One not-so-funny fact about Washington is that nearly all the news media stars who fell for neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq are still around to fall for new ones on Iran, even some like Richard Cohen who briefly regretted his earlier gullibility.

Paul R. Pillar, my former colleague in the CIA's analytical division, has raised a warning flag, cautioning that the same imaginative neocon composers who came up with the various refrains on why we needed to attack Iraq are now providing similar background music for a strike on Iran.

He is right. And as one of my Russian professors used to say, "This is nothing to laugh!"

Pillar's piece - dissecting an op-ed by the Washington Post's Richard Cohen about the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington - first appeared on The National Interest Web site. On Oct. 21, it was posted at Consortiumnews.com under the title "Sloppy Iran Think by WPost's Cohen."

The Cohen column that Pillar critiques is entitled "The alarm bells behind Iran's alleged assassination plot." Yet Cohen's "alarm bells" ringing now about Iran brought a painful reminder of all the alarms he and his colleagues sounded in cheerleading for the attack on Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

[NEO-CONNED -- Richard Cohen of the Washington Post] NEO-CONNED -- Richard Cohen of the Washington PostCohen was one of the many big-name opinion leaders to put on the pompoms after Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his deceptive Iraq War speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. Joining a cheerleading pyramid of pro-war consensus, Cohen mocked anyone who still doubted that Saddam Hussein possessed hidden WMD stockpiles.

"The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations - some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail - had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise."

However, six weeks after the Iraq invasion, with not one WMD stockpile discovered, Cohen's conscience may have begun to trouble him a bit. To his credit, I suppose, Cohen seems to have been embarrassed enough to fess up, sort of, using the device of an apocryphal conversation with his long-dead grandfather.

In an April 29, 2003, column entitled "Baghdad Bait and Switch," Cohen recounted a middle-of-the-night visit by Grandpa, who is not at all pleased with his grandson's credulity about President George W. Bush's case for war.

"You think maybe you got snookered?" Grandpa asks. "For this your mother sent you to college? ... For this you fight a war?

"I read the column where you said that ['Saddam Hussein was like another Hitler']. All my friends said, 'This is your grandson, the hotshot columnist? This is the guy people read so they should know what to think?'

"Hitler? Hitler was a threat to the world. Saddam threatened only his own people. He fought for only 26 days. I had longer fights with your grandmother. ...

"First you wanted a war because of terrorism, then because Iraq had a nuclear program. Then you wanted a war because he has poison gas and little crawling things you can't see. Now you want to bring democracy to the Middle East.

"You know what we used to call this when I was in retail? Bait and switch. ... I hope everything turns out hunky-dory, like you've been writing. ... Otherwise, you should have been an accountant."

Accountability, Anyone?

One might think that a columnist who got something as wrong as Cohen did would have the decency to admit that Grandpa was right and switch professions.

After all, endorsing the falsehoods that led to an aggressive war in violation of international law - an invasion that led to hundreds of thousands of dead and the squandering of $1 trillion or so - isn't exactly a minor mistake.

But Cohen apparently found safety in numbers. The fact that he was surrounded by scores of other big-name media stars who had fallen for the same "bait-and-switch" scam meant that he kept his place as a major national columnist - and soon returned to his comfortable role defending the war policies of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

For instance, in a June 19, 2007, op-ed, Cohen rallied to the defense of Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby who had been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about his role in unmasking covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The destruction of Plame's career was collateral damage resulting from the Bush administration trying to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing Bush's use of a misleading claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa.

But Cohen showed no sympathy for Wilson or Plame, two patriotic citizens who had been personally targeted by Cheney and the White House. Cohen worried only about Libby.

In the column, Cohen denounced the trial as "a mountain out of a molehill." Following the neocon propaganda themes on the Plame case, Cohen concluded there was no "underlying crime" and poked fun at Americans who thought the invasion of Iraq might have been a bad idea.

"They thought - if 'thought' can be used in this context - that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something," Cohen wrote.

Smirking at Torture

Cohen also sympathized with Cheney over his enthusiasm for torturing Muslim detainees. In a May 11, 2009, column - entitled "What If Cheney's Right?" - Cohen justified "enhanced interrogation techniques," including the near-drowning tactic of waterboarding, as worthwhile in eliciting important intelligence information and thus saving American lives.

Starting the column, Cohen made light of the whole issue of torture with the quip, "Blogger Alert: I have written a column in defense of Dick Cheney."

While conceding that torture is morally wrong, Cohen wrote, "where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether 'enhanced interrogation techniques' actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it."

Cohen noted that Cheney - through his declaration that critical intelligence was extracted by these means - "poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?"

With unintended irony, the columnist regretted that Cheney's credibility on torture had been dinged by the fact that his pre-Iraq War claims had proved false, like his insisting "that 'the evidence is overwhelming' that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the 'evidence' was virtually non-existent."

What Cohen left out was the very relevant point that precisely those claims of a Saddam-al-Qaeda connection resulted from a coerced confession from one of the CIA's "high-value detainees," Ibu al-Sheikh al-Libi.

A June 2002 CIA report cited claims by al-Libi that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi's information was then inserted into a November 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

Al-Libi's false claim - which he later said he offered to escape torture - also found its way into Cheney's public presentations and into Powell's UN speech. But Cohen did not deign to mention this inconvenient fact in his column defending these harsh tactics.

On Oct. 6, 2009, Cohen was back serving the neocon cause, baiting President Barack Obama into a major military escalation in Afghanistan, through an opinion piece entitled "Does Obama Have the Backbone?" - questioning Obama's mettle as a war president.

"The war in Afghanistan is eminently more winnable than was Vietnam," Cohen wrote. "Still, the war will require more than a significant commitment of troops and, of course, money. It will take presidential leadership, a consistent staying of the course - an implacable confidence that the right choice has been made despite what can be steep costs."

So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Richard Cohen is now helping to set the stage for another war - with Iran.

Quick! Someone conjure up Cohen's grandfather again. We need him to pin back Richard's ears once more before the gullible grandson falls for a new round of neocon propaganda and enables another catastrophic war.
(c) 2011 Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

THE MOST sensible - I almost wrote "the only sensible"- sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old boy. After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: "Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?" He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs.

The little boy replied: "Because we caught many of them and they caught only one."

FOR MORE than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication. Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means "ruler"). His pictures were plastered all over the place like those of Comrade Kim in North Korea.

It was one of those rare moments, when Israelis could be proud of themselves. Few countries, if any, would have been prepared to exchange 1027 prisoners for one. In most places, including the USA, it would have been politically impossible for a leader to make such a decision.

In a way it is a continuation of the Jewish ghetto tradition. The "Redemption of Prisoners" is a sacred religious duty, born of the circumstances of a persecuted and scattered community. If a Jew from Marseilles was captured by Muslim corsairs to be sold on the market of Alexandria, it was the duty of Jews in Cairo to pay the ransom and "redeem" him.

As the ancient saying goes: "All Israel are guarantors for each other."

Israelis could (and did) look in the mirror and say "aren't we wonderful?"

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Oslo agreement, Gush Shalom, the peace movement to which I belong, proposed releasing all Palestinian prisoners at once. They are prisoners-of-war, we said, and when the fighting ends, PoWs are sent home. This would transmit a powerful human message of peace to every Palestinian town and village. We organized a joint demonstration with the late Jerusalemite Arab leader, Feisal Husseini, in front of Jeneid prison near Nablus. More than ten thousand Palestinians and Israelis took part.

But Israel has never recognized these Palestinians as prisoners-of-war. They are considered common criminals, only worse.

This week, the released prisoners were never referred to as "Palestinian fighters", or "militants"' or just "Palestinians". Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist Haaretz to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as "murderers", or, for good measure, "vile murderers".

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words. Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action. As the Bible has it: "Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21). Releasing a thousand enemy fighters is one thing, releasing a thousand vile murderers is something else.

Some of these prisoners have assisted suicide bombers in killing a lot of people. Some have committed really atrocious acts - like the pretty young Palestinian woman who used the internet to lure a love-sick Israeli boy of 15 into a trap, where he was riddled with bullets. But others were sentenced to life for belonging to an "illegal organization"and possessing arms, or for throwing an ineffectual home made bomb at a bus hurting nobody.

Almost all of them were convicted by military courts. As has been said, military courts have the same relation to real courts as military music does to real music.

All of these prisoners, in Israeli parlance, have "blood on their hands." But which of us Israelis has no blood on his hands? Sure, a young woman soldier remotely controlling a drone that kills a Palestinian suspect and his entire family has no sticky blood on her hands. Neither has a pilot who drops a bomb on a residential neighborhood and feels only "a slight bump on the wing", as a former Chief of Staff put it. (A Palestinian once told me: "Give me a tank or a fighter plane, and I shall give up terrorism immediately.")

The main argument against the swap was that, according to Security Service statistics, 15% of prisoners thus released become active "terrorists"again. Perhaps. But the majority of them become active supporters of peace. Practically all of my Palestinian friends are former prisoners, some of whom were behind bars for 12 years and more. They learned Hebrew in prison, became acquainted with Israeli life by watching television and even began to admire some aspects of Israel, such as our parliamentary democracy. Most prisoners just want to go home, settle down and found a family.

But during the endless hours of waiting for Gilad's return, all our TV stations showed scenes of the killings in which the prisoners-to-be-released had been involved, such as the young woman who drove a bomber to his destination. It was a continuous tirade of hatred. Our warm admiration for our own virtue was mingled with the chilling feeling that we are again the victims, compelled to release vile murderers who are going to try and kill us again.

Yet all these prisoners fervently believed that they had served their people in its struggle for liberation. Like the famous song: "Shoot me as an Irish soldier / Do not hang me like a dog / For I fought for Ireland's freedom...." Nelson Mandela, it should be remembered, was an active terrorist who languished in prison for 28 years because he refused to sign a statement condemning terrorism.

Israelis (probably like most peoples) are quite unable to put themselves into the shoes of their adversaries. This makes it practically impossible to pursue an intelligent policy, particularly on this issue.

HOW WAS Binyamin Netanyahu brought to bend?

The hero of the campaign is Noam Shalit, the father. An introverted person, withdrawn and shy of publicity, he came out and fought for his son every single day during these five years and four months. So did the mother. They literally saved his life. They succeeded in raising a mass movement without precedent in the annals of the state.

It helped that Gilad looks like everybody's son. He is a shy young man with an engaging smile that could be seen on each of the stills and videos from before the capture. He was youngish looking, thin and unassuming. Five years later, this week, he still looked the same, only very pale.

If our intelligence services had been able to locate him, they would have undoubtedly tried to liberate him by force. This could well have been his death sentence, as happened so often in the past. The fact that they could not find him, despite their hundreds of agents in the Gaza Strip, is a remarkable achievement for Hamas. It explains why he was kept in strict isolation and was not allowed to meet anyone.

Israelis were relieved to discover, on his release, that he seemed to be in good condition, healthy and alert. From the few sentences he voiced on his way in Egypt, he had been provided with radio and TV and knew about his parents' efforts.

From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, almost nothing about the way he was treated was allowed to come out. Where was he kept? How was the food? Did his captors talk with him? What did he think about them? Did he learn Arabic? Up to now, not a word about that, probably because it might throw some positive light on Hamas. He will certainly be thoroughly briefed before being allowed to speak.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS repeatedly asked me this week whether the deal had opened the way to a new peace process. As far as the public mood is concerned, the very opposite is true. The same journalists asked me if Binyamin Netanyahu had not been disturbed by the fact that the swap was bound to strengthen Hamas and deal a grievous blow to Mahmoud Abbas. They were flabbergasted by my answer: that this was one of its main purposes, if not the main one.

The master stroke was a stroke against Abbas.

Abbas' moves in the UN have profoundly disturbed our right-wing government. Even if the only practical outcome is a resolution of the General Assembly to recognize the State of Palestine as an observer state, it will be a major step towards a real Palestinian state.

This government, like all our governments since the foundation of Israel - only more so - is dead set against Palestinian statehood. It would put an end to the dream of a Greater Israel up to the Jordan River, compel us to give back a great chunk of the Land-God-Promised-Us and evacuate scores of settlements.

For Netanyahu and Co. this is the real danger. Hamas poses no danger at all. What can they do? Launch a few rockets, kill a few people - so what? In no year has "terrorism" killed as many as half the people dying on our roads. Israel can deal with that. The Hamas regime would probably not be running the Gaza Strip in the first place if Israel had not cut the Strip off from the West Bank, contrary to its solemn undertaking in Oslo to create four safe passages. None was ever opened.

That, by the way, also explains the timing. Why did Netanyahu agree now to something he has violently opposed all his life? Because Abbas, the featherless chicken, has suddenly turned into an eagle.

On the day of the swap, Abbas made a speech. It sounded rather flat. For the average Palestinian, the case was quite simple: Abbas, with all his Israeli and American friends, has got no one released for years. Hamas, using force, has released more than a thousand, including Fatah members. Ergo: "Israel understands only the language of force."

THE VAST majority of Israelis supported the deal, though convinced that the vile murderers will try again to kill us.

Never were the lines of division as clear as this time: some 25% opposed it. These included all the extreme right-wing, all the settlers and almost all the national-religious. All the others - the huge camp of the center and left, the secular, liberal and moderate religious - supported it.

This is the Israeli mainstream on which the hopes for the future are resting. If Netanyahu had proposed a peace agreement with the Palestinians this week, and if he had been supported by the chiefs of the army, the Mossad and the Security Service (as he was this week), the same majority would have supported him.

As for the prisoners - another 4000 are still held in Israeli prisons, and this number is liable to grow again. The opponents of the deal are quite right in saying that it will provide Palestinian organizations with a strong incentive to renew their efforts to capture Israeli soldiers in order to get more prisoners released.

If all of Israel is drunk with emotion because one boy has been returned to his family - what about 4000 families on the other side? Unfortunately, ordinary Israelis don't put the question this way. They have got used to seeing the Palestinian prisoners only as bargaining chips.

How to thwart the efforts to capture more soldiers? There is only one alternative: to open a credible way to have them released by agreement.

Until recent events proved otherwise, the hyper-commercialized surface of the corporate state gave the appearance of being too diffuse--too devoid of a center to pose a threat of totalitarian excess. Accordingly, as of late, due to the violent response to OWS protesters by local police departments in Oakland, Atlanta, Chicago, and in other U.S. cities, the repressive nature of the faux republic is beginning to be revealed.

Behind the bland face of the political establishment (purchased by the bloated profits of the plundering class) are riot cops, outfitted and armed with the accoutrements of oppression, who are ready and willing to enforce the dictates of the elitist beneficiaries of the degraded status quo. In deed and action, as of late, the police state embedded within neo-liberal economic oligarchy is showing its hyper-authoritarian proclivities to the world.

In general, existence within the present societal structure inflicts on the individual a sense of atomization and its concomitant feelings of alienation, vague unease, free floating anxiety and anomie. The coercion is implicit and internalized.

Because of its mundane, ubiquitous nature, the system is reliant on an individual's sense of isolation (even ignorance of the existence of the structure itself) to remain in place. In short, the exploitive system continues to exist because its denizens are bereft of other models of comparison.

The public commons inherent in the OWS movement provides a model of comparison. Apropos, that is why we are beginning to receive reports such as the following:

On Tuesday Oct. 25, 2011, the Oakland Tribune reported that police raided and demolished the local OWS encampment after declaring the area a “crime scene”. This is revelatory regarding the character of the enforcers of the present order: Those in positions of power within a police state view freedom of assembly and freedom of expression as a punishable offense.

It is a given that: Authoritarian personality types take particular umbrage when citizens are expressing their displeasure with official abuses of power and begin to do so in an effective manner.

Too many in the U.S. have bought the fiction that the nation was, is and will remain a democratic republic. Therefore, by drawing its brutal operatives and mendacious apologist into the open, the state will reveal itself in all its ugliness. As a result, all concerned will be able to observe the true nature of the police/national security/oligarchic state in place in the U.S.

Ideally, few illusions will remain intact regarding the ruthless, brutal forces against which we struggle.

Moreover, the actions of the police in regard to public protest are premeditated tactics aimed at the suppression of the right to public assembly. The goal of the power brokers, their political operatives and police enforcers is to render one's (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed right to dissent too prohibitive to be practiced. 



The economically dispossessed and members of minority communities have known for many years what OWSers are suffering, presently, at the hands of official power and its enforcers. 



In turn, individual police officers are well aware of whom they are sworn to protect (and it isn't those who desire to exercise their rights to free assembly and free speech). In most cases, if an individual police officer ever refused an order to make an unconstitutional arrest, he/she would be committing an act of careercide; their chance of advancement within the department would have to be scraped off the sidewalk on the spot and transported to the city morgue.

Are you willing to leave the confines of your comfort zone and go to jail for justice?

Rarely, does reform arrive without the arrest of frontline agitators. Power does not yield without a fight, without attempting to silence dissent by brutality and forced detention. The powerful demand that those of us who notice their excesses and crimes be placed out of sight and out of mind.

Hence, in Oakland, the local corporate news affiliates, to their shame, turned off their cameras when the violent attacks and mass arrest of protesters began.

Are you willing to risk injury to body and reputation to bear witness? The survival of the OWS movement depends on having bodies on the ground and eyes (as well as cameras) on the thugs in uniform.

True to form, a servile corporate media will proclaim how unsightly dissenters are, inferring that sensible folk, simply as a matter of good taste and public propriety should disregard the protesters’ entreaties and that these malcontents and cranks should be denied entrance into the realm of legitimate discourse, that these disheveled interlopers be barred by walls of silence.

To be in the world is to be confronted with walls. How we respond to these barriers is called character and art.

Many brave souls have confronted walls such as these.

Often, as I gaze upon the blue wall of mindless repression surrounding Zuccotti Park and reflect on other OWS sites nationwide, I am induced to feel the sadness and longing of the repressed souls of the earth, of those throughout time who have met walls of blind hatred, of economic exploitation, of institutional repression....

I empathize with all of those who faced walls of smug indifference, walls of internalized shame and walls of official lies--those who stood powerless before the stark reality of seemingly implacable circumstances. I reflect upon the lives and work of itinerate blues musicians of the U.S. Deep South and the manner they met walls of both official repression and collective blind, ignorant fear and hatred, and how they transformed those prison walls into the numinous architecture of The Blues...How they alchemicalized the barriers into guitar technique.

Musical instruments, like word meeting meter to a poet, serve as both barrier and salvation; the limits of the self are tested, explored, and by effort, failure and moments of elation are transformed by confrontation and union with the instrument, personal circumstance and audience.

As is the case with those on the front lines of OWS encampments, millions of people throughout history have met seemingly implacable barriers in the form of walls of human brutality e.g., Jim Crow laws, union busting management goon squads, the Zionist apartheid wall, various secret police and public bullies--but they weren't going to let the bastards "turn them 'round..."

If you choose to resist entrenched power, when confronted by mindless authority, your heart will know the drill; it will guide you--its natural trajectory is towards freedom. Hence, you will know what to do when the moment arrives--and will gain the knowledge that your predecessors discovered in their struggle for justice...that the cry arose forth from deep in their souls, "We shall not be moved."

The practitioners of the Delta Blues came upon walls of oppression...walls of raging hatred, and responded by passing through those walls...to inhabit a landscape more alive, more resonant, more ensouled than their oppressors will ever know possible. They occupied their own hearts and draw us still into the immediacy of the world by their victory over their degraded circumstances by their appropriating the very barriers that were placed in their path by their oppressors and transforming the criteria of their oppression into the living architecture of the soul.

Those who know this--have already won...have already overcome.

Lorca limned the situation (one extant as well in the enfolding OWS movement) in his theory of "the duende". His concept of the duende reveals why people, when faced by the ossified order of an inhuman system, either become caught up--even compelled--by the challenge to begin to make the world anew--while others are seized with mortification, indifference, resignation and hostility.

In which direction does your soul wend?

"The arrival of the duende always presupposes a transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly created rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm." -- from The Havana Lectures, Federico Garcia Lorca.

When I witness police harassing, arresting and brutalizing those exercising their rights to free assembly, I find myself gripped by a surge of rage...The rage rises in me in an animalistic fury--an urge to fight tooth and nail, to tear at the throats of these vicious intruders into the territory of authentic social discourse. 



As of late, instead of pushing down the fury rising from within me or acting upon it, I let it inundate my being. As a result, the coursing rage transforms into a penetrating, powerful force--enveloping and demarcating the geography of my convictions...arriving to bring acceptance and to define and defend the contours of my true self.

Rage can appear as an angel of self-definition, the protector of one's authentic nature and a source of personal power..."ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me 'round ..."

One's anger is vital to one's existence; it is a valuable gift; therefore, it should not be squandered...no need to waste it on fools and idiots.



When rage arrives, invite him in; his presence will fill the room with alacrity, and his surging vitality will allow you to push farther and deeper into the unexplored regions of your soul.

In contrast, the world of the neoliberal oligarchs, the duopolistic political class and of the cops has been called into question. They have grown accustomed to having their way, of having a compliant and complicit peasantry. In this they are not unique; what they are experiencing is universal: The world we know (or at least believe we do) and struggle to maintain, from time to time, is apt to reveal an aspect of itself that seems alien and unmanageable e.g., the growing dissent across the nation, perhaps too vast and potent to be kettled, penned, tear gassed, cuffed and detained. The otherness of the world seems too large...has become an army of aggrieved angels.

I once saw a Great Dane on Second Avenue attempt to engage in canine communion with his fellows. In order to display his intentions were benign, friendly, he crouched down on the sidewalk, making his massive frame as small as possible, even placing his large head on the concrete...doing all he could to produce the artifice of submission, to even the smallest dog that approached him. 

In other words, to enlarge his world he created the illusion of smallness. He did not reduce his essence; he created the artifice of smallness so he could grow larger than himself by his union with the otherness of the world.

We are not requesting that cops crouch before us. They just need not bristle so. 

To grow in each other's presence, we are required to meet the other at eye level, even if one has to descend a bit from a habitual position of power and authority.

We find these views to be mutually relevant...

That all people, by virtue of their basic humanity, deserve the opportunity to live, work, and associate according to the dictates of their own consciences and capacities;

that the exercise of such freedoms is only tenable in conjunction with the ability of all people to do so, in the recognition that no one is free unless everyone is free;

that people situated in place know best how to manage the conditions of their lives, and that the political autonomy and economic self-sufficiency of local communities are the primary means of ensuring the freedom of the individuals in their midst;

that individuals and communities do not exist in isolation, but are interlinked through a global network of communications and cultural exchange that enables the realization of a shared future and a common interest in effectively preserving the continued existence of humankind;

that the integrity of the whole is based on the vitality of its parts, and that the stability and productivity of social relationships is contingent upon and reflective of our collective human interactions with the balance of life around us, upon which we depend for survival;

that the fruits of the earth belong to humankind collectively, and especially to the future generations from whom we merely borrow their blessings;

that no one ought to be bound into the indentured servitude of indebtedness, which coerces people to become complicit with an alienating economy and structures of their own oppression;

that education must be free, open to all, and not merely confined to classrooms and institutions;

that intergenerational justice works in both directions, with young and old alike being equivalent teachers and learners, bringing together the lessons of the past, the challenges of the present, and opportunities for the future into an evolving tapestry of mutual engagement;

that none should be compelled to labor for another except by the inherent desires of conscience and the reciprocal benefits of being served by others through the experience of community;

that collective decisions shall only be taken with the direct participation and informed consent of all those potentially affected by them;

that people, left to their own devices, are capable of self-organizing, self-regulating, and developing mutually beneficial structures of governance and the distribution of resources;

that we live in a world of abundance rather than scarcity, with the problems of inequality being ones of maldistribution and disenfranchisement rather than of quantitative lack;

that the shared spaces of society, including the material bases of existence, cannot be owned or controlled by private interests but must remain the collective responsibility of humankind entire;

that we already possess all of the tools and technologies necessary to create a just world, and that we require only the will to reorient the purposes to which we deploy them in order to realize it;

that what we do matters, that there is meaning to our existence, that we honor ourselves and each other through service and compassion, and that our lives are bound together in a seamless web of destiny;

that our rights and freedoms are equally balanced by our responsibilities and mutual obligations;

that we seek both independence and interdependence as the necessary conditions of social existence;

that there can be no peace without justice, no future without the past, no individuality without community, no opportunity without education, no liberty without equality, and no politics without participation;

that we strive to always create more than we destroy, to produce more than we consume, to give more than we take, to laugh more than we cry, to uplift more than we denigrate, to construct more than we critique, to share more than we acquire, and to love more than we hate;

that we seek a better world not merely for ourselves, our communities, and our allies, but for all of humankind, including those who have exercised their power unjustly and unwisely;

that we acknowledge the urgency of the moment while affirming our willingness and desire to remain engaged in long-term, perhaps even unending, struggles for human dignity and environmental sustainability;

that this task cannot be passed on to others, that we are the ones it has fallen upon, that it is our generational calling, that we have the power to alter the arc of society, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for to bring peace and prosperity to the world;

that the pursuit of material wealth represents a moral and spiritual void, and that the use of manipulation and force to maintain wealth disparity is a self-defeating enterprise based on the failure to recognize the binding principle of interconnectedness in every aspect of existence;

that we can, must, and will succeed in working collaboratively to turn crises into opportunities and to move from the brink of annihilation toward a world of appreciation;

that life is meant to be lived, that we are the creators of culture and not merely its consumers, that our actions and processes are ends in themselves, and that what we do at every moment is the revolution;

that the future depends upon us to occupy place and liberate space on its behalf, and our own;

that we have nothing to lose but our chains, and literally everything to gain;

that the person standing next to you is part of you, an extension of you, a reflection of you, an ally, a colleague, a relative, and a friend;

that the earth beneath our feet creates and sustains us, and that we must do the same for it in return;

that there is one unified race, the human race, and that our inherent diversity provides the strength that will see us through the changes and challenges at hand;

that there are no nations or borders, only peoples and places;

that we need everyone's open hearts, willing hands, strong backs, and keen minds to avert calamity and ensure posterity;

that the sound of a child's laugh casts out the monotonous drone of commercialism, that the wonder in a child's eyes invokes beauty against blight, and that the hope in a child's heart is more powerful than the downward spiral of despair;

that you are important, that your dreams are real, that your needs will be met, that your burdens are shared, that your wellbeing is paramount, and that you are loved.