Tsang: Well, that's why they coined the term "gooks" to use against the Filipinos. The US used it and of course Mark Twain spoke out against the war, you know, the US imperialism there. There's a whole history of resistance, actually. And also there's now a big campaign to get. There was a big massacre and there's a film going to be made about this

whole U.S. soldiers’ massacre of Filipinos at this place. And it's called “the bells of something,” I can't remember…[Bells of Balangiga]. But there's a filmmaker [Gil M. Portes] from the Philippines doing a film about this massacre in the Philippines when the Navy, I guess, of Marines took back the seas, the bells of this church there. And now there's a demand from Filipinos to get it back. [Funding woes forestalled Portes being able to make this movie.]

 

Davis: Well, I'm actually going to read my students a letter which I bought over eBay in an auction. And it's a letter written by a young farm boy, he's in the Kansas Volunteers. The Kansas Volunteers were one of the units that stayed in the field the longest in the Philippines. And it's written in 1900 to his sister back in Topeka. And he's telling her

in a kind of matter-of-fact way, how his company has just massacred a village in the Philippines and shot all the prisoners, which is both kind of My Lai before its time but it's also a continuation of the same policies that would have been applied to village of Lakota people on the Great Plains of the United States. Americans, white Americans, at least I think don't understand how important the US involvement you know was in the Philippines its initial overseas colonial experience in shaping American foreign policy, in shaping our attitudes toward East Asia. And of course, I think we all need to be keep an awareness that before the Second Iraq Crisis, before 9/11, this administration seemed, for whatever reasons, hellbent on confrontation with the People's Republic of China and that the major theater where American geopolitical and imperial ambitions will ultimately be most contested is not the Middle

East or even the Western Hemisphere. It will be in East Asia, it will be with North Korea, but it eventually be with China. And this is, of course, one of the deepest splits amongst American elites, one of the deepest differences between the kind of “new economy” forces represented in the Clinton administration and the constellation of old economy and Likud Party supporters in the Bush administration. They seem to have a singularly mad idea about how to deal with China. China will become a great military power. The root notion of this administration; if you were

to condense its foreign policy and invasions into just one sentence is to prevent any other superpower from ever emerging in the whole future course of world history. This can't possibly be the case. And by adopting this as the consensus or the foundation principle of American policy is just a recipe for the unthinkable.

 

Stefano Sensi: You actually describe very grim scenarios. And on the other end, there is something to be considered, I guess there is this incredible flux of people all around the planet. And, for instance, the United States are something a little bit more than just white Americans. There are many Latinos, there are many Chinese, for instance. And that

actually may play a big role in future situations. 

 

Davis: I suppose I always do sound more pessimistic than I really am. I guess I believe in the old revolutionary dictum of "pessimism of the intelligence and optimism of the will." But we clearly saw a new world born with the

demonstrations of the fifteenth, and it really is a new kind of global commons. But what this global commons needs to irrigate it and to make it grow and thrive is the rebirth of belief that there is truly an alternative civilization possible, one based on social justice and an equal sharing of the world's resources. We need that like we need oxygen to believe. It can't just stop by a victory that returns us to the status quo ante, which is the world as it was regulated during the Clinton years on behalf of the world's most advanced corporations. Now we have the old dinosaur corporations in power. But we have to seize the opportunity to go beyond that. And we have to resurrect all the dreams of the last two hundred years. We have to be able to think afresh and above all, we have to believe, and hope.

 

Sensi: Do you think that actually a revolution could be possible?

 

Davis: I don't think revolution is possible, but I think it's a necessity. I think that at the end of the day, you really have no choices, no other way to visualize or understand a world that's at peace and where life has centered around deepening equality of human affection and experience except by the democratic social control of the largest

corporations, the world's resources. So ultimately, the only way we can address what is the most frightening ultimate problem of all, which is the growing divide between two halves of humanity or one third of humanity and the other two thirds --- the great ideas of the Enlightenment, the 19th century of the labor and national liberation movements of socialism are the heritage that we have to reclaim and again, make urgent and relevant to today's struggles. And in fact, I think this is exactly what's happening. And certainly my generation, the Sixties generation, will play a very, very small part in this.... 

 

New generations will show us the way. And frankly, for someone my age and political experience, nothing could be more exciting than that. And I must brag that both of my children, who live in Ireland, marched in antiwar 

demonstrations two weeks ago.

 

Tsang: Do you see this? Some of my friends, my anarchist friends see going back to like a hunter, feral kind of society, the hunting gathering society without any kind of, you know, industry.

 

Davis: No, no! I mean, I know a lot of people believe this because their problem is they can't see how we are going to square a decent, egalitarian standard of living for everybody on this planet with a sustainable relationship to the world ecosystem and its resources. You know, if we simply raised everyone to an Orange County standard of

living, we would destroy the planet. So the answer has to be either to reduce the number of human beings and their pressure on the resources to accept growing inequalities or accept some kind of spartan egalitarianism. We'll all be, you know, hunter gatherers. And in fact, none of this is necessary. It's all a bit of nonsense. I think the secret of

sustainability and social justice, together, lies in making cities act more like cities. We're in the age where the first time in the history of the world a majority of human beings live in super-large cities. These cities are both the problem and the solution. The solution, in the sense of what cities can do is create public and collective forms of consumption

that are so much more satisfying in every way than private consumption and collective consumption. Public luxury is incredibly efficient. Environmentally, it can massively reduce the resources needed.

 

What I'm thinking about is looking at cities much like the way college campuses work. You don't have to have a huge library in your dorm room. You can go to the magnificent library. You don't have to have a private swimming pool. You have a great swimming pool on campus. Many college campuses are some of the best examples of what an

environmentally successful but luxurious society could look like because it's not based just on private consumption and accumulation but allowing cities to do what they do best: The genius of bringing immense numbers of people together to create and generate new needs and to satisfy those new needs with public luxury in public space.

 

Unfortunately, the direction in American cities, particularly in the environmentally sensitive and vulnerable Southwest, is going the opposite direction --- to strip cities of their truly urban qualities, to make everything suburban, to center everything around, you excessive private consumption and physical obesity and little pods of affluence while other people are left in slums. But I don't believe there's any contradiction at all between the historic ideals of socialism and those of environmentalism. I think red-green politics will show the way, but it has to become a politics of urbanism more than anything else.