The British Establishment Is Losing Its Mind Over Afghanistan – Jacobin magazine

Its pretty straightforward, this one. If you think about the arguments that were made for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they were straightforwardly liberal. I realize there is an aspect of this thats neoconservative. But, if you look closely at neoconservative arguments, they are an interesting and contradictory fusion of Burkean conservative ideas and classically liberal ideas, and its the classical liberalism that Im getting at here. So, of course theres a tradition of liberalism thats property-based you can go back to Grotius and Locke and their justifications for colonialism and slavery. Grotiuss road to justification for colonialism was based upon the right to property, and even a justification for piracy based upon the right to property and the limits to where property could apply (so piracy on the high seas was no problem because ultimately no one could have property on the high seas!). It was perfectly permissible, provided you were punishing somebody who had done something wrong to you.

Locke argued that slavery was justified as a continuation of perpetuation of conquest. Essentially, theyre your captives and you deal with them how you like. Its a right of war. Obviously, he favored the appropriation of territorial property on quasi-religious grounds (Gods command is that we improve the goods of the earth and make proper use of them, and if there are these tribes in North America who arent properly using them and bear in mind he was a profiteer on this front then we have every right to take that land and put it to good use).

I could go on, but I think its important to say this tradition opens up into warring camps, if you like. Although there is a critique of the racist, imperialist, and patriarchal aspects of enlightenment, its important to say that people like Kant argued against empire on fairly cosmopolitan and universalist grounds. Jeremy Bentham also argued against empire, as did Diderot. There was a strong anti-imperialist and universalist tradition within liberalism and thats something to value. But, by and large, by the time of the 19th century, when empire is becoming its most bloody, you have people like John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens both sentimental liberal, moral reformers as far as the UK is concerned (perhaps thats unfair to Mill, who I think was brilliant) but when it came to the international order . . . I think Id better read some quotes from him, because this is what he said: Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually affecting that end. . . . Until such time as theyre improved, he went on, to implicit obedience to an Akhbar or Charlemagne was their lot.

In A Few Words on Non-Intervention, he argued for a strict dichotomy between the legal and political standards that you would apply to natives versus those that would apply to domestic citizens, and so on. Its not based on biological racism, but its a strain of cultural chauvinism that should be reminiscent of the kind we saw in the war on terror, where theres the constant argument around questions like Is it fair to argue that the West is superior? and a lot of muscular liberals saying Of course its superior. You cant say its all relative, and essentially using that to justify Islamophobia.

You can find that in that tradition in Mill, Tocqueville, Roosevelt, Wilson (well, Woodrow Wilson was an out-and-out white supremacist, but he fused race thinking and blood thinking with some quite interesting liberal ideas about self-government). You can find it on the Left too: you can find it with the Fourierists, and to some extent in early Marx and Engels (where there are some quite brutal statements about the conquest of Algeria and the war on Mexico by the United States). You can find it particularly pungently in the Fabians who argued that essentially again, Im going to quote from them because its useful sometimes when people come out in such explicit terms but essentially their argument was that Britain had an obligation to what they called the non-adult races. That was a term that they inserted into the Labours manifesto in 1919, which was otherwise a very radical manifesto.

Anyway, in response to the Boer War, in which there was quite a strong antiwar opinion in Britain it was minoritarian but it existed they argued that parliamentary institutions for native races was a dream that had been disposed of by the American experiments after the Civil War. In other words: letting black people rule themselves hadnt worked. They were also impracticable in India, they said, and therefore the best that the natives could hope for was grandmotherly tyranny. So theres an idea of racial uplift built into this strain of liberalism. Its a paternalistic, benevolent kind of liberalism, which also turned out to be extremely bloody.

You have to understand that, at the time that these things were being said (for example, in relation to the Boer War) its a situation of concentration camps and mass murder. In relation to the Indian uprising and Mills justification for British power, it was massacres. At the time of the Indian uprising, Charles Dickens who in other respects we think of as a conscientious liberal wrote to his friend: I wish I were commander in chief over there. I would address that Oriental character, which must be powerfully spoken to in something like the following placard: I, the inimitable, holding this office of mine, have the honor to inform you Hindu entry that it is my intention with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty, and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with abominable atrocities. Thats an open call for genocide there.

In the context of the war on terror and liberal arguments being advanced, they began with, Were going to liberate these people, were going to emancipate these people from the twin despotism of Saddam and sanctions. Were going to make their lives better. Were going to bring them food. This was Bushs speech: Were going to bring them food, were going to bring the medicine, their lives are going to get better. And then it becomes Were at war with Islamic fascism. And then it becomes Christopher Hitchens saying, Cluster bombs are pretty good, actually, because itll go straight through them and out the other side. And then it becomes Sam Harris arguing that the people who speak most sensitively about Islam are actually fascists. You can see how quickly the fundamentally liberal argument for domination a temporary domination, if you like girded by the nineties revival of paternal imperialism under the rubric of humanitarian intervention, becomes vengeance. It becomes Were losing not because of anything weve done wrong, but because the enemy is barbaric, because the enemy is Al-Qaeda, because our enemies are psychopaths and murderers and rapists.

As Hitchens said, We cant live on the same planet as them, and Im glad because I dont want to. In other words: elimination, extermination. Theres always a danger in human tragedy of confusing the pleasures of aggression with virtue, and that has never been more pungently and obviously the case in my lifetime than during the period of triumphalist, chauvinist, browbeating, bullying, bloodthirsty, liberal imperialism in that era. And Blair was the most fervent advocate and champion of that era. So disaster liberalism, I would say, is putting it somewhat mildly.

Read this article:

The British Establishment Is Losing Its Mind Over Afghanistan - Jacobin magazine