FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2011
CARPETBAGGERS :
“After the civil war in the US, carpetbaggers was a derogatory term Southerners gave to Northerners (also referred to as Yankees) who moved to the South during the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877
Together with Republicans they are said to have politically manipulated and controlled former Confederate states for varying periods for their own financial and power gains. In sum, carpetbaggers were seen as insidious Northern outsiders with questionable objectives meddling in local politics, buying up plantations at fire-sale prices and taking advantage of Southerners.”
Cut to present day: the Yankee is seen no differently to what he was in the previous century. The arena has changed. From the confines of N America, the world has become the theatre. Moving for country to country, the carpetbaggers seek to intervene in matters of state with the presumption that the formula they bring with them is the most suitable for that country, with business interests of a chosen few following the state intervention.
Not that such a methodology is new- the Spanish, the Dutch and later the British and the French, and later, et all of Europe jumped the bandwagon and followed this well laid out strategy - enter as traders, follow it with missionaries, proselytise, and when the locals get enraged at an alien faith being superimposed to their existing faith and culture, call in the army, fight wars, and finally take over their territories. Familiar script, but wait, doesn't is sound terribly colonial? Could it be adapted to the present day? We all we are, after all, in the 21st century, and nations are sovereign, so the script has to be re written to give it a modicum of respectability for the present day.
The present day strategy has been geo political spheres of influence, starting with, initially containing the aggrandisement of Prussia, Russia, Karl Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Kennedy, Brezhnev, Kim Il Jong and so on- the list is endless. From Banana Republics to dictatorships, to Communists, to struggles for independence, the world has offered innumerable opportunities for intervention of the guardians of peace, whoever they may be. Powers of relative size and strength as in the case of the US and USSR in the first instance, and followed by Britain France and Germany have all played decisive roles in their relative spheres of influence, which has in turn always made space for the carpetbagger to come in and rake the spoils of war.
In keeping with this tradition, the United States has over the last 100 years, has assumed the role of the peacemaker along with the rich industralised nations, first in the creation of the League of Nations, after the first world war, and then with the revised and moderinsed version, the United Nations. Often enough, the supreme peace keeping bodies have been misused to get sanction for invading sovereign nations as was done in the case of Iraq by President George Bush.
After the Second World war, two factors came to play in the world theatre; the Cold war, ie the standoff between the two predominant blocs, the Western world compromising of the capitalist nations, and the Eastern Bloc, comprising of the socialist nations. Much of the earlier years after the 2nd WW a paranoia gripping the West about containing the spread of communism, and a fight in such areas, such as the Korean war of North/ south, the Vietnam war of North /south, the Cuban missile standoff at the bay of pigs, the Kuwait invasion, the Iraq invasion, the Afghan invasion..
Whilst the earlier part of the second half of the 20th century was spent waging wars against communist protagonists, the later part was spent in coming to terms with religious militancy. The US were the initial authors of proxy wars, mercenary Muslim armies were mobilised to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Later after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan these armies were cut adrift, and without a job in hand, became Islamist militia, mercenary to begin with, and then later as the Afghanistan state government called Taliban, a medieval sub human form of religious fanatic statecraft with the singular principle of radical Islam. It was these radical islamists that gave sanctuary to Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder that came to regard the US as enemy no 1
Whilst the war aginst terror is a well documented, what assumed importance in later years is the presence of coalition forces in Afghanistan.
