November follies: pictures of the week / The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World / 'September 1, 1939' ~W.H. Auden
"Can we face it in this
election season? America is a weapons factory, the White
House a war room, and the president the manager of the
neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet."
"If not stopped, it will be a short century."
"Are we stupid yet?"
~Luciana Bohne, at Counterpunch
Can we face it in this election season? America is a
weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the
president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to
recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On
the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the
military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of
America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.
If not stopped, it will be a short century.
Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free
World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to
30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the
earth’s people. In the 19th century, America exterminated
another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding
treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native
populations into concentration camps (“Indian
reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.”
By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the
frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There
was a world to conquer, and America trained its
exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.
American external imperialism was born.
 Then,
something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful
social revolution in Russia, the second major after the
French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the
few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the
world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside
their differences and united to stem the awful threat of
popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded
Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the
counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in
1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended
in a spectacular victory for Moscow.
For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a
civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had
a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror,
disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US
was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a
“the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its
holy writ was international law; its first principle was
the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.
All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid
society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately
selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice
top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in
intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show
trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the
McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with
a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to
prevent independence and unification. It assassinated
African independence leaders and bestowed fascist
dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western
Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation”
in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition
parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort
to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination
in the colonial world.
By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991,
and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last,
the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could
resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s
identity would be regenerated through violence, which had
delivered the American West to the European invaders in
the 19th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came
a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically
exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the
messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s
property on earth could be fulfilled.
The “civilizing mission” was afoot.
 A
cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what
I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a
revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The
Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21st
century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American [jewish supremacist] values
globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and
democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This
frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into
official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11,
but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of
Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on
the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter,
remaking the map of the world into a borderless American
hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty
and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or
humanitarian pretext for use of force.
Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty,
exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to
policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was
induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of
defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment
cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing
Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,”
urged “a new principle of international relations: the
destruction or displacement of groups of people within
states can justify international intervention.” The report
recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must
be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war”
has no authority in international law. The Charter of the
United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it
impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of
sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human
rights. The reason behind the proscription was not
heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been
the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany,
Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other
words.
The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999
Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the
architecture of the post war’s legal order played out
there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration
launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent
for waging war without Security Council clearance of many
to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations.
The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian
genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that
Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian
intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German
minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the
monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security
Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely
to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through
bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler
had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the
Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta
Conference that if the USSR were to join the United
Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to
insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and
a multilateral action.
As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority
for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to
the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the
pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of
PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the
United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go.
In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally
and deliberately destabilized the United Nations,
substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill,
Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of
war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not
the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by
the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a
cynic might add.
 So
now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since
the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist
power answering to no law but its own unilateral,
humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has
spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO
bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for
survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups,
armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped
in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan
languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten
thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote
human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after
twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine,
Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and
humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate
to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are
watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms
after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.
Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious,
and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes
against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has
recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon
claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the
Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula.
Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with
anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight
its own creature? Are we stupid yet?
$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the
War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military
destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one
recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle
East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the
surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic
globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that
virtually abolish the constitution of states, including
our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the
periphery and the entire world is the so-called
“Washington Consensus.”
It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global
neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control
of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option
to poverty and social chaos.
Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of
nations has yielded anything close to a stable,
prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death,
destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees
and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth
in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden
called “the international wrong,” which he named
“imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis
that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces,
and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where
imperialism drives.
 In
this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even
establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both
the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the
end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the
totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic
descent into social brutalization. If none calls this
foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a
sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except,
almost certainly, for the worse. |
| SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one
of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
|
The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World
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