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Tyranny, Empire, and the End of the World as We Know It? (Part 2) |
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Click here to read Part One American Lebensraum: From Nation-states to a Global Corporate Superstate? Globally, since the end of the Cold War, we are in an era of an attempted transition from a world of nation-states to what will, in effect, be a transnational corporate superstate, headquartered in Washington, whose sole aim is and will be the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the political meaning of corporate globalization, approaching Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1904, with the British Empire at the peak of its imperial glory, US President Teddy Roosevelt wrote to the British Foreign Office: It is a good thing for Egypt and for the Sudan, and for the world, when England took Egypt and the Sudan. It is a good thing for India that England should control it. And so it is a good thing, a very good thing, for Cuba and for Panama and for the world that the US has acted as it has actually done during the last six years. The people of the US and the people of the Isthmus and the rest of mankind will all be the better because we dig the Panama Canal and keep order in its neighbourhood. And the politicians and revolutionists at Bogota are entitled to precisely the amount of sympathy we extend to other inefficient bandits. [1] It was Roosevelt's desire, as that of the American imperialists who followed him, to organize the banditry properly and make it efficient. Well-organized banditry is what he calls "a good thing". Historically, since the days of George Washington, when imperial expansion was proceeding rapidly both west and south, the United States had been a "rising empire". In his remarkable new book on Roosevelt’s imperial geographer Isaiah Bowman, the scholar Neil Smith speaks of the three significant moments of the American empire. The first was 1898, when President McKinley dispatched the US navy to "liberate" the Filipinos and the Puerto Ricans from the Spanish. The second was in 1945, when Washington used the atom bombs on Japan to announce the arrival of the new world hegemon, imperial privilege moving its centre of gravity from Britain to the US (it may be well worth remembering that, ironically, the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1947). The third was November, 2001, when the Americans took over Afghanistan at the dawn of the war on terror. [2] By the time of World War II, the strength of the British Empire had waned considerably, thanks in part to two costly wars. The US, on the other hand, had bided its time and was straining at the leash to take command of the world. In his book Smith quotes from a 1942 article in a Washington Journal which reveals the plans that were being laid out in the wake of the Atlantic Charter: Behind the scenes in Washington, a new world is being planned for you…If the plans materialize, you are going to be given a try at running the world. . . . If you think that defeating the Axis is the chief aim of the Government's foreign policy, you are going to get a surprise. American leadership in world affairs, looking toward a pacific and prosperous epoch, is the ultimate goal of those in Washington who are endeavoring to design the shape of things to come. [3] Washington's message to the American people - of the goal of world dominance - was laid out in advance of its participation in World War II. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs put the seal on its hegemony. The setting up of the UN in October, 1945, under US leadership, legitimized it. For the next 45 years, the US engaged the USSR in an unequal Cold War (which was fought viciously through proxies in Asia, Africa and Latin America). Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990, American capitalism is said to have won the Cold War against Soviet communism. However, in many respects it has been a pyrrhic victory, especially if one keeps in view the assaults on the welfare state and the enormity of environmental crises that saddle the planet, not to speak of the innovations of imperialism detailed above. It remains to be seen how much longer the prevailing set of global economic arrangements can last without breeding mass rebellions and environmental devastation across the globe. In an era when privatization, liberalization and globalization have served as by-words for growth and prosperity, capital, especially financial ‘paper’, is enormously mobile across national boundaries. Goods and services are much more mobile than they used to be, though more in one direction (from rich to poor countries) than in the other (poor to rich). Labour is the least mobile of the factors of production. Immigration continues to be a sticking point both in the EU and in the US. So much for "free" markets. However, perhaps the most momentous change that the end of the Cold War has already brought about is the rapidly changing structure of power in the world. Now that the Soviet Union and the communist challenge are out of the way, the US has been seeking a consolidation of its hegemony. With globalization led by the US, it is precisely the system of nation-states, under-laid by a founding principle of national sovereignty, around which the world is politically organized, which has come into question over the past decade and a half. To be sure, nationalism has become more potent, as governments try to rally their populations – for war or economic growth. However, between what governments say and what they do are huge gaps. So, for instance, it is customary for governments in India since the liberalization of the economy in 1991 to rally their constituencies with popular slogans, and then bend backwards to allow Western MNCs to invest in the country under historically unprecedented conditions of corporate freedom (from regulation). India is actually not an atypical case of an autonomous nation being run by a client state effectively serving the needs of the American patron. It welcomes American corporations to invest in India under remarkable concessions (Coke, for instance, does not have to pay a penny for its use and pollution of groundwater at any of its plants in the country) , [4] buys plenty of weapons from the US, carries out joint military exercises and signs nuclear treaties with the superpower, serving all along as a foil to China in South Asia from Washington’s perspective. (China’s military threat to the West is hugely exaggerated to serve as an excuse to amass weaponry. Israel has more nuclear warheads than China, just to keep things in perspective.) After each such moment, Smith argues, Washington consolidated its empire further. The latest moment was prepared by high-powered think-tanks in Washington, especially the well-known PNAC (Project for the New American Century) who plotted the Afghan and Iraq wars since 1997. The goal of full-spectrum dominance (by land, water, air and space) had already been announced in 2000 by Washington war planners in their "2020 Vision". They made clear that they are aiming at a level of planetary military control whereby they can deter or defeat any adversary to US dominance. [5] This has been buttressed by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, announced in his Axis of Evil speech in 2002. It is not the case that if the Democrats were in office the policies would have been dramatically different. Around the same time as PNAC was formulating its plans, Zbigniew Brzezenski (once, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser) published his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. He dares to suggest that "the three great imperatives of geo-political strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence amongst the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." Who are the ‘vassals’? Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Colombia, Indonesia, Phillipines. The ‘tributaries’? Canada, Australia, Britain and the EU. The ‘barbarians’? All the rest of us: Muslims, Latinos, Africans, Indians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, ‘Gooks’, Hajis, and so on. This is the language in which the Democratic Party talks to itself. [6] What stares us in the face is the growing maturing of a global dictatorship of capital in which the American government runs an effective system of client-states across the globe devoted to the singular goal of endless capital accumulation. The rhetoric notwithstanding, the operative decision-making authorities are no longer aligned with the nation, so much as to closely networked global corporate and financial elites spread far and wide across the planet. Already, a casual glance at the backgrounds of leading American politicians reveals that they have been CEOs of major corporations in the recent past. The evidence also suggests that politicians return to their corporate sinecures whenever they are not in office. Our times are revealing an ancient truth: class is more important than nation. The loyalties of American rulers are much more with their own corporate class, and the collaborating comprador classes of Third World societies than with ordinary, working American citizens. The same is true for their clients. We are in an era of transition from the nation-state to a trans-national corporate superstate, headquartered in Washington. This is the primary reason why democracy is under unprecedented threat everywhere where there are resources, markets and cheap usable labour for global corporations to exploit. The hypocrisy of nationalist slogans is essential for politicians to garner votes from the voting public and sustain the legitimacy provided by elections. The irony is that nationalism has never been weaker, if by the word one understands the welfare of citizens. The true loyalties of leaders lie with the interests of their own corporations and sponsors, wherever on the surface of the globe they may be conducting their operations. A coalition of global business elites is made possible today by technological developments and financial innovations, both enabling the interlocking of interests and coordination of business plans across continents. The World Economic Forum meets at Davos in Switzerland every year, inviting only the rich and the powerful to its meetings. As one of the participants, Prof. Samuel P Huntington of Harvard boasts: "Davos people control virtually all international institutions, many of the world’s governments and the bulk of the world’s economic and military capabilities." [7] One is reminded of Adam Smith’s rarely remembered thought: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. [8] CNN has drawn up a list of over 800 US corporations which have been exporting jobs overseas by moving operations to other countries, where labour is much cheaper and human rights and environmental standards are lax compared to the US. [9] What is even more interesting from the perspective of the growing irrelevance of the nation-state to the corporations is that close to half of the huge US trade deficit with China comes about because of exports manufactured by Chinese workers employed by American corporations operating in China. [10] So, while the burden on the American public exchequer grows, American corporations make hay. China is only the middle term in the overall transaction. Corporate interests everywhere are treating the claims of the nation with equal disdain. There are Indian millionaires, even billionaires, who are not only comparably rich to their counterparts in rich areas of the world, but are in fact, invested largely outside India and can be said to belong to the global corporate elite, rather than to the Indian one. (One example of this is the steel magnate, Laxmi Mittal, involved recently in the acquisition of Arcelor in Europe.) Forbes recently listed 23 Indians among the 793 individuals worldwide, as belonging to the category of billionaires. [11] Capitalism has always been a global system. Since the end of the Cold War it formally reincarnated as "globalization", announcing its intention to conquer the planet, recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s insight that capitalism needs to expand constantly just in order to survive as a system. Today it threatens to change the political structures of the nation-state in order to expand "freely" to every corner of the world. The end of the Soviet Union was the critical political watershed in the second half of the 20th century. It made the whole world imagine that capitalism is, by proof of historical survival, the best way to organize human life. The transition from a system of nation-states to a monster global superstate is likely to go through, unless stalled by social and political movements across the world. We are likely to see a global dictatorship of capital for a substantial period of time. Constitutions will be rewritten, as will be definitions of democracy, freedom, human rights and not least, torture. If we are already living in Orwellia, we will be living in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in the future. When one considers the increasingly breathtaking economic, political and social inequalities of the world, and how they have grown in recent decades it is perhaps conceivable to foresee the arrival of the "World State" which organizes human happiness by controlling the social castes (through such methods as "sleep-teaching") and mental processes of human embryos, directing them to pre-assigned destinations based on the economic requirements of society: "all conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny." [12] Some of Huxley’s foresight has already been validated by recent developments. In the book, as in much of our world, the government controls the past by suppressing it entirely. Others, such as the suppression of individual freedom, and the control of culture, religion, sexual practices and physical life processes like aging may happen in the future. The technologies, institutions and necessary public opinion are being mobilized and readied for such goals. The key step will be when the state succeeds in taking infants for "Death Conditioning" to get them used to seeing death as a part of life and be rewarded with chocolate ice cream. This will allow civilization to overthrow any "savagery" with greater force without the slightest pangs of conscience about its own, far more monstrous, savagery. War is for Mercenaries, Not for Patriots War and insecurity are profitable. Peace and security are not. This is the underlying reason for the globalization of the military-industrial complex and the perceptible expansion of the security industry worldwide. If war is the regulated market in weaponry and murder, terrorism is the free one. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorism will continue to grow because the ruling powers want it to continue, in order to justify the enormously profitable and growing security and arms industry. It will keep the peace scare (of the chicken-hawks in Washington) at bay. Besides, the weapons manufacturers make money when they sell arms to people who are otherwise classified as terrorists by the US government. This sort of military Keynesianism, as economists have traditionally termed it, has proved to be extremely effective in generating demand, all too often a source of concern, in a capitalist economy. The reigning view among most critics of the war on Iraq is that it has been a fiasco. No weapons of mass destruction were found, nor any link with the terrorists who plotted 9-11. Most importantly, more than 3 years after Bush declared the end of the war, the insurgency in Iraq is stronger than ever. Undeclared civil war is threatening to break up the country. Hundreds of thousands of innocents may have died after the American invasion, in addition to over 2500 US soldiers, and the end is not in sight. Is there reason to believe that the war has actually not been a disaster from Washington’s point of view? History teaches a lesson here. The dominant view is that the Vietnam War was lost by the US. It was driven out of Vietnam. That may be superficially true. However, if you look at it from the perspective of American corporate elites, rather than from the perspective of the majority of Americans, Washington succeeded in its primary goal, which was to prevent an alternative model of independent Third World development (something like what Cuba has tried and Venezuela is trying these days) from taking root. Vietnam was not allowed to set an example which might have generated a domino effect across the developing world, much to the loss of the United States, which would have become a less indispensable nation. True to American plans, Vietnam is an open-market economy today. The hidden agenda of the US government in Iraq has been three-fold. Firstly, to take control of the world’s second largest oil reserves, thereby seizing one of the key oil spigots of competitors like Japan, China and the EU. Secondly, to prevent the dollar-based world oil market from transacting in Euros, something Iran, Iraq and Venezuela have been attempting since 2002, when the Euro was launched. Thirdly, the establishment of permanent US military bases in the strategic heart of the world (The US is building the world’s largest embassy – employing 5000 people – in Baghdad). In all three respects, the war has been a resounding success (though the world cannot be told this). It has also achieved some other remarkable, unmentionable goals for Washington. Firstly, it has managed to demonstrate the "credibility" of its military intentions of gaining full-spectrum dominance in the post Cold War world. It has been, as one journalist puts it, "a global experiment in behaviour modification." [13] Secondly, the war industry has made huge profits as military orders have grown, Bush repeatedly asking Congress for more, almost $ 0.3 trillion having already been spent on the war. [14] Nobel-Laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates the war to cost (and the weapons manufacturers to get) between $1 and 2 trillion over the next several years. [15] Thirdly, firms from the reconstruction industry have been having a field day, the costs of reconstruction (which are effectively benefits for the US corporations, at the expense of the Iraqi public: "we destroy, we rebuild, you pay") are estimated at somewhere between $10 and $60 billion over the next several years. [16] The Economist had described Iraq sometime back as "a capitalist dream." [17] Senator John McCain had called it "a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies." [18] The Halliburtons and the Bechtels, as much as venture capitalists have been dipping greedily into the pot for sometime already, have had their access cleared and guarded by the US military, just as Thomas Friedman had opined. After a long time of economic seclusion under Saddam Hussein, followed by the decade of UN sanctions that strangled the country, the resources, the markets and the labour of the country have been put at the disposal of "the international community" (that is, Americans, occasionally including the British). Among those who know, the accepted view is that Iraq has suffered two assaults, the military one and the corporate one, both filling the coffers of Washington’s patron corporations at the expense of epic human misery. Reviewing the enormous corruption and the no-bid contracts handed out to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, The Boston Globe recently suggested that the American involvement "amounts to two invasions. First the bombs. Then the banks. This is robbery, not reconstruction." [19] To add insult to these injuries, all US oil corporations operating in Iraq have been granted total legal immunity from prosecution for any crime – involving labour, human rights or environmental law or any other violations – under an Executive Order issued by the President a few years ago. [20] In yet another, sinister, sense the war has been a remarkable success from Washington’s angle. It may succeed in dividing forever the three main communities in Iraq, Shia, Sunni and Kurds, enough to sustain the justification for a permanent US military presence in the country. Keeping a defeated nation on the brink of chaos may be part of a more or less conscious (if obviously secret) strategy to secure the long-term benefits of military and economic occupation. [21] This is an old – divide and rule – tactic of colonial powers, aimed at making the country ungovernable from within. The Americans have learnt it from the British. The logic was often given in the case of Hindus and Muslims in India by the British in the early part of the last century, Churchill always eager to point out that Indians would not be able to govern themselves in the absence of the British. All imperial powers are devilishly driven to create vacuums which they alone can occupy. Other little successes have been notched up. Security corporations – with their hired mercenaries from all over the world – have been used on an unprecedented scale. Poor young men from regions as far afield as South Asia and Central America have been tempted with possibilities of US citizenship and high salaries to fight white men’s wars. The racism is old. The corporate technique is new. [22] It is noteworthy that global security is one of the fastest growing industries today. It is already $100 billion in size and growing at 7-8% annually, expected to double in size by 2010. [23] From Washington’s point of view, perhaps the most significant success of the Iraq venture is that the experiment with the two-pronged – destroy and reconstruct – approach to enriching US corporations has worked. Now the module can be deployed with as much profit elsewhere. Iran? Venezuela? The more oil the country has, the better from the US point of view. Neither the loss of lives, American or otherwise, nor the unprecedented fiscal crisis in Washington is going to stop the empire from enlarging the scope and scale of its global operations. No imperial overstretch yet, it seems. The US Federal Reserve can be, literally, banked on to print the necessary currency to finance any number of wars – and get the American and world public to pay for them. A great, but little-known secret about the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, is that it is ultimately owned and controlled by shareholders belonging to large, private commercial banks (several of them non-American) like Lehmann Brothers and Rothschilds. So while private bankers make huge amounts of money by merely printing and lending it to the government, the tax-paying public must keep footing the bill of war expenses. Loss of American lives can be minimized – and the dreaded Vietnam syndrome avoided – by using the hired guns of security corporations from other countries, whose deaths are not even reported. Money for more wars can be borrowed from East Asians and others too, who don’t look like they are going to stop their purchase of US Treasury Bonds anytime soon. The day is not far when, as the American historian Theodore Roszak has recently suggested, the American imperium becomes a private, for profit, off-the-shelf, regime-change industry. There will be firms standing ready to fight the wars, organize the occupation that follows, rebuild the ruined infrastructure that results from the wars, recruit new governments, and manage the post-war economy. There may even be private educational services hired to train the conquered population in the rudiments of high-consumption democracy… [24] The Barbarism of Civilization: Might is Not Right "The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth...it is needless to multiply the examples of civilized barbarity; they far exceed in the amount of misery they cause the crimes which we regard with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow-creature." - Herman Melville, Typee. Might is not right. Given the mistaken ease with which conquering cultures appropriate and monopolize public morality and universal values on behalf of their narrow projects, it is more than likely that we will see civilization, unless effectively resisted, carry out many more wars and genocides in the future, doubtless on way to noble goals of peace, justice, freedom, and not least, prosperity. Fear, greed and cultivated ignorance will ensure that educated humanity tolerates, even abets, such mass deceit. The scale of US ambition to dominate the planet is such that its multiple projects cannot make progress unless ideologies of exceptionalism, based on underlying racism, are resorted to. Of course, in the age of political correctness, the hidden premises of official policies will always be denied by flourishes of vacuous rhetoric about freedom, democracy and human rights. It is a common error in victorious cultures to imagine that military superiority somehow implies cultural superiority, as though comparison of cultures is even possible. Throughout the era of European colonialism the belief in cultural superiority was widely held and used to justify conquest, occupation, even extermination of peoples, in the name of higher values like "progress", "the Christian mission" or "the white man’s burden" of civilizing barbarians. In a pioneering work of a whole genre of racist European writing about the peoples of the planet, the biologist Herbert Spencer wrote, back in 1850, that imperialism enables civilization to clear the planet of its inferior human inhabitants. The latter must yield to superior races just as lower creatures had given way to savages in the evolutionary past. Defending such "progress" he wrote: The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way…Be he human or be he brute, the hindrance must be got rid of. [25] No less a figure than Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. [26] When the intellectual priesthood of Western civilization was so astonishingly convinced of the racial superiority of the white man, there is little surprise in the fact that Britain's Prime Minister Lord Salisbury could dare to announce in a public speech on May 4, 1898: "one can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying", unabashedly admitting that "the living nations will fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying." [27] Small wonder that European-Americans in North America did not feel at all constrained by the many treaties which they had signed with Native Americans, violating them routinely with cavalier impunity. As many a recent historian has been led to remark, such racist discourse from the highest levels of European society followed genocides in Africa and the Americas and foreshadowed the rise of Nazi Germany, culminating in the worst barbarity in the heart of so-called civilization. [28] How much greater and more enlightened a vision is expressed by the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti: Man has no special rights because he belongs to a particular race. It is sufficient to say "man" to comprehend therein all rights…Man is more than white, more than mulatto, more than Negro…the Negro as Negro is neither inferior nor superior to any man. [29] Has the racism which justified European imperialism for centuries as a biologically necessary historical process been dispatched forever? It is easily forgotten today that US-style Apartheid – involving racial segregation and Jim Crowe laws – lasted for a whole century after the abolition of slavery in 1865. That racial segregation finally ended and blacks won the right to vote in 1964 was no thanks to white leadership, which found all sorts of obstacles to protect its privileges. Such heroic victories were the result of struggles for civil rights led by African-American leaders like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. But those who believe, in line with the official rhetoric of political correctness and the tokenism visibly demonstrated in the selection of top officials like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, that the United States is a society that has overcome racial discrimination once and for all are out of touch with the facts. Even a casual review of recent evidence shows that the underlying premises of politics and economic life in the US remain stubbornly racist, even if there are remarkable individual exceptions to institutionalized forms of racism. The amnesia of our times makes it convenient to forget that the Apartheid regime of South Africa was a US ally all the way till it was finally dismantled in the early 1990s after long and bitter struggles waged by political movements like the one led by the African National Congress. It bears recall that Nelson Mandela was a "terrorist" in the official classification of the Reagan administration during the 1980s. It is a well-known fact that today, 50% of the over 2 million prisoners in 2000 US jails are African-American, though less than 13% of the US population is black. More African-American young men are in prisons than in colleges, since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration went "tough on crime". They suffer beatings, tortures, and deaths on a systematic basis. When they are not being pepper-sprayed, they are being electrocuted by Taser guns, or dying of positional asphyxia in medieval restraint chairs. [30] 13% of African-American men (1.4 million) are disenfranchised on charges of felony, a number that proved crucial in Bush's election in Florida in 2000 (where one-third of African-American men are not allowed to vote). [31] Under the pretext that the language used against Israel was too critical (asking that its racist policies in Palestine be discussed) the US boycotted the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. [32] If further proof was needed of the racist underpinnings of official US policies, the systematic human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib prisons provide it in ample measure. The leaks notwithstanding, in neither case has the government released most of the pertinent information (the Pentagon, for instance holding back 1700 of the 1800 pictures it first gathered together on Abu-Ghraib). Nor have there been thorough investigations or anything close to adequate justice in hundreds of cases of torture, rape, murder and other abuses. Most importantly, none of the big heads who seem to have authored "stress matrices" and masterminded the tortures, have rolled. It is unimaginable that had whites been the victims, as against "Gooks" and "Hajis", such would have been the state of justice. Finally, to round up what is but a brief sampling of relevant facts, the weather exposed the racist and class prejudices of the present administration in Washington when last year Hurricane Katrina took over a thousand vulnerable lives and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless, the government too preoccupied with its imperialist priorities in the Middle East. Again, it is unimaginable that a similar catastrophe in the affluent suburbia of Long Island, for instance, would have elicited the same ineptitude from the federal government. Some of the more outspoken hawks in US policy-making circles have offered a thinly disguised cynicism to make a pitch for US war plans, the underlying racism not hard to detect. In 1997, Maj. Ralph Peters wrote in a US Army journal, seeking to harden men’s hearts to the odd challenges of the new century: There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. [33] Softer, more palatable, forms of the same approach came from an urbane and well-spoken President: It's easy ... to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so. Later statements "genocide is in and of itself a national interest where we should act" and "we can say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it" strengthened the doctrine of intervention. [34] The Clinton Doctrine was skilfully used to justify the American intervention in the Balkans in 1999, but overlooked the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The genocide in Darfurs has likewise been ignored so far, though US action may happen more readily there because of oil interests. It is worthy of note that terrorists are not laying down goals like "full-spectrum dominance". Nor do they have the economic or military wherewithal to do so. Most don't even have access to a runway! In the best cases, such as Palestine or Iraq, they want redress of injustices. In the worst cases, they exploit local situations for political gain using violent means, only marginally more effectively than petty criminals. However, it is not merely functional but imperative for the emerging corporate superstate, for all the reasons detailed in an earlier section, that such a phenomenon as international terrorism exists. If terrorism did not exist it would have to be invented. At the end of the Cold War in 1990, Islamic terrorism existed, but as a relatively minor phenomenon. After the unanticipated collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a "peace scare" in Washington. It was not clear what could justify the high military expenditures that the US government was still carrying out. And so the bogey of Islamic fundamentalism was generated to keep alive the pretext for US militarism. The human costs of terrorism are not even remotely comparable to that of self-conscious imperialism. Prof. Gideon Polya has used the UN Population Division data to estimate avoidable mortality [35] in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war on terror was announced in 2001. If they are even vaguely correct the numbers should shock anyone, especially those who consider themselves to be "good, decent" citizens living in the free world. While Muslim terrorists are responsible for about 5000 murders of people from Western countries over the past two decades, the West is accountable for over two million avoidable deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war on terror was launched after 9-11 alone! Quite apart from the murders carried out by insurgents and troops, the Anglo-American occupations have caused big increases in infant mortality and deaths from lack of medicines, food and collapsing infrastructure, all these factors raising mortality rates to well above the levels under Saddam Hussein. Polya remarks that "the war on terror is in actuality a war on mothers and infants." But the denial of the holocaust in Western media sources, especially in the US, is almost total. It is more than likely that in the future many "terrorists" and "barbarians" are likely to be found in resource-rich regions of poorer parts of the world, especially those which have large reserves of water and energy. Most peoples of the world are invisible and irrelevant to imperial designs, much like in the era of European colonialism. They are not even worthy of racism. As far as the American public itself is concerned, the evidence indicates that most people do not mind being deceived as long as they benefit from the deception, or at least do not stand to lose by it. They appear to be willing prey to the mass deceptions and self-censorship of the corporate media. Ignorance in educated, affluent societies and classes is necessarily cultivated. Not only do people not want their buttered bread to fall, they are keen to add to the butter as and when they can. And if a government is in place which makes it its task to do so, why would anyone wish to expose its lies? Once upon a time imperialism was Christian. Then it was civilized. Today it is democratic. Is imperialism ever merely imperialistic? Will imperial powers have the moral strength to acknowledge one day that what really compels them to intervene in the lives of far-flung peoples on the planet is the insatiable appetite for resources, markets and cheap labour, all in the end serving the desires of privilege and power? Franklin Roosevelt had said of a cruel Central American dictator, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." [36] A leading Washington intellectual offers this corollary to Roosevelt's opportunistic realpolitik: The essence of foreign policy is deciding which son of a bitch to support and which to oppose--in 1941, Hitler or Stalin; in 1972, Brezhnev or Mao; in 1979, Somoza or Ortega (sic). One has to choose. A blanket anti-son of a bitch policy, like a blanket anti-ethnic cleansing policy, is soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion. [37] It becomes clear that the morality espoused by Washington is transparently cosmetic. Its commitment to democracy, human rights, even free markets, is all too opportunistic. Its treatment of prisoners within its own territorial boundaries is ample testimony to its huge hypocrisies. In Typee, Herman Melville was led to conclude: "Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendship of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass anything of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe. If truth and justice, and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees? So pure and upright were they in all the relations of life, that entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement: 'Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of the divine and gentle Jesus.' I will frankly declare that after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories." What would Melville write today? Power Is Not the Same as Freedom: the Republic Lost in the Shadow of Empire Power is not the same as freedom. Thanks to colonialism and technology, the West is powerful. Thanks to its obsession with power, it is not free. And thus, nor is the rest of the world. Unless massive social and political movements force governments to change course radically, American tyranny, global empire, and ultimately, planetary environmental collapse are the shape of things to come. If Franco's Spain, or Salazar's Portugal, both brutal dictatorships for several decades, had reserves of oil, it is unlikely that the US would have tried to go in for regime change and remove those leaders, in order to install their own home-grown version of democracy in the Iberian peninsula. In her landmark book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt pointed out that if European racism did not already exist in the culture, it would have had to be invented. It was the sole possible ultimate excuse for colonialist imperialism. Moreover, it had corrosive effects on the public ethos of imperialist cultures. Relying largely on examples from the first quarter of the 20th century, she wrote: Lying under anybody's nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. Empire outside, totalitarianism within, racism being the glue between the two: this was Arendt's view. Arendt argued that liberal democracy was threatened by racism, which allowed powerful classes and their leaders to blame societal ills on a selected ethnic or religious group. Once a majority of people became falsely convinced of a diagnosis, they turned into potent mobs. Classes transformed into masses whose energy was mobilized by totalitarian leaders to destroy all possibilities of rational, democratic political action. Terror was used to invoke deadly loyalties. Totalitarian leaders took advantage of public gullibility and harnessed the power of capital to further their projects of power even when the latter sometimes implied overruling material or utilitarian considerations. Most ominously, though her own analysis drew upon the experiences of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, Arendt predicted that totalitarian "solutions" could outlast the demise of totalitarian regimes. Such "solutions" can offer power to a few and bread-and-circus privileges to many, but can never allow a free society. There are many reasons why a country loses its freedom when it exerts its muscle over others beyond its territories. One big reason has to do with the sequence of lies and myths its leaders have to maintain in order to justify their external invasions and conquests (the Iraq war and the now exposed mendacity that has allowed it, is a case in point). True reasons have to do with outright avarice for resources, markets, territories, power. But these cannot be offered to the citizenry. Thus, public falsehoods – promotion of civilization, progress, freedom, democracy, human rights – have to be held up as the reasons for overseas adventures. Even when a significant number of the citizenry can see through the charade, there is definite loss of sanctity in public discussions and debates when so many of the participants necessarily have to wink at each other to take the official arguments seriously. Red herrings and distractions are most useful from the ruling elite's perspective since they waste popular political energy, given how false most of the premises for the arguments are. As people begin to get cynical about their political helplessness, apathy sets in. Not a predicament that would sustain "democratic sentiments", to put it in the language of Tocqueville. Another reason why democratic sentiments cannot mature and flourish in such an environment is that a culture of secrecy develops in society. The more their leaders have to hide from the public, the more whispers and corridor conversations take place and the less trust people have in their leadership and in each other. If the media does not play its proper role of being a watchdog for democracy, the situation is gravely aggravated. Citizens in the Western world have been bribed or scared into the belief that they are free, when in fact they are merely privileged. In fact, they live under unspeakable conditions of psychological servitude. This is hard to discern because it is masked by the unprecedented affluence of significant majorities and repeated, disingenuous comparisons with dictatorships and endemic poverty in large parts of the world, the latter in good measure sustained by unfair Western policies. Narrowly experienced (consumer) sovereignty, in any case a profound myth in the era of pervasive manipulative advertising and mark-up pricing, is misunderstood as freedom itself, as per the textbooks of microeconomic theory. It should not need to be said, but is, alas, necessary to say so today. Power is not the same as freedom. This elementary confusion is made by practically everyone, especially those who live in the shadows of conquest, benefiting from its prolonged largesse. In his book on power, referred to in an earlier section of this essay, Bertrand de Jouvenel observed that "this confusion of thought is at the root of modern despotism." The difference between power and freedom is as great as between night and day. While my power grows at the expense of others, my freedom grows in proportion to theirs. Those liberals who believe that freedom is about individual rights, mine ending where yours begin, have not experienced true freedom, which is always a shared phenomenon. It is in fact astonishing that almost the entire world is being led by the nose today to imagine that power is freedom. The West is not free. Thanks largely to its technological growth and the history of colonialism, it is just enormously more privileged and powerful – militarily, economically and politically – than the rest of the world, its accumulation of mechanical destructive force unprecedented in history. And freedom cannot be, under any circumstances, a matter of comparing servitudes and finding one to be greatly preferable to the other, simply because it is gilded while the other is not. If I rob someone of their land and property and then lock up the victims in their own house – a predicament all too familiar to Palestinians – it is obvious even to a child that those thus incarcerated are unfree. But what about those who have won for themselves the privilege of jailers? Are they free? Or are they not eternally haunted, all visible affluence and privileges notwithstanding, by the fear of reprisal should the victims succeed in liberating themselves one day from the yoke? It is the fate of all conquering societies in history, whether it is Greece or Rome, America or Israel, to be stalked night and day by this fear. Ultimately, they live in a state of siege. Freedom cannot be enjoyed in the lap of such fear. The United States is one of the most frightened nations today, perhaps next only to Israel. Hence its recurrent need to remind itself that it is, after all, "the home of the free and the land of the brave." The propaganda about freedom must be believed for the projects of imperial power to be endorsed by the American public. If America was truly a free society it would have adopted a live-and-let-live approach to the world. It would not be trying to impose its wasteful and violent way of life on other peoples and cultures. It would have found its true freedom in abandoning the quest for world dominance in the guise of liberating other places and peoples. For freedom cannot last unless it is shared. Citizens of the dying American republic may be rich and powerful. Free they are not. Contrary to appearances, American democracy is dead. We will be fortunate if the republic survives the mounting ravages of empire. The grand illusion of democracy is maintained in what has become in practice a Kafkaesque society – replete with wiretapping and summary arrests, growing in scale with each foreign foray – to repeat the words of a writer for The Washington Post. The events of the past decade have shown that the warlords in Washington have little regard for multilateralism, international law and such niceties as the Geneva Conventions. Those rules and conventions are for the rest of the world. The UN has become a thoroughly anaemic and decrepit organization being used more or less as a rubber-stamp of legitimacy by Washington where needed, ignored where necessary, and used against selectively defined "rogue states" all the time. (Just a count of the number of occasions when a nearly unanimous UN vote against Israeli aggression was vetoed by the US is a very instructive exercise.) If the American conquest of the planet proceeds, unchallenged by successful resistance from democratic mass movements both within and beyond the borders of the country, it is not hard to foresee what some of the consequences are going to be, even if news of the many disasters to follow will not reach the ears of the educated public for a long time yet. Militarily, US power will extend its tentacles over the whole planet. It already has 700 bases in over 100 countries. In the future, it is likely to install itself in such strategic locations as India and those parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America which have so far resisted its hegemony. This will give the US unassailable superiority over China and Russia, its two most likely rivals, given that the EU is unable to forge a military and diplomatic course independent of US interests. The human cost of world conquest is unpredictable and painful to imagine. All one can say is that places like Iran and Syria are not about to hand over their hard-won political autonomy without an epic fight. As Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon demonstrates, such aggression will be returned. A greater Middle East war, stretching from one end of the Islamic world to the other is more than likely, and will have possibly nuclear fallout, its consequences for the world as a whole catastrophic. If the US succeeds in consolidating and extending its global empire over the next few decades, assuming the world survives all the mayhem, a global dictatorship of capital, controlled by Washington through a system of client-states, is the most likely form of government that will emerge. Formal democracy – involving nominal legitimization of autocratic corporate power – will become the norm, as substantive democracy, yielding unexpected popular outcomes, is destroyed. If the people elect a government which the American masters do not approve of – as, for instance, the people of Venezuela, Palestine or Iran – have done, they are likely to be severely punished (as Palestinians are being punished) for electing the wrong leaders by a lack of recognition of the government, crippling economic sanctions and, if need be, forced regime change or invasion. What has been happening over the past 5 decades in secret will now have overt legitimacy. The global dictatorship of capital will ensure smoother and easier terms for corporate investment and growth, accelerating the environmental pillage of the planet. Given the reluctance of the US corporate leadership to sign the Kyoto Protocol and make the transition away from a fossil-fuel based economy, other economic powers like China, India, Japan and the EU are also going to mine the planet's energy resources competitively, speeding up, rather than slowing down, the already ominous processes of climate change and global warming. Concluding Remarks: Why We Are All "Good Germans" Now "The murderous order of the world -- which kills 100,000 people every day from hunger and epidemics -- does not only make the victims feel ashamed, but also us, Westerners, Whites, rulers, who are accomplices of this massacre, aware, informed and nevertheless silent, cowardly and paralyzed. "…In the empire of shame, controlled by organized scarcity [of food and essentials], war is not sporadic any more, it is permanent. It is not any more a crisis, a pathology, but normality. It does not any more imply the eclipse of reason -- as Horkheimer expressed it -- it is the very raison d'être of the empire. The lords of the financial war have put the planet under the scalpel of organized economic destruction. They attack the normative power of the States, challenge the sovereignty of the people, subvert democracy, wreak havoc on nature, destroy human beings and their freedoms. The liberalization of the economy, the "invisible hand" of the market, is their way of dealing with the universe; the maximalization of profit is the way it works. I call this practice and this cosmogony structural violence." - Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on Food and author of Empire of Shame [38] No serious person doubts that we live today in a world in which nobody has to die of hunger or curable diseases. All hunger and most of child and infant mortality are man-made. Moreover, all the millions of victims of wars of choice are actually victims of the entirely avoidable human lust for power. We are invited to feel (rightly) indignant at the hundreds of lives lost to terrorism every week, but there is a stunning, numbed silence over the quiet genocides that have become routine in this cowardly old world, for which educated, privileged humanity is collectively, squarely responsible. No shame is felt by our species when we are collectively culpable for crimes of a magnitude incomparably greater in scale than the undoubted damage being done by bloodthirsty terrorists. Our thinking and moral sense has been corrupted by the distortion of our audio-visual capacities: the sensational damage done by terrorists is shown to us every evening on our TV screens, but the colossal murderous routine of hunger and disease falls below the threshold of media sensation. This auto-censorship is also because those who bring us the news are also perhaps aware, at the back of their minds, that the reigning world order is to be held responsible for such crimes against humanity. In this sense, we are all like the "good Germans" of the early 1940s, looking the other way from obvious crimes, when we know better. This essay has sought to draw a detailed political map of the world as it appears today to a concerned observer. In conclusion, I would only like to draw attention to something which has escaped mention thus far: the force of cultural hegemony. We live under the dispensations of the US Empire today. And yet this empire is uniquely different from every other in history, in that while geography is still quite central to it, its decisive advantage, apart from being market-based, comes from the cultural hegemony it exercises over how diverse peoples right across the world conceive and assess their way of life. For no matter where one looks today, "the American way of life" – of expressways and supermarkets, skyscrapers and giant corporations – has become the very norm for evaluating everything else. It is this, backed and underwritten by the rapidly encroaching institutions of state corporate capitalism, that everyday reinforces American dominance and what is arguably, the most predatory and ultimately self-destructive style of life known to humanity. Moreover, it is precisely this fact which accounts for the rise of consensual tyranny and the decline of substantive democracy. Will the American Empire collapse at some point in the not too distant future? No reading of history can miss the mortality of empires. So this one shall have its end too. There is a sharply accelerating convergence of crises, too many to go into here. But there is a saying in India that "even a dead elephant is worth a million bucks." It may well turn out that the American Empire, like a wounded tiger, kicks and screams its way to a slow death in the human jungle, bringing down much else besides itself. Maybe that is precisely what is beginning to happen before our eyes since the dawn of the present century. (After all, the golden age of US capitalism, by common agreement amongst economists, ended in the 1970s, best symbolized by the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods system.) Humanity has often been threatened in the past by the cumulative consequences of its own follies, as much as by natural causes. What is new today is that these two forces of destruction are increasingly enhanced by the historically unprecedented powers of destructive technology, driving us collectively towards an abyss of perhaps historic proportions. It is fair to say that humanity is threatened with extinction from multiple sources of its own making. And the peril is heightened especially since cowboys are writing a "what can we get away with" foreign policy for the superpower. There is the looming threat of unprecedented crises and possible species extinction on account of the changes in climate and other natural disasters that ongoing industrial revolutions are precipitating. If China and India succeed even half-way in achieving American standards of living, there is assuredly no planet left. Then of course, we may wipe ourselves out through nuclear war, a more distinct possibility today than perhaps at any point during the days of the Cold War, when American enemies could be more precisely located and targeted, and the fear of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) kept the superpowers well-behaved, a predicament which has changed substantially now. Finally, there is the danger of public health catastrophes – not excluding public outbreaks of madness – in a globalized world. All of this raises political temperatures around the globe and makes conflict between and within societies ever more likely. This makes physical security a matter of the highest concern for most people, a fact that governments are always good at manipulating to their political advantage, exaggerating threats as and when necessary for their narrow purposes, often acting on them in order to retain the credibility of threats. This exacerbates the prevailing conflicts further, especially because of the growing speed and precision of technologies of destruction. Propaganda through action, one might call it. [61] To face these crises-ridden times with courage and to make room for fresh hopes and new visions of human freedom, the manifold hypocrisies of the rulers of the world must be repeatedly shown up. Their compassion is selective, their morality cosmetic. Perhaps they should be reminded of a verse from William Blake every time they set about seeking to fix some wrong in an oil-producing nation: ‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: You can't be serious about bringing freedom and prosperity to others while torturing and killing people in your own prisons or letting your own people die in hurricanes. Freedom for the world is already there if America is free. The tragedy of our world is that it is, alas, confusing its power with its freedom. It is this confusion which has to be brought before the public eye for moral intelligence to be provoked and a new world to be sought. Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer from India. He got his doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has taught Economics at US universities in the past. Most recently he taught Philosophy at Nordic College in Norway. He can be reached at aseem62@yahoo.com
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