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Mazar-e-Sharif

Mazar-e-Sharif

The publication, in New Zealand, of Hit & Run by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson has drawn our attention to the remote Tigran valley, north of Kabul, in the millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Tigran is divided from Kabul by a high mountain range, and those wanting a description of the countryside should read Eric Newby’s travel writing classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Tigran, in the Baghlan province, is situated on the historic trade route from Kabul north to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, but the New Zealand SAS wouldn’t have followed Newby’s horseback route; they would have taken a one-hour flight directly to Baghlan. Quicker and safer.

I discussed dividing Afghanistan into millispheres with a friend, who had worked for the Red Cross in Kabul in 1991.

Shew said Afghanistan had never really been one country, but a collection of regions dominated by ethnic warlords. For a start the country is roughly 85 percent Sunni Muslim and 15 percent Shi’a.

Kabul is the fifth fastest growing city in the world; a decade ago it didn’t qualify as a millisphere but now, with an urban population around 3.7 million, it does.

Kabul is roughly 45 percent Tajik, 25 percent Hazara and 25 percent Pashtun, and these three ethnic groups are spread throughout the country in roughly those proportions.

Baghlan province, where the NZ SAS Operation Burnham took place, is in a region dominated by the “northern alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks. Mazar-e-Sharif, after the largest city in the region, is the name I’ve given this millisphere, and geophysically it is the upper Amu Darya river catchment that drains north into the Aral Sea.

North is also the direction Afghanistan’s opium takes on its journey to the West.

When the Taliban seized control in 1996, opium production fell to less than 20 percent of what it was during the decade long 1980s Russian/Mujahideen war.

Since the American invasion in 2001, opium production has climbed to greater than pre-Taliban levels – despite the Americans spending $US7.6 billion on poppy eradication programmes.

During the Russian occupation, the Americans supplied money and arms to the Mujahideen. Joining this “jihad” against the Russians were 25,000 Arab fighters including one Osama bin Laden, who famously turned from being an ally of convenience to a sworn enemy of the US.

Working in Wellington earlier this decade, I met Monroe, a Maori soldier, who after serving his time in the New Zealand Army, signed up with the US-led ISAF and worked in Kabul, training Afghan armed forces.

His take on the situation was that only those on the bottom in Afghan society would sign up with the invaders. He called recruits “homos and junkies” whom he thought would never beat the Taliban.

It is estimated that the Taliban have only 25,000 farmer/fighters in the field. Despite a ratio of 12:1 in favour of the US and its allies, backed by sophisticated military equipment, the Taliban still control large areas of Afghanistan.

Before the Taliban, Baghlan province was controlled by the Hazara warlord Sadat Jafat Naderi who belongs to the Ismaili Shi’a sect which comprises about 20 percent of all Shi’a Muslims. There are about six million Ismaili Shi’a in Afghanistan and about 25 million worldwide.

The Ismaili Shi’a give their allegiance to the Aga Khan who, with a personal wealth of $US800 million, is one of the richest royals in the world. The current Aga Khan was born in Geneva to an English mother and lives in France.

The Taliban use asymmetrical warfare, such as suicide bombers, and their sanctuary over the border in the Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan mean they are still a force to be reckoned with.

In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great said: “May the Gods keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans”.

The New Zealand army lost four soldiers during its time in Afghanistan; Britain lost 450 and the Americans 2,300.

Should we have been there and identified as a ally of the American?

As the Dutch said before becoming one of the first Nato countries to bail out: “We came to help rebuild, not to take sides in a civil war”.

The Dutch also couldn’t stomach the corruption.

 

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Chilangolandia

It didn’t matter who became the next president of the Nation of Darkness (POTNOD). Nothing will change very fast. Their toxic food, drug and gun culture will remain and the American empire will continue to spend half its annual budget on “defence” i.e. weapons of mass destruction.

Currently the world is fixating on travel restrictions, imposed by the new POTNOD, but crossing a United States border could be an unpleasant experience already, whether it is entering the “homeland” or crossing between states.

In Europe your details will have been processed while you are still in the air and when you land at Schiphol or Frankfurt you just walk straight in, and it’s the same driving from one country to the next. In the EU there will be a sign beside the road as you drive across the border, not a state trooper asking to see your passport yet again as in “the States”.

I remember the first time I entered the United State of America I was presented with the following sentence: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of an offence or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or been arrested or convicted for two or more offences for which the aggregated sentence or confinement was five years or more; or been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

A country, which has been known to engage in assassination and torture and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands civilians in some military adventure abroad, was asking me if I had committed a moral turpitude! Tempting as it was to ask the border person what a turpitude was and whether Uncle Sam had the blood of innocent people on his hands, I thought it was safer to just tick the no box.

I once discovered that if you want to experience bad tempered American border guards at their rudest try crossing from Mexico, at night and without a visa (coming from a visa waiver country New Zealanders don’t need a visa). And then there is the lengthy process of standing on two yellow footprints and looking at a camera, as a machine, a good deal more intelligent than its operator, computerises your iris, finger and thumbprints.

Unfortunately if you place a string on a globe east from Auckland to Heath Row in London it will pass directly over LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) which most travellers to and from Europe use as their half way transit hub.

There are Air New Zealand flights direct to San Diego and Houston (for those wanting to travel on to Cuba, Mexico and Central America) and one to Vancouver, which means it is possible fly east around the north of the USA.

Mexico City International Airport (MEX) would be a convenient transit hub for both the Caribbean and Central America or onwards to Europe but as yet there are no direct flights from NZ to MEX for travellers who want to avoid the Nation of Darkness

MEX is Latin America’s second busiest airport and air traffic there “exceeds current capacity.” A new international airport will be completed next year and with the capability to move 120 million passengers per year it has the potential to become the busiest airport in the world.

A media spokesperson said Air New Zealand was not considering a direct flight to Mexico City anytime soon.

Given the choice of stopping over in LAX or MEX I would recommend the later. It helps if you can speak a little Spanish but the art galleries and museums, the street life and music, the food and the Hispanic style are well worth the journey. By distancing itself from the drug wars Mexico City is a safe city, of sorts.

The United States of Mexico is a federation of 31 states and one federal district. In the heart of Mexico City is the old “Districto Federal,” population 8.9 million, which has last year been given the status of a state and is now known as the “State of the Valley of Mexico.”

Greater Mexico City has an urban population of over 21 million and counting the surrounding municipalities Mexico City is the centre of a “megalopolis” of 34 million (2015) the sheer scale making it one of the largest economies of any “global city.”

Mexicans refer to Mexico City as “Chilangolandia” – a chilango being a loud, arrogant, ill-mannered, loutish person.

Now that the chilango gringo POTNOD north of the border has scrapped the TPP the Mexican government has initiated direct trade talks with the New Zealand government. What an economic opportunity. New Zealand prime minister Bill English should tell Mexican president Enrique: the first thing we need is a direct flight to MEX as soon as the new international airport is operational in 2018.

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London

“Citizens of nowhere,” the millisphere of London post-Brexit.

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

Two of our friends who live and work in London were visiting Wanganui last week and I was interested to quiz them about London post-Brexit.

London, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted in the 2016 referendum to stay in the EU, while almost all the rest of the UK voted to leave.

“I remember the night it happened, it was so negative and depressing,” said Jocelyn who teaches at the Camberwell School of Art. “ At work the next morning the students were in tears, I had to take them all out for a cup of tea, it cost me a lot of money,” she recalled.

Change would be dramatic she thought, for example, in terms of fees, her EU students would now be seen as “foreign students” not “home students” anymore. “It will take a lot of intellectual effort to untangle from all sorts of areas.”

Of the 8.5 million people living in Greater London almost one million of them are from the EU and don’t have British passports.

“We are living through the death-knell of Great Britain,” said Celia who once worked at Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery and now works at the Tate Modern. “It’s going to be pretty tough, I think they will lose Scotland in the end.”

“London is a very tolerant city, and very mixed, on the number twelve, which is my bus, they’d think I was the only English person, and I’m not,” Jocelyn observed. “My co-worker is Greek with two children born in London, but didn’t have a British passport, which costs a thousand pounds, therefore she couldn’t vote in the referendum, people are already getting letters telling them to prepare to go home.”

London’s status as a global financial hub can no longer be guaranteed.

HSBC is planning to move a thousand workers to Paris over the next two years and Lloyds of London has announced setting up a new European base to retain privileged access to the single European market. On the other hand Google, Apple, Facebook and Snapchat are setting up offices in

London.

Sadiq Khan, the Moslem mayor of London, at Davos this year, has warned that a “hard Brexit” won’t necessarily benefit European financial centres like Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt but rather will benefit global centres like Hong Kong, Singapore and New York.

Journalists living in “university, internet and travel bubbles” and looking at the UK through a “London lens” didn’t see Brexit coming. Elite Londoners saw themselves as “citizens of the world.” British nationalists called them “citizens of nowhere.”

Brexit has unearthed a polarisation in the UK along the lines of age, education, class and geography. Between those who were able to move freely and embraced globalisation versus those dissatisfied with the political establishment and saw the future with fear and alienation. Between those caught up in lower wages and rising house prices since the 2008 financial crisis versus the financial elite who mostly came out of crisis richer than when they went in.

Jocelyn and Celia still maintain a home in Castlecliff and call Whanganui a “relaxed and lovely” place. For all its faults they still find London “staggering” with “layers and layers and layers of meaning and opportunity” for those working in the arts.

What attracts them to London is that it is open and tolerant, that there is interaction across diverse communities, and continues to attract the “Dick Whittingtons” of the world, although, these days, young New Zealanders are more likely to do their OE in Berlin (where it is cheaper to live) than in Earls Court, where their parents did their OE.

They are concerned with the rise of the right and nationalism and xenophobia in the UK. “The frightening thing is that Teresa May looks like Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump,” they agreed.

“One of the pleasures of living in London is taking the train out into the surrounding countryside to look at the stunning English landscape,” said Jocelyn. “A landscape maintained with EU subsidies,” added Celia, and they both laughed.

London, which has traditionally been open to foreign immigrants, which needs them both to do the work that the British won’t do, as well as for skilled workers in the finance, technology and pharmaceutical sectors, voted to remain in the EU. On the other hand regional Britain where immigrants generally don’t go, voted to cut the ties with the EU and send foreign workers back home.

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Miami (Pahayokee)

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

This column is on the millisphere of Pahayokee (Seminole Indian for Grassy Water). Pahayokee (population 6.9 million) covers the southern third of the State of Florida, is only a few metres above sea level and mostly covered by the Everglades swamp – actually a very shallow and very wide river slowly flowing from north to south.

For a century and a half “developers” have attempted simultaneously to drain the Everglades for agriculture and to build dikes to protect the Miami Metropolitan Area from flooding.

Today the Everglades are significantly degraded, subject to periodic droughts, fires and floods; salt-water contamination of freshwater aquifers; phosphorus and mercury contamination from agriculture and urbanisation and the invasion of exotic flora and fauna like the Paper-bark (Melaleuca quinquenerria), from Australia, and the Burmese Python, which grows over six metres long.

Realising the magnitude of the environmental damage both the Bush and Obama administrations have approved expensive Everglades environmental repair programs ($US 10 billion to date) and voted to buy out US Sugar’s manufacturing and production businesses, but there have been delays in implementation and urbanisation continues creeping in from the coast.

Meanwhile on the coast the urbanised strip is experiencing “sunny day flooding,” where higher-than-normal tides are bubbling up from the stormwater drains, flooding roads, gardens and apartments. Miami is raising roads, installing pumps and valves and the US Army Corps of Engineers is planning for a 300mm rise in sea level by 2045 at the Kennedy Space Centre further up the coast at Cape Canaveral.

Barack Obama has said that if sea-level-rise, caused by global warming, is a reality; “South Florida is ground zero”. After Guangzhou, in China, South Florida has the highest value of assets subject to flooding with less than half a metre of sea level rise.

Despite these environmental threats the Miami Metropolitan Area is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the US, with, at present, 25,000 new condominiums proposed and under construction.

Florida’s governor Rick Scott has warned state workers not to discuss climate change or sea-level-rise and instead to refer to “nuisance flooding” and Florida’s senator the Cuban-American Marco Rubio confidently says, “humans are not responsible for climate change”. Florida has about 1.5million Cuban-Americans, many living in Miami’s “Little Havana.”

America’s first Jewish senator, David Levy Yulle, represented Florida in the nineteenth century. Described as “more Jewish than Tel Aviv” Miami Beach has been a favoured retirement destination for Jews from New York, and Jewish immigrants from both Israel and Russia.

Palm Beach is a favoured retirement destination for the super wealthy. Before being locked away for the biggest fraud in American history Bernie Madoff had a home there and was a member of the Palm Beach Country Club. Donald Trump last year sold a Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovev for $US 95 million.

US president-elect Donald Trump has his beachfront “winter White House”, Mar-a-lago, at Palm Beach West and has taken a “King Canute” position on sea-level-rise, claiming, “global warming is a hoax”, that he is “not a big believer in climate change” and “nobody really knows”; right in the middle of “ground zero” Mar-a-lago is one of the best places in the US to find out though.

Since taking over Mar-a-lago Donald Trump has engaged in series of court actions relating to his property. The first involved a 6m x 9m American flag he put up a 24m pole. Palm Beach regulations limited flagpoles to 13m and the county charged him with violating their code. Trump, naturally, counter-sued, gained a number of concessions, accepted a 21m flagpole and then dropped his suit.

The second case involved repeated actions by Trump against the Palm Beach County to stop noisy aircraft from the Palm Beach International Airport from flying over Mar-a-lago. Trump went so far as to charge the US Federal Aviation Administration with deliberately and maliciously directing aircraft over his property. In 2015 the judge ruled against Trump’s arguments but since winning the American presidency in 2016 Trump can now make Mar-a-lago a no fly zone for reasons of national security – and because he is now the president he can fly a flag as big as he likes!

Donald Trump may be ideally suited to lead the American empire hell bent on consumption at the expense of the environment, but can he hold back the tide at Pahayokee?

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Palestine

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

map Palestine

The millisphere of Palestine (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea) is the habitat of approximately 13 million people; roughly half of them are Arab and the other half Jewish. The West Bank and Gaza have about 4.5 million people (including more than half a million Jewish settlers) and Israel has another 8.5 million (Jews and Arabs).

About a 100 years ago the population of Palestine was about 10 per cent Jewish, and in 1947, before the creation of the modern state of Israel, there were just fewer than two million people in Palestine, of whom about 30 per cent were Jewish.

The Christmas Eve 2016 United Nations resolution, co-sponsored by New Zealand, censuring Israel for continuing to build settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, has rekindled debate about the feasibility of a two-state solution.

In 2004 the American Rand Corporation undertook a feasibility study called “the Arc,” which visualised a Palestinian state, linking Gaza with the West Bank.

The United Nations is predicting that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020 unless Israel allows urgent infrastructure repairs. In millisphere terms the numbers work for this two-state solution, but it is unlikely to happen under the present Netanyahu Israeli administration.

A geophysical two-state solution, dividing the water catchments into two, one draining west into the Mediterranean and the other east into the Dead Sea, once again satisfies the millisphere population requirements but confronts problematic water politics (the Israelis control all the water).

Theoretically, one could divide Palestine into two millispheres: one for Jews and one for Arabs, but in practical terms these peoples are too mixed together for that.

The only other solution for peace is for everyone to learn to live together in one state, but this would require the Zionists to give up on their ideal of an exclusively Jewish state.

In the late 19th century, in the Russian empire, after suffering a series of pogroms at the hands of Orthodox Christian Russians, there was a debate among Russian Jews about organised emigration. Locations such as Siberia and Uganda were considered but eventually the USA and Israel were chosen as destinations.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli president to have been born in Israel, the rest have been immigrants.

Both sides of Netanyahu’s family originated in the Russian empire, one side going early on, directly from Belarus, before Israel existed as a state, the other side went via the US. The Netanyahus represent the new demography of Palestine, religiously Jewish but genetically Slavic and with American connections.

This stream of emigrants from Eastern Europe continues to this day. Under Israel’s “law of return” anybody with one Jewish grandparent can automatically claim Israeli citizenship for his or her family on arrival.

Unemployed Ukrainians are today choosing to start a new life as settlers in the Palestinian occupied territories, encouraged by the Israeli state. Meanwhile there is no “law of return” for the approximately five million Palestinian refugees, two million in the occupied territories and another three million in Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon.

After the Christmas Eve UN resolution (referred to by Prime Minister Netanyahu as a “declaration of war on Israel”), the New Zealand Jewish Council has called on the governments of New Zealand and Israel to work together to keep the Israeli embassy in Wellington open. Not missing the business opportunity, Jewish Council spokeswoman Juliet Moses said the embassy played a vital role in facilitating business links and that Israel had much to offer New Zealand in the fields of security and counter-terrorism.

In 2007 Israel handled 10 per cent of the global arms and security trade and in 2014 was the world’s sixth-largest arms exporter.

Not bad for a country with 0.1% of the world’s population. Israel continues to be the USA’s single largest military aid recipient – on average about $US 3billion (4.30b) a year. Warfare is big business.

Religion lies at the very heart of the Palestinian conflict. Monotheism (there is only one god, and it’s my god) easily leads to the creation of “the other”, as the Christian Palestinian philosopher Edward Said pointed out.

Non-monotheism on the other hand recognises that there is my god, and your god and his and her gods, and they are all different, so let’s get on with the job at hand.

Thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal would be good places to start and $US 3billion a year would go a long way to rebuild bombed-out Gaza.

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Cuba

                            Fidel Castro (1926 – 2016)

When news came out that Fidel Castro had died I got a call from my friend Blackie in Auckland. It has been a sad year for us baby boomers of a certain cultural bent – David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and now Fidel.

In the ‘90s Blackie had worked as a “cowboy carpenter” in Canada and had flown down to Cuba for some holiday sun. “It reminded me of my youth in Northland in the ‘50s,” he said when I asked him about his impressions. “The Cubans I met spoke highly of Fidel and were proud that they had seen off America.” We agreed that Donald Trump’s characterisation of Castro as a “brutal dictator” was predicably shallow and hugely ironic given American dictatorial intervention in Cuban affairs for more than a century.

The flash point for the Spanish-American war was the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour in 1898. The Americans claimed it was a Spanish mine, but in all probability it was an accidental gas explosion in the coalbunker, igniting the ship’s magazine. “Remember the Maine, down with Spain,” crowed the American media, alleging sabotage and a reason to go to war with Spain and invade Cuba. It was a bit like the “weapons of mass destruction” ruse used by George Bush to invade Iraq.

The defeat of Spain lead eventually to Cuban independence (actually an American protectorate) with the USA awarding itself the lease of a small port in Guantanamo Bay for a coal-bunking station and for “no other use.” Since the 1959 revolution Cuba has disputed American claims to “Gitmo.” Every year America sends a cheque for the lease – which the Cubans decline to bank. Before Fidel, Cuba was described as a brutal kleptocracy with links to American organised crime.

In 1961, CIA trained mercenaries, supported by B52 bombers from Florida, invaded Cuba at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) south of Havana. Partly due to President Kennedy loosing his nerve and calling off air support the Cuban Army defeated the invaders. America retaliated by locking into place a complete embargo on Cuba for the next fifty years

Under Barrak Obama there has been a softening of US relations towards Cuba. American tourists are now allowed to travel there and George Bush before him allowed US food exports to Cuba. A majority of Americans now favour normalising relations with Cuba, but Donald Trump doesn’t.

Tourism is now Cuba’s number one foreign currency earner. There are two currencies in Cuba, CUCs (for tourists) and CUPs (Cuban Pesos). There are about 25 Pesos to the CUC and there is talk about unifying the two currencies sometime soon. Remittances from the two million Cuban Americans (1.4million in Florida) amount to nearly $US 3 billion per year.

I spoke with Charlotte, a young New Zealand backpacker who had visited Cuba the month before Fidel died. “It was like no other country I have visited, old cars, not many goods in the shops, no advertising, no media celebrities, Fidel is their hero not the Kardashians,” she told me, but things were changing, there was now Internet. “In a park, at night, for a couple of CUCs, I bought a black market password which got me onto WiFi, it was like buying drugs,” she laughed.

Beverley, from Whanganui, who takes tour groups to Cuba, had also noticed changes. “Before people were allowed to open restaurants and takeaways in their own houses there was no rubbish, no plastic in the street, now there is, it’s sad.” She told me what the others had told me. Cuba was safe for travellers and that all Cubans loved Fidel and were proud of their socialist country. “I have a real soft spot for the Cuban people, the music, the relaxed way of life, I hope it all works out for them,” she concluded.

It is predicted that next year Raul Castro will step down and be replaced by Miguel Diaz Canel, who is seen as a pragmatic moderniser. Some worry that there will not be enough money, some that there will be too much, too fast. Some say that meaningful change can only be equivalent to another revolution.

There are a number of pessimistic scenarios: rape by the United States of America (again), theft by the communist party oligarchy (as in the USSR), hyperinflation, armed Cuban Americans led by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio claiming their lost property back and Havana turns into another Miami.

Optimists pray for a soft landing and sketch out a more hopeful scenario: normalisation with America, a high-speed car-ferry to Key West in Florida (140km from Mariel), creative and meaningful work to progress careers, building on Cuban advances in health and education, tourism based on their built heritage and their natural environment – preserved by Fidel’s conservation initiatives.

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Los Angeles

The Millisphere of LA

By my definition a millisphere is a “sphere of interest” of one thousandth of the total world population; a region of roughly 7 million, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million, people. I use it as a “lens,” a human geography model, through which to attempt to make sense of the world.

In a previous column I had sketched out the millisphere of Te Moananui, covering all the islands of the Pacific. In that column I incorrectly stated that Los Angeles was now the world’s largest Polynesian city, fact checking revealed that Auckland still holds that record.

Los Angeles is one of about 40 millispheres fronting onto Te Moananui, 20 to the East and 20 to the West.

Los Angeles County (population around 10 million) has the second largest urban population (after New York) in the USA and owed its initial 20th century growth spurt to the extraction of oil in California; but it was the Second World War that made it what it is today.

During the Second World War, Los Angeles was home to six of the USA’s major aircraft manufacturers. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen or dreamed possible,” commented one general after the war.

That Los Angeles has an African American population has its foundation with the 300,000 black workers brought from the American South to work the LA munitions factories during the Second World War.

Both Lockheed and Martin, later to merge and form Lockheed Martin, the world largest arms manufacturer, were started in LA. The worlds second largest firm, Northrop Grumman, is based in LA.

Excluding China, the world’s arms producers’ total sales in 2013 were somewhere between $US four and seven billion, with six American companies in the top ten.

Lockheed Martin, a sponsor of the “NZ Defence Industry Assn Conference,” in Auckland last week, employs 125,000 (security cleared) workers worldwide and in New Zealand Lockheed Martin have 200 staff embedded in NZ military bases, undertaking prosaic work such as the $446 million upgrade on Te Mana and Te Kaha frigates, and weapon and instrument repair; as well as wiring us into the “five eyes” cyber-surveillance infrastructure run out of Pearl Harbour.

“With today’s attacks, you are clueless about who did it or when they will strike again. It is not cyber-war but cyber-terrorism,” said Eugene Kaspersky, an American Internet security firm CEO describing this new form of warfare. The United States has been both a victim and an agent of cyber-attacks.

Arms manufacture has been described as state sponsored research and development and a Keynesian stimulus to the wider economy, this is certainly true of the USA, it’s what built Los Angeles.

Arms manufacture is big business and they amass export earnings for their host state by selling their wares to the developing world.

One theory on the development of the Chinese economy, links its rise to the Vietnam War in the ‘70s. The shipping container was in its infancy until the US Defence Department gave it the 8ftx8ftx10ft ISO standard for a trial run from Los Angeles to Saigon to supply the American forces in Vietnam.

Within a decade the standardised shipping container had gone global, in turn distributing Chinese manufactured goods to a now global market.

In 2015 Long Beach and Los Angeles were America’s largest container ports, but globally they were only 16th and 18th; most of the rest being in Asia, with Shanghai as number one.

The idea of warfare driving cultural development is not new. That the Scientific Revolution happened Europe in the seventeenth century and not somewhere else was, some have suggested, because of Europe’s peculiar geography of competing waring states.

Violent deaths in European wars peaked in the 20th century with death rates of between 10 and 20 million per year during the Second World War, which was then followed by a long period of peace (in terms of the numbers of deaths).

These days globalisation has produced so many shared interests in trade and finance that states prefer to go to arbitration than to war. There are now remarkably few wars between states. Conflicts are now civil wars and these conflicts within states kill fewer people than war between states.

In 2011 the world’s three deadliest conflicts were in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan but deaths in those conflicts were far fewer than the murders carried out in Mexico’s drug wars with America being the main buyer of the drugs and the seller of the arms. The street gangs of LA are a legend in that ‘plaza’.

The arms industry continues to move with the times; now there is growth to be had as the state polices its own citizens in an increasingly, militarised, American way.

Just as we got used to helicopters and black-clad, para-military NZ police with all the latest equipment swooping on the Kim Dotcom mansion in Auckland (on behalf of the Hollywood) they were doing the same (minus the helicopters) to our local criminal family in Abbot Street in Gonville.

’High intensity policing’ and ‘low intensity warfare’ is threatening to merge, at least in LA. The US Army Medical Corps has its training hospital in South LA because of the nationally high numbers of gun shot wounds presenting there.

All the while Hollywood, once again based in LA, presents a constant stream of propaganda, a summary of which is: a gun solves all problems.

What America now needs to consider in its “War on Terror”. How could you wage war on an abstract noun and how could you ever declare victory?

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Syria (part two)

Asi, Halab, Furat, Rojava – and the three-step peace plan for Syria.

Imaginary speech to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nation Security Council, in our speech last week we said that the conflict in Syria was a proxy war between Russia and America. In this our second speech, we declare once again that empires cause war and we put forward a peace plan based on this supposition.

The first step of our peace plan we call “Russki and Yankee go home.” Russia must give up its Mediterranean naval and air bases in Latakia and withdraw from Syria. The United States has military personnel stationed in 133 countries around the world and it is high time for them to all go home, starting with those in the Middle East. All other member states of the United Nations must then halt arms sales to the various parties to the Syrian conflict.

The second step we call the “Millistate solution,” based on a proposal by the Marquis of Bath: that to avoid warring empires the world should consist of one thousand roughly equal population states. This means the creation of states with an average population of around seven million people.

The third step we call the “Bio-region solution.” When drawing the boundaries of these new “millistates” we should attempt to follow geophysical boundaries not geopolitical ones – ideally water catchments and river systems. We propose redrawing the map of Syria into the separate regions where the various factions have dug in and ground to a halt. Some of these millistates will straddle the borders of neighbouring countries.

The Asi River catchment and Damascus together form the millistate of Asi. It includes the Russian base at Latakia and a small piece of Turkey that the Asi flows through on its last few kilometres to the Mediterranean. Safely wrapped around their ally “sister Lebanon” Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite, Shia aligned clan can remain in charge and the military bases in Latakia can be converted into holiday parks for sun starved Russian tourists.

Halab (Aleppo) was the Mediterranean terminus of the Silk route from China. When the Ottoman Empire was split up, after the First World War, the region around Aleppo was divided between Turkey and Syria. Restored Halab would have a connection to the sea at Iskenderun (in Turkey) and Aleppo would again be a terminus for highways leading north, south, east and west. The bombing of Aleppo must cease immediately and interim power should devolve to the people who have been driving the ambulances, staffing the hospitals, reconnecting the power, water and sewage and keeping the roads open (whether they be Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew or Kurd).

Terrorism is a consequence of the Syrian war; it did not cause it. Maps of ISIS held territory show lines through the Syrian Desert that are either roads or the Euphrates River (al Furat). Sunni tribes all the way from Jarabulus on the Turkish border to Ramadi and Fallujah near Baghdad largely control the millistate of Furat. The withdrawal of Assad’s forces from their last base in Dayr az Zawr would give the Sunni tribes control of this stretch of the Euphrates straddling the Sykes-Picot on the Iraq/Syria border.

North of Furat, on the border with Turkey, is the semi-autonomous region the Kurds call Rojava. There are about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, enough for six or seven millistates on their own. History has drawn the red lines of national borders through the middle of their homelands, which straddle the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The Syrian army has all but withdrawn from Rojava and the Kurds there should be left to manage their own affairs – as they do in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

Mr Chairman, members of the Security Council, our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. How right she is.

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Syria (part one)

Fred’s speech to the United Nations about the war in Syria

Mr Chairman

This speech marks the end of the two-year period in which New Zealand has been one of the ten elected members of the United Nations Security Council.

Last year New Zealand pointed out that the Security Council is an institution with failings. This year we go further and call the United Nations Security Council a failed institution. The problem is a structural one. The power of veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), merely because they were victors of the Second World War, means that the P5 negotiate positions before engaging us, the ten elected members, and that no action is taken if any one of the permanent five does not agree. This extraordinary imbalance of power is what is preventing action on Syria.

New Zealand challenges the authority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council for reasons other than structural ones. The Russian Federation was not one of the winners of the Second World War, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who helped defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, therefore we challenge the right of Russia to be a permanent member of the security council.

Equally we question the right of the United States of America to still be a permanent member. The Security Council was originally set up to resolve conflicts and prevent wars such as we are seeing today in the Syria. Since the Second World War the USA has developed a massive global arms industry that has an economic interest in fuelling conflict, therefore we believe that America has lost any moral right to a permeant seat.

In summary New Zealand believes that the superpowers are part of the problem; that what we are seeing in Syria today is actually a proxy-war between Russia and America – the shared rationale being, to quote Henry Kissenger, “he who controls oil controls the world.”

Our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Some of the causes for the war in Syria go can be traced back to the First World War and the division of the Ottoman Empire, but there are others. Resource depletion from overpopulation is one – although the Syrian birth rate has fallen from seven children per woman in the1960s to three at the present day. From 2006 to 2009 Syria experienced its worst drought in living memory resulting in a million pastoralists moving to the towns and cities, joining the 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq that Syria was already hosting. This contributed to overcrowding, worsening unemployment and rising tensions.

The first thing that is required on the ground is a nationwide ceasefire. The main suppliers of arms to the conflict are in order of magnitude, starting with the largest: America, Russia, China and then Israel (recently moving from position six to position four). If the flow of arms from the superpowers, either directly or indirectly, to the various factions in Syria were to stop then the conflict would simply run out of bullets and the process of reconstruction could begin – it is estimated that there are over a thousand different armed militias with constantly shifting alliances operating in Syria today.

The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground is compounded by various religious disputes. As the numerous sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam embrace fundamentalism and then turn inhumanly on one another it is useful to remember that Moses, Jesus and Mohamed were all Middle Eastern Semites.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nations Security Council, thank you for giving us the time to present what we think are the causes of the awful conflict in Syria. Next week we will outline our plan to bring peace.

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Helvetia

In this rapidly overpopulating planet it helps to put the geo-political focus on population instead of focusing, as the media so often does, on celebrities, the nation state, warfare and the global economy. For this I use the lens of the “millisphere” (a region with roughly one thousandth of the world’s population).

As my millisphere analysis of “Palestine” showed, this model can confront nationalism and religion and sometimes meets head-on deeply held beliefs about the nature of the state and god.

Our friends Ross and Marie (ex communards from the Ahu Ahu Ohu) have just returned from visiting “Helvetia” – the old name for Switzerland. With a population of 8.4 million, it is a state that also qualifies as a millisphere.

Ross described it as a “beautiful country, like the Southern Alps on steroids, and very ordered.” As a timber miller and a greenie, Ross was surprised by the number of small sawmills and impressed with the management of their selectively logged mountain forests and the high alpine pastures.

They stayed in a typical village, “bigger than Waverley but smaller than Hawera”. High tech wood burners heating the houses are so efficient that “all you see is a little plume of steam and the air in the valleys is sparkling clean”. This winter the lakes froze over for the first time in decades.

Helvetia is ranked first for protecting the environment and the Swiss are reputedly top recyclers. Switzerland is the world’s wealthiest country per head of population and has the most dense rail network in the EU, 100 percent of which is electrified.

Helvetia has a long history of armed neutrality. There is compulsory military service and all reservists are issued with a gun from age 18 until 34. Referenda to disband the military in 1989 and 2001 were firmly defeated.

Switzerland was the birthplace of the Red Cross and Albert Einstein. It is where LSD, Velcro and the World Wide Web were invented and is the home of Nestle, Novatis, Credit Suisse, FIFA, the IOC and the ILO.

Their GST is 33 percent (compared with 15 percent in NZ). Food and housing are expensive and unemployment is very low, as is their tax rate. Last year a referendum on introducing UBI (universal basic income) was defeated.

Their constitution is that of a federation of “cantons” which, technically, have not handed over power to the centre and they are famous for “direct democracy” and have a referendum for nearly everything. Helvetia has an upper house of representatives from the cantons and a lower house elected from the general population.

In 1920 the League of Nations was formed in Geneva, which, after New York, has the United Nations’ second largest office and is home to the WHO, UNHRC and the WTO; but it was only in 2002 that the Swiss finally decided, by referendum, to become a full member of the UN, on condition that they are exempt from military requirements.

The Swiss were foundation members of the European Free Trade Association but have consistently voted not to join the EU and to retain their own currency. Through bilateral treaties they have minimal trade barriers to the EU and in 2009 joined the Schengen Zone, which allows for free movement across European borders.

Researching this column I talked to Sandra and Azian, both from Switzerland and now residents of Whanganui. I put it to them that “Helvetia” was an exemplar as far a well-run millisphere went.

Neutrality in an increasingly connected world was like balancing the Yin and the Yang Sandra thought; on the one hand maintaining independence and on the other being a global player. Like the USA, UK and Europe, Switzerland is experiencing rising xenophobia and nationalism.

Between 2012 and 2013 Switzerland took in 30,000 refugees. For a country with twice the population as New Zealand they take forty times as many refugees! Twenty percent of the Swiss population are immigrants but in 2014 a referendum to restrict the numbers of new immigrants was narrowly passed.

Switzerland has taken many Tibetan refugees form Northern India, settling then in the high plateau, and the Dalai Lama regularly visits this Tibetan enclave.

Azian thought that their high standard of living wasn’t as green as it appeared on the surface. Selling second hand cars to Poland “isn’t recycling” and the quest for material goods just made the Swiss unhappy and grumpy. “Too much all for one,” she concluded, referring to the Swiss motto: “all for one and one for all.”