American Century

By Bukka Rennie
April 19, 2003

It is been said that the 21st Century is the "American Century". The world is now a unipolar world. And the peoples of the world are sensing that the Americans are now more than ever driven by an historic sense of Empire.

It all began after World War II, given the overall devastation of Europe, the power of US military might, their major role in the North Atlantic security system and the supremacy of the US Dollar established by the International monetary System after Breton Woods.

The American nation had been the nation that was best placed to ensure the objective dictates of capitalist accumulation on a global scale. That dictate was the mission to pull every nook and cranny of the world into the global market, thereby deepening the market, and bringing modern economic development to even the most remote areas.

The internal law and dynamic of capital multiplication and accumulation demand an ever expanding and deepening market for goods and services. And in this context, the Americans were always in the forefront.

The picture immediately comes to mind of President Kennedy shaking his fist at the Berlin Wall and shouting: "This wall must fall!"

It should have been clear even then to keen observers of historic development that both the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain had to come down. The Iron Curtain (ie the USSR and the "colonised" satellites of Eastern European countries) and the Bamboo Curtain (ie China) were both aberrations to the modern capitalist productive and reproductive system.

For decades, the captains of industry, the CEO's of giant US Corporations, had been talking and predicting the coming of a new world order that was free of the limitations of national borders and national fiscal and customs regulations, a new order in which "capital" could be moved freely to any location at any time beholden to no one and nothing except that which is essential to generate super rates of profitability.

The fall of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains brought into the fold and added to the modern capitalist "free" market close to two billion people, and the demand for capital injection in these areas for infrastructure and new plant outlay totaled trillions of US dollars.

Of course, the subjective part to all this was the abundant prattle about the "end of ideology". The one fly in the ointment, the one limit to the modern world as a world beholden to nothing but the dictates of capital is the theocratic dictatorships of the Arab region, the very region in which lies the largest reserves of oil, the commodity of all commodities, the " lubricating breath" of all industrial processes. The Arab region still stands to be drawn kicking and screaming fully into modern existence. The American intelligentsia hopes to accomplish this via the war on Iraq.

Pumped up by their growing sense of historic importance, the American intelligentsia have envisaged a divine responsibility to police the world. They asked the question: who can do it? And answered it themselves: "only America!"

Throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's their excursions, both covert and overt, all over the world from Latin America to the Middle East to the Far East read like a litany of barbaric destruction, and gave rise all over to the concept of the "Ugly American".

They trampled national integrity and sovereignty into the dust and are quick now to say that it was all in the interest of freedom and democracy.

Just as they were accused by Borges, the Argentine writer, of appropriating the name of an entire continent for themselves - the USA is a land with no name, he says, "America" is the continent - so too they appropriate the ideal of human history, "democracy" and equate it with a system that merely describes the politics of capitalist production, accumulation and distribution.

Democracy cannot be equated with the political dictates and required philosophical framework of open market. Democracy, the legacy of ongoing human history, is much bigger and more extensive than that.

The case is repeatedly made by American intelligentsia, in order to justify their world-policing activity, that there is a "terrorist axis of evil" existing that is bent on destroying American civilisation and American way of life.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, American intelligentsia seeks always to give their citizens the impression that they are the victims of forces around the world bent on destroying America.

The average American citizen by design has no real view of the world and no sense of geography: America is the world, that's it.

The point is that is America citizenry had grown up knowing about Byzantine and Constantinople, they would certainly be familiar with the requisites of both the rise and fall of Empire and most certainly be able to discern the signs the times.