Archive for the ‘The World-Empire and the Terrorists’ Category
Colouring the map red
After the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was completed, the entire continent (apart from Ethiopia and Liberia) was partitioned between the European colonial powers. It is largely forgotten now, but this was not always a matter of outright aggression and conquest. Just as in British India, some of these territories were actually protectorates. For example, the tribes [...]
The Oikumene and the barbaroi
Even BBC World has headlines like ‘Options on dealing with Iran’. Despite the claim to be serving all the peoples of the world, and despite all the pretty black and brown anchorwomen, therefore, the BBC still identifies itself as part of the ‘we’ who must deal with ‘them’. When are we going to see BBC [...]
We are the world?
So many British and American movies, and yet so few European, Asian or South American movies, are about ‘saving the world’, that we are obliged to wonder whether this is a peculiarly Anglo-American obsession. These movies beg for classification on the basis of what exactly the world is being saved from: total destruction, as with [...]
Weltherrenschaft oder Untergang!
Hannah Arendt used to argue that the United States was never in fact threatened by Communism. What was under threat from Moscow-directed revolution was not the national existence of the US but its global hegemony. Yes indeed, but such observations are irrelevant, as long as the population of the United States has been successfully [...]
It’s the oil, stupid
If the neocon game-plan for the Middle East was truly, as has been alleged, to create a self-supporting dynamic whereby Iraqi oil would finance the conquest of the other unfriendly oil-rich countries, while satisfying a SUV-worshipping electoral base, then American behaviour becomes readily comprehensible as the continuation of a political tradition going back to the [...]
Mission accomplished
On the first day of the occupation of Baghdad, billions of dollars of Iraqi oil wealth went missing. Mission accomplished! Moreover, Iraq is not after all a political failure, for it has in fact been successfully remade in the image of the US, or at least the red-state vision thereof: a massively corrupt oil sector, [...]
Weapons of piecemeal destruction?
When did nuclear, chemical and bacteriological armaments get classified together as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – as distinguished perhaps from weapons of individual destruction? It is true that throughout the Cold War, the three things were lumped together under the convenient abbreviations of ABC or NBC, but that was because defence against them shared the [...]
Only if we don’t get hurt
That the US Administration genuinely believed that Saddam had WMDs is a ridiculous idea. The invasion, conducted by troops lacking adequate NBC gear, is itself evidence that they knew perfectly well that he didn’t have any. Equally ridiculous is the idea that the Administration disregarded the UN inspectors’ belief that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs. [...]
Saddam Hussein and Jack Bauer
One of the reasons for invading Iraq that the Americans tried on for size, ex post facto and after the collapse of the previous WMD excuse, was that Saddam was in the habit of torturing people. And so indeed he was, but, as Jack Bauer has so exhaustively explained to us, it is perfectly OK [...]
Close, but no cigar to the eyeball
The occasion for the special regime at Guantánamo Bay was supposed to be that the Geneva Conventions and other international law did not cover what the Americans call ‘unlawful combatants’. In fact there is a perfectly clear category that would seem to cover fighters picked up in Afghanistan, and Iraqi insurgents, with a respectable legal [...]
