Don't Trust The US, Says Fidel
By Farooque Chowdhury
Countercurrents.org
Amidst weeks of mainstream media-gossip about Fidel the world again heard the voice: “I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged one word with them …”
The revolutionary leader expressed his observation in a letter he wrote to the student federation at the University of Havana. The letter, “For my Federation of University Students classmates”, appeared in Granma, newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba. The letter was also read out on state television in Cuba.
Fidel Castro said in the letter: “I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged one word with them, though this does not in any way signify a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or threats of war.”
Fidel's cautious approach is evident in the statement. As a reader of Lenin, which he mentions in the letter, Fidel is fully aware of the Empire and its policies, and at the same time, he doesn't reject non-hostile approach to conflicts.
He mentions Lenin as a genius of revolutionary action. Lenin has views on peace, negotiations, and imperialist war. Fidel doesn't miss the contradictions within war and peace and within the present global reality as he writes:
“Observe carefully the realities of this well-known, globalized and very poorly shared planet Earth, on which we know every vital resource is distributed in accordance with historical factors: some with much less than they need, others with so much they don't know what to do with it. Now amidst great threats and dangers of war, chaos reigns in the distribution of financial resources and social production.”
Fidel stands for peace as he writes: “Defending peace is the duty of all. Any negotiated, peaceful solution to the problems between the United States and peoples, or any people of Latin America, which does not imply force or the use of force, must be addressed in accordance with international principles and norms.”
But the Empire doesn't go by widely accepted international principles and norms. Fidel's letter mentions an example from Africa:
Ronald Reagan authorized the delivery of nuclear weapons to the racist South Africa to attack Cuban and Angolan forces defending Angola against the racist troops attempting to occupy the country. “In such a situation, there was no possibility whatsoever for a peaceful solution.” The racist army was trying to liquidate Angola, bleed the country.
The world is full of similar examples. Media reports including reports by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and declassified government documents have exposed the Empire's “peace” enterprises: patronizing killers with the target of interference, war, subjugation, plunder. The enterprise has ravaged countries, devastated lands, ruined peoples' lives. None of these, the patronization of killers and anti-democratic forces, the ravages “bestowed”, the deaths “awarded”, has brought peace and democracy in any land. Following are a few examples:
We don't like this guy
In 2002, Hugo Chavez was pushed out of power in a 47-hours coup by a ring of military officers and business leaders. “Senior members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months [before the coup] with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office, administration officials said today [April 15, 2002].” (NYT, April 16, 2002, “Bush officials met with Venezuelans who ousted leader”) The daily cited US officials, and one of them said: “We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy” [Chavez]. Another official, the White House spokesman, “suggested that the administration was pleased that Mr. Chavez was gone.”
The coup was not a single effort against Chavez. Eva Golinger, the author of the famous The Chavez Code, writes: “Chavez's international influence turned him into the number one enemy of Washington. The threats against Chavez were constant, attempts against his life never ceased. There was a systematic aggression against his government from the most powerful interests in the world, together with their agents in Venezuela.” (“A tribute – Chavez: A giant under the moon”)
She raises another serious question: “We may never know if his death was provoked or not, although enough evidence exists to investigate” (ibid.) Questions concerning the death of Hugo Chavez have also been raised from other responsible quarters including the chairman of the Venezuelan legislative assembly.
Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela has recently accused publicly: The US is behind an attempted coup in Venezuela. He has alleged the US vice-president Joe Biden was behind the entire destablizing plot. Maduro said: “The northern imperial power has entered a dangerous phase of desperation, going to talk to the continent's governments to announce the overthrow of my government. And I accuse Vice-president Joe Biden of this.”
This is the first time a direct accusation of this gravity was made publicly. However, there was denial from the other side. On an earlier occasion, Maduro specified a number of US agencies for allegedly plotting against Venezuela.
During recent accusation, Maduro questioned US president Barack Obama publically, whether the US president was “aware of these plans to promote violence and a coup in Venezuela”. Terming the situation as no ordinary crisis the Venezuelan president said: “There are US diplomats in Venezuela contracting military officials to betray their country, looking to influence socialist political leaders, public opinion leaders and entrepreneurs to provoke a coup.” He appealed to the people and the patriots among the officials to be on high alert “as a bloody coup is underway in Venezuela.”
Maduro alerted: “The people must be prepared to rescue their democracy, the Constitution and their revolution”. Maduro said it's difficult to imagine, despite earlier promises, how to maintain diplomatic relations with the US, in light of its constant attempts to subvert the Venezuelan leadership and sink the country into a crisis.
The Empire's interference in Venezuela is not a new case. Eva Golinger in an article, “The dirty hands of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela”, provides the following facts as she mentions anti-government protests led by several individuals and organizations have close ties to the US government:
“Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado, two of the leaders behind the violent protests, have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez's political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado's NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns. These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014 including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called ‘civil society' to execute a coup d'etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years. At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors in Venezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn't stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela's National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration's Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.
“The NED, a ‘foundation' created by [US] Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA's work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED's 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure, $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another $590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition. More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro's government politically.
“One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA, an organization … tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID [US Agency for International Development] to opposition groups in Venezuela …
“Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. …Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.
“In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to ‘share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia...and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries'.
“Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: ‘To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia …'
“IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with anti-government coalition in Venezuela since before the 2002.
“Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it in the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.”
All these are being done in the name of democracy. And, it's not only a Venezuela-case.
Hip-hop in Cuba
An investigation by the Associated Press found the USAID attempted to infiltrate the Cuban hip-hop movement as part of a covert project to destabilize the country. The AP report, “US co-opted Cuba's hip-hop scene to spark change”, was available on December 11, 2014.
The AP investigation found documents that indicate that USAID hired a group of rappers to organize a youth movement opposed to the Cuban government. The plan was implemented covertly for more than two years.
Its aim was using Cuban musicians to organize a network to agitate against the system. To undermine the Cuban government, it involved millions of dollars. A bank in Lichtenstein was also there with the purpose to hide the money trail to Cuba, where thousands of dollars went to fund a TV program.
The Huffington Post website published a chronology of USAID covert operations in Cuba. It showed in detail the activities of Rajko Bozic, a Serbian presenting himself as a musical promoter. Rajko arrived in Cuba with instructions to involve Cuban rappers including the Aldeanos duo in the covert hip hop program.
The covert operation net was wide. In Panama, the publication describes, a company, the Salida Company, was organized in March 2009. It was organized as a front for Washington-based Creative Associates International (CAI). In August 2009, the CAI hosted a meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica to discuss using the Concert for Peace organized by Colombian musician Juanes in Havana to boost Los Aldeanos and their destabilizing discourse.
In December 2009, Alan Gross, the USAID contractor, was arrested in Havana for having illegally imported satellite phones and computing equipment to Cuba without the appropriate permits.
The USAID hip hop covert operation was conducted along with two other operations sponsored by the US agency, which were also exposed by AP. These were the Zunzuneo or the Cuban twitter project, and a plan to send young Latin Americans to Cuba to build dissatisfaction among the Cuban youth and promote criticism of the government.
These facts lead Raul Castro to warn the US against meddling in Cuba's affairs.
These facts lead Josefina Vidal, Cuba's top official for US affairs, say in early-February: “The way those (US) diplomats act should change in terms of stimulating, organizing, training, supplying and financing elements within our country that act against the interests of ... the government of the Cuban people.”
Vidal said the Americans were meddling in internal affairs of Cuba. “Matters of the internal affairs in Cuba are not negotiable”, said Vidal. “Nor are we going to negotiate matters of an internal nature regarding Cuban sovereignty in exchange for lifting the embargo. Beyond that, everything else is a process of negotiation.”
Cuba's pain is old. In 1898, the US forced Cuba to accept Platt Amendment that allowed the Empire to intervene in Cuba and establish the base at Guantanamo.
The Empire's war against countries aspiring to live with dignity is widespread. The war is conducted not only with subversion and coup. It goes to economic front also.
Shadow oil war
In mid-December 2014, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia said in an interview: The US is behind the current drop in oil prices as it is aiming to undermine the economies of large petroleum producers like Russia and Venezuela.
Morales said: “Of course, now that America can't overthrow a president by a violent military coup, it starts to view the option of economic sanctions. I am sure that the oil prices plunge was provoked by the US to undermine the Russian and Venezuelan economies.”
Morales said: America is acting like other large empires did for centuries as they “disseminated strife and hatred inside and outside, wishing to establish political control over other nations and to plunder them economically.”
And, the shadow oil war is now pushing Libya to the brink of bankruptcy. Shall the oil interests in Libya gain with this reality even if the interests of the Libyan people are ignored?
The cases are not only South America-centered. A conviction in the US exposes the Empire's activities around the globe.
Derail Iran
An AP report, “Ex-CIA officer convicted of leaking secrets to reporter” (January 26, 2015) exposes another type of activity. The report said:
“A former CIA officer was convicted of leaking details of a covert mission to derail Iran's nuclear program ….” According to former US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice the mission was “among the government's most closely held secrets during her tenure as well as one of its best chances to derail Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions”.
The classified operation involved using a CIA asset nicknamed Merlin, who had been a Russian nuclear engineer, to foist deliberately flawed nuclear weapons blueprints on the Iranians, hoping they would spend years trying to develop parts that had no hope of ever working.
Probably, the mission backfired.
Similar “stories” are many, or the history is long.
Make the economy scream
In Chile, as it turned out that socialist Salvador Allende would win the presidency the US president Nixon told the CIA to “make the economy scream” to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him”. Declassified government documents with the National Security Archive show the fact.
Augusto Pinochet, the US backed general in Chile, overthrew Allende in a bloody coup, one of the bloodiest in the history of Latin America, on Sept. 11, 1973. In the politico-military process, thousands of citizens were tortured and killed. Thousands “disappeared”, murdered. Pinochet's soldiers also killed two US journalists. [This part of killing of the American journalists, and Kissinger is another long story. Recently a court verdict in Chile sentenced two officers involved with the murder, and Kissinger had to experience a protest in the Washington DC as the protesters demanded Kissinger's trial for war crime.]
The story of “peace” and “democracy” is stretched over countries. It's also a story of putsch and killing.
Take every step that we can
In Brazil, generals led by army chief of staff general Humberto Branco overthrew the elected government of Joao Goulart in 1964. A blood-thirsty government sat there for two decades.
And, the US president Lyndon B Johnson extended support to the “game”: overthrow the elected government and repress the people.
Declassified documents presented by the National Security Archive show:
The Empire was ready to back the coup plotters. Johnson instructed aides on preparations for a coup in Brazil on March 31, 1964: “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do.” Johnson was briefed by phone at his Texas ranch as the military moved against Goulart. “I'd put everybody that had any imagination or ingenuity… [CIA director John] McCone… [secretary of defense Robert] McNamara” on making sure the coup went forward, Johnson instructed undersecretary of state George Ball.
Through top secret cables the US ambassador Lincoln Gordon forcefully pressed Washington for direct involvement in supporting coup. On March 27, 1964, Gordon wrote to the White House, state department and CIA: “If our influence is to be brought to bear to help avert a major disaster here – which might make Brazil the China of the 1960s – this is where both I and all my senior advisors believe our support should be placed.”
To make the coup a success, the ambassador recommended through cables: “[M]easures be taken soonest to prepare for a clandestine delivery of arms of non-US origin, to be made available to Castello Branco supporters in Sao Paulo”; these weapons be “pre-positioned prior any outbreak of violence”, to be used by paramilitary units and “friendly military against hostile military if necessary”; to conceal the US role, the arms be delivered via “unmarked submarine to be off-loaded at night in isolated shore spots in state of Sao Paulo south of Santos.”
The declassified cables show CIA's covert measures in Brazil were “to help strengthen resistance forces”. The measures included “covert support for pro-democracy street rallies … and encouragement [of] democratic and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, armed forces, friendly labor and student groups, church, and business.”
Four days before the coup, Gordon requested Washington for “modest supplementary funds for other covert action programs in the near future”, and tankers carrying petroleum, oil and lubricants to facilitate logistical operations of the coup plotters, and deploy a naval task force to intimidate Goulart's backers and be in position to intervene militarily if fighting became protracted.
In 1954, the government in Guatemala was overthrown. The “game” was engineered by the CIA. There was the interest of the United Fruit Company. The US company felt its interests were going to be threatened in Central America with development of democratic forces in Guatemala. The coup was followed by decades of civil war with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens.
In 1960, the Empire backed a rightist group in Laos, and the rightist group took power in mid-December. War razed Laos. The entire Indo-China episode is a classic example of post-WWII imperial wars.
Acts of atrocity, rape, murder, massacre and destruction are part of the war carried on in countries.
Atrocity rape murder massacre
In the 1980s, the Salvadoran military committed atrocities with US backing.
In the 1960s and 1970s, The Guatemalan military was carrying on a war against the people aspiring for democracy. Despite widespread human rights violations by the military the Empire backed the war with military funding and training. Among the recipients of the funding and training was a special force unit, Kaibiles, accused for a number of massacres.
In Nicaragua, proxy warriors – Contra – were funded by the Reagan administration. Contra terrorists were organized to fight against the Sandinista government, and the terrorists murdered, tortured and raped civilians. The Reagan administration accused human rights organizations of working on behalf of the Sandinistas as the organizations including the International Human Rights Law Group reported the crimes in 1985.
With the support of the Nixon Administration the rightwing military dictatorship waged a “dirty war” in Argentina during 1976-1983. The war – murder, babies stolen from mothers considered sympathetic to democratic cause, torture – made 30,000 citizens “disappear”.
Declassified documents – including two memoranda of conversations with the Argentine foreign minister admiral Cesar Guzzetti, one with Kissinger himself on October 7, 1976 – collected by the National Security Archive show:
In October 1976, secretary of state Kissinger and high ranking US officials gave full support to the military junta and urged them to quicken and complete the “dirty war” before the US Congress cuts military aid. Guzzetti returned home “euphoric” and “convinced that there is no real problem with the USG” over human rights. The admiral “heard only what he wanted to hear”.
The School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, US, trained generals from Latin America, and the generals ultimately were responsible for massacres and torture of tens of thousands of citizens in respective countries.
Murdering and killing of ordinary citizens and activists are not the only acts in the war. Judiciary is not also spared.
Spy on and smear campaign against judges
The Colombian military faces allegations of human rights violation. The military dressed non-combatants from poor neighborhoods as guerrillas, and killed them as guerrillas to inflate enemy casualty statistics.
The Colombian intelligence services spied on Supreme Court judges, and carried out smear campaigns against legislators, judges, journalists and human rights activists, which led it to disbanding. Through Plan Colombia, the US has pumped more than $6 billion into Colombia's military and intelligence services since 2002.
“[N]ew revelations in … political scandals under former president Alvaro Uribe, a close US ally … have implicated American aid, and possibly US officials, in egregious abuses of power and illegal actions by the Colombian government under the guise of fighting terrorism and drug smuggling.
“American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service … to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe's political opponents and civil society groups, according to law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with prosecutors and former Colombian intelligence officials.
“Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes, and more than a dozen other agency operatives are on trial.
“Prosecutors say the Uribe government wanted to ‘neutralize' the Supreme Court because its investigative magistrates were unraveling ties between presidential allies in the Colombian congress and drug-trafficking paramilitary groups.
“One unit dependent on CIA aid, according to the testimony of former DAS officials in depositions, was the National and International Observations Group.
“Set up to root out ties between foreign operatives and Colombian guerrillas, it turned its attention to the Supreme Court after magistrates began investigating the president's cousin, then-Sen. Mario Uribe, said a former director, German Ospina, in a deposition to prosecutors.
Broader societies pay for the mishandling of affairs by the Empire. It's with guns and lives. Justice is also denied.
Guns lost justice undermined
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) allowed smugglers to purchase weapons. It was ATF's effort to track guns as those moved across the US-Mexico border. But the ATF lost track of the guns as those landed in the drug cartels in countries including Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, among others, carried a report (“How Mexican killers got US guns from ‘Fast and Furious' operation”, July 26, 2011) on the issue. The Washington Post also had a similar report (“A gunrunning sting gone fatally wrong”, July 26, 2011).
Mexican authorities seized almost 70,000 weapons of US origin from 2007 to 2011. In 2004, the US Congress declined to renew a 10-year ban on the sale of assault weapons. The weapons turned out as the guns of choice for Mexican drug cartels within a short time. About 50,000 people have died in Mexico since launching a military assault on the cartels in 2006. (Los Angeles Times, “Mexico government sought to withhold drug war death statistics”, January 11, 2012)
In 2006, Colombia demobilized the largest rightwing paramilitary organization AUC, and offered lenient sentences to those who would offer details on the atrocities the organization committed. But instead of facing justice in the country Colombia extradited more than a dozen of paramilitary leaders to the US to face drug trafficking charges. This made many Colombians to find out facts on the murders and kidnappings of their loved ones. One of the paramilitary leaders during a videoed confession took responsibility for more than 450 slayings. In 2010, a US district judge blocked public access to seven Colombian paramilitary leaders' cases. This judicial act virtually wiped out all signs of their existence. (Chisun Lee, Oriana Zill de Granados and Jennifer Janisch, “Vanished from justice: Colombia's paramilitary leaders”, September 10, 2010, PBS)
Problem within
Scores of similar examples are there. In all the cases, it was the people, the commoners, the common citizens that paid. And, in all the cases, the Empire teamed up with and backed reactionary and ultra-reactionary forces, the forces that were bent on taking away traces of scope people could utilize to make their life easier.
People need the scope. By making life easier people could organize their effort and struggle for a better life, could organize their democratic struggle, an indivisible element in their journey to progress, an indivisible element to get rid of a life overwhelmed with backward ideas as the backward ideas help perpetuate exploitative relations.
With this history of intervention and blood in the background new trends and problems are rising their heads, which are making situation more dangerous and more unstable, making reliance on the Empire by its allies more undependable, making the alliance less reliable.
“Problems” within the Empire make issues increasingly difficult, which doesn't only affect the Empire. People in countries also pay with their life, with their day-to-day economic activities, and with their botched democratic struggle. It's the people that make the first payment. Today's Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Pakistan are the burning examples.
Libya is not a single example of imperialist intervention, not a single example of ruined civil life, not a single example of the Empire's problems with policy. Its dealing with the Tahrir-moment and the post-Tahrir developments in Egypt also show its ways of policy formulation that affects its interest.
The state of US foreign policy, suffers from contending interests, misunderstood reality, lack of far-sightedness and even failure to foresee self-interest, and turn tactical alliances into alliances of inconvenience. These are not products of shortage of intellectual capacity or lack of sense of history; but capacity and sense made incapable by immediate interests, by a sense of urgency and contingency, and by heightened competition between interests within as space for competition is squeezing down.
Exposures following investigations, and controversies and legislative games (US Congress investigation panel on Benghazi, etc.), and incoherence within administration concerning Libya, dealings with Qaddafi (the end-January 2015 report by The Washington Times on talks with Qaddafi regime), choosing friends from among Qaddafi adversaries are only a few examples. The Libya debacle turns stark if it's compared with the post-WWII Berlin blockade- , missile deployment in Turkey- , Cuba missile-crisis-chapters – the way the Empire formulated related policies and organized the incidents.
Symptoms of decay these – the current incidents – are, and, no doubts, the symptoms have origins. And, implications of these are also there. First, the Empire gets hurt; its weakened position gets exposed. The way Karzai was talking during his last days, the way at least one of the Empire's allies in the Middle East behave, and the way the Thai junta recently uttered, “don't meddle”, show the Empire's position – gradually weakening, gradually loosing grip, increasingly challenged.
Increasing crises at planetary level (environmental, etc.) and within the world imperial order (the great financial crisis, etc.) are, on the one hand, worsening imperial position, and on the other, making the global imperial system more aggressive.
The magnitude of the crisis within the imperial world order is starkly evident, and is now being admitted by mainstream. Annual reports of the World Economic Forum, for example, are one of the evidences of conceding a few of the facts of the crises. The recent McKinsey Global Institute report, Debt and (not much) Deleveraging (February 2015), said: “After the 2008 financial crisis and the longest and deepest global recession since World War II, it was widely expected that the world's economies would deleverage. It has not happened. Instead, debt continues to grow in nearly all countries, in both absolute terms and relative to GDP. This creates fresh risks in some countries and limits growth prospects in many”. Since the Great Financial Crisis in 2007, the report finds, global debt has increased by $57 trillion. In Japan, the debt to GDP ratio has jumped to above 500 percent. With this reality emerge questions about financial stability. Threat of another crisis is there. The global debt reached $199 trillion at the end of 2014, with the growth rate exceeding the pace of global economic expansion and the debt to GDP ratio increased from 269 to 286 percent.
These economic aspects, appearing corrosion, produce political impact at global level, in the world imperial system. Developments – economic and political, policy and people's role – in smaller economies can make strong impact on the global system. Greece is the most recent example. [Now the US is trying to convince European bank robbers to compromise with Greece as the Empire finds the system's failure in Greece will have greater impact.]
At the same time, aggressiveness in the imperial world order is starkly evident in Ukraine, in the region surrounding Russia, in NATO postures and activities, and the current Munich Security Conference deliberations. The acts of provocations, a part of aggressiveness, are product of a desperate situation. Even, moves by parts of Europe's may appear a bit distance from the Empire while the Empire pushes Europe to engage with acts of provocation. It's a mixture of contradictory moves, and it's like more the corrosion more the aggression. This makes the Empire undependable.
Fomenting civil disturbance, interventions in the name of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), proxy wars, increasing role of private war companies in the name of defense contractors now appear an old tale. These all are signs of aggressiveness and heightened competition in the world order.
It's an escalating situation. At times, the situation is moving in a very fast pace. But the global imperial system fails to take it into notice. Evo Morales in the already cited interview said: “[The US thinks] we are living 200, 300 or 500 years ago, instead of today. But all the past should remain in the past. The US should realize this.”
The emerging situation within the Empire and in the world stage makes its allies shaky and uncertain with the realization that it's undependable, untrustworthy, and this in turn forces the Empire to be more imposing than its actual strength. It's a reality of dilema with many faces, which increases dangers. For countries with geostrategic and geotactical locations, countries with potential for larger market, countries with strategic materials, the danger increases many fold.
The reality demands caution and awareness among people with sense of dignity. “The grave dangers which today threaten humanity”, Fidel says, “must yield to norms which are compatible with human dignity. No country can be denied such a right.” (op. cit.) The situation leads to Fidel's assertion: “I insist, nonetheless, that revolutionary ideas must always be on guard as humanity expands its knowledge.” (ibid.)
And, Fidel says: “In this spirit I have struggled, and will continue to struggle, to my last breath.” (ibid.) The spirit – struggle to the last breath – has to be kept awakened, has to be awakened in all countries in the interest of the countries and their peoples.
Farooque Chowdhury is Dhaka-based free lancer.
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