Imperial Rhetoric

 I spend so many days of the week now basically agreeing with Bush-era neoconservatives on subjects like Trump, or Vladimir Putin, that I often forget what a chasm still separates our views. If I was in need of a reminder, though—Bret Stephens's column yesterday in the New York Times gave it to me. 

"The Case for Overthrowing Maduro," it was called. And yes, it amounted to a standard Bush-era argument for deploying U.S. military force to topple a Third World dictator. 

The "case" for doing so—as Stephens frames it—is pretty much what you would expect. Maduro's dictatorship is terrible, Stephens points out. And yes, I agree with him: it obviously is. 

But what I find ceaselessly fascinating is that neoconservatives always seem to take it for granted that, if you can just prove that the dictator of another country is bad, then you have won the argument. 

They treat it as obvious that, so long as the government of another country is bad, then of course the United States had a moral right to violate the principle of non-aggression and invade them without any justification from self-defense. UN Charter be damned!

To be fair, Stephens does throw out a few hints that it is at least theoretically possible to view Maduro as bad, and yet still oppose invading his country. He acknowledges that there are some potential downsides to such a military action—such as the "law of unintended consequences." 

But Stephens frames all of these potential objections as consequentialist ones. He urges us to weigh the "balance of risk." At no point does he acknowledge that one might have a principled basis to oppose invading other countries without prior provocation or military necessity. 

Maybe, if we lived under an elected world government with powers of legitimate sovereignty—such a government could arrest Maduro and remove him from power. But I don't see why the United States or any other county would have the right to appoint itself to such a role, without putting the matter to a vote. 

As the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius one put it—in a line that could serve as a standing refutation of neoconservatism as an ideology: "'Correction' is only when someone in authority punishes those who are subject to their rule. It is not for peers to punish one another by war."

Under the current global system, the United States and Venezuela are peers. They are both sovereign nations, with no higher sovereign above them. It is not the role of one to "punish" the other "by war." 

But of course—Stephens argues—(just as Bush administration types argued about Iraq in 2003), the Venezuelan people would be better off if we neglected such doctrines as mere "non-aggression" and territorial sovereignty. 

Don't we have a higher moral obligation to save the Venezuelan people from dictators and human rights violations? What is an abstract principle such as non-aggression when weighed in the balance with actual human lives and futures? Shouldn't we set aside international law here for a higher purpose? 

I wouldn't let us be detained too long by this argument. There isn't a war of aggression or expansion in history that wasn't similarly defended at the time, by its instigators, as being ultimately "in the best interests" of its victims. "The good intentions of conquerors," as Eric Hobsbawm once put it, have always found a place "in the sphere of imperial rhetoric." 

Indeed, even such naked acts of imperial expansion as the 19th century Mexican-American war were defended at the time as "humanitarian" in nature. In the Biglow Papers, James Russell Lowell depicts the war's supporters as claiming that the United States should invade Mexico in order to "shelter" her people "under our eagle's pinions." 

But this rhetoric of humanitarian uplift—Lowell notes—could scarcely disguise the fact that the war's true purpose was: "ascrougin' 'em out o' thir own dominions"—which he defined as meaning "to take a feller up jest by the slack o' 's trowsis / An' walk him Spanish clean right out o' all his homes an' houses[.]"

Likewise, that's all a war of aggression against Venezuela would amount to, in actual fact—robbery and conquest and murder. For all the humanitarian rhetoric that has sprouted up like mushrooms around neoconservative invasions—they still amount to killing without legal justification or the necessity of self-defense.

And so: "Ez fer war, I call it murder," as Lowell's yankee protagonist in the Biglow Papers puts it. It's murder because it will inevitably lead to the deaths of innocents. And even if it didn't—the United States has no legal right to decide unilaterally the guilt or innocence of foreign rulers. 

There is something distinctly sickening about the way in which neocons have always borrowed the language of human rights and democracy in order to defend butchery and theft. But I suppose it's no more hypocritical or repulsive at heart than the way their 19th century imperialist forbears invoked the ideals of Christianity and the "civilizing mission." 

As George Orwell writes, in his Burmese Days (based on his time as a colonial policeman in the then–British colony of Burma): "All I object to is the slimy white man's burden humbug [...] the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them." 

The lie "corrupts" the practitioners of British imperialism, his protagonist Flory says. "There's an everlasting sense of being a sneak and a liar [....] We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we'd only admit that we're thieves and go on thieving without any humbug." 

So too, one is almost inclined to say that it would be preferable for the United States to just practice imperial conquest in Venezuela outright—without trying to dress it up as a favor they're doing for the natives. 

Or...  maybe not. Because I suppose, in a figure like Trump, we have a living example of someone who seems to be intent on making war of some kind on Venezuela—but who is simultaneously content to drop even the pretense of a humanitarian purpose behind it. 

Indeed, his administration openly defends this approach. Whenever people within their coalition accuse them of violating their ostensible isolationist principles and of being closet neocons, they say: "Oh no, we're nothing at all like Bush; because we're just doing this out of America's self-interest, not out of any desire to help other countries." 

Oh, goody. So—we will have just as many wars and kill just as many people as always. But now—we'll do it without even a smokescreen of trying to help the people we are butchering. And that's supposed to be an improvement? 

So, maybe Flory is not right after all. The robbery and murder is still pretty distasteful, it turns out—even when the robber-king brags openly that it is all he is intent on doing. Brigands without hypocrisy are still brigands, after all. 

If anyone in this debate does actually still care about the humanitarian situation in Venezuela or helping the victims of Maduro's dictatorship—by the way—I can think of a means to help them that doesn't require launching an illegal war or otherwise killing thousands of Venezuelan people. 

Namely, we could just let the asylum-seekers who have already fled Maduro's regime stay in the United States. Instead of violating international law by invading another country without cause—we could just implement international law, as it currently stands, by not returning Venezuelan refugees to the clutches of the dictator they fled. 

But instead of that—Trump has done all in his power to send these refugees back to the hands of the very government he denounces (not incorrectly) as an illegitimate dictatorship. He has revoked TPS for Venezuelans. He has renewed deportation flights to Caracas. 

And, in the worst crime against humanity of them all—he abducted 250 innocent Venezuelan men off the streets of U.S. cities and sent them to a prison in El Salvador, where they were beaten and tortured for months—based on no trial or due process whatsoever. 

That's what this country is actually doing to the Venezuelans who oppose Maduro's regime, and are trying to escape his brutality. We are locking them in dungeons—at the U.S. taxpayer's expense—to be tortured and abused. That's apparently what being "sheltered under our eagle's pinions" looks like in practice. 

So let us have no more of this canting hypocrisy, from Stephens et al., which seeks to justify murder and robbery by calling it charity. Let us have no more of those prophets of their Press, as Wilfred Scawen Blunt once put it, 

Pouring their daily flood of bald self-righteousness,

Their poets who write big of the "White Burden." Trash!

The White Man's Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.