Public meeting at Melbourne Unitarian Church on Wednesday 6 March for Peace in Syria

The film in here is terrific! It clearly and quickly lists signs of the shock doctrine (which the speaker calls 'The New World Order) as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine a few years ago. I was particularly moved by Syrian Partisan Girl's reference to how the new Egyptian government had signed away their country's banking and taken on debt. Syria's still has public banking owned by the state. I want to congratulate candobetter on this article.

In addition to poverty, backwardness, repression, rapid population growth, religious and ethnic hatred, "Arab Springs", and stateless peoples (such as the Kurds and the Palestinians), the region has unstable borders. The Middle East is in the eye of the turmoil of a global cyclone of change and unrest.

Almost 70,000 people have been killed in what has become one of the most brutal conflicts this century.

An estimated 80,000 are sleeping rough in caves, parks or barns. An estimated 300,000 people have been wounded and desperately require medical care, but more than half of all Syria's hospitals have been damaged

Escalating conflicts in the Middle East threaten to engulf neighboring countries like Lebanon into a "vortex" of unrest, a U.N. official said. U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said "Regrettably, the warring parties remain locked in a military logic which is bound to bring more death and destruction." Additionally, he said: “We are concerned at any actions that risk drawing Lebanon into the conflict in Syria.”

The "vortex" could suck in the rest of the world too.

Despite heavy criticisms of North Korea's nuclear testing, the US remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another nation. The US has approximately 5,113 nuclear warheads, including tactical, strategic, and non-deployed weapons. According to the latest official New START Treaty declaration, the United States actively positions 1,722 strategic nuclear warheads on 806 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers. [1]

President Obama has increased the budget for nuclear weapons and the weapons complex. The president doesn’t like to talk about it as much — he prefers the lofty speech about a world free of nuclear weapons — but the truth is that in this realm he’s a big spender.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-08-31/opinions/35490294_1_nuclear-weapons-nuclear-warheads-and-bombs-nuclear-stockpile

The United States has the most accurate, powerful and modern nuclear force in the world. The long-term US funding of anti-government programs in Syria has raised questions about the types of groups being supported. The argument that the US and its allies have only armed the “moderate” rebels is a deeply flawed one. Weapons are in high demand by all rebel factions and there is little means to effectively prevent arms from gravitating toward hardcore Al-Qaeda fighters. The track record of allied Western and Gulf states shows that they are more interested in enabling terrorism for their own purposes rather than preventing it.

Population growth is creating difficulties for economic and human development in the Arab world in general. In addition to population size, the poor quality of education is not producing a knowledgeable young people who are innovative and competitive. The Middle East is host to the largest refugee population in the world. As the demand for the scarce resource increases in the developing Middle East, water could be a source of regional destabilization as well as a political tool or target for terrorist attacks. The world won't need heavy explosive weapons in the future against enemies, or to keep "peace", but scarcities of natural resources will limit human-caused aggression.

Footnote[s]

1. See North Korea and the United States: Will the Real Aggressor Please Stand Down? of 4 Mar 2013 by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers in Global Research for a most chilling read about all the wars that have been fought against Korea since 1866 including the Korean War of 1950-1953 in which nearly a third of 'North' Korea's population of 8-9 people were killed.