Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 7, 1995 TAG: 9501090017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLEN MARTIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was about initiatives within the United States government, mostly sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace, to use ``conflict resolution'' or ``preventive diplomacy'' techniques around the world to defuse conflicts and hostilities before they erupt into violence.
This was presented as a new approach intended to cautiously replace past policy in which ``the United States has sought to protect its global interests and maintain stability with a simple formula of coercion and rigid, traditional diplomacy.''
Wood lists the ``frustrating and often humiliating disasters'' that the standard policy has produced, and says ``these setbacks have forced a growing number of experts to an obvious conclusion: It isn't working.'' His article describes efforts primarily in Somalia, Bosnia, Israel-Palestine and recently in Haiti to use conflict resolution to maintain peace and limit or prevent war. Indeed, with such efforts, especially in ethnic conflicts where economic and long-term business interests are hampered by chronic violence, U.S. conflict-resolution managers may be making a difference.
But the undefined and unspoken assumptions behind this article reinforce American ideology that really serves to cover up and legitimize brutal wars and atrocities that the United States has engaged in worldwide since the end of World War II. The article claims the conflict-resolution movement is significant since ``these new peacemakers are treating not the results but the causes of conflict.'' This serves to divert our attention from any careful analysis of the possible causes of these wars by promoting the unquestioned (very American) assumptions that the real goal of U.S. foreign policy is peace, and that U.S. global interests are compatible with peace.
Both assumptions are false. They are treated by the mainstream media as unquestioned assumptions to keep our American ideology in place, and to prevent the morally hideous nature of our society and its murderous foreign policy from breaking into the consciousness of our citizens.
What are the ``global interests'' the United States has sought to protect through a ``simple formula of coercion and rigid, traditional diplomacy''? Does the unemployed black citizen in Los Angeles have global interests? How about the lower-middle-class factory worker in Wisconsin, the small dairy farmer in New York state, or the store clerk in Virginia?
The assumption that we're all equally part of a collective entity that has global interests obscures the reality that we're not all the same and don't have the same interests.
Government figures tell us that about 90 percent of our country's private wealth (amounting to trillions of dollars) is owned by about 10 percent of the population, a tiny class of superrich individuals who have political and economic clout in Washington that the average citizen, with his/her tiny single vote, cannot even imagine.
Most of these superrich (primarily white males) have major interests in giant transnational corporations that do multibillion dollar business worldwide. Like all corporations in our system, they seek to maximize profits by finding cheap labor and materials to produce their products, and by selling their products at the best possible price. The United States' ``global interests,'' which are protected and defended by diplomatic and military means, are nothing if not the interests of these giant corporations and their wealthy owners.
The immense poverty, international debt and economic defenselessness of poor countries of the world form the perfect ``free market'' for these transnational corporations. They can hire cheap labor to manufacture their products, buy up natural resources of these countries at a fraction of their real worth and bring their manufactured products back to this country's middle classes to sell at a healthy profit.
When politicians speak of global interests of this country, they mean the global economic interests of transnational corporations. Similarly, when they offer domestic policies for our ``common good'' (from taxes to health care to crime), what they mean is the good of the top 10 percent of the population who have such tremendous influence over lawmakers.
Citizens of poor Third World countries must watch their children grow up hungry, malnourished, without health care, without decent housing, water, education and without hope. What can ``peace'' mean in this situation? It's revealing that Wood says, ``the United States has sought to protect its global interests and maintain stability'' through war and diplomacy.
Our policy of maintaining stability has meant maintaining this status quo of poverty and misery so U.S. transnational corporations can continue to exploit it. It has meant attempting to destroy any and all popular movements where poor people have tried to organize their countries to the point where their country's resources are used for their own benefit.
This has meant three main forms of foreign-policy interventions: massive military and training aid to brutal dictators who suppress and torture their own people while allowing transnational corporations to exploit their poverty and misery; direct destruction of democratically elected governments that favor policies of land distribution or equalization of wealth for the benefit of their own people; or outright military invasion and war. Peace is the goal only if you mean the quiet acceptance by destitute Third World peoples.
The superrich need to keep decent citizens of the United States believing that somehow we all have ``global interests'' that need protection by this unspeakably brutal and violent U.S. foreign policy. We citizens need to make clear that not all Americans are so easily deceived.
The time is coming when the majority of Americans will find their moral voice and act to redeem themselves from starvation, murder and bloodshed that we all have on our hands, and when decent American citizens will no longer tolerate a deceptive, violent and war-making government in the service of an economic system of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
Glen Martin of Radford is an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University.
by CNB