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From: "Wyles, Margaret" <•••@••.•••>
To: "'•••@••.•••'" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: In the end, it's an old story after all......
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 11:10:53 -0800
[Workers World News Service]
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 27, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Globalization, militarism & the U.S./NATO war against
Yugoslavia
By Richard Becker
International Action Center
San Francisco
Excerpts from a speech at the No to WTO/People's
Assembly, Seattle
Nov. 28, 1999
The world's attention this week is on Seattle, the World
Trade Organization, and the struggle against what has
become one of the buzzwords of the 1990s,
"globalization." But what is "globalization"? Is it a
new phenomenon? I'd like to read a few words from a
pamphlet written more than 150 years ago.
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its
products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere ... . The
bourgeoisie, through its exploitation of the world
market, gives a cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country. ...
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
a bourgeois mode of production. It compels them to
introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,
in other words to become bourgeois themselves . . . In a
word, it creates a world after its own image."
Those words are from the most popular and widely
translated work ever written, "The Communist Manifesto."
It shows that globalization is not new.
Our definition of imperialist globalization is the
process of breaking down all barriers to the free
movement of capital and its right to freely exploit the
resources and labor of all countries.
Some in the left have misunderstood this to mean that
capital has become denationalized. There was a theory in
the early 1990s of "global mobile capital," that capital
had become detached from its national roots. This is
like an old theory called ultra-imperialism. It's a
false theory that conveniently--and not
coincidentally--relieves its proponents of the need to
fight against their own ruling class.
It allows some on the right, and the social-democratic
left as well, to argue that the U.S. capitalists have
become unpatriotic--as if at some point they were
patriotic to anything besides profits.
U.S. capital in driver's seat
The Pentagon, the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines
do not exist to defend capital in the abstract or in the
general sense. They exist to protect and serve U.S.
capital--not only to extend and maintain its domination
in what used to be called the Third World, the oppressed
countries, but also vis-a-vis its imperialist allies and
rivals. The domination of U.S. capital is the overall
strategic objective of U.S. policy.
Maximization of profit is, of course, what drives the
system. But maintaining U.S. hegemony is the guiding
principle of U. S. strategic doctrine. Globalization
yes, but globalization with U.S. capital in the driver's
seat.
How does all this relate to the U.S./ NATO war against
Yugoslavia? What is the relation ship between
globalization and militarism?
Ten years ago, neither Yugoslavia nor Iraq would have
seemed likely targets of U.S. military attack. Both are
key countries in key strategic regions.
While the United States had been fiercely hostile to
both of them after their respective
revolutions--Yugoslavia in 1945, and Iraq in 1958--it
seemed to change over the years. Ten years ago the U.S.
policy toward both countries was officially friendly.
In 1990 and 1991 however, all this friendliness suddenly
evaporated. The benign mask dropped away, revealing the
true face of U.S. policy. The U.S. rulers proceeded to
first demonize and then to devastate both
countries--tearing one to pieces, and inflicting on the
other a human-made famine and deadly epidemics.
Both the Yugoslav and Iraqi people have suffered immense
human, productive and cultural losses. Both were
subjected to nearly a decade of war, blockade and
subversion. Today the U.S. government's official policy
toward both countries is called "regime change." The
imperialists are continuing their aggression against
both countries.
What happened to bring about such a cataclysmic change?
Was there a dramatic change in the government of either
country? No, those governments are basically the same
today. Did they change their basic orientation? No, not
at all. Did either one of them menace the United States?
No, neither is in a position to do so.
The real change that took place was inside neither Iraq
nor Yugoslavia.
What happened was a sharp change in the balance of
forces in the world brought about by the disintegration
and then collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist
bloc in Europe in the period of 1989 to 91.
Imperialism's friendliness toward Iraq and Yugoslavia
lasted exactly as long as the existence of the socialist
camp.
First the governments in the newly reunified Germany and
subsequently Britain, France, Italy and above all the
United States set out to carve up the Yugoslav
Federation, fanning the flames of chauvinism while
arming the most reactionary nationalist elements within
that country.
U.S./NATO role
destroying Yugoslavia
The destruction of Yugoslavia with its extremely diverse
and intermingled population required a bloody civil war.
The imperialists were only too glad to do everything
they could to make the civil war as atrocious and brutal
as possible. The United States and the other NATO powers
used an integrated, economic, military and diplomatic
strategy to destroy the former Yugoslavia.
The economic austerity plan implemented by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the
1980s played a major role in heightening the tensions
between the different republics and provinces of
Yugoslavia that had different standards of living,
within the federal state.
The threat of trade sanctions and other penalties was
used to support the secessionist movements in Yugoslavia
in 1991 and 1992. Economic sanctions--a total blockade
of the country that was based on the sanctions
implemented two years earlier against Iraq--were brought
to bear on Yugoslavia in 1992 and imposed until 1996.
Both the U.S. and German regimes, but increasingly the
U.S., armed, funded and trained the Croatian and Bosnian
military. Washington insisted that NATO must carry out
the bombing of Bosnia in the summer of 1995. Meanwhile
the U.S.- retrained-and-led Croatian army ethnically
cleansed half a million Serbs from the Krajina region of
Croatia where they had lived for many centuries.
This was the integrated strategy. The combination of
sanctions, blockade, economic and financial measures,
NATO bombing and U.S. intervention forced the Yugoslav
government to sign the Dayton Accords in 1995.
And 1999 brought a new round of war--a massive 78-day
bombing campaign by NATO, led by the Pentagon, and then
new economic sanctions, which exist today. Washington
justifies this policy by claiming it was standing up for
human rights!
U.S. capitalism grew wealthy largely through the
exploitation of millions of people who were enslaved,
carried out the greatest ethnic cleansing in history on
this continent by clearing out the Native inhabitants,
and put its nation together by war and conquest. What
right do U.S. rulers have to speak to any people
anywhere in the world about human rights? None.
Washington's goals in Balkans war
Washington and NATO launched a war against Yugoslavia
for the same reasons the U.S. army invaded Cuba, Puerto
Rico and the Philippines in 1898. They want to subject
Central and Eastern Europe to a new form of colonial
domination. They don't care about the lives of any of
the peoples of Yugoslavia any more than they cared about
the rights of workers and farmers in Cuba or Puerto Rico
or the Philippines a hundred years ago.
Just since World War II, Washington has fought the
Korean War; overthrown the elected governments of
Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Indonesia; fought wars against
the people of Central America; invaded Leban on; carried
out a genocidal war in Indo china, in which millions of
Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and more than 50,000
U.S. troops died; and enforced an economic block ade
against Iraq that has taken the lives of more than a
million and a half people, half of them children under
the age of 5.
Given this horrific and bloody record, are we to believe
President Clinton or Madeline Albright or Gen. Wesley
Clark on certain days wake up in the morning and say,
"Human rights are being threatened somewhere in the
world--we must act!" No, of course not; it's ludicrous
to think so.
The real objective of the war on Yugoslavia is to
re-balkanize the Balkans--to break up Yugoslavia into
small, easily controllable and digestible pieces, in
order to insure U.S./NATO, and especially U.S.,
domination of this key strategic region.
While 10 years ago it had none, today the United States
has military bases in Albania, Macedonia, Hungary,
Bosnia and Croatia. Washington and its NATO partners
have cut up Kosovo into little pieces, occupation zones.
I want to read a quote from Thomas Friedman, who writes
for the New York Times--a thoroughly despicable
individual who is now held up as the highest example of
U.S. journalism. Friedman wrote approvingly on March 28,
1999:
"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to
act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden
hand of the market will never work without a hidden
fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without
McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the
hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technology is called the United States Army,
Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
New U.S. military buildup
A new military buildup is already under way, despite the
fact that the United States today already spends more on
its military that the rest of the UN Security Council
combined. Having spent $19 trillion since 1940 on the
military, the U.S. government proposes to spend an
additional $1.2 trillion in the next four years.
The purpose of this military buildup is to provide
security for corporate America's far-flung empire. It is
part of the globalization strategy.
It is also designed to assure that U.S. capital is
pre-eminent over all others. This was laid out in a
Pentagon "White Paper" publicized in March 1992, soon
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, called the
Defense Planning Guidance Document. It stated
forthrightly that the top U.S. aim in the post-Soviet
era should be to prevent any potential rival from even
considering the possibility of trying to achieve
competitive balance with the United States.
U.S. military superiority is the key to U.S. imperialist
global economic domination. The United States does not
have superiority over its rivals just by virtue of its
economic system and technology. But what it does have is
this vast military apparatus to implement its will.
There are many in the anti-war movement who were deluded
into thinking that the demise of the Soviet Union and
the end of the Warsaw Pact would usher in a new era of
peace and demilitarization. Those who held this hope did
not understand that imperialism is still imperialism.
And the imperialist leaders, instead of thinking about
peace, saw the changed relationship of forces in the
world as a new opportunity to secure domination over key
markets, labor and resources.
Instead of becoming more peaceful, they became more
aggressive.
We do not live, unlike what so many in academia tell us
now, in some post-modern era. We still live in the era
of imperialism--of imperialist war and socialist
revolution. Imperialist globalization, based on the
maximizing of super-profits and the transnational banks
and corporations, is laying waste to the world and to
its people.
At the same time, this process expands every day in
every country the ranks of those who were described in
that same pamphlet that I quoted earlier as the
gravediggers of the system--the working class.
Today imperialism appears to be riding high; the
imperialists feel strong. But I want to quote another
great revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, who once said,
to paraphrase, that "every ruling class thinks itself
invincible until history teaches it otherwise." Our job
is to organize the movement that teaches them otherwise.
- END -
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Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
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