11/12/08 – Philip Hammond – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and welcoming our first guest today, it's Professor Philip Hammond from the London South Bank University.
He writes for the Spiked Review of Books, is the author of the book Media, War and Postmodernity, and has an article reproduced at Spiked Online, Darfur, the dangers of celebrity imperialism.
It was our spotlight article on Anti-War.com on Monday.
Welcome to the show, Philip.
Hi, we seem to have a very bad line, I'm sorry to say, I can barely hear you.
Oh, really?
Well, let me try to speak up here and turn this up.
Can you hear me now or should I call you back?
Hi, I can hear you a bit better this time.
Is it a bit better this time?
That's good.
All right.
Still not great, but...
All right, well, I'll try to remember my rule for when I interview people in England, which is to try very hard not to interrupt because of the delay, you won't be able to hear me interrupting you anyway.
Okay.
Sometimes I forget and it leads to catastrophe.
All right, so, bottom line, you have this great article in Spiked Review of Books and it's reproduced at Spiked Online, it's called Darfur, the dangers of celebrity imperialism.
And I think basically the bottom line here, the point is that the Save Darfur campaign, which of course is strong in England as well as here in America, is really about us, it's not even about the people of Darfur at all, it's about do-gooder liberals finding something to do.
Well, I think that's right, yeah.
I think that in a way, humanitarian causes taken up by both the do-gooders, including many celebrity activists, and indeed by politicians and governments, are taken up largely for their own purposes, even though they justify their actions and policies in relation to saving victims somewhere else.
I think it's to do with trying to find a sense of purpose and mission for Western states in the kind of post-Cold War landscape.
It seems like they're trying to do penance for supporting the Iraq War or something.
Well, this would be an actual humanitarian application of force, not like the Republicans lied and sold us Iraq was going to be.
Well, I think one of the oddities about it is that you have people who are kind of simultaneously pro-war and apparently anti-war at the same time, that they say, you know, we're against the war in Iraq, but we're for military intervention in Darfur, and I think that there's a lot of things going on there.
One of the things that's problematic about that is, I think, a kind of misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary military intervention that blames the kind of war on terror interventions, especially in Iraq, simply on the Bush administration, says that there's a kind of progressive, humanitarian, human rights-driven type of Western intervention which can be revived.
I'm sure we're going to see a lot more of it under President Obama in the coming months, but it kind of harks back to the 1990s and this idea that the West could play this ethical or moral role in world affairs, intervening in humanitarian crises and other people's wars.
Well, and you know, it's funny too, because a lot of the criticism about Iraq from mainstream Democratic Party types, like Hillary Clinton, actually, for example, I remember in the primaries said, now Serbia, the war in Serbia, Kosovo, that's how you do it.
See, we Democrats, we're competent war starters.
Yeah, I think that in Britain too, Kosovo is still seen as a kind of successful war, a kind of positive humanitarian intervention.
You know, Darfur is, I guess intervention in Darfur is supported for similar sorts of reasons.
In both cases, there's a kind of distortion, I think, of what's happening on the ground prior to the kind of campaign for intervention in Britain or the US.
And in particular, there's the kind of talking up of what's essentially quite a low-level civil conflict into a kind of apocalyptic genocide that then forms the basis for these calls for intervention.
And I think the lesson we ought to learn from Kosovo is to be very, very cautious when we start to hear that kind of moralistic, often slightly hysterical rhetoric.
What you point out in this, and you're actually reviewing a handful of books here, Darfur, The Ambiguous Genocide, Genocide in Darfur, War in Darfur, and Darfur in Perspective.
And some of these are more realistic than others.
But basically, you pick up from this that genocide really is the magic word.
That once, especially a government, like say, for example, the US government adopts that term to describe a situation there.
Now everything is black and white, good and evil, Yanks versus Nazis, and it's time to do something about it.
Yeah, I think that, I mean, one of the interesting things is that the, I mean, some of the activists themselves will acknowledge that there's a kind of oversimplification going on when they say that it's black and white, it's a good and evil kind of conflict.
They know that that's a kind of simplification of what's actually been happening in Sudan.
But they think that that simplification is worth it, because it's the felt need to prompt this kind of morally righteous style of intervention, which is really driving it rather than a kind of accurate understanding of events on the ground.
And I think that, you know, celebrities have been quite important.
People like George Clooney or Mia Farrow have been quite important in putting across that very simplistic good versus evil portrayal of the conflict.
Well, you know, when you talk about the activists kind of deliberately obfuscating that they understand the complexity and yet gloss over it anyway, that's not just hyperbole on your part.
You actually quote from this book, War in Darfur, where they say that this myth that it's Arabs versus, you know, Arab government-backed air forces versus black civilians is, quote, severely oversimplified and almost ignorant of the rebel movement, which, you know, that's almost a surprise right there.
You know, we are talking about rebels here, you know, never mind who started any of this.
But they say that, quote, this gives an apparent moral clarity to the situation, so therefore it's okay to continue oversimplifying.
Yeah, it's quite an astonishing admission, I thought so anyway.
And yes, you say these are people who've been involved in activist campaigning, basically acknowledging this, which I think, again, goes to show that it's not really about events over there, it's much more about this kind of search for moral clarity over here.
That's what's kind of motivating them and driving them to push for kind of greater Western involvement.
Yeah, it's really strange.
It reminds me of the George Carlin bit where he talked about how no matter what it is, we have a war on it, a war on drugs and a war on poverty and a war on cancer and a war on everything.
And I guess our society is just so militarized now that George Clooney, you know, Mr. Trophy Winner or whatever, can't feel good about himself unless he's starting a war, unless he's figuring out a way to get American combat forces on the ground somewhere.
Yeah, it is astonishing.
One of the things that surprised me was the story of Mia Farrow going to have talks with Blackwater, you know, the private security firm, to see if she could get them on a kind of freelance basis to go and strengthen the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.
And she said, you know, Blackwater has a much better idea of how to, you know, run peacekeeping operations than Western governments do.
This is despite Blackwater's pretty atrocious records in Iraq.
So, you know, there is this slightly kind of loopy, almost deranged aspect to some of the things that celebrity activists get up to.
But I think it's part of this kind of wider, as you say, I mean, you might call it a kind of militarization.
I think it's a kind of attempt to moralize, an attempt to find some way to make, as you say, make Western societies feel better about themselves, given the sense they have this kind of purpose and mission in the world.
And political leaders, you know, time and again have gone to the international arena to look for that idea of purpose and mission.
And it wouldn't surprise me if we see more of it in the coming months.
Well, and, you know, this is something that the, I guess people don't really remember it as clearly now, along with all the weapons of mass destruction.
There was a lot of hype even before the invasion, and obviously they changed their public relations line after the invasion away from weapons entirely to democracy building and all that kind of thing.
But even before the war, I mean, there was really a lot of appeal along the lines of we're going to go liberate those poor Iraqis and we'll finally be able to lift all the sanctions and blockade and they're all going to have at least some form of representative government now and be free and wonderful.
And it really was sold partially along the lines of a humanitarian mission.
And, of course, the new republic and a lot of center left intelligentsia, as well as the Democratic Party types got on board for the Iraq war, citing those very things.
That's very true.
Yes, they did.
And certainly in Britain, the debate was very similar, that there were kind of liberal interventionists, if you like, who had supported military action for alleged humanitarian or human rights reasons in the 90s.
Many of them said, well, we ought to therefore support Iraq for the same reasons.
And Tony Blair made all those same arguments about liberating the Iraqi people and so on.
And even Afghanistan, which was initially presented as essentially a matter of self-defense, that too was propagandistically presented as a kind of war for women's rights in Afghanistan, a war to let little boys fly their kites, a much nicer, more democratic regime.
So there's a sense in which both sides of the argument, if you like, are reaching for these, what you might call more kind of politically correct justifications for war.
And even the opposition to the Iraq war was almost entirely made up of a chorus singing, only if the UN says it's OK, only if we get the UN Security Council to say it's OK and we bring in more of our allies, then it's OK to launch an aggressive war.
Yes, very true.
It's a peculiar kind of opposition as we're against the war unless there's another UN resolution and then we're for it.
A very odd way to, I mean, I don't think there was any opposition in principle to the idea that there ought to be very extensive and coercive Western intervention in Iraq in 2003 when states such as France and Germany, who came out against U.S. policy, nevertheless were proposing policies of their own at the time, which would have involved a kind of extensive program of Western interference, including with armed forces in Iraqi territory.
So I think that despite the kind of divisions and arguments that we've seen in recent years over Iraq, there is that much kind of deeper level.
There is a certain agreement that if it's for the right reasons, if it can be justified in kind of humanitarian, human rights terms, then Western interference in weaker countries is not only justified, but most people would say I think a good and positive thing.
And that's what, I guess, what worries me about Darfur and other examples too, is that we're beginning to see a kind of more explicit revival of this idea now.
People say, well, Iraq was the Bush administration's mistake.
We'll put that behind us and we'll look for other places where this idea of ethical or moral intervention could be resurrected.
Well, and as you point out, they've already used that line in the case of Afghanistan, and now they're just starting that back up again.
That's the good war if Iraq is the bad one.
That's right, yes.
It has to be said that I don't think, in a sense, if you think about what purpose this is trying to serve, I don't think it really works, or at least it can only work in a very kind of short-term way, in the sense that when political elites attempt to use this kind of moral grandstanding over intervention as a way to demonstrate their own kind of sense of purpose or mission in the world, that they stand for something positive.
Well, it can, as in the case of Kosovo, it can get the chattering classes excited for a short time, but it doesn't really transform political engagement.
It doesn't really form the basis for any kind of new political project.
Afghanistan, I think, is a good example of that.
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, when he came to office, said, you know, now I'm going to prioritize Afghanistan, and they put a big kind of propaganda effort into sort of trying to report the good news from Afghanistan.
But several months down the line, you know, it hasn't really made all that much difference, but still it's a kind of fairly demoralized sort of state of mind among British officials and military involved in Afghanistan, in the sense that they're not really making that much progress there.
So it doesn't really make for any kind of transformation, either in domestic politics or in the kind of interventions themselves, but repeatedly it seems to get used.
And, you know, when one bandwagon falls by the wayside, another one seems to come along that they can jump on.
Yeah.
Isn't it interesting how that's like some kind of pointy-headed academic argument that, oh, by the way, just because you want to send the Marine Corps to do good work in Darfur, it doesn't mean that it would work out that way if you could get them on the ground there, you know, to think that consequences and intentions don't always gel together, you know?
That's true, yes.
And, you know, of course, Obama has also said that he, much like Brown did, I think that, you know, to try and distinguish his foreign policy from his predecessors, to say, you know, OK, Iraq, that was pretty bad, but never mind, we're going to do good in Afghanistan.
So I'm sure we'll see further attempts to present a kind of morally righteous variety of Western foreign policy.
Well, and that was something that John McCain promised, too, was to do something about Darfur.
Although, I'm curious, you know, it's been years and years throughout the Bush administration that we've had this campaign.
What exactly have they been pushing for?
I mean, I guess, you know, you can address George Clooney and them if you want, but I'm kind of, I'm interested in just all the different, you know, there must be little strip malls with offices of Save Darfur campaign people all around the country.
What are they doing, actually?
Are they just spending the money on more hype, or are they actually helping people in Sudan with the money at all, or what's going on?
Well, humanitarian agencies who are kind of active in Darfur are rather resentful of the fact that they don't see this money.
They don't see any kind of practical benefits from all this campaigning activity.
As I understand it, their kind of goal and their purpose is sort of to raise awareness and to put pressure, public pressure, on Western leaders, especially the U.S. government and the U.N., to take a kind of tougher stance against the Sudanese government and in support of the rebels and its supporters.
So, you know, as we've seen in other instances, there's an attempt to kind of take sides, to portray quite a complex conflict as a simple case of good guys and bad guys, and say we should be intervening in a forceful way on the side of the good guys.
Some people have called for, you know, kind of more troops to be sent or more.
For instance, one of Save Darfur's recent activities was to put a helicopter outside the U.N. building with a sign on it saying, send me to Darfur, you know, hoping to kind of, or Mia Farrow's talk to Blackwater, you know, hoping to kind of toughen it up, to give it more sort of military muscle so that it could intervene in a more forceful way.
I think that, you know, if you look back over the records of humanitarian military interventions that there have been over the 1990s, it doesn't bode well.
But the Western intervention has tended on the whole to make things much worse rather than improving matters.
So the goal of the campaign is, I don't even think it's a kind of worthy goal, but I think that if they were to get their way, it would make things actually worse than they already are.
Well, you know, something that the Austrian economists talk about when they criticize central planning from, you know, economically speaking, from Washington, D.C., is what they call the local information problem.
And how could a bureaucrat in D.C. really know which business ought to thrive and which business ought to fail or whatever?
You have to leave that up to the price structure in the market system, because any intervention based on that local information problem will end up with unintended consequences that almost always are worse than whatever the original problem supposedly was.
And it seems like the same thing applies here.
You know, you talk about good guys and bad guys and these kinds of precepts that the war party types are trying to push on us.
In fact, you know, my friend Bill Kelsey flies relief missions in Africa for a nongovernmental organization.
He didn't fly Clooney around, but one of his buddies did.
And last time he was there, well, last time I interviewed him, he said that he had just been back from Chad, by the way, the refugee camps in Chad, just a few weeks before, I think, and said that last he knew there were 16 different factions fighting, and he was certain that that information was outdated and no longer relevant.
Yeah, well, I think that I'm sure there is a problem, you know, a practical problem in terms of not understanding the kind of detail on the ground.
And as I was saying earlier, you know, I think that, in a way, the campaigning isn't really motivated at root by what's happening on the ground.
It's more inward looking and kind of self-directed.
But I think the other important point is that it's not so much kind of lack of understanding that creates difficulties, but just the fact that outside intervention in conflict, I think, tends to distort dynamics and to make a resolution of conflict often less likely.
So, I mean, we've seen that, for example, in the Balkans throughout the 1990s, that when the West, in the case of Bosnia, for instance, said, yes, we're going to back the independence of a Bosnian state.
Well, that made it much more difficult, in fact, to achieve any kind of compromise or negotiated settlement with the federal Yugoslav state.
And then the Bosnian Muslims were encouraged to hold out for better peace agreements, even though the one they ended up with was very similar to one they could have had in about 1992 or 1993.
So it doesn't do any good for the victims that are supposedly being helped by this.
In the case of Darfur, I think, and I wrote about this in the review, because one of the books, The War in Darfur, edited by Alex de Waal, came out of the international mediation that produced the Darfur peace agreement in 2006.
And the authors, some of whom were directly involved in those negotiations, point out that the purpose and the objective of the international players involved in this mediation was not so much to gain an agreement and broker a resolution to the conflict as to be seen to be getting a paper agreement.
It was more that they could turn around and say, look, we've done it, we've got this piece of paper, look what a great thing we did there.
And the results of it were actually pretty negative, and the kind of splintering of the rebel movement that your friend is describing there is a kind of direct consequence of this international mediation, because some factions signed up, others didn't.
The ones who did and the ones who didn't then started disagreeing within their own groups, and the whole rebel movement has kind of splintered, and you get factional fighting.
And again, it makes it much more difficult to achieve kind of actual settlement or compromise solution.
Hey, let me ask you something.
Do you know about the history of Sudan going back, and how long has Sudan been Sudan, and who drew that border, and this is something left over from the British Empire, and you have different people that are really kind of different nationalities all stuck together within an artificially drawn border from colonial days?
Well, I'm not a kind of expert on Sudan, but again, one of the books that I was reviewing, this War in Darfur, which I thought was actually the best of the bunch that I was writing about there, is edited by Alex de Waal, who is a kind of expert on Sudan.
He's been visiting and studying and writing about the region for a long time, and he makes a couple of points in relation to that.
One is that there's nothing particularly remarkable or unusual or unique about the current conflict in Sudan.
The previous governments of different political orientations have ended up with quite a similar problem.
It's to do with the kind of structure and character of Sudanese politics and Sudanese society and economy that lead to these kinds of divisions and conflict.
There's nothing particularly odd about the position that the current government finds itself in, except that it's attracted unprecedented international attention.
And the other thing I think to bear in mind is that the ethnic, you know, what you're kind of hinting at, I think, there is that maybe these kind of underlying ethnic differences have been papered over by having different groups in one state.
But I don't think that's really the case, that these differences have become important only quite recently.
It's only over the last sort of 20 years or so that these divisions, ethnic divisions, have become a significant thing and a thing that people are willing to fight in the name of.
So the division between people who identify themselves as African or identify themselves as Arab, they're not kind of some primordial sort of fundamental identities that have always been there, have always given rise to conflict.
And I think it's only in particular political circumstances that people will see those identities as important and as a source of kind of division and conflict.
Well, you know, I know the liberal activist, I was actually kind of surprised to read your quote when you talked about, because, you know, clearly it's been oversimplified as a genocide and what have you, although honestly I haven't really looked into the liberal do-gooder propaganda about it.
Well, that one paragraph we talked about before where they admitted that it's kind of a myth of the genocide, where they kind of made the distinguishing definition there between black Africans and Arabs and what have you.
But my friend Bill tells me, you know, basically what you're saying, which is that, you know, if there's a, well, you didn't mention this part I don't think, but he says, you know, if there's a real kind of ethnic difference at all, it would be between the blacks in the south of Sudan, who are mostly Christians and animists, and yet in Darfur, basically everybody's black, everybody's Arab, everybody's Sunni, everybody speaks Arabic, and what's really going on at the core is a battle between nomads and farmers, because you have people planting crops where the nomads have traditionally gone, and so then the nomads' camels eat all the crops, and it's basically an argument over property rights and a difficult dispute.
Certainly the kind of dispute that a bunch of American bureaucrats are going to know how to solve.
Yeah, I mean, there is, you know, there is a kind of problem with resources and with a kind of lack of economic development in Darfur, as in some other regions of Sudan.
I think, as you say, it would be wrong to portray it as an ethnic, you know, conflict arising out of some primordial sense of identity.
I don't think that's really the case.
And equally, I think it's wrong to see it, you know, as a kind of some pre-planned campaign of genocide implemented by the Sudanese government that, for whatever reasons, and sometimes it's economic underdevelopment and struggle over resources are cited as the reasons, for whatever the reasons, the rebels, you know, were attacking the police and the army and the security forces of the Sudanese government in Darfur and trying to get themselves out from the authority of the Sudanese government.
So the Sudanese government, you know, I think pretty much like any government would, reacted to that.
And you might well say they overreacted to that and that they reacted in a kind of brutal way.
But I don't see any sense in which it's helpful to oversimplify and to say, oh, this is just some evil master plan for genocide being implemented by these criminals in the government against innocent rebels and civilians.
It clearly is nothing like that.
And really, I want to go back to what you said about the intervention actually splintering the opposition movement.
This is something that I've heard before, too.
You brought up a great example in Bosnia.
This is the kind of thing that happens, that local information problem again, where we come in and decide who's right and who's wrong and what have you, but not really having good information.
And it ends up thwarting efforts to make peace.
I mean, people don't want to be killing each other all the time if they don't feel like they absolutely have to.
If they have a way to make peace, that's good.
And yet then you have a bunch of people from way on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean deciding what deadline, I think you call it, what time to deadline diplomacy.
You know, you have to do this by this time and what have you.
And all it does is just screw everything up and cause even more violence.
Yeah, I think that's right.
It does kind of up the ante and it encourages people essentially to kind of fight for a better settlement if they think, oh, well, maybe we're going to get the support of powerful outside sponsors.
You know, if it looks like, oh, look, there's all these campaigners and celebrities on our side in the United States.
So why should we compromise?
You know, it looks like it looks like maybe there's going to be some international backing for them.
It kind of discourages them from coming to any kind of compromise agreement, let alone the kind of clumsy strategy adopted by the negotiators in the Darfur case.
I mean, probably to go back to the, you know, what we were talking about earlier in this successful, supposedly successful example of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.
I mean, that's the kind of textbook example of exactly this thing.
In this case, again, it wasn't sort of lack of information.
They did it more or less knowingly, you know, helping to train and support the Kosovo Liberation Army, conducting what was effectively sort of fake or false diplomacy, saying privately that U.S. officials reportedly said privately that they knew that the Serbs needed to have some bombing.
They needed to be taught a lesson.
And even though it later emerged NATO countries knew that the main obstacle to peace was the Kosovo Liberation Army, they portrayed it publicly as the other way around, that it was the Serbs who were the intransigent ones who were causing ongoing conflicts in Kosovo in 1999.
So, you know, in that instance, I think you can see something even worse, which is a tendency to kind of actively encourage conflict and division in order that the Western powers can then step in and apparently magically resolve it.
Which, of course, One of the things that worried me over the last few months is that, you know, there's been a sense that some new catastrophe is needed in order to, I don't want to sound conspiratorial about this, but there is a sense that some new emergency, maybe it's going to be Darfur, maybe it's going to be something else, will offer an opportunity and it will offer an opportunity for the elite to say, Look, here we are.
We can come in and help.
We can provide the peacekeepers.
We can send in the Marines in the name of human rights or humanitarianism.
Well, and if Serbia and Kosovo is their shining example of success, we can see, you know, deliberately or otherwise, however the situation was created, which I'm not saying you're wrong.
Obviously, the KLA narco terrorists were trained and armed and financed by the U.S., like you said.
But the consequences of all that action, even as deliberate as it was, they were left with a rump state that they didn't know what to do with for almost 10 years.
And then they went ahead and decided, well, OK, I guess we'll guarantee their independence now.
And so now, you know, America's in the position that Britain was in before World War I or something, somehow guaranteeing borders in the Balkans.
And, of course, then you have Russia doing their tit-for-tat, taking the opportunity when Georgia attacked South Ossetia to go ahead and take Ossetia from the American Empire in Georgia.
And so the consequences continue to reverberate.
Even when they know exactly what they're doing, they don't know what they're doing.
Well, I think that's true that, you know, clearly Russia had its own reasons for going into Georgia.
But, you know, they presented it, and I think with some justification, as being basically just like what the Western powers had done in Kosovo.
They said, look, you did this, and now we're going to do it, too.
And used all the same kinds of arguments and justifications in putting their case.
And I also think that it's important to bear in mind that it doesn't even, these kinds of interventions don't even do what they say they're going to do for the people that they're ostensibly designed to help.
I mean, it's true that, you know, Kosovo, and before it, Bosnia, are kind of formally independent.
But it's not as if the people of Bosnia or Kosovo have genuine self-determination and genuine self-government.
They are, in both cases, overseen by the international community.
It's really the international community, the European Union, the United Nations, and Western governments who kind of call the shots in both of those places.
I mean, even years after the Dayton settlement in Bosnia, it's international representatives who continue to have the final say on what goes on in the country, you know, including the ability to kind of overturn political appointments and overturn decisions of the government and the legislature and so on.
So it's not as if there is even any kind of genuine benefit to the people who are supposedly doing well out of these interventions.
And, you know, when you look down the line, I mean, here we are before Obama ever takes office, before any intervention in Darfur even happens, and at least from my angle, there's a pretty educated guess that this is going to be an absolute disaster in terms of, if they do this, any kind of Western boots on the ground there.
It's just going to be lumped in as part of the greater war on terrorism, from the point of view of the people that that war on terrorism is against, the war against Islam.
And, you know, here's a land where there have been, I guess, hundreds of thousands of deaths, I don't even know exactly what the casualties are, but no suicide attacks in Sudan yet, and it hasn't been framed as part of the war on terrorism at all.
It's a local problem, and yet you get American forces in there, and you've just spread a brand new front in the war between America and the Sunnis were fighting.
Well, that might be right, and I should imagine that policymakers are kind of cognizant of that.
The thing to remember, I guess, is that it's not only the kind of gung-ho, fully armed and tooled up, heavy troop deployment that caused the problems, and oftentimes we've seen something quite different.
I mean, we've seen kind of full-on military intervention in Iraq recently, but most of the interventions, until and since the end of the Cold War, have been quite kind of halting and hesitant and ad hoc and reactive, and that, too, I think, in a way, makes it, in a sense, even more damaging.
It's important to remember that even non-military intervention has these quite negative consequences that we've been talking about.
I mean, the case of Bosnia is a kind of prime example where, in a way, the most damaging intervention wasn't the NATO bombing towards the end of the conflict.
It was the diplomatic intervention right at the beginning, where, by lending diplomatic support to certain people within the Yugoslav state, Western countries effectively helped to spark what was a low-level conflict into an outright war, again by suggesting that some republics had powerful outside sponsors should they wish to succeed from the Yugoslav Federation.
So, you know, it's not just the kind of direct military intervention that I think we have to be worried about.
It's the kind of, the other sort, if you like, the kind of more indirect campaigning-style intervention that also has these damaging consequences.
Well, I guess it was no different during the American Revolution when the Americans were basically beaten and just holding on for dear life in the hopes that the French would send their navy to help, to declare independence, to win our independence from Britain.
And from the point of view of, you know, the French peace movement, I guess, they were just prolonging the war by intervening.
I didn't hear that very well.
I could hear that you were talking about the US war for independence.
Oh, yeah, I was just talking about that.
One thing that I would say, I suppose, about contemporary conflicts as opposed to conflicts of the past is that there is a sense nowadays that, you know, there's something different about warfare, that the wars that we see around the world nowadays are not really about sort of politics and clashes of interest and so on, that there's something different going on.
And sometimes that's talked about in terms of ethnic identities and kind of conflicts arising from that.
Sometimes it's understood in terms of, you know, basically evil and a kind of plan for genocide or something along those lines, or ethnic cleansing.
It seems that there's something sort of irrational, that they're more or less inexplicable, these kinds of conflicts that we see, and they tend to be exaggerated, they tend to be poorly understood.
And the reason for it is that, again, it's all about the way that these conflicts are discussed in Belfort, in the Balkans, various places, isn't really about what's happening there.
And the point of the discussion tends to be to try and say something about the West's identity and what the West can therefore see itself as doing on the international stage.
Right.
Yeah, and I think especially in America, too, it's because of World War II.
That's really the founding myth of America, at least of the American empire, is America versus the Nazis.
And if we can only just relive that moment, believe me, it's on TV.
World War II is on TV, on at least one or two channels, 24 hours a day.
It's World War II in this country.
Yeah, I can well believe it.
And the same is true in Britain.
I think that there's a constant kind of recycling of the Second World War.
I mean, I suppose the thing about it is that there aren't very many issues or events around which you can expect to get a high level of public agreement nowadays.
Here we are.
Political leaders nowadays tend to talk a lot about shared values.
It's quite difficult when they try to articulate what those values might be.
It's hard to come up with anything very coherent.
Whereas the Holocaust, the Nazi era, well, that's something which they can say in black and white, absolute terms, look, here's good, here's bad.
There's this kind of temptation to constantly revive and revisit the Second World War.
So, you know, ever since Saddam became the new Hitler in 1991, you know, we've had a succession of new Hitlers and new genocides and new Holocaust.
And I think every time we hear that and every time we hear journalists and political leaders and celebrities, too, talking about, talking in these kind of simplistic black and white terms, we should be very cautious and an alarm bell should go off that this is a repeated formula that's been used time and again, usually with not much justification.
All right, everybody, that's Professor Philip Hammond from London South Bank University.
The article is at spiteonline.com.
Darfur, the dangers of celebrity imperialism.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.