I was lucky enough to have Al McCoy as a university history teacher for a while when he taught in Sydney. For me a high point of this marvellously distilled conversation (with good questions asked) was when McCoy refers to the apex of US imperial power "during the 40 years of the cold war". As he suggests, during that period it had many sides of Eurasia within its military control. It had Europe with NATO on one side of Eurasia. It had East and South East Asia on another axis (presence in Japan, Philipines, South Korea, Australia etc with alliances such as ANZUS, SEATO, ASEAN). It then took over the British base in the Bahrain taking power in the underbelly of Eurasia in the Persian Gulf. McCoy goes on to note this history is the background to the 700 plus military bases the US has across the planet - "1,000 jet fighters all ringing around that Eurasian landmass blocking up those two great landed powers, China and Russia, during the Cold War, and dominating that land mass, and that has been the underpinning of US global power. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, we dominated Eurasia and that was the epicentre of our global power."
Excellent and extraordinary interview, thank you so much! Aside from the civil society "principle" versus empire "power" duality (or, perhaps, dialectical?) historiographical framework Alfred McCoy advances, to contextualize geopolitics past and present, l listened especially acutely to the last half hour, concerning energy usage and our present ecocide and climate collapse. (I am a philosopher, not a historian, and my specialties include the hard empirical sciences like physics and atmospheric science). I wholeheartedly agree with A.M. that China is wielding the shovel, in digging our grave (we don't need to engage in MAD, via nukes, we're doing it already, via irreversible runaway global warming, climate collapse, and all its symptoms including ecosystem collapses, extinctions, including our own.) Frankly, l believe A.M. put it best when he said that historians can accurately retrospectively interpret past patterns, but are laughable when it comes to predictions (interpolation is not extrapolation.) Overall, l commend his "solutionist" optimism about our present climate collapse predicament, though he betrays (like most who advocate this view) his own form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, by his very admission, he acknowledges that "there's no planet B," i.e. the climate apocalypse we're creating is unraveling any prospects of a future world order, and on the other hand, he speculates that we can go on business as usual with some techno and policy bandaid modifications: more nuke facilities (lean and mean) and restructure the UN Security Council, that sort of thing. These are red herrings, predicated on "hopium." To explore or present predicament from a deeper perspective involving history energy use and ecology I invite everyone to read William Catton's classic Overshoot (1980) and also to focus on organizations like Michael Dowd's PostDoom. The sooner we truly understand the predicament (from a deep structural way) the better we'll be able to adapt to the present and inconceivably future horrors (barring some one-off miraculous event like we suddenly awaken to a post scarcity economy because fusion-not fission- power has become economically viable and penetrates the energy infrastructure on a global scale. But this is pure science fantasy.)
Thanks for your comment! As you'll see, we just published our conversation from 2020 with political ecologist Patrick Ophuls - very much a kindred spirit to William Catton, Overshoot. Ophuls' books Plato's Revenge and Immoderate Greatness are well worth a read.
There is no ecocide or “climate collapse”. There is just weather changing, as it has always done. You seem to be less of a philosopher and more of a religious fanatic. The earth will be fine.
@@bmc8871 I am a scientist fyi. If you call imminent arctic blue ocean events, and ecosystemic collapses which are happening all over the world and ocean acidification and mega droughts which are causing resource wars including the WW 3 that we're in (historical and scientific facts, not articles of religious faith) the "Earth being fine," that's your prerogative. You also seem to be quibbling with semantics: I never said the Earth would not be "fine," I am talking about the troposphere and the biosphere capable of sustaining the Earth's present population of 8 billion humans, alright? That doesn't seem to be too "fine" at all, last time I checked. Moreover, you're also equivocating climate with weather. Consider the idiocy of your claim that it's all just attributable to "just changes in the weather." This is analogous to saying that, for instance, a 104 degree fever, is "just a change in body temperature," and to talk about anything like pathological causal factors (e.g., infection and inflammation) is "religious fanaticism." The laws of thermodynamics, the laws of atmospheric physics, the laws of limited growth are not susceptible to your delusions of hopeium and your quibbling with semantics. The ocean levels will keep rising, methane will keep being released at exponential rates, multiple bread basket failures will still occur all over the planet, record wildfires will still wipe out nations, as the oceans continue to steadily acidify. These are scientific facts. "Growth economics is not science; it is an idolatrous religion. It is not science because it flies in the face of the first and second laws of thermodynamics and ignores ecology. It is idolatry because it conceives of mankind as an all powerful creator rather than as a creature subject to limits." ~Herman Daly, World Bank senior economist (1988-1994)
UK anti slavery efforts weren't completely altruistic. Managing slavery's wildly complicated kudzu like growth became too much. In addition a new form of slavery was coming online. Coal etc replaced slaves, amplified exponentially the work formerly done by slaves. In an incredible jiujitsu move we're all now slaves bonded to fossil fuels. Thanks for great vid!
also bear in mind that the UK knew fully well that the cotton it was importing into its textile mills in Manchester was being produced on the backs of slave labor in the US. They capitalized on slavery indirectly but fully intenionally.
I trust in humans, humanity. Chinese citizens doubly so. They've had a taste of a better life. Western foods and habits causing huge growing healthcare problems. Their now 25+ year infrastructure is beginning to time out here in US we know what comes next. On environment regardless of climate outcomes is burning through one hundred billion barrels of oil equivalent energy per year. Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, the height of Pittsburgh's power! Endless coal shafts in and around the city. Just north of Pittsburgh is Drakes Well, first commercial oil well. Oil was so easy to get at a wooden bit did the digging. Today all the coal and oil are gone. There's no Oil Fairy refilling the holes. After all it's fossil fuels made over billions of years being used millions of times faster than they were made.
There's loons out there who think fossil fuel depletion is a myth to prop up some sort of WEF attempt at global dominance. According to them the oil is being replenished under the ground as quickly as it's being pumped out. The libtards are trying to control us.
McCoy certainly shared a number of profound insights but the entire discussion avoided the topic of global economic organization and its political forms. The problems we confront are systemic. While it's not as though you can't have an opinion on a direction to be taken within the context of the current moribund system, i.e. capitalist relations of production. Peace is preferable to war. Access to education and healthcare is preferable to the opposite. However, short of simultaneously embracing a socialist political perspective humanity's prospects keep winnowing down to... too little, too late. That was missing. Does McCoy think that the problems inherently identified with capitalist organization can be solved within and by capitalism? That has proven itself to be a continuously doomed project. And don't identify the cruel outcomes in the Soviet Union and China with socialism. Those distortions are a consequence of the isolation of the revolution to backward countries with leadership structures that succumbed to the pressures of isolation, i.e. Stalinism. There are no national solutions.
Thanks Bob, great comment. Indeed, we hope to get a guest on soon to speak to the theme that a "double movement" in the spirit of Karl Polanyi is still pending at the international level. Watch this space!
Agree. I was also struck by a few idle comments that indicated that McCoy buys the party line nowadays, like the lies behind 911. It was clearly an inside job and muslims had little to do with it (and certainly not Iragis and Afghanis). That said, McCoy's 1972 book on the Politics of the Opium trade is an all-time great book that provided one of the first real views how the CIA really operates. Unfortunately, little has changed as a result of this and similar books.
I was lucky enough to have Al McCoy as a university history teacher for a while when he taught in Sydney.
For me a high point of this marvellously distilled conversation (with good questions asked) was when McCoy refers to the apex of US imperial power "during the 40 years of the cold war". As he suggests, during that period it had many sides of Eurasia within its military control. It had Europe with NATO on one side of Eurasia. It had East and South East Asia on another axis (presence in Japan, Philipines, South Korea, Australia etc with alliances such as ANZUS, SEATO, ASEAN). It then took over the British base in the Bahrain taking power in the underbelly of Eurasia in the Persian Gulf.
McCoy goes on to note this history is the background to the 700 plus military bases the US has across the planet - "1,000 jet fighters all ringing around that Eurasian landmass blocking up those two great landed powers, China and Russia, during the Cold War, and dominating that land mass, and that has been the underpinning of US global power. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, we dominated Eurasia and that was the epicentre of our global power."
"DEMOCRITIZATION OF ENERGY " is Prof. McCoy's sliver of hope for the future of humanity. Thank you so much. A truly great man.
Thank you very much for the conversatioin with professor Alfred McCoy. I always a fan of his work!
loved this a lot ty
Wow! Such breadth of knowledge and integration of multiple prospective. Thank you.
Mr McCoy one of the underrated historians/ analysts since he’s not a mouthpiece for Empire’s services in charge of propaganda.
Great conversation!
Excellent and extraordinary interview, thank you so much! Aside from the civil society "principle" versus empire "power" duality (or, perhaps, dialectical?) historiographical framework Alfred McCoy advances, to contextualize geopolitics past and present, l listened especially acutely to the last half hour, concerning energy usage and our present ecocide and climate collapse. (I am a philosopher, not a historian, and my specialties include the hard empirical sciences like physics and atmospheric science).
I wholeheartedly agree with A.M. that China is wielding the shovel, in digging our grave (we don't need to engage in MAD, via nukes, we're doing it already, via irreversible runaway global warming, climate collapse, and all its symptoms including ecosystem collapses, extinctions, including our own.)
Frankly, l believe A.M. put it best when he said that historians can accurately retrospectively interpret past patterns, but are laughable when it comes to predictions (interpolation is not extrapolation.)
Overall, l commend his "solutionist" optimism about our present climate collapse predicament, though he betrays (like most who advocate this view) his own form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, by his very admission, he acknowledges that "there's no planet B," i.e. the climate apocalypse we're creating is unraveling any prospects of a future world order, and on the other hand, he speculates that we can go on business as usual with some techno and policy bandaid modifications: more nuke facilities (lean and mean) and restructure the UN Security Council, that sort of thing.
These are red herrings, predicated on "hopium."
To explore or present predicament from a deeper perspective involving history energy use and ecology I invite everyone to read William Catton's classic Overshoot (1980) and also to focus on organizations like Michael Dowd's PostDoom.
The sooner we truly understand the predicament (from a deep structural way) the better we'll be able to adapt to the present and inconceivably future horrors (barring some one-off miraculous event like we suddenly awaken to a post scarcity economy because fusion-not fission- power has become economically viable and penetrates the energy infrastructure on a global scale. But this is pure science fantasy.)
Thanks for your comment! As you'll see, we just published our conversation from 2020 with political ecologist Patrick Ophuls - very much a kindred spirit to William Catton, Overshoot. Ophuls' books Plato's Revenge and Immoderate Greatness are well worth a read.
There is no ecocide or “climate collapse”. There is just weather changing, as it has always done. You seem to be less of a philosopher and more of a religious fanatic. The earth will be fine.
@@bmc8871 I am a scientist fyi. If you call imminent arctic blue ocean events, and ecosystemic collapses which are happening all over the world and ocean acidification and mega droughts which are causing resource wars including the WW 3 that we're in (historical and scientific facts, not articles of religious faith) the "Earth being fine," that's your prerogative. You also seem to be quibbling with semantics: I never said the Earth would not be "fine," I am talking about the troposphere and the biosphere capable of sustaining the Earth's present population of 8 billion humans, alright? That doesn't seem to be too "fine" at all, last time I checked. Moreover, you're also equivocating climate with weather. Consider the idiocy of your claim that it's all just attributable to "just changes in the weather." This is analogous to saying that, for instance, a 104 degree fever, is "just a change in body temperature," and to talk about anything like pathological causal factors (e.g., infection and inflammation) is "religious fanaticism."
The laws of thermodynamics, the laws of atmospheric physics, the laws of limited growth are not susceptible to your delusions of hopeium and your quibbling with semantics. The ocean levels will keep rising, methane will keep being released at exponential rates, multiple bread basket failures will still occur all over the planet, record wildfires will still wipe out nations, as the oceans continue to steadily acidify. These are scientific facts.
"Growth economics is not science; it is an idolatrous religion. It is not science because it flies in the face of the first and second laws of thermodynamics and ignores ecology. It is idolatry because it conceives of mankind as an all powerful creator rather than as a creature subject to limits."
~Herman Daly,
World Bank senior economist (1988-1994)
Can’t believe this guy is nearly 80. What an intelligent articulate man.
Brilliant video
Clear concise logical cognitive
😊🏴☠️
UK anti slavery efforts weren't completely altruistic. Managing slavery's wildly complicated kudzu like growth became too much. In addition a new form of slavery was coming online. Coal etc replaced slaves, amplified exponentially the work formerly done by slaves. In an incredible jiujitsu move we're all now slaves bonded to fossil fuels. Thanks for great vid!
also bear in mind that the UK knew fully well that the cotton it was importing into its textile mills in Manchester was being produced on the backs of slave labor in the US. They capitalized on slavery indirectly but fully intenionally.
Great insight.
Naïve Guy: "We're such a hyper connected world now that war is impossible."
Putin: "Hold my vodka."
Ask who you can not criticize. It's them who rule the world.
I should perhaps begin learning Mandarin ASAP.
I will be delighted to see the end of Washington's empire.
❤❤
I trust in humans, humanity. Chinese citizens doubly so. They've had a taste of a better life. Western foods and habits causing huge growing healthcare problems. Their now 25+ year infrastructure is beginning to time out here in US we know what comes next. On environment regardless of climate outcomes is burning through one hundred billion barrels of oil equivalent energy per year. Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, the height of Pittsburgh's power! Endless coal shafts in and around the city. Just north of Pittsburgh is Drakes Well, first commercial oil well. Oil was so easy to get at a wooden bit did the digging. Today all the coal and oil are gone. There's no Oil Fairy refilling the holes. After all it's fossil fuels made over billions of years being used millions of times faster than they were made.
There's loons out there who think fossil fuel depletion is a myth to prop up some sort of WEF attempt at global dominance. According to them the oil is being replenished under the ground as quickly as it's being pumped out. The libtards are trying to control us.
That man of sin who's throne is in Rome.
McCoy certainly shared a number of profound insights but the entire discussion avoided the topic of global economic organization and its political forms. The problems we confront are systemic. While it's not as though you can't have an opinion on a direction to be taken within the context of the current moribund system, i.e. capitalist relations of production. Peace is preferable to war. Access to education and healthcare is preferable to the opposite. However, short of simultaneously embracing a socialist political perspective humanity's prospects keep winnowing down to... too little, too late. That was missing. Does McCoy think that the problems inherently identified with capitalist organization can be solved within and by capitalism? That has proven itself to be a continuously doomed project. And don't identify the cruel outcomes in the Soviet Union and China with socialism. Those distortions are a consequence of the isolation of the revolution to backward countries with leadership structures that succumbed to the pressures of isolation, i.e. Stalinism. There are no national solutions.
Thanks Bob, great comment. Indeed, we hope to get a guest on soon to speak to the theme that a "double movement" in the spirit of Karl Polanyi is still pending at the international level. Watch this space!
Agree. I was also struck by a few idle comments that indicated that McCoy buys the party line nowadays, like the lies behind 911. It was clearly an inside job and muslims had little to do with it (and certainly not Iragis and Afghanis).
That said, McCoy's 1972 book on the Politics of the Opium trade is an all-time great book that provided one of the first real views how the CIA really operates. Unfortunately, little has changed as a result of this and similar books.
No o
.