"After enduring a torrent of scorn from New York's
corporate media and weeks of naysaying by the poobahs of the
illiberal and yea, even the liberal press, thousands of global
justice activists hit the streets here on Saturday and did
just what they said they'd do. They showed up in huge numbers
and demonstrated peacefully, despite no end of differences
among them, and no end of goading by police and journalists.
The crowd that marched on the World Economic Forum gathering
at the Waldorf Astoria hotel this weekend was old and young,
local and from out of town. Despite a literally suffocating
police presence (long lines of motorcycle cops on Harleys
hemmed in the marchers, belching fumes,) the festivities
remained nonviolent, against all odds." So writes Laura
Flanders at WorkingForChange.com.
Since 11 September, the "war on terrorism" has
provided a pretext for the rich countries, led by the United
States, to further their dominance over world affairs.
By spreading "fear and respect", as a Washington Post
reporter put it, America intends to see off challenges to its
uncertain ability to control and manage the "global
economy", the euphemism for the progressive seizure of
markets and resources by the G8 rich nations.
This, not the hunt for a man in a cave in Afghanistan, is the
aim behind US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s threats to "40
to 50 countries". It has little to do with terrorism and
much to do with maintaining the divisions that underpin "globalisation".
Today international trade is worth more than £11.5bn a day. A
tiny fraction if this, 0.4 per cent, is shared with the poorest
countries. American and G8 capital controls 70 per cent of world
markets, and because of the rules demanding the end of tariff
barriers and subsidies in poor countries while ignoring
protectionism in the west, the poor countries lose £1.3bn a day
in trade.
By any measure, this is a war of the rich against the poor. Look
at the casualty figures. The toll, says the World Resources
Institute, is more than 13 million children every year, or 12
million under the age of five, according to United Nations
estimates.
"If 100 million have been killed in the formal wars of the
20th century", wrote Michael McKinley, "why are they
to be privileged in comprehension over the annual [death] toll
of children from structured adjustment programmes since
1982?"
McKinley’s paper, "Triage: a survey of the new inequality
as combat zone" was presented to a conference in Chicago
this year and deserves wider reading (he teaches at the
Australian National University. It vividly describes the
acceleration of western economic power in the Clinton years,
which, since 11 September, has passed a threshold of danger for
millions of people.
Last month’s World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha in the
Gulf state of Quatar, was disastrous for the majority of
humanity. The rich nations demanded and got a new
"round" of "trade liberalisation", which is
the power to intervene in the economies of poor countries, to
demand privatisation and the destruction of public services.
Only they are permitted to protect their home industries and
agriculture; only they have the right to subsidise exports of
meat, grain and sugar, then to dump them in poor countries at
artificially low prices, thereby destroying the livelihoods of
millions.
In India, says the environmentalist Vandana Shiva, suicides
among poor farmers are "an epidemic".
Even before the WTO met, the American trade representative
Robert Zoelliek invoked the "war on terrorism" to warn
the developing world that no serious opposition to the American
trade agenda would be tolerated.
He said: "The United States is committed to global
leadership of openness and understands that the staying power of
our new coalition...[against terrorism]...depends on economic
growth..." The code is that "economic growth"
(rich elite, poor majority) equals anti-terrorism.
Mark Curtis, a historian and Christian Aid’s head of policy,
who attended Doha, has described "an emerging pattern of
threats and intimidation of poor countries" that amounted
to "economic gunboat diplomacy".
He said: "It was utterly outrageous. Wealthy countries
exploited their power to spin the agenda of big business. The
issue of multinational corporations as a cause of poverty was
not even on the agenda; it was like a conference on malaria that
does not discuss the mosquito."
Delegates from poor countries complained of being threatened
with the removal of their few precious trade preferences.
"If I speak out too strongly for the rights of my
people," says an African delegate, "the US will phone
my minister. They will say that I am embarrassing the United
States. My government will not even ask, ‘What did he say?’
They will just send me a ticket tomorrow...so I don’t speak
for fear of upsetting the master."
A senior US official telephoned the Ugandan government to ask
that its ambassador to the WTO, Nathan Irumba, be withdrawn.
Irumba chairs the WTO’s committee on trade and development and
has been critical of the "liberalisation" agenda.
Dr Richard Bernal, a Jamaican delegate at Doha, said his
government had come under similar pressure. "We feel that
this [WTO] meeting has no connection with the war on
terrorism," he said, "[yet] we are made to feel that
we are holding up the rescue of the global economy if we don’t
agree to a new round [of liberalisation measures]."
Haiti and the Dominican Republic were threatened that their
special trade preferences with the United States would be
revoked if they continued to object to "procurement",
the jargon for the effective takeover of a government’s public
spending priorities.
India’s minister for commerce and industry, Murasoli Maran,
said angrily, "The whole process is a mere formality and we
are being coerced against our will...the WTO is not a world
government and should not attempt to appropriate to itself what
legitimately falls in the domain of national governments and
parliaments."
What the conference showed was that the WTO has become a world
government, run by the rich (principally Washington). Although
it has 142 members, only 21 governments in reality draft policy,
most of which is written by the "quad": the United
States, Europe, Canada and Japan.
At Doha, the British played a part similar to Tony Blair’s
promotion of the "war on terrorism". The Secretary of
State for Trade and Industry, Patricia Hewitt, has already said
that "since 11 September, the case is very overwhelming for
more trade liberalisation". In Doha, the British delegation
demonstrated, according to Christian Aid, "the gulf between
its rhetoric about making trade work for the poor" and its
real intentions.
This "rhetoric" is the speciality of Clare Short, the
International Development Secretary, who surpassed herself by
announcing £20m as "a package of new measures" to
help poor countries.
In fact, this was the third time the same money had been
announced within a year. In December 2000, Short said the
government "will double its support for trade-strengthening
initiatives in developing countries from £15m over the past
three years to £30m over the next three years".
Last March, the same money was announced again. Short, said her
press department, "will announce that the UK will double
its support for...developing countries’ trade
performance..."
On 7 November, the £20m package was announced all over again.
Moreover, a third of it in effect is tied to the launch of a new
WTO "round".
This is typical of the globalisation of poverty, the true name
for "liberalisation". Indeed, Short’s title of
International Development Secretary is as much an Orwellian
mockery as Blair’s moralising about the bombing. Short is
worthy of special mention for the important supporting role she
has played in the fraudulent war on terrorism.
To the naïve, she is still the rough diamond who speaks her
mind in the headlines: and this is true in one sense. In trying
to justify her support for the lawless bombing of civilians in
Yugoslavia, she likened its opponents to Nazi appeasers.
She has since abused relief agency workers in Pakistan, who
called for a pause in the current bombing as
"emotional" and has questioned their integrity. She
has maintained that relief is "getting through" when,
in fact, little of it is being distributed to where it is most
needed.
Around 700 tonnes are being trucked into Afghanistan every day,
less than half that which the UN says is needed. Six million
people remain at risk. Nothing is reaching those areas near
Jalalabad, where Americans are bombing villages, killing
hundreds of civilians, between 60 and 300 in one night,
according to anti-Taliban commanders who are beginning to plead
with Washington to stop. On these killings, as on the killing of
civilians in Yugoslavia, the outspoken Short is silent.
Her silence, and her support for America’s $21bn homicidal
campaign to subjugate and bribe poor countries into submission,
exposes the sham of "the global economy as the only way to
help the poor", as she has said repeatedly.
The militarism that is there for all but the intellectually and
morally impaired to see is the natural extension of the
rapacious economic policies that have divided humanity as never
before. As Thomas Friedman wrote famously in the New York Times,
"the hidden hand" of the market is US military force.
Little is said these days about the "trickle down"
that "creates wealth" for the poor, because it is
transparently false. Even the World Bank, of which Short is a
governor, has admitted that the poorest countries are worse off,
under its tutelage, than ten years ago: that the number of poor
had increased, that people are dying younger.
And these are countries with "structural adjustment
programmes" that are meant to "create wealth" for
the majority. It was all a lie.
Giving evidence before a House of Commons select committee,
Clare Short described the US as "the only great power
[that] almost turns its back on the world". Her gall
deserves a prize. Britain gives just 0.34 per cent of GNP in
aid, less than half the minimum laid down by the United Nations.
It is time we recognised that the real terrorism is poverty,
which kills thousands of people every day, and the source of
their suffering, and that of innocent people in dusty villages,
is directly related.
.... a ZNET commentary - please consider subscribing to ZNET
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Science for Peace Forum and Teach-In - How Should Canada Respond
to Terrorism and War ?
I have been asked to speak on the topic "Why Is There A War
in Afghanistan?" I could focus on the innumerable
suspicious circumstances of this latest U.S. aerial war on a
poverty-stricken country - its typical overriding of
international law, its strategic fit with U.S. corporate designs
for foreign oil resources, and the U.S. past strategic support
of the very Enemy said to be targeted - like Noriega, Saddam,
and Milosevic in the past.1 But instead I am going to situate
this latest U.S.-led war on a third-world region within a much
wider global process. I am going to consider "America's New
War" as the latest expression of a much deeper and wider
terrorist campaign of an emergent totalitarian pattern of
instituting world corporate rule with no limit of occupation or
accountability beyond itself. Unhappily, it is not easy to see
Canada's foreign policy role in all this as anything other than
obedient subjugation to this transnational corporate agenda at
every senior level of decision-making.
The Unseen Terrorist Pattern
The gravest problem with corporate market fundamentalism is that
it is decoupled from society's life conditions. It is, in fact,
incapable of recognizing any value to anything except corporate
"value adding" which, it is assumed, should regulate
all peoples and conditions of life on earth for
"efficiency" and "maximum growth". To this
point, there has been no outside margin to this total doctrine's
demands, or government subservience to them.
Since the commitments of a society to safeguard the lives of its
members and to ensure they are able to express themselves as
human is the measure of its civilization, this global corporate
program is not merely uncivilized. It is, beneath recognition,
terrorist in its meaning. For if we recognize the real meaning
of "terrorism" - to instill in innocent people fear
for their life security to coerce their compliance to an armed
faction's demands - we see its pattern increasingly at work
across world life organization. Under the financial dictates of
the corporate market backed by rising extremes of armed force,
citizens everywhere are subjected to a low-intensity campaign of
destabilization and fear that leaves no aspect of their lives
secure.2
Even in Canada, one of the world's most well-off societies, the
silent terror grows. Its vast water heritage is so in peril that
people unprecedentedly die from for its pollution, while our
governments sign its future away to U.S.-engineered
trade-and-investment dictates. The minds of our young are so
shackled by a culture of violence and demands to buy that their
capacity to think is stunted, while their public education is
increasingly structured as a marketing site to reproduce
students as compliant servo-mechanisms. The rule of law is
cumulatively overridden by transnational trade edicts to
subjugate all that exists for corporate profit. Riot squads club
and gas unarmed opponents, and civil liberties are stripped by
Orwellian "security" machinations.
Always the threat is against life and life means to coerce
compliance to corporate demands. Our country's national symbol
for the hemisphere, healthcare for all, is degraded and
privatized for profit as citizens are deprived of family
physicians by the hundreds of thousands (30,000 in my own small
city). Corporate motor commodities and schemes now so lay waste
to Canada's land, water and public ways that it may be unsafe to
breathe the air, walk freely, or count on a forest or aquatic
habitat being there in a year. The vocation of serving fellow
human and planetary life by one's daily service of work, our
humanity itself, is slashed in every life function. Always the
command is to turn money into more money for corporate
investors, or "not survive".
The pattern cannot be plausibly denied once it is exposed. There
are two major forms of attack on peoples' means of life to
coerce them to conform to global financial and corporate
demands. The first is to defund societies' non-profit social
infrastructures everywhere until peoples have no choice but to
privatize their management for profit. The second front of
attack is more directly violent - to wage one financial and
military war after another on the poorest peoples of the world
to control their states and expropriate their regional
resources. Both these wars on humanity are driven by a fanatic
fundamentalism - to produce ever more money for those with most
money, with no limit, regulation or higher goal permitted to
"obstruct" these transnational money sequences.
The shape of this Beast's ever grosser lines dwarfs the monster
beheld by St. John of the Apocalypse, or the boundless greed of
Duryodhana told by the Mahabharatta. We live under an
increasingly global reign of terror, but our disconnection from
the meaning is its triumph. Instead we are made to believe that
the terror comes from pre-industrial fanatics in poor countries.
The Shape of the Beast
The world has been usurped by a pattern familiar in the
microcosm, but not yet decoded at the macro level - a revolt
against human society itself. The historical maturation of
nations after the world's greatest Depression and War was called
"the Great Transformation" by Karl Polanyi, but the
Great Reversal has not yet been publicly understood. Its meaning
is primeval. It is the atavistic return of society to an
unaccountable male gang seeking to dominate the world.
We see this pattern in the 9-11 War. Its public phase began when
thousands of people of mixed nationalities, most American
civilians, were killed by suicide bombers of a foreign male gang
of Islamic fundamentalists.3 Each side then duly proclaimed the
other the embodiment of evil, each repudiated the rule of law
from start to finish, and both killed as many innocent people as
got in the way of their war to rule other countries. While the
gang leaders throughout stayed unscathed behind walls of armed
protectors, both called each other "cowards".
There is little difference in moral substance between these
atavistic gangs, although a megalomaniac rhetoric of each side
proclaims direct backing from God. Both sides are mass killers,
and both systematically destroy civilians and their means of
life with sanctimonious justification overriding all
accountability to truth or due legal process. Both proclaim
their mission as the working of divine Justice, and both destroy
the lives and human conditions of innocent others with a
pathological abandon that takes the breath away. This is, in
fact, the function of the demonstration killings and
destructions - to command by terror, and seize whatever is
wanted. With complicit governments like Britain's and Canada's
barking and crouching behind, the real deal is struck beneath
public notice - incalculably more innocent people in terror in
exchange for incalculably more oil supplies for U.S-led. oil
corporations and, as a side deal, $200,000,000,000 in giveaways
of public revenues to corporations and the very rich.4
But the primeval criminal-gang structure is not tracked for two
reasons. The first is that saturating conditioning disconnects
people from reality. "It is easy. All you have to do is
tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the the
peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
danger."5 These are Herman Goering's words, and they
transmit the code of this the gang form of rule. Concealed under
the most ludicrous lies, its coercion reigns supreme. Already
university employees and a talk-show host have been
unconstitutionally suspended in the U.S. for pointing out the
most undeniable truths. The disorder goes to the heart of the
ruling corporate psyche. Images of Manliness
Decoding the Global Market as Corporate Gang Occupation
Consider the pattern. The adolescent group-mind plots in secret
behind the closed doors of secluded forts for control of the
rest of society to maximise the gang's private take. Privately
multiplied debt issuances are the currency of the global
corporate gang's control. Sex and violence are the ruling images
of its kingdom of ever bigger deals and attacks on designated
out-groups. The gang's ethos of power and control pervades the
larger society with a barbaric code of acquisitive stratagem,
takeover of others' territories, continuous extraction of gang
tribute, and indiscriminate violence and armed force at will.
Throughout, group slogans and tough-talk re-enforce the bonds of
male and servant-female bravado in the face of ever greater
extremes of life-depredation, confiscation and fear. The
universal insecurity the many feel is, as the resistance grows,
played back to them as what the gang is protecting them from.
The logic of rule by force is then openly declared. The U.S.
President declares an ultimatum to the world - "You are
either with us or for the terrorists", and after starving
Afghanistan is carpet-bombed, his administration proclaims,
"Who will be next? ". Charles Krauthammer declares the
mood in Time Magazine: "America is no mere international
citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant
than any since Rome.
Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms - - -
How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of
will".6 The extortion racket of the neighbourhood is, in a
word, writ large as "the international war against
terrorism" - a war in which those who monopolize terror are
licensed to exempt themselves from its meaning.
Lacking the resources of character to compete head-on, the
global corporate gang everywhere relies on controlled images
instead. The image-set loved most by the gang's crowds are
performed around the clock - symbolic male gangs in corporate
logos attacking one another day in and day out in competitive
spectacles, all constructed to glorify the riches of the
winners. The never-ending sudden-death dramas hold the many in
thrall, and so the actual violent struggles of life and death in
the wider world are diverted from. They are displaced onto the
sports or war screen as a universal marketing site for
corporations and banks.
"Sport", as it is ironically called, is the corporate
gang's daily morality play of trained groupthink, fanatic
factionalism and ever more money for those with most. Defeating
others by overpowering monopoly is the heroic display most
highly revered. Pistols, bombs, collisions, space thrusts,
takeovers, wars, round-the-clock terror, get-rich schemes,
endless machines and fast-lane consumption are "our way of
life" before adoring crowds and female bodies.
Behind the scenes, the real action goes on. "Instruments of
transnational trade and investment", "competititive
mergers" and "privatisation and deregulation of the
public sector" are the deep booty system. Outside of the
manufactured conflicts of the mass-spectacle games the many have
their hearts and minds fastened to, the world is restructured as
a pay-on-time system where the payments issue more and more debt
for all to pay. As this or that entertainment product wins or
loses in the coliseums, the gang's trade lawyers secretly
construct hundreds of new laws behind everyone's backs in which
only the rich can win. This "new world order" is
backed by iron cages, starvation, rains of gas and clubs for
resisters, and genocide for peoples from which the latest
declared Enemy comes. But few dare to name the game. And so its
order is ritualised with ever more one-sided shows of mass
destruction and violence discharged on the dispossessed to
demonstrate the inevitability of its rule.
Outside the bombing of poor peoples, whatever stands in the way
of the global corporate gang's axings of expenditures on life is
declared "an obstacle" to its freedom or - in
revealing slogan - a "protectionist barrier". Any
public law to regulate, protect or retain control over any
sector of domestic economies is prohibited. There is a prize for
all this, and it is a prize without end - all free existence
which corporate vehicles can reconstruct to extract profit from.
In the end, the global corporate gang wages a war on life
organization itself. The world, in the revealing terms of the
occupiers, is a "limitless market opportunity" for
"maximum penetration and control".
Yet in the era of "the global knowledge economy",
there is a vulnerability of this reign of fear and rapine which
cannot be overcome. It can only work where its deep pattern
evades exposure.
The deep pattern of the male corporate gang in its global form
is, as David Rockefeller put it at the June 1991 Bilderberg's
meeting in Baden Germany, a "supranational sovereignty of
an intellectual elite and world bankers which is surely
preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past
centuries".7 As such a structure of world rule, it is
accomplished by the same financial and media system deciders as
put Tony Blair into office in Britain and George Bush Jr. into
the White House against majority vote. Transnational
corporations have marketed and financed these political leaders
to ensure that captive states serve them rather than the peoples
governments are elected by, guaranteeing through state
plenipotentiaries and transnational trade edicts that
governments can no longer govern them in common interest without
infringing the new trade and investment laws in which
transnational corporations alone are granted rights.
All along the corporate media have, as Rockefeller again
advises, co-operated with this "plan for the world "
by a "discretion" of public secrecy for which he
thanks them. "It would have been impossible for us to
develop a plan for the world if we had been subjected to the
lights of publicity during those years".
With financial and media selectors ensuring compliant party
government leaders, all the requirements for this "plan for
the world" have been set in place for a totality of control
of world societies by a centralised global system which is by
law not accountable to any electorate. The meaning of the
post-September 11 bombing of Afghanistan may be best understood
in the light of this general background. What is important to
recognize beneath all the spasms of propaganda of
"America's New War" and "the forces of Good
versus Evil", variations on an old theme, is that every
step of the preparation and aftermath of this "whole new
war with no end" confers cumulatively more strategic, legal
and military control over the world's peoples from an
unaccountable U.S. financial and armed-force centre. But the
"war with no end" is not just for world dominion and,
as it is humorously titled, a "fight for
civilization". The grand prize of this war is unimpedable
control by U.S. multinational oil corporations over the world's
greatest oil and gas deposits which are located around the
Caspian Sea of Central Asia, formerly the territory of the
Soviet Union. Long-time U.S. strategic adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, counselled "unhindered financial and
economic access" to precisely these "Central Asia
natural resources" years ago in 1997, referring
specifically to the "enormous economic prize of natural gas
and oil located in the region". Brzezinski advised that in
the face of domestic resistance, it will become ever "more
difficult to fashion a concensus on foreign policy issues,
except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat" (emphasis added).8
Brzezinski's plan is not disconfirmed by any evidence since.
The result is that the U.S.-led corporate regime is more
effectively total and pre-emptive of thought or act in
opposition to it than any previous totalitarian interregnum - as
successive catechisms of "no alternative", "globalisation",
"controlling earth from space", and "the whole
world has changed" reveal to connective thought. In
Congressional expression of this totalitarian mind-set, U.S.
Senator Bob Smith, whose legislation got the U.S. "Space
Commission" for monopoly military control of the heavens
passed in 2000 long prior to September 11, prescribes this new
world order as the plan of Fate: "It is our Manifest
Destiny. You know we went from the East Coast to the West Coast
of the United States of America settling the continent [sic] and
they call that Manifest Destiny and the next continent if you
will is space, and it goes on forever".9
This is the supra-terrestrial correlative of the doctrine of
total power, and it can conceive of no limit to itself. As earth
events interfere in resistance to the unaccountable world rule,
military and police links are forged on the very sites of any
resistance, constructing and exploiting the new Enemy to justify
the sweeping new powers of coercion and terror which the global
corporate system requires to rule an unwilling world. As in all
protection rackets by terror and financial manipulation, the
greatest threat to life comes from the very system of armed
force, surveillance and attack which is said to be protecting
citizens from it - conceptualised by presidential proclamation
after September 11 as one in which all "in every region - -
are for us, or are with the terrorists". U. S. Trade
Representative, Robert Zoellick then explained this meaning to
include those protesting against the WTO. "This President
and this administration will fight for open markets. We will not
be intimidated by those who have taken to the streets to blame
trade - and America - for the world's ills".10
The Omnipresent Centre
Totality of rule is not the only parameter of totalitarianism.
In Hannah Arendt's phrase, limitlessness of power also proceeds
from "an omnipresent centre". In the new totalitarian
movement, this omnipresent directive force communicates through
global financial and media control centres, with Washington and
Wall Street the dominant nodes of the interlocked system.11 The
world's means of life and mass media are the material and
symbolic vehicles by which the flows of goods and demand for
goods control populations.
The regulating principle of all decisions is to multiply by ever
more deregulation and new financial instruments the monetised
circuits of power through which directive control of all of the
world's means of existence increasingly pass.
As with all totalitarian systems, the dominant instruments of
social power are wrested from traditional authorities, and then
unleashed with none of the formerly inhibiting mechanisms of
law, custom and social norm to limit their use and
magnification. The telltale sign of the totalitarian movement is
that it cannot stop by its nature. It careens from one
life-destructive crisis and suppression to another in supreme
confidence of its limitless power and capacities until its
overreach exposes it to collapse or destruction. This is the
totalitarian career path we know in previous usurpations of
accountable public authority.
Armed terror is not the essence, but the punctuation mark of the
new totalitarianism's meaning. The money-and-consumption command
channel is the secret of the movement's success because it
avoids responsibility for its failures. Wall-Street prescribed
market failures to provide for societies are, instead, always
attributed to transcendental forces of "the invisible
hand" punishing these societies for alleged sins against
"market laws". Thus as catastrophes increasingly
befall the majority of the world, the victims are blamed for
their new deprivation, misery and oppression. This is a far more
effective mode of rule than jackboot terror which is more overt,
but it exposes the system to another form of resistance. For
such a regime depends throughout on keeping knowledge silenced
and repressed. This is its Achilles heel. As soon as people see
through it and flag it to surrounding community, the collective
trance which it depends on begins to come undone.
The new totalitarianism is, ultimately, an American corporate
confidence game which rules the world by images and projections
of power arcing over the globe's surface, while limitlessly
rapacious financial sequencings called "free flows of
capital and commodities" strip world's peoples and their
life-ground underneath. The evidence is all around.
The meta-pattern is most globally fatal with the planetary
ecosystem, but has played out catastrophically on the social
level in Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South-East Asia
since 1990.12 But never is the private and centralised financial
control of these operations raised publicly as an issue, nor is
the control of the money used by private investment banks and
the financial divisions of corporations whose revenues are
generated on the basis of creating over 95% of the world's
money-demand. Thus "the omnipresent centre" of
interlocked global finance can deprive hundreds of millions of
citizens of their very means of existence or their life-security
overnight, with no exposure of the foreign private powers behind
the control of the world money supply constitutionally vested in
national governments. The system's choice paths of value are
assumed, on the contrary, to be as given as the laws of nature
and as unchangeable as the tides - to which they are sinisterly
compared.
The question thus arises. Where is the failed global experiment
of this totalising rule by private corporate power ever raised?
The ground of the silence in even social science classrooms is
that this monopolist program become internalised as public
value-set. The omnipresent centre is, in this way, made more
invisible and unaccountable as it spreads. The public signifiers
and meanings to see it are increasingly ruled out in the
steering media to set the public mind-lock upon which this
totalitarian system depends. All becomes secret in "the war
with no end" to ensure closure against the public even
knowing the lines of this system's world advance.
Rule By Insecurity and Constructed Crises
To sustain acquiescence in the sacrifices it requires, a
totalitarian movement must keep all its subjects off-balance by
a nonstop succession of disruptive changes and demands. Private
fear for one's own security is a necessary condition across
communicatively isolated citizens for their submission to such a
regime. The violation of long-accepted norms presented as fait
accomplis, and the loss of life-bearings by permanent threat to
secure livelihood are the psychological operations which are at
work in any totalitarian movement. To keep the majority in a
continual state of inner anxiety works because people are made
too busy securing or competing for their own survival to
co-operate in mounting an effective response. In the past
decade, the entire population of the globe has been kept
permanently off-balance with one financial meltdown and
transnational trade fiat after another emptying national coffers
and overriding rights of domestic self-determination.
Populations have been so overwhelmed by the moving juggernaut of
economic and environmental crises that a rule of universal
insecurity has rendered social majorities paralysed by a
low-intensity terror - the necessary condition for any
totalitarian movement to continue its advance, for keeping its
subjects perpetually off balance is its modus operandi. That is
why in the Afghanistan case, the war no sooner seems over than
the cry goes up, "Who is next?"
Again, the two system deciders in the new totalitarianism are
financial and media selectors. Together they confront peoples
with continuous uncertainty about their future, destabilising
threats from without, and images of dream-like omnipotence of
success - the latter of great importance in a social field where
grandiose images are all that exists to redeem the increasingly
shabby lives of the majority . Orwell describes the phenomena of
totalitarianism brilliantly as fiction, Hannah Arendt as reality
in their great works of 1984 and The Origins of Totalitarianism
respectively. But the mechanics of this ever-shifting world of
primary fears and aggressions are not based in the new
totalitarianism on what Orwell and Arendt's descriptions feature
- brutal shows of violence by the state.
Arendt's 1955 study is confined to "the only two forms of
totalitarianism we know" -- Nazism and Stalinism. But
Arendt warns in words that are not remembered that
totalitarianism is "an ever present danger" grounded
in "the endless process of capital and power
accumulation" which erupts past former historical and
social limits by its "alliance with classless
masses".13 Arendt's far-seeing overview of "endless
capital accumulation" mobilising as overwhelming social
force by "alliance with classless masses" is
revealingly silent in even scholarly texts on Arendt's work and
in complaisant analyses of totalitarianism as only elsewhere.
The agenda of thought is, rather, distant "rogue
states" and shadowy foreign "terrorists" which
are ever ready as new pretexts for more mechanisms of social
repression.14 "The negative solidarity of atomized
masses" which remains is a mental pulp incapable of mutual
life defence, and manipulatable by any new scheme of war fever,
attack-the-poor populism, or civil self-destruction.
Totalitarianism is thus always accompanied by a public
communication culture of formulaic discourse and bizarre
extremes.
Beneath communication, totalitarianism is a pathological
solution to insecure and atomised life bearings which it appears
to remedy with a homogenised unity - as we saw in the 1930's, or
after the 9-11 crisis. In the latter case, orchestration of
patriotic fervour overrides popular awareness of a collapsing
internal economy, an illegitimate presidential vote, and rising
forces of life-ground opposition. In fact, however, the new
unity is false-bottomed. The civil vacuum is not resolved, but
exploited to occupy with the restructuring of democracy by the
"new order".
Demagogic images are then sold at will to demoralised
populations. When there is security for life, people claim life
freedoms, as we saw at the acme of the "golden age" of
the post-war "welfare state". The transnational
Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Council, the Bank for
International Settlements and other interlocking
corporate-financial-state bodies that were functioning before
the turn to the "no-alternative" future did not fail
to observe this general fact. The Trilateral Commission is now
known by scholars for its 1976 "Crisis of Democracy"
report on "the excess of democracy" and
"entitlements" for "previously passive and
unorganized groups in the populace, blacks, Indians, Chicanos,
white ethnic groups, students and women".15 In other words,
fear of the people being free was the ruling motive of the
world's corporate CEO's, U.S. presidential candidates, and
Harvard concept-setters leading the Commission's strategic
recommendations. What eventually came - global capitalism with
no "barriers" of democratically accountable public
authority, life-protective regulations, or social ownership -
was constructed in accordance with their strategic plan.
External wars then become saleable again behind new veils of
total control of images. If spectacularly one-sided, they can be
sold as patriotic events to a population whose conditions of
life freedom no longer ground demands for an alternative order.
The campaign of life destabilisation was continuous and
many-sided - "the global terrorist" scare to justify
the reversal of the Carter "human rights agenda" and
genocidal armed interference in El Salvador, Guatemala,
Nicaragua and Grenada, with every citizen made to feel the
suspicion frisk at airports from then on; the arms race to
bankrupt and thus conquer "the Soviet conspiracy to rule
the world" while testing the new "low intensity
warfare" against poor populations seeking land reforms who
were labelled as "pro-Soviet communists"; the
interest-rate constructed "debt crises" across the
globe which broke the institutional backbone of social spending
and stripped social and welfare programs across the world;
nonstop globe-roaming currency attacks continuing to "hold
governments' feet to the fire" whenever they were perceived
as deviating from the global "fiscal and monetary
reform" experiment; and transnational "free
trade" regimes imposed across continents with massive
firings and casualisation of labour forces, rise of part-time
and insecure livelihoods for more and more peoples, and the
return of the world sweatshop and mass unemployment in the
industrial North.
The permanent war against "terrorists" of the Third
World is the cap of a continuous and historically unprecedented
financial deregulation of markets and haemorrhages of
transnationally mobile capital in and out of nations leading to
meltdowns from Brazil and Mexico to Russia and Asia. - - The
pace of "re-engineerings" of societies' economic bases
has been dizzying, as all totalitarian movements require to keep
destabilising expectation. Within a decade, the world has been
made to serve the only legitimate value-set now permissible in
public discourse: "private investor value", a
condition overtly celebrated as "the brutal global
competition to survive".16
The Inner Logic of the Big Lie
The most notorious characteristic of totalitarianism is
"the big lie" - a pervasive overriding of the
distinction between fact and fiction by saturating mass media
falsehoods. In the familiar forms of totalitarianism, "the
big lie" occurs in a moving, ad hoc form - typically
targeting an internal group for systematic attack by brutal
persecution, and filling the news with false portrayals of an
external enemy. The traditional form of the big lie targets a
highly symbolic event (the Reichstag fire or the U.S. Trade
Centre attack), or a claimed enemy of the populace
("communists" or "Islamic extremists").
Global corporate totalitarianism, however, is not plausibly
distinguishable as totalitarian in this way - although the
targeting in the U.S. and its Latin American
"backyard" of falsely alleged "Soviet-led
communists" to justify the violent persecution of hundreds
of thousands of people by death-squads and orchestrated military
pogroms was certainly a lead-up to the present corporate system.
What interests us here, however, is a more routine and pervasive
form of "the big lie". The big lie - in the sense of
omnipervasive lie - is disseminated by round-the-clock,
centrally controlled multi-media which are watched, read or
heard by people across the globe day and night without break in
the occupation of public consciousness instead of national
territories. Group-think, not soil, is the breeding ground of
the new totalitarianism.
On the micro level, the omnipervasive lie operates through a
total conditioning apparatus - not only through continuous
television, newspaper, car-and-home radio, disc and film
mass-programming across private and social life, but
increasingly against the citizen's will by unstoppable
phonecalls and messages, ad mail and corporate flyers occupying
mailboxes and home entrances, and round-the-clock invasions of
fields of sight and hearing by demands to buy corporate
commodities - eventually compounded by corporate security-state
systems to "put people in jail simply for participating in
a political protest".17 What is in common among all these
saturating occupations of citizens' sense-organs is that all
their statements and images are false and misleading as a form
of communication. Typically they are voluminously trivial with
no meaning beyond their occurrence, or repetitions of
mind-shackling misrepresentations in high-decibel certitudes.
Questions do not arise in such a total sign field. Indeed there
is no ground of truth from which to raise them. For no criterion
of truth or falsehood exists within this "knowledge
economy" system. This is its quintessentially totalitarian
feature. Across the increasingly invasive occupations of all
attention fields by corporate ad-vehicles, including school
classrooms and public policy meetings, the regulating standard
overriding all others is more sales for more profits to dominant
corporations. In the old totalitarian culture of the Big Lie,
the truth is hidden. In the new totalitarianism, there is no
line between truth and falsehood. The truth is what people can
be conditioned to believe.18 The dare is now out, and not for
the first time - "We can take anything, anywhere, and have
the masses' support by declaring that someone else is attacking
them".
Notes:
1.There is growing suspicion, which is officially unspeakable,
that the Afghanistan War is "a set-up", including
September 11 itself. With any such hypothesis, one looks not
only for the evidence confirming it, but more conscientiously,
for the evidence disconfirming it. The evidence confirming U.S.
and allied security awareness of and possible complicity in the
9/11 attack is considerable, but I have found no evidence
disconfirming it. The principal reason against is the assumption
that it is impossible that the U.S. national security apparatus
would ever permit such a mass killing of Americans on U.S. soil,
but this assumption itself is shaky given that Pearl Harbour
itself was likely known about in advance, and non-defensive wars
since have sacrificed tens of thousands of U.S. citizens (not to
say millions of others) for so-called "foreign policy and
national security objectives". On September 12, I wrote a
paragraph for publication that seems no less telling today.
"The pervasive Echelon surveillance apparatus and the most
sophisticated intelligence machinery ever built is unlikely not
to have eavesdropped on some of the very complicated
organisation and plans across states and boundaries for the
multi-site hijacking of planes from major security structures
across the U.S. - especially since the suicide pilots were
trained as pilots in the U.S., and the World Trade Centre had
already been bombed in 1993 by Afghan ex-allies of the CIA.
Since the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, is himself an ex-CIA
operative in Afghanistan, and his moves presumably under the
intensest scrutiny for past successful terrorist attacks on two
U.S. embassies in 1998, one has to reflect on the connections.
To begin with, the forensic principle of "who most benefits
from the crime?" clearly points in the direction of the
Bush administration. One would be naive to think the Bush Jr.
faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers
who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the
majority of Americans as poor on the economy (a Netscape Poll
poll taken off the screen when the planes hit the towers), and
more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the
global environment and the international rule of law, do not
benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there
was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of
events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to
attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime's popularity
climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security
apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as
dominant as they can over civilians in 'the whole new era'
already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan
to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and
Israel's apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time.
Even the surgingly popular 'anti world-trade' movement is now
associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade
Centre. The more you review the connections and the sweeping
lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the
lines point backwards" (published in The Record, September
and Economic Reform, October 2001). As we will see ahead, these
benefits of the 9/11 attack go still deeper than the payoffs
enumerated here. Isolated reports by major newspapers across the
world of pre-9/11 links between the CIA, the Pakistan ISI, and
bin Laden's Al Qaeda network have been usefully documented by
Michael C. Ruppert <www.copvcia.com>.
2.The meaning of terrorism I remind us of here retains its
linkage with "terror", unlike the official definitions
of terrorism, which have delinked its meaning from public
experience, and redefined it as what obstructs official and
corporate business. For example, Canada's "Anti-Terrorist
Bill" (Bills C-35 and C-36), defines as
"terrorist" what is "intended to cause serious
interference with or disruption of an essential service,
facility or system" (Bill C-35 83.01 (1)(b)(ii)(E)). Much
well-taken criticism has been directed at the sinisterly
sweeping definition here, but none has recognized the deeper
delinkage from meaning itself which is presupposed. No
connection with terror remains. Only the emotive charge of the
word remains - which is then linked to what corporate-led states
are set to criminalise and impose right to arbitrary rule over,
without normal protections of law. The disconnection from
meaning escapes detection of even those who are opposed to the
law. Thus eminent Professor of Law, Martin Friedland, properly
objects to the "too broad" definition, but seeks to
ameliorate it by substituting (like the U.K. law) "an
electronic system" for "an essential service, facility
or system" (Martin Friedland, "Police Powers in Bill
C-36", in (eds. R.J. Daniels et al) The Security of Freedom
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 270). The
Orwellian operation of expanding criminalizing concepts into
unconnected meanings in the law itself is internalised without
demurral - a sign of the totalitarian communications field
analysed ahead.
3.The official number began as "almost 7000
Americans". Unpublicised counts then disclosed, with no
comment on the radical changes of facts, that there were a great
number of non-Americans killed, and the official number was
revised to 3900. AP News Service then counted the actual deaths,
and reported a figure of 2772 persons killed, 40% of the number
killed on the basis of which "America's New War" was
declared.
4.This figure is cited by Julian Borger, "Tax Bonanza for
Bush's Cronies", Guardian Weekly, November 8-14, 2001, p.
4.
5.I am grateful to Connie Fogel and the Canadian Defence of
Liberty Committee for this quotation in their November 18, 2001
newsletter.
6.Cited by Lewis Lapham, "The American Rome", Harper's
Magazine, August 2001, pp. 32-3.
7.Cited inter alia by <http://freedomlaw.com/coffee.html>
which lists among its sponsors the Cato Institute, the Heritage,
and the Mackinac Centre for Public Policy. Rockefeller's further
words below are drawn from the same source.
8.Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard : American Primacy
and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997),
pp. 124, 211. Brzezinski's former Trilateral Commission and NATO
colleague, Johannes Koeppl, reportedly recalls: "It was a
criminal society I was dealing with - - In 1983-84, I warned of
a takeover of world governments being orchestrated by these
people [including Brzezinski] - - It was not possible to publish
anymore in the so-called respected publications." The
quotation from Koeppl is provided by Michael Ruppert, "A
War in the Planning for Four Years", <guerillanews.com>.
9.Quotation is from Karl Grossman, "Beyond Missile Defense:
Bush Team Envisages Space Weaponization", Economists Allied
for Arms Reduction (ECAAR) Newsletter, June 2001.
10.Cited by Katherine Ainger, "A Culture of Life, A Culture
of Death", New Internationalist, November 2001, p. 22.
11.A few global media conglomerates, who "work together for
the greater good", control most to all of the world's mass
news, entertainment and publishing (ie., AOL-Time-Warner,
Murdoch/News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Disney,
Berlusconi/Vivendi), . Most of these media firms are, in turn,
put together by Wall Street firms, such as Morgan Stanley and
Goldman Sachs, which alone constructed media and telecom mergers
worth $888,000,000,000 in 1999 and the first quarter of 2000
(Robert McChesney, "Global Media, Neoliberalism and
Imperialism", Monthly Review, March 2001, pp. 1-20).
12.The predictable failure of IMF "emergency loans" to
do anything but sink their Asian targets deeper into economic
crisis while bailing out Wall Street "investors" has
led the IMF to rename its "Emergency Structural Adjustment
Programs" as "Poverty Reduction and Growth
Facilities". Meanwhile 21 million more people in Indonesia
alone fell beneath the absolute poverty line.
13.Arendt, Hannah (1955). The Origins of Totalitarianism.
London: George Allen and Unwin.
14.Before the Quebec Summit in April 2001, the imminent threat
of "terrorism" and "terrorists" who never
materialised except in the form of a police plant equipping and
egging on a small group (see Chapter 1, note 87) was the central
public pretext of a steel wall around the city, thousands of
riot troops, and 5000 toxic teargas grenades subsequently
launched indiscriminately into crowds ("Police Prepare For
Terrorist Attacks At Summit of Americas" (Canadian Press,
April 7, 2001). No subsequent comment by the media or government
on the false threats was occurred. On the more internationally
institutionalised level, "rogue states" and
"foreign terrorist threats" remain the constant
pretext for totalisation of US military control of the planet
which is recently expressed in official plans to (emphasis
added) "project power through and from space in response to
events anywhere - - - with little transit, information or delay
in weather" (Commission to Assess United States National
Security Space Management and Organisation, 2001, cited by Karl
Grossman, ""Bush Team Envisages Space Weaponization",
ECAAR Newsletter, June, 2001
http//www.ecaar.org/ECAAR/Library/News/ApMay2001.pdf
