Mahathir, Sukarno and anger against the West

Max Lane, Visiting Fellow, Asia Research Center, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir's speech at the recent Putra Jaya meeting of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) articulated an anger against the West which is slowly but steadily accumulating, or re-accumulating, around the world.

I use the term re-accumulating because anti-Western sentiment in the sense of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiment drove most of world politics from the beginning of the century until the defeat of the United States by Vietnam in 1975. Between 1975 and 2005 this sentiment has been relatively subdued, latent rather than active. Now it is on the rise again.

Mahathir's attacks on the West capture a sentiment that is grounded in reality, although his own analysis cuts these sentiments off from parts of this realty. Since the 1980s major international corporations based in the United States, Western Europe and Japan have been facing slowly declining rates of return on their investments.

They began a big squeeze on whomever they could to increase this return. In the rich countries, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher clamped down on trade unions and pushed down wages and conditions.

For the rest of the world a policy of enforcing austerity and liberalization, using the debt leverage as the means of enforcement, started to be implemented. This was given the name "globalization" to hide it under the general process of internationalization of communication, culture. The term also disguises the fact that there has been no globalization of investment in the real economy and that such investment continues to be centered in the rich countries.

In this sense Mahathir's criticisms that the Western power centers are not interested in seeing the rest of the world industrialize are correct. These governments, spearheaded by the military and economic giant of the United States, envisage a world permanently divided between modern and industrialized and backward, poor, under-industrialized countries under more-or-less colonial domination.

Mahathir is also correct in issuing a call for those who are the subject of this Western disdain to unite, rise up and fight back, using -- as he put it -- "brains" rather than "just brawn".

He made valid criticisms of those striking out in anger aiming only to inflict pain on the enemy but not winning victory, in fact, providing opportunities for the enemy, as he called them, to strike back. His self-criticism of the leaderships of Islamic countries echoed the calls for an self-educational revolution that were part of the first anti-colonial revolutions between 1900 and 1975.

Mahathir's anger and his summons to action points to a political process that is now in gestation around the world: A second wave of anti-colonial revolutions, against the new-style colonialism of the IMF and of Iraq-Afghanistan-Solomon Island style re-colonization.

However, Mahathir reads the West's political tactics too narrowly. He sees, or at least on this occasion, he portrayed the West's globalization aggression as aimed against Islam and engineered by a Jewish conspiracy. Of course, at one level this is an understandable mis-reading of what is happening.

It is true that since the Sept. 11 suicide attack on the World Trade Center, propaganda against Islam in one form or another in the Western mainstream media and by Western politicians has increased.

This is usually disguised in carefully worded statements about respect for Islam, but the number of times politicians and newsreaders use the term "Islamic terror" and "Islamic violence" has increased dramatcially. Meanwhile U.S. and western support for the Zionist state of Israel remains solid.

But Western elites have no interest in Islam. Figures such as George W. Bush and John Howard mouth anything about Islam or any other religion depending on the electoral and general tactical needs of their narrow power and economic interests.

For them and for the myriad of commentators and politicians that now back the U.S. "war on terror", Islam is simply a code- word for everything "non-western". From the point of view of the political economy of the U.S.-IMF led globalization of austerity and liberalization, the non-western world happens to equate with the Third World, the ex-colonial world which is now slated for deepened exploitation and re-colonization.

Mahathir's picture of a Jewish-Muslim conflict actually narrows the possible anti-globalization, anti-recolonization alliance that is needed. Globalized re-colonization is not targeting just the Muslim world but all of the former colonial world: Asia, Africa, the Arab world and Latin America.

Some of the most daring and strong new initiatives are coming from Latin America, with the drive for political and economic sovereignty by the Chavez government in Venezuela, not to mention the longer historical struggle for such sovereignty that has been waged by Cuba.

Mahathir seems to be vying for a leadership position that Indonesia once held under president Sukarno. Gen. Soeharto and his Golkar government of 33 years turned its back on the principle of sovereignty allowing Indonesia to be re-colonized by stealth through the instrument of debt and through cultural take- over.

This policy is being continued by President Megawati Soekarnoputri and is supported by most of the current Indonesian elite, whose economic fortunes are now so tied to accepting subservience to Western institutions.

Mahathir is attempting to fill the gap left by Soeharto's coup against Sukarno in 1965. But his vision is not as far-sighted, humanist or radical as that of Sukarno who, 39 years ago, spoke of the need for a united resistance to policies of exploitation and dominance from the West that included not only the progressive states of the ex-colonial world, but also their peoples and all the progressive minded people in the Western world itself. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements in the rich countries are also part of this resistance.