Colonialism and the New World Order

Russell Means of the Republic of Lakota explains how what the world knows as U.S. imperialism was first developed against American Indians, and colonialism perfected on American Indian reservations...and it continues.

U.S. Marines in Arima, Trinidad

U.S. Marine Sea Stallion flies low over Barataria on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008

The Mayor of Arima, Adrian Cabralis, and presumably the Deputy Mayor as well (Ricardo Bharath, who is also the head of the Santa Rosa Carib Community) played host to a contingent of U.S. Marines who are in Trinidad for "Operation Continuing Promise" (CP 2008). This mission comes with little in the way of an advance public announcement, most Trinidadians being very surprised to see two U.S. Marine Sea Stallions flying low and scouting areas along the East-West Corridor on Sunday morning. The government of Patrick Manning is aligned with the Bush regime in the U.S., and this "humanitarian exercise" in an island strategically located a mere seven miles from the Venezuelan coast comes as Venezuela prepares to host joint naval exercises with Russia in a matter of days.

Prime Minister Patrick Manning (left) and George W. Bush, June 2007

This exercise represents part of a new thrust on the part of the U.S. military to develop its troops' cultural familiarity with zones of potential military action, so that they are better accustomed to the language, terrain, climate, and broad cultural makeup of the theaters in which they are deployed. This comes as part of the U.S. military's new enchantment with "culture" and the exercise of "soft power," a means of avoiding the costly and messy outcomes of unleashing massive firepower without first enmeshing itself in local networks. Similar efforts are planned as part of the U.S.' new "Africa Command" (AFRICOM), launched this month as well. In addition, the Caribbean region is seeing the reconstitution of the U.S.' Fourth Fleet, a move seen as a threat by a number of governments in the hemisphere, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

Captain Walt Towns, of the United States Navy and commanding officer of the USS Kearsarge, tries his hand on the steel pan at a welcoming ceremony for the ship and its contingent at the Arima Town Hall, Arima, on Monday, October 27, 2008.

With its obssession with the "global war on terror," and the sheer butchery visited on civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq on the part of American invaders and occupiers, it is disheartening -- to say the least -- to see Arima, and the Carib leader, play host to such forces without a hint of protest, or even simple questioning. It is also disappointing to see those in power turn culture into a playful showcase, forgetting the long role of culture as resistance to colonialism and imperialism. It makes one wonder about the name of the ruling party too -- the People's National Movement: Which people? What "nation" do you serve? What "movement"? And one must wonder why a nation in the middle of a petroleum and natural gas export boom, erecting one new skyscraper after another, suddenly needs a few Marines to come and treat local foot fungus and fill cavities.

Wake up.

For more see:

US ship to provide medical help
NEWSDAY, Tuesday, October 28 2008

US Marines in TT
NEWSDAY, Sunday, October 26 2008

"Name that Scientist!"

First posted at Open Anthropology:

Imagine, 2008, and some foreigner travels to Barbados, and right under Barbadian noses he picks up the “world’s smallest snake,” known to native Barbadians since there have been native Barbadians, and he proclaims — without a metal helmet, bible, and cross — that he has discovered the snake, and that he will name it. The man clearly has balls, because he also decided to name the creature after his wife. S. Blair Hedges then says the naming is to establish its “genetic profile.” Apparently now his aim is to drive his wife into a murderous rage.

While some local academics tried to hush up the very negative local reactions to this latest episode of scientific imperialism (it’s no surprise that they would do so, given their dependence on academic networks owned and controlled within the dominant seats of Western power), Barbadians are clearly right to be critical.

What kind of world is it where one people gets to name the world for the rest of the world?

What kind of world is it where words from one particular, dead, European language are granted exclusive dominance in the name of “science”?

The answer: it’s a 2008 world, hardly different from a 1492 world.

So name that scientist!

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Anthropology's Dirty Little Colonial Streak?

In good times it might appear to be a minor streak; at other times it is a big, broad swath. The coloniality of anthropology might be something hidden and obscured by the passage of time, perhaps seemingly esoteric; at other times, such as the present, anthropology's role as an instrument of empire can come back into sharper focus as an inherent problem of a Western way of knowing the world (at other times, anthropology might simply be an amusement of empire). This is of course not meant to paint most, let alone all anthropologists as sinister figures. Yet, we have to admit that imperialism is a significant feature of a "discipline" that was made possible by colonial expansion and where once again anthropologists can find profit from imperialist missions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. When this is added to the chorus of voices in anthropology that would like to diminish indigeneity, that disputes the very concept "indigenous," that refers to the struggles of the colonized for rights in terms of "seeking special rights," and that lords over indigenous physical remains as if other people's bodies (specifically colonized bodies) were the natural property of anthropology--then it is no wonder that this "discipline" (the martial severity of this terminology is indicative and fortuituous in this case) continues to be banished from most universities in the "decolonized" world.

It is also no wonder that numerous programs have been spawned in universities that some anthropologists indignantly criticize as attempts to expropriate their discipline's cherished subject matter, programs such as Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and numerous Native Studies, American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies, and First Nations Studies programs. Why should native communities receive anthropologists who wish to "study" them when anthropology is still fighting with its own colonial heritage, and when some anthropologists seem to have enlisted in the John Howard School of Anthropology? (I am using the figure of right wing Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, whose aim is to force Aboriginals into the white Australian "mainstream" where nobody is to be deemed different or "special," no matter how much shorter their lifespans, or how much greater their poverty, or how different their languages and social relations may be, and in spite of the fact that ideas such as "Australia" can be read as synonymous with invasion.)

What prompted this seemingly sudden outburst of critical self-reflection is the growing number of media reports of anthropologists participating in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. See for example: "Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones," by David Rohde, in The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007. Some anthropologists are volunteering to take part in what the American military calls "Human Terrain Teams," and once again the terminology tells us something: a conceptualization of a "field" as an object of surveillance and occupation. (See a New York Times video on Human Terrain Teams--Cultural Anthropologists in Afghanistan). Beyond this particular issue, it is surprising that anthropologists, myself included, can so easily resort to talking about "fieldwork" with little in the way of conscious examination of the "scientistic" and colonialist connotations of the idea. Indeed, an Australian anthropologist who helped to devise the new military strategy, David Kilcullen, approvingly calls counterinsurgency "armed social science" (see his articles on anthropology and counterinsurgency in the Small Wars Journal). Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist who has advocated "embedding anthropology" in military missions seems to dismiss critics who say this is militarizing anthropology: "we’re really anthropologizing the military." Wonderful. And what is the military doing "over there" again? Marcus Griffin, who muses on "Of What Use is Anthropology?" defends the participation of anthropologists in these Human Terrain Teams.

It turns out that this latest New York Times article is just the tip of a growing body of information--see for example:

• "Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the War on Terror?" The New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2006
• Anthropology and CIA: "We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work"
• Protests against British research council: "Recruits anthropologists for spying on Muslims"
• Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations
• Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents
• More and more anthropologists are recruited to service military operations
• The dangerous militarisation of anthropology
• Montgomery McFate's Mission: Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?

In this climate, and with this historical baggage, anthropologists will have to work even harder (after decades of "decolonizing anthropology") to challenge the perpetuation of a fairly accurate image of a discipline that is probably the "whitest" (broadly conceived) of all the social sciences in terms of the composition of both its students and faculty. After years of my own complaints at how "unfairly" anthropology was portrayed in some quarters as an Ugly White Colonial discipline, I am tempted to silently acquiesce.
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The Imperialist Drive

While it would appear that formal colonialism largely ended in the last century, the imperial impulse entered the new millennium in altered forms, writes Ayman El-Amir in Al-Ahram Weekly Online at:
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/854/op6.htm

Extract:

"One is often tempted to believe, even through a sheer lapse of memory, that colonialism and the long trail of generations that fought it is something of the past, now dead and buried in history books. Yet nearly three- quarters of all member states of the United Nations today have become independent sovereign countries in the past half century through struggles of self- determination. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has, during his recent visit to Algeria, declined to apologise for the atrocities France committed during its 130-year-long occupation and exploitation of Algeria. It is a strong reminder that colonial attitudes remain a bitter reality and that despite the promise of globalisation, colonialism in its varied forms still poisons the lives of many around the world....Colonialism in all its abominable forms, whether direct military conquest or settler colonialism, has crept into the 21st century."

Unfair Trade: EU against Africa, Caribbean & Pacific

From The Guaradian (UK):

Unfair trade
UK ministers, who claim to promote sustainable development, are part of a push to force developing countries to sign away their environment. Countries affected include those of the ACP (Africa Caribbean Pacific) bloc, as well nations in Central America, the Andean region of South America, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Venezuela.

April 26, 2007

...unfair trade deals that the European Union is forcing on 76 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, of which 39 are among the least developed in the world. These so called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) are comprehensive free trade instruments that are set to force ACP countries to eliminate trade barriers to almost all EU imports. This will expose family farmers and fledgling industry to direct and unfair competition from powerful European corporations - driving farmers off their land and causing mass unemployment....New investment rules in particular would open up and deregulate oil, mining, forestry and fishery sectors on behalf of European transnational corporations. This would undermine poor communities' access to the natural resources that fishing communities, farmers and indigenous peoples - in particular women - rely on for their livelihoods, medicines, fuel and food security needs....READ MORE

The Colonization Will be Televised

"For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one"--Susan Sontag

When a conservative British daily such as The Telegraph can feature a commentary ("Execution gives Saddam a martyr's crown") condemning the execution of Saddam Hussein, with such strong statements as: "grotesquely botched execution," that Saddam Hussein was "shown dying with dignity and no little courage at the hands of hooded thugs," and thus, "the martyr's crown surely beckons," then one can just begin to guess what the reactions would be in the colonized world. In fact, it's not so much a matter of guessing, when there have been protests in several nations, not just in the Middle East, plus countless caustic newspaper editorials from Malaysia to North Africa--and not because Saddam Hussein had a large and adoring following. Everything about the pursuit of Saddam Hussein has shown tremendous blood lust, fierce jingoism, and most of all, a desire to humiliate the vanquished.

Huge numbers of Americans hated Saddam Hussein without really knowing anything about this man who never attacked their nation, who never invaded their soil, and who at one time was the darling of their own elites and their many wealthy business partners who dominate the Gulf states. In North America we have been told countless times that we live in "the civilized world," by political leaders such as George W. Bush. These words should ring as loudly as they ring hollow, for they necessarily imply an other half: the uncivilized world. A war against the uncivilized world then, by force of history and custom, can easily be translated into a colonial war against "savages."

Is there anyone left who will still protest that the world of 2007 is fundamentally different from the world of 1492, or the imperial "scramble for Africa" of the late 1800s? Would anyone still like to argue that the act of putting conquered natives on display, as part of a gory freak show, is something of the distant past? Does any scholar still use the term "post-colonial" as if it actually meant something?

Not in my lifetime have I seen the overthrow of a leader of a foreign nation resemble, in such a macabre manner, a vulgar Mafia "hit" (killing his family, blowing up his home). What I dreaded and expected from the beginning, knowing the extent to which Western culture lionizes imagery, not to mention electronic images, was for the humiliation to be televised. The act of "embedding" journalists with invading forces mandated this outcome from the outset. We were, once again, to be given a front row seat in the conquest of another nation, and this was presumably being done for our benefit. As in recent times, where spectators could see a bombing, from the point of view of the bomb, audiences would be socialized and trained to identify with the conqueror, and damn it, they were to enjoy it.

When, in the early weeks of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraqis broadcast video segments on television of four American soldiers who had been taken prisoner, the American forces howled about "the Geneva Convention," which they had, to their convenience, suddenly rediscovered. Was their response more humane, more civilized?

1. Claiming to show "thousands" of Iraqi soldiers being held as prisoners in southern Iraq, Western media outlets sprayed their front pages with gigantic images of the captives in the early weeks of the invasion, being marched with their hands on their heads.
2. Saddam Hussein's two sons were photographed, dead, after they had fallen to American gunfire, and these images were published worldwide.
3. Saddam Hussein's "spider hole" (terminology meant to add to the dehumanization) was photographed, as was his medical examination by American captors, like a wild animal caught by White big game hunters, as if undergoing delousing before being put on public display.
4. Saddam Hussein's days in what was indisputably a Kangaroo Court, televised, also gave many pleasure, to see this man made to fight when the outcome had been predetermined, to allow him an appeal when his sentence was already made certain, and to watch his furor grow at the lynching that was inevitably in store for him; all of this would give some the same perverse joy that wicked children show in pulling the wings off of a fly or burning a caterpillar under a magnifying lens.
5. Saddam Hussein's execution, on government television no less, with complete footage released by two government officials who were permitted to openly record the proceedings with their cell phones, to the accompaniment of sectarian insults, and distributed across the Internet.
6. And, I do not need to remind anyone of the countless Abu Ghraib photographs.

[I would like to refer readers to Susan Sontag's critique, "Regarding the Torture of Others," which appeared in The New York Times on May 23, 2004.]

Is all of this just an accident? Obviously not, it is done by design. So what is the design?

Whether it is Pirates of the Caribbean 2 or Apocalypto or the murder of Saddam Hussein, we are being treated to a ghoulish feast of images of the supposed barbarity of others, yet displaying our own in greater abundance. In an effort to stem the tide of photographs and videos which show the extreme vulnerability of coalition forces in Iraq (whether it is the famed series of "Juba the Sniper" videos showing an Iraqi sniper at work against US troops, filmed from the perspective of the barrel of his rifle, or the collage of roadside bomb clips where the trajectories of American bodies up through the tank and into the air is traced by an illuminated red circle added by a video editor--my, how the uncivilized learn the arts of civilization so quickly), clearly the "civilizers" have done no better than the "uncivilized." That is also not an accident, not a stumbling into a situation of contradiction.

What I find most disturbing (as if all of this was not disturbing enough) is that these images are shown to us...as if we were expected to enjoy them. And that, I think, is the answer to what appears, superficially, to be a contradiction we enjoy (the civilized gawking at the uncivilized in what is after all a very uncivilized manner). When our political leadership and the media establishment treat us to these spectacles, they expect us to gaze at these pictures of conquest without seeing ourselves at work in the gazing. To put it bluntly, the one who takes pleasure at the sight of the conquest of the other avoids seeing himself as the demented, drooling savage he claims to abhor. These photos and films permit viewers to watch, themselves unseen, but even worse than that: barring them from seeing themselves in the act of looking. This is what the deliberate, studied, and regulated display of these images is meant to accomplish: our own colonization as we are emotionally and unconsciously recruited into celebrating the oppressor. The fact that this does not work nearly so well, so smoothly, in reality is something that gives one some hope.