Libya — Lather, Rinse, Repeat — Syria:
Liberal Imperialism and the Refusal to Learn

Maximilian C.Forte

MRZine

10th August, 2011

Two of my favorite quotes come into play here, one by the English poet, Alexander Pope, who explained that “some people will never learn anything . . . because they understand everything too soon,” and George Bernard Shaw, much more resigned and ironic in stating that “we learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”  From various misguided and superficial “open letters” to “the left” on Libya, to the recent renewal of righteous interventionism with respect to Syria, it seems that the greatest deficit in Western thinking about these unruly and barbarous others is not a deficit in sincerity, as I once mistakenly thought, but a learning deficit.  One detects a strong tendency among liberal imperialists and assorted self-designated “progressives” to think of their actions and thoughts as being above history, as if residing in some altostratus of unimpeachable rectitude.  If they pretend to act and think as if they were gods, it is not an historical accident.  At the end of their day, as believers in Western progress, they remain convinced that they are at the high point of evolutionary teleology.  At the last stage of a dying empire, imperial advocates (not confined to any one ideology) are still gripped by the conviction that theirs is the highest stage of human achievement.  They resent history (inevitable imperial decline) as much as they resent particularity (difference they can never tolerate).  High up in the clouds, perched on the wings of various stealth bombers, they preach the ideology of universal, individual human rights.  Blinded by their own wind, they lose the ability to see that even their own “universal declaration of human rights” contained distinct concerns for social and economic rights — though buried at the end, past the point of the current imperial attention deficit disorder (Arts. 21-27).  If people have the right to eat, but not the right to tweet, then they are judged to be living under tyranny.  This is shallow humanitarianism, callous in its disregard for the materialities that make human life possible, a humanitarianism at the end of empire and as bankrupt as the state powers whose authority the humanitarians invoke.

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