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The Real Axis of Evil
George Katsiaficas
This is a revised version of a speech given at
an international peace conference in Seoul, June 21, 2002. |
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Long before North
Korea announced in October 2002 that it possesses nuclear weapons,
Bush's infamous "axis of evil" speech was a clear sign that
his administration had made North Korea a target.1
In early 2002, the US not only labeled North Korea part of an "axis
of evil," it also threatened to use nuclear weapons against it.2
In the first year and a half of the Bush presidency, there were not
any serious talks between the US and North Korea. Moreover, under
pressure from right-wing congressmen, the Bush administration reevaluated
the 1994 U.S. agreement with North Korea, known as "The Agreed
Framework."3 Although most Americans
remain completely unaware of it, in 1994 the US came very close to
bombing North Korea unilaterally. "The Agreed Framework"
narrowly averted a new Korean War that in the estimation of the US
military commander in Korea would have killed more than the 3 million
people who lost their lives from 1950-1953.4
Alongside its looming war against Iraq
and hostile actions against North Korea, Bush and Co. are today waging
wars in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Colombia; they arm Israel
and permit it to overrun and destroy Palestinian towns and cities;
they are encouraging the revival of German and Japanese militarism;
they are attempting to overthrow the Chavez government in Venezuela;
they have withdrawn from the International Criminal Court, scrapped
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto protocols, refused
to sign a new international protocol to the 1972 biological warfare
treaty, and dramatically increased military spending. Most ominously,
Bush adopted a new "first-strike" strategic doctrine, replacing
decades of US policies of "deterrence" and "containment."
When I say Bush and Co., I do not refer
only to one man and his administration. It is the system that is the
problem. No matter who sits in the White House, whether George Bush
or Al Gore, militarism has long been and—until we change it—will
remain at the center of US foreign policy and economic output. The
US Congress has been little better than Bush: among other things,
it rejected the nuclear test ban treaty signed by 164 nations. Currently,
with Congressional funding, the US now has over 250,000 troops in
141 countries—and they are seeking new bases and attempting to
install more troops in places Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Northeast
Asia, 100,000 US troops are stationed indefinitely.
In a phrase, military madness defines
the mentality of the top US decision-makers. We cannot therefore regard
recent threats as empty. We need a huge international peace movement
mobilizing millions of people across the world in order to stop US
military madness before it results in renewed wars. In the following
remarks, I hope to clarify the historical character of this disease
and recommend a possible cure.
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THE HISTORICAL PATTERN OF VIOLENCE |
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Before they became
organized as nation-states, white European settlers in America committed
genocide to steal the land of indigenous peoples. Beginning in the
16th century, peripheral areas were rapidly assimilated into a capitalist
world system based in Europe. Whether in what is now Mexico, Peru
or the US, the pattern was generally the same. Besides massacring
tens of millions of Native Americans, European colonialists enslaved
tens of millions of Africans to build up their new empires. Estimates
of the number of Africans killed in the slave trade range from 15
to 50 million human beings, and that does not count tens of millions
more who were enslaved. From its earliest days, the US practiced biological
warfare. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, after whom towns in Massachusetts,
New York and New Hampshire are named to this day, was celebrated because
he devised a scheme to rid the land of indigenous people without risking
white lives. He gave Native Americans blankets carrying smallpox virus,
thereby wiping out entire villages under the guise of helping them.
In the century after the American Revolution, nearly all native peoples
were systematically butchered and the few survivors compelled to live
on reservations. Have people in the US apologized for and renounced
such violence? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Indeed, towns are
still named for Amherst, and one of the fanciest restaurants near
prestigious Amherst College is called the "Lord Jeff."
In 1848, the US annexed almost half
of Mexico in the name of expanding "Anglo-Saxon democracy"
and "Manifest Destiny." Even though dozens of US soldiers
were executed under orders of General Zachary Taylor for refusing
to fight against Mexico, US expansionism accelerated. At the end of
the 19th Century, as manufacturers looked for international markets,
the US (led by men experienced in the Indian wars) conquered the Philippines.
Six hundred thousand Filipinos perished from the war and disease on
the island of Luzon alone. William McKinley, who went on to receive
a Nobel Prize, explained that "I heartily approve of the employment
of the sternest measures necessary." The director of all Presbyterian
missions hailed the slaughter of Filipinos as "a great step in
the civilization of the world."5 For
Theodore Roosevelt, the murders in the Philippines were "for
civilization over the black chaos of savagery and barbarism."
In 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, summarized the colonialist
mentality: "We are the ruling race of the world...We will not
renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God of
the civilization of the world." One cannot help but wonder precisely
what the definition is of the "civilization" to which he
refers.
Although Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist
League attempted to change US policy, imperial ambitions were far
too strong. Between 1898 and 1934, US Marines invaded Honduras 7 times,
Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5, the Dominican Republic 4, Haiti and Panama
twice each, Guatemala once, Mexico 3 times and Colombia 4 times. In
1915, 0ver 50,000 Haitians were killed when US troops put down a peasant
rebellion.6 Marines were sent to China,
Russia, and North Africa—in short, wherever the masters of US
imperialism needed them.
With the Great Depression of 1929,
militarism became more than an instrument of colonial conquest: it
has emerged as the primary solution to stagnation in the world economy.
Since 1948, the US has spent more than $15 trillion on the military—more
than the cumulative monetary value of all human-made wealth in the
US. (More than the value of all airports, factories, highways, bridges,
buildings, machinery, water and sewage systems, power plants, schools,
hospitals, shopping centers, hotels, houses, automobiles, etc.!) If
we add the current Pentagon budget (over $346 billion in fiscal 2002)
to foreign military aid, veterans' pensions, the military portion
of NASA, the nuclear weapons budget of the Energy Department and the
interest payments on debt from past military spending, the US spends
$670 billion every year on the military—more than a million dollars
a minute.7 The US military budget is larger
than the world's next 15 biggest spenders combined, accounting for
36% of global military expenditures. Here, the main problem is the
US but nearly two-thirds of global military spending occurs outside
the US. Recently Japanese and German militarism are being revived,
and in South Korea, the military budget has been increased by 12.7%
for 2003 to more than $14 billion. |
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US MILITARISM AND ASIA |
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Unless we ignore
geography, we must understand that Bush's "axis of evil"
is entirely in Asia. This is no accident. Lest we forget history,
it is in Asia where in the last half century the US slaughtered over
5 million people in regional wars so distant from the US (and Russian)
mainlands that historians refer to this period as the "Cold"
War. In a mere 3 years, between 3 and 5 million people were killed
in Korea. Although thousands of civilian refugees were massacred and
the US used biological weapons, it still will not admit to nor apologize
for these actions. Rather it moved the killing fields to Indochina,
where it used more firepower than had been used in all previous wars
in history combined, killing at least 2 million people and leaving
millions more wounded or made into refugees. Chemical warfare, euphemistically
called Agent Orange, was systematic and deadly. Over 20 million gallons
of Agent Orange were sprayed on Vietnam. For every man, woman and
child in South Vietnam, the US dropped more than 1000 pounds of bombs
(the equivalent of 700 Hiroshima bombs), sprayed a gallon of Agent
Orange, and used 40 pounds of napalm and half a ton of CS gas on people
whose only wrongdoing was to struggle for national independence.8
The kill ratio in these two Asian wars was about 1000 times that of
wars in Central America and even higher for the more than 200 other
US military interventions during the "Cold War."
Recently, East Asia's importance as
a market for military goods has been increasing dramatically. After
the end of the Cold War, when demand for such products leveled off
in North America, Western Europe, and the former Soviet Union, arms
suppliers looked to other markets. US arms exports rose from $8 billion
in 1989 to $40 billion in 1991. British arms exports rose nearly 1000%
from 1975 to 1995 (when they reached $4.7 billion). In 2001, global
military spending (conservatively estimated) rose 2% to $839 billion,
2.6% of world GNP or about $137 for every man, woman and child on
the planet. According to the International Institute for Strategic
Studies: "Between 1990 and 1997, East Asia's share of global
defence imports by value almost tripled, from 11.4% to 31.7%. In 1988,
only 10% of US arms exports went to the region. By 1997, this had
increased to 25%."9 Within East Asia,
South Korea's share of military spending in 1997 ($14.8 billion) was
nearly as large as the combined total spending of Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore and Thailand.10 In the wake of
the Asian financial crisis, military buildups were delayed, but Malaysia's
recent purchase of three French submarines for $972 million, South
Korea's decision to acquire 40 F-15's for $4.23 billion and its rapidly
increasing military budget are indications of military spending growing
in the region. According to Kim Kook Hun, a major general and director
of the South Korean Defense Ministry's arms control bureau, 7 of 17
countries in the world with nuclear weapons or weapons programs were
in the Asia/Pacific region, as were 16 of 28 with missile programs,
10 of 16 with chemical weapons and 8 of 13 with biological weapons.11
Even more alarming is the revival of
Japanese militarism. Its annual defense spending is now second only
to the US, amounting to some 5 trillion yen (about $40 billion), and
international deployment movement of its military, banned since 1945,
has resumed. Five warships have currently been dispatched to the Arabian
Sea. In April 2002, Ichiro Ozawa, leader of Japan's second largest
opposition party, stated that Japan could easily make nuclear weapons
and become stronger than China. More recently, Shinzo Abe, deputy
chief cabinet secretary, publicly explained that Japan could legally
possess "small" nuclear weapons. Barely a week later, Yasuo
Fakuda, chief secretary of the Japanese cabinet, said that Tokyo could
review its ban on nuclear weapons. Rather than reaping a peace dividend
with the end of the Cold War, East Asia is posed for what could become
a regional nuclear arms race and massive buildup of conventional forces.
The need for global peace movements
is strongly indicated by the above dynamics. Without massive and militant
peace movements, political elites will be unconstrained to use military
spending to prevent global stagnation, aggrandize national power and
enrich large defense contractors. One countertrend can be found in
the Filipino example of expelling the US from its huge base at Subic
Bay, an important trendsetter for anti-militarism movements. But as
we watch US troops conducting military operations in the Philippines
today, we must reflect upon the urgent need to cure the disease of
military madness, beyond temporarily fixing the symptoms. Strategic
popular movements need to inject long-term vision into moments of
crisis. Necessary for the health of the existing world system, militarism
is a scourge that squanders humanity's vast resources and threatens
to destroy our hard-won accomplishments. The impetus for militarism
resides in the capitalist world economic system, and it there that
peace movements must focus if a cure for the disease is to be found. |
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THE REAL AXIS OF EVIL |
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The key recognition
here is that the real axis of evil is composed of the World Trade
Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. Like their
predecessors in the colonial world, these international institutions
masquerade as bringing people more freedom. "Free" trade,
IMF "bailouts" and World Bank "assistance," however,
too often mean more poverty for people at the periphery of the world
system—not more freedom. Historically there is an inverse relationship
between the expansion of prosperity and democracy in the core of the
world system and poverty and dictatorship in the Third World, a dialectic
of enslavement meaning that greater "progress" in Europe
and the US spells increasing misery in the periphery.
Conventional wisdom holds that increasing
core democracy should mean more enlightened policies towards the Third
World and improvement in the conditions of life for all human beings.
One exponent of such conventional wisdom is Francis Fukuyama, whose
argues we have reached the "end of history"—that contemporary
European/American political institutions are at the desired endpoint
of human development. Fukuyama believes that the battle of Jena in
1806 (when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy) marks the consolidation
of the liberal democratic state, and that "the principles and
privileges of citizenship in a democratic state only have to be extended."
For Fukuyama, "there is nothing left to be invented" in
terms of humanity's social progress.12
For Fukuyama, the spatial extension
of the principles of the French Revolution means that the rest of
the world will likewise experience progress. Evidence abounds, however,
that the extension of those principles has resulted in increasing
dependency and poverty for the Third World. The American and French
revolutions helped propel the nascent world system centered in Europe
into international domination, concentrating military power in nation-states
and accumulating the world's wealth in the hands of giant corporations
and banks. The worldwide penetration of the economic and political
system produced by the American and French revolutions has, to be
sure, resulted in rapid economic development and some of the most
important forms of political liberty that our species has enjoyed.
For a majority of its people, the US is arguably the freest society
in the world. The dialectical irony of history means that it is simultaneously
a white European settler colony founded on genocide and slavery as
well as on freedom and democracy. But what are the costs of living
in such a society? Slavery in the Third World? Ecological devastation?
Military madness?
The dynamic of increasing political
democracy in the North giving rise to intensified exploitation in
the South has a long history. French colonialists in Vietnam provided
a particularly graphic example when they placed a copy of the same
statue of liberty that France gave to the United States (the one now
in New York harbor) atop the pagoda of Le Loi in Hanoi. Le Loi was
the national leader who in 1418 had helped defeat the Mongols when
they invaded Vietnam. Today he is still regarded as a national hero,
a man whose mythology includes Hoan Kiem (Returned Sword) Lake, where
the golden turtle that gave him the magical sword he used to drive
the Mongols out subsequently reappeared to reclaim the sword—a
story not unlike that of King Arthur in British history. The placing
of a statue of liberty on Le Loi's pagoda certainly was an affront
to the Vietnamese, one which symbolizes how the spatial extension
of the principles of the French Revolution can be an affront to the
Third World.
French colonialism was brutal and deadly.
Indochinese recall that dead human beings fertilize each tree in the
country's vast rubber plantations. During the great war against fascism,
French exploitation of Vietnam was intensified. In a famine from 1944
to 1945, at least a million and a half, possibly two million, Vietnamese
starved to death in the North (where the population was under 14 million),
at the same time rice exports to France were fueling its liquor industry,
a blatant disregard for human life in the midst of the war against
"fascism." In American popular culture, President John Kennedy
is often associated with the word "Camelot" and remembered
for his beautiful wife. Tragically, it was he—one of the most
"liberal" US presidents in history—that ordered massive
use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly, the strongest French imperial
expansionists were staunch anti-clerical "progressives"
who regarded themselves as the ideological heirs of the French Revolution.
They were "enlightened" liberals, much like John Kennedy
and members of his administration were "enlightened" liberals
who believed they were carrying forth in the tradition of the US revolutionary
heritage. As Minister of Education, Jules Ferry defied the Catholic
Church in France by making education universal, secular, and obligatory.
He was later the first French prime minister to make colonialism and
its intensification his principle platform. He felt that it was France's
duty to civilize inferior people, and on May 15, 1883, a full-scale
expedition was launched to impose a protectorate on Vietnam.13
Conservatives in France objected to this colonial expansion. As Vietnam
disappeared, subsumed under the names of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin
China, even the identity of Vietnamese people was attacked as the
French referred them to as Annamites. Here we see the spatial expansion
of the liberal values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—values
which became the basis for France's "civilizing mission"
("Mission civilisatrice"), just as the American revolution
was later turned into "Manifest Destiny." It was the same
French troops, bringing with them "civilization," who in
1885 burned the imperial library at Hue, which contained ancient scrolls
and manuscripts and was a repository for thousands of years of oriental
wisdom.
In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a disciple
of the French Revolution and author of the famous book, Democracy
in America, watched in Memphis, Tennessee the "triumphant march
of civilization across the desert," as he put it. As he observed
3,000 or 4,000 soldiers drive before them "the wandering races
of the aborigines" that is, those Native Americans who were lucky
enough to survive "Jacksonian democracy" (named after a
man who ordered his men to exterminate "bloodthirsty barbarians
and cannibals"), Tocqueville was impressed that Americans could
deprive Indians of their liberty and exterminate them, as he put it,
"with singular felicity, tranquility, legally, philanthropically,
without shedding blood," and most importantly "without violating
a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world,"
the European world, one should say. "It was impossible,"
Tocqueville said, "to kill people with more respect for the laws
of humanity."14 Fukuyama's spatial
extension of the liberal principles of the French and American revolutions
could not be more eloquently enunciated.
In the name of civilization and liberal
democracy, the British destroyed the communal ownership of village
land in India, structures which had sustained local culture for centuries,
a communal tradition surviving invasions by Persians, Greeks, Scythians,
Afghans, Tartars, and Mongols, but which could not, as Fukuyama would
insist, resist the perfection of the liberal principles of the British
state. Under British enlightenment, large estates developed and peasants
were turned into sharecroppers. In 1867 the first fruits of British
liberalism appeared: In the Orissa district of India alone, more than
one million people died in a famine. This was a famine that, I might
add, was not indigenous to India, with its "backward" traditions
(according to European values), but famine brought by the "enlightened"
liberalism of European democracy, by the spatial extension of the
principles of "democratic" capitalism.
Under direct influence of its great
revolution, France proclaimed a crusade against Algerian slavery and
anarchy and, in the name of instituting orderly and civilized conditions,
was able to break up Arab communal fields of villages, lands untouched
by the "barbarous" and "unenlightened" Ottoman
rulers. As long as Moslem Islamic culture had prevailed, hereditary
clan and family lands were inalienable, making it impossible for the
land to be sold. But after fifty years of enlightened French rule,
the large estates had again appeared and famine made its appearance
in Algeria.
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CIVILIZATION OR BARBARISM? |
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I have indicated
how European capitalist "civilization"—especially its
most "enlightened" forms—has systematically slaughtered
native peoples and created a centralized world system that demands
militarism as a key organizing principle. If this were simply past
history, we could all breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, these
very tendencies are today stronger than ever. According to the United
Nations, in the 1990s more than 100 million children under the age
of five died of unnecessary causes: diarrhea, whooping cough, tetanus,
pneumonia, and measles—diseases easily preventable through cheap
vaccines or simply clean water. UNICEF estimates that some twenty
to thirty thousand children under the age of five die of easily preventable
diseases every day in the Third World.15
Kofi Anna recently declared that as many as 24,000 people starve to
death every day.16 Altogether one billion
people today are chronically malnourished, while austerity measures
imposed by the International Monetary Fund have resulted in a drop
in real wages in the Third World and declining gross national products
in many countries. While 70 percent of the world's wealth is in the
hands of 20 percent of its population, one in ten human beings suffers
starvation and malnutrition.
Despite—or more accurately, because
of—the spatial extension of liberal values in the period after
World War II, there were four times as many deaths from wars in the
forty years after World War II than in the forty years prior to World
War II. While the world spends something like a trillion dollars a
year on its militaries, one adult in three cannot read and write,
one person in four is hungry, the AIDS epidemic accelerates and we
are destroying the planet's ecological capacity to sustain life. The
absurdity and tragedy of such a world is made even more tragic and
absurd by the ignorance and lack of concern of the wealthiest planetary
citizens for the continuing plight of human beings in the periphery.
In such a world, of course, there can
be no lasting peace. As long as the wretched of the earth, those at
the margins of the world system, are dehumanized, branded as terrorists,
and kept out of decision-making, they have no alternative but to wage
war in order to find justice. In order to remedy this irrational system,
we need to redefine what civilization means. We know what it is not
for the billion or more "wretched of the earth" for whom
increasing planetary centralization and dependence upon transnational
corporations, militarized nation-states and the international axis
of evil mean living hell. With the passing of time, it becomes more
obvious that this same "civilization" squanders humanity's
wealth, destroys traditional cultures wholesale, and plunders the
planet's natural resources.
The structural violence of an economic
system based upon short-term profitability is a crisis that all peace
and justice movements need to address. Even if some of the above irrationalities
of the present system are reduced, the structural unreasonability
of the system will be displaced to other arenas. As long as the vast
social wealth remains dominated by the "enlightened" and
"rational" principles of efficiency and profitability, there
will be militarism, brutal degradation of human lives along with unbridled
destruction of the natural ecosystem; there will be mammoth socially
wasteful projects, for example tunnels in the Alps and Pyrenees, bridges
connecting Denmark and Sweden or Prince Edward Island and the Canadian
mainland, redundant World Cup stadiums—rather than constructive
use of humanity's vast social wealth. A few hundred multinational
corporations today control this vast social wealth through the most
undemocratic of means and for ends benefiting only a few. According
to the logic of "enlightened" neoliberal economics, these
corporations must either grow or die. I say, let them die! Only a
fundamental restructuring of the world system can lead us toward an
ecologically viable life-world, one in which we decentralize and bring
under self-management OUR vast social wealth.
If we ourselves a brief moment of utopian
speculation (today more difficult than ever in the aftermath of the
carnage of September 11) few people would disagree with the desirability
of the complete abolition of weapons mass destruction—not just
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons but also so-called conventional
ones like fighter jets, bombers, landmines and artillery. Acting strategically,
global peace movements should be directed toward the abolition of
militaries, not their reform. In a world where even peaceful means
of transportation are turned into weapons of mass destruction, nearly
everyone would consider such a proposition foolish, but with major
weapons systems in the hands of governments, how else can the powerless
fight back? Only through the universalization of non-military conflict
resolution will humanity's future fate improve beyond our abysmal
reality. Of course, the destruction of the world's militaries would
undoubtedly send the global economic system into a disastrous depression-all
the more reason for us to discuss it as part of the need for a completely
different world system (or anti-system).
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- On November 25, 2001, the Sunday New York Times
featured a story entitled "After the Taliban, Who? Don't
Forget North Korea."
- In March 2002, a Pentagon review of US nuclear
policy recommended that the US threaten to use nuclear weapons
against 7 countries-including North Korea
- North Korea agreed to shut down and eventually
dismantle its nuclear weapons program. In return, the U.S., Japan,
and South Korea agreed to provide the North with two light-water
nuclear reactors for generating electricity. These reactors were
never built.
- See "Engaging North Korea," by Jimmy
Carter, New York Times, October 27, 2002, p. wk13.
- Noam Chomsky, "The United States and Indochina:
Far From an Aberration," in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long
(editors), Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States and
the War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991) p. 165.
- See the illustrated book by Joel Andreas, Addicted
to War: Why the US Can't Kick Militarism (Oakland: AK Press,
2002).
- Andreas, p. 39.
- Vietnam Documents, edited by George Katsiaficas
(New York: ME Sharpe, 1992) p. 146.
- Tim Huxley and Susan Willett, Arming East
Asia (International Institute for Strategic Studies/Oxford
University Press, 1999) p. 23.
- Ibid, p. 15.
- Michael Richardson, "Fears spread that other
Asia nations will seek nuclear arms," International Herald
Tribune, June 6, 2002, p. 5.
- See his article "The End of History,"
Foreign Affairs 1988, p. 5.
- See Greater France, A History of French Overseas
Expansion by Robert Aldrich (New York: St. Martin's, 1996)
p. 98.
- See Chomsky, op. cit.
- "UN Says Millions of Children Die Needlessly"
by Elizabeth Olson, New York Times, March 14, 2002, p.
13.
- "'Time to Act' on Hunger, Annan says,"
International Herald-Tribune, June 11, 2002.
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