Subjects Archives: Imperialism

  State terrorism is the use of state violence against innocent civilians to create fear in pursuit of a political objective — an ugly side of imperialism. There are two varieties of state terrorism: overt and covert. The most obvious examples of overt state terrorism are the 1937 bombing of Guernica and the 1945 atomic […]

On Saturday, May 3rd, 2003 Monthly Review and the University of Vermont co-sponsored “Imperialism Today,” a one-day conference in honor of Harry Magdoff. Invited speakers were asked to discuss the context and workings of the current U.S. global hegemony, the means by which control is exercised over resources and the global periphery, the maintenance of (and challenges to) ideological hegemony, and the prospects for anti-imperialism.

Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press, 2002) is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the causes, effects, and rights-and-wrongs of the Balkan wars of the past dozen years. The book should be priority reading for leftists, many of whom have been carried along by a NATO-power party line and propaganda barrage, believing that this was one case where Western intervention was well-intentioned and had beneficial results. An inference from this misconception, by “cruise missile leftists” and others, is that imperialism can be constructive and its power projections must be evaluated on their merits, case by case. But that the Western intervention in the Balkans constitutes a valid special case is false; the conventional and obvious truths on the Balkan wars that sustain such a view disintegrate on close inspection

They who advocate and enforce the neoliberal agenda have now lost intellectually, morally, even in terms of their own beloved market test. The neoliberal policies of the last decades have failed to bring about economic growth and financial stability, to say nothing of meeting the test of justice or of addressing the social costs and wrong headed quality of the growth the existing system does produce. It is now clear to a great many people around the world that the neoliberal agenda is bankrupt. The World Bank and the academic defenders of the so-called Washington Consensus have stopped defending it as before. Suddenly the need for “reform,” which has up to now meant the imposition of the Washington Consensus, is applied by them to the Washington Consensus itself. Of course these “reforms” are mostly aimed at disarming critics. “Dialogue” and “partnership” are on offer only so they can better pursue their unchanged agenda of domination

One thing about the CIA is that their playbook rarely changes. Take for example, the agency’s involvement in the recent abortive military coup against Venezuela’s democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez. The April 13 Washington Post reported that during the period leading up to the coup against Chavez, “members of the country’s diverse opposition had been visiting the U.S. Embassy…hoping to enlist U.S. help in toppling Chavez. The visitors included active and retired members of the military, media leaders and opposition politicians.”

I do not think it is necessary here to go over truths that are no longer questioned by anybody, such as the ever-increasing lack of credibility and the extreme politicization that today weigh down the work of the Human Rights Commission. Disrepute is growing, time is running out. It is essential that we democratize the methods of this Commission, reestablish with transparency its purpose and rules; in a word, set it up anew. We need a Commission at the service of everyone’s interests, and not hostage to the designs of a minority or, as becomes more obvious every day, to the whims of the mightiest

Whatever might be terrorism’s deep origins, whatever the economic and political factors involved in it, and whoever might be most responsible for bringing it into the world, no one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which must be eradicated.