The Liberal Defence of Murder

Download or read book The Liberal Defence of Murder written by Richard Seymour and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.