Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized) – Page 40

2005/12/262009/12/04

Review: Unspeakable Truths–Facing the Challenges of Truth Commissions (Paperback)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

“The” Reference, Applies to 9-11 and USA Truth Commissions,

December 26, 2005

Priscilla B. Hayner

The publisher has been lazy and inconsiderate in failing to post adequate information about this superb book. It is without question the single most important reference, covering the theory, the history, the practice, and future of truth commissions. It is comprehensive, clear, easy to read, and superbly documented.

This book has special meaning for me, at the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about global issues and national security and prosperity issues, because on the basis of real-life experience and reinforced by the 600+ books I have reviewed in just the past four years, I have become convinced that the US public must demand two Truth & Reconciliation Commissions if we are to reach the next century in any kind of good order: one must focus on the ills that America has bestowed on the world through its Cold War years (see Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World as well as–among many others–Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project), its support of 44+ dictators world-wide (see Ambassador Mark Palmer's Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025), and our predatory immoral capitalism (Cf. Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man‘ Greider The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy and Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: There are *so* many other books I have reviewed that could be listed here. The sad thing is that in 8 years Bush-Cheney, with the total abdication of Congress and the media, have led an apathetic nation into ruin.

We also need an internal Truth & Reconciliation Commission that could usefully start with the treasonous, treacherous, immoral, and disgraceful failure of local, state, and federal government in the preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina, and go backwards from there to explore not only our abuse of minorities, but our abuse of the working poor (see Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America and then go from there to the pernicious deliberate looting of the Commonwealth by a combination of military-industrial, pharmaceutical, and energy special interests; corrupt Congressmen, and a Wall Street that thrives on laundering drug money and picking the pockets of the middle class (Cf . Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil)

Most interesting to me, although not mentioned in this book, if one Goggles for truth and reconciliation USA one discoveres the Greensboro North Carolina Truth and Reconciliation endeavor, to explore past human rights abuses through slavery and related themes. This is a proven process that is clearly relevant to all countries, and especially to the 900-lb gorilla called America. The growing gap between rich and poor is the moral equivalent of global genocide and ecocide. If the rich wish to see their future generations survive, they had better start thinking about this important alternative to popular justice.

It is in this very American context that we can conclude that not only is this book at least as important to every American as it is to the rest of the world, but that the 9-11 Commission was a cover-up, a farce, that failed to engage the people, failed to discover all that could be known, and failed to hold anyone accountable.

I am most impressed by the diligence, scope, and coherence of this book. This is an extraordinary examination, based on global travel, deep research, and penetrating personal insight that is graceful and low-key, into the role of truth commissions, the great difficulties that accompany the creation and maintenance of such commissions, and the long-term implications of a successful outcome.

On page 23, after discussing the new emerging field of “transitional justice” the author declares that it “is certain that more countries will be turning to official truth-seeking in the coming years.” As we review books like Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People and Why They Hate Us: September 11, 2001…and Justice For Non and many others, two things are clear: 1) the dictators are not long for this world–I give them twelve years at the most; and 2) it is not just “dictatorships” that need commissions, but also those democracies that are fraudulent, among which I would include the United States of America (see my review of Jimmy Carter's new book, and the books recommended there, including Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It).

The author is to be commended for blending a reference work that concisely and clearly covers the 21 existing truth commissions at the time of the first writing as well as the 12 emergent between the hard copy and the new soft copy, and that brings out the reasons, the lessons, the benefits, and the costs. The most important benefit is mentioned on page 135, in which the author discusses the importance of honoring the past and overcoming what some call the conspiracy of silence. I would refer readers to Robert Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth' as well as Larry Beinhart, Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin, and of course the recent classic, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. The list goes on.

The book has a practical side as well, identifying key factors in whether a truth commission will succeed or fail, chief among which is whether they get an adequate staff and budget, and whether there is a good process of engaging the public in defining the goals and the process.

The appendices and the index are quite professional, and overall this is a world-class reference work of enormous value to the possibilities of using transitional justice to achieve sustainable peace around the world.

2005/12/092009/12/04

Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid–Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Future, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Nobel Prize Material–Could Transform the Planet,

December 9, 2005

C.K. Prahalad

There are some excellent and lengthy reviews of this book so I will not repeat anything that has already been said. This book review should be read together with my review of Stuart Hart's “Capitalism at the Crossroads,” which points to several other related books, and Kenichi Ohmae's book, “The Next Global Stage.” All three are published by Wharton School Publishing, which has impressed me enormously with its gifted offerings.

Here's the math that I was surprised to not see in the book: the top billion people that business focuses on are worth less than a trillion in potential sales. The bottom four billion, with less than $1000 a year in disposable income, are worth four trillion in potential sales.

In combination, Prahalad and Hart make it clear that business suffers from the same pathologies as the Central Intelligence Agency and other bureaucracies: they are in a rut.

I will end by emphasizing that I believe this author merits the Nobel Peace Prize. As the U.S. Department of Defense is now discovering, its $500 billion a year budget is being spent on a heavy metal military useful only 10% of the time. Stabilizization and reconstruction are a much more constructive form of national defense, because if we do not address poverty and instability globally, it will inevitably impact on the home front. This author has presented the most common sense case for turning business upside down. He can be credited with a paradigm shift, those shifts that Kuhn tells us come all too infrequently, but when they come, they change the world. It may take years to see this genius implemented in the real world, but he has, without question, changed the world for the better with this book, and make global prosperity a possibility.

NOTE: This book comes with a DVD that is an extraordinary value all by itself. Wharton Publishing has really delivered a one-two intellectual punch, first with the book, and then with the DVD which as a short introductory presentation by the author, and then a series of 2-4 minute multi-media snap-shots of the various case studies and the “faces of poverty” transformed. I am really impressed–I've had Wharton MBAs work for me before (but please note, it was Michigan MBAs that excelled in the work I am reviewing(, examining OSS.Net and how to take it to the next level, but the work reflected in these case studies and by the author as a manager of budding intellects has taken my respect for Michagan (and Wharton) to a whole new level.

Note: while this book is totally unique, and inspired my idea to create the Earth Intelligence Network and be intelligence officer to the poor, organizing 100 million people to teach the five billion poor “one cell call at a time,” there are several other books that have given me enormous hope, and I list them below.
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives

2005/10/192009/09/25

Review: Rage of the Random Actor

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secession & Nullification, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, Compelling, Urgently Applicable to All

October 19, 2005

Dan Korem

I am utterly astonished to not see this book at the top of the charts and being absorbed by every school principal, every small town mayor, every police chief, and every counter-terrorism expert. This book is extraordinary, it is compelling, and it is utterly and urgently applicable to every single person who wishes to “defuse” potentially deadly “random actors.”

Although it is a thick book packed with details, you do not have the read the whole thing to extract value. Suffice to say that armed with this book, communities and organizations will have all they need to know to achieve early warning of potentially threatening “random actors.”

This is not a book full of psycho-babble. If anything, it is solidly grounded in practical case studies going back twenty years, and I for one, as a 30-year veteran intelligence professional, including clandestine service with constant exposure to bad boys and girls, find the book credible, useful, and easy to understand.

The bottom line, without seeking to simplify the book, is avoid de-personalization, prevent bullying, open up to individuals and empower them, and above all, be alert for any sense that they see teachers or other authority figures as “CONTROLLING” and rules as “INAPPLICABLE.”

The author's finding that terrorism is a rich kid's game, and that most US-based random actors will come from upper middle class families in small towns, are consistent with my own research and practical experience with revolutionaries.

Sadly, the underlying theme across the book is that of societal collapse. The major institutions, from school to church to sports to social clubs are all degenerating and failing to provide the inclusiveness and alternatives to boredom and alienation that they once represented. The threat of “random actors” imposing catastrophic fatal acts on their communities is very real.

This book is an important reference work, and one that I would recommend be bought in bulk, and discussed in a structured manner by every school staff and every local police department…and of course by parents!

2005/07/122009/12/04

Review: Dying to Win–The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Hardcover)

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Terrorism & Jihad, Truth & Reconciliation, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Original–A Major Contribution to Understanding,

July 12, 2005

Robert Pape

The University of Chicago is an extraordinary institution–the author, employed there, lives up to their reputation for methodical, scholarly, useful reflections grounded firmly in the facts. This work significantly advances our understanding of terrorism and of the three forms of suicidal terrorism: egotistic, altruistic, and fatalistic. The author documents his findings that most suicidal terrorists are altruistic, well-educated, nationalistically-motivated, and fully witting and dedicated to their fatal mission as a service to their community.

Of the 563 books I have reviewed–all in national security and global issues, and all but four among the best books in the field–this new work by Professor Pape stands out as startlingly original, thoughtful, useful, and directly relevant to the clear and present danger facing America: an epidemic of suicidal terrorism spawned by the “virtual colonialism” of the US in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and now Iraq as well as other countries.

I will not repeat the excellent listing of facts in the Book Description provided by the publisher–certainly that description should be read carefully. If you are a Jewish zealot, don't bother, you will not get over the cognitive dissonance. Everyone else, including Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic contributors to Congressional and Presidential campaign funds, absolutely must read this book.

There are many other books that support the author's key premises, all well-documented with case studies and the most complete and compelling statistics–known facts. I am persuaded by the author's big three:

1) Suicidal terrorism correlates best with U.S. military occupation of specific countries that tend to be undemocratic and corrupt, where the U.S. in collusion with dictators and one-party elites are frustrating legitimate national aspirations of the larger underclass and middle class;

2) Virtually all of the suicidal terrorists comes from allies of the U.S. (at least nominally–they actually play the U.S. as “useful idiots”) such as Saudi Arabia, rather than Iran;

3) The three premises shared by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, and now the Iraqi insurgency, are all accurate and will continue to be so if the U.S. does not pull its military out of the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other locations:

a) Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and virtual colonialism everywhere else, demand martyrdom operations;

b) Conventional inferiority mandates self-sacrifice (not only suicidal terrorism, but other asymmetric attacks including the death of a thousand cuts against key energy, water, and transportation nodes in the USA; and

c) The US and its European allies are vulnerable to coercive pressure. The withdrawal of the Americans and the French from Viet-Nam and then Lebanon, of the Israelis from the West Bank, and other concessions itemized by the author, have all made the case for suicidal terrorism. It works and it will explode.

I will mention several other books to support this author, but wish to stress that alone, his work is spectacularly successful in documenting the fallacies of the U.S. national security policy.

Among the books that support him are
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods
Understanding Terror Networks
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

This is a core reading for every officer at STRATCOM and SOCOM, and for anyone who wishes to be effective at either Public Diplomacy or Strategic Communication or Information Operations. This author should be an invited distinguished funded speaker at every single war college in the Western democracies. We cannot win without listening to him. Military withdrawals, combined with energy independence, are essential. Without them, we not only will not fully defeat the current crop of suicidal terrorists, but we will, in attempting to deal with the current threat with old counter-productive and heavy-handed means, give birth to hundreds of thousands in the next generation of suicidal terrorists.

There are not enough guns in the world to win this one, even if we had competent intelligence at the neighborhood level, which we do not. In keeping with the author's recommendations, it is clear that moral capitalism, informed democracy, equanimity toward bottom up movements for national liberation and an end to corruption, an honest policy process in Washington, D.C.–these are the keys to victory.

This is a towering accomplishment and a major contribution to strategic thinking.

2005/05/072010/12/18

Review (Guest): The Phenomenon of Man

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Philosophy, Religion & Politics of Religion, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

5.0 out of 5 stars The Theory of Global Human Consciousness

May 7, 2005

By “Patrick” (Los Angeles, Ca.) – See all my reviews

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1945) was a Jesuit Priest, theologian, philosopher, and paleontologist who expanded on the concept of the noosphere originated by the Russian mineralogist and geochemist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky (1863-1945) who also originated the concept of the biosphere- the “life zone” where all biological life exists between the crust of the earth to the lower atmosphere or the “life envelope” surrounding our planet.

The “noosphere” or “thinking layer”, according to Chardin, comes about at that point in time when humans evolve to the realization of a global human consciousness and is totally aware of itself and then headed for the ultimate destination- the “Omega Point” or “Kingdom of God”. At this point, the earth is enveloped by a collective human consciousness.

Chardin uses both science and theology to support this theory and his dissertation on this is fascinating and thought provoking. Unlike most of his religious peers, he was a proponent of directional evolution and that Darwin had hit upon the proof of God's intent, that final destination of the human conscious evolution where the Creator is realized. Darwin, of course, preferred to distance himself from theological assumptions of species evolution, especially so with us humans and his religious wife.

Chardin distinguishes humans from all other life-forms because of our abilities to contemplate our existence, hence, the uniqueness of or the “phenomenon of man”. Hopefully, he concludes, that the human family will evolve to be totally conscience, intelligent and loving, cooperative, and rising far above our current chaotic existence. Amen to that lofty, but desirable goal!

The evolutionary path of the noosphere is laid out in Chardin's earth evolution and stated as: “We have been following the successive stages of the same grand progression from the fluid contours of the early earth. Beneath the pulsations of geo-chemistry, of geo-tectonic and of geo-biology, we have detected one and the same fundamental process, always recognizable-the one which was given material form in the first cells and was continued in the construction of nervous systems. We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis, which turned out in the end to be nothing less psychogenesis.” (p 181). And leading therefore, to “noosgenesis” or global consciousness. Finally, and due to the interconnectedness and seemingly intentional direction of life on earth, Chardin gives Earth a soul: Gaia thinking- Earth “intentionally” supports life.

No wonder then that Chardin is referenced and quoted in a mountain of science and religious works. His theories have influenced such great thinkers as: Lewis Thomas (“The Lives of a Cell”), Buckminster Fuller (“The Dymaxion Map”), the Gaia Theory- Earth as a conscious, intentional, self-regulating life-support system and expounded upon by Guy Murchie (“The Seven Mysteries of Life”) and later by James Lovelock (Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine”), Thomas Berry (“The Dream of the Earth”) and many, many more.

Chardin traveled the world on his scientific investigations and he was present at the discovery of the Peking Man in China. Some historians have intimated that much of Chardin's travels were at the behest of the Catholic Church for they were not thrilled with his attempts to blend science and religion and the farther away from Rome he was, the better.

The church cautioned him not to publish any of his works and faithful to that edict, he left them to a friend in the U.S. to publish posthumously to avoid further conflict and retaliation from the Church- bad memories of the history of the Catholic Church's terrible treatment of scientist and thinkers whose musings drifted from repressive, suffocating church dogma, i.e., Galileo Galilei, et al.

No matter where one's leanings are on religion or science, this is a potent dissertation on bringing science and religion together for awe and respect of life and eventual peace on Earth through global consciousness.