by
Jason Hirthler
Part
4 - A Pretext for Pillage
Thanks
to this artful disguise, the West can stage interventions in nations
reluctant to adopt its platform of exploitation, knowing that on top
of the depredations of an exploitative economic model, they will be
asked to call it progress and celebrate it.
Washington,
the metropolitan heart of neoliberal hegemony, has numerous methods
of convincing reluctant developing nations to accept its neighborly
advice. To be sure, the goal of modern colonialism is to find a
pretext to intervene in a country, to restore by other means the
extractive relations that first brought wealth to the colonial north.
The most common pretexts for intervention depict the target nation in
three distinct fashions.
First,
as an economic basket case, a condition often engineered by the West
in what is sometimes called, “creating facts on the ground.” By
sanctioning the target economy, Washington can “make the economy
scream,” to using war criminal Henry Kissinger’s elegant
phrasing. Iran, Syria, and Venezuela are relevant examples here.
Second,
the West funds violent opposition to the government, producing
unrest, often violent riots of the kind witnessed in Dara, Kiev, and
Caracas. The goal is either to capsize a tottering administration or
provoke a violent crackdown, at which point western embassies and
institutions will send up simultaneously cries of tyranny and
brutality and insist the leader step aside. Libya, Syria, and
Venezuela are instructive in this regard.
Third,
the country will be pressured to accept some sort of military
fettering thanks to either a false flag or manufactured hysteria over
some domestic program, such as the WMD restrictions on Iraq, chemical
weapons restrictions on Syria, or the civilian nuclear energy
restrictions on Iran. Given that the U.S. traffics in WMDs,
bioweapons, and nuclear energy itself, insisting others forsake all
of these is perhaps little more than racially motivated despotry.
But
significant fear mongering in the international media will provide
sufficient moral momentum to ram through sanctions, resolutions, and
inspection regimes with little fanfare.
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