Mahathir, Sukarno and anger against the West

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.