by
Jason Hirthler
Part
5 - Schooling the Savages
Once the
pretext is established, the appropriate intervention is made. There’s
no lack of latent racism embedded in each intervention. Something of
Edward Said’s Orientalism is surely at play here; the West is often
responding to a crude caricature rather than a living people.
One
writer, Robert Dale Parker, described western views of Asia as little
more than, “a sink of despotism on the margins of the world.”
Iran is incessantly lensed through a fearful distrust of the ‘other’,
those abyssal Persians. Likewise, North Korea is mythologized as a
kingdom of miniature madmen, possessed of a curious psychosis that
surely bears no relation to the genocidal cleansing of 20 percent of
its population in the Fifties, itself an imperial coda to the madness
of Hiroshima.
The
interventions, then, are little different than the missionary work of
early colonizers, who sought to entrap the minds of men in order to
ensnare the soul. Salvation is the order of the day. The mission
worker felt the same sense of superiority and exceptionalism that
inhabits the mind of the neoliberal.
Two
zealots of the age peddling different editions of a common book. One
must carry the gospel of the invisible hand to the unlettered
minions. But the gifts of the enlightened interloper are consistently
dubious.
It might
be the loan package that effectively transfers economic control out
of the hands of political officials and into the hands of loan
officers, those mealy-mouthed creditors referred to earlier. It may
be the sanctions that prevent the country from engaging in dollar
transactions and trade with numberless nations on which it depends
for goods and services. Or it might be that controversial UNSC
resolution that leads to a comprehensive agreement to ban certain
weapons from a country.
Stipulations
of the agreement will often include a byzantine inspections regime
full of consciously-inserted trip wires designed to catch the country
out of compliance and leverage that miscue to intensify
confrontational rhetoric and implement even more far-reaching
inspections.
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