The China scenario, it must be observed, is strikingly similar to the interwar scenario — when there were similar debates regarding engagement vs. confrontation re/ Japan and Germany. China evidently has the same brand of soul-deep national ambition shared then by Japan and Germany, and a similar potential to express it effectively in action. Japan and Germany could only be tamed — the historic lesson seems to clearly say — by complete destruction and unconditional surrender, followed by complete rebuilding under U.S. tutelage.

These are precedents that cannot be far from the minds of our Foreign Affairs authors, although their pens would be unlikely to develop such comparisons until closer to the climax.

The parallels with the interwar period are only accentuated by what we learn in 'China preys on American minds — The U.S. this week', Guardian Weekly (6 April 1997). Martin Walker describes the on-the-ground implementation of the engagement agenda. We are told of the Beijing-based U.S. Business Council, "a formidable group of U.S. executives whose corporate lobbies back in Washington have worked hard to ensure that no U.S. politician dare confront the engagement-trade-investment model." We are also reminded of "fat Chinese consultancy fees earned by those former secretaries of state, Dr. Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig." Clearly Foreign Affairs (Robert Ross) was providing philosophical background for what turns out to be an already operational corporatist agenda — an investment-intensive era parallel to that of the interwar years.

Interestingly, Mr. Walker casts moral derision on this money-grabbing behavior: "There ought to be scandal in the way U.S. corporations scurry to serve Beijing’s interests." He reports with explicit admiration some words of Newt Gingrich, delivered recently at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing:

Americans cannot remain silent about the basic lack of freedom — speech, religion, assembly, the press — in China. In the most basic sense, we are simply asking the Chinese government to enforce its own constitution.

Perhaps one can presume Gingrich is replaying the crowd-pleasing Churchill role: espouse the high moral ground, encourage a simmering pool of popular suspicion toward the future enemy, and wait in the wings for the moment of fame when the bugle finally sounds. Like Churchill, he would be seen as morally untainted (as regards what in the endgame is known as appeasement), although I imagine his constituency gets its share of Chinese opportunities in the interim. The interwar parallels are again underscored.

The article next reveals an interesting clue as to how the increasingly confrontational climate is to be spun in mass media doublespeak:

The Clash of Civilisations, the book by Harvard professor Sam Huntington, may not have hit the bestseller lists, but its dire warning of a 21st century rivalry between the liberal white folk and the Yellow Peril — sorry, the Confucian cultures — is underpinning the formation of a new political environment.

To adapt one of Mao’s subtler metaphors, Huntington’s Kultur-kampf is becoming, with stunning speed, the conceptual sea in which Washington’s policy-making fish now swim.

Mr. Walker lays out for us — and this seems to be the official mass-media party-line — the proposition that the only reason for the U.S. to be concerned about China is the question of human rights, and that the only other reason conflict might develop is due to some mythical notion of inevitable cultural warfare. Nowhere in this party-line is mentioned the fact, so obvious to not-so-mass-media Foreign Affairs, that Western balance-of-power interests (not human rights, culture, or ideology) will be the primary counter-consideration to investment opportunities, vis a vis China policy.

Teddy Roosevelt said "Walk softly, and carry a big stick." The more profitable version of this admonition, as carried out in the interwar years, in Iraq, and apparently again with China, is: "Profit through engagement, then deliver a just-in-time death blow."

The popular-consensus/media-propaganda version of history looks nothing like what we’ve been talking about. According to the consensus myth, WW II was caused by a pair of maniacal monsters — Fanatic-Yellow-Peril and Racist-Nazi-Demon — who were driven by disturbed psyches (personal and collective) more than normal national ambitions, and whom the other nations of the world were compelled to subdue — solely in the interests of freedom, democracy, and human rights. People don’t want to fight to obtain balance-of-power adjustments, but they’ll fight valiantly if they can be sold a cover story that taps into appropriate emotional-response triggers.

An offensive war by a modern democratic society must always be represented to the domestic population as being defensive, in pursuit of lofty goals, and necessitated by a maniacal aggressive enemy, or at least that’s been the pattern to date.

As previously with Nazi-Demon and Yellow-Peril, a new mythology is being prepared for us to justify the final round of major geopolitical adjustments. Sam Huntington, via his KulturKampf Clash of Civilisations, is the canonical proponent of this new mythology. As with the previous mythology, there is ample factual basis for its thesis — but its overall effect is to distract from the larger operative forces. Yes there are real cultural differences between China and an idealized West, but the cultural differences could be accommodated — what may not be so easily accommodated is China’s culture-independent nationalist aspirations. Balance-of-power realpolitik is not dead — not yet.

Kultur-Kampf is the mythology to be foisted on the public to cover the real motives behind the anticipated violent adjustment of great-power relationships — ie. the coercion of a destroyed and re-engineered China into the global system on globalist terms, by replay of the Japan-Germany unconditional-surrender scenario.

The propagation of a Kultur-Kampf Big Lie — especially with China being likened to the already demonized Arab states — provides a sound basis for evoking the emotional climate appropriate for war popularization. With the bass-drum of Kultur-Kampf beating a steady rhythm in the popular media, the pace can be jazzed up with juicy Chinese atrocity stories whenever necessary, and the warpath-kettle can be kept just below boil. This is astute war-preparedness, as regards strategic propaganda.

What, in fact, America (leading proponent of globalization) seems to be doing with China is to consciously replay the interwar scenario: profit maximally from trade and investments in China, encourage U.S. public opinion to maintain a simmering hostility toward what may become a future enemy, tacitly facilitate China’s military development, closely monitor developments — and most important — be sure that the U.S., together with its projected allies, maintains strategic dominance militarily. In this last regard, the U.S. may have skirted danger in WW II more closely than it will need to this time around.

This time around the U.S. is on a continual wartime footing, with fleets sufficient for simultaneous conflicts, nuclear submarines, satellite superiority, strategic missiles, and the new gadgets the Economist tells us about. This is a far cry from the comparative state of U.S. preparedness in the interwar years. And — due to the Grenada-Panama-Iraq precedents — the U.S. has field-tested formulas for arranging hostilities with favorable publicity at any time of its own choosing.

The first step in preparation for actual military engagement with China would be a demonization campaign, and it would need to be a globally effective campaign, not just for U.S. consumption. Need I point out how incredibly easy that campaign would be? Slave labor camps, all but outright genocide against minorities such as the Tibetans, killing off infant females, religious suppression, massacre of peaceful demonstrators, legions of political prisoners, no semblance of human rights or free press by Western standards, heartbreaking behavior, perhaps, toward Hong Kong, a dictatorial regime — the mix may change over time, but China will for quite a while be a very easy target for modern demonization campaigns.

The immediate war-initiation scenario might not be much different from that which brought the U.S. into WW II. Sinking a carrier task force would have the same emotional impact on the U.S. public as did the attack on Pearl Harbor, and no holds would then be barred the U.S. military by domestic opinion. We saw how China’s recent belligerency toward Taiwan (one of Bernstein and Munro’s seven flash points) resulted in the dispatch of American fleets which then flouted their electronic superiority to the chagrin of the Chinese navy and the embarrassment and frustrated anger of Chinese leaders.

A more assertive China with a more formidable military capability — and this is where we’re most likely heading — would make similar confrontations both more likely and more dangerous. And for the U.S. to back down from what it perceived as strategic challenges would be to yield to that very Chinese hegemony which Foreign Affairs informs us is categorically unacceptable to "American Interests."

The Combat Scenario; Hi-tech Arsenal Considered Mandatory

Let us consider the parameters of the hypothetically resulting military conflict. The U.S. strategy would have certain mandatory objectives, which one can presume, based on common sense and precedents, would include:

(1) no nuclear strikes tolerated on U.S. soil
(2) nuclear annihilation of China not desired
(3) tactical nukes in China OK
(4) land war in China out of the question
(5) unconditional Chinese surrender a must

For such a full-scale offensive, encumbered with such objectives, to be feasible, the U.S. would need to quickly achieve the same total mastery-of-theater that it obtained in Iraq. The U.S. could achieve its objectives only if it could suppress all air-defense measures, prevent China from launching strategic weapons, and have the unrestricted ability to pound China with cruise missiles and bombs — nuclear armed in the case of unusually large, hardened, or strategic targets.

China is a good bit bigger than Iraq, and would be much better prepared, and so the Desert Storm technology would need to be radically upscaled and refined. The race to re-invent C4 (hi-tech warfare) systems, as reported recently by the Economist and others, seems to be a straightforward strategic imperative for U.S. planners.

Armaments and public opinion are both being systematically prepared, apparently, for the anticipated conflict. There will be no time to build a thousand bombers and no dissension will be tolerated — when the decisive moment for action arises. When the "innocent" U.S. fleet is blown out of the seas, as it rushes, say, to protect Taiwan, Plan B (blitzkrieg warfare) must be ready for instant execution — there will be critical first-strike missions that cannot be allowed to fail. And once the show starts, the pace will not slacken.

It would have to be planned as a one-campaign war, a full-court press all the way. The modern warfare model is a blitzkrieg model, and we saw its field tests in Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. All weapons systems, including those of the endgame, must be in full readiness at conflict start. We can therefore expect C4 development to continue to accelerate over the coming months, and expect at least one additional test prior to the big event, timed to suit the requirements of systems evaluation more than any real geopolitical emergency. Hence the media (and U.S. foreign policy) endeavors to keep demonization quotients at chronically high levels for Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea — so that a sizable weapons test can be arranged quickly and conveniently whenever needed.

After the final war — or, perhaps, after China submits peacefully to globalist authority out of an unexpected prudence — we will enter the era which some prematurely claim we have already entered — a post-national context in which other primary forces will be allowed to shape the global architecture in new ways, as fades the structuring force of competitive nationalism. The "other" structuring force, it should be clear, is megacorp-dominated globalism.

(Megacorp: n. large transnational corporation)

The Global Megacorp State

The current world system, now coming to an end, is an anarchistic (not centrally controlled) one — based on nation states, shifting alliances, imperialism, warfare, and trade. Just as capitalist monopolies constitute the natural final stage of an anarchistic economic system, so political/military monopolies constitute the natural final stage of an anarchistic political system.

Thus over the past few centuries, as technology has been knitting a global infrastructure, we’ve seen ever more powerful empires vying for dominance. At the end of WW II, the system finally reached the stage where a single nation-state had achieved an effective near-monopoly of political/military power, cold-war rhetoric notwithstanding.

When a system reaches its final stage, that stage may be stable or unstable. If it is stable (e.g. ancient Incas and Egypt), then that system may persist until outside events intervene. But if it is unstable, as happened with Rome, then the result will be either degeneration/fragmentation or else the birth of a new organizing principle — a principle strong enough to bind together the elements brought together by the predecessor system — but a principle that adds greater stability.

Within the context of the anarchistic nation-state world system, the all-but-implemented final stage is a Global Imperial America. But if such were to be formally instituted, it would be highly unstable. Uncle Sam trying to rule a traditionally-structured world empire would make the Vietnam debacle look like a Sunday picnic.

It is a tribute to the acumen (I didn’t say wisdom) of our world leaders that they were well aware of this final-stage instability, and that they took effective steps to institute a new organizing principle.

Preparations began during WW II (FDR & Churchill’s United Nations Declaration) for the first-ever hierarchical world system. Since that time, by means (both overt and covert) of treaty arrangements, economic/political pressures, and military interventions, the U.S. has used its dominant position to guide, bribe, and coerce the world into its current globalist phase.

Globalization brings the necessary new organizing principle, a principle stable enough to create and maintain a new world order — at least for a while. The new principle is capitalist/corporate hegemony, and the infrastructure which supports it is the collection of transnational corporations, with their astronomical resources and control of the global economy.

To a large extent, the megacorps already are the world system. They operate globally, they directly control global finances and much of the world’s economic activity, and they’ve put together a set of mechanisms (WTO et al) that regulates, on a harmonious collaborative basis, the rules of their collective game.

Globalization, at its heart, is the yielding of political sovereignty to this proven corporate system — acknowledging that nation-states have evolved themselves into a historical cul de sac. If the corporate elite can keep the world-system trains running, so to speak, that seems to be preferable, to many, to the uncertain future of nation-state political developments.

The price to be paid — disenfranchisement and exploitation of the citizenry — is not clearly marked on the price tag of globalization. As the price becomes widely evident — as it already is in the Third World — instability will arise from citizen unrest.

Police-state structures are being rapidly implemented (more about this later) to contain such unrest in the First World, and have already been deployed in the Third World. Meanwhile, the soporific mind-control mass media carries the primary burden of population control.

The transition to megacorp rule is being accomplished in the First World by the dismantlement of national infrastructures, the bankrupting of governments, and the imposition of treaties which officially grant authority over the world’s major economic and trade (and other) policies to corporate-dominated commissions (WTO et al).

This transition program was launched in the early 1980’s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, acting as crowd-pleasing standard bearers for the corporate-sponsored agenda. With the rhetorical flags of "efficiency" and "reform" flying high, the wheels were set in motion for dismantlement (privatization and program cutbacks), bankruptcy (corporate tax cuts and reckless borrowing), and transfer of social and economic sovereignty ("free trade" and GATT). This program is rapidly spreading, with occasional temporary setbacks, from its original US-UK base to the other leading Western nations.

In most of the Third World, corporate domination has been a fact of life for some time. Over the past several years the IMF, using as leverage the immense Third-World debt burden, has been increasingly assuming the authority to dictate, at a micro level, economic and social policies in Third World nations. In India, for example, many public officials take their instructions directly from the international commissions, rather than bothering to go through the central government at all.

The transition program for First-World nations, as outlined above, has the effect of downgrading the First World to Third-World status. By ceding control of their own infrastructure (privatization), by undertaking unmanageable levels of debt, and by subscribing to disempowering treaties, First World nations are voluntarily caging themselves into a permanently weakened position. Regardless of which future governments might be elected, and regardless of what agendas they might espouse, First World nations will find themselves as powerless to overrule the dictates of the corporate commissions as do Third-World nations today.

Already the commissions, and the corporations which they serve, are beginning to lay down the law to the First World. The WTO just this month overruled the EU’s ban on U.S. hormone-treated beef, and the Ethyl Corporation is using the NAFTA agreement to sue Canada for $251 million over a new Canadian environmental law. Earlier a Canadian no-fault insurance law was repealed, in preference to defending against expensive litigation by a U.S. insurance firm. Under the guise of "free trade," we can expect domestic social, economic, and environmental policies to be increasingly dictated to the First World by the new globalist regime, as has already become commonplace in the Third World.

The policy agenda of the WTO, therefore, should be of serious concern to citizens everywhere, given that it is the agenda they’ll be living under. That agenda is being determined totally un-democratically — the membership of the commissions is dominated by megacorp representatives — and is being drawn up outside of public view. The agenda is not entirely secret, however, and what is known about it is more than a little alarming.

A highlight or two from this agenda will serve to illustrate the magnitude of the problem. The Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex), for example, is taking charge of worldwide food and drug regulations. We learn from the FDA’s world-wide-web site that "Since its inception, Codex has developed in excess of 200 Commodity Standards, more than 40 codes and guidelines, about 2,500 pesticide/commodity maximum limits, and has reviewed the safety of over 500 food additives and contaminants." Codex is dominated by the largest pharmaceutical companies, and it is their profit interests that will determine — without any meaningful review — the health and safety of all of us. Among the radical measures being pursued by Codex is the outlawing worldwide of all non-prescription vitamins and health products.

Scott Nova and Michelle Sforza-Roderick of Preamble Center for Public Policy, Washington, D.C., describe the work of another commission:

Virtually unreported, the latest and potentially most dangerous of these agreements is now under negotiation at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The purpose of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), as the proposed pact is known, is to grant transnational investors the unrestricted ‘right’ to buy, sell and move businesses, and other assets, wherever they want, whenever they want. To achieve this goal, the MAI would ban a wide range of regulatory laws now in force around the globe and preempt future efforts to hold transnational corporations and investors accountable to the public. The agreement’s backers (the United States and the European Union) intend to seek assent from the 29 industrial countries that comprise the OECD and then push the new accord on the developing world.

The scope of the issues being addressed, the radical nature of the policies being adopted, and the pace of the proceedings should, by rights, make the work of these commissions one of the hottest news stories of the day. But the story shows up not on the front page, but, if at all, in the business pages. The commissions have no need to build public constituencies for their endeavors, since they are outside the province of democratic process, hence the corporate mass media has no reason to inform the public about what’s going on.

Similarly, as the elite-controlled multinational force takes over control of international affairs, the media has recently announced a planned reduction in coverage of international news. Purportedly reflecting changes in viewer preferences, the reduced coverage can more reasonably be taken as a verification of the fact that military interventions are now to be decided above the level national governments, and that popular rabble-rousing for such activity will no longer be required.

What I’m describing, in case it’s not apparent, is the death of democracy. After a brief two-centuries of existence, democracy is being superseded by a corporate variety of neo-feudalism. Weakened and subservient nation-states are becoming hardly more than fiefdoms, whose governments have little role other than to keep the population in line and extract tribute (personal taxes) to be passed on to the corporate overlords as repayment of debt. All foreign policy and activity, and most domestic policy and activity, is to be managed offline from the democratic process by the lords of the manor — corporations and their representative agencies.

The democratic institutions themselves may continue to exist, with elections, legislatures, courts, etc., but the governments are being disempowered, and the whole notion of meaningful popular sovereignty via representative democracy is rapidly becoming only a nostalgic memory.

Thus the anarchistic nation-state world system is being replaced by a hierarchical world system with the WTO et al at the apex of the social and economic power pyramid, and the US-NATO axis at the apex of the military power pyramid — both controlled by the same elite corporate interests. This leaves us, however, with an anarchistic economic system. To be sure the WTO et al lay down the ground rules as a central authority, but the operating economy itself — who owns what, which development projects are to be undertaken, whether beans or corn will be planted, who will merge with whom, etc. — is an anarchistic competitive game.

The endgame of this economic scenario is readily predictable from numerous historical precedents: a small number of monopoly operators will emerge and dominate each industry and market. Just as competitive nationalism leads ultimately, as we have seen, to a single dominant clique, so does unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism lead ultimately to fraternities of monopoly operators.

The classic example, of course, is the Seven-Sisters gang of major oil companies — transnationals long before their time. More recently we’ve seen a dramatic spate of mega-mergers in the media and communications industries — creating whole new merged-industry categories of commerce. One could also mention the airline industry, retail food chains, book sellers, discount bulk-shopping chains, and many others. The advantages of scale — not only cost savings but the ability to control markets and pressure suppliers — are so overwhelming that large monopolies do inevitably form, force the development of similar competitors, and drive everyone else into marginal market niches.

This is a familiar pattern. It ran rampant in the latter half of the nineteenth century, leading not only to extreme wealth and power concentration, but also to wide-scale corruption and chronic economic instability, signalled by frequent and severe depressions. The lesson became clear to everyone at the time that capitalism’s invisible hand works best if government creates a level playing field and forces competition on the markets. The regulations which evolved from that hard-earned lesson, and which succeeded in stabilizing Western economies, are the very regulations which are being wholesale abandoned as part of the globalization process. History is being totally ignored, while "market forces" is being touted as a brave new idea, whose beneficent economic efficacy should be self-evident to all — a blatant example of Orwellian historical revisionism, accomplished by omission.

The disenfranchisement, exploitation, and instability that is in store for everyone is bound to lead, as noted earlier, to chronic social unrest in the First World as well as the Third. In the meantime, social services, unemployment, infrastructure maintenance, and crime have all been greatly worsened by the intentional bankrupting of governments. Already we’ve seen massive protests of globalist measures in the First World, including Australia, France, and Germany.

This prognosis for the future may appear speculative and perhaps even surprising to some readers, but it has been understood for some time by those pushing globalism. In preparation for containing the expected increase in social unrest, there has been a decades-long concerted campaign to appropriately re-invent law enforcement across a broad front: more prisons, mandatory sentences, paramilitary police forces, significantly reduced civil protections, increasingly arbitrary conspiracy laws, diminished right to trial by jury, routine surveillance of persons, transactions, and communications, and, last but not least, the development of a prison-labor industry.

Not only can a greater quantity of troublesome individuals be processed by these modernized crime-management systems, not only can those individuals be put to profitable use while incarcerated, and not only does the criminal justice system drive a profitable industry in its own right, but the new enforcement regime is particularly well designed to monitor and disband any politically-oriented organization that might threaten to rouse the population in protest to its disenfranchised, serf-like status.

It has been a testament to the effectiveness of media spin-masters that this wholesale installation of a police state — a globalist trend being led as usual by the U.S. and U.K. — has been largely a stealth affair. Under cover of the mania over drugs, crime, and terrorism, the various repressive measures have been adopted one after the other, each time with debate — and hence public awareness — stifled by some media-linked crime or act of terrorism that was receiving intense news coverage at the time. One need only recall the Oklahoma bombing and how that event helped rush through the far-reaching Anti Terrorism Bill, or the World Trade Center bombing and the new precedents set there for conspiracy convictions, or the TWA 800 crash and the invasive airport security measures that were promptly adopted.

The point is not that the problems of crime, etc., aren’t real — it’s that the "solutions" don’t solve the problems, couldn’t reasonably be expected to solve the problems, and have "collateral" consequences that move us systematically toward a police state. This process may appear to be a case of incremental, if faulty, responses to difficult problems — indeed it’s been designed to appear that way — but it has been in fact the very preparation — and none too soon — necessary to manage popular unrest under the rapidly foreclosing globalist regime.

This then is the overall picture of our globalist future: nations — possibly devolved in size — reduced to police-state, tax-collecting fiefdoms, paying tribute to outside-the-law corporate overlords — who in the meantime are organizing themselves into global monopolies while they operate the world’s affairs. One is reminded of the evidently prophetic visions of such futuristic films as Rollerball and Blade Runner, with their haunting images of megacorp splendor contrasted with social squalor, repressive police, and political bankruptcy.

If at a future time some nation might decide to re-assert its sovereignty through repudiation of treaties and debts and the expropriation of corporate facilities, then the multilateral force can make short shrift of such boldness, much as the U.S. has done for decades in Latin America. That which globalism joins together, none may dare set asunder.

There’s a proud array of soldiers -
what do they round your door?
They guard our master’s granaries
from the thin hands of the poor.
- Lady Jane Wilde (1826-96): The Famine Years

It is perhaps ironic that the final end of major warfare — an achievement right-thinking people for centuries have yearned for — seems destined to usher in an ominous new Dark Millennium. Be careful what you ask for, warned the sage, you might get more than you bargained for. So true. But there is a ray of hope: corporate globalism is not the only possible future. It is not mandated by natural forces — media propaganda notwithstanding — but is the intentional result of think-tank research, elite planning, and corporate political activism.

For a few years yet — very few — democratic institutions may retain enough power that an aroused citizenry could achieve political ascendency in their several nations in time to moderate the plunge into a global laissez-faire corporatist regime. The time is running short for political movements of sufficient breadth and vision to emerge from the sea of vague dissatisfaction and provide a focus for citizen awakening. Any potential leaders and organizers who want to make a difference had better focus on the Main Problem and seek, with others, to form broad, inclusive, coalition movements around reclaiming democracy, reasserting national sovereignty, and restructuring the relationship (tax and regulatory) between governments and corporations.

...Can’t add my name into the fight when I’m gone
And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.
- Phil Ochs: When I’m Gone

Richard Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, currently lives and writes in Wexford, Ireland. He currently runs the Cyberjournal "list" on the Internet. Email: rkmoore@iol.ie Address: PO Box 26, Wexford, Ireland