To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

By Alfred W McCoy

Book Review

This book concerns the concept of “world orders,” which McCoy describes as over-arching global control by a single empire. He asserts there have been three world orders in the last 500 years.

The first was the Iberian world order, lasting from 1494 (with the creation of the first New World colonies) until 1815. The British world order (arising from the catastrophic Napoleonic wars and the replacement of slavery with fossil fuels) lasted from 1815 until 1945. The Washington world order (arising from the collapse of European economies after World War II) began in 1945. McCoy’s describes America’s world order as maintaining a strong official stance on human rights, while simultaneously using the CIA to overthrow multiple democratically elected governments. McCoy predicts America’s world order will end in 2030.

He provides a detailed historical account of the events leading up to each of these world orders. For example, he explains how the Age of Exploration was precipitated by the Black death and the loss of 60% of European and Chinese populations. This severe labor shortage meant serfs became free wage laborers, making European desperate for new sources of labor to exploit.

The book also examines the scholarly theoretical basis for forming and maintaining a new world order. Britain was very much influenced by naval historian Captain Alfred Thayer Mahal, writing in the 1890s that creating a world order required a powerful Navy and “an empire of islands” for naval bases. Mahal’s writings also influenced US strategy in their imperialist adventures following the Spanish-American War, German strategy in World War I and Japanese strategy in World War II.

In 1904, the opening of the Transiberian Railroad inspired Sir Halford MacKinder to propose an alternative strategy for world domination: namely gaining control of the “World Island,” aka the Eurasian land mass. Zbigniew Brzezinski slavishly followed MacKinder’s approach in pressuring President Carter’s to launch a massive covert CIA operation in Afghanistan in the late seventies.

I learned a great detail about European history from this book that I never learned in school. I was intrigued to learn how labor shortages caused by the Black Death also led directly to important labor saving devices, such as the printing press and more efficient sailing ships.

McCoy’s history of the North Atlantic slave trade and Europe’s brutal colonization of India and Africa is also extremely comprehensive. I was especially intrigued to learn how active the British navy was in conducting anti-slavery patrols following Britain’s ban on the North Atlantic slave trade in 1807. In total Britain’s navy liberated a total of 82,000 captives from slave ships and transported them to Sierra Leone. There they were registered as British subjects, with some remaining there, some enlisting as soldiers and some returning to their homelands.

McCoy’s chapter on China is extremely disappointing, as it clearly reflects the US State Department-CIA view of China’s global role in the world. Likewise his final chapter (on climate change). The latter relies on he corporate elite’s exclusive focus on carbon emissions, neglecting the fact that global warming has numerous causes (with massive deforestation and industrial agriculture being far more important than fossil fuel emissions) and can’t be solved by simply replacing fossil fuel with renewable energy.

Dmitry Orlov: Predicting Collapse

Below is a link an extremely informative podcast interview with Russian-American engineer and writer Dmitry Orlov.

After living through the Soviet collapse, Orlov identified five aspects of collapse for people to use as signposts to identify when the process had begun.*

Orlov clearly believes the collapse of the US empire has already begun. He asserts most Americans aren’t aware of it because they only believe what the TV tells them, ie that current problems of US are only temporary.

Orlov, who predicted imminent US collapse nearly a decade ago, points out the fulfillment of each of his predictions.

1. Financial Collapse – early signs of runaway hyperinflation, with skyrocketing levels of money creation disguised as debt that will never be repaid. He also points to growing unwillingness of various countries, especially Russia and China, to accept the US dollar as currency.
2. Commercial collapse – total unwillingness of businesses to invest in new factories.
3. Political collapse – total corruption (and incompetence) of executive branch of federal government. This is reflected in major recent military losses (the interview preceded the hasty and undignified US exit from Afghanistan). At 10.00 min, he points to a recent announcement the US isn’t going to the moon (and never did, according to Orlov).**
4. Social collapse – total breakdown of community and civil society, ie the networks and groups which ordinarily look after people who slip through the “safety net” of government welfare programs.
5. Cultural collapse – loss of faith in the goodness of humanity.

Orlov believes the US collapse will be more catastrophic than its Soviet counterpart (at 21 min) because the Russians had stronger family and community ties. Absent in the US, these resulted in a strong moral obligation to help one another survive the life-and-death struggles Russian people faced in the early 1990s.

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*See also https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-04-11/the-five-stages-of-collapse-by-dmitry-orlov-book-review/

**According to Orlov, the US never possessed the rocket technology to carry off a moon shot.

 

Drug Trafficking: The Watered Down Al Jazeera Version

Drug Trafficking Politics and Power: The Lost Territories

Al Jazeera

Film Review

This documentary mainly focuses on the role of Afghanistan in heroin production, of Colombia in cocaine production and of Mexico in smuggling cocaine, heroin and fentanyl into the US.

Despite a brief mention of the role of (nearly all) global major banking institutions in laundering illicit drug money, it makes no mention whatsoever of CIA involvement in international trafficking in Afghanistan and elsewhere. See Afghan, Heroin and the CIA, and articles by Peter Dale Scott and Alfred McCoy.*

In fact, the film gives the misleading impression that the Taliban is mainly responsible for Afghan heroin production, with some participation by Afghan warlords and members of former president Hamid Karzai’s government.

According to filmmakers, major heroin production began in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, when the (CIA-financed and trained) Mujaheddin (1979-1992) helped finance their opposition Soviet occupation via (CIA-facilitated) opium and heroin production. Beginning in 1994, the Taliban would also rely on heroin production to finance their efforts to bring Afghanistan under their control.

In 2000, seeking global recognition of their legitimacy (and foreign aid), they banned heroin production and burned all the country’s opium plantations over the next year. The US reintroduced opium and heroin production to Afghanistan with their 2001 invasion and occupation.

The segments on Colombia and Mexico mainly focus on the ungovernability of both countries owing to the rise of paramilitary forces (in Colombia) and armed drug cartels (in Mexico).

With the rise of the Medellin cartel (1972-1993), cocaine traffickers organized their own paramilitaries, while FARC rebels had their own guerrilla groups (1964-2017). Following cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar’s death in 1993, Mexican drug cartels would take charge of global cocaine distribution. After 2003, they would add heroin and fentanyl to their inventories.

The film identifies Sinaloa, Jalisca New Generation, Gulf, Ciudad Juarez and Los Zetas as the major Mexican cartels. Each is identified with a specific geographic region, though turf struggles translate into constant boundary shifts. Each cartel also controls the extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking schemes for their region.*

When the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) ruled Mexico (1929-2000), they received a cut of the cartels’ drug profits. In return, they played a mediating role in disputes between cartels.

When the PRI was voted out of power in 2000, this mediating role ceased, which the film blames for Mexico’s massive increase in violence. More than 60,000 Mexicans have been murdered or disappeared since 2006.

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*Peter Dale Scott CIA Drug Trafficking and The Politics of Heroin

**Afghanistan currently produces 80% of the world’s heroin

***Criminals who engage in such activities must pay a “tax” to the drug cartel running their region.

The film can be viewed free at the Al Jazeera website: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/featured-documentaries/2021/1/25/drug-trafficking-politics-and-power-the-lost-territories

JSOC: America’s Secret Killing Squads

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

Directed by Richard Rowley (2013)

Film Review

In this highly troubling documentary (based on Cahill’s book by the same name), investigative journalist Jeremy Cahill describes how he first learned about the Joint Special Operations Campaign (JSOC). He describes in detail how all extrajudicial raids and killings increased substantially under Barack Obama (and Joe Biden, who directed his foreign policy), who used JSOC as their own private assassination squads.

Cahill first crossed paths with JSOC while investigating 2010 night raids killing Afghan civilians in rural areas under Taliban control. He was particularly concerned about a raid that occurred at Gardez, in which a police commander trained by the US and two pregnant women were killed. Surviving families referred to the bearded gunmen (with no apparent link to official US occupying forces) as the American Taliban. The Obama administration totally denied involvement in the Gardez massacre – until a cellphone video surfaced showing bearded English-speaking Americans searching and rearranging the bodies. At this point JSOC admitted responsibility and offered survivors a sacrificial goat as compensation.

During the period Cahill covered Afghanistan, JSOC undertook roughly 1700 night raids a month.

Cahill would go on to investigate similar JSOC night raids in Iraq, as well as illegal US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The latter occurred well before US ally Saudi Arabia declared war on Yemen in 2015. The prominent Yemeni reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye was arrested and imprisoned for exposing the U.S. cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah that killed 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children in December 2009. Then Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced his intention to pardon Shaye. However he changed his mind after a personal phone call from Obama.

Scahill published a number of articles in the Nation and elsewhere about illegal CIA and special forces activities in Yemen, especially after the father of US citizen Anwar Alawki filed a 2010 lawsuit (with ACLU support) to stop Obama (who had placed him on the kill list) from assassinating him. Despite the suit and the publicity it generated (and a congressional bill seeking to ban extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens), Obama had no qualms about using JSOC to murder Alawki in with a drone strike September 2011 . Two years later, the president would also kill Alawki’s 16 year old son in a drone strike.

For me, the final section of the film was the most interesting. It begins by tracing Alawki’s history as an extremely popular imam in San Diego. Following 9-11, he and hundreds of other US Muslims faced growing harassment and persecution by the US government. In 2006, at the direction of the US government, Yemeni authorities imprisoned Alawki for 1 1/2 years.

Public library patrons can view the full film free at Beamafield.

https://beamafilm-com.eznewplymouth.kotui.org.nz/watch/dirty-wars

Policing International Drug Trafficking in Iran

Drugs: No Way Out

Press TV (2018)

Film Review

This is a very interesting documentary about the role of Iranian customs officials  in disrupting the flow of Afghan heroin to Europe. At present, Afghanistan (thanks largely to the CIA) is the world largest producer of opium and heroin. Between 2001-2010, the Afghan opium/heroin trade took in over $68 billion in revenue. Of this, $66 billion went to the drug “mafia” (CIA?), $2 billion to the Afghan government and $200 million to the Taliban insurgency.

The principal (shortest) route for transporting heroin to the lucrative European market is via Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. Most of the illicit heroin is smuggled in trucks across the Turkmenistan border. Iranian customs officials also intercept a lot of diazepam (Valium) originating from Pakistan, where the drug is available without prescription.

At the Turkish border, Iran intercepts large volumes of hydrochloric and acetic acid. These chemicals are destined for Afghanistan, where they are used to refine opium into heroin. Large amounts of ephedrine (used to manufacture methamphetamine) and synthetic drugs (eg tramadol and ecstasy) are also intercepted at the Turkish border.

Former Guantanamo Detainee Exposes MI5 Role in Rendition

The Confession: The Story of Moazzam Begg

Al Jazeera (2017)

Film Review

In this horrifying documentary, Moazzam Begg, who spent a year at Bagram prison and two ears at Guantanamo relates the history of his kidnapping and rendition from Islamabad (Pakistan), his rape and torture in both prisons, his release without charge in 2005 and his ongoing demonization by Islamophobic police, MI5 agents and British media.

Begg, the son of Pakistani immigrants, was born and grew up in the UK (Birmingham). After several beatings by skinheads, he paid a visit to Bosnia, where foreign Islamic fighters were supporting local Muslims during the NATO war against Yugoslavia. A short time later, he quit his job to open an Islamic bookshop in Birmingham. It was at this point he began to have regular contacts with an MI5 agent named Andrew.

In mid-2001, he was arrested under the Terrorism act, and British police raided his home and bookshop. The charges were dropped, and following his release, he moved his wife and three children to Afghanistan, which at that point was ruled by the Taliban.

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, he and his family fled to Islamabad. On Jan 21, 2002, a group of English-speaking men came to his home, kidnapped him and flew him to Kandahar prison in Afghanistan. There, after being threatened with rendition to Syria or Egypt for further torture and/or summary execution, he signed a confession admitting to membership in Al Qaeda. He reasoned that signing it would keep him alive long enough to stand trial.

Following the US invasion of Iraq, he was transferred to Bagram prison and from there to Guantanamo.

After his January 2005 release, he was briefly in custody in the UK and released without trial. It took three years to get his passport back. He then traveled to Egypt, Tunis, Libya and Turkey seeking further evidence of the US/UK rendition program. Under this process,  Muslim intellectuals were routinely kidnapped and “rendered” to totalitarian regimes (mainly Libya, Syria and Egypt), where they were tortured and forced to confess to Al Qaeda-related crimes.

In 2014, British police arrested him for the third time and he spent seven months in Belmarsh prison on a charge of training Syrian rebels and supplying them with an electrical generator. The case collapsed for lack of evidence. He believes this arrest stemmed from pure MI5 maliciousness for his efforts to expose their role in rendition and torture.

The video can’t be embedded for copyright reasons but can be viewed free at Confession: Story of Moazzim Begg

 

 

Al Jazeera vs Blackwater Founder Erik Prince

Erik Prince Acknowledges 2016 Trump Tower Meeting for First Time

Al Jazeera (2019)

Interview

This is a most revealing interview/debate in which Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan confronts Blackwater founder Erik Prince over his current proposal to replace 50,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan with 8,000 private military contractors – from Prince’s Hong Kong-based company Frontier Services Group.

In response to highly specific confrontations concerning Blackwater’s fraudulent billing and war crimes, Prince literally oozes sociopathy. In addition to blaming the US State Department for Blackwater’s well-documented war crimes, he blames a Blackwater contractor’s 2018 murder conviction on a Washington DC jury (DC has a majority Black population).

In 2012, Blackwater paid a $7.5 million settlement to resolve other criminal charges, including billing fraud

Prince has compared his proposed Afghanistan project to the notorious British East Indian Company that colonized India and Southeast Asia. When reminded that Ashraf Ghani, the current president of Afghanistan, opposes his proposal, Prince smugly assures Hasan that Ghani faces defeat at the next election.

When asked about his current contract with China’s government to build a training camp in Xinjiang (to help Beijing crack down on minority Uighers), Prince asserts his company is merely providing construction services and security training for overseas-bound Chinese officials. A recent article in the Guardian suggests otherwise: Blackwater’s Erik Prince to Build China Training Camp

Hasan also asks Prince about lying to the US Congressional Intelligence Committee about his involvement in a 2016 Trump campaign meeting with a Russian oligarch. Prince admits to the meeting but denies lying about it. When Hasan confronts him with the hearing transcript, Prince contends the transcriber got it wrong.

The interview can’t be embedded for copyright reasons but can be viewed free at the Al Jazeera website: Erik Prince Acknowledges Trump Tower Meeting For First Time

 

The Electronic Whorehouse

The Electronic Whorehouse

by Paul Sheehan

McMillan Australia (2003)

Although 15 years old, this book offers valuable historical insight into the major transformation of traditional media in the 21st century. Paul Sheehan is a columnist and former senior editor for for The Sydney Morning Herald. His book is pretty wide ranging. As a point of departure, he examines the simultaneous rise of Fox News and Alex Jones, just as total network news viewership dropped from 60 to 30%, with a comparable reduction in newspaper readership.

One of Sheehan’s most important points is that the rise of the Internet has ended exclusive control by politicians, bureaucrats, media executives and journalists over the flow of public information. A second relates to the role of Fox News in forging a divergence between the “cultural elite” (represented by the traditional TV networks and CNN) and “mainstreet.” In describing Fox News’ appeal to blue collar white workers and Christian evangelists (almost never reflected in network news coverage – despite representing 46% of the US population), Sheehan eerily foreshadows the Trump phenomenon and the battle currently being played out between Trump and heritage media.

Sheehan goes on to decry the growing blurring between news, opinion and entertainment, as well as the exponential growth of the public relations industry as the source of most western news.

His conservative political bias comes across loud and clear in his diatribe against so-called “economic” refugees*, who he claims cheat the asylum process, and antiglobalization protestors (like myself), who in his view are merely trade unions playing the system for higher wages.

Oh really? That’s news to me – and I’m sure to conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, as well.

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*With the chaos the US and allies have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the distinction between “economic” and “political” refugees has become purely arbitrary. When the basic infrastructure of a society has been totally destroyed, the question of basic survival becomes even more acute than if a refugee has received actual death threats.

 

 

A Closer Look at Trump Supporters

Trumpland

Fusion (2016)

Film Review

This documentary, filmed a month before the 2016 election, explores the life circumstances of a cross section of Trump supporters, referred to by Hillary Clinton as “deplorables.”

Commonalities shared by this demographic are

• recent personal or family experience with job loss, bankruptcy or foreclosure.
• strong feelings about Wall Street outsourcing manufacturing jobs to third world countries.
• strong feelings about US politics being a “crooked” system set up to destroy the middle class.
• strong opposition to their perceived corporate control of the two major political parties.
• a perception that Trump, unlike other politicians, “can’t be bought.”

When answering filmmakers’ questions about Trump’s perceived racism and xenophobia, their replies vary. Some (especially women) feel that Black Lives Matter activists have a point about the abysmal way Black people are treated in the US. Others claim that Black people (and women) are demanding special privileges not enjoyed by white men.

Most deny that Trump is racist, claiming he only wants to prevent terrorist attacks by banning immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. They agree with his proposed wall because they believe his claims that most illegal Mexican immigrants are drug dealers and rapists. This flies in the face of research indicating undocumented immigrants (who are loathe to draw attention to themselves) commit far fewer crimes than either legal immigrants or native born Americans.

Deportees in Mexico: Unwanted by Either Side

US and The Wall: Deportees in Mexico Unwanted by Either Side

RT (2017)

This documentary explores the plight of newly deported immigrants  – many of whom have lived in the US more than 20 years and speak no Spanish. Most end up in Tijuana which, run by drug cartels, is one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Because they’re not local, it’s fairly common for Mexican police to detain deportees and steal their money.

The film profiles three main groups, volunteers who leave gallon jugs of water in the desert to prevent migrants from dying of thirst; armed vigilantes, drawn from former military and police personnel, who patrol the Arizona desert hunting down illegal immigrants; and US veterans who have started a shelter in Tijuana for veterans deported after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most were enticed to enlist with a promise of citizenship – only to be deported for minor crimes such as DUIs, drug possession, bad checks or firearms offenses. One veteran talks of pleading guilty based on a broken promise he wouldn’t be deported.

During the filming, the shelter is visited by seven Congress people concerned about the plight of deported veterans.