Isegoria

What made Alexander great? Randall Collins answers with this list:

1. His father’s army and geopolitical position
2. Tiger Woods training
3. The target for takeover
4. Greek population explosion and mercenaries
5. Alexander’s victory formula

Alexander is famous for having conquered the Persian Empire, but it’s his father who prepared the expedition — only to be assassinated at the farewell party.

Alexander famously received his education from Aristotle — but his real education was his military apprenticeship under his father.

The target of his conquest, the Persian Empire, was only able to be taken over because the Persians had successfully forged an empire — and could easily be replaced by another conqueror.

At this time, the Greeks had too many armed young men looking for work — often in Persia.

Collins suggests that Alexander’s victory formula was to establish emotional domination as quickly as possible.

When the Bosnian crisis began in 1992, humanitarian groups and the UN came in to help the victims of Serb aggression:

But they quickly began to realise they were being used by western governments as a way of containing a crisis that the politicians did not want to get involved with.

The journalist David Rieff wrote

“The idea was simple, coarse and brutal. Instead of political action backed by the credible threat of military force, the Western powers would substitute a massive humanitarian effort to alleviate the worst consequences of a conflict they wanted to contain

‘Containment through charity’ was the way one UN official put it.”

And then at Srebrenica thousands of civilians gathered together in the enclave — believing they were under international protection. But when the Serbian troops led by General Mladic marched in, the UN troops did nothing. The promise of protection had simply made it easier for the Serbs to kill over 8,000 people.

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One of the UN’s special envoys in Bosnia, Jose Maria Mendiluce realised that Glucksmann was right:

“You don’t reply to fascism with relief supplies. Only if we stop being neutral between murderers and victims, if we decide to back Bosnia’s fight for life against the fascist horror of ethnic cleansing, shall we be able to contribute to the survival of the remnants of that country and of our own dignity.”

And then a few months later American air power — under the command of NATO — was used to force the Serbs to negotiate a peace. Almost no-one disagreed. It was a Good War in which the left-wing humanitarians were now allied with their old imperialist enemy — America.

Out of Srebrenica came a strange new hybrid — a humanitarian militarism. And in the 1990s it rose up to capture the imagination of a generation on the left in Europe.

Ever since the collapse of the left in the early 1980s they had been searching for a new vision of how to change the world for the better. Now they found it — a humanitarianism that had the power to right wrongs around the world rather than just alleviate them.

It even had French philosophers behind it.

And one of that generation who was most entranced was Tony Blair, and in 1999 he took this humanitarianism to its moment of greatest triumph.

It was also a moment of triumph for Bernard Kouchner. He became the head of the interim administration in Kosovo — and he set out to create a new democracy.

Many of his staff were leftist revolutionaries from 1968. Even one of the NATO commanders had fought on the streets of Paris.

But Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.

They all had vendettas with each other — which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time.

It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn’t always lead to the simple triumph of goodness.

Which became horribly clear in Iraq in 2003.

Humanitarian intervention soon evolved into armed intervention:

At the same time as the humanitarian movement was rising up, so too were the new despots that were going to become some of the main targets for this new idealism.

Many of them — like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gadaffi — were also, in a strange way, products of the failure of the Communist dream. Like Kouchner they too were trying to rework revolutionary theory — but in their case with horrific results.

I have found a sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary made in 1976 which follows Muammar Gadaffi around as he goes about ruling Libya. [...] The interviewer asks Gadaffi to explain why he has sent Libyan troops to fight with the Palestinians against Israel, and why he has sent in Libyan agents to try and overthrow President Sadat of Egypt.

In response Gadaffi launches into an explanation that countries like Libya have a duty to intervene in other nations where the ordinary people are being oppressed by autocrats or oppressive governments — and help free them. That includes helping to liberate Egypt and Tunisia.

But it also means, he says, that politicians like him are justified in intervening in Northern Ireland to help the Provisional IRA. Because they are oppressed by the British government

They too are victims.

What Gadaffi was arguing was a strange mirror image of the theory that Kouchner and the other ex-leftists in Europe were developing.

For they too were heading towards the idea of “armed intervention”.

In the 1980s the humanitarian movement was flourishing — above all in Afghanistan. But in Afghanistan the movement also came up against a big political problem.

Men and women from what was now called “the doctors’ movement” went in over the mountains to help the victims of the Soviet attacks. They were brave and daring and they saved the lives of many Afghan civilians.

But they also helped the Mujaheddin. Under the theory of the humanitarian movement this was fine. The Mujaheddin were resisting the Soviet totalitarianism. They were victims fighting back so it was morally right to help them.

But others didn’t see it that way.

Here is video of the trial in Kabul in 1983 of a French doctor who had been captured by the Afghan army.

He is called Philippe Augoyard. He worked for Aide Medicale Internationale — which was another version of MSF. The trial is absurd — and in the tradition of all communist show trials the doctor reads out a “confession” and admits to “working with the counter-revolutionary bandits”.

But there is also another part of his confession that was both true and embarrassing for all the ex-Marxists and Maoists in the humanitarian movement. The mujaheddin they were helping were backed, funded and armed by the Americans.

Which meant they were helping American global imperialism.

But then a group of French philosophers came to the rescue. They came up with a theory that said it wasn’t bad to work with American military power. In fact, if the humanitarians could harness America’s armed might, they could use it to change the world in a revolutionary way.

The philosophers were led by another ex-Maoist called Andre Glucksmann. He had turned against the left and had developed his own theory which he called “anti-totalitariansm”.

But he wasn’t alone. Glucksmann was part of a group of intellectuals that rose up in France in the late 1970s called the New Philosophers. They saw Bernard Kouchner as an action hero putting their ideas into practice. Another prominent one was the glamorous Bernard-Henri Levy.

Glucksmann put it in stark terms. Everything that oppressed people around the world he called “Auschwitz”. Even famines were called “Auschwitz”.

It was the ghost of the Second World War again.

Glucksmann then said that people with power had a right to intervene in other societies to prevent “Auschwitzes”. And that included using American power.

Maybe, he said, power exercised by the strong was not always oppression. If it was used decently it could liberate the oppressed.

And — Glucksmann said — this didn’t just mean medical help. It included “armed resistance”.

Out of Biafra came a new idea of how to save the world:

And the man who would create it was a young French doctor called Bernard Kouchner.

Kouchner had worked for the Red Cross in Biafra, but he had become disgusted by the Red Cross’ refusal to publicise the genocide created by the Nigerian government.

Just as the Red Cross hadn’t revealed the horrors they saw in World War Two in the Nazi concentration camps because they insisted on being “neutral”

Kouchner resigned and went back to Paris where he founded a new humanitarian organisation called Medecins Sans Frontieres. Being neutral, Kouchner said, really meant being complicit in the horror. And MSF would never be complicit. It was on the side of the innocent victims.

Kouchner — and many of the others who founded MSF — had been Marxist or Maoist revolutionaries, but they had become disenchanted with those utopian visions. And what they were doing was reworking the politics of third world liberation into a new form.

It was a type of liberation that they believed went beyond the politics of left and right and instead was about saving individuals from the horrors of totalitarianism whether that came from the right or the left.

They weren’t going to be neutral. They were going to take sides. But it was the side of the victims — because they were neutral.

Their first slogan was “There are no good and bad victims”.

And in 1979 Kouchner dramatically demonstrated this belief. He hired a ship to go and rescue the Vietnamese boat people who were fleeing the communist regime who now ruled Vietnam.

The left — and many liberals — were shocked. Because these were “bad victims”. Victims of the noble anti-imperialists who had defeated America.

Modern humanitarian intervention begins with the Biafran war in 1968:

It is a fascinating moment because it is where the framework — the contemporary filter through which we now perceive all humanitarian tragedies — was first constructed.

The Eastern part of Nigeria had declared independence and called their new state Biafra. In response the Nigerian army attacked the rebel government. Things went very badly for the Biafrans, but no-one in the West cared. While the British government happily sold lots of arms to the Nigerians.

But then the Biafran government found a very odd Public Relations firm in Geneva, called MarkPress who set out to change the way people in Europe saw the war.

I have discovered a great documentary in the BBC archive which tells what then happened. It is shot inside the PR company’s offices and interviews the men running the campaign.

It shows how they turned a war that people saw simply as a political conflict in a faraway land into something heart-wrenching and dramatic.

It became a moral battle between evil politicians in Nigeria — aided by cynical and corrupt politicians in London who were selling the arms — and the innocent victims of the starvation caused by the war.

The British newspapers went for it in a big way. And a new movement grew up. It was driven by moral outrage, fuelled by a disgust with the old British political class who were prolonging the suffering through arms sales.

Celebrities joined in. They held a 48 hour fast in Piccadilly Circus over Christmas. Here are some frame grabs from the news report. The one that shows what was really happening is the placard that says BATTLE OF BRITAIN 1940 — BIAFRA ’69.

The conflict was being fitted to the template that was going to define the whole movement. It was the Good War. A justified resistance against evil to protect the innocent wherever they were being threatened in the world.

Just like the struggle against fascism in the Second World War.

But Biafra also revealed the terrible dangers of this simplified view of wars — dangers that would always haunt the humanitarian movement.

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[T]he aid that resulted from the wave of sympathy that these images created had a terrible unforeseen consequence. It prolonged a futile war for a further 18 months — and thus contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.