Imperialism – Wis[s]e Words

Highway of Death revisited

Published on October 28, 20191 Comment

The latest Call of Duty has taken the infamous massacre of fleeing Iraqi soldiers and civilians from Kuwait back in 1991 and made it into a war crime perpetrated by the Russians.

Call of Duty screenshot:

Only a few weeks ago I watched Rambo for the first time. I’d watched First Blood years ago and that turned out to be a decent if rightwing revenge fantasy that made sure to show how hollow revenge was and had Rambo lose at the end. I’d never watched Rambo because, well, it looked like it was a dumb power fantasy about going back to ‘Nam and finally get to kick commie butt without any of the complexities that made the first movie so interesting. And indeed Rambo turned out to be just what I expected, except much dumber. The enemy is cartoonishly evil, a beautiful Vietnamese ally dies to underscore Rambo’s greatness and lines like “Do we get to win this time” are uttered with a hilarious sincerity by Stallone. the only thing funnier in all of this was knowing Rambo III was dedicated to the people who’d blow up the WTC two decades later.

Obviously silly as Rambo was, it’s Nobel Prize material compared to what Call of Duty did. To just boldly take one of the most notorious war crimes of the first Gulf War, fictionalise it and flip it so that it was the old Cold War enemy did it is dumber than anything the Rambo series ever got up to. Even for a brogamer first person shooter like Call of Duty it’s beyond the pale. Bad enough to have the developers recycle other people’s suffering as background material for your game. But blatantly rewriting your own war crimes so you can still be the good guys? That’s disgusting on a whole other level.

All the Shah’s Men — Stephen Kinzer

Published on September 24, 2014Leave a comment

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah’s Men
Stephen Kinzer
258 pages including index
published in 2003

If you read the name Roosevelt, you probably think of the American president during World War II, or perhaps his predecesor Theodore Roosevelt, who gave his name to the teddy bear. But there’s another Roosevelt who has been of some influence in world history, a grandson of Theodore, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the man behind the coup against the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. That was the coup that overthrew a government nominally an ally of the United States, on the behest of a British oil company to install a dictator whose father had had nazi sympathies, who himself would be overthrown a quarter century later in the Islamic revolution of 1979, when Americans were baffled to realise most of Iran hated them, a ahtred that had its roots in 1953.

That 1953 coup is one of those monumental changes in history that are far less well known than they should be. Though not exactly a secret, the American involvement and leadership of the coup is even less known, or at least that was the case when this book was published, in the year the US would invade another former client state, Iraq. These days the sad and sordid story of American meddling in the Middle East is well known, at least to those who paid attention to what happened after 9/11. I’m not sure how much Stephen Kinzer’s book contributed to this though.

NSA tapped 2 million dutch phone calls in one month

Published on October 21, 20132 Comments

So it turns out the NSA managed to intercept and tap some two million Dutch phone calls in just a month. Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Our own government is already far too keen to listen in to us and is obliging telecom companies and internet providers to keep traffic data for at least six months. The Americans were supposedly doing this as part of the War on Terror, but it seems politicians, civil servants and various commercial bigwigs were also tapped. Again, not suprising that once a capability to this is in place, it will be used for other purposes.

What’s more, does anybody actually think the NSA has stopped tapping phone calls here? Or believe the Dutch government is all that keen on getting them to stop? Our secret services and police are thick as thieves with the yanks anyway; they don’t care, they just care it came out.

Rawagede: Holland’s very own Srebrenica

Published on September 14, 2011

Survivors of the Dutch massacre in Rawagede, Indonesia, have gotten some justice from the Dutch courts as the Den Haag civil court ruled the statue of limitations did not apply to them:

A Dutch court has ordered the government to compensate the widows of seven villagers who were summarily executed and a man shot and wounded in a notorious massacre during Indonesia’s bloody battle for independence from colonial rule.

The Hague Civil Court ruled on Wednesday it was “unreasonable” for the government to argue that the widows were not entitled to compensation because the statute of limitations had expired.

According to Indonesian researchers, Dutch troops wiped out almost the entire male population of Rawagede, a village in West Java, two years before the former colony declared independence in 1949.

[…]

The only living witnesses are now in their 80s, and illiterate, after having to fend for themselves following the deaths of their husbands.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, many of which we found in the river after the shooting stopped,” said Cawi, a survivor.

[…]

The court’s judgement paves the way for a case to establish the level of indemnities to be paid to the relatives.

However, Zegveld said its narrow focus on widows of massacre victims means it is unclear whether it will expose the Dutch state to a flood of compensation claims from other relatives of people killed during the Dutch fight to retain control over the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia in 1949.

Authorities in the Netherlands say 150 people died while a victims’ association claims 431 lost their lives during an operation to root out a suspected independence fighter hiding in the village, known today as Balongsari.

Every western colonial power has skeletons like this in its closet and would rather they stay there. Yet I can’t help that the Dutch are particularly good at only remembering the history they want to remember. While World War II, in which the Netherlands was a victim of German and Japanese aggression is now an integral part of the Dutch self image, the dirty colonial wars that took place in Indonesia almost from the moment the Japanese had left have been largely erased from our collective memory. In fact, in some respect WWII offers cover for what we did in Indonesia afterwards. It’s only now, when many of the people directly involved (including the victims) are dead that we’re finally getting some recognition of what we did there. We were outraged at what Bosnian Serbs did in Srebrenica and justifiably so, but this means that we should recognise our own atrocities as well.

Wilderness of mirrors

Published on June 14, 2011

Simon Reynolds reviews an Indonesian rock anthology:

another example of the trend of reissue labels moving into the pasts of foreign countries and finding there a kind of narcissistic mirror image of Western pop and rock, a mirror-image that’s slightly askew. but only very slightly. so Those Shocking, Shaking Days is really hot, fiercely played early 70s hard ‘n’ heavy rock with a bluesy groove funk energy (the kind of stuff Woebot might dice into chunklets for recycling) but betrays zero traces of gamelan or much else Indonesian… so it’s like we’re going abroad but all we’re discovering is another facet of ourselves, our own cultural hegemony…

Which is sorta-kinda another example of what I was getting at yesterday. This isn’t quite cultural appropriation because nothing of the other culture is taken; it’s just feedback from our own cultural imperialism. Importing this feedback just reinforces our own cultural narcissism without engaging with the people behind the product we’re consuming or the cultural context in which they operated. It’s still all about us.