It’s not new, but in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, people did think the world could be changed for the better. And when that feeling goes away, then all these retrogressive groups and movements come to the fore.
Could you talk about the use of torture in Guantánamo, elsewhere?
Well, the fact that torture has become acceptable again is all part of the war on terror logic. It’s right to torture because we have to torture them to get information from them, they’re going to attack us. This is an old, old argument which goes back to the medieval era, to the Inquisition. That’s where we are now. And if you can’t torture them in the United States proper, torture them in Guantánamo. If you can’t torture them in Guantánamo, torture them at the Bagram base and prison in Afghanistan, where the Russians used to torture people. The United States and its allies are torturing people in exactly the same place. And there are horrific stories coming out of there. Or use the Pakistani torture system, or the Egyptian, or the Syrian. Send in our people to soften up a guy until he tells the truth, never asking how do you know it’s the truth? This guy was waterboarded, god knows how many times, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I mean, what value does his testimony have in any court of law after that? You’re basically destroying anything you might have got from a serious interrogation of these people. So these are the values. You know, after the 9/11 attacks, Bush and Blair used to say, we will never let these people change our way of life. But you have.
Chapter 6
The Revenge of History
Oliver Stone: You write in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, “There is a universal truth that pundit and politician need to acknowledge: slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters. Time and time again, in the upheavals that have marked the world since the days of the Roman Empire, a given combination of events has yielded a totally unexpected eruption. Why should it be any different in the twenty-first century?”
Tariq Ali: It won’t be any different, of that I am pretty sure. We can’t predict what these events will be or where they will happen, but they will surprise the world. It’s precisely because one knows what has happened in history before that one maintains a certain degree of optimism. The Latin American developments were not foreseen by anyone. No one expected that Venezuela, a country that was barely known in the world, would suddenly become part of the “axis of hope,” as I call it. Chávez put Venezuela on the world map. You know, the first time Chávez went to the Middle East, Al Jazeera interviewed him for one hour. Because Arab viewers hate subtitles, a very good actor read all his lines in Arabic. Chávez is anyway quite magnetic, but afterwards, the Al Jazeera producer who did this said to me, we had thousands and thousands of emails, more than we’d ever had. And 90 percent of these emails said, in one form or the other, when will the Arab world produce a Chávez?
Where could the next Chávez come from?
Well, it is difficult to predict exactly, but I think that South Asia and the Far East might throw some surprises at us, which we’re not ready for. We talk about China as an economic giant but we very rarely talk about what the effects of this system are in China. Peasant uprisings, working-class factory occupations, a restless, turbulent intelligentsia, all these things could happen.
And is there a potential wild card in an internal economic collapse of the empire? Some people have suggested we cannot afford all these troops, all these bases.
Well, I think a lot will depend on the economy. A lot will depend on what the American public will do if the economy continues to go down like this. If the American population comes out and rebels against all this, well, that’s the end for the empire. It can’t continue.
It’s very hard for the population to rebel against the military. That is always difficult historically.
Yes, but people might vote for someone who says, we’ve done too much abroad for too long, and the costs have been great for us, and now let’s use that same energy to transform the shape of our country at home. If a politician were to say that at the present time, I think such a person would get a lot of support. Obama had possibilities, but it’s obvious he’s not going to go down that route. He might if there was a big popular movement in the United States demanding that. There isn’t. But I think that is what is needed.
Another potential wild card that I would suggest is in the offing would be some large environmental crisis. That would shake everybody up fast.
Well, without any doubt. I mean, once that becomes obvious to most people. But, again, how do you then reorganize the world?
At that point it becomes necessary—
—essentially to work together, to plan, to have a planned economy.
There would be a plan right away?
There would be.
Would people be pulling out their Marxist textbooks on how to do it? Are there specifics?
Well, I don’t think there are any good textbooks to show how good planning can work, but at least we now know how not to do it. And we know that the plan needs to involve the population as a whole, which needs to offer some oversight from below.
What is the best planned state in the world? Is it Switzerland?
I think it probably is one of the smaller Scandinavian ones. The Norwegians are quite well planned. The Cubans are well planned in terms of their social infrastructure. They’ve done it, and they’ve shown how it could be done.
But this would be perhaps the biggest surprise of all because people do keep saying, yes, it’s going to happen, but they don’t expect it to happen tomorrow.
No, and because so many people like living in the present—and are encouraged to live in the present—they don’t want to think about tomorrow. They live for today.
You write that it’s as if history has become subversive. The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it’s best to forget it and start anew. But as everyone is discovering, you can’t do this to history. It refuses to go away. If you try to suppress it, it reemerges in a horrific fashion.
Precisely.
Do the particular origins of the US Empire make it in any way different, more prone to ignore or deny history?
When I think about the origins of the American Empire, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that the colonists began by destroying the native population they encountered, and this was linked to a religious fundamentalist belief in their own goodness and greatness. I mean, the fundamentalists who came here, the pilgrim fathers, had a way of thinking that wasn’t basically different from that of the Wahabis or Osama bin Laden. In fact, there are lots of similarities between Protestant fundamentalism and Wahabi fundamentalism, and you see that in how they treat women, all the campaigns.
The Salem Witch Trials?
Exactly. You know, women are possessed by the devil. Beat it out of them. So that was the origin. Then you have slavery, the basis for much of the wealth generated inside the United States. Then you have the violent expansion of the empire, which is something Cormac McCarthy describes very well in one of his finest novels, Blood Meridian. Then you have the Civil War, which we are told is about the liberation of slaves, and which is partially to do with that, but which is essentially an attempt to unify the United States by force. So all this created the modern United States as we know it. And from the First World War onward the United States grew in size and influence, and became a dominant power, which after the Cold War has become an ultra-imperialism, unchallenged, unchallengeable militarily, very strong, without rivals. This is the first time in human history that an empire has been without any rivals. The Romans sometimes used to think that they were, but that’s because they weren’t totally aware of the strength of the Persians or even the Chinese. They thought in terms of the Mediterranean world, not globally. So, this is the first time that this has happened. And it made the leaders of this empire extremely complacent, who took the consent of their people for granted.