The UN call to the Sri Lankan government is an admission that the Government of Sri Lanka has not offered terms of negotiation nor even terms for the LTTE’s surrender. The government’s intentions, instead, are advertised more clearly on the Sri Lankan Army’s website. On May 5, the military spokesman announced “The 58, 53 and 59 Divisions of the Army were advancing from three different directions and moving towards the area where some of the key LTTE members and Tiger leader Prabhakaran were hiding.” The Army’s site is rich with details of ever more captures of LTTE arms caches, captures and killings of LTTE “suspects”. The site is steeped in counterinsurgency language: LTTE are referred to everywhere as “terrorists”. Deaths in the No-Fire Zone are always attributed to the LTTE firing on civilians. Any killings by the Army are of “terrorists”. As a last resort, the government can blame collateral damage on the LTTE’s “blending” with civilians (which, according to many reports, is occurring, with LTTE fighters preventing civilians from leaving the zone and shooting at them).

Tragically, the UN’s call is likely to fail on both sides. The LTTE, whose forces had included naval and even some air force capacity, has been destroyed as a conventional force. Its cadres can only hope to survive if they are allowed to leave their surrounded No-Fire Zone with the civilians in a ceasefire arrangement. From their perspective, to allow the civilians to leave would be to guarantee their own deaths. The government, meanwhile, is being carried forward on the momentum of its own military success. Seeking a military solution rather than a political solution to the conflict and seeing the prospect of a total military victory, the government is trying to persist until the LTTE leaders are captured or killed, and have shown a willingness to kill thousands of civilians to reach this goal. By keeping journalists and humanitarian workers out of the war zone, attacking the accounts of Tamils whose stories get out, and amplifying stories of LTTE abuses, the Sri Lankan government has bought time to pursue the military option, time purchased in international indifference and civilian blood.

There are both recent proposals and social movement precedents for political solutions to the Sri Lankan conflict, that feature federalism and autonomy in the Tamil-majority areas of the North and Northeast. The problem is that neither the Sri Lankan state, nor the regional powers involved (India, Pakistan, China), nor the US, has any interest in such solutions. They point to abuses by the LTTE and to its refusals of negotiations, in 1994 and 2002. The LTTE have made errors and committed abuses. But they are slated for destruction not for these, but because their presence in the North and Northeast prevents access to territories coveted by multinationals and the state for tourism and agribusiness megaprojects. The devastating 2004 tsunami had the effect of clearing territories under government control, destroying thousands of fishing communities on coveted coastal real estate. In the areas controlled by the government, these territories were rebuilt for corporations (Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” has a chapter on this). As the Sri Lankan army moves north, it is finishing the work of the tsunami: moving whole Tamil communities into internment camps, destroying organizations of resistance, and asserting territorial control.

When wars against civilians close political options, the voices and ideas of peoples are silenced. They become victims while the world watches armed actors fight it out over their bones. Despite their slim chance of success, the main elements of the call by the UN and humanitarian organizations: for a ceasefire, for the government allow journalists and humanitarian organizations in, and for a political solution to the conflict, are correct. To understand the forces against such a solution, some background is necessary. Although the brief account below omits very important details, it provides some background that is crucial for understanding today’s fighting and in considering future options for peace.

Sri Lanka is a country of about 21 million people, about 74% of whom are Sinhalese. Some 3 million are Tamils and another 1 million are “Indian Tamils” or “Up Country Tamils”, who have a different history on the island. In precolonial times, there were separate Tamil and Sinhalese kingdoms with little interaction or armed conflict. British colonialism turned this complex society into an imperial plantation. It subordinated Sinhalese Sri Lankans to plantation labour and moved populations, importing a large number of Tamils from India to work in plantations in the central hills of the country (these are now the “Tamils of Indian Origin”). After independence in 1948, Sri Lankans, like other South Asians, struggled to forge independent nations out of economies and polities restructured for colonialism. While many Sinhalese and Tamils struggled together for agrarian and political rights, ethnic-based mobilization also occurred. As in other South Asian countries, this “communalism” caused tremendous damage. Disputes centered on competition for civil service jobs. In 1956, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which mobilized on a Sinhalese communalist platform, made Sinhala the official language and imposed quotas in government jobs. The Sinhalese-dominated army was sent to the northern provinces in the early 1960s for the first time, and abuses committed then caused resentment and eventually helped fuel guerrilla movements.

1977 is a key year for three reasons. First, in 1977, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) ran in elections on a platform of independence for a new Tamil Eelam state in the Northeast, receiving overwhelming support in the northern and eastern provinces and declaring autonomy from the government in Colombo. Second, the LTTE appeared on the scene in this year as well.

Third, and most important, 1977 was the year IMF structural adjustment came to Sri Lanka, exacerbating the conflict dramatically. From independence until 1977, Sri Lanka had been viewed, like the Indian state of Kerala, as an imperfect but interesting model for social progress in spite of relative economic backwardness. Much of this progress was lost after the restructuring. For example, land reforms enacted in the 1950s gave farmers a degree of protection from creditors. These were lost in the IMF structural adjustment program.

In addition to opening financial, trade, service, and construction sectors to privatization, the government participated in a megaproject, the Mahavali Scheme, to divert the largest river for irrigation and power-generation. Lands “opened up” by this scheme were given to Sinhalese (themselves peasants who were displaced by the IMF restructuring), even though these lands were opened in the Tamil east. Settling some 80,000 Sinhalese in the east, where Tamils were some 40% of the population (they are 86% of the population in the north), was viewed as colonizing Tamil lands and referred to as a “West Bank solution”.

From 1977 to 1983, the economic situation continued to deteriorate under the IMF-WB regime. Price controls and subsidies were eliminated, communal problems worsened, and the government gave itself new powers to crack down on “terrorism” as well as protests and riots. 1983 is typically dated as the start of the civil war. That year saw abuses by the Sri Lankan army, ambushes by the LTTE, and horrific communal riots against Tamils that killed thousands and included an element of government complicity. Many Tamils left the southern provinces for the north.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a Sinhalese insurgency was taking place by the Janatha Vimukthi Perumana, ‘People’s Liberation Front’, or JVP (now a major political party). Made up mostly of Sinhalese youth, the JVP rose in rebellion several times (in 1971 and again 1987-9) and assassinated some major political figures. They were crushed, with some 10,000 killed in 1971 and 40,000 or more killed in 1987-9. India assisted Sri Lanka in crushing the JVP rebellions. The JVP rebellions suggest two things. First, that the structural violence and impoverishment that gave rise to the LTTE are also operative in the majority Sinhalese community, and that such violence is not solely an ethnic problem. Second, that the state’s model for dealing with such problems is not to address them, but to physically destroy the activists and attempt to co-opt the leadership.

Since 1983, the civil war against the LTTE has been divided into four periods. During Eelam War I, 1983-1987, India supported the LTTE and which ended with an Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in the Tamil areas. The 1987-1990 was the period of the IPKF debacle, which ended with the IPKF fighting the LTTE and being told to leave by the Sri Lankan government. In 1991, the LTTE assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu. From 1990-1992, the LTTE expelled most of the Muslim population from the North through massacre, with about 150,000 Muslims fleeing the North by the end of the period. Eelam War II (1990-1995) ended with a ceasefire and attempted peace talks. Eelam War III (1995-2002) was the period of the LTTE’s greatest military success and ended with an internationally monitored ceasefire agreement. The current round, Eelam War IV, which began in 2006, during which the Sri Lankan Army has imposed a near complete defeat on the LTTE.

Several factors explain the success of the Sri Lankan Army in this round, success that had eluded it for decades. First, the most important single factor is the banning of the LTTE and its classification as a ‘terrorist organization’ since the War on Terror. This classification has denied the LTTE its main sources of finance and supply. The Sri Lankan government has been able to destroy LTTE sea supply lines and sink many supply ships. Second, in March 2004, the eastern commander of the LTTE, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan (Colonel Karuna) broke from LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabakharan’s main group. In mid-April, Prabakharan’s forces attacked Karuna’s group, which fled with his veterans and was placed under government protection. Karuna organized the Tamil Eelam People’s Liberation Tigers (TEPLT), a defection that cost the LTTE 5-6000 soldiers and, ultimately, the eastern province. Third, other regional actors (India, China, Pakistan), are more closely aligned with the government than they had been (see for example this 2006 assessment by Indian writer Sudha Ramachandran). Fourth, as a part of the “War on Terror”, Sri Lanka’s war has received US support as well. The extent of US assistance to Sri Lanka in this operation is unknown, but the US did state that they had an assessment team of the Marines in Sri Lanka for months before the operation began. Speaking in India on May 14, US Pacific Command Chief Admiral Timothy J Keating told reporters:

“We had sent a military assessment team about two to three months ago under a Brigadier General of the United States Marine Corps to Sri Lanka to work with our embassy there and abide by the situation. We prepared a range of military options that were and remain available (for the crisis).”

Fifth, the devastation of the 2004 Tsunami and the politicized reconstruction processes may have disadvantaged the LTTE. 30,000 people were killed, half a million to a million made homeless, and two-thirds of the fishery was wiped out. The highest percentages of affected people were Tamils and Muslims. One of the hardest hit districts was Mullaitivu, one of the sites of recent fighting. US and Indian troops were involved in emergency response to the Tsunami in the Northern region, and the LTTE complained that these foreign forces provided intelligence to the government.

In addition to the abuses they have committed, the LTTE also made three strategic mistakes that exacerbated each of the above problems. First, they denied pluralism in Tamil politics, claiming for themselves, sometimes through violence against rivals, the role of sole representative of Sri Lankan Tamils. Second, they increasingly favoured the military over the political, which gradually cut them off from their base and alienated the people. Third, they did not make links to related struggles against the common sources of oppression or coalitions with other oppressed peoples, Sinhalese or, especially, Muslim: the expulsion of the Muslims from the North in the 1990s was perhaps the worst example of this. Their mistakes and abuses are themselves products of the violent context, but they isolated the Tigers and made them politically more vulnerable to destruction.

Communalism, like insurgency, feeds on the memory of atrocities like the one that is unfolding today. All of the elements exist for the current round of fighting to end in a tragedy still more horrible than the thousands killed (UN estimates are 6,500 killed) and tens of thousands displaced. Whether LTTE leaders are captured alive (an unlikely proposition given the organization’s practice of carrying cyanide capsules around the neck rather than being captured and tortured by the Army) and treated to “victor’s justice” without parallel war crimes trials for the government’s crimes or slaughtered wholesale along with thousands more civilians, the horrors of the No-Fire Zone will not be easily forgotten. The Tamil population, especially those in the IDP camps and the No-Fire Zone, is in a more precarious situation than ever before, and dangers to them will only increase without a political solution. A ceasefire and political solution could give decent forces in the country a chance to begin to address the structural violence that victimizes all Sri Lankans, and Tamils especially. The bloody massacre being prepared is an attempt to finish the work of the tsunami, clearing lands, locking down peoples, and handing the country over for plunder.

And today, if you want to have the first idea what is happening in Israel/Palestine (or most of the rest of the world), the best thing to do would be to turn them off completely.

In the face of a major ongoing crime like that of Israel’s siege and assault on Gaza, Canadians turn to the Canadian media in good faith to try to learn and understand what is happening, who is to blame, and what they might be able to do to help the victims. On each of these counts, the Canadian media fails. But the days when Canadians would be stuck listening to local radio, picking up the local print newspaper, or watching local television packaged by Canadian media corporations for their consumption are over. There is, for the time being, media choice. And given the choice, on Israel/Palestine, it would be foolish to turn to the Canadian media.

These days I actually don’t have the stomach to do an exhaustive survey of Canadian coverage of these massacres. I have done such surveys in the past (see my letter to the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter from a few years back), and I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how to democratize the mainstream Canadian media and pressure it to be more open. These days, though, I mainly follow my own advice. A friend of mine, Brooks Kind, spent some time going through the least biased of the Canadian media, CBC radio, over the past two weeks. He found that the CBC suppressed crucial facts, presented an unrepresentative spectrum of opinion, and falsified the historical record. The suppressions and omissions are in the service of the perspective of the US and Israeli governments (and Canadian politicians), but they are no less false for that. With the reminder that I am picking on the CBC not because it is the worst, but because it is by far the best, here are just a few examples.

First, remember that the pretext for Israel’s attack is that Hamas refused to renew the June 19/08 ceasefire and started rocket attacks in December/08. But Israel violated the ceasefire in two ways. First, by continuing to starve Gaza (as Israeli officials openly admit and have done for years), and second, by attacking Gaza on November 4/08 and killing six Hamas people. Why is this important? There is a pattern here: Israel has repeatedly broken truces, ceasefires, and peace talks with spectacular assassinations that involve killing large numbers of people. This has been a pattern for many years, and has included the assassinations of many of Hamas’s leaders (Abd-el-Aziz Rantisi, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, and many, many others). It is an explicit part of Israel’s strategy to provoke its opponents and get pretexts for further attacks. But this timeline, and the November 4/08 attack by Israel, is not part of the ‘boilerplate’ provided when the attack on Gaza is reported in the Canadian media.

Second, Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has been making very strong statements about Gaza in recent months. Falk is an acclaimed scholar and a highly credible source. He works for the United Nations, which Canadians supposedly have special respect for. When Falk traveled to Israel, he was detained, strip searched, and deported. Israel’s contempt for the United Nations could hardly have been more starkly revealed. Except, perhaps, when the Israelis killed a Canadian UN observer (Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener) in Lebanon in 2006, along with 3 others (Du Zhaoyu of China, Jarno Makinen of Finland, and Hans-Peter Lang of Austria). Or, perhaps, when the Israelis bombed the UNRWA school in Jabaliya on Jan 3/09, killing 43 Palestinians and wounding 100. Unlike much of the UN, whose main response to these killings might as well be to apologize for getting in the way of the bombs, Falk has provided urgent warnings to the world about the seriousness of the situation. But Falk’s story is not given any prominence in any Canadian media. An entire story on the UN aspects of the situation quotes Israel’s envoy to the UN and Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and others, but not the important and strong voice of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.

And then, of course, there are the cliches, the horrible cliches of this conflict. Like this story about how “World leaders call for Mideast ceasefire as more civilians die.” They just “die”, these civilians. The lead reads “World leaders called for a ceasefire in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas as civilian casualties climbed in the Gaza Strip.” The “casualties climbed”, the “civilians died”, of their own accord, with no help from the Israelis. Israeli officials are allowed the grace of their titles (”Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak”) but Mahmoud Zahar from the elected Hamas government is called “Gaza’s Hamas strongman” (there are no Western strongmen).

Just before the current massacres, on December 8/08, Radio Canada’s ombudsman found that the CBC had erred in running a very factual documentary called “Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land” (3PL). The ombudsman Radio Canada erred in broadcasting because “militant pro-Palestinian groups were involved in researching” it. Who were these groups? FAIR, or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, whose principal activity is to act more or less as Radio Canada’s ombudsman should, pointing out inaccuracies and unfairness in US media coverage of critical topics. “Factual errors” pointed out by the ombudsman include that the film “speaks of the occupation as being illegal, but Miville-Dechene points out that this has never been clarified by the courts”. This merely suggests that the ombudsman lacks the most cursory understanding of international law. And possibly, an understanding of what constitutes a factual error. In any case, the Quebec Israel Committee (QIC) said that, by changing its policies to prevent documentaries like these from being seen by Canadians, “Radio-Canada has strengthened its credibility and has become a better news organization.” The more “credible” a media outlet is to an outfit like the QIC, the better off Canadians would be in turning it off altogether. What is good about this situation is that all Radio-Canada can really do is prevent Canadians from seeing 3PL on Radio-Canada. They can’t prevent Canadians from seeing it altogether (in fact, you can watch it at the Media Education Foundation site or on Google Video. The natural response is the right one: turn off Radio-Canada.

A last example. The rally against the Gaza massacres that happened in Toronto (as well as many cities in the world) on January 3, 2009. I was at the rally. I have been to a lot of rallies over the years. Many of these, I must admit, have been very small. Activists learn how to assess (and yes, unfortunately, sometimes to inflate) numbers at demonstrations. But to say that the January 3, 2009 rally had “more than 1000 people”, as CBC did, is simply preposterous. They may as well have said “more than one”. There were easily 10,000 people there — unless someone can show me how you can fill Yonge Street between Bloor Street and College Street in Toronto with a thousand people. And no, at no point was the march single file.

In the past, when I, and others like me, have made points like these to Canadian journalists, they reply that we are leftists and biased and merely want them to be biased the way we are. But the above are mostly matters of fact and of professionalism, not of analysis or opinion.

I am willing to declare my biases. I write for ZNet and work as an editor for it. I wouldn’t do either if I didn’t think people should read it, and I wouldn’t criticize the mainstream media if I thought it did a good job. ZNet is a site for analysis. It features analysts who write on other sites, like the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies, Jonathan Cook, Ha’aretz’s own Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, other Israelis like Neve Gorden and Jeff Halper, as well as folks who write mainly for ZNet. If you’re distrustful of the “alternative media” and fear that folks from the region will be biased, try the mainstream (liberal) UK papers, whose openness to diverse analysis puts the Canadian press to shame. Guardian’s Comment is Free section has had Leila el-Haddad, Nir Rosen, Seamus Milne, and plenty of others that don’t see the light of day in the Canadian press. Reading these analysts reveals the incredible mediocrity of the Canadian punditry when it addresses international affairs.

But analysis is not news, and people do need news. Not only do they need news, but they need a variety of perspectives, and the Israeli perspective is a very important one. There is, however, a difference between what the public relations line of a state at war and the actual perspective and debates in that state. In other words, if you want the Israeli perspective, you can get it directly, in the Israeli press: read Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post. They are available in English, and they are much more frank about Israel’s aims and practices than the Canadian media are. Why read what the Israeli military wants Canadians to read, when you can read what they want Israelis to read?

If you want news about how Israeli destruction looks to its victims, there is nothing better than the IMEMC, which is a genuine news outlet run by Palestinians, in the Occupied Territories, with as high professional standards as you could want. These are journalistic heroes, and the first place I go.

If you want news that is actually balanced, with “supporters of Israel” and “pro-Palestinian” voices represented, as well as actual reporting from the ground, use al-Jazeera.

[Aside: I can't use the phrase "supporters of Israel" without reminding readers of Chomsky's note in Fateful Triangle, where he said "supporters of Israel" should more aptly be called "supporters of the moral degradation and eventual destruction of Israel". "Pro-Palestinian" is another strange term, since it seems that thinking that a group of human beings are, in fact, human beings, makes you "pro-Palestinian", rather like how agreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change makes you an "environmentalist".]

If you want to make your own decision about how many people were at a demonstration or what its message was, you might as well go directly to the people involved: they all have their own websites. The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid has one, the Canadian Arab Federation has one, and so on.

Let me rephrase my point here. Modern Western armies, like those of Israel, the US, and Canada, think of information as part of warfare. They expend tremendous time and resources mobilizing support for their violence. They do this by controlling information, disallowing independent journalists (as Israel is doing), using embedded journalists, and running a massive public relations machinery designed specifically to deliver arguments and propaganda for the foreign press and for foreign consumption. There is a special machinery just for Canadians, and a special strategy to sell war in Canada. There was one for the Iraq war, there is one for the Afghanistan war, and one for Israel’s wars as well. What is so unusual about the media environment today is that all this expense, all this media machinery, can be circumvented by anyone in its target audience by the simple click of a mouse. So click away.

The Canadian media are a biased little niche of pro-Israeli spin, and should be seen that way. There are times when the Canadian media are useful for news about Canada, if read critically. Even for Canada, there are reasonably good alternatives for analysis, commentary, and features The Dominion, rabble.ca, Briarpatch), and plenty of direct information from politicians (the political parties have their own sites, as do many individual politicians, activist groups, and so on). Still, read critically, the Canadian media can be a good source on goings on in the country.

But on Israel/Palestine, please, find more serious sources.

At this point, Israel is not even allowing Palestinians to leave, so displacement is not the goal, at least for the time being. On the other hand, when body counts rise into the thousands or tens of thousands, Israel might then allow the Palestinians to flee further massacres, and be lauded for its generousness by the international community.

The second reason the ceasefire was unsustainable was deeper. So long as Israel is unwilling to negotiate a political settlement and share the land, with the US on side and with shedding Palestinian blood being a source of political credibility in Israeli society, Palestinians have no choice but to resist. If they are not starved and bombed, they will be more effective at resisting their own displacement and colonization. With each step Israel takes to try to dismantle Palestinian resistance, a genocidal logic advances. Palestinians have been walled in and blockaded. Now they are bombed and invaded. When they have been thrown off their land and into neighbouring countries, they are attacked in those countries, in their refugee camps. Indeed, the people of Gaza are mostly refugees who were thrown off lands in what is now Israel. If they were displaced from Gaza, into Egypt, what would stop Israel from attacking them there? Would being displaced twice offer more protection than being displaced once?

Once the ceasefire ended, Israel was at war. This was a war of choice, and a war it had prepared for extensively on diplomatic and military levels.

The diplomatic scenario was favourable to Israel in several ways. Palestine had been further divided. The West Bank was controlled by Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority collaborates with Israel. The PA is currently maintained in power because the elected Hamas parliamentarians are in either PA or Israeli prisons and because Israeli security forces, as well as the PA, arrest scores of people in the West Bank every week. Gaza was controlled by the elected Hamas leadership. Israel could focus on one enemy and leave the suppression of the Palestinians of the West Bank to the PA. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinian children in the West Bank and shot and killed many demonstrators there in recent weeks, but these violations have become routine and barely register next to the more spectacular massacres of dozens at a time in Gaza. Hizbollah in Lebanon, who in 2006 interrupted a pattern of massacre and strangulation that Israel was conducting in Gaza (“Summer Rains”), have domestic constraints preventing them from intervening, which would bring more thousands of dead to Lebanon in a new Israeli air campaign, against which Hizbollah has no defenses. Egypt has been more co-operative with Israel than ever before, keeping the Rafah crossing sealed and, at the official level, blaming Hamas for bringing the massacres on themselves. According to Hamas, Egypt also told them that Israel was not planning an attack – which gave the Israelis the surprise that helped them to massacre over 200 Palestinians in a single day at the start of their air campaign. As usual, Israel can count on unconditional official US support from all parts of the political spectrum, which seems to be enough to prevent any useful intervention by anyone else in the world. Many progressive governments, including that of Venezuela and Bolivia, have condemned the atrocities, but have not taken any further steps to try to diplomatically isolate Israel or support Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS), which might be part of a strategy that could stop Israel. Street protests have been large, in some parts of the world unprecedentedly so. But without any official political expression, these protests can be dismissed and ignored as the February 15, 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq were ignored.

On the military level, some basic points. Calling the current conflict a ‘war’ is more of an analogy than a description, because the word ‘war’ still evokes the idea of armies meeting on a battlefield and contesting territory. Israel has all of the weapons of war, but it does not really have an opposing army to fight. It can take any territory it wants and easily kill anyone trying to contest it. It can hit, and destroy, any target, anywhere Palestinians live, at will. One compilation by the al-Mezan Centre in Gaza from December 31/08 presented 315 killed (41 children), 939 injured (85 children), and 112 houses, 7 mosques, 38 private industrial and agricultural enterprises, 16 schools, 16 government facilities, 9 charity offices, and 20 security installations. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) figures to December 31/08 were 334 killed (33 children), 966 injured (218 children), 37 homes, 67 security centres, 20 workshops, as well as 40 invasions in the West Bank, killing 3 Palestinians and arresting/kidnapping hundreds more.

Skimming the IMEMC site, here is some of what Israel destroyed since the attack started.

December 27-28/08
-Palestinian Police Headquarters
-Rafah Police Station
-Saraya Security Compound
-Beit Hanoun municipal building
-Rafah governorate offices
-A police jeep in Gaza City
-The Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs
-Greenhouses in Alqarrara
-Charity offices throughout Gaza
-A medical storage facility
-A fuel station in Rafah
-A fuel truck in Rafah
-A police station in Gaza City (al-Shujaeyya)
-al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City
-Houses in Gaza City and Jabaliya refugee camp
-Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV station in Gaza City
-Hamas’s Asda’ media office in Khan Yunis
-Tunnels in Rafah
-An apartment in Tal-Alhawa in Gaza City
-A car in Nuseirat refugee camp
-The Islamic University in Gaza (several buildings, including the female students’ residence)
-A mosque in Jabaliya
-A fishermen’s dock at Gaza shore

December 29/08
-A house in Jabaliya (killing 5 sisters, all children).
-A blacksmith workshop in al-Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City
-A house in Khan Younis
-A house in Abasan town
-The Ministry of the Interior in Gaza

December 30/08
-The Ministries Compound
-The Popular Resistance Committees center in Gaza City
-A house in Beit Lahia
-Another fuel truck in northern Gaza
-The UNRWA school in al-Qarara
-Houses in Rafah
-A house in Jabailya
-A sports club in Tal AL Hawa
-A police station in Beit Hanoun
-Bani Suheila City Council
-Training grounds for the Al Qassam Brigades
-The mosque of Omar Bin Al Khattab Mosque in Al Bureij
-Al Khulafa’ Mosque in northern Gaza
-The governor’s office in northern Gaza
-The Ministries Compound in Tal Al Hawa in Gaza completely destroying it (including the Ministry of Finance, Interior, Education)
-A military camp that was previously used by Force 17, loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.
-A dairy in Gaza City
-A workshop in Beit Lahiya
-Another home in northern Gaza (killing two children)
-The Rafah-Egypt border crossing
-The house of a Fatah leader in al-Mighraqa
-A house in Beit Hanoun (killing two children)
-A house in al-Maghazi refugee camp

December 31/08
-Ambulances in Gaza City (killing a doctor, a driver, and a medic)
-The oxygen refilling plant in Gaza City (used by hospitals in Gaza)

Jan 1/09
-Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza City
-The Ministry of Education in Gaza City
-The Ministry of Justice in Gaza City
-A house in Nuseirat refugee camp
-A workshop in Rafah
-A picnic park in Rafah
-Tunnels in Rafah
-A clinic in Rafah
-A house in al-Maghazi
-Nizar Rayan’s home, killing him, his wives, and all of their children (16 people total)

Jan 2-3/09
-An apartment building in al-Qarara
-A house in Jabaliya (killing 2 children)
-A house in al-Boreij refugee camp
-A mosque in Jabaliya
-The American School in Gaza City
-A house in al-Shujaeyya
-A house in Gaza City
-Fishing boats in Gaza City
-A car on the Gaza Valley bridge
-A police station in Gaza
-At least 20 homes in Gaza

Israeli bombing strategy has been to bomb the same targets repeatedly. This means not only more thorough destruction of the infrastructure, but also additional killing of medical personnel and residents who try to help the first round of victims.

Israel’s actions are not constrained by the opposing army but by two political considerations: First, how much killing can it do before it begins to face the threat of diplomatic isolation? Disallowing journalists and observers is part of Israel’s strategy to deal with this, as it was for the US in Iraq. Israel’s ground invasion has been accompanied by a total blackout even of Israeli reporters. Given the intensity of its intelligence and the precision of its weapons, Israel is able to choose the death toll, with some precision. At least some of the current killing is likely designed to push the limits and see how far Israel can go before eliciting any serious reaction.

The second consideration is, can Israeli military casualties be kept low enough that the Israeli public continues to support war? To deal with the latter, Israel uses airpower and artillery to destroy from a distance, and opened its ground invasion at night. Since it has long since dismantled Gaza’s electricity infrastructure, its soldiers are the only ones who can see at night through their infrared goggles – Gaza’s people, civilians and anyone who might want to try to defend them, are in complete darkness.

Israel’s active military is estimated to be some 170,000. With universal conscription, it has some 2.4 million people between 17-49 years old fit for military service and everyone has had some training. Its military budget is 9% of its substantial GDP, totaling some $18.7 billion. It receives about $3 billion per year from the US. It has about 1000 main battle tanks, 1500 lower quality tanks, over 1000 artillery pieces, over 500 warplanes, about 200 helicopters, 13 warships, and 3 submarines. It has the latest unmanned aerial vehicles and can gather very precise intelligence using aerial photography and satellites.

Hamas is mainly a political organization, but it has an armed wing that has the capacity to improvise rockets and explosives and to train fighters with small arms. Hizbollah in Lebanon had some success against Israeli ground forces in 2006 partly because of armaments: they were able to destroy Israeli tanks with anti-tank missiles and fight against Israeli soldiers at night with night-vision goggles. Hamas does not have access to such weaponry. In 2002, when Palestinian fighters defended Jenin from Israeli forces, they improvised some explosions but ran out of ammunition and supplies and were ultimately defeated when Israel leveled the central part of the camp with bulldozers.

Because calling it ‘war’ is basically metaphorical, the notion of a ‘military casualty’, as opposed to a civilian death, on the Palestinian side doesn’t make much sense. If a soldier or even a militant is killed in battle, he is counted as a military casualty. If that same soldier is killed in his house by a missile from the sky or a shell from kilometres away, he is the victim of an assassination. If his entire family and various other people are killed because they were in his proximity, they are victims of murder. There are other words that can describe it, such as ‘collateral damage’, but murder is the most accurate, something that would be clear if racism against Palestinians were not so pervasive.

Israel invites us to dehumanize ourselves by estimating how many of its victims were ‘militants’ and how many ‘civilians’. In this game, Israel claims everyone it has killed was a militant and those who were not are victims of the militants because they hide among civilians. The United Nations has accepted the broad parameters of the game, estimating at one point that one fifth of those killed were civilians. The details can then be quibbled over. But no one would accept this game if it were not Palestinians who were being killed. No one tries to divide the victims of Hamas’s rockets or, in years past, suicide bombings. No doubt many of these were off-duty soldiers, since Israel has universal conscription. But everyone understands that these were civilians and killing them, a crime (an act of terrorism, no less). Most people understand that subdividing the young victims of a suicide bombing at a cafeteria based on whether they were active duty or reservist soldiers would be a pretty disgusting thing to do. But the same simple logic fails when attempted to extend it to Palestinians at a marketplace or school or hospital or university, all of whom are legitimate targets of murder unless proven otherwise (and Israel allows no one to see the evidence to prove anything in any case).

Though there is some uncertainty about Hamas’s military capability, the invasion of Gaza will not likely be a replay of Lebanon 2006. Palestinians might be motivated and have little to lose, but they cannot compete with Israel’s weaponry. Indeed, the reason the Israelis were surprised in Lebanon was that they had gotten used to fighting lightly armed and helpless opponents. Israel knows how to occupy Gaza. Before the 2005 ‘disengagement’, their forces operated from fortified settlements and cut Gaza in three parts, blocking the three main north-south roads with armor. They used extensive aerial surveillance and cameras from towers to watch every square inch of Gaza and snipe at people, including children, at will. They came out of their bases in massive armored force and with air support to bulldoze houses and neighbourhoods, after first using artillery and air strikes. Helicopter gunships would make short work of any lightly armed militants, who (unlike Hizbollah) have nothing capable of shooting one down. They can create their own no-go zones and minefields using cluster bombs, making even more of Gaza’s tiny area uninhabitable – and making the concentration camp that much more concentrated.

If everything goes Israel’s way, as it seems to be going, the next question is how Israel will decide if it has won. It can probably destroy many tunnels and, by occupying the area, silence the rockets. It can probably also conduct house-to-house searches and massacres, and will probably attempt to capture or kill the elected Hamas leadership. Since most countries refuse to recognize Hamas’s government and many have accepted Israel’s request that it be listed as a terrorist organization, there is nothing protecting these leaders’ lives any more than the lives of the people who voted for them (or against them). With its soldiers back in Gaza, Israel will be able to return to its noble project of starving the Palestinian population, this time with an even more destroyed infrastructure and from up close. As Alex de Waal pointed out about Darfur, ’starve’ is a transitive verb: it is something one people does to another.

In November 2008 a group of terrorists attacked several sites in Mumbai and killed almost two hundred civilians. We still don’t know very much for certain about who they were or what they were after. Their planning took place in secret. The attackers were all killed or captured. The massacres were dubbed “India’s 9/11″. India’s friends and enemies alike condemned the attacks and the attackers.

Right now, Israel is still attacking sites all over Gaza and has killed more than three hundred civilians (with more deaths to follow). Their planning has been slow, deliberate, and open. The killers are celebrated and encouraged to continue. The countries of the West are falling over themselves to endorse the atrocities as retaliation, with an occasional word of concern that Israel be judicious in its murders.

No one is talking about “Palestine’s 9/11″. Palestine doesn’t get to have a 9/11.

In making these attacks Israel has short-term considerations, including upcoming elections (killing Palestinians provides an electoral advantage) the holiday season (with international observers on vacation) and the US political situation (to commit Obama to facts on the ground created by Israel). But Israel’s reasons for this attack spring directly from its long-term purpose, which is basically genocidal. Most of Israel’s resources are dedicated to imprisoning, starving, occupying, and murdering, and displacing Palestinians. Most of its diplomacy is dedicated to ensuring that Palestinians have nowhere to go and no basis to have a society, economy, or culture.

Physical destruction is part of this, and ongoing. Israel has long concentrated the Palestinians in Gaza, with 1.5 million people in an area of 360 square kilometres. For years, Israel has prevented food, medicine, and energy from entering, but also paper, ink, books, and other basics. Palestinians in Gaza have to deal with the missiles that are killing them without any help from the outside world and without medical supplies. Gaza is out of medicine. The Israelis have targeted schools, mosques, and hospitals. 5 ambulances and 3 fire brigades are working to service all of Gaza – until the Israelis blow these up too.

Israel is not committing war crimes. There is no war. These are crimes against humanity, against people who it is imprisoning and starving, occurring in full view of the entire world and with its endorsement. Israel can’t besiege the Palestinians alone: it takes the whole world to starve a small country. As a consequence these crimes are not Israel’s alone. So long as Western countries are unable to tell the difference between aggression and retaliation, between a war with two equal sides and the destruction of a helpless population, they will be accomplices to the crimes. Israel’s agenda is clear to anyone who is paying attention. It will continue until it is stopped, and it cannot be stopped by its victims. So how long will the world keep up the torture?

The international environment is favorable to the Colombian state’s strategy of making its enemies invisible before physically attacking them. The US electoral spectacle is a black hole for attention, mainstream and alternative. The US Democrats have a slightly different position from the Republicans on free trade with Colombia, and the question of murdered union leaders even made it into a presidential debate (McCain ignored it, while Obama actually suggested that Colombia’s murdering union leaders was a bad thing). The policies of privatization, social service cuts, militarization, and the pillage of Colombia’s resources by multinationals have been bipartisan for decades. But so has the dispensability of individual Colombian leaders and contractors of dirty work. Perhaps Colombia’s President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, and his team, are worried that their heads could roll if there is a change of administration in Washington. Perhaps they are trying to accelerate their own program to destroy local opposition before this occurs. That may explain the particular brutality of the past few weeks.

The causes of the protest run deeper, however. The history of this part of Colombia mirrors much of Latin America. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of people were thrown off their lands through massacre, violence, and civil war (an event called “La Violencia”). Many of these people were then forced to come back to lands that had been theirs, and work as insecure laborers on massive sugar plantations owned by a wealthy elite. Some groups, like the indigenous Nasa of Northern Cauca, over decades of struggle, succeeded in winning back their lands and recovering much of their culture and traditional economy. Many others, including thousands of Afro-Colombian cane workers, struggled hard just to keep themselves and their families alive.

Today, the economics of sugar plantations are absurdly exploitative. In a full 14-hour day of work, a cane cutter can harvest some six tons of cane. That ton gets turned into 200 kg of refined sugar that sells for about $120. The cutter gets, before deductions, about $2.50. After deductions, it’s about $1.50.

The plan is for such plantations to expand massively. And, indeed, much of the land of the 3.5-4 million internally displaced people in Colombia (the majority of whom are Afro-Colombian and a huge disproportion of whom are indigenous) has been taken over by sugar plantation owners. The plan is not just for refined sugar, but also for biofuels. Long after Venezuela’s oil runs out, North Americans will still be able to pour the products of Colombia’s sugar plantations into their car engines.

The enemies of this plan are the indigenous and peasants who want to stay on their land and use it to grow food and a decent agricultural economy, and the laborers who want to be able to survive on their wages. Both are treated the same way: to false accusations, to arrested and murdered leaders, to tear gas, and to bullets. The cane workers have been on strike since September 15 and their demands are heart-breakingly minimalist. They want to have an actual contract, rather than the piecework system they have now; the right to unionize; and a decent salary and working conditions.

On October 19, the indigenous protesters held a press conference to outline their position. “We don’t have a government in Colombia”, said Nasa spokesperson Feliciano Valencia. The indigenous authorities announced their own agenda: “No to the economic model and the FTA’s with the US, Canada and Europe, removal of legislation that impoverishes peoples, destroys and denies rights and freedoms, delivers the wealth of the country to corporate interests and has not gone through consultation with those affected. No more war and terror as the main Government policy. Respect and application of international and national agreements and establishment of the conditions that will allow the people to construct a new, possible and necessary country.” Next Tuesday (Oct 21), they announced, they will march from the site where they are gathered, La Maria Piendamo, to Cali. They will be joined by other movements and organizations. They will accept a dialogue with the government but the military must cease fire and remove itself from the territories.

Colombia’s movements continue to shoulder more than their fair burden against one of the most brutal regimes in the hemisphere. The regime can’t be allowed to drown out their story.

* To read more about and to financially support the cane workers: visit here.

* The statement of the indigenous movement:

This extraordinary capacity to finance not on past wealth but on the present value of future anticipated cash flows is at the core of America’s dynamic approach to wealth creation.

– Edelstein, R., and Paul, J.M. Europe needs a new financial paradigm. Wall Street Journal Europe, June 12-13, 1998. Quoted in The Fisherman and the Rhinoceros.

Writers on financial or economic matters rarely see the need to explain the basics of the field or justify them at the best of times, let alone in the middle of unfolding crises. What are these “financial instruments” — futures, options, and swaps? What are they for, and how did they increase the dangers of what occurred? What is the relationship between finance and the ‘real economy’? What exactly is wrong with that relationship? Events move so quickly that stories discussing them rarely stop to explain the basics.

Luckily, there are occasionally exceptions. A book by Eric Briys and Francois de Varenne, The Fisherman and the Rhinoceros: How International Finance Shapes Everyday Life (Wiley, 2000. The original French version was called La mondialisation financiere: Enfer ou Paradis?, and was published in 1999), teaches how the financial economy works and explains why it is such a great thing. At the time their book was published, the stock market collapse of 2003 had not yet occurred, nor had the collapse of Enron, the Iraq war, the oil and food price crises, and the current mortgage meltdown. Briys and de Varenne were working for Deutsche Bank when the book came out. They had both previously worked at Merrill Lynch (which no longer exists, sold to Bank of America) and Lehman Brothers (which no longer exists, largely sold to Barclays). The authors are excellent writers. They provide a rare and wonderful thing: a clear, confident explanation by practitioners of ideas and attitudes which, when implemented, proved unambiguously disastrous.

Briys and de Varenne start their book with a question that is today on everyone’s minds:

“Is the globalization of finance steering us towards heaven or hell? Ought we to be afraid of the new economic system that we live in? Should we fear the financial markets and their infamous derivatives? Should we be dreading the prospect of a domino effect that will drag the world economy into a chain of one collapse after another? In short, have we, like Frankenstein, given birth to creatures which can no longer be controlled and which are a permanent threat to our future?”

Their answer is no. Mine is yes. I will first summarize the lessons they teach in their book, then describe the problems with their worldview.

The Skill of Risk Management

The fisherman’s (and in their book it’s a man) parable is used to explain the importance of the futures contract.

A fisherman has a great skill set, sailing, navigating, handling the risk of storms and accidents, catching and hauling fish back to port. That fisherman will be familiar with taking and managing certain kinds of risks to his physical safety in his work. On top of these risks and these skills, though, he also has to worry about the uncertainty in the price of his catch. When he brings his fish to market, what if there happens to be a glut of fish, and he can only fetch a very low price, one so low that he can’t pay his expenses?

He can hedge against this risk by taking a futures contract. He can sell his fish before he catches them if he can find a buyer at an agreed-upon price. He will agree to deliver a certain quantity of fish at a certain time at a certain price.

Who might buy this contract from him? Two kinds of people. The first kind is another business, say a fish canner. The canning factory needs a steady supply of fish to keep running. While the fisherman is worried about risk that the price will go down, the cannery is more concerned that there won’t be any fish when they need it. They might be willing to pay extra in order to know that they will get the fish they need when they need it, rather than trying to get the cheapest possible price for their supply. The fisherman might be willing to accept a lower price than the best possible price he could get, so that he could guarantee that the price won’t be lower than what he can accept. Both parties win, and importantly, both can focus on what they’re good at: the fisherman at catching fish, the cannery at canning fish.

The second person, who might accept the fisherman’s contract and buy the fish before they are caught, is the speculator. While the cannery will take a futures contract out of a need for a steady (if higher than perfect) supply, the speculator is not interested in fish at all, but is merely betting that the price of fish will be higher than what he bought it for. The speculator hopes merely to turn around and sell the fish. To someone not trained in finance, this might seem like mere gambling, and that the speculator is adding no value. But the speculator is providing a social service, and has a skill to bring to bear as well. The fisherman’s skill is catching fish. The speculator’s is managing risk. When both focus on what they do best, they both profit, and society at large profits as well. Again, everyone wins.

The Monte Carlo Strategy and the Importance of Regulation

So, according to the proponents of finance, the speculator is not a parasite on the real economy, but almost a saint, someone who helps everyone by taking on the specialized task of managing risks. For assuming these risks, the speculator gets the chance of profits.

All is well, in this world, except when the speculator can use someone else’s money. The next parable in the book is that of the blind pearl-fisher. These pearl-fishers, like fishermen, assume huge risks in swimming on the sea floor for oysters with pearls in them. They almost all come to lose their sight — but active pearl fishers have a kind of self-help organization where some of their catch is reserved to take care of pearl fishers who have gone blind. Active pearl-fishers can feel assured that they will be taken care of when they lose their abilities, so they feel safer in assuming the physical risks of their work.

What if, instead, these pearl fishers pooled their money and gave it to a banker? The banker takes $9,000 from them, promising them their principal plus interest. He takes their $9,000, adds $2,000 of his own, and goes to the casino in Monte Carlo with the $11,000. There, he bets $1,000 on red (his own money) and $10,000 on black (the $9,000 from the fishers and $1,000 of his own).

Now, if black wins, he gets $20,000, pays the fishers back their interest, takes back his $2,000, and is seen as a financial genius for making huge profits.

If red wins, he’s just lost all of the fishers’ funds, but he still keeps his own $2,000. Now he tells the fishers, “sorry, I can’t pay you back after all,” and walks away. Because he did all this on behalf of a corporation, his liability is limited, his personal money protected. He’s unlikely to go to jail, and if his bank is big enough, he might just get bailed out by the government.

He was supposed to be providing a service: helping the pearl-fisher’s assets find their most efficient use in the real economy, where they would earn the biggest return, a return he and his clients could share in. Instead, he used a permissive environment (for which the government is to blame) to engage in a Monte Carlo strategy. He went for broke with other people’s money, took care of himself, and lost.

If the government creates a permissive environment for this, by acting as guarantor of bankers who act this way, then these crises will continue to occur, the proponents of finance argue. Instead, what the government should do is create a regulatory environment where bankers and insurers are encouraged and free to use these instruments responsibly. Or, alternatively, so deregulate finance that depositors know they will have no protection except their own hedging if the bank defaults. The depositors thus have an incentive to keep an eye on the banks — in a system where the government is present, they do not. The problem with the banker and the pearl fishers in this parable is, in their view, that they did not use financial instruments to hedge!

Instead of trusting the banker, the pearl fishers could have avoided ruin by using insurance, through a credit default swap! They could still have given their money to a banker (though not the irresponsible gambling banker), but they should have paid a series of regular payments to someone else. That person, the seller, would take the payments, but would pay the pearl fishers the value of their assets ($9,000) if the banker defaulted on the loan. The pearl fishers accept a lower rate of return on their money, but are insured against a default by the banker because they bought a swap. The real economy is served, the pearl fishers are ensured, and the risk is managed.

Briys and de Varenne explain the option contract using a parable of a Genovese merchant, Zaccaria, in 1298. This skilled merchant was going to get a shipment of alum from Aigues Mortes to Borges. Zaccaria had contacts in Borges and the means to hire the ship. He also was well aware that there were storms at sea and possibly pirates. So he sold the alum to a partnership, Suppa and Grilli. The partners sold Zaccaria the right to buy the alum back if it reached Borges.

Suppa and Grilli would make a profit if the ship reached Borges, but would lose their investment if the ship sank. Zaccaria, meanwhile, had covered his risk. If the ship didn’t reach Borges, he had made a small profit by selling to Suppa and Grilli. If the ship did reach Borges, he would buy the shipment back and re-sell it in Borges at an even higher price and at an even higher profit. He could concentrate on doing what he did best: moving and selling goods, and let Suppa and Grilli do what they did best, assume the risk and take a premium for it.

The Tyranny of the Real Economy

But now Suppa and Grilli, whose option contract effectively made them insurers, have a problem of their own. They are betting their money on the ship not sinking. The way they can manage that risk for themselves is to make many bets on many ships. Some of these will sink, and they will lose, but many will land, and they will profit. They set the premium they charge based on their assessment of the risks to the ships.

The same problem applies for the “seller” of the swap, who ensured the pearl fishers against a default by their banker. They are betting against a default, and their cash is on the line if a default occurs. They are speculators. Their job is to manage risk. How best to do so?

To the proponents of finance, the answer to this question has everything to do with the sources of risk. And the sources of risk are not from the financial economy, but from the real economy — what Briys and de Varenne call “the tyranny of the real economy.” This tyranny includes, especially, the weather, but also, presumably, the tyrannical biological systems on which life depends, the tyranny of there only being so much oil in the ground, and so on. What the financial economy enables us to do, they argue, is break free of that tyranny. Risks can be moved through the use of these derivatives not only to the right people, but also forward into the future for the right time! By trading swaps for swaps, bundling debts and re-selling them as assets, and selling derivatives on these assets, risks can be moved around until they are in exactly the right place, as determined by the market. Among the cases of businesses that have successfully broken free of this tyranny, the authors mention two: Enron and mortgage-backed securities.

They describe Enron’s innovations:

Peter Tufano describes Enron’s bold move as follows: “Their vision was to create a ‘gas bank’ that would serve as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, allowing both to shed their unwanted risks.” The move, although bold, was quite rational. Indeed, Enron’s core asset is a deep knowledge of the natural gas market, from exploration to distribution. The new generation of Enron products was born… From being a producer and distributor of natural gas, Enron Capital and Trade Resources became a natural gas banker managing the volatility of the price of natural gas. This mutation has far-reaching implications. First, the methane molecule is no longer anonymous: it bears Enron’s landmark. Second, to avoid failed promises, Enron had to make sure that it was properly equipped to monitor and trade the price risk of natural gas. To ensure this, it invested millions of dollars in the required technology and human capital. Nevertheless, the story would not have been a success if commodity derivatives had not been available. Enron would still be wondering how to redefine itself and the clients would still pray that prices remain stable . . . Obviously, the more tradable the risks at their disposal, the more efficient their construction.” (pp. 96-97)

Enron’s “bold move” was based on fraudulent accounting, in which present and future assets were counted but future costs were not. It ended in blackouts, swindles, and jail terms.

On innovations in the mortgage market, they have this to say:

“In the United States, commercial banks have gradually been driven out of the mortgage loan market. Much of their mortgage business has been swallowed up by financial market operators and specialist investment banks. Today, mortgages are tradable on a buoyant mortgage-backed securities market. In essence, the financing of mortgages has broken free from its traditional master and has become a ‘free agent’. This is the process known as securitization. Its scope now includes car loans, credit card loans, music rights… As individuals and consumers, we end up better off because we deal with financial institutions that are more efficient in delivering the products and services we need and want.” (pp. 91-92)

The “financial market operators and specialist investment banks” that outcompeted the commercial banks today either no longer exist or have been purchased by the very commercial banks they drove out, precisely because those commercial banks have funds from their depositors. As for the securitization of car loans, credit card loans, and music rights — those chickens have yet to come home to roost.

Arguments Against the Financial Economy

The point of reviewing an eight-year old, pro-financial economy book in such detail was not to kick these bankers when they’re down or to show how absurd they sound when real events reveal the falsehood of their breathless claims. On the contrary. Our historical and political memories are short. Financial memory is still shorter. These arguments, and the financial instruments they justify, however, will remain. There will not be a better time to discredit them as thoroughly as possible. There are four main reasons why the arguments of Briys and de Varenne fail.

First, they fail because they overstate the complexity of the financial economy. The complexity is more contrived than real, the financial instruments more convoluted than complex. The authors ask the rhetorical question: “On what grounds can one reasonably expect that a complex financial contract solving a complex real-world issue does not deserve the same thorough scientific treatment as an aeroplane wing or a micro-processor? Only ignorance would suggest such an idea.” (p. 76)

In reality, the aeroplane wing and the microprocessor deal with systems far more deeply understood than economies. It is not a question of complexity but of the depth of knowledge we have, and could conceivably have, about the topic. Liberal economist James Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his Brief History of Financial Euphoria (p. 19) that, “financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation . . . all financial innovation involves, in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets.”

Second, they fail because the “tyranny of the real economy” is not so easily escaped. It is certainly possible to treat the future like a colony to be stripped of its natural and human wealth, a repository of pollution and garbage. But those who live in the future, like those who live in the colony, will suffer as a result. Breaking free of the tyranny of the real economy is always transferring the risk and the suffering on to someone else.

The business world has several different ideas on finance and the real economy. Proponents of the real economy, in contrast to Briys and de Varenne, argue that investors and finance should focus on serving the real economy: real assets and people working with them to produce real value. There would be a role for hedging and derivatives, but these could be very strictly regulated to ensure they were not being used for mere speculation. So, to return to the parable of the fisherman, futures contracts for fish might be regulated so that only people in the fish business could buy them. Many kinds of financial activity would thus be banned, and the tyranny of the real economy would shackle finance from its desire for freedom. Strict regulation of this kind would certainly solve some problems. It would prevent many types of bubbles from occurring and bursting. It would match investment to real production needs. It would not stop displacement of peasants and indigenous people from their territories, exploitation of workers, union-busting, environmental destruction by extractive industries, pollution by manufacturing industries, the depletion of resources and ecosystems by consumption, or climate change, since these are all artifacts of the “real economy.”

Third, they fail because they assume that the rules by which the economy runs are neutral. In fact, the rules favor some actors over others. Our system favors capital over labor, corporations over peoples, and the first world over the third world. But even at a more superficial level, the rules can be set to favor speculators and their activities rather than the businesses the speculators are supposed to serve by managing risk. By changing the rules of the game, speculators undermine the value of their activities to real economy business and subordinate that activity to their own. The psychology of speculation plays a role in this, which is part of why these crises recur. After a crash, the rules are changed to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again. After several years of increasing prices and values, everyone forgets the last crash and the government relaxes the rules to facilitate gambling.

Fourth, and most importantly, they fail because the ultimate absorber of any risk is always society at large. That is what happened with every bailout in the past, and it will happen again, despite the pretense of a private enterprise system. Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987 that, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” But in economics, the exact opposite is true. There is only society — to make the rules, to enforce them, and to face the consequences. The economic lives of individuals are lived in society. Society has options for governing its economic life. Today it is organized to provide state support for corporations and elites to accumulate massive shares of wealth and power, guaranteed by us all. It need not be.

“Moral hazard” is the fear that people will take risks they wouldn’t otherwise because they know the government or someone else will bail them out. But it is not something that can be avoided through clever use of financial instruments, or even by selectively bailing out only the rich and not those who are losing their homes in foreclosures and evictions.

The people on whose behalf society is organized will always feel that they can take risks and have society save them. Are those people us? The question for a society is whether we want our lives to be devoted to saving elites from the monstrous power gambles for obscene amounts of money, or whether we would rather absorb the more moderate risks that everyday people have to take seeking decent survival. That would not automatically happen even if the rules were changed to reassert the “tyranny of the real economy,” but would require a very different sort of real economy.

And being isolated from the West carries heavy penalties. Sudan is feeling that right now: the International Criminal Court has decided to pursue charges against Omar Bashir, the sitting president of Sudan, for war crimes in Darfur. Alex de Waal’s books and blog are the best guides to that complex conflict, and on that blog the ICC’s decision was referred to as “a Disaster in the Making.” Putting aside the political nature of such a prosecution, given that no one is considering prosecuting Bush for what the US is doing in Iraq or Israel for what it’s doing to the Palestinians, there is also the effect of such a move on the possibilities for peace in Sudan. In that context, it is a very irresponsible move, a pre-emptive strike against a negotiated settlement. But it does have another effect: to show third world leaders what might be in store if they are too defiant. Or,in Pakistan’s case, if insufficiently committed to the war on terror.

Of course, the war on terror is not the only war going on in this region. In the background, ready to be re-emphasized at any minute, is the war on drugs. Like the war on terror, it is ill-defined, open-ended, both unwinnable and unloseable (drugs will never declare victory), and therefore a perpetually useful pretext: until it is widely seen for what it is. Below I will discuss supply, demand, and possible solutions.

Before delving the war on drugs, I would like to dispense with one little phrase. The idea of an “opium fueled insurgency” can be deceptive. It is true that the covert networks designed for smuggling arms and money to counterinsurgent forces — such as the CIA and ISI networks designed to supply the Afghan mujahadin when they fought against the USSR — are also easily converted to drug smuggling networks. It is also true that illicit drugs were understood and tolerated as a way for these forces to support themselves financially during the war against the USSR (on the connection between drugs and covert operations, the indispensable book is Alfred McCoy’s Politics of Heroin). But the current situation in Afghanistan is slightly different. Today, the Afghan economy is dependent on poppy, which, according to UN sociologist David Macdonald’s book Drugs in Afghanistan (Pluto Press 2007), supplies 60% of Afghanistan’s GDP and employs 10% of its people (pg.96). Everyone in the economy, from farmers to local warlords, from foreign intelligence agents to government officials, from the Taliban to probably NATO soldiers as well, are taking a piece. So it’s not just the insurgency that’s opium-fueled, it’s the entire economy.

What is the drugs situation? As with any commodity, we can look at supply and demand. Part of the supply side is the covert networks just discussed. Most opium moves from Afghanistan by the “Balkan route”: through Pakistan, Iran, the Gulf States, through to Turkey and Europe (Macdonald pg. 105), taking about 9 months to arrive from the Afghan farm to the European street. There are creative ways of smuggling employed, since high profits in the industry make it feasible to do things like stuff almond shells with heroin and smuggle them randomly interspersed with real almonds. But above all, the trade depends on the suborning of public officials. In Afghanistan, reports range from estimates that dozens to 60% of elected parliamentarians are linked to warlords and drug trafficking in some way (pg. 95). Similar percentages probably apply for police and of course the warlords who still control local areas. Then there are the officials in the countries along the route.

Another important piece in the supply puzzle has to do with the push-the-water-balloon nature of drug cultivation. Both Iran and Pakistan were major opium producers until 1979, when the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan both outlawed production in their countries — production which simply shifted to Afghanistan. If production in Afghanistan could somehow be eliminated, it would no doubt shift somewhere else.

The final supply side consideration is the farmer. No Afghan farmer grows rich from growing poppy. On the contrary, sociologist David Mansfield conducts field studies for the UK government and other NGOs on why Afghans do or do not grow poppy. He found four differences between farmers who grow poppy and those who are able to make a living growing vegetables, fruit, wheat, and other cash crops. First, poppy growers have less land (or no land, working as sharecroppers). Second, poppy growers have more debt. Third, poppy growers live in areas where access to market is difficult, while successful non-poppy growing farmers live near provincial centers. Fourth, poppy growers generally live in regions where the writ of the state is weak or not fully extended.

In this context, eradication programs lead to financial ruin for already heavily indebted farmers.

In a May 2007 report to the UK government, Mansfield warns that “talk of spraying elicits the threat of violence and/or a declaration of intent to support Anti Government Elements. The perception that corruption is endemic amongst those conducting eradication (including their involvement in the drug trade) and reports of bribery and partiality during implementation further weakens the legitimacy of counter narcotics efforts.” He also notes reports that “in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar as well as Farah, there were increasing reports of Taliban and government officials finding ways to co-exist. Respondents suggested that in many areas both sides had made agreements not to engage in hostile action. These agreements left government officials undisturbed in the district centres whilst the Taliban were free to operate in the surrounding rural areas.” Evidently Pakistan is not the only place where separate peace agreements and local arrangements are being made.

Now we turn to the demand side. In the imaging of Afghanistan as a source of drugs that corrupt the streets and youth of the West, the many victims of addiction in the region are made invisible, as Macdonald shows. Addiction is complex, but it does go along with displacement and war. Many Afghan refugees became addicted to opium in Pakistan or Iran (both of which have major addiction problems of their own) and brought their addictions back when they returned. Without prospects for peace or opportunity, religious and legal restrictions are insufficient to stop people from turning to opium and heroin to dull their pain. A study by the RAND corporation years ago suggested that the cheapest way to fight a drug war was to spend dollars on treatment for addiction, which was far cheaper than trying to interdict shipments of drugs or eradicate crops.

Finally, to solutions. The most likely possibility is that the drug war will be allowed to continue, providing its many benefits to many people and meting out suffering to many others. Perhaps a truce will be called for a time? The governor of Helmand province suggested in 2006 that those in the drug business should be encouraged to invest their profits in Afghanistan (construction companies and industries) rather than taking the money out to tax havens (Macdonald pg. 97). Among those seeking victory in the war on drugs, some look to the Taliban’s ban on opium in 2000 as a total success. Macdonald points out several problems with this: first, it was accomplished through terror. Second, it was only a year-long, a year in which, some suggest, the Taliban used the ban to drive the price up so they could sell off existing stocks at high profit margins, after which they would have probably allowed cultivation to resume (had they not been deposed).

One suggestion by the Senlis Council (a European think tank) in 2005, is to license Afghanistan to produce opium legally. Today, licit opium is produced by Turkey, India, France, Australia, Hungary, Spain, and a few other countries (pg. 34). The idea was rejected by the Afghan government. The counter argument by the Afghan Minister of Counter Narcotics, that they could not guarantee that opium wouldn’t be smuggled out for the illicit trade, seems to me to be unconvincing. How could a situation where some licit and some illicit opium was coming out of Afghanistan be worse than the current situation? Of course, this kind of licensing would have problems too: it would drastically lower the price available to the farmer, who would probably then require some form of price support (which could also be applied to other crops). Without such support, and so long as an illegal market existed and set a higher price, smuggling would continue.

David Mansfield and David Macdonald implicitly suggest some mix of alternative development for farmers, interdiction, and fighting the addiction. Within the current framework of prohibition, that may be the best that can be done. But accepting the current framework means accepting some absurdities. Macdonald reports that “Australian and German bio-engineers have also recently created another alternative to traditional opium poppy plants, mutated poppy plants that produce … thebaine and oripavine used in analgesic pharmaceutical drugs … but without producing morphine that can be processed into heroin.” (pg. 71)

Surely we ought to be able to change the rules to fit the plants than to change the plants to fit the rules.

In the 1970s, under the imperially-controlled regime of the Shah, Iran managed to distribute opium legally to registered addicts. In Macdonald’s words, this “suggested a humane drug regime that permitted older people who had used opium for many years the comfort afforded by regulated doses of opium for the aches and pains of old age and to avoid suffering withdrawals.” Those under 60 had to seek treatment — treatment based on a maintenance dose (for more arguments on ending prohibition, see Mike Gray’s 2000 book Drug Crazy). Most societies seem to combine both irrationality and hypocrisy in their drug policies. These serve those who profit from the drug war, the monies, the weapons, and the pretexts that it provides. They do not serve addicts, users, or farmers. An end to prohibition and an end to the drug war would take a powerful weapon away from the war on terror.

* Justin Podur is currently visiting Islamabad.

It raises a question of who the sides are in this war. The Pakistani army has engaged in some bloody fighting against the Taliban on the border in the past, although the current method involves negotiation and conceding control of areas to the Taliban. When the government fights the insurgents, they are seen as doing the bidding of the US. On the other hand, according to Ahmed Rashid’s analysis, the government uses and manipulates the insurgents and historically has used them to try to have their way in Afghanistan. This is why the responses to the insurgency are so contradictory. The US mission is expensive and its interests there are unclear — the US supposedly wants to find and destroy al Qaeda, but there are also ways that a constant terrorist threat is useful to governments that try to use fear to control the population. The US also probably wants troops and bases in the region to watch South and Central Asia.

In his new book, Descent into Chaos, the incomparable Ahmed Rashid offers an analysis that is at its core a statement to the US: if you really want to get rid of al Qaeda, you have to do something about the Taliban; if you want to stop the Taliban, you have to rebuild Afghanistan and allow Pakistan to democratize (i.e., stop supporting the military exclusively). For the US, though, the questions are — there are costs and benefits to al Qaeda’s existence as a low-level insurgency capable of doing occasional terror attacks on US civilians, there are benefits to having US troops in the region, but the costs of what it would take to really stop them really worth it? Would paying those costs bring the US increased control over the region or the world?

Probably not. The Taliban would wither away if Afghanistan and Pakistan had the type of sovereignty where the direction of government and economy were determined by their people (and if there were sensible global agricultural policies and no drug prohibition — but more on that in a future column), the dream of third world nationalism. Under such conditions the Taliban would have no legitimate claim to be fighting foreign occupation and all they would have to offer was social conservatism and violence. Other political and social forces would emerge they would not be able to compete with.

Unfortunately, a dream of a world of sovereign countries is a nightmare for the US. In that sense, I disagree with Rashid: I don’t think the US will act in ways that would bring its citizens safety from terrorism, because the rewards of domination of the region, for those in charge, outweigh the risks of terrorism against US citizens. On the other hand, not everything is under US control. The Taliban (and probably part of Pakistan’s establishment) figures NATO will get tired of the costs and go, and that they can be waited out. If the US choice is between building a sovereign Afghanistan and allowing a sovereign and democratic Pakistan on the one hand and cutting some kind of deal and leaving on the other, they are more likely to just leave.

If it is too much to suggest the US can suddenly act benevolent, what about Pakistan? The Taliban, some argue, have flourished not just because of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan but also because of the absence of the state in the border areas. A story by Anwarullah Khan in yesterday’s Dawn reports the Taliban setting up Sharia courts in Bajuar agency, “and a large number of people are using them to get disputes resolved, instead of waiting for action by the tribal administration.” The Taliban said this was because people were tired of the current system. That’s one response to a vacuum created by the state’s absence from an area. Another lynching, as happened in Karachi in May. Four men had robbed a house, were caught by a mob and three of them killed. Police were stopped from helping the victims. Another attempted lynching happened a few days later in Lahore but police were able to save the robbers. Anees Jillani in the June edition of the (excellent) monthly magazine Newsline argues that the police are under-resourced and untrustworthy, the judges corrupt or afraid.

But it might be too simplistic to talk of the “absence of the state.” The June edition of Herald, another fine magazine, had a special feature on “The Great Land Robbery”: in which elites, entrepreneurs, the military and bureaucrats took a great deal of land for the Gwadar port in Balochistan (a resource-rich province with poor people) and distributed it for personal enrichment, with callous disregard for local people’s rights. There are stories of local fishing and picnic spots being seized to make way for tourist hotels, of people being roughed up for trying to get their rights to their own land recognized, and worse.

The cover story concludes: “Though the focus so far has remained on the violent conflict taking place elsewhere in the province, Gwadar too is seething quietly.” Here the state isn’t absent so much as present in ways that are negative, which generates rebellion as a consequence. That the state then deals with the rebellion by force doesn’t help address the deeper problem of the nature of the state and its relationship to the people.

Without addressing that though, it is hard to see how the current problems could be solved. A hard-nosed analyst might say “yes, but we live in the world we live in, and neither NATO nor Pakistan’s government are perfect but they are the only tools to deal with the Taliban.” That would be true if they were tools that were capable of fixing, rather than further breaking, the situation. It might actually be less realistic to expect the US or Pakistan’s establishment to solve these problems.

Ahmed Rashid argues in his book that the Taliban were not of Afghanistan or Pakistan but a kind of transnational phenomenon. The flip side of that is that they don’t have, and I don’t think will get, deep roots in

Punjab or Sindh or even Balochistan, where there are other class structures and huge concentrations of economic, political, and military power and a 150-or-so-million other people. The maximal scenario, it seems to me, is that when NATO leaves, if NATO leaves irresponsibly as they are likely to, the Taliban could take over Afghanistan and Pakistan’s NWFP. That would be a terrible outcome, but I believe the counterinsurgency underway makes that outcome more likely as time goes on. A similar suggestion has been made more than once in the media here in recent days: that Pakistan just withdraw to the borders of NWFP and allow the Americans to occupy the region. It is offered tongue-in-cheek, of course, because that would just precipitate the Taliban takeover and also discredit Pakistan’s government massively domestically and internationally — governments don’t, and can’t, willingly hand over parts of their country for foreign occupation.

Where does that leave the writ of the state? The writ of the US should not be over Afghanistan or Pakistan, and it is creating more problems than it is solving. Withdrawal is necessary, and the sooner the better.

One can recognize that there are more and less responsible ways to withdraw without supporting an imperial power’s claim that it needs to be there to prevent things from getting worse. As for the writ of Pakistan’s state and its transformation, that’s a project for the people, but one that would also be made easier without destructive US interference.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

The experience of reading the book is a jarring one. Tarek frequently overreaches, making claims beyond what the evidence provides. “the pain we suffer is caused mostly by self-inflicted wounds, and is not entirely the result of some Zionist conspiracy hatched by the West.” (pg. xi) How IMF restructuring or repeated US bombings, invasions, and occupations are “self-inflicted” is unexplained. Sentences like that also put all Muslims together, though the politics and problems in different Muslim societies are different. CM includes preposterous statements about “nations such as India and China, with few natural resources other than their burgeoning populations” (pg. 325). India and China in fact have tremendous natural resources (especially agricultural resources) that are exploited to the fullest because of their large populations.

Tarek also says “being Canadian has had the most profound effect on (his) thinking”, and lists his Canadian heroes, which include both men and women, French and Anglo-Canadians. But his list does not have Louis Riel or Joseph Brant or any other indigenous person. Tarek’s references to “ordinary Canadians” don’t include the country’s indigenous people or the crimes that were done to them. It is striking though, given his emphasis on Canadian-ness and his expressed desire to hold a mirror up to the Muslim community, that he shows a blind spot for Canada’s disgraceful colonialism.

The book is also jarring because of bombast and cliche. Phrases like “the Palestinian movement cannot be allowed to degenerate into a fad for out-of-luck leftists in search of a cause… When these rich armchair anti-imperialists spout on Palestine, they seem to do it out of an addiction, not a commitment” (pg. 74) occur throughout, and make the whole book very demoralizing to read. The use of phrases like “the new found love affair between the left and the Islamists” (pg. 318) make a case by insinuation, a problem found throughout the book, especially when describing Muslim organizations in the West and money they receive from Saudi Arabia and other places. His newspaper columns are no different, and are part of what makes it an easier choice to simply discard what he has to say.

On the other hand, CM also offers interesting information, especially about Islamic history and recent debates in the West. His attacks on rigid doctrine, internalized racism, and illiberal politics are valid and important. He has more than once presented me with obvious things I hadn’t thought about. When Maher Arar was being tortured in Syria, for example, he wondered why people didn’t demonstrate at the Syrian consulate, but only the US and Canadian consulates. To be sure, to send someone somewhere to be tortured was horrific, but shouldn’t some anger be directed at the torturer? When a Palestinian refugee was threatened with deportation for having been a member of the PFLP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist Palestinian formation that Canada has deemed “terrorist”), Tarek wrote an open letter to the Canadian Prime Minister saying he, too, had been a member of the PFLP and so if al-Yamani was going to be deported, so too should he be. For reasons like these, Tarek deserves better than casual dismissal. If the flaws can be filtered out, what remain are important questions on very serious matters worthy of debate.

Tarek divides his target audience in five parts. First, Muslims, who he hopes to persuade of his central thesis: that being a good, pious Muslim, to follow the Qur’an and the five pillars, does not require a particular form of state, and that trying to create an Islamic state can only lead to calamity. Second, “ordinary, well-meaning, but naive non-Muslims of Europe and North America”, who he hopes to persuade that Islamists are not authentic anti-imperialists. (pg. xiv) Third, “conservative Republicans in the United States and their neo-conservative allies in the West” who he hopes to persuade that “dropping bombs helps the foe, not the friend.” Fourth, Arabs, “who have suffered at the hands of colonialism”, whose “cause is just”, but who “need to recognize that… the plight of the Palestinians has been abused and misused by their leadership for ulterior motives. They also need to fight internalized racism that places darker-coloured fellow Muslims from Africa and Asia on a lower rung of society.” (pg. xvi) Last, “Pakistanis who deny their ancient Indian heritage”, and who, as a consequence, “have become easy pickings for Islamist extremist radicals who fill their empty ethnic vessels with false identities that deny them their own ethnic heritage.” (pg. xvii) Because I suspect I have only limited access to only the second part of Tarek’s target audience, this review will focus on what is of interest to the “liberal and left-leaning”.

The premises of Chasing a Mirage

CM’s explicit thesis, that religion and politics ought to be separated in Islam, rests on several implicit theses. The most important of these is that Islam, or political Islam, is the major reason for what is wrong in places like Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and immigrant Muslim communities in the West. Tarek sometimes acknowledges colonialism and occupation (though he is more dismissive of the idea that there might be racism against Muslims in the West), but also blames Islamist doctrine and ideology as a cause (as opposed to primarily an effect, to which we will return).

From this flows the second implicit thesis, that there is something unique about Islam in this respect. When Europe went through Renaissance and Enlightenment, Christianity and Judaism advanced, and Islam remained behind. “While most of humanity has come to recognize the futility of racial and religious states, the Islamists of today present (the) sordid past as their manifesto of the future.” (pg. 19) Failure to separate religion from politics in culture and theory left the way open for Islamists (Syed Qutb, Abul Ala Maudoodi) to create doctrines based on the politicized use of religion.

The third implicit thesis is that in politics, Western-style democracy is the best form. Tarek is a Canadian by choice, he reminds the reader, and cherishes the freedom that he finds in the West, where “the only Arabs who today vote without fear of reprisal” live (pg. xvii). Islamism is bad for the West and for Muslims in part because it causes Muslims to “refuse to integrate or assimilate as part of Western society, yet wishes to stay in (its) midst” (pg. xiv). Also, there is nothing wrong with Islam itself, nor any other religion. Only the combination of religion and politics is undesirable, and CM remains constantly respectful of the basic tenets of Muslim religion.

From these premises, Tarek in Part 1 goes through a series of case studies. Pakistan’s politics have been distorted by Islamism and were distorted from the start. The Saudi regime, with the US guaranteeing its safety in power and its unimaginable oil wealth, reaches out and sponsors Islamism all over the world. Iran’s Islamists destroyed the leftist revolutionaries who they came to power with, and then imposed their will on a reluctant society in brutal and totalitarian ways. And Palestine has been hijacked by Islamists within and without. Next, in Part 2, Tarek reads medieval Islamic history from the death of the prophet Muhammad through to the Damascus, Baghdad, and al-Andalus caliphates. The point of this reading is to show that this past provides no useful guidance for political conduct in large, complex, industrial societies. In Part 3 he moves on to contemporary case studies: He concludes that the recent attempt to apply Sharia law in Ontario for personal disputes between Muslims was a very bad idea. Democratic laws have to apply to everyone and everyone must receive equal protection. He concludes that the doctrine of jihad in Islamism, which, he says, is not about inner struggle but about war, should be discarded. And while he supports the right to wear the hijab, he argues that it is an arbitrary convention without a solid basis in the Qur’an or core Muslim religion. Finally, he concludes that Islamists and Islamism should be strongly confronted in the West, by democrats of all kinds, Muslim and non-Muslim. Since they hold illiberal views, Islamists should not be allowed to use liberalism to undermine its foundation.

Before assessing CM’s conclusions, it may be useful to state my own rather different premises, for understanding the problems experienced by the societies CM discusses (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and the Muslim diaspora) as well as some of those he does not.

An alternative set of premises

I agree that religion and politics ought to be separated. But I believe that political Islam is primarily an effect of what is wrong in Muslim societies, not a cause. Explaining the causes of the problems of the third world is beyond the scope of a book review. But a “left-leaning” explanation would look for causes related to economic and political inequalities within and between societies. While these may have pre-existed colonial encounters (Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel is devoted to explaining why the geography of Europe gave it certain advantages for conquering the rest of the world) they were intensified by them. Millions of indigenous people of the Americas died building wealth for Europe and the American states (see Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America). Millions of Africans died in slavery and colonialism (see Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade). Throughout Asia, lands and resources were taken over through military conquest, or sometimes through finance, without firing a shot. These encounters distorted the colonizers: they lost their ethical sense, they developed doctrines of racism and exclusive notions of religion, and locked the world into constant warfare.

But by far the greatest trauma was suffered by the colonized These societies were not perfect before colonialism destroyed them: they too were full of caste (see BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste) and class hierarchy, patriarchal traditions and religion, and militarism and violence of their own. But colonialism intensified all of these and used them to its own ends. The former colonies tried to make sense of what had happened to them and how to free themselves from it (one one very important aspect of this attempt, see Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations). Their responses included nationalism and communism, both of which were brutally attacked by the Western powers (on these attacks, see William Blum’s Killing Hope). Religiously based nationalism in these parts of the world was often seen as less threatening by the West.

This is where political islam enters the picture in Muslim societies. Tarek is right that it does not provide the freedom and equality so badly needed to address the other urgent problems of our societies. But without a comparative perspective (which is adopted for example by Eqbal Ahmad, one of Tarek’s heroes and one of my own) one is left thinking there is something especially bad about Islam or Muslim societies. This is a convenient belief for Western readers who want to believe the current “war on terror” might be justified. But an equally strong case could be made, and has been, about the caste, irrational belief, and hierarchy in East Asian cultures, or African cultures, or Indian culture, or East Europe, or Latin America, or Europe or America itself — and if the West were at war with these societies such cases would receive greater attention here.

I do not believe that Islam has a monopoly over the failure to separate religion and politics. I believe that all religions are systems of authority, based on irrational belief, that mostly cannot meet the burden of proof for the demands they make of their believers. A distorted, politicized Christianity is a clear and present danger in the United States (see Chris Hedges’ American Fascists, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? and watch Jesus Camp). Similar problems exist with Israel and Zionism (see Michael Warchawski’s Towards an Open Tomb, or Uri Davis’s Apartheid Israel). As a result I disagree with Tarek’s statement that “most of humanity has come to recognize the futility of racial and religious states”. If only it were so.

I believe that the rest of the world, including the Muslim world but especially indigenous peoples and Africans, have paid a blood price so that those in the West could live in comfort and freedom. Democracy in the West is worth defending to the degree that it can look in the mirror of these atrocities, condemn them, and redress them. Self-congratulation about Western achievements, freedoms, or superiority in rewarding itself with what it stole from others is harmful to this necessary self-examination. Massive inequalities in Western societies and between the West and the rest of the world distort democracy, ethics, and the possibilities for decent survival on the planet. Dealing with these distortions is the most urgent political task at hand.

We all grow up and live in a world of traumas, hierarchies, and inequalities, and we all rebel against these in different ways (see Bruce Levine’s Commonsense Rebellion for a diagnosis of everything alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, sex addiction, and workoholism as problematic ways of rebelling against meaninglessness and lack of control in daily life). Constructive, collective, political rebellion is what many of us strive to do and hope to see. But there are more problematic ways of rebelling, some of which can sometimes have perverse effects, and these are sometimes better rewarded by the institutions that produce the ills we’re rebellin against.

Because it is usually the oppressed who have to free themselves (and their oppressors), and because many of those powerless and under attack and fighting back (sometimes in ways that are themselves distorted) are Muslims, an examination of the current role of Islam, and religion in general, in politics is important. So, too, is thinking about what that role could or should be. CM’s value is in contributing to that debate.

Assessing the conclusions of “Chasing a Mirage”

Starting from these somewhat different premises, how do the conclusions of CM appear? Take the Sharia law debate in Ontario. Some Muslim organizations argued that Islamic law be used in binding arbitration to settle disputes between parties. Their principal argument, which CM does not mention, was that those principles were already being used in Jewish and Christian communities: if religious arbitration was okay for some religions, why not all? In the event, the Ontario government’s decision was the best one possible: rather than allowing it for all religions, Ontario struck religious arbitration down for all.

Should jihad be discarded, and hijab recognized as an arbitrary cultural convention and not a religious requirement? Yes, in the same way that all doctrines should be subjected to tests of ethics and reason and discarded if they fail those tests. The same is true for using the distant past, described in Part 2 of CM, as a political guide for the future. If some political idea, from history or elsewhere, will have good effects from a perspective of universal human values, then it should be used. If not, it should be rejected. These conclusions are similar to Tarek’s, though they come from different premises.

And what of the importance of challenging the illiberalism of the Islamists in the West? Here we have a more serious disagreement, not on the question of whether illiberalism should be challenged, but on where the illiberalism comes from and what should be done about it. Tarek, like Ed Husain in the UK (author of The Islamist) attributes the strength of Islamists in the West to the tolerance of “bleeding heart liberals” and “the left”. In doing so, he attributes more power to this social force than it actually has. Liberals are on the defensive everywhere in the West, and leftists are so marginal that one can only read about us as rhetorical foils in books on political topics. Decency and internationalism have plenty of followers in the West, to be sure. But it is not tolerance, but intolerance and the exploitation of legitimate grievances that others have failed to answer, that has strengthened religious politics.

How can we assess CM’s analysis of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Palestine? Pakistan was indeed founded on a religious basis, and the partition and confrontation between India and Pakistan did incredible damage to both societies over many decades. Saudi Arabia is ruled by a monarchy held up by the US military, that in exchange controls the population and uses its wealth to divert politics in religious directions. CM presents Iran from the perspective of some of its defeated leftists, who helped overthrow the Shah only to be destroyed politically (and, ultimately, physically, in mass murders of political prisoners in the 1980s).

CM’s chapter on Palestine, by contrast, is wholly without merit. Tarek offers the chapter as if it is strategic advice to the Palestinians, but like reading much of the North American media, one can come away thinking Israel’s occupation is a minor issue and that the central conflict is between lslamists and others. This is one of the confusions of Tarek’s politics in general. At times he adopts the tone of a self-critical leftist, who leftists ought to take seriously, at other times the self-congratulation of Western pundits, who leftists would normally dismiss because of lack of time. From both postures, he blasts leftists and anti-imperialists with, at times, ugly rhetoric. What’s more, since the cause of Palestine should be based on universal human rights and self-determination and Islamists (indeed Muslims, or Jews) have no special right to comment on it, Tarek’s dissident Muslim position adds nothing of interest to the debate.

Those concerned about the Palestinian cause could, no doubt, benefit from serious examination of how Hamas came to power and the Palestinian left became so marginal. It is important to think about how best to resist the agendas of Israel and the US (and Canada) for the Palestinians — an agenda of starvation and murder, it bears repeating — and how to relate to the significant social force that Hamas now represents in Palestine, for better or worse. But for that examination, one will have to look elsewhere — perhaps to Azzam Tamimi’s Hamas: A history from within, to some of Amira Hass’s reporting since the 2006 election, or Adel Samara’s critiques of “NGO-ization”.

Leftists I’ve spoken to were dismissive. They disliked Tarek’s frequent and sweeping attacks on what he calls “the left” (I prefer to use the term “leftists”, since “the left” does not really exist in any organized form in North America in any case). Another anti-Muslim book, they guessed, part of a cottage industry designed to demonize the selected victims of Western foreign policy. Iraq is occupied, a million people killed. Palestine is occupied, starved, choked to death. Afghanistan is occupied. Iran is threatened. Deportations of Muslims are rampant in Western countries. Secret trials are occurring. The Egyptian regime receives billions in weaponry and subsidies in exchange for support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and suppression of the population. Other dictatorships in Muslim countries receive similar largesse. Of course, to do all this to a group of people requires an industry to produce convenient stories about them. Anyone who can produce such stories will be rewarded handsomely, with sympathetic reviews, prominent placement in bookstores, and high sales for telling convenient things to people about what they are doing. Irshad Manji’s Trouble With Islam was part of this industry, and many might assume CM is as well. While Tarek refused Manji’s acknowledgement of him in her book, he called her “courageous” and expressed sympathy that she was being called opportunist and her message ignored in his own, a fate his book will share, in some quarters.

A better comparison than Irshad Manji might be to black conservatives in the US, such as Shelby Steele or John McWhorter, who draw on a worthy tradition of black self-help but emphasize it out of context to the degree that the central problem of institutional racism is lost.

In any case Tarek and CM should not be quickly dismissed. For all the book’s flaws, it does at times deal with serious issues seriously. It raises important questions about politics in immigrant communities and in poor countries. And although Tarek sometimes lacks compassion, makes cases by insinuation, ignores or blows off key parts of the story, misses crucial context, and makes claims well beyond his evidence, he also presents interesting arguments about history, discusses some neglected crimes whose main victims, after all, are Muslims, and is worth reading on contemporary debates even when you disagree. Unfortunately, to disagree with Tarek is to invite bombastic and overblown replies, but he also at times seriously attempts to engage in a way that might actually advance the debate on how best to advance decent values in both Western and Muslim societies. To advance that debate, it is worth assuming Tarek’s good faith and giving Chasing a Mirage a careful reading to separate the parts that are without merit from the parts that have some.

Haiti has never had a period without interference in its sovereignty. Indeed Haiti’s history could be seen as one long, heroic struggle against such interference: first to overthrow the slavers and colonizers of France (and the rest of Europe), and then to fight for sovereignty against the US, which viewed Haiti as part of its domain, to dispose of according to its own whims.

Those whims included a brutal invasion and occupation by the US Marines from 1919-34, during which Haiti’s government, military, and financial sector were re-organized in the US interest. US policy included support for the Duvalier dictatorships for decades after the occupation, and support for military governments since the end of the Duvalier era in 1986. In the 1980s, a social and political force emerged in Haiti to overthrow the dictatorship and give expression to a popular desire for sovereignty and democracy. The force called itself ‘Lavalas’, which translates as “the flood”, and its most visible leader, Jean Bertrand Aristide, became the country’s first democratically elected President. At its core, Peter Hallward’s remarkable book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, is the detailed story of the struggle between the Lavalas movement and the forces arrayed against Haitian sovereignty and democracy.

Damming the Flood (DTF) focuses on a recent chapter in that struggle, the second administration of President Aristide beginning in 2000 and ending with his overthrow in a coup/invasion in 2004. Hallward takes a forensic approach, investigating the crime of the coup, its motives, the actors involved, and how it was done. Since the coup in 2004, Hallward has probably been the most lucid non-Haitian analyst writing on Haiti in English (some of the indispensable Haitians have been Patrick Elie, Marguerite Laurent, and Jean St. Vil). For myself, trying to make sense of what was occurring in the midst of disinformation, including from those who should have known better, like Grassroots International and later 7 Stories Press – Hallward’s New Left Review article “Option Zero in Haiti” (May-June 2004) was the single most useful piece in the months after the coup (Thomas Griffin’s report from the University of Miami and Kevin Pina’s reports in the Black Commentator before the coup were also indispensable).

What was this disinformation? There were several stories about Aristide and Lavalas that were circulated during the time he was overthrown that Hallward deals with at length. Aristide was accused of arming gangsters to terrorize political opponents (this argument is made in propaganda form in Asgar Leth’s film Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a disgusting exploitation of two impoverished young men, Billy and 2Pac, who are used as sexual objects in the film while wealthy members of the opposition like Andy Apaid provide the film’s narrative). He was accused of ruling autocratically. On the other side, he was also accused of betraying the movement by capitulating to neoliberalism, by allowing the US to enter Haiti in 1995 to remove the military regime that had overthrown him, by being unsupportive of armed struggle, and by accepting violent traitors (like Dany Toussaint) into his entourage. Hallward’s book deals with each of these accusations, to which we will return. In a remarkable interview with Aristide, provided as an appendix, Hallward puts each of these questions to the ousted President himself, allowing a man who was kidnapped and flown across the world that he might be silenced to finally respond to the accusations against him.

Hallward is a Canadian-born professor specializing in French philosophy working in the UK. He brings an unusual set of credentials to writing DTF, and these set it apart from many other books on Haiti. This is best said in his own words, and so worth quoting at length:

“This is not a book motivated by any personal association with Haiti, its government or its people, and nor has it emerged from a long familiarity with its history or culture. A philosopher and literary critic by training, I have visited Haiti only twice, and make no claim to the sort of insider or anthropological knowledge that authorizes much published work on the country. I have no special interest in the peculiarities of Haitian society, of its (remarkable) language or (even more remarkable) religions. I have assumed the reader would have still less interest in an account of my own (altogether unremarkable) travels or experience.

“Instead this is purely and simply a political book. In what follows I will assume that politics doesn’t concern things that make people different but things that they hold in common. I will assume that true political action is animated by collective principles that concern everyone by definition — principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, justice… I will assume that the collective action required to apply such a principle requires the self-emancipation of the oppressed… I will assume that such self-emancipation requires forceful engagement with the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power, and that it is this engagement – more than its social motivation or economic determination — that makes politics a matter of divisive rather than consensual universality. I will also assume that the persistence of emancipatory politics demands discipline and unity, and that it depends on a capacity to resist the various kinds of fragmentation and betrayal that its very existence is bound to provoke.” (from the Introduction, pg. xxxiv).

Hallward’s “purely and simply political book” thus sets out its fundamental assumptions and principles explicitly. Hallward’s influences and sources are no less transparent. Haitian activist Patrick Elie anchors much of the analysis and recurs throughout the book. So, too, does American lawyer Brian Concannon. The list of acknowledgements at the beginning of the book consists of a community of people, Haitian and non-Haitian, who emphasized the importance of foreign interference and imperial agendas in explaining what happened in 2004 and beyond.

Because Hallward was a part of this community (as was I), he could be accused of simply cherry-picking his evidence to prove a thesis based on his stated principles and assumptions. But all books are partisan. Two such books on the same period that Hallward mentions, for example (Notes from the Last Testament, by Michael Deibert, which I reviewed, and The Prophet and Power by Alex Dupuy, which Hallward reviewed), also make political points. Hallward does not ignore counter-arguments or evidence, however, nor does he smear those who disagree with him. A good part of the book is devoted to dealing with some of the controversies and debates that occurred before and after the 2004 coup. To Hallward, it was simply Lavalas’s, and Aristide’s, challenge to “the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power” that provoked “fragmentation and betrayal” within their movement, not necessarily flaws or errors on their part. Many people who supported the 2004 coup made much of their credentials as supporters of Lavalas and Aristide in the 1990s. They were with Aristide back then, but things had changed, they said, and he had to go. This narrative of betrayal, offered by many long-time Haiti experts, including Amy Wilentz, Jane Regan, Raul Peck, and many others, was one of the most powerful arguments in trying to mobilize supporters of Haiti to support the destruction of the movement that represented the country’s best hope.

But had things changed? By pointing out that any political movement will be smeared and attacked in vicious ways, DTF returns the debate to political and human terms, not anthropological particularities about Haitians and racist assumptions about Haitian culture. What happened in Haiti in 2004 is an instance of a more general phenomenon of destabilization, invasion, and occupation. Some aspects of what happened there were developed in tandem with destabilization attempts in Venezuela, notably the coup against Chavez in 2002, and have served as a model for current destabilizations, including the partly successful coup against Hamas in Palestine in 2006, and the one that is occurring in Bolivia today.

In each of these cases (Venezuela, Palestine, Bolivia), economic sabotage was used. In Palestine and Haiti, this took the form of particularly brutal blockage of aid to societies and infrastructures whose independent economies had long since been destroyed (in Haiti over centuries but rapidly by the Duvaliers and the military dictators of the 1980s and 1990s; in Palestine by Israeli missiles and bulldozers). In Venezuela and Bolivia, it took the form of “capital strikes” and actual sabotage. Political organs of imperial states, like the US-based International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and aid agencies like USAID and Canada’s CIDA, provided funding to partisan political groups in opposition to the regime (again, in Palestine, refusing to deal with the elected regime was a prerequisite for receiving any aid monies, as became the case in Haiti as well). These foreign political organs intervened in electoral processes (in Venezuela in 2004, in Palestine in 2006, in Bolivia this year in the May 4 illegal, unmonitored “referendum” on “autonomy” held in a region carefully selected by the opposition that, like the opposition in these other countries, is in direct communication with the US). The US and its proxies also invested very heavily in the media, a very important part of the political process. Finally, armed action has been constantly threatened and was pursued more than once. In Venezuela (and also in Bolivia and Ecuador) this has happened repeatedly through the US ally, Colombia, and through local military and paramilitary groups that were co-opted by the US; In Palestine, through Israel and also through some factions of Fatah.

Every political activist, in power or opposition, trying to challenge “the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power” in the “free world” has had to contend with this array of subversive and ruthless forces. In each case, the supposed depravities of the victims, their culture, and their particular character can be cited as the cause of their problems. Chavez is a dictator, Hamas refuses to give up violence and recognize Israel, Morales lacks majority support, and Aristide armed gangsters to fight his opponents. These charges usually lack any merit. Even if they were true, though (and one has to look very carefully at the evidence to determine this), cases against the victims by journalists or writers of the reactions to the destabilization model in different countries and contexts drown out the incredible consistency of the model, the interests behind it, and the effects on peoples and their aspirations. Hallward’s great strength is his ability to present the details of how the model played out in Haiti without ever losing sight of that consistency.

I will not re-tell the story of Haiti that Hallward tells so well in his book. I do wish to note that Hallward explores several very important debates about Lavalas and comes to interesting and novel conclusions.

First, DTF explores the question, raised by the peasant NGO PAPDA, the Trotskyist NGO Batay Ouvriye and others, of Aristide and Lavalas’s capitulation to neoliberalism. Aristide allowed the opening of free trade zones. He acquiesced in some privatizations (and his Lavalas successor, Rene Preval, also did so). Batay Ouvriye presents this as a betrayal. To Hallward, however, this is a misreading of how much power Lavalas and Aristide had. Political action has to be developed and understood in a context of the overall balance of forces. Ignoring that balance can have perverse effects, as DTF argues about Batay Ouvriye’s position on the coup: “It is one thing to criticize and protest against a government elected by the great majority of the people, it is another to denounce it as an evil to be destroyed at all costs. Although it is easier to make certain criticisms when you have none of the responsibilities of power, leftwing labor groups are clearly entitled to pressure any government to adopt more progressive policies… But BO not only attacked Lavalas, they attacked it in ways that played straight into the hands of their own worst enemies, and they did so with a bitterness that can only be understood in terms of a distorted sense of betrayal and resentment.” (pg. 188)

This theme, of the constraints and opportunities for political action, emerges repeatedly in DTF, and in Hallward’s view, Aristide and Lavalas emerge as very shrewd strategists, winning successes against overwhelming odds. This leads to Hallward’s view of Aristide’s decision to return to Haiti in 1994 with the support of the US military. Aristide justified this as the only way to stop the ongoing torture and massacre under the military dictatorship that had overthrown him in 1991. Some of his left-wing detractors argued that he returned in order to subvert and co-opt an armed struggle against the dictatorship that could have succeeded. A similar argument was made about Aristide’s refusal to use arms to destroy the insurgent movement that ended up overthrowing him in 2003-4 (since despite the claims about his arming gangsters, Aristide in fact counted on political mobilization to stop the coup attempts and, arguably, underestimated the military threat). DTF suggests that armed struggle was never a feasible option for Haiti, and that Aristide probably made the best choice under the impossible circumstances he faced. He quotes Aristide: “Who wants to be proved right by the blood of the people? You’re kidding yourself if you think that the people can wage an armed struggle. We need to look the situation in the eye: the people have no weapons, and they will never have as many weapons as their enemies. It’s pointless to wage a struggle on your enemies’ terrain, or play by their rules. You will lose.” (pg. 47)

Finally, DTF presents a very interesting, and cautiously optimistic, perspective on Haiti’s future. The 2004 coup did not show that the empire is invincible. Instead, the lengths to which the empire had to go to oust the regime, the length of time that it took to do so, and the fact that it had to return the country to some semblance of democratic governance just two years later in 2006 (when Preval was elected again), suggests that Haiti’s people cannot be counted out. Nor can Lavalas. To quote DTF’s conclusion at length:

“… this era, in spite of the astonishing levels of repression it aroused, has indeed opened the door to a new political future. There is little to be gained from judging this opening by the standards of either armed liberation movements on the one hand or entrenched parliamentary democracies on the other. Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilization can proceed under the pressure of exceptionally powerful constraints…

“…Members of Lavalas organizations populaires have for many years worked alongside representatives of the more militant PPN [National Popular Party]; in spite of many obstacles, a stronger version of such a collaboration may well manage to mount and win an anti-imperialist campaign for the presidency in 2010. Damaged by its wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the capacity of the US to deter such collaboration is perhaps weaker today than at any time over the preceding century. Just as importantly, the capacity of the US or its allies France and Canada to pose as friends of the Haitian people is for the forseeable future damaged beyond repair…

“Over the last couple of years the Lavalas organization has also begun to confront some of its own internal limitations, by becoming less dependent on Aristide’s personal charisma and influence, and by purging itself of many of the opportunists who manipulated this influence in the late 1990s… younger grassroots leaders are more prominent now than when their organization was in office. They have learned from Aristide’s example as well as from his mistakes. The combination of disciplined resilience and strategic flexibility that won the election of 2006 suggests that parts of this organization may have emerged from the crucible of repression stronger than before.” (pp. 315-316)

Just over 200 years ago Haitians gave the world an unprecedented gift: they showed it was possible to overthrow slavery and colonialism, by doing it. DTF’s gift, much more humble, is to point out something perhaps as important: that Haitians are still nobody’s hard-luck case, but a place to look to to learn about what can and should be done to make the world a more decent place.

Over the past few years I have come into contact with several different indigenous movements in different parts of the world, including where I live, in Canada. One of these indigenous peoples are the Nasayuwe of Cauca in southern Colombia, and they describe our economic system as a ‘proyecto de muerte’, a ‘death project.’ When they reclaim their ancestral territories or prevent paramilitaries from entering them, they say that they are defending life. What is rational from the perspective of defending life seems insane in our system, in our culture. Environmental problems are deadly serious, as serious as problems of war and peace, and to give ourselves a chance at survival we have to be willing to think in ways we might not be accustomed to and break taboos. I hope to break some taboos here, and I just wanted to warn you in case that happens.

Taboos and Irrationalities

An architect named William McDonough and a chemist named Michael Braungart have a book called “cradle to cradle.” It imagines an industrial system in which all of the things we use are reclaimed after we use them. You use a computer, say. But you don’t buy the computer. You just pay to use the computer for some amount of time, and when it’s done, you give it back to the manufacturer, who designed it so it can easily be disassembled and its parts used to make another computer, perhaps an upgraded one. We have ‘recycling’, but McDonough and Braungart don’t think what we have merits the term ‘recycling’. Instead, it’s ‘downcycling’. Cars are made of high-quality and low-quality steel, for example. But when they are ‘recycled’, these are all blended together. The resulting alloy can’t be used to make another car. High-quality paper is recycled into lower-quality paper. The way we ‘downcycle’, we are just creating a brief stop on the way to the landfill. And in any case, if you’ve seen The Story of Stuff, an amazing 20-minute movie you can watch online, you know that industry produces 70 tons of garbage for every ton produced by consumers. If we accept the “cradle to cradle” philosophy, there’s no reason there should be any garbage at all. No waste. Living systems, ecosystems, don’t waste. The results of natural processes are always food for other natural processes, whether it’s a carcass left behind after predation ultimately enriching the soil or a standing dead tree left behind after fire providing habitat for birds. But our economic system does waste, an awful lot. For that to be different, everything would have to be designed with its ultimate fate in mind.

We are very far from that, today. We have global industries producing massive amounts of stuff, planned for obsolescence, made of toxic petrochemicals that are mined, hazardous to workers and users, shipped across the world in tankers and trucks (using more petroleum), used very briefly before being dumped in a site where they will remain, leaking toxics into air and water and soil, for thousands of years.

We come now to our first taboo, something not normally talked about in polite company: human waste. I recently read a book called The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. He starts out by saying, there are two kinds of people in the world. People who defecate into bowls of drinking water and people who do not. In North America we have evolved very sophisticated technology for cleaning water that has been fouled by humanure (I am deliberately avoiding the word ‘waste’, following Jenkins). What we have not tried is not putting it in the water in the first place. Jenkins describes a very simple composting system that he says doesn’t smell (and he uses it), isn’t dangerous or toxic, and results in reclaiming the humanure for the valuable fertilizer that it is. He lives in the country and uses it in his own garden, but he describes, plausibly I think, a system that could work in an urban setting as well. Humanure creates very serious public health problems when it gets into water. But properly composted it is a resource for agriculture. This waste, and now we can call it waste, is a window into our agricultural system. I could imagine a system where food was organic, local, used these kinds of closed loops, in which people’s ability to think and design worked in concert with the self-design of ecosystems so that people could eat and drink very well, and even in cities take part in gardening and cooking, and without having to worry about toxins or genetic modifications in the food. There are such systems that exist, in Cuba, for example, where people in the city grow an impressive proportion of their own food using organic methods.

How does our food system work, instead? It is not based on farming so much as mining soil, pouring petrochemical fertilizer and mined nitrates into the ground and using pesticides to ensure that only one type of plant can grow — increasingly a type of plant that is genetically modified to better handle the pesticide. All this produces a massive amount of a single crop, harvested by machine and processed by people who we pretend don’t exist most of the time, people who work for less than minimum wage, have no protections or benefits, and are expected to do the work and disappear again. The crop is then sent off to manufacturers (on trucks, using petroleum) to process even more, with more petrochemicals, into syrups and starches and food that comes in plastic-wrapped packages and metal cans. And these workers are also insecure, poorly-paid, vulnerable to workplace accidents and unemployment. Then trucked off (petrol again) to stores or fast-food restaurants to be sold for very cheap — more processed food is cheaper than fresh food, and in many neighbourhoods fresh food just can’t be had at all. And people need to eat this stuff because they are working multiple jobs to make ends meet and don’t have time to cook, or money to afford fresh food, or time to seek it out.

Possibly, our second taboo, which is to say something negative about one of North America ’s most sacred institutions: the automobile. I live in a city, Toronto, but I grew up in a suburb, called Mississauga. The suburb I grew up in looks like every suburb in North America. Subdivisions of homogeneous detached houses with lawns and driveways and cars, malls and plazas with parking lots around them, big, wide roads and lots of highways, and now plenty of big-box stores. These places were designed not for people, but for cars. The simplest way to tell is to try to meet someone else in the same suburb. How will you get there? You can ride your bike in the city, it’s not too far. Or take transit, it won’t take two hours waiting for the bus to go along a convoluted route that will get you there by the end of the day. It’s not different people who live in the suburbs, it’s just structurally impossible to get around without a car.

The problem isn’t just that every place starts to look the same, or that you have to drive everywhere, or that not everyone can afford a car and people who can’t are basically excluded from civic life. The transportation system is responsible for a huge part of CO2 emissions that are changing the climate.

But we want our stuff, right? We want our plasma TVs and our fast foods and our fast cars and SUVs and gasoline, right? We want to flush toilets and run faucets and not worry about where the water comes from or goes, right? Until we stop wanting these things, aren’t we hypocritical to say they are absurd?

Well, do we really want these things? How could we know? People are adaptable to all kinds of situations. We have certainly learned not to miss things that we are missing — like time to spend with our loved ones, or work that is fulfilling, or being able to feel safe among people at night. We could probably adapt pretty quickly to life without plasma TVs and SUVs too. But I would go even further. One clue about what we really want comes from the advertisers. They sell fast food with images of families or friends eating together: community, human connection. They sell cars with images of mountainous, forested, and coastal landscapes: a connection to nature. They sell stuff by implying that it will increase your status, make you more sexually attractive, healthy, smart, comfortable. The stuff is a means to some end. They know this. But when someone points out the consequences of the way we get all our stuff, they are ready to point the finger at consumers and say — it’s your fault, you want the stuff. Our society is set up so you can’t do without it, and if you could, the systems would continue, unless they are consciously changed. More on that in a minute.

Means and Ends

First, a little more about means and ends. We are in a church, so it seems a fitting place to talk about what the real ends are, what it really is all about. An important thinker on energy issues is Amory Lovins, who wrote Soft Energy Paths back in the 1970s. I thought of this means/ends distinction reading his passage early in the book, where he says something like, people don’t want electricity, they want warmth, light, and the comforts they get through it. We can take that analysis deeper. People don’t want things, they want the ends that come or that they think will come from having those things. What are those ends? I’d invite you to think about them. I came up with about seven. Mine are health, safety, knowledge, relationships (to people and nature), comfort, freedom, and meaning. You can play around with the list, subdivide the categories or come up with your own categories. But you’ll notice that when you look at it this way, there’s no particular technological level, no particular lifestyle, that is automatically better than another. Health can be served by high-tech medicine but harmed by high-tech chemicals, helped by clean air and water and food but harmed by parasites or predators.

If you accept that these (or some others) are (or ought to be) the real ends of life, then you can take these and use them to evaluate our system, our society. You can evaluate our society against past societies, or against some possible future. And you find that we are doing something other than serving our real ends, then we should change what we do.

And means? Again, I’d invite you to think on it more. But I came up with four. I was following the late Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani scholar and activist who taught at Hampshire College. He listed the four elements of nationhood as land, water, culture, and leaders. I am not talking about the elements of nationhood but the means of survival, so I would modify the list to be: energy, water, life (or land, or living systems, what I want to express is the self-designing, self-propagating aspect of life, that human and nonhuman life both depend on), and culture.

Look at this list of means, and I think the problem with our system becomes a little clearer. Our system is destroying the means of survival. We can go one at a time. Energy? Oil, and other fossil fuels, are being sucked out of the ground faster than it ever was, and the carbon from it is going into the atmosphere and wrecking the climate. There is probably enough fossil fuel to wreck the climate very badly before we run out. Water? Most of the surface water has been fouled and aquifers are being depleted everywhere. Climate change is changing the hydrological cycle, killing people both through droughts and floods. Life? Every year there are fewer forests, fewer fish, less agricultural land, more soil erosion and loss, more poisoned ecosystems, more wild species going extinct, more genetic pollution of plants. Culture? Measuring the loss of culture is a little harder. I have definitely had a feeling that people on roads and in routine bureaucratic interactions are becoming more antisocial all the time, that things like road rage just get worse and worse every year, and that people are losing their basic capacity to relate to each other as humans. But there are other ways of measuring cultural destruction. Languages with no speakers? Skills and techniques for making and doing things that no one knows how to do, because we can just buy a thing to do it and throw the thing away? Now maybe that is just progress, but what if we find out later that it might have been good to know how to store vegetables without refrigeration, or compost manure, or p lay an instrument?

The American System and Change

The economic system we live in, capitalism, uses these means. But it is dedicated to taking these means of life and turning them into money, in the process restricting access to them and killing them. Ultimately all of these things, the fisheries, the forests, the oil and minerals in the ground, people’s time and lives and sweat, they become money — paper or blips in bank accounts. We are asked to go along with this, and in return we get — stuff. I don’t think it is a good trade. How did it happen?

This is actually the American system, and it had some progressive aspects. When the twentieth century, also called “the American century,” started, there were several rival projects in the world. One was socialism, which was based on economic equality and solidarity and came to be associated with dictatorship and the Soviet Union. It is too bad, because there is no reason that economic equality and solidarity have to go with dictatorship, and I think they could exist with democracy. Many working people in Europe and elsewhere, even in America, stuck in poverty and debt at the bottom of a very rigid class hierarchy, came to believe in socialism and struggled for it. The American system offered a different solution, but like those who struggled for socialism, believers in the American system were also betrayed.

The American system was supposed to work like this. Instead of a rigid class hierarchy, there was some class mobility. Instead of mass poverty, there could be mass consumption. Good wages, plenty of jobs, low prices, lots of stuff, and the chance to rise in status, privilege, and education.

Anyone watch The Wire? I discovered it late and I’ve been devouring it over the past three weeks, wondering why on earth I find myself liking a cop show. Then I read that its creator says it’s not a cop show but a show about the betrayal of the working class, and I thought, ah, that’s why I like it. When people talk about the betrayal of working people in this country, they are talking about the erosion of the American system. Technological advances weren’t used to make workers more comfortable, but to automate jobs, move them offshore. Unemployment increased, wages went down or stayed static, prices for stuff stayed cheap but prices for education and housing made class mobility less likely. This happened because of decisions by elites, not environmental limits. Naomi Klein writes about it in her book The Shock Doctrine.

But as the system reaches environmental limits, the environment will become the scapegoat for the end of a system of mass consumption and mass privilege and its replacement with a system of elite privilege, in which access to nature will itself be a privilege from which most people are excluded. This kind of argument was used in forestry, for example, on the West Coast of the US during the Clinton years. The media presented a conservation plan as ‘jobs versus owls’. But the job losses weren’t coming from conservation. They were coming from automation. It was a false dichotomy then. But the idea was that either the environment or working people would have to suffer, so that elites could continue to profit. That is how it was presented and how it will continue to be presented, although the last part, “so that elites could continue to profit”, is never explicitly stated, just an invisible assumption.

I know this is not a catholic church, but my family background is Catholic, and I am an environmentalist, so I know a lot about guilt. Environmentalism is too often about guilt. But, as environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen points out in his fine book Endgame, being guilty about consumption choices or lifestyles confuses what we have choices about and what we don’t have choices about. The system we live in constrains our choices. We can feel guilty for not understanding or trying to change that system, but we shouldn’t forget how constrained our choices are.

I think that a defense of life, changing our society so that it allows people to work towards real ends and preserves and enhances the means of life, will have two steps. The first step, the harder step is to stop the system from destroying what is left and taking control, actual democratic control, of our societies. This is hard because, as insane as this ‘death project’ is, those in power and those who identify with it will defend it, and so turning it around will require a lot of thinking, a lot of courage, a lot of persistence and action. The second step will be, once we have the power to decide, to decide to be a part of a society that provides its members with health, freedom, knowledge, safety, comfort, relationships, and meaning, in ways that do not destroy the means of survival for us and other species.

Environmentalism and climate science

A lot of people come to the climate change issue as environmentalists. Environmentalism is diverse, but I would say that a common denominator for environmentalists is that they are concerned with the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystems that sustain life on the planet and want to make changes that reduce that negative impact — or have no impact or positive impact. But having agreed on this, there are many different views within environmentalism. Some environmentalists want to protect nature from humans, some want to protect nature for humans. Some think technology is to blame, others think technology could be the solution.

Environmentalists sometimes talk about a “triple bottom line”. That’s ‘social, economic, and environmental’. The ‘social’ part is ‘social justice’, it’s a concern for people. People concerned about social justice usually believe that equality is a value society should strive for, especially in the economy. They are critical, skeptical, of the claims of those in power or authority.

I am also concerned about climate change as a scientist. The scientists who have developed our understanding of climate change are mostly atmospheric physicists. I studied atmospheric physics as an undergraduate, but now I work in forestry, and like most scientists, I work in a fairly specialized area. My work is not about how climate change occurs in the atmosphere, but on the impact of that change on forests, specifically on forest fires in the Canadian province of Ontario. I will elaborate on climate science below, but I want to say that working in this field, I have had the experience of most scientists. We use the established models from our field of application (in my case, models about how fast fires spread in different forest types and under different weather conditions). We feed these models some possible, and likely scenarios for what the weather will be like if things continue along present trends. We look at the results and are shocked by how much worse things are than we could have predicted. That’s the experience of modelers like me. The scientists who gather the data, who are watching the polar ice or the temperature trends, are similarly shocked every time they look at the new data.

I think that having all three of these lenses: an environmentalist one, a ‘social’ one, and a scientific one, is very useful in looking at the climate problem and possible solutions. It takes a bit of work to bring these views together, but in the end you get a good picture of the situation and what has to be done about it.

Science and environmentalism

Let me start by talking a little more about the science. I thought Al Gore’s film was a good and straightforward presentation of the science. Some of the best books on solutions to the problem — George Monbiot’s Heat, for example — don’t get into the science very much. They assume it, or they accept the authority of the scientific consensus. Should we? There are legitimate questions about this. Leftists raise legitimate questions about this. Even though not all questions about the science of climate change are legitimate or well-meaning or raised by people with decent values, it is worth spending some time taking them on.

A lot of the controversies about climate science are artificial. They are manufactured by petroleum-industry funded lobbyists who have gotten visibility and equal time in the media despite not having scientific credibility. Monbiot, who is a journalist and an expert at the kind of investigation that exposes these links, exposes these ‘denialists’ in his book, Heat. Here is a problem though, for someone who is concerned about social justice and critical of the media. We might believe there is an establishment that uses mechanisms like editorial review, self-censorship, and social sanction, to exercise a subtle control over what information gets out and what information gets emphasized in the public conversation. Is the scientific establishment any different, a socially critical person could ask? And is the current media interest in climate change not a sign that climate change isn’t really a problem, since we know the system tells lies? This is the argument made by a pair of (frequently very perceptive) social critics from my part of the world, in Canada, and by Alexander Cockburn here in the US. To answer this argument requires some quick discussion on what science is.

To repeat the problem: we are all told that we face a very serious threat to human civilization in the form of global warming caused by our emission of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels. We have to act against this threat, and we have to act quickly. We are told this by ’science’. But why should we believe ’science’? Who is behind it? Is it a network of university-trained elite professionals, funded by government and private sector grants, a gentlemen’s club that protects its interests and promotes ideas that will further those interests?

Of course it is. Some of the better known philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, shows how most scientists in most times work within a set of assumptions — what he calls a paradigm — and that science advances when one or more of these assumptions is shown not to hold. Those scientists who work within a paradigm are doing what Kuhn calls “normal science”, and there is certainly lots of “normal science” going on in climate research. It’s humble stuff. Kuhn shows how “normal science” defends itself by excluding new ideas and that new ideas only advance when old generations die off. But it gets worse even than that. Physicist Jeff Schmidt wrote a book, Disciplined Minds, that gives just such an analysis. In that book he shows how graduate and professional school, even in the most “disinterested” of sciences like physics, train people to think creatively, but inside a box. And still worse, consider how much of research activity is ultimately intended for military ends. Or how much pharmaceutical research and medical research has been corrupted by the interests of drug companies. And this doesn’t even get into the social sciences, like economics, which produce arguments in favor of inequality and barbarism and present them with scientific authority. So yes, science is an establishment.

But it is also something else. In Einstein’s words, science is the refinement of everyday thinking. To me, science is applying certain human capacities — combining consistent logic and reasoning, creative leaps and then systematic testing, attention to evidence — to the world. It is something everyone can do and it is cumulative, maybe the most cumulative of our activities because it is intrinsically based on building on what others have done. The promise of science is that we can, if we pay attention, discipline ourselves to think clearly, and work and think with others, and give ourselves time and make the effort, come to some understanding about the world. It will be tentative, it will be subject to change, but we will be able to have some mental understanding, some mental model, that corresponds to reality. What I like about science, in other words, is that it doesn’t depend on authority. It is about not accepting things on authority. It’s actually when we don’t use our scientific capacities that we are left with nothing but some external authority to tell us how to understand the world.

Of course, ‘science’ itself is presented as just such an authority. Psychologists, doctors, government- and university-employed scientists constantly make public claims invoking the authority of science. What they do not do enough is actually open the process up: talk about the evidence behind the claims, the methods they use, the assumptions they make. They don’t present science as the refinement of everyday thinking and help people refine their thinking because that would actually reduce their authority. If you reject their claims, you can be accused of being ‘unscientific’. Who wants to be ‘unscientific’? Outrageous claims made by people with an air of authority can be used to make something seem ‘controversial’. If the process were more open, people could be invited to look at the methods, the evidence, the assumptions, and decide how credible a claim is. Because some things, some fields, are better understood than others.

Atmospheric science involves mostly physics and chemistry. Fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and spectroscopy are well-developed, well-understood fields with experimental backing and very credible theory. The atmosphere is complex, but it is a much more narrow field of inquiry than the ecosystems it interacts with, because adding life to the mix introduces something qualitatively different. Add human society and economy into this and you get another qualitative change. And in general, the more narrow the field of inquiry, the deeper the understanding. Social sciences like economics are intrinsically incredibly broad, and the results are therefore shallow if they’re valid. Economists try to narrow their inquiries by making assumptions, but this often abstracts out very important elements of the real world and makes their results useless for the real world.

I am arguing that atmospheric science, the science that tells us the climate is changing, is a field where more precise and accurate claims can be made than in economics. But the public discussion is presented as if the opposite were true. As if our society had to weigh the ‘certain’ costs of dealing with climate change against the ‘uncertain’ threats from it.

It’s true that climate science is uncertain. But all science is uncertain, and climate science claims are less uncertain than economics claims. It has a much better record of prediction. And uncertainty cuts both ways: the ‘uncertainty’ about the impacts of climate change mean that things could be much worse than we think. A Danish statistician named Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. He sometimes shows some interesting ‘skepticism’ about environmentalist claims, but he doesn’t show skepticism about claims about economic activity, or cost, or growth, or markets. These assumptions are accepted so completely that we don’t even know they are assumptions. But this is the opposite of a skeptical attitude or a scientific attitude. Science advances when people discover assumptions they didn’t know they held.

Science is work, it takes time, and because it is cumulative, there are many pieces that build on others. What the denialists do is take one piece out of context and present some (usually dubious) counter-evidence or simple argument. They are usually wrong about the pieces they take on, but they also try to use some small piece to discredit the entire building. In a short time, it’s impossible to present all of climate science. If I had a full hour I could not do better than Al Gore did in his film. But let me just present some elements of the science as it was taught to me. You can, and should, look into it further if you are interested. If you do, I think you will be able to convince yourself of its validity.

The climate story

The basic argument is this. The energy to warm the earth comes from the sun’s radiation. Some of that is reflected straight back into space by clouds or ice (the reflectivity of the earth is called its albedo). Some of it reaches the earth’s surface, raises the earth’s temperature, and radiates out as heat. Some of that heat is, in turn, trapped by the atmosphere and returned again to the earth’s surface. How much heat is trapped by the atmosphere depends on the composition of the atmosphere — different chemicals have different characteristic frequencies that they emit at. CO2 emits heat. So does CH4 (methane) and some other important gases. The atmosphere has increasing amounts of these gases because we keep burning fossil fuels. The gases eventually cycle out of the atmosphere and back to the surface of the earth, when plants grow for example, but we are emitting into the atmosphere much more and much faster than the carbon is returned to the earth’s surface. The result is more heat in the atmosphere and higher temperatures, which, because the atmosphere and the climate are complex systems, have effects on everything else.

There is a carbon cycle. Carbon travels in a kind of equilibrium between the ocean and the earth’s surface, plants and animals on that surface, into the atmosphere, and back. The processes that drive the carbon cycle have a lot to do with life. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere as they use energy from the sun to grow. Animals release carbon into the atmosphere when they breathe. When organisms die, a lot of the carbon in their bodies is released. But it can also be stored. Coal is ancient plant matter that has been stored. Oil is ancient plankton, from the ocean. These fossil fuels can be thought of as dead, trapped, concentrated solar energy.

Flannery quotes a scientist named Jeffrey Dukes at the University of Utah who concluded that 100 tonnes of ancient plant life is required to create four litres of petrol (about 1 gallon). Growing that much plant life takes a lot of years of sunlight. The equivalent of about 1 year’s fossil fuel use (1997) globally is 422 years of sunlight.

It takes a remarkable process to make oil, a really remarkable sequence of events over thousands of years. It is such a chance event that I want to describe it in detail. This is Flannery (pg. 76):

The geological process for making oil is as precise as a recipe for making soufflé. First the sediments containing the phytoplankton must be buried and compressed by other rocks. Then, the absolute right conditions are needed to squeeze the organic matter out of the source rocks and to transfer it, through cracks and crevices, into a suitable storage stratum. This stratum must be porous, but above it must lie a layer of fine-grained, impervious rock, strong enough to withstand the pressures that [would shoot] the oil and gas into the air… and thick enough to forbid escape. In addition, the waxes and fats that are the source of oil need to be ‘cooked’ at between 100-135 degrees Celsius [water boils at 100 C] for millions of years. If the temperature ever exceeds these limits, all that will result is gas, or else the hydrocarbons will be lost entirely. As there is no cook tending the great subterranean ovens wherein oil is forged, the creation of oil reserves is the result of pure chance — the right rocks being cooked in the right way for the correct time, usually in a dome-shaped structure where a ‘crust’ overlies a porous oil-rich level that prevents the oil’s escape.

It can’t be replicated, which means our economy, based on it, is inherently unsustainable. But even if it could, our economy is also based on taking carbon that has been out of circulation, stored in the ground, for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere.

This changes the carbon cycle. To have an ecological world-view is to understand that everything is connected to everything else. So changing the carbon cycle changes the atmospheric temperature. It changes the hydrological cycle. It changes habitats for wildlife. It changes agricultural potentials and the amount and type of life different ecosystems can support. It combines with all the other kinds of toxins we release into the atmosphere, water, and land in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. These changes are making parts of the earth, which are habitat for diverse life forms, unlivable. They are making parts of the world where millions of people live, unlivable. Let me not make the case for how serious the problem is, here. I refer you to Gore, or Flannery, or just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s very conservative estimates. This presentation assumes you think the problem is very serious and must be solved quickly. The solution has an easy and a hard part.

The easy part of the solution

Two scientists from Princeton, Pacala and Socolow, published a paper in Science 2004 called “stabilization wedges”. The abstract of the paper is worth reading in full.

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

The elements that Pacala and Socolow present include what I call non-solutions like ethanol fuel and nuclear power as well as things that have to happen like reducing reliance on cars and stopping deforestation. Ethanol is already contributing to rising food prices and hunger in Latin America. By taking agricultural land out of circulation to produce corn for ethanol that then goes in a car, we’re still emitting CO2. But we’re also feeding cars instead of people. And the energetics of ethanol are scandalous. Filling an SUV’s tank takes enough corn to feed a person for a year. The food system and farming is dysfunctional as it is, distorted because of energy inputs and ecological destructiveness, actually. But we are hoping to stabilize the climate in time to prevent millions from dying and being displaced because of floods and drought. We don’t want to do it in a way that threatens millions with mass starvation. Nuclear power has other problems. If there is no safe way of disposing of it, if there are small risks of unthinkably catastrophic events, it is irrational to keep incrementing these risks with new plants.

Another non-solution is carbon offsets. The idea here is that if you are going to emit CO2, you can purchase “offsets” somewhere else so that you can end up with a net carbon balance of zero — your money is taking up as much carbon as it is putting out. Most of these “offsets” have to do with planting trees. But trees need to be planted anyway, and there are a whole number of reasons why a tree should or shouldn’t be planted in a certain place. Is that agricultural land? Is it well-watered enough for growing trees? Is the tree useful habitat for wildlife, or would some other land use in that area make better habitat? Even more than this, forests have an equilibrium role in the carbon cycle. When they grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere. When they die, they release it. Burning fossil fuels is not an equilibrium activity — we are taking carbon that’s been buried for millions of years, out of circulation for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere. Forests cannot be used as a substitute for reducing emissions.

George Monbiot’s book, Heat, goes much deeper than Pacala and Socolow do in their paper, and he also rejects biofuels. He starts by saying, if it is technologically impossible to have an advanced, comfortable civilization and a stable climate, then we are probably doomed, because it will be impossible to generate the kind of social movement necessary to stabilize the climate if people have to mobilize to ruin their own lives. But then he does a very careful evaluation of the technologies and some evaluation of political feasibility, and shows that it is technologically possible to have pretty much all of the comforts and conveniences we are used to and still have a stable climate — all the conveniences except mass commercial flight. Which, obviously, since I’m convinced by Monbiot, makes me feel somewhat silly for flying here from Toronto to do this talk. Perhaps next time I’ll visit by videoconference?

I should say that, think that, Pacala and Socolow are basically right: the scientific, technological, and industrial knowledge exists to solve this problem. But every solution that is proposed needs to be evaluated for its ecological, social, and ethical implications. The test for any technology, any institution, any idea, any action, ought to be — what will this do to people, what will it do to nature, does it protect or destroy life?

One technology that I think does pass this test is a type of idea environmentalists are always raising. I’m presenting it as a technology following George Monbiot. The simple “technology” is called leaving the fossil fuels in the ground. It sounds crazy, but it would be very good for the atmosphere. It would also be good for society — if we could learn that not everything has to be viewed as a resource and not every resource has to be harvested, that would be positive. Since most people are not getting the benefits anyway, and since most people are being harmed, this technology isn’t one that harms the poor more than the rich. So, instead of society mobilizing its people, its brains, its institutions, to take resources and burn them, we could redirect our efforts to figuring out how not to do this. And how to do what we really want without doing this.

The hard part of the solution

It would seem, then, that the path is reasonably clear. We live in a democracy, after all. So we convince enough people that the climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect leaders who do. Some who make decisions for the economy, through businesses they own or manage aren’t elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. British Petroleum is getting ‘beyond petroleum’, they just call themselves BP now so you can wonder whether they’re British or Beyond and whether Petroleum really has anything to do with it any more. If parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of catastrophes for nature and people, that would be bad for business, right? So they will come along with the right arguments and proposals?

I wish it was true, but I don’t think that’s how things work. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t democratic. We are ruled by a system that takes the elements of life – nature, land, water, energy, cultures and peoples — and destroys them to turn them into money and power. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it, you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab — for most people it’s their own lives — and turn it into money. If you’re excluded from it, you’re excluded from the very means of survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival for yourself or your loved ones outside of the system, you will be met with violence. If you’re in this system you cannot think about whether it is killing the planet, whether the whole system is basically leading us to suicide. Even if you know that’s true, so long as it would make you more money to ignore it, you will never be able to compete with someone who does ignore it unless you do. And so much of our world is based on competition: between individuals, between businesses, and between countries. Economic competition, political competition, military competition.

You have probably figured out that I am talking about capitalism. It is a system based on profits, accumulation, competition, private property, class hierarchy, the destruction of nature, backed up by force. It coexists with a culture that has what environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen calls a ‘death urge’ — a culture that hates life, that hates women, that hates indigenous peoples and encourages hatred of anyone below on the rungs of a hierarchical society.

It is leading us to a disastrous future. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine is about what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’. Those in power can use disasters to reconfigure the institutions of a country to make it easier to make profits. When they don’t have a disaster to hand, they can create one. One of her chapters is about Iraq. Another is about New Orleans. The book could be a picture of a nightmare future, except that it is the present. But a future along these lines can only get uglier.

Neither the climate problem nor running out of fossil fuels can be ignored. They will be dealt with. But they will be dealt with according to the principles of disaster capitalism. Yes, parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Other parts of the world will be habitable. These will be reserved for elites. Those who live there now will be displaced, by force. Yes, there will be a scarcity of energy, food, water, land. There will be some of these resources, and they will be reserved for elites. They will be used by elites to keep themselves secure from the rest. Before petroleum runs out, it will probably be reserved for exclusive use by the military. This will happen until the resources are run down and the basis for life is destroyed. Warning elites of this collapse won’t help — they know they are the only ones who have a chance of surviving it.

We know this will happen. It has happened. It is happening. And despite the ultimately suicidal nature of the system, it will defend itself against attempts to change it. That is why, as destructive as competition is, I don’t think we can completely discard it. For a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some people and some institutions. Success in that competition will require all the tools of social change: organization, communication, demonstration, and actions of all kinds, at least some of which will be new and correspond to the time and place. Everybody has to join that, and we have to win it.