Araw ng Kalayaan

On June 12th the Philippines celebrates the 121st anniversary of its independence. To all our Filipino readers, friends etc (especially "etc"), Walt sends best wishes for Independence Day and the future of your country!

If you'd like to hear a really great version of Lupang Hinirang -- the national anthem of the Republic of the Philippines -- click here. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to go out and shoot an imperialist!

Independence Day salute to the Philippines and Filipinos!

Posting this a day early, just in case I don't get online tomorrow. To all our Filipino readers, friends etc (especially "etc"), Walt sends best wishes for Independence Day and the future of your country!

If you'd like to hear a really great version of Lupang Hinirang -- the national anthem of the Republic of the Philippines -- click here. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to go out and shoot an imperialist!

Will America never learn? The persistence of bad foreign policy

Almost 237 years ago the United States of America started life through an armed rebellion against established authority -- the British monarchy -- which established a revolutionary new model of government "of the people, by the people and for the people". That remains a great and noble goal, and the fact that it has yet to be fully realized hasn't stopped US governments from trying to impose their model on the rest of the world.

Over the course of the last two centuries, successive administrations have adopted a policy of forcing other countries to adopt the US model, sometimes by persuasion and sometimes by conquest. Walt has a little list.

In 1812 the US Congress thought Canadians could hardly wait to join the new republic. Taking Canada from the British would be "merely a matter of marching", said Jefferson. Two years later, with the White House burned and the country nearly broke, Congress changed its mind.

The Mexican Invasion of the mid-19th century succeeded in annexing to the USA a large chunk of the southwest. For some reason, people from further south keep coming into "New Mexico" and neighbouring states, wanting to keep their language, customs and religion. Some folks, especially in Arizona, think it might be better to give the territory back to the Mexicans.

Then came the War Between the States, in which some states had the temerity to assert the right to leave the Union, a right which they thought had been guaranteed by the Constitution. They learned that once you're in the Hotel America, "you can check out, but you can never leave".

Having got that nasty business out of the way, and realizing that the Hispanics were a soft target, the USA embarked in 1898 on a truly imperial war against Spain. The net gain was a handful of tropical paradises (?) --- Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines -- but hey, America was now a colonial power, just like Britain! The economic and other benefits were, errr, dubious.

What about the World Wars, I hear you ask. [Yes, what about the World Wars? Ed.] Is Walt saying the USA should have stayed out of the War to End All Wars...and the second War to End All Wars? Didn't America save the world for democracy? Well... No matter how many John Wayne movies you watched, America didn't bail out the Allies singlehandedly. And if the USA had come into the wars at the beginning rather than during the second act, the other colonial powers might have been accomplished faster and at considerably less economic and human cost.

But, you might argue, that's precisely why the USA was so quick to jump into Korea. Sorry, wrong again. Omar Bradley called the Korean War "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy". One lesson that might have been learned (but wasn't) is that if you're going to fight, use both hands!

Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross the Yalu and invade Communist China, possibly dropping the Big One for a quick and decisive victory. But "wiser men" in the Truman administration wouldn't let him, for fear of provoking a war with the Soviet Union, for which China was merely a proxy.

Apparently they didn't consider the possibility that the USSR wasn't as strong as it appeared, and might well have been defeated, sparing the world the 40 years of cold war that followed the Korean truce. Even the willingness to call it a draw may now be regarded as a mistake, for the war, which technically never ended, threatens to go ballistic -- literally -- at any moment.

Which brings us to Vietnam, which Pentagon types will tell you is the first war the US ever lost. (This ignores the War of 1812, but Washington's memory is short.) In The Rise of the Chinese Republic (McGraw-Hill, 1989) American historian Edwin P. Hoyt says:

The Americans did not learn fast. It took them still another war in Asia [Vietnam] to learn that what American leaders had said many years ago was true. No statesman with a lick of sense will let the country get involved in a land war in Asia.

There was another lesson that the Americans May not even yet have learned: Anyone who interferes in an indigenous revolution anywhere is a fool, and such interference is bound to fail. In China and in Vietnam the Americans tried to interfere. These actions cost them billions of dollars and far too many lives, and ultimately the revolutions succeeded in the face of American interference.

Mr. Hoyt wrote that in 1989. Since then we've had the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan and (sort of) Libya. These theatres of war are all in Asia, although not the part Hoyt was thinking of. And they're all part of the Muslim world. Walt predicts that 100 years from now historians will lump them all together as "the Middle Eastern War" or "the Great War Against Islam". ("Crusades" has already been used.)

And still the USA cannot or will not learn. Now the Prez -- no Muslim he? -- is making noises (again) about taking action (nature unspecified) in Syria to overthrow a tyrannical dictator, make it safe for democracy, yada yada yada. Haven't we seen this movie before? (Canadians need not feel all smug and superior. "Call me Steve" Harper and his bumboy Baird are very vocal in their willingness to hold America's coat...at least until Uncle Sam's nose bleeds.)

Edwin Hoyt again:
The United States has run out of gas politically and philosophically. Any nation that converts from a dynamic economy to a service economy...finds that it loses that precious quality of initiative. The American government is still posturing itself in the world as the defender of the status quo. It is hard to consider a less dynamic and less appealing posture for a nation that once boasted of its revolutionary spirit.

UN human rights rapporteur links Boston Marathon bombings to US "global domination project"

Dr. Richard Falk, a citizen of the Excited States of America, is Professor Emeritus of international law at Princeton University. He is also the Disunited Nations' special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, reporting to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

And what does the good doctor think of the state of human rights in America's dear ally, Israel? Not much. He has compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians with the horrors of Nazi Germany. Expressing this sentiment earned Dr. Falk the distinction of being one of the few American Jews permanently banned from setting foot in the Zionist entity.

This week Dr. Falk garnered a huge round of Bronx cheers from the usual suspects for having the temerity to suggest that the Boston Marathon bombings were the result of the United States "global domination project" and Washington's policy on Israel.

He made these controversial remarks in a commentary published in Foreign Policy Journal on April 21st. You will note that there is no link to his article. The Journal's website -- www.foreignpolicyjournal.com -- seems to be unavailable this evening. Of course we know there's no censorship in America, so it must be some kind of technical glitch. However, Ed. was able to locate a critical article in The Jewish Daily Forward, from which he pulled these quotes from Dr. Falk's commentary.

"The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world....

"In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world," Dr. Falk wrote.

[Hold the presses! Ed. -- I've always wanted to say that...]

Ed. has just located an earlier version of Dr. Falk's commentary, posted on his own blog on April 19th.

Readers of WWW may want to compare his comments with Walt's post "'We don't know who did it or why...'", published on April 16th. Perhaps Dr. Falk is another of Walt's regular readers?

Canadians follow American policies, provoke same terrorist response

The burden of Walt's recent posts about the Boston Marathon bombing and now the alleged plot to blow up a VIA Rail train has been that Islamic extremists -- homegrown as well as imported -- are doing their damnable thing to protest American policies and actions in the Middle East.

As American presidents from Teddy Roosevelt onwards have not yet learned, if you keep on playing the bully -- trying to impose your ideas of what's right and good on other countries and other cultures by force of arms -- the 97-pound weakling will eventually fight back.

Walt doesn't know all his readers and followers by name [but he knows where some of you live! Ed.] but notes with delight sympathetic comments that appear on the Net and in the Twitterverse. One such was released into the ether yesterday by a possible "Waltist" -- Max Depontailler, a staffer for Céline Hervieux-Payette, former leader of the Liberal opposition in the Canadian Senate. Here's a screen grab of a comment M. Depontailler immediately regretted making.

This was posted yesterday, following news of the arrest of two Muslim fundamentalists who were allegedly plotting to blow up a VIA Rail train at the Whirlpool bridge near Niagara Falls.  M. Depontailler thought he was tweeting from his own account. Too bad for him he was still on the account of his boss! He deleted the post almost immediately, but it still appears on a number of cached sites.

Mme Hervieux-Payette hasn't commented publicly, nor is she likely to, since in times past she has expressed similar sentiments herself. In 2006 she wrote to American critics of the seal hunt that what she finds horrible is ”the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners – mainly blacks – in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, and the destabilization of the entire world by the American government’s aggressive foreign policy, etc.”

Which brings us back to Walt's (and Max's) point. As Americans (and Canadians) search for the root causes of the terrorist attacks on their countries, they might well start by looking in the mirror.

"Call me Steve" Harper might well ask himself why he would choose to ally Canada so closely with the USA, given the ROTW's resentment of American political and cultural imperialism. He might just as well sew a great big red-and-white target on the maple leaf flag.

Afghanistan: exemplar of the failure of post-colonial policy

In 2002, a Scottish lad by the name of Rory Stewart walked, west to east, across the centre of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. Why anyone would do this, especially in the middle of a shooting war, is beyond me. Stewart himself seems to have lost the point of the exercise, as he admits towards the end of The Places in Between (Picador, 2004).

If it was poppies the lad was looking for, he was disappointed. All he saw was sand, rocks, snow and the occasional mud building. The book has pictures, in black and white, which rather surprised me until I read the author's description of the dun monochrome he looked at from dawn till dusk. No point in spending extra on four-colour printing for that.

It turns out Mr. Stewart is a historian or ethnologist or a bit of both. He wanted to follow the path taken in the 16th century by the great Babur (it means "tiger") a descendant of Timur the Lame, who succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor.

Of Babur's mighty works in Afghanistan, virtually nothing remains. Stewart didn't even see ruins. What he saw were ruins of ruins, such as what's left of the Bamiyan Buddha, a world heritage site dynamited by the Taliban just before Stewart got there. Something similar happened in Timbuktu (Mali) last week. No competing religions allowed in Muslim countries, you know.

All in all, The Places in Between is, like the journey it describes, tedious and depressing. I did, however, find a nugget, a footnote to the chapter headed "@afghangov.org". I present it here for the stone truth the author tells about the failure of Western foreign aid -- indeed of Western foreign policy -- in places like Afghanistan, which is a metaphor for all of the Middle East and Africa. The words are Stewart's; the added emphasis is mine.

Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans' diverse experiences, [Western] policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.

They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.

They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices.

There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact, their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action of judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

Book review: Sinclair describes India as it was and is

A couple of days ago, in "Politically incorrect India", I gave you a quick review of Gordon Sinclair's Khyber Caravan, a dated (written in 1935) but still cogent account of the author's travels and misadventures in the wild, wild northwest corner of the British Raj...and beyond. Three-quarters of a century since, the area he describes -- the Khyber Pass and its surrounds -- has changed very little -- and not necessarily for the better.

Khyber Caravan was not Sinclair's first book about the south Asian sub-continent. Three years earlier he wrote Footloose in India (S.B. Gundy, 1932), subtitled "Adventures of a news chaser from Khyber's grim gash of death to the tiger jungles of Bengal and the Burmese battle ground of the black cobra". Melodramatic? Definitely. A fascinating portrayal of a "loco land of lotus, lice and loincloths"? Decidedly! Worth reading today? Walt would say so.

21st-century readers may find Sinclair's style dated and a tad over the top. He writes in the "tough guy lingo" popular in Hollywood movies of the day. Imagine dialogue spoken by Edward G. Robinson reduced to print: gams, gats and bad eggs. Sinclair's prose is not just violet, but deep purple. But he was writing for a popular audience, what we might call the "middle-brow" readers of the Toronto Star. Did he speak to them in language they could understand? Footloose in India was published in October 1932 and the first edition sold out on the first day of release. It went on to become a best-seller in Canada that year, and in the USA and UK the following year.

Sinclair's books would today be called racist and politically incorrect in the extreme. He said and wrote what he thought. Here's an example which he quotes from a brief interview with Mahatma Gandhi. "India is undoubted the filthiest, smelliest, unhealthiest country in the known world."

Gandhi did not argue the point, possibly out of politeness, possibly out of annoyance. Or possibly because it couldn't be denied then and shouldn't be denied now. It's just that we don't say those things now. Which is exactly why Footloose in India should be read as an antidote to the poison of one-worldism and political correctness which the lamestream media is feeding us every hour of every day. We are not all the same! Some cultures and civilizations are more advanced, healthier, saner and generally better than others.

Later in Footloose in India, Sinclair recounts a visit to a mosque in Delhi.
The sight there was one to remember. Twenty thousand men faced the east and bowed in prayer like animated clockwork. Up front on a marble throne the priest droned his sing-song about life and death -- "What is written is written."

Nobody can do anything about anything. You live and die exactly the way it is all planned out in the beginning. No wonder these people make no progress in the world. No wonder they crawl about in filthy hovels. No wonder they suffer from inferiority, lice, starvation and fear of devils. It is written.

That observation could just as easily be written today, only in Pakistan, say, or Afghanistan, there being a dire dearth of mosques in Hindu India. Pious Muslims still believe "what is wwritten is written". Nothing has changed. It's just that we don't say those things now.

Does Gordon Sinclair's jaundiced view of the sub-continent mean that he hated or despised India and Indians? No. Did he not go back only three years later for another look? Which is more than many latter-day travellers could stomach. He just told it like it was, no sugar-coating or wilful blindness. Footloose in India and Khyber Caravan are good books, honest and entertaining. Read them if you can find them, before the PC police burn them.

Footnote: According to Sinclair's introduction to a 1966 edition of Footloose in India (McClelland & Stewart), he wrote another book, which was never published because "by the standards of that day, it was considered dirty". Ed. and I have looked hard [very hard! Ed.] but have been unable to find any trace of the hidden opus. Anyone with any information is asked to e-mail us.

Book review: Politically incorrect India

Late last year I mentioned Gordon Sinclair's Khyber Caravan (Hurst & Blackett 1936, Pocket Books 1975). Sinclair described a case of child prostitution in what would today be part of Afghanistan, and I made the comparison with a case reported in the press just last week.

I've just finished rereading Khyber Caravan, and recommend it highly for those with a taste for tales of adventure in the benighted backwaters of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of the stories -- alledgedly true -- which Sinclair tells make Kipling's tales of the Raj look tame.

Khyber Caravan was written in 1935, published a year later. I doubt if it could be published at all in today's super-sensitive, ultra-PC society. Although he merely records what he saw and makes comparisons with western civilization, Sinclair would today be criticized (and doubtless hauled in front of a human rights tribunal) for being a hopeless racist, sexist, imperialist, whateverist.

Oh yes, and a religious bigot too, for calling attention to the cruel and barbarous practices of both Hinduism and Islam. The truth is that Sinclair, a cynical Scot, didn't have much time for organized religion of any stripe, and was pretty sharp in his criticisms of Christians as well as heathens.

As for being an imperialist, read what Sinclair has to say -- writing in 1935, remember -- about the British presence in Waziristan -- the patch of wasteland where Afghanistan, Pakistan and India today meet and compete.

You look at these people [Pathans, Pushtuns, Waziris, etc.] living in the homeland in which they were born and raised and over which they still hold nominal control and you wonder why, by all that's just and holy, any outside nation should send a mighty army in to torment them and spy on them and burn their homes.

Britain doesn't attempt to administer the tribal belt of Waziristan; doesn't claim to own it. In its hills live courageous, hawk-eyed hillmen.

The hillmen endeavour to hold this homeland from invasion with native-made rifles; loosely-jointed home-packed shells. At the same time they must squeeze out a living from crusted mountain soil w hich sees no rain for seven months at a time.

Opposed to them are 7000 men whose only job is fighting or preparing to fight. Well-fed men, men with every killing device known to science. Men so armed that they can blow up tribal villages of mud and sticks without ever seeing them or rain bombs on scurrying enemies from the air and wipe them from the face of the earth. But why do it?

The emphasis is mine. It's as good a question in 2011 as it was in 1935. The only -- repeat, only -- US politician asking that question today, and pledging to bring all American troops home from the Middle East and other foreign hotspots, is Ron Paul.

You may, if you're lucky, find Khyber Caravan in the 904 section of your local library, if your library uses the Dewey system. The paperback edition, 1975, is on Amazon.

Note to those who are offended by the picture in Walt's post on Swaziland: Khyber Caravan has pictures that today would probably get the publisher slapped into the hoosegow!

Humanitarian imperialism

Writing in today's Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente makes the connection between the West's latest invasion of an Arab country -- Libya -- and the doctrine of "responsibility to protect" (R2P) which is at the heart of the UN resolution. R2P is, as Ms Wente says, all the fashion these days among foreign policy liberals such as Hellery Clinton.

Two excerpts from Ms Wente's column are worth repeating here.

The war in Libya is a creation of the liberal intellectuals – just as the war in Iraq was a creation of the neo-conservatives.... Both groups are serenely convinced of their own moral rightness. Yet, the delusions of the R2P crowd aren’t all that different from the delusions of the neo-cons, who thought they could march into Iraq, decapitate the dictator, and help the cheering throngs embrace democracy. Has the past decade taught these people nothing? Evidently not.

Well said. But the one that really caught Walt's eye comes right at the end.

We have entered a new age – the age of humanitarian imperialism. Humanitarian imperialists are besotted with fantasies of the West’s inherent goodness. As American writer David Rieff puts it, they have promised that, from now on, all wars will be “noble wars of altruism.” To them, the facts on the ground don’t matter much. What really matters is their good intentions.

"Humanitarian imperialism". What a wonderfully descriptive oxymoron. And what a concept! This bears further discussion...