I've
just caught up with this superb, plain-talking essay by Jason Hirthler
on how different and shocking western policy might look, at home and
abroad, if we could for a moment step outside the narrow confines of the
neocolonial mindset that has been actively cultivated in us.
Some highlights:
The neoliberal economic model of deregulation, downsizing, and
privatization was preached by the Reagan-Thatcher junta, liberalized by
the Clinton regime, temporarily given a bad name by the unhinged Bush
administration, and saved by telegenic restoration of the Obama years.
The ideology that underlay the model saturated academia, notably at the
University of Chicago, and the mainstream media, principally at The New
York Times. Since then it has trickled down to the general populace, to
whom it now feels second nature. Today think tanks like the Heritage
Foundation, the Brookings Institute, Stratfor, Cato Institute, American
Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment,
the Open Society Foundation, and the Atlantic Council, among many
others, funnel millions of dollars in donations into cementing
neoliberal attitudes in the American mind. ...
The crux of
neoliberalism is to eliminate democratic government by downsizing,
privatizing, and deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize
that the state is the last bulwark of protection for the common people
against the predations of capital. Remove the state and they’ll be left
defenseless. Think about it. Deregulation eliminates the laws.
Downsizing eliminates departments and their funding. Privatizing
eliminates the very purpose of the state by having the private sector
take over its traditional responsibilities. Ultimately, nation-states
would dissolve except perhaps for armies and tax systems. A large,
open-border global free market would be left, not subject to popular
control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent.
And the whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath
the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism. ...
The most common pretexts for intervention depict the target nation in three distinct fashions.
First, as an economic basket case, a condition often engineered by the
West in what is sometimes called, “creating facts on the ground.” By
sanctioning the target economy, Washington can “make the economy
scream,” to using war criminal Henry Kissinger’s elegant phrasing. Iran,
Syria, and Venezuela are relevant examples here. Second, the West funds
violent opposition to the government, producing unrest, often violent
riots of the kind witnessed in Dara, Kiev, and Caracas. The goal is
either to capsize a tottering administration or provoke a violent
crackdown, at which point western embassies and institutions will send
up simultaneously cries of tyranny and brutality and insist the leader
step aside. Libya, Syria, and Venezuela are instructive in this regard.
Third, the country will be pressured to accept some sort of military
fettering thanks to either a false flag or manufactured hysteria over
some domestic program, such as the WMD restrictions on Iraq, chemical
weapons restrictions on Syria, or the civilian nuclear energy
restrictions on Iran. Given that the U.S. traffics in WMDs, bioweapons,
and nuclear energy itself, insisting others forsake all of these is
perhaps little more than racially motivated despotry. But significant
fear mongering in the international media will provide sufficient moral
momentum to ram through sanctions, resolutions, and inspection regimes
with little fanfare. ...
The benign-sounding structural
adjustments of the West have fairly predictable results: cultural and
economic chaos, rapid impoverishment, resource extraction with its
attendant ecological ruin, transfer of ownership from local hands to
foreign entities, and death from a thousand causes. We are currently
sanctioning around 30 nations in some fashion; dozens of countries have
fallen into ‘protracted arrears’ with western creditors; and entire
continents are witnessing huge outflows of capital–on the order of $100B
annually–to the global north as debt service. The profiteering
colonialists of the West make out like bandits.
