Anderson is asking a fair question: is the liberal world order of infinitely beneficient interventions by democratic powers merely a camoflaged continuation of an old colonial order, founded on the slave trade, conquest, and genocide? Is it possible that the liberal powers, heirs of their illiberal forefathers, are continuing the work of their forefathers? And if it isn’t, why is it that no other forms of restitution and change than intervention are considered?

If Rawls is right, surely one can look around and find acts of pure benefit that emerge from liberal interventions. So, where are they? If Anderson is right, there should be material benefits flowing to intervening nations that have couched their interventions in liberal terms. Are there any?

On Anderson’s side is history: for example, the seizure of half of Africa, by the Brits, was done in the name of stopping the slave trade, and ended up benefitting white British farmers, ranchers, and miners enormously, while displacing and destroying native African groups. On Rawls side —Bosnia has not recently suffered the massacres it suffered last decade.

The dispute between Rawls and Anderson isn’t about misreading, then, it is about interpreting social facts. Nor is Anderson’s position simply nihilistic—for instance, if he is right, a positive liberal politics would recognize past and current patterns of economic and ecological oppression. A good place to start would be to stop the use of the World Bank to jimmy wealth out of third world nations after investors have systematically corrupted a ruling elite with bribes and saturated these countries with huge and unproductive debts by calling for a massive debt cancellation. For instance, the vast majority of the money loaned to Venezuala in the 90s was robbed by the governing class that contracted the debts, with the knowledge and the connivence of the lenders. Let’s simply make those debts uncollectable. A nice form of liberal intervention, n’est-ce pas?

My claim is pretty simple—that philosophy is not so distant from social fact that you can’t look around in the world to make judgments about conflicting claims. And certainly one of the great social facts during Rawls life time was the explosion in debt in the third world . And that debt had a pattern—money from poorer countries poured into rich countries. So I am thinking, hmm, if we really want our liberal interveners to be liberal, maybe they can start their intervening at home. I also notice that the liberal intervenors in Bosnia were, simulatanously, arming to the teeth various non-democratic countries—for instance in the Gulf. And I think: well, if Anderson is right, I’d expect that these for profit enterprises will be given some ideological covering to make them seem democratic.

I refer you to the speeches of Bush, vis a vis Pakistan.

People such as Gabriel Kolko exposed the sordid history of liberal interventionism when he was a lad. From the Vietnam era revisionists, we learn that Sumner Welles longed for the days when “the Pacific should be a lake under American jurisdiction…”

Meanwhile, Churchill wrote Eden at the time, “If the Americans want to take Japanese islands which they have conquered, let them do so with our blessing and any form of words that may be agreeable to them. But ‘Hands Off the British Empire’ is our maxim.”

As far as the struggle against Hitlerism is concerned, I’ll refer you to “The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion” by Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel. It is interesting that this MR book had a preface by Christopher Hitchens before he went through the Road to Damascus conversion that Attila Hoare and Chris went through.

Practical reason would instruct us that intention is not the whole of morality—both means and character are also factors. To give a concrete instance of this—when Truman intervened in Korea, he also decided to desegregate the armed forces, realizing that it was impossible to hold the moral high ground and still hold to outright racism. So here’s the question—if we have a theory of intervention that is only one way—that has no channel that changes the bad behavior of the intervenors—doesn’t this rather explode the very base of liberal intervention?

I should disclose that I have experience both as an employee of Anderson’s at Verso and as a member of the NLR editorial committee. I think a straw poll of former occupants of either position would reveal a great deal of peevishness quite unrelated to any political difference. But apart from that: what Matt said.

Notice how Anderson characterized Rawls’s service in the war against aggressive Japanese militarism:

Service in America’s war to regain the Pacific.

I was referring instead to the notion that American capitalist politicians act out of some moral consideration. In Rawls’ case, this led to a wild exaggeration of Lincoln’s virtues.

Any impartial study of Lincoln’s career would reveal not the slightest willingness to abolish slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was adopted in order to shore up the North during a particularly perilous moment in the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa082800a.htm

In his new book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, black American author, Lerone Bennett, presents historic evidence supporting the theory that Abraham Lincoln was, in fact, a devoted racist harboring a life-long desire to see all black Americans deported to Africa.

Bennett suggests that as a young politician in Illinois, Lincoln regularly used racial slurs in speeches, told racial jokes to his black servants, and vocally opposed any new laws that would have bettered the lives of black Americans.

Key to Bennett’s thesis is the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which, Bennett argues, Lincoln was forced into issuing by the powerful abolitionist wing of his own party. Bennett asserts that Lincoln carefully worded the document to apply only to the rebel Southern states, which were not under Union control at the time, thus resulting in an Emancipation Proclamation that did not in itself free a single slave.

At one point, Bennett quotes William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who referred to the proclamation as a hollow, meaningless document showing no more than, “our sympathy with the slaves by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Henry Clay Whitney, a close friend of Lincoln, is quoted by Bennett as saying the proclamation was “not the end designed by him (Lincoln), but only the means to the end, the end being the deportation of the slaves and the payment for them to their masters – at least to those who were loyal.”

Bennett asserts that Lincoln often put forth plans for deporting the slaves to Africa both before and during his presidency.

The tone of Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream is decidedly angry, as if Bennett feels betrayed by what he calls the “myth” of Abraham Lincoln.

“No other American story is so enduring. No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false.”—Lerone Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.