We are about to complete the first decade of the 21st Century. If we add to this the last decade of the 20th century, we now have two decades of decay under the “glorious” capitalist globalization. After 20 years of globalization, people have started realizing the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production and the degeneracy of its socio-political system. The rot has gone to the roots. The citadel itself is crumbling and America finds itself entangled in one of its worst economic crises. Will it ever come out of this mess or will be the end of the road? That will perhaps be the story of the next decade!
The beginning the last decade of the 20th Century started with the two most important events that have influenced global politics. On January 16, 1991, American forces started the air attack against Iraq leaving 200,000 Iraqis dead. The second event was the fall of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, lead a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 to grab power that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Thus started the present phase of globalization.. With all its aberrations and distortions, the Soviet Union alone stood in the path of the Western Capitalist mode of production and the “free market” having a different ideal if not a true socialist system. Globalization bulldozed all that under the hypocritical slogan of freedom and democracy. The resistance however came from the Islamic militants who on February 26, 1993, tried to destroy the World Trade Center, killing five people and trapping tens of thousands of office workers in the tower.
George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of America on Jan. 20, 2001. This was hardly a good omen for heralding the 21st century! The top item on Bush's domestic agenda was a $1.6 trillion tax cut. By the time Americans began receiving their tax rebate checks in August, the country's budget surplus had indeed withered. On September 11, 2001 terrorist attack that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre at New York killing several thousand people. U.S. and British forces attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001 which collapsed after two months of bombing. “War against terrorism” thereafter became a convenient slogan to hit at all those who opposed capitalist globalization and the total destruction of Iraq followed, leading to the death of Saddam Hussein.
The last five years of George W Bush was of course terrible. He presided over the collapse of the American economy which exploded with the sub-prime loan disaster in 2006/07. Dozens of major Banks and financial Institutions went bankrupt and the American economy is kept alive by pumping tax payers' money into the corporate sector.
Alongwith the receding economy, the political and moral standards of societies all across the globe have also crumbled. Three of the most heinous genocides have also been carried out in this period. The "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia left 25,000 dead till January 1992, when a UN supervised ceasefire took place. In 1994, over 800,000 innocent Tutsis were hacked to death by Hutu extremists in the Rwanda genocide. Closer at home, over a thousand innocent Muslims were butchered in Gujarat in 2002. Two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq have virtually been destroyed. Globalization has indeed globalised violence and degradation all across the globe!
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