2-19-07, 9:44 am
Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich Coral Springs, Florida, 2006.
Dedicated to the late Karen Talbot and introduced by Michael Parenti, Greg Elich's Strange Liberators is a sad and powerful book that that grows stronger in its critique of U.S. and “Western” imperialism as it literally follows imperialism from Iraq to North Korea to dismembered Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe, comparing what Americans and Europeans are being told as to what is happening to the people in these disparate countries.
The phrase Strange Liberators, as many may know, comes from Martin Luther King's famous speech against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York in 1967. Elich follows not only King's larger anti-imperialist vision but also his method, to speak truth to the people who are being systematically lied to by a power structure about what is really happening and why it is happening.
Elich begins with a short chapter on the “war on terror” and shows that the battle against Al Qaeda after the U.S. invasion, such as it was, was largely left to Afghan war lords while the U.S. had other objectives, particularly the establishment of bases against China. (Americans forget that Afghanistan, while lacking natural resources, was long a battleground between great powers, the British and Czarist Russian empires in the late 19th early 20th centuries, because of its strategic importance.)
Iraq has great natural resources and Elich shows the well-known corporate profiteering that accompanied the invasion. He also shows the less well known privatization policies that the U.S. occupation has launched and the largely unknown facts that billions of dollars received by U.S. contractors were from Iraqi, not direct U.S. funds.
On the invasion itself, the looting of Iraqi cultural antiquities, which Elich quotes one archeologist as calling “the lobotomy of an entire culture,” is highlighted in one of Strange Liberators best chapters. In general, this looting is also well-known, but its specifics are not. The heroism of the National Museum staff is contrasted with the indifference of the U.S. military leaders (who had oil properties to protect) and the U.S. occupation authorities' attempts to use media to downplay the events, especially Donald Rumsfeld's so what comment, “stuff happens.”
After three days of looting in which thousands of objects were stolen, the staff managed to return to the museum and post signs that U.S. troops were inside--a lie, but one that helped dissuade looters, even though the looting continued in many places and
Elich also deals with the global antiquities black market in which vast sums are exchanged. In Iraq, this looting was a very big business it which organized looters used trucks, even bulldozers, as armed guards protected those with the knowledge to find and steal valuable materials from any interference. “The same philosophy of greed and individual acquisitiveness at the expense of the public good, “ Elich concludes, “lies behind both the antiquities trade and plans that call for the privatization and sell off of Iraqi owned state firms to Western corporations.”
Elich then examines the North Korean nuclear dispute in which he shows the Bush administration's hostility to the agreement reached in 1994 with the North Korean government by the Clinton administration and to any serious negotiations with North Korea before the present controversy over North Korea's nuclear energy and weapons program began.
Elich also shows that operational plans for a war on the Korean peninsula have existed for a long time and are updated every two years. Before the present nuclear controversy began, Bush in 2002 named Korea along with Iraq and Iran a charter member of the “Axis of Evil” and also called upon the Pentagon to become more “flexible” i.e., to broaden, the situations in which it would use nuclear weapons, including retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, destruction underground facilities not amenable to conventional bombing (which many saw as aimed at North Korea's underground installations) and responses “in the event of surprising military developments,” which could possibly mean anything the Bush administration wanted it to mean.
That these policies were good reasons why the North Koreans would see the Bush administration as seeking to undermine existing agreements for an attack on them should surprise no one, given the history of the Korean peninsula since the Korean war of 1950-1953.
That the Bush administration also acted to sabotage negotiations over and over again, to isolate North Korea against the wishes of South Korea and other regional states (even if that meant the possibility of a nuclear war which would devastate the Korean peninsula) is highlighted by Elich in a number of clearly written, tightly argued chapters. If there is a “rogue state” willing to risk nuclear war and threatening East Asia with nuclear war, it is clearly the Bush administration.
Elich then deals with civil war ravaged Yugoslavia, traveling to Serbia with Jasenovac Research Institute (JRI) director Barry Lituchy and highlighting the devastation in the region in both material and human terms. As a member of the Board of JRI, which is named after the Jasenovac concentration camp, the third leading death camp in Europe and seeks to educate people about the WWII Holocaust in Yugoslavia (I am also a board member) let me state here that Greg Elich has long fought against the U.S.-NAT0 bloc forces and states whose sanctions and bombings and troop landings were essential to the destruction of Yugoslavia as a multinational federation of socialist republics.
In Strange Liberators, Elich also compares also the cynicism and the lies used in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia; for example NAT0's attack on the Milosevic led Yugoslav government for “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians (driving them into Albania and Macedonia), using such charges which saturated Western media as an excuse for massive bombing which did, in a Catch-22 sense, bring about the exodus of Albanians from the bombed regions which NATO was claiming to oppose.
Elich shows the role of NAT0 troops in Kosovo in disarming Serbians and looking to be generous the other way as Albanian KLA fighters carried out extensive atrocities against them and drove them from their homes.
The KLA's involvement with international drug traffickers and other organized crime groups and rightwing Muslim “holy warriors” aka “freedom fighters” aka “terrorists” while reported in a very limited way in U.S. media, was never highlighted or analyzed. Elich does both, along with showing the role of the CIA in training and aiding the KLA, some of whose leaders were descendants of powerful regional families that fought on the side of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in WWII.
Elich also highlights the persecution of Roma people (Gypsies) who generally sided with the Yugoslav government, since their rights had only been respected in socialist Yugoslavia. It should be noted that Muslims and ethnic Albanians who refused to go along with the KLA were also victims of atrocities
What Elich shows with great power is the double standard the justified both the intervention and its aftermath. The Serbian, Roma, and political victims of rightist Croatian, Bosnian, and Albanian secessionists were largely invisible or at very best minimized in Euro-American media while the victims of Yugoslav and ethnic Serbian forces, including rightist Serbian paramilitaries, were both taken out of context, and often had their numbers exaggerated. After the dismemberment, the NATO bloc victors concentrated on punishing Yugoslav and Serbian officials accused of war crimes at the Hague while the Croatian government often punished those who exposed atrocities committed by Croatian officials and the Hague officials handled non Serbians accused of war crimes at best in a half-heated and largely token manner.
Elich concludes with an analysis of Zimbabwe, where he emphasizes the long colonial policy of expelling Africans from the land and the continued control of the most productive lands by white farmers which is largely invisible in U.S, media. While I would be more critical of the Mugabe government than Elich is, he clearly shows that the “democratic opposition” in Zimbabwe which European and U.S. media have hailed is not so much “democratic” but an opposition amenable to the developed capitalist countries in what they want in Zimbabwe Elich also shows that these same states and their media were perfectly happy to praise the Mugabe government in the past when it was giving their corporations and the IMF-World Bank system which represents those corporations what they wanted. Finally, he introduces evidence to show that they are willing, as in “the good old days” of the cold war, to work with the “democratic opposition” to launch coups and establish any regime, however dictatorial it will be in practice, to serve their economic interests.
In his introduction, Michael Parenti writes that “the difference between what U.S. citizens think their rulers are doing and what these rulers are actually doing is one of the greatest propaganda achievements in history.”
Greg Elich's engaging and acute analytical work displays that “achievement” in its present forms from the Near East to East Asia to the European Balkans to Southern Africa. What the U.S. government and its allies are trying to do, what connects up these very different societies, is “nothing less than the extension of Third World conditions to ever widening areas of the globe, with a growing gulf between the wealthy few and impoverished many.”
You won't find reviews of Strange Liberators in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the New York Review of Books, and if you did, I am sure they would be disparaging. But you should buy this book and read it and ask your libraries to purchase it. It is should a must read for all progressive people who want to strengthen their understanding of contemporary imperialism and thus their ability not to be fooled by its propaganda.
