"Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember
somewhere out there a person died for me today.
As long as there must be war, I ask and I must
answer Was I Worth Dying For?” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Climate Change
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxidetrap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."
In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.
The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.
Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.
The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.
In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.
When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.
James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."
In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.
The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.
Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.
The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.
In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.
When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.
James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Immigration
THIS IS SAD, BUT OH SOOOO TRUE!
Free Lunch...900 teachers just got laid off from the Los Angeles Unified
School District. They are $650,000 over their annual budget.
The following English teacher helps to explain one area that looms large
over California 's educational crisis.
This English teacher has phrased it the best I've seen yet.
From a California school teacher - - -
"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal
immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of:
I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large
southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school,
meaning that its students average lower socioeconomic and income levels.
Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens,
Huntington Park , etc. where these students are protesting, are also Title 1
schools.
Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say
free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full
breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott
proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it
being dumped in the trash uneaten.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least
moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school
also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as
young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to
arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for
the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget
was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer
learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with
graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and
grateful to have a free education in America.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers
whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country
less than 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling
them "Putas" (whores ) and throwing things, that the teachers were in tears.
Free medical, free education, free food, day care, etc, etc, etc. Is it any
wonder they feel entitled not only to be in this country but to demand
rights, privileges and entitlements?
To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute
to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they
like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal
immigration and see the TRUE costs.
Higher insurance, medical facilities closing, higher medical costs, more
crime, lower standards of education in our schools, overcrowding, new
diseases etc, etc, etc. For me, I'll pay more for tomatoes.
Americans, We need to wake up. The guest worker program will be a disaster
because we won't have the guts to enforce it. Does anyone in their right
mind really think they will voluntarily leave and return?
It does, however, have everything to do with culture: A third-world culture
that does not value education, that accepts children getting pregnant and
dropping out of school by 15 and that refuses to assimilate, and an American
culture that has become so weakand worried about "political correctness"
that we don't have the will to do anything about it.
If this makes your blood boil, as it did mine, forward this to everyone you
know including your Congressmen and Senators.
CHEAP LABOR? Isn't that what the whole immigration issue is about?
Business doesn't want to pay a decent wage.
Consumers don't want expensive produce.
Government will tell you Americans don't want the jobs.
But the bottom line is cheap labor. The phrase "cheap labor" is a myth, a
farce, and a lie. There is no such thing as "cheap labor."
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes
a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no
income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return,
he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible), no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills...
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at
(our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners
insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in
benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after paying
their bills AND his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash
clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD BE ADDRESSING TO THE PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES FOR EITHER PARTY. 'AND WHEN THEY LIE TO US AND DON'T DO AS THEY
SAY, WE SHOULD REPLACE THEM AT ONCE!'
THIS HAS GOT TO BE PASSED ALONG TO AS MANY AS
POSSIBLE OR WE WILL ALL GO DOWN THE DRAIN BECAUSE A FEW DON'T CARE!!!
Free Lunch...900 teachers just got laid off from the Los Angeles Unified
School District. They are $650,000 over their annual budget.
The following English teacher helps to explain one area that looms large
over California 's educational crisis.
This English teacher has phrased it the best I've seen yet.
From a California school teacher - - -
"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal
immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of:
I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large
southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school,
meaning that its students average lower socioeconomic and income levels.
Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens,
Huntington Park , etc. where these students are protesting, are also Title 1
schools.
Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say
free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full
breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott
proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it
being dumped in the trash uneaten.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least
moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school
also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as
young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to
arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for
the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget
was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer
learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with
graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and
grateful to have a free education in America.
(OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers
whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country
less than 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling
them "Putas" (whores ) and throwing things, that the teachers were in tears.
Free medical, free education, free food, day care, etc, etc, etc. Is it any
wonder they feel entitled not only to be in this country but to demand
rights, privileges and entitlements?
To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute
to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they
like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal
immigration and see the TRUE costs.
Higher insurance, medical facilities closing, higher medical costs, more
crime, lower standards of education in our schools, overcrowding, new
diseases etc, etc, etc. For me, I'll pay more for tomatoes.
Americans, We need to wake up. The guest worker program will be a disaster
because we won't have the guts to enforce it. Does anyone in their right
mind really think they will voluntarily leave and return?
It does, however, have everything to do with culture: A third-world culture
that does not value education, that accepts children getting pregnant and
dropping out of school by 15 and that refuses to assimilate, and an American
culture that has become so weakand worried about "political correctness"
that we don't have the will to do anything about it.
If this makes your blood boil, as it did mine, forward this to everyone you
know including your Congressmen and Senators.
CHEAP LABOR? Isn't that what the whole immigration issue is about?
Business doesn't want to pay a decent wage.
Consumers don't want expensive produce.
Government will tell you Americans don't want the jobs.
But the bottom line is cheap labor. The phrase "cheap labor" is a myth, a
farce, and a lie. There is no such thing as "cheap labor."
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes
a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no
income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return,
he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible), no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills...
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at
(our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners
insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in
benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after paying
their bills AND his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash
clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD BE ADDRESSING TO THE PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES FOR EITHER PARTY. 'AND WHEN THEY LIE TO US AND DON'T DO AS THEY
SAY, WE SHOULD REPLACE THEM AT ONCE!'
THIS HAS GOT TO BE PASSED ALONG TO AS MANY AS
POSSIBLE OR WE WILL ALL GO DOWN THE DRAIN BECAUSE A FEW DON'T CARE!!!
Monday, July 25, 2011
Prager
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:
1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.
The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans -- through myriad associations -- took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state -- vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents -- Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.
2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today's workers don't have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.
3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.
4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.
5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality -- another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism -- labeling each new entitlement a "right" -- reinforces this sense of entitlement.
6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.
7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.
8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.
And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.
9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.
10. The leftist (SET ITAL) weltanschauung (END ITAL) sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.
None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms "social justice" and "compassion," and by labeling their opponents "selfish" and worse.
If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.
1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.
The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans -- through myriad associations -- took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state -- vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents -- Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.
2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today's workers don't have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.
3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.
4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.
5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality -- another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism -- labeling each new entitlement a "right" -- reinforces this sense of entitlement.
6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.
7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.
8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.
And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.
9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.
10. The leftist (SET ITAL) weltanschauung (END ITAL) sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.
None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms "social justice" and "compassion," and by labeling their opponents "selfish" and worse.
If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Three D
The most ironic aspect of 3-D moviemaking jumps into the foreground with the opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2: Depth-of-field works most effectively when you hardly notice it.
“David’s guiding aesthetic was that a 3-D film should be no more than a richer visual telling of the story and never a distraction,” Murray said. “If you’re reacting to a 3-D gimmick, you can’t simultaneously be lost in the narrative.”
Unlike the eight-week rush job that delivered a critically underwhelming Clash of the Titans conversionlast year, Murray and the 3-D vendors spent seven months on Deathly Hallows Part 2, adjusting their calibrations to conform with a two-pronged, story-driven approach.
one can only hope other filmmakers learn from Harry Potter’s final trick: Start with a good film, dust with subtle stereoscopic visuals and stir gently to make movie magic.
Subtle 3-D adds to fantastic scenes in the final Harry Potter movie.
The formula could come straight from the Deathly Hallows Part 2 style guide. Titled “Keeping It Real,” the filmmakers’ manual stressed the notion that even in a fantastical universe, certain rules of perception dictate whether the human eye is going to buy a given effect as an organic enhancement or reject it as cheesy exaggeration.
“The Potter universe requires you to believe that this is a real world, parallel to ours, that just runs by a different set of rules,” Murray said. “It’s critical that the 3-D doesn’t undo that sense of the magical version of the ordinary. So no gimmicks, no impossible spaces.”
“David’s guiding aesthetic was that a 3-D film should be no more than a richer visual telling of the story and never a distraction,” Murray said. “If you’re reacting to a 3-D gimmick, you can’t simultaneously be lost in the narrative.”
Unlike the eight-week rush job that delivered a critically underwhelming Clash of the Titans conversionlast year, Murray and the 3-D vendors spent seven months on Deathly Hallows Part 2, adjusting their calibrations to conform with a two-pronged, story-driven approach.
one can only hope other filmmakers learn from Harry Potter’s final trick: Start with a good film, dust with subtle stereoscopic visuals and stir gently to make movie magic.
Subtle 3-D adds to fantastic scenes in the final Harry Potter movie.
The formula could come straight from the Deathly Hallows Part 2 style guide. Titled “Keeping It Real,” the filmmakers’ manual stressed the notion that even in a fantastical universe, certain rules of perception dictate whether the human eye is going to buy a given effect as an organic enhancement or reject it as cheesy exaggeration.
“The Potter universe requires you to believe that this is a real world, parallel to ours, that just runs by a different set of rules,” Murray said. “It’s critical that the 3-D doesn’t undo that sense of the magical version of the ordinary. So no gimmicks, no impossible spaces.”
Friday, July 15, 2011
Suicide bombers
Criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s religious beliefs, that is, his ideas about God and the afterlife, is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.
Sam Harris The End of Faith
SAM HARRIS
BlogBooksEssaysDebatesMediaBook StoreAboutSpeakingContactForum
THE FIRST TEN PAGES
1
Reason in Exile
The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city.
The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles.With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money.
These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man’s religion?
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:
You have only two weeks to live.
You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.
These are mere words—until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.
Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.
But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.
A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.
3
We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point.
Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures—forces like greed, hatred, and fear—for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould’s notion of a “loving concordat” between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price—by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions—Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this.
The Myth of “Moderation” in Religion
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.
According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe that it is the “inspired” word of the same—still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only 17 percent of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his infinite wisdom, is likely to have authored this text—or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation (40 percent believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a religious “moderate” in the twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna:
If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .(Deuteronomy 13:7-11)
While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a “symbolic” reading of passages of this sort. (In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1—“Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”) The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for “moderation” in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.
The only reason anyone is “moderate” in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.
So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time (they haven’t); it is just that they have been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains—the “good parts”—has been spared the same winnowing because we do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago—while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate—or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us—culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive
it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
*Trepanning (or trephining) is the practice of boring holes in the human skull. Archaeological evidence suggests that it is one of the oldest surgical procedures. It was presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism. While there are still many reasons to open a person’s skull nowadays, the hope that an evil spirit will use the hole as a point of egress is not among them.
BlogBooksEssaysDebatesMediaBook StoreAboutSpeakingContactForum
THE FIRST TEN PAGES
1
Reason in Exile
The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city.
The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles.With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money.
These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man’s religion?
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:
You have only two weeks to live.
You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.
These are mere words—until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.
Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.
But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.
A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.
3
We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point.
Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures—forces like greed, hatred, and fear—for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould’s notion of a “loving concordat” between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price—by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions—Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this.
The Myth of “Moderation” in Religion
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.
According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe that it is the “inspired” word of the same—still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only 17 percent of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his infinite wisdom, is likely to have authored this text—or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation (40 percent believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a religious “moderate” in the twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna:
If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .(Deuteronomy 13:7-11)
While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a “symbolic” reading of passages of this sort. (In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1—“Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”) The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for “moderation” in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.
The only reason anyone is “moderate” in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.
So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time (they haven’t); it is just that they have been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains—the “good parts”—has been spared the same winnowing because we do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago—while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate—or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us—culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive
it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
*Trepanning (or trephining) is the practice of boring holes in the human skull. Archaeological evidence suggests that it is one of the oldest surgical procedures. It was presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism. While there are still many reasons to open a person’s skull nowadays, the hope that an evil spirit will use the hole as a point of egress is not among them.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Bill Maher on Casey Anthony
“If you can look at a crime where everything points to one answer and not see it, you’re a dumb ass.
Bill Maher on Casey Anthiny
“If you can look at a crime where everything points to one answer and not see it, you’re a dumbass. And if you can look at the deficit and not see that the problem is that the rich stopped paying taxes, you’re a Republican.”
Friday, July 8, 2011
Africa
CHAPTER ONE
Africa in Chaos
By GEORGE B. N. AYITTEY
St. Martin's Press
Read the Review
Introduction: The Lost Continent
Mobutu and his cronies have turned Zaire into little more than a bankrupt kleptocracy. They bear more allegiance to their own bank balances than to their country's future. And what makes the tragedy of Mobutu's Zaire so much worse is that it is so unnecessary. The country should be prosperous. It has fertile lands, enormous mineral resources and a talented population. Instead, it is poor, even by African standards.
--David Rieff, The Washington Post (16 November 1996, C1)
Nigeria, the comatose giant of Africa, may go down in history as the biggest country ever to go directly from colonial subjugation to complete collapse, without an intervening period of successful self-rule. So much promise, so much waste; such a disappointment. Such a shame. Makes you sick.
--Linus U.J. Thomas-Ogboji, African News Weekly (26 May 1995, 6).
Africa is four times the geographical size of the United States and, with its approximately 700 million people, has more than thrice that of the United States. It is a continent with immense untapped mineral wealth. Africa has "40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power supply; the bulk of the world's diamonds and chromium; 30 percent of the uranium in the non-communist world; 50 percent of the world's gold; 90 percent of its cobalt; 50 percent of its phosphates; 40 percent of its platinum; 7.5 percent of its coal; 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves; 12 percent of its natural gas; 3 per cent of its iron ore; and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmland. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity" (Lamb, 1983, 20). Angola, for example, "contains an estimated 11 percent of the world's known reserves of diamonds. Its diamonds are stunning: at an average price of about $140 a carat, with some reaching $350, they are second in quality only to Namibia's, and more than 12 times more valuable than Australia's" (The Economist, 14 September 1996, 68).
In addition, Africa has 64 percent of the world's manganese, 13 percent of its copper, and vast bauxite, nickel, and lead resources. It also accounts for 70 percent of cocoa, 60 percent of coffee, 50 percent of palm oil, and 20 percent of the total petroleum traded in the world market, excluding the United States and Russia. The tourism potential of Africa is enormous. Unrivaled wildlife, scenic grandeur, and pristine ecology constitute Africa's third great natural resource after agriculture and mineral wealth.
Yet, paradoxically, a continent with such abundance and potential is inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. It is in the throes of a seemingly incurable crisis. Eating has become a luxury for many Africans, and hunger stares them squarely in the face. For example, in Jalingo, Nigeria, prices of even locally produced foodstuffs have been increasing by leaps and bounds, pushing food out of the reach of many. "A 100kg bag of maize is now selling for 1,600 naira, up from 800 naira a year ago. A bag of unshelled rice costs 1,700 naira, up from 1,000 naira. The reasonably priced yam is fast disappearing from the markets, with the price of the few available skyrocketing. Parboiled rice, semolina, beverages, fish, meat and beans are now considered luxury foods. Other necessities no longer affordable include clothing materials, bedding furniture, drugs, detergents and cooking utensils" (African News Weekly, 1 September 1995, 15).
When Africa gained its independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, the euphoria that swept across the continent was infectious. It was best evinced by the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first black president of Ghana. "We shall achieve in a decade what it took others a century ... and we shall not rest content until we demolish these miserable colonial structures and erect in their place a veritable paradise," he declared exuberantly (Nkrumah, 1957, 34).
The nationalists who won freedom for their respective countries were hailed as heroes, swept into office with huge parliamentary majorities, and deified. Currencies bore their portraits and statues were built to honor them. Criticizing them became sacrilegious and, very quickly, the freedom and development promised by Nkrumah and other African nationalists transmogrified into a melodramatic nightmare. In many countries these nationalist leaders soon turned out to be crocodile liberators, Swiss bank socialists, quack revolutionaries, and grasping kleptocrats. After independence true freedom never came to much of Africa. Nor did development.
For many Africans, the "paradise" promised them turned out be a starvation diet, unemployment, and a gun to the head. Disaffection and alienation set in. A spate of coups quickly swept across Africa in the early 1960s. The first occurred in the Belgian Congo on September 15, 1960, barely three months after independence. In West Africa the first coup occurred in Togo on January 13, 1963. Between 1963 and February 1966 there were 14 significant cases of military intervention in government. By 1968 there had been 64 attempted and successful interventions across Africa (Decalo, 1976, 6).
The first generation of coup leaders in the 1960s was professional soldiers who brooked zero tolerance for corruption, inefficiency, government waste, and mismanagement. They threw out the elite bazongas (raiders of the public treasury), cleaned up the government house, instilled discipline in the civil service, and returned to their barracks. They were hailed as "saviors" and idolized by the people.
The second generation of military rulers, who assumed control in the 1970s, emerge from the dregs: They were more corrupt, incompetent, and brutal than the civilian administrations they replaced. They ruined one African economy after another with brutal efficiency and looted African treasuries with military discipline. Africans watched helplessly as they experienced yet another betrayal. This second batch of "military coconutheads," as Africans call them, came from the bottom of the pit and left wanton destruction and carnage in their wake.
In 1978 Edem Kodjo, then Secretary General of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), echoed the sentiments of many Africans when he solemnly lamented before the African heads of state gathered for an OAU summit that, "Our ancient continent is now on the brink of disaster, hurtling towards the abyss of confrontation, caught in the grip of violence, sinking into the dark night of bloodshed and death" (Lamb 1983, xi).
Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. By the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear something had gone terribly wrong in Africa. The continent was wracked by a never-ending cycle of civil wars, carnage, chaos, and instability. Economies had collapsed. Poverty, in both absolute and relative terms, had increased Malnutrition was rife. In addition, censorship, persecution, detention, arbitrary seizures of property, corruption, capital flight, and tyranny continuously plagued the continent.
Infrastructure had decayed and crumbled in much of Africa. Roads, schools, and telecommunications systems were in shambles. Empty bookstore shelves greeted visitors to university campuses. Many school buildings showed obvious signs of decay and disintegration. Most buildings had not even seen a coat of paint since the colonialists departed. The quality of education had deteriorated sharply. Nigeria's 38-school university system, for example, was in ruins. Students could not get books. Nor could professors do research. Ahmadu Bello University is one such facility in a dilapidated state. Dormitories are overcrowded, laboratories lack chemicals to perform experiments, and some buildings are collapsing.
When the vice-chancellor of a major Nigerian university wanted to resign, he called a press conference. As Linus U. J. Thomas-Ogboji, a Nigerian scholar based in Asheville, described it: "His reasons for abandoning the job are a pathetic commentary on the putrid demise of a once-promising nation: admission and grades were being sold openly; dormitories for adolescent females had become brothels; threats of death and mayhem by gangs were rife on a campus that had gone without electricity or running water for years" (African News Weekly, 26 May 1995, 6).
A similar decrepit situation was described by a Ghanaian university student, Foster Koduea: "The University of Ghana, Legon, established in the [1950s] with very comfortable accommodations, beautiful buildings and surroundings, is now in a deplorable state. A room meant for two students is now used by six students and a room which is supposed to be used by three or four students is now inhabited by eight to ten students. At Legon Hall most of the rooms are very congested and hardly is there room for free passage. Lecture halls are congested" (Focus, 13-20 February 1995, 4).
In most places in Africa, telephones do not work; they "bite back." Electricity and water supplies are sporadic. What are called roads are often passageways truncated by crevasses large enough to swallow a truck. Hospitals lack food and medical supplies. Doctors even have difficulty finding paper on which to write prescriptions. Often patients are requested to bring their own blankets and bandages. Communicable diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and cholera--once believed vanquished--have reappeared with a vengeance.
In the cities, many banged-up and unrepaired vehicles move sideways in a crab-like manner. Even government buildings have reached advanced stages of dilapidation. Broken windowpanes abound while offices reek of mold, rust, and dust. Civil servants, and even diplomats, go for months without pay. One Nigerian civil servant at the Ministry of Works in Lagos, George Adeleye, "died from exhaustion while waiting for hours to collect monthly wages of 1,500 naira ($20)" (African News Weekly, 16-22 September 1996, 26). "He complained that he had not eaten for two days as he was without money," said one of his colleagues.
For four months, November 1988 to February 1989, Sierra Leone's high commissioners and ambassadors accredited to overseas countries received no budgetary allocations. Electricity and water supplies to its embassy in Washington, D.C. were disconnected for nonpayment of utilities. In March 1989 teachers in primary and secondary schools boycotted classes in protest against salary arrearages, which in some cases, went back as far as October 1988 (West Africa, 20-26 March 1989, 436). Ironically, Sierra Leone is well endowed with minerals such as diamonds, gold, rutile, iron ore, chrome, and illemite as well as piassava and coffee. As Robert Kaplan (1994), an American journalist put it:
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It now consists of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and the interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again "unexplored." (48)
Indices of Africa's development performance have not only been dismal but have also lagged persistency behind those of other Third World regions. Economic growth rates in Africa in the 1970s averaged only 4 to 5 percent while Latin America recorded a 6 to 7 percent growth rate. Average per capita gross national product (GNP) in 1981 was $770 for Africa, $973 for Asia, and $2,044 for Latin America. From 1986 to 1993 the continent's real GNP per capita declined 0.7 percent, while the average for the Third World increased by 2.7 percent. For all of black Africa, real income per capita dropped by 14.6 percent from its level in 1965, making most black Africans worse off than they were at independence.
High taxes, rampant inflation, runaway government expenditures, unstable currencies, and high-level corruption have stunted Africa's economic growth potential. "Africa's deepening crisis is characterized by weak agricultural growth, a decline in industrial output, poor export performance, climbing debt, and deteriorating social indicators, institutions, and environment" (World Bank 1989, 2).
Agriculture, which employs the bulk of Africa's population, has performed abysmally. Since 1970 agricultural output has been growing at less than 1.5 percent--less than the rate of population growth. Consequently, food production per capita declined by 7 percent in the 1960s, by 15 percent in the 1970s, and by 8 percent in the 1980s. Over the postcolonial period 1961 to 1995, "per capita food production in Africa dropped by 12 percent, whereas it advanced by leaps and bounds in developing countries in Asia" (The Economists, 7 September 1996). Zaire. now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, exported food when it was the Belgian Congo. Today, it cannot feed itself, nor can postcolonial Zambia, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. In 1990, about 40 percent of black Africa's food was imported, despite the assertion by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that the Congo Basin alone could produce enough food to feed all of black Africa. The situation has deteriorated so rapidly in Nigeria that many people eat only once a day.
Increasingly, Africa has become unattractive to foreign investors and even to the donor community which suffers "donor fatigue" after so many failures. Net foreign direct investment in black Africa dropped dramatically from $1.22 billion in 1982 to $498 million in 1987. From 1989 to mid-1994, over half of British manufacturing companies with African subsidiaries divested from those operations. In mid-1989 there were 90 British companies with 336 equity stakes in Anglophone African manufacturing enterprises. By mid-1994 only 65 companies with 233 equity stakes remained (African Business, May 1995, 16). The French also have become disillusioned: "French direct investment in sub-Saharan Africa ran at $1 billion a year in 1981-1983; by 1988 that had translated into a net outflow of more than $800 million" (The economist, 21 July 1990, 82). Between 1990 and 1995 the net yearly flow of foreign direct investment into developing countries quadrupled, to over $90 billion) Africa's share of this fell to only 2.4 percent. According to the World Bank, in 1995 a record $231 billion in foreign investment flowed into the Third World. Singapore by itself attracted $5.8 billion, while Africa's share was a paltry 1 percent, or $2 billion--less than the sum invested in Chile alone (The Economist, 9 November 1996, 95). "Even that meagre proportion has been disputed by some analysts who believe the true figure to be less than $1 billion," said The African Observer (11-24 April 1996, 20).
To maintain income and investment, African governments borrowed heavily in the 1970s. Total African foreign debt has risen 24-fold since 1970 to a staggering $400 billion in 1996, which was equal to its yearly GNP, making the region the most heavily indebted in the world. (Latin America's debt amounted to approximately 60 percent of its GNP.) Currently debt service obligations absorb about 40 percent of export revenue, but only about half of the outstanding debts are actually being paid. On the other half, arrearages are continually being rescheduled.
The exceptions to this horrid picture of economic atrophy are pitifully few: Botswana, Mauritius, and possibly Uganda. One could focus on these success stories, hoping that other African countries would emulate their policies. This approach has the additional advantage that it presents a positive image of Africa. The World Bank and other Western organizations are veterans in this trade, peddling one African country after another as a success story, only to abandon it in search of another in the twinkle of an eye. But the World Bank's obsession with "success stories" blurs its vision for Africa.
On 21 June 1997 The Washington Post carried a story, "Africa: A Grim Picture," which painted a sobering vision of the continent. The vice presidents of the World Bank's African region, Callisto Madivo and Jean-Louis Sarbib, took offense: "The picture ignores the other side of the Africa story. Togo, Lesotho, and Uganda have averaged more than 10 percent growth in the past two years" (The Washington Post, 11 July 1997, A22).
It is a shame that the World Bank does not get the larger picture. When large African countries, such as Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Zaire, were either imploding or on the brink of explosion, the Bank was trotting out Togo, Lesotho and Uganda as "success stories." This is not much consolation in the wake of the destabilization of so many other nations. Now most Africans view World Bank labels of "success stories" with rabid cynicism and even as a morbid premonition. It may be recalled that the Bank declared Cameroon, Kenya and Zaire as "success stories" in the 1980s. Then in March 1994, the labels were applied to Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. What happened to all these African "success stories"?
Robert Kaplan was quite worried: "Ghana is being touted by the U.S. State Department as a West African success story, even as 67 villages were destroyed in tribal warfare there last February between Kokombas and Nanumbas. The results were 13,000 refugees and 1,000 corpses buried by Ghanaian security forces. Labeling of places as `success stories' prior to their dissolution promotes public cynicism toward a place like Africa. Kenya was once a `success story,' remember? Now its capital, Nairobi, is known as `Nairobbery,' due to surging violent crime [and ethnic strife]" (The Washington Post, 17 April 1994, C2).
The focus on the few success stories is a futile exercise in grand delusion. Jon Qwelane, a columnist for the Johannesburg Star said: "Sure enough, Botswana and Namibia have been shining exceptions to the general rule since each attained its independence. But on a continent of some 52 independent nations, two exceptions are not exactly indicative of a very healthy state of affairs." (24 May 1997, 10) Moreover, it is a dishonest attempt to conceal the fact that an overwhelming majority of African countries have performed dismally in the postcolonial era. Problems cannot be solved when their existence is either denied or concealed. It would be far more useful to evaluate why the majority of African countries are imploding and performing poorly economically.
Since the beginning of the 1980s--described by most analysts as "the lost decade"--one African country after another has collapsed, scattering refugees in all directions: Ethiopia (1985), Angola (1986), Mozambique (1987), Sudan (1991), Liberia (1992), Somalia (1993), and Rwanda (1994). In March 1994 the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) grimly predicted that nine more African countries were on the brink of complete social disintegration: Algeria, Burundi, Egypt, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Zaire. In November 1996 the threat of imminent starvation of 1.2 million Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire compelled the international community to prepare a military intervention force to be led by Canada. Its objectives were twofold: to feed the starving refugees and to establish an "aid corridor" to facilitate the return of Hutu refugees to Rwanda.
Few would quibble with the objectives of that humanitarian mission. To stand by idly and watch thousands die daily from starvation and disease would be immoral and cruel. But to barge into an African crisis situation without any understanding of the complexities of the issues involved and without any clue as to what the long-term solution should be, knowing full well that the mission will be abandoned should the going get tough, is even crueler. Time and again in recent years the international community has mounted eleventh-hour humanitarian missions into Africa. And time and again these missions have been abandoned at the least sign of complication or trouble. A memorable example was the Somalia debacle, which cost the international community $3.5 billion and the lives of 18 U.S. Rangers and scores of U.N. Pakistani soldiers, leading eventually to the 1994 pull-out by the United Nations. These "stop-and-go" Band-Aid solutions compound Africa's crises by covering up festering wounds.
Long-term, durable solutions to Africa's innumerable problems require an understanding of their root causes. That, in turn, requires making two fundamental distinctions: first, between African leaders and the African people, and second, between traditional Africa and modern Africa. Western administrators often use the generic term "Africans" to refer to African leaders, as in the expression, "Africans are reforming their economies." But this usage is misleading. It carries the implication that all Africans are involved in this process when in actual fact it is the leaders who claim to be "reforming their economies." Furthermore, lumping the leaders and the people together prevents many from criticizing the policies of African leaders for fear of being labeled "racist" if one were white or "traitor" if one were black. Most African leaders are despots and failures. But leadership failure is not synonymous with failure of Africans as a people. And criticizing African leaders does not mean one hates black people.
(C) 1998 George B. N. Ayittey All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-312-16400-9
Return to the Books Home Page
Africa in Chaos
By GEORGE B. N. AYITTEY
St. Martin's Press
Read the Review
Introduction: The Lost Continent
Mobutu and his cronies have turned Zaire into little more than a bankrupt kleptocracy. They bear more allegiance to their own bank balances than to their country's future. And what makes the tragedy of Mobutu's Zaire so much worse is that it is so unnecessary. The country should be prosperous. It has fertile lands, enormous mineral resources and a talented population. Instead, it is poor, even by African standards.
--David Rieff, The Washington Post (16 November 1996, C1)
Nigeria, the comatose giant of Africa, may go down in history as the biggest country ever to go directly from colonial subjugation to complete collapse, without an intervening period of successful self-rule. So much promise, so much waste; such a disappointment. Such a shame. Makes you sick.
--Linus U.J. Thomas-Ogboji, African News Weekly (26 May 1995, 6).
Africa is four times the geographical size of the United States and, with its approximately 700 million people, has more than thrice that of the United States. It is a continent with immense untapped mineral wealth. Africa has "40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power supply; the bulk of the world's diamonds and chromium; 30 percent of the uranium in the non-communist world; 50 percent of the world's gold; 90 percent of its cobalt; 50 percent of its phosphates; 40 percent of its platinum; 7.5 percent of its coal; 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves; 12 percent of its natural gas; 3 per cent of its iron ore; and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmland. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity" (Lamb, 1983, 20). Angola, for example, "contains an estimated 11 percent of the world's known reserves of diamonds. Its diamonds are stunning: at an average price of about $140 a carat, with some reaching $350, they are second in quality only to Namibia's, and more than 12 times more valuable than Australia's" (The Economist, 14 September 1996, 68).
In addition, Africa has 64 percent of the world's manganese, 13 percent of its copper, and vast bauxite, nickel, and lead resources. It also accounts for 70 percent of cocoa, 60 percent of coffee, 50 percent of palm oil, and 20 percent of the total petroleum traded in the world market, excluding the United States and Russia. The tourism potential of Africa is enormous. Unrivaled wildlife, scenic grandeur, and pristine ecology constitute Africa's third great natural resource after agriculture and mineral wealth.
Yet, paradoxically, a continent with such abundance and potential is inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. It is in the throes of a seemingly incurable crisis. Eating has become a luxury for many Africans, and hunger stares them squarely in the face. For example, in Jalingo, Nigeria, prices of even locally produced foodstuffs have been increasing by leaps and bounds, pushing food out of the reach of many. "A 100kg bag of maize is now selling for 1,600 naira, up from 800 naira a year ago. A bag of unshelled rice costs 1,700 naira, up from 1,000 naira. The reasonably priced yam is fast disappearing from the markets, with the price of the few available skyrocketing. Parboiled rice, semolina, beverages, fish, meat and beans are now considered luxury foods. Other necessities no longer affordable include clothing materials, bedding furniture, drugs, detergents and cooking utensils" (African News Weekly, 1 September 1995, 15).
When Africa gained its independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, the euphoria that swept across the continent was infectious. It was best evinced by the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first black president of Ghana. "We shall achieve in a decade what it took others a century ... and we shall not rest content until we demolish these miserable colonial structures and erect in their place a veritable paradise," he declared exuberantly (Nkrumah, 1957, 34).
The nationalists who won freedom for their respective countries were hailed as heroes, swept into office with huge parliamentary majorities, and deified. Currencies bore their portraits and statues were built to honor them. Criticizing them became sacrilegious and, very quickly, the freedom and development promised by Nkrumah and other African nationalists transmogrified into a melodramatic nightmare. In many countries these nationalist leaders soon turned out to be crocodile liberators, Swiss bank socialists, quack revolutionaries, and grasping kleptocrats. After independence true freedom never came to much of Africa. Nor did development.
For many Africans, the "paradise" promised them turned out be a starvation diet, unemployment, and a gun to the head. Disaffection and alienation set in. A spate of coups quickly swept across Africa in the early 1960s. The first occurred in the Belgian Congo on September 15, 1960, barely three months after independence. In West Africa the first coup occurred in Togo on January 13, 1963. Between 1963 and February 1966 there were 14 significant cases of military intervention in government. By 1968 there had been 64 attempted and successful interventions across Africa (Decalo, 1976, 6).
The first generation of coup leaders in the 1960s was professional soldiers who brooked zero tolerance for corruption, inefficiency, government waste, and mismanagement. They threw out the elite bazongas (raiders of the public treasury), cleaned up the government house, instilled discipline in the civil service, and returned to their barracks. They were hailed as "saviors" and idolized by the people.
The second generation of military rulers, who assumed control in the 1970s, emerge from the dregs: They were more corrupt, incompetent, and brutal than the civilian administrations they replaced. They ruined one African economy after another with brutal efficiency and looted African treasuries with military discipline. Africans watched helplessly as they experienced yet another betrayal. This second batch of "military coconutheads," as Africans call them, came from the bottom of the pit and left wanton destruction and carnage in their wake.
In 1978 Edem Kodjo, then Secretary General of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), echoed the sentiments of many Africans when he solemnly lamented before the African heads of state gathered for an OAU summit that, "Our ancient continent is now on the brink of disaster, hurtling towards the abyss of confrontation, caught in the grip of violence, sinking into the dark night of bloodshed and death" (Lamb 1983, xi).
Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. By the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear something had gone terribly wrong in Africa. The continent was wracked by a never-ending cycle of civil wars, carnage, chaos, and instability. Economies had collapsed. Poverty, in both absolute and relative terms, had increased Malnutrition was rife. In addition, censorship, persecution, detention, arbitrary seizures of property, corruption, capital flight, and tyranny continuously plagued the continent.
Infrastructure had decayed and crumbled in much of Africa. Roads, schools, and telecommunications systems were in shambles. Empty bookstore shelves greeted visitors to university campuses. Many school buildings showed obvious signs of decay and disintegration. Most buildings had not even seen a coat of paint since the colonialists departed. The quality of education had deteriorated sharply. Nigeria's 38-school university system, for example, was in ruins. Students could not get books. Nor could professors do research. Ahmadu Bello University is one such facility in a dilapidated state. Dormitories are overcrowded, laboratories lack chemicals to perform experiments, and some buildings are collapsing.
When the vice-chancellor of a major Nigerian university wanted to resign, he called a press conference. As Linus U. J. Thomas-Ogboji, a Nigerian scholar based in Asheville, described it: "His reasons for abandoning the job are a pathetic commentary on the putrid demise of a once-promising nation: admission and grades were being sold openly; dormitories for adolescent females had become brothels; threats of death and mayhem by gangs were rife on a campus that had gone without electricity or running water for years" (African News Weekly, 26 May 1995, 6).
A similar decrepit situation was described by a Ghanaian university student, Foster Koduea: "The University of Ghana, Legon, established in the [1950s] with very comfortable accommodations, beautiful buildings and surroundings, is now in a deplorable state. A room meant for two students is now used by six students and a room which is supposed to be used by three or four students is now inhabited by eight to ten students. At Legon Hall most of the rooms are very congested and hardly is there room for free passage. Lecture halls are congested" (Focus, 13-20 February 1995, 4).
In most places in Africa, telephones do not work; they "bite back." Electricity and water supplies are sporadic. What are called roads are often passageways truncated by crevasses large enough to swallow a truck. Hospitals lack food and medical supplies. Doctors even have difficulty finding paper on which to write prescriptions. Often patients are requested to bring their own blankets and bandages. Communicable diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and cholera--once believed vanquished--have reappeared with a vengeance.
In the cities, many banged-up and unrepaired vehicles move sideways in a crab-like manner. Even government buildings have reached advanced stages of dilapidation. Broken windowpanes abound while offices reek of mold, rust, and dust. Civil servants, and even diplomats, go for months without pay. One Nigerian civil servant at the Ministry of Works in Lagos, George Adeleye, "died from exhaustion while waiting for hours to collect monthly wages of 1,500 naira ($20)" (African News Weekly, 16-22 September 1996, 26). "He complained that he had not eaten for two days as he was without money," said one of his colleagues.
For four months, November 1988 to February 1989, Sierra Leone's high commissioners and ambassadors accredited to overseas countries received no budgetary allocations. Electricity and water supplies to its embassy in Washington, D.C. were disconnected for nonpayment of utilities. In March 1989 teachers in primary and secondary schools boycotted classes in protest against salary arrearages, which in some cases, went back as far as October 1988 (West Africa, 20-26 March 1989, 436). Ironically, Sierra Leone is well endowed with minerals such as diamonds, gold, rutile, iron ore, chrome, and illemite as well as piassava and coffee. As Robert Kaplan (1994), an American journalist put it:
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It now consists of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and the interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again "unexplored." (48)
Indices of Africa's development performance have not only been dismal but have also lagged persistency behind those of other Third World regions. Economic growth rates in Africa in the 1970s averaged only 4 to 5 percent while Latin America recorded a 6 to 7 percent growth rate. Average per capita gross national product (GNP) in 1981 was $770 for Africa, $973 for Asia, and $2,044 for Latin America. From 1986 to 1993 the continent's real GNP per capita declined 0.7 percent, while the average for the Third World increased by 2.7 percent. For all of black Africa, real income per capita dropped by 14.6 percent from its level in 1965, making most black Africans worse off than they were at independence.
High taxes, rampant inflation, runaway government expenditures, unstable currencies, and high-level corruption have stunted Africa's economic growth potential. "Africa's deepening crisis is characterized by weak agricultural growth, a decline in industrial output, poor export performance, climbing debt, and deteriorating social indicators, institutions, and environment" (World Bank 1989, 2).
Agriculture, which employs the bulk of Africa's population, has performed abysmally. Since 1970 agricultural output has been growing at less than 1.5 percent--less than the rate of population growth. Consequently, food production per capita declined by 7 percent in the 1960s, by 15 percent in the 1970s, and by 8 percent in the 1980s. Over the postcolonial period 1961 to 1995, "per capita food production in Africa dropped by 12 percent, whereas it advanced by leaps and bounds in developing countries in Asia" (The Economists, 7 September 1996). Zaire. now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, exported food when it was the Belgian Congo. Today, it cannot feed itself, nor can postcolonial Zambia, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. In 1990, about 40 percent of black Africa's food was imported, despite the assertion by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that the Congo Basin alone could produce enough food to feed all of black Africa. The situation has deteriorated so rapidly in Nigeria that many people eat only once a day.
Increasingly, Africa has become unattractive to foreign investors and even to the donor community which suffers "donor fatigue" after so many failures. Net foreign direct investment in black Africa dropped dramatically from $1.22 billion in 1982 to $498 million in 1987. From 1989 to mid-1994, over half of British manufacturing companies with African subsidiaries divested from those operations. In mid-1989 there were 90 British companies with 336 equity stakes in Anglophone African manufacturing enterprises. By mid-1994 only 65 companies with 233 equity stakes remained (African Business, May 1995, 16). The French also have become disillusioned: "French direct investment in sub-Saharan Africa ran at $1 billion a year in 1981-1983; by 1988 that had translated into a net outflow of more than $800 million" (The economist, 21 July 1990, 82). Between 1990 and 1995 the net yearly flow of foreign direct investment into developing countries quadrupled, to over $90 billion) Africa's share of this fell to only 2.4 percent. According to the World Bank, in 1995 a record $231 billion in foreign investment flowed into the Third World. Singapore by itself attracted $5.8 billion, while Africa's share was a paltry 1 percent, or $2 billion--less than the sum invested in Chile alone (The Economist, 9 November 1996, 95). "Even that meagre proportion has been disputed by some analysts who believe the true figure to be less than $1 billion," said The African Observer (11-24 April 1996, 20).
To maintain income and investment, African governments borrowed heavily in the 1970s. Total African foreign debt has risen 24-fold since 1970 to a staggering $400 billion in 1996, which was equal to its yearly GNP, making the region the most heavily indebted in the world. (Latin America's debt amounted to approximately 60 percent of its GNP.) Currently debt service obligations absorb about 40 percent of export revenue, but only about half of the outstanding debts are actually being paid. On the other half, arrearages are continually being rescheduled.
The exceptions to this horrid picture of economic atrophy are pitifully few: Botswana, Mauritius, and possibly Uganda. One could focus on these success stories, hoping that other African countries would emulate their policies. This approach has the additional advantage that it presents a positive image of Africa. The World Bank and other Western organizations are veterans in this trade, peddling one African country after another as a success story, only to abandon it in search of another in the twinkle of an eye. But the World Bank's obsession with "success stories" blurs its vision for Africa.
On 21 June 1997 The Washington Post carried a story, "Africa: A Grim Picture," which painted a sobering vision of the continent. The vice presidents of the World Bank's African region, Callisto Madivo and Jean-Louis Sarbib, took offense: "The picture ignores the other side of the Africa story. Togo, Lesotho, and Uganda have averaged more than 10 percent growth in the past two years" (The Washington Post, 11 July 1997, A22).
It is a shame that the World Bank does not get the larger picture. When large African countries, such as Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Zaire, were either imploding or on the brink of explosion, the Bank was trotting out Togo, Lesotho and Uganda as "success stories." This is not much consolation in the wake of the destabilization of so many other nations. Now most Africans view World Bank labels of "success stories" with rabid cynicism and even as a morbid premonition. It may be recalled that the Bank declared Cameroon, Kenya and Zaire as "success stories" in the 1980s. Then in March 1994, the labels were applied to Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. What happened to all these African "success stories"?
Robert Kaplan was quite worried: "Ghana is being touted by the U.S. State Department as a West African success story, even as 67 villages were destroyed in tribal warfare there last February between Kokombas and Nanumbas. The results were 13,000 refugees and 1,000 corpses buried by Ghanaian security forces. Labeling of places as `success stories' prior to their dissolution promotes public cynicism toward a place like Africa. Kenya was once a `success story,' remember? Now its capital, Nairobi, is known as `Nairobbery,' due to surging violent crime [and ethnic strife]" (The Washington Post, 17 April 1994, C2).
The focus on the few success stories is a futile exercise in grand delusion. Jon Qwelane, a columnist for the Johannesburg Star said: "Sure enough, Botswana and Namibia have been shining exceptions to the general rule since each attained its independence. But on a continent of some 52 independent nations, two exceptions are not exactly indicative of a very healthy state of affairs." (24 May 1997, 10) Moreover, it is a dishonest attempt to conceal the fact that an overwhelming majority of African countries have performed dismally in the postcolonial era. Problems cannot be solved when their existence is either denied or concealed. It would be far more useful to evaluate why the majority of African countries are imploding and performing poorly economically.
Since the beginning of the 1980s--described by most analysts as "the lost decade"--one African country after another has collapsed, scattering refugees in all directions: Ethiopia (1985), Angola (1986), Mozambique (1987), Sudan (1991), Liberia (1992), Somalia (1993), and Rwanda (1994). In March 1994 the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) grimly predicted that nine more African countries were on the brink of complete social disintegration: Algeria, Burundi, Egypt, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Zaire. In November 1996 the threat of imminent starvation of 1.2 million Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire compelled the international community to prepare a military intervention force to be led by Canada. Its objectives were twofold: to feed the starving refugees and to establish an "aid corridor" to facilitate the return of Hutu refugees to Rwanda.
Few would quibble with the objectives of that humanitarian mission. To stand by idly and watch thousands die daily from starvation and disease would be immoral and cruel. But to barge into an African crisis situation without any understanding of the complexities of the issues involved and without any clue as to what the long-term solution should be, knowing full well that the mission will be abandoned should the going get tough, is even crueler. Time and again in recent years the international community has mounted eleventh-hour humanitarian missions into Africa. And time and again these missions have been abandoned at the least sign of complication or trouble. A memorable example was the Somalia debacle, which cost the international community $3.5 billion and the lives of 18 U.S. Rangers and scores of U.N. Pakistani soldiers, leading eventually to the 1994 pull-out by the United Nations. These "stop-and-go" Band-Aid solutions compound Africa's crises by covering up festering wounds.
Long-term, durable solutions to Africa's innumerable problems require an understanding of their root causes. That, in turn, requires making two fundamental distinctions: first, between African leaders and the African people, and second, between traditional Africa and modern Africa. Western administrators often use the generic term "Africans" to refer to African leaders, as in the expression, "Africans are reforming their economies." But this usage is misleading. It carries the implication that all Africans are involved in this process when in actual fact it is the leaders who claim to be "reforming their economies." Furthermore, lumping the leaders and the people together prevents many from criticizing the policies of African leaders for fear of being labeled "racist" if one were white or "traitor" if one were black. Most African leaders are despots and failures. But leadership failure is not synonymous with failure of Africans as a people. And criticizing African leaders does not mean one hates black people.
(C) 1998 George B. N. Ayittey All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-312-16400-9
Return to the Books Home Page
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Earth wind and fire
The following singles reached the Top Ten on either the United States Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart or the United Kingdom UK Singles Chart.[116][118]
1975: "Shining Star" (US #1)
1975: "Sing a Song" (US #5)
1978: "Got to Get You into My Life" (US #9)
1978: "September" (US #8; UK #3)
1979: "Boogie Wonderland" (featuring The Emotions) (US #6; UK #4)
1979: "After the Love Has Gone"(US #2; UK #4)
Way of the world
1975: "Shining Star" (US #1)
1975: "Sing a Song" (US #5)
1978: "Got to Get You into My Life" (US #9)
1978: "September" (US #8; UK #3)
1979: "Boogie Wonderland" (featuring The Emotions) (US #6; UK #4)
1979: "After the Love Has Gone"(US #2; UK #4)
Way of the world
Monday, July 4, 2011
Alliance for Progress
The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve.
Too Big to Fail
Take the "too big to fail" principle, which the House committee is discussing today. But what does "too big to fail" mean? "Too big to fail" is an insurance policy. It's a government insurance policy. Government means the public pays, which says, "You can take huge risks and make plenty of profit, and if anything goes wrong, we'll bail you out." That's "too big to fail." Well, that's extreme protectionism. It gives US corporations like Citigroup an enormous advantage over others, like any other kind of protection.
Why did they change the subject just when Perle was getting slaughtered?
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
Let me separate again two issues: what's the right kind of development model, the proper topic for an academic seminar. What's the right kind of policy? The right kind of policy is one that allows people to be as free as they can to determine the course of their own affairs, without foreign intervention, without violence.
HERMANN: I'm going to turn now to some questions from you. The first one:
QUESTION: What would you consider a viable alternative to the current Palestinian situation? Would the current Occupied Territories serve as an adequate sovereign state, with a government independent from Jewish influence? Mr. Perle, can we start with you?
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
Let me separate again two issues: what's the right kind of development model, the proper topic for an academic seminar. What's the right kind of policy? The right kind of policy is one that allows people to be as free as they can to determine the course of their own affairs, without foreign intervention, without violence.
HERMANN: I'm going to turn now to some questions from you. The first one:
QUESTION: What would you consider a viable alternative to the current Palestinian situation? Would the current Occupied Territories serve as an adequate sovereign state, with a government independent from Jewish influence? Mr. Perle, can we start with you?
United Fruit Response
HERMANN: Let us ask Mr. Perle about that. You gave me a response. The international liberalism that you said you like, he is saying produces an economic model that produces crops for export, which profit only a small sector and produces indigenous wide-scale poverty and starvation.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
Prele responds to united fruit
HERMANN: Let us ask Mr. Perle about that. You gave me a response. The international liberalism that you said you like, he is saying produces an economic model that produces crops for export, which profit only a small sector and produces indigenous wide-scale poverty and starvation.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
United Fruit
The Third World, remember, had a very definite role in that system. Its role was to fulfill its function as a source of raw materials and markets for this conservative, quasi-democratic order that we had reconstructed, by pressure and force in fact, in Europe and Japan. And it did that. When I mentioned Honduras, that is just a symbol. That is a symbol of US development policies everywhere. I mentioned Honduras because it was only one minute, but the point is not that Honduras is exporting snow peas, the point is that Honduras is not producing food. The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve. And you make profits. So you take land that was used for subsistence agriculture, you turn it over to ranchers linked to American agro-business or the Hanover Company and so on, to produce specialized vegetables and flowers and beef for pet food for the American markets, GNP goes up. Profits go up. A small sector of the local economy profits and the population plummets into disaster. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Honduras in the last years, and in fact, pretty much the same story was true throughout most of Central America. Take Nicaragua. Nicaragua did have an economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, child malnutrition doubled and general misery vastly increased. That laid the basis of the crisis of Central America. And similar things are true in much of the Third World, that is the effect of this development model.
Chomsky
Why is it in the interest of the United States to drive Nicaragua into the hands of the Soviet Union? That is transparent, actually. First, let us establish again that that was the policy of the United States. Simply to review the record, the Carter administration tried very hard -- first of all, supported Somoza until virtually the end, long after the Nicaraguan business community, our natural allies, turned against him, and after other Central American allies turned against him. When it became impossible to support Somoza, because he was obviously gone, the Carter administration tried to maintain the National Guard in power. In fact, it called upon the Organization of American States to intervene to maintain the National Guard in power, in a policy that Latin Americans called "Somocismo without Somoza." That failed, the Latin American countries refused to go along. After that, the Carter administration tried in every way, first, to rescue the National Guard, for example, they sent American planes under Red Cross markings -- a violation of the laws of war, incidentally, into Managua to take National Guard officers out. The Contras were reconstituted on the border, they were quickly picked up by the Reagan administration, and turned into a terrorist force to attack Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Carter administration offered aid, but not to the Sandinista government, let me repeat that: that aid went to the private sector. It was again a last-ditch effort to try and prevent the Sandinista from coming into power. Maybe the Carter administration would have made some arrangement, we can not tell, but the Reagan administration came in, that was finished. They launched an attack against Nicaragua almost immediately, both a military attack and an economic attack. They prevented our allies from sending aid to Nicaragua, so for example there was pressure put on France to stop them providing arms -- the story about arms in El Salvador, I can go into it if you would like, but there is nothing to it. Both economic warfare and military warfare increased, international lending institutions were pressure to stop giving aid. An embargo was called at a time when Nicaraguan trade with the entire Soviet block was roughly comparable to ours. Again, I say it does not take a genius to realize that the result of this policy will be to force them to rely on the only group we allow them to rely on to defend themselves against our attack. So assuming something short of total stupidity, that was the purpose, since it was obviously the perfectly predictable consequence, and the consequence that, to a limited extent, took place. Now why did we want to do it? Well, that is obvious. In fact, it is a consistent pattern: we did it when we wanted to overthrow Guatemalan democracy, we did it when we wanted to overthrow Dominican democracy in 1965. If you want to attack and destroy a political system, there is a way to do it within our political culture: try to show that it is an agency of the Soviet Union. When you have succeeded in establishing that, then you can attack and destroy. This is a record that has been replayed so many times since 1947, when Dean Acheson pioneered it with a totally fabricated account, as he more or less conceded, of the Soviet intervention -- which did not exist -- in Greece. At the time of the Truman doctrine, as he knew and as we now know, the Soviet intervention was an attempt to get the Greek to stop interfering with an imperial settlement that they had made with Britain, which granted Britain control over Greece -- that is not even debatable anymore. That record has been replayed over and over. The Soviet Union, incidentally, does exactly the same thing when they want to invade Hungary or Czechoslovakia or whatever: they argue that they are defending it from CIA machinations, and they try to show that they are working for the CIA, etc. Other powers do the same thing, so it is obvious why we should do it.
Now was US policy as inept as Mr. Perle suggest? On the contrary, it was extremely successful. The policy of liberal internationalism reconstituted Europe and Japan on the old, conservative order. Remember what that meant: that meant eliminating, destroying, often by violence, the antifascist resistance in much of the world. It meant destroying labor unity. It meant blocking efforts at radical democracy that had substantial support in both Europe and Japan -- it is particularly striking in Japan with the reverse course in 1947. It meant reconstituting something like the old order, under US control, with enormous profits for US corporations, a huge expansion of investment, of exploitation of the Third World, and so on -- all of this an enormous and maybe unprecedented success.
The Third World, remember, had a very definite role in that system. Its role was to fulfill its function as a source of raw materials and markets for this conservative, quasi-democratic order that we had reconstructed, by pressure and force in fact, in Europe and Japan. And it did that. When I mentioned Honduras, that is just a symbol. That is a symbol of US development policies everywhere. I mentioned Honduras because it was only one minute, but the point is not that Honduras is exporting snow peas, the point is that Honduras is not producing food. The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve. And you make profits. So you take land that was used for subsistence agriculture, you turn it over to ranchers linked to American agro-business or the Hanover Company and so on, to produce specialized vegetables and flowers and beef for pet food for the American markets, GNP goes up. Profits go up. A small sector of the local economy profits and the population plummets into disaster. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Honduras in the last years, and in fact, pretty much the same story was true throughout most of Central America. Take Nicaragua. Nicaragua did have an economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, child malnutrition doubled and general misery vastly increased. That laid the basis of the crisis of Central America. And similar things are true in much of the Third World, that is the effect of this development model.
HERMANN: Let us ask Mr. Perle about that. You gave me a response. The international liberalism that you said you like, he is saying produces an economic model that produces crops for export, which profit only a small sector and produces indigenous wide-scale poverty and starvation.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
Now was US policy as inept as Mr. Perle suggest? On the contrary, it was extremely successful. The policy of liberal internationalism reconstituted Europe and Japan on the old, conservative order. Remember what that meant: that meant eliminating, destroying, often by violence, the antifascist resistance in much of the world. It meant destroying labor unity. It meant blocking efforts at radical democracy that had substantial support in both Europe and Japan -- it is particularly striking in Japan with the reverse course in 1947. It meant reconstituting something like the old order, under US control, with enormous profits for US corporations, a huge expansion of investment, of exploitation of the Third World, and so on -- all of this an enormous and maybe unprecedented success.
The Third World, remember, had a very definite role in that system. Its role was to fulfill its function as a source of raw materials and markets for this conservative, quasi-democratic order that we had reconstructed, by pressure and force in fact, in Europe and Japan. And it did that. When I mentioned Honduras, that is just a symbol. That is a symbol of US development policies everywhere. I mentioned Honduras because it was only one minute, but the point is not that Honduras is exporting snow peas, the point is that Honduras is not producing food. The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve. And you make profits. So you take land that was used for subsistence agriculture, you turn it over to ranchers linked to American agro-business or the Hanover Company and so on, to produce specialized vegetables and flowers and beef for pet food for the American markets, GNP goes up. Profits go up. A small sector of the local economy profits and the population plummets into disaster. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Honduras in the last years, and in fact, pretty much the same story was true throughout most of Central America. Take Nicaragua. Nicaragua did have an economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, child malnutrition doubled and general misery vastly increased. That laid the basis of the crisis of Central America. And similar things are true in much of the Third World, that is the effect of this development model.
HERMANN: Let us ask Mr. Perle about that. You gave me a response. The international liberalism that you said you like, he is saying produces an economic model that produces crops for export, which profit only a small sector and produces indigenous wide-scale poverty and starvation.
PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain.
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)