How War Lost Its Politics

How War Lost Its Politics

Mary L. Dudziak  Summer 2016

In the Gulf War (1990–91), the United States introduced new guided missiles, which made war seem cleaner and more precise (Airman Magazine)

As the Obama administration announced plans to step up its military campaign against ISIS this spring, a twenty-eight-year-old army officer, Captain Nathan Michael Smith, took President Barack Obama to court. He argued that the war against ISIS is illegal because Congress has not authorized it. Smith’s action highlights persistent problems with the legal basis for the military campaign, and has generated interest and support from leading legal scholars. And so President Obama, a law professor turned president who pledged to bring in the rule of law to restrain presidents’ use of force, finds himself the target of a lawsuit arguing that his own military initiative is unlawful.

Captain Smith is stationed in Kuwait, as part of the American military effort to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. His claimed injury is that fighting an illegal war requires him to violate his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His lawsuit challenges the fractured logic of the legal basis for the military campaign, including the idea that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against those who perpetrated the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their supporters somehow extends to an organization that did not exist at the time.

But something more fundamental underlies this dispute. The reason the president has been unable to get Congress to pass a new war authorization isn’t because Congress opposes military action against ISIS, and it isn’t a simple matter of partisan stalemate. It is because there is no real political constituency for military matters. Faraway conflicts upend lives on the battlefield. As long as someone else’s family does the fighting, U.S. military operations have little impact on Americans at home. Most Americans are protected from the costs of armed conflict. There is no required military service since Congress eliminated the draft in 1973. Other changes in the way the country wages war—relying on contractors to reduce the number of troops, and on technologies that make war appear more precise and less destructive—contribute to a buffer between American civilians and the wars their country is fighting. Without voters paying attention, neither the president nor Congress is held accountable.

Election years used to be occasions for pitched battles over whether to go to war. One hundred years ago, for example, as war raged in Europe, and American troops were engaged in skirmishes in Mexico, the question of when and where the United States should use military force was an important election issue.

No one had a larger role in making war an issue in the 1916 election than a former president: Theodore Roosevelt. Not himself a candidate that year, Roosevelt was a forceful surrogate for Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes. Ever since the British ocean liner Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, killing over a thousand, including 128 Americans, Roosevelt had excoriated President Woodrow Wilson for failing to respond militarily to defend American rights and honor.

Four days before the election, Roosevelt did his best to bring the Lusitania dead back to life in a harshly partisan address at Cooper Union in New York. Wilson had promised to hold Germany to “strict accountability,” he told his audience, yet Americans continued to die from submarine warfare. “Hundreds of American men, women and children have been murdered on the high seas” and in conflict with Mexico, Roosevelt noted. Yet Wilson had abandoned the dead, had “let them suffer without relief, and without inflicting punishment upon the wrongdoers.” Wilson should be haunted by “the shadows of men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from the graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves.”

Roosevelt’s bitter attack did not place war on the agenda of the campaign, however. The Democratic Party embraced the slogan “He kept us out of war” in support of Wilson. Roosevelt’s flamboyant belligerency enabled Wilson to run against Hughes by running against Roosevelt. The weekend before the election, a full-page ad appeared in leading newspapers that asked: “Wilson and Peace with Honor? Or Hughes with Roosevelt and War?”

The harsh campaign rhetoric was effective in one respect: it signaled to voters that the election would shape American war policy. Hughes, the losing candidate, blamed the outcome on the impact of antiwar campaigning on voters in the West and Midwest. Wilson’s election ultimately would not keep the United States out of the First World War, of course, but it gave the decision to go to war a higher threshold—a threshold that was ultimately met both for Wilson and many Americans after German submarines started sinking American ships without warning in early 1917.

In the aftermath of American engagement in a large-scale war on another continent, pacifists sought to make it more difficult for the country to become embroiled in distant conflicts. They proposed a constitutional amendment to require a public referendum before the country entered another foreign war. In 1935, 75 percent of respondents to a Gallup Poll favored its enactment. It failed in the House of Representatives by only a handful of votes. That was as far as the War Referendum amendment would go, but deep public sentiment against another faraway war led Congress to strengthen neutrality laws.

Building upon the sentiment against military engagement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, campaigning for reelection in 1936, said: “We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.” Pressing issues at home mattered most in that election year, but Roosevelt also reassured the public that he would avoid foreign entanglements. FDR would not be a reluctant warrior, like Wilson, however. Instead, as the Second World War broke out, he calibrated American engagement with an eye toward what the political climate would bear.

Americans don’t tend to think of politics as being relevant to U.S. entry into the Second World War, since the United States declared war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But the U.S. government chose sides and supported the Allies long before that attack. In September 1940, for example, Roosevelt signed a “destroyers for bases” deal with Great Britain, which transferred destroyers to England in exchange for lengthy leases of British bases. He did not seek congressional approval, but based his actions on an expansive reading of the president’s powers as commander in chief. By late spring of 1940, with Germany occupying Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, war was firmly on the agenda of that year’s presidential campaign. Republican candidate Wendell Willkie gained traction by claiming that Roosevelt would take the country to war and had a secret plan for this with foreign powers. Roosevelt responded with a pledge he would later regret, telling voters: “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

During both world wars, supporters of military engagement believed that their president could not send American troops to war without public support. Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who favored U.S. entry into the First World War, wrote in late January 1917:

Sooner or later the die will be cast and we will be at war with Germany. . . . We must nevertheless wait patiently until the Germans do something which will arouse general indignation and make all Americans alive to the peril of German success in this war.

Submarine sinkings resulting in American deaths did the trick.

Something similar was needed to mobilize political support for the Second World War. FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained that war with Japan was anticipated, but he thought the public was gripped with “a spirit of isolationism and disbelief in danger.” The administration knew they needed broad public support for war mobilization. For this to happen, “it was desirable . . . that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.” This is why it was better to wait for Japan to fire first.

In both world wars, the political climate constrained formal entry into war, but ultimately, as Theodore Roosevelt had understood, nothing stimulated war support like dead Americans.

American war politics changed in the aftermath of the Second World War, but war had not yet become disconnected from politics. President Harry S. Truman did not ask Congress to declare war before U.S. intervention in Korea in 1950, however. Instead he turned to the new United Nations Security Council. One crucial difference in going to war through a Security Council Resolution was that Truman did not need the kind of catastrophe involving loss of American lives that enabled the declarations of the First and Second World Wars.

American engagement in Vietnam began with a limited number of American “advisors” and little press coverage. President Lyndon Baines Johnson brought that war into American electoral politics in 1964. He carefully positioned himself as less belligerent than Republican nominee Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. But in contrast to Wilson and FDR who had avoided calling for military engagement before presidential elections, Johnson successfully pressed to get an authorization for the use of force in Vietnam passed before the Democratic National Convention. A draft authorization for war had been drawn up in the spring, but the president initially held off on asking Congress to pass it. He waited for an event that would galvanize popular support.

When the U.S. destroyer Maddox, on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported that it was under attack for a second time on August 4, 1964, Johnson had the incident he had been waiting for. He used the episode to get his military authorization passed, emphasizing to congressional leaders the need for a swift and strong American response. In the meantime, however, confusion surfaced about the attack, and the captain of the Maddox cabled Washington to advise that action should not be taken until the situation was evaluated. Years later, declassified documents demonstrated that the second attack never happened.

The language of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was breathtakingly broad. It did not identify an enemy or a precise geographic area, placing the judgment for war in the hands of the president. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin sought to amend the resolution to clarify that it would not authorize sending American ground troops to Vietnam. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas pressed him to drop it. An amendment would send the resolution back to the House of Representatives, so that it would not be passed before the convention. The Republicans had just nominated Goldwater, a hawk. Johnson wanted the resolution in order to look strong on defense. He would go on to be elected by a landslide in November. Four months later, 3,500 Marines, the first American ground troops, landed at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam.

President Johnson was ultimately undone by Vietnam. In 1968, over 500,000 American troops, many of them draftees, were serving in the war, and over 16,500 troops were killed in that year alone. Facing widespread antiwar protest and deep divisions in the country and in his own party, LBJ announced that he would not seek reelection. It was the last time a popular movement against war shaped the outcome of a presidential election.

Although Vietnam weakened Johnson, he left behind the legacy of a shift in the political calculus. In later elections, a candidate’s willingness to use force was now most often a positive trait, not a negative one. It seemed to show that they had the resolve to be Commander in Chief.

Johnson’s successor, Richard M. Nixon, made ending the military draft a campaign promise, fueled by the argument that the draft violated free-market principles. This had a lasting political impact. The absence of a draft took away the broader vulnerability of most Americans to their country’s use of force, severing the tie between most American families and the ultimate cost of the country’s entry into war.

Over time, serving in the military became concentrated in particular families and communities. By 2010 a smaller proportion of Americans served in the Armed Forces than at any time since before the buildup for the Second World War. As post–9/11 conflicts drag on, the impact of war has been palpable in communities around American military bases. Elsewhere in the United States, civilian life is largely unaffected. For most American civilians, war is not a personal experience. War is a story in the newspaper that can be read or ignored.

Getting rid of the draft was tremendously important to the atrophy of political engagement with American war. Because of that, restoring the draft is often seen as a corrective to the contemporary military/civilian divide. But the problem is more intractable because it is multi-causal. The relationship between the American public and war continued to change after Vietnam. Ending the draft was just the first of three important changes in the way the country goes to war that would distance the American people from the carnage wrought by their nation’s use of force.

The second development was the increased privatization of the armed services. Reliance on private military contractors grew in the 1990s in the context of a broader move to outsource government tasks to private industry. Use of contractors has expanded in the post–9/11 years. Once greatly outnumbered by troops, contractors have outnumbered U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, and about equaled them in Iraq, according to U.S. government statistics. Relying on contractors for many of the tasks traditionally performed by military personnel has enabled the United States to project more force with fewer soldiers on the line. There are also fewer military casualties, and contractor injuries and deaths are not added to military casualty statistics. The full human cost of war is dispersed and hard to track.

The third change in the way the country goes to war was technological. During Operation Desert Shield in the Persian Gulf (1990–91), the United States used new guided missiles and “smart bombs” designed to hit a precise target. In media coverage of the war, the image of a computer screen showing a bomb hitting a target made war seem clean and precise. Relying on airpower and precision-guided weapons was a conscious strategy by U.S. military leaders to minimize American casualties and “collateral damage,” otherwise known as injured and dead civilians. Reducing casualties is of course laudatory, but a key reason was to keep U.S. and civilian casualties from undermining the American public’s support for the conflict.

High-tech war has been a particular focus in the Bush and Obama administrations, with the use of drones for targeted killing. This allows the United States to project deadly force without American personnel physically present. Now, the shooter can be a continent away from the target. And media coverage is exceedingly difficult in this kind of warfare. There are no embedded reporters at the site of a drone strike, and access is limited for media who might otherwise verify or question government reporting.

Over time, this trilogy—no military draft, reliance on contractors, and high-tech warfare—has insulated the American public from the cost and the consequences of war. Without a personal stake, Americans pay little attention to their country’s ongoing wars. Presidents no longer need to wait for an attack on Americans to galvanize public support for armed conflict. There is simply no need to mobilize the citizenry.

This helps to explain the circumstances that led to Captain Smith’s lawsuit. President Obama has been relying on strained interpretations of preexisting Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, and his own presidential power as commander in chief, for authority to conduct ongoing military action in the Middle East. He asked Congress to pass a new authorization for war against ISIS. Congress appears to support this military campaign, but has not exercised its power to authorize it. The lack of an authorization does not limit Obama’s deployment of military force, however. Instead it provides a justification for the expansion of the president’s power to act on his own.

There has been much attention given to the way government secrecy about the use of force and surveillance under the Bush and Obama administrations enables unchecked presidential power. But an important cause of the absence of accountability is deep in the structure of American war politics. The direct exposure of most Americans to this war is limited to news sources and social media, when they choose to pay attention at all. With little personal stake, they make no demands of their elected officials. The inattention of voters means that members of Congress have few incentives to prioritize it. Without Congressional action, war power devolves to the president. This has resulted in ongoing war with no end in sight.

The fracturing of American war politics has been many years in the making, and there is no easy fix. Smith’s lawsuit is unlikely to get Congress to act, and most certainly won’t result in troop withdrawals. When it comes to limiting presidential power, there has simply never been a substitute for political movements against war.

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Mary L. Dudziak is a professor of Law at Emory University and the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Root and Structural Causes of War

Root and Structural Causes of War

September 1, 2005

Introduction: The Trauma of Civilization

The human invention of urban “civilization” about 3500 BC (250-300 human generations ago) coincides with the advent of patterns of systematic violence previously unknown. The development of massive civil obedience to the vertical authority structures that ushered in civilization, originally in the form of kings, has witnessed a reported 14,500 major wars. This obedience has become a habit, generally void of any memory of the autonomous freedom of pre-urban civilization tribal groups.
The new vertical power structure soon became an abstraction and an end in itself, utilizing the first megamachine (Mumford) of statehood (kings and their elite team of priests and scribes organizing huge projects) composed of human parts. Virtually all civilizations have been traumatized by:

• centralization of control with aid of bureaucracy and hierarchy
• separation of classes — stratification and lifetime division of labor
• creation of slavery (forced labor) for industrial, agricultural, military purposes
• mechanization for massive production (pyramid tombs, irrigation, palaces, etc.)
• magnification of power via a military for expanding control over adjacent territory and coercing more labor
• human sacrifice, direct or disguised
• secrecy

Psychological, Deep Root Causes of War: Millenia of Insecurity

Class and stratification ripped people from their historical roots of living in small tribal groups. This separation of people from their intimate connections with the earth, produced deep insecurity and fear. The field of ecopsychology suggests that such fragmentation created a primordial breach resulting in severe trauma and insecurity in the human psyche (Roszak). Psychologists describe “defense mechanisms” by which authentic freedoms become deferred to belief in authority structures, and their mythologies and controlling ideologies (De La Boetie, Eisler).
This pattern has contributed to a deep shame (invalidation), recognition of which is pre-empted by the newly imposed belief systems. Many successive generations of shame-based child upbringing (Miller) and shame-ethics has led to generations of patterns of violence (Gilligan). Arrogance rather than humility, denial rather than awareness, and violence against “others,” became major “defense mechanisms” to relieve anxiety created by the deep insecurities (Millburn and Conrad).
In the alternative, the ancestral memory of the high, or “rush” from experiences rallying around collective defense to a common enemy (Ehrenreich), and search for meaning in a culture of void suggests “war is a force that gives us meaning” (Hedges).
Tyranny is inherent in concentration of political, social, and economic power, whether achieved through elections, force of arms, or inheritance. The method of rule is essentially the same — achieving massive consent either through fear or propaganda/myth (De La Boetie). People have deep yearning for meaning and autonomy, remnants of their evolutionary memory, but the void is at least temporarily fulfilled through name-calling and violence with a “cause.”

Structural Causes of War

Political-economic systems, unfolding through 5 millennia of vertical authority structures, are intended to preserve privilege and class through rationalized exploitation. They are generally addicted to expansion (to acquire workers, resources, markets) to maintain their “prosperity” which has in turn been supported by the insecure masses despite detrimental consequences. The United States, with but 4.6% of the world’s population, insists on maintaining the American Way Of Life (AWOL) which consumes anywhere from 25% to nearly half the world’s resources. This “nonnegotiable” Way Of Life (Bush I), grotesquely disproportionate in its unfairness and danger to global stability, is the mother of all structural problems. It requires constant theft by force or its threat, though AWOL resides within the context of 500 years of colonialism exacted by Eurocentric “superiority” forcefully enriching its 20 percent of the world’s population through enforced impoverishment of the remaining 80 percent of “heathens and savages.”
Centralized vertical structures are similarly rooted in the origins of “America” during its “bourgeois” American revolution which initially “preserved inherited property (not human rights) as it destroyed inherited government.” The U.S. “Founding Fathers” had visions of an “empire of liberty” (Jefferson), “imperial republicanism” (Madison) and a mercantile, expansive nation, but not a vision of democracy. By the 1820s Kentucky Congressperson Henry Clay began calling for creation of “an American system.” The U.S. Constitution is based on feudal principles since the citizenry is both beholden to and the responsibility of the highest Lord, in our case the strong central government. This pre-empted the ideas of the original 1773 Revolution by farmers and small communities who rose up opposed to any strong central authority structure (Raphael), whether imposed from England or a homemade version of same. The early age of mercantilism was succeeded by laissez faire, then corporation capitalism.
A class-conscious philosophy permeated from our origins combining defense of private property with belief in the necessity of expansion to assure prosperity. Since the nation’s founding, there have been more than 500 overt military interventions in over 100 countries, and since World War II likely more than 15,000 covert, destabilizing actions around the world enhancing selfish U.S. economic interests, always at the expense of other’s well-being.
“America” has been mythologized in language describing it as “republican,” then “democratic.” In fact it has been an insidious version of a White Male Supremacy society–a nation ruled by oligarchs and their supportive plutocrats. “Americans” have insisted on believing their rhetoric of being a “democratic” society endowed by a unique gift of “exceptionalism.” Its second “bourgeois” revolution (the Civil War) entrenched property power in factories and railroads as it abolished property in man” (Lynd). The granting to corporations the constitutional rights of legal persons usurped the Bill of Rights (especially 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments). The military-industrial-intelligence-information complex continually makes huge sums of money on war and destruction under the cover of “Constitutional democracy.” Utilizing the phoney GNP (Gross National Product), every event is commodified for profit.
U.S. historian William Appleman Williams describes U.S. America as Empire As A Way of Life(1980). Author Derrick Jenson describes the The Culture of Make Believe (2002), a fantasy built on three unrecognized holocausts, a chronic pattern of terrorism that has stolen (1) landfrom the Natives, (2) labor from Africans and others, and (3) resources from virtually everywhere, at gunpoint, killing millions with virtual total impunity, which has enabled it to “enjoy” a holiday from history to the present day. This is consistent with the pattern of virtually all “civilizations” since their advent some 5,500 years ago
Western cultures are addicted to technology enabling a more comfortable, convenient, and faster Way Of Life, at the expense of others and the Earth. Obsessive belief in the myth of progress through large (rather than small and local), capital (rather than labor) intensive, violent (versus nonviolent), and complex (versus simple) technologies, pre-empts intermediate technology, local ingenuity, and preservation of regional economic and cultural sufficiency independent from far-away external inputs.

Conclusion

The American and Western Way Of Life has, during 500 years of colonialism, produced a spoiled 20 percent while impoverishing 80 percent, rationalized with racist ideology and Eurocentric arrogance. We live in a bubble of make-believe. The “American” society ishabituated to obedience to vertical authority structures (using the oxymoron, “representative, Constitutional democracy”) and is literally addicted to a Way of Life enabled by the short-term blip of an oil-based economy. We must recover our archetypal characteristics of empathy and humility enabling participation in mutual aid in smaller, sustainable communities with local autonomy. This is the healthy social organization that our human memory has known for more than 99.9 percent of our Hominid evolutionary journey. Horizontal, radical democracy is currently being taught to us by the Mayan, Zapatista revolution in southern Mexico. We would do well to heed the lessons of how to live sustainably without expansion.

References

De La Boetie, Etienne. (1997, 1553). The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. (1997). Blood Rites: The History of Origins and Passions of War. New York: Henry Holt.
Eisler, Riane. (1987). The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Gilligan, James. (1997). Violence: Reflections On A National Epidemic. New York: Vintage.
Hedges, Chris. (2002). War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Public Affairs.
Jensen, Derrick. (2002). The Culture Of Make Believe. New York: Context Books.
Lynd, Staughton. (1982). Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Milburn, Michael A., and Sheree D. Conrad. (1996). The Politics of Denial. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
Miller, Alice. (1983). For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Montagu, Ashley, Ed. (1978). Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mumford, Lewis. (1966). The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
Raphael, Ray. (2002). The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord. New York: The New Press.
Roszak, Theodore, Gomes, Mary E., and Kanner, Allen D. (1995). Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club.
Williams, William Appleman. (1980). Empire As A Way Of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, William Appleman. (1961). The Contours of American History. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.

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Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler?

Forbes

Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler?

Paul Johnson, Contributor

This story appears in the May 5, 2014 issue of Forbes.

As Mein Kampf makes clear, Hitler sought to unite all the people of German speech and culture into one state, or Reich, preferably by peaceful nego tiation, otherwise by war and conquest.

To do this Hitler needed to void the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany had signed after its defeat in the Great War of 1914-18. First he marched into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized under the treaty, stationing regular army divisions and tanks there. The Allies–Britain and France–did nothing.

Next Hitler marched into German-speaking Austria–an annexation known as the Anschluss. Having been stripped of their empire and reduced to an insignificant small state, the Austrians were glad to become part of a mighty Reich. Again, the Allies did nothing.

Hitler’s next claim was the Sudetenland. This was a territory on the border of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking people who were absorbed into the new state against their will. The Allies allowed this landgrab to stand in an agreement reached at a Munich summit meeting in September 1938. This was regarded as a surrender to Hitler, but British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who negotiated the agreement, argued that Hitler was merely asserting the rights of the Sudeten Germans, who wanted to belong to his Reich.

The falsity of Chamberlain’s position and Hitler’s deceit were proved within months. The Sudetenland’s annexation had made the Czech frontier indefensible, and in March 1939 Hitler invaded. The Czechs put up no resistance, and the rest of the country fell into Hitler’s hands without a shot being fired.

From left to right (front): Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Alarmed, the Allies signed a protective treaty with Poland. But Hitler also had claims against the Poles, in particular the German-speaking port of Danzig, which  the Versailles Treaty had ceded to the Poles as their “outlet to the sea.” When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Allies reluctantly fought.

Had the Allies stopped Hitler at the beginning, when he was remilitarizing the Rhineland, he’d have been overthrown and World War II avoided. But the only one pointing this out was Winston Churchill–and his was a lonely voice.

Today’s drift toward war with Russia seems like a replay of the past. Putin is a Russian nationalist, who believes in a strong Stalinist state. His goal is to reverse the events of 1989–the end of the Soviet state and dissolution of its enormous empire. He seeks to do this by using what remains of Russia’s Stalinist heritage: the military, a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and immense resources of natural gas and other forms of energy. These are powerful tools to wield against the various weak states that were part of the U.S.S.R. None has nuclear weapons, and most are dependent on the (relatively) cheap energy Russia supplies. All have ethnic Russian minorities, who speak the language, boast of their superior Russian culture and claim to have been relegated to second-class citizenship. Putin can rely on these minorities to agitate for Russian intervention whenever he wants–most importantly in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His successful annexation of Crimea is greatly encouraging to his long-term plans, and it’s clear he’ll use everything in his power, including military force, to reconstruct his empire.

SHADES OF MUNICH

What’s to stop Putin? The West is led by the modern equivalents of Chamberlain: President François Hollande of France is a political nonentity repudiated by his own compatriots; Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have both ruled out the use of force to stop Putin from annexing Ukraine; and worst of all, President Barack Obama–the one man who has the power to stop Putin in his tracks–does nothing. He makes Neville Chamberlain seem like a bellicose activist.

The U.S. is the richest country in the world. Thanks to the fracking revolution, it has the means to meet the energy needs of all the former Soviet states. Its fleets and armies make Russia’s much reduced military power seem puny. It could move troops and aircraft into Ukraine within 24 hours, and its fleets could ensure protection to the Baltic states in a way that Putin would find unanswerable. Yet Obama makes no decisive moves. What ails the man? Is it cowardice? Indecision? A kind of executive paralysis he tends to display when firmness is called for? Clearly there’s something fundamentally wrong with the U.S. President. Meanwhile, Putin, who runs what is, in essence, a second-rate nation with a weak and declining demographic structure, behaves as if he rules the Earth.

Sadly, there is no Churchillian voice to sound the alarm and call the democratic world to action.

An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists

ALT-MARKET.COM

An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists

Wednesday, 08 October 2014 02:39  

Brandon Smith 

 

It's sad to say with such finality, but a universal fact of existence is that most of the people you meet in this life are fundamentally and functionally ignorant. Not necessarily stupid, but certainly ignorant. Ignorance comes not from a lack of intelligence, but from a denial of knowledge and truth. That is to say, ignorance takes hold when people decide to act as though they know and understand a thing, even if they do not. Ignorance prevails when a society or nation chooses to value the appearance of expertise, to value the theater of overconfidence, and to cheer for the bluster of morons rather than admit that they have unanswered questions on subjects they do not yet grasp. For nothing is worse for the self absorbed than to acknowledge that they do not know.

Entire nations have fallen throughout history because of this terrible weakness...
By extension, such ignorance is not just an inherent disease but also an easily exploitable disease. When we refuse to think critically and examine our surroundings thoroughly, we become like grazing gazelles oblivious to the predators encircling us in the tall grass. And, just as there are predatory individuals that hide amongst us, there are are also predatory oligarchs that camouflage themselves as benevolent politicos and financial professionals standing above us. Normal predators we fear, establishment predators we invite into our homes as protectors, saviors, and partners.

The disease of ignorance leaves us vulnerable to many other plagues, including literal plagues like the Ebola virus. When we take the establishment at its word concerning the threat of Ebola outbreak, we make ourselves vulnerable. When people assume that the worst could never happen to them, history shows us that it inevitably does.

The recent discovery of an Ebola infected patient in Dallas, Texas has led to reasonable concern from the general population, but mainstream media efforts along with CDC and White House spin have subdued any practical response by the citizenry. The constant droning voice of the establishment claims there is nothing to be worried about; that even if there was an outbreak in the U.S., it would be quickly squashed by highly prepared medical response teams.

First and foremost, the existence of just one Ebola infected person within America's borders indicates a likelihood of others, or the possibility of others in the near future unless policies and procedures are changed. As far as I can tell, the government has no intention of introducing rational fail-safes such as requiring mandatory quarantine for those seeking to reenter the U.S. from known outbreak regions, shutting down unrestricted travel into the country from countries with Ebola, training hospitals properly in the identification of the disease, or committing mass resources to quelling Ebola in hot zones before it reaches our shores, at least not in time to make a difference.

Secondly, the establishment also has no intention of giving the general public accurate information as to the behavior and dangers of Ebola. Those I have spoken with in the medical field including some who work within major city hospitals have related to me that the CDC has not been honest in its assessment of the probability of outbreak. For example, the CDC is consistently reminding the public that Ebola is not an “airborn” disease, and this is technically true as far as the science indicates. However, they forget to mention that it is indeed a “droplet born” disease, meaning, it can travel through the air carried in an infected cough or sneeze. The tight quarters of an airplane make for a perfect petri dish, with droplets and particulates passing back and forth through the same space and oxygen for hours at a time. The spread of Ebola is nowhere near as containable as the CDC claims.

I have been told that most hospitals are completely unprepared to fend off an outbreak of a virus as destructive as Ebola. Little to no standardized training has taken place, and some facilities are only now putting together a list of emergency procedures. Human error within the chain of care also occurs often, as we saw in Dallas, Texas, and these errors can lead to greater infection in a hospital environment.

CDC and WHO efforts in countries like Liberia have been so ineffective and halfhearted it leads one to question why their budgets are in the billions of dollars? Where is all their capital and their resources going if not to bring an unprecedented hammer down on a clearly dangerous outbreak of Ebola? Why is the virus being allowed to flourish rather than being destroyed right where it started? Where has the full force of the CDC been for the past several months while death gestates in Africa?

The one legitimate function of government, any government, is to protect the right of the people to pursue their own life, liberty, and happiness. I think stopping the invasion of mortal viruses would fall into this category. The one job our government is MANDATED to do, and it refuses to do it. Why?

I have made the point many times in the past and I'll make it here again; when a catastrophe takes place, or a crisis is imminent, ask yourself, who ultimately benefits? I believe that the lack of strong prevention response from our government, an inadequacy which is obvious to all of the health care workers I have talked with and to anyone who has the sense to do their own research, could be absolutely deliberate. I believe the spread of Ebola may be desired by certain power brokers, and here is why:

The Perfect Cover Event

I have been warning for quite some time that the banking establishment in particular is well aware that an economic collapse of incredible proportions is coming. In fact, they have done everything in their power to make one possible. This collapse, according to my research, is designed to clear the way through monetary carpet bombing for a new international Bretton Woods-style agreement which will plant the foundation of a truly global economic system centralized and controlled by a highly select few elites. Needless to say, the internationalists would prefer not to take the blame for such a calamity.

Regional or widespread war, terrorism, cyber attacks, etc, are all useful vehicles to conjure mass confusion, and can also be used as scapegoats for the eventual downfall of our economy. That said, a viral pandemic truly surpasses them all in effectiveness. All other tragedies could easily be tied to the first “domino” or “linchpin” (as Rand Corporation calls it) of Ebola transmission, but the strategy goes deeper than this...

An Act Of Nature

Even though most people are well aware of the fact that governments have been engineering biological weapons for decades, few people think political leadership would ever use them at all, let alone use them on the people they are tasked to protect. Even with the complacency and inaction of our government in terms of the response to Ebola, the general assumption by most of the American population will be that any viral outbreak is a product of nature, not of men.
Acts of nature are not things that the common man can easily rebel against. People rebel against governments and corrupt despots all the time, but not the plague. If a viral pandemic strikes, nearly everything a government does after the fact, no matter how corrupt or destructive, can be rationalized as necessary for the greater good of the greater number. If anyone does rebel, they will be labeled as pure evil, for they are now disrupting the government's ability to stop the pandemic from spreading, and thus, are partly responsible for the mass deaths that follow.
During a viral outbreak, government becomes mother, father, nurse and protector. No matter how abusive they are, most people will still look to them for safety and guidance, primarily because they have no knowledge of disease. What they do not understand, they will fear, and fear always drives the ignorant into the arms of tyrants.  One should also take into consideration the fact that most globalists lean towards the ideology of eugenics and promote the concept of population reduction.  A pandemic would fulfill this desire nicely...

Rationalized Economic Collapse

Who would question the event of an economic collapse in the wake of an Ebola soaked nightmare? Who would want to buy or sell? Who would want to come in contact with strangers to generate a transaction? Who would even leave their house? Ebola treatment in first world nations has advantages of finance and a cleaner overall health environment, but what if economic downturn happens simultaneously? America could experience third world status very quickly, and with it, all the unsanitary conditions that result in an exponential Ebola death rate.

The treasury, labor department, and private Federal Reserve have gone to vast lengths to skew statistics and rig markets with trillions in fiat dollars. Despite historic numbers of Americans falling off unemployment rolls, imploding shipping and manufacturing statistics, and the U.S. teetering on the edge of global “de-dollarization”, a large portion of the citizenry has been led to believe that economic recovery is assured. What they do not understand is that fiscal implosion is unavoidable, and the whole bull market is a circus designed to distract.

Amidst even a moderate or controlled viral scenario, stocks and bonds will undoubtedly crash, a crash that was going to happen anyway. The international banks who created the mess get off blameless, while Ebola, an act of nature, becomes the ultimate scapegoat for every disaster that follows.

Rationalized Travel Restrictions

If you want to lock down the movement of a population to prevent the spread of dissenting groups or ideas, I can't think of a better way than to claim it is to prevent the spread of a deadly virus. Our government and world health officials are approaching Ebola with an attitude of nonchalance right now, because prevention is NOT part of the plan. When Ebola strikes hard within our country, that is when they will finally decide that strict measures are needed. Suddenly, those borders that they could never secure before will become impassable for you and I. And traveling between states or perhaps even counties may be extraordinarily difficult. “Papers please...” will become the new mantra of petty authority.

Forced Health Measures

Do not be surprised if an Ebola vaccine of some kind suddenly appears on the market just as the situation begins to turn tragic. And, do not be surprised if said vaccine is a total sham that ends up making more people sick. Expect that forced vaccinations will take place, especially as a prerequisite for receiving treatment from CDC or FEMA hazmat facilities. Expect that these facilities will become nothing more than obscure prisons for the sick where people quietly die. Expect that every American will be required to be tested and screened, with biometric data carefully stored, beginning with airport travel (once the virus is already entrenched).  The options are endless for abuse in terms of totalitarian health laws when the public thinks they could end up bleeding from every orifice and dying of liver failure.

Rationalized Martial Law 

Imagine if some Americans decide they don't like being poked, prodded, tagged and bagged by the establishment. Imagine they decide to fight back, Ebola be damned. An already uphill battle becomes an epic struggle when a large percentage of the population thinks you are a monster that wants to hasten the spread of Ebola. Not that the ignorant count for much in the grand scheme of history, but waking at least some of them up in the future to the bigger threat (the globalists) is hard to do when all they can see is devilish microbes. Those who plan to combat the rise of the internationalists, as I plan to, should accept now the likelihood that the only people we will have on our side tomorrow are the people we have been able to wake up today. Martial law will be welcomed by the rest.

International Response

An international response is almost guaranteed during a major pandemic. Sovereignty will be tossed in the dirt. UN and WHO teams and perhaps even troops could accompany an aid package to the U.S. Think of the glorious propaganda, as globalists tell stories of how they “saved humanity” by surpassing the barbaric practices of national and individual sovereignty, defeated the Ebola virus (after millions of deaths, of course), and out of the ashes, the “phoenix” of global governance was born. If they succeed, imagine what the history books will say for the next several centuries.

What Do We Do?

There are no silver bullet solutions. There never have been and there never will be. People looking for them will be sorely disappointed and ill prepared after wasting so much time searching for an easy out. The only answer is for communities of people to take their own survival into their own hands and become as self sufficient as possible. This means that neighborhoods, towns, and counties will have to take precautions now to steel themselves for a pandemic event, instead of simply sitting on their hands and expecting government officials to save them.

The treatments for Ebola in most cases involve nothing more than the steady replacement of vital fluids, electrolytes and plasma until the patient's body can build up an immunity to the virus. Those with stronger immune systems before contraction are more likely to survive and beat back the disease. Government care, for the most part, is NOT going to save many people either way. That is to say, your survival will depend on you and your immune system, not them. Communities that make efforts to prevent contact and that strengthen individual immunity will have a better chance of survival than going into any government run hazmat facility. Government is not needed, and will often end up being more of a threat than the virus itself. Groups I work closely with and talk with, many with their own doctors and nurses, are already setting prevention guidelines in motion.

If you can prove you don't need the system to save you, their rationale for attempting to control you is weakened. The ignorant will still try to demonize us for our efforts, but self sufficiency is all we have in the face of this kind of storm. If we can lead by example with our own successful health standards while saving people where the establishment could not, perhaps we can turn the tide.




You can contact Brandon Smith at:  brandon@alt-market.com

Noam Chomsky: Are We on the Verge of Total Self-Destruction?

News & Politics  

TomDispatch / By Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: Are We on the Verge of Total Self-Destruction?

 

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. 

 

June 4, 2013  |  

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What is the future likely to bring?  A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.  So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now -- assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious -- and you’re looking back at what’s happening today.  You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction.  So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is: What are people doing about it?  None of this is a secret.  It’s all perfectly open.  In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions.  There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them.  If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.  Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada.  They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world -- Australia, India, South America -- there are battles going on, sometimes wars.  In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences.  In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand.  The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.”

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it -- and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil.  He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting.  Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer.  Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product.  In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use.  That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer.  You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background.  Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.  At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States.  Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside.  What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere.  Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something.  Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets.  It’s not because the population doesn’t want it.  Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming.  It’s institutional structures that block change.  Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian -- if there is one -- would see.  He might also read today’s scientific journals.  Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

“The Most Dangerous Moment in History”

The other issue is nuclear war.  It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow.  You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  It’s well understood.  So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called “the most dangerous moment in history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor.  Which it was.  It was a very close call, and not the only time either.  In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.  The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.  There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey.  Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time.  They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer.  Kennedy and his advisors considered it -- and rejected it.  At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half.  So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we -- and only we -- have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others -- and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public.  Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image.  He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on.  The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned -- try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa.  These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares?  We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world.  That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert.  It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon.  Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office.  Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer.  Essentially, these were mock attacks.  The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike.  Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call.  And it goes on like that.

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran.  There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises.  Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try.  They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West -- not in the Arab world, not in Asia -- the gravest threat to world peace.  It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here.  Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace?  Actually there are quite a few.  One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran.  In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region.  That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward.  And there were ways to proceed.  Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this.  What happened?

You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported -- only in specialist journals.  In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting.  A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right.  The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states.  Nothing resulted.  So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population -- it doesn’t hurt the regime -- and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing.  North Korea may be the craziest country in the world.  It’s certainly a good competitor for that title.  But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways.  Why would they behave the way they do?  Just imagine ourselves in their situation.  Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing.  Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply -- a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.   And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive.  The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination.  It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death.  How magnificent!  It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present.  There’s an interesting recent history.  In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country.  President Clinton intervened and blocked it.  Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test.  The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides.  When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea -- “axis of evil” and all that -- so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program.  By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement.  In between, other things happened.  In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development.  In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements.  They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it.  He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.  The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program.  And that’s the way it’s been going.

It’s well known.  You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.  What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy.  You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own.  You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening.  We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us.  In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past.  They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way.  Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are.  Yes, they are.  But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives.  The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous.  So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture.  Unless people do something about it.  We always can.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and most recently (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

[Note: This piece was adapted (with the help of Noam Chomsky) from anonline video interview that Javier Naranjo, a Colombian poet and professor, did for the website What, which is dedicated to integrating knowledge from different fields with the aim of encouraging the balance between the individual, society, and the environment.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.

Tom Dispatch / By Tom Engelhardt

 

 

Feet to the Fire: Time to Hold the Big Energy Villains Who Kill the Earth While Making a Killing Accountable

 

We've heard plenty about terrorists. Time to talk about the 'terrarists' and make them pay for their crimes.

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Marilyn Volan/Shutterstock.com

May 23, 2013  |  

 

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We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.

The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world.  Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific.  Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes.  And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either.  But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.

In the case of the terrarists -- and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell -- you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.

It wasn’t that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.

How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do In the Planet

None of this was exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988. It took a while -- thanks in part to the terrarists -- but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.

Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing “doubts” about the science (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.

The peak oil people hadn’t been wrong when they suggested years ago that we would soon hit a limit in oil production from which decline would follow.  The problem was that they were focused on traditional or “conventional” liquid oil reserves obtained from large reservoirs in easy-to-reach locations on land or near to shore.  Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and (if I can use that word) energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves (sometimes by processes that themselves burn striking amounts of fossil fuels): fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar-sands production, among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “extreme” or “tough” energy -- oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.  In many cases, moreover, the supplies being acquired like heavy oil and tar sands are more carbon-rich than other fuels and emit more greenhouse gases when consumed.  These companies have even begun using climate change itself -- in the form of a melting Arctic -- to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies.  With the imprimatur of the Obama administration, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been preparing to test out possible drilling techniques in the treacherous waters off Alaska.

Call it irony, if you will, or call it a nightmare, but Big Oil evidently has no qualms about making its next set of profits directly off melting the planet.  Its top executives continue to plan their futures (and so ours), knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat, the very temperature range that for so long made life comfortable for humanity.

Their prior knowledge of the damage they are doing is what should make this a criminal activity.  And there are corporate precedents for this, even if on a smaller scale.  The lead industry, the asbestos industry, and the tobacco companies all knew the dangers of their products, made efforts to suppress the information or instill doubt about it even as they promoted the glories of what they made, and went right on producing and selling while others suffered and died.

And here’s another similarity: with all three industries, the negative results conveniently arrived years, sometimes decades, after exposure and so were hard to connect to it.  Each of these industries knew that the relationship existed. 
Each used that time-disconnect as protection.  One difference: if you were a tobacco, lead, or asbestos exec, you might be able to ensure that your children and grandchildren weren’t exposed to your product.  In the long run, that’s not a choice when it comes to fossil fuels and CO2, as we all live on the same planet (though it's also true that the well-off in the temperate zones are unlikely to be the first to suffer).

If Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 plane hijackings or the Tsarnaev brothers’ homemade bombs constitute terror attacks, why shouldn’t what the energy companies are doing fall into a similar category (even if on a scale that leaves those events in the dust)?  And if so, then where is the national security state when we really need it? Shouldn’t its job be to safeguard us from terrarists and terracide as well as terrorists and their destructive plots?

The Alternatives That Weren’t

It didn’t have to be this way.

On July 15, 1979, at a time when gas lines, sometimes blocks long, were a disturbing fixture of American life, President Jimmy Carter spoke directly to the American people on television for 32 minutes, calling for a concerted effort to end the country’s oil dependence on the Middle East.  “To give us energy security,” he announced,

“I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun... Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.  Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

It’s true that, at a time when the science of climate change was in its infancy, Carter wouldn’t have known about the possibility of an overheating world, and his vision of “alternative energy” wasn’t exactly a fossil-fuel-free one.  Even then, shades of today or possibly tomorrow, he was talking about having “more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias.”  Still, it was a remarkably forward-looking speech.

Had we invested massively in alternative energy R&D back then, who knows where we might be today?  Instead, the media dubbed it the “malaise speech,” though the president never actually used that word, speaking instead of an American “crisis of confidence.”  While the initial public reaction seemed positive, it didn’t last long.  In the end, the president's energy proposals were essentially laughed out of the room and ignored for decades.

As a symbolic gesture, Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the White House.  (“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”)  As it turned out, “a road not taken” was the accurate description.  On entering the Oval Office in 1981, Ronald Reagan caught the mood of the era perfectly.  One of his first acts was to order the removal of those panels and none were reinstalled for three decades, until Barack Obama was president.

Carter would, in fact, make his mark on U.S. energy policy, just not quite in the way he had imagined.  Six months later, on January 23, 1980, in his last State of the Union Address, he would proclaim what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear,” he said. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

No one would laugh him out of the room for that.  Instead, the Pentagon would fatefully begin organizing itself to protect U.S. (and oil) interests in the Persian Gulf on a new scale and America’s oil wars would follow soon enough.  Not long after that address, it would start building up a Rapid Deployment Force in the Gulf that would in the end become U.S. Central Command.  More than three decades later, ironies abound: thanks in part to those oil wars, whole swaths of the energy-rich Middle East are in crisis, if not chaos, while the big energy companies have put time and money into a staggeringly fossil-fuel version of Carter’s “alternative” North America.  They’ve focused on shale oil, and on shale gas as well, and with new production methods, they are reputedly on the brink of turning the United States into a “new Saudi Arabia.”

If true, this would be the worst, not the best, of news.  In a world where what used to pass for good news increasingly guarantees a nightmarish future, energy “independence” of this sort means the extraction of ever more extreme energy, ever more carbon dioxide heading skyward, and ever more planetary damage in our collective future.  This was not the only path available to us, or even to Big Oil.

With their staggering profits, they could have decided anywhere along the line that the future they were ensuring was beyond dangerous.  They could themselves have led the way with massive investments in genuine alternative energies (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, algal, and who knows what else), instead of the exceedingly small-scale ones they made, often for publicity purposes.  They could have backed a widespread effort to search for other ways that might, in the decades to come, have offered something close to the energy levels fossil fuels now give us.  They could have worked to keep the extreme-energy reserves that turn out to be surprisingly commonplace deep in the Earth.
And we might have had a different world (from which, by the way, they would undoubtedly have profited handsomely).  Instead, what we’ve got is the equivalent of a tobacco company situation, but on a planetary scale.  To complete the analogy, imagine for a moment that they were planning to produce even more prodigious quantities not of fossil fuels but of cigarettes, knowing what damage they would do to our health.  Then imagine that, without exception, everyone on Earth was forced to smoke several packs of them a day.
If that isn’t a terrorist -- or terrarist -- attack of an almost unimaginable sort, what is?  If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is?  And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term?

To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?