LENIN'S TOMB

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Somalia and Africom posted by Richard Seymour

There was an understated news report on the BBC yesterday which informed viewers that Hillary Clinton was threatening Eritrea with 'action'. The US is accusing Eritrea of supporting the insurgents against what the BBC characterises as Somalia's 'unity government', and promising more weapons for its clients. Clinton claims that the 'al-Shahab' insurgents are liable to become a "threat" to the United States and "launch attacks against countries far and near". That rootless, worldwide conspiracy against freedom just will not go to bed.

It's important to clarify a couple of terms here, though. First of all, many of the 'insurgents' were once the government of Somalia, but were overthrown by CIA-funded warlords and a US-backed Ethiopian invasion. You may recall that this created a humanitarian catastrophe that the UN was moved to described as 'worse than Darfur' (some historical background here). Secondly, the 'unity government', as the BBC acknowledges, only controls a small section of Mogadishu - which means it isn't a government, and unites no one. (It seems rather odd that an entity backed by the immense power of the United States could be placed in such a difficult position by Eritrea. They've given millions of dollars and over forty tonnes of weapons to their clients, and yet are undone by the alleged illicit activities of a tiny neighbouring state?) The only thing that makes it a 'unity government' is that it incorporates 'moderate' elements of the old Islamic Courts Union. Apart from that, it evidently has no popular support whatsoever. Ironically, given the hysteria about Somali pirates, it is worth noting that this 'unity government' is far less effective at dealing with piracy than their Islamist opponents were.

The 21st Century scramble for Africa is taking us to some very strange and ugly departures. The US estimates that in six years, a quarter of its oil will come from Africa, but the trouble is that - as the establishment Committee on Foreign Relations complained some years back - China is doing a good job of getting its foot in the door. So, America responded by forming Africom, initially as a subdivision of Eucom and then, by October last year, as an independent command. Just on the off chance that anyone doesn't get this, Africom is specifically charged with running military operations in 53 African states. That is it's job. It's formation consolidated a conscious drive to increase military intervention into the continent. Now the main vector for US aggression in Africa, it was initially justified by 'war on terror' conspiracy theory. The anthropologist Jeremy Keenan points out that, while Africom clearly represents a militarised drive to control strategically important, resource-rich areas of the continent, the initial rationale for its creation was a lie. Specifically, it was set up allegedly in response to a faked 'terrorist' kidnapping that was actually carried out by Algerian intelligence, and which the Bush administration used to prove that there was a 'swamp of terror' that need drained. That spurious policy justification established, the US has been able to plant its troops at strategic points on the continent the better to intimidate and terrorise anyone who gets in their way. And now little Eritrea is threatened with having its lights punched out.

Chris Floyd also has some interesting thoughts on this development.

Labels: 'war on terror', africom, eritrea, ethiopia, somalia, US imperialism

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Beating them at their own game. posted by Richard Seymour

This is about what Hamid Dabashi calls 'colonial modernity', the strange process in which the practises supposedly associated with Enlightenment, daring to know, using one's own intelligence, were exported by virtue of military force in a way that deprived the supposed subjects of such Enlightenment of the agency to fulfil the Kantian imperative. I do not need to elaborate on the common theme in imperial ideology, from Mill to Whitman Rostow, in which the colonised world was regarded as being in need of a violent military ruler who would impose such Enlightenment until the subjects were of age. But this is particularly about a pre-emptive strike by the targets of colonial powers, by states that sought aggressively to appropriate the forms of colonial modernity before it was imposed on them. This process was an important, if complicated, component of the global challenge to European rule. Gerald Horne writes that the decline of white supremacy as a global system of state organisation was signalled by developments in the 1890s, particularly in the form of an event quite often just overlooked or skated over in the histories of Italy: the Italian defeat at the hands of Ethiopians in 1896. Horne writes that: "at the time there was “no parallel case in modern history” of a “European army . . . annihilated by a native African race.”" Before Ethiopia became a global beacon of resistance to Mussolini, a focal point in the struggle against white supremacy in its most pernicious forms, it had already made anti-colonial history right in the middle of the Scramble for Africa.

Less than a decade later, Japan would prove its mettle against Imperial Russia. The dynamics of state formation are crucial here: Japan had reacted defensively to incursions by the West, specifically Commodore Perry's 'opening' of the country in 1854, by building a form of state capitalism. It had built a modern state, and was admired by American politicians and thinkers for its willingness to imitate the white man. Similarly, Ethiopian modern state formation was driven by self-defense against the forays of European colonial states.

In the north of Africa and parts of western Africa, Islamic reformism provided the legitimising ideology for strategies of state-building and the development of 'legitimate commerce' (which is not to imply that capital accumulation was always coterminous with the development of modern states - it isn't the case with Ethiopia). So, for example, attempts by colonial powers to prevent Egypt from industrialising and maintain it as an agrarian periphery of Manchester (which was, apparently, to its "comparative advantage" in the Ricardian terminology of the time) were resisted by the subalternised elites increasingly under the banner of reviving Islam. Ethiopia was not Muslim but Christian, and according to prevalent raciological assumptions, the 'true' Ethiopians were 'white' since they could trace their descendants to the Hamitic invaders of north Africa. Indeed, Ethiopia was seen by some colonial sources as a welcome bulwark against Arab-Islamic expansion. But, according to the historian Teshale Tibebu, its processes of state formation in the nineteenth century, centralising rule over previously disunited sovereignties, were similarly defensive and similarly offensive. That is, to resist European colonial powers, Ethiopia's rulers understood well enough that a strong state could be built much as they had been in Europe: through territorial conquest, and by integrating parcellised groups and statehoods into a larger polity. The same military build-up and use of imported rifles that enabled the construction of a centralised Ethiopian state also facilitated its victory in the 1896 Battle of Adwa.

The very logic of centralisation and homogenisation - under which Emperor Haile Selassie would later repress regional demands for autonomy and quash the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation, and which validated the destructive centralism of the Derg - would have important consequences for the emergence of Ethiopian nationalism partly as a result of the victory at Adwa. On the one hand, it created a predatory state in which the martial class was at liberty to appropriate from the peasants even during peacetime. It also threatened to undermine the basis for national unity precisely through its repression of regional identities. On the other hand, though a relatively powerful army had been built, the Battle of Adwa was notable for being a popular war. Peasants from across the country, including the 'colonised' domains marched by foot, carrying their own equipment, to deliver a crushing defeat to the Italian would-be colonists. The Ethiopian army was 100,000 strong and, had it not been for the arrogance of the Italians in sending 14,500 troops to fight a vaster army of well-armed Ethiopians, the war may have been won without a shot being fired. The peasants who rallied to the defense of Ethiopia did so not to defend the aspirations of the monarchs. After all, it was Emperor Menelik who had signed a treaty with the Italian rulers, allowing them to rule Eritrea - and it was that treaty which, it turned out, gave all of Ethiopia to Italy in the Italian language version. The peasants had every reason to distrust and despise the Ethiopian ruling class, but they mobilised to resist what they knew would be an even more predatory and oppressive ruler, and thus opened the space for a generalised critique of the oppressive colonial modernity into which they were being integrated. The national identity that emerged after Adwa cannot be read off from 'natural' ethnic allegiances (even supposing such a thing could exist), but from a popular desire for equality and justice that could be turned against the ruling class itself.

This dynamic of national liberation was evident throughout the twentieth century: the attempt to subvert the racial hierarchy (or in the case of Japan, to invert it, to place white Euro-Americans at the bottom of the pyramid) involved a dual process in which national rulers sought to emulate the colonists through the construction of developmentalist states, and at the same time mobilised popular movements who would challenge the colonial model in its entirety. And of course, the model for popular insurgency, or at least the informing lexicon, came from the Russian Revolution. Horne argues that this revolution was by far the key moment in the attack on white supremacy. American race theorists certainly saw it in such terms:

The implications of the Bolshevik Revolution for “white supremacy” were glimpsed early on by Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and other theorists of “white supremacy.” The latter saw “Asia in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners organizing an assault upon western Europe.” The former saw Lenin as “a modern Jenghiz Khan plotting the plunder of a world”; Bolshevism, he exclaimed, was “in fact, as anti-racial as it is anti-social” and “thus reveals itself as the arch-enemy of civilization and the race. Bolshevism is the renegade, the traitor within the gates, who would betray the citadel. Therefore, Bolshevism must be crushed out with iron heels, no matter what the cost.”

Even racist American rulers entertained respect for 'plucky' little Japan. Theodore Roosevelt admired their martial capabilities a great deal, and there was in fact a brief period of conviviality between the US and Japan after the defeat of Russia, which lasted until Wilson's role in thwarting a clause calling for racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference. But Bolshevism was something different. It was a frontal attack on a whole model, a whole 'way of life' as it would come to be called. It was fundamentally alien and threatening precisely because it sought to revolutionise modernity, to draw out its democratising, egalitarian impulses and bring them to their logical conclusion. There could be no co-existence with it, and no mutual respect, because Bolshevism didn't just mean healthy competition with white ruling classes: it meant death to them.

Labels: colonial modernity, colonialism, ethiopia, italy, white supremacy

Monday, March 10, 2008

Mussolini in Africa. posted by Richard Seymour

On March 17, 1937, Mussolini was greeted by notables from Tripoli and presented with a bejewelled sword, that was to symbolise his role as the 'Sword of Islam'. This is an interesting episode, because it is picked on by neoconservative authors such as Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer to give sustenance to their gripes about the Islamification of Europe and its inherent totalitarianism. Of course, it's absolute nonsense, as the notables in question were exhorted to greet Mussolini in this manner (the Duce did enjoy his parades and ceremonies). Libya had by then been re-conquered by Italian forces, and subjected to furious massacres including a bout of genocide. Mussolini's claim to be a liberator of Islam was as meaningful as Napoleon's claim to the same fame when he invaded Egypt in 1798, yet quite often his opportunistic manouevring is taken as a serious policy orientation - "pro-Arabism", it's called. Those lucky Arabs.

There are some reasons why people might feel ill-equipped to deal with this topic. On the one hand, colonial policy, far from being epiphenomenal, was central to Mussolini's ambitions for Italy. On the other, the topic is actually touched on only rather lightly in histories of the Middle East and Africa, as well as in the histories of fascism. In several mainstream histories of the Middle East that I possess, for example, little is even mentioned about the Italian occupation of Libya, and the only one that mentions the genocide is Ilan Pappe's 'Modern History of the Middle East'. It is not discussed at all in Roger Eatwell's book on fascism - Ethiopia is touched upon, Libya glanced toward, but beyond vague adumbrations about 'repression', there is little detail. Even Alexander De Grand's valuable short introduction to the topic of Italian Fascism doesn't spend a great deal of time talking about colonial policy, and has nothing at all about Libya beyond a few references to the 1911 war. Robert Paxton's history, The Anatomy of Fascism, does at least mention some of the policies in both Libya and Ethiopia. In Italian histories, the colonial policy of the fascist regime tended to be overlooked almost entirely right up until the 1970s. It seemed that with the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the Italian elite simply gave up the colonies and agreed not to say too much about it, and the historians followed suit (although there was a fifty volume history produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was ecstatic about the whole business and Italy's civilizing role). Chemical weapons, concentration camps and genocide are apparently touchy subjects. In some cases, this could be related to the disturbing efforts to resuscitate the Duce's reputation. Where there isn't outright resuscitation, there is a general argument that he was a moderate who transcended left and right, and if only he had stopped in 1936 and resisted the Hitlerian nemesis, then all would have been perfectly fine. For an example of the latter, you might consult the Spectator journalist Nicholas Farrell's biography, Mussolini: A New Life, or Richard Lamb's Mussolini and the British, which argues that Mussolini was essentially a good chap who could have been won to the allied side if he hadn't been so bewildered by the unsporting criticism of his invasion of Ethiopia.

In fact, Italy's capacity to wage war for its own glory was at the heart of Mussolini's political transformation. Having been a revolutionary and a pacifist who made his name opposing the 1911 Libyan war, he shifted rapidly to the right during the first few months of World War I, and was taken up and encouraged by sectors of Italian power including corporate interests, as well as by the French and Belgian governments. He advocated 'democratic interventionism' - instead of neutrality, or Italy fulfilling its obligations in the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, Italy should support the 'democratic' states. There was no democratic content to the war at all, and Mussolini was in reality siding with the most reactionary elements in Italian politics. Once an opponent of the moderate Socialist leader Bissolati, Mussolini came to rely on him to keep him out of the conflict (he didn't personally enjoy the battle, unlike Hitler), and he was returned from battle to work on his paper, Popolo d’Italia, after a relatively slight injury in 1917. The claim to any kind of socialism, 'national' or otherwise, was shortly abandoned. Il Popolo embraced anti-communism and was the first publication to carry John Spargo's hostile accounts of the Russian Revolution. Whatever Mussolini's spurious appeals to the Italian proletariat, neither the Popolo nor the fasci di combattimento formed in 1919 showed much sign of working class involvement. The fascists had essentially shed the assorted socialists and syndicalists that had comprised part of the initial membership base in Milan, and became a pro-monarchical rightist party of petit-bourgeois and agrarian resurgence. Yet the appeal to some specious notion of 'progress' and workerism would stay in his rhetoric long after he had ideologically, formally and organisationally separated himself from radicalism of any stripe. Even in 1940, he was appealling to 'proletarians' to defend the "Revolution" against the "plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West". The proletarians later killed him and hung him upside down from a meat hook.

I don't need to go into detail about the rise of fascism and the March on Rome, but suffice to say that the reformist Prime Minister Giolitti's attempts to hold the liberal state together in the face of working class insurgency, in part by forming a coalition with the fascists, failed. The elections in May 1921 demonstrated that the Socialists and Communists remained a powerful electoral bloc, and the traditional liberal political class was wilting. Only the fascists could hold back the Left, and when the state began to collapse, the Italian capitalist federation Confindustria indicated support for a combined Mussolini-Giolitti government. Mussolini was able to reassure capital, clergy and monarchy that he was serious and would not attempt any radical experiments, and so he was given permission to sieze power in October 1922. Given difficult international conditions and Fascist Italy's lacklustre economic performance, colonial policy had to be placed on the backburner throughout the 1920s: the siezure of Ethiopia, which Italy had failed to conquer in 1896, would have to wait until 1935. But that didn't mean that Mussolini was uninterested. The Italian Geographical Society (SGI), long a major pillar of the state's expansionist ambitions and provider of explorers to scope out potential territory for conquest (first in Tunisia and Morocco, then Abyssinia/Ethiopia and Somaliland), was patronised early on by Mussolini. Several of its officials were integrated into the administration and the organisation provided much of the vital information for the ongoing wars to reconquer Libya, since Italian control had been reduced to the coastal cities and towns since 1915.

Mussolini's aggressive reassertion of Italian international power began in earnest in 1930 as the depression sank in. In Libya, the colonial authorities finally defeated the insurgency by imprisoning almost the entire "pacified" population in a system of brutal concentration camps from 1930 to 1932. Most of those captured died in the camps. Acting on the military doctrines of General Douhet, a Fascist supporter who advocated gassing, aerial bombardment and 'Total War', the colonialists could pound the 'inferior' natives from the seemingly limitless sky rather than getting down and dirty where the insurgents could mount some resistance. The Arab fighters were attacked with chemical weapons and bombs, destroyed and dispersed into the desert where the Italian air force could finish them off. Official Italian figures estimated a 37% reduction in the population, an authentic colonial genocide. The SGI's explorers were thereafter able to return to Italy with extensive ethnographic, cartographic and anthropological data, in its way 'proving' the progression of what had been a penumbral terra incognita into an enlightened Italian territory. Talk about power-knowledge. They produced studies of race types and a science of colonialism that would come to decisively influence the domestic politics of the Fascists.

Ethiopia, the sweetest plum in East Africa as far as Mussolini was concerned, was one of those territories as yet unoccupied by France, Britain or Germany. It was seen as available - dare I say virgin? - territory. Further, Fascist Italy was still on good terms with Popular Front France, and it would not have expected criticism from Britain for a colonial endeavour of this kind. However, Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations and could claim its protection. So when Mussolini went to war on October 3 1935, the League voted for sanctions. Britain and France offered a compromise: Italy could have a large part of Ethiopia if it would accept the fiction of a rump Ethiopian state. Italy accepted, but the deal was leaked to the press and died in the exposure. Sanctions were applied, but at any rate without much commitment, and Italian forces proceeded into Addis Ababa to put the crown on a new Italian Empire. The atrocities perpetrated in the war generally passed without comment. Poisonous gas sprayed from airplanes, the bombing of Red Cross hospitals, massacres, summary executions, hundreds of thousands of deaths - these were not matters that other colonial powers had an opinion about unless Mussolini crossed them. Even after WWII, a seventeen-member UN War Crimes Commission specifically excluded Ethiopia, mainly because it was only concerned with crimes committed against European powers, Russia and the United States. How could a British government whose wartime leader approved of gassing natives, and was actually rather fond of Mussolini at times, raise the issue? At any rate, Italy's successes in East Africa radicalised the Fascist regime. Race theory, largely eschewed in its biological variants until 1935, became increasingly important to the regime. The Fascist 'new man' was to be shaped in the new order, and colonial racism became the basis of domestic racism. Just as in Ethiopia racial intermarriage was outlawed, so in 1938 the new 'Manifesto of Fascist Racism' forbade 'racial' intermarriage along the lines of Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. Mussolini had once enjoyed a small amount of Jewish support, and he had no objection to the Zionists - he particularly admired of Jabotinsky, who returned the compliment - but the regime began to discriminate against the country's ancient, well-integrated Jewish community. That persecution, of course, was not to become extermination until the so-called Republic of Salo. Unlike the Nazis, who could buy off business and popular constituencies throughout their spiralling derangement with the booty of pillage in Eastern Europe, Mussolini had little to show for his involvement, and nothing to offer either worker or parasite. The Italian ruling elite, desperate at the failure of supporting the German side in the war, tried in 1943 to oust Mussolini and have him arrested. The Nazis rescued him, occupied the country, and formally restored Mussolini's dictatorship, albeit within the confines of a puppet state. The agents of the Republic were the most radicalised and vicious sections of the fascist elite, and pursued the extermination of the Jews far more vigorously than most Italians were prepared to, and waged an unusually savage war of repression to stymy the leftist insurgency beginning in 1944.

Fascism did not need colonialism in order to be vicious and repressive. But the colonial idea gave it an impulse of radicalisation that led to its most destructive, and self-destructive phase. There could hardly be a more chilling example of Aime Cesaire's reminder that before Europeans were the victims of fascism, they were its accomplices; that "they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack."

Labels: colonialism, ethiopia, fascism, genocide, italy, libya, mussolini