The Liberal Defence of Murder (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Among those who share responsibility 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

Product Description

Searching examination of the influence of the "pro-war Left" on US foreign policy.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of prominent thinkers on the Left found themselves increasingly aligned with their ideological opposites. Over the last decade, many of these thinkers have become close to Washington; forceful supporters of the War on Terror, they help frame arguments for policymakers and provide the moral and intellectual justification for Western military intervention across the globe. From Kanan Makiya, one of the chief architects of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, to Bernard Henri-Levy's advocacy of "humanitarian" intervention, The Liberal Defense of Murder traces the journey of these figures from left to right and explores their critical role in the creation of the new American empire. With wide-ranging testimony from many key figures on the left, this is a crucial account of the emergence of the "pro-war left," and its shaping of our post-9/11 world.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Verso (October 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844672409
• ISBN-13: 978-1844672400
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #333,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars State of Mind, November 18, 2008

By	a reader (nyc) - See all my reviews

I've been following Richard Seymour's blog "Lenin's Tomb" ever since a google search during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006 led me to his site. There are some good blogs on the internet, but I was unprepared to find a blog with such a superlative command of history, highly-crafted deployment of the English language, and withering rhetorical style. So when this volume was announced (a year ago?) I was anxious to get my hands on it. It was worth the wait; Seymour extends his highly-footnoted argument through the 358 pages of this book (not 224 as shown here on Amazon) in a way that both keeps the pages turning quickly and convincingly argues his thesis, which is:

simply, that as long as there have been colonies, empires, invasions, and imperialisms, there have been liberals who nominally "should" seek to defend essential human rights and who "should" know better than to lend their intellectual powers to the hyperpowers that seek legitimacy for their military actions, BUT they (the "liberals") usually do not. In fact they aid and abet the murder of many, many human beings. This book charts why and how these intellectuals make their choices to support and defend all sorts of different projects from the British Empire to US Imperialism, WWI, the Cold War up to the conflicts of the 1990s and then, of course, the still-evolving invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is most powerful about this book to me is how it places the role and rhetorical tactics that so many well-known pundits and intellectuals embraced after 9/11 in the run-up to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in a long-running historical context---this is a role that has continued to thrive for hundreds of years, a certain state of mind, or a mind that begins to identify with the State, or hyperState like the US or British Empire, and project all of its former peace-and-equality-loving liberalism onto this power. The result being a naivite about the potential benevolence of imperial powers and consequent demonization of the enemy (racism).

This book is highly recommended to those who have already made up their minds about pro-war liberals and wish to read a well-written historical critique of this personality type, but it is perhaps even more highly recommended to those in NYC and elsewhere who after 9/11 embraced a certain type of "decent" flag-waving, pro-war rhetoric, but who now and over the past few years have begun to reevaluate exactly what was happening then and how those who used their intellects to help enable military invasions might have been (even unknowingly) covering for an older and more insidiously murderous historical project.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the money they made won't buy back their soul, March 20, 2009

By	Zaytoun (London) - See all my reviews

If there was one book that I would have wanted written, it was this one. The so-called pro-war left has been immensely useful to the powerful elite and their neo-colonial project, which has resulted in the deaths of well over a million people in a few short years. The elite's agenda has been blatant, their propaganda in the gutter, and their militarism utterly ruthless, and yet so-called liberals have sided with their barbarism and provided the 'war on terror' with a much-needed veneer of credibility, at a time when cynicism and dissent amongst the global population is at an all-time high. The old adage 'sold their soul to the devil' has never been more apt.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine first book for Mr. Seymour , December 9, 2008

By	Chris (Washington state, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

The author (Seymour) discusses how prominently the defense of slavery figured in ante-bellum American foreign affairs. He notes how intense racist feelings drove American intervention in the Philippines and Haiti. He points out that American intervention in Cuba was prompted not by a desire to save Cuba from Spanish terror but that a big motivation was a fear that Cubans of African descent were in the leadership of the anti-colonial rebellion. He notes that Andrew Jackson declared that it was inevitable and of no problem to him that Native Americans would eventually be exterminated in the face of the advance of Anglo-Saxon culture across the continent. Similarly, Theodore Roosevelt exulted in the achievements of "white" civilization in its westward expansion, though he thought this achievement was marred by the presence of African Americans in the South and Native Americans. TR declared with regard to the latter that they had little more right to the American land mass than the wild animals which inhabited it. In a similar fashion, Seymour shows that Alexis de Tocqueville argued in the 1840's that even if France had committed hideous atrocities in Algeria, France was still the superior civilization and North Africans had to be forced to recognize that.

Seymour notes that while Karl Marx was repudiating his previous endorsement of British colonialism and damming the horrendous British atrocities during the suppression of the Indian mutiny in 1857, John Stuart Mill had a different take. After the suppression of the Indian mutiny, Mill wrote articles glorifying the great humanitarian achievements of the British Empire in India. British rule, of course, brought about the robbery of Indian natural resources for the benefit of the British elite, many famines, and virtually no gains in the standard of living for the vast majority of Indians.

Liberals, socialist and marxists also commonly supported colonialism in the early 20th century.......

Seymour spends a great deal of time discussing the ideology of liberal and leftist humanitarian interventionists and how these folks are predecessors of previous liberals and leftists who supported colonial state terror. These brethren, unfortunately probably often with a great deal of honest belief, accept American claims to benevolent intentions without applying any serious examination of the results of American actions. They avoid sticking their necks out and leading mobilizations against U.S. backed human rights horrors like in Colombia under Alvaro Uribe orTurkey's ethnic cleansing of its Kurds. Seymour spends a great deal of time in the book discussing the liberal-left support for US wars in the Balkans. One of the more interesting things that Seymour notes but which I never realized is that in the middle of the Kosovo War, Christopher Hitchens expressed the realization that Serbian ethnic cleansing began after, and was a predictable effect of the NATO bombing that began on March 24th 1999. But it was not long before Hitchens abandoned such doubts and resumed his now familiar path toward the sad spectacle he is today.

Seymour provides a survey of some of the writings of the patriotic liberal-left. He examines Paul Berman's support for Reagan's terrorist war against the Contras. Seymour notes that ex-contra leaders like Edgar Chamarro admitted that the Contras had committed many hideous atrocities against civilians; the Sandinistas had won a free and fair election in 1984; the Nicaraguan people voted out the Sandinistas in 1990 after George H.W. Bush warned them that economic warfare and contra terrorism would continue unless Violetta Chamarro was put into office. Yet Berman, who professes to be an anarchist, idiotically insisted that the Contras--led by the barbarian ex dictator Somoza's military men--were similar to the Kronstadt rebels facing down the Bolsheviks in 1921.

Seymour discusses the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. He quotes the head of the British army as saying in September 2007 that the vast majority of the Iraqi resistance is not composed of salafist terrorists but Iraqi nationalists. Seymour notes how economic "shock therapy", the same which has caused such suffering in the former Soviet bloc, has been imposed on Iraq. Regarding racist views of the occupier toward the natives, Seymour notes how Robert Kaplan joyfully reported how US troops welcomed him to "Injun country" in Afghanistan. He points out that documents obtained by the ACLU showed that troops at Camp Mercury outside Fallujah regularly inflicted severe beatings on detainees and "Haji" is a frequently thrown around adjective. He notes that American backed death squads, such as the Special Police Commandos--General Petraeus's creation and staffed by Badr brigade troops and ex-Bathist intelligence men--have committed widespread torture and murder.

He notes that one study has shown that small farmers in Afghanistan have become allied with the Taliban, not because they desire to see all the works of Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis burned. US sponsored fumigation programs have ruined their poppy crops, their only source of income, while poppy crops of large landowners have remained untouched.

Seymour also gives an account of the French "anti-totalitarian" clowns and gives examples of their appalling stupidity and ignorance (including one from Bernard Henry Levy in the endnotes).

To make some criticism: There are a few typos regarding names (e.g. at one point the author refers to the ante-bellum politician Henry Clay as being Secretary of State in 1897). I know this book is supposed to be a study, in part, of liberal discourse. However I think Seymour spends just a little too much time conducting deep philosophical inquiry into the highly clichéd ideas of "anti-totalitarian "thinkers.

The author runs a UK based blog called "Lenin's Tomb," which I rely on as a source of analysis of current affairs. Seymour displays a wide-ranging knowledge about the social, economic and political events around the world and a grasp of sources and details that seems similar to that of Noam Chomsky. I was impressed by the range of secondary sources he uses for this book. Seymour is a Leninist (not an anarchist like Chomsky) though he is non-dogmatic and libertarian in spirit.