Two thousand one was not the first year that the US government declared a “war on terrorism.” As Noam Chomsky reminds us, the first “war on terrorism” was declared by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s during the US-sponsored terrorist wars across Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. The Reagan administration called terrorism a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself.” In keeping with this sentiment, in 1987 the United Nations General Assembly proposed a strongly worded condemnation of terrorism. One hundred fifty-three countries voted for it. Only the United States and Israel voted against it. They objected to a passage that referred to “the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence . . . of people forcibly deprived of that right . . . particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation.” Remember that in 1987, the United States was a staunch ally of apartheid South Africa. The African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were listed as “terrorists.” The term foreign occupation was taken to mean Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Over the last few years, the “war on terrorism” has mutated into the more generic “war on terror.” Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired old horse that politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But could it be that ordinary people are fed up with that poor old horse and are looking for something different? There’s an old Hindi film song that goes yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public, she knows it all). Wouldn’t it be lovely if the song were right and the politicians wrong?
Before Washington’s illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war.
The question is: Is “democracy” still democratic?
Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions of its sarkar?
If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism and the logic that underlies terrorism are exactly the same. Both make ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al-Qaeda made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in the thousands for the actions of the Taliban, and the people of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein.
The crucial difference is that nobody really elected Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein. But the president of the United States was elected (well . . . in a manner of speaking).
The prime ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were elected. Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are more responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis were for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban?
Whose God decides which is a “just war” and which isn’t? George Bush Sr. once said: “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.” When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.
So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist?
In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?
In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office. But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neoliberalism, privatization, censorship, Big Dams—on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism—the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the fifty-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the Far Right. It was also the Congress Party that first opened India’s markets to corporate globalization. It passed legislation that encouraged the privatization of water and power, the dismantling of the public sector, and the denationalization of public companies. It enforced cutbacks in government spending on education and health, and weakened labor laws that protected workers’ rights. The BJP took this process forward with pitiless abandon.
In its election campaign, the Congress Party indicated that it was prepared to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions of India’s poorest people came out in strength to vote in the elections. The spectacle of the great Indian democracy was telecast live—the poor farmers, the old and infirm, the veiled women with their beautiful silver jewelry, making quaint journeys to election booths on elephants and camels and bullock carts. Contrary to the predictions of all India’s experts and pollsters, Congress won more votes than any other party.
India’s communist parties won the largest share of the vote in their history. India’s poor had clearly voted against neoliberalism’s economic “reforms” and growing fascism. As soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them like badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured split screens. Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, as the coalition government was cobbled together. The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress Party might actually honor its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We saw the Sensex stock index move up and down and sideways. The media, whose own publicly listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock market crash as though Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi.
Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media that privatization of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the BJP, now in opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose foreign direct investment and the further opening of Indian markets.
This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy.
As for the Indian poor, once they’ve provided the votes, they are expected to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them.
And what of the US elections? Do US voters have a real choice?
It’s true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil tycoons and Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change. Few will be sorry to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft or an end to their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is that in the new administration their policies will continue. That we will have Bushism without Bush.
Those positions of real power—the bankers, the CEOs—are not vulnerable to the vote (and in any case, they fund both sides).
Unfortunately, US elections have deteriorated into a sort of personality contest, a squabble over who would do a better job of overseeing Empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of Empire as fervently as George Bush does.
The US political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial-
corporate structure will be allowed through the portals of power.
Given this, it’s no surprise that in this election you have two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier, both talking up war and arguing almost childishly about who will lead the war on terror more effectively.
Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the expansion of US economic and military penetration into the world. He says he would have voted to author
ize Bush to go to war in Iraq even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He promises to commit more troops to Iraq. He said recently that he supports Bush’s policies toward Israel and Ariel Sharon “completely.” He says he’ll retain 98 percent of Bush’s tax cuts.
So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost absolute consensus. It looks as though even if people in the United States vote for Kerry, they’ll still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President George Berry.
It’s not a real choice. It’s an apparent choice.
Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they’re both owned by Procter & Gamble.
This doesn’t mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that the Congress and the BJP, New Labor and the Tories, the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course they’re not. Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxyboosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser.
In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the BJP) and a party that slyly pits one community against another (Congress) and sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably harvested by the BJP.
There are differences in the IQs and levels of ruthlessness between this year’s US presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in the United States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and venality that led to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and intimidation it faced.
This was a service not just to people here but to the whole world.
But why is it that the Democrats do not even have to pretend to be against the invasion and occupation of Iraq? If the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of “sensitive” imperialism. Is US imperialism preferable if it is supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it preferable if the UN asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of US soldiers? Is the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?
Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice?
I’m sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal questions, but they must be asked.
The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naive.
The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital—hot money—into and out of third world countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.
All this goes under the fluttering banner of “reform.”
As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down, millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.
Anyone who criticizes this process is mocked for being “anti-reform,” anti-progress, anti-development. Somehow a Luddite.
The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that “we live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history.”
Billions wonder: Who’s “we”? Where does he live? What’s his Christian name?
Once the economies of third world countries are controlled by the free market, they are enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality. For example, Western countries that together spend more than a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity. Then they flood the markets of poor countries with their subsidized agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possibly compete.
Countries that have been plundered by colonizing regimes are steeped in debt to these same powers, and have to repay them at the rate of about $382 billion a year. Ergo, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—not accidentally but by design. By intention.
To put a vulgar point on all of this—the truth is getting more vulgar by the minute—the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires in 2004 (587 “individuals and family units”), according to Forbes magazine, is $1.9 trillion. This is more than the gross domestic product of the world’s 135 poorest countries combined. The good news is that there are 111 more billionaires this year than there were in 2003. Isn’t that fun?
The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation-state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation-state to put down revolts in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own.
Time and again we have seen the heroes of our times, giants in opposition, suddenly diminished. President Lula of Brazil was the hero of the World Social Forum in January 2002. Now he’s busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits, and purging radicals from the Workers’ Party. Lula has a worthy predecessor in the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left thousands of people homeless, jobless, and without water and electricity. When Harry Oppenheimer died in August 2000, Mandela called him “one of the great South Africans of our time.” Oppenheimer was the head of Anglo-American, one of South Africa’s largest mining companies, which made its money exploiting cheap Black labor made available by the repressive apartheid regime.
Why does this happen? It is neither true nor useful to dismiss Mandela and Lula as weak or treacherous people. It’s important to understand the nature of the beast they were up against. The moment they crossed the floor from the opposition into government, they became hostage to a spectrum of threats—most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader’s personal charisma and history of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works.
Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.
So when we speak of public power in the age of Empire, I hope it’s not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public that disagrees with the very concept of Empire. A public that has set itself against incumbent power—international, national, regional, or provincial governments and institutions that support and service Empire.
Of course those of us who live in Empire’s subject nations are aware that in the great cities of Europe
and the United States, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, there is now open talk about the benefits of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. It wasn’t long ago that colonialism also sanctified itself as a “civilizing mission.” So we can’t give these pundits high marks for originality.
We are aware that New Imperialism is being marketed as a “lesser evil” in a less-than-perfect world. Occasionally some of us are invited to “debate” the merits of imperialism on “neutral” platforms provided by the corporate media. It’s like debating slavery. It isn’t a subject that deserves the dignity of a debate.
What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist Empire? By resist I don’t mean only to express dissent but to effectively force change.
Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the crosshairs of the US cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina’s the model if you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you’re the black sheep.
For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars—losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. All this overseen by the repressive machinery of the State, the police, the army, the judiciary. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities.
The End of Imagination Page 38