Past movements for social justice insisted on character in their recruits, in honor, loyalty, and integrity. The culture of resistance created by the Spanish Anarchists valued ethical personal behavior. Writes Murray Bookchin, “They were working men and women, obrera consciente, who abjured smoking and drinking, avoided brothels and the bloody bull ring, purged their talk of ‘foul’ language, and by their probity, dignity, respect for knowledge, and militancy, tried to set a moral example for their entire class.”82 We could do worse. The right will continue to successfully blame the left for the destruction of culture and community as long as the left can’t or won’t stand firmly in defense of our values.
This is probably the right time to defend the concept of a work ethic. The alternative culture of the ’60s was in part a reaction against the conformity of the ’50s and its obedience to authority. In 1959, my mother and her friends decided to start an underground newspaper at their school. Their first step? Asking permission from the principal. He said no. They dropped the idea. No wonder the ’60s happened.
The alternative culture was based on the premise that essentially nobody had to do anything they didn’t feel like doing. A major part of their rebellion was the rejection of a work ethic, always cast as Protestant. But taken to its logical end, this is the position of a parasite. The dropouts either got money from their parents, from friends who got it from parents, or from the state. Eventually, each life has to be supported with resources from somewhere. I have seen a few too many protests and alternative communities surviving on the Mooch Ethic. I have sat on couches that housed rats, eaten off dishes that gave me gastroenteritis, and learned (secondhand, thankfully) that an itchy butt at sundown means pinworms. I’ve watched incredible resources go to waste—houses fall to ruin, land repossessed—for refusal to do basic adult tasks like paying the taxes. I don’t know which is worse: the general ethos’s entitlement, or the stupidity; the smell of the outhouses, the unwashed bodies, or the marijuana.
The rebellion against a work ethic is another characteristic of youth culture. The ventral striatal circuit, which is the seat of motivation in the human brain, doesn’t function well during adolescence, which is why teens are often accused of being lazy. This means that the norms of youth culture will gravitate toward structureless days with no expectations or goals. It also means that the youth culture and marijuana aren’t a good match.
The war on drugs is appalling. It has a corrosive effect on communities of color especially and has also made it difficult for those with legitimate need to get pain relief from drugs like marijuana.83 Medical cannabis is a legitimate treatment for a number of conditions, some of which, like autoimmune disorders, are life-threatening. People who need it should be able to get it, and society as a whole would probably be better off if cannabis was legalized.
But drugs and alcohol have been a terrible detriment to both activist cultures and oppressed communities. I have watched people that I love erode with addiction, a slow death I’m powerless to stop. I am very sympathetic to the straight-edge punks. It was obvious to me at age fourteen that there were two weapons I would need for the fight: a mind that could think and the heart of a warrior. Drugs would destroy the one and numb the other. I swore away from drugs and I’ve never regretted that decision.
Drug and alcohol addiction has had terrible effects on both oppressed communities and cultures of resistance. Such effects are broad and deep: the self-absorption, lack of motivation, and broken synapses create a population in semipermanent “couch lock.” Drugs and alcohol will not help us when we need commitment, hard work, and sacrifice, which are the foundation of all cultures of resistance. Addicts have no place on the front lines of resistance because an addict will always put their addiction first. Always.
I came of age in a post-Stonewall lesbian community that recognized the role that alcohol had played in destroying gay and lesbian lives. Our events specifically avoided bars as venues, and were often labeled “chem-free.” These were and are acts of communal self-care that were linked to survival and resistance. It was an important ethic, and it was understood and embraced. There are parallel calls for a chem-free ethic in some Native American activist groups, and for the same reason: drugs and alcohol have been damaging enough to name them genocidal. The radical left would do well to model itself on these recent examples and to consider an ethic of sobriety as both collective self-care and resistance. We need everyone’s brain. If our goal is a serious movement, then we also need focus, dependability, and commitment. On the front lines, we need to know our comrades are rock solid. In our culture, we need a set of ethics and behavioral norms that can build a functioning community. Basic awareness of addiction—its symptoms, its treatment options—is important both to help the afflicted and to keep our groups safe and strong.
A related issue is the general lassitude caused by poor nutrition exacerbated by vegetarian and vegan diets. One investigator of alternative communities writes, “… for many of the rural groups, common activity is limited to part-time farming. In their permissive climate, there is often a debilitating, low-thyroid do-nothingness that looks like nothing so much as the reverse image of the compulsive busyness of their parents.”84
The diet that holds sway across the left will produce that state exactly. A food ethic stripped of protein and fat may meet ideological needs, but it will not meet the biological needs of the human template. Our neurotransmitters—the brain chemicals that make us happy and calm—are made from amino acids; amino acids are protein. Serotonin, for instance, is produced from the amino acid tryptophan. We cannot produce tryptophan; we can only eat it. Likewise endorphins and catecholamines. We must eat protein to have brains that work. We need fat, too, and you’ll notice that in nature, protein and fat come packaged together. In order for your neurotransmitters to actually transmit, dietary fat is crucial. This is why people on low-fat diets are twice as likely to suffer from depression or die from suicide or violent death. If you need more reason to eat real food, your sex hormones are all made from dietary cholesterol: please eat some. A steady diet of carbohydrates, on the other hand, will produce depressed, anxious, irritable people too exhausted to do much beyond attend to the psychodramas created by their blood sugar swings, which about sums up the emotional ambiance of my youth. And the author’s inclusion of “low-thyroid” in his description is right on the mark. Soy is often the only acceptable protein on the menu. Besides its poor quality—plant protein comes wrapped in cellulose, which humans cannot digest—soy is a known goitrogen. In large enough quantities, like when eaten not as a condiment but as a protein source, it can suppress and even destroy the thyroid.
I’ve been to a few too many potlucks with brown rice, dumpster-dived mangoes, and the ubiquitous chips and hummus. I feel my grandmother’s horror from the grave: why are we feeding each other poverty food? This is the only time I feel sorry for men, watching them repeatedly—and I mean four and five times—approach my pot of (pasture-raised) beef-and-leek chili for more. They’re desperate. They may be getting enough bulk calories every day, but they’re starving. Men tend to crave protein because their protein needs are higher—testosterone means men have more muscle than women, and muscle is built from protein. Women tend to crave fat because our bodies are designed to store fat for pregnancy and lactation.85 The current anorexic beauty standards, besides being a very effective tool of patriarchy and capitalism, also point to a profound death wish embedded in this culture. Humans have been celebrating female fat—a veneration both aesthetic and spiritual—since we created art and religion. Our first two art projects reverenced the lives that made ours possible: the large ruminants we ate and the large women who birthed us.
We must stop hating the animals that we are. Only ideological fanatics (I was the most extreme version—vegan—for almost twenty years, so I’m allowed to say that) will be able to stick to such body-punishing fare for any length of time. Everyone else will “cheat” and feel guilty over moral or even spiritual failings without understanding why they failed. The answer is simple: we have paleolithic bodies, we need paleolithic food. If you’re fighting evolution, you are not going to win. There is a reason you feel hungry without fat and protein, a reason for the exhaustion that aches in your muscles and surrounds you like fog, a reason for the gray weight of depression. A plant-based diet is not adequate for long-term maintenance and repair of the human brain or body, and it has been taking a heavy toll on the left for several generations.
“One person died and another was badly burned when a gas well exploded here last year,” my friend Adam says, pointing to an oil well set back a hundred yards from the road. We’re on the plains beneath the Front Range in Colorado, where the Rockies meet the flatlands. Oil country. Wells and fracking rigs are everywhere, scattered among the rural homes and inside city limits.
I’m on my way home from volunteering with Buffalo Field Campaign outside Yellowstone National Park, and I’ve stopped in Colorado to see friends and learn more about the fight against fracking that’s going on here.
Adam explains to me that there are thousands of wells in the area, despite widespread opposition. Cities have passed laws against fracking, been sued by industry groups in response, and lost the lawsuits. Democracy is clearly less important than profits in the United States—but that’s no surprise to anyone who is paying attention.
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A few days earlier, Buffalo Field Campaign held the first annual Rosalie Little Thunder memorial walk through Yellowstone National Park.
We walked 8 miles past “the trap” where Yellowstone National Park uses tax money to trap and send to slaughter wild buffalo, past APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services) facilities where buffalo are captured, confined and subjected to invasive medical testing and sterilization, and past Beattie Gulch where hunters line up at Yellowstone’s boundary to shoot family groups of buffalo en masse as they walk over the Park’s border. As we walked, I watched two of Rosalie’s sisters holding hands as they walked together in honor of their sister.
Cresting a small rise, we came upon a group of more than a hundred buffalo, grazing and snorting softly to one another. As we approached the herd, indigenous organizer and musician Mignon Geli began to play her flute, accompanied by drums. As if they could sense the whispers from our hearts and the prayers carried in the music, the buffalo began to move south, further into the park and towards safety.
Safe for the moment. But by late March, that entire group may be dead. Yellowstone National Park workers—including biologists—will lure the buffalo into the trap, confine them in the “squeeze chute” for medical testing, and then ship them to slaughter. As I write this, there are about three hundred buffalo who have now been trapped, very likely including the one pictured above.
I’ve never seen a wild buffalo confined in a livestock trailer, but I’m told it’s a horrible thing. Some describe it as a metal coffin on wheels.
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Earlier today, I gave an interview to a radio show. The host asked me about why Deep Green Resistance focuses on social justice issues in addition to saving the planet. My response was to quote my friend, who explained it more concisely than I ever could when she said, “all oppression is tied to resource extraction.”
In other words, racism doesn’t exist just for the hell of it. It was created (and is maintained) to justify the theft of land, the theft of bodies, the theft of lives. Patriarchy isn’t a system set up for fun. It’s designed to extract value from women: free and cheap labor, sexual gratification, and children (the more, the better).
I wrote earlier that protecting the buffalo requires dismantling global systems in addition to local fights. That’s because the destruction of the buffalo today is tied into the same system of “resource” extraction. Buffalo can’t be controlled like cattle, and they eat grass, which makes ranchers angry. The ranching industry exists to extract wealth and food from the land. It does this by stealing grass and land from humans and non-humans, and privatizing it for the benefit of a few.
The story is the same with fracking. The people of the front range are dealing with atrocious air quality and poisoned water. Cancers and birth defects on one hand, and big fat paychecks on the other hand, will be the legacy of the short-lived fracking boom. That, and the destruction of the last open spaces that have been preserved from urban sprawl. No vote or political party can make a difference, both because the two major parties are thoroughly capitalist and fully invested in resource extraction, and because the U.S. constitution is set up to privilege business interests above all other considerations.
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There are differences of opinion at camp. These divides emerge during late night conversations around the woodstove and during long car rides. But looking at the rampant oppression and resource extraction we’re facing, it strikes me that we must remember to stick together. One of my friends says that we must practice radical forgiveness. Another often says that we must learn from how the buffalo take turns breaking trail in deep snow, the strongest taking the longer turns.
On the Rosalie Little Thunder memorial walk, indigenous activist Cheryl Angel spoke about how Rosalie’s fighting spirit lives on in each of us. She made a material change in the world that those of us who live have a duty to carry on.
At BFC, there is a quote from Rosalie that is often mentioned. She said, “Remind yourself every morning, every morning, every morning: ‘I’m going to do something, I’ve made a commitment.’ Not for yourself, but beyond yourself. You belong to the collective. Don’t go wandering off, or you will perish.”
Permaculture and resistance, restoration and direct action, working inside the system and revolutionary action, aboveground and underground—we all must work together to tear down the brutal empire we live within, and to build a new world from the ashes.
Featured image: Demonstration against TTIP. Sebastian Heidelberger, creative commons licence
Editor’s note: This is the second part an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read Part One here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
DJ: Let’s talk about the American response and the question of some commonalities of the response to empires on the decline of their own power, if you could fit those two together.
AM: First of all the American response. This is where the White House actually matters. You can make an argument that the Presidency doesn’t make that much difference in the fabric of American life, but when it comes to foreign policy, and particularly military power; the presidency matters. The man in charge makes a difference. Because you’ve got the economic apparatus, the diplomacy, the military, all of these concerted forces arrayed at the fingertips of a single person.
Under the Obama administration: Obama was what I call a geopolitical genius. He’s one of three Americans in the past 120 years who understood geopolitics and knew how to play it. Obama sensed the nature of the Chinese challenge, and he came up with an explicit strategy to counter it, a three-fold strategy. First of all, he realized that the logic of the Chinese infrastructure and their big new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, was basically to make sure that the trade of the Eurasian landmass was heading towards China. Obama countered that very deftly. He negotiated, mostly in the course of his second term in office, two international trade pacts. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, with a dozen nations who together account for about 40% of world trade. He also launched negotiations for another pact called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or T-TIP, with the European Union, that controlled about another 20% of trade.
Through these two trade pacts, Obama had the idea of draining the world island the life blood of commerce. China could build its railroads and its pipelines to its heart’s content, but if Obama’s plans had gone through, these preferential trade pacts would have diverted the trade from Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, across the Atlantic, across the Pacific towards the United States.
The second part of Obama’s strategy was that because of the energy independence of the United States through fracking and the Canadian oil boom, we no longer needed Middle Eastern oil. He felt that we were energy-self-sufficient, and indeed we’re going to start exporting pretty soon. He said basically “We’re going to pull our surplus forces out of the Middle East where we don’t really have any real interests anymore, and we’re going to shift them to rebuild the U.S. position on the axial end of Eurasia” along that Pacific island chain from Japan through South Korea down to the Philippines and Australia.
He went to Australia in 2011 and announced what was called the Pivot to Asia. He then arranged for a U.S. Marine battalion to be based at Darwin along with some Navy vessels, giving the United States ready access to the South China Sea through the Indonesian archipelago. His diplomats negotiated the right of U.S. forces to position equipment and have ready access to five Philippine bases in the South China Sea, renewing that long but now fated strategic alliance. He worked with South Korea to build a new base at Jeju and he renewed the strategic alliance with Japan. He got Japan to back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to the hilt. And by the time Obama left office, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was running into trouble, but it still had a chance of passing. The European treaty ran into the populism in Europe, which was rising very strongly. That was going to have a much more problematic passage.
The other part of Obama’s strategy was his major Africa diplomatic initiative. He had a summit meeting for about 50 African leaders. He made a major Presidential visit to Africa, which was not the sentimental journey that people imagined, but serious diplomacy. He was hoping to use diplomacy to get African nations to redirect their trade and investment toward the United States. So he had a systematic strategy.
President Trump intuited the pillars of U.S. power and began attacking them systematically in a kind of demolition job with almost a kind of unerring instinct, a malign design, if you will. In his first week in office, despite the pleas of Japan’s Prime Minister by phone call and personal visit to Trump Tower, Trump canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Prime Minister Abe of Japan said “This is a serious mistake, because China has its own regional cooperation pact with 16 members, that’s going to capture all the trade. So if you don’t have the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China’s going to direct all that trade towards it. You’ll lose out.” Trump didn’t pay any attention, he went ahead with that.
The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was already fading before Obama left office. The other thing that Trump has done is he’s systematically damaged our relationship with all of the four pillars underlying those axial ends of the Eurasian landmass. When he made his visit to NATO in May of this year, he refused to defend the mutual defense clause in NATO. Without that clause, there is no NATO. It was a major blow. Then we have the transcript of his first presidential phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia, in which Trump says it’s the worst phone call he’s ever had and slams the phone down. That accelerated the alienation of the Australian people away from the United States and towards a primary alliance with China.
We have the transcript of his presidential phone call last April with President Duterte of the Philippines. Trump’s calling up about the North Korean missile launches. It’s a very interesting transcript and it has a significance that nobody realized. Trump says “Kim Jong Un’s a real problem” and Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” President Trump says “Look, I got two nuclear subs right in the area. Very powerful subs.” Duterte says “I’m going to call China.”
And Trump says “You know, we got 20 times the bombs of North Korea.” President Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” It’s very clear. The Philippines is gone. The Philippines has moved into China’s orbit. That treaty for access to the five bases in the Philippines is basically a dead piece of paper.
Trump systematically attacked Korean history and politics, alienating Korea, so that the current President of South Korea, President Moon Jae-in, ran on a campaign slogan of “Say No to America.” I think that in the fullness of time, the tensions in the Korean peninsula are going to play out in a way that the U.S. bilateral pacts of both Korea and Japan are going to be very seriously diminished. I don’t know if they’ll become dead letters, but very pretty close to it.
Through his inept leadership on the global stage, Trump is accelerating the decline of the U.S. geopolitical position. He’s undercutting those axial ends of Eurasia that have been the pillars of U.S. geopolitical power for the past 70 years.
DJ: What are some commonalities of the end of empire that we can see manifesting in the U.S.?
AM: Empires decline through a complex series of processes. First of all, the numbers. The trade, the military dominance, the technological primacy that a rising empire has at its start, is inevitably eroded over time as other powers acquire similar skills, or they become more vital and newer economies. So the long-term trends are for any empire, at some point, they start to head downward. When the power is fading, the elites of a society who’ve enjoyed this kind of psychological sense of empowerment and dominion — the masters of the globe, the titans astride the planet – get irrational. They then can conduct military operations that are called by historians “micro-militarism.” The prime example is the United Kingdom. In the mid-1950’s, the United Kingdom had full employment, had dug themselves out of the rubble from the bombing of World War II. They had organized a systematic and very disciplined liquidation of their empire. They were giving up, through negotiations, political control over India, Malaya, etc. They were retaining the substance of their trade and investment as they negotiated their way out of colonial rule. It looked like Britain, in the mid-1950s, was on a path of comparative decline, but it was carefully managed, it was a slow decline that was leaving Britain in a pretty good position economically and diplomatically.
Then came Sir Anthony Eden in the Conservative Party. Somehow, the process of losing empire produced a psychological crisis. So when Gamal Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the British Conservative Party collectively reacted in an irrational fury. They secretly plotted with the French and the Israelis to launch the massive Suez invasion, concealing this operation from the United States, Britain’s prime ally: 300,000 troops, six aircraft carriers, and the Israeli Army launched itself across Sinai. They occupied half the Canal before the operation began to fall apart diplomatically. The British pound in Britain couldn’t sustain this operation. It was the global reserve currency and it began to lose value. The first bailout by the IMF was not done for Mexico or some impoverished third world country. It was done for Britain in the aftermath of Suez. That’s where the bailout came from. Because the world’s global reserve currency was trembling at the brink of collapse.
Suddenly Britain went from the mighty imperial lion to kind of a toothless tiger that would now roll over when America cracked the whip. And that all happened in the space of a month, through this micro-military invasion. Clearly, leaders can accelerate the decline of imperial power. Leaders that are reacting irrationally, that are brash and bold and kind of thunder and trumpet, laying claim to power that’s slipping away from them. In doing so, they actually accelerate the loss of power.
If there were ever a Sir Anthony Eden figure to take over the United States government, that would be Donald Trump. And the micro-military disaster can occur in the South China Sea, in the Korean peninsula, or somewhere in the Middle East. It awaits us. In fact, there are those who would argue 30 years from now, that America’s real micro-military disaster was the Iraq invasion of 2003. That was the same thing. American conservatives feeling a loss of U.S. global power, decided on a bold military strike. Capture Baghdad; build a massive embassy, the Green Zone; insert the U.S. in the heart of the Middle East; unleash the tides of democracy and capitalism. Break down these kind of socialist autocracies and bring the Middle East firmly into the American camp. Didn’t quite work out. Proved to be closer to Suez than a brilliant imperial coup.
So that pathology of power that’s so rational when the empire’s on the ascent, becomes dangerously irrational when an empire’s in decline.
DJ: Leaving off the sort of immorality of having an empire in the first place, and acting in the self-interest of the imperial power in decline, how would you see a reasoned and rational response to a decline of empire playing out? What would those at the center of empire do if they were continuing to act in their imperial self-interest and perceiving the decline? How would they age gracefully?
AM: First of all, we not talking about colonies anymore. We’re talking about the U.S., what’s known in the rubric as an informal empire, where we don’t actually control the sovereignty of nation-states. Back in the heyday of the British empire, a quarter of the globe, both population and territory, were British colonies, painted red on the map. But another quarter of the globe were part of the British informal empire. From the 1820’s to the 1890’s that included Latin America. At one point it included Egypt, Iran, and China. So there was another quarter of humanity that was in the British informal empire.
The U.S. iteration of empire looks like that British informal empire. The 190+ sovereign states of the world all have presidents and prime ministers, they have sacrosanct boundaries and national sovereignty. And yet, the United States exercises hegemony over them. The U.S. empire has overtones like the British.
Now, the question is not “whether empire.” It’s what kind of empire are you going to have? You take Professor Niall Ferguson’s point, that there have been 69 major empires over the last 4000 years of human history. The possibility of the next 100 years being without an empire seems pretty remote. Think back to one of the great events that shaped the world we live in: World War II. That was a clash between two powers: the British empire – Churchill was very proud, he didn’t talk about Britain, he talked about the British empire, – and the U.S. as an ascendant imperial power on one side. And there were the Axis powers on the other. Hitler had the largest control over Europe, a continental empire. Even larger, through his allies, than Napoleon. And the Japanese empire, if you count the population, through their conquest of China and Southeast Asia, and their occupation of Korea and Taiwan, had in terms of population the largest empire in human history.
So World War II was a clash of empires. Personally, I think most of us would agree that it’s probably a good idea that the British empire and the American hegemony defeated the Axis empires Japan and Germany. Because they didn’t offer much except exploitation of the subject peoples to benefit the metropole.
The U.S. empire has not only had its dark chapters, as every empire does, but we’ve been a distinctive empire in several ways. One of them has been that at the peak of our power, right after World War II, when the world was in ruins and rival industrial powers were heavily damaged, we had something like 50% of the world’s industrial production under our control. The United States presided over the construction of a new international order: The United Nations. Then they established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was the predecessor of the World Trade Organization. They created the instruments for the management of the global economy; the IMF and the World Bank.
The United States also believed in the rule of law. There was an international court that was linked to the United Nations, and instead of lining up the defeated heads of the Axis empires, the Germans and the Japanese, and just shooting them, or throwing them into some prison island, the United States conducted tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Those established, admittedly somewhat problematically but nonetheless established certain international rules of law. The Nuremberg Medical Code, for example.
This was an international order, grounded in the idea of inviolable national sovereignty. Every nation was sovereign. Second, nations did not conduct their affairs via conflict and war but by the rule of international law. Third, that there were human rights, and the object of this international order was to realize the human potential, the liberation of every individual. Though we all can list, chapter and verse, all the times we failed our own values, nonetheless, those values stand. So it’s important to have a kind of slow, managed transition, so that even as U.S. global power fades, that liberal international order that we built up at the peak of our power survives us.
That’s I think the troubling part of China’s rise. Because China does not stand for those principles.
DJ: What we can do to maintain these efforts toward human rights in the decline of the U.S. empire?
AM: I think that one of the most positive signs that we saw was when President Trump imposed his initial ban on travel from predominantly Muslim nations. That looked very clearly like a betrayal of the Constitutional protection of religious liberty, and furthermore a betrayal of the part of the mission of the U.N.: to deal with refugees. There’s a U.N. High Commission for Refugees. It manages what happens when people leave their state and they’re in the kind of limbo between states. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees moves in and does human rights work, provides food, clothing, shelter, education; and ultimately tries to get other states to take in people that have left their own state. This is a very important part of the maintenance of international order. In many ways, it’s the realization of the belief in human rights. We manifest it, we prove it by the way we treat those that are within the International order, who are stateless.
President Trump was challenging that very important international principle, imposing that Muslim ban and keeping the refugees out. This is triumphant nationalism: in his endless talks about sovereignty at the U.N. he undercuts the international community of nations, the rule of law, and the commitment to human rights. Sovereignty and boundaries transcends all. So there are Americans fighting that: hundreds of thousands of people across the country turned up at airports, lawyers came out and sat in the arrivals lounge with their laptops, filing appeals on behalf of people that were in INS holding behind the Customs barrier. That sort of popular outpouring in the United States represented a very deep commitment from a certain sector, I think a majority of the American people, to these principles and ideals. I think it’s important to keep up that kind of activity to defend these principles.
Sometimes our small actions, fighting for a refugee to get a visa, seems very small, just one individual or family. But it has profound implications for the principles of the U.S. liberal international order.
Then there is the resistance against some of the more excessive moves by the Trump administration. People who are fighting the wall, for example, which is a visible symbol of the closed nation-state, nationalism above all else. There are all kinds of manifestations of opposition to Trump that are ongoing. And that’s important, because whether consciously or unconsciously, all of the impacts upon the liberal international order.
DJ: I understand what you’re saying about the importance of resistance to Trump. That makes sense. With an ascendant Chinese imperial form, how does one maintain those human rights associated with the United States internationally? How does one extend that across the world?
AM: In very real terms, there was a lot of popular opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Nobody liked the secret arbitration tribunals that were going to be created by it. The Obama administration argued that in fact labor rights, environmental protections were inbuilt in the treaty far more than any other trade treaty. So there was a heavy debate on that issue. But basically, progressives joined nationalists and conservatives in an attack on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And at the time, when we were titans standing astride the globe, with our power seemingly unchallenged, I don’t think people realized what was at stake. That 40% of world trade was at stake. And that if we gave it up it would go to China.
So the issue on the left, and even on the right was just “stop the TPP.” People were unaware of the implications of what would happen when you did that. That it would represent a kind of retreat of the United States from international trade. It would weaken our relationships with those 11 other nations, which were critical trade and strategic partners for the United States.
People looked just at the domestic side of the equation, and they didn’t realize the very important international implications. I would argue that, on balance, a kind of liberal response, maybe a centrist response to the TPP should not have been “stop it.” It should have been “Reform it, revise it.”
There will be other treaties like that. Something will come again, it has to. Because another administration is going to realize that China is capturing all this trade through these preferential agreements, and there will be a revival of these negotiations.
At that point I would say that we should have learned our lesson from the TPP. That popular forces should go in eyes wide open, realizing the trade-offs. You want to reform it, you want to revise it, you want to get the best deal possible, but if you kill it, China’s going to capture the trade and they are not concerned about the environment or the working conditions of workers. There will be no protections in the Chinese trade pacts. So if you’re concerned about the people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and in the future, Burma, who are going to be working in those factories, producing goods for export; better that they’re in an American trade pact with sensitivity to those kinds of environmental and human rights and labor protections, than in a Chinese trade pact where it’s all realpolitik cash and carry, and the Chinese don’t care about those conditions.
I think we’re going to miss the American liberal international order, now that it’s fading and disappearing. We are going to come to appreciate it. We know its excesses to a fare thee well: manipulations of elections, torture, abortive wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the rest. But there’s the other side. The principles we stood for, and the international community we tried to build. We’re going to miss American hegemony as it fades away. We are going to miss the international rule of law, the environmental protection, the human rights, the community of nations that the U.S. has constructed. For that reason, it’s very important to realize the stakes, and to campaign in a way so that we manage this transition to a more multipolar world carefully and cautiously.
Featured image: Gwadar, Pakistan, site of a $200 billion Chinese infrastructure investment.
Editor’s note: This is the first part of an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read the Part Two here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
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Derrick Jensen: In the new book you mention the word “empire” a couple of times. Can you talk about the fact that the United States has been and is an empire? What is an empire?
Alfred McCoy: First of all, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson said that basically there have been about 69 or 70 empires in world history over the last 4000 years. It’s essentially a system whereby a dominant power exercises control, whether directly, through what was known as colonization, or indirectly through what is called “informal empire.” Those mechanisms of control include financial; political, sometimes through political manipulations of various sorts; military; and very importantly, cultural. It is the soft power, the salve, if you will, that makes all of the above a little bit more palatable for the peoples that are subordinated.
The United States has not only been an empire, but in the opinion of British imperial historians like John Darwin of Oxford University, it has been the most prosperous and powerful empire in human history. Americans, during the long years of the Cold War, particularly American historians, were a population in denial of this fundamental political reality. To summarize and simplify the politics of that period, basically the Soviet Union used the Marxist-inflected term “imperialist” to denigrate the United States. They aggressively promoted anti-imperialism, they made heroes of people like the liberator of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. In the Soviet propaganda, we were the bad empire, the pernicious, dominant, exploitative empire. For historians in the United States the United States was a world leader, a superpower, a global hegemon. But not an empire, because it contained that pejorative.
Once the Cold War was over, within a decade, when we were mired in the Middle East and Iraq intervention and the ever-more difficult pacification of Afghanistan – when it looked like U.S. global power was being challenged, like our massive military intervention in Iraq was going very badly indeed, when it looked like our power was challenged; right across the political spectrum, from very conservative all the way over to very liberal and radical, everybody started using the term “empire.” Now it was shorn of its pejorative, its propaganda value.
And they were using it to ask the question: “Was the U.S. empire over?” And the answer, generally, under the Obama administration was “No, the United States would be an empire for as long as it wanted to be.” The U.S. was the maker, the shaper of world history. We would decide when we wanted to give up our empire. Nobody could challenge us. Well, that’s changed.
DJ: What has changed?
AM: In a word: China. From the beginning of 2004 to 2012, a period of eight or nine years, in the midst of this revival of this discussion of empire, what historians found, myself included, was that the United States was the most powerful and prosperous empire in human history. But because of that evasion and denial, we weren’t the empire, the Soviet Union was the empire, we were the exceptional nation, we had American exceptionalism. The belief in American exceptionalism and its many manifestations was an article of faith, literally, among American historians during the Cold War. Not only was the United States empire the most powerful in human history, but it was arguably the least studied of them all.
I got together with some colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, and very quickly we created a global network called “Empires in Transition.” We had, at our peak, about 140 historians on four continents. We probed the comparative rise of the U.S. empire to global power. That was our first volume, a real door-stopper. In our second volume, after our conference in Barcelona, Spain, held in collaboration with the Pompeu Fabra University, we did a volume called Endless Empires about the decline of various empires; Spanish, European and American.
Although we could see the signs in 2012 when that book came out, that U.S. global power was fading, there wasn’t at that time a challenger. What’s happened in the last four or five years, particularly events in the South China Sea have made China’s challenge blindingly clear. In my book In the Shadow of the American Century that just came out last month, I drew upon that decade of study by 140 scholars on the comparative history of empires and boiled it all down into terms that ordinary readers could understand. Then explored, in a comparative sense, the rise of the U.S. to global power. What kind of empire were we at our peak, what were the bases of our power, and then how were the bases of our power being challenged by China’s rise? Those are the two problems I explore in the book.
Now China’s challenge is straightforward. It’s a strategy that most Americans don’t understand. Those that claim that the American empire will last forever, the sun will never set on the American empire, to paraphrase. The people who believe that simply don’t understand the nature of the Chinese challenge, how fundamental it is.
The Chinese challenge is twofold. And to appreciate it, we have to go way back to a cold London night in January, 1904. That night, at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row in London, the head of the London School of Economics, a guy named Sir Halford Mackinder, stood up and gave a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” He proposed, by looking at the map, that Europe, Asia and Africa were not three separate continents. In fact, if you looked at them a certain way, as a geographer could and should – and he was a geographer – they were a single continent, a single land mass that he called “the world island.” And he said that the epicenter of world history, of global power, lay at the heartland of the world island: a vast zone stretching for 4000 miles, from the Persian Gulf north and east, all the way to the East Siberian Sea.
Then he said that the human history for the past five centuries had been changed by something very simple. The people of western Europe learned to sail around the world island, from Europe all the way to Asia. And by doing so, they conducted a kind of strategic flanking maneuver over the great nomadic peoples of the heartland of the world island. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Turks, the Arabs; that had pounded at the gates of great empires: China and Europe. And by sailing around the world island, we saw then the rise of a half dozen European maritime empires.
“But now,” said Sir Halfred Mackinder, and he was alluding to an event that everyone in that audience that night in 1904 knew well – “Now the world is changing.” Because, as he was speaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway was being built by the Czarist empire, and it was stretching from Moscow for 5000 miles, all the way to Vladivostok. For the first time, Europe and Asia were actually a single landmass. They were only two continents because of the vast distances in the great empty center of this, places like the Gobi Desert. But now that this was being crossed by a railroad, Sir Halfred Mackinder predicted that there would be more railroads and that the power that learned to tap into the resources of the heartland of the world island would be the source of a new empire.
Mackinder not only made an observation about the past five centuries and a prediction about the future of global power, but in that single lecture he invented, by the application of geography to global power, the science of geopolitics. It’s in that single lecture. Everybody that’s been good at geopolitics ever since has really been basically an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder.
Of course, it took a long time for Mackinder’s prediction to come true because World War II intervened. Hitler tried to penetrate, break through at Stalingrad and capture Lebensraum, in the heartland, because Hitler was tutored by Mackinder’s German acolyte, a guy named Haushofer at Munich University. When Hitler was in prison, after his aborted Beer Hall Putsch, he was tutored by an expert in geopolitics. That’s where Hitler got the idea of Lebensraum. And then the Cold War came and dropped the Iron Curtain right across the would-be world island.
Ten years ago China began realizing Mackinder’s vision. With their $4 trillion in profits from world trade, much of it with the United States, the Chinese spent a trillion dollars, starting roughly in 2007, to lay down an amazing grid – first of all, 9000 miles of high-speed rail all across China. Then transcontinental rail links that stretch from western China all the way to western Europe, right across the world island. More importantly, they laid down a grid of gas and oil pipelines from Siberia in the north to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the center, all the way down to Burma in the south. They are bringing the oil and gas resources of central Asia and the Persian Gulf via that southern pipeline, into China. The net result of this grid is to realize Mackinder’s vision for infrastructure that will tie this vast land mass together, and shift the epicenter of geopolitical power to the nation that dominates the heartland of the world island, in this case China.
China has overlaid that physical infrastructure. Last year they opened the Infrastructure Development Bank with 57 nations, including many of our closest allies. They contributed on opening day $100 billion, which is about half the capital of the World Bank. They have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and they had a big conference earlier in the year, where President Xi Jinpin announced another trillion dollars to tie together the world island, to continue this massive infrastructure investment.
China is also going to have about $1 trillion of capital invested in Africa by 2025. Already they have three times the trade of the United States with Africa. So they’re really fully realizing Mackinder’s vision of the world island.
That’s part one. Part two is that China is very deftly threatening to undercut the basis of U.S. global power. 70 years ago the United States emerged as the world’s greatest power. In the first decades after World War II, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower laid down the instruments of U.S. global power. But everybody’s forgotten about how they did it. We no longer understand what the pillars of U.S. global power are. That same historian I talked about earlier, John Darwin, wrote a book that surveyed a thousand years of imperial clashes in the Eurasian landmass. He said that the United States after World War II became the most powerful empire in human history, because we were the first empire in history to capture what he called the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.
By that he meant that in 1949 the United States established the NATO alliance, which gave us a firm control over western Europe, one of the axial ends. Then in 1951, we signed four mutual defense treaties with a string of nations running down the Pacific island chain running down off the Asian landmass; Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. This gave us the other axial end of control. And then, between these two axial points in western Europe and the Pacific littoral, the United States laid down successive circles of steel. The first was a series of mutual defense treaties: NATO in the west, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in the east, and those four mutual defense treaties that I mentioned.
On top of that we had massive fleets. The 6th Fleet, based at Naples in the Mediterranean. The 7th Fleet, based at Subic Bay, Philippines, in the western Pacific on that Pacific littoral chain. After Britain pulled out of the Persian Gulf in the 1970’s, we established the 5th Fleet at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Our most recent addition, on top of hundreds of air bases and strategic bombers and fighters and all the rest, our latest circle of steel is: a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily all the way to Guam in the western Pacific the United States has built over the last ten years. That allow us to strike over much of the world island.
Now, the second part of the Chinese strategy is to slice through those circles of steel and break the U.S. geopolitical encirclement of Eurasia. They’ve done it over the last three years by building seven bases in the South China Sea, using dredges to convert atolls to military bases. They’ve now got antiaircraft missiles and jet landing strips on those military bases.
There is also something that Americans haven’t paid too much attention to. The Chinese have actually got even a stronger position in the Arabian Sea, which is geopolitically very important because that’s where the mouth to the Persian Gulf lies. Ten years ago, China invested $200 billion to transform a sleepy fishing village in western Pakistan, at Gwadar, which is just about 300 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf; about a day and a half sail, or steam. Then, a little over a year ago, President Xi Jinping went to Pakistan and he announced, with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, that China would invest $46 billion to build a road, rail, and gas oil pipeline corridor stretching from western China down the length of Pakistan all the way to Gwadar.
Then just last year, China opened a big naval base at Djibouti, at the other end of the Arabian Sea. So with their position in the South China Sea, and these two big bases in the Arabian Sea, China is slicing through that geopolitical encirclement. China is also using its trade to drive a wedge between America and its four major Asia-Pacific allies that are the foundation for the Pacific littoral that’s the axial end of U.S. geopolitical power.
So that’s the nature of the Chinese challenge. The American response has been mixed.
Two days ago, three of last wild bison were shot and killed illegally in a no-shooting zone in a campground barely 100 yards from the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.
The next morning, I skied out of the woods with a patrol from Buffalo Field Campaign and found the buffalos’ butchered carcasses; ribcages, stomachs, patches of hide, and a few leftover chunks of flesh parting the slowly flowing water of the Madison River.
I’m not opposed to hunting. In fact, I’m a hunter myself and am looking forward to elk season. The problem is that the Central Herd of the Yellowstone buffalo number less than 700. Their numbers have plummeted in recent years. Park biologists say that the population decline is “unexplained,” but it seems pretty well explained to me: hazing, harassment, human manipulation, and overhunting are driving wild buffalo in Yellowstone to the brink.
I just learned a few minutes ago that the other major threat (besides unsustainable overhunting) to wild buffalo in the greater Yellowstone area is nearly ready to begin operation. Yellowstone National Park is opening their buffalo trap on the north side of the park in the Gardiner Basin. At this facility, your tax dollars and your public lands are put to work to trap and ship to slaughter hundreds of wild buffalo each year in an effort to maintain populations at an artificially low “minimum sustainable number.” All this is being done on behalf of Montana’s infamous livestock industry.
The total buffalo population is less than 4700, and the U.S. government and legally permitted overhunting is killing hundreds per year.
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Here at Buffalo Field Campaign, everything revolves around the buffalo. Patrols leave every morning and afternoon to keep tabs on herds and hunting activity. Another group monitors the trap and firing-line style hunting at Gardiner. We gather each evening to discuss the day’s activity and share information on where the buffalo are, how many are located in which areas, which direction they are moving, what patrols to do the next day, and so on.
On bad days, we share information on how many were killed.
We bear witness to these atrocities and organize to stop them under a buffalo skull mounted on the wall and a shrine of artwork, poems, quilts, and other items dedicated to or inspired by the buffalo. As I write this, I can look up and see artwork from kids. “I heart buffalo – Tatanka roam free!” “Don’t kill the buffalo!” “I love buffalos.”
The headquarters of Buffalo Field Campaign is located in a 100-year-old cabin that was originally built for railroad workers. The irony that a building originally constructed by one of the prime instruments of western colonization is now being used to house a resistance movement isn’t lost on us.
But the walls are thick and the old stonework throws heat from the big wood stove nicely. This is a good place now. A 20-year spirit of resistance emanates from the patina on the lodgepole pine walls and the hearts of the people moving through the space. It’s practical, too. We’re close to the areas where hunting and hazing pressure is highest, and having a place to warm up, eat a delicious meal (fresh 20-inch trout and wild rice last night), and sleep soundly is important after a day out skiing in 5-degree temperatures.
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Sitting around camp this afternoon after returning from patrol with a few friends, we talked about how the dominant culture is killing everything. Prairie Dogs are being poisoned en masse in Colorado (and elsewhere). Pinyon-Juniper forests are being bulldozed into oblivion. The oceans, the watery womb of all life on this planet, are dying.
Places like Buffalo Field Campaign provide a starting point for building effective resistance. Long-term, grassroots projects based on non-compromising defense and material support are essential. And organizations allow for enough resources to be gathered in one place to be more effective.
In an article titled, “Once, the Monsoon,” my friend Suprabha Seshan writes about her work in plant conservation in the Western Ghat mountains in India. She writes of the breathtaking beauty of her home, “where a small team of dedicated ecosystem gardeners, skilled in various aspects of horticulture, plant conservation and Western Ghat ecology, grow native plants of this mountain ecosystem, or biome, through techniques honed over four decades of experimentation and practice.
“The trails are full of jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and smashed, partly-eaten remains of its relative, the ainili (Artocarpus hirsutus), which sports smaller orange fruits with a spiny skin enclosing lobes of sweet flesh and large seeds. Wild jamuns and mangoes, rose apples, guavas and sweet limes, and dozens of forest tree species are also fruiting. Bonnet macaques, Nilgiri langurs, Malabar grey hornbills and giant squirrels are gorging in the canopy. Someone reported seeing a troop of lion-tailed macaques with babies. It is feasting time for everybody in this valley: wild boar, humans and cattle included. Elephants come by at night, attracted from afar by the smell of overripe jackfruit—to them, a delicacy.”
Her team cultivates more than 2,000 species of highly endangered plants, “mostly from areas that have already been deforested.” She describes their work as a search-and-rescue mission, writing that “we refer to these plants as refugees, similar to human refugees suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change and general toxification of the environment.”
The monsoon that brings life-giving rain to the Western Ghat mountains is failing because of global warming. Rains are coming late or not at all. All the beings that are dependent on the monsoon, including humans, are at risk of total collapse because industrial civilization is destroying the Earth’s climate. The heroic work being done at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary could be undone by the collapse of the biosphere as a whole. Suprabha concludes her article by saying that we need to be asking where our loyalty lies: with “the machines or the monsoon?”
Here with the buffalo, the same questions are occurring to me. The heroic work of defending the buffalo is absolutely essential, and unless the death march of this culture is stopped, the buffalo are headed for the same extinction that faces us, too.
I want a world in which wild buffalo roam 60 million strong and in which the monsoon brings rivers of rain to the Western Ghat mountains. This will require working with organizations like the Buffalo Field Campaign and the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, and it will also require dismantling the larger systems that are killing the planet.
Without both approaches—fighting for the local, and dismantling the global—we, and the buffalo, and the monsoon, are doomed.
