29 IMPERIALISM FOR BEGINNERS

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire communities. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, or political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become “commonwealths,” and colonies become “territories” or “dominions” (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, “commonwealths” too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of “national defense,” “national security,” and maintaining “stability” in one or another region. Here I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.

By “imperialism” I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.

The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some 800 years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what later became known as the British Empire. A part of Ireland still remains under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people Emperor Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the ninth century were Slavs. So frequent and prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that “Slav” became synonymous with servitude. The word “slave” derives from “Slav.” Eastern Europe was an early source of raw materials, cheap labor, and capital accumulation, having become wholly dependent upon Western manufactures by the seventeenth century.

A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps.

The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans.

Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. One may speak of “Soviet imperialism” or “nineteenth-century British imperialism” but not of U.S. imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted the opportunity to research U.S. imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would be ideologically driven and therefore not scholarly. While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this country persons who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing “leftist” or “hate-America” blather.

Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it invests in other countries, penetrates cultural and political life, and integrates the overseas economies into an international system of profit accumulation.

Given its expansionist nature, corporate capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that “chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It creates a world after its own image.”1 Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages give way to desolate shanty towns, and autonomous regions are forcibly wedded to centralized autocracies and international markets.

Consider one of a thousand such instances. Some years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted and fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their community was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Declared “business zones,” their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas. Driven from their homesteads, the inhabitants were transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages—when fortunate enough to find employment.

North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries, mostly in Asia.

Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate-profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries and have continued to rise dramatically. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. transnationals, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global “free market” and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.

Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, the former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such “multiple sourcing” enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against each other.

Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World (but with higher growth rates in the Third World in recent years). If corporations lost all their Third World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American markets. In response, one should note that even in the unlikely event that capitalism could survive without imperialism—it shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only way to pursue profits, but they are a most lucrative way.

Whether imperialism is necessary for capitalism is really not the question. Many things that are not absolutely necessary are still highly desirable, therefore strongly pursued. Overseas investors are strongly attracted to the Third World’s cheap labor, rich natural resources, and various other highly profitable conditions. Superprofits may not be necessary for capitalism’s survival but survival is not all that capitalists are interested in. Superprofits are strongly preferred to more modest earnings. That there may be no necessity between capitalism and imperialism does not mean there is no compelling linkage.

The same is true of other social dynamics. For instance, wealth does not necessarily have to lead to luxurious living. A higher portion of an owning class’s riches could be used for investment rather personal consumption. The very wealthy could survive quite comfortably on more modest sums but that is not how most of them prefer to live. Throughout history, wealthy classes generally have shown a preference for getting the best of everything. After all, the whole purpose of getting rich off other people’s labor is to live well, avoiding all forms of thankless toil and drudgery, enjoying superior opportunities for lavish lifestyles, superior medical care, quality education, travel, recreation, security, leisure, and opportunities for power and prestige. While none of these things are really “necessary,” they are fervently clung to by those who possess them—as witnessed by the violent measures endorsed by advantaged classes whenever they feel the threat of an equalizing or leveling democratic force.

The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the “Third World” to distinguish them from the “First World” of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct “Second World” of communist states. Third World poverty, called “underdevelopment,” is treated by most Western observers as an original and inherent historic condition. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through so much trouble to plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor—and they are poor because of the pillage they have endured.

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, and ebony; and still later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.

Through the centuries of colonization, many self-serving imperialist theories have been spun. I was taught in school that people in tropical lands are slothful and do not work as hard as we denizens of the temperate zone. In fact, the inhabitants of warm climates have performed remarkably productive feats, building magnificent civilizations well before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today, even though they often work long, hard hours for meager sums, the early stereotype of the “lazy native” is still with us. We hear that Third World peoples are culturally retarded in their attitudes, customs, and technical abilities. It is a convenient notion embraced by those who want to depict Western investment as a rescue operation designed to help backward peoples help themselves. This myth of “cultural backwardness” goes back to ancient times, when conquerors used it to justify enslaving indigenous peoples.

What cultural supremacy could by claimed by the Europeans of yore? From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe certainly was “ahead” of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings, murders, and other violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, and other such afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); and frequency of famines, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacres and inquisitions. Those who claim the West has been the most advanced civilization should dwell a bit more on all its achievements.

More seriously, we might note that Europe enjoyed a telling advantage in navigation and armaments. Muskets and cannon, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.

It was said that colonized peoples were biologically less evolved than their colonizers. Their “savagery” and “lower” level of cultural evolution were emblematic of their inferior genetic evolution. Actually in many parts of what is now considered the Third World, people developed impressive skills in architecture, horticulture, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other such things. Their social customs were often more gracious and humane and less autocratic than what was found in Europe at that time. Of course we must not romanticize these indigenous societies, some of which had a number of cruel and unusual practices of their own. But generally, their peoples enjoyed healthier, happier, more leisurely lives than most of Europe’s inhabitants.

Other theories enjoy wide currency. We hear that Third World poverty is due to overpopulation, too many people having too many children to feed. Actually, over the last several centuries, many Third World lands have been less densely populated than certain parts of Europe. Furthermore, it is the industrialized nations of the First World, not the poor ones of the Third, that devour some 80 percent of the world’s resources and pose the greatest threat to the planet’s ecology.

This is not to deny that overpopulation is a real problem for the planet’s ecosphere. Limiting population growth in all nations would help the global environment but it would not solve the problems of the poor—because overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have large families because children are a source of family labor and income and usually sole support during old age.

Frances Moore Lappé and Rachel Schurman found that of seventy Third World countries, there were six—China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba—and the state of Kerala in India that had managed to lower their birth rates by one third. They enjoyed neither dramatic industrial expansion nor high per capita incomes nor extensive family planning programs.2 The factors they had in common were public education and health care, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women’s rights, food subsidies, and in some cases land reform. In other words, fertility rates were lowered not by capitalist investments and economic growth as such but by socio-economic betterment, even of a modest scale, accompanied by the emergence of women’s rights.

What is called “underdevelopment” is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries. With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were set back in their development sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British investors.

By 1850, India’s debt had grown to 53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities that the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India’s development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country. The massive poverty we associate with India was not an original historical condition that antedates imperialism.

As with India, so with many other Third World countries: they are not “underdeveloped” but overexploited. The bleeding process that attends Western colonization and investment has created a lower rather than a higher living standard. Referring to what the English colonizers did to the Irish, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1856: “How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and industrially. By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation.”3 So with most of the Third World, including China, Egypt, and much of Africa. The Mayan Indians in Guatemala had a more nutritious and varied diet and better conditions of health in the early 16th century before the Europeans arrived than they have today. They had more craftspeople, architects, artisans, and horticulturists than today. What is called underdevelopment is not an original historical condition but a product of imperialism’s superexploitation.

Imperialism has created what I call “maldevelopment”: modern office buildings and luxury hotels in the capital city instead of housing for the poor, cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals for workers, highways that go from the mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might hope to see a doctor or a teacher.

Wealth is transferred from Third World people to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and later on Japan) by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices. The colonized country is denied the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, trade, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment are discouraged at every turn.

Hundreds of millions of Third World people now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban slums, suffering hunger and disease, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, with their mental and physical health severely damaged. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care. In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. In the Philippines and Malaysia, corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment.

When we say a country is underdeveloped, we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of “underdeveloped” has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street Journal, and parties of contrasting political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as developing nations, a term somewhat less insulting than “underdeveloped” but equally misleading.

I prefer to use “Third World” because “developing” still implies that backwardness and poverty were part of an original historic condition and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.

The dominant theory of the last half century, enunciated repeatedly by writers like Barbara Ward and W. W. Rostow, and afforded wide currency in the United States and other parts of the Western world, maintains that it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the “backward” nations of the South, bringing them technology and teaching them proper work habits. This is an updated version of “the White man’s burden,” a favorite imperialist fantasy.

The development scenario goes like this: With the introduction of Western investments, the backward economic sectors of the poor nations will release their workers, who then will find more productive employment in the modern sector at higher wages. As capital accumulates, business will reinvest its profits, thus creating still more products, jobs, buying power, and markets. Eventually a more prosperous economy evolves.

This “development theory” or “modernization theory,” as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism. Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but self-enriching transnationals.

People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters. They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps Volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no reliable access to firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from overweight North Americans. They usually know what foods best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labor so that they might work for themselves and feed themselves.

The local economies of the world are increasingly dominated by a network of international corporations that are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan. If there is an integrative globalization, it is happening among the global-investor classes, not among the indigenous Third World economies that are becoming increasingly fragmented from each other and within themselves. In sum, what we have is a world economy that excludes much of the world’s people.

Territorial acquisition is no longer the prevailing imperial mode. Compared to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves, today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits. Rather than being directly colonized by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted the trappings of sovereignty—while Western finance capital retains control of the lion’s share of their profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: “informal empire,” “colonialism without colonies,” “neocolonialism,” and “neo-imperialism.”

U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most notably in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in the war of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its nominal independence. The Cubans then had their own government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.S. hands, as did the island’s wealth, including its sugar, tobacco, nickel, and tourist industries, and its major imports and exports.

Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without the bother of owning and administering the nations themselves. Under neo-imperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a similar strategy of neo-imperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. Though the newly established Third World country might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a foreign colonial power. Furthermore, under neo-imperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on skimming the cream—which is all they really want.

After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global corporate orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and loans. In many instances a comprador class was installed as a first condition for independence, that is, a coterie of rulers who cooperate in turning their own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, no minimum wage or occupational safety laws, no prohibitions on child labor, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong social regulations, effective labor unions, and higher wage and work standards.

Still, neo-imperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self-rule incite a desire for the fruits of self-rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without risks for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.

30 THE FREE MARKET PARADISE LIBERATES COMMUNIST EUROPE

For decades we were told that the Cold War was a contest between freedom and communism, without any references to capitalism. But with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders and news media began to intimate that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former “captive nations”—namely free markets. Of what value was political democracy in the former communist countries, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed for the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? So they publicly acknowledged that a goal of U.S. policy was to restore capitalism in the former communist nations.

The propaganda task was to treat capitalism as inseparable from democracy, while ignoring the many undemocratic capitalist regimes from Guatemala to Indonesia to Zaire. However, “capitalism” sounded, well, too capitalistic, so the preferred terms were “free market” and “market economy,” labels that sound less capitalistic by appearing to include more of us than just the Fortune 500. Thus President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: “Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.”4

A few years earlier, in 1990, as the Soviet Union was preparing for its fatal plunge into the free-market paradise, Bruce Gelb, head of the United States Information Agency, told a reporter that the Soviets would benefit economically from U.S. business education because “the vipers, the bloodsuckers, the middlemen—that’s what needs to be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That’s what makes our kind of country click!”⁵

Today, the former communist countries and China are clicking away with vipers and bloodsuckers. Thousands of luxury cars have appeared on the streets of Moscow and Prague. Rents and real-estate prices have skyrocketed. Numerous stock exchanges have sprung up in China and Eastern Europe, sixteen in the former USSR alone. And a new and growing class of investors, speculators, and racketeers are wallowing in wealth.6

Greater opulence for the few has meant more poverty for the many. As one young female journalist in Russia put it: “Every time someone gets richer, I get poorer.”⁷ In Russia, the living standard of the average family has fallen almost by half since the market “reforms” took hold.⁸ A report from Hungary makes the same point: “While the ‘new rich’ live in villas with a Mercedes parked in a garage, the number of poor people has been growing.”⁹

Under the direction of Western policymakers, the free-market governments in Eastern Europe have eliminated price controls and subsidies for food, housing, transportation, clothing, and utilities. They have cut back on medical benefits and support for public education. They abolished job guarantees, public employment programs, and most benefits. They forbade workplace political activities by labor unions. They have been selling off publicly owned lands, factories, and news media at bargain prices to rich corporate investors. Numerous other industries have been simply shut down. The breakup of farm collectives and cooperatives and the reversion to private farming has caused a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity in countries like Hungary and East Germany—where collective farming actually had performed as well and often better than the heavily subsidized private farming in the West.

The fundamental laws were changed from a public to private ownership system. There was a massive transfer of public capital into the coffers of private owners, and a sharp increase in crime, corruption, beggary, alcoholism, drug addiction, and prostitution; a dramatic drop in educational levels and literacy standards; and serious deterioration in health care and all other public services. In addition, there has been galloping inflation, and a dramatic rise in environmental devastation, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill.10

In countries like Russia and Hungary, as widely reported in the U.S. press, the suicide rate has climbed by 50 percent in a few years. Reductions in fuel service, brought about by rising prices and unpaid bills, have led to a growing number of deaths or serious illnesses among the poor and the elderly during the long winters. Medical personnel in public clinics are now grossly underpaid. Free health clinics are closing. More than ever, hospitals suffer from unsanitary conditions and shortages of disposable syringes, needles, vaccines, and modern equipment. Many hospitals now have no hot water, some no water at all.¹¹

The deterioration of immunization programs and health standards has allowed polio to make a serious comeback, along with tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, and sexually transmitted diseases. Drug addiction has risen sharply. “Russia’s hospitals are struggling to treat increasing numbers of addicts with decreasing levels of funding.”¹²

There has been a decline in nutritional levels and a sharp increase in stress and illness. Yet the number of visits to doctors has dropped by half because fees are so costly in the newly privatized health care systems. As a result, many illnesses go undetected until they become critical. Russian military officials describe the health of conscripts as “catastrophic.” Within the armed forces, suicides and deaths from drug overdoses have risen dramatically.¹³

The overthrow of communism brought rising infant-mortality and plummeting life-expectancy rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia’s birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age.14

With the end of subsidized rents, homelessness has skyrocketed. The loss of resident permits deprives the homeless of medical care and other state benefits, such as they are. Dressed in rags and victimized by both mobsters and government militia, thousands of indigents die of cold and hunger on the streets of various cities. In Romania, thousands of homeless children live in sewers and train stations, sniffing glue to numb their hunger, begging and falling prey to various predators.¹⁵

In Mongolia, hundreds of homeless children live in the sewers of Ulaanbaatar. Before 1990, Mongolia was a prosperous nation that had benefited from Soviet and East European financial assistance and technical aid. Its industrial centers produced leather goods, woolen products, textiles, cement, meat, grain, and timber. “The communist era dramatically improved the quality of life of the people . . . achieving commendable levels of social development through state-sponsored social welfare measures,” but free-market privatization and deindustrialization has brought unemployment, mass poverty, and widespread malnutrition to Mongolia.¹⁶

Unemployment rates have risen as high as 30 percent in countries that once knew full employment under communism. One Polish worker claims that the jobless are pretty much unemployable after age 40. Polish women say economic demise comes earlier for them, since to get a job, as one puts it, “you must be young, childless and have a big bosom.”17 Occupational safety is now almost nonexistent and workplace injuries and deaths have drastically increased. Workers now toil harder and longer for less, often in sweatshop conditions. Teachers, scientists, factory workers, and countless others struggle for months without pay as their employers run out of funds.¹⁸

Even in the few remaining countries in which communist governments retain ostensible control, such as China and Vietnam, the opening to private investment has contributed to a growing inequality. In China, there are workers who now put in twelve- to sixteen-hour days for subsistence pay, without regularly getting a day off. Those who protest against poor safety and health conditions risk being fired or jailed. The market reforms in China have also brought a return of child labor.¹⁹ “I think this is what happens when you have private companies,” says Ms. Peng, a young migrant who has doubts about the new China. “In private companies, you know, the workers don’t have rights.”²⁰

Likewise, as socialist Vietnam opens itself to foreign investment and the free market, “gaps between rich and poor . . . have widened rapidly” and “the quality of education and health care for the poor has deteriorated.”²¹ Prosperity has come “only to a privileged few in Vietnam” leading to “an emerging class structure that is at odds with the country’s professed egalitarian ideals.”²²

Throughout Eastern Europe, unions have been greatly weakened or broken. Sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacations, and other job benefits once taken for granted under communism have been cut or abolished. Worker sanitariums, vacation resorts, health clinics, sports and cultural centers, children’s nurseries, daycare centers, and other features that made communist enterprises more than just workplaces, have nearly vanished. Rest homes once reserved for workers have been privatized and redone as casinos, night clubs, and restaurants for the nouveau riche.

One booming employment area—besides prostitution—is business security. Private police and private armies in Russia alone muster some 800,000 men. Another employer of choice for working-class youth is the immense and repressive state apparatus of secret police, surveillance units, and other state paramilitary security forces which are “now more formidable than that of the Soviet period. Today, this apparatus is numerically superior to the Armed Forces, better paid and better equipped.”23

Real income has shrunk by as much as 30 to 40 percent in the ex-communist countries. In 1992 alone, Russia saw its consumer spending drop by 38 percent. (By comparison, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, consumer spending in the United States fell 21 percent over four years.) In both Poland and Bulgaria, an estimated 70 percent now live below or just above the poverty line. In Russia, it is 75 to 85 percent, with a third of the population barely subsisting in absolute economic desperation. In Hungary, which has received most of the Western investment to Eastern Europe, over one-third of the citizens live in abject poverty, and 70 percent of the men hold two or more jobs, working up to 14 hours a day, according to the Ministry of Labor.

After months of not getting paid, coal miners in far eastern Russia were beginning to starve. By August 1996, 10,000 of them had stopped working simply because they were too weak from hunger. With no coal being extracted, the region’s power plants began to shut down, threatening an electrical blackout that would further harm the nation’s Pacific-coastal industry and trade.²⁴

Eastern Europeans are witnessing scenes “that are commonplace enough in the West, but are still wrenching here: the old man rummaging through trash barrels for castaway items, the old woman picking through a box of bones at a meat market in search of one with enough gristle to make a thin soup.”25 With their savings and pensions swallowed up by inflation, elderly pensioners crowd the sidewalks of Moscow selling articles of their clothing and other pathetic wares, while enduring harassment by police and thugs.²⁶ A Russian senior citizen refers to “this poverty, which only a few have escaped” while some “have become wildly rich.” ²⁷

As the people in these former communist countries are now discovering, the “free market” means freedom mostly for those who have money, and a drastic decline in living standards for most everyone else. A leading anti-Soviet academic, Richard Pipes of Harvard, uncomfortably reported in 2004 that, according to recent surveys, four out of five Russian respondents blame “the country’s widespread poverty on an unjust economic system,” and feel that the inequalities in wealth are “excessive and illegitimate”; 78 percent said that democracy is a façade for a state that is in the grip of rich and powerful cliques; 70 percent want to restrict “private economic activity,” and 74 percent regret the demise of the USSR, believing that life was better under communism.²⁸

No wonder the newly established “democracies” of Eastern Europe are making moves to repress communist organizations and activities. For example, in October 2006 the Czech government outlawed the Communist Youth Union (KSM). The youth group had been leading a well-organized campaign against the building of U.S. military bases on Czech soil. The campaign included a mass petition drive against the bases and for a public referendum. In the June election, the Communist Party’s vice-president and parliament member was viciously beaten by unidentified thugs. Election ballots cast by communist voters were stolen. Around that time, government-sponsored T-shirts sporting the slogan “Fight for peace, Kill a Communist” were widely circulated, even being sold in Czech embassies around the world. The government justified the ban, arguing that the KSM program wants “to replace private ownership of the means of production with public ownership,” a position that “is against the constitution and is incompatible with fundamental democratic principles.”29 Once again, the propagators of free-market capitalism equate it with democracy.

In 1986, when the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European communist countries were still in existence, I wrote:

The U.S. media’s encompassing negativity in regard to the Soviet Union might induce some of us to react with an unqualifiedly glowing view of that society. The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problems of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some persons in the population. ³⁰

Still I argued that, despite the well-publicized deficiencies, crimes, and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, such as the free medical care and human services; affordable food, fuel, transportation, and housing; universal literacy; gains in women’s rights; free education to the highest level of one’s ability; a guaranteed right to a job; free cultural and sporting events, and the like.

But to utter anything that might be halfway positive about existing communist countries has long been an unforgivable ideological sin in the eyes of many U.S. left intellectuals, whose greatest passion was—and still seems to be—anticommunism, a totalistic negative view that borrows heavily from the demonized images propagated by U.S. policymakers and mainstream media.

When the communist governments were overthrown, most such anticommunist left intellectuals enthusiastically welcomed it as a great leap forward, a liberation from what they saw as the Leninist aberration and Stalinist monstrosity. A normally verbose group, these intellectuals—some of them quite prominent and prolific—have had almost nothing to say about the post-communist free-market paradise of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

31 THE RATIONAL DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In 1999 the White House, with other NATO countries in tandem, launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days, dropping 20,000 tons of explosives, and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo—or so we were told. Many of the liberals, progressives, and other leftists of various ideological leanings who opposed President George W. Bush’s destruction of Iraq (rightly so) were the same people who supported President Bill Clinton’s destruction of Yugoslavia. How strange that they would denounce a war against a dictator and torturer like Saddam Hussein yet support a war against a social democracy like Yugoslavia. Substantial numbers of liberals and other “leftists” were taken in, standing shoulder to shoulder with the White House, NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the IMF, and the mainstream media when it came to Yugoslavia.

In the span of a few months, Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq intermittently, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the United States was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and sundry other places. And of course U.S. forces continued to be deployed around the globe, with hundreds of overseas support bases—all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

U.S. leaders have been markedly selective in their “humanitarian” interventions. They have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Roma (“gypsies”), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or Israel for its continual repression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, or Turkey for what was done to the Kurds, or Indonesia for the slaughter of over 200,000 East Timorese, or Guatemala to stop the systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were often complicit with the perpetrators—who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.Why then did U.S. leaders suddenly develop such strong “humanitarian” concerns regarding Yugoslavia?

Yugoslavia was built on an idea, namely that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided peoples, squabbling among themselves and easy prey to outside imperial interests. Together they would compose a substantial territory capable of its own self-development. Indeed after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and something of an economic success. For many years it had a vigorous growth rate, a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a high life expectancy. Yugoslavia offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was almost entirely publicly owned, although there was a substantial private sector that included some Western corporations.

Whether Yugoslavia thereby qualified as socialist in the eyes of all left intellectuals is not the question. It was far too socialistic for U.S. policymakers, not the kind of country that free-market global capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, it had been allowed to exist for 45 years, useful as a nonaligned buffer to the Warsaw Pact nations. But once the Soviet Union and the other communist regimes were dissolved, there was no longer any reason to have to tolerate Yugoslavia.

The dismemberment policy was initiated by Germany, the United States, and other Western powers. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily abolish its public sector and install a free-market system, the one country that had no interest in joining NATO or the European Union. The U.S. goal was to transform the Yugoslav nation into a cluster of weak, dependent right-wing polities whose natural resources would be completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo; with an impoverished population constituting a cheap labor pool that would help depress wages in Europe and elsewhere; and whose petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, and automobile industries would be dismantled or destroyed outright, thereby offering no further competition with existing Western producers.

U.S. rulers also wanted to abolish Yugoslavia’s public-sector services and social programs—just as they want to abolish our public-sector services and social programs. The ultimate goal was the privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, as it is the privatization and Third Worldization of the entire world, including the United States itself. Much of the Yugoslav economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, described in the New York Times as “war’s glittering prize . . . the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans . . . worth at least $5 billion” in rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver.31

That U.S. leaders planned to dismember Yugoslavia is not a matter of speculation but of public record. As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued U.S. National Security Decision Directive 133: “United States Policy towards Yugoslavia,” labeled “secret sensitive.” It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a “quiet revolution” to overthrow Communist governments while “reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market.”³²

In November 1990 the Bush Sr. administration managed to persuade Congress to pass the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided aid only to the separate republics, not to the Belgrade government, and only to those forces whom Washington defined as “democratic,” that is, free-market separatist parties.

In 1992 another blow was delivered. A freeze was imposed on all trade to and from Yugoslavia, bringing recession, hyperinflation, greater unemployment, and the virtual collapse of the health care system. At the same time, the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises. 33

In February 1999, U.S. officials at Rambouillet made clear their dedication to capitalist restoration. The Rambouillet agreement—actually an ultimatum imposed by the Clinton White House upon what remained of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)—declared: “The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.” There was to be no restriction on the movement of “goods, services, and capital to Kosovo,” and all matters of trade, investment and corporate ownership were to be left to the private market.³⁴

Another goal of U.S. policy was media monopoly and ideological control. In 1997, in what remained of Serbian Bosnia, the last radio station critical of NATO policy was forcibly shut down by NATO “peacekeepers” in order to advance democracy by “bringing about responsible news coverage.”³⁵ Likewise, NATO bombings destroyed the two government TV channels and dozens of local radio and television stations, and killed sixteen newspeople in one instance. By the summer of 1999 the only TV one could see in Belgrade, when I visited that city, was German television, CNN and various U.S. programs. Yugoslavia’s sin was not that it had a dictatorial media but that the publicly owned portion of its broadcasting system deviated from the Western media ideological monopoly that blanketed most of the world.

One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that “those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia—not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers—are depicted as saviors.”36

In Croatia, Washington’s choice separatist leader was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews,” and that “only” 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust. Tudjman’s government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag and anthem.³⁷ Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over a half-million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary executions.³⁸ This included the 200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion was propelled in part by attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Tight controls were imposed on Croatian media, and anyone who criticized President Tudjman’s reign risked incarceration. Yet the White House hailed Croatia as a new democracy.

In Bosnia, U.S. leaders supported the Muslim fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic, an active Nazi in his youth, who called for strict religious control over the media and wanted to establish an Islamic Bosnian republic. Bosnia was put under IMF and NATO regency. It was not permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor allowed to extend credit or self-finance through an independent monetary system. Its state-owned assets, including energy, water, telecommunications, media and transportation, were sold off to private firms at giveaway prices.

In early 1999, the democratically elected president of Republika Srpska, the Serb mini-state in Bosnia, who had defeated the West’s chosen candidate, was removed by NATO troops because he proved less than fully cooperative with NATO’s “high representative” in Bosnia. The latter retained authority to impose his own solutions and remove elected officials who proved in any way uncooperative.39

None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented in 1994: “Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.” While U.S. leaders claimed they wanted peace, Boyd concluded, they encouraged a deepening of the war.⁴⁰

Kosovo presented a similar pattern. U.S. rulers aided separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), previously considered a terrorist organization by Washington. The KLA was a longtime player in the heroin trade that reaches from Afghanistan to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden.⁴¹ KLA leaders had no social program other than the stated goal of cleansing Kosovo of all non-Albanians, a campaign that was pursued for decades. Between 1945 and 1998, the non-Albanian Kosovar population of Serbs, Roma, Turks, Gorani (Muslim Slavs), Montenegrins, and several other ethnic groups—subjected to systematic intimidation and expulsion—shrank from some 60 percent to about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the Albanian population grew from 40 to 80 percent (not the 90 percent repeatedly reported in the press), benefiting from a higher birth rate and a heavy influx of immigrants from Albania.

In 1987, the New York Times reported:

Ethnic Albanians in the [Kosovo provincial] government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. . . . Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls. . . . As the Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years . . . an “ethnically pure” Albanian region. . . .42

While the Serbs were repeatedly charged with ethnic cleansing, they themselves have been the victims of such cleansing in Kosovo. Serbia itself is now the only multi-ethnic society left in the former Yugoslavia, with some twenty-six nationality groups, including thousands of Albanians who have lived in and around Belgrade for many years.

The Serbs were the designated enemy probably because they presented the biggest obstacle to the breakup of Yugoslavia. They were the largest ethnic group in the federation, the one most committed to keeping the country together, and with a working class that was most firmly socialist. The U.S. public was bombarded with stories demonizing the Serbian people and their elected leaders. The Serbs were accused of massacres, mass rapes, and even genocide. Yugoslavia’s democratically elected president, Slobodan Miloseviç, was portrayed as a bloodthirsty tyrant and “Serbian nationalist.” In fact, Miloseviç and his wife, Mira Markoviç, herself an active player in Yugoslav national politics, had long polemicized against nationalistic supremacy of any stripe (including Serbian nationalism), and for multi-ethnic unity.⁴³

All sides in the secessionist wars committed atrocities, but the reporting seemed consistently one-sided. Incidents of Croat and Muslim war crimes against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and when they did they were accorded only passing mention. 44 Meanwhile Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated. John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asked where the TV cameras were when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica. ⁴⁵ The official line, faithfully parroted by many U.S. liberals and elements of the sectarian left, was that Bosnian Serb forces committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.

Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the story about the five-hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, a tale repeated and believed throughout the Gulf war of 1990-91, only to be exposed as a total fabrication years later. During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an official policy of rape. “Go forth and rape,” a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly announced to his troops. The source of that story never could be traced. The commander’s name and the troop units to whom he spoke were never produced. The time and place of this supposed happening was never determined. Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved.”⁴⁶

The “mass rape” theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the continued NATO attacks on Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner boomed: “SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY.”⁴⁷ No evidence or testimony was given in the story itself to support the charge of organized rape. Buried in the nineteenth paragraph, we read that reports gathered by an official mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) found no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens, “and not many dozens,” according to the OSCE spokesperson. A few dozen rapes is a few dozen too many, but can it serve as a justification for aerial assaults upon civilian populations and the destruction of a nation?

The Serbs were blamed for the Sarajevo market massacre. According to the report leaked out on French TV, however, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.48 On one occasion the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week.⁴⁹

Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken some 2000 lives from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources put the figure at about 800. Such casualties reveal a civil war, not mass genocide. Belgrade was condemned for the forced-expulsion policy of Albanians from Kosovo. But such expulsions began in discernible numbers only after the NATO aerial attacks commenced. Tens of thousands fled Kosovo because it was being mercilessly bombed by NATO, or because it was the scene of sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or because they wanted to avoid conscription into the war or were just afraid and hungry. Asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police, an Albanian woman responded, “There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the [NATO] bombs.”50 Thus the refugee tide caused by the bombing was used by U.S. officials as a justification for the bombing.

British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence or credible specifics. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages, but when Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six teenage rape victims. Even in regard to those six, he admitted that he had not spoken to any witnesses, and that “we have no way of verifying these reports.”⁵¹ Officials said there were refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan “could not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening.” Yet every day western journalists reported “hundreds” of rapes and murders. Sometimes they noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated. If so, why were such unsubstantiated stories given such prominent play?

After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians “might be buried in mass graves.”⁵² But mass graves of Albanian victims failed to materialize. The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no clear evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the victims might be Serbs.⁵³

On 19 April 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were in full swing, the State Department announced that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. A few weeks later the Defense Department announced that 100,000 military- aged ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs.54 Such widely varying but staggering figures from official sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals and leftists who supported the “humanitarian rescue operation.”

On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that “in more than 100 massacres” some 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500,000 and 100,000 bandied about by U.S. officials). A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associated Press and other news agencies, echoing Hoon, reported that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs. No one explained how this figure was arrived at. No war sites had yet been investigated and NATO forces had barely begun to roll into Kosovo.

On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations’ chief administrator in Kosovo and premier disinformationist, asserted that about 11,000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY), the court that was set up by the Western powers to try Miloseviç et al. But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day, Kouchner has not explained how he came up with his numbers.⁵⁵

As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, so with Kosovo: unsubstantiated references to “mass graves,” each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of victims, were published in daily media reports for weeks on end. When it came down to hard evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear. In mid-June 1999, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Miloseviç, one purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged 107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was hailed as the “largest crime scene in the FBI’s forensic history,” but it came up with not a single report about mass graves. After two weeks the FBI team returned home empty-handed. 56

Likewise a Spanish forensic team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Pérez Pujol, acknowledged that his team found not one mass grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves as being part of the “machinery of war propaganda.” All across Kosovo the search for killing fields continued, but bodies failed to materialize in substantial numbers—or any numbers at all.⁵⁷

The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Miloseviç allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine’s vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts, not a shoe or belt buckle, or any evidence that the vats had ever been used to dissolve human remains.⁵⁸

By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was no reliable evidence regarding the nationality of victims. No mass killings means that the ICTY war crimes indictment of Miloseviç “becomes highly questionable,” notes Richard Gwyn. “Even more questionable is the West’s continued punishment of the Serbs.”59

No doubt people in Kosovo were killed by NATO bombs and by the extensive land war between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead may have expired from natural causes, as would happen in any large population over time, especially one under such stress. No doubt there also were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of “genocide.” The German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: “Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters.”⁶⁰ Still, Miloseviç was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary mass executions.

We repeatedly have seen how “rogue nations” are targeted. The process is predictably transparent and not very original. First and foremost, the leaders are demonized. Qaddafi of Libya was a “Hitlerite megalomaniac” and a “madman.” Noriega of Panama was a “a swamp rat,” “one of the world’s worst drug thieves and scums,” and “a Hitler admirer.” Saddam Hussein of Iraq was “the Butcher of Baghdad,” a “madman,” and “worse than Hitler.” Demonization of the leader then justifies U.S.-led sanctions and military attacks upon the leader’s country and people. What such leaders really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development not in compliance with the dictates of the global free market.61

In keeping with this practice, Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloseviç was described by Bill Clinton as “a new Hitler.” Earlier he had not be considered so. Initially, Western officials, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him as a “charismatic personality.” Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon who “started all four wars.” This was too much, even for the managing editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria. He noted in the New York Times that Miloseviç who rules “an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors—is no Adolf Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein.”⁶²

Miloseviç was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties, while opposition parties and publications openly denounced him and demonstrated against his government. These facts went almost unnoticed in the U.S. news media. To reject the demonized image of Miloseviç and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim that Serb forces were faultless. It is merely to challenge the notions fabricated to justify NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia.

While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and leftists were convinced that “this time” the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight. “Yes, the bombings don’t work. The bombings are stupid!” they said at the time, “but we have to do something.” In fact, the bombings were other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did work; they destroyed much of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, impoverished cluster of mini-republics, submissive wards of the free-market global empire. For U.S. foreign policy it was another smashing success.

32 TO KILL IRAQ

In October 2002, after a full-dress debate in the House and Senate, the U.S. Congress fell into line behind almost-elected president Bush Jr., giving him a mandate to launch a massive assault against Iraq, a nation already battered by twelve years of bombings and sanctions. The debate in Congress was marked by its usual evasions. Even many of the members who voted against the president’s resolution did so on the narrowest procedural grounds, taking pains to tell how they too detested Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, how they agreed with the president on many points, how something needed to be done about Iraq and about fighting terrorism, but not quite in this way. Few members dared to question the imperial right of U.S. rulers to decide which nations shall live and which shall die.

PRETEXTS FOR WAR

Bush Jr. and other members of his administration gave varied reasons to justify the invasion of Iraq. They claimed it was to insure the well-being of the Middle East and the security of the United States itself, for Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear missiles. In fact, right up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, U.N. inspection teams maintained that Iraq had no such nuclear capability and actually had been in compliance with yearly disarmament inspections.

If the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t they use them against the invader? Why weren’t they ever found by the occupying forces? Such questions were never answered. Iraq once did have factories that produced chemical and bacteriological weapons, but it was the United States that had supplied these materials to Baghdad. The quip circulating at the time was: “We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction—we have the receipts.” But according to United Nations inspection reports, Iraq’s chemical warfare capability had been dismantled.

Still the White House kept talking about that country’s dangerous “potential.” Through September and October of 2002, the White House made it clear that Iraq would be attacked if it had weapons of mass destruction. In November 2002, Bush Jr. announced he would attack if Saddam denied that he had weapons of mass destruction. In sum, if the Iraqis admitted to having such weapons, they were to be invaded. If they denied having them, they still would be invaded—whether they had them or not.

Bush Jr. also charged Iraq with having close links with al-Qaeda and allowing terrorists to operate within its territory. But U.S. intelligence sources themselves let it be known that the Baghdad government was not connected to Islamic terrorist organizations. When a House committee in closed sessions asked administration officials whether they had information of an imminent terrorist threat from Saddam against the United States, they stated unequivocally that they had no such evidence.63

Bush and company seized upon another pretext for war: Saddam had committed war crimes and acts of aggression, including the war against Iran and the gassing of Kurds at Halabja. The Pentagon’s own study, however, found that the massacre of Kurds was committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis.⁶⁴ Another seldom-mentioned fact: U.S. leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military support in its war against Iran. If war crimes and wars of aggression are the issue, it might be recalled that U.S. leaders themselves had launched invasions of Grenada and Panama and sponsored wars of attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and scores of other places, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. No communist state or “rogue nation” had a comparable record of military aggression.

With the various pretexts for war ringing hollow, the Bush administration resorted to the final indictment: Saddam was a dictator; the Iraqis needed democracy. The United States stood for democracy and human rights. Ergo, U.S. leaders were obliged to use force and violence to effect regime change and bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. Again, questions leaped to the fore: There was no denying that Saddam was a dictator, but how did he and his cohorts come to power? Wasn’t Saddam’s conservative wing of the Baath party backed by the CIA? Weren’t they enlisted to destroy the popular revolution, torturing and murdering every democrat, progressive, reformer, communist, and constitutionalist they could get hold of, including the left wing of their own Ba’ath party? During the years he was committing his worst atrocities, Saddam Hussein was Washington’s poster boy. All this the U.S. press let slip down the memory hole.

A former U.S. Army special forces commando, Kevin Tillman, who served in Iraq and whose brother, famed NFL football star Pat Tillman, was killed in Afghanistan, summed up his frustration:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or it harbored terrorists, or it was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or it received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or it had mobile bio-weapons labs, or it had WMD, or it had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or to stop an insurgency, or to stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.65

When policymakers keep providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action, they most likely are lying. When people keep changing their story, you can be fairly sure it’s a story. Having seen that the reasons given by the White House to justify war were highly questionable, some observers incorrectly concluded that the administration had no sensible reasons for its policy, and was simply unwilling to admit its befuddlement. But just because the Bush people were trying to mislead and confuse the public does not perforce mean they themselves were confused. In fact there were some tempting and compelling reasons for war, kept from the American public because they reveal too much about what U.S. rulers are doing in the world. Consider the following.

GLOBAL POLITICO-ECONOMIC SUPREMACY

As enunciated by leading members of the Bush administration, a central goal is to advance U.S. global supremacy.⁶⁶ The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to foist upon people everywhere—including North America—the blessings of an untrammeled free-market globalism.

To achieve that goal, the emergence of any potentially competing superpower or, for that matter, any competing regional power must be prevented. Iraq is a case in point. In 1958 a popular revolution in Iraq kicked out the oil companies. Ten years later, the rightwing of the Baath party took power, with Saddam Hussein serving as point man for the CIA. His assignment was to undo the democratic revolution, which he did with vicious repression. But then, instead of acting as a comprador collaborator to Western investors in the style of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Chile’s Pinochet, Peru’s Fujimora, and numerous others, Saddam committed economic nationalism, pursuing policies of public ownership and development, even retaining some of the social programs of the earlier progressive government. By 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East.

A major goal of the U.S. invasion was to bring Iraq firmly within the free-market sphere, as a client state with a puppet government open to Western investors on terms entirely favorable to the investors. Things did not go quite that way. The invasion and occupation destroyed Saddam’s secular military regime. The nationalist Baathist elements were systematically eradicated in assassination attacks, some of which were directed by the Ministry of Interior under CIA auspices.⁶⁷ Meanwhile the most retrograde sectarian elements in the region were incited. Sectarian terrorism, which had not been a problem before the invaders arrived, became a growth industry afterward.

PRIVATIZATION AND MONETARY CONTROL

Soon after the overthrow of the Soviet Union, U.S. rulers decided that Third World development no longer needed to be tolerated. The last thing the plutocrats in Washington wanted in the Middle East or any other region was independent, self-developing nations that controlled their own labor, capital, natural resources, and markets. The Iraq economy under Saddam was entirely state-owned, including the media. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vented his alarm about Iraq’s “Stalinist economy.” Months before the March 2003 invasion, the White House had put together a committee whose purpose was to supervise the privatization and deregulation of the Iraqi economy.

In the subsequent years of U.S. occupation, the Iraqis may not have received much electricity, clean water, or human services but one “reform” was delivered to them in abundance: privatization. Just about every major component of the Iraqi economy was either destroyed, shut down, or privatized at easy prices. Poverty and underemployment climbed precipitously, so too the Iraqi national debt as international loans were floated in order to help the Iraqis pay for their own victimization.

The intervention also undid another act of troublesome independence. In October 2000, less than half a year before the invasion, Saddam Hussein dumped the U.S. dollar (“the currency of the enemy”) and made the euro the reserve currency for his oil trade. Shortly after that, Iraq converted its $10 billion reserve fund at the United Nations to euros. Instead of buying up U.S. currency to keep it from collapsing, Saddam was now cashing in his dollars. For an oil-rich country to do that, perhaps inducing other OPEC countries to follow suit, could have had a shattering effect on U.S. currency markets. Saddam’s ruling clique had to be replaced with a pliant puppet government that would revert to a dollar standard—as indeed happened. According to some critics, this was a central consideration behind the U.S. invasion and occupation.68

NATURAL RESOURCE GRAB

Another reason for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. As of late 2002 Saddam had offered exploratory concessions to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia. But with the U.S. takeover and a new puppet regime in place, all such agreements were pretty much forgotten. The Bush Jr. administration is composed in part of oilmen who are both sorely tempted and threatened by Iraq’s oil reserve, one of the largest in the world. With 113 billion barrels of quality crude at $55 a barrel, Iraq’s supply comes to over $6 trillion dollars, the biggest resource grab in the history of the world.

During the late 1990s, because of the slumping price of crude, U.S. leaders were interested in keeping Iraqi oil off the market. As reported in the London Financial Times, oil prices fell sharply because Iraq’s agreement with the United Nations would allow Baghdad to sell oil on the world market in larger volumes “competing for market shares.”⁶⁹ The San Francisco Chronicle headlined its story in no uncertain terms: “IRAQ’S OIL POSES THREAT TO THE WEST.” In fact, Iraqi crude posed no threat to “the West,” only to Western oil investors. If Iraq were able to reenter the international oil market, the Chronicle reported, “it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine American oil production and—much more important—it would destroy the huge profits which the United States [read U.S. oil companies] stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in Azerbajian.”70 Direct control of Iraqi oil was the surest way to keep it off the world market when the price was not right, and the surest way to profit from its eventual sale.⁷¹

WAR PROFITEERING

The aggression against Iraq was extremely good for the powerful military-industrial contractors and their many subcontractors. Billions of dollars in no-bid contracts resulted in astronomical profits for Halliburton, Bechtel, and some one hundred other companies, while producing paltry results for the Iraqi people. Most of the sewers remained unconnected, the utilities dysfunctional, and water supplies chancy or nonexistent. For the big companies, however, the combination of brazen corruption and lack of oversight made Iraq the place to be. As much as one-third to one-half of the immense funds allocated by Congress remained unaccounted for. It could not get any better than that for those feeding at the trough.

ISRAEL FIRST

The neoconservative officials in the Bush Jr. administration—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Lewis Libby, Abram Shulsky, and others—were strong proponents of a militaristic and expansionist strain of Zionism linked closely to the right-wing Likud Party of Israel. With impressive cohesion these “neocons” played a determinant role in shaping U.S. Middle East policy.⁷² In the early 1980s Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing classified documents to Israel. Instead of being charged with espionage, Feith temporarily lost his security clearance and Wolfowitz was untouched. The two continued to enjoy ascendant careers, becoming second and third in command at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld.

For these right-wing Zionists, the war against Iraq was part of a larger campaign to serve the greater good of Israel. Saddam Hussein was Israel’s most consistent adversary in the Middle East, providing much political support to the Palestinian resistance. The neocons had been pushing for war with Iraq well before 9/11, assisted by the well-financed and powerful Israeli lobby, as well as by prominent members of Congress from both parties who obligingly treated U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East as inseparable. The Zionist neocons provided alarming reports about the threat to the United States posed by Saddam because of his weapons of mass destruction. At that same time, reports by both the CIA and the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) registered strong skepticism about the existence of such weapons in Iraq.73

The neocon goal has been Israeli expansion into all Palestinian territories and the emergence of Israel as the unchallengeable, perfectly secure, supreme power in the region. This could best be accomplished by undoing the economies of pro-Palestinian states including Syria, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia. A most important step in that direction was the destruction of Iraq as a nation, including its military, civil service, police, universities, hospitals, utilities, professional class, and entire infrastructure, an Iraq torn with sectarian strife and left in shambles.⁷⁴

DOMESTIC POLITICAL GAINS

As of 10 September 2001, Bush Jr.’s approval ratings were sagging woefully. The stock market was down, unemployment was up, wages remained flat, and a recession showed no sign of easing. But the next day’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly trumpeted war against terrorism and the massive bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, sent Bush’s approval ratings soaring.

Then came the corporate scandals of 2002. By July, both President Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney were implicated in fraudulent accounting practices with Harken and Halliburton respectively. The companies claimed false profits to pump up stock values, followed by heavy insider trading, selling at great profit (by Bush, Cheney and others) just before the stock was revealed to be nearly worthless and collapsed in price. By October 2002, the impending war against Iraq blew this whole issue out of the news. Daddy Bush had done the same thing in 1990–1991, sending the savings and loan scandal into media limbo by waging war against that very same country, thus keeping at least two of his sons from criminal prosecution.

Pegged as the party of corporate favoritism and corruption, the GOP again emerged as the party of strong patriotic leadership, fearlessly guiding America through perilous straits. Some of our compatriots, who are usually cynical about politicians in day-to-day affairs, display an almost childlike trust and knee-jerk faith when these same politicians trumpet a need to defend our “national security” against some alien threat, real or imagined. Many rallied around the flag, draped as it was around the president.

All through 2005–2006 Bush Jr. repeatedly intoned, “We are at war,” inviting us thereby to suspend critical judgment and fall in line. In a speech before the U.S. Naval Academy’s graduating class in 2005, he pointed enthusiastically to the brighter side of bloodletting: “Revolutionary advances in technology are transforming war in our favor. . . . put[ting] unprecedented agility, speed, precision, and power in your hands. . . .We can now strike our enemies with greater effectiveness, at greater range, with fewer civilian casualties. In this new era of warfare we can target a regime, not a nation.”75 Something to look forward to.

SUPPRESSING DEMOCRACY AT HOME

The statist psychology fostered by perpetual war makes democratic dissent difficult if not “unpatriotic” and provides an excuse to circumscribe our civil liberties, such as they are. Under newly enacted repressive legislation almost any critical effort against existing policy can be defined as “giving aid and comfort to terrorism.” The Military Commissions Act of 2006 grants the president the power to incarcerate anyone at anytime without any accountability, a power that is dictatorial. Even the normally staid New York Times described the act as “a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.”⁷⁶

Political democracy has historically been a weapon used by the people to defend themselves against the abuses of wealth. So it was in the ancient Greek and Roman republics and so it remains to this day. Consequently, the plutocrats wage war not only against the public sector and against the people’s standard of living, but also against the very democratic rights that the populace utilizes to defend its well-being.

Some of the liberal cognoscenti are never happier than when, with patronizing smiles, they can dilate on the stupidity of Bush Jr. What I have tried to show is that Bush has been neither retarded nor misdirected. To be sure, his invasion of Iraq sank into an unanticipated insurrectionary quagmire not long after he announced “victory” was at hand. At the operational level his administration made gross miscalculations, yet his policy was anchored in some real material interests of much concern to him and his fellow plutocrats. On the eve of war, the White House was populated not by fools and bunglers but by liars and manipulators.

33 GOOD THINGS HAPPENING IN VENEZUELA

Even before I arrived in Venezuela for a recent visit, I encountered the great class divide that besets that country. On my connecting flight from Miami to Caracas, I found myself seated next to an attractive, exquisitely dressed Venezuelan woman. Judging from her prosperous aspect, I anticipated that she would take the first opportunity to hold forth against President Hugo Chávez. Unfortunately, I was right.

Our conversation moved along famously until we got to the political struggle going on in Venezuela. “Chávez,” she hissed, “is terrible, terrible.” He is “a liar”; he “fools the people” and is “ruining the country.” She herself owned an upscale women’s fashion company with links to prominent firms in the United States. When I asked how Chávez had hurt her business, she said, “Not at all.” But many other businesses, she quickly added, have been irreparably damaged as has the whole economy. She went on denouncing Chávez in sweeping terms, warning me of the national disaster to come if this demon continued to have his way.

Other critics I encountered in Venezuela shared this same mode of attack: weak on specifics but strong in venom, voiced with all the ferocity of those who fear that their birthright (that is, their class advantage) was under siege because others below them on the social ladder were now getting a slightly larger slice of the pie.

In Venezuela over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Before Chávez, most of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist. The neoliberal market “adjustments” of the 1980s and 1990s only made things worse, cutting social spending and eliminating subsidies in consumer goods. Successive administrations did nothing about the rampant corruption and nothing about the growing gap between rich and poor, and the worsening malnutrition and desperation.

Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things the Chávez government has accomplished:

 A land-reform program was designed to assist small farmers and the landless poor. In March 2005 a large estate owned by a British beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for farming purposes.

 Even before Chávez there was public education in Venezuela, from grade level to university, yet many children from poor families never attended school, for they could not afford the annual fees. Education is now completely free (right through to university level), causing a dramatic increase in school enrollment.

 The government set up a marine conservation program, and is taking steps to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples.

 Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives, and farmers.

 Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry—80 percent of which is still publicly owned—were halted, and limits have been placed on foreign capital penetration.

 Chávez kicked out the U.S. military advisors and prohibited overflights by U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in Colombia.

 “Bolivarian Circles” were organized throughout the nation; they consist of neighborhood committees designed to activate citizens to assist in literacy, education, and vaccination campaigns, and other public services.

 The government has been hiring unemployed men, on a temporary basis, to repair streets and neglected drainage and water systems in poor neighborhoods.

Then there is the health program. I visited a dental clinic in Chávez’s home state of Barinas. The staff consisted of four dentists, two of whom were young Venezuelan women. The other two were Cuban men who were there on a one-year program. The Venezuelan dentists noted that in earlier times dentists did not have enough work. There were millions of people who needed treatment, but care was severely rationed by the private market, that is, by one’s ability to pay. Dental care was distributed like any other market commodity, not to anyone who needed it but only to those who could afford it.

When the free clinic in Barinas first opened it was flooded with people seeking dental care. No one was turned away. Even opponents of the Chávez government availed themselves of the free service, suddenly being quite able to put aside their political aversions. Many of the doctors and dentists who work in the barrio clinics (along with some of the clinical supplies and pharmaceuticals) came from Cuba. Chávez also put Venezuelan military doctors and dentists to work in the free clinics.

That low-income people were receiving medical and dental care for the first time in their lives did not seem to be a consideration that carried much weight among the more “professionally minded” medical practitioners. Much of the Venezuelan medical establishment was vehemently and unforgivably opposed to the free-clinic program, seeing it as a Cuban communist campaign to undermine medical standards and physicians’ earnings.

I visited one of the government-supported community food stores that are located around the country, mostly in low-income areas. These modest establishments sell canned goods, pasta, beans, rice, and some produce and fruits at well below the market price, a blessing in a society with widespread malnutrition. Popular food markets have eliminated the layers of intermediaries and made staples more affordable for residents. Most of these markets and stores are run by women. The government also created a state-financed bank whose function is to provide low-income women with funds to start cooperatives in their communities.

There are a growing number of worker cooperatives in Venezuela. One in Caracas was started by turning a waste dump into a shoe factory and a T-shirt factory. Financed with money from the petroleum ministry, the co-op put about a thousand people to work. The workers seem enthusiastic and hopeful. Surprisingly, many Venezuelans know relatively little about the worker cooperatives. Or perhaps it is not surprising, given the near monopoly that private capital has over the print and broadcast media. The wealthy media moguls, all vehemently anti-Chávez, own four of the five television stations and all the major newspapers.

The man most responsible for Venezuela’s revolutionary developments, Hugo Chávez, has been accorded the usual ad hominem treatment in the U.S. news media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes a political opponent who called Chávez “a psychopath, a terribly aggressive guy.”77 The London Financial Times sees him as “increasingly autocratic” and presiding over what the Times called a “rogue democracy.”⁷⁸ In 2005 ABC’s Nightline labeled him “the leftist strongman” who “delivered a tirade in the United Nations against President Bush.”⁷⁹ A New York Times news story reported that his government “is hostile to American interests.”⁸⁰

The following year Chávez reappeared at the United Nations General Assembly and lambasted George W. Bush again for his single-minded dedication to the rich and powerful, and for his aggressive war policies that were in violation of international law. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi rushed to Bush’s defense, calling Chávez “an everyday thug.” The next day the Venezuelan thug announced that Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuelan state-run oil company, planned to more than double the amount of low-priced heating oil it was making available to needy Americans mostly in the Northeast United States, from forty million gallons a year to one hundred million gallons.⁸¹

In the Nation, Marc Cooper—one of those Cold War liberals who regularly defends the U.S. empire—wrote that the democratically elected Chávez spoke “often as a thug,” who “flirts with megalomania.” Chávez’s behavior, Cooper rattled on, “borders on the paranoiac,” was “ham-fisted demagogy” acted out with an “increasingly autocratic style.” Like so many critics, Cooper downplayed or ignored Chávez’s accomplishments and popular support, and used name-calling in place of informed analysis.⁸²

Other media mouthpieces have labeled Chávez as “mercurial,” “besieged,” “heavy-handed,” “incompetent,” “dictatorial,” a “barracks populist,” a “firebrand,” and, above all, a “leftist” and “anti-American.” It is never explained what “leftist” means. A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable use and development of social resources and human services, and who supports the kinds of programs that the Chávez government has been putting in place. Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.

Occasionally readers are allowed to challenge the demonizing barrage. When a report in the San Francisco Chronicle described Chávez as “a populist strongman with leftist leanings,” an annoyed reader pointed out that these were loaded terms: “To be consistent, newspaper writers should refer to President Bush as ‘an elitist oilman with far-right leanings who became president by political manipulation.’”83 A New York Times article described Venezuela’s efforts to aid poor people, including Mexicans needing eye surgery and Americans needing heating oil, as Chávez’s “pet projects.” A reader pointed out that the same article described similar efforts by the U.S. government as “development programs.” He asked why were these not also described as “pet projects?” Why such asymmetry in reporting? He also asked, “Don’t all countries seek foreign allies? Why is it particularly nefarious for Venezuela to do so?”⁸⁴

Chávez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against Venezuela’s democratically elected government, have been depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “pro-democratic” and “pro-West” governance. They were referring to the corporate-military leaders of Venezuela’s privileged social order who killed more people in the forty-eight hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chávez in his years of rule.⁸⁵

When one of these perpetrators, General Carlos Alfonzo, was indicted by the Venezuelan government for the role he played in the undemocratic coup, the New York Times chose to call him a “dissident” whose rights were being suppressed by the Chávez government.86 Four other top military officers charged with leading the 2002 coup were also likely to face legal action. No doubt, they too will be described not as plotters or traitors who tried to overthrow a democratic government, but as “dissidents” who supposedly were being denied their right to “disagree” with the government.

President Hugo Chávez, whose public talks I attended on three occasions in Caracas, proved to be an educated, articulate, remarkably well-informed and well-read individual. Of big heart, deep human feeling, and keen intellect, he manifested a sincere dedication to effecting some salutary changes for the great mass of his people, a man who in every aspect seemed most worthy of the decent and peaceful democratic revolution he was leading.

Millions of his compatriots correctly perceive him as being the only president who has ever paid attention to the nation’s poorest areas. No wonder he is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in his own country and from ruling circles up north. Chávez also charges that the United States government is plotting to assassinate him. I can believe it. And if U.S. rulers should succeed in that ever so foul deed, Nancy Pelosi, Marc Cooper, and the others will rush forth with assertions about how Chávez brought it on himself.

34 A WORD ABOUT TERRORISTS

Terrorism is a form of violent political action directed against innocent and defenseless people. Along with denouncing such murderous assaults, we must try to comprehend why they happen. A number of the U.S. corporate media’s pundits maintain that “Islamic terrorists” have attacked us because we are prosperous, free, democratic, and secular. As CBS-TV anchorman Dan Rather remarked, “We are winners and they are losers, and that’s why they hate us.”

In fact, if we bother to listen to what the Islamic militants actually say, they oppose us not because of who we are but because of what we do—to them and their region of the world. The individuals who were convicted of bombing the World Trade Center the first time, in 1993, sent a letter to the New York Times declaring that the attack was “in response for the American political, economic, and military support to Israel . . . and the rest of the dictator countries in the [Middle East] region.”87

In November 2001, in his first interview after 9/11, Osama bin Laden had this to say: “This is a defensive Jihad. We want to defend our people and the territory we control. This is why I said that if we do not get security, the Americans will not be secure either.” A year later, a taped message from bin Laden began: “The road to safety [for America] begins by ending [U.S.] aggression. Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. The [terrorist] incidents that have taken place . . . are only reactions and reciprocal actions.”⁸⁸ In November 2004, in another taped commentary, bin Laden argued that the war his people were waging against the United States was a retaliatory one. He explicitly addressed the assertion made by Western officials and media pundits that the United States is targeted because it is so free and prosperous. If so, he argued, then why haven’t the jihadists attacked Sweden? Sweden is more prosperous and more democratic than the United States. Predictably the questions posed by bin Laden received no serious attention in the U.S. news media.

As early as 1989, former president Jimmy Carter offered a fairly accurate explanation of why people in the Middle East see the United States as the enemy. He told the New York Times: “You only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers—women and children and farmers and housewives—in those villages around Beirut [an attack ordered by President Ronald Reagan]. As a result of that . . . we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what . . . has precipitated some of the terrorists attacks.”89

We critics of U.S. foreign policy have argued that the best road to national safety and security lies neither in police-state repression at home nor military invasions abroad but in a foreign policy that stops making the United States an object of hatred among people throughout the world.

The Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation, for instance, does not seem impelled by a hate-ridden envy of the United States as such but by a desire to get the Americans out of Iraq. The Iraqis resent the United States not because it is so free, prosperous, and secular but because U.S. forces have delivered death and destitution upon their nation. As exclaimed one Iraqi woman whose relatives were killed by U.S. troops, “God curse the Americans. God curse those who brought them to us.”⁹⁰ Under the U.S. occupation, unemployment climbed to 50 percent or higher, and villages and towns continued to go without electricity, water, and sewage disposal. Meanwhile the country’s public institutions were in shambles, and its economy was privatized and stripped bare.

An in-depth, five-year study of religiously motivated terrorism was conducted by Jessica Stern, who interviewed religious militants of all stripes. She found men and women who were propelled neither by hatred of America’s prosperity and democracy nor by nihilistic violence. Rather they held a deep faith in the justice of their cause and in the possibility of transforming the world through violent sacrificial action.91 The United States was not envied but resented for the repression and poverty its policies were seen to have imposed upon their countries.

To be sure, there have arisen cadres of extremist Islamic zealots, of whom the Taliban in Afghanistan are a prime example. The Taliban are dedicated to waging holy war in the hope of imposing their theocratic rule upon their country. In their maniacal intolerance, they pursue indiscriminate bloodletting, ghastly mistreatment of women, and a readiness to sacrifice themselves to their own acutely warped version of Islam. It might do well to remember that the Taliban were a product of the CIA-created, post-Soviet era in Afghanistan.

In various other parts of the world there are extremist Islamic sects and grouplets that teach their members to loathe all non-Muslims and detest even those Muslims who belong to the wrong sect and who indulge in such evil pursuits as shaving, listening to music, or allowing their women to leave their faces uncovered.⁹² (This fanatical intolerance has its parallel among certain fundamentalist Christian sects that delightedly dwell on how all nonbelievers—as well as incorrect believers in competing sects—will writhe in eternal hellfire and are deserving of every ill-fated mishap here on Earth.) These kind of aberrant religious groups have long existed in various countries. The question is: what are the socio-political conditions that feed their accretion, thrusting them onto center stage in force and numbers?

In Iraq, as of 2007, fanatical sectarian elements have come to the fore but only after the U.S. invasion and occupation. This would suggest that the desperate conditions created by Western imperialism and globalization serve as fertile breeding grounds for such groups. The invasion of Iraq has created far more terrorists than ever previously existed in that country.

Meanwhile our rulers indulge in their own form of terrorism. They would have us believe that the terror bombings and invasions inflicted upon the peoples of other nations are for their own good. Why the targeted populations cannot see this remains a mystery to the chief sponsors of Washington’s “humanitarian wars.” When asked why he thought some populations have a “vitriolic hatred for America,” George W. Bush offered his superpatriotic mystification: “I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”93

Even the Pentagon allowed that what U.S. leaders do abroad might have something to do with inciting terrorism. A 1997 Defense Department study concludes: “Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”⁹⁴ Such “U.S. involvement,” it should be noted, often consists of a state-sponsored terrorism that attacks popular movements throughout the world, exterminating whole villages and killing large numbers of labor leaders and workers, peasants, students, journalists, clergy, teachers, and anyone else who supports a more egalitarian social order for their own country.

People throughout the world are also discomforted by a U.S. superpower that possesses an unanswerable destructive capacity never before seen in human history, that can with impunity visit aerial death and destruction upon any nation that lacks a nuclear retaliatory strike force. With only five percent of the Earth’s population, the United States expends more military funds than all the other major powers combined.95 U.S.-sponsored terrorism—in the form of death squads, paramilitaries, invasions, and occupations—has taken millions of lives in scores of countries.

Whole societies have been undermined and shattered, not only by U.S. military assaults, but by U.S. sanctions and monetary policies that have imposed a debt peonage and poverty upon struggling nations. Maybe all this has something to do with why the terrorists oppose this nation. But to consider such things in any detail is to get too close to exposing the hypocrisies that sustain the U.S. global empire. Washington policymakers find it more convenient to pose as misunderstood paladins in shining armor puzzled by the ingratitude of those whom they purportedly rush to rescue.

NOTES

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (various editions).

2. The reference to China is prior to the 1979 modernization and rapid growth and prior to the one-child family program: see Food First Development Report no. 4, 1988.

3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (selected writings) (International Publishers, 1972), 319.

4. Italics added. When the text of Clinton’s speech was printed the next day in the New York Times, the sentence quoted above was omitted.

5. Washington Post, 11 June 1990.

6. New York Times, 1 and 3 November 2006.

7. New York Times, 15 October 1995.

8. New York Times, 16 June 1996.

9. New York Times, 27 February 1990.

10. Vladimir Bilenkin, “Russian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime: Notes on a Class in Defeat,” Monthly Review, November 1996, 1–12; and Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997), chapters 6 and 7.

11. See Eleanor Randolph, Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

12. CNN news report, 2 February 1992.

13. Toronto Star, 5 November 1995.

14. New York Times, 6 April 1994.

15. NPR news, 21 July 1996.

16. K.L. Abeywickrama, “The Marketization of Mongolia,” Monthly Review, March 1996, 25–33, and reports cited therein.

17. Nation, 7 December 1992.

18. Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1996.

19. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1990.

20. Wall Street Journal, 19 May 1994.

21. New York Times, 8 April 1996.

22. AP report, 28 October 1996.

23. Bilenkin, “Russian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime”; italics added.

24. Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1996.

25. Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1990.

26. Washington Post, 1 January 1996.

27. Modern Maturity, September/October 1994.

28. Richard Pipes, “Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want,” Foreign Affairs (May/June, 2004).

29. Information and quotations in the above paragraph are from Laura Petricola, “Czech Gov’t Bans Youth Group, Torpedoes Democracy,” People’s Weekly World, 28 October 2006.

30. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 145.

31. New York Times, 8 July 1998.

32. Sean Gervasi, “Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis,” CovertAction Quarterly, winter 1992–93.

33. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1996; and Chossudovsky’s “Banking on the Balkans,” THIS, July-August 1999; see also see the collection of reports by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Nadja Tesich, Michel Choussudovsky, and others in NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition (International Action Center, 1998).

34. Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo (the “Rambouillet Agreement”), February 23, 1999, reproduced in full in The Kosovo Dossier, 2^ND ed.(Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1999).

35. New York Times, 10 October 1997; for more details of this incident, see selection 3, “Methods of Media Manipulation.”

36. Joan Phillips, “Breaking the Selective Silence,” Living Marxism April 1993, 10.

37. Financial Times (London), 15 April 1993.

38. See for instance, Yigal Chazan’s report in the Guardian (London/Manchester), 17 August 1992.

39. Michael Kelly, “The Clinton Doctrine is a Fraud, and Kosovo Proves It,” Boston Globe 1 July 1999.

40. Foreign Affairs, September/October 1994.

41. San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 1999 and Washington Times, 3 May 1999.

42. New York Times, 1 November 1987.

43. For example, Mira Markoviç, Night and Day, A Diary (Dragiša Nikoliç, 1995).

44. For instance, Raymond Bonner, “War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops ‘Cleansed’ the Serbs,” New York Times, 21 March 1999, a revealing report by a reputable correspondent that was largely ignored.

45. John Ranz, paid advertisement, New York Times, 29 April 1993.

46. “Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia, “ New York Times, October 23, 1993.

47. San Francisco Examiner, 26 April 1999.

48. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt, 1997), 262.

49. New York Times, 7 August 1993.

50. Brooke Shelby Biggs, “Failure to Inform,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 5, 1999.

51. Audrey Gillan, “What’s the Story?” London Review of Books, 27 May 1999.

52. Washington Post, 10 July 1999.

53. Carlotta Gall, “Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs,” New York Times, 27 August 1999.

54. Both the 500,000 and 100,000 were reported in the New York Times, 11 November 1999.

55. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, “Where Are Kosovo’s Killing Fields?” weekly analysis, 18 October 1999.

56. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, “Playing the Numbers Game” (www.aim.org/mm/1999/08/03.htm).

57. Perez Puhola quoted in London Sunday Times, 31 October 1999; see also Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, “Where Are Kosovo’s Killing Fields?” weekly analysis, 18 October 1999.

58. For a fuller discussion of the atrocity lies and related issues, see Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso, 2000).

59. Richard Gwyn’s report in the Toronto Star, 3 November 1999.

60. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, 12 January 1999 and 29 October 1998 to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, 20 April 1999.

61. For further discussion of this point, see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights Books, 1995).

62. New York Times, March 28, 1999.

63. San Francisco Chronicle, 20 September 2002.

64. New York Times, 24 January 2003.

65. Kevin Tillman, “The Day After Pat’s Birthday: A Plea to Speak Up for Democracy,” CommonDreams.org, 19 October 2006, www.commondreams.org/views06/1020-23.htm.

66. See the report Rebuilding America’s Defenses promulgated by Project for a New American Century, the right-wing think tank that provided the top policymakers of the Bush Jr. administration.

67. Max Fuller, “Ghosts of Jadiriyah,” 14 November 2006, www.brusselstribunal.org/FullerJadiriyah.htm.

68. W. Clark, “The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq,” Independent Media Center www.indymedia.org, 6 March 2003; and Coilin Nunan, “Currency and the War on Iraq,” www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil, 27 March 2003.

69. London Financial Times, 24 February 1998.

70. San Francisco Chronicle, 22 February 1998.

71. On paper, Iraq’s oil industry was still state owned as of 2006.

72. James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006), 61–62 and passim.

73. Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States, 21 and passim.

74. See Yahya Sadowski, “No War for Whose Oil?” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2003; Patrick Seale, “A Costly Friendship,” Nation, 21 July 2003, and Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States.

75. New York Times, 12 June 2005.

76. New York Times editorial, 28 September 2006.

77. San Francisco Chronicle, 30 November 2001.

78. Financial Times, 12 January 2002.

79. ABC’s “Nightline” 16 September 2005.

80. New York Times, 19 October 2006.

81. Associated Press report, 22 September 2006.

82. Nation, 6 May 2002.

83. San Francisco Chronicle report, 16 April 2002; and response by Donald Scott, 18 April 2002.

84. New York Times article, 4 April 2006; and response by Robert Daiman, 5 April 2006.

85. See Gregory Wilpert, ed., Coup Against Chávez in Venezuela: The Best International Reports of What Really Happened (Fundación por Un Mondo Multipolar, 2003).

86. “Venezuelan Court Rules Against Dissident,” New York Times, 16 April 2005.

87. New York Times, 9 January 1998.

88. Los Angeles Times, 13 November 2002.

89. New York Times, 26 March 1989.

90. San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January 2004.

91. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God (Ecco, 2003).

92. For example, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam (Tarcher, 2007).

93. Boston Globe, 12 October 2001.

94. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DOD Responses to Transnational Threats, October 1997, Final Report, Vol.1. www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans.pdf, cited.

95. On the U.S. military empire, see the collection of articles in Carl Boggs (ed.) Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (Routledge, 2003).