Ten years on, the inconvenient truths about the neoliberal response to global warming
-Ten years is a long
time.
-It can be a very long
time. Even so, it’s still only 10 years.
-No, I only want to
explain, gentlemen, that very often, between one historical period and another
ten years certainly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole
century. And so, often we have to realize that our judgments and our
interpretations and even our hopes may have been wrong. [i]
Marlon Brando playing a British
agent provocateur
in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Queimada
(1969)
In
2006, with his speaking tour and famous film An Inconvenient Truth, former
American vice president Al Gore gained fame and praise for his commitment to
alerting the world about the need to take drastic actions to curb global
warming. The clear message of his film was that big changes were necessary, a
radical paradigm shift in the way we use energy. He stated emphatically that “a
moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable.” He called on Americans to
take on global warming as if it were among the greatest challenges that America
has dealt with in its history, such as the revolution and war of independence
and the abolition of slavery. He asked:
Are we, as Americans,
capable of doing great things even though they are difficult?...We formed a
nation, we fought a revolution and brought something new to this earth, a
free nation guaranteeing individual liberty. America made a moral decision. Its
slavery was wrong, and that we could not be half free and half slave. We, as
Americans, decided that of course women should have the right to vote. We
defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic
simultaneously. We desegregated our schools... We worked together in a
completely bipartisan way to bring down communism... So now we have to use our
political processes in our democracy, and then decide to act together to solve
those problems. But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It’s
different from any problem we have ever faced before... [Earth] is our only
home. And that is what is at stake. Our ability to live on planet Earth, to
have a future as a civilization...[ii]
The
reason Mr. Gore’s campaign didn’t change the world can perhaps be found in the
contradictions and nonsense expressed in the above passage.
He
mentioned the American Revolution that overthrew the existing political order
and created a completely new one, but he never followed through to the logical
implication that a revolution would be needed now. He merely advocated for
local change, innovation, altering personal behavior, and getting the
Washington establishment to adopt better energy policies.
He
referred to the abolition of slavery, but not to the inconvenient fact that a
civil war had to happen to bring about that change. Similarly, we might wonder
if a civil war will be necessary now to overcome a government controlled by
corporate interests. It would be wrong to assume they are going to give up
their advantages without a fight.
Next
he stated America “won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously,”
neglecting to mention that in Europe the allies did all the heavy lifting until
1944 and suffered the great majority of casualties and ruined cities.
Finally,
he insulted the ally that sacrificed the most to win that war against
totalitarianism by saying, “We worked together in a completely bipartisan way
to bring down communism.” The leaders of today’s Communist Party of China would
be amused and confused by this statement, having upheld a communist system and
won a thirty-year trade war with America, but in any case, such boasting about
“bringing down communism” is meaningless. It is only a crude display of ignorance
and arrogance about what has happened to the world in the last thirty years.
Convergence
theory emerged in the 1940s among some political scientists as a way of
describing how both the US and Soviet systems had come to resemble each other.[iii] Roosevelt’s
New Deal showed the importance of government in controlling the commanding
heights of the economy, then the war made defense spending the major factor in
the economy. The Cold War race to build thousands of nuclear weapons further
entrenched the role of government. By the 1970s, both the Soviet Union and the
United States were highly bureaucratized techno-military complexes that had
managed to deliver a decent standard of living to a majority of its citizens. A
significant difference was that the Soviet Union lacked a stock exchange in
which private entities could profit from government programs. It was a
one-party state, but it had institutions that involved the participation of
citizens in the party and civic life in ways that didn’t exist in America.
America had two political parties with little ideological difference between
them, and policy and leadership was largely set by corporate influence and
elite managers of government institutions.
Whenever
progressive politicians emerged in American politics, they went to the
Democratic Party to change it from within, but always ended up being the
sheepdogs that herded progressives into the mainstream while the party bosses
decided the candidates and the policy. The Democratic Party became known as the
place where radical ideas go to die. All in all, the Soviet and American
systems had converged enough to make it difficult to say which was more
democratic. By the time of the Soviet collapse, it was a matter of America
having more power and control of more of the earth’s resources, and the Soviet
Union being in a state of internal disarray. If anyone “brought down communism”
it was Gorbachev, who did it willfully through the sort of radical reform that
America is incapable of. But it’s nice of Al Gore to try to take credit for
destroying another nation’s political system and way of life, as if that were
America’s moral duty to perform for the world.
Convergence
theory remained relevant after 1991 as the US and the EU continued to become
more bureaucratic and governments became more deeply embedded in the private
market, and vice versa. Today, it can be said that American global
capitalism has been “sovietized,” a term meant to awaken those who believe the
market is still free. The term indicates that the political, bureaucratic and
corporate entities have fused together in such a way that there is no longer a
distinction between the private and government sectors. Since 2008, central
banks have been printing money and buying stocks to prop up private banks and
corporations. One needs to be on the inside, among the fortunate nomenklatura, to
avoid being on the losing side of the arrangement. In an interview on
the Keiser Report, financial analyst Chris Whalen described it
thus:
Chris Whalen: It’s
like the pre-Reformation. They’re selling dispensation. You [corporations] come
to Washington. You’re buying forgiveness, even before the fact. It’s like Minority
Report. You haven’t committed the crime yet, but you have to go to
Washington and pay them off so that they don’t prosecute you.
Max Keiser: This is no
big secret. Why does the average American, the CNBC watcher, seem oblivious
that this is a very corrupt cesspool?
Chris Whalen: They
want to cling to the notion that there is a private market out there where they
can invest and make money. The reality is that politics has largely subsumed
the markets to the extent that the regulators call all the shots. Private
companies are now subordinate to this whole process, much like in Europe. It’s
the same attitude. The political figures, their companions in the regulatory
world, they call all the shots. Much that drives stocks has to do with the
decisions they make or do not make. Look at financials. Financials are
overwhelmed by the regulatory state. And I think that is very important for
people to understand: We don’t have a free market. The feds put us all into an
induced coma.[iv]
We
should also keep all this in mind when an American speaks of “bringing down
communism,” and we should recall what that destructive effort looked like to
people on the receiving end of the stick. During Al Gore’s term as vice
president it involved boxes of US dollars flown into the American Embassy in
Moscow in 1996 in order to help the unpopular and despised Boris Yeltsin and
his oligarchs. Before this time, the Clinton administration had supported
Yeltsin in 1993 when he shred the constitution and launched an artillery
assault on parliament. These desperate measures were taken to stop the
communist party from coming back to power. Winning this game meant propping up
the oligarchs and tolerating killing of journalists and dissidents,
associations that are now deemed to be such a threat to the United States
simply because Donald Trump’s connections to some Russians are alleged to have
contaminated the precious bodily fluids of American democracy.
Another
dark episode of the 1990s has been well hidden behind the false narrative of
the Rwandan genocide. As vice president, Al Gore must surely have had the
security access to know that as the war in Southern Africa wound down and the
USSR and Cuba backed out of supporting foreign wars, there was an American plan
to manage the new Africa in rivalry with France’s traditional neo-colonial
interests there. Africa’s unrecognized continental war of 1990 to 2003 led to
some seven million excess deaths, so one of the ironies of “bringing down
communism” is the fact that the bloodiest conflict of the late 20th century
occurred when the Cold War was over, enabled by a low-level proxy rivalry
between two NATO allies, the two nations that gave the world their examples of
democratic republics in the late 18th century. Some scholars believe that the
intensity and intentions of the France-US proxy war has been greatly
exaggerated, but if it wasn’t war then, it certainly was afterwards in the form
of the bitter accusations that flowed about which side had provoked and enabled
the genocide, then later protected parties that were guilty of crimes against
humanity. That war rages still.
The
carnage might have been less if the US and France and the rest of the
“international community” had perceived Africa as a priority, learned about
what they were getting into, and stayed focused on it. However, they were only
interested enough to get involved out of institutional momentum or the belief
that they must take responsibility for managing the new world order, but they
were not interested enough to pay attention for long and understand what their “support”
would lead to. America was asserting itself as the sole superpower in the
early 1990s, and that meant asserting itself everywhere, even in regions that
weren’t the most vital interests. The lack of full commitment was obvious in
the failure to halt the war on Rwanda launched from Uganda, and the subsequent
failure to stop the conflict widening into the continental war that lasted from
1996 until 2003. Ironically, it was the Bush administration, famous for
launching two wars elsewhere, that was the first to signal to Rwanda that the
game was up and they could no longer play upon Western “genocide guilt” to
obtain unconditional aid.
If
one wants to look for a root cause of the genocide, it can be found in the US
support of Tutsi exiles to invade from Uganda, to start what was wrongly
referred to in the early 1990s as a “civil war.” The violation of the UN
Charter (sponsoring aggression against a sovereign nation) never seemed to be a
concern. One could look for causes further back in the earlier expulsion of
Tutsi from Rwanda, but it should have been obvious that that problem was never
going to be resolved by a foreign-sponsored invasion.
Paul
Kagame was chosen as the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the army
of Tutsi exiles living in Uganda since 1959. He was sent to the US to be
trained for his future role. The genocide was not foreseen and not part of the
American plan, but it should have been obvious that the invasion would escalate
the conflict and cause chaos to spread to neighboring countries. It is not
clear how much America plotted with the RPF in the takeover that came about, but
it is clear that America refused to intervene in the 1990-94 war and in the
genocide until the RPF had finished its invasion and seized power. Perhaps the
tail wagged the dog and the Americans and the French never understood what they
were getting into. The theory that it was all an imperialist plot planned far
in advance is actually a racist presumption that Africans had no agency in what
was happening. One must give credit to the African leaders for their
Machiavellian skills as they exploited their foreign sponsors at every turn.
The Western powers never seemed to have imagined a genocide was possible, and
after it occurred they didn’t see the next chapter caused by the RPF pursuing the Hutu militias living in exile in refugee camps in Zaire (now Democratic
Republic of Congo) amid the majority of refugees who were unarmed.
The
Arusha Accords of 1993 were supposed to have brought a peaceful resolution to
the “civil war,” but the side which had the most to lose in this deal was the
RPF because they would always be a political minority. They had more to gain
from a full invasion to bring down the French-backed regime in a short war,
then set up a power base for the Anglo-American sphere of influence. It didn’t
go so smoothly. Some specialists believe that Western access to African
resources was never much of a factor. International mining companies, or buyers
abroad, would have got the resources regardless. The resources were much more
significant to all local military factions because controlling them was
essential for financing war. With states weakening after the Cold War and the
genocide, no national or sub-national group in the region could afford to not
fight for a claim on diamonds, oil, coltan, cobalt etc.
The
well-known narrative of the 1990s is that Bill Clinton was discouraged by the
failed intervention in Somalia, or distracted by his dalliance with an intern
during this time and tragically failed to respond to the urgent need for a
large peacekeeping force at the time when tensions were brewing. However, this
narrative doesn’t explain why nothing was done after the genocide started, or
after the conflict continued in Congo. The atrocities were known, but a large
UN force was never sent during the three months of April-June, 1994. It seems
clear that the Americans were waiting for the RPF to finish with their
invasion, and a UN force would have got in the way of that. Toward the end,
France guided refugees into Congo, where the Hutu
militias lived in exile by siphoning off aid money for
refugees, who, some allege, became their hostages in the ongoing conflict along the
Rwanda-Congo border. The UN never intervened effectively in solving this
problem, either.
The
RPF was recognized as the new government of Rwanda and tasked with
“reconciliation” in a country where they had been foreign invaders for the last
four years. The Tutsi refugees took over a country they had never really known,
as most of them had left in 1959 or been born outside the country. Their second
language was English whereas the second official language of Rwanda had been
French until the RPF took over and changed it to English as a way of pushing
the Hutu out of the education system and other elite functions of state.[v]
Hutu
militias living among the refugees in Congo launched raids into
Rwanda, but some of these were proven to be false flag attacks by the RPF itself. These incursions gave the RPF the excuse to “clear out” the reluctant refugees who were
afraid to go home--for good reason. RPF revenge killings occurred, and there
was a large scale slaughter at Kibeho in February 1995, witnessed by UN troops.
By this time Mobuto, president of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo)
and America’s Cold War anti-communist ally, had become a depraved embarrassment
to his American supporters, so Rwanda had American support when it invaded to
deal with the Hutu army in exile--one which might in some distant future do
exactly what the Tutsis in exile in Uganda did in the early 1990s.[vi]
The
war eventually involved eight African nations and twenty armed groups that
financed themselves with Congolese resources.
The
common denial of this history told here claims that Kagame’s training by the
CIA was insignificant and that because Rwanda has no natural resources, America
has no interests there. This disingenuous argument glosses over the fact that
sometimes having obvious interests is not a factor. Resource-poor places can
still have a great strategic value for establishing regional control. Rwanda
became a stable base of operations from which the well-supplied and
well-trained RPF were able to become the most formidable force on the
continent. Once the war with Congo started, Rwanda mysteriously became endowed
with natural resource exports. It became a large “exporter” of gold thanks to
what was being taken out of Congo. Such factors as these were well concealed
under the “genocide credit” which allowed the Rwandan government to focus the
world’s attention on Tutsi victimhood and deflect all criticism as “genocide
denial.”
One
is automatically called a genocide denier for writing such accounts as this. It
usually goes unreported that critics of Paul Kagame’s regime do not deny any of
the established facts of the genocide perpetrated by the Hutu in the spring of
1994. A good clarification of the issue was written by a Tutsi exile (writing
under a pseudonym, out of fear for his life) who suffered under both regimes,
before and after 1994:
I faced death not once
but three times under the Hutu regime. I went into exile and faced the same
under the rule of the ruthless killers of the RPF... When I went back to
Kigali, I witnessed the grave cruelty of the RPF rule under Kagame... The
genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda is a reality none can ignore, and it is inscribed
in the history of this world. In addition, massacres of innocent Hutus in
Rwanda and Congo, the pogroms of millions of Congolese killed on their own land
by Kagame’s troops, is a reality political interests cannot erase in the
history of this world. None can ignore these realities and call Kagame a
“visionary” or “one of the greatest leaders of our time” [as Tony Blair and
Bill Clinton do].[vii]
In
contrast to the popular narrative that the tragedy of the genocide came to a
conclusion in 1994, Africa specialist Gérard Prunier had a different
assessment:
There was no political
treatment of the genocide in Rwanda by the international community. No efforts
were made to prevent it. No efforts were made to stop it, and no efforts were
made to remonstrate with those who spoke in the name of the victims when they
started to abuse their role. Mature political treatment was replaced by
humanitarian condescension and diplomatic bickering... As a result, more than
two million refugees poured over the borders of Rwanda, complete with the
trappings of quasi-sovereignty, including an army, a treasury and a complete
set of corrupt politicians. Because the treatment of the crisis, or should I
say non-treatment, was purely humanitarian, the situation was allowed to
fester.[viii]
I wrote about Rwanda here because it is one of the less-frequently
discussed chapters of the Clinton presidency and Al Gore vice presidency. Their
record of bombing Serbia with depleted uranium, and, in domestic politics, on such regressive policies as welfare
reform and de-regulating the financial industry, have been written about
elsewhere, so I leave those topics aside. The American false narrative of
recent African history may seem unconnected to policy on global warming, but it
is a corollary of other false solutions like the 2015 Paris Agreement on
climate change. If the international community couldn’t react to the immediate
threat to millions of lives in Africa, and had to make up a false, comforting
narrative about what happened there, what are the chances that its narrative
about its global warming solution consists of a serious plan to deal with this
distant, abstract threat? The Paris Agreement was decried at the time of its
announcement as an insufficient con job that would allow for capitalism as
usual, although some critics, curiously, changed their opinion of it when
President Trump took America out of the deal.
Returning
to Al Gore’s global warming crusade, there is one more thing to note on his
remark about “bringing down communism.” It was uttered without any awareness
that socialism argues for the preservation of nature and critiques how
capitalism destroys it. Marx’s critique of capitalism included observations of
what it did to the public commons and nature. Thus bringing down communism, or
at least ignoring Marx’s critique of capitalism, might have worsened the
problem that Al Gore sought to solve.
It
is well understood that Donald Trump is too poorly educated in history and
international relations to hold political office, but Al Gore’s views here
illustrate that the problem can be found throughout the intellectually barren
political establishment. It should be clear that any possible solution to
global warming, and other environmental problems, is going to smell dangerously
socialist to those who want to maintain the rights of corporations to plunder
the earth. We have waited a few decades now for people in Western nations to
voluntarily recycle, re-use and reduce, but it hasn’t happened in any
significant way. It is complete insanity to continue to advocate the same
solution and expect different results.
The
inescapable conclusion might be that the only thing that could work is
government imposing restraint from above. Living with less and downsizing
lifestyles is never going gain popular support. America is a country where SUV
sales go up as soon as the price of oil goes down. The only solution may be a
revolutionary vanguard that could impose environmental protection on an
reluctant populace. Who knows what another socialist revolution could achieve
toward this goal, if it didn’t have to fight constant wars to defend itself
from reactionary backlash? Would Al Gore be ready to “bring down” capitalism
this time around? After eight years of the Obama administration, the
destruction of Bernie Sanders' popular and progressive campaign, and Hillary
Clinton’s policy-free lesser evil presidential campaign, it is obvious that the
solutions will never come from “our political processes in our democracy,” as
Gore suggested in 2006.
The
truly telling gesture by Al Gore was his reluctant endorsement of Hillary
Clinton in 2016, which he waited to give until after she had won the
nomination.[ix] His
reluctance showed that he knew in his heart that the status quo in Washington
was not going to achieve anything, but he couldn’t bring himself to say
anything radical during the election campaign, or to support Bernie Sanders.
What happened to all that talk about bold solutions and rising to the
challenges, as if it were a fight to end energy slavery? The obvious thing for
him to do was to endorse and vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party, the only
candidate on the ballot with a platform that demanded the kind of change he was
calling for in 2006-07, but of course doing that would have been a stinging
reminder of Ralph Nader’s third-party candidacy in the year 2000 election
campaign which he lost to George Bush. Thus his personal issues trumped the
call to boldly leap into the unknown and take on the big challenges of the day.
“Are we, as Americans, capable of doing great things even though they are
difficult?” he asked in 2006. The answer ten years later was a big, pathetic
“no.” All he could find courage for was an endorsement of the lesser-evilism
that paved the way to the Trump presidency. In the end, we have to ask
whether An Inconvenient Truth achieved anything, and whether
the carbon footprint of Al Gore’s lecture tour was offset by any meaningful
effect on energy policy. There was some progress in terms of renewable energy
expansion, but this probably would have happened regardless of the film.
The
director of An Inconvenient Truth went on to promote the
charter school movement with his next film Waiting for Superman (2010).
It too has not aged well, as it was identified quickly as a vehicle promoting
the privatization of public education; that is “bringing down” socialism from
another sphere of American life.[x] The
past decade of American life spans the time from the 2007-08 collapse of the
financial system to the election of Donald Trump as president. It also includes
many such neoliberal false-hope campaigns to save the environment, or the
education system, or whatever. These events do indeed “... reveal the
contradictions of a whole century. And so, often we have to realize that our
judgments and our interpretations and even our hopes may have been wrong.”
Notes
[i] Gillo
Pontecorvo (Director), Queimada (Burn!) United Artists,
1969. Dialog from the film, 00:59:50~.
[ii] Davis
Guggenheim (Director), Al Gore (Writer), An Inconvenient Truth,
Paramount Classics, 2006.
[iii] Wilfried
Loth and George Soutou, The Making of Détente: Eastern Europe and
Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965-75 (Routledge, 2010), 25.
[v] Filip
Reyntjens, Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 1-7.
[vi] Howard
W. French, “The Case Against Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame,” Newsweek,
January 1, 2013.
[vii] Jessie
McBride, U.S. Made (Christian Faith Publishing Inc., 2015).
The cover of the book credits a “J.E. Murphy” as the apparent author, while the
credits inside the book list the author as “Jesse McBride.” This unusual
self-published book is written in broken English by an unidentified Tutsi who
claims to have been persecuted by both the pre and post-genocide regimes, and
known many of the key players due to his work as a journalist and government
advisor.
[x] Diane
Ravitch, “Michelle Rhee’s Cheating Scandal: Diane Ravitch Blasts
Education Reform Star,” Daily Beast, March 29, 2011.
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