The Fascist Project of Empire-Building

In March 1999, the cover of the New York Times magazine displayed a giant clenched fist painted in the stars and stripes of the US flag above the words: ‘What The World Needs Now: For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is’. The cover story by Thomas Friedman, author of pro-globalisation bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, urged the United States to embrace its role as enforcer of the capitalist global order: ‘… the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. …

The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’ This was not a lone voice; many people like Martin Wolfe, Robert Kaplan and others began to stress the need for a ‘new imperialism’. Evidently, on the eve of a new century and a presidential change-over, America was preparing for the big leap in world domination — frantically searching for excuses and scapegoats, which would soon be discovered in 9/11 and Saddam’s fabled WMDs.

To see the new development in proper perspective, let us note that from the time of its founding in 1776 with 13 British colonies on the east coast, US expansionism has passed through four stages: continental expansion (toward the west coast of the continent; up to the end of the nineteenth century), overseas expansion (from the Spanish war of 1898 to the second world war), semi-colonial and neo-colonial domination (up to the end of cold war) and the current phase of unabashed empire-building. A distinct feature of the historical evolution of USA as a great power lay in its emphasis on trade, foreign investment, aid (mostly state loans) and banking and finance rather than on grabbing colonies (as was the case with older powers like Spain, France, England etc). Even during the phase of overseas expansion, it acquired few colonies like Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, preferring instead to extend its sphere of influence over the Caribbean Islands, Central and South America etc. This accent on economic penetration and indirect control enabled the USA (a) to keep aloof from the great wars for redistribution of colonies and avoid the losses suffered by countries like England, France and Germany, even as it reaped enormous profits from “war contracts”, including supply of arms and ammunitions, ships etc. (b) build a huge military-industrial complex in the process and (c) to outshine all other competitors when indirect means of control and exploitation remained about the only available ones.

In the wake of WW-II, the US entered upon its third phase of expansion — the extension of hegemony (leadership based on a certain degree of moral authority plus coercion in case of necessity) over the entire capitalist world — by means of the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, WB, GATT), NATO and other mechanisms including military manoeuvres. But in the prevailing political milieu the American imperialists thought it wise to distance themselves from the hated imperial/imperialist legacy. Said President JF Kennedy: “what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced upon the world by our weapons of war”. Kennedy’s successors — Democrats and Republicans alike — more or less followed this line in public utterances, Vietnams notwithstanding. Empire and imperialism remained embarrassing terms in the dominant discourse in the world’s most aggressive imperialist country.

But things changed in the 1990s. Emboldened by the collapse of the other superpower and the international support or muted response to the first war on Iraq, the world’s most powerful, most ambitious bourgeoisie decided to go over to a new phase of aggressive, unilateralist and unabashed empire-building. While the Democrat Clinton presided over a series of aggressions — Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq (punitive air strikes, effective domination over a third of the country via Kurdish agents in the north and “no-fly zones” in the south and economic blockade to destroy the state and the economy) — and took measures like passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, Republican hawks were busy working out a complete, long-term strategy as well as an immediate programme of world domination. Three landmark developments in this regard were: (a) the Project for New American Century or PNAC founded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Olfowitz in 1997, (b) the strategy of “full-spectrum dominance” contained in the PNAC policy document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000) and (c) the “National Security Strategy” adopted by the Bush administration in September 2002 which put forward the doctrine of preventive strike. The ruling consensus was very clearly expressed in this 1998 remark of Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.” With authentic organs of the bourgeoisie (New York Times as mentioned above, and others like Wall Street Journal, Washington Post etc.) taking the lead, terms and phrases like benevolent/soft imperialism, imperial preference, “The Case for American Empire”[1] and so on came to be freely used in support of a more aggressive foreign policy.

It was this planned political build-up that continued into the wars over Afghanistan and Iraq. Arrogant unilateralism of the solitary superpower manifested itself also in acts like rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on environmental controls on industry, bullying of sovereign states like Syria while shamelessly supporting the rogue state of Israel, total disregard shown to the UN and the International Criminal Court, and
so on.

In keeping with the Roman pretensions of his administration, Bush often speaks as if he were a modern Caligula (the Roman emperor who reigned from 37 to 41 AD and who wanted to appoint his horse to the Senate). In the second presidential debate on October 11, 2000, Bush said, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator. “A little more than a year later, he replied to a question by the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, “I’m the commander — see, I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” – Bob Woodward, Bush at War

Is there anything incongruous about this apparently stupid shift from a hegemonic policy of manufacturing consent, which had earned Washington considerable support bases around the world, to unilateralism and overt empire-building? Not really. Left to itself, capital is limitlessly and savagely voracious; it operates within limits only to the extent it is so compelled. During the first few decades after WW-II, two things — the aroused anti-imperialism of Third World peoples and the enhanced power and appeal of socialism — actually forced capital’s strongest state to enter into a ‘New Deal’ with the American working class and take the indirect route of aggrandising itself in the process of preserving and leading the entire capitalist world in opposition to the socialist challenger. The compulsions were removed with the gradual corruption of the first force by the ruling elites and the great setback of the second. Unchained, and egged on by its own internal crises, the beast pounced on the prey: the resources, the masses and the markets of mother earth. Having colonised Afghanistan and Iraq and established military bases in about 140 of the 189 member countries of the UN, Washington was now actively pursuing a time-bound programme of colonising the space. After the dreaded swastika logo, the Statue of Liberty became the new mascot of anti-people empire.

Yes, it is not for nothing that Gorge W Bush has been rechristened the Hitler of 21st century. Nor is it simply a matter of this war criminal’s personal bent of mind. At work in American society and polity are deeper and more long-term processes or trends which can only be termed fascist.

Full-blown fascism, or fascism in power, means negation of bourgeois democracy and open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most aggressive sections of imperialist finance capital. But fascism does not come to power in a day. It crops up on the soil of bourgeois parliamentarism (both Hitler and Mussolini were, to start with, elected heads of governments), gradually corrupts and erodes it from within, and if not resisted in time, usurps dictatorial powers at an opportune moment of ‘national crisis’. Fascism fans up racist/national chauvinist/fundamentalist fanaticism directed against some imagined ‘enemy of the state’ to mobilise popular support for the fascist project. Such a project expresses itself in foreign policy as aggressive expansionism and domestically as extreme attacks on people’s livelihood and political rights, together with state-sponsored bonanza for millionaires, particularly those in strategic and war-related sectors.

All these symptoms or features of a fascist tendency, a fascist buildup, are quite prominent in the US today:

That the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal works for the notorious energy sector and the military industrial complex, some being paid agents of the latter, is well known.
So are the post-9/11 attacks on democratic and civil rights (PATRIOT Act being just one case in point), on racial minorities and immigrants etc, all these being justified in the name of an war on terror.
The way Bush was elected President clearly demonstrated the subversion of the judiciary by powerful corporations bent on installing the neo-conservatives in power.
Nazi complicity in the Reichstag fire, which supplied the pretext for attacking the communists and imposing a naked dictatorship, is now almost universally acknowledged. The idea of a shocking event that would stun the nation into accepting an American version of dictatorial military rule (albeit with a democratic facade) has been on the minds of an influential section of the ruling elite for quite some time. One year before 9/11, the PNAC had talked about “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbour,”[2]. The PNAC architects seem to have had anticipated, with cynical accuracy, the use of the September 11 attacks as “a war pretext incident”. In perfect tandem, President Bush gleefully greeted the attacks as Pearl Harbour of the 21s1 century, raising doubts about the complicity or foreknowledge on the part of his administration.[3]
According to official statistics, (which is a gross understatement) 10.4 million American workers are jobless, and 1.4 million among them have run out of unemployment benefits. The 2.3 million net jobs lost during the Bush period is a new record. The AFL-CIO website in late December 2003 informs us:

“In February 2003, Bush proposed a fiscal year 2004 budget with a $951 billion tax cut package over the next decade that would primariiy benefit millionaires, push the federal budget to a record deficit in fiscal year 2004 and destroy 750,000 more jobs over the next 10 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In May, Congress passed a $320 billion tax measure that gave the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans an average of almost $100,000 in tax reductions over the next four years.”

All this stands in stark contrast against massive tax-cuts, protective tariffs, bail-out operations for corrupt corporations etc. the rich-poor gap is growing at an alarming rate, and 13,000 richest families in US now have almost as much income as the 20million poorest.[4]

From hate campaigns and false propaganda to the reincarnation of ‘blitzkrieg’ in ‘shock and awe’ strategy in Iraq to the doctrines of permanent warfare and ‘full spectrum dominance’, the neo-Nazi proclivities of the military junta are only too conspicuous.

To take serious note of these symptoms is not to suggest that a fascist takeover is imminent in the US. Apart from ordinary women and men, considerable sections of the American capitalist class are opposed to the dangerous ways of the ruling dispensation and a partial reversal of the hawkish policies after next presidential election cannot be ruled out. But we have drawn attention to the fascist tenets because to build up an effective resistance and to carry it to its logical conclusion – to the demolition of the imperial regime itself- the enemy must be known and exposed for what it is. And to gain a better understanding on this score, we must extend our study to cover the broader category of imperialism, of which the US empire-builders are the most obnoxious product.

Notes :

2 (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAC304A.html).

3 a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event.” (Ibid)

4 (Socialist Worker, August,2003).