Apartheid

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were the USA’s close NATO allies Britain and France, the fourth was Russia (which has also
become much of an ally since the end of the Cold War) and the fifth was yet another NATO
member and close American ally, Germany.
Two years later, Russia had jumped to second place, and Britain had also slipped
behind France in selling weapons. The US, however, still accounted for nearly half of the
world’s weapons sales, with second-place Russia selling less than half of what the US did.
Furthermore, the USA has long had the largest number of troops deployed outside of its
borders, again followed by a close ally, this time France. In October 2002 there was
reportedly US military presence in 132 countries, i.e. in more than two thirds of the world’s
countries, most of it connected to the undefined US ‘War on Terror’, a contradiction in terms
that were nevertheless uncritically adopted wholesale by most of the world’s governments as
well as the mainstream mass media from the US government and armed forces across almost
the whole world following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September
11, 2001.
Yet, prior to those attacks, in 2000, the hegemonic power spent 36 per cent of all
military costs worldwide, more than the next nine powers combined. This was eleven years
after the total defeat of the Soviet-led Communist group of countries, the last seriously
challenging enemy of the USA. By 2003, US military expenditure had risen to more than half
of the whole world’s. The US government has now let its citizens and the world know that its
‘War on Terror’ could last for fifty years or more, in effect giving itself a carte blanche for
repression as well as overt and covert control worldwide. 153 In a sense, this is the first real
world war. In the previous great wars with that name, the main powers all fought, but there
the majority of US taxpayers or voters. The USA does not, however, officially admit to these patterns, although
it is rather obvious that at least its political, military and corporate elites profit the most (in the short term) from a
war-torn, overpopulated world with scarce natural resources – though of course only as long as the USA remains
the world’s undisputed military leader, able to control or take control over most of those resources – and that
those elites can also best augment their influence and power under such circumstances. The rest of the world has
become dependent on the USA, and labor costs around the world are being driven down to a minimum as US
power increases. In my opinion there is too much synergy and sophistication in the policies and positions to put
the increase in human rights violations and drastic curtailment of diversities down to accidental and unintended
consequences of US policies, at least since before the end of the Cold War. The elite representatives’ sense of
vision may reach no further than the tips of their own noses, but they are – like perhaps all of the major elites in
world history – opportunists. They lack strong principles, and therefore they can be moved. Moreover, like all
empires of the past, this one must also crumble and fall. And we are today closer to a cosmopolitan and global
democracy than ever before in world history. See Monbiot: How to Stop America, 2003, and footnote 764,
below. It should be added, again, that the USA did not invent any of the main varieties of oppression, nor the
form, globalized capitalism, within which much of it happens today. (There is, moreover, a human face to
capitalism, whereby firms, rather than organisms (people), are selected and eliminated in the struggle for
survival. But this section is not about that.) Significantly, the USA is the largest guns seller but not the largest
guns exporter in the world, the EU is. See Arieff: World Gun Supply 639 Million and Growing –Survey, 2003.
(And what is the inhuman aspect of the USA but an extension of western European greed, megalomania, vanity,
and warmongering?) Yet, for the reasons outlined above, the US elites did and do, in my opinion, make more
choices to the detriment of the whole world than any other society has done in the recent past.
153 Pilger (2003 (2002): 1f.) points out the uncanny resemblance of this US scheme, the longest war in my
knowledge since the Hundred Years War between England and France during the European Middle Ages, to
George Orwell’s chilling dystopia, ‘1984’. See also Chomsky: Deep Concerns, 2003; Callinicos: Marxism and
Global Governance, 2002: 258. Callinicos cites the Financial Times, December 8, 2001, on the figure for the
year 2000. With wars nowadays claiming around 95 per cent civilian victims, it can be argued convincingly that
war is terror, and that military elites are part of a self-serving transnational elite system. (In the first World War,
conversely, civilian victims were only around five percent. The turning point was World War II with a roughly
50-50 per cent ‘balance’ between civilian and military death tolls. See Philipose: Real Death in a Primetime War:
Forgive Average Americans for Believing This Is a Fireworks Display, 2003.) Thus, a ‘war on terror’ is
eminently self-defeating, unless of course ‘war’ is only used metaphorically to mean peaceful enrichment of the
poor and empowerment of the marginalized. Sir Peter Ustinov made the same point when, in one of his last
public appearances before his death, he said: ‘…war and terrorism are intrinsically the same thing, except that
terrorism is the war of the dispossessed and war is the terrorism of the powerful.’ Ustinov: The Transatlantic
Rift: Introductory Remarks, 2003