Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

[fpb]

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

Comments

[kulibali]

First of all, I am a Canadian citizen, which you would know if you had taken 30 seconds to look at my profile.

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.

[fpb]

If I was wrong, I was wrong. I admit it. But don't come and tell me that the Americans did not engineer the Pinochet coup (in a country that had never known a military coup before), when the people who did it at the time are still bragging of their part in it now. Don't come and tell me that they did not play the same game dozens of times from at least the fifties to the eighties, on the principle that a military murderer and thief is better than a Communist military murderer and thief. And if we are to bring in personal experience, I was in Italy in the sixties and seventies when no less than five or six right-wing coups were attempted; and in the eighties, when no less a figure than the President of the Republic, Cossiga, revealed that most of these involved a "secret army" called Gladio, created and financed by the Americans. And since we are talking about France, you may remember that the estrangement between France and the US began when FDR, the hero of democracy, did everything in his power to support Vichy and exclude De Gaulle - who had put his life and that of his few supporters on the line in the allied cause from the beginning - as legitimate representatives of France. In that case as in those of Pinochet and other Latin American tyrants, the Americans simply decided that they knew what was better for France better than the French did. This is a constant of American policy.

[notebuyer]

the principle that a military murderer and thief is better than a Communist military murderer and thief

Sounds good to me.

[fpb]

Murder has no colour. If you think otherwise, I am afraid I find myself forced to defriend you right now.

[jordan179]

If the choice is between two flavors of murderer for the local government, why would you want to see the Communist one in power in preference to the pro-Western one? I can see one and only one reason -- having a murderer on one's own side makes one look bad.

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?"

[fpb]

This is the kind of thinking that led the US to support murderous mujaheddeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. What followed from that, we all know. It is OK to ally oneself with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but to assume that one has to take part in any monstrous struggle between monsters is plain stupid. When the struggle is between murderers, and when no desperate national interest is concerned, it is better not to be involved at all.

[jordan179]

This is the kind of thinking that led the US to support murderous mujaheddeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. What followed from that, we all know.

The first thing that it helped cause was the defeat of international Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union. These were not trivial victories.

It is in the nature of things that in any large conflict (such as the Cold War), one will not be able to avoid unsavory allies. It is also in the nature of things that, after the war is won, some of those allies may turn into enemies.

It is OK to ally oneself with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but to assume that one has to take part in any monstrous struggle between monsters is plain stupid.

Why is it ok to ally with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but not to ally with the Afghan rebels (not all by any means of whom were Taliban) when trying to survive the Soviet Union?

When the struggle is between murderers, and when no desperate national interest is concerned, it is better not to be involved at all.

Had we followed your advice, we might not have won the Cold War, because the resources of many Third World countries would have been added to the Soviet empire.

[fpb]

So you think that the Soviet Union would not have collapsed without the Afghanistan war? I disagree. And as for the resources of many third world countries being added to the Soviet Empire - they were. Are you old enough to remember the seventies? I am. The whole third world, except for a few Latin American military dictatorship, was in the Soviet Union's pockets. The West was besieged, under attack by terrorists from the inside and by economic warfare from the outside (the deliberate use of oil as a weapon). Inflation was up to 25% in some countries, unemployment in the tens of millions. And then, one day, the besieged citadel woke and found that there were no besiegers any more; that the Soviet Union was looking for deals, that the third world could no longer support the burden of their own debt, that the oil bloc could not keep up its artificial price in the face of their own internal hatreds - Saudi Arabia vs. Iraq vs. Iran - and that the Soviet Union was quite willing to underprice them anyway. Do you know what defeated the Soviet Union? Afghanistan? Don't be ridiculous: that was a footling affair that any Russian government could have kept going for ever. What defeated them was that immense Mother Russia, with the broadest and most fertile arable lands in the world, was having to import grain from Canada and the US. That the cars in its streets were cheap knock-offs of outdated Fiat models produced under licence. That most families lived in two-rooms prefabricated flats. That people had to queue for hours to buy bread, while food supplies rotted in railway sidings for lack of organization. That the ships of the mighty Soviet navy had engines that had to be started by chucking a lighted match into a pilot flame. That is what put an end to the Soviet Union: it had become economically dependent on the West. As had all its other enemies. And so, one day, the citizens of the besieged citadels walked out and started taking care of the affairs of their enemies. It was wealth that did it, my friend, the accumulation of capital in Tokyo and New York, in London and Paris and Frankfurt; capital without which the rest of the world could no longer live. And that capital accumulated there and nowhere else - in West Berlin and not in East Berlin - because the one society was free and the other was not. Freedom, political freedom, was the ultimate power on the victorious side. Afghanistan only showed that the Soviets were too tired to fight it any more - Stalin, or any Tsar, would have disposed of the nuisance in five years flat. It also, incidentally, allowed some Americans a certain amount of pleasing revenge for the similar Hell cooked up for them by the Soviets a few years earlier in Vietnam. But as for having any ultimate meaning, any war would have done as well - or no war at all.

They both murder.

[notebuyer]

And yes, murder is bad. Torture is bad. But there is another distinction, made by Jeane Kirkpatrick:

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other
resources, which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual
rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal
relations.

Essentially, the autocracies protect their own power and wealth, but leave most other aspects of life relatively untouched. As the name implies, they are more concerned with who in society will wield authority, i.e. themselves, than with imposing any particular ideology. Because this is the case, they in fact preserve many of the institutions upon which democracy can later be built, whether the Church or corporations or other civic organizations.

Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, as the name implies, seek to totally reinvent and control every aspect of society. This requires them to so violate the existing institutions as to render the society nearly incapable of evolving into a democracy.

In other words, the disrespect for the reality of personhood by totalitarian regimes is not specific, but general. And that violation means that even when it stops short of murder, destruction and violence, it continues to insist on itsr right to control all social and human institutions without regard to their human, and divine, foundation.

While I would regret being dropped from your list of friends (since I rather enjoy the exchanges from which I can, sometimes, learn), you will remain on my list of friends.

Re: They both murder.

[fpb]

Kirkpatrick's distinction always struck me as one of the most odious pieces of apologetics ever designed by a clever and unprincipled person to make followers believe that black is white. The moral characteristic of police states is exactly the same, whether they drape themselves in black or in red. The midnight knock at the door, the terrified rumours about what happens in certain buildings and certain camps in the country, the sudden disappearances - sometimes for no discernible reason - and the creeping fear and demoralization that follows them, do not change. Kirkpatrick would have done better to point out that, in point of fact, most Latino military murderers killed rather less than most Communists did. Pinochet's proven murders, for instance, are about four thousand, which makes him a positive slacker as compared to most Communists. But any notion that government by fear and disappearance does not violate the basics of humanity is unworthy of an honest person. If you want a reason why Kirkpatrick was universally hated in Europe, this disgusting argument (as heard by societies where Fascism was a living memory) is a very good one.

[kulibali]

Don't confuse me with other posters. I said nothing about Pinochet or about American meddling in other countries' affairs. I simply was trying to point out that French criticism of America on that score is breath-takingly hypocritical.

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.

[fpb]

What started this polemic - in another thread - was my disgust at the ignorant right-wing American attitude to France, and specifically to something that offended me, personally, very much. I am a cartoonist and a comics fan from of old, and once upon a time, Captain America used to be one of my favourite Marvel heroes. I was disgusted to find that some moron had made him use "France" as synonimous with surrender, and that started the whole thing. Any complaints about French African policies are in the nature of red herrings, dragged across the trail to draw attention away from the sickening ignorance and vanity of this sort of attitudes.

[kulibali]

You started this thread with the following: "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." You then proceeded to say that this precipitated vocal criticism (and admittedly invalid historical revisionism) of France from a certain segment of American society.

However, the French did NOT merely say that they thought that an invasion & occupation of Iraq was "not ... a good idea". They criticized the US for being warmongering cowboys (in so many words). I am arguing that the American reaction was in disgust at such blatant hypocrisy, given that France was engaging in just such unilateral military faction elsewhere in the globe. French African policy is entirely relevant.

[fpb]

I told you what started this polemic. To take this position is as good as to call me a liar. Please remember that this is my LJ and that I am the ultimate judge of what goes in it. If you insist on fruitless and one-sided reiterations of what I told you is a side issue, I will have to put an end to this debate.

[kulibali]

I am not calling you a liar. I simply believe you are wrong in thinking that French African policy has no bearing on the argument. You may choose to ignore a line of evidence in an argument if you like, but that does not make it any less valid.

[fpb]

It has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not ignorant Americans are justified in calling the French cowards. I was in the Italian Army when the Americans, having suffered one major terrorist attack, left Lebanon without even warning their supposed allies, a small British force and large French and Italian ones. And everyone remembers the similarly precipitate retreat from Somalia. A nation that, in the face of enemy fire, decamps without even warning its own allies, has no business calling anybody cowardly.