On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

^{Chapter 4} Pax Americana?

Oliver Stone: Conservatives take credit for Reagan ending the Cold War. I think the counterargument would be that the Soviet system had exhausted itself economically and that Afghanistan in some way presaged its own problems for the Soviet Union, as Iraq presaged some problems for the United States. I see some similarities the path the United States has traveled and the one the Soviets traveled.

Tariq Ali: When one system, the Soviet system and all that it entailed, collapsed, in its wake there was a triumphalism in the West for years. We won, we smashed you, we beat you, now we’re dominant. And all over the world, no alternative appeared to be emerging to this narrative. And I think a complacency set in among US leaders. They felt that we can now do whatever we want, get away with whatever we want. There is no one to challenge us. The system is unbeatable. And that is always a dangerous frame of mind for any imperial power—to believe that nothing can effect you, because the world isn’t like that. So the first challenge, curiously enough, came from South America, and it came from a continent that had experimented in neoliberalism. After all, the Chicago boys didn’t try out neoliberalism in Britain first. They tried it out in Chile under Pinochet, and later in Argentina. So you begin to see the emergence of social movements in a number of Latin American countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela—that are fighting against attempts to deprive them of certain things they liked, like free water, transport subsidies, things which in the scale of the world appear very tiny but are very important for the everyday life of many people. And these social movements then produced reactions. In the case of Venezuela, three thousand people trying to protest against the IMF rules were killed in the streets by the military.

This is pre-Chávez?

Pre-Chávez, yes. That’s what produced Chávez. Chávez didn’t drop from the sky. He was produced from within the army, an army that used to massacre its own people. And Chávez and a whole group of junior officers met and said, this is not what we were created for. The only purpose of a military is to defend the country from outside invasion, and yet we’ve been used to kill our own people. That’s how a dissenting group emerged inside the Venezuelan army.

Related developments were taking place in other parts of South America. In Bolivia, the neoliberal government decided to sell the water supply of Cochabamba to a subsidiary of Bechtel, the US corporation. And one of the things the water privatizers got the government to do was to pass a law saying that, from now on, it was illegal for poor people to go onto their roof and collect rainwater in receptacles because that challenged their monopoly of water. There’s an uprising, an insurrection. The military intervened, a kid was shot to death, others were injured. More people came out, and they began to win. And these victories in South America were the first big sign that the old order could not be maintained, that things were changing. That the Washington consensus, postcommunist world ruled by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO no longer could carry on that the same way in South America. Interestingly, these movements were also throwing up political leaders, and these political leaders were winning elections democratically. So you had a big shift away from the guerrilla warfare phase of South American politics, toward mass involvement in democracy, which everyone should have been cheering. I certainly was. Politicians are promising people certain things, and they’re getting elected, and they’re now trying to deliver on those promises. It was totally misunderstood in my opinion, deliberately so by the Bush administration, which tried to crush all these developments, organizing military coups, backing the most reactionary people in these countries.

Bush, Junior?

Bush, Junior. Bush, Junior did all that, backed by Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice in a very reactionary state department.

What about Clinton in Bosnia?

The intervention by the United States in Bosnia, seen by many people as humanitarian, turned out to be a straightforward attempt to increase American power and influence. So you have now a big permanent US missile base in Tuzla, and one of the largest helicopter bases ever in Kosovo. So this was the expansion of US power after the end of the Cold War, but the real resistance in terms of countries began in South America. And that is where it has remained ever since, with this exception: what’s happened now is that the collapse of the neoliberal system, the bursting of the bubble, means the whole world now is waiting for alternatives.

I think it is quite possible that this particular world economic crisis, which is by no means over, is going to change people’s ideas again. To what extent and in what direction we will see. But suddenly the South American experience becomes very important because these leaders who have been attacked in the media, the Bolivarians attacked as crazy, wild people, now seem very sober. And a new administration in Washington is having to deal with them rationally as elected politicians who represent their people. So if this example spreads to other continents, we could be in for interesting times again.

And everywhere we see taxpayers’ money being used to bail out the rich. The whole ideology of neoliberalism is that the state is useless, the market will do everything. The market is supreme. The market collapses, and they fall on their knees before the state, and say to the state, “Help, please.” And taxpayers’ money goes to bail out every single bank in the Western world, more or less. But the effect this will have on popular consciousness, we are waiting to see.

So, we have seen these hugely important developments in South America. On the other hand, the economic center of the world has moved eastward. China is the new workshop of the world. Every cheap product you can buy all over the world is produced in China. And when the economy moves in such a big way, can politics be far behind? So the question that will haunt the twenty-first century is whether a new imperial power is emerging on a global scale to challenge the United States from the east. Will this happen? What will the United States do to block it? These are the questions now, which can only be understood by seeing the history of what has happened in the preceding two centuries. You can’t run away from history. I don’t think we will have a repeat of the First World War, because that would mean obliteration. On the other hand, the big question, which couldn’t be asked a hundred years ago but has to be asked now, is put at its simplest, does the world have the resources for every single family to live like an American middle-class family lived in the 1950s and 1960s? And I think the answer is no. The world doesn’t have the resources to do that. In which case, what is the point of this crazed, endless competition? Wouldn’t it be better to find a different way of living for people all over the world?

You’re talking about global problems, but you don’t have much respect for one of the bodies that was allegedly established to address such problems, the United Nations, for instance. Is that correct?

Yes, this is true. I don’t go for the international institutions. I think a lot can be done regionally. Here again, I return to the one example we have of a certain amount of regional cooperation in South America. I’m not one of those who thinks that what is going on in South America is a revolution, even though some of the leaders, such as Chávez, call it that. Essentially what is going on is that elected politicians are pushing through important social-democratic reforms to benefit the poor. That is very important in itself. One doesn’t have to give it a new coloration. That’s what they’re doing. And the fact that, over the last fifty years, the Cubans have created a social infrastructure that produces more doctors per person in the population than any other country in the world, and these doctors can be provided as human capital in return for other things to Latin America and Africa is an amazing development. So when Hugo Chávez is confronted by a strike of middle-class professionals and the hospitals are closing down, he rings his friend Fidel Castro and within a few days, sixteen to twenty thousand Cuban doctors with their cheap medicines are on planes, coming over to set up clinics in the poorest parts of the country. That has an impact on people, including people who disagree with you.

I’m not saying that the world is going to be just changed like this everywhere, but for countries to collaborate regionally becomes important. Why shouldn’t China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula form a sort of a union, like the European Union? Why? Because the United States won’t let it happen.

Why is that?

Because the United States sees the Far East as the biggest threat to its global hegemony. The Japanese, unlike the Germans, have not even been allowed a foreign policy of their own since the Second World War. They more or less do what they’re told. This is dangerous, because it could give rise to dangerous forms of nationalism again, which wouldn’t be good either for Japan or anyone else. What might be better is if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans were encouraged to work together. Within that framework you could settle the North Korean question as well.

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, ironically, 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.