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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2005
The authors of Chapter one, Magdoff, Mchesney and Bellamy Foster give some insights into the U.S. war in the Philipines. Villages were regularly burned and their inhabitants placed in concentration camps. The "water torture" was regularly used on Filipino detainees. One general told his troops to attack anyone over ten, to burn everything they saw and to turn the island of Sumara into a howling wilderness. Another said in California said that the U.S. might have to kill half of all Filipinos. It came out in Congressional testimony that the Americans killed fifteen times more Filipinos that they wounded, probably killing several hundred thousand. According to a private letter of General Arthur Macarthur in 1899; it appeared that, the vast majority of the country supported the anti-U.S. army. It took quite a few years to subdue the Moro Moslems in the Southern part of the islands(the U.S. of course has military "advisors" in this area today under cover of fighting terrorism). The culmination of that effort was the massacre of about 900 Moros hiding in a volcanic pit, by artillery bombarding, many of them women and children. Mark Twain wrote sarcastically "this is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States." President TR was perfectly serious however when he congratulated the troops on this event.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz shows how opposition to British rule in Ireland from the sixteenth century onward was repressed by exterminating whole clans, relocating villagers, suppressing indigenous Irish culture. She quotes a governor of an Irish province Sir Humphrey Gilbert as recommending that severed heads and scalp of Irish be placed along paths to homes to sufficiently terrorize the people. Imported to North America from Britain's Irish wars was the practice of placing bounties on the heads and scalps of the rebels. The Irish were soon to be declared as barbaric people, on the level with non-whites, by European ideologues. Americans would take up the burden of expansion for the superior races. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson denounced King George for preventing WASP expansionism west of the Alleghenies and blamed him for the villainies of the "merciless Indian savages." Andrew Jackson spoke about "expanding the realm of freedom" as he cleansed Indians east of the Mississippi and helped white settlers introduce slavery into and eventually annex Texas.
. By the Vietnam War era, the European Union and Japan had grown to be economic rivals of the U.S. In that new competitive environment, the U.S. could no longer tolerate regulated exchange rates, capital controls, or strong unions within the U.S. Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein and Michael Klare all write that control over the dispersion of Persian Gulf Oil, not necessarily direct control over it, is what has always motivated the U.S. in the Middle East. Europe and Asia are more than ever dependent on Persian Gulf oil; the U.S. primarily gets its oil from Latin America and West Africa. The American puppet state in Iraq will disperse oil at prices and amounts which the U.S. approves, to U.S. economic rivals. Meanwhile, on the domestic fronts, Europe and Japan have been trying to imitate the U.S. economic model. It is not much observed, by planners in those countries that the boom of the Clinton years was actually a bubble based on stock market fraud and speculation. America's only really successful sectors vis a vis Europe and Japan have been related to the Pentagon run military industrial complex, out of which things like fighter jets and the internet have come. Even these sectors have been surpassed by Europe and Japan.
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Klare notes that Laurence Eagleburger, declared that George W. Bush should be impeached if he invades Syria. Eagleburger was perhaps speaking for business elites uneasy about the open flouting of international law(which the U.S. has always engaged in Chomsky observes) and are worried that economic cooperation with Europe was being disrupted. Joseph Halevi and Yanis Varoufakis point out that since the worldwide stagflation of the seventies, securities investments from Europe, Japan and the third world have flooded to the U.S., are what keep our economy afloat and allow us to maintain such levels of debt from households on up. As George W. Bush drove up our deficit to previously unheard of heights while cutting taxes for the rich, the message to "Old Europe' was obviously that it better increase its investments in the U.S. to keep pace in covering for the U.S. debt. The Germans and French were not pleased. Related to this, Halevi, et.al, quote a Unocal executive testifying before congress. This man proposed to intimidate China into easing its restriction on its foreign investment in Western securities by occupying Afghanistan and increasing the U.S. military presence in Central Asia and the Gulf where China is becoming exclusively dependent for its gas and oil supplies.
Amiya Kumar Bachi writes that there has been heartening opposition within India to Hindutva fascism, which triggered the slaughter of 3,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. She writes that the anti-dam movement in India, the picquitaroes in Argentina and the Landless Workers movement that elected Lula in Brazil have been hamstrung by the power of international finance. Bernadine Dohrn notes the use of fear as an instrument of control in the U.S.; she notes how many Muslims were held incommunicado for months in terrible conditions and ordered to undergo insulting and stressful registration with the govt. These methods found no 9-11 plotters. Ashcroft melodramatically announced terrorist charges against two Muslim charities; both were quietly acquitted some time later. Barbara Epstein recalls that the executive order to intern Japanese-Americans, signed by FDR was based on reports that later turned out to be fabricated of radio and light communications from the Pacific to spots on the West coast.
Some of these essays are harder to read than others, but they are all outstanding.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz shows how opposition to British rule in Ireland from the sixteenth century onward was repressed by exterminating whole clans, relocating villagers, suppressing indigenous Irish culture. She quotes a governor of an Irish province Sir Humphrey Gilbert as recommending that severed heads and scalp of Irish be placed along paths to homes to sufficiently terrorize the people. Imported to North America from Britain's Irish wars was the practice of placing bounties on the heads and scalps of the rebels. The Irish were soon to be declared as barbaric people, on the level with non-whites, by European ideologues. Americans would take up the burden of expansion for the superior races. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson denounced King George for preventing WASP expansionism west of the Alleghenies and blamed him for the villainies of the "merciless Indian savages." Andrew Jackson spoke about "expanding the realm of freedom" as he cleansed Indians east of the Mississippi and helped white settlers introduce slavery into and eventually annex Texas.
. By the Vietnam War era, the European Union and Japan had grown to be economic rivals of the U.S. In that new competitive environment, the U.S. could no longer tolerate regulated exchange rates, capital controls, or strong unions within the U.S. Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein and Michael Klare all write that control over the dispersion of Persian Gulf Oil, not necessarily direct control over it, is what has always motivated the U.S. in the Middle East. Europe and Asia are more than ever dependent on Persian Gulf oil; the U.S. primarily gets its oil from Latin America and West Africa. The American puppet state in Iraq will disperse oil at prices and amounts which the U.S. approves, to U.S. economic rivals. Meanwhile, on the domestic fronts, Europe and Japan have been trying to imitate the U.S. economic model. It is not much observed, by planners in those countries that the boom of the Clinton years was actually a bubble based on stock market fraud and speculation. America's only really successful sectors vis a vis Europe and Japan have been related to the Pentagon run military industrial complex, out of which things like fighter jets and the internet have come. Even these sectors have been surpassed by Europe and Japan.
.
Klare notes that Laurence Eagleburger, declared that George W. Bush should be impeached if he invades Syria. Eagleburger was perhaps speaking for business elites uneasy about the open flouting of international law(which the U.S. has always engaged in Chomsky observes) and are worried that economic cooperation with Europe was being disrupted. Joseph Halevi and Yanis Varoufakis point out that since the worldwide stagflation of the seventies, securities investments from Europe, Japan and the third world have flooded to the U.S., are what keep our economy afloat and allow us to maintain such levels of debt from households on up. As George W. Bush drove up our deficit to previously unheard of heights while cutting taxes for the rich, the message to "Old Europe' was obviously that it better increase its investments in the U.S. to keep pace in covering for the U.S. debt. The Germans and French were not pleased. Related to this, Halevi, et.al, quote a Unocal executive testifying before congress. This man proposed to intimidate China into easing its restriction on its foreign investment in Western securities by occupying Afghanistan and increasing the U.S. military presence in Central Asia and the Gulf where China is becoming exclusively dependent for its gas and oil supplies.
Amiya Kumar Bachi writes that there has been heartening opposition within India to Hindutva fascism, which triggered the slaughter of 3,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. She writes that the anti-dam movement in India, the picquitaroes in Argentina and the Landless Workers movement that elected Lula in Brazil have been hamstrung by the power of international finance. Bernadine Dohrn notes the use of fear as an instrument of control in the U.S.; she notes how many Muslims were held incommunicado for months in terrible conditions and ordered to undergo insulting and stressful registration with the govt. These methods found no 9-11 plotters. Ashcroft melodramatically announced terrorist charges against two Muslim charities; both were quietly acquitted some time later. Barbara Epstein recalls that the executive order to intern Japanese-Americans, signed by FDR was based on reports that later turned out to be fabricated of radio and light communications from the Pacific to spots on the West coast.
Some of these essays are harder to read than others, but they are all outstanding.
