From Maggie Zhou, MA delegate to GPUS, to the peace contingent gathering for the 10/2/10 One Nation Working Together march in Washington, D.C.

Brothers and Sisters,

We are here today because we are angry at the multitude of problems that our government is responsible for, the many ways the system has failed us, and we recognize the root causes of all these problems are the same, and therefore they require common solutions.

Many of us here are peace activists.  For nine years, we have been trying to stop the ongoing US wars for oil and for the expansion of the military-industrial complex.  In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are epicenters of the larger war we’re waging against Mother Earth & her children.  It is where our death-dealing empire bombs the planet, drill her, bleed her for her oil, poison her with radioactivity, and rape her out of the life she had, the innocent lives of men, women and children, and the fertile soils that once was the food basket of the Middle East.

But, there are many other epicenters in this larger war against Mother Earth.  A massive hemorrhage was just inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico by one of the worst perpetrators in this war.  Mountain Top Removal coal mining has been denuding, defacing & poisoning the beautiful mountain ranges and streams of Appalachia and the entire coal country.  Hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for “natural gas” extraction, has been poisoning our groundwater, and consequently food production, anywhere it touched, and it’s taking over America with a vengeance.  Looking around the globe, the gazillion mines where we humans extract the insides of Mother Earth & poison her outside with it, the many shopping malls and pavements and parking lots we built in place of her life-giving forests and grasslands, the many dams we built that chokes the life out of her ecosystems, the diversion of her rivers & streams & precious groundwater reservoirs for monoculture, chemical-laiden farming operations, and now devastatingly, the crazed worldwide expansion of “energy crops” for biofuel, biomass & biochar production…  

Nothing else in the world… not all the armies…  is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

                                                           — Victor Hugo

Last night I got to see Bill McKibben deliver a typically rousing and depressing speech in his hometown and the home of the American Revolution, Lexington, Massachusetts. McKibben is one of very few leading lights building a global climate movement up to the task of preventing an all-out climate catastrophe. I credit McKibben more than any other single person with pushing those concerned about climate change to take meaningful collective action. So I was a little nervous when I got to ask him a question from the audience about something I find troubling about his approach.

Early in his talk, McKibben pointed out that the number 350 — equal to the maximum safe level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere — was entirely non-ideological. He went on to suggest that we can build a movement that can shame and pressure our elected officials to act to price carbon high enough that we begin to phase out our devastating use of fossil fuels. Missing from this approach, however, is McKibben’s own analysis that the paradigm of economic growth is an underlying cause of the climate crisis. While McKibben was clearly embracing the task at hand as a political one, he seemed excruciatingly timid about the fact that the political task at hand is an ideological one.

{ Excerpt from a piece I wrote for Swans Commentary, June 2007 }

But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America.

-Naomi Klein, Baghdad Year Zero

In a searing article in Harper’s Magazine in September 2004, Naomi Klein laid out a theory of the Iraq War that shreds even today’s conventional wisdom about the motivations for our invasion. Her theory was that the neocons saw Iraq as a potential test tube for their ideological utopia, and pursued a strategy of shock therapy, where the devastation of war would force Iraqis to rebuild their nation from scratch. Out of desperation (not to mention shock and awe), they would be receptive to U.S. economic policy unimaginable in any other country. The common refrain that Bush did not have a postwar plan is inaccurate. According to Klein, the neocons’ plan started to backfire once the companies they were counting on to privatize the country hesitated to jump on board, and not for the reason you think. Yes, the security situation wasn’t perfect. But more importantly, companies decided to wait for the creation of an Iraqi government because international law prohibited the United States as an occupying force from running the show.

Of course, there were other parts to the ideological impetus for this war, including but not limited to Iraq’s tremendous oil reserves, the extension of US hegemony through the establishment of military bases, and the ever-present profit motives of the military-industrial complex. While Naomi Klein exposes the neoconservative drumbeat for war that we all love to hate, these other reasons hone in on a rift in the antiwar movement that must be overcome. That rift, my friends, is between those of us who hold out hope that the Democratic Party can be moved to spurn these deeper-rooted motivations for war, and those of us who know they cannot and will not.