Chimps, War And Serfdom

I've been thinking about Chimpanzees- our (joint) closest relatives and all round evil bastards. They are far stronger than humans and when they attack are brutal- with genitals and fingers being pulled out first before they bite your face off. I'd rather be locked in a room with a tiger or a crocodile than a chimp.

They also practice warfare among themselves, in which the aim is to commit genocide of neighbouring chimp populations. They patrol their own territory and kill any rival males who encroach upon it while also making opportunistic raids into rivals' lands to kill any outnumbered males they find there.

If all this sounds familiar it's because it is what humans have done to each other all too frequently- and continue to do today in many tribal societies- which suggests it is a form of behaviour that has deep routes in our shared evolutionary past.

However in most of recorded history, simply wiping out a vanquished opponent is rare*- a lot of killing occurs but the Anglo Saxons didn't wipe out the Celts, the Normans didn't annihilate the Saxons, the fall of the Roman Empire doesn't seem to have involved genocide of the Romans. Instead elite replacement occurs.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the tendency of civilised agricultural based societies to form complex and exploitative hierarchies- in which a self serving elite forms to control the surpluses produced and dominate society may not have been such a bad thing after all compared to the alternative.

An elite that exploits the rest of society will have very little interest in wiping out a defeated population in the way an egalitarian hunter gatherer society does- because it makes little difference whose work they are exploiting.

None of which should is an argument for the perpetuation of social elites today of course, this is just speculation about how we came to be where we are as a species.

* Wars between civilised countries are bloodier overall but not on a per capita basis.

Book Review: King Leopold's Ghost

I haven't written any book reviews for about two years. Partly because I have been reading fewer books (although probably more online material) than I did before and partly because I've been less interested in writing reviews of what I have read.

Here is a review of Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost.. I am out of practice when it comes to writing reviews so forgive me if I ramble or repeat adjectives too frequently:

 A Forgotten Genocide

King Leopold's Ghost was written to remind the world of a forgotten atrocity- as such it is both highly accessible and informative.

The atrocities in the Congo included mass murder, enslaving the local population and working them to death and stealing and burning their. Much of the cruelty was officially sanctioned- with secret instructions to the authorities on how to enslave the natives. Some of it was done by individual sadists who were free to execute Africans for trivial offences or massacre villages at will if they refused to collect rubber.

One of the frustrations that Hochschild repeatedly refers to is that the tale largely has to be told from the point of view of foreigners, as the Congo's native population was not literate at the time and left few direct testimonies. However the records of the colonial authorities, missionaries, traders and diplomats are used to great effect.

The portraits of individuals involved in the story are well done, the story of ED Morel who initiated the international campaign against King Leopold's rule is particularly inspiring- a lowly shipping clerk who used his powers of deduction to realise that the Congo must be a slave state and then devoted his life to exposing it.

Whilst I was vaguely aware of the atrocities in the Congo I had not realised how much of it was the doing of King Leopold II personally. He was a deceitful, manipulative and immensely greedy man and his personal culpability in the genocide is established beyond doubt. He deserves to be considered along with Mao, Hitler and Stalin as one of the great monsters of the 20th Century.

Genocide, Gulags- No Bad Thing

If this is what is behind the Times's paywall then I am glad that I never see it. Writing about North Korea, Simon Winchester pays tribute to Korean uniqueness:

North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

This is a regime that has let millions of people starve to death and runs gulags which whole families get sent to.

Winchester is an idiot, but he is repeating the argument of a more notable idiot, the North Korean apologist Bruce Cumings,  whose own version of the argument is skewered brilliantly here:

It seems to have slipped the professor's notice that many countries manage to stay independent without dragging children off to gulags, and that North Korea is a place where a lot of characteristically Korean behavior—speaking bluntly, for example—is punishable by execution.

He also makes the point that North Korea has been highly dependent on support from outside to prop up the Kim dynasty so is about as far from representing an independent Korea as it is possible to get.

Voting On History.

US-Turkish relations are in trouble over the decision by congress to formally recognise the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that the genocide happened and the attitude of modern Turkey towards it is sinister and dishonest.

Having said all that, there is also something faintly sinister about history being determined by political bodies such as congress. Does anyone seriously believe that a bunch of US politicians have any special expertise to make these sort of determinations?

There is I suppose a case for them recognising contemporary genocides because that may necessitate political action but stuff like this is political grandstanding and is determined more by political expediency that a heartfelt desire for truth.

It would make much more sense to criticise Turkey's present day suppression of free speech over the genocidal campaign than to vote on the actual events themselves.

Harold Comedy Dies.

In the wake of Harold Pinter's death the Grauniad republishes one of the genocide supporters articles that he did for them. In this paragraph he asks a number of questions:

Sometimes you look back into recent history and you ask: did all that really happen? Were half a million "communists" massacred in Indonesia in 1965 (the rivers clogged with corpses)?

No

Were 200,000 people killed in East Timor in 1975 by the Indonesian invaders?

No, around 18000 civilians were killed. This is horrible but vastly less than those killed in places like Bosnia where he supported the genocide.

Have 300,000 people died in Central America since 1960?

No. Given the population of central America that would be an absurdly low figure even it the region were like Switzerland.

Has the persecution of the Kurdish people in Turkey reached levels which approach genocide?

No.

Are countless lraqi children dying every month for lack of food and medicine brought about by UN sanctions?

No they were dying because Saddam's regime whim he was an apologist for sold all the food and medicine to build palaces.

Did the military coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile result in levels of repression and depth of suffering comparable to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and the Khmer Rouge?

No. Millions of people died in Germany, Cambodia and Russia compared to a few thousand in the Latin American dictatorships. Disgusting as they were the Juntas were less murderous than a certain other Latin American regime that Pinter also supports. It is a form of genocide denial to place the crimes of Nazi Germany on a level with those of Pinochet's Chile.

Whilst the regimes that Pinter condemned were frequently murderous and despicable that was not why he condemned them as can be shown by his wholehearted enthusiasm for far more murderous regimes who happen to be anti-American. His only motivation was an intense xenophobic hatred of the United States.

No doubt he was a great playwright and those who knew him as a person have my sincere sympathies but he should not be portrayed as some kind of moral inspiration which he clearly was not.

Quick Points.

Three quick points that don't quite merit separate posts.

• Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser Samantha Power is forced to quit after being reported referring to Hillary Clinton as a 'monster'. Quite right, honesty has no place in politics. It wouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone who read her first book 'A Problem From Hell' that the isn't a fan of the Clintons. There have understandably been criticisms of interventionism in recent years after the very poor handling of the Iraqi occupation, but it is often forgotten that doing nothing also has a price which is hidden. Samantha Power's retelling of Bill Clinton's almost vegetative approach to the genocides of the 1990s in Rwanda and Bosnia cost far more lives than the Iraq war ever will.

• The government has decided to allow 66 Ethiopian refugees to settle in Middlesbrough has been criticised. I have to say that for once I think that the government have got something right though (saying that feels horrible), the fundamental problem with our asylum and immigration system is the large numbers of people who enter either illegally or on bogus pretenses and then claim asylum. What has happened in Middlesbrough is closer to how the system should operate, the Ethiopians fled to a Kenyan refugee camp and then applied lawfully to be allowed to resettle somewhere else permanently and were accepted. Controlled immigration is not a major problem, uncontrolled immigration is.

• The BBC and other media outlets have been shocked, shocked I tell you, by the abuse suffered by uniformed RAF personnel in Peterborough. This is the same BBC who recently devoted a whole episode of their flagship current affairs programme, Panorama, to a sleazy activist lawyer to repreat already discredited claims about British servicemen conducting massacres (and being so ruthless that they left no actual evidence) of Iraqi civilians. If I went around spreading vicious lies about someone who was later attacked I'm pretty sure that I would face prosecution.

Nutters & Liars Part Two.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.

Lie #2
There was no massacre of Bosniak Men & Boys at Srebronica.

This is one of the most preposterous claims made at Israpundit, one example of the denial will suffice although I could provide further examples if required:

But it is the word “Srebrenica” that represents the most villainous use of this word “Massacre”. There, indeed, there was a ***real massacre, but it happened in the years before the Serbs retook Srebrenica, when thousands of the simplest and most innocent of rural Serbian folk were systematically liquidated, usually at night under cover of darkness, by the Islamofascists in that area. This was ignored by the Media and took place under the noses of the UN “peace” keeping taskforce.

Meanwhile, though, the truth about the Srebrenica Massacre that was pinned on the Serbs was that it did not happen, and not a shred of proof has been produced by Albright and co that it did happen.

Unsurprisingly every factual claim made in that passage is untrue. Evidence for the atrocity at Srebrenica includes:

Testimonies From Survivors.

The testimony of a man who miraculously survived the mass executions that followed the fall of Srebrenica was heard this week in tribunal’s biggest-ever case.Mevludin Oric is believed to be one of only 12 men to have escaped the July 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces soon after they overran the enclave.He said he had stayed alive only because he hid under a pile of dead bodies for hours before fleeing the execution site.

According to Israpundit, Oric must have made this up, and the people he accuses are actually heroes.

There Are Confessions By The Perpetrators.

These are even more damning than survivor testimonies, if you follow the Israpundit line then it must be difficult to explain why men like Momir Nikolic would confess to crimes they did not commit.

Some of the mass graves have been discovered.

No doubt there is a perfectly reasonable explanation why thousands of bodies or body parts have been found in the vicinity of Srebrenica.

The Serbian government admits it!

The Dutch Government Resigned Over Their Soldier's Failiure To Intervene.

Genocide deniers like those at Israpundit point to a Western conspiracy, but why would a government conspire to bring themselves down?

Some Of The Killings Were Captured On Film.

The video shows men wearing camouflaged uniforms executing a number of young men, two of which were identified this week by their families as missing after the fall of Srebrenica. Four appear to be minors, two in their Thirties.

The tape, which carries no visible time or date, begins with the alleged Serbian paramilitary unit members leading the six captives from a lorry through a wooded area to a place of execution, prodding them like cattle.

The Muslims walk calmly, with their hands tied, their eyes on the ground, looking subdued. The paramilitaries then tell their captives to stop, position them for execution and then shoot them point blank, killing four.

Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica – for a long time staunch opponent of the tribunal – appeared on a press conference in Belgrade on June 2 together with the Hague chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte to announce the arrests, which came after the tape had been aired in Serbia.

Deniers of the Srebrenica massacre have somewhat less in the way of evidence. Indeed their primary source for there claims appears to be the website Emperors Clothes, and its sister site. Unsurprisingly this is not the only conspiracy those two websites peddle (it never is), the editor Jared Israel is also a keen 9/11 truther! Still the truthers look comparatively sane next to the Srebrenica liars at Emperors Clothes who claim, and I swear that I'm not making this up, that what really happened at Srebrenica was that the Muslim population was transported to places like Ireland and Australia by the Red Cross to make it look as if a massacre had occurred, in order for Nato to have a cause to attack Serbia.

It seems as though the Red Cross, the UNHCR, and a host of "western" governments around the world were engaged in hiding the fact that these men were not massacred.

Nutters & Liars.

Oliver Kamm has been writing recently about his encounter with the commentators of Israpundit, many of whom are, to put it kindly, people whom nursey hasn't dosed up fully.

To put it less kindly they are ill informed, paranoid conspiracy theorists who have developed a counter factual fantasy about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in which the principle perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing, particulary the Bosnian Serb army and to a lesser extent the Belgrade government, are portrayed as innocent victims who were caught up in islamist plots to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state. The victims of the genocide are dismissed as either non existant or as having brought their fate upon themselves.

Having once had an unproductive discussion with one Israpundit contributer (Felix Quigley, on another blog), in the wake of Slobadon Milosevic's death last year, I feel obliged to warn Oliver Kamm that things like facts, evidence or logic will be of little use if he is planning on changing the minds of the hardcore genocide deniers but as I am at a loose end I shall take some time to nail a few of the more obvious lies spread by Israpundit's contributers.

Lie #1.
President Alija Izetbegovic Was An Islamofascist.

This is a claim that has been made frequently by various Israpundit contributers. One frequently cited out of context quote (or often a misquote) of Izetbegovic's recurs repeatedly:

there is no peace between the islamic faith and non islamic social and political institutions.

This was from a book he wrote in the 1960s called the 'islamic declaration', which as Noel Malcolm explains in 'Bosnia- A Short History' was specifically referring to countries where an absolute majority of practisin muslims existed, it plainly could not apply to Bosnia wher only 43% of the population were even nominally islamic and of those, according to a 1985 survey, only 17% actually practiced the religion. So only 7% of the total Bosnian population were practicing muslims. As someone who does not not like what Islam itself very much, I must say the vision Izetbegovic wanted, in the 1960s, for islamic societies does not appeal to me at all but he clearly did not think it could be imposed on a society by force and Bosnia was a non starter as Islam was not widely practiced in any case. He explicitly rejects the creation of such a state by physical force.

By the 1980s the views Izetbegovic was expressing was even further removed from those held by islamist extremists, explicitly praising Christianity as a 'near union of supreme religion and supreme ethics' and praising Anglo American culture and philosophy, in a time where the USA was being regularly denounced as the Great Satan in Iran.

Ironically given the fondness of Israpundit for the epiphat 'islamofascist', the man who coined the word, Stephen Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of Izetbegovic, who during the 1990s was being even more explicit in his condemnation of the islamic chauvinism of the Wahabbis and ayatollahs, telling an islamic meeting in Iran that:

The West is neither corrupted nor degenerate. It is strong, well educated, and organized. Their schools are better than ours. Their cities are cleaner than ours. The level of respect for human rights in the West is higher, and the care for the poor and less capable is better organized. Westerners are usually responsible and accurate in their words. Instead of hating the West, let us proclaim cooperation instead of confrontation

Is it even imaginable that the genuine breeds of islamofascism in Saudi Arabia or Iran could utter such words? It would be unthinkable.

The other claim about Izetbegovic is that he recruited for the SS during WW2, this is based on essentially no evidence whatsoever, so I shall not spend any time refuting it, but suffice to say if the people who make the claim had any evidence I am sure it would have been produced long ago.