THE SYSTEM IS
THE PROBLEM
Recent media attention to the
plight of Iraqi prisoners in US custody portrays the brutality of Americans as
exceptional and unique. Sadly, such abuse has a long and tragic history, dating
at least to the Vietnam War when suspected Viet Cong were routinely tortured
with electric shocks and often thrown out of helicopters. Evidence from the
Korean War also indicated US violation of norms of decency—if not international
law. In the prison camp on Koje Island, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett
documented dozens of cases of medical experimentation, tattooing of political
slogans and torture. In the coming weeks and months, as the court martial of
enlisted personnel is covered in world media outlets, the Bush administration’s
attempt to blame small fry for the excesses of empire will be little more than
a smokescreen hiding a much larger problem.
Between the first Gulf War in 1991 and the current rejuvenation of
American-led attempts to reduce the Iraqi people and their oil to instruments
of global capital, the neoliberal war against Iraq has cost well over one
million lives, mainly from the effects of the UN approved embargo but also from
the residual effects of the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium weapons left
behind by the US. Alongside the
current war against Iraq and threat of war against North Korea, Bush and Co.
are today waging wars in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Colombia (where they
are using extensive chemical spraying that affects hundreds of thousands of
innocent farmers and their families); they have armed Israel and permit it to
overrun and destroy Palestinian towns and cities; they are encouraging the
revival of German and Japanese militarism and are attempting to overthrow the
Chavez government in Venezuela; they have clamped a decades-long embargo on
Cuba; they have withdrawn from the International Criminal Court, scrapped the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto protocols, and refused to sign a
new international protocol to the 1972 biological warfare treaty; they seek to
develop new genetic weapons,
miniature nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs (in defiance of international treaties
to which the US is a signatory) and dramatically increased military spending. Most
ominously, Bush and Co. have adopted a new “first-strike” strategic doctrine,
replacing decades of US policies based on “deterrence” and “containment.”
When I say Bush and Co., I do
not refer only to one man and his administration; it is the system that
is the problem. Although American media continually celebrate the distance of
current US policies of those from Nazi Germany, during World War 2, President
George H.W. Bush’s grandfather owned several large corporations that worked for
Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Americans celebrate their distance from German and Japanese fascism, but
immediately after World War 2, US policymakers made Japan and Germany their new
best friends—quickly isolating Russia and, after 1949, China—their former
allies in the struggle against fascism. In West Germany and Japan, US
administrators quickly embraced former fascist operatives, integrating them
into US structures of military and economic control. More recently President
Bush I and co-workers like James Baker have been involved with the Bin Laden
family in the Carlyle group, a
well-connected Washington merchant bank specializing in buyouts of defense and
aerospace companies.
Thus wars in which millions of people have been killed and continue to be
killed should be seen as little more than members of the super-rich jockeying
for world power.
No matter who sits in the
White House, whether George Bush or John Kerry or someone else, militarism has
long been and will surely remain at the center of US foreign policy and
economic development. The U.S. Congress has been little better than Bush: among
other things, it rejected the nuclear test ban treaty signed by 164 nations and
has fully endorsed Bush’s foreign policy on every issue. With Congressional
funding, the U.S. now has over 250,000 troops in 141 countries—and it is seeking
new bases and attempting to install more troops in places like Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan. In Northeast Asia, 100,000 US troops are stationed indefinitely.
Since 1948, the US has spent
more than $15 trillion on the military—more than the cumulative monetary value
of all human-made wealth in the U.S.—more than the value of all airports,
factories, highways, bridges, buildings, machinery, water and sewage systems,
power plants, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels, houses, and automobiles. If we add the current Pentagon budget (over
$346 billion in fiscal 2002) to foreign military aid, veterans’ pensions, the
military portion of NASA, the nuclear weapons budget of the Energy Department and
the interest payments on debt from past military spending, the US spends $670
billion every year on the military—more than a million dollars a minute.
The US military budget is larger than the world’s next 15 biggest spenders
combined, accounting for 36% of global military expenditures. Although the main problem is obviously the
U.S., nearly two-thirds of global military spending today occurs outside the U.S.
Japanese and German militarism are
being revived, while in South Korea the military budget was increased by 12.7% for
2003 to more than $14 billion.
In a phrase, military madness
defines the world today—no matter who sits at the pinnacles of power in
national governments. In the following remarks, I hope to clarify the
historical character of this disease.
The Historical
Pattern of Violence
Beginning in the sixteenth century,
peripheral areas were rapidly assimilated into a capitalist world system based
in Europe. Before they became organized as nation-states, white European
settlers in America committed genocide to steal the land of indigenous peoples.
Besides massacring tens of millions of Native Americans, European colonialists
enslaved tens of millions of Africans to build up their new empires. Estimates
of the number of Africans killed in the slave trade range from 15 to 50
million human beings. From their earliest days, Northern European
settler-colonists practiced biological warfare. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, after
whom towns in Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire are named to this day,
was celebrated because he devised a scheme to rid the land of indigenous people
without risking white lives. He gave Native Americans blankets carrying
smallpox virus, wiping out entire villages under the guise of providing
assistance. In the century after the American Revolution, nearly all native
peoples were systematically butchered and the few survivors compelled to live
on reservations.
Have people in the US
apologized for and renounced such violence? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
Indeed, towns are still named for Amherst, and one of the fanciest restaurants
near prestigious Amherst College is today called the “Lord Jeff.” In a similar
vein, white European settler-colonists purposely wiped out the buffalo, seeking
to deprive native peoples of their primary source of food. Between 1872 and
1874, it is estimated that 3,700,000 buffalo were slaughtered (only 150,000 of
them by Native Americans). From 1874 to 1883, as settler colonialism in the
West intensified, some 8 million buffalo were massacred. Far from feeling
guilty for this form of biological warfare, “Buffalo Bill” staged a “Wild West”
circus-style show for many years, touring not only the East Coast of the US but
also Europe, at times even including the great Lakota/Sioux warrior chief,
Sitting Bull.
In the name of freedom, the US
annexed nearly half of Mexico and slaughtered as many as a million Filipinos,
600,000 on the island of Luzon alone. Between 1898 and 1934 US Marines invaded
Honduras 7 times, Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5, the Dominican Republic 4, Haiti
and Panama twice each, Guatemala once, Mexico 3 times and Colombia 4 times. In
1915, over 50,000 Haitians were killed when U.S. troops mercilessly put down a
peasant rebellion. Marines were
sent to China, Russia, and North Africa—in short, wherever the masters of US
imperialism needed them.
The Killing
Fields of Asia
Lest we forget history, we
must recall that in Asia in the last half century, the US has slaughtered over
8 million people in regional wars so distant from the US mainland that
historians refer to this period as the “Cold” War. In just three years, some five million Koreans perished, the vast
majority of them innocent civilians. Although cities were routinely reduced to
rubble and ash and the US employed biological weapons,
it still will neither admit to nor apologize for these actions. Instead it
moved the killing fields to Indochina, where it used more firepower than had
been used in all previous wars in history combined, killing three million more
human beings and leaving millions more wounded or refugees. Chemical warfare, euphemistically
called Agent Orange, was systematic and deadly: over 20 million gallons of
Agent Orange were sprayed on Vietnam.
For every man, woman and child in South Vietnam, the US dropped more than 1000
pounds of bombs (the equivalent of 700 Hiroshima bombs in total), sprayed a
gallon of Agent Orange, and used 40 pounds of napalm and half a ton of CS gas on
people whose only wrongdoing was to struggle for national independence.
The kill ratio per capita in these two Asian wars was about 1000 times that of
wars in Central America and even higher than for the more than 200 other US
military interventions during the “Cold War.”
To understand these
atrocities, we must look to history. As previously stated, in 1945 Japan and
West Germany were quickly made into new best friends of the US. The wartime
occupation planned for Japan was sent instead to Korea, where at least 100,000
patriots (some say as many as one million) in the southern part of the country
were massacred prior to the official outbreak of war in June 1950. Under the US
military government, a massacre in Jeju began in 1948 that killed upwards of
30,000 people out of a total population of 300,000 (some estimates place the
number of people killed closer to 70,000). When the 14th Regiment
and other members of the South Korean military force organized and armed by the
US mutinied in Yeosu and turned their guns on the US-sponsored regime, Captain
James Hausmann, a US officer, personally led and organized the Rhee
government’s suppression of the insurrection, carrying out reprisals against
the population of Sunchon, Yeosu, Kure and other cites that have yet to be
acknowledged. The killing fields were brought to Jiri Mountain, where official
US military documents complained that the men were too tired from using
bayonets to kill prisoners.
As previously mentioned,
former Nazi and Japanese-collaborators were hired by the United States in both
West Germany and South Korea to help maintain order. Thus Nazi intelligence
service personnel, German rocket scientists, and Japanese experts in biological
warfare became employees of the US government. Of all these men (very few were
women), the most notorious is Colonel Ishii Shiro of Unit 731 of the Japanese
Imperial Army. Although he personally oversaw wartime experimentation with
biological weapons on thousands of prisoners—including American and British
POW’s—Col. Ishii was rewarded for his crimes with amnesty, trips to the US and
during the Korean War to South Korea, and lived the remainder of his life with
honor and prosperity (as did the other members of Unit 731).
In exchange for thousands of slides and dozens of interviews, Col. Ishii and
his fellow war criminals were promised immunity in 1946 by Gen Douglas
MacArthur and granted immunity from prosecution by the government in 1947.
US POW’s were compelled to sign affidavits promising to keep secret their
treatment by Col. Ishii’s unit—including daily injections of germ agents. Boxes
of files detailing Unit 731’s activities were sent back to Japan by the US
military prior to a Congressional investigation. Subsequently, in a “complete
search of HQ files” an aide to MacArthur assured investigators that there was
nothing in the files about Japanese biological warfare.
In fiscal years 1951-1953, the US spent more than $345,000,000.00 on bio-war
research, money that developed weapons used in Korea during the Korean War.
Although the US government denies to this day that it used biological warfare
against North Korea, a mountain of evidence weighs against the US—so much so
that scientist George Wald, a Nobel prize Laureate, concluded in 1979 that the
US had indeed used them.
Less than a week after the
official outbreak of war in Korea, the Earl Stevenson Commission issued a
report advocating biological warfare’s use. During the war the US Air Force
acknowledges that Unit 406 in Yokohama Japan needed 20,000 white mice per
month, and that samples of plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid and dysentery were
available to them. On March 31, 1952, the International Association of
Democratic Lawyers issued a report charging the US with War Crimes in
Korea—including but not limited to biological warfare—and in 1953 an
International Scientific Commission confirmed that biological warfare had been
used.
Moreover, chemical warfare was also employed. According to the New York
Times of August 18, 1952, the US had used five times the amount of napalm
on Korea as had been used in all of World War 2.
As early as 1950 the US
threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, and dams and dikes were
bombed—actions that had been labeled “war crimes” in Nuremberg. The US bombed
cities and killed columns of civilian refugees routinely; as in Iraq today it
abused and tortured prisoners; in short it used all means possible in a vain
attempt to defeat Korean people’s aspirations for independence and
unification—and it continues to do so. From 1976 to 1993, “Operation Team
Spirit” threatened invasion and nuclear war on the DPRK. Every day US planes
capable of dropping nuclear weapons approached the 38th parallel
and, at the last minute, veer off. For people in the DPRK, the possibility of a
US nuclear attack has thus been a daily reality for decades. In the 1980s and
1990s, North Korea reports more than 7900 provocative acts per year, and the US
admits to daily high-altitude surveillance flights over North Korea. Over the
years since the armistice, at least ten US planes, including an EC 121 spy
plane, have been shot down by the DPRK. In March 2003, the US deployed a dozen
B-52 bombers and an equal number of B-1’s to the US Pacific territory of Guam,
within range of the DPRK.
In
South Korea, the US maintains operational control of the country’s military.
Under the SOFA agreement, US troops enjoy immunity from prosecution in Korean
courts, leaving thousands of crimes against Koreans unprosecuted or poorly
adjudicated. In 1980, the US sanctioned the use of elite troops to suppress the
Gwangju People’s Democratic Uprising, resulted in hundreds of deaths.
Has the US apologized for
such actions? Of course not, but less well known is the fact that the US
continues to deny its responsibility for the above actions. In 1958, the
Eisenhower administration even charged three journalists with sedition for
reporting US biological warfare. To most Americans, all of the above events are
forgotten or at best distant history. The obscenity of murder and mayhem
visited upon the world by the United States, however, continues unabated—at the
very moment when US policy-makers plan for even wider wars—in which Asia will
once again be in the crosshairs of US weapons. Like a contagious disease, US
military madness is now a global phenomenon, and East Asia’s importance as a
market for military goods has been increasing dramatically. After the end of
the Cold War, US arms exports rose from $8 billion in 1989 to $40 billion in
1991, and “East Asia’s share of global defence imports by value almost tripled,
from 11.4% to 31.7%. In 1988, only 10% of US arms exports went to the region.
By 1997, this had increased to 25%.”
According to Kim Kook Hun, a Major General and director of the South Korean
Defense Ministry’s arms control bureau, 7 of 17 countries in the world with
nuclear weapons or weapons programs were in the Asia/Pacific region, as were 16
of 28 with missile programs, 10 of 16 with chemical weapons and 8 of 13 with
biological weapons.
With
the revival of Japanese militarism, annual military spending there is now
second only to that of the U.S., amounting to some five trillion yen (about $40
billion). In the name of “peace” and humanitarian aid,” international
deployment movement of its military (banned since 1945) has resumed, and it
threatens to develop nuclear weapons.
The Imperial Crusade
The key recognition here is that
expansion of the capitalist world system is the fundamental dynamic underlying
the military madness and obscene wars of recent history. For two centuries,
progressive thinkers and policy-makers guided by “enlightened” values have
presided over the system’s most successful expansion. Conventional wisdom holds
that increasing core democracy should mean more enlightened policies in the
Third World and improvement in the conditions of life for all human beings, but
evidence abounds for just the opposite. The American and French revolutions helped
propel the nascent world system centered in Europe into a framework of
international domination, concentrating military power in nation-states and
accumulating the world’s wealth in the hands of giant corporations and banks.
The
dynamic of increasing political democracy in the North coinciding with
intensified exploitation in the South has a long history. French colonialists
in Vietnam provided a particularly graphic example when they placed a copy of
the same statue of liberty that France gave to the U.S. (the one now in New
York harbor) atop the pagoda of Le Loi in Hanoi. Le Loi was the national leader
who in 1418 had helped defeat the Mongols when they invaded Vietnam. Today he
is still regarded as a national hero, a man whose mythology includes Hoan Kiem
(Returned Sword) Lake, where the golden turtle that gave him the magical sword
he used to drive the Mongols out subsequently reappeared to reclaim the sword—a
story not unlike that of King Arthur in British folklore. The placing of a statue
of liberty on Le Loi’s pagoda certainly was an affront to the Vietnamese, one
symbolizing how the spatial extension of the principles of the French
Revolution can be brutally offensive to the Third World.
French colonialism was indeed brutal
and deadly: Indochinese recall that dead human beings fertilize each tree in
the country’s vast rubber plantations. During the great war against fascism, French
exploitation of Vietnam was intensified. In a famine from 1944 to 1945, at
least a million and a half and possibly two million Vietnamese starved to death
in the North (where the population was under 14 million), at the very time rice
exports to France were fueling its liquor industry—a blatant disregard for
human life in the midst of the war against “fascism.” In American popular
culture, President John Kennedy is often associated with the word “Camelot” and
remembered for his beautiful wife. Tragically, it was he—one of the most “liberal”
U.S. presidents in history -- who ordered massive use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Similarly, the strongest French imperial expansionists were staunch
anti-clerical “progressives” who regarded themselves as ideological heirs of
the French Revolution. They were “enlightened” liberals, much like John Kennedy
and members of his administration were “enlightened” liberals who believed they
were carrying forth in the tradition of the U.S. revolutionary heritage and
Manifest Destiny.
Under the direct influence of
its great revolution, France proclaimed a crusade against Algerian slavery and anarchy
and, in the name of instituting orderly and civilized conditions, was able to
break up Arab communal fields of villages, including lands untouched by the
“barbarous” and “unenlightened” Ottoman rulers. As long as Moslem Islamic
culture had prevailed, hereditary clan and family lands were inalienable,
making it impossible for the land to be sold.
But after fifty years of enlightened French rule, the large estates had
again appeared and famine made its ugly appearance in Algeria.
In
the name of civilization and liberal democracy, the British destroyed the
communal ownership of village land in India, structures that had sustained
local culture for centuries, a communal tradition surviving invasions by
Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Afghans, Tartars, and Mongols but which could not,
as Fukuyama would insist, resist the perfection of the liberal principles of
the British state. Under British enlightenment, large estates developed and
peasants were turned into sharecroppers. In 1867 the first fruits of British
liberalism appeared: in the Orissa district of India alone, more than one
million people died in a famine. Such
famines were hardly indigenous to India, with its “backward” traditions
(according to European values), but were brought by the “enlightened”
liberalism of European democracy, through the spatial extension of the
principles of “democratic” capitalism.
These references to history
underscore my point that no matter who sits in the White House, the problem is
not the person: it is the system. The best of modern US presidents exemplifies
my point. JFK’s presidency is regarded today as one of optimism and hope, of
peace and prosperity. Yet it was Kennedy who initiated Agent Orange spraying in
Vietnam, thereby putting himself in the same category as Saddam Hussein as
heads of state who have sanctioned the use of chemical warfare. Indeed,
Hussein’s Hallabja massacre pales by comparison: instead of one attack, JFK
continued chemical warfare for years, killing and maiming untold thousands of
people. During the Cuban missile crisis (precipitated by the US invasion at the
Bay of Pigs), JFK took the world to the brink of nuclear disaster as well.
Bush’s nuclear threats on North Korea’s decision to develop a nuclear deterrent
follow in the footsteps of JFK’s bullying of Cuba. While Kennedy enforced the
Monroe Doctrine in the nuclear age, Bush applies it to the whole world.
Civilization or Barbarism?
I have indicated how European
capitalist “civilization”—even its most “enlightened” forms—systematically slaughtered
native peoples and created a centralized world system that demands militarism
as a key organizing principle. If this were simply past history, we could all breathe
a sigh of relief. But these very tendencies are today stronger than ever. According
to the United Nations, in the 1990s more than 100 million children under the
age of five died of unnecessary causes: diarrhea, whooping cough, tetanus,
pneumonia, and measles—diseases easily preventable through cheap vaccines or
simply clean water. UNICEF estimates that up to 30,000 children under the age
of five die of easily preventable diseases every day in the Third World.
Kofi Annan declared in 2001 that as many as 24,000 people starve to death every
day.
Altogether one billion people are chronically malnourished while austerity measures
imposed by the IMF have resulted in a drop in real wages in the Third World and
declining gross national products in many countries. While 70 percent of the
world’s wealth is in the hands of 20 percent of its population, one in ten
human beings suffers starvation and malnutrition.
Despite—or more accurately, because
of—the spatial extension of liberal values in the period after World War II,
there were four times as many deaths from wars in the forty years after
World War II than in the forty years prior to World War II. From 1992 to 2002,
the world’s total income increased by an average of 2.5% per year. Yet the
number of poor increased by 100 million. Of the top 100 biggest economies, 51
are corporations, not countries. The
top 1% of the world has the same income as the bottom 57% and the disparity is
growing. While the
world spends something like a trillion dollars a year on its militaries, one
adult in three cannot read and write, one person in four is hungry, the AIDS
epidemic accelerates and we are destroying the planet’s ecological capacity to
sustain life. The absurdity and tragedy of such a world is made even more
absurd and tragic by the profound ignorance and insensitivity of the wealthiest
planetary citizens regarding the terrible plight of human beings in the periphery.
In such a world, of course, there can be no lasting
peace. As long as the wretched of the earth, those at the margins of the world
system, are dehumanized, branded as terrorists, and kept out of
decision-making, they have no alternative but to carry out insurrection and
wage war in order to find justice. In order to remedy this irrational system, a
crucial task is to redefine what civilization means. We know what it is not for
the billion or more “wretched of the earth” for whom increasing planetary
centralization and dependence upon transnational corporations, militarized
nation-states and the international axis of evil mean living hell. With the
passing of time it becomes more obvious that this same “civilization” squanders
humanity’s wealth, destroys traditional cultures wholesale, and plunders the
planet’s natural resources.
The structural violence of an economic system based
upon short-term profitability is a crisis that all peace and justice movements
will have to address. Even if some of the above irrationalities of the present
system are reduced, the structural contradictions of the system will inevitably
be displaced to other arenas. As long as vast social wealth remains dominated by
the “enlightened” and “rational” principles of efficiency and profitability,
there will be militarism, brutal degradation of human lives and unbridled destruction
of the natural ecosystem—rather than constructive use of humanity’s enormous
social wealth. A few hundred multinational corporations today control this
social wealth through the most undemocratic of means and for ends benefiting
only a small minority. According to the logic of “enlightened” neoliberal
economics, these corporations must either grow or die. Only a fundamental restructuring of the world
system can lead us toward an ecologically viable life-world, one in which we
decentralize and bring under self-management the vast social wealth of
humanity.
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