Indignation as Policy - Richard Sale

In the year 1850, John Parker Hale, free soil Democrat from New Hampshire who had been watching the painful aftermath of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, began a speech to express his sympathy for “the millions who are under the heel of power.” Taking the tone of today’s human rights crusaders, he said he viewed the crushing of the revolution in Hungary by Russia and Austria as a moral, not simply a political, question. He urged “…the American Senate, the highest legislative body of the world, the wisest, greatest and most magnanimous people” to “constitute themselves a high court” whose mission should be “to try the nations of the earth for ‘atrocious acts of despotism.’” Hale urged that we Americans as “a high court of indignation. “are to arraign at our high bar the nations of the earth, and they are to pass in trial before us.” America’s targets weren’t to be small fry or second rate powers, but villains like the Czar of the Russia,” the aim to try him “not only for what he did to Hungary,” but “for what he had done long ago in sending those unfortunate exiles to Siberian snows.” Hale then asked, “And after we arraign Russia, what would the next target be? England for the way they had treated the Irish and for the cruelties oppressions they did there?” (or) “go to Algiers to inquire what the French had done there?” Hale wanted to try the czar of Russia, In other words, Hale felt that the U.S. government should become a unilateral agency for the promotion of human rights.

Henry Clay, then at the twilight of his career, brought some perspective to the debate with Hale. He agreed that Austria had played a poor part in the Hungarian revolution, but why not send a distinguished American to Vienna on behalf of the Hungarians? Why not bring forward “some original plan for affording succor and relief to the exiles of Hungary?” Clay rejected the idea that we can judge foreign countries and their actions by our own notion of what is right and proper in the administration of human affairs. He ended by saying that Hale’s view that America should right the world’s wrong by intervention had its hazards. “Where it he limit?” Clay asked, “Where are we to stop?” This 1850 debate only shows how little we have advanced in the debate over how to advance actual U.S. national interests versus our compulsion to rely on using human rights to improve the conduct of human rights of foreign countries. The gigantic and fatuous ocean of trite statements issued daily by the media, the unending tiresomeness about “the aspirations of the Syrian people,” or “giving the Syrians democracy and a free market economy,” or “Give freedom to Syria’s opposition,” only make us gag. They numb the mind. The phrase “Syrian people,” used by U.S. politicians is especially annoying because it is a species of theft, the infirm product of some mentally limping office-seeker who is laying claim tothe authority to speak for millions when in fact they know only a minute and obliging scatter of citizens. Frankly, the phrase “American people” is for weak-kneed and semi-literate.

The great poet Paul Valery once said that the only word that truly defined the phrase “the French people” was the word “mixture.” The latter word deflate a lot of grandeur from of the phrase, but it did let the air out of bombast. Deflating bombast is sorely needed in today’s world where so many shrill, tinsely voices often blare their loud rhetorical bugles while sitting on their high horses. The futility and irresponsibility of outfits like CNN are repulsive to the soul and distasteful to the mind. CNN and other similar groups have embraced “parachute journalism” – sending in some half-informed chatterbox into Syria to parrot talk about democracy and freedom from the oppression of Assad, without once condescending to tell us who their sources are, what ends they serve, who is backing them, and where these sources are located. We know that the term “The Opposition,” is apparently is something so prestigious and haloed that we don’t need to scrutinize what it means. But what do we really know about The Opposition? Do they welcome democracy, free speech, the rule of law, the pursuit of happiness? Do the rebels use free speech to spread their views, do they really value free speech and democratic values, or it is simply a tool of propaganda, a crude way of manipulating or pandering to American public opinion.

Day by day, CNN and its hireling’s indulge in rhetorical flourishes that frantically wave before us like white hankies. The fact is that rebels inside Syria are completely at odds with exile groups outside the country especially regarding the direction of their country once Assad falls. For example, there one indigenous group, the Khalid ibn al-Walid Battalion, which is supported by the Muslin Brotherhood. The al-Farouq Battalion is armed and funded by Saudi Arabia. There is another. None of these has a plan to unite warring religious or opposition groups, nor are they able to formulate a coherent policy that has real traction among the Syrian public. The Syrian conflict prompts one to ask, what kind of freedom fighters are these, these allies of America? Do the CNN defectives ever look at American’s allies aligned against Assad? The UAE is violating a number of fundamental principles of human rights. Specifically, the UAE does not have democratically-elected institutions and citizens do not have the right to change their government or to form political parties. Qatar, which had U.S.-trained Special Forces on the ground in Syria, restricts freedom of speech and the press, and it has been found of guilty of using forced labor in its economy. Some of the labor rights violations include beatings, withholding of payment, charging workers for benefits which are nominally the responsibility of the employer, severe restrictions on freedom of movement (such as the confiscation passports, travel documents, or exit permits), arbitrary detention, threats of legal action, and sexual assault. The Saudis punish crime by flogging, and the amputations of hands or feet. Saudi law does not recognize religious freedom.

You would think this would quiet some of the fervor to spread democracy in the Middle East but apparently it doesn’t. After euphoria in Egypt about the downfall of Mubarak, today we learn the Muslim president has just begun to censor articles unfavorable to him. . President Jimmy Carter condemned “the folly of trying to inject power into the internal affairs of other nations.” President John Kennedy was the one who said that “Since human rights are basically indivisible, this body (the U.S.) cannot stand aside when those rights are abused and neglected by any member state.” He said these words only two months before Dallas. FDR on the other hand, always argued that ideals should be a part of foreign policy but only a part. I would argue that while human rights are an important factor, they are not the most decisive factor in framing a policy

The questions that should be posed about Syria’s future should be these.What is the U.S. national interest in Syria in a region that is unprecentedly complex? Is our opposition to despotism ideological or is it practical? What is idealistic element in handling of the conflict as opposed to what is indispensable element? Do other countries in the Middle East really share the U.S. our view of human rights? Do other nations feel the same interest in resisting an act of Syrian aggression? Do U.S. allies have the same identical motives in opposing Assad? Do other Arab countries consider the spread of representative institutions as the key to bringing peace to the area as we do? The American inclination is always to protect the weak against the strong, but in Syria, who are the weak? What are they tempted by? We know who the strong are, but who are the weak? Do they pretend to be weak until they have grown strong and pitiless and become the despotic they once pretended to despise? Do that have underground agendas that pose us difficulties and would spread instability. To me, the spread of democracy smacks of intervention and intervention always seems to me to imply conversion. Americans are an insecure people. They only like what they know and are suspicious of what they don’t. To like what you know is merely an act of recognition. To suspend judgment about what you don’t know requires a much higher order of mental gifts. Most of us lack them. It takes an acute perception which can absorb details of the unfamiliar without pronouncing judgment on them. It requires the ability to place the unfamiliar in some context that makes it intelligible and it requires knowledge to interpret it correctly. It takes an absence of panic, which is, after all, a very unmanly emotion. To interpret the unfamiliar, requires true ingenuity, an ability to imagine, a freedom from fear. It requires the courage not to regard the unfamiliar as the hostile. A neocon recently urged “The Syrian people need the tools so that they can finish the job of removing this cruel regime.” Brave words. It is very difficult to translate principle into effective policy. What is the U.S. national interest in Syria? Has anyone defined it? Once we thought that defeating communism and rolling it was our national interest in Vietnam. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance warned “we must recognize “the limits of our power and our wisdom” and avoid at all costs, “a rigid, hubristic attempt to impose our values on others” and reject the illusion that "a call to the banner of human rights will bring a suddenly transformation in authoritarian societies.” I’m with him..  Sale

Comments

[Babak Makkinejad]

Mr. Sale:

Your questions and the issues that they raise have already been answered by the executive branch of US Government.

I think you are behind the course of events and those events have demostrated the answers...

[Matthew]

"Hale wanted to try the czar of Russia, In other words, Hale felt that the U.S. government should become a unilateral agency for the promotion of human rights."

Priceless. Fortunately for us, the promotion of human rights does not include prohibiting water-boarding or funding "destabilization" campaigns.

[David Habakkuk]

Richard Sale,

A very fine post indeed. You put your finger very precisely on crucial aspects of what has been wrong with American – and British – foreign policy in recent years.

It is interesting to ‘fast forward’ from 1848 to 1905. The attempted revolution in Russia, in that year, prompted Mark Twain to express enthusiasm for the assassination of the Tsar. And, of course, Twain was not a neocon hack, but one of America’s greatest writers, a major figure in world literature – and a very funny man.

However, about Russia, he was talking dangerous nonsense.

The figure who was largely responsible for suppressing the 1905 revolution was the Interior Minister, Peter Durnovo.

In February 1914, Durnovo wrote a memorandum for the Tsar whom Twain had wanted to see assassinated, and was, of course, eventually assassinated, together with his family. The policy conclusions of this memorandum were quite simple – keep out of a war with Germany at all costs, and avoid an alliance with ‘perfidious Albion’.

The memorandum contains one of the most prescient anticipations of the catastrophe which the First World War would bring to Russia, Europe, and the world.

There is a fascinating essay on Durnovo by Dominic Lieven, elder brother of Anatol. The Lieven brothers have a complex ancestry – Baltic German servants of the Tsars on the one side, Catholic Irish servants of the British Raj in India on the other. They both have great insight into the nightmares of European history – and also what I can only call a kind of purged aristocratic pride. They understand, very well, the nightmares which both resentment and frivolous pseudo-idealism can create.

As Dominic Lieven notes, an interesting feature of Durnovo was that he had no principled objections to republican government, as practised in the United States, at all. He simply believed that the conditions for such government to work successfully did not exist in the Russia of his day.

Crucially – drawing on his experience as a veteran secret police official – Durnovo realised that Russia’s historical development had left the small Westernised segment of the population desperately isolated.

The Westernised liberals might think that undermining Tsarism would hand power to them, but they were deluded. For the peasantry who formed the vast bulk of the population, the liberals were even more alien than Tsarist officials. Accordingly, if once a war opened the way for the liberals successfully to attack Tsarism, the end result would be a social revolution, which would destroy the liberal segment of the Westernised classes, as well as the conservative segment.

In the event, the revolution not only destroyed both segments – that segment of the Westernised section of Russian society who had absorbed the ideas of the radical wing of European social democracy, the original Bolsheviks, were themselves destroyed as a result of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’.

In the context of the ‘Arab Spring’ the Durnovo memorandum seems to me of great interest. It is available on the net at:

http://www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/classes/durnovo.html

[Babak Makkinejad]

What relationship, if any, obtained between Durnovo and Stolypin?

Do you know?

[kao_hsien_chih]

It's worth remembering that only a decade after the debate, though, people like Hale did go to war to morally judge a nation, his own countrymen, or erstwhile countrymen, however you might characterize the South. One wonders what would have happened if people like him had full and unchecked rein on power in 1860s....

[kao_hsien_chih]

One can make the same argument about France in late 18th century: the "westernized" (deliberately ironic use of the term) aristocracy thought that, by putting pressure on Louis XVI, they would be the beneficiaries of the expected (fairly minor) regime change. But once the revolution broke out, they lost control, many lost their heads, and power ultimately fell to a mad Corsican, who might well have stayed in control indefinitely had he not warred on all Europe. Idealists make for lousy revolutionaries.

[Mark Kolmar]

After the protests began in Syria, as conflict escalated, I was optimistic that parts of the opposition could remove the top of the Assad regime without complete collapse of the government. The Syrian state and civil society seemed to function reasonably well by modern standards against examples such as hunger and poverty in Egypt, diffuse power centers in Pakistan, or illiteracy and the various shambles in Afghanistan. As with the example of Egypt, the bureaucracy and basic framework that remains might not be much of an improvement over 5 or 10 years.

Even if we only want to consider the Arab Spring in terms of U.S. interests, my sense is that in the long term it is better to manage instability while the decks are reshuffled than to stick with (arguably) secular, autocratic regimes, military dictatorships, or any of the other formalized graft and thievery on offer.

Do many of the Arab and North African cultures need to work through Islamic governments in different forms before they can reconcile with classically liberal notions of self-determination, etc., as we like to try to practice in the West? Granted, it could take decades to get beyond Islamist experiments with regression and nostalgia. I would gamble that these societies, in the long run, would move toward more democratic and representative governments with Islamist characteristics (whatever that might come to mean), more closely aligned but not exactly parallel to the future interests of western governments and global business. When people are better able to determine their own futures, it should affect the futures they desire for themselves. The attitudes of more urbanized Iranians today (what I can infer, anyway) point to an instructive direction, very much despite their so-called leaders. Turkey has one obvious template.

[MRW]

Another winner article, but then I'm partial towards Sale's POV. It's as if he stands a few coordinates away from me in a 3D sphere of all points looking at the world from the same perspective; it's just he's a much better writer and thinker than I am.

The list of questions show, within the internals of part of a paragraph, his brilliant facility to assess consequences, without which the future can be neither determined nor designed.

I have one question, which underscores why I am the lesser here. "Brave words." Were you being sarcastic?

[David Habakkuk]

Babak Makkinejad,

They cordially disliked each other – but I think this was more to do with personal antipathy than ideological difference.

The rulers of Russia were trapped in a familiar dilemma – that survival without ‘modernisation’ was impossible, but ‘modernisation’ threatened to exacerbate all kinds of latent tensions in the polity. If there was a non-catastrophic resolution, the key was not political reform but economic – in particular the break-up of the commune, whose great champion was Stolypin.

Historians argue over whether his programme might have worked – Lenin thought it might. As you of course know, a significant body of Russian opinion agreed with Mark Twain, and Stolypin was assassinated in 1911.

Of the Tsarist statesmen who are central points of reference for Putin, Stolypin is one – Gorchakov, who played a weak foreign policy hand deftly after the Crimean War exposed Russia’s weakness, another. Another important influence is Ivan Il’in, a leading figure among the émigré intellectuals who were concerned with how Russian might find a way out from communism.

[Walrus]

Mr. Kolmar,

You might like to consider the possibility that secular humanism, and the liberal democracy it has spawned in the West, is the exception to the established order of human affairs.

Three hundred years of American democracy is but a momentary aberration in the glorious history of the Catholic Church - or Islam - or the Russian Orthodox Church. That is how Conservatives think and the prisons into which they want to drag you, mentally and physically, are very very old.

To put that another way, America and the West had a far better understanding of its real interests during the cold war than it does today. The threat of nuclear annihilation had a certain clarifying effect on political thought.

So what do we have today? Torture, Murder and indefinite detention without trial as Government policy. The entire "debate" about Syria rests on a foundation of quicksand while we fail to apply the very rules we would foist on others to ourselves.

[Babak Makkinejad]

The alternatives to the (Catholic) Church or Islam are not liberal democracy but ethno-racial tribalism of NAZIs and assorted others.

[FB Ali]

I'm not sure if you mean that the West's "far better understanding of its real interests during the cold war" resulted in it promoting "secular humanism and liberal democracy". Because that is not what I can recall.

At home there was the McCarthy era and similar witch-hunts. Abroad there was the courting of dictators (mostly with military aid) and the clandestine overthrowing of regimes that were friendly to the Soviets.

With the jihadi menace having replaced the Communist one, there isn't much difference to be found.

[seydlitz89]

David Habakkuk-

This memorandum is very interesting. How do we get from this February memorandum to the "Period Preparatory to War" decided on 24 July . . . ?