Sunday 12 November 2017
Nudging can also be used for dark purposes
Tim Harford in The FT
“If you want people to do the right thing, make it easy.” That is the simplest possible summary of Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We are all fallible creatures, and so benevolent policymakers need to make sure that the path of least resistance goes to a happy destination. It is a simple but important idea, and deservedly influential: Mr Sunstein became a senior adviser to President Obama, while Mr Thaler is this year’s winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics.
“If you want people to do the right thing, make it easy.” That is the simplest possible summary of Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We are all fallible creatures, and so benevolent policymakers need to make sure that the path of least resistance goes to a happy destination. It is a simple but important idea, and deservedly influential: Mr Sunstein became a senior adviser to President Obama, while Mr Thaler is this year’s winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics.
Policy wonks have nudged people to sign up for organ donation, to increase their pension contributions — and even insulate their homes by coupling home insulation with an attic-decluttering service. All we have to do is make it easy for people to do the right thing.
But what if you want people to do the wrong thing? The answer: make that easy; or make the right thing difficult. Messrs Thaler and Sunstein are well aware of the risk of malign nudges, and have been searching for the right word to describe them. Mr Thaler likes “sludge” — obfuscatory language or procedures that accidentally or deliberately encourage inertia. Voter ID laws, he says, are a good example of sludge, calculated to softly disenfranchise. Meanwhile Mr Sunstein has written an entire book about the “ethics of influence”.
And as we are starting to realise, Vladimir Putin is well aware of the opportunity that behavioural science presents, too. Rumours circulate that the Russian authorities are keen recruiters of young psychologists and behavioural economists; I have no proof of that, but it seems like a reasonable thing for the Russian government to do. I am willing to bet that not all of them are working on attic-decluttering.
According to Richard Burr, chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, Russian troll accounts on Facebook managed to organise both a protest and a counter-protest in Houston, in May 2016. Americans are perfectly willing to face off against each other on the streets, but if you want it to happen more often, make it easy.
A number of other memes, political advertisements and provocateur accounts — both left and rightwing — have since been identified as of Russian origin. Social media networks have unwittingly sold them air time; news sites have cited them; people have shared them, or spent effort refuting them. Nudge isn’t the word for this, but neither is sludge. What about “grudge”?
The Russians are not alone in using grudge theory to manipulate public opinion. Three social scientists — Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts — recently managed to infiltrate networks of shills in China, who are paid to post helpful messages on Chinese social media. (Their nickname is the “50 cent army”.) Unlike the Russian trolls, their aim has been to avoid engaging “in debate or argument of any kind . . . they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely”. The tactic is, rather, to keep changing the subject, especially at politically sensitive moments, by talking about the weather, sports — anything. If you want potential protesters to make cheery small talk instead, make it easy.
Just as noble tools can be turned to wicked ends, so shady techniques can be used to do the work of the angels. For example, why not disrupt online markets for illegal drugs by leaving bad reviews for vendors? Research by social scientists Scott Duxbury and Dana Haynie suggests that because people rely on user reviews on illicit markets, law enforcement officers could attack those markets by faking negative reviews, thus undermining trust.
The parallel with Mr Putin is alarmingly clear: it is possible to attack democracy and rational discourse by creating an information ecosystem where everyone yells at everyone else and nobody believes anything.
But we should not give too much credit to Mr Putin. He did not create the information ecosystem of the western world; we did. The Russians just gave us a push, and probably not a very big push at that. Perhaps I should say they gave us a nudge.
Social media do seem vulnerable to dark nudges from foreign powers. But more worrying is our vulnerability to smears, skews and superficiality without any outside intervention at all. Messrs Sunstein and Thaler ask policymakers to make it easy to do the right thing; what have we made it easy to do?
It is easy to find a like-minded tribe. It is easy to share, retweet or “like” something we have not even read. It is easy to repeat false claims. It is easy to get angry or personal.
It’s less easy to distinguish truth from lies, to clear time and attention to read something deep, and to reward an important article with something more than a digital thumbs up. But then, none of this is fundamental to the business model of many media companies — or of the social media networks that spread the news.
Nudge, sludge or grudge, we can change this. And we should start by asking ourselves whether when it comes to news, information and debate, we have made it difficult to do the right thing — and all too easy to stray.
Outrage and opposition are not the same
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
I cannot say this online, I am sure, but I do not believe in getting publicly outraged. This does not mean that I do not feel privately outraged at times. I do. When one hears of a woman being raped, one feels outraged. When one hears of the most powerful man on earth reportedly discussing nuclear war options, one feels outraged.
And yet, it is one thing to feel outraged and another to act from outrage or even cultivate that self-righteous feeling of outrage. Because outrage is not opposition. Actually, it is not even rage. It is an ‘outing’ of rage.
Rage versus outrage
Rage is a problematic word: its etymology connects it to madness, violence, passion and fierceness in battle. Its uses, if they can be justified, are hazardous, and pertain to extreme circumstances. In Greek mythology, the consequences of human or semi-divine rage tend to be disastrous, even when the act of rage is seen as justified. However, rage has one purpose in extreme circumstances: it can get things done.
Outrage is not like rage: it is a venting of rage. When we are outraged, we basically let off steam. This is more so online. Its primary purpose is to make us feel good about ourselves. Unlike rage, it might not even get anything done. Because once we get outraged and post a few things or espouse a list, our attention wavers, and soon we have another matter to get publicly outraged about.
Like rage, outrage often leads to hasty action. In India as well as in Europe, people got outraged at the rumour of some women putting spells on their cattle or their person, and proceeded to burn the women as witches. Racists in the American south are known to have become outraged at some real or imagined slight by African Americans and lynched them. The list of innocent people persecuted, killed, burned, or lynched because otherwise decent people got publicly outraged is pretty long.
Unfortunately, outrage is particularly adaptable to online culture, where the dominant ethos is that of self-indulgence rather than an engagement with the other. By getting outraged, we signal to ourselves and others that we have the right views. We might also, by the very level of our outrage, absolve ourselves from a close examination of the matter and an organised effort (with others) to tackle the matter. Outrages tend to lead to nothing at all — or to witch-hunts.
By moving on from one outrage to another, we might also make it more difficult to address the root causes of the injustice, if it exists, behind our outrage. Outrage is expressive, reactive, wordy, fleeting. Opposition requires physical action, thought, organisation and perseverance. It is a major mistake to confuse the two.
Opposition needs a considered evaluation of evidence and possibilities; outrage tends towards self-centred and sweeping pre-judgment, usually passed without deep thought to the matter or comprehensive collection of evidence. It is worth remarking that ‘prejudice’ basically means ‘prejudgment,’ from the Latin words prae and judicium.
The general flow of outrage is towards a kind of fascist violence: it assumes guilt unless the victim is proved innocent, and moves too fast for sufficient proof to be collected. Opposition is a democratic construct: it accepts that you are innocent unless proved guilty.
Dismissing opposition
Unfortunately, given our hyperventilating cybercultures, outrage has become synonymous with opposition. Apart from the problems outlined above, this has another serious drawback: in an atmosphere of frequent outrages, it is possible to dismiss legitimate opposition as outrage. This, as we know from places like India, Turkey and the U.S., is the usual policy of the parties in power.
Because all opposition is increasingly wrapped in verbal and digital forms of outrage, this is easy for people in power to do. Online postings, TV shows, etc. consistently assume the registers and pace of outrages, so that the pith of the matter is often lost in the smoke, and even necessary acts of opposition can be dismissed as just the hyperventilation of easily outraged groups.
It is sad that this has happened even in India, where Gandhiji set a very rigorous example of calm and collected opposition, even, I would say, a slow and forbearing opposition. He knew that any true opposition — he would have called it a just opposition — needs thought, time, slowness and perseverance. These are not characteristics that outrage respects.
I find it troublesome that we have entered a phase of public discourse where, on the one hand, outrages erupt one after another and then evaporate in the desert sands of usual practice, and where, on the other hand, genuine acts of opposition are dismissed by people in power as just fleeting outrages.
On the one side, there are people yelling at us to be outraged, without considering evidence, context or effective responses, and on the other side, there are people telling us that we are just acting outraged when actually we are opposing something that needs to be opposed. How does one negotiate a public space like that? Your answer is as good as mine. But I think slowing down just a bit before passing judgment and looking more deeply at matters might not be such bad ideas.
I cannot say this online, I am sure, but I do not believe in getting publicly outraged. This does not mean that I do not feel privately outraged at times. I do. When one hears of a woman being raped, one feels outraged. When one hears of the most powerful man on earth reportedly discussing nuclear war options, one feels outraged.
And yet, it is one thing to feel outraged and another to act from outrage or even cultivate that self-righteous feeling of outrage. Because outrage is not opposition. Actually, it is not even rage. It is an ‘outing’ of rage.
Rage versus outrage
Rage is a problematic word: its etymology connects it to madness, violence, passion and fierceness in battle. Its uses, if they can be justified, are hazardous, and pertain to extreme circumstances. In Greek mythology, the consequences of human or semi-divine rage tend to be disastrous, even when the act of rage is seen as justified. However, rage has one purpose in extreme circumstances: it can get things done.
Outrage is not like rage: it is a venting of rage. When we are outraged, we basically let off steam. This is more so online. Its primary purpose is to make us feel good about ourselves. Unlike rage, it might not even get anything done. Because once we get outraged and post a few things or espouse a list, our attention wavers, and soon we have another matter to get publicly outraged about.
Like rage, outrage often leads to hasty action. In India as well as in Europe, people got outraged at the rumour of some women putting spells on their cattle or their person, and proceeded to burn the women as witches. Racists in the American south are known to have become outraged at some real or imagined slight by African Americans and lynched them. The list of innocent people persecuted, killed, burned, or lynched because otherwise decent people got publicly outraged is pretty long.
Unfortunately, outrage is particularly adaptable to online culture, where the dominant ethos is that of self-indulgence rather than an engagement with the other. By getting outraged, we signal to ourselves and others that we have the right views. We might also, by the very level of our outrage, absolve ourselves from a close examination of the matter and an organised effort (with others) to tackle the matter. Outrages tend to lead to nothing at all — or to witch-hunts.
By moving on from one outrage to another, we might also make it more difficult to address the root causes of the injustice, if it exists, behind our outrage. Outrage is expressive, reactive, wordy, fleeting. Opposition requires physical action, thought, organisation and perseverance. It is a major mistake to confuse the two.
Opposition needs a considered evaluation of evidence and possibilities; outrage tends towards self-centred and sweeping pre-judgment, usually passed without deep thought to the matter or comprehensive collection of evidence. It is worth remarking that ‘prejudice’ basically means ‘prejudgment,’ from the Latin words prae and judicium.
The general flow of outrage is towards a kind of fascist violence: it assumes guilt unless the victim is proved innocent, and moves too fast for sufficient proof to be collected. Opposition is a democratic construct: it accepts that you are innocent unless proved guilty.
Dismissing opposition
Unfortunately, given our hyperventilating cybercultures, outrage has become synonymous with opposition. Apart from the problems outlined above, this has another serious drawback: in an atmosphere of frequent outrages, it is possible to dismiss legitimate opposition as outrage. This, as we know from places like India, Turkey and the U.S., is the usual policy of the parties in power.
Because all opposition is increasingly wrapped in verbal and digital forms of outrage, this is easy for people in power to do. Online postings, TV shows, etc. consistently assume the registers and pace of outrages, so that the pith of the matter is often lost in the smoke, and even necessary acts of opposition can be dismissed as just the hyperventilation of easily outraged groups.
It is sad that this has happened even in India, where Gandhiji set a very rigorous example of calm and collected opposition, even, I would say, a slow and forbearing opposition. He knew that any true opposition — he would have called it a just opposition — needs thought, time, slowness and perseverance. These are not characteristics that outrage respects.
I find it troublesome that we have entered a phase of public discourse where, on the one hand, outrages erupt one after another and then evaporate in the desert sands of usual practice, and where, on the other hand, genuine acts of opposition are dismissed by people in power as just fleeting outrages.
On the one side, there are people yelling at us to be outraged, without considering evidence, context or effective responses, and on the other side, there are people telling us that we are just acting outraged when actually we are opposing something that needs to be opposed. How does one negotiate a public space like that? Your answer is as good as mine. But I think slowing down just a bit before passing judgment and looking more deeply at matters might not be such bad ideas.
Saturday 11 November 2017
How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian
Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than pulling rickshaws”. But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”, they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects – their “new-caught sullen peoples”, as Kipling called colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
These colonial subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go largely uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance Day. The ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major British dignitaries, the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the laying of poppy wreaths and the singing of the national anthem – all of these uphold the first world war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe whose unresolved issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed, returning Europe to its proper equilibrium.
With more than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
Injured Indian soldiers being cared for by the Red Cross in England in March 1915. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Biblioteca Ambrosiana
Senegalese soldiers serving in the French army on the western front in June 1917. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power. Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history. Rather it was, as Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, was already insisting in 1918, a “mediating passage that connects the past and the future”.
The liturgies of Remembrance Day, and evocations of the beautiful long summer of 1913, deny both the grim reality that preceded the war and the way it has persisted into the 21st century. Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
Nearly a century after first world war ended, the experiences and perspectives of its non-European actors and observers remain largely obscure. Most accounts of the war uphold it as an essentially European affair: one in which the continent’s long peace is shattered by four years of carnage, and a long tradition of western rationalism is perverted.
Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia.
A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
Recent commemorations have made greater space for the non-European soldiers and battlefields of the first world war: altogether more than four million non-white men were mobilised into European and American armies, and fighting happened in places very remote from Europe – from Siberia and east Asia to the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and even the South Pacific islands. In Mesopotamia, Indian soldiers formed a majority of Allied manpower throughout the war. Neither Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia nor its successful campaign in Palestine would have occurred without Indian assistance. Sikh soldiers even helped the Japanese to evict Germans from their Chinese colony of Qingdao.
Scholars have started to pay more attention to the nearly 140,000 Chinese and Vietnamese contract labourers hired by the British and French governments to maintain the war’s infrastructure, mostly digging trenches. We know more about how interwar Europe became host to a multitude of anticolonial movements; the east Asian expatriate community in Paris at one point included Zhou Enlai, later the premier of China, as well as Ho Chi Minh. Cruel mistreatment, in the form of segregation and slave labour, was the fate of many of these Asians and Africans in Europe. Deng Xiaoping, who arrived in France just after the war, later recalled “the humiliations” inflicted upon fellow Chinese by “the running dogs of capitalists”.
But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged. Contemporary historians of German colonialism (an expanding field of study) try to trace the Holocaust back to the mini-genocides Germans committed in their African colonies in the 1900s, where some key ideologies, such as Lebensraum, were also nurtured. But it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
Indeed, the mentalities of the western powers converged to a remarkable degree during the high noon of “whiteness” – what Du Bois, answering his own question about this highly desirable condition, memorably defined as “the ownership of the Earth for ever and ever”. For example, the German colonisation of south-west Africa, which was meant to solve the problem of overpopulation, was often assisted by the British, and all major western powers amicably sliced and shared the Chinese melon in the late 19th century. Any tensions that arose between those dividing the booty of Asia and Africa were defused largely peacefully, if at the expense of Asians and Africans.
Campaigners calling for the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (upper right) at Oriel College in Oxford. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
This is because colonies had, by the late 19th century, come to be widely seen as indispensable relief-valves for domestic socio-economic pressures. Cecil Rhodes put the case for them with exemplary clarity in 1895 after an encounter with angry unemployed men in London’s East End. Imperialism, he declared, was a “solution for the social problem, ie in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines”. In Rhodes’ view, “if you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists”.
Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”.
With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press. The Daily Mail, right from its inception in 1896, stoked vulgar pride in being white, British and superior to the brutish natives – just as it does today.
At the end of the war, Germany was stripped of its colonies and accused by the victorious imperial powers, entirely without irony, of ill-treating its natives in Africa. But such judgments, still made today to distinguish a “benign” British and American imperialism from the German, French, Dutch and Belgian versions, try to suppress the vigorous synergies of racist imperialism. Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), is clear-sighted about them: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” he says. And to the new-fangled modes of exterminating the brutes, he might have added.
In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
It is often proposed that Europeans were indifferent to or absent-minded about their remote imperial possessions, and that only a few dyed-in-the-wool imperialists like Rhodes, Kipling and Lord Curzon cared enough about them. This makes racism seem like a minor problem that was aggravated by the arrival of Asian and African immigrants in post-1945 Europe. But the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
Italy actually joined Britain and France on the Allied side in 1915 in a fit of popular empire-mania (and promptly plunged into fascism after its imperialist cravings went unslaked). Italian writers and journalists, as well as politicians and businessmen, had lusted after imperial power and glory since the late 19th century. Italy had fervently scrambled for Africa, only to be ignominiously routed by Ethiopia in 1896. (Mussolini would avenge that in 1935 by dousing Ethiopians with poison gas.) In 1911, it saw an opportunity to detach Libya from the Ottoman empire. Coming after previous setbacks, its assault on the country, greenlighted by both Britain and France, was vicious and loudly cheered at home. News of the Italians’ atrocities, which included the first bombing from air in history, radicalised many Muslims across Asia and Africa. But public opinion in Italy remained implacably behind the imperial gamble.
Germany’s own militarism, commonly blamed for causing Europe’s death spiral between 1914 and 1918, seems less extraordinary when we consider that from the 1880s, many Germans in politics, business and academia, and such powerful lobby groups as the Pan-German League (Max Weber was briefly a member), had exhorted their rulers to achieve the imperial status of Britain and France. Furthermore, all Germany’s military engagements from 1871 to 1914 occurred outside Europe. These included punitive expeditions in the African colonies and one ambitious foray in 1900 in China, where Germany joined seven other European powers in a retaliatory expedition against young Chinese who had rebelled against western domination of the Middle Kingdom.
Troops under German command in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (then part of German East Africa), circa 1914. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Dispatching German troops to Asia, the Kaiser presented their mission as racial vengeance: “Give no pardon and take no prisoners,” he said, urging the soldiers to make sure that “no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German”. The crushing of the “Yellow Peril” (a phrase coined in the 1890s) was more or less complete by the time the Germans arrived. Nevertheless, between October 1900 and spring 1901 the Germans launched dozens of raids in the Chinese countryside that became notorious for their intense brutality.
One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives. In China, he despoiled Ming graves and presided over a few killings, but his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. The death toll perhaps seems less startling when one considers that 26 of the 30 US generals in the Philippines had fought in wars of annihilation against Native Americans at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me”. In a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.
The modern history of violence shows that ostensibly staunch foes have never been reluctant to borrow murderous ideas from one another. To take only one instance, the American elite’s ruthlessness with blacks and Native Americans greatly impressed the earliest generation of German liberal imperialists, decades before Hitler also came to admire the US’s unequivocally racist policies of nationality and immigration. The Nazis sought inspiration from Jim Crow legislation in the US south, which makes Charlottesville, Virginia, a fitting recent venue for the unfurling of swastika banners and chants of “blood and soil”.
In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation” – much as Liang Qichao could see, in 1918, that the war would prove to be a bridge connecting Europe’s past of imperial violence to its future of merciless fratricide.
These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
In the end, Asia and Africa could not remain a safely remote venue for Europe’s wars of aggrandisement in the late 19th and 20th century. Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
In our own time, nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
But, as Arendt predicted, its failures have only produced an even greater dependence on violence, a proliferation of undeclared wars and new battlefields, a relentless assault on civil rights at home – and an exacerbated psychology of domination, presently manifest in Donald Trump’s threats to trash the nuclear deal with Iran and unleash on North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US, often applauded by the white supremacist in the White House, who is making sure there is nothing left to violate.
The white nationalists have junked the old rhetoric of liberal internationalism, the preferred language of the western political and media establishment for decades. Instead of claiming to make the world safe for democracy, they nakedly assert the cultural unity of the white race against an existential threat posed by swarthy foreigners, whether these are citizens, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers or terrorists.
But the global racial order that for centuries bestowed power, identity, security and status on its beneficiaries has finally begun to break down. Not even war with China, or ethnic cleansing in the west, will restore to whiteness its ownership of the Earth for ever and ever. Regaining imperial power and glory has already proven to be a treacherous escapist fantasy – devastating the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa while bringing terrorism back to the streets of Europe and America – not to mention ushering Britain towards Brexit.
No rousing quasi-imperialist ventures abroad can mask the chasms of class and education, or divert the masses, at home. Consequently, the social problem appears insoluble; acrimoniously polarised societies seem to verge on the civil war that Rhodes feared; and, as Brexit and Trump show, the capacity for self-harm has grown ominously.
This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”. Sane thinking would require, at the very least, an examination of the history – and stubborn persistence – of racist imperialism: a reckoning that Germany alone among western powers has attempted.
Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than pulling rickshaws”. But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”, they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects – their “new-caught sullen peoples”, as Kipling called colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
These colonial subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go largely uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance Day. The ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major British dignitaries, the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the laying of poppy wreaths and the singing of the national anthem – all of these uphold the first world war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe whose unresolved issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed, returning Europe to its proper equilibrium.
With more than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
Injured Indian soldiers being cared for by the Red Cross in England in March 1915. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Biblioteca Ambrosiana
In May 1915, a scandal erupted when the Daily Mail printed a photograph of a British nurse standing behind a wounded Indian soldier. Army officials tried to withdraw white nurses from hospitals treating Indians, and disbarred the latter from leaving the hospital premises without a white male companion. The outrage when France deployed soldiers from Africa (a majority of them from the Maghreb) in its postwar occupation of Germany was particularly intense and more widespread. Germany had also fielded thousands of African soldiers while trying to hold on to its colonies in east Africa, but it had not used them in Europe, or indulged in what the German foreign minister (and former governor of Samoa), Wilhelm Solf, called “racially shameful use of coloureds”.
“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
This was the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of the modern west.
Today, as white supremacists feverishly build transnational alliances, it becomes imperative to ask, as Du Bois did in 1910: “What is whiteness that one should so desire it?” As we remember the first global war, it must be remembered against the background of a project of western global domination – one that was shared by all of the war’s major antagonists. The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any other time in its long peace since 1945.
When historians discuss the origins of the Great War, they usually focus on rigid alliances, military timetables, imperialist rivalries, arms races and German militarism. The war, they repeatedly tell us, was the seminal calamity of the 20th century – Europe’s original sin, which enabled even bigger eruptions of savagery such as the second world war and the Holocaust. An extensive literature on the war, literally tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles, largely dwells on the western front and the impact of the mutual butchery on Britain, France, and Germany – and significantly, on the metropolitan cores of these imperial powers rather than their peripheries. In this orthodox narrative, which is punctuated by the Russian Revolution and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the war begins with the “guns of August” in 1914, and exultantly patriotic crowds across Europe send soldiers off to a bloody stalemate in the trenches. Peace arrives with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only to be tragically compromised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which sets the stage for another world war.
In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom. In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious. But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism – one of the west’s first major reckonings with Europe’s grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered “humanity into master and slave races” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
This was the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of the modern west.
Today, as white supremacists feverishly build transnational alliances, it becomes imperative to ask, as Du Bois did in 1910: “What is whiteness that one should so desire it?” As we remember the first global war, it must be remembered against the background of a project of western global domination – one that was shared by all of the war’s major antagonists. The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any other time in its long peace since 1945.
When historians discuss the origins of the Great War, they usually focus on rigid alliances, military timetables, imperialist rivalries, arms races and German militarism. The war, they repeatedly tell us, was the seminal calamity of the 20th century – Europe’s original sin, which enabled even bigger eruptions of savagery such as the second world war and the Holocaust. An extensive literature on the war, literally tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles, largely dwells on the western front and the impact of the mutual butchery on Britain, France, and Germany – and significantly, on the metropolitan cores of these imperial powers rather than their peripheries. In this orthodox narrative, which is punctuated by the Russian Revolution and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the war begins with the “guns of August” in 1914, and exultantly patriotic crowds across Europe send soldiers off to a bloody stalemate in the trenches. Peace arrives with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only to be tragically compromised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which sets the stage for another world war.
In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom. In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious. But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism – one of the west’s first major reckonings with Europe’s grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered “humanity into master and slave races” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
Senegalese soldiers serving in the French army on the western front in June 1917. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty ImagesIn the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power. Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history. Rather it was, as Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, was already insisting in 1918, a “mediating passage that connects the past and the future”.
The liturgies of Remembrance Day, and evocations of the beautiful long summer of 1913, deny both the grim reality that preceded the war and the way it has persisted into the 21st century. Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
Nearly a century after first world war ended, the experiences and perspectives of its non-European actors and observers remain largely obscure. Most accounts of the war uphold it as an essentially European affair: one in which the continent’s long peace is shattered by four years of carnage, and a long tradition of western rationalism is perverted.
Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia.
A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
Recent commemorations have made greater space for the non-European soldiers and battlefields of the first world war: altogether more than four million non-white men were mobilised into European and American armies, and fighting happened in places very remote from Europe – from Siberia and east Asia to the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and even the South Pacific islands. In Mesopotamia, Indian soldiers formed a majority of Allied manpower throughout the war. Neither Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia nor its successful campaign in Palestine would have occurred without Indian assistance. Sikh soldiers even helped the Japanese to evict Germans from their Chinese colony of Qingdao.
Scholars have started to pay more attention to the nearly 140,000 Chinese and Vietnamese contract labourers hired by the British and French governments to maintain the war’s infrastructure, mostly digging trenches. We know more about how interwar Europe became host to a multitude of anticolonial movements; the east Asian expatriate community in Paris at one point included Zhou Enlai, later the premier of China, as well as Ho Chi Minh. Cruel mistreatment, in the form of segregation and slave labour, was the fate of many of these Asians and Africans in Europe. Deng Xiaoping, who arrived in France just after the war, later recalled “the humiliations” inflicted upon fellow Chinese by “the running dogs of capitalists”.
But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged. Contemporary historians of German colonialism (an expanding field of study) try to trace the Holocaust back to the mini-genocides Germans committed in their African colonies in the 1900s, where some key ideologies, such as Lebensraum, were also nurtured. But it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
Indeed, the mentalities of the western powers converged to a remarkable degree during the high noon of “whiteness” – what Du Bois, answering his own question about this highly desirable condition, memorably defined as “the ownership of the Earth for ever and ever”. For example, the German colonisation of south-west Africa, which was meant to solve the problem of overpopulation, was often assisted by the British, and all major western powers amicably sliced and shared the Chinese melon in the late 19th century. Any tensions that arose between those dividing the booty of Asia and Africa were defused largely peacefully, if at the expense of Asians and Africans.
Campaigners calling for the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (upper right) at Oriel College in Oxford. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the GuardianThis is because colonies had, by the late 19th century, come to be widely seen as indispensable relief-valves for domestic socio-economic pressures. Cecil Rhodes put the case for them with exemplary clarity in 1895 after an encounter with angry unemployed men in London’s East End. Imperialism, he declared, was a “solution for the social problem, ie in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines”. In Rhodes’ view, “if you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists”.
Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”.
With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press. The Daily Mail, right from its inception in 1896, stoked vulgar pride in being white, British and superior to the brutish natives – just as it does today.
At the end of the war, Germany was stripped of its colonies and accused by the victorious imperial powers, entirely without irony, of ill-treating its natives in Africa. But such judgments, still made today to distinguish a “benign” British and American imperialism from the German, French, Dutch and Belgian versions, try to suppress the vigorous synergies of racist imperialism. Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), is clear-sighted about them: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” he says. And to the new-fangled modes of exterminating the brutes, he might have added.
In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
It is often proposed that Europeans were indifferent to or absent-minded about their remote imperial possessions, and that only a few dyed-in-the-wool imperialists like Rhodes, Kipling and Lord Curzon cared enough about them. This makes racism seem like a minor problem that was aggravated by the arrival of Asian and African immigrants in post-1945 Europe. But the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
Italy actually joined Britain and France on the Allied side in 1915 in a fit of popular empire-mania (and promptly plunged into fascism after its imperialist cravings went unslaked). Italian writers and journalists, as well as politicians and businessmen, had lusted after imperial power and glory since the late 19th century. Italy had fervently scrambled for Africa, only to be ignominiously routed by Ethiopia in 1896. (Mussolini would avenge that in 1935 by dousing Ethiopians with poison gas.) In 1911, it saw an opportunity to detach Libya from the Ottoman empire. Coming after previous setbacks, its assault on the country, greenlighted by both Britain and France, was vicious and loudly cheered at home. News of the Italians’ atrocities, which included the first bombing from air in history, radicalised many Muslims across Asia and Africa. But public opinion in Italy remained implacably behind the imperial gamble.
Germany’s own militarism, commonly blamed for causing Europe’s death spiral between 1914 and 1918, seems less extraordinary when we consider that from the 1880s, many Germans in politics, business and academia, and such powerful lobby groups as the Pan-German League (Max Weber was briefly a member), had exhorted their rulers to achieve the imperial status of Britain and France. Furthermore, all Germany’s military engagements from 1871 to 1914 occurred outside Europe. These included punitive expeditions in the African colonies and one ambitious foray in 1900 in China, where Germany joined seven other European powers in a retaliatory expedition against young Chinese who had rebelled against western domination of the Middle Kingdom.
Troops under German command in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (then part of German East Africa), circa 1914. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesDispatching German troops to Asia, the Kaiser presented their mission as racial vengeance: “Give no pardon and take no prisoners,” he said, urging the soldiers to make sure that “no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German”. The crushing of the “Yellow Peril” (a phrase coined in the 1890s) was more or less complete by the time the Germans arrived. Nevertheless, between October 1900 and spring 1901 the Germans launched dozens of raids in the Chinese countryside that became notorious for their intense brutality.
One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives. In China, he despoiled Ming graves and presided over a few killings, but his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. The death toll perhaps seems less startling when one considers that 26 of the 30 US generals in the Philippines had fought in wars of annihilation against Native Americans at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me”. In a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.
The modern history of violence shows that ostensibly staunch foes have never been reluctant to borrow murderous ideas from one another. To take only one instance, the American elite’s ruthlessness with blacks and Native Americans greatly impressed the earliest generation of German liberal imperialists, decades before Hitler also came to admire the US’s unequivocally racist policies of nationality and immigration. The Nazis sought inspiration from Jim Crow legislation in the US south, which makes Charlottesville, Virginia, a fitting recent venue for the unfurling of swastika banners and chants of “blood and soil”.
In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation” – much as Liang Qichao could see, in 1918, that the war would prove to be a bridge connecting Europe’s past of imperial violence to its future of merciless fratricide.
These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
In the end, Asia and Africa could not remain a safely remote venue for Europe’s wars of aggrandisement in the late 19th and 20th century. Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
In our own time, nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
But, as Arendt predicted, its failures have only produced an even greater dependence on violence, a proliferation of undeclared wars and new battlefields, a relentless assault on civil rights at home – and an exacerbated psychology of domination, presently manifest in Donald Trump’s threats to trash the nuclear deal with Iran and unleash on North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US, often applauded by the white supremacist in the White House, who is making sure there is nothing left to violate.
The white nationalists have junked the old rhetoric of liberal internationalism, the preferred language of the western political and media establishment for decades. Instead of claiming to make the world safe for democracy, they nakedly assert the cultural unity of the white race against an existential threat posed by swarthy foreigners, whether these are citizens, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers or terrorists.
But the global racial order that for centuries bestowed power, identity, security and status on its beneficiaries has finally begun to break down. Not even war with China, or ethnic cleansing in the west, will restore to whiteness its ownership of the Earth for ever and ever. Regaining imperial power and glory has already proven to be a treacherous escapist fantasy – devastating the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa while bringing terrorism back to the streets of Europe and America – not to mention ushering Britain towards Brexit.
No rousing quasi-imperialist ventures abroad can mask the chasms of class and education, or divert the masses, at home. Consequently, the social problem appears insoluble; acrimoniously polarised societies seem to verge on the civil war that Rhodes feared; and, as Brexit and Trump show, the capacity for self-harm has grown ominously.
This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”. Sane thinking would require, at the very least, an examination of the history – and stubborn persistence – of racist imperialism: a reckoning that Germany alone among western powers has attempted.
Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
Saudi crown prince’s revolution is the real Arab spring
Zev Chafets in The Dawn
WHEN Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia rounded up 500-head of royals and billionaires last weekend and tossed them into luxury confinement, it was more than just a power grab by a young man in a hurry. It was a revolution. But of what kind?
Faisal Abbas, editor of Arab News, the English-language daily that normally speaks for the government, provided an answer of sorts from the Saudi perspective.
“With all due respect to the pundits out there, ‘experts’ analysing Saudi Arabia in previous decades had it too easy,” he wrote on Tuesday. “We need to understand that the days when things took too long to happen — if they happened at all — are forever gone. The exciting part is that thanks to the ambitious reforms being implemented … we are finally living in a country where anything can happen.”
Muhammed, known as MBS, is 32. He looks like a storybook Arabian prince and he talks like a progressive. He says he plans to liberalise and modernise his sclerotic society, expand the civil rights of women, reduce the economic power of the Saudi fossil fuel industry, and loosen the grip of the 5,000-member royal cousins club that has bled the country dry for generations.
Not only that: the prince also promises to transform Saudi Islam into a more tolerant brand of religion that does not fund extremist mosques in the West or underwrite jihadists in the Middle East.
Isn’t this the Arab leader we have been waiting for?
Yet so far, there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in world capitals. With the exception of US President Donald Trump, who has tweeted his support, events in Riyadh have elicited mostly silence.
This is understandable. Sometimes bright young Arab revolutionaries turn out to be Anwar Sadat, whose radical vision brought peace between Egypt and Israel. More often, they are tyrannical like Gamal Abdul Nasser or murderous like Osama Bin Laden or hapless like the Egyptian yuppies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2010. Let’s hope the dismal outcomes of that so-called Arab Spring have taught gullible Westerners not to engage in wishful thinking.
Still, you have to admire the boldness of the young prince. He has made enemies of the Saudi aristocracy, its billionaire class and their foreign business partners, who will eventually be looking for revenge. He has also locked up some senior clerics. The Saud family has historically derived its status as the Protector of Makkah from its alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam. The kingdom is full of young disciples who will not take kindly to the silencing of their jihadist preachers. (It’s true, however, that the prince has shown a less enlightened penchant, cracking down on human-rights advocates and academics as well.)
The prince also faces a threat from Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani warned that a Saudi alliance with the US and “Zionist regime” of Israel would be a “strategic mistake”. Since the US has been allied with the Saudis for decades, this sounded like a redundant warning.
It was not. Adding “Zionists” to the equation made it a death threat. Open collaboration with Israel by Arab heads of state is life-threatening. In the early 1950s, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem for allegedly talking peace. In 1981, after signing the deal with Israel, Sadat was shot to death by Islamic extremists at a military parade in Cairo. The next year, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was blown to bits in Beirut, presumably by Syrian agents.
Like MBS, Gemayel was the scion of an aristocratic family, one that publicly allied himself with Israel. The Saudi crown prince is too young to remember Gemayel, but Saad Hariri — who resigned as Lebanese prime minister over the weekend and is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia (or a nearby Gulf state) from Hezbollah assassins — can fill him in on what happens to Arab leaders who get accused of philo-Semitism.
This dynamic, by the way, explains Israel’s silence over MBS’s manoeuvrings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted by the emergence of a new Arab leader who shares his view of Iran. The last thing Bibi wants to do is get him shot.
Let’s be optimistic. Suppose Prince Mohammed survives hitmen, the wrath of his cousins and the fiery opposition of jihadist clerics — that he rises to the throne and moves to implement his domestic reforms. Granting women equal civil rights, permitting theatres and cinemas to open, tamping down the more inflammatory mosques, diversifying the economy — it is, as Abbas writes, an exciting prospect.
But there remains the question of his wider ambitions. He has made it clear that he considers Iran a mortal enemy. It is equally clear that he wants to lead a Sunni Arab coalition that can take on Tehran and end its regional aggression. This is a worthy goal, but not realistic.
The crown prince is the commander-in-chief of the army. He knows that it is a third-rate fighting force, unable to defeat even Houthi militia bands in Yemen, let alone Iran and its allies. His father and previous kings have been elderly rulers, cautious and focused on self-preservation. The most impressive fighting force in the kingdom is the National Guard, whose main role is guarding the royal family. The Saudi style of warfare has been funding proxy armies, while the US defends its borders.
Will MBS follow prudently in the footsteps of his predecessors? Or will he be seduced by dreams of restoring his family’s ancient warrior tradition and imposing Sunni primacy in the Muslim Middle East? I vote for option No 1.
An energetic, liberalising young king in Saudi Arabia would be a very good thing for the Middle East. He could be an important ally in the international war against terror, and a fine role model for other aspiring Arab revolutionaries. It would be a shame to waste this potential on half-baked military adventures. He needs to bring the Gulf into the modern world, not get bogged down in an Iranian Bay of Pigs.
WHEN Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia rounded up 500-head of royals and billionaires last weekend and tossed them into luxury confinement, it was more than just a power grab by a young man in a hurry. It was a revolution. But of what kind?
Faisal Abbas, editor of Arab News, the English-language daily that normally speaks for the government, provided an answer of sorts from the Saudi perspective.
“With all due respect to the pundits out there, ‘experts’ analysing Saudi Arabia in previous decades had it too easy,” he wrote on Tuesday. “We need to understand that the days when things took too long to happen — if they happened at all — are forever gone. The exciting part is that thanks to the ambitious reforms being implemented … we are finally living in a country where anything can happen.”
Muhammed, known as MBS, is 32. He looks like a storybook Arabian prince and he talks like a progressive. He says he plans to liberalise and modernise his sclerotic society, expand the civil rights of women, reduce the economic power of the Saudi fossil fuel industry, and loosen the grip of the 5,000-member royal cousins club that has bled the country dry for generations.
Not only that: the prince also promises to transform Saudi Islam into a more tolerant brand of religion that does not fund extremist mosques in the West or underwrite jihadists in the Middle East.
Isn’t this the Arab leader we have been waiting for?
Yet so far, there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in world capitals. With the exception of US President Donald Trump, who has tweeted his support, events in Riyadh have elicited mostly silence.
This is understandable. Sometimes bright young Arab revolutionaries turn out to be Anwar Sadat, whose radical vision brought peace between Egypt and Israel. More often, they are tyrannical like Gamal Abdul Nasser or murderous like Osama Bin Laden or hapless like the Egyptian yuppies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2010. Let’s hope the dismal outcomes of that so-called Arab Spring have taught gullible Westerners not to engage in wishful thinking.
Still, you have to admire the boldness of the young prince. He has made enemies of the Saudi aristocracy, its billionaire class and their foreign business partners, who will eventually be looking for revenge. He has also locked up some senior clerics. The Saud family has historically derived its status as the Protector of Makkah from its alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam. The kingdom is full of young disciples who will not take kindly to the silencing of their jihadist preachers. (It’s true, however, that the prince has shown a less enlightened penchant, cracking down on human-rights advocates and academics as well.)
The prince also faces a threat from Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani warned that a Saudi alliance with the US and “Zionist regime” of Israel would be a “strategic mistake”. Since the US has been allied with the Saudis for decades, this sounded like a redundant warning.
It was not. Adding “Zionists” to the equation made it a death threat. Open collaboration with Israel by Arab heads of state is life-threatening. In the early 1950s, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem for allegedly talking peace. In 1981, after signing the deal with Israel, Sadat was shot to death by Islamic extremists at a military parade in Cairo. The next year, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was blown to bits in Beirut, presumably by Syrian agents.
Like MBS, Gemayel was the scion of an aristocratic family, one that publicly allied himself with Israel. The Saudi crown prince is too young to remember Gemayel, but Saad Hariri — who resigned as Lebanese prime minister over the weekend and is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia (or a nearby Gulf state) from Hezbollah assassins — can fill him in on what happens to Arab leaders who get accused of philo-Semitism.
This dynamic, by the way, explains Israel’s silence over MBS’s manoeuvrings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted by the emergence of a new Arab leader who shares his view of Iran. The last thing Bibi wants to do is get him shot.
Let’s be optimistic. Suppose Prince Mohammed survives hitmen, the wrath of his cousins and the fiery opposition of jihadist clerics — that he rises to the throne and moves to implement his domestic reforms. Granting women equal civil rights, permitting theatres and cinemas to open, tamping down the more inflammatory mosques, diversifying the economy — it is, as Abbas writes, an exciting prospect.
But there remains the question of his wider ambitions. He has made it clear that he considers Iran a mortal enemy. It is equally clear that he wants to lead a Sunni Arab coalition that can take on Tehran and end its regional aggression. This is a worthy goal, but not realistic.
The crown prince is the commander-in-chief of the army. He knows that it is a third-rate fighting force, unable to defeat even Houthi militia bands in Yemen, let alone Iran and its allies. His father and previous kings have been elderly rulers, cautious and focused on self-preservation. The most impressive fighting force in the kingdom is the National Guard, whose main role is guarding the royal family. The Saudi style of warfare has been funding proxy armies, while the US defends its borders.
Will MBS follow prudently in the footsteps of his predecessors? Or will he be seduced by dreams of restoring his family’s ancient warrior tradition and imposing Sunni primacy in the Muslim Middle East? I vote for option No 1.
An energetic, liberalising young king in Saudi Arabia would be a very good thing for the Middle East. He could be an important ally in the international war against terror, and a fine role model for other aspiring Arab revolutionaries. It would be a shame to waste this potential on half-baked military adventures. He needs to bring the Gulf into the modern world, not get bogged down in an Iranian Bay of Pigs.
The magic money tree does exist, according to modern monetary theory
Youssef El-Gingihy in The Independent
After seven years of austerity, we are accustomed to thinking of the economy as a household with the nation’s credit card maxed out, to paraphrase David Cameron. The fetishisation of debt translated into massive cuts to UK spending on public services. At the same time, there remains widespread public anger that the big banks continued to make record profits and bonuses in spite of George Osborne’s assurances that we would all be in it together.
That was then though. Both Cameron and Osborne have since departed. This year, the political climate turned on its axis. The Conservative majority of 2015 gave way to a hung parliament with 40 per cent of voters opting for Corbyn’s Labour. The electorate’s acceptance of austerity mantras had evidently reached its limit.
Against this backdrop, the publication of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal Worldcould not be more timely. It is written by 65-year-old Australian heterodox economist William Mitchell and the journalist and author Thomas Fazi. The book’s introduction is topically titled “Make the Left Great Again”; a sentiment that will no doubt chime with many progressives.
It diagnoses that neoliberalism was not just a right-wing Thatcherite-Reaganite prospectus. The centre-left, as embodied by Mitterrand’s socialists in France, Blair’s New Labour and the Democratic Party in the US, was complicit in its imposition. This consensus culminated in the decimation of manufacturing, decline of union membership, the expansion of financial services, wage flattening, falling living standards and the privatisation of public services. At the heart of neoliberalism was the assertion that the free market is the supreme arbiter with the economy managed by technocratic expertise. The flip side of this depoliticisation resulted in ordinary people becoming alienated and disillusioned with the social democratic parties that formerly represented them. Instead they turned to anti-establishment (usually hard right) parties.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both knelt at the altar of neoliberalism (AFP/Getty)
Furthermore, Mitchell and Fazi point out that the notion that neoliberalism is anti-state is a misconception. In fact, the state has been essential to the neoliberal project as became evident in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The state is not only required to bail out corporations and banks but to create new markets and in an authoritarian mould to police its citizens. However, Mitchell and Fazi intend to reclaim national sovereignty as part of a 21st century progressive vision. This is where modern monetary theory (MMT) comes in.
Bill Mitchell is one of its key proponents. MMT is one of those Alice in Wonderland, down the wormhole kind of concepts that neutralises every received wisdom – from that childhood conversation when your father sat you down to explain banks using saving deposits to invest in other businesses right up to politicians telling us that the UK is broke. In other words, prepare to be blown away and forget what you think you knew about money.
MMT essentially proposes that money is created ex nihilo or out of nothing. Whether it is private banks, central banks or governments, money is an abstract concept of ones and zeros. Thus, when your bank lends you a mortgage, it essentially creates money by typing it up on a computer. Similarly, the government has the power to create “fiat money” – that is money established by government regulation or law as opposed to currencies with intrinsic value, such as gold.
In effect, the usual dictum of “tax and spend” is inverted to “spend and tax” with spending stimulating jobs and growth, which can later be taxed. Taxation is not therefore a way of raising revenue but a tool for either controlling the money supply or shaping policy through incentives. Of course, it is much more complicated than that as certain conditions must be met. Public spending cannot be unlimited and must be commensurate to the capacity of the economy amongst other things in order to avoid hyper-inflation.
Ecomomist William Mitchell argues that the notion that neoliberalism is anti-state is a misconception
Both authors have been on a global book tour taking in the US and Europe. In London, Mitchell and Fazi gave their talk at the Newington Green Unitarian Church – one of Britain’s oldest nonconformist churches. Mary Wollstonecraft was the most famous member of its congregation and was inspired by the sermons of the radical minister Dr Richard Price in her thinking on the new French republic and the rights of women.
The setting is certainly suitable for the preaching of a heretical doctrine. In fact, I am reminded that it is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pinning his 95 theses to the door of a Wittgenstein church. The parallels are hard to overlook; then as now Europe was in crisis with Britain exiting the established order.
Huddled on a church pew for the interview, I ask Mitchell what exactly is MMT? He answers that it is “a lens through which we can understand the monetary system”. Remarkably, the elemental question – where does money come from? – does not have a settled answer amongst economists, experts and policy makers. Organisations such as Positive Money have already embarked on the process of demystifying money creation. I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Money Trick” in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists in which loaves of bread are used to illustrate how the concept of money and surplus value (profit) guarantees perpetual penury for the working class and concentration of wealth for the ruling class.
So how might all of this play out post-Brexit? Mitchell and Fazi seem to be making the progressive argument for Brexit (nicknamed Lexit). This is in keeping with the old-left position that the EU does not represent genuine international solidarity. They acknowledge that it is difficult to make progressive arguments for sovereignty as nationalism has been condemned to a default reactionary position.
John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have pledged to take private finance initiative contracts back into public hands, but how would financing of infrastructure work under a Corbyn government? (Getty)
Yet polling demonstrates that sovereignty was the most common reason for people voting Brexit. Mitchell and Fazi reformulate a progressive definition of sovereignty as having democratic control over the economy rather than simply within ethno-nationalist parameters. According to Mitchell, sovereignty is absolutely fundamental in order for countries to exercise power over their money creation. As long as a country has its own central bank and currency then it is free to spend. While Greece, bound by the constraints of the European Central Bank and the euro, does not have this freedom. After the talk, Mitchell tells me that sovereignty entails having a currency issuing monopoly: “The reality is that national governments are the monopoly issuers of their own currency.”
Mitchell also debunks the idea that governments borrow money from international markets and with it the notion that they are hostage to the market. He has recently written a blog on how Corbyn should not be afraid of global markets. Mitchell cites the 2001 Argentinian debt default as demonstrating that a country can get away with it and recover. Similarly, Iceland imposed capital controls (measures to regulate capital flows in and out of a country) in order to steer the economy through rough waters after its banking system crashed.
In the same vein, Mitchell proposes that governments do not use bonds and gilts to raise revenue. He cites a previous Australian Conservative administration issuing debt when they were running surpluses as an example of the use of bonds as corporate welfare thus “exposing the game”.
At the recent Labour conference, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell stated that Labour would take private finance initiative (PFI) contracts back into public hands. So how would financing of infrastructure work under a Corbyn government? At the start of the year, this question might have appeared absurd yet only this month The New York Times published an op-ed piece titled “Get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn”.
Milton Friedman said money supply must be controlled in order to limit inflation, so government debt must be prioritised
Here is where quantitative easing (QE) comes in. QE was intended to stimulate bank lending in the aftermath of the financial crisis. However, growth levels have remained stagnant in Britain and Europe. In reality, the banks simply said thank you for the free lunch and used QE to restore their balance sheets. Studies have shown that much of QE ended up contributing to stock market and property bubbles.
Economist Richard Murphy – whose work has focused on tax avoidance and the offshore world – proposed what came to be termed “people’s QE”. For a while, this was a central tenet of the Corbynomics programme. Murphy’s basic idea was that if QE could be used for the banking system, then why not use it to build new homes or create climate jobs? As long as sufficient value was created then the nemesis of hyper-inflation could be avoided.
It therefore appears that Theresa May’s oft-repeated refrain attacking Corbyn on the grounds that there is no such thing as a magic money tree is not exactly true. So if money can basically be created with the press of a button, then suddenly our world appears to be (pacePanglossian disciples) the craziest of all possible worlds.
At this point, you might understandably be asking why on earth we do not just spend our way out of the current mess. And while we are it – give the NHS more money, shelter the homeless and feed the poor of the world. This is where we come up against the ideological edifice of neoliberalism.
Monetarist doctrine states – as per the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman – that the money supply must be controlled in order to limit inflation. Thus, government debt must be prioritised. The Maastricht treaty, which founded the EU, stipulated limits on public spending. Greece is the textbook example of austerity in which debt repayments are prioritised in order to appease creditors (mainly banking institutions).
Banks used quantitative easing to restore their balance sheets (Getty)
After seven years of austerity, we are accustomed to thinking of the economy as a household with the nation’s credit card maxed out, to paraphrase David Cameron. The fetishisation of debt translated into massive cuts to UK spending on public services. At the same time, there remains widespread public anger that the big banks continued to make record profits and bonuses in spite of George Osborne’s assurances that we would all be in it together.
That was then though. Both Cameron and Osborne have since departed. This year, the political climate turned on its axis. The Conservative majority of 2015 gave way to a hung parliament with 40 per cent of voters opting for Corbyn’s Labour. The electorate’s acceptance of austerity mantras had evidently reached its limit.
Against this backdrop, the publication of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal Worldcould not be more timely. It is written by 65-year-old Australian heterodox economist William Mitchell and the journalist and author Thomas Fazi. The book’s introduction is topically titled “Make the Left Great Again”; a sentiment that will no doubt chime with many progressives.
It diagnoses that neoliberalism was not just a right-wing Thatcherite-Reaganite prospectus. The centre-left, as embodied by Mitterrand’s socialists in France, Blair’s New Labour and the Democratic Party in the US, was complicit in its imposition. This consensus culminated in the decimation of manufacturing, decline of union membership, the expansion of financial services, wage flattening, falling living standards and the privatisation of public services. At the heart of neoliberalism was the assertion that the free market is the supreme arbiter with the economy managed by technocratic expertise. The flip side of this depoliticisation resulted in ordinary people becoming alienated and disillusioned with the social democratic parties that formerly represented them. Instead they turned to anti-establishment (usually hard right) parties.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both knelt at the altar of neoliberalism (AFP/Getty)
Furthermore, Mitchell and Fazi point out that the notion that neoliberalism is anti-state is a misconception. In fact, the state has been essential to the neoliberal project as became evident in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The state is not only required to bail out corporations and banks but to create new markets and in an authoritarian mould to police its citizens. However, Mitchell and Fazi intend to reclaim national sovereignty as part of a 21st century progressive vision. This is where modern monetary theory (MMT) comes in.
Bill Mitchell is one of its key proponents. MMT is one of those Alice in Wonderland, down the wormhole kind of concepts that neutralises every received wisdom – from that childhood conversation when your father sat you down to explain banks using saving deposits to invest in other businesses right up to politicians telling us that the UK is broke. In other words, prepare to be blown away and forget what you think you knew about money.
MMT essentially proposes that money is created ex nihilo or out of nothing. Whether it is private banks, central banks or governments, money is an abstract concept of ones and zeros. Thus, when your bank lends you a mortgage, it essentially creates money by typing it up on a computer. Similarly, the government has the power to create “fiat money” – that is money established by government regulation or law as opposed to currencies with intrinsic value, such as gold.
In effect, the usual dictum of “tax and spend” is inverted to “spend and tax” with spending stimulating jobs and growth, which can later be taxed. Taxation is not therefore a way of raising revenue but a tool for either controlling the money supply or shaping policy through incentives. Of course, it is much more complicated than that as certain conditions must be met. Public spending cannot be unlimited and must be commensurate to the capacity of the economy amongst other things in order to avoid hyper-inflation.
Ecomomist William Mitchell argues that the notion that neoliberalism is anti-state is a misconception
Both authors have been on a global book tour taking in the US and Europe. In London, Mitchell and Fazi gave their talk at the Newington Green Unitarian Church – one of Britain’s oldest nonconformist churches. Mary Wollstonecraft was the most famous member of its congregation and was inspired by the sermons of the radical minister Dr Richard Price in her thinking on the new French republic and the rights of women.
The setting is certainly suitable for the preaching of a heretical doctrine. In fact, I am reminded that it is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pinning his 95 theses to the door of a Wittgenstein church. The parallels are hard to overlook; then as now Europe was in crisis with Britain exiting the established order.
Huddled on a church pew for the interview, I ask Mitchell what exactly is MMT? He answers that it is “a lens through which we can understand the monetary system”. Remarkably, the elemental question – where does money come from? – does not have a settled answer amongst economists, experts and policy makers. Organisations such as Positive Money have already embarked on the process of demystifying money creation. I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Money Trick” in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists in which loaves of bread are used to illustrate how the concept of money and surplus value (profit) guarantees perpetual penury for the working class and concentration of wealth for the ruling class.
So how might all of this play out post-Brexit? Mitchell and Fazi seem to be making the progressive argument for Brexit (nicknamed Lexit). This is in keeping with the old-left position that the EU does not represent genuine international solidarity. They acknowledge that it is difficult to make progressive arguments for sovereignty as nationalism has been condemned to a default reactionary position.
John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have pledged to take private finance initiative contracts back into public hands, but how would financing of infrastructure work under a Corbyn government? (Getty)
Yet polling demonstrates that sovereignty was the most common reason for people voting Brexit. Mitchell and Fazi reformulate a progressive definition of sovereignty as having democratic control over the economy rather than simply within ethno-nationalist parameters. According to Mitchell, sovereignty is absolutely fundamental in order for countries to exercise power over their money creation. As long as a country has its own central bank and currency then it is free to spend. While Greece, bound by the constraints of the European Central Bank and the euro, does not have this freedom. After the talk, Mitchell tells me that sovereignty entails having a currency issuing monopoly: “The reality is that national governments are the monopoly issuers of their own currency.”
Mitchell also debunks the idea that governments borrow money from international markets and with it the notion that they are hostage to the market. He has recently written a blog on how Corbyn should not be afraid of global markets. Mitchell cites the 2001 Argentinian debt default as demonstrating that a country can get away with it and recover. Similarly, Iceland imposed capital controls (measures to regulate capital flows in and out of a country) in order to steer the economy through rough waters after its banking system crashed.
In the same vein, Mitchell proposes that governments do not use bonds and gilts to raise revenue. He cites a previous Australian Conservative administration issuing debt when they were running surpluses as an example of the use of bonds as corporate welfare thus “exposing the game”.
At the recent Labour conference, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell stated that Labour would take private finance initiative (PFI) contracts back into public hands. So how would financing of infrastructure work under a Corbyn government? At the start of the year, this question might have appeared absurd yet only this month The New York Times published an op-ed piece titled “Get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn”.
Milton Friedman said money supply must be controlled in order to limit inflation, so government debt must be prioritised
Here is where quantitative easing (QE) comes in. QE was intended to stimulate bank lending in the aftermath of the financial crisis. However, growth levels have remained stagnant in Britain and Europe. In reality, the banks simply said thank you for the free lunch and used QE to restore their balance sheets. Studies have shown that much of QE ended up contributing to stock market and property bubbles.
Economist Richard Murphy – whose work has focused on tax avoidance and the offshore world – proposed what came to be termed “people’s QE”. For a while, this was a central tenet of the Corbynomics programme. Murphy’s basic idea was that if QE could be used for the banking system, then why not use it to build new homes or create climate jobs? As long as sufficient value was created then the nemesis of hyper-inflation could be avoided.
It therefore appears that Theresa May’s oft-repeated refrain attacking Corbyn on the grounds that there is no such thing as a magic money tree is not exactly true. So if money can basically be created with the press of a button, then suddenly our world appears to be (pacePanglossian disciples) the craziest of all possible worlds.
At this point, you might understandably be asking why on earth we do not just spend our way out of the current mess. And while we are it – give the NHS more money, shelter the homeless and feed the poor of the world. This is where we come up against the ideological edifice of neoliberalism.
Monetarist doctrine states – as per the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman – that the money supply must be controlled in order to limit inflation. Thus, government debt must be prioritised. The Maastricht treaty, which founded the EU, stipulated limits on public spending. Greece is the textbook example of austerity in which debt repayments are prioritised in order to appease creditors (mainly banking institutions).
Banks used quantitative easing to restore their balance sheets (Getty)
However, even mainstream economists feel that the logic of austerity is somewhat fallacious. Keynesian economics posits that public spending stimulates growth with debt as a secondary consideration. As the New Economics Foundation think tank points out, Britain has historically seen much higher levels of public debt. The debt/GDP ratio was higher during a whole century between 1750 and 1850 (at the time of the Napoleonic wars and the height of Britain’s imperial glory) as well as in the aftermath of the Second World War when the welfare state was created.
While a landmark 2014 study demonstrated that the UK coalition government’s welfare changes enabled tax cuts for the wealthiest thus cancelling out any impact on the deficit. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has also argued that the austerity strategy applied to Greek debt has been extremely counterproductive. The combination of bailouts with cuts has depressed the economy resulting in an increase of the debt (as a percentage of GDP).
The ascendancy of neoliberalism was such that its ideology became an all-pervasive atmosphere. During the event, Mitchell asks how many in the audience have heard of the Powell memorandum. Only a couple of hands go up. Lewis Powell was an American lawyer – later appointed as a Supreme Court justice by Richard Nixon – now indelibly associated with his eponymous 1971 memorandum. This outlined a blueprint for the American conservative movement and the network of think tanks funded by business interests. It recommended that the business class should close ranks in order to present a united front. It also stipulated that lobbyists would be needed to influence policy makers and legislators. And it suggested that infiltration of the media and academia would be necessary in order to achieve the goals of unshackling free enterprise from government interference.
So what would happen if governments followed through on the logic of MMT? Well for a start the Goldman Sachs, JPMorgans and HSBCs of this world would not be as rich or powerful and in the worst-case scenario they might even cease to have any purpose. A recent comprehensive survey from the pro-market Legatum Institute confirms that significant majorities of the British public are in favour of renationalisation of utilities and railways. The public is equally split on nationalisation of the banks with 50 per cent in favour. Corbyn and McDonnell have proposed a national investment bank with a network of regional banks in order to help rebalance the economy and encourage lending.
Whether or not one accepts MMT, it is increasingly apparent that public and democratic oversight of finance and money is becoming a central pillar of progressive postcapitalism alongside public control of public services, a green economy, full automation and the four-day week.
While a landmark 2014 study demonstrated that the UK coalition government’s welfare changes enabled tax cuts for the wealthiest thus cancelling out any impact on the deficit. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has also argued that the austerity strategy applied to Greek debt has been extremely counterproductive. The combination of bailouts with cuts has depressed the economy resulting in an increase of the debt (as a percentage of GDP).
The ascendancy of neoliberalism was such that its ideology became an all-pervasive atmosphere. During the event, Mitchell asks how many in the audience have heard of the Powell memorandum. Only a couple of hands go up. Lewis Powell was an American lawyer – later appointed as a Supreme Court justice by Richard Nixon – now indelibly associated with his eponymous 1971 memorandum. This outlined a blueprint for the American conservative movement and the network of think tanks funded by business interests. It recommended that the business class should close ranks in order to present a united front. It also stipulated that lobbyists would be needed to influence policy makers and legislators. And it suggested that infiltration of the media and academia would be necessary in order to achieve the goals of unshackling free enterprise from government interference.
So what would happen if governments followed through on the logic of MMT? Well for a start the Goldman Sachs, JPMorgans and HSBCs of this world would not be as rich or powerful and in the worst-case scenario they might even cease to have any purpose. A recent comprehensive survey from the pro-market Legatum Institute confirms that significant majorities of the British public are in favour of renationalisation of utilities and railways. The public is equally split on nationalisation of the banks with 50 per cent in favour. Corbyn and McDonnell have proposed a national investment bank with a network of regional banks in order to help rebalance the economy and encourage lending.
Whether or not one accepts MMT, it is increasingly apparent that public and democratic oversight of finance and money is becoming a central pillar of progressive postcapitalism alongside public control of public services, a green economy, full automation and the four-day week.
Thursday 9 November 2017
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