Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff’s epistles to the Americans to “a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], transforming Bush’s blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.”51
Imperialism is, by definition, unpleasant for its victims. Even a supporter such as Niall Ferguson acknowledges that it is “the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples.”52 Regimes created by imperialists are never polities ruled with the consent of the governed. Evelyn Baring (later known as Lord Cromer), who was the British consul general and de facto overlord of Egypt from 1883 to 1907— officially he was merely an “adviser” to the formally ruling khedive—once commented, “We need not always enquire too closely what these people ... think is in their own interests.... It is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience, ... we conscientiously think is best for the subject race.”53 Lord Salisbury, Britain’s conservative prime minister at the start of the twentieth century, put it more succinctly: “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.”54
Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson never consult the victims of the allegedly beneficent conquerors. As the American historian Kevin Baker points out, “The idea of Rome or the British empire as liberal institutions of any sort would have come as a surprise to, say, the Gauls or the Carthaginians, or the Jews of Masada; or, respectively, the Zulus or the Boers or the North American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand.”55 Eric Foner, the historian of American race relations, similarly reminds us that “the benevolence of benevolent imperialism lies in the eye of the beholder.”56 What can be said, however, is that the British were exceptionally susceptible to believing in the “goodness” of their empire and, in this, the United States has indeed proved a worthy imperial successor. In his analysis of Jane Austens 1814 novel
Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleaders back home, know that they are hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the “reform” of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a difference in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out “administrative massacres,” to use Arendt’s potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance.58 A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over “subject races” and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their “civilization” on others.
Those who supply such rationales of domination belong to what I call the “Jeane Kirkpatrick school of analysis.” As Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Kirkpatrick once said, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”59 Historians like Ferguson are of this persuasion, which particularly flourished in the first years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Anglo-American countries. That Britons and Americans have proven so comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them—with Maxim machine guns in the nineteenth century, with “precision-guided munitions” today—seems to reflect a deeply felt need as well as a striking inability to imagine the lives and viewpoints of others. While this, too, is typical of any imperial power, it has perhaps been heightened in the cases of Great Britain and the United States by the fact that neither has ever been defeated and occupied by a foreign military power.
On the other hand, even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic, and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II “embraced defeat,” in the historian John Dower’s memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism.60 All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny, or a “civilizing mission” to cover their often barbarous behavior in other people’s countries. As Foner points out, sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be “freeing” members of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations from backwardness and superstition via Christian conversion, while Britons in the late nineteenth century liked to think that in massacring Africans they were actually helping to suppress the slave trade.61
There is, in fact, nothing new about such self-enhancing American military campaign names as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Infinite Justice” (as Centcom called the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan until Muslim scholars and clerics objected that only God can dispense infinite justice), and “Just Cause” (Bush senior’s vicious 1989 assault on Panama).62 Such efforts reflect both justifications for imperialism and strategies for avoiding responsibility for its inevitable catastrophes. The first recourse in justification has long been racism—or at least a sense of superiority—in all of its forms, including the belief that victory over the “natives” (including their mass deaths due to diseases the imperialists introduce) is evidence that God or the gods have divinely sanctioned foreign conquest. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism.”63 Then there has been the long list of what writer Sven Lindqvist, in his book
Racist defenses of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits, often economic, on their conquered peoples even as they pauperize or enslave them. Examples from the last two centuries include the benefits of “free trade,” globalization, the rule of (foreign) law, investor protection, “liberation” from other imperial powers or homegrown dictators, or “democracy.” In supporting Bush’s attack on Iraq, the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier notes approvingly, “Empires function by virtue of the prestige they radiate as well as by might, and indeed collapse if they rely on force alone. Artistic styles, the language of the rulers, and consumer preferences flow outward along with power and investment capital— sometimes diffused consciously by cultural diplomacy and student exchanges, sometimes just by popular tastes for the intriguing products of the metropole, whether Coca-Cola or Big Macs. As supporters of the imperial power rightly maintain, empires provide public goods that masses of people outside their borders really want to enjoy, including an end to endemic warfare and murderous ethnic or religious conflicts.”65
Finally, in retrospect, there has been simple amnesia: the systematic omission of subjects that are impossible to square with the idea of “liberal imperialism.” For example, both Ferguson and the
Other intellectual strategies have been concocted to avoid facing the reality of imperialist depredations. For
