Mark Phillips: The American Question

3/11/03: Devolution.

My good friends believe that humankind are advancing as a species. I believe that all available evidence suggests the opposite. Our most obvious advance has been in our ability to kill more efficiently. By most reasonable measures of civilization we've devolved, if we take the beginning of the colonial epoch as our point of comparison.

These are some of the benchmarks I propose as measures:

• From 24,000 to 150,000 human beings starve to death each day. This is a new phenomenon. While there were great famines in history prior to colonialism, since then starvation has become endemic, that is, permanent, outside a minority of privileged countries. The impact of international market relationships is the primary cause. Throughout much of the world, local elites displace peasant subsistence farmers, replacing food grown for local consumption with cash crops such as wheat, cotton and coffee grown for sale on the world market. The former food-growers starve, or are driven into squalid urban slums where they starve more slowly.
• While these people die, governments of the advanced countries with their extraordinary levels of mechanized productivity pay farmers not to grow, particularly the handful of enormous agricultural corporations which control most food production. The reason is simple. Productivity in first-world agriculture is so high that production at full capacity would flood the food market, causing the relationship of supply to demand to tilt far enough to endanger profitability. To say this another way, production of food for the free market can only be profitable if that production is artificially limited. Meanwhile people starve. This is a recent phenomenon which first began, in the U.S., during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• The populations of whole continents have been devastated by colonialism. Africa is perhaps the most extreme example. Historians attribute billions of African deaths since the 17th century to imported diseases, the ravages of slavery, and the disruption of indigenous agriculture following the Arabic and European invasions. Many Americans are familiar with the destruction of the native peoples of North and South America by genocidal European settlers. The history was similar in Australia, Siberia and elsewhere. Before the modern epoch, humans had the ability to sack small towns. We now routinely destroy whole peoples. This is not progress.
• 150,000,000 people died in 20th century wars over First World control of natural resources and other geopolitical advantages. These experiences are far from evolved. 20,000,000 Russians died during the German invasion of 1941-45. Americans using napalm, Agent Orange and similar chemical weapons killed 2-3 million Vietnamese. On a small but indicative scale, 20,000 Iraqi draftees were massacred on the "Highway of Death" outside Kuwait City, while trying to retreat per U.N. orders. Destruction of this magnitude has been made possible by the industrialization of warfare since the beginning of the modern age.
• As technology has advanced it has been increasingly harnessed for immoral purposes. Americans will think immediately of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fire-bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo were as bad. For hours, thousands of bombers dropped napalm in patterns which had been scientifically calculated to create super-hot fires at specific locations throughout these cities. When the fires became hot enough, enormous artificial hurricanes formed -- hurricanes of fire -- which literally sucked the oxygen from the air. Tens of thousands died of suffocation, while the storms shot blazing electrical lightning thousands of feet into the heavens. Your tax dollars at work.
• The ethics of the "civilized" peoples have devolved proportionately to these crimes. Colonialism introduced the ideology of racism. World War Two added the concept of "total war". Rape and torture became instruments of American policy in Vietnam and Central America; now torture is again in use against captured Muslims. "Propaganda" and "disinformation" became tools of governance, in democratic and authoritarian societies alike. Since the 1980s education has been devastated in America, so much so that American students now rank only 15th among industrialized countries on standardized tests; meanwhile our people's treasure is invested in more and better weapons. Military control over wartime press reports stifles democratic decision-making, while the unprecedented domestic repression of the War on Drugs and the Patriot Act have required more prisons to be built than schools over the past twenty years.

These are not advances. They're the result of defeat. There has been only one historical force which has attempted to fight these evils, in the name of human decency and progress. This was the Socialist movement, with its simple slogan which accurately encapsulated the alternatives faced by the civilization of their time: "socialism or barbarism". They were right, and, they lost. The history of the 20th century was the outcome of their defeat. Our civilization today is the barbarism they correctly predicted.

I take exception to the ideology of "evolving humanity" because it blinds us to the circumstances into which we've been born: the defeat of those who preceded us in the struggle for a better future. In its best form it leads to the smug disengagement of sanguinity; in its worst form it leads to surrender; in all forms it tends to demobilization. I strongly believe there's but one course open to those who choose the side of "morality": struggle. If we refuse to fight we empower evil. If we're to fight intelligently we must do so in the ways available to us, in the circumstances we've inherited, on the basis of the lessons we glean from past defeats. I'm glad that my friends, despite the logical implications of their ideology, do choose to fight.

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