An uncontrollable tidal wave from cyberspace has commenced!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The mobilization of the peoples has commenced.

Those who continue to speculate on the deathbed of “globalization”, those who met in Davos… are generally ignorant of current reality: citizens are starting to express themselves through modern communications technology. The time for resignation and silence is over.

They have consistently refused to listen: for years I and many others have predicted that distance participation using mobile phones and Internet would change the course of history, greatly increasing citizens’ capacity to influence the democratic process, which previously was limited in the best scenarios to voting in elections. But I added that genuine democracy is not only being counted in elections, but counting, being taken into account daily. The voice of the people! The “We, the Peoples!” so lucidly proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.

The United Nations have been reduced to an international humanitarian agency and an institutional refuge of convenience, conferring real power to groups of the world’s wealthiest nations (G6, G7, G8… G20). Since the 1980s when values (social justice, equity, solidarity …) were replaced by the rules of the market and the “democracy” that the UN represented was replaced by plutocracy, it became clear that inequalities would increase, production would be outsourced, tax havens would overflow instead of being shut down once and for all, supranational trafficking (drugs, arms, people) would go unpunished, financial transactions would remain unregulated…

But it was all in vain.

Cyberspace’s capacity for moving the masses soon became apparent, even in Iran! It is now extending to the Maghreb. Hopefully it will be peaceful, and what could have been predicted won’t be put down with violence.

And, above all, let’s hope that those responsible for the current situation, particularly the “great dominion” (the energy, military, economic and media powers) promptly take the appropriate measures. When the Berlin Wall fell and with it, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s magic, the Soviet empire, I warned that if the current tendencies weren’t rapidly rectified, the same would happen in the “Western” empire. “A system based on equality, but lacking in freedom has just collapsed. Now, if there are not radical changes, this system based on freedom but lacking in equality and justice will also collapse”.

The exploited, frustrated, poor and impoverished, those who have been humiliated may now make themselves heard and “seen”. Until recently, the scope was local and the basis for protests was also “local”. Now there are global causes, and the markets’ intolerable hounding of political action has become widespread.

Today it’s so easy to see that those who provoked this situation are those who are now accusing the leaders of the countries affected by this “tidal wave”! They must immediately start taking corrective decisions, because citizen mobilization, like an uncontrollable high tide (which hopefully won’t become a tsunami) is now unstoppable.

We were silenced because they deemed our voices utopian, irrelevant, irritating but insignificant… instead of realizing that this was a gradual process toward mobilization at all levels.

I remember years ago they called us “do-gooders,” when from positions of responsibility all over the world we advocated a rapid reform of the United Nations, so that citizens could finally play the role that the United Nations System represents and promotes, inspired in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Don’t look the other way. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Accelerate change. Change is going to come, regardless. Think of that incontrollable tidal wave …

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