Three New Reads – November
Is Britain’s forthcoming general election the most critical since 1945? Or just since 1979? While the Johnny Walker wisdom runs high on that, we can all agree – saving those who on principle shun the electoral process (as have I on lesser occasions) – this is a big’un.
Then there’s Bolivia’s coup. And yesterday, as if you needed reminding, brought the fifty-sixth anniversary of an event the world watched in disbelief as the President of the United States of America slumped mortally wounded at the Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
My three reads for November.
*
As the most crucial UK election in living memory looms, it wouldn’t do at all not to kick off with that. John Rees, former SWP leading light and StWC luminary – I’ll hold neither against him, not for current purposes – penned his thoughts for Counterfire. Here’s the penultimate paragraph:
Policy without power is just so much hot air. And power is not, for the most part, founded in elections or in parliament.
No argument from me on that score. Noting that the realpolitik of traditional Labour voters has them considering not just policy but the likelihood of its coming to pass, Rees turns to Labour’s “woeful” response to the high court ruling on CWU’s right to campaign for a strike vote:
You can see the wheels turning in the minds of labour strategists: we can’t have an illegal strike in the middle of an election. Yet this is exactly the kind of question of class and power which is decisive for the consciousness and combativeness of working people.
… the ability of the Labour movement to face down such an all-out attack on basic trade union rights … could instil the confidence that election of a Labour government requires.
Instinctively, even unconsciously, working people will see that the labour movement incapable of defending its most basic rights today is hardly going to be a labour movement which will suddenly deliver a four day week in a dozen years time.
The class power to deliver on Labour’s promises does not lie only, or mainly, in the electoral field. It lies in the mass power of protest, demonstration, and strike action. Every working person with any familiarity of labour history knows this to be a fact.
And what does he conclude? That it matters not who wins this election? Far from it. Though free of what Marx called parliamentary cretinism – the fanciful belief that a ruling class would ever allow socialism through this route – he does not draw the sectarian conclusions others do.
Rees the revolutionary wants Labour the reformists to win, and sees timidity as perilous even on its own narrow terms. Noting its ability to mobilise door knockers, he offers this:
The mass turnout for canvassing is truly remarkable. Nothing like it has been seen in the election for generations, if ever.
Labour should turn this into a central fact of its campaign … which encourages the public to join … an army that is marching to victory, that organises voters into active supporters.
I hear Marshal McLuhan and the medium is the message – but that’s another thing I won’t hold against him. Smart thinking, Mr Rees.
*
My next read takes a microscope to the Bolivia ouster. Writing in The Nation, Jeeshan Aleem walks us calmly through the events – socio-economic, juridical, electoral – before and after the moment Evo Morales heeded his top general’s “suggestion” and jumped on a plane for Mexico.
This head-spinning sequence of events has produced an intricate social scientific puzzle: There are multiple factors that alone could be sufficient for explaining why Morales left La Paz. In interviews with dozens of Bolivians across the country and more than a half dozen political experts who focus on Bolivia, I found that the question of how and why Morales stepped down is far from settled.
In particular, whether to characterize his departure as a coup has become a lightning rod, because defining it as such has huge implications for validating the movement that rose up against him, and the legitimacy of the current interim government.
… many factors contributed to Morales’s ouster. But ultimately, the military intervention, however gentle or brief, makes it impossible to avoid analyzing this as a coup.
I like this kind of writing. Whatever its author’s politics, and however restrained its conclusions, there’s much to be said for its empirical, get-out-there-and-talk-to-people approach.
I wouldn’t advise making this your sole read on the ouster but, alongside broader perspectives – perspectives that ignore neither the continent’s déjà vu merry-go-round of violence, nor the dark shadow cast by that rogue state to the north – this is a useful aid to understanding.
*
My third read was on OffGuardian a year ago, fifty-fifth anniversary of the day JFK was gunned down. Late to the gig as ever, I happened upon it on the fifty-sixth. But its approach to the event and infamies behind it persuaded me to include it all the same.
I can’t be the only one who missed it first time round.
Author Graeme MacQueen writes of a talk in November 1998 by Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest critics of official accounts. Says Salandria:
I began to sift … the myriad facts regarding the assassination which our government and the US media offered us. What I did was to examine the data in a different fashion from the approach adopted by our news media. I chose to assess how an innocent civilian-controlled US government would have reacted to those data. (Emphasis added.)
Salandria continued:
only a guilty government seeking to serve the … assassins would consistently resort to accepting one improbable conclusion after another while rejecting [more] probable conclusions
It’s an elegant approach with wider applicability than the events of November 1963. MacQueen takes just two aspects, the grassy knoll and ‘magic bullet’, again quoting Salandria:
Let us assume … all of the eyewitnesses who had concluded that shots were fired from the grassy knoll were dead wrong. But an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong [nor] immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched single assassin theory as fact.
Of the thesis that a single bullet passed through Kennedy to wound Governor Connally, a feat necessitating a mid flight change of direction, Salandria noted tersely that:
our Cold War government in the context of the assassination had declared a moratorium on the science of physics.
All fascinating stuff. But what interests MacQueen – and me – is the generalisability of Vincent Salandria’s method: how an innocent government would have reacted to those data.
So how would it? MacQueen draws parallels with 9/11 and the NIST Report but we’re spoiled for choice. How would an honest Washington have responded to alleged chemical attacks at Douma last year? Or to those events leading to the death of Jeffrey Epstein this summer?
You get the idea, I’m sure. You’re smart too.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
regarding Bolivia:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/11/legalienate-hails-democratic-coup-in-bolivia/
A question that is almost never, in my experience, asked of people like Rees is what would have happened in the Labour Party if the ‘left’ had not withdrawn from it or watched as it was purged, thus reducing the Party to a coterie of careerists, functionaries on loan from the Trade Unions (themselves busy being ineffective in the face of anti-union onslaughts] and Gaitskellite friends of Imperialism. Those who talk about the Labour party always having been hopeless tend to be recruited from the ranks of those who never joined it, took part in its life, attended ward meetings, canvassed for council elections, went to Conferences, regional and National of the party, its youth wing or womens sections, dragged the CLP into anti-war alliances, marched from Aldermaston or to Grosvenor Square under the party banner,. And fought, fought and fought again to preserve Clause IV (4) and put its… Read more »
You don’t mention the Labour Party’s Bans & Conscriptions, in place since the 1940s that prevented Labour Party members working with others on the left and of course, prevented lefties from joining the Party. Yeah, the SWP, piggy-backing as usual, pure opportunism but it doesn’t explain the imperialist nature of the Labour Party, literally dince its inception. I think a little dose of William Morris is in order: “There — it sickens one to have to wade through this grimy sea of opportunism. What a spectacle of shuffling, lies, vacillation and imbecility does this Game Political offer to us? I cannot conclude without an earnest appeal to those Socialists, of whatever section, who may be drawn towards the vortex of Parliamentarism, to think better of it while there is yet time. “If we ally ourselves to any of the presen[t] parties they will only use us as a cat’s-paw; and… Read more »
Sorry, Proscriptions
Good old Morris. So far as the proscriptions are concerned, there had been a long struggle against them, a long struggle that the left was close to winning in the sixties. The right held power only in those CLPs which were closed to new members , mostly in places like Glasgow and the west midlands. The CLPs were, for the most part far to the left and moving further left. And it was the CLPs that did all the hard work. The Unions were, as always a drag and provided many bases for right wing reactionaries. And then there was the influence of NATO and the US. But the left was ascendant. My suggestion was that the sects diverted tens of thousands from joining the Labour party and dragged thousands out of it. It did this in many ways not the least of which was providing the right with perfect… Read more »
As to Imperialism it was and is-see Mason Paul- a temptation for opportunists and racists, though it is much diminished now. It is something that there was constant argument about in the sixties- which greatly cramped the ambitions of the right, dominating the PLP , to throw full support to the US in Vietnam. That was a great victory and in stark contrast to the failure in 2001 to resist those who ended up sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Labour Party is and was an imperialist party, an intrinsic component of the ruling political class. Successive Labour governments ‘administered’ the colonies as zealously as their Tory counterparts. 1945 was ‘socialism’ for the British workers, paid for, in part by our overseas colonies. Nigeria comes to mind as a prie example. Successive Labour governments participated in the Cold War with enthusiasm. The sooner we dispel people of the myth… Read more »
You appear to believe that because, during the high noon of the British Empire and in the long decline into dependency on the US, the Labour Party was inclined to imperialist policies, it must always be so inclined. I disagree I believe that policies change as conditions change. The argument that British workers benefited from the exploitation of the empire was never in my view true but it was certainly plausible, especially in a climate of suffocating racism. But such arguments are no longer even minimally plausible- it is clear that imperialism only works for the benefit of the few and that for most people there are no dividends to be had from imperialism except the masochistic delight of being beaten by it. The point is that the Imperialist idea, that once held sway, no longer does. It is a tradition no longer sustained by any kind of socio-economic reality.… Read more »
I disagree. Well over one-third of the British population benefit directly from the UK’s imperialist role as a major nexus of transnational capital, surely it’s our role as an imperialist power that singles the UK out. Yes, subsidiary to the US Empire, but still an empire.
What has changed is the nature of imperial power, transformed by the creation of vast, transnationally-owned corporations. Our empire is now invisible, but an empire nonetheless.
And that empire, of which the UK is a part, in a precipitate decline, while the UK is powerless even to modify the suicidal course steered by the US. At the same time it is bound by imperial decree not only to sit and watch its manufacturing industrial base disappear and its population de-skilled into hewers of wood and drawers of water but to specialise in acting as a financial centre for a dollar system which looks increasingly fragile. This course was set in 1945 when instead of pursuing its own national interests, the UK subordinated its interests to those of the US for a mess of pottage in the form of a loan which was too small at the time for its purpose, but which prevented the UK from doing the obvious thing which was to work with the Soviet Union to translate the Resistance movements in Greece, Italy… Read more »
A quibble: the article is written with a number of first-person (I/me) comments, but I can’t see a byline. Who is the author? Like RobG, I live in France and can’t vote in the British general election. My impression is that Corbyn has not dealt robustly enough with the MSM smears (especially of anti-semitism) or with the Blairite PLP, and is now not being clear on Brexit. Seen from here, he comes across as a well-meaning ditherer. Many working-class leavers will be reluctant to vote Labour, so unfortunately I can’t see Labour winning the election – the Brexit Party is likely to take votes from them in Labour-held seats in the north of England and cost them any chance of a parliamentary majority. On the other hand, I don’t know how much influence non-Brexit issues such as the NHS are going to have on low-income voters. As a leftwing leaver… Read more »
Philip Roddis- the Steel City scribbler.
Very neat handwriting.
It’ what he comes across as after he’s got the power of PM over a bunch of PLP sewer rats, consisting mainly of two broad factions–newly or already established pseudo radicals on the one hand and yesterday’s recalcitrant Brown Blairites on the other, each every bit as ruthlessly conniving and self-serving as the other–that the view of Corbyn from anywhere will be worth anything more than a tin of the proverbial shit.
John Rees, former SWP leading light and StWC luminary – I’ll hold neither against him, not for current purposes
here’s an extended account of the exploits of John Rees and his former organization:
https://madammiaow.blogspot.com/2013/02/swp-sex-implosion-its-dehumanisation-in.html
Just going to point out that the so called stop the war coalition supported the wars on Syria and Libya and wanted to “intervene” (because the words wage war was too much for an anti war group) in Hong Kong and Venezuela amongst other places
Just glad to know I’m not the only one.It gets kinda lonely sometimes.
Yep, know how you feel Guy.
I’ve given up even mentioning things like the OPCW whistle blowers or Julian Assange or Palestine or anything to most people I know (not that many too start with anyways).
They don’t want to know, and even if you point them to evidence debunking the mainstream presstitutes Crap, they won’t even look at it.
It’s too difficult to read a 5 or 6 minute long article apparently. Hope the weather in Canada is not too…. frigid?
You are quite correct ,the majority just don’t want to know .I guess that is where the saying “ignorance is bliss” comes from .
Temp is actually hovering around 0 C during the day but the big chill is coming ,as it usually does in December until late Feb. We are used to it and winter can be quite enjoyable .
Cheers.
“How would an honest Washington have responded to alleged chemical attacks at Douma last year? ”
By firing those of its employees who faked the attacks, murdered the victims and fiddled the investigations.
Interesting that you’ve woken up to the fact that we are ruled by complete psychopaths.
Corbyn is not perfect, but he is not a psychopath.
I really get bored with the commentators on here who have their head up their arse.
Get used to it (a-holes). Corbyn is going to be the next PM.
That’s when things will start to get interesting…
I’ve taken a screen-shot of that prediction, with the time-stamp, and will come back and challenge you about it on 13th December.
No….no, of course, I haven’t, and won’t, but nevertheless, it’s a bold prediction.
I stand by my prediction (and feel free to call me an a-hole on 13th December!).
Corbyn is weak spineless twat who has flip flopped and won’t even support workers unions in court! He refused to kick out blairite trouble makers and sat and took it up the arse with no lube from the media and never once fired back in a meaningful way! He’s a political lightweight and everything he has promised CANT be done under capitalism and under the EU an EU he’s spent the last 40 years railing against that he now magically doesn’t want to talk about much anymore! You think the conservatives are sheep and idiots when you fake socialists are no better (I bet you do say stuff like taxes and the nhs are socialism)
I’m no fan of Corbyn, and I’m not a member of the Labour Party, and I have no connection to this election campaign (I live in France). My point of view is that Corbyn is all that we’ve got at the moment, to roll back four decades of neoliberal madness.
You have valid criticisms of Corbyn. However, I don’t know any politician who could have survived what Corbyn has been through over the last four years (not least the vast majority of the PLP doing everything they can to stab him in the back). I don’t think history will judge Corbyn as being ‘weak and spineless’.
It has been sobering indeed to watch the whole Corbyn phenomenon. The first Labour leader in four decades with a right to be called “Labour” – and treated like the devil himself. Recently the vile Laura Kuenssberg (female counterpart to the weasel Blair?) made a comment about how the battle between the parties is now over how much the government “should interfere in the economy” thus showing clearly how the BBC is now just a cheerleader for neoliberalism. I have no doubt that, should Corbyn be elected, the campaign against him will skyrocket to psychotic proportions. And the depressingly common sentiment, “I’m left wing but I couldn’t vote for Corbyn. I just don’t like him” only goes to show how ridiculously unaware many people are of how much they are being manipulated. Such is the legacy of four decades of vicious neoliberal brain rot. Perhaps Corbyn’s apparent weaknesses have been… Read more »
I can still hear the ‘principled’ Corbyn, intoning in his reedy way, characteristically devoid of any principle whatsoever, that ‘It now appears that Russia was indeed responsible for the attacks in Salisbury’ etc etc
He’s an invertebrate. Either irredeemably gullible or part of the corrupt UK establishment.
Mr Rees makes some interesting observations. Following Marx; Trotsky and Red Rosa – the best state capitalism can be is a vanguard to a more revolutionary/evolutionary kind of politics. There is no Parliamentary instrumental ethic to anything. It is a life-blind dead dead end. Then he commits to the greatest cardinal error of all: betraying his own revolutionary politics. He commits to the least worst candidate. One tries to maintain a degree of compassion for the deep, deep nescience of the herd: but a revolutionary thinker should know better. Cretin: can there be any other descriptor more apt? The vote is not a vote: it is a legitimation of a whole ruling value system of beliefs and normative anti-life ethics that are dominated by the hegemony of capitalist accumulation. An accumulation and valorisation system that McMurtry has defined as the ‘money multiplier cancer’ – the root of the root of… Read more »
So, don’t vote, is that what you’re saying? Given that there’s no left in this country, all you appear to be left with, is a rant. Total idealism. You wish for something that simply doesn’t exist. So 5 years of Bojo. Good on yer!
Go on barovsky what’s your tip then?
I don’t have one, I wish I did but we’re paying the price of a bankrupt left, devoid of ideas and running on empty, so all we’re left with is Corbyn and an aberration if I ever saw one. So my ‘tip’? well either don’t vote or vote Labour, what else is there? And if by some miracle we actually get a Labour govt, it will be on us to exert the max pressure on Labour. The problem with this is that we have a divided ‘left’, that spends more time fighting amongst itself than it does fighting capitalism and in my experience (70 yrs), it’s always been like this!
My tip is that we put the country under new management: ours. Which does not necessarily entail anarchy – because, by and large, we are too immature for anarchy. All this ‘Social Contract’ and ‘General Will’ theory is clearly not working out. It never did. It never will. The Trotter School of “This time, next year, we’ll be millionaires” is pure fantasy. The ‘money multiplier cancer’ will consume the host – that host being all life on Earth – soon enough. Giving it legal-rational legitimacy to do so is an undiagnosed psychosis. It is not going to work out well if we obsequiously obey. The work to find a credible alternative cannot be reduced to the eve of the election. Plenty of people have been working on the alternative for decades. The thing is to bring that to the national consciousness. There is no alternative if there is only a… Read more »
You’re just confirming what I’ve already stated. Yes, of course we need to break with Parliamentary ‘democracy’. Yes, of course the system is broken. I’m not a fan of Corbyn, he’s a Party man but you say in your first sentence:
This is just wishful thinking. Exactly how? You might as well say, ‘we need a revolution’, and yes we do but none of the groundwork has been done. We’re still living in 1945 as far as the ‘left’ is concerned. Your nine paras are pure idealism. You talk about what has to be done but without even an inkling of how!
It’s very depressing to have listened to this argument for at least 6 decades with nothing changing one iota except that is, going backwards.
Let’s keep voting then and see what happens? The ecological and economic collapse we are manifesting is tangible: even if the cruelty we are perpetrating on all life is deliberately hidden. The ‘hate the billionaires’ of Corbyn’s propaganda is nothing other than a crude *Volksgemeinschaft* – creating an ingroup mentality made cohesive by emnification of the scapegoated outgroup. This is the crudest form of mass psychology: but it seems to be working well. Only addicts repeat destructive behaviour sets over and over. They do not even form the expectation of a different result: they are addicts. They want the same result. What is so different here? We reconstitute the state in the hope of reforming our ressentiment for the scapegoated ‘billionaires’. There is a serious amount of ignorance involved in this. We keep getting the same result: which is our own voluntary servitude and psychosexual infantalisation by authoritarianism. No wonder… Read more »
BTW: putting pressure on a poor ‘best-of-the-worst’ Labour government is even more naive than my naive idealism. Power moved ‘offshore’ before I was born: around about the time you were born. You understand Labour perfectly: but still validate a pure systemic evil. You and I can’t change the world: but we can keep it going just the way it is …which we both seem to agree is unconscionable. Withdrawing our obedience is the only resistance we have left in this depoliticised world. The vote is but a token. It will not change anything. The best we can all prepare to pick up the pieces when the inevitable collapse of this ruling value system happens. Which to all intents and purposes: won’t be too long now.
Even this far down this sub-thread you keep on picking up the downvotes. There will be no one “picki[ng] up the pieces” unless it is to try to re-build the same “ruling value system” that made them love that system. The system cannot be propagandized; it is not some sort of conditioning; it is the loved creation not of some external force but of each and every individual who themselves reinvents it anew and thereafter venerates it as the eternal way. Put another way, (99% of the Wall Street Revolutionaries and 99% of the other 1%) plus (99% of the current Green activists, under whatever banner they choose and 99% of the other 1% and 99% of their downvoters) plus (99.99% of all remaining homo sapiens) are 99.9999% totally irremediable, unredeemable kunts. The only thing left is for the Election Commission to send out notice that their deposits have been forfeited and their ballots have been counted as deliberately spoiled.Here is an acid test. Anyone who nominates any of the hominids when asked to identify the most visible hero of the occasion is
PS: I swore I’d never, ever vote Labour ever again but is it different this time? Is it a ‘one-of’ deal? I think it’s more a question of voting against Bojo rather than voting for Labour.
If someone else here as an alternative to offer I’d be more than willing to consider it. I’ve written one piece on this issue her: https://investigatingimperialism.wordpress.com/2019/11/19/is-corbyn-a-socialist-and-does-it-no-longer-matter-if-he-isnt/
Interesting, the ‘youth’ vote, over 2 million in a few weeks!
See: https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/youth-surge-2-million-register-to-vote-in-under-two-months/
And, for a breakdown. Most important, 81% of new registers now done online.
https://www.gov.uk/performance/register-to-vote
Trotsky and his followers are scumbags and liars and love a good CIA coup
f*** off, troll. Leon Trotsky — Anti-Imperialist Struggle Is Key to Liberation In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The… Read more »
Your point being?
Somebody once told a teenager that Trotsky, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbachev, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Chekhov and Putin were all bad men, and it somehow leaked out into the general consciousness of uneducated teenagers.
Can’t be helped.
“… were all bad men, and it somehow leaked out into the general consciousness of uneducated teenagers.”
I’m afraid the “ooh he’s a bad man” mantra works on more than just “uneducated teenagers” or, to be more precise, a large proportion of the “mature” British public are still “uneducated teenagers”. How do I know this? In a word: Corbyn. The most pathetically desperate smear campaign of all time …and it worked!
I do agree that Salandria’s method is intelligent and plausible. And while I’m receptive to the direction in which his reasoning leads, I have a small cavil. If a not-yet executed plan to assassinate a wildly popular sitting president is to be a closely-held secret, for operational reasons, then the number of people who were aware, and therefore complicit or conspirators (e.g., “guilty”) would be small, vanishingly small. But the number of government officials who knew or feared that some branch of government might be involved may have been far larger. Indeed, anyone with even a sense of how many bodies are buried out there (i.e., any fair-minded student of US government action) might well suspect, and might fear the consequences to self, party, in-group or the nation itself. The harm was already done. Better perhaps, to steer the aftermath in the safest direction that presents itself, (even while turning… Read more »
Can I suggest everyone examines climate change/global warming through the same lens of ‘what would an innocent citizen-led government do?’ Plan for climate resilience : a. Identify the risk factors to the citizens’ homeland from a variety of risk factors: i. Drought, floods. ii. Forest fires, hailstorms and hurricanes. iii. Tsunamis, high tides and coastal erosion. iv. Warming by 1/2/3C AND cooling by 1/2/3C. v. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. vi. Carrington events and meteorites. vii. Others. b. Prioritise these risk factors based on statistical probabilities of occurrence and societal effects of an actual occurrence. c. Develop costed action plans to manage any such events developing as a result of an understanding of the necessary financial safeguards needed to insure effectively against such events, including modelling statistically unlikely multiple events happening in a short time period. d. Develop early warning systems flagging up heightened states of risk for each major risk… Read more »
If you really like ‘weird’ then I should remark that the US’s Department of Defense is not only a believer in climate change but is taking proactive steps to manage its effects. So while the actual government and its backers might be full on deniers who at best just want to keep kicking the can down the road the people actually charged with making things happen have a much more sanguine view.
(BTW — Mapping this back to the three events cited in this article gets you into tinfoil hat territory.)
It’s been this way since the 1970s, when the science was rugged enough to come the right conclusion about capitalism’s effect on the biosphere. In private of course. RAND Corp, MIT, DARPA, they’ve known for decades where it’s all headed. Yet nothing is done. Why? But you might as well ask why capitalism destroys entire countries and their cultures? It knows the outcomes. Thus one can only come to the conclusion that capitalism is incapable of doing anything else but rushing headlong into oblivion and unfortunately taking all of us with them.
The US DoD is the biggest single fossil fuel burner on this planet. Their only green is their budget dollars and uniforms. Looks like they managed to fool one sucker…
You draw an important connection here. Our actual civilizational response to the plausible prospect of catastrophic climate destabilization could not have been designed to be less effective. Which leads one to the conclusion that this fecklessness is to a considerable degree a matter of design. Instead of turning this issue into the ultimate political wedge, the design might have followed a risk-management approach entirely familiar to the corporations hastening the conflagration.
Happening in some alternate version of Earth history in a part of the multiverse achingly near…
An even simpler hypothesis is that hom-‘sap-sap’ is simply not up to the task, as a feckless naked-ape species, of creating a comprehensive, effectual plan to counter the crises – and then get a critical mass of us to join in actively.
My dog couldn’t organise such a thing either, even with all her dog friends helping. Just as yeast simply can’t help poisoning themselves. For any species, some things are just beyond their competence.