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Enemies Are Always Dictators – Talking With Them Is Unpresidential
Welcoming and supporting dictators who act in U.S. interests is the usual behavior of any U.S. president. U.S. media support such.
Obama greeting the hereditary dictator of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev
But when Trump talks and meets some head of state who works for the interests of his own country, he is breaking some iron rule of established U.S. foreign policy. In FP-circles "talking with the enemy" is seen as sincere crime. Trump invited the duly elected president of Philippine Rodrigo Duerte and mused casually about meeting the DPRK head of state Kim Jong-il. Both are seen as insufficiently deferring to U.S. diktats.
Thus someone in Washington DC ordered up a media campaign depicting Donald Trump as coddling dictators.
The Washington Post responded with an op-ed and an "analysis". Both border on satire:
Trump keeps praising international strongmen, alarming human rights advocates
As he settles into office, President Trump’s affection for totalitarian leaders has grown beyond Russia’s president to include strongmen around the globe.
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In an undeniable shift in American foreign policy, Trump is cultivating authoritarian leaders, one after another, in an effort to reset relations following an era of ostracism and public shaming by Obama and his predecessors.
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Every American president since at least the 1970s has used his office [at least occasionally*] to champion human rights and democratic values around the world.
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Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said “This is a man who has boasted publicly about killing his own citizens,” Cardin said of Duterte in a statement. “The United States is unique in the world because our values — respect for human rights, respect for the rule of law — are our interests. Ignoring human rights will not advance U.S. interests in the Philippines or any place else. Just the opposite.”
[* the words "at least occasionally" were added only after the original piece was mocked on Twitter and elsewhere.]
Yes, the U.S. of course never ignored human rights in the Philippines… (/snark)
There surely is a certain "uniqueness" in U.S. global political behavior. But its is certainly not engagement for "human rights". It is exactly the opposite. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked about a blood dictator: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
The NYT joins today's anti-Trump/anti-Duerte campaign with an editorial and a racist cartoon:
The United States has long seen itself as a beacon of democracy and a global advocate of human rights and the rule of law. It has faltered, sometimes badly, undermining leaders whose views did not fit its strategic objectives and replacing them with pliant despots. Yet for the most part American presidents, Republican and democratic, have believed that the United States should provide a moral compass to the world, encouraging people to pursue their right to self-government and human dignity and rebuking foreign leaders who fall short.
Who believes such marketing bullshit? Fact is that the U.S. has always coddled dictators as long as they did what it asked them to do. Clinton, Bush, Obama all welcomed various theocratic sheiks and murderous dictators at the White House. Since World War II the U.S. has attempted or succeeded in "regime change" over 50 times. It did not care if those countries were dictatorships or staunch democracies like France or Australia. In fact none of these illegal interference was motivated by "human rights". Many succeeded in eliminating progressive democracies by installing murderous right-wing regimes.
Bush invaded Iraq based of lies willingly peddled by the New York Time and the Washington Post. Obama directly ordered American citizens killed by drones and without any legal procedure. U.S. police shoot dozens of innocent each year, but when drug dealers get killed in a Philippine police raid its elected president is called a "strongman". Meanwhile U.S. they U.S. directed war on drugs in Mexico has killed thousands.
It is obviously helpful for U.S. interest when its president meets and proselytizes those who are not fully on the U.S. side. One makes peace with one's enemies, not with friends. But such logic does work in the establishment's deluded minds.
Any head of state disliked by the establishment is called a strongman, totalitarian, autocrat or dictator. The real reason for such characterization has nothing to do with democracy, elections or "human rights". It is rather the "thuggish anti-American behavior" of some leader as one U.S. imperialist calls it. "Thuggish anti-American behavior" is automatically attributed to any head of state who works foremost in the interests of his own country.
What do writers and editors like the above think when they peddle such mythology? They know that it is evidently contradicted by facts their own papers report on other occasions.
George Orwell called this "doublethink", the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs in one's mind and to accept both of them. Is that not just another form of insanity?
As to the marketing bullshit, I suspect virtue morality naive realists believe it. The people who believe these things, including many (former) leftists, are naive, in the sense that they do not hold a prior theory or information of the world, and often lack means or willingness to develop such theories or find such information. A prior theory need not be an absolute bedrock, and it should be modified *logically* per the normal logical process of science, as expressed in the tautologies:
for all a,z, ((a) AND (a implies z)) implies z
for all a,z, z implies ((not a) OR (not (a implies z)))
Let a be composite (c AND d AND …), and apply de Morgan’s theorem ((not c) OR (not d)…) with OR being inclusive or (a OR b = a OR b OR both). Let c be the fact that US supported (mis)information peddlers/propaganda houses claim a given violation, and d be the truth of a claim. Z is “Assad used Sarin,” or “The rebels are moderate,” etc. Attention to prior claims, especially long after the claims have served their purpose, may disabuse one of a high probability of d being true for a given c.
Allow that d is probably false in a given case. If d is false, then no logical conclusion follows on z, although it should be assumed to be false until evidence to the contrary arrives; compare this situation to the defendant in a criminal case, who has been suborned to institutionalised perjury (plea bargain)—even if the defendant perpetrated the alleged actus reus, the particulars of the complaint are likely to be in error due to police sloppiness, efforts by the police to hide their own crimes, and erroneous presuppositions on the part of the police.
There is a non-zero probability that a given claim, no matter how ridiculous on its face, may be substantially true. Put aside the fear of being abused verbally or prosecuted legally for de facto abetting a serious crime—leftists, and even apolitical journalists, will often face that risk, based on their beliefs and evidence before them, and proudly so. Rather, the problem is facing oneself, and living with oneself given the possibility that the propaganda is true. Once one caves once, caving to the propaganda in the future may become easier, and harder to recognise.
Thus we may understand this problem of the left, and of otherwise critical journalists, not so much as prior fecklessness and dishonesty, but as subconscious fear of unvirtuous conduct. Some examples:
Chomsky (and his hangers on, e.g. Amy Goodman, Michael Albert and similar folks), repeat lurid fantasies from the propaganda, about Assad, for example, but given an external reference (Postol), he may make a principled stand—his conscience may bear it.
Another example is Stan Goff, who has written at some length on virtue ethics, complaining about Tulsi Gabbard, and sounding uncharacteristically like Louis Proyect; he has omitted to post my first comment, in which I gave a detailed criticism of the background to the current situation, especially regarding Ukraine. Allow that what he says about the character of Gabbard to be true—if she is not bound by virtue ethics, and judges matters based on self-interest, or on ethical frameworks other than virtue ethics, she can observe the reality in Syria far more keenly.
Perhaps this is why universities have ethics courses that lay special emphasis on virtue ethics (when convenient)—my experience was a course on ethics for engineers, although the usual practice is to give the example of killing an infant, in order to save the lives of many infants. The purpose of such examples is precisely to produce an inability to act of one’s own volition outside of social(ly engineered) norms. Goff’s own example in the one link (crime novels) may serve a similar purpose.
Because of the general weakness of logical thinking, especially in the west at the moment (elimination of Euclidean geometry a generation ago in most syllabi, followed by the elimination of syllabi for rot such as “outcomes based education“, and general incoherence when that farce is ended), a naive realism takes hold, in which the reality that is held to be true, is the information given.
I abused Proyect recently, to rub in his face his support for aggression against Syria, but perhaps the problem is greater. He studied Turkish some years ago; this would have made him particularly receptive to Turkish propaganda on Syria. The fact that his background is programming, should not lead one to think that he has a good formal logical background—many programmers do not have such a background, and have simply developed a large set of algorithms that work, and algorithms to develop new algorithms, rather than clear logical thinking. I nearly ran into a similar problem when studying Ukrainian (around the time of the first Maidan), and if it weren’t for prior information about Ukraine, and information from counterpunch at the time, I might well have gone down the same route.
Thus there is a danger to see these individuals as necessarily unvirtuous, which is a precise misdiagnoses. A better solution was presented by Ward Churchill, who suggested deliberately non-virtuous conduct (guns, less than ideal feminist attitudes toward sex) as a curative for what ails the left. Once one can willingly do something evil, even as one generally avoids such conduct, and the fear of evil conduct (including abetting) no longer dominates how one approaches situations in which the information is incomplete, it becomes easier to resist the lurid propaganda.
Posted by: Johan Meyer | May 2 2017 18:14 utc | 19
There is no doubt that some of the strategies Duterte has promoted in a sensationalist attempt to address the Philippinnes crystal meth problem are beyond questionable, but equally Filipino politics have finally elected a president from outside the five ruling families of Luzon. Duterte himself originates from Mindanao – altho his origins are from the language group of an island that lies between Luzon & Mindanao.
Mindanao has been treated like a garbage dump ever since imperialists chose Luzon as the administrative base for their takeovers.
Spanish, amerikan, Japanese and then amerikan again, greedy fuckers. They didn’t just fuck over Luzon, the uncaring assholes destroyed the ancient cultures of Mindanao by dint of slave driven resource extraction. Initially by using the low level conflicts that had been happily bubbling away between different clans on Mindanao. But it didn’t take the indigenous people long to recognise that unity was needed to overcome the external threat; they unified so the next trick was to destroy the social fabric & cultures of the island by indulging in a program pretty similar to the Indonesian transmigration program. Indonesian transmigration caused many formerly peaceful & productive islands in the Indonesian archipelago to be ‘javanised’ due to the forced migration of thousands/millions of people from the slums of Djakarta to outlying islands.
The same on Luzon. With a practice which appears to have been invented by the englanders & Australia, millions of Luzonese have been forcibly removed to other islands.
Selecting the already disadvantaged as the forced migrants ensured that Mindanao, once a home to several successful if competong cultures, became anarchic and uncontrollable. Little surprise then that when Duterte was just a Mindanao pol, he promoted himself as the ‘great bridgebuilder’ whose stated aim was to restore a semblance of order by favouring neither indigenous nor the bigger population of exotic cultures. He became popular & he went on to dominate national politics.
To also paraphrase FDR, Filipinos may believe Duterte is an asshole but he is their asshole.
I don’t wanna sound all drug elitist – there is no doubt that people who do bad shit when intoxicated, do that shit as a result of who they are – their behaviors – not the drug’s; but one cannot deny that crystal meth does inspire/enable more people to do more dreadful shit that most other illegal intoxicants do.
The shit meth heads can get up to reduces much more ordered societies than the Philippines’ chaotic tightrope of a developing culture to near disaster.
Most people just want to ‘get by’. That is the unfortunate reality for those of us who understand the world could be much better for humans if more of us gave a fuck about more than just the immediate needs of our whanau, that is not how most people think however, so Duterte was elected in a reasonably honest (definitely a more accurate & true reflection of voters wishes than say, amerikan elections) ballot as the president of the Philippines.
He announced he was going to go to war with the metho’s and he did.
There are many concerns particularly about the concentration on street level dealers who are frequently only in the game to fund their habits, whilst the ‘Mr Bigs’ have largely escaped the old double tap to the base of the brain, but even so most filipinos support his strategy.
We all know what this dislike of Duterte by western media and to a lesser extent the trumpet himself, is really about.
Firstly he is not a regular example of what a philippines prez should be. Ke doesn’t prostrate himself in kneejerk obeisance to the biggest amerikan asshole in the room.
Neoliberalism is only partially accepted – where the benefits are palpable and the ‘deal’ has been examined for fish hooks – worst of all President Duterte has taken on a few activists formerly with NPA (New Peoples Army) links into his team. amerika views them in still in 1950’s terms as “Chicoms”. Duterte understands that the Philippines has a substantial Islam population and that the only real hope the nation has of not being destroyed by sectarian civil war is if the primary driver of dissatisfaction towards the established order, inequality and its inevitable partner, poverty is seen to be addressed.
Even that could be considered ‘tolerable’ by the assholes in DC, London, Paris and Tel Aviv, if Duterte led the way in allowing his nation to be a battleground for the coming war on China.
Duterte may be old but he isn’t stupid or senile; he knows that the only opportunity his people have lies in not taking sides in the coming blue.
Hence he has backed away from previous governments’ (amerikan poodles all of em) antagonism toward China particularly in regard to disputed territories.
Not because he is a commie, but because he understands that if he can successfully negotiate a way through without overly antagonising either side, filipinos will benefit long term. As China shifts much of its low wage low skills work offshore, the Philippines can benefit and hopefully enjoy a similar move up the laddr as China has.
We (correctly IMHO) can consider that to be a bad deal longterm for the Philippines, but OTOH if you have spent any time in that beautifully cursed nation you must concede that ‘things cannot continue as they are’.
amerika believes that things must continue as they are and has always blocked any move (even pointlessly cosmetic base closures by previous filipino govts) as being unacceptable.
When the trumpet & Duterte talk, the trumpet will doubtlessly adopt the usual bully-boy tone towards Duterte that State, amerikan military and corporate assholes have always used.
Except they cannot, if Duterte drops Xi Jinping’s name as a more frequent dinner partner of his than trumpet’s, amerika has to listen. Listen and alter the way they consider the Philippines in future.
In the old days they would simply off Duterte, but just as with Latin America, the amerikan concentration on ME ‘terrorism’ since the late 90’s, has left them somewhat impotent. Plus of course Filipinos would be understandably outraged & the country would either sink into a chaotic civil war with jihdists on one side, duterte-ists another and Luzonese neolibbs another, if somewhat less popular, third grouping.
That doesn’t prevent the Davos loving neoliberal cocksuckers from trying to revert back to the old days using their media propaganda. It won’t work, but it could encourage amerikans to naively support the truly outrageous – the rape of Manila or something equally awful.
So, for want of a viable alternative, it is Duterte who is the one most deserving of our support.
Posted by: Debsisdead | May 3 2017 5:18 utc | 47
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