Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies

The United Nations Information Service (UNIS) Vienna in cooperation with the Permanent Mission of Slovakia to the United Nations (Vienna), EKOTOPFILM International Festival of Sustainable Development Films and the Slovak Institute, invite you to -

The Sustainable Development Film Week at the Vienna International Centre

14-18 May 2012

A selection of award winning films from the EKOTOPFILM International Festival of Sustainable Development Films will be screened throughout the week:

Programme:

for the opening day – 14 May 2012, at 12:00 Noon, Opening of the Film Week

VIC (The Vienna International Center – or the UN Headquarters in Vienna) Rotunda

Introductory remarks by:

Janos Tisovszky, Director, UNIS Vienna

Ambassador Marcel Pesko, Slovakia

Peter Lim, Executive Director, EKOTOPFILM

Followed by a musical and culinary programme courtesy of the Slovak Cultural Institute and SL’UK then the  14 May 2012, 13:00 Screening of a selection of short films in UNIS Cinema Room G0575:

2086 - Director: Olena Maksymenko (Ukraine, 2010, 5 min) A possible future of the earth without air…

99% Rust - Director: Nenko Genov (Bulgaria, 2010, 4 min) About 70% of all metal is used just once and then it is discarded.

Tomatoes Eat You! Director: Nenko Genov (Bulgaria, 2010, 1 min) For generations they were cooked, mashed, canned, eaten alive… or even worse! And now they strike back! Prepare for a horror beyond your imagination! This summer tomatoes eat you!

Africa: Digital Graveyard: A UNTV film. Director: Mary Ferreira (2011, 10 min) Mobile phones and computers have transformed the lives of many – yet billions of discarded electronic devices are ending up in landfills in the world’s poorest countries, posing a potentially lethal toxic threat. But one African country is finding innovative ways to handle this so called e-waste.

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We posted the UN in Vienna activity originally on May 8-th and the UPDATE is after the first day  of the Vienna showings – May 14-th.

We learned from Dr. iur Hana Kovacova, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Slovak Republic to the International Organizations in Vienna, that Ekotopfilm is a Slovak organization based in Bratislva that holds yearly film and documentary showings on topics of Sustainable Development and the environment.

This year the show and judging of the films will take place in Bratislava in October in a five days film festival. This will be followed by a 3-4 days event in November in Kosice where the films will get a commercial preview.

The May event in Vienna is to honor both – the preparations for RIO+20 and the colleagues at the UN Headquarters in Vienna.

Last year’s winner in the Bratislava International Competition was the film on Africa which was the last that was shown today – the opening day in Vienna. I picked up from the internet:

Ekotopfilm, based in Slovakia, awarded the top prize to a film,  “Africa: Digital Graveyard”, produced by me for my employer, United Nations Television, UNTV – said Mary Ferreira, who made this film .  The film is part of UNTV’s monthly series 21st Century and won first place out of 20 contenders in the Current Affairs category.

“Africa: Digital Graveyard” addresses the growing problem of electronic waste or “e-waste” as developed nations ship obsolete and second-hand electronics to countries like Ghana. Most of the items are worthless and end up in dumpsites in Accra. The film also depicted action taken by innovators in South Africa who have found creative ways to recycle, refurbish and reprocess elements from old electronics for use as raw materials in the manufacture of new products.  Link to film -goo.gl/IWqEc

Now, why should one send what is considered garbage in Developed countries, to lesser developed countries – even under guise of extracting value from them -?  Will this allow for a modicum of self-esteem.

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The 15 May 2012, 12:00 Film screening:  Trou de Fer – The Iron Hole UNIS Cinema Room G0575.

Director: Pavol Barabas (Slovakia, 2011, 55 min) Trou de Fer is a unique and majestic natural phenomenon sitting in the heart of the National Park on Reunion Island. Volcanic eruptions made the Earth sink into a void and continuous and heavy rain showers formed a place like no other. Because of its inaccessibility nature has been left untouched and untamed. The depths of the canyon have been visited only by a few individuals.

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The 16 May 2012, 12:00 Film screening:  Architects of Change: Nothing is Lost UNIS Cinema Room G0575

Director: Jean Bourbonnais (France, 2009, 52 min) The trash we generate, our outmoded or broken gadgets, the water we waste – it is all thrown out into the environment after we have used it. Far from being satisfied with managing the accumulation of electronic waste, most of which contain toxic materials that are harmful to the environment and human health, Fernando Nilo also wanted Recylca to provide jobs for socially disadvantaged people.

This film shows how bad our relation is to the environment and to ourselves. How the throw-away society is losing its treasures and making the land inhabitable by throwing away as pollution resources we could use as further inputs to industry.

Water is a recurrent topic – we use it and rather then clean it up and reuse it, we throw it into the pool of man-made pollution.

The other recurrent topic is electronics waste that literally harbors gold.

The target of the film is us and it tries to tell s that we will gain even financially by doing the right think of harvesting the present polluting waste.

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14-18 May 2012 Exhibition in the VIC Rotunda

The film week will be accompanied by an exhibition on EKOTOPFILM International Festival of Sustainable Development Films.

The exhibition will also present finalists of the Drop by Drop – the Future We Want Ad Competition, launched by the UN Regional Information Centre in Brussels (UNRIC), in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme and UN information offices in Europe with the support of the Nordic Council of Ministers. In the competition Europeans were asked to create a newspaper ad that inspires others to preserve water now and for future generations.

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REGISTRATION was REQUIRED for those who do not hold a valid VIC Grounds Pass

A system was in place at the time but the UN in Vienna does not want us to continue providing that information.

Absurd, intellektuell, moralisch: der Dramatiker Václav Havel (1936 – 2011)

Die Burg, ein Muttertheater

Von Hans Haider

• Viele von Havels Stücken wurden im Burgtheater uraufgeführt.

 www.wienerzeitung.at/nachrichten/…

Nicht der Autor, sondern eine Tafel mit seinem Namen verbeugte sich im Akademietheater.Foto: Burgtheater

Prag, Hradschin, früher Jänner 1990. Wissenschaftsminister Erhard Busek überbringt Glückwünsche aus Wien. Václav Havel trägt im Amt, es ist später Vormittag, einen schwarzen Rollkragenpulli. Sein Gesicht strahlt. Er blättert im Pass, den er eben bekommen hat, dem ersten seit zwanzig Jahren. Was seine “Proféssion” ist, liest er zögerlich vor: Président de la République fédérative tchèque et slovaque. Über die Schriftstellerei kein Wort. Aus der von ihm selbst und der Mehrheit der Bürger gewählten Politikerrolle wird der Dichter nie mehr herausfinden.

2008 wollte es der schwer lungenkrebskranke Expräsident noch einmal wissen. Der Entwurf für das Stück “Abgang” (Odchazeni) lag seit 1988 in der Schublade. Ein Staatsmann räsoniert, ironisch-selbstkritisch und darum selbstzerstörerisch, nach dem Verlust der Macht über die verlogenen Mechanismen von Politik und Medien. Ein Achtungserfolg, nicht mehr. “Abgang” wurde als Abrechnung mit Havels Widerpart Václav Klaus missinterpretiert. Er verfilmte den Plot noch selbst als Regisseur – Premiere war heuer im März.

Zum Sterben zog sich der 75-Jährige in sein Häuschen im nordböhmischen Weiler Hrádecek zurück. Wo er am 18. Dezember einschlief, probierte er in den Jahren der Verfolgung in Privataufführungen neue Texte aus. Er kannte sein Publikum jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs kaum. Was dort als universeller aufklärerischer Humanismus ankam, war mit unzähligen Anspielungen gespickt, die nur in der CSSR oder von tschechischen Emigranten zu verstehen waren.

Kein kalter Krieg
Der Schöpfer von Welterfolgen wie “Das Gartenfest” (1963) und “Benachrichtigung” (1965) saß sechs Jahre im Gefängnis. Warum der Polizeikrieg gegen die Dichter, die Intellektuellen? Der 1968 von der Sowjet-Internationale zerschlagene “Prager Frühling” war eine Kulturbewegung – zugleich Wiederbelebung der Avantgarde in der 1939 schon von den Nazis vernichteten bürgerlichen Republik und jugendkultureller Internationalismus Marke Woodstock. Havel liebte die Prager Popgruppe “Plastic People of the Universe”. Als sie ebenfalls drangsaliert wurde, formierten sich ihre Verteidiger zur “Charta 77″.

Kritik an kalten bürokratischen, verachtenden Systemen war, mit Orwells “1984″ als Leitbuch, eine Waffe im Kalten Propagandakrieg. Kafkas Angstbilder in “Der Prozess” und “Das Schloss” wurden im Westen simpel als vorausgeschaute Beschreibungen von Stalins Terror interpretiert. Havel wollte kein Kalter Krieger sein. Er warb für die Zivilgesellschaft und führte, als Konservativer, in soziotechnokratischen Fiction-Kulissen scheinbar rationale moderne Politsysteme ad absurdum. Wie alle Intellektuellen gar zu gerne, wusste auch Havel das Schicksal der Welt in deren Hände gelegt. Sein Dr. Heinrich Faustka in “Versuchung” (1986) ist ein Wissenschafter in einem Institut zur Bewahrung der reinen materialistischen Lehre. Mephisto spricht für die Hölle, den Staat, das System. Das System siegt, Faust verbrennt.

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Im Wiener Akademietheater fand Havels geistreiche Zuspitzung wenig Beifall. Sie war die letzte einer Serie von sechs Uraufführungen, die 1976 unter lautem Jubel mit dem Einakter “Audienz” begonnen wurde. Havel durfte trotz Interventionen von Kreisky und Sinowatz nicht zur Uraufführung reisen. Direktor Achim Benning, Dramaturg Rupert Weis und der Rowohlt-Theaterverlag organisierten den Schmuggel der Manuskripte über die Grenze. Havel pries die Burg als sein “Muttertheater” (materské divadlo).

Ekel vor Intellektuellen

Foto: Erich Lessing

Joachim Bissmeier traf bravourös die existenzielle Traurigkeit und Unbeugsamkeit des Alter-Ego Ferdinand Vanek, ein Schriftsteller, der wie Havel zur Zwangsarbeit in einer Brauerei verdonnert wurde. Der Braumeister muss der Polizei Überwachungsprotokolle schicken, scheitert aber am Formulieren. Der Dichter nimmt ihm die Arbeit ab. In den Fortsetzungen debattiert Vanek seine Freiheitsideale mit bürgerlichen Aufsteigern (“Vernissage”) und Intellektuellen (“Protest”). Und wendet sich angeekelt von denen ab.

Im Jänner 1977 wird die “Charta 77″ bekannt, an der Havel mitgeschrieben hat. Die Amnesty-Gruppe Burgtheater lud zur Solidaritätsaufführung – und Kreisky, Sinowatz, Taus, Busek kamen. Wie nach der Premiere im Oktober fuhr eine Tafel mit dem Namen des Dissidenten aus dem Schnürboden.

Information

Briefe als kleine Fenster im Gefängnis

(cb) Erich Lessing hat auf ebay Glück gehabt. Dort hat er ein Exemplar von Vaclav Havels “Briefe an Olga” ergattert. Dieses Buch ist nämlich vergriffen. Also nicht ganz. Denn der Thomas Reche Verlag hat einige der Briefe Havels aus dem Gefängnis neu herausgegeben. In dem Buch sind Briefe aus dem Jahr 1981 mit Bildern des Magnum-Fotografen Lessing illustriert (“Fünfzehn Stimmungen”). Es sind einerseits Fotos, die Lessing in den Jahren 1956 bis 1958 in Prag gemacht hat (siehe Bild). Auf der anderen Seite sind es Bilder, die das Eingesperrtsein verbildlichen: Mauern, tiefe Brunnen, kleine Fenster. Die Briefe mussten durch eine strenge Zensur – Havel erzählt in einem Interview, dass er besonders kompliziert formulieren musste, damit die Texte durchgingen. Gleichzeitig war ihm bewusst, dass die Briefe als literarische Signale in der Außenwelt aufgenommen wurden. Die Texte wurden zur einzigen Leidenschaft jener Zeit. Ein versprochenes Vorwort für das Buch hat Havel nicht mehr geschafft. Aber, so Lessing, Havel hat das Buch noch gesehen. “Ich habe ein von ihm signiertes Exemplar. Vaclav Havel steht da, mit einem Herz.”

Der junge Havel, als Klassenfeind vom Studium ausgeschlossen, tippte auf der Schreibmaschine visuelle Poesie wie Ernst Jandl. Im Prager Frühling befreite er sich aus der Zwangsrolle des anonymen Dramaturgen im Theater am Geländer – einer Kleinbühne unter der Leitung von Jan Grossman. Der inszenierte 1965 Havels in absurde Höhen geschraubte Totalitarismus-Satire “Benachrichtigung”. Funktionäre tyrannisieren die Bürger mit der Kunstsprache “Ptydepe”, die Knechte des Systems sind schaurige Jasager. Im “Berghotel” (1981) entlarvt sich ein totalitäres System in einsamer Höhenlage bei einem Bal macabre. Anders als Vanek resigniert hier die Hauptperson, wieder ein kritischer Schriftsteller. In “Largo desolato” gab Bissmeier einen Philosophen, traumatisiert von Verfolgung und Isolation. Er widersteht der Versuchung, proletarischer Märtyrer zu werden. Wieder waren es eigene Skrupel, die Havel zur Feder greifen ließen. Wieder wurden sie im Ausland nur von kritischen Intellektuellen und von den Hütern autoritärer Systeme verstanden. In seinem Essay “Versuch, in der Wahrheit zu leben” schrieb er 1980 Klartext, der in den Kanon der politisch-moralischen Weltliteratur einging.

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Vaclav Havel’s Triumph

December 22, 2011 | by Aryeh Neier

Vaclav Havel never received the Nobel Peace Prize.  He probably could have gotten it but, in 1991, when he was most celebrated as the dissenter and long-term political prisoner who had become the hero of Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” and then its democratically elected president, he campaigned for its presentation to someone else.  He said it should be given to Aung San Suu Kyi and, with his support, she was chosen.  Not long before that, the Burmese military junta had cancelled an election after voting had taken place and it became clear that her political party, the National League of Democracy, would win more than 80 percent of the seats in Parliament.  She had been placed under house arrest.

Right now, a political opening may be taking place in Burma.  Some political prisoners have been released (though many more remain behind bars) and Aung San Suu Kyi says she is thinking of running for Parliament.  In the 20 years since she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she has endured long periods of house arrest and also a period of actual imprisonment.  Yet the fact that she has survived and that her country now has a chance to emerge from its long nightmare of repressive rule has a lot to do with the protection provided by the Nobel Peace Prize.  Vaclav Havel was not only the hero of the Velvet Revolution.  He is also a hero of the transformation that is still to come in Burma and in such other countries as Belarus, Cuba, and China, to which he devoted his energies in recent years.

I met Vaclav Havel only a few times.  One occasion that stands out in my memory is when he came to the headquarters of Human Rights Watch in New York, where I was then the executive director, to thank us for our efforts on behalf of Czech dissenters during the period of communist rule.  This took place when he visited New York to attend a meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations not long after he became president.  Visiting our office to meet with the entire staff was a thoughtful gesture that made everyone there feel good about the work they were doing.

My last opportunity to see Havel took place a few weeks ago when I visited Prague to speak at the Forum 2000 conference that he has organized every year.  Because he had been ill, it was not certain that he would appear at his own conference.  Many of the participants knew that it would probably be their last chance to see him.  When he did appear, and expressed solidarity with those still struggling against repression, it provided a palpable thrill that I think was shared by all of us listening to him.  Not inclined to politics, he was more intent on practicing his profession as a playwright.  Yet he had become a central figure in the most important political struggles of our time, always as the champion of those whose cause seemed most hopeless.  His death is an occasion for deep mourning and, simultaneously, for celebration of the triumph of the human spirit.

We were informed of a Press Briefing

at the Vienna International Cenre, Thursday, September 8, 2011, 1:30 p.m. on

Adaptation to Climate Change by Spatial Planning in the Alps.

This was to be about: The main results and outcomes achieved under the CLISP Project “Adaptation to Climate Change by Spatial Planning in the Alpine area” will be discussed at the CLISP international final conference organized by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Federal Environment Agency Austria, held at the Vienna International Centre at that date – on 8 September 2011, at which the Head of the UNEP Vienna Office, Harald Egerer, stressed the importance of the particular study as a platform for the development of an integrated, transnational approach toward adaptation to impacts of climate change in the highly sensitive area of the Alps.

It also said  at the margins of the Conference, high level representatives from the European Union, the Alpine Convention and Austrian agencies will take part at the Press Briefing with the purpose of illustrating present and future strategies to tackle negative effect of climate change in the Alpine space.
Speakers include:

Rosario Bento Pais
DG Climate Action, European Commission

Andre Jol
Head of vulnerability group, European Environment Agency

Marco Onida
Secretary General, Alpine Convention

George Reberning
Managing Director, Federal Environment Agency Austria

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Having shown interest, later we also received a Press Release:

Climate Change Adaptation by Spatial Planning in the Alpine Space.

At the Press Conference there were just two journalists – myself and the Vienna editor for an industry magazine 4C, Ms. Margarette Endl who came as a guest of the organizers of what turned out to have been the “graduating” event – the release of the final documents of this stage inthe CLISP Project.

Other people in the room were part of the conference and thus asked no questions. Ms. Endl asked questions on the basis of her attendance at the morning session.
I ended up asking on the base of my general interest in the subject, and learned that since the three poles concept the subject has evolved, and I have now much more to learn about the mountain regions. As evidence of this large area – I already posted several items today based on other sources of information.

Coincidently, years ago, I was present when Ambassador Dr. Irene Freudenschuss-Reichl  introduced for Austria and UNIDO the subject of Mountain Regions to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. At the UN Mountains were always a synonym to the Himalayas like deserts, arid and semiarid lands are a synonym to Africa – but she was already then speaking about Austria and the Alps. Now the subject has evolved and we speak of regions within this large area previously included in the Alpine region.

I mentioned the three poles where the Himalayas are the third pole – and asked if we should talk now of five poles – including the Alps and the Andes – while leaving out the lesser areas like the mountains of New Zealand – because the region is rather small or Africa where the melting of the snows of Kilimanjaro has sort of eliminated the problem. I knew this was a rather provocative question and got a very good answer from Mr. Pier Carlo Sandei where he explained that the mountain regions are not just about the disappearance of the glaciers – but rather about the moving up of vegetation lines – thus a general  changing in the nature in the mountains because of Climate Change and other reasons. This is a general UNEP interest and the subject has progressed through a series of Conventions.

I stayed for the afternoon sessions that were chaired by Ms. Sabine McCallum, the department head for the subjects of Environment Impact Assessment & Climate Change of the Austrian Department of the Environment. she was actually the head of the project and her Minister – Helmut Hojesky, Federal Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment, and Water Management, was the main speaker at the High-Level Panel Discussion: “Taking action towards climate-proof spatial development – What is the way forward?”

Others on the panel were Thomas Probst, Swiss Federal Office for the Environment; Rosario Benito Pais and Jose Ruiz de Casas, both from the European Commission one from  Climate Action and the other from Regions; Andre Jol, Head of group Vulnerability and Adaptation, European Environment Agency; and Marco Onida, Secretary General of the Alpine Convention.

What happened here was that the area of the Alpine Convention has been divided into 10 regions that the study dealt with separately. It is obvious that the problems of the Swiss Alps that are dedicated mainly to tourism are very different from the problems in the newer members of the EU from the Balkans and the Carpathian regions where there are also States that do not belong to the EU altogether. The project did not just reshuffle data – but produced data and starts proposing plans of action – this being the ultimate goal of the project that after being absorbed by the States involved – will then be continued in order to come up with further plans of action.

We were told not to forget mitigation. While adaptation is a defense for the countries here – if there are no tangible results on mitigation here and elsewhere – there will be need for more adaptation in the future.

The European Commission told us that CLIMATE ACTION is now a new DG (that means a Department with Department Head and Stuff and a mandate to act). All these studies and Plans of Axtion will be under this department.

THE minister said that his people learn the Swiss and German experience – AND WE HAVE TO ADAPT TO CLIMATE CHANGE – BECAUSE IT WILL HAPPEN – WHATEVER WE DO.

UNEP declared that they are here because they want to learn from the A-B-C … the Alps, Balkans, Carpathian regions. The countries that were parts of Yugoslavia and Albania have lot of historic experience but having become independent of each other, whatever centralized poiicy there was it is now worse – there is no communication between them. Cooperation is needed and this project provides a unified platform and future regional adaptation. The Balkan region is actually a Balkan and Dinaric Arc Region that covers the Adriatic Coast.

So far as Vienna goes – as always – it finds itself in the middle – this time in the middle between the Alps and the Carpatians with the “B” region to the South.

There was the need for a Carpathian Convention in addition to the Alpine Convention. The Carpathian Convention includes The Ukraine and Serbia that are not part of the EU. 66% of the Carpathian region is still covered with forests – this provides extra-potential to preserve biodiversity, landscape and quality of air.

Pier Carlo Sandei spoke of SUSTAINABLE GROWTH in the context of the 21st Century – rather then the 20th Century. He gave me the feeling that Sustainable Growth as understood earlier is a no=no today when we must think of TRANSNATIONAL REGIONS that will aim by 2020 to be sustained by 20% Sustainable Energy.

He also used in the summary the conclusion: MITIGATION IS GLOBAL – ADAPTATION IS LOCAL & REGIONAL. One will have to look at climate costs – if you invest or you do not invest. This reminds us of the situation that compares the way industry looks at their strategy to answer CO2 emissions decrease requirements.

If you do something overseas – you get the credits and you can apply the full amount right now – but if you reduce your own emissions at home, you do not get the immediate full credit – you rather get the credit apportioned for the long range of the project – and that is what sends corporations to buy credits overseas. AHA! You Kyoto Protocol; affectionados – hear it from us = we warned you that the system never made sense!

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Looking at the nice collection of material I took along – I would like to give here references for the benefit of our readers:

A – ALPINE CONVENTION, 2nd efition, January 2011, Permanent Secretariat of the Alpine Convention, Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse 15, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria with a branch office in Bolzano-Bosen, Italy.  www.alpconv.org

B – BALKAN VITAL GRAPHICS – Environment Without Borders. Published by UNEP/GRID=Arendal in 2007. It was backed by Austria and canada and was used as part of the Belgrade October 10-12, 2001 Ministerial Conference on Building Bridges To The Future Environment For Europe. It deals with mining, water and nature.

C – A COLLECTION ON THE CARPATHIAN CONVENTION, material prepared for the Second Convention of the Parties, Bucharest, June 17-19, 2008. Published in
Bolzano, Italy. www.carpathianproject.eu  —– This material was followed by the Carpathian Project headed by Mr. Harald Egerer of UNEP Vienna. www.carpathianconvention.org … Harald.Egerer@unvienna  … The Partners to the project are institutions from Austria, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Greece, Czech Republic, Germany, Romania, The Ukraine.

After the first week-end of July, with school having closed for 9 weeks, you see also many of the smaller businesses, and the major palaces of art closing for vacation, and families leave town to go to some summer retreat or plain travel. But do not worry – Vienna does not fall asleep – instead it is invaded by guests, students, and just tourists.

Instead of the usual indigenous Opera, Philharmonic orchestra, and theaters, all sort of art-groups from abroad come as part of orchestrated guest programs that the city is very well trained by now to organize. this does not only enrich the horizons of those from the locals who remain in the city, but also provides for the entertainment of the tourists and guests – after all – hospitality makes for a serious part of the Vienna economy.

Also, City Hall gets involved in setting up non-competing special festivals in public places. Let me move now to examples of what one could have done this past week-end.

For instance, as part of “Summerstage” – defined as Wine (culture) Festival – a series of well structured booth have been set up on Rossauer Laende on the Danube Canal. I suspect that this is a yearly event so everyone involved knows his place from last year. The wine part is obvious, and supplied by known Austrian vintners who also own “Hoerigen” houses. The food part is in the hands of selected – one of a kind – restaurants of the Vienna 9th District: Mortons Bar & Grill where this Saturday I had a lamb knuckle with a decent Riesling wine;  Charlies Ps – “Fish & Chips and homemade Pommes;”  Pancho und mas! – the Mexican place; Echo – the City Thai; Pizzeria Riva true Neapoli food;  and Casa Caribena – the Caribbean place where on Friday I had just some garlic toast with Austrian beer. In addition there is also the Viennese Pavilion where theoretically, if you order in advance at particular dates, you get expensive dinners delivered from the wine houses – but that does not happen in reality because of the fact that the mostly foreigners that come there at night just do not bother making plans in advance – so, on Saturday, there was not a single meal served under above plan. But no worry, sitting outdoors in good weather along the Canal is well spent time. Now to the Culture part – on Sundays – there are readings at the Pavilion by some of Austria’s best present writers.

On the culture side – Vienna, with its theaters abandoned for the summer by their lawful residents, the theaters are available to foreign troops – so I partook from this richess by going to see two unusual dance evenings.

Friday night, in the beautiful building of the Volkstheater, next to the Museum Quarter, I saw the Eduard Lock troupe “La La La Human Steps.” This is an amazing Montreal Canadian group that uses ballet dancing on toes with completely new way of moving the hands. I was watching with amazement fascinated by the movements and lighting – the four levels of the packed theater  so there was not any standing room left.

The audience was in its majority English speaking and I wondered where did all these folks come from? Yes, Vienna has a large expatriate community that swells in the summer with further influx of young tourists. The show must have been sold out for a while, but seats became available as some of those ticket holders did not show up to pick them up. The  musical accompaniment was by a band of four classical instruments on stage – at times part of the scene of the dance.

I will acknowledge that I was not really up to the very complicated text the dancing was about. This was a two track performance in which one track dealt with “Dido and Aeneas” while the other track with “Orpheus and Eurydice” – twice the young lady and the older lady appeared on two huge screens above the dancers – being there together but not really looking at each other – though – with sort of Mona Lisa smiles – telling us they understand each other. This tremendous image became even more a put-down to me and told me that had I known what I will be seeing I would have done some refresher reading of those two classic love stories, and the operas that were created by Purcell and Gluck. In retrospect now I see that it was not just the richness of the movements, but also the clever retelling of the stories that I should have been able to grasp – this said – I will just add that it is not an evening I will forget.

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The dance series of Vienna summer 2011 started actually on Wednesday July 13th with a free performance of the Terrence Lewis Contemporary Dance Company based in Mumbai (Bombay), India with their “Jhoom” in Bolywood style. That is clear joy to the eyes and you really do not have to worry not knowing the stories of the Indian deities that are painted over the image they have of Holywood entertainment.

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Sunday night, again, there was something else. This time it was the Belgian Jan Fabre who brought to Vienna his somewhat morbid “Preparatio Mortis” which I saw at the Odeon theater, and the Prometheus – Landscape II,” that will be performed at the Volstheater on Tuesday July 19th.

Fabre has the vision that death gives us better understanding of life – so we saw a one woman show of a sort of return to life. Annabelle Chambon, who trained and got started in Lyon, starts to move from under a carpet of flowers after quite a while of musical preparation, Eventually there is ahand sticking out, then another, a head and legs. We get a a naked  body coming back to life, After a while she retreats to her original place.

Fabre works in many different forms of art – not just dance. in effect he is the only contemporary artist who was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Parisian louvre (2008). It was titled Angel of Methamorphosis.

In dance he works now in choreography  with the Troubleyn/Jan Fabre  troupe.

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As I said at the beginning – some summer activities in Vienna are very well planned ahead with the help of City Hall that does not forget for a minute that their city has to sell itself to visitors in order to support the city economy. But then other things happen that work in the same direction even they were not planned by City Hall. This Saturday this was no less then the event that put to final rest the Habsburgs Empire.

 In the key state of Baden-Wuerttemberg the anti-nuclear Green party more than doubled their vote to 24.2 percent, allowing them to capture the state’s presidency when combined with Social Democrat allies who garnered 23.1 percent.

CDU’s share of the vote slumped from 44.2 percent in the 2006 state election to 39 percent, according to official figures. The Christian Democrats have held power in the state for almost six decades. The outgoing governor, Stefan Mappus, was a strong advocate of nuclear energy.

“This is a day that has strongly changed the political landscape in Germany,” Green party chairwoman Claudia Roth said in Berlin. 

The outcome of Sunday’s (27 March) election is seen as an important setback for Merkel, whose attempts to stop political contamination from Japan’s nuclear accident appear to have failed.

Directly after news of damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor emerged, the chancellor temporarily suspended production at seven of Germany’s oldest reactors among its 17 nuclear plants. The move was seen by a generally nuclear-sceptic public as electioneering. The switch just did not help and brought about deep mistrust.

Sunday’s vote in the wealthy south-western state of 11 million people followed demonstrations in various German cities over the weekend, with roughly 200,000 people calling for the permanent closure of all reactors at the country’s 17 nuclear plants.

Germany’s Green party also did well in concurrent elections in the Rhineland-Palatinate state, where the ruling Social Democrats will now need them as coalition partners.

The country’s Liberal party (FDP) led by foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, CDU coalition partners, were the seen as the weekend’s big losers in both polls.

EU leaders on Friday agreed to stress test the bloc’s 140-plus nuclear plants, but despite moves in Germany many countries including France and the Czech Republic have shown little appetite for a reduction in their nuclear energy use.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party also suffered considerable losses during the second round of French local elections over the weekend, the last direct voting before presidential elections next May.

Opposition Socialists emerged as the main winners of the local elections, securing roughly 35 percent of the vote.

———————-

In Austria, Kanzler Faymann of the Austrian Socialist Party (the SPÖ) is expressing his happiness with this week-end’s election results. After all, just last week it turned out that the Former Kanzler Mr. Schuessel is on a yearly retainer of 200.00 EURO from the German biggest nuclear company RWE. – this while the Austrian Environment Minister Niki Berlakovich proposed stress tests for all EU nuclear plants. How will Mr. Schuessel react if an RWE reactor fails the Berlakovich stress test?

But we do not stop at this as we must remark that Austria draws electricity from the Verbund network that includes nuclear plants outside Austria. To us this means that despite the positioneering – Austria is not really nuclear free. Will there be now young people in Vienna, like those in Germany, to protest publicly against all EU nuclear plants?

Will other politicians in the EU learn from the debacle that has befallen Ms. Angela Merkel, the German Kanzler? It seems that the pro-nuclear stand she had just two months ago may now lead to her political demise, and Germany is watching how a chemistry teacher, Winfried Kretschmann, replaces the pro-nuclear Prime Minister Stefan Mappus of that 11 million people State of Baden-Württemberg where the right of center CDU was in power for 58 years.

The Japan disaster has brought so far the Green Party for the first time in German history to head a Prime Minister’s cabinet, and they will be in the rulling coalition in two German States – also in the industrial State of Rheinland-Pfalz. The lack of trust in the honesty of their leaders, as evidenced in nuclear policy issues,  will probably lead to similar results in future elections.

3/11 has the potential of becoming a date to remember as 9/11 is. Then we learned to live with terrorism, now we may have to start to learn to live without nuclear power – or without the security we felt from believing in a life based on unsustainable energy – call it the assumed right to waste energy.

From Hiroshima 1945 to Fukushima 2011 – it is “Cukooshima!”

Let me start by saying that this posting is not an expression of any arrow shooting at Japanese that acted for all those years against their best interests. Yes – but sorry – it was Cukoo.

It all started with Japan believing it can stop US expansion in East Asia, and Japan picking the losing side in WWII. This led to the dropping of two nuclear bombs over Japan. Then Japan decided to compete with the US economy and went the way of nuclear energy for peaceful use. Now we see that this was as disastrous as their first encounter with nuclear technology – but this time by their own choice.

We love Japan. For one – I spent three weeks in Kyoto in 1997 with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting that gave birth to the failed Kyoto Protocol. At that time I got to know the Kyoto – Nara – Osaka triangle. But this was not my only encounter with the Japanese. In effect, with my family, we spent two weeks staying with Japanese in their homes thanks to the Ryokan hospitality system, and we exchanged our time-share at the Krystal Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for a week at the Resorpia Hakone Japanese Business Class Resort at Hakone, at the foot of the Fiji Mountain. We got to know two different levels which sandwich the Japanese society.

With this said – let me add that I write now from Vienna and that the Austrian people have voted down the opening of an atomic plant as they understood the terrible danger of living with an atomic monster-plant in your backyard. Austria has not even one nuclear plant but gets part of its electricity from the European grid that includes nuclear plants. The Austrians are thus not clean of nuclear energy either – this unless they disengage from the European grid and run their own separate grid for which they have enough hydro-power to provide over 80% of electricity need and could easily supply the remaining part with biomass, biofuels, solar and wind energy. Clearly no real need for nuclear power and the possibility to achieve this without empty posturing based on the truth that once in the past they voted down the opening of the Zwentendorf nuclear plant.

—————————

The Donella Meadows Archive – Voice of a Global Citizen – wrote:
Zwentendorf, a Nuclear Plant That Will Never Be Turned on.

On the bank of the Danube 20 miles northwest of Vienna stands a
completed nuclear power plant, loaded with fuel, ready to start up. It
has stood there, just so, for 9 years, while the Austrians argue about
what to do with it. The most popular plan is to turn it into a museum
for obsolete technology.

The plant, called Zwentendorf, was intended to be the first of six
Austrian nuclear plants. It was begun in 1970 and completed in 1978 at
a cost of 8 billion Austrian schillings — at present value about a
billion dollars. It is rated at 700 megawatts, about two-thirds the
size of Seabrook and Shoreham, two American nuclear plants that are
also ready to go and hotly contested.

“When Zwentendorf began, we didn’t know anything,” an Austrian
environmentalist told me. “Nuclear power sounded better to us than a
coal plant or another hydropower dam on the Danube. If only we had
known then what we know now.”

They know now that two of the four German plants with the same design
as Zwentendorf have been shut down permanently by mechanical problems.
They know now that Zwentendorf is located squarely on an earthquake
fault zone. And during a Danube flood, water seeped into its
containment vessel, so now they know that the groundwater is not
protected from contamination in case of a meltdown.

Furthermore Austria, like every other country with nuclear power, has
no plan for the disposal of nuclear waste. The original idea had been
to bury it in deep granite under the Alps. But the villages at the
chosen site vehemently rejected this plan, and by Austrian law a
locality cannot be forced to accept such an imposition from the
federal government. The Austrians offered the waste to Hungary, Egypt,
and China, but all refused. The Shah of Iran was eager to have it, but
then he fell from power. The Ayatullah wasn’t interested.

By the time Zwentendorf was finished, so many doubts had been raised
that the government was forced to hold a referendum to decide whether
to start the plant. During the weeks preceding the vote, the argument
raged — the same one that polarizes every country that permits public
discussion of nuclear power. People were told they had to choose
between progress and safety, between jobs and the environment, between
present brownouts and future contamination. Bruno Kreisky, then
Chancellor, declared Zwentendorf a top priority and appealed for a yes
vote. Austrians still do not agree whether he caused more
anti-Zwentendorf pro-Kreisky people to vote yes than he did
pro-Zwentendorf anti-Kreisky people to vote no.

At any rate, on November 5, l978, 50.5% of the voters said no to
Zwentendorf. The Austrian nuclear power program came to a halt.

This is part of an article from The Donella Meadows Archive, for
further information please contact Sustainability Institute, 3 Linden
Road, Hartland, VT 05048

Today – that is in 2011 – the Zwentendorf  facility serves as a source
of spare parts for the five German atomic power plant of the same
design, and is used for training purposes. Visits are possible only in
exceptional cases.

————————-

Austrians understand the pain of Japan and the papers are full with articles and letters regarding the nuclear events unfolding in Japan.

The PolitikHeute page of the popular free-of-charge Vienna Heute daily, March 18, 2011, has two out of the three letters from readers, dealing with the EU “Stress Tests for EU Nuclear plants, or the EU and the Atomic Power Plants (the German word AKW):

H. Fruhwirth from Hoenbach reminds us that it is Austrian Environment Minister Nikolas Berlakovich who suggested the stress-tests for all EU AKWs and thinks that had one done so with the Fukushima plants perhaps they would have been stopped before disaster stroke. The mentioned stress tests have already led Germany to announce the non renewal of the operating licenses for as many as 12 plants – this to take effect in a month or two.

Further, the letter points out that politicians, and those that favor nuclear power, finally were driven by what happened in Japan to the realization that humanity is helpless before environmental inputs.

S. Hauer writes a short note asking why the EU deals with crooked bananas and crooked cucumbers, but has no decisions regarding the AKWs, airplane accidents, acts of terror, earth-quakes – even though it is clear that 100% safety does not exist?

On the following page there is an article titled ANSWERS, by Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

The Cardinal announces  that tonight, Friday March 18th, 7 pm, he will hold at the Stephansdom (clearly most important Cathedral in Austria) – a special service for Japan.

The Cardinal writes that the Fukushima events made him think these last days of his friend, a Chemist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, Professor Max Thuerkauf, who lost his position at the university because of his criticism of the technological insufficiencies of our times and warned of dangers even of the peaceful uses of nuclear power.  His words sound prophetic these days.

Back in 1984 he was saying that the nuclear power plants were just the tip of an iceberg – the development of technologies that were unsustainable. No engine is safe he was saying to those that argued that nuclear power plants are safe. He was noting that men build them, and use them, and we know that even the impossible can happen.

Thuerkauf  said that atomic energy is a fire that cannot be extinguished – surely not by closing a faucet. There is no material that can extinguish a fire that burns a thousand time brighter then the sun – the artificially created radioactivity.  Science has no means to bottle up this artificially created radioactivity will be here for eternity,  and the Cardinal calls us to reconsider what we are doing and look at what price the poor Japanese will pay for these activities.

—————————-

But I cannot leave it at this only. I feel I must make a further comment regarding the Japanese culture that bred the reality of people committing harakiri for some National purpose. Obviously, we had no admiration for those that sacrificed themselves for their emperor and we do not admire a Prime Minister who makes now an official visit to the shrine that sort off deifies their memory, but look now at the 50 workers that still busy themselves in the pit left by the explosions at the dying reactors of Fukushima. These people know they have little chance to survive. The head of the Japanese nuclear authority did not go to inspect the disaster – right on location. He must have had years ofd good pay and it is those workers that will be his sacrificial lambs. He is no better then the US bank-directors that raked in the profits  from the financial collapse in the US or the BP officials who watched the fouling up of the US Gulf. Neigh – the Japanese energy leaders might actually prove to be much worse then these other self-gratifiers.

A cloud of nuclear mistrust spreads around the world.

 After decades of lies, nuclear reassurances now fall on deaf ears

Special report for The Independent of London by Michael McCarthy

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

It is unprecedented: four atomic reactors in dire trouble at once, three threatening meltdown from overheating, and a fourth hit by a fire in its storage pond for radioactive spent fuel.

All day yesterday, dire reports continued to circulate about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, faced with disaster after Japan’s tsunami knocked out its cooling systems. Some turned out to be false: for example, a rumour, disseminated by text message, that radiation from the plant had been spreading across Asia. Others were true: that radiation at about 20 times normal levels had been detected in Tokyo; that Chinese airlines had cancelled flights to the Japanese capital; that Austria had moved it embassy from Tokyo to Osaka; that a 24-hour general store in Tokyo’s Roppongi district had sold out of radios, torches, candles and sleeping bags.

But perhaps the most alarming thing was that although Naoto Kan, Japan’s Prime Minister, once again appealed for calm, there are many – in Japan and beyond – who are no longer prepared to be reassured.

And first palpable direct result – see Germany closes seven of its oldest reactors.

Related articles:

• Workers temporarily retreat from Japan nuclear plant
• Thousands flee Tokyo as experts try to calm contamination fears
• No hysterical outbursts, just an endless stream of quiet grief
• Huhne orders checks on nuclear power station safety systems
• Christina Patterson: What do we do with tragedy like the one in Japan?
• Thousands told to stay inside as plant leaks radiation
• Jeremy Laurance: The scale of the disaster will be revealed in radiation sickness
• Germany closes seven of its oldest reactors
• Japan: Triumph of the spirit
• The clean-up crews who risk everything
• Panic over Japan triggers market turmoil
• Fed policy unchanged despite global shocks
• Hamish McRae: This tragedy will have an impact far beyond Japan
• David Prosser: The stock market is a poor guide to the consequences of Japan

VALERIO CALZOLAIO, a journalist, ecologist, and ex-member of Italian parliament, is the author of:

“ECO-REFUGEES: FORCED MIGRATION YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW.”

He writes, as reported by Roberto Savio of IPS, from Rome, October 8, 2010:

“For the entire month of August the front pages of the world’s major daily papers gave considerable coverage of developments in the Indus Valley: monsoon rains in the north of Pakistan in late July, the flooding of rivers and tributaries, submerged land, villages, and towns, then more flooding in the centre and south of the country, the contamination of wells and aqueducts and other sources of water, inadequate international funding, flight, desperation, and anger.

Almost two thousand dead were immediately confirmed, thousands and thousands of people lost, six million left homeless, 10 million evacuated, 20 million effected in some way. They could be defined climate- or eco-refugees.

It was a disaster on a planetary scale represented in shocking photographs of the distant suffering. But alongside this story ran a range of national matters of varying importance -in Italy, for example, the story about a drop in prices of homes in Montecarlo. Now the climate refugees of the Indus have vanished from the media. For two months we have heard nothing more about the disaster, though hundreds of thousands of people remain in camps and normal life has not returned for millions of Pakistanis.

In recent weeks, however, news has arrived about another wave of climate refugees elsewhere in the world, in Indonesia, the Amazon, and the Danube in Hungary. For almost twenty years the proliferation of climate refugees has been a source of diffuse emergencies, migrants driven to leave their homes by bad choices or the mistaken behaviour of humans. In the case of climate change, they are fleeing because of actions that we are taking here.

In 2008 and 2009 the number of international “political” refugees (those who are given “refugee” status) was about 15 million; the official number of international eco-refugees was higher. The number of eco-refugees even exceeds that of internal political refugees (who remain within their country’s border). With world conferences about to be held yet again on biodiversity (Nagoya) and the climate (Cancun), in November and December, it is time the UN is provided permanently with the means to help eco-refugees and prevent the creation of more of them.

In a book now being released in Italy, I have tried to reflect on these figures and means. Whether we like it or not, hundreds of thousands of eco-refugees are arriving in Europe each year, and their numbers will only rise. Moreover it is we that are responsible for their lack of homes. They cannot stay in camps forever, not will all manage to find a home in their own country, and the sooner we recognise this the better.

I recognise that since Adam and Eve there have always been environmental and climate refugees. It is not by chance that I dedicated the first part of the book to migratory species and the archaeology of the original waves of human migration. The migration of individuals and groups of our species have always had multiple causes and environmental and climatic effects and repercussions, especially when forced, when people were driven from their homes.

In the history and evolution of homo sapiens, the other major causes of migration are war and conflict. Refugees and eco-refugees are not an invention of modernity. Today those made refugees by “political” causes -violence or persecution by institutions or human communities- are granted “refugee” status and assistance by a United Nations commission. And yet climate refugees are victims of human action, too, so shouldn’t they be given this same status? We must find a way to provide the same assistance and take the same preventive measures in the case of migration caused by contemporary human-caused climate change. The second part of my book is dedicated to this subject.

I have tried to reconstruct the infancy and adolescence of the UN system, showing who’s in charge (and how) of human rights and the right to asylum, aid, and protection from climate change. I have sought to gather together the most advanced proposals from UN agencies, scientists, and researchers to address the migration caused by rising sea levels, by the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and by the shrinking availability of water for drinking and sanitation.

Forecasts indicate that in the next two decades there will be tens of millions of new eco-refugees, especially in certain areas, headed primarily towards Europe, mostly across the Mediterranean. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports call attention to global developments that are certain to occur though they will vary in intensity according to location: rising sea level, water scarcity, and extreme weather events.

For example, according to the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), the real risk of deaths resulting from flooding has risen by 13 percent from 1990-2007 while the percentage of the world population directly effected has increased by 28 percent in that period. Moreover, on the basis of past experience and forecast models, over 75 percent of these risks will be concentrated in a handful of countries: those effected by monsoons (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) and China.

The risks are not the consequence of exposure and intensity alone: an island or sparsely-populated country or a small poor country risks both the life and development of entire populations for generations. Forced emigration is the near certain outcome. By 2050 the risk of becoming climate refugees as a result of these developments, even in a best case scenario, will cast its shadow over no fewer than 200 million people.”

The Danube’s menacing industrial legacy.

When the earthen retaining wall burst on a Hungarian chemical refinery’s settling pond last week, a lake of caustic red sludge burst forth, drowning or burning to death at least nine people and polluting large tracts of land and river.

But the Ajkai alumina refinery disaster also exposed an alarming, half-buried legacy of poison and potential disaster that stretches along the banks of the Danube River as it courses through the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe – a decades-old legacy of crumbling chemical plants and mines that threatens far worse accidents.

More related to this story

• Residents return to sludge-ravaged Hungarian town despite safety concerns
• No charges for head of Hungarian firm linked to sludge spill: lawyer
• Executive facing charges in Hungarian sludge disaster

Map of the affected area

Video

Race to save Danube ecosystem

Video

Toxic sludge reaches Danube

Regional organizations, ecological groups and the European Union list hundreds of rickety Communist-era chemical plants, refineries and mine smelters strung along the banks and watersheds of the Danube.

Most are like the Ajkai refinery, which was built by the Soviet-bloc Hungarian government in the 1940s and privatized in the early 1990s while relying on the same aging infrastructure.

During the decades of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets had designated the Danube basin – notably Hungary, but also Romania, Bulgaria and their neighbours – the empire’s centre of chemical and mineral processing. After the end of communism in 1989, the plants either passed into private hands, often with little investment or upkeep, or were abandoned.

“We have no idea how many ticking time bombs are out there – we thought we had a list of the most dangerous sites, but then something like this takes us by surprise,” says Andreas Beckmann, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Vienna-based Danube program.

The WWF, Greenpeace and local environment groups had all maintained lists of the dangerous mines and chemical ponds in the area – a list that includes more than 1,000 operating and 700 abandoned sites in Hungary alone, and eight that are considered dangerous “hot spots.”

But the Ajkai refinery, site of the worst disaster in a decade (though environmental groups say they have detected only minor pollution of the Danube itself), did not even appear on those lists.

“In this case I wasn’t aware it had existed until last week, which is the unsettling thing – it makes you wonder what else is out there,” Mr. Beckmann said. Its aluminium-oxide sludge pits, which contain millions of litres of a sufficiently potent alkaline to give lethal burns, are not considered a serious pollutant under European regulations.

When the countries of the eastern Danube joined the European Union – Hungary in 2004, then Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 – they became subject to some of the world’s most rigorous environmental regulations. To qualify for membership, both the prospective members and Brussels invested billions in upgrading health and safety infrastructure.

But officials now fear that many of these countries, which tend to register high on corruption indices, may have hidden unsafe, crumbling industries in much the same way that Greece hid billions in debt liabilities. There is a fear, one European Commission official involved in the Hungarian case said, that “these guys could be paying the inspectors to overlook a chemical Chernobyl.”

Hungarian environmentalists feel that the Ajkai alumina plant could not have passed any sort of rigorous inspections – aerial photos released Thursday showed the containment walls leaking and crumbling months before the collapse. “They made a huge mistake in legalizing this factory in the first place,” Marton Vau, spokesman for Greenpeace Hungary, told reporters.

And while weak and under-inspected mines and refineries such as Ajkai are a worry, even more serious are the hundreds, possibly thousands, of abandoned Communist-era chemical plants and storage ponds, many of them falling under the jurisdiction of no private or public-sector authority, some of them forgotten.

To drive across Bulgaria, for example, is to pass through scores of abandoned Stalinist factory towns, their concrete work yards and high-rise apartments turned into graffiti-pocked ghost towns. Many contain fields and lakes of serious toxins, slowly leaching into the watershed as their containers decompose.

And the Danube nation of Serbia is a particular worry, as it contains hundreds of ex-Yugoslav Communist factories – many abandoned – is not yet a member of the EU, and lacks the financial resources to clean up its industrial ruins.

“I do worry that there could be an even more serious catastrophe out there that we haven’t noticed, waiting to happen,” said Mr. Beckmann of the WWF. “And instead of red sludge, it could end up being cyanide next time.”

More related to this story

• Hungary fears collapse of reservoir will trigger another toxic-sludge spill

Under the Patronage of the President of the Republic of Austria – Dr. Heinz Fischer.

With a Honorary Committe that includes Patricia Kahane – President of the Karl Kahane Foundation,  Dr. Michael Hauple – Mayor of Vienna, as well as Former Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister  – Dr. Alois Mock, and famous Austrian artists – Andre Heller and Joseph Hader. Also among others, Rabbi Marc Schneier from the US, Rafi Elul from Israel, Ibrahim Issa from Palestine.

The Conference will deal with Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the toning down of media that inflames hatred.

The Conference will avoid  touching upon Middle East Conflict Issues in an effort at reaching first mutual understanding before tackling issues on which there can be built an agreement to disagree – and seeing that there are other points of view.

 www.mjconference.org/

THE MUSLIM JEWISH CONFERENCE – VIENNA – AUGUST 1-6, 2010.

«Our first step together creating the power to forge a link between possibility and reality.
Because the pronunciation of our names is no barrier for friendships.»

The first ‘Muslim Jewish Conference’ 2010 is being held in Vienna from the 1st until
the 6th of August. 60 students from all over the world with a common goal of
establishing peaceful relations between both religions will participate. The conference
consists of discussion committees, guest speakers, open dialogue panels and social
events.

The idea for this project was born in Vienna by two Austrian students, Ilja Sichrovsky
and Matthias Gattermeier, due to their experiences at international student
conferences and driven by the desire to create cultural awareness between young
aspiring Jewish and Muslim academics.

Today, the ‘MJC’-committee harbours over 20 volunteers from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and America, including countries like Austria, Israel, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Turkey and the U S. The Assistant Secretary General in charge of the core of 15  volunteers is Ehab Bilal who grew up in Austria, studied in the UK, and is a Muslim of Libyan parentage.

Ilja Sichrovsky, founder and Secretary General of the MJC: “Representing the
University of Vienna at numerous international student conferences, I have
witnessed inevitable misunderstanding and prejudices between young Muslims and
Jews at first hand. The ‘Muslim Jewish Conference’ was called to life, to be the first
step together for young people creating the power to forge a link between possibility
and reality. Because the pronunciation of our names is no barrier for friendships.”

The ‘Muslim Jewish Conference’ is officially endorsed by the ‘United Nations Alliance of Civilisations’ (UNAOC) and the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The project is partly financed by the ‘Karl Kahane Foundation’ as well as by private donors.

Our vision is to make the MJC an annual conference, set up in different countries
each year and to provide a platform for real change in the interaction between
Muslim and Jewish Communities.

The participants represent a new generation of thinkers and upcoming opinion leaders who are connected by their joint believe in a new era of cooperation.

————————————————————————————–
Date: 1. – 6.08.2010
Place: Institute for International Development – University of Vienna
c/o Institute for African Sciences – Campus – AAKH, Hof 5.1
A-1090 Wien
URL: www.mjconference.org

———————————————————————————–

The Organisation Committee:

• Ilja Sichrovsky – Secretary General
• Ehab Bilal – Assist. Secretary General
• Matthias Gattermeier – Logistics, Protocol & Security
• Fatima Hasanain – Committees & Content
• Asad Farooq – Organization & Registration
• Florence Rivero – Organization & Design
• Yvonne Feiger – Logistics & Fundraising
• Mustafa Jalil Qureshi – Head of chairs
• Daniel Gallner – Finance
• Abdul Niazi – Ambassador for the MJC
• Stefanie Andruchowitz – Head of Department Support
• Valerie Prassl – Head Public Relations
• Akshay Ganju – Chair
• Eyal Raviv – Chair
• Magdalena Kloss – Chair

————————————————————————————

When we researched the internet, we found that The Muttahidda Jihad Council (MJC), an alliance of Muslim Kashmiri freedom fighters as they call themselves, or terrorists, as we call them, is what the web knew as MJC before the start of this new Austrian effort. Things get even worse as there are other Abdul Niazi on the web. Whatever, we hope that the Austrian effort grows to become a success and we remember the role Chancellor Kreisky had in starting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations years ago.

Further, Karl Kahane and Bruno Kreisky , with other Kreisky friends, created in 1991 through the Karl Kahane Foundation also the Bruno Kreisky Forum in order to continue the Kreisky’s work on Human Rights, the Middle Eastern Peace Process,  Europe after the Cold War, and other issues close to him – we assume that the powerful ongoing Kreisky Forum had something to do with the organization of this new effort at tackling the Middle East peace process issue from a longer term understanding base.

The involvement of Rabbi Marc Schneier from the US is proof that his three year old  ongoing effort, on which our website reported several times,  of  bringing Jewish and Muslim communities in the US to a closer contact with meetings in homes as well as within religious centers, intended to listen to each others deep concerns rather then professing to shout at each other their frustrations, is part of the concept of the new effort.
 www.karlkahanefoundation.org/inde…

Also, New Generations – Crossing Borders.
In 1994 the Middle East Youth Peace Forum together with the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue started the project New Generations – Crossing Borders. A group of young Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians and Austrians met regularly over a period of four years in order to establish personal relations, overcome stereotypes, gain skills in conflict resolution and acquire leadership qualities.

The experiences of the participants were documented in the German/English publication Crossing Borders by Margit Schmidt et al, published by Picus Verlag, Vienna, 1999.

This comes to show that the young may eventually achieve what the older generation was not able to achieve.

??http://www.karlkahanefoundation.org/index.php?36

———————————————————————————-

Jüdisch-muslimisches Treffen.

Muslim Jewish Conference von 1. bis 6. August in Wien.

Wien. 60 muslimische und jüdische Studierende aus aller Welt treffen von 1. bis 6. August in der Uni Wien bei der “Muslim Jewish Conference” (MJC) zusammen. Das Ziel: eine gemeinsame Sprache zu finden und Vorurteile zu überwinden, sagt MJC-Generalsekretär Ilja Sichrovsky. Der 27-Jährige studiert in Wien “Internationale Entwicklung”.

Sichrovsky hat mehrmals an der “World Model United Nations Conference” teilgenommen, bei der eine Uni-Delegation ein Land verkörpert. Dabei ist der Wiener Jude mit muslimischen Studenten in Kontakt gekommen und musste feststellen, dass die Vorurteile auf beiden Seiten groß sind, man aber vieles im intensiven Gespräch ausräumen kann. “Ich habe gemerkt: Wir sind gar nicht so verschieden, wie es uns Medien und auch unsere Eltern zu vermitteln versucht haben.” So kam ihm 2008 erstmals die Idee für die Konferenz.

Gemeinsames Papier

Organisator ist Ehab Bilal (25). Der bekennende, aber nicht streng praktizierende Moslem kommt aus einer libyschen Familie, wuchs in Wien auf und studierte in England. Seit 9/11 hat er das Gefühl, “dass ich schon ein bisschen unterdrückt werde wegen meiner Religion”. Wenn er reise, werde er drei Mal gefragt, mit welchem Ziel er komme. Ihn ärgert, dass wegen einiger Extremisten die gesamte Religion in Verruf kommt.

Zu drei Themen werden die Studenten im August eine gemeinsame Deklaration veröffentlichen:

“Antisemitismus und Islamophobie” – Sichrovsky betont, dass es sich um eine Aufzählung, nicht um eine Gleichstellung beider Begriffe handelt – sowie die Rolle der Bildung und der Medien im Abbau von gegenseitigen Stereotypen.

Der Nahostkonflikt wird beim ersten Mal bewusst ausgeklammert. Man müsse zuerst eine gemeinsame Sprache finden, bevor man ein Thema angehe, “wo man weiß, dass man anderer Meinung ist”, so Sichrovsky.

Die Konferenz wird großteils von der Karl Kahane Foundation finanziert, Bundespräsident Heinz Fischer übernahm den Ehrenschutz. 120 Studenten hatten sich beworben, die besten wurden ausgewählt. Ihr Spektrum reicht von sehr religiös bis säkular.

www.mjconference.org

 www.ipiworldcongress.com/singlevi…

INTERNATIONAL PRESS INSTITUTE (IPI)

WORLD CONGRESS – 2010 VIENNA & BRATISLAVA – September 11-14, 2010.

A topic that will be part of a panel discussion:

“Professional Journalism Is Being Devalued Whether We Like It or Not.”

Thursday, 15 July 2010

Jeff Howe, Coiner of the Term ‘Crowdsourcing’, Tells IPI Why Journalists Need To Face up To Change.

Louise Hallman

If history has taught us anything, it has taught us that things change. Ideas that were once innovative become commonplace, taken for granted and eventually obsolete.  Industries emerge, grow and are ultimately forced to adapt or collapse.

If we have seen such change in so many other industries – mining, car-making, banking –should we be surprised to see it happening in the news industry?

Harvard journalism fellow and writer Jeff Howe doesn’t think so – and yet is oft-criticised for his view: “The news industry, too, is subject to the forces of history, just as every other industry is.  Things change. Things fall apart…  Will we still be doing the same things in 50 years? No, because no other industry is going to be the same in 50 years either!  It’s not a radical proposition.”

Nonetheless, news organisations are still grappling with the change thrust upon them by the Internet. Many news outlets are finding themselves forced to make cut-backs to their professional staff.  According to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual review of the America media landscape, 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008 alone, more than double the number of 2,400 in 2007.

As news organisations struggle to maintain their position in the industry, executives have turned to much cheaper – or even free – means of creating content.  ‘Crowdsourcing’ – a term coined by Howe in an article for Wired magazine in 2006 – is just one of the latest buzzwords/innovations which media owners hope will provide them with some respite from what some see as an inevitable decline.

Crowdsourcing is, by Howe’s own definition, “the act of taking a job, generally performed by employees, and out-sourcing in the form of an open call to an undefined audience, generally using the Internet. And the crucial terms there are ‘open call’ and ‘undefined’, in that the essence of crowd-sourcing is a recognition that you don’t necessarily know who’s the best person to perform a task, or more to the point a whole collection of people might be able to perform a task.”

Howe’s term – which was invented to cover a whole host of businesses, and not just the news industry – has since taken on a life of its own, covering a multitude of free, collaborative efforts.

Speaking to the International Press Institute (IPI) ahead of his appearance on the panel “Found News? The New Platforms for Delivering Information” at the IPI World Congress in September, Howe stated that in journalism crowdsourcing has two different meanings: ‘reverse-publishing’ or ‘document-dumping’.

Reverse-publishing has been adopted across the media landscape at many different levels; from hyper-local projects such as Glasgow’s Evening Times mini-sites in Scotland, UK, where locals write their stories which if good enough are then published in the daily newspaper, to the likes of CNN’s iReport, where, once verified by a CNN editor, viewers’ own video footage and photographs can be broadcast on the international news channel.

Document-dumping, which is probably closer to Howe’s original notion, has become increasingly common as staff numbers have dwindled at news organisations.  For many newspapers, gone are the days when staff could be allocated enough time to pore over pages and pages of documents for an investigative report.  And in the era of the World Wide Web, why bother, when you can get a team of interested readers to do the work for you?

An example of document-dumping came last summer when, in the wake of the expenses scandal at the Houses of Parliament, the UK-based newspaper The Guardian uploaded 458,832 pages of documents to its website and invited its readers to “join us in digging through the documents of MPs’ expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation.”  The “best” individual discoveries were then collated online, enabling the Guardian’s own journalists to follow up and write thorough analyses for the newspaper and its website.  The project is so large that, although it was launched in June 2009, less than half of the documents have been reviewed online so far.

But are all these crowdsourcing efforts devaluing professional journalism?  Although he holds a positive outlook for the future of journalism, Howe agrees.

“Professional journalism is being devalued whether we like it or not,” he told IPI.  “In fact, it’s not as much being devalued as it is being ‘amatuerised’.

“There’s no point in newspapers sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that websites like Associated Content and Examiner.com aren’t out there paying people $1 per article or even using computer algorithms to create news articles … . So whether we like it or not the basic news article has become a commodity, and a really cheap commodity at that.”

However, despite the growing presumption that anyone can write a news story, Howe remains passionate about journalism, and believes there will still be a place for good, solid reporting.

“A good source network is as valuable as it’s ever been,” he said. “An algorithm can’t find a whistleblower within a Verizon or a big pharmaceutical company.”

{my God – how wrong he is, granted the algorithm will not find the whistleblower – neither will the classic newspaper – it is only the internet that can find the whistleblower – this because it is known that a classic newspaper, burdened with financial ties to institutions and businesses, will not publicize what that whistleblower tells them – so he will not tell it to the conventional press. See this at the UN – it is only the few bloggers left in the house of the UN that get the real scoops – not any kind of major Press does it!}

Among the most radical of Howe’s views is the belief that in the not so distant future, the term ‘journalist’ may have ceased to exist.

“To tell you the truth, and I know it’ll sound pretty radical to a bunch of journalists, but I think we do ourselves a disservice by calling ourselves ‘journalists’,” he said.

“People who can access information that other people can’t access, that other people are willing to pay for, and if they can compose it in a fashion that is entertaining, illuminating, compelling – those people are always going to find work.  We can call it journalism, but I don’t know for how much longer – maybe the next 40 years we’ll still have something call journalism…

“I just think we can love and admire what is at the heart of journalism without being beholden to the word, which is to say we’re beholden to a set of conventions… We really get lost in the name. We all decide that we’re going to adhere to the conventions instead of what is at the root of those conventions, which is the idea that truly being the Fourth Estate, serving the public interest, creating beautiful things like bits of prose and beautiful video and audio, educating people and making their lives more interesting and richer – that’s what we should be worried about!”

Perhaps he’s right.  If the root of the conventions stays the same, perhaps the term by which we refer to those who adhere to those conventions will change. After all, the term ‘journalism’ only dates back to the 1800s, but newspapers have existed in some format for over 1000 years, with the bulletins in Roman times and 7^th century China. Even the term ‘newspaper’ only dates back to the 1600s. Who knows what we will be calling ourselves in 25, 50, 100 or 500 years?

But in the shorter term, as the editors, publishers and leading journalists of today gather in Vienna in September for the IPI World Congress, to debate whether we are losing the news, Howe is hoping for one thing: “Knowledge transfer. One thing alone, it would be great to get Americans to realize that newspapers are flourishing in countries like India!

“Are we losing the news? I don’t know, but hopefully people will come to a Congress like this and realize that the answer is very complex.”

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the media and entertainment industry, among other subjects. In 2006, he published “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” in Wired. He is also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and teaches a course entitled “The Independent Journalist in the Digital Age”.  Howe will appear on the “Found News? The New Platforms for Delivering Information” panel in September alongside Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Telekom Austria Group, Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager at Google News and Rajesh Kalra, Chief Editor at Times Internet Ltd in India.  The panel will be moderated by Errol Barnett, presenter of CNN’s iReport.

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That was then

Photo: Reuters / Reuters Newsroom (1950)

This is change if the old media likes it or not. In the end the computers win over the typewriters – we bet!

This is now

Photo: Reuters / Reuters newsroom in London (2007)

New pact to let European public track pollutants.

The 17 states that have ratified the Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers are: Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland. The European Commission is also a party.

—–

GENEVA (Reuters) – Friday, July 2, 2010 – European citizens will be able to find out what dangerous substances are emitted in their neighborhoods under an environmental treaty to go into effect in 17 countries in October, the United Nations said on Friday.

Participating states will have to issue public inventories of major pollutants that their industries, traffic, agriculture and enterprises spew into the air, soil and water, including greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Some 86 categories of substances — ranging from mercury and other heavy metals, benzine, asbestos, pesticides including DDT, and dioxins — are covered under the pact.

“These inventories are made available to the public over the Internet and generally also through a downloadable map that helps people identify major pollutants that are traveling through their neighborhoods to discover what is in their backyard …,” Michael Stanley-Jones, an environmental expert at the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), told reporters.

“It doesn’t cover all chemicals, but it does cover the major releases of chemicals,” he said.

The pact, signed in 2003 by 36 countries, enters into force on October 8 after being ratified recently by a 17th country (France), according to the Geneva-based agency. It is open to all U.N. member states for ratification.

“It is truly a global instrument, part of a global movement initiated in the 1980s after the major accidents in Bhopal and Chernobyl,” said Stanley-Jones.

A catastrophic industrial accident in central India killed nearly 8,000 people in 1984 when tons of toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant of Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co, the largest U.S. chemical maker.

The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986, the world’s worst civil nuclear accident, sent radiation over most of Europe.

The protocol to the 2001 Aarhus Convention enables citizens to voice concern over pollution to industry or regulators.

“As the major greenhouse gas pollutants are included in the protocol, this will give decision-makers and the public powerful new tools for identifying the major industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions,” Stanley-Jones said.

“Major exceptions are for national security (facilities) and also the nuclear industry — radioactive substances are not covered by the protocol,” he said, noting that countries may add further substances and facilities to their national registers.

Countries outside of Europe, including Chile and Mexico, have developed their own registers and China’s industrial region of Shanghai is also drawing one up, according to the expert.

The 17 states that have ratified the Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers are: Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland. The European Commission is also a party.

Freedom of The Media in a ‘News-for-Free’ Age.

Josh Cohen, Google News

Google News & The Race Down the Information Highway. In this week’s newsletter, we bring you an interview with two of our panellists – Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager at Google News and Susan Pointer, Director of Public Policy & Government Relations for Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Google. Cohen will be featuring on our “Found News? The New Platforms for Delivering Information” panel.

Susan Pointer, Google

We asked him and Pointer about Google News’ and Google’s role in the media as well as its commitment to freedom of information.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Cohen, on the perceived clash between Google News and newspaper publishers:

It’s a misunderstanding of how Google News works. We absolutely do not see publishers as competitors to what we’re trying to do. To the contrary, it’s very much a symbiotic relationship. We help people discover the information that all these sites produce… where they have the opportunity to monetise it.

…We absolutely honour and respect copyright. We never show, whether it’s on news or a web search, anything more than a snippet, the first sentence or in many cases the headline – and a link to the source itself.

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Pointer, on Google’s role in censorship:

We believe that more access to information is better than less access to information… Access to information is a good thing. Freedom to express oneself and exchange ideas and content is a good thing.

That obviously doesn’t come without limits.

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What do you think?

And don’t forget to join us in September at our World Congress in Vienna and Bratislava!

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IPI to Hold 60th Anniversary World Congress in Vienna and Bratislava

Thinking the Unthinkable: Are We Losing the News?

The International Press Institute (IPI) will hold its annual World Congress in Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Slovakia, from 11-14 September 2010, the organisation today officially announced.

The 2010 World Congress will mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of IPI, and the organisation will celebrate 60 years of defending press freedom in a series of events, culminating in the World Congress in the “twin cities” of Vienna and Bratislava. Under the overall theme, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Are We Losing the News? (Media Freedom in the New Media Landscape),” the three-day conference will focus attention on the state of the news media itself, providing new business models and solutions for the media, and the unique opportunity to meet and interact with major players from both traditional and new media outlets.

The Congress will also look at the new ways of delivering information and how new technologies are proving to be a powerful ally of freedom of opinion and expression.

“The new information platforms are having an enormous impact not only on mainstream journalism, but also on press freedom in countries where authoritarian regimes seek to curtail freedom of opinion and expression,” said IPI Director David Dadge.

At a special Gala Dinner and Ceremony, to be held at Vienna City Hall, IPI will honour “60 World Press Freedom Heroes” to commemorate the 60 years of its existence. IPI’s Press Freedom Heroes are individuals who have made a significant contribution to the defence and promotion of press freedom, especially – but not only – if this involved acts of resistance or bravery under hardship conditions. “We will pay tribute to these brave men and women, who displayed the utmost courage in defending press freedom in their country or region,” said Dadge. “Many of them paid the ultimate price, murdered for what they wrote or said.” IPI intends to invite all surviving Heroes to the ceremony in Vienna.

For the first time, IPI will also hold – parallel to the Congress – a “New Media & High-Tech Innovations Exhibition”, showcasing the latest in new media technologies and information platforms.

The Congress programme features a roster of world-class speakers, including Alex Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired Magazine and author of the best-selling book, “Crowdsourcing”; Jim VandeHei, co-founder and executive editor of the influential Politico website; Martin Figueiredo, publisher and editor-in-chief of i Daily in Portugal; Guy Black, executive director of the Telegraph Media Group in the United Kingdom; Alexandra Föderl-Schmid, editor-in-chief of Der Standard in Austria; Sarah Montague, presenter, BBC, London, and many more. The event is expected to draw over 400 participants and their guests from around the world.

Confirmed partners for the Congress are: Google; OMV; Samsung; Telekom Austria Group; City of Vienna; Twin City Liner; and Austrian Airlines, as official carrier.

IPI’s media partners for the Congress are: ORF; Der Standard & APA.

This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary.

On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people.

Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 – so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology.

Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now.

Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there – all as part of his UN Ambassadorship.

Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians – and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria.

So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War?

He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated – something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on.

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***

Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals.

By BILL KELLER
Published in The New York Times August 16, 2008

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Related
Map
Russia Marches, Neighbors Check Their Cards (The New York Times, August 17, 2008)
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China (The New York Tines, August 14, 2008)

Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism  www.ft.com August 12, 2008)

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor.

This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.

History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.

***

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The New Age of Authoritarianism.
By Chrystia Freeland
Published: August 12 2008 in The Financial Times.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.

It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.”

Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal – and possibly eternal – ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet – which was really the Russian – suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.

That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment – China – is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.”

But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view – and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength – and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society – an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”.

Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad – as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

 chrystia.freeland at ft.com

Georgia and the Ukraine made moves to get closer to the West – they applied to become members of NATO. Georgia also worked with Western Europe in order to help the EU with access to Azerbaijan and Central Asia petroleum and gas. Russia clearly did not regard this bypassing of its traditional authority over what it considers as its brood. At the UN they still are bunched as former CIS and other Eastern bloc friends. Georgia had to be punished and Ukraine had to be thought that its future may be of the same sort.

Now, did the Georgians think that the US will be more then a paper tiger? Lots of promise, social help – but militarily? Then – it really is not direct US interests, but rather EU interests. So, why would Russia not say to itself that showing the EU that the US is a paper tiger – nu – that is something that can also help loosen further the EU-US ties.

Will the US react by telling the Russians that their economy does not justify their being members of the G8? That would be a reasonable game-play, but who will pick this up in the US Presidential contests?

Aha! so here we go. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw honesty. Perhaps he was right of sorts and Putin has now provided a pay-back. Russia’s moves strengthen McCain in his competition with Obama.

Was this move intended to help the Republican’s in the Presidential competition, and a sign of an oil-hungry party in charge, that barks but does not bite, rather then a new force that would make the world less dependent on oil – and oil these days is indeed the only thing going for the present version of a degraded Russia. The future is bleak for Russia in a world that will be dominated by China and India with the billion-plus people, and their booming internal economies that by now whistle at Russia as there is very little except brute nuclear power that this country has to offer them. Oil – yes – but the oil to China and India will arrive by ship rather then by pipe – and if it is a pipe – that pipe will come from Central Asia and not Russia.

Do we think that National borders are holly? No! But then South Ossetia belongs together with North Ossetia to one Free Ossetia State – and that is clearly not what Russia wants. They did not let go of Chechnia either. So the question here is whose ox is being gored – and the ox will suffer just the same under this or another regime. The South Ossetians of Georgia had at least a chance at a new and better life. By playing the Russian cards they blew it and that is why the civilized world is on Georgia’s side. If this sort of game digs deep into the Ukraine, our best advise to the Ukraine government is to take the Czech example of friendly divorce, and let go of those eastern territories that want some more Russian punishment. Ukraine will then soon find out that they are better thereof – and the Russian Ukrainians will just be set back and have to start their lives anew.