A brilliant piece from John Laughland in
The Spectator in 2005 goes a long way to explain the messianic policies of "regime change" pursued by even supposedly "Conservative" government's in Britain and liberals in the USA and the "socialist" government of Hollande in France. The sentences in bold are mine.
....the way in which the West has itself adopted many of the old
nostrums of communism, and especially the twin doctrines of revolution
and internationalism.
Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western
political lexicon. Fifteen years ago it still carried — at least for
conservatives — the negative connotations of ‘Bolshevik’, ‘sexual’ and
‘French’. Not any more.
The myth of revolution now wields such a strong
hold over our collective consciousness that, with the compulsiveness of
children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept at
face value fairy tales about revolutions in a faraway country of which
we know nothing. Being tabula rasa for us, t
hese countries are the
perfect backdrop on which to project our own fantasies: these tales
invariably follow the same formulaic sequence, in which a dishonest or
authoritarian or brutal regime is overthrown by ‘people power’, and
everyone lives happily ever after.
Recent years have seen a spate of such ‘revolutions’. The overthrow
of Slobodan Milosevic on 5 October 2000 in Belgrade; the overthrow of
the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, in the ‘rose revolution’ of
November 2003; the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine last Christmas; the
violent overthrow of the president of Kyrgyzstan in March; the uprising
in the Uzbek city of Andijan in May — all these are presented as
spontaneous outbursts of righteous popular indignation.
Perhaps
authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are
brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song. But
before
the fall of communism, ‘revolution’ and ‘people power’ were considered
just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime’s appeal to its
own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister
reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have
become more naive, and have started to take these same two-dimensional
archetypes seriously.
It often happens that, after the event, reports reveal that things
were not as spontaneous as was believed at the time. In the case of
Ukraine, for instance, it is now a matter of public record that the
Americans poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko, and
that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans’ side,
playing a key role in stagemanaging the whole charade.
To be sure, the
fact that secret services may be involved does not mean that the people
on the streets themselves do not believe in the rightness of their
cause, or that the events are the result of manipulation alone. But the
simplistic terms in which these ‘revolutions’ are presented by our
media, and believed by us at the time, are so strong that they reveal
more about our own inner fantasies and desires, and about the true
nature of our own political culture, than they do about the countries
themselves.
In particular, they reveal that
the West has fallen in love with the
myth of revolution. If Chairman Mao once said that ‘Marxism consists of a
thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: “It is right to
rebel”’, that sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political
orthodoxy. One of the key catchphrases of George Bush’s presidency has
been the eminently Trotskyite concept of world revolution: on 6 November
2003 the American President specifically said, ‘
The establishment of a
free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in
the global democratic revolution.’ In his second inaugural speech, on 20
January, Bush announced nothing less than a programme of political
emancipation for the whole planet — he said that America was pursuing
‘the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world’.
George Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his
closest advisers, especially the neoconservatives, come from what can
only be described as a post-Trostkyite background. The original Marxist
plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and
this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It famously
came up against the buffers of Stalin’s alternative proposal to build
socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world
revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938. Within
two years, Irving Kristol — the man who was later to be the founding
father of the neoconservative movement which so dominates the Bush
administration — joined it. Kristol’s own influence has been immense and
his son, William, is now one of America’s most influential neocons. But
Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in
1983 he wrote that he was still proud of it.
The same goes for numerous leading lights in the neoconservative
movement.
In 1996 Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute,
one of the leading ideologues of the war on terror, coined the phrase
‘global democratic revolution’ — in the subtitle of a book in which he
attacked Bill Clinton for being a ‘counter-revolutionary’. The book’s
title, Freedom Betrayed, is an obvious allusion to Trostky’s own 1937
account of his break with Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed.
Another
leading neocon, David Horowitz, himself a former communist, published
The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits in 2000: the book
was given a warm write-up by Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief of staff, as
‘a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield from an
experienced warrior’ even though Horowitz quotes Lenin approvingly in
it: ‘You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political
debate. You can only do it by following Lenin’s injunction:
“In
political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument,
but to wipe him from the face of the earth.”’
In the same vein Eric
Hobsbawm, the veteran Marxist historian, wrote at the end of June that
‘At least one passionate ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only
half in jest: “After all, this is the only chance of supporting world
revolution that looks like coming my way.”’
If such comparisons seem outlandish, it is precisely because we in
the West have failed to grasp the true nature of Marxism-Leninism. We
think of communism as being all about state ownership of the means of
production and central planning: in fact, Karl Marx advocated neither.
Instead, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the ‘soul of Marxism’ lies
in something called dialectical materialism. Derived from Hegel and
ultimately Heraclitus, this doctrine holds that the world is in a
constant state of flux, that nothing is absolutely true or false, and
that everything is connected to everything else.
Permanent revolution is
consequently the natural state of reality, and hence of politics.
Because flux is the natural state, Marx, Engels and Lenin all reasoned
that all fixed forms of political association, i.e., the state, were
oppressive, and that men would not be free until the state itself had
‘withered away’.
How was this withering away of the state to occur? For Marx and Engels the answer was clear: world capitalism
would do the trick. The two authors of The Communist Manifesto eulogised
the unstoppable revolutionary force of world capitalism — what we now
call ‘globalisation’. They were convinced that capitalism was an
unstoppable revolutionary force; that it would overthrow all the
existing structures of nation, state and family; and that it would usher
in a politically and economically united world. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ they
enthused, ‘cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that
is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned.’
For Marx and Engels, indeed, the key to the revolutionary power of
the bourgeoisie lay precisely in its international and cosmopolitan
nature. ‘To the great chagrin of Reactionists,’ they wrote, ‘the
bourgeoisie has drawn from under the feet of industry the national
ground on which it stood. In place of the old local and national
self-seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.’
Globalisation, in
other words. Engels argued explicitly that the atomisation and
deracination caused by international capitalism was the necessary
precursor to worldwide emancipation. ‘The disintegration of mankind into
a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms,’ he wrote, ‘means the
destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular
interests and is the last necessary step towards the free and
spontaneous association of men.’
It is well known that Marxists believe political arrangements to be a
mere ‘superstructure’ determined by the underlying economic reality.
‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord,’ Marx wrote, ‘the
steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.’ After the fall of
the Berlin Wall, when the division between East and West was overcome,
Western ideologues of globalisation used this same Marxist argument to
claim that things like the internet and the fax machine meant that the
sovereign state belonged in the dustbin of history. They then used this
alleged withering away of the state to argue in favour of a one-world
political regime, in which statehood would have to give way to the
superior claims of universal human rights. Tony Blair justified Nato’s
attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 by saying that the right to bomb a country
for alleged human rights abuses derived from globalisation. ‘People are
recognising that if there is a serious problem with the Brazilian
economy, it develops into a serious problem for the British economy,’ he
said. ‘It is similar with security problems.’
The neocons hated Bill Clinton for his pragmatic refusal to follow
Tony Blair’s logic through to its conclusion — for instance, when he
withdrew from chaotic Somalia rather than carry the burden of
nation-building. George Bush has done the opposite. He seldom allows
reason of state, or any other practical consideration, to befog his own
ideological clarity. In his second inauguration speech,
Bush pronounced
the word ‘freedom’ 28 times, the word ‘free’ seven times and the word
‘liberty’ 15 times: he sounded as if he was singing the Internationale.
Bush makes a highly moralistic appeal to universal values, which he says
America embodies and which he insists ‘are right and true for all
people everywhere’. ‘Freedom,’ he has said, ‘is the non-negotiable
demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person — in every
civilisation.’ Laced as it is with religious (often esoteric and even
apocalyptic) vocabulary — the American President frequently says that
freedom is God’s plan for mankind — Bush’s messianic political discourse
recalls the Marxist movement which swept through Latin America in the
1970s, conjugating God and politics, and which was known as ‘liberation
theology’.
It is this promise to emancipate the whole of mankind which so
endears George Bush to a phalanx of former Marxist ideologues like
Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill and David
Aaronovitch. People who in their youth idolised the worker ‘who has no
country’ have little difficulty identifying with today’s cosmopolitan
ideology of globalisation, or with George Bush’s internationalism.
Hitchens has defended his own surprising work with the neoconservatives
by saying, ‘I feel much more like I used to in the 1960s, working with
revolutionaries’, and he understands that George Bush’s policy of regime
change is by definition going to be supported by revolutionaries. As he
pointed out, with his customary clarity, in a recent debate on the
Today programme with his brother, Peter, ‘It is right, I think, that
conservatives oppose regime change: that is what conservatives do.’
Support for the programme of world revolution also explains the
support given by ten Eastern European heads of government, nearly all of
them former communist apparatchiks who, almost alone in the world,
lined up obediently to sign an open letter of support for the impending
Iraq war in February 2003
.
‘Dissidents’ in Eastern Europe — broadly
speaking, the people who are now in power — were not anti-communists at
all, but instead ‘critical’ Marxists who worked within the communist
system to reform it, not destroy it. Bush’s announced fight ‘against
tyranny’ is of obvious appeal to those who used to rally around the old
communist cry of ‘anti-fascism’, which in turn was largely a slogan
expressing leftist hostility to the nation and the state, both of which
are now deeply unpopular concepts in the West.
Indeed, it is a striking indication of the dominance of left-wing
modes of thought in the West that the supreme political insult in the
new world order is ‘authoritarian’. Authority is, by definition, a
conservative notion — and that is why it is universally reviled in the
West today. Without exception, every single political leader whom the
West has removed, or tried to remove, in the last decade and a half has
been labelled ‘authoritarian’ or ‘nationalist’, as if these right-wing
vices were the only political sin. This malediction is bandied about
even when the leaders so attacked are in fact old lefties like Slobodan
Milosevic, Alexander Lukashenko or Saddam Hussein.
In short, any state which pursues a policy of national independence
will soon find itself in the West’s cross-hairs. The Clintonite doctrine
that there are such things as ‘rogue states’, which has been
effortlessly adopted by George W. Bush, means precisely this. There is
an international and a domestic aspect to this hostility to the state:
internationally, George Bush’s ‘forward strategy of freedom’ —
predicated as it is on the assumption that states have a right to enjoy
their national sovereignty only under certain conditions — entails
support for the anti-sovereignist dictates of punitive supranational
law. In internal politics, the anti-state Marxist-Hegelian doctrine of
‘civil society’ has become a central plank of Western thinking, at least
for states it wishes to control.
In Eastern Europe, for instance,
supposed ‘non-governmental organisations’ are invariably presented as
being more authentic and objective representatives of popular opinion
than the established, public, law-based structures of the state. This
applies even when the so-called NGOs are in fact front organisations
funded by Western governments, as is often the case. Indeed, the mere
activity of ‘opposition’; is, by itself, often elevated to a sort of political sainthood, as if
the exercise of authority and power were intrinsically sinful. In one
egregious case, in Georgia, the task of counting the votes in the
January 2004 presidential election was given to just such a private NGO,
with the established state authorities simply sidelined.
Like Marxists, indeed, and like many of his European friends, George
Bush appears to believe both that freedom is an ineluctable ‘force of
history’ and also that it requires constant struggle to achieve it. He
argues, like Hegel, Marx’s precursor, that humanity is one, and that a
free state like the USA is not really free if other states live under
tyranny. In his mind, old-fashioned American Puritan millenarianism
marries easily with the missionary mentality of world revolutionists.
‘The survival of liberty in our land,’ he said in January, ‘increasingly
depends on the success of liberty in other lands.’
A true conservative,
by contrast, would say that there is much evil in the outside world —
and that the duty of a statesman is to hold it at bay.
George Orwell is rightly credited with predicting a great deal, yet
it is an indication of how far leftwards the West has travelled that his
key prediction is often overlooked.
Orwell saw that the Cold War would
end on the basis of a convergence between communism and capitalism — the
very predicament in which we now find ourselves. At the end of Animal
Farm the farmer, who symbolises the capitalist West, returns to the farm
and plays cards with the pigs, who symbolise communism. The shivering
creatures outside ‘looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from
pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was
which’.
