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Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market
Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").
(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)
The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".
I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.
No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.
(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)
The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".
I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.
No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.
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While France was opposing the Iraq invasion, they were unilaterally invading Cote d'Ivoire, including destroying the air force of the legitimate government (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526243), and massacring peaceful protesters (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3997885.stm).
In addition, during the 1990s, 60 percent of tropical hardwood sold in France came from the warlords of civil-war-torn Liberia (in John-Peter Pham, _Liberia, Portrait of a Failed State_).
This may not say anything about France's status as a ally of the US, but it says a lot about its stance as an upright and responsible member of the international community.
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???
In Chile, we gave money and advice to a native political faction, we did not march our own troops into the country and oust the regime by main force. I suggest you read up on the actual mechanics of the coup that ousted Allende.
Or about being an irresponsible member of the international community in general.
Doubly ???
Most of the trouble America has gotten into has been because we have tried to be a hyper-responsible member of the international community. We have intervened against invasions (such as the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam) which most of the world community was willing to idly watch completed by conquest. If not for us, the Soviet bloc would have captured the Third World during the Cold War.
With no immediate threat the size of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, we are quite willing to take our toys and go back home. This is, basically, what the French would like us to do -- they imagine that they would then have a free hand to reap colonial gains in Africa and the Mideast.
They are deluding themselves: an American return to isolationism would mean that, abruptly, third-tier Great Powers such as France would find themselves the primary defenders of their regions and interests against movements such as Islamic fundamentalism, not to mention the second tier Great Powers such as Russia and China. At that point, they would probably beg us to return and fight for them; and they might find their policy of encouraging American isolationism had succeeded a tad better than might then be convenient for themselves.
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Latin Americans are of course willing to blame the failure of their countries to rise to Great Powers on America: it's easier and feels better than addressing their institutional problems. It won't produce any progress, however.
I'm not saying that we haven't interefered in Latin American countries' internal politics. So have the Russians, so have the British, so have the French.
I'm saying that the real problem is the aspects of those countries' internal politics that make them attractive -- and in some cases necessary -- to interfere in.
Even when they eventually converted to imposing democracy instead of brutal military tyranny, their bullying ways and imposition of inappropriate free marketeering managed to make democracy itself look odious.
Oh my, how cruel of us, forcing countries to govern themselves! By the way, what is "inappropriate free marketeering?" When is "slave marketeering" preferable?
The results you can see right now in places such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where the anti-American backlash is entirely local in origin, let alone in Venezuela.
They are welcome to gut their own economies on the altars of socialism, if they prefer. If they ally with the Terrorists, though, we will hopefully oust their leaders so fast it will make their heads spin.
They can have the cell next to Manuel Noriega, with whom they can discuss their respective "dignities" :)
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Second, I grew up in Liberia, and lived a year in Cote d'Ivoire. I still have friends there, and got my information from them, not from any newspapers or the BBC.
I'm afraid that you are the one to have the fact wrong. Laurent Gbagbo won a democratic election that had been fixed by a military dictator, Robert Guei. The French didn't like Gbagbo because he wished to reduce the French economic stranglehold on his country -- thus leading to the French "Mugabeizing" smear.
And the civil war was between the Muslim north and Gbagbo's government in the south. It came about because Gbagbo was _anti-Muslim_, you twit! He riled up the Christian south against the large Muslim immigrant population from Burkina, etc.
You have a strange idea of democracy if you think that a democratically-elected president who came to power through a popular (and peaceful) protest against a military dictatorship is not "legitimate".
And you do not recall correctly about the protests in Abidjan. There was violence against French citizens and business, whose armed forces, after all, were engaged in systematically destroying their legitimate government's combat power. But the crowd in front of the Hotel Ivoire (in whose bowling lanes and ice-cream parlour I spent many a delightful hour) was entirely peaceful and non-threatening. There was an hour-long home video distributed on the net of the incident. The crowd was not threatening the French, who had drawn a cordon of armoured vehicles around the hotel. There was chanting, and singing, and then shots. People's heads really shouldn't be split open like that. It makes their brains spill out all over the pavement.
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Sounds good to me.
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The problem is that, in a lot of the world, one only has the choice between different flavors of murderers. You accused me of failing to respect the sub-Saharan Africans -- in most of those countries, the leaders of all popular factions are murderers and will murder some more if they gain power. What alternative would you propose ... especially since you are rejecting "recolonialization?"
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They both murder.
Re: They both murder.
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I would say that the constant of American policy is NOT that they know "what's better for France", or any other country. The constant is what they think is better for the USA, period, full stop, end of story. As it happens, from 1946-1990 the USA was in a global struggle for existence against the USSR, and did what it thought would help US interests. The US won that war, which I think is, in the end, a better outcome for the world than the alternative.
The source of American frustration with France is that when the US, having been forced back onto the world stage by 9/11, decides -- as one part of its overall strategy; read Robert Kaplan's _Imperial Grunts_ about some of the other less-visible parts -- to remove one of those dictators for which it was so roundly (and justly) criticized for propping up during the Cold War, it takes all kinds of opposition from a government that was itself hand-in-pocket with said dictator and at the very same time engaged in interfering, often violently, with numerous other countries' affairs.
I'm not defending the American record of foreign involvement. I'm defending the American disgust with France over criticising the US for its foreign involvement -- while engaging in the very same kinds of activities.
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It certainly shows a strong degree of French hypocrisy, given the far less egregious acts for which the French have condemned America. I've also never appreciated the French stance of moral superiority over Indochina, and their continued trade with North Vietnam during America's Vietnam War, given just who messed the place up so badly that the Communists were able to convince a significant number of Vietnamese to follow them as an alternative. And the French behavior during the War on Terror has been despicable, with the sort of short-term cunning and long-term sacrifice of French interests that France has been famous for since they bit at that telegram in 1870. I say "long-term sacrifice of French interests," because it never seems to have entered their pretty little Existentialist heads what position they are putting France in should they succeed in pushing America back into an isolationist mode.
But they certainly aren't as bad as the Russians and Chinese. The countries the French are pushing around are half- to quarter-civilized African joke-nations which probaly need some recolonization anyway if they are to avoid slipping into total anarchy. And they haven't engaged in a wholesale massacre of their own people since World War II, and that was under duress from Germany (another country that really should shut up and get out of the way of our war).
Perhaps France annoys us more than Russia, China, or Germany because the French are not only so incredibly arrogant about their role in history, but (unlike the Chinese) make their claims based on concepts of what constitutes excellence similar to our own. We can laugh at the Chinese idea of being "the Middle Kingdom" -- France, however, challenges us on grounds we have to take seriously.
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Because "the Third World" became such a source of "authenticity" to the academic Left, there has not been much examination of the incredible folly, perpetuated not only by the Truman but also the Eisenhower Administrations (so it was bipartisan), of American support for decolonization in the two decades immediately following World War II.
This support originated not only in outright Communist moles such as White and Hiss, but also in a general American hostility to empire which still exists today (the reasone we didn't really fight a "war for oil," which might have worked better in terms of American interests). Our nation having originated in an anti-colonial secession movement, we tended to uncritically support the anti-colonialists in our first essays at Great Power postwar diplomacy, both under Wilson at Versailles and under Truman and Eisenhower through the United Nations.
This had disastrous consequences. The small states of Central Europe that Wilson helped create were but appetizers to Hitler and Mussolini; the Third World nations that emerged from the post World War II breakup of colonial empires were not only small, and hence similar treats served up for the delectation of Stalin and his successors, but also barbaric, and hence barely able (in some cases unable) to even rule themselves.
We tended to draw analogies between the new Third World states and the nascent American Republic of the late 18th century; between their secession struggles and our own Revolutionary War. We missed the important difference: we were civilized and struggling to achieve liberty; they were barbaric and struggling to achieve local tyrannies. It was this confusion that led to the misguided American tolerance extended to Ho Chi Minh, Gamel Abdul Nasser, and Fidel Castro, in the beginning of their reigns.
The worst consequence of this was not our lack of support for France in 1945-54, but rather our lack of support for Britain, France and Israel in 1956 in the Suez Crisis. Here we took the side of Nasser against our own NATO allies and the only democracy in the Mideast, mostly to curry favor with the Third World.
To salve their pride the British and French have decided now that they were in the wrong, but they were clearly in the right -- Nasser was in violation of the teaty that had returned the Canal to Egyptian control. We gained nothing by this betrayal, and we paid heavily for it -- this is one of the reasons why Europe was willing to trade with North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Indeed, this was one of the direct provocations that turned France anti-American.
The lesson we should take from this: Never betray long-time allies to curry favor with potential allies.
That's the lesson I take from it, anyway.
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There is more, and you are not being nearly forceful enough. Eisenhower did not show "lack of support" in 1956 towards his own NATO allies: he stabbed them in the back, and incidentally allowed the Soviets to get away with their contemporary murder of Hungary. And from Versailles in 1919 to the Suez crisis, the American claim to be an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist power has only one real meaning: to reduce the major European powers to impotence. Like Wilson, Eisenhower wanted Europe to be essentially an American toy. The thrust of the Suez crisis was to make an independent European foreign policy impossible, and, thanks to British cowardice and subjection (the French and Israelis would have gone on), it succeeded for a few decades.
Essentially, however, Eisenhower had bet on the wrong horse. The Arabs were going nowhere - as Israel dramatically demonstrated in 1967 - and, in the long run, Soviet domination over Eastern Europe was untenable. Conversely, the vicious historicistic jargon of "declining powers" and "old Europe" does not allow people to notice the enormous concentration of economic power between Lisbon and Berlin and between Oslo and Palermo, a concentration that has done nothing but grow, and that, with the collapse of Soviet power, has received an extra boost. People are looking at China with wonder, but the real centre of the world's economy remains Europe. London has recently surpassed New York City as a trading centre, for the first time in ninety years. Europe is slowly awakening, confused and bewildered by fifty years of subservience, to its own enormous power. The only tool it is using to extend its reach, for the present, is money; but it has so much of that that its reach is constantly growing. European governments are having to make decisions on a world stage for the first time in fifty years, and no wonder that many of them move stupidly, ignorantly, or like men in a dream. But the legend of "declining" and "rising", "old" and "young" nations, must die once and for all, before people begin to realize what the world really is like.
I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
Really? How would you describe them?
"Failed states" is just a more polite way of saying the same thing.
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
You're ignoring a whole mess of Sub-Saharan African states here, including (offhand) Zimbabwe and Rwanda. Anyway, I never said that Africa was the only home of failed states; simply that it is one of the places they are commonly found. Which is true.
I have no prejudice against black people. I have a lot of prejudice against post-colonials sub-Saharan African states, however, based on the historical examples. They tend to be incredibly violent and sadistic dictatorships, with their origin in atrocious civil wars. This is reality; the idea of sub-Saharan Africa as "just another part of the world" is a comforting fantasy.
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
She had little good to say about her home country. She spent a great deal of time telling me about the problems with local warlords that the government was either unable or unwilling to put down, about fighting between muslims and Christians, about the extreme poverty and lack of education, and about how, in her view, the current government of the country is run by "thugs". She used the word "barbaric" to describe the state of her own country, more than once.
And she lived in the city, where most of the time they had electricity, running water, public transportation, and the internet. I imagine in rural areas, it was even worse.
So, "quarter-civilized", while a rather rough and rude description, may not necessarily be a bad one. At least, for Zona's experience of Nigeria, anyway. (She is back there now, and stuck, due to problems with extending her Student Visa.)
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
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The conflict in Cote d'Ivoire (formerly one of the _most_ civilized nations in sub-saharan Africa) also involved spill-over from the Liberian disaster, financed by blood diamonds and, oh yeah, the French hardwood industry.
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
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If other countries "may see fit to intervene", then the US may see fit to invade Iraq (whose war with the Kurds and Shia was only held in check by continuing US presence -- this was one of the points in JHR-114), and France should not criticise, given that it was also engaged in intervention.
If the US invasion was not legitimate (warmongering cowboyism, remember, not just a bad idea), then neither was France's, and France should not criticise.
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Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
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Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
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Quelling the Infection