On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation
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You realize there’s a lot of antipathy between these three countries?
Of course, but there was a lot of antipathy between the Germans and the English, between the Germans and the French in Europe. Despite the bad history, there is nothing on earth now to stop these countries collaborating with each other,
Well, the Japanese were apparently so brutal in China and Korea that it’s difficult for the Chinese to accept that the Japanese will not apologize for any of this.
Well, that is true, but I think an apology doesn’t cost very much. The Germans are having to pay for what they did by reparations to Israel forever.
The Germans have apologized.
They have.
But the Japanese have not.
No, you’re right. Has the United States apologized to them for using nuclear weapons?
No, nor to Vietnam.
No, nor to the Vietnamese. What I’m suggesting is not an easy way out. And there are lots of obstacles in its path, but that’s the way things should go. I think we need to strengthen regional corporation for the world to pull out of the crisis and for something decent to happen.
You have written about Israel and Pakistan as confessional states. Pakistan is a division from India. Israel is a division from Palestine. Germany, Korea, and Vietnam were also created through separation. But these you would not say are confessional states, Korea, Germany, and Vietnam. So among the divisional states, the confessional states have turned out to be more dangerous. That’s what you are saying?
I am, though in the case of Pakistan, the country broke up in 1971, when East Pakistan split off and became Bangladesh, which reduced its effectiveness as a state and severely damaged its ideology. The Israelis, by contrast, have been slowly accumulating more and more land, occupying more and more territory. But in both cases the elites are fairly hardened, implacable people who do what they think best, whether or not they have the support of their populations. The Israelis do have the support of their population. The Pakistanis don’t. Nonetheless, in both these cases, it is not impossible to conceive that at the end of this century, Pakistan will be part of a larger union while preserving its state structures—a South Asian Union with India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal makes a lot of sense—and that, at some stage, the Israeli population will realize that enough is enough, and that the Palestinians will realize they are never going to get an independent state of any significance, and there will be a move toward a single-state solution of Palestine and Israel in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, smaller minorities, will be able to live together. I don’t think there is another way out.
You quote Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, as saying it’s not just McDonald’s but McDonnell Douglas that you need to run the empire.
Yes.
And what did he mean by that?
He meant that essentially it is US military power that is decisive in this world, and that helps to maintain McDonald’s all over the world. You know, there are now US military bases or installations in sixty or seventy countries of the world. That is a very heavy presence for the United States. And it doesn’t help them particularly, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, to have these extensions. This projection of US power not only produces anger and resentment, it has a destabilizing effect. The Russians, for instance, in Georgia, are saying, if you can intervene militarily in Kosovo, we can do it in Georgia. Who are you to tell us what to do? The Indians are saying, if terrorists from a country hate you, you occupy that country. How can you tell us not to do the same thing? So this pattern of American behavior has not created a world that is moving toward peace and stability, which they claimed was their aim.
A sort of Pax Americana? There would be one power, and it would be benevolent?
Yes.
It doesn’t work that way.
It doesn’t work that way. Even the Roman Empire, which had the Pax Romana, couldn’t maintain its dominion for too long, and began to crack up. The United States on its own terms is already a very, very large country with a huge population and enormous resources. The best example it could set in the world is to put its own house in order. I mean, the fact is, the United States doesn’t have a health service. The education system leaves a lot to be desired. When New Orleans was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and all of those people were left unprotected, large numbers of my American friends in New York and the West Coast said they had no idea things were so bad. And that worried me. Why didn’t you?
I remember during the last election, people were energized the world over when they saw huge numbers of kids turning up for Obama’s election campaign. People said this couldn’t happen in Europe, because in Europe the bulk of kids between eighteen and twenty-six tend not to vote these days. So we are seeing a process where, because of the economic system and the way it offers no possibility of any alternatives, democracy itself is becoming hollowed out as a process. And people are saying if the choice we were offered between center left and center right in Europe, or between the Congress Party and the BJP in India, or between party X and party Y in some other country is really not very deep, then what the hell is the point of voting? And, again here, the example which contradicts all that is Latin America where you have people who are offered choices, different choices, and who go and vote according to their beliefs. Some wanted to stay with the old, some wanted the new. So which of these trends is going to win out remains to be seen. I think a lot will depend on how the economy develops.
Let’s talk about the economy for a moment. What is Marxism, first of all?
Marxism is essentially a form of understanding history. I think Marx’s most important contribution theoretically was to say that history is essentially, though not exclusively, a struggle between contending classes, from the days of antiquity to now. And that assumption, which seems now relatively straightforward, transformed the way we look at the world and how we study history.
The second thing Marx did was to explain the ways in which capitalism functions. The drive to profit, which is the dominant drive in capital, determines everything. And then there are some incredibly prescient passages in which he talks about fictive capital, fictional capital, the system using money that it doesn’t have and imploding. And he points out that this cycle will repeat itself in the history of capitalism as long as the system lasts. He never describes in detail what an alternative to the capitalist system would look like. That is not his function. That is left to other people who make revolutions to describe. But he says that the gravediggers of the system are produced by the system itself, the system will let people down, that they will rise and topple it.
So for Marx, the countries most suited for socialism are the countries where the productive forces and technology have developed the most. According to this conception, the United States would be the country most suited for a rapid transition from one system to the other because all it needs is a planned system. Whereas most of the revolutions, if not all the revolutions that took place, happened in countries that were very backward—tsarist Russia, China. Cuba was pretty backward, too, in many ways.
You have written that we only had one shot at socialism, and it failed. But there have been many shots at capitalism.
This is true. I say this because capitalism has failed numerous times. I don’t know whether there’s agreement, but, from 1825, there have been dozens and dozens of capitalist cycles of boom and bust, boom, bust, collapse. I mean, certainly we can remember the big ones, but there have been minor ones as well. Yet that system is always permitted to revive, or is revived, as we are seeing today. And the socialists, the communists and the socialists, had one attempt, which lasted seventy-five years and then collapsed, and everyone says it’s over. And in my opinion, that particular style of communism and that particular attempt may be over, but there is absolutely no reason why people shouldn’t think of better systems than the existing one, without going back to the worst of what the Soviet system was.
The United States, iro
nically, is in a position where the state has a large ownership in the economy now.
This is true, but how is it using this stake? Is it for state capitalism or is it to create a public utility capitalism, which is certainly possible now by injecting a lot of state money into public utilities that would produce for need and not for profit. I mean, that is I think what should be done, and what a rational capitalist state would now do. What I would say to these guys at the banks and mortgage companies and investment houses is you failed. We gave you a big chance, we backed you up. It’s not that the state didn’t intervene. The state provided the basis for you guys to get away with murder, to make billions, and you let us down very badly, you failed us, so now we are not going to let you do it for the next fifty years. We’re going to build and develop public utilities, which we are doing to control, run, and pay for. And this is going to benefit our population far more than anything you ever did. I mean, there are some things that people deserve by right, including health, education, some form of affordable dwelling—which in Europe social democracy used to promise to try and deliver, and often did deliver.
In smaller countries.
In smaller countries.
It’s harder to do in the Soviet Union, the United States, or China, I would imagine.
It is true though, to be fair, I do not think the Chinese breakthrough, because that’s what we have to call it, would have been possible had they not had a revolution and created a very high-level class of graduates, scientists, and technicians. And I think that explains why they’re economically way ahead of India. The raising and lifting of the culture of the country, producing these people who came from very humble backgrounds, is actually the basis of the current transformation of China.
Would you describe yourself as a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will?
I would. We are now for instance coming to a time when the car as the big icon of capitalism, as the only way for nations to move forward, is facing collapse. This is not just the rising price of oil, but also because the demand for American cars is falling. Why can’t a rational government in the United States develop an effective public transport system, including rebuilding trains, rebuilding tracks? It’s the one thing the Europeans are beginning to do now.
Or pass a tax on carbon emissions?
Yes. Pass a tax. It’s a simple political decision. It’s a matter of willpower. Instead we see the same paralysis that existed at the end of the Roman Empire, when the population could not be imposed on for anything; they had to be provided with spectacle, as Octavio Paz said. Now we have the spectacle of television. And reality television, in which everyone is encouraged to be a celebrity.
Yes.
I mean, it’s quite astonishing the way this has happened.
Has it hit Pakistan yet?
It’s not hit Pakistan, but then you sometimes feel that the whole of Pakistan is like a reality television show anyway.
But it’s hit India.
It has hit India in a big way, with disastrous effects on the Indian media. I mean, the Indian newspapers used to be among the best in the world. If you look at them now, they’re filled with trivia and trash. Pakistan’s television stations and newspapers and magazines are at the moment infinitely superior to India’s. They have not gone down that route. So you can see and hear debates on the independently owned private television networks and in Pakistani newspapers, that you don’t at all in India. It’s quite a worrying development.
You’ve written that the fate of the Jews, events in Palestine and Congo, are the responsibility of “bourgeois civilization.” I suppose that’s a Marxist term, right?
Right.
You blame bourgeois civilization?
Well, what I say is that, whatever way you want to describe it, it was European capitalist civilization that was responsible ultimately for the death of six million Jews, yes.
And the Congo?
And the Congo.
And World War I? There are a lot of people who died in World War II.
Yes, absolutely.
You think it’s the result of bourgeois civilization?
I think there is no other way to explain it. That and competitiveness between different strands of this civilization.
So the competition that I went through in boarding school, which was so cruel and is not the way out—we are told it makes you a better man, a stronger man, but at the same time—
—it’s very destructive. Yes, it’s also very destructive. With individuals, it can have certain negative effects on the psyche of the individual. But when states engage in competition, it leads to the loss of millions of lives.
But our state is created by people from Eden, Harrow, Choate, St. Paul’s, Andover, Exeter, Yale, Harvard. These are the people whom you call the state intellectuals.
These are people who run the state. This is absolutely true. In the case of the British Empire, the system of private schooling expanded phenomenally, and some schools were created explicitly to train imperial administrators. And this happens in the United States, too. Many, many people from the elite universities, Ivy League universities, used to go, and still go, into the foreign service, run the state department, and so on. The system and its administrators reproduce themselves through this elite educational system. But the question is: are they going to repeat past histories and fight each other to a standstill and, in the process, destroy the planet? That’s the big question now.
Chapter 5
Blowback
Oliver Stone: Could you talk about the concept of “blowback”?
Tariq Ali: A very honest, decent, strong-minded, truthful American scholar, Chalmers Johnson, who had worked as a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and came from an old naval family, wrote a book in 2000 called Blowback. The book offers a strong critique of US foreign policy. His basic argument was that, given what we have been doing to the rest of the world, it’s only a matter of time before some people take the law into their own hands and decide to hit us. And he developed this argument with great skill. When the book came out, it was either attacked by critics or ignored. He was astonished at the viciousness with which the book was received. I wasn’t, actually. But immediately after 9/11, the book, which had been ignored until then, took off by word of mouth. The book sold and sold and sold, and Chalmers became a world figure. It was translated everywhere.
The idea of “blowback” was about the American support of Arabic Jihadists in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Soviets.
Yes, and many people warned the United States that they were playing with fire, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski said, it’s a small price to pay for bringing down the Soviet Empire. No, the exact words he used were even cruder. He said what are a few “stirred-up Muslims” compared to bringing down the Soviet Empire? Well, we know how that story ends.
The “war on terror.”
I always found the “war on terror” an odd concept. The history of terrorism is real, it exists, and what it means usually is small groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes a few thousand, who decide that the way to change the world is to hit strategic targets. The anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to try to kill presidents, heads of state, the tsar of Russia. Sometimes they succeeded, but usually they failed. In Paris, they would bomb bourgeois cafés, and say “we’re killing the bourgeoisie.” This sort of nonsense has happened for a long time. It never really changes anything, but it makes people who carry out these acts feel good. It was referred to as “propaganda of the deed.” We’re showing we hate X and Y by doing this, even though none of these people they were attacking crumbled as a result. Then you had a big wave of these politics in the 1960s. You had the Weather Underground in this country. They targeted installations, and sometimes they killed themselves by accident. And during this period you also had terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Japan. Then you had right-wing groups in the United States. I mean, the Oklahoma bombings
were carried out by a guy who went hunting with the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist group. You had Cuban terrorists trying to destabilize the Cuban regime, backed in this case by the United States. The foundation of Israel is linked to terrorist groups, in particular the Irgun, which destroyed the King David Hotel. One of the members of the Irgun was Menachem Begin, later given the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. When Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, was asked for her comments, she said, I don’t know whether they deserved the Nobel Prize, but they certainly deserve an Oscar for acting.
The history of the world is littered with examples of terrorism. So why make this act of terror so different? The spectacle and scale of it doesn’t make the people who did it different from other terrorists. And we now know from the various books that have come out that immediately after 9/11, senior members of the Bush regime said, we must now use this attack to get our way. Everyone knows that their basic gut instinct was to attack Iraq, not Afghanistan. They wanted to punish Saddam Hussein for something he hadn’t done. So the war on terror essentially became a holdall for US foreign policy getting its own way wherever it wanted to, locking up people, and picking up people all over the world with the help of its allies in the name of this war on terror.