Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Fate of Our Earth
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on January 5, 2016, Printed on January 6, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176086/ ;
Why the Islamic State Is the Minor Leagues of Terror
Putting Threats into Perspective for 2016
By Tom Engelhardt
It's time to panic!
As 2015 ended, this country was certifiably terror-stricken. It had the
Islamic State (IS) on the brain. Hoax terror threats or terror imbroglios
shut down school systems from Los Angeles to New Hampshire, Indiana to a
rural county in Virginia. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, citing terror
attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, cancelled a prospective tour of Europe
thanks to terror fears, issuing a statement that "orchestra management
believes there is an elevated risk to the safety of musicians and their
families, guest artists, DSO personnel, and travelling patrons." By year's
end, the Justice Department had charged an "unprecedented" 60 people with
terrorism-related crimes (often linked to social media exchanges).
While just north of the border Canada's new government and its citizens were
embracing the first of 25,000 Syrian refugees in an atmosphere of near
celebration, citizens and government officials in the lower 48 were
squabbling and panicking about the few who had made it here. ("Sid Miller,
the Texas agriculture commissioner, compared Syrian refugees to
rattlesnakes, posting on Facebook images of snakes and refugees and asking,
'Can you tell me which of these rattlers won't bite you?'")
In the two presidential debates that ended the year, focusing in whole or
part on "national security," the only global subject worthy of discussion
was -- you guessed it -- the Islamic State and secondarily immigration and
related issues. Media panelists didn't ask a single question in either
debate about China or Russia (other than on the IS-related issue of who
might shoot down Russian planes over Syria) or about the relative success of
the French right-wing, anti-Islamist National Front Party and its
presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen (even though her American analog,
Donald Trump, was on stage in one debate and a significant subject of the
other). And that just begins a long list of national security issues that no
one felt it worth bringing up, including the fact that in Paris 195
countries had agreed on a potentially path-breaking climate change deal.
As the Dallas Symphony Orchestra signaled, "Paris" now means only one thing
in this country: the bloody terror attack on the Eagles of Death Metal
concert at the Bataclan theater and related assaults. In fact, if you were
following the "news" here as 2015 ended, you might be forgiven for thinking
that we Americans lived in a land beset by, and under siege from, Islamic
terror and the Islamic State. The latest polls indicate that striking
numbers of Americans now view the threat of terrorism as the country's
number one danger, see it as a (if not the) critical issue facing us,
believe that it and national security should be the government's top
priorities, and are convinced that the terrorists are at present "winning."
You would never know that, if you left out what might be called
self-inflicted pain like death by vehicle (more than 33,000 deaths
annually), suicide by gun (more than 21,000 annually) or total gun deaths
(30,000 annually), and fatal drug overdoses (more than 47,000 annually),
this is undoubtedly one of the safest countries on the planet. Over these
years, the American dead from Islamic terror outfits or the "lone wolves"
they inspire have added up to the most modest of figures, even if you
include that single great day of horror, September 11, 2001. Include deaths
from non-Islamic right-wing acts of terror (including, for instance, Dylann
Roof's murders in a black church in Charleston), a slightly more impressive
figure in recent years, and you still have next to nothing. Even if you add
in relatively commonplace mass shootings, from school campuses to malls to
workplaces, that are not defined as "terror," and accept the broadest
possible definition of such shootings (a minimum of four killed or injured),
you would still have the sort of danger that couldn't be more modest
compared to death by vehicle, suicide, or drugs -- phenomena that obsess few
Americans.
The Islamic State in Perspective
Still, as 2016 begins, terror remains the 800-pound gorilla (in reality, a
marmoset) in the American room and just about the only national security
issue that truly matters. So why shouldn't I join the crowd? Who wants to be
left in the lurch? But first, I think it makes sense to put the Islamic
State in perspective.
Yes, it's a brutal, extreme religious-cum-political outfit, the sort of
movement that probably could only arise on a shattered landscape in a
shattered region filled with desperate souls looking for any explanation
for, or solution to, nightmarish lives. There can be no question that it's
had remarkable success. Its self-proclaimed "caliphate" now controls
territory the size of (to choose a common comparison) Great Britain with a
population of perhaps a few million people. Since there are seldom reporters
on the scene (for obvious reasons of health and well-being), we have no idea
whether IS has 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000 fighters and potential
suicide bombers under arms. We do know that those arms (despite a couple of
captured tanks) are generally light and the bombs largely of the homemade
variety.
The Islamic State has shown quite a knack for generating a stream of revenue
from black market oil sales, ransoms from kidnappings, the ransacking of the
region's archeological heritage, and wealthy Sunnis elsewhere in the region.
In addition, it's been skilled at promoting its "brand" in other parts of
the Greater Middle East and Africa, from Afghanistan to Libya, Yemen to
Nigeria, where local populations are also facing shattered landscapes,
failed states, oppressive governments, and desperation. Finally, thanks to
the talents of its social media militants, it's shown a facility for
attracting disaffected (and sometimes whacked-out) young Muslims from Europe
and even the United States, as well as for inspiring "lone wolves" to acts
meant to unnerve its enemies in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere.
So give credit where it's due. Compared to a few training camps in
Afghanistan -- the al-Qaeda model before 2001 (and again recently) -- this
is no small thing. But the Islamic State should also be put in some
perspective. It's not Nazi Germany. It's not the Soviet Union. It's not an
existential threat to the United States. It's a distinctly self-limited
movement, probably only capable of expanding its reach if even more of the
region is laid to waste (as is, for instance, happening in Yemen right now,
thanks in large part to a U.S.-backed Saudi war on the Iranian-inclined
Houthi rebels).
IS is so deeply sectarian that it can never gain the support of a single
Shia, Christian, Alawite, or Yazidi. Its practices, religious and
political, are too extreme for many of the Sunnis it might want to appeal
to. It is also an embattled movement. It has already lost some of the
lands it captured to U.S.-backed Kurds in both Syria and Iraq and to the
U.S.-backed, U.S.-equipped, and U.S.-trained Iraqi Army as well as Shiite
militias. Its extremity has clearly alienated some of the Sunnis under its
control. It's unlikely to take seven decades, as in the case of the Soviet
Union, to implode and disappear.
On the other hand, if the Islamic State, at least in its present form, is
crushed or driven into some corner and the region is "liberated," one thing
is guaranteed -- as images of the rubble and landscapes of skeletal
buildings left behind at the "victorious" battle sites of Kobane, Sinjar,
Homs, and Ramadi will tell you. Combine the massively bomb-laden,
booby-trapped urban areas under Islamic State control, American air power
(or, in parts of Syria, the barrel-bombing air force of the government of
Bashar al-Assad and now the firepower of Russia), and fierce urban combat,
and what may be left in the moment of "victory" could be a region in utter
ruins. One expert suggests that it may take decades and cost $200 billion
-- three times Syria's prewar gross domestic product -- to rebuild that
country, bringing to mind the famed line from Tacitus: "They make a desert
and call it peace."
And just remind me, who's going to help with the reconstruction of that
shattered land? Donald Trump? Don't count on it. And don't for a second
believe that from such devastated worlds nothing worse than the Islamic
State can arise.
While we may be talking about a terror machine, IS represents a far more
modest and embattled one than its social media propaganda would indicate.
Its ability to threaten the U.S. bears little relation to the bogeyman
version of it that at present occupies the American imagination. The sole
advantage the Islamic State has when it comes to this country is that it
turns out to be so easy to spook us.
"A Republic of Insects and Grass"
Still, don't for a second think that terror isn't on the American agenda.
You really want terror? Let me tell you about terror. And I'm not talking
about 14 dead (San Bernardino) or 130 dead (Paris). What about up to
140,000 dead? (The toll from Hiroshima.) What about 285 million dead?
(The official estimate of the dead, had the U.S. military's Single
Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, of 1960 been carried out via more than
3,200 nuclear weapons delivered to 1,060 targets in the Communist world,
including at least 130 cities -- and that didn't include casualty figures
from whatever the Soviet Union might have been able to launch in response.)
Or what about -- to move from past slaughters and projected slaughters to
future ones -- a billion dead? Despite the recent surprise visit of Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi to his Pakistani counterpart, that remains a
perfectly "reasonable" possibility, were a nuclear war ever to develop in
South Asia. India and Pakistan, after all, face each other across a heavily
armed and fortified 1,800 mile border, having fought three major wars since
1947. Small armed incidents are commonplace. Imagine that -- to take just
one possible scenario -- extreme elements in the Pakistani military (or
other extremist elements) got their hands on some part of that country's
ever-expanding nuclear arsenal, now believed to be at about 130 weapons, and
loosed one or more of them on India, starting a nuclear exchange over issues
that no one else on Earth gives a damn about.
Imagine that, in the course of the war that followed, each side released
"only" 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons on the other's cities and industrial areas
("0.4% of the world's more than 25,000 warheads"). One study suggests that,
along with the 20 million or so inhabitants of South Asia who would die in
such an exchange, this "modest" local nuclear conflagration would send
enough smoke and particulates into the stratosphere to cause a planetary
"nuclear winter" lasting perhaps a decade. The ensuing failure of
agricultural systems globally could, according to experts, lead a billion or
more people to starve to death. (And once you're talking about a crisis of
that magnitude, one humanity has never experienced, god knows what other
systems might fail at the same time.)
I hope by now you're feeling a little shudder of fear or at least anxiety.
Perhaps not, though, since we're remarkably well protected from thinking
about the deeper terrors of our planet. And mind you, if you're talking
terror, that South Asian war is penny ante compared to the sort of event
that would be associated with the thousands of nuclear weapons in the
arsenals of the United States and Russia. Since the Cold War ended, they
have more or less been hidden in plain sight. Call it an irony of sorts,
then, that nuclear weapons have loomed large on the American landscape in
these years, just not the ones that could truly harm us. Instead, Americans
have largely focused in the usual semi-hysterical fashion on a nuclear
weapon -- the Iranian bomb -- that never existed, while Russian and American
arsenals undoubtedly capable of destroying more than one Earth-sized planet
have remained in place, heavily funded and largely unnoted.
When you look at what might be posssible under unknown future conditions,
there is no reason to stop with mere millions or even a billion dead human
beings. A major nuclear exchange, it is believed, could lead to the
shredding of the planetary environment and a literal liquidation of
humanity: the wiping out, that is, of ourselves and the turning of this
country into, in the phrase of Jonathan Schell, "a republic of insects and
grass." As he explained so famously in his international bestseller of
1982, The Fate of the Earth, this became a genuine possibility in the
post-Hiroshima decades and it remains so today, though given scant attention
in a world in which tensions between the U.S. and Russia have been on the
rise.
Apocalypses, Fast or Slow-Mo
It's not that we don't live on an increasingly terrifying planet. We do.
It's that terror fears, at least in our American world, are regularly
displaced onto relatively minor threats.
If you want to be scared, consider this unlikelihood: in the course of just
a few centuries, humanity has stumbled upon two uniquely different ways of
unleashing energy -- the burning of fossil fuels and the splitting of the
atom -- that have made the sort of apocalypse that was once the property of
the gods into a human possession. The splitting of the atom and its
application to war was, of course, a conscious scientific discovery. Its
apocalyptic possibilities were grasped almost immediately by some of its own
creators, including physicist Robert Oppenheimer who played a key role in
the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb during World War II. As
he witnessed its awesome power in its initial test in the New Mexican
desert, this line from the Bhagavad Gita came to his mind: "Now I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds."
The destroyer of worlds indeed -- or at least, potentially, of the one world
that matters to humanity.
The other method of wrecking the planet was developed without the intent to
destroy: the discovery that coal, oil, and later natural gas could motor
economies. It was not known until the final decades of the last century
that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of such forms of
energy could heat the planet in startling ways and undermine the very
processes that promoted life as we had always experienced it. It's worth
adding, however, that the executives of the giant oil companies knew a great
deal about the dangers their products posed to Earth way before most of the
rest of us did, suppressed that information for a surprisingly long time,
and then invested prodigious sums in promoting the public denial of those
very dangers. (In the process, they left the Republican Party wrapped in a
straightjacket of climate change denial unique on the planet.) Someday,
this will undoubtedly be seen as one of the great crimes of history, unless
of course there are no historians left to write about it.
In other words, if enough fossil fuels continue to be burned in the many
decades to come, another kind of potential extinction event can be imagined,
a slow-motion apocalypse of extreme weather -- melting, burning, flooding,
sea-level rise, storming, and who knows what else.
And if humanity has already managed to discover two such paths of utter
destruction, what else, at present unimagined, might someday come into
focus?
In this context, think of the Islamic State as the minor leagues of terror,
though at the moment you wouldn't know it. If we are all now the children
of the holocaust -- of, that is, our own possible extinction -- and if this
is the inheritance we are to leave to our own children and grandchildren,
perhaps it's understandable that it feels better to fear the Islamic State.
Its evil is so specific, so "other," so utterly alien and strangely distant.
It's almost comforting to focus on its depredations, ignoring, of course,
the grotesquely large hand our country had in its creation and in the more
general spread of terror movements across the Greater Middle East.
It's so much more comfortable to fear extreme Islamist movements than to
take in two apocalyptic terrors that are clearly part of our own patrimony
-- and, to make matters harder, one of which is likely to unfold over a time
period that's hard to grasp, and the other under as yet difficult to imagine
political circumstances.
It's clear that neither of these true terrors of our planet and our age has
to happen (or at least, in the case of climate change, come to full
fruition). To ensure that, however, we and our children and grandchildren
would have to decide that the fate of our Earth was indeed at stake and act
accordingly. We would have to change the world.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176086
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Fate of Our Earth
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on January 5, 2016, Printed on January 6, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176086/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We're back and braced for a new year that
undoubtedly will prove to be the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to
the subjects this website covers! Let me offer a final thank you to TD
readers for responding the way you did to our December appeal for donations.
Your remarkable generosity has ensured that TomDispatch enters 2016 with its
head above water, no matter how dramatically sea levels may be rising. Tom]
Why the Islamic State Is the Minor Leagues of Terror
Putting Threats into Perspective for 2016
By Tom Engelhardt
It's time to panic!
As 2015 ended, this country was certifiably terror-stricken. It had the
Islamic State (IS) on the brain. Hoax terror threats or terror imbroglios
shut down school systems from Los Angeles to New Hampshire, Indiana to a
rural county in Virginia. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, citing terror
attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, cancelled a prospective tour of Europe
thanks to terror fears, issuing a statement that "orchestra management
believes there is an elevated risk to the safety of musicians and their
families, guest artists, DSO personnel, and travelling patrons." By year's
end, the Justice Department had charged an "unprecedented" 60 people with
terrorism-related crimes (often linked to social media exchanges).
While just north of the border Canada's new government and its citizens were
embracing the first of 25,000 Syrian refugees in an atmosphere of near
celebration, citizens and government officials in the lower 48 were
squabbling and panicking about the few who had made it here. ("Sid Miller,
the Texas agriculture commissioner, compared Syrian refugees to
rattlesnakes, posting on Facebook images of snakes and refugees and asking,
'Can you tell me which of these rattlers won't bite you?'")
In the two presidential debates that ended the year, focusing in whole or
part on "national security," the only global subject worthy of discussion
was -- you guessed it -- the Islamic State and secondarily immigration and
related issues. Media panelists didn't ask a single question in either
debate about China or Russia (other than on the IS-related issue of who
might shoot down Russian planes over Syria) or about the relative success of
the French right-wing, anti-Islamist National Front Party and its
presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen (even though her American analog,
Donald Trump, was on stage in one debate and a significant subject of the
other). And that just begins a long list of national security issues that no
one felt it worth bringing up, including the fact that in Paris 195
countries had agreed on a potentially path-breaking climate change deal.
As the Dallas Symphony Orchestra signaled, "Paris" now means only one thing
in this country: the bloody terror attack on the Eagles of Death Metal
concert at the Bataclan theater and related assaults. In fact, if you were
following the "news" here as 2015 ended, you might be forgiven for thinking
that we Americans lived in a land beset by, and under siege from, Islamic
terror and the Islamic State. The latest polls indicate that striking
numbers of Americans now view the threat of terrorism as the country's
number one danger, see it as a (if not the) critical issue facing us,
believe that it and national security should be the government's top
priorities, and are convinced that the terrorists are at present "winning."
You would never know that, if you left out what might be called
self-inflicted pain like death by vehicle (more than 33,000 deaths
annually), suicide by gun (more than 21,000 annually) or total gun deaths
(30,000 annually), and fatal drug overdoses (more than 47,000 annually),
this is undoubtedly one of the safest countries on the planet. Over these
years, the American dead from Islamic terror outfits or the "lone wolves"
they inspire have added up to the most modest of figures, even if you
include that single great day of horror, September 11, 2001. Include deaths
from non-Islamic right-wing acts of terror (including, for instance, Dylann
Roof's murders in a black church in Charleston), a slightly more impressive
figure in recent years, and you still have next to nothing. Even if you add
in relatively commonplace mass shootings, from school campuses to malls to
workplaces, that are not defined as "terror," and accept the broadest
possible definition of such shootings (a minimum of four killed or injured),
you would still have the sort of danger that couldn't be more modest
compared to death by vehicle, suicide, or drugs -- phenomena that obsess few
Americans.
The Islamic State in Perspective
Still, as 2016 begins, terror remains the 800-pound gorilla (in reality, a
marmoset) in the American room and just about the only national security
issue that truly matters. So why shouldn't I join the crowd? Who wants to be
left in the lurch? But first, I think it makes sense to put the Islamic
State in perspective.
Yes, it's a brutal, extreme religious-cum-political outfit, the sort of
movement that probably could only arise on a shattered landscape in a
shattered region filled with desperate souls looking for any explanation
for, or solution to, nightmarish lives. There can be no question that it's
had remarkable success. Its self-proclaimed "caliphate" now controls
territory the size of (to choose a common comparison) Great Britain with a
population of perhaps a few million people. Since there are seldom reporters
on the scene (for obvious reasons of health and well-being), we have no idea
whether IS has 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000 fighters and potential
suicide bombers under arms. We do know that those arms (despite a couple of
captured tanks) are generally light and the bombs largely of the homemade
variety.
The Islamic State has shown quite a knack for generating a stream of revenue
from black market oil sales, ransoms from kidnappings, the ransacking of the
region's archeological heritage, and wealthy Sunnis elsewhere in the region.
In addition, it's been skilled at promoting its "brand" in other parts of
the Greater Middle East and Africa, from Afghanistan to Libya, Yemen to
Nigeria, where local populations are also facing shattered landscapes,
failed states, oppressive governments, and desperation. Finally, thanks to
the talents of its social media militants, it's shown a facility for
attracting disaffected (and sometimes whacked-out) young Muslims from Europe
and even the United States, as well as for inspiring "lone wolves" to acts
meant to unnerve its enemies in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere.
So give credit where it's due. Compared to a few training camps in
Afghanistan -- the al-Qaeda model before 2001 (and again recently) -- this
is no small thing. But the Islamic State should also be put in some
perspective. It's not Nazi Germany. It's not the Soviet Union. It's not an
existential threat to the United States. It's a distinctly self-limited
movement, probably only capable of expanding its reach if even more of the
region is laid to waste (as is, for instance, happening in Yemen right now,
thanks in large part to a U.S.-backed Saudi war on the Iranian-inclined
Houthi rebels).
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20IS is so
deeply sectarian that it can never gain the support of a single Shia,
Christian, Alawite, or Yazidi. Its practices, religious and political, are
too extreme for many of the Sunnis it might want to appeal to. It is also an
embattled movement. It has already lost some of the lands it captured to
U.S.-backed Kurds in both Syria and Iraq and to the U.S.-backed,
U.S.-equipped, and U.S.-trained Iraqi Army as well as Shiite militias. Its
extremity has clearly alienated some of the Sunnis under its control. It's
unlikely to take seven decades, as in the case of the Soviet Union, to
implode and disappear.
On the other hand, if the Islamic State, at least in its present form, is
crushed or driven into some corner and the region is "liberated," one thing
is guaranteed -- as images of the rubble and landscapes of skeletal
buildings left behind at the "victorious" battle sites of Kobane, Sinjar,
Homs, and Ramadi will tell you. Combine the massively bomb-laden,
booby-trapped urban areas under Islamic State control, American air power
(or, in parts of Syria, the barrel-bombing air force of the government of
Bashar al-Assad and now the firepower of Russia), and fierce urban combat,
and what may be left in the moment of "victory" could be a region in utter
ruins. One expert suggests that it may take decades and cost $200 billion --
three times Syria's prewar gross domestic product -- to rebuild that
country, bringing to mind the famed line from Tacitus: "They make a desert
and call it peace."
And just remind me, who's going to help with the reconstruction of that
shattered land? Donald Trump? Don't count on it. And don't for a second
believe that from such devastated worlds nothing worse than the Islamic
State can arise.
While we may be talking about a terror machine, IS represents a far more
modest and embattled one than its social media propaganda would indicate.
Its ability to threaten the U.S. bears little relation to the bogeyman
version of it that at present occupies the American imagination. The sole
advantage the Islamic State has when it comes to this country is that it
turns out to be so easy to spook us.
"A Republic of Insects and Grass"
Still, don't for a second think that terror isn't on the American agenda.
You really want terror? Let me tell you about terror. And I'm not talking
about 14 dead (San Bernardino) or 130 dead (Paris). What about up to
140,000https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasa
ki dead? (The toll from Hiroshima.) What about 285 million dead? (The
official estimate of the dead, had the U.S. military's Single Integrated
Operational Plan, or SIOP, of 1960 been carried out via more than 3,200
nuclear weapons delivered to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including
at least 130 cities -- and that didn't include casualty figures from
whatever the Soviet Union might have been able to launch in response.)
Or what about -- to move from past slaughters and projected slaughters to
future ones -- a billion dead? Despite the recent surprise visit of Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi to his Pakistani counterpart, that remains a
perfectly "reasonable" possibility, were a nuclear war ever to develop in
South Asia. India and Pakistan, after all, face each other across a heavily
armed and fortified 1,800 mile border, having fought three major wars since
1947. Small armed incidents are commonplace. Imagine that -- to take just
one possible scenario -- extreme elements in the Pakistani military (or
other extremist elements) got their hands on some part of that country's
ever-expanding nuclear arsenal, now believed to be at about 130 weapons, and
loosed one or more of them on India, starting a nuclear exchange over issues
that no one else on Earth gives a damn about.
Imagine that, in the course of the war that followed, each side released
"only" 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons on the other's cities and industrial areas
("0.4% of the world's more than 25,000 warheads"). One study suggests that,
along with the 20 million or so inhabitants of South Asia who would die in
such an exchange, this "modest" local nuclear conflagration would send
enough smoke and particulates into the stratosphere to cause a planetary
"nuclear winter" lasting perhaps a decade. The ensuing failure of
agricultural systems globally could, according to experts, lead a billion or
more people to starve to death. (And once you're talking about a crisis of
that magnitude, one humanity has never experienced, god knows what other
systems might fail at the same time.)
I hope by now you're feeling a little shudder of fear or at least anxiety.
Perhaps not, though, since we're remarkably well protected from thinking
about the deeper terrors of our planet. And mind you, if you're talking
terror, that South Asian war is penny ante compared to the sort of event
that would be associated with the thousands of nuclear weapons in the
arsenals of the United States and Russia. Since the Cold War ended, they
have more or less been hidden in plain sight. Call it an irony of sorts,
then, that nuclear weapons have loomed large on the American landscape in
these years, just not the ones that could truly harm us. Instead, Americans
have largely focused in the usual semi-hysterical fashion on a nuclear
weapon -- the Iranian bomb -- that never existed, while Russian and American
arsenals undoubtedly capable of destroying more than one Earth-sized planet
have remained in place, heavily funded and largely unnoted.
When you look at what might be posssible under unknown future conditions,
there is no reason to stop with mere millions or even a billion dead human
beings. A major nuclear exchange, it is believed, could lead to the
shredding of the planetary environment and a literal liquidation of
humanity: the wiping out, that is, of ourselves and the turning of this
country into, in the phrase of Jonathan Schell, "a republic of insects and
grass." As he explained so famously in his international bestseller of 1982,
The Fate of the Earth, this became a genuine possibility in the
post-Hiroshima decades and it remains so today, though given scant attention
in a world in which tensions between the U.S. and Russia have been on the
rise.
Apocalypses, Fast or Slow-Mo
It's not that we don't live on an increasingly terrifying planet. We do.
It's that terror fears, at least in our American world, are regularly
displaced onto relatively minor threats.
If you want to be scared, consider this unlikelihood: in the course of just
a few centuries, humanity has stumbled upon two uniquely different ways of
unleashing energy -- the burning of fossil fuels and the splitting of the
atom -- that have made the sort of apocalypse that was once the property of
the gods into a human possession. The splitting of the atom and its
application to war was, of course, a conscious scientific discovery. Its
apocalyptic possibilities were grasped almost immediately by some of its own
creators, including physicist Robert Oppenheimer who played a key role in
the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb during World War II. As
he witnessed its awesome power in its initial test in the New Mexican
desert, this line from the Bhagavad Gita came to his mind: "Now I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds."
The destroyer of worlds indeed -- or at least, potentially, of the one world
that matters to humanity.
The other method of wrecking the planet was developed without the intent to
destroy: the discovery that coal, oil, and later natural gas could motor
economies. It was not known until the final decades of the last century that
the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of such forms of energy
could heat the planet in startling ways and undermine the very processes
that promoted life as we had always experienced it. It's worth adding,
however, that the executives of the giant oil companies knew a great deal
about the dangers their products posed to Earth way before most of the rest
of us did, suppressed that information for a surprisingly long time, and
then invested prodigious sums in promoting the public denial of those very
dangers. (In the process, they left the Republican Party wrapped in a
straightjacket of climate change denial unique on the planet.) Someday, this
will undoubtedly be seen as one of the great crimes of history, unless of
course there are no historians left to write about it.
In other words, if enough fossil fuels continue to be burned in the many
decades to come, another kind of potential extinction event can be imagined,
a slow-motion apocalypse of extreme weather -- melting, burning, flooding,
sea-level rise, storming, and who knows what else.
And if humanity has already managed to discover two such paths of utter
destruction, what else, at present unimagined, might someday come into
focus?
In this context, think of the Islamic State as the minor leagues of terror,
though at the moment you wouldn't know it. If we are all now the children of
the holocaust -- of, that is, our own possible extinction -- and if this is
the inheritance we are to leave to our own children and grandchildren,
perhaps it's understandable that it feels better to fear the Islamic State.
Its evil is so specific, so "other," so utterly alien and strangely distant.
It's almost comforting to focus on its depredations, ignoring, of course,
the grotesquely large hand our country had in its creation and in the more
general spread of terror movements across the Greater Middle East.
It's so much more comfortable to fear extreme Islamist movements than to
take in two apocalyptic terrors that are clearly part of our own patrimony
-- and, to make matters harder, one of which is likely to unfold over a time
period that's hard to grasp, and the other under as yet difficult to imagine
political circumstances.
It's clear that neither of these true terrors of our planet and our age has
to happen (or at least, in the case of climate change, come to full
fruition). To ensure that, however, we and our children and grandchildren
would have to decide that the fate of our Earth was indeed at stake and act
accordingly. We would have to change the world.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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