9] Destroy the Box!

Destroy the Box!


Previously I wrote on the continuing special friendship between Anwar Ibrahim, The Pentagon specifically, and the American Imperial Power in general. I suggested that we need to understand the consequences of this pattern of alliance.

Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, a huge success in the United States, attempts to deconstruct perception management by exposing the supposed alliance between The Bush dynasty, Dick Cheney and Halliburton http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=15, The Bin Laden family, and the Pentagon that led to the quagmire in American and world politics.

Only by looking at events from a political-economic perspective and by understanding the notion of “perception-management” can we discern the complexities of these potentially dangerous liaisons. By “perception management”, I mean the ability of one to use print, broadcast, and digital media to enhance one’s disposition in the eyes of the public. Public perception can be crafted, and manipulated, including via the use of “pulp fiction” endorsing who would be the next dictator, president, or prime minister.

We might, engage in many years of living dangerously if we do not know how to deconstruct the innerworkings of perception management and read these signs of our times. [See my second column on “reading the book of signs]


When Corporate Capitalism gains Weight

It is said that capitalism, when it no longer can carry its own internal weight, creates wars that blind us of internal issues and manages perception by displaying anger towards external others.

National anger can be translated into international conflicts, masking the issue that is based on the political economy of control over strategic resources.

To appease the masses that are angry over the issues that govern their daily existence, governments may consciously or uncontrollably divert the national attention into somewhat nationalistic expression directed at some “foreign power”.

For instance, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution of 1789, France went to war with Marie Antoinette’s Prussia in order to save the enfant republic from its new internal contradictions.

World history has taught us that perhaps nations can only “co-exist peacefully” between thirty to forty years. That duration would give enough time for tribes, peoples, warring parties to come together. This will then give time for ruling parties, autocrats, despotic rulers, military regimes, military-in-civilian-clothes regimes”, or “emperor-without-clothes” to siphon the wealth of people they govern in the name of “national development”, “modernization”, and “progress” that are calculated using the indicators of the Word Bank and the International Monetary Fund combined.

The near collapse of the American economy, under the name The Great Depression, during the Roosevelt Era brought the nation into World War I. Remilitarization of Germany was amongst the causes of World War II which created jobs for America.

The Cold War and the accumulation of over 50,000 (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction between the American and the Soviet Empire fuel the engines of the war machinery and help The Pentagon create jobs too. The United States, as of January 2003 is reported to have more than 7,000 nuclear weapons http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/worldnuclearforces.html/view?searchterm=US%20Nuclear%20weapons.

The War on Terrorism created war-time industries such as the production of uniformed human killing-machines, un-uniformed suicide bombers, and bullet proof Humvees http://www.army.mil/fact_files_site/hmmwv/ coming out of Florida automobile plants.

Conflicts are a good way to create the need for weapons and design the necessity for military build-ups. Regions become earmarked for the testing of new weapons of mass destruction.

Regions rich in oil become very popular spots for the control over “black gold”, devastating the peoples, enriching despots, arms dealers, multinational oil companies, and of course neo-colonialist powers that is architectured after the design of what Eisenhower call “the military –industrial complex”. War is good business for corporation of war-time industries http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11257

The explosive history of the Middle East, with Iraq as the world’s second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria and now the Nusantara – all these point to the strategic issues in contemporary geopolitics.

Who knows -- the present dispute in Sulawesi might have been created by those who own the means of “conflict-production”, in order to legitimize the installation of foreign military bases under the pretext of both, war on terrorism and over Petronas-Shell oil.
If we do not wish to arrive at this historical juncture, we need to be vigilant about alliances such as that started in the Anwar-Wolfowitz-Pentagon dialogue.

The political-economy of oil and the deadly regional and global conflicts it has wrought upon nations is certainly not new.

The logic is this: The military-industrial complex, an alliance of corporations, the government, and the military, such as The American Corporation-State Department-Pentagon alliance, needs oil to fuel the armed forces. No other state ideological apparatus or “modern estates” uses oil as hideously as the military.

The armed forces is needed to protect the interests of multinational corporations worldwide, and the multinational corporations need global markets to make their parent-governments richer and their CEOs richest in the world, They need to force nations to open up their markets so that these global giants can force-feed the natives with things they do not necessarily need.

If possible, they need to seduce nations, rape them of their resources, and leave them by the roadside of human progress hunger-stricken, povertied, diseased, and humiliated.
If possible, the multinational corporations will make a few natives billionaires, whilst the rest of the population is left gasping for clean air.

Some nations like Malaysia seek advice from these major Fortune 500 companies to even help it develop its “corridors”, as in the case of The invention of the Multimedia Super Corridor whose International Advisory Panel [http://www.msc.com.my/msc/iap.asp] are Malaysia’s “digital mahagurus” flown in yearly to help advice Malaysia on what digital divide and a “digital discourse on inequality” may look like.

Hence, we have amongst others, CEOs of Microsoft and Netscape and the president of the Motion Picture Association of America helping the nation digitize itself and teaching the natives how to live a “better life on the computer and movie screen”.

Keen students of international relations that look at current events from a “realpolitik-al” point of view, or from the point of view of what Hans Morgenthau or any “developmentalist political theorists” call politics amongst nations, would call it “border disputes”.

But let us leave the outdated-ness of realpolitik and political realism based on some Machievellian and Bismarkian frame of analysis and put on a new lens of political-economy and semiotics, or “political-semiotics” as I would call it, to analyze the increasingly tense situation and consequently offer a proposal for the Malaysian and Indonesian peacemakers.


The Rich gets Richer, The Poor goes to War

Reading the reports on Shell http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=238, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=3508 I am worried of our national involvement through strategic alliances with this corporate giant.

The Malaysian oil company Petronas, according to the story is in alliance with a major international company, Shell Corporation; like Anwar Ibrahim is in alliance with a major figure in international pro-war policy-making, Paul Wolfowitz a friend of President-deposed Soeharto http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7876. It is a natural alliance based on what American and British management gurus would call “smart partnership” or “corporate synergy” or a “win-win situation”.

But do we need to give anymore money to the global rich? To create more fortune for companies of Fortune 500?

Or do we need to pull together to help the destitute and poverty-stricken amongst us Asians.

Does Shell Oil need more money than the Indonesians, especially those in Banda Acheh?

Shell is an extremely rich and powerful company. It can even be more powerful than sovereign nation-states. http://www.corporatewatch.org/publications/shell.html. It has also been associated with human rights abuses through its collaboration with despotic regimes such as in General Sani Abaca’s Nigeria. http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/ken/murder.html

Could the concession be designed in such a way that only the poor will benefit?

All the talk about helping Banda Acheh become another “Putrajaya” (if that is what it actually need,) can be realized if negotiations can point to this peaceful conflict resolution.

Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality no more?

What might become of the Zone of Peace Freedom and Neutrality with the resurfacing of border claims, the increasing gap between the rich and poor, the pattern of long-rule of despotic rulers, the emergence of political dynasties patterned after the synthesis of kinship and corporate-crony-capitalism that has no regard for social justice and moralistic principals of Southeast Asian statecraft?

My fear is that should there be an escalation of conflict arising from the border dispute over the control of oil in Sulawesi, the zone will be a fertile area for military alliances with nations that have interest in the ASEAN region.

If despotic rulers of Malaysia and Indonesia in the past can showcase “democracy” by building towering military forces and twin towers and in the process create more wealth for the already towering few, we can now switch modes of capitalist accumulation and expansion before we collapse on our own weight.

Build schools for the Nusantara

A test of humanitarianism lies in the way we plan for the reconstruction of Banda Acheh [provide link to Steven Gan’s editorial on the pledge to help Acheh], especially in the field much needed” education. Thousands of teachers have perished, thousands of students have died, and hundreds of learning centers are gone.

What then must we do?

If there is genuine effort to solve one of the regional problems of humanity of the beginning of this century, it is the effort to channel our energy to help Indonesia rebuild the once great city-state of Acheh; a city-state that produced numerous philosopher-statesmen who has contributed a great deal to the foundations of Malay political philosophy, before that philosophy was overshadowed by Wahabbism and Khomeini-ism.

Let us no longer think of making the rich of this region richer and instead transform this border issue into a cumulative program that is foundationed upon moral justice to help the millions of Indonesians who lost their homes and will need decades to reclaim human dignity.

It will take a decade to rebuild Banda Acheh and also to build decent housing and provide educational needs for Malaysians of all races; Malaysians who are “poor and unknown” who belong to the “other end” of the Fortune 500 companies.

The idea of a Royal Dutch Shell as one of the possible root causes of the Sulawesi conflict brings back painful memories of the enslavement of the peoples of Java Islands by the Dutch East India Company; a servitude of 400 years only to be continued with another 30 by the General Soeharto, the ancient Javanese “Yudistira-reincarnate” who brought “peace, justice, and harmony” through the barrel of the gun.

Lets us not only “step out of the box” but destroy it.

If policy-makers are in a box marked “Military-Industrial-Complex”, let us create “Cooperative Circles of Regional Social Justice” that will utilize our newly-found natural resources to help the “poor and the hungry teeming masses” in the Nusantara.

In fact, in addition to the reconstruction of Banda Acheh mentioned earlier, the effort of educational help must be extended to all poor areas in Malaysia and Indonesia with the money from oil be used to help children irregardless of race, creed, religion, and ethnicity. They must be educated for peace and social justice that will benefit the greatest number of people.

Our commitment to the Universal Declarations of Human Rights demands us to think for the poor and not be bought over by the rich.

We must step out of the box or the box will suffocate us.

Make peace now -- before we have Pentagon bases named after Royal Dutch/Shell or Exxon, as in Iraq! http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=6128

Intellectuals of Nusantara, let us together craft our own history!