Dear cj,
Sorry not to have posted for the past week... an intensive session was
required to learn how to build web databases and interactive forms (rent's
gotta be paid!) Many of you sent in further comments on the
book-discussion thread. We'll get back to those later.
The subject for today is the dramatic and rapid consolidation of the new
global regime. George Bush's comment in 1990, that the Gulf War heralded a
'new world order', was the trigger that got me started on the path of
analyzing and writing about political power relationships. Bush was
suggesting that the Gulf War was more than a special case, that it was
establishing some kind of new pattern for international order. He didn't
tell us much about the details, and I found myself drawn in to figuring out
what he could have meant.
The starting point for the investigation was the Gulf War itself. What was
unique about it?
In some ways it wasn't anything new - it looked quite a bit like
yet-another case of American gunboat diplomacy, one which expanded on the
tactics used earlier in Panama and Grenada. All three events were
accompanied by misleading propaganda, including lies about how the conflict
developed, about the intensity of the bombing, and about the postwar
consequences. All three invasions were carried out quickly, blitzkrieg
style, avoiding the public backlash that can accompany protracted
engagements.
In all three cases, a new regime of control over the media was in evidence.
Release of official information was highly centralized, and media channels
made no effort to pursue independent sources - even though sources were
often readily available. The result was more than simply slanted news -
the coverage didn't resemble previous war reportage at all, it was more
like a real-time Hollywood movie - a story with black-and-white characters
and a simple, clearly developing plot line. In the end, the bad guys were
defeated and the good guys were victorious, and the whole tidy episode
happened within the dramatic attention span of the audience. That last
word sums it up - we had become an _audience to a presentation. As in the
the Roman Republic, the meaning of citizenship had been reduced to the act
of watching circuses.
I highly recommend the documentary "Panama Deception" for a dramatic and
in-depth treatment of all the points mentioned above, as they apply to the
case of Panama. (If anyone knows where to order copies, please let me know
so I can post it). In this case, there was a very definite hidden agenda
(partly sovereignty over the canal, and partly related to Central American
policy), an invasion _much larger than we were led to believe, and the
media coverage was trivialized into an irrelevant 'search for Noriega '
chase story. It's a documentary that should be shown to every high school
student. (:>)
In all these ways, Desert Storm was simply the latest version of
intervention, American style, employing the state-of-the-art in stealth
warfare - both on the battlefield and in the management of public opinion.
---
What was unique about Desert Storm was the way in which the project was
internationalized. For the invasions of Grenada and Panama, 'legitimacy'
came from the approval of the American public, and the propaganda was
directed primarily at an American audience. The contrived war-provocation
incident involved an American serviceman who was shot (after speeding
through a Panamanian checkpoint and exchanging fire with the guards, none
of which was revealed at the time), and it was an American court in Florida
which had indicted Noriega on drug charges.
In Desert Storm, the 'legitimizing audience' became an international one,
and the contrived war-provocation incident was one of international concern
- the invasion of Kuwait. It is important to note that the US could
probably have carried off a unilateral action against Iraq, just as it did
in Panama and Grenada. There would have been protests from some quarters
in the international community, but that hasn't stopped the US in the past.
It seemed that the US was _intent on achieving international legitimacy, as
a goal in its own right. But the legitimacy sought was of a rather narrow
variety. The US wasn't really seeking allies as it did in WW II - joint
powers acting from a shared consensus. Instead, the US simply wanted an
_official authorization to pursue its own agenda, and _token allies, whose
presence was more symbolic-of-legitimacy than substantive militarily. Much
was made of the need for an authorizing UN resolution, but once the
resolution was signed the US completely ignored the spirit and letter of
the resolution - and proceeded to carry out the war in whatever way it
wanted, releasing only the information if chose to release.
These considerations led me to a tentative hypothesis regarding the nature
of the new world order to which Bush was alluding.
It seemed that a whole slice of American culture - the traditional warpath
scenario - was being re-installed in a larger context. Under this
scenario, the international (particularly Western) public would be managed
with the same Madison-Avenue / Hollywood techniques which had been
perfected in the US; wars and interventions would be justified by
contrived or fabricated incidents, and once underway would be pursued by
means and toward ends which would be largely unnanounced; the UN would be
expected to emulate the American Congress, which traditionally gives the
Executive a blank check in time of warfare.
This hypothesis, at the time, was highly speculative. It was based on
three asumptions: (1) Bush was serious with his NWO remark; (2) his
seriousness was linked to policies that _some community of people had the
power to implement; (3) the unique aspects of Desert Storm provided the
necessary clues as to what those policies were about.
I didn't realize it at the time, but subsequent events were to
overwhelmingly validate the hypothesis in every one of its particulars.
More about that a little further down. While waiting for on-the-ground
validation, I used my time to investigate _who this community might be,
that could define and then implement new world orders - of whatever
variety, and what _else was invovled in their new order besides the
globalization of US interventionism.
This led me to investigate corporate power, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution,
the EU, the free-trade agreements, and the rapidly developing global
bureaucracy centered in the WTO (World Trade Organization), IMF, et al.
This led to a review of the history of the _old world order... the
Enlightenment and the birth of republics, and the relationship between the
growth of capitalism and the growth of 'democracies'.
Already in late 1995 this work had led to an analysis which includes most
of the elements now in Part I of the "Achieving a Livable World". Here are
three paragraphs from "Common Sense and the New World Order", which was
published in New Dawn in September-October, 1995):
This nightmarish political regime is being expanded to the
Second and First Worlds by means of NAFTA (North American
Free Trade Area), GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade), the WTO (World Trade Organization), and other
similar agreements and entities. Unlike the IMF, which
controls via the purse strings, these so-called "trade
agreements" control via intrusion into the regulatory power
of signatory nations. By exploiting the treaty mechanism,
which has the force of national law, these agreements become
permanent parts of each constitutional system, making it all
but impossible for future governments to choose different
regulatory policies. Thus the transnationals are able to
translate temporary political ascendency, attained at
considerable effort and expense, into a permanent
stranglehold over sovereign nations.
Over the past century, the U.S. has felt free to "intervene"
unilaterally in dozens of countries to support the
operations of various corporate interests. As foreshadowed
by the Gulf precedent, the NWO scheme is to "legitimize"
such interventions, by embedding them within an
international framework. That framework won't be the U.N.
-- which includes too diverse a representative base --
instead, it will be framed within organizations such as
NATO, which fit better the technocratic model and are more
easily managed by the NWO elite.
Thus the military agenda of the NWO can be foreseen by
simply looking back at the history of U.S. imperialism in
the Third World. Whenever a country gets too uppity --
pursuing its domestic interests rather than those of
transnational corporate investors -- it can expect to be
subdued by overwhelming military force, preceded by an
appropriate media demonization campaign. Traditional
international law -- largely ignored in practice anyway --
is to be _formally_ replaced by an "internationalized", but
elite controlled, NWO Police Strike Force.
---
So far, I had been looking at two things: the events of the day and a few
history books. I had not yet heard of Samuel Huntington and his "Crisis of
Democracy" and "Clash of Civilizations", nor had I looked into the Council
on Foreign Relations and the well-documented history of elite planning as
the basis for major US policies. The current genre of globalization books
had not yet been published, including two landmark works: Michel
Chossudovsky's "Globalization of Poverty", showing how the IMF acts as a
conscious agent of Western neo-imperialism, and Mander & Goldsmith's "The
Case Against the Global Economy", which comprehensively covers the economic
and political aspects of globalization (but not the military aspects).
All of this later material, together with the continued unfolding of the
NWO agenda on the ground, only served to confirm and to expand the orginal
hypothesis. The evidence became overwhelming and conclusive. There _is a
new world order; it is a consciously organized project; it brings the end
of national sovereignty and the destabilization of Western democracy; it is
based on the intentional maintenance of international conflict; it is to be
backed by a ruthless and centralized military force; it represents the
final stage of global capitalism, in many ways similar to the predictions
of Marx & Lenin (but with some significant differences).
By the end of 1997 none of this, in my mind at least, was any longer in the
'hypothesis' category. The investigation had been carried out, and the
conclusions were inescapable. I turned my attention to two new projects:
(1) learning how to explain what I had learned in terms that could be
received by those who have been conditioned by a lifetime of dis-education
and corporate propaganda, and (2) investigating what could be done to
change things. As members of the cj and rn lists, you have been
appreciated participants in these projects.
---
Nonetheless, c. Jan 1998, much of the NWO was still latent. The
handwriting was on the wall, but the implementation had not been carried
out. For the skeptical, Desert Storm could be seen as a one-off event, and
even still today the WTO has not unleashed its full powers against
environmental laws and the like. Most people still think they are living
in sovereign nations, and link the term 'NWO' to right-wing conspiracy
theories. Much of what I was writing could be categorized as 'prediction'.
Now all at once, in the space of a few short months, the NWO hammer has
come down - the final implementation of the global military regime has
occurred. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have announced that Yugoslavia is
only the beginning, that we can expect interventions throughout the world
as routine policy. NATO is to be the vehicle, 'humanitarianism' is to be
the pretext, and centrally-controlled wag-the-dog propaganda is to make
sure events are interpreted with the white hats and black hats plainly
assigned to the right characters.
Clinton made it all quite clear, when he spoke to NATO troops recently in
Macedonia ("The Clinton Doctrine", from the Washington Post, reprinted in
The Guardian Weekly, July 1-7, p. 31):
"We must win the peace. If we can do this here...we can then
say to the people of the world, 'Whether you live in Arica
or Cental Europe or any other place, if somebody comes after
innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because
of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and
it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.'"
You've got hand it to them... it's a very effective formula. Who can
resist the idea of 'doing something' to prevent genocide?
The problem with the tidy little formula is that the same folks who decide
where to intervene are the ones who run the global system that
intentionally creates the conditions which are destabilizing societies
globally and making pretexts for intervention plentiful.
It is the US who installed and supported Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, the
Shah, and the Ayatollah; it is the West that sold Saddam weapons of mass
destruction; it is the West that supported Suharto and profited from his
crony-capitalist regime and East Timor repression; it is the US and Germany
who intentionally promoted the destabilization of Yugoslavia over the past
decade and repeatedly encouraged Milosevic, giving him enough rope so they
could later hang him with it.
A band of arsonists has successfully usurped the role of global fire crew.
They start fires all over the world on a routine basis, and whenever they
want to intervene militarily, all they have to do is turn the media
spotlight on the results of their own diabolical handiwork. Not only that,
but when they do intervene, as we've seen in Iraq & Yugoslavia, they don't
put out the fire: they simply burn down the rest of the house.
If you seek alternative source of information, then you know ethnic
repression is going on all over the world, including within staunch
American allies such as Turkey and Israel, and Most-Favored-Nations such as
China. But when the mass media gets around to 'revealing' such
circumstances, then you know you're being prepared for a sooner-or-later
potential intervention.
---
Let's move up one level, re/ strategic analysis... let's 'follow the money'.
In terms of global capitalism, what we are seeing in Yugoslavia is a
large-scale redevelopment project. When a developer wants to build a new
shopping center, or housing estate, he bulldozes down all existing
structures and starts over from the ground up. That's exactly what
happened in Yugoslavia, and that's why the biggest bombs were aimed at the
economic infrastructure. I can thank Eric Margolis for pointing out that
weeks into the attack most of Milosevic's military equipment had not been
touched by the bombing. Eric interpreted this as stupidity on the part of
NATO targeters. In fact, it merely confirms the economic origins of the
prefabricated sequence of events in the Balakans during the past decade.
As Marx and Lenin foresaw, the global triumph of capitalism has led to the
exposure of contradictions inherent in the system. Growth and wealth
concentration, the engines of capitalism, can only proceed so far. Real
economic _growth in the global economy has been relatively stagnant for
more than a decade now. The paper-growth that we read about in the
economic news and on the exchange ticker-tapes is related more to the final
stages of _concentration, where giant TNC's gorge themselves with mergers
and by taking over markets currently served by smaller businesses or by
public agencies.
The engineered destabilization of Southeast Asian economies was part of
this concentration phase, knocking competitors to Western-based TNC's out
of global markets, and giving those TNC's an opportunty to further gorge
themselves on undervalued Southeast Asian assets.
But as I mentioned above, even this IMF-assisted concentration phase cannot
last forever. The TNC's already control something like 80% of global
markets. They're now rapidly squeezing the last few miles out of this
growth vehicle.
Capitalism far from ready to give up the ghost, and new growth vehicles are
being developed. In Yugoslavia we see the latest model being deployed.
NATO blitzkrieg is the bulldozer, and 'recovery' programs are the growth
vehicle. Over the next few days I'll post some good pieces about the rush
to begin the redevelopment phase in Yugoslavia, the corporate scramble to
see who can profit the most from rebuilding Kosovo. Serbia too will
eventually be invaded by the developers, but it will apparently be
subjected first to the discipline of Iraq-style sanctions. The people of
the world must understand that it's not nice to resist the dicates of the
new world order.
bye for now,
rkm
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