Click here to access article by Stephen Gowans from his blog What's Left.
Gowans strikes again! I mean this in the narrow sense that he pierces through the fog of the never-ending barrage of propaganda that Western academics who, while paying homage to their ruling class masters, imposed on us a highly distorted understanding of the history of that region since WWII.
WWII was a pivotal event in world history. The old colonial powers quickly allied themselves after WWII with the intact and powerful USA to continue their old patterns of imperialism, that is, the desire to constantly expand their operations in pursuit of wealth and power over the rest of the world. WWII was merely a contest among fascist-inclined empires: the British Empire, the German/Italian empire (Third Reich), and the Japanese Empire. The British Empire was reduced to a shell of its former stature, but its ruling capitalists quickly allied itself with the ruling capitalist class in the US and created the state of Israel to obtain financial backing by fascist-inclined Jewish capitalists (Zionists) as well as a base in the energy-rich Middle East.
Since then, the Empire's ruling transnational capitalist class has used technological advances to largely remove national boundaries that hindered their exploitation of working people all over the world in order to satisfy their insatiable appetite for greater wealth and power. Note that the latter clause implies what I firmly believe is an addiction.
I also believe, along with many others, that this historical development portends the end of the human species either in the short term as a result of a catastrophic nuclear war or in the long run (roughly 30 years) through the destabilization of our climate via the loading of our atmosphere with greenhouse gases because of the system's requirement of relatively cheap energy to satisfy this addiction.
Gowans performs a valuable service for us by his clarification of the often obscured history, especially since WWII, of this important region.
