by Phar Kim Beng, Straits Times, September 2, 2004
Mr. Bill Clinton made the promotion of democracy the centrepiece of his foreign policy when he was president of the United States. President George W. Bush, especially after Sept 11, did the same, looking to democracy as a means of reforming Arab/Muslim societies and awakening them to their faults.
But do democracies admit their errors? Do they confront unsavoury aspects of their own past?
British historian Eric Hobsbawm once said that the 20th century was an age of extremes. Western democracies, however, have hardly given any thought to the destruction they have wrought in World War I, World War II and the Cold War.
When asked by throngs of journalists ‘if he slept well’ after ordering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US president Harry Truman, for instance, answered in the affirmative, without even batting an eyelid.
Across the Atlantic, as World War II came to an end, Winston Churchill could counsel magnanimity even as he tried to restore the status quo ante, with Britain retaining its colonial empire.
What is amazing about the US or Britain is not only their unwillingness to confront their unsavoury pasts, but also their ability to remain innocent despite that past. The capacity of democracies to repeatedly claim innocence is one reason why their histories often have an aseptic quality.
America, for instance, almost obliterated Native Americans, both before its War of Independence and after. Americans, however, remain effectively oblivious of this.
In the case of Britain, it controlled at one stage up to 80 per cent of the world’s surface. Colonialism is still seen as a sign of English genius, not a cruel infliction on non-Western peoples.
What is at issue here is not self-censorship. It is certainly not a case of enforced amnesia, with textbooks rewritten to whitewash or erase an unsavoury history. The nasty facts of history can be found – in libraries, government archives and academic publications – if citizens were so inclined to find them.
Rather, what repeatedly distinguishes these democracies is their conviction, in the teeth of all the evidence, that their motives are always pure.
As Professor Richard Falk, an international law don at Princeton University, once wrote: ‘One of the most harmful features of global dominance, Western-style, is the perpetual rediscovery of its own innocence’.
No amount of abuse and exploitation, however catastrophic its consequences for non-Western victims, seems able to erode this sense of innocence.
There are perfectly logical reasons why democratic leaders, as well as the laity, can feel unremorseful about their past. For one, democracy is a brilliant instrument for reclaiming innocence.
Though democracy as such does not necessarily lead to moral prevarication, it allows for more than one idea to prevail at any one time. Its very ability to allow for a contest of ideas and policies makes it easy for it to abandon ideas and decisions that turn out to be wrong or tragic.
The very ability of democracies to criticise and dismiss their own errors enables them to also emerge from moral crises smelling like the proverbial rose.
In the case of the US, charges of war atrocities in Vietnam or Korea – or even in World War II, the ‘good’ war – for example, failed to dent its mantle. Each president, like every generation of Americans, can begin with a new slate. Policy errors and tragic mistakes can be ascribed to one particular political segment, and dismissed.
Still, there is a downside to the sense of perpetual innocence that democracies exhibit. When such a beatific belief shapes the mindset of the decision-makers in democracies, democracy can quickly congeal into a system that feeds on its own righteousness.
The war on terror, for example, though justly prosecuted to eliminate evil – in the words of President Bush, to rid the international community of vengeful ‘malcontents and murderers’ – ignores the root causes of terrorism.
As such, the negative consequences of US policy in the Middle East – in particular, America’s one-sided support of Israel and its support of oppressive Arab regimes – are ignored. Americans, convinced of their moral purity, cannot acknowledge their guilt.
Their claim of innocence renders them oblivious to America’s past foreign policy derelictions in the region, making Washington almost unable to change its present behaviour.
The writer is an analyst at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Kuala Lumpur.
Source: The Straits Times