By Glen T. Martin

The assumption that freedom can be defended within one nation-state is false because it is the system of militarized nation-states itself that is the cause of worldwide destruction of human dignity and liberty…

The US military can now ‘disappear’ anyone, anywhere, and hold them forever in secret prisons, without any right to a trial, counsel, or being charged with a crime. Civil society no longer controls the military, and the laws of civil democracy no longer trump military totalitarianism…

 

US soldiers in Somalia, 1993. (Public domain, Wikipedia)

The boldly stated plan announced by the Project for the New American Century document (for all to see on the internet) is moving ahead on schedule.

Signed by a coterie of major US right wing chicken hawks such as Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, this plan details the solidifying of a global American empire for the 21^st century.  The plan required “an attack on U.S. soil,” comparable to Pearl Harbor.

This has now been accomplished.

The plan required launching major wars and establishing new military bases throughout Asia in order to encircle Russia and China, and this has now been accomplished. It required vast increases in the American military budget at the expense of the budget for schools, healthcare, and civilian infrastructure, and this has now been accomplished. It required converting the thinking of the American people from the idea that wars have a beginning and end and are fought against a determinant enemy to the idea that wars are endless and everywhere with enemies who may be anywhere and anyone.

This has now been accomplished.

This plan for global empire required putting the American people on a permanent war-footing, which entails, as do all wars, the elimination of civil liberties, with the institution of virtual military rule at home and abroad. As Naomi Wolf and others have pointed out, this has been systematically accomplished since 9/11 through manufacture of fake security threats, the use of secret prisons where torture takes place, use of paramilitary forces (like Blackwater) outside the rule of law, massive surveillance of ordinary citizens, arbitrary detentions of citizens, the targeting of key high visibility resisters (e.g., Julian Assange), restricting the press (and criminalizing press investigation of government secrets), and the criminalizing of non-violent protest and dissent in general.

On March 1^st the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) went into effect, officially denying the right of habeas corpus to everyone on Earth including American citizens at home and abroad. The US military can now disappear anyone, anywhere, and hold them forever in secret prisons, without any right to a trial, counsel, or being charged with a crime. Civil society no longer controls the military, and the laws of civil democracy no longer trump military totalitarianism.  The Project for the New American Century here takes another giant step forward in its vision of global domination by the US military and their multinational corporate backers.

The rapidly increasing use of computer controlled, weaponized drones expresses this same phenomena. The weapons, run by computer over foreign skies from locations within “the homeland,” embody the absolute denial of human rights and dignity as this dignity is manifested in the right to habeas corpus and a fair trial if suspected of a crime. From computer terminals inside the US, people worldwide are being summarily executed, along with whomever happens to be with them, a matter of mere “collateral damage.” Where drones are not engaged, US assassination teams operate with impunity, murdering whomever is thought to oppose the global system of domination by the world’s superpower. It is not that there are a multiplicity of assaults against liberty going on coincidentally. All these phenomena are aspects of a unified attack on human freedom and dignity in the name of the soulless drive to power and domination.

There are many courageous people within the US who are raising the cry and resisting the coming darkness of tyranny.  But they are often naïve about both the causes of the nightmare and how to defeat its satanic drive toward the crushing of human freedom and dignity everywhere on Earth. Naomi Wolf, for example, writes concerning NDAA that “here is only one solution: organize votes loudly and publicly to defeat every single signer of this bill in November’s general election. Then, once we have our Republic back and the rule of law, we can deal with the actual treason that this law represents” (Guardian, UK, 1 March 12).

But the assumption that freedom can be defended and/or secured within one nation-state is false, because it fails to realize that it is the system of militarized nation-states itself that is the cause of this worldwide destruction of human dignity and liberty.  Every nation assumes the right to militarize itself, which necessarily means that every nation assumes that the world exists in a state of perpetual war and that human rights, defended by the rule of law, do not exist, in the final analysis, on planet Earth.  If the United States (and its imperial lackeys such as Great Britain) was not the global aggressor and hegemon, it would be some other nation that happens to fill the role of superpower.

The system of fragmentation (of the planet into some 200 sovereign nation-states) that inherently refuses to recognize the universality of human rights and dignity is the cause of this totalitarian assault on the human spirit.  It is not simply bad leaders, whether George Bush or Barack Obama. They are mere instruments of an inhuman system of global capital accumulation that works within a system of sovereign nation-states: dividing and conquering, exploiting, destroying all human values in the service of private wealth and nation-state fragmentation.

Capitalism turns all things and people into commodities to be used in the service of private profit, inherently stripping people of their dignity.  The nation-state system, which is intrinsically a war system, turns all people into potential enemies, stripping everyone on Earth of their universal human rights.  In war, all people lose their rights and dignity, since war precisely means the absence of civilized respect for the due process of law. And since the system of sovereign nation-states is intrinsically a war system, human rights become a meaningless impediment to the rule of unrelenting force and violence.

As much as we admire the courage of those living within the belly of the beast who struggle for freedom and dignity under the rule of national laws, we must not be fooled by their naïve assumption that you can establish freedom within the absolute borders of a sovereign nation-state.  For the very act of recognizing absolute borders implies that the rule of law does not apply to those beyond these borders. What do apply are power relationships, not democratic relationships, but war. The destruction of freedom within the United States is logically inseparable from the destruction of freedom worldwide. Both are intrinsic consequences of a system of autonomous, militarized nation-states intertwined with global capitalist dehumanization and exploitation.

The system of states that claim the right to militarize to fight external enemies inevitably impacts the internal governing of these same states. External war and mistrust destroy democratic relationships both externally and internally. Militarization requires that freedom be sacrificed in defense of the homeland. The situation of economic domination by big capital worldwide penetrates all 200 militarized, supposedly independent, national fragments, subjecting them to non-democratic forces beyond national control. In a globalized situation that is inherently one of economic exploitation protected by imperial wars, there can be no freedom.  This generalized world disorder prevents and distorts order within the fragments. The global war system distorts the possibilities for the rule of democratic laws protecting freedom. In no nation on Earth can citizens create freedom for themselves under the rule of democratically legislated laws within this world system that distorts all human relationships, both internal to nations and externally.

The death of the human spirit appears historically immanent.  It is immanent not because of evil persons who may or may not be assassinated by the equally evil, totalitarian institutions of our planet.  The death of the human spirit is immanent because we lack the vision and courage to unite together with human beings everywhere to demand an end to the sovereign nation-state and global capitalism.  There is no true freedom unless all are free.  There are no protected human rights unless all are protected.  There is no respected human dignity unless all are respected.

This can only mean uniting together under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth that is sponsored by the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) and establishing the rule of democratically legislated law for all humankind.  The “broad functions” of the Earth Federation, expressed in Article One of the Earth Constitution, state exactly what can only be done by the federation government: eliminate war, protect human rights everywhere, end poverty and create prosperity for all, protect the planetary environment, conserve the essential natural resources of the Earth, and address all those problems that are beyond the scope of the nations.

Only enforceable democratic world law can eliminate militarism and, therefore, the present-day working assumption that human rights do not exist beyond national borders. Only world law can institutionalize human dignity so that every person on Earth enjoys habeas corpus and civil liberties. Only enforceable world law can effectively regulate the global economic system in the service of reasonable prosperity for all. Only world law can protect the global environment and begin to restore the integrity of the planetary ecosystem. Only world law can protect the Earth’s resources and address all other global problems.

Our fragmented and myopic thought patterns give us the illusion that these problems can be handled at the level of nations.  None of them can.  It is sovereign nation-state system, penetrated and manipulated by a global economic system far beyond the control of any nation, that is at the root of all these problems.  Today’s immanent global totalitarianism is a consequence of this world system, and cannot be effectively overcome without changing the system itself.  Either human beings unite or we die.  This option is still before us.  Soon it may be too late.

(Glen T. Martin is Professor of Philosophy at Radford University in Virginia. He is President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association and also President of the Institute on World Problems (IOWP).)

By Tim Thornton

New River rapids near Glen Lyn. Photo by Linda Burton.

On the winding road between North Carolina mountain towns of West Jefferson and Boone, George Santucci is headed for the South Fork of the New River and the beginning of the 2011 New River Expedition.

It’s a three-state trip from a creekside park in Boone to the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. It’s a chance to reconnect with the river, Santucci said, a chance to get people who don’t know the river out on it so they can see what a wonder it is.

“The goal is to show the connectivity,” Santucci said at the beginning of a similar trip three years ago, “to show how every community along the river is connected and show how every community along this beautiful river impacts every community on downstream.

“We just want to get people connected to it, to get them to remember that this magnificent resource is out there, and have them join us.”

“It’s a rejuvenation for all of us,” he said on his way to this year’s trip, “like hard work can be.”

—–

Local Schedule:
8/6 Radford Bissett Park / Dudley’s Landing to 114
8/7 114 Bridge to Whitehorn
8/8 Whitehorn meet at Eggleston
8/9 Pembroke (meet at 460 Bridge) to Bluff City
8/10 Glen Lyn (meet at City Park) to Shankins Ferry
For more details see NCNR schedule pages

Video of the expedition is here: watch?v=qw037bKadfQ

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A raft of details

This year’s New River Expedition will use canoes and kayaks and rafts, following pretty  much the same course the New River has followed since before the Appalachian Mountains existed.

The South Fork starts in the mountains above Boone, N.C. The North Fork starts to the west of there, on Snake Mountain. The streams wriggle and grow their way north, joining fewer than five river miles from the Virginia state line.

Taking the trip isn’t such hard work, but organizing it is. Santucci is executive director of the National Committee for the New River. He and his staff began planning this year’s expedition before last year’s ended.

Between July 20 and Aug. 17, the expedition will spend 20 days in the river, covering more than 200 river miles. There’s raft full of details to handle; government officials and citizens groups to coordinate with; river clean ups and cookouts to organize.

And less than a week into the trip, the National Committee has its annual meeting to introduce new board members and hand out awards and make sure the troops are fired up for the work of preserving the river and the land along its banks.

The National Committee for the New River was born in a dam fight.

Downriver from here at Dog Creek to the VA border, the New is protected under federal law. Photo by Tim Thornton.

In 1962, Appalachian Power, a subsidiary of American Electric Power, began planning to dam the New River. AEP already had three dams on the river: Buck and Byllesby, a pair of dams that make up a pumped storage facility in southern Virginia; and the hydroelectric dam that makes Claytor Lake, the centerpiece of Virginia’s Claytor Lake State Park.

Four other dams had been built on the river, most of them to generate electricity for factories. One built decades ago to control flooding downriver from Hinton, West Virginia is being retrofitted so it can generate power, too. The Hawk’s Nest dam, also in West Virgnia, redirects the river into a three-mile tunnel through a mountain. So little of the river remains between that tunnel’s mouth and the power plant’s outfall that stretch is called The Dries.

All of those dams are minor intrusions compared to the Blue Ridge Project. More than ninety river miles and more than 40,000 acres of Virginia and North Carolina would have been swallowed by reservoirs. The project didn’t die until September 1976, when Gerald Ford signed legislation that made 26 miles of the South Fork of the New a Wild and Scenic River.

The National Committee for the New River was what the folks who fought those dams left behind. The committee has helped expand North Carolina’s New River state Park. It helps landowners prevent erosion of their property. It works to get land along the riverbanks into conservation easements.

And, once a year, it gets as many people as it can to join a trip that begins where the river is first deep enough to float a canoe – barely – and ends where the New and the Gauley meet to form the Kanawha.

Origins of the expedition: the paddle on the wall

The New River Expedition is the descendent of a 2008 trip Shawn Hash, a Giles County, Virginia, outfitter, organized to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the New’s designation as an American Heritage River. Hash and some of his employees carried a commemorative paddle downriver, stopping at river festivals in Ashe County, NC, Radford, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia.

That paddle hangs on a wall in Tangent Oufitters’ Pembroke headquarters, but the National Committee for the New River saw an opportunity to bring river communities together and increase attention to the New River’s value and its perils.

The first year, 2009, the New River Expedition covered virtually every inch of the river between Boone and Gauley Bridge – about 345 river miles. The next year, the group surrendered to the difficulties of logistics and spent about 245 miles in the water. This year, the number will be closer to 200 miles. Some folks will paddle most of the expedition’s route. Others will join for just a day or two.

And old river’s history

Native Americans beat Europeans to the river by a few thousand years, but when Abraham Wood “discovered” the river in the 17^th century, he named it after himself. The name didn’t stick, however, and when When Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam followed the New River in 1671, they thought it was a route to the Pacific Ocean. They were sure they saw the tide coming in near Pearisburg, Virginia.

“We set up a stick by the water side,” their journal says, “but found it ebbed very slowly.”

The New River in "the dries" in West Virginia. Photo by Tim Thornton.

In 1812, John Marshall, the 57-year-old the Chief Justice of the Unites States Supreme Court, led a 250-mile trip from Lynchburg to the Kanawha River, commissioned by the Virginia General Assembly to find a potential river and canal route from Richmond to the Ohio River. The group used batteaux, the cargo-hauling boats that plied the New until the 1930s. They were up to seventy-five feet long and carried as much as sixteen tons of goods in as little as one foot of water.

The New River Atlas tells of three brothers about to go off to college in 1901. Craving one last adventure together, they built a row boat and set off from their home near Crumpler, North Carolina, headed for Hinton, West Virginia, 200 miles away. They saw the river’s first hydroelectric dam under construction.

When it looked like Appalacahian Power was going to build its dams in Grayson County, Proctor Kirk and three of his buddies came to North Carolina from their homes around Hinton, West Virginia, to run the river while they still could.

“You couldn’t convince us the dam wasn’t going to be built, even though we were fighting like hell. Pardon my expression,” Kirk said. “And we decided that we better get down there if we were going to see what the river looked like and run the river.”

The men’s wives drove them down to where the New River gets narrow and dropped them off. Then Kirk and his three buddies headed home to Hinton in a pair of aluminum canoes.

The struggle for scenic river designation in Virginia

North Carolina has its 26 miles of state and federally designated scenic river; 53 miles of West Virginia’s section is a national river, part of the National Park system. None of Virginia’s section of the New has any similar designation, though some people have tried to change that.

In 2007, when a U.S. senator from North Carolina tried to add 21 miles of the New that twists back and forth across the North Carolina-Virginia line to the Wild & Scenic list, Virginia legislators opposed it and the legislation died.

Another Virginia section of the New has been under consideration for national Wild and Scenic status since 1992. In 2009, the National Park Service released a study that said the six-mile section, plus about 13 miles of river in West Virginia, qualifies, but shouldn’t be included. There’s not enough local support, according to the report. So the Giles County Board of Supervisors, the county’s representatives in the General Assembly, then-Congressman Rick Boucher’s staff and local citizens’ groups all said they are for it.

Nothing happened.

What you’ll see on the river

That stretch of river, which runs from the Giles County town of Glen Lyn to West Virginia’s Bluestone Lake has lots of bass, as much of the New River does. But it also has walleye and excellent habitat for hellbenders, the largest salamander in North America. The nocturnal predators can get close to three feet long and live more than 30 years.

Eagles and osprey are common and the section holds what The New River Atlas calls “the best batteaux sluices on the New River.” The Army Corps of Engineers controls the land in Virginia. The West Virginia Department of Natural Resources manages the land past State Line Falls. For miles, the only hint of development visible from the river is an occasional corn field.

Noah Adams, whose bestselling book Far Appalachia followed the New River from Snake Mountain to Gauley Bridge, called it one of the most pristine sections of the river. “You see West Virginia up there on the horizon,” he said, “and there’s nothing around you and that’s just exactly what your ancestors would have seen.”

Santucci called it “one of the most spectacular sections of the river that’s not already a national park or state park.”

Recognizing those treasures and preserving them are important, Santucci said. And he’s convinced more people are coming to realize that there’s economic value in the river, not just from the power it can generate and the water it can provide, but from the businesses it can generate.

Virginia’s push to market its natural and cultural heritage is an example of the way people are making money and building community by promoting and preserving what they have. The same thing is happening in West Virginia around the New River Gorge, he said, pointing out that the Boy Scouts are creating their largest camp near there.

When Bill Clinton traveled to Ashe County, North Carolina, to sign legislation making the New an American Heritage River, the president talked about the economic advantages the designation would bring, but he ended his speech with this:

“This ancient river has flowed through the heart of this land for millions of years – hundreds of millions of years longer than blood has flowed through any human heart. The Cherokee even say that this was the very first river created by the Great Spirits’ hand. Who are we, such brief visitors, on this Earth to disturb it? But when we cherish it and save it and hand it on to our children, we have done what we were charged to do, not only in our own Constitution and history, but by our Maker.”

—–

To learn more about the schedule of this year’s New River Expedition, to contact outfitters handling boats and shuttles and to find out how and where you can join up with the trip or join in a river cleanup, go to http://ncnr.org.

By Prof. William Turner, Berea College

The month of January is a most appropriate time to apply phrases from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to what is, for most, an invisible place, Black Mountain: Kentucky’s highest peak, the physical heart and soul of my hometown, Lynch, in Harlan County.

I am happy to join those protesting the strip mining of Black Mountain. I have a dream that their creative and nonviolent dissent will go down in history as a successful demonstration against this most environmentally destructive and morally reprehensible form of mining, one that profits few yet denies many life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I have a dream that their petitions will stop the progress of the blasting and the growling of machines that have already torn asunder — forever — the Virginia side of this ancient fortification, but a flyrock’s throw from the town of Appalachia.

I have a dream that the protests against strip mining above Lynch and its sister city, Benham, will be heard — from every mountainside — by the Environmental Protection Agency and that a momentous decree will be issued that will save the mountain. It has been long loved by people who worked underneath it and who now languish in a place that put the steel in Pittsburgh, the headquarters of United States Steel, the company that owned this town for almost a century, starting in 1917, before deserting it and stripping it of its proud legacy as one of America’s model underground coal mining towns.

The mountains are high in Harlan County, and they separate its residents — many suffering in poverty — from those who have the power to put a stop to the shameful and unhealthy conditions that strip mining Black Mountain brings.

I have a dream that Black Mountain will become like the National Mall was in 1963 when King spoke there — a sacred and hallowed spot where demonstrations against the inexpressibly horrific images left by strip mining will be sent out around the world.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of preventing the strip mining of Kentucky’s highest peak. In the process of meeting our energy needs, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.

Let us not seek to quench our thirst for light and heat — and fortune — by tearing down the mountain; for our destiny is inextricably tied up with the fate of the flora and fauna on the hillsides and the creatures that live in Looney Creek, the fountainhead of which springs from the mountain and flows into the Cumberland River and beyond. We all live downstream.

We have seen enough already of what strip mining does; examples of its nightmarish results are abundant throughout Eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia. Countless once-lush green valleys are now filled with rock debris while once-exalted peaks and prominent inclines are little more than bumpy, rough, rutted and uneven molehills made low, the crooked creeks buried beneath what the Lord revealed majestically 450 million years ago, its life-affirming magnificence awesome and inspiring, the eco-tourists’ dream.

I have a dream that one day as my four little grandchildren visit the mountain I hiked in my youth, they too will be able to jump across nature’s own stones of hope and tiptoe in the creeks of their ancestors’ pride and not be repulsed by the appalling sight of mountains of despair, the evidence of the greed of man.

I dream that they will roam and wander the relatively unsullied hills around my hometown beneath which their relatives lived and worked and died and are buried.

From no mountainside should the hammers of strip mining ring.

From every mountainside, let scenic views reign. Let waters of hope and scenes of economic justice flow like mighty streams, from Jellico Mountain in Tennessee to Coal Mountain in West Virginia.

And when this happens, when the piercing sounds of strip mining are hushed, may the people in every village and every hamlet and every town, in every extraction zone — places like Lynch and Benham — join hands and sing together the words of a New Mountain hymn, “Our Mountain is free of strip mining!” Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, our mountains are free of strip mining — at last!”

Republished with permission from the Lexington KY Herald-Leader

By Fred First

We hardly need more reasons—as children or adults—to put technology, crowds, and hurry behind us and go more often to the woods. We sense a stroll in the forest is somehow good for us, and more and more, we’re learning why that is so.

If we will submit to it, our rhythms change in a natural place free of man’s doing. Rarely is anything urgent in nature as a day or a season unfolds. We sense that. No committees or ordinances are required for decay and growth, sunlight and shade, riffle and boulder and oak tree and beetle to do what it is they do as part of an ancient and resilient corporation called an ecosystem. We’re off the clock and not in control. We need not be, and can simply be.

In the economy of nature, everything is connected to everything else, a calming integrity difficult to know in our hurried, overloaded and superficial culture.

After some while in the forest or meadow or mountaintop, our internal clocks recalibrate; our rhythms and pace change. We open up to the outer world of nature that “just is”—before, beyond, and around us since the beginning.  Our greatest thinkers have sought the solitude and re-creation of wilderness to find clarity and peace, and for some, to hear the voice of God.

In our suburbs and cities and shopping malls and private electronic experiences, we are aliens to nature’s healing solace and tranquility. Our children hear warnings of the dangers “out there”—lions and tigers and bears—oh MY! And poison ivy and snakes and ikky things. And yet…

The list of health benefits of being in natural areas includes positive changes for ADHD, asthma, depression, stress and improved immune function. The research support for this is broad and solid, and it is growing every year.

I recently learned that it might be more than just the sounds, smells and sensations of the woods that give us that sense of well-being we come home with. The Japanese are studying the effects of “forest bathing” (Shinrin-yoku)

which is not what it sounds like. Forest immersion might be a better English translation. There is something in the air breathed out by the trees.

(more…)

After more than six years in the New River Valley and half of those years as Editor of the New River Voice, it is odd to now call North Carolina home. At least it’s partially home. I still own the house where the “magic” of the New River Voice happened and where meetings were held and interns worked. (If you’re interested in buying it, it’s for sale!) But I’ve started a new job as Web Editor for The Laurel of Asheville, which means my time with the Voice will be quite limited. (more…)

I’m sure many of you have already placed your Christmas decorations nicely in their place and more than likely any gifts you received have become a picture of normal in your life. As of now, I’m still looking at my Christmas tree and finishing all the cookies I can. But the reality is this … what if Christmas didn’t end? (more…)