A Late Candidate Arises

It's a shame I've already named my Weekly Jackass, because Eric Hobsbawm makes a strong late run with this piece of excrement from the Guardian. Titled 'America's Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail' (the title alone puts Hobsbawm in the exalted company of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn), it's a fantasyland Marxist portrait of a global scene that exists only in the author's deluded paranoia. Some highlights:

Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945...

Why is it that Marxists can't write? Awful...at any rate, the size of the U.S economy is helpfully charted at this link...that's some decline!

...as the Iraq war shows, even this unparalleled capacity to destroy [i.e., our unsurpassed military prowess] is not enough to impose effective control on a resistant country, and even less on the globe...

Because, you see, if there's one thing that unites Americans (and really, it's the only thing), it's our all-consuming desire to RULE THE WORLD! Bwwaaaaa-haaaaa-haaaa!...

The second element of continuity is the peculiar house-style of US empire, which has always preferred satellite states or protectorates to formal colonies...The American empire thus consisted of technically independent states doing Washington's bidding...

Why, you diabolical...the audaciousness of the plan! Instead of permanent occupation and colonization, we give the members of our 'empire' independence! A breathtakingly devious plan...

The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution - which, like all major revolutions, developed world-missionary convictions, limited only by the wish to shield the the new society of potentially universal freedom from the corruptions of the unreconstructed old world.

Ahh, yes, those dirty Je...er, neoconservatives, neoconservatives, I didn't say Jew! Of course, the American revolution was like no other revolution before it, or indeed, after it, but that doesn't fit the Marxist world-view, so, out you go, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights - you're nothing to me!...

Nevertheless, this does not quite explain the evident megalomania of US policy since a group of Washington insiders decided that September 11 gave them the ideal opportunity for declaring its single-handed domination of the world.

You remember that day, don't you? That cold November day, the snow was falling, a hush fell over the nation, as a group of Washington insiders declared its single-handed domination of the world - what? You don't? Jeez, I thought I was the only one...

It is reasonably certain that the project will fail. However, while it continues, it will go on making the world an intolerable place for those directly exposed to US armed occupation and an unsafer place for the rest of us.

God, Eric, I hope so...I hope indeed this world will become an intolerable place for the terrorists directly opposed to our military. Indeed, I hope every last one of them dies a horrible death and goes straight to Hell. Let's just pray you're right.

UPDATE 06/29/05 8:46 a.m. - many thanks to the great Arthur Chrenkoff for the link...