Sins of the century: Stolen lives, childhood, dignity and hope in the name of power and money

My last movie trip was tought. For a brain. To digest this injustice which is mostly hidden to “civilised world”.  The Constant Gardener, Invisible Children and The Kite Runner (thanks to oceanshaman for a tip) have one thing in common. Stolen lives, childhood, hope and dignity. Of the whole generations, continents,.. People and kids as collateral damage of power play. Yet every human being has heart and soul, so many dreams, love and hopes within,…are those hope and dreams less worth than western ones? How can we talk about high level of moral values, humanism  and scientific achievements our civilisation has built if small part of human race use other majority as a tool for their own well being? People as predators.

As Baba in The Kite Runner says: “No matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. (..) When you kill a man, you steal a life. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?”

The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener  is a story of African poverty, ruthless exploitation of continent and people in order to maximaze corporations’ profits (in this case Pharmaceutical colonialism), with underlying beautiful love story beetwen Justin and Tessa (Ralph Fiennes  and Rachel Weisz).  Movie is based on John le Carre’s  novel The Constant Gardener. (Trivia: Le Carré published an essay entitled “The United States has gone mad” in The Times in January 2003, protesting against the war in Iraq, saying: “How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history.”)

Movie is directed by Fernando Meirelles  who directed also  Cidade de Deus – City of God . Stunning pictures of landscape and sensitive portrait of suffering and survival of African people who are desparately  waiting for leftovers from rich man’s table. So sad.

INVISIBLE CHILDREN  

At the end of the movie Justin run from rebels who are stealing children.  Wanted to know more about, i found documentary  INVISIBLE CHILDREN  , which really shocked me. Still have picture of those fearful and fearless kids in my head. Made me think how i can help. Cos if this documentary doesn’t move something within people than we are the ones whom this civilisation has stolen the soul not just to African people. Kids as a weapon, kids with weapon (5-12 years old, reminds me on City of God); fearless trained small killing machines. Ruthless power of tribes, fueled by corrupted governments, financed by multinationals and U.N. with the purpose to further exploit African land and people.

See this shocking video and spread the word…

And see the role of US, U.N. and Russia in Africa. Unbelievable! (have African people ever had a possibility to decide for themselves)

 

And it’s getting even nastier. See some article bellow on which big media mostly don’t  pay attention but are crucial to understand what is really going on.

Understanding AFRICOM:
A Contextual Reading of Empire’s New Combatant Command

In early February 2007 the White House finally announced a presidential directive to establish by September 2008 a new unified combatant command with an area of responsibility (AOR) solely dedicated to the African continent. While there had been chatter and debate over a period of years about the form that such a military command should take, the announcement to proceed with centralizing military resources in Africa should not have surprised anyone paying attention for the past seven years 

Pharmaceutical colonialism in Africa

Big drug companies are conducting clinical trials in Africa with no consideration for ethics, the health of patients or the relevance of the drugs to the needs and the pathology of the continent. Nobody is testing traditional medicine to see if it works, and how.

Africa: EPA Means Economic Enslavement 

The new plan of the European Union to have economic agreements with her former colonies has not received much attention in terms of critical analysis especially by the civil society groups and trade union movements. The agreement represents another way of rapaciously and legally exploiting the resources of the third world countries especially Africa where most of the population are living in absolute poverty. In the first place, the goods to be exported to European countries are mostly agricultural produce with little local content and market value while European countries will bring in finished goods which are high valued. This definitely means the continuous underdevelopment of the third world countries. Therefore, there will continuously be wide technology gap, increased trade imbalance and capital flight from the countries.

WTO Proposes Slavery for Africa

“Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory,” Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as “compassionate conservatism” has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or “compassionate slavery,” could be a similar boon to developing ones.

Beutiful african music from The Constant Gardener

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The Kite Runner

With current US politics the future for Afghanistan, Iraq, etc seems no different than African ones. Permanent presence of troops, suportof their corrupted governments and juntas which empowers constant civil wars will leave the countries robed of natural resources, diminishing of local culture and people without a future.

But as Marc Foster  shows in The Kite Runner (based on Khaled Hosseini  book The Kite Runner) behind those games there are real people with real lives, real hopes, real sadness,… They are not a pictures in newspapers; they hope, fear, love, play, …

AFGHANISTAN MISSION CLOSE TO FAILING (Guardian) 29/2/08

After six years of US-led military support and billions of pounds in aid, security in Afghanistan is “deteriorating” and President Hamid Karzai’s government controls less than a third of the country, America’s top intelligence official has admitted.Mike McConnell testified in Washington that Karzai controls about 30% of Afghanistan and the Taliban 10%, and the remainder is under tribal control.

The Afghan government angrily denied the US director of national intelligence’s assessment yesterday, insisting it controlled “over 360” of the country’s 365 districts. “This is far from the facts and we completely deny it,” said the defence ministry.

But the gloomy comments echoed even more strongly worded recent reports by thinktanks, including one headed by the former Nato commander General James Jones, which concluded that “urgent changes” were required now to “prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state”.

  

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

 “City “City of God”… what a name for a place which could not be so radically different than a paradise. This movie (Cidade de Deus) is brilliant in many senses. It shows the favelas in Rio de Janeiro through the eyes of internal observer. Who lived there. No preaching, no moral judgement’ quotes of high or middle class. It just unfolds the reality of living there, self-organized structure which appears when people are pushed beyond conventional social system and its values. The violence, love, hopes for a better future, survival…

According to Wikipedia most of the current favelas began in the 1970s, as a construction boom in the richer neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro initiated a rural exodus of workers from poorer states in Brazil. Heavy flooding in the low-lying slum areas of Rio also forcibly removed a large population into favelas, which are mostly located on Rio’s various hillsides. According to movie, government pushed unemployed and rural people into the “City of God”.

All chaotic systems tend toward self-organization. This one as well. But beyond social norms, the structure built up itself upon violence and cruel dominance of Alpha male. Since all were new, no clans of old gangsters were present. So the first ones were kids, younger than 18 years…

The last scenes really shocked me. The kids, no older than 12 years, took dominance over the favelas. it was joke for them, like they were shooting on PlayStation. lots of fun. But than, what kind of kids that  social structure beyond social structure can produce? According to some sources, those kids still have control over favelas today … http://www.davidalton.com/brazilreport.html

It seems to me that  our capitalistic society is ruled by the same principle, just on more noble and sophisticated way.

Vietnam, FED, Bilderberg group, September 11, Irak, ….alpha males, drug trafficking, weapons trade, civil causalities in the name of power and $$$ ….order within the order, order which orders all or strange attractor? When after many iterations you can recognise pattern.

Rocinha – the largest and most complex favela of Brazil. This favela holds 150000 people within 1 square mile.

Can Chaos theory  as theory of dynamic systems explain dynamics of social behaviour?

Chaos theory offers an explanation and description of the transformation of social tori and other strange attractors from quasi-stability toward deep chaos.  The short version is that when the periods of a system bifurcate the third time, they are in a situation where another very small change can produce great numbers of possible endstates toward which a person, a group, a business or a society might go.
The operative point to keep in mind for a theory of deviancy is that this great increase in alternative ways to behave is a feature of the whole system not just the single, acting person; punishment of individuals for trying to cope with such emergent conditions is an exercise in folly if not in mean-spirited vengeance.  And, for those in social philosophy generally, it is good to remember that even in deep chaos there is a great deal of order.

And, even in deep chaos, it is possible to obtain an uncertain stability.  A. Hbler (1992), of the University ofIllinois, Urbana, has shown that, if one can model the key rhythms of chaotic displays, one can control chaos even in the most uncertain regions of a bifurcation map.

An important point to note is that, in a sea of disorder, there are pockets of order. The emergence of such pockets of order is entirely unpredictable.  Ilya Prigogine (1984) won a Nobel prize for setting forth the principles by which new order emerges out of disorder.

Watched today similar movie The Departed  regards structures within the structure, voilence with its own rules. Well done (of course Scorsese), great actors (Di Caprio, Nicholson, Damon, …). Music as well: Roling Stones, Pink Floyd,..  Won 4 Oscars, excelent Scorsese’s movie piece.  It just hasn’t touched me so much as City og God where the players were mostly amateut actors. And where reallity heavely strikes you.