Civilization and barbarians. posted by Richard Seymour

The neo-imperialist apologists have made themselves perfectly clear: comparisons with the Nazis are unwelcome unless it is to unequivocally distinguish, unless it is to mawkishly celebrate how fabulously different Western imperialist states are, as per Paul Wolfowitz's astonishing remarks at the UN on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps. That such people often invoke the mytheme of 'totalitarianism' would surprise Hannah Arendt, who was explicit in pointing to the imperialist precedent for Nazism. Totalitarianism was, according to Karl Popper, merely the latest name for the age old war between 'open' and 'closed' societies. It is a civilisational discourse, and one that - at least in the field of international relations - could at one time be used to point to the barbarism within, especially when Hitler took control of Germany and announced that the Treaty of Versailles was the proximate problem, but the Treaty of Westphalia was the real cause of German weakness. There was no Treaty of Westphalia, as it happens, but it stands as a mythical moment of consolidation in the modern states system based on the balance of power, and pacific internal European relations. (Ironically, theorists like Zimmern contrasted the barbarism of Hitler with "the spirit of Western Christendom" - but it was precisely at the moment that the notion of Christendom was subordinated to the notion of Europe that we are supposed to perceive the beginnings of internal pacification in Europe because of 'the Westphalian moment'). The civilisation/barbarism dichotomy was, prior to World War I, strictly an affair of racial hierarchy, in which barbarism was projected into the vast non-white periphery which was to be brought under a regime of civilisation radiating from European metropoles. But following the Thirty Years Crisis (1914-1945), and with the intellectual apparatus supplied by Freud and Spengler, no one could be certain that the barbarian did not reside within.

Contemporary imperialist ideologues often present themselves as Wilsonian idealists, opponents of the realist doctrine that became rather fashionable during the interwar period, especially in the United States. The realist doctrine has it that all states are imperialist in the narrow sense of being 'power-maxisers', and since for realists the state is the ontologically primary unit of global human affairs, there is an insistence that no one state or potentate should be able to dominate others. States should form such alliances or build such capacities as to prevent others from having overwhelming ability to dominate. Hence, 'balance of power' politics. Wilsonian idealists see things differently: as adherents of democratic peace theory, they hold that democratic states do not go to war with one another or at least are less disposed to because of the restraining power of the popular vote (this has some merit, provided we add the stipulation that rulers of liberal democracies have gone out of their way to undermine that potentially restraining power). States with autocratic rule can much more easily order or coax populations to war on an imperialist whim, it is held. Hence, for world peace, we need 'democratic revolution across the Middle East'.

I don't want to pretend that these intellectual currents explain why leaders go to war. On the contrary, these cognitive scripts supplied by intellectuals are regnant or relegated based on the specific state of imperial affairs. They bear no other relationship to actual strategies. As it presently stands, the US plays a dual game, suggesting a transitional phase: it publicly endorses the notion of democratic transformation across the vital regions that it needs to inhabit or control, but in terms of its interaction with other states, it relies on classic realist arguments and the assertion of its sovereign right to self-defense, and indeed one of the principal arguments of the Bush administration in invading Iraq was the alleged threat to the security of states with whom it is involved in alliances by treaty. Yet, the emergence of doctrines of 'preemptive strike', the subversion of the UNSC, and the quite flagrant violation of principles of international law on spurious legal pretexts (such as the invasion of hospitals that are allegedly propaganda fronts for the enemy) depicts a sharp move in the direction of outright expansionism, and outright hostility to all pacificatory norms and contracts. If the Cold War was marked by appeals to balance of power politics, and the frustration of a would-be domineering potentate in the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War situation has almost completely obviated the appeal of such doctrines for Western ruling classes. Blair's famous Chicago speech, asserting the new 'cosmopolitan' international law in which the rights of citizens were more important than the rights of states legitimised the over-riding of the UN, since citizens did not have representation at the UN whereas states did. State sovereignty could be abolished at a stroke, given some magnanimous pretext of assisting an oppressed people: and the genius of this was that it was held to be in accordance with international law and therefore any apparent gap between the letter and its application could be described as circumstantial or merely apparent.

The Bush administration, however, takes Blair's doctrine much further. The international network of torture flights, secret prisons (known unknowns, you might say) and the public ones such as Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and so on - all accrue a curious public rhetoric that accompanies careful legal positioning behind the scenes. In public, Guantanamo is a legal "black hole" a response to an "unprecedented situation" and so on. In dealings with other states and state organisations, however, their answers have been legalistic. In response to a request from the OAS to clarify the position of Guantanamo prisoners, the US cited article 4 of the Geneva Conventions under which neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda could be party to the Geneva Conventions and therefore no prisoners arrested as such could not be granted prisoner-of-war status. To put it another way, while the US is by no means abandoning the system of inter-state interaction which it helped set up and which has served it so well (the UN has, after all, bestowed numerous blessings on blatantly imperialist missions, not least of which the current carnage in Haiti), it is preparing the public, particularly the audient masses in countries likely to be targeted, for the prospect of complete, open, unconditional trashing of any code, contract, treaty or law. All of these exiguous contraints can be dropped, probably with the invocation of some 'state of exception'.

It is not quite Lebensraum or Generalplan Ost, but it certainly has precedents in Hitlerian discourse, and it is classical Schmittian doctrine: since law is indeterminate, some structuring principle must be provided by the some absolutely arbitrary superordinate power. Hitler's invocation of the Volkgemeinshaft is obviously rooted in the kind of now antiquated racial doctrine which would not avail itself to modern state leaders, but the gesture of displacing an internal antagonism onto an external war and mobilising public support for it through hectoring appeals to an allegedly threatened national community is not exactly unfamiliar today. The logical limit of dehumanisation of the Other is genocide. Arguably, the mass murder in Indochina couldn't be anything but genocide. Yet the racist language about 'gooks' was subordinate to the master passion of the Red Scare. Today, there is an even more menacing and insidious Muslim Scare, and the recent finding that 40% of Americans would like their Muslim neighbours to have to bear some kind of special ID is an ominous result of this. The humanitarian exception is not even new: Hitler's public claim was that his invasion of Poland was a result of the latter's alleged refusal to stop mistreating the small number of Germans living in Poland. Realists at the time recognised the Machiavellan in Hitler: they saw a power-maximiser who casually and cynically utilised normative and legal appeals while ruthlessly pursuing the sheer self-interest of his 'national community'.

Not only realists saw it, however. Trotsky's Fourth International once wrote that:

The sole feature of fascism which is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder. Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism.

Fascism had its precedents in colonialism, and in white supremacy. Cecil Rhodes too saw expansion and plunder of unworthy savages ("chaff" as Hitler called those not of "good race") as a means of displacing an internal antagonism. Until the middle of the 20th Century, both American and Canadian governments pursued race-based eugenics. The British innovated the concentration camp during the Boer War. All of the components of fascist savagery were present in what is misleadingly called Western culture or Western civilisation prior to the arrival of Adolf Hitler. The components of a new fascism are certainly present today, in the culture of capitalism and imperialism. The apologists for imperialism today fetishise a bastardised version of the Enlightenment, which must be defended against assorted enemies (usually Muslim). It is a curious gesture: fascism, too, was a product of a particular kind of Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, the regular appeals to a contrastive history of Nazism in which other imperial societies are exonerated, and the self-pitying pronouncements that 'we' are restrained by principles not held by the enemy, are not themselves unfamiliar either. This is Hitler in 1942: "The German is always restrained by moral scruples, which mean nothing to the British; to the latter such an attitude is merely a sign of weakness and stupidity." I have no doubt you could find examples of similar statements from British, US and Israeli officials today, and I invite submissions to the comments boxes. The barbarous behaviour of the civilised is always reactive, always defensive, always much too attenuated by moral scruples, always driven by altruism. Consider:

In August 1941, during the campaign, or rather, the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, faced with a relentless and unforeseen resistance, the German General Halder explained away such resistance with the claim that the enemies had carefully prepared for the war ‘with the absolute lack of scruples typical of a totalitarian State’. Although he did not use the term ‘totalitarianism’, Goebbels explained the unexpected, unprecedented resistance that the invading army encountered in the East in a similar manner: by erasing every trace of free personality, Bolshevism ‘transforms men into robots’, ‘war robots’, ‘mechanised robots’. (Domenico Losurdo, 'Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism', Historical Materialism, 12:2, page 28)

The current "Wilsonian idealists" control nothing, but merely provide the intellectual battery with which even modest contraints on the ability of states to wage aggressive wars of conquest can be removed. The quality of their mercy shall not be strained.