I'd like to
begin with my conclusion: The
greatest challenge of our times is to get our two great
countries with such different histories and cultures,
the US and China, to work together as allies rather than
to be protagonists and adversaries. For even if we
avoid war -- which these days can be political,
economic, covert, and cyber, as well as military -- we
have to start using our combined talents and energies
for positive purposes, not for conflict preparations.
We can no longer afford to squander our resources
preparing for conflict with each other. Rather we
have to use everything we have to jointly and
collaboratively fight the grave problems that truly
threaten all of us human beings on this small endangered
planet.
The geo-political trajectory our two great countries are
on will sooner or later lead to confrontation which can
take various forms. We are already in the early
stages of such hostilities. If you don't
think this is the case I urge you to simply read some of
the public statements made by both Chinese and American
military leaders in the last year and to imagine the kinds
of war games they are playing in
private. And if you need a little help
imaging the war games look no further than the very
popular American TV program 24.
In the most recent weekly episodes in fact, China, for the
first time, sends an aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean.
The Americans then sink it killing everyone.
The Chinese in response decide to attack the largest
American military base in the Pacific, that's Okinawa
Japan. But then, in a twist, the Americans at the
last minute convince the Chinese that their aircraft
carrier was sunk by mistake because of a false attack
order caused by a covert Russian plot to get the US and
China to go to war with each other!
Just a few other historical reminders about how when
nations prepare for war and start threatening and
sanctioning each other they risk a war igniting for
unexpected reasons. This month is the 100th
anniversary of the start of World War I. No one then
imagined an assassination in the Balkans would lead to a
multi-year war killing 17 million people. No one
then imagined that the way this War
to End all Wars would end, as it
was known then, would set the stage for World
War II and all the wars that have
taken place in the Middle East since the 1918 Paris Peace Conference,
now known as the PEACE TO END ALL
PEACE. Even in recent years think
9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Yemen,
Sudan, Balkans, Palestine..and now Ukraine, and not that
long ago Korea and Vietnam, and now the military build-up
being undertaken by both of our countries in the Pacific.
And so our overall task as Chinese and Americans must be
to change this trajectory from fear and huge expenditures
for confrontation preparations to
understanding, appreciation, and cooperation. Only
then can we responsibly deal with the real dangers all of
us should be collectively, synergistically and urgently
confronting.
I know that most of you are business people concentrating on
building your own companies. And we all know how
time-consuming and difficult that is these days even for the
most talented and well-educated and connected among us.
But even as you concentrate on your own lives and
businesses, at the same time we are all citizens of the two
most important countries as well as citizens of the now
globalized world. And we just happen to be alive at
this sui generis, unprecedented,
unique time in human history. Our world is
literally pregnant right now with immense dangers, as well
as with great opportunities, as never before.
I've come from Washington DC, modern-day Rome, to be with
you today. And I want to sincerely thank the
organizers for inviting me and making this special event
possible for all of us.
I went to law school here at NYU and spent 4 years
representing the International Student
Movement at the United Nations up
the street. I didn't pursue business, or law, but
rather became a journalist, traveled to many countries on
some 200 international trips, making new friends with people
all over the world and learning from them in many intense
exchanges how they see the world so differently. Along
the way I've gotten a little older than many of you, so
today I feel the most valuable thing I can do, in the few
minutes we have together, is to share with you my
conclusions, my fears, as well as my
hopes. I am independent, not representing
any government or business interest, and thus free to say
what I really think and believe. Hoping to make this
short time we have together worthwhile for you I will be
blunt, not diplomatic, about what's going on in our world
and what we should all be extremely concerned about.
The bottom line is that never before in human history have
we all collectively faced such global and urgent
dangers. The list includes:
- climate change is now our mutual, universal,
great enemy
- we must work together to end poverty, disease,
and war
- we must work together to insure basic food and
water for all
- we have to use science and technology to advance
all of human society while avoiding using
these same means to destroy ourselves.
- we have to prevent the arms race from going into
space and prevent war itself from being sanitized by
robots and drones who will fight proxy wars in our names
but killing others rather than ourselves.
The bottom line is that our two countries --
China and the U.S. -- now have the future and fate of
humanity in their hands. And well-educated privileged
people like us have the future and fate of our countries in
our hands.
This is the huge challenge of our lifetime. It just
happens we are alive at what may well be the turning point
for human beings planet earth. The generations ahead
of us, tragically, have not solved our great problems, but
rather have brought them about. Now in the 21st
century all of us wherever we were born, whatever countries
we are citizens of, are inter-connected with each other
daily as never before, in ways even our parents just a few
years ago could hardly imagine.
I was born and raised American and Jewish, in Minnesota, and
like each of you I have my own evolutionary story. In
my case I became, in my own mind and heart that is,
politically a citizen of the world and religiously an
existential humanist. These are not just words,
I will explain. After law school when I went to
graduate school at Princeton to study international affairs,
I was awed to find myself walking the same paths as did
Albert Einstein, the Man of the Century, in his final
years. For me it wasn't Einstein's theories of
space and relativity that inspired me, but rather his
succinct summary about the task of life and the value of
human beings. Please let me share what he said with
you:
"A human being is part of a whole,
called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time
and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a
kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us
to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest us. Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by widening our circles
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole of nature in its beauty... The true
value of a human being is determined by the measure
and the sense in which they have obtained liberation
from the self. We will require a substantially new
manner of thinking if humanity
is to survive."
Einstein wrote
these powerful words as World War II was
approaching and with his awareness that
unprecedented atomic and other scientific
breakthroughs were looming.
Today, as we go about our individual lives and
businesses and relationships, we must constantly
be aware that humanity itself is now at risk in
our time. The threat of global nuclear
war remains real, even if we don't focus on it
as we did years ago. The threat of global
warming that already has the potential to
destroy human civilization is real -- even the
U.N. Panel of Scientists said specifically
this in their unprecedented
report earlier this
year. The threat of pandemic
disease, global hunger, worldwide economic
catastrophe -- these are all very real, not
science fiction, not something for future or
just past generations. And the threats
resulting from human hatreds -- fostered by
terrible injustices and inequalities and
horribly unjust wars of conquest and occupation
like today in Palestine -- mean that there will
be new generations and more non-state actors
seeking both liberation and revenge. And
they may turn to bio, chemical, dirty nukes, and
other weapons they can develop in addition to
becoming suicide bombers.
And so the overriding challenge for all of us is
indeed to promote serious "new
ways of thinking", and
of acting, now -- in our own lives, in the
policies we advocate for our countries, in what
we must demand from our international and
transnational institutions which includes our
multinational corporations and global
organizations.
As we try to pursue the urgently needed "new
ways of thinking" we
should all be facing some basic facts that all
too often are glossed over or avoided.
Right now in both of our great countries the
political and economic systems are in urgent
need of basic structural reform.
China has one controlling establishment party,
mine has two wings of what is also a controlling
establishment party. In both
of our countries self-serving rich and powerful
elites have control and all too often work
primarily to benefit themselves and those few
nearest to them (think Einstein). I'm no
expert about China so I'll only say that we all
know there are very basic issues of human
rights, poverty, corruption, and repression of
free thought and association that China must
deal with. Like the extremely
serious smog pollution in China there is also
basic values pollution that has not been handled
very well so far. This said I'll
primarily focus on my own country.
First of all some of us Americans have avoided
drinking the jingoistic nationalistic
militaristic cool-aide. We know our
country is not a democracy but rather a kind of
corporate oligarchy now in decline. We
also know that while we may look good to many in
comparison to other countries, things are not really
so good for Americans if you take into consideration
all of the advantages we have had for so long, our
potentials versus our realities, and how far we have
strayed from our own basic principles, values, and
aspirations.
In my country the oligarchs using their huge sums of
money not only control the means of production and
investment, they have more and more in recent years used
their financial power to take control of the means of
governance and legislation as well as the means of
information. We have a cleverly created
deceptive veneer of democracy that is purposefully
designed in fact to mask these realities.
In my country some 400 families have the combined wealth
of about half of our entire citizenry...that's 400
families versus 150 million people! In my
country the super-rich mini-class has figured out how to
use their money to buy and control the political system
in order to propagate the laws and regulations that make
them even richer and more controlling! It has also
figured out how to buy up and control the so-called "Main
Stream Media" enabling them to
manipulate public opinion and counter any and all who
dare challenge their exploitation and fiscal crimes.
In more recent years they have also greatly
infected our major think-tanks and our best educational
institutions so that professors fear to speak up and
students get short-changed in what they learn and
discuss among themselves at a formative time in their
own lives.
In America we desperately need to change our campaign
finance system because it's very purpose is to legalize
the social, political, and financial corruption all around
us. We also need to create a firewall between
those who have economic power and those who control
government, media, and education. These
concerns about how to most fairly govern society
go back to Plato and Socrates...but now in the 21st century
we are running out of time. We
don't need philosopher kings. We do need educated,
worldly, independent, principled, socially-concerned,
free-thinking men and women who
understand why Einstein said what he
did.
Many of you may not realize that in the US today we
also have very serious and growing
social and economic problems. The wealth divide is
greater than at any time since the Depression.
Belief in government institutions -- in Congress, in the
White House, and in the Courts -- has never been
lower. 1 in 5 of our families are near poverty
living on food-stamps and welfare. Even in
Washington DC one in five children are growing up in
poverty, in major parts of the city some 40% of
students do not graduate high school, and about 1 in
15 are HIV infected. In some sections of our big
cities gang killings are daily occurrences and our for-profit
prisons are full of small-time
non-violent petty drug offenders. We have by far the
greatest percentage of our population in prison, mostly the
poor and black.
Yet, in just recent years, even with such problems here at
home, my country has invaded and destroyed other
countries in the Middle East at a cost of millions of lives,
many more millions of refugees, and trillions of dollars,
most of which we have borrowed from China and others to feed
our dangerous military-industrial complex even at the
expense of greatly weakening our financial infrastructure
and future.
Just in recent years in fact my country has helped foment
civil wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, Sudan, Yemen and most
recently Ukraine. Egypt is now ruled by a terribly
repressive military Junta — also US trained and armed.
Pakistan is on the brink filled with anti-U.S. hatred.
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan — all more
bastions of severe repression and all with giant US military
and clandestine CIA bases in addition to American
"contractors" and NGOs — are collectively bulking up buying
more than $100 billion in arms from the same US
military-industrial complex.
Furthermore, I'll say something many Americans believe
but don't want to talk about even with each
other. The actions undertaken by many top
US government officials clearly make them international war
criminals by the standards I learned in law school right
here at NYU.
And so the starting bottom line is that in both of our
countries major political, social, and economic reforms are
urgently needed always keeping in mind that the purpose of
government should be to benefit society as a whole not to
further enrich the already privileged and empowered.
That said there is another very major change that is
urgently needed. We have to stop letting ourselves be
manipulated by the fear-mongers, the war-profiteerers, as
well as the super nationalists and ideological zealots among
us. In this regard I urge all of you to watch
the amazing BBC documentary, THE POWER
OF NIGHTMARES, which, by the way, even though it deals
with 9/11 and major issues of our day, no American network
has been willing to broadcast.
The great dilemma of course is we cannot count on those who
currently have accumulated self-serving economic,
political and media power to make the changes that will
limit and in fact end their special
privileges. For that to happen we who are
journalists and academics, as well as business people,
somehow working much more together than we have so far, have
to constantly expose the corruption and hold those in power
accountable.
As another of my mentors, this one I knew personally, the
great journalist I.F. Stone said: "The
purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted" --
that is to tell the stories of the powerless, the helpless,
and what needs to be changed -- and he
added, "TO AFFLICT
THE COMFORTABLE" -- that is
to hold those in power accountable for their failures, their
corruption, their self-enriching narcissistic ways.
Thus we who are the privileged, the educated, the first
globalized generation -- we who have the luxury to attend
such conferences as this and who are so fortunate to have
each other as friends and colleagues -- we have huge
responsibilities and challenges ahead of us all. We
must stop finding excuses and start looking for new,
creative, impacting ways to engage with each
other. We should relish the opportunity to work
together to greatly improve the way our world is governed
and how our critical talents, energies, and resources are
used.
This is how we can at least have a fighting chance of
bringing about Einstein's "New Manner
of Thinking" and being able to truly work together for
the rest of our lives to urgently solve the global human
problems that now bedevil our world.