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President Bush declared that the U.S. would not send a high-level
delegation to the United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban this
week, it looked like a good example of smart politics — and
that may indeed by the case.
By giving as
his reason that the U.S. would not allow its "good friend and
ally," Israel, to be put in the dock by the Third World on
the grounds that Zionism is a form of racism, Mr. Bush seemed to
be taking a gallant and even chivalrous stand.
Nor is there
any reason to doubt that he was both sincere and politically shrewd.
The Durban conference undoubtedly will be a fiesta of anti-Israeli
sentiment. By saying so, Mr. Bush is likely to gain support among
American supporters of Israel, mainly but not entirely Jews, who
by and large voted for Al Gore last year. And making these altruistic
noises, the U.S. slides cleverly out of a conference that will also
be a fiesta of anti-American sentiment (and of anti-European sentiment.)
For another
controversial item slated to be on the agenda was reparations for
slavery. Originally the proposal was couched as direct payments
(plus apology) by the West to African states and to the descendants
of slaves in America today. But the host South African government,
encountering some Western diplomatic resistance to being put in
the historical dock, has been proposing instead a grand package
of debt forgiveness and foreign aid package for the Third World
financed by Europe and America. Once granted, of course, such an
aid package would be treated as a Western admission of historical
guilt.
To discuss
slavery in these terms is, of course, to invert history. Slavery
was a universal human institution which continued in Africa and
Asia until the twentieth century. (It continues in some African
countries even today.) Most African slaves who ended up in America
had been sold to slave traders by their African owners-some the
rulers of African slave empires. Whites and Arabs were complicit
in this trade, of course. But it was the West, in particular the
British Empire, which first outlawed slavery at home and then suppressed
the international slave trade by force.
If reparations
are to have any connection with historical justice, then those paying
them should include the African states which are the successors
of the pre-colonial African slave empires-and those receiving them
should include the descendants of the officers and men of the Royal
Navy who risked their lives (and sometimes died) to suppress the
trade in human beings around the world.
To say anything
like that in Durban would, of course, be to invite a charge of Racism,
Racial Intolerance, Xenophobia and/or Related Intolerance. Slavery
is likely to be treated as a Western invention imposed on the Third
World by colonialism-when in fact colonialism, whatever its other
abuses, generally put an end to slavery. Similarly, Racism, Racial
Discrimination, etc. are likely to be portrayed as purely white
Western pathologies that are magically responsible for such evils
as economic backwardness, poverty, and tyranny everywhere.
For the whole
point of conferences like that in Durban is to make the West, in
particular the U.S., the defendant in a grand historical psycho-drama
of Western guilt and Third World entitlement — and of course
to extract substantial fines from the wretched criminal upon conviction.
Moreover, as
the Hudson Institute's distinguished scholar, John Fonte, recently
pointed out, the stakes have been raised recently by progressive
American Non-Governmental Organizations such as Amnesty International
USA, the American Friends Service Committee, the National Council
of Churches, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, NAACP,
and the ACLU.
These NGOs
hope to use Durban not merely to humble the U.S. and make it cough
up more foreign aid but also to compel it to alter its domestic
policies in a sharply leftwards direction. To quote Mr. Fonte:
On July 20
in Washington, D.C., Gay McDougall, an organizer with the International
Human Rights Law Group (one of the chief NGOs), told a pre-conference
strategy meeting of NGOs that "the foreign policy of our
government (U.S.) is responsible for racial oppression around
the world."
Or again: "NGOs
have insisted that the U.S. government should "remove all reservations"
to the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
(CERD) that the U.S. ratified in 1994.The "reservations"
in question? The State Department notes that the CERD's restrictions
on free speech and freedom of assembly are incompatible with the
First Amendment. It is these "reservations" that the NGOs
seek to eliminate."
And much else.
In the face
of this ideological assault, mounted by an alliance of Third World
states and domestic leftists, there are two possible responses.
The first is
the Daniel Patrick Moynihan response: Send a high-level delegation
to the Durban Convention to mount a fiercely brilliant, historically
grounded, savagely witty, ideological attack on the false leftist
assumptions underlying the entire U.N. Racism pantomime, on the
despotic politics of most of the West's accusers, and on the illiberal
and anti-democratic maneuvers of those American NGOs which are lending
support to an attack on their own country.
The second
response is not to attend at all. A show trial deprived of its chief
victim, the U.S., would be a very poor show indeed. It would have
little chance of generating news coverage, let alone a worldwide
demand to pay U.S. reparations under any guise.
Which of the
two is the smarter politics depends on whether this administration
can summon up the eloquence to wage ideological warfare effectively.
If Colin Powell were to lead the charge, the first course would
be the better. If not, then staying away is indeed smart politics
— though smart politics of a discouragingly timid kind.
Alas, by deciding
on a compromise between these two courses, the administration has
(not atypically) fallen between two stools. The U.S. is to send
a delegation headed by a Deputy Assistant Secretary, Michael Southwick,
but including a representative of the Congressional Black Caucus,
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. It will be Mr. Southwick's humiliating
duty to stand in the dock as the representative of the U.S. government,
nervously denying the more outrageous charges against the U.S. and
receiving custard pies in the face, while Ms. Johnson piously concedes
the justice of those same charges to the applause of the assembled
NGOs and diplomats.
Something is
clearly wrong when you begin to feel nostalgic for Warren Christopher.
Editor's note: This piece is based on a column that
originally ran in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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