In contrast, today, a war between the USA and Germany is unthinkable, for the German power elite, as well as the other European and Japanese power elites, who may be said to have roughly the same social base as the US power elite, do not seek to compete with them for global hegemony.
The age of inter-imperialist wars is over. Now there is only one empire, the one led by the US power elite, and this empire is multinational, consisting of the USA itself and other countries that have attained roughly the same level of economic development, namely Europe and Japan.
Wars today never happen between two or more advanced capitalist countries -- they are either the US-led multinational empire's attacks on this or that state in the global South (e.g., Iraq and perhaps Iran later) or civil wars and other conflicts in the global South in which the empire sometimes intervenes in various ways (e.g., Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Sudan). Moreover, the multinational empire's main weapon is not war but economic sanctions, covert actions, "democracy assistance," and, more generally, cultural assimilation (assimilating the top 20-40% of each nation of the global South into the capitalist consensus of the multinational empire).
On 9/14/07, Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
> > CB: Isn't taking a strategic view of the truth a postmod principle ?
> >
> =================
>
> Was Pontius Pilate a pomo?
>
> Your opportunism is showing......
My Persian teacher says that, back when he was still an old-fashioned leftist, he attended a big conference of Iranian diaspora leftists in Germany, where he proceeded to propose that they collectively translate the latest works of Marxists such as Terry Eagleton into Persian and publish them in Iran. His proposal was immediately dismissed by those who said, "But Eagleton is a pomo, not a Marxist!" (Many of them refused to publish anything in Iran anyway, on the grounds that doing so would legitimate the Islamic Republic.) Thus in Iran post-modernism largely remains a province of the philosophical establishment of the Islamic Republic, whose diasporic oppositions are dominated by dogmatic secularist modernists, liberal or Marxist or royalist, who often conflate modernization, secularization, and Westernization as if they were inseparable (and a number of them add economic liberalization to this package). -- Yoshie