If We Should Live, Our Scribes Will Record 2024 As The Beginning of the End for Humanity
1.9.24
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
If we should live to tell the tale, our scribes will record the third decade of the 21st century as the time when the last vestiges of coherent political thought — and any notion of political integrity — were abandoned by those with power and influence, not only in national parliaments, but also in the media and in corporate boardrooms throughout the Global North.
In the last two and a half years, our leaders have chosen to revive apocalyptic war and slaughter as the purpose of existence, while simultaneously ignoring the greatest “war” of all — humanity’s “war” on the precious climate that makes all human existence viable.
The two are, I believe, closely connected, the frenzy for war and slaughter a buried, unacknowledged, psychically traumatized response to the realization — as spelled out incontrovertibly by climate scientists — that everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us.
When neoliberalism first reared its ugly head in the 1980s — promising unparalleled profits for those who embraced a policy of unfettered privatization and the deliberate suppression of workers’ rights, a malignant dream that was sold through the manipulation of the media — climate scientists were already sounding the alarm about man-made climate change, but were largely ignored in a frenzy of unparalleled corporate profiteering disguised by a relentless bombardment of misinformation about how the future was brighter than ever, and all that mattered were our selfish, atomized, materialistic desires.
The emergence of this new world, which largely coincided with the “fall” of the Soviet Union, was focused on a conspicuous lie — that funnelling wealth to a new class of the super-rich would lead to a “trickle-down” of money to those below. In reality, it was built on the increasing exploitation and marginalization of vast numbers of workers both at home and abroad, but it created a sufficient number of new “middle class” consumers — given above-average incomes in the private sector, and seduced with signifiers of “growth” and progress (a housing bubble, more and better cars, affordable global holidays, fast fashion, endless new toys and trinkets) — that its horrendous inequalities were sufficiently disguised or sidelined to enable the successful marketing of this fake future that was brighter and cleverer than anything that had come before.
Against this tsunami of propaganda and selfishness, the climate scientists never stood a chance. Although the UN established a scientific review body, the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 1988, which began reporting on the profound and unparalleled threat from man-made climate change in 1990, efforts to implement the changes necessary to ensure human survival, involving annual climate summits (the COP summits, which have been meeting since 1995), have failed to stem our inexorable path towards self-inflicted extinction, despite supposed success in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol established legally binding (but unenforceable) obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris Agreement, in 2015, whose goal was to keep the rise in global temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
The rise and fall of climate awareness and resistance
In 2018, a popular breakthrough in awareness occurred when the IPCC issued a report warning that we had just 12 years, until 2030, to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 45% to keep the global rise in temperature to 1.5°C. The report warned that implementing these changes would require “deep emissions reductions” and “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, and also stressed that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being”, advising that, in contrast, a temperature rise of 2°C would exacerbate extreme weather, rising sea levels, diminishing Arctic sea ice and the loss of ecosystems.
Coinciding with the report, Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenage climate activist, and Extinction Rebellion, a UK-based climate activist group, undertook protests that captured the public imagination. Finally, it looked as though the unparalleled, cataclysmic realities of climate change had galvanized the public, the media and governments into taking action. Polls showed widespread public concern, and politicians queued up to declare “climate emergencies.”
Despite this, it was all largely posturing. Politicians mostly did nothing, while further polling showed that, although people allegedly recognized the severity of climate change, they weren’t actually interested in fundamentally changing their lifestyles to make a difference.
Then came COVID-19, an infectious virus that sparked global panic and led to unprecedented lockdowns of entire populations, and the allied disruption to numerous forms of economic activity. For a moment, those who were aware of the severity of climate change glimpsed the possibilities of a world in which our reckless, frantic, fossil fuel-based over-consumption could be curtailed, but, as the lockdowns eased, a widespread amnesia set in. The choking petrol fumes once more filled our streets, the skies filled once more with aeroplanes, and everyone with power and influence rushed to return to “business as usual.”
Although the climate crisis was now more severe than ever, with the IPCC’s sixth report, in August 2021, containing what the Guardian described as its “starkest warning yet” about how “human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in ways ‘unprecedented’ in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, with some of the changes now inevitable and ‘irreversible’”, governments and the media largely shrugged and moved on, even though it was already becoming apparent that the report’s forecasts — that, “within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather” — were already being superseded by reality.
With the third decade of the 21st century barely underway, the extreme weather that was taking place around the world, with no continent left unscathed, via extreme and unprecedented heat, uncontrollable wildfires, widespread droughts, and flash floods and intense rainfall caused by mutated weather systems, had already made the warnings of 2018 — that we had until 2030 to effect major changes to our lifestyles — look completely redundant, and the last few years have only continued to reinforce this undeniable reality.
In January 2024, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record “by a huge margin”, with a UN press release noting that, since the 1980s, each decade has been hotter than the previous one, and the past nine years have been the hottest on record. The WMO’s analysis of temperature records also revealed that the 1.5°C global temperature rise — still supposedly comfortably consigned to the late 2030s or early 2040s — had almost been breached in 2023, with the annual rise in temperature since the pre-industrial era registered at 1.45°C.
You’d think that these changes — happening so swiftly and so monstrously — would sound alarm bells and lead to immediate action, but instead the world has largely gone silent. Although those in the Global South are painfully aware of the reality, many in the Global North refuse to even believe the evidence of their own eyes. In the US, for example, places like Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas are becoming uninhabitable, but people living there are currently being asked to choose between two presidential candidates who are either unwilling to tell the truth about the gravest threat imaginable to the continued viability of human existence in the US (Kamala Harris), or who actively promote climate change denial (Donald Trump).
While fossil fuel company corruption plagues both main parties, Trump is most closely working on behalf of the oil and gas companies and their backers, who will, one day, be damned as the most genocidal individuals in human history, as they have known, since the 1970s at least, when they commissioned reports and then hid the results, that fossil fuel-driven climate change is all too real, but who continue to pump out misinformation, these days largely through social media, through the right-wing media, and through compliant right-wing and far-right politicians.
The situation isn’t fundamentally any different anywhere else in the Global North. In the UK, for example, which hasn’t been hit as hard by climate change as many other countries in Europe, although it had the hottest days ever in July 2022, and has subsequently been plagued by too much rain, the last General Election, on July 4, was a fight between two main parties who both decided to ignore the gravest threat to human existence that has ever been known.
Instead, the far-right Tories pursued an authoritarian path, which now, it seems, has been wholeheartedly embraced by Keir Starmer’s new Labour government. This involves, via new anti-protest laws, viciously punishing the messengers, imprisoning climate protestors for up to five years for engaging in a Zoom call to plan disruption to a major traffic route, for the sole purpose of highlighting how the British government has failed to implement the cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that it agreed to in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The public, meanwhile, largely behave as though climate change — or climate collapse, as campaigners have now taken to calling it, with greater accuracy — is something that can be ducked, or ignored when, for the first time ever, we have encountered a threat — one made by ourselves — that very fundamentally cannot be ducked or ignored, in which every second we waste in prevarication and denial only makes the future worse.
It says something alarmingly profound about our degeneration as a species that the human race — big-brained and resourceful, but fundamentally physically vulnerable — has gone from being acutely aware of danger, with an extraordinary survival instinct in its early days, to the dismal reality now, in which we have become so detached from nature that we don’t even believe the evidence of our own senses.
However, that, sadly, is the reality, and it is into this world that our leaders, flailing about and trying to deal with the ultimate hubris of having believed their own hype about how we can have endless all-polluting growth on a finite planet — have slipped into genocidal tantrums instead.
The psychic collapse of our leaders
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, provoked, over many decades, by the expansionary belligerence of the US-led NATO, our leaders collectively retreated into a broken psychic landscape in which, as so often in human history, if faced with something uncomfortable — as, in this case, our own wilful and self-imposed extinction — they have chosen to slaughter everyone instead, and to lay waste to human environments to make them uninhabitable.
This is what NATO has done in Ukraine — with the added PR bonus that the human carnage doesn’t even involve our own disposable soldiers, but someone else’s instead — and it is what, since last October, we have also been doing in the Gaza Strip, providing Israel with the weapons to, if feasible, exterminate an entire population of 2.3 million people to drown out the voices telling us that it is all just a desperate distraction, anything to prevent us from looking in the mirror and recognizing the horror of what we have become.
In Gaza, the situation is rather more complicated (although Israel’s genocide also, helpfully, involves us yet again neatly sidestepping the sacrifice of our own soldiers), as we are not only exercising our own vengeance on life itself, which we ourselves betrayed; we are also defending an indefensible regime that has spent generations killing, oppressing and dispossessing a native population for having the effrontery to have been living, for hundreds of years, on land that the colonizers — Israel — regard as belonging to them.
In this, our support (in which, it should be noted, our mainstream media is almost entirely complicit) also recalls the giddy days of slaughter throughout our many centuries of colonial brutality, when we conquered most of the world and killed untold numbers of indigenous people who dared to resist our rape and depredation of their land, but at its heart all this killing is the genocidal, monstrous bellowing of brutal, broken people who cannot face the reality of who they are, what they have become, and what they have done to themselves, and who are transferring the soul-withering cost of their foul failures onto others, seeking to slaughter another people in their entirety to vindicate a blood-lust that, when the red mist clears, will leave them either permanently depraved, and a permanent menace to anyone who approaches them, or still unable to look in the mirror to see what they have truly become.
The intolerable slaughter in Gaza — and the horrific, self-justifying, giddy swagger of those undertaking it, which makes those who undertook all previous genocides look positively demure in comparison — echoes the wider slaughter of the climate needed to sustain our very existence on what, until we started burning coal and drilling for oil and reviving up our beloved engines, was a finely-balanced chemical miracle.
It may — just about — not be too late for the decent people of the world to somehow rise up in the next few years to tear down capitalism and implement a radical program of mitigation that may see us hanging onto life on a planet that is oblivious to whether or not we survive, but it’s clearly a colossal uphill struggle, as we face what has always been humanity’s greatest weakness — broken, violent, power-obsessed individuals, often capable of dragging vast numbers of people into their malignant orbit, who would rather kill than live.
Are we capable of resisting, or will we hope to somehow survive, to see whether any scribes are even left to record the demise of a race of big-brained apes who thought they were so much cleverer than they were, but who, in the end, fatally underestimated how consciousness, if not used widely, deranges us and makes us into monsters?
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
43 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
This is meant to hit hard, and I hope it does. It’s my analysis of how, faced with the the gravest threat humanity has ever experienced — wildly accelerating climate collapse, which will make the planet uninhabitable for humans, and probably in the not too distant future — our leaders have, instead, suffered a massive psychic collapse, unable to accept that, as I describe it, “everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us”, and have “collectively retreated into a broken psychic landscape in which, as so often in human history, if faced with something uncomfortable — as, in this case, our own wilful and self-imposed extinction — they have chosen to slaughter everyone instead, and to lay waste to human environments to make them uninhabitable.
After 2018 and 2019, when the scale of climate collapse began to be widely apparent, the arrival of COVID-19 began our leaders’ derangement, as the lockdowns, which signposted a post-capitalist world of degrowth, made them all the more determined — with the help of the media and a largely compliant populace — to rush back afterwards into “business as usual”, even though it is killing us.
When Russian invaded Ukraine, our leaders’ psychic derangement found a new focus — the revival of war as the focus of existence, conveniently focused on adversaries who can be framed as pure evil, free of context and nuance, and which has expanded, since last October, into the Gaza Strip, and our support for the messianic genocidal death cult of the State of Israel against another adversary, Hamas, that has been shamefully portrayed as the epitome of context-free evil.
As I point out in the conclusion of my article, “It may — just about — not be too late for the decent people of the world to somehow rise up in the next few years to tear down capitalism and implement a radical program of mitigation that may see us hanging onto life on a planet that is oblivious to whether or not we survive, but it’s clearly a colossal uphill struggle, as we face what has always been humanity’s greatest weakness — broken, violent, power-obsessed individuals, often capable of dragging vast numbers of people into their malignant orbit, who would rather kill than live.”
Can we somehow rise up and drag ourselves out of the genocidal and mass-suicidal gutter into which our broken leaders — of almost all political persuasions — have dragged us, or am I right to flag up 2024 as the beginning of the end for humanity?
...on September 1st, 2024 at 5:29 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Ruth Gilburt wrote:
Hugely important piece, Andy.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 5:41 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thank you so much, Ruth. I touched on the genocidal psychic collapse of the west’s leaders in an earlier article, but I felt it needed spelling out much more clearly, and I’m so glad you appreciate it.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 5:41 pm
Andy Worthington says...
David Barrows wrote:
Excellent piece of writing. It is so true that our current world is entrusted to destructive and selfish power addicts who are willing to gamble away the survival of vast swaths of humanity with self-righteous wars and who are continuing the exploitation of the natural world into its permanent death.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:42 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, David. I’m so glad you appreciate it. I genuinely think that, beyond the usual corruption of our political systems, in which politicians and leaders are bought by fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers and other powerful lobbyists, a very particular derangement has become more pronounced in the last few years, and I think it’s important to try and understand it. The denial of reality – particularly regarding climate collapse and genocide – has never been so widespread.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:42 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Susan Spivack wrote:
Andy, Yes! we must face reality, but please as a journalist and musician/songwriter, fellow human, please balance your dire warnings with posts that do the opposite of leaving your readers rolling up in despair in shadowy corners. Lift up and help us focus on the groups and occasional individuals who are working their butts off right now to lift up love, kindness, environmental preservation, the end of genocide and other mass murdering war events in too many places on this planet.
These are groups we can donate our $$ to, find petitions to sign, and words to use in calling on elected leaders, and ideas to share to hearten others and other actions to take in our local and public lives. Here’s a short list taken from my gmail inbox:
https://peacenow.org/
American Friends of the Parents Circle https://parentscirclefriends.org/
Combatants for Peace https://cfpeace.org/
Environmental preservations https://350.org/
Groups providing essential medical and other help: https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/
To stay active we must maintain hope, and always know we have no idea how any and all of this will actually play out.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:44 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I appreciate your list of organizations that are worth people’s attention, Susan, and I can only apologize for the perceived bleakness of my post, but I wrote it because of what I regard as the crucial importance of focusing unblinkingly on what it is that is so deeply wrong with our leaders.
My intention is to create an awareness of how we need to build a coherent response to what, as I see it, consists of various extremely disturbing examples of dangerous mental illness, beyond the more obvious reasons for degenerate leadership – the power of lobbyists, for example.
There’s a sickness at the heart of our political systems (and the media who support them), which is sicker than ever before, and almost unthinkingly cruel and irresponsible, and I wanted to confront it directly. I hope you understand.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote:
Susan, in this world, money rules, nothing else. That’s what I’ve learned.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:46 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Mostly, Richard, but there’s a cruelty too, and, as we’re seeing now, that is spilling out into open, even self-righteous enthusiasm for genocide, and complete indifference towards our self-inflicted extinction. We seem to be in unique peril, because of the rage of our leaders in the face of a truth that they simply cannot bear – that their beloved capitalism is killing us.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:46 pm
Andy Worthington says...
David Barrows wrote:
Susan, Andy does show the protest work that Witness Against Torture does. I don’t know about British news, but U.S. news tends to play down climate warming: it talks about weather catastrophes without naming the causes. U.S. corporate news boils down to headlines without insight or the desire to offer solutions to problems in governance; instead it’s he says, she says.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:47 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, David. Yes, the mainstream media bear a colossal responsibility for people’s ignorance, because they simply won’t tell the truth, as that would involve addressing the thorny topic of how capitalism is killing us.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:48 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Damien Morrison wrote:
Susan, the days of petitions are gone, i’m afraid it has now to be direct action.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:57 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, I think so, Damien, and in the US there’s a wonderful group of angry motivated young people called Climate Defiance, who are worth watching as they disrupt the lives of corrupt fossil fuel execs and lawmakers: https://www.climatedefiance.org
Sadly, here in the UK, we’re struggling with the horribly draconian laws introduced by Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which, predictably, Keir Starmer’s Labour seem to have no interest in revoking.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 7:58 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Damien Morrison wrote:
we’re dying everything is dying ffs how did we let it get to this point?
...on September 1st, 2024 at 8:10 pm
Andy Worthington says...
We didn’t have any choice, Damien. It’s been a 40-year program of manipulation, across politics and the media, to encourage everyone to be atomized and as horrendously self-obsessed as possible. It’s been horribly successful.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 8:11 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Mary MacGregor Green wrote:
I walked up the dirt road to Lama Foundation around now but back in 1971… and I met the best people in my life, who were then and are now all about climate change. In these 50 plus years, we have done what we can as individuals … and while I’m grateful for every moment till now …YES IT IS TIME TO STAND UP AND SAY … now is the time, this is the hour.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 8:14 pm
Andy Worthington says...
That’s very poignant and powerful, Mary. Thanks. As you say, “now is the time, this is the hour.” Let’s hope that more and more people realize it over the coming years, which are going to be crucial to our future.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 8:15 pm
Andy Worthington says...
David Schwartzman wrote:
Thanks again Andy for your eloquent articles and this provocation! Here is my response. It is not so much the “broken, violent, power-obsessed individuals” who are the problem, rather global fossil capital, in this U.S. election its prime instrument, the climate denialist Trump/Republicans. In contrast, Harris/Democrats are not climate denialist, but still heavily influenced by the fossil capital lobby. Strategic voting, defeating Trump in swing states and boosting the Green Party in red/blue states can open up a path to undermine the Harris administration’s imperialist foreign policy, starting with the end to U.S. complicity in Israeli genocide. See my CounterPunch article, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/02/a-lesson-from-the-french-popular-front-for-left-presidential-candidates-in-the-us/
And the critical global subject of winning this struggle is the working class and its allies. In the case of the U.S., the Democratic Party is much more pro worker and union than the Republican Party. With the latter’s defeat, building the capacity of the organized working class will be significantly promoted.
On your section on the Russia/Ukraine war, Putin’s Russian took U.S./NATO’s bait in its illegal, criminal and catastrophic invasion of Ukraine. Putin could have avoided this war with a global peace offensive, using the opposition of Germany and France to Ukraine joining NATO. Now U.S./NATO and Putin are obstacles to a ceasefire without conditions, leading to negotiations guided by China’s peace principles, respect for the UN Charter and sovereignty of the nations involved.
And finally, as a climate scientist and activist, I say, yes, to your conclusion “It may — just about — not be too late for the decent people of the world to somehow rise up” and confront the ever increasing threat of climate hell for the future of the children of the world. Here is my analysis: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/01/08/an-ecosocialist-strategy-that-can-still-make-1-5-possible/
...on September 1st, 2024 at 8:54 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks very much for your feedback and for the links to your articles, David. Much appreciated. I particularly like that quote from Paulo Freire: “what can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?”
...on September 1st, 2024 at 9:02 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote, in response to 2, above:
I agree with Ruth and with the sentiment of the writing. I’m at a loss and desperately sad – and angry.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 9:12 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Anita. It came from a place of pain and anger that I hoped would have some resonance.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 9:13 pm
Andy Worthington says...
David Barrows wrote, in response to 5, above:
Andy, the trouble seems to be that people feel helpless before the challenges and do not realize that if they organize constructively with each other they can be both seen and heard. In the U.S. people have trouble tolerating different opinions and too often lack the skill of friendly persuasion. Hence, difficult and challenging subjects are avoided helping “to keep the peace,” but in reality, making society ignorant and impotent.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 9:59 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, that feeling of helplessness seems to be prevalent everywhere in the west, David – people not able, or no longer able to understand their strength in numbers, or simply withdrawing from reality by somehow managing to pretend that all the horrors that are happening aren’t actually happening (a kind of denial that can’t be endlessly prolonged, evidently).
...on September 1st, 2024 at 10:00 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Damien Morrison wrote:
Andy, I was reading about neanderthal man, apparently they were a gentle peaceful people physically stronger and more intelligent … they were wiped out by the homo sapiens [what a surprise ] … one wonders if perhaps the wrong group of humans survived … im afraid to say im becoming … over … the human race … we have as you and I have discussed been shown repeatedly over and over again … how to live upon this planet … the only planet … how to live with each other … and yet here we are.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 10:56 pm
Andy Worthington says...
We’re such a bewildering species, Damien. We’re obviously riddled with massive insecurities, and can behave abominably, and yet acts of everyday kindness remain a prominent part of our story too. The worst thing, I think, is that we get stuck in systems, to which the the flock mentality generally ensures conformity, and yet it can all change suddenly, and our societies can adapt and behave completely differently.
For 40 years we’ve been stuck in the most grotesque world of isolated selfishness and greed, and while I fear for the worst as it all comes crashing down, I’m also prepared to contemplate that I might be wrong, and that when it all comes crashing down we just might surprise ourselves.
...on September 1st, 2024 at 10:57 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote:
Andy, when the world has been colonised by oil and extraction corporations, this is the result – global corporatocracy. It’s faceless, values-less, & psychopathic. Protest against what they’re doing, and if possible, they’ll kill you. If not, they’ll ensure you’re silenced through threats (many of the FFF children have been silenced this way), or criminalisation. It may have been people at the helm of the colonisation, but now it’s a relentless corporate machine. We know it’s funding the far right while also dictating party leaders who’ll be funded, or destroyed. That’s the world we live in.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:33 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Anita. I hadn’t realised that children in the Greta Thunberg-inspired Fridays For Future movement have been intimidated into silence, but that makes sense, sadly.
Your description of a “relentless corporate machine” with no one at the helm has a resonance for me. I’ve felt, for decades now, that no one is specifically in control, and it’s perhaps helpful for us to realise that much of what we’re dealing with is the result of a corporate system that exists primarily – or even solely – to prioritise shareholder profits with no mechanism that, at the same time, evaluates the moral or ethical dimension of this profit-making.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:34 am
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote:
The big trouble with the U.S. and Britain, is that that there is no proportional representation. In real democracies there would at least be an anti genocide party to vote for that would get representation Who tf would think that both parties would support these horrendous slaughters since the vast majority of its people do not.
Something is so rotten in the US and Britain. The leaders must be tried for “aiding and abetting genocide”, one of the biggest crimes a nation can do besides actually doing it like Israel is doing – and faces no consequences. Biden, Blinken, Harris, Kunak and Starmer will get away with assisting in genocide.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:35 am
Andy Worthington says...
You’re absolutely correct to point out how notions of democratic representation in both the US and the UK are undermined by the absence of proper proportional representation, Richard, so that we’ve ended up in the absurd position whereby both major parties in both our countries support the genocide despite a majority of voters opposing it.
However, the psychic collapse I discuss afflicts other countries that do have proportional representation, with Germany (Israel’s second biggest arms supplier after the US) being the most prominent example. Germany has become quite spectacularly deranged in recent years, first over Ukraine and now in such enthusiastic defence of Israel that its police violence against Palestinian supporters is rivaled only by the US.
Sadly, in Germany the left can no longer seem to find a way to appeal to a significant proportion of the German people to challenge this, and in fact a third component of our collective psychic collapse – virulent racism and anti-immigrant sentiment – seems to have filled the gap instead, with the AfD, who have already begun addressing the far-right’s long hunger for the forced repatriation of people who aren’t white, securing nearly a third of the votes yesterday in two state elections in the former East Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/german-far-right-party-afd-state-election-victory-thuringia
So even with more representative systems, there generally seems to be a gap where the left should be, with a third of people seduced by the far-right, a third being “centrists” who have become increasingly right-wing, and a third not voting at all.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:35 am
Andy Worthington says...
Sylvia Posadas wrote:
I knew it was all over for humans when they first ignored the IPCC reports. The writing was on the wall since Aldous Huxley wrote about peak phosphorus anyhow. Humans doom themselves through relentless, unmitigated greed, despite their ability to reflect on the results of their own actions.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:36 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks for your thoughts, Sylvia. What a world we live in, with international bodies established after WWII that are increasingly revealed to be impotent becuase they lack enforcement mechanisms. It’s true of the IPCC – and more specifically the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement – and it’s also true when it comes to Israel, where, in defence of a genocide, the Global North’s leaders seem prepared to destroy the UN entirely rather than have Israel be held accountable for anything.
Last month’s opinion by the ICJ about the illegality of Israel’s entire occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory was a devastating condemnation of Israel, but I’d be willing to bet that most people didn’t even hear about it, so degraded is the state of our mainstream media: https://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2024/07/23/what-now-after-the-world-court-condemns-as-unlawful-israels-entire-57-year-occupation-of-the-palestinian-territories/
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:37 am
Andy Worthington says...
Ed Calipel wrote:
I’ve been surprised recently by the type of people who don’t look at me as if I’m an alien if I mention the rapid decline in fauna and change in predictability of what remains of seasons.
That is perhaps due to the majority of the few people I meet locally living a rural life and so in closer touch with our environment.
The other people I meet are a different matter.
Rather than rework the content of other comments, I’ll provide – somewhat tangentially but it’s part of the overall human problem, what I think is a stark example of how people pay lip service to environmental concerns.
This year I joined Nature House, an intermediary focusing on holiday homes that are environmentally responsible and sustainable.
Unfortunately, visitors using that platform appear to believe they have little or no responsibility; clear instructions for triage of refuse are provided, detailing what should and should not go in each container. These instructions are largely ignored – and how does an “ecologically-friendly” family of four fill a 250 litre recycling bin with plastic in 3 days?
Across all intermediary platforms I have a rating average of 100%, 96% for 2 properties; on Nature House it is lower – not for the reasons you might expect.
One rating, that the visitor said was a “very good review” of 60% was due to their being spiders in the house; patently they don’t know that relocating indoor spiders outside is virtually the same as vacuuming them up and killing them immediately. I explained this, the ethos of Nature House (cleanliness is a resounding 100% across all other platforms) and my no-kill policy and his response was that “people have different standards”. He has children …
Another reviewer on Nature House mentioned they couldn’t use a lawn as the grass was too long; the lawn had several hundred bee orchids in full bloom and was buzzing with life – many different species, the pollinators that should be protected and cherished unlike farmed bees that disrupt indigenous fauna.
So that’s a big part of the problem, people are either ignorant or choose to salve their conscience without actually changing the way they live.
Comfortable in their bubble.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:38 am
Andy Worthington says...
Good to hear from you, Ed. I’m sure you’re right about rural people being able to recognise the significance of climate change because they are still close to nature, unlike city-dwellers, so many of whom have little or no connection to it at all.
Your anecdotes about Nature House are very telling, both about humans’ widespread tendency to hypocrisy, and the dangerous obsession with “cleanliness” that I first noticed in the late ’80s when ferocious anti-bacterial products were first widely introduced, and I recall experts pointing out how, without dirt, we can’t build up our immune systems.
Since then, as you note, people can now no longer tolerate any other life form in their homes (apart from their pets, of course), prefer plastic grass to real grass in vast numbers, and are no doubt relieved that our windscreens are no longer covered in dead insects because if was such a faff having to clean them.
We have been led into alienation from nature very thoroughly over the last 40 years, which is not only alarming on the basis of our inability to understand that everything is connected; it also, I think, explains much of western humanity’s confusion, as we are alienated from ourselves, not only though our atomizing culture, but also by cutting ourselves off from the nature that we’re intrinsically part of.
...on September 2nd, 2024 at 10:39 am
Andy Worthington says...
Kären Ahern wrote:
Andy, I haven’t read your essay yet, but just what you have written on your post is exactly how I am feeling/thinking. Those I find who feel similarly are scattered about the Globe. I long for Unity and a Global Strategy. It takes hope to muster it.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I’m so glad to hear that what I wrote in my introduction has resonance for you, Kären. On the one hand, these are more desperate times than ever before, but, while the spirit of resistance lives, hope is not dead, and, if we can keep connecting the genocidal warmongering and the denial of – or lack of action on – climate change with an understanding of quite how deep the psychic collapse of almost all our leaders and gatekeepers is, we might be able, collectively, to take the next step, but it’s definitely going to take a revolutionary mindset.
Voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz isn’t going to achieve it, for example, even if that keeps Donald Trump out, just as voting the Tories out in the UK hasn’t made any fundamental difference; they’re all complicit, and we’re going to have to find effective ways to stop cooperating.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote, in response to 27, above:
Andy, I remember studying economics and people like Amartya Sen, and André Gorz pointing out that capitalism was only ever meant to describe our economic system. It was always meant to be just a part of a greater system of values.
[As for teen activists], young Francisco Vera has been open about death threats sent to him, but others have just gone quiet.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-change-book-for-children-francisco-vera/
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:18 pm
Andy Worthington says...
How interesting to hear that perspective regarding capitalism, Anita. It has always seemed to me that the rot truly set in after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the western neoliberals started believing their own hype – that capitalism had defeated Communism, and was therefore above reproach. It was absurd then, and its only got more and more dangerous ever since.
And thanks for that link to Francisco Vera’s story, which I hadn’t come across before. It’s young people’s futures that are most as stake, and we should do all we can to empower them.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:18 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote:
Andy, the post war social contract put a reasonable values system alongside capitalist economics, rather like the social democrats of the Nordic countries whose revolutions coincided with the beginnings of formal social policy at the beginning of the 20th century. Yeah – then the elite manufactured oil crisis, followed by the end of the cold war and the neolibs managed to remove all references to any kind of values system apart from survival of the richest.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:19 pm
Andy Worthington says...
“Survival of the richest”: what a deadly and accurate motto for the last 40 years, Anita.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:19 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote, in response to 29, above:
Andy, yes, the German government has gone astray. The Greens have failed the German left, so has Die Linke. But bc Germany has a proportional system, a new left is emerging under Sarah Wagenknecht, so at least they have a new left to choose from.
Europe has been overwhelmed with immigration from non European nations. We have to remember that Europeans are the indigenous people of Europe and don’t like the loss of what they see is the loss of their culture. Hungary and Poland are refusing to take in immigrants. They are not evil because of this.
The German right is at least against the virulent anti Russian sentiments of NATO, and has a voice to shed them. The U.S. and Britain have none. Scholz is unpopular. The German people, I think, are waking up faster than the British and American people to the destructive nature of the West, but not quick enough.
A government based on proportional representation, at least has a chance to face things more squarely and give more options, although it might take a while. No system is perfect. The American system, imo, is the worst. I call it pure oligarchy since the wealthy and Zionists buy the politicians here. It’s is so obvious and so anti democratic. It mocks democracy.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:22 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks for your thoughts, Richard. I’m rather more dubious than you are about Sahra Wagenknecht, and I certainly don’t for a moment share any belief amongst so-called indigenous Europeans that the continent is somehow theirs; we are all fundamentally immigrants, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise, and, in addition, more recent immigrants are necessary in countries in which what you call the indigenous people are statistically getting older and older.
I certainly agree with your assessment of the US, though. A “pure oligarchy” indeed, in which money openly buys power.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:22 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote:
Andy, people can disagree.
I don’t know much about Sahra Wagenknecht, I will have to look deeper. But if she is in favor of trying to end the Ukraine Russian war, and if she wants the US out of Europe I think this would be good for world peace.
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:23 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I know a German left politician, Richard, who told me, several months after the Ukraine war started, how absurd the situation was in Germany, as they were being relentlessly attacked by the centrists (and Greens!), while being simultaneously wooed by the far-right, who shared their opposition to war, but, of course, had nothing else in common with them.
I find the rise of the far-right always to be profoundly disturbing, although the rise of Wagenknecht’s party is obviously more nuanced, as we’re clearly in new territory with a party that claims to be on the left economically, but is on the right when it comes to immigration. Economically, this would seem to send a clear message to the centrists about the failure of their neoliberal model, but I can’t claim to be reassured at all by a conservative, protectionist model that elevates the ‘native’ population above others, as that’s never ended well.
But as you note, any political presence in Europe that opposes the dominance of NATO warmongering is at least helpful in trying to shift the insane status quo of the last two and a half years, in which, as I tried to explain in my article, war has essentially been revived as the purpose of existence (even as the gravest war of all – of ourselves against a habitable planet – is ignored).
...on September 3rd, 2024 at 1:23 pm