Image - The Nanking Massacre: it falls to the Chinese "Communist" Party to attribute the crimes of the Japanese bourgeoisie to the Japanese without distinction of class.

Who controls the past controls... the future: who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four", 1949

This year's sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War have provoked the ruling classes of the leading nations to indulge in a more than usual degree of nationalist reappraising of history. This is no accidental phenomenon. The bitterness of the debates have shattered any lingering idea that the end of the Cold War and the advent of "globalisation" also meant an end to imperialist rivalries. These are as obvious as ever and the vehicle of history is but the ideological expression of them. Using and abusing history is, of course nothing new for the ruling class. As Marx said, in itself,

History does nothing. It possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles.

On the contrary,

It is rather man, real living men, who does everything, who possesses and fights.

The control of the interpretation of history is, though, part of the defence of property and an ideological weapon of the ruling class. As Marx further wrote in The German Ideology

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

This explains why all kinds of reactionary spokesmen like Andrew Roberts, Simon Schama, David Starkey and Niall Ferguson appear on the media claiming to represent "history" with few dissidents getting a look in. History, or what they want us to think is history, is actually a brilliant ideological device for forging national unity and subservience to state aims.

Post-modernist thinkers thought they could challenge this view by declaring that history is not about what happened in the past but what we think happened. They correctly argued that history is essentially about social constructs which owe their origins to the present day preconceptions of those writing them. But this is a feeble argument since all it does is deliver the message that "all things are relative" and it plays into the hands of the bourgeois class who can agree and then swamp society with their interpretation of the direction of humanity. The argument is also not as new as our "post-thinking modernists" believe. Benedetto Croce, the idealist philosopher and Gramsci's early mentor, announced in the dying years of the nineteenth century that all history "is contemporary history", a thought elaborated by E.H. Carr nearly half a century ago. He pointed out that history has always been "an unending dialogue between the past and present" ⁽¹⁾. In other words we can only look at he past through the prism of the present. Now this would be OK if everyone accepted that historians were the servants of "truth" and therefore as "men (and women) of goodwill" they are part of a great enterprise adding to humanity's knowledge of itself. However, this is not the case. Historical interpretation in a class society is based on a class perspective. History is a weapon of class war. We, as revolutionary communists, do everything we can to bring the real history of the proletariat and its capacity for struggle to the working class today. The capitalists, on the other hand, pay fortunes for university professors to deny this and to denigrate all those who fought for the proletariat in the past. In this unequal struggle the outcome is clear. "Official" history, like all other social constructs is, at all times and in all epochs, the servant of the ruling class. For it history has to be a celebration of ruling class interests, ruling class achievements and a justification of the present order of things. It has also to provide the ideological basis for their domination of society and even for further expansion of that society. The events of the last few months have confirmed that history is a part of the class war.

The Sino-Japanese textbook war

In early April, 10,000 Chinese protesters attacked a Japanese department store in Chengdu. At first, the police stood by and watched but finally prevented the protesters from burning down the store. A week later, student demonstrators in Beijing (where no non-official demonstrations have been allowed since Tiananmen Square in 1989) marched on the Japanese Embassy. Within a few days thousands more protesters had attacked Japanese businesses and diplomats in cities across China. The ostensible cause was the production of a new school history textbook in Japan which fails to mention the atrocities carried out by Japanese troops in China and Korea in the 1930's and 1940's. The Nanking Massacre, in which more than 300,000 Chinese civilians died in 1937, the forced prostitution by the Japanese Army of hundreds of thousands of so-called "comfort women" in China and Korea, and the horrible vivisection experiments conducted on tens of thousands of human guinea pigs in China are all omitted from this textbook.

However less than one per cent of school boards in Japan have decided to use this textbook (which is actually no worse than the previous books issued before Emperor Hirohito died in 1989). There is no doubt that these demonstrations were whipped up on the orders of the Chinese Government who are using them as part of a campaign to develop the global challenge of Chinese imperialism. Chinese history textbooks are also unsurprisingly a little coy about China's past. China History the main text book for 13-15 years olds does not mention Tienanmen, the annexation of Tibet in 1959, the Chinese failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and the massive failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958-9 which created famine in which 30-40 millions died. However, before we utter the necessary condemnation of the odious Chinese ruling class we need to note that they are not alone.

On the Japanese side, the Japanese Government has at regular intervals expressed "remorse" (the usual word they use, sometimes predicated with a "deepest") for Japanese behaviour in China (where 35 millions are thought to have died between 1931 and 1945). The current Prime Minister Koizumi has said sorry at least once every year since 2001. But Koizumi is himself under another pressure from the revival of a Japanese right wing nationalism once confined to a few ex-army officers but now alive and well in Japanese universities. The Tsukurukai or Society for Textbook Reform has decided that the negative picture of the country's wartime past is bad for the patriotic development of the nation's youth. Revisionism is on the agenda. The publication in 1998 of a three volume cartoon book called "On War" by Yoshinori Kobayashi maintains that the Japanese war was an heroic one to liberate Asia from "white racists", that the Nanking massacre never happened, the "comfort women" were not slaves but greedy prostitutes and the stories of Japanese Army atrocities against POWs and civilians alike were just Allied propaganda. The campaign has already had concrete results. Japanese school teachers who refuse to make the children sing the monarchist national anthem in front of the of the national flag are being sacked all over the country. Koizumi still goes every year to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. This is dedicated to the 2.5 millions of Japan's war dead but as it also commemorates known war criminals this has also brought international condemnation from Japan's former wartime adversaries.

The real roots of these debates are not about an interpretation of history but about its engendering support to further the imperial ambitions of the powers in question. The Japanese ruling class wants a seat on the UN Security Council. It resents having a US imposed constitution which forbids it from fighting abroad. This resentment has been fanned all the more since the New World Order began after the collapse of the USSR. Japan today, as in 1941 when it attacked Pearl Harbor, is totally dependent on oil supplies from abroad. In 1937, the US had cut off its oil supplies which led to the Japanese attack on the US in 1941. Today the Japanese still rely on the US to maintain their oil supplies but are increasingly worried about this. In the first Gulf War, the Americans got the Japanese to cough up billions to finance an American adventure which brought only financial gains for US capital. In the distant past British imperialism used to pay other states on the continent of Europe to fight its battles for it. The Pax Americana version is different - the dominant imperialist power of the day uses its own troops (who then occupy more territory) but gets its client imperialist partners (which included Germany as well as Japan) to cough up the finance! The Japanese ruling class are right to be alarmed as Chinese ambitions are even greater. Given the widespread social conflict inside the country, the Communist Party are trying to offset it by increasing China's influence overseas. China aims to create its own sphere of influence and wants to make sure that the Japanese don't act as a US stool pigeon in Asia (the US supports Japan's campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council). Last March, China passed an "anti-secession" law against Taiwan and the Chinese President Hu Jintao invited the armed forces "to prepare for armed conflict". Japan responded by supporting Taiwan's independence. Wen Jibao, the Chinese Prime Minister then warned other powers to stay out of the issue but added "we are not afraid of any interference should it occur". The Chinese further countered by increasing the military budget by 12.6%. Furthermore, China is already expanding its sphere of influence. The Chinese Prime Minister has signed a deal with Pakistan to open a naval base at Gwadar nearly 600 years after a Chinese fleet first anchored in the Arabian Sea. China's growing dependence on oil imports means that it is also keen to "protect" the world's shipping lanes (at the same time as signing pipeline agreements with Russia and Iran).

Imperialist apologia

The battle over the interpretation of history and the imperatives of empire is not confined to the Far East. In Europe and the United States revisionism is on the march too. Everywhere we are hearing that "empire" was/is not so bad. A distasteful reminder of this was the law passed in the French Assembly on 23rd February 2005. This declared that France

...recognises its debt to the women and men who participated in the work carried out by its former departments in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Indochina and in all the territories formerly under French sovereignty.

In other words those who carried out repression and torture to try to maintain the French Empire's feeble grasp on its old colonies in the twentieth century are once again recognised as national heroes. The same law went further to decree that

School courses must... recognise the positive role played by the French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa and must accord the prominent position that they merit to the history and sacrifices of the French armed forces. ⁽²⁾

So children in school, some descended from the same Algerians and Vietnamese who were murdered by French colonial forces, will have to be confronted with this detestable past. We might have thought that an "old" nation like France would have been beyond such petty nationalism but then the same thing is going on all over the "advanced" world. In Britain, right-wing academics like Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson have been pushing for a benevolent re-appraisal of the role of the British Empire. Roberts is an open advocate of the imperialist re-conquest of Africa and frequently gets wheeled out on the radio and TV to defend the wonders of Britain's past empire. Ferguson is less barmy but more dangerous. His televised series and book Empire - How Britain Made the Modern World came out shortly before the Professor defected to the United States. The move to Harvard was an appropriate one for him since his view is that the British Empire was the forerunner of the US current free market dominance. He is now in the right place to argue his case that the US should be more imperialist and formally conquer greater swathes of the planet. So the progressive role of every imperialist power is once again to be proclaimed, despite past, well-documented, genocides and other attacks on what a sane society might consider basic human rights. You will find no talk of the Amritsar massacre of 1921 in India nor of the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration camps in the 1950s Mau Mau struggles in Kenya. The hangings, mutilations and rapes in this colonial episode have only just been fully researched by Caroline Elkins ⁽³⁾ but then who has heard of her or given her a TV series? The Opium Wars of 1839-40 in which the Chinese were forced to open up their ports to the Burmese opium the British were trying to poison them with are also absent from this type of history. The politicians have not been slow to comment either. Gordon Brown, the supposed saviour of Africa with his debt relief scheme told the Daily Mail ⁽⁴⁾ in January that

...the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial past are over.

Apart from the fact that nobody seems to remember any apologies being offered by any British statesmen, it seems that the Führer-in-waiting shares much of the enthusiasm of his current boss for the old British Empire. The remark was obviously calculated to set Brown up as a suitable national leader for the time when he is to control the destiny of the nation. Perhaps we should expect him to announce that as Africa had no debts when Britain ran most of it then a revival of the British Empire can really make poverty history in Africa!

Another manifestation of the manipulation of history came with the celebrations of the 60th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. In Britain those of us who were born at the end of that war can remember that all celebrations for half a century were fairly muted. The usual patriotic rubbish was churned out for Armistice Day as old soldiers got to parade their medals but there was little more. In fact nationalist symbolism was in decline. Empire Day in schools, such a feature of the year until 1939, was never resurrected. After Suez in 1956 revealed just where Britain lay in the world imperialist league (roughly where Leeds United is today in the Football League) the British elite seemed to accept reality. The National Anthem, which used to be played in cinemas at the end of performances, was abandoned because almost everyone walked out ignoring it. Even the constant re-winning of the Second World War on celluloid by John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, et al. was innocently low on jingoism by modern standards, as even the SS sadists were nearly always "gentlemen". It is only since the end of the Cold War that the celebrations have been stepped up. On the Fiftieth Anniversary it might have been a peculiar and significant exception but on the Sixtieth? This year we have had more jingoism than ever with concerts in Trafalgar Square led by Dame Vera Lynn with the Royal Family getting front row seats. It has also gone beyond mere nostalgia for Flanagan and Allen songs. We have had flypasts by ancient Lancaster bombers all over the country and every second pub staged a VE night on May 9th. Even the hitherto uncelebrated Women's Land Army got mentioned (presumably because there are more of them left). It is clear that all this adds up to a deliberate attempt to whip the population behind the "national cause" however our rulers define it.

The failure of the majority of the British population to accept that there was any purpose or justification for the devastation of Iraq means that our ruling class realise we are poorly prepared for the sacrifices that the "war on terror" will demand. The 2 million strong demonstration against the war in Iraq on February 15th 2003 may not have shaken the Government then, but they seem to be trying now to ensure that we will all be much more patriotic the next time around. The notion that the British Empire brought civilisation to a barbarous "dark continent" will fit in well with the idea that imperialist interference will be beneficial for the world. In real terms the British government had trouble finding an ideological justification for its adventures alongside the US. The "weapons of mass destruction" lie imploded so the shift was made to "regime change" justified by the need to "spread democracy". But this justification is really the "Manifest Destiny" of the United States.

The debate on the history of Empire and the Second World War in Britain is a pale shadow of the much more open abuse of history by the dominant power on the planet. When Bush was en route to meet Putin in Moscow last May, his ruling clique realised that the governments of some of the Baltic states (in particular Lithuania) as well as Poland were refusing to attend the Moscow ceremony commemorating the Allied victory over Nazism in 1945. They argued that the Soviet victory meant for them 45 years of occupation. Bush's response was to join them in denouncing the Yalta Agreement signed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945 because it delivered Eastern Europe over to Stalin's control. Bush's apparent ignorance of history seems completely crass ⁽⁵⁾. The reality was that in February 1945 the Red Army was only fifty miles from Berlin and the British and Americans, despite facing less than a third of the forces of the Wehrmacht were still only in the Ardennes. There was little choice except to change sides and make a separate peace with Germany (something both Hitler and Stalin believed might happen). Churchill, despite his well-documented attempts to prevent the advance of the Red Army, had recognised the realpolitik of the situation and carved up zones of influence with Stalin on a single piece of paper. However, Bush's apparent "stupidity" is really deliberate. It is not what really happened that counts but what you say really happened. His aim (or rather the aim of the ruling class for which he is only the main mouthpiece) is not the past but the present. By now claiming that Yalta was an error which delivered Eastern Europe to "tyranny" he aims to put the US in the position of posing as the defender of democracy in the world - a central plank of the Project for a New American Century. It is the ideological justification for new military adventures throughout the planet, driven by the new conditions for US imperialism, which have emerged since the collapse of the USSR.

The new American imperium

These new conditions are creating an increasingly dangerous world. When the dominant imperialist power on the planet, which spends more on armaments than the next 8 most powerful military states put together, is the real rogue state in the international order then the world had better watch out. The "New World Order" phrase was hardly uttered by the elder George Bush in 1990 when it immediately began to disintegrate. What we have seen since is the growth of rabid nationalism which has fed genocidal conflict, as in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time we have had imperialist wars in the Gulf, in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have not come to an end despite years of fighting, hundreds of thousands of deaths and the dropping of tons of bombs. International rivalries, whether about nuclear power or trade relations, have multiplied and the "war on terrorism" has given birth to more fear and instability than ever existed during the Cold War.

Throughout the 1990's, the US, far from trying to maintain a restraining influence on a world freed from the conventions of the Cold War, actually saw the collapse of the USSR as a victory, an opportunity to push forward its own unilateral interests. During the decade not only did US troops wage wars overseas on numerous occasions (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, etc.), but the US constantly refused to pay its dues to the UN and imposed unilateral economic sanctions against 35 UN member states. It refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Human Rights over the Iran-Contras affair and in any other case involving the USA and it passed laws which allowed it to act in US interests outside the US (thus infringing international law). It further refused to ratify intentional conventions and arms control treaties (including the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the production, trade and use of anti-personnel land mines) as well as repudiating the test ban treaty. The US did ratify the chemical weapons convention but attached so many exemptions as to virtually reject it. The famous rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by Bush in 2001 was just a continuation of these polices. Add to these the use of the World Trade Organisation to browbeat its trading rivals into favouring US imports and you have a picture of a global bully acting out of fear. In some ways the September 11th atrocities were a convenient excuse for the US ruling class to further develop its aggressive and assertive unilateralism against the rest of the world.

Indeed the development of the neo-conservative free market ideology and its increasing fusion with a popular base in the Bible belt has led to a new vision of imperialist domination based on what Professor Samuel P. Huntington has defined as "robust nationalism". Huntington fears that the US could face problems from a "liberal" enemy from within so he has called up the ghosts of God, Patriotism and War to help define what commitment to the US means. He is against attempts to find world peace

Real conflicts of interest exist among groups and societies. These are not the result of misunderstanding, faulty communications or short-sightedness but are rooted in the human condition, self-interest, and the struggle for wealth, security and power ⁽⁶⁾.

In the 1990's, the US ruling elite was concerned about the problems of maintaining their domination. Indeed the British historian who they looked to then was Paul Kennedy, whose Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was much discussed in Washington. Kennedy looked at past empires such as the Roman and how they lost power through "imperial overstretch". This may have made the US more multilateralist in the 1990's, but the warning has now been largely forgotten. Basically, the philosophy is that you identify the main enemy and then use a combination of economic pressure, re-armament (which is widely believed to have been the reason why the USSR collapsed in 1990) and outright threats to keep them down. Huntington specifically indicates that Russia and China are the ones to watch if US hegemony is to be maintained. His analysis is much appreciated in Washington and echoed by Condoleezza Rice who has called for the US to

...meet decisively the emergence of any hostile military power... and to deal decisively with rogue regimes and the threat of hostile powers.

The US is not just talking tough here. The fact that the "military-industrial complex", which was denounced as a threat to US democracy by President Eisenhower in the 1950's, is the chief beneficiary of US Government spending is no accident. It finances Republican election campaigns and in return it receives the spoils. The thrust for total military dominance has both an economic and a military rationale. The military rationale is that the US wants to keep dominating the world. To this end the Bush regime has committed itself to the development of miniaturised nuclear weapons and will soon announce that it intends to develop a Global Strike space strategy. This goes one step further than Reagan's Star Wars policy in that it intends to be used offensively and not just to intercept threats to US soil. The USA, which already has troops on the territories of over half the member states of the UN wants to make sure that it can strike at any command centre or any missile base anywhere in the world.

All this out and out re-assertion of classical imperialist policies should shut up those who have argued that globalisation was the negation of the whole idea of imperialism because the growing international cooperation between capitalist states meant we had reached something like the stage of ultra-imperialism predicted by Kautsky during the First World Imperialist Butchery. What these pundits failed to note was that international cooperation is always a feature of the capitalist system alongside the basic competitive struggle for raw materials, sources of investment and markets even under imperialism. It has also always been a feature of monopoly capitalism that individual monopolists have sought to promote international cooperation even as the tendencies towards decline into war were becoming obvious (indeed the activities of these individuals have been cited by capitalist apologians as evidence that wars in our epoch do not specifically have capitalist causes). It is also a fact that, whatever the transnational activity of a company, the ultimate beneficiary of its economic activity is one or other imperialist state from where its capital originates. Perhaps the most laughable (not to mention obscure) attempt to argue that imperialism is now an inadequate concept was that of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their book Empire (Harvard, 2001).

They not only argued that "Empire" today is not only "not a weak echo of modern imperialism but a fundamentally new form of rule". Empire is no longer linked to anything so concrete as a nation state but in metaphysical shape is "a concept" which "has no limits". To a metaphysical thesis they added the metaphysical antithesis. Opposed to a global, frontierless, nationless, stateless world order they give us an amorphous classless international opposition which they call "multitudes". The internationalising drive of "Empire" brings forth a struggle of these "multitudes" who have to reclaim their "right to reappropriation". The multitudes contain the proletariat (which is not the working class as understood in previous generations) but it is not at all clear who else other than the proletariat is in it, or how they can carry out their fight for "rights of reappropriation". Empire, in so far as it has any coherence, repeats the kind of analysis that revolutionary organisations like ours have about the changing composition of the proletariat. In this sense it is a weak echo of Marxism but given the vagueness of its concepts (and on this it prides itself) it is written like a perfect candidate for Pseuds' Corner.

Materialism, not metaphysics, is the only possible way to explain the contemporary unipolar imperialist world of the USA and its would-be challengers. It is no mystery how this situation of world domination by a single power has arisen. The rise of the USA corresponds with the process of "concentration and centralisation" of capital that succeeds every crisis, as Marx described in the nineteenth century. By 1914, even the (deservedly) much maligned Kautsky could see that the real victor from the First World War would be the United States:

The reconstruction of the economic ruins of Europe after the war will be impossible without American aid. The defeated states, at least, will fall into dependence on American finance capital.

"Der Krieg" in Neue Zeit XXXII, 1913-14, Vol. II, p845, quoted in Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938", NLB 1979, p.183

Absolutely accurate, as Germany was forced to do precisely this, but Kautsky's perception here was, as usual, too optimistic about the drive of capitalism in its imperialist phase. For Kautsky this European indebtedness to the USA meant that militarism would be checked and was part of his picture of a peaceful post-imperialist world. His optimism about the USA representing a more progressive form of capitalism would have done credit to Henry Ford. However, he was right about the increasing global dependence on US capital so that, when the Wall Street Crash occurred, it dragged down the entire planet into depression. The process of US domination increased after the Second World War when it emerged not only with the most powerful productive apparatus in the history of the world but was also the only imperialist power which had not had its infrastructure (including its labour force) devastated by the most destructive conflict in history. This domination was sustained by the Marshall Plan (in US mythology an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice) which provided the capital and the loans for the world economy to restart a cycle of accumulation. Without this the US itself would have been in crisis as its commodities would have had no markets to go to. As it was, US commodities now dominated the world market in almost monopoly conditions. The only opposition to this was the USSR and Stalinist-dominated Eastern Europe. Stalin had refused East European states like Czechoslovakia permission to accept Marshall Aid. Instead, the Iron Curtain of non-convertible currencies was imposed throughout the Soviet Bloc. This prevented US commodities battering down the barriers Stalin had erected. It was not the lack of democracy that the US opposed in the USSR (after all they supported blood-thirsty dictators in every corner of the globe) but the lack of opportunity for US goods to penetrate Soviet dominated territory. And when Mao took over China in 1949 that meant a third of the globe was outside US influence. This, rather than ideology about capitalism or communism, was the real basis for the Cold War.

But, as we wrote in 1982, the USSR was really " a weak imperialism". Economically it could not compete with the USA and was crippled by its attempts to militarily match the USA. As the Soviet Union entered into stagnation it was forced to spend more and more of its GDP on weapons. In the final years of the Cold War the USSR was spending less than the USA to maintain the arms race, but it was equivalent to 25% of GDP compared to the USA's 6%. The USSR was left with the choice of a pre-emptive nuclear strike or reform. The KGB calculated that the former would fail and tried to promote Andropov and then Gorbachev to carry out reform. As so often happens when the basis of a regime is questioned the system imploded as a result of the attempts to change it. But the "end of history", as White House triumphalism initially dubbed it, also found a USA in crisis. The end of the third cycle of capitalist accumulation of the imperialist (or, if you prefer, decadent, era of capitalism) came in 1971 with the first devaluation of the US dollar. This had been the bedrock of the system set up at Bretton Woods in 1945. The dollar was literally as "good as gold" and fixed. But, by 1971, the post-war boom was over, the cycle of accumulation under the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was drawing to a close. By floating the dollar, the US government gave itself the freedom to print dollars exceeding the actual value produced by the economy. This meant that all those countries which held dollars would hold a devaluing asset but, as world commodity exchange was (and largely still is) in dollars, it meant that the US could export its crisis to rest of the world. This is unique in capitalist history. For the first time an arbitrary piece of paper (the dollar), rather than a solid metal has represented the basic unit of calculation of international exchange.

The US was now able to live way beyond its means (and it still does). It has got away with this for decades because the dollar remains the currency of exchange for the international commodity and financial system. To cover its debts it has now reached a point where it is absorbing 80% of world savings. It issues dollars for financial transactions which create money but not new value. This new printed money (and sometimes it is not even printed but appears only balance sheets on a computer screen) is then held by overseas sellers of commodities, who give the US hard international currency with which to buy real commodities to enrich the lives of the upper echelons of US society. Meanwhile, the holders of US dollars do so in the forms of financial pieces of paper which amount to no more than IOU's, like Treasury notes or bonds, or other products. If this seems very Alice in Wonderland then that is because it is! The whole game can only go on so long as the promissory notes of the US Government are accepted as real money.

Key to commodity pricing is the price of oil ⁽⁷⁾, which is not only the most important commodity in global markets but also the most massively and permanently traded. Since the US now depends for 65% of its oil on imports it is now especially important for the US to control the strategic supplies of oil and to ensure that the oil trade is dominated by the dollar. Its main ally here is Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama Bin Laden, but never dubbed by the US as a terrorist state. The reason for this is clear. As one US Ambassador lucidly put it

One of the major things the Saudis have historically done, in part out of friendship with the United States, is to insist that oil continues to be priced in dollars. Therefore, the US Treasury can print money and buy oil, which is an advantage no other country has. With the emergence of other currencies and with strains in the relationship, I wonder whether there will not again be, as there have been in the past, people in Saudi Arabia who raise the question of why they should be so kind to the United States ⁽⁸⁾.

It is the latter fear which has driven the recent wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Hence, the growing militarism of the USA as it has to defend itself against the wider potential threats. Hence, too, the pressure put on the Chinese to revalue the renminbi. This is just one act in a growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing. It does not mean that an open breach is on the agenda immediately but the framework is already in place and the various appeals to history are all part of the package. With the USA openly calling for greater democracy and human rights in China, as well as assisting dissident campaigners inside the country, the grounds for a deeper conflict are being prepared. Expect more false appeals to history in the coming months...

Notes:

(1) "What is History?", The George Macauley Trevelyan Lectures (Jan - March 1961) , Macmillan, 1961, p24

(2) Claude Liauzu "At war with France's past" in Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2005

(3) in Britain's Gulag, Jonathan Cape 2005

(4) The same Daily Mail which opposed "disease ridden refugees" being allowed into Britain (in reference to German and Austrian Jews in 1938)

(5) The original accusation over Roosevelt's betrayal of Eastern Europe was actually made by an Australian Chester Wilmot in the 1940's. It was taken up in the McCarthite witch hunts of the 1950's. See Battaglia Comunista 6 (June 2005), Ricomincia la guerra Fredda, ma non troppo (The Cold War is starting again - but not too much)

(6) Samuel Huntington, "Robust Nationalism" in The National Interest, Washington D.C., 1999

(7) For a longer explanation of this phenomenon see "The Roots of the War in Iraq" in Internationalist Communist 22

(8) Quoted in Faisal Islam, "When it Comes to the Global Oil Trade the Dollar Reigns Supreme", The Observer, 23rd February 2003