Recently, a poll of 1,000 adults in the United States was conducted for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling company, from July 5-10 and another poll of 1,045 eligible voters in Japan was conducted for Kyodo by the Public Opinion Research Center from July 1-3. What was interesting to me is that it showed six in 10 Americans  consider World War III Likely. "I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y. (See; http://wid.ap.org/polls/japanus/index.html)

The Japanese were less likely than Americans to expect a world war, less worried about the threat from North Korea and less inclined to say a first strike with nuclear weapons could be justified.

When I read this I couldn’t help recalling how a series of novels with God as the active hero - the Left Behind series – last year was the best-selling American fiction of all time: twelve volumes, fifty-eight million copies. (New York Times, 2 September 2004, A22.)

Almost more important than God in the books is Satan, who can be recognized because he speaks more than one language, is noticeably urbane and wants to unite the world. To be perfectly clear: the antinationalist position is presented as satanic.

But then this was already so in the old Europe as pointed out in 1960 by the social scientist Elie Kedourie who, among others, viewed nationalism as a secular version of millennial `political religion', and went on to trace the origins of nationalism to a distant medieval source. Nationalism, he argued, is found to be the secular heir of Christian millennialism and proclaims the same apocalyptic message. More recently this approach was taken a step further by Anthony D. Smith (a Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism) in "Chosen Peoples", 2003.

Humans tend to see themselves as living in a civilization. And they understand civilization to be centred on a shared destiny, often called the public good.You find that identification in The Epic of Gilgamesh written over a thousand years before both Homer and the Old Testament. Or in Confucius. Or in the Koran. In Western civilization this idea has evolved in an unbroken line from the twelfth century.  When you look carefully you find that the debate is always about seeking an equilibrium between societal obligations and individual rights. Repeatedly we are brought back to the natural relationship between the two - what I call responsible individualism. At the heart of that idea of civilization lies the certainty that responsible individualism implies the existence of real choices in the shaping of our destiny.

Of course there is also God’s, willingness to make regular appearances on the side of various participants in the so called civilizational clashes.  There is nothing new of course about the political God still so actively supporting the nationalist cause. He has been active throughout the post-Napoleonic period.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Russian czar Alexander I was in direct contact with him and received instructions to shut down most political and social reforms in favour of clear monarchical authority. God convinced him to act as he did because his enemies were driven “by the genius evil.” (Édit de Nantes: “[Ô]ter la cause du mal et troubles qui peut advenir sur le fait de la religion qui est toujours le plus glissant et pénétrant de tous les autres.”)

Some kings heard a very different voice. In 1599 Henri IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes to try to deal with the Catholic-Protestant divide. He wanted “to remove the cause of evil and of the troubles that can appear because the religious slope is always the slipperiest and can penetrate all the others.” The purpose of the Edict was to remove religion, and God with it, from the political debate. When the Edict was revoked eighty-six years later, God reappeared in politics.

More recently star appearances in massacres all over Africa. He has been wandering the Afghan mountains with Taliban and Al Qaeda guerrillas. He has broken down temples and led riots in India. He has supported anti-immigrant campaigns in Europe. In his spare time, he inspires the rhetoric of those who want more of the death penalty, and more virgin brides, more flags of specific colours flown. He accompanies American presidents, and for that matter most American elected representatives, on all public appearances. In the 2003 State of the Union speech, there were twenty-two religious references.

That is the context in which to understand the statement in 2004 by then attorney general of the United States, John Ashcroft, that his country had been spared a second attack since September 11, 2001, because the government had been assisting “the hand of Providence.” There was a competitive air to his claim. (International Herald Tribune, 22 October 2004, p.8.)

It must also be said that in many places, God takes on a very different voice. This is a voice that can be heard via people organizing slums in Bangkok or Nairobi. These people are often the driving forces behind hospitals and schools. They speak for the God who never went away.

But also came Huntington’s 1996 bestseller/analysis, of the world as a clash of civilizations. Rational, people now understood what was happening around them, why things were not working out as expected. As for the specific case of the United States, its survival was dependent upon “Americans reaffirming their Western identity.” The broad welcome this argument received revealed how confused and obscure the vacuum is. But it also told us how people have become frightened in the growing disorder of the Globalist era, how uncomfortable they are with the broad global sweeps of inevitability. After all, only a few years ago economic inevitability was on every tongue.  Abruptly, the same people or their friends are insisting that exclusive culture is the key.

Father Andrea Riccardi of the Sant’Egidio movement, someone who shows no signs of fear, simply noted that Huntington, in his dividing up of cultures into exclusive groups that should hang out together, hadn’t bothered to assign Africa a civilization.

Also not mentioned by Huntington was that during the eighteenth century for example, the British, followed by the French and the Americans, wanted to buy high-quality Chinese goods - tea, silk, porcelain. The West could not produce these goods, or at any rate could not match the Chinese level of excellence. The problem was that the Chinese didn’t want any Western goods. There being no two-way trade, the West had to pay cash. The British used silver they received in trade with Spain. In 1781 there was no silver, so Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, sent off Indian opium to be sold in China to pay for British imports. This eventually led to two Opium Wars in which the West - pretending to be at war over the treatment of their traders - fought China to force the country to go on importing opium, thus addicting its citizens. By 1830 this trade was probably the largest single commodity business in the world.” The same House of Commons, so enthusiastic about the moral virtues of free trade, defeated motions to ban the opium trade in 1870, 1875, 1886 and 1889. And the trade only ended officially in 1913 as part of the winding down of the first free trade experiment.

In October 2000 the American National Bureau of Economic Research put out a press release to deliver dramatic news: ECONOMIC GROWTH IS REDUCING GLOBAL POVERTYA new study showed that the number of people living on $1 a day or less had plummeted to 350 million. (Press release from the National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2002, www.nber.org/digest/oct02)

How wonderful if it were really true. Even in the case of Africa according to the author Sala-i-Martin, in thirteen countries the $1 poverty was reduced. I couldn’t help noticing that five of the thirteen could also be found on a quite different list - the short list of countries suffering most from AIDS, a disease destructive of social and economic systems precisely because it strikes people down in their early to prime careers. Even more peculiar was the star country of Sala-i-Martin’s African prosperity - Botswana - which had cut its $1 poverty rate from 35 percent to 1 percent and its $2 poverty rate from 60 percent to 9 percent. Botswana is also number one on the AIDS emergency list, with some 40 percent of people aged fifteen to forty-nine HIV positive. How did it become an international statistical star at the same time?  Sala-i-Martin doesn’t explain, but the answer is simple. Botswana has a very large diamond mine, a very small and, thanks to AIDS, shrinking population to share the wealth, and a reasonably good government.  None of which has anything to do with the post-1971 theory of global economics. Rwanda was also on Sala-i-Martin’s hopeful list. An AIDS emergency country, it went through a terrifying genocide - somewhere around 800,000 murdered - and societal collapse during precisely the period when Sala-i-Martin was finding statistics of economic success.

What could these success stories mean? Is it like the outcome of the Black Death? So many people had died that the survivors by the simple act of surviving and inheriting the property of victims became richer. The more fundamental question is whether such statistical propositions as the $1 -a-day-life reflect any reality that real people live. Perhaps that is why people like the Aga Khan have so little time for GDP measurements and now propose looking at people’s Quality of Life. After all, people at $3 a day could be living a life of pure despair in a savage slum of Lagos, a life far worse than that at $1 a day in a stable slum like Klong Toey in Bangkok, where there is a societal structure.

Our obsession with a certain kind of austere, abstracted measurement is closely tied to the idea of a civilization that believes it is being led by economics. That sort of leadership involves a bizarre contradiction: an aggressive certainty that these economics can be measured with great precision versus a passive certainty that they can only very marginally be shaped. Aggressive on the details, passive on the larger picture.

Also fairly recent are  the cutting edge of public anger especially in the former ‘colonies’  including China (that did not forget how the trick of how they formerly bought  high-quality Chinese goods at a dirt-cheap prices),  the new buzzword, ‘intellectual property rights’. In fact this anger cuts across all political lines in all sorts of formerly colonial, societies.

One of the key developments here allowed the private sector around 1980 to get patent control over research done in universities at public expense. (Marcia Angell, The Truth about the Drug Companies, 2004, p.3.)

Thus populations in Africa, forced to face epidemics without the necessary medical tools, are also on the same side as aging Americans, who can’t afford the medications they need, along with politicians everywhere caught in a permanent budgetary crisis because they cannot afford to finance public drug programs. Western populations are aging, and epidemics in the developing world are spreading.

So, for example, Brazil, choose to treat health as a human right. From the early 1990s on, it attacked the growing AIDS crisis as Western countries had once successfully attacked polio: as a matter of public well-being.

In 2001 however the United States government dragged Brazil before the WTO. Yet also in South Africa a small citizen-based movement set out to accomplish the same thing, gradually convincing its own government to take up the cause. This in addition provoked thirty-nine pharmaceutical companies into suing the South African government. Clearly under some pressure, later in 2001 ‘all’ corporations climbed down and withdrew their case. But these victories are never as clear as they might be.

However  in May 2003 the companies agreed to cut prices in South Africa by 25 to 80 percent. This approach was supported by the EU and the United States - homes of the major corporations. Going from an expenditure of $11,500 per person per year to $2,500 is meaningless in such circumstances; $100 would be unaffordable, except to the local elite. It is difficult to avoid asking whether these corporate cuts are not precisely an attempt to buy the silence of the society’s leadership. The dean of Yale’s school of medicine, David Kessler, said in the same year that the companies had to wake up to the public good. “At stake is the very patent protection system that allows them to control drug prices. They want to keep the power of pricing their products, but they must bend for a true international crisis.” (Kessler, quoted in Guardian Weekly, London, 10-16 April 2003, 23.)

Instead of bending, they continue to play the corners, as if this were a cynical game. They offer some cuts here and there, all the while attempting to undermine public health systems. The CEO of the largest corporation, Pfizer, moans at specialist meetings:
“[T]he fact is that Europe, Canada and Japan do not pay their share of the costs of research.” (Translated from  Le Monde, Paris, 17 April 2003, p.18. “Le fait est que l’Europe, le Canada et le Japon ne payent pas la part qui leur revient des coûts de recherche.”)

This is not a fact.The fact is that “research and development is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies - dwarfed by their vast expenditures for marketing and administration.” In her remarkable analysis, Marcia Angell, author of The Truth about the Drug Companies, goes further. “The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the cost of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R and D.” Most new drugs have been “based on taxpayer-funded research.” Foreign companies are moving their R and D operations to the United States “to feed on the unparalleled research output of American universities and the National Institutes of Health. [I]t’s not private enterprise that draws them here but the very opposite - our publicly sponsored research enterprise.” (Angell, The Truth about the Drug Companies, xv-xvii.)

Their obsession with their corporate rights seems to prevent them from absorbing what real people identify as reality. Seventeen hundred children infected with HIV/AIDS every day. Two million children under fourteen with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. India, Russia and China with infection numbers on the edge of tipping into full-blown epidemics.

People cannot believe in the seriousness of organizations that put their right to maximize profits ahead of the human right to life. In September 2004, as if to prove that they had learned nothing, the corporations provoked the U.S. trade negotiators to once again threaten Brazil over intellectual property rights, this time threatening to punish Brazil in unrelated trade areas.Why pick on Brazil when earlier attempts have failed and the international public sees this as an expression of irresponsible self-interest?  Probably because Brazil is encouraging the developing world to embrace its approach toward medicine.

In 2004 a Spanish court ruled in favour of a pharmacologist who had published an analysis of a drug accusing one of the giants of “a scientific fraud.” See Joan-Ramon Laporte, “The Supposed Advantages of Celecoxi and Rofecoxib: A Scientific Fraud.” Butlleti Groc, the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology.Seealso The Canadian Medical Association journal, 17 February 2004, and The Lancet 363, no. 9818 (24 April 2004). International Herald Tribune, 22 October 2004, 13.David Graham, associate director for Science and Medicine in the FDAs Office of Drug Safety, 18 November 2004, testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. USA Today, 19 November 2004, 1.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal revealed how another of the giants “sought to manipulate the results of published research,” endangering the lives of children, rather than risk the yearly $5 billion sales of this particular drug. Much of the problem in these sorts of cases goes back to the corporations’ contractual right to prevent scientists from discussing or disclosing the negative outcomes of their tests.

All the same, the whole area of corporate power via the contract and patent system remains highly controversial. In a case involving the breadth of a drug patent defined and held by Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology company, the courts of different countries have ruled differently. An American court has come down on the company’s side, while the House of Lords’ Law Lords - the highest British court - has revoked the patent, saying its claims were too broad.  This refusal of a patent monopoly will now reverberate through the European system. The withdrawal of a painkiller Vioxx - from the American market provoked the revelation from senior scientists at the Food and Drug Administration that this was not an isolated case, that the public evaluation systems “are broken.” The suggestion was that “the FDA has become too chummy with the industry it regulates.” The point is that an industry that benefited greatly from our willing suspension of disbelief is now broadly distrusted. The Vioxx hearings involved industry’s having to explain itself. According to The Economist, when the head of Merck was called to testify, he “looked terrified..”( The Economist, 27 November 2004, p.64.) It was yet another of those tiny moments when the undefendable was brought into the light of day.

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