A Second Hand Conjecture

The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

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I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
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Last night Joshua argued that Saakashvili, having quite obviously failed to recapture his renegade territories, is certain to be finished one way or the other. Either overthrown by the Russian army, or by the Georgian people at the ballot box. This is a bit of an analyst consensus as you look around the web. Not so fast, says me.

It should be said that the mere fact of the Russian demand to remove him has supplied a method for his political redemption — which is why it was so important for the United States to leak the Russian foreign minister’s views on this. If Russia fails to bring him down, he can easily emerge as a defiant patriot who defeated the one Russian objective they most desired, through force of personal will.

The trouble with pressing your advantages and changing your objectives to increasingly ambitious goals, is if you get to a point where you cannot (or will not) actualize the final measure, you can create the circumstances for a political defeat. With the world aware that the Russian goal is to remove Saakashvili, if they don’t do it now, that can (and probably will) rescue him as a political leader.

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At least 160,000 deaths in the suppression of Chechen independence by Russia. Just a reminder for when someone tries to set Russia up as the great defender of South Ossetia’s right of national self-determination. There’s a diplomatic argument for that, but it isn’t one that can be made by Russia and especially not by a Russian imperial invasion force.

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Francis Fukuyama chats with Robert Kagan on a number of interesting things: Flash | WMV | MP3 (via: The American Interest).

Of immediate interest is Kagan’s notion that the the emergence of global multipolarity induces an imperfect, baseline bipolarity of ideological division in diplomacy, between the West and the surging authoritarians of the “New East.”

In the opening minutes, Fukuyama argues that while the recent diplomatic concord on Zimbabwe between China and Russia might suggest this, the two reborn Eastern powers have certain fundamental divisions of world-view which impact alliance structure, due to their historical relationship to power. He argues that China has traditionally perceived itself as a kind of destination for power and politics. The mandate of heaven makes China the imperial center of the universe, of which the rest of the world can only envy in political sinocentrism.

Whereas Russia –increasingly animated today by Soviet nostalgia– may again begin to see itself as a kind of departure point for power and politics. In Russia at least there is a political tradition of the country serving as a aggressive universalist tutor for the developing world. Perhaps Moscow could even perceive itself in the way Lenin saw the role of Russia in the context of international revolution. Lenin after all, went so far as to argue that the Soviet Union could not survive absent a world revolution driven by his exportable political principles.

In essence, Fukuyama seems to be wondering whether Russia could be an internationalist while China remains a nationalist,with both representing not dissimilar models for authoritarian power, but presumably finding difficulty in unified action at the United Nations and elsewhere.

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(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)

Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.

Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:

Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)

That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.

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There’s editorial sensationalism, and then there’s Keith Olbermann. Consider Mr. Olbermann on Bush recently: “If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism?” Plutocracy, would perhaps be a better term for what he’s after. Or to be both frank and cynical about it, he just described government of almost every kind. Fascism worthy of the name would propose the seamless mutuality of nationalism and socialism, in the service of dictatorship. Collusion between big business and the state is generally incidental. And wherever it occurs, the role for business is entirely subordinate not reciprocal, as Keith would have you believe. Power is not for sharing under fascism. For too many people unfortunately, the word has taken on a entirely personal definition, meaning “that of which I disapprove.”

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You just have to love the title of Geoff Mulherin’s piece on the Monument Mandala in the Province of Papua: Suharto’s Last Erection. It also happens to head a fascinating exploration of the Indonesian effort to unify their disparate archipelago through nationalist narratives in monumental architecture.

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(listening notes; Dinosaur Jr., The Volcano Suns, The Minutemen, The Dixie Chicks, Hank Williams Sr., The Rolling Stones)

Late in the eighties I was taking a course in American history after 1945. One of my fellow students was a bright, interesting Palestinian. We had become acquaintances and spent a fair amount of time after class discussing various topics. He was not in my mind anyone much different than other students. He was a good guy. While he was a Muslim, and a believer he wasn’t what I would call devout and certainly not radical. Needless to say eventually the topic of the class turned to the Arab Israeli conflict and the professor gave an entire class period over to this young man to give a presentation. It was quite good, if one sided, at showing the conditions in the refugee camps, various atrocities committed by the Israeli’s and Israel’s refusal to negotiate in good faith. He was quite effective at arousing the sympathies of the class, including mine. The discussion after that turned into a chance for the more left leaning members of the class to give monologues about their deep sympathy for the Palestinian people and the brutality of the Israeli’s.

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