Imperialist austerity posted by Richard Seymour

You'll remember Dov Weisglass's 'quip' about putting the Palestinians on a diet.  As he put it:

“It’s like a meeting with a dietitian. We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.”

Now the cold calculus of Israeli near-starvation policy has been exposed in detail:

After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally released a 2008 document that detailed its "red lines" for "food consumption in the Gaza Strip."

The document calculates the minimum number of calories necessary, in COGAT's view, to keep Gaza residents from malnutrition at a time when Israel was tightening its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip, including food products and raw materials. The document states that Health Ministry officials were involved in drafting it, and the calculations were based on "a model formulated by the Ministry of Health ... according to average Israeli consumption," though the figures were then "adjusted to culture and experience" in Gaza.

....

In September 2007, the cabinet, then headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, decided to tighten restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from the Gaza Strip. The "red lines" document was written about four months afterward.

The cabinet decision stated that "the movement of goods into the Gaza Strip will be restricted; the supply of gas and electricity will be reduced; and restrictions will be imposed on the movement of people from the Strip and to it." In addition, exports from Gaza would be forbidden entirely. However, the resolution added, the restrictions should be tailored to avoid a "humanitarian crisis."

...

The "red lines" document calculates the minimum number of calories needed by every age and gender group in Gaza, then uses this to determine the quantity of staple foods that must be allowed into the Strip every day, as well as the number of trucks needed to carry this quantity. On average, the minimum worked out to 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be supplied by 1,836 grams of food, or 2,575.5 tons of food for the entire population of Gaza.

Bringing this quantity into the Strip would require 170.4 truckloads per day, five days a week.

From this quantity, the document's authors then deducted 68.6 truckloads to account for the food produced locally in Gaza ­ mainly vegetables, fruit, milk and meat. The documents note that the Health Ministry's data about various products includes the weight of the package (about 1 to 5 percent of the total weight) and that "The total amount of food takes into consideration 'sampling' by toddlers under the age of 2 (adds 34 tons per day to the general population)."

From this total, 13 truckloads were deducted to adjust for the "culture and experience" of food consumption in Gaza, though the document does not explain how this deduction was calculated.

While this adjustment actually led to a higher figure for sugar (five truckloads, compared to only 2.6 under the Health Ministry's original model),
it reduced the quantity of fruits and vegetables (18 truckloads, compared to 28.5), milk (12 truckloads instead of 21.1), and meat and poultry (14 instead of 17.2).

 

Labels: free palestine, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, imperialism, Israel, palestine, zionism

BBC: keep the pressure on posted by Richard Seymour

Let's see: we have a campaign of protests and returning license fees. We have the initiatives of celebrities (see David Soul, Ursula Le Guin and China Mieville on the Stop the War website). We have had three BBC HQs occupied, the latest of which was BBC Manchester. There was also a new protest outside BBC Scotland yesterday. We have 112 170 MPs backing a motion to force the BBC to change its stance on the Gaza Crisis Appeal. We have the Archbishop of Canterbury sticking his beard in. Now we have the nobel prize winning head of the IAEA boycotting the BBC. Every time Mark Thomspon restates his position, he only sounds more incoherent. He cannot explain how ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 managed to show the appeal without a sudden collapse in viewer confidence. And now the UN, as if to underline the terrible needfulness of the situation in Gaza and the callousness of those who would withhold aid, has launched an appeal for $613m. Could the UN be... good Lord... taking sides? And amid all this talk about impartiality, what has been brought out in striking clarity, and even reported in some right-wing papers, is the BBC's manifest bias toward Israel. I tell you, even if the BBC doesn't back down on this, this campaign is going to make them rue the day. We can and should make it the worst decision Mark Thompson ever made.

Labels: bbc, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, Israel, war crimes, zionism

Gaza appeal posted by Richard Seymour

Watching this, you get a sense both of how insolent and stupid the BBC is being, and how frightened the Israeli government must be. It is extremely moderate, even - perhaps because it was made weeks ago, I don't know - somewhat understating the extent of the problem. It is as depoliticised as it is possible to be. Yet, it is still damaging for Israel because it is no secret how that suffering came about. And the demand of Israel and its supporters has been: cover up our war crimes, and don't do anything to help our victims, otherwise you're biased. That agenda is essentially what the BBC has acceded to. I note that, aside from the various celebrities speaking out (Samantha Morton, Bill Bailey, David Soul), The Guardian reported today that BBC workers were increasingly incensed at the attitude of the director-general. The NUJ and BECTU have also condemned the BBC. After having seen what all the fuss was about, those workers would be forgiven for going postal on the management.

Labels: bbc, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, Israel, palestine, war crimes, zionism

Update from Glasgow Stop the War posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: bbc, gaza, humanitarianism, Israel, stop the war coalition, war crimes, zionism

The very model of a modern director-general posted by Richard Seymour

From the archives:

"The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she 'started to cry' when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.

Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hardine Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country's political class.

Sources at the Beeb also suspect that it heralds a "softening" to the corporation's unofficial editorial line on the Middle East.

'This was the first visit of its kind by any serving director general, so it's clearly a significant development,' I'm told.

'Not many people know this, but Mark is actually a deeply religious man. He's a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors.'"

(Some sort of prize will be awarded to anyone who can suitably re-work the original Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics).

Update: Whatever happened to Orla Guerin?

Labels: bbc, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, Israel, war crimes, zionism

BBC HQ occupied! posted by Richard Seymour

Stop the War Coalition
Press Release
Saturday 25 January 2009
Immediate
www.stopwar.org.uk

Contact: Keith Boyd: 07912348366

BBC HEADQUARTERS OCCUPIED IN SCOTLAND

Over 100 supporters of Scottish Stop the War Coalition and Palestinian groups
have occupied the BBC headquaters in Glasgow. They say they will not end their
occupation until the BBC has reversed its decision not to broadcast an
emergency aid appeal for Gaza. The protestors are demanding to meet with a
senior representative of the BBC.

Keith Boyd, one of the protesters occupying BBC Scotland's HQ, can be contacted
on: 07912348366


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Andrew Burgin
07939 242 229
Press Office
Stop the War Coalition
27 Britannia Street
London WC1X 9JP
www.stopwar.org.uk

Labels: bbc, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, Israel, palestine, war crimes, zionism

The facts are insufficiently impartial posted by Richard Seymour

Facts are awkward. They take sides. They do not conveniently distribute themselves evenly along the spectrum of opinion and, therefore, they lack balance. They must either be suppressed or complemented by some lies. For instance. It is a matter of controversy only to Tzipi Livni that Gaza is experiencing a profound humanitarian crisis. Aside from the thousands dead and wounded, 50,000 people have been left homeless, 400,000 have been left without water, and 84% of the population have no secure source of food. Power shortages are normal - 40% of the population gets no electricity, while the remaining 60% only have intermittent access. Eight of Gaza's hospitals were partially destroyed by bombing and shelling during the war and 26 clinics were hit, and the whole medical system is suffering from severe shortages, including those resulting from having inadequate or non-existent power supplies. For over a month, access to Gaza's already diminished medical structure was severely reduced. By standards that are commonsensical, this is a humanitarian catastrophe. It has been worsened by the fact that, due to Israeli attacks on humanitarian workers, much aid delivery had to be suspended during the war itself. 89% of the people have received no aid at all. The simple fact is that if aid doesn't arrive soon, a great many people will suffer horribly and die.

The Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group of 13 UK-based humanitarian agencies, did what it usually does in such circumstances. It prepared an urgent campaign to raise funds from the British public, for Gaza. Under an agreement dating back to 1963, the BBC broadcasts the DEC's emergency appeals, and other broadcasters tend to follow suit. Yet, this time, they have refused, a decision that will deny the campaign millions of pounds. Other broadcasters are now using this as an excuse to refuse to carry the appeal. The BBC says that its decision was prompted by concerns that broadcasting such an appeal would call its impartiality into question. I have to confess, I have absolutely no idea what this can mean. Does it actually mean anything? Note that the BBC didn't consider its broadcast on Kosovo, just under a decade ago, to have any implications for its impartiality. This despite the fact that the (very real) humanitarian crisis in Kosovo was at that point being used as a justification for war by the NATO powers that were at that point actually co-responsible for the crisis through their bombing campaign. In that case, there was an obvious consequence of broadcasting the DEC's appeal, inasmuch as it could have fed into pro-war propaganda and facilitated further carnage - but only a miserly sod would have demanded that it be withdrawn on those grounds. In the case of the Gaza appeal, the only likely consequence of broadcasting it is that some people get a slightly more comfortable and prolonged life. Obviously, the consequence of not broadcasting it is that they don't. The BBC is therefore clearly not being impartial. It is taking sides, effectively boycotting aid for Gaza on the apparent assumption that their job is to avoid offending Israel's supporters.

Tomorrow's protest starts outside BBC Broadcasting House at Portland Place, from 1.30pm. In the meantime, Stop the War recommends that you call the BBC and complain, on this number: 03700 100 222. Press 3 for complaints. And you might also consider donating to the DEC appeal.

Labels: bbc, gaza, humanitarianism, Israel, stop the war coalition

Sentimentality as the superstructure of barbarism posted by Richard Seymour

In a way, the few increasingly deranged voices spewing pro-Israeli propaganda, right when it is engaged in a degenerate war against civilians underwritten by a military doctrine that deems collective punishment a virtue, are talking themselves into a corner. The more strident their voice, the less convincing they are. They more voluble they are, the less they have to say. And, the more emotive their language, the more barbarous is their logic - but then, as Jung once supposedly said, sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality. So, then, consider this eye-opening tribute to Israeli humanitarianism - in Jenin, no less:

as part of its operation against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, Israel did not launch a massive and indiscriminate air assault. Instead it sent troops into Jenin. The result was between 50 and 60 Palestinian deaths, almost all of them fighters (not the massacre of 500 originally reported and eagerly believed by so many). But the Jenin operation also cost the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers.

That is to say, Israel sacrificed the lives of its own sons to avoid massive casualties among Palestinian non-combatants.

Emphasis in original. For Israel so loved the Palestinians that it sacrificed its "own sons" in order to save them. This reminds me of that other example of condign humanitarianism described at Harry's Place, in which Israeli hospitals treat Palestinians who have been wounded by Israeli violence. The argument apparently being that Israel does blow the Palestinians to pieces, but it also puts some of them back into one piece, and is thus essentially giving the Palestinians the gift of surprise. Still, let us stick with Jenin, the refugee camp and city attacked amid a general assault by Ariel Sharon on the Occupied Territories in the spring of 2002. The fact that Israel launched a ground invasion in Jenin, just as it is now doing in Gaza, is taken to prove the integrity of the IDF's 'purity of arms' doctrine. This, it is implied, proved that the aim was to attack the "terrorist infrastructure" as Ariel Sharon claimed at the time.

The assault on Jenin has been pored over again and again, usually with an impassioned attempt by apologists to decouple the word 'Jenin' from the word 'massacre'. It has been necessary, in the course of this, to refute the claims made by the IDF, who claimed to have killed up to 300 people, and Shimon Peres, who called the operation a "massacre". Now, we know that Israeli troops 'only' killed a few dozen people. As Yitzhak Laor has written, "ten dead Israelis are a massacre; 50 Palestinians not enough to count". Yet, there are some points about which there is no controversy. Israel didn't simply send in its best boys to do battle with Palestinian insurgents, for example: it sent its boys encased in enormous metal shells called tanks, supported by great buzzing metal hulks called helicopter gunships. Sweeping in from the rear were squadrons of bulky metal objects known as bulldozers. The centre of the refugee camp was bulldozed, burying civilians alive and making 4,000 people homeless. Hospitals were bombed, medical equipment looted, and ambulances were denied access to the wounded and dying. Water tanks were perforated with bullet-holes, and roads dug up. The entire urban infrastructure was attacked. Almost half the population of the city was driven out. The manifest aim was to deprive the Palestinians in that camp, collectively, of the water, electricity, housing, and medical care that they required to sustain a minimally acceptable life. This was congruent with the overall conduct of Operation Defensive Shield, in which it is estimated that 500 died (this is the origin of the rumours that a Palestinian spokesperson claimed that 500 had died in Jenin alone) with thousands wounded. The Israelis attacked not merely the minute military infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and various Palestinian groups, but beseiged the civilian infrastructure. As the Israeli refuseniks have pointed out, the destruction of Palestinian civil life, the regular annulment through violence and blockade of a normal life, is integral to Israeli strategy. The aim, they have said, is "to dominate, starve and humiliate an entire people".

Today, sez HP Sauce, the ground invasion of Gaza is being carried out in such a way as to avoid simply destroying Gaza from the air and killing tens of thousands - that is to say, in order to avoid committing genocide, Israel is committing a lesser form of mass murder. After all, it has 'only' killed 470 people so far (that was 13 hours ago, before last night's massacres), and has 'only' injured 2,400. It has 'only' attacked mosques, apartment buildings, universities, police stations, television stations, schools, parliament buildings, ambulances, medical centres, and hospitals. It is 'only' engaged in mass terrorism. In the algorithm of apologia, this is the ultimate rationalisation when everything else has been tried and found wanting. Whatever evil one is perpetrating is a lesser evil than one could perpetrate: the killing only proves one's humanity, and nobility. As Alexei Sayle has said, this is the psychology of the murderer.

Labels: air strikes, barbarism, gaza, humanitarianism, Israel, palestine, sentimentality

The will to possess posted by Richard Seymour

Nietzsche, in his typically indiscriminate way, skewered the humanitarian and philanthropist in these terms:

Among helpful and charitable people, one almost always finds the awkward craftiness which first gets up suitably him who has to be helped, as though, for instance, he should "merit" help, seek just THEIR help, and would show himself deeply grateful, attached, and subservient to them for all help. With these conceits, they take control of the needy as a property, just as in general they are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property. One finds them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled in their charity. Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children--they call that "education"; no mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to HIS OWN ideas and notions of worth. Indeed, in former times fathers deemed it right to use their discretion concerning the life or death of the newly born (as among the ancient Germans). And like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a new possession. (Beyond Good and Evil)

Nietzsche's greatest contempt, of course, was reserved for "socialist pity", the "common herd" and "the rabble", but I just quote this passage because it seems to me to sum up a certain attitude that is sometimes confused with "solidarity".

Labels: charity, humanitarian intervention, humanitarianism, nietszche, will to power

BHL bears witness posted by Richard Seymour

One of the most hilarious passages in Philippe Cohen's biography of Bernard-Henri Lévy is the description of BHL's attempts to refashion himself as a journalist. Amid the usual impostures and vanity, Lévy consistently gets the facts wrong, bungles his analysis, regurgitates propaganda, and then justifies it all on the basis that whatever the flaws in his reporting, it has helped to mobilise international communities in opposition to this or that atrocity. And despite his obvious moral fervour, he has never been one to waste too much time in the sticks. Thus, when he was campaigning for Izetbegovic and decided to make a documentary about Bosnia, Susan Sontag (who contributed a great deal to that campaign) suggested that he might well change his acronym to DHS - Deux Heures a Sarajevo, on account of his having spent a single afternoon there with his film crew before jetting back home on a French military plane. Well, here he is again, reporting direct from vital Gori! Behold the moving "testimony" on a shattered city and its beleaguered residents! Gasp as BHL witnesses scores of Russian tanks crawling menacingly toward Tbilisi! There is truly no hardship that BHL will not endure to get the real story. The trouble is, it is all fantasy: he spent two and a half days in Georgia, never got into Gori, and didn't see "at least a hundred" Russian tanks heading toward the Georgian capital. He did, however, eventually make it to Tbilisi - to the Marriot hotel in fact, where he loafed around, smoked endless fags, and chattered with his intellectual confrères. Surely at this point the normal procedure would be for the French government to appoint BHL as 'special envoy' to Georgia? It must happen - I demand it! The world demands it! Gori demands it!

Labels: bhl, humanitarianism, the liberal defense of murder

Humanitarian cluster bombing posted by Richard Seymour

Following the recent banning of cluster bombs by a number of states (including, to my surprise, the UK), the United States government has been at pains to stress that it only wants to keep the humane cluster bombs. And so:

Faced with growing international pressure, the Pentagon is changing its policy on cluster bombs and plans to reduce the danger of unexploded munitions in the deadly explosives.

The policy shift, which is outlined in a three-page memo signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, would require that after 2018, more than 99 percent of the bomblets in a cluster bomb must detonate.

Awfully sweet of them, don't you think?

Labels: cluster bombs, humanitarianism, US imperialism

A Model Occupation posted by Yoshie

In the last couple of decades,¹ advocates for war, sanctions, boycotts, and other measures on the human rights and humanitarian grounds have become a politically significant presence on the broadly defined Left in the USA and Western Europe (inflated during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the final push for independence of East Timor, a little deflated since the Iraq War, but re-flated through Darfur, Tibet, etc.).

This current of thought is not non-existent in Japan. However, it has been a much smaller and much less politically significant current in Japan than in the USA and Western Europe.

There are various reasons for this difference.

1. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: being on the receiving side of atomic bombs has a way of encouraging pacifism and discouraging militarism, at least among leftists.

2. Japanese leftists, unlike American and European leftists, do not have a memory of being on the "right side" of a "Good War" in their "people's history." So, there is no ready-made narrative structure in which would-be pro-war leftists in Japan could easily marry militarism with humanitarianism and human rights advocacy. Besides, Japan is economically of the West but not culturally of the mythical West (whose narrative goes "from the birth of democracy in Athens to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment to liberal democracy of universal human rights," the narrative that is attractive not just to the Right but also to the Left, which may position itself as the better defender of the Enlightenment than the Right), so leftists in Japan cannot easily see themselves as protagonists in this dominant narrative of humanitarian imperialism.

3. Till very recently, the Liberal Democratic Party had had a de facto one party state in Japan. The Left in Japan being a minor force that has not had a chance of becoming a governing party or a member of a governing coalition, there has also been much less temptation to opportunism for them than those parties and intellectuals in Europe and the USA who could become, and sometimes did become, part of the establishment by joining center-left parties. (This may change sometime in the near future, with the ascendancy of the Democratic Party in Japan.)

4. The Communist Party, albeit no longer Marxist, has remained a mass party in Japan, more or less hegemonic over left-wing political culture in the country, not only directly but also through its numerous affiliate institutions and publications, in a way that Communists in the USA and Western Europe have not been especially since the long Sixties.

5. After WW2, both the Left and the Right of Japan renounced any ambition to develop their own foreign policies: the Left by embracing the "Peace Constitution"; the Right by always deferring to Washington. They embraced the defeat, as John W. Dower says.

This last fact has both positive and negative aspects for leftists in Japan. There is no big constituency for assertive liberal imperialism in Japan, which is good for the Left. However, by accepting what the occupier imposed on the Japanese, the Left in Japan has failed to develop a political culture of republicanism and democracy, which is not only bad for itself but also bad for the rest of the country.

That failure also has had unforeseen consequences for people in the global South. The Japanese Left's acceptance of the occupation -- seeking "to turn the conqueror's democratic revolution peaceably into a socialist one" under the leadership of a "lovable Communist Party" in the early post-war years (John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, pp. 255-256) -- has encouraged those on the broadly defined Left in the USA to look back nostalgically upon the occupation of Japan as a model occupation, good for the conscience of the occupier and good for the welfare of the occupied, a model which makes them think, "If we had done it the way it was done in Japan, we could have succeeded in Iraq" (blaming the Bush White House for its "tactical errors"), or "If Iraq had been like Japan, the occupation could have worked" (blaming the Iraqis for their "underdevelopment"). Therefore, no matter how disastrous the occupation of Iraq becomes, it doesn't curb the enthusiasm for other interventions, for the myth of the model occupation tells them seductively: select the right target and employ the right tactics, and you will be a liberator again.

Here's a dialectical irony: humanitarian imperialism has failed to grow on the Left in Japan; but its growth on the Left in the USA and Europe may very well have been copiously fertilized by the post-war choices made by the Japanese Left.

1 To be sure, there had always existed both imperialist and anti-imperialist political currents on the broadly defined Left. Liberalism, social democracy, and socialism all had politico-economic theories that could lend themselves to either current. For imperialist liberals and social democrats, imperialism brings capitalist development, which in turn, especially if it is tempered by reforms, fosters social and cultural development; for imperialist socialists, imperialism, by dissolving feudal barriers and dispossessing peasants, can hasten the day when the gravediggers of capitalism, the proletariat, are born on the world scale. A relatively broad anti-imperialist consensus at the height of anti-colonial struggles in the twentieth century may have been a historical anomaly.

Labels: human rights, humanitarianism, imperial ideology, imperialism, japan

The quality of their mercy. posted by Richard Seymour

It is not unusual for those recanting from Left-Wing or marxist positions to cite among their reasons for doing so that the Left is too dismissive of rights, insufficiently appreciative of the pacifying effect of liberal institutions, and particularly insensitive to the cruelty that rights-regimes try to curtail. This was Kanan Makiya's argument, and of course Alan Johnson recently repeated it in his list of observations about why he is no longer a marxist. The Eustonites - effectively, though not dearly, departed - made a great deal of their support for 'human rights for all', and again it was part of their belabouring of the Left that it had proven insufficiently appreciative of those rights.

So, a very simple question. Does apostasy improve one's commitment to such rights? Does liberalism? We can put this question historically. Were those who rallied round the Wilson administration in 1917-18 more or less concerned with individual liberty than before, especially those who sent up a hue and cry about Bolshevism? Were the Cold War liberals more sensitive to domestic curtailments of individual liberty and rights than their more radical forebears might have been? The ex-Trotskyists among them: were they more or less inclined to oppose McCarthyism, given their understanding of Stalinist repression? Was Camus a better defender of human rights in Algeria than Sartre? Are the 'war on terror' liberals more or less attentive to the issues of cruelty to prisoners, arbitrary detention, torture, evidence-based trials, the rule of law and so on, than their radical opponents? I think the answers to most of the mentioned examples are too obvious to meditate on. And while there is clearly no simple answer to the last one, there are a few relatively simple cases. One of the co-founders of the Euston Manifesto is an apologist for torture and a supporter of internment and/or deportation based on MI5 say-so. Another wants to withdraw from European human rights legislation and set up Diplock courts, after those used in Northern Ireland to try and imprison suspected Republicans. Do we need to rehearse the history of those Diplock courts, or the legacy of internment? Not "human rights for all", then. And this fits into a wider intellectual milieu, with people like Sam Harris defending torture, Michael Ignatieff warning that it may be the 'lesser evil' (retracting his criticism of the Qana massacre too), and Martin Amis flaunting his sinister balls. I can hardly be bothered to reproduce the kind of thing that Christopher Hitchens is likely to come out with these days, and at any rate he seems to have taken too literally Oscar Wilde's aphorism that "the wise contradict themselves."*

Perhaps a more frequent response than outright support for repression is a tactful silence or a drastically curtailed attention span. Yet it is hardly possible for anyone supporting the 'war on terror' and buying its quack ideology not to be an apologist for some atrocities here and some repression there. By contrast, the fiercest critics of the current global torture regime, the secret prisons, the crackdowns on civil liberties, the conscious murder of civilians in Iraq and Palestine and Afghanistan and Haiti and Somalia by our governments, the repression of asylum seekers (particularly of those who are 'detained' in 'decention centres' without having committed any crime), and so on, are indisputably those whose job it is to scorn 'bourgeois rights' and be all, you know, totalitarian. Now why might that be?

* The full epigram is: "The well-bred contradict others. The wise contradict themselves." Hitchens perhaps doesn't realise that by noisily contradicting others and unwittingly contradicting himself, he does not become both well-bred and wise.

Labels: 'war on terror', cruise missile liberals, deportation, detention without trial, eustonites, human rights, humanitarianism, internment, pro-war 'left', torture

The limits of humanitarianism. posted by Richard Seymour

About a month after bloggers noticed, the Washington Post has reported on the confirmation of a vast escalation in aerial attacks on Iraq. Of course, they have done so only after carefully filtering the information through Pentagon spokespeople, which means that they have seriously described the attacks as being directed at weapons caches, safe houses and bomb making facilities. Presumably, if they have intelligence that good, it would be a relatively simple matter to go and find the caches and bomb equipment and take them back to base - while also taking snapshots for the media to reproduce as part of the 'success' story. However, leave that aside. Far more problematic is the obligatory 'humanitarian' angle: yes, this aggressive new campaign by General David Petraeus is striking the insurgents hard, but what about the innocent? Thus:

The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population. The military assures that the precision attacks are designed to minimize civilian casualties -- particularly as Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy emphasizes moving more troops into local communities and winning over the Iraqi population -- but rights groups say bombings carry an especially high risk.

"The Iraqi population remains at risk of harm during these operations," said Eliane Nabaa, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. "The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area."

UNAMI estimates that more than 200 civilian deaths resulted from U.S. airstrikes in Iraq from the beginning of April to the end of last year, when U.S. forces began to significantly increase the strikes to coordinate with the expansion of ground troops.

...

Human rights groups estimate that Afghan civilian casualties caused by airstrikes tripled to more than 300 in 2007, fueling fears that such aggressive bombardment could be catastrophic for the innocent.

Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at Human Rights Watch who tracks airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the strikes carry unique risks. "My major concern with what's going on in Iraq is massive population density," he said. "You have the potential for very high civilian casualties, so you need really granular intelligence on what you're going to hit. But I don't think they're being careless."

Leave aside the fact that the numbers they give for civilian deaths are utterly risible, an unbelievably low estimate by any standards. Leave aside the fact that it is completely implausible that the strategy of aerial bombardment is only killing large numbers of 'baddies'. We know enough about US military strategy to know that they consistently carry out attacks which deliberately kill large numbers of civilians. Even Mark Garlasco knows this. The only question they see fit to ask is whether some civilians might be "caught in the cross-fire" as it were, and whether the planners are being "careless", (even where they admit half-way through the article that the bombings are partially designed to terrorise). And not only is this the automatic purview of the Washington Post, it happens to be shared by Human Rights Watch. I can think of other problems that might be raised, one of which is that those resisting the US forces militarily are no more in need of swift airborne death than those who are not directly involved in combat. The US, after all, has no business being in Iraq, much less razing the country to the ground in order to kill those who do not assent to them being there. But humanitarian discourse in this context admits no knowledge of the criminality of US-orchestrated mass violence designed to subdue the country.

Human Rights Watch distinguished itself during the attack on Lebanon with a set of spurious attacks on Hezbollah for allegedly deliberately targeting civilians with its rocket-fire. It later emerged that while Israel's claims that Hezbollah hid its rocket launchers among civilians were bogus, Israel had certainly located prime military targets right among its population centres. HRW blithely insisted that this made no difference to its claim that Hezbollah indiscriminately attacked civilians. The point isn't really that HRW and like organisations are inconsistent in their determination of criminality. On the contrary, they are consistently biased toward the purlieus of power when they systematically fail to acknowledge or take account of prior, ongoing aggression. In the almost exclusive emphasis on the civilian-military distinction (which matters, I make no bones about it), they reproduce an ideological formation which holds that the incineration, shredding and dispersing of those designated combatants is perfectly acceptable: even if there are other options; even if the war need never have taken place; even if the murder is being perpetrated by aggressors who have it within their power to terminate hostilities at any point.

It is easy to understand why the reigning ideology sets aside a substantial space for 'human rights' criticism, which can be incorporated provided it doesn't "go too far" or step outside its designated boundaries and offer what is invariably construed as "politicised" commentary (whereas omitting the salient facts is not at all politicised). Humanitarianism in action mandates the most extraordinary barbarism. Impeccable sources of moral jurisdiction, authoritatively coequivalent with the missionaries, the court clerics and the piritual advisors. They bear the ensign of opposition, and a purpose derived from a higher authority (natural rights), and all the while they consistently absolve. Is it any wonder the new imperialists spent the greater part of the 1990s refining the categories of humanitarianism?

Labels: barbarism, humanitarianism, occupation, US imperialism