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March
11, 2002
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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March 11, 2002
This is the Way the World Ends
By Hani Shukrallah
Is global capitalism in direr straits than anyone
previously thought, or is it doing what it's doing simply because
it can? War mongering, national hysteria, jingoism, rampant
racism, assaults on civil liberties: historically they have
always accompanied intractable systemic crises, are, indeed,
the system's way of dealing with major threats, if not to its
existence, then to the minimum requirements for its reproduction
under fairly stable conditions.
But where is the threat? What has become
of the market-driven global village, the praises of which were
being sung with such abandon barely a year before the 11 September
attacks, during Kofi Annan's millennium extravaganza just a
few blocks away from the ill-fated twin towers?
The Soviet Union and its "evil empire"
had collapsed, not by virtue of war or nuclear holocaust, but
courtesy of an implosion so pathetic as to evoke revulsion,
rather than sympathy, in the hearts of all but the blindest
of its one time supporters.
Well before, the "phantom of communism"
had ceased haunting Europe (it was always a mere shadow of itself
in North America), having stimulated as well as transmutated
into social democracy's welfare state; ironically, the very
hallmark of capitalism's "golden age." The Reagan/Thatcher
era put the lid on the welfare state; trade unionism was all
but destroyed; labour became New Labour; and social democrats,
when in power, had no compunction about advocating and implementing
the deregulation policies their conservative adversaries had
already put in place.
If anything, the fate of "the communist/socialist
threat" in the Third World (which Mao had designated "the
centre of world revolution") was even more ironic. Third
World communism's greatest triumph, in Vietnam in 1975, was
also its swan song. The dreaded "domino effect" was
sunk in the marshes of Cambodia's killing fields, and barely
a decade was to pass before the most populous "communist"
country in the world was setting itself up as international
capitalism's most promising growth market.
The wave of Third World liberation movements,
which had produced a host of populist/corporatist socialisms
(producing also the Non-Aligned Movement, Afro-Asian Solidarity
and a certain UN clout) were to be found, repentant and hat
in hand, queuing up before the doors of the IMF, the World Bank
and, of course, the White House. Once triumphant liberation
movements (as in defunct Zaire) were making deals with multinational
corporations even before they had finished "liberating"
their capital cities. And an old "dependista" theorist
such as Enrique Fernando Cardoso could become president in Brazil
in order to push forward the free market and greater integration
into the world economy while old Stalinists could return to
power in this or that eastern European country to do pretty
much the same thing.
A single product is on offer for the
whole world; only the size and the packaging vary.
What's left? Al-Qa'eda, rogue states,
the Muslim world and its alleged deeply-rooted cultural/civilisational
antipathy to modernism? No world power in history has ever had
to contend with such a sorry group of enemies.
Admittedly, the scale of the 11 September
attacks, by virtue of their shockingly graphic symbolism as
much as the devastating toll in civilian casualties, sent Americans
crying for vengeance. But what do we really have here? An organisation
of a few hundred, or even a few thousand underground militants,
long-nurtured by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service
but now hounded by the intelligence services of the whole world,
including such repentant "rogues" as Sudan's Al-Bashir
and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Egyptian Jihad organisation,
which seems to have provided the ideological and organisational
backbone of Al-Qa'eda, was effectively crushed inside Egypt,
thanks largely to an insouciant attitude towards due process
and basic civil and human rights, i.e. the very same attitude
that is being embraced today in defence of Western "democratic
values."
And what if a group of the world's least
industrialised, most authoritarian, corrupt and inept regimes
take up or reject modernism, whatever that means? The whole
question is farcical; in particular, given that Islamic fundamentalism
had for decades been fostered and supported by the "modernist"
West as a bulwark against communism and secularist nationalism.
A state that is spending $379 billion a year on its military
is supposed to be afraid of war-and-sanctions devastated Iraq
and/or any of the rest of the sundry group of states designated
as "evil" by an intellectually-challenged American
president and his warmongering aides?
If anything, it is the absence of any
real threat to world capitalism and the overpowering hegemony
of its imperial centre that seems to provide the most distinctive
feature of today's world in contrast to that of two decades
ago.
Yet undeniably there is anger, seething,
unbearable, and growing in intensity as the avenues available
for its expression shrink. Dominant systems are supposed to
survive by virtue of more than mere coercion. There is supposed
to be some sort of compact between the dominant and the dominated:
rules of the game; a certain room for manoeuvre by the oppressed;
a rationale by which they may, however grudgingly and rebelliously,
accept their lot. Indeed, it is the disintegration of such compacts
that, throughout history, has lent impetus to the transformation
of the daily acts of resistance and subversion by the oppressed,
turning them into revolutions.
What we see today is naked power, unmitigated
by compacts or any semblance of reason, shameless in the flaunting
of its stupidity and sheer madness. But there are no revolutions,
no real rebellions, only ever-growing, ever-futile anger. And,
of course, such things as a fluke but devastating attack on
the twin towers, a monstrous Eid-eve butchery of a journalist,
Muslims killing Copts in an Egyptian village; Hindus massacring
Muslims in Ahmadabad, Muslims massacring Hindus on a train --
the world of (very) late capitalism, aptly ruled over by Dubbya
Bush.
Hani Shukrallah
writes a column for al-Ahram.
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