Date: Mon, 01 Dec 1997 21:06:17 -0800
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Re: Jim Heartfield's reply to Mark Jones


James Heartfield wrote:

> Readers must have wondered if they were watching the same programme,
> since its central message was that the people of the third world deserve
> better, and that the West should not be allowed to impose its agenda of
> frustrating third world development.
>

No, it's central message (as is clear from the transcript) is that
global warming is a myth. That position is conservation policy for
ostriches. It is, quite simply, mad. Only extremely wealthy, sybaritic
OPEC tycoons and GM shareholders who have lost touch with humanity
affect to believe that, and seemingly some low-paid Marxists. But
Furedi/Heartfield's problem is that once you understand that global
warming is real, happening now, and a disaster, then you can only argue
for western lifestyles and industrial society to be transplanted to the
third world, if you hope for the fate of a chicken kebab. 

In fact this whole politics of synthetic sympathy for third-worlders, is 
crocodile tears shed on behalf, not of gullible and desperate villagers 
but of vast and greedy corporations who will stop at nothing to continue 
their literally life-destroying politics of plunder-production, and who 
now, in a manner both pathetic and shameful, stoop so low as to recruit 
the world's most helpless and vulnerable communities in their support, 
peasants and proletarians who have been plunged into misery exactly thru 
the colonialism of monopoly capitalism. 

It is not an urbanite sentimentalising of a non-
existent Arcadian past to register the fact that capitalism's law of population
has given the Third World western population densities with no 
hope of western living standards to match -- only the pathetic delusions
peddled by the sinister Furedi and his gang of corporate lickspittles.

There is no excuse for Marxists to be ignorant about this. Only mental sloth 
prevents us from doing the necessary reading, only a comfortbale nostalgia
with the prehistory of our movement and a refusal to stare obvious facts 
in the face justifies our scandalous neglect of what is not just THE issue
facing the workers and peasants we are supposed to serve, but an issue more 
terrifying, more universal in its horror, in the tragic nature of the fate 
awaiting all of us and our children, than anything we know from history.

To say that is not just to say the truth, it is not even to begin to do justice
to the calamities in store for us, and which it is alreayd to late to forestall,
perhaps even to mitigate. Those alleged Marxsists who comfort themselves with 
inner complacency, snide remarks, brushing aside the truth with a sneer make a
 mockery not only of their own intellectual pretensions, but even of their common
humanity.It is necessary to think and to act and NOTHING is more
important than this issue, in any of our lives.



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