We live and operate, today, in a political world whose favourite prefixes imply that much of our old business is finished, and that we are constantly dealing with something new. When they emerged in the mid-1990s, the Zapatistas were roundly lauded as having put into motion the world’s “first post-modern revolution”; their enemies were the forces of neo-liberalism. Post-colonial studies have flourished in an age where IMF and World Bank austerity programmes have been renounced as harbingers of neo-imperialism. There are neo-cons, neo-Nazis, and plans for a space station on Mars giving us, in George W. Bush, a neo-Armstrong. While we should applaud the constant adaptation of activists and intellectuals to evolving political realities, we must also be prepared for regression. That is to say, we should be ready to recognise old friends, as well as old enemies. If the standing analysis ain’t broke, don’t prefix it.

Scholars and activist commentators around the world, led by Britain’s Tariq Ali in his lucid and expert Bush in Babylon, have rushed to highlight the significance of the fact that the Union Jack is again raised over Iraqi cities. An open experiment in the re-colonisation of ‘properties’ lost to twentieth century revolutions is underway in today’s Middle East. Because of the unapologetic ways in which hostilities manifested in direct military invasion and hostile take-over, Iraq has served as the most fluorescent example of the return of robust, old-fashioned imperialism.

It doesn’t, unfortunately, stand-alone. Old-style imperialists, in the United States as well as in Europe, are today eyeing the markets that they fled however many decades ago with a more open, cocky, belligerent swagger. Britain has developed a fixation on Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe while simultaneously administrating the prison in Palestine in which leaders of the Popular Front are languishing.

Washington spent weeks this past year pondering Liberia. This past week, the Monroe Doctrine and the glory of l’Empire Française competed in terms of salivating over the chaos in the world’s oldest black republic, Haiti. Paris, as well as Washington, has long coveted the resource-rich nation, which won its hard-fought independence from the French through history’s first triumphant slave revolt in 1804. In the two centuries since then, Washington has enacted countless damaging ‘interventions’ into the affairs of the Haitian people. George W. Bush, hell-bent as he is on the maintenance of American traditions from penis-vagina marriages to having presidents named Bush, kept another one going this past Sunday when U.S. troops moved, once again, into Hispaniola.

So blunt, clumsy, and in-our-faces was the invasion of Iraq that the similar Northern arousal with regards to Haiti wasn’t even lightly masked in the language of maintaining order or democracy, or even their appearance. In the court of international media, the French and the Yanquis buttressed the cause of Haiti’s thug-led opposition by openly and uncritically espousing their highest aim as a prerequisite for peace: the ouster of the democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

None of this to suggest that we should have accepted a Franco-American peacekeeping force. The rhetorical rubric of “peacekeeping” is a fig leaf that the Left has generally (and irresponsibly) granted a stay of execution. Despite the concrete examples of anti-colonial martyrs such as Patrice Lumumba, the well intentioned throughout the world continue, regularly, to call for humanitarian interventions as though the international appetite of capital might be satiated in times of real human need. It serves us well to remember that the camouflaging of imperialist intentions in the language of conflict resolution, the protection of minority rights, and the maintenance of rightful authority is by no means a new monster. Initial British forays into India and Egypt were justified along the lines of the need to buttress the sovereignty of the Mughal and Ottoman empires, respectively. The Anglo-Franco terror in the twentieth century Middle East was built upon notions of protecting “persecuted” minority groups -- Zionist settlers in Palestine and Maronite Christians in Lebanon. In short, pleasant-sounding rationale has never lagged too far behind colonial adventures. There are as many “humanitarian” justifications in human history as there are vicious episodes of imperial violence.

That said, one may reasonably charge, what is to be done about humanitarian catastrophes such as that facing the people of Haiti if we rule out armed intervention? There are alternative actions which we in the North may demand of our governments in lieu of invasion, and these all tend towards loosening, rather than strengthening, the grip of empire over the South. Debt cancellation and the withdrawal of disruptive social and economic presences, such as Western-funded local paramilitaries, military bases, maquilladoras, and IMF austerity restructuring, would all provide massive relief in the Third World, as well as providing democratic initiatives with much-needed oxygen in the short and long term. International ANSWER, one of the leading anti-war groups in America, has widely distributed a very principled text stating that if a sovereign Haiti were to receive the reparations owed it by colonial pillagers such as France, it would go a long way towards solving many of the types of crises we face today.

In the meantime, we in the North may also readjust our already constantly-evolving lexicon in order to make room for an old term which, in the face of the Cold War, covert operations, and puppet regimes, was dropped by all but the most stalwart Marxists: imperialism. Talk of “globalisation” and “neo-liberalism” is quite simply too vague, as well as too novel for describing an old, familiar phenomenon which is making less and less of an effort to distinguish itself from the barbarism which it unleashed upon the world in the wake of Europe’s industrial revolutions.

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