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Of course, choosing to do nothing is still a choice and choices still have consequences but waving the magic crystal around feels a bit like doing something and with just a touch of self-deception the woes of the world can be someone else's fault.
Evil will succeed only if enough good people do nothing.
This quote has been attributed variously but was probably Edmund Burke, it has been paraphrased many times over. The point that I'm getting at is people are finding more and more advanced, complex ways of doing nothing.
Like all Communist revolutions, corruption ensures that the original ideal (power to the farmer and the worker) has long ago been forgotten and thus we have an underclass of disgruntled villagers who are overworked, taxed and eventually displaced by progress when the land they are occupying is more useful than the people themselves.
The clash in Dongzhou also marked an escalation in social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside over land seizures for factories, power plants, shopping malls and other projects. Farmers often say they are paid too little and some accuse officials of stealing compensation money.
The thing is that technology can provide for people, in this case they are trying to build a wind farm power plant which is an excellent idea. China has horrible pollution problems from dirty coal-buring power plants and wind power could be an excellent project for China's future. There is no doubt that some people (probably quite a lot of people) will benefit from this project.
Sadly, one problem that maths and science have failed to solve is the social problem of corruption. If you think about it, whatever "*ism" you want to subscribe to, corruption eventually corrodes all ideals. Social structures (no matter what they started out like) will, over time, devolve into nepotism, under-the-counter deals, looking after your mates, and ripping off those who can't defend themselves. Corruption is an attractor for social structures and although corrupt societies do work, they don't work terribly well.
Both Capitalism and Communism have been undermined by corruption over the years. Capitalism turns into Corporatism and ultimately into Facism. Communism drifts toward a single ruling party, under a single authoritarian leader who needs to exert more and more extreme violence in order to maintain control. The final end point is the same, no matter what your starting point.
Speaking of corruption, the idea of Democracy always seemed like a good way of keeping the little people protected from their government. What we have discovered is that by keeping enough people ignorant and controlling the flow of information, Democracy can be subverted thus one of the key signs of corruption is the systematic manipulation of public information. This article is a good example of that process at work, the Howard government has made it clear that they are willing to shoot the messenger rather than allow an inappropriate message to be broadcast.
The films include a multi-award-winning documentary called The President versus David Hicks and Garuda's Deadly Upgrade.
The name "David Hicks" speaks for itself. John Howard would be very happy for him to just vanish without a trace. The other film, Garuda's Deadly Upgrade is quite an interesting little story.
Munir died after boarding a Garuda flight to Holland. At the check in, he bumped into an old acquaintance, Garuda pilot Pollycarpus, who offered to upgrade him to business class. A few hours later, he was dead – poisoned by the airline food. "I was shocked they'd done that to my husband," grieves his widow.Suspicion for Munir's murder immediately fell on the Indonesian intelligence, BIN, which had many reasons for wanting him dead. "There is no other institution who could place someone in a company like Garuda except an intelligence body," explains colleague Rachlan Nasidik. But it also quickly became apparent that Garuda airlines helped organise, or at the very least covered up, the political assassination.
This film actually got past the Indonesian censors but is being blocked by the Australian government -- how strange is that? Could it really mean that Indonesia is more democratic than Australia? Maybe it just means that in Indonesia no one powerful need worry about being investigated so there is no need to suppress such accusations.
Another film that the Aus Govt attempted to block was Dhakiyarr Vs The King which takes a view sympathetic to Aboriginals who have had difficulties with law enforcement. No mystery why that film failed to meet the approval of John Howard's all seeing eye. The Howard government has the world clearly partitioned by sound economic principles: give everything a price tag, measure people (and all other resources) by how much money you can get out of them. Using this simple economic measurement, the Australian Aboriginals are not worth much -- they are not a big tax base, they do not represent a major voting lobby and the land that they occupy might be more profitably used by mining and agriculture.
That's how technological progress works: a stone-age spear-throwing culture is being replaced by mass production powered by fossil fuel.
I personally believe that some compensation should be offered to the Aboriginals for the taking of their land and the destruction of their way of life. Australia is quite a rich nation and could easily afford the overhead of paying such compensation. From a purely economic point of view it is more efficient not to pay compensation, but economics is only a limited representation of the world. Factors such as humanitarian concerns and social wellbeing tend to get ignored by economic calculations (just as they are ignored by John Howard and his government).
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