Samir Amin Lashes Out At American Imperialism, Equates with Nazism

["M. Junaid Alam" <redjaguar@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dude goes all out.
--

Confronting the empire
The present crisis has demonstrated the ambitions of the United States
-- nothing short of bringing the entire planet under its military
control, writes Samir Amin
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 From the 1980s on, and with the collapse of the Soviet system, the
ruling class in the United States, whether Democrat or Republican, began
drawing up a hegemonic programme. Carried away by its military power,
and without any competitor able to temper its fantasies, the US chose to
reinforce its domination by deploying a military strategy aiming at
"planetary control". An early series of interventions -- in the Gulf,
Yugoslavia, Central Asia, Palestine and Iraq -- began this plan for
endless wars that would be "made in the USA" and that would be planned
and decided unilaterally by Washington.

The political strategy that accompanied this programme set up the
pretexts for it, whether these had to do with terrorism, with the fight
against drug trafficking, or with accusations of producing weapons of
mass destruction. These are obvious pretexts when one recalls the CIA's
invention of convenient terrorist adversaries, whether the Taliban or
Bin Laden.

Accusations of producing dangerous weapons, made today against Iraq and
North Korea, but tomorrow against any convenient state, pale besides the
actual use of these weapons by the United States. The US used nuclear
weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and chemical weapons in Vietnam, and
it is threatening the further use of nuclear weapons in future
conflicts. Such pretexts are only propaganda tools, in the sense that
Goebbels gave that term: they are useful perhaps to convince slow-witted
US opinion but less and less credible elsewhere.

The idea of "preventive war", now claimed as a "right" by Washington,
does away with any notion of international law. The United Nations
Charter forbids the recourse to war except in cases of legitimate
self-defence, and it allows military intervention only under strict
conditions, any response having to be measured and provisional. All
specialists in international law know that the wars undertaken since
1990 have been completely illegitimate, and therefore those who bear the
responsibility for them are also war criminals. Indeed, the United
States, with the cooperation of other countries, is already treating the
United Nations as the fascist states treated the League of Nations.

The abolition of the common rights of all peoples, already underway, has
substituted the distinction between a "Master Race" (Herrenvolk) -- the
people of the United States, and, behind them, those of Israel -- and
other peoples for the previous principle of the equality of peoples. The
existence of those peoples that do not belong to the US Master Race can
only be tolerated if they do not constitute a "threat" to the ambitions
of those calling themselves the "masters of the planet". This Master
Race reserves the right to conquer whatever "living space" it judges
necessary for itself and for those peoples it supports.

What are the "national interests" that the US ruling class considers as
giving it this right?

This is a class that recognises only one objective -- that of making
money. The North American state is openly at the service of satisfying
the demands of the dominant segment of capital made up of US
multinationals.

We, therefore, have all become "Red Skins", the contemptuous name
reserved for the Native Americans, in the eyes of the Washington
establishment -- that is to say, peoples who have the right to exist
only in so far as they do not frustrate the expansion of US-based
multinational capital. We have been promised that resistance to the US
will be crushed using any and every means, even extermination if
necessary. If it is a question of making an additional 15 million
dollars in profit for the American multinationals at the expense of 300
million victims, then there will be no hesitation. The "rogue state" par
excellence, to borrow the language used by Presidents Bush Senior and
Junior, as well as by Clinton, is none other than the United States
itself.

Rest: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/627/sc12.htm


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