Book review: Strange Liberators
Gregory Elich
December 2008 - January 2009
Book review: Strange Liberators
Author: Gregory Elich
The dissolution in 1991 of the Soviet Union, after 35 long years of
degeneration, gave the ideological representatives of imperialism great
cause for celebration. In the hallowed halls of government and academia, the
reactionary banter could barely be heard over the din of clinking champagne
glasses.
In his infamous The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued
that the struggle of ideologies had ended and that the final result was the
victory of ‘liberal democracy’, which Fukuyama predicted would soon prevail
everywhere.
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the
passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history
as such ... That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and
the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.”
As the reach of this universalised western liberal democracy was extended to
the whole of eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, its true
nature was revealed.
Take, for example, the former USSR:
“Production, as well as per capita income, has more than halved; there has
been a precipitous fall in living standards; male life expectancy fell by a
spectacular six years (from 64 to 58) between 1990 and 1994; a free health
service, the education system, with its proliferation of crèches,
kindergartens and holiday camps, which were a source of legitimate pride to
the Soviet people, have all but disappeared. From being the second largest,
the Russian economy has been reduced to the size of the economy of the tiny
Netherlands; unemployment, which had not been seen in the USSR since 1932,
is rampant, with an estimated 40 million unemployed in the territory of the
former USSR. The wealth produced by the honest toil of the Soviet working
class has been stolen by a handful of kleptocrats and mafiosi, while the
mass of people are reduced to penury; fraternal harmony and friendship have
given way to fratricidal warfare; prostitution, alcoholism, drug abuse and
drug trafficking, organised and violent street crime, homelessness, and such
other concomitants of the ‘free market’ have assumed epidemic proportions.”
(H Brar, Imperialism, the Eve of the Social Revolution of the Proletariat)
Such is the state of the world addressed by Gregory Elich in his
recently-published book, Strange Liberators – a world in which the ‘liberal’
imperialists ‘liberate’ the long-suffering people of the world from the
tyrannies of independence, nationalised economy, employment, education, food
security and, not infrequently, life itself.
The title of Elich’s book is a reference to Martin Luther King’s well-known
speech at Riverside Church, New York City, on 4 April 1967, where he said of
the Vietnamese people: “They must see Americans as strange liberators … They
watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.
They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to
destroy the precious trees … So far we may have killed a million of them –
mostly children. They wander into towns and see thousands of the children,
homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals …
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the
Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps
of Europe?” (We note in passing that King’s principled opposition to the
Vietnam War was almost certainly among the main reasons the US state decided
to assassinate him.)
Over 40 years later, in this era of the ‘end of history’, the strange
liberators are still bringing their strange liberation to the people of the
world. Michael Parenti notes in his preface:
“Since World War II, US rulers have played a crucial role in overthrowing
reformist democratic governments or insurgent popular movements in
Guatemala, Guyana, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Iran, Indonesia, Greece,
Argentina, Haiti, Egypt, Peru, Congo, Portugal, Nicaragua, Jamaica,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Mozambique, East Timor, the Fiji Islands, Grenada,
Panama and various other countries, at a cumulative cost of millions of
lives. All this is a matter of public record yet seldom mentioned in
mainstream discourse.
“And since World War II, US forces have launched direct military invasion or
aerial attacks (or both) on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, the Dominican
Republic, North Korea, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia, and
Iraq.”
Elich writes about a world that is getting increasingly difficult to live
in. He notes that the world’s slum population has now increased to over a
billion – more than 30 percent of world’s urban population; that over half
the world’s population subsists on less than $2 per day while the richest
200 individuals own equivalent wealth to the 2.6 billion poorest; that
amphetamines are routinely added to drink containers in Thai factories
making goods for major sports/fashion brands such as Reebok, Adidas and Levi
’s; that, despite the sharp reduction of poverty levels in China, the number
of global hungry is increasing – it now stands at 900 million.
“Each year, 40 million people die needlessly from hunger and malnutrition,
victims of a global capitalist system that cherishes wealth but not human
life.
“If is often said that capitalism is the most efficient system for producing
wealth. It would be more accurate to say that what it accomplishes is to
produce a concentration of wealth. Capitalism does not generate wealth from
the thin air. It seizes it. The price for this concentration of wealth in
the hands of the few is death and misery on an extraordinary scale, yet we
rarely if ever hear the cries of those who are trampled underfoot in the
stampede for riches.”
This is what the ‘end of history’ looks like, as far as imperialism is
concerned: concentration of wealth in the hands of the few combined with
death and misery on an extraordinary scale.
And yet, the activities of imperialism around the world are very little
mentioned and understood in the imperialist countries, even among those
considering themselves to be left wing. Such is the stranglehold of the
mainstream media that people haven’t got the slightest clue as to what’s
happening in Congo, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba
or anywhere else.
The default understanding of the situation in north Korea is as follows: it’
s an isolated outpost ruled by a mentally unstable recluse who lives like a
king while his people starve; we want to make the lives of the Korean people
better, but the north Korean government won’t play ball.
The default understanding of the situation in Zimbabwe is as follows: Mugabe
is an evil tyrant hell-bent on destroying Zimbabwe’s economy and maintaining
himself in power; the people want democracy but they are being denied it;
Britain is trying to help, but Mugabe stands in the way.
The default understanding of the war in Yugoslavia is as follows: the
Yugoslav government under Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing
against Albanians in Kosovo; the brave and heroic forces of Nato intervened
to put a stop to this disgraceful behaviour, and they tried very hard to
only bomb military targets.
It is exactly such ill-informed views that Elich seeks to correct in his
meticulously-researched book. Referencing literally hundreds of primary
sources – articles, books, interviews, speeches – Elich brings to light
exceedingly important information exposing the true nature of the ‘war on
terror’, the dirty and disruptive role played by the US with regard to north
Korea, the attempts to turn Zimbabwe into a neo-colony, the cynical and
ruthless war waged against Yugoslavia in pursuit of mineral wealth and
market liberalisation, and the startling damage that is being done to the
earth’s environment in the name of profit.
To attempt to detail this research in a short article would be a fruitless
task; all we can say is that anyone with an interest in these topics will
find in Strange Liberators a wealth of useful information and informed
opinion.
Elich does not offer solutions as such; he mainly concerns himself with
describing the problems – scraping off the tint from our rose-coloured
glasses and shattering our illusions in benevolent capitalism. However, he
makes it very clear that he doesn’t consider modern capitalism to be the
‘end of history’.
“A system that depends on military and economic might to maintain the
privileges of the few while sowing death, starvation, poverty, exploitation
and ruin for the many has no right to go on calling itself ‘efficient’ and
‘the system that works’. Not when those who benefit already possess far more
than they will ever need, while crushing the aspirations of billions of
people throughout the world, and not when corporate greed and avarice
threaten to ruin the very planet itself.”
We would add that imperialism – perhaps unwittingly, but inevitably, unable
to free itself from its own inherent contradictions – is driving humanity
backwards into a state of permanent war, repression and grinding poverty for
the masses of the people.
Only socialist revolution can turn the tide. Books like Elich’s provide a
crucial weapon for the working class in its struggle to get rid of
capitalism and to build a world characterised by cooperation, freedom and
abundance.