UPDATE: AUGUST 3

for new statistics, see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5242732.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5240746.stm

When discussing war, it’s easy to get caught up in inflammatory and highly emotional rhetoric.  Too often, in this flurry of rhetoric, the facts are forgotten or deliberately concealed, making it hard for casual observers to ascertain the truth.  Rather than launch my own emotional op-ed on the new Israeli-Arab war, I would just like to present some uncontroversial facts about the situation in hopes that it clarify the issue a bit.  So, starting from the beginning, what has happened over the past few months that led to yet another horrifying war in the Middle East?

Timeline of events, Israeli-Arab War 2006:

1. March 3, 2006 – Hamas Ceasefire

Hamas agrees to a unilateral, year-long ceasefire with Israel for 2006, provided that Israel refrains from using force against Palestinians.[i]

2. Early June, 2006 – Israeli attacks kill civilians in Gaza

Israel launches a series of unprovoked military attacks on Gaza.  First, on June 9^th, a family of eight civilians is killed on a beach in Gaza by an explosion caused by the Israeli military, according to Palestinian witnesses and Human Rights Watch.  Four days later, an Israeli missile attack killed eleven Palestinians and injured thirty others.  Another missile attack killed three and wounded fifteen a week later.  In response to these attacks, Hamas suspended its ceasefire.[ii]

3. June 25, 2006 – Israeli soldier captured

Palestinian militants capture one Israeli soldier and kill two in a raid.  The militants offer to return the soldiers in return for the release of some of the 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds of children and thousands of women, held in Israeli jails on charges that are perceived as illegitimate  Israel flatly rules out the possibility of negotiation.[iii]

4. June 27, 2006 – Hamas “implicitly accepts” Israel’s right to exist

Hamas “implicitly accepts” Israel’s right to exist, amidst a massive Israeli military buildup on the border of Gaza, a major victory for moderates in the Hamas movement and a breakthrough which could have created the opportunity for a peaceful solution to the conflict through negotiation.  Hamas’ previous policy of rejectionism had been cited as the only major roadblock to negotiations by Israel and the United States.[iv]

5.  Late June, 2006 – Israel invades Gaza

Israel invades the Gaza Strip, bombing the main power plant (crippling water, sewage, and health systems), transportation networks, and other infrastructure targets.  Israel’s offensive has killed at least 140 Palestinians to date including 35 children (August 3), almost exclusively civilians, with many more enduring resource shortages and other hardships as a direct result of the invasion.[v]  Approximately 1/3 of (democratically elected) Palestinian government officials were kidnapped by Israel, with another 1/3 forced into hiding.[vi]

6. July 12, 2006 – Hezbollah raid against Israel

Hezbollah militants capture two Israeli soldiers and kill eight in a raid.  Again, the kidnappers offer to exchange the kidnapped soldiers for Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.  Again, Israel flatly rules out the possibility of such a nonviolent solution.

7. July, 2006 – Israel invades Lebanon

Israel invades Lebanon.  At least 900 Lebanese have died so far in the Israeli offensive, almost exclusively civilians, 3,000 or more have been severely injured, with a million refugees forced to flee the country.  As many as 40 Israelis have died so far in fighting.[vii]  The invasion greatly exacerbated sectarian divisions in Lebanon, a country which, not long ago, endured a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years and left 100,000 dead.

The facts speak for themselves.  Israel has killed over one thousand Lebanese and Palestinians (approximately: 20 before the first Israeli soldier was captured, 140 in Gaza since that capture, at least 900 in Lebanon) so far during the last two month in its reinvasions of Gaza and Lebanon.  According to Israel, it is morally justifiable to kill over one thousand people in order to secure the freedom of 3 hostages, even when the kidnappers have offered nonviolent, diplomatic solutions to the hostage situation!  Needless to say, Israel’s right to do this is never questioned in mainstream debate in the United States (after all, the US government used the deaths of 3,000 Americans in the 9/11 attacks to justify two subsequent wars which have killed at least 5,000 Afghanis and 100,000 Iraqis respectively).

Another matter which is never seriously debated within the United States is the cause of the current crises in the Middle East: had it not been for the unprovoked aggression of Palestinian and Lebanese militants (perhaps with Syrian or Iranian guidance), it is claimed, Israel would never have reinvaded Gaza or Lebanon.  Obviously, this is in stark contrast to the facts. Hamas only suspended its ceasefire after a series of unprovoked Israeli attacks on civilians which killed over 20 people; realistically, it’s hard to imagine that Hamas could have maintained its unilateral ceasefire while Palestinian civilians were being actively attacked (remember that the only condition of Hamas’ ceasefire was that Israel not initiate violence), and one has to wonder if Israel was not trying to elicit a violent response from a Palestinian militant group to justify a new invasion of Gaza.  In Lebanon, it is less obvious which side is to blame for starting this phase of the conflict.  On the one hand, Hezbollah’s raid was the first instance of violence between Israel and the Lebanese in the current phase of conflict, and in that sense, Israel’s reaction could be construed as a nominally defensive, albeit horribly destructive and uncalled for, overreaction.  However, in another sense, Hezbollah’s attack could be seen not as offensive, but as neither offensive of defensive, but an act in ongoing war.  After all, Israel was holding Lebanese political prisoners hostage, and many Muslims see themselves as a united community, so to them, Hezbollah’s attack was not an act of aggression but a legitimate act of resistance against a government which was already in the process of killing dozens of innocent Muslims in a campaign of aggression.  In any case, even if Hezbollah’s attack was an uncontroversial act of aggression, Israel’s response could not possibly be justified.  A peaceful state, in a similar situation, would seek to negotiate the release of its hostages, especially if the kidnappers had already offered a nonviolent and just solution, rather than engaging in a massive bombing campaign that overwhelmingly punished the civilian population of the offending party’s country.

In recent years, the American government has instituted a foreign policy designed to expand and maintain the unipolar neoliberal economic and ideological empire which came into existence following the demise of the Soviet Union.  In its campaign to expand the reach of its mercantile system of global capitalism, the United States has engaged in military operations in countries with policies adverse to American hegemony in order to gain control over markets, geopolitically important areas, and the last of dwindling resources, particularly energy resources.  Although these operations are typically justified as noble humanitarian acts motivated purely by altruism or else as necessary to protect the lives of American civilians in public statements by government officials and in the commentary of the mass media, serious discussion amongst the leaders of the establishment—which is usually devoid of the rhetoric, emotion, and ideological fanaticism which permeates popular discussion of foreign policy—makes it quite clear that the goal of American foreign policy is designed principally to  perpetuate the hegemony of the American political and economic elite throughout the world.  It is important for people interested in dismantling the American Empire to have an understanding of the motives and interests that American foreign policy is designed to satisfy, so that we may develop appropriate strategies for combating this imperial system which are maximally effective.

In order to maintain American political and economic hegemony across the world, it is necessary for the United States to contain potential military, economic, or political rivals that might become powerful enough to threaten US dominance in any of these fields.  This policy of containment typically involves isolating rival states in the international community, surrounding these countries with well-armed and subservient client states in order to prevent the rivals from expanding their spheres of influence, and inhibiting the economic development of contending world powers.  When there is competition for dwindling resources with other emerging powers, as there is today, it is doubly important, from the perspective of political elites in the United States, for the US to gain control over disputed resources; even if the action is not immediately profitable for American corporations, starving rising powers of the raw materials that are necessary for economic development is an end in itself.[i]

The importance of perpetuating the unipolar international system was expressed most clearly in a Pentagon document written by Paul Wolfowitz leaked to the New York Times in 1991, entitled Defense Planning Guidance.  The document makes clear that the principle aim of the American foreign policy following the collapse of the Soviet Union would be to prevent regional powers from threatening the US’ ideological, military, or economic dominance.  This includes stifling attempts by “advanced industrial nations [to] challenge our leadership,” and containing “regional threats and risks,” which could threaten “regions critical to the security of the US and its allies, including Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and the territory of the former Soviet Union... Latin America, Oceania, and Sub-Saharan Africa...  The US will be concerned with preventing the domination of key regions by a hostile power.”  The document warns that the immediate threat to US world domination would be “an authoritarian regime bent on regenerating aggressive military power... in Russia.”

Threats to Hegemony

Presently, the greatest threats to US hegemony include Russia and China, and to some extent India.  Most of America’s recent foreign policy can be interpreted as an attempt to secure America’s position of global dominance in a time when this dominance is being tested by the rise of these nascent Asian superpowers.  Some aspects of American foreign policy have been aimed at directly stifling the growth of China as a power, but many operations have had indirect effects on the balance of global power.  The most direct action that the United States has taken to contain China has been a campaign of encirclement around the country.  The United States has strengthened old alliances and created new alliances with countries surrounding China including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Nepal, and Indonesia,  and has also increased military aid to some of these countries, to ensure that China can not expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the US.  The US has also worked to diminish the sphere of Russian influence, by offering a great deal of financial backing to pro-EU, pro-NATO, anti-Russian candidates in former Soviet provinces,[ii] leading to the “color-coated revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.  A similar situation may be developing in Belarus, which has recently been placed under US and EU sanctions following a contested presidential election in which the pro-Russian candidate was named victor.[iii]  The United States has also strengthened its military presence in the oil-rich Caspian region, which has traditionally been Russia’s main source of oil and natural gas, ostensibly to starve Russia of important resources.

Traditional American allies such as the European Union and Japan may also challenge the unipolar system in the near future, as they are no longer dependent on US military support to protect them from “Soviet aggression” and may desire more independence from Washington.  The European Union and China are developing increasingly close ties, and together could be economically and militarily powerful enough to counter the dominance of the United States in international affairs.  The Centre for European Reform notes that “China's exports to the EU have risen by an astonishing 820 per cent since 1990, while EU sales to China have jumped by 600 per cent... Bilateral trade is expected to top €180 billion, making the EU China's largest trading partner, ahead of the US and Japan. EU-based companies have also ploughed vast amounts of investment into the booming Chinese market. Many EU companies, such as Volkswagen or Carrefour (a French retail giant), now rely heavily on China for their profits.”[iv] The European Union also repealed an arms embargo and has started to sell weapons to China, as has Israel; amidst deafening protest from ideologues in Washington. 

Meanwhile, Asia has continued to grow closer together and assert itself as a unified bloc; Japan and India have agreed to back each others’ bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, China and India have settled border disputes and have become increasingly friendly, China and Pakistan have agreed to cooperate in anti-terrorist anti-separatist actions.  Asia is also becoming more economically integrated, with bilateral trade between India and China reaching $13.6 billion in 2004, threatening to surpass bilateral trade between India and the US which is currently at $20 billion.[v]  While there still may be divisive political and ethnic tensions between China and Japan, their economies are highly integrated.  According to Asia Times, “China is Japan's biggest trading partner, accounting for 20.1% of its trade in 2004. In concrete terms, it was worth a staggering 22.2005 trillion yen ($206.56 billion) in 2004 with exports to China hitting 11.8278 trillion yen and imports totting up to 10.3727 trillion yen. Major Japanese firms such as Toyota Motor Corp are expanding rapidly in China while big Chinese players such as the Shanghai Electric Group are entering the Japanese market.”[vi]

Given the trend towards greater Asian unity and independence, and greater closeness between the EU and Asia, it seems obvious that if the United States intends on holding onto unipolar dominance, it will have to act quickly to disrupt the unification of Asia, solidify oil resources under its rule, and perhaps attempt to isolate China by allying itself with India.  The US has been courting India for an anti-China alliance in recent years.  On this subject, the Economist magazine reports that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has positioned India “no longer as a leader of the third world, nor [as a non-aligned country], but as ‘proud to identify with those who defend the values of liberal democracy and secularism across the world’... India's strategists [say that] America needs India more than India needs it.”[vii]  Earlier this year, the United States signed a major nuclear deal with India in a further attempt to solidify an anti-China alliance.[viii]

Neoliberalism versus unipolarity?

Why is it necessary to control economic and military rivals, when today’s world of capitalist globalization is supposed to be destroying the nation-state and leading to global integration? Contrary to the argument put forward by globalization’s enthusiasts, such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, neoliberalism is not an internationalist system, and global economic integration is certainly not going to lead to more stability or a more peaceful world.  In fact, the economic system that is referred to as “globalization” is merely a mercantilist project designed to benefit American corporations.  This system of mercantilism rarely tolerate competition from other capitalist powers, let alone from alternative systems of economic management, and can only be perpetuated by constant military action to suppress challenges to its rule.  The fact is, the slogan of capitalist globalization—“plutocrats of the world unite”—can never be achieved; it is simply incompatible with capitalist logic of infinite individual accumulation.  The oligarchs in Russia, China, and the United States will always be in competition with each other and will only cooperate when it is absolutely necessary to do so to suppress internal dissent.

                All of this completely contradicts the theories of Thomas Friedman, who suggested that corporate globalization would usher in a new period of world harmony.  Friedman’s thesis is that no two countries that both have a McDonald’s restaurant have ever waged war against each other; thus, McDonald’s must be the harbinger of world peace, as anyone who knows the joy of a Big Mac will be too complacent to fight for anything.  For one thing, when was the last time a third world country (one without a McDonald’s) invaded anyone?  To my knowledge, the only recent example of such an occurrence was Saddam Hussein’s invasions of Iran and Kuwait, both with American weapons, with American encouragement in the first example and a “green light” from George H. W. Bush in the second.  Other than that, it doesn’t seem to be the countries without McDonald’s that are starting all of the world’s wars.  A more realistic thesis would state that the US invades countries that have not opened their doors to US corporate domination and then installs puppet regimes with pro-American business policies. So, it makes about as much sense to say that McDonald’s restaurants bring world peace as it does to say that Christian churches brought peace during the Crusades; no two countries with Christian Churches attacked each other during the crusades, as the Christians were far too busy committing atrocities against Muslims in Palestine.  In both cases, one group was trying to export its own system, be it neoliberalism or Christianity, and was invading countries precisely to instate this system and to erect the McDonalds or Christian Church.

            The struggle between the American Empire and the powers of the emerging world for global hegemony will be grand in scale, and will most likely define international politics throughout the early part of the 21^st Century.  It is important for us to understand the nature of this struggle, and to understand that it is ultimately rooted in the capitalist economic system, if we wish to develop rational strategies for confronting imperialism.

This week, President Bush presented his proposed budget for 2006.  The budget would increase the already astronomical military budget by 6.9%, to $439.3 billion, and would also increase spending on “homeland security” to $30 billion.  To pay for the increase in military spending, Bush has proposed potentially devastating cuts in funding to already under-funded social services.  Medicare would be gutted by $36 billion over the next five years, and aid to children’s hospitals would be reduced, as would be the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a government organization which works to prevent the spread of disease and combat health hazards.  The proposed budget cut from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention occurs in the midst of panic regarding the spread of avian flu, which, experts fear, could kill hundreds of millions of people if  its mutates into a form which is easily transferable between humans.

To put the US government’s colossal military budget in perspective, consider this: at the end of the 20^th century, the United Nations estimated that the cost of providing universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers was only $40 billion dollars, [i]  approximately 9% of the proposed US military budget for 2006, and between 2 and 4% of the estimated amount of money to be spent on the invasion of Iraq, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The justification for the astronomically large military budget that is currently in vogue amongst elite pundits is that the United States needs a powerful “defense” force in order to win the “war against terrorism.”  Somehow, we are supposed to believe that by spending trillions of dollars on its military and waging vicious imperialist wars in which hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives, the US government can not only defeat all clandestine and decentralized terrorist organizations, but can destroy the very anti-imperialist ideology which unites these organizations and which is shared by a large portion of the world’s population!   Never do mainstream pundits consider the possibility that the United States government’s choice to spend trillions of dollars on campaigns of mass slaughter and imperial conquest while neglecting to invest a mere fraction of that money to end global poverty might itself actually be a major reason for the prevalence of anti-American sentiment worldwide, and thus of anti-American terrorism.

If the US government was serious about fighting terrorism, it would immediately put an end to its policies interventionism and imperialism, which are increasingly terrorism,[ii] and would invest a mere $40 billion providing universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers.  If people saw the United States extending a benevolent hand to the world and lifting billions of people out of poverty and doing its part to end war and injustice globally, how could Osama bin Laden and his ilk possibly recruit terrorists to fight the United States?  The truth is, the terrorist threat to the US could be eradicated with without illegal domestic wire tapping programs and illegal wars of aggression abroad in this manner, if the US government really was actually interested in ending the threat. However, the US government is clearly not concerned with ending terrorism; it is concerned only with protecting and advancing the interests of the capitalist elite that controls it, so it funnels astronomical amounts of money into the military-industrial economy, and spends astronomical amounts of money on wars to secure resources and markets, leaving ordinary Americans to deal with the consequences of preventable terrorism.

The sad truth of the matter is this: our country could invest its immense wealth caring for the sick and injured and preventing disease in our country and around the world, but instead, our government invests its wealth on programs which are causing more health problems by the hour, like the war in Iraq, which has already wounded between 15,000 and 48,100 American soldiers[iii] and countless Iraqis.  Our country could be using its wealth in the interest of advancing peace, but the American government continues to devote the vast majority of its resources to fighting unjust wars and participating in other less overt campaigns of imperialist violence.  Our country could use its wealth to permanently eradicate global poverty, but our government instead uses its wealth and power to exacerbate and perpetuate the problems of poverty and economic inequality.

Bush’s proposed budget for 2006 epitomizes the priorities of America’s capitalist elite and the wastefulness of the capitalist system in general.  In order to perpetuate economic inequality and elite privilege, the ruling class wastes trillions of dollars worth of resources on violent institutions such as military and police forces which protect their interests.  This is money that could otherwise be spent eradicating poverty worldwide and ensuring prosperity for everyone, providing high-quality health care for all the world’s citizens, combating existing pandemics and preventing future outbreaks, and advancing scientific knowledge, but because of the deadly priorities of the capitalist system and those who control it, humans are instead using it to perpetuate poverty, violence, and disease.  Everyone in the world suffers because of capitalism’s deadly priorities which consistently put profit over people, from the American children whose hospitals will be denied aid because of the increase in the US military budget, to the Fallujan children whose hospitals have been decimated by US bombs, and it’s time that we all unite to put an end to this anti-human system once and for all.

No country in the world has suffered more sustained misery at the hands of the American Empire in the post-Soviet era than Iraq, which has been punished with a degree of ferocity unseen since the invasion of Vietnam.  The people of Iraq have endured horrific tragedies caused by the United States government during the past 20 years, beginning with the rule of the ruthless tyrant Saddam Hussein who was armed and aided by the United States[1] during the 1980s while he may have massacred between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis.[2]  Later, when relations between the United States and the dictator soured, the people of Iraq endured a US invasion[3] in 1991 during which as many as 100,000 Iraqis died and 300,000 were wounded as a direct result of the atrocities committed by the US military.[4] During the Gulf War the United States committed widespread abuses and war crimes, including the infamous use of bulldozers to plow living, injured, and dead Iraqi soldiers into the ground, burying some alive.[5]  Civilian targets were purposely attacked,[6] Iraqi soldiers who had raised a white flag in surrender were mercilessly killed,[7] and the military used depleted uranium in bullets and missiles, causing untold suffering including birth disorders and genetic defects.[8] The US bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power plants—crippling its water, sewage, and medical systems—and also destroyed the majority of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure, severely crippling its economy and limiting its ability to provide for its population.

Following the utter devastation of Iraq’s economy in the Gulf War, the United States imposed draconian economic sanctions on the country which prohibited the sale of food, medicine, machinery, and other humanitarian items[9] to Iraq.  The effect of the embargo was catastrophic for the Iraqi civilian population: it is estimated that perhaps 1.7 million Iraqis died as a direct result of the sanctions, including perhaps 1 million Iraqi children under the age of five years old.[10]  The culpability of the United States in the deaths of the 1.7 million Iraqis cannot seriously be disputed; it is simply ridiculous to claim that a government could impose complete sanctions preventing the sale of food, medicine, machinery, and other vital items to a country utterly demolished by war, with no means of providing for its own population, and not realize that such an embargo would lead to millions of civilian deaths. The government officials responsible for the imposition of the sanctions were clearly aware of the human toll of their policies, and were remorseless: when Clinton’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, was confronted with the fact that half a million Iraqi children had died because of the economic sanctions on the television show 60 Minutes in 1996, she did not challenge the statistic, but infamously declared “we think the price is worth it.”  

The sanctions remained in effect until the 2003 military invasion, which has led to an additional 100,000 Iraqi deaths thus far according to the best estimate by the British medical journal the Lancet.^[11]  Once Saddam Hussein’s regime had been defeated, the United States established a military occupation in the country, began a counterinsurgency campaign against anti-occupation forces, and proceeded to turn over much of the Iraqi economy to American corporations.  Among the many egregious atrocities[12] committed by the United States in Iraq include the use of napalm in combat^[13] and brutal torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.[14]

The extremely brutal American policy towards Iraq during the past 20 years would seem to be so terrible as to border on genocide. The term “genocide,” like the term “holocaust,” is one that contains extreme emotional value and should never be used lightly, or for purposes of political persuasion.  However, the atrocities perpetrated against the people of Iraq during the last 20 years are so extreme that we should at least be willing to discuss the applicability of a term such as “genocide.”

The term “genocide” is defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[15]

Of the five acts listed above which are classified as being genocidal, the United States has clearly and indisputably engaged in the first three, directly killing with its own military at least 200,000 Iraqis during 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, causing serious bodily injury to the 300,000 Iraqis injured during the Gulf War, the 42,500 civilians (at the very least) injured during the 2003 invasion,[16] and the untold thousands exposed to depleted uranium and napalm, and deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about destruction by passing sanctions on the sale of food and medicine to an impoverished, economically devastated country.  Dennis Halliday—the UN Humanitarian Coordinator on Baghdad, Iraq who resigned in protest over the sanctions—clearly thought the United States’ actions met the United Nations’ definition of genocide, as he said upon resigning: “I don't want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.”[17]

            But, it would seem, simply killing members of a group, causing bodily harm to members of a group, or deliberately inflicting destructive conditions on a group of people is not a great enough crime to merit the term “genocide.”  If every instance in which one of those three acts occurred were to be classified as genocide by the UN, then every single war, ethnic conflict, and counterinsurgency campaign in the world would qualify as genocide.  Perhaps a better way to determine whether or not the actions taken against Iraqis by the United States government classify as genocide is to compare the Iraq situation with other historical situations that are generally accepted as genocides.  In mainstream discourse, there are several campaigns of mass-murder which have been deemed genocide, including the extermination of more than 10 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents by the Third Reich in Germany, the annihilation of perhaps 1.5 million Armenians by nationalists in Turkey, and the murder of at least 800,000 Tutsi by Hutu nationalist in Rwanda.  Other events which are generally described as genocide in mainstream discourse—despite some dissention—include the massacre of 1.7 million Cambodians by the country’s government under the Khmer Rouge regime, the murder of millions of dissidents by the government of Joseph Stalin in the USSR and Mao Tse-Tung in the People’s Republic of China, the colonization and murder of an untold number of indigenous inhabitants of the western hemisphere by European colonialists, the ethnic warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo which has caused approximately 4 million deaths, and the various campaigns ethnic cleansing associated with the demise of Yugoslavia.

Iraq is certainly comparable to several events typically described as “genocides” in terms of death toll; the death toll caused by the United States during the last 20 years—roughly 1.9 million Iraqis[18]—surpasses the death toll of the Cambodian auto-genocide (1.7 million), the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million), the Rwandan Genocide (800,000), and the Bosnian Genocide (200,000).  It would appear that, measured just in terms of deaths, US policy towards Iraq should certainly qualify as genocide.

However, some people argue that genocide is a term that can only be used to describe campaigns designed to completely obliterate an entire ethnic, social, or political group from the earth, and nothing short of this—no matter how high the death count—merits the term genocide. US Policy in Iraq clearly does not meet this description; the US government’s motive for killing nearly 2 million Iraqis is clearly more about enforcing corporate political and economic hegemony than it is about a racial agenda.  However, there are many other historical cases of mass-violence typically called genocide that arguably do not involve purposeful obliteration of a single group, such as the extermination of indigenous Americans by Europeans—which was essentially a campaign of colonization so unspeakably brutal that almost all of its victims were killed—or Pol Pot’s massacre of millions of his fellow Cambodians who stood in the way of his political, economic, and social goals.  If we decided that US policy toward Iraq should not be described as genocide, then the extermination of Native Americans or Pol Pot’s massacre should not be described as genocide either.  However, if we continue to call Pol Pot’s massacre genocide, then we must accept that the US Iraq policy must also be deemed genocide. 

Anyway, I doubt that it makes a great deal of difference to the victims of a mass-slaughter whether their murder’s intention was to exterminate them or merely to take control of their resources.[19]  If we elect not to classify US Policy towards Iraq during the last 20 years as genocide, we do so only because of a technicality in terminology, and not because the people of Iraq have suffered any less than the victims of comparable tragedies that technically are genocides.

Regardless of whether US policy toward Iraq is to be classified as genocide or not, it is important that we as Americans begin to understand the magnitude of the crimes committed by our country’s government; that the number of deaths is even large enough to merit comparisons to the Cambodian Genocide ought to be enough to galvanize many Americans into opposition to the war and the occupation of Iraq.  The criminal war against the people of Iraq is still going on, and it must be our utmost priority to end the campaign of colonization and extermination.  We must do absolutely everything that we can to ensure that not another Iraqi dies at the hands of the US government.  We must demand that American troops leave Iraq immediately.  Every day that US troops remain in Iraq, the slaughter continues, and the suffering endured by the people of Iraq and the people of the United States increases. 

If you have found my articles on this website interesting and insightful, and you would be interested in receiving more news and information about this pamphlet, including the release date and purchasing information as that information is available, please send me an email at dbaake@sbcglobal.net .

I have included two excerpts from the text below:  

First Excerpt: Introduction

We live during an era of extreme oppression, despair, and anguish, but also an era of great opportunity for positive change.  Vast technological improvements have been made in recent years, making it technically possible for the human race to guarantee not only subsistence, but prosperity, for all members of its population.  The greatest impediment to universal prosperity is no longer nature; it comes from within our species, from hierarchical human institutions and social systems.  Humans have struggled for thousands of years to overcome natural threats to our existence, only to reach a point where our existence is threatened by our own social systems, specifically, at the current point in history, the capitalist system.

 Global capitalism is an overwhelming catastrophe, perhaps the most dangerous the human species has ever faced.  As a result of Social-Darwinist economic policies, billions live in abject poverty and desolation; slowly dying from the moment of their birth from malnutrition and curable diseases; never allowed a chance to experience life as anything but torture, never given a chance to manifest their own creative human potential.  Millions of others are massacred and annihilated by machine guns, tanks, and bombs; sacrifices to the ever-expanding, insatiable, hegemonic god that is capitalism.  From General Suharto’s killing fields in East Timor, to the napalmed jungles of Vietnam; from the ghettos of apartheid Palestine, to the cities of El Salvador where death squads roamed the streets searching out peasants on which to prey; the bloody effects of capitalism have reverberated throughout the world.

 In a world ruled by capitalism, 1 billion children live in abject poverty, 640 million do not have access to appropriate shelter, 140 million have never attended school, 400 million do not have access to clean uncontaminated water, 500 million do not have basic sanitation, 270 million have no access to health care, and 90 million are severely food deprived;^[i] while the world’s 225 richest people have combined assets of over 1 trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the worlds population, or 2.5 billion people. Approximately 12.3 million people live in conditions of “modern slavery.”[ii]  The three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries in the world.  It is estimated that it would cost only $40 billion dollars a year to provide universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers, less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.^[iii]

This sort of astronomical inequality is an essential feature of the capitalist system. Capitalism encourages people to pursue infinite individual accumulation, regardless of the human and environmental costs of this accumulation. The cumulative costs of systemic capitalist accumulation are severe, and they have the potential to destroy the entire biosphere and the human race.  Moreover, the reckless competition that capitalism mandates necessarily creates a world of extreme material inequality; one in which billions of people fail to meet subsistence even when it is technically possible for every human in the world to live in prosperity. 

The capitalist economic system in practice is indeed a system of competition, but not between employers and corporations, as capitalist intellectuals suggest it is. Primarily, it is a system of competition between workers, peasants, and their third-world nations to work for the lowest wages and the least benefits in a desperate attempt to attract corporate employers who will offer them miniscule, sub-starvation payment for their services, while synergized transnational corporations and business elites make trillions of dollars in profit.  It is this competition that capital must unceasingly seek, which has forced it to move beyond the First World, with its social-democratic systems designed to combat the poverty necessary for capitalism to function, into the Third World, devastated beyond belief by centuries of imperialism.

Profits have drastically increased as the imperatives of capitalism have been imposed across the world by corporations, their financial institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and G8) and their state and military benefactors.  These groups force Third World countries to liberalize trade, reduce tariffs, privatize social services, and loosen environmental and labor restrictions in order to make them more hospitable to corporations.  When countries refuse to comply with the mandates of international capital, they are severely punished and face international sanctions, military assault, or simply a denial of life-saving aid.  The price for defying elite dictation is severe, but the price for complying with it can be even worse, as Third World countries that do comply must allow billions of dollars in debt and material resources to be extracted by corporate mercantilists.

It is clear that anyone who believes in human equality or simply a level playing field for all has an obligation to overthrow the capitalist system.

The worldwide anticapitalist movement at the present moment is still only embryonic, but it is growing larger, and rapidly becoming more powerful.  This movement will have the responsibility of confronting the capitalist beast, and therefore is responsible for presenting a critique of the capitalist system to the world and developing theoretical and actual alternatives to capitalism. Anticapitalists must answer fundamentally important questions: what ideals do we value that have not been realized under the current system, and can never be realized within a capitalist system? How can a society be created in which these ideals will be realized, and what tactics should we employ to help create such a society?  

Second Excerpt: Anarchism and Human Nature

Throughout the history of political philosophy, many people have rejected Anarchism on sociological grounds; that is to say, their understanding of human nature suggested that humanity could not function without oppression, suffering, and hierarchy.  These critics of Anarchist thought argued that no society could ever achieve both positive and negative freedom for all its citizens because of an intrinsically “evil” nature of humans; or, if it could achieve universal freedom, it would come at such a terrible cost that it would not be worth it.  First off, it is absolutely absurd to argue about whether the essential nature of the human species is “good” or “evil.”  It is inappropriate to discuss something’s essence in moral terms, because morality is a standard of judging freely taken choices.  No one chooses their intrinsic nature, any more than they choose to be born male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, Iraqi or American.

Instead of discussing human nature in terms of morality, we should discuss it in terms of potential.  Is every human being born with the potential to be peaceful, loving, creative, and unique?  I believe that the answer is yes.  Geneticists have not located a gene that makes an individual a criminal or a murder.  Every person is born with a physical and genetic foundation on which to build his life.  Each person has, at the beginning of his or her life, the potential to be a murder, a criminal, or a truly ethical being.   While every individual has freedom to shape his or her life, and thus to choose which potentiality becomes reality, the choices a person is presented with to an enormous extent depend on the social environment a person lives in.  The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out, all humans experience a hierarchy of needs. From most basic to most advanced, these needs include: physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, intellectual needs, and aesthetic needs. Every person must fulfill his or her most basic needs before he or she can attempt to fulfill more advanced needs.  Only when a person fulfills all of his or her needs does he or she become a “self actualizing person”—a person who lives life to the fullest extent.

In a hierarchical society, very few people ever reach self-actualization; indeed, billions of people never fulfill their most basic biological needs.  It is necessarily this way under a hierarchical system.  A person who has fulfilled all his or her needs will never submit to another person, will never allow him or herself to be turned into a soldier or a wage-slave. One individual only wields authority over other people if he has the power to obstruct the fulfillment of their fundamental human needs.  An employer has power over his employs because he has the power to deny them their subsistence if they act insubordinately. A government has power over its citizens because it has the power to murder them, to deny them of their right to life. 

In an Anarchistic society, however, every person would have the opportunity to become a self actualizing person, to realize his or her full potential, and in all likelihood, almost everyone would. 

With this understanding of human nature in mind, we can now address specific arguments against Anarchism that deal with human nature.  First off, what is human nature, according to critics of Anarchism?  In his essay Goals and Visions, Noam Chomsky quotes Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan making a prototypical establishmentarian statement about human nature:

“Any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires.  That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”^[iv]

Chomsky notes that this opinion would have been considered “pathological” by any classical liberal thinker.  I don’t know anyone who would admit to daydreaming about being a slaveholder, although it’s not entirely surprising to hear such talk from neoliberal economists or Wall Street brokers, who are of course the ideological heirs of America’s slaveholders.  We should always remember which people are trying to discredit Anarchism: it’s no coincidence that the people who argue that humans can’t exist without coercion are the people at the top of the social hierarchy, whose privilege would be threatened if coercive institutions were abolished.  Regardless of the fact that people attempting to discredit Anarchism have an economic stake in the perpetuation of the current system, their various arguments need to be responded to.  I’ll try to do that quickly.

“A society based on universal freedom, cooperation, and voluntary association could never work.” This argument can be easily refuted. There already have been Anarchies that have worked, not only in revolutionary Spain, the Paris Commune, and the worker-run factories in Venezuela, to pick a few examples, but also in everyday interactions between people.  Any time a group of people voluntarily come together to engage in mutually beneficial activities together, they are proving that humans can indeed function without coercion and hierarchy. 

“People will not work unless they are constantly on the edge of subsistence, so, if a society were to insure that no one ever fell below subsistence, everyone would stop working.” While I personally think that a society where no one worked and everyone had access to basic necessities would be a vast improvement over the current system—which requires the vast majority of the world’s population spend the majority of its lifetime working or else starve—I do not believe that people would stop working entirely in a free, nonhierarchical society.  Why is it so hard to imagine a community dividing up necessary tasks among able-bodied workers and performing them?  Don’t communities work together to build communal playgrounds and parks at the present time, even though every member of the community is already spending the vast majority of their time working for private business?  Why can’t the same system also work for maintaining a community’s roads, or growing a community’s food?

There is reason to believe that if hierarchical systems were abolished, the amount of time each person would need to work to maintain a functioning society would drop drastically.  If a socio-political system were created that did not waste trillions of dollars of resources on protecting the privileges of a tiny minority from the rest of the populace, and that used technology not to wage class warfare, but to raise the collective standard of living, society could conceivably function with the average worker spending far less time laboring than they do under the current system.

I think that people would be willing to work for a few hours everyday in exchange for access to a communal store of resources: food, clothes, shelter, select luxury items, etc.  Most people have an intrinsic desire to be socially productive and creative, and if they were allowed complete control over their own working environment, I think that almost everyone would want to perform socially beneficial work, especially if every laborer were able to split time between different jobs—some requiring intellectual labor and others manual labor—so that every worker could have the most stimulating and interesting work experience possible.  It is hard to believe, anyway, that the billions of people who now do miserable work for starvation wages would not be willing to engage in enriching community work in exchange for a guaranteed prosperity. 

“All people really care about is material wealth; any system that is based on cooperation is doomed.  It will become extremely corrupt, and eventually, the system will devolve back into unrestrained Darwinistic struggle.” While utter selfishness is certainly a trait that capitalism tries to foster, it’s doubtful that the human race would have survived as long as it has as a group of anti-social, profit-maximizing egoists.  Humans are sociable beings who generally care for the needs of one another; during times of tribulation, they almost always cooperate and share to collectively survive.  In fact, even the enemies of egalitarianism are aware that humans are cooperative beings: in America for example, human compassion is so strong that corporate capitalists have had to spend billions of dollars on propaganda to convince people that the United States’ foreign policy is truly promoting democracy and freedom, that capitalism is lifting people out of poverty and creating a better world.  If the enemy regards compassion as so powerful that they need to spend billions of dollars to appeal to it, I don’t think it is wise for us to underestimate its power.

“An Anarchist society would become stagnate and fail to meet its full potential in areas of importance to the human race as a whole, such as in science and art.  Development in science and art can only occur within an economically competitive social framework, and such development will ultimately raise the cumulative quality of life more than universal freedom.” I think one would be hard pressed to find a truly gifted mind in science or art who was convinced to pursue his or her work solely by external rather than internal motivation.  In fact, many geniuses were so internally motivated that they allowed themselves to fall into poverty in order to continue their work..  There is every reason to believe that uniquely talented people would continue to make their contributions to society whether or not they received material reward for doing so.  If it is hard to imagine an artist or scientist motivated by external reward, it is nearly impossible to imagine that such a person would have anything worth contributing.  I don’t think that people really need the music of Britney Spears or other manufactured art anymore than they need the insights of a career intellectual who just wants to get tenure.

It’s hard to imagine a socio-political system more nurturing of art and science than an Anarchist society.  Throughout history, the number of people who could spend their time creating art or pondering science was extremely limited; as only the richest had the time and energy to devote to such endeavors.  In an Anarchist society, absolutely everyone would have the time and energy to devote to art and science; one would expect the number of scientific and artistic advances to increase exponentially.

“Biological evolution cannot occur unless the weakest humans die before they can reproduce, and universal freedom is less likely to raise quality of life as a whole than progressive human evolution.”  I think here Anarchists and some non-Anarchists just disagree; nothing is worth a future of perpetual genocide, no matter what wonderful characteristics the surviving humans could acquire in the end.  While these eugenicists dream of a future free of disease, of ultra-intelligent humans, etc, the sacrifice is far too immense and unceasing, and there’s no real reason to believe that the human race will survive long enough to undergo significant evolution anyway.

Why did the government feel it needed to establish martial law in New Orleans?  It was not for humanitarian reasons; during the state of “anarchy” and “disorder” in New Orleans, three or four people are rumored to have been killed, and perhaps as many raped, of a refugee population of tens of thousands.  This number is negligible when compared to the thousands of people who lost their lives because they could not evacuate New Orleans, or the number of people who died because of lack of medical attention, lack of food, and lack of water is far greater; but the government made no attempt to save any of these people.  Why has the government been so concerned with reestablishing “order” and ending “anarchy” that it sent National Guardsmen to the town before it sent any food or medical aid, or any buses to evacuate refugees?

The answer is pure and simple: the government needed to reinforce the supremacy of private property, and it did so with bullets.  The government paid no attention to the people of New Orleans when all they were doing was dying, because the government could care less about a few thousand lower class black people.  Once they started taking matters into their own hands and “looting” from private property, however, they became a major problem.  Never mind that the vast majority of the “looters” were simply taking food and water to try and keep themselves alive.  Never mind that most of the material that was looted had already been written off as lost by insurance companies, or would have spoiled in a few days time because of the power outage.  These people presented a major threat to the status quo, because they infringed on the sacredness of private property.   What kind of message would the government send to the rest of the country if it allowed the people of New Orleans to steal food to feed the hungry? Imagine what would happen if the tens of millions of people living below the poverty line across the country followed the example set by the people of New Orleans, and began to take what they need to survive.  If this sort of action went unpunished in New Orleans, the results could be catastrophic for American capitalism, and could stir up revolution. This is why the cops and the National Guard have been told to shoot and kill looters:  to defend the supremacy of private property at all costs.

Hurricane Katrina Aftermath
Infoshop News Hurricane Mutual Aid Info Chemical depot explodes. Buildings on fire. Thousands experiencing drug and alcohol withdrawal problems. No aid for thousands stranded at convention center, hotels, and neighborhoods Corporate media openly criticizing Bush administration and government agencies for "bungling" relief effort New Orleans Indymedia Indymedia: Email From EMT Recounts Initial Aftermath Will the "New" New Orleans be Black? Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead Government Directing Katrina Money to Pat Robertson The big disconnect on New Orleans Katrina and the Corps of Engineers: Manufacturing Disaster Katrina, Iraq and Blood Profits Why Katrina Is Likely to Be a Disaster for President Bush, too Head Of Emergency Operations: “This Is A National Disgrace”... Governor's Office Lied About Children's Hospital Looting The Drowning of New Orleans: Hurricane Devastation Was Predicted Well Fed Media Pigs Call It "Looting" Anatomy of an unnatural disaster "Looting" or "finding"? George Bush Fiddled While New Orleans Sank [REAL PHOTOS!] Hurricane Katrina: a calamity compounded by poverty and neglect

            Why has the world failed to realize the goals set forth by the founders of the UN?  We have not been able to do away with war, genocide, oppression or poverty because the forces of nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, and statism have repeatedly sabotaged any move made towards libertarianism, egalitarianism, and internationalism. Because the United Nations has been a leading force for equality and human rights in the world during its existence, it has been a prime target for subversion by hierarchical forces.  Plutocratic first world governments have used their power within the UN to push imperialistic policies, and to subvert programs designed to keep peace between nations and protect human rights. The United States’ government in particular has viciously assaulted the UN: by attempting to utilize it in imperialist ventures (notably during the Korean War), by ignoring it entirely and repeatedly vetoing resolutions it found unfavorable, and most recently, by nominating an outspoken critic of the UN and international law, John Bolton, as US ambassador to the UN.[1]

If the United Nations is to remain devoted to the ideals upon which it was founded—human rights, international peace, and equality—it must undergo radical and far reaching democratizing reforms.  If the UN does not undergo significant changes, it risks the fate of other supranational institutions such as the European Union, which might have been a force against imperialism and for human rights, but instead became a tool of American imperialism and neoliberalism. 

Short-term reform

            In the short term, it is absolutely vital that the third world receive more representation in the UN, particularly in the most powerful body of the UN, the Security Council.  Control of the Security Council is crucial because, unlike recommendations to member countries by the General Assembly, decisions made by the Security Council must be accepted by member governments under the UN Charter.  Currently, only five countries hold permanent, veto-wielding seats on the Security Council: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. In addition to these five, the General Assembly elects ten members to the Security Council, with each member remaining on the Security Council for two years. However, elected members cannot pass a resolution without the consent or abstention of all five permanent members; a single veto from a permanent member can kill any resolution.

            If the UN is to remain a sovereign defender of human rights and international peace, it is crucial that the Security Council be expanded to better reflect the geopolical realities of the modern world.  This would mean giving permanent seats to Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil (known as the G4), at least two permanent seats to be rotated among the countries of the African Union, and at least two seats to be rotated among the Islamic countries.  In addition, it might prove necessary to revoke the veto rights of all members, which the first world nations have often used to block decisions that were supported by a vast majority of the world’s population.

Long-term democratization

Simply increasingly the size of the Security Council, however, will not be enough to ensure that the UN remains a tenacious defender of human rights.  The only way to do that is to radically transform the UN, to make it completely democratic.  At present, the UN is almost completely unaccountable to the population of the world which it is supposed to serve, and thus, it could potentially become extremely authoritarian.  Because all UN representatives are appointed by national governments and not elected by the citizens of their country, only people living in democratic countries can theoretically have any influence as to who represents them at the UN, and even then, citizens rarely have a say: a recent CNN poll found that three out of every four Americans opposed the nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, but he became ambassador anyway.[2]  People living under dictatorships have absolutely no influence over the UN at all.

Instead of allowing governments to appoint representatives to the United Nations and allowing dictators to help shape international law, representatives should be chosen by direct democratic election in every single member country.  It seems obvious that the people of the world ought to be able to choose their own representative to an institution that is supposed to work for them.  The United Nations is one of the few institutions which the billions of people in the third world could conceivably use to defend themselves against the first world, one that could theoretically represent their interests, but because it is completely undemocratic at this point in time, it is at best an irrelevant bureaucracy and at worst an international tyranny working alongside corporate imperialists.

 A democratic UN would have a single parliamentarian body, and the ratio of representatives allotted to one country as compared to the total number of representatives would be in proportion to the population of that country as compared to the world population.  National governments would have absolutely no power within the UN, and all representatives would be elected democratically.  A just, democratic UN would also allow people of occupied or unrecognized nations such as Palestine, Taiwan, and Western Sahara to elect representatives.

A democratic UN would be far more effective at keeping peace and protecting human rights than an undemocratic UN.  For an example, take the civil war in Sudan.  The UN has not taken significant action against the Sudanese government involved in a genocide which has killed over 200,000 people because Chinese oil companies have been given very profitable contracts under the current Sudanese regime.  Because the authoritarian Chinese government primarily represents the economic interests of its elite, it has blocked several UN attempts to take action against the government of Sudan.  If the Chinese representative to the UN was democratically elected, however, it is extremely unlikely that he or she would support a government involved in genocide.

If there is to be a libertarian and egalitarian future, an international organization such as the United Nations dedicated to preserving international peace and universal human rights must be part of it.  Such an organization would have jurisdiction over issues of global importance such as protecting human rights, keeping peace among nations and within nations, combating medical pandemics, and issuing humanitarian aid.  An organization such as this would not be permitted to use violence or other coercive measures, but would solve disputes through diplomacy and negotiation.

It is clear that if the UN wishes to be anything more than an appendage of US imperialism, it must undergo drastic reform.  Only a democratic UN can effectively defend the noble principles set forth in the UN Charter.

          Africa’s problems are indeed immense.  The HIV/AIDS pandemic can be described as nothing short of a holocaust, with 25 million Africans presently HIV positive, and, if more is not done to combat the disease, 90 million potential victims who could contract AIDS in twenty years time.  Tragic conflicts are indeed widespread, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a protracted battle between rebel and governmental forces has left an estimated 3 million dead, and in Sudan, where 200,000 have died as a result of a civil war.  Poverty is widespread, and democracy all but nonexistent.

None of these problems are insurmountable, however.   The UN has reported that an international campaign against HIV combined with up to $105 billion dollars in investment in Africa to build infrastructure could save 16 million contractors from dying from the disease and another 43 million from becoming infected with the disease at all.  It would doubtlessly also be helpful if Christian fundamentalists would stop committing the atrocity of attempting to prevent the dispersion of condoms and accurate information on sex and the HIV virus in Africa.  The various civil wars can also be ended, as UN and African Union peacekeepers have shown to be mostly successful in the areas to which they have been deployed and received adequate financial backing to accomplish their task. 

The root cause of all of these horrible problems, however, is devastating poverty.  Because Africa was so desperately impoverished following a history which saw Europeans rape and plunder the entire continent, African governments have been forced to rely on humanitarian and development aid from the west and global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for funds to keep their citizens alive.  As a prerequisite to receiving this life-saving aid, however, African countries were forced to pledge their support for economic austerity measures, liberalization of their economies, and privatization of their most basic and vital social services—measures which in turn ensure that these countries can never develop economically.  It is a vicious cycle, specifically designed to ensure that Africa remains a Dark Continent plagued with civil wars, famine, and disease, so that the west can continue to quietly plunder billions of dollars from Africa in minerals, oil, and interest on debt

It is not as if first-world western leaders are only indifferent about Africa’s development.  The global economy has developed in such a way as to have three tiers of hierarchy, a post-industrial first-world core around which all economic activity orbits, an industrial second-world whose participation in the world economy is less prominent, but whose quality of life is high enough to provide consumers for first-world products, and a completely marginalized third-world, which must be kept virtually paralyzed and powerless so as to ensure that the first-world can plunder its resources and exploit its workers at near-starvation level wages.  Africa remains underdeveloped because the global economy is designed to prevent any and all development.

The G8 debt cancellation should be understood within this context, and it should be quite obvious that if the world’s richest countries stood to gain nothing from ‘aid’ to Africa, not a single cent would be handed over to the most destitute people in the world.  The G8 made the terms of their generous ‘cancellation’ explicit: only countries that have completed six to ten years of economic restructuring in the form of trade liberalization and privatization qualify for debt ‘cancellation.’  The G8’s generosity is in reality merely a bribe, a reward for those countries that have agreed to accept neoliberal economic policies which will cripple any and all development, and an incentive for other countries that have not yet fully complied with neoliberalism to do so.      

A major investigation by the International Labor Organization has found that 12.3 million people live in a condition of ‘modern slavery’ worldwide, on all continents and in nearly every country.  Three out of four forced laborers are enslaved by private agents, with 11% forced into prostitution or another form of commercial sexual activity and 64% working as bonded laborers in traditional sectors of the economy, including the industrial and agricultural sectors.  Twenty percent of the cases studied in the examination involved direct exploitation by state or military, including forced prison labor.  Slavery is an extremely lucrative industry, generating 31.6 billion dollars in profit every year, comparable to El Salvador’s Gross Domestic Product and an approximately $13,000 per forced laborer annually.

The distinction between traditional slavery and wage slavery proves to be difficult to articulate.  The ILO officially defines slavery as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”  According to this definition, sweat-shop labor should qualify as a form of slavery, as it constitutes the extraction of labor under the threat of a penalty, starvation; which no person endures by his or her own choice.  It seems clear that a person working for Wal-Mart in a Chinese sweatshop making between 13 and 23 cents an hour and forced to work 60 to 70 hours a week or be fired and face starvation should be classified as a slave; however, the ILO does not consider sweatshop labor to be a form of slavery, on the precarious grounds that forced labor encompasses only coercion that is a “severe violation of human rights and restriction of human freedom,” violations which apparently do not occur in “situations of pure economic necessity” that would force one to work in a sweatshop. 

Whether or not direct capitalist exploitation meets the definition of slavery, however, the ILO report shows clearly that forced labor exists primarily because of conditions imposed by a system of capitalist globalization. The report explains that “many victims enter forced labor situations initially of their own accord,” undoubtedly consenting to horrific conditions out of sheer desperation for any sort of income, which cannot be earned in other sectors of the economy due to the crippling of any attempt at economic development in third world countries by multinational corporations and their financial institutions.  Because social welfare apparatuses have been dismantled as a prerequisite for economic loans from the World Bank, for instance, people in abject poverty have no choice but to enter into forced labor situations to pay for life necessities such as health care and education or simply to receive food.

Neoliberal policies which allow first world corporations to flood third world economies with cheap, subsidized products such as food that drive local producers out of work are another reason for the desperate poverty in the third world.  Because of the ‘race to the bottom’ brought about by the transition to neoliberalism in the world economy which allows corporations to move effortlessly from one country to another in search of lower and lower wages, forcing third world countries to lift laws offering any protection to labor or the environment in an attempt to entice employers, wages in many countries do not meet subsistence levels for the laborer.

This extreme poverty also leads destitute parents who are unable to feed their own children to sell them to rich masters force them to work as servants and often sexually exploit them.  The sale of children is most prevalent in Haiti, where 200,000 children work as restavecs, or domestic laborers. Destitution is often even greater in countries such as Haiti that have, in addition to being plundered by corporations, have also been ravaged by American military operations. 

Internal wars also wreck devastation, and there are many cases of people who become mercenaries in such wars in order to earn subsistence, particularly in African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast, and later find they are unable to leave the army for fear of retribution.  These internal conflicts led to a vicious cycle in which thousands of young men are forced to become mercenaries because of poverty.  These mercenaries perpetuate the war, which inflicts even more destruction upon the community and increases poverty. 

Even in the increasingly rare cases in which forced laborers are forced into their position not by economic necessity but social custom, capitalist globalization is responsible for its perpetuation.  This slavery is often allowed to exist because of lax labor laws that are instituted because of the need to compete in the ‘race to the bottom’ which prevent governments from taking action to end the slavery. 

It is clear that the struggle against capitalist globalization and the struggle to eradicate slavery are one in the same.  To combat slavery, stronger laws to protect laborers must be implemented both by national governments, international financial institutions, and international diplomatic institutions.  As long as there is abject poverty in the world and as long as capitalism continues to promote it, there will be people who have to live with the miserable reality of slavery.  

For more on modern slavery, visit http://www.ilo.org/   

At the time being, the only country that possesses nuclear weapons in the Middle East is Israel, which may have as many as 200 warheads.  According to Israel’s sympathizers, these weapons of mass destruction have been produced only to defend Israel from hostile Arab enemies seeking the destruction of Israel.  The idea that Israel’s nuclear arsenal was built to be a deterrence is simply ludicrous and is in direct contradiction with facts.  One rather obvious flaw in this explanation of the WMD, who does Israel so desperately need to protect itself from?  No Arab countries process nuclear weapons, and the only Muslim country that has nuclear weapons, Pakistan, is governed by an American ally.  Israel is allied with the greatest military power in the world, and an attack on Israel would mean certain annihilation for any country in the world.

A more fundamental problem with this explanation is apparent to anyone with even a superficial knowledge on the history of Israel’s arsenal.  During the 1980s while Israel was proliferating, it kept its weapons program top-secret from the entire world.  The international community only learned about the WMD when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician working on the weapons, leaked details of the program to the British press.  Vanunu was subsequently abducted by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and forced to serve 18 years in prison, 11 in solitary confinement.  If Israel were trying to build weapons to serve as a deterrence, why didn’t they want anyone in the world to know?  When North Korea felt it needed to defend itself against a foreign threat, it did what any rational country fearing its safety would do, it began advertising the fact that it had nuclear capabilities, in all likelihood before it actually had these capabilities, so that no country would be willing to attack it for fear of being dealt a nuclear attack.  If Israel was truly worried about being attacked, it would have done the same thing.  Only a country intending to use weapons offensively would build them secretly. 

This should serve as proof to anyone who thinks otherwise that Israel does perhaps have imperial interests, once it has ethnically-cleansed all of historic Palestine, to expand into other neighboring lands as it did in 1967 in service of American imperialism, and perhaps at some point independently of the US' wishes. As for Vanunu, the heroic prisoner of peace is still to this day denied basic human rights, rights which are not his, claim members of Likud, because he is not human [1].  He is still forbidden to go abroad, to speak with foreigners, and to give interviews.  He is regarded in Israel as a traitor, which is odd, since Israel’s nukes could not serve there defensive purpose that they apparently serve had Vanunu not leaked the truth.  Mordechai Vanunu ought to be regarded as a great hero for all those who wish to see peace in the Middle East, for without him, Israel’s murderous weapons might still be secret, or worse, might have been used.