International Politics: April 2006 Archives

"One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women."

In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?

What will the U.S. do about Iran? Sanction? Bomb? Invade?

How about... nothing.

That's right, nothing.

So suggests a Republican member of the U.S. House who has been sounding the alarm in Congress about the rush to act against what he dismisses as nothing more than "the next neocon target".

An article by two prominent American professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy has triggered a furious row, pitting allegations of anti-semitism against claims of intellectual intimidation.

Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, published two versions of the essay, The Israel Lobby, in the London Review of Books and on a Harvard website.

Billionaire philanthropist Jimmy Walter and WTC survivor William Rodriguez this week embarked on a groundbreaking trip to Caracas Venezuela in which they met with with the President of the Assembly and will soon meet with Venezuelan President himself Hugo Chavez in anticipation of an official Venezuelan government investigation into 9/11.

Rodriguez was the last survivor pulled from the rubble of the north tower of the WTC, and was responsible for all stairwells within the tower. Rodriguez represented family members of 9/11 victims and testified to the 9/11 Commission that bombs were in the north tower but his statements were completely omitted from the official record.

Shrii Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar propounded the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout) in 1959 as an alternative to capitalism and communism. All his ideas are enunciated in Prout in a Nutshell, Neo-Humanism in a Nutshell, Human Society - Parts 1 and 2 and A Few Problems Solved. In this article, I elaborate on his contribution to humanity in the area of political theory.

The experience of contemporary history has exposed the fallacies of cherished social, political and economic ideas, classical as well as revolutionary. The world is full of opportunities - material, mental and spiritual - and so to build a better and freer society is a practical possibility. Yet we are observing a process of social decadence, moral degeneration and the collapse of values which is corroding the springs of human action and corrupting the ideals of a civilized life. Failure and disappointment are bound to follow from attempts to solve the problems of our time with the ideas of previous centuries. These ideas emphasized material progress and scientific development.

However, the mental makeup and moral standard of the civilized community have not matched the level of material progress. In other words, the development of civilization - refined cultural progress - has proven far slower than scientific development.

The civilized world in this century has been confronted with new problems that seem to baffle human intelligence, which is probably inevitable if solutions are defined on the basis of old ideas and theories. Communism, which promised material well-being and security in a socially regimented and spiritually enslaved life, has collapsed, creating disillusionment about revolutionary ideals.