WAKING WITH THE COYOTE UGLY, BUT TRYING TO KEEP YOUR LEFT ARM:

September 24, 2004

The Cult of Che: Don’t applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. (Paul Berman, Sept. 24, 2004, Slate)

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles’ movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford’s Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries. [...]

The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.

These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians’ organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel’s statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.

Every essay from the pen of Paul Berman over the past few years has struck a note of anguish at what has become of the Left that he still imagines himself a member of. Take his first sentence: “The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time.” Strike the “our time” and replace it with “the Left” and you’ve got the truth he can’t quite face.

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EITHER SOVEREIGNTY OR MORALITY:

September 10, 2004

Violating ‘Sovereignty’: Questioning a Concept’s Long Reign (Carlin Romano, 9/10/04, The Chronicle Review)

As an explosive real-world political idea, sovereignty propels international armies and costs untold lives. As a historical concept within political philosophy — roughly defined by one scholar as “supreme authority within a territory” — it remains a back-alley matter, outside the main arena.

Compared with idealistic de jure notions like “justice” and “democracy,” it’s often a de facto embarrassment. Compared with relatively coherent concepts like “desert” or “entitlement,” it’s a mongrel: born in “divine right” theology and circumstance, barely coherent at best, terminally ambiguous at worst, preternaturally dangerous.

[Alan Cranston's] posthumously published essay, recently issued as The Sovereignty Revolution (Stanford University Press), begins dramatically: “It is worshiped like a god, and as little understood. It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name. It is at once a source of power and of power’s abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful. It is sovereignty.”

An indefatigable international diplomat, Cranston insists on his subject’s enormous sway: “The fires of passionate crusades to achieve, assert, or defend sovereignty for one purpose or another or to avenge some breach of it light up the night skies of our time like some giant uncontrolled forest fire raging all over the world.”

Most of Cranston’s essay alternates between reporting the bare bones of multiple world crises rooted in the vagaries of his subject, and advancing a few basic positions. He argues that when people understand sovereignty as the absolute power of a government over its own territory and citizens, a shield against the intervention of other governments, nongovernmental organizations, and outside powers, it is an illegitimate and dangerous medieval idea. At best, sovereignty should be understood as the right of people to determine their own destinies. Such sovereignty, he maintains, delegable to governments through democratic process, is the only legitimate form, and political history in the West happily continues to head in that direction.

Finally, sovereignty as a defense against outside intervention to stop extraordinarily unacceptable behavior by a government against its people is always, in Cranston’s view, heinous and unjustified. International covenants on genocide and human rights similarly demonstrate the world community’s declining appetite for claims of such absolute state sovereignty. [...]

Dan Philpott, the University of Notre Dame political scientist who offers the definition of “supreme authority within a territory” in his excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject, draws attention to facets of the concept important for current purposes. He writes that if sovereignty assumes authority, then authority, as the philosopher R.P. Wolff outlined, assumes both a right to command and a right to be obeyed. Philpott, author of Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2001), notes that a “holder of sovereignty derives authority from some mutually acknowledged source of legitimacy — natural law, a divine mandate, hereditary law, a constitution, even international law. In the contemporary era, some body of law is ubiquitously the source of sovereignty.” Yet much media discussion of sovereignty ignores the issue of whether a thug regime — e.g., Saddam Hussein’s — has in any sense earned a right to be obeyed, and thus earned sovereignty.

Similarly, Philpott observes, “territoriality is now deeply taken for granted” in the sense that simple presence within a geographical area presumptively places someone under a particular sovereignty. But a case such as that of the Kurds, a stateless people who have suffered under Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian sovereignty without any moral acceptance of that rule, shows how sovereignty often plays out merely as a recognition of power, not an acknowledgment of just power.

Such historical and philosophical perspective suggests that moral foreign policy must cut through the threshold concept of sovereignty instead of allowing it to be a conversation stopper. It must push on to sovereignty’s etiology, to issues of justice, democracy, and legitimacy. Debates that reflexively criticize, for instance, the United States for violating Iraqi sovereignty, or Israel for violating Palestinian sovereignty, or Russia for violating Chechen sovereignty, make little sense if one doesn’t explain why the supposedly violated sovereignty deserves that status.

Alan Cranston?

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