The Liberal Defence of Murder [Hardcover]

I really hate the title of this book. Hate it. It's too shouty. Too much like an Evening Standard placard. But it is undeniably apt. And this book does what the best histories do. It surprises, entertains and illuminates. I say it's a 'secret' history. A lot of what it says you don't chat about in mixed company. Much of it is scandalous, much intriguing. And it will be new to many people. You don't hear every day that Locke was a racist slave-driver, Charles Dickens harboured genocidal fantasies about Indians, the founder of "liberal internationalism" was a KKK supporter and white supremacist, and that all too many of today's liberals have a soft spot for death squads and racist murderers. This is a secret history of "the liberal defence of murder".

Seymour's polemic is apparently motivated by an attempt to undercut the liberal supporters of Bush's wars, like the increasingly yawnsome Christopher Hitchens. This is why the intro and prologue contain a mixture of scattergun arguments, witticisms, interviews, gossip and testimonials, and bitter critique of the 'clash of civilizations'-style stories used to demonise Muslims and justify wars. But it is only when you get to the meat of the text, the four chapters making up the main body of the book, that you start to see how all this fits together. And it's here that the text rises above the usual polemics. Only when you've been through the colonial era, the Cold War, and the era of humanitarian interventions do you really see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Then you understand that pro-war liberalism is not a transitory phenomenon, but merely a recent expression of an old blight.

The best chapter by far is the one on "Old Europe", tracing the evolution of European liberalism's relationship to empire from its inception until the 1960s. It is a sombre narrative, a gruelling death march from the colonisation of Ireland the Americas to World War II, when European liberals and leftists "sleepwalked into the twin propellers of fascism and war". Seymour argues that liberalism had to develop unique arguments for empire that would imply that it was ultimately a progressive, humanitarian and egalitarian venture. Locke sees colonialism as delivering the "improvement" and better use of the earth's goods, Mill conceives of colonial rule as a feminist and humane project, and the Fabians (representing either the left-wing of liberalism, or the liberal wing of the Left) champion the British empire as a petri dish in which socialism can develop.

There is also a strain of left-wing imperialism, whether it is Engels' diatribes against the Algerian anti-colonial insurgency or the French communists' support for the crusing of the FLN. Adding insult to injury, from Seymour's perspective, the Euro-supremacism of leftists undermined their emancipatory goals and was part of a stance that accepted the legitimacy of the state, thus undermining their struggle against fascism when it emerged. Chapters two and three are unsavoury slices of Americana. That's where you will find the full dirt on Woodrow Wilson and 'liberal internationalism', on the Cold War anticommunists and the neocons. The neocons are assessed by means of a kind of bibliographical review, an assay of the existing literature that cheerfully debunks explanations of the neocons as either a Jewish sect or an occult Trotskyist faction. Instead, the neocons are seen as CIA liberals become Burkean conservatives, counterrevolutionaries rather than revolutionaries in the closet.

Chapter four takes readers up to date, from the French 'antitotalitarians through left-wing supporters of Contra death squads, and through the heady arguments over Yugoslavia. If I have a criticism of this section, it is that Seymour pulls his punches in dealing with the Balkans wars. Not that there isn't much a lot of useful and enlightening material here, but he seems determined not to be pigeon-holed as an apologist for Serbian nationalism, so occasionally 'balances' his justified criticisms of war propaganda with hat-tips to conventional wisdom. A futile defensive strategy in my opinion. Nor does he acknowledge the extravagant, bellicose pronouncements of Slavoj H Zizek, Superstar - too few bombs, too late! Even so, this is a better account of the conflict than most scholarly discussions for the simple fact that it confounds the usual demonology centred on a Greater Serbian nationalist parasite.

This is a more penetrating and durable work than Seymour's 'The Meaning of David Cameron', which I also recommend. It isn't as flightily entertaining and jocular, but it's a bargain even at the exorbitant cover price.

Richard Seymour, who runs the Lenin's Tomb website, has written a fascinating study of Britain's imperial wars and their liberal apologists. They variously claimed that the British Empire brought feminism, humanitarianism, internationalism, secularism or democracy. In reality, empires mean autocracy, reaction and violence. Empire is not and never was a force for good.

He shows how liberals and Labour social-democrats backed the empire's endless wars. They tried to justify their support for imperialism by claiming that the only alternative to empire was barbarism, so the Empire was the lesser evil.

They claimed that empire paved the way for democracy, that conquest meant freedom, and that colonialism brought `civilisation' and `progress'. The reality was far grimmer: between 1872 and 1921 life expectancy in India fell by 20%. In the years 1876-8, between 6 and 8 million Indians died of hunger and in 1896-1900 another 17-20 million died.

After 1917, liberals and social-democrats joined conservatives in defaming communism (later personalised as `Stalinism') as the worst evil, making everything permissible. The logic of anti-communism is a slippery slope, with no stopping place before connivance with the crimes of imperialism. Seymour dissects the shifting lies of the pro-war `left', Greens like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Trotskyists like Christopher Hitchens. The current fashion of humanitarian intervention fits in with the neoconservatives' moralisation of empire.

Seymour explores the vague and elastic notion of `totalitarianism' and denounces those who call Islam the `third totalitarianism'. He shows how Hitchens distorts his opposition to religion in order to target Islam.

Empires mean domination and exploitation at home and abroad. Reaction abroad breeds reaction at home. Empire brought no gain to the great majority of Britons in the past and brings no gain to Americans now. While the US has extended its reach across the world, American workers have had no real wage growth for 30 years.

Richard Seymour is the author of the popular left-wing blog "Lenin's Tomb", and this book is his first book. It chronicles the development of the new trend of supposed 'humanitarian' interventionism, and particularly the support of much of the self-declared political Left for this type of imperialist war. For that is what it is, whether its PR campaigns may invoke 'human rights' or not, as Seymour takes pains to make clear.

The author discusses not just the nature and development of the new war-mongering on the part of supposed 'Leftists', but also goes into detail on the history of this type of warfare. Unfortunately, at times this becomes simply yet another list of the many and multifarious imperialist crimes and interventions on the part of Britain, France, the United States etc. in the long and sordid history of imperialism, with the link to specifically leftist or 'liberal' politics sometimes being rather unclear. Yet this is contrasted by Seymour with more in-depth portraits and commentaries on the various current opinion leaders involved with forging the new pro-imperialist consensus among the 'respectable' Left, which contains an interesting range of different people, from Christopher Hitchens to Makiya and from Samantha Power to Norman Geras. Richard Seymour is deservedly unsparing of these modern apologists for imperialist war, but he also takes care to properly describe and contextualize their positions and arguments, which is quite helpful since it allows a succesful and effective contrast between their claims on the one hand and their opportunism and hypocrisy on the other. This, after all, is the point of the book, and in that sense it is definitely a useful and important read.

It must be noted as an aside that the book is quite riddled with spelling errors, incorrect transscriptions, misspelling of names and so on, which is more Verso's fault than Seymour's, but really ought to be corrected. The structure of the book is also not always clear, with the author hopping to and fro from historical overviews of colonialism to the specifics of current politicians and journalists like Ignatieff and Paul Berman, and then back again to the interventions in Yugoslavia and Iraq. A more well-defined overall narrative would have made this useful book truly excellent. Nonetheless, it is still very much worth reading, in particular since it gives such a clear and well-supported contextualization for many of the beaters of the war drums of the past decade or so.