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Where were you when the world was ransacked by the rich and greedy?
How The Rich Are Destroying The Earth.
By Hervé Kempf. Green Book
WHEN I told a group of Americans in Alaska that I had dived under a hedge as a kid when a buzz bomb stopped above me during the London Blitz, they hailed me as a hero.
So what will I tell my grandson when he asks: “What did you do, Grandpa, when the ‘money men’ mugged the world and people lost their jobs, their houses, their savings?”
The national newspapers are calling for drastic regulation of the banks, despite telling us that Iceland was top of the tree for investment. They produce headlines that extol the mess we’re in yet remain ignored and disbelieved because they do it every day.
However, the warning signs have been there, probably since that great brain Sir Isaac Newton, no less, lost £20,000 on the South Sea Bubble, while we have been brainwashed by politicians and the media into thinking the housing boom might well go on forever, to new dizzy heights.
One of the best of those warnings has, alas, only just been published here, a year after it appeared in France, and with a title How The Rich Are Destroying The Earth. Its message is now so self-evident that you wonder why we have all been sleepwalking over Beachy Head.
Hervé Kempf, the environmental editor of Le Monde – who has been described as an “intellectual original” – says he got the message at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.
“There was an overwhelmingly obvious need to think about ecology,” he writes. “And there was an exigency: to report about it. I began to do that just that.
“Since then, I have always been guided by two rules – to be independent, and to produce good information that is precise, pertinent and original. Also, I held back from doomsdayism. While I was the first to write about climate issues, the genetically modified organism (GMO) adventure and the bio-diversity crisis, I have never exaggerated.
“It seems to me that the facts, presented with tenacious attention to such obviously important subjects, are sufficient to speak to our intellect. And I believe that intelligence would be sufficient to transform the world.”
But it wasn’t. We have trashed all soothsayers and gone down the road of greed that has not only threatened our personal lives but the future of the world in total.
We have generally ignored Kempf’s message to “think globally – act locally” or impose such commonsense demands as “consume less – share better”. Every day has become Christmas with goodies galore there for the taking.
Indeed, as Greg Palast points out in his foreword to the book: “So why the hell shouldn’t the rich destroy the planet? After all, it’s theirs. They own it. We all live on it, true, but we’re just renting space from the landlords of our piece of earth, our air, our water. The landlords do what they want with their property. To get at their gold, they dump arsenic in our drinking water; to get at their oil, they melt our polar caps and pump soot into our lungs.”
It is democracy that is at stake, as Kempf insists, regardless of Barack Obama becoming the next President of the United States. And it serves no purpose to compare our current situation to the dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin or even Mussolini.
“What is happening in front of our eyes cannot be compared to those three regimes, for the times have changed, as well as the forms of political life and the techniques of social control,” says Kempf. “Rather than violent dictatorships, the oligarchy prefers the progressive bastardisation of democracy.”
Here is a paperback that is more than an Orwellian polemic, one you cannot afford to miss if you have any desire to sustain human life by taking some action, no matter how small, to halt our decline. It’s better that than watching the world collapse from the comfort of your armchair.
As Kempf concludes: you can’t resolve the ecological crisis without sorting the social one first. Come on Gordon, put your Flash cape on and fly to our rescue!
Gerald Isaaman
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