Superpowered individuals

In the introduction to his book, Longitudes & Attitudes, Thomas Friedman writes about three balances that characterize our globalized world today – first is the traditional balance of power between nation-states; second is the balance between nation-states and global markets; and the third is the newest and most relevant to the events of 9/11 – the balance between individuals and nation-states.

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Osama bin Laden is an example of that superpowered individual in our time Just think of it, Friedman continues, here is one man declaring war on the United States first by organizing the bombing of two American embassies in Africa and then forcing the US airforce to retaliate with cruise missile attack on his bases in Afghanistan "as if he were another nation-state." Furthermore, in 1998, the US fired 75 cruise missiles at bin Laden which is an enormous lot of money if a cruise missile costs $1 million to use against one person! But there are also good superpowered individuals such as Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams who led the campaign to outlaw landmines and got the endorsement from 120 countries except Russia, China and the US. When asked how she accomplished all this, she said, "e-mail".

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In the interwired world, nobody is quite in charge although news on the first balance is what often gets priority treatment in the media, whether print or broadcast - news of China balancing Russia, Iran balancing Iraq or India confronting Pakistan. On the second, global markets refers to the electronic herd of millions of investors clustered in s Wall Street, Hong Kong, London and Frankfurt. Friedman uses the example of Indonesia and how Suharto was ousted when the global markets withdrew support from the economy. The third balance is the newest and probably the most relevant to the events of 9/11,.ccording to Friedman. That is the balance between individuals and nation-tates.

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Modern technology through the Internet has empowered individuals around the world. It gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. "So you have today not only a superpower, not only supermarkets, but also what I call superpowered individuals. Some of these superpowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage."writes Friedman. I would not be surprised if the millions who thronged the streets in 600 cities in a collective display of people power against war in Iraq were put together by Internet in one way or another.

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Here in the Philippines, known as the texting capital of the world, we also have had our own example of how cellphones have superempowered individuals. It is well-known that the downfall of the Erap government was brought about by texting. Indeed, in the book Texting-selves:Cellphones and Philippine Modernity by Raul Pertierra, Eduardo Ugarte and Alicia Pingol discuss that cellphones link their users into global structures, generating new communities of intimacy that include strangers. I have no doubt that this modern way of communicating will have an extraordinary influence on the Philippine political scene. When the Absentee Voting Bill was signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacañang recently I could not help but feel a certain hurt – that what took us painful years to organize by slow traditional mail, others who followed did much faster, indeed instantly around the world and brought the advocacy to a homerun. We may have been the original proponents but we could not bring it home until the arrival of mass home computers, e-mail and Internet. Ofelia Mananquil Bakker, one of the leaders of Filipino cyberspace explained it neatly, "You did not have e-mail then, now we have."

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When I read about the attempts to put "roadblocks" – using such excuses as the lack of money, etc. that might delay or postpone the implementation of the right to vote for overseas Filipinos, I cannot help but think how futile or even ill-advised these actions are. The triumph of the absentee voting bill is not just about the right to vote, it is also about getting Filipinos involved in their home country. By granting overseas Filipinos the right to vote, we also give them an opportunity to be more publicly involved. Since the signing of the bill into law some days ago, overseas Filipinos have formally organized themselves into Global Filipinos, Inc. and will be looking into every advocacy for good governance. Global Filipinos, Inc. is composed of both overseas Filipinos and their local counterparts, a potent combination that will have both the money and the dedication to pursue goals of national interest. I understand that Eddie del Rosario will be representing the group in the People’s Summit on Monday at the Club Filipino organized by the Consultative Forum for Constitutional Reform and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. It is hoped that advocates for constitutional change will now be able to translate their words into action.

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The case of Farzad Bazoft. It has been such a long time, I no longer remember even his name. But I did meet a man who tried to get information on Iraq’s military secrets and was executed for it. US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone sent me two excerpts from books written which refreshed my memory on a trip to Baghdad which I made in the late 80s while I was a political exile in London. I was one of several journalists invited by the Iraqi government at the time. Also in the group was Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian born freelance journalist working for London’s Observer who would be later executed by Saddam Hussein despite strong protests from the Thatcher government. I remember one evening when a group of us were talking at the hotel lobby and the indiscreet Bazoft taunted our Iraqi guides telling them that Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was on sale at a downtown bookstore. Bazoft then invited some of us to join him for drinks at the British Club which I politely declined. Weeks later, when I had already returned to London, the newspapers published the unfortunate case of Bazoft. Apparently he never made it to the airport. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in the early 1990s recalls in the book Saddam’s Bombmaker that it was Bazoft’s case that threw open the secret on the bomb project at Al-Atheer. With the help of a British nurse, Bazoft had allegedly collected sand near Al-Atheer which would show traces of biological and chemical weapons. But the alarms went off as he dugged sand and he was arrested and later executed as a British spy. The nurse, Daphne Parish was later freed. In Arms and the Man, William Lowther writes that Bazoft may have wanted to find information that the Iraqi government wanted to keep hidden. Whether he did this as a spy or as a journalist was not resolved.

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