The post-1990 world order—an ensemble of norms, rules, and institutions, informed by economic and political liberalism—is in disarray. The façade of an inter-state system based on rules not power, free trade not protectionism, open not closed societies, multilateralism not unilateralism, and human rights not crimes against humanity, is less legitimate to the worst and less credible to the rest.

To those who spun that dreamworld, including in places like Sri Lanka, this is disorienting. Less so for the global majority. They live the nightmare of discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberal values and the reality of deprivation of freedom from want and fear. They are witnesses, within and between states, to the operation of force and never fairness.

It is convenient but not correct to date the unravelling of what Francis Fukuyama defined as “the dominant organising principle of world politics”, to the second inauguration of the new bully-in-chief of the old US empire. While Trump 2.0 has reinforced and accelerated these trends, the digging and trench works were underway.

What are expressions of the new world disorder, in which liberal internationalism is well and truly traduced? For brevity let us seize on at least four: Trump’s arbitrary punitive tariffs on US imports; authoritarianism and far-right advance in the Euro-US core; Western collusion and UN uselessness in Israel’s genocide in Gaza; and the irrationality of the states most culpable for the ecological crisis.

Sri Lanka is not insulated from any of this, regardless of the indifference of its state and government, political and civil society. Global economic growth will crawl up by 2.3% this year, the World Bank forecasts, in a dreadful geopolitical context. The memo has not reached Colombo’s troglodyte think tanks; nor the IMF, to whom as The Sunday Morning editorialised recently, “the [National People’s Power government] has outsourced economic policy”.

“[T]hese countries are calling us up, kissing my ass” (Donald J. Trump)

The response of most states to the one-sided tariff war, has indeed been to beg and flatter him. The world trading system and the dogma of free trade was built by and for the western powers. But their tongue only wags when it comes to the ex-colonised, reserving their licks for the Palpatine of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In Sri Lanka, the effective US tariff on traditional exports as of 1 August, now ranges from 30% to 55%; whereas the average rate for apparel was 16.65% previously and zero on tea and rubber products. What will happen to the workers, whose representatives this government is yet to meet?

As bulwark to the stability and maintenance of imperialism, Europe’s powers are petrified that the US is losing interest in being the hegemon. The annexationist fantasies of NATO’s ‘daddy’ on Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada, must be tolerated. Who else but the US can contain Russia in the west and China in the east for them?

The IMF admits that Sri Lanka’s economy may contract by 1.5% consequent to US actions. Yet, nothing in the real world in 2025, may modify the rigid fiscal conditionalities its mathematical model determined for 2023’s austerity programme; nor shake the shibboleths of deregulation, marketisation, privatisation, and globalisation as panacea for systemic crisis.

As ordained, the weak must do as the strong say, and not as they do: slash domestic tariffs; abolish para-tariffs; diversify export markets; increase the number and deepen bilateral and regional free trade agreements. Sri Lanka’s way out, the right-wing pundits proselytise, is as vassal for extraction by Indian crony capitalism, and/or node of accumulation in China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative.

“What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” (JD Vance)

At the Munich Security Conference in February, the US Vice-President slammed European allies – for falsehoods such as restrictions on freedom of (hate) speech and (dis)information, nullifying elections, and uncontrolled migration – as backsliding on “values shared with the United States of America”.

This is of course disingenuous, when on both sides of the Atlantic, illiberalism is the West’s new normal. The far right is fast marching forward. Liberties of expression, association and assembly once taken-for-granted, are in rapid retreat. The liberal firewall has fallen. The traditional parties of the right, centre and even left, embrace anti-immigrant, misogynist, anti-diversity-equity-inclusion, prejudices, and language. The attempt to abolish the US Department of Education is in goose-step with this poisonous brew.

The stripping of even birthright citizenship of perceived ‘enemies of the state’ is on the cards. Mass deportations by US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in Trump 2.0 are set to vie with the staggering 3.16 million and 4.44 million people torn away from family and means of living by the ‘liberal’ Obama and Biden administrations respectively.

EU interior ministers routinely gather to find crueller ways of closing borders. Those fleeing wars, famines, and climate disasters, the undocumented, persons with disabilities and trans-persons, are dehumanised. Deaths at sea, in overland journeys, and at crossings, of undocumented men, women and children, neither shock nor cause outrage.

Abductions and disappearances are staged by masked federal thugs across the US to squash critics of its foreign policy and terrorise dissenters on and off university campuses. Civilised Europe wrote the prologue: violently clamping down on peaceful protest of Israel’s genocide; with Germany even threatening deportation of other EU nationals. Palestine Action and Jeune Garde have been banned in Britain and France respectively.

When it comes to rearming Europe, the debt brake on public spending is off the floor. As taxing the rich is taboo, the poor must pay the projected 800 billion euros for technologies of destruction and disaster, through swingeing cuts to their disability and sickness benefits, public healthcare, and state pensions. Social, political, and legal gains from the struggles of women for abortion access, and the racially and sexually oppressed for equality and dignity, in more hopeful times, are being uprooted.

Deindustrialisation, de-unionisation, unemployment, crumbling public infrastructure, and decaying public services, have fuelled the growth of neo-fascist movements, actively engaged in racist violence. It has not stopped there. In Italy and the Netherlands, the heirs of Mussolini and Mussert are the government. In England, France, Germany, Portugal, and the Spanish State, this scum shapes political discourse.

The ripples have reached Sri Lanka. Essential services like emergency shelters and income support programmes are scrabbling for scraps, as US funding is terminated and the EU slashes grant aid to fund the military-industrial complex. Western anti-woke populism finds its adherents here in the ‘Mothers Movement’ (Mawwarunge Peramuna) and others, spreading hate against LGBTQIA+ people, opposing women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and amplifying pro-Zionist and Islamophobic narratives.

“This is what a settler-colonial genocide looks like” (Francesca Albanese)

In the killing fields of Gaza, the moral superiority of western liberal democracy is nowhere more absurd to common folk the world over. A rogue state, unironically feted as the Middle East’s only democracy, has in its extermination of 59,219 Palestinian lives (and counting), demolished the post-1945 principles of jus in bello and international humanitarian law; and with the patronage and protection of that system’s self-acclaimed guardians.

Mass killings of civilians sheltering in their homes, in schools, and in places of worship; along with the razing of Gazan infrastructure, through obliteration of residential areas, universities, hospitals, and water treatment centres; and accelerated land grabs in the occupied West Bank, are the end stage of the 1948 nakba initiated by the British empire’s carve-up of Palestine and midwifing of a Zionist state.

To this abominable charge-sheet should be added the continuing starvation and malnutrition of the living through blockade of supplies; wanton massacre by the deranged Israeli Defence Forces of the hungry and sick in search of food and water; far right settler pogroms in the West Bank; the recent bombing of Iran murdering 865 men, women, and children; and announcement of a ‘final solution’, on the ruins of Rafah, in a concentration camp for the undead.

The liberal democratic states that urged ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in the face of atrocities in the Balkans and Libya, are now accomplices to war crimes on an unprecedented scale through their arming and financing of Israeli fascism. The western sponsors of the Rome Statute brazenly disregard enforcement of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, as genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu flies across their airspace to the White House or Mar-a-Lago. Nie wieder (never again), did they once say?

In the next act of this tragic farce, Trump must be awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, fittingly nominated by Israel and Pakistan. After all, 2009 laureate Barack Obama went on to earn the honour, by ordering 563 drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, killing 3797 men, women, and children.

Useless and irrelevant, the United Nations (UN) is the object of common people’s derision and anger. Its most powerful members routinely disregard the UN Charter; flagrantly ignoring when not violating, the human rights principles and institutions that they themselves fashioned from the ashes of the second world war. The US veto in its Security Council is routinely used to block moderate censure and mild action on Israel. UN development agencies are handmaidens of the dominant market ideology, cleaving to the political whims of their bilateral and multilateral donors. How long before the UN joins the League of Nations in the dustbin of history?

“Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders” (Greta Thunberg)

Each year up to this has been hotter than the last. Ocean temperature is already 0.7-degree Celsius higher than the 1991-2000 average. The 1.5-degree Celsius global warming threshold fixed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is more likely than not to be exceeded before 2029. In Europe alone between late June and early July, 2300 deaths are attributed to the heat wave.

Political leaders have wilted before climate change denialists and fossil fuel commerce. They have failed us. The consequences of ecocide are desperate already. Climate disasters are not the exception but the norm. Even in the rich countries, and nastiest in the neediest. In oil-rich Texas (drill, baby, drill) flash floods following prolonged drought carried away at least 135 lives in a few hours on the 4^th of July – coincidentally the anniversary of the declaration of a white supremacist settler-colonial state on stolen indigenous land.

Global warming is produced within states; but its actors and impacts are transboundary. Twenty percent of global carbon emissions since 1850 is the responsibility of the US alone. But once more, Trump has pulled out of the Paris Accord of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This time around his regime is doubling-down on climate change denialism by suppressing data, defunding state agencies and scientific research. His appointments to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency make clear their brief is to shred regulations and enable fracking and pollution.

Growth for the sake of growth, and the celebration of profit and wealth, in place of human need and wellbeing, are the lodestars of the rich and powerful and their organic intellectuals in the media, academy, and civil society. The billionaires are already building their arks and bunkers – where Artificial Intelligence (hence the US fever for mining rare earth elements) will substitute for cheap human labour – wherever they think they will be safe on Earth or Mars. What other life survives is destined to adapt to nuda vita (bare life) in conditions of barbarism on a burning planet.

“There is great disorder under heaven” (Mao Zedong)

The situation is not excellent. In this time of monsters, we desperately need a new map, and changed coordinates, at home and abroad.

24 July 2025.

Image credit: ‘The Triumph of Death’ (1562-63, oil on panel) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

In this fiery and uncompromising speech, Yanis Varoufakis calls out Europe’s leaders for their complicity in endless war, economic injustice, and the betrayal of the dream of a peaceful and just Europe. Speaking at Anti-Siko’s rally in Munich, Varoufakis denounces the militarisation of Europe, the genocide in Palestine, and the exploitation of Ukraine for profit by the Western military-industrial complex. Varoufakis reminds us that the dream of Europe as a peace and justice project has been replaced by austerity, deindustrialisation, and fascism’s resurgence. But there is hope – if we stand together and say: NEVER AGAIN, ANYWHERE. This is our call to action. This is our moment to seize the day and dream of a new Europe.

An analysis of a new global economy run by government backed multinational companies who are further widening the gulf between the rich and the poor.

“A small group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of Africa. Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world’s economic activity… The famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times bordering on a form of slave labour.”

Globalisation had become a topical subject by the time The New Rulers of the World was screened. More than a million people opposed to the increasing gap between rich and poor, at a time when the control of resources was becoming centred in fewer and fewer hands, had staged a series of anti-capitalist demonstrations.

John Pilger’s documentary on globalisation brings together several of the themes that run throughout his work – the way in which superpowers use small countries as pawns in their global strategies, the courting of dictators by the West to open the doors to valuable resources and the exploitation of workers in those countries to provide riches in which they do not share.

The New Rulers of the World puts the story of multinationals’ global domination into a political context and demonstrates how the West has increased its stranglehold on poor countries by using the might of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization to control their economies.

Through secret filming, Pilger shows how cheap labour in an Indonesian sweatshop produces goods such as Nike, Adidas, Gap and Reebok running shoes that are sold for up to 250 times the amount received by workers, about 72p a day. Almost 70 million Indonesians live in extreme poverty, many in labour camps housing the workers, where children are under-nourished and prone to disease. Inside the sweatshops, mostly young women are crowded together under the glare of strip lighting in temperatures of up to 40°C, some doing 24-hour shifts.

Observing the parallel between modern-day globalisation and old-world imperialism, Pilger recalls that Indonesia has been “plundered by the West for hundreds of years”. Globalisation in Asia began in Indonesia, where Western governments backed dictator General Suharto after he seized power in the mid-1960s. “Within a year of the bloodbath,” says Pilger, “Indonesia’s economy was effectively redesigned in America, giving the West access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour – what President Nixon called the greatest prize in Asia.” In 1997, the World Bank had called the country a “model pupil” of the global economy.

The IMF’s first deputy managing director, Stanley Fischer, tells Pilger that complete debt cancellation is not the only means of relieving poverty around the world – governments should be willing to integrate with Western economies. Meanwhle, Barry Coates, of the World Development Movement, suggests that consumers should put pressure on retailers and manufacturers to provide information on the source of products and give assurances about the conditions under which they are produced.

Pilger concludes with his own prescription: “Why not abolish the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organization, and replace them with genuine trade and development institutions that are democratically accountable? And why not cancel a debt that condemns nations like Indonesia to poverty and disease?”

The New Rulers of the World (Carlton Television), ITV1, 18 July 2001

Director: Alan Lowery; producer: John Pilger (54 mins

Awards: Gran Prix Leonardo Award, 2003; Certificate of Merit, Chicago International Television Awards, 2003.

Republished From: https://johnpilger.com/the-new-rulers-of-the-world/

4 November 2024 

The liberal order supposedly built since World War II and claims of international promotion of human rights now stand fully exposed with the West’s unconditional support for Israel’s wars and heinous crimes in the Middle East

Today, I mark my one hundred and fiftieth Red Notes column. As I started writing this column, I reflected on if and how I should continue on this twice-a-month weekend preoccupation. If it were cricket, at a century and a half, I would have to consider if the pitch is changing and the light is fading, and how long to continue batting before getting all out or retiring. But what about in writing? Am I steady with my strokes; how is the world changing, and is anybody even reading?

My first column in March 2017 was titled, ‘Global Turmoil: International Tutelage and Adherence in a Time of Crisis’. I began that column by paying homage to one of my mentors and comrades, Kethesh Loganathan, who also wrote a column in the Daily Mirror for many years. He was silenced by an LTTE assassin in August 2006, when he was a year younger than I am now. The broader world I described in my first column is eerily similar, and perhaps gotten worse today. 

International tutelage and pressure

This is what I wrote in my first column, over seven and a half years ago:

“The global economy has not recovered from the Great Recession of 2008. Brexit signalled last year the tremendous backlash against neoliberal globalisation and the rising tide of anti-immigrant and racist forces in Europe. With the election of Trump, the American mask has come off, and its naked exploitative interests are bound to undermine international treaties and laws, which for better or worse, maintained a certain global order and stability. Furthermore, even the emerging power China is in a deep economic crisis, as its debt driven construction boom has reached its limits… 

“If the political leadership in the West is too much to stomach, there is always the bureaucracy of the international organisations whether it be the UN, the IMF or the World Bank. The buck does not stop there, when these international agencies lose their legitimacy with repeated political and economic crises – as with the war in Iraq and the anarchic fallout in the Middle East or the global economic crisis of 2008 – there are the metropolitan academic centres for coaching, whether it be Harvard or Oxford. So, for countries like Sri Lanka, it is not a question of what advice is sought or given, rather how and through what institutions, the same imperial policies are pushed and received gratefully by our elite.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South

“The most far reaching international disciplining of Sri Lanka in recent years is the IMF Extended Fund Facility Agreement in June 2016. However, even as the IMF demanded liberalisation of capital markets to allow for the free flow of capital into Sri Lanka, that very month, three senior researchers of the IMF wrote an article titled, ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’, about the risks of such policies. They argued that the chances of financial crises and inequality increases with such capital inflows. The IMF researchers were forced to question such policies after the IMF’s failed interventions in Europe, particularly in Greece. But in practice, the IMF works with double standards, one for the West and another for the Global South… As Sri Lanka stumbles along on the knife edge of an economic crisis, the advice we receive pushes us towards a deeper crisis…

“With Sri Lanka at the crossroads in a time of global turmoil, it is high time we eschewed our colonial mind-set of looking for solutions in the West. Rather, we must learn from struggles in other countries like ours, against their neoliberal states enriching their elites and critiques of similar forms of Western tutelage. More importantly, we must listen carefully to the protests of our people for land and housing, for sustainable agriculture and fisheries, for free healthcare and education, and for permanent work and decent working conditions.” 

Has the world not changed much since I started writing my column? Am I just repetitious in my writing? Or is the global order in a downward cycle with wars raging around the world along with economic crises in countries like Sri Lanka?

Over the next two weeks, we will see the results of two important elections. The outcome of the Trump and Harris election in the United States, which this time has little to offer the world. The Democrats in power have been as naked as the previous Trump regime in pushing imperialist interests. The liberal order supposedly built since the Second World War and claims of international promotion of human rights now stand fully exposed with the West’s unconditional support for Israel’s horrible wars and heinous crimes in the Middle East. 

In this context, amidst our hopeful moment in Sri Lanka after regime change, the General Elections next week are under the shadow of tremendous pressure from the West to stick with the IMF road of deprivation. The economic depression devastating Sri Lanka requires considerable relief, but the new government is constrained by powerful global actors demanding repayment of defaulted loans to international creditors.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South. The debt crisis of the 2020s now affecting over half the developing countries is only being patched up to prolong the extraction of global finance capital. It is in these troubled global waters that the National People’s Power (NPP) government will have to swim.

Looking back from the future

In the impossible probability that I will be writing this column seven and a half years into the future, what would I be writing? 

That destructive wars and brutal extraction by global powers has morphed liberal democracies onto the path of authoritarian populism and fascism in many parts of the world. Alternatively, that a non-aligned world led by progressive leaders emerging in the Global South are building a post-neoliberal world favourable to working people.

Closer at home, Sri Lanka has gone into its 18th IMF Agreement and again in the middle of a debt restructuring process following its second default on high interest International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs). And that free education and healthcare have been completely dismantled with drastic cuts and privatisation. Furthermore, Sri Lanka’s only major sector is tourism that falters from year to year, even as public utilities – unaffordable to working people – are owned by multinational giants from India and China. Alternatively, Sri Lanka has become one of the first indebted countries to exit the IMF programme in the 2020s, and found avenues of development financing avoiding commercial borrowing with ISBs. That a self-sufficient economy reviving agriculture with a strong food system has reduced inequality, and the country has become a beacon of economic democracy. 

As Sri Lanka goes into a decisive parliamentary election to form a new government for the next five years, the great expectations of the citizenry cannot wait seven and a half years. They will want to see changes in the next year itself. Elections, we know, are only one form of democratic engagement, and in the absence of social and economic changes, working people’s protests will follow suit regardless of who is in power. The year ahead is bound to be eventful, with either major progressive changes or more dispossession and repression.

1. Labour Theory of Value: Marx argues that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. This theory critiques the classical economic view that value is derived from utility or market demand.

2. Surplus Value: A central concept in Marx’s work is surplus value, which is the difference between the value produced by labour and the wages paid to labourers. Marx contends that this surplus value is extracted by capitalists and is the source of profit in a capitalist system.

3. Capital Accumulation: Marx examines how capital accumulates and grows through reinvestment of surplus value. This process leads to the concentration of capital in fewer hands and can result in economic crises and increasing inequality.

4. Commodity Fetishism: Marx introduces the concept of commodity fetishism, where social relationships between people are masked by relationships between commodities. This leads to a distorted understanding of the nature of economic exchanges and human relations.

5. Historical Materialism: Marx uses historical materialism to explain how economic structures and class relations shape historical development. He argues that the mode of production (how goods are produced) determines the social, political, and ideological structures of society.

These lessons highlight Marx’s critical analysis of capitalist economics and its impact on labour, value, and social relations.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3XtxABo

In recent election rallies in the South, AKD (Anura Kumara Disanayaka) has taken a commendable stance, repeatedly telling his supporters that those working for his opponents or voting for them should not be harmed, as it’s their democratic right to vote for their political parties. This message of tolerance and respect for political freedom is crucial to a healthy democracy.

However, his tone took a stark turn during a rally in Jaffna. Speaking to the largely Tamil audience, Anura implied that not supporting the ‘change’ the people (largely Sinhala) were expecting may have negative consequences. A few days later, when questioned in a Neth FM interview he stood by his words uttered in Jaffna and repeated, ‘…I appeal and ask you to be part of this change, if you do not partake in this change what attitude will be created in society towards you?’ This raises important questions about consistency. Why is the right to political choice upheld for the Sinhala voters in the South, but not equally extended to Tamil voters in the North? His comments in Jaffna suggest chauvinistic and coercive undertones, implying that Tamil voters may face social alienation if they don’t align with the wishes of the people in the South. All citizens, regardless of ethnicity, can vote freely for the candidate of their choice.

It is Sinhala ethnocentric politics to coerce the minority Tamil community to conform while advocating for tolerance within the majority Sinhala community. Isn’t this kind of Sinhala ethnocentric politics risk deepening ethnic divisions?

What needs to be done: AKD should change his Sinhala ethnocentric attitude towards minority communities, respect their political autonomies and uphold them too in his campaigns in the South. This will, certainly, contribute to bringing real change to the polity of the country, thus paving the way for real democracy in Sri Lanka.

Redley Silva