Imperialism – Page 3 – Wis[s]e Words

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

Published on April 6, 2009

Cover of Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania
Vesna Goldsworthy
254 pages including index
published in 1998

What immediately came to mind when I picked up this book from the library was Edward Said’s cite>Orientalism. Where that book looked at how Europe created its image of the Middle East, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination looks at how the western idea of the Balkans has been shaped or even created by writers of popular fiction and travel literature. Goldsworthy focuses mainly on British literature, as for British writers “the Balkans are sufficiently close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers” while they are “too far away to be of consistent interest to American writers”. Historically, she limits her inquiries to relatively modern times, from the early nineteenth century up to now, as she argues that the Balkans as an area of interest only emerged as Ottoman supremacy in the area was broken. Before there can be stereotypical images of the Balkans, there first has to be a Balkans, obviously and until the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate there wasn’t.

A book like Inventing Ruritania, which wants to expose the cliches with which western thought has been riddled about the Balkans, can’t help but be political. This is more so when you consider when it was published, in 1998, barely a year before NATO would wage its first humanitarian war against Serbia, just after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. You could see Inventing Ruritania as a sort of metacritique of the sloppy thinking in Britain and elsewhere with which these events were explained and written about. One of Goldsworthy’s points in this book is indeed to lay bare the sort of racist stereotyping language about the Balkans that is still used thoughtlessly, often by people who would never dream about deescribing areas like Africa or India in similar terms… Yet Inventing Ruritania isn’t a polemic, not even to the extent Orientalism was.

What We Say Goes — Noam Chomsky

Published on October 12, 2008

Cover of What We Say Goes

What We Say Goes
Noam Chomsky
223 pages including index
published in 2007

Noam Chomsky has been one of the most consistent critics of American hegemony and empire of the past four decades, maintaining a prodigious rate of output over the years as one of the few socalled public intellectuals who does not see his role as parroting received wisdom. His books, articles and interviews have always managed to explain in clear, understandable language how America and its ruling class keeps its power both domestically and abroad and particularly how it dictactes the boundaries of acceptable discourse. A measure of his importance as a critic of American power can be found in the vehemence of the criticism aimed at him by both conservative and liberal commentators. Despite their differences, both groups believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a right, or even a duty to shape the rest of the world according to its own desires. What Chomsky has done for so long has been to show the reality behind “defending democracy” and “humanitarian intervention” and neither liberals nor conservatives like this.

What We Say Goes is his latest book, a collection of interviews he gave to David Barsamian about “U.S. power in a changing world”. It’s fair to say that there are few surprises here for those who’ve read his previous books, with the interview format used here precluding much indepth analysis. However, if you look at this book as an introduction to Chomsky and his concerns, What We Say Goes works fine. It’s short and to the point and as per usual Chomsky manages to cut to the heart of things quickly. He talks about all his usual obsessions — the way in which democracy and human rights are used against official enemies, the role of the US in the Middle East and South America, the role of the socalled free press in determining the boundaries of criticism allowed — and ties them together, with the interview format helping in keeping things rolling along.

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins

Published on August 3, 2008Leave a comment

Cover of Britain's Gulag

Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005

Before Tom Wolfe used “Mau Mauing” to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies. Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn’t take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn’t ripe at all for independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so, protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.

That’s the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in cite>Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different.There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns
rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu’s struggle for freedom.

Why is NATO? What is point NATO?

Published on April 4, 2008

Once upon a time this was an easy question to answer. NATO was either a defensive alliance against the threat posed by the USSR and its allies, or, if you were so inclined, it was an instrument of western imperialism aimed at the people of Eastern Europe and Russia. Then the Cold War ended, not through any NATO effort, and the need for the alliance was gone. So why hasn’t it disbanded, why has it in fact not just continued to exist, but actually grown? Surely as a defensive alliance it is no longer needed as despite efforts to find a new evil empire, none have come to light. Even China is only a third rate military power still happy to buy secondrate Russian equipment and to suggest that an Iran or North Korea is so much of a threat we need NATO to defend ourselves is absurd.

Perhaps we see the real purpose of NATO in the current discussion of membership for the Ukraine and Georgia, something Russia has long objected to. From their perspective the long, steady eastward march of NATO during the nineties and zeros looks remarkably like a slow motion offensive, an encirclement of the motherland. They have some reason to feel that way, having been invaded three times in the twentieth century alone. You can of course reject all this as Russian paranoia and believe the assurances of NATO itself that it’s all perfectly innocent, honest. Myself, I’m not so sure, especially not after what happened in Kosovo.

Kosovo is seen as the great succes in liberal intervention, but remember that it was never sanctioned by the United Nations, featured terror bombing of civilian targets and did not achieve its main goal of ethnic cleansing. Instead NATO served as the KLA’s private airforce in their war against Serbia. The endresult is a combination gangster state/NATO protectorate. Kosovo opened the way for NATO to function as the armed arm of democracy, a role it’s now attempting to fulfill in Afghanistan as well. NATO as security for When the UN is going through one of its maddingly independent phases again; a handy tool to intervene in other countries when the UN doesn’t want to.

It also binds the European powers to the US and its foreign policy and prevents the European Union from following a more independent, perhaps more confrontational course. Many European Atlanticists thinks this is worth it, because NATO also binds America to Europe and prevents it from withdrawing in isolationism again. It’s sort of the old argument that Blair and co used to support the US in the War on Iraq: at least if we’re on their side we can influence them somewhat. Guess how well that worked out in practise.

In short NATO is obsolete and dangerous and needs to be abolished. It’s not needed to fight the real threats of the 21st century and the money wasted on it can be better spend elsewhere. The sooner it’s gone the better.

The Battle of Venezuela – Michael McCaughan

Published on March 10, 2008

Cover of The Battle of Venezuela

The Battle of Venezuela
Michael McCaughan
166 pages
published in 2004

If there’s any subject where the failure of the western news media to fulfil its supposed function of objectively informing its audience is completely uncontroversial, it should be Venezuela. This was especially apparant during the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez, when leading western newspapers like The New York Times portrayed it as a democratic uprising against a dictator. It ignored the fact that while Chavez had been democratically elected and had made no attempt to suppress political opposition against his government, the coupists immediately suspended the constitution, started imprisoning Chavez supporters and in generally behave like the traditional juntas off Latin America. Even after the coup failed the agitation against Chavez in western media continued, again portraying him as a dictator and a lunatic for withdrawing the broadcasting licence of a television station heavily involved in the coup. In short, it’s impossible to get an objective view of Venezuela from
the mainstream media.

And while there are alternative news sources that attempt to correct the skewed portrayal of the country, but I’ve found for myself that these are not enough to get the whole picture if like me you don’t speak Spanish. Which is why The Battle of Venezuela was such an excellent find, as here you have a short to the point history of Venezuela and the Boliverian revolution, written by a “proper journalist” with no axe to grind against Chavez. At this length (only 166 pages in the edition I read) you can’t expect an in-depth analysis, but as a general introduction it would be hard to beat.