I've talked about the quiet importance of "pipeline politics" before on this blog, especially as it applies to Central Asia. Well, Russia just struck a ridiculously favourable pipeline deal that will generate $300 billion for Russia and $200 billion for Turkmenistan over its 25-year lifetime.
If the USA did this, it would be called the worst kind of energy imperialism. As Ariel Cohen's "Checkmate" notes:
"By playing multi-dimensional chess of energy and geopolitics, and catering to Turkmenbashi's paranoid proclivities, Russia positioned itself to become a market maker in natural gas - a position that can be only compared to that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the oil market. The gas deal of the century signifies Russia's coming of age not just as a key geopolitical, but also as a geo-economic player in Eurasia."Read the full article to appreciate the full breadth of the aftershocks, which will definitely stretch to include Europe and the EU.
And is it no wonder that Turkmenistan is currently run by a Stalinistic despot? Hell, this deal even beats the TotalFinaElf deal with Iraq.
"If the USA did this, it would be called the worst kind of energy imperialism."
Rightly so, no? Why is this important? Maybe I'm missing something, but if you're an American, it should be your responsibility to expose US crimes and conflicts of interest, not Russia's. Unlike the latter, you can, at least in theory, do something about the former.
Oh yes, rightly so. This has "ripoff" written all over it in big neon letters. I'm not an economist, but to my eye it sure looks like energy imperialism.
We stop agreeing when Jonathan intones the mantra of America-haters everywhere:
"...if you're an American, it should be your responsibility to expose US crimes and conflicts of interest, not Russia's. Unlike the latter, you can, at least in theory, do something about the former."
This excuse is ages-old, and "excuse" is exactly what it is. It's an open declaration that one will not see evil anywhere but America. Its logical end point is James Hudnall's line that "No one seems to get outraged by mass murder unless Americans or Israelis are involved." This is, I submit, despicable.
Transpose one identity, and rewind to 1940, and presumably it would remain equally true:
"...if you're an American, it should be your responsibility to expose US crimes and conflicts of interest, not Nazi Germany's. Unlike the latter, you can, at least in theory, do something about the former."
Which was, of course, an argument put forth by Joe Kennedy and others of the extreme right wing at the time. One they shared with the American Communist Party, at least until Hitler dissolved his alliance with Stalin and invaded Russia.
It was the same argument heard in the 60s, 70s and 80s, too, by demonstrators who protested U.S. policy in Europe and said not a word for the people like Vaclav Havel and others. Real Havel and his compatriots as they talk about this - they're still bitter about it, and still hold those people in the most abject moral contempt. Rightly so.
I covered this very tendency in greater depth back on May 7th, and the materials in the UPDATE are worth re-reading. The leftist Michael Walzer makes this point better than I, and it's a point worth heeding. At least, if one wants to belong to a decent left that has any credibility with mainstream American society... or serious people elsewhere.
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. "
-- George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism"
Or how about:Mr Katzman,
The demagogic value of your Nazi rendition of my quote aside, as much as it might be shocking, it is still true and rational. You should not seek to highlight crimes of your enemies at the price of ignoring the crimes you have a capability of ending or preventing. Perhaps if American intellectuals paid less attention to the fabricated fears of enemy workers movements overseas who threatened centralized control of industrial power, they would have noticed US military and economic support for fascist regimes throughout Europe, like Nazi Germany and like Fascist Italy, or Fascist Spain under Franco, when knowledge of their atrocities was not at all a secret. Hopefully you wouldn't argue that the US entered World War II because it was opposed ideologically to Fascism or to what Hitler, instead of it being ok so long as it didn't conflict with US power interests. As bad as Nazism was and as easy as it is to manipulate it to make emotional arguments half a century later, the rational minded person should still apply the same principles to themselves as they would their enemies. If Hitler didn't have unquestioning, patriotic support from Germans he might not have been able to commit his crimes.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't understand the crimes of our enemies, we should seek understanding about anything we can change for the better. However, If you're an American, and have an American audience, where is there any moral value whatsoever in exposing the crimes of regimes you can do little about, if it requires neglecting crimes you can easily stop? What would the benefits to humans be if American Intellectuals spent more time highlighting the crimes of regimes the US government sells arms to, paramilitaries the US trains, or regimes which commit crimes against humanity with US support, and, importantly, the US official involvement in these crimes?
What if instead of American intellectuals spending hours writing trying to educate other Americans about the crimes of Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, or Iraq, they spent as much time writing about the crimes of countries that go on with US support, funding, arms, training, etc? Why not spend half of that time educating Americans about, for example, their government's diplomatic, military, and financial support for a violent coup in Indonesia which cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives, bringing to power a despot named Suharto who then invaded the small island of East Timor and killed another half a million people or more. Or why not the history of a coup in Guatemala which resulted in another near Genocide, or a coup in Chile which installed a neo-fascist regime, or how these events generalize throughout Latin America, again, with the support of US taxpayers.
Surely plenty of people could benefit from these things coming into public debate, and then at least you'd be in a better position to talk about the crimes of enemies, being that you don't tacitly support, and seemingly refuse to acknowledge, those same crimes when they're commited by your friends.
Perhaps a productive project for the Winds of Change staff would be to start coming up with ways to hold the US accountable for its genocide in Vietnam? Surely there's more moral value to that than trying to hold Hitler or Stalin accountable genocides that happened twice as long ago, the US is, afterall, still in power and Americans can have an effect on its policy.
It might be a useless exercise arguing with someone with totalitarian tendencies. The term "America Hater" is despicable. That you can't be honest about American crimes without hating America is the logical equivalent of saying you couldn't understand the crimes of your brother without hating your brother.
What is the purpose of learning the history of Russian crimes? It has to be purely intellectual. But there is also a practical purpose of history, which is something foreign to a lot of intellectuals. In practical terms, learning about Russian or Chinese crimes rates low compared to learning about the crimes that happen with our tacit support or behind our backs because people are too uncomfortable to talk about facts that are under their nose. If the mainstream media refuses to discuss them, as independent intellectuals with an audience, I don't see how the moral imperative doesn't become clearer.
If your audience can't use the knowledge you're giving in a practical way to make lives better, there is only limited value to it. There is practical and moral value, and arguably moral necessity, to bringing American crimes to light to an American audience, because the lives of many people in the third world living under the gun of thugs the American government and corporations support, for reasons of economic dominance, could immediately be made better.* But that is if and only if this was something people could freely debate without being called "American Haters" by people who would otherwise be Fascist cheerleaders if, for some weird reason, we were ever conquered and then occupied by the murderous Fascist dictatorship the US supported in Brazil in the 1960's.
*and if the principled approach isn't enough, there are pragmatic reasons as well. In Saudi Arabia 15 people decided to commit suicide by flying planes into buildings into two symbols of US military and economic might. Saudi Arabia was the recipient of, off the top of my head, 43 billion dollars in military and security sales over the past decade, much of it funded by US and Saudi taxpayers. Saudi Arabia also is one of the leading violators of Human Rights on the planet, and a large supplier of oil to the West. It would be impressive ignorance to think these things don't have any relationship.
"Unlike the latter, you can, at least in theory, do something about the former."
I don't understand why Jonathan keeps reiterating that we can't do anything about the crimes of other countries. We have, over and over. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and its satellites (to the extent that Reagan's policies accelerated their downfall), the Balkans, Iraq come to mind. Have we had mixed motives? Sure? Did our intervention save lives? Absolutely. Are all those areas better off today than when they were under the grip of tyranny? No question.
Does Jonathan think groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Intl. should just fold up because they advocate for people in countries other than those of their subscribers? Would Jonathan's argument also apply to the UN?
Why does Jonathan think that holding our own country accountable to its principles and challenging tyrannies in other places are mutually exclusive? All the progressives I know try to do both, and understand their interconnectedness.
"start coming up with ways to hold the US accountable for its genocide in Vietnam"
What genocide in Vietnam? Links, please. Or did you mean Cambodia? Wouldn't that genocide by Pol Pot qualify as one of the crimes we shouldn't stick our noses into (don't worry - we didn't)?
What genocide in Vietnam. Ha ha ha. Pol Pot wasn't the one who dropped more bombs on a peasant country than all of the bombs dropped in World War II combined. Pol Pot wasn't the one who left unexploded ordinance and dioxin in Vietnam which kills people to this day. Yehudt, I'd let me support my arguments, instead of proving them for me. I say genocide in Vietnam and you offer the knee jerk Pol Pot... no he wasn't the only one who killed massive amounts of people in Cambodia, either.
Which brings me to my next point... I don't argue that exposing the US for their crimes and exposing other countries for theirs is mutually exclusive. Just do a little test, and look at the archives on winds of change.net. Tell me how many times you see Mr. Katzman post about the US involvement in supporting human rights violations, and tell me how many times he posts about the crimes of official enemies. Lunch on me for a month if the ratio is higher than one to twenty.
You're also right that we can do things about other countries crimes... we can convince the US to go to war with them. That's a great democratic option for the people of this country.
"Does Jonathan think groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Intl. should just fold up because they advocate for people in countries other than those of their subscribers? Would Jonathan's argument also apply to the UN? "
No it doesn't apply to the UN. The UN is an international organization where member states agree to submit to its laws.
My argument doesn't really apply to international watchdog groups... they can still operate if their purpose is to expose crimes where they see them, free from ideological pressure to be dishonest. When either group becomes nothing but an arm of the US to demonize its official enemies meanwhile refusing to be honest to Americans about crimes of The US, US clients or allies -- which they can easily have some influence over -- for ideological purposes, then yes. They, like many net intellectuals, should fold up because they'd have become morally bankrupt.
Jonathan,
You are mistaken. The genocide did happen but not in the manner you state. It happened in Vietnam by the communists after the Americans had left.
Tell that to the multimillion civilians who died as a result of three decades of US policy toward Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Ho Chi Minh wrote in a letter to President Truman in 1946:
The French war against Indochina was funded and supported by the US, on a large scale. You read it right -- forced widespread Starvation.
The Impossible Victory: Vietnam