Back in 2003 I cited (in a similar paper) Sub-Commandante Marcos, charismatic leader of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) in Mexico, who wrote:

“The ineptly-named cold war actually reached very high temperatures: from underground workings of international espionage to the interstellar space of Ronald Reagan’s famous “Star Wars”; from the sands of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam; from the frenzy of the nuclear arms race to the vicious coups d’état in Latin America; from the menacing maneuvers of NATO armies to the machinations of the CIA agents in Bolivia, where Che Guevara was murdered. The combination of all this led to the socialist camp being undermined as a world system, and to its dissolution as a social alternative. The third world war showed the benefits of “total war” for its victor, which was capitalism. In the post-cold war period we see the emergence of a new planetary scenario in which the principal conflictual elements are the growing importance of no-man’s-lands (arising out of the collapse of the Eastern bloc countries), the expansion of a number of major powers (the United States, the European Union and Japan), a world economic crisis and a new technical revolution based on information technology.”

We are surely now in the midst of the Fourth World War – a war to determine who controls the means of communication and the flow of information. So far, the internet still belongs to the people, but there are growing threats to it from GovCorp. The sad irony of the matter is, that the grand majority of those whose very freedoms are at stake, are as yet largely unaware of the impending chaos that is likely to result from their own ignorance and inaction.

I personally believe that this is what 2012 is truly all about, because people can’t possibly become enlightened overnight. It will probably be a rude sociological awakening that could get a lot worse, before it gets any better.

Peace be with you (and all of us for that matter).