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09/07/2005:

"The Moral Empire: The Politics of Comscience"

by Priyamvada Gopal
A few years ago, Tony Blair termed the state of Africa a 'scar on the world's conscience'. It was not the first time that the dubious honour of being a moral touchstone had been conferred upon the continent. By the late 19th century too, Africa was the foil for various European crises of conscience even as major European powers were busy consolidating colonial regimes across large swathes of the globe. In his remarkable book, King Leopold's Ghost (1999), which chronicles the brutalities of the Belgian monarch's venal reign over the Congo, Adam Hochschild has shown how British popular outrage over extreme degradation 'elsewhere' could serve to normalize injustices at home and in Britain's own colonies. Interestingly, Leopold had undertaken his own violent expropriation of the Congo's land and natural resources by establishing humanitarian bodies such as the 'International Africa Association', whipping up righteous European indignation at 'Arab slave traders.' He had his celebrity allies, like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who extolled the 'wisdom and goodness' of Leopold's ostensibly humanitarian reign which also came to be known as the 'rubber terror' during which thousands of Africans were forced into servitude, maimed and killed to feed Europe's hunger for the newly discovered material.

Despite a shared penchant for self-regarding moralism and for all the unconscionable bloodletting that he has sponsored in Iraq—which now rebounds on British civilians (most of whom opposed the invasion)—Tony Blair is no Leopold. But the two historical moments have something in common. Then as now, the technology of modern warfare was used to help 'civilisation overcome barbarism'. It was then too that international humanitarian crusades came to have distinct political uses. Firstly, vast tracts of African or Asian land and resources come under indirect or direct command of the benefactor nations. An equally significant, though less visible, fact was that the emphasis on situations of extreme degradation had the effect of minimizing other kinds of misrule and violence even within progressive quarters. For instance, remarkable activists like the intrepid E.D Morel, who founded the hugely important Congo Reform Movement to expose Leopold's murderous reign in that region, refused to criticize Britain's colonial practices which could also include the expropriation of resources and the use of forced labour. With scrutiny focused on material misdeeds elsewhere, Britain could function, Hochschild suggests, as a kind of new and different 'Moral Empire.'
zmag.org