Poodle patting in int'l relations: An Asian experience (2)

Poodle patting in int'l relations: An Asian experience (2)

This is the second of two articles on an Indonesian friend of
our correspondent Harvey Stockwin who once taught him something
relating to the present Asian crisis.

HONG KONG (JP): I was in South and Southeast Asia at the time,
reading what was being written by China-watchers in Hong Kong
about the great upheaval then developing throughout China. It
was already clear -- and of course became clearer with the
passage of time -- that immense chaos and suffering was once
again being imposed upon Chinese by Chinese. What shocked me
then, and still angers me today, were the Western commentators
and analysts, academics and journalists, who dug deep into their
capacity for rationalization and pronounced the GPCR a wonderful
event, a revolutionary blessing, or a great start for the New
China.

It was poodle-patting of the highest order. The poodle
patters did not seek out truth from the facts of the situation,
such as they were at the time, and then let the analytical chips
fall where they may. Instead, they tried to justify an event in
the best possible light, in the process frequently attacking
those who did deal in hard facts for being "anti-China".

Had an event as horrendous as the GPCR taken place in the
United States or in Europe, these same people would probably not
have hesitated to denounce and expose it. But the GPCR was in
'mysterious', 'wonderful', or 'revolutionary' China -- the China
which the west had mistreated and abused for so many years -- so
the development simply had to be justified.

Of course it didn't really matter what China's poodle-patters
said at that time. China effectively embarked upon a civil war
and there was nothing the world could do about it. The China
apologists were merely grist to Beijing's propaganda machine.

But, just possibly, fewer Chinese would have died, and China
would have come to its political senses sooner had the "friends
of China" been true to their intellectual heritage, and told it
like it was.

Any mention of poodle-patting and China inevitably leads to
the broader question of the romanticism with which China is
viewed in the wider world, and which plays an unending role in
the relations which most major nations develop with the Middle
Kingdom. Sufficient to note that poodle-patting can often be a
two-way street. Soepomo didn't think of things in that way --
but, as with dogs, so with humans, some poodles do like to be
patted.

This is why I am remembering Soepomo and the folly of poodle-
patting at this particular time. In a nutshell, poodle-patting
lies at the heart of the current Asian economic financial and
political crisis.

One way in which the West has been exceedingly unhelpful to
Southeast and to East Asia has been in the promulgation by
Western academics, journalists, the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund and assorted politicians of the dubious thesis
concerning the so-called Asian "economic miracle".

Without going into all the arguments now, this was and is
singularly inappropriate terminology.

The far more relevant concept is that Asian nations have been
valiantly, though sometimes belatedly, combating tremendous
population pressures, deeply ingrained poverty, woefully weak
infrastructure, high levels of illiteracy, and profound social
and ethnic divisions with a modest degree of success and many
failures. Economic statistics said there was great progress, but
that "miracle" was seldom, if ever, registered on the ground in
the face of all these profound problems.

There has been nothing truly miraculous about the degree of
progress achieved, especially as countries like China (under
Mao), Indonesia (under Sukarno) and the Philippines (under
Marcos) -- to name only three examples -- had earlier wasted
decades on ruinous political diversions, during which they went
backwards, not forwards.

East and Southeast Asia are only now beginning to catch up
with their problems. They have a long way to go.

For the West to dub the limited achievements so far as "a
miracle" was either disdainful, patronizing or naive, at best,
carrying distinct overtones of what my friend Soepomo rejected --
quite rightly -- as poodle-patting.

At worst, it was racial poodle-patting, based, perhaps
subconsciously, on the racist assumption that it was "miraculous"
that Asians were reacting to the challenge of modernity like the
white folks once did.

After all, no one ever called it the "British Miracle" when
the industrial revolution was invented. No one termed it "the
American economic miracle" when the United States overtook
Britain, and went on growing from them until the present day.

The biting irony has been that the word "miracle" was
particularly inappropriate for developing Asia, since it injected
into an already strongly religious environment an element of the
supernatural or the mystical, in relation to what should always
be seen impersonally as the complex mechanics of economic and
political progress.

If the West was wrong to accept and propagate the "Asian
Miracle" idea, Asians have been equally at fault in adopting the
concept as a bolster to their post-colonial pride.

This is where poodle-patting became a two-way street. On the
one hand, in relation to the Asian economic miracle concept,
there were those who were flatterers. It is equally relevant to
find fault with those who succumbed to the flattery -- and then
made the additional error of believing their own propaganda.

Sure enough, as this first great truly regional crisis has
seeped through Southeast and East Asia, it has been all too easy
for political leaders imbued with false ideas of a miracle to
assume that it is in their stars, rather than themselves, that
they have become underlings. The religious "miracle" concept has
bred irresponsibility, as well as complacency, and has also
subverted Asia's innate capacity for crisis management.

Today yet another misleading spin-off from the mistaken belief
in the "Asian economic miracle" is observable among both
flatterers and flattered. Simply because past achievements were
exaggerated, so possible present and future failures are now
being over-emphasized, too. Spoken at a similar moment of
crisis, President Franklin Roosevelt's injunction that "the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself" seems as relevant today as
it was in 1933.

So I remember how, way back in 1959, Soepomo reminded me of
the essence of modernity: avoid all forms of poodle-patting, and,
as the poet says, when faced with triumph or disaster, "treat
those two impostors just the same".

I have asked several friends over the years to trace Soepomo
for me but they have never managed to do so. Wherever you are, my
friend, I am sure you are still striving for true equality, and
keeping your critical faculties at the service of mankind.
Wherever you are, I miss you -- but thanks for a precious memory.