The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Africa

The Ongoing Libyan Catastrophe

It’s worth remembering that before Hillary Clinton convinced Barack Obama to support bombing the hell out of Libya, Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa.

Today, it has open air slave markets and is fought over by various Jihadist groups. The so-called central government is a punching bag.

Even if you thought Libya was a bad place, run by a bad man (and he was no saint), the truth is that you never, ever, want the US to intervene in any country unless you want it to become a failed state wasteland. This isn’t your great-grandfather’s US; it isn’t the US which rebuilt Germany and Japan. This is late-Imperial-decline-America, incapable of nation building even at home, let alone in other countries.

Libya was the primary reason Clinton was unqualified to be President. After being for the Iraq war, Libya proved she had learned nothing; that she would make the same mistake again.

Libya has also contributed to destabilizing the EU, as it has contributed to the refugee crisis. Whatever problems the US has with the EU, and vice-versa, straight realpolitik suggest that you don’t undermine you second most important ally in the world (right after Japan) when a new hegemonic power (China) is rising to challenge your dominance.

But ultimately it’s about the people. About the harm. About the slavery, death, disease, rapes, and torture that the “intervention” led to. The attack was, ultimately, monstrous, judged solely on its results. Results which, after Iraq and Afghanistan, were easily predictable.

American liberals have this weird idea that they’re still the good guys, and that the US is a force for good in the world. It isn’t. The best thing for the world, and the US (and Americans), right now, would be for the US to remove its troops from around the world, stop attacking other nations (including drone bombing them) and mind its own business. There’s plenty of problems at home the US should fix first, before it ever goes abroad looking for monsters.


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Mandela’s NeoLiberal Compromise

South Africa may no longer have apartheid, but the majority of the population still lives in poverty, the heights of the economy are controlled largely by whites, and rich blacks are concentrated in the upper ranks of the ANC and their families.  The rape rate is possibly the highest in the world, with a quarter of men admitting to having committed a rape and a quarter of women to having been raped, while murder is rampant.

The ANC had originally intended to purse socialist policies, including taking away the wealth of the richest whites.  Nelson Mandela decided not to do that.  There are varying accounts of why, from outright bribery to being convinced, but let’s go with convinced.  The story is that once Mandela was released from prison, as he traveled the world, it was explained to him that if white flight occurred, his country would mimic Zimbabwe’s fate, and taking away the wealth of the richest whites and distributing it would cause that white flight.

So most of the redistributive part of the ANC’s program was jettisoned.  Blacks were to have political freedom, but whites would control the economy.  (Though you certainly don’t want to be a poor white in S. Africa.)  Tax rates in S. Africa are typical: low for individuals, lower for corporations.

Bear in mind that when Mandela made this decision the prices of commodities, S. Africa’s main exports, were substantially depressed.

Mandela was in a bind, take that advice as ‘warnings’ and you probably read it better: “if you do this, we will disapprove. We cannot allow such redistribution to work, so it won’t.”

Mandela chose to take what was on the table, political freedom absent redistributive justice.

Was it the right decision?

Yes.  Not because it isn’t theoretically possible to do redistribution and make it work, but because at the time it was harder, and because the ANC wasn’t up to the job.  Given how they have botched far simpler policy areas, like HIV, given their rampant corruption, the idea that redistribution could be managed by them in a fair way, while maintaining economic growth and avoiding being crushed by the outside reaction is not credible.  These are not competent people, they are noticeably incompetent.

S. Africa has significant advantages in its mineral wealth (though that can also be a curse).  Resources that the rest of the world must have give you leverage to do what you want, and tell everyone else to take a hike (see Saudi Arabia).  But pulling that off requires finesse and it is harder to do if you have a redistributionist ideology, because international elites are happy to tolerate regressive regimes but do not want fair regimes to succeed, lest they show other countries that inequality and unfair trade deals are not inevitable.

Venezuela, though good has been done, is botching their experiment; so is Argentina.  S. Africa could never have pulled it off.

Much of this is probably also down to Mandela’s age: he was in his late seventies when he was President.  He did not have ten good years left to finesse through this sort of change, he did not have competent heirs or time to create them; instead he had the ANC, whose leaders were corrupt at best.

When the attempt is made at real redistributive justice, as it must be, it will be easiest done if a number of countries do it at about the same time, supporting each other, and acting as a bloc. If key resource nations like Canada, Russia, much of South America and S. Africa were to get together, it would be very difficult to bully them, because they control key resources which cannot be substituted away from except at great cost, and in some cases, at all.

Trade is key in the sense that countries must be able to buy certain key things they can’t make.  If producers work together, in solidarity, they can gain policy independence internally.  But this can only be done as a group, or great costs will be inflicted by the oligarchical forces of the developed world who do not want to, ever, see 90% tax rates create good economies ever again.

 

How to Create a Viable Ideology

The most important question about any ideology or social structure are: “Does it win?” and “Can it defend itself?”

Hunter-gathering, if the land-capacity isn’t close to carrying capacity, is usually a pretty good way to live. What we see in the archaeological record is that when the land gets close to carrying capacity, there is ton of violence, the number one cause of death of adult males becomes violence. Enough below the carrying capacity and there is very little violence. This is a generalization, there are exceptions, but the data seem to indicate it is generally true.

Hunter-gatherers are, generally speaking, healthier than agriculturalists and pastoralists. They live longer, suffer less from disease, are taller, the women have wider hips and suffer less from childbirth, they have better dentition and so on. The societies, again with some exceptions, are more egalitarian than most agricultural societies (though very early agricultural societies are more egalitarian than late hunter-gatherer societies, again, in general). They also have vastly more free time than agriculturalists.

Basically, being a hunter-gatherer is about as good as it gets for most of human existence. There are some better agricultural societies to live in for brief periods (certain periods of Roman history, say) but they are rare. Industrial society produces better medicine and goods, but we work harder and have vastly more chronic disease even at the same age, and industrial society includes, as its concomitant, things like the widespread rape in the Congo and African poverty–that’s a requirement of our society, it’s not incidental.

But hunter-gatherers lose confrontations with pastoralists and agricultural societies. It’s a great way to live, but more dense societies were better at violence, so hunter-gatherers were forced to the margins.

Whatever your society is like, it has to be able to win confrontations. However your ideology organizes your society, even if that ideology produces a much more enjoyable society in which to live than your competitors, it must be able to persist in either the long or short term against its competitors. Otherwise, you’ve got a problem.

Time-scale matters. An ideology that produces a society that lasts for 150 years of pretty wonderful life then loses to someone better at violence might look pretty damn good to most of us.

An ideology may also have internal contradictions which doom it. The Soviet form of Marxist-Leninism was vastly successful in its early years, something we forget now. During the Great Depression, the USSR was doing far better than most of the rest of the world (except the fascist bits). The USSR is the only country larger than a city state to industrialize using anything but mercantilism. I am aware of no other exceptions.

But the USSR’s control mechanism could not deal with the information problem. It worked gangbusters at first, but then parties formed who were able to control information flow to the central planners, doomed it. Mancur Olson, in his book Power and Prosperity, deals well with both the rise of the USSR and its fall.

Neo-liberalism has amongst its internal contradictions the complete inability to manage climate change. This contradiction comes from its insistence on short term interest and its refusal to deal properly with public goods. To neo-liberalism, the future exists only at the point a market starts discounting that future. Unfortunately for the world, markets suck at recognizing the future beyond a few years out, and by the time a market notices, the key decision points for heading off an undesirable future may well be long past.

(Neo-liberalism also has a pile of other internal contradictions, but this isn’t an article on neo-liberalism, so we’ll pass them by for now.)

Within an ideology are prescriptions for internal vs. external power relations. So a society must be able to win its fights with outside societies running different ideologies, but it also includes prescriptions for how power is divided internally. In the European Middle Ages, most of Europe was ruled by rapacious nobles, but the Swiss Cantons had male suffrage. This was based on the fact that Swiss Pikemen could beat the pants off feudal noble cavalry. But the requirement for Swiss Pikemen was economically prosperous men who could and would fight, not starved peasants. And men who could fight, and had to fight together, insisted on having power.  There is a direct analogy between this and classical Greek Democracy (made up exactly of the fighting population), and the Roman Republican period, where citizenry is divided into three classes, based in part on how they fought (the Equestrian class, above the Plebes, could afford to fight on horseback.)

Power comes in a number of flavors. You have violence. You have productive capacity.  You have consumptive ability. You have social ties. You have ideological production.  The more of each of these any group has, the more power they have. The more power they have, the more of the surplus production of their society (or, in many cases, the non surplus production) they are able to control.  If you want prosperity, you want power spread as evenly throughout your society as possible. You never want complete equality in outcome, because you do want some competition, it helps drive society forward, but right now our problem is the exact opposite: too much concentration of power, too little equality.

Each of those groups, and they will exist, will compete against each other. Different people have different interests. If one group or a coalition of groups gains more  power, they will also gain more of the productive surplus. Part of an ideology’s job is to make it so that, as much as possible, everyone’s interests in society are similar.

John F. Kennedy once said “a rising tide lifts all boats.” People took that as a descriptive statement, but in a society it is not, it is a prescriptive statement: if you want any increases in production to go to everyone, you have to make that happen, and to make it happen you have to believe it should happen. But the step before that is making sure that power is divided relatively evenly through society, so that it does happen. But, again, that is an ideological choice: many people don’t believe that everyone should have relatively equal power.

To have relatively equal power you cannot allow the means of production or violence to be overly concentrated.  Jefferson was making a profoundly practical statement when he warned that banks and standing armies were dangerous to a republic and democracy. Banks allow people to print money, those who print money make money, it gives them a powerful advantage over people who cannot do so. Those who control violence: well, I’m sure I don’t have to make that point.

It is for this reason, for example, that I believe everyone (male or female) should have military training.  It is not an accident that Switzerland, where every male has an assault rifle and military training, has such a high standard of living or voted on whether to have a guaranteed annual income. It is also why I believe in cadre armies and that no large standing armies should exist.  (The solution for money creation is more complicated, and I’ll go into it at a later date.)

If you want a society, then, which is prosperous and egalitarian, with the proceeds of increased production going to everyone and not just a few, you must have an internal structure of power which gives ordinary people quite a bit, makes concentration of power in private hands difficult, makes the government unable to use too much power against its own citizenry while (and this is the important bit) still being able to defend itself externally, and able to resist internal putsches. Egalitarian societies which cannot defend themselves get overwhelmed by hierarchical societies which are better at violence.

This extends to monetary matters. If outsiders with money can buy up your society and upset your internal political and productive relationships because they are more efficient, or just bigger, or have their capital more concentrated, if you will let them buy you up because some part of your society wants to cash out, then whatever internal relationships you have are vulnerable. This has happened to vast swathes of the third world, where Westerners come in and buy out traditional relationships. NAFTA pushed millions of Mexicans off their farms, made Mexico weaker because those people now needed to pay for food (often foreign, and also less nutritious), and made Mexico, objectively, worse off than before NAFTA. But some Mexicans got very rich by selling out.

This is a particular problem for smaller groups trying to create societies within larger societies. If you can be bought out, if some of you want to sell, take the money and run, you are not viable. Quakers and so on have an ideology which doesn’t allow for selling out this way, thus they are viable in the long-term, whatever one thinks of them.

So, an ideology, a belief system, among other things, tells you what is and isn’t legitimate to sell for money. A stable system says you can’t buy key parts of the social structure. In a functioning democracy, anything that comes even close to buying a vote, for example, is verboten. When we moved from late Feudalism to early industrialization, feudal rights were done away with–including the commons. Enclosure of land took away rights from people who had them before and gave those rights to other people. Serfs, for all we sneer at them, had rights. Those rights were taken away. The ex-serfs who flooded into early industrial cities after enclosure lived far worse lives than they had under late feudalism (this is WELL established). They lived shorter, unhealthier lives, worked harder to earn money which left them living in worse circumstances than when they were back on the land.

So when you’re creating a new ideology, or modifying an old one, you have to consider these points: the relation to the means of production, the ability to generate violence in defense or offense and the effectiveness of that violence, the question of whether the system can be capsized by money or if the key parts of the system are off-limits (due to irrational attachment, absolutely it must be irrational) to capsizing through money or equivalents. If you want an egalitarian prosperous society is power objectively divided up so that the masses have the ability defend their share of surplus production? How will those who do get a little extra (and they will always exist) or who control a little extra, try to capsize that system and seize more? What are the protections against what they will try and are those protections based on strong, irrational beliefs and backed up by a willingness to employ violence? (If you aren’t, and they are, you will lose. Period.)

Note, finally, the use of the word irrational. We think of irrationality as bad, but rational decision making leads to betrayal. If someone’s going to offer me more than I can otherwise earn to betray the rest of my people, a lot of folks are going to take that deal unless they have the irrational belief that it’s wrong, and a rational belief that if they do it, those who have an irrational belief in the system will hurt them, or even kill them.

This is ideology. Any ideological system that doesn’t produce people willing to die and kill for it, will lose to an ideology that does. The question is not whether violence is permitted, the question is when it is permitted. Most of us want to live in a peaceful society; I certainly do. But that peace is always and everywhere under-girded by rules about when to commit violence, a willingness to do so and an ability do it well. Societies and ideologies that do not do violence well exist at the sufferance of those who do, and live under the conditions and in the places that those good at violence permit. Generally very bad conditions.


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Destroying the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia Caused the Nairobi Mall Attack

Look, years ago, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) destroyed the warlords who ran Somalia’s capital.  These warlords, to give some context, would drag teenaged girls, by which I mean 14 years old, out of their parents shanty, take them away, and gang rape them.

The ICU were Islamic, to be sure, but they weren’t particularly radical as such folks go, and they brought law and order.  They were willing to make nice without the outside world, wanted to be the government and were willing to negotiate.  Sure, they would have imposed some variation of Sharia, but it would have been an improvement on the Warlords.  A massive improvement.

The West wouldn’t have it, it got African neighbors to invade (and don’t pretend it would have happened if the US, in particular, hadn’t wanted it to).  The ICU splintered, and as often happens, the people who replaced them were far nastier, were straight up Islamists.

And so you get this chilling statement:

An Al Shabaab spokesman as far back as in October 2011 had threatened Kenya with retaliation if it did not get its soldiers off Somali soil.

Ali Mohamud Rage said: ‘‘We, the Mujahideen, say to the Kenyan government: have you thought of the repercussions of the war against us? We are far more experienced in combat than you.’‘

Which is chilling because it is true.

As for driving them out of the cities, so what?  The Taliban was driven out of the cities too.  Rural based insurgencies don’t need the cities, they are not particularly important.  They’re easy for conventional militaries to hold, bit they also don’t matter much.

 

 

How To Defeat the Somali Pirates

Matt Yglesisas sums it up properly—you defeat them by denying them ports to sell their goods and the reason piracy is so out of control is because, as I noted at the time it was happening, they decided to get rid of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the only movement that stood a chance of reunifying Somalia, stopping warlords from raping and murdering whoever they wanted, and, incidentally, stopping piracy.

So, if the Obama administration is serious, what they need to do is a 180 degree turn and support the successors to the ICU.  Yes, that will mean supporting some Islamists, but so what?  If the US can do business with and support Saudi Arabia, which is even more socially regressive than the ICU ever was, and funds foreign terrorists who attack the US, which the ICU never did, it can make a deal with Somali Islamists, who in any case, are mostly interested in having some basic law and order in the country so that warlords don’t rape their teenage daughters and murder whoever they feel like.

Given a choice between having my teenage daughter raped, and a little bit of Islamic law, I know which one I’d choose.  Perhaps America should let Somalis make the same choice.  As a side benefit, there’ll be a lot less piracy, because the new government will want normal trade and diplomatic relations (and aid) and the price for all that can be to crack down on the pirates, which as Matt notes, can only really be done on land.

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