The Dangers of Dogmatic Dichotomies

Simplifying the world is very easy. Reducing its complexities to overarching Manichean dualisms allows humans, who are inevitably of limited understanding, to gain some degree of intellectual purchase on difficult-to-understand situations. We are all culpable, because such thinking is more satisfying, more easily-digested, more ego-boosting than simply admitting confusion or providing an explanation so qualified and multifaceted that it loses emotional punch and rhetorical power.

However, this reflex has troubling consequences; it can encourage self-delusion, duplicity and dubious moral shortcuts. An obvious example is US foreign policy during the Cold War, which tended to label countries and peoples as being either ‘the Enemy’, godless Communist troublemakers, or ‘the Good Guys’, allies of USA, and therefore naturally friends of liberty. The only relevant factor for judging which category a government or movement fell into was their attitude towards the US and its self-proclaimed ‘values’, although of course the only value that really counted in the end was respect for US capital and hostility towards the Soviet Union. Any regime or government that showed any hostility towards US interference or argued for any economic model different from America’s idea of capitalism was labelled as communist and therefore automatically in the pay of the Soviet Union and obedient to the Kremlin; it was the ‘only’ explanation. Other explanations – a genuine interest in democratic non-communist socialism or an alternative economic model, a desire to maintain national sovereignty, nationalism, religious piety, non-alignment – were ignored or interpreted as covers for the ‘real’ agenda, Bolshevism. So, for example, US analysts in Iran during the 1979 revolution, and indeed during the 1953 Mosaddeq incident, completely misunderstood the situation, constantly looking for Cold War motives and reds-under-the-bed despite the fact that a mixture of Iranian nationalism, Islamism and hostility to the Shah’s regime was far more significant. It didn’t occur to US policymakers that some events could not be forced into the interpretive rubric of the apocalyptic confrontation between the ‘Evil Empire’ and ‘the Free World’.

Something similar happened in Nicaragua, where the US completely, indeed deliberately, misinterpreted the Sandinista movement. Because the Sandinistas were leftists who wanted to extend health, education and agricultural services to the poor and redistribute wealth and land, they were automatically branded ‘Commies’, Nicaragua a Soviet client state. Chomsky has shown in great detail in the ridiculousness of this claim – as he points out, when the US embargo began in 1985, only about 20% of Nicaragua’s trade was with the USSR, which was about the same as the USA, and there is no evidence that Nicaragua had any particular links with the USSR before the US conducted its well-documented campaign of starvation and terror against its people. However, with the US embargo and US-backed Contra terrorist campaign, Nicaragua, which had made extraordinary social progress in terms of combating poverty and extending social services during the first years of Sandinista rule as documented by organisations such as UNICEF and Oxfam, found itself reduced to utter devastation and poverty. It was thus forced to turn to the Soviets, since the USSR was one of the few countries that ignored US pressure not to trade with Nicaragua – for example, it bought Soviet jets to defend itself against US-backed aggression because the US had blocked the sale of all jets from non-Communist countries. In other words, the USA forced Nicaragua into the arms of the USSR via violence and intimidation, and then used this fact as ‘proof’ that Nicaragua was an agent of Soviet imperialism in central America – hence Reagan’s risible suggestion that if the Sandinista movement were not crushed, before long Soviet tanks would be rolling into Texas. Similar claims were peddled in Congress and the US media for years.

This case is different from Iran. In the case of Iran, the US genuinely misinterpreted Mosaddeq and the ’79 revolution – US policy towards Iran has been a notorious disaster area since at least the 1950s, as documented in James Bill’s excellent book ‘The Eagle and the Lion’ - whereas in Nicaragua the US wanted to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution because it feared it would become a model for socio-economic development, thus threatening the interests of US capital in South America, and so it deliberately attempted to force the Sandinistas into the role of Cold War partisan to justify its violent policies to a domestic audience. Most of the US public, media and politicians accepted this interpretation unquestioningly, which suggests that they were used to interpreting everything in terms of the Cold War dichotomy.

However, it is not just the US government and Right in general that is guilty of gross deception and mendacity as a result of a seeing all world events through a distorted lens. The Far Left has an extremely worrying tendency to excuse or ignore atrocities and crimes that cannot easily be attributed to US imperialism, and to oppose all US or Western intervention regardless of the situation.
In the view of many on the Far Left, all crimes and problems in the world can be attributed to US imperialism and the perverted functioning of international capitalism. When it appears that a problem is the result of nationalist passions, murderous dictators or ethnic tensions, this is merely a mask for or distraction from the ‘real’ issue.

Take the Rwandan genocide. Richard Seymour, blogger and SWP member, has written an interpretation of the Rwandan genocide here - http://intercontinentalcry.org/rwanda-a-genocide-that-isnt-over-part-i/ Now, much of what Seymour says is true. Belgian imperialism is largely to blame for the racialisation of the Tutsi/Hutu divide. The instability of world commodity prices and IMF intervention did destabilise the Habyarimana regime. America did back the RPF, and the war did make the genocide more likely. However, the overall message of the article is clear – the idea that the genocide could have prevented by foreign intervention is nonsense – it was caused by foreign intervention! This is used to back Seymour’s crusade against western intervention generally.

This is crazy. Just because the intervention that did take place was largely immoral or indifferent is not a reason why the West should not have intervened– it is a reason why the West should have intervened differently. If, say, the large countries in the UN had pressured for a vastly expanded UNAMIR force early in April 1994, and given it a mandate to stop the violence when it became clear that it was systematic genocide, then Seymour would have been the first to criticise, because ‘all’ western intervention must be to the end of US Imperialism – selfless or sensible Western interventionism is an oxymoron in the eyes of those who see everything as a battle between American imperialism and the brave resistance of the oppressed masses. Seymour’s article is full of criticism for the US, but the genocide itself is entirely skated over. The fact is that ultimately the genocide was the result of a pre-planned strategy on the part of extremist ‘Hutu Power’ racists who had committed many atrocities against Tutsi in the past and wanted a chance to finally wipe them out. Yes, the IMF structural adjustment programme, the vagaries of commodity prices, the immoral policies of the West created a situation where the genocide was more easily carried out, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the ragbag of murderers, racists and madmen in the Akazu, an extremist group connected to Habyarimana’s wife, and the CDR, the party of the Hutu Power racists. Yet the Far Left isn’t interested in this. Most Far Leftists are interested in victims and oppressed people only insofar as it can attribute their suffering to imperialism or capitalism – other atrocities are ignored, and intervention to prevent them scorned as inevitably an imperialist conspiracy, even when the case for saying this is tenuous or non-existent.

Something similar can be said about the break-up of Yugoslavia (the Bosnian war etc), wherein criticisms of Western intervention coming from the Far Left were plentiful, but criticisms of the racist violence of the partisans of a ‘Greater Serbia’ were completely absent. Similarly, the Far Left condemns the idea of intervention in Darfur as imperialist warmongering by traitors on the liberal left (such as that well-known agent of international capitalism Human Rights Watch).

Now, I am not denying the reality of US imperialism. The record of US foreign policy is a bloody and shameful one – overthrowing Allende in 1973 and installing the murderous Pinochet, illegally backing a client terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 80s, support for a whole range of murderous despots in El Salvador, the Vietnam War etc. Often, US intervention can be explained in terms of imperialism, or at the very least cynical and immoral pursuit of national interest at the expense of human rights. However, in certain situations either the pursuit of US national interest happens to coincide with humanitarian objectives, or the US national interest actually isn’t the biggest factor. It’s very difficult to explain, for example, the US-fronted UN intervention in Somalia in the early 90s in terms of US imperialism. The USA had little to gain from such intervention – it was a genuine attempt to create a secure environment for humanitarian operations, protect civilians and prevent a famine. If the USA had taken action in Rwanda by bolstering the UNAMIR force, then it could have prevented the worst of the genocide, and the death toll may have been significantly less than the million or so it ended up as. What imperialist motivation there could have been for such a course is unclear.

The interpretation of US foreign policy as imperialist has some validity of course, I’m not denying that -but not always, and sometimes the crimes of US imperialism are not the only crimes in the world. There’s a tendency among some Far Left intellectuals – Chomsky, much as I respect him and agree with him in some ways, is guilty of this – of saying, when asked about some atrocity that the US is not responsible for or when the thorny issue of US/Western intervention to end some atrocity comes up, that x event – Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan in the past, genocide in Darfur or Rwanda, violence in Somalia – is not the ‘real issue’. The ‘real’ issue is this or that policy of the USA. This is insane. It is possible for both US crimes and mistakes to co-exist with other crimes and problems as ‘real’ issues. It is the duty of the Left to condemn atrocities and support action to alleviate them (when feasible) no matter who is responsible.

I’m not denying the complexities of an interventionist foreign policy and I’m not saying that intervention is always right – the failure in Somalia illustrates that even when well-intentioned, intervention always entails unintended consequences, and it is difficult to judge sometimes where imperialism ends and humanitarianism starts. But a blanket-anti intervention attitude is unhelpful, the product of a mindset that sees everything in terms of the great duel between socialism and imperialism. Sometimes that analysis is of very limited use or outright inappropriate. The West did not intervene against Milosevic because he was some kind of socialist, they intervened against him because he was a murdering nutter. I am not a huge fan of US foreign policy, but to take the attitude that anything the US does is by that very fact wrong, and that any enemy of the USA is a friend, is crazy, and product of the simplified self-righteous grandiosity of the Far Left’s analysis of the world. In cases where western intervention can realistically end or disrupt clear cases of systematic murder, genocide or human rights cases, the left has a duty to support such intervention, not just as socialists, but as human beings.

Ultimately, what I’m saying is that in analysing events in the world, we have to take a nuanced, qualified, cautious approach that takes into account many factors and doesn’t try to force every event into this or that interpretive contortion to satisfy ideological dogmatism. The criticism that often a heavy-handed, ideologically-fuelled simplistic rubric is used to interpret world events, rather than a sensitive and flexible one, is one that applies to elements of both the Right and Left.