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I’m almost done with Sorrows of Empire so I will stop deluging the blog with quotes, but I cannot forgo Johnson’s explanation of the mutating monster that Neo-liberalism is. I’d like to reproduce the entire chapter because it is that good, but instead we’ll look at how insidious neo-liberalism is when it comes to being critiqued by the intelligentsia residing in centres of Western power.
“It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. It is also designed to persuade the new imperialists that “underdeveloped” countries bring poverty on themselves thanks to “crony capitalism”, corruption, and a failure to take advantage of the splendid opportunities being offered. The claim that free markets lead to prosperity for anyone other than the transnational corporations that lobbied for them and have the clout and resources to manipulate them is simply not borne out by the historical record. As even the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former director of research at the World Bank, has come to acknowledge, “It is now a commonplace that the international trade agreements about which the United States spoke so proudly only a few years ago were grossly unfair to countries in the Third World… The problem [with globalists is] … their fundamentalist market ideology, a faith in free, unfettered markets that is supported by neither modern theory not historical experience.
[…]
There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world’s twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine. What globalization has produced, in the words of de Rivero, is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities). There is occasional evidence that this result is precisely what the authors of globalization intended.
In 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, “It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of combing up after him.” Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder.
-Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. p.262.
So really, colonialism by any other name… I’m so glad we’ve progressed so far.
We have truly breached new moral ground, made the world a safer place (for oligarchic capitalism), and ensured the continued well being of right class of people.
For more on ‘ladder kicking’ see Cambridge’s Ha-Joon Chang and his post on this very topic.
The following is an excerpt from John McMurtry’s book Value Wars – The Global Market Versus the Life Economy p. 40 – 41.
The value-set that selects for the destruction of a human society is based on an absolutist first premise that whatever serves its unilateral globalization is good, and whatever obstructs or resists its universal advance is evil. No fact can disturb this presupposition if it is locked into the ruling group-think and remains credible to the collaborating publics. To comprehend the depth of mind-lock and its mass murderous consequences, consider the following sequence of official US policy in Iraq after the war was over. US Defense Intelligence documents silently released years later in 1995 demonstrate that the global market’s first power knowing selected for the consequences of infrastructural bombing, including the disease-killing of hundreds of thousand of children. For example, a US Defense Intelligence document entitled ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’, January 1991, spells out exactly how postwar sanctions against Iraq were constructed to prevent any public authority from providing clean water to citizens. Extensive technical detail then reports that ‘with no domestic sources of water treatment replacement or chemicals like chlorine’ and ‘no desalinization membranes’ and with water ‘laded with biological pollutants and bacteria’, ‘epidemics of such diseases as cholera. hepatitis, and typhoid’ will occur, but ‘it will probably take six months [of sanctions] before the system is fully degraded’. One is reminded of Adolf Eichmann’s punctilious attention to detail in administrating another and less painful form of mass death implementation.
A second document, ‘Disease Information/Effects of Bombing on Disease’, also dated January 22, 1991, reports: ‘Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks by coalition bombing’, with the ‘most likely diseases during the next sixty-ninety days (descending order): diarrhial diseases (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis including meningococal (particularly children), cholera’. The third document in the US Defense Intelligence series, ‘Medical Problems in Iraq’ is dated March 15, 1991. It reports that the US-British-enforced sanctions by interdiction of needed civilian water-treatment resources and bombing [Tony Blair’s ‘humanitarian sanctions’, comes to mind here] have succeeded in ensuring that ‘water is [now] less than 5 percent of the original supply… diarrhea is four times above normal levels… Conditions in Baghdad remain favourable for disease outbreaks.’. The fourth document of May 1991 reports: ‘Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps’ and the fifth document in June, ‘Health Conditions in Iraq is still heavily censored, but can be deciphered as reporting observations that ‘almost all medicines were in critically shorty supply’ and ‘Gastroenteritis was killing children… In the south 80% of the deaths were children’
Observe the repeated use of the phrase ‘favorable for disease outbreaks’. It discloses the pathologically inverted value-set regulating official perception and speech. Us and British political and military commands are undoubtedly war criminals under law, and guilty of the gravest crimes against humanity. To conclude that they are also ‘terrorists’ of the most virulent nature in ‘the killing of innocent civilians to achieve political goals’ – the official definition – is a conclusion which reason is constrained to admit. In connecting the fanatic mind-set across its expressions, we see the US state’s systematic operation of projection since September 11th, 2001 revealed with breathtaking clarity.
Documents in question can be found at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil . The first document referenced is here.
There really is no limit to what we’ll do to win. Shame on us.
*Update*: Digesting all of what McMurtry has to say takes a bit. I find that his commentary mostly jives with other authors who write about Empire and its effects on people. It really is disquieting because one has to relive the horror and revulsion experienced when the realization dawns that you are part of the nightmare system that is destroying other people because they believe in different things that we do.
It is not ‘progress’ but quite the opposite, it is like a snake hungrily devouring it’s own tail, we wield the such fearsome capacity to destroy and exploit but with each ‘victory’ we become a little less human and less connected to what we would esteemedly call ‘morality’ or virtue. Replacing our morality is the ethic of consumption and a perverted notion of darwinism in which we somehow deem ourselves the most fit and therefore justified in carrying out or being complicit in the atrocities perpetrated in the name of ‘Freedom and Democracy’.
Only by getting outside the realm of official though and approved notions can one appreciate the monstrous nature of what our oligarchic society has become.
Al Jazeera reports: Mexico has become the top provider of sex slaves to the Americas, according to the United Nations.
Is this report really surprising? I mean with NAFTA and all the globalization free trade nonsense aka the Race to the Bottom how can this be an unexpected result? Mexico is at the bottom of the North American socio-economic heap we should look to this country as laboratory as to the results of unregulated capitalism and what it does to people, especially women who inevitably are on the lowest tier of society.
The report is chilling.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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