Richard Seymour's The Liberal Defence Of Murder
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Seymour, Richard: The Liberal Defence of Murder, Verso Press, 2008,
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-240-0, 358 pages.
(Swans - February 23, 2009) To get straight to the point, Richard
Seymour's The Liberal Defence of Murder is a masterpiece of intellectual
history and political agitation that is to the early 21st century what
Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs was to the post-WWI period. One
supposes that as long as capitalist war continues to plague humanity,
there will be a need for such a book every generation. Richard Seymour's
astonishing accomplishment is to rise to the occasion on his debut
literary undertaking. Making a seamless transition from the blogosphere
to the printed page, the young man associated with the popular Lenin's
Tomb blog proves that an old-fashioned book still has its uses.
In a sense, I am the ideal reader for such a book since I have had many
of the same concerns as Seymour going back to the outbreak of war in
Kosovo a decade ago. Some of the doubts I had about liberal opinion in
the first Balkans war in Bosnia now came to a head as I saw one
prominent intellectual after another cheering for the NATO bombing of
the Serb republic. Many of them had come of age politically during the
Vietnam War, including Michael Ignatieff. Despite having ostensibly
learned to dig beneath their government's justification for war after
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, many an ex-peacenik was now ready to join
the bandwagon for war in the Balkans. They were now ready to believe
that the Serbs had slaughtered Kosovar civilians in Racak, just as some
intellectuals took LBJ at his word when he blamed the Vietnamese for
attacking American destroyers without provocation.
As it turns out, the Michael Ignatieffs of this world were simply
reverting to form as Richard Seymour ably demonstrates in a tour de
force of intellectual history. As accustomed as I was to this sordid
history after doing some of my own research over the past 10 years, I
was not prepared for the examination of more than 200 years of
imperialist apologetics of the kind we now associate with Ignatieff,
Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Norm Geras, et al. The most startling
revelation for me was how widespread this tendency was, even among
writers I had always considered unblemished.
Take, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who I knew only as a sharp
commentator on American society in the 19th century who defended French
colonialism's right to impose its will on Algeria on the basis of its
Arab citizens being "half-savage." Tocqueville also dismissed American
Indians and African slaves as being incapable of participating in a
democracy for the same reasons.
full: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/lproy52.html
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