Re: a kinder, gentler hacktivist..

[Ashok Agrwaal <ashokagrwaal@vsnl.com>]

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This is my first posting to this list.  Like Bernie I consider myself an
activist though (regretably) not a hacktivist.  As Bernie says, maybe
someday.

I agree with Bernie totally on Corporations.  Besides, merely feeding
people is not enough.  They need to be empowered.  That can only happen
when the thrall which grips them is broken.  That can never be till this
world remains ordered as 'World Inc.'.

People have made money from time immemorial.  Iniquity and inequity are
both as old as the human race.  Yet there is something very evil that
particularises the present (European) era-often touted as the 'ultimate
effulgence of human civilisation'.  Put this way it has the ring of
death.  As if there is nowhere left to go from here.  As if millions of
years of evolution (by the way Darwin was just the first European in a
long line of evolutionists stretching back into the mists of time) were
destined to end in this kicking, screaming, fighting, clawing, hate
filled cauldron of cupidity that is commonly known as the "modern"
world.  As if Europe and its civilisation were the graveyard of
humanity.

Clearly the white supremacists are wrong.  (By the way read 'Black
Athena' by Martin Bernal to know more about that fount of European
civilisation-Greece.).  Not that I grudge them their conquest of the
world.  No longer.  There is no doubt that superior force, motivation,
organisation and technology won.  Though technology did not play the
kind of role, that is ascribed to it today, in the conquest.  Merely, it
is much nicer for the inheritors of this conquest to think of the
devastation of the whole world and the genocide of so many peoples in
terms of 'the better (more skilled, better equipped in evolutionary
terms) side won'.

My concern therefore, is with what comes next.  The danger here is that
for the first time the whole world is in the same thrall.  In the past
the rise and the fall of civilisations has proceeded along
characteristic lines because there was always people untouched by the
'decay triumphant'.  Their lack of decadence was the guarantee of the
civilisational progression.  This is increasingly not the case today.
The global village is getting smaller and tighter and meaner and
meaner.  We in India know very well how tyrannical and enervating such a
village can be.  And the portents are ominously similar.  The same
wealthy overclass.  The birth based concept of superiority.  The mass of
the underclass, tinged with varying degrees of the taint of
untouchabilty (aparthied). { I am sure you will accept that aparthied is
not dead.  It has merely gone underground.  It is alive and kicking even
among Indians (many of whom have fancy 'Aryan' notions about themselves)
what to speak of those really "melanin challenged".}  Lastly, the same
endless toiling of the masses for the welfare of the 'classes'.  A few
more generations of this and the spark may be gone forever?!  For,
hunger breeds dullness.  Chronic hunger breeds inertia.


I am not being morbid.  Nor am I a pessimist.

Today the favoured method of golbalisation is 'corporatisation'.  So, as
Bernie says, Carmine, please rethink your view.

Ashok



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