Humanitarian interventions

[Kill all the fetuses!]

I wanted to ask what is your stance on humanitarian interventions? And I mean not any intervention masqueraded as humanitarian intervention, but the one's like a potential intervention in Rwanda back in the 90s. Do they help, can they help?

Are there any successful examples of a humanitarian intervention in modern history?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Not that I know of. I would find it hard to believe that one of the big powers would just altruistically "help" anyone. Even when they have had a seemingly benign intervention, or seemingly neutral (like UN forces), there's some other motive driving it and we'd have to ask well why THIS disaster is deserving of financial aid and military engineer corps and "peacekeepers" etc. Why THIS war, why THIS group of desperate people and not the millions who need relief any day of the week?

[Kill all the fetuses!]

Not that I know of. I would find it hard to believe that one of the big powers would just altruistically "help" anyone. Even when they have had a seemingly benign intervention, or seemingly neutral (like UN forces), there's some other motive driving it and we'd have to ask well why THIS disaster is deserving of financial aid and military engineer corps and "peacekeepers" etc. Why THIS war, why THIS group of desperate people and not the millions who need relief any day of the week?

Wasn't there one in Somalia, which led to withdrawal after some soldiers were dragged dead through the streets?

I have no illusions of a benign super-power giving support just for the sake of it. I am interested more if it could work, like, would it have been a good idea to send troops with guns in Rwanda or would it have escalated to something worse?

Like, if the U.S. is pressured by the working class to intervene in Syria or any other country which has a huge conflict/genocide or whatever.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The French actually did intervene in Rwanda. The intervention was an unmitigated disaster that prolonged the genocide.

The working class has no business "forcing" "its own" bourgeoisie into imperialist intervention. For socialists, the bourgeoisie is always the enemy, not an agent of change.

[PhoenixAsh]

The problem with intervention is that there was probably an earlier form of "intervention" which caused the problems to begin with.

[Kill all the fetuses!]

The French actually did intervene in Rwanda. The intervention was an unmitigated disaster that prolonged the genocide.

The working class has no business "forcing" "its own" bourgeoisie into imperialist intervention. For socialists, the bourgeoisie is always the enemy, not an agent of change.

I guess the this has become my pet peeve. I mean, this radical purity, no lesser evilism, no collaboration with the bourgeoisie etc. It's very easy to say something like this when you aren't being hunted down by some other ethnic group within your country.

But thanks for the reference to French intervention, I will have to check it up as to how they prolonged it.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I guess the this has become my pet peeve. I mean, this radical purity, no lesser evilism, no collaboration with the bourgeoisie etc. It's very easy to say something like this when you aren't being hunted down by some other ethnic group within your country.


No, it's not easy to say that people in Crimea or Syria are pretty much screwed for a while unless another option, besides appealing to one imperial power or another and picking the lesser evil, becomes a real choice. But I do think this is basically the case and (part of the reason) why we need to rebuild international working class movements independant of rulers and imperial powers, specifically with strong and organic revolutionary forces or elements within it.

These powers are interested in stability when it suits them, they are interested in dividing up Iraq or Ukrane into hostile ethnic-cleansing factions when it suits them too. They are going to do what they are going to do at this point, so our support (radicals or workers) for their intervention only gives them some cover and then makes it harder to oppose them when they have a more obvious invasion that they label as "humanitarian intervention".

EDIT: also IMO, this isn't grandstanding or being some kind of dogmatist - I think it's actually very practical and based in real historical experiences. In these situations, the population probably wants some peace, some settlement of the crisis - but what that means for workers and what that means for rulers of Capitalist Empires are entirely different things. So ethnic cleanising and faction bloodshed is "peace" in Iraq for the US - a police state and resumption of crack-downs in Egypt is "order" to the US. An outside intervention can't "solve" any organicly internal strife within a society... they can only manage this. Usually for imperial powers in the post-war era this means figuring out which faction is least harmful to your interests and then supporting them under the guise of re-establishing order. Depending on how severe the internal crisis was, if it's severe manageing it tends to requires a great deal of force at the begining or a lot of repression at once a political order has been re-established.

[Kill all the fetuses!]

These powers are interested in stability when it suits them, they are interested in dividing up Iraq or Ukrane into hostile ethnic-cleansing factions when it suits them too. They are going to do what they are going to do at this point, so our support (radicals or workers) for their intervention only gives them some cover and then makes it harder to oppose them when they have a more obvious invasion that they label as "humanitarian intervention".

The problem is that I don't see that everything in this world is bent to the wishes of capital. That is to say that there are events that happen independently of the wishes of bourgeoisie.

Take Rwanda for instance. It seems to me that the bourgeoisie wasn't really responsible nor it incited the genocide, though I've heard that distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was meaningless before the colonial power came. So I don't really see how the bourgeoisie really wanted and created the genocide. And the UN officials stated that they are gonna recommend world leaders to not intervene, because there are no resources. So here you have circumstances that don't fit your description, although, I wholeheartedly agree that more often than not they do.

So my point is merely that you have these circumstances - would it be a good idea for the working class to push for a military intervention there? If not, are there any other reasons apart from this radical purity thingy (e.g. would it work, ideally?).

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I guess the this has become my pet peeve. I mean, this radical purity, no lesser evilism, no collaboration with the bourgeoisie etc. It's very easy to say something like this when you aren't being hunted down by some other ethnic group within your country.

But thanks for the reference to French intervention, I will have to check it up as to how they prolonged it.

I mean, it's not that we don't want it to work. If it did, it would basically be the best thing ever, because we could skip the tedious, thankless and often dangerous work of building organs of proletarian solidarity etc. and just go petition Obama or something. But it doesn't, it never has, and it is clear from Marxist analysis of the situation that it never will. In fact this sort of "well-meaning" reliance on the bourgeoisie just saps the strength of proletarian movements, and ends up providing a "left" alibi for imperialism. It isn't purism to advise people not to bang their heads against the wall, and we certainly don't do it because we're afraid the wall will collapse.

[VivalaCuarta]

Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Cuban troops in Angola.

Of course, Vietnam and Cuba are workers states, bureaucratically deformed, and the USSR was a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. It's about class.

What should be noted is that "human rights" was the standard under which Ayatollah Jimmy Carter re-mobilized U.S. imperialism after its defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese. First target, Afghanistan, using jihadi proxies. It didn't end so well for the human rights of central Asian women. Marxists said Hail Red Army in Afghanistan, while most of the left enlisted in Carter's imperialist "human rights" crusade -- the same left that a few weeks ago was grooving about the Nazi/NATO coup in Ukraine, until the Nazi part became too embarrassingly obvious.

[blake 3:17]

The only successful one I can think of was East Timor. I'd say it's the exception to the rule.

And as mentioned above, the Vietnamese in Cambodia.