IS THIS THE FOURTH WORLD WAR?
James Woolsey and Subcommander Marcos Say Yes
by Bill Weinberg
On September 13, 2001, the New York Times' Tom Friedman wrote: "Does my
country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack
was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war
ahead."
More sophisticated minds have since challenged this declaration as
numerically incorrect. While sharing the pro-war consensus, former CIA
Director James Woolsey is on the lecture circuit asserting that the global
crusade against terrorism is World War IV--the Cold War having been III.
"This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either
World Wars I or II did for us," Woolsey told a group of UCLA students in
April. "Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."
Woolsey's mathematics is shared by the unlikeliest of intellectual
allies--Subcommander Marcos, verbose spokesman for the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN), in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. Marcos
issued his communique asserting that the planet is in a "Fourth World War"
in 1997--well before the 9-11 attacks. But his analysis illuminates why the
new hawks prominently include those such as Friedman, who has made a career
of boosting globalization as a boon and inevitability. For Marcos, the
Fourth World War is indistinguishable from corporate global integration:
"Globalization, neoliberalism as a global system, should be understood as a
new war of conquest for territories... A world order returned to the old
epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania. This is a strange
modernity that moves forward by going backward. The dusk of the twentieth
century has more similarities with previous brutal centuries than with the
placid and rational future of some science-fiction novel. In the world of
the post-Cold War, vast territories, wealth, and above all, a qualified
labor force, await a new owner."
Significantly, the Maya Indian rebels of the Zapatistas launched their
revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the precise moment that NAFTA took effect. The
changes to the Mexican constitution calling for privatization of communal
indigenous and peasant lands as a condition of the trade pact were declared
a "death sentence" for Mexico's Indians. These lands--protected as
traditional village holdings as a gain of Emilianio Zapata's peasant
insurgency in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-7--now stand to be delivered
to the highest multinational bidder. This is the most obvious example of
"reconquest of territory" via the legalistic and bureaucratic means of
"free trade" policy--or "neoliberalism" by its Latin American moniker.
If war is an extension of policy by other means, then it is axiomatic that
Marcos' "Fourth World War" and Woolsey's "World War IV" are one and the
same. Since 9-11, the war of reconquest has become, to a far greater
degree, an actual shooting war.
In the Cold War ("World War III"), "communism" was the official target, but
the real targets were often indigenous peoples fighting for their land and
resources. The renewed Cold War of the 1980s saw actual genocide against
the Maya Indians of Guatemala--as UN investigations have now confirmed.
The bloodletting was an effort (largely successful) to force the Indians
back into submission before the communist guerillas they had come to
support could threaten Guatemala's landed oligarchy. In World War IV, a
"dirty war" has this time come to the Maya lands on the Mexican side of the
border, in Chiapas. But the new Zapatista guerillas are proudly
indigenist--not communist. And their movement was largely launched to
protect their reduced and impoverished landbase from reconquest by
triumphalist post-Cold War capital.
There is a double sense in which this is the Fourth World War. The "Fourth
World" is a term coined by defenders of indigenous peoples to denote
land-based, stateless ethnicities, distinct from the "First," "Third" or
(now non-existent) "Second" worlds. The Center for World Indigenous Studies
in Olympia, WA, has been publishing a "Fourth World Journal" that reports
on indigenous lands struggles worldwide since 1984. In their fourth issue,
at the height of the grueling Reagan-era wars for Central America, they
published an essay by UC Berkeley geographer (and specialist on Nicaragua's
Miskito Indians) Bernard Nietschmann, who posited a universally overlooked
essence to the crisis on the isthmus. Rather than left-versus-right,
East-versus-West, communism versus the "Free World," Nietschmann saw the
Central American conflict as primarily one of nations versus states.
In Nietschmann's eyes, states--whether right-wing like the Guatemalan
military dictatorship, or left-wing like the Nicaraguan revolutionary
regime--were claiming the land and resources of stateless but distinct
nations within their official borders. When these native nations fought
back, the offensives launched against them sometimes reached the point of
genocide.
Criticizing Henry Kissinger's 1983 report to the Reagan administration that
mapped the White House policy of rolling back Central America's
revolutionary movements, Nietschmann (who died in 1999) wrote: "Not
included in the Kissinger Report is mention much less analysis of Maya
peoples more than one-half of Guatemala's claimed population and
territory), who are being invaded and occupied under the guise of economic
development. No mention is made of the Miskito, Sumo and Rama nations which
have fielded the Americas' only Indian army and who are fighting Central
America's largest army over Indian control of one-third of Nicaragua's
claimed territory. The report ignores [Panama's] Kuna who have their own
autonomous nation run by the Kunas' own political, economic and social
systems. These are different and distinct from those of Panama, and of the
East or West, North of South. Not only does the Kissinger Report overlook
the Maya, Miskito or Kuna, it only refers indirectly to indigenous peoples
by mentioning Indians three times."
Like Stalinism in the Cold War, the threat of terrorism is real--and not
only to those things in the West which are genuinely worth defending
(pluralism, secularism, basic rights for women), but also to indigenous
peoples, who are invariably targeted by religious fundamentalists as
heathens, much as they are relegated "backward" or "primitive" by
globophiles. But the anti-terrorist states of World War IV have a
paradoxically incestuous relationship with the Islamic terrorists, which
they groomed to fight Communism in the Cold War from Egypt to Palestine to
Afghanistan. And the actual targets of the global anti-terror campaign are
more frequently indigenous peoples defending their lands from corporate
resource plunder than actual terrorists.
The Zapatistas have played their cards very well, fastidiously avoiding
targeting civilians, even for the brief period in 1994 when they were "at
war" with the Mexican state. They are still perceived as occupying the
moral high ground virtually across Mexico's political spectrum--so it has
been impossible for either the US or Mexican governments to effectively
label them "terrorists." But throughout the hemisphere, militarization in
the name of counter-terrorism is now used to disenfranchise indigenous
peoples.
Most US military aid to Mexico is still in the name of the War on Drugs,
which can be seen as a 1990s transition war between the Third and the
Fourth, especially in the western hemisphere. In Colombia, the transition
has been made from the Drug War to the Terror War--yet the military
(supported by the US to the tune of $2 billion since 1996) has been used
against U'wa Indians protecting their lands from exploitation by Occidental
Petroleum. Under the Andean Initiative (as Bush has dubbed his expanded
version of Clinton's Plan Colombia), military aid is also being distributed
to Ecuador--where Shuar and Quichua Indians are resisting Occidental's new
trans-Andean pipeline. Also included is Bolivia--where the Huarani and
Aymara Indians are resisting new pipelines being built by Shell and Enron.
In Eurasia and Africa as well, the US-led War on Terror is being unleashed
on native peoples who are themselves targets of terror. The Indonesian
military is let slip on the native people of Aceh, whose lands are coveted
and exploited by Exxon. The Nigerian military defends Chevron and Shell
from Ijaw and Itsekiri tribespeople asserting control over their own
homelands. In Algeria, the latest recipient of US counter-terrorism aid,
the indigenous Berbers are caught between the military dictatorship and the
jihadis, both equally hostile to their autonomy demands--while Halliburton
and BP-Amoco are assured of security for their oil and gas operations.
In Iraq, Kurds in the north and Ma'adan ("Marsh Arabs") in the south--as
well as Turkomans and Assyrians--are grateful to see the last of Saddam
Hussein, who bitterly persecuted them, but pledge to resist the US
occupation if they are denied local autonomy in the new order. And the
lands of these ethnic minorities include some of the most oil-rich in Iraq.
In the Central Asian heartland now encircled by US and allied troops based
in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, some of the most remote
land-based cultures on Earth stand to be expropriated by the final thrust
of corporate capitalism. The US Energy Department is even funding oil
exploration in Siberia--where indigenous peoples such as the Evenks are
making a last stand to save their culture from extinction, demanding rights
to their ancestral lands from an intransigent Russian government.
And within the United States, the Navajo, Shoshone, Inuit and other native
nations who faced the prospect of their lands becoming "National Sacrifice
Areas" in the Cold War, to be plundered for their strategic coal and
uranium, now face a renewed corporate threat in the atmosphere of economic
"liberalization" and emphasis on "energy independence" given war and fear
in the Middle East.
This may be the Fourth World War not only by the math of global conflicts
since 1914, but because, even more so than the Cold War, it is a war on the
Fourth World.
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Center for World Indigenous Studies