The good empire
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Chalmers Johnson
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Chalmers Johnson's biography and other articles by this writer
Regardless of who succeeds George W. Bush, the incumbent US president will have to deal with an emboldened Pentagon, an engorged military-industrial complex, an empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not revealing to the public what the US military establishment costs or the kinds of devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end – and that turning it into an openly military empire will not, to say the least, be the best solution to that problem.
One common response to this view is that the United States is actually a "good empire" like the one from which it gained our independence in 1776. Whatever its faults and flaws, contemporary America – like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is said to be a source of enlightenment for the rest of the world, a natural carrier of the seeds of "democracy" into benighted and oppressed regions, and the only possible military guarantor of "stability" on the planet. We are, therefore, said to be the "cousins" and inheritors of the best traditions of the British empire – which was, according to this highly ideological construct, a force for unalloyed good despite occasional unfortunate and unavoidable lapses.
The expatriate Scot and now Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British empire was motivated by "a sincere belief that spreading ‘commerce, Christianity, and civilization' was as much in the interests of Britain's colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself". He insists that "no organisation [other than the British empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world" and that "America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?" The Los Angeles Times' right-wing columnist Max Boot argues: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."
According to Erik Tarloff, a British journalist: "Claims that the British Raj redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother country [are], I should think, irrefutable." Given that for two centuries – between 1757 and 1947 – there was no increase at all in India's per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria's reign between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and plagues brought on by British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921 the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 per cent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at least open to question.
THE REWRITING OF HISTORY TO PRETTIFY THE BRITISH EMPIRE has long been commonplace in England, but it became politically significant in the United States only after 9/11, when the thought – novel to most Americans – that their own country was actually an "empire" began to come out of the closet. Beginning in late 2001, approval of American imperialism became a prominent theme in the establishment and neoconservative press. "It was time for America unabashedly and unilaterally to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order," writes Joshua Micah Marshall, editor of an influential Washington internet newsletter. "After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist."
Bernard Porter, a professor at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a recognised specialist on Britain's imperial past, likes to argue that his country acquired its empire unintentionally. Apologists for American imperialism also contend that the United States acquired its continental girth as well as its Caribbean and Pacific colonies in a fit of innocent absentmindedness. Despite his tendency to minimise the importance of the British empire, Porter is an acute observer of trends in the candour with which this history has been approached. In the twentieth century, he observes:
Imperialism – in the old, conventional sense – suddenly became unfashionable ... [New books] took an entirely different line on it from before: hugely downplaying the glorious military aspects of it; almost giving the impression that most colonies had asked to join the Empire; stressing Britain's supposed "civilising" mission; and presenting the whole thing as simply a happy federation of countries at different stages of "development" ... A new word was coined for it, which was thought to express this sort of thing better: "Commonwealth". A popular metaphor was that of the "family".
In Porter's view, the ordinary Victorian Englishman was never much interested in the empire, which was always a plaything of the military classes and those who wanted (or had) to get out of the British Isles. But in America, the idea that the British Empire was really nice – totally unlike its French, German, Russian and Japanese contemporaries – has long been well received by novel readers and latter-day fans of long-running televison series.
During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytisers was Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for "humanitarian imperialism", aka "Empire Lite". As the demand for his cheer-leading faded in light of the Iraq War, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and became a politician. Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologised for having used "we" and "us" some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled "Lesser Evils", which is a defence of official torture. In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserted:
Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but "empire" describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.
In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: "Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs ... Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state ... The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world's most inflammable region? ... The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike."
IMPERIALISM IS, BY DEFINITIION, UNPLEASANT FOR ITS VICTIMS. Even a supporter like Niall Ferguson acknowledges it is "the extension of one's civilisation, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples". Regimes created by imperialists are never polities ruled with the consent of the governed. Evelyn Baring (later known as Lord Cromer), who was the British consul general and de facto overlord of Egypt from 1883 to 1907 – officially, he was merely an "adviser" to the formally ruling khedive – once commented: "We need not always enquire too closely what these people ... think is in their own interests ... It is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience ... we conscientiously think is best for the subject race." Lord Salisbury, Britain's conservative prime minister from 1886 to 1902, put it more succinctly: "If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made."
The British, however, have been exceptionally susceptible to believing in the "goodness" of their empire, and in this the United States has indeed proved a worthy successor. Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleaders back home, know that they are hated – that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticised their methods or advocated the "reform" of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a difference in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out "administrative massacres", to use Hannah Arendt's potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance. A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over "subject races", and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their "civilisation" on others.
Those who supply such rationales of domination belong to what I call the Jeanne Kirkpatrick school of analysis. As Reagan's UN ambassador, Kirkpatrick once said: "Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is." Historians like Ferguson are of this persuasion. That Britons and Americans have proven so comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them – with Maxim machine guns in the nineteenth century, with "precision-guided munitions" today – seems to reflect a deeply felt need, as well as a striking inability to imagine the lives and viewpoints of others. While this, too, is typical of any imperial power, it has perhaps been heightened in the cases of Great Britain and the United States by the fact that neither has ever been defeated and occupied by a foreign military power.
On the other hand, even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II "embraced defeat", in historian John Dower's memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that, in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans, they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism. All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial pre-eminence, manifest destiny or a "civilising mission" to cover their often barbarous behaviour in other people's countries.
There is, in fact, nothing new about such self-enhancing American military campaign names as "Operation Iraqi Freedom", "Infinite Justice" (as Centcom called the 2001 US attack on Afghanistan until Muslim scholars and clerics objected that only God can dispense infinite justice) and "Just Cause" (Bush Snr's vicious 1989 assault on Panama). Such efforts reflect both justifications for imperialism and strategies for avoiding responsibility for its inevitable catastrophes. The first recourse in justification has long been racism – or at least a sense of superiority -– in all of its forms, including the belief that victory over the "natives" (including their mass deaths due to diseases introduced by the imperialists) is evidence that God or the gods have divinely sanctioned foreign conquest. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught: "The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism." Then there has been the long list of what writer Sven Lindqvist, in his book Exterminate All the Brutes (Granta, 1996) – which is a gloss on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness – usefully terms pseudo-scientific "ideologies of extermination": eugenics, perversions of Darwinism, natural selection, survival of the fittest, Malthusian demography, and more.
Racist defences of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits – often economic – on their conquered peoples, even as they pauperise or enslave them. Examples from the last two centuries include the benefits of "free trade", globalisation, the rule of (foreign) law, investor protection, "liberation" from other imperial powers or home-grown dictators, or "democracy". In supporting Bush's attack on Iraq, the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier notes approvingly:
Empires function by virtue of the prestige they radiate as well as by might, and indeed collapse if they rely on force alone. Artistic styles, the language of the rulers, and consumer preferences flow outward along with power and investment capital – sometimes diffused consciously by cultural diplomacy and student exchanges, sometimes just by popular tastes for the intriguing products of the metropole, whether Coca-Cola or Big Macs. As supporters of the imperial power rightly maintain, empires provide public goods that masses of people outside their borders really want to enjoy, including an end to endemic warfare and murderous ethnic or religious conflicts.
FINALLY, THERE HAS BEEN SIMPLE AMNESIA: the systematic omission of subjects that are impossible to square with the idea of "liberal imperialism". For example, both Ferguson and the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire neglect to mention that the empire operated the world's largest and most successful drug cartel. During the nineteenth century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium. The opium grown in India and shipped to China, first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the Government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and South-East Asia. The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, "without the drug, there probably would have been no British empire".
Racism has been the master imperialist rationale of modern times, one with which British imperialists are completely familiar. "Imperialism," Hannah Arendt wrote, "would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world." But what exactly needed to be explained by racism? Initially, it was the growing dominance by small groups of well-armed, ruthless Europeans over societies in South and East Asia that in the eighteenth century were infinitely richer and more sophisticated than anything then known in Europe. As historian Mike Davis observes: "When the sans culottes stormed the Bastille [in 1789], the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta [in China] and Bengal [in India], with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind." In the early eighteenth century, India was a "vast and economically advanced subcontinent" producing close to a quarter of total planetary output of everything, compared with Britain's measly 3 per cent. As the British set about looting their captured subcontinent, this reality proved an inconvenient one. It became indispensable for them to be able to describe the conquered populations as inferior in every way: incapable of self-government, lacking in the ability to reason, hopelessly caught up in "static" Oriental beliefs, overly fecund and, in short, not members of the "fittest" races. In other words, their subjugation was not only their own fault, but inevitable.
At its heart, British imperialist ideology revolved around the belief that history and human evolution – either divinely guided or as a result of natural selection – had led inexorably to the British empire of the nineteenth century. As a result, the British extermination of the Tasmanians ("living fossils"); the slaughter of at least 10,000 Sudanese in a single battle at Omdurman on September 2, 1898; General Rex Dyer's use of Gurkha troops on April 13, 1919 at Amritsar to kill as many Punjabis as he could until his soldiers ran out of ammunition; the sanctioned use of explosive dumdum bullets (meant for big-game hunting) in colonial wars but their prohibition in conflicts among "civilised" nations, and many similar events down to the sanguine, sadistic suppression of the Kikuyu people in Kenya in the 1950s, were not morally indefensible crimes of imperialism but the workings of a preordained narrative of civilisation.