Principled, Pragmatic AND Expedient? You Betcha! Replying To Paul Buchanan.

Predatory Morality: Is geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, right? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars – especially New Zealand?

MUCH IS BEING MADE of the fact that New Zealand firms are exporting military equipment to unsavoury regimes. Geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, reflected the views of many critical of New Zealand’s involvement in the international arms trade when he declared on his Kiwipolitico blog: “If NZ is to regain a semblance of integrity in diplomatic circles, its foreign policy decision-making matrix must change away from trade obsessed expediency and towards the principled but pragmatic orientation that grants it the independence that it claims to have.”

“Regain a semblance of integrity”? Seriously? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars?

Certainly, New Zealand’s arms exports are not going to be condemned by their principal recipients (which, if Buchanan is to be believed, includes the NATO countries and many of our most important regional allies). Nor should we tolerate the slightest reproof from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (USA, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France) who also just happen to be the world’s five largest arms exporters. Unlikely, too, that this country will suffer criticism from the really “bad buggers” on our list of arms importers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They, at least, have no expectations of ever being regarded as unblemished moral exemplars. Murderous autocracy is its own reward.

So, if the foreign offices and state departments of the world are not going to waste a moment tut-tutting little New Zealand for daring to export military equipment to their friends, allies and leading petrochemical suppliers, then who is?

A couple of idealistic RNZ journalists, seemingly. Tipped-off, perhaps, by that outspoken anti-imperialist Valerie Morse, who has never seen a gun she didn’t abhor – unless it was in the hands of her wannabe freedom-fighter friends “exercising” in the Urewera bush.

Then there’s the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman, who has been tut-tutting fit to beat the band. But, then, Ghahraman, if properly cross-examined, would probably admit to not wanting New Zealand to have an arms industry at all – or, for that matter, an army. In the eyes of the Greens, guns (and mortar sights) are inextricably bound up with imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and all those other things deemed injurious to children, animals and other living things. Away with them!

One can only feel a pang of sympathy for the boffins in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). On the receiving-end of a flurry of Official Information Act requests, they had little option but to reveal the extent to which New Zealand’s high-tech industries have been making the most of the world’s insatiable appetite for the weapons of war.

Promoting trade is, after all, MFAT’s job, and, to give them their due, they’re bloody good at it. Like the rest of the world’s diplomats and bureaucrats, ours tend to work on the principle that what is not expressly prohibited is tacitly permitted. Should someone have been looking over someone’s shoulder when the application for a permit to export military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE came across their desk. Probably. Politicians hate surprises, so a good public servant anticipates trouble before it becomes a headline. Even so, no laws were broken.

Buchanan has posed the question: “Principled, pragmatic or expedient”. Once again, the proposition is a curious one. Is he arguing that it is possible to be both principled and pragmatic but not expedient? His positioning of the word “or” would suggest so. But to treat all expedient decisions as in some way morally objectionable is to render practical diplomacy impossible.

The conduct of sovereign states is almost always dictated by what their rulers deem expedient. Indeed, it is easier to mount a moral case for the most principled diplomacy being that which delivers the most expedient outcomes for all the states involved in an international dispute. Pragmatism, in this context, may be seen as the ability to obtain the maximum of one’s country’s objectives with the minimum of moral and material compromises.

Buchanan would also have New Zealand draw a clear distinction between the moral status of its Five Eyes partners – most especially his homeland, the United States – and other international actors. Included on his list of countries with whom it is unacceptable to seek expedient outcomes one finds not only Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia, but also the People’s Republic of China. The latter is castigated by Buchanan for systemically abusing human rights at home, denying individual and collective rights as a matter of course and treating minorities as if they were foreign enemies.

As someone who has worked closely with not only America’s soldiers, but also America’s diplomats, Buchanan must be aware of the speciousness of this line of argument. The great distinction between Chinese and American imperialism is that China, for its whole history, has been a contiguous land empire. Unlike the United States, which, upon subduing (and in many cases exterminating) all those who hindered its expansion across the North American continent, proceeded to extend its imperial reach across the entire planet, China has been content to remain within its historical borders. Ethnic and religious threats to China’s rulers have always been dealt with internally. Threats to America’s global hegemony, by contrast, almost always originate offshore. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the USA – no less than China – has abused human rights with wanton and murderous abandon.

Buchanan’s laborious description of the United States process of determining whether or not arms should be supplied to a particular regime would be funny if it was not for the sobering fact that this former participant in “the decision-making chain” for “US military sales and training, etc. to Latin American countries” clearly believes every word he is writing. As if the sickening history of Uncle Sam’s murder and mayhem in Latin America was perpetrated by some other power. “The process was slow and circuitous but in the end it was comprehensive and transparent.” Tell that to the victims of the Contras, Paul! Tell it to the Mayans!

Perhaps it is Buchanan’s own experiences in Latin America that cause him to treat expediency as a dirty word. Certainly, what New Zealand finds it expedient to do differs greatly from what the United States considers expedient. Buchanan knows full well that New Zealand’s size and relative powerlessness severely restricts the harm it can do. Ultimately, the well-being of New Zealanders depends upon their country’s trading relationships with the rest of the world. Maximising that trade is, accordingly, the principled, the pragmatic and the expedient thing to do.

Buchanan is the son of a brutal imperial power. New Zealand used to be the colony of one and must now do all within its power to avoid becoming the colony of another. It ill-behoves a former citizen of the United States (and a newly-minted citizen of New Zealand) to lecture his adopted country on the morality, or otherwise, of its foreign policy. The Kiwi, unlike the Bald Eagle, is not a bird of prey.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 April 2021.

In Harm's Way.

What It's Not About: The harms suffered by those on the receiving end of Free Speech will always be less than the harms unleashed upon the rest of society by any attempt to suppress it. The experience of suffering is part of the human condition. Nothing throughout history has given rise to more damage, injury and hurt than the attempts by ideologues of all persuasions to create a world in which nobody comes to harm.

WHAT IS “HARM”? On how this word is defined will turn a number of critical political debates. The meaning of Freedom of Expression and the definition of Terrorism are only the most important of these pending societal conversations. “Harm”, and what it is deemed to encompass, may precipitate profound legal and cultural consequences. Define the term too widely and many of the civil liberties we take for granted as citizens of a democratic state may disappear. Clearly, what we’re talking about here is “some pretty serious shit”.

Let’s begin with the generally accepted definition of “harm”. In plain language, to harm someone is to “damage, injure or hurt” them. In a legal context, harm may be inflicted by damaging, injuring or hurting a person’s body, mind, property and/or reputation. Thus, one’s standing in the community can be harmed by slander and defamation. One can also be harmed indirectly by being forced to witness hurt and injury being inflicted upon others. Intention is crucial to the definition of harm. In the absence of clear evidence that the alleged harm was inflicted intentionally, guilt is difficult to establish.

Over the next few months we are likely to see the concept of harm deployed in the name of further limiting Freedom of Expression. Our legal system already prohibits speech that is intended to – and likely to – inflict physical and/or emotional harm on persons on account of their ethnicity.

In the wake of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings, however, pressure has been building for a significant expansion of the legal meaning of harm. In addition to banning speech inciting physical violence and contempt against persons on account of their ethnicity, it is proposed to also ban criticism and/or vilification of the cultural and religious practices and beliefs of individuals, groups and “communities”. In effect the idea that a person’s reputation (and, hence, their well-being) can be harmed by untruthful words, spoken and/or written with malicious intent, is being extended to include entire ethnicities and faith communities.

If successful, this expansion of the definition of harm will make it legally hazardous to criticise too vigorously a religious faith and its adherents. These legal reforms may even extend to banning the expression of ideologies asserting the existence of an ethnic and/or cultural hierarchy in which people of colour are degraded and the “white races” exalted as supreme. Such restrictions would be justified by characterising such speech as a form of defamation: harming not only the collective reputation of the ethnic group under attack, but also inflicting serious emotional damage on the individuals targeted by such speech, and thereby materially damaging their ability to live full and happy lives.

If harm is construed in this way it will become possible for the definition of terrorism to be changed in the manner suggested by both Paul Spoonley and Paul Buchanan on this morning’s edition of RNZ’s Morning Report.

The old definition of terrorism spoke of “actual or threatened violence deployed by individuals or groups in pursuit of a specific political objective, or set of objectives”. But if harm is taken to include emotional as well as physical injury, then violence, too, can be redefined. Taking a leaf out of the family law textbooks, the concept of violence may be stretched to include the “collateral damage” inflicted upon those forced to witness the spectacle of others being hurt.

A terrorist could, thus, be any individual or group which, by seeking political changes based on the suppression of certain ethnic, religious and/or cultural communities, is guilty of inflicting emotional violence on other, supposedly non-targeted, individuals and groups. Merely by giving voice to hateful ideological precepts, it could be argued, these miscreants are applying direct political pressure to the nation’s democratic institutions – and thereby identifying themselves as terrorists.

Both Spoonley and Buchanan seemed keen for the creation of just such a regime. By freezing the assets of citizens designated as terrorists by the Prime Minister, they could be “calmed down” and brought into line. At which point, presumably, their property would be returned to them and, just like the drugged-up dissidents released from Soviet mental asylums in the 1970s, they could re-enter society as model citizens.

To a great many New Zealanders the redefinition of “harm” and “terrorism” in the manner described above will be greeted with dismay and suspicion. Extending the state’s legal powers in the ways suggested would weaken quite significantly the rights guaranteed to New Zealanders by the Bill of Rights Act 1990. Where once there had been general agreement on what could and couldn’t be said in relation to one’s fellow citizens, changes of this nature will open up deep rifts in New Zealand society. Such measures will be widely interpreted as an attempt to police people’s thoughts and beliefs by criminalising opinions with which the authors of the legislation disagree.

Far from calming people down and persuading them to come into line with the official view, laws seen as protecting specific ethnicities and cultures by limiting what other ethnicities and cultures are permitted to publicly endorse will undoubtedly embitter and inflame a dangerously large number of those so constrained. Convinced that they are being unjustly criminalised on account of their beliefs, a hard core of the targeted group will embrace the very hate-filled terrorist tactics such laws are intended to control and punish.

Buchanan would categorise such behaviour as evidence of the Right’s lack of consciousness of the consequences of their ideological convictions and utterances. He would argue that, since the taking of offence is justifiable only among those who have been offended, it is up to them – and them alone – to determine what is, and is not, offensive. That only those harmed can define what is harmful. Or, to put it more plainly, the right-wing assholes on the receiving end of these new definitions of harm and violence will just have to suck it up.

The glaring fault in this reasoning is that in attempting to rectify the Right’s lack of consciousness of the political consequences of its actions, the Left will have opened itself up to exactly the same charge – and the political consequences of its failure to be mindful of the future will be no less serious.

The only viable way out of this conundrum is to inculcate in both the Left and the Right the notion that the harms suffered by those on the receiving end of Free Speech will always be less than the harms unleashed upon the rest of society by any attempt to suppress it. The experience of suffering is part of the human condition. Nothing throughout history has given rise to more damage, injury and hurt than the attempts by ideologues of all persuasions to create a world in which nobody comes to harm.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 23 March 2021.

Steering By The Real: Chris Trotter Responds To Paul Buchanan.

Uncharacteristically Idealistic: Normally a cool-headed realist (as befits an expert in international relations) Dr Paul Buchanan has taken issue with Chris Trotter's "cynical" Bowalley Road posting Dirty Politics - Is There Any Other Kind? by offering a passionately idealistic defence of democratic politics.

WHEN ACADEMICS take to blogging the rest of us best be careful. And when they offer comment on the subject of dirty politics we should all pay attention. I will always remember my history lecturer, Dr Michael Cullen’s, confident dismissal of the challenge of representing the working-class Dunedin electorate of St Kilda after the 1981 General Election. Having secured selection, he told his admiring followers in Labour Youth that Parliament would be a welcome respite from the most vicious and dirty political environment of them all – the university common room.

 

Dr Paul Buchanan has more reason than most to endorse Dr Cullen’s comments, which is why I was surprised to see him describe what I regarded as an admirably realistic assessment of democratic politics as evidence that I had either lost my ideological bearings or had “consciously decided to join the Dark Side”.

 

In Why Throw In The Towel? – A Brief Response To Trotter’s Cynicism I am thus dismissed by Dr Buchanan as either bewildered or a blackguard, and my offending essay Dirty Politics – Is There Any Other Kind? is deemed “a cynical defence of dirty politics as being the norm”.

 

Unfortunately, Dr Buchanan’s critique does not engage with my essay’s essentially historical-realist argument. He does, however, rehearse (in suitably dense academic prose) my inverted Clausewitzian characterisation of politics as “the continuation of war by other means”. Democratic politics, in particular, argues Dr Buchanan, must be “self-limiting” lest the “political game descends into a zero-sum self-interested maximisation of collective opportunities.”

 

The above sentence is not, however, how I would formulate the alternative to the self-limiting behaviour so crucial to democracy’s success. The historical record suggests that, in the real world, the “self-interested maximisation of collective opportunities” is the democratic norm, and that, historically, the descent from that norm is characterised by the decision of key political actors to abandon self-limitation in favour of popular or state violence. “Foul means or fouler” was how I put it: revolution or repression.

 

Bluntly speaking, Dr Buchanan’s uncharacteristically idealistic aspirations for democracy (in his discussions of international relations he has always struck me as a pretty staunch realist) cannot survive the taste-test of history. And it is this ahistorical idealism which largely explains his disinclination to engage with any of the many historical examples included in my essay – not even the all-American examples advanced by his compatriot Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

 

Whether it be the dirty political deal that abandoned Southern Blacks to their fate in 1876; or Joseph P. Kennedy’s dirty deal with the Chicago mob to secure the crucial electoral votes of Illinois for his son in the desperately close presidential election of 1960; or the low-down and dirty theft of the 2000 presidential election by the Bush clique and their Supreme Court allies; the historical proofs for the universality of dirty politics are legion.

 

Nor can Dr Buchanan escape this reality by shovelling all the blame for dirty politics onto the “elites”. The shenanigans I have observed in union elections do not bear repeating, and even in the idealistic Green Party the ruthlessly ambitious have been known to reach for the contents of the self-composting toilet.

 

Democracy has always danced upon the back of the monstrous interests composing the capitalist state. It does so, with the lightest of feet, because it knows that while the monsters beneath prefer to govern by consent, they are perfectly willing to resort to force. To preserve at least the illusion of consent, the political writers of the 1920s, were quick to reassure the powerful that, properly managed by astute politicians, a responsible media and the new (dark) arts of advertising and public relations, the millions of newly enfranchised voters would pose no serious threat to the status quo. For the likes of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, democracy without deception and distraction was a non-starter.

 

These are not pleasant truths, but those who locate themselves on the Left would be most unwise to ignore or dismiss them. Navigating by the starry eyes of the idealistic all-too-often lands left-wingers on the rocks. I prefer to steer by the real.

 

But there is dirty politics that works, and dirty politics that doesn’t. The manufacturing of popular consent increases in effectiveness in inverse proportion to the voters’ proximity to the factories where it is made. What Nicky Hager has exposed in his book is the failure of the National Party leadership to recognise in Cameron Slater and his comrades a political cadre too protean, too volatile, and much too much in love with the smell of napalm in the morning to be allowed anywhere near the Prime Minister’s Office. What Nicky describes is Watergate writ small: a scandal precipitated by a general failure, at the highest levels, to understand that the essence of successful democratic politics is illusion; and the only thing you must never do is allow the mask to slip.

 

This essay was simultaneously posted on the Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog blogsites on Friday, 22 August 2014.