From: ww@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Date: 01 Jan 93 22:59 PST
Subject: Civilization & a Few Aircraft Carri
Nf-ID: #N:R1HqwB3w165w@nyxfer.uucp:1862757591:000:6507
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!ww    Jan  1 22:59:00 1993


Subject: Civilization & a Few Aircraft Carriers
From: nyxfer!ww (Workers World Service)


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: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)


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