In response to the gentle souls who think harsh criticism of Thomas Friedman is “mean,” here is Glen Greenwald, author of the NY Times best seller, How Would a Patriot Act? on what it is that makes the columnist a richly deserving target. in his public persona, of course. We have nothing against Friedman personally, needless to say. He may be the nicest of human beings in private life – but his public views are as lethal as any weapon of mass destruction. They need to be defused….
The Tom Friedman disease consumes Establishment Washington
(Friday, Dec. 1, 2006 – later updated
Someone e-mailed me several days ago to say that while it is fruitful and necessary to chronicle the dishonest historical record of pundits and political figures when it comes to Iraq, I deserve to be chastised for failing to devote enough attention to the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal “hawks” and thereby creating “consensus” support for Bush’s war — Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as “the nation’s preeminent centrist foreign policy genius.”
That criticism immediately struck me as valid, and so I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite — amazingly enough, I think it’s more accurate to say “because of” — his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America’s history.
This matters so much not simply in order to expose Friedman’s intellectual and moral emptiness, though that is a goal worthy and important in its own right. Way beyond that, the specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman’s strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and “centrist” and “responsible” political figures currently attempting to “solve” the Iraq disaster.
In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called “knee-jerk liberals and pacifists” (so as not to clutter this post with long Friedman quotes, I’m posting the relevant Friedman excerpts here).
But at the same time Friedman was cheering on the invasion, he was inserting one alarmist caveat after the next about how dangerous a course this might be and about all the problems that might be unleashed by it. He thus repeatedly emphasized the need to wage the War what he called “the right way.” To Friedman, the “right way” meant enlisting support from allies across Europe and the Middle East for both the war and the subsequent re-building, telling Americans the real reasons for the war, and ensuring that Americans understood what a vast and long-term commitment we were undertaking as a result of the need to re-build that country.
Only if the Bush administration did those things, argued Friedman, would this war achieve good results. If it did not do those things, he repeatedly warned, this war would be an unparalleled disaster.
Needless to say, the Bush administration did none of the things Friedman insisted were prerequisites for invading Iraq “the right way.” And Friedman recognized that fact, and repeatedly pointed itout. Over and over, in the months before the war, Friedman would praise the idea of the war and actively push for the invasion, but then insert into his columns statements like this:
And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won’t be able to do it right.
But: Despite the Bush administration’s failures to take any of the steps necessary to wage the war “the right way,” Friedman never once rescinded or even diluted his support for the war. He continued to advocate the invasion and support the administration’s push for war — at one point, in February, even calling for the anti-war French to be removed from the U.N. Security Council and replaced by India, and at another point warning that we must be wary of Saddam’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate an alternative to war lest we be tricked into not invading — even though Friedman knew and said that all the things that needed to be done to avert disaster were not being done by the administration.
Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:
(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.
Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the “wrong way” and would thus — also by his own reasoning — create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn’t what we would get.
To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets.. ……”
“THE CRIMES AND FOLLIES OF THE Bush-Cheney administration have boosted secessionists’ fortunes, but when Bush-Cheney, like all things, passes, the case for radical devolution loses none of its cogency. The problem with the U.S. is one of scale, and it cannot be solved by electing new or different or better people to public offices. As Donald Livingston says, “The public corporation known as the United States has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government, in the same way that a committee of three hundred people would be too large for the purposes of a committee. There needs to be a public debate on the out-of-scale character of the regime and what can be done about it.”
The average congressional district now contains 647,000 persons. And this is the “people’s house,” thought by the Founders to be the most responsive and grassroots of federal institutions. How is anything like representative government possible on such an enormous and impersonal scale?
Decentralizing power would have the additional virtue of localizing those coalition-splitters known as “social issues.” Case in point: When one of the southern delegates at the Burlington convention calls abortion a heinous crime, I sit back to watch the fireworks. They are doused in the fresh waters of federalism. There is general agreement on a mind-your-own-damn-business principle. If Marin County wants to serve joints with school lunches and Tupelo, Mississippi, wants the Ten Commandments in the classroom, well, that’s up to the people of Marin and Tupelo. Ain’t none of my business. Yours, either.
Let Utah be Utah, and let San Francisco be San Francisco. The policy will drive busybodies mad with frustration, but for the rest of us, it just might be the beginning of tolerance.
There is no reason why this kind of hands-off mutuality requires secession—they didn’t used to call the U.S. system “federalism” for nothing—but the urge to intervene is so irresistible to Dobsonian conservatives and Clintonian liberals that states and cities and towns have been deprived of the right to make their own laws, shaped by local circumstances, on such matters as the legality of marijuana and abortion and the proper way (if any) to define marriage. Does anyone really think that the Christian Right or feminist left will ever agree to denationalize such issues and trust local people to make their own laws?
Trust local people. That, really, is the soul of the case for secession. Bringing it all back home, as a small-town Minnesota boy who took the name Bob Dylan once wrote. For home is where secession must be rooted. Ideology of any sort is not so much a dead end as it is a road without end that carries the enthusiast far from any place resembling home. It unmoors him, it leaves her without anchorage, quick to blame societal ills on outsiders, on dark alien forces. I know: we live in the seventh year of the bloody and imperial Bush Octennium. If Dick Cheney isn’t a dark alien force I don’t know what is. But a healthy secessionist movement must be founded in love: love of a particular place, its people (of all ethnicities and colors), its culture, its language and books and music and baseball teams and, yes, its beer and flowers and punk rock clubs.
Maybe the Burlington conference was a sideshow, an amusing tour of the more outré precincts of American politics. Or maybe it was a harbinger.
Think what you will. This is radicalism deep-dyed in the American grain. “The military-industrial-energy-media complex is running an empire on the ruins of the republic,” says Rob Williams, who does not think that merely putting Democratic hands on the levers of power will solve anything. It’s the levers themselves that have to be removed.
Would the union miss Vermont? Sure. But as a young John Quincy Adams said, “I love the Union as I love my wife. But if my wife should ask for and insist upon a separation, she should have it, though it broke my heart.”
Besides, Vermont’s not going anywhere. Even if she were to secede, the Green Mountains will not be moved, the sap will still flow, the novels of Howard Frank Mosher and Dorothy Canfield Fisher will remain; hell, even Ben & Jerry’s will keep dishing it out. But why shouldn’t Vermonters run Vermont? Why should, say, Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator John McCain or Speaker Nancy Pelosi or President George W. Bush have even a whisper of a say in how Vermont orders her affairs?
“I want to leave my country,” says Kirk Sale, “without leaving my home.” That line packs a jolt, at least for this Little American. My home comes first. Yet I also want my country. I’m not sure what I think about leaving the U.S.A. But isn’t it time that we gave the matter some thought?”
WASHINGTON – Karl Rove, President Bush‘s close friend and chief political strategist, announced Monday he will leave the White House at the end of August, joining a lengthening line of senior officials heading for the exits in the final 1 1/2 years of the administration.
On board with Bush since the beginning of his political career in Texas, Rove was nicknamed “the architect” and “boy genius” by the president for designing the strategy that twice won him the White House. Critics call Rove “Bush’s brain.”
“Karl Rove is moving on down the road,” Bush said, appearing grim-faced on the White House‘s South Lawn with Rove at his side….”
I love Bill Blum’s work, so I was sorely disappointed to find this in his latest anti-Empire report (please read it, since it also has some exquisite tidbits on the imperial mindset that pervades the current crop of jacks-in- office…)
“Libertarians: an eccentric blend of anarchy and runaway capitalism
What is it about libertarians? Their philosophy, in theory and in practice, seems to amount to little more than: “If the government is doing it, it’s oppressive and we’re against it.”
LR: Bill, that seems to be your way of looking at it. No one who has read Mises, or Rothbard, or Hayek would see it that way.
BB: Corporations, however, tend to get free passes.
LR: From Murray Rothbard onward, true libertarians have been criticizing corporate boondoggles far more than many liberals I know. And talking about income differentials. Don’t confuse some brands of libertarianism with the whole of it, or I will start tarring all socialists as Stalinists and Maoists?
BB: Perhaps the most prominent libertarian today is Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who ran as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988 and is running now for the same office as a Republican. He’s against the war in Iraq, in no uncertain terms, but if the war were officially being fought by, for, and in the name of a consortium of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, and some other giant American corporations, would he have the same attitude?
LR: Oh, this is an argument? Suppose, I said the same about the left: If the war was for “the people” — then you would be fine with mounds of dead bodies? Isn’t that putting words in your opponent’s mouth? Where has Ron Paul supported wars for corporations? In fact, right now he opposes the war, because he thinks it was fought for corporations, which use the state as their tool. That is precisely the libertarian position about the corporatocracy and the corporate state.
In fact, the antiwar position is absolutely central to libertarian thinking, because for libertarians, it is the war economy that legitimates the command economy. Anyone who doesn’t know that simply hasn’t studied any serious libertarian theorists. Or is confusing the prowar positions of some libertarian writers at magazines like Reason (others at Reason disgreed) with authentic libertarianism. I suppose I could confuse the prowar position of some journalists at the Washington Post with the left-liberal position too.
Here is Rothbard about the the 1991 Gulf War:
“Bechtel, the Rockefellers, and the Saudi royal family have long had an intimate connection. After the Saudis granted the Rockefeller-dominated Aramco oil consortium the monopoly of oil in Saudi Arabia, the Rockefellers brought their pals at Bechtel in on the construction contracts. The Bechtel Corporation, of course, has also contributed George Shultz and Cap Weinberger to high office in Republican administrations. To complete the circle, KA director Simon’s former boss Suliman Olayan was, in 1988, the largest shareholder in the Chase Manhattan Bank after David Rockefeller himself.
The pattern is clear. An old New Left slogan held that “you don’t need a weatherman to tell you how the wind is blowing.” In the same way, you don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see what’s going on here. All you have to do is be willing to use your eyes….” (Why the War? Lew Rockwell, 1991).
Ron Paul has been the one voice of sanity about the Federal Reserve’s reckless creation of credit, which is the real reason for the season of mad money lending we’ve just survived and which is now on the verge of tearing apart the economic fabric. That, Mr. Blum, is not the fault of “capitalism,” any more than a gold-digging trophy wife is an indictment of marriage as an institution. It is central bank induced financialization by a transnational oligarchy.
Please. Like many on the left, Mr. Blum’s opinion about what the right thinks or doesn’t think is drawn from hearsay and innuendo, by other leftists.
BB: And one could of course argue that the war is indeed being fought for such a consortium. So is it simply the idea or the image of “a government operation” that bothers him and other libertarians?
LR: Where does Paul say that?
BB: Paul recently said: “The government is too bureaucratic, it spends too much money, they waste the money.”[9]
Does the man think that corporations are not bureaucratic? Do libertarians think that any large institution is not overbearingly bureaucratic? Is it not the nature of the beast? Who amongst us has not had the frustrating experience with a corporation trying to correct an erroneous billing or trying to get a faulty product repaired or replaced? Can not a case be made that corporations spend too much (of our) money? What do libertarians think of the exceedingly obscene salaries paid to corporate executives? Or of two dozen varieties of corporate theft and corruption? Did someone mention Enron?
Murray Rothbard never stopped talking about corporate bail outs. I differ from him on some of his positions, quite strongly, but nowhere does he support the use of fraud, force or war in support of enterprise.
Neither do most genuine ethical libertarians.
But no corporation can raise a standing army or tax citizens or enjoy the legitimacy of a state. And some of us (a good number of right libertarians) think that corporations would not reach the size they do, without the state granting licences and privileges.
Gabriel Kolko argues for that as well.
BB: Ron Paul and other libertarians are against social security. Do they believe that it’s better for elderly people to live in a homeless shelter than to be dependent on government “handouts”? That’s exactly what it would come down to with many senior citizens if not for their social security.
LR: This is a false alternative. The alternative to social security is not homeless shelters. Look what a low opinion of people the left really has. According to them, people are blind, deaf and dumb; they can’t save, they can’t plan…they can’t do anything without the commissariat of soviets to do it for them. Does that make sense? Don’t you think that without government interference, people could still sit down and figure out what they really needed, instead of being forced to pay for things they don’t need? Half the waste would disappear; costs of insurances would decline sharply; variety and flexibility would increase; all the various leeches and parasites on the system (many of them middle and upper class….don’t let that tired class rhetoric about the aged poor scare you) would fade away. Scaled back and scaled down, we would get back to the scale of the human.
BB:
Most libertarians I’m sure are not racists, but Paul certainly sounds like one. Here are a couple of comments from his newsletter:
“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”
“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”[10]
LR: Paul had an opinion based on some mistaken statistics being circulated then. It was a misguided opinion. A dumb over-generalization. It wasn’t fundamentally racist but crude and insensitive. And apparently, he made a sweeping statement about the opinions he thought black people hold about economics. Asians make such generalizations all the time too, about whites and blacks. ..and other Asians (or to be fair, I should say browns or yellows or yellow-browns, maybe). Bill Blum just made one about libertarians that was all wrong. So do all groups — whether they are prepared to say so in public is another thing. Nor do I want to live in a society which demonizes people for saying such things. Let him apologize and move on.
By the way, if we are going to bring it up, some of the most “racist” attitudes I encountered in this country were not from the right. But from the left – which continues to feel that its model is the only one that serves minorities and people from the third world, in general. And demonizes anyone who falls out of step. (Not, mind you, that paternalism or even feelings of superiority expressed by other groups bothers me much. My thinking is that if an ideas strikes you as right, you should adopt it, regardless of who holds it and whatever their attitude to you might be. Racism runs a good second to mass killing in my mind and does not necessarily lead to it, either, contrary to what some people seem to think.
BB: Author Ellen Willis has written that “the fundamental fallacy of right libertarianism is that the state is the only source of coercive power.” They don’t recognize “that the corporations that control most economic resources, and therefore most people’s access to the necessities of life, have far more power than government to dictate our behavior and the day-to-day terms of our existence.”
LR (sigh):
And there are no socialists who are not unreconstructed Maoists? But does that make me confuse democratic socialists in the US with the Great Leap Forward? Please.
We expect better from our socialist friends.
There ARE many libertarians who fail to apply their critical skills to corporations and fail to see that they don’t embody free enterprise. They should start to do it in no uncertain terms.
But they should do it in libertarian terms and not in the tired, dead-end rhetoric of the left-right divide.
Libertarians should attack corporations for what they criticise governments for — bureaucracy and anti-individualism. And the left should start reigning in its knee-jerk thought-police for the very thing they attack the right for — intolerance.
Like it or not, the revolution in thinking is from the right, his time. And has been so for some time. Only it got high-jacked by a bunch of neoconservatives — who were actually ex-leftists originally.
But the real right is awake at last.
So now, move over, Trotsky.
(Defend your honor, as they say, or people will think you have none…)
“In the late 19th century the coast of Angola was home to a flourishing export market that shipped African goods to Europe. On the one side of this market were European settlers who operated the export industry, and on the other side were African producers in the remote interior who harvested the goods required for export. Connecting these two groups were African middlemen who traveled to the interior to collect the goods and then carried them to the coast for export.In the 19th century this region was for all intents and purposes anarchic. Although Europeans had settlements with European laws and interior African communities had their own, largely informal institutions of internal governance, there was no government to oversee the interactions between members of these groups or their interactions with the middlemen. The problem this created was that middlemen tended to be substantially stronger than interior producers, posing the threat of force described above. Why pay producers for goods if middlemen could use their superior strength to simply steal them instead?
Like with the pirates, instead of throwing in the towel and either accepting that they would be routinely plundered or stopping productive activities altogether, so that there would be nothing for middlemen to steal, African producers devised an institutional solution to the problem of force that allowed them to realize the benefits of trade with these bandits.
The institution they devised for this purpose was credit. The key to understanding how credit solved the problem of force and facilitated peaceful exchange is straightforward: you can’t steal goods that aren’t yet produced, but you can trade with them.
Here’s how the credit institution worked: Producers would not produce anything today but would instead wait for middlemen to arrive in their villages looking for goods to plunder. With nothing available to steal the middlemen had two options: return to the coast empty-handed after having made a trip to the interior, or make an agreement with producers to supply the goods they required on the basis of credit. In light of the costliness of their trip to the interior, middlemen frequently chose the latter
According to their credit arrangements, middlemen advanced payment to producers and agreed to return later to collect the goods they were owed. When they returned for this purpose all that was available for taking was what they were owed, so stealing was not an option. Instead, middlemen frequently renewed the credit agreement, which initiated a subsequent round of credit-based trade, and so on.
This simple arrangement performed two critical functions in allowing producers to overcome the threat of force that middlemen presented. First, it enabled them to avoid being plundered, as though they had not produced anything at all, but also to realize the gains from trade, as though middlemen did not pose a threat of violence. Second, it transformed producers in the eyes of middlemen from targets of banditry into valuable assets they had an interest in protecting. If middlemen wanted to be repaid they needed to ensure that their debtors remained alive and well enough to produce. This meant abstaining from violence against producers and protecting producers against the predation of others.”
This fascinating scenario answers one of the most common objections to libertarianism. That there would be no way by which a weaker group could protect itself from a stronger group intent on plundering it.
It demonstrates that people are capable of ingenious solutions to disparities in power on their own, if a huge state machinery does not get in the way.
I am going to file this away along with the earlier Rothbard post on Ireland in a new section which will contain vignettes of real world example of libertarian living. A picture being worth a thousand words usually. And one from history worth ten thousand.
Update: I found an interesting response from Dani Rodrik, “The Limits of Self-Enforcing Agreeements,”also at Cato Unbound,which I am linking here. I actually reference Rodrik’s work in my new book with Bill Bonner, in chapter 3, in a rather lighthearted way in wondering how much democracy is really correlated with economic success.
“The problem with self-enforcing agreements is that they do not scale up. One of the findings from Elinor Ostrom’s extensive case studies is that self-enforcing arrangements to manage the “commons” work well only when the geographic scope of the activity is clearly delimited and membership is fixed. It is easy to understand why. Cooperation under “anarchy” is based on reciprocity, which in turn requires observability. I need to be able to observe whether you are behaving according to the rules, and if not, I have to be able to sanction you. When the size of the in-group becomes large and mobility allows opportunistic behavior to go unpunished, it becomes difficult to maintain cooperation. Imagine that the pirates numbered in the millions and they could easily jump ship to join competing groups mid-voyage; would the arrangements Leeson describes have been sustainable?
Unlike in pirate societies or pre-colonial Angola, modern economies require an elaborate and ever-evolving division of labor—among owners of firms, managers, and their employees, among producers up and down the value chain, and between producers and providers of supporting services such as finance, accounting, and legal services. The complexity, fluidity, and geographic non-specificity of these activities leave too much room for opportunistic behavior for self-enforcing arrangements to work well. They require an external backstop in the form of government-enforced rules.”
Comment:
Just off the bat, it seems there are some problems with Rodrik’s argument. The first is that there is a mechanism for the complexity of economic variables to self adjust — it’s called pricing. Secondly, the need for rules does not necessarily entail a bureaucratic central government, such as we typically find today. Possible substitutes are many — local bodies that are loosely federated, non-government lawmaking bodies, canon law (for communities so disposed)…there are lots of possibilities, once we get out of our self-created rut of thinking in terms of leviathan..
“Anarchists will argue, of course, that you don’t need a government to do that. Private groups are perfectly able to provide security, defense and infrastructure. We won’t argue with them. We don’t believe we know enough of the matter one way or other. But one thing we do know is that both the anarchists and the statists are confused when they talk. They say state when they mean government, and they say government when they mean the rule of law. They confuse anarchy with chaos, and the absence of the state with the absence of law.
Somalia is stateless, but it is not entirely without laws; there is anarchy, but there is not yet complete chaos. Somalia may be an example of how spontaneous order can take root even when the state collapses.
The Law of the Somalis, written by Michael van Notten, goes to the heart of the matter. Van Notten, is a Dutch lawyer who married into a Somali clan and lived in the country for the last decade or so of his life. [9]
Van Notten points out what the BBC does not want to notice. Somalia might lack a state, but it’s not completely without government. The country still relies on traditional Somali customary law, which, he points out, would not be able to work if a central government and western style democracy were imposed on top of it. Somalia’s free market is not operating in suspended animation, or in a vacuum. It rests — in a precarious, wobbly way, it is true — on the traditional law of the Somalis. And it does have a government — even if it is only the government of the Somali clans.
Somali customary law and clan government follow natural law closely. And whatever fragments of a genuine free market operate there do so only because of the norms of behavior springing from this indigenous system.
Van Notten makes another interesting point. He suggests that the terrible problems plaguing Somalia don’t arise from the free market or the lack of central government at all. Instead they are the result of the constant attempts to impose government, albeit unsuccessfully.
“A democratic government has every power to exert dominion over people. To fend off the possibility of being dominated, each clan tries to capture the power of that government before it can become a threat.” [10]
And the fear of domination is only kept alive by incessant U.N. efforts to intervene and impose a Western style government in the country. Leave the clans alone, he says. Let foreign governments just deal with them.
The irony is, a real free market is not free at all. It is, and always has been, restricted: by laws, customs, traditions, morals, expectations. In Somalia or the West, you have to choose. It is either natural law or the law of the jungle……”
The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.
And about the incestuous love of the state and mercantilism by both right and left:
” Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6] When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients……
Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]
The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality)…..”
“In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and “Enlightenment” intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although “the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.”
Apropos some earlier comments from a reader on the Congo and how the best thing that ever happened to it was the Belgian empire (since the Belgians suppressed Congolese cannibalism):
(And that should put a dent in the idea that liking Western culture means you have to endorse imperialism)
“Leopold is too well known as a domestic person, as a family person,” said Mark Twain, facetiously, “as a king and a pirate, to believe what he says. He sits at home and drinks blood. His testimony is no good. The missionaries are to be believed. I have seen photographs of the natives with their hands cut off because the did not bring in the requited amount of rubber. If Leopold had only killed them outright it would not be so bad; but to cut off their hands and leave them helpless to die in misery–that is not forgivable.
“We’re interested in all this because we were the first country to give recognition to Leopold’s villainous Congo Free State in 1885.”
Mr. Clemens commented on some of the brutalities perpetrated by other nations on the natives of Africa and cited the Matabele war, in which the English massacred so many thousands of the Matabeles….”
And now some details about Leopold of the Congo:
KING LÉOPOLD II OF BELGIUM
Country: Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and Belgium.
Kill tally: Five to 15 million Congolese (the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo River basin).
Background: The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cao reaches the Congo River in 1483. Commerce between the coastal Kongo Kingdom and Portugal quickly develops, with the trade in slaves soon coming to dominate all other exchanges. The Dutch begin to arrive in the 17th Century, to be followed by the French and British. As the influence of the Europeans steadily moves inland, the Congo River basin is raised in the imagination of the West, with the exploits of 19th Century explorers such as David Livingstone receiving wide publicity. More background.
Leopold Bio: Born on 9 April 1835 in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. He is the eldest son of Léopold I, first king of the Belgians. His full name is Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor.
Excerpts:
… Léopold continues to advocate his long-held belief that Belgium should become a colonial power. “I believe that the moment is come for us to extend our territories. I think that we must lose no time, under penalty of seeing the few remaining good positions seized upon by more enterprising nations than our own,” he says in 1860.
Over the next 20 years Léopold lobbies the Belgium Parliament to get a colony “in our turn.”
1876 – Léopold sponsors an international geographical conference in Brussels where he proposes the establishment of an international benevolent committee for the “propagation of civilisation among the peoples of the Congo region by means of scientific exploration, legal trade and war against the ‘Arabic’ slave traders.”
“To open to civilisation the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Léopold says at the conference.
“I’m sure if I quite openly charged Stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of Africa, the English will stop me,” Léopold says. “So I think I’ll just give Stanley some job of exploration which would offend no one, and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on.”**Léopold also tells Stanley, “It is a question of creating a new state, as big as possible, and of running it. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to the Negroes. That would be absurd.”
**Over the next 23 years Léopold will amass a huge personal fortune by exploiting the Congo directly and by leasing concessions to private companies prepared to pay him 50% of their profits. The period will witness some of the worst atrocities ever committed on the African continent. However, Léopold will never visit the region, ruling instead by decree from Belgium.
***Ostensibly formed to put down the slave trade, the Force Publique, will quickly be turned on the Congolese.
***The Congolese will be systematically exploited and abused. Their forced labour will build the colony’s infrastructure, transport rubber and ivory from the interior to the river ports, and produce all the territory’s food. At the same time, they will be required to pay taxes to the state (a ‘provisions tax’ and a ‘rubber tax’). However, the remuneration they receive is completely arbitrary and inadequate and little of the revenue from the taxes is reinvested in the state.
***The Congolese are only allowed to trade with approved agents. To ensure that the maximum is squeezed out of each sector, the salaries of the agents are set at a bare minimum, with the bulk of their income coming from a commission on the rubber and ivory they supply. The agents in turn hire and arm African mercenaries, the so-called ‘Capitas’, to force the Congolese under their jurisdiction to work. Communities who refuse to be intimidated or who retaliate are brought into line by military “expeditions”.
**The general act ratified by the conference includes an article binding the signatories to “support and, if necessary, to serve as a refuge for the native populations; … to diminish intertribal wars by means of arbitration; … to raise them by civilisation and bring about the extinction of barbarous customs, such as cannibalism and human sacrifices; and, in giving aid to commercial enterprises, to watch over their legality, controlling especially the contracts for service entered into with natives.”
1891 – The price of rubber begins to increase following the invention of the inflatable rubber tire. The agents and concession holders exploiting the Congo’s wild rubber vines now stand to make enormous profits, with returns of up to 700% per year being reported.
To cash in on the opportunity, the Congolese labourers are squeezed further still. Local chiefs are required to supply men to collect the so-called ‘rubber tax’, with wives and children being held hostage and chiefs imprisoned until the men return with their quotas. The amount of rubber needed to meet the tax requires the men to work for up 25 days each month harvesting the wild rubber vines in the Congo forests. Failure to supply the quotas results in floggings, torture, and death.
**Resistance to Léopold’s rule again mounts and is again crushed, with local chiefs organising many uprisings. The Babua tribes revolt in 1903, 1904, and 1910, and the Budja in 1903 and 1905. In 1895 and 1897 the Force Publique mutinies.At its peak, the Force Publique numbers about 19,000 African conscripts, led by about 420 European officers. The force commits many atrocities to terrorise the Congolese into complying with Léopold’s ever-increasing demands. Villages are burned, and men, women and children are indiscriminately slaughtered or forced into slavery.
**To prove the success of their patrols, Force Publique soldiers are ordered to cut off and bring back a dead victim’s right hand for every bullet fired. The soldiers resort to cutting off the hands of the living to ensure that the number of spent cartridges tallies with the number of preserved hands. They are also reported to engage in cannibalism.
The headquarters of Force Publique leader Leon Rom exemplifies the gruesome nature of the regime. The fence surrounding Rom’s office bears a severed native head on each slat, and the garden contains a rockery full of rotting heads.
The terror campaign succeeds and Léopold’s profits soar….”
First, using abhorrent cultural practices to justify the colonial invasion of a country is nothing new: it was a justification used by the British over the veiling of women. The treatment of women (for eg. the stoning of adultrous women) in Islamic countries today was also used as one of the many pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and for current neocolonial policies there.
Second point, cannibalism occurs in different contexts. You notice that two of those contexts (famine and mental illness) still obtain in modern Western societies, even if the others don’t.
“Care should be taken to distinguish among ritual cannibalism sanctioned by a cultural code, cannibalism by necessity occurring in extreme situations of famine, and cannibalism by mentally disturbed people. ”
Third point. There is some evidence that cannibalism may have been a practice common in the human past. It has been practiced by cultures all over the world, in ancient and in modern times. And memories of it remain in religious practices even in the major religions.
According to wiki (which also gives examples of Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Liberian, Aztec, and even American anthropophagy), a British tribe reportedly practiced it:
St. Jerome, in his letter Against Jovinianus, tells of meeting members of a British tribe, the Atticoti, while traveling in Gaul. According to Jerome, the Britons claimed that they enjoyed eating “the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women” as a delicacy (ca. 360 AD). In 2001, archaeologists at the University of Bristol found evidence of Iron Age cannibalism in Gloucestershire.[11]
Charges of cannibalism were common in the blood libel against Jews, and evidence of cannibalism among tribal people was often exaggerated to dehumanize them and win popular support for mass killings, expropriation of their land and enslavement. If you tot up the deaths from cannibalism (it was frequently ritualistic and occurred in a cultural context that lent meaning to the practice — so it can’t be seen as solely murderous) among the Congolese at the hands of their own against deaths at the hands of their civilizers, there’s no doubt what the numbers would show.
An analogy. Reportedly there are around 5000 honor killings (not exact) a year around the world. But using those 5000 killings to initiate wars and economic policies that kill or mutilate millions and ruins tens of millions more sounds like a pretty flimsy and immoral pretext.
Apart from that, if you were to balance those 5000 honor killings against the innumerably greater number of rapes and other forms of street crimes against women in Western countries (there are almost no street crimes of that nature in Saudi Arabia, for example) — you would get a clearer idea of the disingenuousness of such arguments.
As a further example, the US has among the highest rates of infanticide (a practice that was widely prevalent in many cultures until the advent of birth control)
[Update: According to Laila Williamson, for infants less than one year, the American homicide rate was 11th in the world in 1998, while for one through four it is 1st, and for five through fourteen it was fourth. From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages constituted nearly 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States].
Now, would some foreign country have been justified in bombing American civilians en masse because of this? I think not…
But that’s the power of propaganda. It gets otherwise rational people to swallow patent absurdities and go charging off the cliff because some government/corporate hack told them to on TV…
The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God, and force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and end its cross-border rocket attacks. “If the soldiers are not returned,” Dan Halutz, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said at the time, “we will turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.” Israel bombed the runways of the Beirut airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets, mainly Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory. Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so won; Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped all his stocks on the eve of the war, resigned, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, saw his approval rating fall to as low as two per cent.
More recently, Hezbollah’s ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States, found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the West Bank to Hamas as well. Not even the ceremonial office of the Israeli Presidency was immune from the year’s disasters: a few weeks ago, President Moshe Katsav agreed to plead guilty to multiple sexual offences and resign, lest he face trial for rape. Despite a resilient, even booming economy, peace and stability have rarely seemed so distant.
In this atmosphere of post-traumatic gloom, Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, managed to inflame the Israeli public (left, right, and center) with little more than an interview in the liberal daily Ha’aretz, promoting his recent book, “Defeating Hitler.” Short of being Prime Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His father was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority….”
Update: I’m adding the section in “Mobs” that I wrote about the British empire.
Here’s the section, it’s in “Flattening the Globe,” Chapter 10 (my solo chapters in the book are 4, 5, 10, 11, with one section in 4 by Bonner. 3, 9, and 17 are joint, and I wrote sections within Bonner’s solo chapters, 7,12, 15).
The Angelic Empire
Globalization gurus like Friedman are always quick to point out that the phenomenon is not new. Some leading pontificators on the subject think we are in the third wave of it, the first having begun in the Age of Exploration, with Columbus and Magellan. Others think globalization only goes back to the heyday of the British Empire, in the mid nineteenth century. What all of them are united on, however, is that it is a good thing because it is free trade between free people. And it is an inevitable thing, they say, because it is a force of nature, a call of destiny, a historical imperative.
It is The Way Things Ought to Be.
When pushed further, the gurus will tell you why they think this. They will tell you that globalization is also The Way Things Have Been Before. They will point out to you the British Empire. That, they will say, is what globalization looked like once. That’s how it worked once. And since what the Romans were to the Greeks, we are to the British, that’s also where we should be heading. After all, wasn’t the British Empire, indisputably, A Good Thing?
Was it?
Were the British the one (and only) angelic imperialists? We are not in a position to say, one way or other, nor do we think we will ever be in such a position, but we offer a caveat to the argument itself: If what we had under the British Empire was globalization, then whatever globalization was, it was not free trade. And we also offer a corollary to the caveat: If what we are looking for is free trade, then the British Empire is not what we should be imitating. For, whatever trade it was that took place under the Empire was from the beginning not free but wrapped up in force…and fraud…plenty of it.
Take the way in which the Indian state of Bengal passed into the hands of the East India Company. The salient fact was that a clerk-turned soldier-adventurer, Robert Clive, managed to defeat a vastly larger Bengali army. How? Was it by superior skill…advanced technology? Not at all. The Muslim ruler (Nawab) of Bengal had insulted a fabulously wealthy Hindu merchant, who controlled the flow of goods to the ports of Bengal. In revenge, the merchant led a group of his fellow traders to talk the Nawab’s generals into negotiating with the English. The treacherous general threw away the Battle of Plassey and received the ruler-ship of Bengal in return. The Company then became the rent collector for the area. Within a few years, they acquired the right to collect revenue for the whole of North-East India[i]
Plassey was the cornerstone of British imperial rule and it made Clive one of the icons of the Empire. But, it was simply a fraud…the outcome of Clive’s treachery toward the local ruler whom he had first befriended.
As for the benevolence of the British empire, consider this: In the first half of the 19th century, there were seven famines in India, leading to a million and a half deaths. In the second half, after Victoria was crowned Empress of India (1877), there were 24 (18 between 1876 and 1900), causing over 20 million deaths (according to official records), up to 40 million according to others, or between 12-29 million, according to a recent scholar.[ii]
As early as 1901, W. R. Digby, noted in “Prosperous British India” that “stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread.”
The British mission civilisatrice took perverse forms. During the famines of 1877 and 1878, the British viceroy, Lord Lytton actually had merchants export millions of hundredweight of wheat to England. Lytton, whose father was the well-known novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, seems to have been certifiably insane. He passed “The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act” of 1877, which prohibited, “at the pain of imprisonment,” “private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” Those who worked in the labor camps were reportedly fed less than the inmates of Buchenwald. Women and children were “branded, tortured, had their noses cut off, and were sometimes killed,” – a circumstance regarded with equanimity by the British governor, who subscribed to the Malthusian notion that famine was nature’s way of keeping the Indians from over breeding. Meanwhile, funds were available for extravagant celebrations of Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India.[iii] And the viceroy even ran “a militarized campaign” to tax those who survived to raise funds for the empire’s ongoing war in Afghanistan. So finally, even in the North West – which had crop surpluses – 1.25 million people died.
Yet, so powerful are myths that even the victims buy into them. Long after India became independent, we recall a grand-uncle reminiscing fondly about his days recruiting for the famed British army, although by then its history was already studded with imbecilities like the invasion of Kabul in 1842. The invasion is legendary now for the incompetence of its leader. It should be remembered equally for the incompetence of those who appointed him in the first place. The appointment casts some doubts about the pukka-ness of the pukka British administration. Major-General William Elphinstone, the hapless commander, actually tried to turn down the job, but it was no use. The Governor General of India – at the time Lord Auckland – was determined he should go. He went, and it cost him his life.
“Elphy Bey” (bey is the Turkish term for commander) was a gentle, doddering old fool. And coming apart at the seams. Just sixty, the ailments he suffered from could have filled a small hospital ward. He was mentally incompetent…and incontinent……flatulent…. and gouty…and his rheumatism was so bad that he was crippled and had to be carried everywhere on a litter. And to top it off, his arm was in a sling. Afghanistan, with its ferocious climate and even more ferocious warriors, was no place for the soft, senile general who had been retired on half-pay since acquitting himself – creditably it seems –at Waterloo. But Auckland was determined to take Afghanistan, and thus, in 1839 the Afghan amir, Dost Mohammed, was driven into hiding. He was replaced by another incompetent, Shah Suja and British garrisons were left at the capital, Kabul, as well as all along the route back to India.
Unfortunately, the new cantonment at Kabul provoked the suspicion of the Afghan rebels, led by the old amir’s son. The British were there to stay for a while, he thought, and began to look for ways to strike at them.
He did not have to look for long. The cantonment was located in a low swampy area, which presented an easy target to the rebels swarming in the hills and forts around. The circumference of the place was too great to be defended and all the supply stores were outside. The British might just as well have sent out an engraved invitation to the enemy to seize their supplies and starve the population inside. Which is precisely what happened.
“You will have nothing to do here. All is peace,” opined the outgoing commander when Elphy Bey and his main man, the brutal and belligerent Brigadier John Shelton, arrived. It was a singularly inaccurate prediction.
Not long thereafter, a brigade returning to India was besieged. Then, when Elphinstone’s health took a turn for the worse and the Governor General had to send out a replacement for him, he too was attacked and forced to hole up in a fortress.
The Kabul cantonment seems to have turned into the nineteenth century version of Iraq’s Green Zone. No one could go outside without drawing fire, and even inside, soldiers were constantly being gunned down.In short order, the British Resident and his staff were polished off by the rebels. Then, the supply stores were pillaged, leaving those inside the cantonment with only about three days worth of food.
Not content with a broken arm, poor Elphy tried mounting his horse and fell off. Then he hurt his leg, when the beast decided – perhaps with some justification –to step on it. That may have sent the old man straight out of his mind, because he now started begging for more ammunition to be sent around, although there was actually enough left for a year. By then, all he knew about the military situation was what random civilians were telling him, for Shelton was keeping mum and treating him with unrelenting scorn. The old man had to make do with Councils of War where almost anyone would wander in and say anything they wanted. Junior officers lectured their seniors. Civilians offered their advice unsolicited to the soldiers. In the midst of it all lay Shelton on his bedding, snoring… to show his contempt for the whole proceeding.
But Shelton was hardly a military genius himself.Once, he led his men to no more than 20 paces from the Afghans and fired. When not one enemy soldier, or even horse, was killed, the Brits were forced to turn and flee. Another time, the idiot ordered his soldiers to fall into squares so concentrated and tidy that the Afghans, who were experts at hitting targets that were scattered and hidden, thought they were getting a Ramadan gift. Each of their bullets sent a small handful of the poor Englishmen tumbling like bowling pins. Sheldon, who had compounded this criminal performance by taking with him only one cannon when British Army regulations – with good reason – mandated two, soon found it too hot to operate. He had to fall back on muskets. But these were so poorly handled that the Afghans actually managed to get to point-blank range unscathed. By then the Shelton’s men were down to throwing stones. But, their wretched leader still held on pig-headedly. Finding themselves being picked off one by one, the soldiers finally came to their senses and fled, pointedly ignoring even Elphy’s attempts to rally them. The punch line of the whole business came when they learned that they had been driven back not by Afghanistan’s notorious warriors but by a bunch of Kabul shopkeepers.
The farce degenerated further. Elphinstone got himself shot…of all places, in the buttocks. The British Envoy, unable to stand things any longer, took it on himself to make nice to the head of the rebels. For his pains, he was assassinated and his head and torso skewered like a kebab and paraded through Kabul. Elphy, a world-class ditherer, now made the worst decision yet of his life. In return for Afghan guarantees of safe conduct he agreed that the cantonment would return to Jalalabad in India. They would go through the Khyber Pass, the infamous point of entry of every conqueror….in mid winter.
And so, 16,000 men, women, and children marched through snow a foot deep, on the orders of a senile general. Along the way, tribesmen from every neighboring village, including children, taunted, harassed and picked them off like ripe plums. At the end of all the hacking and butchering, Elphinstone was dead and so was every European except the Surgeon-General. But the British got their revenge in time. Elphinstone’s replacement, General Nott, finally extricated himself from his corner, marched to Kabul and burned down its famous bazaar.
Still, even then, the luckless Elphy could get no peace. On the way to Jalalabad, his coffin, decorously prepared by the new amir, was ambushed by tribesmen. They cracked it open, stripped the body and pelted it with stones. The amir had to send out another expedition before the dimwitted general was allowed to go to his rest with full…and completely undeserved… military honors.[iv]
The story of Elphy Bey was not unusual. Wherever the empire-builders succeeded, it was most often in spite of incompetence. It was force and fraud…and some luck… not genius. If there is a grand design in anything they did, it eludes us.
[i]Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, K. M. Panikkar, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953, pp. 78-9.
[ii]Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines, and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis, New York: Verso, 2001.
[iv]The Brassey’s Book of Military Blunders, Geoffrey Regan, Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 2000, pp. 31-34.
The Angelic Empire
Globalization gurus like Friedman are always quick to point out that the phenomenon is not new. Some leading pontificators on the subject think we are in the third wave of it, the first having begun in the Age of Exploration, with Columbus and Magellan. Others think globalization only goes back to the heyday of the British Empire, in the mid nineteenth century. What all of them are united on, however, is that it is a good thing because it is free trade between free people. And it is an inevitable thing, they say, because it is a force of nature, a call of destiny, a historical imperative.
It is The Way Things Ought to Be.
When pushed further, the gurus will tell you why they think this. They will tell you that globalization is also The Way Things Have Been Before. They will point out to you the British Empire. That, they will say, is what globalization looked like once. That’s how it worked once. And since what the Romans were to the Greeks, we are to the British, that’s also where we should be heading. After all, wasn’t the British Empire, indisputably, A Good Thing?
Was it?
Were the British the one (and only) angelic imperialists? We are not in a position to say, one way or other, nor do we think we will ever be in such a position, but we offer a caveat to the argument itself: If what we had under the British Empire was globalization, then whatever globalization was, it was not free trade. And we also offer a corollary to the caveat: If what we are looking for is free trade, then the British Empire is not what we should be imitating. For, whatever trade it was that took place under the Empire was from the beginning not free but wrapped up in force…and fraud…plenty of it.
Take the way in which the Indian state of Bengal passed into the hands of the East India Company. The salient fact was that a clerk-turned soldier-adventurer, Robert Clive, managed to defeat a vastly larger Bengali army. How? Was it by superior skill…advanced technology? Not at all. The Muslim ruler (Nawab) of Bengal had insulted a fabulously wealthy Hindu merchant, who controlled the flow of goods to the ports of Bengal. In revenge, the merchant led a group of his fellow traders to talk the Nawab’s generals into negotiating with the English. The treacherous general threw away the Battle of Plassey and received the ruler-ship of Bengal in return. The Company then became the rent collector for the area. Within a few years, they acquired the right to collect revenue for the whole of North-East India[i]
Plassey was the cornerstone of British imperial rule and it made Clive one of the icons of the Empire. But, it was simply a fraud…the outcome of Clive’s treachery toward the local ruler whom he had first befriended.
As for the benevolence of the British empire, consider this: In the first half of the 19th century, there were seven famines in India, leading to a million and a half deaths. In the second half, after Victoria was crowned Empress of India (1877), there were 24 (18 between 1876 and 1900), causing over 20 million deaths (according to official records), up to 40 million according to others, or between 12-29 million, according to a recent scholar.[ii]
As early as 1901, W. R. Digby, noted in “Prosperous British India” that “stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread.”
The British mission civilisatrice took perverse forms. During the famines of 1877 and 1878, the British viceroy, Lord Lytton actually had merchants export millions of hundredweight of wheat to England. Lytton, whose father was the well-known novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, seems to have been certifiably insane. He passed “The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act” of 1877, which prohibited, “at the pain of imprisonment,” “private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” Those who worked in the labor camps were reportedly fed less than the inmates of Buchenwald. Women and children were “branded, tortured, had their noses cut off, and were sometimes killed,” – a circumstance regarded with equanimity by the British governor, who subscribed to the Malthusian notion that famine was nature’s way of keeping the Indians from over breeding. Meanwhile, funds were available for extravagant celebrations of Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India.[iii] And the viceroy even ran “a militarized campaign” to tax those who survived to raise funds for the empire’s ongoing war in Afghanistan. So finally, even in the North West – which had crop surpluses – 1.25 million people died.
Yet, so powerful are myths that even the victims buy into them. Long after India became independent, we recall a grand-uncle reminiscing fondly about his days recruiting for the famed British army, although by then its history was already studded with imbecilities like the invasion of Kabul in 1842. The invasion is legendary now for the incompetence of its leader. It should be remembered equally for the incompetence of those who appointed him in the first place. The appointment casts some doubts about the pukka-ness of the pukka British administration. Major-General William Elphinstone, the hapless commander, actually tried to turn down the job, but it was no use. The Governor General of India – at the time Lord Auckland – was determined he should go. He went, and it cost him his life.
“Elphy Bey” (bey is the Turkish term for commander) was a gentle, doddering old fool. And coming apart at the seams. Just sixty, the ailments he suffered from could have filled a small hospital ward. He was mentally incompetent…and incontinent……flatulent…. and gouty…and his rheumatism was so bad that he was crippled and had to be carried everywhere on a litter. And to top it off, his arm was in a sling. Afghanistan, with its ferocious climate and even more ferocious warriors, was no place for the soft, senile general who had been retired on half-pay since acquitting himself – creditably it seems –at Waterloo. But Auckland was determined to take Afghanistan, and thus, in 1839 the Afghan amir, Dost Mohammed, was driven into hiding. He was replaced by another incompetent, Shah Suja and British garrisons were left at the capital, Kabul, as well as all along the route back to India.
Unfortunately, the new cantonment at Kabul provoked the suspicion of the Afghan rebels, led by the old amir’s son. The British were there to stay for a while, he thought, and began to look for ways to strike at them.
He did not have to look for long. The cantonment was located in a low swampy area, which presented an easy target to the rebels swarming in the hills and forts around. The circumference of the place was too great to be defended and all the supply stores were outside. The British might just as well have sent out an engraved invitation to the enemy to seize their supplies and starve the population inside. Which is precisely what happened.
“You will have nothing to do here. All is peace,” opined the outgoing commander when Elphy Bey and his main man, the brutal and belligerent Brigadier John Shelton, arrived. It was a singularly inaccurate prediction.
Not long thereafter, a brigade returning to India was besieged. Then, when Elphinstone’s health took a turn for the worse and the Governor General had to send out a replacement for him, he too was attacked and forced to hole up in a fortress.
The Kabul cantonment seems to have turned into the nineteenth century version of Iraq’s Green Zone. No one could go outside without drawing fire, and even inside, soldiers were constantly being gunned down.In short order, the British Resident and his staff were polished off by the rebels. Then, the supply stores were pillaged, leaving those inside the cantonment with only about three days worth of food.
Not content with a broken arm, poor Elphy tried mounting his horse and fell off. Then he hurt his leg, when the beast decided – perhaps with some justification –to step on it. That may have sent the old man straight out of his mind, because he now started begging for more ammunition to be sent around, although there was actually enough left for a year. By then, all he knew about the military situation was what random civilians were telling him, for Shelton was keeping mum and treating him with unrelenting scorn. The old man had to make do with Councils of War where almost anyone would wander in and say anything they wanted. Junior officers lectured their seniors. Civilians offered their advice unsolicited to the soldiers. In the midst of it all lay Shelton on his bedding, snoring… to show his contempt for the whole proceeding.
But Shelton was hardly a military genius himself.Once, he led his men to no more than 20 paces from the Afghans and fired. When not one enemy soldier, or even horse, was killed, the Brits were forced to turn and flee. Another time, the idiot ordered his soldiers to fall into squares so concentrated and tidy that the Afghans, who were experts at hitting targets that were scattered and hidden, thought they were getting a Ramadan gift. Each of their bullets sent a small handful of the poor Englishmen tumbling like bowling pins. Sheldon, who had compounded this criminal performance by taking with him only one cannon when British Army regulations – with good reason – mandated two, soon found it too hot to operate. He had to fall back on muskets. But these were so poorly handled that the Afghans actually managed to get to point-blank range unscathed. By then the Shelton’s men were down to throwing stones. But, their wretched leader still held on pig-headedly. Finding themselves being picked off one by one, the soldiers finally came to their senses and fled, pointedly ignoring even Elphy’s attempts to rally them. The punch line of the whole business came when they learned that they had been driven back not by Afghanistan’s notorious warriors but by a bunch of Kabul shopkeepers.
The farce degenerated further. Elphinstone got himself shot…of all places, in the buttocks. The British Envoy, unable to stand things any longer, took it on himself to make nice to the head of the rebels. For his pains, he was assassinated and his head and torso skewered like a kebab and paraded through Kabul. Elphy, a world-class ditherer, now made the worst decision yet of his life. In return for Afghan guarantees of safe conduct he agreed that the cantonment would return to Jalalabad in India. They would go through the Khyber Pass, the infamous point of entry of every conqueror….in mid winter.
And so, 16,000 men, women, and children marched through snow a foot deep, on the orders of a senile general. Along the way, tribesmen from every neighboring village, including children, taunted, harassed and picked them off like ripe plums. At the end of all the hacking and butchering, Elphinstone was dead and so was every European except the Surgeon-General. But the British got their revenge in time. Elphinstone’s replacement, General Nott, finally extricated himself from his corner, marched to Kabul and burned down its famous bazaar.
Still, even then, the luckless Elphy could get no peace. On the way to Jalalabad, his coffin, decorously prepared by the new amir, was ambushed by tribesmen. They cracked it open, stripped the body and pelted it with stones. The amir had to send out another expedition before the dimwitted general was allowed to go to his rest with full…and completely undeserved… military honors.[iv]
The story of Elphy Bey was not unusual. Wherever the empire-builders succeeded, it was most often in spite of incompetence. It was force and fraud…and some luck… not genius. If there is a grand design in anything they did, it eludes us
[i]Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, K. M. Panikkar, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953, pp. 78-9.
[ii]Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines, and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis, New York: Verso, 2001.
[iv]The Brassey’s Book of Military Blunders, Geoffrey Regan, Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 2000, pp. 31-34.
ll my writing gives full credit to my co-author. (As an author and former academic I know as well as anyone the dangers of improper attribution, quite apart from the ethics of it)
As always, it was only libertarians on the right who saw through the pretensions of what neoconservatives today avow was the one and only “good” empire — on which America ought to model itself.. In fact, IS modeling itself.
So, let’s take a look at what that empire actually did (caveat: this piece is from the socialist press, so it makes no distinction between the mercantilist policies of today’s capitalism and a real free market; it also tends to simplify the actual interaction of race and religion with state policies — it’s downright wrong on that in some places but the facts are not in dispute):
“Tax collections rose even as millions died of man-made famines. Like Bengal of 1770-72. The East India Company’s own report put it simply. The famine in that province “exceeds all description.” Close to ten million people had died, as Rajni Palme-Dutt pointed out in his remarkable book, India Today. The Company noted that more than a third of the populace had perished in the province of Purnea. “And in other parts the misery is equal.”Yet, Warren Hastings wrote to the directors of the East India Company in 1772: “Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of this province, and the consequent decrease in cultivation, the net collections of the year 1771 exceeded even those of [pre-famine] 1768.” Hastings was clear on why and how this was achieved. It was “owing to [tax collection] being violently kept up to its former standard.”
The Company itself, as Palme Dutt observed, was smug about this. It noted that despite “the severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made” in the collections.
Between 24 million and 29 million Indians, maybe more, died in famines in the era of British good governance. Many of these famines were policy-driven. Millions died of callous and wilful neglect. The victims of Malthusian rulers. Over 6 million humans perished in just 1876 — when Madras was a hell. Many others had their lives shortened by ruthless exploitation and plunder. Well before the Great Bengal Famine, the report of that province’s Director for Health for 1927-28 made grisly reading. It noted that “the present peasantry of Bengal are in a very large proportion taking to a dietary on which even rats could not live for more than five weeks.” By 1931, life expectancy in India was sharply down. It was now 23.2 and 22.8 years for men and women. Less than half that of those living in England and Wales. (Palme-Dutt.)
Mike Davis’ stunning book, Late Victorian Holocausts, also ought to be required reading in every Indian school. Davis gives us a scathing account, for instance, of the Viceroy Lord Lytton. Lytton was the most ardent free-marketeer of his time — and Queen Victoria’s favourite poet. He “vehemently opposed efforts … to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organising the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India.” The weeklong feast for 68,000 guests, points out Davis, was an orgy of excess. It proved to be “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history.” Through the same week as this spectacular durbar, “100,000 of the Queen Empress’ subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore” alone.
In fact, barring the scale, it all sounds depressingly like the present. In terms of ideology and principle at least. The Raj nostalgia of today’s neo-liberals is quite heart-felt. .
Cannon fodder
Yes, there’s that, too. British good governance killed more than those tens of millions in famines. Countless numbers of Indians died in wars waged for, by, and against the British. Over 8,000 died in the single battle around Kut in Iraq in 1916. London used them as canon fodder in its desperate search for a success against the Turks after the rout at Gallipoli. When there were no Indians around, the British sacrificed other captive peoples. “Waste the Irish” was the term used by an English officer when sending out troops on a suicidal mission.
In his book Global Capitalism and India, C.T. Kurien gives us a stark example of British-led globalisation from the 1860s. The civil war in America had hurt the flow of cheap, slave-labour cotton to Britain. So the Raj forced the growing of that crop here on a much larger scale than before. “From then on, commercialisation of agriculture continued to gain momentum. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the middle of the twentieth, when food production in India declined by 7 per cent, that of commercial crops increased by 85 per cent. Widespread and regular famines became a recurring feature during this period…….
Again, while the scale is wholly different, the parallels are odd. In June this year, we could see Montek Singh Ahluwalia speaking solemnly of problems, even a crisis in agriculture. (Gee! I wonder who told him.) These headaches, he feels, go to back to the mid-1990s. No mention of who was shaping the ghoulish policies of that — and the present — period. And no questions asked about it in the media. There’s good governance for you. Welcome back, Lytton. All is forgiven, come home.”
I am not fond of the reiteration of the terms “White” and “Christian” in this piece — though color and religion probably exacerbated attitudes toward the peasantry and even to some of the Indian elites. It’s a fact, however, that racial attitudes were strengthened only AFTER the establishment of imperial “good governance” and not in the early history of the British East India company, the entity that began this whole remarkable mercantilist conquest. And obviously I don’t sympathize with the idea that more government interference is the needed prescription.
But still, the Davis’ book is a welcome antidote to the neoconservative glorification of the British empire (as in Niall Ferguson’s poorly-sourced coffee table primer – “Empire.”
Not as dreadful as Hitler or Stalin or Mao is not good, and as you can see, the death toll from the famines was certainly up there as far as sheer numbers go.
You can’t equate intentionally killing vast numbers of people with deaths from famines that were set off at first by climate conditions (hmmm….does Davis have an axe to grind?) and dreadfully worsened by pitiless and incompetent policies. And I’m not really sure what the use of the word ‘holocaust’ was intended to do here, either. An intentionally murderous policy is not the same as horrible mismanagement and callousness. Still, at a certain level, if you go ahead knowing what’s going to happen, you can’t hide behind “intention” after that. Driving a truck through a classroom without “intending” to kill children is something of a self-contradiction, I would think. Collateral damage you calculate before hand and discount counts as intended.
That aside, Davis has shone some light on a history that many people simply don’t know.
When Americans take up the imperial purple from the British empire, they should read about its darker side. However admirable English culture, laws, and civil society may be, they were not made so by empire, but undermined by it.
In fact, as I pointed out, racial feelings only seriously developed after the imperial state had administrative charge of the whole of the country – after very decent, well-meaning British civil servants had been sent out to man the apparatus of government. Many of them were of a much higher caliber than the corrupt merchant adventurers of the earlier centures — true. But the record seems to show that in spite of that, racism really came into the mix only later in imperial history, not earlier. It was a theoretical justification for the overwhelming inequality between rulers and ruled by the nineteenth century.
In any case, whenever it developed (most probably in the 19th century), it seems to me to have been exacerbated by the expansion of the empire.
You can admire British culture, literature and science but still see this. British culture and society are not the same thing as the British empire and they never needed to have been.
No matter what Dinesh D’Souza says.
Mark Twain had it right.
“Now considered the quintessential American novelist, yet he too was called a traitor for opposing the annexation of the Philippines. Twain was thought un-American. ‘Shall we?’ he asked, attacking McKinley’s foreign policy. ‘Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first?’
Update: What about the benefits of British rule, you might ask? There were some. The railroads, for one example. But at what expense did the Indians get railroads? And couldn’t they have got them from, industrialization, free trade (and free trade is NOT mercantilism) and competition just as well? They could have got all the cultural benefits without the murderous sideshow.
Do I deny that culture plays a big role in things? Not at all. What I do deny is that you need an aggressive state to foster the kinds of civic associations and laws needed for culture to grow.
As for Social Darwinism and statism being opposed — you only have to look at policies where the state actively intervenes to prop up the financial classes, while it lets the rest sink or swim — you can have both going on at the same time. The powerful get bail-outs, handouts, while the rest get the law of the jungle. Note – the powerful doesn’t always mean the rich. I mean those who have the state to mop up their mistakes and shove their costs on to other people.
Look – the free market always assumes you already have laws and morality. Where statists are mistaken is to think you need a modern bureaucracy and a standing army for laws and morality to exist…
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev criticized the United States, and current President George W. Bush in particular, on Friday for sowing disorder across the world by seeking to build an empire.
Gorbachev, who presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union, said Washington had sought to build an empire after the Cold War ended but had failed to understand the changing world….”
Comment:
Well – missing that ole Soviet empire, eh Gorbie? Or glad you bailed out in time?
Don’t worry, we didn’t learn any lessons. It may take us awhile to catch up with you — but we’re getting there…..
