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The Face of Imperialism | |
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| Author | Michael Parenti |
| First published | 2011 |
The Face of Imperialism is a book written by Statesian academicMichael Parenti, published in 2011 by Paradigm Publishers.
1 - Thinking About Empire
IN THIS AGE OF EMPIRE, how do we arrive at the truth? Many of our political perceptions are shaped by culturally prefigured templates implanted in our minds without our conscious awareness. To become critically aware of these ingrained opinions and images is not only an act of self-education; it is an act of self-defence. This seems especially true when dealing with matters of global impact, such as the nature of empire.
Orthodoxy as "Objectivity"
In 1932, Carl Becker was among the first to give currency to the phrase the climate of opinion. Becker argued that ideas and notions about reality do not spring forth from the mind in a social vacuum. They are pursued because they seem to fit into the ongoing climate of opinion.[1] They reinforce each other, gaining acceptance through circulation and repetition. The notions that fit into the prevailing climate of opinion are more likely to be accepted as objective, while those that clash with it are usually seen as beyond the pale and lacking in credibility. So, more often than we realise, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the ongoing opinion climate.
In other words, the mental selectors we use to organise our perceptions are not mostly of our own creation. Much about our personal perception is not all that personal; rather, it is shaped by a variety of forces and conditions outside ourselves, such as the dominant ideology (or "dominant paradigm"), the conventional social values, one's position in the social structure, the available flow of information and disinformation, and the potential benefits and losses attached to the perceptions and pronouncements one makes. On that last point it is obbligato to reference Upton Sinclair's remark: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."[2]
If what we call "objectivity" is really little more than a conformity of mainstream bias, then isn't one paradigm about as reliable—or unreliable—as another? Is all truth, then, nothing more than opinion and belief? If not, what makes a heterodox analysis better than an orthodox one?
First, radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.
Second, we can value an opinion by the function(s) it serves. The heterodox view has a special task: to contest the prevailing orthodoxy, to broaden the boundaries of debate, to wake people up, to unearth suppressed data. The function of orthodox or conventional opinion is just the opposite: to keep the parameters of discourse as narrow as possible, to dismiss evidence that ill fits the dominant paradigm. Hence, all opinions are not of the same value. It depends on what they are being used for, what interests they serve.
We have all observed that if something does not fit what people believe, they marshal their reserve defences. Rarely when faced with contrary evidence do they discard their preciously held beliefs. And if they cannot challenge the validity of what confronts them, they have fallback positions that explain to their satisfaction the data that do not fit the pictures in their heads.
When the orthodox view becomes so entrenched, evidence becomes irrelevant.
Broaching certain subjects casts doubt on the credibility and sanity of the dissident who dares to raise a question. Consider such inflammatory topics as: the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election in the United States, the Shangri-La image of Tibet before the Chinese invasion, the findings of the Warren Commission regarding the assassination of President John Kennedy, the number of people killed by this or that tyrant, the Clinton/NATO/CIA war against Yugoslavia, the unanswered questions of the 9/11 Commission, a class power analysis of the American political system, and the absence of politico-economic content in public policy debates.
Such topics raise issues that cross the boundary of allowable opinion. They move into forbidden terrain and are therefore dismissed out of hand, denied the opportunity for rational discourse. Through a process of immediate assertion and intensive repetition, the universe of discourse is preempted and monopolised. This is one way the dominant paradigm is maintained. One crosses the lines beyond permissible opinion only at a risk to one's intellectual reputation or even one's career.
The Myth of Innocent Empires
The presence of self-legitimating ideological boundaries is evident in the discussion about empire. When writing a book about ancient Rome, I discovered that much of the historic literature on empire is rather favourable.[3] Empires have been hailed as grand accomplishments, bringing stability and peace where before there had been only squabbling tribes. We even give empires laudatory peace names, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.
Empires also are sometimes seen as innocent unintentional accretions that arise stochastically—that is, by chance, without benefit of any kind of "conspiratorial" planning or even consistent causality. Years ago we used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a "fit of absentmindedness." More recently, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, and referring to that event, The Economist, a conservative British publication, wrote, "Empires are born in funny ways, and sometimes via the law of unintended consequences by accident."[4]
In fact, empires are not innocent, absent-minded, accidental accretions. They are given purposive direction by rulers who consciously mobilise vast amounts of personnel and materials in order to plunder other lands and peoples. The British, for instance, did not just happen to find themselves in India. They pushed their way in with all deliberate force and rapacious intent. The Americans did not just mistakenly stumble into Iraq because of some misinformation that the Iraqis were linked to Al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction. The White House coterie that pursued war had been calling for intervention against Iraq for at least a year before the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and well before there was ever any thought of Al Qaeda terrorist networks in Baghdad or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.[5]
Despite the sympathetic treatment accorded empires by numerous historians and others, the term empire was not comfortably applied to the United States during most of the twentieth century, at least not by us Americans. Other countries had colonies, but America had "territories" and "possessions"—so I was taught in grade school. The word empire remained suspect, an unbecoming appellation that besmirched our shining republic.
No wonder that when I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, some of my American compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that US rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defence or for humanitarian rescue operations or to restore order in a troubled region or overthrow tyranny and propagate democracy. But some few years later, oddly enough everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like The Sorrows of Empire, The Folly of Empire, Twilight of Empire, Empire of Illusion—all referring to the United States.
One professor, writing in Harvard Magazine, was unequivocal about his country's force majeure role in the world: "We are militarily dominant around the world. [...] A political unit that has overwhelming superiority of military power, and uses that power to influence the behaviour of other states is called an empire. [...] [O]ur goal is not combatting a rival but maintaining imperial order."[6]
One also could hear right-wing pundits announcing on television that we are an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire, and as the strongest nation in the world we have every right to act as such—as if having the power gives US leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they see fit. So liberals and conservatives began to lay claim to the notion of empire and treat it as worthy of public embrace.
"What is going on here?" I asked myself at the time. How is it that after years of denial and denunciation, many individuals now feel free to talk about empire when they mean American empire? The answer, I realised, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. "Empire" seems to mean simply dominion and power, most notably military power. Thus Chalmers Johnson tells us that the United States has an empire of bases rather than colonies. He sees a US government that is "obsessed" with maintaining military dominance over the entire world. The 730 or more US military bases that ring the globe, he claims, are proof that the "United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction." (In fact, the United States constantly uses negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction along with a whole arsenal of other modes of influence.) The rise of American militarism, Johnson goes on to say, is accompanied by layers of bureaucracy and secrecy designed to circumvent public scrutiny and keep power in the hands of the Pentagon.[7]
What is missing from these kinds of analyses and even more so from the public discourse in general is the politico-economic content of empire. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism. This is strange, for imperialism is what empires do. Imperialism is the very activity of empire. (Another name for empire is imperium.)
By imperialism I do not mean just power and dominion; I mean the process of transnational investment and capital accumulation. Nor would I pretend to be the only investigator who thinks of imperialism that way. There are a number of advanced scholars—such as James Petras, Eva Golinger, Gregory Elich, Gerald Horne, Henry Veltmeyer, Francis Shor, and David Harvey—who offer a more developed and accurate view of the forces of imperialism.[8]
For latter-day liberal converts like Chalmers Johnson, however, the word imperialism is used in the same empty way as is the word empire: to denote dominion and control with little attention given to the powerful economic interests that operate as a motor force behind US policy. Johnson and a host of others have produced shallow critiques of empire, characterising US interventionist policies as "reckless," "misguided," "inept," "bumbling," "insensitive," "overreaching," "self-deceptive," "deluded," "driven by false assumptions," and "presuming a mandate from God," while ladened with "tragic mistakes" and "imperial hubris."[9] They see all this as a mindless proclivity embedded in the American psyche or culture. We are left to conclude that US leaders are chronically deluded, stupid, and incapable of learning from past experience; they lack the splendid intelligence of their liberal critics. For the critics, empire has little to do with economic class interests and is mostly a product of an aggrandising national temperament incited by myopic overweening leaders.
Not Just "Power for Power's Sake"
In this book, imperialism is defined as follows: the process whereby the dominant investors in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labour, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. In short, empires do not just pursue power for power's sake. There are real material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over. Behind Colonel Blimp there stood the East India Company and the Bank of England. Behind Teddy Roosevelt and US Marines there stood the United Fruit Company and Wall Street. The intervention is intended to enrich the investors and keep the world safe for them.
For centuries the ruling interests in Western Europe and, later on, North America and Japan laid claim to most of planet Earth, including the labour of indigenous peoples (as workers or slaves), their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), their markets, and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, slaves, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, fruits, tobacco, palm oil, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently, uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and—say it again—oil, and numerous other things.[10]
Empires are enormously profitable for the investor interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonised country. Even today, plundered populations bemoan the resource curse, knowing from bitter experience that countries rich in natural resources usually end up as losers. Many of the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are rich, only the people are poor. The imperialists search out rich places, not barren ones, to plunder.
"Arid Spain and Portugal siphoned off South America's gold; tiny Holland dominated vast Indonesia. Britain, barren except for coal, built an imperial swap shop of grain, lumber, cotton, tea, tobacco, opium, gems, silver, and slaves. Japan, less than a century out of its bamboo-armour era, conquered much of China for its iron and coal. The postcolonial era [1950 to today] hasn't been any easier on the resource-rich have-nots."[11]
In addition to the pillage of their lands, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders. This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and slaughter huge numbers of innocent people. Along with those who are killed outright, the victims should include the many shattered survivors whose lives are reduced to a miserable subsistence or a grieving and painful undoing.[12]
The purpose of the imperial killings is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging—nations that might threaten the imperium's hegemonic control, thereby jeopardising its political-economic advantages. Just to give one example of the imperium's carnage, during the Vietnam War about a million and a half Vietnamese were killed: 185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 924,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers, and 415,000 additional civilians. About 58,00 American troops also perished.[13] The great majority of these killings were perpetrated by US military forces with their vastly superior fire power.
Regarding imperialism's capacity to deliver death and destruction, consider the case of Iraq. In 1991, twelve years before Iraq was invaded and occupied by President George W. Bush, his father, President George H. W. Bush, launched an aerial war (the Gulf War) against that same nation. At that time, Iraq's standard of living was the highest in the Middle East. Iraqis enjoyed free medical care and free education. Literacy had reached about 80 percent. University students of both genders received scholarships to study at home and abroad. Most of the economy was state owned. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was pressing for a larger portion of the international oil market. In the eyes of the Western imperialists, Saddam was charting an independent course and was guilty of committing economic nationalism. He would have to be taught a lesson. His country needed to be bombed back into the Third World from which it was emerging.
In the six weeks of aerial attacks in 1991, US planes (with minor assistance from other NATO powers) destroyed more than 90 percent of Iraq's electrical capacity, and much of its telecommunication systems including television and radio stations, along with its flood control, irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectric systems. Domestic herds and poultry farms suffered heavy losses. US planes burnt grain fields with incendiary bombs and hit hundreds of schools, hospitals, rail stations, bus stations, air raid shelters, mosques, and historic sites. Factories that produced textiles, cement, petrochemicals, and phosphate were hit repeatedly. So were the refineries, pipelines, and storage tanks of Iraq's oil industry. Some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed in those six weeks. Nearly all the aerial attackers employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles, leaving hundreds of tons of radioactive matter spread over much of the country, leading to tens of thousands of more deaths in the following years, including many from what normally would be treatable and curable illnesses.[14] Twelve years later, Bush Jr. invaded Iraq and wreaked further death and destruction upon that country (see Chapter 9).
So the face of imperialism reveals endless carnage. This should be kept in mind when using such neutral terms as foreign policy, international relations, overseas commitments, régime change, and intervention.
Instrumental "Truths" and the Dominant Paradigm
The imperialists are among the socio-economic and political elites who are the keepers of the dominant paradigm. The dominant paradigm is the prevailing ideology or mode of thought that purports to explain how and why society functions as it does. The purveyors of the dominant paradigm in the United States and the western world in general most certainly believe in it. The ideology they propagate defines their world for them. It is the magic alchemy that lends virtue to their class supremacy, assuring them of their indispensable worth to society. The dominant paradigm tells them that all their wrongfully acquired gains and privileges are rightfully theirs.
Along with one of their eighteenth-century progenitors, Alexander Hamilton, the corporate economic elites believe that the country should be run by "the rich and the wellborn." They deeply feel they are deserving of their station in life. They believe the United States should lead the world and they should lead the United States. They are convinced that the poor are the authors of their own poverty, and that the working class consists of a troublesome lot who need to be reined in along with the middle class—both of whom are admonished to ratchet down their standard of living so that those at the very top can get an ever larger portion of the pie and an ever firmer grip on the servings.
Do those who put forth the lies of empire believe what they tell us? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That an opinion buttresses one's self-interest does not necessarily mean it is hypocritically embraced. If anything, it is all the more fervently held and is believed to be correct by the very fact that it serves one's advantages so well. Do the empire builders believe the propaganda they put out in support of specific policies? To be sure, sometimes they deliberately fabricate, as when you catch them in blatant inconsistencies. Much of the time truth is not even given consideration. It is much like the advertising world: the prime concern when selling a product is not "is it true?" but "will it sell?" Is the message effective? Is it getting across? If so, then it is "true" so to speak, and we can go with it. If not, then it is discarded. The approach to truth is purely instrumental.
Take the propaganda line that President George W. Bush used for almost a year in regard to Iraq: stay the course. Eventually the administration ascertained that the public did not like the idea of indefinitely staying the course in Iraq. It made them feel as if there was no hope for a change in policy, no hope for ending the war. Hence, sometime in early 2007 the White House stopped using that phrase not because they no longer believed it (assuming they ever did) but because it was not serving their propaganda goal, their big sell.
Do those who preside over the US empire believe in their own virtue? All people, parties, and national leaders believe in their own virtue. But even more so, more than anything else in the world, with the utmost dedication and ferocity, they believe in protecting and advancing their own material interests. And, as we shall see, they do whatever it takes to do so.