I resumed transferring articles from my old web site to this one today and have just moved over five articles I wrote on different aspects of imperialism from 1992 to 2001. As usual its a little scary to be reading stuff from that far back, in particular when it carries a title like The return of the "white man’s civilising mission"!
I resumed transferring articles from my old web site to this one today and have just moved over five articles I wrote on different aspects of imperialism from 1992 to 2001. As usual its a little scary to be reading stuff from that far back, in particular when it carries a title like The return of the "white man’s civilising mission"!
That article (from 1992) turned out to be not so bad apart from carrying the idea (quite common at the time) that the Japanese economy was going to continue to boom exasperating the tensions with the USA. In reality not soon afterwards it entered and stayed in recession, the role of Japan back then has very much been replaced with China today, something no one was predicting in 1992.
Much cruder is 1492 – 1992 Christopher Columbus slaver and thief which I seem to have written in response to the wave of indigenous protests back in 1992 at the way the ‘discovery’ was being celebrated. The bits on Columbus are fair enough but the attempt to portray the indigenous societies that existed as either ‘primitive communist’ or alternative (and barbaric) class societies reveals a lack of knowledge about the wide and complex range of other types of society that existed, something that I really only began to become aware of in the aftermath of the Zapatista rebellion. That’s the danger of putting pen to paper on the basis of a pretty limited knowledge but I often think the greater danger is being afraid to say anything until you are sure you know everything. Anyway my decision to start blogging hardly reflects a more cautious approach today.
In the same year I reviewed Chomsky’s Terrorizing the Neighbourhood, the comparative density of article writing in this period is explained by the fact that at the time WSM only had five members and we were publishing (and selling) a 8 A3 sided newspaper four times a year! Which basically meant I had two and sometimes three articles in each issue of the paper. With second and subsequent ones published under psyudonyms which I’ve ditched for this republishing.
The MRTA Peruvian embassy siege and what it tell us about the media was I think the first bit of substantial writing I ever did for the internet. Apart from the details of the siege what had motivated me to write was the sudden attention given to internet radicalism. It wasn’t the first occurance of this, in 1995 I was working with the Spunk press archive when it was targetted by the Sunday Times in a similar fashion. Much of the article looks at the concept of Netwar that was then being floated by the likes of RAND before returning to events in Peru. The disclaimer at the end is a little embarrasing, I suspect its the last time I felt the need to do something like that.
The final article of this batch is 10 years after the Gulf War : Their New World Order is as deadly as ever is much more specific. At the time Britain and the USA were engaged in a bombing campaign against Iraq (technically no war was in progress but in many ways the 1991 war against Iraq never really ended and flowed into the 2003 invasion). Over a million people had died due to the sanctions at that point in time.
This of course isn’t everything I’ve written on the topic of imperialism, just a batch of articles that were clustered together under the title On Imperialism and anti-imperialism on my old web site. I seem to be about half way down the page (and transfer process) although I know I skipped ahead and transferred the stuff I’d written on the Zapatistas a while back. Yet to come is most of the stuff I’ve written on Ireland, in addition the imperialism index here includes a number of articles written after than old page was created and also groups the articles on the 2003 war into this category. Part of my reason for the creation of the new site was the CMS classification means each article can be listed under more than one relevent category.
Reading them I’m think I should probably attempt another overview article on anarchism & imperialism. The last substantial one I wrote is already on this site and was Globalisation: the end of the age of imperialism? written back in 1999. I’ve done a lot of reading since then plus the current crisis will result in some major changes in how imperialism operates. If I can make the time I’ll have a go.