Tag: Neo-colonialism

The Fundamental Difference between the U.S. and China

Why is the United States so anti-Chinese? Why all this Sinophobia?   

It’s because of the basic difference between China and the U.S. that virtually none of our basically ignorant “leaders” — much less the mainstream media — seems to understand. Let me explain.

On the one hand, you have the United States. It’s leading a coalition of overwhelmingly white European colonialists who with less than 25% of the world’s population think they somehow have the right to control the entire world. In this context, the U.S. with 4.2% of the population considers itself the leader that can dictate terms to the other 95.8% of the world, including those Europeans whom it has successfully and surprisingly reduced to the status of obedient and subservient vassals.

In its position as world hegemon that alone emerged unscathed from the ravages of World War II (aka the second Intercapitalist war) the U.S. has decided to maintain control the world militarily. As a result, it annually invests more of its national treasure in war and preparation for war than the next nine countries combined (including China and Russia). A huge proportion of that treasure is spent on maintaining more than 750 military bases in more than 80 countries across the planet.

U.S. bases represent a key element in our country’s neo-colonial strategy aimed at controlling the Global Majority (i.e. former colonies) by regime-change interventions. These interventions have the United States removing from office any governments seeking to directly improve the lives of their citizens by redistributing income, or by providing healthcare, education, or other benefits and laws directly benefitting working classes rather than the wealthy and corporate interests. Since the 1950s, the world has witnessed such interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and other locations too numerous to list here.

Yes, regime changes benefit the rich and powerful. However, in terms of directly benefitting you and me, those operations and the bases that support them contribute virtually nothing. Yes, they keep millions of military personnel off the streets as well as providing jobs for those working in weapons manufacturing plants. However, the bases and forever wars they stimulate are otherwise completely counterproductive.

For instance, over the past two years, Washington has spent $175 billion on its proxy war in Ukraine which according to Lloyd Austin is aimed at regime change in Russia. That means $175 billion not spent on universal healthcare, not funding college tuition, not providing improvements in infrastructure, not spent on highspeed rail or on mitigating the effects of climate change. All of us can see the results in our decaying urban centers with homeless beggars sleeping on sidewalks and in tents under our bridges.

In other words, overseas military bases are completely parasitic. They live off the rest of us devouring the nutrients that would otherwise sustain and improve our quality of life. Internationally, their purpose is to maintain “stability” in a world where power and wealth have since WWII been concentrated in the U.S. and Europe – the imperial countries that have controlled the world for the past half-millennium. It’s a world of billionaires on the one hand and grinding poverty on the other – especially in the former colonies.

Contrast this U.S. parasitism with the policies of China. As indicated above, China spends far less than the United States on its military. China maintains but a single military base outside its borders. It hasn’t fired a bullet beyond those confines over the last 40 years.

Instead of investing in bloodsucking military bases, China maintains what might be described as development nodes across the planet. Over the past decade and more, its “Belt and Road Initiative” has constructed highways, ports, electrical grids, and highspeed rail systems across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America from Beijing to Tierra del Fuego. And those installations have vastly improved the lives of ordinary people wherever they appear – including those of the Chinese people themselves. As everyone knows, China was recently recognized by the United Nations as successfully raising more than 800,000 of its own citizens from extreme poverty.

What I’m describing here is the rebalancing of the world. Led by China, the planet’s majority is asserting the power that belongs to it in terms of population, which by the way is not white. China has about 18.5% of the world’s population; Africa has about the same; India has slightly more. All those non-white people are rebelling against the humiliation of control by the whites who have drawn completely arbitrary borders. That’s legendary in Africa and the Mid-East where colonizers in their tents drew lines on maps arbitrarily cutting up Africa and all that Mid-East desert land floating on a sea of oil. And they did so with virtually no knowledge of the countries, cultures, and populations they were dividing.

Accordingly, the non-white victims of such ignorance are currently refusing to honor such geographical restrictions. Under pressures from climate change (induced by the colonizers) and by the absolute decimation of western regime-change wars, the victims of such policies are relocating massively. And they won’t be stopped by walls, laws, or border patrols – and much less by ignorant nativist arguments. Yes, people of color are here to stay. Get used to it. Trump or no Trump, they will not be denied.

 It’s a new multi-polar world. It’s time has come. It is long overdue. My only fear is that the “leaders” of the collective west might find the loss of hegemony so threatening that they’ll decide to end the world by initiating a nuclear war. They’ve thought about this before. Remember “It’s better to be dead than red?”

Their new line seems to be: “It’s better to be dead than not in complete control.”

God help us!

Mali for Dummies (Part Two: Mali)

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On Monday we saw that U.S. interest in the 3rd world (i.e. the former colonies) follows the pattern identified by J.W. Smith of the Institute for Economic Democracy. That pattern holds that:

1. Any former colony (or group within that entity) attempting to break for economic freedom
2. By establishing government representing the interests of its own people rather than those of the former Mother Country
3. Will be accused of terrorism or communism
4. And will be overthrown by military intervention
5. Or by right wing (often terrorist) elements from within the local population
6. To keep that country within the ex-mother country’s sphere of influence
7. So that the former colonists might continue to use the country’s resources for the invaders own enrichment,
8. And that of the local elite.

Following that sequence, U.S. and E.U. interest in Mali is driven by resource concerns, not by zeal for democracy or anti-terrorism. It is also motivated by competition with China for the resources in question (uranium, oil, and gold among others).

The indigenous Tuaregs represent an obstacle to the desired U.S. and E.U. access to those resources. The Tuaregs are secular Muslims – i.e. not fundamentalists desiring to impose Sharia Law. Since achieving independence from French colonialism in the early 1960s, the Tuaregs have been seeking independence from the artificially created Mali. Tuaregs want control of their own territory and its resources, presumably with the option of selling them to China. In fact, the Tuareg want their own country (Azawad). Presumably, Azawad would eventually be co-extensive with the Tuareg People who spill over into parts of neighboring Niger, Algeria and elsewhere in the region.

The Tauregs see Mali’s government as the puppet of France facilitating alienation of Azawad’s valuable resources from the Tuareg People to benefit France, the E.U. and U.S. To achieve liberation from such western control, the Tuaregs have organized a rebel army, the NMLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad).
In its drive for independence and control of its own resources, the NMLA was supported by Muammar Gaddafi. As a “Pan Africanist,” Gaddafi was a proponent of ‘Africa for Africans” and generally opposed continued control of the continent by the U.S. and Europe. (This was a principal reason for western demonization of the man.)

Many Tuaregs were part of Gaddafi’s army. And after its dissolution (with major intervention by the U.S. and E.U.), these Tuareg fighters returned to Northern Mali with many of Gaddafi’s sophisticated weapons. Their heavily armed participation in the Tuareg struggle enabled the NMLA to make strong headway against the government of Mali, thus causing concern to its European and American sponsors about unfettered access to the region’s uranium and other resources. In fact the NMLA gained complete control of Northern Mali, declared their rebellion successful and announced withdrawal of Azawad from Mali. As far as Azawadians were concerned, the rebellion was over.

It was not over however for the U.S. and France. In response, they facilitated a military coup to replace Mali’s president (seen as ineffective against the Tuaregs), substituting in his place a U.S.-trained military general. His new government [allied with the U.S. and E.U. (led by France)] encouraged Muslim jihadists (otherwise considered “terrorists” by the West) to rebel against the NMLA so as to weaken its hold on the country’s North. According to western sources, chief among the Muslim jihadists is AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb).

AQIM successes have created a cover for France (with support from the U.S.) to intervene directly in Mali under the claim of prosecuting its “war on terrorism” against the AQIM it had just used for its own purposes up north. However, the real intent of the intervention (as it has been for 500 years) is resource transfer to the E.U. and U.S.

And that’s where most of us dummies came in. The story never changes, and we’ll fall for it every time: We’ll also be expected to dumbly foot the resulting bill and eventually accept austerity measures to pay for it.

Mali for Dummies (Part One: General Background)

Are you confused by what’s happening in Mali? Welcome to the club. We’re probably all puzzled and feel like dummies overwhelmed by information pieces that provide a welter of names, dates, organizations and explanations that are complicated, contradictory and vague. As a result, we probably accept the “official story” behind France’s U.S. – supported intervention in Mali as promulgated by our own State Department, France, Algiers and others.

That story goes that “we” are fighting AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) which has suddenly materialized in Mali as part of a world-wide terrorist offensive that justifies the “Global War on Terrorism.” Well, if it’s a fight against al-Qaeda, we might reason, I guess I have to be for it.

I too felt drawn to just throwing up my hands and participating in the dummy syndrome of simply surrendering to government de-contextualized muddle and propaganda. But then I remembered what I’ve been reading in Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States. I recalled what I studied in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. I drew on my recollections of Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America.

All of those taught me that the real justifications for invading the former colonial world rarely coincide with the stated rationale. It’s virtually never about democracy or protecting national sovereignty (though it might be about “maintaining regional stability” in lands where the median income is less than $2.00 per day!) Instead developed-world intervention is invariably connected with continuing the process of transferring wealth and commodities from the resource-rich south to the “developed” north. It’s about keeping the rich south subservient and impoverished.

In fact, as pointed out by J.W. Smith of the Institute for Economic Democracy, there’s a pattern to all interventions like the one we’re witnessing in Mali. In its starkest form, the pattern runs like this:

1. Any country (or group within a country) attempting to break for economic freedom
2. By establishing government representing the interests of its own people rather than those of the former Mother Country
3. Will be accused of communism or terrorism
4. And will be overthrown by military intervention
5. Or by right wing (often terrorist) elements from within the local population
6. To keep that country within the ex-mother country’s sphere of influence
7. So that the former colonists might continue to use the country’s resources for the invaders own enrichment,
8. And that of the local elite.

To put a finer point on all of that, the sources I have mentioned have taught me that the West is not interested in democracy or in the freedom of its former colonies. That’s proven by examining a short list of dictators the West (particularly the United States) has supported. The list includes Bonzer (Bolivia), Mobutu (Zaire), the Duvaliers (Haiti), Rios Montt (Guatemala), the Somozas (Nicaragua), Resa Palavi (Iran), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Suharto (Indonesia), Pinochet (Chile), Fujimori (Peru), Diem (Vietnam), Marcos (Philippines), Noriega (Panama), Al Saud family (Saudi Arabia), Batista (Cuba).

All of these are robbers and thugs. In fact, colonialism is little more than a system of robbery intended to transfer raw materials and agricultural produce from the resource-rich colonies to the “Mother Countries.”

European and American colonists initially achieved control of the colonies by military power. The power was used indiscriminately, viciously and “necessarily” since the colonies were overwhelmingly inhabited by tribal peoples who typically did not share western values. You just couldn’t do business with most of them. After all, they usually believed that their land belonged to their God and cannot be treated simply as another commodity. So at least since 1492 the West has engaged in a world-wide genocidal process of eliminating and neutralizing tribal peoples. We’re witnessing the latest chapter of that process today in Mali.

Because of the business-averse tendencies of most tribal people, the colonial process also involved identification of individuals or groups within tribes who were willing to sell out their brothers and sisters. Alternatively it consisted in identifying and exploiting rivalries between tribes. In either case the point was to employ cooperative local elites (frequently, it turns out, Christian and lighter skinned) who were richly rewarded for controlling and using violence to oppress their own people or rival peoples on behalf of the colonists. In other words, the favored locals ended up being mercenary puppets of the colonists during the colonial era.

Following the end of formal colonialism (1950s and ‘60s), the departing colonists typically tried to keep their puppets in control by rigging “free” elections to elect “the willing” who would continue doing business with their former masters on favorable terms. Colonial powers also arbitrarily drew up gerrymandered borders delineating colonist-created “countries” that separated tribal peoples from fellow tribe members. This was done in order to segregate natural allies from one another and to set them against each other in competing states. The result was the creation of artificial “countries” like Mali and Niger whose boundaries have little meaning for the tribal families they separate, while the primary loyalties of those families remain to their tribes.

The processes and consequences of all this are being demonstrated in Mali today as the French, attempt to reassert control of rebels in their former resource-rich colony.

(On Wednesday we’ll review the particulars.)