18 Comments

1. Carlo Fusco:

   I would like to point out this nice research work available on line (*): “Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities Before the 20th Century”:

   (*) http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm

   MODERATOR’S NOTE: These figures are tainted by the standard Western Cold War lies that Mao killed (now) 40 million (tho they then say from famine, which happened in China before Mao with deadly regularity) and the Stalin figure of 20 million which is cribbed repeatedly from Robert Conquest’s manufactured estimates, commissioned by William Randolph Hearst (a rabid asnd very active anticommunist).

   The reason this is important is that ths kind of body-count inflation (or in the case of Iraqi deaths, deflation) is still developed as a stock claim by Western propagandists posing as journalists. Once we’ve determined that any leader around the world is “bad,” then inflating the deaths under that leader by any means necessary is seen as okay… because those who fail our moral litmus tests (real or artificial) are seen to “have it coming.” Unfortunately, lies remain lies.

   Purging Stalin (Alexander Cockburn, New Statesman and Society, 3/3/1989)

   Marching arm in arm with the credulity of US journalists still swallowing
   nonsense from the State Department and Pentagon about “exposing the central
   front” to Soviet blitzkrieg, is their willingness to take at face value
   almost anything they are told by intellectuals in Moscow, so long as it is
   somehow associated with “reform” (which to American journalists means, in
   the last analysis, restoration of capitalist relations).

   And in these heady days in Moscow it seems that some of these Soviet
   intellectuals will say anything they think Americans want to hear. A
   friend of mine recently returned from a conference in Hawaii, where American
   historians associated with “revisionist” readings of the origins of the
   Cold War were increasingly irked to hear Soviet participants piously
   echoing all the most hawkish American constructions of Soviet behaviour in the
   postwar period, to the tremendous pleasure of the American right-wingers in
   attendance. At this stage in the process of _glasnost_, these Soviets
   plainly felt that any defence of Soviet deeds in the pre-Gorbachev years
   amounted to a betrayal of the new thinking.

   At the start of February, the tabloid _Argumenti i Fakti_ reported that
   the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev had proposed that Stalin’s victims
   amounted to some 20 million. From Moscow, the _New York Times’_
   correspondent Bill Keller relayed this to his newspaper which on 4 February
   ran a front-page headline announcing “Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million
   Died as Victims of Stalin”, with the lead paragraph reiterating Medvedev’s
   claim that “about 20 million died in labour camps, forced collectivisation,
   famine and executions”.

   To me, the total figure seemed to have an insouciant roundness and also a
   suspect symmetry with the total - also 20 million - normally reckoned for
   Soviet losses in the war against Hitler. Looking through Medvedev’s
   breakdown one could perceive that the word “million” really meant “a lot”,
   with no substantive precision beyond the vague imputation of multitude. As
   relayed by Keller these volumes were expressed as “one million imprisoned
   or exiled from 1927 to 1929″, or “nine or 10 million of the more prosperous
   peasants driven from their lands”, and so on. In the end we were left with
   an overall figure of 40 million who, on Medvedev’s account, had an awful or
   terminal time of it between 1927 and 1953, with 20 million actually killed.

   All US reports of Medvedev’s estimates told their readers that his was the
   most “precise” accounting thus far. No newspaper or TV programme that I
   saw, rang up any of the relevant scholars to get their reaction. When I
   started to do so myself, I was interested to find well-qualified historians
   and demographers in the US who regard Medvedev’s claims as absurd. Sheila
   Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin,
   told me there was “no serious basis for his calculations” and that
   privately some Soviet demographers and historians find Medvedev’s work in
   this area embarrassingly bad. She gave me a couple of examples to explain
   why she thought Medvedev’s numbers ridiculous.

   Medvedev concludes that nine to 11 million prosperous peasants were driven
   from their lands with another two to three million arrested or exiled in
   the forced collectivisation of the early 1930s. But, Fitzpatrick says,
   Medvedev makes no distinction between those who left their villages
   voluntarily and those who left by force. This was the era of
   industrialisation and many of Medvedev’s millions were moving to the town.
   Medvedev also bases his figures on the assumption that the average peasant
   family in the late 1920s had eight members, whereas in fact five was the
   normal size. Fitzpatrick also cited the famous conversation between
   Churchill and Stalin as another flimsy source, often used by some to claim
   that Stalin told Churchill that ten million peasants died in
   collectivisation. The actual passage in _The Hinge of Fate_ makes it clear
   Stalin was talking about the total number of peasants he was dealing with,
   not those who died. According to Fitzpatrick, a respected estimate,
   concurred with by several historians in the West, is that of the historian
   Victor P Danilov, who recently wrote in _Pravda_ that approximately three
   to four million died in the famine of the early 1930s. But where does that
   leave us on the matter of the purges?

   In his 1946 survey, _The Population of the Soviet Union_, the demographer
   Frank Lorimer studied data from the Soviet census of 1925 and 1939 and all
   available information on fertility and mortality between these two dates.
   He calculated that what demographers call “excess deaths”, that is, in
   Lorimer’s method, a comparison of the reported total population in 1939
   with the expected population at that date - given the count in 1925 and
   everything known about fertility, mortality and emigration between those
   years - amounted to somewhere between 4.5 million and 5 million, though
   this total included perhaps several hundred thousand emigrants, such as
   those Central Asian nomads moving into Sinkiang to avoid collectivisation.

   In their 1979 volume _How the Soviet Union is Governed_, Professors Jerry
   Hough and Merle Fainsod generally supported Lorimer’s calculation and
   concluded that the more extreme western estimates “cannot be sustained”.
   Rather, “a smaller - but still horrifying - number” of “maybe some 3.5
   million” emerges as the direct or indirect result of collectivisation in
   the early 1930s. With respect to the purges of 1937 and 1938, Hough and
   Fainsod again criticise excessive Western estimates, and report that on the
   evidence of extant demographic data, “the number of deaths in the purge
   would certainly be placed in the hundreds of thousands rather than in
   excess of a million”. Indeed, “a figure in the low hundreds of thousands
   seems much more probable than one in the high hundreds of thousands, and
   even George Kennan’s estimate of ‘tens of thousands’ is quite conceivable,
   maybe even probable.”

   At the far end of the spectrum from Hough and Fainsod, is Robert Conquest
   who had reckoned in excess of 20 million deaths under Stalin before 1939.
   In his essay _The Stalin Question Since Stalin_, Bukhtain’s [sic -
   Bukharin?] biographer, Stephen Cohen cites Conquest’s figure as
   “conservative”, without mentioning lower numbers by other scholars and
   concludes by saying: “Judged only by the number of victims, and leaving
   aside important differences between the two regimes, Stalinism created a
   holocaust greater than Hitler’s”.

   In this decade the most significant scholarly battle on the subject has
   been waged in the pages of the _Slavic Review_ between Stephen Wheatcroft
   and Steven Rosefielde, with Wheatcroft writing in 1985 that “these wildly
   unscholarly estimates [such as Cohen’s] serve neither science nor
   morality”, and “It is no betrayal of thm [the victims] nor an apologia for
   Stalin to state that there is no demographic evidence to indicate a
   population loss of more than six million between 1926 and 1939, or more
   than three to four million in the famine. Scholarship must be guided by
   reason and not emotion.”

   In a widely noted essay, also in _Slavic Review_ for 1985, the demographers
   Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver supported Wheatcroft, reckoning “excess
   deaths” between 1926 and 1939, to those alive in 1926, at a median figure
   of 3.5 million. Conquest, now at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, says
   that Medvedev’s numbers are “obviously in the right range” though “perhaps
   he spread them wrong”, and “I’m not sure where he gets them from”. He
   slighted Anderson and Silver’s work as the product of demography rather
   than sovietology, and derided Hough and Fainsod’s figures as “improbable”.
   From the University of Michigan, Anderson responds that: “Conquest wouldn’t
   know a number of it bit him.” She thinks Medvedev’s computations
   “ludicrous”.

   No doubt some will be eager to conclude that the foregoing is somehow an
   attempt to exonerate Stalin, dismiss the purges as got up by western
   propaganda. The following observation by Hough and Fainsod is salutary:
   “Some persons seem instinctively to object to [our] figures on the grounds
   that the Great Purge was so horrible that the number of deaths cannot have
   been so ‘low’. We must become so insensitive to the value of human life,
   however, that we dismiss tens of thousands of deaths as insignificant and
   need to exaggerate the number by ten, 20, 30, 40 times to touch our
   feelings of horror.”

   The task is obviously to arrive at truth, but many such estimates evidently
   have a regulatory ideological function with an exponential momentum so
   great that now any computation that does not soar past ten million is
   somehow taken as evidence of being soft on Stalin. One can find an analogy
   in current writing on the French Revolution, where the passionately anti-
   Jacobin Rene Sedillot has produced a book addressing the matter of the
   Revolution’s (and Counter-Revolution’s, though it’s never quite put like
   that) human cost where he boils up, by very questionable means, a casualty
   figure far in excess of all previous estimates.

   The symmetry that calculations, such as Medvedev’s, seek to establish
   between Stalin and Hitler performs similar injury to history. Hitler
   wanted to exterminate the Jews and the gypsies, and though accuracy is
   important it does not alter the moral scale of this horror one iota to
   propose that, in pursuit of this design, Hitler may have, in reality,
   killed a million less or a million more than the conventional estimate.

   Evil though he was, Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide,
   and to say that he and Hitler had the same project in mind (or as right-
   wing German historians now argue, that somehow Lenin and Stalin put Hitler
   up to it) is to do disservice to history and to truth.

   21 March 2007, 6:49 am

2. stacia:

   can you define what you mean by ‘civilization’?
   what point in human history is the marker for when civilization, as you are defining it, started?
   at what point in the transition from market town to imperial city, did ‘civilization’ occur?

   21 March 2007, 9:37 pm

3. R.S. Morris:

   I’m reading Vol. 1 of Derrick Jensen’s “End Game” right now, and he has a pretty nice definition:
   [paraphrase]
   Civilization is what happens when people start moving into cities, where they cease to live according to the sustainability of the land base, requiring the importation of “resources” (i.e., food, water, slaves, etc.) in greater and greater quantities in order to maintain a particular “civilized” lifestyle.

   Randy

   22 March 2007, 1:09 pm

4. DeAnander:

   @stacia — all the authors cited above would offer different definitions. I was inviting FS readers to contribute some of their/our own…

   if I had to make an attempt at a consensus or synthesis of the arguments I’ve been reading of late, I would say that an imperial city, the civitas, exists when there is a permanently-inhabited urban area (usually with monumental construction), managed by an elite who stockpile or otherwise control the food and/or water supply for a surrounding tributary region. in other words when the balance of power has shifted from the rural producer to a managerial elite living in an urban (possibly fortified) concentration and exacting tribute from a periphery. tribute has replaced sharing, and concentrated authority and expertise has replaced the more fluid forms of leadership and collective action observed in pre-imperial people.

   but I don’t think we can pick an arbitrary threshold and say simply, “this right here is the tipping point at which human life becomes ‘civilised’” — any more than we can pick a specific moment in time and say, “this is the point at which the marriage or relationship became abusive.” people’s movements for producer autarky, rebellions against elite hierarchies, etc. are endemic throughout history; the struggle against the imperial model is implicit in the imperial model, and there have been a lot of wrestling matches back and forth across the borderland between, say, the free self-organised market town and the imperial capital or citadel.

   the town as a symbiotic rather than parasitical institution recurs as an historical theme — Bookchin is particularly interested in the history of workers’ communes and Free Cities. perhaps the moment we are interested in is the moment of imbalance, when symbiosis starts to morph into parasitism as something — communications? centralisation? a standing army? techne? — gives the urban elite a decisive edge over everyone else. Bookchin speculates at length about the evolution of the culture of domination and authority, and how it might have appeared slowly, over many millennia, as a series of mutations of earlier less hierarchical social forms. gerontocracy becoming patriarchy becoming kingship becoming empire, that sort of thing.

   maybe it doesn’t matter exactly when we “went wrong” — we can’t go back to that point in our prehistory and take a different fork in the road. but we can critique and deconstruct the mythologies of Civilisation, that smug sense of superiority that is inculcated from earliest life into the urban dweller, into the industrialised Westerner, into Anglos, etc. (and in doing so we can undermine much of the idiotic self-justification of colonialism)… and we can analyse the physical energy dynamics of modern cities, the roots of urbanisation, patterns of land use, and the implications of these things on such issues as food security, biodiversity, energy security, public health, democratic process, elite accumulation, foreign policy, etc.

   the fundamental assumption of modern times is that modern times are in every way far better than any times that went before, that the city is far better than the country, that the more removed we are from the biotic world and its processes the better off we are.

   needless to say, the hundreds of millions of people whose lives and cultures were extinguished to create this “modern” society might disagree if they were still around to do so (and they did disagree at the time, sometimes with desperate heroism in defence of their lands and lifeways). in an epoch where it seems pretty clear that we can’t afford — in any realistic ecological or thermodynamic sense — to continue on the path of industrial modernism, there is a Great Fear of “devolving,” slipping backwards into a lifeway that many people sum up as “shivering in the dark,” a kind of composite nightmare/cartoon of backbreaking labour, indentured peonage, hunger, cold, discomfort, illiteracy, boredom, “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. but is that an accurate portrait of “uncivilised” life?

   while this cartoon represents folk-memory of famine and political oppression in feudal Europe (which was already many-times-over colonised by Civilisation), the question remains whether it accurately represents every preindustrial reality; and whether “Civilised” preindustrial reality was any better (produced any more general happiness or stability) than “primitive” preindustrial reality. we are constantly told by those who benefit most from our current system, that without them and their methods and technologies, without Civilisation, without Authority, we would all be miserable, hungry, and poor. yet Anglo explorers in the earliest days of contact with indigenes in Africa and the Americas often marvelled in their diaries and journals at the health, beauty, and apparent happiness of the “native” cultures they then proceeded to “improve” and “uplift” into extinction. and today, our “cutting edge” ultramodern ‘permaculture’ and the “sustainability revolution” it promises are, basically, a scientifically-informed re-evaluation of cultivation methods that were well known to indigenous peoples a millennium and more ago… an admission, essentially, that the “efficient” agricultural methods on which our Civilisation was founded — and by implication the whole culture of Taylorism and centralised control that they both enable and perpetuate — were a big mistake.

   something is fishy about the triumphalist Story of Civilisation that I was taught in school. I’m trying to figure it out. if it has brought us to our current perilous situation, then something is really wrong at the heart of the model. we don’t end up heading for a brick wall at top speed and in full denial (as imho we are) w/o a long history of some kind of bad reasoning leading up to the crash.

   22 March 2007, 5:26 pm

5. stacia:

   although I agree with the critique of civilization—it’s a big target, after all—the problem I have with the critique is a feminist one.
   I think the problem (and the solution) is more with oppression than with civilization. If the pre-civilized culture, be it hunter/gatherer or agrarian, had a gendered division of labor, it carried within it the seeds of the catastrophe we are currently in. Where there is division of labor, there is value, there is more important work and less important work, and the people doing the work become more or less important, and the thinking of these people becomes more or less important. Where there is value, there is power. Where there is power, there exists the potential for oppression, for exploitation.
   And there we are, as hunter-gatherers, on the slippery slope toward civilization. It always existed, even when we lived in the trees, even when we huddled in caves, hoping that whatever it was that lived in the back didn’t come out and get us.
   As a woman, I don’t want to go back there, or forward there, either.
   No, thank you.
   And for hunter/gatherers, there was always the Other, the threatening, different Other. And it was all highly gendered. There were wars, there were raids, sometimes over resources, sometimes just because it was time for boys to become men. Just as now, there was attaining manhood by killing other men, by kidnapping ‘their’ prized possessions, aka women.
   No, thank you.
   I’m not making a case that we are better off now than then, or that women are happier now than then. It seems to me that in order to survive, we have to do something not only different than civilization, but different than pre-civilization, too, and that is oppression, which existed in both, and the thing that seems common to all societies is oppression according to gender.
   It seems to me that the sustainability of a culture would depend not only on its ability to stay within the carrying capacity of its environment, but also on its ability to survive external threats, be they human or non-human. If a culture has already divided itself, they are often that much easier to conquer. Their divisions make them weak. It becomes easier for the conquering force to buy one party off or otherwise pit them against each other and take them apart and swallow them. When a community is under attack, fear often makes it conservative. They don’t ask the less-valued people to the table to figure out a response, but stick rigidly to the dominant group’s old ways of doing things, effectively shortchanging themselves of half or more of the community’s intelligence, just when they need it the most.
   The experience of oppression, both as perpetrator and as victim (and we’re all both), is not just theoretical or intellectual but emotional. Emotion is like epoxy that keeps old thinking in place, often unawarely and despite our best intentions, but how to overcome it is rarely addressed in leftist discourse, probably because we don’t know how, and we probably don’t know how because we don’t value it enough to find out. Emotion is associated with women, or is dismissed as bourgeois navel-gazing, a self-indulgence of the privileged. Fear, confusion, despair, rage, guilt, denial, timidity, numbness, addiction…they make us stupid, they bring down our movements and sabotage our unity.

   23 March 2007, 1:46 am

6. Stan:

   I couldn’t agree more with you, Stacia, on the subject of emotional resonance as that kind of “glue.” I have more than once recommended Linda Kintz’ “Between Jesus and the Market” for treating that very subject with in depth.

   But I think there is a miscommunication going on with regard to the critique of civilization here. No one is idealizing the social relations of the past — I know I’m sure not. And I don’t know of any of us who believe anyone can “return” to times past (however characterized, and I would be careful about generalizing on that account).

   The reason we have to pay attention to those periods, as well as we can with very little understanding of what was likely a hugely complex system even then, is we have to figure out those ways in which — through several epochs of development in several places — human productive activity vis-a-vis the biosphere has seen itself as facing nature as an adversary. There is pretty good evidence that when human societies that use this approach end up destroying their own ecosystems and collapse. These ARE characterized by hierarchical social relations between people that have a determinative effect, ie, capitalism accelerates itself; but that is not the sum of the crisis we are facing right now in the world.

   The problem we are facing right now is that, in conjunction with a population that has leapt to around 7 billion souls, we are watching an unprecedented planetary eco-collapse that is already stranding billions of people on the razor edge of daily survival… assisted, of course, by the global bourgeoisie, BUT…

   …it can be shown that, regardless of changes in other social relations throughout human social evolution, the existence of cities themselves — and moreso the more technologically appointed — is an exploitative relation. The plain fact is we are consuming far, far more than what we can sustain even in the short term, and the city within the “civilization” takes far, far more than its share.

   Those of us who are taking about this are trying to see through to what a post-civilization world might look like, not a pre-civilization world. This one is wrecked, and we have A LOT more people. We can’t industrialize our way out of this dilemma. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says, “No! There are limits to growth, and most of them are behind you already.”

   We might be able to re-tool and re-design our way out, but that depends a lot on issues of political power. And in studying the past, we can see if there are tools and designs that might still work.

   At any rate, this notion about going back to the Ice Age is a straw cave-man.

   I am right with you on gender. The end of patriarchy is a precondition of the revolution.

   23 March 2007, 12:45 pm

7. Randy Morris:

   I think that stacia’s stated concerns probably represent the top “A-list” goal of this forum’s creators, and I appreciate hearing the questions articulated so clearly by stacia—these are questions that need constant reiteration.

   “…the sustainability of a culture would depend not only on its ability to stay within the carrying capacity of its environment, but also on its ability to survive external threats, be they human or non-human.” (stacia)

   This is something I would like to see discussed at length. Internal defense of a “sustainable” culture against predation is one of those seemingly taboo subjects among the pacifist Left. I have strong opinions concerning, but I would much rather hear from a cross-section of contributors here (if the interest exists), especially as it relates to the fine line between “defense” and “right arm of tyranny.”

   I love this place,

   Randy

   23 March 2007, 7:06 pm

8. robert:

   A vector potential has two components. one component is curled the other one is not curled. localize the curled A magnetic vector potential and you will behold the non-curled A potential (free Enegry). A/B Effect. MODERN THERMODYNAMICS by Dilip Kondepudi, Ilya Prigogine. The World problems are non linear is why they wont be solved with a linear adjustment From this infantil materialistic derangement Humanity is ready to Mature Spiritually.In the new Energy from the Vacuum CD Mr. Tom Beaden explains Thermodynamics and the A/B EFFECT. always rcorraljr. (www.cheniere.org)

   24 March 2007, 3:58 am

9. Randy Morris:

   Well Stan, now you know your website has “made it”—you’re getting spammed with ads for perpetual motion machines!

   I guess Viagra just isn’t enough of a miracle for everyone.

   Randy

   25 March 2007, 12:02 pm

10. DeAnander:

    yep, I was surprised that one made it through moderation.

    what amazes me about the perpetual motion / free energy scams is not so much the crankiness of the ideas, but the disturbing fact that our whole economy and economic ideology is based on the same type of magical thinking. they aren’t really cranks — they are right in the mainstream of the culture, just stating the premises a bit more openly and clearly.

    25 March 2007, 3:24 pm

11. Randy Morris:

    …and this is why I love coming here: De shines the light of deconstruction on yet another insidious cliche.

    Thanks for pointing out the connection here—”The Enduring Myth of Perpetual Motion Machines” is something that was ridiculed over and over by faculty at every school I attended, but nobody ever made the leap to compare that fantasy with the equally absurd fantasy that powers our economic ideology.

    Thanks De!

    Randy

    25 March 2007, 5:52 pm

12. DeAnander:

    another kind of magical thinking at work — a cornucopian fantasy for the proles, a cargo cult. [warning: half baked ideas follow…]

    anthropologists have theorised that the cargo cult (and similar phenomena resulting from contact between affluent “civilised” people and pre-imperial people) was a more or less inevitable product of culture shock due to sudden exposure to (apparently) infinite and effortless wealth, plus the “obvious superiority” of the trade goods (stuff which could not be made using the resources and skills of the indigenous people and hence seemed like magic).

    this makes me consider that most people in the affluent countries today do not understand the technologies w/which we are surrounded and on which we depend; we cannot reproduce with our own hands and resources the quality or function of the overwhelming glut of goods on show in storefronts and displayed in advertising. somehow it doesn’t surprise me that we should fall prey to cargo-cult thinking, a symptom of the erosion of autarky and the undermining of the meaning of objects and uses. I don’t recollect Marx and Engels discussing the notion of “use-devalue,” or the depressing devaluation of a cherished possession because a new or improved version is being flaunted at us.

    I suspect that the mystification of production and the “superiority” of mystified objects produces a sense of helplessness, a loss of autarky and a despair that devalues in our own estimation those things we can produce ourselves — this in turn makes us less valuable and respectworthy in our own estimation, fit not to act or produce or create but only to pray and beg for magical largesse from a mystified system, “the man behind the curtain.”

    in other words, at least one element of the cargo cult phenom is not so much intercultural or colonial (though armed might and imperial crime certainly played their part) as industrialism itself vs some core elements of the human experience, i.e. what Veblen calls the “instinct of workman[sic]ship” and Bookchin calls the tradition of usufruct.

    26 March 2007, 5:50 pm

13. Randy Morris:

    This awesome bit in The Onion— http://www.theonion.com/content/infograph/the_secret —
    along with the breathless way everyone talked about it convinced me to take a pass.

    Randy

    27 March 2007, 12:55 am

14. Jewels:

    Ahhhhh, now I see why no one is embracing the truths of “zero point energy” AKA SCALAR energy. It is a MYTH! Alrighty-then. I guess I have been self-deluded all these years I have bene studying the longitudinal waves that Tesla discovered which travel in the vacuum of space.
    But, as I know, he was also mocked way back when!

    As a nurse, I understand the concept of ‘interstitial space.’ It is not real space, per se, but it is a “filler.”
    Once the body dies, that space disappears, and, eventually, the water molecules, etc. One is left with naught but a pile of dust. THAT in itself, is miraculous!

    Miracles are a fact of life. They said no one would ever fly-they did. And are.

    They said we could never accomplish space travel-we did. And still are.

    No one believed in electricity-it is now our modern “standard.”

    NO one could comprehend radio waves and UHF and VHF and even ELF and VLF. My gosh, they’re invisable! But they are real. Or you wouldn’t have a stereo and a big screen TV! And how about the Internet? 50 years ago, could anyone have envisioned this? No way!

    You people are jaded. I have lived almost half a century, and I know of whence I speak. Most discoveries are mocked and disbelieved. Until one sees the results for one’s self.

    I could go on and on..the fact is, that if people don’t understand something, they mock it. I am sorry you cannot get your brains around such a complex subject as E=dc2. It is the power of Time itself…and it is a “miracle!’

    Only problem, it is being used for evil…just as many of us thought. THIS is why our species is doomed to die out, if we don’t wake up to a better reality and a different way of doing things. The Old Ways are killing us!

    Debate that , if you can.

    Oh, BTW, I found your website on CLG…whom I have been contacting re: this powerful tool and its possible ramifications for our future. Now I see why I have been ignored.

    All the brain power in the World cannot suffice…unless thre is imagination. Without imgination, we are stagnant. And, therefore, doomed.

    That is an original concept.

    Jewels

    27 March 2007, 1:55 pm

15. Richard:

    Hi. The reading list is much appreciated. On the topic of “pre-civilization” and feminism and division of labor, I suggest taking a look at the work of Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight, in particular his book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. See a review here:
    http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/Publications/Knight.htm

    I have a question on the topic of the body-count commonly attributed to Stalin’s rule. Thanks for Cockburn’s article, but I note that it was published in 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Is there a recommended book and/or articles published since then that takes into account any declassified Soviet documents, but still supports the lower counts described by Cockburn and the sources he discusses? I ask because I’ve seen people claim that recent disclosures from such Soviet documents only reinforces the earlier claims made by Conquest, etc.

    27 March 2007, 2:53 pm

16. Charles:

    On defintion of swivilization: male supremacist family, private property and the state. The state is special repressive apparatus, standing bodies of armed men that protects private property.

    27 March 2007, 4:02 pm

17. Randy Morris:

    Jewels–

    Please go read the previous essays and posts concerning the laws of thermodynamics and civilization, then come back and let us know if there’s still anything left to debate.

    Or, alternately, you can send me your working perpetual-motion prototype at the following fictitious address:

    Randy Morris
    P.O. Box 666
    Middle-of-nowhere, WY
    87654

    I will be happy to subject your zero-point energy source to a battery of appropriate tests and post my findings here on FS.

    Imagine the glorious possibilities if this claim turns out to be true: no longer will the destruction wreaked by our civilization be constrained by the limited extractive energy sources we now rely upon. With ZERO-POINT ENERGY(tm) we will be able to convert our entire solar system into cheap Taiwanese consumables within a matter of months! INFINITELY FUELED CORPORATE CAPITALISM—YAY!

    /sarcasm off

    Sorry. I’m not really a mean person, I just wanted to express that it doesn’t matter to me if we suddenly find some inexhaustible energy source—that isn’t our salvation. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

    Randy

    29 March 2007, 1:55 pm

18. Effilusly:

    Last night, Georgian troops committed what amounts to an act of aggression against Russian peacekeepers and the civilian population in South Ossetia.
    Please read this http://digg.com/politics/Dmitry_Medvedev_made_a_statement_on_the_situation_in_Ossetia
    You’ve got to know the truth.

    8 August 2008, 4:41 pm

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