Africa,  Human Rights

The Imperial Vanity of Humanity

Finally we have been subjected to the acme of post modern moral relativism on the idiot Left courtesy – of course – of The Guardian. Writing in their Comment Is Free section, Stephen Kinzer makes an impassioned plea to “End Human Rights Imperialism Now”.

In a piece blurbed “Imposing western, ‘universal’ standards on developing countries has made political idiots of groups such as Human Rights Watch”, he writes:

Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don’t conform to the tastes of upper west side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!

Pretending to offer fresh insight, actually this argument is growing quite tired. It is hardly a surprise that the “anti-imperialist” left throws accusations of neo-colonialism, racism, stoogism and a range of other loaded taunts at campaigners on a range of issues. Criticise a misogynist Muslim cleric with an affection for female genital mutilation or a sharia kangaroo court wanting to stone a rape victim to death for adultery, or a kleptocratic African dictator starving opposition into submission, or a Jamaican pop act performing anthems glorifying gay-bashing, or a terrorist cult leader, and you’re a racist, neo-colonialist stooge of Imperialism.

We have to understand, he says, that authoritarianism may be appropriate for some nations, if it provides stability and running water and prevents ethnic violence.

One can’t help wondering if Mr Kinzer would have the courage of these convictions to retroactively lament the passing of the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. Would he say it was “right” for the particular African circumstances of the time. Certainly, the regime which followed – aided in its success of deposing Smith by “upper west side intellectuals” – brought with it starvation and economic collapse. Life expectancy at independence was 60. Today, despite medical advances that have seen a global increase, in Zimbabwe has dropped to 40.

Certainly a successful defence of the Smith regime using Kinzer’s arguments would have prevented the massacre in Matabeleland in which over 20 000 people were killed in concentration camps set up by the North Korean-trained Zimbabwean army.

“Giving people jobs, electricity, and above all security is not considered a human rights achievement; limiting political speech and arresting violators is considered unpardonable,” he argues.

Fine. It’s an argument. But to test whether Mr Kinzer is entirely honest in his argument – that he is pleading for this end to this “absolutist view” of human rights on purely practical and utilitarian grounds rather than from the more usual ideological “anti-imperialist” position which discards western liberalism when it is inconvenient – let us hear him say that liberals were wrong to campaign against Ian Smith, particularly since hindsight gives us the consequences in detailed technicolour. Perhaps, to put it another way, a racist, colonialist government was what the country needed. Perhaps in the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe context there was “a stark choice between one set of rights and the other” and the disaster that followed was cheered on by liberals with “narrow, egocentric definition of what human rights are”.

Does he have the stomach for that? Or is his piece just more vacuous Guardian-style West-bashing which, ironically, now mimics the sort of arguments one once read in The Telegraph:

But that has been the story of post-colonial Africa and, although this week’s obituaries will largely dismiss Smith as a colonial caricature, a novelty politician from another age, if you were to go to Harare today and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader – Smith or Mugabe – the answer would be almost unanimous. And it would not be Mugabe.

I have no idea whether The Telegraph writer is correct in his estimation, but I do know this: If the dictatorial regimes in the African countries Kinzer now wishes us to stop criticising were led by a white minority, I can’t see The Guardian running his piece. But if the issue is the material over the philosophical – food, water and electricity over freedom and democracy – why would the colour of the dictator matter?