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By Charles Davis
The new imperialism is caring a bit too much about the suffering of
people who are being brutalized by a regime which is not currently an
ally of the United States – and the new anti-imperialism is not giving a
damn at all, solidarity that extends beyond the border permissible only
if the drawing of attention to their plight could not possibly be used
as ammunition by the “humanitarian” militarists of the American empire.
The world, in this view, is divided into but two camps: those with
America and those against it, with the good anti-imperialist’s outrage
dialed up if the atrocity can be linked to the United States, as well it
should be, but dialed down to total silence if it’s not.
This is, of course, the “anti-imperialism” of the reactionary, in more
than one sense: How a person of the left responds to a pile of dead
women and children is in effect dictated by how the U.S. government
itself responds, the advocate of the poor and forgotten consigning
foreigners to their fate – “not our problem, pal,” as one popular
liberal congressman essentially put it on cable TV – if their interests
have the misfortune of being perceived as aligned with America’s, the
left’s commitment to internationalism abandoned for an inverted form of
muddled nationalism that sees U.S. imperialism as not just one factor to
consider in a complex world, but the only factor relevant in how we in
the imperial core should view what happens on the rest of the globe. And
if your cause is sullied by the perception it’s America’s cause too? The
leftist sounds just like that liberal who sounds like Pat Buchanan:
Sorry, pal, if you wanted our solidarity you should have been born
somewhere that better lends itself to a black-and-white anti-imperial
critique.
full:
http://pulsemedia.org/2015/10/06/anti-imperialism-2-0-selective-sympathies-and-dubious-alliances/
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