From 11 September to 7 October: The fake ‘War on Terror’ collapses
For years, the US executed Israel’s regional destabilization program using phantom terrorists as justification for the ‘War on Terror.’ But 7 October 2023 killed Washington’s never-ending war project – with a flip of the switch, US adversaries have now turned the ‘Long War’ on Israel.
Pepe Escobar
September 13, 2024
Credit: The Cradle)
Colonization … is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage … the same rules of international morality do not apply … between civilized nations and barbarians.
– John Stuart Mill, quoted by Eileen Sullivan in “Liberalism and Imperialism: JS Mill’s Defense of the British Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, 1983.
The events of 11 September 2001 were intended to impose and enshrine a new Exceptionalist paradigm on the young 21st century. History, though, ruled otherwise.
Cast as an attack on the US Homeland, 11 September 2001, immediately generated the Global War on Terror (GWOT), launched at 11 pm on the same day. Initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, the term was later sanitized by the administration of Barack Obama as “Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).”
The US-manufactured War on Terror spent a notoriously un-trackable eight trillion dollars defeating a phantom enemy, killed over half a million people – overwhelmingly Muslims – and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim-majority states. All of this was relentlessly justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community” – before that term, too, was renamed as the “rules-based international order.”
Cui Bono? (who stands to gain) remains the paramount question related to all matters related to 11 September 2001. A tight network of fervently Israel-first neocons strategically positioned across the defense and national security establishments by Vice President Dick Cheney – who had served as secretary of defense in the administration of George W Bush’s father – sprang into action to impose the long-planned agenda of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That far-reaching agenda had waited in the wings for the right trigger – a “new Pearl Harbor” – to justify a slew of regime-change operations and wars across much of West Asia and other Muslim states, reshaping global geopolitics for the benefit of Israel.
US General Wesley Clark’s notorious revelation of a secret Cheney regime plot to destroy seven major Islamic countries over five years, from Iraq, Syria, and Libya all the way to Iran, showed us that the planning had already been done in advance. These targeted nations had one thing in common: they were resolute enemies of the occupation state and firm supporters of Palestinian rights.
The sweet deal, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, was that the War on Terror would have the US and its western allies fighting all these serial Israeli-profiting wars on behalf of “civilization” and against the “barbarians.” The Israelis couldn’t have been more happy or smug about the direction this was going.
It’s no wonder that 7 October 2023 is a mirror image of 11 September 2001. The occupation state itself advertised this as Israel’s own “11 September.” Parallels abound in more ways than one, but certainly not in the way Israel-firsters and the cabal of extremists leading Tel Aviv expected.
Syria: the turning point
The western Hegemon excels in constructing narratives and is currently wallowing in the Russophobia, Iranophobia, and Sinophobia swamps of its own creation. Discrediting official, immutable narratives, such as the one about 11 September, remains the ultimate taboo.
But a false narrative construct cannot hold out forever. Three years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers collapsing and the onset of the War on Terror, we witnessed a great unraveling in the intersection of Central and South Asia: the Taliban were back in power, celebrating their victory over the Hegemon in a discombobulated Forever War.
By then, the “seven countries in five years” obsession – aiming to forge a “New Middle East” – was being derailed across the spectrum. Syria was the turning point, though some would argue that the tea leaves were already cast when the Lebanese resistance defeated Israel in 2000, then again in 2006.
But smashing independent Syria would have paved the way for the Hegemon – and Israel’s – Holy Grail: regime change in Iran.
US occupation forces entered Syria in late 2014 under the pretext of fighting “terror.” That was Obama’s OCO in action. In reality, though, Washington was using two key terror outfits – Daesh, aka ISIL, aka ISIS, and Al Qaeda, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – to try to destroy Damascus.
That was conclusively proved by a declassified 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, later confirmed by General Michael Flynn, the DIA’s chief when the assessment was written: “I think it was a willful decision [by the Obama administration]” when it comes to helping, not fighting, terror.
ISIS was conceived to fight both the Iraqi and Syrian armies. The terror group was an offspring of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then renamed Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then rebranded as ISIL, and finally ISIS, after it crossed the Syrian border in 2012.
The crucial point is that both ISIS and Nusra Front (later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) were hardcore Salafi-jihadi Al-Qaeda offshoots.
Russia entering the Syrian theater at Damascus’ invitation in September 2015 was the real game-changer. Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to actually engage in a real war on terror in Syrian territory before that terror reached the Russian Federation’s borders. This was captured by the standard formulation in Moscow at the time: the distance from Aleppo to Grozny is only 900 kilometers.
The Russians, after all, had already been subjected to the same brand and modus operandi of terror in Chechnya in the 1990s. Afterward, many Chechen jihadis escaped, only to end up joining dodgy outfits in Syria financed by the Saudis.
The late, great Lebanese analyst Anis Naqqash later confirmed that it was the legendary Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani who convinced Putin, in person, to enter the Syrian theater of war and help defeat the terrorism. This strategic masterplan, it transpires, was to fatally debilitate the US in West Asia.
The US security establishment, of course, would never forgive Putin, and especially Soleimani, for defeating their handy jihadist foot soldiers. On the orders of President Donald Trump, the anti-ISIS Iranian general was assassinated in Baghdad in January 2020, alongside Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, deputy leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), a broad spectrum of Iraqi fighters who had coalesced to defeat ISIS in Iraq.
Burying the legacy of 11 September
Soleimani’s strategic tour de force of setting up and coordinating the Axis of Resistance against Israel and the US was years in the making. In Iraq, for instance, the PMUs were propelled to the forefront of the resistance because the Iraqi military – US-trained and US-controlled – simply could not fight ISIS.
The PMUs were created after a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani in June 2014 – when ISIS began its Iraqi rampage – by imploring “all Iraqi citizens” to “defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens and its sacred sites.”
Several PMUs were backed by Soleimani’s Quds Force – who, ironically, for the rest of the decade would be invariably branded by Washington as a master “terrorist.” In parallel, crucially, the Iraqi government hosted an anti-ISIS intel center in Baghdad, led by Russia.
The credit for defeating ISIS in Iraq went mostly to the PMUs, complemented by its help to Damascus via the integration of PMU units into the Syrian Arab Army. That was what a real war on terror was all about, not that misnomered American construct called the “War on Terror.”
Best yet, the indigenously West Asian response to terror was and remains non-sectarian. Tehran supports secular, pluralist Syria and Sunni Palestine; Lebanon features a Hezbollah–Christian alliance; Iraq’s PMUs feature a Sunni–Shia–Christian alliance. Divide and Rule simply do not apply in a homegrown anti-terror strategy.
Then, what happened on 7 October 2023 propelled the regional resistance forces’ ethos to a whole new level.
In one swift move, it destroyed the myth of Israeli military invincibility and its much-lauded surveillance and intelligence primacy. Even as the horrifying genocide across Gaza proceeds unabated (with possibly as many as 200,000 civilian deaths, according to The Lancet), the Israeli economy is being eviscerated.
Yemen’s strategic blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea to any Israel-linked or destined shipping vessel is a masterstroke of efficiency and simplicity. Not only has it already bankrupted Israel’s strategic Eilat Port, but also, as a bonus, has offered a spectacular humiliation of the thalassocratic Hegemon, with the Yemenis de facto defeating the US Navy.
In less than a year, the concerted strategies of the Axis of Resistance have essentially buried six feet under the fake War on Terror and its multi-trillion-dollar gravy train.
As much as Israel profited from events after 11 September, Tel Aviv’s actions after 7 October rapidly accelerated its unraveling. Today, amidst massive Global Majority condemnation of Israel’s Gaza genocide, the occupation state stands as a pariah – tainting its allies and exposing the Hegemon’s hypocrisy with each passing day.
For the Hegemon, it gets even more alarming. Recall the 1997 warning of Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski: “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
In the end, all the combined sound and fury of 11 September, the War on Terror, Long War, Operation This-And-That over two decades, metastasized into exactly what “Zbig” feared. Not only has a mere “challenger” emerged, but a full-fledged Russia–China strategic partnership that is setting a new tone for Eurasia.
Suddenly, Washington has forgotten all about terrorism. This is the real “enemy” – now considered the top two US “strategic threats.” Not Al-Qaeda and its many incarnations, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized in the previous decade as those mythical “moderate rebels” in Syria.
What’s even more eerie is that the conceptually nonsensical War on Terror forged by the neocons immediately after 11 September is now morphing into a war of terror (italics mine), embodying the desperate Hail Mary pass by the CIA and MI6 to “confront Russian aggression” in Ukraine.
And that’s bound to be metastasized into the Sinophobia swamp because those same western intelligence agencies consider the rise of China to be “the greatest geopolitical and intelligence challenge” of the 21st century.
The War on Terror has been debunked; it is now dead. But get ready for serial wars of terror by a Hegemon unaccustomed to not owning the narrative, the seas, and the ground.
The puzzle is Asia. The puzzle of Asia lies not so much in how Asian states and governments followed, as did others, all that we saw being ordered from December 2019 and which we categorise under the portmanteau word ‘covid’, but how and why the peoples of today’s Asia were led to such a point.
How far back must we look for an answer? Perhaps to the formation of the regional bloc known as Asean (the Association of South-East Asian Nations), perhaps to the USA’s war on Vietnam and especially its lengthy aftermath, perhaps to 1945 and the conclusion of what was called the Pacific theatre of the second world war, when one expansionist Asian power was replaced by an expansionist and occupying American power, but perhaps more than any of these points in the 20th century, to the transmutation of colonial power to corporate power whose seat lay firmly in the colonising states.
If the frame is the colonial world versus what replaced it (whether sooner or later) then is the puzzle only an Asian one and not a South American one, an African one, a Middle Eastern (or Near-Eastern one)? No, of course it isn’t. But if one is to take a view broader, and also one more empathetic, than the worlds conventionally thought of as being those of the colonised, then I would also consider as colonised those vast working class masses of first Europe and later, what came to be called the Western world, who toiled for the colonial industries.
But this is getting ahead, or perhaps abeam, of the central notion of what I would like to present, the puzzle of the capitulation of Asian peoples and nations, one after another, to a Western suzerainty that replaced Eastern forms of governance with Western, likewise justice, commerce, education and forms of habitat.
For younger readers, those who are 30 years old and younger, the terms Western and Eastern seem scarcely to differ from one another, for other than a mother-tongue and a few bodily racial features, there is very little indeed that distinguishes a young Easterner from an equally young Westerner. For those between 30 and around 60, the distinction may well be perceivable although mostly through received memory and oral anecdote from the preceding generation. For those above 60, who would have witnessed and remembered well the steam railway engine being replaced by the electric, even while the bullock-cart still roamed the countryside, the Eastern and Western were two vastly different worlds.
But even that was only as long as such a view lay in the country. The cities of Asia, at the fin-de-siecle of the 19th and the first fraught decade of the 20th centuries, leaned already more, in manner and intent, to the West than to their own patrimonies. And thus became Yangon, Penang, Melaka and Singapore; Batavia, Bandung, Semarang, Surabaya, and Makassar; Saigon, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai and Hanoi; Aden, Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Colombo, and Calcutta. Their very names, the each of them, evoke especially for an older generation, kinds of Asian-ness that infuse an European cityframe. But that was then, before even the lurid brightness of neon washed upon old tiled roof and new steeple.
Some of these were the very essence of what was known as the Far East. Others were India and its orbit. What was meant, what could have been meant, by ‘Far East’? In volume three of ‘Civilisation and Capitalism’, which is given the volume title ‘Perspective of the World’, Fernand Braudel, that meticulous documenter of world systems, essayed an explanation of the term.
“The Far East taken as a whole, consisted of three gigantic world-economies: Islam, overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and controlling the endless chain of deserts stretching across Asia from Arabia to China; India, whose influence extended throughout the Indian Ocean, both east and west of Cape Comorin; and China, at once a great territorial power – striking deep into the heart of Asia – and a maritime force, controlling the seas and countries bordering the Pacific. And so it had been for many hundreds of years.
“But between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, it is perhaps permissible to talk of a single world-economy broadly embracing all three. Did the Far East, favoured by the regularity and the usefulness for shipping of the monsoon and the trade winds, actually combine to form a coherent whole, with a series of successive dominant centres, a network of long-distance trading connections and an inter-related series of prices?”
I see in Braudel’s understanding of what was called the East several key concepts. The first is his top-tier concept of world-economies, a concept that found voice and enlargement from the ‘age of discovery’ certainly until the exporting of the industrial revolution’s processes and mechanisms to the colonies. A second is control, whether of land or maritime routes and regions. A third is the related terms of ‘dominant centres’, ‘trading connections’ and ‘prices’.
It is in their manifestation of these concepts that the colonial cities and ports, several that I named earlier in a parade of what was portrayed around the world as Asian exotica (to which long distance airliners flew, such as TWA and Pan-Am), were quickly identified with. Many of them, the great majority, were built on the coast or had extensive riverine anchorages. Therefore they boasted promenades and bunds, these lined from end to end with majestic structures such as the most important banks, the head offices of trading firms, courts of justice, public libraries, national art galleries, an erstwhile ruler’s palace or two, the opera.
Nearby were well-constructed wharfages, cavernous warehouses, police headquarters, the central offices of key departments such as home and exchequer. Nearby too were a fort with its garrison and arsenal, its cannon guarding the navigation channels. A little farther away but still within a furlong or two from the water’s edge were public hospitals, public greens and ovals, the university and its grounds, the city’s bus-stand and railway terminus, a mews, hotels and hostelries, and of course the commercial centre, with its lesser trading firms, shipchandlers, moneychangers, merchants’ chambers, and their dense feeder alleys of small shops and establishments.
As is well known to architecture students who are guided to study the hybrid styles and building-forms that emerged during the 19th century in these colonised kingdoms and territories and nations of Asia, the transfer of the template of the European city centre into an Asian setting – usually riverine or coastal – brought with it, in every single locale, a built style in vogue in the coloniser’s homeland, but which was made distinctive by the incorporation of local features and embellishments, usually copied from some crumbling old palace or ruined pagoda.
And so the colonial city came to have, not only the imprimatur or great stamp upon a foreign land of its colonial masters, it also became the three-dimensional material medium through which foreign institutions of control and order became colonial, and then local. The interiors of the structures – large halls, adjunct chambers, thoroughfare corridors, ante-rooms, senior functionaries’ offices, foyers, functional staircases and ceremonial staircases – all played a part in cementing foreign systems of administration, control and indeed interpretation of the connection between state and commoner.
In their examination of world systems, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein in ‘Antisystemic Movements’ employ a re-reading of ‘Wealth of Nations’ that I find underlines the considerable powers that formed the colonial city and its subservient (if restive) hinterland.
“The Wealth of Nations being a work of legislation, the purpose of this ‘class analysis’ was to warn the sovereign against the dangers involved in following the advice and yielding to the pressures of merchants and master manufacturers. As the head of the national household, he should instead strengthen the rule of the market over civil society, thereby achieving the double objective of a more efficient public administration and a greater well-being of the nation.”
Wallerstein and Arrighi count as perhaps the most natural heirs of Braudel’s particular oeuvre, and their view, like that of other world systemists, leans quite distinctly towards elaborating the relationship between state and merchant. This is what, at first reading, any world systems tract appears to be primarily absorbed with. Many however do look for ways to contend with what in our time (and especially in our very recent past, taking the time-stamp of 2019 December) is considered to be the melding of state and merchant. This, as we now note with a mixture of indignation and familiarity, is the foundation of globalism.
The ” greater well-being of the nation” referred to in ‘Antisystemic Movements’ is not in any way nation as understood by and as participated in by the colonised nations’ inhabitants (now colonial subjects). No, this nation is instead a territory-in-transformation, an exclave of the occupier, distant but well fortified, its wealth in continuous transfer to the occupier (or its factors), its local elites having been co-opted or coerced into full-time assistance of the colonial enterprise, its inhabitants systematically denied of their own socio-cultural institutions, their own modes of habitation, their own language and symbols.
And even their own voice. For this was stated very plainly indeed on 16 November 1905 by no less a potentate than Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, during his farewell speech at the Byculla Club in Bombay. Declaiming pompously about his own voice being “raised on behalf not of a section or a fraction, but so far as the claim may be made, of all India,” Curzon went on, “And in any case, it will be of an India whose development must continue to be a British duty, whose fair treatment is a test of British character, and whose destinies are bound up with those of the British race. So far as it in me lies it will be a voice raised in the cause of impartial justice and fair dealing; and, most of all, seeing that Indian interests are not bartered away or sacrificed or selfishly pawned in the financial or economic adjustments of Empire.”
There were no two ways about it. The colony’s interest was determined fully by the imperial interest, its ‘development’ was designed by and articulated by the empire’s men, its voice or voices could be native only so long as that native voice followed the narrow script of the British administration. Naturally, the natives were roused to fury. Naturally also, some of their number, particularly those who were merchants and financiers, both ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds. Those who did so successfully (that success being assigned by the colonial eye, not the native one) became the economic and social elites. They set the tone, the bar, and were handed places of influence in social institutions, and partook of the colonial rulers’ tables.
All that was a century and more ago. After what is properly called the thirty years’ war of the 20th century, which began in 1914 and ended in 1945, the colonial machine underwent what we today recognise as a ‘reset’. Put as simply as possible, the calculus was that under the project called freedom, a greater and more pervasive colonialism may well be able to entrench itself. Freedoms ensued, and former colonies became ‘free’ and duly celebrated their ‘independence’.
It mattered little to the celebrating proletariat, hearing speech after rhetorical speech on the radio and drunk on simplistic ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’, that the new government and new administration were in fact very much like the old. In former colonies, a decade after their day of ‘independence’, the colonial-era buildings, still imposing and stately (if a little more stained and grimy), still housed the same departments and ministries. The baton had only been handed over. It remained a baton.
Perhaps it was a man curiously named Glubb Pasha (but formally, Sir John Bagot Glubb) who had described it best (at least for English readers of the impulses that guided the British empire). “The present fashion for ‘independence’ has produced great numbers of tiny states in the world, some of them consisting of only one city or of a small island,” Glubb had written in a slim volume titled ‘Search for Survival’. “This system is an insuperable obstacle to trade and cooperation. The present European Economic Community is an attempt to secure commercial cooperation among small independent states over a large area, but the plan meets with many difficulties, due to the mutual jealousies of so many nations.”
So overweening was the drive for commerce, and its control, for empire’s ideologues like Glubb, that he chose startling examples to advance his thesis. “Even savage and militaristic empires promoted commerce, whether or not they intended to do so. The Mongols were some of the most brutal military conquerors in history, massacring the entire populations of cities. Yet, in the thirteenth century, when their empire extended from Peking to Hungary, the caravan trade between China and Europe achieved a remarkable degree of prosperity – the whole journey was in the territory of one government. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the caliphs of Baghdad achieved fabulous wealth owing to the immense extent of their territories, which constituted a single trade bloc. The empire of the caliphs is now divided into some twenty-five separate ‘nations’.”
That was the next stage, the great leap forward for globalism-kind, which would grab decolonisation by the scruff of its untidy brown neck and pitch it into the carefully prepared cascade of revolutions – consumer, retail, mobility, telecom, financial, electronic, digital, fourth industrial.
Glubb was extraordinarily well qualified to state what he did. He served throughout the first World War in France and Belgium, in 1920 volunteered for service in Iraq, in 1926 resigned his commission and accepted an administrative post under the Iraq Government, in 1930 signed a contract to serve the Transjordan Government (now Jordan), from 1939 to 1956 commanded the famous Jordan Arab Legion (hence the ‘Pasha’ nickname). In 1957, the European Economic Community was formed. The caliphs and khans so admired by Glubb and his trenchmen became the administrators of the European common market, the forerunner of the European Union.
But of soldierly dreams are not global economic fates fashioned. Decolonisation required direction, and who better to provide direction than a welter of new technical and advisory departments set up by the former colonial powers, out of the goodness of their contrite hearts. These directed many if not all the policies of newly independent countries and territories. They wrote guidelines, draft legislation, blueprints, multi-year plans, the whole lot. Heavy industries were set up (with technical collaboration), modern agriculture, infrastructure, development finance, tertiary education, a public health system, scientific research centres, stock exchanges. By the 1970s, the by now well decolonised countries were debating whether they were still the Third World or which of the labels, ‘less developed’ or ‘under-developed’, was more offensive. Whatever their ignominy, they were ensnared by what would become known as the development and foreign aid industry. And none of it was either run by nor described by the Third World.
There is a passage in the Cambridge History of South-East Asia (volume two, 1992) that describes what was at work, although it does so because I have juxtaposed it here, after providing a very particular context. “In a general sense the Europeans, the chief Western actors for much of the century, were impelled by their political and economic strength and strategic advantage, which had increased since their initial successes in Asia, and would increase further with their industrial and technological revolutions and enhanced capacity to mobilise their resources. On these advantages they wished to build. They were also impelled by other purposes, not necessarily mere rationales, nor mere products of the pursuit of wealth and power, though related to their success and to their wish to build upon it: to convert, to civilise, to spread European culture.”
What was this culture, this conversion, this civilising mission? It was the creation of new markets not for the products, shiny and useless, that we know well which are sent out by the megaton shipload from the globalist factories, but for the social customs and modes of living invented by the globalists’ great psychological corps, behaviourists and the iconographers of suggestion. That was the next stage, the great leap forward for globalism-kind, which would grab decolonisation by the scruff of its untidy brown neck and pitch it into the carefully prepared cascade of revolutions – consumer, retail, mobility, telecom, financial, electronic, digital, fourth industrial.
Every kind of socio-political ‘system’ of Asia that had been given a label was subordinate to the plan, which unfolded over carefully monitored decades. The centrally planned communist economies of China and the Soviet Union, the centrally planned quasi-socialist or ‘mixed’ economies of India and its part-time partners, Indonesia notable among them, of what were self-consciously called the non-aligned group of nations, the industry and electronic seats of East Asian dominance – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the natural commodities and cheap consumer goods economies of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
And as for the Asia that lay between the north-western frontier of British India and the Kurdish homelands, once territories of the caliphs of Glubb’s admiration, those nations and peoples came to be called the Middle East and the currency it was burdened with was oil and gas (those too were ruthlessly directed by the vulpine consortium called the Seven Sisters).
Curzon arrogating to himself a voice of India, and doing so without facing a serious challenge, was quickly noted by the other European powers in Asia. They seized upon all available symbols. A potent one, which could enter the native household and be displayed every day, was the school uniform for children. The white blouse and pinafore for girls, the white shirt and half-pants (as they used to be called) for boys (plus shoes and socks, absurd in tropical climates), became powerful symbols. Schoolchildren’s uniforms were replete with symbolism: the path that leads away from the wretchedness of the Third World, the promise of literacy, the assurance of a bright future for the school-educated, the country’s future in good hands. (Unicef still wields such imagery every day.)
Traditional games and sports were run out of town. In their place, in schoolyards and playgrounds and especially in gymkhana precincts (presided over by local elites) came football and cricket and rugby. The joint family was ridiculed. The bullock-cart became a museum piece, the ox-drawn plough was rudely shoved aside by the tractor. The Asian rice farmer was told he is an ignoramus by the rice biotechnologist. The traditional healers and bone-setters and herb-gatherers were turned into criminals by newer amendments to public health legislation, drafted by the transnational pharmaceutical industry and passed into law by the bribing of elected members of parliaments. For the genus of parliaments and their subsidiaries, provincial assemblies, had in post-colonial Asia been turned into the very engine rooms of globalisation.
By the 1990s, the ‘Asian tiger economies’ were being lauded and feted around the world, becoming special subjects in business schools such as Insead, Harvard and MIT Sloan. In Singapore, the boast was that its taxi drivers could discuss the finer points of GDP. Japan’s zaibatsu and keiretsu reigned as the poster boys of ‘global economic integration’. Westward across the Sea of Japan, South Korea’s chaebol were beginning to be anointed as the next poster boys. Taiwan both invented bubble milk tea and became chip supplier to the world’s computer giants. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh produced cheap piece goods textiles, Thailand turned cheap resort tourism into a national industry, every other call centre in the world relocated to the Philippines.
Hundreds of new ‘engineering’ colleges spat out tens of thousands of graduates a year in India who, without missing a step, walked right into the info-tech sector, and those who couldn’t donned headsets in the business process outsourcing industry. China, meanwhile, gobbled up the majority of the iron ore and coal that could be shipped and became the largest steelmaking country in the world, but also supplied Walmart and big box retailers in the USA and Europe, which movement of raw material and finished products tied up a large part of ocean-going shipping tonnage worldwide. Little wonder then that during the first half of the first decade of the 21 century, “being global” meant manufacturing somewhere in Asia, and marketing all over the OECD.
What remained of Asia at all? What remained of the red bean fields, the slow sampan, the padi buffalo, the kampong of the Malay peninsula, the longhouse of the Indonesian archipelago, the houses on bamboo stilts, the bronze gongs, the silkworm farms, the pagodas festooned with creepers in whose dusty halls robed youngsters chanted the dhammapada? Where did this Asia go? It became a sensory accessory to tourism, a case study that demonstrated climate change, or biodiversity, or gender equity, or stakeholder participation, or whatever it is that became in vogue for that year and that series of glittering international United Nations-directed and -sponsored conference series.
And that is why they bent their heads, put away their mopeds, dutifully switched on their television sets, plugged in their rice cookers, and went along, between December 2019 and April 2020, with the diktats that were handed down, through tier after subservient tier, from the Lords of the West, from those once derided and once caricatured as ‘gweilo’ and ‘feringhee’. Decolonisation, always a work in progress, still lies somewhere beyond the last Asian horizon.
