Book Reviews

- Jeremy Agar

"As Mothers Of The Land:The Birth Of The Bougainville Women For Peace And Freedom"

Josephine Tankunani Sirivi and Marilyn Taleo Havini, editors, Pandanus Books, Australian National University, 2004. $79.99

Some people do actually wage revolutions and wars of independence against the transnational corporations (TNCs). One such struggle occurred in our backyard – in 1989 the people of Bougainville, led by the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), succeeded in shutting down the cause of their misery, the gigantic Panguna mine, owned by Rio Tinto of Britain, the world’s biggest mining company, and the owner of Comalco in this country. The mine has never been re-opened nor has the company ever returned to the island. That war of independence against a TNC and its client government exacted a terrible cost in human suffering for the people of Bougainville and, in 1997, led to the extraordinary spectacle of the Papua New Guinean (PNG) government hiring foreign mercenaries to try to succeed where its own military had failed. This use of mercenaries by TNCs, particularly mining TNCs, has become common in Africa, and is the logical development of corporate feudalism. State violence has become privatised, along with all other State "services".

But we owe the people of PNG a big vote of thanks - they rose and physically chucked out the mercenaries, forced the Government to back down, and voted out the politicians (including the Prime Minister) who were responsible. The mercenaries fiasco provided the breakthrough to the peace settlement on Bougainville, which has achieved autonomy (with a guaranteed vote on independence to be held in ten to 15 years). The people of one of the world’s most "primitive" countries defeated the world’s biggest mining company and its local agents. And they did so with a minimum of bloodshed, using homemade weapons or those retrieved from where the retreating Japanese had stashed them during WW11.

For most of the 1990s, Bougainville was sealed off by a particularly brutal blockade by the PNG military (backed up by helicopters piloted by Australians and New Zealanders), which closed off all contact with the outside world and led to the deaths of anything up to 20,000 people, many from perfectly treatable illnesses. No medicines could get in and anyone requiring hospitalisation had to risk violent death from PNG forces on the short but extremely risky sea crossing to the nearby Solomon Islands. Ed.

This anthology of the experiences of Bougainville women* when their island was caught in a civil war is a memorable publishing event, the first of its kind. Bougainville, between PNG and the Solomons, was politically, but uneasily, part of PNG, which was trying to put down a secessionist revolt. The theme is of the personal struggles of the women represented in these pages. War is the constant background, but the topic is coping with deprivation. This is an effective approach, conveying some of the frustrations that ordinary people must have felt amid the mad swirl of a confusing war. An implied moral throughout is that no-one on Bougainville stood to gain, but cause and effect is not discussed, and blame is not dished out.

* Women play a much more prominent role in Bougainvillean society than is the case in most other Pacific nations. It is a matrilineal society i.e. land is passed down the female side of the family. Both editors were leading figures in the independence struggle, as were their husbands. Moses Havini was Bougainville’s international spokesperson, based in Australia; Josephine Sirivi’s husband, Sam Kauona, was the head of the BRA. Ed.

According to one contributor, up to 20,000 Bougainvilleans, or 10% of the population, died between 1988 and 1997. Sirivi estimates that PNG spent $A800 million on the war, a vast waste in the context of one of the world’s least developed areas. It was enough to ruin the fabric of Bougainvillean life, yet not enough to win. So the war dragged on with no one able to impose order.

Harrowing Reading

It makes for harrowing reading. Most of the book tells of daily life in camps where villagers hoped to avoid random violence in terrible conditions. Without basic medicine, unable to keep warm and dry, babies and the old died. It was little better in the few clinics run by the authorities, where, according to a nurse’s testament, basic hygiene was ignored.

Wisely, events are left to speak for themselves. When societies break down, the line between ignorance and malice can blur. Beyond the islands, the Australian government, it is hinted, played a dubious role, but New Zealand appears in these pages in an entirely favourable light. The talks which led to the end of the war, at which most of the books’ contributors were delegates, were held at Burnham Army Camp and Lincoln University. In the book’s Foreword, Don McKinnon, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, says that Sirivi is his son’s godmother. In 1998, as NZ’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, he played host to the negotiations that ended the violence.

 

"Tell Me Lies: Propaganda And Media Distortion
In The Attack On Iraq", edited by David Miller

David Miller editor, Pluto Press, London, 2004. $47.95

During the 1980-88 presidency of the late Ronald Reagan (see obituary elsewhere in this issue. Ed.), you might remember, the US had to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada because it was building an airport for Russian bombers. Nicaragua, on the Central American isthmus to the west, had been taken over by evil thugs. American TV viewers were reminded that Nicaragua was only "two days marching time" from Texas. It was a toss-up whether the Nicaraguans would beat the South American killer bees in the race to destroy America. Or would bees and Nicaraguans find Texas already bombed into submission? Cubans, in league with the Russians and Grenadians, were held responsible for much of the trouble. Further afield, Libyan hitmen and Hispanic narco-terrorists plotted.

In the last contribution to "Tell Me Lies", an analysis of the propaganda devised to sell the 2003 war on Iraq, Noam Chomsky recalls the 1980s in order to make the point that the comic-strip propaganda of Reaganite America might now seem absurd, but at the time it worked well enough. There was no mass rejection of Reagan’s claims by those in "Middle America" whose allegiance matters to Washington. Chomsky thinks Americans have learned. Major wars, like that waged against Vietnam, begun two decades earlier, could not now occur without provoking domestic opposition too strong for an American government to ignore.

Let’s hope he's right. If so, it will be at least partly the result of the efforts of Chomsky himself, who has documented American foreign policy for decades. One of his recurring themes has been that it’s never been pretty and its purpose - to secure the maximum possible global influence - is assumed by all American administrations. But if they were presented to the scrutiny of citizens, its violent methods would not be acceptable. So the need for secrecy and deception is permanent.

In NZ, during the 1960s and 70s, we were told that navies of Vietnamese might land on the beach at any time to enslave us. A government couldn’t sell that now. Could it? We didn’t believe it then either, so then we were told that the Chinese were making them do it. Now we are told that Osama bin Laden was behind Saddam’s nastiness. Or whatever it was that was being said. None of these things can stand scrutiny after the event.

We are accustomed to think of the Sixties as an age of enlightenment, but critical journalism about Vietnam was rare. Much of the grist for the anti-war mill was provided by one man, the late Izzy Stone. IF Stone's Weekly kept us updated with reports from Washington of seemingly non-stop scandal and abuse. Stone always said that he did nothing more than rummage around easily available public information. To him, the regular press corps were contemptible, content to parrot the self-serving press releases of officialdom. This was partly the consequence of an acceptance by US elites that foreign policy is "bi-partisan". It's always been bad manners to raise questions. Writers in this collection, both British and American, agree that little has changed. The conventional wisdom is still supine.

"Creative Destruction"

Now, with events in Iraq tottering near the uncontrollable, Americans might be getting restless. A flood of books are ridiculing Bush, who threatens domestic consensus and alienates foreigners in a way that no recent President has done. Much of the critique so far is personal and fusses about with gossip. Who cares if Dubya is inarticulate? Does it matter if he struts around his hobby ranch pretending to look for critters to brand? This collection, thankfully, doesn't waste space with cheap shots. Anyone can do that.

The Bush Administration is dangerous in that it is openly, defiantly, putting US interests ahead of other policy considerations. Some might think all US governments do this, but there are new emphases. For one thing, the US is now less likely to consult with other powers. This makes the opinions of Bush's advisers, who include some scary zealots, significant. We’re about to find out how far the US will go in defiance of world opinion. President Dubya doesn’t seem to mind what the rest of us think.

The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Little Aussie Battler, John Howard, have been Dubya’s only real mates. Both look shaky at home, possibly as a result. The tension between a more open American disdain for world opinion and an apparently sharpened international impatience with its behaviour in Iraq is giving Bush less room than he might have supposed he would have - though he might not have noticed. It's not likely that he took literally the June 2004 transfer of power to Iraqis.

In this context, "Tell Me Lies" is reassuring. Even Dubya would prefer some foreign backing. He probably thinks he still needs the UK. So for the sake of the rest of us it’s good to see that critics are thick on the ground in Britain. The book analyses the way in which the Blair government prepared the country for its decision to tag along with the dumping of Saddam Hussein. The war was always unpopular, at home as well as abroad. As we now know (and the case for the prosecution has become stronger since Miller put out this book) it was too big an ask. If you lie, you have to be able to hide the truth. The bulk of "Tell Me Lies" is a detailed investigation of how British propaganda evolved.

One UK war apologist mentioned in this collection tagged the attack on Iraq "creative destruction". This phrase, borrowed from a long-gone philosopher, has become a cliché with "more market" economists as a cute way of evading responsibility for their policies. Maybe things have to get worse before they can get better, they imply. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. In Iraq, where the destruction has been more in evidence than the creation, you have to wonder if they had a recipe. That's the trouble with an empty oxymoron substituting itself for responsible policy. You get a sense that the word-spinner is a neoliberal zealot on loan to the Foreign Office.

Abstract language is like that. It can't be tied down. Usually the propagandists prefer soothing inanity, and the normal public relations (PR) masquerades as pseudo-scientific, as though talking in long Latinate words proves you're objective. Blair himself is a smooth talker, gifted with a persuasive manner. You get the feeling he's been spinning words and clambering up the greasy pole of power all his life. His tone, when we hear him on Iraq, is a cross between Sunday School teacher and management lecturer. Blair is all moralising self-satisfaction, a foil to the fundamentalist Texan. At least Bush is blunt. The official New Labour style is all preachy evasion.

"Information Support"

It used to be that the UK Ministry of Defence carried out "psychological operations", or "psyops". The Blair government calls it "information support". "Information support" is what happens when you have a "traditional objective of influencing the perceptions of selected target audiences ... to mobilise and sustain support for a particular policy and interpretation of events". When MPs talk like this you get nostalgic for 007 (the fictional British spy, James Bond. Ed.) and some good old-fashioned villainy.

As was said apparently at the time of the disastrous 1990s Big Power response to Yugoslavian chaos, you have to fix "one and a half eyes on media perceptions". The people entrusted with running their country’s foreign relations think their responsibility has to do with "massaging public opinion into accepting controversial foreign policy decisions".

Notice how the emphasis is on manipulating domestic opinion elites, the politicians, journalists and academics who mediate between governments and the rest of us. For the policymaking classes, the public, as we were once called, doesn’t exist. We are assumed to be fit only to be passive consumers of the lies governments invent, and now refer to as their "products".

It’s hard to talk about this stuff without littering the page with endless quotation marks. The phrases of New Labourspeak have no meaning, so you can’t reject them. They’re there to baffle, to set the limits of acceptable discourse. As long as people put up with Big Brother "massaging" their minds, they won’t challenge with real words. The Blairites had to sell their "product" of an unwinnable and nasty war they must have known that few would like. British voters might call the result a pack of lies. The PM’s publicists call it "the Future Strategic Context".

Why Blair hitched his wagon to Dubya’s is still a subject of some bemusement. Past history and present economics suggest that oil has something to do with it, an observation that the PM likes to tag a "conspiracy theory". In this well-worn conceit a rational analysis of the effects of history, geography and politics on a nation’s policies is ridiculed as looney tunes. Instead Blair invites us to admire the sobriety of his take on why he had to fight Iraq. It has something to do with the agnostic Saddam Hussein’s penchant for launching missiles at Britain (which would have landed in 45 minutes flat) to further the cause of some foreign religious fanatics. Or something.

Stephen Dorril, a researcher with a track record, contributes a critique of how the State is skilled at "flattering and deceiving" journalists. While the journalists are as naive and lazy as they were in Stone's day, the "Intelligence agencies are not very good. The only mystery is why journalists have not treated them with the same derision and contempt they generally reserve for politicians".

This raises interesting points about Intelligence agencies and about politicians. We tend to think that the spies are idiotic hypocrites but it’s probably more accurate to say that they are idiots. In all the great crises of the 20th Century the conventional wisdom, as formed in Westminster and Washington, was wrong, and not just in hindsight. The policy experts did not listen to what informed lay opinion could have told them about Germany in the 1930s or about Vietnam in the 1960s.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

In the 30s the expertise was the random impressions of your mates from the old school. By the 60s, possibly in reaction to the amateur ethos, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sought an illusionary technological precision. But no matter how many computers print out how many spread sheets, if it’s garbage in, it’s still garbage out.

The spies have been good at fostering a mystique of their own brilliance, but the record is of permanent failure to understand what’s going on in the world. At first it seems incredible that Dubya’s billion-dollar "intelligence" gurus thought that the US Army could install a puppet regime in Iraq, call it a democracy, assume its longevity, and proclaim success. However, the record reminds us it’s par for the course. The CIA has never thought it needed to temper the often crude prejudices of its bosses with dispassionate understanding of foreign places. It’s easy to be an imperial bully when you don’t want to know and you don’t care. Bullies enjoy the way their ignorance has the power to anger opponents.

We accept that the "embedded" journalists in Iraq, dependent on the US and UK governments, could not be trusted to probe for themselves in print. We might also consider the dangers of embedding ourselves with the sorts of politicians who accept New Labour-style Orwellian language. Whenever words are used for the sole purpose of hiding the truth, we’re in trouble. The Blair project, with its "Future Strategic Contexts", is ultimately aimed at its own citizens. Its "information support" has other "products" to sell. And if we let our governments treat our public business, any of it, as a PR ad campaign, we too are victims of a propaganda war.

The conventional wisdom to explain Blair’s increasing unpopularity at home is that he is paying the price for his Iraq policy. It could be truer to say that Blair’s former supporters are reacting to having to cross one rickety bridge too far. The Iraq mess is not a one-off. It’s one of series of New Labour betrayals. In all of them, and most are to do with domestic policy, Blair has tried to talk his way out of trouble, the words spiralling out from the Westminster thinktanks towards his audiences among the British elites, and thence to Washington.

 

"Hegemony Or Survival:
America's Quest For Global Dominance"

Noam Chomsky, Allen & Unwin, NSW, 2003.

Noam Chomsky’s title challenges with a stark dilemma. America can become the single world power, able to impose its will over everyone else, or we can survive. It’s just the sort of big statement that more cautious commentators would put as a question, an attention grabber to provoke debate. That’s not Chomsky’s style. He wants us to take him literally.

There’s nothing rhetorical about Chomsky. He is one of the most respected critics of US policy, making his case only after a relentless accumulation of fact and logic. Those who don’t know Chomsky might assume that his take on ballistic missile defence is that of a sci-fi buff or that his contempt for the Bushites is biased. Big media in the US and other apologists for the US state don’t make either criticism. They try to ignore Chomsky. This is a big compliment. If he didn’t make his case so well, they’d ridicule him.

Chomsky’s book is about pretty much all of American foreign and economic policy. He takes us to every continent and into space. It sounds sweeping and airy. It isn’t. When Chomsky looks at official space policy his feet are planted on a firm grounding of historical relevance: "The goals of militarisation of space are far-reaching. The Space Command’s Clinton-era brochure Vision for 2020 announced the primary goal prominently on the front cover: ‘dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment’. This is presented as the next phase of the historic task of military forces. Armies were needed ‘during the westward expansion of the continental United States’ - in self-defence. Nations also built navies, the Space command continues, ‘to protect and enhance their commercial interests’. The next logical step is space forces to protect ‘US national interests and investments’, including missile defence, as well as ‘space-based strike weapons’ enabling ‘the application of precision force from, to, and through space’" (p229)

For successive American governments, in other words, there is no real distinction to be made between establishing control over the "continental" US (all of its 50 States except Alaska and Hawaii) and running the rest of the planet. What they call America’s "manifest destiny" to do what it likes has been accepted by all US leaders for over a century. The difference is that in the early, continental stage, Native Americans were killed; in the succeeding stages, foreigners were killed. Now, however, as Space Command knows, "globalisation" is expected to bring about a "widening economic divide" between "haves" and "have-nots". The natives around the world are restless.

They Need To Know That Resistance Is Futile

Unlike so many critics of US policy, Chomsky can join the dots so that the picture comes into focus. Foreign and domestic policy have a common motivation: to make the world safe for US investors. As a miltary power the US is now a hegemon to an extent that was not the case even ten years ago. There is no other combination of militaries that can pose a threat. Economically, however, America, while dominant, is not in absolute control. Europe and Japan are important enough to be taken into account.

Hence the concentration on terrorism and "rogue States" - those few countries which resist integration into the American orbit. Global neoliberalism has tied smaller countries to US markets, while retarding domestic development. We hear of the inevitable results through the riots, famines and bombings in the daily news.

Chomsky draws through the otherwise random moments of history, so that his portrait is clearly three-dimensional. While US policy now is global in its reach, the US has dominated the Americas almost from the beginning. Washington wanted docile labourers and access to raw materials, but local governments weren’t always to be relied on to sell out their own people. The State Department warned in 1945 that the locals wanted "policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses....Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country" (p66).

The US therefore imposed its "Economic Charter for the Americas", the means by which it ended this "economic nationalism in all its forms". It had to. If countries controlled their own economies they could usher in dangerous "new aspirations for industrialisation". To say that American involvement has been bad for poorer countries might seem harsh, but it should not surprise any of us colonials. The history of NZ after British colonisation, for instance, was partly a history of what happened after the Bank of England damped our "new aspirations for industrialisation".

Those who would like to dismiss Chomsky have a major problem. His basic argument is that states protect their interests. Henry Kissinger *, the most destructive of modern US tacticians, has said the same thing. Kissinger would agree with Chomsky that armies aren’t raised and space shuttles aren’t designed in a policy vacuum. Corporations with billions invested don’t fund friends and relatives for political office just for the hell of it. The themes of Chomsky’s books - this is his latest of many - are consistent with our common-sense hunches about the nature of power. * Dr Henry Kissinger was National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford in the 1960s and 70s, a truly Machiavellian figure, and if there was any justice in the world, he would have long ago stood trial as one of the 20th Century’s worst war criminals. Ed.

American policy has long assumed a need to keep others dependent, often an absolute dependence in the case of poorer, developing countries. Chomsky is unable to find any exception to a pattern of imposed impoverishment, often enforced by the Marines in the name of restoring "order" or creating "democracy". He suggests that in the post-WW2 era there were only two armed interventions that did in fact improve life for the civilians involved, but that neither was an American intervention. One was India’s invasion to halt chaos in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The other, Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Pol Pot’s genocidal Cambodia, was actively opposed by the US.

A Global Network Of Mass Murderers And Kleptocrats

Vietnam was defined as a major enemy, but not because it had beaten the US. Vietnam’s sin was that it was allied with the former Soviet Union at a time when this was the one cardinal sin in US theology. Grand strategy demanded that thugs around the world be installed - if the thugs renounced the Devil. Chomsky takes us through some of the worst excesses. In 1965 an American diplomat reported back in alarm that Indonesians wanted "to stand on their own feet’ free from foreign influence". If they succeeded, the US government agreed, "Indonesia would provide a powerful example for the underdeveloped world and hence a credit to communism and a setback for Western prestige" (p93). Some half a million people were therefore killed in Suharto’s coup.

It’s hard to think of any of the world’s recent tyrants who were not sponsored by the US State. Chomsky cites Ferdinand Marcos, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, Mobutu Sese Suko and Manuel Noriega *. And so long as they were anti-Moscow, even Communists were among the Elect, notably the most dictatorial commie of the lot, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaucescu - admired by the first Bush for his "respect for human rights". *The dictators of the Philippines, Haiti, the former Zaire and Panama, respectively. Marcos died in US exile and lies, unburied, in the Philippines. Duvalier lives in luxurious French exile. Mobutu died in Moroccan exile. Noriega is in an American prison. Ceaucescu and his wife were summarily shot by those who overthrew them. Ed.

Saddam Hussein, whose example ties the threads of Chomsky’s story, was another client. US Iraq policy can be understood fully once we appreciate Chomsky’s twin themes. These are, firstly, that foreign and economic policy are interdependent, and, secondly, that present policies are a continuation of traditional policy. Like Noriega, Hussein was once "our" puppet.

It is through such a lens that Afghanistan’s recent woes come into focus. The bin Laden fanatics and their drug-exporting mates hated the secular tone of an insecure Afghan government that came to rely on the Soviets. So Al Qaeda joined the list of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stooges. For the Americans this alignment was unexceptional, Afghanistan being on the Soviet Union’s border and thereby a link in the fence "containing" evil.

Of all those who have offended the US state, Cuba was longest at the top of the enemies list. Chomsky reminds us why the US provoked Cuba to seek Soviet help. The British Ambassador reported to his Government that the head of the CIA, the archetypal cold warrior John Foster Dulles, asked him not to provide a beleagured Fidel Castro with arms. His "main reason was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet arms" and justify a US embargo. The Americans went on to stage terrorist incidents intended to set up Cuba. It reads like madcap conspiracy theory stuff, but Chomsky’s sources are unimpeachable.

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century the US did all it could to sharpen world tensions, the means by which it could flex military muscle and gain economic influence. Chomsky shows, for instance, how successive American governments panicked the Russians into an arms race, a strategy which has been attributed to former President Ronald Reagan. The policy was in fact longstanding. Wasting billions of dollars on weapons too terrible to use did more than impoverish the "Evil Empire". It helped extend the American State’s power over potential rivals, domestic and foreign.

The present shape of US policy was formed after 1945, but Chomsky traces the drive for global dominance back to Woodrow Wilson, the President normally regarded as a genuine nice guy. There’s nothing new under the eagle’s talons, Chomsky suggests, referring to America’s "twin goals that have been declared with considerable clarity: to institutionalise a radical restructuring of domestic society that will roll back the progressive reforms of a century, and to establish an imperial grand strategy of permanent world domination" (p125).

American Triumphalism

In 1992 an in-house elite academic, Francis Fukuyama, made himself popular with the establishment by declaring that America had made it. There would be no more interference from lesser nations. The United Nations, thought by some to be the voice of all the world, had become "perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism and indeed may be the primary mechanism through which that unilateralism will be exercised in the future" (p29).

Fukuyama had in mind the ending of the cold war. For Bush the Second this freed his hand to revive the Reaganite nightmare of first-strike nuclear weapons. Bush wants Star Wars. He also wants to develop nukes which could be deployed on the battlefield. This in turn would erode the distinction that has existed between conventional and nuclear weapons, and with it, the logic of deterrence. Nothing is to deter the grand imperialists. All the boundaries that restrain the raw exercise of dominant power are being washed away.

There is a random irony of history in a detail noted by Chomsky. In 1982 Cuba, the chief villain of the Cold War era, was added to the official list of terrorist states, replacing Iraq, so as to make Saddam eligible for US aid. More recently, of course, Saddam’s Iraq was back as Public Enemy Number One, while Cuba matters less.

There is, however, an important distinction to be made. The US went after Cuba because it was the most advanced nation in Latin America, offering a dangerously hopeful example to its peers. The US attacked Iraq because it could. Propaganda to justify the 2003 war, as we are discovering daily, was perfunctory. The developing world now has no Kennedy-era Castros, no pin-up Che Guevaras (that’s one reason why dismal North Korea is left alone. The other reason is that it might have nukes).

This is a point that Chomsky does not make, perhaps because he assumes he will make it for ourselves, but he does make a comparable point about the Bush insults offered to Germany and France. Remember those cheese-eating surrender monkeys? They were "Old" Europe. Former East bloc regimes, desperate for bribes, went all the way with the USA. They’re "New" Europe. It wasn’t just that the Coalition of the Bidden were neoliberal zealots, champions of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). What might be more important is that Germany and France were serious countries maintaining a social market system, providing evidence that capitalism does not have to be extremist to survive. They are to Bushite America what the revisionist (former) Yugoslavia was to Stalin.

That last bit is not in Chomsky, who stays on task throughout (and might or might not agree). It’s just as well he didn’t insert opinions or follow hunches or his book would stop being comprehensive and start being cluttered. As it is, we get more than a summary of recent events. This would be interesting, but it would be less than what "Hegemony Or Survival" offers.

Chomsky goes beyond the headlines and behind the more obvious nastinesses, enabling us to see why community standards are under constant and increasing attack. The Bush government is presiding over what it hopes to be the final transfer of the ability to regulate society from elected governments to unelected corporations.

"Since World War 11," Chomsky set out to demonstrate, "the US government has adopted the standard practice of powerful states, regularly choosing force over law when that was considered expedient for ‘the national interest’, a technical term referring to the special interests of domestic sectors that are in a position to determine policy" (p29). The policy has been constant. Only the openness with which Dubya goes about it, to the exclusion of niceties, is new. And his military reach is absolute.

War On The Very Notion Of Society

In this context it’s sobering to hear that a National government (keen, according to its shadow Defence Minister, to tag along with any and all future US invasions) would reform the Resource Management Act by including a Think Big "national interest" clause. Environmental issues are in fact a frequent expression of the conflict between public and private government. Bush’s drive for global power means the right to control not just space, but also the world’s water and air.

So an anti-social US government is inevitable: "The Bush Administration has been widely criticised for undermining the Kyoto Protocol (on global warming. Ed.) on grounds that to conform would harm the US economy. The criticisms are in a sense odd, because the decision is not irrational within the framework of existing ideology. We are instructed daily to be firm believers in neoclassical markets, in which isolated individuals are rational wealth maximisers. If distortions are eliminated, the market should respond perfectly to their ‘votes’, expressed in dollars or some counterpart. The value of a person’s interests is measured the same way. In particular, the interests of those with no votes are valued at zero: future generations, for example. It is therefore rational to destroy the possibility for decent survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing we can maximise our ‘wealth’ - which means a particular perception of self-interest constructed by vast industries devoted to implanting and reinforcing it. The threats to survival are currently being enhanced by dedicated efforts not only to weaken the institutional structures that have been developed to mitigate the harsh consequences of market fundamentalism, but also to undermine the culture of sympathy and solidarity that sustains these institutions" (p235).

The NZ branch of this ideology expressed its understanding of first principles by naming its political party the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (the original name of ACT. Now it is just known by the word. Ed.). Like Dubya, ACT leader Rodney Hide and his mates believe they have to strengthen State controls in order to secure private wealth. They believe we do not exist as social beings with common interests. We are consumers rather than citizens. ACT - and National’s leader, Don Brash, their agent - has as its mission statement the "dampening of new aspirations" that could take the form of a new "economic nationalism".


Non-Members:
It takes a lot of work to compile and write the material presented on these pages - if you value the information, please send a donation to the address below to help us continue the work.

Foreign Control Watchdog, P O Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa. August 2004.

Email cafca@chch.planet.org.nz

greenball Return to Watchdog 106 Index
CyberPlace