Because We Say So (12 page)

Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking—a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.

Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change.

One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists,
the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown—which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse.

Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately.

The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.

At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “we must stop being the stupid party. . . . We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Within the system of really existing capitalist democracy it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the
short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within really existing capitalist democracy, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar “market inefficiencies,” among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these “externalities” can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring “systemic risk”—the possibility that the whole system would collapse—when they undertook risky transactions.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In the future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions—actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet.
The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be.

Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict—unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of really existing capitalist democracy.

IN PALESTINE, DIGNITY AND VIOLENCE

April 1, 2013

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18, 2013.

The Swedish novelist Henning Mankell tells of an experience in Mozambique during the civil war horrors there 25 years ago, when he saw a young man walking toward him in ragged clothes.

“I noticed something that I will never forget for as long as I live,” Mankell says. “I looked at his feet. He had no shoes. Instead he had painted shoes on his feet. He had used the colors in the ground and in the roots to replace his shoes. He had come up with a way to keep his dignity.”

Such scenes will evoke poignant memories among those who have witnessed cruelty and degradation, which are everywhere. One striking case, though only one of a great many, is Gaza, which I was able to visit for the first time last October.

There violence is met by the steady resistance of the Samidin—those who endure, to borrow Raja Shehadeh’s evocative term in
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, his memoir on Palestinians under occupation, published 30 years ago.

Greeting me on my return home were the reports of the Israeli assault on Gaza in November, supported by the United States and tolerated politely by Europe as usual.

Israel isn’t Gaza’s only adversary. Gaza’s southern border remains largely under the control of Egypt’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, which credible reports link closely to the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.

Just last month a young Gaza journalist sent me an article
describing the Egyptian government’s latest assault on the people of Gaza.

A network of tunnels into Egypt is a lifeline for Gazans imprisoned under harsh siege and constant attack. Now the Egyptian government has devised a new way to block the tunnels: flooding them with sewage.

Meanwhile the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports on a new device that the Israeli army is using to counter the weekly nonviolent protests against Israel’s illegal Separation Wall—in reality an Annexation Wall.

The Samidin have been ingenious in coping with tear gas so the army has escalated, spraying protesters and homes with jets of a liquid as noxious as raw sewage.

These attacks provide more evidence that great minds think alike, combining criminal repression with humiliation.

The tragedy of Gaza traces back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were forcibly expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion held that “the Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them—to run away.”

It is noteworthy that today the strongest support for Israel in the international arena comes from the United States, Canada and Australia, the so-called Anglosphere—settler-colonial societies based on extermination or expulsion of indigenous populations in favor of a higher race, and where such behavior is considered natural and praiseworthy.

For decades Gaza has been a showcase for violence of every kind. The record includes such carefully planned atrocities as Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009—”infanticide,” as it was called by Norwegian physicians Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who worked at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital with their Palestinian and Norwegian colleagues through the criminal assault.
The word is apt, considering the hundreds of children massacred.

Violence ranges through just about every kind of cruelty that humans have used their higher mental faculties to devise, up to the pain of exile.

The pain is particularly stark in Gaza, where older people can still look across the border toward the homes from which they were driven—or could if they were able to approach the border without being killed.

One form of punishment has been to close off more of the Gazan side of the border, turning it into a buffer zone, including half of Gaza’s arable land, according to Harvard’s Sara Roy, a leading scholar on Gaza.

While a showcase for the human capacity for violence, Gaza is also an inspiring exemplar of the demand for dignity.

Ghada Ageel, a young woman who escaped from Gaza to Canada, writes about her 87-year-old refugee grandmother, still trapped in the Gaza prison. Before her grandmother’s expulsion from a now-destroyed village, “she owned a house, farms and land and she enjoyed honor, dignity and hope.”

Amazingly, like Palestinians generally, the elderly woman hasn’t given up hope.

“When I saw my grandmother in November 2012 she was unusually happy,” Ageel writes. “Surprised by her high spirits, I asked for an explanation. She looked me in the eye and, to my surprise, said that she was no longer worried about” her native village and the life of dignity that she has lost, for her irrevocably.

The village, her grandmother told Ageel, “is in your heart, and I also know that you are not alone in your journey. Don’t be discouraged. We are getting there.”

The search for dignity is understood instinctively by those who hold the clubs, and who recognize that apart from
violence, the best way to undermine dignity is by humiliation. That is second nature in prisons.

The normal practice in Israeli prisons is once again under scrutiny. In February, Arafat Jaradat, a 30-year-old gas-station attendant, died in Israeli custody. The circumstances might yet spark another uprising.

Jaradat was arrested in his home at midnight (an appropriate hour to intimidate his family) and charged with having thrown stones and a Molotov cocktail a few months earlier, during Israel’s November attack on Gaza.

Jaradat, healthy when arrested, was last seen alive in court by his lawyer, who describes him as “doubled over, scared, confused and shrunken.”

The court remanded him to another 12 days of detention. Jaradat was found dead in his cell.

Journalist Amira Hass writes that “the Palestinians do not need an Israeli investigation. For them, Jaradat’s death is much bigger than the tragedy he and his family have suffered. From their experience, Jaradat’s death is . . . proof that the Israeli system routinely uses torture. From their experience, the goal of torture is not only to convict someone, but mainly to deter and subjugate an entire people.”

The means are humiliation, degradation and terror—familiar features of repression at home and abroad.

The need to humiliate those who raise their heads is an ineradicable element of the imperial mentality.

In the case of Israel-Palestine, there has long been a near-unanimous international consensus on a diplomatic settlement, blocked by the United States for 35 years, with tacit European acceptance.

Contempt for the worthless victims is no small part of the barrier to achieving a settlement with at least a modicum of justice and respect for human dignity and rights. It’s not
beyond imagination that the barrier can be overcome by dedicated work, as has been done elsewhere.

Unless the powerful are capable of learning to respect the dignity of the victims, impassable barriers will remain, and the world will be doomed to violence, cruelty and bitter suffering.

BOSTON AND BEYOND

May 1, 2013

April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year.

There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was murdered right outside my office building.

It’s rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily—for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings.

On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target.

The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States—something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish.

His neighbors had admired the United States, Al-Muslimi told the committee, but “now, however, when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant.”