Читать книгу Reinventing Collapse - Dmitry Orlov - Страница 10
ОглавлениеOFFICIAL PROPAGANDA has always tried to portray superpower conflict as an obvious and inevitable consequence of the irreconcilable differences between the two sides. One’s own side was represented as the manifestation of all that is good and just in the world and the other as all that is evil and repressive. There was usually a catchy label to go with the description that tested well with the target audience, such as the “Imperialist Aggressor” or the “Evil Empire.” When you switched sides, the orientation of the propaganda you had just heard flipped automatically: it was like stepping through a mirror.
It is axiomatic that in order for a contest to make an engaging spectacle, the contestants have to be evenly matched. A mock pugilistic contest between a schoolgirl and her pet kangaroo may provide amusement, but it cannot be regarded as proper sport. What we generally look for is a fair fight, or at least the semblance of one, and this requires that the two fighters weigh about the same, have similar training and be able to go on expertly punching and blocking for several rounds. They would probably turn out to have other things in common as well: a diet rich in red meat or a tendency to try solving many different kinds of problems by throwing punches. A given audience may decide to cheer one and boo the other, making the contest more interesting to watch, but that is irrelevant to the outcome.
If a contest goes on for an extended period of time — in the case of the superpower contest, over three decades — it would appear safe to conclude that the contestants had been evenly matched. But we will probably never know for certain why the Soviet fighter chose to take a dive in the fourth round, because that certainly did not look like a proper knockout. It is also hard to understand why the American fighter concluded his little victory jig by kneeing himself in the teeth, or why he is now draped unconscious over the ropes and getting pummeled by some junior featherweights from the stands. And why is the Soviet fighter now seated back in his corner, laughing? It is never easy to give up the title of World Superpower Champion, especially when it is not being challenged, but this is ridiculous! What sort of sporting event is this anyway? Bring back the schoolgirl and the kangaroo!
Turning slightly more serious, some would find a direct comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union incongruous, if not downright insulting. After all, what grounds are there to compare a failed Communist empire to the undisputed world leader? Others might find it preposterous that the loser might have advice for the winner in what they might see as an ideological conflict. Since the differences between the two appear glaring to most, let me just indicate some similarities, which I hope you will find are no less obvious.
The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.
They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality and a guaranteed — albeit lower — standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn’t realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don’t know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.
Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing, funneling arms and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology and thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails (South Africa was a contender at one point). In this last category, the US is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex.
While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden, the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. These almost universal negative feelings are likely to prove more durable than the superpower’s good fortune: nobody likes a loser, especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union, and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either.
The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating an international financial crisis. Russia’s finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices along with rising oil exports, and it is now well on its way to becoming an energy superpower.
The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world’s largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.
There are many other similarities. For instance, both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the US, a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap and, after that, probably won’t work at all.
All the similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization. But what is interesting for our purposes is to identify and describe the key elements that made these superpower contestants so evenly matched that their sparring went on for decades.
None of these key elements can be sustained forever. The hypothesis I wish to test is that the lack of these same key elements, readily identifiable in the Soviet collapse, likewise spells the demise of America, definitely as a superpower, probably as a major part of the world economy, and possibly as a recognizable entity on the political map.
The Myth of Inclusiveness
Like that of our metaphorical heavyweight champion, a superpower’s diet must contain plenty of red meat — in this case, human flesh. A superpower must continually ingest plenty of highly skilled and motivated personnel — managers, scientists, engineers, military officers — who must be willing to endure hardship, give up their best years, ruin their health, perhaps even give their lives, slaving away designing and building things, fighting and doing all the dirty work. Motivating the needed quantities of people with money is out of the question, because that would not leave enough for the ruling elites to siphon off. The upper classes tend to already be highly motivated by both money and status, but they also tend to be allergic to dirty work, and they can never be numerous enough to satisfy a superpower’s appetite for flesh. The only thing that can possibly provide the necessary motivating force is an idea: a communal myth powerful enough to cause people to commit their insignificant yet essential selves to the righteousness and glory of the great whole. A superpower’s vitality is critically dependent on the sustaining power of this myth. Shortly after it fails, so does the superpower.
Both the Soviet and the American models featured an inclusiveness myth as their centerpiece. In the Soviet case, it was the myth of the classless society. The great revolutionary upheaval was said to have erased class and ethnic distinctions, creating an egalitarian society that provided for everybody’s basic needs, curbed excesses of wealth and allowed people from humble origins to become educated and rise to positions of respect and authority. This myth proved to be so powerful that it propelled a poor, industrializing but still mainly agrarian nation on a trajectory to becoming a leading military and industrial power. As the decades wore on, the myth gradually lost most of its luster. The satisfaction of basic needs gave rise to an insatiable appetite for imported consumer goods, which were either inaccessible or in short supply, except to the elite, and this, in turn, ruined the appearance of egalitarianism. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” went the saying, and morale plummeted. This led to a situation where no new common effort could be organized. As everyone started thinking for themselves, a slow rot set in, and the superpower gradually became enfeebled.
America’s belated and half-hearted answer to the classless society of the Soviets is the middle class society. After wallowing through the Great Depression and grasping at straws during the New Deal, the United States reaped a gigantic windfall following World War II, as the only large industrial player left standing. Much of the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure had been bombed to rubble, giving the United States an opening. They used it to put every American within striking distance of achieving a cheap simulacrum of landed gentry, symbolized by a detached house surrounded by a patch of land big enough to accommodate private parking, a patch of grass and some shrubbery, and adorned, as an absolute necessity, by one’s own private automobile. American society is classless, at least in theory, since no one wants to admit to being either upper or lower class. There is, supposedly, one large and homogeneous middle class; in fact, though, it has a small upper portion and a large and rapidly expanding lower portion.
The wonderful thing about the American middle class concept is its malleability, because it is almost entirely symbolic. You could be middle class, own an ancestral mansion in an old brick and fieldstone suburb, drive a Mercedes and send your children to an Ivy League school. Or you could be middle class, live in a dolled-up trailer home, drive a souped-up pickup truck and send your children to a community college that teaches them how to milk hogs. The least common denominator is that you have to drive a motor vehicle, otherwise you can no longer perform this charade.
This is why there is so much denial about it being necessary to give up the car and all the current talk about resorting to biofuels to continue feeding the car addiction. Biofuels amount to burning one’s food and destroying what is left of the topsoil in order to continue driving. This is also why so many Americans would forgo a healthy diet, a reasonable work schedule, education for their children, needed medical treatment and even give up their house, rather than give up their car. Not having a car makes one, within the American suburban landscape, a non-person.
The universal right to drive a car is the linchpin of the American communal myth. Once a significant portion of the population finds that cars have become inaccessible to them, the effect on the national psyche may be so profound as to make the country ungovernable. Solving the underlying transportation problem, through the reintroduction of public transportation or other means, is beside the point: the image of the automobile is indelibly imprinted on the national psyche and it will not be easily dislodged. For many, their car is a public extension of their persona, a status symbol and even a symbol of sexual potency, and this makes the automobile, along with the gun, a sacred national fetish. Like the gun, the car is also a potent weapon that can be used for murder or for suicide. It is propelling the American communal myth toward a flaming crash with the reality of permanent fuel shortage, compared to which the gradual fading away of the Soviet communal myth will have been gentle and benign.
Better Living through Science
Both the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to achieving better living through science, staking their very existence on the ability to deliver technological fixes to all manner of existing problems, as well as to all the unforeseen new problems that were created in the course of applying technological fixes to existing problems. The inability to either prevent or successfully mitigate catastrophes, which, in a technology-based civilization, shows up as the inability to deal with a set of technical challenges, eventually destroys the population’s faith in the system. In a society where every kind of prestige and status emanates from the exercise of technical prowess, such failure destroys trust and undermines respect for every kind of authority.
Each of the two superpowers strove to position itself at the forefront of science and technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that science and technology were arenas of serious competition and relentless copying between the superpowers. Americans led in product design; many Soviet research institutes were busy secretly reverse-engineering American-designed products. The Soviets held an advantage in basic science; numerous American PhD candidates laboriously deciphered the Cyrillic of obscure Soviet scientific articles, then scurried back to the lab to reproduce their results. Both superpowers produced impressive results in areas such as energy, power generation, weaponry, shipbuilding and aerospace. Soviet-built capital equipment has proven to be extremely hardwearing and relatively easy to maintain, and Soviet-built motor vehicles, aircraft and plenty of other machinery are still in use throughout Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. In an ironic twist, Soviet-built planes have been pressed into service to resupply American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are uniquely able to handle rutted and cratered runways.
One area of superpower technology competition that was particularly bound up with national prestige was the space race. The two early Russian wins — the first unmanned success of the Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned orbital flight — struck fear into the hearts of Americans, causing them to get slightly more serious about learning math and Russian and in due course to counter with the Apollo missions to the moon and other impressive exploits. The Soviet manned space program is alive and well under Russian management and now offers first-ever space charters. (As I write this, a former Microsoft executive is on his way to the International Space Station, accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts, having paid $20 million for the privilege. Once there, he will try making some of Dr. Martha Stewart’s cookie recipes in zero gravity — important scientific work, to be sure!) Americans from the official space program have been hitching rides on the Soyuz as well, while most of their remaining spaceships sat in the shop, plagued by loose heat tiles and cracks in the foam insulation, before finally being retired with nothing to replace them. To be fair, the Americans have been quite successful with their unmanned missions to Mars, fly-by missions to the outer planets and other robotic spacecraft.
The Soviet Union failed to remain technologically competitive in three important technological categories: food production, consumer goods and information technology. None of these factors was lethal on its own, but the combination was quite damaging, to the prestige as well as the pocketbook. It is uncanny that the United States now appears poised to fail in these same categories as well — which is why I chose to include them here.
Industrial Food Production
There is no reason why food production should be relegated to the area of technology; after all, people grew and gathered food with little or no technology for many thousands of years. But the introduction of collectivized, mechanized agriculture broke the back of pre-revolutionary Russian agrarian society, and no amount of technical supervision from Moscow was able to restore the prolific productivity of the backward old village.
In most parts of Russia, agriculture has always been a somewhat dubious proposition. The growing season is short. The soils are thin outside of a single belt of fertile black soil called chernozëm that runs through Ukraine and some of Russia’s southern regions. There are frequent spring droughts and early cold snaps. These factors make very marginal yields and outright failed harvests quite common, and there have been several episodes of outright starvation. Because agriculture is so unreliable, throughout their long history Russians have augmented it with other types of traditional economic activity (so-called promysly) such as fur trapping, hunting, fishing and logging. Nevertheless, before the havoc wreaked by World War I and the ensuing revolution, Russia was by all accounts a well-fed country, known for its blini-eating contests, that supplied wheat to Western Europe. In Soviet times, it had to import wheat from the United States and Canada on credit, and many people were forced to supplement what was available in the state-run shops with what they could buy at the farmers’ markets, gather in the woods and produce from their own small kitchen garden plots.
Corporate, mechanized agriculture in the United States is often viewed as a success story, able to supply its people with a high-fat, high-protein diet, which also contains plenty of salt and sugar, along with many mystery chemicals. Never mind that it spans the entire spectrum of flavors — from sawdust all the way to cardboard — cleverly disguised by the fat, salt, sugar and mystery chemicals. Never mind that this questionable food is often ingested in a hurry, from a piece of paper or plastic. Never mind that it makes the people fat, crazy and sick. The portions are nothing if not generous, even for the poorest people, many of whom sport cathedral-like domes and buttresses of fat.
The US also produces many agricultural commodities for export. However, this agricultural system depends on the availability of fossil fuel-based energy, mainly in the form of diesel for agricultural machinery and transportation and natural gas for fertilizer and other chemical manufacturing. In effect, the industrialized agricultural system transforms fossil fuels into food calories with the help of soil (which it gradually destroys in the process) and sunlight. The ratio of fossil fuel energy to derived food energy has been calculated to be about ten calories from fossil fuels for each calorie of consumed food. The combination of depleted domestic oil and gas resources and demand outstripping foreign supplies, coupled with increasing demand for biofuels and the predicted onset of dust-bowl conditions due to global warming, represents a less than rosy scenario for American food security in the coming years.
Consumer Goods
The Soviets’ inability to compete in the area of mass-produced consumer goods stemmed mainly from an administrative preference for financing capital goods expenditures while ignoring light industry. Also, consumer goods production requires a flexible economic model that is difficult to accommodate within a centrally planned economy. Consumer goods were regarded not as an important segment of the Soviet economic system but as a cost to the government, competing with other, more essential social services such as housing, education and health care. As it turned out, the trickle of imported consumer items eventually turned into a flood; coupled with falling oil export revenues, this exacerbated the Soviet Union’s financial shortfalls.
Since the talent to design fashionable, attractive clothing was certainly always present, this was strictly a failure — one of many — on the part of the Soviet leadership. What they entirely missed was the ability of consumer goods, especially clothing, to undermine morale by allowing privileged young people to differentiate themselves in appearance from the rest of the population, and to do so in a way that quietly made a mockery of the official ideology, without any sign of overt dissent. It is well known that putting on a uniform has a profound effect on a person’s behavior. Attire that is branded with an ideologically charged symbol actually influences one’s ideology, because putting it on implies making a statement, and because people tend to agree with themselves, standing by the statements they make. Consequently, putting on attire that is branded with an ideologically hollow symbol, such as a designer logo, is a way of shrugging off ideology altogether and of denying the power of ideologically charged symbols. It gave young people a painless way to opt out of looking and feeling Soviet.
Today, the United States is being flooded with imported consumer goods, just as the Soviet Union was during the stagnation period of the ’80s, and with similar impact on the country’s trade deficits, but here these branded products are too common to serve as a social differentiator. To the contrary, with the exception of sports brands, it is the cheap clothing that is most often emblazoned with a corporate brand, not the high-priced articles. The few consumer articles that are still manufactured in the United States more often than not have a strangely old-fashioned, stolid, institutional look, reminiscent of Soviet production, and maintain their tentative foothold within the domestic market by appealing to the US consumer’s sense of patriotism. When the exporting countries finally decide to stop selling their products on credit, and their container ships stop visiting America’s ports, perhaps the institutional look will become fashionable. Then again, the homemade look may win out, or the threadbare look, or the clothing-optional look; the future of fashion is hard to predict. The worst possible outcome is that everyone will don uniforms, fashioning themselves into identical, mass-produced, ideologically lobotomized servants of the fully privatized, corporate-run state.
Information Technology
One area of superpower competition in which the United States declared early victory, and in which it is now handily defeating itself, is the area of information technology. The Soviet Union failed to keep up for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important one was the insistence that the whole endeavor be shrouded in secrecy, for security reasons, due to the Soviet government’s deep mistrust of its own people. Their failure to keep up was especially striking in view of the fact that they had some of the best talent. During the late ’70s, many of the pioneering American computer companies were staffed by specialists who had recently emigrated from Russia.
Also, the explosive development of computer technology has generally proceeded through oversight and random, accidental successes, rather than through successful central planning. The US funded the development of Internet routing protocols hoping to create a network that would be resilient in the face of nuclear attack. Luckily, this ability was never to be tested, but the factors that made it resilient also made it anarchic, and this eventually gave us worms and viruses, botnets, peer-to-peer networks and spam. IBM released their PC architecture into the wild, thinking it worthless, and others took the basic blueprint and made a multitude of cheap clones of it. A few tinkerers in a garage came up with the first generation of Apple’s machines. A few other tinkerers at Bell Labs used their copious spare time to write the Unix operating system, more or less as a joke, and it eventually took over most of the bigger machines. It later morphed into Linux, which is now gradually taking over many of the smaller ones. Microsoft blundered across a good thing when IBM mistakenly failed to provide a viable operating system for the PC, and no amount of subsequent blundering has been able to erase this initial advantage. The Soviets, with their secretiveness and tight central control, simply could not match this level of amateurism, haphazard innovation and random improvisation.
It took a while, but the United States eventually found ways to approximate the Soviet failure in this area, and is presently hard at work looking for creative ways to kill the goose that lays golden eggs — by developing some secretiveness and tight central control of its own. The US is executing a three-pronged attack on the goose: through enforcing intellectual property laws, through criminalizing work in the area of computer security and through perpetuating a fraud called enterprise software, which has become something of a poster child for national dysfunction.
It is in the nature of all information to want to spread freely, and networked computers make it ridiculously easy for it to do so. This is really just a minor effect, because information found ways to be shared before the advent of computers and it will go on being shared after the lights go out for good and the disk drives stop spinning. But as computers started to displace newspapers, stereos, television sets and library books, corporate interests decided to start charging rent on the use of information, as opposed to charging for products or services, and they pushed through laws to make that possible. These laws are hard to enforce and the information they are intended to hold for ransom is easy to liberate, with some unintended consequences. It is now possible to buy a DVD of an American film — or any other — in Beijing or Moscow before it even premieres in the United States. It also means that a Chinese or a Russian can generally use any commercial software free of charge, whereas an American has to either pay for it or be threatened with prosecution. The officials in these countries actually like intellectual property laws, because they give them arbitrary authority to prosecute anyone they happen to dislike, but, based on their record of enforcing these laws, they seem to like most people. Finally, let us consider the fact that American corporate equity, with intellectual property included, is being bought up by foreign interests, which are no longer happy accepting US Treasury paper. What this means, in the end, is that Americans will be reduced to paying foreigners for the privilege of using their own creations, while everyone else enjoys them free of charge.
Add to this the dubious American innovation of extending patent law to cover software. Software is basically speech — an expression of the programmer’s thoughts in mathematical or logical constructs — and software patents are limits on such speech, restricting what sorts of things a programmer is allowed to write. According to the very highly respected computer scientist Donald Knuth, the computer revolution of the 1980s would probably never have happened had software patents existed then. The existence of software patents means that any software project may run afoul of some number of patents, which are expressed in vague and tortured legalese, making it legally unsafe to sell software in the United States without entering into various corporate alliances and cross-licensing agreements. The only viable strategy with regard to software patents is to fashion yourself into a sufficiently large nuisance by having plenty of patents of your own and by threatening litigation against anyone who infringes on them, so that anyone thinking of litigating against you would opt to negotiate a cross-licensing arrangement instead. This strategy is only open to large and well-connected software companies, because all the smaller ones would be automatically bankrupted by the exorbitant costs of litigation. Historically, these large companies are also the ones that are the least likely to do innovative work.
This is not to imply that software patents are beneficial even for the software giants. For them, the software patent system is like a large wrecking ball swinging about the software industry, toppling this or that part of it. A recent example is the pending lawsuit filed by Oracle Corporation against Google, based on patents Oracle came to own as a result of acquiring Sun Microsystems. The irony of the situation is that many of the patents in question are essentially nuisance patents, filed by Sun’s engineers as a defensive measure after they had lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by IBM. Sun lost, essentially, because it didn’t hold enough patents at the time. One of the key patents held by IBM and infringed upon by Sun — the so-called “RISC patent” — basically said, once you strip away all of the ridiculous legalese, that if you make a microprocessor simpler, it will run faster. One of the patents Sun filed in response (by none other than James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language) basically describes a software analogue of using a light switch to control a light bulb. You see, Sun’s engineers were competing to see just how ridiculous a software patent can be and still be granted by the patent office. The definitive answer is that the sky is the limit. The first software patent ever granted was the proverbial lawyer’s nose under the tent.
With regard to computer security, the United States is making strides in making its computers less secure. Computer systems are considered secure if they are very difficult to break into (it is never impossible, unless the power is off or the network cable is unplugged) and not by virtue of the fact that nobody is trying to break into them. In fact, if the general public is prevented from even trying, then we are to assume that they are not secure at all, because they have not been tested in a real world environment. For many years now federal prosecutors in the United States have been generating consternation and outrage in England and beyond by trying to extradite a troubled British youth, Gary McKinnon, who broke into some Department of Defense systems looking for evidence of UFOs. Clearly, American officials find it easier to secure their jails than their computer systems, but since it is not possible to preemptively imprison every potential hacker, this is not an effective workaround. Such prosecutorial zeal is very helpful to professional information thieves, who might want to hack into the government’s systems in order to accomplish something more serious — say, steal a nuclear bomb or two — by making sure that their security remains untested by helpful amateurs.
The third prong of the three-pronged attack on IT is the effort to maximally bureaucratize the process of software development via something called enterprise software. The programmer is now buried under layers of non-programmers: product managers, project managers, solutions architects, various other managers and directors, and let’s not forget marketing and sales. The product, if one ever emerges, is evaluated by technical buyers, not by the poor people who will have to actually use it. The software itself is built up of a multitude of pieces, many of them purchased and licensed separately, and getting these pieces to talk to each other often requires diplomatic efforts by a team of consultants.
Finally, it all has to be written in a language that is maximally bureaucratized as well. Imagine a language whose dictionary defines each noun as a list of other nouns, which are defined elsewhere, followed by a list of verbs that apply specifically to that noun, but only some of which are defined. Now try writing something meaningful in this language. You will have to be creative, because you will have to find ways to navigate the strictures of the language, but you will soon enough find that you are too demoralized to actually say anything new or interesting. Is it any wonder, then, that so few people want to get degrees in computer science? And so it happens that all the best software is now written outside of the large software companies and is free, while horribly bloated, bug-infested, expensive, unstable and only marginally usable software is more often than not the flagship product of one of America’s premier software companies. Information technology is one of the few sectors of the economy that the United States could be proud of, and these developments do not bode well for it.
The Cost of Technological Progress
Whether one succeeds or fails in any given technological endeavor, technological progress itself exacts a high cost on both the natural and the man-made environment. Both in the former Soviet Union and in North America, the landscape has fallen victim to a massive, centrally managed uglification program. Moscow’s central planners put up identical drab and soulless buildings throughout the vastness of Soviet territory, disregarding regional architectural traditions and erasing local culture. America’s land developers have played a largely similar role, with a similarly ghastly result: the United States of Generica, where many places can be told apart only by reading their highway signs. The commonplace result is a place not worth caring about — whether you are from there or not, it is just like most other such places in the world.
The Soviet public’s faith in science and technology was severely shaken by the explosion of nuclear reactor number four at Chernobyl. Not only did the disaster itself expose an obvious lack of technical competence (it was caused, it later turned out, by the technical incompetence of some political appointees), but the lack of truthfulness in addressing the immediate consequences and in communicating the true state of affairs to the public did much to undermine trust in the government, as well as tarnishing the prestige of science and technology overall. Initial public pronouncements that “the reactor core is being cooled” were followed by evidence that there was no reactor core left. Highly radioactive chunks of nuclear fuel and graphite moderator rods that once made up the reactor core were later found scattered around the reactor site. The catastrophe awakened a latent environmentalist sentiment within the population: these were their ancestral lands that were being made radioactive and uninhabitable for generations. Specialists with access to scientific equipment ceased to have faith in the veracity of official government research and began to make and exchange their own measurements of radioactivity and industrial pollutant levels. The results were not encouraging and many started to feel that the Soviet economic development program had to be shut down.
Until 2010, America’s answer to the Chernobyl disaster had been the handling of the humanitarian disaster following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2010, it managed to do one better in the aftermath of the blowout, explosion and massive oil spill at BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The similarities between Katrina and Chernobyl included a lack of truthfulness in addressing the immediate consequences, loss of ancestral lands and political appointeeism (a horse specialist nicknamed “Brownie” was thrust in command, based on his credentials as the college roommate of a friend of the President). After the hurricane, the government continued to claim that the refugees were being evacuated, while in reality they were herded together, turned back by police and national guard troops when they tried to walk out of the disaster zone and allowed to die. As with Chernobyl, the government continued to lie until there was a public outcry, with much damage to the reputations of all concerned.
With the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the analogy with Chernobyl is much more direct, because both events fall into the category of technogenic catastrophes — direct failures of technology — rather than natural disasters. After Chernobyl, Soviet nuclear power stations were retrofitted with safety equipment that has so far prevented another disaster. It is not at all certain that a similar approach can be applied to deepwater drilling because of the already extremely high costs of these operations. Technology which can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, but which cannot be retired for economic reasons, amounts to a false choice between physical survival and economic survival.
True to pattern, just as after Katrina, there followed an impressive display of official mendacity, fecklessness and shenanigans. Highlights included a video of retired coast guard admiral Thad Allen declaring that the well has been plugged in the attempted “top kill” operation appearing on news web sites right next to a live webcam of the selfsame well, gushing just as before. A truly astounding feature of BP’s spill mitigation strategy was to disperse the oil (by spraying massive amounts of the toxic dispersant Corexit into the sea) while simultaneously attempting to contain the oil, both at the seafloor and at the surface. Just as you’d expect, dispersal precludes containment. As soon as the well was tentatively cemented shut, the White House rushed to announce that most of the leaked oil had somehow miraculously vanished — in fact, most of the spill has now taken the form of a giant deep underwater plume that stretches for miles and consists of a diffuse suspension of oil droplets. It will remain like this for years, drifting slowly, poisoning the marine food chain of the Gulf and the Atlantic waters beyond.
It remains to be seen which type of catastrophe predominates: natural or technogenic. On the one hand, increasingly frequent killer hurricanes and other extreme weather events, a predicted consequence of ongoing rapid climate change, are likely to repeat the Katrina pattern. On the other hand, now that all the easily-accessed offshore oil fields have been depleted, deepwater exploration and production will continue to become more challenging and more costly. One of the reasons the Deepwater Horizon exploded was that BP tried to drill the world’s deepest oil well, but to do it on the cheap. The relentless pressure to cut costs is not conducive to improved safety, raising the probability of more giant explosions and massive oil leaks. Given the anemic response of the American political establishment to either of these disasters, this is more likely to be death by a thousand cuts. After each catastrophe, the promise of a technological remedy will begin to seem ever more outlandish, and the person proffering it will come to be seen as progressively less trustworthy. As the authorities lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the population, they will also lose its cooperation.
Militarism
The arms race is commonly viewed as the key element of the superpower standoff known as the Cold War (one hesitates to call it a conflict or even a confrontation because both sides diligently practiced conflict avoidance through deterrence, détente and arms control negotiations). Military deterrence and parity is seen as the paramount defining factor of the bipolar world that was dominated by the two superpowers. Military primacy between the United States and the Soviet Union was never actively contested and there was quite a lot of inconclusive militaristic preening and posturing. While the Americans feel that they won the Cold War (since the other side forfeited the contest) and were at one point ready to start awarding themselves medals for this feat, it is actually something of a success story for Russia.
Beyond the superficial and assumed offensive parity, the historical landscapes that underlie Soviet and American militarisms could not be more different. The United States considers itself a victor country: it goes to war when it wishes and it likes to win. It has not been invaded during any of the major modern conflicts and war, to it, is primarily about victory. Russia is a victim country. It has been invaded several times, but, since the Mongol invasion, never successfully. To Russians, war is not about victory — it is about death. The epithet that Russians like to apply to their country is nepobedimaya — “undefeatable.”
The United States is a country that enjoys bombing other countries. The Soviets, having seen much of their country bombed to smithereens during World War II, had a particularly well-developed sense of their own vulnerability. To compensate for this, they devoted a large part of their centrally planned economy to defense. They produced a staggering number of nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, tanks, bombers, fighter jets, warships and other military junk, much of which now sits quietly rusting somewhere, perpetually threatening to wreak havoc on the environment. The nuclear stockpile continues to pose a particularly nasty problem. Much of this war production was a complete waste and even the object of some humor: “I work at a sewing machine factory, but every time I bring the parts home and assemble them, I end up with a machine gun!” But they did not get bombed by the Americans — hence victory.
The list of countries which the US has bombed since the end of World War II is a long one, from “A” for Afghanistan to “Y” for Yemen (that the list does not run “A” to “Z” is presumably explained by the fact that Zambia and Zimbabwe do not present a sufficiently target-rich environment to America’s military planners). The Soviet Union did not do nearly as much bombing. Czechoslovakia and Hungary received what amounted to a slap. Afghanistan was the one significant exception, playing host to a sustained and bloody military confrontation. Perhaps one positive effect of having one’s homeland extensively bombed is that it makes one think twice about inflicting that experience on others.
And so it is quite a satisfactory outcome that the United States has not been able to bomb a single country within the former Warsaw Pact and to this day has to play careful with Russia and her friends. This is because mutual assured destruction remains in effect: each side has enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the other. Since this is an affront to the American military ego, Americans have continued to preen and posture, announcing a defense doctrine that allows nuclear first strikes and actively pursuing the development of strategic missile defense. The Russians do not appear to be impressed. “We believe this strategic anti-missile defense system is somewhat chimerical, to put it mildly,” said Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister. “One can find a much cheaper response to any such system.” The cheapest response I can think of is simply having Mr. Ivanov periodically stand up and say a few words.
Perhaps that is all the response the situation calls for, but Russia sells a lot of weapons, including a new generation of supersonic missiles and torpedoes, against which the US has no adequate defense, and successfully marketing them requires taking a stand in defense of national military prestige. And so we are bound to hear a great deal more about Americans destabilizing the security of Europe, and about Russia countering this threat with some anti-missile chimeras of their own — much cheaper ones. The United States needs a new Cold War to show itself and the world that it still matters, and Russia, finding the venture not too risky and quite profitable, is willing to hold up a mirror to American militarism. But the whole thing is a farce, and Vladimir Putin was quick to offer an old Russian saying by way of explaining it: “Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked.”
Russia has scaled back defense spending considerably since the Soviet collapse, but the defense budget of the United States has kept growing like a tumor and is on course to match and surpass what the entire rest of the world spends on defense. While one might naively assume that the rest of the world is quivering before such overwhelming military might, nothing of the sort is occurring. There is a little secret that everyone knows: the United States military does not know how to win. It just knows how to blow things up. Blowing things up may be fun, but it cannot be the only element in a winning strategy. The other key element is winning the peace once major combat operations are over, and here the mighty US military tends to fall squarely on its face and lay prone until political support for the war is withdrawn and the troops are brought back home. The United States could not conquer North Korea, resulting in the world’s longest-running cease-fire. It is a stalemate punctuated by crises. The United States could not defeat the North Vietnamese with their underground tunnels and their primarily bicycle-based transportation system. The first Gulf War was precipitated by a misunderstanding caused by diplomatic incompetence: Saddam Hussein was a generally cooperative and helpful tyrant and all could have been resolved amicably had not April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, told him: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.” Saddam took her at her word and thought that he could punish the Kuwaitis for stealing his oil. Bush Senior then proceeded to stand poor April on her head, declaring that “this will not stand!” The ensuing skirmish ended inconclusively, with Iraq humiliated and in stasis for a generation. This was considered a victory, with endless parades and much flag-waving. The US military was said to have recovered from “Vietnam syndrome.” But nothing could hide the fact that it was a job left unfinished.
