Generally speaking I would resist discussing emergent ideas until they were more thoroughly worked out. This case is a little different. These ideas are not recent but over 50 years old. When I first had them 50 years ago and discussed them I was met with ‘ that is quite interesting … but beyond my area of speciality.’
In my eyes these ideas would upturn all contemporary history on the one hand and all contemporary philosophy on the other. ‘Quite interesting’ did not cut it for me.
Lets start with history and in another post I will discuss the philosophical ideas.
It was a standard trope that around 500 years ago Western man suddenly began ‘exploring’ the rest of the world and conquering all before it. None of this actually makes sense. Lets look at this more closely. Columbus travels to the New World were incredibly difficult to finance. However there was a new model discovered : the plunder of South America generated enormous wealth which could be used to finance an invasion of Africa and creation of slave routes. Under the old rules of war European armies would be easily defated. But now with the wealth of America available to fund further wars and the expectation of increasing wealth once the wars were effectively concluded a new dynamic was created. Angola was a case in point. The European armies could be defeated but could simply fund ‘endless wars’. Each war depleted the resources of the local empires so if Europeans could keep ‘loosing’ indefinitely they would eventually succeed.
It is the plunder of South America that financed the slave trade routes out of Africa. Western academics could be relied upon to tell a tale of inevitable superiority of Western arms. This never made any sense as most ‘Europan ‘ armies were staffed by troops from the ‘colonies’. After the subjugation of the Canary Islands there were few opportunities for the local men other than manning Portuguese military operations elsewhere.
This is a matter of fundamental importance in that it explains the deep weakness in the Marxist model. According to Hegel, the European adventure emerged out of indigenous Europeean developments and spilled outwards. This was incorporated into Marx’s model whereby capitalism exports itself into the Third World. This also explains elements among modern Marxists of celebrating Western man’s ‘vigour and capitalist endeavour’. These are of course serious misunderstandings. If the engine of future world development emerged entirely within Europe it is difficult to see what useful role the rest of the world has to play other than as spectators. Both Kant and Marx could agree on seeing the rest of the world as ‘surplus labour’.
Once the financial model was established the next step was to formalise it. Conquests of other countries were based on ‘endless wars’. The new empires were based on naval supremacy, which meant that if any country, A, rebelled, naval power would bring men and machinery from across the globe on the one hand and deny them allies on the other hand. No individual country would, in the end, survive this. On top of this strategy would be a dynamic to reduce intra-European rivalry abroad and the promotion of ‘white world supremacy’ to suggest that non-white countries could be used as cannon fodder but not as true allies.
As always technological developments would play a major historical role. The invention of machine guns made the invasion of African countries much more cost-effective. The Berlin Conference was a meeting to agree a worldwide ban on the sale of machine guns to Africa, otherwise the presence of Japan would be inexplicable. While machine guns made the invasion of Africa feasible and cost-effective, the emergence of 1917 was like a thunderbolt. Now the Soviet Union had the means to produce and distribute modern war machinery all over the globe.
Western countries had begun to believe in ‘endless wars’ and in WW1 were tempted to apply this among themselves. In the light of this analysis one will be inclined to disentangle WW1 into many different wars, many different escalations. Similarly with WW2. Is it in fact reasonable to say ‘the War’ ended in ‘1918’ or in ‘1945’? The obvious challenge would be ‘which war?’
In the aftermath of WW2 there was a conundrum. Post-war, the European imperial treasuries were bare, the costs of suppression had escalated due to the availability of modern arms to the insurrectionists, and the ability in the post-suppression period to recoup the investment by super-exploitation was blocked by the fact that super-exploitation would provoke further armed resistance and there was now a rich and powerful competitor for the sources of super-exploitation. There were typical rumblings among the French elite that they were fighting the wars in Indochine to enrich the US!
Certain mythologies emerged. UK naval power allowed the UK to provide arms and equipment to others and to transport them to conquer the globe under the British flag. Initially, the financing was done by pure plunder and slavery but later industrial production would play a role. Domestic populations were fed a fantasy that 30 million Brits went out and conquered millions of foreigners. Feeding the population a fantasy instead of resources was a good trade for any dominant party. While it has been said that religion was an opium for the masses, it would be more accurate to say that imperial glory was an opium both for the masses and the middle classes. British public school boys would be sent to far-flung parts of the empire, without adequate medical care or other provisions, to die in significant numbers in order to preserve the ‘Empire’. That such a con continued for so long requires investigation.
Today many complain about how unethical the US is in providing finance, arms and equipment in order to fight a war to the last Ukrainian. But from the British perspective: it was ever thus!
One can say that the Ukrainian expedition was an attempt to treat Russia like Haiti. Haiti broke the French army, defeated Napoleon and made the independence of the US secure. However, it was humiliated by being subjected to economic and diplomatic encirclement. This gives rise to the difference: Haiti could find no allies, while Russia could find many allies.
An imperial era was based on plunder and slavery to finance slave routes followed by a doctrine of ‘endless wars’ to bankrupt any resistant state. An ideology of natural superiority was developed and sold to the population. An academia was found to rewrite history as required.
‘Endlss war’ requires a post-suppression opportunity for super-exploitation. In the Ukraine situation, many have made rough estimates of the trillions of dollars of natural resources in the ground in Ukraine. A large US deficit simply means that the US will be in search of opportunities for vast super-exploitation. It is correct to say there is no peace option in the US because peace might be catastrophic.
There is a good objection worth addressing which is that on many occasions US wars have not provided a return on investment. Correct. But the American elite is dominated the culture of tech investing whereby you allow for many failures to be recouped by a sensational success.
Others are puzzled why the US will not engage in diplomacy. US policy elites are in fact realists (pace Mearsheimer). No amount of diplomacy will get others to freely hand over trillions of dollars of their own resources.
We are where we are.