http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18047.htm
What Comes After The U.S. Empire?
Introductory Speech at the TRANSCEND International Meeting - 6-12
June 2007, Vienna, Austria
By Johan Galtung
07/20/07 "ICH" -- - I first want to say a few words about the current
G8 meeting, and then talk about major conflicts in the world. This
will cover much of the world situation, a reflection on global
capitalism, and the US Empire and its imminent demise and what will
happen after that.
The G8 meeting is actually an act of sabotage, and in my
view a deliberate one. It sabotages and undermines the UN. In 1975,
the meeting was established as a small forum for intimate meetings
between 3 leaders from each participating country. However, from a
purely economic agenda it has become much more, incorporating a lot
of UN agenda items (security issues and global warming etc.) and
thereby actually hijacking the subjects of global importance to about
8 countries only. Russia, which was invited under Yeltsin, is the
black sheep in the community. Also, not inviting Chindia is a
guarantee for sabotage, as is talking about Africa without having
even one African representative present. The good news is that there
were 100,000 demonstrators, and the bad news is that there were some
violent idiots.
If the nonviolent majority could practice the technique
of 20 nonviolent encircling every violent one in a nonviolent way,
incapacitating their capacity for violence, it would be an enormous
feat. There is, however another piece of what I would call bad news;
the 100,000 without constructive, positive ideas. I've gone through
the whole rigmarole of the slogans. Personally, I don't like the
slogans against globalization; there is no way in the world to stop
globalization because it is driven by things we all love:
communication and transportation. We are not going to turn that
backwards. A good slogan would be "another globalization is possible"
and spelling out that better globalization as opposed to the
economically exploitative process we know.
So, having said that, we have dark days in front of us.
We have impending climate and economic disaster and on top of that a
political military issue, the so-called Shield. There isn't hardly a
person in the world who believes it is against Iran. It is a part of
a policy started in 1996, counter-posing against each other, on the
one hand NATO and AMPO (the US-JAPAN arrangement), and on the other
hand the SCO countries, the biggest alliance in human history: the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with 6 full members and 3
observers. The 6 members are China, Russia and four of the former
Central Asian republics, excluding Turkmenistan. The three observers
are India, Pakistan and Iran. Together, it's about 50% of humanity,
confronting a relatively small country called the United States of
America, with only 300,000,000, not a very impressive size these
days.
I have said this, knowing that of the 10 points of the
Project for the New American Century--written by people who are still
in power, although there is an erosion among them--point number 7 is
to change regime in China. I am of the opinion that whatever be the
method, that the Chinese will rather do the change of regime
themselves, and are not enthusiastic about being encircled. It is the
major conflict confrontation of the world today, between NATO/AMPO
and SCO, and since it is the major one, it is also the one least
talked about. The Shield has to neutralize missiles from Russia and
China. I think Putin understood it correctly in Munich, and sees it
in the light of the cancellation of the ABM treaty, which was a
cornerstone of the peaceful development during the Cold War. It was
canceled unilaterally by the United States. The anti-missile
capacities in the Czech Republic and Poland come on top of the US and
NATO breaking the promises made to Gorbachev at the end of the Cold
War: that the Soviet Union would withdraw from Eastern Europe,
including Eastern Germany, and the United States would not follow
suit, whereupon the United States had filled almost every base
opportunity, and enrolled practically speaking all the countries in
NATO. That has heightened the tension immensely. Whether it will
dominate the Heiligendamm [G8 meeting] meeting, I don't know, but I
would imagine that it could be quite important. The guess is that the
US would do anything they can in order to bribe the citizens of the
villages selected in Poland and the Czech Republic with high amounts
of money in order not to demonstrate against. So, G8 spells only bad
news, as introduction to the six conflicts:
1. Economic Contradiction: Global Capitalism
Let me just say a word about global capitalism. The two
antidotes to the market mechanism that have been effective have been,
on the one hand, a welfare state, and on the other hand,
protectionism. Microcredit, you can forget about it, these are small
drops in the bucket, giving relief to some small groups. The
countries that practice it most, Bangladesh and Bolivia, are still at
the bottom, economically speaking. The combination of selective
protectionism and welfare state, that is the real stuff. The way
Japan did it, the way Taiwan did it, the way South Korea did it, the
way Hong Kong did it, the way Singapore did it, the way Malaysia did
it, with considerable success. You find in the whole of the East
Asia/South East Asia conglomerate countries that have been doing
exactly this. That is important, and the neo-liberal free market
syndrome is of course against that. They are doing everything they
can to eliminate the two factors. That means that the global market
place becomes a vertical assembly line for the transportation of
capital from the bottom to the top. And this works with three
mechanisms: monetization, privatization and globalization,
border-free market, of which globalization is the least important.
The most important is monetization, setting a monetary price on
everything. It is the most important because it means that those who
have no money have no chance, and they are about 1,000,000,000. Their
option, that is very clear, is to join the ranks of the dying;
125,000 dying every day with 25,000 starving and 100,000 dying from
preventable and curable diseases, for which cures exist, but they
are monetized. User's fees in Africa are a disaster. All of this is
known today! Adam Smith warned against unmitigated markets; David
Ricardo warned against unmitigated labor markets in periods with high
labor supply, saying that it would have lasting unemployment as a
result, and extreme poverty among the labor.
From global capitalism as it is operating today, we can
expect no solution to these problems. So let me then add the kind of
approach that I, as one person, would advocate; taming capitalism, by
introducing at the same time about 14 other types of economies. In
other words, it is a little bit like the thinking about energy: we
don't say an unconditional no to hydrocarbons, but we introduce 6, 7,
8 other methods. The energy profile becomes complex. Time does not
permit me to get into all 14, I'll not do it, some of you have the
manuscript and the book A Life-Sustaining Economy is close to
completion. The point I am arguing is a pluralistic economy. There is
no single formula that covers all the alternatives, and the
pluralistic profile must be adjusted to the preconditions in space
and time.
2. Military Contradiction: Terrorism and State Terrorism
Number two on this list is the military contradiction
between terrorism and state terrorism. The USA state contradiction on
terrorism has now entered military intervention number 73 since the
Second World War; Number 73 being what they are doing in Lebanon
right now: killing Palestinians. There are 470,000 Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon, almost half a million, scattered in camps from
the north to the south. We now know the number of the people who were
driven out of the territory that became the Jewish state during the
Naqba, the Catastrophe: the number of Palestinians driven out was
711,000, very far from 'a couple of thousand'. It is a very major
number for a small nation. Some of them, not necessarily in that
period, found their way to Lebanon. This is number 73 and the number
of people killed in overt Pentagon-driven military action after the
Second World War is now between 13 and 17 million. The number of
people killed in covert action is at least 6 million. The number of
people killed by structural violence could be 125,000 people per day,
but for that the USA is not alone responsible. What the USA is
responsible for is giving the military cover for that economic
system. You can go through the total amount of interventions, 243,
since Thomas Jefferson started, and you will find that almost without
exception the interventions are triggered by some political action
that sounds like or might lead to redistribution of wealth and power
somewhere in the world. So, you get this endless pairing: intervening
when the Sandinistas are in power but not when Somoza is in power,
intervening when Chavez is in power but not when, for instance,
Jimenez is in power. Both of them were darlings of the International
Monetary Fund, a solid pillar of exploitation.
Iraq
Right now the major arena is Iraq, the coming arena may
be Iran. One particularly gifted journalist, Andreas Zumach, has
written an article saying that for the Iran war everything is
prepared. It is totally wrong to assume that because the US has
problems in Iraq it will not attack Iran. I will also say that it is
totally wrong to assume that the US is losing in Iraq. You will only
assume that if you assume that the major goal of the United States is
a cohesive Iraq entity that has some semblance to parliamentary
democracy. If you look at the real goals, oil and military bases,
they may ever be winning. There could be an oil law, the chances that
it could be passed are not that small. And it is the Paul Bremer
concept they are working on that essentially presupposes that the oil
resources are put on the global market, bought up by the 5 big
companies, with 100% repatriation of profit.
It is sometimes pointed out that the US Empire is not
colonial. That is correct. They had colonies in the past, after they
in 1898 stepped into the Spanish empire and acquired some major
indigenous problems. One interesting thing about colonialism,
however, is that it gave colonizers some paternalistic sense of
responsibility that you can forget about when it comes to what's
going on under imperialism.
Let me just add one point to that. I find the idea of
pulling out of Iraq one of the most cowardly, dishonorable ideas I
can imagine, so let me immediately formulate an alternative. Shed the
uniform, and start helping the Iraqi people you have brutalized.
Compensate, apologize, you have a lot of infrastructure at your
disposal, you US army could still do a decent job. And one of the
worst proposals in addition to that is to say "Just go to your bases
and stay there". Those bases are for the coming war with SCO, that's
why they are there. Have a look at the analysis of the length of the
runways and you will see the purpose behind them.
Let me come back for a second to the idea of pulling out,
which in my mind is such a bad idea that we could expect it from the
US. What it means is that you pull out so that you don't suffer any
humiliating defeat. You make yourself unavailable for defeat. I can
understand the reason, it is not difficult. The 30th April 1975, the
humiliating defeat in Vietnam became a major trauma. To avoid that
situation is the priority of course, pulling out better than to
continue killing, but, I just think one should call a spade a spade,
and no way I see cut and run as peaceful action. We shouldn't, I
would say, contaminate the concept of peace with cowardice, trying to
"save face" after having killed 750,000 so far. Multiply that by 10
for the bereaved--the persons who feel the loss of a friend, a
spouse, a brother, a sister, a child, a parent, a colleague, a
neighbor--multiply 750,000 by 10 and you have an estimate of the
hatred that has been created. Add to that the 4 million who are
displaced, some of them among the 7,5 million I just mentioned; and
add to that the psychosis induced in the high number of US military
who have been to Iraq; and add to that the about 25,000 wounded who
have come back to the US and you may probably add 10% of them dying.
The definition of a person of the US army personnel killed in the war
is that he dies in Iraq, that means "Put them on the plane get them
to Walter Ried as quickly as possible, don't let them die in Iraq". I
am not saying that to get somewhere closer to realism when discussing
this enormity.
Why don't the USA with some allies win? Because they are
against an enemy that is unconquerable, and why is that? Because of
"asymmetric warfare" is too sterile. Of course they are using
"improvised explosive" devices against these sophisticated things
that the US army used. But they have two more arms at their disposal:
time and space.
An unlimited time perspective. There is no point called
"capitulation" in their rules, that can just be forgotten, it
belonged to the old days. We are dealing with a type of warfare where
what used to be called the weaker party has any amount of time at its
disposal. These people are trained in fighting a government empire
for 400, 500 years, like the Serbs were fighting the Turks for 500
years. The Orthodox, among the three Christianities, have a time
perspective very similar to the Islamic one. I don't think you will
find 500 years patience in Washington, maybe not even 5 months for
that matter.
And, they have space, there are 57 members of the OIC,
the Organization of the Islamic Conference. 56 of them are states,
number 57 are the 160 million or so Muslims in India. Most of the
borders of the 56 countries are drawn by the West; they are borders
that make no sense to Islam at all. That doesn't mean there are no
fault lines inside Islam. More important than Shia-Sunni is probably
Arab-non-Arab. The non-Arab countries are in the majority, of the 56
only 22 are Arab. Of the 1.350.000.000 Muslims, 300.000.000 are Arab.
If the Arabs feel that the religion is essentially theirs, then they
are in a minority position. That is becoming something interesting,
and of course the US plays on those fault lines. It seemed to work as
long as they were dealing with Khomeini, he is a Shia, the "bad"
Islam. But, bin Laden, a Wahab, was a Sunni, and didn't look much
more attractive than Khomeini. So something went wrong somehow with
that Harvard University distinction.
Harvard University, by the way, is the university that by
far has contributed most economists to the neo-liberal attack on
humanity. Like Jeffrey Sachs, a major person in the destruction of
Bolivia and of Russia, and now proceeding to the whole world. He has
changed his rhetoric, even humanized the rhetoric. But if we look at
the measures, they look very much like what he did to Bolivia and
Russia.
Having said that, if you have time and space on your
side, then you are dealing with enormous resources. In principle, the
whole Islamic world is on the other side. This constitutes the "Clash
of Civilizations" that Samuel Huntington's publisher stole from
Bernard Lewis, a far more important intellectual, professor at
Princeton University, and a major advisor to Cheney. One of those
who, more than anybody else, has whispered in Cheney's ears "Attack
Iraq!". Everybody is blaming Samuel Huntington, best read the book,
you'll find almost nothing about civilization. Read Bernard Lewis,
and you will find quite a lot, particularly about Islam.
It is a complete mistake to talk about this as a
civilizational-religious clash only. It's economic, military,
political, it's the full house. The more one says the "clash of
civilizations", the more is one inclined to forget the economic,
political, military interests hidden underneath. It must be wonderful
for Washington to have all this clash-of-civilization-talk and
establish 14 military bases, and then try to put your paw on all the
oil. "Keep them discussing civilization". And this of course is why
we need the concept of imperialism, because it is holistic, one
reason why the concept does not have a very high standing in the USA.
The war of state terrorism against terrorism is an elitist warfare
against peoples warfare. The people's war is close to unbeatable, but
it may take time. That holds for Iraq and it holds for Afghanistan.
Anybody who knows a little bit of the history of Afghanistan and the
British attacks in 1838 and 1878 and the Soviet attack in 1978, also
know how it ended; with humiliating defeats. The one in 1878 ended
even with the massacre in the British embassy in Kabul in 1883. I
think they would have wished for good life insurances for those
people.
How is it possible to enter a thing when so much
knowledge would indicate otherwise, with all these negative
indicators? Is it permissible to be that ignorant of history? To deny
entirely a whole lot of facts that nevertheless somehow play a role?
I myself think we give much too much credit to facts, but some facts
are quite useful. It tells a lot to have a President who has both
ignorance and denial fitted into his mental framework, but I would
warn strongly against associating the calamity with Bush alone.
The US empire is resting on a deep structure and a deep
culture. Let me take the deep culture first. There is both
Chosenness, the vision of past and present glory, and a strong sense
of trauma. There is Dualism, Manichaeism, and the sense that
Armageddon will solve it. But, this is no Republican monopoly. It is
found in both corporate parties, with some fringes that feel some
uneasiness. And, of course, of those, the Republicans have suffered
the humiliation of losing the elections. But the two parties
re-cohered, voted for the "surge", voted for 100 billion more money,
adding some clauses. In other words, we are faced with a Republican
Democrat entity, a Repucrat, Repurat, whatever we want to call it; a
single-party coalition with two wings. That was the bad news, the
good news are the 50% who don't vote. Somewhere in those 50% there is
a solution, not as one person. In other words, there is good news and
bad news.
How does a person like Andreas Zumach, very well
informed, think that the war against Iran will be? It could be based
on a provocation, constructed, fake and false. Like Racak in Kosovo.
A Finnish forensic specialist has now released her report which was
silenced by Joschka Fischer at a critical moment, and the report on
Racak is very clear: there was a gun-powder slam, but, the slam was
on their hands and not on the neck. In other words, it was on those
who had been shooting, not on the executed victims. Killing had been
done in an ordinary manner and they then assembled the corpses and
lay them out. They need a US ambassador to make that, it bears the
stamp of William Walker. The total number of killed in Kosovo was not
150,000, but 8,000 over the years, 5,000 Albanians and 3,000 Serbs. I
am just saying that because we have been treated to lies, and if
there is the war against Iran it will be initiated by lies. To
propagate those lies we have the corporate press, meaning press owned
by the corporation. Information is easily arranged.
From the plans that have emerged it looks as if the
100,000 targets have been identified in Iran. These targets include
not only some nuclear arrangements, but the total military
infrastructure of the country, that means any kind of center of
command, naval points, air bases, anything that has to do with
missiles. But that would only amount to one half of the 100,000
targets, the other targets would be anything that has to do with
civilian infrastructure in the sense of railroads, airports, roads of
course, sewerage, bridges, canals or watering, electric power plants,
anything that keeps the civilian population going. Starting at 5 am
some morning, 100,000 targets, in association with Israel. As far as
I understand the Iranian counterattack will be considerable. I don't
know, but I could guess there could be dirty bombs inside the US,
ignited by remote control. Only an idiot will use missiles. They will
of course use totally different methods. So I mention it as an
example of what we may be facing.
Afghanistan
In March I was invited to give a talk for three
ministries in the UK, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry
or Department of Defense, and the Department for International
Development (DFID). It was organized by the latter. I was a little
surprised when I was asked to give the keynote address, and in the
chair was the former Foreign Minister. The keynote was about
Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. And since I have just been
mentioning Afghanistan, let me say some words about what I saw as
possible solutions. The basic point I have just made: you can forget
any possibility of winning. You may have a lull, and God bless you
when it comes to what happens after the lull: Osama bin Laden. You
can also forget calling your enemy Taliban, Talib means "student",
it's a highly anti-student type of word, you can forget about that
too. We are essentially dealing with the Afghan people. I remember a
discussion I had myself in that meeting, with an Afghan general. He
gave a talk about how many small weapons he had confiscated, 90,000,
and how his forces were fighting. And I said to him "General, tell me
a little bit more about that fighting", and he looked at me and said,
"Of course it doesn't work. I cannot ask my Afghan troops to kill
Afghans, it makes no sense for them. The Russians, no problem." He
didn't say, but he was thinking "Americans, no problem", but that was
not politically correct at such a conference in London. I will never
forget how the twinkle in his eyes met with the twinkle in mine,
twinkle meets twinkle, and we understood each other perfectly.
The 5 points that would give a solution to Afghanistan
would be the following from the TRANSCEND mediation in Peshawar in
February 2001.
1. Make a Coalition Government with the Taliban. 100% Taliban
is intolerable. But the Taliban has a moral fiber, which most others
don't have. If you eliminate them you will get heroin and corruption
and not much more. They are needed.
2. Afghanistan is the material from which a Federation is
made, not a unitary state, even if the Northern Alliance based on
Tadjiks and Pashtuns with Kabul in the middle, count for half. There
are at least ten others. To call potential Prime Ministers "warlords"
is an insult. You have to be very much removed from reality to
believe that by insulting them you can eliminate them or make them
your friends.
3. A Central Asian Community surrounding Afghanistan with the
countries that contribute to the national mosaic that is Afghanistan,
the Pashtuns from Pakistan, the Tadjiks from Tadjikistan and the
Dari-speaking from Iran, and so on and so forth, would make a lot of
sense. That will include Kashmir, and Pakistan, and Iran. The
Shanghai Cooperation Organization has almost realized it. The
Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not publish much, but moves in
very, very clever, slow, movements. It moves so slowly that the
journalists do not discover it, because it would have to move from
day to day in order for a jour-nal to record it.
4. Make Basic Needs the leading line of the Government
policy. That means food, education, health, clothing, whatever is
needed for the somatic human being, shared by all, and available to
men and women alike. That last problem can only be solved on a
Quranic basis, and is being solved in a number of Islamic countries.
One of the most interesting solutions was by Saddam Hussein, number 3
of the 14 good things he did. He told the Iraqi women, "From tomorrow
on you decide whether to wear the hijaab or not. Only you. And if
anybody tries to change your view come to me." Now, to come to Saddam
Hussein was not a very appetizing invitation, so this was definitely
under threat, but it worked. It created a very, very vibrant group of
women in Iraqi society. That of course is now all disappearing.
5. Security, provided by cooperation between the UN Security
Council and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The UN
Security Council has a veto nucleus of 4 Christian powers, and one
Confucian. It has no legitimacy whatsoever in the Muslim world, that
has to be understood. To believe that one can organize a
UNSC-sponsored security operation in a country that hates the UN, not
only because of the composition of the Security Council, but for
having killed 1 million through the Iraq sanctions, is naive. And
they gave a very clear expression for their hatred by killing the
Secretary-General's representative in the Iraq UN building. It
doesn't help much to call the people who did it "extremists". In the
war we had against the German occupation in Norway, the people who
did violent acts were extremists, and most people were sitting on the
fence, applauding. But, don't be confused, don't call the
fence-sitters moderates. They were waiting for the wind to blow a
little bit more clearly and then jumped down taking a clear stand.
With those 5 points, I think one could arrive at
something. It is not for us to impose any solution on anybody, and
TRANSCEND in this case was essentially the Canadians. I was an
adjunct. One of them was an Afghan Canadian, Seddiq Veera, of
considerable diplomatic acumen. When that report was read in front of
the working groups, a former Cabinet Member said "This is the best
I've ever seen, the only problem is it has no chance... Why,
because," he added, "the Americans will attack us in October 2001,
because they want to control pipelines, and they want bases." So I
asked him, "How do you know that?". And he said, "Would you mind
coming to my room this evening?" The room was very dark, and had a
considerable amount of electronics, and quite good assistants who
were very discrete, and he presented quite a lot of very interesting
pictures. "When the Americans attack in October, they will put their
military bases exactly here", he took a map and put his finger
exactly where a major base is today. You will of course remember that
this was to be exact seven months before 9/11.
But having said that, the question comes up: "How does
one move a plan like those 5 points?" Well, the reports from the
conference, with the keynote address, is there, circulated to all
kinds of governmental circles, not only in England. I don't know, but
we need a better dissemination technique. The corporate press will do
their best to deny us that access, because we are uncontrollable,
unpredictable. And I think they want it to remain like that, and so
do we.
3. Nations and States Contradiction: 200 States, 2000 Nations
Let me go on to number three, very briefly, 200 states,
2000 nations. In Kosova they are now practicing the principle of
self-determination. They are not practicing it in Republica Srpska,
they are not practicing it in Transdniestria, they are not practicing
it for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. They are practicing it where they
want to practice it. What TRANSCEND tries to do is to open the space
between independence and unitary states. And we have a lot of
research done and a lot of experience when it comes to the range of
in between points. And the three best known points are of course
federation, confederation and devolution. Those are in-between parts.
We did not have any success so far in Sri Lanka. The parties are not
convinced that they can win, but they are convinced that they can
deprive the other side from winning. Not quite the same, but almost
equally good. If both of them want to deprive the other side of
winning it can go on for a considerable amount of time, because you
won't even have the mechanism of victory or capitulation which sets
some full stop, for some period. They needed of course the cease-fire
agreement brokered by the Norwegian government in order to arm and
re-deploy, and both parties make use of it. During that period, there
was not a single serious effort to solve the conflict; certainly not
by the Norwegian government, nor by the others. A very sad picture.
And I'm afraid that whatever beautiful peace-building efforts one can
make, it has limited impact. There has to be a solution. The good
news from my own experience: the moment you do have a solution, it is
incredible how much bad sentiment and behavior can evaporate quickly
because the solution is there.
4. Cultural Contradiction: Islam vs Christianity
Number four, the cultural one. Imagine that you take the
TRANSCEND 5 point diagram and you simply say Islam hates
Christianity, wants to kick it out, and Christianity hates Islam,
wants to kick it out. That formula is called intolerance. We are
against that. There is the neither/nor possibility they may both
conclude that there is something crazy in both religions. Let us turn
to Buddhism, or let's become secular. Secularism, I think, can partly
be traced back to the 30 years war in Europe (1618 - 48). I don't
have the historical evidence, but I have at least the hypothesis that
a high number of people came to the conclusion that if these are two
Christianities that both define themselves as the only correct one,
and that's the way they treat each other, there must be something
basically wrong in the whole Christian message. At the time, they did
not have alternative religion, so they turned to secularism.
Secularism supported itself as science, and they fell
into a very deep dark hole. Science, as you know, is based on data as
the ultimate arbiter between hypotheses. But, data come from the
past. In opting for science you give the past practically speaking
100 percent of the power. I have been struggling almost all my life
to develop epistemology that does not take that dramatic position,
but maneuvering even-handedly between past and future. It means that
you give the potential, the negatively non-existing, as much praise
as the positively existing. The moment secularism allies itself with
science, it allies itself with the past. It is very easy to
understand why they do it: because they are Christians, maybe Jews,
maybe Muslims, and God created the world, and if God is perfection
then His work must also be perfection. To talk about an alternative
future is to challenge the creation. Any alternative future from a
science point of view is speculation. From that point of view
Darwinism and intelligent design are very very similar. The driving
forces are in the past. What could be a true global future of this
relation? We should draw on the potential of future wishes, of the
dreams and the wishes and the values as an equally important part of
the intellectual enterprise, and here I am not with Noam Chomsky.
Brilliant, he is a digger for facts, and I dig him too. But he is
chemically free from any concrete, constructive and creative future.
There isn't one single idea except "writing a letter to your
Congressman". And he has proven again and again and again how futile
that exercise is. He is called the major intellectual in the world.
So, having said that, I am very much attracted by a
statement by an Iranian, and that statement by an Iranian is as
follows. I will read it to you in English. It is the 14th Century
Persian Sufi poet Hafiz and his ultimate words about the distinction
and struggle between Christianity and Islam:
"I have learned so much from God that I can no longer
call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. The
truth has shed so much of itself in me that I can no longer call
myself a man, a woman...".
The latter is going a little bit too far, I'm not sure I
can follow him into that!
"...An angel or even a pure soul, love has befriended
Hafiz so completely, has turned to passion, freed me of every concept
and image my mind has ever loved... man/woman, thing."
And that is what I for reasons of time will say about
number 5 on the list:
5. Sufism
It comes straight out of the Axis of Evil. Ahmadinejad
wrote a letter of 18 pages to Bush, a little bit repetitive at times,
but a fascinating letter. What an indictment of the Western
civilization that they are not even able to answer that letter.
Nobody is of course expecting any answer from George Bush, but he has
a couple of people: couldn't Condi try her hand at it for instance? I
mean, she is a bright woman. Why not?
A quote from Daoism:
"Sharing the suffering of others, the life and joy of
others. Use the good fortune of others as your own good fortune. View
the losses of others as yours."
This is "we-ness", this is swinging in harmony, two
persons, or, humanity swinging in harmony, sensing each other's
delight and suffering. Compare that with the profoundly egoistic lex
talionis: "Do unto others as you want others to do unto you." Why is
it so profoundly egoistic? Because it ends up with my ego, somebody
should do something good to me, but I'm so smart that I know that the
best way to get that is to be nice to that person, you get much more
from him with that method. If you treat him badly you might get
nothing or worse. A light-year away from the Daoism of creating we's.
This is the kind of thing that I find fascinating in connection with
religion: it is not neither/nor, it is not the compromise, it is not
one dominating over the other. Better, try to take the both/and, pick
up the gems from all of them, make them coalesce, cohere somehow! A
fascinating challenge, a little bit ahead of its time, or then maybe
not. Maybe a lot of people think that way, it only has to be
released, perhaps, in public space.
6. The US Empire
Let me introduce number 6, with a quotation from the
South African Nobel Prize winner in literature J.M. Coetzee.
Absolutely brilliant. The essay he wrote and published in 1974, when
he was 34 years old, was about South Africa and the Vietnam War. He
wrote a statement about the USA, putting it in the working of a
specialist in a U.S. think tank in California, southern part. The
project he is working on is how to break the wild of the Vietcong,
and substitute for Vietcong goals goals that are compatible with the
sincere US love for the Vietnamese people. He writes:
"If the Vietnamese had come singing towards us through
the hails of bullets, we would have knelt down and embraced them."
If they can come singing through the hails of bullets. A
good way of putting it. Yes, if only it's exactly what happens. The
idea that we can bomb the people into submission, and make them love
us, is insane. When the Germans were "bombed into submission", it
actually strengthened the Nazi party. What then happened to the
Germans was something else. At a certain point they realized that
their whole project was doomed, the whole Nazi project was wrong
wrong wrong. They were not taught a lesson by being bombed. "If only
they would come singing through the hail of bullets, we would go down
on our knees and embrace them." The perception of their own project
came from the inside. What Coetzee leads up to is psychosis,
diagnosis maybe a combination of narcissism, megalomania and
paranoia, maybe with elements of a fantastic detachment from reality.
But we are not dealing with psychopaths, we are dealing with
socio-paths. Maybe lovely individuals, but with an image of the world
totally devoid of any humanitarian reality when those attacked refuse
to do what Reagan said when he was entering a helicopter, in
connection with Nicaragua. "Mr. President, what do you want them to
do?" "All I want them to do is to say 'Uncle'", meaning "I submit."
It doesn't work like that with a deep culture and a deep
structure at work. US political science and US economics have no
concept of history, and, it seems, only two concepts of structure,
hierarchy and anarchy. If you come from a Nordic country, or from the
European Union, you have no problem what equity is about, even if I
had to make up the word "equiarchy", to add to hierarchy, polyarchy
and anarchy. Their only approach to equity was and is the signed
agreement, contract, regardless of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th level
consequences. Similarly, solution to them means settlement, a signed
document, and I would argue it isn't good enough, solution is deeper.
So how is the US Empire performing these days? There are
15 contradictions at the end in the hypothesis made in the year 2000.
Let me say what the basic theory is about. An Empire is a transborder
arrangement that combines economic, military, political and cultural
power. It's an enormous power display that obviously brings with it
contradictions. Contradictions are problems you cannot solve unless
you change the system, but you can coexist with a couple of
contradictions. When the contradictions start multiplying,
synchronizing and synergizing, they become serious.
For the Empire people hit by an Empire start
understanding that they have a common cause: get rid of the Empire -
like colonialism, like slavery.
I can now pick up some of them, such as the amount of
Euros passing the Dollars in circulation last December, Toyota
passing GM in January, and you have the number of patents in the
world with the US proportion sinking in comparison with other
countries passing the US in one domain after the other. There is all
of this happening, and much much more.
Let me point to a key factor. It hasn't happened yet.
But, many Europeans have felt bothered, and the moment they meet
people in the Iraqi resistance movement and they compare notes, a
sense of a common cause may start arising. If I now take all of these
15 points, some of them also inside the US, and Americans also sense
that they are better off without the US Empire, the moment that
common cause factor comes about, the US Empire is doomed. That is
what happened to the Soviet Union. My prediction made in 1980 was
that the wall would fall before 1990 and that the Soviet Empire would
follow and they performed on time. The prediction of the US Empire is
by 24 October 2020, the UN day and also my 90th anniversary, and you
are all invited to celebrate. And let us combine it with a TRANSCEND
meeting, but we need to make a jump, because they are now in odd
years.
What comes after the U.S. Empire?
A. The European Union as Successor
And then what? Three possibilities. 1) A Successor
Country or Countries, 2) A Regionalizing World, 3) Another
Globalization. Let me say a couple of words on all three. And you
will take note, of course, that the end of an Empire is the most
natural thing in the world. Empires come and go, it's been like that
all the time. No empire lasts forever. However, this one happens to
be so brutal, so killing, so intervening, doing so much damage that
you would expect it to be more short-lived than many of the others.
It didn't have the decorum and the sense of responsibility sometimes
exercised by the English and the French, to a large extent by the
Spanish, to a minor extent also by the Dutch, much less by the
Portuguese and the Belgians. You will of course also remember that
the Portuguese in Brazil, with the US, were hanging onto slavery more
than any other. So there is a tradition here.
But leaving that point aside, I think China is one of the
least likely successor candidates. On my list, candidate number one
is the European Union. You need a sense of universalism, China has
nothing of that. They are still convinced that it is surrounded by
barbarians. They are willing to buy quite a lot. The annual global
income is 54 trillion dollars, and China's reserves are more than one
trillion. The US currency reserves right now amount to 47 billion,
which is nothing. That means when you want 100 billion for more
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have to take more loans. That
they get those loans is something still a little bit strange, but
they do pay something in return, namely access to the US markets. So,
having said that, a likely successor is the European Union, very
universalist, with the 11 major colonial powers all members, and all
concerned about their part of the world. And they are willing to say
"I'll not protest if you do something in your part if you'll not
protest when I do something in my part". It is European political
common market. There is much more to the European Union, but this is
one important aspect.
We had a conference on peace studies in Hull in England
one week ago, about democracy and peace. And I launched the idea of
the European Union as a successor, after 19 reasons why the
hypothesis of "democratic peace" is false, even a fraud, but I leave
out all of that. The point I'm making is simply that the European
Union has the deep culture and the deep structure it takes to become
an empire. There were protests to the effect that there was no such
plan also from Members of the European Parliament. Back then, a
German from the European Commission raised his hand and said: "I'll
tell you one thing, I work in the European Commission, but
occasionally I go over to the Council of Ministers and whenever I am
in the building, so many of the people walking around are in uniform,
they suddenly disappear into some room, and it is very clear that the
doors are closed." There is of course also the Tindemans plan, and
the Tindemans plan is exactly what they need for that successor
purpose. So let me proceed to what I think is most likely,
regionalization.
B. Regionalization
We have 4 regions or maybe 5, EU, AU, SAARC and ASEAN.
Number 5 is the G8, it's not contiguous, but it doesn't have to be
contiguous to be a region. And we have 4 regions that are coming, and
they have one thing in common: they are not going to ask Washington
for permission.
The first one is the Estados Unidos de America Latina y
el Caribe, the United States of Latin America and the Caribbean. The
common currency will be a Bolivar. Nine of the countries met in La
Paz in December and drew up the basic plans for the Charter. A basic
pattern of thinking is what they call a "social economy" and about
that one I will just say one or two lines. When sanctions came to
Cuba in 1960, or 1961 rather, the only trading possibility was with
the Soviet Union, meaning sugar in return for shoddily manufactured
goods. The Soviet Union collapsed, so did the trade, and Washington
was already looking forward to the collapse of Cuba. What did they do
then? First of all they switched to organic agriculture to be
self-sufficient. In industrial products, they have enormous
shortages, but they have some trade possibilities. And then you would
immediately say that it was obvious, but not everybody thought about
it. "We have human material, let us process that human material to as
high a level as possible." That started university education to an
extent unknown in most other countries, with a science and training
center outside Havana for the training of doctors, dentists,
engineers, social workers, educators, teachers of all trades.
Thousands and thousands of them, ready to go to Latin America. But
they didn't have the money till Chavez. He had the money, and a
messianic complex. He is the Messiah with a budget. Imagine Jesus
Christ with an oil budget? You see the triangular theme? Chavez pays
Cuba for providing the manpower for lifting the bottom level of those
9 countries, starting with the slums, and they pay Chavez a certain
allegiance to the Estados Unidos, which is evolving everyday today.
Venezuela then, a couple of weeks ago left the World Bank and the
IMF. You cannot leave it unless you have paid all your debts and
Venezuela paid them some time ago. The other countries cannot leave
because they haven't paid their debts, so Venezuela is going to pay
their debts for them. The Messiah with a budget. The difficulty of it
is, that Messianism might go to his head and make his populist
democracy, as opposed to the usual Latin American elitist democracy,
similar to people's democracy in Eastern Europe, as opposed to any
democracy. As it is obvious I like his policies, I would hate to see
that happen.
The second one is an Islamic community from Morocco to
Mindanao. 1,300,000,000 Muslims crossing almost 1,300,000,000 Hindus,
from Nepal to Sri Lanka, like two highways, but at the same level. A
major potential for a major conflict, making small riots in India
look microscopic. I use that as an exercise for diplomats and say,
"Please come up with 5 solutions for this one".
Third, an East Asia Community, without Japan and with
India, possibly combined with SCO.
And fourth, possibly, Putin could pull it off, but he may
not be the man for it, is a Russian Union with a Chechnya having as
much autonomy as the Netherlands in the European Union. Today widely
off the mark. Tomorrow? Maybe. It would be widely in Russia's
interest. The problem is that Putin came to power by being
anti-Chechen. So, let us see. Maybe somebody can come to power by
being pro-Chechen.
In a regional world we do not have any guarantee for
peace. As a matter of fact, the country that will benefit most from
the decline and fall of the US Empire will be the US Republic. They
may start sleeping well at night, and they might use their enormous
natural and human resources for innovative projects and their
capacity for cooperation, all of that, for better purposes, and make
a decent country out of the USA.
C. Another Globalization
That means of course a stronger UN with globalization
through the United Nations. I was advisor to the Commission for
Global Governance. They had a lot of good ideas whose time had not
come, so let me just say the three that for me are most important.
Abolish the veto power. They may meet, in the G8, but put
their agenda on the UN agenda, and if they don't like what they come
up with, outvote them by expanding the Security Council to 54 members
like the Economic and Social Council, and see to it that all parts of
the world are there. That's point one.
Point two, democratize the United Nations. They can
mobilize an enormous amount of initiatives through a democratic
United Nations. Maybe with one representative for each 1 million
inhabitants, some say for each 10 million.
And, point three, take the United Nations out of the
United States and put it somewhere else. Put it in a more friendly
environment. This can all be done within a span from 5 to 20 years.
If democracy is such a good idea, then why not practice it?
My own book on The Decline and Fall of the US Empire--And
Then What? is scheduled for next Spring. The book on alternative
economics is also for next year, and so is the book on deep culture.
Books, books, books, what matters more is peace, peace.
So let me end by simply saying that I was asked to say
something on the state of the world. I've done that. And, if anybody
can come up with ideas on how to speed up constructive, creative,
concrete development, please don't hesitate!
Thank you.
Johan Galtung, Dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies; Founder,
TRANSCEND, a peace and development network ( www.transcend.org )
15 contradictions of the US
ECONOMIC
1. Between growth and distribution: overproduction, 1.4
billion below 1 dollar a day, 100,000 die a day from preventable and
curable diseases and 25,000 from hunger;
2. Between productive and finance economy: currency, stocks,
bonds, overvalued, crashes, unemployment, contract jobs, not
positions;
3. Between production/distribution/consumption and nature:
ecocrisis, depletion/pollution, global warming;
MILITARY
4. Between US state terrorism and terrorism: blowback;
5. Between US and allies: except UK-Germany-Japan, allies
will say "enough";
6. Between US Eurasia hegemony and Rus-Chindia triangle with
40% of humanity;
7. Between US-led NATO and the EU army: a Tindemans follow-up;
POLITICAL
8. Between USA and the UN: the UN ultimately hitting back;
9. Between USA and the EU: vying for Orthodox/Muslims support;
CULTURAL
10. Between US Judeo-Christianity and Islam: the UNSC nucleus
has four Christian, and none of 56 Muslim countries;
11. Between US and the oldest civilizations: Chinese, Indian,
Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Aztec, Inca, Maya;
12. Between US and EU elite cultures: France, Germany etc.
SOCIAL
13. Between state-corporate elites and working classes of
unemployed and contract workers; the middle classes?
14. Between older generation and youth: Seattle, Washington,
Praha, Genova and ever younger youth. The middle generation?
15. Between myth and realities: the US dream and US reality.
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