The Global Community Tribunal

“Belief in impossibility is the starting point for logic, deductive mathematics, and natural science. It can originate only in a mind that has freed itself from belief in its own omnipotence.”

Alan Cromer.

I do believe that the only checks and balances for political power, whether it exists and is exercised on national or global level, rest with the people subject to it. In his latest release “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore makes the following two statements:

“And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.” But he also remarks “It is too easy – and too partisan – to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?”

To a certain extent I think that the rest of the world – we – need to share some of the guilt for what has been happening on a global level. Some of the blood spilt in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Myanmar, Darfur, etc is on our hands too. It is easy and comfortable to leave everything to politicians, diplomats and activists to handle the problems and, when things go wrong, to play the blame game.

But Humanity finds itself at a cross-road in history. We are faced by problematique which, if not addressed effectively, is going to terminate our way of life, our civilization and most probably a very large percentage of us as well.

Yes, I know that this is a very alarmist kind of statement to make. But take poverty for instance. When Willy Brandt in 1986 published “world Armament & World Hunger” nobody were very impressed with his warnings of world hunger and starvation. But today America and Europe find themselves in the same position as with the Fall of Rome. They are being overrun by people who needs work to survive starvation in their own countries. Next year this will be a major issue in the American presidential election.

In “The Acceleration of History” an essay published in “The Future of a Troubled World” (1983) Gerard Piel write: “In the secular apocalypse, mankind is to perish by population explosion, by exhausting of resources, by pollution – unless it is spared such terminal misery by thermo-nuclear suicide.”

In this same book Shridath S Ramphal contributes an essay under the title “The Political Map of the Future”. He remarks: “ How palpable today those mutual needs! How obvious the need for a global coalition of survival to rescue our world society – our one society – from collapsing into economic chaos or sliding to self-destruction. ………….. Because we are one world – one inseparable humanity – we will feel trapped by our interdependence so long as we indulge the illusion that we are sovereign states with unbridled choices of our own destiny…..”

J.C.Grobler.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 6:06 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.