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It could be the greatest crime in history and that, believe me, is saying a lot. I'm talking, of course, about the broiling of a planet where heat records are being set globally on an almost daily basis in what's likely to be the hottest year in possibly yes! a million years (long before, that is, human beings even existed).
And the biggest criminals? The ultimate outlaws to use a word TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon employs in today's piece are, of course, the greatest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet. Historically, that's the United States and, in the present moment, China. Note that, only recently, climate representative John Kerry finally met with his Chinese equivalent, Xie Zhenhua, to discuss the crisis. As it happened, it was on the very day when a new heat record was set in Western China, while in the U.S., Phoenix, Arizona, was about to break its record for the most days in a row (19) above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, in case you hadn't noticed, a broiling Europe was achieving its own temperature records and the planet itself was having one record-breaking day of heat after another.
And though it's obviously good to finally have the climate representatives of the two "great" powers talking again, neither country is moving faintly fast enough to deal with the planetary crisis at hand, while the "representatives" of the fossil-fuel companies are all too typically backing off on even their all-too-modest promises to clean up their disastrous act. And lest you think that only wars kill, heat does, too. More than 61,000 Europeans are believed to have died in last summer's then-record heat waves, for example, and the casualty list is only going to grow.
So, yes, we're on a broiling planet where the use of coal, oil, and natural gas until recently thought to be the cleanest of the fossil fuels, but according to a new study (given the methane leaks that go with its production), no better than coal in destroying this planet is ever more obviously a criminal activity of the first order. In short, we're distinctly on an outlaw planet. In the U.S., of course, we identify the outlaws as elsewhere. Vladimir Putin is an outlaw for invading Ukraine, for instance. (Forget that our country invaded Iraq no less egregiously in 2003, causing, in the end, hundreds of thousands of deaths.) So, take a moment, with Rebecca Gordon, to remind yourself that there are far more outlaws on this planet than we ever care to imagine. Tom
The United States Refuses to Play by the World's Rules
Here Are Three Ways
In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she'd met, but that's another story.)
In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother's commentary on what she considered their boorishness and insensitivity. In my 11-year-old mind, I tended to agree. I'd already heard the expression "the ugly American" although I then knew nothing about the prophetic 1958 novel with that title about U.S. diplomatic bumbling in southeast Asia in the midst of the Cold War and it seemed to me that those interlopers in France fit the term perfectly.
When I got home, I confided to a friend (whose parents, I learned years later, worked for the CIA) that sometimes, while in Europe, I'd felt ashamed to be an American. "You should never feel that way," she replied. "This is the best country in the world!"
Indeed, the United States was, then, the leader of what was known as "the free world." Never mind that, throughout the Cold War, we would actively support dictatorships (in Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among other places) and actually overthrow democratizing governments (in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, for example). In that era of the G.I. Bill, strong unions, employer-provided healthcare, and general postwar economic dominance, to most of us who were white and within reach of the middle class, the United States probably did look like the best country in the world.
Things do look a bit different today, don't they? In this century, in many important ways, the United States has become an outlier and, in some cases, even an outlaw. Here are three examples of U.S. behavior that has been literally egregious, three ways in which this country has stood out from the crowd in a sadly malevolent fashion.
Guanta'namo, the Forever Prison Camp
In January 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush established an offshore prison camp at the U.S. Naval Base in Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba. The idea was to house prisoners taken in what had already been labelled "the Global War on Terror" on a little piece of "U.S." soil beyond the reach of the American legal system and whatever protections that system might afford anyone inside the country. (If you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here's the story: in 1903, long before Cuba's 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States "coaling" rights at Guanta'namo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)
In the years that followed, Guanta'namo became the site of the torture and even murder of individuals the U.S. took prisoner in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries ranging from Pakistan to Mauritania. Having written for more than 20 years about such U.S. torture programs that began in October 2001, I find today that I can't bring myself to chronicle one more time all the horrors that went on at Guanta'namo or at CIA "black sites" in countries ranging from Thailand to Poland, or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or indeed at the Abu Ghraib prison and Camp NAMA (whose motto was: "No blood, no foul") in Iraq. If you don't remember, just go ahead and google those places. I'll wait.
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