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SPEAKING FREELY
The semantics of
Empire
By M Shahid Alam
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
"Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to
gas his own people ..."
- George W Bush, March
22, 2002
"As he [Bush] said, any person that
would gas his own people is a threat to the
world."
- Scott McClellan, White House
spokesperson, March 31, 2002
"Saddam Hussein
is a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people
..."
- Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002
"He poison-gassed his own people."
-
Al Gore, December 16, 1998
We might glean a few
insights about the semantics of the global order - and
the reality it tries to mask - from the way in which the
United States has framed the moral case against Saddam.
Saddam's unspeakable crime is that he has
"tortured his own people". He has "killed his
own people". He has "gassed his own
people". He has "poison-gassed his own people".
In all the accusations, Saddam stands inseparable from
his own people.
Rarely do his accusers
charge that Saddam "tortured people", "gassed people",
"gassed Iraqis", or "killed Iraqis". A Google search for
"gassed his own people" and "Saddam" produced 5,980
hits. Another search for "gassed people" and Saddam
produced only 276 hits.
It would appear that the
indictment of Saddam gathers power, conviction,
irrefutability, by adding the possessive, proprietary,
emphatic "own" to the people tortured, gassed or killed.
What does the grammar of accusations say about the
metrics of American values?
It is revealing. For
a country that claims to speak in the name of man,
abstract man, universal man, the charge is not that
Saddam has killed people, that he has committed murders,
mass murders. Instead, the prosecution indicts him for
killing a people who stand in a specific relation to the
killer: they are his own people.
This
betrays tribalism. It springs from a perception that
fractures the indivisibility of mankind. It divides men
into tribes. It divides people into "us" and "them":
"ours" and "theirs". It elevates "us" above "them":
"our" kind above "their" kind. It reveals a sensibility
that can feel horror only over the killing of one's
own kind.
Life is sacred at the core. In
the United States, we have an inalienable right to life.
It is protected by law; it cannot be taken away without
due process. Americans are proud, sedate, in the
illusion that their president never kills his
own people; their history is proof of this. An
American president would never think of killing his
own people.
Saddam's crimes are most foul
because he has tortured his own people; he has
killed his own people; he has gassed his
own people. He has violated the edict of nature.
His actions are un-American.
Saddam's
unnatural crimes trouble us, however, not because we
feel empathy for his victims. His crimes predict
trouble for us. If he can kill his own kind, how
much more willingly would he kill us? In Scott
McClellan's version: "Any person that would gas his own
people is a threat to the world" (read the United
States).
Of course, Saddam might plead innocence
to this charge. "You've got it all wrong about the
people I kill. The Kurds I killed are not my own
people. They are not even Arabs and, worse, they wanted
to break up Iraq and create their own independent
Kurdistan. What would you do to your blacks,
Amerindians, Hispanics or Asians if they took up arms to
carve out independent states of their own? Were not the
Southern whites your own people? But you killed a
half-million of them when they took up arms against you
in the 1860s. More recently, you killed your own kind at
Waco."
Now, as the United States prepares to try
Saddam for torturing, gassing and killing his own
people, does this absolve us of killing the same people
because they are not our own? Is the
killing of Iraqis a crime only when the perpetrators are
local thugs - once in our pay - and not when we
take up the killing, and execute it more efficiently, on
our account?
In the colonial era, racism
inoculated people against feeling empathy toward those
other people in the periphery. Those other
people were children, barbarians, savages, if not worse.
We had to kill them if they could not be useful to us,
or if they stood in the way of our progress.
There wasn't much squeamishness about this. It was good
policy.
In the era of the Cold War, we went easy
on the language of racism, though not always on its
substance. When we sent our men and women to kill
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Koreans, we
justified this by claiming that we were doing it to
protect our freedoms. Of course, it was all right
to kill for our freedoms.
However, in the
new era, the United States learned to contract the
killing to thugs in the periphery. This was a win-win
for us. We kept our hands free from bloodstains, so we
could smell like roses. At the same time, we could point
to colored killers (in our pay) and say: "Look, they are
still incapable of civilization." What is more, we could
use their savagery as justification for killing colored
peoples on our own account.
More recently, the
US has gone back to killing on its own account. Starting
in the 1980s, taking advantage of their indebtedness -
which we helped create - we began a general economic
warfare against the periphery, stripping down their
economies for takeover by core capital. In this new war,
the colonial governors and viceroys have been replaced
by two banks - the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund - and a trade enforcer, the World Trade
Organization. Like the famines in British India, this
war has produced tens of millions of hidden victims,
dead from hunger and disease.
In 1990, the US
introduced a new, deadlier form of economic warfare: it
placed Iraq under a total siege. This instrument was
chosen because we knew that Iraq was vulnerable: it
imported much of its food, medicine, medical equipment,
machinery and spare parts, nearly all paid for by oil
exports. Imposed to end Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, the
siege ended some 13 years later only after the US had
occupied Iraq. Only after the siege had killed more than
1.5 million Iraqis, half of them children.
Once
again, the US is the world's nerve center of reactionary
ideologies. The postwar restraints on the use of deadly
force now gone, the US revels in the use of deadly
force. Not that alone, it wants to be seen using
deadly force. It wants to be feared, even loathed for
its magnificent power, raining death from the skies as
never before, like no other power before. At
manufacturing death, we brook no competition.
Imperialism, militarism and wars create their
own rationale. In time, Islamist enemies were elevated
and magnified, with help from the Zionists. Rogue states
stepped out of the shadows. The swamps began to spawn
terrorists. Weapons of mass destruction proliferated.
Sagely Orientalists suddenly awoke to an Arab "democracy
deficit". Islam, they declared, is misogynist,
anti-modernist and anti-democratic. The civilizing
mission was Arabized. The musty odors of jingoism,
militarism, racism and religious bigotry infested the
air. Like a godsend, the attacks of September 11, 2001,
galvanized America. Imperialism and racism rode into
town, cheek by jowl, hand in hand.
The new
colonization project has now snagged its chief prize. An
Arab Ozymandias brought low. The man who tortured,
killed and gassed his own people is in American
hands. Our civilizing mission displays its trophy. We
are repeatedly invited to peep into the oral orifice of
this bedraggled Saddam. "Ladies and gentlemen, we got
him."
The images of Saddam the captive, haggard,
resigned, defanged, are images of our raw power. Our
power to appoint, anoint, finance and arm surrogates in
the periphery: and when they go wrong, our power to wage
war against their people; destroy their civilian
infrastructure, poison their air, water and soil with
uranium; lay siege to their economy; and finally to
invade and occupy their country. We will go to any
lengths to save the people of the periphery from our
tyrants.
Come, then, wretched denizens of the
periphery, there is cause to rejoice. Lift your colas
and offer a toast to the Boy Emperor even as he launches
plans to establish a thousand years of Pax
Americana. He will bring down all outmoded
tyrannies, and root out rogue states, dictatorships and
monarchies. He will extirpate all fundamentalists, hunt
down all terrorists, track down all drug lords, and
scrap all unfriendly weapons of mass destruction. This
will be the great cleansing of all self-created
challenges to the Empire. In the end nothing will stand
between the Empire and the periphery, between capital
and labor, between thesis and anti-thesis.
Rejoice, the Empire is advancing its day of
reckoning with history.
M Shahid Alam
is professor of economics at Northeastern
University. His last book, Poverty from the Wealth
of Nations, was published by Palgrave in 2000. He may
be reached at m.alam@neu.edu. Visit his webpage.
(Copyright 2004 M Shahid Alam)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
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