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.]
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Copyright 2013 Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.
