My new piece from the Daily Express.
It's the start of a new year and time for resolutions.
One that I can heartily recommend is to start keeping a diary. Oscar Wilde wrote: "Memory is the diary... that we carry about with us".
But while that may work for the big things that happen to us, smaller matters are very easily forgotten unless they're written down. That's a pity as it's often the things which we regard as mundane that become the most interesting.
Last year I rediscovered old diaries of mine from the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was in my teens. In these diaries I recorded almost everything: what television programmes I watched, what meals my family and I ate, what the weather was like, the national and international news.
Sounds a bit dull? Not a bit of it.
You can read the whole article here.
1 comment:
Maybe Jeffrey D Sach's New Year resolution is to be forthright about the fact the terror attacks in Paris were blowback from Iraq and Syria. And, yes, I am talking about the shock therapist himself who seems to have been decent enough as a man to recognise that the overdependence upon oil fuelled economic growth has caused geopolitical collisions and clashes ( though unlike me he does not emphasise the role oil and attempted 'liberal' interventionism in Ukraine.
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We in the West hate to acknowledge – and most refuse to believe – that our leaders have been flagrantly wasteful of Muslim lives for a century now, in countless wars and military encounters instigated by overwhelming Western power. What is the message to Muslims of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003? More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians – a very conservative estimate – died in a war that was based on utterly false pretenses. The US has never apologized, much less even recognized the civilian slaughter.
Or consider Syria, where an estimated 200,000 Syrians have recently died, 3.7 million have fled the country, and 7.6 million have been internally displaced in a civil war that was stoked in no small part by the US, Saudi Arabia, and other allied powers. Since 2011, the CIA and US allies have poured in weapons, finance, and training in an attempt to topple President Bashar al-Assad. For the US and its allies, the war is little more than a proxy battle to weaken Assad’s patrons, Iran and Russia. Yet Syrian civilians are the cannon fodder.'
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/radical-islam-western-military-intervention-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2015-01#v95dMjeLqf2Qxkiq.99
As for me, I'm still ploughing my lonely furrow on future resource wars and the lethal double standards behind military interventionism and covert assistance to 'the right rebels' who in other contexts would be 'the wrong rebels' depending on whether they advance or retard strategic resource interests and untrammelled 'western' hegemony.
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