Re: The text of Bush's speech at Whitehall Palace

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well it's really more your type of thing (the Washington Post has quite a
good micro-story: "despite all the elaborate rituals and customs the
president had to observe, the palace made certain accommodations to suit his
tastes. The orchestra played "King Cotton," a Sousa march, and "My Heart
Will Go On," the theme song from the movie "Titanic." And, just before the
guests arrived, the palace butlers placed bottles of Coca-Cola alongside
decanters of the queen's port. Despite all the elaborate rituals and customs
the president had to observe, the palace made certain accommodations to suit
his tastes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63581-2003Nov19.html ).

Just to explain, the reason why I posted on Blair and Bush is because, when
under pressure to tell some true story about the significance and motive of
the war in Iraq, and not a lumpen-bourgeois falsification, they clearly and
simply articulate the imperatives and themes of bourgeois imperialist
policy: (1) the need to enter into negotiations with competitors and keep
the lines open, (2) the need for violence to destroy resistance to
imperialist policy, and (3) the need to create political consent for
imperialist policy.

The basic problem with "globalisation" babble is that it disorients the
working class, and it disorients progressive political opinion, it is a
political disaster for the Left, as I have warned a long time ago, for many,
many reasons. If you concede to globalisation rhetoric, you have already
lost. Once there's a clear focus on imperialism, and the globalisation
babble is left behind, then socialist politics can again orient itself in
international affairs. An academic like Panitch could of course elaborate
the "meaning of imperialism", but you could also just read the daily
newspaper, and when you do that, you discover how totally stupid the
globalisation theorists really are, and how stupid Leftists inspired by Marx
are, to give them any intellectual credit. The reality is that bourgeois
social theory is incredibly weak, but instead of smashing those ideological
myths, Leftists adapt to the weakness, and ingratiate themselves with those
ideological myths.

"Globalisation" is supposed to be progressive, but it is in reality merely a
way of stating as a general principle that the international expansion of
the capitalist market and free trade is progressive, while in reality that
expansion occurs on the basis of imperialism, on the basis of
empire-building and competition. The concept of globalisation is an
ideological hot-air concept, which falsifies what really happens in the
world, and what the real result is, and if you have any knowledge of five
centuries of history of bourgeois development and the modalities of
primitive accumulation, then you know that seemingly "benign" business
development goes together with mass murder, racism and exploitation, except
that, in the mind of the imperialist bourgeois, these things somehow have
nothing to do with each other, and consequently, ordinary people should not
be made to think about it that way, either. And that is precisely what Bush
and Blair are saying, and I do not need to either read or write a learned
treatise on imperialism in order just to point that out (the Left doesn't
really want theory anyhow, it interferes with their lives, you know, sex,
power, money, consumption etc.).

Why do you think the bourgeoisie is so very keen to wipe out any discussion
about imperialism, while prattling about democracy, liberation and freedom ?
Because they consider the concept of imperialism "divisive" or
"controversial" for policy, and of course any divisions which don't
correspond to your own norms, are "divisive", just as anybody that doesn't
agree with you is "undemocratic", and anybody who has a different concept of
freedom from you is "totalitarian". We are not talking about a private
tete-a-tete here or an academic discussion, but a question of the assertion
of class power, and so the only bourgeois theorists who are allowed to
operate the concept of imperialism are those who prove its progressive
content.

According to Julius Ceasar in the Bello Gallico, the point of departure was
that Gaul consisted of three parts. "All Gaul is divided into three parts",
he says, "one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who
in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third. All these
differ from each other in language, customs and laws." If therefore, you
were to say that this was a false idea, that there were more parts, then
Ceasar would have said you were being divisive, obstructive, irrational,
introducing irrelevancies and so on. Because he had already decided on those
three parts, basta. Understood ?

Jurriaan