Humanitarian rhetoric masks a bipartisan assumption that developing peoples cannot govern themselves.

Evidence

Thus, liberalism and human rights discourse effectively masked imperial objectives and imperial violence. “Benevolent hegemony” is a reworking of the white man’s burden and is based on the notion that the United States knows best what is in the interests of developing nations. While the rhetoric is no longer blatantly racist in neocon and realist/liberal circles, its assumptions that people in developing nations are incapable of self-rule or of change from within minus imperial intervention has been part of a bipartisan consensus for a while. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 483

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly continues the chapter 7-8 thread that infantilization racializes subjects (‘still infantilizes and therefore racializes’), and echoes chapter 6 on civilizing-mission ideology.

Related

• Human rights rhetoric masks imperial assumptions that racialize colonized peoples (similarity 0.90)
• Liberal human-rights rhetoric racializes by infantilizing those it claims to help (similarity 0.88)
• Liberal humanitarian rhetoric masks imperial violence and infantilizes its targets (similarity 0.87)
• Benevolent hegemony language still infantilizes and racializes the colonized. (similarity 0.82)
• Human-rights rhetoric functions as core neoconservative propaganda, not liberal exclusivity (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Communitarian moral rhetoric masks a project of disciplining individuals #complicates (0.72)