A recent Howard Scripps/Ohio Uni national poll found 1 in 3 US repsondents thought their government might have been complicit in the 911 attacks. Another poll found 42% calling for an independent re- investigation of 911. Seems remarkable to me but if accurate then the possibility of political chaos in the US is something we Aussies should maybe seriously think about, seeing as we’ve shoved our heads about as far up Bush’s arse as we can go.

My rule of thumb nowadays though, as far as being skeptical about the reality of our crazy world, is to be wary of my own reactionary bourgeois angst in dismissing anything to do with the geopolitics of energy without first looking at the available information. You perhaps have come up against this yourself when you first became aware of imminent peak oil and in your attempts to warn friends and family. It is a rather difficult prospect to broach.

With many good people bad news that threatens our officially sanctioned and mass mediated consensus reality is quite often dismissed without any informed opinion and with the implication that you are perhaps suffering from a manic condition or at best you are a confused eccentric. Push a little further and soberly provide supporting evidence or testimony and all you mostly do is stir their emotions even further and deepen the irrational rejection and hostility, in many cases anyways that’s been my experience with both peak oil and the 911 controversy. These are both unsettling and interrelated propositions with revolutionary implications so no wonder we want to hold to the delusion of ‘business as usual’, shut our eyes, click our red ruby slippers and chant ‘there’s no place like post WW2 global modernity’ …

As far as the official story of 911 goes it is already a conspiracy theory involving 19 mostly Saudi hijackers but if you actually read the government reports and what the critics are saying about them the entire story along with the 911 Commission and US government sponsored NIST and FEMA reports are so amazingly full of holes that any rule of thumb here would very simply indicate a rather desperate and incredibly brittle coverup, which the 911 Commission itself has just confirmed in part with revelations the Pentagon actually lied to them. Add to that the empirical evidence for controlled demolition in all 3 collapsed towers and as far as I’m concerned it’s a real ’slam dunk’.

I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone here though but if you’re interested in seeing for yourself check out the Scholars for 911 Truth at http://www.st911.org/. You can also see what all the fuss is about via Google video with the ST911 founders broadcasting their views via the national US public TV channel CSPAN a month ago:

Now it’s no real surprise to us here that the threat of peak oil has led Australia into complicity with US supreme crimes of aggression in the Middle East … is it? Knowing the very serious implications, to put it mildly, of declining oil extraction on our way of life some of us might even argue that since peak oil affects every nation on earth then if it comes to war ‘better them than us’. The only problem here of course, apart from founding our national energy security on mass murder which is ‘evil’, is that the US Neoconservatives are such ludicrously inept fascists that they seem to be on the verge of complete imperial overreach. If 911 Truth goes mainstream god only knows where the US might go, I assume that when push comes to shove as the global economy tanks and declining extraction really starts biting into their middle classes it will most probably hang on whose side their military decides to support, the people or the state.

We can call it a ‘hypothetical’ if you like, but I was just wondering what people here think about Australia being an isolated vassal state of an emerging predatory totalitarian super power that is on the verge of possibly violent collapse as we progress into the peak oil plateau. If that actually turns out to be the case then what? Duck and cover?

A global war that ‘will not end in our lifetime’ is a waste of energy and national wealth which can only impoverish the majority of us and divert the nation from dealing with what will still become an enforced powerdown, equitable or otherwise. If we’re very lucky though maybe the collapse of our democratic humanist facade and the public realization that waging oil wars actually does mean supporting naked fascism at home and abroad will lead to a real and sane change of course. And yes, probably not but who really knows?

Sounds cool, OPEC extraction has fallen so far this year and there are reports that the Saudi super giant Ghawar field is in decline by up to 4% or more and they’re only just maintaining their total production via a few new secondary fields. As Simmons said, once Ghawar is in decline we’re past peak as it is by far the biggest field in the world and the mainstay of Saudi production. But whatever happens it’s doubtful the Iranians will be given much air time in the US. I’ve been checking youtube.com and google video which have a lot of US tv videos and their propaganda channels on Fox and CNN are going feral ever since the surprise Israeli attack. The recent Lebanon slaughter was being billed as the start of WW3 by the usual establishment shills like Gingrich, Ledeen and a bunch of other high profile neoconservative crazies and they were given prime time to spread the propaganda. I think the Israeli’s actually backed away from widening the conflict and they’ve come under some virulent criticism by those same neocons for not attacking Syria. The current US regime is clearly the craziest on the planet and they’re getting very desperate as Republican support is collapsing across the board in the run up to their mid term congressional elections. WW3 and rigged electronic voting may not even be enough to save them although martial law and the suspension of elections would postpone the day of reckoning. Since the current US regime did 911, and the case for that is now very clear and is breaking into their mainstream media, another ‘false flag terror attack’ before the elections is also a distinct possibility.

The Wall Street journal ran a ludicrous propaganda piece by a Princeton historian Bernard Lewis ( http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=… ) suggesting the Iranians are preparing for the mother of all suicide bombings and will nuke Israel and/or the US on Aug 22 basically making the entire Iranian nation a martyr once the US and Israel respond in kind. It’s completely insane but the rabid mainstream US propaganda news and talk shows have run with it and their followers on the internet are spreading the word as you can see here:

These mad fuckers want nuclear armageddon, and about 1 in 3 US citizens are apparently uneducated and obesely Xian enough to believe this crap. Another 1 in 3 think Bush did 911 and are openly calling for the regime’s arrest. The last third are ‘undecided’. The US is going completely crazy, not that you’d guess from our utterly sanitized mass media.

Kant renders this notion of being as objectivity. The transcendental concept of the objectness of things needs a subjective ego cogito and we have the ontological foundation of empirical science. Heidegger’s Nietzsche thinks ‘objectivity’ as a value defining what is real rather than an objective concept in itself. For Nietzsche’s metaphysics all previous philosophy is Platonic philosophy, and all notions of objective, supersensuous, Christian or transcendental truth are inverted as subjective value positing in the service of what is good for ‘life’. As will to power, ‘life’ defines what is good as the highest valuation for any particular metaphysics, and as such all metaphysics is a ‘moral’ interpretation of truth as value positing.

All previous metaphysics are defined by will to power as value positing without knowing it, thus Nietzsche’s metaphysics seeks to make this subjective principle explicit in a new valuation of the highest values. Will to power becomes the highest value in that it is the condition of the possibility for positing value. If nihilism is the positing of truth values, its completion is the recognition that the only absolute truth is the will to power for which all posited truth is ‘good’ only insofar as it empowers ‘life’.

(Echoes of Quine’s notion of scientific truth as pragmatic myth in the rejection of Logical Positivist mapping of truth to perception. Science can only approximate the flux of perception/becoming and is truthful only insofar as it leads to more useful outcomes than a belief in divine intervention for instance.)

Nietzsche’s nihilism in this sense devalues all notions of absolute truth but only in order to recognise itself as the arbiter of truth in the service of what is good for life. It’s a ‘positive’ or affirmative nihilism that devalues all notions of truth not explicitly founded in subjective truth positing. The proposition ‘god is dead’ understood philosophically undermines all notions of the supersensuous authority of truth guaranteed by a belief in god, moral law, reason, historical progress and/or social instinct. The human subject, rather than defining itself in relation to ‘higher truths’, becomes itself the principle of truth as value positing. This is the completion of the metaphysics of subjectness as the absolute reversal of all prior metaphysics where the transcendental or supersensuous becomes subjective truth in the service of the empowering of ‘life’.

Nihilism is the history of western metaphysics as an ongoing moral valuation that posits absolute ideals of truth, goodness and beauty that are supposedly valid ‘in themselves’. Their devaluation is thus ensured as they are necessarily incommensurable with life, and nihilism is the historical process of this devaluation. Once this traditional world is devalued its truth collapses, and the collapse can be catastrophic, and only then do we enter into the ‘preliminary form’ of the completion of nihilism, that of pessimism and the seeming valuelessness of all truth. The western world has already endured several such collapses to get where we are today, other more traditional societies are going through this transition as we speak, and our contemporary, widespread moral and truthful relativism in all walks of westernised life is I think an excellent example of Nietzsche’s notion of preliminary nihilism, where the endless display of pessimism shown on this list is a microcosm of that nihilism.

But where to with all this pessimism? According to Heidegger’s Nietzsche weak pessimism, as historicism, doesn’t posit future possibilities for change but only looks to the past in order to endlessly critique the present. Strong pessimism however analyses the present historical situation in order to open up the possibility of a new path to the future (This latter is what I refer to as Heidegger’s pessimism in his critique of his present historical situation and the analysis of the will to will of Nazism. Needless to say his version of pessimism takes the devaluation a step further (or back?) in the devaluation of truth as will to power).

These two pessimistic possibilities are an ‘intermediate stage’ in the completion of nihilism leading to firstly an imperfect nihilism. The old values are devalued but then simply replaced by new ideals - ‘early Christianity’ (socialism) is replaced with communism, dogmatic Christianity by ‘Wagnerian music’. Does anyone think this might be a veiled criticism of the metaphysical ideals of national socialism? I think perhaps it refers to the earlier Germanic idealism, or to dogmatic Nazi ideology, but we could also equate the overthrow of the ideals of dogmatic Christianity with the ideals of ‘freedom and democracy’ and scientific positivism. These various ideals overthrow the old traditional order and values, but by prolonging the rule of the supersensuous they merely postpone the emergence of ‘extreme nihilism’ and its collapsing of the supersensuous realm of truth.

I think it’s this extreme activist nihilism and the rejection of any ‘eternal truth in itself’ that Heidegger equates with at least the ‘great beginnings’ of the Nazi led German revolution, and it’s this extremism that I’d say also in part characterizes the Straussian Neocon world view (perhaps Anthony could delve into this possibility further?). Passive extremism merely accepts that the actual world does not conform to how it ought to be, and that this idealised vision of how it ought to be doesn’t actually exist, neither in a god’s moral law nor in the ideals of human progress. Active extremism takes this a step further in devaluing the past ideals and their supersensuous realm and positing new valuations based solely on its own possibilities for life, it ‘makes space and steps into the open’ as ecstatic nihilism. Free from previous traditional prejudices, such as a belief in supernaturally guaranteed Judaeo-Christian moral values for instance, ecstatic nihilism recognises itself as the arbiter of all values amidst the essential chaos of becoming. As ecstatic nihilism it keeps itself open to possibility, and this openness is an ongoing revolution against the reappearance of the supersensuous realm of ideals (something Hitler obviously betrayed from the beginning, at least in historical hindsight).

Ecstatic nihilism is an affirmative, classical nihilism, it builds its world on the basis of its own truth as will to power where all truth as value is first posited explicitly as value without recourse to supersensuous ideals. Will to power becomes the explicit principle for truth as value positing, and as such it becomes the explicit condition for the possibility of the truth of beings as a whole, the possibility of an ecstatically open ‘world view’ and its empowerment.

I think it’s this fragile, ecstatic ‘openness’ of will to power, on the threshold of the meaning of being, that drew Heidegger into his entanglement with Nazism and his initial attempt to guide the revolution ‘towards the good’ from its beginnings. The leaders however were apparently ‘too limited in their thinking’ and the initial ecstatic ‘openness’ of the German revolution (or more likely Hitler’s public semblance) inevitably fell back into the dogmatism of Nazi machination, initially evident with the crushing of the Roehm revolutionaries and consummated in the disaster of WW2.

So where does that leave us today? With our philosophical/moral pessimism and the intermediate nihilism of mass democracy and its collapsing ideals of ‘liberty and equality’ in Iraq? Ideals that the democratic leaders themselves, as extreme nihilists, only adhere to for propaganda purposes and where the slaughter of thousands of innocents, the use of concentration camps and torture, and the unilateral collapse of international law are merely effects of the total mobilisation of democratic forces in a global war to empower ‘our’ western way of life for the next century?

I guess that’s the essence of being on the open threshold of history - where to now? It’s easy enough to point out that we’re transparently being dragged en masse back into the unilateral play of global power struggles, back into the historical repetition of explicit, amoral will to will that characterised the Nazi expansion ending in the catastrophe of WW2. But now instead of the collapsing semblance of Nazi ideals and power it’s democracy’s turn to shatter its own vastly self-righteous, hypocritical self-image. Perhaps if the Neocons can get away with yet another term in power they can complete this transitional nihilism and grind us democratic populations down into an extreme nihilism and total valuelessness. Maybe then there’ll open up a historical possibility to something new beyond the empty salvation of technological ordering?

Or maybe I’m just too pessimistic for my own good.

YOU would contend that the root cause for modern violence is to be found only in the others atrocities then? We terrorised are just and the terrorists are unjust? I can understand that perspective, and would it be correct to say from this perspective that we fight today because we are free men who don’t sleep under the oppression of Islamic terror? We want to restore freedom from terror to our nations through a just war on terror, and as the terrorists lay waste to our nations so shall we lay waste to theirs.

I would say though that no one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure, whereas thinking people like us moderns, when disaster strikes, should make it our priority to look for its root causes in order to prevent it happening again. Yet I ask you is defending oneself from terror and punishing the terrorist aggressor in kind through the violent imposition of democratic freedom on their people, is this itself objectionable state terrorism? If it is such, then more Iraqs are unavoidable for us and the war on Islamic terror will likely not end in our lifetimes. Such is the price of living in democratic freedom from terror.

Would you also agree that our security is in our own hands and the whole world knows that every rogue nation that doesn’t play with our security will automatically guarantee its own security, but only so long as their leaders join with us in the war on terror while promoting the democratic freedom of all people to live under our Pax Americana? Our resolute belief in freedom for all humanity is our guardian and helper, while the terrorists lost in their reactionary nihilism have no guardian or helper, their god a lost cause.

The link between oil and food is a serious one for us moderns especially as we have become completely habituated to eating heavily processed foods that are transported from all corners of the earth. Next time you sit down to eat a meal consider the amount of energy that has gone into bringing it to your plate, including the energy you required to cook it. You are literally eating the embedded energy of the crude oil that fuels our entire modern global economic order. Without an equivalent energy input to that sourced from the extraction of oil you and your family would quickly starve to death, it only takes a week without food to seriously debilitate your body and usually less than 30 days to die.
Hitler’s Russian conquest for Lebensraum was supposed to deliver Caucasus oil and Siberia’s natural resources, along with a Slavic slave labour force, as the economic base of a greater Third Reich. If he’d been successful the post WW2 super power balance would have been between the US and Germany rather than the Soviet Union and I have a feeling Hitler’s democratic, capital friendly dictatorship would have been much more accommodating business partners than the Stalinists. The US itself and its economic and military power is founded on the British conquest of North America in competition with the other European colonial powers for the riches of the New World. Rape and pillage have long been a profitable mainstay for economic growth opening up markets and procuring resources in situations where commerce has failed to deliver the goods. As far as I’m concerned a nation’s military power is wedded to its economic power and both are dependent on maintaining the security and constant growth of energy supply.

The current bloody occupation of Iraq is a defining example of how gigantic military force can be unleashed when energy security is threatened. For those of you who insist that this conquest is in the interests of opening up democratic free markets it remains to be seen whether the massive US national debts now accruing will be offset by the global economic benefits of enforcing liberal democracy on rogue nations and their people. More to the point, is the entirely unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ both in Iraq and in our vulnerable major cities worth it?

Yes, and such is the amorality of the will to will for which the good is the most profitable means to an end, a matter of pragmatic cost/benefit analysis, like Eichmann dictating bureaucratic/logistical orders in his government office, or Churchill and Roosevelt calmly signing battered Poland over to Stalin’s wrath. These are the business decisions of state where the strangely popular idea of a ‘national identity’ becomes a collective subject in itself in constant competition with others, and for whom morality is necessarily a matter of national self interest. At least that’s how I see it from Nietzsche/Heidegger’s critical perspective anyway.

I’m interested in interpreting our post WW2 history in terms of Heidegger’s critique of Nietzschean Nazism and its blindly technological setup. But I’m only interested in this history insofar as it sets up the the historical horizon of our present historical situation and its possible futures. One premise of this interpretation is that technology sets up the preconditions for our globalising way of life and that it is these conditions that bring about the global play of will to will as constant historical struggle or polemos. Another premise is that this struggle and its historical setup isn’t something that is controlled by humanity and its leaders let alone a god or gods. Humanity does not order the technological setup of modernity but rather constantly conforms to the ordering demanded by our modern situation which is now well and truly a planetary phenomenon.

From this perspective the history of modernity from the beginnings of the scientific/technological project in Western Europe 500 years ago through to the catastrophe of WW2 and on to our current global war footing is a history of amoral reactive necessity driven by the technological challenge to grow and develop nationally at an exponential rate. The leaders themselves are called forth and conform to this struggle so in a sense they are not an active force and neither are their nations. They simply fill the void and perform the functions made possible and thus necessary by their place in the technological ordering and its world historical struggle.

This accidental history has driven modernity as a way of life to colonise the entire earth, massively increasing its population and technological reach to the point that we are now on the threshold of triggering runaway global warming while in the midst of an accelerating major extinction event brought on by our exponentially growing consumption of finite planetary resources, most especially fossil fuels, and the subsequent biosphere destruction. As if this present context isn’t alarming enough humanity as a whole now faces the geological possibility of an imminent terminal energy decline.

So then, what function must the world’s lone military and economic super power perform within this historical setup? The possible intentions and moral choices of the individual leaders are irrelevant here, the question rather revolves around the possibilities for gain that America’s historical potential opens up in this global context and how these gainful possibilities might drive the leaders and the led towards their future fruition.

Polemos is my theme in Heidegger’s sense of the Auseinandersetzung, but the reciprocal confrontation here is that of the will to will as gainful volition driven not by an individual’s beliefs or morality but by the amoral and pragmatic necessities of one’s historical predicament. From this perspective belief and morality are rationalisations one constantly makes after the fact. So long as we continue to believe history is an effect of our active volition rather than a condition for its possibility we will always already be too late.

But then perhaps that’s always been the way for those incapable of functioning in a society and its free markets when cut off from family support. At the moment in Australia the family is still the primary safety net for mental illness, supported by invalid pensions and emergency hospital care in the overloaded public mental health industry. Apparently about 1 in 100 of us suffer schizophrenic breakdown which is on the extreme end of mental disturbance, the diagnosis grades from there into ’schizophrenogenic’ manic depression and less extreme forms of bipolar disorder through to the mainstream depression epidemic that is now treated in youth and the workforce with the widespread use of anti-depressants. So with schizophrenia, on the extreme end of mental dysfunction, we have perhaps 200 000 people who are severely incapacitated and in need of care. Of those who don’t commit suicide (4 in 10 attempt it, 3 in 20 succeed) but still fall through the family support safety net they either end up on the streets, in locked hospital wards, in prison, or if they are very lucky and functional enough they might end up in increasingly underfunded halfway houses. And that’s just for the extreme end of the mental health scale.

Before the medical profession took on mental dysfunction as a medical problem in the 1800’s the problem was solved by imprisonment for the vagrancy and petty crime that accompany homelessness. Severe cases went to asylum prisons which eventually developed into the mental health hospitals we have today. It seems that the US is trending back towards the earlier historical model of imprisonment and I guess that’s inevitable once government social funding gives way to free market economics. With the advent of peak oil if social equity declines along with energy equity then the least productive of us will be the first to suffer and schizophrenic sufferers generally have a very poor prognosis. But then with energy decline so do old people, injured and sick workers, and I guess the children of the poor as well if you want to press the point.

Generally, at the moment at least, a schizophrenic diagnosis here in Australia still guarantees an invalid pension, and Centrelink staff seem to be reticent to even interview them for review. However, it remains that without family support, emergency hospital care, pension and the medication provided by the PBS many sufferers simply die young. And who said life wasn’t meant to be easy?

As a nation we’ve already done the least we can for these people, and with energy decline imminent I’m sure there’s so much less we can do.

John Howard is known for his admiration of the Menzies era and we seem to be well on the way to returning to the fifties when, as my mum found out to her disadvantage, only rich people’s kids got to go to uni. The Libs have senate control next time the Federal Parliament meets and Nelson is set to ‘revolutionise’ the tertiary education industry by funneling research funding to private and elite universities leaving the rest to scramble for a shrinking federal budget supplemented by student fees. I think Howard is set to put his generational stamp on Australian society by wiping out the social reforms laid down by Whitlam 30 years ago and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. The unions are gearing up but their membership is at historical lows and Labor was politically castrated at the last election while the current generation of youth seem to have largely grown up in a political vacuum.

My peak oil forecast for future political change is the coming economic recession fed by rising oil prices ($US100/barrel +) pushing up interest rates and bursting the gigantic credit card and mortgage debt bubbles that help drive the domestic and global economy, probably within the next 5 years. Only then will the aspirational middle class mass of consumers wake up to the fact that enduring prosperity is founded on frugality and real savings rather than ballooning credit fuelled consumption. Trouble is they’ll wake up in the social wasteland they helped build, trapped in their suburban slums just in time to come to grips with the emerging self evidence of terminal energy decline and an era where publicly funded education, health and welfare will be a nostalgic memory. This Howard government is an ongoing national disaster.

In just over a day our nation goes to a federal election that will decide our international standing. Yet perhaps the most important question in our history has yet to be openly debated beyond the poorly reported anti-war protests. Should we support mass murder as foreign policy?

Our nation is about to go to a federal election that will decide which faction of the Australian Business Party will gain control of our nation’s economic, military and foreign affairs. Due to the constitutional gerrymander guaranteed by our two party preferred system of voting we can only choose between the social or ant-social factions of a parliament dominated by plutocratic interests, either that or we can vote informally or not at all. The last two choices are perfectly valid democratic responses to our limited form of mass democratic participation even though they will effectively be an informal vote for John Winston Howard.

The election campaign is currently being fought mainly on domestic terms and as a nation we seem to be largely ignorant of the world at large. While Howard has made noises about preempting terrorists on our neighbour’s soil it seems to have gone largely unnoticed that his policy of ‘preemptive’ strikes has already been put into practice. 10 000 slaughtered innocents including infants, pregnant women and the most elderly and infirm are testament to his iron will in defence of the good people of Australia. As a member of the Coalition of the Willing we support the widespread US terror bombing of Iraqi population centres currently underway.

So I have a question for the electorate:

As a nation should we support the slaughter of our neighbours children? Should we support mass murder as foreign policy?

Hitler also had a policy of preemptive self defence and he played to his people’s need for salvation, for god, for bread, for a restoration of their national dignity in a strong nationalist peace and for protection from ’semitic’ terror at home and abroad. It was his preventive war against Polish ‘terrorism’ that prompted the British Empire to declare war on Germany and brought bombs to London. Yet Hitler wanted peace with the West in order to launch his preemptive strike against the growing threat of Stalinist communism and it is ironic that WW2 not only failed to save the Poles but was immediately followed by the West taking up Hitler’s own fight against the Communist terror.

Nowadays us supposedly non-fascist democracies are being terrorised by a new semitic threat from abroad as we nervously look to our leaders to continue the constant growth in wealth we apparently enjoy, and while Nazi bombs aren’t raining down on London the bombs of the Coalition of the Willing are certainly raining down on Fallujah, Samarra, Baghdad and many other towns and cities in Iraq even as we write. The offensive against Iraqi insurgents is intensifying in the run up to the US elections with sustained bombardments of towns like Tal Afar in the north in September and air strikes on Sadr City. When Bush wins his second term it’s likely much more terror will rain down on defenceless men, women and children all over Iraq and beyond.

As a nation we seem to condone this illegal war of conquest and brutal occupation even as we seem to accept that it was sold to us on outright blatant lies. This is supposedly a preventive war against semitic/Islamic terror but as a war that has usurped the UN charter and international law it is a supreme crime of aggression that has resulted in the grotesque mass murder of over 10 000 innocents including babes in their mothers arms torn to bloody shreds of meat by razor shards of shrapnel. This slaughter isn’t collateral damage but state terrorism and the nation of Australia initiated it at the behest of our military and economic masters in order to help secure Persian Gulf oil for the next couple of decades in the face of an imminent global energy crisis.

I find the political debate in this country in the run up to what may well be the most significant federal election in our nation’s history utterly insane. And I’m not speaking rhetorically or for emotional effect here, we are simply and quite literally already a rogue nation drenched in the blood of thousands of our Iraqi neighbour’s children. While many people will vote for Howard without the benefit of any real debate on this most pressing national concern, largely due to the controlled and propagandised nature of our mass media, I find it rather chilling that our nation might reelect our war criminal Prime Minister this Saturday and effectively endorse our complicity in the murderous war crimes being committed for oil.

We are already well on the way to becoming a vassal state to a fascist imperial super power. Howard and Blair are quisling ‘arse lickers’ who are still using propaganda lies to manipulate their constituencies into following the proto-fascist neoconservative US administration along a path that leads to economic disaster, totalitarianism and a continuation of mass murder as foreign policy. Rather than international cooperation and investment in renewable energy to mitigate the problem this continued and expanding slaughter of innocents is our national strategy for the coming energy decline.

Most of us are aware of this Iraq problem of course yet it seems to hardly make an impact on the national psyche and talk of ‘fascism’ is written off as un-Australian leftist drivel. However, unlike us most Germans in the 1930’s didn’t have the historical hindsight to help them understand the modern democratic dictatorship that was Nazism and they dismissed its virulent anti-semitism as political rhetoric until the escalation of Hitler’s war on semitic/Jewish/Bolshevik terror overwhelmed them. We are already there with them, locked into a common belief in our already bankrupted individual and national morality, and the developing global energy crisis will drive us far deeper into this fascist abyss.

Again, I’m not speaking rhetorically here, I am trying to be as soberly literal about the reality of our current situation as possible. This coming federal election will not just decide which faction of our plutocracy will gain power, it will decide our nation’s standing within the international community at a time of an international crisis of historical proportions. I can only hope that those who intend not to vote Howard out might honestly think about what it means to effectively condone the murder of your neighbour’s children in order to steal their oil. Or better yet, since pictures are far more powerful, perhaps you might remember the faces of these innocent victims of the Coalition of the Willing as you prepare to not vote in good conscience.

The feral male of our species does not vote and does not collect the dole, I guess he doesn’t have a wage either so he doesn’t have to dodge paying tax or if he has divested himself of all bureaucratic identity he is a feral ghost in the black market machine. But he does use the internet (on a stolen or ancient computer and a hacked ISP?) which nonetheless runs on electricity that he presumably does not pay for. Nor does he eat any form of processed food supplied by the mechanised agricultural industry fed by our oil economy and its petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides, or at least he eats only ‘organic’ produce but not from the large supermarket chains that are the main distribution channel for our industrial farms.

He certainly does not drive a car as paying for fuel not only contributes to global warming caused by globalisation and its consumption of fossil fuels but is also heavily taxed. I hope he doesn’t smoke cigarettes as these are also heavily taxed and merely uphold the multi-billion dollar global tobacco industry. He refuses to purchase any form of plastics, in fact any commercial goods requiring transport, as these also uphold the global oil economy by consuming huge amounts of oil as raw material and for fuel. He also trusts only homeopathic remedies rather than the drugs synthesised from petrochemical sources.

I imagine he drinks only rain water as well since our privatised water corporations are also tied up in the bureaucracy of the fossil fuel economy and use electricity to pump our mains water provided by commercial coal and gas energy. Relying on solar and wind to generate electricity and permaculture to survive, and having rid himself of all dependency on the modern conveniences paid for by the exponential growth of globalisation since WW2 and founded on the constant growth in the production and consumption of oil, he is well placed to survive the coming energy descent. He will also make an excellent conscientious objector once the balloon goes up and the federal government is forced to institute a draft to feed the total war machine.

Apparently an imminent peak and subsequent terminal decline in oil production may lead to a global economic collapse with total war precluding any internationalist approach to either global warming, overpopulation, energy alternatives or maintaining even the semblance of democratic order resulting in a globalised capitalist totalitarian feudalism, historically gigantic population culls through war, famine and pestilence accompanied by accelerating biosphere destruction with the end result that within 100 years or so a Permian style planetary extinction event will wipe out 90% or more of all life on earth including us - unless we preempt nature through either adapting to the changes being forced on us or we commit the ultimate genocide and destroy ourselves in a nuclear apocalypse.

In the interest of public debate during this rather absurd and largely content free election campaign I would like to put forward a possible worst case prognosis for our nation’s future:

Energy depletion leading to economic collapse and total war in the context of global warming means extinction.

The more we release the gaseous byproducts of our exponentially growing energy consumption into our world’s atmosphere the more we brew perfect storms where the increased solar energy trapped by the Greenhouse effect leads to ever more energetic extremes. Where these chaotic extremes coincide and reinforce one another a perfect storm forms marshaling all the destructive forces available to nature. And by the way, the poles are melting along with huge expanses of what used to be permafrost at the same time as Australia’s rainfall is rapidly declining. Perth in Western Australia has experienced a two thirds drop in its rainfall since the mid 70’s and the decline has been accelerating since the late 90’s. The good people of this city are now considered to be the early warning canary in the global warming coal mine as this climatic drought is spreading eastwards throughout the entire continent. According to Dr Tim Flannery their city may become a ‘ghost metropolis’ within the next 50 years as our dry sunburnt continent becomes even drier in climatic conditions ‘not seen in 40 million years’.

Climatic change of course isn’t merely an Australian problem, it’s a human problem. Our post WW2 industrial globalisation has led to a massive restructuring in the way of life of a large section of the global population and an exponential growth in the total number of humans taking advantage of every resource this world has to offer. There are now over 6.4 billion of us, 4 people are born every second, 2 people die, the population as a whole is growing by 200 000 people every day, and that growth is exponentially increasing by 1.3% per year. Even though that rate is steadily declining from its peak of 2.2% in the 60’s, by 2050 there will still be 9 billion of us and we will be amongst the oldest of them. There are, however, growing scientific concerns that the available natural resources of this earth that supports today’s massive global population may be reaching their natural limits, from food production to water supplies, and most especially the super abundance of cheap hydrocarbon energy that fuels our constant economic growth and globalisation as a whole. We are consuming the earth at an exponential rate and are the principal cause of deforestation, desertification, the collapse of fisheries, massive worldwide pollution and an increasing species extinction rate rivaling the late Cretaceous extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Australia, perhaps the most biologically diverse and ecologically fragile land mass on this earth, is at the forefront of this world wide problem with our modern industrialised land management practices destroying native species and habitats at a world record pace. We are the Thorpedoes of modernity and according to Flannery we are also “one of the most physically vulnerable people on the Earth”, at the head of the pack leading humanity on towards a global warming catastrophe in the next 50 years and beyond. No doubt we will consume ourselves out of the problem, just as Perth will burn coal and gas to generate electricity for a proposed desalination plant in order to offset the growing water demands of its constantly growing population and the fall in water catchment runoff due to our industrial way of life and its global warming.

So at the moment we have exponentially growing overpopulation fueling accelerating biosphere destruction and global warming, and these seem to be an artefact of our growth based economic/political order founded on the constant growth in our consumption of energy with seemingly no end in sight to everyday business as usual even though that means a deferred death wish for today’s children and their children. For those of you who agree that the human situation at the beginning of the 21st century is becoming seriously unsustainable you would perhaps also agree that we need to approach these problems rationally, guided by the science and cooperating at the international level to help developing nations implement sustainable economies while we radically reduce our own industrial greenhouse emissions and change our way of life at the federal, state and local community levels. The Kyoto protocol was a first attempt at such internationalism and Australia is once again one of the world leaders in its ongoing failure.

Australia under Howard has actively worked to undermine any long term international approach to the problem of biosphere destruction while Australia under Bush is following the US into a brave new world where all increasingly urgent environmental concerns are secondary to keeping our globalised growth economies growing. Without constant growth the global economy would collapse as it is fed by inflating debt bubbles that can only be serviced by the production of more wealth, primarily paper wealth. Australian total debt is now over one trillion dollars and growing, US total debt is 37 trillion dollars, our middle classes are being buried under heavy mortgage debts that finance consumer spending with a lot of consumers resorting to credit for their weekly purchases. The engine driving our globalised economy is a gigantic debt bubble. According to recent economic warnings any serious rise in interest rates could destabilise our economy, burst the housing bubble and lead to a recession the size of the one that occurred in WW2. Our current consumer economy is poised on the edge of a precipice and increasingly vulnerable to external threats to the status quo. It’s not likely we will see heavy investment of our national wealth in changing our way of life any time soon unless something rather radical happens. There seems to be no current economic solution to the extinction threat of climate change other than to ignore it.

However, at the same time as global warming is starting to make an impact on that way of life there are growing concerns that the hydrocarbon energy reserves that have fueled the globalisation that leads to all these problems may also be reaching a limit in growth. Independent geological predictions of the imminent peak in global oil production are for 2005-2008 with a terminal decline self-evident by 2010. More optimistic oil industry estimates put the peak at 2020, just 15 years from now. For a previous Indymedia discussion on this topic see Peak Oil is Here but in summary, the possible consequences of peak oil are gigantic and involve nothing less than a forced, massive, radical and sustained change in our way of life as we transition to alternative energy sources and the economic/political order they support. Our current oil fed, growth based, globalised industrial civilisation will not survive the transition, something new must take its place.

If peak oil occurs within the next 4 years we will see a series of recessions as oil prices fluctuate wildly and trend upwards. Any increase in oil prices flows through to all our economic activity resulting in stagflation where economic growth slows and inflation sets in. To control inflation as our dollar devalues the federal reserve can only lift interest rates that will put pressure on our middle class debt bubble resulting in further economic chaos and a possible global stock market and banking crash. Some time after 2010 a global great depression will set in as economies shrink along with the terminal decline in oil supply and the middle classes are bankrupted, welfare collapses, food, housing and commodity prices keep rising and long term unemployment becomes systemic and widespread.

This pressure is starting now with the beginnings of a rollover in demand and supply of oil. OPEC is apparently pumping at full capacity and world supply at around 82 million barrels a day is only just keeping up with growing demand as the Chinese and Indian economies are coming on line. Even without a global peak in oil production demand rollover will inevitably push the price of oil up. If this price rise fails to stimulate further oil discoveries, and new oil finds peaked in the 60’s and have been falling ever since, then peak is inevitable as we draw down on our globe’s finite oil reserves. US Vice President Dick Cheney recognised this coming crisis in 1999 as chairman of Halliburton. President Bush was warned about it during his 2000 election campaign. Industry experts in Australia and Britain have been testifying to parliamentary commissions on the problem since the late 90’s. Our current leaders are fully aware of the situation and are going to extremes to prepare us for this energy transition.

Unfortunately for our economically and environmentally vulnerable nation this preparation does not generally involve any sort of public recognition of an emerging, historically unprecedented energy crisis nor any international agreement for cooperation on a more orderly global transition, if such is possible, to alternative and sustainable forms of energy. The Europeans, apart from Britain, seem to be further ahead in terms of their political response to energy and climate concerns. There is also generally a much more open public debate in the media, and the European Parliaments are entering that debate. Here in Australia we have one of the most heavily monopolised mass media industries in the entire OECD and peak oil is barely mentioned although the ABC and SBS are starting to respond to the message. While the federal parliamentary debate is almost entirely silent the Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson has acknowledged the problem in passing, the Greens have also made some comments and WA State Minister for Planning and Infrastructure Alanah MacTiernan fully recognises the emerging energy problem with the state government spending billions to address it. In hindsight, Western Australia has a 30 year head start on dealing with global warming and its associated problems, it is currently the most vulnerable community of the most vulnerable peoples on earth.

As a nation however we have gone in the entirely opposite direction. There is no chance the current federal government will support an international depletion protocol such as Upsalla, it refuses to even acknowledge a problem and has decided instead to embark on the antithesis of internationalism by participating in an illegal war of conquest in the Middle East. According to former Liberal Party president John Valder our current Prime Minister John Howard should be tried as a war criminal.

Technically speaking the Iraq war does seem to be a supreme crime of aggression, the same crime that led to the executions of what was left of the Nazi hierarchy and to the founding of the UN charter. It’s the supreme crime because it includes all other crimes committed by states that illegally invade sovereign nations including in the case of Iraq: The mass murder of over 10 000 innocents, violations of the Geneva conventions, the destruction of infrastructure like sewerage and electricity which leads to more civilian deaths, primarily children, and non-military detainees subjected to torture that has included the rape of children. Australian troops have been largely kept out of the insurgency so far but are there in a support role. We are a leading member of the Coalition of the Willing, our SAS may even have preempted the Bush ultimatum and initiated the war. As a nation we are complicit in everything that has happened in Iraq from the moment the war started through to the Fallujah assault, the Abu Ghraib atrocities and the assault on the holy city of Najaf, in every death and torment suffered by Iraqi’s under an illegal occupation. Legally speaking that is, at least potentially if it ever got a hearing under international law. But that’s one of the main consequences of the conquest of Iraq, the US National Security Strategy or ‘Bush Doctrine’ has redefined international law by usurping it and the UN. We are already operating under nationalist law defined by the most powerful nation on earth where the notion of preemptive or rather ‘preventive’ war means that wars of conquest are now ‘justified’ by those with the power to do so. It’s a new world order and a new definition of justice that is essentially the same as the order Hitler enforced on Poland leading to Britain’s declaration of WW2.

The advocates of this neoconservative new world order are openly lobbying for a religious crusade or clash of civilisations in the Middle East. These totalitarian extremists at the highest levels of the Bush administration are highly educated, philosophically informed ideologues who see war as human nature, the US as a ‘warrior society’, and power as the highest value and truth. They are now openly advocating a war with Iran following the doctrine of ‘creative destruction’ which calls for a Middle East conflagration fed by a military draft and the total mobilisation of the US peoples in an open ended global total war on ‘terror’ that will not end in our lifetimes. The 911 attacks were apparently a marvelous opportunity, a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ predicted in advance, allowing for a new order with the Patriot Act setting up an extreme version of Nixon’s police state and opening the door to a totalitarian takeover on the domestic front as well as the conquest of the Persian Gulf.

Their principal enemy seems to be China as it represents the greatest long term economic threat to US hegemony and they openly debate the problems of sustaining an Imperial US dominance of the world in both economic and military terms over the next 100 years. Central to that concern is securing the Middle Eastern oil fields before the coming energy crisis deflates the US dollar and their domestic economy collapses taking the global stock markets and banking with it. If you take the neocon extremists at their word the end game for the current US administration would more or less be the securing of the entire Persian Gulf oil supply through a bloody military occupation lasting decades. A wider energy war beyond the Middle East is most probably inevitable, it’s just a matter of when. With peak oil imminent, demand rollover starting and the global economy on a knife edge there seems to be no hope whatsoever for an internationalist approach to either the pending collapse of our current civilisation or catastrophic global warming so long as Bush and his neoconservative extremists, and their coalition of willing quislings, remain in power.

In the coming energy/wealth decline there will be increasing pressure to concentrate the remaining wealth in the industrial and military sectors that need it most, at the expense of everyone else and their democratic and human rights. The US already seems to be going this way as the presidency isolates itself even further from congressional oversight and Bush starts to rule by decree. At the same time there is a gigantic flight of US federal funds into the corporate and military sectors and an even larger tax break for the wealthy. Following a global economic collapse this plutocratic rule will probably turn into a free for all, the worst case scenario being a form of globalised capitalist totalitarian feudalism some time after 2010. With the rise of totalitarianism there follows the total mobilisation of a nation’s human and material resources in a total war of annihilation against all competitors. That is the logic of modernity and its great power games, our historical precedent is the rise of Nazism and the slaughter of WW2. The coming world war, however, will be fought with tactical nuclear weapons against non-nuclear or weak nuclear opponents, and one might hope that this limited nuclear warfare would not trigger a much more dangerous nuclear showdown between any number of major nuclear powers. Once unleashed, nuclear escalation may take on a life of its own as that is the very nature of total war, its proponents are ultimately driven to take total chances resulting in either total success or annihilation.

Now while a decline in the consumption of oil will certainly help lessen the impact of global warming, the ongoing and future energy wars along with the collapse of our international institutions will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of those of us exposed to the ravages of poverty, war, famine and pestilence now and in the decades ahead. Even worse, the intense short term competition for resources to feed any military and industrial war effort will most probably lead to the unrestrained use of coal for the generation of electricity and liquid fuels with no thought given to the long term consequences for climate change. Peak oil could quite possibly unleash a perfect economic and military storm leading to the extinction of the human species through either a nuclear apocalypse or runaway global warming. The latter possibility could result in a mass extinction event, within the next 100 years, as large as the late Permian extinction some 250 million years ago that wiped out 90-95% of all species on earth. How we respond to peak oil now may well decide the course of planetary evolution.

There is no political solution as such that can maintain our current growth based oil civilisation through the coming energy decline but politics will still play its part with federal, state and local reactions to that energy decline as it happens. The localisation of our food production, travel, work and manufacturing as vehicle use declines will also mean a localisation of our politics, and at its most fundamental level ‘politics’ means making peace with your immediate neighbours and joining together as a local community to share resources and skills in a barter economy. Its most basic unit is one’s own extended family which is how pre-conquest Australian Aboriginal societies operated. We will need to relearn how to live with one another rather than have our political order instituted from above, and only a popular grass roots movement can change our nation’s current suicidal course away from unilateral war towards international cooperation.

We need to stop our involvement in the oil war in Iraq and start publicly discussing some of the gigantic problems facing us starting with the imminent energy depletion, amidst global warming and a mass extinction, that is driving the lone US super power into blundering around like a dry drunk terrorizing Arabs. In the best of all possible worlds the US would turn towards true internationalism and lead the nations of the world by example in supporting a UN ban on all war and putting into action an agreement on an international depletion protocol integrated with a revised Kyoto protocol that addresses population growth. Unfortunately, as a plague species we are not in control of the biosphere, we are not in control of our technology, nor are we in control of our social and economic systems, our political processes, and we are most definitely not in control of our selves. Technological modernity is a historical juggernaut and our leaders are driving us all at full speed into the brick wall of energy depletion with their eyes wide open. Today, genocidal world war appears to be the dominant political solution being put forward by our leadership to address these myriad interrelated problems.

For those of you who plan to vote Liberal in the upcoming federal election I would hope you think twice before casting your lot with someone implicated in a supreme crime of aggression and the mass murder of thousands of innocents. For the others, if Labor wins all that will happen is that an alleged war criminal leaves office and his successor steps up ready to kiss the US President’s ring or face his wrath. For those of you who choose not to vote you will effectively be voting for Howard the “arse licker”, which is of course a perfectly reasonable use of your democratic right to not vote, and what real difference would it make anyway?

Whatever happens in the political realm, evolution is tenacious, life on this planet is incredibly adaptive and one of its most tenacious species is Homo sapiens. Never underestimate the capacity of the human animal to adapt to change and learn from its history, nor should we underestimate our capacity for stupidity and ignorance, the future is as always an open question.

Our corporate and governmental leaders are currently marching us into a global oil war that, once peak oil hits and terminal economic decline sets in, will probably erupt in WW3. What do you want to do about this state of affairs?

Global oil production is starting to peak with midpoint by 2008 and terminal decline becoming self-evident by 2010. Anglo democracies are on the march worldwide running full tilt towards the imminent energy descent and securing the Persian Gulf oil fields by military force. Once oil depletion hits over the next 5 years, the terminal global economic decline that accompanies it will literally translate into oil for food for billions of us around the world. Our current government has completely aligned itself with the US administration and military to see us through this life and death struggle. They aim to survive by force of arms rather than international cooperation and the current oil wars have lit the fuse that could ignite World War 3: A global nuclear war.

The impending Australian federal election stands to provide Howard with an implicit mandate for this coming war to end all wars. The danger facing the Australian nation is extreme. The efforts we take to meet it may be just as extreme if we go down the path of global war. The time will come when the leaders will demand we remove our gloves and use our fists. Once energy depletion sets in we will no longer make only partial use of the war potential at home and throughout the Coalition of the Willing. We will be driven to use our full resources, as quickly and thoroughly as it is organizationally and practically possible for the leaders to bring this about. All concern for humanity and the rule of international law will become wholly out of place. The total war effort required to prevail over our energy competitors will become a matter of the entire Australian people. No one will be allowed any excuse for ignoring its demands.

Apparently our leaders agree that it is human nature to survive by murder and that the historic democratic experiment has failed. It’s failing already in Iraq. The ideology driving this mad rush to total war resides at the highest levels of the current US Federal Government as our own John Pilger reports:

One of George W Bush’s “thinkers” is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about “total war”, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America’s “war on terror”. “No stages,” he said. “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq… this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war… our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

The term ‘total war’ refers to actual bloody warfare. Total warfare, as espoused by Neocon ideology fed by Straussian philosophy and real-politik, means the total subjugation of one’s people in the service of the total military domination of all other powers. It requires the total mobilisation of all national resources, both human and material, in a war with no moral or legal bounds, or what the Nazi’s called Vernichtungskrieg, their ‘war of extermination’ in the east. A total war is totally unrestrained warfare made possible by a total war economy in which every citizen is pressed into service on the home front or in battle without exception.

The last total war was WW2 and it slaughtered upwards of 50 million people or more in the European/Russian theater alone. It ended with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Use of the term to describe the Cold War and its grotesque internecine strife and slaughter is merely metaphorical otherwise our industrial power would be totally given over to a war economy and we would already be drafted into war service or hiding from the military and civilian police as a draft dodger.

While all humanity will have to deal with the coming terminal energy crisis within the next 5 years our leaders have thrown caution and common sense to the winds and are dragging us into a nuclear apocalypse in a naked grab for the world’s remaining oil reserves. Neocon ideology is leading the charge and must be defeated if we are to have any chance of actually dealing with the end of cheap energy. War means only the wealthiest and strongest survive, the heaviest burden is always borne by the common peoples, and most especially the poor. Nuclear total war threatens nothing short of the extinction of the human species. Globalisation is already crumbling, the international order is collapsing into naked competitive nationalism and we are already embarked on global war. The nation state needs no help from us in this regard apart from our continued consumer debt spending and consumption of fossil fuels until terminal oil decline sets in within the next decade. By that time we’ll be reduced to poverty along with the middle classes and serving as human raw material for a total war machine. Such is business.

One possible action we might take to avert WW3 is to help the yanks dump Bush 2 by voting against Howard. One’s democratic free choice not to vote will only make it easier for the Australian hawks within the government to win another mandate for this insane war we’re involved in. This decision is ours and it is the most basic political decision we could make, it’s between war and peace. If Howard wins the coming federal election he will effectively have a mandate for the ‘war on terror’ oil war that we are already heavily involved in. Although it’s easy to miss in our newspapers, we are already a nation at war initiated against the overwhelming wishes of the population. The whole world has been on a war footing ever since the Bush Doctrine was declared and we helped initiate the supreme crime of aggression that was the attack on Iraq. The founding principle of the UN outlawing state aggression has been superseded by a new world order based on the unilateral right of the US to attack any country it deems to be a threat to its national security. In this new world order you are either with them or against them, no neutrality will be recognised as we enter into the coming energy crisis.

Yet what is the difference between Howard & Latham as regards US power? Probably not much, they both support the US-British alliance formed during WW2 and the fight against the Germans, Italians and Japanese just 60 years ago and cemented over the Cold War against the Chinese and the Russians. But Latham is committed to an at least symbolic withdrawal from the war in Iraq, a withdrawal that Bush 2 himself warns will be “disastrous” for the Coalition of the Willing. It would probably do a favour for Kerry in his electoral battle with Bush.

Of course the ALP has never been a pacifist party as far as I know, and the WW2 PM John Curtin was a Labor man who broke with Churchill to align with the US and sent raw troops into Papua New Guinea against the Japanese Imperial Army. Breaking with Bush doesn’t break the US alliance, at least not if Kerry wins yet he would also be a war president working under the same pressure to ensure US ‘energy security’. The gigantic problem of peak oil will remain along with the ‘war on terror’ and whatever other god awful mess Bush leaves as his legacy to our future but a change of leadership in both nations should hopefully slow the pace of war as the Neocons would be swept from office. And all we really have is hope.

Democrats, conservative Republicans and sections of the CIA and others in intelligence and the US military are actively working against the Neocons, Rumsfeld and Cheney while an impeachment of Bush might be forthcoming from the Grand Jury on the outing of Valerie Plame. If Bush attempts to suspend the elections in November it may all come down to who the military leadership supports. A totalitarian dictatorship simply must have the support of the armed forces when it comes to the suspension of a nation’s constitution. They ultimately guarantee the order.

Beyond November who knows what will happen? Even so, the future of the earth hangs on our military success or failure in the Middle East. I would equate a military failure with the outbreak of a wider war far beyond the Middle East as competition for declining energy resources intensifies. Those of us who prefer peace over total war need a government of the day willing to pursue international cooperation to prepare for peak oil and an irreversible global economic decline that will force a massive, radical and sustained change in our way of life as we transition to alternative energy sources and the economic/political order they support.

I humbly suggest that we should all vote NO to global total war.

Why are we so afraid of war?

Not voting in the coming federal referendum on Howard’s war is a perfectly reasonable way to use one’s voting rights. However, an abstention is already a form of voting and one that Howard is counting on amongst disaffected left wing nihilists and youth in general. In the circumstances they might as well just join the Young Liberals and vote Liberal/National Party.

I’m not saying that Labor would be much different, there’s not a lot of choice involved in a constitutionally gerrymandered two party deomcracy as you’ll get the social and anti-social factions of the one business party that basically makes for a one party plutocracy but this forthcoming election is nonetheless important for a special historical reason. We are currently involved in a global oil war that may last 30 years or more if we don’t self-immolate as soon as the nukes start flying, and the overwhelming burden will fall heaviest on us working poor. With peak oil the future looks rather grim and if you think the dole is hard try googling ‘West Africa’ for an insight into what’s in store for us developed westerners once the global economy starts shrinking and/or collapses.

The US has responded to this crisis by simply stating it will dominate the world by military force and has demonstrated this new founding principle for world order through the conquest of Iraq. If you understand peak oil then you can see where we’re going: WW3 and global capitalist feudalism more extreme than you can probably imagine. The only way out of this global catastrophe is international cooperation and the immediate diversion of the gigantic funds currently being spent on the military and war into research for alternative fuels while we still have the wealth to do so.

Howard stands to win an implicit mandate for involving us in an oil war that promises armageddon. Voting for the Greens with Labor preferences will help vote Howard out while Latham is committed to a very public if limited withdrawal from Iraq that will further undermine the US presence there and help to increase pressure on Bush 2 in the US November election. Lefties who choose not to vote will simply help Howard and the proto-fascist neoconservative extremists win and we’ll sink further into the quagmire of a global oil war that has already slaughtered thousands of innocents and threatens to drag us all into an apocalypse of gigantic proportions as the oil dries up over the next 5-10 years.

What do you think about our abstention rights from this perspective? A ‘mandate’ is won by gaining a majority of whoever votes. An abstention from voting means giving up the only minimal power we have left in a failing democratic state and handing it completely over to the vested interests that increasingly have a stranglehold on power. Rather than bringing the democratic order down the US system relies on this self-disenfranchisement of voters, Bush 2 has already profited from it by getting elected with less than 50% of a popular vote decided on by the US Supreme Court and he is leading the world towards an apocalypse.

Another case in point is the democratic election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party which never won a majority rule. He was a democrat who gained power in coalition with other far right wing parties and legally instituted a democratic, constitutional, absolute dictatorship by decree. Elected democratically he legally dissolved democracy and became a popular dictator. His rule led to the holocaust of WW2.

Howard doesn’t care if you don’t vote, in fact it suits his agenda perfectly the more people, especially socialists, turn off and don’t listen to what is going on in this world. As the terminal energy crisis hits we will be driven into poverty and the plutocratic rule will entrench itself by way of global war, famine and pestilence. This is the Neocon world view, total war requires totalitarian rule as the age of cheap energy collapses. Only the ‘chosen few’ will be allowed to lead this new order.

Power doesn’t need our vote, it only needs us to bury our collective head in the sand, click our Red Ruby slippers and dream that everything bad will go away. The bureaucratic system is not going to fade away even as the global economy enters a terminal decline over the next 10 years. Democracy may collapse but totalitarian power will intensify as it is already intensifying at the moment. The time span to arrest this intensification is rather narrow in world historical terms as peak oil extraction is predicted for 2008 with terminal decline self-evident by 2010.

I understand why some may feel the coming election is pointless, it’s a poisoned chalice whether you vote or abstain. But voting against Howard just this once may help bring about the demise of the Neocons who intend the destruction of whatever minimal democratic freedoms we still enjoy and whose response to peak oil is to launch a global war that will probably ignite a nuclear WW3 and doom us to poverty at the same time as the stock markets crash and the price of housing, electricity, food and water goes through the roof.

Either we spend what national wealth we have left on a transition to an alternative energy economy as soon as possible or we waste it on a war that might consume us all.

Which poison do you prefer?

Remember the movie ‘Independence Day’? How the alien ships arrived over major cities around the world and a countdown began towards apocalypse? Well that’s kind of where we are today except the mainstream media and world governments are hiding the threat from view while the US regime under Bush 2 is running rampant across the globe to secure as much as it can before the news breaks worldwide. Apparently we’ve run out of cheap oil.

It’s easy to get confused with all the mad news stories going around nowadays, especially given the overwhelming criminal compliance of our corporate and public media and the government propaganda it pedals, you’d hardly think we’re all actually involved in a global war, an illegal attack on Iraq, in extra-legal detention and torture, and in the ongoing mass murder of 10 000+ innocents while our world plummets on towards a global warming catastrophe. The biggest news in the world at the moment however is also the most suppressed, and it is actually quite frightening. It’s suppressed because it completely obliterates all the ludicrous reasons we’ve been fed about why we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because once it becomes self-evident the global stock markets will panic and crash.

Obviously it’s all about the neo-colonial theft of Iraqi oil but the motivation driving this theft is rather more urgent than just funnelling oil into Haliburton’s maw. Apparently, according to oil industry people and independent geologists, Hubbert’s Peak has possibly already arrived with a plateau in global oil production this very year, midpoint peak by 2008 and terminal decline setting in from 2010. You may have noticed a growing number of stories about it but for those of you who don’t know, peak oil occurs when half the oil in the ground around the world has been pumped out. From that moment on the remaining oil is harder to extract, so they pump water and natural gas into the oil field to maintain pressure as the production in barrels per day declines. Using more energy to pump it out and less of a flow means oil is more expensive to produce and there’s increasingly less of it to go around. Or in other words, and it’s just a simple geological fact, there’s no more cheap oil.

The notion of ‘peak oil’ has been around for a while ever since Hubbert predicted it for the year 2000 back in the late 50’s. The recent predictions are based on geological data from the 2000 US Geological Survey and after the latest Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO http://www.peakoil.net ) conference in Berlin in late May attended by oil company geologists, market analysts, members of the European Parliament and international media this story is starting to break all over the internet just this last few weeks. It’s not a conspiracy myth, it’s not the ravings of disaffected lefties, it’s science.

Dr Colin Campbell has recently revised the ASPO estimate for peak oil and gas production to just 4 years from now: “The present model departs from earlier ones in recognition that the Middle East no longer has sufficient spare capacity to discharge a swing role. A volatile epoch of recurring price shocks and consequential recessions dampening demand and price is now regarded as more likely, with terminal decline setting in and becoming self-evident by about 2010″.

There are lots of recent 2004 reports speculating about the Saudi’s ability to increase production suggesting that the peak plateau may already have arrived with midpoint by 2008. OPEC is apparently pumping at its full rate, while everyone else from the Russians, US, North Sea to our own oil fields are apparently depleting already. The first major oil shock could be as early as the fourth quarter of this year and some analysts suggest that the Saudi’s are on the verge of a collapse in their major Gawar oil field, the largest in the world.

According to what I’ve read, if this all turns out to be true then we’re currently on the threshold of a gigantic transition in the structure of our modern globalised industrial civilization, a transition that humanity seems completely unprepared for. More than just the price of petrol at your local bowser, cheap oil means cheap road/rail haulage and international shipping as well as air travel, it means cheap food produced by mechanised industrial agriculture with its petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, more than just underwriting the value of the US dollar and their domestic economy it upholds the global stock markets and banking system. Cheap oil has paid for our modern lifestyles since WW2. The end of cheap oil will mean a lot more than $4 per litre and rising, just to drive a car around. Beyond the current oil wars and the short term economic effects of unstable oil supply and prices over the next 5 years, peak oil threatens an irreversible global economic decline that will force a massive, radical and sustained change in our way of life as we transition to alternative energy sources and the economic/political order they support.

The cost of everything will rise and rise with the poorest of us the first to start suffering. A terminal economic decline will begin with a recession in Australia the size of the one that occurred in WW2, and this possibility is already being discussed in our mainstream media. Think an end to public welfare across the board, food stamps and eventually food riots, massive rising unemployment, the collapse of Medicare and public hospitals, a severe crisis in the cost and delivery of water … but at least the roads will be less congested, more room for the ultra wealthy and their gas guzzling limousines.

At worst peak oil could mean a complete global economic collapse sometime after 2010, middle class poverty and the breakdown of law and order, truly gigantic starvation in the third world and the unrestrained outbreak of global warfare with the risk of numerous ‘limited’ nuclear conflagrations. It could ultimately mean the extinction of the human species through global nuclear war and its companions famine and pestilence.

If you’re a radical anarchist then quite possibly your time in the sun is coming very soon.

We need a government of the day that can honestly face this global energy crisis and work towards a coordinated international transition to alternative and sustainable energy sources apart from coal and nuclear energy as soon as possible. Unfortunately it appears that current political and corporate leaders around the world are incapable of an honest and open response to the problem of peak oil, let alone global warming and other related ecological disasters in waiting that are fueled by our exponentially growing consumption of fossil energy. Far from facing the inevitable threat of peak oil, our current government’s oil friendly energy policy, theft of East Timorese oil and participation in the illegal war in Iraq keeps us in lock step with the Bush administration’s militarist regime. Responding to this looming terminal oil crisis by collaborating in the mass murder of upwards of 50 000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers in order to gain strategic control of the Persian Gulf oil fields is probably the most criminally dangerous act imaginable in the circumstances. And it’s us liberal Anglo democracies that have done it.

My question to the Indymedia network is what potential exists here to organise around this global problem and help get this ‘Peak Oil’ message out? With the likelihood that oil prices will never again fall much below $US40 a barrel but on the contrary will inevitably keep rising as peak sets in the time is right for the truth to start making a whole lot of awful sense to a lot more people. An Australian federal election is imminent, perhaps as early as August, in which Howard stands to win an implicit mandate for our involvement in a global oil war with no end. The real election issue is do we want global total warfare as a way of life or international cooperation in dealing with the impending collapse of our modern industrial civilisation?

Perhaps now is the time for all anti-globalisation activists to come together and fight the propaganda war currently being waged on us by the corporate media and mainstream political parties, using the new media weapons at the disposal of Indymedia. There is an editorial policy but is there any sort of consensus of opinion nationally and internationally amongst the Indymedia crews about the threat of peak oil and can Indymedia coordinate its activities and agenda on a national and international level?

What sort of relations can be built with local youth and student groups and other fringe dwellers focusing on an information campaign about peak oil as the underlying problem fuelling globalisation, oil wars and the disaster of global warming?

Some possibilities for action are: Encourage people to vote against Howard’s response to peak oil; encourage the stencil and graffiti artists to go political about it; organise ongoing poster/leaflet campaigns; form letters to government, corporate and union functionaries; online petitions; letters to the editor; indie ‘end time’ gigs; sit ins; rallies and whatever else comes to mind.

The central message is simple - Peak Oil is Here - everything else from corporate and governmental interference in our daily lives and the rape of the environment, to Howard’s use of concentration camps for ‘illegal aliens’ and the prosecution of an international war crime in Iraq, is a consequence of that simple geological fact and the end of the cheap energy that fuels globalisation. If 60’s activism revolved around ‘make love not war’ and the atrocity of Vietnam this generation is faced with nothing less than the possibility of the end of our modern industrial civilisation, a global apocalypse.

Ideas can be powerful, especially if they’re true and most especially if they involve an overwhelming threat to a peoples well being. That’s how the government’s propaganda campaign on ‘terror’ works, and its principles are based on Goebbels Nazi propaganda machine. Instead of spin and machination though what you have on your side is scientific truth.

It looks like the peak oil message is starting to make some inroads at the state government level, at least in Western Australia. The Sustainable Transport Coalition’s ‘Oil: Living with Less’ conference was held at the Perth Convention Centre on Monday August 9th and was opened by the state Minister for Planning and Infrastructure, Ms Alannah MacTiernan.

Alanah MacTiernan, who seems to be a genuine peak oil convert, recognises that “a problem is emerging” and mentioned peak in the time frame 2010-2035 although obviously thought it was more likely sooner than later. While she is perhaps the only one in cabinet who is onto the problem her portfolio is perfect for a peak oil advocate. There are some large projects underway in Western Australia such as a new train line tunneling under the CBD and a second gas pipeline coming down from the North West shelf that apparently have been brought forward at least in part by the oil supply concerns. An emphasis on bus transport and a move away from our car based culture was also evident.

The view from the convention centre windows at the lunch break was informative, there is a big field of mud where there used to be a freeway onramp soon to be a rail station for the new line. Is Perth the only capital city in Australia that is demolishing freeway to make way for rail?

Bruce Robinson of the Sustainable Transport Coalition claimed that WA is a ‘world leader’ in its approach to oil depletion although I think we’ve got a long way to go as it is still very much a car based culture with massive suburban sprawl.

Brian Fleahy warned that while “water is renewable the energy used in its delivery systems isn’t”. A new peak capacity power station is being built to cope with growth in electricity consumption, probably using gas, and the desalination plant will use a lot of that as well. A sustainable water policy is important for Perth’s future as rainfall runoff into our catchments has apparently fallen by over 50% since the mid-70’s and the drought is accelerating. Fossil fuel based global warming is having a drastic effect on our local climate and apparently Perth is the canary in the coal mine for all of Australia with Dr Tim Flannery warning recently it may become a ghost town.

Dr Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, of the National Iranian Oil Company, suggested that Australia is better placed than perhaps most other nations and was surprised at the level of discussion of the problem in WA. He sees a global peak in oil production by 2006-2007, no later than 2008 and does not think non-conventional (deepwater and arctic) oil will make much of a difference. Outside of the Middle East, oil production worldwide is already falling and the Persian Gulf oil supply is itself largely founded on old super giant fields like Ghawar.

He claims both Saudi and Iranian fields are overextended and the only good fields left are in Iraq. The largely unexplored Iraq western desert may hold upwards of 40 Gbl, or nothing at all, and if ever brought online optimum production in all of Iraq could be over 6 mbl/d according to his calculations. However, this optimistic level of production should be compared with our current consumption of 81+ mb/d and strong demand growth of 3% or more per annum, a production level that Dr Bakhtiari thinks is already very close to its peak.

There will probably be a fairly long plateau period for Persian Gulf oil though which will therefore increasingly play an even more important role in world supply but there is currently very little leeway as far as spare capacity goes. He warns that our way of life will change ‘very, very soon’ and that change will be absolute and unprecedented.

Dr Bakhtiari left after his talk to brief state cabinet on the oil situation before returning for the afternoon sessions. He also appeared on the local commercial news with Channel 10 leading with a short interview and the headline ‘petrol to rise to $3/L in 2-3 years’. It’s the first mainstream peak oil news byte I’ve seen on Australian TV, and both the conference and cabinet meeting made the business section headline in the West Australian newspaper. His talk at the conference seemed to make the biggest impact as he stressed the global urgency of the problem and its massive implications for our way of life, something the STC perhaps isn’t as focused on with its emphasis on transportation issues. The food production problem for instance didn’t get much of a hearing, an omission Brian Fleahy pointed out.

Overall there was a good mix of people from business, the unions, government, charity organisations and others. There was even a talk by David Smith from the state Treasury Department on the modeling they’ve done based on a 20% rise in fuel prices. Nothing particularly interesting apart from the fact they’re looking at the problem in the first place. Lisa Baker of the WA Council of Social Services (WACOSS) gave a talk on the growing poverty levels in WA and the problems faced by especially rural communities that rely on car transport to connect with services that are already shrinking along with employment. She claimed charity organisations around the state are already strained by rising fuel costs and the regional poor are very vulnerable especially where demand for charity assistance has risen sharply the last couple of years with over 500 000 transactions per year statewide. So much for trickle down economics.

The afternoon session was divided into three scenarios, fuel prices staying at $1, rising to $3, and the supposedly extreme scenario of $10/L oil. I opted to see what they thought of the $10 scenario. It started out rather optimistically with estimates of the timeframe for $10 petrol within about 20 years or so until we considered the possibility of the outbreak of a wider Middle East conflict. The scenario was then split into two possibilities, one being a short term spike in price due to war or other unforeseen circumstances and the second due to the longer term supply decline as the resource depletes. The severe oil shock was seen as much more problematic as far as its economic consequences and our community’s ability to respond goes.

Generally there seemed to be, at least initially, an emphasis on how we might transition to more efficient transport and the STC people seem to believe that a hydrogen economy is possible. The ultra-light sub 1 litre car was even economical at $10/L petrol. However, after it was pointed out that the US economy is over $US30 trillion in debt, the Australian economy over $AUS1 trillion in debt with both economies driven by middle class credit spending, the possible economic chaos caused by this $10 scenario highlighted the difficulties that might be faced in any transition to a more energy efficient economy.

Basically by the end we seemed to agree that the $10/L scenario is quite probably a national and state emergency scenario, especially in the event of a sudden oil shock driven by war. Such a shock could very well result in a global economic crash and the collapse of international trade as air and sea freight costs go through the roof. By the time I mentioned the possibility of hyperinflation and terminal economic depression with the debt ridden middle classes being just as vulnerable as the poor the discussion got rather heated. I think there may have been a few debt ridden middle income earners there.

Overall the scenario calls for a massive localisation of travel, manufacturing of basic commodities, food production, education and other services - that is, a return to earlier modes of community. The STC delegates put the big picture together rather quickly and stressed the need for a move to cycling and public transport, to the use of trains and even shipping for moving goods around Australia, and the necessity of a coordinated response at the local, state and national level. In the medium term WA’s gas supply looks like a lifesaver so long as we don’t turn into a desert too quickly and the stated reserves don’t deplete too quickly. A point was made that transport and travel will revolve more around considerations of cost rather than time, for instance moving freight by truck in 36 hours coast to coast will give way to slower rail and even possibly shipping as the costs scale up. There may even be a return to passenger shipping with someone mentioning the cheap Asian sea fares that students took advantage of in the 70’s.

Dr Bakhtiari sat in on the session for the last 30 minutes or so and by the end we were into emergency government and war economy scenarios in the context of a severe oil price shock and/or global economic depression. Dr Bakhtiari suggested that it would require an act of god for the world to avoid warring over depleting energy resources, at which point our time was up. He also said the best thing we could do is to talk about it as we were already doing since planning and change needs to happen now, and that change is already on its way whether we plan for it or not.

One of the most disturbing predictions I’ve read comes from evolutionary biological theory on species extinction and the phenomenon of ‘die off’. A successful species can exploit its environmental niche to such a degree that it not only eliminates all competition but it also exponentially increases its population far beyond the carrying capacity of that niche and exhausts the natural resources that support it leading to a radical decline in its population, a die off that in some instances can result in localised extinctions. This model has been observed in various species from bacteria to the polynesian peoples of Easter Island.

According to some extreme pessimists peak oil may mean that humanity as a whole will exhaust the technologically elevated carrying capacity of the earth that sustains it in just *20 years* resulting in a collapse in the global population to pre-oil levels. From 6.4 billion souls to around 1-2 billion or even less within our lifetime. This apocalyptic scenario includes mass starvation due to the collapse of industrial farming as well as mass murder from increased competition for energy resources and the global warfare that implies. We’ve already embarked on the global war path and the next 5 years may bring more oil wars and the beginnings of a global ‘great depression’ with terminal economic decline setting in after 2010.

This apocalypse isn’t of course a certainty, given the right leadership and an unprecedented level of international cooperation the situation may be manageable and a transition to alternative sustainable energies, ways of life and economies accomplished in time to avert a serious die off. Trouble is it should have been started 30 years ago in the 70’s when these problems first became evident. Even worse, the Bush administration is obviously going down the unilateral path of global military domination rather than international leadership, and under Howard we’re all blindly following in tow. The corporate media obscures this madness by repeating mantras about ‘Islamic terror’, ’security’, ‘freedom’ and so on while suppressing the growing chorus of scientific voices warning of imminent peak oil.

Now this ‘die off’ threat is just a possibility but one that should at least be recognised as such along with all the other possible futures facing us as global oil production starts to peak and the constant growth in supply slows to a stop. Constant growth in cheap energy equals globalisation. Peak oil means the collapse of globalisation but the collapse may be truly catastrophic and intensify the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the plutocrats that control global capital.

The end result may be a form of globalised capitalist feudalism within 20 years far exceeding anything pro-democratic forces have to deal with today. Peak oil isn’t merely one facet of globalisation, it’s the underlying primary motivation for its acceleration over the last 3 decades. How we deal with it rationally at a local, national and international level for the good of all may well decide the future of the human species. Unfortunately, historically speaking, reason has had very little to do with how we got here to begin with, greed and ignorance are generally much more powerful motivators of human action.