Introducing A Game As Old As Empire

[A version of this letter introducing John Perkins' new book "A Game As Old As Empire" was emailed to grass-roots volunteer friends and social activists on Sunday Feb 4, 2007]

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To: my social activist friends
Subject: A Game As Old As Empire

Salaam everyone,

Attached is a preview of an about to be published book that its publisher just sent me with the above title.

I am sharing it with you because all of us are concerned about globalization to some degree in its many manifestations, and many of us don't actually understand what devious shapes and forms it often takes. We often view it only as black and white. The protagonists extol its virtues and the antagonists rail against its evils, neither really possessing any depth of understanding of why they take these positions. It's obvious to the antagonists that it causes poverty. It's also usually self-evident to many well meaning protagonists of its inevitability, and that is often cited as justification for acceptance, closing the doors to exploring other solutions spaces that might be more equitable. However, usually hard data and analysis is often missing on both sides among the ordinary peoples to whom this impacts the most. And we are indeed these ordinary peoples!

When participating at WSF 2006 in Karachi in a forum, I had made this seemingly strange statement: "Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism are two sides of the same imperial coin". In one other forum on water privatization, I had noted something equally bizarre to the effect (in Urdu): "deception is a key component in this game and you have to assume this as your working premise when you investigate or evaluate any proposal that is put your way on why or how water privatization will be beneficial to you - they wage war by way of deception".

It was simply remarkable how many people had thronged around me afterwards to learn more and ask for elaboration. That's when I realized that the real intellectual underpinnings behind the impetus towards globalization and the neoliberal agenda were not being addressed to their full unravellings and disambiguation anywhere. All of a sudden I seem to be the only one talking about it in these terms, often needing to even challenge the perceptions of many of the learned panelists themselves whom I felt were speaking at the most superficial levels - the outer most visible layer of the onion. In one other forum on "fundamentalisms", I found one person (a physicist) on the panel describing the term "fundamentalists" as if the mighty oracle, the illustrious progenitor of the war-mongering idea of "clash of civilizations", Mr. Bernard Lewis himself was speaking through him to justify the other side of the imperial coin! Almost everyone has heard this term "clash of civilizations" and Samuel Huntington's 1996 book of the same name. How many actually know that it was seeded into the public consciousness in 1991-92 by Bernard Lewis for an article in Foreign Affairs magazine? And what was happening in 1991 in the global space to synthesize such bombastic messages? No amount of field work or participating in grass-roots socialization events like WSF can unravel these mysteries.

People in general are ill equipped with the intellectual tools to either comprehend this problem of globalization in its multifaceted dimensions, or take on addressing its root causes. Grass-roots the world over has become synonymous with action in the streets, or working in the field doing good works and deeds. Few read, even fewer dig even when they might read. Even students at elite schools like my own, MIT, study poverty under a microscope in their laboratories (there is a poverty alleviation lab at MIT - do google it), and come up with the most interesting red herrings to pursue, such as reduce the birth rate for instance to solve poverty problem, or the newest fad in microcredit schemes. Both eminently reasonable propositions on the surface for many progressive minds to alleviate poverty. But as I had come to appreciate in computer science and as a practicing engineer in Silicon Valley, the highest order bits entirely determine where the page faults! And here, what is incredible to me is that they entirely end up ignoring the giant elephants trumpeting on the newlyweds' bed - debt cancellation of the third world; inequities of global trade treaties like WTO; economic conscription that generates a new class of labor camps in the wonderful duty-free zones where the employer reigns supreme and few labor laws that apply in the developed nations apply there; or that "free trade" has been the mantra of all dominant civilizations and mainly only favors them. None of these are studied as the primal first cause of global poverty, or how poverty is harvested for the benefit of multinationals when they offshore, or the fact that the third world is deliberately being raped by supporting dictatorships and kingdoms that can be more easily controlled than any fractious genuine parliamentarians ever could.

These same geniuses with fancy PhD. degrees in economics will then head various World Bank and its sister organizations and often not have a clue. And when they do get a clue, they are so complicit that extricating themselves can become quite impossible. This is how empires are built in neoliberalism. We have already witnessed how empire is extended using neoconservatism. The distinguished New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it the best in his now famous "Manifesto for a Fast World": "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - MacDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

And a major aspect of this "hidden hand" is what John Perkins disclosed and confessed to in his first book in 2005, the "Confessions of an economic hitman" - the notorious EHM. ...


Please continue reading at www.humanbeingsfirst.org "Introducing A Game As Old As Empire"


Thank you.

Zahir