Not True Communism - the left and Cambodian genocide

It was in 1980 when I first encountered the Western academic response to the Khmer Rouge, Angkar and Pol Pot. This was something of an eye-opener - my spectacularly low opinion of Noam Chomsky was formed at this time - as we considered the still emerging evidence of communist atrocity in Cambodia set alongside the dominant commentary, inspired by the likes of Chomsky, that the refugee tales couldn't be believed and it was just "...a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."

Cambodian academic, Sophal Ear and US researcher, Donald W. Beachler call this the "Standard Total Academic View" - it was pretty much what that part of my South East Asian Politics module taught. Question the reports, challenge the numbers (we had a whole seminar dissecting the numbers who died - downwards and sideways mostly) and argue that the sources of criticism were either 'neo-colonialist', US imperialist or Viet imperialist. Even as we read reports about children killed, their heads smashed against trees, starvation and mass murder using the most basic of implements - shovels, mattocks, axes, our reading list contained stuff like this:

Chomsky invites us to consider historian Ben Kiernan’s hypothesis that the Khmer Rouge leaders never properly established discipline over insubordinate soldiers: “[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry.”

This quote comes from a frightening article by Matthew Blackwell describing both the personal tragedy, the scale of death and the manner in which so much of what we'd now call "progressive academia" denied or down-played what was happening. These were heroic socialist liberators, how could they possibly install such a reign of murderous terror? Even today some still deny - here from 2012 in American 'radical' magazine, Counterpunch:

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocuters.

Set against a million dead people, torture and starvation, we have people - academics, commentors, reporters - prepared to spin and prevaricate so as to suggest that, far from the Killing Fields being the direct consequence of a deliberate policy imposed by the Angkar and inspired by the Marxism they'd learned in 1950s Paris, they were some sort of accident or mistake.

This is a pattern for these progressive academics and writers - from G B Shaw's apologia for Stalinism through Chomsky's excusing of Pol Pot to today's left fawning over Chavez's Venezuela and Castro's Cuba. And when the denial of the violent oppression communism requires becomes to painful, our leftists fall back on "that wasn't true communism".

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King Mongkut and the saving of Thailand's independence and monarchy.

Doesn't look anything like Yul Brunner

David Bassett who taught me South East Asian history at Hull in the early 1980s hated the musical The King and I. Dr Bassett was a mild mannered chap but when we began to look at how Thailand retained its monarchy and its independence, his hackles rose a little and he engaged in a gentle rant about the film's historical inaccuracy and, in particular, its portrayal of Thailand's saviour King Mongkut. The real problem is that the accounts of Anna Leonowens exaggerate her influence on both the King and on his son.

But that's a different story to the one I want to relate. For Mongkut did save Thailand and Thailand's monarchy. And on the day we hear of King Bhumipol's death, it's perhaps worth reflecting on the manner of that salvation. For when the Thais look at their closest neighbours - in Indo-China and in Burma - they see once proud nations that were cast into colonial slavery under the French and British. Moreover they can look more recently at the tragedies of independence for those places - at the impoverishment of Burma under Ne Win's lunatic Burmese Way to Socialism, at the millions dead and displaced by nearly thirty years of war in Vietnam and at the suicidal genocide Pol Pot visited on the Khmer.

Thailand - Siam - avoided this tragedy because it remained independent. And the members of Thailand's parliament stood for nine minutes in silence today because Mongkut saved the monarchy too. Far from the bumbling, lovestruck man of the film, Mongkut was an intelligent, wise, hard-working and effective monarch. Not the first or last victim of American historical revisionism but undoubtedly one of the more egregious cases of rewriting what happened to make it seem down to a Yankee.

In 1855 Mongkut - or rather his ministers led by (my favourite Thai of all) Somdet Chao Phraya Borom Maha Si Suriyawongse - signed a treaty with the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring. Because we're western-centric, we usually refer to this as the Bowring Treaty:

Bowring Treaty, (1855), agreement between Siam (Thailand) and Britain that achieved commercial and political aims that earlier British missions had failed to gain and opened up Siam to Western influence and trade.

The treaty lifted many restrictions imposed by Thai kings on foreign trade. It set a 3 percent duty on all imports and permitted British subjects to trade in all Thai ports, to own land near Bangkok, and to move freely about the country.

Again we should appreciate that Mongkut and his advisors knew what was happening elsewhere - in China, in Vietnam and even in India. The Siamese negotiating position was not strong and Mongkut knew he had to arrange some sort of deal or see what had been done to the stronger and richer kingdom of Burma happen to his kingdom. Siam had some leverage from playing the British, French and Dutch off against each other but in the end a deal was concluded with Britain rather than with the corporate interests representing France and the Dutch. Sir John Bowring was an envoy of another monarch allowing Si Suryawong to get him in front of Mongkut so as to conclude the deal:

There shall henceforward be perpetual peace and friendship between Their Majesties the First and Second Kings of Siam and their successors, and Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and her successors. All British subjects coming to Siam shall receive from the Siamese Government full protection and assistance to enable them to reside in Siam in all security, and trade with every facility, free from oppression or injury on the part of the Siamese; and all Siamese subjects going to an English country shall receive from the British Government the same complete protection and assistance that shall be granted to British subjects by the Government of Siam.

For all that came afterwards, this moment in modern Thai history was central. In principle Siam was the equal of Britain (although everyone involved knew this was something of a conceit) and had kept its freedom at the cost of ending the Royal monopoly of trade, removing tariffs and allowing British - and subsequently through further treaties, American - merchants to operate freely within the kingdom.

So today I know Thailand will, while mourning the passing of King Bhumipol, nod to history and to the time when an earlier wise king secured peace and independence by signing a trade deal with the world's most powerful nation. Thailand is a great country because of Mongkut - it's a shame our view of him is of a bald, buffoon in a 1950s Hollywood musical. Dr Bassett was right, he deserves - and Thailand deserves - much better.

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So is it democracy or a chimera of democracy?

The EU's approach to decision-making that is?

As I understand it, the European Commission is the bit of the EU that proposes the legislation. It does this on the instigation of either or both of the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. And off its own bat.

The Commission doesn't make the decision. That is for the EU's weird bicameral system - a majority in the Parliament plus, usually, a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers is necessary for the Commission's proposals to become law. The Parliament is elected and the Council of Ministers (again usually) consists of elected people although those people are not elected to the Council.

It's a little more complicated than this because, as vapers discovered, the Council of Ministers can (and does) amend the proposed legislation approved by Parliament. This process is call 'trialogue' and is described by Transparency International:

As we pointed out in our EU Integrity Study, the meetings are a major transparency black hole where large concessions are won and lost with very little oversight and without public disclosure. In the vast majority of cases, Parliament’s plenary vote serves only to rubber stamp the deals secured by a handful of negotiators from each institution, side-lining 99% of MEPs in the process. Even the Parliament’s own internal strategy document recognises that transparency has been traded off against efficiency and there is need for reform.

In theory this is about ironing out the process but, as we saw with the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), it can be used to put back into the legislation things that the Parliament has removed. And remember that the parties to these discussions do not automatically include the proposers of amendments approved by Parliament. In practice, what the Council of Ministers and Commission wants gets passed regardless of Parliament's wishes.

The final part of all this is whether 'we the people can kick the bastards out' - does the public voting bit of the system allow any change. It's clear that the Commission and Council of Ministers are only affected by a series of domestic elections in individual member countries as they are entirely - albeit for different reasons - appointed structures. And while the Parliament is directly elected so could be subject to change, it is pretty clear that not only is it a fairly unchanging body but it also has little or no power to affect institutional change since it cannot propose laws, does not have the final decision on those laws, and cannot insist that its democratic mandate takes precedent.

The inability of Parliament to enforce democracy or transparency (even assuming this was something it desired) demonstrates that the EU is not recognisably a democracy. This is compounded by most members of the European Parliament (MEPs) perceiving their role as being European courtiers fluttering round the grandees of the EU. Access to this decision-making process for non-corporates - again as vapers discovered - is extremely difficult since the entire system, typical of a court, is geared towards engaging with organised corporate representation whether that is business, NGO or professional lobbyist.

So in summary we have a system that lacks transparency, where the decisions of democratic (or seemingly democratic) bodies can be overturned in secret, where access to power is restricted by the lobby and by organisational gatekeepers, and where there is no mechanism for removing our rulers or prospect of those rulers introducing such a mechanism.

At university I recall studying the political regimes of The Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia and pre-Communist Cambodia. My politics lecturer, Dr Oey Hong Lee, described these polities as 'pseudo-democracies' - places where elections are held, where there are all the trappings of a democracy (parliaments, votes, prime ministers, opposition) but where this is all window dressing for business-as-usual cronyism. The same politicians remain in power either because of a rigid ethno-politics as in Malaysia, because the ruling party is endorsed by monarchy (Thailand, Cambodia), or because the system is designed to look like a democracy without actually being one (Phillipines, Indonesia).

This is, without question, what we see with the European Union. It has all the symbols of a democracy, indeed that word is seldom far from the lips of political and corporate leaders, but the system is geared towards either processing agreement between 28 individual nations - a sort of rolling treaty programme - or else serving the needs of influential groups and especially sectoral lobbies with powerful corporate backing (farming, industry, banking, health). But what the EU is not, is what most folk see as democratic. The Union falls down on the very basics - that people we elect make the decisions, that decisions are transparent and open to challenge, and that the people have the collective power to change our rules.

It is not democracy. It is a chimera of democracy.

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Benevolent lying...

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A wonderful observation by Dan Murphy about the IMF and World Bank:

Over the years current and former employees of both groups have explained that bias is down to the belief inside the financial institutions that their rosy projections can take on a life of their own by inspiring that elusive beast "investor confidence" and unleashing a deluge of cash upon their clients. They see it as a form of benevolent lying.

I find this a fascinating take on the problem of these international - and essentially unaccountable - organisations. I recall being taught - back in the early 1980s - that the two babes in the Bretton Woods were essentially superior bodies since they didn't suffer from the self-interest or realpolitik of bilateral interventions. Now it seems that the truth is sneaking out - their guesses are just as self-serving as the guesses of political leaderships in client countries. And the prescriptions - based on these optimistic guesses - have dreadful consequences:

"However, not tackling the public debt problem decisively at the outset or early in the program created uncertainty about the euro area’s capacity to resolve the crisis and likely aggravated the contraction in output. An upfront debt restructuring would have been better for Greece although this was not acceptable to the euro partners."

However Murphy suggests we shouldn't be surprised:

In the middle of that decade (1990s), the so-called Asian financial crisis hit much of the region, with capital flight threatening private banks, government coffers, and project finance alike. Thailand and Indonesia accepted IMF loans in exchange for "structural adjustment programs" (government spending cuts, foreign investor friendly legal changes, promises to have fully convertible currencies), while Malaysia, against dire warnings from the IMF, imposed currency controls and sought to stimulate the economy out of the downturn with an expansive government budget. The results? Malaysia weathered the crisis better than its neighbors, with fewer job losses and much less political turmoil.

Perhaps the time has come for politics to reassert its ascendancy over the cosy internationalist boondoggle. It seems that, whatever the choices made, it is better for them to be made by politicians we can kick out rather than on some distant scapegoat of an international institution. Especially one with as lousy a record as the IMF!

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