[This is the third chapter of Murphey's book Out of the Ashes: America's Renewal? (2002).]
Chapter 3
THE IDEAS UNDERLYING INTERVENTION
Since the early nineteenth century the Left in the United States
has been deeply alienated against the mainstream society, which
it calls "bourgeois." The Left has produced a
massive literature charging Americans in virtually every walk of
life – it is a mistake to think it has just been in business
– with provincialism and a limited mentality. As part
of its alienation, it has also accused the United States of much
atrocious behavior.
In a series of studies during the 1990s, I examined six of the purportedly most flagrant episodes: . the three-century dispossession of the American Indian,
. the relocation of the Japanese-Americans from the west
coast during World War II,
. the history of lynching,
. the "Hollywood Blacklist,"
. the J. Robert Oppenheimer national security case, and
. the shootings at Kent State.1
My goal was to study each objectively, but without starting from
an alienated perspective. This produced a result sharply
different from the "politically correct" (leftist)
consensus that prevails about them, since in each case I found
the charge unjustified.
It is important for readers to know that I have defended the
American people in several instances where virtually no one else
has spoken up from their perspective. This is relevant
because there have been other episodes in American history where
Americans have in fact, in my opinion, committed wrongs they
should be ashamed of. When I talk about some of them here,
it won't be from the "hate America" point of view.
I have a strong revulsion against "blaming the victim"
for the atrocities of September 11, for example. Nevertheless,
the things I will discuss are important to understanding American
thought about foreign affairs. I won't hesitate to point to
the shallowness and naivete of much American innocence about
foreign affairs. (Indeed, we are an
"innocent" people in world affairs; but an innocence
carved out of ignorance, hubris and sentiment leads to a strange
oxymoron: culpable innocence. Most assuredly, that is the
best many of the other peoples of the world can credit us for.)
The failure to understand other peoples deeply and empathetically
is almost certainly not uniquely American. It is a
universal, or at least a near-universal, trait, if we are to take
seriously the lesson in William James' delightful essay "On
a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." James wrote
about how people often miss what is going on in the lives of
other people, and especially miss the meaning that life has to
those others. If there is a general blindness in human
beings' daily relations with each other, it is more than likely
magnified so far as their understanding of strangers is
concerned. And few people count as "strangers"
more than those living within other cultures.
A confused welter of principles
Here are some of the ways cultural naivete has been apparent in
American attitudes about world affairs:
1.
The belief that currently-held American and Western perceptions
and values are universal (even though the attitudes may be of
very recent origin and may change rapidly in historic terms), the
reverse side of which is a failure to appreciate the world's vast
complexity.
Cultural historian Samuel Huntington speaks of "the Western and particularly American belief in the universal relevance of Western culture. This belief" he says, "is expressed both descriptively and normatively. Descriptively it holds that peoples in all societies want to adopt Western values, institutions, and practices... Normatively the Western universalist belief posits that people throughout the world should embrace" those things. That this outlook is false, immoral and dangerous because of the means of interference and control that will be needed to carry it out is the central thesis of his recent book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.2
During the non-interventionist first century of the United
States' national existence, Americans believed in the superiority
of their institutions and way of life, which is why they wanted
them to stand as an example to others. They thought it was
something else entirely to see this as a mission to mold other
peoples in that image.
Such a mission has become, however, a premise underlying the
meliorism supported by today's "world community."
It isn't hard to understand how other peoples, who thought they
had thrown off the colonial system of the European empires after
World War II, see it as a cultural re-colonization.
Such a mission overlooks the world's unfathomable complexity.
Consider India: In Culture & Foreign Policy, Valerie M. Hudson cites a book about the condition of children in India, where there are "no effective laws mandating universal education and no effective laws banning child labor." "India, he [Weiner, the book's author] points out, is the largest single producer of the world's illiterates. Weiner attributes this state of affairs to a set of beliefs widely shared by state bureaucrats, social activists, academics, and, more broadly, the Indian middle classes – of whatever political persuasion. These groups, he argues, tend to view social inequality and differential privilege as the natural and proper order of things... Weiner argues that these beliefs have their origins in religious notions and in the premises that underlie India's hierarchical caste system...."3
Consider the Balkans: Robert Stacy McCain wrote an
article recently titled "The Balkans have a long history of
factions and warfare," with a subheading that "the
clash between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo is
the latest incident in centuries of conflict in the
Balkans."4 The current
divisions, he says, go back as far as 395 A.D. when the Roman
Empire was split in two; "the dividing line ran through what
is now Bosnia. Croatia and Slovenia were part of the
Western Empire and the areas of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia
went to the Eastern Empire. That division is still
reflected in the religions of the region: Croatia and Slovenia
are largely Roman Catholic, while the Serbs are part of the
Eastern Orthodox churches." Centuries of Ottoman
dominance later added Islam as a third major religion and
culture.
With reference to just part of the broader division, Callahan tells how "the history of conflict between the Serbs and the Croats stretches back hundreds of years. Each nationality has an oral tradition that highlights its persecution at the hands of the other. During World War II, Serb civilians were massacred in vast numbers by Croats...."5 It is little wonder that Huntington can observe that "the Bosnia Serbs and the Bosnia Croats overwhelmingly rejected" the American insistence (born out of current multiculturalist ideology) upon a multiethnic Bosnia.6
Consider Kosovo: Americans not long ago were repulsed by
images of Serbian forces burning homes and forcing ethnic
Albanians to flee. Americans weren't aware, of course, that
that sort of group violence has long been prominent among the
Albanians themselves. A history of Kosovo shows that the
customary law of the Albanians (the Kanun, which remained an oral
tradition until it was written down in the nineteenth century)
set out the rules of the "blood feud." British
historian Noel Malcolm says that its concept of honor holds that
"an offence is not paid for with property, but by the
spilling of blood or a magnanimous pardon." "The
aim is not punishment of a murderer, but satisfaction of the
blood of the person murdered... Honour is cleansed by killing any
male member of the family of the original offender, and the spilt
blood of that victim then cries out to its own family for
purification." All of this has been accompanied by
"the burning down of the offender's house and the expulsion
of his family." Malcolm says that "one
mid-nineteenth-century vendetta in the Malesi [the northern
Albania highlands]... led to 1,218 houses being burnt down and
132 men killed."7 Because Americans
know little of this, they assumed that the Albanians they saw
fleeing on television as their homes burned are people very
similar to themselves.
Complexity and an intricate prior history – not a readily understood clash of good and evil – have also defined the situations in Lebanon, Biafra and Palestine. According to Callahan, "During the early 1970s, the Muslims of Lebanon felt underrepresented and, at times, ill-treated by a Christian minority that refused to acknowledge the country's changing demographic reality. In the years before Biafra was formed, the Ibo of Nigeria had come to believe that their security and political rights could not be protected by the Nigerian government... The 1987 Palestinian Intifada in Israel's Occupied Territories arose after twenty years of Israeli rule that left a huge population of people politically disenfranchised, economically impoverished, and subject to various forms of harassment...."8
Many other cauldrons around the world may be added to this list:
the repeated attempts at genocide, one against the other, by the
Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi; the plight of the Kurds
in Turkey and Iraq; the ethnic complexity of Indonesia, with its
17,000 islands and 300 languages, a complexity that the bloodshed
in East Timor brought to world attention; starvation and
the rule of the warlords in Somalia; the conflict between India
and Pakistan over Kashmir; and the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in
Sri Lanka.
The world a simple place, readily grasped? Hudson points to
"recent upheavals... that include the ‘third wave' of
global democratization that began with the fall of Portugal's
dictatorship in 1974; the continuing growth since the Iranian
revolution of 1979 of Islamist movements in much of the Middle
East; the burgeoning phenomenon of ‘collapsed states' in
places like Somalia and Rwanda in Africa; and, perhaps most
notably, at the outset of the 1990s, the collapse of Marxist
regimes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia."
In-depth analysis and a marvelous grasp of history are needed
fully to explain any of these situations, but that is precisely
what is lacking in any outlook that sees the world in simple
ideological categories. Even this is faulty: it assumes
"a full explanation" is possible. More likely,
the reality in any of these situations is a mixture of fact,
sacramentalized myth (which, far from being merely empty
fabrication, is vitally important to people as they attribute
meaning to their lives), subjectivity and long-harbored outrage.
Anyone who says he "understands" it so well that he is
willing to impose his own "solution" onto it is
necessarily willing to settle for an over-simplification.
There is an associated confusion: The fact that the consensus at
any given time within certain "enlightened" nations has
come to think and feel a certain way (in what is, in fact, merely
the latest stage in a series of phases in which the consensus has
gone from one moralistic attitude to another) does not mean that
all other peoples are at the same "stage of
development" socially, culturally, morally and
intellectually. I don't mean to suggest by this any
progressive phase-theory about societies; it is enough merely to
point out that not all members of the global choir are
"singing from the same page." It is profoundly
naive to think that attitudes in the United States at the
beginning of the twenty-first century are universal (or, for that
matter, will be long held even in the United States; it's
noticeable they aren't the same attitudes that existed a few
years ago).
Centuries ago in New England, there was a general belief in
witchcraft, leading to the now-infamous hanging (thought
erroneously by many to have been burning) of "witches"
in Salem. The belief was soon abandoned. But a
December 2000 news report from Mexico City told of a widespread
belief in witchcraft in Mexico today, where "witches"
from "all over Latin America" even "hold annual
conventions."10 The "New
Age" sections of American bookstores carry much material,
presented seriously, about witchcraft.
2.
The underlying assumption behind the Kellogg-Briand mentality:
that the world has reached a point at which the status
quo can be presumed legitimate, so that any effort to
change it by force is necessarily a violation of international
order.
One of the reasons members of the United States Senate voted down the League of Nations Covenant was that, like the Holy Alliance at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it "implied an attempt to freeze the global status quo," which the opposing Senators knew was futile.11
This same split between a realistic view of the world and naive
optimism emerged again in 1928 with the Pact of Paris, also known
as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. The Pact renounced war as an
instrument of national policy. It was eventually ratified
by almost every country. The U.S. Secretary of State, Frank
B. Kellogg, was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for negotiating it
in cooperation with Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister.
Its futility was soon made clear by Japan's 1931 invasion of
Manchuria and Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. The
problem was not even mainly that it lacked a mechanism for
enforcement; its basic assumption, that the world had reached an
end-point, a stasis, in which all conflicts can be settled
by negotiation, overlooked the complexity of the existing
world, the extent to which peoples differ over whether the
current dispensation is "just," and the explosive
pressures of on-going demographic change.
This naivete has continued, undeterred by the failure of the
Pact. Robert H. Jackson notes that "the basic norm of
the UN Charter concerns the recognition of [state] boundaries and
a pledge not to infringe upon them without lawful cause."
He recognizes that this norm is at odds with "culture,
religion, language, ethnicity, or any other nonjuridical
definition of statehood in international relations."
Jackson gives a recent example: "When in 1990 the German
chancellor questioned the postwar boundary separating Poland and
a reuniting Germany, he was informed in no uncertain terms...
that the boundary could not be questioned and must be
accepted."12 This is a
boundary that is itself a moral monstrosity and very likely a
bone in the throat of future European peace; it came about at the
end of World War II when Poland's western border was moved west,
appropriating an integral part of Germany, and Poland's eastern
border was itself moved far west to allow the Soviet Union to
take a significant portion of what previously had been eastern
Poland.
The Kellogg-Briand premise that the status quo must be
inviolate (unless on some basis the "world community"
condones a change) is reflected in much of what we hear today.
It is implicit, for example, in Callahan's observation that
"a capacity to predict ethnic conflicts is of little use if
it cannot be harnessed to policies of prevention." He
notes that "efforts to prevent ethnic conflict [are] now
quite extensive." This assumes that conflicts are
inherently evils to be prevented. Callahan supports this
assumption even though he knows the difficulties; he says that
"responding to ethnic conflict must be part of a broader
strategy for reinvigorating U.S. internationalism" and he
speaks of the need to "promote lasting stability in
conflict-riven parts of the world."13
The reader will notice that "ethnic conflict" is
thought of as a generic category, an abstraction, without any
effort to consider the merits of particular disputes, which
necessarily implies an assumption that the status quo is
at least presumptively valid and permanent.
3.
The premise, often implicit, that unless intervention continually
steers them onto the right path great portions of the world are
bound to spiral downward.
A likely explanation of the psychology of interventionism is that
many people feel forebodingly that the world will take a slippery
slope downward unless it is prevented from doing so.
Such pessimism is precisely what Adam Smith undercut when he
wrote about the harmony of undirected economic effort by
countless independent actors, who by their behavior formed a
"market" with certain self-adjusting features. Mercantilism
had said the opposite; nothing was expected to work unless it was
directed. During the two-plus centuries since that debate,
the same issue has divided classical liberals from socialists,
such as Stuart Chase, who saw the need for "central
planning." American "liberalism," as we know
it, has relatively little faith in the ability of life to thrive
on its own. Everything requires a boost and without it is
trapped by circumstances. Similar attitudes have appeared
in religion, where American history has seen various movements,
of which the Social Gospel was just one, that have presupposed
that a great many people would be misdirected without the fervor
of the moral reformism they have preached.
In Chapter 8 we will revisit the point made in Chapter 1 that the
vast technological revolution through which the world is just
beginning to pass will bring not only vast and unforeseen
blessings but also a broad displacement of work and an explosive
polarizing of incomes and wealth. With that in mind, we
will see the need for a worldwide sharing of consumer technology
to prevent a precipitous downward slide by hundreds of millions,
more likely billions, of people. But if we set that aside
until we get to it, and consider humanity in the world as we have
known it, we see that there has been no reason to think that vast
portions of the world would sink into an abyss. On the
contrary, it used to be the assumption of many, such as the
English Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, that humanity
was on an upward trajectory. The twentieth century gave
much reason to shake that article of faith, but did it provide a
firm basis for an opposite conviction? To say so assumes
that human beings are inert or worse, which isn't the case most
of the time. At the very least, in the absence of immense
economic displacement and the steps needed to address it, the
issue is so much in doubt that there should be no automatic
premise that global intervention is needed as a way perpetually
to prop up the world.
4.
The readiness to see looming dangers where they do not exist
– in effect, as John Quincy Adams said, "going abroad
in search of monsters to destroy."
An important variation on the theme that things will spiral
downward in the absence of intervention is the view that a
balance of power must everywhere be maintained by American
military might – or else global or regional
"hegemons" will "dominate" the world or some
part of it (or at least "challenge American primacy").
We need to understand that this is a premise that by itself
will put the United States into the middle of every situation.
Often, the "prevention of the rise of hegemons" means
struggling against a very natural tendency, all the while making
an enemy of the nation that is to be restrained in opposition to
its normal growth and influence.
The most
important single example of this today is China (although the
"specter of Islam" has been the center of attention
since September 11). China now has 1.2 billion people and
is expected to grow to a billion and a half in the next
quarter-century. At the same time, it is growing
economically and technologically at breakneck speed. Sixty
million Chinese live in the nearby countries, and are leaders in
their economies. And yet, several authors call for the
United States to "balance" against China's becoming a
"dominant" power in East Asia. It is essential
that we see that they are calling for the impossible, since,
given the facts we have just recited, China's having a towering
presence is inescapable. They are urging a premise that
guarantees inevitable hostility and eventual war.
A similar prediction of attempts at "world domination"
is being made about Islam in the aftermath of September 11.
This prediction is made by some commentators only about
"fundamentalist Islam," as Linda Chavez did in her New
York Post column on October 10. "The enemy,"
she says, "is militant Islamic fundamentalism." She
cites the Koran as "filled with elaborate instructions on
the conduct of war, the methods of executing the infidels, the
rewards that will accrue to those martyred in a holy war."
But others cast a much wider net, and make the same dire
assessment of Islam as a whole. Again, passages from the
Koran, going back several hundred years, are quoted to show
Islam's expansionist intent. In a review she has written of
Bat Ye'or's book The Decline of Eastern Christianity under
Islam, Ellen Myers has spoken of "Islam's goal of world
dominion." She quotes Ye'or as saying that for Islam
the world "is divided into two regions... the ‘domain
of Islam' and ‘the domain of war'... The earth belongs to
Allah and all its inhabitants must acknowledge this reality; to
achieve this goal there is but one method: war."
These imputations of commitment to world war are ridiculous.
They ignore both the existence of the vast number of peaceable,
moderate Muslims within the highly diverse composition of Islam
as it exists in real life, and the off-setting existence of the
other eight civilizations. Islam cannot "dominate the
world" so long as the United States, China, Europe and
Russia exist.
When I made this point to a friend recently, he countered with
the fact that Europe and America are themselves coming to have
major Islamic populations. But to what are we to ascribe
that? If Islam spreads demographically into Europe and the
United States, that is more a reflection of the immigration
policies of their own peoples acting under the influence of
"multiculturalist" ideology and their own lack of will
to exist than it is a demonstration of Muslims' own will to
power. Again, those who create a fiction of
"expansionism" where none exists are putting the West
in the position of "begging for a fight." It is a
prescription for perpetual war. And perpetual war is
unspeakably dangerous now that asymmetrical weapons of mass
killing are available. Conflict with an immense population
can lead to short-term victories in battles or even what we might
call "wars," but never in the larger conflict itself.
There should, of course, be great skepticism toward any such
assertion that someone is out to dominate the world. For it
to be accepted, the evidence must be compelling. The
country or the people must have both the intent and the
capability. Part of the evidence must be that the expanding
force has such universal appeal that it can be expected to pick
up backers, resources and momentum as it progresses. Communist
ideology had this potential because it provided a vehicle for
every sort of envy and frustration. Nazi ideology lacked it
because a doctrine of Germanic superiority would hardly be
appealing to non-Germans. To the extent Nazism had a
broader appeal, it was because of other aspects than its
pro-Germanism, such as its appeal to those who idealistically
opposed the "chaos and venality" of non-command
societies and its quasi-religious call for a more
"heroic" life than could be found in commercial
civilization.
As compared to either Communism or Nazism, the German nationalism
of Kaiser Wilhelm, which was thought by Woodrow Wilson and others
to make the world unsafe for democracy, was only by fevered
imagination turned into a world-expansionist force. The
gross exaggeration of the "evil" he represented (an
exaggeration that was believed in passionately by my
grandparents) transformed World War I into an existential
conflict in which each nation was convinced it faced the
unthinkable if it did not prevail. We run the risk of
fashioning precisely such a polarity, on a purely fanciful
ground, if we do the same thing today with either China or Islam.
5.
Conceptual confusions.
Double Standards
The existence of confused and internally contradictory ideas
within the program of meliorist intervention is nowhere better
illustrated than through the presence of double standards:
· One of the most egregious, long-lasting and damaging has
related to the totalitarian ideologies. Hitler was seen as
pure evil well before there was any intimation of an
extermination program against the Jews; but Stalin, who had
already murdered millions through his enforced starvation in the
Ukraine and elsewhere in 1932-3, his rampant purge-trial
executions and his deportation and enslavement of vast numbers,
was considered sufficiently acceptable by the United States and
the West that Stalin's attacks on Poland, the Baltic states, and
Finland were ignored (and even today continue to be omitted in
the popular retrospectives written or shown on television), with
the result that the West was quite willing to enter into an
alliance with a totalitarian USSR to fight a totalitarian
Germany. Churchill and FDR wound up toasting Stalin at
Yalta, a conference at which decisions were made premised on
faith in Stalin that in effect delivered hundreds of millions of
people in eastern Europe and the Far East into Communist hands.
The ideological double standard is evident today to those who
visit the Mall in Washington, D.C., where they can tour the
Holocaust Museum to see a graphic depiction of Nazi horrors but
find no comparable commemoration of the far more numerous victims
of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and Pol Pot.14
Until a thorough-going correction of this ideological
double-standard evolves and permeates world consciousness, little
will be understood with any accuracy about the twentieth century.
It is central to countless issues.
· Don Feder points to a double standard when he writes that
"in Western eyes, all humanitarian disasters are not equal.
In 1995, Croat dictator Franjo Tudjman drove 300,000 Serbs out of
the Krajina region, killing 14,000 in the process. Having
determined that the Serbs... are the enemies of civilization,
Clinton and NATO ignored this ethnic cleansing" (emphasis
added).15 Nevertheless,
it was to stop "ethnic cleansing," depicted as an
absolute evil, that the United States intervened in Kosovo by
massively bombing Serbia. This difference in treatment of
the ethnic cleansings by Croatia and Serbia, respectively, cannot
be justified by the kind of prioritizing that would cause the
United States to intervene in the Balkans but not in Rwanda.
Croatia and Serbia are right there together.
·
Callahan tells how in 1994 President Clinton played a role in the
negotiations over Northern Ireland. "At Clinton's
direction, Tony Lake, his national security adviser, wrote to the
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and urged him to accept a secret
offer by the British government to establish a dialogue on peace
if the IRA ordered a cease-fire."16
In light of this, if we have some historical memory and care at
all about the principles involved, it is worth asking: Who is
right as between William Clinton and Woodrow Wilson over the
beautiful ideal of "open covenants, openly arrived at"?
Is there any conceptual consistency about that, or have we
accepted the notion that the "open covenants" formula
was mere rhetoric? Most likely, we just don't think about
it.
· Huntington highlights others: "Democracy is promoted but
not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power;
nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for
Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for
agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with
Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively
repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians."
Non-Westerners, he observes, "do not hesitate to point to
the gaps between Western principle and Western action."17 An article in The Times of India in
1998 said that "the U.S. and British governments should know
a lot about Mr. [Saddam] Hussein's WMD [weapons of mass
destruction] arsenal. In the eighties, they – or their
corporations – made billions helping him build it... In the
nineties, he suddenly became a villain... To punish him, the West
must employ double standards... Washington cites Resolution 687
to demand unfettered inspections. But surely it would not
like some other UN resolutions (e.g. 242 on vacating Israel's
occupation) to be implemented." The author notes the
disparity between the United States and Britain's having nuclear
weapons while denying their legitimacy in the hands of other
nations.18 To citizens
in the West, this difference seems normal and desirable; but
other peoples are acutely aware of the incongruities.
An Associated Press report in April 2001 presaged September 11. "In northwest Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from around the world celebrated the hard-line approach to Islam and berated the West – and the United States in particular – as being bent on the destruction of Islam. They shouted support for a global jihad, or holy war." The report went on the say that "an Islamic leader, Liaquat Baluch, said the anger is born of an increasing frustration with the West, which Muslims see as having two standards: one for Islamic nations, and another for non-Islamic nations... It demands democracy in Pakistan, now ruled by the army, but says nothing about the monarchy that runs Saudi Arabia...."19
"Self-determination": another conceptual confusion
Conceptual confusion arises in other ways, too, not just in
double standards. Invoking the concept of
"self-determination," Woodrow Wilson "called for
the creation of many new states to represent the yearnings of
ethnic groups that had been ruled by the Ottoman and
Austro-Hungarian Empires," according to Callahan. The
concept is "premised on the notion that all peoples with a
sense of national distinctiveness [have] a right to
self-determination."20 But a little
reflection shows that the concept is fraught not only with
incredibly fractious difficulties in implementation, but also
with a serious ambiguity. When a population of Hispanic
origin comes clearly to have a majority in the southwestern
United States, will it be the majority in those states or the
majority in the United States as a whole that has the right of
self-determination? That is, what is the "unit"
to which the concept applies? And what point in time is to
be conclusive?
Another
difficulty is that the concept would confirm the results of every
demographic shift regardless of the "meaning" the
previous people have come to invest in the land that is now
occupied by the newcomer and regardless of the
"meaning" the previous people attach to their own
continued historic integrity. The investiture of life with
meaning is one of the more essential features of human existence,
and is understood by all who are not themselves deracinated.
All of this is brushed aside with shallow incomprehension by the
high-sounding ideal of "self-determination," which is
naive and poorly thought-out.
Despite its inconsistency with the "self-determination" principle, which hasn't been consciously repudiated, the conventional wisdom in the United States today is that "multiethnicity" is not just desirable but morally demanded in any society; but this, too, raises serious questions. The world community ostracized South Africa until finally the white minority gave up its Apartheid (separateness) policy and turned the country over to the black majority, with the idea that a multiethnic society would result. Nevertheless, it is not suggested that Japan or China need to become multiethnic to make themselves internationally acceptable. When the recommendation was made recently that "historic homelands" be internationally recognized for the 18 million Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey; for the 2 million Hungarians in Romania; and for the 600,000 Hungarians in Slovakia, this invoked an idea of separateness that was treated as despicable when South Africa tried it.21
The "multiethnicity" formula, for its part, absolutizes
a certain confusion in the thinking of today's world elite, but
is hopelessly muddled because if taken seriously it
simultaneously affirms and denies the value of distinct
ethnicity: ethnicity is exalted, but it is intolerable for a
people to separate off and protect their own. In today's
world we need to understand, of course, that the concept is not
to be taken seriously, precisely because within the vagaries of
contemporary ideology, with its alienation against the West most
especially by the intellectual class of the West itself,
"multiethnicity" is primarily an ideological weapon.
It is a way of demanding that Westerners abandon their ethnic
distinctiveness while others are encouraged to celebrate their
own.
The truth is that neither "self-determination" (by
specific ethnic groups) nor its opposite,
"multiethnicity," should be thought of as a moral
absolute. Neither fits all situations. And it
requires a God-like omniscience and presumption for outsiders to
say which it should be in any given context.
The making of any principle into a moral absolute contradicts the
assumed notion that the world's status quo is valid and
should not be disturbed. This is because the world simply
is not organized around a single principle. The global
"consensus" approaches any given situation with a
self-righteous moral certitude about the principle that at the
particular moment strikes the consensus as most attractive.
This simply illustrates the conceptual confusion. Despite
all its self-assurance, the "world community" hasn't
stopped to think these things through.
Confusion over "moral equivalence"
During the struggle to contain Communist expansion, a serious
moral error made by many observers who opposed an anti-Communist
response to the so-called "wars of national liberation"
was to treat both sides as morally equivalent. Force used
in defense of a people against Communist guerrilla warfare was
condemned as itself immoral, such as when the U.S. incursion into
Cambodia to destroy the Communist sanctuary there provoked riots
on American university campuses.
The alleged moral equivalence in that setting was perverse.
The devotees of a totalitarian ideology were making it their
business to force that ideology, with all the killing and other
horrors that went with it, onto the world at large. The
non-Communist peoples did not "pick the fight"; it was
forced on them. To fail to see one side as morally worthy
and the other as not was to forfeit the will – and, with it,
the right – to resist.
Conservative commentators who recognized that perversity are, by
extension, inclined to condemn other perceptions of "moral
equivalency," as though the same point applies in today's
world. (In what follows, I will refer to two such authors for
whom I have the utmost respect.) Columnist Cal Thomas, for
example, in April 2001 cited how U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell "blamed the Palestinian side and their unprovoked
mortar attack on Israel for the new outbreak of violence,"
and then criticized Powell for including Israel in the blame:
"But then, in the usual moral equivalency that has
characterized past administrations, Secretary Powell said Tuesday
that Israel is failing to live up to its part of the 1993 Oslo
peace accords...."22
Along the same lines, Steven Mosher rejects notions of moral equivalency between China and the West. "Many China experts [argue] that there is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by lecturing China... In the name of moral equivalence, they set aside China's obviously retrograde political values and institutions," and accordingly "ignore human rights abuses in China."23
One of the great difficulties in social thought is that it is
often necessary to make distinctions where situations differ.
Both Thomas and Mosher are using a concept where it no longer
fits. The issue of "moral equivalency" actually
involves two separate issues: one about the respective merits,
morally, of the opposing sides in a conflict; and the other about
whether it is appropriate for outside parties to make a judgment
(or, having made a judgment, to act upon it).
With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is by no
means clear that the moral weight is on the side of the Israelis;
it is, arguably, on the side of the Palestinians because of the
forcible creation of Israel in their midst after World War II.
(One becomes enmeshed in a quagmire of "infinite
regress" if one tries to assess blame for any one of the
later attacks that either side has made against the other. Each
attack can be, and in fact is, considered a reprisal for an
earlier attack by the other side. It is a serious fallacy,
probably fashioned out of bias in favor of one side or the other,
to decide who the "good side" and the "bad
side" is based on a reaction to anything that has happened
recently.)
Nor is it clear that outsiders have an obligation to decide the
issue, or to act upon it if they do. The Commission on
America's National Interests ranks the "survival of Israel
as a free and prosperous state" as one of the United States'
"vital interests," which the Commission says are the
things "indispensable for [U.S.] survival." But,
of course, this is ludicrous. It is a ranking that shows
how much the Commission adapted its findings to domestic
political and ideological imperatives. The United States is
not well served by being the enemy of either the Israelis or the
Arabs; both should be our friends. The only way to
accomplish that is to stay out of their confrontation, or at most
be an "honest broker" between them.
With regard to China, anyone who cherishes an "open
society" of limited government and personal freedom will not
find it difficult to believe that Western values are morally
superior to those of the prevailing Chinese dictatorship. They
are not "morally equivalent" when judged purely in
those terms. Where the difficulty arises is in supposing
that China's internal affairs are "our business."
Do we respect the sovereignty of China, or do we not? There
is no end to the entanglements and dangers that are implied by
setting up the United States or the West as the moral censor of
the world. Those entanglements can easily lead to damage to
– or even the destruction of – a great many things that
we cherish as themselves having moral value.
"War Crimes"
Finally, thought should be given to the recent move toward the
definition and punishment of "war crimes." A
number of war crime trials were convened in the aftermath of
World War II, most conspicuously that conducted by the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the comparable
trial in Tokyo. In 1993 the United Nations responded to the
war in Bosnia by creating a war crimes tribunal at the behest of
the Clinton administration. In August 2000 the U.N.
Security Council voted to set up a war crimes court to hear
prosecutions against rebel leaders in Sierra Leone. Then in
late December 2000 President Clinton signed a treaty that would
establish the world's first permanent international war crimes
court. These developments are conceptually flawed in at
least four ways:
First, there is no way to avoid the prosecutions' being highly
selective and partisan, making a mockery out of the Rule of Law.
We have already noted the double standards applied by the
U.S.-led "world community" to the reciprocal slaughters
between the Serbs and the Croatians. In the context of war
crimes, such a double standard "stacks the juridical
deck" in favor of some and against others. World
public opinion still has not come to see the atrocious betrayal
of justice at the IMT in Nuremberg, where the indictment charged
the Germans with killing the Polish officer corps at the Katyn
Forest, a Soviet general served as one of the four judges, and
the Katyn charge was not even mentioned in the Final Judgment (a
telling reflection on its integrity) when the facts made it clear
that the Soviet Union, not the Nazis, had done the killing.
No international tribunal has ever been convened to indict Stalin
or other Soviet officials for that mass killing – or any
other. The recent Black Book of Communism by several
European scholars says that there have been virtually no
prosecutions for Communist atrocities after the collapse of
Communist states, despite an estimated 85 to 100 million victims.
That is worth repeating: 85 to 100 million victims and no
prosecutions.
We are told of "gross violations of human rights" by Belgian paratroopers as part of the United Nations effort in Somalia. "Belgian paratroopers, ashamed of what they had seen, bore witness anonymously on Belgian Radio, saying that ‘official kill figures should be multiplied by four or five.' It soon became obvious that most of the statistics in those ‘kill figures' were in fact unarmed civilians."24
In a world of such selectivity, the ideal of the Rule of Law is
easily brushed aside by an action-oriented humanity. In a
great many contexts, it seems, the objection that "a
mockery" is made of "the Rule of Law" seems to
carry very little weight. It is an objection that means
almost nothing to the acting man, even at the highest levels.
This fact by itself suggests that an organized legal system is
often a vehicle for human passions and isn't as far removed from
lynch-justice as most people assume it is. The ideal of the
rule of law is one of mankind's noblest, but much of the time
there is little real commitment to it among people as they go
about their practical affairs.
Given this selectivity, it cannot be surprising that the war
crimes tribunals are seen by many as instruments of politics and
policy, not of law and justice. Aleksandar Popovic, the new
president of Yugoslavia after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic,
is no enthusiast for the court at The Hague, which he considers a
"political" instrument.25
As the United States attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan after
September 11, President George W. Bush established a system of
military tribunals to try non-citizens who conspired in the
atrocities. There was much criticism that this
"violates the Rule of Law." What those critics
did not understand was that any attempt to cloak punishment with
the forms of law in such a situation would itself horribly mangle
the concept of law, since the trials would be mere charades,
similar to that at Nuremberg. There would be, and could be,
no impartiality, which true procedural justice demands. Show
trials don't serve the Rule of Law, they mock and distort it.
It showed respect for the Rule of Law to treat the matter of
punishment as a political and military issue, to be made a
subject of administrative decision, as Bush did.
Second, a
vast accumulation of evidence shows that atrocities are not
aberrations, as usually assumed, but are virtually a universal
part of warfare. Anything approximating an even-handed
criminal process will need an army of investigators, judges,
jailers and executioners, and military forces for enforcement.
These will then need to prosecute the military forces, regular
and irregular, of literally every country, not just of a few.
Even the victors and often their leaders should be prosecuted.
But no one wants this sort of even-handedness.
When we think of "war crimes," we may bring to mind
images of the wanton killing of hundreds or even thousands, and
especially of civilians or prisoners (since they are
defenseless). But compare the list published in Insight
magazine of just the more recent genocidal killings:
"Sudan, where 1.5 million-plus are dead; Rwanda, where
estimates range from 500,000 to 800,000; East Timor, at least
100,000; Sri Lanka, 54,000; Tajikistan, 30,000 to 50,000;
Algeria, 70,000 to 80,000; Liberia, 200,000; Chechnya, 80,000;
Ethiopia-Eritria, 10,000 in recent weeks; Iraq, 1 million; and
Kosovo, 2,000 prior to the NATO bombing attacks."26 Even these rank low when compared to the
slaughters that preceded them in the twentieth century. The
figures, given as aggregates, obscure the fact that each victim
was a human being who, if the circumstances had been right, could
have been photographed and shown to us graphically in a way that
would fill us with outrage.
Third, those who support the indictment and punishment of war
criminals will do well to consider that a shift of fortune can
bring the whole thing down on their own heads. The immunity
the United States and other Western nations enjoy from
international criminal indictments is entirely a product of
superior power. But the arrest of Pinochet in England upon
the motion of a Spanish judge, something smiled upon by the world
community while Pinochet was held for several months until he was
finally released to return to Chile because of failing health,
raises the specter that at some future time no country's leaders
will be able to travel into other countries without the
possibility of being arrested and tried. In fact, the
international community has even condoned one country's
kidnapping an individual from another country for criminal trial
and execution. Fourth,
a threat of war crimes prosecution is a practical equivalent of a
demand for "unconditional surrender." For the
leaders of the country faced with defeat, it turns the struggle
into a desperate fight for personal survival. Great Britain's
foreign secretary, David Owen, saw this about Serbia's Slobodan
Milosevic, saying that Milosevic "would sooner provoke a
civil war in Montenegro or even Serbia before he'll allow himself
to face a war-crimes tribunal."27
There may be times when it makes sense to induce such
desperation, but it is only confused thinking that can believe
that that is advisable in all instances.
Moral Dualism: the Demonizing of Enemies
1.
The American belief in the purity of its motives.
Notwithstanding the contrary facts that Marxian analysts or
sociological realists can most certainly adduce, and
notwithstanding also the cynicism toward institutions and motives
that was argued so forcefully by the counterculture of the 1960s
and that is held to by those (on both Right and Left) who are
most aware that underneath the vast superstructure of modern
government there is at all times a struggle of self-interested
groups, the American public has almost always believed in the
purity of American motives in international affairs. The
least we can say is that when millions of people believe they are
acting in a good cause out of selfless motives, the very belief
gives a tangible reality to it, making it a moving force.
We have seen, for example, that the American people pursued some
very questionable, naive, uninformed and ideologically skewed
moral choices as they reacted to Pearl Harbor and went into World
War II, based on a double standard that ignored Stalin's
bloodthirsty history; but this does not diminish the very real
fact that the millions who went to war, in the armed services and
through work on the homefront, did so with the utmost conviction
about the rightness of their crusade against what they perceived
as intolerable evils. Americans look back now at that
generation as "the greatest generation" who
"fought the good fight," so that even now, more than
half a century after the war, almost no American is able to look
past that to see the horrors inflicted in pursuit of that very
cause. Americans know, and rightly so, of the immense
courage of those, for example, who flew the bombers over Germany.
But tragic irony lurks behind that wonderful sense of having been
so right: there is a disconnect, a compartmentalizing of
realities. The heroism remains pure and unsullied, while
off in a different world there is also the awful truth of what
was done to the hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly women
and children, who were subjected to the fire storm at Dresden.
2.
Demonizing opponents.
How can such a splitting of reality occur? The answer is
that ones conviction that he is entirely right has a second side
to it – a readiness to see opponents as necessarily
thoroughly perverse (i.e., "evil"). The premise:
if they [the opponents] were decent people, they couldn't
possibly support what they do. And this leads on: when
opponents are seen virtually as demons, embracing as they do pure
evil, the crusade against them becomes a desperate imperative,
justifying whatever measures are needed to destroy them and force
their unconditional surrender. The "enemy" are
not just the leaders, but the people themselves who are perverse
enough to support the leaders.
There may be times in life when an unambiguous Good faces an
unambiguous Evil. But that can hardly apply to a face-off
between two peoples. When we are talking about millions on
each side, those millions involve enormous numbers of both
ordinary and extraordinary human beings. Among them will be
many who are compassionate, intelligent, morally upright, caring
about their families – in other words, thoroughly decent.
That isn't changed by the fact that they may (or may not) be
passionately committed to their country's cause.
The shallowness of understanding that lies behind both the conviction of total rightness and the perception of enemies as purely evil is, as with the naivete and shallowness generally, not a uniquely American trait, just as we saw earlier with regard to other examples of naivete. Referring to what he calls "fault line wars," Huntington says that "each side demonizes its opponents, often portraying them as subhuman, and thereby legitimates killing them. ‘Mad dogs must be shot,' said Yeltsin in reference to the Chechen guerrillas. ‘These ill-bred people have to be shot... and we will shoot them,' said Indonesian General Try Sutrisno, justifying the massacre of East Timorese in 1991."28
If we want to know how it is that human beings can do unthinkable
things to each other, we need to understand how it is that people
can come to see others as "below the threshold of their
sensibility." The demonizing of opponents is one way.
(But unfortunately there are others, which should be a major
concern of any theory of criminology and even an important part
of psychological theory.)
I run the risk of overstating Americans' propensity to demonize
opponents if I don't direct attention to at least one instance in
recent years in which Americans felt a compassionate impulse
precisely not to overlook the humanity of their opponents.
During the Gulf War, Americans were fascinated by the televised
images of "smart bombs" and other high technology, and
were thoroughly anti-Hussein, but at the same time were almost
sick at heart about the very fact of war and the miseries it
would impose. This has been very little commented upon, if
at all. I was especially aware of it because at the
beginning of Desert Storm I wrote a poem called "An American
Pledge" expressing those very sentiments, and I know how
well it was received, which included its having been reprinted in
several newspapers. (Oddly, but consistently with the
thesis of this chapter, the American people have lost all sense
of this empathy during the ensuing ten years of economic embargo
against Iraq, which has caused untold suffering by the Iraqi
people. That suffering has been unseen by the American
people, since the media almost never mention it.)
The centuries-long demonizing of the Spanish.
Patrick Buchanan describes how the Spanish were demonized during the Spanish-American War. This built on the "Black Legend," a stereotype that had long seen "Spaniards as bloodthirsty despots." Buchanan says that "led by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the papers competed daily in the vitriol they poured on the Spanish."29
The demonizing of Milosevic and the Serbs.
In connection with the bombing of Serbia as part of the recent
fight over Kosovo, President Clinton compared the Serbian leader,
Slobodan Milosevic, to Hitler. Serbs generally were
pictured as entirely in the wrong, in effect a criminal people.
In the context of world and American opinion, the comparison with
Hitler was the blackest possible. (Thomas Fleming of the
Rockford Institute pointed out how absurd it was: "The death
rate in Kosovo before the bombing was lower than the murder rate
in [Washington] D.C.")30 Discerning
readers will understand that to point these things out does not
make someone a partisan for Milosevic or the Serbs.
The demonizing of Osama bin Laden.
President George W. Bush has cast the "war against
terrorism" as a conflict between Good and pure Evil. Here,
we run into the paradox that the motivation for strenuous action
often demands that issues be cast in sharp black-and-white terms.
Indeed, when people see atrocities committed before their eyes on
television, they have no desire to think in any terms other than
black-and-white. It remains true, however, that the
eventual transcendence and reconciliation that must end the
conflict demands, just as much, a rational understanding of the
reasons for the conflict. We need to understand the hatred
that has built up within Osama bin Laden and his followers (and
countless millions of others within the Islamic world and
elsewhere), not to excuse the atrocities that flow from it, but
to guide our own conduct in directions that are ultimately
constructive from precisely our own point of view. The
United States and "civilized world" is likely to lose
in a war of terror if the war has as its enemy a nondescript mass
of hundreds of millions of people whom Americans refuse to
understand. As painful as it is to say it, those millions
have some valid reasons for hating the United States, and it is
in the interest of the United States and of Americans as a people
to understand and to act upon that. To say this is not an apologia
for the enemy or a siding with the "hate America
crowd" that has long been alienated against the United
States; it is something that must be realized precisely by those
who value America most.
Most fateful [at least until recently]: The twentieth-century
demonizing of the Germans.
The most
significant demonizing prior to September 11 came against the
Germans, starting with World War I. By 1917, Americans had come
to see "the Hun" in the blackest tones. (My
mother, who was born in 1907 and grew up in Denver, told me how
for years she had nightmares of huge German soldiers rushing past
Dutch windmills.)
That Americans held such a perception was largely the work of
propaganda (a telling commentary, unfortunately, on how subject
to manipulation opinion is in a democracy). After the war,
a member of the British parliament, Arthur Ponsonby, wrote a
devastating expose of the propaganda.31
He concluded that man's "habit of lying is not nearly so
extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe." "There
is the lie heard and not denied... There is the mistranslation...
There is the deliberate forgery... omission of passages...
deliberate exaggeration... concealment of truth... the faked
photograph." Both sides worked hard at propaganda, but
British and French propaganda most successfully reached American
ears. There was the nurse who died in agony after German
soldiers cut her breasts off; the Kaiser was " a
lunatic," a "barbarian chief," a
"madman," and a "monster"; pictures purported
to show a Belgian baby whose hands had been eaten by German
soldiers, and a picture was fabricated showing the Kaiser with an
axe standing beside a pile of hands; "Deutschland uber
Alles" in the German national anthem was mistranslated to
suggest a claim to dominate the world; Canadian soldiers were
said to have been crucified, pinned to a wall by bayonets; the
Germans were reported to have boiled down their own dead soldiers
to produce stearine and refined oil; and the list goes on. Ponsonby
says that "stories of German ‘frightfulness' in Belgium
were circulated in such numbers as to give ample proof of the
abominable cruelty of the German army."
Of perhaps the greatest importance to Americans were the lies
told about the sinking of the Lusitania, which had 124
Americans on board. As we have seen, the American public
was told that the Lusitania was an unarmed passenger ship
carrying no munitions; it wasn't until years later that the truth
came out that it was armed and loaded with a cargo of munitions
bound for England.
The resulting animus became one of the twentieth century's more
pivotal factors. American intervention prevented a
stalemate and thereby made possible the Carthaginian peace
imposed by the Treaty of Versailles that in turn led on, in what
was really a continuation of the first conflict, to Hitler and
World War II. John V. Denson writes that "World War I
is like a continental divide for Western civilization... It
brought communism to Russia, Nazism to Germany, fascism to Italy
and socialism to England." He quotes historian John
Keegan as saying that the war "terminated European dominance
of the world."33 Much of this is
attributable to the war itself, with its ten million dead; but
much was due, too, to the effects of American intervention.
Loss of perspective.
One of the surprising features of the American conviction that Germany under the Kaiser was so utterly befouled is how greatly American opinion lacked perspective, totally forgetting then-recent history going back a mere fifteen years. If it had not been ignorant of or forgetful about the United States' own conduct in the suppression of the Filipinos' fi