The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has issued a report documenting the severe impact of the global economic crisis on employment prospects for the world’s youth. The report, “Global Employment Trends for Youth”, presents detailed statistics on the growing number of 15-to-24-year-olds who find themselves out of work.
The most striking findings are those showing the rapid rise of youth unemployment from the eruption of the financial crisis in 2008 onwards. At the end of 2009, according to the report’s introduction, global youth unemployment stood at 81 million. This was an increase of 7.8 million, or nearly 10 percent, from the end of 2007.
In percentage terms, global youth unemployment rose from 11.9 percent to 13 percent during this period, an increase described as “sharper than ever before”.
In 2009 alone, the number of young people out of work globally rose by a staggering 6.6 million. As the report noted, “To put this in perspective, over the course of the ten-year period prior to the current crisis (1996-1997 to 2006-2007), the number of unemployed youth increased, on average, by 192,000 per year”.
The leak describes Red Cell as a CIA unit created by the Director to develop "out-of-the-box" analysis offering "alternative viewpoints" on key intelligence issues.
This document doesn't disappoint in being out-of-the-box.
The Pentagon is embarking on a major base construction effort in Afghanistan even as Obama administration and military officials are making it clear that the US “surge” will last well past the July 11 deadline for beginning a drawdown of US troops.
The Washington Post reported Monday that the US Congress is preparing to pass legislation providing “$1.3 billion in additional fiscal 2011 funds for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan”. These funds would cover, in part, $100 million expansions for each of three major US air bases in different parts of the country.
These projects, the Post stated, are indicative of plans “to support increased US military operations well into the future.”
A notice seeking contractor bids placed on a US government web site last week maps out plans for the expansion of one of these US bases in Shindand, an airfield in western Afghanistan that had been used by the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan more than two decades ago.
The project is to include new runways, hangars, barracks, storage areas, a “weapons arming area” and other facilities. They are being built to accommodate the Special Operations troops used by Washington to carry out “targeted killings,” i.e., assassinations, which have become a key component of the US war. They will also house a unit operating pilotless drone aircraft for purposes of “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance” as well as missile attacks.
The request for bids states that the contract will not be issued until January of next year and that the job itself will not be completed until at least a full year after that, i.e., January 2012, six months after the deadline set by President Barack Obama for the beginning of the drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan.
AT NO time since the Second World War has Europe been so firmly in the grip of right-wing leaders. From old hands like Angela Merkel in Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, to the recently elected David Cameron in the UK, the center Right now governs the biggest European countries. Even the figureheads of the EU—including the presidents of the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament—have an impeccable conservative political pedigree. The only notable left-wing holdout, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain, will likely be defeated at the polls when he stands for reelection in less than two years.
With such unprecedented power, it would seem that the Right has a rare opportunity to reshape Europe in its own image. Left-wingers might fear that their adversaries will roll back the achievements of the last decades. What major political reforms, they might ask with terror in their voices, is the Right implementing? In what fundamental ways will it change Europe over the next five to ten years?
The hegemony of the Right is cause for serious concern. Even so, scared questions about the transformative political vision of Europe’s current leaders smack of hyperbole. In reality, they are strangely toothless. Their policies barely deviate from those of their left-wing predecessors. The question is: why?
The trilateral summit of the presidents of three Persian-speaking countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan wrapped up on August 5 in Tehran and recorded another unforgettable event in the memory of the three brother nations. With innumerable cultural, religious, social, lingual and strategic commonalities, the three countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated their potentiality to build one of the strongest diplomatic partnerships in the region and benefit the world nations through a unique, fruitful and constructive cooperation.
The people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, whose countries were parts of the Greater Persia in ancient times, consider Iran as their cultural homeland and believe that the Iranian nation is the inheritor of their paternal legacy, the Persian civilization.
Veteran British Labourite Tony Benn has launched a call for “a broad movement of active resistance” to the UK Conservative/Liberal-Democrat coalition government’s austerity measures.
He announced his “coalition of resistance” in the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section on August 4. His call was backed by 73 signatories: just two Labour MPs, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, the solitary Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, a handful of trade union leaders, including Mark Serwotka of the PCS civil service union and Bob Crow of the Rail Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, as well as prominent figures from the media, such as Ken Loach, and academics and campaigners who have the reputation of being “on the left”. A variety of pseudo-left groups then endorsed his call and began campaigning on his behalf.
Benn’s campaign is fraudulent and should be rejected as a diversion by everyone genuinely seeking to oppose the savage cuts to the welfare state and public sector jobs. Benn revealed its bogus nature when he compared the movement he has in mind to that organised by the Greek trade unions.
The Greek unions have called a series of 24-hour stoppages that have not halted the government’s programme of austerity measures, but which were expressly designed to let off steam without threatening the PASOK government’s ability to impose the cuts demanded by the global markets. When the Greek truck drivers went on strike threatening to bring the economy to a standstill, the government responded by conscripting the drivers and bringing in the army to smash the strike. The response of their union, which had been trying to cut a deal with the government all along, was to capitulate. The presence of the army on the streets in a country that was living under a military junta from 1967 to 1974 is a stark warning of how sharp class antagonisms have become. European governments are attempting to dismantle welfare states that were built up in the post-war period. Such a wholesale destruction of social conditions demands a decisive shift in class relations and cannot be carried out within the framework of parliamentary democracy.
Book Review: A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl
Many years ago I read the autobiography of R Buckminster Fuller (one of my heroes whilst at art school), who before becoming a visionary architect/engineer/designer and philosopher trained as a naval architect, a profession he later credited with equipping him with his holistic vision of the world. Not surprisingly therefore, Fuller had an abiding interest in the Royal Navy’s strategic role in maintaining the British Empire. Fuller referred to the fact that in the closing decades of the 19th century the British and US governments made a pact, a pact that saw an alliance between the imperial Royal Navy’s unassailable (at that time) control of the world’s trade coupled to the rising industrial and financial might of the US, an alliance that would rule the planet for the next century. And this was no megalomaniac vision but a reality built upon centuries of colonial rule and the wealth looted literally from one quarter of the planet. Those guys had a plan. Making it all possible of course, was the Royal Navy and its fleet of planet-spanning ‘ships of the line’, the mightiest navy the world had ever seen, with which it was able to protect its trade routes, engage in its euphemistically named ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in order to keep the ‘natives’ in line and to make sure that its imperialist competitors didn’t steal a reach on its ill-gotten gains.
But by the 1870s the Empire had reached its high point and England began the longest economic depression in its history, one that it was not to recover from until the 1890s. And in the meantime its European competitors, chiefly Germany, now outstripping Britain in industrial production and technological innovation, by the 1890s also had a navy to rival that of Britain’s. And it is here, at the shooting end of the British Empire that we see the role of oil take centre stage when the advantages of oil-fired turbines revolutionised naval warfare (this in spite of the Navy’s rejection of the idea some years earlier), extending the reach and speed of its biggest battleships.
This is the point at which Engdahl’s story effectively begins by examining the economic competition between England and Germany largely over Germany’s expansion East toward Turkey and South into Africa. East where the oil was (then in Iran) and South to the riches of Africa and onwards…dangerously close to the ‘jewel’ in the empire’s crown, India.
In our previous articles we emphasized the ideological nature of today’s problematic Islamic ‘threat’. (See ‘Islam in the Western Imagination’ and ‘Urgent Threats of Yesteryear’.) Historically this ‘threat’ fits into an established tradition of hysterical propaganda campaigns – whether against ‘Indians’, ‘Negroes’ or ‘Reds’ -- which distort and exaggerate real and potential challenges to U.S. capitalism / imperialism so as to justify violence, state terror and wars of plunder.
If the truth is ‘the first casualty’ in war then democracy is the second. Although framed by the U.S. in terms of defending (or spreading) ‘democracy’, today’s East-West conflict turns out to be not so much a Clash of Civilizations as an ideological Clash of Fundamentalisms. While hyping the threat of ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’, U.S. media and politicians conveniently fail to point out that their own outlook is based on the same kind of reactionary hard-shell fundamentalism as ‘Political Islamism’. Let’s call it ‘Political Christianism’. The Christian right in the U.S. aspires to the same kind of theocratic domination over government and peoples’ private lives as the Ayatollahs. Its members speak with the same hysterical absolutist certainty, believe the ends justify the means, and are willing resort to violent means – like murdering abortion-providers and bombing women's health centers. Both fundamentalisms offer identity and community to the disaffected masses while silencing opposition and bullying the hesitant through fear. The Zionists and the Jewish Religious Right are equally ruthless, and recently the U.S. Christian right has overcome its traditional anti-Semitism to form a reactionary pro-Israel, pro-U.S. alliance with right-wing, pro-Zionist Jewish organizations and leaders like the notoriously Jewish Senator Lieberman – much to the dismay of the vast majority of liberal, secular U.S. Jews.
Sheffield City Council in South Yorkshire, England, last month announced £6.5 million in budget cuts, half of which will fall on young people’s services. Council workers face pay freezes, more unpaid holidays and less redundancy pay. This is just a prelude to £219 million in cuts planned for the next four years by the Liberal Democrat-controlled town hall.
Labour councillors offered no opposition, while the Green Party only suggested some slight rearrangements so the cuts fall on different services.
Sheffield Futures, a charity that provides youth workers and runs the Connexions careers service, has had its council funding cut by £1.5 million, a quarter of its budget. Ninety-five of its 368 staff in Sheffield will lose their jobs, following a loss of 60 jobs in 2004, and pay will be lowered. It is also unclear whether the service’s contract will be renewed next March.
Bob Rae, the Liberal Party foreign affairs critic and former New Democratic Party (NDP) premier of Ontario, penned an op-ed column in the Toronto Star last week that argued for Canada to continue to play a major role in propping up Afghanistan’s corrupt US-installed government. In particular Rae insisted upon the importance of Canada—that is, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF)—providing military training to Afghan forces when the current CAF mission in the southern province of Kandahar comes to an end in December 2011.
Canada has deployed almost 3,000 troops, backed by fighter planes and Leopard tanks, to support the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan.
Titled “Why Afghanistan is not Vietnam,” Rae’s column argues that the West and Canada have a fundamental strategic interest in subjugating the impoverished Central Asian country and that Canada must resist, therefore, mounting calls to “abandon ship.” “The Taliban,” says Rae, “joke that ‘you have the watches but we have the time’. They are betting on a speedy departure. If the rush to the exits takes hold as the new prevailing orthodoxy, it will mean that extremism has won an important victory.”
While some senior US figures have praised the publication of secret US military files detailing the progress of the war in Afghanistan, other Democrats and Republicans have united to condemn the Wikileaks cache in suprisingly strong terms.
Ross Baker, a professor in politics at Rutgers university and a former staff member for Republican and Democratic members of Congress, was cutting in his denunciation, on the Politico website: "This information is giving aid and comfort to the enemy and begins to look like WikiTreason."
The Republican leadership in Congress is keeping its head down and has avoided public comment – a sensible move, given that the leaks largely come from the Bush administration era and that the party remains committed to the US mission in Afghanistan.
Secretive political prisons for “domestic terrorists” called Communications Management Units have been operating for more than three years on U.S. soil. Last week the federal Bureau of Prisons quietly submitted a proposal to make the experimental units permanent: a process that, by law, should have occurred before they were ever opened.
As a quick introduction, there are two Communications Management Units, or CMUs, in the country. They radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the “Supermax,” ADX-Florence. [For more information on CMUs and who is housed there: "Secretive U.S. Prison Units Used to House Muslim, Animal Rights and Environmental Activists."]
On April 6, the Bureau of Prisons submitted a proposed rule (Docket No. 1148-P), listed in the federal register. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, there is now a required public comment period for responses to this proposal.
The public notice comes after the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union each filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the secretive facilities, where political prisoners have been transferred without notification, without explanation, and without opportunity for appeal. [See "5 Things You Should Know About America’s 'Little Guantanamo.'"]
The same week that European officials announced the results of bank stress tests designed to give bankers a green light to continue their speculative ways, European Central Bank (ECB) President Jean-Claude Trichet published a column in the Financial Times (July 22) arguing for an end to economic stimulus programs and the rigorous imposition of austerity measures across Europe.
In the article, entitled “Stimulate No More—It is Now Time for All to Tighten,” Trichet wrote that following the financial breakdown of September 2008, the world was just able to avoid a “financial meltdown and a second Great Depression,” but at a high price. According to ECB calculations, “the volume of taxpayer risks earmarked to support the financial sphere ... was as high as 27 percent of gross domestic product.” Trichet noted that a similar percentage of GDP was made available to the banking system on the other side of the Atlantic.
I arrived in Venezuela with a fair amount of cynicism but with a desire to hear the other side of the story, that is to say the pro-Chavez, pro-revolution, pro-socialism side. I leave Venezuela unsure if the Bolivarian experiment can work, though impressed by what I have seen of it. Hoping the experiment will be allowed to plot its own course by the US, Europe and large corporate interests in particular, is pointless. Venezuela will not be left alone. The world should watch Venezuela with interest, and in my opinion, with hope.
Barrios climb out of the city centre.
It is important to begin these impressions of Venezuela by explaining that our time in this country, in which we have been lucky enough to get beneath the surface, has confirmed suspicions that 90 per cent of what we hear about Venezuela in Australia is utter nonsense. It’s not in the paper it is on the wall - the US is at war with Venezuela, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and the fourth largest of natural gas. The US has had control of these resources since their discovery over a hundred years ago via hand-picked dictatorships and false democracies. They have lost control of this country, thanks, not to Chavez, but to the poor majority he inspires.
However, US strategy is clear, and thinking back to Australian media and the information we receive about Venezuela, I fear they are winning. It’s a simple yet sophisticated strategy used against many countries to justify interference or attack. Since the failed US-backed coup against the democratically elected President Chavez in April of 2002, the US have switched to Plan B, which is a campaign to swing global public opinion, through its influence over international media, against the Chavez government to justify overthrowing it. It’s working.
Of course this strategy is in combination with funding opposition groups and supporting disruption. Many locals believe there are US-trained Colombian para-militants carrying out random killings in the country to help create a feeling of insecurity under Chavez rule. The media tactics are clever and need no truth. For example, un-named US officials will release a statement that Venezuela is supporting FARC rebels in Colombia, which receives headline treatment on the news. A few days later a quiet press release is issued stating that actually they have no evidence of this, and of course the second release is deemed ‘un-newsworthy’ and the public are none the wiser.
The Rachel Corrie MV Continues to Sail Towards Gaza in Defiance of Israeli Threats
Following Israel’s criminal raid in international waters on May 31st, the Rachel Corrie MV continues to sail towards the Gaza coastline in defiance of Israeli threats.
In an act of tremendous courage, the Rachel Corrie MV is determined to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
At noon today, I received the following message from Christopher Chang and Ram Kardigasu, on behalf of the Malaysian and Irish peace activists, who are on board the Rachel Corrie:
RACHEL CORRIE: MV Rachel Corrie is now the sole ship on the international freedom flotilla moving towards Gaza.
The Malaysian and Irish peace and humanitarian activists aboard share their deepest grief and sense of lost with the loved ones of those killed and injured in the illegal action undertaken by Israel on Monday 31st May 2010 in the international waters of the Mediterranean.
In the names of our friends, we are more determined than ever to continue into Gaza with our humanitarian cargo and our support for the blockaded and suffering people of Gaza.
We expect Israel to respond to the international condemnation of its violence by not impeding by any means the safe passage of the Rachel Corrie.
We appeal to the international community and United Nations to continue to demand Israel our safe passage into Gaza.
Jointly issued by Malaysians and Irish on board the Rachel Corrie.
Sent on behalf of the humanitarian activists on aboard the Rachel Corrie – by PGPO land team (Ram Karthigasu and Christopher Chang)
On May 31, under cover of darkness, Israeli commandos conducted a premeditated act of state terrorism against civilian aid activists trying to deliver thousands of tons of essential to life aid to besieged Gazans. Israeli radio reported that 19 were slaughtered, dozens more injured, and according to Earth Times.org:
"About 480 foreign activists who were stopped by Israel on the high seas while sailing to Gaza were transfered overnight to a prison in the southern city of Beersheba, Israeli Radio reported (June 1)." About 48 others were deported. Other reports had over 600 arrested and an Israeli-imposed news blackout.
Those held now face grueling interrogations, followed either by deportation or detainment ahead of prosecution, Israel's customary practice - blaming victims, absolving state terrorism, repeatedly committed, claiming it's to safeguard national security.
Or by Israeli logic, its attack was self-defense. Linked to "global Jihad, Al Qaeda and Hamas," humanitarian activists were an "armada of hate and violence (engaging in a) premeditated and outrageous provocation," according to Israel's deputy defense minister, Danny Ayalon.
Not according to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Canceling scheduled military exercises with Israel and recalling his ambassador, Oguz Celikkol, he said:
"It is no longer possible to cover up or ignore Israel's lawlessness....This action, totally contrary to the principles of international law, is inhumane state terrorism. Nobody should think we will keep quiet in the face of this."
Nor should anyone let Israel get away with a crime this grave, its latest example of lawlessness, this time in international waters in violation of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas and 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Michael Behe is an American scientist and biochemist. Being an intelligent design advocate, he serves as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Lehigh in Pennsylvania. He is also a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
Behe has controversially challenged the evolution theory of Charles Darwin which underpins the ideology of western thought with regards to the material life and universe.
In his 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box", Behe has proposed the notion of irreducible complexity which underscores the role of an intelligent designer in the emergence of complex biological systems. According to this theory, certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler and less complex predecessors.
The theory of Behe undermines the basis of atheism and secularism as it advocates the role of an intelligent, conscious designer in the creation of human being. That's why Michael Behe has been attacked and insulted by a number of his opponents and the materialist scientists who deny the existence of God.
Michael Behe has been accused of disseminating deceitful falsehood and what is describe as pseudo-science in the scientific circles around the world. Behe's theory has been labeled as argument from ignorance and the University of Lehigh has clearly distanced itself from his viewpoints regarding the evolution - creation debate.
Here is the complete text of interview with Michael Behe in which he describes why the western society is afraid of the propagation of "intelligent design" theory.
Last weekend, European leaders and finance ministers agreed to a rescue package for the euro which inaugurates the most comprehensive offensive against the working class since the end of World War II. This offensive must be repulsed by the combined resistance of the European working class.
On Friday evening, the leaders of the euro-zone countries met in Brussels to formally pass the €110 billion package for Greece drawn up during the week. But a two-hour dinner then turned into a six-hour crisis meeting.
Two days beforehand, a general strike in Greece had clearly shown the scale of the resistance to the austerity measures being introduced by the Greek government. The financial markets, which had seen massive profits garnered through speculation on a Greek sovereign default, were then gripped by panic. On Thursday, America’s Dow Jones stock index at one point plummeted by up to nine percent.
This increased the pressure on the European governments to provide debt guarantees not only for Greece, but also for all other deficit-ridden euro countries. President Obama picked up the phone personally to convince German Chancellor Angela Merkel to abandon her opposition.
In a night session, the heads of state and government leaders then established the foundations for a comprehensive financial package that was then further elaborated at another summit meeting on Sunday. It was to be finalised in the early hours of Monday morning, before the Japanese markets opened and the wave of speculation against the euro resumed.
In 2008 the people of Pakistan voted into office the PPP, hoping that this would bring genuine change, i.e. a real improvement in their living conditions. Instead we have a worsening economic situation, real suffering of the millions of poor, and warfare killing many innocent civilians. Meanwhile the PPP leadership is busying itself applying the IMF-imposed policies of cuts and privatisations. In these conditions it is not surprising that many are asking themselves what democracy has meant for them.
As the Pakistani official political scene was dominated by the debate on the 18th Constitutional amendment, which basically does away with the undemocratic provisions introduced by different military governments in the past, the majority of ordinary Pakistanis were wondering what democracy has really meant for them.
Leaflet produced by the Pakistani Marxists condemning the recent incident of killing of innocent civilians by the army in the tribal areasThe country’s population is facing severe economic problems, prolonged power cuts (or as they are officially called “load shedding”), high inflation, cuts in public spending, etc. To this we have to add all the side effects of the US “war on terror” in Afghanistan: the killing of innocent civilians in Pakistan’s tribal belt, both by the Pakistani army and the CIA drone bombers and increased terrorist attacks in the country’s main urban centres.
This article appeared on p6 of the G2 section of the GuardianMonday 14 January 2008. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 08.18 GMT on Monday 14 January 2008. It was last modified at 14.47 GMT on Tuesday 18 November 2008. on
Facebook has 59 million users (Now over 400 million) - and 2 million new ones join each week (Now likely 5 million a week). But you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site.
The US intelligence community's enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after 9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999 were anachronistically linked in the article below. Since 9/11 happened in 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two years earlier.
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
Without the control of the banks and key sectors of the economy, one cannot talk in Venezuela of a planned, and therefore socialist, economy. Alan Woods sums it up in one sentence, “you cannot plan what you don’t control”. Even doing that and radicalising the revolutionary process is not enough. A change in the state is also needed, because it is obvious “that the old bureaucrats of the IV Republic will not carry out socialism”. Participative and protagonist democracy in the state and the companies. Russia was a “totalitarian and bureaucratic caricature which failed and was bound to fail”.
Now that president Chávez has called for a radicalisation of the revolution, it might be useful to consider the opinions of Woods, a Marxist theoretician who confesses being an “unconditional supporter” of the Bolivarian process.
On several occasions you have insisted that the Bolivarian revolution is at a crucial stage, at a crossroads. What do you mean?
In the last 11 years there have been many advances, that is true. But, can we say that the revolution has been completed? President Chavez himself, on the day when he inaugurated the militia, gave the answer: “in Venezuela there is no socialism yet, this is not finished”, and that is obviously true. Although there have been nationalizations, which we support, there are key sectors of the economy, the banks amongst others, which are still in private hands. Therefore, we cannot talk of a planned socialist economy. This is very dangerous, particularly in a situation of world crisis of capitalism, which has affected the Venezuelan economy with very negative consequences for the people, particularly inflation and other problems that you know better than me. We could fall into a potentially dangerous situation, because the right wing is taking advantage of this situation to argue against the revolution, discrediting socialism and preparing the way for a possible defeat.
The Pentagon is embarking on a major base construction effort in Afghanistan even as Obama administration and military officials are making it clear that the US “surge” will last well past the July 11 deadline for beginning a drawdown of US troops.
Many years ago I read the autobiography of R Buckminster Fuller (one of my heroes whilst at art school), who before becoming a visionary architect/engineer/designer and philosopher trained as a naval architect, a profession he later credited with equipping him with his holistic vision of the world. Not surprisingly therefore, Fuller had an abiding interest in the Royal Navy’s strategic role in maintaining the British Empire. Fuller referred to the fact that in the closing decades of the 19th century the British and US governments made a pact, a pact that saw an alliance between the imperial Royal Navy’s unassailable (at that time) control of the world’s trade coupled to the rising industrial and financial might of the US, an alliance that would rule the planet for the next century. And this was no megalomaniac vision but a reality built upon centuries of colonial rule and the wealth looted literally from one quarter of the planet. Those guys had a plan. Making it all possible of course, was the Royal Navy and its fleet of planet-spanning ‘ships of the line’, the mightiest navy the world had ever seen, with which it was able to protect its trade routes, engage in its euphemistically named ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in order to keep the ‘natives’ in line and to make sure that its imperialist competitors didn’t steal a reach on its ill-gotten gains.
In our previous articles we emphasized the ideological nature of today’s problematic Islamic ‘threat’. (See 
Michael Behe is an American scientist and biochemist. Being an intelligent design advocate, he serves as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Lehigh in Pennsylvania. He is also a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
