For a century, the counterrevolutionary reaction to the events of October 1917 has arguably been the most determining ideological factor in Western politics. Today the victory of that counterrevolution is complete, but Western powers still need their inherited antithesis, in changing form, as self-justification. | more…
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers—above all, the United States—in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938. | more…
Military interventions on supposedly humanitarian grounds have become an established feature of the post–Cold War global order. Since September 11, this form of militarism has taken on new and unpredictable proportions. Diana Johnstone’s well-documented study demonstrates that a crucial moment in establishing in the public mind — and above all, within the political context of liberalism and the left — the legitimacy of such interventions was the “humanitarian” bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999. | more…