On that note: Financial Information. Over the past week I worked 29 hours @ $15/hour, making my total payment $435.00, and total donations throughout the week at $25.00.
Through the week, I put more work into my chapter on the history and origins of Zionism, and have also produced a tentative outline for the entire book, which is quite… extensive, to say the least. I have decided to merge the two chapters on Zionism and Israel within other chapters in the book, dealing with similar historical and present themes on imperialism, philosophy, and resistance, as it makes for a better fluidity in the book, and there is simply too much relevance to other issues to present these chapters as entirely separate. So the chapter on the origins of Zionism, in relation to anarchism and imperialism, will be placed within a wider historical context of a chapter on the expansion of European imperialism, the explosion in new ideas of resistance and the changing geopolitical context of that era. As for the subsequent chapter on the history of Israel since its founding, I decided to place this within the larger chapter on the brutality of the modern empire, dealing mainly with the end of the Cold War onward, but with some Cold War-era discussion. I made this decision because in the wider context of the book, with significant overlap between subjects and issues throughout all chapters, it would be very obscure to have two chapters standing out as very specific in subject matter, almost separate from the rest of the book.
So, throughout the past week I also put together roughly 20 pages thus far on a chapter on poverty, race, and exploitation, and there is a great deal of work yet to be done on that chapter. My chapters are generally about 50 pages single spaced, with slight variations, but that seems to be the average. Also, I have been doing more work on a previously unfinished chapter on the history of public relations, consumer society, advertising, and the notion of “engineering consent.” I have done a lot of work on this chapter previously, and am hoping to finish it quite soon. At the moment, I am reading about 20 academic journal articles and four different books on these subjects, which will prepare me to finish writing this chapter, as it’s sure to be a very interesting one, with some unique individuals (such as Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays), as well as some important ideas of the era, and of course, some of those institutions whose names keep appearing where ever power is being centralized and society engineered (aka: The Rockefeller Foundation). The general theme of this chapter is based around the popular elite ideas of the era which saw the masses of people as irrational (due in large part to the development of modern psychology and psychoanalysis at the time), and thus, that it was necessary for an elite managerial class to “engineer consent” among the people in order to steer society into desired directions. This was a changing concept of “democracy” at the turn of the 20th century, where elites established a consensus among themselves that in the modern world, a “democracy” must be managed by a small technocratic elite and the people must be made to think and act a certain way. Of course, from a logical standpoint, this has much more in common with despotism than democracy (in the true sense of the words), though, the system has been highly effective. The course of the chapter takes us through the origins and development of this idea, and examines the growth of public relations, advertising and consumer culture as one of the primary means through which consent is engineered.
This week (October 31 – November 6, 2011), I have launched a fundraising campaign to raise more funds for my book, since I am hoping to (as I have this past week) really expand and increase my work on this book to attempt to finish as soon as possible, which means putting in a lot more time. Thus, as a promotional fundraising initiative, for every donation over $100.00 over the next week, each donor will receive an exclusive chapter from the book, which I am also polishing up throughout the week to make it more of a finished product (though by the final process, more changes are likely).
So what chapter will the donors have exclusive access to?
The chapter deals with the specific concept of the “New World Order,” from the ending of the Cold War, and the roles played by Western NGOs, foundations, think tanks, and elites in “opening up” Eastern Europe to Western domination, to the political concept of a “new world order” as articulated by intellectual elites within the United States, the concept of “global governance” as a central feature of the “new world order,” the development of centers for the study of “global governance” at major universities throughout the West, and the development and content of the curriculum of “global governance” studies as a form of social engineering undertaken largely by the dominant American foundations, designed to produce elites and intellectuals for a new global system of “global governance,” the differences between “global governance” and “global government,” and the resurgence of the promotion for a “world government” to rule the world, and a brief historical examination of the intellectual movement in promoting the concept of “world government” in the first several decades of the 20th century, as well as the development of the anti-globalization movement, and its subsequent co-optation by the major American foundations as a means to incorporate the opposition to globalization into a direct component of the process and structure of “global governance.”
It is an important chapter in the book, covering the transition from the Cold War into the New World Order, examining the ideas, institutions and individuals who were and are central to this global transformation.
For every donation over $100.00 between October 31 and November 6, 2011, the donor will receive this chapter in full!
