Richard Seymour - The Liberal Defence of Murder

RICHARD SEYMOUR lives, works and writes in London. A research student at the London School of Economics, he runs the Lenins Tomb website and is the author of The Meaning of David Cameron and American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism.

This updated paperback edition first published by Verso 2012
First published by Verso 2008
Richard Seymour 2012
All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-861-7
eISBN (US): 978-1-84467-928-7
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-962-2

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v3.1

To Marie. With all my love.

We must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

Aim Csaire

This is the first book I have written, and it could not have been completed without considerable help. Many thanks are due to the following, some of whom are quoted in the text, and all of whom provided important information and suggestions well beyond that indicated by the use made of the relevant interview material: Sasha Abramsky, Gilbert Achcar, Ian Birchall, Rony Brauman, Robert Brenner, Alex Callinicos, Vivek Chibber, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Philippe Cohen, Mike Davis, Alex de Waal, Peter Drucker, Liza Featherstone, Peter Gowan, Serge Halimi, Johann Hari, Corey Robin, Catherine Samary, Adam Shatz, Enzo Traverso, Dominique Vidal, Ellen Meiksins Wood and Gary Younge. Also extremely helpful in discussions were Dan Hind, Max Lane, Dragan Plavsic, Gspr Tams and Andy Zebrowski. I am grateful to Alberto Toscano and China Miville for reviewing the drafts and providing insightful commentary. Whatever miscues remain in the text, their guidance has helped me to avoid the worst. The team at Verso have been accommodating and helpful throughout. Thanks especially to my editor, Sebastian Budgen, who provided an immense variety of invaluable material and assistance, checked my dubious translations from French to English, and facilitated most of the interviews. And a great thank you to Charles Peyton for his invaluable copy-editing work on the manuscript. I am indebted to dozens of friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention here, for providing references and forwarding useful material and commentary. This second edition has been emended to take note of several criticisms and corrections, some offered anonymously, some in sympathy and others in polemic. If a criticism hasnt resulted in a correction, its because I disagreed with the criticism.

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldnt analyze at first and didnt fully grasp I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration.

Christopher Hitchens

This book seeks to explain a current of irrational thought that supports military occupation and murder in the name of virtue and decency. It will be recalled that those predictions of a cakewalk towards a jubilant, free Iraq were not solely the product of the Bush administration. What has sometimes been called the pro-war Left in fact, a loose coalition of liberals, former radicals and ex-socialists has shocked and awed former colleagues and comrades, with bold and strident claims about the great works that American military power could achieve in Iraq, and elsewhere. It has been of great service to the Bush administration that, in addition to the shock troops of Christian fundamentalists, Israel sympathizers and neoconservatives, it could boast the support of many prominent liberal intellectuals, some of whom still claim an affiliation to the Left. (A number of them even claim to represent the authentic Left against the pseudo-Left.) Some of these commentators are close to Washington or to figures who have been prominent in the Bush administration. Some have helped formulate policy, as when Kanan Makiya was called upon to help devise plans for the New Iraq. And they have all performed a role of advocacy for the Bush administration and supportive governments.

The reasons why their support should have been so useful are explored in more detail in the Conclusion. To put it briefly, they have If it were not for certain widely held assumptions about the remedial power of conquest, originating in the age of European empires, their arguments would make no sense to anyone. In the chapters that follow I will excavate the origins of these liberal apologies for empire, and track their development over the course of three centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Many of the current batch of liberal advocates of empire have a history on the Left, often abandoned at some point after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For all but recalcitrant Stalinists, the human prospect following the collapse of the Russian superpower in 1989 was supposed to be a promising one. Fukuyamas sighting of an end to history was, notwithstanding his own dyspepsia, touted as a prospectus for universal accord. The one true model for society had been revealed by no less an authority than History, and that model enjoined free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. As Gregory Elliott observes, the locomotive of history had terminated not at the Finland Station, but at a hypermarket. All roads lead to Disneyland? There were some outstanding problems, of course: in place of Stalinist dictatorships emerged new particularisms of a religious or national sort that, while hardly systemic threats, clearly posed problems for the New World Order that Bush the Elder had vaunted. It was in the course of engagement with these problems that former left-wingers decided at various points to pitch in their lot with what the French Foreign Minister Hubert Vdrine had referred to as the American hyperpower.Yugoslavia, and the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the absence of states purportedly bearing the historical mission of the proletariat, many former Marxists, including anti-Stalinists, either made peace with centrist liberalism or morphed into their neoconservative opposites. American military power was now an ally of progress rather than its enemy.