Edward B. Rackley

On my first day back in Kinshasa I met Mr. Kapupu Mutimanwa, self-appointed leader of Pygmy peoples in DR Congo. Unicef arranged our meeting in their high-rise offices in the bustling and congested center of town.

Kapupu was returning from an international forum of Pygmy peoples (1) organized in the forest outside of Impfondo, a remote town in the northern region of the Republic of Congo. Brazzaville, its capital city, lay across the mammoth Congo River, visible from where I sat waiting for Kapupu.

The forum convened pygmy representatives from eight countries in the region to address land access rights in the face of expanding agro-forestry and mining industries. I hoped Kapupu would brief me on what this meant for the Pygmy groups I would be visiting in Equateur, DR Congo’s northwestern province hundreds of miles upriver from Kinshasa.

Les freres de Kapupu

A call to a Unicef assistant informed us that Kapupu was “empeché au port” – stuck in the web of bureaucratic process after taking the barge from Brazzaville earlier in the day. I looked around the office. Posters instructing mothers to vaccinate their children decorated the walls. The surface of the faux-wooden desk where I sat, otherwise new and unblemished, was marked by deep circular scratches. A hole the size of a car tire was visible in a lower corner of the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window gave onto the streets below, and to Brazzaville across the river.

The Unicef assistant smiled and explained that during city battles the month before, a mortar crashed through the window, bounced off the floor and onto the desk. There it spun in circles, but failed to detonate. Staff were hunkered down in office corridors for two days, waiting for the fighting to subside. Several employees in a bank three floors below were killed by stray bullets and mortars; Unicef personnel escaped uninjured. Hostilities are still virulent following the presidential elections in late 2006.

Kapupu arrives towards the end of our scheduled meeting. He enters embarrassed but smiling, and extends his hand. “Papa,” he calls me, and excuses his late arrival. He proudly wears a suit and tie, his small frame swallowed by an oversized neck collar and chunky cufflinks.

As we sit down, Kapupu recounts his personal journey as the first Congolese Pygmy to graduate from university, the first Pygmy to meet former president Mobutu, the first to travel abroad to visit indigenous groups in Latin America, the first to win grants from the European Union to organize fora like that of Impfondo. He hails from South Kivu, a province in eastern Congo. He has never visited Equateur, it turns out.

Kapupu reiterates his intention to bring all Congolese Pygmy groups under his leadership. I infer that the power to represent Pygmies to the wider world is not easily won. I learn nothing of the situation in Equateur, except that Pygmies there are all “les freres de Kapupu” (Kapupu’s brothers).

After an hour of Kapupu monologue, Unicef calls the meeting to a close. As he leaves, the real reason for his visit becomes clear. “Whenever the white man appears to help Pygmies,” he says to no one in particular, “there is more suffering.”

“So self-imposed exile is the solution?” I ask him. He then backtracks, apparently not having thought through the implications of such a position.

With his charisma and masked desperation, Kapupu was unlike any Pygmy I had ever met. His style and demeanor reminded me more of Congo’s civil servants, an army of low-level administrators scattered throughout the country’s forgotten interior. With no link to the febrile Kinshasa government, Congo’s provincial bureaucrats—all charlatans like Kapupu—fashion their leadership from pure chutzpah and enchantment with their own spectacle. Easily intimated and gullible, impoverished illiterate rural populations submit to these neo-feudal overlords without question. Lord of the Flies in flesh and blood.

Fear and Loathing

I was accompanied on this trip by Benani Nkumu, an educated Pygmy from southern Equateur, who contrasted with Kapupu in every imaginable way. Unlike Kapupu, Benani is not interested in the politics of redress for indigenous peoples. His work as an effective community mobilizer introduced him to Unicef, for whom he serves as a kind of interface between rural Pygmy groups in the region and Unicef development programs. Benani harbors no victim complex, and though he fears the Bantu (2), in their presence he is neither vindictive nor overcome by insecurity as are other Pygmies. His recurring anxiety, he told me over palm wine one afternoon, stems from the envy of his ‘confreres’ or brethren.

Jealousy, ressentiment and Schadenfreude permeate intra-Pygmy relations; they are equally pervasive in rural Bantu society. An ambition to improve one’s lot, be it for personal or collective gain, is suspect and is discouraged through a variety of means. Theft, explicit threat and black magic are common ways that pioneering spirits like Benani are intimidated. Because the Pygmy status quo is also its least common denominator (“stay poor, indentured and disenfranchised like the rest of us, or else”), Benani fears reprisal. Poisoning is his biggest worry, and he never leaves his glass unattended during drinking sessions with other Pygmies. Pygmies and Bantu refuse to eat or drink together, and do not intermarry.

At one point in our journey after a long day of interviews and slow progress over muddy overgrown tracks, we got lost. It was late at night, and pitch black with no moon. Villagers ran out into our path yelling that the road ahead was not passable. We stopped the jeep, deciding it best to continue the next morning with the benefit of daylight. None of our party knew anyone in the village, or exactly where we were. Myself and the driver got out of the car and introduced ourselves to the villagers, explaining why we were lost and where we were headed. There was no food, they said, but we were welcome to sleep with them. Some palm wine appeared, and we sat down in the dark to chat and rest.

All this while, Benani and another Pygmy we picked up along the way, Pastor Linganga, remained in the car. I opened the door to ask if they planned to sleep in the car or to join us outside, and noticed immediately from their body language that they were afraid and uncomfortable with the turn of events. I said that I thought our new hosts were good people, and that they would be welcome here. Soon we were all drinking and talking comfortably, with no elephant in the room.

We slept a few hours and at first light, we packed and drove into the forest. Our host family had organized a large party to follow us on foot, to help in case we got stuck, which happened almost immediately. After a brief negotiation, a digging team of Pygmy and Bantu went into action, and by 6pm that evening the jeep was free and back in the village. We would try a different route the next morning. The experience proved to me that with a financial incentive, Pygmy and Bantu could work together as equals, and share the dividends.

“My Pygmies”

While preparing for this trip I picked up The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, which I first read twenty years ago. It chronicles the lives and personalities of a small band of hunter-gatherers in the Ituri Forest of the country’s northeastern quadrant. Published in 1961, it is still a pleasant read, pre-dating the turn of anthropology’s gaze upon itself—where “watching the watcher” displaces exploration of an alien world as the primary analytic activity.

In the last two weeks of visiting Pygmy settlements along the rivers and long-abandoned roads within the isolated interior of Equateur province, one of Turnbull’s phrases surfaced in my mind. Turnbull describes the mixture of mistrust and awe with which the sedentary Bantu tribes regard their Pygmy neighbors as “a loathing, born of a secret fear.” For the Bantu, the Pygmy represents an “exotic other.” Coming from the forest—the abode of spirits good and evil—Pygmies are exceptionally skilled hunters, their women coveted, their knowledge of medicinal herbs and roots vast, and they have believed to possess spiritual powers and connections to nature that the Bantu lack. Because of these differences, they are judged as unhygienic, hard drinkers, unpredictable and ill-disciplined. Xenophobia is a classic identity enhancer; all peoples do it to some degree.

Unlike other countries where indigenous groups are marginalized and excluded, land and forests are plentiful here. Access to land is arbitrarily controlled by Bantu groups, and while Pygmies here are largely sedentary, their subsistence farming is limited to small plots. To survive, they clear, sow, maintain and harvest fields for their Bantu overlords, for which they receive less than 50 cents a day. Bantu families “own” one Pygmy family or more, who besides working in their fields, fetch water and firewood, clean their homes and sweep their courtyards. In all our interviews with Bantu chiefs, priests, community leaders and ordinary folk, each referred to these day laborers as “my Pygmies.”

Bottom of the hierarchy

Apart from the cultural component of discrimination and quasi-enslavement, there is a structural element to the violence and inequality inflicted on Pygmies. Elsewhere in Central Africa, Pygmy civil society and activist groups tend to argue for redress and entitlement on the basis of “historical precedence” (they were here first), and in some cases “cultural genocide” (as their livelihood and traditional lands are threatened). Unicef works with Pygmies across this region, but does not support these arguments or fund activist groups pursuing these angles of argument.

Instead, Unicef situates the Pygmy predicament within the context of their systematic discrimination and marginalization by the Bantu majority, who determine the contemporary social, political and economic conditions. Its aim is to promote the development of all by focusing on the most vulnerable—Pygmies in this case.

As I traveled with Benani, I often wondered about the historical, factual origins of the current situation. Extant literature is not particularly helpful, although theories about the origins of human inequality abound. In these, Pygmies continue to be the subject of ‘noble savage’ fantasies à la Rousseau. Turnbull’s experience with the Mbuti was clearly infused with this sentiment. Levi-Strauss’ equally popular study of hunter gatherers in the Amazon, Tristes Tropiques, did not romanticize their existence. In an earlier piece for 3QD, I considered the Jared Diamond hypothesis and its relevance to Pygmy marginalization.

“By accident of their geographic location,” Diamond writes, societies either inherit or develop food production capacities that in turn facilitate population density, germs, political organization, technology, and other “ingredients of power.”

The Diamond thesis illustrates one way in which Bantu peoples have been able to populate a much wider area than the original Pygmy inhabitants, outnumbering them and ultimately dominating them. Of the animals or edible plants indigenous to the so-called Congo River Basin (DRC, ROC and CAR), none are among those domesticated and cultivated by Bantu. In the forest, nomadic Pygmies survive off of wild plants and animals that are resistant to regular cultivation as crops and domestication as livestock. Hunting/gathering not only precludes an economy of surplus, because it is motivated by immediate consumption, but it also limits the geographic range in which Pygmies can live without undertaking a radical shift in their primary mode of subsistence.

Bantu can take their crops and livestock wherever there is plentiful water and arable land, which includes forest areas used by Pygmies. As the Bantu demographic saturates a newly settled area, Pygmy domains are ‘colonized’—a common sentiment among Pygmy leaders we met during the visit. All felt that while the Bantu were now independent with the retreat of the European colonial regime, Pygmies remained colonized by their Bantu ‘masters’. The majority of Pygmies we met were sedentarized, but did not farm for themselves. Instead they worked as day laborers for the Bantu.

Given the master/slave dynamic of Bantu-Pygmy in this part of DR Congo, Diamond’s thesis lacks a key causal element behind the dynamic. This is the comparative advantage that colonialism afforded the Bantu, being already settled and accessible to outsiders, while Pygmies were still mobile in the forest. As such, Pygmies were largely inaccessible to the colonial administration’s ‘civilizing mission’.

Colonialism brought new economic and political structures that reinforced the power of sedentary agricultural peoples over herders, hunters and gatherers. During colonial rule, agricultural peoples had easier, if quite limited, access to education, health care and other social services that were almost completely denied to indigenous communities.

Colonialism thus made it easier for Bantu to access the state apparatus. When colonialism ended, it was Bantu educated elites that took over the institutions of political and social power. At the bottom of the post-colonial hierarchy were nomadic hunters and gatherers. Congolese Pygmies have had to play ‘catch up’ ever since. Indeed, they have nowhere to go but up.

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1 The term ‘Pygmy’ is used here as adopted by indigenous activists and support organizations to encompass the different groups of central African forest hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers. Sometimes used pejoratively, here the term is used to distinguish them from other ethnic groups who may also live in forests, but who are more reliant on farming, and who are economically and politically dominant. The Pygmy groups covered in this study include the Tua and the Lumbe.

2 A term conventionally used for settled farming peoples, although these groups include Oubangian and Sudanic language speakers as well as Bantu language speakers. In the southern Equateur province of DRC where this trip took place, the primary Bantu groups using Pygmy labor and whose discriminatory practices form the object of this study are the Nkundo and the Mongo.

Justin E. H. Smith

O who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

–W. B. Yeats, “ A Song”

I am a salaried functionary and a family man.  I long for peace and quiet and a good night’s sleep, and I wear whatever my wife tells me to wear.  At this point I no more belong in Williamsburg than I do in Sadr City.  I send none of the signals that would assure the natives of my right to be in either place. 

Just yesterday things were quite otherwise, at least as far as Williamsburg is concerned, and I attribute the changes not to will but entirely to necessity. Physiologically, I simply did not have the luxury of extending my membership in metropolitan youth subculture indefinitely.  My temples went grey, my body shape changed, and college students started calling me ‘sir’ at an age when I was still holding out the hope of being invited to their parties.  In large measure it was unfavorable genes that forced me out of what would otherwise have been a life of unrepentant hipsterism.

By ‘hipsters,’ I mean the youth in the developed world who construct their social identity primarily in opposition to the prevailing sensibilities of the age, without however conceiving this opposition as political.  On a global scale, hipsters seem to have emerged out of the Reagan-Thatcher years in those countries that earlier witnessed the cultural shift known in Western Europe as “’68” and in the US more broadly as “the sixties.”  (To some extent, the origins of the new form of opposition can be found in the sixties themselves, from French situationism to Abbie Hoffman’s advocacy of ‘revolution for the hell of it’, but the prevailing ideals of that era remained serious ones.)  The complete account of hipsterism’s emergence out of the ruins of 1960s utopianism is beyond our scope here, yet the genealogical link is clear: where sex, drugs, and rock and roll were not a principal cause of historical change, where instead the youth were contending with wars, dictatorships, and real –government-imposed– cultural revolution, today there is little or no hipsterism.  Today you will see stencils of Mr. T (or whomever; you get the idea) spray-painted on the walls of London and Amsterdam, but not Bucharest. 

For hipsters, prevailing ideas and values are not necessarily oppressive, just stupid; not necessarily worthy of anger, just ridicule.  (They generally focus on cultural output from the recent past, for reasons we have yet to consider.) Thus for example hipsterism encourages its adherents to propose, in writing, on their t-shirts, to sell moustache rides for five cents, not because they intend to give anyone a moustache ride, and not even because the apposition of ‘moustache’ and ‘ride’ is seen as a source of humor.  What is humorous is that in some imagined Country Comfort Lounge in Amarillo or Cheyenne a generation ago some big slab of a man actually sported a moustache of which he was proud, which he believed could function directly and un-ironically as a sexual attractant.

In Bucharest in contrast you will see t-shirts bearing the following messages: “Action Product Girl,” “Ultimate Outback All-Star Crew,” “Surfing Life-Style #1: O-Yes!” You will see the suggestive “Varsity Marine: Red Bum’s Up in Seemans Quarter,” the poetic “Rebellion Speed Inside Energy World’s,” and, my personal favorite, “Fertile Enclosure Fashion 56.”  Have there, I wonder, been any sociolinguistic studies of these English-sounding strings of words?  Clearly, they are generated and displayed in part out of a simple fetish for the sterling-standard idiom of the era of globalization.  But for the most part I suspect there is no intentionality at all behind them. These words are not bearers of meaning; they are strictly decorative. Whether I am right about this or not, one thing is clear: one does not wear such t-shirts as a joke.  They either convey nothing at all, or, to the extent that the message is understood by the wearer, they convey an earnest wish to say something serious about oneself: ‘I am an Action Product Girl,’ ‘I participate in the Surfing Life-Style.’  They are a world away from the “moustache rides” message.  They are the product of a different history and a different logic.

But why is hipster ridicule directed at the cultural output of a generation ago?  Why is irony focused upon the recent past?  Contrary to some facetious fears that the retro gap is closing, and that soon we will be celebrating for its ironic value the cultural output of this very day, in fact it seems that the ironic focus is eternally fixed upon the detritus that was floating about right around the time of one’s own origins, the things that could help to explain how one came to be at all, including the invitation to a moustache ride that just might have led to one’s own conception.

Hipster irony is at bottom a preoccupation with the problem of origins, and as I have said the portion of one’s life one can appropriately devote to hipster irony depends in large part on the course set for the body by the genes. But the changes in my case were not just physiological. Psychologically too, at some point all my interests either became earnest interests, or no interests at all. I offer an example from that most common measure of subcultural identification: music.  In the mid-1990s, I made the rare discovery (for an American) of Joe Dassin, Dalida, and other French and Italian pop stars from a generation prior.  I would put on Dassin’s “L’été indien” at parties and the guests would marvel at how treacly and over-the-top the string section was, how the rhythm made them think of ‘70s swinger parties of the sort Michel Houellebecq would later ruthlessly de-eroticize, or of some French smoothie in a Jacuzzi, again with a moustache, inviting a topless female reveler to ‘make love’.  And most of all they would marvel at how recherché my CD collection was, at how well it reflected the desire among those of my generation for music that fascinated precisely because it was originally created for listeners whose lives we could scarcely imagine.

And yet, today, my wife and I put on Joe Dassin when we are at our respective computers writing, for the simple reason that we enjoy the sound of it.  Why, my heart now wonders, would anyone listen to music that he does not, straightforwardly and earnestly, like?  Why, for that matter, would anyone take an interest in anything other than in view of its genuine interestingness?  Just what are the smart-ass youth, who like trucker hats precisely because they look down upon truckers, and who appreciate cowbells in music because naïve disco-goers once truly appreciated cowbells in music, trying to pull off? What, in short, is irony in its latest and dominant form?   

History’s greatest philosophical ironist conceived of philosophy itself as nothing more or less than a preparation for death.  When Socrates said that to philosophize is to prepare to die, and when Montaigne echoed this at the dawn of modernity, they did not mean that philosophy consists in tending to one’s last will and testament or constructing one’s own coffin out of plywood.  They meant that the project of becoming wise is one that culminates late in life in a stance of equanimity vis-à-vis one’s own mortality.  “I have seen men of reputation,” Socrates tells the jury about to convict him, “when they have been condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to fancy that they were going to suffer something dreadful if they died, and that they could be immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I think that they were a dishonor to the state, and that any stranger coming in would say of them that the most eminent men of Athens, to whom the Athenians themselves give honor and command, are no better than women.”  His tranquil acceptance of his hemlock is a reflection of his wisdom.  Yet in his speech to the jury he also points out that he is now 70, and probably would not live much longer anyway.  His death is not met as a sacrifice, but with indifference (this in marked contrast to the death of Jesus Christ at 33).  No one could expect a youth to meet death with indifference.  A corollary of this point is that no one expects a youth to be wise. 

Philosophy today is age-blind, which is to say that (other than a few thought-experiments involving infants), philosophers talk about the way people think and act as though people do not go through stages of life.  Imagined rational agents, making decisions about the most just society from behind a veil of ignorance, or deciding whether to pull a lever at a switching station, are presumed to be adults, certainly.  But are they 20, or 70?  Isn’t it reasonable to expect different sorts of behavior in the one case than in the other?  There is general agreement that some degree of selflessness in one’s conduct is morally laudable, but the scientific evidence tells us that the changing quantities of hormones in the body throughout the stages of one’s life have a good deal to do with whether one will act egocentrically or not.  I find myself growing more concerned about the well-being of others, but I do not think that this is because I am becoming ‘more moral’. It is only because I am no longer driven by that mad fire that used to course through my veins and cause me to strive for nothing but my own advancement and gratification.  I couldn’t have done otherwise then, and I can’t do otherwise now. 

Race, gender, and sexual orientation have captivated academic imaginations for the last few decades, particularly among leftists in the humanities who had grown bored with the traditional focus upon class antagonism as the engine of history.  Race and gender are more or less fixed social categories, notwithstanding the opportunity medical technology has offered to a very small minority of people to change the biological basis of their gender identity, and notwithstanding the ultimate biological illusoriness of racial taxonomies.  Sexual orientation is fluid, even if the tendency in our society is to conceive it on analogy to race and gender, that is, as constituting part of one’s ‘essence’ and thus as being coextensive with one’s own existence.  Yet all the while age remains well outside the radar of the organizers of conferences and the getters of grants, and it is interesting to note in this connection that unlike sexual orientation there is no possible way to essentialize it, that is, there is no way to conceive of the predicate ‘…is young,’ say, as pertaining to the identity of an individual always and necessarily.  Being young, like sitting or sleeping, is something that can be both true and not true of the same subject. 

‘…is young’, as I’ve said, is a predicate that pertains to me less and less, and it is perhaps for this reason that I have, of late, begun to hope for the reintroduction into philosophy of reflection upon what used to be called the ‘ages of man’.  I do not know whether aging is something to be thankful for, as Socrates seems to have thought, but I do know with certainty that it is not something to be awkwardly and unconvincingly denied, as balding hippies, with their scraggly ponytails and their irrelevant cultural reference points, insist on doing.  And there is no use in pleading that, though the ponytail thins, the gut expands, and the stream weakens, one is nonetheless ‘young at heart’.  For the body is the body of the soul, and these outward signs of the approach of death are but reflections of internal changes.  Yet it is characteristic of the postwar generation to deny that the heart must grow old, to insist that it is free to follow a course entirely independent of the geriatric corporeal substance.    

But what I am concerned about is my own generation, those who have worn “moustache rides” t-shirts for reasons several degrees removed from their original intent, and its prospects for aging well, which is to say its prospects for dying with grace and equanimity.  At first glance, the fact that hipsters share irony with the West’s wisest condemned prisoner would seem to bode well for them.  Yet Socratic irony and hipster irony could not be more different.  Hipster irony has to do with taste, not truth, and it only makes sense relative to a certain context of commitments and preferences, while what Socratic irony strives for is a contemplative detachment from all partis pris.  In an absolute sense, there is nothing more in Death Cab for Cutie or Arcade Fire that commands one’s earnest and straightforward appreciation than there is in Boxcar Willie, Juice Newton, or Perry Como.  From a certain perspective, it is all garbage, and from another it is all fascinating.  Hipsters still hope to draw a distinction between the genuinely good and the merely humorously good, by means of a bivalent logic in the end no more subtle than the ‘cool’/‘sucks’ dichotomy through which Beavis and Butthead filtered the world.  An elderly ironist in contrast has had the time to watch enough cultural flotsam go by that he can no longer pretend that one instance of human productivity is intrinsically much more ridiculous than any other.  Fully convinced of this truth, he might truly be prepared to die: he knows what to expect from the world, and so expects nothing more. 

But that of course is no fun, while youthful irony is a blast.  It will thus be interesting to see in the coming decades whether the irony that has defined the world view of an entire generation of educated Western children will prove capable of aging along with those former children’s bodies.  It is still far too early to tell, though it is likely that the repellent example set by their aging parents, who remain deadly serious about the ‘accomplishments’ and enduring relevance of their generation, who never really learned how to be old because they remained so loyal to the moment of their youth, will serve as an incentive towards reflection on how to age well, which, again, the old philosophy tells us, is the same as to die well.

Even in my own case, it is far too soon to tell.  I am sure as hell not yet wise, as I find myself nowhere near ready to die.  Like some modern-day Ivan Il’ich, I cannot begin to imagine how I –who once impressed party-goers with my selection of “L’été indien,” and who mixed it seamlessly in the mid-1990s with some other bit of music that had just come out of London or Bristol, something they called ‘trip-hop’ that set the crowd to dancing on my packed living room floor– could possibly do that well.  I am serious, all too serious, about all those bits of flotsam to which I’ve happened to cling, and which have kept me buoyed and breathing.

Iasi, Romania
19 June, 2007

For a comprehensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com

by Alan Koenig

Two prominent Liberal hawks recently celebrated the arrival of Bernard Kouchner as French Foreign Minister, for here was a heroic humanitarian, the founder of the noble Doctors Without Borders, a tireless champion of the oppressed, who has risen to command the foreign policy of a nation that cravenly opposed the Iraq War. Christopher Hitchens sang his praises in Slate, and The New Republic reprinted portions of Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists, a fascinating intellectual group biography of the European New Left and their rise to relative power. There’s just one problem with these paeans from the Liberal hawks, a small fact that Hitchens omits and Berman oddly misinterprets: Kouchner publicly opposed the Iraq War.

Kouchner had long decried the tyrannical horrors of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and he often berated the international community for not coming together to remove the dictator, but he repeatedly opposed the American invasion. This shouldn’t be a terribly complicated position, and Kouchner first put it in print in early February of 2003 when he coauthored a “manifesto” entitled Neither War Nor Saddam in which he opined that the “solution to Saddam will take time,” that “it can not proceed at the same time as military pressure,” and the United Nations should call together a conference to bring more international pressure on Saddam.

If you can read French:

La solution du problème Saddam prendra du temps. Elle ne peut procéder, en même temps que du maintien de la pression militaire, que de la prise de parole du peuple irakien telle que pourrait la favoriser la désignation d’un médiateur des Nations unies. Avant tout, nous souhaitons que les membres du Conseil de sécurité organisent sans délai une conférence internationale qui mette en lumière les exactions de Saddam Hussein et amplifie la pression conduisant a son départ, au lieu de tout faire pour fabriquer un nouveau héros.

(If you need a translation) Kouchner’s conclusions seem very clear even if your French is as atrocious as mine: “Non a la guerre, non a Saddam Hussein.”

Kouchner stuck to this line even a week before the war; during a debate at Harvard he continued to rail against Saddam’s despicable regime and oppose the war, just as he had stated in Neither War Nor Saddam:

He repeated his opposition to war several times in his half-hour speech and during a subsequent question-and-answer session. Yet even as he said the Iraqi people’s voices should be considered, he also said he’s sure some would approve of their nation being bombed if it meant being rid of Hussein . . . Despite the ongoing brutality, however, Kouchner said he also knows the brutality that war brings and said he does not support an American war on Iraq. [emphasis added]

So how does the intellectual historian Paul Berman read Neither War Nor Saddam? He starts out with the Kosovo crises and the bombing campaign against Serbia, and somehow ends up asserting that Kouchner proposed the same tactics for Iraq in Neither War Nor Saddam:

Kouchner wanted to try similar methods in Iraq, a series of graduated steps, in the hope that one or another of those ever more forceful measures would ease Saddam out of power, without having to resort to anything as violent and risky as a full-scale invasion. Give less-than-war a chance, was his idea–though the only way to do this convincingly was to brandish the certainty of all-out war as the only alternative. Kouchner belonged to a bipartisan, left-and-right political club in France called the Club Vauban, and, in the name of this organization, he and another club-member composed a manifesto under the slogan, “Neither War nor Saddam,” advocating these graduated measures.

“Brandish the certainty of all out war as the only alternative?” What about Kouchner’s claims that the “solution to Saddam will take time” and that this “can’t happen at the same time as military pressure?” And where did the call for a bombing campaign come from? Did Kouchner propose such a thing elsewhere and Berman mistakenly conflate the two statements?

I’ve been unable to locate any such statement of Kouchner’s, but Berman repeats his assertion that Kouchner advocated for a Kosovo like solution in the Spring issue of Dissent, while you can see for yourself that there’s no such mention in Neither War Nor Saddam. From this apparent misreading, Berman goes on to assert that Kouchner’s arguments justified the Iraq War:

But Kouchner’s argument about Iraq mostly focused on a specific reality, and this was the scale of the disaster in Iraq under Saddam’s rule. The grimness of the human landscape in Iraq, together with the plea for help that so many Iraqis had been making for so many years, sufficed to justify the invasion, even without reference to worldwide principles. Yet where were the champions of the humanitarian cause, the human-rights militants, who should have responded to these pleas?

Where were they? Perhaps, Mr. Berman, they were listening to his “Non a la guerre.” Lacking an accurate understanding of Kouchner’s manifesto, some of Berman’s narration appears contorted and bizarre. Throughout Power and the Idealists, he seems confused by Kouchner’s gentleness, his tolerance, for the positions of his anti-war debating partners — a confusion that can be lifted by reinserting Kouchner’s own opposition. For instance, in a debate between Kouchner and the famed European New Leftist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Berman wonders where the fireworks are:

Cohn-Bendit did call for Saddam’s overthrow, actually. It was just that, in Cohn-Bendit’s estimate, the proper way to overthrow Saddam, as he explained, was to maintain a multilateral pressure, and help the Iraqis themselves overthrow their own dictator, someday. Kouchner could hardly take this seriously. Cohn-Bendit’s program was a nonprogram. A make believe. Kouchner didn’t point a finger, though.

Hmmm. Maybe Kouchner didn’t point a finger because Cohn-Bendit was so close to his own position. By the time Berman writes his profile of Tariq Ramadan in The New Republic, Kouchner’s position on the war — has become for Berman — a “highly modulated” endorsement of the war. So much for “Non a la guerre.”

In Berman’s defense, it is not difficult to find media and other analyses that believe that Kouchner supported the war, though many of them, like Stephen Holmes (writing in The Nation), do so by simply repeating Berman’s apparent error. Now, it is possible that Kouchner did, on occasion, voice support for the Iraq War by calibrating his responses according to his audience, but that wouldn’t make him much of a hero to the Liberal hawks (nor answer how they missed out on so much of the content and meaning of his public opposition). Indeed, in a lunch with the Financial Times Robert Graham, Kouchner was reported to have said:

Saddam was a monster. The case for going to war to get rid of him was not one of weapons of mass destruction – they probably weren’t there anyway. It was a question of overthrowing an evil dictator and it was right to intervene.

You could read this as saying that it was right to intervene for humanitarian reasons, and that case wasn’t adequately made by the Americans, as Kouchner, Joschka Fischer and Berman have complained. But there is some obvious ambiguity here, and the full quote tends to get attenuated when repeated, as does Kouchner’s public opposition:

Kouchner was one of the few in France’s political elite to justify military intervention against Saddam Hussein – on humanitarian grounds, not because Iraq might have been seeking weapons of mass destruction.”It was a question of overthrowing an evil dictator, and it was right to intervene,” Kouchner said in 2004.

(The NYTimes, which originally published the article above corrects the record for another article here.) It’s also possible that Kouchner continued to rail against Saddam with all the righteous passion for which he is so famous, and in his denunciations, certain people missed out on the qualifiers against the American-led invasion. Either way, Kouchner at some point had to have heard of the ambiguity surrounding his position. Why didn’t he clarify or correct the record? As Oliver Kamm has noted, Kouchner apparently did so in May of this year in the pages of Le Monde:

Regarding Iraq, [Kouchner] recalls that, without sharing the tone of French diplomacy at the time, he opposed the war. “My position … is the one I expounded in a viewpoint entitled ‘Neither war nor Saddam’, published in Le Monde on 4 February, 2003…. It is the only one I have defended. I wrote: ‘Above all, we wish the members of the UN Security Council to organise without delay an international conference to make clear the abuses of power of Saddam Hussein and increase the pressure leading to his departure, instead of doing everything to manufacture a new hero. We do not wish for war, but we do not want the martyrdom of the Iraqi people to continue. No to war, no to Saddam Hussein.’” [emphasis added to Kamm’s translation]

What we’re left with after all this exegesis are two questions. How have Hitchens and Berman missed Kouchner’s public opposition to the Iraq War, and what does his dissent mean for the future of interventions that wish to claim humanitarian justification?

On Saturday morning, when I entered my kitchen to make tea for my brother-in-law (BIL) – who was visiting for the long weekend – I found him sitting at the kitchen table, looking intently at a row of glasses of water: eight of them, filled up to the rim.

“No thanks, I will not have tea. I’d rather have this water.” He declared.
“All eight of them?” I sounded surprised.
“ To flush the toxins, that is how many you need.” he said.
“Eight glasses can’t flush your sins.” I teased BIL, the hedge fund manager.
“I said toxins, not sins.”
I sat there and watched him with curiosity: his eager gulps of the first glass waned into reluctant slurps of the fourth and forced sips of the last.

Relishing my tea, I envisioned the silent journey of this water through his body.

The water falls into BIL’s stomach, which absorbs some and pushes the rest into the intestines. The surface of the small intestines sucks it up – not like a sponge, but by actively creating an osmotic gradient. (Water travels by osmosis from lower osmotic concentration to higher. The amount of dissolved solutes in water determines its osmolality; more solute concentration generates higher osmolality.) The cells lining the intestinal lining actively absorb sodium ions (salt) and extrude them into the microscopic space between the cells, which creates a higher sodium concentration in this area. Water permeates into this space from the intestinal lumen by osmosis and then leaks into the blood stream meandering in the minute capillary blood vessels.

BIL’s intestine must cope with the massive deluge; about 90% percent of water will enter the blood circulation through the small intestine. The permeability and absorption of water will decrease as it travels to BIL’s colon.

Blood circulation carries water to the farthest cells and inundates them. The cells have been used to this; they remember the times when they drifted alone in the oceanic soup four billion years ago. After many mutations and missteps they evolved a wall around them – the cell membrane – to protect them from the surrounding poisons and maintain their internal chemical tranquility, which includes maintaining a normal osmolality of 285 to 290 mili-Osmols. The cell walls maintain this constant osmolality by rejecting the entry of sodium into the cell and preventing the escape of potassium and phosphate from inside.

When BIL’s consumed water arrives, it dilutes the fluid surrounding the cell and drags down the osmolality. The cell membrane lets only the water permeate into its interior thus maintaining the osmotic equilibrium. The dehydrated cells will keep the water but the already hydrated cells reject excess water.

Water also reaches BIL’s brain and heart – the two organs with sensors, which detect water load.

The hypothalamus part of brain senses variations in osmolality (solute content) and in response secrets a chemical messenger: anti diuretic hormone (ADH), which regulates the volume of urine excretion. An excess of ADH decreases and lack of ADH increases the urine production.

The heart has pressure sensors, which read the volume of circulating water and produce another chemical – natriuretic peptide – in response. Higher circulating water volume induces this peptide, which in turn coerces the kidneys to get rid of excess water.

BIL’s water binge does two things: it decreases the blood osmolality and increases the circulating volume. This shuts down production of ADH and enhances the manufacture of the peptide form the heart. Consequently, kidneys oblige and get rid of the excess water.

That is exactly what I observed. BIL got up after the 4th glass – and a few more times later- to ease himself. The water had flooded BIL’s kidneys; ADH from the brain and the peptide from the heart had assaulted his kidneys and poor BIL had to frequent the toilet.

I visualized the nephrons of BIL’s kidneys in overdrive. Nephron is the filtering and urine-manufacturing unit in the kidney. And there are 1.4 million of them. This exquisite, intelligent, U shaped microscopic tube is the final arbiter of the water volume in BIL’s body.

BIL’s water filters into one end the nephron, travels through the U loop and trickles out at the other end into to the urine collecting system. Since BIL has excess water in his body, each nephron makes more urine and the union of 1.4 million members of the urine production trade sends BIL to the toilet frequently.

The nephron has the ability to respond to the sum of blood volume or pressure, sodium concentration and the quantities of floating ADH. Through these mechanisms, it can produce varying volumes of urine of different solute concentrations. The function of the kidneys is to excrete solutes unwanted by the body and the water serves as a solvent carrier.

Kidneys have a maximum ability to excrete up to 1200 mili-Osmols (mOsm) of solutes per Kg of water. BIL has to eliminate, an average of 600 mili osmols (mOsm) of solute daily. Since the maximal urine concentration is 1200 mOsm/kg water, the minimal urine volume BIL needs to make is 500 ml to excrete 600 mOsm. With BIL’s normal kidneys, mere 500 ml should be enough to “ flush the toxins – and sins.” But BIL just inundated his poor unsuspecting kidneys with eight glasses of water and the penance for this ‘sin’ is the trip to the toilet.

BIL’s body handled the flood better than Bush managed Katrina. Water gushed to the heart, which pumped it vigorously to the farthest crevices of the body. As it traveled farther it slowed to a trickle, then seeped through the accommodating tissues and finally permeated into the cells. BIL’s body fluid regulatory apparatus sensed the deluge and the sirens went off.

OK, eight glasses is no Katrina, but we will agree BIL did it better than Bush.

Let us also be fair to BIL: 60% of his body weight is water and a mere loss of ten percent can be lethal. Water still surrounds and nourishes each cell, like it did when the cell was a complete organism in the waters of early evolution. When we left the oceans to venture onto land, we carried our share of water with us. The distribution of solutes and water is of utmost importance to normal cell function.

BIL maintains the volume of water in his body with exquisite precision of thirst, intake, absorption and excretion. His kidneys, hypothalamus, heart, cell membranes and the thirst mechanism work in unison and simultaneously.

On a normal day, he looses about 1500 ml in urine and another 500 to 1000 ml in breath, sweat and stools. He needs to replenish this by drinking 2 to 3 liters of water daily.

Should BIL drink plain water or a sports beverage?

Water is the osmotic slave of salt and follows sodium with utmost fidelity. BIL does need some sodium in his guts for efficient absorption of water and to absorb sodium the intestinal cells need a little sugar. Water with a dash of sugar and a pinch of salt will suffice. Sugar exceeding 8% of the beverage may actually slow the water absorption.

Here is a recipe: one liter of water; 1/3 cup of sugar; ¼ teaspoon of salt; add lemon or orange flavor; refrigerate and drink. This is the cheap homemade ‘Gatorade’. (BIL can use the other expensive one just for the ceremonial drenching of the coach.)

But BIL being a hedge fund manager lives by the dictum: nothing succeeds like excess; moderation is a fatal habit.

He inundates his cells in water with an atavistic compulsion and like so many other beliefs; he holds that drinking eight glasses of water in the morning cleanses the depths of his interior. It would be more physiological, if he spread his drinking through out the day.

BIL cannot drink water in the morning to hedge against the dehydration of the evening.