Universal Hitchens

Michael Young quotes HItchens:

A favorite trope among those who try to politicize the justified outrage over New Orleans is the plight of the slum-dwellers and the dark-skinned, and quite right, too. But it's highly objectionable to be told, by those who go on in this way, that we should instantly dump the Iraqis and Kurds who are fighting for their lives in a slum that could become another slaughterhouse and plague-spot. There is something degrading and suspect here-why lavish any of our care and resources on the wogs? Does this suggestion do anything to diminish xenophobia and resentment "at home," at just the time and just the place where we don't need it? Am I expected to tell a homeless woman in Biloxi that she has just been ripped off by an Ay-rab? A scuttle from Iraq or from Afghanistan (where the Kabul-Kandahar highway also took a lot of time and equipment and manpower to build) would add to the number of stricken and broken cities in the world, and not reduce it. If liberalism and humanitarianism do not mean internationalism, they mean precisely nothing. Shame on those who try to turn the needy and the victims against each other.

So let's see:

1. Liberalism and humanitarianism must mean internationalism, or they mean nothing. Check, I guess, with the proviso that this is what is arguably insane in Western thought, and then in the proselytizing religions, including Christianity and Islam: we've got the truth/a good thing/something that makes sense: we should probably spread it to the entire human race. There is a genuine philanthropy in the Greeks, but it was somehow restrained, free from fanaticism or anything like a war-cry. They may have suspected that except for family and friends (possibly students), it is difficult to do more good than harm in trying to help one's fellow man.

2. Liberalism and humanitarianism, in their proudly internationalist guise, fully justified invading Iraq--and in fact, made it unthinkable or evil (objectively pro-Hitler, perhaps?) to do otherwise. Doubtful. Doubtful that this was among the top three motives for the Bush administration.

3. Once the U.S. is in Iraq, whether rightly or wrongly, internationalist blah blah blah requires that they remain. Doubtful.

4. Anyone who wants the U.S. to pull out, or uses Katrina as an excuse for this position, is probably (objectively?) a racist: they are implicitly saying those people don't count. Er, no. Hitchens seems to miss the fact that W, in particular, has an obligation to protect U.S. citizens, in particular, when they are at home, in particular. Whether he has an obligation that is in any way comparable or similar to care for Iraqis, anywhere at all, but especially outside the U.S., is very doubtful.

Clifford Orwin:

Jean-Marie Le Pen has remarked that he will consider it appropriate to concern himself with rapes in Bosnia only when there are no longer any rapes in the region of Paris. This recalls the rationalizations of earlier French politicians (leftist as well as rightist) for turning a blind eye to German persecution of the Jews.(13) If humanitarian action abroad has to await the cessation of all problems at home, then none will ever be undertaken.

Yet there is this much truth in Le Pen's odious position: that the government of France does bear primary responsibility for the safety of the women of Paris and that its duty to protect them no matter what the cost is clearer than its duty to the women of Bosnia. However general the obligation to affirm universal human rights, a government's duty to risk the lives of its citizens to secure those rights for strangers -- in effect the duty to police the world -- will always remain debatable. And we may rightly deride the government that undertakes an intervention abroad to distract attention from nagging problems at home. Today any such intervention is likely to be a humanitarian one, and if indeed its motive is diversionary, then Rousseau's critique of "loving the Tartars" is fully applicable to it.

Fri Sep 9, 2005 7:31 pm MST by robertll | Email Article |

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Universal Hitchens