Revolution is the solution
Becoming vegetarian is more than a moral decision, it is a threat to the new world order. Tony Wardle outlines his personal view of current happenings
In the 1960s, I became the father of a beautiful little girl. It was a time when the talk was of peace, great changes were being demanded and old, repressive values were being challenged.
Seemingly from nowhere, we began to show concern for the environment. I remember a newspaper article in The Guardian headlined Spaceship Earth. It likened our planet to a space craft, the environment to a life support system and global resources to the stores on this tiny space shuttle. The conclusion was simple – either we started to behave responsibly and sustainably or we would eventually pay a terrifying price for our stupidity. The logic was inescapable and my eyes were opened.
I was filled with hope because it seemed that we were finally beginning to formulate caring, commonsense policies that would create a saner, less avaricious world. I felt my daughter had the prospects of a wonderful future and vowed I would never judge her by her financial success but by the generosity of her spirit, the openness of her heart, her capacity for love and understanding and her ability to embrace values of care and compassion. She has rewarded me handsomely.
In August, 2002, I again became a father – of twins – and two tiny little mites cried their first cries in a very different world. What had happened in the interceding 37 years is incredible.
The civilising values that ordinary people had fought for over decades and thought they had won in perpetuity – decent healthcare, education, secure retirement, affordable transport and control over their own institutions – are all in an advanced state of dismemberment. No longer are these essential support systems judged on their ability to meet the needs of those who use them but on their ‘efficiency’ – a code for eventual profitability. If money can’t be made from them, they’re not worth supporting.
Like the word ‘love’ in American movies, the word democracy is constantly abused – and the more it is quoted, it seems, the more fragile becomes democracy itself. A refusal to ban hunting or to take back the railways into public ownership are simple examples of contempt for democracy on a national level. On an international level it is to accuse countries such as Iraq of being undemocratic while historically supporting every foul dictatorship that emerged, providing they allowed western multinationals to grow and prosper on cowed and cheap labour.
That Saddam Hussein is a dictator, cruel and barbarous and spits on human rights is beyond question. But that has always been his way yet it didn’t stop us from queuing up to sell him armaments, helping him in his war against Iran and acting as apologists for him when he gassed Kurdish villagers. I remember Douglas Hurd (I think it was) claiming that the massacre might have been perpetrated by the Kurds themselves in order to gain public sympathy for their cause. That was cynicism polished to a high sheen.
So, Saddam is evil because he attacks Kurds. When the Turks do the same thing we remain silent because they are one of us. Saddam kills people publicly and barbarically and we complain. When Saudi Arabia makes a spectacle of slicing off the heads of terrified little Philippino servant girls in Jedah’s Chop Chop Square, we remain silent and keep the arms shipments flowing.
The principle protagonist in this war – which in reality is an invasion – is not Mr Bush, egged on by our own administration, but global capital. Bush is merely the mouthpiece. He has introduced a string of measures at home which reward the energy companies who paid for his election and permit them to trash the environment at will. He has transferred resources from the poorest to the richest and is happy to leave 40 million of his own people without any access to health care while talking of human rights. Internationally, he has torn up arms limitation treaties so that the military/industrial complex can prosper, turned his back on the World Court, refuses to acknowledge global warming as a problem and declines to sign the Kyoto agreement on limiting CO2 emissions. He claims God as his mentor but it is the devil who can be heard chuckling the loudest.
The ideology which lies behind these domestic and foreign policies is not difficult to understand. The US accounts for 25 per cent of the world’s pollution because of its irresponsible and profligate use of global resources. We like to blame overpopulation for the world’s problems and yet the birth of one American child is 20 times more damaging than the birth of an Ethiopian child or a Bangladeshi because each US child will consume 20 times more of the world’s precious resources than either of these. For a British child it is between six and 10 times more so we are hardly free from criticism.
The economic system that drives the US – and increasingly the entire planet – requires ever-increasing consumption to keep it afloat. A consumer economy which does not grow will quickly collapse. So, like a huge and bloated queen bee, the rest of the world is now engaged in sustaining the US way of life, crawling all over it to meet its insatiable demands, hopefully waiting for the crumbs that might be brushed from the dining table. The key to this constant growth is, of course, oil.
Once self sufficient, the US now gobbles up 25 per cent of world oil production and has to import over 50 per cent of its needs, much of it from the despotic Saud regime in Saudi Arabia. This dependency will grow to two-thirds by 2020, just at the time when production has peaked and demand is dramatically increasing – a frightening situation for any oil addict. The Saud family are unlikely to survive and may well be replaced by a fundamentalist regime who wouldn’t hesitate to use oil as a political weapon against the US.
Iraq has the second-largest reserves of oil in the Middle East and a compliant, US-backed regime would provide just the security the US needs if it is to continue consuming the world like a frenetic Pacman. Cynics now believe (or at least this one does) that the US war on terrorism and its global campaign to gain control of foreign oil reserves are one and the same thing and the invasion of Afghanistan fits neatly into this mould.
The new Caspian oil-producing countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, clustered around Afghanistan’s northern border, were at risk of being swallowed up by the Taliban and their anti-US, fundamentalist bile. As it is, that threat has been defused and a strong US military presence in these countries now keeps them politically in line and at the same time allows the expensive but vulnerable new oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Mediterranean to be patrolled and defended.
If you have God and right on your side you don’t need to lie. So, when we are told that there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, despite a complete lack of evidence, we know that something else is cooking. When it is claimed that weapons inspectors will never find the laboratories producing deadly spores and chemicals because a front room is all that’s needed, we know that front rooms exist as commonly in Bermondsey as they do in Baghdad. When it is claimed that a clapped-out, 30-year-old Russian-made missile that might manage to travel 100 miles on a good day with the wind behind it is a threat to the entire western world, it pushes rhetoric to new frontiers.
And then, of course, there’s MAD – mutually assured destruction. The balance of terror which supposedly kept the Russian nuclear might at bay for 50 years crumbles impotently when confronted by a dad’s army of reluctant conscripts (mostly) and a dozen or so Airfix kit tanks – or so we’re told.
While this floodtide of rhetoric has been swirling over the airwaves, those who monitor the real state of the world have been throwing their hands up in despair. The UN Environment Agency, the World Watch Institute, even the conservative World Wildlife Fund for Nature are all saying that human’s tenure of this planet is extremely limited unless we act now to curb our profligacy and the devastating damage it is causing to the natural world. And now comes our own Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, with an apocalyptic article in The Guardian. It is hard to believe he is in the same government as Blair and Prescott.
He likens the human race to a deadly virus which is transforming the world and its ecosystems at an exponential rate, climate change being only the most obvious example. At last someone confirms our own warning that we are in danger of creating a phenomenon called positive feedback, which once begun cannot be reversed.
Meacher maintains that temperatures are forecast to rise by as much as 5.8 deg C this century – by 8.1 deg in some parts of the word. Even a slight warming of the oceans reduces their ability to absorb CO2, causing even more warming. But worse, if higher temperatures cause instability in the shallow waters of the Arctic, a devastating 10,000 billion tonnes of methane – 20 times more damaging than CO2 – could be released. Incredibly, while scientists say we should be reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent to lessen this risk, they are projected to increase by 75 per cent by 2020.
“The ultimate concern is that if runaway global warming occurred, temperatures could spiral out of control and make our planet uninhabitable. This is the first time that a species has been at risk of generating its own demise” says Meacher.
The US could not have indicated any more clearly that it has no intention of listening to Mr Meacher nor the scientists who inform him. Nor will it curb its destructive, gargantuan appetite. In fact it has constructed a world order whose main purpose is to help keep its consumption going. The World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are the non-militaristic tools through which the economies of smaller countries are thrown open to US multinational exploitation. When these imperialistic institutions fail to get their way, armed invasion is now the reserve position.
Once it was just industries which were swallowed up but now it is such basic necessities as the provision of clean water, health care, social services and transport. If you are in any doubt as to what the world will look like under this global hegemony, just go to Harlem and Watts and the massive slums of Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington, where infant mortality rates are on a par with some of the poorest developing countries; or talk to the 40 million US citizens who have no right to health care; or take a look at Southern Africa and witness the despicable spectacle of US multinational pharmaceutical companies refusing the right to impoverished countries to produce cheap ‘generic’ versions of AIDS drugs for their stricken people. Meanwhile, the number of AIDS orphans climbs into the stratosphere. Increasingly, take a long, hard look at our own society and see what is happening to it with its carbon-copy policies.
It is this which is the real betrayal by Blair and his New Labour. They have signed up lock, stock and barrel to the most rapacious form of capitalism the world has ever seen which, like the economic dinosaur it is, will thrash around in a damaging orgy of frenzied, myopic self interest, trying to ward off the death agonies which are already starting to bite.
And what has all this got to do with us veggies and those who are horrified by the desperate cruelties handed out to animals? Everything! Of all the world’s damaging consumer habits, meat production and dairying are the most damaging. Pick any environmental problem – almost any one – and you’ll find these industries at the heart of it. Deforestation and the spread of deserts; loss of soil fertility and erosion; water pollution and the drying up of the water table; nitrogen pollution and acid rain. And of course, global warming.
And it’s set to get worse. The introduction of GM technology has nothing to do with feeding starving people but is a concerted attempt to increase crop production in order to provide sufficient food to spread factory farming across the world. Here, in these fetid and stinking prisons, is where the profits lie – not so much the meat itself but the battery of fertilisers, pesticides, drugs and antibiotics necessary for intensive agriculture and to keep these systems afloat.
Fifty billion animals a year consume an awful lot of chemicals! They also eat an unimaginable volume of high-quality feed while the 12 million children who die from hunger-related diseases every year are merely part of the ‘collateral damage’.
By stepping aside from this frenetic destruction you are clearly stating that there is more to your ethos than profit and loss. It would seem you have a very different view of what the world should look like and it is a more benevolent value system that guides your life. For this reason you are a threat and so you can continue to expect to be marginalised, trivialised, patronised and reviled. It doesn’t mean to say that you will not prevail because one thing the attack on Iraq has taught us is that people can think for themselves. We have to hope this is only a beginning.
I sincerely hope my little boys will develop the same loving values as their sister but they are going to need something else. The real weapon of mass destruction that threatens all of us is the adulation of profit and its rapacious destruction of our beautiful world. If it is to be stopped, my boys will have to become revolutionaries. I don’t envy them because they will have a bitter fight on their hands.