Derek J Wilson

 ROAD TO HELL: GLOBALISING TO CATASTROPHE
"FIVE HOLOCAUSTS"
by Derek J Wilson, Steele Roberts Ltd, 2001
- Dennis Small

Fire and Ice
"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice,
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice".
Robert Frost

"Unfortunately, the most likely futures are pretty awful - scenarios that no sane person would wish to live in. This scenario is based on the continuing human impact on the global environment. Global warming is bad enough, but there's also the impact on other species, on wildlife extinctions, on soil loss or tropical forests - basically, gross and sustained simplifications of Earth's life-support systems. We have to learn to rein in this growth. But growth is the engine of a capitalist economy, so this is a very tough question - how to move to a form of development which satisfies human needs but doesn't wreck the life support systems while we are doing it . . .

"Capitalism is perfectly unsustainable and everyone knows it at some level. But that knowledge is repressed. There are massive interests keeping this system going, despite the cost. I don't know how long it is going to take for us to learn that but we have to learn it" (Richard Slaughter, President of the World Future Studies Federation & Professor of Future Studies at the Australian Foresight Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, New Scientist, 1/12/01, no. 2319, pp42-45).

As I embarked on this review of Derek Wilson's book, "Five Holocausts" ("5H"), the 2002 October/September Conference on Sustainable Development was just getting under way at Johannesburg, South Africa. This particular summit was intended to be a follow-up of the Earth Summit at Rio Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, along with the other smaller Earth Summits throughout the intervening decade. As usual, the indications were that this would be yet another farcical failure in trying to turn the tide against the forces of global destruction. Yet, in his most timely study, Wilson does a grand job in describing the increasingly desperate challenges for humankind. He identifies five looming paths to a coming holocaust (or holocausts!) - militarism, human oppression, economic destitution, the population explosion, and environmental destruction; and as he makes clear throughout his study these problems are deeply interrelated and continue to compound their effects as we move further into the new Millennium. A longtime peace and environmental activist, the author of "Five Holocausts" has been the Coordinator of Architects Against Nuclear Arms since its foundation in 1984, besides being an active member of other peace and disarmament groups. Derek Wilson has also direct experience of armed conflict, having served in World War II as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm.

Violence, Wealth and Power

The major theme of "Five Holocausts" is the worsening conflict between rich and poor. At the international level, this is most evident in the division between the Third World (also known as the South, i.e. the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America) and the rest (the West, or more broadly the North, or simply the developed or industrialised countries). As someone who has worked in the area of what might be called "development education/activism" since the early 1970s, I feel that I can well express the core of this challenge today. In the West, it is usually far too psychologically threatening for people to truly confront the reality of the power structures that make for human oppression, and this applies even to people with some initial concern and interest. Global capitalism is an international system that involves varying and interconnected layers of oppression and injustice, and the consumption enjoyed by the West as a whole is perpetrated on the backs of the Third World (see Watchdog 100, August 2002, for some discussion of the conflict over what can be called the New International Economic Order [NIEO]).

Whatever the obvious long-term implications of the patterns of such injustice and distorted consumption for everyone on the planet, any apparent threat to the immediate and short-term gains accruing to the generally well-off, let alone the richest and most entrenched capitalists, are much too hard to handle in any positive, constructive sense. In a relative and comparative fashion this generally applies both within societies and between them, although there can be wide variability, e.g. some Scandinavian societies firmly endorse the principle of equity. Above all, the flagrant wealth and consumption of the few at the expense of the many, in the US and elsewhere, can only be maintained by ripping off the South, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and other areas through the plunder of resources, sweated labour, environmental dumping, and various other forms of exploitation. And, of course, this process has been going on for centuries.

More specifically, the present pattern of inequalities within the so-called developed countries can only be perpetrated through the surplus extracted from the South. "In 1960 the industrial countries were 20 times richer than the poor, in 1980 they were 42 times richer" (p357). Worldwide, polarising trends are also reflected in the changing ratio of the per capita income between the poorest 20% of the global population and the wealthiest 20%: whereas in 1948 it was 1:10, by 1997 it was 1:74 (p160). "In the US in 1980 . . . managers earned 40 times as much as industrial workers. Today, the 40 has increased to over 90" (p336). James K Galbraith, director of the University of Texas's Inequality Project, says that worldwide inequality has been rising sharply under globalisation. In recent years, it has been quite dramatic in Latin America, Central Europe, China, and, above all, in Russia. Among Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) countries, NZ has experienced the largest increase in inequality. The most crucial factor, as indicated by timing, points to the triumph of private global finance in 1980s. Rogernomics was simply one expression of this (see "Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View", ed. JK Galbraith & M Berner, Cambridge, 2001). Deepening socio-economic divisions are fundamental to capitalist growth ("Social Darwinism" by Peter Dickens, OUP, 2000).
"The chances of these increasing disparities - especially unemployment - being eased, let alone rectified, in the near or medium-term future, are very slim, for as Paul Kennedy states: 'Given the difficulties of reform, humankind's instinctive avoidance of uncomfortable change and its preference to make only minor ones is likely to prevail . . . In short, it is not that solutions to such transnational (and national) challenges are lacking, but that publics and politicians are equally reluctant to implement changes which cause short-term personal costs to secure long-term general benefits" ("5H", p339: quoting Kennedy's "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century", Harper Collins, 1992). It can be added here that the very essence of capitalist growth militates against consideration of "long-term general benefits". The axing in Aotearoa/NZ of the Commission for the Future was more than just symptomatic of this syndrome.

NZ, indeed, has been very much involved in maintaining and reinforcing this international system of economic oppression, most clearly symbolised in recent years by the role of the former Trade Minister, "Mad" Mike Moore, as Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Mad Mike was the hand picked choice of the US Administration to which the European Union (EU), the other major market force in the WTO, also acquiesced. Despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Moore today actually tries to portray himself as genuinely concerned with getting a better deal for the South. When Mike, as NZ Trade Minister, was fronting NZ's contribution to getting the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade) Uruguay Round under way in the late 1980s, there was a lot of opposition from many Third World countries to what was seen as the repressive agenda of the big industrialised countries and their hangers-on like NZ. Of the larger developing countries, Brazil and India were to the fore in this opposition movement.

Consequently, in 1987, Moore was complaining bitterly about how Brazil and India were the countries in particular, which were giving NZ a hard time ("We Are the World" by Gordon Campbell, Listener, 21/3/87, pp22-25). But he also made clear how the Western engineered linkage between services and agricultural trade was likely to disrupt this obstructionist Third World alliance. The carrot of supposedly easier access to developed country markets for the agricultural exports of the developing countries would be played off against these latter opening themselves up to the service transnational corporations (TNCs) of the former. It was a game that Moore and his mates carried on throughout the GATT Uruguay Round. The driving force behind GATT has been "a 'globalisation' of industrial power in the hands of an unaccountable international elite" (p345).

In those days, Mad Mike could still be openly cynical, despite his often flowery rhetoric, avowing that the NZ government would "use any argument" it could to achieve its perceived "self interest" (Listener, ibid.). Putting a moral gloss on furthering exploitation has long been standard practice for NZ representatives like Moore in negotiations with Third World countries but occasionally the Realpolitik unashamedly reveals itself. Having finished his US-backed term of office at the WTO (the former GATT), Mike has been put out to pasture, both to ruminate and to posture (including being a "special trade envoy" for the NZ government). For his work in furthering the corporate agenda, he is praised by NZ newspaper editors like Bob Cotton of the Christchurch Star (18/9/02), pleased to spin the image of Moore as the great architect of positive change at the WTO, and facilitator of the fuller "participation of poorer member countries . . .". This is how great myths are manufactured by the Establishment propaganda machine.

Siphoning Up Versus Trickle Down

Again and again in "Five Holocausts", Derek Wilson picks up this theme of the central international conflict between rich and poor. As he well points out, quoting British historian Mark Curtis with regard to the Cold War: " . . . the 'Red Scare' was useful for hiding the fact that British and US 'economic interests' in the so-called Third World in the post-war period have been 'synonymous with the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of the local population'" (p25; quoting The Ecologist, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan/Feb. 1997). Later, citing a 1949US State Department document, Wilson notes how according to Western strategy "the Third World ' . . . would fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market for industrial capitalist societies" (p120).
In 2002, a few hundred billionaires and multi-millionaires, many of them American, have more wealth than billions of poor people in the South. In fact, a mere 1% of the global population controls 60% of the world's wealth. According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 35,615 children died from malnutrition on September 11, 2001 (as opposed to the 3,000 or so people who died in the terrorist attacks on the US that day. Ed.) Some 13 million die each year from starvation (p165). More than 800 million people worldwide go hungry. Over one billion people lack safe water. The obscenity of international injustice is breathtaking but daily the Western mass media legitimise these conditions in a myriad ways. In Aotearoa/NZ there is a TNC-engineered campaign, via the National Business Review and other media, etc., to celebrate the lifestyle of the rich and powerful as part of revamping the "trickle down" theory; and yet at the same time some Auckland streetkids can kill for a pizza and a few dollars - the legacy of Rogernomics along with its current manifestations. Globally, there are about 100 million streetkids and their numbers are growing.

Reflecting on the current international centralisation of power and wealth, Wilson also quotes an endorsement made in 1989 by National’s eminently unctuous Simon Upton, that: "NZ is well situated to be a supplier of raw materials to rich neighbours, a home to well fed peasants who hopefully would not unsettle things for the outward looking elites" (p120; quoting NZ Herald, 30/12/89). Upton, who went on to become a Minister in the 1990-99 National government, has boosted his career through active participation in the far-Right Mont Pelerin Society. These days he is the chairperson of the OECD's round table on sustainable development (so help us all!). Upton's performance at the June 1997 Earth Summit in New York when he was the then NZ Minister for the Environment eloquently testified to his Government's "abysmal" record on issues like the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (pp232-33). A Garrick Tremain cartoon aptly pictured him hanging on strings as a puppet of the fossil fuel lobby (p233).

Like Mike Moore, Simon Upton is another of those Big Business-oriented New Zealand politicians who have worked assiduously to enact global rule by TNCs. Incidentally, it is also a mark of how subjugated NZ society has become that in recent years various former Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) officials have gone on to head TNC-sponsored, globalising organisations here like the Asia 2000 Foundation. In glaring contrast, CAFCA, and other like-minded groups, will carry on our work to help "unsettle things" for Upton's comprador "outward looking elites" and their mechanisms of foreign control! In Aotearoa/NZ, socio-economic inequalities deepen as the market bites even further into the heart of society. A study by the Ministry of Social Development shows that one in three children live in poverty and that conditions are worsening (Sunday Star Times, 8/9/02; Press, 9/9/02).
Furthermore: "Kevin Hackwell, spokesperson for Wellington's Downtown Ministry, said families of low-waged workers were the fastest growing group using food banks" (Sunday Star Times, ibid.). Throughout "Five Holocausts", a regular thread is the theme of this deepening national division within Aotearoa/NZ (part of the vast global pattern within and between societies) which so often adversely affects Maori and Pacific Island peoples. Historically, land disenfranchisement lies at the root of much of the problems involved ("5H", p285). Redress and closing the gaps must come through a range of measures that the current Government is still struggling to realise.

Militarising Repression And Disorder

The aim of US foreign policy since World War II has always been to enforce as much as possible the disparity of living standards between its own people and the Third World. The greatly influential State Department strategist, George Kennan, made that plain in 1948 by stressing that the primary policy goal of the US Administration must be to maintain this enormous disparity at whatever the cost necessary to universal human ideals (p138). Kennan emphasised that this goal could certainly not be achieved by humane methods accompanied by vague appeals to democracy, human rights and similar liberal slogans. Harsh measures would need to be taken, and eventually even the pretence of idealism discarded. Realpolitik should rule - and blatantly at that too.

These days, US propaganda is still channelled along Orwellian lines with the key slogans as ever - "freedom", "liberty" and "democracy". I remember once perusing a booklet containing formerly secret documentation relating to the TNC International Telephone and Telegraph's (ITT's) subversive intervention in Chile in the early 1970s. Especially striking was the repetition of an ever so transparent and ritually artificial appeal to the word "freedom", even as ITT and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), etc. operated to systematically undermine the democracy of another country. Fittingly enough, ITT was linked in the past with the Nazi war machine (p386/7). In 2002, more than ever, the propaganda mask is yet coming detached from the raw reality of power and violence as the Bush Administration takes unilateral action to enforce its own narrowly construed interests - interests that are yet globally defined. Its newly proclaimed National Security Strategy endorses pre-emptive strikes against alleged potential "terrorist" threats, unilaterally if necessary (for example, see the Press, 25/9/02). This strategy is, of course, most dramatically signalled at present by the threatened war against Iraq even as that on Afghanistan drags on with unfolding human rights abuses.

In the first chapter specifically, and also later in "Five Holocausts", Wilson traces the advance of militarism around the globe with a focus on the "iron triangle" of the US military-industrial complex. The iron triangle is that combination of political interests, defence contractors, weapons researchers, and military force Establishment (the Pentagon) that lies at the heart of American capitalism (pp31&100-1). This is the system that President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, & co. epitomise in all its malevolent darkness. This is the system that abrogates unilaterally the right to itself to endlessly develop and wield weapons of mass destruction in order to keep the bulk of the world's population in subjugation to its dictates (at the same time, ironically enough, as fostering the spread of these weapons in other ways!).The iron triangle feeds on the military waste it creates outside the market production generated by supply and demand. Militarism is integral to capitalist growth, and in the long run militarisation is set to prevail unless...

As Mike Moore's namesake in the US, anti-corporate activist and media presenter Michael Moore, can aptly declaim - this is indeed "the awful truth". Wilson quotes analyst Douglas Roche on the "under-the-table" reasons used to justify the existence of the nuclear weapons held in the West: they "are for the protection of the Western way of life against the rising clamour of the disenfranchised of the world" (p101; quoting Roche's book "The Ultimate Evil: The Fight to Ban Nuclear Weapons", James Lorimer & Co., 1997). The US is now even developing smaller and more manageable nuclear weapons for use just like conventional munitions.

A sobering insight into how representatives of Third World nations relatively close to the US see the Administration's ambitions has been provided by academic historian and Mexico's Ambassador to the UN, Miguel Marin-Bosch (technically, Mexico is supposed to be part of the OECD!). "Protecting oil supplies and boosting political popularity are the reasons US President George W. Bush wants war against Iraq", he told a Christchurch audience on a visit to NZ (Press, 21/9/02). ". .. the American need for oil was the basic cause of its [the Administration's] hostility towards the Iraqi regime" (ibid.). This abuse of international law and disregard of the UN was denounced by the Ambassador as "outrageous". Another major contributing reason for warmongering at this particular time is obviously the need to divert public attention from the corruption crisis at the heart of capitalism (including Bush's own record), exemplified by the Enron, WorldCom, etc. scandals. As Wilson so aptly notes: "'The reality is that corruption by both elected politicians and government officials is endemic', as are corrupt business deals" ("5H", quoting "The Political Racket" by Martin Gross, Ballantynes, 1996).

More than 50% of all Federal taxes gathered in the US go to the military, lavishly benefitting a small group of TNCs like General Electric, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Boeing, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas, etc. The free market certainly works in miraculous ways. Wilson documents some of the hugely corrupt exploitation of the American taxpayer with overcharging for basic items, of up to many thousands of times the usual price (p29). "In 1996 the US spent $US264 billion on its military - more than the combined military budgets of $US229 billion of the next six top military spenders - Russia, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and China" (p62). This same year saw the US as "the top international seller of arms" with orders of $US7.3 billion to developing countries. Also in 1996, in conjunction with its imperial partner, Britain was the second biggest seller of arms. Thus both nations go on blithely sowing dragon's teeth for the future. Post-September 11, 2001, the US has a vastly boosted arms programme under way, enforcing a newly expanding international system of repression. Meantime, China is rapidly building up its own military forces while Russia is unloading a massive arms sale on to the South. Even little old NZ has a small but robust "defence" industry, launched by the ANZAC frigate project, and now eagerly encouraged and promoted by the Government.

Cultivating Crises

"During their time holding the reins of power, Presidents Reagan and Bush (senior) and Prime Minister Thatcher, coupled with the CIA, have what becomes known as 'the love affair' with Saddam Hussein, secretly courting him with trade deals and military equipment, including the wherewithal to manufacture biological, chemical and nuclear weapons" (p19). This is the same "wherewithal" the same two imperial nations are now wanting Hussein to dismantle at the point of a gun. As Geoffrey Kemp, head of the Middle East section in President Reagan's National Security Council, has put it: Saddam "was a SOB [son-of-a bitch], but he was our SOB" (ibid.).

In his chapter on "Human Oppression", Wilson takes as his three case study exemplars of despots the dictators Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Throughout its history the US has had many SOBs like Saddam, some of the more recent other outstanding examples being the Somozas of Nicaragua, the Duvaliers of Haiti, Stroessner of Paraguay, Mobutu of Zaire, Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto of Indonesia, Pinochet of Chile (soul-mate of Britain's ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), Noriega of Panama, Fujimori of Peru, the death squad regime rulers of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, and on and on, ad nauseam. The latest is President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, engaged today in carrying out a US- mandated programme of governmental murder. On the other hand, a 2002 US-backed coup against President Chavez of oil-rich Venezuela failed, although no doubt there will be future attempts to install a more friendly government.

Sometimes such leaders outrun their use-by-date and then have to be removed - one way or another - and all duly sanctioned by the reversal, or appropriate realignment, of Western propaganda. Symbolically enough, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, whose regime was once lauded in the Western media (including the NZ version) as a model of free market reform, got a honorary doctorate - along with Mike Moore - from NZ's own Lincoln University. Now exposed as very corrupt and an ardent exponent of death squad repression, Fujimori represents yet another exemplar of the governmental violence that goes arm in arm with the global increase in capitalist accumulation, along with mounting rivalry for resources and markets.

In the opening pages of his "Human Oppression" chapter, Wilson pertinently quotes from a revealing Listener article: "Now that the Soviet threat has receded, (former North Atlantic Treaty Organisation commander Sir James) Eberle was candid about the role of security pacts like ANZUS within the Western alliance. Such pacts will exist not so much to defend the West from an external threat, he explains, but to serve as platforms for launching forces to ensure our access to key resources in the Third World. 'The new divide is not one of ideology, but of prosperity'. Military alliances will still be needed, he concludes, to confront those who do not recognise 'the norms of civilisation' about who should be the haves, and who should be the have nots" (p112; quoting "Like the Bomb Dammit" by Gordon Campbell, Listener, 8/7/91).

Again, as previously indicated above, while ideological mobilisation along Orwellian lines is still basic to the dominant strategy of the ruling Western elite, the mask is increasingly slipping as the age of naked power politics heralded by George Kennan dawns upon us. Gross over-consumption by the rich is fundamental to globalisation, and free trade is the cutting edge of late capitalism, i.e. other than outright military projection (pp175-178).

The New Imperialism

The smear term of "politically correct" is a term levelled by the Establishment Right against what it sees as Leftist inroads into its bastions of control. In fact, of course, what the Right itself defines and embraces as politically correct for its own benefit rules in a multitude of domains. It is highly significant that one of the most politically incorrect terms of all is that of "imperialism". Generations of Westerners have been indoctrinated to regard it as denoting something that happened in the distant past, and/or as an empty swear word used by Communist ideologues. Its reality is systematically denied or evaded by armies of apologists even as a small minority of the world's population, headed by the US Administration, dictate terms to the rest through the globalised and closely interconnected power structures of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), WTO, CIA, Pentagon, World Economic Forum, etc (pp285/6&pp460/1).

"Derived from the Latin word 'imperium', it ('imperialism') refers to the relationship of a hegemonic state to subordinate states, nations or peoples under its control" ("Penguin Dictionary of International Relations" by G Evans & J Newnham, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 244). While many engaged in the Western academic study of so-called "political science" contend that "imperialism" has become "now a political slogan so vague and wide-ranging" as to be devoid of any meaningful application (ibid., p245), in the early 21st Century imperial manifestations are once more glaringly rampant in the Middle East and Central Asia. The extremely aggressive projection of US power into these areas is indeed the spearhead of American globalised capital. "Globalisation is in fact the particular re-emergence of the age of imperialism of the 1879-1914 international economy" ("5H", p169); and American "global imperialism" its central source.

Moreover, to quote Richard Falk, Professor of International Relations at Princeton University, Western values in practice actually legitimate this sort of foreign policy, "validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence" . . . For sure, "there has been inculcated in public consciousness an ethos of violence that is regulated, if at all, only by perceptions of effectiveness. A weapon or tactic is acceptable, and generally beyond scrutiny, if it works in the sense of bringing the goals of the State more closely toward realisation . . . Considerations of innocence, of human suffering, of limits on the pursuit of State policy are treated as irrelevant, (and to be) scorned" (p114; from Falk's article 'The Terrorist Foundations of Recent US Policy' in "Western State Terrorism", ed. Alexander George, Polity Press, 1991).

As an illustration, take an August 19, 2002 editorial in the Murdoch-owned Press, titled "Ousting Saddam". After lambasting an array of Saddam Hussein's crimes (some aided and fostered by the West at the time), the Press editorial opines on why the US should take action to eliminate this particular SOB. It contends that the "political case for getting rid of this tyrant is getting stronger by the week". Purportedly, the real question according to the editorial writer(s) should be installing a "democratic government in Baghdad". In light of the Press's own grossly hypocritical track record in helping whitewash US-backed dictatorial SOBs over many years this can only be the stuff of self-satire (see for example its record on Suharto's Indonesia in Peace Researcher: Special Issue, no. 25, March 2002).

The Myth Of Democracy

The US does not give a damn about democracy in such situations. Indeed, it fears the spread of democracy because more and more people would want to challenge its hegemony. Instead, time and again the American Administration tries to manipulate the democratic process in foreign countries by secretly funding selected political parties, disseminating propaganda, practising psychological warfare, and so on. Besides the US's "political and military interventions in 69 countries since 1945", there have been US-engineered "perversions of foreign elections in [at least] 26 countries since the 1950s . . . and the undermining of peace and human rights initiatives at the United Nations between 1978 and 1987 on 113 occasions" ("5H", p460).

In many ways, too, the US itself is very much a pseudo-democracy locked firmly in the grip of corporate power and the military-industrial complex. Given the cynical cultivation of ruling paranoia interminably into the future, it could very easily become a fully fledged, fascist-style national security State, both internally as well as externally. Meantime, the Press is quite happy to treat the general violent lawlessness, including ongoing human rights abuses, which are still prevalent in Afghanistan under the rule of the terroristic "war on terrorism", as part of an outcome to date "far better than many imagined" (Press, ibid.). To be sure, the only thing that would really worry the Press would be the pain of obviously visible costs inflicted on the international corporate interests it so assiduously represents.

As if the general contents of its publication were not sufficient, the Press even has a weekly Right On column where Business Editor Neil Birss (and his sidekick) can openly extoll the virtues of the good white Western life against the barbarian hordes of Iraq, "Third World leaders", "West-haters", the "UN bureaucracy", and the "mob" who subjected Colin Powell to "shameful jeering" at the South African Earth Summit; while at the same time lamenting how "we decline open entry to a thousand or two persecuted Zimbabwe white farmers" (Press, 7/9/02). Similarly, NZ First and ACT are whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments and racial antagonism to Third World immigrants, while National Party and ACT politicians even brazenly call for NZ support for the US crusade against Iraq in order to help buy a free trade agreement (Press, 5/9/02). The global race war of rich and poor is now being cranked up by such ideologues. Documents obtained under the Official Information Act have shown that MFAT officials strongly pressed the Government to try and get gains for NZ business from supplying materiel for the American war on Afghanistan.

"'How is it that Western establishments can invert the public truth of their own power and terrorism?' asks John Pilger. 'The answer is that it is apostasy in Britain and the US (also NZ, etc.) to describe the democracies as terrorist states . . . The omission from public debate of these truths is given respectability by a legion of Western academics, think tanks, 'defence' correspondents and popular Western culture'" ("5H", pp114/5; quoting Pilger's "Hidden Agendas", Vintage, 1998). Back in the 20th Century, George Orwell pictured his dystopian nightmare of the world's future as set ahead in "1984" but some elements of it were already flourishing far earlier. In this regard, Derek Wilson also cites another incisive comment: "'Terrorists', wrote the historian Frank Furedi, 'become any foreign people you don't like. Moreover, terrorism is redefined to serve an all-purpose metaphor for the Third World, demanding concentrated action from the West'" (ibid., p115; quoting Furedi's "The New Ideology of Imperialism", Pluto Press, 1994).

Incidentally, Pilger's latest book, "The New Rulers of the World" (Verso 2002) includes chapters analysing the effects of Western sanctions on Iraq, the "Great Game" of Western geo-political control of the Middle East/Central Asia (in particular the oil and gas resources in which the Bush Administration has such flagrantly vested interests), and the continuing cover-up of the CIA-instigated massacre in Indonesia, 1965-66, which ushered in the Suharto regime, the planned outcome of close US/British collaboration. These topics are also well surveyed by Wilson in "Five Holocausts" (refer, too, for the Indonesian case to the Peace Researcher issue cited above. It can be accessed online at www.converge.org.nz/abc).

Looking After Our SOBs

Indonesian "totalitarianism" (remember how the National government's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Don McKinnon and his Ministry, as well as the Ministry of Defence, used to admire it so?!) was keenly assisted, among others, by the NZ government ("5H", p134). "NZ was only too happy to train Indonesian armed forces, exercise jointly with them, and refurbish Indonesian Skyhawk fighter-bombers. Nor were there any difficulties over Suharto family wealth being used to purchase large tracts of land and business operations" (ibid.). In this connection, Wilson refers readers to the exposure of these matters by CAFCA in Watchdog 92 (December 1999, and in plenty of other issues as well. Check either of our Websites: www.cafca.org.nz and www.converge.org.nz/watchdog). After indicating how the CIA was instrumental in drawing up lists of names for Suharto's death squads in 1965 (p132), Wilson draws a parallel with later American support for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 and describes the similarly grim outcome for this part of the world.

In this connection, he cites here arch conservative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the UN in 1975 and long-time influential US strategist and policy maker. Moynihan used to spend a lot of his time at the UN lambasting Third World governments as part of his brief to counter the push for a more just international economic order. However, on the Indonesian takeover of East Timor, Moynihan has said: "The US wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The Department of State (as part of its policy of global hegemony, especially over oil supplies) desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success" (p134; quoting New York Times, 28/1/1976 & Moynihan's "A Dangerous Place", Little Brown, 1978).

Appropriately enough, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been the most favourite person of NZ's Mike Moore (Mike sure knows how to grease up to the rich and powerful). In Mike's own inimitable words: "It's difficult to have heroes when you are in your late forties, but I still have one - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who constantly commits the greatest political sin of all, namely being right too soon" (see Moore's "A Brief History of the Future: Citizenship of the Millennium", Shoal Bay Press, 1998, p133). Would Moore today be ready to say Moynihan was right about East Timor in 1975? Well, perhaps not . . . not openly anyway . . . Moore does yet approvingly cite a quote he says comes from Moynihan's book, "Pandaemonium": "If the forces of nationalism and self-determination and indigenous rights and of sovereignty are on the throne today, it is by merit: they are responses to real problems and to the experience of imperial arrangements" (ibid.).

Both Moore and Moynihan are an embarrassment even to Orwellianism. In one of those supreme Mike Mooreish statements, the former has averred that: "The age of empire is over: the age of enlightened internationalism is hopefully nearly upon us" (introduced of course by the Mike and Patrick double act, wink, wink); and, moreover that: "Democracy thrives on information and the competition of ideas (which he worked so hard to suppress when a Minister and, very briefly, Prime Minister). But (he adds) politicians are not averse to manipulating language to further their own ends" (ibid. p44). And at this point, Moore then goes on to endorse Orwell's warnings . . . There is indeed a "frightening undermining of democracy. The US is reported to have spent $50 billion on its intelligence activities in the 1998 financial year. One wonders to what extent George Orwell's Big Brother is literally breathing down our necks" ("5H", p308).

"Five Holocausts" also elaborates on the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Following his self-praise on what he helped to do to East Timor in 1975: "Moynihan added that within a week or two (of the Indonesian invasion) some 60,000 people had been killed, '10% of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War'. (Wilson then goes on to point out that): This US action was shamefully backed by the British Government when in July 1975, in a cable to the Foreign Office, Britain's Ambassador said it was 'in Britain's interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon, and as unobtrusively as possible, and that if . . . there is a row in the UN, we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides against the Indonesian government'" (ibid., p134).

Besides straight-out slaughter, this absorption meant "excruciating tortures inflicted by the Indonesian military" who sometimes fondly photographed their techniques: strangulation with chains; burnings and beatings; bamboo poles pushed into stomachs and down throats; electric shock treatment; and various other atrocities (ibid.). For the two Anglo-Saxon nations now leading the "war on terrorism", the facilitation of this particular episode of oppression has been only one instance of their many attacks on human rights across the globe since World War II. Recently released NZ government documents have shown how NZ similarly collaborated with the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and turned a blind eye to any human rights abuses (Press, 7/9/02).

Warmongering

A former NZ Ambassador to the UN, Terence O'Brien, often has wise commentary to make on international affairs. As he has well remarked: "US policy continues to display the manipulative European imperialist tradition. President Bush insists Yasser Arafat departs the scene in Palestine, at the same time is committed to undermining the government in Iran, and is determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq" (Press, 19/8/02; the one redeeming feature of the Press is that it still prints the occasional article contrary to the dominant editorial line). O'Brien went on to say that such actions are likely only to incite "yet further terror attack"; and meanwhile all this is happening at a time when "rules-based foundations for non-proliferation of weapons are being repudiated by the US" (ibid.).

Like O'Brien, well known NZ historian and writer Michael King decries the US's "imperial role in world affairs" (Press, 7/9/02). "Imperialism" is now yet a term that may even be coming into some acceptable use in the established media. Certainly, some American hard Right ideologues like the Wall Street Journal features editor Max Boot and journalist Robert Kaplan are openly looking forward to an American imperial Reich far into the future (see International Herald Tribune, 2/4/02). The US is rejecting any set of international rules that does not suit the interests of its corporate rulers - from the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming to the newly created International Criminal Court. Likewise, Earth Summits, the WTO, and other international institutions and agreements are all subject to US unilateral action just as President Bush and his cronies see fit. In its newly inflated imperial role, the US Administration is becoming a rogue regime to the extent that it is now imposing terms over Iraq on the UN, threatening to take military action as it sees fit. This blatant abuse of the principle of common security could soon undermine the very basis of collective internationalism and thus any hope for future world cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict - "The most worrying part of the Bush doctrine . . " (Press, 25/9/02; see also an excellent article by Dr Steve Urlich, outlining the problems and suggesting remedies, Press, 28/9/02).

In this context, " . . . a partly declassified 1995 assessment by the US Strategic Command, released in 1997" had a chilling message for the world, a message that President Bush & co. are obviously determined to continually reiterate. "Called 'Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence', it argued that having US military and civilian leaders 'appear to be potentially out of control can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers . . . That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries'" ("5H", p80; quoting "Targets of Opportunity" by Hans Kristensen, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct. 1997). This is a further extension of the nuclear madman doctrine promoted by President Nixon to keep his opponents worried - brinkmanship to stretch the threshold of deterrence. It is today being linked to the (President) Carter doctrine of military intervention to secure oil supplies in the Middle East/Central Asia as the US becomes more dependent on overseas sources (pp40/1&393). The US already imports about 60% of its requirements from overseas.

Wilson repeatedly emphasises the critical aspects of this new imperialism and the resulting enforcement of "global apartheid". There is thus plenty of overlap among his chapters on "Militarism", "Human Oppression" and Economic Destitution". In his own words: "It is difficult at times to distinguish between human oppression and militarism for when the latter ('undue prevalence of military spirit or ideals') dominates or gets out of hand, oppression is inevitable. It has thrived under numerous names; in recent centuries, including the 20th, imperialism" (p112). 2002 sees power "redesigned in the image of a corporate elite which has substituted for whatever standards of morality may have existed its own measure of power and greed . . . the quest for profit and power as ends in themselves" (p54).

Reactionary Fundamentalism

Again: "Nations have lost their sovereignty and governments their control to an exceptionally powerful and covert, self-elected and self-serving behemoth at the top of which sit the world's leading banking empires and the TNCs" (p153). The emergence of the World Economic Forum is both expressive and symbolic of this. While one may think that Wilson can somewhat overstate his case on occasion, his focus does accurately document the erosion of democracy in the very face of the constant stream of propaganda intended to persuade us that freedom is flourishing. Paradoxically, disorder is also increasing hand in hand even while there is unprecedented concentration of power, wealth and violent control . . . or, indeed, precisely because of this.

Wilson is yet acutely aware of this contradictory process as well. With reference to "the new global anarchy of the international marketplace", he notes that the capitalist casino could easily implode. He likens the ultimate implications of global speculation to geological plate tectonics. "When these enormous, unstable, electronically controlled plates finally slide, as they surely will, although no one knows when, the damage could be horrendous" (p154). Besides positive protest and opposition, globalisation is also engendering religious and nationalistic/ethnic fundamentalism across the world in reaction to capitalist impositions and intrusions, whatever elements of these might sometimes be adopted or adapted as well by such opponents. Al Qaeda-type terrorists will inevitably multiply. Meanwhile in the US, too, warmongering religious-capitalist fundamentalists are among President Bush's most fervent supporters, just as under the previous Reagan/Bush senior Administrations (see Tariq Ali's "The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity", Verso, 2002).

Warmongering and war could certainly trigger off a global collapse. While the Bush Administration aims at Iraq, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are militarily engaged over Kashmir; Afghanistan remains unstable with its puppet President even having to be protected by US Special Forces; violent Israeli/Palestinian conflict continues; China is leaning on Taiwan while flexing its muscles as a growing regional and world power; the two Koreas are at an uneasy standoff; and some other regional/local conflict could also easily light a fuse starting a fire that could eventually get out of control. An expanding regional conflict could quickly suck in other nations further afield. More than one major regional conflict at the same time would be hugely disastrous for everybody.
As the world's most powerful country, the US could do enormous good for the future through sponsoring constructive, cooperative initiatives on disarmament, economic reform, sustainability, etc. instead of blowing it all away as is happening at present. The great civilised values of human rights, democracy, freedom, and justice as embodied in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights are under threat as never before - ironically, of course, the very values that the US is proclaiming to uphold. Wilson pertinently records the Declaration's Articles on pages 146 to 149 of "Five Holocausts" (most usefully, his book reproduces many such key statements and declarations on human rights, peace, development/justice and the environment).

Population, Environment And Resources

Four of Wilson's holocausts (excluding population) draw on the analytical framework of Paul Ekins, Research Fellow, Department of Economics, Birkbeck College, University of London (p13; quoting Development, no. 4, 1992). Wilson adds the "population explosion" because of its importance as a "growing problem" (p205). On the political Left there always has been much unease in looking seriously at this issue. The Malthusian * tradition has been firmly based in the Right of the political spectrum; and the solutions proposed to solve alleged over-populationproblems have sometimes been barbaric and obscene, as well as being clearly promulgated from a grossly privileged and self-interested perspective. Starvation, war, disease and death have been the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse deliberately advocated by some people as the means to control excess human numbers. *Malthus was an 18th Century English cleric who identified over population as a major cause of poverty and advocated brutal solutions to it. Ed.

In many ways, Malthusianism, including its Social Darwinist form, has clearly been conservatism at its worst (p205/7). However expressed in the course of history, Social Darwinism is both the logical and empirical conclusion of capitalism doctrine and practice. My own activism on Third World matters was sparked in the early 1970s by an article in Truth titled "Let them Starve", calling for the withdrawal of aid for the hungry. Disease (especially AIDS), famine, and war are already savagely stalking Africa but Western concern is only very faintly registered. There is certainly no sense of Western responsibility for the devastating results of free trade/market policies, debt payment, and structural adjustment programmes imposed through the agency of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the GATT/WTO. Mike Moore, as the committed Rightwinger that he is, blames overpopulation for being "the most significant cause of environmental damage", not the lifestyle and the TNCs that he represents ("A Brief History of the Future", p. 162).

In the 19th Century, Malthusianism served as one of the sources of inspiration for Darwinism which, of course, has resulted in the present scientific understanding of biological evolution and what it means for human development in the long run. If we try for a moment to put our political biases aside surely the most striking thing about human development in the last few centuries is the extraordinarily rapid increase in numbers. There are obviously dimensions to the population issue that cannot be ignored, or only ignored at the price of stupidity. About four and a half billion people were added to the one and a half billion at the start of the 20th Century ("5H", p204). This has so far been achieved through economic growth powered by new ways of viewing the world and its resources, coupled with the systematic application of ever more innovative technologies. From 2002, the world human population is set to double in about 30 years. Human labour certainly is destined to be the cheapest resource for capital to exploit.

In the natural world, animal populations can also at times undergo such phenomenal growth and then die back rapidly as their numbers become unsustainable due to lack of food/nutrients (eating out their staple supply), competition from other species, damage to their environment, disease - indeed a whole range of factors, often operating in combination. The big question is whether this is likely to happen to the human species in the near or not so distant future. Global degeneration into resource wars surely appears eminently feasible if current trends go on (see Professor Michael Klare's "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict", Metropolitan Books, 2001). Resource wars are happening right now. The war against Iraq has really been going on for the past 12 years and includes child-murdering sanctions, the effects of uranium-depleted munitions, and regular bombing ("5H", pp88/89,179-81&461).

Cancerous Growth

Capitalist ideologues recognise no limits to growth. For an example of crazily utopian projections, we can refer to Adrian Berry's book, "The Next 500 Years: Life in the Coming Millennium" (Gramercy, 1996). Berry, who has long been the science correspondent of the hard Right British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, predicts the intensive farming of the seas; the ever increasing wealth of the Earth; and the colonisation of the Moon and Mars. Probably today the most prominent prophet of the triumph of technocratic capitalism is American political economist, Francis Fukuyama, recently hosted in NZ by the Business Roundtable (Press, 12/8/02). His message is similarly grossly superficial and fantastical, even proclaiming the "end of history"; human history might indeed eventually end but in a far different way to the politico-mystical garbage spouted by Fukuyama. He looks forward to a bio-engineered humanity.

Berry and Fukuyama have counterparts in NZ like Associate Professor Denis Dutton, self-proclaimed sceptic, admirer of the deeds and thoughts of Mad Mike, and philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury. Technology will constantly transform human possibilities for the better. As Wilson points out, the official approach of the World Bank is: "that although 'Earth's resources are limited as is the absorptive capacity of its sinks, the compensatory ability of substitution, technical progress and structural change allow us to assume that no bounds need be placed on the growth of human activity'" ("5H", p197; quoting the Bank's World Development Report 1992). As Wilson comments, this is "ludicrous" but in policy and/or in practice it is the capitalist line.
In this context, a most interesting observation was made by Prime Minister Helen Clark when interviewed at the South African Earth Summit. She was prepared to recognise ecological limits and said that the developing countries could not in fact hope to have our standard of living so had to learn somehow to cope differently (TV1, Holmes, 5/9/02). Meantime, her own Government is aiming at 4% sustained economic growth! Obviously, the discriminatory contradictions of the official understanding of sustainable development do not register at all with its proponents. It is very much business as usual (see "Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Megaprofits and the Attack on Democracy" by R Mokhiber & R Weissman, Common Courage Press, 1999; "Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits from Poverty", ed. M Hudson, Common Courage, 1996; "Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order" by R Barnet & J Cavanagh, Simon & Schuster, 1994; also "Empire" by M Hardt & A Negri, Harvard University Press; "Private Planet: Corporate Plunder and the Fight Back" by David Cromwell, John Carpenter Pub.; and "Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth" by David Bollier).

The wider reality, as Wilson continually emphasises in "Five Holocausts" is that the Third World in a vast variety of ways subsidies a parasitic and predatory Western style of life. The US alone, with only about a twentieth of the total human population, accounts for 30% of resource consumption per year. President Bush senior made it very clear that the petroleum-guzzling American way of life would not be negotiable ("5H", p294). His son's plan for American "full spectrum" domination of the planet embodies the resolution to strike anywhere at will in what the Administration sees as increasing international anarchy, a state that the US government has done so much to engender, and will continue to engender (NZ Herald, 23/9/02). Unashamedly, the US is turning itself into the planet's pirate state.

Closer to home, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr. J Morgan Williams, has signalled some of our own failings. "The continual emphasis by successive governments on economic growth as a priority has the potential to accelerate us towards unsustainability if it simply means escalating energy and materials consumption, waste and pollution problems. Instead, emphasis should be shifted to development that improves quality of life, produces less waste, adds more value to goods and services, and manages in a sustainable way rather than 'quarries' resources" ("Creating our Future: Sustainable Development for New Zealand", Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment", June 2002, p16). As this report makes clear, NZ is not functioning in a sustainable manner. The problems are widespread. For example, already Auckland is reaching out for the water resource of the Waikato River, while Canterbury faces looming water constraints on agriculture and other demands. Meantime, NZ is losing soil about ten times faster than the rest of the world (Press, 19/9/02). And so it goes . . .

Inequalities, Ecological Constraints And Constructive Response

Taken on a per capita basis, a person in the so-called developed world has a much greater impact in terms of resource consumption and pollution than a person in the South ("5H", pp160,210&234: see also National Geographic for pictorial comparisons of the "ecological footprints" of the global impact of haves and have-nots, e.g. March 2001 & July 2001 issues). For instance, in 1995 it was estimated that energy consumption per head, per annum, amounted in NZ to 151 gigajoules, and in the US to 295 gigajoules, but in Brazil to only 23 gigajoules, and in Bangladesh to a mere two gigajoules (p210; quoting Dai Redshaw & Keith Dawbers, "Sustainable Energy Options for New Zealand", Otago University Press, 1995). An excellent article by Mark Revington in the Listener (31/8/02), drawing on a new World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, indicated that another planet is needed by 2050, given the current rates ofthe exploitation of natural resources! This reinforces a grim UN report on the state of the global environment (Press, 23/5/02). In fact: "If everyone on Earth were to enjoy Canada's material standards of living a minimum of about five additional planet Earths would be required!" ("5H", p267). With the debacle of the latest Earth Summit as predicted, the outlook is bleak to say the least (see also "Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture and the Pursuit of Happiness", ed. Roger Rosenblatt, Island Press, 1999).

In his chapter on "Environmental Destruction", Wilson presents an overview of the major problems as well as a range of others, some of which may yet be little understood, laced with plenty of practical recommendations as to what we can do to alleviate or obviate them. He covers everything from declining biodiversity to AIDS, including air pollution; global warming and climate change; the plunder of marine fish stocks; eutrophication * of waterways; out-of-control urbanisation; the rape of tropical forests; excessive irrigation; species extinction; soil erosion; and genetic engineering. The combined effects are damaging human, animal and plant existence in a multitude of ways; and increasing poverty, unemployment, disease, racism and ethnic conflict, refugees, and a whole array of local, regional and global problems. Wilson rightly warns against the impending threat of the privatisation of essential resources like water and public assets in general, now continuously menaced by TNCs, often in the form of the NZ Business Roundtable and other manifestations of predatory greed. * Eutrophication – the excessive buildup of elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen in waterways, usually resulting from farm fertiliser runoffs. It effectively kills the waterways. Ed.

After charting a litany of woes throughout "Five Holocausts", illustrated with lots of searing examples of rampant inhumanity, it is certainly challenging for Wilson to help us see much light at the end of the tunnel. But this is what he valiantly endeavours to do in the last third of his book with chapters on "Our Common Future", "Survival", and the need to invest in peace. In fact, his analysis is extended on as well into the ruling power structures of the global economy, and both includes and extends an interesting review of hard Right organisations from the Mont Pelerin Society to the Heritage Foundation. It can be argued from a "big picture" perspective that Wilson puts too much emphasis on such groups, rather than on the systemic elements, factors and processes of capitalism (indeed "capitalism" does not even appear as an entry in the book's lengthy index). However, at the same time, his approach is refreshing enough in that many of these groups tend to work largely behind the scenes invisible to public scrutiny, and are regularly shielded from investigation and any real in-depth scrutiny by the established media. They certainly deserve far greater exposure!

Some aspects of the account of these groups are highly contestable however with elements of Rightwing conspiracy theory unfortunately mixed up in the analysis. Where Wilson does refer to the dynamics of the international economic system, he tends to do so in a general fashion, e.g. denouncing: "An all-powerful global economic system of growth and free trade . . . (that) has triggered enormous destruction through the wholesale encouragement of consumption, militarism and waste . . . " (p280). He is usually sound in his sources and references when looking at the operation of these factors, e.g. his documentation on militarisation, as already intimated above, is especially strong.

"Five Holocausts" does incorporate lots of recommendations for things to do, to help make a better world with an emphasis on peace education. To be sure this is more than ever vitally necessary today. In this connection, Wilson refers to the imperative of managing conflict non-violently. Articulation of a national vision for Aotearoa/NZ as an international mediator for peace - as a beacon of positive neutrality - has long been the work of John Gallagher, the leading pathfinder in this area (see his many articles in Nuclear Free; also some in mainstream media, e.g. National Business Review, 25/2/85 & Press, 24/6/00). Unfortunately, too, we also need to prepare for further drastic international crises. Capitalism is inherently and ultimately militaristic as well as imperialistic, and is destined to generate more global antagonism because it must continue to grow to survive as a system, even though the ultimate endgame must be suicidal. There has been much debate over this in the past. The truth now stares us in the face. Avoiding this endgame is going to demand unprecedented collective action.

In launching itself on the warpath again at Iraq, the US has on the way deliberately sabotaged the UN Food Summit in June 2002 (in conjunction with other developed countries; Press, 12/6/02), and later the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. It is prepared to ravage the globe to maintain its extravagant way of life (above all for the ruling minority of its population) and has even explicitly rejected the prospects for renewable energy. It is destroying the future for us all. In lamenting the fate of the latest Earth Summit, "Friends of the Earth International chairperson, Ricardo Navarro said: 'We feel anger and despair because world leaders have sold out to the WTO and Big Business'" (Press, 6/9/02). Somehow in the years to come those striving for positive change will have to make the real meaning of events like September 11, 2001, far more alive to the Western conscience if humanity itself is to survive; and that includes weathering more of the inevitable crises to come.

Embracing The Future?!

Earlier shorter versions of Wilson's book were published by the Pacific Institute of Resource Management (PIRM). Derek has long been a member of PIRM, and "Five Holocausts" reflects the global sweep of this organisation's concerns. Today, PIRM puts out its magazine, Pacific Ecologist (formerly Pacific World), ably coordinated by its dedicated editor, Kay Weir, and also conducts relevant campaigns as much as its resources allow (PO Box 12125, Wellington: $50 for four issues, or $40 if unwaged). Personally, I shall be grateful to PIRM and its founding president, the late George Porter, for much needed support in the early 1990s when I was researching and agitating on free trade, and ironically encountering strong resistance from people who claimed to be working for alternatives to capitalist enterprise. The ever-insistent question is how can we work effectively to broaden and deepen the movement to contest unjust power structures and create viable alternatives. Some of the best initiatives, as usual, are coming out of the capitalist powerhouse of the US, e.g. Lester Brown's Earth Policy Institute and publications like his "Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth" (WW Norton & Co., 2001).

So much Green politics, however, is still just a trendy version of capitalist ideology in a new guise. For instance, the very middle class NZ party version has embraced things like "corporate image" and "entrepreneurship". A Press reporter enjoins the party to follow the German Greens and adopt the "capitalist model" (Press, 23/9/02). This is, in his terms, "Realpolitik" - it is also the kiss of death for any hope of real change. Unless we genuinely confront the trends documented so well in Wilson's book, we don't even get off first base. In the field of future studies, "Five Holocausts" is a very readable and highly comprehensive compendium of information vital for understanding the state of the world, and for informed campaigning. If there are certain points of fact and interpretation that the reviewer would contest (as is inevitable in a book of such size and scope), the overall work constitutes a most useful resource. It should be widely used and promoted. Written with fervent passion, it is indeed "a cry from the heart."

from "The Road Not Taken"
". .Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference".
Robert Frost

"Five Holocausts" is available from the author. Send orders to Derek Wilson, 77 Burma Road, Khandallah, Wellington, NZ. Fax (64 4) 4793753;e-mail: derek@derekjwilson.co.nz
One copy costs $NZ59.95; you can get two for $110 and three for $150 (add $5 per copy for packaging and delivery within NZ. Overseas charged at most economic rate). You can pay by cash, NZ cheque or credit card.
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