From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: The New Ideology of Imperialism, by John Pilger
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 15:42:07 +1300



Subject: The New Ideology of Imperialism

The New Statesman (London) 15 October, 2001

A war in the American tradition
By John Pilger

The ultimate goal of the attacks on Afghanistan is not the capture of a
fanatic,
but the acceleration of western power.

 =====
The Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan crosses new boundaries. It means
that
America's economic wars are now backed by the perpetual threat of military
attack
on any country, without legal pretence. It is also the first to endanger
populations
at home. The ultimate goal is not the capture of a fanatic, which would be
no
more than a media circus, but the acceleration of western imperial power.
That
is a truth the modern imperialists and their fellow travellers will not
spell
out, and which the public in the west, now exposed to a full-scale jihad,
has
the right to know.

In his zeal, Tony Blair has come closer to an announcement of real
intentions
than any British leader since Anthony Eden. Not simply the handmaiden of
Washington,
Blair, in the Victorian verbosity of his extraordinary speech to the Labour
Party conference, puts us on notice that imperialism's return journey to
respectability
is well under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision of a better
world for "the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those
living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums
of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan". Hark, his unctuous concern
for
the "human rights of the suffering women of Afghanistan" as he colludes in
bombing
them and preventing food reaching their starving children.

Is all this a dark joke? Far from it; as Frank Furedi reminds us in the New
Ideology of Imperialism, it is not long ago "that the moral claims of
imperialism
were seldom questioned in the west. Imperialism and the global expansion of
the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a
major
contributor to human civilisation". The quest went wrong when it was clear
that
fascism, with all its ideas of racial and cultural superiority, was
imperialism,
too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best Stalinist
tradition,
imperialism no longer existed.

Since the end of the cold war, a new opportunity has arisen. The economic
and
political crises in the developing world, largely the result of imperialism,
such as the blood-letting in the Middle East and the destruction of
commodity
markets in Africa, now serve as retrospective justification for imperialism.
Although the word remains unspeakable, the western intelligentsia,
conservatives
and liberals alike, today boldly echo Bush and Blair's preferred euphemism,
"civilisation". Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and the former
liberal
editor Harold Evans share a word whose true meaning relies on a comparison
with
those who are uncivilised, inferior and might challenge the "values"of the
west,
specifically its God-given right to control and plunder the uncivilised.

If there was any doubt that the World Trade Center attacks were the direct
result
of the ravages of imperialism, Osama Bin Laden, a mutant of imperialism,
dispelled
it in his videotaped diatribe about Palestine, Iraq and the end of America's
inviolacy. Alas, he said nothing about hating modernity and miniskirts, the
explanation of those intoxicated and neutered by the supercult of
Americanism.
An accounting of the sheer scale and continuity and consequences of American
imperial violence is our elite's most enduring taboo. Contrary to myth, even
the homicidal invasion of Vietnam was regarded by its tactical critics as a
"noble cause" into which the United States "stumbled" and became "bogged
down".
Hollywood has long purged the truth of that atrocity, just as it has shaped,
for many of us, the way we perceive contemporary history and the rest of
humanity.
And now that much of the news itself is Hollywood-inspired, amplified by
amazing
technology and with its internalised mission to minimise western
culpability,
it is hardly surprising that many today do not see the trail of blood.

How very appropriate that the bombing of Afghanistan is being conducted, in
part, by the same B52 bombers that destroyed much of Indochina 30 years ago.
In Cambodia alone, 600,000 people died beneath American bombs, providing the
catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, as CIA files make clear. Once again,
newsreaders
refer to Diego Garcia without explanation. It is where the B52s refuel.
Thirty-five
years ago, in high secrecy and in defiance of the United Nations, the
British
government of Harold Wilson expelled the entire population of the island of
Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in order to hand it to the Americans in
perpetuity
as a nuclear arms dump and a base from which its long-range bombers could
police
the Middle East. Until the islanders finally won a high court action last
year,
almost nothing about their imperial dispossession appeared in the British
media.


How appropriate that John Negroponte is Bush's ambassador at the United
Nations.
This week, he delivered America's threat to the world that it may "require"
to attack more and more countries. As US ambassador to Honduras in the early
1980s, Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regime's death squads,
known
as Battalion 316, that wiped out the democratic opposition, while the CIA
ran
its "contra" war of terror against neighbouring Nicaragua. Murdering
teachers
and slitting the throats of midwives were a speciality. This was typical of
the terrorism that Latin America has long suffered, with its principal
torturers
and tyrants trained and financed by the great warrior against "global
terrorism",
which probably harbours more terrorists and assassins in Florida than any
country
on earth.

The unread news today is that the "war against terrorism" is being exploited
in order to achieve objectives that consolidate American power. These
include:
the bribing and subjugation of corrupt and vulnerable governments in former
Soviet central Asia, crucial for American expansion in the region and
exploitation
of the last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world; Nato's occupation
of Macedonia, marking a final stage in its colonial odyssey in the Balkans;
the expansion of the American arms industry; and the speeding up of trade
liberalisation.


What did Blair mean when, in Brighton, he offered the poor "access to our
markets
so that we practise the free trade that we are so fond of preaching"? He was
feigning empathy for most of humanity's sense of grievance and anger: of
"feeling
left out". So, as the bombs fall, "more inclusion", as the World Trade
Organisation
puts it, is being offered the poor - that is, more privatisation, more
structural
adjustment, more theft of resources and markets, more destruction of
tariffs.
On Monday, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Patricia Hewitt,
called
a meeting of the voluntary aid agencies to tell them that, "since 11
September,
the case is now overwhelming" for the poor to be given "more trade
liberation".
She might have used the example of those impoverished countries where her
cabinet
colleague Clare Short's ironically named Department for International
Development
backs rapacious privatisation campaigns on behalf of British multinational
companies,
such as those vying to make a killing in a resource as precious as water.


Bush and Blair claim to have "world opinion with us". No, they have elites
with
them, each with their own agenda: such as Vladimir Putin's crushing of
Chechnya,
now permissible, and China's rounding up of its dissidents, now permissible.
Moreover, with every bomb that falls on Afghanistan and perhaps Iraq to
come,
Islamic and Arab militancy will grow and draw the battle lines of "a clash
of
civilisations" that fanatics on both sides have long wanted. In societies
represented
to us only in caricature, the west's double standards are now understood so
clearly that they overwhelm, tragically, the solidarity that ordinary people
everywhere felt with the victims of 11 September.

That, and his contribution to the re-emergence of xeno-racism in Britain, is
the messianic Blair's singular achievement. His effete, bellicose
certainties
represent a political and media elite that has never known war. The public,
in contrast, has given him no mandate to kill innocent people, such as those
Afghans who risked their lives to clear landmines, killed in their beds by
American
bombs. These acts of murder place Bush and Blair on the same level as those
who arranged and incited the twin towers murders. Perhaps never has a prime
minister been so out of step with the public mood, which is uneasy, worried
and measured about what should be done. Gallup finds that 82 per cent say
"military
action should only be taken after the identity of the perpetrators was
clearly
established, even if this process took several months to accomplish".

Among those elite members paid and trusted to speak out, there is a lot of
silence.
Where are those in parliament who once made their names speaking out, and
now
shame themselves by saying nothing? Where are the voices of protest from
"civil
society", especially those who run the increasingly corporatised aid
agencies
and take the government's handouts and often its line, then declare their
"non-political"
status when their outspokenness on behalf of the impoverished and bombed
might
save lives? The tireless Chris Buckley of Christian Aid, and a few others,
are
honourably excepted. Where are those proponents of academic freedom and
political
independence, surely one of the jewels of western "civilisation"? Years of
promoting
the jargon of "liberal realism" and misrepresenting imperialism as crisis
management,
rather than the cause of the crisis, have taken their toll. Speaking up for
international law and the proper pursuit of justice, even diplomacy, and
against
our terrorism might not be good for one's career. Or as Voltaire put it: "It
is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." That does not change
the fact that it is right.

 =====================
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