[lbo-talk] Divide and Conquer (This time in English: Spiegel on Germany/Near East)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Sep 17 19:21:25 PDT 2006


On 9/16/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > There are only a very few countries that can
> > really lay claim to the title of "great power," and
> > Germany ain't one of them. They are the United
> > States,
> > China, Russia, and India.
>
> And Japan. I left out Japan.
>
> Arise Nippon! You've got the giant robots. You've got
> the giant monsters. Arise! ;)

The ruling class of Nippon had a chance but blew it. :->

I just watched Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill belatedly. In it Oren, a Chinese-American-Japanese female gangster boss (who has earlier beheaded a Japanese male gangster who challenged her right to rule on account of her being part Chinese and part American), gets the top of her head cut off by a white American girl wielding a sword made by a master Japanese bladesmith. Is that not an apt visual metaphor for the chosen destiny of the Japanese ruling class?

On 9/17/06, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Why shouldn't Germany have great power interests?
> > Germany is a great power.
>
> Indeed. And I agree with most of what Dennis R. wrote
> about European capital posing a challenge as U.S.
> hegemony "unravels" (to use Giovanni Arrighi's
> excellent phase).
>
> So we all agree that European capital has its
> interests apart and sometimes opposed to U.S. capital.
> All the more reason not to pick a side in the fight.

The point, for American, European, and Japanese leftists, is not to pick a side between American and European capitalists but to drive a wedge between the US and EU power elites as well as between the US and Japanese power elites (the latter is far more difficult than the former). American, European, and Japanese leftists, sadly, lack the capacity to drive a wedge on our own, but Iran is a perfect wedge, due to the great importance of fossil fuels, of which Iran has great quantities, and the centrality of Saudi Arabia (in part in reality and in part in fantasy) and Israel (in fantasy) to the US power elite's geopolitical imagination.

Divide and conquer, as the saying goes. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list