Language and ‘humanitarian interventions’

One more thing I’d meant to mention in the piece I posted Thursday about humanitarianism and war. This is an observation about the way that language has–certainly in the US–become bent and twisted to the extent that when people say “intervention” what they are generally understood to mean is “war”.
Thus nowadays, when people in the policy world say “humanitarian intervention”, what they very often are referring to is outright war.
How twisted is that?
And oh dear, how far we have come from the days when “humanitarian intervention” was generally understood to mean sending food, medicines, or blankets to people in need.
Here’s my proposal, to regain some control of the language and some ethics in our use of it. When we mean “war”, let’s everybody say “war”… or, if they really want to engage in a bit euphemism or jargonish euphemism, they could say “military intervention”. But let’s not ever lose sight of the fact that war is war is war– and that war can never in any sense at all be described as a humanitarian undertaking.
This way, maybe we’ll be able to retrieve and save the original, beneficent sense of the word “humanitarianism.” Wouldn’t that be worth doing?

38 thoughts on “Language and ‘humanitarian interventions’”

  1. Even though the term “humanitarian intervention” is becoming frayed around the edges, there is still a vital difference between it and war. War is an attempt to conquer the enemy and annex its territory (or its colonies or other assets). Humanitarian intervention resembles war in that it involves military attack, but the major point of difference is that there is no conquest, no annexation, no assimilation of the enemy’s territory.

  2. “This way, maybe we’ll be able to retrieve and save the original, beneficent sense of the word “humanitarianism.” Wouldn’t that be worth doing?”
    Wrong.
    This is just exactly where the worm got into the apple. When humanism was discarded for its cheap travesty, “humanitarianism”. Or we can say, when the subjective human was replaced in your (not my) political imagination by generic “human rights” of an abstract kind.
    If you doubt this, read the (verbal) intervention of the British diplomat Clay in Kenya the other day. He threatens withdrawal of aid, on the grounds that people have been helping themselves to it. What he means is that agency belong to the giver, not the receiver. The “corrupt” receivers, on the other hand, more than anything else want to act on their own account. Independence, once a high ideal, has been re-shuffled into its imperial condition, that of a crime.
    In this way the subjective humanist hero of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment has been rendered into a criminal and a scapegoat.
    Since the humanist placement of the subjective person in an objective scientifically-understood environment has been the source of our collective morality, we are now lost. An inverted and contrived indignation takes its place. There is no line to be draw between benign and vicious indignation. In any case it leads to war.

  3. Re: “let’s not ever lose sight of the fact that war is war is war-”
    Seems to me we lost sight of that long ago, when ‘they’… i believe truman… changed the name of the “War Dept.” to the “Defense Dept.”
    That was about the time when they decided only the us of a would be allowed to have a-bombs, currently referred to as wmd’s.
    adela

  4. Doesn’t ANY humanitarian intervention, even one in response to an earthquake or storm, require use of arms to deter looting and banditry? Could there be any charity mission in Afghanistan or Somalia without protection from substantial automatic weapons? Isn’t any government or peaceful order dependent on the existence of government, a thing predicated, at least in part, on what Weber called “a legitimate monopoly of force”? We might hope that people respond to higher motives, but consider how often they do not.

  5. The way to do this is to make foreigners equal to Americans. Take the incident at Waco, Texas, where Clinton and Janet Reno were pilloried, especially from the right, for participating in a seige that resulted in what — 60-90 deaths.
    Clinton would not get away with killing 10-20 of the Branch Davidians to save the rest. Because they were Americans, with a political constituency and representation in Congress, however nutty.
    If America handles security for the world, it has to have a way for the people who will be killed to represent themselves in American politics as proto-citizens with political power. Otherwise they can be killed off quite easily in our system.
    The nest thing that has to be fixed is the liberal human-rights system’s approach to verifying humanitarian crises. I read today where Blair has admitted that 5,000 people have been recovered from mass graves in Iraq, not 400,000 as previously claimed. There is some mealy-mouthing in there from HRW as well.
    http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1263901,00.html
    PM admits graves claim ‘untrue’

  6. wellbasically, you sound mad. I wonder if you have any idea why that might be? I wonder if it possible to explain anything to you.
    The USA is not the world, it is a small part of the world.

  7. America has a larger military than I can’t remember what, the next 10 countries combined? That’s not for the protection of US borders.

  8. Anthony,
    I don’t mean to be nitpicky here, but we ARE talking about language in this thread. The definition of war is “A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties”, not “an attempt to conquer an enemy and annex its territory (or its colonies or other assets)”. War can be entered into for many reasons other than the one you presented, including pure self defense. Your definition fits the term military aggression far better than it fits the word war. It is my conviction that the Bush administration’s invasion and takeover of Iraq fits the term military aggression and your definition, and not the word war.

  10. Dom,
    You seem to be under the impression that if someone does not see eye to eye with you then he is deaf or perhaps too simple minded to understand your more advanced thinking. It does not seem to have occured to you that 1)he sees it differently than you do, 2) his perception is at least as valid as yours is, or 3) you aren’t making yourself clear. It could even be that 4) you just might be the one who doesn’t get it.

  11. “The USA is not the world, it is a small part of the world.”
    I would like that, to be a small part of the world, unfortunately my country is run by a bunch of people who believe they’re running the whole thing.

  12. Thanks, Shirin, you’ve given me the cue to say what I wanted to say, which is:
    I feel here like a person who has accidentally come in from outside, to find a crowd of people discussing that same outside situation. Although I am the last one in and therefore have the fresh news, nobody is ready to listen to me. So I listen to them, only to find that what they are saying bears no relation to what I have just been seeing with my own eyes.
    Then indeed I must say to myself: they see things differently, their perception is as valid as mine, maybe I just don’t get it. I may also ask myself: is it possible that these people are all in cloud-cuckoo land?
    Either way I’m entitled to call it a dialogue of the deaf.

  13. Dom,
    Maybe you are the one in cloud-cuckoo land. On the other hand maybe you are just not conveying your perfectly reasonable ideas in a way that makes sense to them, and maybe you are not listening to their perfectly sensible ideas.
    My suggestion? Try and try again.

  14. Shirin:
    Now we know why they’re losing their ‘wars’ against poverty,crime,cancer,drugs,terrorists etc.
    We’re not talking dictionary definitions here. We’re talking about the perversion of dictionary definitions when they enter the vernacular… which can be done without insulting other’s pov.

  16. Dom (and everyone), I’m delighted you’re here. Please, please stick around!
    I really like it when people’s comments challenge and stretch my thinking.
    I don’t think that by any means you’re the only non-yankee who comments here, Dom, tho maybe over the past couple weeks you’ve been outnumbered pretty heftily. Anyway, do stick around because the yankees you do hear from here are, imho, well worth ‘talking’ with.
    I think ‘pov’ is a point of view, right? (‘Imho’ is ‘in my humble opinion’.)

  17. Thank you, Helena.
    A bit of ad hominem never did much harm. I think it is a necessary spice of life, myself.
    I have been reading “The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” by James Heartfield; a piece by Kenan Malik from “spiked!” a couple of years ago called “All Cultures are not Equal”; and “The Struggle fo Democracy” by Issa Shivji of Dar-es-Salaam University, to name but three.
    These texts for me add up to this: the struggle for democracy and freedom is ours. It is the Imperialists who are the villains. They have tried to reverse our struggle (chapter and verse is available) with coups, structural adjustment programmes and God knows what else, and whenever they have succeeded, put the blame for the resultant misery on the victims.
    There is a mechanism by which history is forgotten, and quotidian journalistic reports of one atrocity or another are selectively used to roll on this process. When you look at it from a distance you see one thing: that Imperialism is a system that demands continuous war.
    Of course I’m saying: yankee, go home. Please go home. You’re not helping. Right now, you are the problem. The “Death of the Subject” is the problem, over there as much as over here.

  18. “nobody is ready to listen to me. ”
    I don’t think you’ve said much, except that I am mad. I appreciate that the concepts are shocking.

  19. From at least the time of the Bhagavad Gita, humanism has been part of religion. The essence of it is that man, humans, can and must act for justice and to change the world for the better.
    In the Catholic religion in which I was brought up, free will is the necessary condition for virtue and also for sin.
    The great Juan Cole, from whose web site I found my way here, had his battles with the Baha’i Faith over its centralism and its proposed “administrative order”. The same issue, as I understand it. No religion, no morality, without free will.
    What’s all this got to do with the price of eggs, I hear you all say?
    Humanism is free will. Humanitarianism is an administrative order. All the difference in the world.
    You are either with the Pandevas or against them!

  20. Just to finish up:
    An “administrative order” or “new world order”, however perfectly conceived, will and must be enforced by a state monopoly of violence, as we can plainly see; and we can also see that the state re-exerts itself in the same way in the home or metropolitan country.
    Freedom does not reign, my friends. Free moving finance capital may reign, but proper freedom is mass popular agency.
    Your “humanitarian principles” play into the hands of the warmongers.
    That is in general.
    In the particular case of Sudan, what have you examined? Not the history of the missionaries, nor the interests of the adjacent countries, nor the machinations of your own CIA. You have rushed to lay blame, and you will yourselves be rushed along in another round of “geo-politics’, the true dimensions of which you have not seen, because you are not looking.
    You are only gratifying your own uneasy sense of righteousness, because you yourselves have forgotten how to be free.

  21. Dom:
    “pov” = “point of view”
    ‘they’ = whoever would ‘lose’ if whatever ‘war’ that can’t be ‘won’ were ‘won’, like all who’ve invested in fighting ‘enemy x’, as a career or source for their cash, such as cops, scientists, social workers, fund-raisers, insurance salespeople, gov’t agencies.
    btw… meaning ‘by the way’… in america, ‘mad’ usually means ‘very angry’, not ‘insane’.

  23. The “state monopoly of violence” line sets you up for betrayal by the populations which try to join the new world order. The expansion of empires happens at least partially because the provincial nations choose to become part of the empire, for administrative efficiency.
    In the classic example, Julius Caesar’s expansion into Gaul was aided by the Gauls themselves, who made up a large part of his army, and joined the empire to get protection from their neighbors.
    Theoretically, the nations of the middle east benefit by having the US take over their security responsibilities. They don’t have to spend money on their armies. As long as the US maintains the order wisely, they don’t need to fight.

  24. [What follows in this comment is an exchange Dom and I had yesterday in the course of all the above. But I had inadvertently put my bit of it into the Comments board on the Arafat/Gaza post and then Dom replied to it there… It made that Comments board look a little chaotic. Maybe it now does the same here? Mine was 7-19 at 11:27 a.m.]
    I think there is a bit of a problem with ad hominem/ ad feminam jabs in cyberspace, however. (Like calling wellbasically ‘mad’, for example; though some of my best friends have mental disabilities I could definitely read that as an unfounded slur.)
    The problem in cyberspace is that we don’t know each other, or more specifically the cultural stew in which everyone here is swimming, well enough to do things like teasing or ‘friendly’ ad-h/ad-f attacks with any degree of confidence that they will be understood in the same way we might intend them.
    A little of my experience in this regard comes simply from having crossed the atlantic… The British stew that I grew up in was quite heavy on teasing, rhetorical attacks, jokes, irony, and all sorts of meta-communication that are not understood in at all the same way ‘here’ in the US… So in general, I try either to avoid such things in the blogosphere… ok not always successfully, I know… But also, for example, to post public ‘irony alerts’ when I’m engaging in that, etc.
    It is kind of culturally arrogant to assume that everyone else understands things in the same way we do, so finding a workable way to communicate across cultures will always be a a bit of a task. But definitely a worthwhile one!
    [Dom’s was 7-19 at 3:14 p.m.]
    Look at this:
    wellbasically:
    If America handles security for the world, it has to have a way for the people who will be killed to represent themselves in American politics as proto-citizens with political power. Otherwise they can be killed off quite easily in our system.
    Me: wellbasically, you sound mad.
    Now:
    Why should “America” (the USA) “handle” security for the world?
    Why should we have to be “proto-citizens” of the USA?
    How can “proto-citizens” possibly have political power?
    How did you get to the stage of killing people off so easily? (You accept the end of habeas corpus in the USA as a “fact on the ground” now?)
    All these outrageous things come in one paragraph.
    Helena, one knows that irony is lost on US people, and sharp contrasts disturb them. But you are forgetting the stick in their own eye, which is the unconscious arrogance, and how offensive that can be to others. Insulting, I could say.
    But what I actually said was not that wellbasically is mad, but only sounded that way. Sailing way beyond mere condescension, up into the realms of imaginary omnipotence. That’s what it sounds like from here.

  25. I agree that the system I approach I described is incredibly arrogant. It’s crashing to the ground even as we type away here.
    It would benefit the world and my country (USA) if the rest of the humans in the world, Iraqis, Africans, etc, got equal votes as Americans and Europeans about world prosperity and poverty, threats to security, etc.
    Like a national government, the world has a leader (the US) and a congress (the UN). The US is not leading wisely and could fail that way. But there will be a leader one way or another.

  26. wellbasically, are there a lot of people like you in the USA?
    I wonder, if you have the leisure and the funds, whether you might consider a lecture tour to such spots as Soweto, Southern Sudan, Harare, and Mogadishu, on the virtues of imperialism for the subject peoples, the example of the Gauls in relation to Julius Caesar (but don’t mention the Rubicon in South Africa!) and the miraculous and ineffable “leadership” of the United States. Bring cameras and make it into a TV series.

  28. That’s a bit bleak.
    What are we discussing, then? Human society from the point of view of an extra-human monad?

  29. No Dom, you and I have to get together if you want to get your country out of misery. First you’ll have to understand the natural forces which made the USA the country that for right or wrong has responsibility for humanitarian crises.
    I don’t think the USA can keep going like it is, and I don’t want it to. The end will be crashing violence. But you can’t go around the USA and say “let’s not be a superpower any more”.

  31. wellbasically, you rely on assertions, and are not listening to argument.
    Perhaps you would prefer to read a US writer in a US publication, on the subject of your supposed super power. Then Google for Counterpunch and read “American Exceptionalism” by Ron Jacobs, posted on July 21.
    Jacobs argues that the reason “lefts” and liberals have not been able to mount an effective anti-war campaign is that at base they share the same grandiose vision of US hegemony that drives the warmongers themselves.

  32. you can’t go around the USA and say “let’s not be a superpower any more”
    Wellba– you can, and I do.
    Actually, I kind of look at the US relation to the rest of the world these days as being similar to the relationship of S. African whites to the rest of the South Africans in apartheid days… “We” US citizens claim to have a finely functioning democracy but “we” keep the terms of trade and of political power in the rest of the world such as to protect our own supremacy, disproportionate access to resources, etc etc., and “we” also fiercely beat back any attempt to challenge that situation…
    Personally, I think it’s past time that we actually sought to join the rest of the human race on an equal footing. I kind of admire the S. African whites for having agreed to start down that road within the little microcosm of that country, though I know that process is still highly unfinished.
    If you want to look at global apartheid, look at decisionmaking in the Security Council, the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, etc… There’s no even cosmetic attempt to enshrine the principles of human equality there, where it counts.

  33. >>>>the reason “lefts” and liberals have not been able to mount an effective anti-war campaign is that at base they share the same grandiose vision of US hegemony that drives the warmongers themselves.
    >>>>”we” also fiercely beat back any attempt to challenge that situation
    I agree times 10.
    The solution has to be presented in a way that will increase wealth for the whole world, including the rich world. I have argued with my conservo-friends that they have to pay attention to the demands of the poor world, by making a bigger pie, before the poor world decides the slice up a smaller pie on its own.
    The problem with the ultra-left or Green approach on this issue is that they advocate policies which will make the pie smaller. This is a loser both in the rich world and in the poor world. That’s why Tom Friedman can find African, Indian, Asian expatriates to fill up his columns with sunny little stories about globalization.
    The US is actually in a good position to hear from the poor world, as we have so many immigrants from poor countries who could work through the US political system. But the US is also trapped in fear and hate of the outside world.

  34. For instance, I read today where Sudan, which is in the middle of a war, has $20B in debt to the IMF. Sudan’s yearly budget is $1B.
    To pay off the debt, Sudan has an income tax rate of 30%. This bracket starts at the whopping sum of $54/year. Because it isn’t working, the IMF is encouraging Sudan to implement further austerity measures, ie cut spending more, increase taxes more.
    But the lefty response is inadequate, because taxes are beneficial and consumption is bad in the lefty universe. The Wall Street Democrats such as Clinton actually still believe that balancing budgets is the way these poor countries will get richer.

  35. Sudan: Action to follow?

    (Sudan Archive) Like many–including Helena Cobbam of the Christian Science Monitor–I am hoping the international community will avoid an invasion of Sudan; yet, there’s a steady drumbeat of reportage from the Darfur region (NW Sudan) to the effect th…

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