-Caveat Lector- Lasker, G.E. and T. Koizumi, Eds. (1997), Symposium on The Culture of Peace in Cooperation with UNESCO (Baden-Baden), A Publication of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, Conference Proceedings. PEACE-THE REALPOLITIK PROSPECTS BEFORE US Robert John International Council on Human Ecology and Ethnology New York, NY. U.S.A. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abstract The power and policy of the U.S.A. seem directed toward moving the peoples and nations of the world into an American Union, a European Union, and an Asian Union, and merging these into a World Union of central authority with military power. Yet specific limitation of central power, and retention of optimal power by an informed electorate, were part of the concept of the Founders of the U.S.A., as was the principle of benign neutrality and non-interference in the affairs of other states. Ethno-national cultures can evolve and conflict reduced by boundaries that allow for common mobilization for defense of interests. National boundaries and self-rule are checks upon exploitative trans-national agencies or corporations. Regional confederations with minimal explicit powers should deal with regional concerns, all subject to the ballot of individual voters. Keywords Peace, confederation, imperium, foreign intervention, nationalism. Prospects are future probabilities based on present indications. With Peace and Liberty, the probability of making the best choice among possible systems is increased by considering present data, noting indications, and adding retrospective, historical data. Of the Pax Americana-Caveat Emptor-Let the Buyer Beware! Centralization of Power-Imperium The world is under a growing imperium (definition: command not subject to definition or limitation of function; absolute command) with unassailable American military power. From Japan and Okinawa, and the Northern Marianas in the western Pacific, through the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Europe, to the Americas and Alaska, its armed forces with fleets of warships and warplanes patrol seas and skies, and its spy satellites look everywhere. Every day of the year its Pentagon spends $67.4 million ($24,600,000,000 for 1997) to prepare to fight a nuclear war. The U.S.A. is armed-and dangerous. "We don't want to engage in a fair fight, a contemporary war of attrition," said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. "We want to dominate across the full spectrum of conflict, so that if ever we have to fight, we will win on our terms" (Ap. 28, 1997). The direction in which we are being moved for the 21st century, is toward centralization of power. Peace, Democracy, and free enterprise are slogans used to sell acceptance of a loss of liberty to control our futures. NATO and the European Union, and their extension eastward, represent European aggregation of power under American patronage. European military dependence is assured through NATO command and American weapons requiring U.S. spare parts. Political and economic control may be maintained through the banking system. Ignoring the object of lesson of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, that-by credit control can influence elections, the European Union is moved by the United States example and German war-guilt syndrome, towards central banking and a single currency which, ironically, might have eventually occurred had that war ended with a German victory! Planned interdependence equals loss of independence. Headquartered in Brussels, the European Union bureaucrats draw large salaries for fixing the size of labels on wine bottles or the identity of a Euro-sausage, but the centralization of power is the real issue. And that centralization, in sequence, facilitates the move toward global centralization of power. American political pressures push the European Union to include Turkey, and then to be extended by 2010 with a free trade zone to include the states of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, with future union. In the western hemisphere, the process is the incremental extension of free trade zones to the whole continent, to be followed by the dissolution of frontiers and the setting up on an American Union. In Asia, there is the strengthening of SEAC, and similar objectives, to form a Pacific Union. All these are being designed to include United States participation, including a military element. The economic elements (e.g. World Trade Organization) and military forces of former states and areas, seem directed toward a master scheme pushed by a power oligarchy, that sets "fast tracks" for enabling legislation. It is not a global convergence of national economic interests or electorates demanding 'interdependence' that are the driving force, but a power oligarchy or imperium. Such a "fast-track" nearly had the European Maastricht Treaty ratified before the European electorate became aware of its implications. How do these policies compare with the vision of the Founders of the U.S.A.? That was a system of very limited central power, with all other powers reserved to constituent states. Changing this historic course has taken several generations. Continuity in U.S. foreign policy is maintained by the Council on Foreign Relations. Thus we find that the planning process on "methods of limitation of national sovereignty" and "problems of general machinery of international cooperation," was in place as early as December 1939, by the State Department with the bland title of 'Division for the Study of Problems of Peace and Reconstruction.' How many Americans knew it was working on methods of limitation of national sovereignty? In a book published in 1991, an official of the Council on Foreign Relations tells us that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1957 had "the goal of building a unified and integrated global system."(Aho, C.M. 1991) How long before did the planning of GATT begin? The long-term planning of globalization and the imperium is a fact. Armed and Dangerous The U.S.A. has grown very powerful in two centuries, profiting from the two World Wars, when Allied investments there were sold to buy supplies, and German investments were confiscated. It is also a country rich in natural resources that include its people. But its fundamental policies have been moved far out of alignment from the positions on foreign affairs, and limited central power, of its visionary Founders. That formulation on foreign relations, expressed by its first president as good relations with all, special relations with none, was affirmed by John Quincy Adams: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" (1821). In 1997, that position is dismissed a hundred times a day by American warplanes violating the sovereign air space of Iraq, six years after the Gulf War. The prohibition and prevention of Iraqi flights across southern Iraq was imposed to protect Shiite Moslems waging an American-promoted uprising in the south, from attacks by Iraqi national forces. Despite receiving millions of dollars in financing from the United States (NY Times Ag. 24, 1995 A14) in the north, a C.I.A.-sponsored secession was stopped by Iraq forces in 1995, and 10,000 northerners have been transported to the U.S.A. to join the million Vietnamese and other "refugees" from American interventions in other countries. The American Congress voted $40 million for the purpose of destroying the currency of Iraq. The United Nations Organization is used as a tool of control. Unlike Iraq or Libya, countries that the U.S.A. supports, Turkey and Israel for example, may confidently ignore its Security Council resolutions without sanctions being imposed against them. But is the 'United States of America' not a benevolent democracy that can be relied upon to support "human rights" of peoples and individuals everywhere, in which we can safely lodge our trust? In an interview with U.S. Secretary of State (then Ambassador) Albright (May 12, 1996) on the TV program '60 Minutes,' for which Leslie Stahl was given a Columbia University School of Journalism award in 1997, she said that U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization figures showed that half a million children died from starvation as a result of the American-led sanctions against Iraq. "I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Ambassador Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it." Stahl: (voice-over) "Worth it because she believes the sanctions are working." Ambassador Albright: "He [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, come cleaner on some these weapons programs than we thought before, and he has recognized Kuwait, which was one of the very important reasons that this whole war started." Is this use of starvation a unique event in the history of American foreign relations? During the two World Wars, the U.S.A. participated in the food blockade of the Central Powers before it was a belligerent. After World War I it continued this policy for six months after the November 1918 Armistice, using starvation of 800 000 civilians to force German representatives to sign the Versailles Treaty (Vincent, 1985). The restriction of food to Germany and starvation of German prisoners-of-war after World War II was a deliberate policy of the American-British-Soviet European Advisory Committee (Bischof and Ambrose, 1992). The United States has accepted and now officially rejects assassination of heads of state as an instrument of foreign policy. During the Kennedy presidency, the CIA had placed a gangster 'contract' for the assassination of Fidel Castro. Preceded by a government disinformation campaign, that fictitious "hit squads" from Libya had been sent to assassinate the American president, an air attack attempted to kill President Quaddafi of Libya during the 'reign' of President Reagan. This was denounced as "state terrorism" by U.S.S.R. head Gorbachev. Under President Bush, President Noriega of Panama escaped the death of hundreds of other Panamanians from a huge American hit or kidnap squad, with the help of an Israeli agent. In the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, former vice-president Quayle suggested in a televised press interview that the congressional ban on assassination as an instrument of foreign policy should be waived and a price offered for the head of President Saddam Hussein. "The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries, including China. . . .In the mid-1980's, it provided $5 million to Polish émigrés to keep the Solidarity movement alive. . . .It provided a $400,000 grant for political groups in Czechoslovakia that backed the election of Vaclav Havel as president in 1990." $3 million went to Nicaragua in 1990 for "technical assistance," but actually to bolster the presidential candidate favored by the United States. The U.S. has also meddled in Japanese elections, for example (N.Y. Times March 31, 1997 A1). Now suppose you are a patriotic candidate for election who does not want to be an American-supported politician. "Sometimes directed, but generally coordinated by NATO, with participation of the C.I.A. and British secret service," clandestine groups have been used in Europe "for domestic political purposes, possibly even terrorism, to justify government crackdowns and defense preparedness." (N.Y. Times N. 14, 1990 A29). "Breaking with its past," declared the New York Times (Mr. 3, 1997 A12), "the Central Intelligence Agency has severed its ties to roughly 100 foreign agents, about half of them in Latin America, whose value as informers was outweighed by their acts of murder, assassination, torture, terrorism and other crimes, Government officials said today." We are all potential victims. These are only items in chapters of American interventionism. To think of the hegemony of the U.S.A. as a sort of benevolent 'Big Daddy' is like President Roosevelt talking of Marshall Stalin as 'Uncle Joe.' Like decentralization of power, the foreign policy of America's Founders has also been turned upside down, with a hundred-year history of growing American intervention abroad, since World War II in the internal affairs of practically every country in the world. The Imperium is a Dark Force. It is more-pervasive, more covert, devious, and difficult to discover, more lethal to our liberty, than these examples may indicate. Weakening Opposition-the Hawaiian Method The third system that the U.S.-headed imperium implements that is opposite to the tenets of its Founders (particularly Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson), promotes loosening of national cohesion through alien immigration. American immigration policies for the Hawaiian islands have made the Hawaiian people a minority in their own islands. The one island which voted 80 per cent against statehood with the United States was the island where non-Hawaiians may not buy property; but 'one man one vote' denied them self-determination. They are a minority in what was their Hawaii. It is projected that, with the changes in U.S.A. immigration policies introduced since 1964, people of European origin, whose ancestors founded the U.S.A., will be a minority in the country in the 21st century. Why is it that all the powerful media in the United States and Western Europe have, since World War II, vilified any person or group that wants to stop alien immigration, labeling them xenophobic-like a psycho-pathological category-or extremist. Why is it that these same organs of public opinion manipulation glorify the multi-ethnic state? All polls have shown that a majority of indigenous peoples want an end to alien immigration. The 'will of the people' is ignored. Alien immigration dilutes 'nationalism,' and makes resistance to the imperium more difficult to organize and implement. Nationalism is an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity of a human population, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential 'nation.' A 'nation' in turn may be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass public culture, a single economy and common rights and duties for all members; a kind of social and cultural community (Smith, 1996). States are ideally autonomous public institutions of coercion and extraction within a delineated territory. The 'Bosnia peace accord' dictated at Dayton, Ohio, is based on the Hawaiian-type, multi-ethnic neo-American state. Majorities of its Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbians, and Moslems, would rather live with and be ruled by representatives like themselves. The imperium grows in power as its servants and media push the process of recasting the Euro-Atlantic concept of nationality from one that reinforces state sovereignty, to a concept of nationality and international migration as a 'human right' (Jacobson, 1996). To deny anyone any nationality and access to any territory would make one guilty of denying that person their 'human rights,' or 'racism'-denunciations equivalent to medieval blasphemy, resulting in social ostracism and loss of livelihood. Reject the Peace of Imperium for Negotiated Peace With Liberty The important British historian with a Marxist perspective, Eric Hobsbawm, contrasts the bureaucratic, conservative elements of the Communist system with the restless turbulence of international capitalism. Capitalism without a country destroys old familial solidarities and increases insecurity. The global economy, with transnational corporations, created a new international division of labor and the possibility of using offshore finance with no accountability. "The most convenient world for multinational giants is one populated by dwarf states or no states at all." Globalization deprives states of effective controls and "the interests of the various parts of the traditional social-democratic constituency" are diverging, and there have emerged new attempts by groups to separate and define their interests. Of this, he disapproves (Hobsbawm, 1995). Hobsbawm correctly 'doublethinks' states (and sovereignty) as means for defense of the values of their peoples. We the People are kept far from the planning and control over supranational authorities. How are the arbiters of the World Trade Organization appointed? Supranational controllers, their appointment and dismissal, are free from electoral vote. To whom are they accountable? If they have power over us, we must have an equal power to remove them. The U.S.A. still has great strengths in its people and its geography, not to be belittled, but to ignore the weaknesses imperils the future. What do the American people think of their government? In a 1997 Gallup survey, only 9 per cent of adult Americans reported a great deal of confidence in the executive branch (the presidency) of the federal government, and only 10 per cent said they had a great deal of confidence in Congress. A decade ago, those numbers were nearly twice as high. On the issue of honesty, government fared no better; 44 per cent rated congressional representatives and 39 per cent rated senators as lacking in ethical standards. "Perhaps this explains why 83 per cent of adults reportedly believe government regulations are a very serious or moderate threat to Americans' rights and freedom"(U.S.A. Today Mr. 31, 1997 15A). Our duty to the future is to see that our descendants do not have to hazard their lives for liberty. The main locus of authority should remain national. Regional confederations with minimal specified powers should deal with regional concerns, all subject to the ballot of individual voters. At this level, the re-drawing of boundaries of states to respond to ethnic or national wishes of majorities/minorities may be peacefully negotiated. This would strengthen social solidarity and the sense of support within culture-communities. We need not exchange community and Liberty for Peace. References Aho, C.M. (1991); in The Growth of Regional Trading Blocs in the Global Economy, (eds. R.S. Belous and S.S. Hartley), National Planning Association, Washington, D.C. Aho was director of economic studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Bischof, G. and S.E. Ambrose (1992); Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood; Louisiana State U. Hobsbawm, E. (1995); The Age of Extremes; Random House. Jacobson, D. (1996); Rights Across Borders-Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship; Johns Hopkins Messick, H. (1971); Lansky; Berkley. Smith, A.D. (1996);The nation: real or imagined? Nations and Nationalism 2 (3), 1996 (p. 359). See also Smith's Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era; Cambridge, 1995. Vincent, C.P. (1985); The Politics of Hunger; Ohio DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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