The Magna Carta was a milestone in civil and human rights. Can we stop its principles being shredded before our eyes?
A rare copy of the Magna Carta in New York Sotheby's, auctioned off for $19m in 2007. Photograph: Michael Nagle/Getty Images
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna
Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human
rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored
is not at all clear.
That should be a matter of serious immediate
concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind
of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if
present tendencies persist – not least, because the Great Charter is
being shredded before our eyes.
The first scholarly edition of
Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It
was not an easy task. There was no good text available. As he wrote,
"the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats" – a
comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the
rats left unfinished.
Blackstone's edition actually includes two
charters. It was entitled The Great Charter and the Charter of the
Forest. The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognised to be
the foundation of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples
– or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, "the charter of
every self-respecting man at any time in any land." Churchill was
referring specifically to the reaffirmation of the Charter by Parliament
in the Petition of Right, imploring King Charles to recognise that the
law is sovereign, not the King. Charles agreed briefly, but soon
violated his pledge, setting the stage for the murderous civil war.
After
a bitter conflict between King and Parliament, the power of royalty in
the person of Charles II was restored. In defeat, Magna Carta was not
forgotten. One of the leaders of Parliament, Henry Vane, was beheaded.
On the scaffold, he tried to read a speech denouncing the sentence as a
violation of Magna Carta, but was drowned out by trumpets to ensure that
such scandalous words would not be heard by the cheering crowds. His
major crime had been to draft a petition calling the people "the
original of all just power" in civil society – not the King, not even
God. That was the position that had been strongly advocated by Roger
Williams, the founder of the first free society in what is now the state
of Rhode Island. His heretical views influenced Milton and Locke,
though Williams went much farther, founding the modern doctrine of
separation of church and state, still much contested even in the liberal
democracies.
As often is the case, apparent defeat nevertheless
carried the struggle for freedom and rights forward. Shortly after
Vane's execution, King Charles granted a Royal Charter to the Rhode
Island plantations, declaring that "the form of government is
Democratical", and furthermore that the government could affirm freedom
of conscience for Papists, atheists, Jews, Turks – even Quakers, one of
the most feared and brutalised of the many sects that were appearing in
those turbulent days. All of this was astonishing in the climate of the
times.
A few years later, the Charter of Liberties was enriched by
the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, formally entitled "an Act for the better
securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonment
beyond the seas". The US constitution, borrowing from English common
law, affirms that "the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended"
except in case of rebellion or invasion. In a unanimous decision, the US
supreme court held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were
"[c]onsidered by the Founders [of the American Republic] as the highest
safeguard of liberty". All of these words should resonate today.
The Second Charter and the Commons
The
significance of the companion charter, the
Charter of the Forest, is no
less profound and perhaps even more pertinent today – as explored in
depth by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating
history of Magna Carta and its later trajectory. The Charter of the
Forest demanded protection of the commons from external power. The
commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: their
fuel, their food, their construction materials, whatever was essential
for life. The forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully
developed over generations, maintained in common, its riches available
to all, and preserved for future generations – practices found today
primarily in traditional societies that are under threat throughout the
world.
The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatisation.
The Robin Hood myths capture the essence of its concerns (and it is not
too surprising that the popular TV series of the 1950s, "The Adventures
of Robin Hood," was written anonymously by Hollywood screenwriters
blacklisted for leftist convictions). By the 17th century, however, this
Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and
capitalist practice and morality.
With the commons no longer
protected for co-operative nurturing and use, the rights of the common
people were restricted to what could not be privatised, a category that
continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. In Bolivia, the attempt to
privatise water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought
the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. The
World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can
proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and
communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental
constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime
that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime
mislabeled as "free trade." And this is only a tiny sample of struggles
underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in
the Eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to
ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and
of course ample profits.
The rise of capitalist practice and
morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are
treated, and also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today
is captured by Garrett Hardin's influential argument that "freedom in a
commons brings ruin to us all," the famous "tragedy of the commons":
what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.
An
international counterpart was the concept of terra nullius, employed to
justify the expulsion of indigenous populations in the settler-colonial
societies of the Anglosphere, or their "extermination," as the founding
fathers of the American republic described what they were doing,
sometimes with remorse, after the fact. According to this useful
doctrine, the Indians had no property rights since they were just
wanderers in an untamed wilderness. And the hard-working colonists could
create value where there was none by turning that same wilderness to
commercial use.
In reality, the colonists knew better and there
were elaborate procedures of purchase and ratification by crown and
parliament, later annulled by force when the evil creatures resisted
extermination. The doctrine is often attributed to John Locke, but that
is dubious. As a colonial administrator, he understood what was
happening, and there is no basis for the attribution in his writings, as
contemporary scholarship has shown convincingly, notably the work of
the Australian scholar Paul Corcoran. (It was in Australia, in fact,
that the doctrine has been most brutally employed.)
The grim
forecasts of the tragedy of the commons are not without challenge. The
late Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her
work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures,
woods, lakes, and groundwater basins. But the conventional doctrine has
force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans are blindly driven
by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution,
bitterly called "the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all
but Self."
Like peasants and workers in England before them,
American workers denounced this New Spirit, which was being imposed upon
them, regarding it as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very
nature of free men and women. And I stress women; among those most
active and vocal in condemning the destruction of the rights and dignity
of free people by the capitalist industrial system were the "factory
girls," young women from the farms. They, too, were driven into the
regime of supervised and controlled wage labour, which was regarded at
the time as different from chattel slavery only in that it was
temporary. That stand was considered so natural that it became a slogan
of the Republican party, and a banner under which northern workers
carried arms during the American civil war.
Controlling the Desire for Democracy
That
was 150 years ago – in England earlier. Huge efforts have been devoted
since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are
devoted to the task: public relations, advertising, marketing generally,
all of which add up to a very large component of the Gross Domestic
Product. They are dedicated to what the great political economist
Thorstein Veblen called "fabricating wants." In the words of business
leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to "the superficial
things" of life, like "fashionable consumption." That way people can be
atomised, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone,
diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge
authority.
The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and
perceptions was termed the "engineering of consent" by one of the
founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. He was
a respected Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy progressive, much like his
contemporary, journalist Walter Lippmann, the most prominent public
intellectual of 20th-century America, who praised "the manufacture of
consent" as a "new art" in the practice of democracy.
Both
recognised that the public must be "put in its place," marginalised and
controlled – for their own interests of course. They were too "stupid
and ignorant" to be allowed to run their own affairs. That task was to
be left to the "intelligent minority," who must be protected from "the
trampling and the roar of [the] bewildered herd," the "ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders" – the "rascal multitude" as they were termed by
their 17th century predecessors. The role of the general population was
to be "spectators," not "participants in action," in a properly
functioning democratic society.
And the spectators must not be
allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in
safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more
whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement
for an administration that came to office promising transparency.
WikiLeaks is only the most famous case, with British cooperation.
Among
the many topics that are not the business of the bewildered herd is
foreign affairs. Anyone who has studied declassified secret documents
will have discovered that, to a large extent, their classification was
meant to protect public officials from public scrutiny. Domestically,
the rabble should not hear the advice given by the courts to major
corporations: that they should devote some highly visible efforts to
good works, so that an "aroused public" will not discover the enormous
benefits provided to them by the nanny state. More generally the US
public should not learn that "state policies are overwhelmingly
regressive, thus reinforcing and expanding social inequality," though
designed in ways that lead "people to think that the government helps
only the undeserving poor, allowing politicians to mobilise and exploit
anti-government rhetoric and values even as they continue to funnel
support to their better-off constituents" – I'm quoting from the main
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, not from some radical rag.
Over
time, as societies became freer and the resort to state violence more
constrained, the urge to devise sophisticated methods of control of
attitudes and opinion has only grown. It is natural that the immense PR
industry should have been created in the most free of societies, the
United States and Great Britain. The first modern propaganda agency was
the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly
defined its task as "to direct the thought of most of the world" --
primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to
come to the aid of Britain during the first world war.
Its US
counterpart, the Committee on Public Information, was formed by Woodrow
Wilson to drive a pacifist population to violent hatred of all things
German – with remarkable success. American commercial advertising deeply
impressed others. Goebbels admired it and adapted it to Nazi
propaganda, all too successfully. The Bolshevik leaders tried as well,
but their efforts were clumsy and ineffective.
A primary domestic
task has always been "to keep [the public] from our throats," as
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders
when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the
mid-19th century. More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited
elite concerns about "excessive democracy," and calls for measures to
impose "more moderation" in democracy.
One particular concern was
to introduce better controls over the institutions "responsible for the
indoctrination of the young": the schools, the universities, the
churches, which were seen as failing that essential task. I'm quoting
reactions from the left-liberal end of the mainstream spectrum, the
liberal internationalists who later staffed the Carter administration,
and their counterparts in other industrial societies. The right wing was
much harsher. One of many manifestations of this urge has been the
sharp rise in college tuition, not on economic grounds, as is easily
shown. The device does, however, trap and control young people by debt,
often for the rest of their lives, thus contributing to more effective
indoctrination.
The Three-Fifths People
Pursuing
these important topics further, we see that the destruction of the
Charter of the Forest, and its obliteration from memory, relates rather
closely to the continuing efforts to constrain the promise of the
Charter of Liberties. The "New Spirit of the Age" cannot tolerate the
pre-capitalist conception of the Forest as the shared endowment of the
community at large, cared for communally for its own use and for future
generations, protected from privatisation, from transfer to the hands of
private power for service to wealth, not needs. Inculcating the New
Spirit is an essential prerequisite for achieving this end, and for
preventing the Charter of Liberties from being misused to enable free
citizens to determine their own fate.
Popular struggles to bring
about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and
repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over
time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though
there is a long way to go and there is often regression. Right now, in
fact.
The most famous part of the Charter of Liberties is Article
39, which declares that "no free man" shall be punished in any way, "nor
will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment
of his peers and by the law of the land."
Through many years of
struggle, the principle has come to hold more broadly. The US
Constitution provides that no "person [shall] be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law [and] a speedy and
public trial" by peers. The basic principle is "presumption of
innocence" – what legal historians describe as "the seed of contemporary
Anglo-American freedom," referring to Article 39; and with the
Nuremberg Tribunal in mind, a "particularly American brand of legalism:
punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a
fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections" -- even if their
guilt for some of the worst crimes in history is not in doubt.
The
founders of course did not intend the term "person" to apply to all
persons. Native Americans were not persons. Their rights were virtually
nil. Women were scarcely persons. Wives were understood to be "covered"
under the civil identity of their husbands in much the same way as
children were subject to their parents. Blackstone's principles held
that "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during
the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of
the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs
every thing." Women are thus the property of their fathers or husbands.
These principles remain up to very recent years. Until a supreme court
decision of 1975, women did not even have a legal right to serve on
juries. They were not peers. Just two weeks ago, Republican opposition
blocked the Fairness Paycheck Act guaranteeing women equal pay for equal
work. And it goes far beyond.
Slaves, of course, were not
persons. They were in fact three-fifths human under the Constitution, so
as to grant their owners greater voting power. Protection of slavery
was no slight concern to the founders: it was one factor leading to the
American revolution. In the 1772 Somerset case, Lord Mansfield
determined that slavery is so "odious" that it cannot be tolerated in
England, though it continued in British possessions for many years.
American slave-owners could see the handwriting on the wall if the
colonies remained under British rule. And it should be recalled that the
slave states, including Virginia, had the greatest power and influence
in the colonies. One can easily appreciate Dr Johnson's famous quip that
"we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes".
Post-civil
war amendments extended the concept person to African-Americans, ending
slavery. In theory, at least. After about a decade of relative freedom,
a condition akin to slavery was reintroduced by a North-South compact
permitting the effective criminalisation of black life. A black male
standing on a street corner could be arrested for vagrancy, or for
attempted rape if accused of looking at a white woman the wrong way. And
once imprisoned he had few chances of ever escaping the system of
"slavery by another name," the term used by then-Wall Street Journal
bureau chief Douglas Blackmon in an arresting study.
This new
version of the "peculiar institution" provided much of the basis for the
American industrial revolution, with a perfect workforce for the steel
industry and mining, along with agricultural production in the famous
chain gangs: docile, obedient, no strikes, and no need for employers
even to sustain their workers, an improvement over slavery. The system
lasted in large measure until World War II, when free labour was needed
for war production.
The postwar boom offered employment. A black
man could get a job in a unionised auto plant, earn a decent salary, buy
a house, and maybe send his children to college. That lasted for about
20 years, until the 1970s, when the economy was radically redesigned on
newly dominant neoliberal principles, with rapid growth of
financialisation and the offshoring of production. The black population,
now largely superfluous, has been recriminalised.
Until Ronald
Reagan's presidency, incarceration in the US was within the spectrum of
industrial societies. By now it is far beyond others. It targets
primarily black males, increasingly also black women and Hispanics,
largely guilty of victimless crimes under the fraudulent "drug wars".
Meanwhile, the wealth of African-American families has been virtually
obliterated by the latest financial crisis, in no small measure thanks
to criminal behaviour of financial institutions, with impunity for the
perpetrators, now richer than ever.
Looking over the history of
African-Americans from the first arrival of slaves almost 500 years ago
to the present, they have enjoyed the status of authentic persons for
only a few decades. There is a long way to go to realise the promise of
Magna Carta.
The Obama administration has perpetuated an assault on the foundations of traditional liberties
Four of the earliest
surviving copies of the Magna Carta, the 1297 charter issued by King
Edward I, on display at the Bodleian library, Oxford. Photograph: Martin
Argles for the Guardian
Sacred persons and undone process
The
post-civil war 14th amendment granted the rights of persons to former
slaves, though mostly in theory. At the same time, it created a new
category of persons with rights: corporations. In fact, almost all the
cases brought to the courts under the 14th amendment had to do with
corporate rights, and by a century ago, they had determined that these
collectivist legal fictions, established and sustained by state power,
had the full rights of persons of flesh and blood; in fact, far greater
rights, thanks to their scale, immortality, and protections of limited
liability. Their rights by now far transcend those of mere humans. Under
the "free trade agreements", the Pacific Rim can, for example, sue El
Salvador for seeking to protect the environment; individuals cannot do
the same. General Motors can claim national rights in Mexico. There is
no need to dwell on what would happen if a Mexican demanded national
rights in the United States.
Domestically, recent supreme
court rulings greatly enhance the already enormous political power of
corporations and the super-rich, striking further blows against the
tottering relics of functioning political democracy.
Meanwhile
Magna Carta is under more direct assault. Recall the Habeas Corpus Act
of 1679, which barred "imprisonment beyond the seas", and certainly the
far more vicious procedure of imprisonment abroad for the purpose of
torture – what is now more politely called "rendition", as when Tony
Blair rendered Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, now a leader of the
rebellion, to the mercies of Colonel Gaddafi; or when US authorities
deported Canadian citizen Maher Arar to his native Syria, for
imprisonment and torture, only later conceding that there was never any
case against him. And many others, often through Shannon airport,
leading to courageous protests in Ireland.
The concept of
due process has been extended under the Barack Obama administration's
international assassination campaign in a way that renders this core
element of the Charter of Liberties (and the Constitution) null and
void. The Justice Department explained that the constitutional guarantee
of due process, tracing to Magna Carta, is now satisfied by internal
deliberations in the executive branch alone. The constitutional lawyer
in the White House agreed. King John might have nodded with
satisfaction.
The issue arose after the presidentially
ordered assassination-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of inciting
jihad in speech, writing, and unspecified actions. A headline in the New
York Times captured the general elite reaction when he was murdered in a
drone attack, along with the usual collateral damage. It read: "The
west celebrates a cleric's death." Some eyebrows were lifted, however,
because he was an American citizen, which raised questions about due
process – considered irrelevant when non-citizens are murdered at the
whim of the chief executive. And irrelevant for citizens, too, under
Obama administration due-process legal innovations.
Presumption
of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation. As
the New York Times reported: "Mr Obama embraced a disputed method for
counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect
counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according
to several administration officials, unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." So post-assassination
determination of innocence maintains the sacred principle of presumption
of innocence.
It would be ungracious to recall the Geneva
conventions, the foundation of modern humanitarian law: they bar "the
carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a
regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which
are recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples".
The
most famous recent case of executive assassination was Osama bin Laden,
murdered after he was apprehended by 79 Navy seals, defenceless,
accompanied only by his wife, his body reportedly dumped at sea without
autopsy. Whatever one thinks of him, he was a suspect and nothing more
than that. Even the FBI agreed.
Celebration in this case
was overwhelming, but there were a few questions raised about the bland
rejection of the principle of presumption of innocence, particularly
when trial was hardly impossible. These were met with harsh
condemnations. The most interesting was by a respected left-liberal
political commentator, Matthew Yglesias, who explained that "one of the
main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to
legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers", so it is
"amazingly naïve" to suggest that the US should obey international law
or other conditions that we righteously demand of the weak.
Only
tactical objections can be raised to aggression, assassination,
cyberwar, or other actions that the Holy State undertakes in the service
of mankind. If the traditional victims see matters somewhat
differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual
backwardness. And the occasional western critic who fails to comprehend
these fundamental truths can be dismissed as "silly", Yglesias explains –
incidentally, referring specifically to me, and I cheerfully confess my
guilt.
Executive terrorist lists
Perhaps
the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties
is a little-known case brought to the supreme court by the Obama
administration, Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. The project was
condemned for providing "material assistance" to guerrilla organisation
PKK, which has fought for Kurdish rights in Turkey for many years and is
listed as a terrorist group by the state executive. The "material
assistance" was legal advice. The wording of the ruling would appear to
apply quite broadly, for example, to discussions and research inquiry,
even advice to the PKK to keep to nonviolent means. Again, there was a
marginal fringe of criticism, but even those accepted the legitimacy of
the state terrorist list – arbitrary decisions by the executive, with no
recourse.
The record of the terrorist list is of some
interest. For example, in 1988 the Reagan administration declared Nelson
Mandela's African National Congress to be one of the world's "more
notorious terrorist groups", so that Reagan could continue his support
for the apartheid regime and its murderous depredations in South Africa
and in neighbouring countries, as part of his "war on terror". Twenty
years later Mandela was finally removed from the terrorist list, and can
now travel to the US without a special waiver.
Another
interesting case is Saddam Hussein, removed from the terrorist list in
1982 so that the Reagan administration could provide him with support
for his invasion of Iran. The support continued well after the war
ended. In 1989, President Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to
the US for advanced training in weapons production – more information
that must be kept from the eyes of the "ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders."
One of the ugliest examples of the use of the
terrorist list has to do with the tortured people of Somalia.
Immediately after 11 September, the US closed down the Somali charitable
network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This
achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the "war on
terror". In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without
merit a year later aroused little notice.
Al-Barakaat was
responsible for about half the $500m in remittances to Somalia, "more
than it earns from any other economic sector and 10 times the amount of
foreign aid [Somalia] receives" a UN review determined. The charity also
ran major businesses in Somalia, all destroyed. The leading academic
scholar of Bush's "financial war on terror", Ibrahim Warde, concludes
that apart from devastating the economy, this frivolous attack on a very
fragile society "may have played a role in the rise ... of Islamic
fundamentalists" – another familiar consequence of the "war on terror".
The
very idea that the state should have the authority to make such
judgments is a serious offense against the Charter of Liberties, as is
the fact that it is considered uncontentious. If the charter's fall from
grace continues on the path of the past few years, the future of rights
and liberties looks dim.
Who will have the last laugh?
A
few final words on the fate of the Charter of the Forest. Its goal was
to protect the source of sustenance for the population, the commons,
from external power – in the early days, royalty; over the years,
enclosures and other forms of privatisation by predatory corporations
and the state authorities who co-operate with them, have only
accelerated and are properly rewarded. The damage is very broad.
If
we listen to voices from the south today we can learn that "the
conversion of public goods into private property through the
privatisation of our otherwise commonly held natural environment is one
way neoliberal institutions remove the fragile threads that hold African
nations together. Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative
venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than
on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments,
communities, and a nation. This is one of the benefits that structural
adjustment programmes inflicted on the continent – the enthronement of
corruption." I'm quoting Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey, chair
of Friends of the Earth International, in his searing expose of the
ravaging of Africa's wealth, To Cook a Continent, the latest phase of
the western torture of Africa.
Torture that has always been
planned at the highest level, it should be recognised. At the end of
the second world war, the US held a position of unprecedented global
power. Not surprisingly, careful and sophisticated plans were developed
about how to organise the world. Each region was assigned its "function"
by state department planners, headed by the distinguished diplomat
George Kennan. He determined that the US had no special interest in
Africa, so it should be handed over to Europe to "exploit" – his word –
for its reconstruction. In the light of history, one might have imagined
a different relation between Europe and Africa, but there is no
indication that that was ever considered.
More recently,
the US has recognised that it, too, must join the game of exploiting
Africa, along with new entries like China, which is busily at work
compiling one of the worst records in destruction of the environment and
oppression of the hapless victims.
It should be
unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element
of the predatory obsessions that are producing calamities all over the
world: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster,
perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Details may be debated, but there
is little serious doubt that the problems are serious, if not awesome,
and that the longer we delay in addressing them, the more awful will be
the legacy left to generations to come. There are some efforts to face
reality, but they are far too minimal. The recent Rio+20 Conference
opened with meagre aspirations and derisory outcomes.
Meanwhile,
power concentrations are charging in the opposite direction, led by the
richest and most powerful country in world history. Congressional
Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections
initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous
radical in today's political scene. The major business lobbies openly
announce their propaganda campaigns to convince the public that there is
no need for undue concern – with some effect, as polls show.
The
media co-operates by not even reporting the increasingly dire forecasts
of international agencies and even the US Department of Energy. The
standard presentation is a debate between alarmists and sceptics: on one
side virtually all qualified scientists, on the other a few holdouts.
Not part of the debate are a very large number of experts, including the
climate change programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology among
others, who criticise the scientific consensus because it is too
conservative and cautious, arguing that the truth when it comes to
climate change is far more dire. Not surprisingly, the public is
confused.
In his State of the Union speech in January,
Obama hailed the bright prospects of a century of energy
self-sufficiency, thanks to new technologies that permit extraction of
hydrocarbons from Canadian tar sands, shale and other previously
inaccessible sources. Others agree. The Financial Times forecasts a
century of energy independence for the US The report does mention the
destructive local impact of the new methods. Unasked in these optimistic
forecasts is the question, what kind of a world will survive the
rapacious onslaught?
In the lead in confronting the crisis
throughout the world are indigenous communities, those who have always
upheld the Charter of the Forests. The strongest stand has been taken by
the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South
America and for centuries a victim of western destruction of the rich
resources of one of the most advanced of the developed societies in the
hemisphere, pre-Columbus.
After the ignominious collapse of
the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a
People's Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries – not just
representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists. It
produced a People's Agreement, which called for very sharp reduction in
emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.
That is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world. It is
ridiculed by sophisticated westerners, but unless we can acquire some
of their sensibility, they are likely to have the last laugh – a laugh
of grim despair.
