IRR > Comment
COMMENT
We the (only) People
01 May 2003
Racial superiority is back on the
agenda - in the guise, this time, not
of a super-race but of a
super-nation, a super-people, a
chosen people, on a mission to
liberate the world.
THE Iraqi peoples have to be saved
from themselves - by force,
necessarily, because they know no
better. And who better to do it than
the US of A, 'the land of the free and
the home of the brave'? 'Liberty',
may not, as the President has said,
be 'America's gift to the world', but it
is certainly, 'God's gift to humanity'
(Bush in excelsis).[1] And I, he
might have added, am merely His
messenger.
That is what is so terrifying about
the Bush junta - the certainty of
their righteousness, the
righteousness of their certainties. It
doesn't matter how you put it - it's a
closed circuit of thought. Nothing
intrudes, neither doubt nor dissent.
It is whole. It is organic: religious
conviction rooted in economic
rationale backed by military might.
Their doctrine is written in tablets
of stone - regime change,
pre-emptive strikes, full-spectrum
dominance - and is conveyed to the
nation through the metaphysics of
fear and the politics of deceit,
wrapped up in the vision of a
Manichaean world polarised between
good and evil, Us (of A) and Them
(the sub-homines), based now on
the myth that 'our way of life, our
freedom, our democracy'[2] is the
sine qua non of all civilisation.
And it is that notion of a superior
civilisation that marks out the racism
of the twenty-first century and
'embeds' it in America's imperial
project to redesign the world to its
corporate needs.[3] Already the US
has begun to destabilise
international institutions, such as
the UN, the ICC, the WHO, that
stand in the way of its imperium.
Every single struggle against
racism, therefore, has consciously to
take on the larger fight against
imperialism and extend its remit to
the true liberation of Third World
peoples.
A. Sivanandan is founding editor of Race & Class
and the director of the Institute of Race
Relations.
[1] Speech to the MacDill Air Force Base, Florida,
26 March 2003.
[2] Blair echoing Bush, see the Guardian, 21
March 2003.
[3] See the programme of the PNAC.
The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from
expressing a corporate view: the opinions
expressed are therefore those of the authors.
IRR > Comment
By A. Sivanandan
6 May 2003, 12:00pm