Smart Power

"I guess the buzz word around here is 'smart power'," said a senator at the hearing for Hilary Clinton's initiation as the US Secretary of State two weeks ago. It's true, all everyone kept saying at this hearing was "smart power".

Sometimes the phrases IR studies professors come up with are unnecessary. Smart power is supposed to be a mixture of "hard" and "soft" forms of power, as a CNN correspondent explained it: military and diplomatic. Hilary Clinton was praised by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her "smart power" approach, in particular, with regards to Iran.


Smart power. Every US secretary of state uses smart power - a carefully planned mixture of arm-twisting and smiling - in order to be a successful imperialist. No secretary has ever been totally hard or totally soft.

The difference between smart power on the one hand, and hard/soft dichotomy on the other, is supposed to be a shift away from aggressive unilateralism, toward a rhetorical entanglement of dominance and institutional hegemony in the UN, WTO, World Bank, and IMF - all of which is backed up by threat of military power. The goal of smart power is to "rally the world behind U.S. goals" according to the seminal author on the topic, Suzanne Nossel, in a Foreign Affairs article, "Smart Power".

Practical implications of Nossel's smart power, she says, would require (1) developing a branch of the US military design to rebuild civilian societies, ostensibly for places under a form of martial law; (2) having other nation-states share the world-policing burden, insofar as they are compatible with U.S. goals; (3) the U.S. maintains its privilege to act unilaterally, leading the world in education, training, and militarism; and (4) reforming the UN to be more pragmatically beneficial for the U.S.

To maintain the international dependence hierarchy, with U.S. goals at the top, requires the logic of smart power to prevent imperial overstretch. Nossel explains,

"Although the military's weapons systems have been calibrated to conserve firepower and minimize collateral damage, the same cannot be said of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, Washington is currently creating new sources of friction, turning friends into antagonists, damaging once-valuable policy tools, and impairing its own ability to harness the power of its citizenry, bureaucracy, and allies. It must reverse course and embrace a smarter, less draining brand of power guided by a compelling and coherent conception of national interest...."

With the right kind of package seal on the agenda, American "progressives" could be easily won over. This way, the United States can combine humanitarian imperialism [liberal internationalism] and anti-terrorism together into one ambiguous project. This will require some genuine commitments.

"The revival of a genuine commitment to spreading freedom and liberalism, conversely, would unite progressives in the fight against terrorists and rogues."


"... by incorporating into the agenda a genuine commitment to free trade and economic development, liberal internationalism can impress Latin American, Asian, and African countries that otherwise view the U.S. antiterrorist agenda as neglectful of their priorities."

etc.

What is a "genuine commitment" to any of these principles? Nossel restates exactly the same goals the U.S. already has. But why Condoleeza Rice did not have "smart power" and why Hilary Clinton does, however, is largely mysterious: it is only a matter of diplomatic style and imagery - not a fundamental shift in policy. This is why I don't find this term particularly helpful. It's useful or interesting only because it's a new promise.

The goal of smart power is imperialist like other political strategies, it's just a more effective way of doing it. What smart power can do, though, at least according to Nossel, is use its pretty face to rally more domestic and international support for imperial expansion and domination by using humanitarian rhetoric and combining military force with economic stimulus. Eventually, however, these ideas result in depletion of others' sovereignty and greater domination by the U.S. and "liberal democracy" over all other forms of political and social organization.

What's so smart about that?

Another Campus-Homeland Security Upgrade

Two weeks ago it was the National Notification Network. This week it's the Wide-Area Broadcast System. Five of these towers emerged within the last month and today security technicians were testing their amplification power. I spend little time on the campus, but since I was there I snapped this photo.

"BEEEEP. This is a test of the Emergency Wide-Area Broadcast System!" the loudspeaker blared off and on. Throughout the entire campus you could hear infrequent beeps and glitches from the goofy looking machines. Students walking by got the shit scared out of them as the towers went off without warning.

No student body or faculty to my knowledge voted (or at the very least discussed) this new security apparatus. It's only been brought to our attention as something "the campus" is doing now. And of course our student newspaper cares more about poorly-written pickup lines than these issues. They could ask questions like, where is the Homeland Security money coming from (ahem), what the fuck are these machines doing here, why the fuck are you doing this without our consent, etc etc. But they won't. And look how easily it was to install an entirely new campus environment before our eyes.

I wonder if our school will buy one of these soon. Data-mining equipment like the kind provided by Narus and its sister corporations in the security industrial complex are the logical next-step in the "emergency preparedness" process. A campus environment, with all its sensitive digital information, is highly vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks and other breaches. So the argument goes, we need more black boxes! Just as "emergency preparedness" is a euphemism for police state, so "lawful interception" is a euphemism for domestic spying. Hundreds of high speed internet offices already set that up in the United States without anyone's consent or notification.

Simple Comparison

The US State Department reported that there were over 22,000 deaths caused by terrorism last year. Over half of those killed or injured were Muslims.

Everyday, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. One child every five seconds.

Bolivian Military Coup Imminent

Reports from inside Bolivia right now are tumultuous given the circumstances.

As the BBC and various other US/UK media outlets have reported, separatists in Bolivia have taken over their government buildings and gas pipelines in support of autonomous control of the gas field regions. The majority of analyses tend to focus on isolated incidents, like the take-over of several airports near Santa Cruz, and firefights in the countryside. The larger picture is that separatists are seeking to recast the question of power in regional terms and in the rhetoric of a struggle against centralism and dictatorship, while the indigenous indios are trying to maintain socialist unity and prevent what they see as a fascist takeover.

At the heart of this issue is racism towards native indios on the one hand, and the controversial oil revenue redistribution scheme organized by the socialist government on behalf of the broader electorate on the other.

Jorge Martin, a Cuban writer for In Defense of Marxism who supports Evo Morales, writes that "armed thugs", or prefects, from the Union Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC) have taken over the buildings and infrastructures as part of a "right wing offensive" to take control of the oil-rich regions of the country. The UJC is an armed and paid youth cadre, the paramilitary arm of rich Eastern Bolivian landowners in the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. In the past they have attempted an assassination of President Evo Morales.

The indigenous Bolivians, mostly peasants, are generally opposed to the UJC and have begun mounting a counter-offensive to the take-over. Morales's political party, MAS, tried to discourage the indigenous from protesting, and the military from cracking down on the UJC. They said "We should not fall for provocations", "what the prefects want is for people to die so they can have their martyrs".

Pro-separatist governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernandez, described a recent massacre of peasants to Reuters not as an "ambush", but rather as a clash between "rival groups", suggesting that the attack was not asymmetric. He added "The government has a great ability to distort things, and its arguments are always the same, accuse without reason."


United States Involvement


The United States Federal Government also has a great ability to distort things. The U.S. was chastised this week by Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales for spurring the separatist movement. Bolivia is a major recipient of USAID money, says the U.S. Center of Economic and Policy Research, with millions of dollars sent to "groups" there. The U.S. also funds "groups" in Bolivia through the National Endowment for Democracy and related organizations. The U.S. Embassy in Bolivia has gone so far as to encourage Peace Corp volunteers to "keep tabs" on Cubans, Venezuelans and Bolivians, essentially asking the Peace Corp to violate Bolivian espionage laws.

“USAID is not supposed to be a clandestine organization," said Mark Weisbrot, the co-CEPR director, in the report, "but nevertheless the U.S. government refuses to divulge which groups in Bolivia are supported with U.S. tax dollars”,

...“By providing clandestine aid to groups that are almost certainly in the opposition, it gives the impression that the U.S. is contributing to efforts to destabilize the Bolivian government.”

Airports, offices, telecommunications companies, radio stations, post offices, tax offices, trade offices, and oil companies in several cities are now occupied by the UJC, who have forced the leftist media to leave and workers to cease operations.

"In most of the cases," Jorge Martin wrote, "police and army units that were protecting these buildings were overrun by the violent gangs of fascists, because they were under strict orders not to shoot and not to use violence to protect them." But since then martial law, Estado de Excepción, was declared and 26 people have been killed in clashes.

The Morales government's semi-pacifist posturing here is reminiscent of former Bolivian president Carlos Mesa, who valued the idea of "social peace" by trying (and ultimately failing) to maintain a centrist politics between the indigenous left and the autonomist right. The goals of Evo Morales, however, involve the deepening of the revolutionary process of indigenous empowerment, a process that creates conflict when it hits the wall of the entrenched resistance of privileged classes.

The autonomist movement has not succeeded through referendums in the past five years, even though autonomy statutes for a free Santa Cruz appear to be victorious according to the numbers. The government alleges that the referendums were held illegally. Far from a movement toward genuine autonomy, one that would involve "participatory democracy" and "government from below", writes Tom Lewis from CounterPunch, "the Bolivian autonomy movement is tied to the entrenched interests of international capital and the dominant sectors of national capital, in particular, the hydrocarbon industry and agribusiness."

The autonomists challenged Morales to another referendum just last month in which had voters decide whether Morales and various governors should step down or not. Fortunately for Morales, the numbers show he won while some of the autonomist governors lost. During the referendum, the UJC blocked pro-MAS voters and Morales himself from getting to the ballot boxes, saying that the government should respect their autonomy statues. The intimidation and the dangers involved with the referendums are a major problem for democracy and social cohesion.


Fears of Military Coup


Rumor has it that the Bolivian military is plotting a coup against the Morales government to restore order. After a different coup plot was reportedly uncovered in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez this week, both Chavez and Evo Morales have decided to expel their U.S. ambassadors and bring their own ambassadors home. "We don't want people here who conspire against democracy," Morales said. The Eastern Bolivian oligarchs are accused of conspiring with the U.S. and the Bolivian military is accused of "coup-mongering".

From the Bolivian military's perspective, the institution of the military has been humiliated by all of this, and over-run by civilians. After Chavez expelled the US ambassador, he then added a warning to the Bolivian military, saying: "Any movement by the oligarchy, the yanquis, or the army to overthrow the Bolivian government or kill Evo Morales, would give us carte blanche to intervene and support any armed movement to restore the people in power". But Bolivia's military command said emphatically it would not allow any foreign intervention on their soil.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said this week that Bolivia has displayed an "inability to communicate effectively and internationally in order to build international support". The charges leveled against the US government and its ambassadors, he said, are false.

King and Country

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
-- George Orwell

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."
- Ernest Hemingway

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill

None of the quotes tell us anything about justice, or even the just causes of war. It only begs the question of why we fight wars. It is upsetting how so many militaristic-minded people in the United States can sidestep questions of justice and skip right to concerns about patriotism and allegiance. It is ironic too that patriotism alone is used as an argument for going to war, since patriotism, when disconnected from justice, is ambiguous.

Assume you are presented with these arguments from behind a veil of ignorance, so you don't know which country, state or king your allegiance is supposed to be for. If two states tell their subjects what Mill, Hemingway or Orwell said above, they would both go to war for the exact same arguments. This is what strikes me as ironic about all the quotes here. Anyone's enemies could say the exact same thing to 'their people'; all who are foolish enough to fall for it would be fighting each other without ever asking whether their side is justified in waging war in the first place. Most nationalists believe that of course our country is justified in fighting whomever we are fighting, so all they need is a bit of belligerent language to get them onto their feet. A world full of sentiments like these is hopeless.

Korean Cold War in Leaflets

According to historians, 2.5 billion propaganda leaflets were dropped by American aircraft in the Korean peninsula during the Cold War.

A new South Korean museum called "Memories of Propaganda" opened in April and includes 700 of these so-called "paper bombs" North & South Korea and the United States. Since collecting the leaflets during the Cold War was considered illegal in both states, some of the older leaflets dating back to the 50s are very rare. The debris from the Cold War are collector's items - the owner, Jin Yong-seon, recalls in a NYTimes article - like what chips from the Berlin Wall are to Germans. In this North Korean leaflet pictured left, for example, Roh Tae Woo, one of South Korea's former presidents during the 90s, kneels before James Lilley (the American Ambassador in Seoul) to take his orders.

When Jin was younger, he found these leaflets scattered all over the hills where he grew up. "If we found them, we were supposed to report them to the police station. We got comic books, pencils or sweets as a reward." As he collected them over the years, the museum began to develop.

Much of the propaganda is easy to understand pictorially, but many of it relies on culturally-specific understandings. Much of the North Korean propaganda relies on the power of proverbs, sayings, and folklore characters to dismiss South Korean and American propaganda. For example, North Korean propagandists dismiss Washington's charges against its nuclear weapons program with the saying: "The dog barks, but the caravan continues." (Why stop the revolution for that silly dog who barks at everything?)

Both sides, however, use propaganda that promises defectors "cash, houses, medals and women," the NYTimes reports. One North Korean defector said when he saw a naked woman on a South Korean leaflet that he "would never see such a thing in North Korea. But it also reinforced our indoctrination that South Koreans were depraved capitalists."

One leaflet (shown above) depicts Communist soldiers being shot as they try to invade the South. The leaflet below it boasts of the miracles of capitalism, showing South Koreans vacationing on beaches and trumpeting the number of cars produced in the South. It seems neither side saw their own propaganda as much as they saw the enemy's, perhaps they did not see it at all. There is hardly any way to compare the accuracy of the enemy's boastful propaganda, inasmuch as you would need to defect in order to verify it. The South Korean propaganda, however, seems more effective in that it critiqued the North Korean economic system, sent American dollars in the leaflets, and enticed men with provocative images.

Perhaps that merely reflects on the effectiveness of state communist propaganda in general - it's never very effective. The old Soviet films, the posters, the contrived parades and silly reenactments of revolutionary history: none of it is really as effective as the self-sustaining spectacle in capitalist societies. Christian missionaries, corporate advertising, the constant development and performance of the spectacle in all its manifestations: news, images, culture, music, lifestyle, art, sex, etc. have done more to spread the message of capitalism than the capitalist governments have, and this works to its advantage. Poor communists and peasant societies can hardly resist.

View ten slides from the archive here.

The Ethernet Offensive on Iran

The Guardian posted a map of the world's submarine Ethernet connections. Last week 4 of the largest cables heading to the Arabian peninsula were "cut". The current net traffic report shows that Iran has lost 100% of its connectivity with 100% of packets lost. The cause of the breakage is "unknown", yet the four broken cables took place in four separate parts of the country at once. It does not appear to have been an accident. This seems much more like information warfare. Joanne Coley from Rocketboom said on Monday that the US and the UK are now re-routing Iran's connectivity through its own Ethernet cables. I had trouble finding any sources for that, but this incident seems extremely suspect, given that American media have virtually blacked this story out in light of "Super Tuesday" and all the distractions from party caucusing.

Iran: Information Asymmetry for Media Audiences

It has been mentioned before in Hyperborea that the US plan to bomb several thousand targets in Iran was real, and so is the intention to provoke an amphibious invasion through the Strait of Hormuz. And every time Bush or Cheney visit the region, some confrontation happens between the US and Iran.

The Pentagon recently released a video describing what happened between US and Iranian naval vessels on Sunday. Five small Iranian boats sped towards the American vessels, and so the US Navy took a "base of action", they said. All the news reports on this, such as CBS's, shows American and Iranian vessels firing into the air. But no shots were actually fired during this incident. (Our tolerance for viewing American and Iranian forces interacting violently at least on the television screen is stepping up.) According to an AP summary of the radio transcript, someone had said that the American warship would "explode", implying some sort of suicide naval operation.

An AP report says that Iranian officials consider whatever happened not out of the ordinary. "This is an ordinary occurrence which happens every now and then for both sides," a foreign ministry spokesman said. The Pentagon says the US vessels were operating within international waters, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard says they had entered regional waters. A portion of the Strait is within Iranian borders, as was quoted by Iran's Fars News Agency. And it has been reported before that the US presence there looks much more like a blockade. That has most likely contributed to rising world oil prices ($100 a barrel this week), but that is less important for the US since Iranian oil is boycotted. A real conflict would cripple world oil supplies and perhaps raise the price to $200 a barrel.

President Bush is using what he calls a "provocative act" on Iran's behalf to step up propagandistic language regarding Iran. The Fars News Agency said that the Americans are spinning the incident against Iran, quoting an unidentified parliamentary speaker as saying,

"We have always demanded establishment of peace and security and the hue and cry made by the US media in this regard is a part of the same psychological warfare they have always launched against Iran."

Meanwhile media audiences on both sides have no reason to accept either account, other than some sense of allegiance to one's own nation state and its news agencies. With Iran, as with Iraq, there have been incredible information assymetries, since Western media outlets gather nearly all the information from these incidents from public officials (and usually unnamed "public" officials at that). Identities are secret and information is supposed to be credible. The strong case against is Iran has been building up ever since Rice and Bush discussed last year (see the first link) how they could convince Congress that Iran is a real threat. Even if what senior members of whichever department are saying is false, the slow buildup of impressions like that does create a sense of looming threat. It is most likely that both sides are doing this, and we therefore have no reason to accept the accounts of either.

The mainstream Western media is failing here since they fail to include their own shortcomings when reporting these incidents. Iranian media is much more directly a mouthpiece for the state, and yet it is clear to see how Western media can serve the exact same function.

The Royal Channel

50 Years ago as a young queen, Elizabeth II was adapting to the changing technological circumstances and began using television as a medium to spread the Royal message to her majesty's subjects throughout the British Empire and its 'commonwealth realms'. Now that message has reached a quarter of a million people on Christmas Day 2007 through YouTube. This year's message is foremost about the primacy of family, caring for the vulnerable, and remembering those who died for the cause of imperialism. But technology, YouTube in particular, will be what this message is remembered for.

"I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct." She said in 1957. "That it's possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us." The Queen said that 25 years before that marked the first year the radio was used to broadcast the message. As the institutions of monarchs becomes less and less important in British society, however, it seems the mediums with which the throne uses to make their messages more personal and direct will have to keep with the changing pace of technology.

Old and New Romes

The miles gloriosus blogger at the Capitol Tribune reviewed a book titled "Are We Rome?". The author presented numerous arguments supporting the rather uncontroversial idea that America is the new Rome, and offered several challenges to that idea. But the idea that the Romes of history are worth defending is usually unquestioned. I'm guessing that the author on some level accepts that the empire hypothesis is, while suffering considerable problems in our own time, a position worth preserving. The author just accepts a soft version of it.

Labor and the Militarization of Youth

There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers world-wide. And although a Kantian practical anthropology would tell us this number is relatively low for contemporary standards, it has enormous potential to garner attention through all sorts of shaming practices. Pointing out that these are, in fact, children, being used already rouses our sensibilities. It is interesting that this is widely known as "child soldering" instead of something like "armed adolescent security". And this has to do with the campaigning that has already taken place and is embedded in our political consciousness.

Children roaming streets are often coerced into joining armed groups, where they are trained, beaten, raped, and sent off into battle. They are used as human shields, human mine detectors, and have fought in the front lines of most of the recent conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Zimbabwe there exists the Green Bombers, a youth brigade amped up on narcotics and used for some of the worst acts of public violence in recent history. Rwanda, still fighting, uses child soldiers to invade parts of the Congo which are thought to house the combatants who instigated the genocide last decade. In Sri Lanka, there have been state collusions in abductions of children to military wings. There also exists the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization that uses young boys and girls as suicide bombers. The most heavily-armed drug trafficking organization in the world, the United Wa State Army, recruits child soldiers to make drug deals and assassinate enemies. The Human Rights Watch list goes on. There are at least 27 countries that have been listed as offenders.

The military use of children is considered a war crime in international law. According the the International Criminal Court, the flat age ban for military use of youth is set at age 15. The International Labor Organization, in the Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, stated that the benchmark age was 18.

An optional protocol was drafted in 1999, called the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, the protocol itself is highly non-binding. There is no enforcement mechanism. It states that it is itself "optional". There are no provisions about making reservations to articles specifically. Most of the worst violators have, in fact, signed and ratified the conventions and the protocols yet continue to violate them. For states that use governmental armed groups to carry out military operations, however, it would seem there is no clear justification for child soldering to take place. Many nations, however, cannot hold the non-governmental armed groups accountable for the practice. There is also an incentive to eliminate one's enemies before following the international codes, since being tried and convicted in the Hague is not nearly as bad as being captured and tortured by one's enemies.

Any sort of organizing that children might themselves do would easily be broken up by the armed groups. If children want to ban together and sell their labor in developing economies, they could collectively bargain for conditions that are favorable. However, labor movements in militaristic regimes are despotically eliminated. Child unionism would be obliterated. There are few options, however, for orphans (who are already in state control) or street wanderers, who are at the mercy of the armed bandits who employ them or force them to fight their battles. There are some fine libertarian lines one could draw between a child's voluntary use of labor, and the overall coercive military use of children. In violent nations, plagued by child soldiering practices already, the recruitment is inherently coercive.

The top-down legal approach is not going to solve this problem. It only creates the appearance that the problem is being tackled by the international community. Labor and autonomous interest movements need to be organized, however, to combat the problem. Dominant ideological themes and belligerent foreign policy should be completely undermined through shaming and virulent NGO infiltration. Labor organizers also have a role to play here.

Violent Prevention and Terrorism Against Homegrown Radicalization

They want to know what makes a radical turn violent. But what I want to know is what makes violent government turn on its radicals.

The Threat of Nationalist Chauvinism

In many countries the dominant image of nationalism is one of aggression and militarism, quite the opposite of a principled belief in national self-determination. The aggressive face of nationalism became apparent in the late nineteenth century as European powers indulged in a "scramble for Africa" in the name of national glory and their "place in the sun". The imperialism of the late nineteenth century differed from earlier periods of colonial expansion in that it was supported by a climate of popular nationalism: national prestige was increasingly linked to the possession of an empire and each colonial victory was greeted by demonstrations of public approval.

In Britain, a new word, jingoism, was coined to describe this mood of public enthusiasm for aggressive nationalism or imperial expansion. In the early twentieth century, the growing rivalry of European powers divided the continent into two armed camps, the Triple Entente, comprising Britain, France, and Russia, and the Triple Alliance, containing Germany, Austria, and Italy. When world war eventually broke out in August 1914, after a prolonged arms race and a succession of international crises, it provoked public rejoicing in all major cities of Europe. Aggressive and expansionist nationalism reached its high point in the inter-war period when the authoritarian or fascist regimes of Japan, Italy and Germany embarked upon policies of imperial expansion and world domination eventually leading to war in 1939.

What distinguished this form of nationalism from earlier liberal nationalism was its chauvinism, a belief in superiority or dominance, a term derived from the name of Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier who had been fanatically devoted to Napoleon. Nations were not thought to be equal in their right to national self-determination. Rather, some nations were thought to possess characteristics or qualities which made them superior to others. Such ideas were clearly evident in European and American imperialism, which was justified by an ideology of racial and cultural superiority. In nineteenth century Europe, it was widely believed that the 'white' peoples of Europe and America were intellectually and morally superior to the 'black', 'brown', 'yellow', and 'Indian' peoples of Africa, Asia, and the colonies.

Indeed, Europeans portrayed imperialism as a moral duty; colonial peoples were the "white man's burden". Imperialism supposedly brought the benefits of civilization and in particular Christianity to the less fortunate and less sophisticated peoples of the world.

More particular forms of national chauvinism have developed in Russia and Germany. In Russia, this took the form of pan-Slavism, sometimes called Slavophile nationalism, particularly strong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Russians are Slavs, enjoying linguistic and cultural links with other Slav peples in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Pan-Slavism reflects the goal of Slavic unity, which the Russians believed to be their historic mission. In the years before 1914, such ideas brought Russia into deepening conflict with Austro-Hungary for control over the Balkans. The chauvinistic character of pan-Slavism was derived from the belief that the Russians were the natural leaders of the Slavic people, and that Slavs were culturally and spiritually superior to the peoples of Central or Western Europe. It was anti-Western and anti-liberal.

Germany's nationalist chauvinism was born out of the experience of defeat in the Napoleonic Wars. Writers like Fichte and Jahn reacted strongly against France and the ideals of its Revolution, emphasizing instead the uniqueness of German culture and its language, and the racial purity of its people. After unification in 1871, German nationalism developed a pronounced chauvinistic character with the emergence of pressure groups like the pan-German League and the Navy League, which campaigned for closer ties with German-speaking Austria, and for a German Empire, her "place under the sun".

(to be continued... on the American Empire and the nature of nationalist chauvinism)

The Sino-Cuban Synthesis

In November I will be representing the Republic of Cuba at the national Model United Nations conference in Washington D.C. Another topic on the agenda in the General Assembly's 3rd Committee on Human Rights is the situation in China. The Chinese Question, for Cuba, is remarkably ambiguous. As I outline in this position paper, there was a harsh break in Sino-Cuba relations after Cuba had sided in the 70s with the more powerful Soviet Bloc. Since the Soviet Empire has fallen, China and Cuba slowly have begun rebuilding their relationship. Leaks in the Western press allege that China generously trades arms with Cuba in an effort to offset or balance the amount of arms trading between the United States and Taiwan. In fact, both China and the U.S. appear to be mirror images of each other--each with its own counter-hegemonic and counter-ideological island that operates in defiance of their respective authoritarian super-power.

Since much of what goes on is no doubt mired in secrecy, this position paper is an attempt to articulate the Sino-Cuban relationship, defend the human rights squalor in China, and stay compatible with the Cuban party line.

On the surface, Sino-Cuba relations may be difficult for historians to take seriously. In 1960 Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize China’s new communist government. Yet early friendly relations turned sour toward the end of the decade with the emergence of the Sino-Soviet dispute, where Cuba sided with the Soviet leadership. Since our President, Fidel Castro, saw Cuba’s mission as an ongoing struggle against United States’ foreign policy and the imperialist organizations of the Washington Consensus, Cuba needed the kind of financial support and military shield that only Moscow could then provide.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry says that 1989 “marked the full resumption and development of Sino-Cuban relations.” Yet all current statements from Beijing and Havana say relations are now at an all-time high. This is not, as it is presumed by Western media, due to an alleged arms trade between China and Cuba in order balance the power the United States’ sphere of influence and its efforts to arm Taiwan. As President Castro has publicly said, Cuba has not traded weapons with China since 1992. Our relations are based uniquely on our common interest in the development and protection of socialist nations. What, then, can be said about the so-called human rights problem in China?

The essence of Cuba’s policy as regards human rights is based on the consensus reached in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, which famously concluded that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated.” However, this is only a contingent fact of Cuban policy.

Increasingly, anthropologists are writing about human rights from a critical perspective, documenting how human rights organizations and NGOs operate as facilitators of Western hegemony. We have on the one hand a standard argument that human rights are universal in nature, and this is accepted without critical reflecting on the nature of Western values and the Western imperial project. On the other hand, we have the legal truism of an explicit “Act of State Doctrine” as outlined in various International Court of Justice principles and trials. This doctrine states that that no supranational organization shall interfere with the sovereignty of any nation. We have witnessed, of course, the habit of Western nations of continually denying this sovereignty to socialist nations, as in Cuba where the agricultural reform laws regarding sugarcane have systematically been disrespected by the imperialist Supreme Court of the United States. Cuba has nonetheless adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, while at the same time maintaining the position that universal human rights are no more than a Western “legal fiction”.

In particular, the concept of universal human rights is fundamentally rooted in the Western liberal project, the conclusions of which are not necessarily obvious or true elsewhere. The development of the human rights project is a development of imperialist thought as outlined in the philosophy of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, who were deeply involved with the workings of Empire themselves, using policy as an imperial tool for expansion and domination.

Cuba, having been incorporated into the Western liberal project from the very start, was imbibed with the Western notions of human rights, and we recognize them as part of our cultural and political inheritance. However, we recognize that not all cultures have inherited these values, and therefore cannot be expected to embrace them. It has been said by the anthropologist that, for example, “Asian values” is something much different from Western liberal values.

Let us take a moment to understand the hypocrisy by which the Western liberal project operates. According to the capitalists’ own economic models, it has justified the historical increases inequality, political repression, and the violation of human rights within their own nations. For example, according to the “non-communist stages theories” of Nobel Prize Economists like Simon Kuznets, these abuses are justified as part of a capitalist development scheme, and China cannot be blamed for merely modeling its behavior on the capitalist West, to which it is opening itself up. Have we now forgotten that America once greatly abused the Chinese laborers during its period of economic growth and Manifest Destiny in the 19^th Century? This is, in fact, why Havana has a vibrant Chinatown—due to the migration of Chinese laborers who sought solace in neighborly Cuba. Have we forgotten all the acts of violent suppression against labor unions in the United States during its own period of rapid economic development and imperial expansion?

All too often, human rights abuses are linked in the capitalist mind to the socialist command economy. It is said that it is a symptom of socialism to deny these rights to its citizenry. Yet this is certainly not so in Cuba, where we have a press system that is free to criticize the government, where citizens are free to find and read anti-Castro newspapers and literature. In Cuba we have freedom and human rights. In China the rural populations are denied many of the basic rights the urban population enjoys. Yet this is rather a symptom of the capitalist development scheme that has taken over the nation, where the working person, the laborer, the agriculturalist, is denied the equality that other Chinese are privileged with.

Cuba encourages the U.N. body to recognize that these conventions on human rights are not universally applicable, and they are to be promulgated as an ideal of the Western liberal agenda. We emphasize the principles and conventions on national sovereignty as having greater weight in international relations than conventions and standards on human rights.

This is the position of Cuba!

Police and the Public Sector (Part I)

I want develop a strong libertarian stance towards the structure of police forces. That is, in a completely free society, what would a private police force look like?

After watching a series of police brutality videos on the net, a friend of mine, working from the idea that private property is itself an illegitimate institution, told me that the police are basically only protecting the property and the property owners themselves. The second half of that idea is largely true, and I believe property is one of the underlying reasons, actually, why anyone should have an incentive to hire a security service. It provides a legitimate basis for jurisdiction and protection. The idea the property is inherently wrong is something I am very skeptical about, but here I want to talk only about private versus government police. However, to push this point further, I don't think there is a legitimate reason why any of the security services (police, military, etc.) should be in the hands government operations. I believe they should all be community-based and landowner-based.

But to point something out very quickly, police do not only protect private property. Police protect communities, streets and land-areas as well. My University, for example, has its own community protection service which is perceived to be more courteous and trusted than the governmental police, Tacoma PD. There are many other areas, besides private universities, that are government-owned and publicly-owned and patrolled by governmental police. Parks, for example. And there is always an issue of ownership and jurisdiction involved. These jurisdictions are based on the governmental grid-mapped boundaries and streets (whether federal, state, or local.) Legitimate protection in a free society requires that all these areas be privately or jointly owned by citizenry, not tied to governmental boundaries.

To understand my position, then, what needs to happen is a complete reorientation about our thinking. This is a world in which all land areas are in the hands of private citizenry, where all land areas are dis-owned by governments, (except places like courthouses, etc.)

Consider the entire city of New York, for example. Some areas of the city are extraordinarily crime-ridden areas where there is little police protection provided by the city authorities. There are some places in every city where citizens walk the street in a state of anarchy, dependent solely on the peace and goodwill of other citizens. And suppose that one area, the Times Square area, including the surrounding streets, was completely privately or jointly-owned. The streets are jointly owned by, say, the Times Square Merchants Association. The merchants would know that if crime was rampant in their area, for example with muggings and holdups, then their customers would fade away and would go to competing areas and neighborhoods. Hence it would be to the economic interest to supply efficient and plentiful police protection so that customers would be attracted to their neighborhood.

It would also be in their interest to supply pleasant and courteous protection. Governmental police have no incentive to be efficient or worry about their customers' needs, but they also have the temptation to wield their power in a brutal and coercive manner. Police brutality is a well-known feature of the police system. As my friend pointed out, we could spend our entire lives watching an endless stream of police brutality videos on YouTube our entire lives -- "if we don't kill ourselves before then." Governmental police are held in check only by remote complaints from the harassed citizenry and media. Yet if the Merchants Association's police yield to the temptation to brutalize their customers, the customer's will quickly disappear to cleaner, more courteous areas of the city. Hence the Merchant's Association will see to it that their police are courteous as well as efficient.

This provides the foundation for a network of private quarters to work with each other so supply adequate security services, giving rise to joint-ownerships or joint-jurisdictions. Merchants and landlords would buy into these protection services, and it would quickly become an expected condition for customers and tenants to do business. Just as heat and running water is expected of merchants and landlords, so would security services come to be expected. One can imagine the security services associations pooling together security-insurances and back-up services to deal with quick re-allocations in times of crisis, much like how lending companies will rely on the security of a "lender of last resort" (i.e. a Central Bank.) In general the services would supply all and only the necessary conditions for adequate and efficient police protection.

There should be nothing surprising or startling about the principle of this libertarian society. We are familiar with the effects of inter-location and inter-transportation competition. We are familiar with the competitive spread of new services like broadband, or airports, or railways. When the private railways were being built throughout the nation in the 19th Century, for example, despite 19th Century labor conditions, the early competition provided an energizing force to develop their locations. Each railway tried its best to induce immigration and development in the areas in order to increase profits, land values, and capital values. (Unless they wanted markets and tenants to move to other ports, other cities, and other lands served by competing railroads.) The same principle would be at work if streets and roads were private as well.

We are already familiar with some of the private police protections. Within their property, stores and banks provide courteous guards and watchmen; factories employ watchmen; shopping centers provide security guards; neighborhoods with high crime rates often have their own security services; cities historically provided guards and towers for watchmen to protect from outsiders.

In fact, the title of this blog, The Nightwatchman, is based on the idea that the only purpose to setup a state is for this very purpose: preserving those most basic Lockean and human rights. The "nightwatchman" is a figure borrowed from a medieval merchant's town where guardsmen were paid to protect the city from alien colonizers and raiders. In comparison, other medieval towns relied on Caesar's protection, and had to suffer from the foreign occupation of Roman soldiers who often yielded to brutal and gluttonous temptations like raping women and consuming inventories. Communities, neighborhoods, jointly-owned districts, centers, and lands ought to work on the nightwatchman principle of providing adequate community protection from invaders, and keeping the peace within the walls of the city.

The libertarian society would simply extend this service to streets and roads, as well as entire cities and trade routes. It is not accidental that there are far more assaults and muggings on the streets than inside the walls of stores and banks themselves. This is because the stores are supplied with watchful, private guards, while on the streets we must always rely on the chaos of inefficient and brutal government police protection. Various blocks in New York City, in response to the galloping crime problem on the streets, the practice of hiring of private watchmen to patrol the blocks became common. And soon this became practiced elsewhere. Due to the very nature of the nightwatchman duty, the benefits extended beyond the specific property boundaries into adjacent streets and stores, etc. The voluntary contributions of landowners and landlords effected the tenants and homeowners on the same blocks. This is called a positive externality.

The problem presently is that the streets and roads themselves are not owned by the residents or the landowners. The governments still own these, and hence there is no effective mechanism for gathering the capital to provide the protection on a permanent basis. Further, the street guards cannot legally be armed since they are not on their owner's property, and they cannot, as store and property-owners can, challenge anyone acting acting under suspicion in these areas. Streets and roads need to be owned by communities and landowners, not governments, and the privatization of security services would simultaneously find a healthy niche.

Restructuring society this way does not simply benefit wealthy capitalists, as skeptics assert. Private mechanisms would end the current spectacle of police being considered by many communities as alien imperial colonizers. The empowerment of governmental police does not give rise to "service" toward the people. It invariably leads to the oppression of their communities. Especially communities of color. We have many areas of cities with tenants and people of color which are patrolled by governmental police. The American Indian Movement in the 60s and 70s fought bitterly against a brutal FBI agents and for-hire vigilantes. This year, black communities in St. Louis are tyrannized by the St. Louis Police Department. Governmental forces are alien to the communities, just like the imperial Roman forces who oppressed and tyrannized townsfolk in the Dark Ages. Police supplied, paid for, and controlled by the residents and landowners of the communities themselves would be a completely different story. Much like a well-developed and empowered neighbor-hood watch regime, they would be supplying (and perceived to be supplying) legitimate services to their customers, rather than coercing them on behalf of an alien authority.

A private police force is only one part of the libertarian society, but it is a crucial part. The society works from the principle that individual and jointly voluntary operations are legitimate; foreign and non-voluntary operations are illegitimate actors. Many people have a hard time believing that community and private operations can provide adequate services like this. They would rather rely on governments and Caesars even when it is clearly apparent that these forces do more harm to their societies and other societies than we should accept. The libertarian alternative provides solutions, and these are empirically and historically positive. It is also infinitely more satisfying to see that we can protect ourselves without relying on paternal forces elsewhere.

Comment on Iranian Appearances

Amidst the sticky politics surround Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University and the UN, and the subsequently ridiculous debate over homosexuality in Iran, most media have skipped something else valuable in his speech:

I am ready in the United Nations to engage in a debate with Mr. Bush, the president of the United States, about critical international issues. So that shows that we want to talk. Having a debate before all the audience, so the truth is revealed, so that misunderstandings and misperceptions are removed, so that we can find a clear path for brotherly and friendly relations. I think that if the U.S. administration, if the U.S. government puts aside some of its old behaviors, it can actually be a good friend for the Iranian people, for the Iranian nation.

This disposes of the "madman" theory of foreign dictators that would have us believe the enemy is so unpredictable that we might as well intervene militarily. Saddam Hussein never had the chance to speak to the United Nations before our invasion. The IAEA Director General, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Prize tried to speak on behalf of the Iraqi people. But he was quickly overruled. With this kind of dialogue we see with the Iranian President, despite whether you say it is propagandistic and insincere, makes it seem as though a unilateral invasion into Iran would receive such an overwhelming condemnation toward US foreign policy that I highly doubt even the most hawkish cabinet could go forward with it. I am beginning to feel at ease about its immediacy, despite previous blogs that might have been a bit alarmist. The plans to bomb 2,000 targets in Iran, however, are still very real and the administration is more than willing to find the opportunity.

La Rebelión de las Monks

"There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descension and fall."

~ José Ortega y Gasset

Burma is exploding into violence. Today, nine more monks were killed, including a Japanese foreign journalist. The attack on the media is extensive. A hotel where foreign journalists were staying has been ransacked. Yesterday the government confirmed one death, when in reality at least five were murdered by the State Peace forces. The UN unanimously condemned the government, which is including China and Russia who rejected a resolution condemning Burma in January. The circumstances in which the monks and the masses find themselves is extremely oppressive. There is a continually violent dialectic exchange between the government and the people.

Ortega wrote that our lives are simultaneously fate and freedom, and that freedom “is being free inside of a given fate. Fate gives us an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, that is, it gives us different destinies. We accept fate and within it we choose one destiny.” For the Burmese, death is now certain if they go out into the streets. The government promised severe retaliation, "serious action", for opposition this morning.

As individuals in a global society, we are not detached from our past. We are not isolated historical persons. Severe retaliation means thousands of Burmese revolutionaries and monks will be executed in the street, just like in 1988. And perhaps no one, not the United States, not the United Kingdom, not the United Nations, will step in and interfere. Perhaps this is a fight that only the Burmese can take on for themselves, in an effort to build a strong, democratic nation, taking matters into their own hands and defeating the military dictatorship. Cease-fire agreements can only postpone the inevitable, we know this from history. The military government is not interested in peace. False peaces can only make a quick and climactic coup into something long and dawn-out, where more Burmese civilians lose their lives and their liberties before overturning the regime. If a cease-fire agreement is made now it will be decades until the next wave of unsatisfied masses will take a stand against their government, and in the meantime thousands will be killed, thousands will be politically imprisoned.

Comparing Two Neighbors: Panama and Colombia (Part II)

Colombia:

All this data explains very well why Panama is doing well in the global economy, but it does not explain how Colombia could be doing, ostensibly, so poorly. Why does Colombia have nearly the same GDP per capita, yet spend significantly less per capita on health services? By way of explanation, we take every scenario in which Panama is thought to excel, and compare this to Colombian policies.

1) Colombia is an industrial and agriculturally-based economy.

For example, Colombia is not a service-based economy. Its main exports are manufactured goods such as petroleum, coal, and surprisingly, pop-up books. The Colombian economy is largely in the process of developing legal exports like coffee instead of cocaine. After recovering from a large recession in 1999, the focus is on rebuilding the economy through crop substation policies and this leaves less money to spent on health services.

2) Differences in the methodology of calculating GDP.

The GDP of Colombia is also adjusted for illegal crop production, to give a better sense of all the economic activity within the borders. Illegal producers are not subject, however, to the same governmental regulations and services, leaving many self-employed citizens out of programs directed towards health services. Social Insurance programs, for example. GDP increases due to anti-crop programs like Plan Colombia also work to offset GDP in a way that would make it appear disproportionate to average health expenditures in other countries of the same GDP per capita. Panama, by contrast, receives no such aid.

3) Migration, Stability and Location.

It is also worth saying that Colombia, while it does not share the Panamanian Canal, does indeed benefit quite a bit from its location which is bordering Panama. But retirees are not fleeing to Colombia. A country in which government corruption is a large problem, and where rebel forces like the FARC and the paramilitaries control certain provinces, is not attractive for American retirees who would likely spend much more on health services than a younger, native population.

The data here is not conclusive. Looking at the graph alone would give the impression that there is much more proactive health care planning in Panama than in Colombia. Colombia has the social security and health care infrastructure in place, yet at the moment its priorities are in line with a program to end the production of illegal drugs. While it certainly provides evidence that a growing economy like Panama can indeed provide the conditions for a healthy human population, in cases like Colombia, where the economy is also growing quite well, political problems and instabilities get in the way of affective health services, and their public or private consumption.

Comparing Two Neighbors: Panama and Colombia (Part I)

If we look at a comparison between health care expenditures (per capita) and GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) in Latin American countries, we find some peculiar disparities. I thought I might have to exclude Brazil from this model, since it dwarfs all other countries in terms of GDP. It has the highest purchasing power, but its health care expenditures were roughly the same as Uruguay's. Mexico has the highest expenditure on health services, and its purchasing power is the second-highest the region, behind Brazil, and followed by Argentina and then Colombia. Yet Brazil's GDP per capita is slightly more than Colombia's.

One of the most disparate comparisons is between Colombia and Panama. Whereas Panama, Belize, Brazil, and Colombia have roughly the same GDP per capita -- Panama's health expenditures are much higher. I would hesitate to label Panama as an "outlier". It is simply that, among all the countries who GDP in US dollars is of 20 billion, Panama is the highest spender in health services. I have come up with several reasons as to why this is the case.

Panama

1) Panama's economy is largely service-based.

Any economy that is service-based is likely to have a higher demand for government services like health care, like environmental quality, etc. Economist and Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets once detailed the relationship between rising income and demand for quality environmental services. The same sort of argument could be made for health services. As a service-based economy is much more in tune with global health practice, and is constantly exposed to healthy foreigners, it will most likely also begin demanding better health services. The sort of infrastructure that a service-based economy has provides the structure for a vibrant and healthy population. Service-economies must have higher-valued human capital than non-service economies.

2) Panama owns a key geographic location.

This is an argument for its economic growth, which is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for health care expenditures to increase. The Panama Canal is a key, strategic location, and is home to the Colon Free Trade Zone, and has nearly 2,000 firms importing and exporting throughout the region and the world. Colombia is in fact the largest purchaser of Colon Free Trade goods.

3) Panama developed an extensive social security program.

This is perhaps the most obvious reason why Panama has high expenditures in health services. The United States Social Security Administration website provides an outline of the program in Panama, which includes coverage for all foreign workers, except those working less than two months. There are no maximum earnings for contribution purposes, and unlike most countries, it covers sickness, work injuries and maternity as well as survivors and old-age benefits. Benefits for dependents are also generous, including specialist care, surgery, hospitalization, laboratory services, medicines, and dental care.

4) Immigration

More interesting, however, is the fact that many Americans are moving to Panama to retire, in fact, due to inexpensive health care and medical insurance, but also the tropical environment. A heart stent, for example, costs 52,000 in the United States. In Panama it costs $11,000. Health insurance companies in Panama also do not deny coverage to those with existing illnesses.

Roger Gallo, publisher of EscapeArtists.com, a site for international relocation, says in a New York Times article that Argentina and Belize have become attractive to American retirees in recent years. But Panama remains among the highest. This would explain why, in terms of sheer numbers, Panamanians would be spending much more on health care per capita than most countries of its GDP per capita size. As more American retirees flee to Panama, the amount expected to be spent on health care services should increase. American retirees in Panama may be surprised that they are still expected to pay income taxes in the United States, however.

Myanmar = State Peace?

Even though we have found out what is happening in Myanmar, there's no telling what exactly is happening inside the country at all times since it's an extremely closed society. The media in Myanmar is very tightly controlled. The print media only prints what the government wants, and it's all government-owned anyway. The same thing is true of the broadcast media. Foreign journalists are barred from entering Myanmar, officially at any rate. Receiving information from inside Myanmar is therefore very difficult. The government blocks the internet and the telephones on and off. Amnesty International notes that there are at least 1,160 political prisoners who are being held in deteriorating prison conditions.

Interestingly enough, a Flickr user by the name Racoles has posted photos documenting the month-long protest in Rangoon, when the regime began fixing petrol prices higher than most would withstand.

100,000 Buddhist monks filled the street of the capitol (Rangoon) this morning, in what is hopefully not a repeat of the 1988 uprising when "State Peace" open-fired on protesters and killed more than 3,000 people.

The BBC says at least one monk was killed today. Other reports say eight. Watch this very rough YouTube video posted this morning to get an idea of what is going on. The UN is urging a restraint on the military junta. President Bush is also urging sanctions. Sanctions, however, have been in place for years. And it's not clear how more sanctions will affect the regime. The full title of the military junta regime of Myanmar is State Peace and Development Council.

A mediating force between the regime and the population might have been the monks, at least a month ago. Yet this mediating force has suddenly become swept up in the frenzy of protests themselves. A BBC newscaster said on a video that early in the morning the faces of the monks were peaceful. After the deaths, everyone was suddenly furious. Monks were seen yelling, shouting, and screaming. Perhaps a more international force will take over the "mediating" position. But this position seems highly overrated at this point. A standoff between the military regime and the population will most likely end in bloodshed and revolution. Hopefully the democrats will overturn the regime this time.

An Yan Suu Kyi, the Noble Peace Prize winner, still on house arrest, might finally be able to resume her activism in the streets. Meanwhile, Amnesty is organizing worldwide protests at as many Myanmar embassies as possible.