NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9737

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From: [e-mail] (Workers World Service)
Subject: Civilization & a Few Aircraft Carriers
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Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


Civilization and a few aircraft carriers

By Deirdre Griswold

There is a term that, after having been in disgrace for many
decades, is creeping back into the vocabulary of bourgeois
newscasters and politicians. Not only blatant imperialists use
it. It rolled effortlessly off the tongue of the liberal
columnist Anthony Lewis recently as he explained to a PBS
audience why the United States is morally obligated to send
troops to Yugoslavia and Somalia.

The term is "civilized world." It seems to have replaced "free
world," which lost its effectiveness with the end of the Cold
War.

What makes this term so odious, so vicious, so exactly the
opposite of the civility it pretends to connote?

Describing one part of the world as "civilized" inplies that the
rest of the world is "uncivilized." Now of course, Anthony Lewis
is a bigshot writer for the New York Times, the paper that sees
itself as the last word in civilized journalism--the arbiter of
what is "fit to print." So clearly he believes he is speaking
from the highest ground in the most civilized of all possible
nations--which qualifies him to judge the level of civilization
in the rest of the world.

It doesn't take a masters degree in world affairs to know that
Lewis and the others are saying that the United States and
Western Europe are the great civilizing influences in the world
today, and therefore must take on the burden of policing the
globe.

Aren't they the ones that dominate the United Nations Security
Council? Haven't they built the greatest "arsenals for
democracy"? Don't they dispense all the various awards and prizes
for excellence and civilized conduct?

This view, which is now also being echoed by the eager would-be
bourgeoisie in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union, needs no further elaboration. It has been
exposed and rejected by the vast majority of humanity, who have
suffered so mightily at the hands of European colonialism and
U.S. neocolonialism.

They have heard it all before. Then it was called "manifest
destiny," "the white man's burden," and "bringing Christianity to
the heathens."

It was the excuse for the most barbaric treatment of subject
peoples the world had ever seen. (The struggle for multicultural
education in this country shows how many people repudiate the
"civilized world" of Mr. Lewis.)

The slaughter unleashed by colonialism in Africa, Latin America
and Asia culminated in World War I. Twenty million European
workers were sacrificed as the capitalists battled among
themselves to dominate these world markets.

CAN'T TURN THE CLOCK BACK

Does the return of such arrogant and racist language mean the
world is inexorably sliding back into those bad old days before
there had been any successful proletarian revolutions or national
liberation struggles?

Despite all the setbacks and defeats, the world today is a very
different place than during the heyday of colonialism. What was
accomplished then with a few companies of soldiers armed with
rifles now requires armies and armadas fortified with the most
expensive technology on the planet.

Look at Somalia. It would be ludicrous if it weren't so ominous.
To disarm at the most a few thousand "technicals" in a small and
impoverished land, the U.S. and its NATO allies are spending
hundreds of millions of dollars on aircraft carriers,
communications centers, tank companies, swarms of helicopters,
and who knows what-all psywar experts and dirty tricksters.

Sure, it gives them a quick rush, an exhilarating high at being
the invincibles, the world's supercops. They've done it
before--the Pentagon in Grenada, then Panama, then Iraq, Britain
in the Malvinas, France in Chad.

But each time it costs more. They can't risk another Vietnam,
politically or militarily. And so they will only send in troops
when the ratio is ten thousand to one in their favor.

And at home, the spoils of war go to an ever-shrinking class of
billionaires, while the mass of workers drown in a sea of red
ink. The social rot spreads deeper.

It is no accident that the United States, which has built the
biggest military juggernaut in history, also now lags miserably
in so many indices of social progress. And this in a country that
spans a whole continent and enjoys the most bounteous natural
resources.

CITIES AND CIVILIZATION

The word civilization comes from the same root as city. In
ancient times, the rise of cities as hubs of commerce allowed the
division of labor into a great variety of arts and crafts,
raising human productivity enormously.

Isn't it ironic that today, in this "civilized world," the
greatest misery and malaise is found in the cities? Instead of
being breeding grounds for new talents, new skills, they are
concentrations of the most acute social problems.

The most wretched manifestation of the utter bankruptcy of the
capitalism system is the permanent army of unemployed that fills
the crevices of every big city and sinks deeper and deeper into
homelessness, disease and despair.

Oh yes, the world needs civilizing alright. The kind of
civilizing that the Chinese workers and peasants accomplished by
the millions when they kicked out the bloodsucking landlords and
the imperialists. The civilizing that Cuba's rebel army achieved
when it overpowered the corrupt gangsters of Batista,
nationalized U.S. companies that had been sucking out their
wealth, ended peonage for agricultural workers, wiped out
prostitution, and brought literacy and health care to the entire
population.

Can the workers in the imperialist countries also shake off the
ideological hold of the ruling class and struggle in their own
interests? Why not?

In fact, the constantly deteriorating social conditions are
paving the way for it. It will be the end of "Western
civilization as we have known it." But it will be the beginning
of true human civilization.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: [e-mail]; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "[e-mail]".)


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