Essay by Ian Buruma in the Financial Times:
Books Essay: Wielding the moral club
By Ian Buruma
Published: September 11 2003 19:24 | Last Updated: September 11 2003 19:24
Here is Gore Vidal, often hailed as the most important literary essayist in America, a liberal maverick, whose languid but always spirited voice of opposition to most US administrations since Kennedy's Camelot never fails to find the keen ears of the European liberal-left. He was asked on Australian radio about what Vidal calls the "Bush-Cheney junta", and how the Iraqis could have been freed from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime without US armed force. His answer: "Don't you think that's their problem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list several hundred, at the moment I would put the Bush regime as one of them."
He was asked on the same show what he thought might happen in North Korea. Answer: "I don't think much of anything is going to happen; they'll go on starving to death as apparently they are or at least so the media tells us." And what about those media, specifically Fox TV? This is when the elegant drawl of the habitual old wit suddenly gathered heat: "Oh, it's disgusting, deeply disgusting, I've never heard people like that on television in my life and I've been on television for 50 years, since the very beginning of television in the United States. And I have never seen it as low, as false, one lie after the other in these squeaky voices that you get from these fast-talking men and women, it was pretty sick."
The Bush-Cheney junta as bad as Saddam's dictatorship. Starvation in North Korea, who cares? It's probably American propaganda anyway. But Fox News, now that's truly disgusting. I am no fan of Fox News, but there is an odd lack of proportion here that could be interpreted in various ways: the callous frivolity of a decadent old man; the provincial outlook of a writer whose horizons end at the shores of the US, or perhaps even at the famous Washington DC Beltway. Or is there a little more to it? Two more examples, from different writers this time.
Tariq Ali, in the Guardian, about the brutal "recolonisation" of Iraq by the US and "its bloodshot British adjutant". It is to be hoped, he writes, "that the invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they install, and that their collaborators may meet the fate of former Iraqi prime minister Nuri Said before them".
Nuri Said, lest people forget, was a pro-western leader, under whose rule Iraq was relatively calm and prosperous. He was murdered in a military coup in 1958. His death marked the beginning of a cycle of coups and counter coups that led to the Ba'athist regime five years later. The Ba'athists had modelled themselves on German National Socialism. One does not have to have the fertile mind of a Tariq Ali to imagine what would happen if his wish for an uprising (by Shi'ite extremists or former Ba'athists, most likely) came true: massacres, more massacres, and another dictatorship.
And, finally, Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist, and favourite "post-colonial" agitprop voice in the European liberal press. In an article denouncing the US for unleashing a "racist war" on Iraq, bringing "starvation" and "mass murder", she can muster just one paragraph about Saddam Hussein himself. "At the end of it all", she sighs, "it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them."
Strengthening civil society. Well, that would indeed be a fine thing. Perhaps more could have been done to strengthen civil society in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, or perhaps in Kim Jong-Il's North Korea too. What is astonishing here is not the naivety, but the off-handed way well-heeled commentators in London, California, or New Delhi, talk about the suffering of the very people they pretend to stand up for. Vidal dismisses it as "not my problem". Tariq Ali calls for more violence. And Arundathi Roy prattles about civil society.
There are, to be sure, perfectly valid reasons to be critical of US foreign policy, especially the neo-conservative revolutionary mission. I was not persuaded that going to war in Iraq was right, because the official arguments were fuzzy, shifty, and changed from day to day. Once democratic governments cannot trust their people to respond to honest persuasion, but resort instead to half-truths and propaganda, democracy suffers. But this does not answer the question of what to do, as citizens of the richest and most powerful nations on earth, about dictators who commit mass murder or happily starve millions to death. Why are our left-liberal intellectuals so hopeless at answering this vital question?
In the case of Gore Vidal, there has always been an old-fashioned isolationist screaming to be let out of the great man's bulky frame. But Tariq Ali, and many of his readers, would surely consider themselves to be internationalists. They profess to care about oppressed peoples in faraway countries. That is why they set themselves morally above the right. So why do they appear to be so much keener to denounce the US than to find ways to liberate Iraqis and others from their murderous Fuhrers? And how can anybody, knowing the brutal costs of political violence, especially in poor countries split by religious and ethnic divisions, be so insouciant as to call for more aggression?
Perhaps it is a kind of provincialism after all. In a short essay about becoming anglicised, Arthur Koestler, witness of communist purges and Nazi persecution, described a basic difference between the English and Europeans like him, who saw England as "a kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age". To the ordinary Englishman, such things as gas chambers and Siberian slave camps were inconceivable, literally beyond his imagination. These were things that were so far removed from English normality that they "just 'do not happen' to ordinary people unless they are deliberately looking for trouble."
Saddam's Iraq, where people were gassed, or fed to shredding machines, or tortured just for fun by the dictator's son, or Serbia under Milosevic, where "ethnic cleansing" was official policy, were indeed a long way from Hampstead or Holland Park. And yet I can't believe that, for example, Harold Pinter's foaming rages about the US, and his denunciation of the Nato war over Kosovo as "a criminal act", while ignoring that without that war, hundreds of thousands of Kosovans were slated to disappear, is just parochial ignorance. Pinter is aware of human suffering far from Holland Park. He has done his bit for Kurdish victims of Turkish brutality, and for central Europeans under the Soviet lash.
So even if Tony Benn's cheery waffle about the achievements of real existing socialism can be dismissed as good old English eccentricity, the same cannot be true of the deliberate obtuseness of Tariq Ali, Pinter, Vidal or Noam Chomsky. The main issue, for them, is the power of the US. This clouds all other concerns. Pinter, a great artist, if not a subtle political thinker, is perhaps a special case. His subject is power, or rather the abuse of power. When applied to human relationships, Pinter's artistic intelligence produces brilliant insights. But when it comes to international politics, he loses all proportion. US power - always abusive in his view - fills him with such fury that he cannot be rational on the subject. It also, incidentally, affects his artistry. Just read his crude poems on the Iraq war.
Anti-Americanism, by which I don't mean criticism of US policies, but a visceral loathing, has a rich history, more often associated with the right than with the left. To prewar cultural conservatives (Evelyn Waugh, say), America was vulgar, money-grubbing, rootless, brash, tasteless, in short, a threat to high European civilisation. Martin Heidegger had much to say about "Americanism", as a soulless, greedy, inauthentic force that was fatally undermining the European spirit. To political conservatives, especially of the more radical right-wing kind, the combination of capitalism, democracy and a lack of ethnic homogeneity was anathema to everything they stood for: racial purity, military discipline and obedience to authority.
It is sometimes forgotten in Britain how closely anti-Americanism resembles old-fashioned European Anglophobia. Modern capitalism, after all, was a British invention.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, reactionaries as well as radical romantics in continental Europe denounced England as a society driven by nothing but the lust for profits. London was seen as a soulless city of bankers and stockbrokers exploiting the poor in their pursuit of ever more wealth. British imperialism, unlike the French Mission Civilisatrice or the German spread of Kultur, was seen as a commercial enterprise dedicated to the expansion of economic and financial power. And worst of all, in the eyes of some, was Britain's relatively mixed population. As the British-born racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain observed to his patron, Kaiser Wilhelm II, British citizenship could be bought by any "Basuto *" with enough cash. Not wholly accurate, perhaps, but a telling image nonetheless.
The left's distaste for Anglo-Saxon capitalism goes back at least as far as Karl Marx. But the leap from right-wing Anglophobia and anti-Americanism to the left-wing variety really came only after the second world war. Soviet propaganda no doubt had much to do with it, and especially the legacy of anti-fascism which the Russians exploited. Anglo-American capitalism was linked to fascism in Soviet propaganda, and seen as the great enemy of all the downtrodden peoples of the world. To be on the left was to be in favour of third world liberation movements. Not every supporter of Mao, Castro or Ho Chi Minh was pro-Soviet, but he or she certainly was anti-US - even though the US actually did much to end the European empires.
When liberation finally came to many colonised countries, celebration quickly turned to massive bloodletting. Dictatorships, some supported by Moscow, some by Washington, were established. Millions in China, Africa, and south-east Asia were murdered, starved, or purged by their own "liberators". America's dictators (Suharto, Pinochet) were denounced by the left, while Soviet clients received special pleading.
But by the late 1980s, there were not many western Leftists around anymore who still admired the Soviet Union or held much brief for violent third world revolutions. Memories of Pol Pot, Vietnamese boat people, and the Cultural Revolution were a quiet source of embarrassment (one hopes). Even the promises of socialism itself had begun to fade in the aftermath of 1989. What got stuck, however, was anti-Americanism.
Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. The socialist debacle, then, contributed to the resentment of American triumphs. But something else happened at the same time. In a curious way left and right began to change places. The expansion of global capitalism, which is not without negative consequences, to be sure, turned leftists into champions of cultural and political nationalism. When Marxism was still a potent ideology, the left sought universal solutions for the ills of the world. Now globalisation has become another word for what Heidegger meant by Americanism: an assault on native culture and identity. So the old left has turned conservative.
This defence of cultural authenticity comes in the guise of anti-imperialism, which is of course the same, these days, as anti-Americanism. Israel plays a significant part in this, as the perceived catspaw of US imperialism in the Middle East and the colonial enemy of Palestinian nationalism. Israel and the US have a way of triggering the reflexes of European colonial guilt that overrides almost anything else.
Israeli policies, just as US policies, are often wrong, and sometimes even wicked, but even if they were always right, Israel would still be hated as the Western invader on Arab territory. On this, the contemporary anti-Zionists of the left sound just like the crusty old Arabists of the old Foreign Office school, who never had any truck with socialism. The fact that Jews can now safely be compared to Nazis, as they frequently are, is an added sop to European guilt about another horrible blot on our collective conscience.
The moral paralysis of the left, when it comes to non-western tyrants, may also have a more sinister explanation. The Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit, calls it moral racism. When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations, or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men, whether they are Americans, Europeans, South Africans or Israelis harm people of colour, hell is raised. If one compares western reporting of events in Palestine or Iraq with far more disturbing news in Liberia or Central Africa, there is a disproportion, which suggests that non-western people cannot be held to the same moral standards as us. One could claim this is only right, since we can only take responsibility for our own kind. But this would be a rather racist view of world affairs.
Again, there appears to have been a reversal of roles between left and right. The conservative right (I'm not talking of fascists), traditionally, was not internationalist and certainly not revolutionary. Business, stability, national interests, and political realism ("our bastards", and so on), were the order of the day. Democracy, to conservative realists, was fine for us but not for strange people with exotic names. It was the left that wanted to change the world, no matter where. Left-wing internationalism did not wish to recognise cultural or national barriers. To them, liberation was a universal project. Yet now that the "Bush-Cheney junta" talks about a democratic revolution, regardless of culture, colour or creed, Gore Vidal claims it is not our business, and others cry "racism".
There is, of course, a strong rhetorical element in all this. The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, could well be a genuine believer in democratic revolutions, but his more conservative colleagues in the Bush administration may not have their hearts set on such radical goals. It is nonetheless interesting to see whom the neoconservatives in Washington managed to convert to their cause, at least as far as the war on Saddam Hussein was concerned. One of the noisiest journalistic cheerleaders for Bush's war was Christopher Hitchens. Since he has a Trotskyist past in common with some of the older American neoconservatives, there is a certain consistency in his promotion of revolutionary projects. Then, again, sending in the US army is a strange way to promote democratic revolutions.
More significant, by far, is the backing for Bush received from Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and especially Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner from East Timor. These are men, who, unlike most commentators in London or New York, know what it is like to live under the cosh. They paid the dues of voicing dissent when it was a matter of life and death. Havel and Michnik were subjects of Soviet imperialism. But the case of Ramos-Horta is more interesting, since he opposed a US-backed government, General Suharto's Indonesian regime. East Timor was a cherished cause for Chomsky and others on the left.
In an article published just before the Iraq war started, Ramos-Horta recalled the suffering of his people. He wrote: "There is hardly a family in my country that has not lost a loved one. Many families were wiped out during the decades of occupation by Indonesia and the war of resistance against it. Western nations contributed to this tragedy. Some bear a direct responsibility because they helped Indonesia by providing military aid." Thus far, none of our left-wing critics would disagree. The split comes in the conclusion. Ramos-Horta remembers how the western powers "redeemed themselves" by freeing East Timor from its oppressors with armed force. Why, then, should the Iraqis not be liberated too?
Ramos-Horta respects the motives of people who demonstrated against the war, although he wonders why, in all these demonstrations, he never saw "one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people". He knows that "differences of opinion and public debate over issues like war and peace are vital. We enjoy the right to demonstrate and express opinions today - something we didn't have during a 25-year reign of terror - because East Timor is now an independent democracy. Fortunately for all of us, the age of globalisation has meant that citizens have a greater say in almost every major issue. But if the anti-war movement dissuades the US and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead".
One might disagree with these words. But they have a moral authority mostly lacking in the polemics of those anti US intervention on principle. He has, however, stated a case that must be answered. Unless, of course, one really believes that the problems of faraway peoples are for them to solve alone, and that we have no business intervening on their behalf against tyrants, and that any attempt to do so has to be, by definition, racist, or colonialist, or venal.
This belief may indeed be more pragmatic, even realistic. But those who hold it should at least have the honesty to call themselves conservatives, of the Henry Kissinger school, and stop pretending they speak for the liberal-left."
Dead on.
