Follow-up....
December 2004
Empire of Barbarism
by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
This is a revised version of a paper written for a conference on “Civilization or Barbarism: Challenges and Problems of the Contemporary World,” Serpa and Moura, Portugal, September 24, 2004.
“A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: “America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand—the destruction of modern secular society.” Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution.
Altogether absent from this establishment view is the predatory role played by U.S. and European imperialism. It is true that we are living in a “new age of barbarism.” However this has its roots not in religious fundamentalism but in what Marx saw as the barbarism accompanying bourgeois civilization and what Rosa Luxemburg once called “the ruins of imperialistic barbarism.” We need to look at global capitalism and beyond that at what the United States and Britain are doing in Iraq, the principal zone of imperialist conflict at present, if we are to plumb the full depths of the barbarism that characterizes our time.
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