The Altruism of Imperialism

Jean Bricmont. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.

Richard Seymour. The Liberal Defence of Murder. London/New York: Verso, 2008.

Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Robespierre once argued that “nobody likes armed missionaries.”  That was in the context of an argument with Brissot de Warville (and those of his ilk generally known as Girondins) who, anticipating elements of the Bush administration, advocated a preemptive attack on the royalists who had run away from the Revolution and their foreign enablers.  Further, according to Brissot, this act of liberation could only be greeted with enthusiasm by the burghers of Koblenz.  To indelicately state the obvious the people of Koblenz were much like the people of Baghdad in not greeting their “liberators” with open arms; while Brissot arguably got what he deserved George W. Bush has really good seats to Texas Rangers baseball games and a presidential library. To heighten the indignity,  history has robbed Brissot of the credit of formulating the Bush Doctrine.

Samantha Power who currently runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council argues that it is the moral responsibility of the United States government to intervene militarily to prevent genocide.  Who could be against the prevention of a genocidal slaughter?  The problem is that this “responsibility to protect” argument transcends simply intervening to halt genocide and allows the ideological cover for a less exalted form of imperialism on the part of the world’s leading interventionist.

Power was reportedly one of the leading advocates of a humanitarian intervention in Libya inside the Obama administration.  At the time of this writing Muammar Gaddafi has been freshly killed and the era of despotism has been vanquished.  The problem is that what started as a humanitarian military intervention to save the civilians of Benghazi has “worked” to achieve regime change. This template for humanitarian imperialism is now far more likely to happen again. Just as Brissot and Bush couched their plans for conquest in humanitarian language so the Obama administration has made imperialism an altruistic activity.

In “A Problem From Hell” Power chronicles the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, who originated the term genocide, to bring the issue to the attention of the world.  The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December of 1948.  Springing into action the United States Senate became the ninety-eighth nation to ratify thirty-eight short years later.

One of the most endearing parts of Power’s book is the story of Senator William Proxmire’s relentless struggle to have the Genocide Convention adopted by the Senate.  Proxmire, a democrat from Wisconsin, used his one minute speech in the Senate 3,211 times to argue for the ratification of the Convention.  Finally, in 1986 that ratification occurred.

Richard Seymour, also known for his blog Lenin’s Tomb, in The Liberal Defence of Murder directly criticizes Power for paying no attention to the worst crimes of Western states e.g. Guatemala and East Timor. She also somehow forgot to include the atrocities in Indochina committed by the U.S. which were quasi-genocidal.  Seymour asserts that “The assumption that the US military will have the answer to genocidal violence wherever it is occupying cannot work without this historical forgetting.” (p. 219)

Seymour argues the process by which the U.S. government launches imperialistic wars of conquest, while at the same time comparing itself favorably to Oxfam, began with the first Gulf War in 1991. The idea that Empires can be trusted to perform good deeds out of a sense of altruism is absurd.  The Gulf War was the real beginning of the exaltation of humanitarian intervention. It is from this point that a straight line can be drawn to the logic of humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia, which in turn laid the groundwork for the debacle in Iraq. 

Supporting American or European power against aspects of global power deemed even more barbaric was irresistible for some.  The “nouveaux philosophes” i.e. Bernard Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner (“Mr. Humanitarian Intervention”), and Alain Finkielkraut were galvanized by a logic of “lesser evilism.” Formerly left-wing intellectuals accommodating themselves to capitalism has led to what Seymour has labeled an “energetic depoliticization of the issues.”  Politics as thus been reduced to a disingenuous discourse of human rights.

Jean Bricmont in Humanitarian Imperialism Using Human Rights to Sell War argues that the well-meaning advocates of humanitarian intervention provide “moralistic cover for the cynicism of a Donald Rumsfeld.”  Since the West is all about “widespread indifference to criminal policies pursued with a perfectly clear conscience” (p. 57) the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” is perfectly suited to these nefarious ends.  This is the epoch when the U.S. Navy can advertise itself as “a global force for good.”  Moralizing rhetoric combined with cynical practice has flourished remarkably in places like Afghanistan.

Bricmont maintains that ideology is the most effective form of social control in a democratic society; a free press is a brilliant propaganda tool in the service of imperialism.   So the defense of human rights serves as the righteous basis of Western imperialism in its offensive against the former socialist bloc and Third World countries escaping from the cold embrace of colonialism. He goes as far as to suggest that humanitarian interventionism has become today’s new opium.

There is a stunning hypocrisy in what liberal imperialists will defend.  Most U.S. Democrats, European Social Democrats, and Greens defend democracy domestically but call for the dictatorship role for a small group of countries on the international level (Obama being the modern version of Gladstone in this respect).  An international Herrenvolk democracy has been created; American liberal ideology has conquered the world. Because Bricmont believes that there is nothing more hopelessly utopian than the notion that there can be stability in a world under American hegemony, he proposes an organization for our time. The watchdog organization that he proposes would be called “Imperialism Watch.”  Its mission would be to denounce wars and war propaganda as well as the economic pressures and other maneuvers that make injustice thrive and prosper. 

All of this might lead us to ask a couple of relevant questions.  Was Rachel Corrie a true example of humanitarian intervention as Richard Seymour suggests? Or, when President Romney launches his first humanitarian assault to whom should he rightfully give credit?

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The Cyclist

Berberian, Viken. The Cyclist: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

I know almost nothing about Berberian as a writer. According to Amazon.com he writes for newspapers, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Financial Times, and others. He has a second novel out, Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets, 2007.  When I say that Berberian is a poet, I do not know whether or not he writes poetry, but his use of language in The Cyclist shows a love and mastery of language that one associates with the careful precise use of poets. Berberian's protagonist is a young man who, the reader learns only towards the end of the novel, was recruited into a terrorist organization (the Academy) following a major bomb explosion of his natal village market square. His target is to be the Summerland Hotel on the beaches of Lebanon. It is clear that this act of revenge is to be carried out regardless of the loss of innocent lives, beleaguered citizens of a battle scarred country.

In preparation for this attack, the protagonist trains to take part in a bicycle race, eventually to veer off from the pack, and to take the bomb to the hotel where he will activate it to kill the maximum number of people. Having sustained great injuries as a result of his training, the novel opens with the cyclist in a hospital bed, unable to blink, unable to eat, unable to move, unable to speak because of a cycling accident. Through careful attention from medical experts and familial and Academy members, one of whom he is a childhood friend Ghaemi who he is very much in love with, the cyclist makes complete recovery.

The novel is written in a sort of stream of consciousness. The reader is unclear what is going on, because the narrator is also only partially informed and aware of what is happening. We have no idea whether Ghaemi loves him or is acting as a loyal member of the Academy. We do not know the sincerity of the leader Sadji who travels, buys clothes at the most expensive boutiques, and, in the name of deception and fact finding, spends time recreating with the higher levels of society. We do know that neither Ghaemi nor Sadji intend to risk their lives to carry out their prime initiative. Neither do we know whether they have had something to do with the accident that put the cyclist in the hospital, whether anything they say can believed beyond its power to manipulate the protagonist.

The cyclist is a lover of food and this figures as prominently in his thoughts as love and desire for Ghaemi. Once out of the hospital, the cyclist follows the path set out for him by the Academy. The reader begins to see the events that have brought him to the point of carrying out mass murder, but the logic of an action that harms the same people who are being avenged  is never apparent. There is no logic, only passion, and seductive power. As the cyclist inadvertently meets, face to face, people who will be victims of his action, the juice man who saved his life after the first accident, a cellist who escapes one terrorist act only to unwittingly be confronted by his, the cyclist's own grasp of the logic of his action begins to crumble.

Berberian, through his narrator, illustrates the richness of a culture eviscerated by wars and American hegemony through the succulent elements of its cuisine and culinary practices. As the protagonist prepares himself for his bloody task, he calms himself through the repetition of instructions and concepts, the importance of bicycle helmets, the baby that is his bomb and the baby that could be his and Ghaemi's true child, the listing of dishes and their ingredients.

As the novel reaches its conclusion, the cyclist attempts to explain how he has come so far beyond his passion for the tastes of his native cuisine to the task of an out of scale revenge. He tells his readers or listeners or imagined audience, "I suppose one can be philosophical and ask as I do every day why some of us return home safely after a morning of shopping at the fish market, sifting through rows of mollusk and marlin, while others become the target of a mugging, a beating, even a bombing. For years I have wrestled to find the answer. But what is the point of procrastination? The road to terrorism does not begin with boredom." (170).

It is clear as the narration progresses, that the protagonist does not want to die, and his determination to carry out the plan becomes rattled when, the night before he is to carry out the bombing, he is told by Sadji that the plan has changed and they want him to explode the bomb in effect, as a suicide, "deliver the baby straight from your bosom" (162).

The rest I leave for you to discover.

I didn't realize until after I had read the novel that it was written in 2002. Since I just bought it in a small bookstore (Bindlestiff between 44th and 45th on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia), I just assumed it was new. I was already amazed with the intricate beauty of Berberian's writing on such a subject...giving the reader so much to think about and weigh, but my amazement is magnified thinking of the task of writing this so soon after the 9/11 event--provoking both sympathy and judgment in the reader.

Find this novel at a library near you.