NORTH
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‘In a dark time the eye begins to s e e ’
TIM ES
EAG LE
50C EN TS
VO L25N O 5
-T H E O D O R E ROETHKE
ONE WORLD FOR ALL
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“History is just one damned thing after another."
-A. J. P TAYLOR
Humanity’s sly calculation of time might not fit any
other world than its own, and even so is a compromise between
observation and superstition. This beginning of an early year of
the 3rd Millennium of the Xian calendar might be an opportunity
to reassess a few perceptions of human reign over our very
small crowded planet.
One of the larger misperceptions of our era is that early
civilizations and the people who lived in them are archaic and
beyond any relevance. We consider them the old, decayed
(even decadent) times, vanished into the fog of history and
myth. But those were not the old times. They were actually
the young times. This is the old time: Earth is getting older,
our species is aging, our civilization approaches Alzheimer’s.
Our ancient ancestors were not the wintry grayheads
we regard of them as. We are the grayheads. They are instead
the vigorous youth of homo sapiens sapiens, ecstatic, reckless
children, wildly avaricious and ruthlessly violent. We ought to
think of them — without condescension — as the youthful
nursery of our species.
We too often scorn our ancestors as naive and
aboriginal — and we condescendingly regard their epochs as
simpler periods compared to our own generations' modernity
(actually post-modernity) and sophistication. We forget what
they learned for us; nearly everything we know. We are what
they bequeathed us, an inseparable thread of maturation as
well as deterioration.
We are the old ones, born much later in Earth’s age
than our predecessors whose brilliant and inspired youth
constructed our own golden middle age. For all our technological
skill we are enervating beings absorbed only in our own comfort.
A species’ lazy middleaged dream of an effortless materialistic
paradise. A sign of incipient old age.
(Young people believe they pioneer a new future of
galactic cyberspace, but they are later evolutions of Earth,
older than everyone else the instant they are bom.)
We are at the cusp of a new millennium, a trillennium
that already moves as rapidly into its realm of time with the
acceleration of a starship. A millennium is an awesome thought
when you think about it, and we look into this new one in fearful
anticipation, numb from too much change too quickly — we are
afraid of the future, not only because our corpses lie somewhere
up the timeline, but our dreams of the future are seriously handi
capped by a possibility of endless war against phantoms who
have very different dreams and are able to strike anywhere at
any time to express them — but we are also worried by a grim
perception that we have seriously injured our home planet and
that most of the familiar guideposts are continually ripped away
leaving us perplexed about what is next.
The 20th century lies behind our surge into this new
millennium like a huge junkyard, strewn with the rubble of
transient significance and memories already becoming fables.
Humanity spent the last half of the century in fear of obliteration,
and the immense psychological effects are yet to be measured
or understood, especially in regard to their effect upon this new
century/millennium.
Perhaps a millennium up the line the 20th century
might only be remembered as the advent of the Nuclear Age,
when the future really began; or for its human representations
of darkness and light personified by Hitler and Gandhi; perhaps
also for Einstein who changed everything.
A millennium evokes old prophecies; apocalyptic cults
that believe the end is close at hand and flourish to make it
likely. The world was scheduled to end at the first millennium
of the Xian age with an identical script (as well as scripture) of
Armageddon, with the exception we have developed the means
to accomplish the abominations ancient prophecy continues to
incite. Our collective angst is world suicide brought on by the
conflict of our parallel tendencies of piety and murder.
Our past grips the present grimly, wickedly. We feel
out of phase; we sense we have lost control or are out of control
as we lunge into the new century/millennium with accelerating
velocity. We instinctively resist change even as we promulgate
it. Change percolates chaos.
Our fear is that we are being forcibly propelled into
an unknown future in which we will only recognize ourselves
opaquely, moving through an indistinct environment. A future
worldwide civilization of colossal promise and terror is projected.
Gene splitting, recombinant DNA, invented and patented
lifeforms — these human tamperings with the secrets of life
frighten the majority of us more than the continuing possibility
of obliteration.
We live at present in an age of intellectual reversion,
of savage descent into public ignorance and intolerance, which
are generally present but not often given the forum or respect
of recent years. We pay serious, nearly morbid attention to the
pathological pieties and simplifications of religious zealots who
act at the extreme edge of our anxieties and reduce the national
dialogue to a medieval level reminiscent of witchbumings.
Although we are inclined to measure progress through
technical achievement, it should be as important to concentrate
on the contradictory evolution of political liberty and the slow
development of a world civilization. Marx anticipated such a
I
MAC McGILL
civilization in the 19th century and the two World Wars of the
20th century made it impossible to resist Nuclear power, the
fortress of nationalism, has rendered it obsolete.
The contradiction lies with the rights and liberties of
individuals and minorities, and with former colonies and subject
nations that have been released from foreign dominance and
reassert their claims as separate and independent peoples while
genociding themselves with ancient feuds and virulent ethnic
cleansing.
Another contradiction is that a very few powerful
persons and corporations wish to rule the world in much the
manner earlier dictators, fascists and communists dreamed
of doing. International class war is replacing nationalism, and
it first real aspect is the war on terrorism conducted by the
Xian West against the Islamic East.
The designer ‘New World Order’ is a direct schism
between the rich and the poor. The two party system in the
United States reflects this class war. Two political parties don't
represent the people of the country any more than Congress,
the White House or Wall Street. Talk of forming third and fourth
parties are predicated on the assumption that a two party system
actually exists. Instead it is one big party with two heads. The
true second party is made of the disenfranchised who seldom
take part in the political process and generally don't vote
because they don't believe it has any effect. The only real
political parties in the U.S. are the “Rich Party" and the “Poor
Party."
The raw excesses of corporate capitalism in its quest
to dominate world trade and commerce since the end of the
Cold W a r— represented by the empirical rise of the USA —
are under siege, however, by a mounting turbulence caused by
intense pressure from below, the bottom of the resources trickle-
down, which is uniting the majority of overcrowded humanity
that struggles for a decent living on the planet. This upheaval
collates every previous civil rights and working class struggle
and might very well readjust the center of power and pioneer
the first true universally human community in its long evolution.
The major barrier to that universal community is the
United States, which consistently declares itself the only form
of government capable of uniting the world’s peoples into an
umbrella democracy of its own form — paradoxically at the very
moment that democracy is in serious decline in the homeland.
The United States has evolved to world supremacy in
two centuries since its Revolution, which has been the ambition
all along despite fearful and protective tendencies toward
isolation. A history of the USA is not entirely an evolution of
democracy but more essentially its rise as a superpower.
The two World Wars of the 20th century made the USA
a superpower during which it built a war machine unsurpassed
in history while demonstrating a productive capacity that over
whelmed allies and enemies alike This nation was created by
war, maintained its union by war, became a continental power
by decimating native peoples and invading its southern neighbor
and stripping it of its northern half and became a world power
by terminating the decrepit colonial empire of another.
The United States is among history's most successful
militant societies and now dominates global politics with its
immense and highly sophisticated potential for total war as the
only reigning superpower after emerging the victor of a half-
century Cold War against communist Russia, which was
characterized by inconclusive brushfire wars and a horrendous
nuclear arms race that economically and politically broke its
competitor but seriously injured its own economies and ideo
logies.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent
disappearance of communism from major regions of the world
has significantly reduced the options and bargaining power
of so-called third world nations. The end of the Cold War and
Soviet communism gave the industrial northwestern part of the
world tremendous power to reshape the politics and economies
of the southern and eastern areas. A major consequence has
been that the USA, the world’s remaining superpower, has been
able to act aggressively with impunity in these parts of the world
without the threat of Soviet counteraction as prevailed for nearly
half a century.
America flexed its massive military might in Iraq in a
preemptive invasion last year and stampeded over a weak and
bloodied opponent (soft-ened up by a decade of punishing
airstrikes on Iraq's military infrastructure), watched by a world
wide television audience that was in general disagreement with
the war.
The U S. reached back into its history to win the initial
stages of the two-part war, to Grant’s axiom of hitting firstest
with the mostest (Voltaire said that “God is always on the side
of the big battalions”). The war has put the world on notice:
although America’s position on the international market is weak,
with domestic recession and mismanagement of the economy
that has produced a whopping national deficit, the USA’s military
potency is unmatched and is willing and capable to send in the
troops anywhere in the world at any real or perceived provo
cation, or arrogantly for no discernible reason except the desire
to do so.
The new realities of world commerce have adversely
affected American labor; real work has been transferred over
seas as corporate domination moves like a cancer through
American culture. The country is governed by a counsel of
merchants similar to medieval Venice with the exception of a
comic charade of outer layer political marionettes. Cheaper
labor and manufacturing costs in third world nations not only
add to an imbalance of trade but considerably shrink the jobs
of American workers as the U.S. shifts from a producer nation to
a global headquarters complex in which computer programmers,
accounts clerks and stock brokers are more important to the
economy than steelworkers or farmers.
The foundations of the modern interdependent world
economy were laid in the late 19th century with business cartels
dominating the international trade in raw materials through
colonizing most of the third world and infusing billions of dollars
into foreign capital investment, primarily in Eastern Europe (by
Western Europe), North America and European colonies. The
two new great industrial powers in 1900 were Germany and the
United States.
The USA started the 20th century by inheriting as
a result of a brief triumphant war the remaining vestiges of
moribund Spain’s deteriorated empire and became overnight
a world power — except that its new empire was situated on
islands rather than mainlands. The real power the United States
developed over the century was through neo-colonialism — .
dominance by proxy control of foreign economies, industries,
politicians and generals with coercion matched by corruption
instead of occupation and colonial ministries
The Great Depression of the 1930s was an outcome
of the collapse of the inflated American stock market and
caused worldwide financial ruin, dried up international trade and
created mass unemployment: 12 million in the United States
alone by 1932. Franklin Roosevelt won the Presidential election
that year with his promise of a 'New Deal’ to end the Depression
and set in motion reforms and economic stimulation, including
protection of labor unions for the first time and wage and hour
laws — all of which are under intense assault by the combined
Reagan/Bushes Sr.& Jr. administrations. Social Security was
initiated by FDR (presently in danger of being thoroughly looted)
and public works programs were revitalized on a massive scale
— huge dams, rural electrification projects, CCC programs, aid
to small farmers — but ultimately accelerated military spending
and the advent of World War 2 ended the Depression.
The burden of destroying Nazi Germany fell primarily
upon capitalist America and communist Russia Essentially the
U.S. provided the material and Russia the man/womanpower;
after the war these noveau superpowers polarized the world into
nuclear-armed camps separated by an infamous “Iron Curtain,"
which symbolized their fierce competition for supremacy
One year short of its platinum anniversary, Bolshevik
communism disintegrated into ruin and chaos. Once hoped to
be the essential revolution of the masses against the long
history of repression, Bolshevism quickly developed into a
monstrously cruel and eventually stagnant system that simply
fell apart from the mendacious inertia of its own history. The
vast empire of Russian "republics" and east European satellites
collapsed into bitter splinters of ancient hatreds as around the
world communism was simultaneously rejected as a successor
to colonialism and as the structure and ideology of newly enfran
chised governments. Instead of seizing the future and proclaim
ing a "new Man" through world revolution, communism swiftly
diminished as a relic of the past into the dustbin of history',
the god that both failed and died.
Which has left the United States as the world's only
superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The deceit that
capitalism and democracy are intertwined quickly came apart
following communism's collapse. The result is that the USA has
failed to show itself to the world as a true democracy, corrupting
its real manifest destiny with the decrepit quest for empire, much
to the disgust and discouragement of the rest of the world.