What is significant is that it took place. There was a good deal of soul-searching then, primarily among young people, about the course to follow as the Vietnam War moved on from major war crime to utter obscenity. And it reached to a certain extent to privileged intellectuals, the kind of people who read and wrote in the Review. One question—proper, and difficult—was whether to move on from protest to direct resistance, with all of its uncertainties and likely personal costs. Actually I’d been involved in it for several years before, in a tamer version: efforts to organize a national tax-resistance campaign in protest against the war. But by 1967, things were moving to a new stage.
What has changed and what has stayed the same since 1967?
One important change is that there have been a lot of victories, sometimes reaching to issues that were barely on the agenda not very long ago, like gay rights. And consciousness has greatly changed in many domains. Easy to list: rights of minorities, women, even rights of nature; opposition to aggression and terror; and much else.
It’s instructive to look back to see the horrendous atrocities that were easily tolerated then, but not today. It’s also instructive to look back at some of the dramatic moments of the ’60s, for example Paul Potter’s SDS speech at the first major mobilization in 1965, where he roused the crowd by declaring that the time had come to “name the system”; he couldn’t go on to name it, though now there would be no such hesitation. He opened by saying that “most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort.”[93] Few young activists would say that now.
The achievements of the activism of the ’60s and their aftermath leave a significant legacy: it is possible to go on to take up what was cut off then. The fate of the civil rights movement is worth remembering. In the standard version, it peaked in 1963 with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the usual focus of the rhetoric on MLK Day. But King didn’t go home then. He went on to confront the burning issues of the day: the Vietnam War and the plight of the poor, with organizing in urban Chicago and elsewhere.[94] The luster quickly dimmed among Northern liberals. It’s fine to condemn racist Alabama sheriffs, but state crimes and class issues are off-limits. Few remember King’s speech in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated. He was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike of sanitation workers, and was intending to lead a March on Washington to found a movement of the poor and to call for meaningful legislation to address their plight.[95] The march took place, led by his widow, Coretta King. It passed through the sites of bitter struggle in the South and reached Washington, where the marchers set up a tent encampment, Resurrection City.[96] On orders of the most liberal administration since FDR, it was raided and destroyed by the police in the middle of the night, and the marchers were driven out of Washington.
The unfulfilled tasks remain, by now with new urgency after the disastrous economic policies of the past generation. And they can be undertaken from a higher plane.
Many of the old difficulties remain. Movements arise and grow and disappear leaving little organizational structure or memory. Most activism begins from almost zero. It also tends to be separated from other initiatives in a highly atomized society that is in some ways demoralized and frightened, despite its extraordinary wealth, privilege, and opportunities. And there are now questions of decent survival that cannot be shunted aside: the persistent danger of nuclear war, and the threat of environmental disaster, already approaching, and likely to become far more severe if we persist on our present course of denial.
8.
MAD
(Mutually Assured Dependence)
Laray Polk: Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of Greenpeace, has been criticized for bringing a social agenda, not unlike King’s, to the cause of environmental issues. Naidoo has said in response to his critics: “Ever since I came into this job, I’ve been accused of selling out, but I genuinely, passionately feel that the struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin. Traditional Western-led environmentalism has failed to make the right connections between environmental, social and economic justice. I came to the environmental movement because the poor are paying the first and most brutal impacts of climate change.”[97]
Noam Chomsky: I presume that serious environmentalists would agree that saving whales does not get at the root of the problem, and that occupying oil rigs is at best a tactic undertaken to direct attention to deeper causes. On Naidoo, his approach seems to me fully justified, in other respects too. The poor who are (as usual) the victims suffering the most have also often been in the forefront of addressing the root problems. One striking example is the People’s Summit in Bolivia, with its call for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, an appeal voiced by indigenous people worldwide and a challenge to the predatory and lemminglike pursuit of short-term gain by the rich.[98]
Looking at Bolivia’s ecology, it makes sense why they would have the most robust protections for nature: their glaciers are melting, and they’re losing the ability to predict natural cycles of water distribution necessary for maintaining food crops. Those are conditions not unique to Bolivia or Andean glaciers, yet they’re prepared to act.[99] What aspects of cultural practice prepare some communities for addressing ecological realities head-on? Conversely, what aspects of cultural practice impair—and perhaps immunize—other communities to ecological realities?
Looking at the ecology of the rich societies—the US for example—it also makes sense to move toward robust protections for nature. These past few months provide many warnings.[100]
There are many differences between Bolivia—the poorest country in South America—and the US, which by rights should be the richest country in world history, thanks to its unparalleled advantages.
One difference is that the major political force within Bolivia is the indigenous majority. Not only in Bolivia, but worldwide, indigenous communities (“first nations,” “aboriginal,” “tribal,” whatever they call themselves) have been in the forefront of recognizing that if there is to be a hope of decent survival, we must learn to organize our societies and lives so that care for “the commons”—the common possessions of all of us—must become a very high priority, as it has been in traditional societies, quite often. The West too. It’s rarely recognized that Magna Carta not only laid the basis for what became over centuries formal protection for civil and human rights, but also stressed the preservation of the commons from autocratic destruction and privatization—the Charter of the Forests, one of the two components of Magna Carta.[101]
In contrast, the US is a business-run society, to an extent beyond any other in the developed world. Enormous power lies in the hands of a highly class-conscious business elite, who, in Adam Smith’s words, are the “principal architects” of policy and make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of their own society and their colonies (Smith’s concern) and future generations (which must be our concern). In the contemporary United States there has been an increasing growth in the power of the ideology of short-term gains, whatever the consequences. The US business classes have been admirably forthright in announcing publicly their intention of running huge propaganda campaigns to convince the public to ignore the ongoing destruction of the environment, by now quite hard to miss even for the most blind. And these campaigns have had some effect on public opinion, as polls show.[102]
93
Twenty-five thousand participants attended the “March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam,” organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965. Following several hours of picketing outside the White House, Paul Potter delivered his speech at the Washington Monument. To read Potter’s speech, see SDSRebels.com, s.v. “Antiwar Speeches.”
94
See King’s “Beyond Vietnam.” The speech is a hard-hitting analysis of war, militarism, and inequality: “Now there is little left to build on [in Vietnam], save bitterness. Soon, the only solid—solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call ‘fortified hamlets.’ The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech at Riverside Church, New York (April 4, 1967).
95
In King’s 1968 speech, he called for the development of “a kind of dangerous unselfishness” on behalf of sanitation workers and the building of an allied economic base through boycott, a “bank-in” movement, and an “insurance-in” that encouraged patronage at black-owned businesses. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis, TN (April 3, 1968).
96
As part of the “Poor People’s Campaign of 1968,” Resurrection City was organized, built, and occupied for a span of forty-three days from May to June. An estimated five thousand demonstrators participated in the “live-in” located on the Mall in Washington, DC. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy took their toll on the campaign, as did torrential rain on the makeshift city. For successes and failures of the action, see John Wiebenson, “Planning and Using Resurrection City,”
97
John M. Broder, “Greenpeace Leader Visits Boardroom, without Forsaking Social Activism,”
98
A decade prior to the 2010 “People’s World Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth,” Bolivian activists had successfully resisted an attempt by Aguas del Tunari (a subsidiary of US-based Bechtel) to privatize the water supply. For a detailed account, see Oscar Olivera,
99
Tropical glaciers in the Andean region are at risk, and scientists forecast none will exist in thirty years. Jessica Camille Aguirre, “As Glaciers Melt, Bolivia Fights for the Good Life,”
100
In August 2012 the US Drought Monitor reported 62.9 percent of the contiguous US as experiencing moderate to exceptional drought, with the percent of the worst categories (extreme to exceptional drought) doubling. As a result of drought conditions, widespread crop failure was reported nationwide, with FAO forecasts of shortages and rising prices worldwide. See also James Hansen et al., “Global Temperature Change,”
101
101 See Noam Chomsky, “How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta, Part 1 and 2,”
102
According to a recent survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, majorities among six identified groups say climate change and clean energy should be among top national priorities. Yet, according to project director Anthony Leiserowitz, the group with the most influence, climate-change skeptics, account for “only 10 percent [of the population]” but “appear much larger because they tend to dominate… much of the public square.”