- ‘The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 can be taken as the symbolic end of an era in world affairs in which major events fell under the ominous shadow of the Cold War, with its constant threat of nuclear annihilation. That conventional picture is certainly not false, but it is nevertheless partial and misleading.’ (1)
- ‘Control of its domestic population is the major task of any state that is dominated by particular sectors of the domestic society and therefore functions primarily in their interest; that is, any “really existing state.” ’ (1)
- ‘The Cold War confrontation provided easy formulas to justify criminal action abroad and entrenchment of privilege and state power at home. Without the annoying need for thought or credible evidence, apologists on both sides could explain reflexively that however regrettable, the acts were undertaken for reasons of “national security” in response to the threat of the cruel and menacing superpower enemy. An ancillary convention come into play as policy shifts for tactical reasons, or invocation of the threat is no longer needed, or its absurdity becomes too manifest to conceal. At that stage, the fears that were whipped up are to be seen as exaggerated by understandable Cold War passions. Now we will “change course” and be more realistic – until the next episode requires that the record could be replayed.’ (1-2)
- ‘A similar stance has been common more generally as older forms of colonialism are replaced by more efficient modes of subjugation. As the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene, the doctrinal system adopted standard procedures without missing a beat. The entire record of the Cold War years is to be deposited in the archives, the slate washed clean of terror, aggression, economic warfare, and other crimes that have taken an awesome human toll. Whatever happened was the product of Cold War tensions, to be put behind us, teaching us no lessons about ourselves and offering no guide to the future towards which we grandly march with heads held high, observing with dismay the failure of our traditional victims to approach our lofty moral and material standards.’ (2)
- ‘ ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,’ [Churchill] responded with annoyance. ‘I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes….It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases; gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.’ ’ (6)
- ‘During the same months, the Western business press proposed a similar role for the United States, which, having cornered the world “security market,” should run a global protection racket, Mafia-style, selling “protection” to other wealthy powers who will pay a “war premium.” Paid for its services by German-led continental Europe and Japan
- ‘Historical reality is further underscored by a look at the one country of the South that was able to resist colonization, Japan, the South’s sole representative in the rich men’s club, with some of its former colonies in tow, all having flatly rejected the prescriptions for “development” dictated by Western power.’ (8)
- ‘The term ‘war’ hardly applies to a confrontation in which one side massacres the other from a safe distance, meanwhile wrecking the civilian society. That phase having ended, the victors stood by silently while Saddam crushed the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings right under the eyes of Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf, whose forces even refused to allow rebelling Iraqi generals access to captured equipment.’ (8)
- ‘Government and media assured us, but they were necessary to ensure ‘stability,’ a magic word that applies to whatever meets the demands of the rulers.’ (8-9)
- ‘On August 22, 1990 , three weeks after Iraq Kuwait Washington Kuwait
- ‘The impressive exercise of doctrinal control was of considerable significance. Up to the onset of Bush’s bombing in mid-January 1991, polls revealed that by 2-1, the American population favored a framework for peaceful settlement that was close to Iraqi proposals leaked by Bush administration officials but kept out of the press… Had respondents know that such proposals were on the table, regarded by U.S. officials as realistic, and rejected by the administration without consideration, the figures would have been far higher, and it is likely that Washington would have been compelled to pursue the diplomatic options – with what success, no one knows, though ideologists are happy to give the answers that power demands. The significance of these facts with regard to the state of American democracy is evident, but must also be suppressed, and is.’ (10)
- ‘The UN Security Council went along with Washington’s designs, finally agreeing to wash its hands of the matter and leave it to U.S.-U.K. power, in violation of the Charter but in recognition that the procedures laid down there cannot be followed in the face of U.S. intransigence. The government of Kuwait helped out by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Security Council votes, according to Kuwaiti investigators looking into some $500 million missing from Kuwait Investment Office funds.’ (11)
- ‘Authentic dissident voices in the Third World are unwelcome. A striking example is the treatment of the Iraqi democratic opposition before, during, and directly after the Gulf war: its authentic representatives, however conservative and respectable, were barred from any contact with Washington U.S.
- ‘Saddam’s attack on the Kurds was extensively covered, evoking a public reaction that forced Washington U.S.
- ‘The London Times editors also evaded the question of how others are entitled to react to the aggression, assassination attempts, and other atrocities in which their heroes have engaged over the years.’ (18)
- ‘It is, incidentally, not difficult to imagine how the world would look if Washington
- ‘At this point, we enter a world that is truly surreal, defying comment, though its norms are clear enough: assassinations, terrorism, torture, and aggression are crimes that must be harshly punished when the targets are people who matter; they are not even worth mentioning, or are laudable acts of self-defense, if perpetrated by the chief Mafia don himself. So self-evident are these truths that close to 100 percent of reporting and commentary on Clinton’s attack upheld them, even citing U.S. attempts to assassinate foreign leaders as justification for the U.S. attack on Iraq! The rulers of any totalitarian state would be impressed.’ (23)
- ‘The guiding moral doctrines entitle the United States to bomb the invader of Kuwait and starve his subjects, but huge slaughters in the course of Indonesia’s invasion and annexation of East Timor, dwarfing Saddam Hussein’s crimes in Kuwait, are of no concern.’ (23-24)
- ‘International law is a fraud to which the powerful appeal when they seek some veil, however transparent, for whatever they choose to do.’ (25)
- ‘There can be no question of ‘containing’ the United States
- ‘Since these are necessary properties of the United States, just as ultimate evil is a necessary properties of the United States, just as ultimate evil is a necessary property of its enemy, there is no need to consider the factual record in proclaiming our perfection – a wise decision.’ (27)
- ‘The collapse of these fantasies a few years later led to no self-examination or reevaluation: on the contrary, it proved that the prophets of imminent doom were absolutely right, their warnings have just fended off catastrophe in the nick of time.’ (29)
- ‘By similar logic, any other state has a right to control global society for reasons of “national security.” ’ (30)
- ‘Throughout American history, it has been a practice to invoke vast enemies about to overwhelm us.’ (30)
- ‘The Caribbean and the homeland itself were threatened by the German navy before World War I. Preparing the country for entry into World War II in October 1941, President Roosevelt described a ‘secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s Government’ outlining plans to bring ‘the whole continent under their domination’; the map was real enough, having been planted by British intelligence. And on, and on. Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters were simply keeping step when they had him warn that the Sandinistas were just “two hours’ flying time from our own borders” and “just two days’ driving time from Harlingen , Texas
- ‘The United States
- ‘Note that ‘national security’ is used here not to refer to the security of the nation, which could only be harmed by instituting a bitter East-west conflict in Europe, but to economic and political goals of quite a different kind.’ (32)
- ‘On similar grounds, the United States Germany
- ‘Our essential goodness is unaffected by the disasters we have brought to large parts of the world, as we have protected our ‘security.’ To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness.’ ’ (35)
- ‘Atrocities become criminal when they interfere with these interest; otherwise they are of little moment. When Russia
- ‘Stalin’s awesome crimes were also of no concern to President Truman. Truman liked and admired Stalin, whom he regarded as ‘honest’ and ‘smart as hell’; his death would be a ‘real catastrophe,’ Truman felt.’ (39)
- ‘The ‘aims and practices’ reached to the core industrial societies themselves, providing the occasion for the Wilson administration to initiate its Red Scare, which successfully undermined democratic politics, unions, freedom of the press, and independent thought, while safeguarding business interests and their control over state power. The story was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of the Kremlin conspiracy. In both cases, the repression was welcomed by the business community, the media, and liberal intellectuals rather generally, and did bring a period of quiescence and passivity, until the spell was broken by the Great Depression (in the first case) and the popular movements of the sixties (in the second).’ (40-41)
- ‘As part of its policy of containment of the Soviet political threat, the United States lent vigorous support to Mussolini from the moment of his March on Rome in 1922, a ‘fine young revolution,’ as the American ambassador described the imposition of fascism. A decade later, President Roosevelt praised the ‘admirable Italian gentleman’ who had demolished the parliamentary system and forcefully held the line against the labor movement, moderate socialists, and domestic Communists.’ (41)
- ‘ ‘U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power,’ Christopher Simpson points out in a recent study, increasing ‘by some 48.5% between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe’ and barely holding steady in Britain.’ (41)
- ‘Support for fascism ended when it was recognized to be a real threat to Western interests. But the support was resumed very quickly. In Italy
- ‘These features were by no means comparable: the global reach and violence of the United States far exceeded that of the second superpower; internal repression within the USSR was vastly beyond anything within the United States itself, though in the second phase, not at the level of U.S. satellites and clients.’ (44)
- ‘From democratic socialist left to far right, the major criticism of the U.S. attack on South Vietnam and its neighbors (invariably called ‘the defense of South Vietnam’) was that it failed; opinion then divides on whether U.S. goals could have been attained at reasonable cost, and whether we consider only cost to us, or also to them.’ (48)
- ‘A highly instructive illustration of persistent U.S. policy is one that is rarely discussed: Columbia, which has taken first place in the competition for leading terrorist state in Latin America – and, to the surprise of no one familiar with ‘sound-bites and invectives about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy,’ has become the leading recipient of U.S. military aid, accompanied by much praise for its stellar accomplishments. Here the Cold War connection is close to zero – as, in reality, it was in the other cases as well.’ (54)
- ‘The official concept of ‘terrorism’ has been extended to virtually anyone opposing government policies, the human rights reports observe. One project of the security forces and their allies is ‘social cleansing’ – that is, murder of vagrants and unemployed, street children, prostitutes, homosexuals, and other undesirables.’ (56)
- ‘In its December 1993 study, Americans Watch observes that ‘most of the material used by and training provided the Columbian army and police come from the United States
- ‘ ‘The vast majority of those who have disappeared in recent years,’ WOLA added, ‘are grassroots organizers, peasant or union organizers, leftist politicians, human rights workers and other activists,’ over fifteen hundred by the time of the State Department endorsement. Perhaps the State Department had in mind the 1988 mayoral campaigns, in which the twenty-nine of the eighty-seven mayoral candidates of the UP were assassinated along with over a hundred of its candidates for municipal councilor.’ (59)
- ‘The top 3 percent of Columbia’s landed elite own over 70 percent of arable land, while 57 percent of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3 percent. Forty percent of Columbians live in ‘absolute poverty,’ unable to satisfy basis subsistence needs, according to a 1986 report of the National Administration Bureau of Statistics.’ (61)
- ‘Under severe pressure, in July President Aristide accepted the U.S.-U.N. terms for settlement, which were to allow him to return four months later in a ‘compromise’ with the gangsters who overthrew him and have been robbing and terrorizing at will since.’ (63)
- ‘Throughout, the pretext was the Soviet threat. Its credibility is easily assessed. When the decision to overthrow Castro was taken in March 1960, Washington U.S. Cuba Cuba Latin America were ignored. The press happily records the collapse of Cuban society and the suffering of its people, attributed primarily to the evils of Communism, not what the United States
- ‘The United States and Britain could now safely place half a million troops in the desert and use force as they chose, confident that there would be no reaction.’ (69)
- ‘The first post-Cold War edition was in March 1990. The bottom line remained the same: we face terrible threats, and cannot relax our guard. But the argument yielding the conclusion was revised. U.S. military power must focus on the Third World, the report concluded, the prime target being the Middle East, where the ‘threats to our interests…could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door’.’ (70)
- ‘The pattern is highly consistent, yet no one even asks the question that all would raise, and answer with proper contempt, if a Soviet leader were to have made the comparable claim. The fact that even the most trivial question cannot be raised, even contemplated, is no small tribute to the educational system and intellectual culture of the free world.’ (71)
- ‘We must remain ‘the only nation in the world which maintains large, costly armed forces solely for intervention in the affairs of foreign nations.’ ’ (72)
- ‘We can gain a more realistic understanding of the Cold War by adopting a longer-range perspective, viewing it as a particular phase in the five hundred-year European conquest of the world – the history of aggression, subversion, terror, and domination now termed the ‘North-South confrontation.’ ’ (74)
- ‘Independent nationalism is unacceptable, whatever its political coloration. The ‘function’ of the Third World is to provide services for the rich, offering cheap labor, resources, markets, opportunities for investment and (lately) export of pollution, along with other amenities (havens for drug money laundering and other unregulated financial operations, tourism, and so on).’ (74-75)
- ‘To deter what Oxfam once called ‘the threat of a good example,’ it is necessary to destroy the virus and inoculate the surrounding regions by terror, as in Southeast Asia, the southern cone of Latin America, and elsewhere repeatedly in the Third World, a course that must be pursued until the lessons are firmly implanted by the Godfather.’ (75-76)
- ‘The attitudes can be traced back to England’s earliest conquest, when Edward I explained to his subjects in 1282 that ‘it would be more fitting and suitable at this time to burden himself and the inhabitants of his kingdom with the cost of wholly overthrowing the malice of the Welsh rather than to face in the future, as in the present, the afflictions of the conflict which they have caused.’ ’ (76)
- ‘The invasion of Florida in 1818 was in part motivated by the bad example set by ‘mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes’ (John Quincy Adams), seeking freedom from tyrants and conquerors. Fear of freed slaves and even a possible ‘union of whites and Indians’ was a factor in the annexation of Texas
- ‘Secretary of State Dulles deplored the Communist ‘ability to get control of mass movements,’ ‘something we have no capacity to duplicate.’ ‘The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich’ – the great problem of world history. Somehow, we find it hard to peddle our lines, that the rich should plunder the poor, a public relations problem that no one has yet been clever enough to resolve.’ (79)
- ‘The Soviet Union reached the peak of its power by the late 1950s, always far behind the West. By the mid-1960s, the Soviet economy was in trouble, with notable decline in standard quality of life indicators. A huge military expansion sparked by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which revealed extreme Soviet vulnerability, leveled off by the late 1970s. The economy was then stagnating and the society coming apart at the seams. By the 1980s, the system collapsed, and the core countries, always far richer and more power, ‘won the Cold War.’ Much of the former Soviet empire can now be restored to its Third World status.’ (80)
- ‘Disguises aside, the conclusions are clear. The primary enemy remains the Third world, which must be kept under control.’ (81)
- ‘With the deviants returned to the fold and the deterrent removed, the ‘shield’ required for intervention and subversion is no longer needed. We may now intervene ‘by choice,’ asking ‘What is in it for us?’ We also cast aside doctrines that have lost their utility for population control, conceding that the ‘threats to our interest could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’ ’ (81)
- ‘A look at who is celebrating after a conflict and benefits from it, and who is left is distress and suffering, often tells us something about the true victors and defeated, and indeed what the conflict was all about.’ (82)
- ‘Dewey recognized in his later years that ‘politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.’ ’ (87)
- ‘Apart from the former Soviet Union, where ‘anti-Sovietism’ was the highest crime, there are few intellectual communities that could treat with respect ludicrous and deceitful works on ‘Anti-Americanism,’ raging about departures from adequate servility to the Holy State. A book on ‘anti-Italianism’ would only elicit ridicule in Milan Rome
- ‘The Tet offensive and the reaction of power centers to it instantly converted the intellectual community to ‘long-time opponents of the war,’ a fact previously unknown, also inspiring a remarkable rewriting of the earlier record that is immune to expose and critical discussion. But the analytic stance scarcely changed.’ (95)
- ‘Under pressure from the business community, concerned that it will be deprived of potential profits in Vietnam as rivals begin to ignore the U.S. embargo, Washington began to shift policy, perceiving ‘progress’ in Vietnam’s acknowledgement of its sins.’ (96-97)
- ‘International interest ‘vanished’ because the wrong people are doing the killing and destroying. This is not Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where propaganda points could be scored and careers made by a show of anguish over atrocities; a show of anguish, as its readily demonstrated by a look at reactions to similar atrocities that could have been stopped, not merely lamented, had it not been for the silence and apologetics of those who agonize over enemy crimes.’ (98)
- ‘The exploits of d’Aubuisson and his followers had received some attention when the UN Truth Commission published its report on atrocities of the 1980s, attributing 85 percent of the horrendous record to the security forces trained, armed, and advised by the United Stats and another 10 percent to the death squads linked to them and to the wealthy business sector that the United States hopes to keep firmly in power.’ (99)
- ‘The Pentagon system was considered ideal for these purposes. It extends well beyond the military establishment, incorporating also the Department of Energy, which produces nuclear weapons, and the space agency NASA, converted by the Kennedy administration to a significant component of the state-directed public subsidy to advanced industry. These arrangement impose on the public a large burden of the costs of industry (research and development, R&D) and provide a guaranteed market for excess production, a useful cushion for management decisions.’ (100)
- ‘Social spending may also arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighborhoods, and so on, but has no opinion about the choice of missiles and high-tech fighter planes.’ (101)
- ‘Though the Soviet pretext is gone, military spending is to remain a major stimulant to large sectors of the economy, including most of high technology. The ‘peace dividend’ or ‘economic conversion’ will be a mirage until some other mechanism is devised to allow the rich to feed at the public trough. Various rhetorical devices have been devised to obscure these realities: ‘security’ is one; another is ‘jobs.’ Nothing is more inspiring than the fervent desire of corporation executives and political leaders to provide ‘jobs’ and their dedicated labors to this end; the public virtually drowns in this display of compassion, while the same people devote themselves to removing jobs to high-repression, low-wage areas abroad, through corporate decision or government policy.’ (103)
- ‘It is only necessary to understand that ‘jobs’ is the Newspeak version of the unpronounceable term ‘profits.’ By accident, profits always seem to benefit from the policies undertaken in the name of “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,’ while jobs disappear, another of those odd coincidences that must be kept from the public eye.’ (103)
- ‘Despite the inefficiency of military-based industrial policy, the project has scored great successes. The computer industry is a prime example. In the 1950s, when computers were too clumsy and slow to be marketable, the cost of R&D and production was borne by the public, via the Pentagon system; in electronics generally, government funding covered 85 percent of all R&D in 1958. By the 1960s, computers could be sold for profit, and the public subsidy declined to about 50 percent.’ (105)
- ‘Government intervention in the economy in the service of private power takes many other forms. One of the most dramatic was the motorizing and suburbanization of America
- ‘The pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology today – the former enormously profitable, the latter expected to soar to even greater heights – also rely upon and demand public subsidy while instructing others on the virtues of ‘economic rationality.’ The same is true of agribusiness and services, in fact virtually every flourishing sector of the economy. All rely as well on state-aided market penetration abroad, by a variety of means ranging from ‘violence’ to ‘aid.’ ’ (106)
- ‘Largely through military expenditures, the Reagan administration had increased state share of GNP to over 35 percent in 1983, an increase of well over a third from a decade earlier.’ (106-107)
- ‘British MP Phillip Oppenheim, ridiculing Anglo-American posturing about ‘liberal market capitalism,’ notes that ‘a World Bank survey of non-tariff barriers showed that they covered 9 percent of all goods in Japan – compared with 34 percent in the United States – figures reinforced by David Henderson of the OECD, who stated that during the 1980s the United States had the worst record for devising new non-tariff barriers.’ (107)
- ‘The Reaganites also conducted the biggest nationalization in U.S.
- ‘Reagan ‘free marketeers’ also enabled the steel industry to reconstruct by effectively barring imports and undermining unions to reduce labor costs.’ (108)
- ‘Summarizing well-known phenomena, a 1992 OECD study concludes that ‘oligopolistic competition and strategic interaction among firms and government rather than the invisible hand of market forces condition today’s competitive advantage and international division of labor in high-technology industries,’ as in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, services, and major areas of economic activity generally.’ (112)
- ‘Contributing to these difficulties is the great success of the propaganda campaigns designed to create a political culture of opposition to taxation, regulation, and government spending – carefully honed to exempt the state intervention that keeps profits flowing and wealth concentrated.’ (113)
- ‘A major goal of the annexation of Texas was to gain a monopoly of (slave-produced) cotton, then the most important commodity in world trade, analogous to oil today. The achievement ‘places all other nations at our feet,’ President Tyler proclaimed. ‘I doubt whether Great Britain United States
- ‘Modern gynecological surgery, for example, was developed by respected medical researchers who were free to torture helpless Irish indigent women as well as slaves in their experimental work.’ (115)
- ‘At the time of the English takeover, India England
- ‘By the nineteenth century, India was financing more than two-fifths of Britain’s trade deficit, providing a market for British manufacturers as well as troops for its colonial conquests and the opium that was the staple of its trade with China, compelled by British arms to import lethal narcotics.’ (116)
- ‘Manufacturing industries which had been comparable to its own at the time of the conquest, as British government analysts later conceded, not only failed to develop, but were largely eliminated, as India sank into rural misery. After contributing massively to Britain’s wealth and power for centuries, India finally gained independence – destitute, overwhelmingly agrarian, with that population that was ‘abysmally poor’ suffering from mortality rates that were ‘among the world’s highest’ (Dennis Merrill).’ (116)
- ‘Japan
- ‘An immediate concern was the ‘dollar gap’ that kept industrial powers from purchasing U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S.
- ‘The United States Middle East , whereWashington Africa was to be ‘exploited’ for the reconstruction of Europe , while Southeast Asia would ‘fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials for Japan Western Europe ’ (George Kennan and his State Department Planning Staff, 1948-49). The United States U.S.
- ‘ ‘communism’ includes all of those devils who incite the poor to ‘plunder the rich,’ in Dulles’s phrase.’ (122)
- ‘Aid programs quite generally followed the same priorities. Marshall Plan aid for European reconstruction was guided by planning imperatives already mentioned. Few dollars actually left American shoes; in large part, the aid program was a taxpayer subsidy to U.S. Europe gained economically…World Bank loans were directed to European reconstruction, with great benefits to American corporations. From 1946 to 1953, 77 percent of such loans went to buy American goods and services, with a quid pro quo: ‘Bank policy sought to stimulate, directly or indirectly, private investment and private enterprise.’ U.S. U.S.
- ‘Great power aid programs continue to be motivated primarily by the interests of the donors. ‘The developing countries themselves bear the major burden for development,’ Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explained in March 1979, not those who had left them in their present condition.’ (127)
- ‘Great power aid programs continue to be motivated primarily by the interests of the donors. ‘The developing countries themselves bear the major burden for development,’ Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explained in March 1979, not those who had left them in their present condition.’ (127)
- ‘It is commonplace that the ‘main motive’ of aid ‘has not been to end poverty but to serve the self-interest of the giver, by winning useful friends, supporting strategic aims, or promoting the donor’s exports’ (Economist). This ‘carelessness,’ as the Economist calls the regular practice, leads to the ‘bizarre’ result that ‘the richest 40% of the developing world’s population still gets more than twice as much aid per head as the poorest 40%,’ most of it going to ‘countries that spend most on guns and soldiers, rather than health and education.’ ’ (128)
- ‘We would not hesitate to describe these policies as genocidal if they were implemented by some official enemy.’ (131)
- ‘A 1992 UNICEF study, reviewed by Swaminathan and Ramachandran, ‘makes one point emphatically: in the 1980s, structural adjustment programs and the prolonged recession that followed them did great harm to the welfare of children.’ Sharp reversal of progress in infant mortality, nutrition, education, and other indices correlated closely with onset of these programs, which also increased such ‘abhorrent features of contemporary capitalist society’ as child labor and child prostitution.’ (131)
- ‘In Latin America , only one country showed an ‘unambiguous decline in the infant mortality rate’ in the 1980s, Swaminathan and Ramachandra report: Cuba
- ‘Human rights have purely instrumental value in their political culture; they provide a useful tool for propaganda, nothing more.’ (133)
- ‘Some of the distance yet to be traveled was revealed in a Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary, The Body Parts Business, ‘a gruesome litany of depredation,’ reporting murder of children and the poor to extract organs, ‘eyeballs being removed from living skulls by medical pirates armed only with coffee spoons,’ and other such entrepreneurial achievements. Such practices, long reported in Latin America and perhaps now spreading Russia, have recently been acknowledged by one of the most prized U.S. creations, the government that upholds ‘our values and aspirations’ in El Salvador, where the procurator for the defense of children reported that the ‘big trade in children in El Salvador’ involves not only kidnapping for export, but also their use ‘for pornographic videos, for organ transplants, for adoption and for prostitution.’ Hardly a secret, Hugh O’Shaughnessy observes, recalling an operation of the Salvadoran army in June 1982 near the River Lempa, where the U.S.-trained troops ‘had a very successful day’s baby-hunting,’ loading their helicopters with fifty babies whose ‘parents have never seen them since.’ ’ (134)
- ‘The United States Third World countries in the global economy.’ (136)
- ‘The success is real. U.S.
- ‘ ‘debt forgiveness is determined not by pressures to relieve world poverty, but by meeting the contingent political interests of the dominant western nations’ ’ (Meacher) (139)
- ‘MIT economist Rudiger Dornbusch points out that of the gain in per capita income in Reagan-Bush years, ‘70% accrued to the top 1% of income earners, while the bottom lost absolutely,’ so that ‘for most Americans, it is no longer true that the young generation can count on being economically ahead of its parents,’ a significant turning point in the history of industrial society.’ (140-141)
- ‘Among industrialized countries, the proportion of American children below the poverty line is now twice that of the next worst performer, Britain, and about four times that of most others.’ (141)
- ‘One eminent conservative Japan Japan Japan
- ‘As throughout history, such experiments with laissez-faire dogma are not failures for the designers, however others may fare. They are, furthermore, undertaken without support from the general public. The West likes to pretend that ‘democratically elected governments’ in the South are eagerly following the recommendations of their advisers from the rich countries, but even the briefest acquaintance with recent history and social realities suffices to dismiss this cynical pretense.’ (146)
- ‘Popular opposition to the Vietnam war prevented Washington from carrying out national mobilization of the World War II variety, which might have made it possible to complete the conquest without harm to the domestic economy. Washington
- ‘Eatwell notes the striking fact that ‘in 1971, just before the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, about 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions were for the finance of trade and long-term investment, and only about 10 percent were speculative. Today those percentages are reversed, with well over 90 percent of all transactions being speculative.’ (159)
- ‘General Motors plans to close two dozen plants in the United States and Canada, but it has become the largest employer in Mexico, taking advantage of the ‘economic miracle’ that has driven wages down sharply in the past decade, to much applause.’ (160)
- ‘Executives say that ‘workers in most Eastern European nations tend to be as well educated and trainable as their counterparts in the West,’ though not pampered with decent wages and benefits, and increasingly desperate as ‘market shock’ devastates the economies.’ (161)
- ‘The guiding doctrine is straightforward: profit for investors is the supreme human value, to which all else must be subordinated. Human life has value insofar as it contributes to this end.’ (162)
- ‘Following IMF-World Bank prescriptions, agricultural production was shifted to export and animal feeds, benefiting agribusiness, foreign consumers, and affluent sectors in Mexico while malnutrition became a major health problem, agricultural employment declined, productive lands were abandoned, and Mexico, formerly self-sufficient in agriculture, began to import massive amounts of food. As noted, real wages suffered a severe decline and labor’s share in gross domestic product, which had risen until the mid-seventies, fell by well over a third, the standard concomitant of neoliberal reforms.’ (162-163)
- ‘The issues are sharpened by comparison with the formation of the European Community: poorer countries were admitted on condition that their labor and environmental standards ‘harmonize upwards,’ and were granted assistance to this end. Not so as ‘free trade’ is brought to North American under NAFTA, by a great power under more effective business control.’ (163)
- ‘Neoliberal rhetoric is to be selectively employed as a weapon against the poor, who are required to sacrifice in the name of neoclassical efficiency; the wealthy and powerful will continue to rely on state power, violating the rules as they choose.’ (163)
- ‘The Trade Act of 1974 requires that the Labor Advisory Committee (LAC), based in the unions, must advise the executive due on September 9. The text of this intricate treaty was provided to it one day before, ensuring that it could not even formally convene.’ (164)
- ‘We approach the long-sought ideal: formal democratic procedures that are devoid of meaning, as citizens not only do not intrude into the public arena but scarcely have an idea of the policies that will shape their lives. And, it is hoped, will not even know that they do not know.’ (164)
- ‘Environmental and health standards can be challenged on grounds of interference with ‘free trade,’ that is, profits; the challenge will be judged by committees consisting largely of business representatives.’ (165)
- ‘The rules allow the United States U.S. California Oregon Asia , including specialty jeans, shirts, and a line of shorts quaintly called ‘Prison Blues.’ The prisoners earn far less than the minimum wage, and work under ‘slave labor’ conditions, prison rights activists allege. But their products do not interfere with the rights that count, so there is no problem here.’ (175)
- ‘Structures of governance tend to coalesce around domestic power, in the last few centuries, economic power. The process continues. In the Financial Times, BBC economics correspondent James Morgan describes the ‘de facto world government’ that is taking shape: the IMF, World Bank, G-7, GATT, and other structures designed to serve the interests of TNCs, banks, and investment firms in a ‘new imperial age.’ ’ (178)
- ‘Those outside may try to rent themselves to the masters and may purchase what they produce, but few other options are open to the great mass of the population.’ (179)
- ‘Meanwhile the world’s top five hundred firms ‘have shed over 400,000 workers yearly over the past decade notwithstanding the upsurge of their combined revenues,’ Frederic Clairmont and John Cavanagh observe. The phenomenon is reflected within the United States America
- ‘The only respect in which it is a genuine North American Free Trade Agreement is that it applies to North America: it is not ‘free,’ it is not about ‘trade,’ and it is surely not based on an ‘agreement’ among the irrelevant public.’ (183)
- ‘The history has, in fact, been relived over and over. There is little that is new in neoliberal programs, trickle-down theories, and the rest of the doctrinal baggage that serves the interests of privilege and power.’ (187)
- ‘The nature of the experiment is graphically illustrated by a report of the International Labor Organization, which estimates that about 30 percent of the world’s labor force was unemployed in January 1994, unable to earn enough to sustain a minimum standard of living. This ‘long-term persistent unemployment’ is a crisis of the scale of the Great Depression, the ILO concludes. Vast unemployment persist alongside of huge demands for labor. Wherever one looks, there is work to be done of great social and human value, and there are plenty of people eager to do that work. But the economic system cannot bring together needed work and the idle hands of suffering people. Its concept of ‘economic health’ is geared to the demands of profit, not the needs of people. In brief, the economic system is a catastrophic failure. Of course, it is hailed as a grand success, as indeed it is for a narrow sector of privileged people, including those who declare its virtues and triumphs.’ (188)
- ‘the people who own the country ought to govern it.’ John Jay (189)
- ‘As the process takes its natural course, it tends towards globalization of the economy with its consequences: globalization of the Third World model of two-tiered societies, now reaching to the core industrial economies themselves; and a ‘de facto world government’ that represents the interests of the TNCs and financial institutions that are to manage the international economy.’ (189)
- ‘Relations were particularly close, and profitable for U.S. corporations, during the 1949-58 dictatorship of Perez Jimenez, who surpassed Vicente Gomez in brutality and rapacity; he was awarded the Legion of Merit by President Eisenhower.’ (190)
- ‘The United States Middle East oil for itself. Rather, the goal was to ensure that the enormous profits from the energy system flow primarily to the United States
- ‘George Kennan proposed in 1949 that the United States keep control over Japanese oil imports, so as to hold ‘veto power’ over Japan’s military and industrial policies.’ (192)
- ‘The United States opposes democracy in the region, Hiro writes, because ‘it is much simpler to manipulate a few ruling families – to secure fat orders for arms and ensure that oil price remains low – than a wide variety of personalities and policies bound to be thrown up by a democratic system,’ with elected governments that might reflect popular calls for ‘self-reliance and Islamic fellowship.’ ’ (198)
- ‘Today, it is not hard to understand Eisenhower’s lament that ‘the problem is that we have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people.’ ’ (199)
- ‘In January 1958, the National Security Council concluded that a ‘logical corollary of opposition’ to growing Arab nationalism ‘would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-Western power left in the Middle East.’ ’ (204)
- ‘Throughout, Israel Turkey Iran Ethiopia United States Israel U.S. Lebanon Jordan Israel United States
- ‘At the same time, Israel forged close links with U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon, both in military production and in the testing of advanced weapons under battlefield conditions or against defenseless targets, again providing valuable services for U.S. power. Israel United States Israel U.S.
- ‘From 1967 to 1971, there was a broad international consensus on the general terms for a settlement, expressed in Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967. The document ‘emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security.’ It calls for ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’…With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the contending states of the region over the next few years, though their interpretations differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel
- ‘The result by mid-1993 is that of the 600 million cubic meters of water taken annually from the sources in ‘Judea and Samaria,’ Israeli citizens use almost 500 million, which satisfies about a third of ‘the total water requirements of citizens of Israel’.’ (210)
- ‘As is well known, a large part of the significance of the Golan Heights has been control over the headwaters of the Jordan
- ‘Thomas Stauffer…estimates that 40 percent of Israel’s water depends on territories occupied in 1967, and that it would cost Israel $1 billion or more annually if a peace settlement diverted these resources to residents upstream in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank.’ (211)
- ‘The actual reasons for the 1982 invasion have never been concealed in Israel United States Israel
- ‘The phrase ‘military disaster’ does not refer to the killing of some twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians in 1982, overwhelmingly civilians, the destruction of much of Southern Lebanon and the capital city of Beirut, or to Shimon Peres’ ‘Iron Fist’ operations and other atrocities in Lebanon through the mid-1980s. Rather, to Israel Lebanon
- ‘That Hezbollah opposes the peace accord is correct; that it seeks to destroy Israel
- ‘In January 1976, the ‘confrontation states’ (Egypt, Syria, Jordan) proposed a settlement in the terms of the international consensus at the United Nations, with the support of most of the world, including the USSR and the PLO; according to former president Haim Herzog, then Israel’s UN ambassador, the PLO not only publicly supported the resolution but actually ‘prepared’ it. The proposed Security Council resolution called for a settlement on the pre-June 1967 borders, with ‘appropriate arrangements…to guarantee…the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,’ including Israel and the new Palestinian state; the wording of UN 242, supplemented with recognition of Palestinian political rights. Israel United States Middle East diplomacy. The General Assembly continued to advance peace proposals in its annual winter meetings. In December 1990, the General Assembly voted 144-2 (United States Israel United States Israel Dominica United States
- ‘The Universal Declaration is recognized in U.S.
- ‘After the massacre of some thirty Palestinians by an American-Jewish settler in Hebron on February 25, 1994, the UN passed Resolution 280, which called for measures to protect Palestinian civilians (March 18). Apart from the United States
- ‘The U.S.
- ‘Palestinians are to be granted little more than what they have: control over local services. Rubinstein adds the important point that even advocates of Greater Israel had not called for literal annexation of the territories, which would require Israel to provide the ‘restricted services’ available to Israel’s second-class Arab citizens, as enormous cost. Far preferable is some variant of the system then prevailing: Israeli access to the cheap labor, controlled markets, resources, and selected regions for settlement, including desirable suburbs for Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but no responsibilities for the bulk of the population, left to fare as they can under conditions that offer limited prospects. It has been assumed with some confidence that such privileges will remain in effect after ‘autonomy’ is granted. There is no reason to expect voluntary abandonment of them unless the costs of occupation become too high, as happened in Lebanon United States
- ‘As Gaza has declined to utter catastrophe under the military occupation, the costs of direct Israeli rule became too high, particularly after the Intifada broke the pattern of submission. Israel has ‘practically lost the war’ in Gaza, the leading military commentator’s Ze-ev Schiff wrote in April 1993: ‘What is going on today in the Gaza Strip is, in fact, a battle for the conditions of the future withdrawal’ – partial withdrawal, already planned when he wrote, soon to be consummated.’ (224)
- ‘With regard to Jerusalem, whatever may have been envisioned in the past, current understanding is that it extends to ‘Greater Jerusalem,’ ‘a metropolis with much wider borders than the area annexed to Israel in 1967,’ ‘Nadav Shragay points out in a discussion of the expanding concept of ‘Jerusalem’; the occasion for his article was the achievement of a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem (already overwhelming in West Jerusalem) as a result of building programs carried out largely by the Labor Party.’ (224)
- ‘It should be emphasized that it is misleading to call these ‘Israeli policies.’ Though formed and implemented by Israeli authorities, they are, in effect, U.S.
- ‘Returning to Middle East diplomacy in the post-1967 period, along with UN initiatives, those of the Arab states, the PLO, the USSR, and the European allies were regularly rebuffed. These initiatives shared two crucial features that were unacceptable to Washington U.S. United States
- ‘It is, incidentally, next to inconceivable that U.S. news reporting or commentary might take note of the major UN resolution on terrorism, which states ‘that nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right…, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor…the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support [in accordance with the Charter and other principles of international law].’ The resolution passed 153-2, U.S. Israel Honduras
- ‘On these matters, silence has been total, apart from margins of the usual margins, and the most elementary conclusions would be now be virtually unintelligible to a U.S. (indeed, Western) audience.’ (228)
- ‘It is only fair to note, in this connection, that Israeli practice is far more honest. After four hundred Hamas activists were deported in December 1992, a lead article in the Israeli press observed that ‘we cannot accuse [Hamas] of practicing random terror which hits innocent women and children, because they don’t’; ‘we should pay heed to the fact that …all Hamas guerilla operations prior to the expulsion [were] targeted by Uzi Mahanaimi, a respected hawkish commentator on Intelligence and Arab Affairs. Commenting on Israel Lebanon Southern Lebanon and the existence of the State of Israel,’ taking its task to be only that of reversing the conquest, that is, legitimate resistance against an army occupying foreign territory in violation of Security Council orders.’ (228-229)
- ‘Nonviolent resistance was finally displaced by violence, much to the relief of U.S. and Israeli authorities, who have always been particularly concerned about the threat of moderation, as Israeli commentators have long recognized.’ (230)
- ‘In October 1989, as the Baker Plan was being given its final form, the White House intervened in a highly secret meeting to ensure that Iraq would receive another $1 billion in loan guarantees, overcoming Treasury and Commerce department objections that Iraq was not creditworthy. The reason, the State Department explained, was that Iraq was ‘very important to U.S. interests in the Middle East’; it was ‘influential in the peace process’ and was ‘a key to maintaining stability in the region, offering great trade opportunities for US companies.’ A few weeks later, as U.S. invasion forces were bombarding slums in Panama, the White House announced plans to lift a ban on loans to Saddam, implemented shortly after – to achieve the ‘goal of increasing U.S. exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record…,’ the State Department explained with a straight face.’ (232)
- ‘The traditional strategic conceptions and objectives are not being abandoned with the disappearance of the Soviet Union; rather, as General Gazit observed, they are being pursued more vigorously, the deterrent having disappeared and the Third World becoming even more defenseless for this and other reasons. The pattern is exactly what we have seen elsewhere in the world. It is radically inconsistent with decades of propaganda about the Cold War, but quite in accord with both planning and history – with the basic thinking that has undergirded policy, and the way events have unfolded.’ (238)
- ‘The usual subordination to state-private power was amplified by the affection that Israel won among American intellectuals, notably in the left-liberal spectrum, when it demonstrated its military prowess in 1967. This is an important matter that is much too little discussed, the facts being unattractive. A much more useful image for propaganda purposes is that ‘supporters of Israel’ are an embattled few, desperately trying to stem the assault on Israel by its armies of enemies in the press and intellectual community.’ (238)
- ‘A whole new vocabulary has been designed to disguise reality. Thus the term ‘peace process’ does not refer to the process of seeking peace: rather, to whatever the United States
- ‘Note that the Middle East is unusual in that, since 1967, the American intellectual community has been loyal to two states, not just the usual one. This sometimes leads to departures from the norm. Thus in October 1977, President Carter agreed to a Soviet-American statement calling for ‘termination of the state of war and establishment of normal peaceful relations’ between Israel and its neighbors, as well as for internationally guaranteed borders and demilitarized zones, arousing strong criticism from the government of Israel. Instead of reflexively adopting Washington
- ‘The crucial doctrine that must be safeguarded is that, unlike other states past and present, the United States has no coherent policies apart from a generalized benevolence, and no domestic power structure that interferes with the democratic pluralism from which policy decisions flow as a reflection of popular will.’ (241)
- ‘Throughout these years, there was general agreement (including the PLO from the mid-70s) that a settlement should be based on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses 242). There were two basic points of contention: 1) Do we interpret the withdrawal clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus (including the United States Israel U.S.
- ‘The Palestinian police who will be brought in for pacification of the territories are to a large extent foreigners, without roots in the communities where they will serve. They are elements of the Palestine Liberation Army, whose lives were spent abroad, trained as soldiers. The United States and Israel are thus moving towards more rational forms of imperial control, those used by the British in India, the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany in occupied France, the United States in Latin America, and so on.’ (250)
- ‘Control by indigenous forces backed by foreign troops carries ideological advantages as well. The inevitable harshness is sure to be used for a great show of anguish by Western commentators, brought forth as a proof of the inherent unworthiness of the native peoples and a retrospective justification for what shreds may still be recalled of the Israeli military occupation, now to be depicted as tender and merciful in comparison with what the backward natives do to another.’ (251)
- ‘Summarizing, for some twenty years there were three major issues on which the United States opposed the international consensus, virtually alone, relying on its dominance in the diplomatic, military, economic, and ideological arenas to bar a peaceful negotiated settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict: 1) withdrawal, 2) rejectionism, 3) the right of resistance. On the first issue, theUnited States Egypt U.S. United States Palestine United States United States Israel United States
- ‘With fishing barred and Arab fruit and citrus cultivation dwindling, the population of the Gaza Strip was compelled to rely on work under intolerable conditions at miserable pay in Israel or subcontracting for Israeli industries by women and children at home, as in the early days of the industrial revolution, Danny Rubinstein reports.’ (253)
- ‘Rabin’s government also imposed onerous constraints on exports of Gaza oranges, the main cash crop, causing much of it to rut, along with new requirements that all produce by purchased by Israeli agents for sale in Israel or export through Israeli enterprises (for example, about half of Israel’s exports of strawberries, which Gaza Arab farmers are not permitted to export directly). Other forms of independent development, such as a banking structure, continue to be barred.’ (254)
- ‘In the first eight days following the massacre by settler Baruch Goldstein and the army killings that followed, thirty-three more Palestinians were shot dead by the IDF, with ‘no danger to soldiers’ lives’ in at least twelve of these killings, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. After the massacre, the Arab population was placed under still more harsh confinement, ‘kept under lock and key,’ correspondent Graham Usher observes, while ‘the town’s settlers are free to walk, drive and go about their business, armed to the teeth and under army escort.’ (255)
- ‘ ‘Israel supports a process which is intended to prevent any chance for a democratic Palestinian entity (or a state) to form at its side,’ preferring ‘an autocratic form of regime, similar to those existing in the Arab states.’ ’ Uzi Benzamin (256)
- ‘Asked how he was permitted to respond if he saw a Jew aiming a rifle at an Arab with the obvious intent of murders, the Colonel stated that he would be permitted to ‘rush and cover the Arab with my own body, but under no circumstances am I allowed to open fire on a Jew.’ These standing orders ‘invite all the settler fanatics to shoot Arabs, guaranteeing to them that in the course of the action not a hair on their heads will be harmed,’ Denkner adds. Television viewers in January ‘were shocked…to see film of Israeli soldiers running away as settlers shot at Palestinians inHebron
- ‘The ‘closure’ has the usual porous character: Jews are exempt. And the reaction to atrocities has its usual consistency: when an Arab murders Jews, the entire Arab population is subjected to collective punishment; when a Jew murders Arabs, exactly the same is true. The standard practices are considered acceptable among those who foot the bills, on the familiar racist assumptions.’ (260)
- ‘The aim of the current settlement drive is to finish creating circles of contiguous Jewish settlements in the greater Jerusalem zone of influence, so as to further surround the Palestinian communities, limit their development, and prevent any possibility that East Jerusalem could become a Palestinian capital. With control of land that reaches almost to Jericho, the settlements are also designed to cut the West Bank into two geographically separated areas, one north of Ramallah, and one including Hebron in the south.’ Challenge (263)
- ‘Inducements include ‘an especially low price’ and generous subsidies for construction and schooling (ten times what is offered within Israel
- ‘In general, those with the guns tend to win, to exult about their victory, and to praise themselves for their integrity, honor, and virtue rewarded.’ (266)
- ‘ ‘Palestinians in those areas will continue to be barred from importing most Jordanian goods.’ [World Bank] ‘Palestine
- ‘Despite the constraints on information and discussion, unusually severe in this case, the population has tended to favor a Palestinian state by roughly two to one.’ (270)
- ‘The Arab world is passing through a crucial moment in its history. It has rich human resources, cultural and intellectual. It also has rich material resources – notably oil, a wasting resource that will be gone in a few generations. If these resources are used to enrich sectors of the West and local elements that serve their interests, the people of the region will face a tragedy of incalculable proportions in the not-too-distant future. If resources are used to develop a domestic basis for sustained development, the future could be promising. A prerequisite for any serious progress in this direction is the dismantling of authoritarian and repressive structures, creation of an atmosphere of tolerance and defense for freedom of expression, organization of constructive popular forces, and, in general, substantial steps towards meaningful democracy. These choices have to be faced seriously before too long, or it will be too late.’ (271)
- ‘As for the New World Order, it is very much like the old, in a new guise. There are important developments, notably the increasing internationalization of the economy with its consequences, including the sharpening of class differences on a global scale, and the extension of this system to the former Soviet domains. But there are no fundamental changes, and no ‘new paradigms’ are needed to make sense of what is happening. The basic rules of world order remain as they have always been: the rule of law for the weak, the rule of force for the strong; the principles of ‘economic rationality’ for the weak, state power and intervention for the strong.’ (271)
- ‘Traditional tasks also remain: to challenge and unmask illegitimate authority, and to work with others to undermine it and to extend the scope of freedom and justice.’ (272)
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