Who Rules the World? Reframings

by Noam Chomsky

scarcely a day passes without new reports of ominous scientific discoveries about the pace of environmental destruction. It is not too comforting to read that “in the middle latitudes of the Northern hemisphere, average temperatures are increasing at a rate that is equivalent to moving south about 10 meters (30 feet) each day,” a rate “about 100 times faster than most climate change that we can observe in the geological record”—and perhaps 1,000 times faster, according to other technical studies.

The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne. How would we have reacted if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”?

Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, wrote, “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.” The al-Qaeda leader, Scheuer continued, was “out to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”

the two categories of intellectuals, it seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another.

intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

Since Vietnam, “the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy—paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed.”

Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.27 There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians. After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen Iraqi soldiers—“the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,” according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.28 All much as a reasonable person would expect.

Mill’s classic essay on humanitarian intervention was written shortly after the public revelation of Britain’s horrifying atrocities in suppressing the 1857 Indian rebellion. The conquest of the rest of India was in large part an effort to gain a monopoly in the opium trade for Britain’s huge narcotrafficking enterprise, by far the largest in world history and designed primarily to compel China to accept Britain’s manufactured goods.30

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

The eminent American social philosopher John Dewey once described politics as “the shadow cast on society by big business,” warning that “attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion—a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap.

There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes.

the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that, with rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, the limit of safety with regard to climate change will be reached by 2017 if the world continues on its present course. “The door is closing,” the IEA’s chief economist said, and very soon it “will be closed forever.”

the “Anglosphere”—Britain and its offshoots—consists of settler-colonial societies, which rose on the ashes of indigenous populations suppressed or virtually exterminated.

the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of modern humanitarian law: they bar “the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a World People’s Conference on Climate Change with thirty-five thousand participants from 140 countries—not just representatives of governments but also members of civil society and activists. It produced a People’s Agreement, which called for very sharp reductions in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.42 Establishing the rights of the planet is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world. It is ridiculed by sophisticated Westerners, but unless we can acquire some of the indigenous sensibility, they are likely to have the last laugh—a laugh of grim despair.

It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost sixty years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

Oslo II thus rescinded the decision of virtually the entire world, and all relevant legal authorities, that Israel has no claim to the territories occupied in 1967 and that the settlements are illegitimate.

It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction—maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States. “Energy independence” is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to the destruction of the world.

Israel killed, on average, more than two Palestinian children a week for the past fourteen years.

For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies—not an idle dream by any means.

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for thirty years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.”

one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that “the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the US and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure.

“What principles and values rule the world?” That question should be foremost in the minds of the citizens of the rich and powerful states, who enjoy an unusual legacy of freedom, privilege, and opportunity thanks to the struggles of those who came before them, and who now face fateful choices as to how to respond to challenges of great human import.