A Struggle on Two Fronts: Against Reactionaries and

Against Imperialists.
By Christopher Carrico

http://ccarrico.wordpress.com

Originally published in Stabroek News, History This Week, 2 September,

2010

The quote ‘History is written by the victors’ is normally ascribed to Winston

Churchill. Even without the fact that Churchill is a person to whom a great
deal of apocrypha has been attributed, he clearly was not the first person to
conceive of this idea.

Walter Benjamin, a far lesser known figure than Churchill, also addressed
the question of how the victorious write history: in his essay ‘Theses on the
Philosophy of History.’ This dark essay, though one ultimately filled with
faith and hope, was completed in the spring of 1940. Later in the same
year, Benjamin was arrested by Spanish authorities while trying to flee
Europe and Nazi persecution. Benjamin fully expected to be handed over
to the German authorities and sent to the Nazi concentration camps.
Instead of facing these horrors, he chose to commit suicide by overdosing
on morphine.

About history, Walter Benjamin wrote ‘in every era the attempt must be
made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to
overpower it.’ The only historians capable of inspiring hope are those who
are ‘firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if
he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.’

The cultural histories of peoples who have been conquered become part of
the spoils of the victors. Even in developing countries that celebrate their
multiculturalism, there is the risk that official state-sponsored observances
like Amerindian Heritage Month or Emancipation Day will become another
way that those who have ‘won’ in these societies appropriate the culture of
national minorities as part of the spoils of their victory. The bigger portions
of these spoils, however, are collected in the museums and archives of
Europe and America; in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural
History in Washington, D.C.; they were in the World’s Fairs in London and
in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries, where ‘savages’ and
‘barbarians’ were brought from around the world and placed on view before
the ‘civilised’ to show the inevitable linear progression of history towards its
teleological end: Western civilisation. Documentation of the civilising
mission of the West is always also a documentation of the barbarism that
the West has carried out.

It is in this sense – the Janus-faced nature of imperial power (where they

write history as if they were the rest of the world’s saviours) – that the
critics of ‘human rights imperialism’ in fact have a valid point about how the
notion of rights functions in the world today. Human rights organisations as
they actually exist can sometimes be the 20th and 21st century equivalents
of the Christian missions of the colonial era. Whatever the individual
intentions of the missionaries, or of the human rights activists, their ideas
help to form part of the justification for imperialism. Because feudalism,
despotism, ignorance, and social backwardness exist in the world, the
‘enlightened’ West has a duty to civilise the rest. The West is called to
carry, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, ‘The White Man’s Burden.’

There is an element of the appeal to human rights in every American

imperial intervention of recent times. In the Iraq War, even after the world
learned that Iraqis did not have weapons of mass destruction, the war was
still justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and a
gross violator of human rights.

In Afghanistan, the war is said to not just be about the ‘hunt for al Qaeda’
but also to be about the freedom of the people of Afghanistan. In
particular, in fighting a war in Afghanistan, the US claims to be fighting
against extreme forms of gender oppression, and other forms of cultural
tyranny, not just against the Taliban.
The case against Iran has being built for years. The high profile sentencing
of Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiana to be stoned to death for adultery will no
doubt be used by imperialists as another reason why sanctions against
(and possibly even an invasion of) Iran is the right thing for the ‘civilised’
world to do. The fact that in Iran, homosexuality is punishable by the death
penalty will, no doubt, also be invoked as a justification.

The Cold War was full of instances that are similar to the ‘War on Terror’ in
their ideological use. The terror and repression of socialist states was used
as justification for taking preemptive action against left-leaning
governments in the name of stopping the spread of communism.

The logic of the Cold War never totally went away, as we can clearly see in
Latin American and the Caribbean. American-Cuban relations have still not
been normalized; Hugo Chavez is presented in the American media as the
South American equivalent of Saddam Hussein. The Chavez government
was so harassed by human rights imperialism that they expelled foreign
human rights groups from the country. Even Aristide was vilified as a
human rights violator whenever he became inconvenient for the Bush
administration in Washington to keep in power.

In addition to the fact that the human rights agenda always presents the
danger of being hijacked as a justification for war and imperialism, there
are other problems. The agendas of international agencies are not always
what seem best from the point of view of local organisations. The funding
streams that keep NGOs running severely limit what kinds of actions can
be done to address problems in local settings. Organisations from the
developing world often have a lack of autonomy to set their own agendas,
and when they have fought for the space to set their own agendas, foreign
organisations often take credit for the progress that has been made by
action that came from the grassroots.

Organisations that are attempting to fight social problems in the developing

world are going to need to develop more strategies that help them to move
past the trap of the liberal democratic – human rights based paradigm.
Real social movements are going to need to forcefully assert themselves
again from the grassroots up, from the most marginalised and
dispossessed, and not from NGOs who have lost the ability to be
‘movements’ because they are just a string of foreign-funded projects.

More activists around the world will have to recognise that taking your case
to the UN in Geneva, or to the OAS, or to Copenhagen, may not be the
most effective use of your time, energy and resources in creating real
social change in your communities right now. Liberal human rights
strategies, legalistic reforms, lawsuits against the government, etc. can be
one part of an effective struggle for social change, but used alone, without
the support of a broad-based movement to push government and society
for change from below, there will not be an effective ‘revolution from above’
coming from the UN or the OAS, or from individual nation-states like the
U.S., the U.K., Canada, or Norway.

By taking the internationalist human rights paradigm as the default setting

in the world of social activism, activists have already admitted defeat before
they have begun the struggle. They have done so by giving up the fight
over local power and local conditions, by not taking seriously enough the
power of their own nation-states, and the space of the nation-state as a site
of struggle. They have given up hope of substantially transforming their
own societies and governments from within, and hope, in vain, that outside
‘pressure’ from international bodies is what will save them at the end of the
day.

Finally, an appeal to the liberal human rights paradigm requires that those
who seek redress in this manner perpetuate their identities as victims
instead of taking concrete steps to empower themselves in practical ways
in the local and the national context.

In the end, the issue at stake in the absolute hegemony of a single model
of how to achieve human justice in the world has less to do with the
universality of liberal democratic values, and has more to do with the failure
of earlier projects of liberation to be successfully carried out. If national
liberation struggles, the struggle for socialist construction, or the struggles
for co-operative or communist societies had been successful, then
appealing to the international bodies that are designed around the
Washington Consensus model of liberty and formal equality would not
seem like the only option that activists have when entering a struggle to
end inequality and to expand the space for human freedom in the world.

What are we left with? A struggle on two fronts. First, a struggle against
reactionaries: people who defend their power and privilege as a part of their
culture and customary rights, people who condone or look the other way at
violence against the vulnerable, people who explain away and rationalise
extra-judicial killings, people who assert things like ‘homosexuals ought to
be beheaded.’ But there is also a struggle on a second front that needs to
be fought: a struggle against international capitalists who are glad to have
those reactionaries around, because they give them the excuse to do
everything possible to undermine any kind of autonomy that might be
possible at the local or national level.