Practice Won't Make Perfect, But Deliberate Practice Might!

Unconventional words of wisdom!

Practice Won't Make Perfect, But Deliberate Practice Might
September 16, 2017
Written by Ashley Hamer


As many teachers have told us, practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. In other words, hours spent at the piano or in the batting cages or at the chessboard aren't worth much unless you're smart about it. That's the lesson from performance expert K. Anders Ericsson, whose research into "deliberate practice" — despite the scientific kerfuffle it's caused — can help kids (and adults, for that matter) get more out of their practice sessions.
Quality Over Quantity

In 1993, Ericsson and two colleagues published a study in the journal Psychological Review that challenged the idea that a person's talent was the main driver of success. The authors claimed that instead, what seems like innate talent is actually "the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years." This is the basis for the now-ubiquitous "10,000-hour rule," made popular in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers." But in heralding the number of hours of practice, Ericsson says Gladwell missed the point. It's not about quantity of practice, he says, but quality. In fact, he believes that with the right kind of practice, anyone can get good at anything.

Other researchers clash on this last point. While most agree that deliberate practice is important, they say that expertise comes from a complex mix of factors. "In 2014, an entire issue of the academic journal Intelligence was devoted to articles disputing Ericsson's work," writes Jenny Anderson for Quartz, "arguing that IQ and other factors like motivation, range of motion, and the varied timing that some creative talents develop matter just as much as practice."

The key phrase there is "just as much." Sure, deliberate practice may not be the magic bullet that turns you into an NBA star or a Grammy winner, but it's got research-backed benefits — and many people don't know how to do it.

What Is Deliberate Practice?

You could say that the difference between practice and deliberate practice comes down to your comfort level. Regular practice is fun — you get to do what you enjoy, and hopefully what you're good at, for a handful of hours a week. Deliberate practice requires spending lots of time outside of your comfort zone, working at the things you're lousy at and accepting criticism from someone smarter than you. After all, if you only practice your strengths, you'll never improve your weaknesses.

For example, when a child starts playing guitar, she could go one of two ways. In the traditional practice model, she could sit in her room learning the chords she needs to play her favorite songs, meet up with other friends to play those songs together, and eventually start a band and perhaps write songs of her own. It's a journey many of us have traveled.

In the deliberate practice model — which, while more effective, is admittedly less pleasant — she sits in her room learning the chords she needs to play her favorite songs, then starts taking private lessons from an experienced teacher. That teacher assesses her ability and gives her regular, personalized feedback on what needs improvement, which she uses every day to practice her weakest skills. Eventually, she begins performing, first with the help of her teacher, then on her own, all the while doing her own self-assessment to figure out what areas could use more practice.

It's important, though, to not push kids too far, too fast. "It's counter-productive for a parent or teacher to push them longer than they can," Ericsson tells Quartz. "That creates motivational problems and forces the child to do the best they can when they don't have 100 percent concentration. That's linked to developing bad habits." But soon, kids learn that working hard on something they love reaps benefits beyond what they could imagine. And even if they don't become the next Joni Mitchell, they've developed a skill that's even more useful: deliberate practice.

Lying is the root of all sins!

The Root of All Sin
Dr. Walid Fitaihi
19 December 2014

Considered a disreputable trait by all people, frowned upon across cultures, and forbidden in all religions; is lying. It is at the root of all sins, invites evil, and is the doorway to hypocrisy. Lying is one of the shortest roads that can lead to Hellfire, is punishable by the Lord, and it is a great disgrace to be a liar.

The definition of lying is to speak falsely or utter untruth knowingly, with the intent to deceive.

Lying can take on three different forms: falsehood in one’s speech, falsehood in one’s actions, and falsehood in one’s intentions.

The gravest lie one can make is to say something that is not true in regards to the Creator, or to falsely claim rulings of permissibility or forbiddance in our religion, based on one’s personal opinion. Next in severity is to deliberately make a false statement about Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “Whoever tells a lie against me intentionally, then surely let him occupy his seat in Hellfire.” To lie about anything is forbidden, and perjury is a heinous sin.

Lying is no trivial matter, even if told just to make people laugh. The Prophet (peace be upon him) warned, “Woe to the one who speaks lies in order to make people laugh; woe to him, woe to him, woe to him” A Muslim should be cautious of each word before it leaves his/her mouth.

As for being dishonest in actions, one example is how the brothers of Prophet Yusuf (Joseph) stained a shirt with the blood of an animal and told their father that Yusuf had been eaten by a wolf. They lied in both words and actions.

Falsehood in one’s intentions is to do a good deed, but not for the sake of Allah. To do an act of worship, while concealing the desire to please others and to receive praise from people, is a form of lying and hypocrisy.  Whether it is giving in charity or learning the Holy Quran, it should be done to seek Allah’s pleasure and rewards in the Hereafter; not so that people can say that so-and-so is generous or is knowledgeable. Lying is unacceptable.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “Whoever has these four characteristics will be a hypocrite: if he speaks he tells a lie, if he give a promise he breaks it, if he makes a covenant he proves treacherous, and if he quarrels he behaves in a very imprudent, evil, and insulting manner. And whoever has one of these characteristics has one characteristic of a hypocrite unless he gives it up.”

A true believer does not lie, because his faith prevents him from doing so. Lying eventually leads to immorality.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “Truthfulness leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to Paradise. And a man keeps on telling the truth until he becomes a truthful person. Falsehood leads to evil-doing, and evil-doing leads to the Hellfire. And a man may keep on telling lies until he is written before Allah, a liar.”

When you tell a lie, you are hiding the true reality, and every step of the way, you have to come up with a new lie to cover up for your previous lie, and your lie keeps getting bigger and bigger.

What happens to the brain when you tell a lie? What part of the brain is responsible for lying?

In 1999, Professor of psychiatry, Daniel Langleben, conducted research using an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to study images of the brain when someone tells a lie. The MRI detected increased blood flow and higher activity in an area called the inferior frontal gyrus, which is in the frontal lobe of the brain, when subjects were lying. This area of the brain worked harder when telling a lie.

Langleben’s research continued on to create a lie detector, using this imagery technology, with a 90% accuracy rate.

The frontal lobe of the brain is responsible for higher thought processes, such as: reasoning, planning, speech, emotions, problem-solving, judgment, and morality. On the other hand, it is also this area of the brain which enables one to formulate a lie.

And it is particularly this area of the brain that was indicated in the Holy Qur’an 1,400 years ago in the verses that are describing a lying, deceitful, and unethical person.

The following verse in the Holy Qur’an states, {A lying, sinning forehead.} (Chapter 96, verse 16).

The forehead mentioned in this verse no doubt refers to the frontal lobe of the brain.

For over a century, scientists and researchers worked hard at inventing instruments that can detect when a person is lying. The earliest lie detector, the polygraph, was invented in 1921, and it worked by measuring physiological responses associated with lying, such as: increases in blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, and skin conductivity. Ultimately, these instruments failed because they were only accurate 60% of the time.

Advances in science have improved the ability to detect a lie. Among the three most successful ways to expose when someone is lying include using MRI to show increased activity in the inferior frontal lobe of the brain, which indicates lying.

Second, researchers have found that when we lie, it is automatically expressed by the facial muscles. This is only for a fraction of a second, it is unnoticed by the naked eye but it is detectable with training or watching a slowed down video. These ‘micro expressions’ can provide clues as to whether a person is lying.

Third, the new voice stress analysis technology can identify emotional stress that occurs when lying, by measuring changes in pitch, tone, and loudness of the voice, in addition to more subtle indicators.

It is as if telling the truth resonates a song and sound waves of its own, and telling a lie gives a different song and sound waves. Regardless if a lie was caught or not, lying is at the root of all sin.

Writing Down on Paper Can Help You De-stress & Be More Productive!

Power of writing!

How Writing Down on Paper Can Help You De-stress, Regain Clarity and Be More Productive
LaYinka Sanni, September 3, 2018

Her voice rose in pitch as words rushed from her mouth. Her hand gestures became frantic and she barely paused to take a breath. I knew I needed to allow her to let off steam before stepping in with my signature style of asking her a question; a question I was almost certain I knew the answer to.

During the first 10 minutes of our conversation, Ms K had offloaded how overwhelmed and stressed she’d been feeling since our last session together. Between managing her clients as an education consultant, running her home, and caring for her elderly mother, she felt like all the balls she’d been juggling had hit the ground with a resounding thud. When she slowed down and heaved a huge sigh from her chest, I knew it was time for my question.

“Have you written anything down?”

At that, she chuckled and grasped her head, and I knew my assumption was right, long before she uttered a hushed, “No,” and the list of reasons why she hadn’t, the main one being lack of time.

Time — the thing many feel they don’t have enough of, and the very thing that Allah sub?anahu wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted be He) swears by in the Qur’an:

    “By time. Indeed, mankind is in loss, except for those who have believed and done righteous deeds and advised each other to truth and advised each other to patience.” [Quran: Chapter 103, Verses 1-3]

Ms K. was of the belief that taking time to write things down would strip her of time rather than grant her more, leading to her juggling a multitude of work-home thoughts in her head, each wrestling for her attention.

Yet, the truth is: offloading through a pen would do the very opposite of what she’d been experiencing. The simple act of dedicating some time to writing things down would grant her more mental capacity to manage tasks awaiting her, resulting in having more time to do them.
Writing: An integral part of our history

Writing isn’t something alien to Muslims or Islam. In fact, putting pen to paper features heavily in Islamic history, and it’s a major reason why we have bound copies of the words of Allah sub?anahu wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted be He) today, as well as traditions of Prophet Muhammad ?allallahu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him).

Through the act of writing things down, they preserved experiences and knowledge and captured time for us to benefit from today. From stories of old and what is to come long after we’ve expired our time on Earth, the companions of the Prophet ra?yAllahu 'anhu (may Allah be pleased with him) penned knowledge before modern research discovered the myriad of benefits of putting pen to paper, which include: improving memory, gaining clarity, retaining information, maintaining physical well-being, and increasing creativity.

In fact, Allah sub?anahu wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted be He) in His infinite knowledge and wisdom taught us more than 1400 years ago that it’s through the pen that we gain knowledge.
The value of the pen in the Islamic tradition

    “Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous. Who has taught by the pen. He has taught man that which he knew not.” [Quran: Chapter 96, Verses 3-5]

This verse is humbling as it teaches us two key points:

    We inherently possess no knowledge and know nothing until He sub?anahu wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted be He) grants us knowledge. This is reinforced by the fact that Prophet Adam 'alayhi'l-salam (peace be upon him) knew nothing of creation until Allah sub?anahu wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted be He) taught him their names.
    We are set apart from other creatures in that we are possessors of knowledge, and He has taught us to propagate and preserve what we know through the art of writing through the use of a pen. Through writing, we learn, expand, and grow — one generation to another.

The scientific benefits of writing

The significance of writing is great and every single one of us can reap its benefits whether we consider ourselves to be writers or not. A study conducted at the Indiana University revealed that the physical act of writing with a pen or pencil increases activity in certain sections of the brain, and research conducted at the University of Texas discovered that journaling increases the strength of T-lymphocytes, which are the immune cells that help your body fight off infection.

So, if there was ever a great time to whip out your favourite notebook and pen, it would be when you’re feeling unwell. It’s important to note that these benefits come from the action of writing by hand as opposed to typing on a keyboard or touchscreen device, which has become all too common in our digital age.

Just like Ms K. needed to put pen to paper to gain clarity and a better work-home balance, you have complete capability to benefit from writing, even if you’re not a writer and if you believe you’re short on time. Here are some ways you can.
1. Switch from screen to paper

If you’re in the habit of writing everything digitally (especially on your phone), make a pledge to switch to writing things on paper. After being so accustomed to tapping on a screen, mostly without much conscious thought, in order to develop a new muscle of writing on paper, take a moment to pause the next time you’re about to write digitally. This pause gives you room to choose differently for yourself. It’s the point you can consciously put pen to paper. The more you practice pausing before writing on your phone, the easier it’ll be to break out of the habit and into a new one.

2. Carry a pen and a small notebook everywhere you go

Having the means to write things down is a key component of being able to write when the time calls for it. There’s nothing worse than a wave of words hitting you, crying to be written down and you’re forced to scrawl on your arms with your nails! Okay, that might be a bit of an extreme example, but it’s always a great idea to have a writing resource on-hand, so you can jot down thoughts, observations, and even things to remember while you’re out and about. And if you don’t have a small notebook and pen, now’s a great time to invest in one.
3. Find different reasons to write

Writing can serve any purpose you want it to, and that’s why non-writers can write, too. You can keep a gratitude journal where you write things you’re grateful for; or a reflection journal where you express the highs and lows of your day or week. You can also benefit from writing insights you gain when studying the Qur’an — maybe a word in the translation jumped out at you, or maybe you want to remember a particular hadith connected to a verse in the Qur’an. Even a simple list of things you want to accomplish in a day transfers words from your often overcrowded mind onto paper, so you operate with a clear head and with greater focus.

4. Personalize your writing tools

If you find it a challenge to write on glaringly blank pages, why not decorate them? Just like people design their laptops, and phone cases to put their own flavour into the design, decorating your notebook will make a difference. Simply check out a stationery shop to explore what fits your taste and style.

5. Accept everything that flows

When putting pen to paper, there’s no right or wrong. Placing pressure on yourself to write ‘perfectly’ is, in fact, one way to hold your pen hostage. Give yourself the permission to accept all the words that flow from you. And if they make you cringe at first, that’s fine. Just like babies stumbled a hundred times before finally walking with ease, you can improve over time. Progression over perfection — always.

Once Ms K. gave herself the permission to pause to pen, she finally allowed words to tumble from her head in a way that led to her having greater clarity in her client consultations and being more present when at home. Writing is a powerful tool that comes with an array of benefits to learning, clarity, creativity, and connection. From having ah-ha moments about your day (week, or month), to recalling things you might have otherwise forgotten, writing can be a part of your daily life that ups your productivity and focus and preserves a tradition well-established in our rich Islamic history. It’s time to start writing.

When you feel overwhelmed and feel like your life needs an overhaul, pause, put pen to paper, and unload. Our upcoming retreat is the perfect opportunity to have that needed pause to rejuvenate and reorient yourself. Imagine taking a break to somewhere serene and scenic, and taking part in a tailor made, life changing experience to discover how you can become the best version of yourself. Our annual retreat is not to be missed. Keep an eye out for upcoming information. Places are limited.

When was the last time you used writing to de-stress and clear your mind? How did it affect you? Share with us the comments.
'From having ah-ha moments about your day, to recalling things you might have forgotten, writing can be a part of your daily life that ups your productivity and focus and preserves a tradition well-established in our rich Islamic history.'

Banishing truth from media!

World's one of the greatest investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recollects his experience as to how western super powers -- especially US govt is gradually burying cold hard truths by undermining honest journalists.

Banishing Truth
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig 24 December 2018


The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,” describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.

“The editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did.” He describes himself as “full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”

Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the U.S. military’s chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers and volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. He exposed Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his closest aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA’s funding of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA’s spying on domestic dissidents within the United States, the sadistic torture practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by American soldiers and contractors and the lies told by the Obama administration about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet he begins his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that there are crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about, at least if you want to keep your job. One of his laments in the book is his decision not to follow up on a report he received that disgraced President Richard Nixon had hit his wife, Pat, and she had ended up in an emergency room in California.

Reporters embedded with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely witness atrocities and often war crimes committed by the U.S. military, yet they know that access is dependent on keeping quiet. This collusion between the press and the powerful is a fundamental feature of journalism, one that even someone as courageous as Hersh, at least a few times, was forced to accept. And yet, there comes a time when reporters, at least the good ones, decide to sacrifice their careers to tell the truth. Hersh, relentlessly chronicling the crimes of the late empire, including the widespread use of torture, indiscriminate military strikes on civilian targets and targeted assassinations, has for this reason been virtually blacklisted in the American media. And the loss of his voice—he used to work for The New York Times and later The New Yorker—is evidence that the press, always flawed, has now been neutered by corporate power. Hersh’s memoir is as much about his remarkable career as it is about the death of investigative journalism and the transformation of news into a national reality television show that subsists on gossip, invective, officially approved narratives and leaks and entertainment.

Investigative journalism depends not only on reporters such as Hersh, but as importantly on men and women inside the systems of power who have the moral courage to expose lies and make public crimes. Writing off any institution, no matter how nefarious the activity, as filled with the irredeemable is a mistake.

“There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior,” he writes. “They deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.”

One of the heroes in Hersh’s book is Ron Ridenhour, who served in a combat unit in Vietnam and who initiated the army’s investigation into the My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh track down eyewitnesses and participants.

The government’s wholesale surveillance, however, has crippled the ability of those with a conscience, such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, to expose the crimes of state and remain undetected. The Obama administration charged eight people under the Espionage Act of leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden—effectively ending the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government.

This government persecution has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to hackers. And this is the reason hackers, and those who publish their material such as Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, are relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to hermetically seal their activities, especially those that violate the law, from outside oversight or observation. And this goal is very far advanced.

Hersh notes throughout his memoir that, like all good reporters, he constantly battled his editors and fellow reporters as much as he did the government or corporations. There is a species of reporter you can see on most cable news programs and on the floor of the newsrooms at papers such as The New York Times who make their living as courtiers to the powerful. They will, at times, critique the excesses of power but never the virtues of the systems of power, including corporate capitalism or the motivations of the ruling elites. They detest reporters, like Hersh, whose reporting exposes their collusion.

The Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal was held in 1967 in Europe during the Vietnam War. It included the testimony of three American soldiers who spoke of watching soldiers and Marines routinely pump indiscriminate rounds of ammunition into villages with no regard for civilian casualties. Most of the American press dismissed the findings of the tribunal.  The Times foreign affairs columnist, C.L. Sulzberger, launched a venomous attack against the Noble Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then 94 years old. Sulzberger, a member of the family that owned the paper, wrote that Russell had “outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands.” The tribunal, Sulzberger went on, “cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain.”

Hersh, however, tipped off by the testimony at the tribunal, eventually uncovered the My Lai massacre. But no publication would touch it. Magazines such as Life and Look turned down the story. “I was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession,” Hersh writes. He finally published the story with the obscure, anti-war Dispatch News Service. Major publications, including The New York Times, along with Newsweek and Time, ignored the report. Hersh kept digging. More lurid facts about the massacre came to light.  It became too big to dismiss, as hard as the mainstream media initially tried, and Hersh was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The only officer convicted of the war crime, which left 106 men, women and children dead, was Lt. William Calley, who spent three months and 13 days in prison.

Papers like the New York Times pride themselves on their special access to the powerful, even if that access turns them into a public relations arm of the elites. This desire for access—which news organizations feel gives them prestige and an inside seat, although the information they are fed is usually lies or half-truths—pits conscientious reporters like Hersh against most editors and reporters in the newsroom. Hersh, who at the time was working for the Times, describes sitting across from another reporter, Bernard Gwertzman, who was covering Henry Kissinger and the NSC.

“There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me,” Hersh writes. “On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel’s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max [the Times’ bureau chief in Washington] was at that moment on the phone with ‘Henry’ and the call would soon he switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger—he listened far more than he talked—and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon. “Oh no,’ he said. ‘If I did that, Henry wouldn’t speak to us.’”

The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, in which operatives for the Nixon White House in June 1972 broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington while Hersh was at the Times. Kissinger’s assurances—Hersh writes that Kissinger “lied the way most people breathed”—that it was not an event of consequence saw the top editors at The New York Times initially ignore it. The paper, however, finally embarrassed by the revelations in The Washington Post, threw Hersh onto the story, although the paper’s executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called Hersh with a mixture of affection and wariness “my little commie.”

Hersh left the paper after a massive expose he and Jeff Gerth wrote about the corporation Gulf and Western, which carried out fraud, abuse, tax avoidance and had connections with the mob, was rewritten by cautious and timid editors. Charles Bluhdorn, the CEO of Gulf and Western, socialized with the publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger. Bluhdorn used his connections at the paper to discredit Hersh and Gerth, as well as bombard the paper with accusatory letters and menacing phone calls. When Hersh filed his 15,000-word expose, the business editor, John Lee, and “his ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors,” perhaps fearful of being sued, neutered it. It was one thing, Hersh found, to go up against a public institution. It was something else to take on a private institution. He would never again work regularly for a newspaper.

“The experience was frustrating and enervating,” he writes. “Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won out. The ugly fight with Gulf and Western had rattled the publisher and the editors to the point that the editors who ran the business pages had been allowed to vitiate and undercut the good work Jeff and I had done. … The courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an attorney general in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate con men. …”

His reporting, however, continued to relentlessly expose the falsifications in official narratives. The Navy intelligence official, Jonathan Pollard, for example, had been caught spying for Israel in 1985 and given a life sentence. Hersh found that Pollard primarily stole documents on how the United States spied on the Soviet Union. The Israeli government, Hersh suspected, “was trading Pollard’s information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel.” Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in 2015 and now lives in Israel.

The later part of Hersh’s career is the most distressing. He was writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, socialized with Obama and was apparently wary of offending the president. When Hersh exposed the fictitious narrative spun out by the Obama administration about the killing of Bin Laden, the magazine killed the story, running instead a report about the raid, provided by the administration, from the point of view of one of the SEALs who was on the mission. Hersh resigned. He published the account of the raid in the London Review of Books, the beginning of his current exile to foreign publications. When we most urgently need Hersh and good investigative reporters like him, they have largely disappeared. A democracy, at best, tolerates them. A failed democracy, like ours, banishes them, and when it does, it kills its press.

*
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Does Pakistan Have the Capability to Eradicate Terrorism?

There are three distinct categories of militants operating in Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).

Does Pakistan Have the Capability to Eradicate Terrorism?

 By Nauman Sadiq

After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks during the last decade, an across-the-board consensus has developed among Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing international isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security establishment.

Not only Washington, but Pakistan’s “all-weather ally” China, which plans to invest $62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, has also made its reservations public regarding Pakistan’s continued support to jihadist groups.

Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by endorsing the policy of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant outfits operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously guards its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan, and still maintains a distinction between the so-called “good and bad Taliban.”

Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants, the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus. The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.

Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because such militant groups are regarded as “strategic assets” by Pakistan’s security agencies.

Regarding the question does Pakistan have the capability to eliminate terrorism from its soil, Pakistan is evidently a police state whose civic and political life is completely dominated by military and affiliated security agencies. In order to bring home the military’s absolute control over Pakistan’s politics, an eye-opening incident that occurred last November is worth noting.

On the evening of November 2, Maulana Sami-ul-Haq was found dead in his Rawalpindi residence. The assassination was as gruesome as the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul a month earlier on October 2. He was stabbed multiple times in chest, stomach and forehead.

Sami-ul-Haq was widely known as the “Godfather of the Taliban” because he was a renowned religious cleric who used to administer a sprawling religious seminary, Darul Uloom Haqqania, in Akora Khattak in northwestern Pakistan.

During the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, the seminary was used for training and arming the Afghan jihadists, though it is now used exclusively for imparting religious education. Many of the well-known Taliban militant commanders received their education in the seminary.

In order to understand the motive of the assassination, we need to keep the backdrop in mind. On October 31, Pakistan’s apex court acquitted a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who was accused of blasphemy and had been languishing in prison since 2010. Pakistan’s religious political parties were holding street protests against her acquittal for several days before Sami-ul-Haq’s murder and had paralyzed the whole country.

But as soon as the news of Sami-ul-Haq’s murder broke and the pictures of the badly mutilated corpse were released to the media, the religious political parties promptly reached an agreement with the government and called off the protests within few hours of the assassination.

Evidently, it was a shot across the bow by Pakistan’s security establishment to the religious right that evokes a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s epic movie The Godfather, in which an expensive racehorse’s severed head was placed into a Hollywood director’s bed on Don Corleone’s orders that frightened the director out of his wits and he agreed to give a lead role in a movie to the Don’s protégé.

The entire leadership of the religious political parties that spearheaded the campaign against the release of Asia Bibi and hundreds of their political workers have been put behind the bars on the charge of “disturbing the public order” since the assassination.

In the manner thousands of religious protesters who had been demonstrating against her acquittal were treated by the security agencies brings to the fore the fact that Pakistan’s military wields absolute control over its jihadist proxies. Thus, cracking down on terrorist outfits operating in Pakistan, particularly on Kashmir-focused Punjabi militant groups, is not a question of capacity but of will.

What further lends credence to the conclusion that Pakistan’s security establishment was behind the murder of Sami-ul-Haq is the fact that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close associate of the Taliban’s founder Mullah Omar, was released by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in October and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan.

Baradar was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence-based operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding demand of the US-backed Kabul government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban. He is currently leading the Taliban delegation in the negotiations with the US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad in the capital of Qatar, Doha.

Furthermore, Washington has been arm-twisting Islamabad through the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to do more to curtail the activities of militants operating from its soil to destabilize the US-backed government in Afghanistan and to pressure the Taliban to initiate a peace process with the government. Under such circumstances, a religious cleric like Sami-ul-Haq, who was widely known as the “Godfather of the Taliban,” becomes a liability rather than an asset.

*

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

A good piece of in-depth analysis...

As a Sunni Muslim, it may be difficult to swallow the allegations presented in this well-researched article. Muslims will continue to suffer if they fail to assess complicated conflicts from impartial perspectives, and identify the root cause and actual instigators of conflicts. Pakistan is obviously playing victim game and drawing sympathy from the Muslim world by presenting brutalities (true though) meted out to the Kashmiris by the Indian govt but ignoring terrorism aided by them on the other hand.

Pakistan-India showdown: What you’re not being told

Darius Shahtahmasebi

A recent terrorist attack in Kashmir could set the stage for a major conflict between India and Pakistan as India begins bombing Pakistani territory. As always, the root causes of these are being ignored by the media.

 

On February 14, India was rocked by a suicide-bombing which took place inside Jammu and Kashmir. The attack targeted a convoy of security personnel vehicles, killing at least 42 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officers (as well as the bomber himself).

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a Pakistan-based Islamist group called Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). JeM’s main goal is to steal Kashmir away from India and unite it with Pakistan, to ensure that Pakistan is ruled by Sharia law, and to drive Western forces out of Afghanistan. Its other eventual priority is to drive all Hindus and non-Muslims from the Indian subcontinent.

The attack has drawn such negative publicity that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), finally agreeing on something for once, identified India as a victim of terrorism and asked member states to cooperate actively with New Delhi to bring these attackers to justice.

After India vowed a “jaw breaking response” to the attack, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan authorised his military to “respond decisively and comprehensively to any aggression or misadventure” by India. In case it wasn’t clear, both of these volatile states currently sitting on the cusp of war possess nuclear weapons.

Apparently, despite this underlying nuclear catastrophe, someone thought it was a good idea for Indian fighter jets to begin pounding Pakistani territory just today, in order to take part in what India’s foreign ministry coined a “non-military pre-emptive action” against JeM. The recent incursion into Pakistani airspace forced the Pakistani air force to scramble to respond, which in turn led the Indian jets to “release [their] payload in haste while escaping.”

In the process, India claimed that it had killed a “very large number” of terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and jihadis. To be fair, India, for its part, had warned it was ready for war with Pakistan. It was also pushing for Pakistan to be included on a terror-watch blacklist, all the while threatening to weaponize the flow of water to Pakistan as a means of leverage conventional military means can’t buy.

After the raid, Pakistan has understandably asserted its right to self-defense. But self-defense of what – Pakistan’s sovereignty or self-defense of JeM? (If in fact, India was targeting JeM fighters). Actually, that was exactly what the Indian foreign ministry claimed was the rationale for the attacks – Pakistan’s inaction for combating its own homegrown terrorists. And this is where international law can get even murkier as it delves into the “unwilling and unable” justification for the use of force on a sovereign state. In India’s eyes, Islamabad is either unwilling or unable to combat the terrorist threat inside its borders (or perhaps this is just a PR stunt aimed at China’s expanding influence over Pakistan).

But, okay, fine – let’s accept the rationale of the terrorist threat. If we are going to ignite a powder keg that would begin with two-nuclear armed nations and eventually draw in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China, we should at least examine the context in which Pakistan and India are facing a serious threat of terrorism.

Following the money

The United States and its allies have had a curious relationship with Pakistan and terrorism for years, as anyone who knows their history will know. What they might not remember, however, is that in February 2007, then vice president, Dick Cheney, made a trip to Pakistan to meet with President General Pervez Musharraf. According to PBS, the secret US-backed campaign against Iran by the terror group known as Jundullah was high on Cheney’s agenda.

A few months later, ABC News reported that Jundallah, which is “responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005.”

The report explains that “US relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the US provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight.” Not to mention that former Pakistani army chief, retired General Mirza Aslam Baig, further explained that “the U.S. supports the Jundullah terrorist group and uses it to destabilize Iran.”

Okay, so the US supported the Jundullah group in Pakistan against Iran, but what does that have to do with the current situation at hand? Well, it appears that JeM and other terrorist organisations in Pakistan receive direct support from key US allies, including and especially Saudi Arabia.

For example, an action request cable archived by Wikileaks, documenting the illicit finance activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, stated that “it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.”

“Still,” the cable continues, “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia “remains a critical financial support base” for – wait for it – “Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba] and other terrorist groups.” The LeT is a Pakistan-based terrorist organisation which also has a strong focus on Jammu and Kashmir, where the recent terror attack took place (and India’s initial response). Both LeT and JeM have received overwhelming support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since the early 1990s. In fact, LeT became part of the United Jihad Council in 1993, an umbrella group for militant Islamists operating in Kashmir and in doing so, formed a direct alliance with JeM. As far as the US State Department is concerned, the two groups are almost all but completely synonymous.

The ISI itself had been a prime recipient of billions of US aid, particularly under the administration of George W. Bush. The Wikileaks cable clearly shows that the US was well aware elements within the ISI were maintaining ties to the LeT.

The cable also noted that Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE have provided support to LeT and other terrorist groups operating in the region as well. All of these countries are US allies.

Furthermore, a separate Wikileaks cable confirmed that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been funnelling money not just to LeT but to JeM directly, stating that:

“Locals believed that charitable activities being carried out by Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith organizations, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Al-Khidmat Foundation, and Jaish-e-Mohammed were further strengthening reliance on extremist groups and minimizing the importance of traditionally moderate Sufi religious leaders in these communities. Government and non-governmental sources claimed that financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organizations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of those governments.”

Saudi Arabia itself has been considered to be somewhat of a safe haven for jihadists targeting India, including and especially the LeT. An investigation also found that Saudi Arabia funnelled funds to anti-Indian terror groups through Hajj pilgrims, and the Diplomat lamented that JeM hunts for potential recruits among the 150,000 devout Indians visiting Mecca every year.

So, to summarise: the US has a long and documented history of backing anti-Iranian Sunni-based Pakistani terror groups. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have been funnelling financial support to the LeT, who has a direct alliance and operates in the same area as the JeM (who also receives direct funding from Saudi Arabia), which recently claimed responsibility for an attack which killed at least 40 Indian police personnel.

It’s not exactly rocket science. Call me a little bit suspicious, but perhaps this is why Saudi Arabia was quite open in its assurances to Islamabad that it need not go after JeM directly, even while the group’s leadership apparently continues to live comfortably inside Pakistan.

And what no one really seems to be talking about is the implications this wider geostrategic struggle has for the region. Saudi Arabia wants to win Pakistan over in a tug-of-war game in which Islamabad finds itself in the centre, and in doing so, is committing $10 billion to build an oil refinery in the Gwadar port project, which actually puts a major Saudi project on Iran’s border.

Most disturbing is the revelation that Saudi Arabia is also being rumoured to have nuclear weapons “on order” from Pakistan. If it isn’t bad enough that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and are now potentially launching air strikes into each other’s territory, the idea that these apocalyptic weapons could one day end up in the hand of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the country currently launching a genocidal war in Yemen and backing known jihadists right across the wider region, all the whilst constantly threatening war with Tehran, is nothing short of suicidal.

According to Israeli media, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) recent visit to Pakistan has essentially cemented Pakistan’s inclusion in anti-Iran Arab NATO. Will these countries rush to Pakistan’s aid as it is pummelled by Indian fighter jets? Or will diplomacy and cooler heads eventually prevail?

Thankfully, we can trust the media to ask these all-important questions, and not focus its entire energy on yet another regime-change operation in yet another oil rich country, right?

Bernie Sanders won't bring any substantial change!

During the 2016 campaign Sanders referred to the late Hugo Chavez as a "dead communist dictator." The year before he called for Saudi Arabia to "get its hands dirty" in Yemen. Has supported all NATO wars. Why would anyone then persist in portraying him as a honest person who will be co-opted when he's an integral part of the game?

Don’t ‘feel the Bern’ if you don’t want to get burnt

Neil Clark

The news that Bernie Sanders is going to stand for president again was met with cries of joy by those who should really know better. It’ll all end in tears, as the US system doesn’t allow a genuinely transformative president.

When will they ever learn? Even after the latest reality check, with Donald Trump, the president who was going to ‘drain the swamp‘ and sideline the neocons, appointing a whole host of swamp dwellers to his team – and hardline pro-Iraq War hawk John Bolton to be his National Security Advisor – there are still, quite incredibly, a lot of people who are getting very excited about the 2020 presidential race.

This time, Bernie will do it, we’re told. And what a difference this true ‘Man of the People’ will make! Then there’s Tulsi, who’s pledged to oppose ‘regime change’ wars. She’ll stick it to the neocons, all right.

But going by past history, it ain’t going to happen. Neither Sanders or Gabbard are likely to make it to the White House. Even if they did, the odds are they’d follow much the same policies as their predecessors – as Obama did after Bush, and Trump after Obama.

One loses count of the number of presidential candidates who were billed as ’game changers’. People who were going to shake the system up. Take on Wall Street and the special interest groups. Give ‘the little people’ a voice in the White House. Stop the Wars. But it never happened.

The system was simply too strong.

Anyone remember when Howard Dean threw his hat into the ring? The governor of Vermont was one of the front-runners for the Democratic nomination in 2004. He opposed the Iraq War. Yipee! He built a grassroots campaign based on small donations . Yipee! But it all ended in tears. We can blame that ‘scream’ if we like, but there were powerful forces in the Democratic establishment against him and his campaign fizzled out like Bernie’s did twelve years later. But would President Dean have made much of a difference? Seeing how he morphed into a foreign policy hawk afterwards, the answer is not very likely. In 2016, Dean, the ‘insurgent‘ of 2003 backed Hillary Clinton over Bernie.

The system has various mechanisms for (a) preventing  candidates who want to change the status quo from becoming president and (b) making them toe the line if they are elected.

First and foremost there’s money. As Danielle Ryan detailed in a previous OpEd, it’s not Russia that’s damaging American ‘democracy’– it’s  the billions of dollars that have to be raised.

It sounds so thrilling to build a presidential campaign on small donations, but the sad truth is that the big donors will always hold a sizeable advantage. America really is the best ‘democracy’ money can buy.

Linked to this there are the very powerful lobby groups, the most powerful of which in foreign policy, is the pro-Israel lobby which expects – and indeed demands – loyalty towards Israel and hostility towards foreign actors Israel doesn't like.

Then there’s the role of the corporate media, ownership of which is highly concentrated in enforcing pro-Establishment narratives.

Consider the way the ‘anti-war’ candidate Tulsi Gabbard went on the back-foot when being aggressively questioned on Syria on ABC’s the View by the daughter of the late neocon Senator John McCain.

“You have said that the Syrian president, Assad, is not the enemy of the United States yet he’s used chemical weapons against his own people 300 times,” McCain said.

Instead of responding to this by asking for McCain’s sources for the ‘300 times claim’ and reiterating that Assad was not an enemy of the US, which he clearly isn’t, Gabbard said there was “no disputing the fact that Bashar Assad and Syria is a brutal dictator” who has “used chemical weapons and other weapons against his people.”

In other words she caved in. The system 1 Tulsi Gabbard 0.

On foreign policy, Bernie surrendered a long time ago. He’s the classic example of a ‘licensed radical’, namely he’s allowed some leeway to slam the gross iniquities of American turbo-capitalism, but knows the score when there’s an external ’official enemy‘ to be demonised.

The system needs someone like him to give it a  ‘democratic’ veneer, but again appearances can be very deceptive. As ever, Venezuela is a good litmus test.

The self-declared ’democratic socialist’ Bernie, the man so many leftists in America and worldwide are pinning their hopes on, in 2015 referred to democratic socialist Hugo Chavez, probably the most elected man in the world, “a dead communist dictator”– having praised Venezuela and its greater income equality, years earlier.

While he hasn’t called Nicolas Maduro a ‘dictator’ yet, he did parrot a ruling class trope by saying that the last Venezuelan election “was not free or fair.”

He also called on the Venezuelan government not to use violence against protesters. That sounds reasonable enough, but what if protesters themselves use violence against government supporters, as when a black man was burnt alive in Caracas? Is the government still not allowed to respond forcefully to protect people?

On foreign policy Bernie is the ’good cop’, to John Bolton’s ‘bad cop’. He won‘t support direct military action against the target state, but he’ll undermine its legitimacy all the same. Look at how since 2016 he’s indulged in evidence-free Russophobia like the most rabid neocon.

Only last July Bernie introduced a ‘Resolution to protect American Democracy from Russian Meddling’.

“If President Trump won't confront Putin about interference in our elections and his destabilizing policies, Congress must act. Tweets and speeches are fine, but we need more from Republican senators now,” Sanders said.

Senator Joe McCarthy would have been proud of him.

Bernie supporters will argue that toeing the line on foreign policy means their man can prioritise on domestic reforms, but how can he really change things at home if military budgets are not significantly cut and the wars continue?

The idea that any meaningful change comes through the present system in America is at best over-optimistic and at worst, hopefully naive. Only when we accept that the US is not a ’democracy’ but a regime, when everyone who stands for high office – however well-intentioned – is pulled towards promoting pro-imperialist, pro-neoliberal, elite-friendly policies, then we can make some real progress. Continuing to participate in the ’elections are so very important’ charade only prolongs the agony. And in case anyone thinks this is just an American problem, it most certainly isn’t.

Look at Britain and how Jeremy Corbyn, who did promise something really different when first elected as Labour leader in 2015, has been brought into line. Corbyn’s main problem was that he was taking over as leader of a party whose parliamentary representatives were overwhelmingly opposed to any real change. But rather than move against them Corbyn chose to compromise and his party is down to 30 percent in the polls. The one-time anti-war radical, who was going to transform Britain ’for the many not the few’ now looks a shadow of his former self.

If voting changed anything they’d abolish it. That might sound glib, but as we look at how the system operates, we can see that there’s so much truth in it.

Brave New World Revisited !

Great article that shows us now what a genius Huxley was. People underestimated his prescience in the shape of things to come. He was definitely " in the know " about where the Elites want to take this Project. And don't forget H.G. Wells and 'The Sleeper Awakes', written in 1910. It's a future where lives are dominated by 'Babble Machines', known today as the MSM.

The biggest drug today is not one of the legal or illegal drugs but the discharge of dopamine one receives by "being accepted and liked" by some of those other slaves in those social networks. Facebook is the worse drug in the planet right and is destroying our world.

Brave New WorldRevisited Again

Dan Glazebrook

RT : 28 Sep, 2018

60 years ago this year, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World Revisited, which concluded that the real world was moving towards the future predicted in his classic dystopian novel much more quickly than he had first imagined.

Brave New World, published almost three decades earlier, foresaw a future in which social control had been perfected through a mixture of cultural dumbing down, genetic engineering and the prodigious use of recreational drugs and no-strings sex. Unlike that other classic of dystopian fiction (George Orwell’s 1984), Brave New World proved prophetic in its description of a world in which acquiescence to authority would be purchased through mindless consumerism, rather than imposed with bludgeon and baton. As he wrote in Revisited: “It has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behaviour is less effective, in the long run, that control through the reinforcement of desirable behaviour by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the nonviolent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of the individual men, women and children.” In the world of his fable, he noted, “punishment is infrequent and generally mild,” adding that “It now looks like the odds are more in favour of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984” emerging.

The first element of control in Brave New World was prenatal manipulation; that is to say, the “systematic practice of eugenics and dysgenics.” All babies were test tube babies, with “biologically superior” sperm and ova fused together to produce Betas, Alphas and Alpha Pluses. These would become the adults destined to inherit political and economic control: the future brains and leaders of the Brave New World. At one point, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe is asked the obvious question of why everyone is not made Alpha Plus. “Because we don’t wish to have our throats slit,” comes the reply. To this end, “biologically inferior” sperm and ova were treated to the Bokanovsky Process, where they would be deliberately treated with alcohol and other protein poisons to retard their development. These would grow into the “epsilon” workers used for menial and monotonous labour.

Huxley said, “The creatures finally decanted were almost subhuman; but they were capable of performing unskilled work and, when properly conditioned, detensioned by free and frequent access to the opposite sex, constantly distracted by gratuitous entertainment and reinforced in their good behaviour patterns by daily doses of soma, could be counted on to give no trouble to their superiors.” After all, the Controller adds, Alpha Pluses would go mad with epsilon work.

In his 1958 study, Huxley seemed to go back on his forecast of such genetic manipulation, writing that “Babies in bottles and the centralised control of reproduction are not perhaps impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random. For practical purposes genetic standardisation may be ruled out.”

Just 20 years later, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, was born. Of course, this was still a long way from the complete abolition of wombs and state-controlled selective breeding of his fable; but the steady increase in prenatal screenings underway today – pushing towards the potential elimination of conditions like Down Syndrome – are leading to a level of genetic selection which even Huxley had perhaps been too quick to rule out.

A second method of social control was through the ubiquitous use of drugs; namely Soma, a cure-all providing bliss, visions, or sleep depending on dosage; and all at “no physiological or mental cost.”

“The Brave New Worlders,” Huxley tells us, “could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.” Furthermore, the use of Soma was “not a private vice, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”

Updating Marx, Huxley noted that in the Brave New World, Opium – or at least Soma – was the religion of the people; for “like religion, the drug had power to console and compensate, it called up visions of another, better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity.”

Soma was an essential weapon in the armoury of the World Controllers, pacifying and distracting the citizenry from the meaninglessness inanity of their emotionally numbed existence. “Chemically induced euphoria,” Huxley wrote, functioned as “a substitute for the satisfaction of feeling oneself free and creative.”

Which brings us to sex. The Brave New World is one in which thought and reading are frowned upon, the quest for meaning replaced by a never-ending parade of no-strings sex. Monogamy is seen as the “enemy of civilisation” whilst “promiscuity is the rule,” its citizens remind each other, and “romance is degenerate.” Emotion, intelligence, family – all are viewed as afflictions, brakes on individuality; even the very word ‘mother’ is considered obscene. ‘Own-time’, as it’s called, is frowned upon; the most damning indictment of the leading protagonist Bernard – the clearest evidence of his weirdness – is that he “actually chooses to spend time on his own.” Sex is completely detached from emotion, and instead functions as both pleasurable distraction and indicator of status and success.

Ultimately it is this – not a beating from the police – that leads to Bernard’s co-option. Bernard is an Alpha Plus civil servant who finds fame and fortune following his discovery of ‘John the Savage’, a rugged and unconditioned literate who personifies the old world of Christian morality and knowledge-seeking, and gets promptly paraded around like a circus animal. Bernard’s newfound adulation following this ‘discovery’ provides him with a pass to ‘sessions’ with high-status women. In contrast to 1984’s lead character Winston – who is ultimately co-opted through fear and torture – Bernard’s co-option thus takes place as the growing wealth, recognition and sex he receives following his ‘discovery’ naturally tend to blunt his critical outlook on society – raising the question of whether his initial rebelliousness was anything more than jealousy in the first place. In sum, control in the Brave New World is achieved almost entirely by consent; its citizens cowed by what Huxley calls “the infliction of pleasure.”

But, often forgotten in the popular memory of the book, the Brave New World does not span the globe. Parallel to the zone of consent, there is a zone of coercion. Outside the lands of relentlessly vacuous hedonism lie the deprived ‘reservations’ in which the poor and indigenous are hemmed in by electric fences. No serious conditioning takes place there, marriage and family occurs, “monstrous superstitions” such as Christianity and ancestor worship are practiced; it is a place, the tour guide explains, where “infectious diseases, priests and venomous lizards” are rampant. Yet the savages are perfectly tame, a result of their having been subjected to plenty of torture and starvation. And there is no escape from the reservations: those born there are condemned also to die there, adding, perhaps, to the piles of corpses at the boundary left by the desperate souls who have attempted to scale the fence.

Our hedonist wonderlands too are ringed by corpses: the corpses of those who would dare to flee the rampaging militias, broken societies and mass dispossession bequeathed the third world by NATO and the IMF. In the 10 years preceding the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, 23,000 had already perished making the desperate crossing across the Mediterranean, whilst hundreds die each year on the US border with Mexico. And, as climate terror, economic crisis, and war make ever larger swathes of the world uninhabitable, these numbers are set to grow exponentially. Far-right parties across the Western world are already coming to power promising to make the fences impenetrable; to ensure, that is, that the pile of corpses continues to grow. Following suit this month was Jean-Claude Juncker, announcing a new army of 10,000 border guards to this end.

There was one major aspect of the modern world, however, that Huxley missed. In the neofeudal Brave New World, you are born into your allotted role, and conditioned to accept it. “The secret of happiness,” its proponents explain, “is liking what you have to do.” In our world, however, it is not the fatalistic comforts of feudalism that prevail, but the lies of neoliberalism. People, by and large, inherit their future position – class, status, income – from their parents. But everywhere – by the most well-meaning of teachers as much as by the most cynical of advertising executives – they are conditioned to believe that they are responsible for their own condition. The corollary of ‘you can be whatever you want’ is that ‘whatever you are is your own fault’. This basic myth of the modern world has succeeded, not in making everyone happy with their lot in life, but in ensuring they blame themselves for their predicament; if you find yourself in a dangerous, dead-end, or underpaid job, it must be because you are too stupid, lacking in talent or indolent to secure, or indeed deserve, anything else. This systemic production and reproduction of self-loathing – such an integral feature of contemporary life – was not a component of the Brave New World. And for this reason, the refugee plays a different role. In Huxley’s dystopia, the wretched inhabitants of the reservations – personified by ‘John the Savage’ – were objects of amusement, absurd relics of a long-supplanted life. For the overstimulated and under-fulfilled citizens of the West, however, the refugee is a canvas on which to project the unwanted and uncomfortable parts of our own psyche – a vessel to carry that part of ourselves we are taught to loathe, the part that seeks emotional security, decent housing, sustainable well-paid employment, but yet secretly believes we are really not entitled to it. Splitting off this conflicted craving from ourselves, we need to throw it at someone else, someone who can plausibly take on the role of the undeserving seeker of security. Enter the refugee.

Unlike 1984, Brave New World understood the splitting of the world into a zone of consent and a zone of coercion, in which consent could be obtained in the one precisely because coercion had been exported to the other. Yet the split in fact goes much deeper than this – into the very center of our souls. 

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Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.