A Review of a Review of a Book

There's an interesting review by Samuel Moyn in the Nation of a book, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, which criticizes the author, Gary J. Bass, for bracketing the imperialistic underpinnings of humanitarian sensationalism: "Victorian humanitarianism often exported to foreign lands the savagery it purported to be banishing from them." Moyn also notes that the first recorded case of sadism "was a man who found the humanitarian depiction of tortured slaves sexually exciting." I am not very knowledgeable in British Imperial history, and have not read this book, though I found the contemporary implications of Samuel Moyn's criticisms of Bass's book very interesting.

Basically the book is an attempt at charting a legacy of liberal humanitarianism to defend the notion of just wars, e.g. Kosovo (the excessive Nato bombing campaign that helped displace the very people it was supposedly liberating, claimed hundreds of innocent lives as "markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station" were among the targets [quoted from Klein], and set the stage for a capitalist investment frenzy in dismantling state run infrastructure, pipelines and mines, most famously Trepca).

I am still reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which brilliantly outlines the current trend in military/imperialist policy of unloading billions of dollars of bombs (shock and awe) followed by a rebuilding/reconstruction frenzy/contracting Bechtel and Halliburton. It also draws an analogy between torture treatments for the mentally ill (sensory overload, deprivation, temporal disorientation, breaking down and then rebuilding the patient) and the wonderful torture methodology in Guantanamo, formerly Abu Ghraib, and secret prisons throughout Europe, and also at the macro level of military policy/treatment programs for 'rogue states.' On that note, I am skeptical over whether Obama offers a substantial alternative toward our current middle eastern crusade (I was and am still not for the Afghanistan or Iraq War, and am not for a proposed war+sanctions in Pakistan, and am very critical of Israeli policy- though, on a side note, it was encouraging to hear Olmert's comments, upon resigning over bribery allegations, that Israel must withdrawl from the West Bank and from East Jerusalem).

SEE:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/moyn

and for the full article, and other Nation articles, click on the bellow site and enter h11/print.

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/research/article.html