Product Description

A war that has killed over a million Iraqis was a 'humanitarian intervention', the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam. Those are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri Levy. In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquest - including genocide and slavery - have been retailed as charitable missions. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Seymour argues that the colonial tropes of 'civilization' and 'progress' still shape liberal pro-war discourse. and still conceal the same bloody realities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229892 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
Among those who share the responisbility for the carnage and chaos in the Gulf are the useful idiots who gave the war intellectual cover and attempted to lend it a liberal imprimatur. The more belligerent they sounded the more bankrupt they became; the more strident their voice the more craven their position. As the war they have supported degrades into a murderous mess, Richard Seymour expertly traces their descent from humanitarian intervention to blatant islamophobia. --Gary Younge, columnist Nation and Guardian

Indispensable ... Seymour brilliantly uncovers the pre-history and modern reality of the so-called 'pro-war Left.' --China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station

About the Author
Richard Seymour lives, works and writes in London. He runs the Lenin's Tomb website, which comments on the War on Terror, Islamophobia and neoliberalism.

Customer Reviews

Necessary study of the B52 Left.
Richard Seymour runs the 'Lenin's Tomb' blogsite, a site I enjoy lurking at, and this is his first book. I enjoyed it. On the evidence here, bloggers can quite easily make the transition to serious writers. It's well written and easy to read, despite the over use of words like 'refulgent'.

Seymour looks at the history of those Left wingers who end up supporting imperialist war, the political 'understandings' which lead them to do so and who move to the Right politically as a result of supporting such ventures. He's talking about the Hitchens' of this world. As such, it's a timely study.

What did I get from the book? Well, I learned that such attitudes are not at all new, that they have a long history on the Left and that they are common in Europe and North America. The B52 Liberals stand in the same tradition as those responsible for the Great Betrayal of 1914 when many socialists supported a war they had pledged to oppose and sent millions to their deaths. Seymour is quite good at spotting the intellectual tradition and sleights of hand that run through such politics. My criticisms, therefore, come from a position of general sympathy for the outlook of the book and the author. There are good sections on the weakness of the concept of Totalitarianism.

I may be guilty of Anglocentrism here, but I would have liked more emphasis on the British Leftists (more accurately former Leftists) who have followed this path. Seymour is good at identifying the American and French, I was largely unaware of the latter, traditions but less so the British ones. Of course The Eustonites get a mention but I would have liked more. A closer look and critique of Cohen's and Kamm's books for instance. Why not reference Melanie Phillips, a liberal who has gone right over into outright racism? Too easy a target? Phillips provides a salutory warning of where this trend can lead. Well, Phillips and Mussolini.

I would have liked the author of a book on this subject to have interviewed the people he discusses. Did Seymour attempt to do so but was rebuffed due to the hostility between him and them?

I feel there should have been more of a tackling of the dodgy ideas used to justify Left support for imperialism - for instance why Islamism and Ba'thism are not Fascism. The idea that Islamism is Fascism, by the way, was first mooted by the right wing Zionist Daniel Pipes and added to the liberal conceptual arsenal.

I also feel the book stutters to a finish a bit. It would be useful to view the possible future of this trend. Still, a good first book.

The Dark Underbelly of Paternalism
Elegantly written, impeccably researched, with occasional flashes of wry Chomskyan dark humor. Whether or not you agree with the author's point of view, his attention to otherwise glossed-over aspects of liberal/left/neocon theory and policy is thorough and the insights are sufficiently original to justify reading even for those fairly well versed on the subject matter.

The Liberal Defence of Murder
Richard Seymour is the author of the popular left-wing blog "Lenin's Tomb", and this book is his first book. It chronicles the development of the new trend of supposed 'humanitarian' interventionism, and particularly the support of much of the self-declared political Left for this type of imperialist war. For that is what it is, whether its PR campaigns may invoke 'human rights' or not, as Seymour takes pains to make clear.

The author discusses not just the nature and development of the new war-mongering on the part of supposed 'Leftists', but also goes into detail on the history of this type of warfare. Unfortunately, at times this becomes simply yet another list of the many and multifarious imperialist crimes and interventions on the part of Britain, France, the United States etc. in the long and sordid history of imperialism, with the link to specifically leftist or 'liberal' politics sometimes being rather unclear. Yet this is contrasted by Seymour with more in-depth portraits and commentaries on the various current opinion leaders involved with forging the new pro-imperialist consensus among the 'respectable' Left, which contains an interesting range of different people, from Christopher Hitchens to Makiya and from Samantha Power to Norman Geras. Richard Seymour is deservedly unsparing of these modern apologists for imperialist war, but he also takes care to properly describe and contextualize their positions and arguments, which is quite helpful since it allows a succesful and effective contrast between their claims on the one hand and their opportunism and hypocrisy on the other. This, after all, is the point of the book, and in that sense it is definitely a useful and important read.

It must be noted as an aside that the book is quite riddled with spelling errors, incorrect transscriptions, misspelling of names and so on, which is more Verso's fault than Seymour's, but really ought to be corrected. The structure of the book is also not always clear, with the author hopping to and fro from historical overviews of colonialism to the specifics of current politicians and journalists like Ignatieff and Paul Berman, and then back again to the interventions in Yugoslavia and Iraq. A more well-defined overall narrative would have made this useful book truly excellent. Nonetheless, it is still very much worth reading, in particular since it gives such a clear and well-supported contextualization for many of the beaters of the war drums of the past decade or so.