Moral clarity sells as history but masks humanitarian imperialism

Evidence

Berman’s book was warmly received, especially among liberals, who needed their sinews stiffened for the coming struggle. One can also see why Terror and Liberalism found such an enthusiastic audience among journalists and commentators: with its sweeping generalizations compellingly stitched together to form a continuous tapestry of two hundred years of history, it is an impatient person’s idea of a good history book, offering a key to all modern mythologies and explaining how we have arrived at this point. Unfortunately, the book is instead a simple, tub-thumping polemic on behalf of that humanitarian imperialism that was popular for a few years at the start of the twenty-first century. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 622

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humanitarians served as moral shield for the free-enterprise counter-attack on redistributive demands — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 438; Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 390; Clinton’s multilateralist foreign policy claimed a morally righteous humanitarian purpose (+1 more)