John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“The West Is Still Buying into Nonsense About Iran’s Regional Influence”

 

I welcome Cockburn’s analysis as a needed corrective to much Western thinking, and I especially like this:

“Much the same nonsense is being uttered today about an Iranian hand being behind anything the west and its allies do not like in the Middle East. When they claim to be targeting Iran, they are in practice targeting the Shia community as a whole – a mistake for which both they and the Shia are likely to pay a high price.”

But I do think many aspects of the Middle East’s religious division are just naturally blurred into politics and geopolitics, and perhaps it is unavoidable.

I regard the Shia-Sunni divide as something akin to the Catholic-Protestant one that dominated Europe from the 16th century.

It permeated all of European politics and generated wars. There was bloodshed for a very long period in Europe, actually a bit of it extending right into the 20th century in places like Northern Ireland.

The division drove all kinds of violence in a number of European countries, including wars of succession and massacres, and it was a key part in Britain’s “Glorious Revolution.”

It played an important role, often now unrecognized, in America’s revolt when Britain put parts of what would become the American Midwest, then regarded as Indian Reserve lands, under the jurisdiction of Quebec Province with the Quebec Act of 1774.

America’s colonials resented the well-intentioned Act deeply, both for cutting off their opportunities to exploit those lands and for putting them under the control of “popery,” a word very much heard then in New England.

So, for Europeans, political and religious matters were largely indistinguishable and remained that way for centuries.

If you understand that history, you do not look at the Muslim world’s situation as anything mysterious or unusual.

It likely reflects a basic division in human psychological make-up when we see vast religious movements divide into factions, just as people divide themselves into political factions. Indeed, in Britain’s early 18^th century Parliament, there were no political parties as we know them, and when they began to emerge, they were called factions.

I think I might identify the Shia a bit with the early Protestants in that some of what they represent is regarded as revolutionary or at least upsetting to the old order.

In any event, a lot of what is said about Muslims in the West is inaccurate and self-serving.

Remember, “the West” is really a global imperial power, the United States, with loyal satraps like Britain or France scurrying along behind.

The primary interest of “the West” in the world at large is control, not understanding or cooperation.

So, the Muslim world’s natural divisions are exploited towards control.

John Chuckman

COMMENT STIMULATED BY AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND POPULATION CONTROL BUT NOT POSTED THERE

 

“If we want to stop the climate emergency, we need to break the taboo around population and contraception”

 

The author does seem unaware of dramatic changes having taken place in the composition of world population growth.

The natural engagement of a well-established social-economic phenomenon called Demographic Transition has already put population growth on a negative path in all advanced societies.

Every one of them. Any future growth in such societies depends completely on migration, and hasn’t that become a bitterly contested subject, migration, in great parts of the advanced world?

The natural rate of population growth – births minus deaths – is now insufficient to maintain the future size of populations in Europe, North America, Japan, and a good many other places.

Birth rates in fact do respond almost automatically to a sustained decline in death rates in advanced societies. People have fewer children with the assurance that those they do have will survive.

That was not so only a century or so ago, and it is not yet true in the Third World, where birth rates remain very high in some regions, as in Africa or the Mideast or parts of Latin America.

But it is the new norm for advanced societies. Its reality represents the interplay of many forces. Just good hygiene and nourishment and generally healthy, safe conditions plus advanced medicine and miraculous drugs make the probability of a child growing into adulthood extremely high. Also, many social security measures such as pensions add to the adults’ sense of security.

Families are relieved of all old notions of having to have a number of children just to guarantee the survival of at least some of them. Gone too are the old fears of not having someone to look after you and the farm when you are old.

Women in advanced societies want careers, good ones. Families want to maximize their total earnings with two working adults so they can enjoy more of the good things of life. And there is the immensely high cost now of raising even one child well with adequate education and recreation and entertainment over a long period.

The problem with talking about serious population control in such a world is that, de facto, you are talking about people in advanced countries imposing things on people in less advanced countries. Race also enters the issue when we think of Europeans or North Americans telling Africans and others about how many children they can have.

Remember, too, that all the fears and concerns that afflicted generations of European and North American families for centuries still very much afflict families in the Third World. They are not dry old stories from textbooks, they are part of what it still means to be alive and have a family.

So, while it is easy to glibly speak of population control, that glib speech hides a number of massive difficulties, difficulties touching profound and dangerous matters such as race and imperialism and “the rich versus the poor.”

The ideal way to bring population growth down in the Third World, and thus for the world in total, is with economic development there, so that its people too experience the social changes Europeans and North Americans already have experienced, but what are the chances of that? How many serious efforts do we see along those lines?

Indeed, I think it not exaggerated to say that calls for population reduction in the name of climate change or any other goal, no matter how seemingly worthy, calls with no appreciation of the facts I’ve outlined, are potentially quite dangerous.

We do live in a time with a rather heavy undercurrent of resurgent nationalism and ideology as well as a time of an immense number of wars and interventions, advanced states like the United States having come to regard destruction and death as a normal activity of national policy.

Is it not easy to see the potential for something hugely dark and destructive emerging from demands about population? A call almost for a kind of international crusade? One conducted by those who have against those who do not? And on an almost planetary scale?

 

A FEW NOTES ON POPULATION GROWTH

Here is the way population increase is analyzed. I’ve looked a bit into the numbers now, and we do have some surprises.

To replace an existing population with no growth requires a “(total) fertility level” of about 2.1 children per woman.

That is a level which replaces the two parents but with a small allowance for some inevitable infant mortality.

Actual fertility rates for women in North America and Europe are on the order of 1.5 – 1.8, which is a number not sufficient to replace the parents.

This is way down from the beginning 19th century, when fertility levels in places like the United States and Britain were about 6.

The global fertility rate is about 2.5 today, about half of what it was just fifty years ago, so we are making big progress, although there are countries still with rates like 5 or so, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

Charts of all countries’ rates suggest eventual future convergence of fertility rates at around 1.6 to 1.7.

Artificial birth control as well as programs to immunize children have played an important role in these changes. Immunization has played a role in assuring parents that the children they do have will survive.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Robin Adams, below, has it right.

And there were still other less-than-Sterling qualities.

Roosevelt as assistant Secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American War broke out. He actually functioned as Secretary of the Navy owing to the incapacity of his senior. Roosevelt thus was in charge when the phony attack on the USS Maine happened. Roosevelt was quoted in those days as saying he welcomed war, any war, to test out American troops.

To my mind one of his worst qualities – in complete contradiction to his written love of birds – was his hunting activity.

I’m not castigating normal hunting.

But Roosevelt didn’t hunt, he slaughtered on a massive scale.

He would shoot wild game by the dozens and scores, piles of them at each outing.

It was a disgraceful unethical and wasteful behavior, very revealing I think of the mentality that made him one of America’s great imperialists.

He was a man of many talents and tireless energy, and he was remarkable for overcoming his childhood disability of severe asthma, but he was a man to admire in only qualified terms as a leader.