The Post-war Order

I have to say that the US did wonders for the whole world in its post-World War II invention of a world order that sustained peace and tranquility for over half a century. Well done indeed.

 

What made that order possible was the bipolar division of power after the war. I don’t mean that the presence of the Soviet Block was necessarily planned, or that it was in itself essential for the order. What I do mean is that the existence of a mortal enemy to the order as the US conceived it made it possible for the US to be ruthless without seeming to be ruthless and in the event to increase its power, influence, and wealth.

 

Think about all the actions that the US took, either on its own account or by proxies, to stop Soviet expansion, or rather the expansion of communism with the Soviet Union as the ultimate agitator in the process—forgive me the terms I’m using here, from “expansion” to “agitator” and a lot of others in between. I’m writing from the angle made necessary by being in the US myself.

 

There were the big ones, both in the number of casualties and in the direct engagement of US troops. In Korea there were more than five million dead, and in Vietnam somewhere over four million. The minor engagements—minor from the point of view of total dead and a marginal involvement of US combatants—are so myriad that they cannot be easily counted. To pick a continent: there’s the Angolan Civil War, the Congo Crisis, the Ogaden War in the Horn of Africa. There was much manipulation of political actors elsewhere—in Kenya, in Nigeria by deliberate inaction, in Sudan, in Mozambique.

 

Perhaps the slyest of destructive interventions took place in South Africa, where the US supported the apartheid as a counter to Soviet influence while at the same time objecting to the domestic effects of the apartheid system. The absurdity of that position still stuns. In practice, South Africans of all races, except the whites naturally, suffered decades of displacement and psychological denigration predicated on the ostensible superiority of whites and therefore the ostensible inferiority of Blacks, Coloreds, Indians—all the mincemeat categories invented by the Afrikaners to justify their control of the nation.

 

I am not considering the interventions in South and Central America and the Caribbean—there are limits to what I can write more or less briefly.

 

All those manipulations, intervention, actions, and wars were justified because of the threat of Soviet communism to the order that the US established. And there’s no doubt that Soviet communism did indeed represent a threat to the world order. I am by no means excusing the USSR. What I am suggesting is that the USSR played right into the hands of the American world order. I cannot imagine such actions taking place without the threat of communism to justify them. And the result of the Soviet threat was obviously the concomitant expansion of US power, prestige, and wealth. Many millions died. But the American century was secured.

 

Again, the post-war world order was on the whole a good thing. It would have led to increasing global wealth and welfare for everyone, the "everyone" especially emphatic had there been no Cold War antagonism between the US and the USSR. That antagonism simply made it easier for the US to improve its own position in relation to the rest of the world and to reward those who followed its lead, albeit with dire consequences for compatriots who resisted the US position.

 

The Soviets . . . I don’t understand the Soviets. I am assuming that the ideological stance of communism as opposing the depredations of capitalism is little more than smoke and mirrors, as it was in the US for domestic consumption, so that even now to accuse someone of being communist almost guarantees that the person will be persecuted, if not prosecuted. It’s obvious that the Soviet agenda lost again and again. It’s equally obvious that nations that adhered to communism fell further and further behind those that followed good old US capitalism. Think North Korea. Think Cuba. Other than for the sake of preserving the power and wealth of the ruling class in those nations, and perhaps—just as a possibility—the desire to resist American hegemony, why persevere in communism? China might be held up as a counter-example. It seems to have become an economically successful nation despite being “communist.” Is it? It is a single-party state. It is ruthlessly authoritarian. So was Nazi Germany.

 

To finish the thought of the US and the post-war world order as benefitting from the Cold War, consider what happened when the USSR disappeared and the threat of Soviet communism with it. The US—I guess “the West” is now a more appropriate term—immediately discovered a new threat to its hegemony, namely Islam. Indeed, I recall a radio broadcast by one of the right-wing Christian fundamentalist pastors (could it have been Pat Robertson? I can’t recall), which aired within a couple of months of the dissolution of the USSR. The pastor made reference to the Book of Daniel and its warning that Israel would be assailed from the north. It may be needless to point out that the pastor understood “Israel” as both the current state of Israel and the community of Christians derived from the promises of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, with special emphasis on the US. And what’s north of the state of Israel? It had been the USSR. That was gone. What remained is Islam.

 

The threat of Islam hasn’t replaced the threat of godless communism as easily as that pastor imagined it would. Certainly the folks currently in charge of the world order keep trying. But the success of the strategy is nothing like the success of the anti-communist agenda. The result? The world order staggers. It may be on its way to collapse and replacement by something else.

 

Yeats predicted that what’s to come is a “rough beast . . . slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” He may be right. I don’t know. What I do know is that the American century, and the post-war order that codified that century, was also pretty rough.

Terrorism and Patriotism

Was John Brown an agent of liberation, or was he a terrorist? That is an unfair question because it does what so often happens in discussions of controversial subjects. The “or” produces the unfairness. Brown’s actions were brutal, deliberately so. In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown and a group of his followers dragged five men and boys from their homes and killed them. Surely that is a terroristic act. But then the motivation for the act remains within the realm of liberation. The people he killed—at Pottawatomie Creek and then later in Missouri and in Virginia, Harper’s Ferry—were active proponents of slavery, slave owners, fierce defenders of their “right” to own other human beings as chattel property. In Brown’s religious fervor, and in any morally righteous universe, such men represented evil. His actions worked towards the liberation of all the enslaved people of the United States.

 

Change the “or” to “and,” then.

 

According to the OED “terrorist” as a political epithet doesn’t come into English usage until well after our Tea Party, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, when a British newspaper of 1794 called “terrorists” those radical Jacobins who ignited the Terror. In usage not associated with the Terror, the word doesn’t appear until 1806 when another British newspaper refers to Irish freedom fighters as “terrorists.” As a religious epithet, “terrorist” appears at the same time as in political discourse to describe the hell fire and damnation sermons of radical sectarians.

 

Destructive as they were, even the Jacobins are both/and—terrorists to be sure, but also patriots seeking the radical liberation of the people of France. So too the Irish “terrorists” seeking freedom from British domination and the radical sectarians who wished to terrorize their audience into salvation.

 

And so the categories of patriotic hero and terrorist come trailing clouds or perspective. The savage white men disguised as Native Americans who threw British tea into Boston Harbor are our heroes, but their terrorists.

 

Not as violent as the Jacobins, the participants in the Tea Party nonetheless had in mind the same sort of goal as did the Jacobins. The OED, again, defines the more general sense of “terrorist” as follows: “A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” The tea-partiers to a T.

 

Nowhere is the coincidence of terrorism and patriotism clearer than in the Middle East. From the perspective of Israelis every one of the Palestinian groups, from the PLO and Fatah through Hezbollah and Hamas, is a terrorist organization. There is no doubt about the truth of that designation. Random shooting, coordinated attacks, constant subversion of the Israeli state add up to the use of “violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” The political aims are themselves terroristic insofar as one articulated goal of the groups, some of them at any rate, is the destruction of Israel itself. The rallying cry, “from the mountains to the sea,” means erasing Israel in order to establish a comprehensive Palestinian state.

 

From the Palestinian perspective the political goal of the terrorism is necessary, essential to freeing the people of Palestine. They note that the state of Israel is itself founded at least in part because of the terrorism of Jewish groups like the Irgun. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, located in the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate, in 1946. Many Jewish groups in the 1940s condemned the terrorism, which was in effect part of a comprehensive militant campaign against the British mandate, ultimately seeking the establishment of a new state, Israel, as the homeland of all Jews.

 

Britain and the US had moved towards founding a new state regardless of the Jewish militancy, and in 1948 the UN agreed. Israel became a new country. Israel would have been born without the terrorism. Whether the terrorism worked to hasten the birth is arguable. It may be worth noting, however, that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ultimately became prime minister of Israel. Also of note is the current prime minister’s opinion that the bombers of the King David Hotel were “heroes.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument? It is “very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action.”

 

So too would Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah argue. After all, the British mandate in Palestine happens to coincide almost exactly with the borders of Israel.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#/media/File:Map_of_Mandatory_Palestine_in_1946_with_major_cities_(in_English).svg

 

The Palestinian terrorists’ political goal is to recuperate what the Jewish terrorists accomplished. Currently Israel is responding to that goal as ruthlessly as possible. The attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct 7^th 2023 has given the Israeli government license systematically to destroy Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip. That approach to “solving” the Palestinian problem has also empowered Israeli “settlers” to attack piecemeal Palestinian households and communities in the West Bank. In any other context those “settlers” would be labelled “terrorists” because their tactics come straight from the terrorists’ handbook, to “use violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” Whether the government’s approach to Gaza is also terroristic, state-sponsored terrorism, is a live question. Much of the world seems to think so, at any rate.

 

In any morally reasonable universe there ought to be a clear dividing line between terrorism and patriotism. Unfortunately we do not live in a morally reasonable universe. We’re stuck with perspective and point of view. To be sure, most people—I have no idea what percentage of humans, but suspect a very large majority—respond with revulsion to acts of violence and intimidation. Until self-interest of some sort enters the question, that is. Once that happens, terrorism becomes justified by the political goal of the terrorists.

John Brown is not unique in this regard. Hamas justifies the October 7^th attack as a step towards “freeing” Palestine. Netanyahu thinks the bombers at the King David Hotel are heroes in the “freeing” of Jews.

 

Early Modern revenge tragedies tell us the result. An endless cycle of violence, all of it justified on the basis of some grand political objective. Simply put, there is no balm in Gilead.

Colonialism, Slavery, and the Modern World

Having listened to a The Ancients podcast on “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire,” I started to do some online searching for states that had slavery or some other form of forced labor as part of their commonplace social system—together with colonialism, the source of much of Rome’s slaves

. I had so many positive results that it finally occurred to me to switch the direction of the search to countries that had nothad such system. That’s when I found this chart:

 

https://ourworldindata.org/slavery

 

The data the chart reflects is depressing, of course. I recognize as well that some of what it presents is, if not positively inaccurate, still a bit too optimistic for its own good. For instance, while the British Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did end slavery in the Empire, forced or coerced labor did not exactly disappear in the British colonies. Another podcast, “Indian Indentured Labour,” streamed by In Our Time, laid out in painful detail the way that in the Empire’s Caribbean money-making colonies, the indentured servitude of Indian subjects of the Raj in effect replaced slavery in a way that made the term “servitude” more descriptive than “servants.”

 

The chart also takes us from the early Modern period all the way to the Post-modern world that we now inhabit but does not include any pre-modern state—nothing about Rome, for instance, or the Parthian Empire, or the Ghanaian Kingdom, or the Gupta Empire, or the Mayan or Incan Empires or several Native American Chiefdoms and Confederations, or any of the Chinese dynasties, or. . . . As far as I can tell only the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians, neither group in any way associated with colonial imperialism, did not practice any form of slavery. Some hope for humanity after all, it seems.

I was interested in the history and spread of slavery and forced labor as a way to think about the basis for the wealth and superior standard of living enjoyed by most Europeans and their colonial epigones. In fact, I find it almost impossible to distinguish the modern slave trade from modern colonialism. I suspected that Europe and its erstwhile colonies are wealthy now because they practiced slavery from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. For European nations the wealth derives especially from but certainly not limited to the Transatlantic slave trade and the rooting of slavery as the primary tool for extracting wealth from the European colonies in the New World. In Asia and Africa and Australia it was not the Transatlantic slave trade that served as the basis for European wealth, but the enslavement of natives in the various colonies served the same function.

 

Wikipedia provides a ready accounting of the wealthiest countries in the world, by total GDP rather than by per capita GDP, where tiny countries like Singapore, San Marino, and Monaco rank high because they manipulate money. I reproduce here a list of the top ten countries.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

 

China, Japan, and Russia did not participate in the Transatlantic slave trade. That is not to say that China, Japan, and Russia did not have their own forms of slavery and forced labor. India and Brazil, also home to slavery, may seem to stand outside of the picture, but no more so than does another European colony, the United States. All three of those nations are ex-colonies, enjoying today the fruits of slavery and forced labor as practiced in the period from the sixteenth century to the present.

 

I recognize that other phenomena besides slavery are in part responsible for the wealth of some of these nations. The huge populations of India and China, the geographical and natural plenty of the United States and Brazil—all of that played a major role in engendering the wealth of those countries. But would those characteristics suffice without the grounding of slavery and forced labor?

 

Certainly in the case of the relatively small European nations—the UK, Germany, Italy, France—their wealth rests firmly on the foundation of colonization and slavery. Would the UK have produced the Industrial Revolution without the immense wealth that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies provided? The connection between wealth and historical slavery may not be so obvious in countries like Germany or Italy, which certainly practiced their own form of enslavement but whose imperial ambitions come late in the period. But without the effect of slavery on the general European polity, would Germany and Italy be on that list? Of the top twenty-five economies in the world, European nations and their major colonies hold eighteen spots. Some of those countries, like the Netherlands and Spain, are in the same colonial and slavery ballpark as Britain and France. Belgium, a tiny country, is on the list—one could ask of Leopold II why that is the case. Others—Ireland, Switzerland, Poland—seem to me to be on the list by virtue of the general European exploitation of the rest of the world.

 

So yes, slavery and forced labor seem to be par for human course from ancient times all the way to the present—some nations still practice forced labor and, in effect, slavery. As “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire” made clear to me, slavery derived from colonial ambition was the essential component of ancient empires, without which there would not have been a Rome or a Mughal Empire or pharaonic Egypt. But for the modern world, from the sixteenth century onwards, it seems to me self-evident that slavery and its attendant colonial underpinnings have made our world. Slavery gave birth to the wealth of Europe and its sometime colonies.