This blogging week in Sweden, an incipient but promising debate about the semantics of terror soon morphed into a heated argument about motive, (un)civility and bias in the participants. While this is an interesting meta-debate all by itself, it did eclipse the original question somewhat, and I happen to think it important. Hence this ruminative Saturday morning afternoon post.

Historical context:
Earlier this week, SVT’s Faktum explored the possibility of redefining the term “terrorism” to include a slew of state and police actions, and also acts of violence against women here in Sweden. The pseudonymous Alicio wrote an exhaustive rebuttal that contained both substantive points and ad hominem ones (in the technical sense of the term). Ali Esbati, until recently head of the youth wing of the Left Party, responded in kind to Alicio. Then everybody had a say about who was more out of bounds.In debates about terrorism I think it would be helpful to first agree on the terminology, so that all parties know what precisely is being discussed. Too often, this kind of debate involves shifted semantics; the interlocutors argue past each other because they don’t first manage to agree on which words signify which concepts precisely.

I think this happens easily with the emotionally charged topic of terrorism, and I think that it happened specifically in the case of the blog fallout surrounding Faktum’s program. I also think Faktum itself was sloppy in fulfilling its journalistic mandate. No, not because it was biased (it was), but because it omitted interesting and important points that could have fleshed out the debate on its way to a perfectly acceptable biased conclusion. It would have been a much better program had Alicio’s critique been anticipatedOn public television, I don’t mind individual programs that show bias, as long as the channel overall is balanced. I do mind badly made programs.; his substantive points are excellent.

What I think is happening is that the word “terrorism” has gradually been invested with a vernacular meaning that is much broader than the original narrow definition. The vernacular meaning is normative and emotive — the word has practically become a synonym for “heinous act,” a silver medalist to genocide’s gold in an olympics of evil. The narrow definition of terrorism is drier and legalistic, and although there is wiggle room for emphasis, there are clear boundaries as to what it is notMy own version contains these tests for determining if an incident can be labeled terrorist:
 
1. Is the act one of violence or a credible threat of violence against individuals?
 
2. Is the aim to target civilians? (civilian victims as collateral damage in military targets, or as a result of a mistake in the fog of war, don’t count)
 
3. Is the purpose to coerce changes in public policy by instilling fear in the civilian population at large? (The Unabomber and Columbine don’t count. The anthrax attacks in 2001 do (and they were even successful in altering public policy))..

Terrorism then is a class of violence, a legal classification upon which a body of international law has been built. I think it is a pity that the term “terrorism” has also become a shorthand for any especially egregious act of violence, or even just all acts of violence in the name of causes one is opposed to. To conflate these meanings involves descriptive smudging, and in the process we lose the opportunity to pin down arguments in a debate. I don’t mean to say that the vernacular concepts that have come to be attached to the word are useless — I’m saying that we need to give them separate signifiers, so that we don’t run the risk of arguing past each other.

If I understand Faktum correctly, what they are trying to say is that this smudging is encouraged by “the powers that be” in order to whip up in the public the kind of hysteria that excuses all manner of heavy-handed state actions. My problem with their report, however, is that they haven’t chosen a particularly helpful method of making their point, because all they do is “smudge back.” I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of clever underhand agitprop, or a turning of the weapons of the mighty back against them, but the tactic of relabeling as terrorism everything that breaches a certain level of moral outrage does not strike me as an honest attempt at resolving this semantic mess. Rather, it looks to me like they’re wallowing in it.

A case in point: Faktum could have (should have?) homed in on a few specific incidents of violence in the Palestinian Territories and dissected them. Here is an example I prepared earlier 🙂 Three blog posts from July 2002, reactions to an Israeli missile strike on an apartment building in Gaza that killed Hamas commander Salah Shehada but also 14 civilians. I’ll reproduce the most relevant bits here:

Today’s Ha’aretz editorial calls the Gaza strike an act of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t agree, but only because I like to quibble semantically about the proper use of the term “terrorism” — the word should be used to describe acts that deliberately aim to inspire terror in a civilian population. […]

What Sharon is guilty of is pursuing a military objective with wanton disregard for civilian life. His mindset is the same mindset that allowed Hiroshima and Dresden. […]

The moral difference between terrorism and what Sharon ordered is small, though. If you know with certainty your actions will cause civilian casualties way out of proportion with any military or political objective, then intent is irrelevant. If you order a missile strike on a city block, civilian casualties are not a mistake.

[…] If Sharon had known that Salah Shehada was hiding out in a city block full of Israelis, would he have made the same decision? In other words, is a Palestinian 3-year old’s life worth less than an Israeli 3-year old’s? To Sharon, I have no doubt it is, even if he is not fully capable of articulating this to himself.

Rereading this now, I’m veering more towards Ha’aretz’s assessment: One effect of the strike was to signal to Palestinian civilians that their safety does not figure in collateral calculations. To the extent that Sharon intended this to be a message to Palestinians as a motivation to alter their stance towards Hamas, it satisfies my definition of terrorism. Still, killing civilians was not the primary aim here. The missile attack would not have happened had Salah Shehada not been in the apartment building. It is a case of Israel skirting the border between legitimate defense and state terrorism, and in this case stepping across the line.

But me changing my opinion here is not such a big deal. The immorality of the strike in my mind isn’t altered by this legal reclassification. Nor does it change my conviction that a suicide bomber blowing herself up on a Jerusalem bus is a much starker case of terrorism, and also more contemptible — there is the complete absence of a military objective, for example. It is clear to me that the legality of an act and the morality of an act need to be considered separately when judging it in its totality, because while there are infinite gradations of (im)morality, there are only a few for illegality, so there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence.

The gray zone between what is terrorism and what is not is a place of nuance that all such debates should visit. Faktum fails to explore it.

Elsewhere in the program, the semantic smudging takes a turn for the ridiculous. Guantanamo is terrorism? It involves torture and illegal detention, but not terrorism, obviously. Violence against women is terrorism? It is illegal and it is immoral, but is it perpetrated by groups who want to change public policy? No. The invasion of Iraq is terrorism? Regardless of its legality or otherwise, it was a good old-fashioned war with military targets; it’s not automatically terrorism if you think it illegal.

What about resistance movements to military invasions? Faktum is correct in saying that invading powers are often quick to label such movements terrorist, even if the resistance only targets the military. This does not mean that resistance movements can never be terrorist, however. In Iraq, for example, the Baathist resistance has now blatantly adopted terrorist tactics against civilians, especially Iraqis.

In a nutshell, then, here is Faktum’s faulty methodology, made possible by semantic sloppiness: First, an appeal to the vernacular definition of terrorism (“Guantanamo is an outrage, hence terrorism”). Then, the claim of a legal equivalence with other acts of violence that do pass the legalistic test for terrorism (“Both guantanamo and suicide bombings are terrorism.”). Finally, the positing of a moral equivalence for these acts based on the shared terrorism label. (“Guantanamo shows that the US is no better than Hamas.”The logician in me compels me to point out that while it is still possible for the conclusion “the US is no better than Hamas” to be correct, it is certainly not because of this argument.)

Or did I miss something?

I’m not sure if anyone who normally reads my blog is particularly interested in this, but I needed to get up to speed on the situation in Belgium. Consider these my notes, written up.Things are going badly, not just in Holland, but also in Belgium.

On Nov 9, Vlaams Blok — Flanders’ socially conservative, nationalist and xenophobic party — lost an appeal in Belgium’s highest court against a ruling that had declared three of its non-profit associations (the “Nationalist Training Institute,” the “Nationalist Broadcasting Foundation,” and “Flemish Concentration” — no, really) in violation of Belgium’s anti-racism law. This made two things possible:

• Vlaams Blok leaders, party members and business affiliates would from now on be indictable if they collaborated with these associations, which were the de facto organizing committees of the Vlaams Blok.
• Flemish lawmakers could use the ruling to initiate a process to deny Vlaams Blok party-political broadcasting slots on public television and an annual €2 million state subsidy — its portion of the funding granted to all political parties with representatives in both chambers of parliament.

To avoid all this, Vlaams Blok dissolved itself last Sunday, Nov 14, and then immediately reconstituted as Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), with the same leaders, members and manifesto but additionally with a clean slate.

Vlaams Blok could have been stripped of the trappings of partyhood via a piece of legislation [Dutch] enacted in 1999 specifically for the purpose of reining in this partyThis funding is determined in part by the number of votes a party received in the last election: You get €123,950 if you get at least one representative in each of the two chambers of parliament, plus €1.24 per vote cast in your favor. In the case of the Vlaams Blok, this funding amounted to about half of its €4 million total income.: It makes state funding conditional on there being a clause in a party’s program that promises to uphold the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms — and then to actually do so. Vlaams Blok had added such a clause to its program in order to continue receiving state funding, even as its leaders made quite clear in subsequent statements that they considered individual rights to be subordinate to the collective morality of the Flemish nation — as defined by themLast week one party leader expressed the opinion that Muslim women who continue to wear the headscarf should be expatriated, according to NRC Handelsblad [Dutch, Subscription req’d.] Vlaams Belang’s group-rights perspective is also hinted at in their new party program, which is virtually indistinguishable from the old Vlaams Blok one [PDF, Dutch].. The ruling could thus have furnished easy proof that the party was not practicing what it had been coerced to preach in its program for the sake of continued access to funding.

All this might sound like good news. It is not. I’ve got several observations cum policy recommendations for the Belgian political establishment:

1. The cordon sanitaire against Vlaams Blok/Belang doesn’t work. Scrap it.
The cordon sanitaire — the agreement between Belgium’s other political parties to quarantine Vlaams Blok — has not led to a wilting of support for that party. On the contrary, it hands them the protest vote on a platter. The cordon allows the party to portray itself as a victim of political bullying by the establishment parties (which is true), and as the victim of an undemocratic process (which is false — parties can make any alliance they choose). As noble in intent as the cordon may be, Vlaams Blok has used it to great effect to energize its base and attract new discontents.

But there is another process at work: The cordon allows the Blok/Belang to make unconstested claims on large tracts of the political landscape that have been voluntarily vacated by the other parties. Social conservatism, Flemish nationalism and xenophobia are the three political poles now occupied exclusively by Vlaams BelangBlok/Belang is now the largest party in Flanders, with 27% of voting intentions, according to an Oct 2004 poll..

Although these ideologies are often held synchronously, you only need to subscribe to one in order to become a Vlaams Belang voter. The solution, then, from a systemic perspective, is for other parties to quit quarantining and start competing. There is, for example, room for a political party that is socially conservative (regarding abortion and family policies, say) but not xenophobic; or a party that is separatist on economic grounds alone and socially liberal (and not xenophobic). Let xenophobia be the only policy at which Vlaams Belang excels. For all the rest, offer alternatives.

2. Legislative maneuvers against Vlaams Blok/Belang don’t work. Stop all state funding of political parties.
It was also a tactical misstep to link party funding to the presence of the human rights clause in party manifestos. In doing so, Belgium’s political establishment effectively forced Vlaams Blok to look more appealing to voters who sympathize with xenophobic policies but who don’t think of themselves as racist. Vlaams Blok/Belang is now able to point at its party program with a smirk and say “look, we uphold the convention on human rights, it says so right here, how can you call us racists?”

By putting an acceptable face on Vlaams Belang — by helping them into their sheep’s clothing — the party’s pool of potential voters has in fact become much larger. Stop this linkage, then — allow Vlaams Belang to show its true colorsSome lawmakers agree with me. The chairman of the Flemish parliament, SP.A’s (previously the Socialist Party) Norbert De Batselier, said [Dutch, subscription req’d.] he himself preferred battling Vlaams Blok with political arguments, rather than through triggering this legislation..

I do understand that to the majority of Belgians and all immigrants, the idea of their tax euros funding the activities of a political party that rejects universal human rights is distasteful. The solution, however, is not to try to decide through legislation what the limit of acceptable, fundable political debate is, but instead to stop state funding of political parties outright. Privatize political parties. Scrap the rules that limit private funding to €125 per person, and let corporations donate. Frank Vanhecke, the leader of Vlaams Belang, says he would welcome this. I doubt his corporate contributions would be much to boast about.

There is a further unintended consequence of this linkage of the human rights clause and funding: It insulates against schisms. The hardliners in the party, who would never agree on paper to observe universal human rights, have nowhere else to go, so the party stays unified.

There is some evidence [Dutch] of factional tensions [Dutch, subscription req’d.] in Vlaams Belang, and we should encourage these. Some want to scrap the “unrealistic” aspects of the party program, such as the forced repatriation of children of immigrants, born in Belgium, who “fail to adapt.” Currently, there is no opportunity for such factional infighting to result in splits, because the hardliners have no legal recourse to a party that can embody their views. We should encourage them, by not penalizing their ideology financially.

3. Judicial maneuvers against Vlaams Blok/belang don’t work. Decriminalize hate speech.
It’s naive to think that outlawing a party makes its supporters go away. Outlawing hate speech addresses symptoms, not causes — it is equivalent to plastering a band-aid over a gaping wound. The 1 million Vlaams Blok voters have just turned into 1 million Vlaams Belang voters, with leaders that are a little bit more careful about what they say in public. If it is that easy to circumvent such censure, then the court ruling was a useless piece of judicial maneuvering.

I have previously taken a dim view of criminalizing any speech short of an incitement to violence or a credible threat of physical harm (with the usual exceptions for certain kinds of lies, like fraud, perjury and libel). Hate speech needs to be protected because otherwise you drive underground precisely those beliefs that are in most need of being engaged by society. You cannot legislate away beliefs. Let xenophobes say what they really mean, and then explain to the electorate why these ideas are anathema to the very idea of a modern liberal democracy.

The outlawing of Vlaams Blok was driven by a fear of what might happen should their political program ever become government policy. I think we have less to fear than many imagine. Belgium is beholden to European law and international law, and it is almost impossible to extract Flanders from this web of rights and obligations. A determined Flemish nationalist government could do it, by playing the sovereignty trump card, but only at the expense of every multinational company leaving, and the Flemish economy would not survive this. Betray the human rights of law abiding immigrants, or make new laws that forbid non-western modes of behavior that are perfectly legal today (such as wearing a headscarf, or language tests only for immigrants from outside of the EU, but not for Americans and Australians), and you will get the European Court of Human Rights on your back. This whole EU project wasn’t such a bad idea after all, was it?

4. Reclaim the intellectual debate.
Vlaams Blok has been allowed to define the parameters of the political debate for too long. Nobody seems to be questioning their premise that the interests of Christian citizens and Muslim immigrants are a zero-sum game. But this debate should not be cast in us-vs-them terminology — that’s the wrong cleavage to draw battle lines around. Instead, the debate should be reframed in the language of liberty. The freest societies are those that maximize the opportunities for consensual behavior, with tolerance as a guiding light. Vlaams Belang is proposing to veer in the exact opposite direction. Here is the most innocuous version of their proposal, from their manifesto:

It must be made clear to aliens and immigrants in Flanders that they are expected to comply with our laws, and also to adapt to our values and morality, to our habits and to important traditional principles of European civilization, such as the separation of church and state, democracy, freedom of speech and the equal status of men and women. (my italics)

This excerpt is trivially nonsensical in that the laws as they stand already uphold the separation of church and state, democracy, etc… and additionally prohibit stealing, revenge killings, female genital mutilation, terrorism and incitements to violence — all the favorite things Vlaams Belang accuses immigrants of doing with impunity.

The excerpt’s most telling part is the notion that abiding by existing laws is not sufficient — that there should exist additional constraints on behaviour that limit it to western norms (“our values and morality”). The only way, of course, that behavior can be compelled is through laws, so what Vlaams Belang is saying is that it wants to make new laws, laws that constrict consensual behavior in ways that target non-westerners. Vlaams Belang member of parliament Jürgen Verstrepen spells it out for us:

“Not all immigrants need to turn back, just those who do not adapt,” notes [journalist] Van de Velden. “That they abide by the law no longer seems to suffice.” Indeed. It doesn’t suffice. Not for us, and we find ourselves, as far as we are concerned, in the company of government parties in France, Germany and the Netherlands. They too say clearly that immigrants need to adapt and subscribe to our values and norms.“Niet alle migranten moeten terugkeren, maar alleen zij die zich niet aanpassen,” noteert Van de Velden. “Dat ze zich aan de wet houden, lijkt niet meer te volstaan.” Inderdaad. Dat volstaat niet. Niet voor ons, en wij bevinden ons wat dat betreft trouwens in het onverdachte gezelschap van regeringspartijen in Frankrijk, Duitsland en Nederland. Ook zij zeggen nu luidop dat allochtonen zich moeten aanpassen en onze waarden en normen moeten onderschrijven.

The reason Vlaams Blok has been able to define the parameters of the debate is that we have never engaged them — calling them racist doesn’t count, even if it is true. We need to put aside the assumptions and motivations that fuel their arguments, and engage the arguments on their merits. And we need to do this by pointing out that Vlaams Blok aims to reduce the freedoms enjoyed by society as a whole through the targeting of the freedoms of those who belong to minority cultures.

We also need to restore the balance of the blame for the breakdown in ethnic relations in Belgium. Belgium’s immigrants (and those in France and the Netherlands) are not any different in disposition or naturally more violent than the immigrants that moved to the UK, Sweden or the US, where ethnic relations are a lot healthier. I don’t believe Belgians have been particularly welcoming to their immigrants, and that government policy has reflected this. If, as a result, immigrants have shut themselves off from mainstream culture, or view it with disdain, then we need to learn something from London and New York: Multiculturalism is a two-way process, and it is best achieved through cultural laissez-faire-ism. It is when immigrants feel themselves to be on an equal footing that they open themselves up to assimilation; it should be clear to anyone (and I suspect it is to Vlaams Belang) that ultimatums and non-negotiable demands have the opposite effect.

Multiculturalism is what Vlaams Belang fights against, because they are nationalists. We need to make the case for multiculturalism: Point out that the world’s most creative societies gain their vitality from the mixing of ethnicities and cultures, that Antwerp grew great to the extent that it embraced its minorities, and that the alternative is stagnation. I suspect not many creative people vote for Vlaams Belang for precisely this reason.

The only risk with this tack? That Flemish people actually do prefer cultural homogeneity over individual rights. If that happens, then I am all for making sure that the price of this preference is felt in full, economically. It’s worth noting, however, that over two thirds of the Flemish electorate did not vote for Vlaams Blok at the last elections, and I presume this is because they see the fundamental issues at stake.

Earlier relevant writings on free expression and Islam:
2004-02-13: Oops!… I did it again, on banning of headscarves in European schools.
2004-01-21: France’s theatre of the absurd, on the banning of headscarves in France.
2002-05-22: Europe’s illiberal liberalism, on how Islam is being cast as the new communism by people like Fortuyn.
2002-05-17: Giuliani on immigration, a great speech on America’s admirable tolerance of immigrants.
2002-05-07: Sullivan loses it, as he doesn’t understand why Fortuyn was wrong.Upon first hearing of the gunning down of flamboyant anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn in May 2002, everyone, including me, assumed the perpetrator was likely to have been an extremist Muslim. We thought wrong — he was killed by an ethnic Dutch militant animal-rights activist. The murderer’s actions were not subsequently interpreted as the will of a larger collective, there was no broader soulsearching among meat eaters, hunters or vegans, and there were no vigilante reprisals and counter-reprisals on slaughterhouses and forests.

Last week’s murder of Theo van Gogh, a strident/boorish anti-religious filmmaker, saw no such restraint. This time round, a Dutch-Moroccan murderer’s actions are being seen as the harbinger of larger, darker forces, with the very fabric of Dutch society supposedly stressed by a stubborn minority of anti-assimilationist cultural refuseniks.

And yet the actions of the two murderers are directly comparable: They both unpardonably stepped outside the realm of discourse into barbarism to settle their grievances. Why then has only this most recent murder caused the public debate to lurch towards violent groupthink? Because Mohammed B. saw himself as acting in the Muslim interest? Or because the ethnic Dutch see him as doing so? Dutch Muslims reacting on the largest Dutch-Moroccan internet forum certainly aren’t embracing Mohammed B’s actions.

The primacy of free expression by individuals in a liberal democracy works both ways: Just as van Gogh must be allowed to make a film that can be interpreted as insulting to IslamSubmission (see it, the main part is in English) is provocative, topical, possibly not entirely accurate, and almost certainly insulting to observing Muslims., so must Muslims be allowed to choose the manner and extent of their assimilation into Dutch society. Forcing such assimilation denies cultural minorities the very same right to individual expression that the cultural majority takes for granted, and makes a mockery of the liberal foundations of western society. The French forbidding headscarves in schools is a choice example of such illiberal liberalism.

The Dutch already have laws criminalizing murder, incitement to violence and domestic abuse, and these are perfectly adequate for punishing rabid mullahs and actions based on mysogynistic readings of the Koran. Further laws compelling immigrants to assimilate or leave, as are now being publicly mooted, would be a gross breach of the rights of individuals in society. An obligation to be like “us” cannot ever be construed as a right (despite Andrew Sullivan’s best efforts.)

Furthermore, such laws would be useless in preventing future Mohammed Bs. It’s become clear that the 26-year old had in fact assimilated perfectly — one Dutch Arabist expert points out in NRC Handelsblad regarding the letters pinned to van Gogh’s body:

I understood then that the farewell letter was written by a Dutch polderboy. Somebody who’d have passed his assimilation course with flying colors. Somebody who writes his testament in the same manner as we write Santa Claus rhymes. And then you realize that this is not somebody who belongs to “them”. It is somebody who is part of our society, who is Dutch through and through.Ik begreep toen dat de afscheidsbrief geschreven was door een Hollandse polderjongen. Iemand die met vlag en wimpel voor zijn inburgeringscursus zou zijn geslaagd. Iemand die zijn testament heeft geschreven op een manier zoals wij Sinterklaasrijmpjes maken. En dan realiseer je je dat het niet iemand is die tot de ‘zij’ behoort. Het is iemand die onderdeel uitmaakt van onze gemeenschap, die door en door Nederlands is.

This man’s actions were not culturally preordained. They came through a conscious embrace of the Al Takfir wal Hijra strain of terrorism. The threat, then, is not cultural, but ideological, and Dutch police today were targeting these cells, as well they should. Forced assimilation, however, would be a sorry overreaction to this threat.

Another week, another libertarian/classical liberal blogger joins the Swedish blogosphere. It’s an unmistakable trend that both JKL Blog and Media Culpa [English] pick up on today. We now have, in no particular order, Johan Norberg [mainly in English], Johnny Munkhammar [Some English], Henrik Alexandersson, PJ Anders Linder, Dick ErixonPer Gudmundson is a part-time participant., The group blog Smorgasbord [in English] and Tobias Henriksson all blogging from an ideological pole near the Timbro Institute, a Swedish think tank in favor of free markets or else a right wing capitalist cabal, depending on your sensibilities.

Those on the left drawn to conspiracy theories might wonder whether the Ludwig von Mises Institute hasn’t been issuing marching orders; but if the left has such thoughts, they have nowhere to blog it. That’s because the one thing more remarkable than the advent of liberal blogging in Sweden is the near-complete absence of credible socialist/social democrat bloggers pushing back.

What these liberal blogs have in common is that they all stay focused, stay on message, and collectively guarantee that no left-wing political shenanigans go unpunished, at least in the Swedish blogosphere. And sometimes, blogging critically about Sweden’s left-wing is less like shooting fish in a barrel than shooting a barrelful of fishIf I have a gripe, it’s that with the exception of the last two on the above list, Sweden’s liberal bloggers don’t allow commenting, which is lame. It’s not as if any of them are Andrew Sullivan yet. But even if they were, that’s is no reason to turn comments off; look at Kos. Oh, and get RSS feeds..

Why no groundswell of left-wing or even just social democrat blogs? My hunch is that in a society where one political perspective has the hegemony, blogging acts as an assymetric weapon in the war of ideas. Blogging is essentially free, scalable, competitive yet freely associative — right up Liberalism’s alley, in fact. Meanwhile, social democrats and the left are sticking to those big old media guns that got them to the top of the pile in the first place. They have yet to adapt.

But the lack of intelligent social democratic countervetting makes the Swedish blogosphere poorer for it. I have yet to read (or find a link to) a good critique of Catherine Hakim’s new book and its reasons for the marked differences between men and women’s salaries in Scandinavian countries (and I can think of some responses, but this is not my battle, and I’d like to read the book first); and where is the serious response to Johan Norberg’s survey of Swedish libraries showing bias in the purchasing of political booksTo be honest, I don’t think a credible retort is possible in the case of library bias.?

In other cases, incisive left critique would do liberal blogs some good, lest they get all flabby and incestuous. For example, Norberg today approvingly quotes a (still permalinkless) Munkhammar post listing a litany of statistics pointing out how Sweden will effectively cease to exist in 2033I’m sure he’s kidding about the 2033 date, but does that mean we are supposed to take all the other data with a grain of salt?. First off, the post is completely unlinked and unsourced, leaving us fact checkers to do all the hard work; second, some of the quoted statistics are old news and have already been parsed to death elsewhere; third, the one new piece of information to me — “In 1999, Sweden was no 4 in the international investment league, in 2002 it had fallen to no 27” — is tendentiously presented. UNCTAD’s week-old 2002 foreign direct investment (FDI) league tables for this notoriously volatile indicator places Sweden 23rd out of 140 nations, far ahead of the EU norm and handily outperforming that Hayekian paradise – the US, in 92nd place – if these things matter to youWhen it comes to outward investment, Sweden came 8th. Belgium is first globally in both tables, but I’m not taking credit for that..

Furthermore, statistics can prove any point. For example, did you know Sweden is actually one of the world’s best places to do business? The World Bank’s month-old report “Doing Business in 2005 — Removing Obstacles to Growth,” ranks Sweden ninth, globally, for ease of doing business. Only two EU members make it into the top ten: Sweden and the United Kingdom. How so? Among EU members, Sweden, together with Finland, has the lowest number of required procedures to start up a business — three. It has among the EU’s lowest start-up costs, at 0.7% of per capita income (only Denmark is lower). Registering property takes one procedure and two days — easily making it the EU’s top performer. Sweden is also the cheapest place in the EU to enforce contracts, at 5.9% of the value of the debt (vs. an EU mean of 12.1%). I’ll leave out the fact that payroll costs are at the EU norm, just to heighten the effect. No wonder Sweden ranks so high in terms of FDIAnd I’ll spare you the stellar results Sweden had in the World Economic Forum’s 2003-2004 Global Competitiveness Report.
Update 2004-10-13: Rankings for 2004-2005..

But I shouldn’t be doing this work — a left-leaning patriotic Swede should, because, basically, I agree with the liberals. It’s just that it takes two sides for political blogging to get truly fun.

If King Leopold II were alive today, there is no doubt he would be on trial alongside Milosevic at The Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity. You might have heard about Leopold II’s exploits in the Congo at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries — perhaps from Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s GhostExcerpts from Hochschild’s book are available in PDF format here. It’s essential reading., or else White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, a BBC documentary that enraged the Belgian royal family when it was shown in Belgium earlier this year.

Many Belgians have never heard the story. Among the allegations, briefly: The Congo Free State, the personal property of King Leopold II, suffered a decline in population from 20 million to 10 million in the decades straddling 1900 as the king, in constant need of cash, had his colonial agents implement a brutal regime of forced labor on the native population. The process went thus: Belgian agents would enter a village and hold the women and children hostage; to secure their release, the men would have to head into the forest, find rubber trees, tap them, and return with superhuman quotas of sap. Many were worked to death, or else killed. If agents killed those held to ransom, they might chop off (right) hands, to prove that the bullets used hadn’t been wasted on game.

If you were the King, or Milosevic, how would you structure your defence? The numbers are exaggerated? They died from other causes? You never ordered such barbaric acts? You weren’t aware this was going on? It wasn’t systemic, but the actions of isolated individuals? You were framed? The natives did it more than you?

Of course you would. And now, a document [MS Word] published by the Belgian Embassy in LondonDon’t get me started — here is a PDF version I made. in the wake of the BBC documentary mounts a defence of Leopold II precisely along these lines. I have no idea why it even exists — why should government resources be expended defending the personal projects of a long-dead king from the work of historians and documentary filmmakers, irrespective of the accuracy of the claims? Can’t this matter be settled among academics? The Belgian constitution does not grant the current king policy making powers, so I don’t see why royal hissy fits should turn into national policy stances.

It’s a bizarrely defensive document, and stiffly phrased. For example, it doesn’t start, “Yes, King Leopold II’s actions are indefensible, certainly by today’s standards and even by the standards of his contemporaries, but the context in which he acted is more nuanced than a portrayal by a BBC documentary…” Instead, we get nuggets such as these:

About the allegations:

Translation: ‘Weakened,’ ‘some even killed;’ doesn’t sound so bad. And they call this genocide?These media claim that numerous deaths and cruelties ought to be ascribed to the system of licensing that King Leopold II had set up for the exploitation of rubber. The indigenous people were claimed to have been weakened and some even killed by forced labour for the exploitation of rubber in Congo. The reign of Leopold II is described as “genocidal”.

Some excerpts from the defence:

Translation: It wasn’t systemic, and in any case, the locals were doing it too. Bonus gratuitous swipe: They’re still doing it.It was not a practice ordered or imposed by Congo Free State or by Leopold II, but was the result of individual acts, based upon prior existing local customs. Mutilations were not introduced by the Belgians, but already existed (and still do) in some parts of Africa — they occurred not only in the Congo, but for instance also recently in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Taking the “scalp” of the enemy is not even peculiar to Africa.

Translation: There weren’t enough Belgians in the Congo to kill that many (even though they tried). And anyway, of the agents implementing Leopold II’s regime of forced labor, many weren’t Belgian. This reflects well on Leopold II, for some reason.3. Another reason why the accusation of “genocide” is out of proportion and unrealistic, is the fact that only 175 agents were in charge of the exploitation of rubber in Congo at the beginning of the 1890s. Most of them were not Belgian and a considerable number of them quickly succumbed to tropical diseases.

Translation: Some natives died before Leopold’s agents could exploit them. Surely he can’t be held responsible for that?4. […] The alleged deaths for the whole of Congo cannot be ascribed to the Belgians, simply because at the beginning of the colonisation, they were not even present or active in the whole of Congo. (their emphasis)

‘Demographic changes’!! My nomination for euphemism of the year. Translation for ‘Migration’: Apparently some Congolese didn’t like living in Congo Free State. ‘Tropical diseases’: Who would have guessed that exhausted, malnourished and mistreated workers have lowered immune systems? And re the slave trade, which Leopold II made ‘great efforts’ to ‘completely eradicate’: Well, if it contributed to a depopulation of the Congo, how successful were the efforts then? Even if demographic changes would have taken place in certain regions of Congo, they cannot solely by [sic] attributed to the reign of Leopold II. Other factors that have to be taken into account are: migration, tropical diseases and slave trade (which had been taking place in many parts of Congo before the reign of King Leopold II and which he made great efforts to completely eradicate).

Now, all this is just so tactless. Even the one narrow point I am willing to concede is made practically unpalatable by the smug logic the authors use to underpin it:

First of all, the use of the term Îgenocide’ is debatable in this context. ÎGenocide’ can only be used if there is a clear intention to destroy a population on nationalistic, ethnic, racial or religious grounds. Neither King Leopold II nor his administrators ever ordered the extermination of the Congolese population, or of some groups of it. On the contrary, the Congo administration needed the local labour for the cultivation of rubber and therefore had no interest in decimating it.

How enlightened. That practically sounds like sustainable development. Au contraire, the rubber quotas demanded by Leopold II were so large that rubber trees died from overexploitation, requiring desperate Congolese to head further and further into the jungle in bids to secure the release of their kin.

A brief aside here: I don’t believe in holding historical figures to modern moral standards — Vikings just didn’t know any better than to rape and pillage; they were never aware of modern moral alternatives to such methods (like joining the EU, for example) and so cannot be held to task for not choosing them. I do believe in holding rulers to the moral standards of their contemporaries, however, especially if there was widespread condemnation already then on moral grounds. In Leopold II’s case, he was the target of a sustained campaign to stop the abuses in the Congo. People like E.D. Morel, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad made it impossible for the king not to be aware that his rule was morally bankrupt. And yet he did not change. This is what makes the moral indictment stick, in my mind.But, yes, according to the narrow legal definition of genocide, Leopold II did not perpetrate that. He just didn’t give a damn about the Congolese, despite knowledge of the effect his policies were having. The mass depopulation of the Congo was the consequence of his policies, not the aim. In our moot court, however, this makes not an iota of difference to his culpability for crimes against humanity.

The authors, meanwhile, seem to believe that their defense brings his actions back to within the norm of acceptable behavior for a turn-of-the-century monarch — making him someone whom Belgians can continue to honor and respect. But even if everything in the document were true, these defences are so pathetic that Leopold II would still emerge as one of the vilest statesmen of the 20th century. He would still be a vain, racist philanderer whose colonial ambitions led directly to the deaths, estimated far too conservatively then, of at least a million Congolese; and he knew it.

Yet he was king of Belgium, and so there are statues of him around Brussels today. There is one on the Place du TrŸne, around the corner from the Royal Palace and a stone’s throw from EU headquarters. Leopold II is buried in the royal crypt on the grounds of Laeken, a palace he rebuilt entirely with Congo profits, and in which the current royals live.

If you are a soldier or civil servant, put in enough years and you will get a medal with his name on it. Thirty years after becoming an officer, for example, you get to be Commander in the Order of Leopold II. Today.

I find that disgraceful. It’s clear to me that this man needs to be unambiguously disowned by the Belgian state, regardless of the wishes of the royal family. His statues need to come down, his medals need to be replaced (may I propose the Order of Patrice Lumumba?) and, in a gesture of contrition, Laeken needs to be sold to fund thousands of scholarships for Congolese students, so that these ill-gotten gains can finally do some good. (The king has another lovely palace in the center of town where he can live.)

There will soon be an opportunity for all this to happen. In 2005, Belgium’s Africa Museum, founded by Leopold II and which for a century has neglected to tell the story of his rule, will be hosting an academic conference, in order to ascertain the “historic truth” behind Hochschild’s story. An exhibit will accompany it. Sound promising?

The Belgian government admits that individual abuses took place in Congo, but rejects the accusations that circulate in the press. That is the reason why next year the Africa Museum in Tervuren is organising an exhibition, which will portray an independent and realistic picture of Congo under colonial rule.

I guess not.