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AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
A new world order
is emerging against the North American concept of unipolarity. It is
symbolised by recent events at the United Nations, events in Iraq, and
elsewhere. For example:
l On November 4 2003, a record 179
countries voted in support of Cuba�s demand that the illegal US-imposed
blockade against that country be lifted. This is a phenomenal increase
from only 59 votes in 1992, when the myth of the unipolar world was at its
peak.
l At the same time the United States is holding in maximum
security prisons five Cuban patriots whose only crime is that they tried
to stop terrorists based on US soil from continuing to attack Cuba and
from provoking another US war against that country. The case of the five
Cuban prisoners in the US is serving to mobilise even US citizens against
the 43-year-old illegal blockade, thereby merging the two issues.
l Equally significant, and more acute, is the massive resistance
to the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq which, in recent weeks, has
raised unprecedented questions about the prerogative of major imperial
powers to commandeer the services of the UN, the Red Cross and other
"neutral" and humanitarian organisations in pursuit of unipolar aggression
and colonialism.
From events in Iraq, it seems as if the
resistance against the US occupation perceives the United Nations and
other humanitarian agencies as failing to separate themselves from the
objectives of the US and UK aggression. This is a most unfortunate and
unprecedented development requiring quick action on the part of the United
Nations and the humanitarian organisations associated with it.
The
three issues � the 43-year-old US blockade against Cuba; the existence of
five Cuban patriots in US jails who have been wrongly convicted when they
should be praised; and what even US citizens now recognise as George
Bush�s Iraq quagmire � are tightly connected.
The two Cuban issues
demonstrate the bankruptcy of imperial values while Iraq exposes imperial
greed and material vulnerability.
The attempt to sell a war for
oil as a war for democracy has failed dismally and, in so failing, has
further exposed the ways in which the empire has been funded all along �
by hook and crook!
Imperialism gets into serious problems when its
moral bankruptcy coincides with economic-financial bankruptcy. Iraq and
Cuba make this coincidence clear.
But, first, let us look at the
values problem. The following table illustrates how the UN General
Assembly has voted on the issue of the US blockade against Cuba, according
to Juan Diego Nusa Penalver:
UN General Assembly Votes on the US
Blockade
Countries Voting to Countries Voting to Abstaining
Year end the blockade maintain the blockade states
1992 59
3 71
1993 88 4 57
1994 101 2 48
1995 117 3 38
1996 137 3 25
1997 143 3 17
1998 157 2 12
1999 158 2 8
2000 167 3 4
2001 167 3 3
2002 173 3 4
2003 179 3 2
It is obvious that the
record vote of 179 countries against the blockade in 2003, as opposed to
59 in 1992, has been made possible by countries deserting the abstention
column.
The no votes have remained steady; but they demonstrate
the moral isolation of the United States, that is the crisis of values for
the leaders of that country.
A comment on just 2002 and 2003
should illustrate what we mean. In both years, only Israel and the
Marshall Islands voted with the United States, to say the blockade should
not be lifted.
This is similar to what used to happen toward the
end of apartheid, when only Israel, South Africa and the US would vote
against the majority calling for action against apartheid.
Sometimes Israel and the US would abstain together. But the degree
of moral isolation becomes more evident when one asks whether the Marshall
Islands is indeed a country which counts apart from the United States.
What sort of nation is the Marshall Islands?
First, we
learn that it has no currency of its own. It uses the US dollar as its
currency.
Second, we learn that its population would not even fill
one small village in the United States, being made up of only 64 000
people! The chain of islands was owned and ruled by Germany up to the end
of the 1914-1918 war.
Between that war and the Second World War,
it was ruled by Japan. From the end of that war to 1991 it was ruled by
the US. The land mass is 70 square miles.
What is clear is that
the US blockade against Cuba has become so unpopular that the US
government is stuck with only two supporters in the General Assembly.
One of those allies is not even big enough to form a small town in
North America.
Even more critical is the unpopularity of the
blockade within the United States itself. Past administrations used to try
to justify the blockade by claiming that Cuba was an outpost of Soviet
communism and a threat to the existence of not just the United States but
of Western civilisation itself.
Since the Soviet Union and the
entire "Com munist bloc" of Eastern Europe collapsed, this explanation has
become worse than laughable. And new excuses for the blockade are
difficult to invent. Worse still, the blockade flies in the face of the
neo-liberal doctrine of free and open trade, open society, open borders,
free flow of information and the free market of ideas.
It is Cuban
ideas and Cuban trade which have been quarantined for the last 43 years by
the very same preachers of free trade and free flow of ideas. So, who is
afraid of ideas?
Who is afraid of information and communication?
The one who is blockaded or the one who blockades others?
The Iraq
quagmire just helps to underline the bankruptcy of US foreign policy. The
US and UK claimed at one time that, even if there were no weapons of mass
destruction found in Iraq, the fact that Saddam Hussein was overthrown is
still a great accomplishment for democracy.
It was definitely good
for the people of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was deposed, the invaders
claimed.
But now that the overwhelming and disarmed masses of Iraq
are using everything they have, including their vulnerable bodies and
lives, to throw the invaders out � we are told that the invaders cannot
leave because doing so would mean that the same Saddam Hussein would come
back to power!
In other words, the world has been taken full
circle: from a position where we were told that ululating women, hungry
children and former Saddam Hussein armies would come en masse to embrace
the invaders as soon as these reached the Iraq border; now to a position
where the reason for keeping Iraq under indefinite foreign occupation is
that the same women, children and soldiers who were supposed to welcome
the invaders at the border will instead embrace their deposed President
Saddam Hussein and re-install him as soon as the invaders announce a
pull-out!
That is an incredible feat of logic to justify the
latest manifestation of corporate cannibalism.
In short,
imperialism is now quite vulnerable in terms of its pretexts and
rationalisations. Its value system is most incoherent.
Equally,
the Iraq issue also exposes the material vulnerability of imperialism,
which vulnerability brings out the true characteristics of corporate
cannibalism. Iraq is like a lamb which is being boiled in its own mother�s
milk.
Iraq�s oil is being looted in order to pay for the cost of
destroying it first and then pretending to reconstruct it.
In
addition, the entire budget of occupied Iraq is made of income from looted
petroleum and loans from the looting countries, thereby insuring that
future generations of Iraqis will be paying for the Western outrage and
atrocity for generations to come.
The result of these
contradictions is that unipolar imperialism feels most vulnerable at
exactly the time that it has reached its pinnacle in terms of brute force,
in terms of its monopoly on weapons both of mass destruction and mass
deception.
The pre-eminent mass communicators can�t communicate;
the world leaders can�t lead the world. George Bush and Tony Blair command
an impressive amount of force, but they have lost the respect even of
their own people.
They cannot expect the rest of the world to
respect and follow them. Hence, the need to use the Marshall Islands to
support the US at the UN.
The Marshall Islands is the fiction of
national independence, the fiction of nationhood and sovereignty, used by
the empire to defeat and mock the real demands of three fourths of the
world for true sovereignty.
This Marshall Islands fiction of
sovereignty has been used to deny the true sovereignty of revolutionary
Cuba.
What is revealed, therefore, is a world which is ready for
both new leadership and a new value system, against unipolarity and
against the corporate cannibalism which we witness in Iraq.
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