Twin Swords Of Damocles
Over The Heads Of All Humanity
During the 1950s I grew up in a family who
rooted for the success of African Americans in their just struggle for civil
rights and full legal equality.
Then in 1962 it was the terror of my own
personal imminent nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis that
first sparked my interest in studying international relations and U.S. foreign
policy as a young boy of 12: “I can do a better job than this!”
With the escalation of the
Vietnam War in 1964 and the military draft staring me right in the face, I
undertook a detailed examination of it. Eventually I concluded that unlike World
War II when my Father had fought and defeated the Japanese Imperial Army as a
young Marine in the Pacific, this new war was illegal, immoral, unethical, and
the United States was bound to lose it. America was just picking up where France
had left off at Dien Bien Phu. So I resolved to do what little I could to oppose
the Vietnam War.
In 1965 President Lyndon
Johnson gratuitously invaded the Dominican Republic, which prompted me to
commence a detailed examination of U.S. military interventions into Latin
America from the Spanish-American War of 1898 up to President Franklin
Roosevelt’s so-called “good neighbor” policy. At the end of this study, I
concluded that the Vietnam War was not episodic, but rather systemic:
Aggression, warfare, bloodshed, and violence were just the way the United
States Financial Power Elite had historically conducted their business around
the world and in America.
Hence, as I saw it as a young man of 17, there would
be more Vietnams in the future and perhaps someday I could do something about it
as well as about promoting civil rights for African Americans. These twins
concerns of my youth would gradually ripen into a career devoted to
international law and human rights.
So I commenced my formal study
of International Relations with the late, great Hans Morgenthau in the first
week of January 1970 as a 19 year old college sophomore at the University of
Chicago by taking his basic introductory course on that subject. At the time,
Morgenthau was leading the academic forces of opposition to the detested Vietnam
War, which is precisely why I chose to study with him. During ten years of
higher education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, I refused to study
with openly pro-Vietnam-War professors as a matter of principle and also on the
quite pragmatic ground that they had nothing to teach me.
Historically, this latest
eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that
of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated
Spanish-American War in 1898. Then the Republican administration of President
William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino
people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and
subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to
near genocidal conditions. Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial
expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic
exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door”
policy. But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence,
policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for
Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation
into the ongoing Second World War.
Today a century later the serial imperial
aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr. administration and
now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War
III.
By shamelessly exploiting the
terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to
steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central
Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a
war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass
destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled
“humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect.
Only this time the
geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:
control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and
thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and
gas. The Bush Jr./ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining
hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further
conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on
land required for their transportation.
In this regard, the Bush Jr.
administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa
Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the
natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the
very cradle of our human species. Libya and the Libyans became the first victims
to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the
last.
This current bout of U.S.
imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his
seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):
“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited
imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the
Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have
in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its
own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the
confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as
there remains anywhere a possible object of domination--a politically organized
group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for
power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to
conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited
imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic
policies of this kind... “
It is the Unlimited
Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now
in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances
surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War
currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all
humanity.
Francis A. Boyle is a
graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He has advised
numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes,
genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. He received a PHD in political
science from Harvard University.
No comments:
Post a Comment