The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holocaust survivor and author of Night Elie Wiesel spoke pointedly against neutrality at times of moral crisis.
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere,” asserted Wiesel. “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
A decade later, in 1999, Wiesel gave a speech called “The Perils of Indifference” at the White House. President Bill Clinton and many members of Congress were in attendance. Wiesel spoke of his memories as a young boy who had just lost his mother, father, and sister to the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Germany. He also spoke of being liberated from the concentration camp by the American Army. He had come to possess an eternal gratitude for the rage he saw on the faces of the U.S. soldiers as they entered the camp for the first time and observed the state the survivors were in. The combination of fury and compassion he saw in their eyes assured him that they, like himself, would never forget what happened there. They too would bear witness to the crimes committed against humanity.
Wiesel again warned the world of the allure of indifference. He acknowledged that it is easier to avoid the victims of humanity’s evil and that it may even seem necessary at times. However, he soon contrasted this sentiment with a description of the Jewish prisoners, focusing on the vacant look in their eyes and how numb they had become to their physical torment. In conversation with one another, the Jewish prisoners would explain how much better it would be to have been punished by God rather than ignored. “Better an unjust God, then an indifferent one,” Wiesel said.
Listening to Wiesel, one can hear the weight of millions of souls pressing down on them, forcing them to acknowledge what they have the luxury to ignore. Towards the end of his speech, Wiesel asked our nation’s leaders if we had learned anything from our past. “Has society changed?” he said. “Has the human being become less indifferent and more human?”
But interventionism is far from a perfect solution. And what ought it look like? Can, or should, we fashion a moral interventionism?
First, let us confront the issues surrounding this policy, which is, at its core, the act of intervening in the affairs of another country economically, politically, or militarily. The U.S. and other Western powers have shown time and again their willingness to mobilize to save those trapped under the heel of tyranny and oppression. However, when it comes to American public opinion, it seems every stop on the political spectrum has an aversion to intervention.
For some who lean right, there simply is not enough American capital to address all the problems of the world. Such viewpoints dictate that we must address America’s issues first before we concern ourselves with the troubles of others. Fair enough. However, those who are so concerned with the monetary implications of interventionism are myopic at times. For example, when it comes to foreign aid, the issue lies not with how much the U.S. sends but how it is spent. Though at times there is need of better management, there are also clear economic benefits to providing aid to foreign countries – the recipient countries benefit and the international market, which the U.S. relies upon, grows when each and every country is stabilized. Furthermore, the United Nations approximates the total humanitarian need is $25 billion for the entire global community. That’s just a drop in the bucket of the $4.5 trillion the U.S. spends annually — a figure both conservatives and liberals alike find no issue voting to increase every year.
And what about the unnecessary risk to American lives? After all, the tangible impact of interventionism is that we send our young men and women to combat on foreign battlefields. However, this sentiment can be remedied by asking the very men and women serving how they feel about reigning in global actors who utilize terror and inflict suffering. From my experience, you’ll find that it’s often the reason these soldiers decided to serve.
And the grievances from the other side of the aisle? The left articulates the justified fear that interventionism inflicts more harm and loss of life than it prevents. American history is riddled with such examples, where attempts to help resulted in even more horrors than had existed before. Even worse are the accounts of American incursions into other countries which proceeded under the guise of countering human rights atrocities – or even done unbeknownst to the American people. The U.S. has taken down democracies and installed dictators in Iran and Guatemala. It fought the imperialistic Spanish American War (1898) under the pretext of dismantling Spain’s colonial empire. And it has provided arms and supplies to guerillas in Afghanistan and the Congo for purposes which did not include them being utilized against innocent people.
Take for example the genocide of the Bengali people by the Pakistani armed forces in 1971. When the Bengali people fought back against Pakistani rule via democratic methods, leading them to take a majority of seats in the Pakistani Parliament, Pakistani forces executed Operation Searchlight in which Bengali students, professors, and soldiers were massacred. The following days witnessed a genocide committed against the Bengali people, with estimates indicating up to three million killed. The United States not only failed to condemn such actions, it actively aided them. The Nixon administration first sent aid and supplies to the Pakistani military forces. Then, once military defeat seemed imminent for the Pakistanis, the administration sent naval forces into the Bay of Bengal to prop up Pakistani authority during negotiations. Shortly thereafter, twenty U.S. diplomats sent the Blood Telegram to the State Department, condemning the administration for not preserving democracy in Bangladesh.
“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities.” read the telegram. “Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, … We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.
In the case of Operation Searchlight, not only did we allow the perpetrators of genocide to commit the horrendous acts with which Wiesel was concerned, we facilitated them and then allowed the perpetrators to escape answering for it. Under such circumstances, aren’t we morally justified to abhor botched acts of American intervention on the world stage? It simply isn’t the case that just because we allowed this to happen in the past that all future American intervention would have the same result. Requiring that these operations occur only if the American people have given their assent according to some democratic method could serve as an accountability check in the future. After all, in most botched intervention attempts, the U.S. government acted independently by either proceeding under nominally moral motives or working in secrecy entirely. After learning the full story, the usual response of the American people is shock and dismay. It’s also important to note that most atrocities today are ignored and allowed to persist, such as those occurring in Myanmar, Nigeria and the South Sudan.
To turn to current events, the present situation in South America belies a certain indifference to the suffering of others. In Venezuela, under the Maduro regime, starvation is rampant, murder is abundant, and hundreds have died protesting these conditions. With pictures of bodies lying in the street available for everyone to see, the plight of the Venezuelan people is more than evident. Yet concerns about intervention from the left prevent any significant relief for Venezuelans, even as aid caches are burned and the Russian government sends military troops and supplies to ensure Maduro’s iron grip on the Venezuelan people. In contrast, in response to the crisis at the U.S. border the California governor pledged financial aid to address the ongoing crisis of poverty and crime in El Salvador. This has been met with disdain by Republicans in California and around the country who continue to rely solely on heightened border protection as a solution to the current immigration crisis. The efficacy of proposed intervention in either of these cases is outside the scope of my article. However, it is quite clear that partisan politics is at the root of these anti-interventionist sentiments.
Even more horrifying is the political discourse surrounding Iran and Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact that both countries are complicit in state-sponsored terrorism and have legally codified the subjugation of women and the execution of gay men, it is party affiliation that determines one’s views on either country’s moral standing. As author Louise Perry has explained, at the same time as liberal women dawn the hijab in a sign of solidarity with Islam, Iranian women are tormented and imprisoned for taking it off. In contrast, as the president bypasses Congress to sign an $8 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi regime funnels hundreds of millions to the clerics in the South Punjab who use it to radicalize the region’s poverty-stricken inhabitants. The moral hypocrisy which permeates the discourse on interventionism is repugnant.
If one is to discuss America’s failure to address Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is impossible not to confront the most tragic consequence of their rivalry – namely, the crisis in Yemen. In 2017, it is believed that 50,000 children perished from hunger and disease alone, and images of this have shocked the conscience of observers in a way similar to the American soldiers being filled with the rage as they entered the Nazi internment camps. Even though half a million children stand on the brink of falling to the same fate and another twenty-one million survive only on aid from the United Nations, America stands “helpless” to stop the proxy war in Yemen between the two great Middle Eastern powers.
Our geo-political interests and whatever allegiance we have to Saudi Arabia do not justify us standing aside as children starve to death. Though Elie Wiesel died in 2016, a year after the conflict in Yemen began, he would exhort us to remember that “the world is divided in between killers, victims, and bystanders.” We have a moral responsibility to intervene.
It is our duty to take proactive measures to counteract atrocities. We must utilize our past failed experiences to draw up a legal framework for moral intervention. First, we must stop adhering to a foreign policy tethered to serving our national interests and accruing geo-political power. The founders would be shocked to see that we have simply adopted and expanded the realpolitik of the nineteenth century. Additionally, every region which is stabilized and democratized is a future ally when it comes to espousing liberal, democratic ideals. If America wants to continue to be a world leader, then it must begin to lead the world. The United States has no right to retain economic and military primacy if it continues to serve its own interests alone.
Any legal framework which would exist to guide moral intervention on the world stage must be foundationally different from that which has come before. The powers invested with such authority must be guided by what they are permitted to do, instead of what they are not. The interventions of our past failed because such pursuits were co-opted by a desire to profiteer off the sufferings of others. The only way to prevent the same mistakes is to clearly articulate what actions are allowed to be taken. The already-robust network of agencies and non-governmental organizations provide billions in humanitarian aid around the world. They only need to be bonded together, empowered, and guided by a more stringent legal framework. Furthermore, when mistakes are made, we must learn from our failures and fold in preventative measures. We have a moral responsibility to not abandon the world and allow it succumb to starvation, war, and oppression.
At the turn of the millennium, Elie Wiesel surveyed the atrocities of the prior century and grouped together the conditions that led to Southern apartheid, the bombings at Hiroshima, the genocides in Cambodia, and the gulags of the Soviet Union. To him, all this was not the failure of an individual nation-state, but the failure of all humanity – all of our failure. This great man survived the Holocaust and then proceeded to argue that he too carries the burden of humanity’s failure. “Have we become more receptive to the untold suffering of our fellow humans?” asked Wiesel. A resounding “no” must be our answer to him. However, we must ask ourselves a follow-up question. If it is so easy for us to acknowledge our boundless power to destroy, why are we so powerless to acknowledge our power save? We have the ability to do better and and so we must.
Let me conclude with the story of a well-known monument whose history is oft-forgotten. From 1875 to 1885, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi constructed the Statue of Liberty in Paris, later to be assembled in America. What is little-remembered is that the reason it took so long to construct was that the entire cost of the statue was shouldered by the French public. In Paris and around the country, fundraising balls and lotteries were held and the French people donated paintings, jewelry, and other pieces of art to help fund the monument. Bartholdi opened his shop to the general public, who happily paid a small fee to see the new “Colossus” in construction, knowing well that the cost of entrance went towards its production. In sum total, the French people raised 2,250,000 francs, the equivalent of over $6 million today. At the height of the liberal humanist movement, the French people donated to a people an ocean away to create a symbol of freedom against the forces of tyranny and to emphasize their solidarity in common purpose. Could we today even imagine two peoples, separated geographically and when it comes to identity, becoming so fatefully linked with one another? It is precisely this sentiment, of kinship shared across borders, that is necessary for us to recognize the moral responsibility to intervene during times of great need. We can, of course, stand in awe of their recognition of a shared humanity but we must also seek to outdo them.
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