03.24.07
Posted in Theory, Current Events at 1:24 am by diantus
The world is a really big place. This, as an American is an easy thing to forget. For the most recent parts of our history, we have understood our culture and our way of life as being the most developed in all of human history. How it became that way is a long and troublesome tale however. What has been the cost of our ascension?   What of the victims and that prop our red white and blue pagoda over the rest of the world.
A simple examination of statistics underscores the lie that we are the center of it all. After all, a small percentage of the world actually lives in the United States. By and large, our literacy and educational rates are simply atrocious, and much of the world knows us far better than we know them.
Take Korea for example. This small nation is home to 65 million people with a distinct language, culture, and society that can (at times) be strikingly alien. It is also the temporary home of almost 100,000 American military personnel and is a viciously bisected by an imposed border.  North Korea is the most closed and poorly understood nation on the planet. Their southern neighbors, brothers and sisters really, are a staunch American ally who owes their very existence to the ongoing role of American soldiers and diplomats.
The cost of course, has been high. After a half century of colonialism at the hands of the Japanese, the country was turned into a semi colony of the United States. Civil war followed, but not one as we understand it. Rather than run the risk of a communist peninsula, the US intervened and help ROK forces drive the North Koreans back to the other side of the 38th parallel – a division for which there was no historical precedent. In exchange, America was guilty of providing aid and comfort to a string of dictators and brutal rulers who controlled the country through a combination of force and terror. What might have happened had we not intervened is a captivating exercise in historical speculation. Moreover, can we easily accept the idea the North Korea would have become nearly so isolated in the absence of US pressure?
Koreans today are coming to understand the role of their savior nation in propping these right wing dictators and secret police forces. The ROK government regularly tortured citizens and persecuted intellectuals who were in any way critical of these arrangements or their leaders, while making sure that the Americans were given a free hand in economic affairs. Freedom in South Korea was wrenched from the jaws of militarism and dictatorship at great cost, and they remember. Korea will be healing old wounds for decades, and America was complicit in innumerable crimes against her people.
Political freedom is a new thing for the average Korean. After all, the last known victim of governmental brutality was tortured for just over a week in a semi-secret facility in Seoul in 1996. While every aspect of daily life in Korea has changed in the last 50 years, political freedom is brand new, and they are still learning how to cope with it. This is America’s legacy here. An entire nation stands divided, and whole people have been denied that ability to try and understand their role in the world, and those responsible were defended and protected by a nation whose population is barely aware the place exists. And Korea had it pretty good in comparison.
It would be best not to dwell on Columbia, the largest recipient of US military aid in the world, where and ongoing war against communist rebels and their cocaine growing backers has left it one of the most dangerous places in the world. It is a hell in which death squads brutalize the population and a tyrannical right wing regime is kept in power by a potent US military machine. It has been thus for decades. Again, this is the price that Americans are extracting for their hegemony.
Time and again we have funded death squads, supported the armies of unpopular regimes, and suppressed democracy whenever our interests in a place were threatened. When the nation of Turkey declined our military access to Turkish soil for our invasion of Iraq in accord with the wishes of over 90 percent of the Turkish population, we claimed that their government was weak and unable to control the impulses of the masses. This of course is a common accusation leveled against democracies that actually obey the mandates of their people. Turkey was also ruled by a military government that was largely under America’s thumb for many years until they too claimed independence for themselves – from us - owing largely to their interest in integrating into the EU
American foreign policy has done a poor job of promoting freedom. Our requisite is that our businesses be allowed free access and that countries ensure that preferential treatment be given to our investors. Moreover, it is desperately important that they agree with us, and follow our lead whenever we embark on some crazy misadventure. In this way, America has been complicit in more crimes against more people, and the real crime is that most Americans have no idea at all – because we are not being told.
Our planners assume that the standards we hold our enemies too simply do not apply to us. Once you realize that the simple biggest sponsor of global terrorism is the US, you begin to question our current venture in the Middle East. So many people have died with American support, if not outright assistance, that our leaders could easily and justifiably call down a spate of reprisals from a hundred different nations. Fortunately, not many nations seem to be as ethically flexible as Americans. Our foreign policy has a great deal of “because we can†built into it. To bad then that the US public is kept in the dark about what happens in so much of the world. Rest assured my friends, there are people across the ocean, and we owe them the same respect we show our own neighbors, friends, and allies. Just because someone does something you don’t like, you don’t kill them and their family. Talking can be a great alternative to bombs.
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03.15.07
Posted in Theory, Politics at 4:14 pm by diantus
When one takes a moment to examine the history of the short and tragic twentieth century, there is a tendency to allow ourselves a certain moral and theoretical flexibility. This was, after all a century of unprecedented development and violence. It was a time during which each day seemed to be a fight our continued survival as a species and the pitting of two vast and opposing ideological forces. One the one side, there was America; the symbol of freedom and democracy, and on the other, the great and terrible Soviet Empire with its unrelenting aim of global domination and control.
When we look deeper we begin to unravel the strands of a highly nuanced conflict with a history rooted in traditions and beliefs that go back even further. At the start of this conflict, the Soviets represented something far more terrible than tyranny and control – they were pursuing an alternative and a dream. The idea was that the massive productive capacities of a capitalist system of production could be harnessed to create a more equitable and balanced world. It was to be one in which each person was given worth that went beyond their place in an assembly line and a fair stake in their society.
The United States and its allies in this context represented an older world order. This was an order in which the losers far out numbered the winners and their stake grew ever smaller. The intense competition between the forces of capital culminated in the First World War: a conflict the likes of which the world had never before seen. Everything that modern systems of economic development had created was poured into the conflagration. Millions died, cities were simply leveled, and an entire generation in the west was stripped of its history and lost something of its humanity. When the Russian revolution ushered in the era of the cold war, it offered a real alternative. Had the pessimism and fear of the old world not stood so staunchly opposed to what Sovietism had sought to achive, maybe that grand experiment could have gone in a different, more humanitarian direction.
Instead, this new idea was locked from international recognition, bullied, battled, and eventually driven into something of a forced exile. Little wonder that it steeled itself against its neighbors and became a cruel barracks state, existing only to preserve itself by a conflict that looked increasingly inevitable.
Meanwhile, the west looked over the desolation of Flanders and marched stoically forward. Here, the old order was to remain untouched, and its desperate battle crested again when German troops stormed across France once more. Beyond the Nazi threat, they were seeking something that had been lost in the last war. Nazism was again, like Bolshevism, a rejection of the old order. It was a battle cry raised against an unfair system that defended the ensconced and glorified the greedy.
Of course, Nazism was crushed, and only a lunatic or monster would ever suggest that it shouldn’t have been. It was a xenophobic and aggressive theology. But the appeal of change was there, buried behind that flags, parades, and anti-Semitism. Hitler sought to build a new empire on the back of the old order, much as Lenin had two decades before. He talked about it until he finally took his own life.
Following the defeat of the Nazi regime, the world sat divided. On the one hand was the economic imperialism of the United States, a system that wallowed in reactionary thinking clothed in Wilsonian Idealism. The world that they were struggling to reclaim was that of the 18th century, when the whole world was the marketplace of western products. Of course, now the game was played through foreign investment and outsourcing, but it was, nevertheless, the same order that historians still refer to as the Gilded Age. - call it mercantilism without borders. It was still about nurturing dependency and economic domination.
The Soviet Union wasted no time in degenerating into a bloc of nations devoted to political domination, and while it still posed as the alternative, its goals and ambitions were much the same – to control as much of the globe as possible in the service of the Soviets. Really though, in their case, geography and ironed willed megalomania were tools of survival, not simply oppression. There was no room in the world for countries and institutions that sought of opt out. Global economics requires that everyone involved accept their fate and their lot.
Of course, the Soviet experiment failed and floundered under its underdeveloped civil society and over ambitious military budget. There was simply no way for a command economy to outperform the more flexible capitalist model. People still need to feel that their efforts mean something and to attempt to act rationally in the face of their daily lives. But this collapse has left us with a bit of a problem that we are, almost twenty years later, still faced with. What do we do next?
If we understand this version of history to be the tale of revolution and reaction, struggles for control, and economic development, we are back to square one – albeit with color TV’s and nuclear weapons. The rise of Islamic extremism certainly points to the continued existence of a desire for alternative social and economic paths of development, and not the standard one-size-fits-all approach that we, Americans especially, cling to. While there is a liberating impulse that drives these movements in the Middle East, they are certainly socially reactionary and therefore unsuited to the goal of liberation and individual freedom (as we understand it in the west).
The United States, of course, can offer nothing new to the world. At long last, that country now teeters on the top of the pile, and its careful economic subterfuge has created a world in which American businesses are the biggest and most powerful in the world, while the average American can look forward to a life of toil and declining standards of living. The business class has finally taken control of everything, and government is its willing and anxious tool.
It falls to us then, the little people of the world to fight back. The leviathan of global capitalism is lolling about on its back enjoying its day in the sun, and we still absent mindedly assume that we are a benefiting part of it. Even while we watch our governments strip away freedoms and pursue phantom crusades and slaughter hundreds of thousands in order to wrest open the last remaining economic barriers to FDI and capital accumulation, we still dither about and struggle to figure out why we are still not free – why, with all of our wealth and unimaginable power we are resented and feared around the world. The truth is, after a century of unending struggle, most places are still denied the most basic freedoms that we are assured daily that we possess - freedoms like those to choose our leaders; freedoms like those to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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