Humanitarian Interventions and Angelic Powers

Read the Transcript of Noam Chomsky’s speech EUROPE AND AMERICA AS UNDERWRITERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER at the Institute of European Affairs, 19 January 2006. For full transcript, see here

Chomsky speaks about so called "Humanitarian Interventions". He discusses the classic essay on humanitarian intervention. That’s John Stuart Mill’s essay on humanitarian intervention [J.S. Mill, "A Few Words on Non-Intervention," Fraser's Magazine, December 1859.]

I found this bit about the British Raj interesting.

John Stuart Mill’s immediate concern was India, and he was calling for the expansion of the occupation of India to several new provinces. The timing of the article is quite revealing. It appeared in 1859. That’s immediately after what was called in British history the ‘India mutiny’: the Sepoy rebellion [in 1857], which Britain put down with extreme savagery and brutality. This was very well known in England. There were parliamentary debates – huge controversy over it. There were people who opposed it: Richard Cobden, a real committed liberal, and a few others. Mill knew all about it. He was a corresponding secretary of the East India Company, and was following it all closely. The purpose of the expansion of British power over India, as he knew, was to try to obtain a monopoly over opium so that England could somehow break into the Chinese market. They couldn’t sell goods to China because, as they complained, Chinese goods were comparable and they didn’t want British goods. So the only way to break into the Chinese market was by gunboats and to force them to become a nation of opium addicts at the point of a gun and by obtaining a monopoly of the opium trade – didn’t quite make it, American merchants got a piece of it – they could compel Chinese to become opium addicts and gain access to Chinese markets. And in fact he was writing right at the time of the Second Opium War [from 1856 to 1860], which achieved that. Britain established the world’s most extensive narco-trafficking enterprise; there’s never been anything remotely like it. Not only were they able to break into China for the first time, but also the profits from opium supported the Raj, the costs of the British Navy, and provided very significant capital which fuelled the industrial revolution in England.