New Beginnings: A Journal of Critical Thought for a World In Crisis

Laying Bare the Myth of 'the Left'

2010-07-01T02:13:00Z

Read this commentary by David Sirota, taken from the Huffington Post, posted June 30, 2010: Laying Bare the Myth of 'The Left'

The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal: Violating Norms, Terminating Futures

2009-10-19T19:38:00Z

Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana have written a short retrospective on the U.S.-India nuclear deal:

http://disarmamentactivist.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/US-India-Deal-ReachingCriticalWill-18Sep09.pdf

Andrew Lichterman is a lawyer and policy analyst for the Oakland, California based Western States Legal Foundation. M.V. Ramana is a physicist and Visiting Scholar at the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy and Program on Science, Technology and Global Security, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.

Commentary and opinion essays, written by contributing colleagues and associates, are intended to provide readers with fresh perspectives on current issues. The views expressed are those of authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Global Peace and Democracy.

Acting Reflexively: Random Thoughts On Our Cultural Inattentiveness and Politics

2009-10-13T18:28:00Z

In an essay entitled “The Present Human Condition”, Erich Fromm observed that our modern society “needs men who cooperate easily in large groups, who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience, yet are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, be prompted without aim… This kind of man, modern industrialism has succeeded in producing.” Harsh words, but accurate.

Flash forward to the year 2009 and do we see any demonstrable change in our lives? Do we resemble those remarks?

Well, I must confess, the description is too apt for my liking. After reading that essay, I began to think about my own life, and the lives of the people around me. We all seem so stressed out, beaten down. There seems to be less time than ever to do more.

Well, more communicating, for one thing. In 1955, the major pathways of communication by individuals were by letter, for the exchange of less time sensitive communications, or by phone, for more immediate needs; mass communication was accomplished by television and radio. Computers were only found in large, corporate settings because technology was too big to carry. In 2009, we have television, personal computer internet, fixed landline telephones and portable cellular phones, as well as other, fading technological options, such as pagers (why have a pager if you can call someone directly?).

We are more connected through more technology than we have ever been. But are we communicating? I see people walking down the street talking, constantly talking; I hear what is being said, but lot of what I hear is rather mundane. Sometimes, I would rather not hear what is being said, but I don’t seem to have a choice. I went to the movies last week, and even after the pre-movie announcement told people to turn off their cellular phones, there were incoming calls and people answering them, reflexively.

Email is a wonderful invention! I love being able to send a friend a message and get one back so much more quickly than by old fashioned letter. But, these days, I find, my friends don’t have much time to reply to my messages, because they have too much to do, and too many other messages that need to be sorted through. Occasionally, I get an email that contains a software destructive virus, gumming up my computer, or otherwise causing expense and inconvenience. Or, because I belong to a group that I want to keep in touch with, we exchange emails because phone conversations between multiple members is not as functional. On the other hand, a 30-60 email thread is sometimes less effective than a five minute discussion with one or two of the key players.

Letters are very old fashioned, so much so that no one has time to write them any longer. One must wonder if future archeologists will be able to discover any footprint at all from the present generation, as regards day-to-day life. The Post Office delivers only advertising circulars and bills to my door, as well as packages of things I have ordered by; if it were not for the advertising circulars, the Post Office would have to quit operations.

If I am in a waiting room for some sort of appointment, I am greeted by a plasma television screen that broadcasts an endless stream of infomercial about procedures, products, ways to prepare vegetables or chatty witticisms. It is rather alarmingly like the two-way telescreens in Orwell’s 1984. Frighteningly enough, all of this loud technology has been made just for me, to satisfy my desires and to allow me freedom of choice.

The phone rings, and we answer. The email comes, and we answer. The text message comes, and we answer. The bill comes in the mail, and we pay it, and while we are writing checks, we respond to the direct mail request from one of dozens of charity requests we might receive during a week. We sort our garbage into different colored bins, and line them up on the street. Absently. Reflexively.

It occurred to me, at some point, that I spend too much time communicating not very much of substance and even more time following up on loose threads of communications. Reflexively, absently, we serve our technology; our technology does not serve us.

The Modern Myth of Connectivity, Cohesion and Community

There is no mistaking the fact that the average person has become caught up in the sticky web of the “information age.” The biggest sales pitch of the late 20^th Century was that the “information super-highway” would connect people to more of the information that they crave, and that it would, moreover, all be free! In the great American tradition of “keeping up with the Jones,” the public has joined en masse in a run of materialistic hubris that has yet to play itself out. With technological advances dictating ever shorter and shorter times between the next best proprietary version, not just the United States, but every so-called “advanced” or “developed” society that has embraced the computer age has been culpable in contributing to polluting the planet in what may be an irreparable way, and has furthered defined the “anatomy of human destructiveness” that Erich Fromm observed and theorized about throughout his work, particularly in Escape From Freedom, The Sane Society and To Have Or To Be.

The pay-off for this has been what I call the myth of greater connectivity, cohesion, and community. While it is truly marvelous and useful to be able to reach a friend or business colleague on the other side of the world by phone or email, perhaps a lot of our communication that way is not so urgent. In reality, we have become spastic post-modern prisoners of our gadgets and gizmos. We are, in our Facebook world, tethered to Blackberries, iPhones and various species of laptops, just as unfulfilled and isolated as ever we were. We flinch at the first jingle of our cell phones and answer them reflexively, no matter what we are doing or who we are with. Texting has replaced face-to-face conversation. The cynical joke is that we now have more technologically advanced ways to evade contact with other people than ever before. The modern existential dilemma is that we live in fear of being out of touch. We live in fear.

Because we are so focused on our personal image of being up-to-date and “with it”, we have really trapped ourselves in little technological bubbles of false self-importance, losing sight of the world around us, cutting ourselves off from deeper connections with people. We have put the responsibility for defining ourselves and for understanding the world around us on others.

Craving for deeper connection, we are easily manipulated in the marketplace and also, by extension, at the polling places. This manipulation occurs in the most cunning way. The general message is usually something like, “we have what you want, and we want you to have it!” And we have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. “Freedom of choice!” the ad banners loudly proclaim.

How is has this been accomplished? Don’t laugh (for one thing, it is not funny!), but behavior analysis of organizations and behavior modification. We are back to B.F. Skinner and the operant perspective, but expanded to account for political behaviors. Kacmar and Baron (1999) observed that political activities have two common aspects: (1) actual motivations behind behaviors are often hidden from the target of the behavior and (2) political behaviors tend to occur when there is competition over limited resources, perhaps especially when there weak or unclear rules as to how the resources are to be allocated. Political behaviors are either enacted toward the upper end of a hierarchy or networked laterally.

Political Action at the Click of a Mouse

Since 1996, facilitating political action by computer has become a big business trend. The 2008 presidential election saw greater use of political websites than ever before. The non-profit world of “causes” was probably at the forefront of this movement toward electronic politics, offering information about causes. Some sites are more interactive than others. The on-line PAC MoveOn.org has developed an interesting “political talk” approach, definitely of the persuasive variety. Interested parties add their email addresses to the list serve, and the PAC keeps the list serve primed with all the latest news and information. Barber (1984) noted that when political talk is limited to persuasion, where individual participants do not have the freedom to participate with equality of reciprocity, the service to democracy is thin. The approach of MoveOn.org is interesting in that it appears to allow participants the opportunity of face-to-face discussion via local parties and discussion groups (where funds can be raised), but there is little evidence that participation in these groups ultimately results in a group consensus. Instead, the consensus is directed from the top by the use of persuasive email campaigns that often start with a complaint about something “the opposition” has done that should outrage us in some way (for example, a few months ago, I received a message that started out: “Did you hear what Rush Limbaugh said about Obama’s recovery plan?”). The participants are then asked, no—actually, they are directed—to write in to their Congress people or sign a petition.

These are very effective campaigns of persuasion, but do they serve a greater democratic consensus or are do they actually serve a more shallow democracy? And if the latter is true, who are the people defining our democratic action for us (first massaging us by telling us they know we are thoughtful and responsible and reasonable people) telling us what we should be thinking and how we can act on behalf of whatever that is? Could this be lobbying masquerading as democracy?

But, PACs are not the only political entities making use of persuasive political talk. Think about all the email you receive from your Congress persons. Somewhere along the line, you signed up or you wrote in, and your email address was captured, so that you are on the list-serve of some politico who sends you personal notes at intervals. Do they have time to do this? No, of course not. They are busy doing their work. And have press aids or other assistants to write these informative, and sometimes persuasive, letters about the latest legislation they want you to support.

Our Choices, Made By Others

While we are busy keeping up with all the messages from all their various streams and avoiding our work by playing computer solitaire, we are missing what is going on in plain sight. It starts at the municipal level and in the workplace, and permeates every aspect of our living:

We have put our faith in our municipal civic leaders to make decisions on how best to run our communities. We don’t tend to watch these activities closely, we are busy with other things. Then we find out that our city is going bankrupt because the city staff has sold out to developers.

We have put our faith in our union leaders to make decisions that are in our best interest. We let them tell us how to vote, we let them lead collective bargaining. We don’t tend to watch these activities closely because, well, we are working and we think, this is why we have leaders, so that they can look out for us. Then we find out that our leaders have collectively bargained our jobs to other shores, dealt away our health care benefits and pilfered our pensions.

We put our faith in our government regulatory agencies to provide safeguards for our health and safety. They are professionals, we think to ourselves, and we don’t have time, like they do, to do the studies and all the reading. Then we find out that expensive drugs have been put on the market (and widely advertised by all our communication streams) that cause greater health risks than the conditions that the drugs were supposed to alleviate. But we don’t find this out until lots of people end up in the hospital or, worse, die.

We put our faith in our political party leaders to know what we want, what is good for everyone, what is equitable and just. This is why we belong to the party—we don’t have time to keep up with all the issues that our party leaders are on top of day in and day out. We vote they way the party tells us to vote. And then we find out that the party that we have had faith in doesn’t have the backbone to vote in a way that makes life equitable and just.

All Systems Failing

I walk down the street in my town, and the streets are in bad shape; maintenance has been deferred, because the town does not have the money to make the repairs. And even if the town had money to make the repairs, they had to layoff the workers who would do the work.

The cable company keeps double billing me. I call in, but have to wade through a complex phone system to get a customer service person who can talk to me incoherently about my bill. In the old days, there was a line you could call for billing, a line you could call for service; now there is a single phone number and an alphabet soup of exchanges one must make by push button on the phone to direct the call to the right person. Once you get to “the right person” chances are you will be redirected to yet another individual—and the phone connection might be lost, so you have to start the entire process over again.

The Internal Revenue Service reminds me of the telephone exchange in Kafka’s The Castle, where you speak into the receiver, but it is unclear if anyone is at the other end of the line and no one answers your query; in the case of the IRS, you send in paperwork that is never acknowledged, but requests for more paperwork and more money come to you, and none of them ever seem to find true resolution, but lead instead to further requests. There is no way for an individual to investigate what is happening or not happening, and one cannot work with a single agent to resolve an issue from beginning to end. There is no way to determine if what is being done on your case is accurate or inaccurate, just or unjust.

What I allude to, by way of these vague hypothetical examples, is that we believe we live in a land that proclaims freedom and choice. But our choices are determined for us, perhaps most of all by large companies who stock miles of store shelves with consumer items we must purchase if we want to prove to our neighbors that we are free and have choice. Now that I have purchased the plasma television that is digital, not analog, I am told that I am sucking up too much of our precious energy and that this is bad, but there is no going back—analog is gone now. Was that a real choice?

I am free and have the choice to pay for sustainable housing, health insurance, college education, the latest technological gizmos, the ecologically sound car, organic snack foods. But what does this mean? And if I cannot afford to do this, what will happen to me? If society cannot afford to do these things, what will happen to it?

Where This Leaves Us and What Can Be Done

If you think the foregoing assessment has been cynical and unrealistic, let me give you a concrete example from current events: healthcare. For the first time in 8 years, we have an opportunity to finally, after nearly 20 years, get a national healthcare plan. Or do we? Our elected, Democratic Party leaders are working on our behalf, making national healthcare a reality for all people who live in the United States. Or are they?

The reality is that ours is a republic, not a democracy. Our representation can be democratically chosen, and should be—but the system is not democratic. We tend to ignore many of the details at the start of an election process, and vote at the end of it reflexively, based on our party affiliation more than any other reason, as if we don’t have any choice in the matter. And the truth is, we don’t have any real choice, for we have largely given over our personal power to someone or something beyond ourselves.

What is the solution to this dilemma? Well, there is no easy, push the button solution—that is certain. A start is to recognize that our choices are really quite few. We cannot complacently live as blind operatives within an incoherent system—and as if we asked for the system to be that way! No, we must stop acting reflexively, and look away from our technology out at the world, applying critical thought, rather than cute consensus twittering, to things we have too long taken for granted and given over to others to do, without oversight.

Where do we begin? Well, take that popular slogan, “think globally, act locally” and put it into practice when thinking about what your real choices are, and what you want them to be. Any global real choices that we want, we should want them not just for ourselves, but for everyone: clean air, clean water, healthy food, affordable housing, healthcare, meaningful work for a living wage. We need to want that, and work for it where we live; knowing that we can only closely tend our own garden. If we start by working locally, by becoming truly informed on local matters and acting toward what we believe to be in the best interests of everyone, we will be less likely to act reflexively at the ballot box.

Barber, Benjamin R. (1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Fromm, Erich. (1955-56) The American Scholar, Vol. 25, No. 1

Kacmar, K.M., & Baron, R.A. (1999). Organizational politics: The state of the field, links to related processes, and an agenda for future research. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 17, 1-39.

* Elisabeth T. Eliassen is a poet, musician and arm-chair scholar living in Alameda, California.

Reindustrializing America

2009-04-17T19:36:00Z

by Harry Brill

According to the Department of Commerce, foreign affiliates of American multinational corporations employ about 10 million workers. As many as 400,000 jobs annually are being lost as a result of foreign outsourcing. Another study revealed that three years after layoffs about one third of displaced workers were still unemployed. Moreover, about half who did find jobs suffered substantial wage reductions. Millions more blue and white collar jobs are expected to go abroad by the end of this decade, leaving behind the damage -- mass unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and even substantially higher mortality rates, as a study at John Hopkins showed.

The federal stimulus package will ease this dire situation somewhat. But the catch is that a substantial proportion of the stimulus will do more to stimulate foreign economies, which supply us with a growing share of what we purchase. Take for example the following: an astonishing 97 percent of the clothing we wear is manufactured abroad. Green technology is also mostly imported. For instance, seventy percent of wind turbines purchased here are manufactured abroad. And patriotic Americans should know that even the American flag they are waiving might be one made in China. Significantly, about half of all our imports come from foreign subsidiaries of American multinational corporations.

The millions of jobs that are being lost and the decline in wages as a result have contributed immensely to the economic downturn. Leo Gerard, the president of the steel workers union is right when he complained that “We cannot work our way out of this economic mess unless we refocus on making things in America.”But we have a big problem on our hands. The federal government has been complicit with the corporations in deindustrializing America. The Government has been continually involved militarily and politically to assure multinationals a low wage and union free environment abroad. Various bodies and agencies of the federal government have been intervening in Latin America, Asia and Africa on behalf of American multinational companies.

Congress and various federal agencies, including the Commerce Department, Agency of International Development (AID), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have aided multinationals to relocate and remain abroad. For example, congressional legislation exempts foreign subsidiaries from corporate taxes unless the profits are remitted to the United States. As a result, many corporations pay no taxes at all because they shift their domestic profits to their foreign subsidiaries. An IRS investigation could easily uncover the scam. But instead the IRS is looking the other way.

The media on rare occasions gives us glimpses of government complicity in encouraging corporate foreign outsourcing. A few years ago the TV program 60 Minutes exposed the attempt by AID to encourage businesses to take advantage of cheap labor and relocate to El Salvador.The Department of Commerce at taxpayer expense has done the same. In fact, a congressman complained that the Department co-sponsored a conference with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to encourage companies to relocate to Mexico.The loss in domestic purchasing power, precipitated by the unemployment and underemployment that is created as a result of foreign outsourcing, is barely touched by the stimulus package. In fact, the purchasing power created by the stimulus is dwarfed by the considerable economic loss suffered by American workers.

What is to be done? First, legislation, taxes, and bailout policies should be constructed to persuade and even require corporations to manufacture domestically. For example, rather than encouraging GM to retrench as a condition for the bailout money, the federal government should insist that GM set aside some of the factories it is closing to manufacture subway and light rail cars for public transportation, which it is quite capable of making. Also, instead of the government giving foreign subsidiaries more favorable tax treatment than domestic based enterprises, the federal government should impose a higher tax on foreign subsidiaries.

Second, millions of decent paying jobs must be immediately created. The Administration estimates that over three million mainly private sector jobs can be in place in two years. To put the unemployed to work swiftly, FDR’s right hand man, Harry Hopkins in 1933 instead generated public sector jobs. In two months over 4 million unemployed were working in mainly manufacturing and construction related jobs.

Although stimulus money will certainly reduce the pain for many workers and should be supported and expanded, public policy that favors corporate desertion must be radically changed. To continue on our current path may forebode a bleak America with no end in sight.

Harry Brill is a labor activist and retired Professor of Sociology (University of Massachusetts, Boston) who now lives in Berkeley, CA.

Deterrence, Torture, Power

2009-04-15T18:12:00Z

by Andrew Lichterman

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

The headlines tell us that President Obama is committed to working towards a nuclear weapons-free world. As is always the case in such matters, we would do well to look at the fine print. We should not expect that the United States, or any other country, will give up its nuclear weapons anytime soon. “This goal,” Obama tells us, “will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime.” Further, he says, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain an “effective arsenal to deter any adversary.” In this, the justification for nuclear weapons remains the same: the elites of every nuclear-armed country always have insisted that nuclear weapons are only for “deterrence.” With enough nuclear weapons still in existence to destroy civilization and to damage irreparably all life on earth, its time to take a closer look at “deterrence.”

In significant ways, the discourse of nuclear “deterrence” resembles the discourse of torture. We can understand this parallel better if we substitute the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture,” as the Bush regime attempted to do (with some success, as manifested in widespread use of the term, often without criticism, in the mainstream news media).

The difference is that the success of those in power at placing the notion of “deterrence” at the core of nuclear weapons discourse has been far greater than the Bush regime’s effort to place the notion of “enhanced interrogation” at the center of discourse about torture. This is likely so because torture has existed for a very long time across a vast range of human experience, and hence is a well-known and relatively well-understood horror– opaque only to those in populations that have not in living memory been on the receiving end of it. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, still are a new part of the collective human story, and were created and remain closeted still within powerful, secretive, institutions. Hence their perceived character and meaning have been subject to planful manipulation from the very moment of their creation. Elite efforts to define nuclear weapons– and to limit permissible meanings we may give to them– have been so successful that we have no easily available alternative to “deterrence.” We don’t even have our own word for the permanent presence of nuclear weapons in our lives.

So we must first solve the equation: “enhanced interrogation techniques” is to “torture” as “deterrence” is to “_______.” The horrors of nuclear weapons use are so great that it is hard to come up with an appropriate phrase. Constant threat of genocide and ecocide? (too clinical, lacks the deep reference in the concretely rooted collective imaginary of “torture”). “Hell on earth?”(Too abstract and theological, also completely omits the element of human intention that is at the core of whatever the permanent, constant brandishing of nuclear weapons by largely unaccountable elites for decades on end really means).

We can find our starting point, perhaps, in clues that suggest my analogy is appropriate. The intention of the Bush regime’s rhetorical move– calling torture “enhanced interrogation”– was to encapsulate the justification for an inherently awful, degrading, and unjustifiable practice in its new name. If this “move” is successful, then the purpose, the intention, behind torture will simply be assumed, rather than discussed. The “purpose” of “enhanced interrogation” obviously is to “obtain information.” Once this is accepted, the metaphorical battle is quite nearly won. And if the “information” to be obtained can be portrayed as essential to “national security” (another self-justifying phrase in great need of disaggregating), the battle is virtually over.

So too with “deterrence.”The word itself presumes not attack, but defense. It is implicitly passive, unless one linguistically and politically disaggregates it to reveal its terrorist roots. And if one accepts that the purpose of nuclear weapons is only to defend against attack, the purposes of nuclear weapons (and the intentions of those who control them) are already assumed, and assumed to be in the general interest of the nation-state that “possesses” the nuclear weapons. The only question left is whether deterrence “works,” and actually makes a country or the world (again assuming without scrutiny or debate that everyone has the same interests) “safer.” Here too, if this rhetorical move is successful, the argument is nearly over, and readily subject to pacification (another neologism whose real meaning is its opposite) via traditional rhetorical moves and tools of the powerful: deployment of legions of experts claiming privileged access to knowledges too complex and obscure for ordinary folk to understand and to secret “information,” and if necessary attacks on the “patriotism” of any who nonetheless persist in raising questions.

There are other parallels between the discourses of torture and constant- nuclear-weapons-threat (my clunky temporary stand-in for “deterrence”). Both abound with– and place at the center of popular discourse justifying these practices– empirically unlikely, even fantastic, narratives of existential threat, and protection against it by selfless (if secretive) public servants (yet another self-justifying phrase). For torture, there is the captured terrorist who has hidden the ticking time bomb, for nuclear weapons, there is the ever-present possibility of a bolt from the blue nuclear attack. And today, these two narratives converge: the ticking time bomb is nuclear, and anyone who would oppose our nuclear weapons with their own presumptively is a terrorist– and might give them a bomb. Actual, everyday uses of torture and constant-nuclear-weapons-threat– to intimidate and silence entire populations, to provide what American generals call the ultimate ‘top cover’ backing world-wide wars of aggression to sustain a global empire– remain largely unmentionable in a discourse where “reasonable” experts and politicians talk of “enhanced interrogation” and “deterrence."

And even the central—and continuing—confrontation among nuclear-armed states is misrepresented in an increasingly dangerous and contradictory kind of circular reasoning unconsciously engaged in even by many advocates of nuclear disarmament. The possibility of wars among the most powerful states—the kind of wars that in modern times have been precipitated by the kind of broad, complex, economic and political crisis that we face again today—are treated as extremely unlikely, largely because most policy experts believe at some level that “deterrence works.” And yet we have not faced a moment in which the fundamental drivers of conflict among the most powerful states have been present—competition over key resources, intensifying political tension within states over wealth distribution, and general collapse of a prevailing “normal” order of international economic and political relationships—since before the dawn of the nuclear age. Wars among “great powers” are presumed to be largely obsolete --but this assumption is due in large part to a belief in deterrence rooted in the particular geopolitical conditions and experience of a Cold War nuclear confrontation rooted largely in ideology and the existence of the weapons themselves.The dangers presented by thousands of nuclear weapons in the hands of “great powers” thus are implicitly discounted, and most in the “arms control and disarmament community” remain comfortable talking about plans for nuclear disarmament in which truly meaningful progress—reduction to global nuclear weapons numbers below civilization-destroying numbers—is largely aspirational, a hazy distant goal many years, or even decades, in the future.

The result is that dominant opinion among experts and political leaders generates policy debate that viewed with even a smidgen of historical perspective appears increasingly absurd—and absurdly dangerous. President Obama’s White House web site tells us that "the gravest danger to the American people is the threat of a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon and the spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous regimes.” “The Agenda: Foreign Policy,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/foreign_policy, accessed March 25, 2009. In this view, nuclear weapons that don’t yet exist are more dangerous then the thousands that already are in the hands of elites who today face growing threats to their hold on power –concrete social conflicts that also are euphemized myriad ways, from “global instability” to “populist anger” —unseen for a generation.

The hand that controls nuclear weapons is no different from the hand the tortures. The hood of the torturer and of those who threaten us all with death by nuclear annihilation must be removed, their true faces revealed. The legal historian Robert Cover wrote that “The torturer and victim do end up creating their own terrible 'world,' but this world derives its meaning from being imposed upon the ashes of another.The logic of that world is complete domination, though the objective may never be realized.” Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” (1986) 95 Yale L.J. 1601,1603 The practice of constant-nuclear-weapons-threat carries this logic to its existential, its apocalyptic, limit, a world in which those who strive to wield absolute power impose their will by threatening to reduce the world of all who stand in their way to literal, rather than metaphorical, ashes. This will to absolute power is the abiding purpose of those who wield both torture and nuclear weapons. Both torture and nuclear threat are intended to emphasize through terror that transcends all reason that the victim—or potential victim-- is utterly vulnerable, and that the hand that wields the power of ultimate violence is not, is invulnerable, all powerful. The intention– and the effect– is to sustain a world in which most are powerless but some hold great power, most are poor but a few hold great wealth, most are vulnerable but a few can at least convince themselves that for the duration of their time here on earth they are not.

It is a story that those who wield this power tell us is as old as human history– implying as well that it will be with us always, that it is our inescapable fate. Insisting upon the eternal presence of boundless violence in that way only obscures the immense scale and reach of the particular horrors of our chosen modernity. “But even if things have always been so,” Theodor Adorno observed, “although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its forms outdoes the old.” Adorno concludes that “He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, E.F.N. Jephcott, trans. (London: NLB, 1974) pp.234-235.

Adorno wrote in the wake of a cataclysmic global war, with the age of nuclear weapons just beginning, and a world of constant-nuclear-threat still in the future. What has become clear is that humanity can not long survive a global order of things in which “terror without end” lies at the center of power, with those who rule most of us in most places still deploying limitless violence to keep things as they are.The conditions for another global cataclysm are quickening. Our technologies have brought us to the point where we can destroy ourselves and much of the chain of life that sustains us either quickly with nuclear weapons, or slowly simply by staying on the course that those in power insist upon, and insist on “defending” with a spectrum of violence that extends from the midnight knock on the door through the torture chambers to the incineration of cities, lands, and peoples. Even Martin Luther King’s call for “nonviolence or nonexistence” no longer is enough, now it also must be democracy or nonexistence, a full and final recognition of our collective vulnerability and our interdependence, one world, with every voice heard equally, or none.

Andrew Lichterman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has worked for disarmament in various capacities for decades. He is a member of the board of the Oakland, California-based Western States Legal Foundation.