imperialism

No Capitalism Means No Peace: Egypt Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , ,

I just briefly touched on this in an earlier post, but I thought I’d bring in another perspective to shore up my argument. Fraser Nelson, writing in the UK’s Telegraph, explains some of the important differences between freedom and democracy:

While the West was celebrating Egypt joining the comity of democratic nations, Egyptians themselves were sliding into an economic abyss, with terrifying shortages of fuel, food and security. Sectarian violence has been thrown into the mix, with persecution of the Coptic Christians followed by Sunni v Shia strife. The murder rate trebled. Things were falling apart, which is why the generals were welcomed back.

But the Arab Spring was a demand for freedom, not necessarily democracy – and the distinction between the two is crucial. Take, for example, the case of Mohammed Bouazizi, who started this chain of events by burning himself alive on a Tunisian street market two years ago. As his family attest, he had no interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell, and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it was to capitalism […]

The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little appetite for further explanation. But […] this was a protest for the basic freedom to own and acquire ras el mel, or capital.

Read the rest. I think it is pertinent to note that liberalism (the institutional face of capitalism) was murdered by British imperialism in its infancy (“Egyptian freedom means no more British imperialism, therefore…”).

The people of the Middle East will not get out of the rut they are in until there is a revolution of ideas in their societies. The demand for liberal ideas is certainly there, but Western imperialism provides a convenient scapegoat for authoritarians in the region. Western imperialism is different from Russian, or Persian, or Turkish, imperialism because the Arab public holds the West to a higher standard than other states. It’s time we started doing the same: remove all troops and military equipment owned and operated by the United States from the region.

This will lead to the rapid disappearance of the Islamist monarchies our government protects, and will open up the region to important dialogue. As long as the US military remains in the region, though, the Middle East will not taste freedom. Imperialism is antithetical to freedom, as both the society funding imperial projects and the society being forced to receive imperial projects are coerced in the name of central planning.

See also “Moral Markets and Immoral ‘Capitalism’” and “The Hidden Vice of Capitalism” for more in-depth arguments about the term “capitalism” and what it actually means.

Around the Web: Disappearances

muricaderp History, Links, Politics , , , , ,

1. Ron Unz, founder and editor of The American Conservative, skewers the mainstream American media for dropping the ball on all sorts of major scoops, including:

2. Richard Nixon’s abandonment of hundreds of surviving American prisoners of war after the end of hostilities, at a time when he had declared that all surviving POW’s had been repatriated; and

3. John McCain’s exceptionally weird and disturbing role in the decades-long stonewalling of investigations into the fate of these men and efforts to repatriate any survivors.

4. On a separate but similar topic, a discussion of some possible fates of Indian independence leader and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, aka Netaji, officially died in a plane crash in Taiwan, but is widely believed to have died in the Soviet Gulag, to have disappeared into civilian life in asylum in the Soviet Union, and to have lived into his eighties as a “mysterious holy man” in Uttar Pradesh.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hope y’all like the new layout of the blog. Take a few minutes to get comfortable. Take off your coat, your shoes and your troubles. Now have a glass of red wine and a look around.

  1. IRS specifically targets conservative Tea Party groups; So the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein naturally defends the IRS for not doing more: Listen to the fascists sing
  2. Ken White has an update on the man who made the anti-Islamic film “The Innocence of Muslims”
  3. Dear life (gun control and gun violence). Again and again: gun violence has been declining for about two decades now.
  4. The Crushing of Middle Eastern Christianity
  5. A Brutal Peace: the Postwar Expulsion of the Germans
  6. Barack the buck-passer. A laudatory account of Obama’s foreign policy that I largely agree with.

Eye Candy

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , , ,

Just beneath the fold. Continue reading →

Imperialism: The Illogical Nature of “Humanitarian” Wars

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , , ,

Dr Delacroix is simply unable to grasp my argument. There are two possible reasons for this:

  1. He simply does not want to grasp it
  2. He simply cannot grasp it

Most of the time I believe that Reason #1 is responsible for one’s inability to grasp a concept, at least when we are dealing with high intelligence individuals like Dr Delacroix.

But I think this is a case where Dr Delacroix and other like-minded imperialists simply cannot grasp the logic behind my argument. Allow me to hearken readers back to my recent post on “Libertarian IQ” where I quote an academic computer programmer on the inability of some students to grasp the concepts he is trying to teach:

Let me tell a story that is typical of those I heard from the TAs who worked for me at the computing center. A student comes up to the TA and says that his program isn’t working. The numbers it prints out are all wrong. The first number is twice what it should be, the second is four times what it should be, and the others are even more screwed up. The student says, “Maybe I should divide this first number by 2 and the second by 4. That would help, right?” No, it wouldn’t, the TA explains. The problem is not in the printing routine. The problem is with the calculating routine. Modifying the printing routine will produce a program with TWO problems rather than one […]

The student in my hypothetical story displays the classic mistake of treating symptoms rather than solving problems. The student knows the program doesn’t work, so he tries to find a way to make it appear to work a little better. As in my example, without a proper model of computation, such fixes are likely to make the program worse rather than better. How can the student fix his program if he can’t reason in his head about what it is supposed to do versus what it is actually doing? He can’t.

Dr Delacroix is in a position similar to that of the student.

When I point out that the post-colonial states of the Middle East are, by their very structure, incapable of anything other than autocracy, he responds by pointing out that the West has often taken sides in the various conflicts that erupt in these states. The logic behind this reasoning follows accordingly:

Brandon: This hot dog is undercooked, so eating it will make me sick.

Dr Delacroix: Yes, but it has chili on it.

B: No dude, eating it will make me sick.

DD: Yes, but it also has brown mustard on it.

B: I’m sorry dude, but I’m not eating the hot dog.

DD: Now you’re just being senseless (and rude!).

You see how that works?

Dr Delacroix and other “humanitarian” imperialists seem to believe that when the West picks a side in a conflict that has nothing to do with national security, imperialism suddenly becomes a perfectly acceptable way of fixing the problems of the world. Yet just like the programming student in the example above, Dr Delacroix’s attempts to fix a superficial problem (with bombs no less) actually end up exacerbating the real, underlying problem, which is that the states currently in place in most of the world are not seen as legitimate by its “citizens.”

Post-colonial states are not considered legitimate by their subjects because they never had a say in how to go about structuring such a state. They had no say in where the borders should be, or who they could trade with, or how to best accommodate foreigners.

Because they are not legitimate, power struggles (even in long-lived dictatorships) for the center are constant since those who eventually end up controlling the center receive legitimacy from the UN and other imperial institutions (but not their own people). Why bother trying to gain the legitimacy of an impoverished populace when you can simply capture the rent associated with running a post-colonial state?

Is It Time to Reject African States?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , , , , ,

That is essentially what a political scientist is arguing in a short piece in the New York Times:

Yet because these countries were recognized by the international community before they even really existed, because the gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from within, it came without the benefit of popular accountability, or even a social contract between rulers and citizens.

Imperialists like Dr Delacroix and Nancy Pelosi don’t seem to care about the legitimacy of post-colonial states (largely, I suspect, because they thought they did a great job of creating the borders that they did). You never hear them make arguments like this. Instead, the imperial line is all about helping all of those poor people suffering under despotic rule by bombing their countries, just as you would expect a condescending paternalist to do.

Since tactical strikes and peacekeeping missions have utterly failed since the end of WW2, why not try a new tactic? Our political scientist elaborates:

The first and most urgent task is that the donor countries that keep these nations afloat should cease sheltering African elites from accountability. To do so, the international community must move swiftly to derecognize the worst-performing African states, forcing their rulers — for the very first time in their checkered histories — to search for support and legitimacy at home […]

African states that begin to provide their citizens with basic rights and services, that curb violence and that once again commit resources to development projects, would be rewarded with re-recognition by the international community.

Englebert (the political scientist) goes on use examples of democratization in Taiwan as an example of how delegitimizing states can lead to democratization.

Another interesting angle that Englebert brings in is that of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia that has not been recognized by the international community and, perhaps as result of this brittle reception by the international community, it is flourishing economically and politically. You won’t hear imperialists point to Somaliland either. Instead, you’ll get some predictable snark about ‘anarchism‘ or African savagery from these paternalists.

Yet, it is obvious that Somaliland is neither anarchist nor savage, as there is a government in place that is actively trying to work with both Mogadishu and international actors on the one hand, and rational calculations made by all sorts of actors on the other hand. What we have in the Horn of Africa, and – I would argue – by extension elsewhere in the post-colonial world, is a crisis of legitimacy wrought by the brutal, oppressive hand of government.

Read the whole article.

The Predictable Failure of the Iraq War

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve gone over the knowledge problem associated with foreign policy before, and I believe it is sufficient to say that libertarians were right in deflating predictions by hawks that the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq would go over smoothly. Hawks on both the Left and the Right oversimplified the situation in the Middle East. Their condescending tone towards both the Iraqi people and the broader Middle East guaranteed failure from the outset. Anybody who believes that a state – no matter how wealthy and powerful – can just waltz in to another state – no matter how poor and weak – and impose its will upon it is a fool.

Gene Healy reports from DC:

In a 2001 debate on Iraq with former CIA Director James Woolsey, my Cato Institute colleague, then-Chairman William Niskanen, argued that “an unnecessary war is an unjust war” and one we would come to regret having fought.

Niskanen was right. A new report from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University tallies up the costs: nearly 4,500 U.S. troop fatalities, an eventual budgetary cost of some $3.9 trillion and more than 130,000 civilians as “collateral damage.”

[…]

Bill Niskanen, who passed away last year at the age of 78, never tired of reminding conservatives that war is a government program — and an especially destructive one at that.

If you add up the harsh economic sanctions imposed upon the Iraqis by the Democrats earlier in the decade, the 130,000 civilian toll increases significantly (to about half a million, most of whom were children).

Only a foreign policy based around commerce, peace and honest friendship will succeed in both the short and the long runs. Luckily for us, it appears that there is a growing consensus on this argument among the population of the United States. It helps that most advocates of the war are either remorseful or they are becoming more and more discredited by the day. From Hitlery Clinton to Dubya to John McCain, the old guard is steadily giving way to a breath of fresh air. Air that is more suitable for a republic dedicated to individual liberty.

Maps in History

Brandon Christensen History , , , ,

I’m thinking of starting a new project of putting up maps that I think will help to enhance my own perception of history and the struggle between power and liberty. Hopefully it catches on. I’ll probably have a small vignette to go along with some of the maps, some of the time. At least I hope to. This’ll help me clarify my own thoughts and perhaps even help to clarify the thoughts of others. So without further adieu: Continue reading →

Hugo Chavez, Fascist/Socialist (Same Thing) Dead at 58

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , ,

Hugo Chavez, the portly, socialist dictator from Venezuela, died from cancer at the ripe old age of 58. My only lament is that I will probably never get to piss on his grave.

His rule was fairly typical for a Leftist regime: assaults on free speech and the free press, diminished civil liberties, picking and choosing winners and losers in the private sector, strong ties to the military, etc. etc. From the New York Times:

At the same time, he was determined to hold onto and enhance his power. He grew obsessed with changing Venezuela’s laws and regulations to ensure that he could be re-elected indefinitely and become, indeed, a caudillo, able to rule by decree at times. He stacked his government with generals, colonels and majors, drawing inspiration from the leftist military officers who ruled Peru and Panama in the 1970s.

[…]

He began describing his critics as “golpistas,” or putschists, while recasting his own failed 1992 coup as a patriotic uprising. He purged opponents from the national oil company, expropriated the land of others and imprisoned retired military officials who had dared to stand against him. The country’s political debate became increasingly poisonous, and it took its toll on the country.

Private investors, unhinged over Mr. Chávez’s nationalizations and expropriation threats, halted projects. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and others in the middle class left Venezuela, even as large numbers of immigrants from Haiti, China and Lebanon put down stakes here.

The homicide rate soared under his rule, turning Caracas into one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Armed gangs lorded over prisons, as they did in previous governments, challenging the state’s authority. Simple tasks, like transferring the title of a car, remained nightmarish odysseys eased only by paying bribes to churlish bureaucrats.

Other branches of government often bent to his will. He fired about 19,000 employees of Petróleos de Venezuela, the national oil company, in response to a strike in 2002 and 2003. In 2004, he stripped the Supreme Court of its autonomy. In legislative elections in 2010, his supporters preserved a majority in the National Assembly by gerrymandering.

All the while, Mr. Chávez rewrote the rule book on using the media to enhance his power. With “Aló Presidente” (“Hello, President”), his Sunday television program, he would speak to viewers in his booming voice for hours on end. His government ordered privately controlled television stations to broadcast his speeches.

Again, nothing too surprising here. This is what socialism will bring your society, every single time. It’s a conversation that doesn’t happen enough around the world.

What I find most surprising about his death is not that so few on the Left are willing to condemn him for his brutality (Leftists are – by and large – authoritarians who believe that the ends justify the means), but that so many Leftists really believed Chavez’s fascism represented a threat to US interests in the region.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, American policy in the region has changed markedly since the end of the Cold War. American interests in the region have largely faded into obscurity, even when it comes to the drug war (which should end tomorrow). Afghanistan, Mexico and West Africa and the Caribbean are the new fronts in the war on drugs, and overthrowing democratically-elected governments to prevent communism was sooooo 1980s. Nowadays Washington sees democratically-elected socialists coming to power as good for democracy, so long as the fascists don’t try to rewrite the rules to fit their fancies and eliminate democracy (like they’ve done in Honduras, Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Argentina).

Chavez was nothing to Washington. Not even a pain in the ass. That uninformed Leftists continue to lie to themselves, and the like-minded tools they hang out with, should not surprise me, but alas…

Latin America has thrived since Washington has taken a softer, more respectable approach to the region. States that come under socialist influence – like Venezuela and Cuba – become pariahs on their own. Most of this has to do with the fact that militaries are involved in one way or another. Socialism has never come to power democratically.

I’m not too fond of memes, but here is one that often pops into my head when I read a Leftist’s defense of some dictator or other in some part of the world: Continue reading →

Hating Energy Dependence, Not Loving Energy Independence

henrymoore Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

I have been working on this piece since November 30th. I wrote the bulk of it on the first day, and most editing since has been cosmetic. It is related to a project I am helping a friend with, although that is not the reason I wrote it. I don’t often blog about things that recently happened, and when I do bring up current events it is usually in a very general way. The same is true about this post as well. Still, gas prices have been falling, where I’m located at least, ever since before Thanksgiving. A gallon of regular has been stuck at $2.94 for a week or more now and I begin to wonder if they’re not ready to go back up again. Mentioning that is the best I can do to tie to any recent goings-on to the material below, which I hope you, the reader, enjoy, as it is my very first official Notes on Liberty contribution. Thanks again, Brandon, et al.

What’s so bad about Energy Dependence?

Contrary to what one might be led to think, energy independence need not be the opposite of energy (inter)dependence. Likewise, contrary to what many advocates of free markets and free trade will say, energy dependence (perhaps not their choice of words), is not a good thing. Energy interdependence certainly can be a good thing, but in today’s world I can’t agree that every instance of it always is.

The argument in support of energy interdependence runs, energy is cost-effective so long as it is abundant, therefore, the more suppliers of energy we have, the better. But the statement can also lead to another conclusion: therefore, the larger the size of the supply, the better. What this should mean is a very large domestic supply is as good or better than simply a large foreign supply. This does not mean they aren’t both good. And of course, the more suppliers there are the greater the potential for competition to lower prices, but I suspect that it is much easier to get competition amongst a few suppliers in a free (well, sort of) country than it is to get competition amongst several suppliers in an unfree world. Continue reading →

From the Comments: Foreign Policy and the Rule of Law

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , , , , , , ,

This excerpt comes from a debate I had with Dr. Delacroix on his main blog awhile back. It pretty much made me a star within Santa Cruz libertarian circles (i.e. four people now know my name). Behold:

The idea – nay wish! – that the newly liberated people of the Arab world will somehow elect secular, Western-friendly governments after 50 years of oppression by regimes that were perceived by the Muslim public to be secular and Western-friendly belongs to be filed under the category of ‘fantasy’, not foreign policy.

and this:

I think Egypt and Libya are going to be just as bad as they have been, if not worse. Only Tunisia, which did not rely on foreign support AND recently elected Islamist parties to their new government, will come out of this for the better. I hope I’m wrong, of course, but libertarians rarely are!

and finally this:

The idea that Paul knows everything about anything is one that sure does look a lot like dogmatism at first glance. But Ron Paul will be the first to claim that he does not know everything. That’s why he insists that everything go through the Constitutional process – including overseas activities. That is to say, Ron Paul’s idea of dogmatism is to adhere to The Rule of Law. Imagine that!

I highly, highly recommend reading through the whole exchange (it starts after a few other comments in the thread; just scroll down, you won’t regret it, and don’t forget the popcorn!).

Globalization: Its Context and Its Virtues

Brandon Christensen Books, History , , , ,

In my spare time I try to read literary masterpieces and popular non-fiction. The latest book that I’ve picked up is Charles Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. I picked it up because the author’s previous work 1491, had a profound impact on my way of thinking about the world. The new book doesn’t disappoint. An excerpt:

One way to summarize [scholar’s] efforts might be to say that to the history of kings and queens most of us learned as students has been added a recognition of the remarkable role of exchange, both ecological and economic.

[…] In some respects this image of the past – a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics – is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires […] It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries.

Indeed. I want to use this quote to level two separate criticisms, one at the Left and one at the Right. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Free Baluchistan! More on secession, this time in Pakistan. I’d highly recommend taking a gander at this one.
  2. The Economist has great article critiquing France’s “new” relationship with Africa. It appears to be just like the old one.
  3. Six Nations passports, issued in Canada for the indigenous, are more than just travel documents. Or are they?
  4. Bacevich has an article at Foreign Policy suggesting that NATO should become an all-European alliance.
  5. More on secession: Welcome to New Bohemia (this time from the Left).

Life Under Fatwa

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links , , , , , ,

I did once visit Iran when I was 21 years old, during the time of the shah. It was wonderful. I had just graduated from university, and such was the world at that time, 1968, that I was able to drive with a friend from London to South Asia across the world. I mean, try driving across Iran and Afghanistan now! I remember it being a very cosmopolitan, very cultured society. And it always seemed to me that the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture — which is not to defend the shah’s regime, which was appalling. But it was one of the tragedies of history that an appalling regime was replaced by a worse one.

From Salman Rushdie.

At first I found his praise for the Obama administration to be typical of Left-wing establishment figures, but then I remembered that Rushdie is an Indian and had probably had to deal with racist legislation in one form or another while growing up. While the period of colonialism (roughly coinciding with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I) did indeed open up more places to markets, the Jim Crow-like legal barriers that European states erected no doubt helped to foster part of the suspicious climate that now pervades most globalization skeptics worldwide.

This is a shame for two reasons: Continue reading →

Romney and “Defense”

Warren Gibson Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

“If you don’t want America to be the strongest nation in the world, I’m not your President.”  Thus spake candidate Romney recently.  Well, I don’t and he’s not.

Sure, you could interpret “strongest” to mean most prosperous, fairest, etc.  But we all know darn well what Mitt, who is pals with the Zionist militant Netanyahu, had in mind: military might.

Of all the urgently needed reforms in this country, I submit that dismantling the empire is #1.  It is bankrupting us, generating enemies for us, and turning our homeland into a police state.

Yes, I said empire.  Depending on how you count, there are as many as 737 US military bases scattered across the globe, about 38 of which are medium- to large sized.  The number of military and other government personnel involved plus private contractors runs into the millions.  The CIA is hated all over the world and for good reasons.  And as Brandon Christensen pointed out, the US defense umbrella weakens incentives for the Europeans, Japanese, et. al., to take care of themselves.

Obama’s record on these matters is mixed.  The good news: the Iraq war has ended (for the present; keep your fingers crossed), Afghanistan is winding down, and cuts in the “defense” budget are coming.  On the other side of the ledger, there have been ominous buildups in Australia and Central Africa.  On the home front, the police state is escalating and the spiral toward bankruptcy is accelerating.  A pretty awful report card in all, yet Romney could make it worse.

No, I haven’t lost my senses.  I will not vote for Obama, who I believe to be hell-bent for fascist dictatorship, in consequence if not by conscious design.  If you forced me to choose between him and Romney I would cross my arms and refuse to choose.  I’m voting for Gary Johnson, who has called for a 43% cut in “defense” spending.