The Bankrupt ideology of Anti-Imperialism

democratiya ^ | Marko Attila Hoare

[jexus]

'The perfect is the enemy of the good' ...

Imperialism', in the eyes of the average 'anti-imperialist', is coterminous with 'the West', i.e. with the US and its West European and Israeli allies. As such, it is used to refer to the bloc of states that dominates the world today, and there is undoubtedly something emotionally appealing to the individual 'radical' in apparently fighting that which is all-powerful....

Such were the views of a teenage zealot with no knowledge of the Middle Eastern peoples or appreciation of their interests. I debated at the time with Kanan Makiya, the great Iraqi dissident, who shocked me by saying that it was in Iraq's interests to be liberated by the US. Makiya derived his views from his great knowledge of Middle Eastern politics and his love for the Iraqi people; I derived mine from abstract principles. It was only when my own mother's country, Yugoslavia, was torn apart by local fascists that I gradually came to realise that Makiya had been right, and to comprehend the political and moral bankruptcy of 'anti-imperialism'. It is very easy to be ideologically purist when it is someone else's country that is at stake; much more difficult when it is one's own, and one's own people are being slaughtered.

[jexus]

A worthwhile read from a reformed leftist.

[olezip]

I almost think that the anti-imperialists do not even know what imperialism is! If the West was truly Imperialist, the arabs would still be cooking with camel poop, and western countries would be running the oil refineries. There would be no oil crisis if we were true imperialists!

[Dumb_Ox]

Anti-imperialism is based on a demonstrable falsehood - that Western military intervention always has negative results. Everyone knows that British and US military intervention liberated Western Europe from Nazism, and most anti-imperialists would concede that this was a good thing, but few are willing to acknowledge the implications of this for the anti-imperialist paradigm.

Talk about a bad example. We had to go back to Europe because the execrable Woodrow Wilson got us involved in the first place back in WWI.

The author is arguing that isolationism is bad and counterproductive because "imperialist" war in fact advances leftist values and a globalist regime. He's a poster-boy for the conservative anti-war position.