By Robert Barsocchini
The US illustrates to ISIS, and the world, that the path to the seat of regional and then global power is genocide, land-theft, mass enslavement, never paying reparations, then wielding this illegally and brutally obtained money and military hardware over others and proclaiming one’s national group to be superior (ethnocentrism) and a “respected leader”, while in reality the country is feared, loathed, and isolated, maintaining and expanding its hegemony through continued methods of extreme propaganda, subversion, and physical force.
Through terror, bribery, threats, and other tactics, the US foists huge loans on small, relatively weak nations (which are often weak because of having been ravaged by Europe or the US), then forces them to repay the loans with interest as it drains and impoverishes the target countries, making them cheap resource and service stations for the top tiers of an actual global super-elite.
This tightly controlled and forcibly expanded US/Western-peddled economic system, capitalistic oligarchy, euphemistically referred to in the West as ‘globalization’ or ‘neo-liberalism’, which we are intended to believe is a ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ process (it is not), was highlighted this week by Oxfam. While US and Western agencies spend billions trying to convince people that capitalistic oligarchy (‘globalization’) is being globalized for the good of the public, not the enrichment of a tiny elite – a no-brainer propaganda tactic – Oxfam notes:
“Oxfam’s analysis of wealth trends between 2010 and 2015 finds the poor are getting much poorer.
The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion” while “the wealth of the bottom half fell 41 percent or just over $1 trillion.”
These “62 individuals ha[ve] the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, the bottom half of the global population, compared with 388 individuals five years earlier”.
The global oligarchic dictatorship being spearheaded by the United States “did not come about by accident; it is the result of deliberate policy choices”, says Oxfam. These include US/Western military-enforced, corporate-written economic laws and the US’s dubious “loans” to weaker nations, with an emerging end picture similar to a heavily policed planetary slum cheaply laboring to serve a tiny, ultra-rich gated community.
In Lima, the capitol of US-backed Peru, the vast majority of people spend most of their waking hours laboring, then return here.
…while a tiny percentage of the city lives here, in the widely guarded and gated, ultra-rich district.
But in contrast to the self-serving ideology it preaches and forces on its victims, the US itself became powerful by taking out perhaps the biggest loans in world history and then never repaying them (2-3; 6). Further, the loans came from unwilling lenders: the people of Indigenous and African nations. Well-known Israeli author Miko Peled notes in an open letter to Obama this week:
“As a black man, you had an unprecedented opportunity to address the issues of Blacks, but you didn’t. You showed no care for Black lives or for the lives of Blacks in America. You said little and did even less to stop the killing of Black men and the mass incarceration of Blacks. You said nothing and did nothing regarding the over due payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves, men and women upon whose backs the US economy was built. And, if any proof was needed, the outcry of the [Black Lives Matter] movement shows that your priorities were elsewhere.”
The prospects for Native peoples are even more grim. Members of Native nations remain the people killed most often per capita by US government forces. As one Native person commented:
“There are no white or black faces rallying around us, marching with us, protesting with us over this injustice. Why? Because we are a forgotten people.”
If the US were to repay its own loans (or even simply cease its ongoing campaigns of genocide and forced submission), the nation would cease to exist in its current form. All of its physical and more than half its economic foundation rests on the backs of dead Natives and tortured, tormented, raped, enslaved and slain African men, women, and children (the US had a culture, going all the way up to the ‘founding fathers’, devoted specifically to the enjoyment of raping enslaved African children and adults) (6). Yet it is this nation that owes its own existence to loans unprecedented in their scale and ugliness that uses its ill-gotten money and equipment of death to force loans on others and then demand their repayment through funds, labor, ‘favors’, and ‘concessions’.
The US thus illustrates to ISIS, and everyone else, that the path to regional and then global power is to pursue unrelenting genocide, land theft, and hegemonic expansion while taking out huge loans through enslaving people, never repaying the loans, and then using the acquired pool of dirty money to start a global-scale, mafia-style loan-sharking business, and make examples of the disadvantaged people who can’t repay the ‘loans’ by terrorizing and killing them, often en masse.
ISIS seems an apt pupil, but only on a comparatively microscopic scale. However, with further tutelage from continued US refusal to repay its land-theft and slavery loans, and continued US military savagery and expansionism, the US should be able to lead by example and, within a few years, coach ISIS into becoming a stable regional power.
Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’s review of the historical background to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.
20 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org