EDITORIAL #20 (Saturday March 10, broadcast date). War and Warming. Christian Parenti. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011). Original draft of 988 words. See below for shortened radio version.
Title: This is Dick Bennett with War and Warming editorial #20. My title: The Catastrophic Convergence of Wars, US Neo-Liberal economics, and Warming
The subject of these editorials is war and warming, and I turn now to several emphasizing warming. My chief source today is Christian Parenti’s book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.
Climate change is happening, and its consequences are everywhere experienced by increasing and increasingly extreme weather events: heat, desertification, agricultural disruption, hurricanes, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, coastal inundations. These roots of human conflict are being experienced around the world, causing more civil and cross-border wars and more refugees, and more species extinctions.
Sea levels are already among the world’s climate change related greatest stresses, and are estimated to rise an average of 5 feet over the next 90 years. Such heights will lead to massive dislocations. One study projected that 700 million climate refugees will be on the move by 2050. The modern era’s first massive climate refugees were the five hundred thousand Bangladeshis made homeless when half of Bhola Island flooded in 2005. In Bangladesh an estimated 22 million people will be forced from their homes by 2050 because of climate change.
India has almost completed a militarized border fence along its 2,500-mile frontier with Bangladesh, and Hindu anti-immigrant forces are agitating to deport refugee Bangladeshi.
Meanwhile, twenty-two Pacific Island nations, home to 7 million people, are planning for relocation as rising seas threaten them with national annihilation. Where will they go, and how will they be received?
In the United States, also building a wall against Latin Americans, What will happen when its coastal cities flood?
Globally, What chaos and violence will result when Shanghai, New York City, London, and Tokyo are under water?
Climate change arrives in a world already in crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of ceaseless wars and endemic poverty. It’s a catastrophic convergence of political, economic, and environmental disasters.
The Pentagon calls climate change a “threat multiplier.” All across the planet, extreme weather and water scarcity escalate existing social and international conflicts. There are some 46 countries—home to some 3 billion people—in which effects of climate change, interacting with political problems, create a high expectation of internal and cross-border wars.
US and western military planners recognize a world of civil war, refugees, pogroms, and social breakdown. But instead of building a caring, rescuing world, the US particularly, President Trump’s 2018 budget, provides $700 billion for a global, open-ended, violent counterinsurgency.
Resistance:
Political adaptation means transforming human relationships from their present violence, to new peaceful relationships including economic redistribution and diplomacy instead of militarism.
We need a new metaphor for our crisis. Now US leaders and their followers see themselves as in an armed lifeboatresponding to climate change by arming, excluding, neglecting, repressing, policing, and killing. Our lifeboat is the wealthiest and best built and armed, and several more intend to survive similarly. All other lifeboats descend in quality toward chaos; many are leaking; some are sinking.
To speak straightforwardly, fortress USA (Pentagon, Wall Street, White House, Congress, wealthy individuals) is developing a militarized adaptation to climate change to contain failing and failed states, or-- violent counterinsurgency forever.
But will this adaptation be successful? Will not the collapse of the Global South take us all down? If climate change is allowed to destroy whole economies and nations, will walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, permanently deployed mercenaries, or nuclear bombs save us?
References #20, March 10:
Christian Parenti. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. 2011. Chapters 1 and 2, Notes pp. 246-7.
Related:
Cleo Paskal. Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map. 2010.
Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda. A Climate of Conflict: The Links Between Climate Change and War. 2008.
EDITORIAL #19 (Saturday March 3, broadcast date). Warming, Denial, War. Michael Mann and Tom Toles. The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016).
Title: Global Warming: Deniers Delayed Action, Warriors Diverted the Needed Funds.
The Deniers
My last editorial dealt with the environmental costs of militarism. My subject today is two of the many obstacles to public acceptance of the scientific facts of global warming. First, the anti-science deniers of climate warming. They are of several kinds, among them: the officers of organizations and front groups established by corporations or wealthy individuals to confuse the public; the media talking heads, public relations mercenaries, and politicians who serve as accomplices; and the media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for business as usual propaganda. I will identify some of the politicians. The second obstacle to public understanding is the enormous diversion of tax money to the US empire for oil, rationalized by fear mongering. The additional costs of warming to warring make the subject of warming doubly repugnant to a financially stressed populace, and the massive fearmongering by the Pentagon and its warrior allies of foreign “terrorists” everywhere wanting to hurt us, reinforces the people’s evasion of climate realities. My chief source today isThe Madhouse Effect by Michael Mann and Tom Toles.
Florida has maybe the worst situation. With 1,200 miles of coastline and more than 5 million residents who would be displaced by just 10 feet of sea-level rise, Florida has more to lose by unmitigated climate change than any other state. So what was Republican Governor Rick Scott’s plan to protect his state? He proposed banning the use of the terms climate change and global warming in all official state communications and publications. And Florida’s US senator and former presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio? Heattacked the scientists, denied any human role in warming, and oppose all viable policy solutions.
Climate denialism is not only coastal. Senator James Inhofe (R. Okla.) is one of the worst. He declared that climate change is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” And Republican Representative Joe Barton of Texas, said: “the science is not settled, and…is actually going the other way,” “we may in fact be going into a cooling period,” “C02 is rising, but it is not necessarily…causing temperature to rise.” He was chair of the House committee on Energy and Commerce. Both Inhofe and Barton received considerable money from the fossil fuel industry during their congressional fossil fuel industry service.
Global Warming and Wars
Global warming will increase conflict. The population is increasing. Warming will increase competition among a growing global population over less food, less water, and less land—a prescription for a storm of wars small and large. That storm has long been brewing. The ongoing drought in Syria was made worse by the aggravating effects of climate change, increasing population, and increasing scarcity of water, all of which played a role in the civil unrest and social instability that led to the civil war there, in which the US has intervened.
Let’s never forget the foreign wars we are fighting in dangerous regions of the world, like the Middle East to keep oil flowing to the US and its allies. The US had as of October 2015, approximately 35,000 U.S. military personnel in the Middle East. In Iraq in 2016, 5000 and in the other ME countries. And that’s not counting the contractors keeping them combat operating. Think of these wars as a $100 billion subsidy to the fossil fuels industry, courtesy of the US taxpayer.
Conclusion
Lying deniers of warming delayed government action to mitigate and adapt to the effects of warming—needed on the massive scale of the Marshall Plan perhaps plus the Apollo Moon space flight. The warriors diverted the money we needed and need for coastal cities, for all the sea walls, the removal of towns and cities to inland locations, for forest fire-fighting, for recovering from hurricanes and tornadoes, and the list continues into the trillions of dollars.
Our executive and congressional leaders were first warned by James Hansen in the 1980s. We are not much better prepared today for the advancing warming catastrophe as then. 666 words add no more.
References:
Michael Mann and Tom Toles. The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016).
Related: --James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore. Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Greystone Books, 2009. “This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale.”
Dr. Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, UNPRECEDENTED CRIME: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival. 2018. The first half ratchets up the Hoggan/Littlemore exposes to urge prosecution of truth-deniers.
#18 (Sat. Feb. 24 broadcast date). War v. Environment. Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (2009).
Title: The Military Bridge from Holocene to Anthropocene
What are your favorite ironies today? Let me suggest two more. One: The fortress at the center of Baghdad is called the “Green Zone.” Two: In 2008, while the Burj Dubai tower was being built (twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was saying Farewell to the Holocene, Hello Anthropocene!
The Holocene epoch of stable climate that allowed our civilization has ended. Because of the extraordinary human buildup of population, consumption in affluent countries, capitalism, economic growth, CO2/greenhouse gases, warming, weather instability, deforestation, acidification of the oceans, and mass destruction of animals and plants, the Anthropocene epoch has begun. Humans have forced evolution itself into a new, rapidly developing trajectory.
Perhaps the single greatest institutional contributor to warming, the largest single source of pollution in the world, is US militarism; in particular, the military in its most ferocious mode, the US military at war, now ceaseless. The military produces enough greenhouse gases to place the entire globe in danger of extinction.
The scale of environmental damage over the last half century is unprecedented. Falling water tables, shrinking forest cover, declining species diversity all presage ecosystems in distress. These trends are now widely acknowledged as emanating from forces of humanity's own making; ironically however, war, that most destructive of human behaviors, is commonly bypassed.
The disregard that all wars engender for all living things, especially for ostensible enemies, is so common as to be unremarked, and the Pentagon keeps no record of numbers of enemy combatants or civilians killed. The private Information Clearing House, as of January 2009, counted Iraq War civilian deaths at 1,297,997 since the invasion in 2003. I have found no record of the cows and chicken, dogs and cats, birds and snakes, crickets or butterflies killed during those or any other years or wars.
If humans who were seeking to avoid death were so slaughtered, how enormous must have been the decimation of other species from the shooting, firing, dropping, exploding, and incinerating. The “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq began at 10:15 the evening of March 19, 2003, when some 1,700 bombers and fighter planes flew some 1,400 sorties and fired 504 cruise missiles directly into Baghdad. In the first two days 800 cruise missiles were fired, one every four minutes, day and night. Each missile weighed about 3,000 pounds, adding up to a total of 1,200 tons, or 2,400,000 pounds of explosives.
When the US goes to war against a foreign nation it is a war not only against people, but against the Earth, the soil and animals and plants, in the most far-reaching, annihilating ways. The earth can no longer absorb the punishment of war of the ferocity that the greatest superpower in history is capable of inflicting.
Yet the US will not only not let go its will to dominate the world; rather it is tightening its grip. In its latest National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon declared a new Cold War with both China and Russia and promised to wage the war around the globe. That is, it is not a defense strategy, but an aggressive attempt to justify a massively expensive military buildup for global control, the effects of which on the environment and climate are beyond imagination.
What we need is an International Rescue Strategy against the consequences of the onrushing climate catastrophe that includes not only coastal city adaptations to rising seas but relief for global economic inequality within and among nations, and millions of displaced refugees. Instead, the Pentagon offers us the old, ruinous, ostensible threat of Cold War adversaries. As Pentagon Secretary Jim Mattis expressed it, “Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” To the Pentagon, China and Russia threaten the world, not warming, hurricanes, drought, extinctions, or rising oceans.
Resistance
You and I can make two effective responses right now. We can stop saying Department of Defense. It’s the War Department, just as it was before President Truman and the Pentagon cunningly changed its name. And we can support anti-war, anti-imperial organizations; such as Veterans for Peace, Peace Action, AFSC/FCNL, ICAN, NAPF, OMNI.
And then we can urge the United Nations to estimate the environmental and climatic destruction of US wars before and afterward, toward pushing Congress to force the Pentagon to declare the true costs of its wars. This is a feasible and even familiar practice. For example, a 2010 study found that 3,000 companies were responsible for $ 2.15 trillion worth of environmental damage in 2008.
And then we can laugh out loud at all the green washing distracting us from these war and warming connections and costs, many as absurd as Baghdad’s “green zone.” (800 words, I cut this for the radio editorial to around 650 to be under 7 minutes)
References #18:
Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. 2009.
Mike Davis, “Foreword,” to The Green Zone, “Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Melt Down” (2008).
https://www.trucost.com/trucost-news/putting-price-global-environmental-damage/
Oct 5, 2010 -
Robert Borosage. “Trump’s Forever Wars.” The Nation (Feb. 26, 2018).
Alice and Lincoln Day,Producers. Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War. The effects of war and war preparations on the environment, while profound, have been largely overlooked.
EDITORIAL #17 (Sat. Feb. 17 broadcast date)War #9. Presidential/Media Complex for War. Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005).
Title: Challenging US Pro-War Myths
TheUS is a nation of war. It began by war; it conqueredcontinental USA--some 500 Indian nations--by war; it grabbed a third of Mexico by war; it subdued the Philippines by war; in WWI it joined one side in a colonial war of massive slaughter; since WWII its wars—some 40 interventions and invasions-- have been virtually ceaseless. As one historian wrote, the US has killed thousands of “enemy” soldiers and millions of civilians by war.
How was that possible? When a warrior hawk president and his advisors, whether liberal or conservative, want war, the president begins by besieging the public. From the outset, warrior leaders, all of whom represent themselves as the commander in chief, seek the impression of consensus behind the president.
His main weapon is media spin. A media campaign for hearts and minds at home, means going all out to persuade us that the next war is as good as a war can be—necessary, justified, righteous, and worth any number killed.
US leaders follow 2 steps to war: The first is this battle over public opinion, and support for war is the first victory. Conquest is the second—since WWII, to name a few of the invaded countries: Haiti, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, War on Terror! The people of the US have been sold a succession of wars, in their names and with their tax dollars, time after time.
Among all the methods of propaganda, one of the most obvious is fear-mongering. The president’s interventionists, his congressional supporters, and mainstream media enablers insist that military action is necessary to prevent a whirlwind of calamities.
Less obvious is the deployment of unexamined myths repeated so often for so many years, for so many generations, most citizens take them for granted. The march to war has been a 24-7 advertising campaign inseparable from the constant US self-aggrandizement and cultural reinforcement for war. Here are a dozen of the many MYTHS that keep us ready for war:
The US is a Fair and Noble Superpower
Our Leaders Will Do Everything they Can to Avoid War
Our Leaders Would Never Lie to Us
The Enemy Is a Modern-Day Hitler
The US Stands for Human Rights
The War Is Not about Oil or Corporate Profits
We Had to Invade to Protect US Citizens
The Enemy Is the Aggressor, Not Us
Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy
Even if the War is Wrong We Must Support Our Troops
The Pentagon Fights Its Wars as Humanely as Possible
Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman
Withdrawal Would Cripple US Credibility
These have been features of US self-branding as a good nation and people, and therefore as good war-makers. But they have not always been successful, especially if the war is lengthy. The US was defeated in Vietnam after over fifty thousand US troops and some 3 million Vietnamese were killed. The US invasion of Cuba was stopped at its shores, which intensified the US economic invasion.
Hermann Goering offers a partial explanation of public war acquiescence: “…of course, the people don’t want war. . . .But it is a simple matter to drag the people along. . . .the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders [for war]. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce [opponents] for lack of patriotism.”
But Goering was generalizing from a nation lacking robust democratic institutions. The US has had those institutions, and Goering unintentionally suggested how we might strengthen them to prevent or stop wars, at least to make it less easy for our leaders to be sheepherders.
Challenging fear-mongering wherever and whenever by vigorous application of knowledge through the First Amendment can be a safeguard against falsehoods and manipulations by war demagogues. Sturdy critical thinking in the public schools, questioning all the leaders and myths that grease the wheels of war, can be another bulwark against the Democratic/Republican War Party. 674 the editorial we recorded today is 7 minutes 14 seconds long.
References #17:
Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005).
Film based on the book directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp.
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Written and directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. Produced by Loretta Alper. Based on the book by Norman Solomon. Narrated by Sean Penn.
https://fair.org/extra/the-military-industrial-media-complex/
But on the large TV networks, such voices were so dominant that they amounted to a virtual monopoly in the “marketplace of ideas.” This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon's book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). The first chapter of the book can ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNyBEw93NrA
Nov 3, 2008 - Uploaded by University of California Television (UCTV)
William Blum. Killing Hope and Rogue State. Gives a chronology of US interventions and invasions. Source of my statement regarding millions killed by US aggressions.
Editorial #16, War, Saturday, February 10, 2018 (broadcast date).
Rachel MADDOW, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.
Title: How US Leaders Led Us Into Endless Wars.
My broad subject is US culpability or complicity in most of its warsand for warming since WWII. Today I’ll ask again (see #10) how the US became a nation of wars, how we became so quick to war. My main source is Rachel Maddow, her book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2012).
In foreign affairs George Washington sought primarily to keep the United States neutral. He was not only successful, but set a precedent for U.S. foreign policy for many years to come. How the US rejected that policy is a long history. In late 19th century, the US brutally invaded and occupied the Philippines. But the US was reluctant to enter WWI, a war already three years in duration before the US joined the allies in combat.
So how did the US in recent years become a nation of frequent wars? Why has it become so easy for our leaders to choose war rather than diplomacy? What happened to the constraints keeping us from going to war first established by George Washington?
Let’s start with August 2, 1990. The Soviet Godzilla was dead. There was talk of a peace dividend. We could now convert the trillions of dollars for war preparation to human needs at home and abroad. Dick Cheney, Secretary of the Pentagon, and Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been working feverishly to head off a congressional effort to reduce the military budget.
And then Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait replaced the Soviet Union as the enemy, while Cheney and his deputies, like Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, refitted the US military for this New World Peril, as they claimed: without increasing expenses.
What magic was this? Cheney expanded the old pillars or criteria of military capability from 4 to 6 to make it appear to do more with less, by increasing employment of contractors under the new pillar of infrastructure and overhead.
In the 1990s, with many wars behind us, the double expense of a standing army and R&D led the Pentagon to consider private contractors, who, it was argued, would be less expensive and more efficient in ensuring US military preeminence in the coming century.
The first private contractor under this program was signed in 1992. It was a company called Brown & Root. And then Cheney became CEO of B&R’s parent corporation, Halliburton. By the time of the Bosnian war of the Clinton administration in 1995, the private military industry had come of age, and an equal number of private company employees went with the troops.
The first private contractor under this program was signed in 1992. It was a company called Brown & Root. And then Cheney became CEO of B&R’s parent corporation, Halliburton. By the time of the Bosnian war of the Clinton administration in 1995, the private military industry had come of age, and an equal number of private company employees went with the troops.
The 1996 Defense Science Board Task Force on Outsourcing and Privatization declared that private contractors should be expanded throughout the military. In Clinton’s 8 years in office military privatization exploded with massive cost overruns—from a few hundred million dollars to $300 billion when he left office, but not labeled military spending. The militarization by corporations happened so fast and so enormously that the Pentagon could not say whether 125,000 or 600,000 employees were on the payroll.
But what the profit-seeking privateers had not warned the government about was the criminal behavior of the contractors. As one investigator wrote about DynCorp in Bosnia: they were a secretive, unregulated, well-paid, lawless, band of mercenaries guilty of malfeasance, fraud, bilking, and purchasing live-in sex slaves.
DynCorp illustrates the creepto full, unaccountable privatization. By the time Clinton left office, the Pentagon was also outsourcing information technology, payroll, mapping, aerial surveillance—even intelligence gathering.
What had happened, with acute and lasting harm, was the unmooring of our wars from politics, from the decision to go to war to public debate about that decision. Thomas Jefferson’s citizen soldiers made it harder to go to war. Privatization made it easier. The move from a somewhat restricted military to unrestricted private contractors occurred without the public much noticing, which helps explain public acquiescence and silence.
James Madison understood well the consequences of war: “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” 685 (8 minutes?? Shorten next to 7 or 600 words)
References to #16
Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2012).
A sample of books cited by Maddow: P. W. Singer, The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry; Robert Griffith, Jr., The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968-1974; Steven Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989; David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now; Tom Gervasi, Soviet Military Power: The Pentagon’s Propaganda Document ; Lawrence Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up; Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy; Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.
Editorial #10 is also partly about why the US chooses war so quickly.
Forthcoming editorial: Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death .
Editorial #15, War, Saturday, February 3, 2018 (broadcast date). Gar Smith, ed., The War and Environment Reader (2017).
Title of Editorial: “US Permanent War, Terracide, and Ecolibrium”
The preceding three editorials described aspects of the warming planet with connections to continuing war. The last editorial summarized the catastrophic twins of warring and warming and, as in other editorials, suggested a resistance--the Magna Carta’s Charter of the Forests in defense of the commons.
A recent special issue of The Nation magazine is devoted to, “The Resistance,” the dissenters to the powers presently ruling the US. John Nichols praises Bill Moyers as the “Most Valuable Modern Pamphleteer,” and compares him to Tom Paine in the 18thcentury, both of whom advocated revolutionary ideas, radical proposals, and transformational movements. Let’s keep them in mind.
Now we return to the subject of war. My main reference is The War and Environment Reader, edited by Gar Smith (2017).
Permanent War
The history of the world has never seen a Palace Guard even near this size and destructiveness. The Pentagon justifies such expenditure as the protector of the largest empire in history, its population, its freedom. So let’s ask first, What is the cost of all this militarism? In later editorials we’ll assess the military-industrial complex.
By the 1960s the industrial-military-congressional-White House merger already seemed too large and too profitable to reverse. That complex of power controlled not only the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, but the countless other secret or hidden national security departments: NSA, CIA, Energy Dept. (nuclear weapons), Veterans Affairs, State Dept., Treasury Dept. By 2017 the budget was nearly $1 trillion: over half of all the military expenditures of all countries in the world combined.
Today the US maintains tens of thousands of troops at some 800 bases in more than 60 foreign countries, and has troops in about 150 countries, total. It has nineteen aircraft carriers, and ten carrier battle groups. And thousands of combat aircraft. In Arkansas, in Fort Smith, drones. In Little Rock, the C-130Js. In Camden, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman.
Five of the world’s largest war-profiteering companies call the US home. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms dealer, responsible for nuclear weapons, Trident submarines, Hellfire missiles. The next four are Boeing, that makes B-52 bombers and smart bombs. Raytheon: Tomahawk long-range missiles, munitions. Northrop Grumman: Global Hawk drones, laser weapons. And General Dynamics: jet fighters, tanks, missiles, guns.
In 2014 total sales for the top six US arms makers topped $241 billion. Two-thirds of the world’s arms makers are based in the US or Western Europe, and they control more than 84 percent of the global arms trade.
In addition to its combat bombs, tanks, and fuel consumption, according to the Pentagon’s FY 2010 Base Structure Report,its global empire included more than 539,000 facilities at nearly 5,000 sites covering more than 28 million acres. The Pentagon burns 320,000 barrels of oil a day, and that estimate ignores fuel consumed by its contractors and weapons producers. And the Pentagon is exempt from reporting its actual total pollution, that might arouse the public.
Even when not engaged in outright war (but when was that?), the Pentagon’s far-flung operations damage the environment at home and around the world. Inside the US exist more than 11,000 military dumps containing explosives, chemical warfare agents, toxic solvents, and heavy metals. The military is responsible for at least 900 of the country’s 1,300 super-toxic “Superfund” sites.
Abroad, the scale of environmental destruction wrought by the US military tops all the other military powers.
Think of the Pentagon as the greatest institution for export for profit. At home: a few people, especially investors and CEOs, making a mountain of money. Abroad: all of these weapons to ensure global control of investments, natural resources, and transportation-- exporting war and threatening war to ensure perpetual profit. The motto of the military-industrial complex is: War is good for business. War profiteering is the USA.
Let’s pause a moment for two of the ironical features of this egregious weaponizing. First, the greatest linguistic coup in all history occurred in 1947 when President Truman and Congress changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department, and used that misnaming to manipulate the US taxpayers to pay for unceasing intervention, invasion, and occupation. Second, now the Pentagon and its contractors realize that winning wars is not their goal, but much more profitable is fighting unending wars. Hence the some 40 wars since the end of WWII and the unwinnable, undefinable, infinitely expandable “war on terror.”
It should not surprise then that the Pentagon Secretary in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, confessed: “We cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” (The Pentagon is the only federal agency exempt from annual audits.) What should surprise is the silence of the public in every town in the nation that cannot find enough money for good health, water, roads, and education.
War on Planet/Terracide
If one takes time to reflect about this gargantuan military encroachment throughout the world, one can begin to imagine how much of nature it destroys
Thus, with its thousands of facilities and dumps, its intervening, invading, and occupying countries around the world, and possessing the world’s largest air force and navy, the Pentagon is the world’s greatest institutional consumer of oil and a leading producer of climate-changing CO2. That is, the US military does unparalleled environmental harm to the planet.
In 2016, National Geographic warned that new perils were likely to arise from the collision of war and nature. Wars, and other acts of violence will likely become more commonplace in coming decades as the effects of global warming cause temperatures to flare worldwide. A team of researchers predicted personal violence, civil unrest, and war could increase 56 percent by 2050 as the planet warms--accelerating droughts, floods, disease, crop failures, and mass migrations—and violence and wars.
And President Trump endorsed President Obama’s plan to spend $1 trillion improving the US nuclear arsenal.
Equilibrium/Ecolibrium
In contrast, the peace movement hopes, by exposing the incentives, structures, and facts of war and warming, to explain the cascading dangers of terracide, to resist directly the war and warming profiteers, and to convert war profits to ecolibrium—to life for all species in harmony with nature. To this end the movement is pushing for Green Constitutions, a Green Geneva Convention, a U.S. Department of Peace, End of Invasions and Occupations, Green Marshall Plan, Earth Federation, Cultures of Peace, Peace Journalism, Planetary Citizenship, a Nonviolent Peaceforce, Military Accountability and Restoration, Peacebuilding Programs in the State Department, National Budgets for People, Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, Abolition of Arms Trade, Common Security System, Institutions of Nonviolence, Demilitarized National Security.
Next week we’ll continue the environmental costs of militarism. 1105 (radio reading cut to 800)
References:
Gar Smith, ed., The War and Environment Reader (2017).
Numerous books reinforce Smith’s picture of US aggression. Two books by William Blum: Killing Hope and Rogue State. Derber & Magrass, Bully Nation. See any of the many books on US conquest of continental N. America and near-extermination of the indigenous people. Additional books catalog the decimation of nature by these aggressions; e.g., Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. I will discuss these and more books in later editorials.
EDITORIAL #14, WARS AND WARMING, Bridging Editorial #2, JANUARY 27, 2018, Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk, Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (2013)
Twin Planetary Threats: Nuclear War and Warming
My overall topic is War and Warming, the emphasis alternating back and forth. The last three editorials were about warming. Today we transition to wars, or I say, war, singular because for several decades the US has invaded and bombed, or threatened to invade and bomb, many other countries. My title is: Nuclear War and Climate Change. My main reference today is Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe byNoam Chomsky and Laray Polk.
Humanity and all species face the twin catastrophes of nuclear war and climate change. I say twin, because they are inseparable. There will be no limited hydrogen nuclear war, which will immediately kill millions and destroy numerous whole cities, which will significantly increase more warming and more war. And very soon, unless extraordinary alterations are made in our economic and energy system, climate change will become rampant. Already occurring extraordinary weather extremes, will worsen, lead to more hunger, more refugees, and more wars, more hunger, more wars. Even a nuclear war between the nuclear powers Pakistan and India, for example, threatened almost daily by their military clashes in and on the borders of Kashmir, would significantly disrupt the Middle East and Asia and the climate by spreading millions of tons of smoke and debris into the atmosphere, disrupting agriculture worldwide.
The world knows we would do it, based on US history and the double-standard that rules our foreign policy. We are the only nation to use nuclear weapons, and we have threatened their use a dozen times, because of that double standard that we apply to other countries but not to ourselves. For example, President Kennedy was willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union based on the principle that the US had the right to ring the USSR with military bases, missiles, and nuclear bombs, but they do not have the right to place their missiles in Cuba, even to defend Cuba from US terrorist attacks then occurring and invasion being planned by the US.
A decade later, Henry Kissinger called for a nuclear alert to warn the Soviets notto interfere when he was informing Israeli leaders they could violate a cease-fire established under US/Soviet auspices. President Reagan risked nuclear war when he sent air and naval probes near Soviet borders and military bases, causing Russia to fear a nuclear attack was imminent. And many more examples.
To these macho risks, US political and business leaders added the denial or downplay of global warming while increasing consumption of fossil fuels, and consumption of the dirtiest tar sands oil and offshore drilling. It was profit first, short-term profit. The war/warming twins are still racing toward environmental catastrophe, deliberate nuclear war or by accident, the seas engulfing the coastal cities, hurricanes ravaging entire countries, fires sweeping millions of acres.
We need to ask ourselves: what aspects of our society caused this madness. Why have our leaders not engaged in an Apollo moon-shot size, or Manhattan Project crash program, or another Marshall Plan, to build a sustainable energy future, for their and our grandchildren, with good jobs for sustainable energy? Why do we not move to save ourselves, our children and children’s children? Why are we so blind, so paralyzed? The answer must be: our ruling economic system of capitalism more than in any other country in the world not only permits but encouragesall-out extraction and development and growth until all the fossil fuel is exhausted and heat has desertified our land and acidified our oceans.
The principal architects of this system—from Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce to Congress and the White House-- the business/political elite make sure their interests, their ideology of short-term gains, succeed, including permanent war, whatever the consequences, no matter how grievous the effects on the entire world and future generations.
These principal architects include media allies who have successfully immunized the population against their common interests, against international amity, mutuality, cooperation, sharing, the values of the United Nations.
To conclude, let’s look to the past to see an avenue to the future. Remember the Magna Carta? It’s really two Charters. This great British statement of rights in the year 1215 inspired protections for civil and human rights in Britain, then the US Bill of Rights, and eventually the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR). But it also stressed saving the commons from autocratic destruction and privatization, by its Charter of the Forests.The Charter of the Forest was the first environmental charter incorporated in a government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of the commoners, and of the commons.
To be continued next week. 769
References to #14
Chomsky and Polk. Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe, especially chapter 8.
Chomsky. “How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta, Part 1 and 2.” Guardian (July 24-25, 2012); “Carte Blanche,” TomDispatch.com (audio) July 21, 2012. (Cited by Chomsky).
NOAM CHOMSKY. Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It. The “logic” of capitalist development has left a nightmare of environmental destruction in its wake.CLIMATE CHANGEMARCH 23, 2015
NOAM CHOMSKY. It’s Time to Get Serious About Climate Change. Seriously. Our dysfunctional political system is now a threat to the existence of all mankind. CLIMATE CHANGEJUNE 13, 2016
NOAM CHOMSKY. It Is a Wonder We Are Still Alive. Sixty-nine years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, beginning a countdown toward the inglorious end of our species. NUCLEAR ARMS AND PROLIFERATIONAUGUST 5, 2014
Graham Allison. “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: Lessons for U.S. foreign Policy Today.” Foreign Affairs (July-August 2012). Allison predicted the deaths of 200 million US and Soviet citizens.
Lawrence M. Krauss. “Judgement Day.” New Humanist (March-April 2010).
National Security Archive Electronic briefing Book No. 281, s.v. “Documents 8A-D: DEFCON 3 during the October War.”
Stephen Rabe. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. 1969.
(Allison, Krauss, and Rabe were cited by Chomsky
EDITORIAL #13, WARMING (#6 ), JANUARY 17, 2018, 697 words
Title: Resistance to US Capitalism: Giant Engine of Warming
My preceding two editorials discussed the successful two crucial decades of denial of warming by the fossil fuels companies and made a case for replacing profit-first US capitalism with an economic system for all the people. My present editorial gives more specific substance to the resistance to the system. My chief reference is NAOMI KLEIN’s book, NO IS NOT ENOUGH.
Corporations and their government supporters sought to lay a pipeline for the dirtiest oil from Alberta, Canada, across North Dakota to Houston refineries, its destination China. They met BDS resistance all the way--boycott, divestment, sanctions-- by people who knew that more fossil fuels ensured that global temperatures would rise beyond safe levels. The people created blockades to stop the despoilers. The resisters needed help.
President Obama finally denied the pipeline permit. Resisters had been successful: saying no to an imminent threat while working tirelessly to build the yes for the world we want and need. But then Donald Trump became president and began dismantling and reversing against the planet more ferociously than had President Bush.
One achievement of the struggle to stop the oil pipeline was its clarification of the system behind the outrage. The struggle had inspired awareness among the people. Ecocidal capitalism laid the pipeline over the Oglalla Aquifer, under the Native reservation, and through the Missouri River. Racism/white supremacy made it possible to treat indigenous water and climate protectors with water cannons in freezing weather. People were seeing and speaking out about the connections: “that the economic interests pushing hardest for war, at home and abroad, are the very same forces most responsible for warming the planet” and “that the economic precariousness” that most people were feeling flowed “from the same place: a corrosive values system that places profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House.” (NO 232).
The limitless taking and extracting, the maximum grabbing from workers, the less job security, and lower wages, community resources taken away, and workers laid off. Did you see the headline January 9? “UAMS Slashing 600 Jobs to Curb Deficit.” This is what a system addicted to short-term profits and wealth does: it treats people, the earth, and the atmosphere like resources to be mined to their limits
In contrast, when people speak about the world they want, the words are care and caretaking—care for the land, care for the planet’s living systems, care for one another. A system in which everyone is valued, and we don’t treat people or the natural world as if they were disposable.
Out of these experienced connections arose a vision of cooperation for the well-being of all--in Canada called “The Leap.” The world people want and need would create unionized jobs and deliver justice. Green jobs would become anything useful and enriching, without fossil fuels. Nursing, teaching were renewable energy. The goal was to transform an economy of destruction into an economy of love for the rebirth of humanity.
The result is The Leap Manifesto—A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another. Even more urgently, it is a call to the United States.
For decades, ruling elites around the world have been using the power of shock to impose nightmares. Donald Trump thinks he’ll be able to do it again and again—that we will have forgotten by tomorrow what he said yesterday (which he will say he never said). But we can build a movement of resistance and hope and justice and love.
The corporate coup described by Naomi Klein in NO IS NOT ENOUGH and hundreds of books and articles and films and speeches is a crisis with global reverberations that could echo through geologic time. As Santee Dakota artist and poet John Trudell said: “I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.” How we respond to the crisis is up to us. So let’s leap to the call for the United States to care for the earth and one another. 697
References:
Naomi Klein. No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. 2017. (Leap Manifesto at end).
______. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Wolin. Democracy Inc.
EDITORIAL #12, WARMING (#8), JANUARY 10, 2018. (The date is that of the studio recording, not of the radio broadcast.)
REPLACING THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM TO ONE LESS DESTRUCTIVE OF THE ENVIRONMENT
My last editorial reported the massively funded and well-organized campaign of warming denial that delayed mitigation and adaptation for some two decades, continuing and hardening under President Trump. This editorial offers a basic response to those who agree with the President. My main reference is: What Everyone Should Know about Capitalism by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster.
The US, mainly, has pursued an economic system confusingly called “neo-liberal” capitalism of unlimited, minimally regulated growth in a limited environment. It’s a catastrophic equation for the planet. At present it is producing extreme economic inequality among and within nations. Here’s a sample headline: “World’s Richest Add $1 Trillion in 2017.” “The richest people on earth became $1 trillion richer this year, more than four times last year’s gain.” Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos gained $34.2 billion.
But more important, the continuation of this, grow-or-die capitalism based upon unlimited capital accumulation, is a flat impossibility. For all those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change and nuclear weapons loaded and aimed and leaders threatening to use them, but the pressing need to change the basic relationships between humans and the earth. Put simply, we must break with a system based on the motive of profit, and ideology of individualism and competition for the accumulation of capital. Instead we must create a new world in harmony with the planet.
George Monbiot locates this new world in “community,” for the new politics, communities “to own and manage local resources, ensuring that wealth is widely shared. . . . common riches to fund universal benefits.“ But President Trump and his Party are pushing the system farther and farther toward ferocious extremes of extraction and consumption, for a few, regardless of consequences.
Can we stop Trump, get rid of fossil fuels, and Save the Climate? To do so will take tremendous personal restraint in consumption in the developed nations, unprecedented political courage in planning and organizing government for the planet, and global cooperation hardly yet even imagined.
Here’re some ways we can change the present economic system of profit and accumulation, to one that will protect the planet and meet the needs of all species.
1. Give equal weight to equality with freedom in deciding social choices.
2. Infuse public education with understanding of how the US economic system has promoted environmental destruction.
3. Massively cut military spending and thus the military-industrial complex by converting that spending to needs caused by warming.
4. Pressure the US to cooperate in a world agreement for a drastic reduction in carbon emissions. This could follow the Peoples’ Agreement drafted in 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
5. Establish environmental justice for all suffering from environmental inequality.
6. Rich countries provide a fund to help developing countries pay for the costs of adapting to climate change.
7. Provide for all of the world’s energy needs with wind, water, and sunlight (WWS): turbines, wave, geothermal, small hydroelectric, batteries, tidal, solar photovoltaic, concentrated solar, hydrogen.
8. Create jobs for workers displaced by wars and warming, and by automation. Listen to President Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address advocating an Economic Bill of Rights: “the right to a useful and remunerative job…the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation…the right of every family to a decent home…adequate medical care…good education.”
Here are several specific changes to advance these larger goals:
1. Institute a carbon tax in which dividends are returned to the people.
2. Close old coal plants and block new ones.
3. Stop use of tar sands and oil/gas shale to replace diminishing crude oil supplies.
4. Make more efficient use of energy, for example harnessing the enormous heat wasted by industry for greenhouses.
5. Conversion of public subsidies from cars to mass transit.
6. By taxes and incentives, encourage sustainable agriculture, discourage industrial agri.
7. Contain urban development and sprawl that are now taking over agricultural land needed for food.
8. Reverse the privatization of fresh water and put it under public control. Cease the drawing down of groundwater which is exhausting the world’s aquifers.
12. Protect the commons and habitats of endangered species.
13. Stop the “revolving door” by which elites control power and money. 718
My next editorial will launch off from Naomi Klein’s book, No Is Not Enough. Then I will return to my co-subject: war.
References
Magdoff and Foster. What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism. Monthly Review, 2011.
Tom Metcalf and Jack Witzig (Bloomberg News). “World’s Riches Add $1 Trillion in ’17.” NADG (Dec. 28, 2017).
George Monbiot. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso, 2017.
Angela Park. Everybody’s Movement: Environmental Justice and Climate Change. 2009. Chap. 9 explores “the means by which [the book’s dreams] might be realized.”
Peoples’ Agreement on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth. Cochabamba, Bolivia, 2010.
EDITORIAL #11, WARMING (# 7 ), JANUARY 3, 2018, 600 words.
DENYING THE EVIDENCE OF WARMING
My editorials discuss warming and nuclear wars, the two greatest threats to our planet. I alternate from one subject to another. Today I return to warming, specifically those who deny the evidence. My main reference is Climate Cover-up by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore.
This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of deceit, of poisoning public judgement, of an attack on our political structures, and undermining the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest. But it is also a story of resistance, of great public service by investigative reporters, and of finally successful revelation of corporate crime and public truth.
Over twenty years ago the scientific consensus asserted the fact that human-caused, global warming was increasing weather extremes. All of the world’s scientific academies stated emphatically that the world’s climate was changing dangerously and humans were to blame. But that was not what was being reported.
Mainstream newspapers were reporting conflicting stories, because coal and oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and fossil fuels companies like Exxon Mobil had financed an organized campaign to cast doubt on the science.
The corporate deniers were twisting the data to mislead people, hiring the few denier scientists to practice not science but public relations, and hiring the best advertising companies to purvey their lies. The media manipulation worked, exactly as it had years before in delaying regulation of smoking tobacco. For two decades the disinformation campaign was successful, and the government did nothing to disrupt the profitable oil status quo.
Gradually the people of the world learned they had been lied to. As early as 1988 the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, told a Senate committee: “the greenhouse effect is here.” Another early truth-teller was Ross Gelbspan. Near the end of the 20th century, he had discovered that the fossil fuelers had organized a huge, well-funded campaign to make the public think that climate science was controversial, and climate change unproven. He revealed the truth in two books, The Heat Is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004).
But the carbon corporate/congressional campaign to defeat climate science increased its money and its lobbying. The year 2008 was particularly corrupt, we know thanks to reporting by the DeSmogBlog, OpenSecrets.org, and the Center for Public Integrity. One headline declares: “Oil and gas lobbying on Capitol Hill up a Whopping 57% in 2008.” But get this: The industry lobbying budget in 2008 was already $82 million. So the total lobbying budget for 2008 was $128.6 million. Some 770 companies hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence our congressional representatives on climate change, as the issue headed toward a vote on Capitol Hill. That’s more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.
The public’s struggle for the truth has not gotten easier in another way. Whereas the money flow corruption was somewhat restrained in 2008, in its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, Jan 21, 2015, the US Supreme Court opened the campaign spending floodgates. Thinking back to the 1970s, to President Nixon and the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, as I speak, much of the regulation passed earlier is being systematically dismantled by President Trump.
But it’s a free country and oil companies have every right to protect their profits?? Or it’s wrong, and we should all stand up and demand our government work for us before the fossil fuelers push us off the cliff onto the ever-more undeniable rocks waiting below. Next week I’ll discuss that question. 574
References to Editorial #11
Ross Gelbspan. The Heat Is On (1997), Boiling Point (2004).
James Hoggan. Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Greystone Books, 2009.
EDITORIAL #10 (Dec. 27, 2017) WARS (#6), WHY THE US CHOOSES WAR SO EASILY, THE US OUTSIDE THE WORLD QUICK TO WAR (p. 22)
My broad subject comes from the title of the book America Outside the Worldby Louis Beres. On the climate catastrophe rushing upon us, President G. W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Climate Treaty and President Donald Trump rejected the Paris Climate Agreement. On nuclear weapons, against 122 nations, President Trump rejected the UN General Assembly’s treaty abolishing nuclear weapons. And Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in defiance of the world’s nations. Actually, “outside” the world is a euphemism; rather let’s say outlawagainst the world.
Today’s subject continues the theme of US wars, continuing my alternation of wars and warming. My source today is Reasons Why Americans Choose to Kill by Richard Rubenstein.
The 9-11 murder of thousands of innocent men and women in the NYC Trade Towers is an unforgiveable atrocity. But it does no good to call terrorist acts senseless or cowardly, when we need to understand why the NYC buildings were attacked. Malice and fanaticism were in the terrorists’ heads, but so also was opposition to US policies in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden had made that emphatically clear. If we think of the bin Ladens as devils, then consideration of options, of complexity, of thought, are impossible.
Hence Bush and Cheney in furious thoughtlessness invaded all of Afghanistan, defeated the Taliban and killed many civilians, then occupied the country while killing many more civilians and our own troops, in a country where only a handful of Afghans had participated in the bombings of the NYC Towers, while the actual perpetrator, bin Laden, escaped. Two years later George and Dick ordered shock and awe against Iraq based on a pack of lies, and hundreds of more US troops and thousands of Iraqis perished, and the occupation and killings continue in both countries.
The first two questions we might ask is, who are these despicable leaders, and how did they get elected? But leaders are not my purpose. They have received much, though hardly enough, study. Similarly, why would the people of the US elect such leaders, so quick to attack and bomb and destroy? How could they have been so thoughtless? But again that question has been often studied.
Rather let us ask more specifically: Why did so many of the public so quickly accept the Bush administration’s assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (which he did not)? Why was there no public uprising when respected General Powell lied at the UN about Iraq’s wmd on the flimsiest of evidence? Why did the public so willingly believe that invading and occupying and destroying Iraq should be the first instead of the last response? The UN Security Council had refused to authorize the invasion. Why, before sending to war and possible death our young men and women, did the people not insist upon the strongest of evidence? Why, given such absence of justification, did so many accept the most violent, cruelest action over peaceful communication, diplomacy, and negotiation?
Rather let us ask more specifically: Why did so many of the public so quickly accept the Bush administration’s assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (which he did not)? Why was there no public uprising when respected General Powell lied at the UN about Iraq’s wmd on the flimsiest of evidence? Why did the public so willingly believe that invading and occupying and destroying Iraq should be the first instead of the last response? The UN Security Council had refused to authorize the invasion. Why, before sending to war and possible death our young men and women, did the people not insist upon the strongest of evidence? Why, given such absence of justification, did so many accept the most violent, cruelest action over peaceful communication, diplomacy, and negotiation?
The full reply is multiple, but it must include this truth: the majority fell for the oldest of war justifications: the alleged enemy was a super-enemy, he was capital E EVIL who sought to harm the US, that is us. Thus we had a sacred right to violate the standards of clear thinking and of ethics, and to shred international laws, including the UN Charter, by invading and occupying two sovereign nations that had not threatened the US. Later our leaders claimed our moral duty to liberate the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and to create democratic republics. How? By by invading, bombing, destroying the countries and killing their people.
These are familiar arguments by the leaders of the US: from the wars against Mexico, Spain, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf War to Libya and Syria. Their purpose? To create fear. By causing the people to abandon critical thinking and ethics and instead to embrace authority for truth and protection. To create fear by stressing defense against Evil Enemies. Bush’s Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice tried to scare everyone into invading Iraq by saying “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." She put the final nail in the war hysteria begun in 1947 when the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. And our troops have been fighting abroad for the longest continuous stretch in their history: over two decades if one starts with the first Persian Gulf War in early 1990s and the sanctions that killed a half-million Iraqi children.
Many cried out for peaceful and honorable alternatives to war, but the invasions moved forward. A minority of voices declared that war would destabilize the Middle East and even the world, and harm the US, and that proved true. Conflict resolution reason was drowned out by the ruses of war deployed by the highest officials to secure mass approval of yet another war, most of the population acquiesced, and the slaughter in Yemen and the threats of slaughter against North Korea continue the derangements of violent force.
But the human search for a just and therefore peaceful society has not been defeated. We have yet to get at the root of such violent history. Let’s grasp this deplorable shift to ceaseless mass bloodshed as the opportunity to reconceive our public education K-12, above all as the time to learn critical thinking, ethical reflection, healthy skepticism, questioning authority, and demanding evidence before we give our assent to mass killing.
Our leaders tell us we must choose war for freedom, national security, the flag. Instead, let us urge our school superintendent, our principals, teachers, librarians, and ourselves at home, to teach clear thinking, ethics, and alternatives to war. And we must act now, because our country is outside the world, and the next shock and awe is being planned.
References to #10
Richard Rubenstein. Reasons Why Americans Choose to Kill.
Stephen Zunes. “Trump’s Reckless Action on Jerusalem.” Z Magazine (Jan. 2018).
5 essays on Trump and Jerusalem in WRMEA (Jan./Feb. 2018).
OMNI CRITICAL THINKING NEWSLETTER #3, March 16, 2013.
EDITORIAL #9 (Dec. 20, 2017) WARS (#5) , p. 19
(MILITARIZATION OF US) CREATION OF THE US WARFARE STATE: WWII TO PRESENT
My last editorial sought communion and cooperation with all other nations, if we are to avoid climate or nuclear destruction. Today let’s consider why control by armed force is the goal of the United States instead of international amity. Andrew Feinstein’s book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, is our guide.
US victory in WWII ironically eventuated in long-term defeat--the decline from a civilian to a militarized government. MilitarizedIndustrial output doubled between 1940 and 1943 to a level nearly that of Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany combined. The atomic bombs dramatically increased the power of the presidency and transformed the affirmative New Deal of, by, and for the people, into a National Security State. The US populace learned to accept militarization as its way of life: an increasing proportion of US national resources was directed into the military; a closeness grew of US military, government, the presidency, and corporations. While it won the war, victory by war lost the peaceful future.
Particularly unprecedented was the increase of presidential power.
Under Franklin Roosevelt power of command and secrecy increased while under demands of war accountability decreased. By exterminating two civilian city populations, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ordered by President Harry Truman exceeded anything ever imagined for the executive branch, and that bomb power influences our foreign policy to this day. The secrecy and military discipline of the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bombs became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined US government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during WWII extended into the Cold War and the war on terror, the Middle East war, and the pivot to encircle China. For over 70 years a state of continuous war has dominated the US and therefore the world.
After WWII when the “Cold War” as it was called with the Soviet Union heated up, the Truman Doctrine created the most significant expansion of US foreign intervention since the Monroe Doctrine. Truman set in motion the militarized response to Soviet communism as a threat to free people everywhere requiring US protection everywhere, and permanent military preparedness. The National Security Act of 1947 increased the war-making power of the president in specific ways; including the unification of the armed forces, changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense (a title that has bumfuzzled the public ever since), the creation of the CIA and the NSA/National Security Agency, and diminishing the foreign policy power of the State Department. The CIA created an invisible, new layer of secrecy and reduction of accountability. The US national security state had been formally launched.
The main beneficiaries were the arms industry. Since 1947, the Pentagon has become the center of a vast system of recruitment centers, propaganda centers, military bases, laboratories, testing grounds, command centers, intelligence centers, corporations, and academic institutions, for which one thing is certain: it spends more on war than on human needs. Now the military and industry share an unprecedented level of cooperation, compounding their cumulative level of influence over policy--the MIC OR military-industrial complex as described by President Eisenhower—or as he might say today: the corporate, military, intelligence, presidency, Congress, mainstream media, national security state.
In 1953 President Eisenhower delivered his “Chance for Peace” speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Alas, despite these truths, Eisenhower’s administration conducted its foreign policy as did Truman before him and as did all subsequent US presidents—through covert operations in foreign countries, most notoriously Guatemala and Iran.
All under the guise of saving the world from communism, that gigantic octopus reaching around the world and knocking over national dominoes, mixed metaphor disregarded, while never mentioned by the ruling elites, Increasingly, corporate stockholders’ profits soared. Another general told the truth about corporate profit and US empire. Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient and the most decorated marine in US history, said of his own participation in profit-driven US military actions around the world: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And that was long before General Eisenhower made his “Chance for Speech” speech. As I said at the beginning, Big Business has always been in the war racket, and all the time Big Business has grown Bigger and Bigger. 774 words
References
Feinstein, Andrew. The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. 2017.
(Feinstein drew from Eugene Jarecki, The American Way of War (2010),
for the section I used.)
(Feinstein drew from Eugene Jarecki, The American Way of War (2010),
for the section I used.)
Wills, Gary. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. 2010.
Editorial #8 (12-13-17): Wars (#4), the US Outside the World
These commentaries explore the US role in the wars and warming engulfing the planet. Today my very broad theme is “The US Outside the World.” That is, despite the many good things our country has accomplished for humankind, they are undermined by our having become the leading warfare and warming nation.
My last editorial reported on the power over the US and the world of what is called “neo-liberal” capitalism as the primary engine of the climate catastrophe. Today I will report on US imperial, military power, from America Outside the World by Louis Beres. President Eisenhower called the two powers the military-industrial complex. The two main manifestations—warming and wars—are inseparable, and are the subject of these editorials.
During the Cold War from the 1940s to 1980s, US warfare foreign policy—chiefly arising from the presumed need to maintain military superiority over the Soviet Union—exacerbated the economic system: deficits in budget and trade, inflation and waste, commodity obsolescence, frequent product change, unstable markets, cost-plus pricing, and large corporations and bureaucracies beyond public control. The massive transfer of capital away from civilian industry to the military sector neglected the industries the people need. Instead of stimulating productivity, competitiveness, and innovation, Washington’s commitment to war as foreign policy dislocated the productivity of the past, causing the lowest tiers of the middle class to fall into poverty, and many of the poor to become destitute.
Military spending absorbs resources that might have been invested for the people. While the budget goes to weapons, our country ignores essential research that could develop alternate sources of energy, increased food production, better housing, and improved public health. These distorted priorities limit innovation and investment, and lead to the trade deficit and to the national debt, now $20 trillion .
Also, military spending creates a debilitating shortage of professional talent in the civilian sector. With the military sector claiming 30 to 50 percent of the scientists and engineers, US industry is unable to contend with foreign competition. Pretending to solve the problem, our leaders exhort us to “buy American,” but the remedy is to end the wars, and to return our skilled workers from their Pentagon-directed laboratories and drawing-boards, and all else destructive of climate and environment, like the Pentagon, to the capital-starved solar and wind industries and all else beneficial to the people.
I suspect all of this is obvious to most of our population, but now we are beaten down into acquiescence and conformity by the incessant propaganda machine for war, making it preeminent everywhere in every nook and cranny of life. With the support of the economic system, the military system crushes independent, alternative thought and action.
We might be rescued from this captivity of Sovietphobia, now Russophobia, of “war on terror,” and the many enemies contrived by the military-industrial system. We might be liberated from the economic-military-political system’s manufactured, subjugating movie of the world. We might restore the USA to the world by creating the conditions wherein citizens can become autonomous persons. We might, each in our individuality, live in commonality and cooperation with others worldwide.
But I do not believe it will be achieved by some St. George defeating the Dragon. Liberation from wars and warming depends upon self-liberation, people creating affirmative government of, by, and for all the people of the planet. Only then will the nation pursue foreign policies that point not to the perils of nuclear war or climate catastrophe but toward planetization, seeking communion with all other nations. But that kind of education and culture is at present only a dream of those who repudiate the economic and military system ruling the country, those who refuse profit and conquest under the guise of providing safety and freedom, those who reject patriotism and national unity by means of endless slaughter.
My next two commentaries will survey specific events in the recent history of US wars. 651 words
References
Louis Beres. America Outside the World: The Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy. 1987.
Martin Crutsinger. “Budget Deficit Tops $138.5 Billion.” NADG (December 13, 2017). Reported also the national debt of $20 trillion.
Editorial #7 (Warming #3), 12-6-17: Capitalism and Global Warming: RICHARD SMITH’S GREEN CAPITALISM Continued p. 129-
My last editorial introduced Richard Smith’s book, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed. Smith exhorted us to stop over-extracting and overconsuming natural resources, stop burning fossil fuels, stop producing waste that can’t be recycled by nature. But under capitalism these goals are virtually impossible. Here’s why: the eighteen features of an economic system with too little government, that is public, oversight.
1. Massive Corporations too big to fail
2 Human Right to Dominate, Exploit, and Destroy Nature
3. Capital accumulation, drive for personal profit
4. Commodification, turning everything into a product for sale
5. Growth essential to profit, even to exhausting resources
6. Over-Consumption ruinous in developed countries
7. Consolidation, Monopoly, elimination of competition,
8. Instability of Market System, boom and bust
9. Advertising, creating needs, Inducing consumption
10. Hostility to the Commons, everything that cannot be commodified
10. Hostility to the Commons, everything that cannot be commodified
11. Hostility to Organized Workers, against unions, vs. sharing power
12. Hostility to Government Oversight, to affirmative gov
13. Hostility to Taxes on corporations and the rich
14. Inequality of 1% and 99%
15. GNP as Measurement of national success
16. Waste (see Advertising)
17. Wars and imperialism for domination, resources, space
18. Warming, C02, extreme weather
These are the features of US capitalism today. In Green Capitalism: The God That Failed, Richard Smith indicts the economic regime for producing the planet-killing surge of C02 from the 18th century to the present, spiking upward particularly during the past seventy years since WWII.
He presents six theses regarding this system, the US economic system.
1. “Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse.” The key to this human-caused rampage is corporations. Their purpose is not the good of the people of the world, but they function for the benefit of their shareholders. Shell Oilloots Nigeria and the Arctic of fossil fuels that cook the climate. That’s its purpose; that’s what shareholders demand—profit. For example, IKEA, the third largest consumer of lumber in the world, can’t help but level the forests of the world to feed furniture mills. That’s what the CEO is hired by the shareholders to do.
And we’re all locked into the economic system dependent upon fossil fuels in which companies have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders and because we all need the jobs.
2. “Solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious, but we can’t take the necessary steps to prevent…collapse because, so long as we live under capitalism, economic growth has to take priority over ecological concerns, or the economy will collapse and mass unemployment [and violence] will be the result.” Under capitalism, for example, the incentive is to increase the population consumption. How can one make a profit if everything is static. Take cars. In 1950 there were about 2.6 billion people. Today the planet has 7.5 billion. Now add advertising to increase consumption. ln 1950 Americans had 1 car for every 3 inhabitants. Today we have 1.2 cars for every person, and a world total of 1 billion cars, and the car manufacturers are hoping for 2 to 2.5 billion by mid-century. That’s an exponential growth in cars, natural resources use, energy production, and waste.
3. “If capitalism can’t help but destroy the world, then what alternative is there but to nationalize and socialize most of the economy and plan it directly, even plan most of the global industrial economy?”
There is no alternative to planning. We need planning on all levels and coordination among them. We need comprehensive global, regional, national, and local plans. When climate scientists call for cuts in CO2 emissions if we are to have a liveable planet, they are asking for forethought, for planning.
4. “Rational planning requires democracy: voting the big questions.”
Today huge decisions that affect all species on the planet, even the fate of life, are private. Under capitalism the big issues are not put up to a vote, but are decisions made by corporate boards on behalf of self-interested investors, and by their well-lobbied political representatives. But alternatives are available. The public utilities are run democratically with public, that is, government oversight. Greg Palast wrote a book about them, Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services.
5. “Democracy can only work in context of rough socio-economic equality and social guarantees.”
And finally, 6. “This is [not] crazy, utopian, impossible, will never happen.”
Smith’s Conclusion:
The climate problem threatening our planet and all species is CO2 increasing, and atmosphere, ocean, and land warming. These changes will destroy life on Earth. The problem is rooted in the ruling economic war for profit which compel corporations to pour on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes. The solution, impossible as it may seem, is to overthrow this system and all the governments of the 1% that prop it up, and to replace them with a global economic democracy, a radical, bottom-up, democratic ecosocialist civilization. This is no pipedream, no delusion, but a necessity if we are to prevent the train wreck capitalism has prepared for us. Globally people are awakening to a democratic uprising for an alternative economic and social order designed, not for the 1% stockholders and CEOs and their politicians, but for the people.
These editorials explore US wars and warming, past, present, future. Next week we’ll return to the wars. But they are never far from the warming; armaments and warming say to us: SLEEPERS AWAKE!
Editorial #6 Global Warming (#2),
FROM GORE TO RICHARD SMITH’S GREEN CAPITALISM
So what must we do to slow down Arctic ice melting and global oceans warming? We must reduce C02 in the atmosphere. That is, we must reduce fossil fuels emissions drastically. OMNI is hard at work at that, especially by supporting Climate Change Lobby’s efforts since
2014 to tax fossil fuels at their sources. Also, since 2006 OMNI’s Climate Book Forum has discussed several dozen books covering the causes and consequences of warming from many perspectives.
For example, scientists ask, what isthecause? Fossil-fuels emissions yes. But pushing deeper, what’s the cause of planet-killing fossil-fuels? Scientists use the word anthropogenic, or human-caused. But which humans? A number of economist scientists blame the ascendant human economic system, capitalism. But there are degrees of capitalisms. US capitalism, or extreme capitalism, sometimes confusingly called neo-liberalism, differs considerably from the economies of Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland, for example, countries described as social democracies. These countries, by the way, enjoy the top ranking in the 2017 World Happiness Report. And third world countries produce comparatively low emissions.
Therefore some sociologists, especially economist climatologists, argue we must move beyond reforms to revolutionary change. One such economist is Richard Smith, in his book Green Capitalism: The God That Failed. To Smith, US hyper-capitalism’s goal of unrestrained development is driving us to ecological collapse. Overdevelopment began at the beginning of the industrial revolution and accelerated extraordinarily during the last six decades, from WWII to the present. Under the pressures of profit, deregulated growth, competition resulting in monopoly, expanding markets and resulting empire, and increasing population, we now live with an atmosphere increasingly dense with C O2 and therefore warmer and more humid, the oceans warmer and rising, and the weather more extreme. 307 words
When the industrial revolution began in the 18th century, when population and production were comparatively small, capitalist freedom to make and consume at will didn’t matter much. But now when production is in billions of items and increasing, and the population swells toward 9 billion, development and growth, competition and waste, seem frantic and senseless. Between 1950 and 2000 the human population more than doubled from 2.5 to 6 billion, and in these same decades consumption of major natural resources soared more than 6-fold.
Thus the world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary emergency. But no government opposes growth, especially not our own. To the contrary, in capitalist governments, which is most of the world, growth is God, and the supreme goal is to accelerate growth for profit. 439words
We know what we to do: stop over-extracting and overconsuming natural resources, stop greenhouse gas emissions, stop producing waste that can’t be recycled by nature. We don’t need some magical new technological breakthrough to solve these problems. We just need to stop what we are doing through the capitalist system.
My next editorial will continue Richard Smith’s Green Capitalism: The God That Failed.
Editorial #5 Global Warming (#1), Consequences of Warmingand Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel,fewer than 500 words (I cut some to be sure), 10-27-17
My slogan is: Think Global, Act Local and Global. My editorials encompass wars and warming. I have spoken about US wars and empire, particularly about nuclear weapons, and their origins and consequences. Now I’ll discuss global warming similarly, today specifically the effects of warming and begin to explore its deep cause and its solutions.
Here are a few consequences of warming from the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report,leaked to the New York Times in August 2017 because of fears the Trump administration might suppress it. Carbon dioxide has increased to dangerous levels in the atmosphere. Global temperatures are increasing. Arctic ice is melting. The oceans are rising.
“Global mean atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) concentration has now passed 400 ppm parts per million, a level that last occurred 3 million years ago when sea level was significantly higher than today. There is no climate analog to this century any time in at least the last 40 million years.”
“…average temperatures in recent decades over much of the world have been much higher, and have risen faster during this time period, than at any time in the past 1,700 years or more….”
“The Arctic is warming at a rate approximately twice as fast as the global average,” and distant changes in the climate system affect other parts of the world.
“The world’s oceans have absorbed about 93% of the excess heat….Global mean sea level has risen by about 7-9 inches…since 1900, with about 3 of those inches…occurring since 1993….the “rate of rise…is greater than during any preceding century in at least 2,800 years.”
Al Gore’s new documentary, Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,
concentrates on the effects of global warming already happening around the world, and the politics, diplomacy, and moral power of efforts to mitigate it. Al Gore “was perhaps the most scientifically informed vice president in U.S. history. His interest in and knowledge of climate…goes back four decades. He does his research. He respects science.”
An Inconvenient Sequel offers“powerful ways to illustrate both the latest scientific data and the effects” of warming. Gore returns to the Greenland ice cap to show us rushing rivers of meltwater plunging into huge holes in the ice…Time-lapse photography shows vast realms of the ice crumbling before our eyes….Where is that melt-water going? Gorre segues to Miami Beach, its ocean-side streets flooding under high tides.” Then he moves to India on a 120-plus-degree day where a woman’s sandals stick to the melting asphalt.”
“As was long ago predicted scientifically, a warming world leads to more frequent and much more intense heatwaves, storms, and rainfall, and, in dry areas, more severe droughts.”
The film is also about Gore’s long experience in climate diplomacy. Before the 2015 Paris climate accords he worked successfully to get India not to build hundreds of coal-fired power plants by arranging funds for India to go solar. His organized groups of hundreds of climate science trainees around the world.
Although his work has been slowed in the US, the rest of the world is going ahead without us, and Gore is exuberant in the film showing how Chile is undergoing exponential growth in solar capacity. And even in Texas, a Republican mayor led his town to supplant fossil fuels by wind and solar.
Gore is scientist and preacher. When our grandkids look back at us, he warns, they will ask: What were we thinking by not leading the world to protect the climate?
My next commentary will be about Richard Smith’s book, Green Capitalism.
References:
“The 2017 Climate Science Special Report: Excerpts from Key Findings.” Skeptical Inquirer (Nov.-Dec. 2017), 5-7.
Kendrick Frazier. “Truth to Power on Climate.” Skeptical Inquirer (Nov.-Dec, 2017), 56-57.
EDITORIAL #4 TEXT, definitely under 500, around 468 WORDS
I have given 3 editorials on US wars and especially on US nuclear bombing and threatening. My next main subject is the approaching climate catastrophe. In preparation, today I’ll speak about the connected global issues necessarily conditioning local perspectives.
My chief assumption is that the US economic system, US empire, and US gender and racial arrangements are by their nature and practice unjust, justice defined as equity, a word meaning fairness.
Six years ago, supporters of Occupy Fayetteville/NWA, in association with Occupy Arkansas and Occupy Wall Street, walked in the name of justice and peace, and demonstrated on the Fayetteville Square to ban racism and nuclear bombs -- for justice, for fairness. Our leader in perceiving the link was of course Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked about nuclear weapons Dr. King said: “the development and use of nuclear weapons should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic.” And he asked, “What will be the ultimate value of having established social justice in a context where all people, Negro and White, are merely free to face destruction by strontium 90 or atomic war?” Air war, indiscriminate decimation of cities, destroys all achievements by their citizens of any color, and we ought to add: of any gender.
“For King,” wrote Michael McPhearson, “Civil Rights was inextricably linked to [world] peace.” King repeatedly connected what he called the triple evils of war, poverty, and racism, or war, the economic system of inequality, and racism.
The prominent writer, James Baldwin, made the same case. When he spoke at a rally on “Security Through World Disarmament,” he was asked why he chose to speak at such an event, and he replied: The fight for world peace and the struggle for civil rights are the same. “It is just as difficult,” he said, “for the white American to think of peace as it is of no color.”
And again we should add gender. Another important great source of injustice, perhaps even underlying war and racism, is patriarchy. Domination is again the key. To some white men in power, the accumulation of nuclear weapons to dominate and bully other nations is like the desire for power over women.
And perhaps the present greatest, the most dangerous domination is that of planetary warming, the result of human extraction of resources, particularly of fossil fuels. From the beginning of the industrial revolution, the mostly masculine economy has been devoted to exploiting nature for human benefit but also producing too much overheating CO2.
All our main struggles are inextricably linked. Yours is mine, mine is yours. Global is local is global.
That is why we need a full-spectrum movement for peace, justice, and ecology—to ban the bomb, to end color and gender inequality and discrimination, and to defend the climate.
Ref.: Michael McPhearson, “Peace at Home: Mourning Philando,” Peace In Our Time” (Summer 2017, p. 3).
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. 1986.
EDITORIAL #3 (War #3) 494 words
“Facing Nuclear Madness from Hiroshima 1945 to North Korea 2017” (for KPSQ’s Weekly Program Fayetteville Folkus aired July 29 hosted by Jim Lukens. This recording was supervised by Mary Gillcoat.)
My slogan for these thumbnail commentaries is: “Think globally, act locally and globally.” We must cultivate our local gardens, but national and international problems require us to link local to national and international actions. My chief assumptions are that our main dangers are the two catastrophes of nuclear war and climate warming, and our response should be nonviolent.
The second largest population of Marshall Islanders live in Washington County. Thus my first editorial told about the Marshall Islands law suits versus the nuclear nations to make nuclear weapons illegal.
My second editorial summarized Fayetteville native and former Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright’s concept of empathy in his book The Price of Empire. Then I applied his ideas to the challenge of ending United States/North Korean nuclear threatening today.
Now my subject is the long remembrance in Fayetteville of the WWII nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The commemoration was begun by the local Peace Organizing Committee during the 1960s, and held in the University’s Greek Amphitheater. Each year we learned more about the bombs and their consequences from books like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Robert J. Lifton’s Survivors of Hiroshima, and more about how to realize our slogan “Never Again” from speakers of campus and towns, from songs, and music. The 1960s’s Peace Committee evolved into the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology in 2001.
Our Remembrance has been enhanced by the addition to the university campus of the Fulbright Statue and Peace Fountain, and by the Peace Planet sculpture by Hank Kaminsky on the Fayetteville Square. We have alternated our ceremony between the two locations. And our program has also enlarged as part of the growing international desire to ban those bombs entirely. We remember, and we join with others to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s happening: the United Nations General Assembly voted to make the bombs illegal, along with chemical and other weapons of mass destruction, and the Treaty is now being ratified, though not including the United States.
On Sunday, August 6, at 6 p.m., at our location for this year--the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 901 W. Cleveland--the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology invites you to attend our annual Remembrance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We remember the deaths of 230,000 innocents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the victims of all indiscriminate air war, we renounce war and threats of war, join Global Nuclear Zero hopes of all humanity for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and celebrate the United Nations Treaty Initiative to ban nuclear weapons. Music, poetry and speakers will reflect on the meaning of the day. And a live-stream video with Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui or his representative is anticipated.
This is always a deeply meaningful occasion for people who long for peace. Please join us Sunday, August 6, 6:00 pm .
EDITORIAL #2
TO KEEP THE TALK WITHIN 5 MINUTES I EXCISED THis OPENING PAR on empathy/compassion
Fayetteville nourishes many compassion advocacy groups. Compassion is defined in one dictionary as “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for someone struck by misfortune, accompanied by a desire to alleviate the suffering.” No Empathy advocacy group exists here, by name at least, but it is close to compassion. We might describe one mission of the UAF’s Fulbright College to be the enlargement of empathy, defined as “the identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, etc., of another.” Let’s for a moment consider the feelings of empathy and compassion as two steps toward a moral life: empathic capacity to imagine another’s state of mind and compassionate capacity to sympathize with that other person.
TITLE of #2: For World Peace, See the World as Others See It (War #2) 432 words
Usually discussion of empathy is personal and local. But it is also important for national and international affairs, and for world peace. Fayetteville’s native son, J. William Fulbright, exemplifies that belief. Fulbright was briefly president of the Univ. of Arkansas and later a U.S. senator and chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He is perhaps best known for his international educational exchange program, partly based upon a philosophy of empathy defined as “the identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, etc., of another.” In his book The Price of Empire Fulbright explained his commitment to empathy in the conduct of national relations. His final chapter is titled “Seeing the World as Others See It,” and his “Afterword” describes “Changing Our Manner of Thinking.” “Why is it,” he asks, “that so much of the energy and intelligence of nations is used to make life painful and difficult for other peoples and nations, rather than to make life better for all?” His answer is: insufficient ability to perceive and feel the experience, the outlook, the feelings of others, including official national enemies. He notably opposed the Vietnam War and other US invasions, such as the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, and his opposition arose partly from his belief in the power for peace and justice in empathy.
Thus it seems natural to ask how Fulbright might respond now to the confrontation between the United States and North Korea. An aspect of empathy is that knowledge of the other is essential. We must know the history, the feelings and thoughts of North Koreans. But our leaders make no effort to see the world as Kim Jong Un sees it, or as his father and grandfather saw it, despite the ample evidence of their worlds. Many books and articles give us the history of the ancient culture of Korea, by which we can know where the Kims are coming from, why for example they detest the Japanese who brutally occupied their country, and with whom the U.S. has formed a military alliance opposed to North Korea. At least five books—by I. F. Stone, Bruce Cumings, Hugh Deane, Martin Hart-Landsberg, and Charles Hanley--and many articles explain why the Korean War and its horrendous decimation by the United States of N. Korea’s cities and towns have such a powerful hold over Kim Jong Un’s mind.
Armed with knowledge and understanding of the feelings and thoughts of the North Koreans, our leaders could break the present dangerous pattern of threatened invasion and nuclear devastation.
Editorial #1ON NUCLEAR WAR: MARSHALL ISLANDS SUIT V. NUCLEAR NATIONS 386 words
Think globally, act locally. Rather, Think globally, act locally, act globally
I. 2 Primary dangers: Nuc War and Warming
II. Nuclear War
Think Globally
We must abolish nuclear weapons. The nations possessing nuclear weapons have increased from one to 9. So long as the weapons are available, nations will seek them. Trimming the existing number will not stop their proliferation and bring us safety.
Connect Local and Global
I expect you know that the US tested some 60 hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands during the 1950s. And you know that the Marshall Islands community centered in Springdale is the largest outside the Islands. Springdale is the home of Marshall Islands’ US consulate. Not so well known is that nation’s legal suit brought against all of the nations possessing nuclear weapons. In courts in the US and in the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is challenging the nuclear nations for violating the Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT. Specifically, the suit challenges their failure to initiate nuclear disarmament negotiations in violation of Article VI of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international law. In fact to the contrary, the Pentagon and Obama administration in 2015 initiated a 10-year trillion dollar program to upgrade US nuclear weapons.
Think of that. Already, each of the Ohio-class Trident submarines can carry up to 24 ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with multiple, independently-targeted bombs. One of those subs alone is called a doomsday machine, and the US has 14 of them. Add the bombs carried by our intercontinental airplanes and in the missile sites around the country. And the bombs of the other 8 nuclear nations. The danger is incalculably immense—from accident, fear, or malice.
So congratulations to the government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and to former Foreign Minister Tony de Brum for being voted the 2016 Arms Control Person of the Year by the Arms Control Association. The award was given for taking the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the world's nuclear-armed states.
The OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology during its entire existence has warned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons with our annual remembrance of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few years back we joined the international movement to Abolish the Bombs. Check it out. Get the links