Nick Fredman
On August 8, Gerard Henderson, weekly columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, attacked 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly (as he does regularly) and others for promoting the recent Hiroshima Day rallies' opposition to Israel's war on Lebanon, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Henderson implied the organisers were liars and hypocrites for not also denouncing Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iraqi resistance as, he claims, to "genuinely support peace, and to genuinely reject conflict, it is necessary to oppose the actions of both sides".
Henderson's arguments are illogical: he goes on to write about justifiable wars, a category that makes it quite clear that it is possible to struggle for peace while supporting one side in a conflict. Any objective analysis of the Middle East would indicate that the overwhelming burden of fault for the current war lies with the Israeli state's policies of occupation and incursion in Lebanon and apartheid-like oppression of Palestinians.
Most mainstream conservative commentators have no idea of the causes of war and therefore of how war could be avoided. They seem to think war results from the nasty, or irrational, policies of particular leaders who either initiate conflict or are so bad that war is a justifiable response.
In reality, war is fundamentally the result of the economic and social structures that make up the world today. In particular the sharp division between wealthy industrialised states in Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, and the rest of the world that has significantly lower levels of development and per capita income (although there are huge differences between partially developed states and those in absolute poverty).
This division is not just the result of historically differing patterns of development, the effects of which could theoretically be ameliorated over time, but is constantly reproduced through the operation of the global market and particular policies. Although the rich countries provide the poorer countries with around US$50 billion of aid each year (with many strings attached), debt servicing, unequal terms of trade and profit repatriation means that there is, in fact, an annual net flow of around US$200 billion from the poor countries to the rich.
In his 1916 book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin saw a new era in the development of capitalism maturing towards the end of the 19th century. Ruthless competition in the marketplace meant that the earlier era of free trade was moving towards a system of "imperialism" or "monopoly capitalism", characterised by giant corporations dominating particular industries, a merging between industrial and financial capital, and closer ties between growing states and the big companies.
Monopoly capitalism was imperialist because increasing competition drove the rich powers to rapidly colonise the rest of the world to secure raw materials and markets for finished goods. Feverish competition also meant that the brutal, inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I was inevitable.
The system Lenin described fundamentally continues today. While virtually all of the former European colonies have won political independence, economic dependence continues, exacerbating the problems of repressive and corrupt governments, and ethnic and national conflicts and oppressions in many poor countries.
While the emergence of the United States as a global cop with massive military dominance has reduced open inter-imperialist conflict, the need for rival corporate gangs to dominate markets and resources continues, together with the intrigues, coups and proxy wars — a key feature of the policy of the rich countries towards the poor in recent decades.
With the collapse of the highly flawed counter-power that was the Soviet Union, military intervention by the rich countries has become more open, and there has been somewhat of a return to direct colonial control over a number of countries, such as Iraq.
This process is often given a "humanitarian" gloss. But pro-imperialist ideologue Thomas Friedmann was more honest when he wrote in 1999, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas ... And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps."
At the time, Friedmann argued that "globalisation" (the latest phase of imperialism) would solve the problem of war through peaceful trade and development; that no two democracies and no two countries with McDonald's junk-food outlets will ever fight a war. Now that Israel, a parliamentary democracy with McDonald's outlets, is brutally pounding Lebanon, also a parliamentary democracy with McDonald's outlets, the civilising mission of "globalisation" is looking even more threadbare.
Israel is a massively subsidised proxy for US imperialism in the Middle East, where oil reserves make political and economic dominance vital. Israel's role in the world order necessitates the oppression of Palestinians and interference in neighbouring countries. That's the fundamental cause of the present war and the reason why we can fight for peace by demanding that Israel and the US stop the war, and by supporting those resisting Israeli aggression.