8 January 2020: Iran, international law, black and white, and ‘just war’…

Five days ago, on 3 January 2020, the United States military, under direct orders from US President Donald Trump, broke international law with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

I didn’t anticipate having to begin this piece with that sentence, but this statement appears, in the days since, to have become somehow politicised and controversial. I will deal with why that is – and certainly I will talk about Soleimani in terms rather more honest than some of those who agree international law was broken seem to be willing to do – but first, I must stress:

Five days ago, on 3 January 2020, the United States military, under direct orders from US President Donald Trump, broke international law with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

This is not a matter of opinion. Nor is it a matter of interpretation, or me taking a political position on any single person – or indeed state – involved on either side.

It is an objective fact.

On 3rd January, the US sent an armed drone into the air-space of Iraq, a state it is not at war with, and launched missiles at that country’s major international airport, against a national (the Major General and effective commander of the state’s external military force and de facto second-in-command of his entire country, but in fact that’s not really very important in the immediate context) of a third state – on which it had also not declared war – to carry out the extra-judicial murder of that person.

This is illegal, under international law. There is absolutely no ‘wiggle room’ on this point: it was a flagrant and blatant illegal act.

Now. There are a couple of other points we should make about this murder. First, nine other people were also killed. We will mention that again.

But it’s fair, having made the absolutely incontrovertible point that this was an illegal and inexcusable act, to note something else.

Because while international law is important, (we will look at why, how it is currently systematically ignored, and what we can and should do about that), it’s also important that we don’t fall over ourselves to rewrite history.

Soleimani was not, unlike what some statements about him over the past few days seem to suggest, a ‘good man’. This, too, is not a matter of perception, but an objective fact.

He was active in Iran’s war against Iraq which, although it was certainly not started by Iran, became in 1982 (when Iran repelled Iraqi forces which were backed by the US and other states, from its territory) a war of conquest by Iran – effectively by Soleimani, other leading members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s head of state Ayatollah Khomeini – against Iraq, which lasted a further six years and in which 1.1m people were killed.

(Iraq, in fact, killed a further 300,000 Kurdish people, in reprisal for Iraq’s Kurds fighting on Iran’s side, in the Al Anfal genocide. We might note that not only did Soleimani make no effort to prevent this killing, or come to their aid, he had in fact previously led Iranian troops against a Kurdish uprising in the Iranian West Azerbaijan Province).

He oversaw – indeed, his role means he must take responsibility for – the murder of Iranian Kurdish people.

And in the last decade he led large parts of the ground massacres in the Syrian Civil War in support of Syria’s bloodthirsty dictator Bashar al-Assad. Of the million men, women and children killed in Syria since 2011, more than 850,000 were killed by Assad, Russia and Iranian forces. Soleimani also led the force which in Iraq victimised and in some cases slaughtered Iraqi Sunni Muslims.

This, we should stress, is why Syrian and some Iraqi people, who are very well aware that Trump’s action was not carried out on their behalf, nevertheless celebrated the Iranian’s murder.

It’s worthwhile, given the number of people who seem to think that he did, noting that Soleimani did not destroy IS in Syria.

He – through his troops on the ground – played a part in doing so in Iraq, where the state’s Shi’a and Kurdish people (with whom Iran worked closely) and Sunni Muslims (with whom it did not), also worked extremely hard to achieve IS’ expulsion, and Iran absolutely opposes IS for religious and political reasons.

But Soleimani and his Iranian forces in Syria played little part in the fight against IS in Syria, where the terror organisation was not a priority of either Russia or Assad for the majority of its (IS’) presence in Syria. In fact, Solemani suggested and then oversaw IS’ entry into Palmyra.

As mentioned, this was in part because for a long period of IS’ presence in Syria, it was far from the priority of Russia and Assad, and in fact the latter often ordered his ground troops (which included and still include Soleimani’s Iranian army) to stand aside and allow IS to attack the Free Syrian Army which opposed him.

With this in mind, we should also stress that this does not exactly mean Soleimani ‘sold out’ Syria to IS. If anyone did that, it was Assad, who had nominal control over the war’s progress in ‘his’ state, or Putin, who many suspect (and the fact that the war altered so drastically after Russia entered it suggests there is truth in the suspicion) has led the campaign since mid-2015.

But, far from the ‘IS-defeating hero’ some have rushed to portray him as, Soleimani was in his dealings with IS, a pragmatist: his acceptance of IS taking Palmyra helped the defeat of IS in Iraq, but on the other hand allowed the destruction of that world heritage site.

And Soleimani was guilty of the mass slaughter of Syrian people, and effectively stood aside for several years when IS was at its strongest in that state. He was a leading member of a regime which has tortured and imprisoned Iranians, and his dealings with Iraqis over the course of his 41 year career was nothing short of blood-soaked.

Soleimani was illegally murdered by the US.

He too, however, was guilty of war crimes and the slaughter of men, women and children.

The fact that he was killed by a state which actively supports war criminals, which carried out war crimes and which broke international law by deposing the former ruler of Iran and in doing so eventually lifted him and Khomeini to power does not make him a hero, or a ‘good person’ of any description. He was not.

We will return to the issue of international law, but it’s first worth recapping the events of the last five days.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of Soleimani and the nine other people killed in the illegal bombing of Baghdad International Airport, Iran’s head of state Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who rose swiftly through the ranks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at the same time as Soleimani, vowed revenge.

Trump responded by threatening to retaliate against any Iranian attack by targeting Iranian cultural sites – another breach of international law, and in fact a war crime.

The Iraqi government, which began its session related to the assassination with chants of ‘America Out’, voted to remove all US forces from within its borders, a move which the US claimed would cause it to impose sanctions on Iraq.

Late last night (7 January 2020), Iran launched missiles at two locations in Iraq at which US troops are based – Erbil airport and al-Asad airbase.

It is worth highlighting that the strike was carried out using a small number of missiles and in the middle of the night, both of which may indicate that Iran was aiming not to kill anyone (the small number of rockets reducing the damage done, and the timing meaning there was unlikely to be many – if any – people walking around outside of the locations’ buildings) and in fact, no casualties resulted.

But the US’ actions, and both sides rhetoric – even as both Iranian and US politicians say they do not want a war – has fuelled fears that all-out conflict will result.

Now, a number of Syrian and Iraqi commentators have – with some justification – argued that it would be impossible to ‘destabilise’ the Middle East further. Iraq has been devastated by two wars in quick succession in the 11 years from 1980 and a third which – despite official declarations from all sides – has not yet convincingly ended.

Syria has been destroyed by a civil war which has lasted almost nine full years, and is still ongoing, and in which its leader has turned his, Russia’s and Iran’s militaries (as well as Hizbollah) against Syrian civilians.

Israel is engaged in a permanent attack on the Palestinian territories, while the residents of those tiny and shrinking strips of land attempt to attack Israelis with rockets and improvised weapons.

In Yemen, a crisis of mass starvation has resulted from several years of internal conflict, with either side backed by Saudi Arabia and UAE (using US and UK weapons) and Iran.

Qatar has been and is still being blockaded by UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and some sub-Saharan African states because of its perceived alliance with Iran (with which it shares almost all of the Middle East’s gas supplies) and its actual criticism of the first three states’ dictatorial regimes (the irony should of course be recognised) through Al Jazeera.

The same states (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE) have also united with Russia to back the warlord Khalifa Haftar in his lunatic war to be allowed to run Libya as military dictator, while Turkey and Qatar oppose Haftar’s forces. Egypt, meanwhile, is run by a blood-soaked dictator who shot his way to power, has imprisoned and/or killed all his political opponents and flatly refuses to accept that any terrorist activity is carried out by any group which announces it, insisting instead that it has been carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood, which only he, Saudi Arabia and UAE regard as a terror group.

Meanwhile, on the north-western edge of the Middle East, Turkey has built a wall along its border with Syria, has invaded the north of the state and is still engaged with a civil war against its own Kurdish population. Kurdish people in Iraq and Iran are also weighing up their options after military and political moves they feel were designed to victimise them.

In Lebanon, political protests have been ongoing for several months against not just a government but an entire system many members of the public believe to be corrupt, the country’s Prime Minister was kidnapped by the Saudi Arabian royal family in 2017 (though he was released after a little more than a month) and the government is forcing Syrian refugees back into the state governed by the regime they fled.

It is certainly fair to argue that the Middle East is not stable.
But it is not reasonable to argue that a war between Iran and the US would not cause significant further destabilisation.

Iran is the Middle East’s leading Shi’ite Muslim state. Its major interest in Iraq was in 1980 – and remains – the fact that the population of Iraq is primarily Shi’a, but was and is not governed by a Shi’a administration.

It is fighting in Yemen in support of the Houthi people, a Shi’te group (Saudi Arabia, and UAE are backing the Sunni opponents of the Houthis: both Houthis and the Saudi-backed forces claim to be the rightful government of Yemen) and in Syria to prevent what it believes and portrays as a Sunni uprising from succeeding (Assad and his government are Alawites, but Iran is backing him more in order to prevent Syria becoming a Sunni state than to promote him or his branch of Islam) and it backs Hizbollah in Lebanon to keep the Shi’a section of the population strong there.

If the US were to attack Iran, it may – particularly considering the often ill-thought perspectives of its leader Donald Trump – encourage its major allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which oppose and are opposed by Iran (they also oppose each other) to become involved in the attack.

Even if both flatly refused, it is likely that Iran would – in an all-out war – see Israeli and Saudi locations as legitimate targets, which would be extremely likely to pull one or both into a conflict.

It is far from clear that Russia would support Iran in a war against the US – though it may do so remotely – and certainly the US proved unwilling to enter Syria after Putin’s air-force began to destroy Syrian towns and cities in ‘support’ of Assad.

But the region is not safe from swift escalation. Indeed, no region is.

Now. Perhaps because of the nature of the Iranian response, and maybe because of widely publicised statements from political leaders from within Iran that no US civilians in the country would be targeted by the state and none must be attacked by Iranian people, it looks – hopefully – as if war might be avoided. We shall see.

It is too easy, however, to speculate on an all-out world – or even regional – war, as if this alone should be our concern, and we can breathe a sigh of relief if we conclude (none of us now know for sure) that it is unlikely.

In fact, we should consider many other things.

First, one effect of the US’ illegal act in Iraq appears to have been to pull Iraq and Iran closer together, which will have ripples across the rest of the region. Just as importantly, at least in the short-term, it seems to have pulled Iranian civilians back behind a regime many of them increasingly (and correctly) regarded as fanatical, authoritarian, dictatorial and violent.

It is very easy for people to believe government propaganda about a nation’s evil if it is illegally murdering the state’s political leaders (this is another reason why Trump’s decision to unilaterally leave the Iran Nuclear Deal and impose harsh sanctions on the state – despite there being absolutely no indications that Iran had not adhered to the deal’s demands – was a ludicrous move: it forced people closer to the regime because it alone could provide for them, because it appeared to be correct that the US hates Iran and Iranian people need protection from it, and it was clearly an unreasonable and in many ways frightening act against them by the world’s sole military superpower).

This is something of a disaster. Even if we ignore the bitter irony that the current regime is in place largely because the US broke international law to replace Iran’s previous, democratically elected, political leader, the proto-Socialist Mohammad Mossadegh, with the royal family in 1953 (the family was removed from power 26 years later, in 1979, by a multi-faceted revolution at the end of which Khomeini came to power), the Iranian regime has been extraordinarily cruel in its treatment of women, minority groups and in fact anyone who has dared to oppose it.

A growing civilian opposition to it could perhaps have led to the regime being removed, and perhaps (there is of course never a guarantee) replaced by Iranian people by a less vicious, less authoritarian government. Instead, the US’ action – at least in the short-term – appears to have handed the regime increased support.

We also have an opportunity to consider, however, exactly what would (have) happen(ed) if war broke out.

Because in the last few days, many Iranians (and in fairness also some Americans), including the author of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, herself an opponent of the Iranian regime, have pointed out, in as many words, that the average Iranian has more in common with the average American than with the Iranian government, and that the average American has more in common with the average Iranian than with the American government: that is, that because of disagreement between heads of state who realistically, in their personal life and their political positions do not represent the people in their countries, people with no real problem with one another would be forced to kill one another.

The same has, of course, almost always been true throughout history – and certainly since the start of the 20th century.

During the First World War, for example, millions of poor and moderately wealthy British, German, Ottoman, French, Austrian and Russian people (later on, American people as well) were sent to kill each other despite the fact that they had far more in common with one another than with the emperors, kings, and in most cases even governments, which had started the war. In the ‘Christmas Truce’ in 1914, for example, the French, British and Germans who had met in no-man’s land were told they would be shelled by their own side if they did not return to the trenches to recommence killing one another.

Nor is this always solely a class matter (though it certainly IS a class matter). When the Greek state invaded (some Greeks would prefer to say ‘liberated’) Thessaloniki in 1912, the Muslims (known as ‘Turkish’), Jewish and Orthodox Christians (known as ‘Greek’) had far more in common with one another than with the Athenian soldiers (one of whom wrote to his wife ‘this does not feel like a Greek city. There are too many Jews’).

The simple fact is that in almost every war ever fought – and this would be the case in any war fought between Iran and the US – those fighting it do not massively differ in experience or attitude from their opponents.

There has of course been one glaring and relatively recent (in the immenseness of history) exception to this, and we will come to it in a moment.

But what this means is that in every war, we see people killing one another because diplomacy has failed. Very, depressingly, often, because too little effort has been made to use diplomacy (as in Trump’s decision to unilaterally withdraw the US from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and unilaterally break international law to murder an Iranian military leader).

In order to galvanise their own people – who they do not really represent – and in order to attempt to sidestep the fundamental immorality and illegality of war, what those leaders do is to invoke the concept of ‘Just War’.

Now. There is no such thing as a Just War. There literally never has been one, in all of human history (I know. We will get to that).

The reason there is no such thing as a just war is because in every single modern iteration of war, the vast majority of people killed are innocent civilians and soldiers who have admittedly signed up (in most non-conscript cases, though there are many exceptions to this) and are paid to kill, but who have had absolutely no part in starting the war in which they are ordered to slaughter people similar to them, or be slaughtered by them.

There is no justice in a war. Even if occasionally ‘the right person’ is killed, that is not ‘Just’ – in the first place it is just an indication that one side is more powerful (or in a very few cases more lucky) than the other, and in every case it is massively outweighed by the huge number of other – very often civilian – people killed by missile strikes on homes, hospitals and schools.

(There is no such thing as a ‘clean’ strike – or at least very few. Although striking civilian targets is illegal, it happens in every single conflict in such number that either the combatants are deliberately breaking international law, or the missile technology is far below the standards weapons manufacturers claim. And this is where it’s important to note again: the strike which killed Soleimani also killed NINE other people).

There is no justice in being killed in your bed, while recovering from a week at work, or preparing for another. There is no justice in the million people killed since the US invaded Iraq for the second time (a war which Blair – though not Bush – attempted to paint as ‘just’). There is no justice in Russia and Assad bombing civilian homes so Assad can remain in power, or – from the Iranian perspective – Syria is not governed by Sunnis.

Equally, even if a ‘just war’ DID exist, who could tell which one it was, or which side was ‘just’? In most cases the very idea is ridiculous. If Iran and the US went to war, both sides would claim ‘justice’. Iran would argue – with some justification – that the US is a global aggressor, that it keeps invading otber countries, illegally, that it has been targeting Iran for a decade at least and that it (Iran) has a right and duty to defend itself and its people.

But let’s not make any mistake here, the US would – also with some justification – argue that Iran is driven by self-interest, and that in the promotion of that self-interest it is killing innocent people. That in the interest of its own power it is prolonging a bitter war in Yemen, and is massacring Syrian men, women and children. That it is governed by a regime which punishes its people for disagreeing with it, and glorifies the cult of the gun at least as much as the cult of its religion.

And yes. The US would be being enormously hypocritical. But so, too, would Iran. Even as both were also right: who then is ‘Just’?

I know. Some of you are screaming the name of a war, starting with ‘World’ and ending with ‘II’. But here’s the thing. World War Two was not a ‘just war’.

Even if we were to pretend that the UK and USSR (as well as many other nations) and later (again) the US fought that war with only the ‘best of intentions’ – and in none of their cases is that the whole story – the war itself was still not ‘Just’: it was begun by a genocidal maniac, and within it tens of millions of men, women and children, on all sides, were murdered.

It may have been ‘necessary’ – on the grounds that the world would objectively have been a worse place had the Nazis prevailed – but there is no ‘justice’ in the Second World War. Just horror, death, and a grim recognition that if the ‘other side’ had won, things would have been worse.

Once again, however, we have to recognise that the idea of a ‘Just War’ is not only related to convincing your own people to shoot other people, or drop explosives on their houses while they sleep inside, but also to attempt to at least be seen not to have broken international law.

And the problem is that if we take at random, say, four recent wars we all know a little about, not one single one was ‘legal’.

The invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was the invasion of a state (absolutely one run by maniacs) on the pretext, without evidence, that the state’s government was hiding a man who carried out a terrorist attack on the US. Here’s the thing: nothing in international law says you are allowed to invade a state which refuses to hand over a terrorist to your country. (equally, he was in the country next door. He could certainly have moved there in an effort to escape, but that’s not certain).

The invasion of Iraq (again, not run by one of history’s good people, but even so) took place on a false pretext (in the UK, the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ lie; in the US the lie that Hussein was harbouring and training terrorists) and was literally banned by the UN Security Council.

The NATO involvement in Libya – its consistent bombing of Libyan schools, clinics, hospitals and houses – was undertaken despite an international no-fly zone (which Libyan government forces obeyed) and was justified by a misreading of a UN document so facile it’s impossible to believe that it was a genuine mistake. France, interestingly, (see tomorrow) broke the no-fly zone first. The UK and US within days.

And the Syrian Civil War began when the President of Syria – not a position won through election, but by being the previous president’s son – ordered troops to open fire on peaceful demonstrators. It has seen Iran, Assad, Hizbollah and Russia target civilians in blatant breach of international law, and Russia use its Security Council position to block any attempt by the UN to bring the slaughter to an end.

This isn’t about the US, or the UK, or France, Libya, Assad, Russia – though it IS about all of them. It’s about the fact that there is no ‘good war’, and there are almost no – if not actually no – ‘legal’ ones.

We have a duty not to fall into a trap of saying ‘ah, well, this person was bad so it’s OK to break international law to get them’ for the same reason it’s not OK to break into someone’s house and beat them up because they swore at you on a train.

First, because of the cliché (many clichés are true: that’s how they get to be clichés) that the result of an eye for an eye is a room full of blind people, and second because that’s vigilantism and chaos. And people; thousands, even millions of people die in vigilantism and chaos for no reason whatsoever.

We wouldn’t run our houses like that, or our countries, so why would we be happy running the world that way?

Now. I understand that some of you might say ‘OK, but international law doesn’t work. So we need to do something else.’ To an extent you have a point.

But here’s a thing that happened in the UK’s Houses of Parliament earlier today.

The Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, stood up and asked the Prime Minister Boris Johnson if he agreed that the killing of Soleimani was in breach of international law.

The actual Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council replied: ‘The issue of legality is not for the UK to judge, as this was not a UK operation.’

Now the UK’s position in the world, as a leading member of NATO, and the holder along with only four other nations of one of the most powerful positions on Earth, means that in fact, the issue of legality absolutely IS for the UK to judge. It is an abnegation, a dereliction, of the UK’s duty, by its Prime Minister to claim otherwise.

But even if the UK were a ‘small’ country, without Security Council permanent membership, the issue of legality would STILL be its business. Because the point of international law is that it is international. All parts of the international community must be interested in it, work within it, and work to uphold it. That’s what international law IS. It is the international community that has responsibility for international law.

Now the problem that we have at present is that virtually every month, one of the five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council will do something which breaks international law, and/or will back another member or non-member of the Council in its breaking of international law.

Then, those same countries (the US since the banning of the invasion of Iraq has been particularly outspoken on this, behind closed doors, as has Russia in the last five years) will announce almost within the same breath that the UN is ‘too strong’ and ‘too weak’.

So here’s the thing: you, who argued earlier that ‘international law doesn’t work’. You’re sort of right.

But that’s not an argument to ditch it, it’s an argument to ensure it’s enforced.

Because who currently enforces international law? Who ensures those who break it are brought to justice?

The US? But it itself is one of the world’s most consistent breakers of international law, and perpetrators of war crimes anywhere on Earth. It spent years torturing people at Guantanamo Bay, as if its illegal invasions and extra-judicial murders weren’t enough. It also consistently prevents action being taken against Israel which has openly broken international law in every year since 1948. And it backed the literal convicted war criminal Hissene Habre and invited him to the White House even as he was starving thousands of Chadian people to death.

Russia? Ditto (though for ‘Israel’ at present, read ‘Assad’). China? China prefers to abstain on most important votes, and is currently engaged in rounding up its Uighur population and torturing them in camps for being too Muslim.

The UK? Too scared of and close to the US. Also, see Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, above. France? Not so close to or scared of the US, but it was first to start bombing Libya.

So perhaps the UN should do it? Well, OK. But what IS the UN? In reality, the UN – at least the decision making parts of it- is nothing except a collection of its member states, and within that group are the five, any one of which has the power to veto any decision taken by the rest of the UN, listed in the last three paragraphs.

There IS no ‘UN’. Not really. When we say ‘is the UN failing in (insert state/region here)?’ The answer is always no. Because the answer is: ‘WE are failing’. There is no UN independent of ‘us’.

Now. Yesterday, I wrote about the climate catastrophe we are facing. I made an urgent plea that we all – everyone around the world – should cooperate together, stop competing and focus our attention on achieving the common goal of ensuring human civilisation is not destroyed (I also argued that we should abandon money. Yeah, I know. Go and have a look).

The reason I mention it here is because it is relevant. Because we DO need to cooperate globally. Because under the current system in which we live, we are:

1) competing with one another in a way which is rapidly speeding the chances of human civilisation’s survival to zero (as well as forcing people from their homes, where they risk death every step of the way and are then denied refugee status because our definition of refugee fails to match the demand made on us all in Article 25 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights)

2) competing with one another in a way which is starving people to death, killing them from thirst, denying them medicine, clothing, shelter, and forcing people through these illegal acts to either die or leave their homes (from when they risk death every step of the way and are then denied refugee status because our definition of refugee fails to match the demand made on us all in Article 25 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights)

3) literally ignoring and overriding international law to murder one another – including millions of innocent people – with weapons (thus forcing people from their homes, where they risk death every step of the way and are then often denied refugee status because our breaking of international law means we regularly also override and ignore the demand made on us all in Article 25 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights AND the internationally-accepted definition of refugee as set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention).

The solution is in our hands, however – just as every solution to every single human problem is.

In this case, it’s easy: give the UN the power to enforce international law.

In order to ensure that international law is upheld and obeyed – so that people are not blasted to pieces in airports, liquidised in their beds, left to bleed to death, or to starve by the roadside, AND so that we can ensure that war criminals, like Assad, Soleimani, and like a number of other global leaders are brought to trial for their actions – we need to lift the UN out of the hands of its members, and give it the power to act in the interests not of one or other of those states, but international, global, justice.

We need to ensure the UN has the independence and power to act according to international law; to step in where it is being broken, or where that is suspected; to try suspected criminals; to ensure people everywhere are treated with fairness and justice, and that of course they are not murdered on their way to work because one nation or another is allowed to conclude it is above an international law too ‘weak’ to bring it to justice.

That UN would not really need a Security Council, which in any case seems to offer too much temptation to any individual state which is a member.

Instead, it would be a body of legal experts, plus a group of people ready to be deployed where they are needed to bring suspected perpetrators of war and other international crimes to trial, and to rule on cases which involve breaches of human rights. It would also contain the experts needed to set out rules, regulation and standards of behaviour for all to follow so that the world can avoid climate catastrophe, and so we can organise for a future in which we all, as men, women and children, are equal parts of a world we all recognise as our own, and which we can work together to improve.

International law is not ‘weak’. It is just not being enforced. We can change that. We can, if we choose, start today.

When I set a timetable for this piece, I had no idea whether Iran and the US – or the Middle East – or even the world, would be already at war.

At present, it looks as if – for a short while at least – we might have avoided that.

But as with the last three months in Australia, the last five days in Iran and Iraq have been a warning: a clear message about what can happen in a world in which international law is ignored and broken at will.

Once again, it’s time to step up, understand the warning and work to remove the risk.

It’s not even that difficult to do. We just have to actually do it.

7 January 2019: Australia, the world, and the system

Oh good. Someone writing about Australia… Don’t panic. It’s really about the world and what we do next. Better? Well, tough…

OK, so this is the second of the things I am ‘starting’ the year with. Like yesterday’s (and – probably – tomorrow’s), this is on here not because it’s the correct space for it but because I am not sure I have anywhere else sensible to put it.

Equally, as with yesterday’s, please feel free to share it, wherever you like.

So it’s not just going to be about Australia. But that’s because what is happening now is not just about Australia…

Now, some of you may have noticed that Australia is on fire. Very, very on fire. Lots of it, in almost every part of the country. In fact, ironically, everywhere which is wet enough for things to grow has experienced at least some fire.

These fires broke out some three months ago, and despite slightly lower temperatures and a small amount of rain in some areas in the last two days, continue at astonishing and terrifying intensity.

They also, in a number of ways, represent the challenge we all face in the coming months and years due to climate change, including highlighting its causes.

So far, estimates suggest that more than a billion animals have been killed, on a landmass which, although it is roughly the size of Europe, contains large stretches where little animal life thrives, and which is home to many species – indeed a large proportion of its native species – which exist only there. In New South Wales’ mid-north coast, for example, a third of the koala population has been destroyed.

Combined with the likelihood that the effective clearance of land and resultant difficulty many creatures will have returning to the areas in which they previously thrived (for example, it is believed deer species will take over land once inhabited largely by smaller creatures, leaving the latter unable to properly recover), the fires are, in microcosm, a preview of the devastation we can expect if we do not take emergency action to prevent further global warming.

They are a warning of the ecological devastation we are facing in almost all parts of the world. In fact, more worryingly, they are probably a significantly diluted version of that.

Simultaneously, we shouldn’t forget that, though again on a far smaller scale, the Australian fires – and those in the Amazon and elsewhere – are themselves contributing to carbon emissions, making it even more likely that we shall see even swifter temperature rises not only in Australia and Brazil, but all over the world. This will not result in fires everywhere – Indonesia suffered unusually enormous and devastating floods over the ‘festive period’, while the UK has, for the ninth year in the last 15, suffered ‘once in a century’ floods: less devastating in terms of deaths than the Asian floods, but no less concerning from a global perspective.

Again, the Australian and Amazonian fires are unlikely to be anything like as serious in global terms as the levels of carbon being released as tundra and sea ice melt to Australia’s south and thousands of miles to its north, but they are another preview, in miniature, of what we can expect: a reminder – perhaps our final warning – that we are now not in absolute control of what happens next, that rising temperatures are likely to generate increasingly greater and faster increases in global temperature, and, once again, that we live on a planet: what people do, and what happens as a result, in one place, will affect and impact every living thing on Earth.

This is also a stark reminder that human lives will be lost – and many millions, probably billions, enormously and negatively changed – if we do not act fast, and change our attitude to almost every part of international societal and political interaction. We will, of course, come back to this.

Before that, however, we should take a look at the causes of the problem: who is to blame?

The simple, and upsetting, answer, is ‘all of us’.

But there is another answer, just as accurate, which is ‘some more than others’. Once again, for an example of how this works, we can look to Australia.

Since the fires broke out, as a result of climate change some states – including the US – refuse to even recognise fully any longer, and others, including almost everyone else, are simply failing to act on with the urgency the threat demands, it has been pretty clear that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, whose land was effectively stolen when the UK and a few other states decided it would be nice to see some (let’s be honest, rather too much) sunshine, have not really been the leading contributors to emissions in Australia.

Now, we shouldn’t pretend that this is somehow because the Aboriginal people of Australia are ‘better’ than other people there – at least not in terms of the environment.

Those Aboriginal people who live in Australian cities would probably use the same amount of plastic, energy, and other things as anyone else, but have been denied that opportunity: the irony is that now, they effectively get to say ‘wasn’t us, mate’. Outside of the cities, meanwhile, the traditional Aboriginal practices continue, and contribute zero – in some cases a negative amount – to carbon emissions and climate change.

The same is, of course, true of the globe. While the largest proportion of carbon emissions can be traced to fewer than 50 extraordinarily wealthy individuals, most of them in the West (though also in China and the Middle East) entire countries from Argentina to Ethiopia contribute less than one per cent of the world’s total.

This is not a call for everyone to live like Sudanese animal herders (of course, ironically, animal farming in the West, and our consumption of meat, is one of the major contributors to climate change globally), and nor is it to pretend that sub-Saharan African, Australian Aborigines, and the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego are somehow naturally ‘nobler’ or better than anyone else. It’s just to point out that they can hardly be held responsible for the disaster we currently face, even as they are already beginning to be among the most harshly affected by it.

Back to Australia. There have been claims that ‘Greens’ (who are in power in absolutely no part of Australia) had prevented ‘burn-backs’, a technique use by Aboriginal people and some settlers to reduce the likelihood of fires spreading. This claim has been debunked by Australian fire chiefs who today noted that burn-backs have been carried out, but that the ‘fire season’ is now so long that it is increasingly difficult to perform enough burn-backs sufficiently ahead of the wildfires beginning.

So if the ‘Greens’ are not at fault, then who? For now, we are going to skip through the populations of Australia’s (and yes, the world’s – that’s how this works) major cities, who are to a greater or lesser extent controllers of their own destinies but are all individually responsible for their part of the second largest cause of climate change (relentless consumption).

We are even going to skip some of those who have got rich from the world’s largest cause of climate change – relentless production, for no reason other than money.

We will come back to them both, but for now, because they are relevant everywhere, but especially relevant to Australia right now, we are going to note those who are in fact carrying the greatest responsibility: those who make the law, and those who push those who make it.

The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a useful person to take a glance at. His response to the largest fires in recorded Australian history has been absolutely woeful, including leaving the country to go on holiday in Honolulu just as a diabolical situation became horrific, then returning only reluctantly and forcing himself on men, women and children who have spent much of the last three weeks correctly (and hilariously. Admit it, it is) telling him on camera to fuck off.

At this point it might be worth noting that other world leaders have an odd habit of sloping off on holiday at inappropriate times. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, who seemed to have been on holiday for five and a half of the six weeks of the campaign for an election he called, then spent roughly seven hours in Parliament before leaving the UK for a holiday which cost (literally) several thousand pounds more than the average UK wage.

He failed to return even when US President Donald Trump, who himself has managed to spend more time on the golf course in the last three years than any other President in the last 120 years has managed to spend on holiday throughout their entire term in office, staged the extra-judicial murder of a leading member of the Iranian military and government (more on this tomorrow, ‘thing’ fans).

Anyway, long story short, no-one in their right minds thinks politicians should never have a holiday (though some people appear to think they should live in caves and only consume bread and water. Plato, for what it’s worth, said the best form of government was for a philosopher king to live in a cave and representatives of the city to come and ask him what they should do. Plato, of course, was a philosopher who lived in a cave just outside Athens) but Johnson has done himself few favours in the eyes of most people by absenting himself after an extraordinarily divisive election he called, and not even showing himself on TV when an actual murder was carried out by the UK’s supposed closest ally (according to, um, Johnson).

For Johnson, read ‘Morrison’, in spades. Because Morrison did not only go on holiday in the middle of a spectacular disaster (which Johnson at least managed to avoid) and then come back only after showing extreme reluctance to do so. He also managed to annoy everyone even more when he visited them (which, in fairness, Johnson did manage to do while visiting flood victims in the UK during the election campaign) AND when faced with questioning about the causes of the fires – fires which were literally caused by climate change – said it was ‘inappropriate’ to talk about climate change.

So, here’s why it’s appropriate to talk about climate change: 1) because almost every scientist on the planet – including every climate expert – is agreed that the current extraordinary increase in global average temperatures we are experiencing began with the UK’s industrial revolution (closely followed by many other states) in the 18th century and has continued as an increasing number of states entered the ‘industrial age’.

2) because these fires – the largest ever recorded in Australia – are in large part the direct result of that increase in temperature. In short, the cause of the fires is climate change. It is hard to see anything more appropriate to talk about.

The point is made even clearer by the fact that two separate reports, issued in 2007 and 2008 respectively, predicted exactly this level of fire across Australia, within 15 years, if the global average temperature raised by 0.5-1°C within that time (we are at roughly 0.8° across the planet as a whole).

Morrison’s response to those reports? He campaigned for more coal burning power stations.

And here’s an interesting thing. Like Trump, who campaigns for coal as well, and Johnson, who oscillates between backing gas burning, fracking (which delivers gas to be burnt) and nuclear power, Morrison is massively in favour of coal, and in wild denial about climate change.

This is particularly diverting because it’s very easy to point to the enormous (and it really is unbelievably huge) amounts of money fired at governments by carbon-burning power industries and the gigantic nuclear lobby and conclude that there’s corruption happening. This seems even more likely when one notes that Morrison went to the comical lengths of carrying a piece of coal into parliament with him (Johnson has only not done the equivalent because it is against parliamentary rules to enter the Commons scattering shards of uranium and shooting contaminated water around the House from a water-cannon no longer safe to use).

But in fact the reality is likely to be slightly different. Because while there is far too much coal, oil, gas and nuclear cash sloshing around the houses of all our parliaments, and rather too many of our politicians accepting expensive drinks, expensive dinners, and eye-wateringly overpaid jobs with firms who benefit from government handing contracts to carbon burners and nuclear power operators (only after they have retired from politics though, so of course there’s nothing at all to worry about there), there is another, really quite important factor to consider.

In the olden days (1996-2000, olden times fans) I studied Politics and Modern International Relations.

Oddly, at that time, it was very widely known – to the extent that we were allowed as undergraduates to study the topic ourselves and come to our own conclusions – that it is effectively impossible to simultaneously be an environmentalist and a capitalist.

Now. Maybe it’s because of Zac Goldsmith, who has in the last 20 years of pretending to be an environmentalist capitalist achieved literally nothing at all, or Richard Branson, who in roughly 40 years of claiming to be an environmentalist has managed to run a chain of record stores, buy an actual island, take over bits of the NHS (which is of course not being sold off by the Tories. Absolutely not) and run them for his own personal profit, own a privatised rail firm, crash hot air balloons into almost every sea on Earth and – astonishingly – run an actual airline, but literally nothing at all to benefit the environment, but for some reason we seem to be asking one another ‘so why is the climate now a political issue? It’s a matter of science, surely’.

Yes. It’s a matter of science. But for right-wingers, it’s also a political issue. Because combating climate change requires global cooperation at all levels. Capitalism, whether global or otherwise, requires unfettered competition at all levels.

Combatting climate change requires laws. Capitalism, particularly neo-liberalism which requires absolute deregulation of markets and believes in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, which will ‘guide us to greater wealth and achievement’ in much the same way as religious people believe God will deliver for them (actually, it’s worse: at least religious people tell one another stories like the ‘three boats’ – you’ll have to look that one up), abhors laws which would prevent people – and the ‘invisible hand’ – doing whatever they want.

And the thing is, this is important. Because earlier we skipped over the people who consume, who are cumulatively the second-biggest cause of climate change, and the people who produce, for profit. And they are important.

Because one of the buzz-terms of the last 20 years (globally. 30 years in the UK because we, as noted yesterday, started the deranged perma-fail of neo-liberalism) is ‘ethical consumerism’.

And ethical consumerism – only buying stuff you are sure will not cause harm to some person, or some part of the environment – has three major problems. One, it has seldom actually worked – and NEVER when not combined with a clear and open message, most effectively delivered by street protest and demonstrations, which is not really ‘ethical consumerism’ making a difference, but street protests and demonstrations forcing change.

Two, because in any case, it is effectively open only to those who can afford it. If, for example, it was revealed tomorrow that the nine cheapest clothing retailers set fire to whales to light their factories, while powering their sewing machines with coal-powered steam-driven mechanisms, many people might be able to afford to stop buying their products.

But some people would not. The idea of ‘ethical consumerism’, the roots of which lie in Thatcher’s effort to replace political activism with ‘consumer power’, is fundamentally flawed because it effectively denies you the right to (attempt to) ‘make a difference’ if you do not earn above a certain amount of money, and because, directly linked to that, it means no company needs to take very much notice, because they have an effective captive audience.

The third problem with ethical consumerism is that in fact, although every single individual on Earth DOES need to make every effort to reduce their impact on the environment, starting with flying less (we shall come back to this) and eating much less meat, but including consuming less of absolutely everything, that would not be enough to save human civilisation.

We need big businesses – and smaller ones – to act, and act now, or we face genuine catastrophe. And those businesses have proven time and again that they are unwilling to do so. This is not even a criticism, surviving in a capitalist system requires one to put aside all considerations other than making as much profit as possible in the shortest possible time.

But what this means is that we urgently require governments to act, with global laws penalising businesses everywhere which fail to adhere to certain standards and activities. Capitalism in general, and neo-liberalism in particular simply cannot abide the idea of regulation: it is literally the opposite of its model and ambition. Capitalism simply cannot deliver what we need to avert global catastrophe.

In fact, it’s worse. Because not only will capitalism not regulate the market, it actively requires that market to grow, that is, we must consume not less – which we all must do – but MORE. George Monbiot is the most recent (though by no means the only) person to note that the current World Bank and IMF models demand the global economy to grow by three per cent year-on-year, every year.

Under that model, we would in 24 years, have to be pulling out of the ground, producing and consuming twice as much as we do now. It is unsustainable, it is harmful and it will result in the likely deaths of millions of people.

And so this is the point. There is almost certainly corruption – legal or otherwise – involved in Johnson’s desire for fracking and nuclear energy, in Trump’s wish for coal, and in Morrison’s seeming physical attraction to it. But there is something deeper, underlying every move made by those politicians.

Capitalism cannot deliver environmental protection. Certainly not at the level we need. And so, to save the system, the only option for the politicians who promote it and the business owners who profit from it – both of whom must convince us that it is the best of all possible systems because otherwise some of us might start asking why we do all the work and other people get all the cash – is to make it a political issue. To claim that climate change is a lie. That it has been made up, probably for money. That it is nothing to worry about. Not exactly to shore up ‘big coal’ or the never-efficient, always expensive nuclear industry (since the UK literally gave its nuclear industry away to private owners, because it couldn’t sell it, it has had to bail it out four times), but to keep capitalism in action.

And once we have denied climate change, of course the US and Australia, which still have masses of coal, will start promoting coal. Because it’s good for business.

Now, at this point, we should talk about the leader of another state which has in recent months seen enormous forest fires, Bolsonaro. Because Brazil’s proto-fascist is widely regarded as having little in common with free marketeers such as Morrison, Johnson and Trump (though in fact this does the latter two, at least, rather too many favours).

But Bolsonaro, too, is a right-winger. Regardless of how few lunatic ideas about religion, race or society they share with one another (and it’s actually worryingly more than you’d like to think) they share the idea that capitalism, the market-place, a light-touch system guided by the ‘invisible hand’ is the best possible way for humanity to exist.

And, as in Australia, Brazil’s leader refused to countenance the idea that climate change has had any part to play. His brand of political lunacy allowed him to attempt to make this a national, rather than the global issue it is (‘What happens in Brazil is Brazil’s business alone,’ he said, wrongly) but the underlying message was the same: this is not about climate change, and it is wrong for us to discuss it.

In fact, capitalism’s part in Australia’s disaster, as in those in many other places, goes beyond being simply an ‘underlying’ cause. Because one reason the fires have been so devastating is that the Australian government has sold off many of the waterways and surrounding ‘wetlands’ (often simply meadows) which would previously have been used to try to quell some blazes. This was not done to reduce debt, but with a clear eye on the ‘bottom line’ – as much cash as possible.

So, as in the UK, where governments have sold water-meadows – natural floodplains – to be built on, leading to increased flooding across the country, so Australia’s neo-liberals have sold off some of Australia’s natural defences, making a terrible situation far worse, for nothing other than cold hard profit: capitalism at its bloodiest.

Simultaneously, it has been noted elsewhere that many of the men and women fighting the fires are volunteers, and that those who are unemployed have had their social security payments stopped because they have not been able to prove they are looking for work. I cannot even level this one at capitalism (though in fact the stopping of social security payments on the slightest, most ridiculous, pretext is common also in the UK) but to fine firefighters while they battle the worst blazes ever seen in your country is one of the most incredible things imaginable.

But we have mentioned capitalism at its bloodiest, and this is not an accident. Because to date, 25 people have been killed as a result of Australia’s fires. Many thousands more have been impacted because their homes have burnt to the ground. Four thousand people were internally displaced on New Year’s Eve alone, and we must bear in mind that if these fires continue, that displacement will increase, and may well force people to leave their country altogether.

We are already seeing across the world that increasingly erratic rainfall and higher temperatures are causing traditional crops to fail, causing hunger and in some cases drought, and once again, the displacement in Australia is a mirror of what we are already seeing elsewhere, and a ‘miniature’ version of what we can expect going forward.

Now, maybe not very many people know this, but Article 25 of UN Declaration of Human Rights states that: ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and welfare of (the)mself and of (their) family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond (their) control.’

This was signed and came into operation in 1948.

The reason I bring this up, some 72 years later is that we have absolutely failed to deliver on this. All over the world, men, women and children are dying of hunger, of thirst, of exposure, of easily-treatable diseases. From lack, fundamentally, of money.

The idea that they should not is not just something we should hope for or aim towards, it is their – and our – fundamental right as human beings. We have had 72 years to deliver this, and we have failed. Abjectly. Unforgivably.

And it’s important here because we are already seeing people fleeing their homelands because of climate change. This is no longer solely a matter of cash (as disgusting as the fact that people are literally dying because of the existence of money actually is) but a matter of increasingly impossible conditions in which to produce food, or access water.

The phrase ‘climate refugee’ is increasingly discussed and debated, alongside the question of whether or not we should ‘update’ the definition of what a refugee is. It’s a subject I have been engaged with since discovering that people in Tanzania, traditionally a relatively stable African state, are being forced from their land by climate change. That one cause of the Syrian war was not exactly climate change itself but that Assad failed so miserably to respond to the increased joblessness and poverty – as well as the increased populations of Syria’s major cities, driven by the longest drought in 5,000 years of recorded history of the ‘fertile crescent’.

But it’s also simple. Look at Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Anyone denied this internationally-agreed human right where they are, whether by lack of cash or change to the climate, is absolutely entitled to go anywhere else they need to, to exercise this right.

The question should not be ‘should we update the definition of refugee to include those forced away by the climate?’ (just as many in Australia have been forced from their homes) but why the hell has the definition of the term ‘refugee’ excluded so many billions of people denied this fundamental human right, for so many decades?

Now. It’s traditional, at moments like this, to explain what we should do.

So, here goes.

First, we need to effectively dismantle the capitalist system.

Now, I am not advocating the end of all trade, or all interactivity: trade has been a driver of human interaction since before capitalism existed, and we certainly need to interact and cooperate now more, arguably, than we ever have, but capitalism has led us here and it is not equipped to deliver us from the catastrophe we face.

And we really are on the brink of a catastrophe, of which Australia is a mere hint. The world will not end, but human civilisation as we know it almost certainly shall, if even a small amount of what climate experts and scientists in general tell us is true (and Australia, as well as states like Tanzania and others, are already proving them right) and capitalism simply cannot help us. We have to act now, and act decisively.

The first step towards this is to remove all barriers to global cooperation. We need a system in which we work together to prevent the worst of what we are now facing, and capitalism’s basic need for competition is a major barrier to this. Its hatred of regulation is another – and also an obstacle to us acting decisively to prevent businesses and their owners risking all our lives by risking the destruction of the environment we share and rely on, in the name of profit.

Once again, we need not blame these businesses or their owners: they are acting exactly as capitalism demands they do; indeed, as the system demands them to. But this means we must end that system: that we have outgrown capitalism not because we are too clever for it, but because if we do not leave it now, we may never become any cleverer.

Another major obstacle to both global cooperation and the worldwide unilateral action we need to take is Brexit and its ‘sister’ nationalist and isolationist movements. For the purposes of this conversation, it does not matter whether or not I accept that the UK could ‘go it alone’ successfully under other circumstances, and I do accept at least that it’s probably a very comforting thought for some people, but under the circumstances we are in, isolationism and nationalist refusal to interact (Trump’s US is another major exponent of this) literally risks all of our lives. We have to set it aside, immediately. Australia must be our wake-up call.

Now, I understand that for some of you, what I am about to say will be too much to swallow all at once. That’s OK. I do get it. To you I just ask that you get out there and help deliver the things already mentioned: the regulation, laws, cooperation and global interaction we need to avert the catastrophe we face. You – all of us – literally have the chance to save the world. Please, join us, and do it quickly. You can come back and consider the next bit later.

But the last major obstacle to global cooperation, and the last major cause of climate change, is money.

Although there is literally no evidence from any place at any moment in history that barter was the main means of exchange and interaction between people, I can accept that money was at one point a useful idea: a token of value that could be exchanged for goods or services.

But the rise of capitalism, of mercantilism, of the idea that amassing money was the same as increasing power, that wealth was in and of itself mark of one’s value in and to society, is destroying our world, and has for far too long been an obstacle to almost everything we need most as a species.

It was money which caused the starvation of Ethiopian men, women and children in the 1980s, when every Western state had enormous food surpluses (this is literally true: it was considered to cost too much to immediately fly food to the state, as it was cheaper simply to dump it: money was literally the cause of the completely avoidable, unnecessary death of thousands of men, women and children).

It is money which forces people from their homes because they cannot purchase food, water, clothes, shelter, medicine, causing deaths in deserts, at sea, on mountains, in refugee camps.

It is money which drives climate change, by encouraging the US and Australia to promote coal, Iran and Qatar to promote gas, Libya, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others to push oil, even though the burning of all is destroying the planet.

Article 25 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights is literally blocked – has been for more than seven decades – by the existence of money: it is the literal right of all people on this planet to have enough to eat, to drink, to have clothing, shelter, medicine: money and its wildly unequal distribution means this never has been and never will be achieved.

In another context – if we were not faced with climate catastrophe – we could simply solve the problem by simply providing everyone with enough of all of those things; removing money from all aspects of food, water, medicine, shelter and clothing provision.

But that is not the context we are in. We face global disaster, and for as long as money is the problem – and it is, now – it must be removed.

To do so will enable us to ensure that no-one ever needs to starve again on a planet which has never once produced too little for every person upon it. It will enable us to address properly the real refugee issue we must all address immediately – both by reducing the number of people driven from their homes by inability to access necessities, and reducing the number of people who need to flee their homes because of the impacts of climate change.

Because the removal of money does not mean that no trade happens, or no interaction.

I mentioned above that reducing flights is one vital way in which we can (and at present probably must) reduce our carbon impact is by drastically cutting (preferably to zero) all international flights.

This, and suggestions like it, can sometimes seem like they are being suggested by people who wish to return to the Mediaeval era. I can assure you I do not. I believe that affordable, swift travel between countries is of immense benefit to every member of the human race (though it is certainly not, at present, available to every single member of the human race).

But aircraft as they exist at present are a major driver of climate catastrophe. However, one reason for this is that air travel makes a profit. It is not really cost-effective to change it drastically (far less end it outright) because that profit would end. If we were to remove money from the equation, a major block on the effective and swift development of non-destructive air (and other) travel would be removed.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, but so far it has not moved us fast enough to where we need to be. Perhaps, to stretch the metaphor to breaking point, if we were to remove the evil uncle from the living room, where he whispers ‘why bother? Things are going good!’ we would discover that necessity would once more help us deliver what we need.

The same thing goes for electricity. We should not need to ‘reduce’ what we use. We have to because, driven by money and a need to defend a system from attack, we are still producing electricity in a way which threatens all our lives.

And a money-free system can deal with that at the base-point, because it just so happens that nations which are already too hot, or dry (or both) to produce the food they need (Niger is a good example: without oil and/or gas money, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE would also struggle) are perfectly positioned to supply energy from the most renewable resource we have – the sun. In exchange for power, they will receive the food they need. Similarly, wind and water can produce power.

For far too long the argument against producing energy from renewable resources has been ‘it’s too expensive’ (a shocking statement when used by the nuclear industry – renewables have dropped in price by roughly 90 per cent since 1965: nuclear energy is as expensive and in some cases more expensive than in 1955), but once money is literally no object, under a system in which we are working together to avert disaster on several different levels, this is no longer a barrier.

This sounds like a radical plan.

It IS a radical plan.

But it’s necessary, it’s achievable, and most importantly, it will put us in a better place than we are in now, where the world’s fifth-richest state pretends it’s necessary for people to receive charity food hand-outs, where men, women and children are drowning in seas they should never have needed to cross, where Australia and other parts of the world are literally on fire or under water, and where global catastrophe stalks us all.

Australia is a wake-up call. It’s time to wake up. If we do, the day can still be enjoyed.