Prospects for humanity with Francis Boyle

This is a pessimist’s take onhistorical trends and voices the fears of many. A lot of it comes from seeing history as a series of wars.  The assumption of inevitably hangs over all ofthis.  It is my curious contention that waritself has been made obsolete and that is now the driving force in humanaffairs.  The generals can never think thatway but they continue to be sidelined,

It also helps that the sheerweight of Western military power makes all the old equations downright silly toall.  Thus the scramble by our twosociopaths in Iran and Korea to getwhat is believed to be an equalizer in atomic weapons while forgetting to buildthe necessary support of a modern society.

Small time wars continue tobe conducted but they are aimed at drawing the recalcitrant into modernism.  With few exceptions there is nothing seriousout there that age will not solve.

The big dynamic risks arecoming down to Pakistan and Iran and North Korea.  Many countries and ethnic groups continue tosustain a sense of grievance in the face of rapidly diminishing causation, butnone are worth a war and that impetus is slackening as it propones wealth andsocial well been.

This cessation of war makingis setting the stage for a general global settlement that supersedes the ideaof the ethnic state with the idea of a common communion of humanity that issimply post ethnic.  A lot of it is inplace already and will merely take a common effort and acceptance that oldhatreds will die out.

In my manuscript 'Paradigms Shift' I refer to this as the Communion of Xanadu

2011: Prospects for Humanity?

The First and Second World Warscurrently hover like the Sword ofDamocles overthe heads of all humanity.

By prof.Francis Boyle

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22500

During the 1950s I grew up in a family who rooted for the success ofAfrican Americans in their just struggle for civil rights and full legal equality.  Then in 1962 it was the terror ofmy own personal imminent nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis that first sparked my interest instudying international relations and U.S. foreign policy as a young boyof 12:  “I can do a better job than this!”  

With the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964 and the military draft staring me right in the face, Iundertook a detailed examination of it.  Eventually I concluded thatunlike WorldWar II when my Father hadfought and defeated the JapaneseImperial Army asa young Marine in the Pacific, this new war was illegal, immoral,unethical, and the United States was bound to lose it.  America was just picking up where France had left off at Dien Bien Phu.  So I resolved to do what little Icould to oppose the Vietnam War. 

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson gratuitouslyinvaded the Dominican Republic, which prompted me to commence a detailedexamination of U.S. military interventions into Latin America from the Spanish-AmericanWar of 1898 up to President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called “good neighbor” policy. At the end of this study, I concluded that the Vietnam War was not episodic,but rather systemic: Aggression, warfare, bloodshed, and violence were just theway the United StatesPower Elite had historically conducted their business around the world. Hence, as I saw it as a young man of 17, there would be more Vietnams in thefuture and perhaps someday I could do something about it as well as aboutpromoting civil rights for African Americans. These twins concerns of my youthwould gradually ripen into a career devoted to international law and humanrights.

So I commenced my formal study ofInternational Relations with the late, great Hans Morgenthau in the first week of January 1970 as a 19 year old collegesophomore at the University of Chicago by taking his basic introductory courseon that subject.  At the time, Morgenthau was leading the academic forcesof opposition to the detested Vietnam War, which is precisely why I chose tostudy with him.  During ten years of higher education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, I refused to study with openly pro-Vietnam-War professors as a matterof principle and also on the quite pragmatic ground that they had nothing toteach me.   

In the summer of 1975, it was Morgenthau whoemphatically encouraged me to become a professor instead of doing some otherpromising things with my life:  “If Morgenthau thinks I should become aprofessor, then I will become a professor!”  After almost a decade ofworking personally with him, Morgenthau provided me with enough inspiration,guidance, and knowledge to last now almost half a lifetime.   

Historically, this latest eruption of Americanmilitarism at the start of the 21st Century isakin to that of Americaopening the 20thCentury by means of theU.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administrationof President William McKinley stoletheir colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and thePhilippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiianpeople (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidalconditions.  Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion intothe Pacific was also designed to secure America’seconomic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric ofthe “open door” policy.   But over the next four decades America’saggressive presence, policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctablypave the way for Japan’s attackat Pearl Harbor onDec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.    Today a century later theserial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr.administration and now the Democratic Obama administration  are threatening to set off World War III.   

By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedyof 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal ahydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and thePersianGulf under the boguspretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2)eliminating weaponsof mass destruction; and/or(3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention.”  Only this time the geopoliticalstakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control anddomination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the veryfundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas.  TheBush Jr./ Obama  administrations  have  already targeted theremaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, andSoutheast Asia for further conquest or domination,together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for theirtransportation.  In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration  announcedthe establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to bettercontrol, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegatedpeoples of the continentof Africa, the very cradle of our humanspecies.         

  

This current bout of U.S.imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in hisseminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):  

The outstanding historic examples of unlimitedimperialism are the expansionist policies ofAlexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in theseventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in commonan urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its ownsuccesses and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confinesof the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as thereremains anywhere a possible object of domination--a politically organized groupof men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust forpower. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspirationto conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimitedimperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialisticpolicies of this kind...  

On 10 November 1979 I visited with HansMorgenthau at his home in Manhattan.

 Itproved to be our last conversation before he died on 19 July 1980.  Givenhis weakened physical but not mental condition and his serious heart problem,at the end of our necessarily abbreviated one-hour meeting I purposefully askedhim what he thought about the future of international relations. This reveredscholar, whom international relations experts generally consider to be thefounder of modern internationalpolitical science inthe post World War II era, responded:

 Future, what future? I am extremelypessimistic. In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclearwar. I do not believe thatanything can be done to prevent it. The international system is simply toounstable to survive for long. The SALT II Treaty is important for the present,but over the long haul it cannot stop the momentum. Fortunately, I do notbelieve that I will live to see that day. But I am afraid you might.

 Thefactual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like the Sword ofDamocles over the heads of all humanity.  It is imperative that weundertake a committed and concerted effort to head-off Hans Morgenthau’s finalprediction on the cataclysmic demise of the human race.