News and Politics Forum

November 7, 2006

This summer during work I was drawn into a conversation with an eighteen-year-old awkward, pimply boy who had just finished first year engineering. He was a nerdy social recluse, but he was the snobby type that thinks his own tastes to be superior to that of the common man. In particular, he felt himself to be higher up the food chain than I because I had gotten a liberal arts degree, while he was getting an engineering degree (and barely passing it, at that). Yet, it is so often from the mouths of fools that good wisdom comes. We were having a conversation about politics.

He was saying that the major ideological battle of the last century was the cold war: capital vs communist; right vs left. However, he believed that since September 11, the landscape has changed…that now we are entering an era where instead we have “centrism” vs “Islamic extremism.” At first, I balked at the word ‘centrism’, because many in the west do not believe it is centrism but instead the work of the right wing conservative factions in both North America and Europe.

But as I continued to reflect on the term ‘centrism,’ I found that this jester was basically right. What has happened in West since 9/11 has changed the political landscape of the world forever. There are new threats and new political flashpoints. There are new economic conditions. While the right has leaped forwards with a response and an overall plan of action, the left has done nothing but rush to try to keep up. The left in our countries find it very difficult to keep to the old doctrine of labour unions, government welfare, social programs, and international peace in concert with other nations. Although these principles and their ends are noble, it must be understood that they lost their meaning in a short space of five years.

What has happened in that time? There have been half a dozen terrorist attacks on targets in the West, and more than a dozen attacks at various places around the Middle East. America has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; the countries are now being occupied by Western troops and rebuilt on Western funds. America has sent suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, the state prisons of Syria and Egypt, and to new secret CIA prisons whose whereabouts are not revealed. Regulation and security in the airline industry has become very severe, state intelligence agencies have been given exceptional powers of surveillance. The democratic governments of the world have established a firm hold over the public media: this is the case in America, Britain, Canada, Russia, Japan… The price of oil has risen sharply since the beginning of the decade. The public opinion in almost every Western country has become visibly more xenophobic. International capitalism has flourished with the opening of newly affluent markets such as India, China, and Russia.

The left has had almost every one of its values challenged. And the problem is, the arguments from the other side actually make some sort of sense. The left would now have the West pull its armies out of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, for these countries, this would only result in civil war, and further destruction of infrastructure, lives, and resources. It would make the Middle East economically unstable, and the unrest may well result in the rise of a new Islamic fundamentalist government. As for the Islamists themselves, the left believes that they will quiet down once we begin to ignore them and stop bombing them. Well, they won’t. This is a nascent movement of zealots in love with fantastic ideals…this is a group of people who will not stop unless they are killed or marginalized. To have Iraq and Afghanistan become a haven for Islamists will threaten our access to cheap oil, and it will threaten the little peace that exists between Israel and its neighbours.

The left is often cynical about how this recent invasion of the Middle East was carried out for control over oil. Well, yes, of course it was. In fact, it is not only control over the physical oil itself, but control over oil markets, oil prices, and the US dollar as the sole  international trading standard. I read one article that estimated that if the Euro dollar ever replaced the US dollar, the dollar would plummet 20 to 40 percent. This would be the equivalent of another Great Depression in North America. China would hold America in its palm, as it owns about a third of the USA’s foreign debt.

In the larger picture, the left has placed faith in the international system under the UN. However, the UN has proved itself almost useless because of its clear inability to stop the major powers from acting as they wish. Ever since WTO, members of the left have believed in a sort of international movement against capitalist expansion. Anti-globalization protests have been a feature of the majority of the major economic conferences in the 21st century. And in places such as Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and now Nicaragua, it seems there is some international cooperation to evade the capitalist market system and establish socialist democracies and trading cooperatives.

I recall that Chavez has just bought two machine gun factories and has bought weapons from Russia. Anticipating what, do you suppose? In Bolivia, the state nationalized the British natural gas plants; then they rejected the nationalization. It was an attempt to bring British capital and British experts back into running the industry, which the Bolivians found they simply could not do by themselves. In the meantime, foreign investment has fled wholesale from both of these countries, and their economies will soon be left behind by those of their neighbours that developed on a capitalist model: such as Costa Rica or Mexico.

The simple truth about all this is that the world we live in has now changed form fairly swiftly, and we cannot use yesterday’s ideals to find solutions to today’s problems. I have never supported the actions of the American neo-conservatives; yet in the future our governments will have to accept the effects of their policies. The left has no plan for the world economy. It has no plan for the world environment beyond the Kyoto farce. It has no plan to pacify the Middle East and prevent economic collapse. It has no plan to bring an end to the conflict between the West and Islamism. Instead, the entire political platform of left-leaning parties in the West is based upon insulting and criticizing the policies of the right. They have no major policies of note to replace the belligerent imperialism of the neo-conservative. The left that was strong in the twentieth century has entered the twenty-first century without a plan.

On a plane flight earlier this year, I met a woman from Poland who had immigrated to Canada after the fall of Communism. She was about 45 or 50 years old. She was telling me after a short discussion of a woman who wrote a book about the fact that there were too many Muslims in Italy, and that immigration policies had to be changed immediately. This Polish woman entirely agreed with this author, I could see. It forced me to consider whether or not this argument was actually convincing. The thing is, there are countless immigrants from North Africa in Italy, Spain, and France. There are more Muslims in France than Christians now. The population is one fifth Muslim. Most Western countries are considering the security option of racial profiling…as it is quite clear that Arab Muslims are more likely to be Islamic terrorists than Anglo-American or Chinese citizens. There has been talk in Australia of re-adopting its all-white immigration policy.

I personally think race-based immigration and profiling policies are a disgrace, and I will rue the day that our society ever begins to adopt them. But I had to admit that the arguments made sense. They did not fully convince me, but they fully convinced this Polish-Canadian woman. They may not convince you, but they might just convince your neighbour. They reminded me above all that we live in a different world, with different conditions that will need different policies to surmount them. Politics needs a new face, and a new code of values on all sides, and the left has not been keeping up with the times.

Tom Joad, writing from Desolation Row

http://desolationrow.wordpress.com