In Defense of Armed Rebellion Part 2

Blah! I feel like such a chump. Sometimes I can just go on and on about something without ever seeming to make much sense.

Anyway, tribalism itself is a loaded word these days. For some reason the word still conjures up images of primitive hunter-gatherers and projects the notion of a backwards people still living in the caves. This is all nonsense. Tribes, or ethnic groups, are bound together by a common language and a common culture. Just think about Germans living in Germany or Spaniards living in Spain. These various groups of people have set up borders that generally enables people bound by custom and language to inhabit the same territory. Now, this is not to say the system is perfect, or that everyone is happy with it, but this arrangement - small, homogeneous political states bound by language and custom - has contributed significantly to Western prosperity.

This brings me to the Third World. The violence we see today coming from these regions stems from a society or ethnic group's inability to declare independence - REAL independence! - from colonial policy and tyrannical rule. Remember, the Marxists who violently seized power kept the colonial boundaries intact! This was done so that Marxist policy could be carried out more effectively. Oh, and remember, the colonial boundaries were not drawn up randomly, for the Europeans had to work hard to conquer Africa, and the intentional division of ethnic groups between the colonial powers was designed to keep the African tribes/nations/kingdoms/confederations from regaining power.

All too often the West is quick to condemn rebellions, offer military aid to totalitarian governments, and sometimes even resort to putting troops on the ground and "maintain or restore order" (in an ironic twist of fate, most U.N. troops are composed of soldiers hailing from former colonies, while the commanding officers generally come from the West) for the sake of preserving a certain failed state. This is a mistake. Most of the rebellions that continually flare up are based upon rational calls for self-governance and liberation of tribal land from a (in the rebel's point of view) colonial government.

A policy of the West towards the Third World may do well to begin to officially recognize separatist movements as legitimate, and cease providing arms and aid to totalitarian governments abroad. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and decide to fully support an armed rebellion in some part of the world you may never had heard of!

In Defense of Armed Rebellion

I just read a heart aching article over at Dissent Magazine. Its not so much all the death and destruction that gets to me anymore, but rather the almost inevitable pattern that I see arising out of secession movements within the post-colonial Third World.

It is common knowledge that during the later half of the nineteenth century European states began to embark on crusades that involved carving up the world into territories as they saw fit. Liberalism, or I guess I should say the European name for a system of governance that protects individual rights and private property first and foremost - became much more popular in Western Europe than in the rest of the world during the 18th and nineteenth centuries. As a result, nation states became smaller, borders more porous, and people more empowered. They proceeded to conquer the world.

Collectivist ideology destroyed Europe. After the fall of Europe in 1945 their former colonies began to declare independence. Unfortunately, the elites of these societies (who were mostly lawyers; see Tocqueville for details) had been "educated" in Europe's universities, and as a result were indoctrinated with nationalist propaganda, European conceptions about collectivist thought, and taught that their tribal identities were primitive, outmoded, or worse: communal; but as I hope to show you these elites were out of touch with their societies. After helping to thrust the yoke of their Imperial overlords off of their societies' backs, the European-educated elites began to construct new and artificial identities for these former colonial territories.

For instance, Kwame Nkrumah (who was educated in the United States, and not Europe), long recognized as a chief figure in Africa's move to independence, believed that

"...political independence, though worth while in itself, is still only a means to the fuller redemption and realization of a people. When independence has been gained, positive action requires a new orientation away from the sheer destruction of colonialism and towards national reconstruction...In order that this ideology should be comprehensive...it must be socialist in form and in content and be embraced by a mass party."

Here Nkrumah (and echoed by many other independence movement leaders at the time and all over the world) reveals the malicious deeds done by mis-education, and the tragic misunderstanding by Nkrumah and other leaders of how colonies were drawn up and divided by European states. This fundamental misreading of history is what has ultimately led to today's economic stagnation in much of the Third World. Nkrumah himself renamed the former territory of the Gold Coast (which, in turn, was preceded by a powerful trading empire and many other trading peoples) Ghana, after an ancient African empire that was located nowhere near modern day Ghana. The idea behind keeping this former colony's boundaries and governance structures may, in an amateur sort of way, be understood in the following passage:

"The political maturity of the African masses may to some extent be traced to economic and social patterns of traditional times. Under communalism, for example, all lands and means of production belong to the community. There was people's ownership. Labour was the need and habit of all. When a certain piece of land was allocated to an individual for his personal use, he was not free to do as he liked with it since it still belonged to the community."

This quote, taken from his book Class Struggle in Africa, shows an arrogant, deceiving, and perhaps even naive glimpse into the mind of one of Africa's most prominent Marxist leaders. For individualism and protection of private property were prevalent throughout Africa at the beginning of Europe's conquests. For example, the Ashanti empire's success in defeating the British time after time largely rests, I believe, on the power emanating from a distinct form of Liberalism. Protection of private property and individual rights were relatively strong in the Ashanti realm (though slavery and aristocracy did pervade their society at the time. Think Ancient Greece!), and it led to a much more empowered society. I must here point out that the Ashanti government's lust for war against other African states ultimately led to the erosion of those aforementioned rights, therefore destroying individual liberty and economic power. The Ashanti succumbed to the British in 1896. Yet Nkrumah's interpretation of colonialism acknowledges none of this. His whole conception of Africa is based largely on European interpretations of African thought and tradition! Upon further reflection, though, this should come as no surprise, because Nkrumah and other Marxists spent a good deal of time living in the West, and not in Africa.

Let me switch gears here. The Imperial realizations of European states did not stem from Liberalism or free and unhampered markets, but rather from the same collectivist ideology that eventually led to the destruction of Europe in the mid-20th century. Keeping the ideology of Nkrumah and others in mind, observe this passage, delivered by Nkrumah in a speech sometime near the end of his decadent, violent, and lawless rule:

"...I have often said, the party and the nation are one and the same, namely: the Convention People's Party is Ghana and is Ghana the Convention People's Party."

Here we can clearly see that the Third World's economic and political stagnation does not stem from their inability to govern themselves, but rather from the overarching, Leviathan-like ideas that were first laid down upon the African people by Western-educated Africans indoctrinated by collectivist thought in the West. The false notions of communal land in the past and socialist reconstruction for the future is largely to blame for what has kept the Third World in it's modern day chains.

The Marxist ideology that led to consolidation of power for the few and the continuation of artificial borders in the Third World was not the only ideology floating around these colonies at the time of the independence movements, however. You see, the Marxists grasped power (and their overlord's approval) not through votes or from gaining the respect of the people, but through violence - the only known way that Marxism has ever been known to gain governance. However, before the Marxists brutally rose to power there was a brief struggle for ideas, and a more natural, tribal, and individualistic approach was being pushed by others. The ideology behind these ideas is what the West refers to as Liberalism. It has a strong tradition in Third World societies. It is as natural to them as it is to us. If implemented, it would lead to the same prosperity we see in the West. But it is rooted in a concept that is either misunderstood or hastily dismissed by Western intellectuals today: tribalism.

colonial democracy (and its modern day advocates) Part 1

Given all the recent inattention being paid to the ongoing violence in the failed states of Sudan and the Congo, one must be wondering why nothing is being said or done by the West to prevent these atrocious wars from causing any more destruction. After all, if the governments of the West can invade other sovereign nations and violate their rights to property by stealing resources for the benefit of corporations that, coincidentally, paid for the majority of seats in various European Parliaments and the American Congress, why shouldn’t we be using this might instead for humanitarian military missions into sub-Saharan Africa? Why don’t we send a brigade of NATO troops into Zimbabwe and oust President Mugabe from power? Isn’t the West, by ignoring some failed states and dumping billions of taxpayers’ dollars into others being hypocritical? Isn’t there anything that the West can do to help out sub-Saharan Africa? Given all these questions posed by the few individuals who seek to understand the miseries afflicting Africa, one must delve into Africa’s rich history and explore concepts that are, today, mocked, brushed aside as ignorant or altogether ignored by contemporary advocates and activists of modern Africa’s enslavement.

The answer to most of the questions above is ‘no’, with the exception of the hypocrisy of the West. In fact, Western governments already do more than enough to "help" African failed states. The amount of aid donated by foreign governments to sub-Saharan failed states is in the trillions of dollars. Foreign government intervention in the creation, managing and administering of environmental parks has made life much worse for the countless number of Africans would don’t have enough to pay their way into the labyrinth of colonial bureaucracy. And, contrary to the popular delusions of both the socialists and nationalists of the West, sending a military force into a sovereign territory actually causes severe anathema towards the invading army. If one actually thinks about the role of Western nations in African societies over the past two hundred years, one would presumably be inclined to advocate less government-to-government cooperation in the sub-Saharan sphere. If one looks closely at the atrocities in Africa, one will come to the conclusion that Western government aid and agencies are keeping Africans poor, hungry and sick.

As far back as the Roman Empire, and probably much further than even that, trade has existed between the diverse peoples of Africa and the rest of the equally diverse world. Africa’s main exports over the millennia seem to have some constants, most notably raw commodities such as gold and timber, as well as slaves. Though the slave trade ceased in Europe with the advent of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy after the fall of the Roman Empire (which began as a representative republic), slavery continued to persist among the various African empires as well as into parts of the non-African Islamic world, most notably in various Gulf states and the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey.

In the early 15^th century, European merchants began to rent land from sovereign African kings to build trade forts on. This mutually beneficial arrangement, that is, trade between the Africans kingdoms and European merchants, was relatively free of government intervention, and lasted for four hundred years. In that time there was not always peace, but where war broke out, there was always government intervening in the affairs of traders, merchants and workers. Throughout this period of relatively free trade and open borders between societies, individuals of both continents traveled amongst each others’ lands. European missionaries were exceptionally focused on converting Africans to the beliefs of their various faiths. While missionaries belonging to churches that had no ties to government coercion (Swiss and German protestants, for example) focused on feeding the poor and clothing the naked, missionaries who represented churches that were State-sanctioned, or official bearers of the State religion (England’s Anglican Church, France's Catholic Church) called upon their governments time and time again to impose European culture and European law upon the African people. The governments of these various Western nations were all too happy to oblige the humble missionaries’ requests for means to civilize the African people. History has shown, after all, that government will not hesitate to make itself bigger, more powerful, more intrusive and, ultimately, more terrible.

The most traditional way that government grows is foreign policy. By acting on the public’s violent impulses of passion and prejudice, the State seeks to exploit these passions for its own survival. In the early decades of the 19^th century, the governments of Europe, under the various guises of “ending slavery”, “bringing Christianity”, and “civilizing Africa”, began waging war on the sovereign nations of the African continent. By the end of the 19^th century, most had surrendered or succumbed to destruction. In 1884, a European conference was held in Berlin, Germany, by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, himself victorious in a war against 39 independent Prussian states that led to the unification of Germany, to peacefully divide the African continent amongst the various states. Although the United States was invited to attend, the Congress at that time followed a policy of non-intervention and neutrality, much like Switzerland, and as a result, has largely been spared the dreadful consequences that have followed in attempting to govern conquered peoples. The governments of Europe then sliced up the African peoples into various territories that were to be controlled and administered by European bureaucrats. This was known as the General Act of the Berlin Conference and was massively popular with the European public. Corporations, banks, Churches of the State were all instrumental in drumming up support for the Act. In addition, socialists of all varieties supported the act because it officially claimed to end the slave trade and promote the general welfare of the African people. Everyone from prohibitionists to Christian socialists gave their strong endorsement for the Act.

In fact, the little amount of opposition to this Pan-European push for power came from the classical liberals (today’s libertarians), who argued – as always - that wars and administration overseas would merely lead to more problems both at home and abroad. Some Marxists, as well, opposed the actions of the state on grounds of immoral capitalist exploitation. This Act was anything but capitalist, however. In his book Bureaucracy, esteemed economist Ludwig Von Mises explained that

“capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individual’s life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.”

Obviously, this is not what happened in Africa. The governments of Europe instead disregarded all rights to property, self-governance, and personal liberty of the African people and carved up their land in a way that was suitable to those who supported (though didn’t fund; that was what taxpayers were for) the government’s action to begin with.

Indeed, as Western governments poured more blood and treasure into Africa (paid for through taxation and involuntary drafts) for the profit of big corporations (earned by government-enforced exploitation), it appeared as though the liberals were correct in their accusations of government tyranny leading to misfortune for both conquers and conquered. Unfortunately, the liberals never had a chance to point this out in Europe. During the Great Depression, merely forty years after the General Act of the Berlin Conference, fascism and communism had rose to prominence in the West. The liberals sensed that their views – limiting the State to the enforcement of contractual agreements – was becoming increasingly dangerous to espouse, especially in light of fascism and communism’s contempt for a free and open society. The rise of socialism in the West, whether the strains were fascist or communist or social democratic, was to have dire effects on the people of Africa. As the governments of Europe grew ever increasingly powerful and dangerous, many liberals began to flee Europe for the relatively safe shores of the New World. Since their policies naturally opposed the Imperial State to begin with, classical liberal ideas had a hard time reaching the interiors of colonized peoples. A great irony of Western thought at the time was that though they rightly believed in free and open debate, civil liberties, and the right to property, these concepts were something that the conquered would not able comprehend. As a result, although all the various strains of socialist thought reached Africa, especially Marxism, liberalism was unable to penetrate into the heart of African intellectual thought.

Revolution in Africa came as the governments of Europe crumbled under their own might in the wake of World War II. At the forefront of the revolution, as always, were the lawyers, many of whom made up the African bourgeoisie and had studied in the European universities. Unfortunately, as liberalism fled the destructive power of the State during the Great Depression, only socialism and its various forms of control and coercion were being tolerated by the now-totalitarian governments of Continental Europe. It was these ideas only that were to be taught in the universities. It was the socialist ideas of “one people” and “one continent” that influenced the leaders of the revolutions in Africa. Their bourgeoisie upbringings, combined with their socialist, even imperialistic, education led them to believe that they could easily manage the territories carved up by Europeans nearly sixty years ago, into an all-encompassing, all-knowing, all-peaceful existence overseen by - who else? - the very men who led the revolution in the first place. The lawyers’ claims that it is only natural that they lead in time of peace, as well as in rebellion, for it was they who led their people out of slavery are well-founded, and it has always been this way. But the ideas of Marxism that influenced these lawyers doomed them. Instead of dissolving the territories that had been carved up by their European oppressors and allowing the people of Africa to live as they saw fit, the bourgeoisie classes instead opted to keep these territories intact, believing the false economic and political theories of central planning learned in European universities would lead to prosperity and peace. Instead, they got ancient animosities between tribes, nations and families that had been festering under the boot of European government for eighty years. The lawyers of the African rebellion thereby created the failed state scenario we see today through the study and application of Marxist doctrine and theory.

Today we see the failed state scenario play out again and again in not only Africa, but virtually everywhere. Pakistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Balkans states in Europe, to name a few examples, would all be better off if they didn’t exist, and in their place were small, independent, locally governed societies. If one was to look at a map of the world with political boundaries and fathom the differences between Europe, the United States, and East Asia with the rest of the world, one would notice that the failing states encompassing most of the globe are also vastly bigger, physically, than the successful states of the West. It is my belief that this is why most of the world has been unable to produce the same standard of living as the West. Most analysts have mistakenly attributed the failure of these unnatural states to be consequences of bad management or capitalist exploitation. These same analysts, have, unsurprisingly and predictably, recycled the ideas of the old State-sanctioned missionaries and, instead of advocating peaceful relations through trade and travel with all peoples have opted to lobby and/or bribe their own governments into pressuring the various dictators of these failed states into accepting socialist ideologies stressing democracy, environmentalism, and multi-culturalism. These efforts have, of course, failed over and over again.

On democracy.......to be continued