Re: What is the Decisive "Clash" of Our Time?

[thermate]

 Dr.Bricmont, We are extremely proud of you for your brilliant
analysis
 and courage to come out and say it. Your article brings out not one
 but several key concepts, worth close reading. The physicists like
 myself are proud to have one among us like you who seems to have an
 acute sense of humanitarianism ....
 =================
 January 31, 2007
 Resistance to Imperialism
 What is the Decisive "Clash" of Our Time?

 By JEAN BRICMONT

 July 1, 1916, was the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. On that
 single day, the British suffered more than 50,000 casualties, of
which
 20,000 died. The battle went on for four months, leading to about a
 million casualties on all sides, and the war itself continued for
 another two years.

 In the summer of 2006, the Israeli army stopped its attacks on
Lebanon
 after losing about a hundred soldiers. The majority of the U.S.
 population has turned against the Iraq war after less than 3,000
dead.
 That indicates a major change in the mentality of the West, and this
 reluctance to die in large numbers for "God and Country" is a major
 advance in the history of mankind. From the neoconservative point of
 view, however, this phenomenon is a sign of decadence; in fact, one
of
 the positive aspects of the present conflict, from their perspective,
 is that it ought to strengthen the moral fiber of the American
people,
 by making them ready to "die for a cause."

 But, so far, it is not working. More realistic people, the planners
at
 the Pentagon for example, have tried to replace waves of human cannon
 fodder by massive "strategic" bombing. This works only rarely -- in
 Kosovo and Serbia it did succeed, at least in bringing pro-Western
 clients to power in both places. But it clearly is not working
 satisfactorily in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or Lebanon. The only
 thing that might succeed, in a very special sense of course, would be
 nuclear weapons, and the fact that those weapons are the West's last
 military hope is truly frightening.

 To put this observation in a more global context, Westerners do not
 always appreciate the fact that the major event of the 20th century
 was neither the rise and fall of fascism, nor the history of
 communism, but decolonization. One should remember that, about a
 century ago, the British could forbid access to a park in Shanghai to
 "dogs and Chinese." To put it mildly, such provocations are no longer
 possible. And, of course, most of Asia and Africa were under European
 control. Latin America was formally independent, but under American
 and British tutelage and military interventions were routine.

 All of this collapsed during the 20th century, through wars and
 revolutions; in fact, the main lasting effect of the Russian
 revolution is probably the Soviet Union's significant support to the
 decolonization process. This process freed hundreds of millions of
 people from one of the most brutal forms of oppression. It is a major
 progress in the history of mankind, similar to the abolition of
 slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 Still, it is true that the colonial system gave way to the
neocolonial
 one and that most decolonized countries have adopted, at least for
the
 time being, a capitalist form of development. That provides some
 consolation to the ex-colonialists (and disappointment to the Western
 left that opposed colonialism). But such sentiments may reflect a
 misunderstanding of the nature of "socialism" in the 20th century and
 of the historical significance of the present period.

 Before 1914, all socialist movements, whether libertarian or
statist ,
 reformist or revolutionary, envisioned socialism, i.e., the
 socialization of the means of production, as an historic stage that
 was supposed to succeed capitalism in relatively developed Western
 societies possessing a democratic state, a functioning education
 system, and a basically liberal and secular culture. All this
 disappeared with World War I and the Russian Revolution. After that,
 the libertarian aspects of socialism withered away, the majority of
 the European socialist movement became increasingly incorporated into
 the capitalist system and its main radical sector; the Communists
 identified socialism with whatever policies were adopted by the
Soviet
 model.

 But that model had almost nothing to do with socialism as it was
 generally understood before the First World War. It should rather be
 considered as a (rather successful) attempt at rapid economic
 development of an underdeveloped country, an attempt to catch up,
 culturally, economically, and militarily, by whatever means
 necessary , with the West. The same is true of post-Soviet
revolutions
 and national liberation movements. As a first approximation, one can
 say that all over the Third World, people, or rather governments,
have
 tried to "catch up" either by "socialist" or by "capitalist" means.

 But, if one recognizes that aspect, the whole history of the 20th
 century can be interpreted very differently from the dominant theme
 about the "socialism that was tried and failed everywhere." What was
 tried and actually succeeded (almost) everywhere was emancipation
from
 Western domination. This has inverted a centuries-old process of
 European expansion and hegemony over the rest of the world. The 20th
 century has not been the one of socialism, but it has been the one of
 anti-imperialism. And this inversion is likely to continue during the
 21st century. Most of the time, the "South" is strengthening itself,
 with some setbacks (the period surrounding the collapse of the Soviet
 Union being a time of regression, from that point of view).

 This has important consequences for both the Western peace movement
 and the old issue of socialism. There is some truth to the Leninist
 idea that the benefits of imperialism corrupt the Western working
 class ­ not only in purely economic terms (through the exploitation
of
 the colonies), but also through the feeling of superiority that
 imperialism has implanted in the Western mind. However, this is
 changing for two reasons. On the one hand, "globalization" means that
 the West has become more dependent on the Third World: we do not
 simply import raw materials or export capital, but we also depend on
 cheap labor, working either here or in export-oriented factories
 abroad; we "transfer" capital from the South to the North through
 "debt payments" and capital flight, and we import an increasing
number
 of engineers and scientists. Moreover, "globalization" means that
 there is a decrease in linkage between the population of the U.S.A.
 and their elites or their capitalists, whose interests are less and
 less tied to those of "their" country. Whether the population will
 react by adopting some pro-imperialist fantasies such as Christian
 Zionism or "the war against terrorism" or whether it will rather
 increase its solidarity with the emerging countries of the South, is
a
 major challenge for the future.

 On the other hand, the rise of the South means that there is no
longer
 a relationship of military force that allows the West to impose its
 will, the U.S. defeat in Iraq being the most extraordinary
 illustration of that fact. Of course, there are other means of
 pressure ­ economic blackmail, boycotts, buying elections, etc. But
 countermeasures are increasingly being taken also against those
 methods, and one should never forget that a relationship of force is
 always ultimately military ­ without it, how does one get people to
 pay their debts, for example?

The main error of the Communists is to have conflated two notions of
 "socialism": the one that existed before World War I and the rapid
 development model of the Soviet Union. But the current situation
 raises two different questions to which two different forms of
 "socialism" might be the answer. One is to find paths of development
 in the Third World, or even a redefinition of what "development"
 means, that do not coincide with either the capitalist or the Soviet
 model. But that is a problem to be solved in Latin America, Asia or
 Africa. In the West, the problem is different: we do not suffer from
 the lack of satisfaction of basic needs that exist elsewhere (of
 course, many basic needs are not satisfied, but that is a problem of
 distribution and of political will). The problem here is to define a
 post-imperialist future for the Western societies, meaning a form of
 life that would not depend on an unsustainable relation of domination
 over the rest of the world. Whether one wants to call that
"socialism"
 is a matter of definition, but it would have to include reliance on
 renewable energy resources, a form of consumption that does not
depend
 on huge imports and an education system that produces the number of
 qualified people that the nation needs. Whether all this is
compatible
 with the system of private property of the means of production, and a
 political system largely controlled by those who own those means,
 remains to be seen.

 This establishes a link between the struggle for peace and the
 struggle for social transformation, because the more we live in peace
 with therest of the world, the more we give up our largely illusory
 military power and stop our constant "threats", the more we will be
 forced to think about and elaborate an alternative economic order.
For
 the left, the defeat of the U.S.A. in Iraq, tragic as the war is,
 should be understood as good news; not only is the U.S. cause unjust,
 but the defeat will, or at least should, bring us to ask some
 fundamental questions about the structure of our societies and their
 addiction to an increasingly unsustainable imperialism.

 It is a great tragedy that among Greens, at least among the European
 ones, this link has been totally lost during the Kosovo and the
 Afghanistan wars, which most of them supported on humanitarian
 grounds. It is equally tragic that the opposition to the Iraq war in
 the United States has been virtually non-existent and that the
 population has turned against the war almost entirely as a result of
 the effectiveness of the Iraqi ...