July 08, 2003
Not Counting Niggers Theme Song
There assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been ourselves attacked, or threatened with attack; and it is very important that nations should makeup their minds in time, as to what these cases are....
There is a great difference (for example) between the case in which the nations concerned are of the same, or something like the same, degree of civilization, and that in which one of the parties to the situation is of a high, and the other of a very low, grade of social improvement. To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error....
L. Paul Bremer? Donald H. Rumsfeld? George W. Bush? Nope, it's John Stuart Mill's 1859 essay "A Few Words On Non-Intervention". The essay doesn't appear to be freely available on the web, more's the pity. Here's the remainder of an excerpt printed in the spanking new Summer Double Issue of Monthly Review (the best magazine in the country, yes yes).
Suggested usage: Since the Bush Administration has now openly acknowledged that it trades in plagiarism (somebody call the RIAA!), attempt to determine what percent of the Bush Doctrine was lifted directly from Mill's essay. Either that, or affix an Ari Fleischer mask and read the essay aloud to the children at bedtime.
Nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. Independence and nationality, so essential to the due growth and development of a people further advanced in improvement, are generally impediments to theirs....
Barbarians have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one....
A civilized government cannot help having barbarous neighbors: when it has, it cannot always content itself with a defensive position, one of mere resistance to aggression. After a longer or shorter interval of forbearance, it either finds itself obliged to conquer them, or to assert so much authority over them, and so break their spirit, that they gradually sink into a state of dependence on itself .... This is the history of the relations of the British Government with the native States of India.
Update: Tony Blair, in making a commitment to "progressive governance" has noted an eerily similar Canadian document (albeit, the language is a bit more touchy-feely, Blair's especial hallmark), The Responsibility To Protect. The "basic principles" of the responsibility to protect are:
State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.
Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression, or state failure; and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.
Iraq and Afghanistan -- where the "coalition" assumed its "international responsibility to protect" by slaugthering thousands of people, releasing into the atmosphere hundreds of tonnes of radioactive particles with a 4.5-billion-year half-life, littering the country with hundreds of unexploded bombs, bringing chaos (and with it disease and deprivation) which it has been helpless to address, and turning the country's resources over to politically placed multinationals -- will, presumably, be offered as the prototype for this "new world order".
Now, who's next? Indonesia? Israel? Colombia? Russia? Saudi Arabia? The United States (which, after all, maintains history's largest prison population, and is alone among "civilised" nations in continuing to practice capital punishment)?
Come on, Tony. Let's see you walk the talk.
The Canadian report also insists that, "The Permanent Five members of the Security Council should agree not to apply their veto power, in matters where their vital state interests are not involved, to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing military intervention for human protection purposes for which there is otherwise majority support."
It's decided, then: Israel is next up, and the United States shan't apply its veto power in to obstruct resolutions authorising the intervention there.
Posted by Eddie Tews at July 8, 2003 05:30 PM
Comments
does the term "whiteman's burden" ring a bell? the onus lies in the religious layers of "knowing what's best for them" that still rears it's ugly head when aWol has missionarys speak for us in Iraq... -- Posted by: bigmike on July 9, 2003 02:16 PM