extremely uninformed debate
So yesterday I'm at Marlowe's, taking photos for an art project, and he pulls up this site. "Antibiotics? Penguins? Who cares?" he exclaims. Now he sends me the new liberal imperialism, which is getting all the left-wing Brits riled:
The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.
There are two blatant punctuation errors in that paragraph. The thesis sounds shocking, but the article doesn't go deeply into specifics and for the most part it reads like an apologia for the methods that the United States & friends have already been employing for the past half-century. We may be a little kinder and gentler now than in the Kissinger era, but when a perceived threat pops up we're quick to knock it on its ass. Always have been. I don't know that it's realistic to imagine any alternative.
The article also claims that "the world's grown honest," at least the Western world, in the sense that its constituent countries no longer care to invade one another, and that therefore "imperialism in the traditional sense is dead." This overlooks economics pretty blatantly. The World Bank/IMF gets mentioned at the end, but only in the PR sense of a tool toward progress, and hoo boy. I am so sick of the residual guilt that comes from living in the nation (albeit a relatively enlightened nation) that wears Sauron's ring on its finger.
Our theses are due on Thursday. What am I doing? Preliminary sketches for an oil painting. It will be called The Dance of Death.
