07/26/12 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, ScottHorton.org.
Our next guest is Brendan O'Neill, he's the editor of Spiked Online.
Which I don't have in front of me, is it SpikedOnline.co.uk, something like that.
Anyway, hi Brendan, how's it going?
Hi Scott, good thanks.
Is it SpikedOnline.org or .co.uk or what?
SpikedOnline.com .com, well that's easy enough.
I don't know why I thought it had to be more complicated than that.
Well I'm looking at this blog that you wrote for the London Telegraph.
It's blogs.telegraph.co.uk, that's complicated enough.
Amnesty International's latest arms trade campaign is colonialism with a kindly face.
Now, there's this UN small arms treaty, some kind of small arms treaty, I don't know all the details of it.
The only coverage it's getting here in the States is that they want to abolish the second amendment.
And I wouldn't really put it past the Democrats to try, although I haven't read the thing, I don't know if you have.
Well I think the main point about the arms trade treaty is to prevent the sale of arms to countries that are likely to commit human rights abuses.
So this is really not about the domestic American arms trade, this is about small arms sales overseas.
It's mainly about arms trade overseas, that's particularly the aspect that Amnesty is most focused on.
And what's really interesting about it is just the way in which groups like Amnesty are calling on Obama, calling on Washington, to support this treaty and to prevent the sale of arms to certain third world countries, which really promotes the idea that America somehow has the moral authority to say which countries deserve to be armed and which don't, which seems like a very bizarre idea to me.
Yeah, it's more like they have the de facto authority because it's their Joint Special Operations Command training up the death squads in all these various countries around the world.
Well yeah, that's one of the problems with Amnesty's approach.
It's very naive and apolitical and it seems to believe that simply by removing guns themselves from certain countries, you will fix all the problems around the world.
But things are much more complicated, much more political, and America's role in arming these countries for political reasons is, as you say, quite deep and quite profound, and has been going on for many years around the world.
So the problem with groups like Amnesty and their demand that Obama should prevent the sale of arms to certain countries is that they really, firstly it's very naive about the role that America plays in the world, which is a very problematic role, and also it just goes some way towards granting America even more moral authority to dictate to other countries when it is legitimate for them to have guns, when they should fight wars, what they should be free to do, and so on.
So Amnesty is effectively bolstering America's role in the international sphere.
Right.
And isn't it funny that the people at Amnesty, the staff of Amnesty, would be the ones with the doe eyes on these issues?
I mean, you go to these people when you want to find out how bad is the torture in this or that country's prison system, or you want to know how bad is the humanitarian crisis in the Sunni triangle in Iraq, or something like that, and then they're the very same people who, you know, on this show a year ago I had a guy on from Amnesty who couldn't wait for the bombs to fall, well more than a year ago now, couldn't wait for the bombs to start falling in Libya to do the regime change against the terrible Qaddafi.
And I thought, and I said to him, well yeah, but then what?
And you want the Americans and NATO to be the ones in charge of saving the Libyans, really?
The same Americans and Europeans that we've been dealing with?
And, you know, it is like you say, it was like he just got here or something, thought the turnip truck went to go work for the Amnesty, or maybe he's just paid to think that, or I don't know what.
Well, the problem with groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch is that they believe very strongly in the moral authority of the West over the rest, in the moral authority of supposedly civilised countries like America and Britain over uncivilised countries in Africa and parts of Asia.
And you can see that in their campaigning all the time.
So they call upon Washington, for example, to lecture China about human rights and about its role in Tibet, which overlooks the fact that Washington has caused far more devastation in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 10 years than China has done in Tibet.
So the idea that America has any role in kind of telling China what to do is just completely bizarre.
And it also, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch also call on Western institutions like the International Criminal Court to try leaders of African nations that have been fighting in wars.
And so they create this idea that a Western institution like the ICC has the right to tell effectively the blacks of Africa, the uncivilised blacks, where they've gone wrong, where they've committed war crimes, how they must improve their behaviour and so on.
So there's a real old style Victorian imperialist drive behind some of these human rights campaigns.
And I think they often, sometimes wittingly and sometimes unwittingly, they pave the way for interventions around the world.
They pave the way for Western interventions in the way in which they compile constant reports about the terrible things that are happening in foreign countries.
They imbue the West with a sense of moral mission and with the idea that it has the right to go into these countries and to fix them.
So I think Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other groups like that who focus on foreign human rights abuses have actually got a lot to answer for when it comes to Western intervention around the world today.
Well and sometimes it's hard because you could really mean well and end up serving interests that are not your own and are in fact very cynical ones, right?
Like it's pretty easy to just de facto hate and think the authority of the dictatorship in Syria is illegitimate, but that doesn't mean you have to help the Americans and the Israelis and the Saudis have their way there.
You know what I mean?
Well, exactly.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And I think the thing that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and others most remind me of is the Christian missionaries who went to Africa in the 19th century and said, oh, there's all these uncivilized people.
And then in their wake there followed imperialist ventures, wars that conquered certain African nations and defeated certain African tribes.
So I think actually Amnesty plays a similar role to those old Christian missionaries.
It sends its kind of white do-gooders across the world to collect these documents on human rights abuses.
And it has this trickle-down effect within Western government institutions who say, yes, we must do something about human rights.
Yes, we must bomb Yugoslavia in 1999 to prevent human rights abuses by Milosevic.
Yes, we must intervene in Afghanistan in 2001 to prevent women from being repressed and so on and so on.
So I think the human rights activism of the modern missionaries in groups like Amnesty has really provided an otherwise confused Western elite with a kind of new sense of moral purpose and has in many ways invited them to go around the world dictating to people how they should live and how they should run their government.
Well, you know, I think people forget because the cynical nature of the Republicans at the time kind of overshadows the story.
But there was a lot of liberal and left pro-war sentiment in the run-up to the Iraq war as well.
I know that's true in England as well as here in America.
And I wonder, do you remember, I'm sure you were keeping track then, were Amnesty and Human Rights Watch bad on the Iraq intervention back in 2002 and 2003?
Well, I think they were fairly critical of it back then.
And they've become more critical of it as it has become more fashionable to be critical of those two interventions.
But I always think that the Afghan war and the Iraq war really spring from the Kosovo war of 1999.
It's really that war which transformed the idea of Western intervention as something which could be used to prevent human rights abuses and to prevent genocides, as we were told, was occurring in Kosovo.
And that war was, of course, led by left-wingers, ostensibly by left-wingers, Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in America.
It was cheered from the rafters by liberal and left-wing commentators.
And that really gave rise to the idea that the West has the right to override sovereign integrity in the interest of saving a people from abuse.
And so I think the left and liberals have a huge responsibility for creating the modern Western war-like mindset which says that the West has to ride in on a white horse and save all these savages from being repressed by their government.
And I think Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the whole culture they create, which is the idea that you can divide the world between the civilized West and the human rights-abusing South, I think they've really contributed to that rehabilitation of the Western imperialist outlook.
All right.
I'm sorry we have to hold it right there, Brendan.
It's the great Brendan O'Neill, everybody, from SpikedOnline.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Brendan O'Neill from SpikedOnline.com.
And we're talking about this new arms control treaty which is an attempt basically of the Atlantic powers or whatever to control the small arms trade.
I guess they probably are referring to this guy Victor Bout from the Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War.
Did you know that there are private arms dealers going around the world selling to people that it's not exactly the US government's policy to sell the weapons?
Well, that has got to be stopped.
And I guess that's pretty much the nature of this treaty, right?
Barack Obama can arm up African death squads all he wants.
He just doesn't want anyone else doing it.
I think the real aim of this treaty is to concentrate the power of who has guns in the face of the West effectively, in the face of respectable institutions over here who will oversee a treaty which says that some countries can buy guns and other countries can't.
And the measuring stick will be, will those guns end up abusing human rights?
But as far as I can tell, the only reason countries generally buy guns is in order to, in some fashion, undermine human rights.
You know, guns are not used to tickle people.
They are used to kill people or repress people or force people to stop making certain demands.
So it's a bit of a problematic dividing line anyway between, you know, guns that will be used for good things and guns that will be used for human rights violations.
I think that's a very problematic line that groups like Amnesty promote.
And I think the main thing here, the really dumb argument in all of this is the idea that guns cause wars.
That's the argument we're told all the time by Amnesty, by Human Rights Watch, by other campaigners.
They say the availability of guns is what causes conflict in places like Africa, which is a really patronizing idea because, in fact, these conflicts are very political.
They are territorial.
They are conflicts over power and influence and resources.
And to treat them as just the product of the arms industry itself is really to infantilize Africans and other foreigners by depicting them just as children playing with toys rather than as people who are fighting wars.
And that's why they get guns, because they have wars to fight.
Oh, and they have such perfect cover, too, because they're the damn liberals, Brendan.
They sit here and beat everyone over the head with their hurt feelings and their anti-racism all day.
It couldn't possibly be that they are actually the worst racists in the world in practice.
Well, I think there's something to that.
And I think it's very interesting to me that a body like the International Criminal Court, for example, which is supported by numerous liberals in the West and also by Amnesty International, is, to my mind, a blatantly racist institution.
The only people who have ever been put on trial in the International Criminal Court are black Africans.
No one from the West has ever been put on trial there.
No one from the Middle East.
No one from Asia.
Only people who have been put on trial there are from Congo, Kenya, other countries in Africa, and they are all black.
That's the only thing they have in common.
So it seems clear to me that a body like the International Criminal Court is very explicitly an old-fashioned Western imperialist tool through which the West tells Africa that it has committed certain sins, that it is criminal, that it is inferior.
And so for groups like Amnesty to support the International Criminal Court really does raise the question of how legitimate is their claim to be anti-racist.
Yeah, all these things really are just a fig leaf for intervention, right?
It's the same thing with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They can verify the non-diversion of Iran's uranium every couple of months from now until the end of mankind.
The West will still just beat them over the head and accuse them of being in violation of all their agreements.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
The pretended international law just becomes the trip wire, the thing to point at, and they get to go on.
You always have been real good on Kosovo, and you pointed out there about the precedent really that was set in intervening in that civil war back in 1999 in favor of the Kosovo secession.
And yet you look, not yet, but now you look at what's going on in Syria, and the way that they talk about it is that if this qualifies as a civil war, if it's actually a civil war, well, that's when we have to intervene.
Back then it was, can we intervene if it's just a civil war?
Iraq invades Kuwait, and you go, well, that's crossing an international boundary.
The new order has to be enforced, and they must be repelled.
Then they intervene in a civil war.
Can we do this?
Now a civil war is the benchmark for you must intervene on the side of, I guess, whoever's going to lose.
Yeah, I think it seems clear to me now that the West just makes up its rules as it goes along, and it just makes up new human rights ideas and ideas about the West having a duty or responsibility to protect.
It just invents all these new ideas and categories all the time to justify fairly bizarre and extremely destructive interventions overseas.
I think you're absolutely right that often kind of anti-atomic weapons arguments are used to justify interventions overseas, and you can see that with something like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is basically a treaty which says that five very powerful countries, including America, may possess nuclear weapons, but no other country on Earth is allowed to develop them.
This treaty is used to hector foreign countries, to demonize any foreign country that dares to investigate the potential of nuclear weapons, and so you can see how very politically correct ideas, which are very attractive to liberals, for example, the idea of non-nuclear proliferation, are used to justify the authority of the West over the rest.
I think we really need to unpick those ideas, because it's very tempting for people to say, oh, the cause of all the war in the modern world is a stupid right-wing Republican like George W. Bush, but in fact he's not the only person who is doing warmongering these days.
So did Clinton, so is Obama, so are these very liberal-sounding campaign groups that go around the world uncovering human rights abuses.
There is a liberal drive to war these days, which we need to be very watchful of and critical about.
Well, you know, one thing that is, I think, so important to stay mindful of, too, is just how selfish all this is.
I was reminded when I read you talking about these white-skinned do-gooders in gap jackets, and I thought about, you know, I guess you're talking about people who hang around in Brussels or at the UN or whatever, State Department people who really don't know anything, don't have any natural right to this authority over anyone else, who convince themselves that all they're doing is good deeds all day, and yet what is it really about?
It's all just about fitting in, right?
It's all just about going from junior UN member to full-fledged whatever it is and getting attention from their peers.
Like Samantha Power in The Rolling Stone by Michael Hastings.
She wanted to reassert her presence in the White House, and so she decided the Libya war was the way to get ahead in the world.
I think you're absolutely right.
There's something extremely narcissistic about liberal imperialism, and it's effectively about making Western activists and commentators feel better about themselves.
And you can really see that with the current agitation for intervention in Syria, where basically lots of these Western observers are saying, oh, you know, we screwed up over Bosnia 20 years ago in Sarajevo, let's not make the same mistake again in Syria, so let's make up for all our past mistakes by dropping some bombs over there and fixing those people's problems.
And you even have commentators in Britain quite explicitly saying, yes, our intervention will cause lots of problems and kill lots of people, but at least it will demonstrate that the West takes these problems seriously.
So it's all about demonstrating their own inner goodness.
It's all about demonstrating their own soul and morality.
So what you have is a situation where lots of powerful liberal politicians and their supporters in the West are effectively turning foreign countries into theaters in which they can make a performance of their own decency, and they don't care very much, it seems, about the destruction that will be left behind.
So in some ways, I think they're even worse than the old-fashioned warmongers, who at least were quite upfront about the fact that they were invading other countries for resources or for territory or in order to topple a government they didn't like.
What we have today is something worse than that, which is just invading other countries in order that Samantha Power can sleep better at night, or in order that Michael Ignatieff feels better about the fact that he didn't make good enough arguments 20 years ago during Bosnia.
So you have the reduction of international affairs almost to a kind of personality politics, which is really dangerous and feudalistic as well.
Yeah, well, and of course, as you say, they don't really care about the consequences, and the reason why is because there's no accountability whatsoever.
There was this great little period of time in, say, the very early summer of 2003, when it became undeniable that they just don't have warehouses full of sarin gas like the Republicans promised.
And so then the question was, is anybody going to say, geez, there's got to be some kind of reassessment of who all believed what and how we came to believe so, or are we going to continue on pretending that still you're a jerk if you knew better?
And they just decided they were just going to keep pretending, and it worked.
I mean, they were all so guilty, like I'm thinking all the TV personalities and all the biggest newspapers and whatever, they were all so guilty as hell, we'd have had to have an entire turnover in the journalism profession in America.
And so they just decided, you know what, we're just going to keep on going like this, and it's the same thing for all the diplomats and all the State Department weenies and Pentagon flunkies and whatever.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
And I think that's where groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch play a very important role for the West, because they often say things which sound quite radical.
So Human Rights Watch recently, a couple of years ago, said, you know, we might want to investigate George W. Bush for crimes against humanity.
And it sounded like a very radical posture.
But in fact, what they were saying, if you looked into their report, is that it's only by rectifying the mistakes made by Bush.
It's only by coming clean about the fact that he told lies about WMD, that we can then rehabilitate the authority of the West to intervene in foreign countries, to exert its authority over corrupt or evil or genocidal regimes.
So I think even when these kind of groups do say something that appears quite radical and say that Bush and others lied to us, it's all directed at rescuing Western moral authority from the pit that it currently lies in, in order to justify future interventions.
So I think we just need to be skeptical across the board of the arguments that are made today for intervention overseas, and just argue that, in fact, it always has an extremely destructive impact in every instance over the past 20 years.
And we really need to call it off.
All right, everybody, that is the great Brendan O'Neill from spikedonline.com.
This piece is at the Telegraph, blogs.telegraph.co.uk.
Amnesty International's latest arms trade campaign is colonialism, with a kindly face.
Thanks very much, Brendan, appreciate it.
Thank you.