copyleft January 2005

by Zbignew Zingh

“Collaboration” has two connotations. Collaboration among equals is a positive thing. Where power is asymmetrical, however, then collaboration is a negative linked to subservience.

No empire can exist without collaborators.

Alexander's Macedonian army was relatively tiny. As he marched east, he enlisted local troops from each conquered territory with whose help he then conquered more and established small, dependent kingdoms.

The Roman empire would have bled to death had it not augmented its native legions with “barbarian” auxiliaries. The non-Roman auxiliaries were usually placed in the front line of battle against other “barbarians” to suffer the horror of war. As the Roman foot soldier – once a farmer/citizen/soldier – became a professional and permanent military and the “auxiliaries” became the bulk of the army, Rome's ruling class lounged in decadent wealth.

In its conquered lands, the Romans established local rulers whose power depended exclusively on Rome and whose mission was to keep their own people subservient to the empire. These foreign colonies, ruled by collaborator kings, were absolutely necessary to Rome for its food and essential commodities. After centuries of wasting its domestic farmland and forests, Rome's domestic agriculture could not sustain itself without a “globalized” economy of empire-centric colonies regularly shipping their resources to the capital city.

For the same reasons, the Eastern Empire behaved like the Western Empire. For hundreds of years, it bought, sold and sacrificed “foreign” mercenaries, collaborators who maintained the Byzantine Empire and its web of colonial suppliers until, at last, Byzantium fell to the surging Muslim empire of the Ottomans.

Nazi Germany established its collaboration government in Vichy France and recruited French politicians, soldiers and police to administer a truncated and compliant state. The British set up satraps in Asia and colonial governments in America and Ireland. From each it recruited indigenous peoples to help manage the outposts of empire and to fight the empire's wars of expansion for it.

Collaborators are the lifeblood of empire everywhere.

The first and most obvious degree of collaboration is the Quisling class of empire-appointed leaders. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian who identified more closely with the Nazi Third Reich than with his own nation's heritage. He sought and failed to become Norway's leader before the Second World War. After the German occupation of Norway in the early stages of World War II, Quisling willingly served as Hitler's face man and puppet governor. After the war, Quisling was captured and executed by the Norwegians, but he gave his name forever as the 20th Century definition of a collaborator.

The Quisling collaborator is typically well educated and a member of the second-tier of the occupied country's ruling class. This person aspires to power within the society that has been conquered, but he could not attain it through ordinary political means. It is only the conqueror who can place the Quisling on the seat of power.

Today's Quislings are Iyad Allawi and Achmed Chalabi of Iraq, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Pervez Musharrof, Haiti's “interim prime minister” Gerard Latortue, Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, and many others. They are frequently graduates of Ivy league schools. Often, they have a connection with western intelligence agencies. Each one serves at the empire's will and each one does his master's bidding even to the point of killing his own countrymen on request.

The Quisling class of collaborators typically identifies more closely with the occupier than with its oppressed compatriots. They often have disdain for their own people and culture. They think they are smarter and better than their countrymen and women. They think that if they act like the empire's own first citizens then they will be accepted by them as equals.

In reality, no one loves a Quisling, not even emperors whose will they loyally execute; and, in the end, all Quislings are abandoned by the empires they once served.

But it is not the first degree of collaborators, the Quislings, on whom empires really depend.

More important is the second degree of collaborators, the professionals. They are the ones who are just doing a job. They, not the Quislings, actually run their colonized countries. The professional collaborators tend to be apolitical. They figure that, whether their homeland is occupied by foreign tyrants or domestic ones, there is a job to be done and someone has to do it, ostensibly for the benefit of their own people.

Among the professional collaborators are the bureaucrats. Unwittingly, the bureaucrats are not just “doing their jobs”. They are doing the work of the occupier, for without their assistance there would be no “normalcy” and the chafe of occupation would excite the people to resistance.

The “professionals” include the soldiers and police. The soldier class of collaborators, generally young people in their teens and twenties, are indoctrinated into a cohesive, supportive, uniform society when society all around them seems to be disintegrating. They are trained to be “professionals”, which means that they are trained to obey “orders” and to kill other human beings on command. This type of “professional” collaborator is mature enough to be trained and too immature to resist indoctrination.

The police in an occupied colony are also a “professional” type collaborator. Often, they have only recently escaped from a lower class of people who are themselves oppressed. The police collaborator is determined to avoid sliding back down into the oppressed class from which he has escaped, and thus he will follow his superior's directives to maintain “order” and to preserve property for the sake of a remote and foreign overlord.

Typically, the older “professional” collaborators have families and “responsibilities” and mouths to feed. They feel that they must do what they do because others depend on their regular paycheck, and work is scarce.

The occupying empire keeps work scarce because that swells the ranks of the professional collaborators. Fear of unemployment and material deprivation makes the second degree of collaborators particularly useful to the occupying empire. They are loyal to whoever employs them, whoever feeds them, whoever gives them a sense of stability.

But it is not the second degree of collaborators who are essential to empire.

More important than them is the third degree of collaborators, the “score-settlers”.

Every land has its oppressed peoples. Every land has its social flaws and blemishes. Not one society, not one culture, not one religion or ethnicity or nation in history has ever been completely free of bias or injustice. Whether in the United States or in Brazil or Italy or in India or in China or in Iraq, there are individuals and classes of individuals who are stigmatized, oppressed or denigrated.

We must never romanticize any culture or society such that we seek to restore conquered cultures, religions, or nations because they are, somehow, 'superior'. Rather, we should strive to just leave them alone to evolve naturally along their own paths toward their own destinies.

Of course, it is precisely that which the empire cannot do – leave other peoples and cultures alone. The empire may say it wants to civilize the world, and it may say it wants to improve the lot of the poor and uneducated, but what it really means to do is to keep them disordered and mired in ignorance. Civilized, industrialized colonies are potential competitors, whereas those that remain hungry, dependent and chaotic can have their resources drawn out of them and into the empire's maw.

The empire perpetuates its dysfunctional colonies by using the “score-settlers” as a preferred collaborator. Sometimes, the empire will use the social divisions of the conquered lands and elevate a historically repressed ethnic group to lord it over the traditionally dominant one. As a variation on the theme, the empire will break up the unity of a sovereign nation and, thereby, sift out a multitude of willing collaborators. The United States and Europe have played this card in the former Yugoslavia, Israel plays the game in the Middle East, and now again, the Americans play the Kurds and the Shia against the Sunni in Iraq... until it is expedient to sell them all out.

The “score-settler” serves the new empire as an eager collaborator because he was typically maltreated by the newly conquered people. The occupier merely uses the “score-settler” for its own short-term purposes, however, and it is usually only a matter of time before the empire, having achieved domination, proves that he who it elevates to power it can just as easily cast aside.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article about an Iraqi teenager who the Marines nicknamed “Steve-O” after a character on the “Jackass” MTV show. “Steve-O” was an illiterate, poorly socialized, street-wise kid whose father allegedly beat him. When given the opportunity, “Steve-O”, a prime example of the “score-settler” collaborator, betrayed his own father to the Marines as an “insurgent”. He also fingered dozens more among his neighbors as “insurgents.” In retaliation for his treachery, local townsmen allegedly shot his mother. Now virtually an orphan (the fate of his arrested father is unknown), the Marines took the young man under their wing and became his surrogate “parents.” He now, of course, identifies with the soldiers who turned him into a collaborator, and he wants to grow up to be like them – undoubtedly so that he can mete out more punishment, settle more “scores” with those he perceives have done him wrong.

All societies teem with potential score-settling collaborators because all societies, in one way or another, discriminate, oppress or ostracize some of their own citizens. Empires find them and nurture their hurt to the empire's advantage.

However, it is not the “score-settler” who is most necessary to the empire.

More important is the fourth degree of collaborator, the opportunists, the profiteers. These people have no qualms about collaborating with their imperial conqueror because they are simply out to make money. They are like the Wall Street investors who see profit in other people's misery, the loan shark who exacts interest income from the poor, the profiteer who lines his pocket by providing necessities at exorbitant prices when all around him is chaos.

In every disaster, the opportunistic collaborator sees an “opportunity” to better himself, usually at someone else's expense. Everything is just “business.” When plasma is in short supply, the opportunist buys and sells blood. When food is scarce, he hordes food and gouges the hungry. The opportunist is an investor; he is oblivious to the suffering around him because he is too intent on squeezing out a profit from the misery of others.

The opportunist is a collaborator because he helps the imperial occupier break down the bonds of a conquered society. By exalting profit over people, the opportunist demonstrates that nothing has any meaning except the profit motivation of capitalism, and he thereby lessens the value of his culture and his community. The opportunist destroys a subjugated community as thoroughly as does an aerial bombardment.

The opportunist is an important collaborator, but not the most important to the empire.

The fifth degree of collaboration is the gladiator. The gladiator is the bright, smart one whose services are for sale to the highest bidder. In America, they are the corporate lawyers who cravenly serve the Fortune Five Hundred; the government attorneys who inexcusably generate legal memorandums that excuse torture and secret detentions and abrogation of the Geneva Conventions . They are the men and women, business people and jurists, who break labor contracts in bankruptcy court; the privatizers and the outsourcers; the journalists who sell their professionalism for prestige, access to power and job security; the academics and scientists who prostitute themselves for large corporations so that polluters may pollute or that neighborhoods may be paved and people and animals may have the last dime of profit squeezed out of them. They are the false prophets of religiosity who whip their parishioners into a frenzy for the sake of ungodly and political motives.

But the gladiator collaborator is still not the foundation of empire.

That distinction belongs to the sixth degree of collaboration, the merely compliant.

Us. All of us.

In reality, the empire's foundation rests squarely on its own collaborators, on its own citizens' shoulders. We work, we consume and circulate money, we drive, we watch television, we read periodicals, we go about our day to day activities seemingly unaware that our every little action, socially and economically, directly and indirectly tends to support the infrastructure of the empire. Millions upon millions of us, the merely compliant, are the cells of the empire's body. Without our activities, it all simply grinds to a halt.

Within our own ranks are the five lesser degrees of collaboration. We have our own Quislings at the highest levels of government. We are the professionals and the bureaucrats who are just doing “our jobs” for the sake of making an above-average living.

We all, through our own acts of prejudice, intolerance and oppression, create new potential collaborators who will seek to settle their own scores.

We are the opportunists who try to make money out of anyone's misfortune. At the worst, we help to build or design technologies that harm rather than help people. At the least, we invest in the stock of companies that do the same.

We are the gladiators. We try to promote ourselves within the existing power structure. We strive to work for and with those who have the money and the power because that is the pathway to our own advancement. Inevitably, that means we tend to suppress any challenge to that money and power.

We cannot, of course, advocate absolute withdrawal from the system because the monastic or Walden-like life is neither desirable nor practical for most people. We do not advocate poverty or homelessness or unemployment, for while every state of humility has worthy lessons to teach, none is desirable as a goal in itself.

Rather, we should simply become aware, and remain constantly aware, that what we do for a living, how we spend our money, how and where we recreate, what and whether we drive, where and how we invest our savings (if any), all are the sinews of the empire.

In reality, we are not forced to participate in anything that we could simply choose to do differently.

We can be a scientist or an engineer, but not necessarily design weapons systems. We might earn less money, but we will not go hungry.

We can lawyer for the common good, but not pimp the law to the highest bidder. We will feel better about ourselves even though we will earn less. We can police our community without bullying it, and earn affection and not fear from our community.

We can be doctors and healers, and not prey on bodies for profit.

We can spend our money locally, on local produce and goods, rather than in big box chain stores owned by multinational corporations. We can walk, bike, take a bus, ride a train, avoid driving or flying.

We can disconnect the television. We can stop buying what we really do not need.

Although, to some extent, all cultures and societies are flawed and all discriminate, oppress or torment one minority or another, we can strive to create something better; a diverse culture and a just society, so as to minimize the ranks of the potential collaborator. Our innate sense of justice could have evolved from such a long-term strategy for cultural and societal self-preservation.

We can, incrementally, stop collaborating in the negative sense of the word: stop complying; reduce or withdraw our participation. We can start to collaborate in the positive sense of collaboration among equals seeking a common good.

Our complicity, our collaboration, is the ultimate strength of the empire, and its ultimate weakness.