I thought I would send you a preview of an article I have written for the
Economic Research Council magazine, Britain and Overseas. It begins and
ends with Kipling.
Comments welcome.
Best Wishes, Aidan
Liberal Imperialism
By Aidan Rankin
In these pseudo-enlightened times, the fashionably clever like to sneer at
Kipling's belief that 'East is East and West is West', ignoring the intimate
understanding of both that led to this insight. Cultural differences are
seen increasingly as socially condition responses that conveniently cast
aside to build a new world order of democracy and free markets. Ten years
on, it is increasingly clear that the end of the Cold War was the collapse
of communism pure and simple, not the positive triumph of Western values.
Yet Western political and commercial interests still simple-mindedly
proclaim it as 'our victory' and proof of the universal applicability of
'our' democratic systems and values systems.
Ironically, in this global age, our cultural sensibilities are blunted by
political slogans as naïve (at best) as those of the defeated communists.
Like today's Western 'liberals', they believed that their system was
historically inevitable, applicable everywhere and the ultimate product of
human 'progress'. Even the much-derided colonial orders were more
culturally sensitive than this. The British Raj, for example, was often
oppressive and arbitrary, but it also included many decent and humane men
who studied Indian culture and even assisted in the revival and
modernisation of Hinduism. Religious freedom and toleration were not always
adhered to in practice, but they were at least official policy.
Missionaries were protected but their zeal was not encouraged. Liberal
imperialism, by contrast, has spawned a nomenclature of secular missionaries
throughout the 'developing world', a new class of idealistic aid workers,
cold-hearted bureaucrats and political economists besotted with theories
learned by rote in academia.
The missionaries of 'political correctness' lack the humility of most of
their religious forbears, for they are answerable to no deity. They are
also championed unashamedly by Western governments. The task of the secular
missionaries is to take up the white man's burden, re-educate it with
Western 'progressive' schooling, give it packages of 'rights' and brainwash
it with feminism and multiculturalism, ideologies still highly contentious
in the West. Forget religious traditions, forget tribal allegiances, forget
the extended family and forget centuries of accumulated wisdom, the
missionaries tell their captive audience. You are 'free' now, because we
say so - but free to do only what we say. Democracy, which every nation
must embrace, is treated as a gigantic software package - Democrasoft -
that can be installed in a country by a few trained experts. When these
democratic institutions crash, as happens often, it is always the ignorant
locals who are to blame. For just as computer nerds worship their
technologies, today's human rights zealots value their democratic software
more than the people they are claiming to 'help'.
In the Cold War era, human rights were about freedom of speech, freedom of
association and freedom of religion. Their starting points were the
individual, and individual freedom under the rule of law. Democracy was
about the right to choose one's own government, form political parties or
movements and be informed by a free press, instead of official propaganda.
Its starting point was the individual as citizen and political actor. In
the Democrasoft era, the emphasis has shifted from individuals to groups.
We hear less about freedom from state control and more about 'economic and
cultural rights', which are defined and imposed by the state. We hear less
about individual liberty and more about collective 'rights'. These rights
aimed not at each individual as a citizen, but at groups of citizens, whose
interests are defined for them by professional campaigners. Thus we have
'women's rights' defined by feminists, homosexual rights defined by gay
activists and ethnic minority rights defined by race relations bureaucrats.
The latter possess a vested interest in keeping alive racial conflict and
preserving differences between ethnic groups. That is why so-called 'equal
opportunity' surveys ask people to classify themselves along explicitly
racial lines. Recently, when I rejoined my local library in London, I was
asked to fill in such a form. There were several categories of 'Black' and
'Asian', two categories of European ('White' and 'Irish'). British
nationality, the only potential unifying factor, was not an option. To the
amusement of the young chap behind the counter, I said I was 'Black Other'
seeing it as my duty as a free man to give an incorrect answer.
The shift from individual to group has made the idea of human rights less
universal than before and associated it with the partisan, shrill demands of
single-issue fanatics. Amnesty International now actively champions the
rights of 'women' (meaning only feminist women) without running similar
programmes for men, although men are forcibly conscripted to fight and are
more likely to be political detainees. In post-Taliban Afghanistan,
intended as a showpiece of liberal imperialism, the Northern Alliance
government signed a charter of women's rights, sensing that this was more
important to liberal imperialists than, say, feeding children or such
outmoded concepts as individual liberty. There is no human rights charter,
for men, however, even though they have been tortured, starved and murdered
in large numbers. 'Human rights' campaigners have allied themselves with a
Western ideology that favours one sex over another, a sort of
Taliban-in-reverse.
Nor are group rights campaigns in any sense democratic. Their activists are
rarely elected and so are answerable to no-one, least of all 'their' groups,
who offer little more than a power base. Indeed the prevalence of group
rights in politics disenfranchises millions of people, in 'developing' and
so-called 'developed' worlds alike. Many, perhaps the majority of women
dislike feminism, but they are denied a political voice. Most homosexuals
do not wave banners in 'pride' parades but want to lead quite lives in their
local communities. A high point in the media-driven conflict between
Britain and Zimbabwe has been the botched 'arrest' of President Mugabe by
gay activist Peter Tatchell. Most gay men in Britain regard Mugabe and
Tatchell as equally revolting and would rather be thrown to the piranhas
than 'liberated' by the latter. Both are products of the 1960s New Left and
both have written extensively about 'direct action', state-enforced
'equality' and the worthlessness of the 'parliamentary road'. Their
conflict should be seen as no more than a family quarrel between
collectivists.
Over the last few months, we have had the absurd spectacle of the European
Union telling Zimbabwe to 'be democratic or else'. Robert Mugabe is a
brutal dictator and, for his conservative social views, the scourge of the
politically correct. This should not blind us to the hypocrisy of the
exercise. For the EU itself is not a democracy, but a grand design,
increasingly remote from the needs and desires of 'real' Europeans. It is a
classic case of 'physician, heal thyself'. As the power of voters
diminishes in the West, the message of liberal imperialism is proclaimed
ever more stridently: 'be politically correct, or we shall bomb you and
starve you'. Politically correct ideologies, widely blamed in the West for
the breakdown of family, community and personal responsibility, disliked by
the people they are supposed to 'help', are being thrust down the throats of
Third World peoples like bad medicines peddled by quacks.
These corrupt imitations of 'democracy' and 'human rights' will prove
counter-productive and invite fundamentalist backlash. This is because they
work against the grain of ancient cultures and defy human nature itself.
Ironically, the liberal imperialist nomenclature has resurrected most of the
failed premises of failed twentieth century totalitarianism. The group is
more important than the individual, race is more important than citizenship,
equality is better than freedom, the material is more important than the
spiritual - all these are values which liberal imperialism shares with
communism and fascism (which began as a movement of the Left). Like
totalitarians of right and left, the liberal imperialists believe that human
beings exist for the state, not the state for human beings.
Perhaps the Cold War is not really 'over' after all. Instead, the East has
rediscovered individual liberty as the West embraces soul-destroying
collectivism. East is East and West is West, etc. I think I'd rather have
Kipling's brand of imperialism any day.
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