Volume CXXXIII, Number 7 October 26, 2001 f

Prof responds to the "C-word"

To the Editors:

I'm not sure why Todd Buell ("Compassionate Colonialism", October 19) thinks that the "c-word", as he puts it, isn't to be mentioned in polite academic discourse. A quick search on Bowdoin's spiffy new Web site yields about 30 hits on the word, and quite a few of them involve course descriptions. It seems that we talk about colonialism quite a bit. It's quite true that calls for a return to Western colonialism are rather harder to find, but there may be good reasons for that.

Jonah Goldberg has been musing about 'compassionate colonialism' for over a year now, well before September 11. He writes with a studied vagueness about what he actually means, but it seems to involve the forcible takeover of particular areas, followed by temporary American rule-dig some wells, eradicate malaria, end hunger, accept the thanks of a grateful citizenry and then out again, with the warm glow of a job well done.

African states have led his list of possible colonies, of course; Africa is always the playground of choice for colonial fantasies, and it's a truism of conservative theorizing that Africans can't rule themselves. Apparently, he's now extended the idea to Afghanistan and Iraq.

For the most part, Goldberg's ideas are a sort of Colonialism Lite for the twenty-first century. Consent of the governed is irrelevant and there may have to be some preventive killing of Bad Guys, but it's all to be good clean imperialism, done for the Native's Own Good. (Pith helmets and pukka sahibs-it will, no doubt, make a good movie when suitably cleaned up.) The problem is that such justifications have always accompanied colonial adventures, and they very rarely play out in practice.

Look at America's own experience with protectorates: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Philippines today hardly look like good advertisements for such a strategy. The British and French did not seem notably satisfied with the endings of their Age of Empire. Goldberg's favourite strategy for colonial development-in good conservative form, he wants to grant condominiums to multinational corporations-left 10 million people dead in the Congo Free State and has proven one of the worst way to assist regions in economic development.

Historical amnesia is perhaps not the safest state for approaching nation building in Afghanistan and Iran. The modern relationships involved are complex as well. Turkey, a NATO ally and the provider of vital bases for American power projection, has a distinct interest in a crippled and chaotic Iraq. Iran, Uzbekistan and Pakistan, America's new-found and rather tremulous allies in Central Asia, share similar fears of a unified Afghanistan. How are these countries going to perceive American engagement in a twenty-first century version of colonialism on their borders?

It's nice, though mildly startling, to see an American conservative like Goldberg advocate the spending of "...billions and billions of dollars..." in amelioration of living conditions in poor areas of the world. However, there seems a fundamental failure of imagination at work here in the assumption that the only two options for America are to ignore the world outside the frontiers, or to rule it.

Perhaps some alternative suggestions are in order? One such might involve a re-engagement with the United Nations and with the hard-won knowledge about peace-keeping that a number of countries have accumulated in the course of missions coordinated by that body. Another might involve genuine commitment to assist poor countries in the rehabilitation of their economies, without the primary impulse of Great Power game-playing or protection of banking systems. I think such engagements do rather more to help people in Afghanistan, Iraq, or different parts of Africa than do dreams of a new colonial age.

Scott MacEachern
Department of Sociology and Anthropology

To the Editors:

If there's one thing that the anthrax scare has proven to me over the last few weeks, it's that the American government's attack on Afghanistan is, to put it simply, a silly idea. The silly part of it of course isn't the whole eye-for-eye tooth-for-tooth kind of doctrine George W. and the American people generally have been embracing regarding who is responsible for the September 11 tragedy (Osama bin Laden) and "bringing him to justice" (which I suppose means eventually killing him). If this is justice, then let justice be done.

The silly part is the idea that George W. and the American people generally have been clinging to the idea that somehow, some way, our bombing of a distant Muslim-controlled country will fix everything and make us safe again. That the war on terrorism is a war that we can win in the usual way, by blowing stuff up and killing bad guys.

If there's anything these anthrax-contaminated letters, (almost all of them postmarked from Trenton, New Jersey) should say to us Americans, it's the following: the problem, our enemies, the proverbial bad guys, are not hiding in a hollowed-out volcano in Afghanistan. Killing bad guys in Afghanistan or Iraq or Palestine or any foreign country for that matter will not fix the problem, because the problem is not foreign.

Both the September 11 attacks and the anthrax attacks came from within U.S. borders. Both attacks seem to have been executed by, though there is no real way to know right now with the anthrax, a small number of people. And most importantly, both attacks were designed to hit American society at its weakest point: So how can we adequately protect ourselves from biological weapons in the mail without having a police officer in a gas mask open every envelope before it gets to its destination? How can we adequately protect ourselves from 19 hijackers armed with box cutters?

The plain answer to both these questions is that we can't. No matter how many people we successfully kill in Afghanistan, no matter how much we improve security at airports and at post offices, it won't be enough. There are quite clearly enough people like bin Laden all over the world, including Trenton, NJ, to make it nearly impossible to kill enough of them to make ourselves completely safe; there will always be cracks in our internal security, as long as we still have civil liberties, that can be exploited.

The argument then that our bombing Afghanistan is necessary so we don't look like wimps, that it's necessary because to do nothing under these circumstances would be a travesty of justice may be perfectly true. I would hardly argue that a known murderer (of 6,000, no less) should be allowed to go unpunished, if only to maintain the rule of law. So, go ahead and get bin Laden. Go ahead and bomb the Taliban. Go ahead and do what you need to do to continue to be a respectable government. Say what you will about justice, Americans; but please, I beg you, don't trick yourselves into believing that killing bin Laden and removing the Taliban makes life any safer here in the United States.

Marshall R. Escamilla '02