The Neo-Barbarians
/ Michael Warschawski |
24/10/06
Published by Alternative
Information Center
After World-War II, the big powers were obliged
to maneuver under the pressure of huge political
opposition (anti-colonial movements, mass democratic
oppositions) and constantly needed to invent
pretexts with which to provide legitimacy for their
wars and acts of repression throughout the world.
However, 50 years after the victory over fascism,
these constraints no longer bind the big imperialist
powers—the US in particular. |
From an
ethical point of view, history never stands in the same
place: if it doesn’t move towards less oppression and more
justice, it moves towards less rights and more barbarism.
Paraphrasing the German revolutionary socialist Rosa
Luxemburg, who predicted twenty years before the rise of
Nazism, “either socialism or barbarism,” we can say today
that the 21st century will be “either the rule of Right or
the law of the jungle.” It seems, however, that in the first
decade of the third millennium, the law of jungle is taking
the lead.
In an
article published one month ago in Haaretz, Israeli
journalist and analyst Tom Segev tried to challenge the
common idea that the global political context of our time is
much worse than it used to be, let’s say, two decades ago.
According to Segev, war, oppression and destruction have
characterized the political reality of our planet during the
last five decades, and nothing has changed either
qualitatively or even quantitatively in the recent past.
Segev goes further yet, claiming that the “clash of
civilizations” is not a new phenomenon, but has been
characteristic of the previous decades, though under
different labels.
There can
be no doubt that the four decades following WWII were not
peaceful, and during this period more than 76 million human
beings perished, in wars, revolutions and through
mass-repression by dictatorships.[*] It is also true that
during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the “north” conducted a
colonial war against the “South,” and the “West” a
“civilization war” against the eastern communist bloc.
There is,
nevertheless, a qualitative difference between the present
situation and the forty years that followed the victory over
fascism. Three main factors limited the hegemonic
aspirations of the USA following WWII:
The
existence of the Soviet superpower;
The
strength of an organized working class in the imperialist
countries;
The effects
of the memory of the horrors of fascism on international
public opinion, and the perceived illegitimacy of
unilateralism, military aggression, etc.
Due to
these factors, the big powers were obliged to maneuver under
the pressure of huge political opposition (anti-colonial
movements, mass democratic oppositions) and constantly
needed to invent pretexts with which to provide legitimacy
for their wars and acts of repression throughout the world.
However, 50
years after the victory over fascism, these constraints no
longer bind the big imperialist powers—the US in particular.
Unilateralism, “preemptive” wars, colonial ventures, etc.,
are once again legitimate, or, more precisely, no longer
challenged in a way that could seriously harm their
perpetrators. With the absence of a powerful opposition, the
new neoconservative leadership of the Empire has been able
to create a new “global discourse,” which, at least
partially, has been able to conquer the minds of substantial
parts of those who are the victims of the Empire. The four
main elements of this discourse are:
The
collapse of Soviet Union is the ultimate evidence that
capitalism is the only viable way;
(Western)
civilization is threatened by a new global enemy: terrorism;
A
global-permanent-preemptive war is necessary to protect
civilization against the new Barbarians (terrorism/Islam)
and their allies;
In this war
for the survival of civilization, there cannot, and should
not, be any constraints: all the norms and conventions of
the past fifty years are caduc.
And,
indeed, in their crusade for what they call “the New
American Century,” i.e. the imposition by force of the total
hegemony of their empire under the shallow pretext of a “war
against terrorism,” the US administration has declared a
lack of relevance to every moral constraint and
international regulation,
Already in
2003, George W. Bush announced that the Geneva Conventions
are obsolete in the war against terrorism. Guantanamo was
opened in violation not only of international law, but also
of the law of the United States of America. In order to
deprive suspected terrorists of any kind of protection or
rights, the same administration decided to invent a new
category of detainees: neither criminal nor prisoners of
war, but “suspected terrorists.”
The
similarity between the US and Israeli practices is
astonishing: already in the 1970s, the Israeli military
authorities announced, in the Israeli Supreme Court, as well
as in international conferences, that, in the case of the
Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), the Geneva
Conventions do not apply. Moreover, since the late 1960s,
Palestinian political prisoners have been categorized as
neither criminal prisoners nor political detainees; and the
“secret prison” discovered by Attorney Lea Tsemel, near
kibbutz Ma’anit, in 2003, is a twin-brother of Guantanamo.
In
addition, according to both the US neoconservative
leadership and the Israeli government, the aim of wars is no
longer to win a battle, to conquer a territory or to change
a regime, but to destroy states and to dismantle whole
societies.
The state
of Israel—but also the great majority within Israeli
society—have fully internalized this neoconservative
analysis and the strategy which logically follows. In fact,
in the last decade, Israel-Palestine has been the laboratory
for such a strategy, and the Palestinians its guinea pigs.
This is the case, even on the level of armament, as the
leftwing Italian newspaper El Manifesto has recently
confirmed, unmasking the utilization of one of the new and
most barbarian type of bombs manufactured in the US and used
in the last offensive against the civilian population of
Gaza.
The Israeli
war against the Palestinians is clearly aimed at destroying
Palestinian society and transforming the Palestinians from a
nation into scattered tribes, as the Americans are trying to
do in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Indeed, all
wars are barbaric, but the Israeli war in the OPT (and its
broader context, the endless preemptive war against
terrorism) represents a new stage in modern barbarism.
Though the definition of “genocide” is wrong, one can adopt
Bir Zeit University Professor Salah Abdel Jawad’s from
definition of “sociocide,” or Israeli sociologists’ concept
of “politicide.”
The land on
which the Palestinian nation is rooted is being stolen by
“legal settlements” and “illegal outposts,” provoking more
and more “self-transfer”; the Wall is atomizing Palestinian
society into isolated cantons; new laws and regulations are
aimed at limiting the entry of Palestinians into the
Palestinian territory, as well as their capacity to move
within their own territory; the democratically elected
representatives of the Jerusalem population have been
expelled from their city, and dozens of ministers and
legislative council members kidnapped and jailed, as
hostages for an eventual exchange of prisoners.
On top of
all these evils are the horrors of Hebron, where the local
population is subjected to daily harassment by the settlers
and the Israeli military, and denied normal access to a
substantial part of their city, and the martyrdom of Gaza,
which has been the target of an economic blockade and
systematic Israeli bombardments, destroying the basic
infrastructure and slaughtering hundreds.
Needless to
say that all these crimes, some of which have been described
as crimes against humanity by Human Rights Watch, are not
provoking any sanctions, or even protest by the so-called
international community. Impunity to the barbarians is the
new norm, from Iraq to Gaza. As for the Israeli “peace
camp,” it entered into a deep coma the day Ehud Barak
returned from Camp David, swallowing the big lie about the
“existential danger” threatening Israel with a certain
amount of emotional release.
The
similarity between the strategy and methods of Israel and
those of the US, raises the question of who is the dog and
who is the tail, or, in other words, who is moving whom: is
the Israeli lobby pushing the US administration according to
the needs of the Zionist State, or the US administration
pushing Israel to implement its global war policy in the
Middle East?
In reality,
this is a wrong question: there is neither a dog nor a tail,
but one global war of re-colonization, and one aggressive
monster with two ugly heads. Neoconservative strategies were
elaborated jointly by US and Israeli politicians and
thinkers, and implemented simultaneously, though one cannot
deny that Israel had the opportunity to test this strategy
and these methods before the USA, Israeli neocons having won
the elections four years before their American counterparts.
The US and
Israel—but also Blair’s Great Britain, Italy of Berlusconi
and even Romano Prodi, and increasingly other western
countries—are conducting a world-war against the peoples of
the planet, with an unhidden agenda: to impose, by violence
and/or threat, the rule of the Neoliberal Empire. This
global war is a crusade of the Neo-Barbarians against human
civilization.
The role of
Israel in this partnership is to eradicate all forms of
resistance to the Empire in the Middle East, and first of
all the emblematic Palestinian resistance, which, at this
moment in history, is a line of defense not only for the
Palestinian people, but for all the peoples and nations of
the Middle East, from Lebanon to Iran. This is why support
for the Palestinian resistance needs to be understood as a
strategic priority for all the enemies of Barbarism, in the
Middle East as well as in the rest of the world.
[*]“Democide
Since World War II” By R.J. Rummel (numbers for 1945 –
1987).
[Michael
Warschawski is an Israeli activist and co-founder and
co-chairman of the Alternative Information Center (AIC).] |