The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 is tantamount to despondent measures for despairing times, but then these are old imperialist games. Eric Walberg speaks to Gamal Nkrumah about how best to stand up to postmodern imperialism Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games (2011) by Eric Walberg, Clarity Press, Atlanta, Georgia Eric Walberg is no écrivain engagé, and does not pretend to be one either. Neither is he an author on the frontline between competing orthodoxies. Does he fight proxy battles through his prolific writings? I do not know. What I detect in his writings, though, is that he dares to question the global status quo -- the new economic world order. With gusto, he engages with the societies around him, whether in Toronto or Tashkent, Moscow or Cairo. Unsurprisingly, like many works these days, it is easier to order his new book Postmodern Imperialism from Amazon or dozens of other online sites than from bookstores. Colonialism and commerce collide in reality as they do in the work of Walberg. This is an honest piece of work with a sparkling new interpretation of how to interpret a serious historical polemic. Walberg eschews the world of the proverbial literary café. He is an activist with little to lose, and a new world to gain. Waiting passively for the demise of Imperialism serves no purpose. His detractors will charge that he attempts to provide his interpretation of Postmodern Imperialism with some sort of intellectual backbone that rings hollow. This is regrettable in more ways than one. First and foremost, Walberg draws certain parallels between communist resilience to Imperialism and the contemporary resilience of political Islam to Imperialism. "I admire enormously Muslim patience and endurance and the Muslims' stubborn adherence to a spiritual focus in their lives, attributes which non-Muslims have long ago lost," Walberg told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Just consider for a moment the incredible resilience of the Palestinians. It is a miracle that they hang on in the face of concentration-camp conditions, decade after decade. Just as I identified with the communist resilience in the face of Imperialism, so I do with the Muslim resilience today. Note how the anti-Communism of yesterday morphed into the Islamophobia of today." Wearyingly Walberg treads the fine line between writing to win new adherents to his anti- imperialist cause and merely looking for trouble. With Postmodern Imperialism Walberg restores to what many of the voracious readers of ericwalberg.com regard as a sentimental yearning for a better, more progressive future and a nostalgia for golden days bygone. He is an unapologetic critic of Israel. "As for my analysis of Israel, virtually the entire world outside the imperial centre condemns Israel. As for Jews, I have the greatest respect for the dynamism and intelligence that has characterised Jewish culture from time immemorial. It can serve the common good. It will be a key element in finding a way out of Western civilisation's current crisis. Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir, Shahak and Pappe, Finkelstein and Blankfort -- the list is long and growing of Jews who have chosen to dedicate themselves to the common good, to go beyond 'exilic tribalism', as Atzmon puts it. All three monotheistic religions are fine -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- though I see Islam as the final corrective of the earlier versions," Walberg stresses. Always at the heart of the supposed enemy was the urge to beat the rival player, and imperialists have historically been masters of the game. However, Walberg's work is not about virtual weapons or computer game-scams. Leafing through the pages the reader searches in vain for online gaming sites. But there is nothing old-fashioned about Walberg's methodology; he salutes Julian Assange "for his courage and brilliance" in his acknowledgments and quotes Wikileaks through the book. Walberg's work takes us to the Cold War era and by fast-tracking through the "Great Games" reveals the repercussions of the rigours of imperialist powers in their pursuit of prestige and profit. "The term 'Great Game' was coined in the nineteenth century to describe the rivalry between Russia and Britain," notes Walberg. "Britain sent spies disguised a s surveyors and traders to Afghanistan and Turkestan, and several times armies to keep Russia at bay. The ill-fated Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-42 was precipitated by fears that the Russians were encroaching on British interests in India after Russia established a diplomatic and trade presence in Afghanistan. Already by the nineteenth century there was no such thing as neutral territory," Walberg perceptively extrapolates. "The entire world was now a gigantic playing field for the major industrial powers, and Eurasia was the centre of this playing field." I asked him, "Why this ambitious project now?" He said, "The inspiration for my book goes back to my years as a student at Cambridge. I arrived there in September 1973, and still remember graphically the news on 11 September that year that the Chilean president Salvador Allende had been murdered and the army under General Augusto Pinochet had staged a coup, funded and directed openly by the CIA. One of my friends at Corpus Christi was Chilean, and his look of despair affected me. I realised first hand how ruthless and destructive this arrogant pretension to rule the world -- imperialism -- was, and how close I was to the source of the problem. The path my life took since then was a result of this." Walberg does not like labels. He likes to quote Marx's riposte to his son-in-law: "If that's Marxism, then I'm not a Marxist." Walberg, who has taken a number of years to synthesise the ideas in his book, adopts a similar stance to Marx's. His attitude towards religion is similarly eclectic. "I am a freelance monotheist," he quips, quoting Karen Armstrong. Imperialism is a pervasive and constant menace. "My studies were framed by the coup in Chile in September 1973 and the liberation of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Celebrating the latter moment with my friends in the university cafeteria us also etched in my mind." He argues this was a low point for Imperialism allowing people like him to see through it. The impetus and inspiration for Walberg's current work, however, is undoubtedly the Arab Spring. Walberg had moved to Egypt in the closing years of the regime of ex-president Hosni Mubarak and witnessed the wave of revulsion engulfing Egypt. The country was in a seething state of political and social fermentation. It was a fortuitous situation, a godsend. He was here during the 25 January Revolution when he was putting the finishing touches to his work. "The book itself was inspired by the ravages of neo-colonialism in Egypt, a sorry state of affairs." Yet, Postmodern Imperialism is a dispassionate analysis of the sweep of twentieth century history. "The defeat of Communism meant that the only remaining anti-imperialist cultural force was Islam, and I was drawn to Uzbekistan in Central Asia, with a vibrant Muslim heritage. This culminated in another major turning point for me -- watching the twin towers collapse 28 years after the 9/11 coup in Chile, on that more familiar 9/11 of 2001, in bleak post-Soviet Tashkent." The collapse of the Soviet Union had a calamitous impact on neo-colonial states in Africa, Asia and the Arab World. The chilling effect of the Soviet demise added to the unprecedented pressures facing neo-colonies in the developing and underdeveloped worlds. Politically, too, a tsunami was fast welling up. Bold plans, not always fruitful, were afoot to remake the neocolonial nations in peril. Socialists were all over the world in utter disarray. "Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the main foe of Israel, I hadn't paid special attention to the Middle East, assuming that as the anti- Imperialist forces grew, Israel would be pressured to make peace. The assassination of Yitzak Rabin in 1994 and the ascendancy of the neocons made clear this was not going to happen." So what was to be done? The author looked to Marx, whose work he has studied deeply. Walberg's definition of the differences between Marxism and Communism astounded me. His dialectical analysis of Imperialism was simultaneously novel and unique. "Marx is the alpha and the omega in analysing capitalism," Walberg muses. "Marxism is the theory of capitalism. Communism is a black box. We do not know what Communism really is until we get rid of capitalism." His next comment was more conventional. "Communists are political activists who reject capitalism and follow Marx in their understanding of reality." For the purposes of the book, Walberg cuts some corners with terminology to help readers see the forest: "Communism refers to both the theory as proposed by Marx and attempts to realise the theory as embodied in the social formations of post-1917 Russia and post-WWII Eastern Europe. While the latter strayed from the theory, they were nonetheless inspired by Marx." The larger patterns of Imperialism are not always clear when gleaned from the international media. Walberg asserts that only by understanding the larger patterns of the Imperialist Great Games do individual events begin to make sense. That is the premise of his book. He does not see himself as an apologist for the Soviet Union, but he has admiration for this attempt to defy the imperial order. "The Soviet Union right from its inception from 1918, and again in 1941, was invaded. Western secret services were devoting to sabotaging it." Monitoring Western and Soviet policies, Walberg pieces together what was happening in the nascent Soviet Union. "After a brief flirtation with the Trotskyist 'Permanent Revolution' it soon abandoned any pretense to exporting Communism." The author expounds his thesis further. "Trotsky was not a viable alternative to Lenin. He was the gadfly, the Menshevik buzzing around the Bolsheviks jumping on board when the Revolution triumphed." Is Communism unworkable? "It worked, it survived the imperialist invasions. It was the mainstay of the struggle against Nazis. And, there was no reason for it collapse without Western subversion and without the very naïve leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It supported dozens of Third World anti-colonial revolutions once they were underway. It did not foment or instigate revolutions in the Third World in sharp contrast to the Western Powers." Walberg's bold brush strokes will ruffle some feathers both left and right, but he deems them as prerequisite for accurately capturing the essence of our times. "Why are the Trotskyists so ineffectual -- and they have been, right from the start? Just as in religious movements, sectarianism leads to defeat. Trotsky was brilliant but he was a loner. Without a charismatic figure like Lenin and unity of progressive forces, the October Revolution celebrated on 7 November would never have taken place. It is no coincidence that leading neocons had Trotskyist roots." Although this is not the main focus of Walberg's book it is a fascinating sideshow. It helps him target his energies. A much more interesting counter-factual than Trotsky is to consider if Lenin had survived. He died at the age of 47 from arteriosclerosis. "If he had survived he would have implemented very similar policies to the ones that Stalin implemented but without the extensive use of terror. That was the great tragedy of the Soviet Union," according to Walberg. Stalin was duped by the Nazis in the late 1930s, and destroyed his military leadership which weakened the Soviet Union considerably. After War World II he was not duped by the Americans into joining the Bretton Woods institutions, a lesson not lost on Russia's current strongman Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin's Eurasian Union is an ambitious gamble. Is he trying to salvage the Soviet Union? Putin denies this but his policies are focussed on reconstituting a Eurasian union along similar lines. His Popular Front is a communist concept, and he reintroduced the communist-era national anthem. He rehabilitated Soviet achievements in educational textbooks. His popularity derives from his fighting the oligarchs and giving the impression that he is a populist. Whether or not that is true is an entirely different issue. Walberg views Putin as a prime mover in the establishment of a new Russia as rightful heir to the Soviet experience. "It must learn to play the imperial games as one of the boys, rather than as the bête noire." BRICS (Brazil Russia India China South Africa) and more specifically RIIC (sans Brazil and with Iran), struggle to establish the new Great Game agenda and goals. In his treatment of today's complex games, the author devotes considerable attention to their political potential. They are all non- imperialist countries in the classic sense of the term, flexing their muscles in the imperial playing field. Walberg charts how certain countries are on the rise and others on the wane in spite of past imperial glory. For example, "Japan remains a passive actor in Eurasia, the Asian link in the Rockefeller- sponsored Trilateral Commission, first headed by Brzezinski in 1973 to coordinate US, European and Japan affairs. Japan was by then the leading economic power and US ally in Asia." Today, the stalling US capitalism desperately needs help and relies on Japan as tits right hand man in Asia. "It dutifully follows US policy on all major problems. 'Like Britain in the case of Europe, Japan prefers not to become engaged in the politics of the Asian mainland,' says Bzrezinski, and is therefore not a geopolitical player." Other powers changed colour. "India has drifted away from its non-aligned position of Cold War days (Walberg's Great Game II), aligning now more with the US and Israel," Walberg notes. "India, like its rival China, does not have the reputation for intrigue and subversion that the US, Israel and its nemesis Pakistan have." There are some fascinating tid-bits concerning the Jewish state. "Israel is cultivating China, chiefly as China's second largest source of arms after Russia. China was officially a Cold War foe of Israel during Great Game II, but when China joined the US-sponsored war in Afghanistan in 1979, Israeli magnate Shaul Eisenberg undertook a secret $10 billion 10-year deal to modernise the Chinese armed forces. 'one of the most important [deals] in Israeli history'," Walberg documents. "In geopolitical terms, India is the southern extension of Eurasia, and aligning its foreign policy with China, Russia and Iran, as opposed to rimland Britain and the US and geopolitical pygmy Israel, would make it part of a strong heartland axis, breaking the hold of the Anglo-American empire, to which it was subjugated in Great Game I and is now flirting with," Walberg perceptively sums up. Chinese readers (there is a Chinese edition in the works) will find food for thought. "Sinophiles including Bzrezinski welcome the resurgence of China as a 'civilisation state' as opposed to the 'nation state' of the European Enlightenment." The centre-periphery dichotomy has blurred somewhat as time goes on, with countries such as Canada and Australia part of a diffused centre. Ideologies also adapt: "The alliance with the Soviet Union in WWII had inspired the Western public with ideas of socialism, especially after the widespread suffering during the protracted depression of the Great Game I endgame in the 1930s, when the experiment of socialist planning in the Soviet Union was much admired." But this was a time bomb for imperialists: "The wartime planned economies in the US and Canada quickly ended unemployment and resulted in rapid economic development, further inspiring popular support for a post-war socialist order, especially in Europe, here imperial dreams had already largely faded, and where Communist partisans had been the most visible and principled actors in liberating Nazi-occupied lands," Walberg perceptively explains. "Despite deeply ingrained anti- Communism in North America, Communists were elected there. This frightened the Western establishment, caught between the Nazi devil and the deep blue sea of world Socialist revolution." Hence the massive ideological shift after 1945 towards anti-Communism. Yet the fundamentals remain intact through all the games. The centre, the imperialist metropolis, controls the world's surplus. China and Russia don't do that. Britain had, and now America has the pretense to do this. Walberg, at this juncture introduces the concept of Super-Imperialism, a term coined by Michael Hudson, describing how the US managed to assert its financial supremacy after WWII. The Arab Spring is now playing out momentous developments in the Middle East which happened during earlier games. "The weakness of Britain did not escape the notice of Colonel Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who forced them out of Egypt in 1954 and nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, in a rare win for a periphery player in Great Game II." This was Egypt's finest hour in the earlier games. Hence, the posters of Nasser in Tahrir in 2011. Arabs once again have become an inspiration to the world. Where does American Imperialism stand on the question of the Arab awakening? American attitudes toward the current revolts are muddled, or rather muddy. "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which make us wonder at the possibility that there must be something that we are missing," exclaimed an exasperated Nasser in 1957. The more things change ... Uzbekistan is a key Central Asian nation, where Walberg cut his journalistic teeth. The higher standard of living in Uzbekistan as opposed to Egypt, in spite of the ravages of the Karimov regime, compelled Walberg to examine the situation there in some detail, and confirmed his intuition that socialism, even in a harsh form, is preferable for Third World development than capitalism. Though it really got underway only in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet, the current Great Game III actually began with in fateful 1979. "1979 changed everything in the Middle East, Central Asia and in US-Soviet relations. In the first place, having been dragged to the negotiating table by Carter, Israel finally made peace with its main protagonist -- Egypt -- and could explore new ways to achieve Greater Israel and regional hegemony," Walberg states categorically. "Israel had won its own Great Game II [GGII], so to speak, early by neutralising its most important enemy Egypt, and could now move ahead unimpeded to consolidate its 1967 gains, keeping the US onside by helping defeat their common Great Game II enemy -- the Soviet Union." Israel's special relationship with the US is a main focus of the book. The problem with these loose alliances imposed by Western hegemony is that they can never take the place of nation states in determining world affairs. While the defeat of the Soviet Union was in Israel's interests, it was seen very differently in Tel Aviv than in Washington. "This battle was very much in Israel's interests, a win-win, as it would free Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel and eliminate the Arabs' main support," Walberg concludes. Yes, Israel scored high marks in a hot contest. "But 1979 was even more fateful as a result of developments in Central Asia, where the reluctant Soviet occupation of Afghanistan created a new situation, at one and the same time the endgame of GGII and the beginning of a new game on a new playing field." Since then, the world has moved on from the old century to a new one that started ominously with 9/11 2001. But the dynamics set in motion by the American campaign against the Soviet Union in 1979 are with us still. Iran is another major focus of the book, coming into its own in what Walberg calls Great Game III. "The other earth-shattering event of that fateful year was the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which like the Egypt-Israeli peace accord and the [Soviet] war in Afghanistan would impact the global political climate throughout the end of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first." Walberg is critical of the role of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the earlier games. "CIA covert operations specialist Robert Baer states, 'The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally ... the Dulles bothers approved Saudi funding of Egypt's Brothers against Nasser." "For those [Western policymakers] who knew little about the religion and culture of Islam, in search of strategic allies who would not interfere with the US agenda, fundamentalist Islam seemed the best bet to undermine Communism." Thus the Islamists were used by the imperialists both in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East to weaken the attempts to form an anti- imperial front. "Arab nationalists and socialists posed a threat to US-Israeli hegemony in the region at the time, and thus to growing US energy needs." This was an old strategy. "The promotion of Islamists was not new as a strategy, as during Great Game I, the British promoted conservative Islamists." The perennial dilemma for revolutionaries or even reformers (Walberg eschews labels) is that while few would disagree with the socialist ideals of social justice and equal opportunities, there is a glaring lack of consensus on how to achieve these noble goals. Walberg cites the dilemma faced by the newly emergent nations in Africa and Asia. "Kwame Nkrumah, still considered the 'greatest African', penned the seminal Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965." Indeed, it was Nkrumah who coined the term neocolonialism, referring to a country nominally independent but in reality subject to economic and political control by the former colonial master. Sadly, his efforts stumbled on the Great Game playing field during the Great Game against Communism and Third World revolution.
