Year 501 (5 page)

Such ideas animated the “vast communal movements” of pre-capitalist Europe, Brady writes, and “brought elements of self-government into the hands of the Common Man,” arousing “contempt and sometimes fear in the traditional elites.” The common people who sought freedom and the common good were “craftsmen of shit,” “rabble” (“canaille”) who should “die of starvation.” They were condemned by the Emperor Maximilian as “wicked, crude, stupid peasants, in whom there is neither virtue, noble blood, nor proper moderation, but only immoderate display, disloyalty, and hatred for the German nation”—the “anti-Americans” of their day. The democratic upsurge in 17th century England evoked harsh denunciation of the “rascal multitude,” “beasts in men's shapes,” “depraved and corrupt.” Twentieth century democratic theorists advise that “The public must be put in its place,” so that the “responsible men” may “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,” “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “interested spectators of action,” not participants, lending their weight periodically to one or another member of the leadership class (elections), then returning to their private concerns (Walter Lippmann). The great mass of the population, “ignorant and mentally deficient,” must be kept in their place for the common good, fed with “necessary illusion” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” (Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Reinhold Niebuhr). Their “conservative” counterparts are only more extreme in their adulation of the Wise Men who are the rightful rulers—in the service of the rich and powerful, a minor footnote regularly forgotten.
18

The rabble must be instructed in the values of subordination and a narrow quest for personal gain within the parameters set by the institutions of the masters; meaningful democracy, with popular association and action, is a threat to be overcome. These too are persistent themes, that only take new forms.

Adam Smith's nuanced interpretation of state interference with international trade extended to the domestic scene as well. The praise in his opening remarks for “the division of labor” is well-known: it is the source of “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied,” and the foundation of “the wealth of nations.” The great merit of free trade, he argued, is that it contributes to these tendencies. Less familiar is his denunciation of the inhuman consequences of the division of labor as it approaches its natural limits. “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments,” he wrote. That being so, “the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding...and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be...But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.” Society must find some way to overcome the devilish impact of the “invisible hand.”

Other major contributors to the classical liberal canon go much further. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who inspired John Stuart Mill, described the “leading principle” of his thought as “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity,” a principle that is not only undermined by the narrow search for efficiency through division of labor, but by wage labor itself: “Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness”; when the laborer works under external control, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”
19

Smith's admiration for individual enterprise was tempered still further by his contempt for “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” While the “mean” and “sordid” pursuits of the masters might yield incidental benefit, faith in this consequence is mere mysticism, quite apart from the more fundamental failure to comprehend the “leading principle” of classical liberal thought that Humboldt stressed. What survives of these doctrines in contemporary ideology is an ugly and distorted image, contrived in the interests of the masters.
20

Centralized state power dedicated to private privilege and authority, and the rational and organized use of savage violence, are two of the enduring features of the European conquest. Others are the domestic colonization by which the poor subsidize the rich, and the contempt for democracy and freedom. Yet another enduring theme is the self-righteousness in which plunder, slaughter, and oppression are clothed.

A leading liberal figure lecturing at Oxford in 1840, with the spectacle of Bengal and the rest of India before him, lauded the “British policy of colonial enlightenment,” which “stands in contrast to that of our ancestors,” who kept their colonies “in subjection in order to derive certain supposed commercial advantages from them,” whereas we “give them commercial advantages, and tax ourselves for their benefit, in order to give them an interest in remaining under our supremacy, that we may have the pleasure of governing them.” We “govern them by sheer weight of character and without use of force,” the virtual ruler of Egypt from 1883 to 1906, Lord Cromer, explained: this we can do because the British “possess in a very high degree the power of acquiring the sympathy and confidence of any primitive races with which they are brought into contact.” His colleague Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, proclaimed that “In the Empire we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.” The early Dutch conquerors were sure that traders of all nations would flock to the VOC because “the good old free manner of our nation is highly praised.” The Seal of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in 1629 depicts an Indian pleading “Come over and help us.” The record to this day is replete with appeals to the divine will, civilizing missions, partnerships in beneficence, noble causes, and the like. Heaven must be full to overflowing, if the masters of self-adulation are to be taken at their word.
21

Their labors are not unavailing. Among the educated classes, fairy tales of righteous mission and benevolence have long risen to the level of doctrinal truths, and much of the general public seems to believe them as well. In 1989, half the US public believed that foreign aid is the largest element in the federal budget of the country that had, by then, sunk to last place among the industrial countries, with foreign aid barely detectable in the budget and a niggardly 0.21 percent of GNP. Those who harken to their tutors may even believe that the next highest item is Cadillacs for welfare mothers.
22

The subject peoples find odd ways to express their gratitude. To the leading figure of modern Indian nationalism, “the only possible parallel” to the Viceroy “would be that of Hider.” The ideology of British rule “was that of the herrenvolk and the master race,” an idea “inherent in imperialism” that “was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority” and manifested in practice, as Indians “were subjected to insult, humiliation, and contemptuous treatment.” Writing from a British prison in 1944, Nehru was not unmindful of the benevolent intent of the rulers:

The solicitude which British industrialists and economists have shown for the Indian peasant has been truly gratifying. In view of this, as well as of the tender care lavished upon him by the British Government in India, one can only conclude that some all-powerful and malign fate, some supernatural agency, has countered their intentions and measures and made that peasant one of the poorest and most miserable beings on earth.
23

Nehru was something of an Anglophile. Others have been less genteel about the matter, though Western culture, having the guns and wealth, remains largely immune.

It would not be fair to charge that atrocities pass unmentioned. One of the most notorious slaughterers was King Leopold of Belgium, responsible for the death of perhaps 10 million people in the Congo. His contributions and defects were duly recorded in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which describes the “enormous fortune” that he gained by “exploitation of this vast territory.” The last line of the lengthy entry reads: “but he had a hard heart towards the natives of his distant possession.” Half a century later, Alfred Cobban, in his
History of Modern France
, castigates Louis XVI for falling to protect France's interests in the West Indies. The slave trade on which these interests rested merits a parenthetical comment: “its morality as yet is barely the subject of discussion.” True enough.
24

Illustrations are not hard to find.

2. “Felling Trees and Indians”

The English colonists in North America pursued the course laid out by their forerunners in the home country. From the earliest days of colonization, Virginia was a center of piracy and pillage, a base to raid Spanish commerce and plunder French settlements on the coast of Maine—and to exterminate the “devil worshippers” and “cruel beasts” whose generosity had enabled the colonists to survive, hunting them down with savage dogs, massacring women and children, destroying crops, spreading smallpox with infected blankets, and other measures that readily came to the minds of barbarians fresh from their Irish exploits. North American pirates reached as far as the Arabian sea in the late 17th century. By then “New York had become a thieve's market where pirates disposed of loot taken on the high seas,” Nathan Miller observes, while “corruption...was the lubricant that greased the wheels of the nation's administrative machinery”; “graft and corruption played a vital role in the development of modern American society and in the creation of the complex, interlocking machinery of government and business that presently determines the course of our affairs,” Miller writes, ridiculing the great shock expressed at Watergate.
25

As state power consolidated, private-sector violence was suppressed in favor of the more organized state form, though the US would not permit American citizens apprehended for slave trading to be judged by foreign courts. That was no small matter; the British navy was refused permission to search any American slaver, “and American naval vessels were almost never there to search her, with the result that most of the slave ships, in the 1850s, not only flew the American flag but were owned by American citizens.” The US would not accept the standards proposed by Muammar Qaddafi, who urged in 1992 that charges concerning Libya's alleged terrorism be brought to the World Court or some other neutral tribunal, a proposal dismissed with disdain by Washington and the press, which have little use for instruments that might lapse into excessive independence.
26

After the colonies gained their independence in the course of the great international conflict that pitted England against France, Spain, and Holland, state power was used to protect domestic industry, foster agricultural production, manipulate trade, monopolize raw materials, and take the land from its inhabitants. Americans “concentrated on the task of felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries,” as diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey described the project in 1969.
27

These tasks, and the rhetorical accompaniment, have been eminently reasonable by reigning standards of Political Correctness; the challenge to them in the past few years has, not surprisingly, elicited much outrage among guardians of doctrinal purity. Hugo Grotius, a leading 17th century humanist and the founder of modern international law, determined that the “most just war is against savage beasts, the next against men who are like beasts.” George Washington wrote in 1783 that “the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.” What is called in official PC rhetoric “a pragmatist,” Washington regarded purchase of Indian lands (typically, by fraud and threat) as a more cost-effective tactic than violence. Thomas Jefferson predicted to John Adams that the “backward” tribes at the borders “will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains”; the same would be true of Canada after the conquest he envisioned, while all blacks would be removed to Africa or the Caribbean, leaving the country without “blot or mixture.” A year after the Monroe Doctrine, the President called for helping the Indians “to surmount all their prejudices in favor of the soil of their nativity,” so that “we become in reality their benefactors” by transferring them West. When consent was not given, they were forcibly removed. Consciences were eased further by the legal doctrine devised by Chief Justice John Marshall: “discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian right of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest”; “that law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to...the tribes of Indians,”...fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.”

The colonists, to be sure, knew better. Their survival depended on the agricultural sophistication and generosity of the “fierce savages,” and they were familiar with the prevailing norms of violence on all sides. Observing the Narragansett-Pequot wars, Roger Williams remarked that their fighting was “farre less bloudy and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe,” from which the colonists had learned their trade. John Underhill sneered at the “feeble Manner” of the Indian warriors, which “did hardly deserve the Name of fighting,” and their laughable protests against the “furious” style of the English that “slays too many men”—not to speak of women and children in undefended villages, a European tactic that had to be taught to the backward natives. These were common features of the world conquest, as noted earlier.