Letters

Reason, Nov, 2001

Global Village or Pillage?

The July REASON contained several articles defending corporate capitalism in the emerging global world order. Not bad, but consider this: Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism has triumphed globally. Yet we are not living in a freer world, as you document so well. The U.S., via its wars on drugs and terrorism, is turning the world into a globalized police state. Clearly, global capitalism does not equal global liberty. People who have wealth and power will take any steps to safeguard their interests, including and especially initiating force against upstarts who might be foolish enough to believe in democracy or dissent.

REASON does not deal with the era's underlying economic issues: the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the internationalization of finance, the maquilas, the connections between American politicians and corporations, to name a few. Instead, we get some perfunctory support for free trade without any context, as if all that matters are slogans that sound vaguely in tune with laissez faire. The fact that free trade is enforced by death squads in Colombia and rubber bullets in the U.S. goes by the boards.

As for "the demonstrators," while frequently described as "misguided" or "confused," they have a fairly cogent message: Fight against concentrations of transnational power, fight against growing repression and the prison-industrial complex, and fight against the homogenization of politics, as represented by the de facto one party system in the U.S.

Joseph Miranda

Northridge, CA

All the Rage

I thoroughly enjoyed Ronald Bailey's article on the neo-Luddite movement ("Rage Against the Machines," July). Among the many important points he raises is the notion that if we want to reduce inappropriate corporate power, we must eliminate the power of the government to dole out subsidies and protective tariffs. Many people fail to recognize this, imagining that government power acts as a balance to corporate power.

One small quibble regarding Bailey's discussion of the "precautionary principle": The critique doesn't go far enough. Bailey suggests that a scientist could not "prove that a biotech crop was completely safe without the field trials" that the principle would ban.

In fact, no crop--indeed, no technology--has ever been proven "completely safe," and none ever will be. The very notion of complete safety is a specious one. The hypothesis "x is completely safe" cannot be proven because it is a universal statement. Universals can only be disproven or, to use Karl Popper's word, falsified. Scientists endeavour to falsify their theories, but no amount of field testing will ever prove anything is completely safe.

Bradley Doucet

Montreal, Quebec

Canada

There are close similarities between neo-Luddites and the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge were deep ecologists par excellence. They asserted that the cities were dens of sin and corruption, while virtue resided in the countryside. They therefore depopulated the cities, forcing residents into the country at gunpoint.

They compelled these people to return to the land, and to live in remote agricultural villages where they grew organic food without recourse to pesticides or farm equipment. Technology and trade were outlawed. When the crops failed, people starved. The Khmer Rouge refused to relieve the hunger by importing food. Anyone who complained was shot. In this fashion, millions died.

The Khmer Rouge based their program on the doctrines of French intellectuals of the left, whose points of view closely resemble those of the neo-Luddites. Thus, in arguing against today's Luddites, it is worth noting that their program indeed was carried out in Cambodia. It brought the near-suicide of that nation.

T. A. Heppenheimer

Fountain Valley, CA

What a rotten article, Ron Bailey. Surely you're capable of better work. Your willful misrepresentations and "grizzled hippie" stereotyping, combined with your substitution of assertion for evidence, all manage to make the case that technophiles like yourself really aren't in the habit of critical thinking.

The neo-Luddites and others with radical critiques of technology deserve hard-hitting but thoughtful criticism, and the readers of REASON deserve better than what they got from you.

Dave Gross

San Francisco, CA

Enemies of Trade

I agree with Evan McElravy: The FTAA protesters in Quebec were misguided, as was the police-state response ("Enemies of Trade," July). But I find a few things in his article troubling. First, it is difficult to imagine that a responsible government would not have police in place and prepared for violence, given the earlier havoc in Seattle. Were I a property owner in Quebec, I would have been happy to have police there. That said, McElravy is right that police actions must be defined by the particular situation, not by past events.

What also troubles me is McElravy's statement, "The case for free trade has been made primarily by cretinous conservative politicians and pundits, who seldom resist ridiculing earnest youngsters looking for a better world." This is needlessly ad hominem and could easily be turned around: "The case has been made primarily by cretinous youngsters and socialists, who seldom resist ridiculing earnest conservative politicians looking for a better world." After all, it was not conservative politicians who advanced political discourse by wearing masks and walking the streets chanting "Fuck George W. Bush."