Liberal imperialists: send Blackwater into Darfur! posted by lenin

According to the Financial Times:

Mia Farrow, the actress and activist, has asked Blackwater, the US private security company active in Iraq, for help in Darfur after becoming frustrated by the stalled deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force.

Ms Farrow said she had approached Erik Prince, founder and owner of Blackwater, to discuss whether a military role was either feasible or desirable.

Labels: darfur, humanitarian intervention, sudan, the liberal defense of murder

Politics of Disasters posted by Yoshie

A cyclone devastates Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, and an earthquake strikes China's Sichuan Province, and the empire smells blood, itching to send "aid at the point of a gun," urging the United Nations to invoke the "responsibility to protect": "France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta."¹ Why such an unseemly display of arms? Because a natural disaster can turn into a legitimation crisis, giving foreign powers a shot at regime change.

[N]othing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet -- China and Burma -- struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes -- and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.²

A regime's failure to respond promptly and effectively to suffering caused by a natural disaster, the failure that the opposition can exploit, can indeed become a factor in its downfall. Such was the case with the Shah's regime and the earthquake of 1978 that wiped out Tabas and damaged forty other villages in Iran.

Michel Foucault reported in Corriere della sera on 28 September 1978:

Who will rebuild Tabas today? Who will rebuild Iran after the earthquake of Friday, September 8 [Black Friday, when the army massacred hundreds of protesters in Djaleh Square of Tehran], right under the treads of the tanks? The fragile political edifice has not yet fallen to the ground, but it is irreparably cracked from top to bottom.

In the torrid heat, under the only palm trees still standing, the last survivors of Tabas work away at the rubble. The dead are still stretching their arms to hold up walls that no longer exist. Men, their faces turned toward the ground, curse the Shah. The bulldozers have arrived, accompanied by the empress; she was ill received. However, mullahs rush in from the entire region; and young people in Tehran go discreetly from one friendly house to another, collecting funds before leaving for Tabas. "Help your brothers, but nothing through the government, nothing for it," is the call that Ayatollah Khomeini has just issued from exile in Iraq.³

Neither Islamic nor Marxist nor liberal revolutionaries of Iran, however, called upon the West to claim its "right to protect" and send its armies to save them from the Shah. They overthrew the Shah's regime on their own, and Iran's Islamic Revolution has grown into a republic that can survive natural disasters, such as the earthquake of 2003 that destroyed Bam, killing more than 20,000 and injuring many more.

One of the casualties of the Bam earthquake was an American man, Tobb Dell'Oro, who was vacationing with his fiancée Adele Freedman in the city. Freedman, who credits the "kindness of the Iranian people" for her survival,⁴ became the subject of an important documentary film, Bam 6.6: Humanity Has No Borders (Dir. Jahangir Golestan-Parast, 2007), which shows Iranians' solicitude for her wellbeing and gracious hospitality to her parents who initially thought Iran would be a terrible place for Jewish Americans like them to visit but have changed their minds about the Iranian people.

The Bam earthquake also moved many of the normally fractious Iranian diaspora, as well as the populace of Iran, to solidarity, holding benefits and raising funds for their countrymen and women in need back home.

Artists did their part, too. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the finest musician in Iran, held a concert
همنوا با بم [In Harmony with Bam] with Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, and Homayoun Shajarian in remembrance of the victims of the earthquake.


Iran's Islamic government, by the way, did not reject international, including American, offers of assistance -- unlike the Bush White House who didn't let Cuba or Iran help Americans after Hurricane Katrina -- and welcomed international NGOs as well, even though well-intentioned outsiders can create as many hindrances as aids they bring:

In a recent lessons-learned meeting on the Bam earthquake in Iran, a polite and respectful colleague from the Iranian Ministry of Health related his frustration at international NGO coordination in the early days of the emergency. He said that, at the same time as he was desperately trying to set up field hospitals and bury the dead, representatives from over 100 international NGOs had individually requested meetings with him. He appreciated their help, he said, but some organisations wanted to ask him about the siting of rural clinics when he was still trying to arrange emergency medical evacuations. Was there no way, he asked, that these agencies could organise themselves better in the early days of a disaster?⁵

But Iran's government, even under President Khatami, would not have accepted international relief if it had been imposed upon it by a show of force.

1 Robert D. Kaplan, "Aid at the Point of a Gun," New York Times, 14 May 2008.

2 Naomi Klein, "Regime-Quakes in Burma and China," The Nation, 15 May 2008.

3 Michel Foucault, "The Army -- When the Earth Quakes," in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, U of Chicago P, 2005, p. 190. An endnote omitted from the quotation and replaced by a parenthetical editorial clarification.

4 Corey Kilgannon, "For One Earthquake Survivor, Joy Is Tempered by Sorrow," New York Times, 10 January 2004.

5 Jenty Wood, "Improving NGO Coordination: Lessons from the Bam Earthquake," Humanitarian Practice Network, 2003.

Labels: burma, china, film review, humanitarian intervention, imperial ideology, imperialism, iran, love music hate racism

Rambo does humanitarian intervention posted by lenin

So here's what happens. There's a genocide in Myanmar, right, and Rambo happens to be nearby with a big boat stacked full of military equipment. Except, the big dumb goofball is too cautious to get messed up in something that ain't his business. He's become an isolationist after defeating world communism, you see. And then, right, this bunch of human rights workers or something plead to use his boat to travel up to some unspecified part of Burma to try and help the poor local Burmese people who are being rather brutally taken apart by men with guns and sticks and things that spray fire. One of them, a white woman whose heart curdles with the milk of human kindness, tries to persuade the stupid, over-armed American behemoth to take notice of the plight of the poor oppressed people. Only when she and her fellow workers are kidnapped (she is predictably on the verge of rape by some oversexed Oriental) does Rambo remember that he's got a conscience, and he starts kicking ass in the most gruesome ways imaginable. He's such a cold, unforgiving instrument of God that, when he strikes, the enemy is almost certain to explode in a shower of pulped flesh and blood. Naturally, neither the enemy nor their Burmese victims have distinquishable features. Their faces don't quite register, and they have no real stories of their own. An amorphous mass, they either personify abject victimhood or eeeevvvillll.

Incidentally, it is odd that they should pick Myanmar for their genocide tourism, because reports last year suggested that the mortality rate for males aged 15-25 is close to that achieved in Cambodia under Pol Pot. This is not because the repressive government - which provides British capital with a flood of low-price commodities - engages in arbitrary or group-based murder (although it does those things too - about 2% of the population experiences a family member being shot at, beaten or stabbed by government forces). It is because it is a capitalist dictatorship, based on forced labour (up to a third of the population experiences this), with nothing that could be called a social security system. Malnourishment, starvation and treatable or preventable malaria cause the bulk of deaths as a consequence. That is to say, this grim tale is simply part of the reality of global capitalism, partaking of some of its worst ills. Obviously, the UK government repays the regime's services to capital with a steady supply of armaments. So, if Rocky does want to fuck with the Burmese, he has to go through the British first.

Labels: genocide, humanitarian intervention, mooovies, racism, rambo

The primitive accumulation of moral capital. posted by lenin

For liberal interventionists like Michael Ignatieff as much as for neoconservatives like Robert Kagan, there is a 'we', a 'West', an 'America' or some other such collective agent whose actions can be expressed variously through states, aid outfits, pressure groups, PR campaigners and such. Hence, one finds Ignatieff introducing a volume on American Exceptionalism and Human Rights by explaining that Americans have been uniquely involved in pursuing human rights agendas overseas, conflating the actions of AIDS campaigners with those of the State Department (whose statements and press releases he happily takes at face value at any rate) and expounding on the strange paradox that the US nevertheless seems ill-disposed to accepting international human rights laws. How strange. After all, the US chose to ratify the Genocide Convention several decades after its original formulation and acceptance by most other democratic states (Ignatieff prefers the word 'democracies' to the phrase 'democratic states') - and yet, no one accuses the US of support for, complicity or involvement in, or perpetration of genocide.

Again, as he introduces readers to Warrior's Honour, his Huntington-lite guide to the conflicts in Yugoslavia, he describes an urgent mission to describe the sudden willingness of 'Westerners' to go about the world righting wrongs, an historically unlikely fate he avers, since morality has been traditionally bound by tribal solidarities. And again, all the way through Virtual War, his collection of apologetics for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, Ignatieff rehearses what 'Americans' did and did not do, what 'the West' did, and so on. These are not used to imply group designations that summon loyalty: they occlude and obscure distinctions which urgently need to be made.

This is hardly unique. It is a pattern of thought ritually encouraged by the assumption of 'national', 'local' or 'school' credit for the actions of individual sportspeople or whatever. Yet persisting with this fetish is hardly indicative of critical thought. Indeed, in reading through some assorted dreck about the Yugoslav wars, most of it presented as a curious admixture of academese, journalism and humanitarianism, the pre-9/11 elaboration of a 'clash of civilisations' theme (the apparent inability of different tribes or ethnicities to coexist without some degree of distance and separation) is dominant. And if most of it is not so sanguine about the great deeds of 'Westerners' and 'Americans', it nevertheless relies upon a sort of artificial unity of state and people. A typical phrase introducing the relationship between 'Western' public opinion and 'Western' state policies says something like this: "As the images of atrocities flickered across television screens, outraged citizens demanded action...". Not only Virtual War, Ignatty dear, a whole virtual democracy, with virtual outrage and virtual virtuosity assembled around the television. People see, people react, politicians are finally stirred from their slothful, hidebound ways, and some people get saved - all too late, of course.

In this way, media conglomerations acquire the status of humanitarian watchdogs, imperial states with global reach are converted into hermits, and a largely passive desire by television viewers for someone to do something becomes the height of civic duty. The organic unity of the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, CNN, President Clinton, the American public, the military high command and the national security state is thus established through a series of artful inversions. Wars prosecuted by a discrete hierarchy of professional combatants under the direction and authorisation of acquire not only democratic legitimacy, but also the reflected sentimental glory of humanitarianism, conscience, tears, frustration and the longing for a shared human community.

The always-present reference to the images mediating people's understanding of conflict, oppression (the axes of class and exploitation being habitually suppressed and denied) is not only a way of implying a critique of the media that never comes to fruition (since, for example, Ignatieff has no real conflict with his enthusiastic employers). The point about referring to television screens and flickering images is to evoke the one shared experience that is utterly passive, totally without genuine involvement, completely atomised, static and temporary - it is a zone of engagement that is least likely to be engaged, a highly personal but utterly uniform arena of efficacy that has no compulsory effects. All you have to do is wait for the war, then cheer it on when it comes. Bearing no immediate consequences, one's sitting room humanitarianism is apparently the ideal disposition. Well fuck public outrage - if you really want to do something to help an oppressed group, then form an international brigade, raise money and be prepared to evade Europol's new 'counterterrorism' squad.

Labels: genocide, humanitarian intervention, ignatieff, kosovo, spectacle, yugoslavia