1906 AND ALL THAT Remember that in 1906 we did not have Al-Qaida. The 1906 version of the War on Terror targeted Anarchists and any imperially oppressed people foolhardy enough to resist. Nascent Zionism was around. Anarchists wanted regime change in every country; Zionists were more for 'Freedom in one Country' (yet to be defined). In fact by 1906 anarchism was no longer a threat to anyone. However the idea of 'propaganda by deed' has survived and has been taken up by other movements. Aum Shibryoko tried, but the Hamburg cell of Al-Qaida succeeded in bringing 'propaganda by deed' to apocalyptic extremes. Of course terrorists have never been any match for the state in terms of mass slaughter. For the inculcation of real nastiness and blood lust we must examine the school system. The combination of religion and state is a particularly well tried path to brutality. Protestantism in contemporary Northern Ireland and State Shinto in Japan both used propaganda images of small boys agressively poised and willing to beat the hell out of anyone who opposed the ambitions of the state. By 1906 religion was almost everywhere in decline. People might go to church or visit the temple, but this was as often a way of asserting national or tribal identity rather than going in for the philosophy of the religion. One of the World's most modern states was France. Pasteur had done much to improve process industries and medicine. His work did not prevent thousands dying of disease on the Panama Canal project, but the ideas were there. In 1906 Pierre Curie got run over by a horse drawn cart carrying military provisions. He died from his injuries but he left his wife Marie to carry on his illustrius career. The pair had purified radium in a shack in the grounds of a Paris university. By 1906 France was itself an energy poor country. It had lost much of its coalfields in the disasterous war of 1870-71. France remains energy poor. Today, amongst nations, France has the highest proportion of nuclear power generation in the World. Just one hundred years on France still retains its status as a 'Long Established Great Power' by having nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Back in Pierre Curie's day there was an international system which consisted of different treaties signed by different people to settle problems on an ad-hoc basis. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1906 had gone to Theodore Roosevelt for his efforts as referee in the bloody Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. This war had seen thousands of conscript troops attempting to storm concrete protected machine gun posts through barbed wire and minefields. Japan had for some years devoting up to 40% of its GNP on miltarisation, a figure similar to that of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. At that time no one was willing to call Japan a failed state, but the economic indicators pointed that way. Russian anti-semitism was fuelled by stories that Jewish controlled banks had lent money to Japan. The 'Traditional Great Powers' all had the most terrible social problems at home. Emigration, sometimes enforced, was seen as a means of treating anti-social behaviour. The French had a system of overseas prisons in South America and the Pacific. The English had turned a whole continent into a prison. Russia had a great periphery for exiling trouble makers. Despite the social problems French science and engineering were widely admired and the early 1900s saw an influx of Asian students. Alumni included Ho Chi Minh and Dzu En Lai. This happened mostly during and after the First World War. England also had science and culture, and at that time it was much more successful than France. England had apparently inexhaustible supplies of coal but the powers in the admiralty were interested in a switch to oil for its battleships. An investor called D'Arcy had already spent a considerable amount of money searching for oil in Iran. Winston Churchill wanted to 'Join up the British Empire'. In 1906 the USA had itself become an 'Inheritor of Empires'. It had taken over the moribund 'Panama Canal Project' from the French after first securing a slice of Colombia, and then inherited tutelage of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain. American doctors were also making great advances in medicine. Dangerous experiments were made on human patients, often the very poor. Militarized medicine began in America. The Panama Canal Zone represented a well run colony. The Americans had also invented Airplane technology, and , for executions, the electric chair. 1906 saw the San Francisco Earthquake. When the local China town was devastated there were moves to buy up the land and move the chinese elsewhere. THE STATE OF NATIONS IN 1906 Afghanistan 1906 Borderland between Imperial Russia, British India and China. Ruled by magnates and pensioners. Austria-Hungary 1906 Multi national empire. Willing to inherit anything from decaying Ottoman Empire. Britain 1906 Britain had earned a reputation as a temporary home for high profile trouble makers (E.g. Voltaire). It also had its local troubles with Ireland, which was still an integral part of Britain at the time. China 1906 Anti-capitalist Seeking to modernise. A failed state. Germany 1906 A successful new state. Militarised. By 1906 Siemens alone employed 100000 workers. India 1906 The milk cow of Britain. Mahatma Gandhi and his supporters held that cheap British imports of clothing and other manufactured goods had reduced the economy of India to utter penury by killing off traditional Indian manufacturing industries. Nowadays globalisation has brought job losses to Britain, via outsourcing of back office work. Indonesia 1906 Mostly run by the Dutch. Iran 1906 Ruled by losers. Iran had recently lost vast areas to Russia. Italy 1906 Recent arrival as a state. Willing to inherit bits of Ottoman Empire. Japan 1906 Embracing capitalism. A world Power. It had just defeated Russia. Korea 1906 A failed state. Inherited by Japan. Kurdistan 1906 Borderland between Ottoman Turkey and Iran. Philippines 1906 Recently acquired by America. Russia 1906. Previous winner against Turkey. Had just lost a war to Japan. Joint shareholder of Failed State, Poland. Spain 1906 Previous owner of Cuba and Philippines. Had recently lost a war with the USA. Thailand 1906 Pendulum between British Burma and French Indo China. Monarchy seeking modernisation as fast as necessary. Turkey 1906 'Sick Man of Europe'. Anti-capitalist. USA 1906 Inheritor of empires. Electrocuted people to death. 1906 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE Theodore Roosevelt. Arbiter of conflict between Russia and Japan. The USA had had good experience in keeping old style imperialists out of East Asia. America could be seen as an honest broker between rival European powers who all wanted the Philippines. Japan and Russia had gone to war over the exploitation of Manchuria and Korea. The war was mostly faught on Chinese soil with little consideration for the people living in the war zone. Japan was the first Asian country to become Americanized. Already. Back in 1906 ? The Japanese had schools, battleships, and a popular press. There was plenty to write about. American ideas of democracy were available to at least an educated elite, but also literacy was encouraged for the masses. Japan was not 100% American. They wanted to keep the Royal Family (recently arrived in fact) so they also looked up to the British who had a long tradition of a Royal Family. New arrivals as great powers included Germany (Bismark) and Italy (Garibaldi). Japan itself had seen the great impetus for reform and modernisation come from the 'Black Ships' of Captain Perry. Japanese society could absorb most positive aspects of American culture while rejecting the worst. Christian missionaries were generally rejected although some of their zeal for 'civilising pagan nations' was simply translated to zeal for modernising Asia in a Japanese image. Roosevelt got the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing order out of chaos. The Japanese kept Korea, but Russia was expelled from China. The Japanese were only to be allowed in China as equal competitors with other powers such as Germany, France, America and England. They would not be allowed to inherit too much of the former Russian zone although they were established as part owners of Sakhalin Island. Spain, Turkey and Russia were all losers now, while the new tigers, Germany, Japan and Italy had been flexing their muscles. Roosevelt was from an elite that knew all about high budget Peace Conferences. Treaties were signed in places like Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna. The real elite knew the dangers of imperialism, but in a rather academic sense: Edward Gibbon had assigned militarism as one of the root causes of the decline of the Roman Empire. The control of the military by politicians was seen as a key republican virtue by many of those educated in the European classic languages Greek and Latin. Imperialism was percieved as a sort of ever present danger which could lead some modern Caesar to cross some sort of Rubicon and endanger the liberties and republican virtues of the modern state. Roosevelt had been a cheerleader for imperialism during America's own venture to sort out (smash) the problems of a decaying empire. Thousands of American troops had subected the Philipinos to an increasingly brutal conflict at the turn of the century (1898-1903). American tactics had included the burning of villages with fire engines adapted to spray petrol instead of water, the casual shooting of curfew violators, and water torture to extract information from prisoners. Since there were no airforces at the time the terror bombing role was assigned to the gunners of battleships who could shell coastal cities. The main Philippino rebel leader, Aguinaldo had courted the Americans during the last years of Spanish rule in Manila, and he, like many other Philipinos had cheered when Dewey's squadron defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay during 1898. The Americans had paid the Spanish some 20 million dollars for infrastructure in the subsequent peace treaty (Paris). Philipino representatives were excluded from any talks about the settlement. Most of the people at peace conferences were quite racist during those days. America's 1900 presidential election campaign saw McKinley run against a fundamentalist, prohibitionist democrat who had reservations about the war in the Philippines. Both parties vied for the christian vote. The imperialists got endorsement from the pope and the missionary societies for their civilising mission in the Far East. The anti-imperialist camp organised public meetings and they got the endorsement of illuminati from the legal and academic establishments. Some anti-imperialists even thought they could win the 1900 election. Theodore Roosevelt became president following the assassination of McKinley during the great exposition at Buffalo in 1902. An anarchist called Czolgosz shot the president after lining up to shake hands with the great man. All of this did not deter America from its civilising mission in the Far East. In fact the Americans lost few men in subjugating the Philippines. There were only about 3000 combat losses in five years. Disease was not such a killer as in earlier campaigns. American medical schools were already producing many of the world's best doctors. Nineteenth century chemistry and imperialistic expansion saw a whole lot of exciting developments in the conquest of tropical diseases. The Americans were sorting the problems of disease in Panama so that they could get the canal built. Total environmental control was the answer. Get rid of bugs and rubbish, and disease will go away. 1906-2006 CENTURY OF ENERGY The Century of Energy starts off with the death of Nobel Prize winner Pierre Curie. One hundred years later we see a nuclear powered France and America desperate to intervene anywhere to secure oil supplies against the advice of a concerted academic and scientific lobby at home. Roosevelt's Peace Prize settled nothing. There was no nuclear club in 1906. The great powers set limits on battleships then. Nowadays they set limits on nuclear weapons. They can also distinguish between clean ond dirty powers by going along with the Kyoto emissions protocol. If the nineteenth century was the Century of Opium, then the twentieth century could be said to be the Century of Oil. 1906 sees the ending of an era when India and China were locked together in the deadly embrace of the opium trade, orchestrated by the remnants of the British East India Company. The British drank tea from China bought with opium planted in India and managed by an oppressively policed monopoly which forced the Indian farmers to produce the commodity. The monopoly had the support of the British military machine in opening up the markets of China for it's produce. In fact China was quite capeable of producing it's own opium but for some reason it seemed more profitable for local merchants to import rather than rely on home sourcing. In the twentieth century the so called 'Carbon Club' consisting of Texans and Arab sheikhs or dictators amongst others, continued the same sort of trading practices where whole countries were for sale. The Carbon Club also included lots of British and Dutch people because Shell and BP are first class oil companies with a long history and many episodes of record profits. From the 1990s the Carbon Club has acquired ideological enemies. These enemies say that burning carbon is changing the Earth's climate in a disadvantageous fashion. Sea levels are expected to rise, and reduce places such as London and Bangladesh to uninhabitable swamps. New Orleans has already tasted this trend (Hurricane Katrina 2005). Ideological opposition to the Carbon Club is highly factionalised. People working in university departments such as geography, ecology and economics are still allowed to voice opposition in the press. At the same time it is hard to gain popularity by promising to curtail energy use. In the internet age it is possible to find who is in the carbon club. Natural Resources Defence Council The 1960s saw the emergence of a new chapter of the Carbon Club. OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, was dominated by big producing countries. It appeared to be a forum where national governments could talk on equal terms with the large oil companies of the West. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran were all countries which had experienced colonialism and imperialism. The Americans had encouraged intergovernmental co-operation between Middle Eastern states by setting up an organisation called CENTO or Central Treaty Organisation. This was to butress the Free World against the dangers of Communism (Soviet Russia). In fact the government technocrats of the biggest oil exporters were in favour of centrally planned economies with Soviet style five year plans. Iran developed both a motor industry and a nuclear industry in the days of the Shah Pahlavi regime. Japan was never a top member of the 'Carbon Club'. It's weak status was exposed in 1941 when US oil sanctions prompted a military response. Japan's action in 1941 caught western military commanders by surprise and South East Asia changed hands in about 100 days. The next 1200 days saw the main Japanese cities reduced to rubble. Expulsion from the Carbon Club is a serious matter. Japan was expelled in 1941. Iraq was expelled in 1991. America would also like to expel Venezuela, and indeed the strikes which were meant to bring down the Chavaz government were an attempt to hit the oil sector. When Iraq was expelled, Iraq was a large exporter. It suffered ten years of import sanctions on the nuts and bolts which sustain a functioning economy. In the end the Americans conducted a pre-emptive attack. The attack could almost be the result of an administrative muddle. Saudi Arabia was a fully paid up member of the Carbon Club but its expulsion was never on the table. Iran and Libya were good second class members of the Carbon Club, because they retain relationships with former colonial partners. The story of the 9/11 attacks on America put young Saudis aboard the suicide planes. These people were described as 'uncontrolleable elements' who had fallen under the spell of Osama Bin Laden and had agreed to his well publicised 'Jihad' against 'Crusaders and Zionists' and implicitly a jihad against anyone who disagreed with Osama's precise interpretation of 'Jihad'. In fact Bin Laden is an established family company in Arabia, and its family members will have diverse interests including indroctinating people to be the consumers. Wage your Jihad with lung cancer by smoking our cigarettes ! Jihad against your drug addiction, but you must get addicted first! Jihad for the hydrogen economy ! Countries with large coal supplies were the founder members of the Carbon Club. Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria Hungary and the USA all developed their coal reserves early on. Europe had plenty of workers, but the USA was resource rich and labour scarce at this time. Much human and animal labour had already been replaced by machines. In much of Europe there was a surplus of people. Mechanisation combined with imperialism had in fact exported unemployment. The nascent trade unions, in some cases encouraged by the ruling classes, had managed to gain certain rights, but usually as members of some sort of imperialistic venture which would oppress other people. The apex of the old Carbon Club was the battleship industry. Britain and America were clear leaders. Battleships required lots of high specification steel. Bismark had remarked on building a country on 'Blood and Iron'. He meant the iron of modern armaments which can subdue any opposition. The best wars were to be those where a foreign city was bombarded from the sea until regime change was occurred. The Coal Belt of Northern Europe stretches from England, through Northern France and Germany then via Poland to Russia. In 1906 Germany was contiguous from the North Sea to the Eastern Baltic and included most of what is now Poland. Germany therefore enjoyed vast reserves of coal and steel. Mass transport was better than individual transport at that time. This facilitated the outings of paramilitary youth movements such as the boy scouts and quasi-militaristic marching bands that remain a contemporary feature of Northern Ireland in 2005. Rather than hanging about on street corners the youth of Europe were being indoctrinated in patriotic values in preparation for the coming great war. The ruling classes were determined that patriotism should motivate people more than class war. The press could help in this. Newspaper competition meant that there could be a platform from diverse views ranging from annihilation of inferior races by machine gun and high explosive to improving the lot of inferior races by combating corruption and the slave trade in colonial administrations. Few questioned the right to colonial rule. Study of the tables show that India and China are both huge producers of coal. Saudi Arabia remains the single largest source of oil. Coalmining is dangerous and dirty work, but China and India are countries where workers have few rights. Saudi Arabia has a poor human rights record. The Khodarovsky trial in Russia is an example a state versus carbon club clash; sheer hubris. TYRANTS Mao The book loving bully. Jung Chang, Jon Halliday Stalin Hitler Ian Kershaw Pol Pot Kim Il Sung Maybe a pawn of Mao Saddam Hussein Maybe just a pawn. TERRIBLE AND BLOODY BATTLES 1906-2005 1914 Tannenberg The Marne 1915 Gallipoli The making of Mustafa Kemel 1916 The Somme Celebrated in Ulster. 1940 Battle of France Sucessful for Germany Battle of Britain Air battle 1941 Pearl Harbour Battle for Moscow. 1942 Fall of Singapore Churchill wanted 'fight to last man'. Battle of Midway. US Navy sinks Japanese carriers. 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad 1943 Kursk. Greatest evenly matched tank battle. 1944 D-day landings 1945 Okinawa 1946-49 Manchuria 1948 Battles for Israel. 1950-53 Seoul, Inchon, Pusan. Korean war. 1953 Dien Bien Phu 1968? Tet Offensive 1972 Battles for Dacca and East Pakistan. 1982 Battle of the Falklands 1986-88 Battle of the Cities. Rocket attacks on Baghdad and Tehran 1991 Battle of Vukovar 1992 Battle for Kuwait 1994 Battle for Kigali, Ruwanda. 1995 First battle of Grozny. 1999 Air war over Kosovo. 2000 Second battle of Grozny. 2003 American advance on and capture of Baghdad 2004 Falluja WATERSHED WARS Eritrea Ethiopia 1960s-1990s The Alps: Tyrol 1915-18 Balkan mountain ranges Numerous occassions Andes Cocaine wars Taurus, Zagros etc. Kurdish groups. Caucuses Kurds, Armenians, Chechens etc. Pamir Afghanistan Himalaya Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet. East Himalaya Burma or Myanmar. Japan versus British. The Kashmir war entered a particularly idiotic phase when regular military troops were sent to construct a front line in the 'death zone' above 6000 meters (1990s). Altitude sickness and frostbite made conditions hard for the troops. This conflict also tainted Rajiv Gandhi with the 'Bofors Scandal' where there were allegations of bribery in the placing of a contract to buy howitzers. These howitzers had to be specially powerful so that the Indian army could bombard poverty stricken villages at the other side of enormously high mountain ranges. SIGNIFICANT EARTHQUAKES 1906 2006 1906 San Francisco Quake + fires 1908 Messina Quake + Tsunami 30000 1923 Kanto, Japan Quake + fires 143000 1976 Tangshan, China High mortality 250000 1995 Kobe, Japan Quake + fires 6000 2004 Offshore Sumatra Devastating Tsunamis 230000 2005 Pakistan/Kashmir Quake > 70000 Iran has suffered numerous high mortality earthquakes. The political impact of earthquakes depends on the strength of the state. The fires following the Kanto quake were blamed on Korean immigrants to Japan, and the authorities used the resulting mob rule as an excuse to clamp down on minorities including Japanese leftists. After the Tangshan quake chairman Mao, on his death bed, exorted the masses to anathematize his regular political enemies including Deng Xio Ping. DRAMATIS PERSONAE 1906-2006 Mary Stopes Eugenics Indira Gandhi Machine gunned by bodyguards. Qiang Qing Incited cultural revolution. Madam Curie Double Nobel laureate. Margaret Thatcher Great leap backwards for workers. Leni Riefenstahl Nazi publicist. Hasina Bangladeshi leader. Kalida Zia Bangladeshi leader. Condolezza Rice Carbon Club Mascot. Barbara Amiel Bon vivant wife of Conrad Black Karol Wojlycza Celebrity pope. Hammer of the Communists. Prince Talal Saudi. #5 rich man in world. Ahmed Shah Masood Christ like figure Simon Wiesenthal Hunter of 'desk nurderers'. Linus Pauling Double Nobel Laureate. Yasser Arafat Palestine SOME DOUBLE CROSSES AND BETRAYALS 1906-2006 Most soviet from 1905-50. Stalin purges. Greek Civil War Mao's Reckless behaviour in Korean war. Mafia suppression of leftists in Italy Undermining of the UN by American anti-communists. Betrayal of Chinese CP in Malaya. Shah of Iran. 1990s Yemeni civil war. American support for Afghani Mujehaddin. Central Asian Cotton Industry. Drying of the Aral sea. Sporadic and inconsistent sponsorship of Kurdish militia. IMPORTANT PROCESS INDUSTRIES 1906-2005 Ammonia. Haber. Wife suicide. Chased out of his country. Cambridge. BUNA. Nazi Artificial rubber project. Primo Levi as witness. Fission. UF6. Oppenheimer and General Groves. Hanford to Bandar Abbas. Oil Refining. Abadan, Rotterdam, Texas, Shanghai etc. Anthrax, plague etc. Unit 731, Harbin, Manchuria. SASOL. Oil from coal. Auschwitz, South Africa. Processed food. Witness: Rachel Carson. Cancer victim. Also Polly the Cat. She eats processed food. Humans. Children -> zombies via mass media and propaganda. Brainwashing is big industry (always ?). Business schools produce agents of imperialism. Fermenting. Why are modern brewery magnates so right wing? Chaim Weizmann introduced fermentation to produce acetone. Lloyd George needed the acetone to make explosives in the first world war. Chaim's reward was the State of Israel. It's ironic that people claim acetone peroxide was used to blow up London commuters on 7/7/2005. Data Processing. IBM. Process money. Decisive changes in life. Could enable socialism. Actuarial science and futures markets seek to process risk. Cold war DP applications include listing subversives. The success or failure of this type of industry may be explained in terms of the second law of thermodynamics. GREAT MASSACRES OF THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY [1] Armenian Genocide 1917-20 Controversial? Some Turks say the Armenians massacred them. Talaat, Enver, Mustafa Kemel. [2] Stalin's purges. 1936-41, 1944-53. [3] Rape of Nan Jing. Historian Irene Chang described it. Like Primo Levy, she died of suspected suicide. [4] Nazi Holocaust. 1941-44. - you can be sent to jail for being stupid now. - Primo Levi described some of it. Capitalism kills. [5] Fire bombing. 1943-5. Germany and Japan. [6] Battle of Manila. 1945. [7] Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [8] South Asia partition massacres. 1946-48? Described by Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children. [9] Massacre of 'Communists / Chinese'. Indonesia, 1975-76. Establishment of Suharto regime. American approval. [10] Pol-Pot regime. Cambodia. 1973-79. Ideological massacres. You become a 'new man' or else you die. [11] Bophal, India. Union Carbide factory poisons thousands. Technically not carried out by armed forces. Accident in the 'War on Bugs'. [12] Srebenica. 1996. [13] Ruwanda 1994. 1066 AND ALL THAT: A SATIRE ON HISTORY TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. 'Ten sixty six and all that' was a popular satirical work in the mid twentieth century. Even earlier satirical work (Frenzied Fiction) came from Stephen Leacock, a Toronto based mathematician. Following the recent terrorist bombings in London (Al Qaida, not Fenian) the usual suspects from emerged from under their stones to call for a more patriotic version of history to be taught to young people in Britain's multicultural society. Plus ca change! Nearly a hundred years ago Stephen Leackock amused his audience with an aside on a young man studying Turkish, Music and Religion, and career prospects as a choirmaster in a Turkish cathedral. The debate on appropriate university courses is very old indeed. 1066 starts with the death of King Harold following his taking an an arrow in the eye. 1906 could start not with the death of a king, but the death of a scientist. The French military is involved in both stories. Pierre Curie was run down by a horsedrawn vehicle belonging to the French army, right in the centre of Paris. His successor, his wife, got Nobel prizes for chemistry and physics. Bang, crash, wallop! Cartoon of man being hit by vehicle. Not a battle scene, but nevertheless a common enough death scene. Chemistry scores in this history with the story of Haber, the development of synthetic ammonia, and then experiments with war gas during the battle of Tannenburg (1914). Follow up with Lloyd George's explosives crisis and Chaim Wiezmann's solution, leading to the Balfour Declaration. Fast forward to the banning of acetone in drug war stratagy and the use of acetone peroxide in terrorist bombings much later. Physics scores in the nuclear bomb industry. Don't leave out commercial electronics. AT&T was a kingmaker of sorts. Their decision to pass on German messages to British code breakers was described as crucial in bringing America into the First World War, following the 'Zimmerman Telegram' (Barbara Tuchman). Deal with the celebrities: Leni Reifenstal, Meiling Soong (Madame Chiang Kai Shek), Mahatma Gandhi the agitator, Hitler and his terrible doctors, Stalin (make sure he's dead), Tojo, Roosevelt, Churchill a great failure for much of his life, and Mao Tse Tung 'sorted' by Jung Chang. Describe 'Death Factories'. The two obvious answers are Auschwitz and Unit 731 in Harbin. There were many others, including Bophal. Death railways were already feature of the 19th century life. 1980s Cover the Great English Miner's strike. Leslie Boulton. New Millenium: Millenium bug swindle, dot.com bubble, Nepali Royal Family Massacre, and finally the planes crashing into New York skyscrapers. NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES Hitler eliminates Ernst Roehm and the SA. See Heinrich Hohne's book about the SS. 30 June 1934. Albert Speer describes the nervous tension in Hitler just before the act of flying to Bavaria. HARRY POTTER A Beslan terrorist attack survivor cites 'Harry Potter' novels as an inspiration to hang in tough. The 'Harry Potter' phenomenon is not solely an artifact of millionairess JK Rowling. You get similar wishful thinking on most computer systems nowadays. An animated wizard points out how to install some kludgy new software, but hold your breath and make sure the feng shui is right otherwise you will have to reinstall. THE DISMAL SCIENCE John Maynard Keynes John von Neumann Morgenstein Amartya Sen Witnessed Bengal Famine Al Huq Human Development Index Economics has seen a clash of cultures since the days of Marx and Malthus. Malthus eventually wound up being cossetted by the moguls of the East India Company, while Marx refused to get a job and lived with his family in great penury. For a long time the two points of view of these men remained irreconcilable until the death of Mao Tse Tung when the Marxist oriented Chinese Communist Party decided that Malthus was right and instituted the one child policy to save their own skins. The Chinese leadership at the time wondered whether the cohort from the 50s and 60s would welcome their hardly existant economic gains being eroded by the sort of population growth found in Nigeria or India. These late 1970s leaders feared social turmoil if the population grew too fast so they used a mixture of reward and punishment to administer planned population growth. In the twentieth century the advantages of a planned economy became evident to many. Wartime leader Lloyd George anticipated both Lenin and Trotsky in actually trying to put the planned economy into practice. Lenin's Revolutionary Russia became a source of emulation. In the popular imagination Lenin became a sort of rightful caliph to succeed the prophet Marx. Ambitious projects to reform the world economy are still around. The UN Millennium summit of 2000 endorsed environmental sustainabilty or the sort of economy where input and output are evenly balanced, and where constraints imposed by limitations of natural resources have to be taken into account by all planners including those working for neo-con governments. MAKE SURE HE'S DEAD 'Make sure he's dead': attitude amongst Stalin's entourage after his stroke. DON'T LAUGH 'Don't Laugh': instruction to Chinese crowds forced to attend rally celebrating Stalin. 'Don't Laugh': Hamas response to killing of their chief bomb maker when he used an over-smart mobile phone. In fact the mobile phone was not really smart, but it was controlled by Israelis and their agents. Mobile phones may have been used by radical leaders but there was a price to pay. Mobile phone use subjects an ibdividual to precise tracking. Chechen warlord, Doudayev was killed by a guided missile which homed onto his mobile phone. SAUDI ARABIA During the 1980s the Americans placed people in all the key Saudi ministries, but later on they got nine-eleven. The Americans were meant to be running the place, but in the end they said most 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. Michael Moore made a film about the relationship between the Bush administration and the Saudi Royals. The links between Texas and the Arab Peninsula (al Jazira) go back to the time of the Getty oil empire. Harry St. John Philby was a key advisor to the Saud family from about 1916 until the Second World War when he was unceremoniously bundled out of the country for being too anti-British. FRANCE Les banliuex brulent. November 2005. Following tough speaches and tough legislation law and order fanatic Sarkozy has created a new class of 'enrages'. The dissaffected youth of mainly North African areas are fed up with perceived injustice and deprivation. Law and order governments do not create social harmony. They often just amplify racism, and often encourage institutions founded on racist precepts. Just like Sarkozy, Taksin Sinawat is a law and order man, being a former policeman. South Thailand is now militarized rather like an oriental version of Ulster. The new revolts are often coordinated by mobile phone, with the science fiction concepts of the 1950s being turned into channels for the ultra-violent revolutionaries and members of professional armies to glorify their own warlike actions. Some urban gangs go around assaulting people just to transmit video footage of a beating. AUTHORS CONSULTED Albert Speer Inside the Third Reich Antonia Fraser Persecution. Victor Klemperer Dresden 1945 Ian Kershaw Hitler Iris Chang Nanjing Massacre Jung Chang China & Mao Kurt Vonnegut Dresden 1945 Barbara Tuchman 1914, 1918, Zimmerman Telegram Linda Colley Questions on imperialism. Noam Chomsky Deception of the masses Heinrich Hohne Hitler's SS Stehen Leacock Historical Satire Steven Rose Biotechnology developments Simon Singh Maths and science including recent trends. Hugh Trevor Roper Last Days of Hitler, Persecution. Frederick Pohl Bad side of capitalism. Alexandre Solzhenitsin Stalin's Russia. Karl Popper Roots of totalitarianism William Shirer Afghanistan, Hitler Lloyd George Acetone, Chaim Weizman, Balfour Declaration. T.E.Lawrence Arabia, 1914-18 Tsuji Masanubo The Malaya campaign 1941-1942. PEOPLE Leslie Boulton Great English Miner's Strike 1983-84 INTERNET SITES Natural Resources Defence Council Carbon Club Rankings