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Joel Surnow: Imperialism As Adult Supervision

Last year, he [24 creator Joel Surnow] contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.” ~The New Yorker That’s great, except that […]

Last year, he [24 creator Joel Surnow] contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.” ~The New Yorker

That’s great, except that communism wasn’t “solved” by war, at least not in any conventional sense of communism being defeated in a shooting war.  To a very large degree, communism collapsed because of its own political and economic failures.  It was aided in its collapse by meaningful external pressure and the reality of potentially very strong military resistance to any future foreign adventures, but its end had primarily domestic causes.  Slavery in the world continued in Brazil until 1888, when it was outlawed without recourse to war, and serfdom in Russia was outlawed by a single command from the Tsar.  (Slavery still continues to exist in some parts of Africa and Asia, so speaking generally slavery has been severely reduced worldwide but not ended.)  In other words, even when war “solves” something, it usually wasn’t necessary, involves tremendous costs and may contribute to greater evils that come out of the wreckage of societies ruined by the war.  Had it not been for foolish and reckless governments that believed their international disputes could be “solved” through war in 1914, fascism, Nazism and communism could never have come to power in Europe.  Put me down as a skeptic about war being able to solve more problems than it causes. 

On the plus side, Surnow is apparently against the Iraq war and a self-styled “isolationist,” but that does make you wonder what he thinks of Santorum’s batty fears about Iranian world domination.  Unfortunately, in the same breath, his weird global hegemonic paternalism kicks in and he says fairly crazy and demeaning things like this:

In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”

Perhaps Mr. Surnow sees the sabre-rattling directed at Iran as an international version of the father yelling at his teenage son, “Don’t make me come in there!  I said turn that music [or uranium enrichment] down!”  This is as wrong-headed as when he referred fondly to President Reagan as the “father” that the country needed.  President Reagan was an improvement in leadership over his predecessor and someone who made some very good policy decisions (along with quite a few pretty bad ones), but he was not a national father. 

America is neither father nor mother to the world.  It is ridiculous that this even needs to be said.  States that oppose or even mildly criticise the conduct of our government are not rebellious teenagers thwarting our paternal rights or cheeky children talking back to us.  They are sovereign and co-equal nation-states that have had quite enough of this attitude that the world is somehow ours to rule.     

Historically speaking, America is a sort of overambitious twenty-five year old who wants, at least under the present management, to tell his elders what’s what and force all the old folks to start adapting to his way of doing things.  The twenty-five year old may even have a lot of good ideas (though he hasn’t had many recently), but he thinks that the way to fix the old folks’ problems is to bust down their doors, smack them around a little, set fire to their furniture and declare, “You’re free!  Now clean up this mess quickly, or I’ll have to write you off as hopelessly backward.”

Hegemony and imperialism always encourage these attitudes in the people who have political and economic supremacy.    They do not simply encourage a paternalistic condescension towards other peoples, which might exist anyway, but they introduce all the worst possessive instincts that parents have towards their children into the realm of international relations where these attitudes have no place at all.  It is one thing to think of your nation as being “the adult” of the world, which is bad enough when it seems obvious to many other nations that yours is the one throwing a three-year old’s temper tantrum, but it is even worse to think that the pursuit of legitimate interests by other states is an expression of rebellion and ingratitude towards you.  First of all, this is an incorrect assessment of what those states are doing, and second it infuses the entire debate with this emotional rubbish about how the rest of the world “owes” us for keeping the peace and “leading” the rest of the world. 

If America is the country primarily responsible for keeping the peace, and let’s grant that this is the case for the sake of argument, this is simply the fulfillment of the obligation that comes with great power.  I am reminded of a saying from an Indian movie: “It is the tree’s duty to shelter.”  If America is the last superpower, would other nations expect us to do any less?   Obviously, many states have come to expect the superpower to do this as part of the duty attached to our international power.  In my view, it is a duty that Americans do not want and should not have, and it is because Americans do not want to be the world’s leader, but find their country compelled (mostly by their own political class) to occupy this role, many Americans begin to exhibit the attitude that comes with the possession of great power and no sense of obligation towards anyone else.  This is the attitude that other peoples around the world should feel grateful that we are so benevolent and that we treat them as well as we do–the implication is that they are in our power, we are their masters and we could just as easily start treating them very poorly if they don’t watch what they say.  There is no way for other peoples to receive this attitude except as an insult and a veiled threat. 

One of the themes that comes up in Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act is the Ottoman Turkish sense that the Christian peoples of the empire did not show the appropriate gratitude to the Turks for whatever reforms or benefits they had received.  The idea that subject peoples should be grateful to the ruling people is obviously a paternalistic one premised on a presumed natural inequality.  The language of rebellion and ingratitude only comes up in the context of supremacy and the assumption that it is a gift and an indulgence towards less-developed beings to treat them with the appropriate respect and consideration. 

This language of ingratitude frequently came up among neocons immediately after 9/11: “Why don’t these ingrates appreciate all that we have done for Muslims around the world?  We aided jihad for decades, and there’s not even a thank you note!”  It is almost possible to conceive of neocon war fever in the Near East as the acting out of a spurned lover–except, of course, that we understand their other objectives in the region and this is not among them.  Talk of ingratitude reappeared during the row with the Europeans, especially the Germans.  This involved some extremely selective memory and collective ignorance on a grand scale, aided by the substandard historical educations we have all received in this country.  Many Americans would say of German opposition to the Iraq war: “We rebuilt Germany [having leveled it] and those lousy Krauts don’t even have the decency to help us attack another country!  Where is all that good German longing for war we remember?”  Never mind that we simply supplied loans to the Germans for some of their rebuilding and that they rebuilt their own country–they somehow “owed” us, almost sixty years later, for what we had done in our own strategic best interest and were therefore obliged to pay up by way of support for our unprovoked invasion of another country.  Never mind that they were trying to do us a favour by keeping us out of the disaster that Iraq surely would (and did) become.  One of the greatest dangers of a government viewing international opposition to its position as the rebellion of ungrateful subjects is that it makes the government even more likely to pursue the ill-advised course that provoked the argument in the first place, as if to prove to everyone that this government really is master of the world and that the others really are your subjects.  This is incredibly stupid and, as Jack Bauer might say, “we don’t have time for this.”

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