Date: Tuesday, 20 August 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/imperialism-humanitys-greatest-evil
https://theduran.com/imperialism-humanitys-greatest-evil/
IMPERIALISM: Humanity’s Greatest Evil
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
The excerpts presented and discussed here are just an introduction to the subject of imperialism and its consequences in today’s world (a topic that’s addressed in broader conceptual depth in my 2022 book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change). For a quicker read of the following article, please read only what I have boldfaced in it (then read the whole thing if that initial scan of the article has interested you):
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THE TOP-SECRET TRUMAN-ADMIN. PLAN FOR THE U.S. GOV’T. TO COME TO CONTROL, EFFECTIVELY, THE ENTIRE WORLD:
The debate within the Truman Administration over how to deal with communism reached a point in 1950 when the viewpoint of diplomat George Kennan favoring its “containment” became pitted against that of investment banker Paul Nitze, favoring the attainment of an all-inclusive American empire. Nitze’s view won out, because Truman himself had already, by no later than 25 July 1945, been privately persuaded by his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower, that if the U.S. wouldn’t take over the entire world, then the Soviet Union would. The result of this debate was the top-secret (till 1975) National Security Council directive NSC-68, which stated on its page 61, in its Conclusions, “17. Soviet domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United States,” which meant that America must attain “domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means.” (Notice that it ignores the fact that both Russia and China are in, and even constitute the majority of, “Eurasia,” and, so, the U.S. regime there was the aggressor, by definition, because that isn’t U.S. land, it is EurAsian land.) Already by the time of 1947, Truman had established the structures to do that (to take over the world in the ways that NSC-68 warned the Soviet Union might do), by changing the Founding Fathers’s War Department to Truman’s forever-war ‘Defense’ Deparment, and by changing FDR’s OSS to his CIA.
Here is from from Wikipedia’s description of NSC-68:
http://web.archive.org/web/20210726214812/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68
NSC 68
United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC 68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry S. Truman on 7 April 1950. It was kept secret from the American people until 1975, when the U.S. Government chose to make it public, but even today its contents are very little known to the general American public, because the document made clear the aggressive intentions of the U.S. Government against the Soviet Union, and the U.S. Government's determination to control, effectively, the entire world. It was one of the most important American policy statements of the Cold War. In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s." NSC 68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. NSC 68 rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union.[1]
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That is the neoconservative, or actually Rhodesist, overtly imperialist, side of America’s elite institutions, but at the opposite end of America’s billionaire class, have been the moderate ones and their agents, who argue for co-existence with ‘the enemy’ — this being, though more subtly, a “Peace Through Strength” formulation to increase ‘Defense’ spending, and thus likewise acceptable to the billionaire-class.
For an example to show the dangerously reckless and unrealistic miscomprehending of the world on the part of America’s well-funded elite, the liberal “Ecomodernist Manifesto”, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, and endorsed and funded by many pro-megacorporate intellectuals, exemplifies such ‘moderate’ views, and says:
"Violence in all forms has declined significantly and is probably at the lowest per capita level ever experienced by the human species, the horrors of the 20th century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding. Globally, human beings have moved from autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased freedom.”
None of that is actually true. It is sheer fantasy, and the opposite of true. Not only are the U.S. and its allies approximately as much dictatorships by the top 0.1% rich and powerful, against their public, as are the countries that they are invading and sanctioning and destroying, but, also: According to Matthew White, who is the author of the most detailed historical study that has ever been published on the subject of war-casualties over the centuries — the book Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, and whose statistics are also online — the biggest war ever was WW II in the 20th Century, at 66 million corpses — but there were other big ones also during the 20th Century, such as rank #2 called there “Mao Zedong" because that capitalist author blames only the communists and not their capitalist (including fascist) opponents, and the total in that war was 40 million; then #6 is called “Joseph Stalin” and was supposedly NOT due to WW I, and it counted 20 million corpses; then #11, WW I, counted 15 million; and #16, the Russian Civil War, counted 9 million; and the Chinese Civil Wars, counted 7 million. So: all told, those 20th Century wars slaughtered 157 million, and that’s not only around half of all war-casualties in all of known history, all during the 20th Century, but it is overwhelmingly more war-casualties than in any prior century. Consequently, “the horrors of the 20th century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding” is actually ignoring all of that, and they do this because only by doing so can such fantasies be entertained by them as that “Globally, human beings have moved from autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased freedom.”
So, despite the lies by liberal elite fantasists, violence in all its forms has actually increased stunningly during the past century. Global population during the 20th Century increased 4.5 fold, but war-casualties increased even more. But in any case, what the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” said there is a mere fantasy that’s funded by billionaires, and is certainly not reality, not history, but just more mega-corporate propaganda.
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Here is from the most comprehensive study that has yet been done of the countable net costs to the world that have resulted from imperialism:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL EXCHANGE, March 2022
Jason Hickel a, b, c, Christian Dorninger d, e, Hanspeter Wieland f, Intan Suwandi g
Highlights
• Rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South.
• Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices.
• The South’s losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor of 30.
• Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality.
• The impact of excess resource consumption in the North is offshored to the South.
Abstract
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
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In section 1 we mentioned that Northern firms leverage monopsony and monopoly power to depress Southern suppliers’ prices while setting final prices artificially high. Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141). We can see how this plays out in the case of major products like iPhones. The iPhone is produced almost entirely in the global South, by arms-length suppliers. Apple, headquartered in the North, forces its suppliers to compete to drive prices down to cost, with wages depressed to the level of subsistence. This allows Apple to obtain the iPhone for cheap, and then, leveraging its patent monopoly (a privilege granted and enforced not by the market but by the state), mark up the final price by over 100% (see Smith, 2016). In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).
Unequal exchange is also enabled by geopolitical power imbalances in the world economy. For instance, high-income nations exercise monopoly power in the institutions of international economic governance (Chang, 2008). In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests. Subsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).
On top of this, there are several forces that work to prevent the South from developing sovereign industrial capacity (i.e., outside of subordinate positions in global commodity chains). SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.
In other words, structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices. These price differentials enable a significant drain of labour and resources from the South.
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6. Conclusion
This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.
Our findings on net resource appropriation support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77 (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016). At minimum, the social, economic and ecological damages associated with resource appropriation from the South – including damages from emissions – should be paid for by the appropriators, according to the polluter pays principle that operates in the European Union, United Kingdom, United States and other OECD countries. Reparations could also be paid according to the monetary value of appropriated resources, which could be used by the South to claim back resources from the North equivalent to what was drained, thus meeting Southern needs while reducing excess Northern consumption. Ultimately, however, the scale of ecological debt, like the value of resources themselves, cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Ecology is the basis of life itself and money cannot compensate for its loss. True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.
Our findings also have significant implications for international development theory and practice. It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.
There are a number of steps that could be taken toward this end. One would be to democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy. Another would be to end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity. Alternatively, and perhaps more directly, implementing a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices. [Doing that would require the type of U.N. that U.S. President FDR was planning and that his successor Truman neutered.]
Interventions along these lines would allow the South to capture a fairer level of income from international trade. This would be more effective at improving development outcomes than the existing prescriptions based on aid, liberalisation, and market integration; and it would enable the South to mobilize domestic resources and labour for meeting domestic needs, rather than for servicing Northern consumption. But it would also have significant implications in terms of ecology. Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.
Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however, as they would run against the interests of geopolitical factions that benefit prodigiously from the present structure of the global economy. Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below [note this phrase “POLITICAL STRUGGLE FROM BELOW”], including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today (WPCCC, 2010, Scheidel et al., 2020, Nation, 2021). It will also require Southern states to use industrial and fiscal policy to pursue economic sovereignty, food and energy self-sufficiency, progressive import substitution, and regional solidarities (Amin, 1990, Kaboub, 2008, Ajl, 2021).
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The following masterpiece of a speech — only 15 minutes long — from a debate at Oxford University, about imperialism, blew away the opposing side, and has probably never been topped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor%27s_Oxford_Union_speech 28 May 2015
“Shashi Tharoor's Stirring Speech at Oxford Union Goes Viral” no, use (the much better — but far less known) version:
“Dr Shashi Tharoor MP - Britain Does Owe Reparations”
transcript:
https://www.ibtimes.co.in/shashi-tharoor-garners-appreciation-his-spirited-argument-oxford-union-debate-full-text-640299 but (likewise less-known and) better is:
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https://www.amazon.com/How-West-Stole-Democracy-Arabs/dp/0802148204
How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance, Hardcover – Illustrated, April 21, 2020
[book] by Elizabeth F. Thompson (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars
90 ratings
Top reviews from the United States
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Theft of Democracy from the Arabs
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2021
Verified Purchase
Elizabeth Thompson has written a profoundly interesting, readable and valuable contribution to Middle Eastern scholarship. In this volume she has given all the leading figures a three dimensional reality, and full personalities. Her text narrates how the Western allies, victors of World War I, proceeded to discard Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and reserve the Middle Eastern lands of Iraq, and, chiefly here, Syria and Lebanon, for a continuation of Great Power imperialism under the fig-leaf guise of Mandates. These mandates would, on paper, prepare these countries and peoples for independence and full sovereignty, but, in reality, would only be a shell for continued European colonial rule. …
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TO SUMMARIZE: Imperialism is international theft that is organized and perpetrated by, and on behalf of, the aristocrats, the very wealthiest, in the thieving or “imperial” country, to rob from the poor of a foreign country, and to cut in on the proceeds from that theft the aristocrats of the country that’s to be robbed — stripped by exploiting and robbing from its poor. It does NOT ‘raise up the poor,’ but instead robs them and so makes them work harder and harder for less and less money. It’s fraud on a grand scale by the billionaires against everyone else, and enormously enriches billionaires. (The best video on that — and I think the greatest speech I’ve ever seen — is “Dr Shashi Tharoor MP - Britain Does Owe Reparations”.)
CONSEQUENTLY: The recommended “political struggle from below” will fail unless it targets not Governments but billionaires, especially the ones who, via their direct political-campaign contributions and their indirect ones paid through the profit and ‘non-profit’ corporations that they own and control, stand behind and grow their wealth from this mega-organized mega-theft. Collective (as opposed to individual) accountability and punishment is always wrong and profoundly unjust because ONLY the relatively few individuals who planned and created the crime (who can reasonably be presumed to include the individuals who benefited the most from it) should ever be punished for it, and full compensation plus penalties should be paid by them (we’re talking about trillions of dollars from the world’s wealthiest individuals) because these crimes were owned by them, and not by anyone else — not by any mass of people. So: the U.N. must first be reformed and its Charter Amended in order to establish a Court Against Imperialist Crimes, in order to identify, charge, prosecute, and convict, such mega-criminal individuals, who have been behind most of that bribery (of politicians) (including not only campaign contributions but also ‘news’-reporting so as to warp the public’s views of reality). Whenever necessary documentation by which to investigate such crimes is not made available to this Court, and the investigated individual can reasonably be presumed to have possessed that evidence, the law must treat that as being key evidence to convict the charged individual. So, the changes that would be necessary are far more than anyone has thus far suggested. However, to not rectify this problem is to condemn the future to be even worse. So, these changes must be made.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
