The Daily Grasshopper

The fascination with Niall Ferguson's new book, "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World," is still in full bloom. You may recall that a recent "Daily Grasshopper" essay, "Imperial-minded Intelligentsia," (http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/042003.html) focused on the fact that Ferguson and other apologists for U.S. economic and military dominance find themselves right at home in the opinion pages of the big "liberal" daily papers of the northeast United States. In the latest Boston Sunday Globe's "Ideas" section, Matthew Price reviews the neoimperialist Ferguson's book in an opinion piece entitled "Selling Empire" (BG, 4/27/03, p. E2). Here's Price explaining Ferguson's thesis:

"While Ferguson does note some of the British empire's uglier aspects-its origins in a 16th-century 'maelstrom of seaborne theft and violence,' the genocidal inclinations of settler populations in Australia and North America-he argues that it was ultimately a beneficent phenomenon, especially at its height around the end of the 19th century. Its institutional genius, he claims, was a 'triumph of minimalism' that depended as much on the use of indigenous elites as of British administrators.

Summing up its 300-year span, Ferguson declares that 'no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labor than the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And no organization has done more to impose the western norms of law, order, and governance around the world.' Here also, argues Ferguson, are the origins of the global economy-or, in his typically clever (some might say glib) formulation, 'Angloglobalization.'"

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/117/focus/Selling_empire+.shtml

And Ferguson pops up in the Business pages of the Sunday Globe, too. You probably won't be surprised to discover that the headline of the article is "Americans no longer find 'empire' an evil word."

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/117/business/Americans_no_longer_find_empire_an_evil_word+.shtml

The article quotes Ferguson as writing "Americans have it drummed into them from kindergarten that their political lexicon doesn't include the 'E' word." Now, thanks to the New York Times and the Boston Globe, Americans who read the "liberal" press are having it drummed into their heads on a weekly basis that not only is the 'E' word in our political lexicon, but that it's something to which we should aspire.

Maybe part of the reason why Americans no longer find "empire" an evil word is because the concept is being presented in such a one-sided fashion, with all of the glory and very little of the sacrifice (and virtually none of the horror) presented to us in an objective manner by the mainstream media, who embrace theorists like Ferguson and shun dissident scholars who tell a much different (and much less flattering) tale.

Ferguson is well-represented in the Times Company's flagship publication, too (again). The Sunday edition of the New York Times devotes a good-sized chunk of its weekly magazine to Ferguson this week, leaving me to wonder if he's now on staff with the nation's "newspaper of record." You can read his article, "The Empire Slinks Back," here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/magazine/27EMPIRE.html

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits:

"Let me come clean. I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang. Twelve years ago -- when it was not at all fashionable to say so -- I was already arguing that it would be 'desirable for the United States to depose' tyrants like Saddam Hussein. 'Capitalism and democracy,' I wrote, 'are not naturally occurring, but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary . . . by military force.' Today this argument is in danger of becoming commonplace, at least among the set who read The National Interest, the latest issue of which is practically an American Empire Special Edition. Elsewhere, writers as diverse as Max Boot, Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Donnelly have drawn explicit (and in Boot's case, approving) comparisons between the pax Britannica of Queen Victoria's reign and the pax Americana they envisage in the reign of George II. Boot has gone so far as to say that the United States should provide places like Afghanistan and other troubled countries with 'the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.'

I agree. The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of 'postcolonial' historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy 'mix' favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the scary-sounding 'American empire' can deliver them, then I am all for it."

Price's piece in the Globe at least offers some counterpoint to Ferguson's relentless exhortations for the Bush gang to take up the White Man's Burden. Here are a couple of the rejoinders to Ferguson from the Price article:

"In The Guardian, Jon E. Wilson, a historian at King's College, London, pounced on Ferguson, calling him the 'Leni Riefenstahl of George Bush's new imperial order,' and a shill for 'the acceptable face of imperial brutality.' Wilson derided his economic interpretations as flatly incorrect, adding that the British empire was 'run on the cheap,' did little to enrich its colonies, and upheld the rule of law only when convenient-looking the other way, for example, when Indian landlords used violence against their tenants. British imperialism, he argued, merely advanced the short-term interests of a few, and impoverished the world in the long run.

White's claims have a century-long lineage. In 1902, the radical British journalist J.A. Hobson argued that the British empire wasn't even beneficial to the British: It was, among its many other sins, a waste of the taxpayer's money. Indeed, one historian recently suggested that Britain could have reaped a substantial 'decolonization dividend' had it wound down its empire in 1850. As for the colonies themselves, many historians, like Wilson, contend that Britain's legacy in places like India was pauperization, or worse. One need only consult the American historian and social critic Mike Davis's 2001 book 'Late Victorian Holocausts,' which argues that the shiny new infrastructure Ferguson champions led to the deaths of millions of Indians during a series of late 19th-century famines, when merchants used trains to ship grain away from drought-stricken areas."

Those of you out there who are of Irish descent should be aware that heavily-laden grain ships left Dublin on a regular basis during the Great Famine, headed for Britain, in accordance with what Ferguson admiringly calls "the policy 'mix' favored by Victorian imperialists" which "reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund." Just one more reason to be concerned about the lending policies of the IMF and its partner, the World Bank.

And although Ferguson appears to be the Times' favorite new apologist for the imperial project envisioned by the Bush White House, we ought to be fair to the in-house crew at the Times, Thomas Friedman and William Safire (to whose "On Language" column I am indebted for today's title). Today's edition of the Sunday Times included some incredible feats of jingoism from these two, starting with Friedman on the op-ed page:

"Friday's Times carried a front-page picture of a skull, with a group of Iraqis gathered around it. The skull was of a political prisoner from Saddam Hussein's regime, and the grieving Iraqis were relatives who had exhumed it from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam's torture. Just under the picture was an article about President Bush vowing that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, as he promised.

As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam's reign is that when you look at that skull, you don't even know what period it came from - his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality.

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/opinion/27FRIE.html

Of course, a whole new harvest of Iraqi skulls is being planted at this very moment by the nation's "liberators," an unpleasant fact that doesn't intrude upon Friedman's hopeful - and hopelessly naive - narrative. There's actually a story on the front page of the Sunday Times about an explosion at an ammo dump killing "at least 6" Iraqi civilians, with a photo of a blood-spattered survivor (the count was up to a dozen in the Sunday Globe). It's always important to recall that the Times is considered a "liberal" newspaper by a lot of people. What does it say about the direction our government's foreign policy has taken when the chief foreign correspondent of one of the country's more liberal papers has views that are virtually indistinguishable from those of Niall Ferguson? The range of viewpoints to be found in the mainstream media on the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq is becomingly vanishingly small.

Of course, being the occupying force of the empire has its drawbacks as well as its glories, which are documented in both today's Globe and Times, even if Friedman and Ferguson don't dwell on them all that much. Each paper published an opinion piece comparing the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and what happened as soon as it became clear that "liberation" was going to give way to a long "occupation." What's significant is that both articles focus on the difficulties experienced by the "occupiers," and not the "occupied." Their stories are not to be found, apparently not qualifying as "fit to print."

The Times story, "Israelis in a Shiite Land: Hard Lessons From Lebanon," can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/weekinreview/27MYRE.html

The Globe story, "Tipping points":
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/117/focus/Tipping_points+.shtml

There was another line in Ferguson's article in the Times that caught my attention:

"The Irish too played a disproportionate role in enforcing British rule, supplying a huge proportion of the officers and men of the British army. Not for nothing is Kipling's representative Indian Army N.C.O. named Mulvaney. For young men growing up on the rainy, barren and poorer fringes of the United Kingdom, the empire offered opportunities."

It's nice to know, as we contemplate the demands that this burgeoning empire is going to put on our country, that young people of Irish descent will have the same opportunity their ancestors did, even while living a century later and under slightly different imperial rule. History may not repeat itself, as Twain once said, but it sure does rhyme a lot.

According to an article in yesterday's "Boston Works" section of the Globe, Kevin McCormack of Braintree is off to join the Marines this summer, after a brief stint at an oil refinery in Quincy. The article does not indicate whether McCormack understands that he is simply going from the distribution end of the process (at the Quincy refinery) to the procurement end (in the deserts of Iraq), but based on the following quote, I'm guessing he's not aware of how the system really works (maybe he should read Ferguson's book):

"I always wanted to do something else, and by going into the Marines, I have a good opportunity to travel and do some other things. I want to be proud of what I'm doing."

"Armed services provide transferable skills, college money"
http://bostonworks.boston.com/globe/articles/042703_recruit.html

The U.S. armed forces aren't the only ones recruiting, which is hinted at by As'ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. In the Globe article on Lebanon, he pointed out that history has a way of repeating itself, and that the unintended (?) consequences of the invasion of Iraq are still in the process of manifesting themselves:

"The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us."

Isn't empire fun?

PK
http://www.dailygrasshopper.com