Re: Still baffled

At 08:47 PM 4/28/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Randy and others,
>
>I still continue to be baffled by a comment like this:
>
>"The crimes of the United States and the leading democratic western 
>European
>colonial powers, in their colonies and quasi-colonies and protectorates, 
>are
>beyond dispute by myself. I'll only say that unlike the Soviet Union, and
>most unlike Nazi Germany, their crimes occurred outside the boundaries of
>the metropole. In thats sense and that sense only, they were limited."
>
>===========================================
>
<<Why in the world should that make ANY difference?  National boundaries,
borders, are just LINES created by different ruling classes depending on
what they can get away with.  Even discounting the genocide of Native
American Indians and the slavery/murder of African American slaves, which
could be said to have mainly happened before imperialism was consolidated,
two million in prison in the U.S. today is a very profound development. As
Andy and other pointed out, there's been quite a bit of terror at within the
industrialized countries also.>>

So far as I know, at no time since the beginning of the 20th century did the
United States government operate any gulags to liquidate American citizens
living within American territorial boundaries. It did not send death squads
to the South to drive black sharecroppers off the land in the 1930's to
create larger agricultural fields; it did not deport the Navajo to Alaska,
killing a third of them in the process, and let them come back only a couple
of decades later to find their most productive lands occupied by Anglo
_colons_. The United States was all-too-frequently racist, anti-Catholic,
anti-Semitic, xenophobic, anglochauvinistic, anti-feministic, but at least
it deigned to spare the lives of its citizens.

I agree with you totally that that is very small comfort, certainly no
comfort to the colonized peoples and not much comfort to the colonizers. It
reveals how very thin the line beetween peace and justice, and noise and
injustice, is, and the meagre grounds on which imperialists claim the right
to dominate colonized peoples. We need to remember that thin line, and to
remember that when you take that line, _everyone_ suffers -- colonizers and
the colonized -- and you have achieved a totalitarian state on the order of
Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union in most of its lifetime. Imperialism is
only superior to Naziism or Stalinism in that it pretends, most of the time,
when you're looking, to keep itself to an implicit promise to keep the
terror out of the metropolitan society. And when you're not looking, it can
turn on you, but colonizers can pretend that of course it would never do 
_that_.

<<But more directly,  if you believe that there is yet the distinct
possiblity of another major war involving "core"  (Western Imperialist)
ruling classes, then it may be the case that the assumed geographic limits
of imperialism's horrors may expand quite rapidly. Bombs over New York or
chemical/biological warfare in Chicago may sound highly improbable, but
social scientists learn to "Never Say 'Never' ".>>

Well, we did live with that during the Cold War. 

The Second World War gave us a taste of it, with the nuking of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, with the firestorms in Dresden and Hamburg, with the death camps
at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, with the V-2 rockets falling like
rain on western Europe and the mobile front decimating entire provinces in
Russia and Ukraine and Poland. 
A Third World War -- between the Triad and a Russo-Chinese alliance? between
an Amero-Japanese alliance and a greater European Union? between power blocs
the likes of which we have no idea? -- would take the horrible destruction
to which Europe suffered, expand it ten-fold or a hundred-fold, and disperse
it liberally across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

I wouldn't be surprised if a new imperialism forged in the Kondratieff
up-cycle will turn out to be the ruin of the world when the down-cycle
begins. I'd wager that this new imperialism would have the best chance of
coming about if the up-cycle doesn't see any dispersion of wealth beyond the
Triad economies and selected lucky Second World states. Imperialism may
perhaps come into vogue in the Triad because it promises to draw a
comforting line around the imperial/colonial states, protecting the fearful
inhabitants from the chaos of the world outside, presenting itself as better
-- for the citizens of imperial states, anyway -- than other systems, like
fascism, naziism, or communism, that would entail a heavy cost for the
imperial powers (i.e. secret police, death camps, deportations, et cetera). 

Just like the colonial powers of the Long Nineteenth Century, the imperial
powers of the 2030's and 2040's would probably convince themselves that they
are only doing their duty by protecting their citizens from the wrath of the
Other, and that they are actually doing the colonized a favour by imposing
totalitarian order on them. And just like the colonial powers of the Long
Nineteenth Century -- particularly the more aggressive and oppressive ones,
like Russia and Germany -- they wouldn't realize that imperialism was only a
short-to-medium-term solution, and that it would soon turn on _them._

It bears notice how this bears a great resemblance to the situation that,
according to Dr. Wagar, would result in a global socialist revolution. In
fact, from what I know of his book, it bears a very strong resemblance to
his scenario for the future.

>Alan Spector

I hope that I've made myself clear, here.

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada