Incornsyucopia wrote:
Andrew,
I've been thinking about this post of yours for a few days and am wondering if you could oblige me in providing some specifics. What freedoms that the West is founded upon (of expression? religion? the whole Enlightenment kit and kaboodle?) are built upon imperialism, genocide and class war? What's the connection?
[Andrew]Do stop, Melvin. If I thought it would make any difference, I'd jot down a reading list for you. But I already know that "imperialism," "genocide," and "class war" are merely incidental, or immaterial, to your understanding of modern Western history.
[Mel]Quote:
but the definition of "terrorism" is, I think, fairly clear: the use of violence, often of a seemingly random variety, against a civilian population in order to affect political change - would you agree?
[Andrew]So Little Boy and Fat Man count then. Only if you insist.
(Sorry for the lateness of my reply, but I just moved and have had a hard time getting an internet connection working in my new apartment. I spent a couple of hours writing a response at a friend’s house, but it somehow vanished when I tried to post it. Yet another lesson for me to learn to always write longer posts in more stable word processors than fickle online pages.)
Actually Andrew imperialism, genocide and class war are not merely incidental to me - they are rather tragically important components of the incredibly complex process known as human history. You made the claim, however, that they are what the West is founded upon and I would like you to therefore provide some evidence for something which is by no means self-evident to me.
I can at least understand your referencing of imperialism and class war, but genocide? What exactly are you referring to? The only thing I can imagine as your meaning is what happened to the Native Americans after the arrival of the Europeans. But to refer to this as “genocide” is to fundamentally distort the meaning of this so important of words. After all, most of the deaths of Native Americans that occurred were not due to any deliberate plans to wipe them out - as was most certainly the case with the Nazis against the Jews, the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and quite likely the Ottoman Turkish government against the Armenians during WWI - but were instead caused by the spread of amoral pathogens (certainly in some cases aided by morally depraved individuals) for which the Natives had no immunity. There certainly were cases where Natives were slaughtered en masse by Europeans (the Beothucks in Newfoundland being perhaps one of the most telling and disturbing cases), but if genocide - the deliberate plan to wipe out a group of people - had in fact been the intention of the Europeans (the West) than there would be far less (perhaps zero) Native Americans today as the power to bring that about certainly existed in the late 19th century.
I am not trying to excuse the horrors that occurred of which there were indeed many; having spent a fair bit of time on Native reservations I have been witness to the far too often very sad results. That horribly tragic events would occur after the meeting of human populations separated for 10,000+ years should not, however, be at all surprising. And it is hard to imagine how such a meeting could have been avoided indefinitely - if not Colombus then undoubtedly some other curious European explorer not too many years later would have showed up in the Americas.
It also seems to me that imperialism and genocide stand in opposition to each other, if are not mutually exclusive: the object of genocide being to kill off an entire group of people, while the object of imperialism is the economic enrichment of the imperial power through the exploitation of subservient populations which cannot seemingly happen if they’re all dead. How can both of them therefore be what the West is founded upon?
Since I disagree with your opinions as to what the West is founded upon, it behooves me to provide alternatives so here goes.
First, as much as I do not consider myself a Christian (even less the Mormon I grew up as) the Judaic-Christianity has been the master narrative in the West over most of the last 2,000 years besides which barely two centuries of imperialism pales by comparison in importance. To quote Roger Shattuck from his very interesting book Forbidden Knowledge, “The amalgam of the Greco-Roman heritage with Jewish and Christian traditions produced a culture in which the naked rule of status and power began to yield to justice under law, the dignity of all persons under God and a morality of altruism.” Indeed the very fact that genocide is considered so horrific to us is largely a product of our own cultural Christian-based morality even though at least some of us have grown out of the necessity of believing in the accompanying religious dogma.
Second, the Renaissance and the re-birth of critical thinking after centuries of dead-end scholasticism and intellectual conformity to supposedly revealed truth that mark its shift from the Middle Ages.
Third, the Reformation and nearly contemporaneous invention of the printing press that overthrew the religious universalism claimed by the Catholic Church through the cheap and widespread availability (democratization) of information; arguing for the equality of all people before God.
Fourth, the Industrial Revolution that brought about the most profound changes in mankind’s relation to nature: freeing tens of millions from peasantry, while enslaving millions more - for a time, and in some parts of the world still to this day - in the “dark, satanic mills” described so well by Dickens; as well as accelerating the information revolution begun by the invention of the printing press through new technologies such as the railroad and telegraph that eventually brought us to the Internet of today.
Fifth, the French Revolution and concurrent birth of nationalism, though impossible to imagine without the Renaissance and Reformation having preceded it, brought about the overthrow of an (and the idea of) absolute monarchy claiming authority from God instead of from its citizens began two centuries of political change that has, along with the effects of nationalism, radically changed the realities of human organization.
It depends then on what you mean by your characterization of my views on imperialism, genocide and class war as thinking of them as “incidental.” Compared to the five things I just laid out as being what the West is founded upon I indeed do think of them as secondary at best with genocide barely coming into play. (The one clear instance of genocide perpetrated by a Western power being that against the Jews by Nazi Germany, which can hardly be thought of as being representative of the West.)
Imperialism and class war are, as I said however, important in so far as one might wish to understand the last 200 years of Western history. Though elements of both stretch back much further into history (the Spartacus-led slave revolt being one of the most notable early examples of the latter), it is only with the bourgeoisie’s overthrow of the decaying French aristocracy in the French Revolution that class war begins in earnest as the results of the Renaissance, Reformation and Industrial Revolution together bring about a shift in actual power from the nobility, whose power lay in their control of the land, to the bourgeoisie, whose power lay in their control of capital and the various new technologies. The attempts at revolution that swept Europe in 1848, the brutally suppressed Paris Commune of 1871, and those following the Bolshevik Revolution at the end of WWI (even our native Canada having been a participant in the case of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919) attempted to realize the Marxist prediction that the Bourgeoisie would in turn be overthrown by the proletariat, but this, of course, did not happen. I still think it’s possible by the way, but we’re all going to have to wait a while before the necessary internal contradictions reach the necessary critical mass.
As for imperialism, I never thought I’d say this, but I guess I’m more of a Marxist than you are Andrew. Horrible things were done because of it, but then how can one morally judge a historical phase? Individuals most certainly, with King Leopold II of Belgium most notably hopefully roasting in the deepest fires of hell - if there is one anyways - (along with many other moral cretins) for the rest of eternity. As Marx pointed out in his writings on British rule of India, however, imperialism was not all bad. Aijaz Ahmad (in this blog posting:
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/2005/02/ ... india.html), arguing against Said’s often pernicious influence on modern academia makes the point succinctly:
"Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and the their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it an unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies…
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated only be the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
Finally, we come to the matter of Fat Man and Little Boy of which I’ve had seemingly countless conversations and debates; many with our dear friend Cyrus over pints at the ‘ol Power Plant in fact while he was taking a history class on 20th century warfare a few years back - though to be accurate, they fall outside the 50 year window of your original comment. I’ve read a great deal of the revisionist historian’s take on the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I’ll assume you’re familiar, and probably agree with their arguments. They haven’t convinced me, however, as I still believe that Truman’s decision ultimately saved more lives than the alternative since Japan had rejected the Potsdam Declaration and was preparing to fight to the death against an Allied invasion of the main islands as they had shown themselves willing and able to do on Iwo Jima and Okinawa; a sentiment expressed explicitly by the War Journal of the Imperial Headquarters in 1944:
"We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight."
If this had indeed been required, ALL of Japan would have been turned into a battle zone with destruction by conventional weapons of every major city in Japan and deaths of Allied and Japanese armed forces, as well as Japanese civilians, in the millions. The argument that Japan was in the midst of surrendering and would have if they had been allowed the time is belied by the fact that even after what happened to Hiroshima was known to the Japanese government, a majority of the Cabinet still wanted to keep fighting. It was only after the bombing of Nagasaki that then-Emperor Hirohito pushed his government ministers, who were by that time tied as to whether to continue to fight or to surrender, to accept the “unthinkable.” Even then, elements of the Japanese Imperial Army, upon learning of the decision to accept, staged an uprising to try to prevent it from being broadcast, but were defeated when the recording made by the Emperor was smuggled out of the imperial palace after which its leaders committed suicide. (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan for the full details).
f course, “terror” as a military tactic is of the most ancient origins. This doesn’t excuse its use, but to single out U.S. actions against Japan - a country that had, since at least the Rape of Nanking in 1937, employed terror on a vast offensive scale - to try to end a war of previously unimaginable destruction as soon as possible is problematic to say the least. Individually considered I can see the atomic bombings of Japan being understood as terrorism, but given the historical context, and almost uncertain fact that they ultimately saved tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of lives, the label seems hardly appropriate.
I wish I remembered the article that suggested it, but I can at least pass on the idea: if the horrific, devastating power of atomic/nuclear weapons hadn’t been shown to the world, the likelihood of their use in conflicts since would have undoubtedly been much greater with much more destructive results given the increased number of nuclear actors, their increased arsenals and delivery options; and the weapons enormously increased power since the Fat Man and Little Boy. Only the awareness of Kennedy and Khrushchev of how horrific would be the results if nuclear war were to occur between the U.S. and the Soviets saved the world from massive destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Interestingly enough, Fidel, Che and Raul Castro were all for starting a nuclear war if the U.S. attacked Cuba...
Sorry, for the length, but I like to be thorough.