by Tod Davies
We’re being bullied now into thinking that we have a ‘moral duty’ to intervene in other people’s governments when they don’t meet our human rights standards. But as Jean Bricmont points out in his book Humanitarian Imperialism (translated from French by Diana Johnstone), imperialism has a way of using everything it can to further its own ends. And since it’s power that gets to define what a human rights standard is, the powerless don’t get much of a look in
That bullying is effective. For example, how many Democrats do you know who would challenge their own party when it says, sanctimoniously, that we can’t just ‘cut and run’ now that Iraq has descended into chaos? How many people hesitate to argue when someone at a dinner party passionately urges military intervention to solve some problem somewhere else? How many people, even though well meaning as hell, have become completely blind to the fact that, in the world, we the privileged ones are not the Subject that brings Peace, Democracy, and Goodness to the rest of the world, which is then reduced to an Object that we’re supposed to maintain? Just about everybody you know, probably. I certainly get confused about it.
Fortunately, Jean Bricmont has painstakingly separated out the confusing threads that make up our present tie to militarization. He talks about how ideology rather than force is the preferred invisible instrument of control in a democratic society. He lays out the costs of the imperialism we practice without naming it, even to ourselves. He sets out a series of questions to those who would use human rights as an argument for war. For example, he wants to know if they are willing to accept responsibility for torture. Torture, as Bricmont points out, is a direct result of war. “An army that finds itself the target of resistance fighters who are like fish in the sea is inexorably led to try to gain information by force. If one calls for military intervention, one is calling for war and occupation, and in that case, in effect calling for torture.” And Bricmont is not fuzzy minded about torture: he knows that it works. The French dismantled the rebellion in Algeria using torture, even if it didn’t help them to maintain ultimate control. And it certainly has worked in crushing rebellions against American interests in Latin America. But, as he points out, in those scenarios, “no serious person can see bright prospects for human rights.” So the question is: if you’re for preemptive and ‘humanitarian’ war, are you prepared to take the responsibility for what it sure to follow? Rape, massacre, torture — these are not the result of the brutal military mind. These are the inevitable (indeed, traditional, historical) results of war. If you want it, you got it.
Bricmont, with blessed ruthlessness, dissects our prevailing ideology: the ideology of the dinner party, of the glossy magazine, of the cult of personal growth, of everything that just wants to think of itself as good while letting its government get on with the murderous business as usual that lets us lead such pleasant lives here at home. He points out that imperialism (that’s us, guys, yep, that’s right, take a look at ourselves, that’s us, not the underdog no matter what stories we tell ourselves — the Empire) has a way of using everything it can to further its own ends.
“To function as an instrument of domination,” he says, “the human rights ideology calls for rewriting history, selective indignation, and arbitrary priorities.” In other words, only the powerful get to say what’s a violation of human rights and what’s not, with the inevitable result that, by definition, what the powerful does is not an abuse. But, he says, there’s also hope: “The paradox is that the more ethics advances toward a genuine universality — and the human rights ideology constitutes an advance in relation to previous ideologies — the more hypocritical the dominant power becomes. The current dominator powers have a more universalist discourse than, say, Genghis Khan; as a result, they need to be more hypocritical.”
And a good thing too — to be hypocritical is to at least know that you’re wrong. Isn’t it? Well, if you’re not in denial, it is. Which too many of us are. Too many of us calm our consciences about what our government has been up to in foreign countries for the last half century by ineffectually worrying out loud about human rights abuses in other parts of the world: Burma. China. The Sudan. Most of us don’t even know where those places ARE, for God’s sake. Guantanamo Bay, now. We all know where that is. And the Gaza Strip. Most of us know where that is, too. In other words, those of us who are responsible for what goes on in our names, and paid for by our tax dollars, need to be aware of every time we ourselves are hypocritical — every time we shudder at another country’s ‘inhumanity’ or ‘denial of human rights’, and neglect to notice, and to denounce, and to work toward eradicating the inhumanity and denial of human rights to other people in aid of protecting our own view of ourselves and our own over consuming way of life.
Now this book is obviously not directed at those who honestly look at our situation and say that we go to war to protect our own country’s interests, and the hell with everyone else. Whatever else you might say about that position, it’s not hypocritical, and it doesn’t need Bricmont’s arguments. And the book isn’t directed — or it shouldn’t be, anyway — at those liberals who secretly want to keep things exactly the way they are so they can keep their lives exactly the way they are, no matter on whose backs. It’s directed at people like you and me, who honestly want to know who we are, what our country means, what we should be doing in the world. It helps end a little of the confusion we feel on thinking we have an obligation to help the weak. Of course we do. But going to war to ‘help’ them — as Bricmont points out — is not just fatuous and woolly minded, in the end it’s downright murderous.
And those of us who are antiwar have an obligation to counter the bullying that says that we need to be ‘strong’ and ‘ready to fight in the name of democracy’. The author gives practical suggestions how this is to be done.
“The attitude that should be adopted by peace movements is to situate themselves realistically within a global perspective. Indeed, they cannot guarantee a happy outcome to the conflict in Iraq — because that is something nobody can do. Nor could the British anticolonialists guarantee that the end of the Raj would not have had tragic consequences. Would that have been a reason to insist that England occupy India indefinitely? On the other hand, those movements are able to struggle within Western societies to get them to adopt a radically different attitude toward the Third World, an attitude based roughly on the demands of the countries of the South for peaceful cooperation, nonintervention, respect for national sovereignty and conflict resolution using the United Nations as intermediary. Withdrawal from Iraq would be a first step in that direction.”
Jean Bricmont is right. The international antiwar movement is in disarray, the Left has become mute and uncertain, and those of us who…mean well…creep around trying to figure out the best way to move forward in times where leading intellectuals shout down any timid attempts to say that a preemptive war — no matter who it’s against, even the Hitler de jour — is simply wrong, and perhaps we should leave the Iraqis to find their own solutions? Jean Bricmont, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and political polymath, is right. Read his book Humanitarian Imperialism and see.
(Oh, and an entertaining footnote: Bricmont criticizes, among other organizations, Human Rights Watch, for protecting American interests in its reporting on rights abuses. Discussing its muted response to the deaths of Iraqi civilians as a result of the American occupation — Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch said, “Coalition forces generally tried to avoid killing Iraqis who weren’t taking part in combat, but the deaths of hundreds of civilians still could have been prevented” — Bricmont remarks, “This style of criticism is perfectly functional. To establish your own neutrality, you start off by finding fault with your own side, deploring the deaths of a (greatly underestimated) number of civilian victims (there have been tens of thousands), which seem relatively few measured in terms of other genocides and wars.”
Now I had wondered idly about Human Rights Watch. They seemed a little too pious to be completely on the side of righteousness, if you know what I mean. And I got a brief look at why that might be so in the most unlikely place — FOOD AND WINE (October 2007), a glossy US lifestyle magazine mainly directed toward an aspirant imperial middle class. I had to read an article entitled “Sommeliers: The New Party Essentials,” if only for the absurdity of the title. And its content did not disappoint. It turns out that the new must have dinner party is a wine tasting one, where a professional sommelier “will meet with you several weeks in advance, visit your cellar (or look through a spreadsheet of its contents) and suggest wines that make for an interesting mix. [I defy any reasonable person to read that sentence without laughing.] Then, during the tasting itself, the sommelier will both pour the wines and lead a discussion about them.”
Well, it was amusing, that article. But that wasn’t the gripping bit. That came next, in the illustration of this kind of gathering. The sommelier “created a birthday party tasting for Minky Worden, the media director for Human Rights Watch, at her Manhattan apartment.” What? Wait a minute! Minky who? “Worden is married to L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, and the couple has a substantial wine collection.”
That stopped me. I read that part over. The media director for Human Rights Watch is married to the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. And they’re really, really rich — you should read the description of their wine cellar. Hmmm. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean about where their interests might actually lie. Not to mention how working for a glamorous NGO has apparently become a must have lifestyle accessory.
And I loved what Minky said about her party. “It was my birthday, but I wanted something else to carry us through the evening. A discussion of wine sustained us. A discussion of me wouldn’t have.” And indeed, probably a discussion of what was going on, Human Rights-wise, in the rest of the world would probably have cleared out the room. No matter how good the wine.)
(To buy a copy of Jean Bricmont’s HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM, go to www.monthlyreview.org. It’s also available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.)