Washington,
the metropolitan heart of neoliberal hegemony, has numerous methods
of convincing reluctant developing nations to accept its neighborly
advice. To be sure, the goal of modern colonialism is to find a
pretext to intervene in a country, to restore by other means the
extractive relations that first brought wealth to the colonial north.
The most common pretexts for intervention depict the target nation in
three distinct fashions.
First,
as an economic basket case, a condition often engineered by the West
in what is sometimes called, “creating facts on the ground.”
By sanctioning the target economy, Washington can “make the
economy scream,” to using war criminal Henry Kissinger’s
elegant phrasing. Iran, Syria, and Venezuela are relevant examples
here.
Second,
the West funds violent opposition to the government, producing
unrest, often violent riots of the kind witnessed in Dara, Kiev, and
Caracas. The goal is either to capsize a tottering administration or
provoke a violent crackdown, at which point western embassies and
institutions will send up simultaneously cries of tyranny and
brutality and insist the leader step aside. Libya, Syria, and
Venezuela are instructive in this regard.
Third,
the country will be pressured to accept some sort of military
fettering thanks to either a false flag or manufactured hysteria over
some domestic program, such as the WMD restrictions on Iraq, chemical
weapons restrictions on Syria, or the civilian nuclear energy
restrictions on Iran. Given that the U.S. traffics in WMDs,
bioweapons, and nuclear energy itself, insisting others forsake all
of these is perhaps little more than racially motivated despotry. But
significant fear mongering in the international media will provide
sufficient moral momentum to ram through sanctions, resolutions, and
inspection regimes with little fanfare.
Once the
pretext is established, the appropriate intervention is made.
There’s
no lack of latent racism embedded in each intervention. Something of
Edward Said’s Orientalism is surely at play here; the West is often
responding to a crude caricature rather than a living people. One
writer, Robert Dale Parker, described western views of Asia as little
more than, “a
sink of despotism on the margins of the world.”
Iran is incessantly lensed through a fearful distrust of the ‘other’,
those abyssal Persians. Likewise, North Korea is mythologized as a
kingdom of miniature madmen, possessed of a curious psychosis that
surely bears no relation to the genocidal cleansing of 20 percent of
its population in the Fifties, itself an imperial coda to the madness
of Hiroshima.
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