majdal with Jews. From committee to committee, Majdal was “Judaized,” until, with 2,500 Jewish residents, it became known as Migdal-Ad. In December 1949, more Arabs were deported so as to vacate a few more houses — “abandoned property” — for a few more discharged soldiers. The IDF made the life of those Arabs who remained a misery, hoping they’d get the message. The new commanding officer of the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, rekindled the ideas of his predecessor, Yigal Allon. ‘I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be another opportunity to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs - G.L.] out of the Land of Israel,’ he said at a meeting of the Mapai faction, outlining its ideas while in uniform. Dayan backed up his words with actions: He submitted a detailed proposal for “the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants of the town of Majdal.” the chief of staff agreed and Ben-Gurion authorized the plan.

The government was circumvented, the Histadrut labor federation objected, and Rabin informed the residents. The transfer began at the beginning of 1950, although the “official operation” took off in June. There were still those who spoke of dispersing the Arabs around the country; in the end, they were deported to Gaza. They were loaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border — “deliveries,” as they were termed. Just to remind you again, the state already existed. The last delivery of 229 people left for Gaza on October 21. Back in Israel, the officials pondered over how to distribute the “abandoned” houses, most of which went to individuals who had some political clout. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to Ashkelon. To this very day, the former residents of Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the refugee camps in Gaza. But, there were also incidents in which they shot — oh, how they shot — and didn’t weep at all. And lied. This is the picture that emerges from the chapter about the Israeli press at the time of the Kibiya affair, which expresses the dark side of the then already five-year-old state: no longer a community struggling to establish a country, but an orderly, victorious state, thought of as a democracy, with David Ben-Gurion, who lies, poker-faced, and its press, which brazenly conceals scandalous information from its readers and even lies knowingly – all for the glory of the State of Israel.”

OBFUSCATION 10: Asking for Palestinian refugee return is unreasonable and is not conducive to peace

REALITY
http://www.al-awda.org/therefugeeprimer/
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/651/op11.htm

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Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
~ Gen. William Westmoreland

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
~ Adolf Hitler

In a recent commencement address, President Obama declared that “information becomes a distraction, a diversion” which puts “pressure on our country and on our democracy.” Technological innovations – including the Internet – produces a “24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.” He added that “with so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all – to know what to believe, to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not.” Hillary Clinton expressed similar concerns a few years ago when she suggested that a “gatekeeper” be created for the Internet, to prevent just anyone from putting their opinions out into the public.

A book I am currently writing addresses the epistemological question: how do we know what we know? This is doubtless the most important question ever to confront mankind, a question we nonetheless fail to ask because our institutional mind-keepers find such an inquiry too volatile and threatening to the maintenance of their status quo interests. If institutions are organizations that have become their own reasons for being, our inquiry into how we came to accept such thinking could be devastating to such systems.

Life itself is dependent upon our capacity for creative adaptation to changing surroundings. It is resiliency – not rigidity – that sustains life. But in order to act purposefully to achieve life-enhancing ends, we must be able to identify, analyze, and act upon the conditions that confront us. This is why liberty is central to human survival, for it allows people to respond to circumstances as their individual judgments best inform them. But how effective they are will depend upon their capacities for clear thinking, as well as the realistic and accurate nature of the information upon which they are to act.

The problem we encounter is that information is a very elusive, incomplete, and subjectively-defined quality. Each of us looks for, discovers, and assesses information according to the demands of our prior experiences. Added to this, the study of “chaos” tells us that our universe is far too interconnected with networks of variability to allow us to know all of the influences at work upon our decision-making. Our ability to predict outcomes requires a “sensitive dependence upon initial conditions,” which translates into our being able to not only identify all of the factors that influence events, but to measure the precise degree of their influence. (If you doubt this, try predicting the precise events that will occur in your life for the next seven days.)

As uncertain as it is, the quality of the information available to us is a principal factor in determining how well we are to live. One of the main characteristics of an entrepreneur lies in his or her abilities to identify and act upon information that others do not see. If I have located a source of widgets that I can purchase for $10 apiece, and I know of a sizeable group of people who (a) are not aware of this source, (b) are willing to pay me $20 for each widget, and (c) my costs in getting them to this market amount to only $1 per widget, I will likely have a successful business.

Information is also at the core of our social and political behavior. A tribal leader established his authority over our more primitive ancestors by telling them of threats from others – known only to himself – and of his special pipeline to the gods who would assist him in his rule. As we have seen more recently, fear causes us to huddle together around those who promise us protection. This is due to our innocent belief that our alleged “protectors” have more information available to them than do we.

In time, information provided not only by others, but from our own experiences, tell us not only that those we have empowered enjoy no greater access to “truth” than do we but, further, that most of the fears of which they warn us have been fabricated and propagandized by the power-seekers themselves. Do you remember all of those “weapons of mass destruction” with which the Iraqis planned to attack us? Have you heard of the contrived “coming ice age” (oops, “global warming,” oops, “climate change”) that continues to be modified and employed in political efforts to control our daily lives?

Johann Gutenberg demonstrated to the world that the free flow of information is very liberating. His invention of movable type permitted men and women to read and inform their own minds, without a need for authority figures to tell them of the nature of things. Gutenberg’s efforts were responsible not only for the Reformation, but for much of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific age, and, ultimately, that most creative and liberating of all periods, the Industrial Revolution.

Over time, humans began to see just how personally relevant information was to the quality of their lives. At the same time, the political racketeers whose interests depended upon their victims remaining in a state of institutionally-controlled ignorance, saw the threat to their rule. In one form or another, the control-freaks embraced censorship and the burning of books. It was people’s minds, not just their bodies, that got burned at the stake. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 shows how far a totalitarian state might go to preserve its control over the minds of people. Mark Twain expressed the proposition more humorously when he said: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”

Computerized technologies continue to innovate new systems for the creation and communication of information, the most familiar of which is the Internet. Begun as an in-house network for military agencies, it quickly spread – like a genie released from a bottle – into the rest of society. Tens of millions of people were soon communicating with countless others whatever material they chose to send and receive. The model of vertically-structured information flow one found in schools, religions, the media, and the government – premised on the idea “we will tell you what we want you to know” – collapsed into horizontal networks run by nobody who had a monopoly power to control content. Your Uncle Harlow or niece Marcia could become sources of information to others who chose to read their opinions.

But the liberating influence of free-flowing information has proven troublesome to members of the corporate-state establishment whose authority over others depends upon the maintenance of a mindset of subservience. Information gets people thinking about the arrangements in their lives. They begin to see the lies, corruption, deceit, violence, and looting that have been employed – with the help of propaganda supplied by schools and the major media – to keep them in their servile state. Like the disillusioned denizens of Animal Farm, the herds have begun to break up. Sheep are deserting their pens; the cattle are stampeding to greener pastures.

The establishment’s presidential sock puppet warns Americans that the “distractions” produced by the free flow of information and opinions will create more “pressures.” A dictionary defines “pressure” as “the action of a force against an opposing force.” The ruling classes cannot tolerate such countervailing influences that would upset the status quo they wish to maintain. To do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of interests other than their own. Besides, efforts to distinguish “truth” from “falsehood” place a great burden upon the individual mind. Most of us are content to allow others to bear this burden for us; to have the schools and the media provide us that optimal level of knowledge and understanding with which we can function in our assigned stalls as useful institutional servo-mechanisms. The keepers of our thoughts could summarize their message to us in the words implicit in Pres. Obama’s address to college graduates: “confine your thinking to what is in our interests to have you know. We will keep you informed.”

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