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The stage was thus set for the spectacle of liberal intellectuals defending the patently indefensible in the name of ‘anti-totalitarianism’.

The transition from socialist, to anti-Communist liberal, to belligerent conservative was a template that future generations of American intellectuals would mimic, more or less faithfully.

The stories that Americans told one another about conquest were coded in gendered terms, either by defining masculinity as robust, outgoing and adventurist, or using the tropes of femininity to ‘domesticate’ the imperial mission, converting barbarian savagery into a benign and providentially determined process of civilization. These dynamics would be central to the convergence of imperialism with progressivism.

Europe’s colonialist and imperialist regimes did not simply obtain the support of some liberals and socialists because of Bad Ideas. Certainly, the colossal impact of white supremacy as a principle of planetary arrangement produced racist forms of knowledge that irradiated the metropolitan societies, reaching even into the most critical quarters.

The Popular Front government in France did not care to release either him or the colonies, and the Popular Front in Spain did not fight for his release, even though he had pledged to fight against Franco: a great Muslim anti-imperialist fighter (whose successful tactics would inspire Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara) had thus offered his services to the cause of anti-fascism, only to be rebuffed.

The collapse of left parties into support for their own governments as they raised armies for the unprecedented barbarism of World War I tore the Second International apart, and demonstrated the bind that most of the social-democratic parties were in. They were dedicated to class struggle, but increasingly integrated into their respective national states, hoping to secure improvements for workers in that context.

Y’all ever think about the response to 9/11 and just wanna rip out your own brain

They are symptomatic of the hegemony of what Jean Bricmont calls the ‘interventionist ethic’. If it were not for certain widely held assumptions about the remedial power of conquest, originating in the age of European empires, their arguments would make no sense to anyone.