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New
Year in the Sign of the Tsunami
PressInfo #
206
December
30, 2004
By
Jan
Oberg
& Gudrun
Schyman,
TFF Board &
Christina
Spännar,
TFF co-founder
Read also
PressInfo 207 about the real tsunami
scandal
Perhaps Mother Nature is angry? If
so, she has good reasons. The incomprehensible
proportions of the human tragedy in Asia offers us the
most serious opportunity for decades to rethink deeply
and with compassion how we act, what we do and how we
make priorities on our common Earth.
If instead of military security,
human security had been the main paradigm, we would
probably not have seen anything like this death and
destruction. If governments had had a reasonably
objective analysis of what threatens not only their own
countries but humankind and the Earth - and prepared for
it - the rescue work would have been better prepared. If
politics and economics were about human beings and
welfare, not about power and profit, more people would be
alive today.
And if the world was operating less
on male-dominated thinking, chances are that there would
have been a clearer understanding of the
non-sustainability of so-called system "rationality" and
an emphasis, instead, on human rationality.
Mother Nature has all reason to be
angry because we are doing the wrong things to Her and to
each other. Perhaps the tsunami is a sign of what is
coming, an early warning to us all that we must change
our ways and stop being so narrow-minded and
short-sighted? A sign at the end of the old year that, in
order to survive, we must change our priorities and
policies and make them compatible with the Earth, with
permanence instead of fleetingness.
Autumn
leaves under the water,
In memory of the victims of the tsunami
Tofukuji Temple, Kyoto
@ Jan
Oberg 2004
Human
security versus military security
Rich and big powers are ready to
fight wars, including nuclear wars, within minutes of
warning. But there was no warning for the poor people in
Asia, no thought for their human security. We hear talk
about humanitarian intervention and about the "need" for
soldiers to help out in humanitarian catastrophes. But
most governments seem to know neither how to handle
anything like this tsunami nor its aftermath.
While the world, the U.S. in
particular, spends grotesque sums on "fighting" terrorism
- never a big problem in terms of human losses - and now
only produces more terrorism, it pays no serious
attention to the poverty problem and to environmental
security. It spends scarce resources on armament and cut
down national welfare budgets pleasing only
military-industrial complexes and disregarding human
needs everywhere.
There is no such thing as human
security anywhere on earth. Why? Because of our
male-dominated military security paradigm. Because of our
totally wrong priorities. Because of our hopeless
four-year election cycles that prevent every attempt at
long-range macro thinking about the Earth's future.
Because there are no human rights for the poor, nor for
the yet unborn.
Compassion
and willingness to help
Fortunately, human compassion has
proved boundless once again. All over the world
good-hearted people help humanitarian organisations
collect money and donate items for the victims; they want
their own countries to receive these victims. And
they use the Internet and e-mail to raise consciousness.
People help each other on every way they can in the
tsunami region.
It's deeply moving. Undoubtedly,
human compassion, empathy and love is among the strongest
forces on earth - if allowed to flow freely. Normally, it
isn't.
One tsunami a
day, the year around - and few care
But wait a minute!
This compassion only flows freely
when directed at non-political suffering. If
related to economy and to politics, it doesn't. About 50%
of the people on earth - or about 3 billion - still live
on less than 2 dollars a day (while 300,000 Americans die
annually from eating too much and low-quality food).
Worldwide, between 60.000 and 100.000 people die every
day because of poverty, curable diseases, AIDS, lack
of food, clean water, shelter, clothes, medicine and
education.
At the time of writing, this almost
equals the dead from the tsunami (120.000)!!
The people who die innocently in
natural catastrophes touch our hearts. Those who die
equally innocently because of global capitalism, power
games, wars and military over-consumption, don't touch
our hearts. Why? Probably because we know, deep down,
that they die because of us - because of the privileged,
the rich, their greed, their mental self-protection and
entertainment. They die because they must - otherwise the
rest of us could not be rolling in money, materialism and
militarism.
To comfort ourselves, we have
invented the concept of sustainable development. But
of course we know well that the whole thing is totally
unsustainable even in the short run. And we fear that
things won't change by voluntary action, only along with
increasing global system-breakdown.
Every thought of reducing the
consumption of the rich is met with the argument that
then the system would break down! We need more
consumption and more inequality to - survive. But people
die from the survival of this inherently inhuman system!
It's a major enigma of our time
that people have not yet mobilised worldwide against this
self-defeating, non-rational and non-ethical theory!
Wars
also don't touch our hearts this way
A short while ago, the most
respected British journal, The Lancet, published a
study documenting that about 100,000 Iraqis have died
since the invasion and occupation. Before that, UN
organisations estimated that the sanctions against the
Iraqi people - half of whom are children below 16 - cost
the lives of 500,000 to 1,000.000.
It did not stir half the attention
now directed at the tsunami. Isn't it mind-boggling that
we pay much less attention to man-made disasters and show
much less compassion when, in fact, they ought to
cause more because they are the ones we could take
steps to avoid or change?
The war system also diverts
incomprehensible sums from helping the damned of the
earth: the world's governments now spend close to 1,000
billion dollars on armament. The war in Iraq costs the
U.S. alone 1 billion dollar a week! A warning system
against tsunamis, such as Japan's, is said to cost about
20 million dollars.
Virgil Hawkins, in his PhD thesis
reviewed
elsewhere on this site,
tells us this about recent wars:
That 89% of the war dead in the
1990s were found in Africa, 5% in Europe, 4% in Asia, 1%
in the Middle East and 1% in the Americas. More than 5
million people died in the wars in Africa, 1,3 million in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, and 1,1 in the
Sudan alone. Says Hawkins, "Conflicts consistently
portrayed in the media as major conflicts, such as those
in Kosovo (8,000-9,000 deaths, 2,000 of which occurred
prior to the NATO bombing), Israel-Palestine (2,710
deaths), East Timor (1,000 deaths), Northern Ireland
(fewer than 400), were in fact, relatively speaking,
extremely minor."
Who really cared about the real,
great losses of human lives? The media and Western
politicians at least didn't.
Money
and folly
News reports tell that leading Thai
meteorologists were meeting in the morning of the
tsunami. They did not issue an alarm about the tsunami
coming because - if wrong - they feared that the
government would fire them and close down their
institute. Why? Because tourism is the most important
source of income for Thailand.
One can choose to blame them - or
one can say: such is the power of money! Such was the
implicit image of the Thai leadership that has spent huge
sums on "fighting Muslims" in the South and killing them
in the name of the war on terror. It ignored completely
human as well as environmental security. So did the
governments of Indonesia or Sri Lanka, for so long
squandering their resources on wars too - greatly helped
by the world's arms dealers.
What better life could the poor
people - now also hit by this catastrophe - have lived
had their governments operated on more human and less
male-militaristic values?
Hopes,
in spite of all
The tsunami is a human tragedy
beyond comprehension. But it's also an early warning to
us all. Hand in hand human and environmental security
must now substitute military security. We need a
completely different set of priorities and a
global ethics of care, indeed that is what
globalisation ought to be about.
The new year will hardly be a happy
one for the world. Unless we use the tsunami tragedy
constructively to understand and respect the
interrelatedness of everything - and see how late it
is on Earth - the next years could well mean growing
darkness.
But we must also not give up the
hope that there is enough collected wisdom and courage
around for humanity to - still - make peace both with
Mother Nature and among ourselves.
© TFF and the authors 2004
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