Our Irish columnist Gearóid Ó Colmáin on the fate of Le Clem, a grand symbol of western imperialism and the exploitation of the developing world...
Le Clem, French patriots affectionately call it. The Clemenceau aircraft carrier has finally come to rest at Graythorpe in England, where it is to be scraped. But this ship’s post-maritime twilight is likely to be of more historical significance than its heyday, when it patrolled the Middle East.
Serving from 1961 to 1997, the Clemenceau took part in several missions to protect French interests – most notably, during Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when western powers supported the Baghdad Butcher in his quest for regional supremacy, providing their puppet dictator with weapons of mass destruction.
The USA was particularly generous to Saddam, offering him chemical weapons which he used to commit atrocities in Iran and even in his own country. The French provided significant aviation technology, while the Clemenceau took care of French ‘commercial interests’ in the Persian Gulf, protecting its capitalist looters from Iranian boats.
The ship also played a distinguished role during the first Gulf War. Saddam hoped to regain control over the oil fields of Kuwait, a kingdom which he felt – with some justification – was part of Iraq. The American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, brought up Saddam’s plans for Kuwait when she met him just before the war, expressing ambiguous concern but then assuring the dictator that America has “no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.”
Saddam, himself a creation of the CIA, should have known better. He fell for the trap and the US-led western imperialist criminals went on another killing spree to ‘liberate’ the oil fields of Kuwait. The French made sure they played their part in America’s bogus war, and Le Clem came in handy when it transported 40 helicopters, three attack planes and trucks to Iraq during the Desert Storm and Desert Shield operations.
After such a noble career of collusion in mass murder and looting, the French authorities decided it was time to dismantle their precious Clem. But as the 27-tonne ship contained many noxious materials – such as lead, PCB, mercury and asbestos – there was only one option: ‘outsource’ the problem to the Alang shipyard in India, where working conditions are to be expected: appaling.
Outsourcing is the euphemism the plutocracy employs to cover up their despicable exploitation of the world’s poor. Sure, many of them like their sweatshops and scrapyards; they’re happy to have a job, buy more commodities and become unwitting slaves to credit. After all, exploitation works much better if you make the exploited believe they are free.
But it was Greenpeace, the bete noire of the Elysée Palace, who exposed the Alang scandal. The last time they messed with the French government was in 1985 during their war on Iran, when President Mitterand had enough of their moralising and got his secret service to blow them up! However, due to legal pressure from within India, the French were forced to concede and Le Clem was sent to England, where it lies today – a rusting monument to the poisonous influence of the New World Order.
We live in a world of pathological externalisation. The capitalist powers continue to grow by outsourcing labour and war. It’s the only way financial capitalism can continue to reward the few and enslave the many at the expense of our future generations, Indeed, over half of the two billion children in this world are living in poverty, and neither charity nor plutocratic philanthropy will do anything to change this. Mass poverty is the sine qua non for the globalisation of capital.
metrogael.blogspot.com / gaelmetro@yahoo.ie
