ZGram - September 18, 2003 - "The world revolt against the heirs of Trotsky"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 18, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is as fine a piece of writing as  I have seen in a long time!  Enjoy!

[START]


The Times (London)
September 17, 2003

The world revolt against the heirs of Trotsky
by Simon Jenkins

The world is clearly trying to tell us something. Stop running, it 
says, you can hardly walk. This week Sweden's citizens told us they 
were not prepared to join an alien currency on the say-so of a 
bureaucratic elite. This week we learnt that world trade could not be 
liberated in luxury hotels in Cancún. This week we were forced to 
abandon some airily drawn "road map" for the Middle East. We might 
think we could declare "global war" on drugs or terrorism or climate 
change. But sometimes the world walks straight up to us, slaps our 
face and says: "Go home."

I am afraid I cheered when the Swedes refused to treat a matter as 
serious as the euro as if it were a funeral gift to a murdered 
foreign minister. I cheered when the Mexican chairman of the World 
Trade Organisation banged his gavel and concluded that there was no 
way Europe and America would stop giving $300 billion in food 
subsidies to their farmers. Years of G8 pledges to narrow the gap 
between rich and poor were lies.

No less stark has been the realism of Israel's threat to murder 
Yassir Arafat. Why not, if Israel is a free country? America tries to 
murder Saddam Hussein. Why go along with any so-called road map when 
everyone knows that George Bush will not enforce it, least of all in 
an election year? And why should Arafat mend his corrupt ways when he 
and his cronies are drenched in European aid?

Nor is this an end to the clear light of day. Afghanistan has refused 
to stop exporting opium. Why should it, when the West imports it by 
the tonne and backs the warlords who produce it? Last week Osama bin 
Laden popped up to remind us that the West's various invasions and 
occupations have not won any war against terror, but rather sweetened 
the wells at which it drinks. Last week, economic sanctions against 
Libya were abandoned after two decades, despite Colonel Gaddafi still 
heading his appalling regime. His is now a "good" dictatorship, like 
Syria, not a bad one like Iran and North Korea.

I hear an echo. In 1919 Moscow's rulers were so exhilarated by the 
triumph of communism that they determined to bring its benefits to 
the outside world. This was to be led by Lenin's Communist Party 
under the leadership of the Comintern. Agents were dispatched and 
uprisings stirred wherever bourgeois oligarchy seemed ripe for 
toppling.

Trotsky sat in his armoured train, fantasising that no force on Earth 
could withstand his revolutionary Red Army. The Comintern boss, 
Zinoviev, declared that all Europe would soon be one socialist state. 
Communist ideology followed where crusaders and Victorian 
missionaries had formerly trod. Within half a century some version of 
that ideology had overtaken half the globe. The Internationale won 
the hearts of liberal-minded people everywhere.

The export of Russian communism must rank among the great disasters 
of human history. Its final demise in the 1990s was one of the great 
triumphs. But I shudder to see the new crusaders for capitalism and 
democracy mimicking the attitudes of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Flushed 
with victory and blind to the views, or personal sovereignty, of 
others, they criss-cross the Earth claiming the right to superimpose 
their order on its states.

The antics in Cancún demonstrate the dominance of domestic politics 
over global philanthropy. Never was Marx's gibe more true, that 
capitalism was not about promoting markets but about closing them. 
There is no greater battery of "economic sanctions" in place against 
the world's poor than Western food subsidies and trade restrictions. 
Not only does Europe exclude Third World sugar but it dumps its 
surpluses on those who once grew it. America bans African and Asian 
cotton to maintain its own growers. It is not that Western 
governments mean to be cruel to the poor. They simply know that Third 
World farmers do not vote in Western elections. Humbug costs nothing.

Dressing up self-interest as a supranational good is now an 
intellectual industry. But, like many industries, its day may have 
passed. The case for the euro has long been based on the axiom that 
what is "good for Europe" must be good for everyone. This satisfied 
those who breathe the exalted air of Europe's central institutions. 
But the euro's rigidities are clearly impeding the economies of its 
members. Its "stabilisation and growth" rules have been broken by 
Germany and France with impunity. The Swedish people were not fooled 
by the elite freemasonry that claims, on no foundation, to "speak for 
Europe". In this week's referendum, the Swedes did not reject the 
euro so much as declare its case unproven, a far more potent response.

Likewise the interventionist's search for "world order" in the 
Balkans and the Middle East. They rule Bosnia and Kosovo, without 
democracy. They subsidise both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian 
conflict. They bomb and try to make amends in Iraq. Always there are 
the best of intentions. Lenin too wanted to make the world a better 
place. But good intentions also pave the road to Hell. The one 
emotion now binding almost all Muslim countries is a hatred not of 
Western values but of Western power, as a survey in the latest issue 
of The Economist vividly records. Donald Rumsfeld's retort that any 
such hatred can be "confronted" by military might is pure Trotsky. 
George Bush's remark to Bob Woodward that he does not mind fighting 
the whole world alone because "we are America" is pure Comintern.

Advocates of interventionism as diverse as Michael Ignatieff, Philip 
Bobbitt and Geoffrey Robertson have regarded the role of the West in 
setting the world to rights as a maxim not requiring proof. It is 
justified by faith. Their one enemy is isolationism (which they call 
appeasement). Their forebears sought a better Chile, a better 
Nicaragua, a better Vietnam and, I suppose, a better Bay of Pigs. But 
I find it bizarre that those who can be libertarian towards 
individual behaviour at home can be so deeply authoritarian overseas. 
I believe history will show the West's 15 years of intervention in 
Iraq as duplicitous, lethal and wholly counterproductive to regional 
peace and order. Yet at every turn some proto-imperialist will have 
called it "moral".

The zest for world government is as old as Alexander the Great and 
Genghis Khan. Yet it cannot be soundly based when its chief enforcer, 
in this case America, regards any constitutional constraint as 
optional. The UN is humiliated. Armaments and ecology treaties are 
ignored. International law applies to the weak but not the strong. 
Nobody accepts Kant's requirement of a moral dictum, that it must 
apply universally or it will enjoy neither consent nor deterrence.

Nation states are biting back. When democracy is allowed to speak, in 
Sweden over the euro or in France and Germany over Iraq, publics 
reject the automatic moral authority of supranationalism. Across the 
Middle East, Western intervention has fuelled the ghoulish menace of 
suicide killings. The West regards itself as entitled to overrule the 
integrity of states once guarded by the UN charter, yet America and 
Britain display a hypersensitivity when threatened in return. London 
today looks more embattled than it has since the Blitz.

I am not a pacifist, merely a realist. I regard greater humility and 
deference to the self-determination of states (however awful) as 
probably wise. Just as we are unlikely to change the world's climate, 
however many conferences we attend, so we are unlikely to impose our 
values on the Middle East, Asia or Africa, however many states we 
invade. Despite Mr Blair's dossiers, I do not regard them as any 
threat to British security. As for world poverty, that is best met by 
the judicious application of health, education and charity, and by 
bilateral trade deals between states. World summits have only made 
the rich richer and the poor poorer. They do not deliver.

Peoples formed themselves into autonomous nations for a good reason. 
Nations expressed their affinity, their sense of belonging. The 
post-Cold War craze for supranational action, to intervene at every 
opportunity to bring the world to order, has lost touch with national 
roots. It has lost its domestic accountability. Mostly it only 
prolongs disorder.

Come back, Voltaire. We help the world better by tending our own 
garden. This week we heard that message loud and clear.