現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争64 > 660.html
★阿修羅♪
|
現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争64 > 660.html
★阿修羅♪
|
|
| Tweet |
"ULTRALIBERALISM HAS ATOMIZED SOCIETY" By Emmanuel Todd [Liberation]
TRANSLATION: 'American society lives in a relation of predation upon the world'
Written by Mark Jensen
Tuesday, 09 November 2004
In 2002 French demographer Emmanuel Todd published Apres l'Empire ['After the Empire'], arguing that the U.S. is a collapsing empire. -- Todd believes that the Iraq war corroborates this view, and that the policies of George W. Bush will prove to be dangerous for the United States itself, in that they will lead European and Asian elites to reconsider their willingness to finance the gargantuan trade deficit of the United States, the pillar upon which the American economy, as it currently functions, depends. If, however, the populism that supports George W. Bush has now become an autonomous political force independent of elite support, the future could be tumultuous indeed, even nightmarish....
"ULTRALIBERALISM HAS ATOMIZED SOCIETY"
By Emmanuel Todd
Liberation (Paris)
November 4, 2004
Emmanuel Todd is a demographer. In Apres l'Empire ['After the Empire'], published in 2002, he thinks the war against Iraq is the sign of a collapsing empire.
How do you analyze the reelection of George W. Bush?
This election will force us to look reality in the face: the problem is not Bush, it's the United States as a while and the evolution of the American people, ravaged by a regressive and aggressive ideology. Most of the votes Bush received show that Americans find wars of aggression waged on other continents, the bombing of civilian populations, 100,000 dead Iraqis, and sexual torments of Abu Ghraib to be normal, and are willing to support them.
As has happened in Europe on other occasions, the mass of the American public seems to have broadly supported the conservative candidate in the name of domestic security.
By accentuating inequalities, ultraliberalism has deeply transformed American society, has fragmented it, has atomized it and filled it with uncertainty and fear. It has created the social subsoil upon which nationalist, xenophobic, religious, and militarist discourse has been able to develop. But the social structure of the United States is different from other industrialized countries. Europe and Japan need to balance their foreign accounts (what is consumed must correspond more or less to what is produced), but the United States, on the contrary, has recorded during the past twelve months a trade deficit of 600 billion dollars. Which means that the whole of American society lives in a relation of predation upon the world, which is as aggressive as "Bushism."
But there are workers in the United States...
The working class on the other side of the Atlantic is even more beset by outsourcing than is the case in Europe, but, through domestic redistributive mechanisms that would be worth studying in greater detail, the American system succeeds in turning the world of workers into a mass of people that also lives by just hanging on. Paradoxically, if the American upper classes are the primary beneficiaries of this system, we might ask, after reading the calls from major newspapers for Kerry's election, whether it is not from them that the consciousness of the dangerous character of Bush's policies for America itself might come.
How is Bush dangerous for the United States?
Since he's been president, the American empire is in a state of decomposition, because his policies are unifying the world agains him and alienating support from Europe and Japan, the principal countries that are financing its trade deficit (which has gone from 450 billion to 600 billion a year since 2000, with the emergence of a deficit in the high-tech sector). For an empire that lives on capturing foreign capital, this is destructive. From this point of view, it is very possible that one part of the elite classes wanted Kerry's victory, because of the judgment that the Democrats have always been reasonable and civilized managers of the empire. The question that poses itself from now on is whether the populism Bush incarnates has not become autonomous, with respect to the upper classes.
What does the future hold for the United States?
There is a risk that Bush will take the strengthening of his domestic political base to be a strengthening of American power, and that he will throw himself into adventures that could end very badly, for example, an attack against Iran. Because on the ground, the situation has not changed, and no more than before does America have the means of controlling Iraq, and a fortiori the planet. But there will come a moment when the world will see that American society is a consumers' society that costs other countries too much to maintain, and that it has become a source of economic and geopolitical disorder. An empire is only acceptable, however, if ensures order in the territories that it claims to dominate.
--Interview conducted by Eric Aeschimann.
--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, Washington 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 09 November 2004 )
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/1719/2/
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。