I’d
like to comment on topics that I think should regularly be on the front
pages but are not — and in many crucial cases are scarcely mentioned at
all or are presented in ways that seem to me deceptive because they’re
framed almost reflexively in terms of doctrines of the powerful.
In
these comments I’ll focus primarily on the United States for several
reasons: One, it’s the most important country in terms of its power and
influence. Second, it’s the most advanced – not in its inherent
character, but in the sense that because of its power, other societies
tend to move in that direction. The third reason is just that I know it
better. But I think what I say generalizes much more widely – at least
to my knowledge, obviously there are some variations. So I’ll be
concerned then with tendencies in American society and what they portend
for the world, given American power.
American power is
diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it’s
still incomparable. And it’s dangerous. Obama’s remarkable global terror
campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one
shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism – by
far the most extreme in the world. Those who harbor any doubts on that
should read the report issued by Stanford University and New York
University, and actually I’ll return to even more serious examples than
international terrorism.
According to received doctrine, we live
in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite
some flaws. There’s been an interesting debate over the years about the
relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even
compatible? I won’t be pursuing this because I’d like to discuss a
different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist
democracy”, RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked” by accident. To begin
with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we
mean by “democracy”. There are several versions of this. One, there is a
kind of received version. It’s soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety,
patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In
the U.S. version, it’s government “of, by and for the people”. And it’s
quite easy to compare that with RECD.
In
the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science
is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study
of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled
society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and
you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work
that’s essentially the gold standard in the field, it’s concluded that
for roughly 70% of the population – the lower 70% on the wealth/income
scale – they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They’re effectively
disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a
little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is
maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want,
i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not
democracy; it’s plutocracy.
Inquiries of this kind turn out to be
dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature
of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned
funding for them, so we won’t have to worry about them in the future.
These
characteristics of RECD show up all the time. So the major domestic
issue in the United States for the public is jobs. Polls show that very
clearly. For the very wealthy and the financial institutions, the major
issue is the deficit. Well, what about policy? There’s now a sequester
in the United States, a sharp cutback in funds. Is that because of jobs
or is it because of the deficit? Well, the deficit.
Europe,
incidentally, is much worse – so outlandish that even The Wall Street
Journal has been appalled by the disappearance of democracy in Europe.
…[I]t had an article [this year] which concluded that “the French, the
Spanish, the Irish, the Dutch, Portuguese, Greeks, Slovenians,
Slovakians and Cypriots have to varying degrees voted against the
currency bloc’s economic model since the crisis began three years ago.
Yet economic policies have changed little in response to one electoral
defeat after another. The left has replaced the right; the right has
ousted the left. Even the center-right trounced Communists (in Cyprus) –
but the economic policies have essentially remained the same:
governments will continue to cut spending and raise taxes.” It doesn’t
matter what people think and “national governments must follow
macro-economic directives set by the European Commission”. Elections are
close to meaningless, very much as in Third World countries that are
ruled by the international financial institutions. That’s what Europe
has chosen to become. It doesn’t have to.
Returning to the United
States, where the situation is not quite that bad, there’s the same
disparity between public opinion and policy on a very wide range of
issues. Take for example the issue of minimum wage. The one view is that
the minimum wage ought to be indexed to the cost of living and high
enough to prevent falling below the poverty line. Eighty percent of the
public support that and forty percent of the wealthy. What’s the minimum
wage? Going down, way below these levels. It’s the same with laws that
facilitate union activity: strongly supported by the public; opposed by
the very wealthy – disappearing. The same is true on national
healthcare. The U.S., as you may know, has a health system which is an
international scandal, it has twice the per capita costs of other OECD
countries and relatively poor outcomes. The only privatized, pretty much
unregulated system. The public doesn’t like it. They’ve been calling
for national healthcare, public options, for years, but the financial
institutions think it’s fine, so it stays: stasis. In fact, if the
United States had a healthcare system like comparable countries there
wouldn’t be any deficit. The famous deficit would be erased, which
doesn’t matter that much anyway.
One of the most interesting cases
has to do with taxes. For 35 years there have been polls on ‘what do
you think taxes ought to be?’ Large majorities have held that the
corporations and the wealthy should pay higher taxes. They’ve steadily
been going down through this period.
On and on, the policy throughout is almost the opposite of public opinion, which is a typical property of RECD.
In
the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of sardonically, been
described as a one-party state: the business party with two factions
called Democrats and Republicans. That’s no longer true. It’s still a
one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction. The
faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats. There are
virtually no moderate Republicans in what’s called the Republican Party
and virtually no liberal Democrats in what’s called the Democratic
[sic] Party. It’s basically a party of what would be moderate
Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be way at the left of the
political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be in outer space.
There
is still something called the Republican Party, but it long ago
abandoned any pretence of being a normal parliamentary party. It’s in
lock-step service to the very rich and the corporate sector and has a
catechism that everyone has to chant in unison, kind of like the old
Communist Party. The distinguished conservative commentator, one of the
most respected – Norman Ornstein – describes today’s Republican Party
as, in his words, “a radical insurgency – ideologically extreme,
scornful of facts and compromise, dismissive of its political
opposition” – a serious danger to the society, as he points out.
In
short, Really Existing Capitalist Democracy is very remote from the
soaring rhetoric about democracy. But there is another version of
democracy. Actually it’s the standard doctrine of progressive,
contemporary democratic theory. So I’ll give some illustrative quotes
from leading figures – incidentally not figures on the right. These are
all good Woodrow Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberals, mainstream ones in fact.
So according to this version of democracy, “the public are ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders. They have to be put in their place. Decisions must
be in the hands of an intelligent minority of responsible men, who have
to be protected from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd”.
The herd has a function, as it’s called. They’re supposed to lend their
weight every few years, to a choice among the responsible men. But apart
from that, their function is to be “spectators, not participants in
action” – and it’s for their own good. Because as the founder of liberal
political science pointed out, we should not succumb to “democratic
dogmatisms about people being the best judges of their own interest”.
They’re not. We’re the best judges, so it would be irresponsible to let
them make choices just as it would be irresponsible to let a
three-year-old run into the street. Attitudes and opinions therefore
have to be controlled for the benefit of those you are controlling. It’s
necessary to “regiment their minds”. It’s necessary also to discipline
the institutions responsible for the “indoctrination of the young.” All
quotes, incidentally. And if we can do this, we might be able to get
back to the good old days when “Truman had been able to govern the
country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street
lawyers and bankers.” This is all from icons of the liberal
establishment, the leading progressive democratic theorists. Some of you
may recognize some of the quotes.
The roots of these attitudes go
back quite far. They go back to the first stirrings of modern
democracy. The first were in England in the 17th Century. As you know,
later in the United States. And they persist in fundamental ways. The
first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s. There was a civil
war between king and parliament. But the gentry, the people who called
themselves “the men of best quality”, were appalled by the rising
popular forces that were beginning to appear on the public arena. They
didn’t want to support either king or parliament. Quote their pamphlets,
they didn’t want to be ruled by “knights and gentlemen, who do but
oppress us, but we want to be governed by countrymen like ourselves, who
know the people’s sores”. That’s a pretty terrifying sight. Now the
rabble has been a pretty terrifying sight ever since. Actually it was
long before. It remained so a century after the British democratic
revolution. The founders of the American republic had pretty much the
same view about the rabble. So they determined that “power must be in
the hands of the wealth of the nation, the more responsible set of men.
Those who have sympathy for property owners and their rights”, and of
course for slave owners at the time. In general, men who understand that
a fundamental task of government is “to protect the minority of the
opulent from the majority”. Those are quotes from James Madison, the
main framer – this was in the Constitutional Convention, which is much
more revealing than the Federalist Papers which people read. The
Federalist Papers were basically a propaganda effort to try to get the
public to go along with the system. But the debates in the
Constitutional Convention are much more revealing. And in fact the
constitutional system was created on that basis. I don’t have time to go
through it, but it basically adhered to the principle which was
enunciated simply by John Jay, the president of the Continental
Congress, then first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and as he put
it, “those who own the country ought to govern it”. That’s the primary
doctrine of RECD to the present.
There’ve been many popular
struggles since – and they’ve won many victories. The masters, however,
do not relent. The more freedom is won, the more intense are the efforts
to redirect the society to a proper course. And the 20th Century
progressive democratic theory that I’ve just sampled is not very
different from the RECD that has been achieved, apart from the question
of: Which responsible men should rule? Should it be bankers or
intellectual elites? Or for that matter should it be the Central
Committee in a different version of similar doctrines?
Well,
another important feature of RECD is that the public must be kept in the
dark about what is happening to them. The “herd” must remain
“bewildered”. The reasons were explained lucidly by the professor of the
science of government at Harvard – that’s the official name – another
respected liberal figure, Samuel Huntington. As he pointed out, “power
remains strong when it remains in the dark. Exposed to sunlight, it
begins to evaporate”. Bradley Manning is facing a life in prison for
failure to comprehend this scientific principle. Now Edward Snowden as
well. And it works pretty well. If you take a look at polls, it reveals
how well it works. So for example, recent polls pretty consistently
reveal that Republicans are preferred to Democrats on most issues and
crucially on the issues in which the public opposes the policies of the
Republicans and favors the policies of the Democrats. One striking
example of this is that majorities say that they favor the Republicans
on tax policy, while the same majorities oppose those policies. This
runs across the board. This is even true of the far right, the Tea Party
types. This goes along with an astonishing level of contempt for
government. Favorable opinions about Congress are literally in the
single digits. The rest of the government as well. It’s all declining
sharply.
Results such as these, which are pretty consistent,
illustrate demoralization of the public of a kind that’s unusual,
although there are examples – the late Weimar Republic comes to mind.
The tasks of ensuring that the rabble keep to their function as
bewildered spectators, takes many forms. The simplest form is simply to
restrict entry into the political system. Iran just had an election, as
you know. And it was rightly criticized on the grounds that even to
participate, you had to be vetted by the guardian council of clerics. In
the United States, you don’t have to be vetted by clerics, but rather
you have to be vetted by concentrations of private capital. Unless you
pass their filter, you don’t enter the political system – with very rare
exceptions.
There are many mechanisms, too familiar to review,
but that’s not safe enough either. There are major institutions that are
specifically dedicated to undermining authentic democracy. One of them
is called the public relations industry. A huge industry, it was in fact
developed on the principle that it’s necessary to regiment the minds of
men, much as an army regiments its soldiers – I was actually quoting
from one of its leading figures before.
The role of the PR
industry in elections is explicitly to undermine the school-child
version of democracy. What you learn in school is that democracies are
based on informed voters making rational decisions. All you have to do
is take a look at an electoral campaign run by the PR industry and see
that the purpose is to create uninformed voters who will make irrational
decisions. For the PR industry that’s a very easy transition from their
primary function. Their primary function is commercial advertising.
Commercial advertising is designed to undermine markets. If you took an
economics course you learned that markets are based on informed
consumers making rational choices. If you turn on the TV set, you see
that ads are designed to create irrational, uninformed consumers making
irrational choices. The whole purpose is to undermine markets in the
technical sense.
They’re well aware of it, incidentally. So for
example, after Obama’s election in 2008, a couple of months later the
advertising industry had its annual conference. Every year they award a
prize for the best marketing campaign of the year. That year they
awarded it to Obama. He beat out Apple computer, did an even better job
of deluding the public – or his PR agents did. If you want to hear some
of it, turn on the television today and listen to the soaring rhetoric
at the G-8 Summit in Belfast. It’s standard.
There was interesting
commentary on this in the business press, primarily The London
Financial Times, which had a long article, interviewing executives about
what they thought about the election. And they were quite euphoric
about this. They said this gives them a new model for how to delude the
public. The Obama model could replace the Reagan model, which worked
pretty well for a while.
Turning to the economy, the core of the
economy today is financial institutions. They’ve vastly expanded since
the 1970s, along with a parallel development – accelerated shift of
production abroad. There have also been critical changes in the
character of financial institutions.
If you go back to the 1960s,
banks were banks. If you had some money, you put it in the bank to lend
it to somebody to buy a house or start a business, or whatever. Now
that’s a very marginal aspect of financial institutions today. They’re
mostly devoted to intricate, exotic manipulations with markets. And
they’re huge. In the United States, financial institutions, big banks
mostly, had 40% of corporate profit in 2007. That was on the eve of the
financial crisis, for which they were largely responsible. After the
crisis, a number of professional economists – Nobel laureate Robert
Solow, Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman – wrote articles in which they
pointed out that economists haven’t done much study of the impact of the
financial institutions on the economy. Which is kind of remarkable,
considering its scale. But after the crisis they took a look and they
both concluded that probably the impact of the financial institutions on
the economy is negative. Actually there are some who are much more
outspoken than that. The most respected financial correspondent in the
English-speaking world is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. He writes
that the “out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern
market economy from the inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp
eats out the host in which it has been laid”. By “the market economy” he
means the productive economy.
There’s a recent issue of the main
business weekly, Bloomberg Business Week, which reported a study of the
IMF that found that the largest banks make no profit. What they earn,
according to the IMF analysis, traces to the government insurance
policy, the so-called too-big-to-fail policy. There is a widely
publicized bailout, but that’s the least of it. There’s a whole series
of other devices by which the government insurance policy aids the big
banks: cheap credit and many other things. And according to the IMF at
least, that’s the totality of their profit. The editors of the journal
say this is crucial to understanding why the big banks present such a
threat to the global economy – and to the people of the country, of
course.
After the crash, there was the first serious attention by
professional economists to what’s called systemic risk. They knew it
existed but it wasn’t much a topic of investigation. ‘Systemic risk’
means the risk that if a transaction fails, the whole system may
collapse. That’s what’s called an externality in economic theory. It’s a
footnote. And it’s one of the fundamental flaws of market systems, a
well-known, inherent flaw, is externalities. Every transaction has
impacts on others which just aren’t taken into account in a market
transaction. Systemic risk is a big one. And there are much more serious
illustrations than that. I’ll come back to it.
What about the
productive economy under RECD? Here there’s a mantra too. The mantra is
based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice in a free
market. There are agreements established called free-trade agreements,
which are based on the mantra. That’s all mythology.
The reality
is that there is massive state intervention in the productive economy
and the free-trade agreements are anything but free-trade agreements.
That should be obvious. Just to take one example: The information
technology (IT) revolution, which is driving the economy, that was based
on decades of work in effectively the state sector – hard, costly,
creative work substantially in the state sector, no consumer choice at
all, there was entrepreneurial initiative but it was largely limited to
getting government grants or bailouts or procurement. Except by some
economists, that’s underestimated but a very significant factor in
corporate profit. If you can’t sell something, hand it over the
government. They’ll buy it.
After a long period – decades in fact –
of hard, creative work, the primary research and development, the
results are handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and
profit. That’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so on. It’s not quite that
simple of course. But that’s a core part of the picture. The system goes
way back to the origins of industrial economies, but it’s dramatically
true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the study of the
productive economy.
Another central aspect of RECD is
concentration of capital. In just the past 20 years in the United
States, the share of profits of the two hundred largest enterprises has
very sharply risen, probably the impact of the Internet, it seems. These
tendencies towards oligopoly also undermine the mantra, of course.
Interesting topics but I won’t pursue them any further.
Instead,
I’d like to turn to another question. What are the prospects for the
future under RECD? There’s an answer. They’re pretty grim. It’s no
secret that there are a number of dark shadows that hover over every
topic that we discuss and there are two that are particularly ominous,
so I’ll keep to those, though there are others. One is environmental
catastrophe. The other is nuclear war. Both of which of course threaten
the prospects for decent survival and not in the remote future.
I
won’t say very much about the first, environmental catastrophe. That
should be obvious. Certainly the scale of the danger should be obvious
to anyone with eyes open, anyone who is literate, particularly those who
read scientific journals. Every issue of a technical journal virtually
has more dire warnings than the last one.
There are various
reactions to this around the world. There are some who seek to act
decisively to prevent possible catastrophe. At the other extreme, major
efforts are underway to accelerate the danger. Leading the effort to
intensify the likely disaster is the richest and most powerful country
in world history, with incomparable advantages and the most prominent
example of RECD – the one that others are striving towards.
Leading
the efforts to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants
might have a decent life, are the so-called “primitive” societies: First
Nations in Canada, Aboriginal societies in Australia, tribal societies
and others like them. The countries that have large and influential
indigenous populations are well in the lead in the effort to “defend the
Earth”. That’s their phrase. The countries that have driven indigenous
populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing forward
enthusiastically towards destruction. This is one of the major features
of contemporary history. One of those things that ought to be on front
pages. So take Ecuador, which has a large indigenous population. It’s
seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial
hydrocarbon reserves underground, which is where they ought to be. Now
meanwhile, the U.S. and Canada are enthusiastically seeking to burn
every drop of fossil fuel, including the most dangerous kind – Canadian
tar sands – and to do so as quickly and fully as possible – without a
side glance on what the world might look like after this extravagant
commitment to self-destruction. Actually, every issue of the daily
papers suffices to illustrate this lunacy. And lunacy is the right word
for it. It’s exactly the opposite of what rationality would demand,
unless it’s the skewed rationality of RECD.
Well, there have been
massive corporate campaigns to implant and safeguard the lunacy. But
despite them, there’s still a real problem in American society. The
public is still too committed to scientific rationality. One of the many
divergences between policy and opinion is that the American public is
close to the global norm in concern about the environment and calling
for actions to prevent the catastrophe and that’s a pretty high level.
Meanwhile, bipartisan policy is dedicated to ‘bringing it on’, in a
phrase that George W. Bush made famous in the case of Iraq. Fortunately,
the corporate sector is riding to the rescue to deal with this problem.
There is a corporate funded organization – the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC). It designs legislation for states. No need to
comment on what kind of legislation. They’ve got a lot of clout and
money behind them. So the programs tend to get instituted. Right now
they’re instituting a new program to try to overcome the excessive
rationality of the public. It’s a program of instruction for K-12
(kindergarten to 12th grade in schools). Its publicity says that the
idea is to improve critical faculties – I’d certainly be in favor of
that – by balanced teaching. ‘Balanced teaching’ means that if a sixth
grade class learned something about what’s happening to the climate,
they have to be presented with material on climate change denial so that
they have balanced teaching and can develop their critical faculties.
Maybe that’ll help overcome the failure of massive corporate propaganda
campaigns to make the population ignorant and irrational enough to
safeguard short-term profit for the rich. It’s pointedly the goal and
several states have already accepted it.
Well, it’s worth
remembering, without pursuing it that these are deep-seated
institutional properties of RECD. They’re not easy to uproot. All of
this is apart from the institutional necessity to maximize short-term
profit while ignoring an externality that’s vastly more serious even
than systemic risk. For systemic risk, the market failure – the culprits
– can run to the powerful nanny state that they foster with cap in hand
and they’ll be bailed out, as we’ve just observed again and will in the
future. In the case of destruction of the environment, the conditions
for decent existence, there’s no guardian angel around – nobody to run
to with cap in hand. For that reason alone, the prospects for decent
survival under RECD are quite dim.
Let’s turn to the other shadow:
nuclear war. It’s a threat that’s been with us for 70 years. It still
is. In some ways it’s growing. One of the reasons for it is that under
RECD, the rights and needs of the general population are a minor matter.
That extends to security. There is another prevailing mantra,
particularly in the academic professions, claiming that governments seek
to protect national security. Anyone who has studied international
relations theory has heard that. That’s mostly mythology. The
governments seek to extend power and domination and to benefit their
primary domestic constituencies – in the U.S., primarily the corporate
sector. The consequence is that security does not have a high priority.
We see that all the time. Right now in fact. Take say Obama’s operation
to murder Osama Bin Laden, prime suspect for the 9/11 attack. Obama made
an important speech on national security last May 23rd. It was widely
covered. There was one crucial paragraph in the speech that was ignored
in the coverage. Obama hailed the operation, took pride in it – an
operation which incidentally is another step at dismantling the
foundations of Anglo-American law, back to the Magna Carta, namely the
presumption of innocence. But that’s by now so familiar, it’s not even
necessary to talk about it. But there’s more to it. Obama did hail the
operation but he added to it that it “cannot be the norm”. The reason is
that “the risks were immense”. The Navy SEALs who carried out the
murder might have been embroiled in an extended firefight, but even
though by luck that didn’t happen, “the cost to our relationship with
Pakistan – and the backlash of the Pakistani public over the
encroachment on their territory”, the aggression in other words, “was so
severe that we’re just now beginning to rebuild this important
partnership”.
It’s more than that. Let’s add a couple of details.
The SEALs were under orders to fight their way out if they were
apprehended. They would not have been left to their fate if they had
been, in Obama’s words, been “embroiled in an extended firefight”. The
full force of the U.S. military would have been employed to extricate
them. Pakistan has a powerful military. It’s well-trained, highly
protective of state sovereignty. Of course, it has nuclear weapons. And
leading Pakistani specialists on nuclear policy and issues are quite
concerned by the exposure of the nuclear weapons system to jihadi
elements. It could have escalated to a nuclear war. And in fact it came
pretty close. While the SEALs were still inside the Bin Laden compound,
the Pakistani chief of staff, General Kayani, was informed of the
invasion and he ordered his staff in his words to “confront any
unidentified aircraft”. He assumed it was probably coming from India.
Meanwhile in Kabul, General David Petraeus, head of the Central Command,
ordered “U.S. warplanes to respond if Pakistanis scrambled their
fighter jets”. It was that close. Going back to Obama, “by luck” it
didn’t happen. But the risk was faced without noticeable concern,
without even reporting in fact.
There’s a lot more to say about
that operation and its immense cost to Pakistan, but instead of that
let’s look more closely at the concern for security more generally.
Beginning with security from terror, and then turning to the much more
important question of security from instant destruction by nuclear
weapons.
As I mentioned, Obama’s now conducting the world’s
greatest international terrorist campaign – the drones and special
forces campaign. It’s also a terror-generating campaign. The common
understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions generate
potential terrorists. I’ll quote General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus’
predecessor. He says that “for every innocent person you kill”, and
there are plenty of them, “you create ten new enemies”.
Take the
marathon bombing in Boston a couple of months ago, that you all read
about. You probably didn’t read about the fact that two days after the
marathon bombing there was a drone bombing in Yemen. Usually we don’t
happen to hear much about drone bombings. They just go on – just
straight terror operations which the media aren’t interested in because
we don’t care about international terrorism as long as the victims are
somebody else. But this one we happened to know about by accident. There
was a young man from the village that was attacked who was in the
United States and he happened to testify before Congress. He testified
about it. He said that for several years, the jihadi elements in Yemen
had been trying to turn the village against Americans, get them to hate
Americans. But the villagers didn’t accept it because the only thing
they knew about the United States was what he told them. And he liked
the United States. So he was telling them it was a great place. So the
jihadi efforts didn’t work. Then he said one drone attack has turned the
entire village into people who hate America and want to destroy it.
They killed a man who everybody knew and they could have easily
apprehended if they’d wanted. But in our international terror campaigns
we don’t worry about that and we don’t worry about security.
One
of the striking examples was the invasion of Iraq. U.S. and British
intelligence agencies informed their governments that the invasion of
Iraq was likely to lead to an increase in terrorism. They didn’t care.
In fact, it did. Terrorism increased by a factor of seven the first year
after the Iraqi invasion, according to government statistics. Right now
the government is defending the massive surveillance operation. That’s
on the front pages. The defense is on grounds that we have to do it to
apprehend terrorists.
If there were a free press – an authentic
free press – the headlines would be ridiculing this claim on the grounds
that policy is designed in such a way that it amplifies the terrorist
risk. But you can’t find that, which is one of innumerable indications
of how far we are from anything that might be called a free press.
Let’s
turn to the more serious problem: instant destruction by nuclear
weapons. That’s never been a high concern for state authorities. There
are many striking examples. Actually, we know a lot about it because the
United States is an unusually free and open society and there’s plenty
of internal documents that are released. So we can find out about it if
we like.
Let’s go back to 1950. In 1950, U.S. security was just
overwhelming. There’d never been anything like it in human history.
There was one potential danger: ICBMs with hydrogen bomb warheads. They
didn’t exist, but they were going to exist sooner or later. The Russians
knew that they were way behind in military technology. They offered the
U.S. a treaty to ban the development of ICBMs with hydrogen bomb
warheads. That would have been a terrific contribution to U.S. security.
There is one major history of nuclear weapons policy written by
McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor for Kennedy and Johnson. In
his study he has a couple of casual sentences on this. He said that he
was unable to find even a staff paper discussing this. Here’s a
possibility to save the country from total disaster and there wasn’t
even a paper discussing it. No one cared. Forget it, we’ll go on to the
important things.
A couple of years later, in 1952, Stalin made a
public offer, which was pretty remarkable, to permit unification of
Germany with internationally supervised free elections, in which the
Communists would certainly lose, on one condition – that Germany be
demilitarized. That’s hardly a minor issue for the Russians. Germany
alone had practically destroyed them several times in the century.
Germany militarized and part of a hostile Western alliance is a major
threat. That was the offer.
The offer was public. It also of
course would have led to an end to the official reason for NATO. It was
dismissed with ridicule. Couldn’t be true. There were a few people who
took it seriously – James Warburg, a respected international
commentator, but he was just dismissed with ridicule. Today, scholars
are looking back at it, especially with the Russian archives opening up.
And they’re discovering that in fact it was apparently serious. But
nobody could pay attention to it because it didn’t accord with policy
imperatives – vast production of threat of war.
Let’s go on a
couple of years to the late ’50s, when Khrushchev took over. He realized
that Russia was way behind economically and that it could not compete
with the United States in military technology and hope to carry out
economic development, which he was hoping to do. So he offered a sharp
mutual cutback in offensive weapons. The Eisenhower administration kind
of dismissed it. The Kennedy administration listened. They considered
the possibility and they rejected it. Khrushchev went on to introduce a
sharp unilateral reduction of offensive weapons. The Kennedy
administration observed that and decided to expand offensive military
capacity – not just reject it, but expand it. It was already way ahead.
That
was one reason why Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba in 1962 to try to
redress the balance slightly. That led to what historian Arthur
Schlesinger – Kennedy’s advisor – called “the most dangerous moment in
world history” – the Cuban missile crisis. Actually there was another
reason for it: the Kennedy administration was carrying out a major
terrorist operation against Cuba. Massive terrorism. It’s the kind of
terrorism that the West doesn’t care about because somebody else is the
victim. So it didn’t get reported, but it was large-scale. Furthermore,
the terror operation – it was called Operation Mongoose – had a plan. It
was to culminate in an American invasion in October 1962. The Russians
and the Cubans may not have known all the details, but it’s likely that
they knew this much. That was another reason for placing defensive
missiles in Cuba.
Then came very tense weeks as you know. They
culminated on October 26th. At that time, B-52s armed with nuclear
weapons were ready to attack Moscow. The military instructions permitted
crews to launch nuclear war without central control. It was
decentralized command. Kennedy himself was leaning towards military
action to eliminate the missiles from Cuba. His own, subjective estimate
of the probability of nuclear war was between a third and a half. That
would essentially have wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, according to
President Eisenhower.
At that point, on October 26th, the letter
came from Khrushchev to Kennedy offering to end the crisis. How? By
withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba in return for withdrawal of
U.S. missiles from Turkey. Kennedy in fact didn’t even know there were
missiles in Turkey. But he was informed of that by his advisors. One of
the reasons he didn’t know is that they were obsolete and they were
being withdrawn anyway. They were being replaced with far more lethal
invulnerable Polaris submarines. So that was the offer: the Russians
withdraw missiles from Cuba; the U.S. publicly withdraw obsolete
missiles that it’s already withdrawing from Turkey, which of course are a
much greater threat to Russia than the missiles were in Cuba.
Kennedy
refused. That’s probably the most horrendous decision in human history,
in my opinion. He was taking a huge risk of destroying the world in
order to establish a principle: the principle is that we have the right
to threaten anyone with destruction anyway we like, but it’s a
unilateral right. And no one may threaten us, even to try to deter a
planned invasion. Much worse than this is the lesson that has been taken
away – that Kennedy is praised for his cool courage under pressure.
That’s the standard version today.
The threats continued. Ten
years later, Henry Kissinger called a nuclear alert. 1973. The purpose
was to warn the Russians not to intervene in the Israel-Arab conflict.
What had happened was that Russia and the United States had agreed to
institute a ceasefire. But Kissinger had privately informed Israel that
they didn’t have to pay any attention to it; they could keep going.
Kissinger didn’t want the Russians to interfere so he called a nuclear
alert.
Going on ten years, Ronald Reagan’s in office. His
administration decided to probe Russian defenses by simulating air and
naval attacks – air attacks into Russia and naval attacks on its border.
Naturally this caused considerable alarm in Russia, which unlike the
United States is quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and
virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. We have
newly released archives that tell us how dangerous it was – much more
dangerous than historians had assumed. There’s a current CIA study that
just came out. It’s entitled “The War Scare Was for Real”. It was close
to nuclear war. It concludes that U.S. intelligence underestimated the
threat of a Russian preventative strike, nuclear strike, fearing that
the U.S. was attacking them. The most recent issue of The Journal of
Strategic Studies – one of the main journals – writes that this almost
became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike. And it continues. I
won’t go through details, but the Bin Laden assassination is a recent
one.
There are now three new threats. I’ll try to be brief, but
let me mention three cases that are on the front pages right now. North
Korea, Iran, China. They’re worth looking at. North Korea has been
issuing wild, dangerous threats. That’s attributed to the lunacy of
their leaders. It could be argued that it’s the most dangerous, craziest
government in the world, and the worst government. It’s probably true.
But if we want to reduce the threats instead of march blindly in unison,
there are a few things to consider. One of them is that the current
crisis began with U.S.-South Korean war games, which included for the
first time ever a simulation of a preemptive attack in an all-out war
scenario against North Korea. Part of these exercises were simulated
nuclear bombings on the borders of North Korea. That brings up some
memories for the North Korean leadership. For example, they can remember
that 60 years ago there was a superpower that virtually leveled the
entire country and when there was nothing left to bomb, the United
States turned to bombing dams. Some of you may recall that you could get
the death penalty for that at Nuremberg. It’s a war crime. Even if
Western intellectuals and the media choose to ignore the documents, the
North Korean leadership can read public documents, the official Air
Force reports of the time, which are worth reading. I encourage you to
read them. They exulted over the glorious sight of massive floods “that
scooped clear 27 miles of valley below”, devastated 75% of the
controlled water supply for North Korea’s rice production, sent the
commissars scurrying to the press and radio centers to blare to the
world the most severe, hate-filled harangues to come from the Communist
propaganda mill in the three years of warfare. To the communists, the
smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief
sustenance: rice. Westerners can little conceive the awesome meaning
which the loss of this staple food commodity has for Asians: starvation
and slow death. Hence the show of rage, the flare of violent tempers and
the threats of reprisals when bombs fell on five irrigation dams.
Mostly quotes. Like other potential targets, the crazed North Korean
leaders can also read high-level documents which are public,
declassified, which outline U.S. strategic doctrine. One of the most
important is a study by Clinton’s strategic command, STRATCOM. It’s
about the role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era. Its central
conclusions are: U.S. must retain the right of first strike, even
against non-nuclear states; furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be
available, at the ready, because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or
conflict”. They frighten adversaries. So they’re constantly being used,
just as if you’re using a gun, going into a store pointing a gun at the
store owner. You don’t fire it, but you’re using the gun. STRATCOM goes
on to say planners should not be too rational in determining what the
opponent values the most. All of it has to be targeted. “It hurts to
portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. That the United
States may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are
attacked should be part of the national persona that we project.” It’s
beneficial for our strategic posture “if some elements appear to be
potentially out-of-control”. That’s not Richard Nixon or George W. Bush;
it’s Bill Clinton.
Again, Western intellectuals and media choose
not to look, but potential targets don’t have that luxury. There’s also a
recent history that the North Korean leaders know quite well. I’m not
going to review it because of lack of time. But it’s very revealing.
I’ll just quote mainstream U.S. scholarship. North Korea has been
playing tit for tat – reciprocating whenever Washington cooperates,
retaliating whenever Washington reneges. Undoubtedly it’s a horrible
place. But the record does suggest directions that would reduce the
threat of war if that were the intention, certainly not military
maneuvers and simulated nuclear bombing.
Let me turn to the
“gravest threat to world peace” – those are Obama’s words, dutifully
repeated in the press: Iran’s nuclear program. It raises a couple of
questions: Who thinks it’s the gravest threat? What is the threat? How
can you deal with it, whatever it is?
‘Who thinks it’s a threat?’
is easy to answer. It’s a Western obsession. The U.S. and its allies say
it’s the gravest threat and not the rest of the world, not the
non-aligned countries, not the Arab states. The Arab populations don’t
like Iran but they don’t regard it as much of a threat. They regard the
U.S. as the threat. In Iraq and Egypt, for example, the U.S. is regarded
as the major threat they face. It’s not hard to understand why.
What
is the threat? We know the answer from the highest level: the U.S.
intelligence and the Pentagon provide estimates to Congress every year.
You can read them. The Global Security Analysis – they of course review
this. And they say the main threat of a Iranian nuclear program – if
they’re developing weapons, they don’t know. But they say if they’re
developing weapons, they would be part of their deterrent strategy. The
U.S. can’t accept that. A state that claims the right to use force and
violence anywhere and whenever it wants, cannot accept a deterrent. So
they’re a threat. That’s the threat.
So how do you deal with the
threat, whatever it is? Actually, there are ways. I’m short of time so I
won’t go through details but there’s one very striking one: We’ve just
passed an opportunity last December. There was to be an international
conference under the auspices of the non-proliferation treaty, UN
auspices, in Helsinki to deal with moves to establish a nuclear
weapons-free zone in the Middle East. That has overwhelming
international support – non-aligned countries; it’s been led by the Arab
states, Egypt particularly, for decades. Overwhelming support. If it
could be carried forward it would certainly mitigate the threat. It
might eliminate it. Everyone was waiting to see whether Iran would agree
to attend.
In early November, Iran agreed to attend. A couple of
days later, Obama canceled the conference. No conference. The European
Parliament passed a resolution calling for it to continue. The Arab
states said they were going to proceed anyway, but it can’t be done. So
we have to live with the gravest threat to world peace. And we possibly
have to march on to war which in fact is being predicted.
The
population could do something about it if they knew anything about it.
But here, the free press enters. In the United States there has
literally not been a single word about this anywhere near the
mainstream. You can tell me about Europe.
The last potential confrontation is China. It’s an interesting one, but time is short so I won’t go on.
The
last comment I’d like to make goes in a somewhat different direction. I
mentioned the Magna Carta. That’s the foundations of modern law. We
will soon be commemorating the 800th anniversary. We won’t be
celebrating it – more likely interring what little is left of its bones
after the flesh has been picked off by Bush and Obama and their
colleagues in Europe. And Europe is involved clearly.
But there is
another part of Magna Carta which has been forgotten. It had two
components. The one is the Charter of Liberties which is being
dismantled. The other was called the Charter of the Forests. That called
for protection of the commons from the depredations of authority. This
is England of course. The commons were the traditional source of
sustenance, of food and fuel and welfare as well. They were nurtured and
sustained for centuries by traditional societies collectively. They
have been steadily dismantled under the capitalist principle that
everything has to be privately owned, which brought with it the perverse
doctrine of – what is called the tragedy of the commons – a doctrine
which holds that collective possessions will be despoiled so therefore
everything has to be privately owned. The merest glance at the world
shows that the opposite is true. It’s privatization that is destroying
the commons. That’s why the indigenous populations of the world are in
the lead in trying to save Magna Carta from final destruction by its
inheritors. And they’re joined by others. Take say the demonstrators in
Gezi Park in trying to block the bulldozers in Taksim Square. They’re
trying to save the last part of the commons in Istanbul from the
wrecking ball of commercial destruction. This is a kind of a microcosm
of the general defense of the commons. It’s one part of a global
uprising against the violent neo-liberal assault on the population of
the world. Europe is suffering severely from it right now. The uprisings
have registered some major successes. The most dramatic are Latin
America. In this millennium it has largely freed itself from the lethal
grip of Western domination for the first time in 500 years. Other things
are happening too. The general picture is pretty grim, I think. But
there are shafts of light. As always through history, there are two
trajectories. One leads towards oppression and destruction. The other
leads towards freedom and justice. And as always – to adapt Martin
Luther King’s famous phrase – there are ways to bend the arc of the
moral universe towards justice and freedom – and by now even towards
survival.
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