Matrix Escape

Escape from the Matrix

Escape From The Matrix by Richard K. Moore

Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative from Global

Tyranny to Democratic Renaissance by Richard K. Moore

Escape From The Matrix

By RICHARD K. MOORE

The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises “the truth, nothing more.” Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality – something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato’s famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what’s going on in the world – and how things got to be that way – in this era of globalisation. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality – like the Matrix in the film – is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn’t know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn’t make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, “grain of salt” no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality – as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media – bears very little relationship to actual reality. “The matrix” was a metaphor I was ready for.

In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) “left” and “right” are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.

This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is “the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth.... As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free.” Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I’ve had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

Imperialism and the Matrix

From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward – to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labour, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.

The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things – the White Man’s Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history – the fabric of the matrix.

While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honour, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.

Industrialisation, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.

Thus capitalism, industrialisation, nationalism, warfare, imperialism – and the matrix – coevolved. Industrialised weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked – or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

World War II and Pax Americana

1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission – breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established. The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see recommended reading), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.

In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being “democratised”; in the real world, imperialism had become better organised and more efficient. In the matrix world the US “restored order,” or “came to the assistance” of nations which were being “undermined by Soviet influence”; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.

Growing glitches in the matrix weren’t noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realised in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

Glitches in the Matrix, Popular Rebellion, and Neo-liberalism

The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protesters and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest.

These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime’s stability was being challenged from within the core – and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar’s eye-opening Trilateralism (see recommended reading). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations’s Foreign Affairs (see recommended reading).

Huntington tells us that democratic societies “cannot work” unless the citizenry is “passive.” The “democratic surge of the 1960s” represented an “excess of democracy,” which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington’s notion of “traditional policies” is expressed in a passage from the report:

To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment’.

In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarises the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan’s economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialise and become an imperial player – the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan’s then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments – in both reality and rhetoric.

If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits. Regulations governing corporate behaviour could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatised, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption. The matrix reality used real terms like “deregulation,” “reduced taxes,” and “privatisation,” but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of economics, and “less government” became the proud “modern” theme in America and Britain. Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to “get government off people’s backs.” The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

The academic term for laissez-faire economics is “economic liberalism,” and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the “neoliberal revolution.” It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality – a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticised in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected – reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing. Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favour. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

Globalization and World Government

The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognise this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilise national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework – and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.

The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realise that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations – with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory “interference” – were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest “democracies,” the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilising, instead of stabilising, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organisation. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.

The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximise profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.

Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal “reform” packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the “international community,” whose goal is to serve “humanitarian” causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his “Clinton Doctrine,” in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.” This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that “assistance” usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton’s handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find “innocent civilians” wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalisation is referred to as “reform,” (the word is never used with irony). “Democracy” and “reform” are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn’t, it must be your own fault: you aren’t “competitive” enough. Economic failures are explained away as “temporary adjustments,” or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. “Investor confidence” is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the “will of the gods.”

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington’s “The Crisis of Democracy” report discussed earlier.

Management of Discontented Societies

The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, “responding” to the programmed public will.

The “excess democracy” of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn’t worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalisation; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.

The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarised police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos – where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated – have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.

So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realised that much of the US Bill of Rights would need to be neutralised. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill’s authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organise and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralisation project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labour. The Rubicon has been crossed – the techniques of oppression long common in the empire’s periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which “rights” are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring “wars” on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets – and you can’t win a war without using your enemy’s dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary – as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defences into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control – standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with other for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population’s energy will be spent on inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralised, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense – the matrix version of divide and rule.

The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximise divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of “true believers” makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women’s movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the “right wing.”

In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society’s political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organised factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximisation of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton’s liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics – this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

Escaping the Matrix

The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalisation, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal – as earlier, with the Vietnam War. Last November’s anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalisation and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.

Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalisation and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defences at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalisation is centralised tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix “democracy” is elite rule; and “market forces” are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.

Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever – until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.

The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralised-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn’t amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s – and we certainly cannot characterise all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialisation – all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: “Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits.”

The matrix defines “democracy” as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society’s direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions – from the local to the global – on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonised through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonization.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonises the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain’t left or right. It’s up and down.
Here we all are down here struggling while
the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!
— Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist.

Footnotes

1. Primarily Western Europe, later joined by the United States.
2. See “KGB-ing America”, Tony Serra, Whole Earth, Winter, 1998.

Recommended reading:

Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, Peter Rosset, World Hunger, Twelve Myths, Grove Press, New York, 1986.

Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization Of Poverty, The Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, 1997.

Jerry Mander & Edward Goldsmith, ed, The Case Against The Global Economy And For A Turn Toward The Local, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1996.

Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann, The Global Trap, Globalization & The Assault On Democracy & Prosperity, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997.

William Greider, One World Ready Or Not, The Manic Logic Of Global Capitalism, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.

Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1992.

James Goldsmith, The Response, Macmillan, London, 1995.

Third World Resurgence, a magazine published monthly by the Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia.

The New Internationalist, a magazine published monthly by New Internationalist Publications, Ltd, Oxford, UK.

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1. Pax Americana and the postwar corporate regime

If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible. - Harry S. Truman, 1941

World War II resulted in overwhelming U.S. military supremacy. A regime of American-backed "peace" - a Pax Americana - was established early in the postwar world. European businesses could get the benefit of foreign trade and investment without the assistance of their own fleets and armies. Under this new regime, it no longer made much sense for European powers to fight with one another or to compete militarily for economic spheres. After 1945 the old empires were gradually dismantled and Western Europe entered an unprecedented era of collaboration.

The fundamental structure of the international economy had rapidly shifted from partitioned to integrated. And for the first time in many centuries a lasting peace in Western Europe had been achieved. Both of these developments followed naturally from a single revolutionary shift - the establishment of the Pax Americana regime. Before that regime, globalization was impossible and European peace had been unachievable; with the regime, the peace followed naturally and the integration of the global economy, in one form or another, became inevitable.

The outcome of World War II had given America military supremacy, but the U.S. had other options available to it besides establishing the Pax Americana regime. There was considerable domestic pressure for the U.S. to return to isolationism and minimize foreign entanglements. Why did America instead pursue a role of active leadership, guiding the creation of the UN, the IMF, and the other postwar international institutions? And why didn't America follow standard Western tradition, and use its overwhelming power to carve out its own private sphere of influence, leaving the European powers to stake out their own?

It turns out there are very clear answers to these questions. In fact, the strategic considerations that went into these momentous policy choices are a matter of public record.

In 1939 important parts of the world were coming under the control of Japan and Germany, and the U.S. government was trying to figure out what response would best serve U.S. interests. The government turned to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and empowered it to convene a series of planning sessions in order to come up with a sensible U.S. strategy. The CFR was a prominent voice for sentiment which was widespread among U.S. policy makers and elites. The planning sessions were highly secret at the time, but notes and bulletins produced by the sessions have since become publicly available. The development of the strategic thinking can be clearly traced.

The CFR sessions immediately focused on economic considerations. They systematically assessed market sizes, and resource availability, in different parts of the world. They were seeking to identify what sphere of influence the U.S. would require in order to fulfill the trade requirements of the imperialist American economy. Out of these deliberations came the fundamental framework for U.S. war strategy.

In their initial thinking, the Council planning teams were inclined to write off Hitler's gains as irreversible. They painstakingly calculated that they needed the Western Hemisphere, the British Commonwealth, and Asia - as "friendly" zones - in order to remain viable as a world power. They decided that Japan's expansion must be stopped, that Japan must be ultimately incorporated into the American fold, and that Great Britain was central to U.S. strategy. But by 1941 the grand planners expanded their objectives to include the defeat of Germany and the establishment of a world-wide "friendly" zone - what was to later become known as the free world, the underdeveloped world, or the third world.

The Council also outlined, during 1941-2, the basic structures of the Bretton Woods arrangements - the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. The fundamental objectives behind this blueprint were stated clearly and candidly by the participants themselves in publicly available documents. The excerpts below are from the book Trilaterialism - The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management.

Recommendation P-B23 (July 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of "stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions." During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world. - Trilateralism, p. 148

Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure "security", and at the same time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism". The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body. - Trilateralism, p. 149.

From this it becomes clear that the primary objective behind this planning was to facilitate the growth of the global capitalist economy ("facilitate programs of capital investment"). No other primary concerns seemed to play any role in the planning process - least of all any related to human rights, or world peace, or democratic sovereignty. Economic growth, and economic growth alone was the prize upon which these planners always kept their eyes. The rest of the agenda, as expressed above, was about how to accomplish this single objective.

The third world ("backward and underdeveloped regions") was targeted as the place where growth can be generated - through corporate-funded development projects ("capital investment for constructive undertakings "). The planners anticipated that third-world nations would need to be coerced into this agenda ("the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories"). They also anticipated that overt imperialism would be politically unacceptable in the postwar world ("avoid conventional forms of imperialism."). A solution was identified to solve these anticipated problems. That was to deploy American power ("United States had to exercise the strength"), but to disguise it as an international mission ("make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body."). Ironically, the covert objective for the UN - coercion through intervention - was nearly the opposite of the public objective - peace through cooperation.

These policy recommendations were adopted and the postwar "free world" developed accordingly. In public reality the U.S. would be providing benign leadership and policing on behalf of the international community in pursuit of democracy and peace. In hidden reality the U.S. would be intervening on behalf of international capital while explaining its actions in public-reality terms. That's what was explicitly anticipated in the CFR planning documents, and that's precisely how things have developed ever since. William Blum's Killing Hope chronicles in detail the postwar history of this dual-agenda system, contrasting rhetoric with reality in 55 separate intervention incidents. Some of these interventions were overt and some covert - but the motivating agendas were in all cases covert.

In order to carry out the hidden agenda - maximizing capital growth through exploitive third-world development - it was necessary that the socialist ideology be contained. "Mother Russia", which had been heralded as the West's staunch ally against fascism, suddenly became the "Red Menace". In 1946 Churchill articulated the doctrine of the "Iron Curtain" and the Cold War was on. There followed a decades-long propaganda campaign in Western media which demonized the Soviet Union. The Nazi intelligence network which had operated throughout Eastern Europe was kept intact and was incorporated into the new U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Covert destabilization operations against the Soviets were an ongoing part of the Cold War.

It was the ideology of socialism that needed to be contained much more than the USSR itself. Any ideology which sought to organize a third-world economy around its own local self interests, rather than external investor interests, was labeled "Marxist", and the Soviet expansionist Bogeyman was offered as an excuse for whatever "order restoring" military intervention might be required. In fact Soviet forces, and later Chinese, preferred for the most part to stay home and keep order within what was called the Communist Bloc. It was American bases that were strung around the globe, not Soviet or Chinese ones.

The leadership of this global regime remains to this day centered in the top echelons of the U.S. government. And the tradition of ongoing elite strategic planning has been institutionalized in the form of the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and miscellaneous other agencies - all working closely with a network of corporate-linked think tanks and consulting firms. As the U.S. continues to impose its leadership, using unilateral force when considered necessary, it follows the policy guidelines defined by this highly secret, ongoing, corporate-dominated, elite planning process.

Thus it is a corporate elite which is guiding the direction of global events - for its own benefit. Western populations benefitted economically from this system in the immediate postwar years - but the price they paid was the loss of democratic control over their destinies. In the final analysis the people of the West are just as much victims of this elite global regime as is the rest of the world. This fact became apparent with the unfolding of the neoliberal revolution.

Recommended reading:

Holly Sklar ed., Trilaterialism - The Trilateral Commission And Elite Planning For World Management, South End Press, Boston, 1980.

William Blum, Killing Hope, U.S. Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine, 1995.

Michael Parenti, The Sword And The Dollar, Imperialism, Revolution, And The Arms Race, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1989.

Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old And New, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994.

David Horowitz, editor, Containment And Revolution, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967

James Bradford, The Puzzle Palace, Inside The National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization, Penguin Books, New York, 1983.

Covert Action Quarterly magazine, published quarterly by Covert Action Publications, Inc., Washington D.C. 1994.

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2. The Neoliberal Revolution & The Crisis of Democracy

In the postwar years the West continued to exploit the third world as it had been doing for centuries. The primary difference was that the imperial partitions had been removed and a single nation was providing overall "security". Imperialism went from being competitive to being collective. Western nations, apart from America, shed their roles as first-rate military powers - but strong industrialized economies continued to be the fulcrum of global economic affairs. The vision of the postwar era was one of prosperous and contented populations in the industrialized world, living in economically sound nations.

When Volkswagens sold on world markets, the economic benefits went largely to German workers, to a German corporation, and to the German national budget. The story was similar for Renault & France, Fiat & Italy, General Motors & America - or Toyota & Japan. As the global economy grew, the general prosperity of the populations in industrialized nations reached unprecedented levels. The postwar system worked to the benefit of industrialized nations, their corporations, and their populations.

Today - as was discussed above in The Crisis Of Globalization - industrialized nations are in decline. Economic power has shifted from nations to transnational corporations and financial institutions. The WTO - which acts as the agent of international capital - is able to dictate economic policy even to the USA, the world's only super power. General Motors, for example, no longer "belongs to" the U.S. - its factories are spread around the world, Detroit is cluttered with abandoned factories, auto workers have sought new jobs or have become unemployed, and the U.S. treasury receives little direct benefit from GM's immense profits.

The postwar economy was governed by two things: the industrialized nations themselves, and the Bretton Woods institutions. These institutions - primarily the IMF and the World Bank - acted as system gyroscopes. They were designed to stabilize the system and to buffer it against financial and market fluctuations. The U.S. dollar was pegged to gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce, and other major currencies were linked to the dollar by a schedule of stable exchange-rates. Industrialized nations controlled the flow of currencies and capital across their borders. They could establish trade restrictions and could regulate industry so as to maintain the overall health of their national economies.

For two decades the elite-designed system operated according to plan. On the surface it seemed ideal for all parties in the West - the general population, nations, and investors. But stresses were building up beneath the surface and by the late 1960s those stresses were leading to serious problems for Western capital interests. One of these stresses was caused by the very success of the system. Economic growth had been so strong up through the 1960s that maintaining that rate became problematic. Western corporations were finding it difficult to keep up their record levels of growth.

Another source of stress came from the emergence of non-Western economic powers such as Japan. Lower Japanese wages allowed their products to be priced attractively on world markets. The Western commitment to general prosperity - and decent wages - made it difficult for Western firms to compete against such non-Western upstarts. The principle of general prosperity in the West was coming into conflict with the goal of capital growth for Western investors. The postwar system was under stress, and as Japanese products flooded world markets this source of stress mounted.

Western prosperity was important to the postwar regime for two reasons. One reason was that well-paid Westerners were good consumers - their buying power created demand for the products the capitalist system was producing. Prosperity was also important because it provided public support for the regime. The elite planners had assumed that a prosperous population would be a content population, and that a content population would be a politically docile population. Why would people be concerned about how the inner circle was running the world, if those people were well off and had lots of goodies to enjoy? A democratic political system was no problem for the inner circle who ran the regime - as long as voters were docile. A prosperous electorate, it was assumed, would be happy to simply vote and leave the elite regime to run things.

Then quite unexpectedly in the mid 1960s a significant wave of popular discontent began to arise throughout the West. Prosperity was experiencing all-time highs but people were beginning to demonstrate that they lived by more than bread alone. A civil-rights movement sprang up in America, along with an anti-Vietnam War movement. An environmental movement arose throughout the West, challenging the exploitive practices of capitalist development. A general sentiment against militarism and interventionism prevailed, challenging the methods by which the regime managed world affairs. In America there arose a broad-based and fairly well-organized New Left political movement. In Europe, 1968 took its place with 1848 as an historic milestone of popular unrest.

Environmental protection laws were passed which raised corporate costs and cut into profits. Anti-militarist sentiment remained high, making it difficult for interventions to be justified - a phenomenon that came to be known as the Vietnam Syndrome. Even the system of government secrecy - enabling the inner circle to exercise covert control - came under attack in the U.S. with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. The elite regime was under attack from below, and continued prosperity was failing to quell the tide.

As a consequence, the democratic process itself was becoming a net liability to the regime. Popular idealism was taking the political initiative and was pushing politicians in directions that were contrary to elite interests. As environmental and other popular reform measures were implemented, the strong nation state - with its ability to regulate capital flows and corporations - was also becoming a hindrance to corporate growth. The primary interests of the elite were being seriously challenged, and the architecture they had designed was spinning out of control. A crisis had arisen for the elite, and by the early 1970s the time had come to make fundamental adjustments in the postwar architecture.

The first revolutionary shift in the postwar regime came in 1972 when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. That act immediately removed the solid anchor to which major currencies had been pegged. Soon after that the system of fixed exchange rates had to be abandoned since the real value of the American dollar was now subject to fluctuations. A process of creeping destabilization occurred, leading to the gradual development of international financial markets of astronomical size and extreme volatility. Ultimately, in the modern era of globalization, the Bretton Woods institutions themselves have become a vehicle of intentional destabilization.

In 1980, under the charismatic leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a host of other revolutionary changes were introduced. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution goes under several names, and the term that is used most in international circles is neoliberal revolution. Economic liberalism is the doctrine that Adam Smith advocated: free markets unhampered by government interference. In the late 1800s economic liberalism was dominant in the USA and Britain, and it was referred to as laissez-faire capitalism. This era was disastrous for society, and the doctrine fell into general disrepute. Reagan & Thatcher re-introduced the doctrine with a vengeance. Economic liberalism was being revived, and hence the name "neoliberalism". The American political term "liberal" is quite a different thing altogether - American liberals tend to favor government regulation of industry if they think it will be good for society. Neoliberals always put capital growth first, American liberals would put societal benefit first.

The central themes introduced by the neoliberal revolution were deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and the use of mass propaganda to create support for neoliberal policies and to undermine confidence in government itself. This turned out to be a very radical program of change and sophisticated propaganda was central to its success. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of economic history knew that neoliberalism would devastate society as it had in the late 1800s. The elite planners faced a major challenge: how to somehow hoodwink the electorate into tolerating the inevitable consequences.

As in the war-years, a dual-agenda propaganda strategy was adopted. The hidden agenda, as one would expect, was about the expansion of capital growth for wealthy investors. The public agenda was one of liberation: liberating individuals and businesses from "bungling government interference".

The propaganda line went something like this... Tax cuts would take money away from "the politicians" and put it into the hands of businesses and ordinary people - where it could be used "more efficiently". Deregulation would put an end to "government meddling" and allow the "efficient private sector" to "get on with business". All of our societal woes had been caused by "government bungling" and "special interest politicians". If those evil forces could be reined in, then corporations can get on with the job of "rebuilding our economies" and everyone would benefit. Privatization of government-run industries and services was "obviously a good thing" - it would give some "efficient private operator" a chance to clean up the mess that had been created by government ownership.

A notable feature of this propaganda line is its radical fundamentalism. That is, there aren't any qualifiers: government is always bad, it is always inefficient, and it never does anything right. Private business on the other hand is always efficient and never does anything wrong - and it certainly never needs to be regulated by government. There are no balancing considerations, no data to be looked at, no debate to be entered into. The question, once this line has been swallowed, is simply how quickly the project can be undertaken. How quickly can government be made "smaller"? How quickly can business be "freed"? How rapidly can taxes be cut and by how much?

There were in fact two limits to the rate at which the neoliberal agenda could be pursued. The first limit came from the elite planners themselves. Their own agenda was about the orderly expansion of capital growth, which does require the balancing of various considerations, and looking at data, and debating tradeoffs. But in terms of public resistance, the only limit was that society shouldn't be allowed to deteriorate so quickly that unrest outstripped the ability of propaganda to placate that unrest. As long as the ongoing propaganda campaign remained effective, its fundamentalist nature allowed the elite to push things along at their own chosen speed. There was no obvious point where a new propaganda line would be needed - as long as a single regulation remained on the books, the neoliberal revolution could continue to march forward.

In the initial postwar regime, Western governments were expected to regulate industry so as to achieve healthy and balanced national economies. Critical industries or infrastructures might be subsidized, so as to support better operation of the economy as a whole. Financial institutions were prevented from investing in over-risky ventures so that stable financing would be available to businesses and individuals generally. Regulations of wages and working conditions protected worker's interests and encouraged general prosperity. Other regulations protected public health and safety, and helped ensure the quality of products and foodstuffs. Regulations on mergers and acquisitions helped maintain competition and prevent the formation of monopolies. Regulations on capital transfers across borders encouraged capital to stay at home where it could be re-invested in the domestic economy. Naturally, elite economic planners used their influence to minimize the impact of regulations on corporate profits, but this was balanced against other considerations.

Over time, the effect of neoliberal deregulation destabilized this postwar system, drove down wages, reduced worker safety, increased industrial pollution and environmental degradation, encouraged more corporations to relocate their production facilities "offshore" to lower-waged countries, increased unemployment and poverty, and permitted the increasing concentration of ownership and the domination of markets by big operators. Quite predictably, the same kind of social devastation arose which had characterized the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s. Corporate profits were skyrocketing, the stock market grew wildly, and many fortunes were made. Television told people the system was working and that only more deregulation could make things better.

The postwar regulatory regime had served society's best interests and it had been intentionally encouraged by the elite planners themselves. Neoliberal propaganda, on the other hand, claimed that all regulations had arisen out of the perversity of "interfering bureaucrats". Neoliberal propaganda was and still is shallow and simplistic, it ignores all history, and it flies in the face of direct experience. But as propaganda pioneer Paul Goebbels discovered, if you tell a big enough lie, and you tell it often enough, people will eventually believe it. When that big-lie philosophy is augmented by the talents of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and the mass channels of film and television - it is very difficult for the average viewer to know what is real and what is not.

Although the nation state was losing its power over corporations, it remained as powerful as ever over ordinary people. Social deterioration led to unrest and increased crime, as was easily predictable. Policing was increased, tough-on-crime policies were adopted, and prison populations increased. Police forces started getting better equipment and elite police groups were formed which used military-style automatic weapons. Films like "Dirty Harry" depicted police as being hampered by bureaucratic and constitutional restrictions - generating public support for more aggressive policing. Social order in the postwar regime had been largely based on voluntary compliance with laws. Under neoliberalism, the beginnings of police-state tactics and a police-state mentality began to emerge. With general prosperity abandoned, and society rapidly deteriorating, a strong nation state - in terms of police power - was important to the success of neoliberalism.

Part of the police-state mentality was the belief that constitutional civil liberties were a "bureaucratic nuisance" that hampered police investigations and contributed to crime. Popular opinion began to revile the very protections that had been so greatly valued by the earlier citizens who had fought and died to achieve them. The denigration of politicians and government - a central theme of neoliberal propaganda - further eroded public support for democratic institutions. Citizens were applauding the weakening of the only institutions which could possibly represent their interests effectively.

Let us now take a look at some of the elite thinking that went into the formulation of this bold neoliberal architecture. Recall that the Council on Foreign Relations was the elite think tank which had been responsible for designing the postwar architecture. CFR has continued to be highly influential in planning circles. One of the most prominent spokesmen for the CFR is Harvard history Professor Samuel P. Huntington. Huntington has published several pivotal articles and books which serve to promote elite regime changes in terms which appeal to wider leadership circles in government and industry.

In May 1975, a remarkable report was made public - the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies. In the book Trilateralism, Alan Wolfe discusses this report. He focuses especially on the analysis presented by Huntington in a section of the report entitled the Crisis of Democracy. Permit me to paraphrase from Wolfe's discussion, which begins on p. 295...

Huntington tells us that democratic societies "cannot work" unless the citizenry is "passive". The "democratic surge of the 1960s" represented an "excess of democracy", which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their "traditional policies", both domestic and foreign.

Huntington's notion of "traditional policies" is expressed in the following passage from the report: To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's "Establishment."

As you can see, Huntington's analysis was in complete agreement with the one which has been developed in this article. He concurs that citizen docility ("passivity") is central to the success of the elite regime - if "traditional policies" are to be carried out. In other words, docility is necessary if the interests of elite capital ("important businesses, banks" and the rest of the "Establishment") are to be served. His words also re-confirm that policy making is indeed an elite process, centered at the top echelons of U.S. government. Even the title "Crisis of Democracy" was unusually candid - as the "crisis" was one being faced by the elite, not by the public or by government - democracy itself was the crisis.

Huntington was accurately describing the fact that the democratic process was becoming a hindrance to elite objectives, and he was recommending that the "excess of democracy" be "reduced". Huntington's remarks were surprisingly candid - he was giving us a rare glance into inner-circle thinking. Huntington takes it for granted that the purpose of government is to support capitalist growth - democracy is only useful if it serves that purpose. As Wolfe expressed it:

The warning that comes across clearly from a reading of The Crisis of Democracy is that some people with access to the center of power now understand that the change in popular attitudes toward government will necessitate a rapid dismantling of the whole structure of liberal democracy.

As we have seen, neoliberalism indeed did lead to "a rapid dismantling of the whole structure of liberal democracy". Five years before Reagan & Thatcher unleashed the neoliberal assault the clear signals about the agenda were already visible - if you knew where to look. As it turns out, Huntington has published subsequent material which forecasts in some detail later dramatic regime changes. His book The Clash of Civilizations will prove to very useful in section 3 when we investigate the meaning of President George Bush's "New World Order".

The changes caused by neoliberalism were extensive and all-pervasive. They were revolutionary changes and they transformed not only British and American society but they also exerted pressure on other nations to adopt similar policies in order to remain competitive. But as dramatic as it was, the neoliberal revolution did not result in modern globalization. Under neoliberalism, trade barriers remained as an acceptable tool for governments to use to protect local industry. The core of the globalization agenda is about radical free trade - the elimination of all restrictions on international trade and investment. Under globalization transnational corporations are the center of power and national boundaries are irrelevant to corporations and investors.

Recommended reading:

William Greider, Who Will Tell The People, The Betrayal Of American Democracy, Touchstone - Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993.

Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History, America In The Reagan Years, W. W. Norton, New York, 1991.

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3. The New World Order & The Clash of Civilizations

The period 1989-1990 brought more revolutionary shifts in the postwar global architecture. Two very significant historical events occurred during that period - the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Desert Storm. Even before the dust had settled from these events, President George Bush announced on global television that a new world order had been established. What he meant by that was not immediately obvious, but the meaning became clear as subsequent events unfolded - under U.S. leadership and with the support of massive propaganda.

Desert Storm represented a revolutionary shift in international relations. It set a precedent which was to pave the way for later interventions in Albania, Bosnia, and eventually Yugoslavia and East Timor. The kind of "order restoring" interventions which the U.S. had formerly carried out unilaterally - and which were often opposed by global public opinion - were now being carried out on behalf of global public opinion. In addition, other Western powers and NATO started playing a bigger role. Pax Americana continued to provide the framework of world order, but within that framework other Western powers were assuming a partnership role in maintaining by force the system of collective imperialism.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union offered major new opportunities to the West. The Soviet realms were abandoning socialism, and looking to the West for a vision of their new future. Big Western investors and transnational corporations stood to realize immense profits out of development projects in that vast region. A world-class investment vehicle was in the process of being launched. And the Soviet deterrent to U.S. aggression was to be no more - the New World Order was to have a free hand on the world scene.

The build-up to Desert Storm witnessed an unprecedented global propaganda campaign aimed at building widespread support for intervention. Lies were spread about babies in Kuwait being taken from their incubators and left to die. Saddam Hussein - who had been favored by the West during the decade-long war with Iran - was rapidly transformed by a demonization campaign into a reincarnation of Hitler himself.

The U.S. government blocked all attempts at effective negotiation before the war, and the invasion was launched at the earliest moment permitted by the UN authorization - despite (or because of) the fact that a Soviet-brokered deal seemed about to bear fruit. The evidence was clear that the U.S. government wanted this intervention very badly, although the motivation was not apparent at the time. The only thing that was clear was that some hidden agenda was being pursued. The public agenda was all about freeing Kuwait, but the actual execution of Desert Storm went far, far beyond that limited objective. As the Storm progressed - utterly destroying Iraq as a modern nation - the public objective of the campaign gradually shifted from freeing Kuwait to ousting Saddam from power. The way was being prepared for Bush to make historic new-world-order announcement. Once again, by means of dual-agenda propaganda, top U.S. leadership had accomplished their own hidden agenda - in this case the establishment of a new global regime of international "order".

The sanctity of national sovereignty - which had been taken very seriously by the UN's general membership ever since the UN was formed - was to be rapidly abandoned by this new world order. Sovereignty was becoming conditional. If a nation met with the disapproval of the "international community" then it was now to be subject to forceful disciplining by means of Western military power. And what the "international community" approved or disapproved of - it turned out - was whatever the corporate-owned international media said it approved or disapproved of. Since the 1970s the West had funded and supported genocide in East Timor. But only when the mass media started covering events there did "international opinion" take note.

The basic outline of Bush's new world order became eventually obvious from events. However a much more comprehensive perspective was provided for us, once again, by Samuel P. Huntington. In the summer of 1993 he published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled The Clash Of Civilizations. In 1997, he elaborated his vision further in the book, The Clash Of Civilizations And The Remaking Of World Order. In this book he divides the world into eight "civilizations," and provides a detailed description of the dynamics planned for the new global regime. Ongoing kultur-kampf (culture clash) is to be expected.

When Huntington's Crisis Of Democracy was published, little public note was taken. Its prophetic significance only became apparent five years later with the launch of the neoliberal revolution. In the case of Clash Of Civilizations there was again a delay of four years from the time the initial article was published before its full importance was noted. Soon after the publication of the book version, the significance of Huntington's vision was duly noted in the mainstream press:

The Clash of Civilizations, the book by Harvard professor Sam Huntington, may not have hit the bestseller lists, but its dire warning of a 21st century rivalry between the liberal white folk and the Yellow Peril - sorry, the Confucian cultures - is underpinning the formation of a new political environment.

To adapt one of Mao's subtler metaphors, Huntington's Kultur-kampf is becoming, with stunning speed, the conceptual sea in which Washington's policy-making fish now swim. - Guardian Weekly, April 6, 1997

Within regions, according to the kultur-kampf paradigm, there are to be "core states," which are to have a special role in maintaining order within "their" regions. As the US "authorizes" Turkish incursions into Iraq - and as Turkish attempts to join the EU are regularly rebuffed - we can see Turkey being excluded from the Western "civilization" and being guided into a core-state role in the Islamic "civilization."

Between regions, says Huntington, we are to expect perpetual "fault-line conflicts," which are to be resolved through the auspices of "non primary level participants." This is what has been happening in Yugoslavia, where allegedly neutral NATO is "resolving" the fault-line conflict between the Muslim and Christian "civilizations." The media reported on Serbian "ethnic cleansing," but in the larger picture it was the West that has engaged in ethnic cleansing. By destabilizing and fragmenting Yugoslavia, the West could then assign the various pieces to their appropriate "civilizations."

Huntington's core states are nothing really new, but are simply a renaming of what have been traditionally called Western "client states." Managing "fault line conflicts", for supposedly humanitarian reasons, becomes the excuse for intervention, in place of "defending strategic interests" or "resisting communism," - but maintaining collective Western domination continues to be the underlying agenda.

Under this regional regime there is little danger of Armageddon, nor is there any hope of a final peace. Ongoing managed conflict is to be the order of things, providing dynamic stability, with the price in suffering to be paid by the people of the non-Western "civilizations." George Orwell's 1984 becomes especially prophetic at this point in history, not only because of its kultur-kampf-like warfare scenarios, but also because of the rapid "Orwellian" shifts in public rhetoric that have accompanied globalization and the onset of its new world order.

The latest propaganda cloak - masking the regime of kultur-kampf imperialism - is called humanitarian intervention. Clinton made it all quite clear, when he spoke to NATO troops in Macedonia in July 1999. In this momentous announcement, amounting to a global Monroe Doctrine, the US - along with its faithful assistant, NATO - declares its right and its intention to forcefully intervene in the affairs of any nation, whenever and wherever it chooses:

"We must win the peace. If we can do this here...we can then say to the people of the world, 'Whether you live in Africa or Central Europe or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.'"

- "The Clinton Doctrine", from the Washington Post, reprinted in The Guardian Weekly, July 1-7 1999, p. 31

You've got hand it to him... it's a very effective formula. Who can resist the idea of taking action to prevent genocide?

The problem with the tidy little formula is that the same folks who decide where to intervene are the ones who run the global system that intentionally creates the conditions which are destabilizing societies globally and making pretexts for intervention plentiful.

It is the USA which installed or supported Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, the Shah, the Ayatollah, and Saddam Hussein. It is the West that sold Saddam weapons of mass destruction. It is the West that supported Suharto and profited from his crony-capitalist regime and East Timor repression. It is the US and Germany who intentionally promoted the destabilization of Yugoslavia over the past decade and repeatedly encouraged Milosevic, giving him enough rope so they could later hang him with it.

A band of arsonists has successfully usurped the role of global fire crew. They start fires all over the world on a routine basis, and whenever they want to intervene militarily, all they have to do is turn the media spotlight on the results of their own diabolical handiwork. Not only that, but when they do intervene, as we've seen in Iraq and Yugoslavia, they don't put out the fire: they simply burn down the rest of the house. Ethnic repression is going on all over the world, including within staunch American allies such as Turkey and Israel, and Most Favored Nations such as China. But only when the corporate mass media gets around to 'revealing' such a circumstance does it become a 'humanitarian crisis'.

Huntington's civilizational paradigm gives Western nations a plausible justification for pursuing their self interest on the world stage, as they play their "natural role" as one of the contending "civilizations." It gives Western forces a "right" to intervene, as "disinterested parties" adjudicating "fault-line" conflicts or protecting "humanitarian" interests. The kultur-kampf mythology reeks of Western hypocrisy, and its implicit imperialism is disastrous for most of the world in terms of human rights abuses, disease and starvation, and lack of self-determination. Nonetheless, the doctrine appears to offer an effective propaganda strategy for maintaining Western hegemony under globalization into the new millennium.

Recommended reading:

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash Of Civilizations And The Remaking Of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1997.

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4. The revolutionary imperative

The course of world events, for the first time in history, is now largely controlled by a centralized global regime. This regime has been consolidating its power ever since World War II and is now formalizing that power into a collection of centralized institutions and a new system of international "order". Top Western political leaders are participants in this global regime, and the strong Western nation state is rapidly being dismantled and destabilized. The global regime serves elite corporate interests exclusively. It has no particular regard for human rights, democracy, human welfare, or the health of the environment. The only god of this regime is the god of wealth accumulation.

From the beginning, this evolving regime has employed dual-agenda propaganda. For each elite initiative there has been a public cover story which made that initiative seem palatable to public opinion. There has been a public reality and a hidden reality. In public reality the UN was to begin an era of peaceful international collaboration. In fact the postwar era has been dominated by US interventionism in support of international capital. In public reality the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was about freedom and individualism. In fact neoliberalism was about transferring power to corporations and dismantling democracy. In public reality humanitarianism has been the motivation for the recent acceleration in Western interventions in places like Iraq, Albania, Yugoslavia, and East Timor. In fact the global regime has been establishing - in the public mind - the "legitimacy" of its new world order.

In Section 1, The Crisis Of Globalization, the following observation was offered:

A once functional ideology has now become dysfunctional and yet it remains globally dominant. This is humanity's mental disconnect; this is our collective insanity - our dysfunctional, out-of-date growth ideology.

But in fact it is not humanity - in any democratic sense - which has a "mental disconnect". It is not humanity that directs the course of world events. It is not humanity that decides to give top priority to unrestrained growth. And yet humanity, in a general sense, is acquiescing to this state of affairs. It is acquiescing not out of informed choice, but out of a diet of disinformation and a lack of perceived alternatives.

In two centuries the Western world has come full circle from tyranny to tyranny. The tyranny of monarchs was overthrown in the Enlightenment and semi-democratic republics were established. Two centuries later those republics are being destabilized and a new tyranny is assuming power - a global tyranny of anonymous corporate elites. This anonymous regime has no qualms about creating poverty, destroying nations, and engaging in genocide.

Our elite rulers did not lead us into tyranny and environmental collapse because they are evil people, but because they were forced to by the nature of capitalism. Capitalism must continually grow in order to survive. If investors have nowhere to increase their funds then they stop investing and the whole system collapses like a house of cards.

Propaganda myth tells us that capitalism and free enterprise are one and the same thing. They are not. Under free enterprise a business can provide a service or product, make a profit in the process, and continue on stably for many years. Under capitalism such a business would be considered a failure - it does not provide a growth opportunity for an investor. Under capitalism society is forced to continually destroy old ways of doing things and adopt new ways - not because it is good for society but because that is how wealthy investors can increase their wealth still further. That's why General Motors and Firestone banded together to destroy excellent urban transit systems throughout the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s - so that people would be forced to convert to automobiles and create growth for the automobile, tire, and petroleum industries. For exactly the same reasons, and during the same period, rail systems were destroyed in Great Britain and Ireland.

The history of the past two centuries can be understood as a process of creating new growth vehicles as required by the capitalist system. Imperialism provided immense room for capital growth and enough wealth was generated to be shared with Western populations. This process continued up until the late 1960s. At that point growth through external imperialism began to slow down. Neoliberalism permitted growth to continue by consuming the nest of capitalism - by dismantling Western societies and subjecting them to intensive capitalist exploitation. Globalization takes this process even further - creating capital growth through intensive exploitation on a global scale. The new-world-order system of global tyranny is a necessity for capitalism - in order to force the world's people to submit to the exploitation which globalization represents.

Humanity can do better than this - much better - and there is reason to hope that the time is ripe for humanity to bring about fundamental changes. For the past two hundred years capitalism has employed an unbeatable formula to maintain its stranglehold over the world. That formula has been based on the relative prosperity of Western populations. Popular support maintained Western regimes and those regimes had the military might to dominate the rest of the world. That formula reached its culmination in the postwar years when Western prosperity reached unprecedented heights.

With neoliberalism and globalization, this formula has been replaced by another. Western populations and democracy have been abandoned and capitalist elites have bet their future on the success of their WTO new-world-order tyrannical system. In a few years this regime may be so thoroughly established that it will be invincible. But in the meantime - if Western populations wake up to the fact that they are being betrayed - they have the opportunity to rise up and assert the democratic sovereignty which they in theory yet possess.

Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. The nature of capitalism is forcing revolutionary changes. Those of us in the West have a choice. On the one hand we can acquiesce to global tyranny so that capitalism can continue its insane growth. On the other hand, we can assert our rights as free peoples - we can oust the elites from power and reorganize our economies so that they serve the needs of people instead of the needs of endless wealth accumulation.

This is our Revolutionary Imperative. Not an imperative to violent revolution, but an imperative to do something even more revolutionary - to set humanity on a sane course using peaceful, democratic means.

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Epilogue: Toward a Democratic Renaissance

How is it that elites are running the world when the most powerful nations claim to be democracies? Not only are these nations officially called democracies, but most of their citizens believe it to be true. Clearly democracy and elite rule cannot exist at the same time. Something in this scenario doesn't make sense.

The answer to this dilemma is that what we call democracy is not really democracy. We have been taught to believe that choosing between competing candidates is what democracy is all about. It isn't. Who decides who the candidates are? Who finances their campaigns? Whose interests do candidates really serve once they are elected? These are the kinds of questions that need to be answered if we want to begin to understand what democracy is about.

If a candidate wants to get elected, funds are needed to run a campaign. A candidate who is wealthy - or who has access to the wealth of others - is able to run a more impressive campaign. Therefore wealthy people are able to influence elections to their own advantage - and therefore a political system based on competing candidates is ideally suited to corruption by wealthy interests. That is the reality.

Two thousand years ago, in the ancient Roman Republic, most modern forms of political corruption were already well known. Voting-district boundaries were manipulated to favor one constituency over another. Candidates lied to get votes, bribed voters, and sought the favor of wealthy interests. Astronomical sums were spent on campaigns. Then as now, democracy was the rhetoric - and rule by elites was the reality. And then as now, the ultimate outcome was a society ruled by tyranny while the people were distracted by bread and circuses. Today, candidates for major offices are selected and funded by elites, groomed by public-relations consultants, and then sold to the voters like a new brand of blue jeans. This is not democracy.

Even if candidates sincerely want to represent the wishes of their constituencies - how can they know what those wishes are? If most people participate in politics only by occasional voting, then how are their wishes to be known? And if those people are lied to by the media, then how can their wishes be relevant to their own self-interest or the interest of their families and communities? How can such a system possibly lead to a democratic result? It cannot and it does not. Again we are faced with dual-agenda propaganda. The public reality is democracy; the hidden reality is elite rule.

In order to understand how a genuine version of democracy might work, let us consider the "excess democracy" that frightened elites in the late 1960s and caused them to respond with their neoliberal assault on democratic institutions. If elites were worried, then perhaps we the people were on to something useful. That "excess democracy" took the form of massive grass-roots movements. These movements did not overthrow governments, nor did they exercise power directly - but they were powerful instruments of democracy nonetheless.

Such movements spread information without depending on mass-media channels. They acted as vehicles of public education by means of teach-ins, and speeches at mass rallies. They reflected public opinion and they helped form public opinion. They served as forums where people could discuss and develop their common interests - and where they could pursue those interests collaboratively. By means of such movements people became politically active instead of politically passive. In the face of such movements, our official democratic institutions were forced to live up to their best purposes - reflecting popular will. For a few dramatic years, these movements made democracy somewhat of a reality. For elites this was a threat; for we the people it was a glimmer of hope - genuine democracy is perhaps possible.

Historically there have been many previous mass movements: for better working conditions, union recognition, votes for women, the abolition of slavery, and others. Some of these movements were much larger than those of the sixties and achieved even more dramatic results. Although government leaders typically claim credit for democratic reforms implemented while they are in office, it has always been mass movements which have actually been responsible for achieving those reforms.

But these movements have all been ephemeral. When the enthusiasm fades, politics returns to business-as-usual - and elites are once again in charge. Whatever reforms were achieved are then gradually undermined. With all the gains of the environmental movement, for example, environmental degradation is now proceeding at a faster pace than ever before. And the gains of the sixties movements were undone by the elite-sponsored neoliberal revolution. How can we - the people of the world - achieve lasting democracy?

First of all we need another powerful mass movement - for that is the only thing that has ever successfully challenged the power of elites. Second, the goal of the movement must be the achievement of a democratic society - if the goal is anything less, then the movement will dissipate when that lesser goal is achieved. Third, the movement itself must operate democratically - for the means always become the ends.

In building such a movement, different groups will need to listen to one another, identify common interests, and learn how to collaborate together in pursuit of common objectives. As the movement grows, more and more people and groups will need to be brought in, and their interests incorporated. Even members of current elites must be included - but with a voice no louder than anyone else's. In the end, such a movement becomes a democratic civil society. The collaborative movement process evolves into a democratic societal process. If this can be achieved on a global scale, then a livable and peaceful world becomes a possibility. If this is achieved then we will enter a new era - the era of a democratic renaissance.

In early December 1999 a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization was held in Seattle Washington. Activists from around the world, from many different "causes", and across social divisions, all gathered in opposition to the WTO - the central symbol of the global regime. Television viewers worldwide were aware of the street demonstrations, the violent response of the authorities, and the fact that the WTO process was temporarily stalled. But these were not the strategically significant events. Of strategic significance was the fact that an embryonic movement became aware of itself and accelerated a collaborative movement-building process. It was in the street demonstrations that a visceral feeling of movement self awareness arose; it was in the less dramatic classes and discussion groups that the collaborative process gathered momentum.

If new-world-order global tyranny is to be overcome, this beginning spark of a democratic mass movement may represent our last and best hope. In order to succeed, this movement must learn from the successes and failures of past movements and it must aim to become a permanent, inclusive, and democratic political force. If we fail in these objectives - and the elite global regime is allowed to consolidate its power - then we are unlikely to get another chance. Like the Germans after 1933, we will find that our democratic options have been taken away from us. And in our case, there will be no one left to come to our rescue.

Richard K. Moore's web site