By Myrtha Desulme, Contributor"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
Ephesians 6:12
I AWOKE ON November 3, numb with shock and disappointment.
I could not believe that the American electorate had voted for more war, aggression, arrogance, unilateralism, profiteering, Government-manufactured fear, suppression of civic liberties, murder of innocent civilians, global injustice and exploitation, unconstitutional coups and regime changes, delusions of world domination, and more WMDs (weapons of mass deception).
At the dawning of the 21st century, the United States has taken on the frightful guise of a superpower, drunk on its own hubris, born of unchecked power, careening unbridled towards self-destruction, due to the paradoxical reason that there exists no man-made physical limitations to rein in its most reckless and outrageous excesses.
In the 1960s and 70s, during the Vietnam War, the majority of Americans came to realise that the price of U.S. foreign policy, of its crass inhumanity, was simply too great to bear.
Since the 1980s backlash, which glorified greed and other reactionary ideology, however, Americans seem to have forgotten the values their nation was founded upon. With this last election, we have witnessed in the U.S., a fatal blow to idealism.
ECONOMIC AND MILITARY DOMINATION
There is a French saying that 'A people who has lost the power of indignation, is well on its way towards its own demise.'
If Martin Luther King Jr. were around, he would have to remind them that 'justice is indivisible; injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere'.
The 1991 collapse of the USSR established the U.S. as the only world superpower. Never in human history had a single country enjoyed such a crushing economic and military domination.
In that same year, Papa Bush, the then President of the U.S., made his famous 'New World Order' speech. In the build-up to the Gulf War, the main imperialist power on earth, promised a world without wars, without dictatorships and, of course, a world firmly under the control of a single all-powerful world policeman the U.S.
After the fall of Stalinism, U.S. imperialism believed that the world should be under its absolute command, and that it should dictate the destiny of each and every country. All conflicts in the world were to be resolved through a kind of 'Pax Americana'.
'BECAUSE I COULD'
In a 60 Minutes television interview with Dan Rather, Bill Clinton was asked what ultimately drove him to have an affair with a 20-year-old intern.
The only reason which the 42nd President of the U.S., former leader of the free world, could come up with, was: "Because I could."
Likewise, George W. Bush invaded and ravaged Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, "because he could", which even Clinton has admitted, is the most morally indefensible reason for doing anything.
He has declared his authority to wage war at will, without the approval of the United Nations. He has created a series of implosions by removing entrenched governments, effecting regime changes, installing puppet leaderships, (even
placing a former CIA operative in control of Iraq), and ensuring economic dependence, in all of these countries.
And he has only just begun. Like a predatory beast, he scopes the planet for his next victim. For, in the words of a famous Roman senator: 'What would Rome be without its enemies?'
On January 29, 2002, George W. Bush delivered his first State of the Union address after September 11.
In an echo of President Reagan's 'evil empire' designation of the Soviet Union, he declared that "Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their terrorist allies", constituted "an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world", thereby signaling his next targets after Afghanistan.
FABRICATION
According to Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, director of the Center for Research on Globalisation and the author of the international best-seller The Globalization of Poverty, the so-called 'war on terror' is a complete fabrication, based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the US$30 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus.
In War and Globalisation: The Truth behind 9/11, Chossudovsky asserts: "The "war on terror" is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the "New World Order", dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 was the moment the Bush Administration had been waiting for, the so-called "useful crisis", which provided a pretext for waging a war without borders. The hidden agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire right around the world, to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control outside the U.S., and a police state on the inside."
Chossudovsky peels back the layers of rhetoric to reveal a huge hoax a complex web of deceit, aimed at tricking the American people and the rest of the world, into accepting a military solution, which threatens the future of humanity. (Michel Chossudovsky is the 2003 recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity, Berlin, Germany).
SPONSORING DEMOCRACY
One of the greatest myths of all times, is that the U.S. seeks to uphold democracy in the world. For more than a century, U.S. foreign policy has been to support repressive military dictatorships, in the context of the "containment" of the Soviet Union, sponsoring coups d'etats whenever necessary.
The U.S. view is that a leader of any particular Third World country, should be completely subservient and dependent on its good graces, and not on a popular base.
Noam Chomsky, professor and chair of modern languages and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a renowned political writer, who was once described in the New York Times Book Review as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," states in his eye-opening book: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism The Political Economy of Human Rights that "The fundamental belief, or ideological pretense, is that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective."
The basic fact is that the U.S. has organised under its sponsorship and protection, a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror, and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.
Whatever the attitudes of the U.S. leadership toward freedom at home and as noted, this is highly ambiguous systematic policies toward Third World countries make it evident that the alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy.
The operative principle has been and remains economic freedom meaning freedom for U.S. business to invest, sell, and repatriate profits and its two basic requisites a favorable investment climate and a specific form of stability. Since these primary values are disturbed by unruly students, democratic processes, peasant organisations, a free press, and free labour unions, "economic freedom" has often required political servitude.
Respect for the rights of the individual, also alleged to be one of the cardinal values of the West, has had little place in the operating procedures applied to the Third World. Since a favorable investment climate and stability quite often require repression, the U.S. has supplied the tools and training for interrogation and torture, and is thoroughly implicated in the vast expansion of torture since the 1970s.
OFFICIAL VIOLENCE
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism". These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups.
Wholesale official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether.
Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation", "protective reaction" etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse.
The 'development' model applied by the partners (U.S. and its client state's leadership), is so blatantly exploitative, that it has required terror and the threat of terror to assure the requisite passivity.
Latin American church documents point out with pungency how the chosen model of "development" "provokes a revolution which did not exist", and necessitates a national security state, (constant state of martial law), because its brutalities would elicit such indignation, that the only solution has been to impose absolute silence."
The ruthless over-exploitation of the Third World, intensified after the collapse of Stalinism, has meant an enormous transfer of wealth from these countries to the coffers of the big multinational companies and banks.
This can be seen in the debt burden, which has reached such proportions that the major organisations clamouring for debt relief warn that we are headed for a global economic meltdown, as our unsustainable modern global economy is a pyramid bank scheme waiting to collapse.
For every US$1 they receive in aid, Third World countries pay back an average US$11 dollars in debt servicing. In 1994, the less developed countries paid out US$112 billion more than they received.
George W. has now nominated one of his lackeys as the new secretary of state. It is hard to imagine Condoleezza Rice standing up to George W. in a disagreement, or even having an independent opinion, for that matter.
One can only hope that as one of the highest ranking diplomats in the world, she will learn to be a little more diplomatic than she was when, as national security adviser, she tried to browbeat the Jamaican administration over its acceptance of Aristide for a temporary stay. The Caribbean must brace itself for more attempts at coercion and intimidation.
CASE OF HAITI
The case of Haiti, and its kidnapped president, transcends Haiti and Jean-Bertand Aristide. Haiti has become the crucible for everything which is wrong with the North-South dialogue.
Just as France's coercion of Haiti to pay a crippling and odious indemnity in exchange for recognition of the independence which it had won through blood and valour, became the basis for an economic re-enslavement of Haiti, which was used as a model throughout the Third World, so Haiti has become a blueprint for privatisation and policy-based lending.
That blueprint can be seen across the globe, in countries which have been forced to accept loans at the expense of decision-making and self-determination. Loans are not only being paid with interest; they are lent with the demand of lowered tariffs and foreign control of natural resources.
Under the banner of "globalisation" and "opening up of the markets", imperialism has forced through a policy of lowering of the tariff barriers, and privatisation of utilities throughout the Third World.
These policies are a result of the crisis of capitalism in the West, which forces it to constantly have to look for new markets and fields of investment. But they spell bankruptcy for the local industries of the countries affected, which cannot compete unaided against the big multinationals. Effecting the fundamental and radical changes, which are needed to get our economies out of the clutches of the U.S., the Western powers and their multilateral lending agencies, must become our priority and focus in this age of
dwindling sovereignty.
