----- Original Message -----
From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Contra many folks, though, I think the US's collective guilt has far
> less to do with its particular military actions, some of which like
> Kosovo and Haiti I can defend, but in its collective enforcement of a
> global economic system that starves millions of people each years
> throughout the world, while denying needed medicine to millions more.
-A pity you do not see that this economic order depends on the
-permanent exercise of military force, PARTICULARLY those deployed on
-apparently or falsely "humanitarian" reasons, such as is the case in
-Haiti or Kossovo. It seems to be a constant with Anglo politics that
-they will always kill you or rob you on the basis of some
-"principle", as the Irishman George Bernard Shaw once pointed out...
This is exactly where I disagree with many other leftists; American economic
power is a far greater tool for hegemony than military power and, more
importantly, it is exercised in most cases outside the realm where the US
population even recognizes its deployment, either because it is deployed
with no direct political decision at all through multinational corporate
power or through the subtler political directions that get little debate.
Military deployment is usually very much in the public debate and
progressives have some chance to influence its deployment, whether actively
seeking to halt it as with the Vietnam War or in Central America, or in
supporting its deployment as happened in Haiti (pushed by the Congressional
Black Caucus) and in Kosovo (pushed by human rights activists).
The idea that all military action by the US is a seemless part of US
hegemony is belied by the active debate and significant political resistance
to its deployment in cases like Haiti and Kosovo by many corporate and
conservative interests.
Of course, for those leftists looking for an analysis where every act of the
US government is a monochromatic unvarying conspiracy of imperialism (rather
than a contested site of power), the failure of the US to deploy force in
Haiti would have been described as a conscious collaboration with death
squads deposing an elected socialist and failure to act in the Balkans as
the US systematically benefitting from promoting chaos in the region.
When a theory leads to the same analysis with whatever option is chosen, it
loses any useful scientific or theoretical value. It is more a matter of
faith than analysis, since there is no way to present contrary evidence.
The idea that leaving Haiti in the hands of Duvalier-based death squads
would have been a gain for challenges to US imperialism, and thus our
actions there to restore Aristide were a way to serve that US hegemony is
just a fantastic piece of fiction. However, in line with my argument that
it is our economic rather than our military policy that enforces the most
destruction, the subsequent imposition of IMF-led structural adjustment on
Haiti has been part of corporate domination in that country. But the latter
could have been pushed on the Duvalier death squads as well, so there is no
necessary connection between the military and economic actions, and in fact,
the first was supported by the most progressive elements of our political
structure (the Congressional Black Caucus) and opposed by the conservative
and most corporate elements, while the latter economic policy had the exact
reverse configuration of support and opposition.
Unless your theory of imperialism can account for such dramatic shifts in
democratic support and shifting power alliances for policy implementation,
it reduces to some meta-functional explanation where actual people making
actual policy and actual political decisions are irrelevant. They are just
puppets to the functional imperatives of your imagined inevitable
imperialism.
-- Nathan Newman
