The Isocracy Network

The Isocracy Network will be holding its 2013 Annual General Meeting on Saturday, 21st September, 2013, at the United Voice union offices, 117-131 Capel St North Melbourne. Nominations are are sought for the positions of President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, and general committee positions. Please send these to public@isocracy.org by midnight of Friday 20th of September.

A committee report will be distributed prior to the meeting. Minutes of the last AGM follow some relevant articles on drug law reform.

The Eight Pointed Star Movement takes its inspiration from the Eureka rebels. The Eureka rebels used the eight pointed star on their flag - the Eureka Flag.

• Human beings are born with inalienable rights and liberties no Government can legislate away or corporation take away. Ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the people, not the State, the Government of the day or the Corporate sector.
• Citizens should have the ability to initiate legislation through citizen initiated referendums and have the power to recall their political representatives in between elections.
• All human beings have the same rights irrespective of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age or role in society.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders never ceded sovereignty. The 1992 Mabo High Court decision that recognised they had legal rights to land and sea has been drowned by bucket loads of Parliamentary extinguishment. A treaty is the only way to ensure reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians becomes a reality.

A coup d'état (or putsch, or pronunciamiento), the sudden seizure of governmental power by a small group, is almost invariably a detestable event. Typically a military event, as they have the resources to carry this out effectively, they are often associated with the overthrow of a popular democratic government by a military associated with an existing ruling class with foreign backing. The Pinochet coup against the elected socialist government of Allende in Chile in 1973 being perhaps the most well known example of this type. However this is obviously not the only type. Sometimes a coup can occur from the competing different factions within military-dominated governments. The latter case is often tied to a succession of civil wars, and is particularly the case in resource-rich developing countries where different groups aspire to control monopoly profits.

Recent events in Egypt bring certain questions to the fore. In January 2011, protests rose against the government of Hosni Mubarak, whose authoritarian social-democratic National Democratic Party was a member of Socialist International until these protests. Involving hundreds of thousands of people and with clashes with security forces resulting in over eight hundred deaths. Increasingly however, it became clear that the armed forces would not act against the protesters and in February Mubarak resigned with the military assuming control for a while, resulting in a constitution referendum in March and parliamentary elections in November and January 2012.

Inhabited for some 45,000 years, West Papua became part of the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century. After the second world war, the Netherlands eventually recognised Indonesian claims for independence, excluding Dutch New Guinea. In the latter a national parliament was elected in 1961. Indonesia, under Sukarno, engaged in military interventions in the region without success. But the possibility of a conflict lead to a UN agreement transferring authority to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) and then to Indonesia in 1963.

In 1969, the United Nations supervised an "Act of Free Choice", where Indonesian military appointed elders agreed to be part of Indonesia. Released documents show that the decision of the hand-picked individuals to integrate with Indonesia was anything but an act of free choice. (c.f., http://web.archive.org/web/20110106101458/http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/N...)

Welcome to the Isocracy Network Cham Shareef, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Could you describe to our readers who you are, and you became involved in the campaign against the al-Assad Ba'athist regime? How do you - and for that matter, other Syrians - survive in what is obviously very difficult circumstances?

Thank you for your interest to know what I think or what I want to say. I am grateful to learn that someone somewhere cares about my opinion.

For years my friends hated to talk with me around political issues or about the government. They always said that I am a talkative man and were worried that one day I would disappear.

I always knew that somebody listened to me, but the most thing I understood was; there was always a fight between me and those visitors holding in their hand a book to write about me, what I was doing, what I was thinking - everything they could learn about me in order to send me behind the sun. They could also threaten me and take money from me as a bribe. Those "intelligent" always treat us as we were the enemy, and we were under suspicion or accusation of something we might not know about ourselves.

They used to put their nose in everything or anything you might do for work or in your life. In simple words, in Syria with this regime the truth is their enemy. You can't talk about anyone in the government, not even about the smallest one there.

Please find attached the response of the Isocracy Network, Inc. based on the request for inputs for the 2013 Report of the Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect.

We understand that submissions were due on 19 April 2013, but have been informed that there has been an extension.

The Isocracy Network, Inc. is primarily an organisation of political and economic ideas. Nevertheless, the issues raised by the legal norms encapsulated as the responsibility to protect are of particular importance to us, thus our contribution. Due to our limited involvement in international preventative activity our contribution is limited to the first three and question eight.

Just the fact that the New South Wales Parliament considered revoking the right of its citizens to remain silent when being questioned by police is mind boggling enough in itself. That this bill actually passed, and was paid for with the standard thirty pieces of silver that is the due of those who betray the people that they are supposed to be representing, is unbelievable. Regardless of the motivation there can never be sufficient reason to compel anyone to be a witness against themselves and by undermining this fundamental human right the NSW Liberal Party have revealed their truest intentions. If ever there was a time when we should be using our much vaunted freedom of speech to speak out against abuses of our freedom then this de-evolutionary step towards autocratic tyranny is one.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson, Preamble to a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Fall 1788

Excuses for the abuse of universal rights are never acceptable, even if the abuses are carried out by religious or ethnic groups which they themselves can be subject to discrimination. It is ridiculous to describe a person as bigoted, or even more inaccurately and unscientifically as "racist", when the gross abuses of human rights committed under the name of Islam are noted, or when theocratic organisations of the same ilk are described as "Islamofascist". The use of the term may be abused by religious bigots of other denominations. It may be abused by warmongers who desire access to a country's resources that are under the control of an Islamic dictatorship, or by bigots who assign all Muslims under the banner [1]. But this does not address the main points of similarity where it does exist, such as those once illustrated by Christopher Hitchens [2]; a glorification of death and murder, a hostility to modernity and nostalgia for a medieval past, anti-Jewish paranoia, commitment to sexual and gender repression, and opposition to artistic expression. In short, a rejection of individual rights and civil liberties. It is no accident that such organisations and regimes are collectivist and organised through an elite vanguard.

Less than two years ago, the Isocracy Network published a brief piece on the Venezuelan elections and the major economic and political changes that had occurred in that country in the preceding decade [1]. Standing outside of the hyperbolic opposition of the (usually) U.S. right-wing who condemned the Chávez government, sometimes for an apparent lack of democracy but mostly for its socialism, and the similarly the Chavistas of the left who could see in no (or at best) very little wrong with his rule. In contrast to these positions, the Isocracy Network article noted the real reductions in poverty, establishment of co-operatives, land reform, health care and education, employment, and improvements in real GDP. These were largely built on oil wealth, operating on a sound principle that natural resource wealth belongs to the people in common, and achieved more with elections that were mostly free, albeit insufficiently fair. Now that Chávez has died, like so many others it is necessary to engage in a retrospective.

Initially I felt some unease when approached to present today's address on 'isocracy'. I do not particularly care for presentations here which are solely dedicated to political issues that do not refer to our liberal religious tradition, least of all by members of the church. If I want strictly social and political discussion there are these organisations called "political parties" where one's contributions are far more useful and effective. But then I was reminded of my very first encounter with Unitarian-Universalism, over twenty years ago through reading a book entitled "Legitimation Crisis" by Jürgen Habermas. This short, dense, carefully researched book of extraordinary scope was first published in 1973 is arguably the most important contributions to social theory in the last fifty years. The author, an extremely well-known as a "public intellectual" in Europe and in the academic world, is the main contemporary representative of a school of thought known as critical theory a body of intellectuals initially centered around the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in Germany in the 1920s.