Stan Goff--War, Race and Elections

[Aidoneus]

New Year's Day Thoughts
War, Race and Elections
By STAN GOFF

--snip--

The multi-form Iraqi resistance is making it clear to anyone with eyes and ears that they are united around at least one thing -- they do not want to be occupied.

So this UN "internationalizing" thing is a pretty predictable demagogic device by Dean to get elected. Dean seems to be a pretty smart guy, so he probably doesn't believe this simplified bullshit any more than some of us do. He is pandering--as politicians are wont to do-- to two beliefs that have taken root in the American mass consciousness:

(1) That the Bush administration is slightly mad and has abandoned something sane called multilateralism, and

(2) that someone other than Iraqis has to oversee their future to prevent some amorphously defined but nightmarish post- Ba'athist reckoning.

The first notion about Bush lunacy and multilateralism fails to understand what the actual history and nature of so-called multilateralism is, which is a form of cooperative plunder by the Euro-American and Japanese North waged against the under-developed global South. Multilateralism was the form of cooperative imperialism agreed upon when the Marshall Plan was being carried out--a Cold War relic now--in which the US served as Big Daddy Umpire.

Multilateralism--dear people--gave us savage neoliberalism, with the (US dominated) International Monetary Fund as a global loan shark, and for billions of people multilateral imperialism is precisely what has underwritten the suffering that corresponds to their dollar-a- day existence.

The break with multilateralism is not some break with a noble past; it is a falling out amongst gangsters as the turf dries up. Bush's cohort is not insane. They are responding quite logically to the exigency of a post-Cold War conjuncture with the forestalled crisis of profit back upon them, the dollar-a-day natives pissed off, and hydrocarbon energy preparing to exit the world stage.

"Progressives," whatever the hell that means, need to quit listening to NPR and confusing it with critical analysis... "this program underwritten by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Supermarket to the Universe, and Lockheed- Martin, designing technology for the Aryan Future."

The second assumption--that the people living within the former boundaries of the former state of Iraq must have outside oversight to put them on the proper path--is a dressed-up form of something that used to be called the "white man's burden:" a notion that no-one is entitled to make their own history except white Euro- Americans, with the rationalization that "those people" are incapable of self-governance. This racist assumption is exhibited about Iraq with amnesia about the scale of death and destruction visited on "those people" by thirteen years of war and sanctions, and with a dissociative disorder about the present--with violence already part and parcel of every day there, violence provoked by the presence and actions of the occupiers.

--snip--

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff01012004.html

[lcordero]

1. This is great

:D
I never saw anybody kick so many people in the ass in one writing.

[Kolesar]

2. What a fucked up thesis (by Goff)

Because of 19th and 20th century colonialism and imperialism, the powerful countries of the world should not act in concert in international relations. That is naively simplistic.