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[Chapter 1, Part 3 of 3]
>From Cold War to kultur-kampf: evolution of the new world order
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Part of the US role, in making the world safe for collective imperialism,
was the containment of Soviet influence. In 1946, Winston Churchill declared
that an "Iron Curtain" separated the West from the communist bloc. "Mother
Russia", which had been heralded as the West's staunch ally against fascism,
suddenly became the "Red Menace", and the Cold War was on. There began a
decades-long propaganda campaign in Western media which demonized the Soviet
Union, and later Communist China. The Nazi intelligence network which
operated throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was kept intact, and
was incorporated into the new CIA. Covert destabilization operations against
the communist bloc were an ongoing part of the Cold War.
The threat of additional marxist revolutions, in most cases unfounded, was
frequently used to justify military interventions whose actual purpose was
the management of empire. The communist-threat propaganda was very
effective, and it enabled the US to maintain astronomical military budgets.
The US always remained several steps ahead of the Soviets in strategic
military capability, while the Soviet attempts to catch up were always
characterized as threatening -- and so the arms race cycle continued
throughout the Cold War. The vast global military machine the US built,
allegedly to defend against Soviet expansionism, enabled the US to easily
carry out its role as imperial manager in the third world.
While imperialist development of the third world proceeded, with minimal
interference from the communist bloc, various tactics were employed to
gradually wear down and destabilize the Soviet Union. Anti-communist
propaganda was distributed by leaflet and by airwaves in Eastern Europe, and
uprisings were encouraged in Hungary and other Soviet-controlled countries.
Communist forces were drawn into expensive conflicts in Korea and Vietnam,
where the borders of the "free world" had been in dispute. The CIA stirred
up civil wars in Angola and Afghanistan, and these proved very costly for
the Soviets.
It was the arms race itself which ultimately bankrupted the Soviets. Russia
was always, by American standards, a very poor country. For it to compete on
a head-to-head basis with US military might called for expenditures far
beyond its means. Within the context of the capitalist system, military
expenditures for the US were just one more form of economic growth. But for
the Soviets they were a fatal drain on economic resources.
In 1990, after a sequence of events that seemed to pass in the blink of an
eye, the Soviet Union collapsed. Boris Yeltsin pulled Russia out of the
Union, with Western backing, and became the chosen Western stooge, in the
tradition of the Shah, Noriega, Marcos, et al. Yeltsin shelled his own
parliament building, in a haunting replay of a similar action by Lenin over
70 years before, and assured his own dictatorial reign for most of the
decade. He kow-towed to Western demands on every occasion and imperialist
exploitation of the of the former Soviet domains began.
Funds were made available to Russia by the West, but never enough to hold
things together in the crumbling economy. The conditions of the loans
required Russia to dismantle its existing economic infrastructures, without
any plan in place for a smooth transition to a free-market system. The
result of Western policy, which was easily predictable from the nature of
that policy, was the complete and utter destabilization of Russian society.
Russian and East European assets became available to Western buyers at
rock-bottom prices, and billions of dollars were smuggled out of Russia by
corrupt officials. As of this writing, the downward spiral has still not
stabilized. The people of the former Soviet bloc, who initially welcomed
capitalism as if it were Santa Claus, now yearn for the good old days of
Soviet rule. As the Romans ground Carthage into the dust, so has the West
humbled the former super power.
Hitler must have smiled in his grave as his lebensraum vision was finally
realized. The proper conditions had at last been created, and the subsequent
capitalist invasion of the former Soviet bloc was as devastating as had been
the earlier invasion by Hitler's Panzer divisions. Even if Russia manages
yet to install a representative government, it has almost no chance of ever
becoming again a serious threat to Western power. It has been successfully
reduced to third-world status, and the former Soviet realms offer vast
opportunities for imperialist development and enrichment.
The postwar relationship between the West and China proceeded down a
different path. When the People's Republic first came to power in China, it
was aligned closely with the Soviets, and the Western policy toward the
entire bloc was to isolate and contain it. When China split from the
Soviets, Western policy became more flexible, and the communist rift was
encouraged to widen. In the early seventies the West decided that isolating
China no longer made sense, and in 1971 China was allowed to replace Taiwan
in the UN. In 1972 President Nixon paid a state visit to China and trade
channels were then soon re-opened.
Chinese products began to enter global markets, and China's huge population
created a major market for Western exports. Trade increased and the Chinese
economy grew rapidly. Foreign corporations were allowed to build plants in
China, provided they included Chinese partners. Ideology, communist or
otherwise, seemed to have little relevance to China's relationship with the
West. China was behaving like a competing capitalist power, striving to
establish a strong role for itself in the world economy and in Asia. As
China began to assume the stature of a major power, it became a potential
challenge to Western hegemony and the established system of collective
imperialism.
China has said that its "natural role" is to be dominant in Asia(7), as said
Japan in the years leading up to World War II. The US, meanwhile, has stated
that such hegemony would be "contrary to US strategic interests", and
reminds us that the US has fought three major Asian wars in this century to
maintain its "strategic interests". Today's US policy makers articulate two
competing approaches to China: engagement, and confrontation. The goal of
engagement is to seduce China into subservience to the US-managed global
system, while the goal of confrontation is to accomplish the same result
through the use of economic pressure, and if necessary, military force.
Both China and the US are now embarked on aggressive weapons-development
programs, each aimed at assuring the ability to control the outcome of this
final episode of major national competition. China, already a nuclear power,
is investing heavily in military technology and is hoping to achieve a
breakthrough that will enable it to neutralize the effectiveness of
America's premiere weapons system, the carrier task force. The US,
meanwhile, is rapidly upgrading its hi-tech electronic warfare systems.
In Desert Storm, the US managed to achieve control of theater. With
electronic and stealth technology it was able to neutralize Iraq military
capability, and was then able to strike at will anywhere in Iraq. If the US
can be assured of a similar capability with respect to China, and if the US
permits itself the use of tactical nuclear warheads, then it has the basis
of a strategy for defeating China in the event a confrontation arises. In a
pre-emptive strike it could take out China's strategic missiles. It could
then, with control of theater, savage Chinese military and industrial
installations as it did those of Iraq.
"The world is in the early stages of a new military revolution...
the revolution in military affairs revolves around three advances.
The first is in gathering intelligence. Sensors in satellites,
aircraft or unmanned aircraft can monitor virtually everything
going on in an area. The second is in processing intelligence.
Advanced command, control, communication and computing systems,
known as C4, make sense of the data gathered by the sensors and
display it on screen. They can then assign particular targets to
missiles, tanks or whatever. The third is in acting on all this
intelligence in particular, by using long-range precision strikes
to destroy targets. Cruise missiles, guided by satellite, can hit
an individual building many hundreds of miles away...
"The Pentagon already has, or is developing, most of the
technologies required for space weapons. For instance it has just
awarded a $l.l billion contract for an airborne laser to hit
ballistic missiles. if that technology works, it could be adapted
for a satellite..."(8)
As China begins to operate aggressively in global markets, and as its
economic and military power grow, the China Question will not go away. How
this question will be resolved cannot be precisely predicted, but there can
be little doubt about the ultimate outcome. It is inconceivable that the US
would allow China to reverse the direction of the collective Western system
and to return the world to the era of major-power rivalries.
With the Soviet Union dismantled, Western planners are already architecting
and implementing a new regime of world order. The Cold War regime operated
at two levels. At one level, the US was acting to maintain Western advantage
in the imperial system. At another level, the one of public rhetoric, the US
was acting to contain the communist threat. The imperial basis of US policy
will continue, but the end of the Cold War requires a new line of public
rhetoric. Drugs and terrorism have provided an ad-hoc solution to this
problem, but a more systematic solution is in the works.
The new system of world order has been articulated in some detail by a
darling of the US policy establishment, Samuel P. Huntington, in his book
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order(9). Huntington
divides the world into eight "civilizations", or regions, and provides a
detailed description of the dynamics planned for the new regime.
Within regions there are to be core states, which are to have a special role
in maintaining order within "their" region. As the US "authorizes" Turkish
incursions into Iraq, we can see Turkey beginning to assume a core-state
role. Between regions we are to expect perpetual "fault-line conflicts",
which are to be resolved through the auspices of "non primary level
participants. This is what has been happening in Bosnia, where allegedly
neutral NATO is "resolving" the fault-line conflict between the Muslim and
Christian "civilizations".
"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."(10)
Huntington is a member of and spokesman for The Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR). I will have more to say about the CFR in Chapter 2, and its central
role in elite planning. Suffice it to say for now that ideas published by
CFR frequently show up as US Government policy in subsequent
administrations. Policy makers are indeed swimming in the sea articulated by
Huntington, and we can see the evidence "on the ground".
When the US Embassy was recently bombed in Nairobi, the US did not try to
retaliate against the specific terrorist groups involved. Instead it defined
whole nations (Sudan, Afghanistan) as the targets of its reprisals, and
launched cruise-missile attacks against targets in those nations. President
Bill Clinton said "The countries that persistently host terrorism have no
right to be safe havens."(11) Under the kultur-kampf regime, terrorism and
reprisal become acts of war across fault-line rifts.
Huntington's core states are nothing really new, but are simply a renaming
of what have been traditionally called "Western client" states. Managing
"fault line conflicts" becomes the excuse for intervention, in place of
"defending strategic interests," but maintaining collective Western
domination continues to be the underlying agenda. The "civilization
paradigm" provides a philosophical rationalization for Western powers to
engage more openly in their ongoing business of collective domination.
Under this regional regime there is no danger of armageddon, nor is there
any hope of a final peace. Ongoing managed conflict is to be the order of
things, providing dynamic stability, with the price in suffering to be paid
by the people of the non-Western "civilizations".
Under this scheme the postwar myth of universal democratization is being
explicitly abandoned. Instead each region is expected to exhibit its own
"cultural norms", which "unlike the West" do not necessarily include a
concern for human rights or democracy. The Western-serving, oppressive Third
World regimes which have long been the embarrassment of the "free world",
are now to be accepted as "normal" for "those parts of the world".
Huntington's civilizational paradigm thus provides an ideal philosophical
basis for a stable Western-imperial global system. It gives Western nations
a plausible justification for acting collectively in their self interest on
the world stage, namely that they are simply playing their natural role as
one of the contending civilizations. It gives Western forces a "right" to
intervene, as "disinterested parties" adjudicating "fault-line" conflicts or
"disciplining" core states. It is disastrous in terms of human rights and
democracy, but it is an effective strategy for maintaining Western hegemony
under globalization into the new millennium.
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[references still incomplete]
(1) H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920, Garden City Publishing, Garden
City, New York, p. 1005
(2) George Seldes, Facts and Fascism, p. 122; Charles Higham, Trading with
the Enemy, p. 167
(3) William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp
(4) newspaper report, Independence Mo.?
(5) (to be researched)
(6) William Blum, Killing Hope, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine, 1995,
pp. 64-72
(7) "The China Threat, A Debate", Foreign Affairs, March/April 1997
(8) "The Future of Warfare", The Economist, March 8, 1997
(9) Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order", Simon and Schuster, 1997
(10) Martin Walker, "China preys on American minds -- The US this week",
Guardian Weekly, April 6, 1997
(11) "US declares war on terrorism", Guardian Weekly, August 30, 1998, p. 1
[End Chapter 1]
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