'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

America enters the 21st century

Okay, it's a bit late, but I think it's happening.

For the past eight years it has felt as if we being thrown back into some of the worst years of the 19th cntury. Years when the imperial armies of 'white' northern nations set out on expeditions to completely re-make (and control) distant portions of the non-'white' world.

But a majority of US citizens have now, a little belatedly, started to understand that we're not in the 19th century any more.

Thank God.

Back in the 19th century, 'white' leaders wrapped up in the certainty of their own self-righteousness were able to launch those campaigns of imperial aggrandizement and control, and to have a reasonable chance of their success, for two key reasons:

1. They fielded raw military power that far superior to anything that the indigenes of the distant terrains to be conquered could muster; and that military power could be used to quell any resistance and impose imperial control; and

2. Most citizens of the 'white' imperial nations were really not convinced that non-'white' peoples had a humanity equal to their own or were worthy of equal consideration as God's children.

Thus, during the 19th century the British, French, or other European armies could set out from their homelands to seize control of distant land-masses, or the US Cavalry would set out ever further westward to bring under Washington's control vast portions of the lands of Indian nations. ('Treaties' be damned.)

But hear this: we aren't in the 19th century any more. Now, a whole span of 108 years separates us from those days. And during the 20th century, two important things happened:

1. Raw military power, on its own, became progressively less useful, thanks to the rapid improvement of information technology. Back in the 19th century, whole distant nations could be brutally subdued, or even genocided completely, and few people back in the imperial heartland would ever learn about the massacres. All they would ever learn would be incomplete snippets of the news; and even that would come in very late, and through channels dominated by the imperial armies themselves. Since then, the global information environment has been transformed. We get nearly real-time news of distant events through numerous channels, only some of which are controlled by the neo-imperial military. Foreign wars, as I have long argued, have thereby become just about unwinnable.

2. But there's been another important change since the 19th century, too. During the 20th century the international norm of the fundamental equality of all human persons became far more deeply embedded and more widely respected than it was back in 1899. So those distant casualties from imperial wars now matter to citizens of the 'metropolitan' countries, when we learn of them through today's information technologies, much more than the vastly more numerous casualties of the 19th century ever 'mattered' to most citizens of London, Paris, or New York.

So there you have two great achievements of the 20th century: The exponential improvement of the means of worldwide communication (with the concomitant decline in the usefulness of military power), and the much broader international recognition of the norm of human equality.

Which have brought us to a 21st century in which whole new ways for the world's peoples to be in this world together are now not just possible, but mandatory.

And yesterday, 62.5 million US voters-- a clear majority of those who cast a ballot-- finally seemed to understand that.

Jane and Joe Six-pack: welcome to the 21st century.