One World, Many Peaces

A Visual History of Airline Terrorism and the TSA

Source: Online Universities

Intergalactic Peacekeepers? U.S. Military Personnel Say Thank Them

We're all familiar with conspiracy theories about UFOs and little green men in human suits controlling the world, like in the cutesy movie Men in Black. Seriously though, according to a group of U.S. military airmen who recently held a press conference in Washington D.C., not only are the otherworldly protagonists of these seemingly far-fetched stories true, they have had an incalculably positive impact on humanity by preventing us from annihilating ourselves and our planet with nuclear weapons.

"The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it," they affirmed. According to over 120 military personal, by renowned researcher (or total crackpot, depending on your perspective) Robert Hastings' count, since 1948 extraterrestrials in spaceships have not only been visiting Earth but hovering over British and American nuclear missile sites and temporarily deactivating the nuclear weapons, as LiveScience reports.

Strangely, the U.S. Air Force's response did not deny their intergalactic peacekeeping and nuclear disarmament theory. Officials simply referred to the Air Force Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings between 1947 and 1969. The passage most pertinent to the military personnel's claims reads: "No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.” This statement still leaves open the possibility that national security, and global security for that matter, could have been aided thereby. But I have a different theory.

For me, whether or not aliens exist and exert influence on our planet, as a metaphor for the absolute other in whose face humanity unites and solves our common problems or face their judgment, they reign supreme. They can also stand for the actual tens of thousands of peace and nuclear disarmament activists worldwide who have genuinely been considered aliens by their antagonists despite what they have helped achieve, namely the survival of humanity and all life on earth. That the debt the world owes them remains widely unrecognized is truly out of this world. The universal peacebuilding mission of the Federation of Planets in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek never seemed so (im)plausible.

In the words of science writer, not science fiction writer, Benjamin Radford, "UFO folklore and reports - especially from the 1960s and 1970s - often contained supposed messages from our peace-loving and ecologically aware space brothers warning us quarrelsome and destructive earthlings to treat the planet better and seek world peace. That is undoubtedly good advice (regardless of whether its origin is terrestrial or extraterrestrial) though if Hastings and his colleagues are right, the aliens - if they exist - may have everything under control." How about getting everything under control ourselves?

Photo Credit: [F]oxymoron

Selenium Cells: The Secrets of Next-Generation Solar Energy Revealed

By Rosalind Sanders

Scientists at the American Institute of Physics are seeking to identify superior light-catching substances in order to better transform more of the sun's power into carbon-free electric power. And their learned labors are now bearing fruit that could change the way the world gets its energy forever: cheaper, faster and less harmfully to the environment.
 
A new study in Applied Physics Letters (published by the American Institute of Physics) describes how solar energy could potentially be collected by using oxide materials that have the element selenium. A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, inserted selenium in zinc oxide, a relatively low-priced component that could make more cost-efficient use of the sun's power.
 
The research team determined that even a relatively small level of selenium, just nine per-cent of the mostly zinc-oxide base, dramatically enhanced the material's performance in absorbing light.
 
The principal author of this analysis, Marie Mayer (a fourth-year College of California, Berkeley doctoral student) says that photo-electrochemical water splitting, that signifies employing energy from the sun to cleave water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, could potentially be the most revolutionary future application for her work. Using this reaction is key to the eventual creation of zero-emission hydrogen powered automobiles, which hypothetically will run only on water and sunlight.

The conversion effectiveness of a PV cell is the proportion of sunlight energy that the solar cell converts to electricity. This is very important when discussing Photovoltaic products, because boosting this efficiency is vital to making Pv electricity competitive with more standard sources of energy (e.g., fossil fuels).
 
For comparison, the very first Photovoltaic products converted about 1%-2% of sunlight power into electric energy. Today's Pv devices convert 7%-17% of light energy into electric power. Of course, the other side of the equation is the dollars it costs to make the PV devices. This has been reduced over the years as well. In fact, today's PV systems generate electricity at a fraction of the cost of first PV systems.
 
In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies were much smaller than today and lifetimes were reduced, it may well have cost more energy to produce a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. In the meantime, the technological know-how has progressed significantly, and the energy repayment time (defined as the recovery time required for generating the energy spent to produce the respective technical energy systems) of a modern photovoltaic module is normally from 1 to 4 years depending on the module type and location.
 
Normally, thin-film technologies - despite having comparatively low conversion efficiencies - obtain considerably shorter energy repayment times than standard systems (often < 1 year). With a normal lifetime of 20 to 30 years, this signifies that current solar cells are net energy producers, i.e. they generate significantly more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.
 
Rosalind Sanders is the publisher of, and writes for, The Solar Panel Review, which focuses on helping homeowners reduce expenses with solar energy.

A Turning Point in China-U.S. Relations, But Too Late?

Below the global mainstream media radar, an urgent meeting between Chinese and U.S. officials recently took place in Beijing. The topics discussed amongst the senior officials included the now obstinately standard currency and trade disputes on both sides, but also and more importantly the underlying military tensions and arms race between the two countries. This was, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, a get-to-know-you meeting, though inasmuch it can be considered a turning point in early 21st-century China-U.S. relations. But has it come too late?

"The key point of the talks is not to make significant agreements, but to improve understanding of each other's stance. If tensions can be reduced to some degree and confidence increased, that is an achievement," said Shi Yinhong, an expert on the U.S. at Renmin University in Beijing. He emphasized that U.S.-China relations are troubled, but the worst seems to be over and both sides are headed toward reconciliation. Many in the international relations field would consider this outlook overly optimistic and especially premature, given the preliminary nature of the discussions.

What's most troubling is that they are still preliminary. It has been obvious for decades that China is the rising global superpower along with India, yet relations between the two are strained, as are those with the declining superpower, the U.S. China becoming the world's second largest economy, beating Japan, was a wake up call, but only because almost everyone was sleeping. Chinese state media has criticized U.S.-South Korea military exercises in the Yellow Sea and U.S. claims about South China Sea territory, in addition to U.S. arms sales to Chinese rival Taiwan and an Obama meeting with Chinese nemesis the Dalai Lama. For it's part, China's increases in military spending dwarf that of others globally.

There can be no doubt that the peace and prosperity of the world in the 21st century depends on open communications channels and cooperation between China and the U.S., and as a step in that direction this meeting is indeed a turning point. Even if it is too early to determine their outcomes, it has come both too late and at last. "Continuing to develop a positive and comprehensive China-U.S. relationship contributes to our two countries' major interests in peace, security and development," China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said. We couldn't agree more.

World Report on the Decade for a Culture of Peace Submitted to U.N. Secretary General

Capping the United Nations' Decade for a Culture of Peace (2001-2010) efforts to catalogue ongoing peace work globally, the World Report on the Decade for a Culture of Peace has been submitted to the U.N. Secretary General for a General Assembly debate in October. We are proud to say that One World, Many Peaces was included in the report for its pioneering peace journalism.

Over 1,000 peace organizations worldwide contributed to the final report, according to David Addams, leader of the global youth team who helped prepare it. According to Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, who begins the report with a foreword:

"The adoption in 1999 by the United Nations General Assembly of the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace was a watershed event. Nine months of negotiations, which I had the honor to chair, led to the adoption of this historic, norm-setting document now considered one of the most significant and enduring legacies of the United Nations.

During the last ten years, the UN’s work in this area has been particularly spearheaded by the broad-based advocacy and activism of numerous non-governmental organizations throughout the globe. The International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010), which was proclaimed by the United Nations, is galvanizing a global movement for the culture of peace."

The movement for a "Culture of Peace" was originally spearheaded by peace activist and scholar Elise Boulding, who just recently passed away. More about Elise Boulding is available from One World, Many Peaces in an article remembering her pioneering work. The Culture of Peace Working Group of the NGO Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns, a Committee of the Conferences of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CSVGC NY) has sponsored this Report "in the name of all civil society organizations worldwide," notes Chowdhury.

But as Antony Adolf has recently showed in a major new article, "Globalizations of Cultural Criticism and the Transformative Roles of Critics," there are serious problems with trying to establish a single, dominant "culture of peace" when peace cultures always exist and are the result of plural peace traditions, and there are one billion starving people worldwide.  He argues that only the combined efforts of cultural critics and peacebuilders can bring about cultures of peace.

The World Report on the Culture of Peace members include Marcos Estrada (Brazil), Meghann Villanueva (Philippines), Cécile Barbeito (Spain), Lillian Solheim (Norway), Mayte Roitenburd (Mexico), Johanna Ospina (Colombia), Nikki Delfin (Philippines), Shreya Jani (India), Oliver Rizzi Carlson (Switzerland) and Himali Jinadasa (Sri Lanka). Support was provided by Alicia Cabezudo, the Associação Brasileira dos Organizadores de Festivais de Folclore e Artes Populares (ABrasOFFA), the United Network of Young Peacebuilders (UNOY), the Centre Unesco de Catalunya (UNESCOCAT), the Fundación Cultura de Paz, the Escola de Cultura de Pau of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Fundació Privada Catalunya Voluntària and Generation Peace Youth Network among others.

Anti-War Activists: Stop Panicking, Start Thinking Critically and Acting Strategically

"Panicked thinking was shared by many of us then, and it led to the kind of disastrous short-term actions that began to characterize the antiwar movement." So writes the legendary anti-Vietnam War, pro-women's liberation activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her monumental memoir, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the few decades since her, her entourage and their supporters worldwide nonetheless made considerable headway in turning the tide of public opinion. Unfortunately, they and we have failed today even if we need not to in the future

The Afghanistan War is now the United State's longest military engagement, ever. The war in Iraq is rapidly approaching second place after it, too. The burst of anti-war energy that soon fizzled first in 2001 with the Afghan, then the so-called "Summer of Peace" with Iraq in 2003, has never been regained. This is not a eulogy, it's a reproach and recommendation to those who led and participated in those protests globally, thinking they would make a difference in doing so, then went back to their complacent daily lives and let the two wars continue, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

What is "panicking" in an anti-war context and why should it be stopped? Exactly what and why Dunbar-Ortiz claimed it is:  disastrous short-term actions. What's so disastrous about panicking? Aside from that it has achieved absolutely nothing in regards to ending the wars, it has also alienated a lot of the people who would have otherwise worked to end it, while giving those who do it a false sense of accomplishment in the self-centered, self-satisfaction of acting like an angry teenager, or worse yet a two year old in their "terrible phase." As such, it needs to be stopped, but stopping without doing anything different would be like not stopping at all.

We propose two alternatives. First, thinking critically. Not in the sense of armchair philosophizing, but deeply scrutinizing the following, among other things: Why we want the wars to end; why others might want them to end too and why they should join us; it means learning from the long history of peace and anti-war activism dating back centuries, rather than reinventing the wheel; what has worked in the past and can be repeated effectively today; what has not worked in the past and should not be repeated today; how to take advantage of resources like social media that were not previously available;  how to build bridges (not burn them) with related organizations. These last two bring us to the second alternative.

Start acting strategically. If there's an opposite to panicking, this is it. Anti-war strategizing includes planning in the short, medium and long terms; it takes the shape of coordinating the human, economic and technological resources that are already in place, not competing; it means setting egos aside to make the causes succeed;  it requires reaching out to opponents and potential partners to come up and implement solutions that make sense. Anti-war panicking is a deadly disease; critical thinking and acting strategically are its cures and, with them, an end to the war epidemic.

Global Relations Lessons From South Africa's World Cup

Spain's victory over the Netherlands wasn't just a matter of national pride or world glory. Despite being a game that made even the announcers apologize for its boringness, the players on each team made clear two very different styles of trying to win that can teach us a lot about global relations, as can the World Cup media coverage.

A striking parallel can be drawn with the recent Stanley Cup victory of the Chicago Blackhawks over the Philadelphia Flyers, a series of games which was whatever the polar opposite of boring is. Going into the final, the Flyers were known as the "bullies" of the league, and the young Chicago team was known for its finesse and skills. (Disclosure: I live in Chicago and grew up with hockey as a quasi-religion in Canada.)  As you can guess, finesse trumped bullying in the end, which is one part of the moral of this story as it related to global relations.

Soccer players are famous for the on-field drama, but when the Spanish player got kicked in the chest by the Dutch, I felt pain, and not just in my metaphoric heart. Let's leave aside the complex political nuances of the "Orange" (Dutch, after their jersey color) playing near what was once the Orange Free State of Dutch settlers later called Boers and who carried out Apartheid. I'm no soccer/football buff by any means, but I know when I see too many yellow cards and too few shots on goal. That's called bullying, just as it is in hockey. And the Dutch rightfully lost, making Spain's win righteous. Unfortunately, that's not how it always works in global relations even if it should.

South Africa did a tremendous job in hosting the world's largest sporting event, giving the continent its rightful place amongst the rest when it comes to prestige potential. However, the media coverage did a despicable job of reporting on the country and its people, say compared to what was done for China during its recent Olympics, using euphemisms like "troubled past" to gloss over the super-human struggles of South Africans still alive today. Nelson Mandela's name popped up a few times, but rarely was what made the World Cup possible to begin with-- the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu-- ever mentioned. This is the kind of travesty of omission mainstream media commits everyday to the detriment of global relations.

Neither was Apartheid ever faced head on, as a problem or with its triumphal solutions, ostensibly not to mix politics and sports (sorry, that's impossible), actually pushing them below the surface so that they exploded for anyone in the least in the know. The situation in Israel/Palestine is the parallel here. Even a Spanish-born announcer said that his country's team victory was political because it unites Spaniards of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in ways that have never been done.  Did you notice how few Blacks were in the stadium for the final? Did you know that local vendors were prohibited from being within two miles of the stadium so that major multinational corporations could take the stage?

So in addition to the lessons that skill and finesse beat bullying in sports as they should in international relations, here are two others: Don't erase or suppress the past because doing so creates an un-understandable present that can only lead to a undesired future. Do acknowledge the connections between both sports and politics as part of culture for constructive and destructive purposes alike. And, finally, prestige can never replace collaborative prosperity in domestic or global relations.

Photo credit: babasteve

Global Peace Index 2010 Points to a Less Peaceful World This Year

By Liz Ford

The world has become less peaceful over the last year, despite a drop in the number of armed conflicts, according to this year’s Global Peace Index (GPI).

Figures published today show homicide rates and violent crime had increased around the world, particularly in Latin America, where levels of peacefulness showed the biggest slip over the past 12 months.

The GPI has been published annually for the last four years by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a global thinktank that researches the relationship between economics, business and peace. The rankings, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, are calculated using 23 indicators, such as violent crime, political stability and military expenditure, correlated against a number of social development indicators such as corruption, freedom of the press, respect for human rights and school enrolment rates.

Figures show that Africa has become the most improved region of the world for peacefulness over the last four years. The continent has experienced fewer conflicts, less military spending and improved cross-border relations. However, sub-Saharan Africa still remains one of the planet’s least peaceful areas, with nine states featuring in the bottom 20 countries listed.

The Middle East has also shown improvements in its levels of peacefulness since 2006, largely through decreasing military spending and improved relations between states.
However, South Asia has become the most volatile area over the last four years, mainly due to increased involvement in conflicts and human rights abuses. This year, Pakistan was ranked 145 out of the 149 states listed and India ranked 129, evidence, says Steve Killelea, founder of the GPI, of the impact of the war on terror.

Levels of peace

For the second year running, New Zealand is rated the most peaceful country in the world, with Iceland climbing back up to second place, after dropping from the top slot in 2008 to fourth place last year. Japan ranked third. Fifteen of the top 20 countries are western or central European states and all Scandinavian countries are listed in the top 10, suggesting that small, stable, democratic countries are the most peaceful. The UK was ranked 31, one of the few countries to improve positions, while the US dropped two places to 85, largely due to its military expenditure, high prison population and increasing rates of violent crime and homicide.

For the fourth year running, Iraq was found to be the least peaceful country, followed by Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan. Russia ranked 143.

This year, five extra countries were added to the index – Armenia, Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Swaziland, which ranked 113, 63, 99, 53 and 73 respectively.

In a sense, the GPI make a case for peace – putting a monetary value on peace in terms of business growth and economic development. The index authors estimate that the total economic impact of an end to violence could have been US$28.2tr between 2006 and 2009. A 25% reduction in global violence would add an annual $1.85tr to the global economy. Killelea said these amounts could pay off Greece’s debts, meet the yearly requirements needed to hit the Millennium Development Goals and pay for the EU’s carbon reduction programme, and still leave change.

Aid thoughts

The rankings could provide useful backing to donor governments rethinking their aid strategies. The UK government is currently reviewing the countries to which it gives aid and has set up a National Security Council to pull together plans for development and defence. In a speech last week, the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, spoke of the importance of building “peaceful and stable societies abroad”, with particular reference to Afghanistan.

“It’s highly appropriate to look at the index and review how we go about giving aid. In the past, a lot of it was giving on a political whim, to prop up some government,” said Killelea. “You need the right resources and approaches to build a well functioning government and make sure resources are spread around the people.” A government would also save “hundreds of billions of dollars” in military expenditure.

Africa, he added, had experienced significant economic growth over the last decade, which had resulted in improved GDP across the continent, a drop in armed conflict and improvements in child mortality and education rates. But Killelea the continent still had a long way to go. “We don’t want to lose sight that Africa is the most violent region in the world”, he said.

The highest ranked country in Africa is Botswana, at 33. Uganda ranked 100 this year, an improvement on last year. However, Killelea noted that while the country had clearly improved in a number of areas, particularly in terms of economic growth, political instability, a worsening respect for human rights and an increasing number of deaths from organised crime remained major problems.

Photo Credit: syvwlh

The Learning Curve of Peace and the U.S. Department of Peace Conference in Detroit

By Robert C. Koehler

“Why are we violent, but not illiterate?”

This question, originally posed by writer Colman McCarthy, was asked at the Midwest Regional Department of Peace conference, which was held last weekend outside Detroit. It cuts to the core of our troubles. The answer is agonizingly obvious: “We’re taught to read!” Could it be we also need to be taught, let us say, calmness, breath and impulse control, practical applications of the Golden Rule? But until we know enough to ask these questions, violence, like ignorance, is just a fact of life.

Oh, humanity. In Russian, the word “mir” means “earth”; it also means “peace.” We know the answers. They’re hidden in our language. We long for peace with every fiber of our being, yet we spend countless trillions annually pursuing its opposite, as though determined in our perversity to be the worst we can be, to squander our enormous intelligence chasing fear and rage to their logical conclusion and annihilating ourselves.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to H.R. 808, the bill to create a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace. It was first introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2001, and reintroduced in every session of Congress thereafter. It has some 70 co-sponsors in the House right now — thanks to the tireless grassroots lobbying efforts of members of the nationwide Peace Alliance — but remains a long way from passage, or even congressional debate. That’s almost beside the point, however. At this stage, the legislation is a focal point for spreading awareness and getting people (members of Congress and everyone else) to start asking the right questions.

“From the growing rate of domestic incarceration to increasing problems of international violence, the United States has no more serious problem in our midst than the problem of violence itself.”

So cries the Peace Alliance website, going on to point out that, while we pursue incarceration, punishment and war with enormous gusto, economically, emotionally and spiritually, “there is within the workings of the U.S. government, no platform from which to seriously wage peace.

“We place no institutional heft behind an effort to address the causal issues of violence, diminishing its psychological force before it erupts into material conflict. From child abuse to genocide, from the murder of one to the slaughter of thousands, it is increasingly senseless to merely wait until violence has erupted before addressing the deeper well from which it springs.”

This begins to get at it. There’s an enormous amount of data, scholarship and technology available on the root causes of violence and the waging of peace, but the fact of this has yet to be embraced politically. To a large extent, government and its attendant industries (especially the media) remain part of the problem — a huge part of the problem — rather than part of the solution.

To know this, ironically, is to know no peace. Building peace is a lot of work, and the work never stops, nor does the awareness that, if we fail to do so, we’re headed, as a nation and a species, along an arc of self-obliteration. It’s far more “peaceful” to remain in denial, to shut down awareness, to numb ourselves with “the comforts of pessimism” (in the words of Paul Williams, in his poem “Common Sense”).

The irony, of course, is linguistic, not real, because working for peace is a process of connecting and bonding with others in deep and joyous ways, which I learned again and again during the conference weekend. Indeed, creating peace means creating connections with one another and pushing past our isolation. Doing so sometimes feels risky (“the luxury of enemies, the sweetness of helplessness,” Williams writes), but is satisfying beyond measure.

The establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Peace, while it would hardly solve all our problems — and while it may not be the mechanism for challenging the rampant militarism of the American empire — is to my mind a crucial step in the de-escalation of American violence.

The department would recognize and fund a myriad of programs already in place, in our schools and courtrooms and on our streets, and signal that government itself recognizes the value of nonviolent conflict resolution. The legislation would also fund a peace academy, advancing our awareness that peace education and the presence of peacemakers in our society are crucial parts of the future we hope to build.

“We have to take the lead on peace,” said Detroit’s Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the longtime peace activist who gave the keynote address at the conference. He also made a heartfelt plea for the abolition of war, and described in vivid detail the human cost of war in the modern era, mostly as it waged by the United States.

Right now, and throughout my lifetime, we have been the planet’s primary purveyor of violence. For too many, this remains a source of pride — though I doubt those who feel that way would feel a sense of righteousness if we chose, instead, to spread illiteracy in the name of God and country.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

A Tale of Two Neo-Colonialisms: China and the U.S. in Africa

There's a new "Scramble for Africa" taking place as you read this, one that rivals that which gripped and stripped the people and resources of the continent in the hands of Europeans in the late nineteenth century. But now, it's being waged in unprecedented twenty-first century ways that build upon those of the late twentieth, with two main players not a handful as before: China and the U.S.

Taking a closer look at what's been happening since the waves of supposed decolonization of the 1950s-1970s makes it clear that there are two very different kinds of neo-colonialism making inroads now, and they're not shaping up to be what you may expect from the two superpowers, the one old, the other even older.

This U.S. neo-colonialism actually being in the early 1800s, shortly after Americans through off the British yoke they tried to impose their own by supporting the nascent Liberia. The pattern has repeated itself innumerable times since: remain sovereign in name, while we supply you with capital, ideology and military support. During the Cold War, programs like the Peace Corps put a palatable veneer on what was then called neoliberalism in the next few decades, code name for the exportation of capitalism and democracy, whether the receiving country likes it or not.

The results have been mixed at best, and totally off target at worse, causing some of the worst humanitarian crises in human history while the upper classes of the oil-rich countries benefit and the lower classes continue to suffer, as they always have. Meanwhile purportedly global financial institutions, actually the U.S. and its allies in disguise, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) lend African countries sums and at rates they cannot possibly repay just as they "give" them foreign aid that gets sucked dry by men with guns supplied by the U.S. off before it reaches its most desperate targets.

As U.S. neo-colonialism began, China was doing its best not to be colonized by the West, only to be so by the Japanese in the early and mid twentieth century, often considered worse than Nazi occupation. By the time the Communist takeover was complete in the 1950s, China had such serious internal problems that looking outside its borders was practically impossible, let alone doing something. That situation changed when the toil and trouble of the billion or so Chinese made their country a manufacturing, and now middle class consumer, global powerhouse.

Ironically, for the past two decades, China has been anything but communist or neoliberal in its neo-colonialism, instead preferring to make huge direct investments in the infrastructure and resources of dozens of African countries without the pretenses and airs of democracy and military security (at least so far for the latter) Americans like to put on in doing exactly the same thing.

Together, American and Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa are likely to dominate Africa for the foreseeable future, or until such time as they come into conflict with one another. When they do, it will not be a battle of ideology that takes place, but a battle of the businesses and organizations that each country has and will put in place on the continent. That is, unless the pitiable African Union shapes itself up to be the continental leadership it can be and itself throw off all yokes, once and for all.

Or, better yet, keep the yokes that work as current events, make them their own and then disappear, and discard those that don't, at which point we will be in a future created by U.S. and Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa which cannot yet be predicted.