OpEdNews Op Eds Empire of Chaos meets Global Dracula: Trashing Democracy: What is Our Way Out?
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The Empire of Chaos promotes its full spectrum dominance for its own sake, as Pepe Escobar makes clear.[1] There is no credible objective for this globalized militarism that benefits any but the 1%, their global megacorporations and banking cartels, and the self-perpetuating military-academic-industrial-security complex itself. The Empire exists to serve this Global Dracula, which draws the life out of the open veins of Mother Earth. Even decent people in global corporations siphon the life-blood of Mother Earth rather than lose their lucrative jobs. Corporate power is the power of domination and exploitation for its own sake, carried forward by its own colossal momentum, regardless of consequences for people or the ecosystem of our planet. Terrorism is a consequence of this globalized Empire of Chaos: the more chaos the more terrorism.
Here we have a self-evident correlation that should make us suspicious. Are these drone executions really trying to stop terrorism? Or do they need the perpetual threat of terrorism to justify and protect the Global Dracula? World peace researcher Johan Galtung: "Hyper-capitalism sucks the Periphery dry with humans in misery and nature depleted-polluted. Interventionist militarism engenders resistance, the higher the overkill". Force engenders counter-force. Social processes are dialectic, not linear."[2]
Consider the current US bombing of Mosul. The pattern is to destroy the civilian infrastructure. This is a key modus operandi of the US military. They claim that the bad guys "hide" within civilian populations but they instinctively know that the civilian populations hate us, just as people everywhere hate invasion, domination and tyranny. In effect, the entire civilian population becomes the enemy and must be targeted.
Do we believe the Global Dracula and the Empire of Chaos do not know about this dialectic? The militarized "full spectrum dominance" requires chaos, the more chaos the more it is justified. Hyper-capitalism requires human misery in at least three senses: (1) the more impoverished and desperate people become, the greater the capacity for exploitation (think Bangla-desh or Indonesia), (2) the more global misery, the more the "free-market system" is justified under the impossible ideal that only a "truly free market" can address the need: "we need more free market not less." This insane logic is addressed in detail by Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine and the Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[4] (3) all destruction of civilian infrastructure is a lucrative opportunity for the disaster capitalists to reap tremendous profits for reconstruc-tion. The destruction of Mosul, like the destruction of Fallujah, becomes a low-risk investment for future reconstructionist private contractors and hosts of venture capitalists.
The operations of the military are truly globalized, involving every country on Earth in one form or another.[5] Global stock market forces and currency exchanges make our entire planet economically interdependent. When the US banks crashed the sub-prime mortgage bubble in 2008, nearly every country in the world was affected. Today's oil war, in the attempt by the global hegemon to bankrupt Russia, Brazil, and Venezuela through reducing oil prices so that their economies crumble, affects everyone on Earth, for better or for worse.[6]
The Empire of Chaos and the Global Dracula have created hyper-national systems of "global governance" that now put their fingers into every pie: NATO, IMF, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, WTO, GATT, NAFTA, TPP, etc. USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy seek to subvert democratic processes in every country that interfere with the Global Dracula. The 1% are not by any means "global citizens" (implying responsibility to humanity and our planet) but they are "globalists": unrepentant non-patriots loyal to nothing but mammon and sucking the lifeblood from the Earth and its people. If anyone had doubts about these facts, these doubts should have been dispelled by the Panama Papers.[7]
Articles about the Panama Papers point out that the offshore shell-company and tax-evasion industry is not limited to Panama. It includes dozens of locations throughout the world: a globalized system beyond the territorial boundaries of sovereign nation-states. In the universal corruption encouraged by this globalized system (in which all values such as democracy, justice, truth, or compassion appear foolish and childish), both the Empire and the Global Dracula work together as one. World systems scholar James Petras writes about the "legacy" of President Obama: "At this stage, Obama's supreme goal is to leave an enduring legacy, where he will have: (1) surrounded and weakened Russia and China; (2) re-converted Latin America into an authoritarian free-trade backyard for US plunder; (3) turned the Middle East and North Africa into a bloody playpen for Arab and Jewish dictators bent on brutalizing whole nations and turning millions into refugees to flood Europe and elsewhere."[8]
Both Empire and Dracula desire it all, not just 50% of the world's wealth, but it all. They therefore have turned their attention to Europe and North America where ordinary people have too much of everything: housing, social security, food, leisure time, and democracy. Former economic hit man John Perkins describes how the same techniques that he used to insnare third world governments into debt-bondage are now directed at the US and Europe.[9]
It is happening in a major way in Greece and Spain. And they are threatening this in France.[10] Michael Moore's new film "Who To Invade Next?" pretends to invade primarily European countries with the idea that we should take back from them social practices so much more advanced than anything in the US: drug policy from Portugal, education from Finland, jailing corrupt bankers from Iceland, the food provided for school children from France. But Moore ignores the Troika, the attempts to destroy the social systems in Spain and Greece, and the current attempt to neo-liberalize the social democratic system in France. Like so many progressives who can't really bring themselves to become authentically "global citizens," his orientation, despite the "invasion" theme, remains a nation-state perspective.
The movie "The Big Short," directed and co-written by Adam McKay, attempts to make clear the banking collapse of 2008 and the consequences. Leading characters declare of the bankers: "they are either really stupid or really corrupt." However, in the end it reveals that they were not stupid because they knew that the US taxpayers would bail them out, and hence they could gamble with millions of people's lives, homes and pensions without risk to themselves. They are not just partly corrupt, but totally corrupt: absolute greed without conscience, without a shred of morality. Then watch the film about the prostitution of US democracy called "Free for All: One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy," produced by Holly Mosher. The politicians, and those who control voting processes, are just as crooked as the bankers.
On a brighter note, the very fact that we can understand and be aware of these things means that we can change them. The global mess is a consequence of global corruption. To combat corruption you have to change the system. So the people of France are fighting back, and some in the US are fighting back in the form of "Democracy Awakening" and "Democracy Spring" protests that I was recently part of in Washington, DC. More than 1300 people were arrested for refusing to move from the steps of the Capitol building within a two week period.[11] When I was in Venezuela last month, we marched in Caracas with perhaps a thousand women in vocal support of the Bolivarian revolution that Venezuela is struggling to preserve in the face of US-sponsored subversion.
James Petras, in the above-cited article, argues that the subversion of Argentina and Brazil by US sponsored forces has been relatively easy because the left-orientated governments of these countries failed to engage their people in a genuine "class struggle" with the oligarchs. The people of Greece, Spain, and France want to defend their countries against the global economic forces dominating them. The people of the US in "Democracy Spring" want to take back Congress from the politicians who are controlled by big money: a big money that has global interests and global scope. Civil liberties lawyer John Whitehead wants citizens to struggle against the pervasive presence of the US police state.[12]
These, of course, are all good things: all struggle raises consciousness and generates the possibility of lives that are liberating and transformed. But this article should have made clear by now that the "enemy" is global, not local. The enemy is a system, a globalized 1% and their transnational corporations, private security armies, and collaboration with the military-academic-industrial-banking complex within the imperial center. Social thinker Sheldon Wolin writes of the US system: "Its genius lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual."[13] Like a Hydra head, reform of the system in one country will only allow it to pop up in another, for the Empire of Chaos and Global Dracula encompass the planet, independently of any particular nation-state. The system can never be overcome at the nation-state level.
If we want to protect freedom, democracy, and a decent future for people everywhere, we need to begin thinking globally and acting globally. Democracy movements in France, the US, or Venezuela can easily be marginalized and controlled. Even if successful, as Venezuela was under President Chavez, the global empire can easily destabilize and subvert such temporary successes. Even if successful, the "people" only temporarily gain control of some little territory in a world of some 193 countries. The progressive left is still thinking in 19th century sovereign nation-state terms, while the 1% are thinking and acting in 21stcentury globalized terms. There will be no future for democracy or our planetary environment until the PEOPLE OF EARTH decide that the planet belongs to the 99%, not the 1%.
There will be no viable future for human civilization unless we make the conscious decision to transcend our "patriotic" nonsense (which the dominators did long ago) and become loyal to the Earth and its citizens. If we are authentically world citizens, then we see the need for political and economic institutions that are democratically sovereign under the authority of the people of Earth, to end the Empire of Chaos and drive a stake through the heart of the Global Dracula.
http://www.radford.edu/gmartin
| Glen T. Martin is professor of philosophy and chair of the Peace Studies Program at Radford University in Virginia. President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA), the Institute on World Problems (IOWP), and International (more...) http://www.opednews.com/articles/Empire-of-Chaos-meets-Glob-by-Dr-Glen-T-Martin-Change_Chaos_Consciousness_Democracy-160502-506.html |
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