The other means for making disasters pay is to use differential framing and discriminatory labels in order to be able to magnify, stretch-out and globalise otherwise insignificant conflicts and incidents whose exploitation is seen as beneficial to the empire.
Angry demonstrations against governments in Greece, Ireland, France, Britain, Canada, Portugal and Spain are to be under-reported, and treated by media as ordinary, pedestrian indications of "democratic expression" while being put down ruthlessly by the security arms of the state.
The Herald
By Tafataona Mahoso
SOUTH AFRICA, Nigeria, Gabon and the Arab League have all expressed surprise that the US, UK and Nato have used UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya in ways which are not supported by the resolution, in ways which these African and Arab countries had not foreseen.
The attempts by these countries to distance themselves from what the US, UK and Nato are doing in Libya are like attempts to say that we only gave a known habitual burglar enough keys to allow him to sleep in one room of the palace, and we are shocked that he has ransacked the entire palace and is looking for more palaces to ransack in the same manner.
It means that our African and Arab brothers and neighbours have not been reading the geo-political situation, which has unfolded and spread especially since September 11 2001, when New York and the Pentagon were bombed.
The Western neo-liberal system (including the military, the media and the global corporations) have so heavily invested in war and conflict that they will stretch and globalise any local quarrel between brothers or cousins into an opportunity for full scale war especially if it is not within their own borders.
As the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Disaster Capitalism warned four years ago:
"The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at . . . regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial.
"The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investments has turned the stock currency and real estate markets into crisis creation machines . . . Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the (neoliberal corporatist) course; (disasters) will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it (the myth of the invisible hand) actually delivers (frequent and tangible results)."
What Naomi Klein is claiming here is that imperialism has found a way of delaying its own collapse by creating profitable "business" out of the very same crises which are supposed to destroy it.
One of the means used to make disasters pay is privatising and commercialising the responses, which were once reserved for the state and for volunteers, while socialising the responses, which used to be private and reserved for private companies.
In the US, "homeland security" after September 11 was out-sourced, but rescuing of global multinationals such as Ford and AIG from bankruptcy was made the responsibility of tax-payers because these conglomerates were labelled as "too big to be allowed to fail".
They would bring down the entire system with them if they were not rescued by the taxpayers.
The other means for making disasters pay is to use differential framing and discriminatory labels in order to be able to magnify, stretch-out and globalise otherwise insignificant conflicts and incidents whose exploitation is seen as beneficial to the empire.
Angry demonstrations against governments in Greece, Ireland, France, Britain, Canada, Portugal and Spain are to be under-reported, and treated by media as ordinary, pedestrian indications of "democratic expression" while being put down ruthlessly by the security arms of the state.
On the other hand, even one-man demonstrations, hunger strikes and mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere in areas considered peripheral to the empire must be milked to the last drop of innuendo and invective, directed by the same media and hired provocateurs toward regime change.
Readers in Zimbabwe are familiar with this pattern: the bilateral quarrel between Zimbabwe and Britain involving white British settlers (calling themselves Rhodesians) was globalised to rope in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the entire European Union. NGOs were set up in the form of "Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe" and located here in Zimbabwe in order to transfer perceptions of permanent "crisis" away from Britain to Harare.
The tag of "ethnic cleansing" was attached to Zimbabwe because a few white settlers died while refusing to let Zimbabweans - owners of land stolen over one hundred years - retake and reoccupy it.
But in South Africa, where more than 1 000 whites have also died while resisting Africans who demand their land back, there is no crisis; no "ethnic cleansing" because blowing out that real crisis is currently not in the interests of Europe and North America. South Africa, with its large white population is needed by the empire as a perceived counter against Zimbabwe.
Most graphically, a local programme of slum clearance in Harare in 2005 was so blown out of size that two "UN Special Envoys" were appointed, Anna K Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland, to investigate it with a view to taking Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council and charging the Government with crimes against humanity.
Likewise, Zimbabwe's decision to leave the British Commonwealth in 2003 was pictured as the ultimate catastrophe for the people.
But were an objective survey to be conducted today, no one, except a few leaders of the MDC formations, still remembers with any regret that we left the Commonwealth. Most people do not miss it because it had no common wealth to share. It was meant to share our wealth with the British instead.
So, Zimbabweans must be among the first to point out that Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon made a huge and costly mistake when in the name of protecting civilians, they voted to allow Nato to declare a so-called "no-fly zone" over Libya.
That vote gave a habitual burglar and thief some keys to one room in Africa's palace in the belief that this "United Natos" would restrict itself to that one room or one palace.
That vote helped to transfer perceptions and manifestations of grave crisis from the North Atlantic states to Africa.
The three African countries and the Arab League at the UN should have remembered Mick Hume's warning six years ago, when Hume wrote in June 2005:
"Why Africa, why now? Why has the continent suddenly come to dominate the political agenda in Britain . . .? It seems the crisis that has brought all this (fixation) about is not in Africa but in Britain (in the North). There is a crisis of authority afflicting the political (and economic) class, and a crisis of common values in our (Western) society. There is a poverty of leadership at every level, and a dearth of any sense of purpose that is bigger than oneself. Against this background . . . Africa has become an all purpose stage on which everybody from a pop star (Madonna) to a politician (Nicolas Sarkozy) can try to show off their moral worth and sincerity . . . the impetus for this comes from the top downwards."
So we find that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, George W Bush, and now Sarkozy, Barrack Obama and William Hague are in agreement with the embedded journalists at BBC, CNN, Aljazeera English and Euronews as well as the embedded activists at the International Crisis Group - that Africa is where "the action" must be, otherwise "the international community" will count for nothing.
Long before things became as dangerous as we see now in Libya, Dutch philosopher Paul Treanor warned the world to stop the US and Nato from replacing the UN Charter with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the doctrine of "the responsibility to protect civilians."
He warned at the time of a similar "crisis" concocted over Kosovo and former Yugoslavia, that the UN Charter at least pretends to incorporate appeal procedures for injured parties while the UDHR does not. The UDHR has no appeal procedures because it has never been acceded to:
"If the UN decides tomorrow that it is necessary to destroy Beijing with a nuclear weapon to enforce human rights, then no-one can take any legal steps against this decision. Neither the individual residents nor the Chinese Government, nor an organisation can appeal . . . The UDHR is considered beyond appeal, in fact beyond all legal procedure . . . If the United States recolonises Africa over the next 15 years (from the year 2000), it will most certainly refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the ‘legal' basis for its actions."
The experiment which set the precedent for Libya today was conducted in 1999 over former Yugoslavia and Kosovo. This is the case where an act of blatant military aggression produces its own justification, after the fact, precisely because the blatant act of aggression is presented and dutifully covered by the white racist media as an act of charity, "the right to protect."
As Noam Chomsky pointed out in Imperial Ambitions, (2005):
"Take, say, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, again under Bill Clinton. What was the point of that? The standard (Northern) line is that the United States intervened (through Nato) to prevent ethnic cleansing, but to hold that view you have to invert the chronology (and the cause-effect logic) . . . the worst ethnic cleansing followed the Nato bombing and, furthermore, was the anticipated consequence of it. So, (stopping ethnic cleansing) can't have been the reason."
Nato bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 in order to force mass displacement of Albanians who were then framed and reported as victims of ethnic cleansing who needed Nato's protection in the name of the UN.
Chomsky concluded that the real reason was to maintain the "credibility" and "authority" of the US and Nato in global politics and to open the way for Nato and the EU to expand to the east European republics of the former Soviet Union which were seen as full of rich pickings in oil.
Now, there is a question still begging for an answer. Yugoslavia at 1999 had already been reduced by secessions to more or less the same population as Zimbabwe and it had been impoverished through US-EU sanctions.
Why would Nato, including the US and 19 European countries, unleash their most sophisticated jet-bombers on such a small and weakened state for a whole month in order to regain or maintain their authority and credibility as well as to clear a geo-strategic path to the rich oil fields of the Caspian basin?
Why could these objectives not be met through negotiations?
After, all Yugoslavia was most eager to negotiate throughout the period of the provocations and aggression!
The same question arises over Libya. In 2003, the US, UK and EU forced Libya to negotiate agreements, which were highly beneficial to these countries and very costly to Libya.
Why have the same countries now elected to bomb Libya? They could have easily returned to negotiations again?
The answers to this question are important for Zimbabwe as well. First of all, in 2005 it was necessary to negotiate with Libya instead of bombing it because the world and the home populations of the US, UK and Europe had already been worked-up enough over the Iraq invasion by the US and UK and Nato occupation of Afghanistan.
These wars were stimulating enough military spending for the military industrial complex to keep going and thereby keep the capitalist system growing.
The prestige, authority and credibility which had to be restored or maintained through bombing Yugoslavia rather than negotiating with it had to be maintained or regained in the eyes of tax-payers at home and in the eyes of potentially defiant states around the world. The tax-payers had to be impressed enough to allow their governments to escalate military spending. As Chomsky says in Understanding Power:
"Well, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, (the Pentagon) had to change the computer disk (explaining increased military spending) for the first time . . . So, in 1990, the reason they gave was no longer, ‘The Russians are coming,' it was what they called ‘technological sophistication of Third World powers' - especially in the Middle East, where they said our problems could no longer be laid at the Kremlin's door."
A perceived big enemy had just disappeared from the radar. So, little ones had to be invented, provoked, demonised and magnified through the media to fit the bill.
The meaning of the global financial tsunami which hit the US and Europe in 2008 suggests that the military spending stimulated through September 11, through the Nato occupation of Afghanistan, through the illegal invasion of Iraq and through the global terror campaign called the war on terror - all have failed to stimulate enough spending to make neoliberal corporate cannibalism sustainable.
Moreover, in hyperinflationary times, the stimulation of industrial output through military spending alone has become too slow to cope with the escalating crisis of the global casino economy.
That is why Obama was elected to try and handover "stimulus packages" directly to all bankrupt global corporations which have been classified as "too big to be allowed to fail."
In the past, these behemoths had to wait for escalating military budgets to be approved by Congress and to be spent by the Pentagon on slow research, which would reach high-tech production lines after some years, if not decades.
That method can no longer ward off the threatening collapse of the entire edifice of neo-liberal capitalism. So, Obama had to scare tax-payers enough to force them to allow direct stimulus packages to global multinational companies.
But these handouts have provoked jealousy and resistance among the traditional arms researchers and manufacturers who cannot qualify for such stimulus packages.
These arms researchers and manufacturers have therefore been compelled not only to attack the stimulus packages for inciting tax-payers against neo-liberal capitalism, they have also mobilised the media houses and journalists they own to provoke and incite armed conflicts, to incite violence, in the hope of maintaining perceptions of an evil and dangerous world out there, thereby justifying high military spending.
Stimulus packages given to failing banks and automobile manufacturers are viewed as dangerous by the military industrial complex because they do not have the prestige and mystique of escalating military budgets spent on high-tech military research and technology development.
People understand what purpose a bank, insurance firm or real estate company is supposed to serve.
They do not have time or expertise to understand research on cyber-warfare, stealth bombers or weapons designed to make telecommunications systems, cellular systems and satellites inoperable.
In other words, the military-industrial complex has rebelled against stimulus packages because they are easy for tax-payers to understand and to oppose them as an open rip-off.
The military industrial complex would rather rely on open terror and violence to create perpetual panics which create mass media hysteria in order to force citizens to agree to pay for increased military spending.
Direct results of terror and open violence include the threat that if tax-payers do not pay up, energy sources and mines producing strategic minerals will be taken over by foreign despots, or that there will be massive invasions of Europe by African and Arab refugees running away from despots.
So, it is better to bomb the despots and all those surrounding them before there are floods of refugees entering Europe and before civilisation grinds to a halt for lack of fuel.
Unfortunately, as Chomsky has said, it is the same bombs which actually terrify the people into opting to run away and become refugees; just as it is the illegal sanctions in Zimbabwe which produced the so-called border jumpers whom CNN and Aljazeera filmed crossing the fence out of Zimbabwe into South Africa in 2004-2007.
Therefore what we are seeing in Libya is a shameless display of criminal "humanitarianism" which must be condemned as such.
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