On the streets of Moscow in the tens of
thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments
of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists,
all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the
year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian
demonstrators.
“We exist!” Think of
it as a simple statement of fact, an implicit demand to be taken seriously (or
else), and undoubtedly an expression of wonder, verging on a question: “We exist?”
And who could blame them for
shouting it? Or for the wonder? How miraculous it was. Yet
another country long immersed in a kind of popular silence suddenly finds
voice, and the demonstrators promptly declare themselves not
about to leave the stage when the day -- and the demonstration
-- ends. Who guessed beforehand that perhaps 50,000 Muscovites would turn
out to protest a rigged electoral process in a suddenly restive country, along
with crowds in St. Petersburg , Tomsk ,
and elsewhere from the south to Siberia ?
And so it seems, globally
speaking. Tunis , Cairo ,
Madrid , Madison, New York , Santiago , Homs .
So many cities, towns, places. London ,
Sana’a, Athens , Oakland ,
Berlin , Rabat , Boston , Vancouver ...
it could take your breath away. And as for the places that aren’t yet
bubbling -- Japan , China ,
and elsewhere -- watch out in 2012 because, let’s face it, “we exist.”
Everywhere, the “we”
couldn’t be broader, often remarkably, even strategically, ill defined: 99% of humanity containing so many potentially
conflicting strains of thought and being: liberals and fundamentalists,
left-wing radicals and right-wing nationalists, the middle class and the
dismally poor, pensioners and high-school students. But the “we” couldn’t
be more real.
This “we”
is something that hasn’t been seen on this planet for a long time, and perhaps
never quite so globally. And here’s what should take your breath away,
and that of the other 1%, too: “we” were never supposed to exist.
Everyone, even we, counted us out.
Until last December,
when a young Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself alight to
protest his own humiliation, that “we” seemed to consist of the non-actors of
the twenty-first century and much of the previous one as well. We’re
talking about all those shunted aside, whose lives only weeks, months or, at most,
a year ago, simply didn’t matter; all those the powerful absolutely knew they
could ride roughshod over as they solidified their control of the planet’s
wealth, resources, property, as, in fact, they drove this planet down.
For them, “we” was just a
mass of subprime humanity that hardly existed. So of all the statements
of 2011, the simplest of them -- “We exist!” -- has been by far the most
powerful.
Name of the Year: Occupy
Wall Street
Every year since 1927,
when it chose Charles Lindbergh for his famed flight across the Atlantic,Time magazine
has picked a “man” (even when, on rare occasions, it was a
woman like Queen Elizabeth II) or, after 1999, a “person” of the year (though
sometimes it’s been an inanimate object like “the computer” or a group or an
idea). If you want a gauge of how “we” have changed the global
conversation in just months, those in the running this year included “Arab Youth
Protestors,” “Anonymous,” “the 99%,” and “the 1%.” Admittedly, so
were Kim Kardashian, Casey Anthony, Michele Bachman, Kate Middleton, and Rupert
Murdoch. In the end, the magazine’s winner of 2011 was “the protester.”
How could it have been
otherwise? We exist -- and even Time knows it.
From Tunis in January to Moscow in December this has been, day by day,
week by week, month by month, the year of the protester. Those looking back may
see clues to what was to come in isolated eruptions like the suppressed Green
Movement in Iran or under-the-radar civic activism emerging in Russia .
Nonetheless, protest, when
it arrived, seemed to come out of the blue.
Unpredicted and unprepared
for, the young (followed by the middle aged and the old) took to the streets of
cities around the globe and simply refused to go home, even when the police
arrived, even when the thugs arrived, even when the army arrived, even when the pepper
spraying, the arrests, the wounds, thedeaths began and didn’t stop.
And by the way, if “we
exist” is the signature statement of 2011, the name of the year would have to
be “Occupy Wall Street.” Forget the fact that the place occupied,
Zuccotti Park, wasn’t on Wall Street but two blocks away, and that, compared to
Tahrir Square or Moscow’s thoroughfares, it was one of the smallest plots of
protest land on the planet. It didn’t matter.
The phrase was blowback of
the first order. It was payback, too. Those three words instantly
turned the history of the last two decades upside down and helped establish the
protesters of 2011 as the third of the four great planetary occupations of our
era.
Previously, “occupations”
had been relatively local affairs. You occupied a country (“the
occupation of Japan ”),
usually a defeated or conquered one. But in our own time, if it were left
to me, I’d tell the history of humanity, American-style, as the story of four
occupations, each global in nature:
The First Occupation: In the 1990s, the financial types of our world
set out to “occupy the wealth,” planetarily speaking. These were, of
course, the globalists, now better known as the neoliberals, and they were
determined to “open” markets everywhere. They were out, as Thomas
Friedman put it (though he hardly meant it quite this way), to flatten the
Earth, which turned out to be a violent proposition.
The neoliberals were let
loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post-Cold-War Clinton years. They
wanted to apply a kind of American economic clout that they thought would never
end to the organization of the planet. They believed the U.S. to be the
economic superpower of the ages and they had their own dreamy version of what
an economic Pax Americana would be like. Privatization
was the name of the game and their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved
calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund to “discipline”
developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.
In the end, gleefully
slicing and dicing subprime mortgages, they financialized the world and so
drove a hole through it. They were our economic jihadis and,
in the great meltdown of 2008, they deep-sixed the world economy they had
helped “unify.” In the process, by increasing the gap between the
super-rich and everyone else, they helped create the 1% and the 99% in the U.S. and globally, preparing the
ground for the protests to follow.
The Second Occupation: If the first occupation drove an economic stake
through the heart of the planet, the second did a similar thing
militarily. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the “unilateralists” of the
Bush administration staked their own claim to a global occupation at the point
of a cruise missile. Romantics all when it came to the U.S. military and what it could do, they invaded Iraq , determined to garrison the
oil heartlands of the planet. It was going to be “shock and awe” and
“mission accomplished” all the way. What they had in mind was a
militarized version of an “occupy the wealth” scheme. Their urge to privatize
even extended to the military itself and, when they
invaded, in their baggage train came crony corporations ready to feast.
Once upon a time, Americans
knew that only the monstrous enemy -- most recently that "evil empire,”
the Soviet Union -- could dream of world
conquest and occupation. That was, by nature, what evil monsters
did. Until 2001, when it turned out to be quite okay for the good guys of
planet Earth to think along exactly the same lines.
The invasion of Iraq, that “cakewalk,” was meant to
establish a multi-generational foothold in the Greater Middle East, including
permanent bases garrisoned with 30,000 to 40,000 American troops, and that was to be
just the beginning of a chain reaction. Soon enough Syria and Iran
would bow down before U.S.
power or, if they refused, would go down anyway thanks to American
techno-might. In the end, the lands of the Greater Middle East would fall
into line (with the help of Washington ’s proxy
in the region, Israel ).
And since there was no other
nation or bloc of nations with anything like such military power, nor would any
be allowed to arise, the result -- and they weren’t shy about this -- would be
a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana more
or less till the end of time. As the “sole superpower” or even
“hyperpower,” Washington
would, in other words, occupy the planet.
Of course, Iraq and Afghanistan were also more
traditional occupations. In Baghdad ,
for instance, American consul L. Paul Bremer III issued “Order 17,” which essentially granted to every foreigner connected with
the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered
with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institutions. This
included "freedom of movement without delay throughout Iraq ," and
neither their vessels, vehicles, nor aircraft were to be "subject to
registration, licensing, or inspection by the [Iraqi] Government." Nor in
traveling would any foreign diplomat, soldier, consultant, or security guard,
or any of their vehicles, vessels, or planes be subject to "dues, tolls,
or charges, including landing and parking fees." And that was only
the beginning.
Order 17, which read like an
edict plucked directly from a nineteenth century colonial setting, caught the
local hubris of those privatizing occupiers.
All of this proved to be fantasy bordering on delusion, and it didn’t take long for
that to become apparent. In fact, the utter failure of the unilateralists
came home to roost in the form of a SOFA agreement with Iraqi authorities that promised to
end the U.S.
garrisoning of the country not in 2030 or 2050, but in 2011. And the Bush
administration felt forced to agree to it in 2008, the same year that the
economic unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global
domination.
In that year, the neoliberal
effort to privatize the planet went down in flames, along with Lehman Brothers,
all those subprime mortgages and derivatives, and a whole host of banks and
financial outfits rescued from the trash bin of history by the U.S. Treasury.
Talk about giving the phrase “creative destruction” the darkest meaning
possible: the two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet.
They let loose demons of
every sort, even as they ensured that the world’s first experience of a “sole
superpower” would prove short indeed. Heap onto the rubble they left
behind the global disaster of rising prices for the basics -- food and fuel -- and you have a situation so
combustible that no one should have been surprised when a single Tunisian match set it aflame.
The first two failed
occupations plunged the planet into chaos and misery,
even as they paved the way, in a thoroughly unintended fashion, for an Arab
Spring ready to take on the Middle East ’s 1%.
Note as well that, as their
policies went to hell in a hand basket, the first and second set of occupiers
walked off with their treasure and their selves intact. Neither the bankers nor themilitarists went to jail, not a one of them.
They had made out like bandits and continue to do so. They took home their multi-million dollar bonuses. They kept their yachts,
mansions, and (untaxed) private jets. They took with them the
ability to sign million-dollar contracts for bestselling memoirs and
to go on the lecture circuit at $100,000-$150,000 a pop. They had, in the case
of the second occupation, quite literally, gotten away with murder (and
torture, and kidnapping, etc.). In the process, the misery of the
99% had been immeasurably increased.
The Third Occupation: The most significant and surprising thing the first
two globalizing occupations did, however, was to globalize protest. Together
they created the basis, in pure iniquity and inequity, in dead bodies and
bruised lives, for Tahrir Square
and Occupy Wall Street. Their failures set the stage for something new in
the world.
The result was a Chalmers
Johnson-style case of blowback, the spirit of which was caught in the
protesters’ appropriation of the very word “occupy.” There was a sense
out there that they had occupied us long and
disastrously enough. It was time for us to occupy them, and so our own
parks, squares, streets, towns, cities, and countries.
The urge to right things is,
in fact, a powerful one. Gene Turitz, a friend of mine who took part in
the demonstrations that briefly shut down the port
of Oakland , California , recently wrote me the following
about the experience. It catches something of the mood of this moment:
“The mayor of Oakland , a former
progressive, blasted the economic violence that was being perpetrated by
the Occupy movement shutting down the port. No word about the economic
violence of banks stealing people's homes through foreclosures, or the economic
violence of [sports] team owners demanding the city build new stadiums for
their teams or they will move to another city, or of corporations threatening
to move if this or that is not done for them. That’s just the way things
are done. You do not want the ‘violence’ of thousands of people
peacefully showing that things must change to make their lives better.”
Or in two words: we
exist! And possibly in the nick of time.
The Fourth Occupation: This is both the newest and oldest of
occupations. I’m speaking about humanity’s occupation of Earth. In
recent centuries, can there be any question that we’ve been hard on this
planet, exploiting it for everything it’s worth? Our excuse was that we
genuinely didn’t know better, at least when it came to climate change, that we
just didn't understand what kind of long-term harm the burning of fossil fuels
could do. Now, of course, we know. Those who don’t are either in
denial or simply couldn’t care less.
And here’s just a taste of
what we do know about how the fourth occupation is affecting the planet:thirteen of the warmest years since recordkeeping
began have occurred in the last 15 years. In 2010, historically staggering amounts of carbon dioxide were sent into
the atmosphere (“the biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases”); extreme
weather was, well, remarkably extreme in 2011 -- torrid droughts, massive fires, vast floods -- and, in the Arctic, ice is now melting
atunprecedented rates, which will mean future sea-level rises that will threaten low-lying
areas of the planet. And as for that temperature, well, it’s going to keep going up, uncomfortably so.
Potentially, this is the
monster blowback story of all time.
And here’s just a taste of
what we know about business as usual on this planet: if we rely on the previous
occupiers and their ilk to save us, then it’s going to be a long, dismal
wait. Don’t count on energy giants like Exxon or BP or their lobbyists and
the politicians they influence to stop climate change. After all, none of
them are going to be alive to see a far less habitable planet, so what do they
care? Torrid zones are so then, profit sheets and bonuses are so now,
which means: don’t count on the 1% to give a damn.
If it were up to them -- a
few outliers among them excepted -- we could probably simply write the Earth
off as a future friendly place for us. And the planet wouldn’t
care. Give it 100,000, 10 million, 100 million years and it’ll get itself
back in shape with plenty of life forms to go around.
We’re such ephemeral
creatures with such brief life spans. It’s hard for us to think even in
the sort of modestly long-range way that climate change demands. So thank
your lucky stars that the first and second wave occupiers created a third
payback occupation they never imagined possible. And thank your lucky
stars that movements to occupy our planet in a new way and turn back the
global warmers are slowly rising as well.
Like the attempted
occupations of the global economy and the Greater Middle East, each spurred by
a sense of greed that went beyond all bounds, the occupation of our planet is
guaranteed to create its own oppositional forces, and not just in the natural
world either. They are perhaps already emerging along with the Arab
spring, the European summer, and the American fall, not to speak of the Russian
winter. And when they’re here -- as the fifth occupation of planet Earth
-- when they stand their ground and chant “We exist!” in anger, strength, and
wonder, maybe then we can really tackle climate change and hope it isn’t too
late.
Maybe the fifth occupation
is the one we’re waiting for -- and don't for a second doubt that it will
come. It’s already on its way.
Tom Engelhardt,
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as
well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear(Haymarket Books), has just
been published
rubbish... too many words... no sence...
ReplyDelete