Beauty and
nonviolence, and International Day for
Tolerance
Let's begin this Transnational WIRE with a text on
beauty and on how we could learn from appreciation of
beauty that violence is a bad idea
• Does
beauty really equal truth?
Philosopher Elaine Scarry defends beauty from politically
correct critics. Here is one of her beautiful thoughts:
"One of the reasons that violence has in our own era been
so easily anesthetized is precisely because we've gotten
unanchored from beauty."
November 16 was the UN-declared International Day
for Tolerance. Here is how UNESCO's new Director-General,
Koichiro Matsuura, observed this important day:
• Tolerance
- a dynamic world value
And the UN Secretary-General promised to make tolerance a
priority:
• We
can advance tolerance every day, says Kofi
Annan.
The old Cold War -
and the New...
On the occassion of the end of the Cold War:
• CIA
warned of Gorbachev's fall
What did CIA think it knew between 1988 and 1991? If
George Bush and other Western leaders knew that
Gorbachev's chances of survival were THAT slim - why
didn't they do more to support him?
Chechenya splits Russia and the West at OSCE's
summit in Istanbul. But there is a much more important
dimension:
• American-sponsored
oil projects in Central Asia provokes Russia - and
others
The US sponsorship of two pipelines has an overt
geostrategic objective: to pull the countries of the
Caucasus and the Caspian Sea into the western orbit and
the world economy and keep Russia and iran out - writes
the Financial Times in an analysis.
So, why did the relations between the US and Russia
sour to the extent they did in Istanbul?
• America's
Russia policy backfires
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian analyses the last 10
years. It's not a great result for the West...
Nuclearism
NATO split because of US plans for a nuclear
missile defence system
• European
allies fear the US is jilting them for
missile
US plans for a national shield against nuclear missiles
are threatening to plunge the Nato alliance into its most
serious crisis since the end of the cold war, writes the
Guardian.
Kosovo - and
Western self-censorship
Ethnic cleansing goes on in Kosovo - or is it now
so clean that more and more troops can leave?
• 1.200
British troops more are withdrawn
British troops have now been reduced from over 10.000 to
below 4.000 in Kosovo. Michael Jackson earlier told the
world that it was impossible to prevent ethnic
cleansing.
Here is an interesting - and certainly different -
personal account of what it means to be working in a
war-torn society
• Rekindling
Kosovo (Look for "Opinion")
Great and simple truths of humanitarian work: numbing
exhumations, stolen staplers, no phones, and lots of
hope.This is an excerpt of an Oct. 16 letter sent to
family and friends by Carolyn McCool, a Canadian lawyer
working in Mitrovica, Kosovo.
Kosovo makes SLOW news. Slow news is a form of
censorship used in democracies
• Western
media didn't do reporting, they did
propaganda
There is as yet no evidence that genocide took place in
Kosovo. But that fact is nigh impossible to find in the
press, writes John Pilger in the New Statesman.
Globalization
The World Trade Organisation, WTO, is meeting in
Seattle from November 29. Here is an overview piece about
this organisation and why the meeting may be the "Protest
of the century"
• Last
Stop for corporate globalization
How did something as arid and seemingly removed from
people's lives as "the Third Ministerial Meeting of the
World Trade Organization" manage to attract this kind of
opposition?
And if Western democracies were also promoting
economic democracy and economic human rights, there might
be less protesting and criticism around the world. Study
why there is mounting opposition to globalization
at:
• Z
Net's Global Economic Crisis website
• The
Nation
The World Trade Organisation and China - a historic
change of the world economy
• China
is joining - and what does that
mean?
The move will spell the end of Communist control over
large sectors of the economy and speed up the economic
and cultural globalization of a land that only 30 years
ago was almost completely sealed off from the rest of the
world.
The United States
violates everybody's human right
It is hard to believe that the National Security
Agency of the United States, the champion of moralism,
human rights and freedom is planning to do THIS:
• Listen
to million of telephone
conversations...
To date, it has been widely believed that while the NSA
has the capability to conduct fully automated, mass
electronic eavesdropping on e-mail, faxes and other
written communication, it is now also attmepting to do so
with the human voice, over the phones, writes the
Independent.
How quickly will the international human rights community
mobilize against this?
EU's turbo
militarization in the wake of Kosovo
The EU is on turbo defence policy integration and
co-operation with NATO
• Common
EU-NATO exercizes and Solana wants EU at UN Security
Council
Solana calls for voice to match EU might The European
Union flexed its muscles on the international stage
yesterday with a demand for it to be given a voice at the
heart of the United Nations and the announcement that the
embryonic European defence corps will be conducting
military exercises with Nato early in the New Year.
A common sense
Russian peace proposal for Chechenya
Here is a proposal on how to end the war in
Chechenya
• Only
Chechens can end the war
- says a leading business newspaper, The Russia Journal
editorial.
WIRE Editor
Jan Oberg with TFF
Associates
