Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
SPECIAL: BOOK REVIEWS

• Hardcover: 336 pages
  Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-0805092998

[E]lizabeth Kolbert is a science and environmental affairs writer for The New Yorker.  She is also a master story teller.  A book like “The Sixth Extinction” could be both dry and depressing.  Depending upon your point of view, it certainly can be considered to be in the latter category, but dry, certainly not. 

Ms. Kolbert has a lot to tell us about science, our environment, and what our species, Homo sapiens, is doing to it.  It could read like a doctoral dissertation, but it does not.  She tells her story in a lively, engaging way, and indeed, for some readers at least, the book will be a page-turner (it was for me).  She also has a great sense of humor, which makes its way onto her pages with regularity.  Most importantly, she is not telling her story simply from the scientific literature.  For most of her descriptions of the current extinctions, she made field trips with the scientists who are uncovering and analyzing them.  A certain number of those trips were fraught with some danger.  Indeed she ventured from the dying Great Barrier Reef off Australia to the rapidly changing and decaying deep Amazon jungle.

Humans are indisputably the cause of the massive die-off of thousands of species at this time. The evidence suggests this anthropogenic catastrophe may exceed previous natural extinctions.  

The book begins with a history of the development of the concept of “extinction” itself, in the 18^th century.  She then follows the various approaches to the understanding of “what happened,” over time.  She shows how, while in the early days (18^th-19^th centuries) it was thought that extinctions happened gradually, through sciences ranging from geology to paleontology, the modern understanding has developed.  In the history of the Earth, there have been five major extinctions.  While extinctions are going all the time, they usually proceed at a slow pace, in geological terms.  The Big Five all occurred rapidly in terms of the total expanse of geological time.  Only the most recent one, that of the Late Cretaceous which wiped out the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species, occurred almost instantaneously (in geological terms).  That one was the result of the now well-known asteroid strike in the Yucatan (elucidated only beginning in the 1970s).  It hit at 45,000 miles per hour.  The dust cloud was pretty big, and pretty fast-moving too.  And so, many species went down almost immediately.

The Sixth Extinction, in which numerous plant and animal species are disappearing, at an increasingly rapid rate, is going on now.  Differentiating it from all of the others, the cause is not inanimate.  It is us.  A set of human activities is leading, at any increasingly rapid rate, to the disappearance of literally thousands of species, to the extent that in geological terms the period that we are living in has been given our name: The Anthropocene.  Ms. Kolbert writes in great detail about the major anthropogenic extinctions, and to some extent discusses the various means by which we are creating them: global warming, acidification of the oceans, over-population, deforestation, and so on and so forth.  The term “defaunation” has been coined to describe what we are doing to the animal world.  As they say: “Across vertebrates. 16 to 33% of all species are estimated to be globally threatened or endangered, and at least 322 vertebrate species have become extinct since 1500 . . .”

Ms. Kolbert does not get into what underlies these principal causes in terms of the organization of the human social/political economy, but that is not the focus of her book.  Her book is about the what of the Sixth Extinction in the Anthropocene, and the human role in it, not on the why we behave in the way we do in modern times, an eye-blink in geological terms, from pouring carbon into the atmosphere and the seas to over-populating the Earth with no end in sight.  She also does not deal with the probable future of our species, Homo sapiens.  (And let me tell you, if our species is the ultimate result of an “Intelligent Designer” [ho, ho, ho], he/she/it or they was/were not very intelligent at all.)  It will almost certainly be downhill from here, folks, for our species, as well as many of the others.

Across vertebrates. 16 to 33% of all species are estimated to be globally threatened or endangered, and at least 322 vertebrate species have become extinct since 1500.

From 50,000 to about 10,000 years we destroyed all of the mega fauna, like the wooly mammoths and the sabre tooth tigers who ate them, and in more recent times have been destroying much smaller animals, from the dodo bird to a vast number of frog species (now), at an ever-increasing rate.  For example, this season billions of baby oysters off the coast of Washington state have been killed by carbon-caused acidification of the oceans.  The principal question for me that arose from reading the book is, what is going to happen to us?

Homo sapiens have no natural predators, in the animal kingdom that is.  However, for quite some time (in human, not geological terms) we will be our own un-natural predator.  Global warming, combined with the currently uncontrolled over-population (e.g., the population of Africa is estimated to quadruple in this century {M. Pfeifer, et al, letter, Science, 25 July, 2014, p. 389}), will most likely vastly reduce our numbers over time.  There will be a steady reduction in the supply of fresh water (a problem that is soluble with desalinization, but under capitalism that is unlikely to occur on the scale necessary, because of the necessity of profit-making).  There will be increasingly massive flooding of the major low-lying cities and islands (and there are many of them).  Then there is desertification, the destruction of the food-chains because of, for example, the rapid disappearance of certain pollinating species like butterflies and bats due to human causes, and the decline in food supply resulting from that occurrence.  And so on and so forth.  And so, our population will gradually decline, starting probably no later than 50 years from now or so.

The question then becomes, how much will the decline be, and will Earth as a whole survive, as the Sixth Extinction of the other plant and animal species continues on apace.  I have been thinking on this question for quite some time.  After reading Ms. Kolbert’s book, I have come to be in agreement with the anthropologist Richard Leakey, who is quoted in it as saying (p. 268), “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.”  But how might that happen, if we have no natural predators in the animal kingdom?  That is, we have no predators in the animal kingdom other than ourselves of course, and absent nuclear winter (always a possibility) it is unlikely that we would, or could, kill ourselves off completely.

Well, it happens that we do have a set of natural predators that are neither flora nor fauna: the micro-organisms.  One has to wonder if Ebola and the mysterious viral infection spreading among children in the United States  are forerunners of much more serious infections that could be beyond the ability of man to deal with (as in “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and a variety of other fictional treatments).  It could happen.  And for Mother Earth, that might be a benefit.  Given the rapaciousness of Homo sapiens towards Earth and all of its other plant and animal species as well as towards ourselves, in my view our own extinction is the only way that the planet can survive as a place for living beings and avoid becoming like Mars (which may well once upon a time supported life).  More on this subject anon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

http://tpjmagazine.us/); a regular Columnist for BuzzFlash@Truthout (http://www.buzzflash.com, http://www.truth-out.org/); a “Trusted Author“ for Op-Ed News (http://www.opednews.com/); a Contributor to The Planetary Movement (http://www.planetarymovement.org/); and an occasional contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter.

By Alevtina Rea

A review of Andre Vltchek’s new book  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism (Jakarta: Badak Merah Semesta, 2014)

“Who is it, that strange lady with an axe in her hand and with a covered face – the lady whose name is Democracy?”

[T]his question, as a haunting leitmotif, is going through one’s mind while reading Fighting Against Western Imperialism and lingers long after the last page of the book is turned. The author of the book, Andre Vltchek, is one of a few noble knights of investigative journalism who travel to all the dangerous places in the world, “speak truth to  power,” and report on the events on the ground in order that people could open their eyes and minds and learn the seemingly incongruent fact that there are millions and millions of innocents, people like you and me, who were and still are being sacrificed in the name of western-style democracy.

 The triumphs of Western propaganda

Vltchek.

Given the deplorable level of  mass-media reporting, this book is definitely a pearl of  investigative journalism. Unlike the majority of corporate media writers who report mostly what their respective governments want them to write – that is, fabricated lies – Mr. Vltchek has covered “myriads of conflicts, on all continents,” in almost 150 countries, where he witnessed the horrors of those places, incomprehensible by their sheer brutality as “when people were ‘disappeared,’ tortured, thrown alive from helicopters,” and shot, just to name a few. And all these unimaginable horrors were and still are committed under the aegis of the Western Empire, while the western countries’ constituency believes, “increasingly and blindly, that their societies are an inspiration to the rest of the world as the sole examples of democracy and freedom.”

The monstrosities of Western Imperialism are hidden behind the curtain of democracy, and the author of this fiery book is unequivocally clear – this kind of democracy, “as it is seen from Washington, London or Paris, is nothing more and nothing less than what the white man needs in order to control this planet, unopposed and preferably never criticized.” And if there are millions of nonwestern lives being sacrificed on the altar of “democracy,” so be it! The enormity of the western leaders’ deeds is either skillfully hidden from view or painted in such a righteous color that the western publics allow themselves to be easily duped by their respective governments. Western Imperialism is incredibly skillful in swaying citizens from confidence in their civil rights to the complete opposite, when the same citizens readily surrender their rights of privacy and freedom of [political] choice for the sake of illusory safety.

Quite often, to the rest of the world, the western way of life is revealed through landmines, napalm bombs, biological weapons, acts of terror against any governments “that were determined to serve their own people.” In fact, as Mr. Vltchek says, “No other system spilled more blood, no other system plundered more resources and enslaved more people than the one we are told to describe by lofty and benign terms like ‘Western parliamentary democracy’ or ‘Western constitutional monarchy.’” Any resentment toward Western Imperialism is coldly and cruelly crushed for the alleged sake of those who don’t want to recognize that the West wishes them “liberty” and “happiness.” At the same time, in the western world these horrible atrocities are seen through the prism of so-called national security and the underlying sense of superiority over nonwestern ways, thus preventing any critical thinking and easing the manipulation of the western public into a consenting mass in times of political crises.

The enormity of the western leaders’ deeds is either skillfully hidden from view or painted in such a righteous color that the western publics allow themselves to be easily duped by their respective governments.

The sense of a threatening Other – be this Other a non-westerner, communist, “terrorist,” Muslim, Russian, or just any critically thinking individual – accompanies the Western World’s foreign policy as its loyal shadow, while justifying the gargantuan growth of the military apparatus and unabashed infringement of civil rights. Ironic as it is, in the ideal world of Western Imperialism, the western leaders have a submissive constituency at home, and the anomic hordes of the nonwestern nations that are being plundered and robbed under the flag of the false rectitude. And yet, the facts of the western social evils are easily available for the individuals who want to be responsible for their governments and leaders who are clearly unjust and even criminal toward the nonwestern world. As Andre Vltchek so poignantly says, there is “plenty of information, plenty of proof that the world is in flames, that tens of millions are dying, that true democracy everywhere is being raped and the natural resources of poor countries are being plundered, so that Western capitalism can flourish.” But the countless reported proofs of atrocities committed against nonwestern peoples by the West-trained and West-financed puppets and murderers are not enough for the western public to stand up and counter their respective governments’ brutal extermination of millions and millions of those who dared to aspire to genuine people’s power.

In Fighting Against Western Imperialism, Andre Vltchek addresses the glaring paradox of human rights that are applied at will, contingent on the western narrative that is being fed for public consumption. “The sacrifice of ‘the others’ is expected, even welcomed. Seven or even ten million people in Indochina – not a big deal. Three million in Indonesia – it is irrelevant. Ten million in Congo – who cares, they are Christians, but in reality some second rate niggers, just to borrow the vocabulary of the British Christian Prime Minister Lloyd George. Tens of millions all over Africa, from Somalia to Mali – who are they? Un-people, just filthy Muslims! Millions of broken lives all over Latin America – good for them! They were mainly Communists, and atheist hordes. Twenty-six million Soviet people died fighting and defeating Nazism – they were mainly white, but their atheism made them worse than those niggers!”

Wikipedia— click to enlarge)

Such brutal, selective western militarism is “marching everywhere, almost unopposed.” It manifests itself not only in hideous murders all over the globe, but also in killing or “re-telling” the stories and fairytales from different parts of the world and censoring and controlling art, either western or nonwestern. For example, “one of the greatest films ever made – Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai – got swiftly overshadowed by a Hollywood remake, the Magnificent Seven, because it had to be the American cowboys, not Japanese samurai, who had the right to demonstrate a true moral standards to the world.” In the nonwestern world, “all identity is wiped out, all creativity is destroyed.” Meanwhile in the western world, the governed have a right to choose, indeed, but only from the limited, corporate feed the western rulers deign to offer them. As Mr. Vltchek says, the goal is simple – “we will make you … uniformed, uninformed, unimaginative.” Then, you may have your “free choice.” At the end, “you will not protest, you will not demand change of your system. You will work hard to make elites richer, and consume what you are told you should find desirable. Amen.”

This brilliant book is full of prickly truths that western governments don’t want you to know. For one, not many Americans would know that “the Soviet people fought real wars (sic. – in contrast to the carpet-bombing wars that the West likes so much) and they saved our planet. They also helped to liberate dozens of countries from Western colonialism. Without them, there would be no freedom in Africa (such as it is), Middle East, and most parts of Asia. But those facts are oppressed and can’t be mentioned. What also can’t be mentioned is the heroic and at the same time humble involvement of the Cuban people in the African liberation struggle.” Facts like these make western leaders uncomfortable and itchy; they make them cringe, because these truths dispel the cozy myth of western exceptionalism, moral superiority, heroism, which is the inflated foundation of the Western World’s quest for power, its safety blanket, as well as the source of its grandiose delusions.

Drawing examples from the first-hand experiences during his trips to Thailand, Indonesia, Chile, Congo, Venezuela, Ukraine, to name just a few, Mr. Vltchek accentuates the determinative and disastrous role played by the western politics of fear, which is “perfectly manufactured and has been perfected throughout the centuries.” Prefabrications of “facts” and a permanent state of crisis are being used for brutal oppression in the nonwestern world, as well as to curb any kind of critical reasoning and dissent among the western constituency. After all, “fear manipulates the masses to an ignorant obedience, and then threatens those who resist: ‘don’t you see, that is what the majority of people want and think. Follow the others, or else!” To dissent and criticize became a taboo, thus the politics of fear is ushering in the Orwellian nightmare that masks itself as the democratic paradise.

However, the state of affairs is not as gloomy and pessimistic as it may seem. With passion and panache, the author of Fighting Against Western Imperialism writes,

“What the West is now doing to the world – igniting conflicts, supporting banditry and terror, sacrificing millions of people for its own commercial interests – is nothing new under the sun. It is called ‘ordinary fascism.’ And fascism came and was defeated in the past. And it will be again. It will be defeated because it is wrong, because it is against natural human evolution, and because people all over the world are realizing that the feudal structures that Western fascism is trying to administer all over the world belong to the 18th century, not to this one, and should never again be tolerated.”

At the end of the day, willingly or unwillingly, Western Imperialism may be brought before a predicament: either face the abyss of permanent international conflict and a prospect of annihilation, or, to use Zygmant Bauman’s words, recognize the possibility of “knowing how to go on in the face of others who may go on – have the right to go on – differently.” Given the insidious and Procrustean nature of  Western Imperialism, it is up to us – every one of us! – to not be deceived by the mask of  fake democracy any longer. Enough is enough. “The world has been tortured by Europe and the United States for decades and centuries.” In conclusion, Mr. Vltchek emphatically says, “Let us call democracy something else – rule of the people, exchange of ideas, of hopes and dreams. Let our taking control of our lives and over our nations be called democracy!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

rea.alya@gmail.com.

A Review of Gaither Stewart’s Recollection of Things Learned: Remembering Socialism 

By JP Miller

[I]f there ever was a time for recollection and remembrance, that time is now. With the world in a state of perpetual war and the hegemonic forces of capitalism destroying all that was good about our planet, Gaither Stewart, presents us with the lessons we should have learned in Recollection. Much like Lenin’s “What is to be done?”, Stewart again gives the reader a dilemma that cannot be resolved without revolutionary action. However, despite the majority of the laboring classes, revolutionary action is seen as impossible given that “the exploited classes are not only victims. They are also accomplices. Half victim, half accomplice. The historical paradox. The ruling class counts on this dichotomy to maintain the system. Divide and rule. Meritocracy. Rewards for obedience. Two cars and bigger houses for staying in line. A system based on money, domination, wholesale, constant political propaganda, and fear. Religion too, but especially FEAR. Fear of fear. Fear of change. Fear, fear, fear.”  The ruling class or the one percent determines our fate by a system of fear and hope. Fear of failing in the capitalist system and dropping into the rolls of the 99%, and the hope of hitting that lotto number, of improbable riches if we only stay in line.

The first section of Stewart’s primer is an incredibly rich resource of definitions and explanations. But it is much more than that. He informs us where the language of socialism comes from while teaching us the eventual development of the revolutionary cause. There is no book, article or monograph I have ever read that gives so much to the reader as does his Definitions. With the didactic method, Stewart takes us through the rise and fall of socialism, its methods and champions, and its ethos.

While Stewart argues that the positive influences of socialism and the left in general are in stasis or retreat and global and destructive forces of the right are dominant, he gives us hope. That hope resides in Stewart’s own recollections; his memory of what was good and how the promise of socialism was born out of the simple acts of enlightened people. It is not necessarily the intelligentsia that gave us socialism, while the giants of socialist justice are certainly part the impetus, but rather a collection and progression of committed individuals. “Sartre had flirted with terrorists of the German Baader-Meinhof Gang and Debray trained in guerrilla warfare in Bolivia with Che Guevara. Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Régis Debray and also André Gide…” with the everyday man or woman who acts as a socialist, combining their words with alacrity. “In Latin America the recently deceased Gabriel García Márquez (my journalistic model and master on the positive role of bias), the great writer Ernesto Sábato in Argentina who headed action against the military regime, and Pablo Neruda in Chile who joined the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, belong to the committed intelligentsia, as did the prototype of the man of action, Che Guevara, and certainly Fidel, whose role as a dedicated teacher of the masses, as Mao once saw himself, is also well established. (Presidents Chavez and Morales are now following the same route, as no mass revolutionary process can succeed without an alert and politically savvy populace.)”

Without the socialist, leftist work chronicled in Recollection, I am not sure we would have survived this long. Although Stewart points out that the story of socialism may be a sad one due to disunity within and repression from without, how could any progress have been made in any society where Social Darwinism is the status quo. This is socialism’s triumph. Incremental and diluted as the progress may be, socialism has had a real impact in all parts of the world.

It’s important to know where socialism was born and how it was born out of inequity. Recollection gives us that story in order to recognize the inequalities among mankind and their struggle to shake off exploitation by the capitalist system and its indifferent architects of division and inhuman use of labor. Marx and Lenin may be the rightful owners of the cause of socialism and certainly were committed individuals but the story of the monetary divide, the reality of the haves and have-nots is the impetus for the change that is recognized and needed. It’s a simple mathematical problem and an unnatural system.

Stewart takes us on a trip along a social and revolutionary history of socialism, its struggle, its success and its failures. But ultimately, the story is being rewritten by new generations, who have a nostalgia for the socialist ideals and an awakened need for social and economic justice. The cracks in capitalism are there. They are not hard to see. “Everyone knows we live in an unequal world. Half of the world’s population has nothing, a great majority struggles to make ends meet, while wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. Strangely in the age of information few people realize how excessive the inequality has become under the reign of today’s super-Mammon. The world now counts 358 billionaires, whose net worth equals the combined net worth of the world’s 2.5 billion poorest people. The capitalization of some banks exceeds the total national production of 100 countries. This inequitable result is not unavoidable. The gap is not a natural human process.”

And, if we are to survive as a prudent, honorable and just society, we must heed the lessons that Recollection affords us. Stewart’s reminder of socialism’s struggles is poignant. The idealism of the 1960s and 1970s are gone but the next chapter is being written on the streets, slowly perhaps, but we can see it in the faces of the new generation. Will they choose to shake off their chains?

Recollection is one of those rare collections of remembrances, wisdom, guidance, and inescapable truth that have long escaped our consciousness. This book of remembrances should be required reading for University students and perhaps even more so for those of us that have simply forgotten.

Contributing writer JP Miller is a disabled veteran, journalist, and writer who lives in the Outer Banks of North Carolina beside the Atlantic Ocean. He has published short stories and political essays in The Literary Yard, The Southern Cross Review, The Greanville Post, Pravda, Countercurrents, and Cyrano’s Journal.

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NOTE: The print edition of Recollection, priced at $7.99, will be available soon. Buy it on Amazon and other leading booksellers.

Product Details

RECOLLECTION OF THINGS LEARNED: Remembering Socialism
[Kindle Edition] Approx. 108 pp
Gaither Stewart (Author)*
$2.99

• Publisher: Punto Press Publishing (June 22, 2014)

Reviewed by William Hathaway

This book is published by Punto Press, a publishing imprint of The Greanville Post. Purchasing this book will count as an indirect donation to our efforts. And if you like the book, please consider posting a review with Amazon!

*DISCLOSURE: Gaither Stewart serves as Senior Editor and European Correspondent for The Greanville Post, and Cyrano’s Journal  Today.