Customer Reviews

The Liberal Defence of Murder

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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.

Richard Seymour, who runs the Lenin's Tomb website, has written a fascinating study of Britain's imperial wars and their liberal apologists. They variously claimed that the British Empire brought feminism, humanitarianism, internationalism, secularism or democracy. In reality, empires mean autocracy, reaction and violence. Empire is not and never was a force for good.

He shows how liberals and Labour social-democrats backed the empire's endless wars. They tried to justify their support for imperialism by claiming that the only alternative to empire was barbarism, so the Empire was the lesser evil.

They claimed that empire paved the way for democracy, that conquest meant freedom, and that colonialism brought `civilisation' and `progress'. The reality was far grimmer: between 1872 and 1921 life expectancy in India fell by 20%. In the years 1876-8, between 6 and 8 million Indians died of hunger and in 1896-1900 another 17-20 million died.

After 1917, liberals and social-democrats joined conservatives in defaming communism (later personalised as `Stalinism') as the worst evil, making everything permissible. The logic of anti-communism is a slippery slope, with no stopping place before connivance with the crimes of imperialism. Seymour dissects the shifting lies of the pro-war `left', Greens like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Trotskyists like Christopher Hitchens. The current fashion of humanitarian intervention fits in with the neoconservatives' moralisation of empire.

Seymour explores the vague and elastic notion of `totalitarianism' and denounces those who call Islam the `third totalitarianism'. He shows how Hitchens distorts his opposition to religion in order to target Islam.

Empires mean domination and exploitation at home and abroad. Reaction abroad breeds reaction at home. Empire brought no gain to the great majority of Britons in the past and brings no gain to Americans now. While the US has extended its reach across the world, American workers have had no real wage growth for 30 years.

It's a masterpiece. Personally I've have a few problems with some of the nuances of Seymour's positions, but no one can say that this is anything, but a meticulously researched and well written account of centuries of racism and imperialism and the apologias for such crimes by so called "progressive" intellectuals.

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.

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.

Richard Seymour's The Liberal Defense of Murder is much more than a polemic with Christopher Hitchens and Bernard Henri-Levy. It is a critical analysis of imperialism as the cause of humanitarians, philanthropists, and other purveyors of uplift over the last 300 years. Beginning in the Enlightenment, Seymour shows how the writings of Locke and others provided a basis for colonization that went beyond simple greed. At the same time, he shows how there also existed an anticolonial enlightenment in writers such as Kant. He brings this same level of nuance to his history of his respective chapters on British and American liberal imperialism. Seymour has an excellent grasp of the shifting allegiances and ideologies of Western pro-war liberals, and is surely to be commended for packing so much history into a relatively short book.

As anyone familiar with his blog Lenin's Tomb knows, Seymour is also an exceptional writer. While Liberal Defence lacks the abundant sarcasm of the Tomb, in my opinion his sparing use of the barbs here is to even greater effect. The writing also maintains a clarity of style, even when dealing with some very complex issues such as the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Overall, this is crucial reading in the history of empire.

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.

While Seymour's "Lenin" blog is a giant in the land of pixies that is socialist blogs in the UK; he is still a mere blogger. And it shows. The book has pretensions of intellectual rigour that are basely given the shoddy analysis and low level of economic and political sophistication presented. Not all that surprising given that its author is a keen member of the UK Socialist Workers Party. A shrill outfit composed totally of prolier than though students and those thatfailed to grow out of it upon graduation. The level of discourse in the SWP is pitiful and the party is known to the left more broadly as bereft of any serious analysis. For G*d's sake theyre still banging on about the ideas of that old fraud "Tony Cliff".

... for I have never seen such an assault on the English language as the one presented here. I defy any rational human being to read more than ten pages of this extraordinary travesty without feeling the urge to end it all quickly and quietly.

My wife found me weeping and loading the pistol, but luckily had bought a puppy that day and presented it to me as I raised the firearm to my temple. Looking into its innocent eyes I realised life could go on, and that just because some lunatic had tortured and murdered a once proud language with such relish, I didn't have to leave a comely girl widowed and a dog without a master.

There is little in this porrly written "book" that is worthy of comment. The suthor is an out-and-out socialist who, unable to reconcile the atrocious historical results of the ideology he espouses, attempts (and fails) to pull off a bait-and-swtich by blaming non-socialists for all of the world's ills.

It should be further noted that the book, along with the author's website, are rife with anti-Semitic undertones (this is classic European anti-Semitism at its absolute worst).