Standing on the Precipice

Today we stand on a precipice, gazing out over the Middle Eastern landscapes as dark new horizons of a global century envelop the desert in a wild, pulsating post-modern critique and listless faces drag their heels through the streets of Cairo and Tripoli in Yesterday's funeral procession. All the while, bad men dressed as soldiers exchange sweaty glances in the bowels of tomorrow as they plot their next move. As always, the great white hope looms in the background, reluctantly looking on as a self-parody of Kipling's half-hearted beacon of justice. What does the future hold for this troubled region in a world in which borders are nothing more than faded, black lines on dusty yellow papers stacked in the corner of the basement of what was?

It was Aime Cesaire who first said that "a civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization," and though his words have echoed through the empty halls of the Pentagon and Guantanamo for decades, business as usual carries on in the shadow of the Imperial Phallus of our nation's capital. No sooner had the "crests of foam" been carried out on history's strong molten back than a few measured mumbles trickled out of the side of Obama's trembling lips marking a new era. Will no one stand for property? Are we all transfixed in this moment of embarrassing ecstasy as everything we ever worked for slips through our fingers like grains of bitter sand? Now is not the time for romanticism. The sun is crowning on the banks of a new Euphrates and the new global century yawns in the distance.

Patrolling the Information Superhighway

On the heels of the Munich Security Conference, which many have compared to the Congress of Vienna in 1814 or the Conference of Berlin in 1884, many from the Hill to Hong Kong are all aglow at the prospect of truly global century. Among the topics on the agenda were the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, a united attack on Iran's nuclear aspirations, and the first arms-sharing agreement between the U.S. and Russia. However, the most important collaboration to come out of the conference will be the first concerted effort by international magnates to monopolize and control the internet and permanently push back the ground lost in the past years through lack of focus on cyber-security issues.

While the blogger in me can't help but mourn the end of an era of n'er to be repeated net free-for-all, nobody can deny the immense benefit of laying down a few stop lights and sending out a few traffic cops on the information superhighway. Doing so will ensure that popular uprisings such as those in Tunisia, Egypt and Iran in the past year will not arise spontaneously or spiral out of control, meaning that we will be better able to transition regimes when necessary all while keeping a tighter grip on the transaction of goods.

There was, however, one point of concern that comes out of the global internet manifesto laid down by the major powers at the Munich Security Conference, and that is the persistent use of the archaic rhetoric of "terrorism" as a chief strategy for securing the internet. While the term terrorist when applied specifically to Muslim militants still has a little currency for some, in general, the public has gradually realized that this empty term is nothing more than a pretext or justification for otherwise illegitimate actions against states and free individuals. What's worse is that it has drawn attention to the plain fact that managing the globe does require killing innocent people. In this way, world governments have become trapped in their own venus fly trap of anti-terrorist rhetoric which technically brands them as terrorist regimes. While there had been a small push-back against the rhetoric of the war on terror in recent months, the Munich Security Conference and the internet debate have proven that many in the community are still unable to move past this old paradigm. Instead many are still echoing the tired words of Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "We're in a new world. We're in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn't act." Indeed, it is a new, global world, and it is good that we are acting, but can't these measures be justified in some rational framework that will convince the bourgeoisie of where their collective interest lies?