The Iran Crisis #16: Helena Cobban on Hormuz and 5,000 Years of Strategic Power

In this special presentation for Just World Educational's Iran Crisis series, Helena Cobban, the president of Just World Ed, delivered a pre-recorded talk for the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center conference in Orinda, California, on April 25th. Unable to attend in person and having to record her remarks more than 24 hours before they would be delivered, she chose to take a long historical view of the crisis by tracing the Strait of Hormuz across 5,000 years of human history. She traced Hormuz's  origins as a key node connecting the formative ancient civilizations in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamian, and as a central artery in the vast Indian Ocean trading zone that once stretched from East Africa to China. She described that pre-European world as a thriving, self-governed commercial network with its own norms and technologies, drawing on the work of historian Janet Abu-Lughod. She then walked through the entry of five European imperial powers into that world: Portugal, Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France. She described what she called the "White Supremacist International," a succession of empire-building ventures driven by profit, looting, and the rise of finance capitalism. She traced Portugal's violent seizure of Hormuz in 1507 under Afonso de Albuquerque, followed by the London-based East India Company's takeover of the port in 1622, and drew direct parallels between those colonial methods and what Israel is doing in Palestine and Lebanon today. Cobban closed by urging viewers to work toward curbing Western military power and ending the war.Support the show