NP(?) Academia and imperialism

[Doug Millison]

Academia is silent on imperialism,
as German universities were during the rise of the
Nazis
By John Pilger

The other day, I attended a conference at the
University of Sussex on the "new imperialism".
What was extraordinary was that it took place at
all. Julian Saurin, who teaches in the school of
African and Asian studies at Sussex, said that, in
ten years, he had never known an open discussion
on imperialism. About 80 per cent of international
relations studies in the great British
universities is concerned with the United States
and Europe. Most of the rest of humanity is often
rated according to its degree of importance or
usefulness to "western interests", the euphemism
for western power and imperialism.

The concept of modern imperialism seldom speaks
its name. It is a taboo subject, described as
"provocative" by those "liberal realists" who
shunned the Sussex conference. The issue of
academic silence this raises is crucial. At times,
universities that pride themselves on a
free-thinking tradition go silent. Germany during
the rise of the Nazis and the United States in the
McCarthyite period offer obvious examples.

The silence these days is not as obvious, but no
less complicit. For example, an invasion and
occupation that wiped out a third of a population,
causing the deaths of more people, proportionally,
than died in Cambodia under Pol Pot, provoked an
academic silence that lasted for most of 24 years.

This was East Timor, which Henry Kissinger once
likened to an "obscure brand" of soft drink. It
was Kissinger who sent arms illegally to General
Suharto's invading troops. Apart from John
Taylor's marvellous book, Indonesia's Forgotten
War (Zed Books) and the work of Peter Carey, Mark
Curtis and, more recently, Eric Herring, the
greatest genocide in the second half of the 20th
century apparently did not warrant a single
substantial academic case study, based on primary
sources, originating in the international
relations department of a British university. Like
the massacres that brought Suharto to power in the
1960s - in which both the US and British
governments played critical roles - the genocide
in East Timor was airbrushed by those whose job
was to keep the scholarly record straight. The
work of Noam Chomsky, a lone voice on East Timor,
was considered too "provocative".

The study of postwar international relations was
invented in the United States, largely with the
sponsorship of those who designed and have policed
modern American economic power: a network that
included the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller
foundations, the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA)
and the Council on Foreign Relations, effectively
an arm of government. Thus, in the great US
universities, learned voices justified the cold
war and the new Washington-led imperialism.

In this country, with honourable exceptions, this
"transatlantic" view found its echo. There are
current variations, known by their imperialist
euphemisms. A "third way" for Britain as "a good
international citizen" is fashionable. "Humanitari
an intervention" is another favourite. The
interventionist divides the world into worthy and
unworthy victims. The Iraqi Kurds are worthy of
Anglo-America "protection". In Turkey, the Kurds
struggling against an onslaught from the regime
are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato.

The interventionist assumes the moral inferiority
of the target nation. Iraq is Saddam Hussein.
Serbia is Milosevic. However, Suharto, a mass
murderer in a league of his own, was never
demonised. On the contrary, he brought "stability"
to Indonesia. Lately, prominent "third way"
experts have discovered the horrors imposed on
East Timor, long after what they say can have any
effect. Perhaps they will one day discover the
fraudulence of Nato's bombing campaign in the
Balkans, and the genocidal nature of sanctions
imposed on the Iraqi people.

There is no conspiracy. It is the way the system
works, ensuring "access" and "credibility" in an
academic hierarchy whose loyalty has shifted to a
veiled "globalised" ideology that is really
rampant capitalism. Always eager to credit more
ethical intent to government policy-makers than
the policy-makers themselves, the "liberal
realists" ensure that western imperialism is
interpreted as crisis management, rather than the
cause of the crisis and its escalation. Behind the
fog of obfuscation and jargon, this is essentially
a tabloid scholarship that sees terrorism in
groups, individuals and "rogue states", almost
never in "our" governments and arms industries,
which historically are among the world's greatest
abusers of human rights. To state such a truth is
to risk being dismissed as unscholarly.

This recognition of a lethal "us" is the most
enduring taboo. There was no debate on whether to
take humanitarian action against the delivery of
British Hawk fighter aircraft to the genocidists
in Indonesia. There was no debate on intercepting
shipments of American and British weapons to
terrorist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey,
Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Colombia. There is no debate
about whether western leaders ought to be indicted
for crimes against humanity, for which there is
abundant prima facie evidence. Just imagine the
almost immediate improvement in humanitarian
conditions around the world if "we" stopped under-
writing terrorism.

With America ordaining its new enemy, China, while
planning to militarise space, these are dangerous
times. Unless our experience, memory and history
are to be shaped as instruments of great power, we
need independent voices in centres for the study
of imperialism, not echoes and silence.

With thanks to BISA International Relations
Working Group and the Centre for Global Political
Economy, University of Sussex

For more Pilger check out: www.johnpilger.com


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