Re: role of Third World governments

12/31/2000, Kafkazli Seyed wrote:
    > The installation of Ayatollah is not clear in [rkm's]
    debate. If it is taken as to refer to one person or to the
    whole ruling class in Iran, or to the whole religious
    establishment in Iran,

Dear Kafkazli Seyed,

I am referring only to the fact that the U.S. engineered the
installation of a fundamentalist regime in Iran, when the
Shah could no longer be maintained in power.  I have little
understanding of how that regime operates internally, or how
much it has changed since it was installed, or what the term
"Ayatollah" means historically.  Thanks for your
clarifications.

---

12/31/2000, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:
    > [Samir Amin] concludes, after assessing the collapse of
    the imperialist regulatory mechanisms (Fordism, in
    shorthand), with the prediction that increasing chaos
    globally will lead to a new round of national revolutions in
    the periphery.

Dear Richard,

Samir was claiming, in 1994, that "imperialist regulatory
mechanisms" have collapsed?  I find that strange.  That's
just about the time that the WTO was formed, and 'structural
adjustment' programs were accelerated by the IMF - marking
the launch of a new, more tightly controlled, imperialist
regulatory regime.  In what sense can that be called a
'collapse'?  As I see it, words like 'consolidation' or
'intensification' would be more appropriate.

Will there be a new round of 'national revolutions' in the
periphery?  Under the pressures of neoliberalism we will of
course see resistance efforts.  We currently have the
Zapatistas in Mexico, and various guerilla and liberation
movements in Latin America generally.  There are signs of
reaction to neoliberalism in Southeast Asia and India as
well.  But how much hope can we take from such developments?

We need to take into account the fact that the global regime
has been well aware that their neoliberal project would
spark resistance, and we need to look at the preparations
the regime has made to contain that resistance.  I refer to
Huntington, in this regard, not because his 'analysis' makes
any sense, but because of this phenomenon:

    "'The Clash of Civilisations', the book by Harvard professor
    Sam Huntington, may not have hit the bestseller lists, but
    its dire warning of a 21st century rivalry between the
    liberal white folk and the Yellow Peril -- sorry, the
    Confucian cultures -- is underpinning the formation of a new
    political environment. "To adapt one of Mao's subtler
    metaphors, Huntington's KULTUR-KAMPF IS BECOMING, WITH
    STUNNING SPEED, the CONCEPTUAL SEA IN WHICH WASHINGTON'S
    POLICY-MAKING FISH NOW SWIM." [emphasis added]
    - "Guardian Weekly," April 6, 1997.

In other words, Huntingon's words should not be viewed as
'analysis', but rather as 'policy prescription'.

Huntington's kultur-kampf doctrine says that the world is
divided into nine different civilizations, with different
cultures and values - and that ongoing conflict can be
expected between them.  He paints the European Civilization
as being the most enlightened and democratic, with a special
role as 'neutral party' to adjudicate disputes among
'civilizations'.  Although 'kultur kampf' is not a concept
that comes up in the six-o'clock news, we can nonetheless
recognize 'humanitarian interventionism' as being the same
thing under another name.

Under this doctrine, and with the West's formidable 'rapid
deployment' forces, I see little hope of success from
revolutions in the periphery.  On the contrary, as we see in
Yugoslavia, it is the regime which is taking the intiative. 
Rather than waiting for a revolution to squash, they pick
regimes that are insufficiently neoliberal and attack them
proactively.

Before success can be achieved, the revolution must come
home to the core, and in particular the USA.

---

1/1/2001, Jeffrey L. Beatty wrote:
    > The Western nations now semiperipheral?  I don't follow
    you.  "Semiperiphery" in the classic Wallersteinian sense
    refers to a group of middle-income countries that serve as a
    "global middle class"--i.e., they moderate the demands of
    the periphery.  It's not obvious to me that Western
    countries are doing anything of this sort.

Dear Jeffrey,

I must admit to not being a follower of Wallerstein, nor a
believer in the applicability of 'cycle analysis' to our
current circumstances.  I've been taking 'core' to mean the
U.S. and the EU, the periphery to be the third world, and
the semi-periphery to be those in between, with the
boundaries between the latter two being somewhat ambiguous.

As to the 'roles' played by those segments, that is open to
interpretation.

In my view, neoliberal globalization represents a kind of
'universal imperialism', where all nations are moved down a
notch in the power hierarchy.  Perhaps we could say that
Europe got pushed down a notch already in 1945, when it lost
the prerogative to act geopolitically without U.S.
endorsement (as was confirmed by the Suez crisis).  In 1945,
each Western nation had its own sovereign monetary,
economic, and foreign policies.  Today, monetary and
economic polices are being increasingly controlled by
globalist institutions and international banks, and Western
'foreign policy' has been centralized by the elite regime
under the rubric of the 'international community'.  A new
layer of power has been inserted at the top of the pyramid. 
That power center is de-linked from any particular nation,
and it is today's 'core'.


    > I take it you mean the shah rather than the Ayatollah in
    Iran?  The U.S. certainly didn't install the Islamic
    Republic.

As a matter of fact, the U.S. did exactly that.  The history
of the episode is clear, as is the U.S. motivation.  What
you had in Iran was a general uprising by the population
against the Shah, an uprising that was going to succeed in
ousting the Shah, regardless of what policy the U.S. adopted
(short of a U.S. invasion).  According to the reports I've
seen, the expected outcome of that uprising would have been
a sectarian, socialist-leaning, regime, arising out of the
organized labor movement.

Such an outcome was perceived by U.S. planners as being
contrary to their interests. The U.S. wants to keep the
Mideast oil states divided and socially regressive - so that
they can be more easily controlled and exploited. 
Democratic / socialist-progressive regimes are the last
thing the U.S. wants in that region. The challenge for the
U.S. was to co-opt the uprising, and guide it in a more
desirable direction.

Why Islamic fundamentalism in particular?  That's where
Huntington comes in.  Islamic fundamentalism provides the
perfect propaganda example to prove that the different
'civilizations' possess irreconcilable differences in
values.   And Islamic fundamentalism is in fact being
intensively exploited for propaganda purposes.  Every action
spy movie has its obviously Muslim villians, always trying
to blow something up or poison someone's well.  And Musliim-
phobia has been used to help pass police-state 'anti-
terrorism' legislation.


    > neither the United States nor anyone else in the West has
    shown a great deal of interest in being involved in the
    politics of the periphery in recent years.  U.S. military
    involvements during the Clinton years have been selective,
    confined to crisis spots like the Persian Gulf and the
    former Yugoslavia, or driven by the legacy of Cold War
    involvements rather than cultural conflicts, as in the cases
    of Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.  One possible exception
    to this generalization is the mission to Somalia, which
    proved abortive.  The administration seems to have learned
    to stay out of Africa from the experience.

No offense intended, but this represents an extremely naive
perspective on the role of the U.S. throughout the world,
particularly in Africa.  Since you like references, I'll
suggest William Blum's "Killing Hope" and "Rogue State - A
Guide to the World's Only Superpower".  Africa is full of
U.S. military advisors, and arms salesmen.  None of this
shows up in Clinton's rhetoric, or on the TV news, but it's
happening nonetheless.  What has been 'selective' is not so
much the interventions themselves, but rather which
interventions are chosen for publication.  Those are
selected which can be turned to propaganda advantage, or
those which are so large (Yugoslavia) that they cannot be
ignored totally in the press.


    > Note also that Samuel P. Huntington himself does not
    consider "the clash of civilizations" a desirable state of
    affairs.  ... He has argued that his analysis implies a
    world order based upon civilizations, but that countries
    should involve themselves in disputes that affect their own
    civilization, and refrain from intervention in conflicts
    that affect only other civilizations.

Everything that Huntington writes or says in public is
propaganda.  That is to say, it is said for its effect on a
particular audience.  The mission of "Clash of
Civilizations" is to create a mythology which can be used to
explain ongoing conflict to Western populations, and to
justify Western interventionism.

When he says 'refrain from intervention', that has to be
interpreted within the broader context of his doctrine.  The
regime wants to intervene for its own reasons - to fine tune
the neoliberal machine.  They have no interest in
intervening for humanitarian reasons, and they don't want to
be forced by public pressure to overthrow dictators who are
serving the neoliberal regime.  Hence, Clinton says we don't
have the resources to intervene in every conflict.  And
that's why Huntingon talks about 'refrain(ing)'.


    > The point:  my suspicion is that that the peripheral
    involvements of the United States, at least, will be more
    selective and driven more by vital national interests than
    cultural concerns in the years immediately before us.

'American national interests' has for at least a century
been a euphemism for 'corporate interests'.  We might recall
Marine General Smedley Butler, who described his military
role as being a macro-scale gangster, "making the world safe
for Standard Oil".  U.S. foreign policy has _never been about
'cultural concerns'.  Cultural issues are used as
propaganda, when actions need to be justified, but they are
never the actual motivation of policy makers.

If interventions seem 'selective', that is not because the
world is being left to go its own way.  Rather, that
selectivity is made possible by 'earlier lines of defense',
such as IMF structural-adjustment programs, covert CIA
interventions, diplomatic and economic pressure, the
wihthholding of credit, etc. etc. Publicly advertised
military interventions are the 'defense of last resort'. 
Their infrequency shows no lack of control, but confirms the
efficacy of other modes of control.


best regards to all,
rkm
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/guide/