The Great Soul of Power

It is a challenging task to select a few themes from the remarkable range of the work and life of Edward Said, who I was privileged to count as a treasured friend for many years. I will keep to two: the culture of empire, and the responsibility of intellectuals -- or from a broader perspective, the culture of dominance generally, and the responsibility of those with sufficient privilege and resources so that if they choose to enter the public arena, we call them “intellectuals.”

The phrase “responsibility of intellectuals” conceals a crucial ambiguity: it blurs the distinction between “ought” and “is.” In terms of “ought,” their responsibility should be exactly the same as that of any decent human being, though greater: Privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers moral responsibility. We rightly condemn the obedient intellectuals of brutal and violent states for their “conformist subservience to those in power” – I am borrowing the phrase from Hans Morgenthau, one of the founders of modern international relations theory. He was, however, not referring to the commissar class of the totalitarian enemy, but to Western intellectuals, whose crime is far greater, because they cannot plead fear but only cowardice and subordination to power. He was describing what is, not what ought to be. And regrettably, he is basically correct about what is, and has been throughout much of history. It is noteworthy that he was writing in late 1970, after opposition to the Indochina wars had peaked, and the most vocal dissidence of the educated classes.

The history of intellectuals is written by intellectuals, so not surprisingly, they are portrayed as defenders of right and justice, upholding the highest values and confronting power and evil with admirable courage and integrity. The record reveals a rather different picture. The term “intellectual” came into common usage with the Dreyfusards, the prototypical “engaged intellectuals.” But they were a minority: most kept to conformist subservience to those in power. That has been the pattern back to the earliest recorded history. It was the man who “corrupted the youth of Athens” with “false gods” who drank the hemlock, not those who worshipped the true gods of the doctrinal system. A large part of the Bible is devoted to people who provided critical geopolitical analysis and condemned the crimes of state and immoral practices. They are called “prophets,” a dubious translation of an obscure word. In contemporary terms, they were “dissident intellectuals.” There is no need to review how they were treated: miserably, the norm for dissidents.

There were also intellectuals who were greatly respected in the era of the Prophets: the flatterers at the Court. Centuries later they were condemned as “false prophets.” The Gospels warn of “false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them.” That’s correct: it is by their acts, not their lofty words, that we should know them, a good lesson to the present day.

The end of the last millennium was surely one of the low points in the generally dismal history of intellectuals. In the US and Europe, respected figures were entranced by the “normative revolution” unfolding before our eyes, as US foreign policy entered a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow.” For the first time in history a state was dedicated to “principles and values,” acting from “altruism” alone. At last the “enlightened states” would undertake their “responsibility to protect” the suffering everywhere, led by the “idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity.” That is a small sample from the left-liberal end of the deluge, and deluge it was. The illustrations offered collapse under the slightest examination, and while the chorus of self-adulation was resounding, the idealistic New World and its European allies were conducting some of the most horrendous atrocities of those ugly years. But none of that matters in a well-disciplined intellectual culture, and those who dare sully the record with boring fact can quickly be dismissed as “anti-Americans” if not worse, as Edward Said knew well.

The jewel in the crown was the bombing of Serbia in 1999. Standard doctrine – to quote one respected source -- is that NATO went to war “to stop the ethnic cleansing ordered by” Milošević against Kosovar Albanians, and the US-led campaign “succeeded in stopping the violence.” Close to 100% of the flood of commentary on the war repeats this story, reversing the chronology: the ethnic cleansing was the consequence of the NATO bombing, not its cause, and furthermore its anticipated consequence. The Milošević
indictment, issued at the height of the bombing on the basis of US and UK intelligence, refers only to crimes after the bombing, with a single exception two months earlier. The truth of the matter is demonstrated conclusively by a vast collection of detailed documents from the most impeccable sources: the US State Department, the OSCE, NATO, a lengthy British parliamentary inquiry, and others, all in full agreement that the atrocities followed the bombing, and admittedly were its anticipated consequence. The same documentary record shows that the pre-bombing period was ugly, though regrettably not in the least unusual, and not even close to the crimes that the US and UK were implementing right at the same time. According to the British government, until shortly before the NATO bombing most of the atrocities were committed by KLA guerrillas attacking from across the border in an effort to elicit a harsh Serbian reaction, which could be used to bring about Western intervention. And the detailed Western documentation reveals that nothing changed up to the onset of the bombing, after which the anticipated atrocities did take place, in reaction.

There is much more, but what is interesting is the desperation to which the Western intellectual classes cling to the reversal of chronology and a flood of other lies about what happened. The single example I quoted illustrating the deluge is particularly interesting. It appears in the current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Political Science, in a laudatory review of a book that draws precisely the opposite conclusion, and from a highly authoritative source: the highest level of the Clinton administration. The conclusion of the book under review, articulating the thinking of administration planners, is that “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war.” As the words pass through the distorting prism of the intellectual culture, these conclusions are transmuted to the doctrine required for the chorus of self-adulation: NATO went to war “to stop the ethnic cleansing ordered by” Milošević against Kosovar Albanians, and the US-led campaign “succeeded in stopping the violence.” There is virtually nothing that can shake the dogmas required to uphold the nobility of state power, despite the occasional errors and failures that critics allow themselves to condemn.

The grip of imperial culture is sometimes utterly astounding. Even calls for genocide from the highest level of government elicit hardly a murmur. The prosecutors at The Hague were working hard to establish a charge of genocide against Milošević. Suppose they had come across a document in which he orders the Serbian armed forces to carry out a “massive bombing campaign: Anything that flies on anything that moves.” The trial would have been over, and Milošević sentenced to life imprisonment, if not worse. Actually they did find such a document, but from the wrong source: Henry Kissinger, conveying orders from the President to bomb Cambodia. Perhaps you can enlighten me, but I have never found such an explicit call for genocide in the archival record of any state. It was published in the New York Times two years ago, eliciting not a murmur of protest, even qualms. And as educated readers knew, the orders were implemented -- though they could not have known how awesome was the scale, because that was kept quiet. Newly-released Pentagon records, still unreported, reveal that the bombing of Cambodia was about 5 times the scale of the horrifying figures that were previously announced: close to 3 million tons of bombs, nearly half of all U.S. bombing of Indochina, making Cambodia the most heavily bombed country in history, by a wide margin.

All of this happens to be highly relevant to today’s crises. The order for genocide in Cambodia was part of the last stages of the Vietnam war, when US troops were being withdrawn to be replaced by airpower, just what is now being planned in Iraq.

The ability “not to see” what might conflict with the image of righteousness often reaches impressive heights. To mention another current example, last February the NYT published an article by law professor Noah Feldman, who you will recall from his failed effort to impose a US-written constitution on Iraq, part of the effort to ensure that the wrong people would not be elected, as he explained. Feldman was reviewing a collection of speeches of Osama bin Laden, and described his descent to greater and greater evil, finally reaching the absolute lower depths, when he came to advocate “the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government actions, and civilians are fair targets.” The ultimate evil.

Two days later, the lead article in the NYT announced that the US and Israel were adopting Osama’s “perverse claim,” joining him in the lower depths of evil. The article reports that Palestinians bear responsibility for their government, so all must suffer for electing Hamas. They will be held hostage and punished until they elect a government favored by the imperial overlords. Detailed mechanisms are outlined, since implemented. The article also reports that Condoleezza Rice will visit the oil producers to ensure that they do not relieve the torture of the Palestinians. When we adopt Osama’s perverse principle, it is not ultimate evil, but has different names, like “promoting democracy” and noble pursuit of peace and justice.

All of this passed without notice, along with much more: crucially, the fact that Osama’s perverse doctrine has been US-UK policy has far back as we would like to go. Well-known cases include “making the economy scream” in Chile, when citizens of Latin America’s oldest democracy elected the wrong person. That was the “soft track”; the “hard track” led to the imposition of the Pinochet regime on the first 9/11, as South Americans call it: Sept. 11 1973, far more hideous than the second one in 2001. Or to take a more recent example, Afghanistan, where after three weeks of bombing, the US and UK announced a new war aim: to overthrow the Taliban. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British Defence Staff, announced that US-UK bombing will continue “until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to going to go on until they get the leadership changed,” a particularly extreme version of Osama’s “perverse claim” because the attackers were well aware that millions of people faced possible death from starvation if the bombing continued. We may also recall the murderous US-UK sanctions against Iraq, killing 100s of thousands of people and shattering the society, while “paralyzing all opposition to the discredited and moribund regime and giving it a new lease on life,” Iraqi dissident Kamil Mahdi wrote.

We also have to forget the most venerable current example: Cuba. Washington has been running campaigns of terror and economic strangulation against Cuba for over 45 years. The reasons are frankly explained in the secret internal record, from the start: The Eisenhower administration determined that “The Cuban people are responsible for the regime,” so the US has the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation. “Rising discomfort among hungry Cubans” will cause them to throw Castro out, President Kennedy advised, while also initiating a massive terror campaign that almost brought the world to destruction at the Cuban missile crisis. “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government,” the State Department advised. The basic thinking has not changed since. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Clinton Democrats used Cuba’s desperate straits to tighten the vise, intensifying the blockade with the announced objective “to wreak havoc in Cuba” so that the people will suffer and overthrow the government – targeted for attack because of its “successful defiance” of US policies going back to the Monroe doctrine 180 years ago, we learn from records of the Kennedy-Johnson years.

Without continuing, adopting Osama’s most perverse claim to punish Palestinians is no departure from the routine. But thanks to a good education, none of this can be perceived, even when the articles denouncing Osama and lauding ourselves for joining him in the depths of evil appear simultaneously. Such illustrations, easily multiplied, are real triumphs of imperial culture, fully shared in Europe.

Though the end-of-millennium chorus of self-adulation may well have set a new low in the annals of intellectual history, the norm is not very different. The prevailing truth was expressed by US President John Adams two centuries ago: “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.” That is the deep root of the combination of savagery and self-righteousness that infects the imperial mentality – and in some measure, every structure of authority and domination.

We can add that reverence for that great soul is the normal stance of intellectual elites, who regularly add that they should hold the levers of control, or at least be close by. That doctrine holds across the narrow spectrum: it is the standard Leninist doctrine, shared by progressive thought in the West: the so-called “action intellectuals” of Kennedy’s Camelot, for example. The leading public intellectual of 20th century America, the Wilsonian political analyst Walter Lippmann, explained in his essays on democracy that the “responsible” intellectuals who design and implement policy must “live free of the trampling and roar of [the] bewildered herd” as they labor selflessly for the common good, while the herd must be “put in its place”: attending to private pursuits. One common expression of this prevailing view is that there are two categories of intellectuals: the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” – responsible, sober, constructive – and the “value-oriented intellectuals,” a sinister grouping who pose a threat to democracy as they “devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking of established institutions,” even seeking to delegitimate the institutions responsible for the “indoctrination of the young”: the schools, colleges, churches, and so on. I am quoting from a study by the more progressive and humane wing of the international intellectual class, the liberal internationalists of the Trilateral Commission, from the US, Europe and Japan. The Carter administration was almost entirely drawn from their ranks, including the president. They were reflecting on the “crisis of democracy” that developed in the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic sectors of the population, called “the special interests,” sought to enter the political arena to advance their concerns. Those improper initiatives created what they called a “crisis of democracy,” in which the proper functioning of the state was threatened by “excessive democracy.” To overcome the crisis, the special interests must be restored to their proper function as passive observers, so that the “technocratic and value-oriented intellectuals” can do their constructive work, undisturbed by the bewildered herd.

The disruptive special interests are women, the young, the elderly, workers, farmers, minorities, majorities – in short, the population. Only one specific interest is not mentioned in the study: the corporate sector. But that makes sense. They represent the “national interest,” and naturally there can be no question of the national interest being protected by state power. I stress again that I am quoting from the liberal internationalist extreme of the spectrum. The business world and the right took a much harsher stand, and implemented their decisions so as to beat back the dangerous civilizing and democratizing tide, with some success, though only partial. Those reactions have set their stamp on the contemporary era, in a wide variety of ways, ranging from doctrinal management to global economic policies.

There have always been radical extremists who reject the prevailing premises. Some of them, centuries ago, went so far as to condemn the “merchants and manufacturers” who were the “principal architects of policy” in England, and used their power to make sure that their own interests were “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter how “grievous” the impact on others, primarily those in India and elsewhere who were subject to their “savage injustice,” but also the population at home. According to these renegades, a primary task of the ruling economic class is to “delude and oppress the public,” as they pursue the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves, nothing for other people.” Such radical extremists are either ignored or reviled. In the case of Adam Smith, whom I am quoting, ignored. He is revered, but unread; his leading ideas are not only ignored but often simply falsified. To mention only one case of unusual contemporary relevance, everyone has heard his phrase “invisible hand,” but few have taken the trouble to find the phrase in his classic Wealth of Nations. It appears just once, in an argument against what is now called “neoliberalism.” Neoliberal principles, Smith recognized, would devastate England if the merchants and manufacturers who ruled the state in their own interest would invest abroad and rely on imports. But they will not do so, Smith suggested, because they will prefer to do business at home, so as if by an invisible hand, England will be saved from the ravages of neoliberalism. David Ricardo made similar observations, adding that he would be “sorry to see such feelings of the merchants and manufacturers weakened,” in which case his theory of comparative advantage would collapse.

England, of course, did not rely on the invisible hand to ensure that it would develop. England relied on a powerful interventionist state, while its colonies were crushed by forceful imposition of free trade. The merchants and manufacturers who ruled England were unwilling even to toy with the idea of free trade until 1846, after 150 years of protectionism and violence had created far and away the most powerful industrial society in the world. They could therefore expect that the “playing field would be tilted” in their favor, to adapt the contemporary idiom, so that “free competition” would be acceptable. But they were careful to hedge their bets. They relied crucially on their protected markets in India and elsewhere, while also developing the most extraordinary narcotrafficking enterprise in human history to enable them to break into the China market. The US followed the same path, as have other countries that have developed, in radical violation of the precepts of economic theory, again a pattern that persists to the present. But that is another topic.

For those who want to understand today’s world and what is likely to lie ahead, it is of prime importance to look closely at the long-standing principles that are held to animate the decisions and actions of the powerful – bearing in mind that it is by their fruits that you shall know them, not the fine words. In today’s world, that means primarily the US. Though only one of three major power centers in economic and most other dimensions, it surpasses any power in history in its military dominance, which is rapidly expanding, and it can generally really on the support of the second superpower, Europe, and also Japan, the second largest industrial economy. There is a clear doctrine on the general contours of US foreign policy. It reigns virtually without exception in Western journalism and almost all scholarship, even among critics of policies past and present. The major theme is “American exceptionalism”: the thesis that the United States is unlike other great powers, past and present, because it has a “transcendent purpose”: “the establishment of equality in freedom in America,” and indeed throughout the world, since “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.”

The particular version of the thesis I have just quoted is particularly interesting because of its source: Hans Morgenthau, who I quoted before, but that was after the Vietnam war, when he had shifted to a more critical phase in his thinking. His exposition of the “transcendent purpose” is in his book The Purpose of American Politics, written during the Kennedy years, another period of extreme self-adulation among responsible intellectuals. Morgenthau was the founder of the dominant tough-minded realist school of international affairs, which avoids sentimentality and keeps to the hard truths of state power. He was incidentally a very decent human being: he was one of the very few prominent scholars in these fields to oppose the Vietnam war on moral grounds, not on grounds of cost-effectiveness, a stance that was extremely rare in intellectual circles, though not among the unwashed masses; by 1969, 70% of the public condemned the war as “not a mistake, but fundamentally wrong and immoral,” words rarely seen or heard within the mainstream, across the spectrum.

Morgenthau was also a highly competent and honest scholar. While praising the “transcendent purpose” of America, he recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with it. But he explains that we should not be misled by that discrepancy. In his words, we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” The actual historical record is merely the “abuse of reality,” which is of only secondary interest – at least to those who are holding the clubs.

The principles continue to guide intellectual practice, including most scholarship. Just keeping to the present, the most extensive scholarly article on “the roots of the Bush doctrine” appears in the prestigious US journal International Security. It opens with these words: “The promotion of democracy is central to the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of both the war on terrorism and its overall grand strategy.” In Britain’s leading journal of international affairs, the major article on the same topic extends the scope of the thesis. The author writes that “promoting democracy abroad” has been a primary goal ever since Woodrow Wilson endowed US foreign policy with a “powerful idealist element,” which gained “particular salience” under Reagan and has been taken up with “unprecedented forcefulness” under George W. Bush. Such declarations are close to uniform in scholarship. In journalism and intellectual commentary they are taken to be the merest truisms. To be sure, there are critics, who argue that it is important not to go too far in our idealism, because it can be harmful to our interests. To take one significant example, the veteran commentator of the Washington Post, David Ignatius, former editor of the International Herald Tribune, warns that the “idealist-in-chief” of the Bush administration might be “too idealistic -- his passion for the noble goals of the Iraq war might overwhelm the prudence and pragmatism that normally guide war planners.” He was referring to Paul Wolfowitz, now free to pursue his passion for democracy and development as head of the World Bank. The many accolades to Wolfowitz at the time of his appointment scrupulously evaded his record, which is one of utter contempt for democracy and human rights, easily documented – but abuse of history, hence irrelevant.

The scholarly and journalistic presentation of the reigning thesis also carefully evades empirical evidence, a wise decision, because it is overwhelmingly to the contrary. That is obliquely recognized in serious scholarship that focuses specifically on democracy promotion -- Bush’s “messianic mission,” as it is described in the liberal press. The most prominent scholar-advocate of the cause of democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment. He identifies himself as a neo-Reaganite, agreeing with general scholarship that Wilsonian idealism took on particular “salience” under Reagan’s leadership. A year after the invasion of Iraq he published a book reviewing the record of democracy promotion by the US since the end of the Cold War. He finds what he calls “a strong line of continuity” running through all administrations: Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II: democracy is promoted by the US government if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic interests. All administrations are “schizophrenic” in this regard, he concludes, with puzzling consistency. Again, actual history is the abuse of reality, so it can be ignored in responsible circles.

Carothers also wrote the standard scholarly work on democracy promotion in Latin America in the 1980s, in part from an insider's perspective. He was serving in the Reagan State Department in the programs of democracy promotion. Carothers regards these programs as sincere, but a failure. Like Morgenthau, he is an honest scholar, and points out that the failure of the programs was systematic. Where US influence was least, in South America, progress towards democracy was greatest, despite Reagan's attempts to impede it by embracing right-wing dictators. Where US influence was strongest, in the regions nearby, progress was least. The reasons, he explains, are that Washington would tolerate only “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied [in] quite undemocratic societies.”

In short, the strong line of continuity goes back a decade earlier, to the Reagan years, when the “powerful idealist element” in traditional US policy gained “particular salience,” according to Western scholarship. Nonetheless, the dedication of our leaders to the principle is beyond question, and today we must believe that Bush is pursuing his messianic vision of creating a sovereign, democratic Iraq and bringing democracy everywhere, ignoring the overwhelming consistency of the record, the abuse of history. I am surprised to see the doctrine echoed even in the Arab world, where people surely should know better.

In fact, the strong line of continuity goes back much farther. Democracy promotion has always been proclaimed as a guiding vision, but it is not even controversial that the US regularly overthrew parliamentary democracies, often installing or supporting brutal tyrannies: Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, a long list of others. There were Cold War pretexts, but they regularly collapse on investigation. I will not insult your intelligence by recounting how Reagan brought democracy to Central America in the course of the “war on terror” that the Reagan administration declared when it took office in 1981 – quickly becoming an extraordinary terrorist war that left hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and four countries in ruins.

The paradoxical character of policy is also recognized at the dovish extreme of the policy spectrum, where it elicits regret, but is recognized to be unavoidable. The basic dilemma facing policy makers was expressed by Robert Pastor, a progressive Latin America scholar and President Carter’s national security advisor for Latin America. He explains why the administration had to support the murderous and corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and when that proved impossible, to try at least to maintain the US-trained National Guard even as it was massacring the population “with a brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy,” in his words, killing some 40,000 people. The reason was the familiar one: “The United States did not want to control Nicaragua or the other nations of the region,” he writes, “but it also did not want developments to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect U.S. interests adversely.”

Once again we find the dominant operative principle, illustrated copiously throughout history: policy conforms to expressed ideals only if it also conforms to interests. The term “interests” does not refer to the interests of the domestic US population, but the “national interest” -- the interests of the concentrations of power that dominate the domestic society. That truism is often derided by respectable opinion as a “conspiracy theory,” or “Marxist,” or some other epithet, but it is readily confirmed when subjected to inquiry. In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on US foreign policy, published in the American Political Science Review a year ago, two prominent political scientists find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out, “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials.” As they note, the results should be welcome to “realists” such as the influential progressive public intellectual Walter Lippmann, who “considered public opinion to be ill-informed and capricious [and] warned that following public opinion would create a `morbid derangement of the true functions of power’ and produce policies `deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society’,” in his words. The “realism” is scarcely concealed ideological preference. One will search in vain for evidence of the superior understanding and abilities of those who have the major influence on policy, apart from protecting their own interests, Adam Smith’s neglected truism.

I will not tarry on how Wilsonian idealism and love of democracy was actually exercised, with devastating effects that remain until today, particularly in Haiti, once the richest colony in the world and the source of much of France’s wealth, now decaying in misery and likely to become uninhabitable before too long, thanks to French brutality and avarice, carried a long step forward by Wilsonian idealism, then its successors through Clinton and Bush. And that is far from the only case. We may recall that Wilson’s high-minded passion for self-determination had a qualification: it did not apply to people “at a low stage of civilization,” he explained, as in the Middle East, where these defective creatures must be given “friendly protection, guidance, and assistance” by the colonial powers that had tended to their needs in past years, in his words. Wilson's famous Fourteen Points held that in questions of sovereignty, “the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined,” the colonial ruler. Posturing aside, Wilson scarcely departed from Churchill’s doctrine after World War II, when he advised that “the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.”

No sentimentalist, Churchill knew well how Britain’s wealth and peace had been obtained. Speaking in secret to his cabinet colleagues on the eve of World War I, Churchill explained that “we are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves ... an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”

Churchill did publish these remarks a decade later, but made sure to delete the offending passages, italicized above, only discovered fairly recently.

Churchill’s sensible and realistic stance illustrates one of the many reasons for regarding the fabled “American exceptionalism” with some skepticism. The doctrine appears to be close to a historical universal, even including the worst monsters. Aggression and terror are almost invariably portrayed as self-defense and dedication to inspiring visions. Japanese emperor Hirohito was merely repeating a broken record in his surrender declaration in August 1945 when he told his people that “We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” If Asians have a different picture, it shows that they are backward and uncivilized people – a leading source of tension in Asia right now. From Japan’s perspective, Asians who worry about such ancient history as the Nanjing massacre, biological warfare, and other atrocities are “naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown ups” and require “a stiff hand, an authoritative hand,” to quote the description of Latin Americans by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, though he advised President Eisenhower that to control the naughty children more effectively, it may be useful to “pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them.”

That stance extends worldwide, and has recently been announced with regard to China. A few weeks ago, as President Hu Jintao was about to visit Washington, the respected commentator Frederick Kempe explained in the Wall Street Journal that “Americans aim to show Hu how his country can act as a `responsible stakeholder’,” joining the US and its allies in adherence to international law, principles of world order and civilized behavior. The stance and commentary elicit no ridicule, just as Western intellectuals soberly observe the demand of the US and UK that Iran end its interference in Iraq – rather like Hitler’s condemnation of US-UK interference in peaceful occupied Europe. Though the matter passed without notice in the media, we can be confident that shivers went up the spines of Washington planners when President Hu left Washington for Saudi Arabia, returning King Abdullah’s visit to Beijing. And they surely watch with trepidation as Saudi Arabia has become China's largest trade partner in West Asia and North Africa with bilateral trade reaching $16 billion in 2005, and growing, also in Washington’s own backyard in Latin America, regarded previously as a reliable source of oil and other resources, no longer.

While the law-abiding states of the West seek to civilize China, the most respected strategic analysts are calling on China to lead a coalition of peace-loving states to counter US aggressive militarism, which they warn is driving the world towards “ultimate doom.” They appeal to China because of all the nuclear powers it “has maintained by far the most restrained pattern of military deployment.” China has also led the efforts at the United Nations to block the unilateral US refusal, since the Clinton years, to preserve space for peaceful purposes, now extended by the Bush administration to the doctrine of ownership of space, leaving every corner of the world subject to near-instantaneous lethal attack without the need for military bases. It is well-understood that these moves, which are already eliciting the anticipated reaction among potential targets, pose a severe threat to the survival of the species. I happen to be quoting from the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but the basic conclusions are widely shared among strategic analysts. Nevertheless, it is China that is to be portrayed to the public as another of those “naughty children” to whom we must teach manners

The universal stance of “exceptionalism” extends even to the figures of the highest intelligence and moral integrity. Consider John Stuart Mill, who wrote the classic essay on humanitarian intervention, presumably studied in every serious law school in the West. His essay raised the question of whether England should intervene in the ugly world, or whether it should keep to its own business and let the barbarians carry out their savagery. His conclusion, nuanced and complex, was that England should intervene, even though by doing so, it will endure the “obloquy” and abuse of Europeans, who will “seek base motives” because they cannot comprehend that England is “novelty in the world,” an angelic power that seeks nothing for itself and acts only for the benefit of others. Though England selflessly bears the cost of intervention, it shares the benefits of its labors with others equally. Mill’s immediate concern was India. He was calling for the expansion of the occupation of India to several new provinces.

The timing of the article is revealing. The essay appeared in 1859, immediately after what British history calls the ‘Indian mutiny’: the first rebellion in India, which Britain put down with extreme savagery. All of this was very well known in England. There were parliamentary debates and a huge controversy. There were people who opposed the crimes: Richard Cobden, a really committed liberal in the old-fashioned sense, and a few others. Mill knew all about it. He was corresponding secretary of the East India Company, and was following it all closely. The purpose of the expansion of British power over India was to obtain a monopoly over opium so that England could break into the Chinese market, which British exporters could not penetrate because Chinese goods were comparable and they didn’t want British goods. So the only way to sell them was to force the Chinese to become a nation of opium addicts at the point of a gun. Mill was writing right at the time of the Second Opium War, which established Britain’s extraordinary narcotrafficking enterprise, which I already mentioned, and did enable England, later others, to subjugate China and break into its markets. The profits were an enormous boost to British capitalism, right during the period of much pious rhetoric about free trade. In the same essay, Mill also praised the civilizing mission of the French, then underway in North Africa under the orders of the French Minister of War, who called for “exterminating the indigenous population,” with little dissent among the engaged intellectuals.

Without proceeding, exceptionalism seems to be close to universal. I suspect if we had records from Genghis Khan, we might find the same thing. Nonetheless, it is the responsibility of intellectuals to recognize the doctrine as a driving force of US policy, even if they sometimes criticize the idealism as excessive – as in the case of the “idealist-in-chief” in charge of the “noble war” in Iraq.

Perhaps I can end with some additional truisms. The great soul of power extends far beyond states. Slavery was defended with arguments similar to those of Mill: it was a selfless exercise of benevolence to poor people who needed the care of their masters, and if they were “naughty children,” they sometimes needed the rod, or worse, for their own benefit. Some of the arguments of the slaveowners were never really countered. To rephrase anachronistically, suppose I buy a car and you rent one. A year later, which one is likely to be in better shape? Mine, surely, because I protect my capital investment, while you can discard yours and rent another one. Suppose now that I own workers and you rent them. Who is more benign? That argument had considerable force for working people who fought for the Union in the American Civil war, under the banner that wage slavery is little different from chattel slavery, and that is an attack on fundamental human rights to reduce people to the level where they must rent themselves to survive – a perception so common that it was even a slogan of the Republican Party. That was 150 years ago to be sure; we have become more civilized since, and are not supposed to see such social-economic arrangements as an attack on the most fundamental human rights.

The great soul of power extends far beyond, to every domain of life, from families to international affairs. And throughout, every form of authority and domination bears a severe burden of proof. It is not self-legitimating. And when it cannot bear the burden, as is commonly the case, it should be dismantled. That has been the guiding theme of the anarchist movements from their modern origins, adopting many of the principles of classical liberalism after it had been wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, as the anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker wrote. Keeping to the international arena, the contemporary system of nation-states was established with extreme violence and sadism, which for centuries made Europe the most savage region of the world, ending in 1945, when it was recognized that the next time Europeans play the game of mutual slaughter will be the last. Eliminate that factor, and the thesis of “democratic peace” that is much prized in political science loses its core empirical support. There is good reason to believe that the culture of savagery that evolved in the course of establishing the state system was a significant factor in Europe’s conquest of the world. The inhabitants of Asia and the Western Hemisphere were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” military historian Geoffrey Parker observes, enabling “the white peoples of the world [to] create and control” history’s first “global hegemony.” British historian V.G. Kiernan comments aptly that “Europe's incessant wars” were responsible for “stimulating military science and spirit to a point where Europe would be crushingly superior to the rest when they did meet.” Imposition of the European-style state system on the conquered lands was carried out with comparable brutality, and lies at the root of indescribable horrors, including the conflicts that rage today.

One of the most healthy recent developments in Europe, I think, along with the federal arrangements and increased fluidity that the European Union has brought, is the devolution of state power, with revival of traditional cultures and languages and a degree of regional autonomy. These developments lead some to envision a future Europe of the regions, with state authority decentralized. No one wants to reconstruct the Ottoman empire, with its brutality and corruption, but that should not prevent us from recognizing that in some respects it had the right idea: leaving people alone to manage their own affairs, without strict borders and with substantial peaceful interaction at local and regional levels, a conception that should have particular resonance, and memories, in the complex societies of the Levant, I think – and has merits far beyond. To strike a proper balance between citizenship and common purpose on the one hand, and communal autonomy and cultural variety on the other, is no simple matter, and questions of democratic control of institutions of course extend to other spheres of life as well, but such questions should be high on the agenda of people who do not worship at the shrine of the Great Soul of Power, people who seek to save the world from the destructive forces that now literally threaten survival and who believe that a more civilized society can be envisioned and even brought into existence – the cause to which Edward devoted his life and work.