Ghost of a flea

Again, wonderful. These posts are almost too good to disagree with. I would point out one thing. I have worked with Aboriginal law for the best part of my career in one way or another and my understanding of where we have to go as a community does include the question of the title to my small mortgaged square. I also know, however, that maybe five nations have some degree of claim which makes for lively debate and in the end they would all likely agree that I am a sap for buying into the fee simple concept in the first place, which as a Scots Highlander is an extremely compelling argument except for the entire retirement years thing.

I take your point, Alan. Land claims are complicated by all sorts of issues, most notably the radically different treaties contexts when traveling from Newfounland to British Columbia. Not to mention peculiar legal constructions such as the notion of "time immemorial". That said, I am after something simpler with this post. The same people who would deny Israel's existence ignore not only a 3500 year continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land they do so while ignoring the histories underlying their own mortgages or rental agreements.

Yes, quite right. My aside was of the most aside-y of asides.

On another one of a lesser aside-i-ness, I have a question about the right of any nation to existence that is difficult to frame without appearing to invite claims of anti-Semitism. I think there is a vast difference between a communtiy of culture and a present day nation and, especially where there are overlapping claims, the idea that absolute jurisdictional sovereignty eternal is, well, God given is not reasonable. I would invite consideration of the Scots and Quebec and other instances like the nations of Gaul in Roman times well before applying this to the mid-East.

And please remember as I know you will that I am not considering this in anyway related to any group that would call for the slaughter of all the Welsh (or any other group) and frame that as the "existence of a nation" question. Genocide is bad. I am sure I am not the first to say that but I hold its truth close to my heart.

I have a question about the right of any nation to existence that is difficult to frame without appearing to invite claims of anti-Semitism.

Indeed. This is because the question is never posed of anyone except of the Jews.

See, I disagree entirely. Consider the Confederacy, the Welsh or Biafra. Nations that were denied.

I have missed all those demos condemning the Welsh as blood-drinking Nazis. I believe you will find Wales on any map and its "denial" extends to tax-payer funded Welsh languange television and radio, Welsh-language schools and a national assembly. Somehow International ANSWER has overlooked its obligation to protest the occupation of Biafra alongside its erasure of countless (and uncounted) deaths in Rwanda, Darfur, Somalia, etc. etc. In fact, the only street protests from your list involve men in white hoods longing for their lost Confederacy. Your point will have some weight as soon as the United Nations screens Birth of a Nation with the same enthusiasm with which it denounces the Jews. Then again, given the rehabilitation of the Nazis in "progressive" circles I doubt the KKK can be far behind.

Some related unthinkable thoughts. The occupied territories were taken in war from Syria, Jordan and Egypt, countries whose pedigree as nation-states is hardly older than is Israel's. Yet it seems only Israel which is to be forever considered a recent imposition on a landscape outside time. Meanwhile nobody speaks of a right-of-return for those hundreds of thousands of Jews ethnically cleansed from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

It is not that sovereignty cannot be argued about or disputed as a concept (I can provide some sources if you like). It is that the Jews are uniquely disinherited from it in the rhetoric of the "anti-war" left.

Not to cut in on your discussion, but I must also complement The Flea for going out and buying a thousand used typewriters and hiring the thousand monkeys to work away on them ... keep up the great, fun and interesting work!

Bloggish Enlightenment, thy name is Flea.

Thanks, Mike. I had planned to post Christina Ricci in a tight shirt today but I got side-tracked.

I think I have proven the difficulty of raising the point. Let me try again.

For the existence of any nation to be a general principle it is independent of the moral claim of the community to nationhood. Just as we denounce the dream of Greater Serbia as a fantasy of a few so should we denouce the claims that Biafra was not a nation at the time or at the time that the Confederacy was not a nation. We should denounce it as it is not not a matter of moral claim but their military weakness that ended their nationhood. The results of the falling part of the Soviet Union shows certainly that you do not have to be swell to get to be a nation.

Which leads perhaps to the question's restatement. Do all nations have a right to existence? Or just the ones we morally align with? If the latter, we are accepting a questionable principle which means there ought to be a firmer principle behind it. It may be that nations have the right to self defend - which is entirely fine and good - and that has transferred into a right to exist.

The difficulty of raising the point in the way you have is twofold. First, and for the second time, because it is off-topic to my post. Second, because you conflate "nation" and "nation-state" in ways which render your argument unclear.

If your point is that Westphalian notions of sovereignty have to be rethought, I can only agree. If your point is that the concepts of "nation" and "nationhood" are socially and historically contingent and often used in ways which are pernicious or opportunistic, I agree. But if your argument is founded on the phrase "right to exist" without acknowledging that concatenation of words is only ever applied to the Jews your argument is built on sand.

You are most correct that I have deviated but I think it is upon an implicit principle in your post and recent postings that has to be described. But do move it. I am going to cut and paste the entire thing for further self-education as I may still be entirely clouded still.

To add a different bit of aside-i-ness here, the very term "First Nations" has always struck me as yet another manifestation of the noble savage idea. "First" implies original implies present essentially forever. "Immediately Previous Nations" would be a much more appropriate and honest title.

Great conversation & post. While I am no legal theorist (at least of any standing), it seems to me that the issue is the rub between natural law and positivism. The "right" of a nation to "exist" can be derived either from a detached moral authority (natural law) or from the cumulation of social convention (positivism) which directs and supports its legitimacy, or lack thereof. It is not very difficult to come to contradictory conclusions regarding the "rights" of nations(to exist or invade their neighbor) if both philosophies are applied independently.

Nice post Flea...I love the line people are not ewoks.

Even the Welsh nationalists have realised the Welsh can't be arsed to push for independence. They might be a bit daft sometimes after drinking alot and clunking each other at rugby but they aren't dumb enough not realise it would be terribly hard for them to go it alone.

While the Flea are telepathically back-channelling on this one, I think it is telling to note that no one is tackling the far more problematic comparison to Biafra.

"Where's Biafra?"
- Pierre Trudeau

How did you get that Google brain implant before it has even gone beta?

I realize I am coming a little late to the party here, but I have say how good it is to see The Flea in the sort of fighting trim as is evidenced by this post. Well done, Nick.

Ghost (Or is it Flea?),

I apologize for the length of this comment, but I believe you've seriously misunderstood, or seriously misrepresented, the message of "The Mission". Maybe it's been a long time since you watched it. Or maybe you're explaining it as your Canadian Lefties understand it.

Quote: "...its underlying themes have endured. These being, in no particular order, a sense of loss for a vanished innocence, the evils of colonialism and imperialism**, a side-swipe at the Catholic Church and the moral superiority of any and all "non-Western" cultures."

First off, the Guarani were not "innocent" in the movie. They were not portrayed as living in an idyllic Eden. The movie opens with them tying the first Jesuit missionary to a cross, and dumping him over the waterfall. Nothing "noble" about that, unless you think "Leave us alone, Padre" is a noble sentiment. Soon after, they're running through the jungle, pursued and caught by the Portuguese-hired mercenaries, led by Robert De Niro's character Rodrigo Mendoza.

A pretty "nasty, brutish, and short" existence, don't you think? Rather than Rousseau's Noble Savagery, they're portrayed as living in Burke's pre-government brutality.

What they get in the movie is not "innocence", but Civilization (go Burke again!) -- the good parts of it at first -- Christianity from the Jesuits, who bring them out of the jungle to the Mission, teach them the redemptive power of forgiveness (of Mendoza, in a moving and VERY Christian scene), and protection from the Portuguese slave traders by (wait for it)... the Spanish Empire.

Then they get the bad part: slavery and organized murder.

The central conflict of the film is not Paradise Lost. The Guarani aren't Ewoks, and they were never portrayed as them in the movie. They weren't much like the Aztecs though, and I'm not sure why you brought them up in regards to "The Mission". I'm guessing you're trying to defend Israel somehow. But I'm not sure that the Lebanese or Palestinians are much like the Aztecs either. Maybe the Aztecs are just another indigenous American or non-Western group, and they did bad things too, dammit!

The conflict (of "The Mission") is also not a Clash of Civilizations - Western vs. non-Western, or any other. The Guarani were pretty much already "Westernized". They weren't animist, paleolithic hunter-gathers anymore, they were good Roman Catholic farmer-herders, under Spanish imperial rule. They weren't white, though, and it's hard to deny that didn't factor in to the thinking of the Portuguese and Spanish. And it'd be pretty ridiculous to defend a "Spanish Empire = good, Portuguese Empire = bad" proposition. The Portuguese were slavers (at that time), and the Spanish were perfectly willing to abandon the Guarani to their fate for Realpolitik. Not much to like there.

By the way, the Aztecs were an empire, a civilization as well. Not much like Guarani, before or after Catholic conversion, who were actually killed.

The central conflict of "The Mission" is, in fact, the central Conflict OF Civilization-with-a-capital-C, the conflict between the bad parts of it -- tyranny and exploitation and slavery and colonialization and etc., and the good parts of it -- liberty and protection and comfort and Coca-Cola and etc. This conflict is nothing new; in fact the oldest stories we have, Gilgamesh, Pandora, Prometheus, are all about it.

So what causes the bad parts of civilization? Well, the Marxists will tell you it's the Market, unchecked capitalism. More Foucaldian Lefties will tell you that all civilizations depend on and foster exploitation. That Civilization itself is exploitation. There's no avoiding it; it's Fate, as the Greeks would say.

Neither of these explanations are the message of "The Mission".

In the last scene of the movie, the papal legate, Cardinal Altamirano is told of the massacre at the Guarani Mission.

Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world... thus have I made it.

Director Joffé then has the actor break character and look directly at the camera. There's no mistaking the message here:

And thus YOU have made it, fucker.

So what, according to "The Mission", is the cause of the bad parts of civilization? Individuals are. It doesn't blame the System, or some other abstraction. Even in the colonial outpost at the edge of two vast actual frigging Empires, it's the decisions, the moral choices, of individual people that cause slavery, tyranny, and betrayal.

Not particularly Leftist, that. Actually, I fail to see how anyone who prefers democracy to other forms of govern would seriously disagree. Back when conservatives believed in personal responsiblity, they'd probably insisted that it's the only explanation.

All of this applies only to the movie itself of course, as opposed to what actually may or may not have happened.

So, do I get an A in Appreciation of Television?

Hi Mike!

First, you would get an A in Appreciation of Television for i) making an argument which ii) is clearly based on course material. As fewer than ten percent of any class bother to do either, let alone both, my grade distribution curve would remain undented.

Still, some monitor cleaning fluid might lead to an A+. Chucking people over waterfalls tends to underline rather than refute the "savage" part of the noble savage line so we remain safely in Rousseau country with no need of a passport to the land of Leviathan. Yes, the Aztecs were an empire (please apply monitor cleaning fluid and re-read what I wrote) and, yes, Christian values are often the basis for criticism of actions by people claiming to be Christian (re-apply monitor cleaning fluid and repeat). Your precis of the film also helps to underline my point vis-a-vis the films story of the Guarani as innocents caught up in the mendacity of civilized life (be it Spanish or Portugese). Watch the film again and you will discover the whole freaking point is that they would not have been abandoned to the Portugese, and to slavery, had everyone agreed they had souls and this sort of thinking shows how bad we are. Bad, bad, bad. At least, such is the explicit narrative; my point is to illustrate a mistaken assumption of innocence on the part of non-Western peoples, these being grounded in part not only on Rousseau but a particular reading of Scripture. Further, how these myths might make for great art - even in the mid-'80s - but are a lousy basis for public policy.

Long comments are excellent, btw.

Flea,

Ah, yes, the Aztec part came in the "non-Western" vs Western portion of the arguement, not the "innocent" Eden part. My bad.

And my "very Christian" comment concerning Mendoza's penance was meant to emphasize that the film explicitly bases it's moral reasoning in Christian beliefs (it's been a while since I've seen it, but I'm sure it could be mined for other examples), rather than implicitly criticizing Christianity as the "pop-culture critics" pining for Eden do or using some anachronistic Marxist or other Leftist argument.

Actually, I'm still not sure if you're trying to say that the film does so implicitly or not (obviously I think it's explicit), or whether it was just the "pop-culture critics". In fact, I mentioned it to get a response...

As to the whole freaking point, I think it's obvious that the strictly theological question of whether or not the Guarani have souls is a ruse, and everyone (in the film) knows it. After all, the decision had already been made. The papal legate was NOT there to rule on the matter at all. The hearing was a sham. It was evil politics, not bad theology that condemned the Guarani.

And as I think the movie points out, evil political decisions are made and carried out by evil individuals, not institutions. After all, the Jesuits didn't believe it, since they stayed with the mission, and for that matter, they would have never bothered sending missionaries in the first place. St. Francis may have preached to the animals, but no Jesuit ever will :)

... for that matter the papal legate didn't believe it, either.

Altamirano: Your Holiness, a surgeon to save the body must often hack off a limb. But in truth nothing could prepare me for the beauty and the power of the limb that I had come here to sever.

Although I'll grant that some of the slave traders & owners did. However, racism requires neither civilization in general nor Western civilization in particular to manifest itself. There's not much "innocence" of that sort to go around. And frankly, a lot of it comes with Western civilization.

"However, racism requires neither civilization in general nor Western civilization in particular to manifest itself."

Hence my Kalahari Bushmen example. And my Aztec example.

"There's not much "innocence" of that sort to go around. And frankly, a lot of it comes with Western civilization."

And that would, once again, be to repeat paragraph six of my post as if my own argument was somehow an argument against what I, once again, actually wrote.

Are you using Firefox? If so, you need to go to Tools then Options then disable the Word Blender plug-in. That should clear things up. :)

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