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excerpts from the book
The Clash of Fundamentalisms
by Tarij Ali
Verso Press, 2002, paper
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A short course history of US imperialism
282
As he [Reverend Billy Graham] flanked President Bush at the New
York memorial to honour the [9-11] dead, Reverend Graham informed
the gathering of stars and megastars that he had been deluged
with letters and queries since the events. People wanted him to
explain 'why God had let them hit America'. The preacher's response
was straightforward. He confessed his bewilderment. He told his
flock he had no answer.
p284
In October 1948, President Conant of Harvard University informed
the New York Herald Tribune Forum, that
In the first place, this nation, unlike
most others, has not evolved from a state founded on military
conquest. As a consequence we have nowhere in our tradition the
idea of an aristocracy descended from the conquerors and entitled
to rule by right of birth. On the contrary we have developed our
greatness in a period in which a fluid society overran a rich
and empty continent .
Thinly populated, yes, but empty? In whose
eye? Were the Indian wars not real? Were they phantom struggles?
Or was it that Protestant fundamentalism provided a moral justification
for large-scale theft of land held in common by different native
tribes, as well as the mass murder of 'heathens'? The land on
which Harvard University was built had been taken from Indians
through 'military conquest'. The remapping of North America was
a long process, which has been tracked with great care by the
historian Oliver LaFarge in his classic work, As Long as the Grass
Shall Grow:
The roster of massacres of Indian men,
women and children extends from the Great Swamp Massacre of 1696
in Rhode Island, through the killing of the friendly Christian
Indians in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, when the republic was young,
on through the friendly Arivaipas of Arizona, the winter camp
of the Colorado Cheyennes, to the final dreadful spectacle of
Wounded Knee in the year 1870.
p285
The earliest manifestations of America's imperial destiny became
visible in the nineteenth century, first in relation to Latin
America, later in the Pacific with the conquest of the Philippines
and an early declaration of interest in Japan. Some of the most
effective criticism of the first phase of US empire-building was
to come from an insider, someone whose credentials could not be
challenged by even the most ardent Americophile. This was Major
General Smedley Butler (1888-1940) of the US Marine Corps, described
by General Douglas MacArthur as 'one of the really great generals
in American history' and twice awarded the Medal of Honor. MacArthur's
admiration extended to naming the US base in Okinawa after Butler.
Would Butler have been equally impressed by the Viceroy of Japan
and the defender of the Korean Peninsula? His writings would suggest
the opposite. After he retired from the US army, General Butler
spent some time in reflecting on his career before he concluded:
'Like all members of the military profession, I never had a thought
of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained
in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military service.'
His first book was entitled "War
as a Racket". Its thesis was simple. He was no longer in
favour of offensive wars. He would defend his country, but he
would never again become 'a racketeer for capitalism'. 'War is
just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something
that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only
a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for
the very few at the expense of the masses.' In a speech in 1933,
General Butler expounded his 'anti-American' or proto-Occidentalist
views with remarkable clarity, spelling out the nature of US imperialism
in Latin America:
There isn't a trick in the racketeering
bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger-men'
to point out enemies, its 'muscle-men' to destroy enemies, its
'brain men' to plan war preparations and a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man,
to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent
thirty-three years and four months in active military service
as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine
Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant
to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time
being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street
and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for
capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket
at the time. Now I am sure of it.
I helped make Honduras 'right' for American
fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico,
safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and
Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect
revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American
republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering
is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking
house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. 1 brought light to the Dominican
Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped
to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys
in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it,
I feel that I could have given A1 Capone a few hints. The best
he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated
on three continents.
p286
Thomas Friedman from New York Times Magazine article of 28 March
1999,
For globalization to work, America can't
be afraid to act like the almighty super( power that it is. The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer
of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army,
Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
p292
President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech, January 17, 1961
... This conjunction of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American
experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual
- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the
Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this
development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry
can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that
security and liberty may prosper together.
p294
[In 1989] the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated.
The Cold War came to a sudden end, not with a bang, but a whimper.
The Warsaw Pact ceased to exist. The fall was both sudden and
unexpected. It was not the result of military intervention. The
causes were internal: the political and economic bankruptcy of
the bureaucratic elite that had led the Soviet Union. The last
Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had certainly not intended this
result. He had wanted reforms on every level. He was prepared
to envisage a nuclear-free zone from the Atlantic to the Urals
and hoped for a transition from a statist to a mixed economy on
the model of European social-democracy of the Fifties, assuming
that the West would help in this process. He harboured fatal illusions
about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They let him down.
The predators took over. What happened? In a recent essay the
historian Georgi Derlugian, a former Soviet citizen now resident
in Chicago, who had witnessed the process, reflected on this question:
The Soviet Union was not brought down
from without- the West stood watching in amazement. Nor was it
undermined either from above or below. Rather it imploded from
the middle, fragmenting along the institutional lines of different
bureaucratic turfs. The collapse occurred when mid-ranking bosses
felt threatened by Gorbachev's flakiness as head of the system,
and pressured by newly assertive subordinates beneath them. The
eruptions of 1989 in Eastern Europe provided the demonstration
prod. In the process of disintegration, it was the particularly
cynical apparatchiks of an already decomposed Young Communist
League who led the way In their wake followed the governors of
national republics and Russian provinces, senior bureaucrats of
economic ministries, and section chiefs all the way down to supermarket
managers. As in many declining empires of the past, the basest
servants - emboldened by the incapacitation of emperors and frightened
by impending chaos - rushed to grab the assets that lay nearest
to hand. Mingling with them were nimble interlopers, ranging from
the would-be yuppies to former black marketers and outright gangsters.
The luckiest few in this motley galere would become the celebrity
post-communist tycoons.
p303... the cost of the imported oil ...
makes up 10 per cent of US consumption. The same oil accounts
for one-quarter of European and one-half of Japanese needs.
p303
There are at the moment 187 member states of the United Nations.
The United States has a military presence in 100 countries.
p304
Chalmers Johnson
One of the things this huge military establishment
also does is sell arms to other countries, making the Pentagon
a critical economic agency of a United States government. Militarily
oriented products account for about a quarter of the total U.S.
gross domestic product The government employs some 6,500 people
just to coordinate and administer its arms sales programme in
conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around
the world, who spend most of their 'diplomatic' careers working
as arms salesmen. The Arms Export Control Act requires that the
executive branch notify Congress of foreign military and construction
sales directly negotiated by the Pentagon. Commercial sales valued
at $14 million or more negotiated by the arms industry must also
be reported. Using official Pentagon statistics, between 1990
and 1996 the combination of the three categories amounted to $97,836,821,000.
From this nearly $100 billion figure must be subtracted the $3
billion a year the government offers its foreign customers to
help subsidize arms purchases from the United States.
p311
The fascist triumph in Germany would not have been possible without
the support of big business, which benefited enormously during
the first five years of the Third Reich: profits rose from 6.6
billion marks in 1933 to 15 billion in 1938. The destructive delirium
of fascist ideology was carefully targeted. It never obstructed
the payment of permanent homage to its economic backers. Even
at the height of the war, patriotism was never permitted to deflect
the search for profits. In most cases, the Nazi regime obediently
capitulated.(~A classic example is the detailed negotiations between
the Flick companies and the government on the price of bazooka
shells. The government offered 24 RM per shell. Flick demanded
39.25 RM per shell. Agreement was reached at 37 RM, which meant
an extra gain of more than 1 million marks over the period 1940-3.97)
To dress all new enemies in the black
shirts and leather jackets of European fascism is grotesque. It
is done because it helps the media to project the enemy, but the
credulity of Western citizens has its limits and the Hitler fix
won't work every time. State intellectuals might be better advised
to ponder their own back yard. The democracy they boast of is
ailing. Politics equals concentrated economics. The author of
a recent intellectual biography of Tocqueville concludes thus:
Far from being valued as symbolising an
aspiration towards the democratisation of power and a participatory
society of political equals - democracy as subject - democracy
would come to be regarded by late-modern power elites as an indispensable
yet valuable myth for promoting American political and economic
interests among premodern and post-totalitarian societies. At
home democracy is touted not as self-government by an involved
citizenry but as economic opportunity. Opportunity serves as the
means of implicating the populace in | anti-democracy, in a politico-economic
system characterised by the dominating | power of hierarchical
organisations, widening class differentials, and a society | where
the hereditary element is confined to successive generations of
the defenseless poor.
This is what the fanatical preachers of
neo-liberalism had always intended. When they began their work
in the Sixties and Seventies of the last century they were treated
as a joke by Keynesian liberals, scorned by social-democrats and
kept at a distance by the conservatives. A majority of Marxist
economists did not even deign to take them seriously. But for
a quarter of a century, Von Hayek and his loyal followers ignored
the ridicule and burrowed away underneath the surface, suddenly
to emerge and greet the leaders of the victorious counter-Revolution:
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The combination of neo-liberal
ideas and the social forces represented by the two politicians
transformed the globe.
Hayek was not just the high priest of
hard doctrines at home. He favoured military actions to defend
US interests abroad. On the domestic front he favoured the invisible
magic of a manipulated market. No state intervention against the
interests of capital was to be tolerated. But the state was vital
to undertake military interventions in the sphere of international
relations. The circle of neo-liberals were staunch defenders of
the Vietnam war. They supported the US-backed military coup in
Chile. In 1979, Hayek favoured bombing Tehran. In 1982, during
the Malvinas conflict, he wanted raids on the Argentinian capital.
This was the creed of neo-liberal hegemony most favoured by its
founder.
The cuts in direct taxation, deregulation
of financial markets, weak trades-unions and privatised public
services were necessary to assert the primacy of consumption -
the commodification of all goods and services - which was fuelled
by the private sector. The modified capitalist system now accepted
speculation as a central feature of economic life in the world's
financial markets. The success of the system required that private
capital was permitted to penetrate the social fabric with the
mass marketing of mutual and pension funds.
Having united the Western world on the
necessity to push through neoliberal 'reforms', the American Empire
was to follow through on the need to assert its power globally.
In this it was supported to the hilt by its old Trojan Horse in
the European Union, otherwise the United Kingdom. For many years
now, one of the main priorities of the WTO has been to accelerate
the privatisation of education, health, welfare, social housing
and transport. With the decline of profit-margins in the once
prosperous manufacturing sector, Western capitalism is determined
to force entry into a once inviolate public sphere. Giant multinationals
have been busy preparing competitive tenders to capture the public
services share of the gross domestic product.
In its notorious 1993 development report
titled 'Investing in Health, the World Bank described public services
as an obstacle to abolishing world poverty. There have been important
conflicts between US/Canada and the EU on some of the policies
advocated by the WTO which affect the health and safety of citizens,
but the multinationals are winning. A few years ago in the hormone-treated
beef dispute, the WTO ruled in favour of USA/Canada arguing that
EU safety standards were higher than those accepted internationally.
In a sharply critical review of WTO policies Professor Allyson
Pollock (of the Health Services Research Unit at University College,
London) argued in Lancet, the leading British medical journal,
on 9 December 2000:
. . . the WTO's national treatment rule
was used to define a public-health initiative as protectionist
and therefore potentially illegal ... The new criteria proposed
at the WTO threaten some of the key mechanisms that allow governments
to guarantee / health care for their populations by requiring
governments to demonstrate that | their pursuit of social policy
goals are least restrictive and least costly to trade.
New Labour, like their Thatcherite predecessors,
ever desperate to please the United States and its financial institutions,
are determined to be the first EU state that fulfills all the
WTO conditions. Accordingly, the British public was informed that
the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) would be used to create a
new structure in the public sector. In other words New Labour
declared that it would go further than Thatcher and Major dared
and attempt to complete the Thatcher counter-revolution. The air-traffic
controllers will be sold off to a few wealthy airlines. The railways,
whose privatisation has been a total disaster financially and
has led to the breakdown of safety, will not be taken back into
any form of public ownership. New laws are being passed to make
it possible for any local authority to sell off any school to
private industry. At the moment only those schools considered
to be 'failing' - i.e. not provided with sufficient resources
by the government to teach children from poor families - are handed
over to companies. Among the firms directly engaged in teaching
children of 'failed' schools are Shell Oil (special lessons in
ecology?), British Aerospace (lectures on the arms trade?), McDonalds
(healthy eating?).
France and Germany were moving in the
same direction. Lionel Jospin and Gerhard Schroeder had come to
power repudiating the hard-nosed policies that promoted accumulation
and inequality, but their policies have promoted both of them.
The privatisation carried out by the French Socialists have exceeded
that of the previous six administrations. The German social-democrats
have been more hamstrung, but their trajectory is clear.
As they accommodated to neo-liberal fundamentalism
at home, they accepted its militarist logic abroad. Britain, France
and Germany supported the Third Oil War (1991), the Balkan wars
and the 'war on terrorism'. So keen was Germany to become part
of the new world order that the RedGreen coalition voted through
the re-involvement of the German Republic in military adventures
abroad. The dissident Greens in the Bundestag met privately to
determine how they could register a few votes against, without
threatening the coalition.
It would be illusory to imagine that it
is only the Big Three of the EU who line up as obedient retrievers
on US hunting missions. The Scandinavian states, once respected
throughout the world for their independence, have not wanted to
be left behind. Like obedient poodles they follow the leaders
of the Empire: Norway was proud of its role in creating Palestinian
bantustans, Finland brokered the bombing of Yugoslavia, the Swedish
government has been party to the starvation of Iraq, while Denmark
supplied a Viceroy in Kosovo.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world, a
billion people are undernourished and 7 million children die as
a result of the debt owed by the countries in which they live.
It is this that accounts for the desperation and hatred that :surfaces
in large parts of the world against the United States and its
allies. Senegal was instructed by the IMF mullahs to withdraw
territorial sovereignty from its territorial waters or else its
debt would not be rescheduled. It did so. The result? The factory-trawlers
of Europe have taken the fish for the supermarkets of the EU.
The waters from which the fishermen of 5enegal drew sustenance
for many thousand years have been taken over by the rich West.
The people of this country are suffering because there is now
a shortage of fish. Bolivia was ordered to privatise its water.
The poor were forbidden to collect the rainwater that had accumulated
on their roofs. Water rates became prohibitive. There was a semi-uprising
in the town of Cochabamba as a result and some concessions were
won. The situation in Ghana is virtually the same. Here the poor
have been forced to drink untreated water which has led to disease
and death. The Ivory Coast was compelled to withdraw subsidies
to its cocoa farmers. This led to massive redundancies. Skilled
workers were replaced by indentured children. Two-fifths of the
chocolate drunk and eaten by the West is produced by super-exploited
child labour.
This is the world in which we live - out
of tune with the lucid humanity and the social compassion demanded
by anti-globalisation protesters - and beyond which, write the
intellectual apologists of this system, no substantial improvement
can be imagined. 'Obliterate all political passions', cry the
politicians of the globalised world.
p311
from a biography of Alexis de Tocqueville
Far from being valued as symbolising an
aspiration towards the democratisation of power and a participatory
society of political equals - democracy as subject - democracy
would come to be regarded by late-modern power elites as an indispensable
yet valuable myth for promoting American political and economic
interests among premodern and post-totalitarian societies. At
home democracy is touted not as self-government by an involved
citizenry but as economic opportunity. Opportunity serves as the
means of implicating the populace in | anti-democracy, in a politico-economic
system characterised by the dominating | power of hierarchical
organisations, widening class differentials, and a society | where
the hereditary element is confined to successive generations of
the defenseless poor.
p313
In a review of WTO policies, Professor Allyson Pollock of the
Health Services Research Unit at the University College, London,
in the Lancet, British medical journal, on December 9, 2000:
. . . the WTO's national treatment rule
was used to define a public-health initiative as protectionist
and therefore potentially illegal ... The new criteria proposed
at the WTO threaten some of the key mechanisms that allow governments
to guarantee / health care for their populations by requiring
governments to demonstrate that their pursuit of social policy
goals are least restrictive and least costly to trade.
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