Thesis #3:The New World Order, UN Imperialism etc

About 10 years ago, in the early 1990s, there was public discussion in the imperialist press about their need to recolonize Africa. Some of us protested against the idea and tried, with little success, to alert the African intelligentsia and governments on the need to prevent such a thing. You may be surprised and shocked to learn that that Recolonization has been accomplished and most Africans have failed to even notice. They even welcome the instruments and institutions of their own recolonization. Chief among these are the AU [Gadafi’s Arabist Underwear], NEPAD [the New European Practical-joke for Africa’s Destruction], and the New World Order instruments of UN Imperialism, namely the IMF [Imperialist Ministry of Finance], World Bank/ officially the IBRD [Infrastructure Bank for Robbery and Destruction], WTO [Wealth Thieving Outfit], The World Court, the War Crimes Tribunals (for Rwanda, Sierra Leone etc), the UN Peace Keeping and Peace Enforcing Missions, and the ideological package of globalization, democratization, privatization, marketization etc.

   Why do I say that Africa has been recolonized and that the New World Order’s UN, AU and NEPAD are all part of it? Is the UN an imperialist outfit? Yes, it is. This UN that is, allegedly, being reformed, and on whose Security Council Nigeria is campaigning to get a Veto seat? Yes, it is. And is the AU an imperialist outfit? And NEPAD too? Yes, they are. Let me indicate just how these organs and institutions are carrying on the imperialist project.

   The AU is a joint instrument of the Arabs and Europeans for waging race war on Black Africa. Its NEPAD policies serve European power, while its use as a political/diplomatic inhibitor of organized African resistance to Arab aggression serves Arab power.

   The AU was formed at the initiative of Libya’s Gaddafi. It was part of his offering to appease the West so it would end its sanctions against Libya and resume non-hostile relations. Another item in that package of offerings was his surrender of two Libyans to be tried for the Lockerbee bombing. He roped the African countries into his AU [Arabist Underwear] for easier imperialist control. And the West proceeded to con them to implement its NEPAD recipe for Africa’s economic destruction.

   As for the New World Order, it is actually not as new as it is made to appear.  It is simply the UN Global Order of 1945 as it enters the final stages of its construction.  What was made possible in the 1990s, by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the ending of the Cold War, is the final plastering and painting and furnishing of what was organized in Bretton Woods in 1944 and in San Francisco in 1945.  Among these final steps is the creating of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to replace the stop-gap institution GATT; the establishment of an International War Crimes Tribunal with headquarters at The Hague; the move of the UN from peace-keeping to peace-enforcement, as attempted in Somalia and Bosnia; and the clear emergence of NATO as the enforcer of last resort for the UN Security Council – as in the former Yugoslavia.






   This so-called New World Order is simply the collective phase of capitalist imperialism; the institutional arrangement for the collaborative imperialism of those great powers, now known as the G-8, whose rivalries inflicted the carnage of two World Wars on all of humanity during the first half of the 20th century.  Their paramount objective now is to ensure that, after five centuries of unrestrained rivalries and warfare, these great winners shall no longer make war on one another as they compete for the labor and resources of the rest of the members of the UN.  Their second objective is to ensure that rebellion against their collective imperialism, by any of its victim peoples, shall be collectively crushed.  This collective imperialism, whose slogan is Globalism, is upheld, not, as in the 15^th century, by the fiat of the Pope, but by the economic, diplomatic, military, cultural and propaganda might of the G-8 imperialist alliance against the rest of humanity.  The only thing new about this 1945 edition of the Eurocentric Global System is this:  after fifty years of delays in its construction, it is at last emerging fully in the form designed originally by the U.S. and U.K. --its main planners and beneficiaries.

As the UN Charter is the blueprint for this current edition of the Eurocentric Global System, it is imperative to ask:  What really is the UN and what manner of imperialist beast is this UN Global Order?  At the level of the utopian chatter of the UN Charter, and of the sales rhetoric of its propagandists, the UN is a dream scheme that shall save humanity from the scourge of war, promote social progress and better standards of life, develop respect for the equal rights and self-determination of peoples, reaffirm faith in the dignity and worth of the human person, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah!  So claims the UN Charter.  As for the New World Order, it is “a new just order that permits fair competition and protection of the weak from the strong . . .  a joint undertaking of realizing the common aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law . . . an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony” (so said George H. W. Bush[2]).  It is “a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace . . . under . . .free institutions” (Bill  Clinton[3]); with the UN there “to protect human rights, maintain peace and security for all and to deter aggression” (George H. W. Bush[4]). What glorious and inspiring images these are: peace, prosperity, just order, security, freedom, democracy, cooperation, social progress, equal rights, self-determination, fair competition, harmony, human dignity, world without war, protection of the weak from the strong, etc., etc.! 

All this New World Order rhetoric touting Freedom, Democracy, Peace, Development, etc is quite attractive. But is what is preached anything like what is meant, let alone what is practiced? Let us go, for illumination, to those who have closely studied the details of the matter. And let’s consider just three revealing examples: Freedom, Democracy and Development Aid.

   In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the Allies were fighting for Four Freedoms—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. But Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

Roosevelt spoke of Four Freedoms, but not of the Fifth and most important: the freedom to rob and to exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the only one that really counts. A careful look at history and the internal record of planning reveals a guiding geopolitical conception: preservation of the Fifth Freedom, by whatever means are feasible. Much of what US governments do in the world can be readily understood in terms of this principle, while if it remains obscured, acts and events will appear incomprehensible, a maze of confusion, random error and accident.

—Noam Chomsky, Turning The Tide, p.47

So much for their freedom rhetoric. By the way, contrary to official propaganda, America grew rich and powerful, not because of the four official freedoms, but because of the Fifth Freedom: its freedom to rob and exploit, starting with the land of the exterminated Native Americans and the forced and unpaid labor of the enslaved Black Africans.

Chomsky also has cast light on the American usage of the term democracy. Commenting on the situation in the 1980s, he said:

Take the idea that the United States is supporting “democracy” all over the world. Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true. But what does it mean? When we support “democracy,” what do we support?  I mean, is “democracy” something where the population takes part in running the country? Well, obviously not. For instance, why are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic,” but Nicaragua [i.e. under the Sandinista Party] not “democratic”? Why? Is it because two of them had elections and the other one didn’t? No. In fact, Nicaragua’s election [in 1984] was a hundred times as good as any election in El Salvador. Is it because there’s a lack of popular political participation in Nicaragua? No. Is it because the political opposition can’t survive there? No, the political opposition is barely harassed in Nicaragua; in El Salvador and Guatemala it’s just murdered. Is it that there can’t be an independent press in Nicaragua? No, the Nicaraguan press is one of the freest presses in the world, much more so than the American press has ever been—the United States has never tolerated a newspaper even remotely like La Prensa in Nicaragua [opposition paper supported by the U.S. during the contra war], not even close: in any time of crisis here, the American government has shut down even tiny dissident newspapers, forget a major newspaper funded by the foreign power that’s attacking the country and which is openly calling for the overthrow of the government. That degree of freedom of the press is absolutely inconceivable here. In El Salvador, there was an independent press at one time—it was wiped out by the U.S.-backed security forces, who just murdered the editor of one newspaper and blew up the premises of the other.  Okay, that takes care of that independent press.

So you know, by what criteria are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic” and Nicaragua not? Well, there is a criterion: in Nicaragua [under the Sandinistas] business elements are not represented in dominating the state much beyond their numbers, so it’s not a “democracy.”  In El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments are run by the military for the benefit of the local oligarchies—the landowners, rich businessmen, and rising professionals—and those people are tied up with the United States, so therefore those countries are “democracies.” It doesn’t matter if they blow up the independent press, and kill off the political opposition, and slaughter tens of thousands of people, and never run anything remotely like a free election—all of that is totally irrelevant. They’re “democracies,” because the right people are running them; if the right people aren’t running them, then they’re not “democracies.”

--Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 42

In Americanese, a government is “democratic” if it is run by people who serve U.S. interests, and “undemocratic” if it is not. American rhetoric gives the impression that the U.S. supports democracy around the globe whereas in fact it has a long record of blocking democracy and overthrowing democratically elected governments or assassinating their leaders. Here are just a few notorious examples:  Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Ecuador 1981, Grenada 1983, Haiti 1991, Venezuela 2003. And an example happening right now is the case of Palestine, where the U.S. is unwilling to accept Hamas as the party democratically elected by the Palestinians to govern them. Because Hamas is committed to serving the Palestinians and protecting them from Israeli armed attacks, the U.S., Britain and Israel have threatened to not accept or work with it. It is as if Bush, Blair and Sharon are Palestinians and as if their three non-votes should veto the votes of all the real Palestinian voters who overwhelmingly elected Hamas. So much for the rhetoric that America supports democracy around the world.

Now, let’s consider Development AID. The best guide on the rhetoric and practice of foreign AID is probably John Perkins. In the 1970s [1971-1980] he worked as one of America’s Economic Hit Men (EHM)—consultants who are paid, “well paid--to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars” and to ensnare them “in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty.” In his recent (2004) book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins says:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs. extortion, sex, and murder. I should know; I was an EHM,” he adds. [Confessions, p.ix]

He goes on to say:

Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard comments like, “If they’re going to burn the U.S. flag and demonstrate against our embassy, why don’t we just get out of their damn country and let them wallow in their own poverty?” People who say such things often hold diplomas certifying that they are well educated. However, these people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant turning the American republic into a global empire. Despite credentials, such people are as uneducated as those eighteenth-century colonists who believed that the [American] Indians fighting to defend their lands were servants of the devil.”

—[Confessions p. 16]

He goes on to set the record straight:

Claudine [his clandestine NSA trainer for his undercover work as an EHM] told me there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to . . . U.S. companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans . . . so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources. . . . the unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors, and to make a handful of wealthy and influential families in the receiving countries very happy, while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world. The larger the loan, the better. The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health, education, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration. . . .The loans of foreign aid ensure that today’s children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back.

—[Confessions, pp. 15-16, 48]

So, that’s that, as it were, from the horse’s own mouth, from one who worked to lure countries into the debt trap. He further tells us that “we make loans to countries with the full knowledge that they will never repay them; in fact, we do not want them to honor their debt, since the non-payment is what gives us our leverage, our pound of flesh.” [Confessions, p.212] Incidentally, you can now see why imperialism will not allow Nigeria to escape the debt trap, even after OBJ hands over your foreign reserves to the Paris Club.

   With the advantage of such expert insights, we can better appreciate what the World Order, whether the Old or the New, is really all about: Plunder of the weak. Or as Chomsky says:

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. As in the past, privilege and power do not willingly submit to popular control or market discipline, and therefore seek to undermine meaningful democracy and to bend market principles to their special needs.

—Noam Chomsky,  World Orders Old and New, p.271

(The key books to read for basic education on Imperialism since 1492, the New World Order, American power etc are On Power and Ideology: the Managua Lectures, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Turning the Tide, Understanding Power, World Orders Old and New, all by Noam Chomsky; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins; Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney; The West and the rest of Us, by Chinweizu; and The Black Man’s Burden, by E. D. Morel)