Arabs in Antarctica

Homer, Charles

"Arabs in Antarctica" controlled by a bloated state bureaucracy that launches—in the name of socialist efficiency—many hastily conceived crash programs. Rich in socialist rhetoric, the bureaucracy stifles private initiative...

...but in an age when politics has everywhere followed explorers, it is in such obscurity that the continent of Antarctica will find whatever protection it will enjoy...
...Has anyone opposed it...
...So, who is it for...
...Otherwise, he says, the human race will eventually impose upon itself "a dreadful sameness of vision, in a global pseudo-civilization dictated by economics and politics...
...The travelers to China praise the regime for helping the Chinese people, yet have they ever asked a Chinese peasant what he has to say about the revolutionary reforms...
...The answers to the above questions are: The American Spectator August/ September 1978 13...
...Now the suppressed premise of such proposals, for the environmentally concerned, must be that less environmental damage will resultfrom a regime administered by the United Nations, Yet one might better argue the contrary proposition: that the "developing nations" are less sensitive to environmental concerns as such and, more important, the environmental effort will prove itself more effective in the open societies of the parliamentary democracies...
...Now whatever may be said of the existing Antarctic regime, it is not one for the management of large-scale economic activity...
...The Treaty's thirteen articles have provided a code of exemplary international cooperation, remarkable among such a diverse group...
...The other five recognize each other's claims...
...But none has been found, and any development is years ahead...
...collected and congratulated each other...
...Those who gape at the Chinese experiment forget that India, the world's most populous democracy, deserves our interest, allegiance, and support...
...Lofton Leonid, We Hardly Knew Ye A special book review essay of Leonid I. Brezhnev: Pages From His Life by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR...
...Oh, I almost forgot...
...deleted] Some insights can nonetheless be gained from the statements of the American representative to the special meeting on Antarctic fisheries this past February in Canberra...
...Two things are apparent...
...Have you ever wondered if, during the 1930s when Leonid worked in the Dzerzhinsky steel mill as "a good fitter and an even better gas purification machine operator," he was also "a good mixer and sought the company of people his own age, especially those who were bold, energetic, and eager and considered the building of the new world something close to their hearts...
...Instead, Antarctica remained under the regime of science and exploration...
...The Treaty establishes a system of periodic "consultative meetings," and it provides for admission, by unanimous vote of the original twelve, to the governing group...
...An early United States proposal of 1948 seemed to reflect the anti-imperial ethos of American participation in World War II...
...The three points he made to his staff on this occasion were (1) that surely some applications were acceptable as submitted or with minor modifications...
...The arrangement is thus a kind of condominium...
...Unlike the Indian peasant, the Chinese peasant would never risk being frank with a foreigner...
...I didn't see no guns...
...Everybody's plain and simple...
...Even the budding entrepreneurship of our Arabian prince seems anachronistic, as large international corporations and Soviet-style "state trading" apparatuses organize for the exploitation of the continent's potential riches...
...If there is any oil in Antarctica, it will be the most inaccessible and, therefore, the most expensive oil in the world...
...The total water content of The American Spectator August/September 1978 11 all the world's lakes, rivers, soils and air masses represents less than one percent of all the ice...
...Australians, New Zealanders, Norwegians, Chileans, Poles, South Africans, Frenchmen, Russians, and Japanese have all participated in "unlocking" the continent...
...But that is changing...
...Since the "oil crunch" of 1973, there has also been increasing interest in the Antarctic as a potential source of petroleum and natural gas...
...The Canberra communique spoke of the need to "harmonize" the activities of any new international commission for the Antarctic with the "responsibilities of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties...
...The communique also mentioned the need to "take account of international organizations such as the FAO, whose cooperation would be important...
...The other paradigm derives from the Law of the Sea conference, the UN-sponsored negotiations that have for some years now been attempting to create a new legal regime for what used to be thought of as the "high seas...
...What the "Antarctic club" administers is the world's fifth largest continent, slightly more than five million square miles, more than half-again the size of the continental United States...
...No crime...
...They responded by shelving the question of Antarctic minerals, hardly a pressing issue in any case.* Living resources, however, were considered a matter of "urgency...
...Comprehensive planning is not the answer to the problems of India's poor...
...In his journal of the expedition, which would carry him and his party, finally, to the South Pole, Amundsen paid proper tribute to Sir Ernest Shackleton, who "had planted his country's flag so infinitely nearer to the goal than any of his precursors...
...They reached the Pole in January 1912 only to realize that they had lost the race...
...No other moment of the whole trip affected me like this...
...and "I never felt so free from being robbed...
...With a special introduction by President Brezhnev for the American people and over 50 photographs...
...As Nirmal Verma said in the last issue of Seminar, an Indian monthly forced to stop publication during the Emergency: "All projects of 'revolutionary reform' may become instruments of oppression if the people for whom they are designed are deprived of the right to judge and comment upon them in the light of their experience...
...Yet as often happens, when only a few are interested, the interest of the few is strong indeed...
...On December 7, 1911, the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had gone farther south than any man before him...
...Although Venkateranam's approach was radically different from normal operating procedure, it was adopted while he was minister and is generally credited with having provided Tamil Nadu with an unsurpassed period of industrial progress...
...The continent, though circumnavigated by the legendary Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, was actually first sighted by an American in 1820...
...The customary polar projection map shows the landmass to be divided by a mountain range into an eastern two-thirds and a western third...
...Rich in socialist rhetoric, the bureaucracy stifles private initiative to such a degree that "private businessmen, more and more unwilling and unable to cope with government controls, have reverted to extralegal devices...
...Brezhnev, demonstrated his exuberance by axing to death a couple of elderly Swedish tourists...
...It centers on the experience of R. Venkateranam, after he became industries minister in Tamil Nadu...
...Even Mr...
...Indeed, in May 1975, Dr...
...in other words, the lower figures alone imply a doubling of the world's annual "take" of fish...
...Brezhnev's life in full detail...
...11.95...
...Have you ever been in a heated debate about Leonid's life and found yourself stumped and humiliated when your opponent put his nose against yours asking, as a sneer rippled across his upper J.D...
...There is a seeming symmetry, therefore, in the interest of Saudi Arabian princes in Antarctic ice, for Antarctica is even more to water what Saudi Arabia is to oil...
...Estimates for the possible catch of krill run anywhere from 50 million to 200 million tons annually...
...The Belgians sent the first expedition to winter there in 1898...
...Amundsen had written: "I stood looking after him as he disappeared from view, and I thought, if you got together a few more men of his stamp, you could get to the moon...
...That majority often expresses its hostility to traditional free-enterprise approaches to economic activity, even as the New International Economic Order it propounded in 1974 envisions a substantial shift of wealth from rich nations to poor...
...Brezhnev's personal views on major international questions—detente, disarmament, co-existence—and his meetings with various Western leaders, including American Presidents, France's Giscard d'Estaing, and such Socialist leaders as Fidel Castro, are given in detail...
...Article X of the Treaty reads: "Each of the Contracting Parties undertakes to exert appropriate efforts, consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, to the end that no one engages in any activity in Antarctica contrary to the principles or purposes of the present Treaty...
...Prince Mohammed al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, son of the late King Faisal and nephew of the reigning King Khalid, explained his plans for Antarctica to a New York Times reporter this past April...
...Compare with the 30 to 60 billion barrels of oil presumed to lie under Alaska's continental shelf...
...The Chinese work hard to assure Westerners that their vast country has been composed into a harmonious whole...
...Antarctic activity has always had an international character...
...And there is the larger overlay of politics, characterized by the dominance of "Third World" majorities in international organizations...
...by no effort of will could I keep them back...
...All scientific data is to be freely exchanged...
...Amundsen's later achievements in Antarctica were destined for submersion in the tragic fate of the British explorer, Captain Robert Falcon Scott...
...Not one homosexual...
...All this costs about $50 million per year...
...their publications have begun to allude to it, although hardly with great frequency...
...The United States suggested a United Nations trusteeship for the area that would supersede all national claims...
...It is a book of rare and genuine excitement...
...The fact that the poor, in general, have not participated in India's economic growth can be blamed, perhaps, on the continuing problem of untouchability in India...
...After interrupting the interview to take a call from David Rockefeller, the Prince continued: "I think it's a better enterprise than oil....If we had an order now, we could deliver by 1980...
...the shorter they are, the better...
...The subject continues to dwell in an obscurity it perhaps does riot deserve...
...Economic nationalism, especially the movement toward the assertion of exclusive 200-mile fishing zones, has intensified the competition for the remaining areas of "open sea," of which the Antarctic waters now loom as the most important...
...The meeting coincided with the publication of the first United Nations study of Antarctic fisheries...
...Living as he does in a totalitarian state, he knows that if he is asked a pointed question he must smile and say what he has been taught to say...
...Lofton, long-time friend of Leonid Brezhnev and cultivator of championship orchids, is a nationally syndicated columnist...
...At the moment, the total world catch of all marine species runs to about 70 million tons annually...
...Charles Horner Arabs in Antarctica The Nordic explorer gives way to the Third World entrepreneur...
...Although any nation could sign the Treaty, only twelve enjoyed "consultative status...
...The only country so admitted to "consultative status" since the Treaty was signed is Poland, as of July 1977...
...By weight, krill contains about as much protein as beefsteak, and is clearly an important new food, whether for humans or animals...
...Unhappily, the environmental movement is so immersed in the image of the western societies as polluters that it simply cannot perceive the vast advantages to its own purposes of international arrangements which maximize, not minimize, the influence of the industrial democracies...
...Shortly after World War II, it seemed as if the United States had perceived some strategic interest there...
...and (3) that because Tamil Nadu favored industrialization, when officials could not approve private investment proposals, they should recommend alternative projects which could be approved...
...One ought not casually to dismiss the role of humble marine species in the affairs of man...
...The study, and the timing of its release, were ways of asserting the interests of "mankind" in the deliberations of the "club...
...In late 1977, the Washington Post reported that it had obtained an internal U.S...
...Application of this doctrine to Antarctica would mean, presumably, full internationalization of control of the continent...
...The other private organizations were almost exclusively a "who's who" of environmental activists—the Environmental Defense Fund, the Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and others...
...India revived the idea at the United Nations in 1956, but also to no effect...
...According to the Times, "he says he will be able to deliver icebergs to any customer within two years...
...Bernhardt...
...Argentina, Australia, Britain, Chile, France, New Zealand, and Norway are the claimants, but their claims are not generally recognized...
...As Veit says: By his own account, he was frustrated on his first day in office when he found that the staff recommendation on every industrial license application on his desk was "Do not approve...
...Today, the United States maintains four Antarctic stations, two on the coast, two in the interior...
...effort alone involved about 3,000 men and a. dozen ships...
...It would seem prudent to have FAO and perhaps...
...Observers from any Treaty state can freely inspect the installations of the others...
...Once he had come upon a mailman from the Hudson Bay Company cheerily walking alone in the midst of nowhere...
...And, a few days after this, eight Pentacostalists, protesting the lack of freedom to practice their religion in the USSR, sat-in at the U.S...
...UNESCO as full-fledged partners in the endeavor...
...But, as Veit makes clear, "if India had managed the resources that were available for its economic development with less doctrinaire concern for socialism...
...its development would have been faster and even the poor would have participated in the growth...
...The usual map of Antarctica, based on a south polar projection, resembles a pie, the claims being sector-wedges of differing sizes...
...And, a few days later, also in Moscow, a young Soviet citizen, undoubtedly elated over being no more plain and simple than Mr...
...In fact, Antarctic krill has the potential to become, within a reasonably short time, the world's major fishery product (according, not least, to Barbara Ward's London-based International Institute for Environment and Development...
...The Antarctic "consultative parties" met in London in September 1977...
...Scott's sur10 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 viving diary, surely the most consuming of the personal accounts of Antarctic exploration, recalls both the heroic and the patriotic impulses of that era of discovery...
...Right now, only some 50 thousand tons of krill are being taken but, as one student of these things, aware of the gearing up of a krill industry in major fishing nations, points out, "fisheries have a tendency to develop with alarming rapidity once a market has been identified...
...She was accompanied by Steven Burton of the State Department's Legal Adviser's Office and Peter Bernhardt of the Law of the Sea Task Force...
...The twelve, who thus became managing partners for the continent, were Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and the United States...
...No hitchhikers, not one beggar [and no] bad, bad poverty...
...Heroic feats of exploration have already given way to bureaucratized scientific expeditions, duly funded and directed by governments...
...The Prince is apparently the originator of the idea of towing 100-million-ton icebergs from the Antarctic to water-short Saudi Arabia...
...Indeed, this was to prove the highlight of Amundsen's expedition, with the Pole itself something of an anticlimax...
...Is there any thought that the Antarctic resources might be considered as the heritage of all mankind similar to the seabed resources in the Law of the Sea negotiations...
...Aspecial meeting of the parties was scheduled for late February 1978 in Canberra...
...For him, Antarctica seems somehow to fit into the Islamic Renaissance...
...This book is also for Muhammad Ali, who recently returned from a ten-day trip to the USSR to inform us that in Russia: "There's no big shots...
...Embassy in Moscow saying they would not leave until they were allowed to emigrate...
...The entire continent is covered with ice, which can be as much as three miles thick...
...there are "100 nationalities living in peace...
...Pages From His Life is perhaps the first fully-rounded portrait of the Soviet leader and is a work of extraordinary importance, scope and depth...
...Unfortunately, Ali's glowing account of life in the Soviet Union was somewhat marred by the fact that on the very day he held his New York press conference, back in Moscow Vladimir Slepak was being sentenced to five years internal exile for the heinous crime of having hung a sign from his apartment balcony reading: "Let us join our son in Israel...
...But time and technology dissolve the heroic image of the Antarctic...
...Observers of the world economy will recall that the failure of the anchovies to appear off the coast of Peru in 1972 set in motion a complex series of events leading to enormous grain price increases, related global inflation, an embargo of U.S...
...The flag of Norway was planted, but "one gets out of the way of protracted ceremonies in those regions...
...Simon & Schuster...
...The Treaty preserves the continent exclusively for peaceful purposes, and bars all weapons testing, nuclear or otherwise...
...Scott's party had set out from its Antarctic base almost the same time as had Amundsen's...
...About 120 Americans spend the austral winter...
...The political task, then, became one of preserving the regime of science, and that effort is the origin of the unique international arrangement for the control of the continent...
...One can understand why most Americans prefer to go to China, but what about the Westerner's figurative "passage" to India...
...It is not obvious whether this was a tactic of "preemptive environmentalism" from the Department or an open invitation to these groups to respond adversely to any suggestion for large-scale exploitation of Antarctic waters...
...But the Soviets remained relatively uninterested...
...it is hard to envision their pressuring, with equal effect, a United Nations bureaucracy ultimately responsible to a United Nations majority not much given to heeding the voice of the "public...
...By traditional standards of territorial "scramble," imperialism in the Antarctic has been almost as genteel as its exploration...
...But "living" resources are already being exploited...
...Sixty research stations were established...
...The operating premise of the negotiations is that the resources of the deep sea are, as a 1970 UN declaration put it, "the common heritage of mankind...
...and though Antarctica has but a small public, it is an intense one...
...This is clearly one paradigm for the development of Antarctic resources, and the privileged thirteen—regardless of their pronounced differences on other international matters (Chile and South Africa receive no ritualistic abuse at these gatherings)—wish, presumably, to adhere to it...
...A dozen nations agreed on a large-scale research effort, the International Geophysical Year, which began officially on July 1, 1957...
...the coldest of continents became the only one free of the Cold War...
...On February 1 of this year, to coincide with the Canberra sessions, the Department of State released a "Draft Environmental Impact Statement for a Possible Regime for Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources...
...Chile and Argentina, for example, do not recognize each other's claims, but for more than thirty years they have agreed that they are the only two countries with rights to anyclaim...
...The Transantarctic Mountains rise in some places to about 12,000 feet...
...Yet if Hindu India is beyond most of us, civil India—the India of free elections, rule of law, freedom of the press—is not...
...government document which theorized that the Antarctic continental shelf "could contain potentially recoverable oil, in the order of magnitude of tens of billions of barrels...
...India, however, confounds and bewilders, not only because the sight of so much poverty is shocking but also because, as Eric Stokes says, India remains a land "where different orders of civilization and material culture have not displaced one another successively but continue to live side by side...
...All the rivers on earth could be kept flowing for almost a thousand years with the water at present stored in the solid state...
...In both 1946 and 1947, the United States mounted expeditions involving about 5,000 men...
...The hearing record includes the following illuminating exchange: Senator Pell...
...deleted] Mr...
...In their dealings with Western visitors, the Chinese are courteous, deferential, and ordered...
...deleted] Senator Pell...
...According to Peter Berger, the West urgently needs to make contact with "the cosmological imagination of the Indian mind...
...Text of a full-page Simon and Schuster ad in the New York Times Book Review, April 30, 1978...
...It was prepared as a direct result of an approach by Simon and Schuster to the Soviet Union and covers Mr...
...He had sought a Northwest Passage in 1905, and had trudged through the northern polar regions...
...when the sun returns in October, they are joined by another 900, who prepare for the arrival of still another 300 scientific workers...
...Not atypical were the views one of them offered at a State Department Open Meeting on the Antarctic last December...
...The Argentinians began to operate a permanent weather station in 1904...
...deleted] Senator Pell...
...The United States has for several years accepted the "common heritage" concept with respect to the deep seas, but its view of the applicability of this principle to Antarctica remains murky...
...Twenty years later, French, British, and American expeditions established the existence of the large landmass...
...J.D...
...It remains a regime for the scientist, but it is now under pressure from the forces of scarcity, real or contrived...
...No prostitutes...
...The parties recommended, further, establishing a "definitive regime" before the end of 1978 for the "conservation" of Antarctic marine resources...
...Indeed, Antarctica remains one of the few pieces of real estate in the world still governed in accordance with gentlemanly principle and, till recently, almost wholly immune from the coarser displays of international rivalry and individual self-aggrandizement...
...Comments on the draft were solicited from fourteen federal agencies and fifteen private organizations, only one of which could be said to represent * The parties urged "their nationals and other States to refrain from the exploitation of Antarctic mineral resources while making progress toward timely adoption of an agreed regime" concerning those minerals...
...Berger, it strikes me, is asking too much of the West—asking us to appreciate and come to understand a culture that will always remain mysterious, and perhaps unsympathetic...
...Practically unknown until the 1950s, by 1967 the annual catch of anchoveta came to 10 million tons...
...the U.S...
...12 The American Spectator August I September 1978 the "developmental interests...
...Two years later, the United States proposed to the other eleven participants in the International Geophysical Year that they conclude, among themselves, "a treaty designed to preserve the continent as an international laboratory for scientific research...
...If your answer to all these questions is "yes," then this book is for you...
...2) that government should explain its disapprovals because, even though this would give businessmen more grounds to quarrel with official decisions, it would help them to understand the state's policies and submit more acceptable applications in the future...
...There has always been a certain gentlemanliness about Antarctic enterprises, and the heroes of the great age of exploration would surely have scoffed at such notions of profit-making...
...It is easy to imagine environmentalists pressuring the United States and similar governments...
...In it, Mr...
...An excellent question which I would prefer to answer this way...
...Meantime, the Antarctic consultative parties decided to reconvene in Buenos Aires in July to continue work on their fisheries management project...
...lip: "Okay, wise-guy, if you're so smart, can you tell me when Brezhnev was elected First Secretary of the Zaporozhye Regional Party Committee, when he was elected First Secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional Party Committee, and when he was elected First and then Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan...
...But the details of implementation would surely prove difficult...
...I mean, you were there and know what you saw, right...
...The question is superfluous...
...The question will appear on the agenda of the next regular consultative meeting...
...It having slipped your mind, have you ever turned to a friend or loved one and asked: "Do you remember the date that the tabloid newspaper of the Dzerzhinsky steel mill in Kamenskoye, the Ukraine, ran the story about old Leonid being among the top four engineer graduates at the Arsenichev Metallurgical Institute...
...The resulting Antarctic Treaty was ratified on December 1, 1959, and was acceded to by the United States in June 1961...
...This headline-making book represents a major contribution to Soviet-American understanding...
...Meantime, the United States and the Soviet Union have made no territorial claims and do not recognize anyone else's...
...Second, and more interesting, there seems, to be a general feeling among the interested environmentalists that "international participation" in these decisions ought to be broadened...
...Burton...
...Its significance is made plain in a report prepared by a scientific advisory panel to the Treaty powers: Ninety-nine percent of all the usable fresh water on earth is in the form of ice and ninety percent of the ice is in Antarctica...
...The Nordic explorer gives way to a new kind of international adventurer, the well-heeled OPEC entrepreneur...
...Airplanes were introduced by the American admiral, Richard E. Byrd...
...We reckoned now that we were at the Pole....After we had halted, we Charles Horner is Senior Legislative Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York...
...First, the environmental groups display a predictable concern with the ecological problems of the Antarctic...
...Has the United States taken a position in this regard one way or the other...
...Let's be honest, open, candid, and above board and, as Lowell Weicker frequently says, let's put all the cards on the table face up: This book isn't for everybody...
...The Poles, both North and South, seem routine items in the business of strategy or economics...
...I saw] only one policeman...
...Ali says it is a "lie" that there is no freedom of religion in the Soviet Union because he saw houses of worship for Moslems, Jews, and Catholics...
...However, the new institution would clearly have to include more than the original Antarctic partners, in fact "all those engaged in harvesting or scientific research within the Antarctic marine ecosystem...
...A particular example of the bureaucracy's mindlessness is worth quoting in full...
...And if so, who...
...Dixy Lee Ray, then an Assistant Secretary of State and now Governor of Washington, testified before Senator Claiborne Pell's subcommittee on oceans...
...Carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization at the behest of the United Nations Development Program, the report was the first in a promised series on the "living resources of the Southern Ocean," and it dealt mainly with krill...
...The opacity of these issues seemingly allows the American government more than the customary room to maneuver...
...And the ice is the first resource...
...But, what the hey, Champ, these are nits that I'm picking...
...The tears forced their way to my eyes...
...A week later, Amundsen and his party reached the South Pole...
...Nor is the answer a complete break with the past—with traditions that enable Indians to organize politically so thatthey can effectively question the decisions of a massive state bureaucracy...
...Here, attention is focused on shrimplike creatures known collectively as krill...
...The United States committed itself to the creation of a new organization which would implement whatever rules the Treaty parties agree upon...
...t would be simplifying matters to say that state planning in the name of efficiency has caused all of India's economic problems...
...The Working Group on this subject offered some significant notions about the meaning of "conservation" in this context: "It includes rational use, in the sense that harvesting would not be prohibited, but the regime would exclude catch allocation and other economic regulation of harvesting...
...The exploration and governance of the continent have been carried forward with an ethic perhaps best described as "early National Geographic...
...deleted] Mr...
...He understated the immensity of their achievement...
...soybean exports to Japan, the emergence of a major, multi-million-dollar soybean exporting business in Brazil, and other developments...
...Brezhnev [who is] as cute as ever...
...We were further south than any human being had been...
...Burton...
...Surely, it was the first time that the Antarctic partners felt the real effects of the changes in the international climate...
...Although an uncomplicated individual, Amundsen could nonetheless imagine the larger efforts of exploration...
...In the attempt to return to their base camp, all five died...
...Seven countries claim sovereignty over pieces of Antarctic territory...
...Except for a determined few, the passage to traditional India will be too difficult for Westerners...

Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9


 
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