"Instead of there being a reasoned and honest look at the root causes of
resurgent Islamic radicalism, the discussion of strategies in the war against
terror had been almost entirely dominated by the 'counter-terroris experts'
with their language of high-tech-weaponry, militarism and eradication.
The latter may be useful to treat the symptoms but does not, and will never,
treat the disease."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 4
"The smoke and vapour trails over Tora Bora may have signalled the end of
Afghanistan as a favoured destination for aspirant terrorists but it did
nothing to eradicate the reasons for volunteers wanting to go there."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 5
"So, what is al-Qaeda? Ask even well-informed Westerners what they believe al-Qaeda to be and they will tell you that it describes a terrorist organization founded more than a decade ago by a hugely wealthy Saudi Arabian religious fanatic that has grown into a fanstastically powerful network, comprising thousands of trained and motivated men, watching and waiting in every city, in every country, on every continent, ready to carry out the orders of their leader, Osama bn Laden, ready to kill and maim for their cause.
"The good news is that this al-Qaeda does not exist. The bad news is that
the threat now facing the world is far more dangerous than any single
terrorist leader with an army, however large, of loyal cadres. Instead the
threat that faces us is new and different, complex and diverse, dynamic and
protean and profoundly difficult to characterise. Currently there is no
vocabulary available to describe it."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 7
"The word itself is critical. 'al-Qaeda' comes from the Arabic root qaf-ayn-dal.
It can mean base, as in a camp or a home, or a foundation, such as what is
under a house. It can mean pedestal that supports, a column. It can also mean
a precept, rule, principle, maxim, formula, method, model or pattern."
"
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 7
"What bin Laden was able to do, between late 1996 and late 2001, was to provide a central focus for many of these disparate elements. This led not to the formation of a huge and disciplined group, but to a temporary focus of many different strands within modern Islamic militancy on Afghanistan and what, in terms of resources and facilties, bin Laden and his three dozen close associates were able to provide there. These resources -- training, expertise, money, munitions and a safe haven -- were what many militants, either as individuals or working as groups, had spent the years since the end of the war in Afghanistan trying, with varying degrees of success, to find.
"This period is when 'al-Qaeda' matured. Yet it was still far from the structured terrorist group envisaged by many commentators. 'al-Qaeda' at the time consisted of three elements. This tripartite division is essential to understanding the nature of both the 'al-Qaeda' phenomenon and of modern Islamic militancy.
"The first element is the 'al-Qaeda hardcore'. In addition to the dozen or so
associates who had stayed with him since the late 1980s, bin Laden was able to
attract many of the pre-eminent militants active at the time. Most came for
purely pragmatic reasons. Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 was an excellent
place to be. For militants who had spent years trying to mobilise and act,
struggling all the while with domestic security services, Afghanistan was like
a department store designed for Islamic terorists. Recruits, knowledge, ideas
and even cash could be had off the shelf."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 12-13
"A second element of 'al-Qaeda' as popularly conceived involves the scores of other militant Islamic groups around the world. Again, a careful examination of the situation shows that the idea that there is an international network of active groups answering to bin Laden is wrong.
[...]
"There are many other sources of funding and of expertise and training beyond
bin Laden. Groups and individuals have miultiple associations and multiple lines
of support. Groups, or elements within them, may cooperate with each other or
with bin Laden on occasion if thet fell it suits their purpose. But, though
they may see bin Laden as a heroic figure, symbolic of their collective struggle,
individuals and groups have their own leaders and their own agenda, often ones
that are deeply parochial and which they will not subordinate to those of bin Laden
or his close associates."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 14
"There are other models that can be of use. Al-Qaeda can be seen as a venture capitalist firm, sponsoring projects submitted by a variety of groups or individuals in the the hope they will be profitable. Or viewed as a commissioning editor, providing funds and expertise to enable the production of the ideas of someone else.
"Together these links, some tenuous some more direct, allow us to speak of a
loose 'network of networks'. This is not an 'al-Qaeda network'. It is a way
of describing those elements within the broad movement of Islamic militancy
who have some connections to the 'al-Qaeda hardcore' however varied and
indistinct. Along with the 'al-Qaeda hardcore' and the 'network of networks'
is a third element: the idea, the worldview, ideology of 'al-Qaeda' and those
who subscribe to it."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 16
"Almost all terrorist consider themselves to be soldiers who are 'at war'. American right-wingers use the greeting 'RAHOWA' which stands for 'racial holy war'. Their tracts announce that they 'believe there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkeness (today known as the Jews) and the children of light (God), the Aryan race'. Like most religious terrorists, they are convinced that a 'cosmic war' is underway around them. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic extremist terror group, say they too are 'at war'. Meir Kahane's Jewish extremists talk of war between Jews and Arabs. In his 1998 fatwa, bin Laden announced that the American actions in the Middle East were 'a clear declaration of war on God, His messenger and Muslims'.
"If the world is understood as dominated by a cosmic struggle between good
and evil all problems are explained. An individual can explain personal and
communal suffering and humiliation. Even better, they can blame someone for
both. A battle involves a clear and present danger from an obvious enemy.
Seeing the world as a battlefield enables an individual to deploy a whole
series of myths, cultural and religious references. This is hugely empowering.
Those who take part in the cosmic struggle are holy warriors, proud, strong,
deserving of respect and prestige."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 26
"The struggle against zulm [tyranny] is jihad. Indeed an effort against, or for,
many things, is jihad. The root of the word is the Arabic Jhd, meaning strain,
effort, struggle, endeavour or striving. The word ijtihad, the effort to interpret,
comes from the same root. According to one well-known hadith, Mohammed distinguished
two jihads: the greater, against oneself, and the lesser, against another. It does
not necessarily mean 'holy war' as is so often said. Indeed one can have the jihad
of the heart, of the pen, of the tongue, of the sword and so on. Islamic scholars
and jurists have argued over the exact definition of jihad throughout Islamic history."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 31
"The problem for bin Laden and others is that the vast majority of Muslims, though
they may feel profound sympathy with the Palestinians, oppose actions in Iraq, feel
humiliated by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the
Middle East and are concerned by burgeoning Western cultural and political hegemony,
do not sympathize with his methods and reject his extremism. Bin Laden and other
extremists are aware that, of the many Muslims sympathetic to them, very, very few
are going to act on those sentiments. Though they may be pleased, sometimes secretly,
that bin Laden is taking a stand and feel a profound, though complex, identification
with his cause, the vast majority of Muslims do not condone his methods and are not
disposed to take up arms. The extremists thus see their task, like that of all
political activists, as being to mobilise and radicalise. Bin Laden outlined
his aim explicitly in an interview with al-Jazeera, the Qatari TV channel in 1999.
'We seek to instigate the [Islamic] nation to get up and liberate its land, to fight
for the sake of God and make the Islamic law the highest law and the word of God
the highest word of all.'"
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 34-35
"Currently al-Zawahiri says, there is a huge 'gap in understanding between the jihad movement and the common people'. He attributes this to 'the media siege imposed on the message of the jihad movement as well as the campaign of deception mounted by the governement media'."
[...]
"It is here the concepts of jihad and martyrdom, and of the spectacular, are so key. In his book, al-Zawahiri warns: 'we must mobilise the nation of Islam against infidelity. We caution against the risk of...Muslim vanguards getting killed in silence.' For by using modern communications the vanguard...can reach out to the population at large...In his statement on 7 October 2001, bin Laden specifically referred to the September 11th attackers as 'a vanguard of Islam... rendered successful by Islam.'
"There have been many terrorist attacks, some involving the suicide of the attackers,
before. But none has been watched live by tens if not hundreds of millions of
people. This is the spectacular in its most extreme, mediatised form. This was
grasped by the German contemporary composer, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and the
Brisihs artist, Damien Hirst, both os whom, to almost universal opprobrium, have
described the attack on the Twin Towers as works of art. As Jean Baudrillard
pointed out weks after September 11th: 'we are far beyond ideology and politics
now...the aim is...to radicalise the world by sacrifice'. Bin laden made this point
explicitly ina videotaped conversation he held with supporters in Novemeber 2001 in
Afghanistan. 'Those young men [the hijackers]...said in deeds...speeches that
overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches
are understood by Arabs and non-Arabs -- even by Chinese.'"
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 36-37
"Of course the 'war on terror' should have a military component. It is easy
to underestimate the sheer efficacy of military power in achieving specific
immediate goals. Hardened militants cannot be rehabilitated and need to be
made to cease their activities, through legal processes or otherwise. But
if we are to win the battle against terrorism our strategies must be made
broader and more sophisticated. Military power must be only one tool among
many, and a tool that is only rarely, and reluctantly, used. Currently,
military power is the default, the weapon of choice. In fact, the greatest
weapon available in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and
integrity of the vast proportion of the world's Muslims. It is this that is
restricting the spread of 'al-Qaeda' and its warped worldview, not the
activities of counter-terrorist experts. Without it we are lost. There is
indeed a battle between the West and men like bin Laden. But it is not a
battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it
is a battle we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are losing."
-Jason Burke
Al Qaeda, Page 249
"Quite often even the most important step in a man's life, his choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects of his vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch off his critical awareness and to fir himself wholly into the predetermined career.
"My decision to enter Hitler's party was no less frivolous. Why, for example, was I willing to abide by the almost hypnotic impression Hitler's speech had made on me? Why did I not undertake a thorough systematic investigation of, say, the value or worthlessness of the ideologies of all the parties? Why did I not read the various party programs, ot at least Hitler's Mein Kampf or Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century? As an intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my preliminary architectural studies. This failure was rooted in my inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student friends, who were predominantly indoctinated with the National Socialist ideology.
For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that Hitler was
proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that he was a rank anti-semite;
that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule; that after attaining
power he intended to elinate democratic procedures and would therafter yield
only to force. Not to have worked that out for myself, not, given my education,
to have read books, magazines and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have
tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification -- was already
criminal. At this initial stage, my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work
for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning
knowledge creates direct shared responsibility for the consquences -- from
the very beginning."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 18-19
"In retrospect, what perhaps troubles me the most is that my occasional spells of uneasiness during this period were concerned mainly with the direction I was taking as an architect, with my growing estrangement from Tessenow's doctrines. On the other hand I must have had the feeling that it was no affair of mine when I heard the people around me declaring an open season on Jews, Freemasons, Social Democrats or Jehovah's Witnesses. I htought I was not implicated if I myself did not take part.
"The ordinary party member was being taught that grand policy was much too
complex for him to judge it. Consequently, one felt one was being represented,
never called upon to take personal responsibility. The whole structure of the
system was aimed at preventing conflicts of conscience from even arising. The
resutl was the total sterility of all conversations and discussions among these
like-minded persons. It was boring for people to confirm one another in their
uniform opinions."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 33
"I recall, incidentally, that the footage taken during one of the solemn sessions of the 1935 Party Congress was spoiled. At Leni Riefenstahl's suggestion Hitler gave orders for the shots to be refilmed in the studio. I was called in to do a backdrop simulating a section of the Kongresshalle, as wellas a realistic model of the platform and lectern. I had spotlights aimed at it; the production staff scurried around -- while Streicher, Rosenberg, and Frank could be seen walking up and down with their manuscripts, determinedly memorizing their parts. Hess arrived and was asked to pose for the first shot. Exactly as he had done before an audience of 30,000 at the Party Congress he solemnly raised his hand. With hsi special brand of ardour, he turned precisely to the spot where Hitler would have been sitting, snapped to attention and cried: "My Leader, I welcome you in the name of the Party Congress! The congress will now continue. The Fuehrer speaks!"
"He did it all so convincingly that from that point on I was no longer sure of
the genuineness of his feelings. The three others also gave excellent
performances in the emptiness of the studio, proving themselves gifted actors.
I was rather disturbed; Frau Riefenstahl, on the other hand, thought the acted
scenes better than the original presentation."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 62
"There is a special trap for every holder of power, whether the director of a
company, the head of a state, or the ruler of a dictatorship. His favor is
so desirable to his subordinates that they will sue for it by every means
possible. Servility becomes endemic among his entourage, who compete among
themselves in their show of devotion. This in turn exercises a sawy upon
the ruler, who becomes corrupted in his turn."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 83
"Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a
delagation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to
penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eight century, his
visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours.
Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For
theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword
and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have
become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the
Germanic temperment. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their
racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with
the harsher climate and conditions of the country. Thue would not have kept
down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized
Germans could have stood at the head of the Mohammedan Empire."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 96
"I often asked myself whether Hitler was open to influence. He surely
could be swayed by those who knew how to manage him. Hitler was mistrustful
to be sure. But he was so in a cruder sense, it often seemed to me; for he
did not see through clever chess moves or subtle manipulation of his opinions.
He had apparently no sense for methodical decit. Among the masters of that
art were Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, and, within limits, Himmler. Since
those who spoke out in candid terms on the important questions usually could
not make Hitler change his mind, the cunning men naturally gained more power."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 126
"Hitler asked me to report on my impressions of Italy. I had been most struck by the fact that the walls of even the villages were painted with militant propaganda slogans. 'We don't need that," Hitler commented. "If it comes to a war, the german people are tough enough. This kind of propaganda may be all right for Italy. Whether it does any good is another question.*
"*In his speech to the editors in chief of the German press, Hitler described
wha he considered the proper method of propaganda for creating war readiness:
'Certian events should be presented in such a light that unconsciously
the masses will automatically come to the conclusion: If there's no way
to redress this matter pleasantly then it will have to be done by force; we
can't possibly let things go on this way.'"
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 148
"When I was on my trip to Lisbon, a transportation disaster had developed behind the fronts in the eastern theater of war. The German military organization had been unable to cope with the Russian winter. Moreover, the Soviet troops in the course of their retreat had systematically wiped out all locomotive sheds, watering stations, and other technical apparatus of their railroad system. In the intoxication of success during the summer and fall when it seemed that 'the Russian bear is already finished,' no one had given sufficient thought to the repair of this equipment. Hitler refused to understand that such technical measures must be taken well ahead of time, in view of the Russian winter.
"I heard about these difficulties from high officials of the Reichsbahn (the
governement railroad system) and from army and air force generals. I thereupon
proposed to Hitler that thirty thousand of the sixty-five thousand German
construction workers I was employing be assigned under the direction of my
engineers, to repair work on the railroads. Incredibly, it was two weeks
before Hitler could bring himself to authorize this. On December 27, 1941,
he at last issued the order. Instead of hurling construction crews into the
breach at the beginning of November, he had gone on with his triumphal buildings,
determined not to capitulate in any way to reality."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 184-185
"Next day the [Stalingrad] situation had worsened. Zeitzler's pleas had grown even more urgent; the atmosphere in the situation conference was sombre; and even Hitler looked exhausted and downcast. Once he too spoke of a breakout. Once more he asked how many tons of supplies were needed daily to maintain the fighting strength of over two hundred thousand soldiers.
"Twenty-four hours later the fate of the encircled army was finally sealed.
For Goering appeared in the situaton room, brisk and beaming like an operetta
tenor who is supposed to protray a victorious Reich Marshall. Depressed, with
a beseeching note in his voice, Hitler asked him: 'What about supplying
Stalingrad by air?' Goering snapped to attention and declared solemnly: 'My
Leader! I persoanlly guarantee the supplying of Stalingrad by air. You can
rely on that.' As I later learned from Milch, the Air Force General Staff had
in fact calculated that supplying the pocket was impossible. Zeitzler, too,
instantly voiced his doubts. But Goering retorted that it was exclusively
the business of the air force to undertake the necessary calculations. Hitler,
who could be so pedantic about erecting edifices of figures, on this day did not
even ask for an accounting of how the necessary planes could be made available.
He had revived at Goering's mere words and had recovered his old staunchness.
'Then Stalingrad can be held! It is foolish to go on talking any more about
a breakout of the Sixth Army. It would lose all its heavy weapons and have
no fighting strength left. The Sixth Army remains in Stalingrad!'"
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 248-249
"On November 26, 1943, four days after the destruction of my Ministry, another major air raid on Berlin started huge fires in our most important tank factory, Alkett. The Berlin central telephone exhange had been destroyed. My colleague Saur hit on the idea of reaching the Berlin fire department by way of our still intact direct line to the Fuehrer's headquarters. In this way, Hitler too, learned of the blaze, and without making any further inquiries, ordered all the fire departments in the vicinity of Berlin to report to the burning tank plant.
Meanwhile I had arrived at Alkett. The greater part of the main workshop had
burned down, but the Berlin fire department had already succeeded in extinguishing
the fire. As a result of Hitler's order, however, a steady stream of fire
equipment from cities as far away as Brandenburg, Oranienburg, and Potsdam kept
arriving. Since a direct order from the Fuehrer had been issued, I could not
persuade the chiefs to go to other urgent fires. Early that morning the streets
in a wide area around the tank factory were jammed with fire engines standing around
doing nothing -- while fires spread unchecked in other parts of the city."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 289
"I have always thought it was a most valuable trait to recognize reality and not to pursue delusions. But when I now think over my life up to and including my years of imprisonment, there was no period in which I was free of delusory notions.
"The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity of the national Socialist regime. But in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they ahve lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirros, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over. No external factors disturbed the uniformity of hundreds of unchanging faces, all mine.
"There were differences of degree in the flight from reality. Thus Goebbels was
surely many times closer to recognizing actualities than, say, Goering or Ley.
But these differences shrink to nothing when we consider how remote all of us, the
illusionists as well as the so-called realists were from what was really going on."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 291
"An American historian has said of me that I loved machines more than people. He is not wrong. I realize that the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions but not my conduct. On the plane of feelings only sentimentality emerged; in the realm of decisions, on the other hand, I continued to be ruled by the principles of utility. In the Nuremberg Trial the indictment against me was based on the use of prisoners in the armament factories.
"By the court's standard of judgement, which was purely numerical, my guilt would have been greater had I prevailed over Himmler and raised the number of prisoners in our labout force, thus increasing the chances of more people for survival. Paradoxically, I would feel better today if in this sense I had been guiltier. But what preys on my mind nowadays has little to do with the standards of Nuremberg nor the figures on lives I saved or might have saved. For in either case I was moving within the system. What disturbs me more is that I failed to read the physiognomy of the regime mirrored in the faces of those prisoners -- the regime whose existence I was so obsessively trying to prolong during those weeks and months. I did not see any moral ground outside the system where I should have taken my stand. And sometimes I ask myself who this young man really was, this young man who has now become so alien to me, who walked through the workshops of the Linz steelworks or descended into the caverns of the central Works twenty-five years ago.
"One day, some time in the summer of 1944, my friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, came to see me. In ealrier years, he had told me a great deal about the Polish and French campaigns, had spoken of the dead and wounded, the pain and agonies, and in talking about these things had shown himself a man of sympathy and directness. This time, sitting in the green leather easy chair in my office, he seemed confused and spoke falteringly, with many breaks. He advised me never to accept an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Never, under any circumstances. He had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe.
"I did not query him. I did not query Himmler. I did not query Hitler. I did not
speak with personal friends. I did not investigate -- for I did not want to know
what was happening there. Hanke must have been speaking about Auschwitz. During
those few seconds, while Hanke was warning me, the whole responsibility had become
a reality again. Those seconds were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the
Nuremberg Trial that as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had
to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment
on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something
which might have made me turn from my course. I had closed my eyes. This
deliberate blindness outweighs whatever good I may have done or tried to do in
the last period of the war. Those activities shrink to nothing in the face of it.
Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz
in a wholly personal sense."
-Albert Speer
Inside the Third Reich, Page 375-376
"Despite certain events in the twentieth century, most people in the
Western cultural tradition still believe in the Victorian ideal of
progress, a belief succinctly defined by the historian Sidney Pollard
in 1968 as 'the assumption that a pattern of of change exists in the
history of mankind...that it consists of irreversible changes in one
direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.'"
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 3
"Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology -- a secular religion which, like the religion that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. As I've written elsewhere: 'Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations...Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.'
"The myth of progress has sometimes served us well -- those of us seated
at the best tables anyway -- and may continue to do so. But I shall
argue in this book that it has also become dangerous. Progress has an
internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive
trail of successes may end in a trap."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Pages 4-5
"Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth
are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which
fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies -- once
mighty, complex and brilliant -- lie the most instructive lessons for our
own. Their ruins are shipwrechs that mark the shoals of progress. Or --
to use a more modern analogy -- they are fallen airliners whose black boxes
can tell us what went wrong. In this book, I want to read some of those
boxes in the hope that we can avoid repeating past mistakes, of flight plan,
crew selection, and design. Of course, our civilization's particulars
differ from those of previous ones. But not as much as we like to think.
All cultures, past and present, are dynamic. Even the most slow-moving
were, in the long run, works in progress. While the facts of each case
differ, the patterns through time are alarmingly -- and encouragingly --
similar. We should be alarmed by the predictability of our mistakes but
encouraged that this very fact makes them useful for understanding what
we face today."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 8
"Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last three million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making."
"This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a collosal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world's population has multiplied by four and its economy -- a rough measure of the human load on nature -- by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. It's entirely up to us. If we fail -- if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us -- nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea."
"We have already caused so many extinctions that our dominion over the earth
will appear in the fossil record like the impact of an asteroid. So far,
we are only a small asteroid compared to the one that clobbered the dinosaurs.
But if the extinctions continue much longer, or if we unleash weapons of
mass destruction -- I mean the real ones kept in huge stockpiles by the major
powers -- then the next layer of fossils will indeed show a major hiatus
in this planet's life."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 30-31
"I should make it clear that I'm defining 'civilization' and culture in
a technical, anthropological way. By culture I mean the whole of any
society's knowledge, beliefs and practices. Culture is everything: from
veganism to cannibalism; Beethoven, Botticelli, and body piercing; what
you do in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the church of your choice (if
your culture allows a choice); and all of the technology from the split
stone to the split atom. Civilizations are a specific kind of culture;
large complex societies based on the domestication of plants, animals and
human beings. Civilizations vary in their makeup but typically have towns
cities, cities, governments, social classes, and specilized professions.
All civilizations are cultures or conglomerations of cultures, but not all
cultures are civilizations."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 32-33
"Like the butt of Dr. Johnson's joke that much may be made of a Scotsman
if he be caught young, a late Paleolithic child snatched from a campfire
and raised among us now would have an even chance at earning a degree in
astophysics or computer science. To use a computer analogy, we are running
twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago
or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 35
"The hunters at the end of the Old Stone Age were certainly not clumsy,
but they were bad because they broke rule one for any prident parasite:
'Don't kill off your host.' As they drove species after species to
extinction, they walked into the first progress trap."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 40
"The Victorian archaeological scheme of classifying stages of human development by tool materials becomes unhelpful from the Neolithic onward. It may have some merit in Europe, where technology was often linked to social change, but is little help for understanding what happened in places where a lack of the things our technocentric culture regards as basic -- metal, ploughs, whee;s, etc -- was ingeniously circumvented, or where, conversely their presence was inconsequential. For example, Mesopotamia invented the wheel about 4000 BC, but its close neighbour Egypt made no use fo wheels for another 2,000 years. The Classic Period Maya, a literate civilization rivalling classical Europe in mathematics and astronomy, made so little use of metals that they were technically in the Stone Age. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa mastered the ironworking by 500 BC (as early as the Chinese did), yet never developed a full-blown civilization. The Incas of Peru, where metal working had begun about 1500 BC, created one of the world's largest and most closely administered empires, yet may have done so without writing as we know it (though evidence is growing that their quipu system was indeed a form of script). Japan made pottery long before anyone else -- more than 12,000 years ago -- but rice farming and full civilization did not appear there for another 10,000 years, adopted wholesale from China and Korea. The Japanese didn't begin to work bronze until 500 BC, but became famous for steel swords by the sixteenth century. At that time they acquired European firearms, then abandoned them for 300 years."
"We should therefore be wary of technological determinism, for it tends
to underestimate cultural factors and reduce complex questions of human
adaptation to a simplistic 'We're the winners of history, so why didn't
others do what we did?'"
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 46-47
"The great mystery of Easter Island that struck all early visitors was not just that these colossal statues stood in such a tiny and remote corner of the world, but that the stones seem to have been put there without tackle, as if set down from the sky. The Spaniards who had credited the Devil with the splendours of Inca architecture were merely unable to recognize another culture's achievements. But even scientific observers could not, at first, account for the megaliths of Easter Island. The figures stood there mockingly, defying common sense."
"We know now the answer to the riddle, and it is a chilling one. With all due respect to Captain Cook, Nature had not been unusually stingy with her favours. Pollen studies of the island's volcanic lakes have shown that it was once well watered and green, with rich volcanic soil supporting thick woods of the Chilean wine palm, a fine timber that can grow as big as an oak. No natural disater had changed that: no eruption, drought or disease. The catastrophe on Easter Island was man."
"Rapa Nui, as Polynesians call the place, was settled during the fifth century A.D by migrants from the Marquesas or the Gambiers who arrived in big catamarans stocked with their usual range of crops and animals: dogs, chickens, edible rats, sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes, and mulberry for making bark cloth."
[...]
"By A.D. 1400, no more tree pollen is found in the annual layers of the crater lakes: the woods had been utterly destroyed by bothe the largest [humans] and the smallest [rats] mammal on the island."
"We might expect that in such a limited place, where, from the height of
Terevaka, islandes could survey their whole world at a glance, steps would
have been taken to halt the cutting, to protect the saplings. to replant.
We might think that ss trees became scarce, the erection of statues would
have been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes such as
boarbuilding and roofing. But that is not what happened. The people who
felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete
certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway.
All shade vanished from the land except the hard edged shadows cast by
the petrified ancestors, whom the people loved all the more because they
made them feel less alone."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 59-60
"The lesson that Rapa Nui [Polynesian for Easter Island] holds for our world has not gone unremarked. In the epilogue to their 1992 book, 'Easter Island, Earth Island', the archaelogists Paul Bahn and John Flenley are explicit. The islanders, they write:
'carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use fo resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disater leading to a population crash...Do we have to repeat the experiment of [a] grand scale?...Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?'
"The last tree. The last mammoth. The last dodo. And soon perhaps the last
fish and the last gorilla. On the basis of what police call 'form', we are
serial killers beyond reason. But has this always been, and must it always
be, the case? Are all human systems doomed to stagger along under the
mounting weight of their internal logic until it crushes them? As I have
proposed, the answers -- and I think, the remedies -- lie in the fates of
past societies."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 63
"But it's a mistake to assume that the Fertile Crescent, for all its natural endowments, its plants and animals suitable for domestication, developed quickly or easily. Even after several thousand years of farming and herding, the biggest Middle Eastern settlements -- Jericho (near the Dead Sea) and Catal Huyuk (in Anatolia) -- were still tiny, covering only ten acres and thirty acres, respectively."
"Insofar as the Garden of Eden had a physical geography, this was it.
The serpent, however, was not the only enemy. Fortifications at Jericho
and elsewhere speak of competition for land a heavier human presence
than the sites alone attest. Nor was the farming life easier or
healthier than the hunting life had been: people were smaller in
build and worked longer hours than on-farmers. Average life expectancy,
deduced from burials at Catal Huyuk, was twenty-nine years for women
and thirty-four for men. By 6000BC, there is evidence of widespread
deforestation and erosion. Cavalier firesetting and overgrazing by goats
may have been the chief culprits, but lime-burning for plaster and
whitewash also destroyed the woodland, until it became the thorny scrub
and semi-desert seen there today. By 5500 BC, many of the early Neolithic
sites were abandoned. As on Easter Island, people had befouled their nest,
or rather had stripped it bare. But unlike the Easter Islanders, these
people had room to flee and start again."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 66-67
"A small civilization such as Sumer, dependant on a single ecosystem and without high ground, was especially vilnerable to flood and drought. Such disasters were viewed, then as now, as 'acts of God' (or gods). Like us, the Sumerians were only dimly aware that human activity was also to blame. Floodplains will always flood, sooner or later, but deforestation of the great watersheds upstream made inundations much fiercer and more deadly than they would otherwise have been. Woodlands, with their carpet of undergrowth, mosses, and loam, work like great sponges, soaking up rainfall and allowing it to filter slowly into the earth belwo; trees drink up water and breathe it into the air. But wherever primaeval woods and their soils have been destroyed by cutting, burning, overgrazing, or ploughing, the bare subsoil bakes hard in dry weather and acts like a roof in wet. The result is flash floods, sometimes carrying such heavy loads of silt and gravel that they rush from steep ravines like liquid concrete. Once the waters reach a floodplain, they slow down, dump their gravel, and spread out in a brown tide that oozes its way to the sea."
"Staggering alluvial forces are at work in Mesopotamia. In the 5,000 years
since Sumerian records began, the twin rivers have filled in eighty miles
[128 kilometers] of the Persian Gulf. Iraq's second city of Basra was open
sea in ancient times."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 74-75
"When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated in Sumer between the world wars, he wrote:
'To those who have seen the Mesopotamian desert...the ancient world seem[s] wellnigh incredible, so complete is the contrast between past and present ...Why, if Ur was an empire's capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?'His question has a one word answer: salt. Rivers rinse salt from rocks and earth and carry it to the sea. But when people divert waters onto arid land, much of it evaporates and the salt stays behind. Irrigation also causes waterlogging, allowing brackish groundwater to seep upward. Unless there is good drainage, long fallowing, and enough rainfall to flush the land, irrigation schemes are future salt pans."
"Southern Iraq was one of the most inviting areas to begin irrigation, and one of the hardest in which to sustain it: one of the most seductive traps ever laid by progress. After a few centuries of bumper yields, the land began to turn against its tillers. The first sign of trouble was a decline in wheat, a crop that beahves liek a coalminer's canary. As time went by the Sumerians had to replace wheat with barley, which has a higher tolerance for salt. By 2500 BC, wheat was only 15 per cent of the crop, and by 2100 BC Ur had given up wheat altogether."
[...]
"The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered."
By 2000 BC, scribes were reporting that the earth had 'turned white.' All
crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their
original levels. The Sumerians' thousand years in the sun of history came
to an end."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Pages 77-79
"The Maya and the Romans had no connection with each other. They arose at
similar times but in separate social laboratories: the New World and the Old.
This makes them useful for recognizing human behaviours that transcend specifics
of time, place and culture..."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 82
"The careers of Rome and the Maya also show, I think, that civilizations often behave like 'pyramid' sales schemes, thriving only while they grow. They gather wealth to the centre from an expanding periphery, which may be the frontier of a political and trading empire or a colonization of nature through intensified use of resources, often both."
"Such a civilization is therefore most unstable when at its peak, when it
has reached maximum demand on ecology. Unless a new source of wealth or
energy appears, it has no room left to raise production or absorb the
shock of natural fluctuations. The only way onward is to keep wringing
new loans from nature and humanity."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 83-84
"One of the revealing ironies of Rome's history is that the city-state's
native democracy withered as its empire grew. Real power passed from the
senate into the willing hands of field commanders, such as Julius Caesar,
who controlled whole armies and provinces."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 90
"Explanations for Rome's fall run the gamut -- plagues, lead poisoning,
mad emperors, corruption, barbarians, Christianity -- and Joseph Tainter,
in his book on social collapse, has added Parkinson;s Law. Complex
systems, he argues, inevitably succumb to diminishing returns."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 92
"Archaeological work in Italy and Spain has revealed severe erosion corresponding to high levels of agricultural activity during imperial times, followed by a population collapse and abandonment until the late Middle Ages."
"As the empire impoverished the soils of southern Europe, Rome exported
its environmental load to colonies, becoming dependent on grain from
North Africa and the Middle east. The consequences can be seen in those
regions today. Antioch capital of Roman Syria, lies under some thirty
feet of silt washed down from deforested hills, and the great Libyan
ruins of Leptis Magna now stand in a desert. Rome's ancient breadbaskets
are filled with sand and dust."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 93-94
"Now that Maya inscriptions can be read, they have dispelled old notions of Classic Period life as lofty and serene. For all the grand explorations of cosmic time, public texts are also royal propaganda, proclaiming births, accessions, deaths, victories and coup d'etat. During the eight century, as trouble begins to brew, these statements become more strident, betraying a scramble for power and resources in a shrinking world. Militarism takes hold, old alliances break down, dynasties become unstable, the ruling class exalts itself with extravagant building projects. Tikal was built up over 1,500 years, but all the high towers that still watch over the forest went up in the city's final century, costly blooms on the eve of collapse."
[...]
"In the year 810 Tikal recorded its final dates. One by one the cities fell still, inscribing no more monuments, until on January 18, 909 (10.4.0.0.0 to the Maya), the last date was carved (at Tonina) and the great machinery of the Long Count calendar ceased to revolve."
"What went wrong? As in Rome, all the usual suspects -- war, drought,
disease, soil exhaustion, invasion, trade disruption, peasant revolt -- have
been questioned. Some of these are too sudden to account for a collapse that
took more than a century. But many of these things would flow from ecological
malaise. Again, sediment studies show widespread erosion. There are no goats
to blame in this case, but small losses each year still added up to bankruptcy.
Stone axes are slower than steel, and hoes gentler than ploughs, but enough of
them will do the same job in the end."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Pages 98-100
"I have a weakness for cynical graffitti. One relevant to the hazards of progress is this: 'Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.' The collapse of the first civilization on earth, the Sumerian, affected only half a million people. The fall of Rome affected tens of millions. If ours were to fall, it would, of course, bring catastrophe on billions."
"So far we've looked at four ancient societies -- Sumer, Rome, the Maya, Easter Island -- which, in roughly a thousand years each, wore out their welcome from nature and collapsed. I've also mentioned two exceptions, Egypt and China, who achieved a run of 3,000 years or more."
"Joseph Tainter, in his book on past collapses, nicknames three kinds of trouble
the Runaway Train, the Dinosaur and the House of Cards. These usually act together.
The Sumerians irrigiation was certainly a runaway train, a disastrous course from
which they could not deviate; the rulers' failure to tackle the problem qualifies
them as dinosaurs, and the civilizations swift and irreperable fall shows it to
have been a house of cards."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 107-108
"We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic
level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet's
natural capital. We're logging everywhere, fishing everywhere,
irrigating everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere
escapes our haemorrhage of waste. The twentyfold growth in world trade
since the 1970s has meant that hardly anywhere is self-sufficient. Every
Eldorado has been looted, every Shangri-La equipped with a Holiday Inn.
Joseph tainter notes this interdependence warning that 'collapse, if
and when it comes again, will this time be global...World civilization
will disintegrate as a whole.'"
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 124-125
"If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 percent of nature's yearly output; by the 1980s we'd reached 100 percent; and in 1999, we were at 125 percent. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear -- they mark the road to bankruptcy."
"None of this should surprise us after reading the flight recorders in the
wreckage of crashed civilizations; our present behaviour is typical of
failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance. This is the
dinosaur factor: hostility to change from vested interests, and inertia
at all social levels."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 129
"We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted
the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees'
seeds to plant out of the reach of the rats. We have the tools and the
means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care
and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we
don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do
them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this
new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and
collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past."
-Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress, Page 132
"There is now a symbiotic relationship between the Islamist terrorists and
the coalition of interests in Washington that has clambered aboard the
'war on terror.' Neither side wishes the other to triumph, but both thrive
on the confrontation -- and they have grown far beyond the original small
groups of determined people who dragged the rest of us into this mess."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 2
"...the danger is not that extremists from the margins will dominate the global future, but that they will do enormous damage to our future before they go under."
"What is really at risk here is the global project to abolish war and replace the rule of force in the world with the rule of law, a project whose centrepiece is the United Nations. It was mainly an American initiative at the start, almost sixty years ago, and today it still commands the respect of almost every government on the planet (although the Bush administration has been an exception). It is a hundred year project at the least, for it is trying to change international habits that had at least five thousand years to take root. The slowness of change causes immense frustration, especially given the urgency of change in an era of nuclear weapons, and yet the project continues to enjoy majority popular support in almost every country, including the United States. But it is now under serious threat."
"The core of the UN is that war, except in immediate self defence or in
obedience to Security Council resolutions, is illegal. The
new American strategic policy ,
post 9/11, asserts that the United States has the right to use military force
wherever and whenever it judges necessary."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 3
"If the present U.S. strategy of undermining international law and asserting American military hegemony around the planet is quickly abandoned under the pressure of events in Iraq, then normal service will soon be restored internationally and we will get our global project back with only a few dents in it. If the U.S. adventure in unilateralism continues for another five years, other great powers will start taking steps to protect their interests and the UN will start to die. No other major power wants to abandon the project to outlaw war and start back dwon the road to alliances, arms races and all the other old baggage, but if the world's greates power becomes a rogue state they won't have much choice."
"If that happens, we have lost a lot."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 5
"...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, ever the unconscious ironist,
declared: 'I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal
affairs of Iraq.'"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 12
"In anti-colonial guerrilla wars, the locals always win. The Dutch learned
that lesson in Indonesia, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the British
in Kenya and Cyprus, and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. The
United States went through the same learnign process in Vietnam, and the
Russians in Afghanistan. It's all about how much time and how many lives
the two sides are willing to spend on the issue. The fighting may go on
for years, the better equipped foreigners will will almost all the battles,
and ten or twenty guerrillas may die for each foreign soldier, but there is
an endless supply of locals and very little patience for a long war with
high casualties back in the foreigners home country. In the end the foreigners
invariably succumb to the temptation to cut their losses and go home,
because otherwise there will be no end: the guerrillas are never going to quit
and go home, because they already are home. And it makes no difference
how noble the foreigners think their motives are; only the opinion of the
locals counts."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 25-26
"People in positions of power in the United States, faced with the reality
of America's declining political importance and its precarious economic
situation, have been and will be forced to respond to the problems arising
from America's relative decline in strategic importance and economic power
in one way or another even if they only dimly understand them -- and the
course of least resistance, if they are not prepared to make a rigorous
analysis and tough choices, will be to drift back towards solutions that
served the United States well in the past. The default choice is to
recreate the world of the Cold War, or at least a pale facsimile of it,
because that was when the United States really was the indispensable nation,
with a genuine and legitimate role at the centre of both politics and
economics."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 42
"The stakes are much higher than they seem. The foundations of the First
World War were laid by decisions that were made ten to twenty years before
1914, and after that, it was very difficult for anyone to turn back. There
is a strong case for saying that we have arrived at a similar decision
point now; what happens in the next year or so matters a lot, so we need
some answers fast. Is the terrorist threat really worth worrying about?
Is there a serious bipartisan project for restoring American global hegemony,
or is it merely a bunch of neo-conservatives dreaming of lost glories --
or is it just the usual cock-up on an unusually large scale?"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 47
"If we are ever to get some sense of proportion back about terrorism, we need a logarithmic scale for disasters like the one they use for stars. Only the very brightest stars are First Magnitude; divide the brilliance by ten for Second Magnitude stars, by a hundred for Third Magnitude, and so on. Ranking human disasters by the same system, only those that could kill, say, half the population in question would be First Magnitude. For the twelve million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, the Holocaust was a First Magnitude calamity; half of them were dead by 1945. At the global level, a First Magnitude disaster would be one that killed around three billion people: it is possible to imagine a return of the Black Death, for example, that would kill three billion people, and an all-out global nuclear war could reach the same casualty level."
"Divide by ten and a Second Magnitude global disaster is one that kills in the low hundreds of millions of people. A 'clean' Third World War with relative restraint in the nuclear targeting of cities and no nuclear-winter effect would fall into this range. The AIDS epidemic may ultimately prove to be a Second Magnitude disaster, although a very slow moving one. Divide by ten again and we are down to Third Magnitude disaster like the First and Second World Wars and the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918-19, which all killed 10 to 50 million people. An Indo-Pakistani nuclear war would be a Third Magnitude disaster, as would an Israeli decision to unleash its nuclear arsenal on its Arab neighbours."
"Divide by ten once more, and we are down to Fourth Magnitude events, only one-thousandth as big as First Magnitude ones. Big or long-lasting local wars like Korea 1950-53, Vietnam 1965-73, and Sudan 1983-2003 fall into this range, killing two or three million people. The slaughter in the Great Lakes region of Africa that began the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and continues today in Eastern Congo probably qualifies by now as a Fourth Magnitude event. An out-of-control nuclear meltdown in a densely populated area or a megaton-range bomb exploded at the right height over a very large city could also cause deaths at a Fourth Magnitude level."
"Divide by ten again and we drop to the level of purely local catastrophes like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Krakatoa explosion of 1883, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, each of which killed in the quarter-million range. Potential Fifth Magnitude calamities in the present include the Big One along the San Andreas fault in California, an average year's famine toll in Ethiopia, or a successful terrorist attack on a major city using a ground-burst nuclear weapon."
"Another division by ten, and we drop to Sixth Magnitude events like the war in
Iraq in 2003, the 2004 earthquake in Iran, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967,
all of which caused 20,000 to 50,000 fatal casualties. Worse case scenarios
for highly successful terrorist attacks using biological weapons very rarely
rise above this level. And a final division by ten brings us down to Seventh
Magnitude events like the IRA's war in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998, the
Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine from 2000 to the present, and the 9/11
attacks on the United States in 2001, all of which have caused on the order of
three thousand deaths. About as many Americans die each month from gunshot
wounds as died in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93, and those losses,
unlike the terrorist attacks, recur every month. So why is terrorism regarded
by both the U.S. government and media as the world's number-one problem?"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 53-55
"How did a relatively limited disaster like 9/11 lead to the huge, system wide
disruption we are now seeing? The best answer is that the terrorist project
of the al-Qaeda jihadis has collided with and energized another far more
dangerous project for changing the world: that of the American neo-conservatives.
The two groups of would-be world changers do not collaborate or even
communicate, and their goals are largely opposed, but they do feed off each other.
Both their projects, as a result, are now up and running."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 58
"The new Islamist strategy that emerged in the camps of the 'Arab Afghans' at the
end of the war in Afgahnistan put the highest priority on attacks against
Westerners, and above all Americans. Whenever possible, these attacks should
be in Western countries. The aim was to lure Western governements into
indiscriminate counter-attacks against Muslim countries, and ideally even
invasions that put Western troops on the ground in the Muslim world. The
ultimate purpose was to recreate the conditions of a classic liberation war,
where every bullet the foreign troops fire creates another recruit to the
cause, and ultimately the Islamists win and the Americans go home because the
Islamists are the local patriots and Americans are foreigners. Then, once
they are in power, they impose their Islamist ideology, force everybody into
the right ways of believing and behaving, and move to the second stage of the
grand project for putting Muslims back on top."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 99-100
"Capturing or killing Osama bin Laden at this point would make little
practical difference to the Islamist movement's ability to strike against
Western targets. As he said himself shortly after escaping from the American
bombing of the Tora Bora caves in late 2001: 'If Osama lives or dies does not
matter...The Awakening has started.' How much of an awakening ensues, however,
is another question. The answer depends largely on how far the United States
wades into the trap he set. Unfortunately -- and no doubt to bin Laden's
great surprise and delight -- President Bush, having dealt with Afgahnistan,
proceeded to invade Iraq as well."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 106-107
"Pax Romana, the Roman peace, was a quite viable project that delivered order over a large area at reasonable cost: Rome directly ruled more than half the population of the known world two thousand years ago, and could collect taxes and recruit soldiers from that very broad power base."
[...]
"Pax Britannica was closer to what the neo-conservatives had in mind, since it was an overseas imperial venture that was largely driven by commercial and financial considerations and was often content to settle for indirect rule."
[...]
"The original Pax Americana was much more benign, for it didn't formally involve an empire at all. It came into existence in the late 1940s, when a visionary generation of American statesmen and soldiers took upon themselves the responsibility of containing Soviet power without fighting the Third World War."
[...]
"By 1989 or 1990, in fact, the United States had effectively worked itself out of the job of being the 'leader of the Free World,' for the rival world was also becoming free."
[...]
"Many Americans live in fear of a terrorist threat that has been deliberately
and grotesquely exaggerated: most of the politically attentive people in the
rest of the world live with the growing worry that something is going badly
wrong. That something is American foreign policy: Pax Americana has been
raised from its shallow grave, and it has turned nasty."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 111-114
"The United States was the first mass society ever to carry out a
democratic revolution, which is an imperishable achievement: to a
large extent, Americans invented the methods by which a society of
equals can become self-governing. But that was more than two hundred
years ago, and in the wider world the examples of the French Revolution
(which raised issues of racial, class, and gender equality largely
ignored by the American Revolution) and of the slowly evolving
British model of parliamentary democracy have been just as influential
in shaping the many dozens of democratic societies that exist today.
In the past twently years, non-Western societies of many different
cultural backgrounds have demonstrated both their desire for democracy
and their ability to seize it from corrupt and oppressive rulers by
non-violent means, as have European countries living under totalitarian
regimes. None of this is acknowledged in the largely self-referential
American debate, however, and so it sounds perfectly plausible (within
the United States) to argue that America must go to war 'to make the
world safe for democracy.' It allowed President Woodrow Wilson to sell
a plain, old-fashioned imperial war to Americans as a crusade for freedom
in 1917, and it let President george W. Bush to do exactly the same thing
in 2003."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 151-152
"The key thing about Bush's State of the Union speech [2002], reiterated and amplified by public statements made by senior neo-conservative members of the administration over the following weeks and months, was the 'new doctrine called pre-emption,' as the president later referred to it. But it wasn't really about pre-emptive war, where a country facing an imminent and obvious intention to attack on the part of an enemy may, under strictly defined circumstances, act first to blunt that attack. Pre-emptive war is what Israel did to the Arab states in 1967, and it is sometimes legal under traditional international law."
"'America will act against...emerging threats before thay are fully formed,'
Bush wrote in the introduction to the annual
National Security Strategy
document. 'We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary...The greater the
threat, the greater is the risk of inaction -- and the more compelling the
case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty
remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack.' That is not
pre-emptive war; it is preventive war, where you attack a country because
you think it might attack you or become more dangerous to you at some future
time. It is never legal, but it is the doctrine that the neo-conservatives
wanted and needed."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 172-173
"The collapse of the 'intelligence' on which they had made their case for war severely damaged public trust in Tony Blair in Briatin and in Prime Minister John Howard's government in Australia, the only other country to have joined the United States' invasion of Iraq, but it had significantly less impact in the United States. A survey by the University of Maryland found that as late as April 2004, 57 percent of those interviewed 'believed that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda,' and 65 percent believed that 'experts' had confirmed that Iraq had WMD. The decline in American popular support for the war in Iraq is more likely due to mounting U.S. casualties there."
"And meanwhile, the other great powers continue to ponder the message that the
United States sent them by invading Iraq. They received the message loud
and clear, but apart from Britain they have not come to heel. France, Germany,
Russia and China offered only verbal criticism of the invasion of Iraq, but
it is clear that they are reconsidering their options in a fundamental way."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 190-191
"The United Nations as constituted in 1945 was a profoundly cynical organization, more explicitly so even than the League of Nations. It accepted without demur that its member states enjoyed absolute sovereignty and would never be forced to submit to intervention in their internal affairs (with the sole and uncertain exception that acts of genocide might trigger international intervention). The UN Charter made absolutely no moral or practical distinction between the most law-abiding democracies and the most respressive dictatorships among its membership. How could it, when more than half its members were themselves dictatorships? The UN was not about love, or justice, or freedom, although words of that sort are sprinkled freely throughout the preamble to the UN Charter; it was about avoiding another world war."
"The problem that the surviving governments faced in 1945, in an even starker
way than their predecessors in 1918, was this: the existing international
system which gives each sovereign state the right to use war as an instrument
of policy, is bankrupt in an era of weapons of mass destruction. The world
cannot allow countries armed with nuclear weapons to go to war with each other.
It can certainly never again go through one of those generalized great-power
melees (;atterly called 'world wars') that in the past were the main
way of adjusting the international system to accomodate the changing
balance between the great powers."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 207-208
"There is also, however, much that the UN cannot do. First and foremost, it
cannot act against the perceived interest of any of the great powers, for
in order to get them all to sign up it had to offer them a special deal:
vetoes that allow the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China
to block any UN action they don't like. It's neither fair nor pretty,
but how else were the founders of the UN going to get the great powers
to sign up -- and what would the organization be if some of them were
outside it?"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 210-211
"And yet the UN is a central and indispensable part of the modern world.
It is the institution through which a politically conscious global society
forst came into existence, and its specialized organs are still the arena
in which most of the world's alrge-scale deals are made on matters ranging
from telecommunications frequencies and trade to public health and the
environment. It is the organizer and command centre for many of the
peacekeeping missions that hold old enemies apart and try to minimize the
level of violence in failed states, and the source of legal authority for
most of those peacekeeping missions it does not directly control. Since
the end of the Cold War, it has become considerably more active in this
field, in some cases even bending its own rules to ratify intervention in
(smallish) sovereign states against the local government's will to end
genocides and similar massive abuses of human rights. And most important
by far, it is the repository of the new international law that bans the
use of aggressive military force, even by the great powers."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 212
"In attacking Iraq in March 2003, Washington not only violated international law, but it also abandoned the multilateral consensus that had more or less legitimized the various attempts to move beyond the strict UN rules in the name of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s."
[...]
"The real ambitions of the neo-conservatives who came to power with George W.
Bush, frankly expressed in their speeches and writings, was to sweep aside
all impediments to the unilateral exercise of American power, starting with
the legal authority of the Security Council. Many of them were therefore
quietly pleased when the United States ended up invading Iraq illegally and
virtually alone apart from Britain: that helped to drive home to everybody
the fact that America's actions were showing the United Nations to be, in
Bush's favourite word, 'irrelevant.'"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 227-228
"The entire international community is now in a state of suspended animation.
Most other governments deplore what the Bush administration did, but they
are so appalled by the choices they would have to make if this turns out
to be a permanent new reality that they have put everything on hold until
at least early 2005. They continue to believe that the United Nations is
our only real bulwark against a return to the lethal old world of international
anarchy, and they do not want to abandon the workl of sixty years in response
to the actions of a unilateralist U.S. policy that might prove to be only
a passing phase in America's adjustment to the changing global balance
of power."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 228-229
"The best recent historical parallel for the process we may soon embark
upon is the early twentieth century, when the alliances that later fought
the First World War initially took shape."
"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 231
"It's not hard to run the world when things are as easy as they are now. There is an established set of great powers, their relative rankings virtually unchanged for the past fifty years except for the Russians, who have accepted their fall from superpower status with remarkable grace. There are no rival alliance systems, and no great power has a major grievance against any other. The global economic climate is benign, the physical climate is not yet changing radically, and painful decisions that require serious sacrifice can still be postponed. A world where terrorism is seen as the biggest problem is a world without big problems. But this happy scene is going to change."
"Global warming and other environmental problems are going to hit us very hard over the next fifty years, How fast they will hit, and how great the resulting upheavals will be, cannot be known in advance, but very few people aside from the usual suspects in the United States any longer doubt that climate change is a reality, and that it will hurt some countries a lot more than others. There will likely be major disruptions in food supply and mass movements of population in some parts of the world -- including some technologically competent parts of the world that have access to the full range of modern weapons. It will not be possible to ignore their suffering, as they will possess the means of drawing it forcefully to everybody else's attention, so there had better be a system in place that enables us to spread the burden of coping with these changes."
"At the same time the pecking order of the great powers is starting to change again. In a globalized world where regional differences in the level of educations, technological ability, and commercial competitiveness are gradually being erased, small countries with a bif lead, like Portugal in the sixteenth century or Briain in the ninteenth century, can no longer be in the first rank of the great powers; only countries of a semi-continental scale can be contenders. The five biggest powers of 2040 will be China, the United Sates, India, Russia, and Brazil -- probably in that order. This ranking is implicit in the current long term growth rates of these economies, projected one generation out, and while some specific country might surprise us by growing faster or slower than the projections suggest, the overall pattern is practically carved in stone."
"The last time the world went through a change of this order, it ended up in the First World War. Long before we get to 2040 -- within the next ten years, in all likelihood -- the strains and stresses that these gradual shifts in relative power are putting on the existing great-power system will begin to show through. If we have a working multilateral system in place, these stresses and strains can probalby be contained and channelled, and everybody will have time to accomodate themselves to the emerging realities gradually and peacefully. If not, then we may look forward to a process quite similar to that before the First World War, with everybody seeking shelter in alliances of one sort or another."
[...]
"Getting through the next half-century was going to be tricky enough even if the great powers went on trusting one another and the United Nations worked well. It will be hopeless if we end up in alliances and arms races again, but the current U.S. bid to impose a new and unwelcome Pax Americana on the world could set off a slide back into that old pattern and foreclose on our future."
"The risk is compounded by the very fragile state of the U.S. economy. The U.S. dollar's prolonged act of levitation must end one way or another, and the possibility that it will end in a sudden crash cannot be excluded."
[...]
"It could get quite ugly, in other words, and we could end up with a world we
do not like a bit. The objective is to get through what promises to be a very
difficult half-century without a world war, and what happens in the next couple
of years may be decisive. Either we get back to building the international
institutions we started working on sixty years ago, or we get used to the idea
that we are workign our way up to the Third World War. So it is important that
the United States does not succeed in turning Iraq into a Middle Eastern base
for Pax Americana, and that Americans come to see the whole project for global
hegemony as an expensive mistake. But it is also important that other countries
give the United States the softest possible landing. Not only does the world not
need an angry and resentful America, it needs a United States that is actively
committed to the project for building a law-based international society."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, pages 243 - 247
"-- disbanding the Iraqi army and turning several hundred thousand
military men out on the streets _with their weapons_ has to rank
among the ten stupidest decisions of the last century --"
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 251
"American nationality has always been defined in ideological terms, and
pretty sweeping ones at that: the cradle of democracy, to begin with,
but latterly also the head office of the perfect economic system:
free-market capitalism. Letting go of these illusions is bound to be
painful, and there are powerful interests in Washington and elsewhere
that will fight hard to keep them alive. They may not win, but if they
do, Iraq will just be the first stage of a very rough ride."
-Gwynne Dyer, Future Tense, page 254
Last modified July 24, 2005