Category: Collaboration Zones

Interview: Julian Assange on George Bush's Library and Bradley Manning's Trial

Medea Banjamin

OpEdNews.com, 25 April 2013

I had an opportunity to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been granted political asylum since June 2012. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sex allegations, although he has never been charged. Assange believes that if sent to Sweden, he would be put into prison and then sent to the United States, where he is already being investigated for espionage for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic and military memos on the WikiLeaks website.

EXTRACTS

George W. Bush's new presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Texas has opened with great fanfare, including the attendance of Presidents Obama and former Presidents Carter, Bush Sr. and Clinton. George Bush has said that the library is “a place to lay out facts.” What facts would you like to see displayed at his library? 

A good place to start would be laying out the number of deaths caused by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. At Wikileaks, we documented that from 2004-2009, the US had records of over 100,000 individual deaths of Iraqis due to violence unleashed by that invasion, roughly 80% of them civilians. These are the recorded deaths, but many more died. And in Afghanistan, the US recorded about 20,000 deaths from 2004-2010. These would be good facts to include in the presidential library.

And perhaps the library could document how people around the world protested against the invasion of Iraq, including the historic February 15, 2003 mobilization of millions of people around the globe.

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What do you think the trial [of Bradley Manning] will be like? 

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Julian Asange on Bush Jr. Library, Bradley Manning Trial”

The Second Enlightenment Has Emerged: We Should Call It What It Is

Have you ever noticed that there's no convenient, sufficient, or satisfying way to pull all the threads together of all the inter-related branches of wisdom that we're always talking about? despite the fact that they all seem to be part of the same movement: a movement of cutting-edge wisdom?

The movement is no less than the Second Enlightenment. And I think that's what we should start calling it.

It would be a way to pull all the disparate threads together and show their connectedness to each other and their significance in the context of human history. And I think this idea should be spread until citizens and the media start asking the question, “What is this Second Enlightenment everyone is talking about?

There's an excellent article on American enlightenment thought at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a peer reviewed academic resource.

Two of the six key ideas of the movement were deism and scientific progress. Deism was the idea that God is revealed through an understanding of the universal laws of nature, and that reason is the best tool for discovery, not religious dogma or the authority of custom and tradition. And whether in regard to political philosophy or scientific progress, the men of the Enlightenment believed that rational argumentation and the free exchange of ideas was the best means by which deeper truths were discovered. We are the extension of the process that they began.

But the men of the first Enlightenment were only at the dawning of an intellectual movement. There are things we understand today that they couldn't have possibly understood. The breadth and depth of our understanding is rapidly expanding. There are many new fields of thought that would astound them: human consciousness, social science, systems theory, complexity theory, collective intelligence through open-source collaboration, rapidly advancing technology. The list is virtually endless. And it's not just these specialties in themselves that are significant but the way they reflect on one another and inform one another, which is creating a new emerging reality that I think can rightly be called the Second Enlightenment.

Continue reading “Theophillis Goodyear: The Second Enlightment Emergent Now — Comment by Bojan Radej”