The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces -- coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world" -- "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment," in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the U.S. intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today's policy-makers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s influential advisor A.A. Berle that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield "substantial control of the world." And correspondingly, that loss of control would threaten the project of global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II, and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day.

From the outset of the war in 1939, Washington anticipated that it would end with the U.S. in a position of overwhelming power. High-level State Department officials and foreign policy specialists met through the wartime years to lay out plans for the postwar world. They delineated a "Grand Area" that the U.S. was to dominate, including the Western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire, with its Middle East energy resources. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, at least its economic core in Western Europe. Within the Grand Area, the U.S. would maintain "unquestioned power," with "military and economic supremacy," while ensuring the "limitation of any exercise of sovereignty" by states that might interfere with its global designs. The careful wartime plans were soon implemented.

It was always recognized that Europe might choose to follow an independent course. NATO was partially intended to counter this threat. As soon as the official pretext for NATO dissolved in 1989, NATO was expanded to the East in violation of verbal pledges to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It has since become a U.S.-run intervention force, with far-ranging scope, spelled out by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who informed a NATO conference that "NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West," and more generally to protect sea routes used by tankers and other "crucial infrastructure" of the energy system.

Grand Area doctrines clearly license military intervention at will. That conclusion was articulated clearly by the Clinton administration, which declared that the U.S. has the right to use military force to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources," and must maintain huge military forces "forward deployed" in Europe and Asia "in order to shape people's opinions about us" and "to shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security."

The same principles governed the invasion of Iraq. As the U.S. failure to impose its will in Iraq was becoming unmistakable, the actual goals of the invasion could no longer be concealed behind pretty rhetoric. In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors. Two months later, President Bush informed Congress that he would reject legislation that might limit the permanent stationing of U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq or "United States control of the oil resources of Iraq" -- demands that the U.S. had to abandon shortly after in the face of Iraqi resistance.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the recent popular uprisings have won impressive victories, but as the Carnegie Endowment reported, while names have changed, the regimes remain: "A change in ruling elites and system of governance is still a distant goal." The report discusses internal barriers to democracy, but ignores the external ones, which as always are significant.

The U.S. and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. To understand why, it is only necessary to look at the studies of Arab opinion conducted by U.S. polling agencies. Though barely reported, they are certainly known to planners. They reveal that by overwhelming majorities, Arabs regard the U.S. and Israel as the major threats they face: the U.S. is so regarded by 90% of Egyptians, in the region generally by over 75%. Some Arabs regard Iran as a threat: 10%. Opposition to U.S. policy is so strong that a majority believes that security would be improved if Iran had nuclear weapons -- in Egypt, 80%. Other figures are similar. If public opinion were to influence policy, the U.S. not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it, along with its allies, undermining fundamental principles of global dominance.

The Invisible Hand of Power

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.

Elite contempt for democracy was revealed dramatically in the reaction to the WikiLeaks exposures. Those that received most attention, with euphoric commentary, were cables reporting that Arabs support the U.S. stand on Iran. The reference was to the ruling dictators. The attitudes of the public were unmentioned. The guiding principle was articulated clearly by Carnegie Endowment Middle East specialist Marwan Muasher, formerly a high official of the Jordanian government: "There is nothing wrong, everything is under control." In short, if the dictators support us, what else could matter?

The Muasher doctrine is rational and venerable. To mention just one case that is highly relevant today, in internal discussion in 1958, president Eisenhower expressed concern about "the campaign of hatred" against us in the Arab world, not by governments, but by the people. The National Security Council (NSC) explained that there is a perception in the Arab world that the U.S. supports dictatorships and blocks democracy and development so as to ensure control over the resources of the region. Furthermore, the perception is basically accurate, the NSC concluded, and that is what we should be doing, relying on the Muasher doctrine. Pentagon studies conducted after 9/11 confirmed that the same holds today.

It is normal for the victors to consign history to the trash can, and for victims to take it seriously. Perhaps a few brief observations on this important matter may be useful. Today is not the first occasion when Egypt and the U.S. are facing similar problems, and moving in opposite directions. That was also true in the early nineteenth century.

Economic historians have argued that Egypt was well-placed to undertake rapid economic development at the same time that the U.S. was. Both had rich agriculture, including cotton, the fuel of the early industrial revolution -- though unlike Egypt, the U.S. had to develop cotton production and a work force by conquest, extermination, and slavery, with consequences that are evident right now in the reservations for the survivors and the prisons that have rapidly expanded since the Reagan years to house the superfluous population left by deindustrialization.

One fundamental difference was that the U.S. had gained independence and was therefore free to ignore the prescriptions of economic theory, delivered at the time by Adam Smith in terms rather like those preached to developing societies today. Smith urged the liberated colonies to produce primary products for export and to import superior British manufactures, and certainly not to attempt to monopolize crucial goods, particularly cotton. Any other path, Smith warned, "would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness."

Having gained their independence, the colonies were free to ignore his advice and to follow England's course of independent state-guided development, with high tariffs to protect industry from British exports, first textiles, later steel and others, and to adopt numerous other devices to accelerate industrial development. The independent Republic also sought to gain a monopoly of cotton so as to "place all other nations at our feet," particularly the British enemy, as the Jacksonian presidents announced when conquering Texas and half of Mexico.

For Egypt, a comparable course was barred by British power. Lord Palmerston declared that "no ideas of fairness [toward Egypt] ought to stand in the way of such great and paramount interests" of Britain as preserving its economic and political hegemony, expressing his "hate" for the "ignorant barbarian" Muhammed Ali who dared to seek an independent course, and deploying Britain's fleet and financial power to terminate Egypt's quest for independence and economic development.

After World War II, when the U.S. displaced Britain as global hegemon, Washington adopted the same stand, making it clear that the U.S. would provide no aid to Egypt unless it adhered to the standard rules for the weak -- which the U.S. continued to violate, imposing high tariffs to bar Egyptian cotton and causing a debilitating dollar shortage. The usual interpretation of market principles.

It is small wonder that the "campaign of hatred" against the U.S. that concerned Eisenhower was based on the recognition that the U.S. supports dictators and blocks democracy and development, as do its allies.

In Adam Smith's defense, it should be added that he recognized what would happen if Britain followed the rules of sound economics, now called "neoliberalism." He warned that if British manufacturers, merchants, and investors turned abroad, they might profit but England would suffer. But he felt that they would be guided by a home bias, so as if by an invisible hand England would be spared the ravages of economic rationality.

The passage is hard to miss. It is the one occurrence of the famous phrase "invisible hand" in The Wealth of Nations. The other leading founder of classical economics, David Ricardo, drew similar conclusions, hoping that home bias would lead men of property to "be satisfied with the low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations," feelings that, he added, "I should be sorry to see weakened." Their predictions aside, the instincts of the classical economists were sound.

The Iranian and Chinese “Threats”

The democracy uprising in the Arab world is sometimes compared to Eastern Europe in 1989, but on dubious grounds. In 1989, the democracy uprising was tolerated by the Russians, and supported by western power in accord with standard doctrine: it plainly conformed to economic and strategic objectives, and was therefore a noble achievement, greatly honored, unlike the struggles at the same time "to defend the people's fundamental human rights" in Central America, in the words of the assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador, one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the military forces armed and trained by Washington. There was no Gorbachev in the West throughout these horrendous years, and there is none today. And Western power remains hostile to democracy in the Arab world for good reasons.

Grand Area doctrines continue to apply to contemporary crises and confrontations. In Western policy-making circles and political commentary the Iranian threat is considered to pose the greatest danger to world order and hence must be the primary focus of U.S. foreign policy, with Europe trailing along politely.

What exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence. Reporting on global security last year, they make it clear that the threat is not military. Iran's military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the region," they conclude. Its military doctrine is strictly "defensive, designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities." Iran has only "a limited capability to project force beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy." All quotes.

The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it hardly outranks U.S. allies in that regard. But the threat lies elsewhere, and is ominous indeed. One element is Iran's potential deterrent capacity, an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that might interfere with U.S. freedom of action in the region. It is glaringly obvious why Iran would seek a deterrent capacity; a look at the military bases and nuclear forces in the region suffices to explain.

Seven years ago, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote that "The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy," particularly when they are under constant threat of attack in violation of the UN Charter. Whether they are doing so remains an open question, but perhaps so.

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence in neighboring countries, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence emphasize, and in this way to "destabilize" the region (in the technical terms of foreign policy discourse). The U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iran's neighbors is "stabilization." Iran's efforts to extend its influence to them are "destabilization," hence plainly illegitimate.

Such usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace was properly using the term "stability" in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was necessary to "destabilize" the country (by overthrowing the elected government of Salvador Allende and installing the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet). Other concerns about Iran are equally interesting to explore, but perhaps this is enough to reveal the guiding principles and their status in imperial culture. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s planners emphasized at the dawn of the contemporary world system, the U.S. cannot tolerate "any exercise of sovereignty" that interferes with its global designs.

The U.S. and Europe are united in punishing Iran for its threat to stability, but it is useful to recall how isolated they are. The nonaligned countries have vigorously supported Iran's right to enrich uranium. In the region, Arab public opinion even strongly favors Iranian nuclear weapons. The major regional power, Turkey, voted against the latest U.S.-initiated sanctions motion in the Security Council, along with Brazil, the most admired country of the South. Their disobedience led to sharp censure, not for the first time: Turkey had been bitterly condemned in 2003 when the government followed the will of 95% of the population and refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq, thus demonstrating its weak grasp of democracy, western-style.

After its Security Council misdeed last year, Turkey was warned by Obama's top diplomat on European affairs, Philip Gordon, that it must "demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West." A scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations asked, "How do we keep the Turks in their lane?" -- following orders like good democrats. Brazil's Lula was admonished in a New York Times headline that his effort with Turkey to provide a solution to the uranium enrichment issue outside of the framework of U.S. power was a "Spot on Brazilian Leader's Legacy." In brief, do what we say, or else.

An interesting sidelight, effectively suppressed, is that the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal was approved in advance by Obama, presumably on the assumption that it would fail, providing an ideological weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the approval turned to censure, and Washington rammed through a Security Council resolution so weak that China readily signed -- and is now chastised for living up to the letter of the resolution but not Washington's unilateral directives -- in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, for example.

While the U.S. can tolerate Turkish disobedience, though with dismay, China is harder to ignore. The press warns that "China's investors and traders are now filling a vacuum in Iran as businesses from many other nations, especially in Europe, pull out," and in particular, is expanding its dominant role in Iran's energy industries. Washington is reacting with a touch of desperation. The State Department warned China that if it wants to be accepted in the international community -- a technical term referring to the U.S. and whoever happens to agree with it -- then it must not "skirt and evade international responsibilities, [which] are clear": namely, follow U.S. orders. China is unlikely to be impressed.

There is also much concern about the growing Chinese military threat. A recent Pentagon study warned that China's military budget is approaching "one-fifth of what the Pentagon spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," a fraction of the U.S. military budget, of course. China's expansion of military forces might "deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off its coast," the New York Times added.

Off the coast of China, that is; it has yet to be proposed that the U.S. should eliminate military forces that deny the Caribbean to Chinese warships. China's lack of understanding of rules of international civility is illustrated further by its objections to plans for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington to join naval exercises a few miles off China's coast, with alleged capacity to strike Beijing.

In contrast, the West understands that such U.S. operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security. The liberal New Republic expresses its concern that "China sent ten warships through international waters just off the Japanese island of Okinawa." That is indeed a provocation -- unlike the fact, unmentioned, that Washington has converted the island into a major military base in defiance of vehement protests by the people of Okinawa. That is not a provocation, on the standard principle that we own the world.

Deep-seated imperial doctrine aside, there is good reason for China's neighbors to be concerned about its growing military and commercial power. And though Arab opinion supports an Iranian nuclear weapons program, we certainly should not do so. The foreign policy literature is full of proposals as to how to counter the threat. One obvious way is rarely discussed: work to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the region. The issue arose (again) at the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference at United Nations headquarters last May. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, called for negotiations on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the U.S., at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.

International support is so overwhelming that Obama formally agreed. It is a fine idea, Washington informed the conference, but not now. Furthermore, the U.S. made clear that Israel must be exempted: no proposal can call for Israel's nuclear program to be placed under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency or for the release of information about "Israeli nuclear facilities and activities." So much for this method of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

Privatizing the Planet

While Grand Area doctrine still prevails, the capacity to implement it has declined. The peak of U.S. power was after World War II, when it had literally half the world's wealth. But that naturally declined, as other industrial economies recovered from the devastation of the war and decolonization took its agonizing course. By the early 1970s, the U.S. share of global wealth had declined to about 25%, and the industrial world had become tripolar: North America, Europe, and East Asia (then Japan-based).

There was also a sharp change in the U.S. economy in the 1970s, towards financialization and export of production. A variety of factors converged to create a vicious cycle of radical concentration of wealth, primarily in the top fraction of 1% of the population -- mostly CEOs, hedge-fund managers, and the like. That leads to the concentration of political power, hence state policies to increase economic concentration: fiscal policies, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and much more. Meanwhile the costs of electoral campaigns skyrocketed, driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats -- by now what used to be moderate Republicans -- not far behind.

Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2 billion, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn't matter.

While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s.

None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail." The banks and investment firms can make risky transactions, with rich rewards, and when the system inevitably crashes, they can run to the nanny state for a taxpayer bailout, clutching their copies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

That has been the regular process since the Reagan years, each crisis more extreme than the last -- for the public population, that is. Right now, real unemployment is at Depression levels for much of the population, while Goldman Sachs, one of the main architects of the current crisis, is richer than ever. It has just quietly announced $17.5 billion in compensation for last year, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6 million bonus while his base salary more than triples.

It wouldn't do to focus attention on such facts as these. Accordingly, propaganda must seek to blame others, in the past few months, public sector workers, their fat salaries, exorbitant pensions, and so on: all fantasy, on the model of Reaganite imagery of black mothers being driven in their limousines to pick up welfare checks -- and other models that need not be mentioned. We all must tighten our belts; almost all, that is.

Teachers are a particularly good target, as part of the deliberate effort to destroy the public education system from kindergarten through the universities by privatization -- again, good for the wealthy, but a disaster for the population, as well as the long-term health of the economy, but that is one of the externalities that is put to the side insofar as market principles prevail.

Another fine target, always, is immigrants. That has been true throughout U.S. history, even more so at times of economic crisis, exacerbated now by a sense that our country is being taken away from us: the white population will soon become a minority. One can understand the anger of aggrieved individuals, but the cruelty of the policy is shocking.

Who are the immigrants targeted? In Eastern Massachusetts, where I live, many are Mayans fleeing genocide in the Guatemalan highlands carried out by Reagan's favorite killers. Others are Mexican victims of Clinton's NAFTA, one of those rare government agreements that managed to harm working people in all three of the participating countries. As NAFTA was rammed through Congress over popular objection in 1994, Clinton also initiated the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border, previously fairly open. It was understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with U.S. multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled free trade agreements, a privilege granted only to corporate persons, not those of flesh and blood. Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees, and to rising anti-immigrant hysteria by the victims of state-corporate policies at home.

Much the same appears to be happening in Europe, where racism is probably more rampant than in the U.S. One can only watch with wonder as Italy complains about the flow of refugees from Libya, the scene of the first post-World War I genocide, in the now-liberated East, at the hands of Italy's Fascist government. Or when France, still today the main protector of the brutal dictatorships in its former colonies, manages to overlook its hideous atrocities in Africa, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy warns grimly of the "flood of immigrants" and Marine Le Pen objects that he is doing nothing to prevent it. I need not mention Belgium, which may win the prize for what Adam Smith called "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

The rise of neo-fascist parties in much of Europe would be a frightening phenomenon even if we were not to recall what happened on the continent in the recent past. Just imagine the reaction if Jews were being expelled from France to misery and oppression, and then witness the non-reaction when that is happening to Roma, also victims of the Holocaust and Europe's most brutalized population.

In Hungary, the neo-fascist party Jobbik gained 17% of the vote in national elections, perhaps unsurprising when three-quarters of the population feels that they are worse off than under Communist rule. We might be relieved that in Austria the ultra-right Jörg Haider won only 10% of the vote in 2008 -- were it not for the fact that the new Freedom Party, outflanking him from the far right, won more than 17%. It is chilling to recall that, in 1928, the Nazis won less than 3% of the vote in Germany.

In England the British National Party and the English Defence League, on the ultra-racist right, are major forces. (What is happening in Holland you know all too well.) In Germany, Thilo Sarrazin's lament that immigrants are destroying the country was a runaway best-seller, while Chancellor Angela Merkel, though condemning the book, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed": the Turks imported to do the dirty work in Germany are failing to become blond and blue-eyed, true Aryans.

Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate, because they were too swarthy; Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the U.S., including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the U.S., propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.

If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh. Not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 15 years ago, called the "religion" that markets know best -- which prevented the central bank and the economics profession from taking notice of an $8 trillion housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muashar doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

This piece is adapted from a talk given in Amsterdam in March.
(c) 2011 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Gaza In Crisis.

AMRAM MITZNA is a nice guy. He is modest and radiates credibility. He reminds one of the late Lova Eliav, the Secretary General of the Labor party who quit the party in disgust. Like Eliav, he has a lot of practical achievements to his credit – Eliav built the Lakhish area villages in South-Central Israel, Mitzna volunteered to administer the remote town of Yerucham deep in the Negev.

“Buji” Hertzog is also a good guy. He is a scion of a genuine Jewish aristocratic family, in the positive sense of the word; his grandfather was a Chief Rabbi, his father the President of Israel. A person whose deeds as Minister for Welfare speak for themselves – even though he has an unfortunate habit of running - after every action - to tell his (American) friends, as the Wikileak papers disclose. (This is an allusion to a classic Israeli joke: “Why do Israeli men finish so quickly? Because they can't wait to run and tell their friends.”)

Amir Peretz is an interesting character. His life story as an immigrant from Morocco is impressive. He made the mistake of his life when he demanded the post of Minister of Defense and made a mess of it – but people can learn from their mistakes.

Shelly Yacimovich is an assertive woman, a convinced feminist. The social misery of the destitute and downtrodden is burning in her bones, as we say in Hebrew. She believes that it is possible to have a party devoted entirely to these matters, forgetting for the time being unpopular and troublesome problems like peace. That is a mistake – he (or she) who runs away from the Palestinian question, the Palestinian question will run after him (or her). But she will learn.

All these are candidates for the leadership of the Labor Party. Any of them can, perhaps, arrest its deterioration and keep the votes it got at the last elections, and perhaps-perhaps even add two or three seats.

So what?

THE PITY is that this would change almost nothing. Power would remain in the hands of the Right. The balance between the blocs – Right and Left – would not be any different.

Those who once put their faith in the ascent of Kadima have by now learned that Kadima is not a leftist party, nor even a center party – unless the center has shifted far to the right. Kadima is Likud B, pure and simple, led by a woman who grew up in a Likud home and is lacking, so it seems, any political instincts. Her party includes, besides parliamentary zeroes, several racists whose proper place is between Likud and Lieberman, and some fugitives from Labor, whose proper place is nowhere.

The Labor Party can be rehabilitated. Some parties resemble the phoenix and can return from the grave. But Labor is an old bird without any feathers. For most of its long life it was the ruling party, and it has never recovered from that. Even in opposition it behaves and talks like a governing party from which the government has been stolen. It has no strength left to renew, rebel, storm ahead. It was and remains a federation of professional functionaries. Such a party does not make revolutions.

Under the leadership of any of these candidates, it will not fill the huge gap in the Israeli political system. It will not inspire the Israeli Tahrir Square. It will not start the revolution, without which Israel will continue to march in lockstep towards the abyss.

THE PEOPLE who gathered in Tahrir Square were not the remnants of the old parties. Sure, they were there too – the Wafdists, the last of the Nasserists, the Communists, the Muslim Brothers. But they did not provide the ardor, they did not light the flame which is brightening the sky above the entire Arab world.

In the square, completely new forces appeared out of nowhere. To this very day they have no name, except the date of the original event – January 25. But everyone knows where they came from and what they look like. For lack of a better label , they are called “the Young Generation”. They are a cluster of hopes and aspirations touching all spheres of life. They are the resolve to create “another Egypt”, entirely different from the Egypt of only yesterday.

THERE IS, of course, almost no similarity between Egypt and Israel. The Egyptian uprising can serve us, at most, as a metaphor, a symbol. But the principle is the same: the longing for “another Israel”, for the Second Israeli Republic.

The setting up of a new political movement is an act of creation. There is no recipe for it, like “Take 2 Oriental Jews, 1 Russian, half a rabbi, stir well…” It doesn’t work that way. Neither will something like “Take the remnants of the Labor Party, add a spoonful of Meretz, mix with half a glass of Kadima…”. Won’t work.

A new movement of the sort that is needed has to come from nowhere. From the vision and determination of a group of young leaders with a new world-view that suits the needs of Israel’s future. A group that thinks in a new way, sees things in a new light, speaks a new language.

That happens once in a generation, if at all. When it does, it is visible from afar.

AT THIS moment, there are at least half a dozen groups in Israel which are planning this revolution. Perhaps one of them will succeed. Perhaps not, and the spark does not catch till some later date. As the young Jewish rabbi from Nazareth said: “You will know them by their fruit.”

For any group to bring about this miracle, several things seem to me to be absolutely essential:

The new world-view must embrace all spheres of public life. Welfare without peace is nonsense, without a basic change of values peace will not come about, the immortal ideals of freedom, justice, equality and democracy must apply to everybody, in all spheres of life.

Many “pragmatists” assert that the opposite is true. God forbid mixing things. If you talk about peace, the advocates of welfare will leave. If you champion the rights of minorities, say goodbye to the people of the majority. That is true if you think about the next elections, not if you think about the next generations.

Anyone who sets out with the aim of winning the most seats in the coming elections will not make history. Sprinters will not bring back the medal we need. This demands Marathon runners. (Menachem Begin, it may be remembered, lost nine elections before he achieved the Big Change of 1977. What did Yigael Yadin or Tommy Lapid achieve with their ephemeral little triumphs.)

A movement that appears out of nowhere, a movement that carries the future in its womb, cannot speak the language of yesterday. It must bring with it a new language – a new terminology, new slogans. Such a language is not born in a public relations agency. Those who copy the language of their predecessors are condemned to continue on the path of their predecessors.

The new language must touch the minds – and, more importantly, the hearts – of all citizens. Another new Ashkenazi party will not do. The new movement must touch the depths of the soul of Jews and Arabs, Orientals and “Russians”, secular and religious (at least some of them), old-timers and new arrivals, the well-established and the poor. Anyone who gives up in advance on any of these communities is courting failure.

MANY CLEVER and experienced people will smile condescendingly. That’s utopian, they will say. Nice dreams. Won’t happen. There are no such people, no such visions, no fire in the bones. At most, good people with an eye on a seat in the next Knesset.

They may be right. But these same people would have smiled if somebody had told them, some five years ago, that American voters would elect an African-American president whose middle name is Hussein. That would have sounded wildly absurd. A black president? White voters? In the USA?

The very same people would have burst out laughing if somebody had told them, just a year ago, that a million Egyptians would gather in the central square of Cairo and change the face of their country. What? Egyptians? This lazy and passive people? A country which in all its 6000 years of recorded history has not made even half a dozen revolutions? Ridiculous!

Well, there are surprises in history. Sometimes, when the need arises, peoples can surprise themselves. It can happen here. If it does, it will not surprise those of us who believe in our people.

I recently found some old writings of mine from the 1990s. When I began to look through them, I had a sudden sense of foreshadowing — or, perhaps more to the point — postshadowing. While my capacity to express certain ideas has (hopefully) evolved in the ensuing years, I was struck by how similar today’s issues remain to those uppermost in my mind in those halcyon days before 9/11, perpetual war, climatic catastrophes, economic meltdown, and the rest of the “new normal” that has taken hold in the past decade.

To illustrate, I’d like to share one of these prior pieces, this one from 1999. I’ve resisted the temptation to clean up the writing or reword things to sound more sophisticated or up-to-date, instead leaving the text as it was produced a dozen years ago.

The primary point I hope to demonstrate here is how little things change in many ways, despite a sense of rampant transformation perpetually unfolding in our midst. To be sure, the details and the challenges evolve, but the baseline issues continue in force across the decades. In this, perhaps we can actually find a strange optimism in the assurance that social and ecological justice are transcendent and timeless aims…

We live in remarkable and terrifying times. Having reached the cusp of global dominion, the living history that we are enacting — the unfolding story of mythology, culture, and ideology — stands poised on the brink of an alarming threshold in the race to conquer time, space, and even Nature herself. The coming millennium portends revolutions in genetics, biomechanics, quantum physics, the manipulation of matter, the very fabric of creation — not to mention in the mundane social control devices of the compu/phone/vision and McPharma-caffeinated varieties.

Consider the rate of change in the last 50 years, since the end of WWII, then consider the rate in just the last five, and buckle up for an exponential ride into the next eon. It’s not that we won’t care if the rainforests hold the cures for our viral plagues, or if the Zapatistas are winning the war for freedom — it’s just that it might not matter at all. The question, as they say, will be moot — mooted by distraction, medication, disinformation, surveillance, nostalgia, and perhaps even extinction. The ethical dilemmas of the next age loom as behemoths too mighty for philosophy, letters, the arts. This is a job for spirituality, karma, and divine grace — if there be such forces. Time might tell.

But for now, in the meantime, in this mean-place, we have the mighty pen, er, keyboard, ready to take aim once again in the never ending battle against futility and lassitude. Having ceased to be interested in both revolution and assimilation as worthy ends, we find ourselves at something of a loss as to the burning question: What is to be done? The metaphor of “Life Strategies on a Sinking Ship” recently came to mind; it suggests that one might: (a) join the party (that is, give in to the temptations of hedonism and denial); (b) opt out early (“man overboard!”); (c) try to right (or even write) the ship, courting martyrdom and ultimate futility; or (d) sit quietly and hope for the strength to take a leap of faith.

In more post-postmodern terms, the metaphor is “Life Strategies on the H.M.S. Domination and Globalism,” and the salient life strategies become: (a) grab a chunk of power and persona while it’s hot! (b) join a religious cult, live alone in a cabin in Montana, or buy a loaf of bread, olives, and a newspaper and blow your brains out in the bathtub on a quiet Thursday afternoon; (c) try to right (or even write) the ship, courting martyrdom, posthumous misappropriation, and ultimate futility (again); or (d) live simply and in small ways and hope for a paradigm shift in consciousness. Of course, one could also get surreal and (e) deny the existence of the ship altogether. This option offers at least some inspiration, to wit: flout the beast through feigned ignorance and righteous denial, visualize a few melting clocks, court notoriety, and die notoriously martyred, registering a minor karmic ripple. This may be as hopeful as it gets.

We are of course still bandying about the eternal question posed so succinctly by both H.G. Wells and Leo Tolstoy, the question which inevitably follows the knowledge (arduously acquired) that something is amiss in our little late-capitalist utopia, a question that we are loath to ask but desperately need answered: What is to be done? What is to be done? Rainforests, ozone depletion, Chernobyl, Bhopal, acid rain, irradiation, cloning, viruses, cancer and heart disease … it is sometimes said that this generation, X or whatever (perhaps MX is more apt), lacks a unifying cause, a galvanizing Vietnam-esque issue to unite its rebellious energy, a Woodstock sans corporate sponsorship . . . well I have a newsflash for you, my friends, sound-bitten for easy consumption:

Here’s your freakin’ Vietnam! Agent Orange, children dying, the war machine in its glory…. It’s raining chemicals out there folks! The air and water and food — and soon the entire habitat — poisoned, rendered unlivable, felled by the hands of obsessive growth and the quest to dominate nature. Apocalypse when? Could be any day now…

Blame it on whomever you want: Cain, Plato, Christianity, Thomas Hobbes, capitalism, Descartes and Newton, colonialism, industrialization, Henry Ford, Oppenheimer, Exxon — every generation’s got its own disease. Or perhaps, more accurately, every generation’s got a disease which is the logical successor of the cumulative diseases culturally accrued since the time of the first agriculturalists who decided that they were entitled to dominion “over all the earth” (Genesis 1:26) in virtue of their innate superiority as the end product of creation, the ones for whom all the rest had been made. Such dominion even applied to their darker-skinned, nomadic, tribal brothers to the south, the practitioners of the old ways of pastoralism and hunting and gathering, the uncivilized occupants of fertile lands that might otherwise be put under cultivation for the purported benefit of all.

So Cain, the tiller, murders Abel, the shepherd, in a cold-blooded jealous rage and receives from god not punishment but a mark of protection that promises to avenge him sevenfold should anyone harm him — a veritable ‘license to kill’, the father’s approval of the inevitability of Cain’s dominion. Perhaps these are the roots of the crisis, the earliest beginnings of the cultural myth that supports control of nature in the sense of “rule,” that mankind may “subdue it” (again, Genesis; see also Francis Bacon). It’s a not-so-subtle progression from a mindset of dominion, to universalism (crusades, imperialism, GATT), to science and technology (particle physics, molecular biology, the Internet), to today.

The crisis, then, as Fritjof Capra notes, is one of perception — or more precisely, misperception. A mistaken belief in human superiority and dominance, an ideology of power and globalism, the result of arrogantly believing that we know enough to decide which species live and which ones die, the misappropriation of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil despite god’s admonition to Adam (man) that “when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 1:17). Are we poised — here on the cusp of a new millennium rife with apocalyptic visions, messianic mumbo-jumbo, and mother ships on the way — to realize god’s unheeded warning?

We have reached the limit of modern ethical reasoning, and even postmodern “ethics,” having seen the horrors of universalism and the perils of relativism — and being dissatisfied in any event with all such binaries of the individual versus society ilk, including narrowly conceiving our life strategies as confined to assimilation or secession. We need a new moral vision, a certain tribal wisdom, a remnant Paleolithic consciousness that enables us to conceive the whole without losing our unique selves, a simultaneous holism and atomism that sees human existence as an interconnected part of the great cosmic dance, Shiva’s dance, in rhythm with the tides and currents of nature, subject to natural law and not exempt from it, yet still sensate and visceral, aware of our own emotions and longings, each a bearer of a brain filled with unique memories and narrative accounts. Simply put: We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden…

What is to be done? If the world needs a new vision, then I say incite to visualize. Guerrilla theater, random acts of kindness, living simply and doing it with style, drumming and dancing, utopian poetics, pamphlets and portable soap boxes, monkeywrenching, Emma Goldman’s “spirit of revolt” — anything to shake the drones out of their cryonically medicated torpor. Spread as much pagan anarchist holistic wiccan magick as you can, then set your mind in quiet moments on healing the universe from within. And hope for the best, in fact, pray for it. Doesn’t matter if anyone’s out there to hear — only that we hear each other. I know I’ll be listening.

One of the more interesting items upon reflection is the hesitatingly spiritual response to these issues that I seemed to be primarily preoccupied with back in 1999. To be sure, the coming millennial shift was rife with, well, millenarian overtones, including a burgeoning new-age spiritualism and a widespread reconsideration of the eschatological qualities of the old faiths as well. Whatever the tendencies, I can relate to that former self struggling to find “secure moorings” in a world of perpetually shifting ground. Change may be the only constant, but there are perhaps deeper lessons to be learned from the things that stay the same.
(c) 2011 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., teaches peace studies at Prescott College and serves as the executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).