Thursday, October 27, 2011

Why Taoism can save the world


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Why Taoism can change the world

By Ye Xiaonan (People's Daily Overseas Edition)

16:27, October 27, 2011

Edited and Translated by People's Daily Online

The closing ceremony of the international Taoism forum and a prayer meeting for world harmony concluded at Hengshan Mountain of Hunan province on Oct. 25. The forum has made the "Nanyue Declaration," which states that "being simple and sincere can help people to secure a peaceful mind, and following the laws of nature will ensure sustainable development," "respecting public lives will generate common prosperity" and "striving to promote harmony between heaven and mankind as well as world peace."

More than 500 attendees from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and 19 countries communicated during the world’s largest Taoist forum and witnessed the profound Taoist culture.

Spreading Taoism across the world

Chang Cheng, president of the Taoism Society of Taiwan, said that the book Tao Te Ching has become the second best-selling book in the West, only after the Bible. It has been translated into about 500 languages in the world.

A Japanese Taoist said during the forum that Japanese Taoist temples are working on the collection, analysis and research on the Taoist materials that were written in Chinese and preserved by Japan's first generation of Taoists during the country's Edo Period. Japanese people have not only built Taoist venues across the country, but they have also published clear and simple modern versions of the Tao Te Ching and popularized the book through the Internet.

Lin Zhou, deputy president of Chinese Taoist Association, said that Taoism has taken root in many countries and regions, and Taoist believers and followers can be seen in many places around the world. Overseas Chinese make up the majority of Taoist believers outside of China. Wherever there are a large number of Chinese people, there will be Taoist believers. Many Taoist temples have been built in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, France and other countries. Moreover, many Westerners have become Taoist believers, and a lot of foreign universities and academies have been doing extensive research into Taoism.
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Taoism --- hope for the world


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Why Taoism can change the world (2)

By Ye Xiaonan (People's Daily Overseas Edition)

16:29, October 27, 2011

Why Taoism is so attractive to foreigners

A foreign believer with the Taoist name "Jingxiang" said that Taoism clarified his confusions and became his spiritual home.

"When proselytizing abroad, I have found that Westerners can easily accept Taoist concepts, such as the harmony among all things and the integration of Yin and Yang. Many of them are also interested in the Taoist theories of preserving one's health, so Taoism is becoming increasingly attractive and popular," Taoist priest Huang Shizhen said.

Experts said that Taoism, which originated and developed in China, has a long history and rich doctrines. Currently, the whole world faces a series of issues, such as energy crises and the deterioration of global ecological environment, which have drawn many people's attention to the Taoist principles of following the law of nature and being kind to all living things.

Further promoting Taoism in the world

Respecting Taoism, cherishing virtues and co-existing harmoniously are the themes of the Taoist forum. After discussing Taoism for three days, the Taoists from China and foreign countries all had a deeper understanding about subjects such as "following nature," "valuing and enjoying the life," "being kind to all lives" and "returning to the original simplicity." Meanwhile, they also widely discussed the issue of further promoting Taoist culture in the world.

The director of the China Taoism Association Ren Farong said that China has proposed the strategy of sustainable development and the great goal of jointly building up a harmonious society and is calling for international communities to harmoniously co-exist with their neighbors and achieve win-win situations. It is a good medicine for treating the various contradictions of the current world, which has attracted a lot of attention and achieved quite good results.

Martin Palmer said that, with the powerful modern media, they could use books, the Internet and audio-visual products to introduce the Taoism to Westerners so that more Westerners will know about and like it even if they have never been to China.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011

New Era --- post 9/11

>Opinion

9/11 marked turning point in world landscape

By Wu Zhenglong (Jiefang Daily)

15:50, September 08, 2011

Edited and Translated by People's Daily Online

The terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center, a landmark of the "U.S. Dollar Empire," on Sept. 11, 2001 astonished the world. The 9/11 attacks marked a turning point in the world landscape. Thereafter, the world landscape has undergone profound changes and entered into a new era of history.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext of combating terrorism. Unexpectedly, the United States has paid severe consequences for the wars, and the wars have led to more terrorism problems than they intended to address, such as frequent suicide terrorist attacks. After many years, there is still no end in sight for the fight against terrorism.

The international financial crisis in 2008 further decimated the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. government has tried all possible means, the economy is still too weak to recover. The two wars and one crisis have made the U.S. economy feeble.

In contrast, emerging countries, including China, Brazil and India, have maintained higher economic growth than advanced countries over the past decade. Emerging and other developing countries have contributed to 47 percent of the world's economic growth during the period. According to the data from the World Bank, the gross economic output of China, Brazil and India ranks second, seventh and ninth, respectively, across the world. The rapid development of emerging countries has promoted the global recovery and advanced the world's multi-polarization process.

Over the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the balance of world power has undergone historical changes. Even the U.S. president had said that the time when the U.S. spared no expense in outside intervention has gone forever. The world pattern has changed from one in which a single superpower dominates the world to one in which the superpower is forced to coexist with multiple great powers, with large nations governing the world. The United States has abandoned the global strategies of "taking preemptive actions" and "unilateralism" and has adopted "multilateralism" and "smart power."

The United States signed and entered the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia in 2009 and promised to recognize ASEAN's "leadership" in the region. This indicated the first time that the United States abandoned leadership and voluntarily put itself under the lead of other organizations during the post-war period. Moreover, the United States was again "being led" at the France-led meeting on Libya's post-war reconstruction.

After the outbreak of the Middle East unrest, the United States adopted the policy that there are things must be done and things must not be done and took differential polices towards different countries. It adhered to the principle of avoiding excessive intervention and resisted sending ground forces. For example, the United States allowed their allies to be on the frontline and stayed in the back in the Libyan military action. In terms of Syrian issue, it adopted a strategy of "using the tongue, not fists," and froze the assets of Syrian government and senior officials.

East Asia is a priority for the America's "back to Asia" strategy. Apart from showcasing "muscles" in the region, the United States is more inclined to adopt the so-called "smart power." It sows seeds of discord to stir up trouble, lets other nations make trouble or even backs up both opposition sides at the same time in order to obtain the maximum benefits with the minimum output. However, the trend of peace and development is irreversible, and the United States would find it hard to stir up trouble in the region.

It is sure that the United States has a stronger resilience and correction mechanism. Its leading role in the military, economic and technological areas cannot be challenged for a long time. We should have a sober understanding of this and cannot take it lightly.
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Thursday, August 4, 2011

Maybe there is more to it than you think...

Multiverse  --- maybe we are only one of many universes




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1# > A < Posted 2011-8-4 10:18 Only show this user's posts Study hints at 'bubble universes



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2011-8-4 10:18



The team has located possible "bubble universe" evidence in WMAP data







The idea that other universes - as well as our own - lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.



Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these "bubble universes" may have left marks on our own.



This "multiverse" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.



The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.



For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from our Universe's formation.



'Mind-blowing'



The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.



But Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.



"I'd heard about this 'multiverse' for years and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not testable," Dr Peiris told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that you can test for all these other universes out there - it's just mind-blowing."



Dr Peiris' team first proposed these disc-shaped signatures in the CMB in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and the new work fleshes out the idea, putting numbers to how many bubble universes we may be able to see now.



Crucially, they used a computer program that looked for these discs automatically - reducing the chance that one of the collaborators would see the expected shape in the data when it was not in fact there.



The program found four particular areas that look likely to be signatures of the bubble universes - where the bubbles were 10 times more likely than the standard theory to explain the variations that the team saw in the CMB.





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2011-8-4 10:18



Data from the Planck telescope should resolve the question once and for all





However, Dr Peiris stressed that the four regions were "not at a high statistical significance" - that more data would be needed to be assured of the existence of the "multiverse".



"Finding just four patches is not necessarily going to give you a good probability on the full sky," she explained to BBC News. "That's not statistically strong enough to either rule it out or to say that there is a collision."



Dr Peiris said that data from the Planck telescope - a next-generation space telescope designed to study the CMB with far greater sensitivity - would put the idea on a firmer footing, or refute it. However, the data from Planck cannot be discussed publicly before January 2013.





Data from the Planck telescope should resolve the question once and for all

George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, called the work "the first serious attempt to search for something like this... from the methodology point of view it's interesting".



He noted that the theories that invoked the multiverse were fraught with problems, because they dealt in so many intangible or immeasurable quantities.



"My own personal view is that it will need new physics to solve this problem," he told BBC News. "But just because there are profound theory difficulties doesn't mean one shouldn't take the picture seriously."



Dr Peiris said that even if these bubble universes were confirmed, we could never learn anything further about them.



"It would be wonderful to be able to go outside our bubble, but it's not going to be possible," she explained.



"They're born close together - that's when the collision happens - and this same inflation happens between the bubbles. They're being hurled apart and space-time is expanding faster than light between them."



But Professor Efstathiou said the search was inherently worth it. He explained: "It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe. It's a long shot, but it would by very profound for physics."







BBC
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Monday, August 1, 2011

Aborted Dream of a Bad Night Sleeping










By Joseph E. Stiglitz





Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.





Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.





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2011-8-1 08:14



Joseph E. Stiglitz





I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.





In the US, this right-wing resurgence, whose adherents evidently seek to repeal the basic laws of math and economics, is threatening to force a default on the national debt. If Congress mandates expenditures that exceed revenues, there will be a deficit, and that deficit has to be financed. Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer – not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.





This leaves open the question of which expenditures get priority – and if expenditures to pay interest on the national debt do not, a default is inevitable. Moreover, to cut back expenditures now, in the midst of an ongoing crisis brought on by free-market ideology, would inevitably simply prolong the downturn.





A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the US faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt. Unaffordable tax cuts and wars, a major recession, and soaring health-care costs – fueled in part by the commitment of George W. Bush’s administration to giving drug companies free rein in setting prices, even with government money at stake – quickly transformed a huge surplus into record peacetime deficits.





The remedies to the US deficit follow immediately from this diagnosis: put America back to work by stimulating the economy; end the mindless wars; rein in military and drug costs; and raise taxes, at least on the very rich. But the right will have none of this, and instead is pushing for even more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, together with expenditure cuts in investments and social protection that put the future of the US economy in peril and that shred what remains of the social contract. Meanwhile, the US financial sector has been lobbying hard to free itself of regulations, so that it can return to its previous, disastrously carefree, ways.





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2011-8-1 08:14





But matters are little better in Europe. As Greece and others face crises, the medicine du jour is simply timeworn austerity packages and privatization, which will merely leave the countries that embrace them poorer and more vulnerable. This medicine failed in East Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, and it will fail in Europe this time around, too. Indeed, it has already failed in Ireland, Latvia, and Greece.





There is an alternative: an economic-growth strategy supported by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Growth would restore confidence that Greece could repay its debts, causing interest rates to fall and leaving more fiscal room for further growth-enhancing investments. Growth itself increases tax revenues and reduces the need for social expenditures, such as unemployment benefits. And the confidence that this engenders leads to still further growth.





Regrettably, the financial markets and right-wing economists have gotten the problem exactly backwards: they believe that austerity produces confidence, and that confidence will produce growth. But austerity undermines growth, worsening the government’s fiscal position, or at least yielding less improvement than austerity’s advocates promise. On both counts, confidence is undermined, and a downward spiral is set in motion.





Do we really need another costly experiment with ideas that have failed repeatedly? We shouldn’t, but increasingly it appears that we will have to endure another one nonetheless. A failure of either Europe or the US to return to robust growth would be bad for the global economy. A failure in both would be disastrous – even if the major emerging-market countries have attained self-sustaining growth. Unfortunately, unless wiser heads prevail, that is the way the world is heading.







Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy.

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Saturday, July 2, 2011

New Poetry from Koon and friends

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Poets-Voices-Coast-ebook/dp/B0059882SK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1309623104&sr=8-1
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Oil

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China, US simply decide oil market's trend

This topic has been un-sticky by szh at 2011-5-31 16:27.
Abbc

1# > A < Posted  2011-5-31 14:40  Only show this user's posts

China, US simply decide oil market's trend


The U.S. summer driving season starts next week amid predictions that gasoline consumption in the U.S. will be lower than last year as squeezed motorists cut back due to high prices.

The U.S. summer driving season starts next week amid predictions that gasoline consumption in the U.S. will be lower than last year as squeezed motorists cut back due to high prices. Fear that this phenomenon will diminish overall oil demand has been a big factor in the recent fall in international oil prices from their April high of $127 a barrel.

However on the other side of the world, industry observers see the opposite situation due to the threat of electricity shortages in China. If power supply is tightly rationed this summer and the Chinese turn to backup oil-fired generators as they have in the past, oil demand may be significantly higher than previous predictions.

With the balance between global oil supply and demand seen increasingly tight, which of these countervailing trends proves stronger could have a significant impact on prices in the second half of this year.

"Power outages are estimated at between 30 gigawatts, by the China Electricity Council and 50GW, by South China Grid," said Eurasia Group analyst Robert Johnston. When the same thing has occurred in recent years, people have turned to back-up diesel generators to fill the gap.



China's Three Gorges Dam


Increased use of diesel generators has boosted Chinese oil demand by 400,000-600,000 barrels a day in previous summers, according to Barclays analysts. Many analysts, including the International Energy Agency, predict a more modest boost of around 300,000 barrels a day this summer as power shortages are are less severe than previous years, but still significant.

The picture in the U.S. is much less clear. The price of gasoline recently hit the $4 a gallon mark, which is widely seen as the point at which motorists start to reduce the number of miles they drive. But prices have fallen since then, and the strength of the U.S. economy remains difficult to assess.

Data is mixed. Gasoline stockpiles have increased for three straight weeks and most analysis shows consumption down by a couple of percentage points compared with last summer. However, a survey by travel and leisure group AAA last week predicted a fall of just 0.3% in the number of Americans driving to a vacation destination this summer despite high prices.

Estimates for U.S. gasoline demand this summer are all over the map. The U.S. Energy Information Administration still expects a year-to-year increase in liquid fuel consumption of 109,000 barrels a day, although it has trimmed this figure recently.

Another well-respected provider of energy data, the International Energy Agency, recently cut 190,000 barrels a day from its 2011 oil demand forecast this month, citing weak U.S. fuel demand. "We believe U.S. gasoline demand will indeed disappoint this year," it said in its monthly oil market report.

Until more data comes in it will be difficult to judge which of the two opposing forces will prove more significant. The most bearish view says current consumption trends, affected by the recent peak in prices, imply U.S. oil demand could fall by more than 1 million barrels a day, according to Petromatrix analyst Olivier Jakob. "The drop in US oil demand dwarfs the increase in oil demand from China," he said.


As the two biggest economies in the world, US and China both need enough oil to satisfy their developing. However, now the situation has entered a vicious circle that the oil shortage and high price slow down their developing speed on one hand, and on the other hand they keep rising the oil prices by endless consumption. What does the world gonna do to get out it? The situation is getting more and more serious and urgent now!
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Sunday, May 29, 2011

Always Energy Source after Food Source

Who's Right and Who's Wrong? And Whose behind the little Culprit?



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New clash in South China Sea

This topic has been sticky by szh at 2011-5-29 13:52.
MXII

1# > A < Posted  2011-5-29 13:52  Only show this user's posts

New clash in South China Sea



Vietnam has accused China of escalating the long-running dispute over control of the South China Sea after three Chinese patrol boats confronted and damaged an oil exploration ship operated by PetroVietnam, the state-owned oil and gas company.


Vietnam’s foreign ministry on Friday called on China to immediately cease violations of its sovereignty and its exclusive economic zone and asked Beijing to pay compensation for the damage caused.


It also accused China of breaching the 1982 UN convention on the law of the sea and undermining efforts to reduce tensions in the South China Sea.


Carl Thayer, an expert on the South China Sea at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, said that this latest incident represented an escalation in Chinese aggression toward Vietnam.


Just before 6am on Thursday, three Chinese patrol ships rushed the Binh Minh 2, a seismic survey ship owned by PetroVietnam, damaging a number of cables, according to Vietnam’s foreign ministry. The oil exploration vessel had detected the Chinese ships approaching on radar about an hour earlier without warning.


The clash will heighten disquiet among China’s neighbours in south-east Asia over what they perceive as increasingly assertive behaviour in regional waters.


It comes just a week after China and the Philippines pledged “responsible behaviour” in the disputed areas and repeated their commitment to a peaceful resolution of conflicting territorial claims. During a visit of Liang Guanglie, China’s minister of defence, to Manila last Monday, officials from both governments pledged to avoid unilateral moves which could raise tension.


Security experts have said that such an arms race is under way already. Several south-east Asian countries are beefing up their air and sea defences – Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand have all acquired or placed orders for frigates, fighter aircraft and submarines.






China opposes Vietnam oil, gas exploration in China's jurisdictional sea area: FM spokeswoman 



China opposes Vietnam's exploring oil and gas in China's jurisdictional area of the South China Sea, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Saturday.


"China's stance on the South China Sea is clear and consistent. We oppose the oil and gas operations conducted by Vietnam, which have undermined China's interests and jurisdictional rights in the South China Sea and violated the consensus both countries have reached on the issue," Jiang said in a statement.


Jiang made the remarks responding to a recent report saying that Hanoi claimed Chinese marine surveillance vessels interfered with Vietnam's oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea and accused Beijing of violating its sovereignty.


"What relevant Chinese departments did was completely normal marine law-enforcement and surveillance activities in China's jurisdictional sea area," Jiang said.


"China has been committed to safeguarding the peace and stability in the South China Sea. We are willing to work together with relevant parties to seek a solution to related disputes and implement the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea," Jiang said.




Financial Times/Xinhua
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fairdinkum

2# > A < Posted  2011-5-29 14:08  Only show this user's posts
Another exaggeration by FT. What they won't do to increase circulation!
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Huan

3# > A < Posted  2011-5-29 14:24  Only show this user's posts
Vietnam should know its place and not exacerbate the confrontation with China.
Oooh, bright orb! ^^
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Saturday, May 7, 2011

Jose


Jose

Here is a man who’s traveled and lived on three continents only to die alone in a hotel room. Not that he didn’t have family; he had two, one in Hong Kong and one in Peru. He was married twice, once in China and once in Peru. None of “his” children were his, however.

Jose was the oldest of my maternal uncles. When he was twelve, his second maternal uncle got him to Peru. My maternal grandmother let her son go to make his fortune in Peru, where his uncle was raising guyoes, rabbit-like creatures who never drank water. They get their moisture through their nose when their keeper burns leaves. When Jose was 21, his uncle took him back to China to marry. Once married, he had to leave his bride in China and followed his second-maternal uncle back to Peru.

According to Jose, he had many opportunities. First, there was a German industrialist who wanted him to marry his daughter. Jose told me that the Germans in Chile took over the copper mines in Peru after an unjust war with Peru, that is, a war a little bit on the imperialistic side. Those Germans in Chile had technology, but the Japanese were in Peru and they were competition too. Jose then tried logging and one time his vehicle flipped over on the mountain road so that its four wheels “all pointed towards Heaven.” Jose survived unscratched. However, logging in the jungle was not good for his health, for he developed rheumatism from the damp and wet in the jungle. Those days, though, Jose was young and full of ambition, he drank with the Indios and marveled at how the natives which he called “mountain devils” could haul heavy loads day and night without end, without eating, and only ask that they be given enough cacao leaves to chew. And when they run out of cacao leaves, they would just rest their loads and refused to work.

Jose married Carmen, a mestiza, in Lima, and he worked principally in chifas, or Chinese restaurants. Carmen had already a daughter when she came to live with him. While he was in Peru, my family was in the United States, and while Jose’s age when up as his potential declined, ours were improving slowly. Our Chinese-American restaurant in Aberdeen, a coastal town in Washington State along highway 101, got busier and busier. Normally my parents and my siblings work in the kitchen and we hire two white waitresses. But when we were old enough to leave home for college, it became a sore point who and how much anyone was sacrificing for the family. My father decided to get needed help in the kitchen and so he looked up J. P. Sanderson, the immigration lawyer who did the paper work for me to come over from China to join my family some two dozen years ago. We went to the Sanderson private residence. Mr. Sanderson, an old man at that time, was still working from his home near Lake Washington in Seattle. I finally connected the face with the Christmas card I receive from a J. P. Sanderson, P.S.. He was a white-haired, tall thin man. He moved about quietly and deliberately. We were mostly silent in his presence. I have to admit that my father had the ability to employ ability where he lacks it. Not long, when I was living at the Albert Yu house in Seattle’s University District, Jose and my mother and a brother suddenly dropped in to see me. Jose was jubilant and he hugged me. I stepped back a step. Our nuclear family is not very demonstrative with feelings. We went to Tai Tung Restaurant to eat. My mother was disappointed for her older brother did not look very robust, but lately on, we found that it was deceptive. Jose started complaining right away that Tai Tung was not much of a restaurant compared to the chifas in Lima that partied two thousand or more people. And they were owned by Japanese. What Jose complained about was that the Japanese always placed their toilets next to the kitchen.

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Friday, May 6, 2011

An Enormous Conspiracy -- general distust of US in Moslem World.


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The Bin Laden Conspiracy Theories

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The Bin Laden Conspiracy Theories

Why Falsehoods Flourish in the Muslim World

Summary: After the death of Osama Bin Laden was announced, rumors about it swirled throughout the Middle East. Given its history and politics, the region is particularly prone to conspiracy theories--and there is little that can be done to counter them.





Bin Laden the US fabricated terrorist?


Immediately after the death of Osama bin Laden was announced, rumors about it swirled through the streets, coffee shops, and Internet cafés of the Middle East, Pakistan, and other parts of the Muslim world. The raid took place, some claimed, only to hand U.S. President Barack Obama a political victory, or to give him political cover for the troop drawdown in Afghanistan. Other, more outlandish, theories proposed that bin Laden had been collaborating with Washington all along. Another one had it that bin Laden died years ago but that his body had been frozen and retained for later use by the United States; still others suggested that he remained alive. “There are numerous question marks still seeking clear and honest answers from the American administration,” went an opinion piece in the Palestinian paper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. “Why did we not see the corpse of the Sheikh until this moment, while all we have heard was that it was ‘buried’ at sea because his homeland the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia refused to receive it?” Some have even suggested that the world’s most wanted terrorist was not real but an American invention.





The muslim world's pray for "bin-Laden", even the Musliam themselves are deceived?

Conspiracy theories like these are especially common in the Middle East and western Asia. Why? At the simplest level, conspiracy theories in the region are a way of displaying skepticism toward the United States. But they can also be earnest attempts by the angry to explain dramatic events, particularly when people have difficulty accepting them: most residents of Abbottabad were no doubt amazed to learn that they had been neighbors of bin Laden. Media reports have quoted some Abbottabad locals as saying that in the absence of any evidence that bin Laden or other Arab extremists had been living in the town, the bin Laden story simply had to be a conspiracy.




And how about the 9-11 real story and the anti-terrorist timeline?

One reason the region is so susceptible to conspiracy theories is that it has been subject to an unusually high number of actual conspiracies in the past. The overthrow of Iranian President Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 was driven by a secret U.S. and British plot to remove him, and the 1956 Suez War was the result of a covert British-French-Israeli agreement struck in France. Thus, today’s conspiracy theorists often cite real conspiracies of the past as evidence for present-day ones. During the 2003 Iraq war, for example, many Middle Eastern commentators brought up the Suez War: If one generation of foreigners could craft a scheme to conquer a recalcitrant Arab leader, the argument went, why could another not do the same, half a century later? Now, as conspiracies about bin Laden gain currency, those peddling them will likely point to past American plots in the Muslim world, real or imagined, for support.



Conspiracy theories also flourish where people feel disempowered -- a condition that applies to the Muslim world. In much of the region today, there is  a sense of ideological aimlessness and a feeling that the region, for all its history, is unfairly weak and vulnerable compared to the West. Even bin Laden used rhetoric along these lines, justifying jihad as a counterattack against a conspiracy and explaining the Crusades as a Western and Christian conspiracy against Islam. Conspiracy theorists seek to counter these sentiments of disempowerment. Feeling as though one possesses rare or secret knowledge and controlling who shares such information can bring one a sense of power and privilege. This is true even at the societal level: a culture that feels vulnerable can find solace in a conspiratorial perspective of their condition.




The symbol?

The Middle East has been subject to an unusually high number of actual conspiracies in the past. Another factor explaining the ubiquity of conspiracy thinking in the Middle East is the presence of authoritarian governments there. Dictators may spread such ideas themselves as propaganda, to confuse their citizens, divide the opposition, or rally support for the regime or nation. (They may also tolerate or nurture conspiracy claims coming from society, usually for the same reasons.) At times, leaders or elites in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and elsewhere have mouthed conspiracy theories or encouraged others to do so. In the past few months, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi have each cited foreign conspiracies as a source of protests in their countries; the Iranian leadership often justifies the regime’s actions as a response to U.S. or “Zionist” plots. While bin Laden enjoyed little sympathy among the rulers of the Middle East, if conspiracy theories about him mean that people pay less attention to examining their own governments, few leaders will try to stop conspiracy talk.



Given how common conspiracy theories are, and how fragmented, conflict-prone, and anti-American the Middle East can be, is there any hope of conspiracy claims being countered? Direct counterargument is useless; it is exactly what conspiracy theorists expect from a plotter, and it may even strengthen their case. This is why it is a mistake for the U.S. State Department to engage conspiracy theories as it does, posting takedowns of them on its Web site. While understandable, such initiatives are probably futile in changing the views of those most being targeted. Likewise, releasing a photograph of bin Laden’s body will convince only those who remain open-minded about bin Laden’s death: it will have no impact on die-hard conspiracy theorists, or even those customarily suspicious of the United States.



MATTHEW GRAY is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University and the author of Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics.





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Huan

2# > A < Posted  2011-5-6 16:29  Only show this user's posts
Since Obama decided not to release any evidence. Conspiracy theories will dominate the narrative.
When beauty and science-fiction become one.
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