Imperialism

Nature: the latest excuse to deny Chagos Islanders their home

Environment, Imperialism, UK politics
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Seven years ago already I first read about what had happened to the Chagos Islanders, kicked out of their home so the US could have their Diego Garcia base there. The inhabitants were a security risk you see. The Ilois, as they call themselves, were therefore dumped in Mauritius, with many of them eventually settling in the UK as well. Over the years and then decades they have always fought for their right to return home, against succesive British governments, both Labour and Tory and in recent years they actually started winning their legal battles. Unfortunately, getting their claims honoured in courts and getting the UK government to do the same is not the same thing… Again, both Labour and Tory governments have done everything to stop or delay their return.

And the latest trick the current government is trying now might be the dirtiest: turning the Islands into a nature reserve:

This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.

The Ilois of course protested:

Today, Chagossian supporters accused the government of duplicity. “The British government’s plan for a marine protected area is a grotesquely transparent ruse designed to perpetuate the banning of the people of Mauritius and Chagos from part of their own country,” said Ram Seegobin, of the Mauritian party Lalit de Klas, in a letter to Greenpeace seen by the Guardian. “The conservation groups have fallen into a trap. They are being used by the government to prevent us returning,” said Evenor.

They were backed by Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights group Reprieve, who has challenged the UK government on the use of Diego Garcia by the US to render suspected terrorists. “The truth is that no Chagossian has anything like equal rights with even the warty sea slug. There is no sense that the British government will let them go back. The government is not even contemplating equal rights for Chagossians and sea slugs.”

The environmental groups supporting the proposal of course deny they’re part of a greenwash, but it is typical of the divide on the left that they could allow themselves to be used this way. They’ve only looked at their own interests and didn’t consider the islanders until they were forced to.

The American fallacy

Imperialism
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Ronald Reagan discovers that the Russians actually did think the US was capable of waging nuclear war on them:

“Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did … During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike … Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us.”

Quote found at the Wikipedia page about Able Archer, the 1983 NATO exercise about nuclear war that was so realistic it almost fooled the Russians into believing the exercise was real and into launching a first strike.It nicely sums up the American cluelessness about how other countries and people see them, to understand that not everybody agrees that they are the good guys. It’s a classic fallacy of empire of course, this lack of empathy, previously seen in Britain as well as Rome. It exists because as an empire, you do not have to take into account the wishes, desires and fears of lesser countries, it’s they who have to take into account yours. It’s a disease that leads to quite a lot of nasty surprises and which can only be cured by no longer being an empire. The British may pride themselves these days on how much better they understand whichever people they’re the junior partner in the American subjugation thereof they are, but they were just as clueless when Rule Brittannia was still true.

Wrestling pigs

Imperialism, wingnuts
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There’s supposedly a new wingnut meme doing the rounds of rightwing blogs, that the Church Committee, the 1975 senate comittee set up after Watergate revealed some of the dirty tricks the CIA had engaged in both at home and abroad. The idea being that this oversight committee destroyed the CIA and left it helpless to stop 9/11 yada yada. Over at Edge of the West, guest poster Kathy Solmsted quickly demolishes these lies, setting the fact straights. There’s only problem with this.

The facts are irrelevant.

These memes are not fact based, but do rely for some considerable extent on gaining wider circulation by being taken seriously enough by liberals or leftists to offer refutations. Instead of something to be ridiculed, the idea that the CIA was destroyed by teh lieberuls becomes a serious proposition worthy of debate — gaining a false legitimacy. And once an idea is treated seriously, there are always non-partisan bystanders who’ll fall the lies or, because that’s what they’ve been taught all their lives, think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Another disadvantage of attempting to refute lies is that it’s so much more difficult than telling the lie was. It takes time and energy away from stating your own case, puts you on the defense and as we’re again taught by the newsmedia — not to mention countless courtroom dramas — makes you look bad.

Countering these crackpot ideas is difficult therefore, as you have to take them seriously to refute them and if you take them seriously you allow the crackpots to frame the debate. Which is why I prefer the Alicublog method of treating these memes with the seriousness they deserve, by pointing and laughing.

Apart from that, there may also be something of a difference between liberals and leftists playing a role in this particular case. Liberals historically have never had any real problems with the existence of the CIA, just with the abuses of its power revealed by the Curch committee and similar investigations. It was under Truman, a Democratic president that the CIA was founded and under the ur-liberal president Kennedy that it played some of its dirtiest tricks, the difference being that these tricks were directed at foreign socalled enemies and not Americans as much and so perfectly fine. For those liberals therefore who still think the CIA is a valid institution, defending the Church committee in particular and the idea of congressional oversight over it in general is much harder than it is for leftists like me who’d rather see it disappear sooner than later. Once you admit the CIA is a necesary evil by its very nature it becomes harder to argue for strict oversight.

Personally therefore I’d argue that the Church committee didn’t go far enough, was pivotal into bringing to light certain clasess of abuses, largely those against US citizens, but largely ignoring the raison d’etre of the organisation, which is to make the world safe for American business, the first line of defence against any unwelcome development that would harm their interests.

Any Questions and the limits of debate

Decentists and other ex-lefties, Imperialism
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I tend not to listen to Any Questions, unlike my partner, as it annoys me too much. You have this ritualised debate between government and opposition politicians through yet another venue, enlivened by a healty dose of mainstream media commentators all carefully mixed to present a “balance of opinion”, chasing the issues of the day through a thoroughly mainstream Westminster filter. A perfect example popped up on this week’s episode, which for once I did catch.

It came through an audience question about Harry Patch, the last survivor of the war of the trenches, who sadly died earlier this week. Patch had been adamant that he considered all war to be a waste of human live and the question was whether the panel agreed. Said panel, consisting of “Charles Moore, British Medical Association chairman Hamish Meldrum, commentator and chief executive of the Index on Censorship John Kampfner and chair of the Health and Safety Executive, Judith Hackitt CBE” was quick to agree with this but even quicker to backpedal. It just wasn’t possibe, Britain needs an army as deterrent, there are evil countries that need to be defeated, yadda yadda.

The highlight was a short side discussion between Charles Moore, Britain’s slightly more polite answer to Bill Kristol and the “leftist” John Kampfner about Ruanda and humanitarian intervention. Moore started by lamenting the failure of the UN to act in Ruanda, which Kampfner followed up to by agreeing and giving more examples of countries that should’ve been humanitarian intervented: Darfur, Birma, Zimbabwe, the usual litany of soft liberal foreign causes. He then went on to mourn the war on Iraq, as it was this that had shied away western countries from other interventions.

Both either don’t know, or don’t care to think about the realities of all interventions (and Kampfner really has no excuse here, as he wrote a book on Blair’s interventions). None of these interventions is ever done out of charity, few if any make any real difference to the people themselves and they all take place in a context of western supremacy and compliance in whatever situation we are supposed to resolve some years later. As Lenny shows, the Ruanda is actually the perfect example of how western intervention really works:

the story of the Rwandan genocide was one of non-intervention. The ‘West’, or the Euro-American powers so designated, demonstrated ‘indifference’. They considered it just another example of ancient tribal hatreds finding an outlet in a new blood-letting, failing to accept that what was taking place was a genocide that demanded urgent intervention to protect the innocent. (These racist spiels about ancient tribal hatreds are certainly culpable, but I wonder if the reactionary discourse of ‘good-vs-evil’ that imperialists are fond of is really any better?) The lesson drawn from this by those advocating ‘humanitarian intervention’ is that new norms of intervention, mandating the use of military force in emergency cases, have to be elaborated and embedded in international law. Now, even if it were true that the ‘West’ had not intervened, it would by no means follow that it should: you have to make another series of assumptions to justify that conclusion. But it isn’t true, and the widespread acceptance of this idea cultivates the claim of US innocence, the obverse of ‘indifference.

Sending in the US army or the UN blue helmets is just the most visible part of western intervention in the rest of the world. As Lenny argues, it’s the context in which these interventions take place that is important. You just cannot naively wonder why nobody cares enough about Birma or Darfur or Zimbabwe to “do something” about them, without taking into account the interests of the nations that are supposed to act. There are no neutral actors. What’s more, to keep insisting in the face of the evidence, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, that interventions actually solve anything is downright irresponsible if not criminal. It also smacks of a certain arrogance to argue for intervention in Zimbabwe, when the opposition there has always made it clear they don’t want it, they want to solve their problems themselves.

A democratic Pakistan is a failed state

Imperialism, US foreign policy
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Manan Ahmed on the failed state rhetoric as used against Pakistan:

It was that under the rule of the military usurper Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan that Pakistan was adopted as a Cold War ally and held up as a model “developing nation”. During Khan’s tenure, Pakistan was said to enjoy the benefits of a so-called “developmental dictatorship” – many dams were built and much cement was poured.

The US even helped Ayub Khan engineer an election victory in 1965. But shortly thereafter, he foolishly went to war with India; his popularity plummeted, and his flashy foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, began a national campaign for a democracy based on socialist principles. Bhutto’s rise ran afoul of the “domino theory” intended to check the spread of Communism; it was in this context that Pakistan was first crowned a “failed state” – giving rise to decades worth of books and studies with titles like The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan (1962), The Failure of Parliamentary Politics in Pakistan, 1953-1958 (1967), Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1968), Ethnic Conflict and the Failure of Political Integration in Pakistan (1973), Pakistan, Failure in Nation Building (1977) and Pakistan On the Brink (2004).

[…]

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

It’s an old constant in US foreign policy to prefer the familiarity of military dictatorships above the uncertainty of democratically elected governments. They’re easier to deal with and easier to manipulate. It’s never about what’s good for Pakistan, just what suits the US best. Having Obama in the White House doesn’t change this.