DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE
DEMOCRACY
vol.8, no.2,
(July 2002)
The global 'war' of the transnational elite
Takis
Fotopoulos
Abstract:
The
aim of this article is to show that the so called ‘war’ against terrorism
that was launched by the transnational elite
in the aftermath of the events of September 11, like the previous
‘wars’ of the transnational elite (Iraq, Yugoslavia),
aims at
securing the stability of the New World Order -- which is founded on
capitalist neoliberal globalisation and representative ‘democracy’-- by
crushing any perceived threats against it.
However, this is also a new type of war. Unlike the previous ‘wars’,
this is a global and permanent war. A global war, because its targets are
not only specific ‘rogue’ regimes, which are not fully integrated in the New
World Order or simply do not ‘toe the line’, but any kind of regime or
social group and movement which resists the New World Order: from the
Palestinian up to the antiglobalisation movements; and a permanent war,
because
it is bound to continue for as long as the New World Order, and the associated
with it systemic and state violence to protect
the present huge asymmetry of power between and within nations (which
give rise to counter-violence) are perpetuated.
The first task in an effort to interpret the causes and the
significance of the 11/9 events is to delineate the meaning of political
violence, a form of which is terrorism
and to discuss the relationship between terrorism, systemic violence and
democracy —the object of the first section. However, the attacks, which
functioned as the catalyst for the present so-called ‘war’ on terrorism (in
fact, simply a military suppression of technologically much inferior opponents,
as was also the case with the previous ‘wars’ of the transnational elite)
become incomprehensible unless we examine their historical and structural
background, something which brings
us to an examination of the contours of the New World Order (NWO) –and this is
done in the second section. The third section will discuss the events of
September 11 and compare and contrast the present war with the previous wars of
the transnational elite. The penultimate section examines the aims of this new
type of war and its phases up to now, as well as the possible phases of it in
the future. Finally, the concluding section discusses the crucial issue of
whether there is any way out of the present cycle of violence, which, as one can
certainly expect—after the bloody first two phases (Afghanistan,
Palestine)—may quite possibly become even bloodier in the future.
1. Terrorism, Systemic Violence and Democracy
Systemic Violence,
Counter-Violence
and Terrorism
The
attacks
of September 11 were presented by the transnational elite-controlled mass media,
as well as by the intellectuals who function as the apologists of the New World
Order, as the act of fanatic fundamentalists who envy
the wealth and democratic organisation of the West, if not as pure
‘nihilism’, that is, as part of the
eternal
battle of Good and Evil in a dualistic universe fueled by hatred and envy, and
by religious/ideological fundamentalism. To my mind, a meaningful discussion of
the crucial issues that arose out of these events which, according to the
propaganda machine of the transnational elite, were the cause of the ‘war
against terrorism’ that it launched in their aftermath, should involve an
examination of the meaning and causes of political violence (i.e. the use of violence
for political aims) in all its forms: wars, systemic violence, state repression
and state terrorism on the one hand and counter-violence and popular terrorism
on the other.
As
a British analyst pointed out in the aftermath of the September events, ‘the
tendency in recent years, encouraged by the scale of last month's atrocity in
New York, has been to define terrorism increasingly in terms of methods and
tactics - particularly the targeting of civilians - rather than the status of
those who carry it out’.
This is an approach which, as the same analyst stresses, would classify
historical liberation movements, like the ANC and the Algerian FLN that attacked
civilian targets, as ‘terrorist’—an approach which unfortunately has been
adopted today by many in the Left, even self-declared libertarians. All this,
despite the fact that the concept of modern terrorism derives from the French
revolution, where terrorism was only state terrorism.
On
the other hand, a useful definition of terrorism that takes into account
these crucial considerations is the one given by professor Johan Galtung, who,
starting with Clausewitz’s
classical definition of war
as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’,
defines in a similar way terrorism as
‘the
continuation of violence by other means’.
This definition is particularly helpful because it explicitly takes into account
the fact that violence for political aims, either it originates in a
socio-economic system and its political expression, the state, or in opposing
forces ‘from below’, is always a cycle and is incomprehensible unless seen
as such. Galtung stresses in particular the significance of what he
calls structural violence (I
would better call it systemic violence to emphasise its systemic
character), i.e. the institutionalisation of highly asymmetric
situations, which leads to state repression or even state terrorism on the one
hand and its counterparts guerrilla warfare and popular terrorism on the other.
The institutionalisation of asymmetric situations, i.e. systemic violence, may
refer to:
-
the
economic level, where the built-in control of economic resources by a
minority,
which
is institutionalised in a market economy system, leads to unemployment,
poverty and insecurity for vast parts of the population;
-
the
political level, where the institutionalisation of the control of the
political process by a minority in a representative ‘democracy’ leads
the vast majority of the population to political alienation and apathy;
-
the
social and cultural levels, where the control of social and cultural
institutions by parts of the population leads to various forms of
discrimination against the other parts;
All
these phenomena, i.e. unemployment, poverty, insecurity, political alienation
and apathy, as well as various forms of discrimination against parts of the
population on the basis of gender, race, identity etc, are simply forms of
systemic or structural violence,
as a result of
the institutionalisation of concentration of power in all its forms, that is, the institutionalisation of
political, economic and social inequality.
It is therefore clear that the ultimate cause of systemic violence is the
non-democratic organisation of society, in other words its organisation on the
basis of institutions which, instead of aiming to secure the equal distribution
of power in all its forms among all citizens, aims at reproducing the pattern of
asymmetry of power that has historically been established by privileged social
groups.
The
privileged social groups in the last two centuries or so, i.e. during the
periods of liberal and statist modernity[4],
have established their power mainly through their control of the state machines.
However, in the last quarter of a century or so, that is during the present era
of neoliberal modernity, this is increasingly being achieved through their
control of the international institutions established by the transnational
elite, as we shall see in the next section. Still, in both cases, it is
the concentration of power at the hands of various elites that leads to
systemic violence and counter-violence. Counter-violence against systemic
violence may be undertaken by social groups collectively, or by individuals
acting on their own. Collective counter-violence may take the form of
direct action, violent demonstrations and riots that may culminate in a violent
revolution and, in extreme cases, it may assume
the form of guerrilla warfare or even popular terrorism.
Individual
counter-violence mainly takes the form of crimes against property
(robberies, break-ins, car thefts etc), although it may also take the form of
physical violence, as in the case of
terrorist
activities undertaken by individuals or groups (which do not have organic links
to popular movements so that they could be classified as forms of popular
terrorism) against the elites and their representatives.
Collective counter-violence, when it takes mass proportions, could lead
to either direct state
repression (i.e. the violence against civilians, which is undertaken
directly by the state apparatus and is bounded by normal legal proceedings, with
the aim of fighting collective counter violence) or, in extreme cases, to state
terrorism, whereas individual counter-violence is dealt with stricter
legislation on crime and corresponding increases in the prison populations.
It is not
accidental that, historically,
both
state repression and counter-violence have flourished in
the last two centuries. This is because
representative
‘democracy’ and the market economy,
which flourished during this period,
not
only institutionalised the concentration of political and economic power (i.e.
systemic violence) but also made easier the flourishing of counter-violence,
some forms of which
were
legally recognised. No wonder that when counter-violence
was suppressed, as for instance in the case of
military regimes, extreme forms of
counter-violence have developed like
guerila warfare or
even popular terrorism .
As
the above definition of terrorism implies,
there are two main types of terrorism: state terrorism ‘from above’ and
popular terrorism ‘from below’. Although state terrorism is simply a further
elaboration of state repression, it differs from it because state terrorism is
unpredictable and not subject to formal legal procedures. We may therefore
define state terrorism as any kind of violence against civilians, which
is undertaken directly or indirectly by the state apparatus, is unbounded by
normal legal proceedings, and aims at fighting collective counter violence. Such
forms of state terrorism are for instance the US administration-authorised CIA
killings of suspected terrorists (recently extended to include even heads of
state of ‘rogue’ regimes!),
the ‘targeted killings’ by Israel, as well as the collective punishments
against the Palestinian population regularly implemented by the Israeli army. It
is therefore not surprising that as George Monbiot[5]
points out, the US government ‘for
the past 55 years has been running
a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed
by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid,
rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is based in Fort
Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government’. Another form of
state terrorism is
inter-state
terrorism.
This is a
kind of state terrorism that emerges when the symmetry of power between states
leads weak states to clandestinely support terrorist activities against
strong states. Inter-state terrorism is proclaimed by the transnational elite as
one of the causes of the present war against terrorism
On
the other hand, popular terrorism, which is an extreme form of counter-violence,
challenges what the state considers its right, i.e. the monopoly of
violence. This is the reason why every kind of elite is against popular
terrorism—something that could go a long way in explaining the fact that every
ruling elite today, from the
American up to the Russian and the Chinese ones (each for its own reasons of
course), is unanimously in favour of the ‘war against terrorism’. Popular
terrorism differs from guerrilla warfare because, unlike the latter, does not
presuppose some sort of symmetry in military power. In fact, popular terrorism
arises when the asymmetry of power is so great
that guerrilla warfare is impossible.
Popular
terrorism may be defined as the
violence against members of the state apparatus or civilians expressing the
interests of the elites, which is planned by organisations that constitute the
military wing of a popular movement and is carried out by small groups or even
individuals, with the aim to fight systemic violence, state repression and state
terrorism (this is the case, for instance, of national liberation organisations,
resistance organisations against military regimes etc). This definition of
popular terrorism rules out forms of terrorism
like the Italian Right’s terrorist
bombings in the 1970s and the various Latin American death squads . This
is not only because these forms of
terrorism are usually funded and supported by various parts of the elites which
also control the state apparatus, but also because they do not aim at countering
the violence of the elites ‘from above’ but mainly the counter-violence of
the oppressed‘from below’. Similarly, the above definition of popular
terrorism rules out the activities of the various terrorist organisations of the
Left that emerged, mainly in Europe, in the 1970s. Although this type of
terrorism aims at fighting systemic violence and state repression the fact that
it is carried out by organisations that are not organically connected to popular
movements gives them the character of elitist organisations, which hope that,
through their actions, will create the objective and subjective conditions that
will ‘force’ the oppressed to rise in an antisystemic struggle against the
oppressors.
Popular Terrorism and Democracy
It is therefore clear that it is
the institutionalisation of the ‘asymmetry’ (or unequal distribution) of
power in all its forms which is the ultimate cause of popular terrorism. It is
equally clear that popular terrorism is a form of political activity, which has
the special characteristic that it involves the use of violence against military
or civilian targets for political aims. As such, it has to be assessed with
political as well as moral criteria.
As
I will attempt to show next, popular terrorism is not only morally unjustifiable
but also incompatible with the democratic project and therefore, on both
grounds, should be rejected.
Thus, at the
moral level, any political activity which uses as the main means for the
achievement of a political aim the destruction of human life, which should be
considered as the absolute good, has to be rejected.
The only cases in which political violence may be justified, as Hannah
Arendt
also pointed out, are the cases of revolution and collective or individual
self-defence against state violence and violence emanating from the elites.
Furthermore, it is morally degrading for the oppressed to use the same bestial
methods which are employed by the oppressors—something that is bound to
accustom them to political violence, through the negative long term effects on
their personalities that the use of violence creates.
Furthermore,
popular terrorism should also be rejected at the political level as well,
particularly so since physical violence lies outside the field of
logon
didonai (rendering account and reason), which,
"in itself entails the recognition of the value of autonomy in the sphere
of thinking”
that is synonymous with reason itself. In other words, as Hannah Arendt again
stresses, ‘violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech
is helpless when confronted with violence …in so far as violence plays a
predominant role in wars and revolutions, both occur outside the political
realm’.
Democracy, therefore, whose very basis is speech and reason, is incompatible
with violence and terrorism--as long, of course, as change by democratic means is possible within a given
institutional framework. No wonder that the classical concept of politics, which
was developed in the Athenian Democracy, was also incompatible with violence:
To be
political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through
words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek
self-understanding , to force people by violence, to command rather than
persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life
outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head
ruled with uncontested , despotic powers, or of life in the barbarian empires of
Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organisation of the
household.
In this
problematique, the only political issue is whether political violence can be
justified as a means of reaching a genuine democracy, something which brings us
to the issue of ‘confronting the system’, an issue that I have
discussed in the past in my dialogue with Ted Trainer.
As I stressed in that dialogue, this confrontation can be seen in a broad
or a narrow sense. In a broad sense, this confrontation involves any kind of
activity which aims to confront rather than to bypass the system, at any stage
of the transition to a new society. Such activities could include both direct
action and life-style activities, as well as other forms of action aiming at
creating alternative institutions at a significant social scale (e.g. the taking
over of local authorities through the electoral process). The condition for such
activities to be characterised as confronting the system is that they are an
integral part of a mass political movement for systemic change. Clearly, this
type of confrontation does not involve in principle any physical violence, apart
from self-defence in the case, for instance, of direct action, although it
should be expected that the elites will
extensively
use other forms of violence --
particularly economic violence -- to crush such a movement. On the other hand,
in a narrow sense, confrontation means the physical confrontation with the
mechanisms of physical violence which the elites may use against an antisystemic
movement and refers
exclusively to the final stage of the transition towards an alternative society.
For the Inclusive Democracy (ID) project, whether the
transition towards an ID will be marked by a physical confrontation with
the elites will depend entirely on the attitude of the latter at the final stage
of transformation of society, i.e. on whether they will accept peacefully such a
transition, or whether they will prefer instead to use physical violence to
crush it, as is most likely given that this transition will deprive them of
their privileges.
The violence of the oppressors
and the violence of the oppressed
The
experience over the years
Of
nothing getting better
Only
worse
The
humiliation of being able
To
change almost nothing
The
example of those who resist
Being
bombarded to dust
(John
Berger, The Guardian, 25-10-2001)
Although
popular terrorism and political violence in general are (as a rule) incompatible
with the democratic project, and as such rejectable, this does not mean that we
can equate all forms of political violence as many, even in the Left, do today,
who (consciously or unconsciously adopting the logic of the transnational elite
and the NGOs directly or indirectly financed by it) ‘put in the same bag’
the popular violence of the oppressed (e.g. the Palestinian ‘suicide
bombers’) with the state violence of the oppressors.
To my mind, irrespective of the target of violence, the violence of the
oppressors should never be equated with that of the oppressed for the following
reasons :
First, the violence of the oppressors is normally aggressive and in
today’s socio-economic system always aims at the reproduction of inequality in
all its forms (political, economic, social, military), whereas the violence of
the oppressed is normally defensive. Even in the case when the violence of the
oppressed is formally aggressive, as when it aims at the overthrow of an
oppressive regime (as for instance the Palestinian struggle for liberation), its
character is in essence defensive since its aim is the restoration of some form
of autonomy (political, economic, national or cultural) which was usurped by the
oppressor.
Second, the oppressors, given their superior military power, have always
the capacity of selecting targets that do not involve the use of indiscriminate
violence against civilians --particularly so today, in the era of laser-guided
missiles etc. If they do not exploit this capacity, this is due to their
deliberate decision to terrorise the oppressed to submission. This was the aim
of the ‘mass wars’ that involved indiscriminate killings of civilians, which
began with the Nazi bombings in the Spanish civil war and continued with the
carpet bombings of Dresden and then of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, not
to mention the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand,
the oppressed, given the same asymmetry of power, do not have much choice in
their targets, particularly when this asymmetry makes even guerrilla warfare non
feasible. This is the case of the suicide-bomber today who resorts to the last
resort i.e. the use of his/her own life as a weapon, in a kind of desperado
action against the massive killings of civilians by a vastly superior (in
military terms) oppressor.
In this problematique, one may easily understand the motives of the Arab
suicide
bombers in September 2001, or of Palestine suicide bombers in the months which
followed who, unable even to cause any significant military casualties to an
enemy which caused thousands of deaths of civilians in Iraq and Palestine,
resort to this kind of desperado terrorism. Therefore, the only rational way in
which one may understand activities like suicide-bombing is as a kind of a
desperado irrational response to the present, unprecedented in History,
asymmetry of power which is founded on the systemic violence built-in within the
NWO. This implies that the issue for the radical Left is not simply to ponder on
whether it should join the bandwagon of ‘anti-terrorism’ (as most in the
Left have done gaining in the process the approval of the establishment media)
or not. The real issue is what alternative ways of response
to the systemic violence of the elites are possible today--an issue that
we will consider in the last section of this paper.
Finally, whereas the oppressed, being the victims of oppression, are by
definition innocent, this does not apply to everybody on the other side, i.e.
the side which directly or indirectly takes part in the oppression. Those on the
side which carries out the oppression are innocent only when they adopt a stand
against the crimes of their elites—if, of course, they are aware of them. However, the crucial problem here is
that, usually, the peoples are not aware of the crimes of their elites
or, given the power of the media to distort events, are confused and have a
false consciousness about them. Still, to take two obvious topical examples,
there are many Americans who are fully aware of the crimes of their elites but
nonetheless, tacitly or not, endorse them, with the obvious aim to secure their
privileged standard of living -- although they have the power to stop such
crimes, as they did in the Vietnam war when ‘their own boys’ began coming
back in body bags. Similarly, there are even more Zionists in Israel and all
over the world who, being also fully aware of the crimes of the Israeli state
against the Palestinians, still,
tacitly or not, endorse them. Their
motive supposedly is to secure a place of living for the Jews (which, in fact,
can be secured in alternative democratic ways rather than through a Zionist
state) but in reality their stand is founded on their nationalist/religious
ideologies that often verge on racism. In
all these cases one would have to agree with Ellen Cantarow, a Jew writer, who,
desperate in the face of the Israeli crimes in Jenin and elsewhere in the April
2002 onslaught, cried : ‘those who do not speak out against the abominations
of these horrors are complicit by their silence. Those who exonerate or
apologize for Israel as it commits them are guilty by association’.[13]
Of course, this does not apply to the US Congress whose guilt is much more than
that of association. This was made evident for instance
when,
at the very
moment the world anger against the Israeli crimes in Zenin and elsewhere was
mounting, it passed resolutions of blatant support for the Zionist state,
blessing its brutal military campaign as an attempt at "dismantling the
terrorist infrastructure" in Palestinian territory, whereas the House
majority leader declared shamelessly that "I'm content to have Israel grab
the entire West Bank"![14]
2. Systemic violence and counter-violence in the New World
Order
There is no doubt that
counter-violence in all its forms has increased significantly since the rise of
neoliberal globalisation. This can only be interpreted in terms of a significant
increase in systemic violence (or even state repression) and the associated
increase in the concentration of power at the hands of the ruling elites --that
is in terms of a growing asymmetry between rulers and ruled. The discussion of
the crucial issue whether there has indeed been a significant increase in
systemic violence lately will bring
us to an examination of the contours of the New World Order
As I have discussed in detail elsewhere
the meaning of the NWO I will only outline here its main dimensions, which are
also the dimensions of systemic violence.
At the outset, it should be stressed that the meaning of NWO used in
this paper has little relation to the
usual meaning given to this term that simply refers to the
changes at the political and military level that resulted from the collapse of
the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War. In this paper, the NWO takes a much
broader meaning extending to:
-
the economic level, as expressed by the emergence of the present
neoliberal economic globalisation in the form of the internationalised market
economy, which secures the concentration of economic power in the hands of the
transnational economic elite
-
the political-military level, as expressed by the emergence of a new
informal political globalisation securing the concentration of political power
in the hands of a newly-emerged transnational political elite
-
the ideological level, as expressed by the development of a new
transnational ideology of limited sovereignty (supposedly to protect human
rights, to fight ‘terrorism’ etc)-- a kind of ideological globalisation
justifying the decrease of national sovereignty, which complements the
corresponding decrease of economic sovereignty as a result of economic
globalisation.
The economic dimension of systemic violence
As
regards, first, the economic dimension of systemic violence today, the emergence
of neoliberal modernity can be traced back to
important structural changes and their
effects on the parameters of social struggles that
brought about the collapse of the statist form of modernity,
i.e. the period of the social-democratic consensus lasting from roughly
the mid 1930’s to the mid 1970s.
These structural changes were both technological and economic, although mainly
the latter.
The technological changes, which refer mainly to the information
revolution, constitute a parallel (though not independent from the economic
changes) process that marked the shift of the market economy from the industrial
to the post-industrial phase. This resulted in a drastic change in the
employment structure and consequently the class structure of advanced market
economies (through the decimation of the working class) with significant
political and social implications—above all
the decline of the labour movement and consequently of the socialist movement.
As far as the economic changes are concerned, they mainly represented the
growing internationalisation of the market economy during the 1950s and
1960s,
as a result of the expansion of free trade and the corresponding expansion of
the newly emerged Transnational Corporations (TNCs). The expanding needs
of TNC’s led to an informal opening of capital markets, mainly through
development of the Euro-dollar
market (1970s) which, however, was instrumental for the later lifting of
exchange and capital controls.
However, growing internationalisation implied that the growth of the
market economy was more and more relying on the expansion of the world market
rather than the domestic market, making statism
(which kept growing throughout the early post-war period under the pressure of
the labour movement) incompatible with it, as it encroached on competitiveness.
The stagflation crisis of the early 1970s was the result of this incompatibility
between growing statism and internationalisation rather than, as it is usually
argued by orthodox economists, of the oil crisis, or as it is argued by Hardt
& Negri,
of the accumulation of class struggles.
At the same time, the above changes in the ‘objective’ conditions
created the corresponding changes in the ‘subjective’ conditions, in terms
of the rise of the neoliberal movement and the parallel
decline of the trade union and socialist movements.
In this problematique, the arrangements adopted by the economic elites to
open and liberalise markets, mostly, institutionalised (rather than created) the
present form of the internationalised market economy. The opening and liberalising of markets was simply
part of the historical trend to
minimise social controls over markets, particularly those aiming to protect
labour and the environment that interfered with economic ‘efficiency’ and
profitability. The combined effects of these changes has been what is
called ‘neoliberal globalisation’, which clearly reflects the structural
changes of the market economy and the corresponding changes in business
requirements of late modernity. Policies implemented today for the
management of neoliberal globalisation are therefore ‘systemic’ policies,
necessitated by and reflecting the dynamics of the market economy, rather than
capitalist ‘plots’ carried out by unscrupulous neoliberal governments and
decadent centre-Left parties --as the reformist Left suggests
which has never grasped the significance of the present monumental changes at
the economic level and the corresponding consequences at the political, military
and ideological levels.
This system
already
functions as a self-regulating market in which the interests of the elites that
control it are satisfied to the full, almost ‘automatically,’ through the
mere functioning of the market forces. In fact, both economic theory (radical
economic theory and even parts of orthodox theory) as well as empirical evidence
can show that the opening and liberalisation of markets, which constitute the
essence of neoliberal globalisation, inevitably, leads to the concentration of
income, wealth and economic power, given unequal initial conditions. In fact,
there is overwhelming evidence today which confirms the huge concentration of
income and wealth, as a result of neoliberal globalisation, and also makes
obvious the economic dimension of systemic violence: the richest 20% of the
world’s population receive today 86% of world GDP (versus 1% of the poorest
20%) and control 82% of world export markets and 68% of foreign direct
investment.
The
political/military dimension
of systemic violence
Coming
next to the political dimension of the NWΟ,
it is obvious that a transnational economy needs its own transnational elite. In
other words, globalisation cannot be seen only in terms of trade, investment and
communications but it requires also
a
political and security dimension, which
used to be the domain of nation-states and today is that of the transnational
elite. The emergence of such an
elite has already been theorised
both from the Marxist
and the Inclusive Democracy
viewpoints and the evidence on it has been increasingly substantiated. The
transnational
elite may be defined as the
elite which draws its power (economic, political or generally social power) by
operating at the transnational level. It consists of corporate directors, major
shareholders, TNC executives, globalising bureaucrats and professional
politicians functioning either within major international organisations or in
the state machines of the major market economies, as well as important academics
and researchers in the various
international foundations, members of think tanks and research departments of
major international universities, transnational mass media executives etc. Its
members have a dominant position within society, as a result of their economic,
political or broader social power and, unlike national elites, see that the best
way to secure their privileged position in society is not by ensuring the
reproduction of any real or imagined nation-state but, instead,
by securing the worldwide reproduction of the institutional framework on
which the NWO is founded: the system of market economy and representative
‘democracy’. In other words, the new transnational elite sees its interests
in terms of international markets rather than national markets and is not based
on a single nation-state but is a decentred apparatus of rule with no
territorial centre of power.
This is clearly an
informal
rather
than an institutionalised elite. Thus, in the same way that economic
globalisation expresses an informal concentration of economic power at the hands
of the members of the economic elite, political globalisation expresses an
informal concentration of political power at the hands of the members of the
political elite. In other words, the economic elite constitutes that part of the
transnational elite which controls the internationalised market economy, whereas
the political elite constitutes that part of the transnational elite which
controls the distinctly political-military dimension of the NWO. The main
institutions securing the concentration of economic and political power at the
hands of the transnational elite are the market economy and representative
‘democracy’ respectively, whereas the main organisations through which the
transnational elite exercises its informal control are the EU, NAFTA, the G8, WTO, IMF, World Bank, NATO and the UN.
The three ‘wars’
launched by
the transnational elite so far, (I.e. the Gulf war,
the war in Kosovo
and the on-going ‘war on terrorism’), are cases substantiating the existence
of an informal system of transnational governance, a political globalisation
presided
over by a transnational elite. The informal character of globalisation is needed
not only in order to keep the façade of a well functioning representative
‘democracy’ in which local elites are still supposed to take the important
decisions but also in order to preserve the nation-state’s internal monopoly
of violence. The latter is necessary so that local elites are capable of
controlling their populations in general and the movement of labour in
particular, enhancing the free flow
of capital and commodities.
Despite the dominance of the US-based elements within the transnational elite,
it is clear that the latter does not consist only of Americans and that
therefore it is wrong to talk about an ‘American empire’. It is only the
uneven distribution of political/military power among the members of the
transnational elite which establishes the informal hegemony of the US elite in
the present form of political globalisation. This is particularly important if
we take into account the fact that the transnational elite, like national
elites, is hardly a monolithic body
and that there are instead
significant divisions within it. Still, these divisions refer not to the common
goal of protecting the stability of the universal institutional framework
(capitalist neoliberal globalisation and representative ‘democracy’) but on
ways and means of doing so. Such divisions become particularly important today
in view of the deteriorating multi-dimensional crisis, mainly with respect to
its economic and ecological dimensions, as is shown by the clash of views
between
‘conservative’ elements of the transnational elite (mainly US-based)
and ‘progressive’ elements (mostly Europe-based). An example of this
division is the dispute over the Kyoto treaty which has been endorsed by all
members of the transnational elite apart from the US elite. A similar division
has arisen with respect to the growing concentration of economic power that
neoliberal globalisation implies. European
elites, having to face stronger reactions against the neoliberal
philosophy than their American counterparts (due to the stronger
socialist/social-democratic traditions in Europe) propose various measures to
reduce absolute (but not relative) poverty, and pursue a policy of fully
integrating China, Russia and the
‘rogue’ states into the internationalised market economy rather than
alienating them through aggressive political and military strategies. In other
words, the aim of the European parts of the transnational elite is to create a
‘capitalist globalisation with a human face’ that does not
alter the essentials of New World Order.
Finally, the divisions within the transnational elite concerning the future
phases of the war against terrorism is another case illustrating this point.
Still, given the unrivalled power of the US-based parts of the elite, one
might expect that a consensus reached between the various trends within it
on matters of strategy and tactics will mainly express the US positions.
Particularly so today when the US-based parts of the elite have established a
long-term superiority over the other parts of it, not only at the military
level, where the events of September 2001 gave them the opportunity to function
as the policeman of the New World Order, but also at the economic level. The
present US economic superiority is based not only on the long-term decline of
Japanese elites but also on their
unchallenged position in the information revolution placing them well ahead of
rivals in the Far East and Europe. A clear indication of the American
predominance within the transnational elite is the fact that whereas at the end
of the 1980s eight of the 10 biggest multinationals in the world were Japanese,
a decade later all ten were American.
Finally, it
should be added here that the New Political Order, a necessary complement of the
New Economic Order that is based on neoliberal globalisation, is defined not
only by the informal structure of political globalisation which I considered
above but also by an important institutional change: the redefinition of
NATO’s role by the 1999 Washington treaty. As
is well known, NATO was founded in 1949 as a collective defence
organisation against the communist ‘threat’ posed by the Soviet bloc. The
heart of the North Atlantic Treaty was Article 5, in which the signatory members
"agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North
America shall be considered an attack against them all”. In fact it was
article 5 that was used by the transnational elite in order to involve NATO in
the present war against terrorism. But the 1999 Washington summit, which was
dedicated to an expanded NATO that included several formerly Soviet block
countries, adopted a new ‘strategic concept’
that radically changed the nature of this crucial military organisation in which
all main advanced market economies
―apart from
Japan― take part.
The new NATO constitution redefined the role of NATO from a mutual
defence organisation of a number of nation-states allied against the Soviet bloc
into the main military institution
of the internationalised market economy. As, the new constitution explicitly
states,
‘the Alliance therefore not only ensures the defence of its members but
contributes to peace and stability in this region.’ Then, in a section
entitled ‘The evolving strategic environment’ the document lays out the
NATO/UN relationship by stating that ‘the United Nations Security Council has
the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and
security’. It is indicative that at
the time of the summit meeting, President Chirac interpreted this clause as
implying that NATO could not act without UN authorisation, but this
interpretation was immediately contradicted by Solana who stated that a Security
Council resolution would not be necessary before making an intervention outside
NATO territory.
The issue has been resolved in practice, at the NATO war against Yugoslavia: if
the transnational elite cannot secure the votes of all permanent members of the
UN Security Council they will have no hesitation to start military action
without prior UN mandate.
Further on, in a section entitled ‘Security challenges and risks’,
the new strategic concept is clearly defined and the transformation of NATO is
made explicit: from a defensive alliance which protects specific areas from the
communist threat to an aggressive alliance which protects a vaguely defined
broad area (‘in and around the Euro-Atlantic area and the periphery of the
Alliance’) against a series of loosely defined ‘risks’.
In effect, any kind of conflict situation (including ‘the disruption of
the flow of vital resources’ and ‘acts of terrorism’) within this broadly
defined geographical area, that might
directly
or indirectly threaten the stability of the internationalised market economy,
may be considered as threatening the Alliance.
The new role
of NATO as the defender of the transnational elite and its global interests is
therefore obvious from the Washington Treaty. Furthermore, although the above
formulations imply that all members of NATO would take part in defining a
‘risk situation’ and in proposing the appropriate measures to be taken, it
is obvious that, given the US hegemony, it is basically the US part of the
transnational elite that takes the responsibility of defending the New Economic
Order. No wonder that the Pentagon
explicitly declared that ”a
prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds
of the world’s economy” requires
the “stability” that only American “leadership can provide.
Protection of the internationalised market economy and free trade thus depend
on America’s overseas military commitments and power. An influential
New York Times columnist
was even more frank on the matter when he stressed that: “For globalisation to
work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower it is… The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist… and the hidden
fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the
US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Yet, the fact
that US military hegemony is recognised by all members of the transnational
elite does not mean that there are no parts of it which would
like to move toward some degree of independence from the US. The French
parts of the transnational elite, in particular, wish to create an independent
EU military power with the aim of moderating the American dominance over the
other members of the transnational elite. But, as one could expect in view of
the military weakness of the European powers, such wishes can never exceed the
stage of pious hopes. As George Robertson, the Nato secretary general, pointed
out recently, European countries spend on arms the equivalent of two-thirds of
the US defence budget but have nothing like two-thirds of the US defence
capability because of duplication.
In fact, all this was before the recent huge rise in US military spending
announced by the Bush administration which, according to Professor Paul Kennedy
at Yale University, will lead to the
US spending more each year than the
next nine largest national defence budgets combined!,
No wonder that although the Nice Treaty signed by EU ministers in February
2001 states clearly that common foreign and security policy shall include “all
questions relating to the security of the union”, it then goes on to specify
in a long annex that ‘Nato remains the basis of the collective defence of its
members and will continue to play an important role in crisis management.
The development of European security and defence policy will contribute to the
vitality of a renewed transatlantic link’.
It is therefore clear that any European defence force would be fully integrated
into NATO, securing the military hegemony of the US elite and, in effect,
playing a complementary, rather than a competitive, role to it.
So,
the new NATO constitution made it clear that the type of wars envisaged in the
future had nothing to do either with the kind of wars
between advanced market economies culminating in two World Wars which
marked the 20th century, or those that were expected by the original
NATO constitution between the two Cold war blocs. In this sense, the new NATO
constitution accurately reflects the transnational elite’s problematique on
wars in the NWO.
Thus,
as regards, first, wars among major market economies, the smooth functioning of
a self-regulating internationalised market economy, involving free movement of
commodities and capital, is incompatible with embargos and military activities.
Therefore, the present internationalisation of the market economy makes such
armed conflicts between major market economies superfluous, if not impossible.
Today, the nation states are essentially the municipalities of the
internationalised market economy and their job is to provide, at the cheapest
possible cost, the infrastructure and
‘public
goods’ required for the effective functioning of business.
It is simply against the general interest of the transnational elite to allow
any military conflicts to arise between the major advanced market economies,
i.e. the Triad (EU, NAFTA and Japan) on which all elements of the transnational elite are based. Furthermore,
it is not difficult to see that, in the framework of this internationalised
economy, any attempt by a country or an economic bloc to use military force
against another country or bloc within the Triad is inconceivable, since it will
incur the immediate sanctions of the global financial markets, the first
casualty being its own currency. At the same time, a generalised war, like the
two previous world wars, will lead to collapse the internationalised market
economy, through the collapse of the internationalised stock exchanges and the
bankruptcy of the transnational corporations that will have to drastically
restrict their activities.
But,
if wars among the countries in the Triad are ruled out this is not the case as
regards wars between them and countries in the periphery and the semi-periphery
of the internationalised market economy, nor is this the case with regard to
wars (like the present
global
‘war’ on terrorism) to crush any resistance
against the NWO, nor, finally, is this the case with regard to wars
between peripheral countries (often expressing
corresponding
divisions
within the transnational elite).
Thus,
as regards wars between countries in the Triad
and countries in the periphery and semi-periphery, as well as
those against resistance movements, the explosion
of inequality in the world distribution of power within the NWO
implies that attacks against any ‘rogue’ regimes or resistance movments
challenging it will continue unabated—this is the main aim of the present global
‘war’.. Such
regimes or movements will have to be crushed in the kind of total victory that
we have seen in the case of the three ‘wars’ to date. It is with the purpose
of fighting wars of this type that the armies of countries in the Triad are fast
being converted into armies of professional killers (a kind of samurai) who are
not susceptible, as conscripts are, to ideological influences and feelings of
solidarity with the social groups from which they are recruited (usually the
poorest groups). Despite the higher cost of professional armies,
the NWO
elites
have no choice but to finance such extra expenses since wars are no longer for
the defence of the country but purely for the defence of the NWO and the
privileges of those benefiting from it-- primarily the transnational elite but also the upper middle classes in
the Triad countries as well as
the
elites in the peripheral countries.
As
for wars among peripheral states, conflicts of a cultural, religious,
nationalist or ethnic nature may easily arise between them, often giving outlet
to socio-economic frustrations. The reaction of the transnational elite to such
wars is not uniform. In some cases,
as with ethnic wars in the Balkans, such conflicts may threaten the stability of
the NWO and have to be crushed through its military arms, if possible through
the UN, alternatively
by
the new NATO, or as last resort
by
US military power. If these tensions do not threaten the NWO as such but
are useful in financing expansion of the transnational elite’s arrmaments
industries then, such tensions are left to keep simmering.
In conclusion, the military branch
of the transnational elite, i.e. the US Pentagon, with the assistance of the
second-in-command, the British Army
―with or without the help of NATO― play today the role of managing the security
dimension of the NWO. In this framework, the new global ‘war’ of the
transnational elite offers, as we shall see below, the very security apparatus for the process of neoliberal
globalisation (a global war for a globalised economy), as well as the protection
mechanism with respect to any threat against the NWO in general.
The ideological dimension of
systemic violence
Economic
and political globalisation are inevitably accompanied by a kind of
‘ideological globalisation’, i.e. a transnational ideology used
to justify the decrease of national sovereignty, which complements the
corresponding decrease of economic sovereignty following economic globalisation.
The core of this new ideology is the doctrine of ‘limited’ sovereignty which
is used to ‘justify’ military interventions/attacks
against any ‘rogue’ regimes or political organisations and movements.
According to this doctrine, there are certain universal values that should take
priority over other values, like that of national sovereignty. The
five centuries-old culture of unlimited sovereignty, which nations that
participated in the drafting of the UN charter agreed to limit only as regards
their right to wage war in case of an attack, in exchange for a promise that the
Security Council provide collective security on their behalf (an arrangement
blatantly violated by the US’s ‘war’ against Afghanistan),
is therefore completely abolished in the NWO.
In cases where
‘universal values’ are violated, international organisations
expressing the will of the ‘international community’ (i.e. the UN Security
Council, NATO etc) should enforce them by any means necessary, irrespective of
national sovereignty concerns that should never override the primary
significance of these universal values.
This
new doctrine was formally expressed by the UK prime minister in a Chicago
speech, just before the Washington NATO summit. The upshot of this speech was
that democratic states should be allowed to intervene in the internal affairs of
other states so long as human rights are at stake—a principle fully endorsed
by the ‘new’ NATO.
There are two obvious conclusions that one may draw
from this new doctrine of ‘limited sovereignty’, which is fast becoming the
ideology of the NWO, first with respect to human rights and second with respect
to the ‘war against terrorism’. The first conclusion is that this
doctrine overrides the UN Charter which explicitly states that
‘nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United
Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic
jurisdiction of any state’ except upon a Security Council finding of a
"threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression."
This reversal becomes all too clear when one takes into account that a
proposal to ensure the protection
of human rights was explicitly rejected at the San Francisco Conference
establishing the UN. The second conclusion is that given the huge asymmetry of
power in the present world order it is not the sovereignty of the powerful
states in the Triad countries which is going to suffer because of this new
doctrine but only that of the weak ones.
It is therefore clear that this new doctrine is false,
asymmetrical and potentially oppressive. It is false, because primacy of
‘human rights’ or the protection against ‘terrorism’ over national
sovereignty presupposes that we live in a society and a world in which the
peoples of this world (and not their elites) can define the meaning of ‘human
values’ and ‘terrorism’. It is asymmetrical insofar as it creates a right
for the powerful to intervene in the affairs of the weak, and not vice versa.
This could explain, for instance, why massive violations of Palestinians’
human rights in the past and the Jenin crimes during the second phase of the
‘war’ against terrorism in April 2002 at the hands of a brutalised
Zionist army, with the obvious connivance of the transnational elite,
have never warranted any action by the transnational
elite (not even a commisiion of inquiry!), or why the KLA in Kosovo and
the Contras in Nicaragua, easily qualifying as ‘terrorist’ organisations,
not only were never pursued by the transnational elite but instead were armed
and financed by it! Finally, it is potentially oppressive, because it can easily
be used by the transnational elite to oppress any movement that might try
to establish an alternative kind of society which aims to abolish the
unequal distribution of political and economic power. This new doctrine of
limited sovereignty, therefore, plays the ideological role of legitimising
political and military interventions of the transnational elite in order to
guarantee the stability of the NWO.
Finally, it is worth noting
the role of the centre-Left and the mainstream Greens as the
main promoters of the new transnational ideology. Both have
played a vital part in justifying the ‘wars’ of the transnational elite
through the doctrine of limited sovereignty. This is not difficult to explain in
view of the fact that both the centre-Left and the mainstream Greens have
already fully adopted the New World Order in its economic and political aspects.
Thus, all major European centre-Left parties (Germany, Britain, France, Italy
etc) have already adopted the capitalist neoliberal globalisation. Similarly,
mainstream Greens have long ago abandoned any ideas about radical economic
changes and have adopted instead a kind of ‘eco-social-liberalism’ that
amounts to some version of ‘Green
capitalism’.
It was
therefore hardly surprising that the centre-Left endorsed enthusiastically all
three ‘wars’ of the transnational elite, whereas the mainstream Greens, who
at the beginning of the 1990s were concerned about the ecological implications
of the Gulf war, were dedicated supporters of the war against Yugoslavia by the
end of the decade and today have fully endorsed the ‘war against terrorism’.
The argument used by Greens to
justify their stand was that the
Green ideology of fighting for human rights and human liberation in general was
perfectly compatible with the new role of NATO as protector of human rights!
Still, there is an alternative explanation for the Green stand: since ideas
about the anti-party party, direct democracy, and radical ecology were shelved
once the mainstream green parties became ‘normal parties’ fighting for
government power, it was inevitable that, once in power, they would become
‘normal governments’, taking part in criminal activities like the
NATO war.
However, if the historical role of social democrats on the side of the ruling
elites in their various wars can be taken for granted,
this does not apply to the Left in general or the Greens in particular.
As
regards the former, it was surprising though not unexpected to see that the
‘war’ against Yugoslavia was endorsed by most intellectuals of the European
‘left’: from Anthony Giddens and Alain Tourain
to Edgar Morin, Habermas and many
others, who, in effect, served as
apologists for NATO’s attack against the Yugoslavian people when they
justified the doctrine of ‘limited’ sovereignty and talked about a ‘new
era’ in international relations, supposedly marked by the Pinochet affair and
the ‘war’ itself. It is clear that most ‘left’ intellectuals, having
abandoned their critical role are now, as Castoriadis aptly described them,
‘enthusiastically adhering to that which is there just because it is there’.
The
same applies to the Greens who entered the political arena a quarter
a century ago, as a new social movement fighting for the noble goal of
liberating Nature and Humanity from the evils of the present society. Their
participation in the last two criminal ‘wars’ of the transnational elite
(Yugoslavia, Afghanistan) constitutes a flagrant violation of the raison d’
etre itself of the Green movement. This became particularly obvious in the case
of Yugoslavia, when ‘realist’
Greens like the ex Leftists and now
professional politicians Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and
‘red-Greens’ like Alain Lipietz,
as well as the European Green parties, saw no contradiction between the end of
this war (liberation of Kosovars from oppression and ethnic cleansing)
and the means used for this purpose (the criminal war machine of the
transnational elite engaged in the systematic destruction of the country’s
infrastructure). Mainstream Greens have shown
that they no longer have (if they ever did) a vision of an alternative
society: they simply endorse the institutional framework of the present
internationalised market economy and its political expressions. As socialist
critics
were quick to point out, mainstream Greens today cannot claim to be any kind of
‘anti-systemic force’. Clearly, therefore,
from the moment ‘realists’ won the battle against radical currents
within the European Greens, Green parties have become an element of the NWO
engaged in environmental ‘statecraft’ on behalf of the middle classes which
they mainly represent, ending any hopes for their anti-systemic potential.
Counter-violence in the New
World Order
Political violence in all its varieties is not of course a new phenomenon
and has always been present in every
form
of hierarchical (or heteronomous) society.
As
I attempted to show in the first section
political violence was always associated with the
unequal distribution of power at all levels and particularly the political/
military and the economic levels. In other words, the
asymmetry of economic and political/military
power between and within nations has always been the necessary condition for political
violence, both from the point of view of the oppressor as well as that of the
oppressed. One may
even go further and assume a direct relationship
between inequality in the
distribution
of power and political violence:
the higher the inequality in the distribution of
power
the
greater the degree
of political violence in all its
forms.
As hopefully was made clear in
the last section, the NWO has institutionalised an extreme concentration of
economic, political/military power, i.e. an extreme form of systemic violence,
which is the ultimate cause of the huge rise of counter-violence in the last
quarter of the century or so. But, in contrast to the liberal and statist forms
of modernity, when power was concentrated at the national level and therefore
terrorism was also nationally focused, in the
NWO of neoliberal modernity, power is concentrated at the international
level, in the hands of the transnational elite. Not surprisingly, terrorism also
takes a globalised form today to hit the centres of the transnational elite and
particularly the USA. However, it has been various non-extreme forms of
counter-violence rather than
terrorism
itself that flourished in the NWO, although one may notice some significant
variations between the North and the South.
In the North,
counter-violence in the 1980s and early 1990s used to take mainly the form of
individual counter-violence, as expressed through the huge increase in crime. No
wonder that today the world prison
population is an all-time record, with more than 8.75m people in prison around
the world and about half of them in three countries alone: the US (1.93m), China
(1.43m) and Russia (0.96m)
where the concentration of power in all its forms is highest.
The only
North-based terrorist organisations still operating today are either remnants of
the 1970s (November 17th Organisation in Greece and the resurrected
Red Brigades in Italy) or national liberation movements (ETA in Spain, ‘Real
IRA’ in N. Ireland).. However,
with the blooming of neoliberal globalisation in the 1990s, a new form of
collective counter-violence developed recently, as expressed particularly by the
activity of the antisystemic currents within the anti-globalisation movement.
No
wonder that the new antiterrorist legislation that was introduced in many
countries in the North, even before the September 11 events but particularly
after them, has been designed to be applicable not only with respect to terrorism from the South
but also with respect to the
antisystemic currents within the antiglobalisation movement and similar
movements outside it. Particularly so, since the systemic violence is at a very
high level in the NWO, with inequality, poverty and unemployment having reached
record post-war levels, representative
‘democracy’
not giving any outlet for protest as all main parties agree on the basic
principles governing neoliberal globalisation, and the capital-controlled mass
media being busy in manufacturing consent around the aims of the transnational
elite which manages the NWO. Inevitably, this huge systemic violence can only be
sustained through state repression, in case the built-in mechanisms used by the
elite to push the oppressed into passivity and individualisation (consumer
culture, drug culture, mass media
etc) are not sufficient for their control.
On the other
hand, in the South, the rise of systemic violence represented by the NWO has
been met by a corresponding rise of collective
counter-violence, including popular terrorism. This
is the case of many movements that have emerged in the last decade or so in
Latin America --particularly in countries like Brazil where the demands for land
redistribution have grown-- but also, in Asia, in countries like India and
lately China,
where demonstrations against the effects of globalisation seem to have
flourished lately. Popular terrorism is also rampant in the South. This is on
account of two reasons. First, because counter-violence is usually suppressed by
the repressive regimes dominating the South (even if they formally adopted the
representative ‘democracy’ paraphernalia), pushing resistant social groups
to the use of terrorist methods. In fact, terrorism has almost replaced other
forms of collective counter-violence like guerrilla warfare, which used to be
the main form of struggle in the periphery. Second, because when
counter-violence is directed against the North (or colonizers from the North
like the Zionist regime in Israel), the asymmetry of power between oppressors
and oppressed is such that the
latter have in fact no effective choice
but
the resort to terrorism.
3. The
September 11 events as the catalyst for the new ‘war’
The Causes of the September
11 events
The
common theme of the transnational elite and its ideological commissars in
interpreting the September events
has been that
they constituted an
inexplicable attack against democracy and civilisation caused by religious
fanatics whereas the more ‘sophisticated’ of those analysts talked about the
‘clash of civilisations’.
Thus,
the New York Times, the medium par excellence of the transnational
elite, found the causes of the attack in ‘religious fanaticism’ and in the
anger of those left behind by globalisation.[51]
Similarly, several of the
ideological commissars of the same elite ‘explained’ the events as
pure ‘nihilism’. A Harvard university professor, for instance, writing in
the immediate aftermath of the events, gave the following ‘interpretation’,
which obviously aimed at preparing world opinion for the bloody ‘war’ to
come:[52]
It
is important to insist on the apocalyptic content and the nihilistic moral
meaning of these events because so many good people persist in believing that
the attacks were a cry from the heart of an unjust world, an indictment, wrong
in moral form, but right in content, of the injustice of American power. Some
even go so far as to claim that America's guilt deprives it of the right to
strike back. The mistake is to construe an act of annihilating nihilism as an
act of politics… Since the politics of reason cannot defeat apocalyptic
nihilism, we must fight.
As
the above extract makes clear, the aim of the establishment ideologues has been
to separate completely the violence of September 11 from systemic violence so
that the impression of a nihilistic event could be established.
However, neither was the attack inexplicable nor was it directed against
democracy and civilisation. In fact, it was clearly an extreme form of popular
terrorism directly related to the systemic violence built into the NWO. Thus,
the attack becomes far from inexplicable when it is taken into account that the
Arabs who carried out it grew up in
a world order in which their brothers and sisters in Palestine were murdered on
a daily basis in the process of a barbarous ethnic cleansing, the perpetrators
of which, far from being bombed as in Yugoslavia for their contempt of numerous
UN resolutions, were scandalously
supported by the transnational elite-mainly the US-based parts of the elite--
for the sake of its control of Mid East oil, and were rewarded at the rate of over 3 billion dollars per year. They also
grew up in a world order in which more than a million of their compatriots in
Iraq (half of them children) have died out of the mass bombings and the
subsequent embargo[53]
of the transnational elite.
Also,
concerning the allegation that the September events represented an
attack against democracy, one may argue that
it was the very absence of real democracy in the USA that was the cause
of death of innocent victims. Surely, most of these victims were not responsible
for the decisions to subjugate the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Indonesians, or
earlier on the Latin Americans and the Vietnamese. It was the political elites,
at whose hands political power is concentrated in a representative
‘democracy’, that have to be blamed for this. Also, most of these victims
were probably not even aware of the
avoidable death (according to UNICEF) of over 10 m children per year ,
because of the lack of proper living conditions and of the role of Western
elites in the development of such conditions. On the other hand, it is the
200 billionaires, who concentrate in their hands an amount of
wealth which is eight times higher than the total income of 582 m people
in the ‘developing‘ countries,[54]
who in a market economy are invested with
economic
power and, with the support of the privileged social groups, determine the fate
of everybody in the planet.
Finally,
the allegation that the September events represent a kind of ‘clash of
civilisations’
is obviously an ideological smokescreen to cover the real cycle of systemic
violence and counter-violence. Not only the transnational elite has clearly not
been motivated by any crusade but there is also no evidence that the Arabs who
carried out the attack were motivated by some fervent desire to spread Islamic
fundamentalism.[56]
This, does not deny of course the possibility that their religious beliefs (which might well have been exploited
by their leadership to recruit them in the struggle against the transnational
elite) might have helped them in executing (but not in taking) their decision to
sacrifice their own lives. As
regards the rise of Islamic fundamentalism itself, it was only in
the late 1960s that Muslims throughout the Islamic world had begun to develop
what we call fundamentalist movements and it was not before 1979, when the
ayatollahs took over in Iran, that the Islamic fundamentalist movement
flourished—usually enhanced by the West in its struggle to dismantle the
Soviet bloc. This was therefore a phenomenon that happened after, and not
before, the failure of Arab nationalism/socialism to stem the continuous
decline of Arab societies, despite the political and economic independence that
the end of colonialism supposedly brought about. The turn of the Arab
populations (including the radical currents within the Palestinian movement) to
Islamic fundamentalism is therefore the logical outcome of this failure and of
the parallel establishment by the transnational elite of semi-dictatorial client
regimes which stifle any democratic process.
One may therefore conclude that the ultimate cause of
the September 11 attacks should be traced back to the NWO that we considered in
the last section, which has established a huge inequality in the distribution of
economic and political power between and within nations. It
is this huge asymmetry that inspired the attackers to express themselves in a
language of desperation, something that did not represent any clear
strategy, with its long term aims and short term tactics. From this viewpoint,
Saskia Sassen’s observation is
clearly to the point::
the
attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted have used
many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the meaning.
So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that
needs no translation.
At
the same time, the events of September themselves functioned as catalysts and
gave the perfect pretext to the transnational elite, headed by the US-based
parts of it, for its present
attempt to crush any resistance movement in the South, in the hope that this will eliminate any serious threats to its
interests. As the special, correspondent of Le Monde Diplomatique put it:
‘Having been challenged by a new terrorism, the US is
determined to regain control, if only partially, in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and even Iraq. It means to eliminate all the
political and social forces that
pose a violent threat to its interests’.
However, despite the fact that Le Monde Dimplomatique
attempts to differentiate between the US and the European elements of the
transnational elite and blames only the former,
one may argue that
this
elite as a whole did not have any other choice and, in spite of the differences
on tactics, all its members agree on the long-terms of the war, as the European
Commission made clear.
It is therefore clear that, despite the differences in
tactics that may well exist between the various elements of the transnational
elite, it does not make any sense to assume that it will ever take any measures
to fight the causes of popular terrorism (i.e. the systemic violence within the
NWO) rather than its symptoms, as
it does with the global ‘war’. Therefore, one could not expect that this
elite will ever abandon the client Zionist state, which is the main foundation
of the NWO in the area, or that it will stop seeking to overthrow
‘rogue’ regimes and suppress radical movements threatening its vital
interests, or finally that it will
introduce any effective measures to control neoliberal globalisation for the
sake of protecting labour and the environment and against the imperatives of
neoliberal globalisation.
The
aftermath of September
11: launching a new type of ‘war’
The attacks of
September 11 gave the opportunity to the transnational elite, whose military
branch is, de facto, the US
military machine, to start its latest ‘war’ against terrorism. Despite the
fact that the new war has several common characteristics with the previous
‘wars’, as we shall see below, there are also significant differences
between these ‘wars’. Thus, the war against terrorism, unlike the previous
ones, is a global and permanent war. It is a global war, not in the sense of a
generalised war like the two world wars but in the sense that its targets are
not only specific ‘rogue’ regimes (as it was the case with the Saddam and
Milosevic regimes), which are not fully integrated in the New World Order or
simply do not ‘toe the line’, but any kind of regime or social group and
movement which resists the New World Order: from the Palestinian up to the
antiglobalisation movements. As Dan
Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute put
it ‘'the war on terrorism is
analogous to civil war on a global scale, in that it is taking place in a world
which globalisation has shrunk and interconnected.'[61]
Furthermore, it is a permanent[62]
war, because it is bound to continue for as long as the New
World Order and the systemic and state violence associated with it are
reproduced.
In
other words, the ‘war against terrorism’ is a particularly expedient means
of controlling populations that threaten the NWO. The direct target in its first
phases is those populations in the South
which are particularly influenced by
Islamic fundamentalism. As we have seen above, the selection of this target does
not indicate the kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ predicted by the
ideologues of the NWO but rather the fact that the populations in countries like
Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, as well as Indonesia, Philippines and
Malaysia, have been the main victims of the NWO, particularly in its economic
dimension, because of their
geographical and economic position
Still,
the fundamentalist movements in the South are not the only targets of the ‘war
against terrorism’. Direct action movements in the North, like the
anti-globalisation movement, are also the implicit target of the transnational
elite. The significant curbing of civil liberties introduced at the moment
throughout the North (USA, EU etc), ostensibly to subdue Islamic terrorists,
could easily be used to suppress the more radical elements within the
anti-globalisation movement. The tactics used to suppress this movement have
already led to violent confrontations (from Seattle to
Göteborg
and Genoa) which, in the present
anti-‘terrorist’ climate, could clearly be used by the transnational elite
to identify anti-globalisers with ‘terrorists’. Particularly so at a moment
when, as Alex Wilks points out, a number of official and
media commentators have already claimed that the way to fight terrorism is
further economic liberalisation, implying that anyone who dares question this is
on the side of terrorists.
In this problematique, therefore, the ‘war’ against
terrorism does not aim at ‘eradicating’ terrorism, as the official
propaganda asserts, although, as we shall see in the next section, discouraging
counter-violence in general is a basic aim of it. However, counter-violence in
all its forms, which under certain conditions may take the extreme form of
popular terrorism, will never be eradicated as long as there is systemic
violence, state repression and state terrorism. The transnational elite is well
aware of this fact, given the historical experience which clearly shows that
state repression and state terrorism never managed to eradicate popular
terrorism for as long as the asymmetry in power that caused it in the first
instance, still continued. This is particularly true today when terrorists are
prepared to use even their own lives to resist against a formidable enemy, who
is able to use the most deadly technology at a minimum cost (in lives) to
itself.
Common characteristics
of the transnational elite’s wars
Still, despite the novel
elements of this war there are also certain common features characterising all
the transnational elite’s wars so far (i.e. the Gulf war, the NATO war against
Yugoslavia and the war against Afghanistan) and in all
probability will characterise also the ‘wars’ to come within the
general framework of the ‘war against terrorism’. Such characteristics
are:First, the so-called ‘wars’ are decided by the highest echelons of the
transnational elite—the leading role in this decision-taking process being
played of course by the American members of this elite which possess the
necessary equipment and technology. Despite the fact that the regimes which take
part in these ‘wars’ are called ‘democracies’ the peoples themselves are
never involved directly in these decisions and even the professional politicians
in the respective parliaments usually are called to approve these ‘wars’
after they have already been launched.
Second, the
wars are invariably carried out in blatant violation of international law,
both
when they are formally covered by a capitalist-controlled
UN Security Council resolution, as
in the case of the Gulf war, and
when they arer not, as in the cases of Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan.
As
we have seen above, the doctrine of limited sovereignty used to justify these
wars is in blatant contradiction to the UN Charter. With
regards to the attack against Afghanistan in particular, it should be noted that
article 51 of the UN Charter, which has been used to justify
this
‘war’, refers to the right of
‘self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United
Nations’,
not to any ‘right’ to
retaliate
against an attack using a civilian airliner,
and in no way grants permission to attack a country which offers refuge to the
transnational elite’s
enemies!
Third, the pattern of military division of labour
between the members of the transnational elite, as it emerged from all three
‘wars’, involves the almost exclusive use of the US military machine,
particularly its unrivalled air power, in the first stages of the war effort,
with the military machines of the other members mobilised mainly at later
stages, for peace-keeping roles etc. It is this pattern of military division of
labour, which has persuaded some analysts to make the untenable assumption of US
unilateralism, if not isolationism--at the very moment when US is involved in a
global’ war! However, this pattern has
been imposed de facto by the US-based members of the elite, exclusively because
of military considerations, i.e. as a result of the overwhelming superiority of
US military power over the other members of the transnational elite.
This has therefore nothing to do
with any real divergence between the members of this elite regarding the common
long-term aims, although of course the huge
asymmetry in military power among the members of the elite gives a much
greater weight to the views on tactics adopted by th