The System Is The Problem

International Peace Camp 2004

THE SYSTEM IS THE PROBLEM* Presented by George Katsiafikas

Alongside the current war against Iraq and hostile actions against North Korea, Bush and Co. are today waging wars in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Colombia; they arm Israel and permit it to overrun and destroy Palestinian towns and cities; they are encouraging the revival of German and Japanese militarism; they are attempting to overthrow the Chavez government in Venezuela; they have withdrawn from the International Criminal Court, scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto protocols, refused to sign a new international protocol to the 1972 biological warfare treaty, and dramatically increased military spending. Most ominously, Bush adopted a new “first-strike” strategic doctrine, replacing decades of US policies based on “deterrence” and “containment.” When I say Bush and Co., I do not refer only to one man and his administration; it is the system that is the problem. No matter who sits in the White House, whether George Bush or Bill Clinton or someone else, militarism has long been and will surely remain at the center of US foreign policy and economic development. The U.S. Congress has been little better than Bush: among other things, it rejected the nuclear test ban treaty signed by 164 nations and has fully endorsed Bush’s foreign policy on every issue. With Congressional funding, the U.S. now has over 250,000 troops in 141 countries—and it is seeking new bases and attempting to install more troops in places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Northeast Asia, 100,000 US troops are stationed indefinitely. In a phrase, military madness defines the mentality of leading U.S. decision-makers. It would therefore by irresponsible to regard recent military threats emanating from the White House as empty gestures. The world desperately needs a viable peace movement capable of mobilizing millions of people across the globe in order to stop U.S. military madness before it gives rise to perpetual new wars. In the following remarks, I hope to clarify the historical character of this disease and recommend a possible cure.

The Historical Pattern of Violence

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Before they became organized as nation-states, white European settlers in America committed genocide to steal the land of indigenous peoples. Beginning in the sixteenth century, peripheral areas were rapidly assimilated into a capitalist world system based in Europe. Whether in what is now Mexico, Peru or the US, the pattern was generally the same: besides massacring tens of millions of Native Americans, European colonialists enslaved tens of millions of Africans to build up their new empires. Estimates of the number of Africans killed in the slave trade range from 15 to 50 million human beings, with tens of millions more enslaved and harshly exploited. From its earliest days, the US practiced biological warfare. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, after whom towns in Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire are named to this day, was celebrated because he devised a scheme to rid the land of indigenous people without risking white lives. He gave Native Americans blankets carrying smallpox virus, thereby wiping out entire villages under the guise of providing assistance. In the century after the American Revolution, nearly all native peoples were systematically butchered and the few survivors compelled to live on reservations. Have people in the US apologized for and renounced such violence? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Indeed, towns are still named for Amherst, and one of the fanciest restaurants near prestigious Amherst College is today called the “Lord Jeff.” In a similar vein, white European settler-colonists purposely wiped out the buffalo, seeking to deprive native peoples in the plains of their primary source of food. Between…. This early form of biological warfare was never renounced. In fact, “Buffalo Bill” staged a “Wild West” circus-style show for many years, touring not only the East Coast of the US but also in Europe, at times even including the great Sioux warrior chief, Sitting Bull. In 1848, the US annexed almost half of Mexico with the aim of expanding “AngloSaxon democracy” and “Manifest Destiny.” Even though dozens of US soldiers were executed under orders of General Zachary Taylor for refusing to fight against Mexico, US expansionism accelerated. At the end of the nineteenth Century, as manufacturers looked for international markets, the US (led by men experienced in the Indian wars) conquered the Philippines. Six hundred thousand Filipinos perished from the war and disease on the island of Luzon alone. William McKinley, who went on to receive a Nobel Prize, explained that “I heartily approve of the employment of the sternest measures necessary.” The director of all Presbyterian missions hailed the slaughter of

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Filipinos as “a great step in the civilization of the world.”1 For Theodore Roosevelt, the murders in the Philippines were “for civilization over the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” In 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana summarized the colonialist mentality: “We are the ruling race of the world…We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God of the civilization of the world.” One cannot help but wonder precisely what idea of “civilization” he had in mind. Although Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League stood in opposition to U.S. policy, imperial ambitions were far too strong. Between 1898 and 1934 US Marines invaded Honduras 7 times, Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5, the Dominican Republic 4, Haiti and Panama twice each, Guatemala once, Mexico 3 times and Colombia 4 times. In 1915, over 50,000 Haitians were killed when U.S. troops mercilessly put down a peasant rebellion.2 Marines were sent to China, Russia, and North Africa—in short, wherever the masters of US imperialism needed them. With the Great Depression of 1929, militarism became more than an instrument of colonial conquest: it emerged as the primary solution to stagnation in the world economy. Since 1948, the US has spent more than $15 trillion on the military—more than the cumulative monetary value of all human-made wealth in the U.S. -- more than the value of all airports, factories, highways, bridges, buildings, machinery, water and sewage systems, power plants, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels, houses, and automobiles. If we add the current Pentagon budget (over $346 billion in fiscal 2002) to foreign military aid, veterans’ pensions, the military portion of NASA, the nuclear weapons budget of the Energy Department and the interest payments on debt from past military spending, the US spends $670 billion every year on the military—more than a million dollars a minute.3 The US military budget is larger than the world’s next 15 biggest spenders combined, accounting for 36% of global military expenditures. Although the main problem is obviously the U.S., nearly two-thirds of global military spending today occurs outside the U.S. Japanese and German militarism are being revived, while in South Korea the military budget has increased by 12.7% for 2003 to more than $14 billion.

1

Noam Chomsky, “The United States and Indochina: Far From an Aberration,” in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long (editors), Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States and the War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991) p. 165. 2 See the illustrated book by Joel Andreas, Addicted to War: Why the US Can’t Kick Militarism (Oakland: AK Press, 2002). 3 Andreas, p. 39.

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American Militarism and Asia Unless we ignore geography, we must understand that Bush’s “axis of evil” is entirely in Asia. This is no accident. Lest we forget history, it is in Asia where in the last half century the US slaughtered over 5 million people in regional wars so distant from the US (and Russian) mainlands that historians refer to this period as the “Cold” War. In just three years, somewhere between three and five million people were killed in Korea, the vast majority of them innocent civilians. Although thousands of civilian refugees were massacred and the US employed biological weapons,4 it still will not admit to nor apologize for these actions. Instead it moved the killing fields to Indochina, where it used more firepower than had been used in all previous wars in history combined, killing at least two million people and leaving millions more wounded or made refugees. Chemical warfare, euphemistically called Agent Orange, was systematic and deadly: over 20 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed on Vietnam. For every man, woman and child in South Vietnam, the US dropped more than 1000 pounds of bombs (the equivalent of 700 Hiroshima bombs), sprayed a gallon of Agent Orange, and used 40 pounds of napalm and half a ton of CS gas on people whose only wrongdoing was to struggle for national independence.5 The kill ratio per capita in these two Asian wars was about 1000 times that of wars in Central America and even higher than for the more than 200 other US military interventions during the “Cold War.” More here on Korea Biological warfare—several pages Jeju, Yeosu, Gwangju responsibility Although to most Americans, all of the above events are forgotten or at best distant history, the obscenity of murder and mayhem visited upon the world by the United States continues unabated—at the very moment when US policy-makers plan for even wider wars—in which Asia will once again be in the crosshairs of UIS weapons. East Asia’s importance as a market for military goods has been increasing dramatically. After the end of the Cold War, when demand for such products leveled off in North America, Western Europe, and the former Soviet Union, arms suppliers looked 4

International Scientific Commission on Biological Warfare in Korea and China, Report, 1952. available from [email protected]. 5 See my edited volume, Vietnam Documents: Vietnamese and American Views of the War (New York: ME Sharpe, 1992) p. 146.

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to other markets. US arms exports rose from $8 billion in 1989 to $40 billion in 1991, while British arms exports rose nearly 1000% from 1975 to 1995 (when they reached $4.7 billion). In 2001, global military spending (conservatively estimated) rose two percent to $839 billion, 2.6% of world GNP or about $137 for every man, woman and child on the planet. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Between 1990 and 1997, East Asia’s share of global defence imports by value almost tripled, from 11.4% to 31.7%. In 1988, only 10% of US arms exports went to the region. By 1997, this had increased to 25%.”6 Within East Asia, South Korea’s share of military spending in 1997 ($14.8 billion) was nearly as large as the combined total spending of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.7 In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, military buildups were delayed, but Malaysia’s recent purchase of three French submarines for $972 million, South Korea’s decision to acquire 40 F-15’s for $4.23 billion and its rapidly increasing military budget are indications of military spending taking off in the region. According to Kim Kook Hun, a Major General and director of the South Korean Defense Ministry’s arms control bureau, 7 of 17 countries in the world with nuclear weapons or weapons programs were in the Asia/Pacific region, as were 16 of 28 with missile programs, 10 of 16 with chemical weapons and 8 of 13 with biological weapons.8 Even more alarming is the revival of Japanese militarism. Its annual military spending is now second only to that of the U.S., amounting to some five trillion yen (about $40 billion), and the international deployment movement of its military (banned since 1945) has resumed. In April 2002, Ichiro Ozawa, leader of Japan’s second largest opposition party, stated that Japan could easily make nuclear weapons and eventually become stronger than China. Shinzo Abe, deputy chief cabinet secretary, publicly explained that Japan could legally possess “small” nuclear weapons, while Yasuo Fakuda, chief secretary of the Japanese cabinet, said that Tokyo could review its ban on nuclear weapons. Rather than reaping a peace dividend with the end of the Cold War, East Asia is poised for what could become a regional nuclear arms race and massive buildup of conventional military forces. The need for global peace movements is strongly indicated by the above dynamics. Without massive and militant peace movements, political elites will be unconstrained to use military spending in order to prevent global stagnation, aggrandize national power 6

Tim Huxley and Susan Willett, Arming East Asia (International Institute for Strategic Studies/Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 23. 7 Ibid, p. 15. 8 Michael Richardson, “Fears spread that other Asia nations will seek nuclear arms,” International Herald Tribune, June 6, 2002, p. 5.

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and enrich large defense contractors. One countertrend can be found in the Filipino example of expelling the US from its huge base at Subic Bay, an important trendsetter for anti-militarism movements. But as we watch US troops conducting military operations in the Philippines today, we must reflect upon the urgent need to cure the disease of military madness, beyond temporarily addressing the symptoms. To be strategically effective, popular movements will have to inject a long-term vision into moments of crisis. Seemingly necessary for the dynamism of the existing world system, militarism is a scourge that squanders humanity’s vast resources and threatens to destroy hard-won popular gains and victories. The impetus for militarism resides in the capitalist world economic system, and it is there that peace movements must focus if a cure for the disease is to be found.

The Imperial Crusade The key recognition here is that the real axis of evil is composed of the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. Like their predecessors in the colonial world, these global institutions masquerade as bringing people more freedom and rights. “Free” trade, IMF “bailouts” and World Bank “assistance,” however, too often mean more poverty for people at the periphery of the world system —not more freedom. Historically there is an inverse relationship between the expansion of prosperity and democracy in the core of the world system and growth of poverty and dictatorship in the Third World, a dialectic of enslavement meaning that greater “progress” in Europe and the US spells increasing misery in the periphery. Conventional wisdom holds that increasing core democracy should mean more enlightened policies towards the Third World and improvement in the conditions of life for all human beings. One exponent of such conventional wisdom is Francis Fukuyama, who argues that we have reached the “end of history”—that contemporary European/American political institutions are at the desired endpoint of human development. Fukuyama believes that the battle of Jena in 1806 (when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy) marks the consolidation of the liberal-democratic state, and that “the principles and privileges of citizenship in a democratic state only have to be extended.” For Fukuyama, “there is nothing left to be invented” in terms of

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humanity’s social progress.9 For Fukuyama, the spatial extension of the principles of the French Revolution means that the rest of the world will likewise experience human progress. Evidence abounds, however, that the extension of those principles has resulted in just the opposite -increasing dependency and poverty for the Third World. The American and French revolutions helped propel the nascent world system centered in Europe into a framework of international domination, concentrating military power in nation-states and accumulating the world’s wealth in the hands of giant corporations and banks. The worldwide penetration of the economic and political system produced by the American and French revolutions has, to be sure, resulted in rapid economic development and some of the most important forms of political liberty that our species has enjoyed. For a majority of its people, the U.S. is arguably the freest society in the world. The dialectical irony of history means that it is simultaneously a white European settler colony founded on genocide and slavery as well as on freedom and democracy. But one must ask: what are the costs of living in such a society? Slavery in the Third World? Ecological devastation? Military madness? The dynamic of increasing political democracy in the North coinciding with intensified exploitation in the South has a long history. French colonialists in Vietnam provided a particularly graphic example when they placed a copy of the same statue of liberty that France gave to the U.S. (the one now in New York harbor) atop the pagoda of Le Loi in Hanoi. Le Loi was the national leader who in 1418 had helped defeat the Mongols when they invaded Vietnam. Today he is still regarded as a national hero, a man whose mythology includes Hoan Kiem (Returned Sword) Lake, where the golden turtle that gave him the magical sword he used to drive the Mongols out subsequently reappeared to reclaim the sword—a story not unlike that of King Arthur in British folklore. The placing of a statue of liberty on Le Loi’s pagoda certainly was an affront to the Vietnamese, one symbolizing how the spatial extension of the principles of the French Revolution can be brutally offensive to the Third World. French colonialism was indeed brutal and deadly: Indochinese recall that dead human beings fertilize each tree in the country’s vast rubber plantations. During the great war against fascism, French exploitation of Vietnam was intensified. In a famine from 1944 to 1945, at least a million and a half and possibly two million Vietnamese starved to 9

See his article “The End of History,” Foreign Affairs 1988, p. 5.

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death in the North (where the population was under 14 million), at the very time rice exports to France were fueling its liquor industry -- a blatant disregard for human life in the midst of the war against “fascism.” In American popular culture, President John Kennedy is often associated with the word “Camelot” and remembered for his beautiful wife. Tragically, it was he—one of the most “liberal” U.S. presidents in history -- who ordered massive use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly, the strongest French imperial expansionists were staunch anti-clerical “progressives” who regarded themselves as ideological heirs of the French Revolution. They were “enlightened” liberals, much like John Kennedy and members of his administration were “enlightened” liberals who believed they were carrying forth in the tradition of the U.S. revolutionary heritage and Manifest Destiny. As Minister of Education, Jules Ferry defied the Catholic Church in France by making education universal, secular, and obligatory but he was later the first French prime minister to make intensification of colonialism his overriding platform. Ferry believed that it was France’s duty to civilize inferior people, and on May 15, 1883, a full-scale expedition was launched to impose a protectorate on Vietnam.10 Conservatives in France objected to this colonial expansion. As Vietnam disappeared, subsumed under the names of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China, even the identity of Vietnamese people was attacked as the French referred to them as Annamites. Here we can see the spatial expansion of the liberal values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—values that became the basis for France’s “civilizing mission” (“Mission civilisatrice”) just as the American Revolution was later turned into “Manifest Destiny.” It was the same French troops, bringing with them “civilization,” who in 1885 burned the imperial library at Hue, which contained ancient scrolls and manuscripts and was a repository for thousands of years of oriental wisdom. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a disciple of the French Revolution and author of the famous book Democracy in America, watched in Memphis, Tennessee the “triumphant march of civilization across the desert,” as he put it. As he observed 3,000 or 4,000 soldiers drive before them “the wandering races of the aborigines”, that is, those Native Americans who were lucky enough to survive “Jacksonian democracy” (named after a man who ordered his men to exterminate “bloodthirsty barbarians and cannibals”), Tocqueville was duly impressed that Americans could deprive Indians of their liberty and exterminate them, as he put it, “with singular felicity, tranquility, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood,” and most importantly “without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world” -- the European world, one 10

See Greater France, A History of French Overseas Expansion by Robert Aldrich (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) p. 98.

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should say. “It was impossible,” Tocqueville said, “to kill people with more respect for the laws of humanity.”11 Fukuyama’s spatial extension of the liberal principles of the French and American revolutions could not be more eloquently enunciated. In the name of civilization and liberal democracy, the British destroyed the communal ownership of village land in India, structures that had sustained local culture for centuries, a communal tradition surviving invasions by Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Afghans, Tartars, and Mongols but which could not, as Fukuyama would insist, resist the perfection of the liberal principles of the British state. Under British enlightenment, large estates developed and peasants were turned into sharecroppers. In 1867 the first fruits of British liberalism appeared: in the Orissa district of India alone, more than one million people died in a famine. Such famines were hardly indigenous to India, with its “backward” traditions (according to European values), but were brought by the “enlightened” liberalism of European democracy, through the spatial extension of the principles of “democratic” capitalism. Under the direct influence of its great revolution, France proclaimed a crusade against Algerian slavery and anarchy and, in the name of instituting orderly and civilized conditions, was able to break up Arab communal fields of villages, including lands untouched by the “barbarous” and “unenlightened” Ottoman rulers. As long as Moslem Islamic culture had prevailed, hereditary clan and family lands were inalienable, making it impossible for the land to be sold. But after fifty years of enlightened French rule, the large estates had again appeared and famine made its ugly appearance in Algeria. Civilization or Barbarism? I have indicated how European capitalist “civilization” -- particularly its most “enlightened” forms -- systematically slaughtered native peoples and created a centralized world system that demands militarism as a key organizing principle. If this were simply past history, we could all breathe a sigh of relief. But these very tendencies are today stronger than ever. According to the United Nations, in the 1990s more than 100 million children under the age of five died of unnecessary causes: diarrhea, whooping cough, tetanus, pneumonia, and measles—diseases easily preventable through cheap vaccines or simply clean water. UNICEF estimates that up to 30,000 children under the age of five die of easily preventable diseases every day in the Third 11

See Chomsky, op. cit.

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World.12 Kofi Annan declared in 2001 that as many as 24,000 people starve to death every day.13 Altogether one billion people are chronically malnourished while austerity measures imposed by the IMF have resulted in a drop in real wages in the Third World and declining gross national products in many countries. While 70 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 20 percent of its population, one in ten human beings suffers starvation and malnutrition. Despite—or more accurately, because of—the spatial extension of liberal values in the period after World War II, there were four times as many deaths from wars in the forty years after World War II than in the forty years prior to World War II. While the world spends something like a trillion dollars a year on its militaries, one adult in three cannot read and write, one person in four is hungry, the AIDS epidemic accelerates and we are destroying the planet’s ecological capacity to sustain life. The absurdity and tragedy of such a world is made even more absurd and tragic by the profound ignorance and insensitivity of the wealthiest planetary citizens regarding the terrible plight of human beings in the periphery. In such a world, of course, there can be no lasting peace. As long as the wretched of the earth, those at the margins of the world system, are dehumanized, branded as terrorists, and kept out of decision-making, they have no alternative but to carry out insurrection and wage war in order to find justice. In order to remedy this irrational system, a crucial task is to redefine what civilization means. We know what it is not for the billion or more “wretched of the earth” for whom increasing planetary centralization and dependence upon transnational corporations, militarized nation-states and the international axis of evil mean living hell. With the passing of time it becomes more obvious that this same “civilization” squanders humanity’s wealth, destroys traditional cultures wholesale, and plunders the planet’s natural resources. The structural violence of an economic system based upon short-term profitability is a crisis that all peace and justice movements will have to address. Even if some of the above irrationalities of the present system are reduced, the structural contradictions of the system will inevitably be displaced to other arenas. As long as vast social wealth remains dominated by the “enlightened” and “rational” principles of efficiency and profitability, there will be militarism, brutal degradation of human lives along with 12

“UN Says Millions of Children Die Needlessly” by Elizabeth Olson, New York Times, March 14, 2002, p. 13. 13 “’Time to Act’ on Hunger, Annan says,” International Herald-Tribune, June 11, 2002.

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unbridled destruction of the natural ecosystem; there will be mammoth socially wasteful projects, for example tunnels in the Alps and Pyrenees, bridges connecting Denmark and Sweden or Prince Edward Island and the Canadian mainland, redundant World Cup stadiums—rather than constructive use of humanity’s enormous social wealth. A few hundred multinational corporations today control this social wealth through the most undemocratic of means and for ends benefiting only a small minority. According to the logic of “enlightened” neoliberal economics, these corporations must either grow or die. Only a fundamental restructuring of the world system can lead us toward an ecologically viable life-world, one in which we decentralize and bring under selfmanagement the vast social wealth of humanity. Instead of relying on “liberal” governments to constrain US militarism, people can use extraparliamentary tactics to isolate the U.S. -- just as earlier international groups and movements turned the apartheid regime in South Africa into an international pariah. Wherever in the world Bush or senior US officials travel, protests should be as militant and massive as possible. Grassroots rebellions in Argentina, Mexico and Nigeria reflect the high level of consciousness people in many countries have developed and are ready to act upon.14 In this context, far-reaching protests can help unleash a global peace offensive that will compel governments to stop war by raising their costs and disrupting domestic tranquility. In the U.S., where regime change is most desperately needed to prevent use of weapons of mass destruction and fight militarism, an extraparliamentary opposition was galvanized by the Seattle anti-WTO protests. Although reactionary forces now command overwhelming majority allegiance, vital countertrends have appeared, as seen in the 200,000 or more people who marched in Washington at the end of October along with the great popularity enjoyed by such critics as Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. Gradually breaking with the ideological and organizational power of reaction will necessarily proceed from small steps to giant leaps. Since 1968 the international character of popular movements has been recognized as a primary factor in their emergence and impact. Two more examples of the spread of movements across borders, involving a process of mutual amplification and synergy, can be found in the disarmament movement of the early 1980s in the US and Europe 14

See Amory Starr and Jason Adams, “Anti-globalization: The Global Fight for Local Autonomy,” New Political Science 25:1 (March 2003).

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and in the wave of democracy movements in Asia in the mid and late-1980s.15 From a handful of nuclear disarmament protesters in the 1970s, an enormous peace movement changed world history in the 1980s, helping end the Cold War and alter the global balance of power. Movements grew from years of grassroots initiatives in a variety of arenas,16 spreading rapidly and bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of New York, Paris, London, Rome, Brussels and Bonn. The situation in Northeast Asia today is very similar to that of Europe in the early 1980s, when the US and USSR stationed intermediate range Pershing and SS-20 nuclear missiles in the region. Such new missile deployment meant that the US and USSR could have fought a “limited” nuclear war in Europe without either country being directly engaged in military hostilities. The emergence of the Green Party in Germany and the presence of huge protest movements helped Gorbachev convince Russian generals that Western Europe would not attack them, allowing the USSR to change peacefully, release its East European buffer states, and take the initiative to end the arms race.

The Slaughter of Innocents State Terrorism and Genocide in Our Time We have recently left perhaps the bloodiest and most terrifying century of human history. The tragedies are too numerous to mention in full, but a short list will suffice: the Armenian genocide, the Soviet gulag, the European Holocaust, the Nanking Massacre, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the repressions of Maoist China, the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, the slaughter of the Kurds, the “dirty wars” waged by Latin American governments upon their own people. Killing fields dot the landscape of human history. But in the 20th century, we developed the techniques to realize our most murderous tendencies. The end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989 led to much speculation that great historical passions were finally put to rest and the world would settle down to a bureaucratic state 15

These are examples of what I call the “eros effect.” See www.eroseffect.com. For a full analysis, see my book The Subversion of Politics: European Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, published in 1997. 16

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of ever increasing political entropy – the EU-ification of the world. But the 1990s were just as brutal as the previous nine decades. The mass slaughter in Rwanda, the targeting of civilians in the former Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the ruthless suppression of uprisings in Iraq, and countless bloody disputes throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia all suggested that those initial expectations were naïve. The 20th-century atrocities that I’ve mentioned, both before and after 1989, share two things in common. They involved the large-scale death of civilians – non-combatants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or were killed for not having the right ethnicity or religion or ideas. And the perpetrators of these crimes were states, for only states possess the means to plan, carry out, or inspire such large-scale killing. If the 18th and 19th centuries witnessed all the bloody sacrifices associated with the rise of states – consider the French Revolution, the forging of Germany out of “blood and iron,” the making of the Meiji state in Japan – the 20th century provided a cautionary tale of the consequences of mature state power. In the 21st century, some argue that the threat from states has largely retreated, and it is non-state actors – terrorists – who most threaten individuals and the world order. The Bush administration has used this argument to justify recent attacks. It was the Taliban’s sheltering of Al Qaeda that served as the explicit rationale for U.S. intervention in 2001. And the administration, to rally public support for invasion, attempted to link Saddam Hussein to its larger “war on terrorism” by suggesting links that did not exist to Al Qaeda. Both Iran and North Korea, the two other members of the “axis of evil,” are demonized not so much for what they can do directly to the United States (though the United States frequently worries about the reach of North Korean missiles), but for their alleged capacity to service terrorist organizations with material support or even weapons of mass destruction. For all this talk of the terrorism of non-state actors, however, states have not suddenly become benign in the 21st century. States, both large and small, continue to wage war both externally and internally. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers, states continue to be responsible for the overwhelming number of civilian deaths around the world – in the millions over the last decade compared to the thousands killed by terrorists. Approximately 5,000 people died in terrorist attacks from 2001 to the end of 2003 – a record number because of 9/11 – but that compares to an estimated 9,000 civilian deaths in the Iraq occupation alone. This is not to excuse or justify or minimize terrorism.

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From the point of view of the victim, an atrocity is an atrocity, regardless of the perpetrator or the scale of the act. As the largest and most powerful state in the world, the United States plays a particularly troubling role, as much for its acts of war as for its stubborn adherence to unilateralism. This unilateralism predates the Bush administration. Linked to a tradition of American exceptionalism, this “go it alone” ethos is hard-wired into the very practice of U.S. foreign policy. This presentation will look at the role of the state in perpetuating violence against citizens, both in the form of “state terrorism” and “genocide.” I’ll also briefly look at what has been done to curb the excesses of the state, largely through popular movements and legal action at both the national and international level. And I’ll look at how the United States, despite many excellent organizations and committed politicians, has a disproportionately negative impact on creating international standards to prevent human rights abuses. But the central questions I’ll be posing today will be the following. Is it naïve to expect that states can be transformed, or are they, like colonial systems, constitutionally disposed to large-scale, unjust actions? Is it equally naïve to expect that we have any sane or effective alternatives to the modern state? And what can we expect from the most powerful state in the world, regardless of who is in the White House?

A Short History of the State and Terrorism Life before the State was not a great deal of fun, if we are to believe the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It was a “war of all against all,” and the average person’s experience was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The State might be an awesome and fearful force – a “Leviathan” in Hobbes’s biblically inspired words – but it was generally preferable to the alternative of chaos. To prevent challenges to its authority that might return society to this “war of all against all,” the modern state has sought a monopoly on violence. It reserved for itself the right of both foreign military activities and the maintenance of internal order. And the state, with occasional consultation with religious authorities and even less frequent resort to

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treaties, determined whether any particular use of force was just or not. The history of the formation of states can be viewed romantically (Garibaldi and the creation of modern Italy) or with a more jaundiced eye (the slaughter of indigenous peoples, the ruthless suppression of minorities). But today, however you would like to believe a given state was constructed, the 180-odd existing states in the world are legal facts backed up by force of arms. The poorest states, like North Korea, have armies. Neutral states like Switzerland have armies. And even Japan, which was governed by the world’s only “peace constitution,” is lobbying hard to have a “normal” military. (Costa Rica, the only country without a standing army, is the exception that proves the rule). The history of the modern state is also a history of bureaucratic control. This control has been maintained through institutions such as the military, schools, and the civil service. To the extent that state and nation do not coincide – and this is the case throughout the world with only a few exceptions – the state has also used its institutions to create national sentiment as a legitimizing force – to turn “peasants into Frenchmen” in Eugen Weber’s characterization of the breaking down of minority (Breton, Provencal) affections to build support for central French power in Paris. The state, in other words, is the great homogenizer. Violence has been used to maintain borders (or expand them), but it has also been used to enforce loyalty domestically. No state tolerates rebellions, revolts, and revolutions. Governments may come and go, depending on the democratic nature of the country, but states with very rare exceptions – East Germany, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union – do not disappear gently into history. Those who are not loyal to the state – in the form of individual traitors or collective rebellions – are subject to criminal penalties in the first case (including death) and war in the second case (the crushing of uprisings such as the one in Kwangju or the suppression of the National League for Democracy in Burma). Much has been written of the economic origins and justifications of the state. But when it comes to state violence and genocide, economic rationales have rarely played a critical role. Certainly the mass slaughters associated with colonialism – the millions who died, for instance, in Congo at the hands of the Belgians in the 19th and early 20th centuries – were motivated by greed. But desire for wealth cannot explain the rampages of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the Nazis in Europe. These campaigns required some conception or ideology of enforced homogeneity based on race, political beliefs, or a combination of the two. Genocide can be understood as an

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extreme corruption of the homogeneity that all states require and which goes by various names – patriotism, nationalism, political loyalty. It has been common to contrast states and terrorists. States are a legitimate part of the world order, and their violence is legal and expected and governed (to a certain extent) by international law. Terrorists form an illegitimate force whose violence is unexpected and illegal. This facile contrast, repeated by most state leaders, does not hold up to close scrutiny. Let’s look first at several definitions of terrorism. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “the use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end.” The FBI puts an emphasis on the illegal nature of terrorist acts and throws in attacks against property: "the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives." The United Nations has so far been unable to achieve consensus on a definition, but there has been a good deal of support for defining terrorist acts simply as the “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” Even with the FBI definition, it should be clear that terrorism can be a technique used by both state and non-state actors. The Nazi state was a terrorist state, as was the Soviet state under Stalin and the Japanese state of the 1930s – they all used violence against civilians to further political goals. But democracies, too, have used terror and violence against citizens to achieve ends. During the 20th century, for instance, large-scale terror attacks against civilians became a legitimate strategy of war. The Allied fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were specifically designed to kill civilians in large numbers and reduce popular support for the respective governments. U.S. use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II and the bombing of dams in North Korea in the Korean War were a logical continuation of this trend. The continued development of weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War must be considered in this context of state-sponsored terrorism; nuclear deterrence, a cornerstone of the current world order, is a technique by which states balance each other’s institutionalized terrorism. During peace-time, too, democratic states practiced terrorism through both overt and covert operations (for example, U.S. material and logistical support for death squads in Latin America or Israel’s assassinations of its enemies). But terrorism, conventionally, has been used to describe the activities of non-state

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movements. The precursors to modern terrorists espoused violence to combat tyranny. In the modern era, however, terrorist movements initially arose to either create states (Israel, Macedonia), recreate states (Korea, Poland), or transform states (Russia, Germany). To achieve these goals, movements that are outnumbered seek advantage by breaking the “rules of combat.” In many cases, terrorism has only been a method of equalizing power relations so that outsiders can win a seat at the table. Many organizations that have been labeled “terrorist” – the precursor to Israel’s Likud, Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, the African National Congress – have since become political actors in the mainstream. The term “terrorism” is thus ambiguous. Both state and non-state actors use violence against civilians to achieve political goals. The term can be stretched to encompass virtually any group, from the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, from the Red Army Brigade in Japan to the Real IRA in Ireland, and even (according to the Chinese government), the Falun Gong. And former terrorists like Nelson Mandela have become world-renowned statesmen. With the end of the Cold War, however, the categories have shifted once again. A new construct for understanding international relations has emerged: market democracies versus everyone else (rogue states, stubbornly communist countries, terrorist organizations). Anti-terrorism has thus become the anti-communism of our generation. State-sponsored violence, which was once directed against “communists” in Guatemala or Indonesia or South Korea, is now directed against those engaged in “jihad.” What was once a strictly political distinction, for communists were understood largely in terms of their goal of seizing state power, now comes with a set of cultural assumptions as well. Al Qaeda does not believe in “our” God. It rejects “our” social liberalism. And it believes not so much in seizing state power as eliminating modern states altogether in favor of recreating an ancient caliphate with mullahs in charge. The political needs of the “war on terrorism” do not quite square with the cultural overtones of the current crusade against radical Islam. To imagine that Al Qaeda has anything in common with the IRA or the Basque ETA or with North Korea and Cuba or with noncommunist “rogue” states such as Sudan and Syria stretches “terrorism” beyond even its previous malleability. Just as anti-communism saw conspiracies between disparate movements – inveterate enemies such as China and Vietnam or feuding powers like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia or distant acquaintances like Chilean socialists and Cuban communists – anti-terrorism has created an equally disconnected “axis of evil.”

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Before I turn to the “war on terrorism” and current U.S. policy, though, let me discuss the non-violent path to reining in the excesses of the state – popular movements for democracy and human rights.

Democracy and Human Rights The most profound transformation to temper the excesses of the state has been democracy. Majority rule, with minority protections and transparent political institutions, offers the promise of reaping the benefits of the state (stability, economic growth) while avoiding the drawbacks (oppression). Democratic movements serve a vital watchdog function on the exercise of state power, whether overseas or domestic. Democratic institutions, through checks and balances, prevent any one individual or group from using state power unjustly. At least, this is the theory. Without going into the real world failings of democracy, suffice it to say that democracy does not automatically spell the end of oppression. There is the problem of the tyranny of the majority – German support for the Nazi party, Japanese-American internment camps in the United States – which sanctions oppression through popular support. Second, there is the problem of the “national security exception,” which exempts questions of national security from democratic scrutiny. The budget and activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, for instance, are not open to public control. Pentagon strategy is not subject to Congressional control much less citizen oversight. The state argues that the security of the country requires a measure of secrecy, and with this secrecy comes a wealth of opportunities for abuse. Democracy is a necessary condition for putting controls on state violence. But it is not sufficient. Popular movements can organize domestically to improve democratic controls over the army and intelligence agencies. But let’s look at another strategy – applying pressure from the outside. This is where the human rights movement enters the picture. The human rights movement grew out of the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Developing countries, anticipating the break-up of colonialism, demanded the creation of standards for economic and social justice. An incipient NGO movement,

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numbering approximately 40 organizations, pushed for universal human rights for individuals over and above the self-determination of peoples. As described by Mary Ann Glendon in A World Made New, Eleanor Roosevelt guided the Human Rights Commission toward reconciling these two approaches by asserting a set of basic human values that transcended diverse cultural contexts. The UN Declaration of Human Rights offered a potential check on states that engaged in cross-border violence or that turned against their own citizens. At the same time, the Commission was careful not to upset the principle building blocks of the nation-state system, namely the notions of sovereignty and territorial integrity established in the 17th century in the Treaty of Westphalia. As such, no state could use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to justify intervention in another state’s affairs. Sovereignty has always been the last refuge of the state. If internal policies cannot be justified on a moral or legal basis, the state in the end asserts that the policies are not open to external challenge for all states have the right to do what they please within their own borders. Parallel to the work of the Human Rights Commission, however, were Raphael Lemke’s efforts to secure a genocide convention. Here the goal was to establish a kind of exception to the standard of sovereignty if and only if a state attempted mass murder against an ethnic group within its borders. This was a radical move. Even at the Nuremburg trials, Nazi defendants were charged with crimes against humanity only in the cases of German invasion of other countries; what German citizens did in Germany to other German citizens did not count. The convention, which passed in 1948, deliberately excluded political groups from its definition of the potentially victimized. The genocide convention has had more hortatory than actual effect. As Samantha Power makes clear in her 2002 book A Problem from Hell, all states have acknowledged the importance of the genocide convention but very rarely have invoked it. States are large, unwieldy creations. They do not act with moral conviction (though an occasional leader will do so, for better or worse). Only the most slender efforts were made to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Even less was done to stop the killings in Rwanda. Very little is being done today, as we speak, to prevent the Sudanese government and its proxy Arab militias from killing non-Arab Africans in Darfur. Human rights organizations can bring attention to genocide, but they cannot by themselves stop the killing. Nor can the international community, such that it is, stop genocide. Only states

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have the means to prevent (or authorize the UN to prevent) genocide. Although they haven’t been able to stop genocide, the human rights movement has had measurable impact on the activities of states. Human rights movements played critical roles in democratizing Eastern Europe, transforming governments throughout Latin America, and making a profound difference for millions of people throughout Asia. As critically, human rights movements have affected how putatively democratic governments behave, for such movements have challenged pragmatic alliances that the United States or European countries have maintained with dictatorial regimes. Although democratic institutions are more widespread and human rights organizations have greater power today than every before, states continue to oppress. A large gap remains between the state as guarantor of rights and the state as the violator of rights. When the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention were written in the 1940s, there were great hopes that a newly emerging set of international institutions would make states behave. This did not happen. In the 1990s, hopes were renewed that the UN would step into the void of power created by the end of the Cold War. Let me turn now to one of the chief reasons why an international system has been slow to replace the old, creaking nation-state system.

American Exceptionalism Although U.S. civil society and elements of the U.S. government have taken strong stands on human rights issues, there are four major problems in the overall U.S. approach, all of which have made it very difficult to construct an international set of standards that can serve as a backbone for a peaceful, rights-respecting global system. Reluctance to combat genocide Refusal to compromise on “sovereignty” Inconsistent application of human rights standards globally Extralegality in counterterrorism operations . Although U.S. citizens were instrumental in pushing for the genocide treaty, the United States did not ratify the treaty until 1988. Even while they quibbled over the terms of the treaty, U.S. politicians solemnly promised that the European Holocaust would “never again” happen. Actions did not live up to these words. The United States

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condemned the Khmer Rouge during its reign of terror, but then backed the deposed movement after the Vietnam invasion of 1979 in order to achieve a “balance of power” in the region. In a similar effort to balance the power of Iran, the United States sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The U.S. agricultural lobby also blocked consideration of economic sanctions against Iraq when news of the slaughter of Kurds began to leak out (Iraq was the 9th largest importer of U.S. food). The Clinton administration decried the acts of the Serbian government and Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia, but tended to blame all sides. While Croatia was certainly guilty of atrocities (Bosnia committed considerably fewer), this tendency to assess blame evenly prevented the U.S. government from backing more resolute action – more UN peacekeepers, NATO bombings of Serb military targets – to prevent, for instance, the slaughter of 7,000 Bosnians at the supposedly “safe haven” of Srebrenica. And when very credible reports began to emerge from Rwanda of Tutsi atrocities against the Hutu minority, the Clinton administration refused to invoke genocide for fear of being required, by international law, to support intervention into the crisis. Approximately 800,000 Hutus were killed, approximately 80 percent of the Hutu population in Rwanda. In the middle of the genocide, the U.S. government actually prevented the UN from deploying 5500 troops when the Security Council finally approved a measure to expand its forces. Only 800 men were deployed. Why didn’t the United States act? In part, it was reluctant to oppose France, which was aligned with the Tutsis and blocked intervention at the UN level. The United States also did not want to be caught in a long conflict that could cost American lives, especially so soon after the Mogadishu disaster and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia. Nor was there a Tutsi community in the United States putting pressure on the U.S. president or the U.S. Congress. This was a clear case of the necessity of a “humanitarian intervention.” It has been estimated that a force of 5,000 well-armed soldiers deployed immediately could have prevented the bulk of the atrocities. But the United States, like other countries, did not feel compelled, either politically or morally, to intervene. While it is easy to make judgments about genocide after the fact, the choices at the time are not always so clear. Take the example of Kosovo. In March 1999, the Clinton administration finally used genocide as a rationale for instructing NATO for the first time in its 50-year history to wage an actual war. NATO conducted bombing raids over Serbia during which not a single NATO soldier died. Indeed, planes bombed from much higher altitudes than would otherwise be effective simply to avoid anti-aircraft

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fire. This led to several costly mistakes, such as killing a busload of Albanian refugees – overall, approximately 500 civilians died during the bombing, according to Human Rights Watch. Did the bombing work? 2500 Kosovars were killed in the year before bombing. Within 11 weeks of the bombing, Serb forces killed roughly 10,000 (the exact figures are still under dispute). But how many might have died if the bombing hadn’t taken place? Would fewer innocent civilians have died if American fighter pilots had flown at lower but riskier altitudes? These are not easy questions to answer. The second problem of U.S. policy is the government’s refusal to tolerate any formal infringement of its sovereignty. This has led the U.S. government to reject numerous international treaties (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the treaty on landmines, the Kyoto protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court) and to sign others only with “reservations, understandings, and declarations” that render U.S. participation largely nominal. Large powers have shown no qualms about infringing the sovereignty of other countries – invading them, establishing “no-fly” zones, and insisting that they conform to international rules of conduct. But only large countries, the United States most prominently, are powerful enough to remain within the Westphalian system, retaining the right of exclusive control over what happens within their borders. The refusal of the United States to “play well with others” means that the international norms governing genocide, human rights, fair working conditions and so on remain weak. The United States argues that U.S. laws are more robust than any international laws, but this insistence in fact is self-fulfilling. U.S. unilateralism flows from an “exceptionalist” tradition that argues that the United States is an exception to the rules that govern all other nations. The United States has a special role in history (which is God-given, according to fundamentalists), has not suffered from foreign wars on its soil, does not have the baggage of feudalism, and has the moral authority to spread American-style democracy (and culture and economics) worldwide. If other countries don’t understand this role, then the United States must go it alone. The third problem is inconsistency in application of human rights standards. No U.S. government – even the Carter administration – has been immune from economic and political considerations when formulating human rights policy. U.S. economic interests in Uganda, for instance, contributed to the Carter administration’s reluctance to impose sanctions against the brutal Idi Amin. The Reagan administration adhered to Jeanne

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Kirkpatrick’s distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” governments when it ignored the human rights abuses of the former (Chile) and focused on the abuses of the latter (Soviet Union). Subsequent U.S. governments have followed a similar pattern of selective application. For our allies in the war on terrorism – Pakistan, Indonesia, Uzbekistan – human rights has taken a backseat to military aid and trade. When the United States needed China’s support last year for the war on Iraq, the administration conveniently neglected to introduce a resolution on the human rights situation in the country at the UN Human Rights Commission (this year, to deny the Democrats an easy campaign issue, the administration dusted off its resolution because of Chinese “backsliding”). Julie Mertus, in her valuable book Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy, argues persuasively that the United States has systematically refused to apply to itself the human rights standards to which it insists other countries adhere. “In no presidency to date can we say that human rights norms have been pervasively or consistently embedded in thought and action,” she writes. In its recent “war on terrorism,” the Bush administration has highlighted a fourth problem in U.S. policy – extralegality. While other administrations have skirted the law in the past, the current administration has used counterterrorism to justify a sweeping rejection of international standards on such matters as preventive war, political assassination, secret military tribunals, torture, and illegal detentions. In order to limit my remarks, let me focus on political assassination. After the Watergate crisis, a Congressional hearing into covert activities uncovered a wealth of information on U.S. complicity in political assassinations world wide. Here was concrete proof that the United States was engaged in the oldest form of terrorism – plotting to kill leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Salvador Allende and killing as many as 20,000 opponents of the South Vietnamese government in the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As outraged legislators prepared a bill to prevent the United States from engaging in such activities, President Ford stole their thunder by issuing an executive order to the same effect. But there was a big difference between the legislation and the executive order. The president could make exceptions to the executive order. In 1989, the Bush Sr. administration asked for legal clarification of this order. As journalist Mark Danner describes the clarification in Killing Pablo, “a decision by the president to employ clandestine, low visibility or overt military force would not constitute assassination if the U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States.” This interpretation

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permitted the United States to go after drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The Bush Jr. administration has relied heavily on this particular interpretation to expedite its “war on terrorism.” In November 2002, CIA agents used an unmanned Predator drone to kill a suspected high-ranking Al Qaeda lieutenant along with five others. The attack took place outside a war zone. The five other victims not connected to Al Qaeda were considered “collateral damage.” No judicial proceeding determined the guilt or innocence of the targeted victim. The United States simply acted above the law. The United States is not alone in its inconsistent application of human rights standards, the use of extrajudicial killings, the refusal to compromise sovereignty, and the refusal to intervene to stop genocide. But as the largest and most powerful country in the world, the United States is in a special position to establish precedents, lead by moral example, and help create international institutions that can enforce collective decisions.

Conclusion: Beyond the State? The state is at the same time the greatest protector of human rights and the greatest oppressor. Jews, East Timorese, Bosnians have all struggled to build states as a check against genocide and large-scale human rights violations. But as we can see from the example of Israel, even the experience of genocide does not prevent a people from using the state apparatus as a tool of oppression. In the world that we live in – as opposed to the world that we want to live in – states are a given. But go back only a hundred years and you will find an era in which colonial empires were a given. Colonial empires co-existed with the nation-state system. As colonial empires broke apart, new states emerged, which strengthened the inter-state system and, ultimately, made the United Nations possible. We are nearing the end of this process. Yes, there remain some peoples who are struggling to create states – Kurds, Basques, Kosovars, Tibetans, Xinjiang Muslims, Chechens. But new regional and international institutions may soon be able to offer stateless peoples the kinds of protections and guarantees that once only a state could

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provide. The European Union offers Basques and Bretons and Flemish and Lombards and Corsicans and Roma a level of representation other than national. International covenants on human rights and genocide, if backed by a standing army of peacekeepers, will be more than mere pieces of paper. Multilateral humanitarian interventions, rather than unilateral decisions or hastily assembled “coalitions of the willing,” will enforce the collective decisions of an international community. Between today’s world and the world of tomorrow stands what may well be the last empire in history, the United States. As in Hobbes, the United States claims that it must act as a Leviathan in order to prevent the world from slipping into chaos, a war of all against all. The U.S. Leviathan, with its refusal to abide by international standards, is holding the world back from building a new global system in the same way that the British empire prevented the emergence of nation-states in the developing world. In the world that Hobbes described, people supported the Leviathan to escape the chaotic state of nature. But today, the world over, people are increasingly uncomfortable with U.S. misuse of power. And poll after poll reveal that American citizens, too, do not want to bear the costs and responsibilities of empire. In South Korea, you have thrown off dictatorship, built democratic institutions, and created one of the strongest civil societies in the world. Recently you held one of the most exciting elections of the last decade. Now it is our turn to do the same in the United States: so that we can together build an international system that makes genocide and terrorism of all varieties a thing of the past .

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