Thursday, 29 August 2013
Imperialism, Islamophobia, and Torture By Adam Hudson
Imperialism, Islamophobia, and
Torture
By Adam Hudson, published October, 2010
(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
During the Nuremberg Trials, the chief American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, famously stated[i]: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”America has a long history of war and its accumulated evils. It began as thirteen small colonies that sat along the Atlantic coast. In over a century, the United States expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean – from sea to shining sea. The process was not pretty. It involved the genocide of the native Americans and the enslavement of millions of black Africans whose free labor was needed to fuel the American capitalist economy. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States began to colonize other lands, such as Hawaii, the Philippines and Cuba. Since then, it has occupied and intervened with military force in all regions
of the globe[ii], such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. This is not to mention the democratically-elected leaders America overthrew in places like Chile and Iran. The United States currently occupies two countries – Iraq and Afghanistan – and has a network of over 700 military bases globally[iii]. As such, the United States is a de facto empire[iv].
One key element of American imperial history is its use of torture, which can be traced back to America’s treatment of African slaves. Such an analysis of torture, especially in the post-9/11 era, is very uncommon in mainstream political discourse. As such, before I proceed, it is important to dispel the current myths about torture propagated in the mainstream media. As is well known, the United States has tortured hundreds of detainees suspected of being
involved in terrorism. It is hard not to notice when the former Vice President brags about
personally authorizing the use of torture on national television[v]. These acts included waterboarding, physical beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and, in some cases, murder[vi]. The primary justification is that torture is a necessary tool to extract information from people who might know about impending threats of terrorism. Politicians (both Republican and Democrat),intellectuals, pundits and other leaders argue that America faces a new kind of threat. America is up against extremist, religious fanatics who hate the United States and wish to kill innocent Americans. Current domestic and international laws and law enforcement tactics are not sufficient to subdue this threat. As Alberto Gonzalez said to former President George W. Bush, the Geneva Conventions are “obsolete” in this new war against terrorism.[vii]
As a result, the United States must be willing to torture terrorist suspects in order to extract vital information that could prevent the next terrorist attack. This apocalyptic mindset has impacted
the current American psyche and post-9/11 American foreign policy. Since the war is against a nebulous enemy, the war against terrorism is essentially a permanent war.Despite the compelling arguments used to justify torture, adopting an objective view of the facts rips them asunder. First, there is little to no evidence to prove that torture is a useful interrogation technique. In fact, the evidence that does exist proves the opposite – that torture is ineffective because the suspect will say anything, whether it’s true or not, in order to make the torture stop.
Ali Soufan, an intelligence official who interrogated Guantanamo terror suspect Abu Zubaydah, stated[viii] that conventional interrogation techniques compelled Zubaydah to provide actionable intelligence. It was only after Zubaydah was waterboarded several times that he could not provide useful intelligence.
Second, most of the people detained, usually indefinitely, in places like Guantanamo Bay and CIA-owned black sites are not diehard terrorists. The vast majority of them are innocent. Even President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and other high government officials may have been aware of this[ix]. Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Cheney “had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent…If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.” The apocalyptic mindset of the broader War on Terror justified this tragedy.
Third, torture and cruel or inhumane treatment is a violation of U.S. domestic law and international law. The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment and the Torture Act prohibits the use of torture[x]. There are several international treaties that prohibit the use of torture.Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions[xi], the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[xii], the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibit torture and cruel or inhuman treatment[xiii]. The Convention Against Torture even states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Sending a person to a country where it is known they will be tortured – a practice known as extraordinary rendition – is also illegal under international law. However, the current Obama administration continues this practice. Torturing an individual violates that person’s fundamental human rights and their inherent dignity as a human being. Not only is torture illegal, it is also immoral and one of the many accumulated evils of war.
Given the transparency of official justifications for torture, one question remains. Why does the United States continue to torture people, even though it is ineffective, illegal and immoral?
Torture has historically been used by governments for four main reasons.[xiv] One reason is to extract a confession and establish guilt. Torture is commonly used in countries where the presumption of innocence does not exist in the legal system. The second reason is for power.Powerful rulers would torture people in order to instill fear in their citizenry and remind them of who has authority. The third reason is to curb political dissent. While all three of these reasons may be applicable to the United States, the fourth reason gets to the heart of why America tortures. The fourth historical reason for utilizing torture is to subjugate a group of people considered to be sub-human.
An apt comparison to the American use of torture would be the French use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence.[xv] The French colonization of Algeria was based on the racist ideology of the French civilizing mission. In the eyes of the French colonial power, their culture was superior and more advanced than the cultures of racially-inferior “others”, in this case, the Algerians. The French saw it was their duty to “civilize” people who they viewed as primitive
colonialism. As such, the French annexed Algeria and established colonial settlements on Algerian land. When Algerian nationalists engaged in guerrilla warfare to oust the French, France felt it was up against a new kind of enemy – Maoist-inspired guerrillas. In order to defeat this enemy, the French believed it was necessary to engage in exceptional and unconventional means of warfare. This included denial of prisoner-of-war protections for captured combatants, trials in military tribunals, torture and execution. The French counter-insurgency strategy is very similar to American foreign policy post-9/11. It was motivated, in large part, by a belief in Algerian sub-humanity; in other words, racism. Racism is not just an individual problem of prejudice or hate. It is an ideology used to justify systems of hegemony and oppression. It creates a binary between the Self and the Other. TheSelf is ascribed all positive aspects of humanity, such as rationality, intelligence, high culture, and
credit for creating the benefits of modern civilization. The Other is ascribed all negative aspects of humanity, such as irrationality, primitivity, criminality, and barbarity. By categorizing certain groups as inferior “others”, hegemonic powers rob those people of their humanity, thus, making it easier to commit acts of brutality against them for imperial interests.Racism, under the banner of “manifest destiny”, was used to justify the genocide committed against the Native Americans that made room for American territorial expansion. Racism was used to justify the enslavement of millions of black Africans whose free labor was exploited to
work on plantations and build the American economy. Despite the advancements made during the civil rights movement, racism still exists in many areas of American life, such as the disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos in prison, de facto housing segregation, inequality in the education system, and police brutality committed against people of color. Some of the most recent cases of police brutality were the
deaths of 22-year-old Oscar Grant in Oakland[xvi] and 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in Detroit[xvii] –
both of whom were African-American. America’s wars against Afghanistan and Iraq serve to maintain American global hegemony and access to key resources such as oil. The racist dehumanization of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians is committed to justify America’s wars and acts of torture primarily against people from countries whose populations are predominantly Muslim and black and brown-skinned, such as
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. It is not difficult to witness the manifestations of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in American society. It exists within the media and underlies the sophistry of
politicians and leading intellectuals. Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are always suspected of being terrorists, similar to how black and Latino people are suspected of being drug-dealers, gang members and criminals. Racism is the fundamental ideological motivation behind America’s wars and use of torture.
The key task now is to end America’s use of torture and, more broadly, eliminate racism and
imperialism; a daunting task but a necessary one, nevertheless. First, it is important for everyone, of all races, to see and treat every other person as a human being. Despite our cultural differences, we are part of one human family. Second, it is crucial that we hold our political leaders accountable for authorizing acts of torture and starting wars. At Stanford, we can start by pressuring our government to hold current Professor and former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and other government officials, accountable for authorizing torture and engaging in aggressive wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Third, it is vital that we work to build institutions that foster peace instead of war and sustain humanity rather than destroy it. To build a better future for humanity is by no means an easy task. But a million-mile journey begins with one step. Let’s make that first step.
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
EDWARD said and orientalism
Edward Said’s evaluation and critique of the set of beliefs known as Orientalism forms an important
background for postcolonial studies. His work highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of
assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual,
academic, and political levels.
The Terms The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and
is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien (‘Other‘) to the West. Orientalism is ‘a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by
imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.’ It is the image of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because his sexuality poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, and a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior. Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.Earlier Orientalism The first ‘Orientalists’ were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of ‘the Orient’ into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Said’s critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed,the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.
One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is
considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It
includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single ‘Orient’ which can be
studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It
essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental — a biological inferior that is culturally backward,
peculiar, and unchanging — to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual
imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a
colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and
policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the
dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its
Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter
where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of
the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the
scholar who gives it life.
Contemporary Orientalism
Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of ‘Arab’ cultures. The
depictions of ‘the Arab’ as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and —
perhaps most importantly — prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved.
These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident.
Said writes:
The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For
every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the
ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very
institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority
of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of
absolute truth backed by absolute force.
He continues,
One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda — which is what it is,
of course — were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a
real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that
Orientalists … writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their
Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject
matter but also blinds its practitioners.
Said’s Project
Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A
rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and
racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual
pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ Said argues for the use of
‘narrative’ rather than ‘vision’ in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient,
meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic view of half of the globe, but
rather to a focused and complex type of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human
experience. Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences between ‘the
West’ and ‘the Orient,’ but rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and objective
fashion. ‘The Orient’ cannot be studied in a non-Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to
study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who has until now been
known as ‘the Oriental’ must be given a voice. Scholarship from afar and second-hand representation
must take a back seat to narrative and self-representation on the part of the ‘Oriental.’
Read more: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/orientalism/#ixzz2dHeN3gVu
background for postcolonial studies. His work highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of
assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual,
academic, and political levels.
The Terms The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and
is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien (‘Other‘) to the West. Orientalism is ‘a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by
imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.’ It is the image of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because his sexuality poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, and a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior. Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.Earlier Orientalism The first ‘Orientalists’ were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of ‘the Orient’ into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Said’s critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed,the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.
One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is
considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It
includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single ‘Orient’ which can be
studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It
essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental — a biological inferior that is culturally backward,
peculiar, and unchanging — to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual
imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a
colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and
policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the
dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its
Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter
where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of
the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the
scholar who gives it life.
Contemporary Orientalism
Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of ‘Arab’ cultures. The
depictions of ‘the Arab’ as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and —
perhaps most importantly — prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved.
These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident.
Said writes:
The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For
every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the
ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very
institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority
of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of
absolute truth backed by absolute force.
He continues,
One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda — which is what it is,
of course — were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a
real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that
Orientalists … writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their
Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject
matter but also blinds its practitioners.
Said’s Project
Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A
rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and
racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual
pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ Said argues for the use of
‘narrative’ rather than ‘vision’ in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient,
meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic view of half of the globe, but
rather to a focused and complex type of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human
experience. Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences between ‘the
West’ and ‘the Orient,’ but rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and objective
fashion. ‘The Orient’ cannot be studied in a non-Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to
study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who has until now been
known as ‘the Oriental’ must be given a voice. Scholarship from afar and second-hand representation
must take a back seat to narrative and self-representation on the part of the ‘Oriental.’
Read more: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/orientalism/#ixzz2dHeN3gVu
no clearence for aiport-sonia to sugathakumari
Congress president Sonia Gandhi has written to poet Sugathakumari that the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has not yet cleared the proposed airport project at Aranmula. The project has been put on hold by the Minister due to several representations received from NGO activists and eminent citizens, the letter said.
In a telephonic conversation with The Hindu, Ms. Sugathakumari said she had received a letter in this regard from Dhiraj Srivastava, private secretary to Ms. Gandhi, on Tuesday. KGS Group, promoters of the private airport project, had earlier claimed to have procured all requisite clearances.
The letter, dated August 21, says that “the project has been strongly recommended by the Government of Kerala, and the establishment of the greenfield airport at Aranmula was also mentioned in the President’s address to both Houses of Parliament in the beginning of the year.” The Minister had assured the detractors that no action would be taken till all facts were verified, it said. “The MoEF has sought clarifications from the State government vide letter No. 10-51/2010-IA-III, dated July 17 and 18, 2013.”
Welcoming the Congress president’s prompt response to the memorandum filed by the Joint Action Council (JAC), Ms. Sugathakumari called for the former’s immediate intervention to save the remaining paddy land and wetland in Kerala so as to maintain the country’s food security.
CONCERN
Mr. Sugathakumari, who is also the chairperson of the Joint Action Council campaigning against the private airport, which requires large-scale conversion of paddy land and wetland in Aranmula expressed deep concern over the firm stand adopted by the State government in support of the “anti-people and anti-nature” project.
She said the government as well as the MoEF should clarify why the Legislative Committee on Environment chaired by Congress MLA C.P. Mohammed had opposed the airport project.
She alleged that the so-called expert committee report submitted to the State government as well as the MoEF was a “manipulated desk-top report” managed by certain vested interests. The report not even mentioned the vast expanse of paddy land and wetland in Aranmula, she alleged.
Ms. Sugathakumari said the ongoing agitation to save Aranmula was a struggle to protect the remaining paddy land and wetland in the State. She said scientists had already cautioned against alarming groundwater depletion due to wanton land conversion across the State.
The poet said eminent persons such as V.R. Krishna Iyer, K.P.S. Menon, religious leaders, scientists, social activists, and 73 of the 140 MLAs in the Assembly had signed the JAC memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister against the Aranmula airport project.
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
How Elites Determine Development
How Elites Determine Development
The Role of Elites in Economic Development is a volume of 15 essays edited by Alice H Amsden, Alisa DiCaprio and James A Robinson. This book grew out of a United Nations University conference held in Helsinki in the summer of 2009, where more than 150 scholars participated in examining the place elites hold in society and in determining economic processes. As a result, it is safe to say that the selected essays capture the cutting edge of elitefocused research, not just in terms of how elites affect economic development as the title suggests, but just as much in terms of the role elites play in development writ large.
This book also contains some of the final published words of Alice Amsden, an intellectual titan whose work on east Asian development serves as the touchstone for how scholars and policymakers think about late industrialisation. As those who are familiar with this literature recognise industrialisation in countries
like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan was the product of elite-driven enterprise, whereby a small group of technocrats and business leaders navigated the state towards high rates of economic growth.
Coming at a time when scholars and policymakers were convinced that ideologies and factor endowments determined development outcomes, Amsden’s work brought the messy fi eld of politics – and elite-driven politics in particular –back into focus. In doing so, she called into question the prevailing neo-liberal
consensus at the time that freeingmarkets is central for development. She will be sorely missed and this
volume is a testament to her scholarly success, confi rming that elite studies
will continue to be a vibrant fi eld in development studies, attracting the attention of many excellent thinkers from around the world.
A Brief Primer on Elites
In the introductory chapter by DiCaprio, elites are understood to be “a distinct social group within a society which enjoys privileged status and exercises decisive control over the organization of society” (p 4). Defi ning elites in such a manner harkens back to C Wright Mills’ understanding of a “power elite”, whereby a precious chosen few are able to influence all spheres of society and governance (1956). Impressively tracing
the long intellectual history of this powerelite theory from its 19th century Italian foundations to the present, DiCaprio conspicuously avoids engaging the serious challenges to the notion that a power
elite ever exists. That is to say, a separate school of thought on elites claims that nosingle group exercises decisive control over the organisation of society; instead, there are groups who can dominate
certain contested domains. This school of “diffuse elite theory” is best captured
in Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961) – a benchmark book that is not mentioned
even once in this entire volume. Dahl’s painstaking research of a small American
city revealed the spaghetti bowl that comprises local politics in America –
instead of a small cabal determining the organisation of society, nested groups of
elites come to dominate certain specific spheres of policymaking with very little
cross-over between them. In Dahl’s understanding of elites, elites who decide education policy are distinct from those elites who determine sanitation and those groups of elites are distinct from those who are in charge of meting out of justice,
for example. In contrast, those in the power-elite school would expect the
same small group of people to be making decisions in both education policy and sanitation.Whether intentional or not, what emerges is that many of the subsequent chapters in the book underscore how the
thrust of elite-focused research needs to go beyond debates as to whether the
“power elite” is the correct model or whether Dahl’s disaggregated understanding of elites is more appropriate.
Instead, these researchers explore under what conditions does a cohesive decisionmaking elite body emerge and perpetuate, which necessarily requires weighing the opposite question as well – under what conditions should we instead
expect an incongruent and fragmented struggle between elites? In so doing,
this volume shows that the study of elites in the 21st century is going beyond
Mills and Dahl in a promising and fruitful new direction.
The Role of Elites in Economic Development is a volume of 15 essays edited by Alice H Amsden, Alisa DiCaprio and James A Robinson. This book grew out of a United Nations University conference held in Helsinki in the summer of 2009, where more than 150 scholars participated in examining the place elites hold in society and in determining economic processes. As a result, it is safe to say that the selected essays capture the cutting edge of elitefocused research, not just in terms of how elites affect economic development as the title suggests, but just as much in terms of the role elites play in development writ large.
This book also contains some of the final published words of Alice Amsden, an intellectual titan whose work on east Asian development serves as the touchstone for how scholars and policymakers think about late industrialisation. As those who are familiar with this literature recognise industrialisation in countries
like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan was the product of elite-driven enterprise, whereby a small group of technocrats and business leaders navigated the state towards high rates of economic growth.
Coming at a time when scholars and policymakers were convinced that ideologies and factor endowments determined development outcomes, Amsden’s work brought the messy fi eld of politics – and elite-driven politics in particular –back into focus. In doing so, she called into question the prevailing neo-liberal
consensus at the time that freeingmarkets is central for development. She will be sorely missed and this
volume is a testament to her scholarly success, confi rming that elite studies
will continue to be a vibrant fi eld in development studies, attracting the attention of many excellent thinkers from around the world.
A Brief Primer on Elites
In the introductory chapter by DiCaprio, elites are understood to be “a distinct social group within a society which enjoys privileged status and exercises decisive control over the organization of society” (p 4). Defi ning elites in such a manner harkens back to C Wright Mills’ understanding of a “power elite”, whereby a precious chosen few are able to influence all spheres of society and governance (1956). Impressively tracing
the long intellectual history of this powerelite theory from its 19th century Italian foundations to the present, DiCaprio conspicuously avoids engaging the serious challenges to the notion that a power
elite ever exists. That is to say, a separate school of thought on elites claims that nosingle group exercises decisive control over the organisation of society; instead, there are groups who can dominate
certain contested domains. This school of “diffuse elite theory” is best captured
in Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961) – a benchmark book that is not mentioned
even once in this entire volume. Dahl’s painstaking research of a small American
city revealed the spaghetti bowl that comprises local politics in America –
instead of a small cabal determining the organisation of society, nested groups of
elites come to dominate certain specific spheres of policymaking with very little
cross-over between them. In Dahl’s understanding of elites, elites who decide education policy are distinct from those elites who determine sanitation and those groups of elites are distinct from those who are in charge of meting out of justice,
for example. In contrast, those in the power-elite school would expect the
same small group of people to be making decisions in both education policy and sanitation.Whether intentional or not, what emerges is that many of the subsequent chapters in the book underscore how the
thrust of elite-focused research needs to go beyond debates as to whether the
“power elite” is the correct model or whether Dahl’s disaggregated understanding of elites is more appropriate.
Instead, these researchers explore under what conditions does a cohesive decisionmaking elite body emerge and perpetuate, which necessarily requires weighing the opposite question as well – under what conditions should we instead
expect an incongruent and fragmented struggle between elites? In so doing,
this volume shows that the study of elites in the 21st century is going beyond
Mills and Dahl in a promising and fruitful new direction.
Monday, 26 August 2013
modern art as a weapon
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.
The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.
"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.
"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."
To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."
This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.
This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."
He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.
But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.
* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.
Covert Operation
In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.
The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.
So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."
Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.
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