The American sham exposed:
Empire of Barbarism
Today the world is facing what de Silva feared—a barbarism emanating from a single powerful country, the United States, which has adopted a doctrine of preemptive (or preventative) war, and is threatening to destabilize the entire globe. In the late twentieth century the further growth of monopoly capital (as explained most cogently in Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital and Harry Magdoff’s Age of Imperialism) led to a heavy reliance, particularly for the United States as the hegemonic state of the world system, on military spending and imperialist intervention. With the waning of the Cold War this dependence of the imperial superpower on the most barbaric means of advancing its interests and controlling the system has only increased. The continuing decline of U.S. economic hegemony, occurring alongside deepening economic stagnation in capitalism as a whole, has led the United States to turn increasingly to extraeconomic means of maintaining its position: putting its huge war machine in motion in order to prop up its faltering hegemony over the world economy. The “Global War on Terror” is a manifestation of this latest lethal phase of U.S. imperialism, which began with the 1991 Gulf War made possible by the breaking up of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower.
After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the empire could present itself as at war with barbarism and in defense of civilization. “The barbarians have already knocked at the gates,” declares Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University and a principal advocate of U.S. and British imperialism. But today’s barbarians, he charges, are Islamic fundamentalists, and liberal imperialism becomes a way of inoculating the world against such Islamic terrorism. While the knock on the gates represents a clear danger to the U.S.-dominated imperial order, these external terrorist groups, Ferguson contends, will not bring about the decline of the American imperium directly. Instead, the principal threat to the position of the United States in the global economy is internal. It is rooted in an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. state to make a full claim to its position at the head of the global empire.
Ferguson, who believes that the British Empire of old should be emulated—albeit in a form worthy of the twenty-first century—argues in his latest book Colossus and his earlier Empire that the world needs an empire. Many nations would be better off dominated by the United States than having full independence. The United States, he claims, “is a guns and butter empire”—one that represents not just the rule of force but the advance of the principles of liberal empire and liberal bounty, thus yielding a more democratic and prosperous world order. It is no mere coincidence that Ferguson, one of the most influential establishment historians today, explicitly calls for an updating of the old “White Man’s Burden” (to be replaced by a new ideology of “functional” empire) while whitewashing one of the most barbaric wars of modern imperialism: the Philippine-American War at the beginning of the twentieth century—the very same imperial war that Kipling had urged on the United States in his poem “The White Man’s Burden” (Colossus, pp. 48–52, 267, 301–02; Empire, pp. 369–70).
Ferguson’s “guns and butter empire” is now a transparent objective of U.S. policy. With the fall of the Soviet Union, as István Mészáros explained in Socialism or Barbarism, the United States began to assume “the role of the state of the capital system as such, subsuming under itself by all means at its disposal all rival powers” (p. 29). With its immense military power and its willingness to use force, the United States is now leading the world into what Mészáros has called “the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism.” In attempting to prevent revolution (or indeed any way out for populations in the periphery), the United States is seeking to transcend the only certain law of the universe: change. In the process, it has given birth to dictators, supported terrorists, and threatened the world with violent destruction. In the Middle East the United States has nurtured a regressive, fundamentalist political Islam (useful in the CIA-directed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and in closing off all progressive options in the Middle East) that insofar as it turns back and bites the hand that fed it—the United States and its allies—is branded as a “new barbarism.”
‘The Gates of Hell Are Open’
Two years ago, Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League and former Egyptian foreign minister, predicted that “the gates of Hell” would be opened if the United States invaded Iraq. In Cairo this fall he reprised this view, observing that now “the gates of Hell are open in Iraq.” Although he was “scolded” by some for his statement two years ago, this time around, according to USA Today (September 16, 2004), “there was no dissent.” It is clear that the U.S. invasion and occupation has created a bloodbath in Iraq that will continue for years, given the ferocious guerrilla war that Iraqis have launched in response. The U.S. position in Iraq is deteriorating. The occupying forces have lost control over whole sections of the country. In October, bombings occurred for the first time in the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, the imperial command center in that country. Over three dozen Iraqi cities are “no-go” zones under the control of the Iraqi resistance. In the thirty days ending on September 28 there were more than 2,300 attacks by resistance forces against U.S., coalition, and Iraqi government targets in all areas of the country. “The type of attacks ran the gamut: car bombs, time bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, small-arms fire, mortar attacks and land mines.” Iraqi resistance forces launched more than 3,000 mortar attacks alone in Baghdad between April and the end of September (New York Times, September 29, 2004).
U.S. and British air strikes on Iraqi centers of resistance account for the preponderance of the violent deaths among the 100,000 civilians, mostly women and children, that have died so far in the war—according to a study carried out in Iraq by U.S. and British public health experts and published in the leading British medical journal (Lancet, online edition, October 29, 2004). Yet despite such fearsome attacks, which have targeted homes, hospitals, and mosques and unleashed untold levels of bloodshed and destruction, the Iraqi resistance seems only to be gaining in strength.
It is now well recognized by the ruling elements in the United States that the number of U.S. troops engaged in Iraq is not sufficient to accomplish the mission of subduing the population. Iraqis are reluctant to enlist in the Iraqi army and police, and those who have enlisted are deserting in droves. Lacking an internal force to conduct its bidding, the United States despite its vast, state-of-the-art military arsenal is short-handed. Working in support of U.S. occupation operations is deadly, as more than 700 Iraqi police officers aiding the occupation have been killed. On top of this, insurgents are inflicting wounds that strike at the very heart of the U.S. ruling class as oil pipelines are being targeted for destruction. The situation for the occupying forces is bleak: “The bottom line is, at this moment we are losing the war,” states Andrew Bacevich, former Army colonel and professor of international relations at Boston University. Yet, he continues, “That doesn’t mean it is lost, but we are losing” (USA Today, September 16, 2004). All of this has resurrected the Vietnam ghost—the seemingly inescapable symbol of U.S. defeat in imperialist wars.
Barbarism has always been associated with torture. Marx’s comments on the treadmill were aimed at the role this instrument of production played in torturing workers while reinforcing bourgeois social relations. He explored the systematic use of torture by British colonialism in India in his article “Investigations of Tortures in India” and saw the outrages of the “revolted Sepoys in India” as a “historical retribution” for such acts by their British oppressors. The systematic use of torture by the United States in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and on its base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is now generating throughout the world a still deeper hatred of American imperialism. In the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century U.S. troops employed a torture technique known as the “water cure,” in which water was pumped down the throats of the detainees and then their stomachs stepped on until they confessed—usually resulting in death shortly afterwards. One of the tortures used recently on a high-level terrorist suspect by U.S. intelligence is the infamous technique known as “‘water-boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown” (New York Times, May 13, 2004). More standard is a set of slower but highly effective torture techniques: isolation, long-term deprivation of sleep, removal from light and sound, exposure to extreme cold and heat, forcing prisoners to remain naked, use of black hoods, making them stand or stoop in stress positions, beatings, threatening detainees with guard dogs, twenty-four-hour interrogation, etc. According to the Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (August 2004), also known as The Schlesinger Report after the chair of the Independent Panel, former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death, and there are twenty-three other suspicious cases of detainee deaths still under investigation. Much of this was given a spurious “legal” basis by the U.S. government’s refusal to grant terror suspects detained in Guantánamo and elsewhere the status of prisoners of war, thus suspending the Geneva Convention. All of this set the stage for the barbaric treatment of prisoners.
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