Click to access previous journals

2004 journals
April 19 'An existential vacuum armed to the teeth'
April 1 'What lies ahead'
March 9 'The knock on the PM's door at midnight'
February 13 'Netizens of the world unite'
February 3 'Hey Ho from the world social forum'
2003 journals
December 16 'The three hit men from the west'
November 17 'How Iraq is re-shaping the future'
October 30 'How to rescue the future'
September 25 'The mass production of serial killers'
September 5 'Poor fellah my planet'
August 7 'Slam Bam thank you frisco'
July 10 'From PornoPopϨ ro agit prop, the coming age of social justce.
June 16 'The doors of deception, a death metal soundtrack'
May 26 'Murdering the matrix, marketing missiles, marrying machines'
May 8 'Smile, you're on combat camera'
April 12 'Proud to be a peacenik'
April 1 'Forty years ago today'
March 27 'Uncle Sam's underwear'
February 26 'The art of war, the poetry of freedom, a jittery pope'
February 12 'Why the warhorses stomp and snort'
January 28 'Getin' ready for a good ol' Texan Barbecue'
2002 journals
December 29 'Maybe Dr Evil isn't who you think'
November 4 Balaclavas, shock-jocks & Lean Cuisine for the Conscience
October 21 Sick of the Sound of My Own Voice
September 23 The Divine Right of US Citizens
August 22 The cook, the wife, two dogs, the CIA, a mobile, a Massacre
August 17 32 Revelations about the War that Never Ends
August 2 Fuming Fathers & Pedophile Bishops
June 26 Pre-emptive strikes, bad acid & collective guilt
June 10 Lock Up Your Daughters
May 30 High Tea with the Black Dwarf
May 24 Refugee Blues & wild accusations
May 22 Back Among the Gum Trees in Fortress Oz
April 10 Beyond Good and Evil
April 1 Bloody Easter, Joyful Nation
February 26 The 14 wiley whoppers of Philip Ruddock
January 31 Making the world a better place for arms dealers, millionaires and screwed up weirdos
2001 journals
December 29 Ruddock - Wanted
December 28 Hi - Christmas and New Year Message
December 23 Good & Evil, Beyond Rich & Poor, the legacy of Islam's Holy Killer
November 23 For Truth, Lies, Paranoia, Cruelty & the Truth that can't be Silenced.
November 7 Eek - Censorship is back!... Or am I paranoid?
October 25 Death of global consciousness, the decline of CNN, the brutality of warlords, East & West
October 13 Citizens!.. A new awakening or the same Old Testament
October 1 But what would you do if you were George Bush?
August 12 A bull with future shock

Making the World Safe for Civilisation

Journal of a Futurist - 17 August 2002

32 Revelations about the War that Never Ends

This is my pre-emptive strike against the gush of misinformation about to unleashed by the forthcoming anniversary of you-know-what.

Events since September 11 have revealed:

  1. That naked, tooth-and-claw fundamentalism remains a brain disease and the enemy of freedom. This applies to the Old Testament White House and Zionist land stealers, as well as to militant Islam.
  2. That hawks in the West outnumber the doves by at least ten to one, except in Washington and Canberra, where the doves are virtually extinct. If you think Colin Powell is a dove, you’re hallucinating.
  3. That US foreign policy is openly manipulated for the benefit of a group of oil sodden, multi millionaire arms dealers who fight for their feather beds at any cost, including the wellbeing of Earth and the lives of wedding guests in Afghanistan.
  4. That for such an elite, globalisation is a codeword for cheap labour and hungry markets, rather than a unifying approach to international problems, like tyranny, global warming and torture.
  5. That there is one law for America and a boot up the ass for everyone else.
  6. That the Australian Government has learnt nothing from its complicity in the war against Vietnam, unlike our army chiefs who now admit it was a “mistake”. Like Uncle Sam, Canberra is gearing up to shed blood in Iraq.
  7. That the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, believes anyone who questions this policy is a fool.
  8. That the credo of “my country right or wrong”, especially as fanned by media hacks, makes it unnecessary for politicians to be fussy about global justice.
  9. That a free press turns out to be a peacetime privilege, not an inalienable right.
  10. That the web has come of age as an alterative voice.
  11. That shortly after the September strikes there came to light a second series of attacks, both here and in the US, upon thousands of innocent citizens, which perhaps can be classed as acts of ethical terror. It wasn’t landmark towers which crashed to the ground, but landmark companies, starting with Enron, wiping out the savings & livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of employees & shareholders, creating misery and bleak futures. Why? Megalomania, greed and social irresponsibility.
  12. That those at the helm of the terror wars are linked to companies that have fleeced the public and/or pillaged the developing world.
  13. That the Bush administration believes environmental laws do not apply to vast tracts of oceans under US control, paving the way for toxic dumping, oil rigs and war games.
  14. That George Bush was able to describe Ariel Sharon as a “man of peace” without him or any news-reader throwing up.
  15. That Sharon and Arafat will share the same circle of hell.
  16. That around August 12/02, the prolonged beating of a Palestinian child by occupying soldiers was able to take place under the nose of volunteer reservist, Elyakim Rubenstein, the Israeli Attorney General.
  17. That as far as the US is concerned, the Geneva Convention is of no more worth than Enron’s official statement of ethics.
  18. That our own Attorney General, Daryl Williams, has failed to defend the civil rights of Australians swept up in the turmoil of war.
  19. That our own Minister of Immigration, Phillip Ruddock, continues to punish the children of asylum seekers with prolonged periods of imprisonment.
  20. That America intends to forcibly board any vessel on the high seas it regards as “suspicious”.
  21. That in the last calendar year, US weapons manufacturers entered into new agreements worth $US12.1 billion and delivered $9.7 billion worth of arms, cornering the global market in weapons of death. Military oriented output accounts for about a quarter of US gross domestic product. And you thought its wealth was built on soft rock and Walt Disney.
  22. That Hollywood is the Pentagon’s Madison Avenue.
  23. That one year on, the US cluster bombs scattered in the Afghan sands are still killing and maiming children.
  24. That a pre-emptive strike is now considered a civilised option, if delivered by the West.
  25. That each week, factories set up in eastern Afghanistan are currently producing hundreds of kilos of heroin.
  26. That those nations who join the World Court without pledging to protect from its jurisdiction those Americans serving on its soil, are threatened with the loss all U.S. military assistance.
  27. That Britain and the US have assumed the power to detain suspects for as long as they like, without putting them on trial, or even charging them, contrary to rights dating as far back as the Magna Carta (1215).
  28. That to hasten the extraction of information, enemy suspects, are secretly transferred to friendly police states in order to be tortured. In Pakistan, agents of the FBI kidnap Arab suspects from their homes and spirit them across the Afghan border for the same purpose. In the former secret police HQ in Kabul, the Afghan Special Forces are torturing Pashtun prisoners, while being observed by the CIA. (www. independent.co.uk, Aug 13).
  29. That US Defence Secretary and arms millionaire, Donald Rumsfeld, is seeking the power to dispatch “special forces” to work under cover in any country he chooses, friend or foe, without the need to inform the host country.
  30. That the leaders of al Q’aida are still at large.
  31. That instead of fighting to “save civilisation”, as shock-jock John Laws and Prime Minister John Howard jointly boasted they would, live on air, the morning of September 12, both Australia and the US have retreated from civilisation.
  32. That all US prisoners are treated in acccordance with the Geneva convention. For instance in Abu Ghraib jail, Baghdad guards even encourage prisoners to participate in group sex - while wearing hoods.

Ends

www.richardneville.com

Hello, Thanks & Goodbye

Sob, sob. Enthusiastic feedback from Julie Clarke’s scathing jet amusing account of her domestic ordeals in, A WIFE’S DIARY, (see below) the second episode of which will be uploaded in a few days, which I’m dreading. Also, the web stats provided by our ISP reveal that we’ve had 47,000 visitors since June last year (yes, visits, not hits) which is apparently considered wonderful, though no match for sites like Add 5 Inches to Your Penis. Still, if we thread that phrase into the search engines, our readership will further e-x-p-a-n-d. Yes, I’m a teenager at heart.

This coming week there’s a re-launch of the FuturesCafe, with a young turk editor-who-never-sleeps, and some more off-the-wall Oz covers.

For those who are puzzled by my above “pre-emptive strike” linking of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Pentagon, I offer three hints. 1) In most movies, the solution to intractable problems is superior weaponry. 2) In October 2001, the Hollywood chiefs ‘committed themselves to new initiatives in support of the war on terrorism’. 3) Time magazine reports that teams from the CIA have even been “sent to pick the brains of Hollywood scriptwriters who dream up far-fetched terror spectaculars”. Back at HQ, the agents “comb their databases to see if al-Qaeda has the capability to carry out such attacks”, and then, no doubt, send in the carpet bombers. Culture, politics, arms, greed, fantasy, fact – 1984 has arrived. Seeya.