Thug Rule
Originally posted on April 1, 2003 to my "Liberty Politics" list at Yahoo Groups.
As we're gripped by a telegenic "clash of civilizations" in the cradle of civilization itself, it's easy to miss one of the biggest political trends in the world today.
A vast percentage of the globe is ruled by thugs -- or, even more worrisome, is a battleground between competing gangs of thugs, without a clear ruler.
A major war has caused us to ignore a major world event -- the leader of a country assassinated by crooks. Why was Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic killed? The Washington Post doesn't beat around the bush: "Djindjic had made enemies by declaring war on organized crime."
In the world of thugocracy, Serbia is small potatoes. It's easy to make the case that Russia is run by thugs -- I cannot think of a single person I know who's done business there who says anything else. In our "Washington consensus" worldview, Russia is now a stable, responsible, market democracy -- which just happens to be run by a former senior KGB official; the secret police is apparently the only organization that can stay one step ahead of Russia's mobsters.
Most of the former Soviet sphere breaks down into one of three models; lawless chaos, oligarchic warlords, or centralized thugocracies. This is quite simply rule by power, and it jumps past several hundred years of political thought right back to Hobbes and nature red in tooth and claw.
It's not just the former Communists that are having problems; most of Africa is in the same state. Sometimes it's state-sponsored thugs, as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, but even more depressing is the wholly grass-roots thug phenomenon visible in such war-torn places as the Ivory Coast.
The NYT writes, in an incredibly depressing article, 'The Child Soldiers of Ivory Coast Are Hired Guns,'
"Dancing between the tables, another boy, his dirty T-shirt stenciled with the face of the lewd American rapper Sisqo, dangles a Kalashnikov from one hand, a loaded clip from the other. A third child soldier sits clutching a hand grenade the way a teenager in a saner place might hold a cellphone. ... Here in Ivory Coast's wild west, in the most volatile theater of this country's conflict, the detritus of globalization meets the logic of war, West African style. A far cry from the war occupying international attention, this is how the world's other half fights today."
The next time you hear someone bemoaning the violence of teenage boy's music or video games, point out to them what teenage boys do when left to their own devices in a continent littered with weapons.
Oh yes, the weapons... those true weapons of mass democratized destruction, cheap guns and explosives. The world is simply full of the stuff, the detritus of a century of mass production, mass ideology, and mass conflict. Despite the quixotic attempts of American gun aficianados to buy up the world's entire stock of ex-military arms, a great many of them get sold at incredibly low prices to whoever wants them.
A recipe for thugocracy.
Somalia. Afghanistan. Ethiopia. Eritrea. The Hutus and the Tutsis (who skipped the guns and went straight to machetes). A large portion of Africa is ruled by thugs as well.
How do you combat this trend? Well, as the U.S. government demonstrated with Waco and David Koresh, even the sophisticated resources of a highly advanced nation may not be enough to deal with well-armed locals determined to have their own way. Koresh, though no angel, wasn't a thug; his equally well-armed counterparts in other nations of the globe have larceny in their hearts, and very little to lose. Their hired (often child) soldiers have even less constraint.
Most of these people are not fighting for anything more than plunder, loot, pillage, or simply pay. They have no ideals; no goals; no positive vision of how society should be organized or structured. They are the antithesis of civilization. If we're to have a war of civilization, perhaps we might think about fighting this one, instead of setting the more developed and cultured and law-abiding bits of the world against each other.
There are many other movements in other part of the world which do combine a goal or a mission with thug tactics. These rarely bring much better results; ideals are apparently a poor buffer to automatic weapons. I understand what the Palestinians are fighting for, but their methods are those of the gutter. The rebels of Columbia, and Bolivia, and Aceh in Indonesia, want their fair share of the resources of their own country. The newly exploited oil fields of central Africa are driving the same dynamic. People who have been left off the gravy train, or who feel a grievance, taking up weapons ready at hand to get what they want. The Irish Republican Army. Timothy McVeigh.
These are all of a sort. They have ideas - usually negative ideas of what they *don't* want -- and yet they do not have either the capacity, or the will, to carry out their objectives by any means other than violence. Are they right? Have their intransigent foes left them no other recourse? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never simple. But the result, in every case, is an absence of law and order; death, bloodshed, and misery.
Democratized destruction in the form of guns and bombs is here to stay, and thug rule today covers as much as a quarter of the globe. The countries where this depressing order is in place can participate in the world system only in the most base and resource-extractive ways -- as even the mostly civilized Soviet Union is demonstrating, as it sinks to a position of agricultural subsistence and mining for profit. It is very much in our interest, and the interest of evey civilized country, to bring these areas, and their people, into something resembling the rule of law. Not just for their sake, but for ours.
What are we going to do about this?
It's not a problem that can be solved with cruise missiles and the "giant hammer" mentality.
It's not a problem that can be solved with the market and "shock therapy."
It's not going away, unless we fix it.
Do we have better things to do? Apparently.
As we're gripped by a telegenic "clash of civilizations" in the cradle of civilization itself, it's easy to miss one of the biggest political trends in the world today.
A vast percentage of the globe is ruled by thugs -- or, even more worrisome, is a battleground between competing gangs of thugs, without a clear ruler.
A major war has caused us to ignore a major world event -- the leader of a country assassinated by crooks. Why was Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic killed? The Washington Post doesn't beat around the bush: "Djindjic had made enemies by declaring war on organized crime."
In the world of thugocracy, Serbia is small potatoes. It's easy to make the case that Russia is run by thugs -- I cannot think of a single person I know who's done business there who says anything else. In our "Washington consensus" worldview, Russia is now a stable, responsible, market democracy -- which just happens to be run by a former senior KGB official; the secret police is apparently the only organization that can stay one step ahead of Russia's mobsters.
Most of the former Soviet sphere breaks down into one of three models; lawless chaos, oligarchic warlords, or centralized thugocracies. This is quite simply rule by power, and it jumps past several hundred years of political thought right back to Hobbes and nature red in tooth and claw.
It's not just the former Communists that are having problems; most of Africa is in the same state. Sometimes it's state-sponsored thugs, as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, but even more depressing is the wholly grass-roots thug phenomenon visible in such war-torn places as the Ivory Coast.
The NYT writes, in an incredibly depressing article, 'The Child Soldiers of Ivory Coast Are Hired Guns,'
"Dancing between the tables, another boy, his dirty T-shirt stenciled with the face of the lewd American rapper Sisqo, dangles a Kalashnikov from one hand, a loaded clip from the other. A third child soldier sits clutching a hand grenade the way a teenager in a saner place might hold a cellphone. ... Here in Ivory Coast's wild west, in the most volatile theater of this country's conflict, the detritus of globalization meets the logic of war, West African style. A far cry from the war occupying international attention, this is how the world's other half fights today."
The next time you hear someone bemoaning the violence of teenage boy's music or video games, point out to them what teenage boys do when left to their own devices in a continent littered with weapons.
Oh yes, the weapons... those true weapons of mass democratized destruction, cheap guns and explosives. The world is simply full of the stuff, the detritus of a century of mass production, mass ideology, and mass conflict. Despite the quixotic attempts of American gun aficianados to buy up the world's entire stock of ex-military arms, a great many of them get sold at incredibly low prices to whoever wants them.
A recipe for thugocracy.
Somalia. Afghanistan. Ethiopia. Eritrea. The Hutus and the Tutsis (who skipped the guns and went straight to machetes). A large portion of Africa is ruled by thugs as well.
How do you combat this trend? Well, as the U.S. government demonstrated with Waco and David Koresh, even the sophisticated resources of a highly advanced nation may not be enough to deal with well-armed locals determined to have their own way. Koresh, though no angel, wasn't a thug; his equally well-armed counterparts in other nations of the globe have larceny in their hearts, and very little to lose. Their hired (often child) soldiers have even less constraint.
Most of these people are not fighting for anything more than plunder, loot, pillage, or simply pay. They have no ideals; no goals; no positive vision of how society should be organized or structured. They are the antithesis of civilization. If we're to have a war of civilization, perhaps we might think about fighting this one, instead of setting the more developed and cultured and law-abiding bits of the world against each other.
There are many other movements in other part of the world which do combine a goal or a mission with thug tactics. These rarely bring much better results; ideals are apparently a poor buffer to automatic weapons. I understand what the Palestinians are fighting for, but their methods are those of the gutter. The rebels of Columbia, and Bolivia, and Aceh in Indonesia, want their fair share of the resources of their own country. The newly exploited oil fields of central Africa are driving the same dynamic. People who have been left off the gravy train, or who feel a grievance, taking up weapons ready at hand to get what they want. The Irish Republican Army. Timothy McVeigh.
These are all of a sort. They have ideas - usually negative ideas of what they *don't* want -- and yet they do not have either the capacity, or the will, to carry out their objectives by any means other than violence. Are they right? Have their intransigent foes left them no other recourse? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never simple. But the result, in every case, is an absence of law and order; death, bloodshed, and misery.
Democratized destruction in the form of guns and bombs is here to stay, and thug rule today covers as much as a quarter of the globe. The countries where this depressing order is in place can participate in the world system only in the most base and resource-extractive ways -- as even the mostly civilized Soviet Union is demonstrating, as it sinks to a position of agricultural subsistence and mining for profit. It is very much in our interest, and the interest of evey civilized country, to bring these areas, and their people, into something resembling the rule of law. Not just for their sake, but for ours.
What are we going to do about this?
It's not a problem that can be solved with cruise missiles and the "giant hammer" mentality.
It's not a problem that can be solved with the market and "shock therapy."
It's not going away, unless we fix it.
Do we have better things to do? Apparently.
posted by Ethan at 6:46 PM
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