Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Race and Empire

The legacy of the “white man’s burden”

by Justin Raimondo, April 18, 2012

".... It’s a paradoxical fact of life in Imperial America that the more intolerant we are of racism – real or imaginary – here on the home front, the more blatantly ethnocentric our foreign policy becomes. This is reflected in the US government’s shocking disregard for non-white lives. The politically correct mandarins of Washington thought nothing of imposing murderous economic sanctions on non-white Iraq, a blockade that literally took the milk right out of the mouths of babies: many thousands perished. Our drones roam the skies over the Middle East and Africa, taking out scores of innocents in the pursuit of “terrorists.” Can you imagine a similar drone strike aimed at a terrorist cell in Hamburg, or Britain? Thought not.

Racism of the variety under discussion is the belief that a white life is worth more than a non-white life, and if the history of US military interventions in the post-9/11 era illustrates a single consistent principle, then it is surely that. When Robert Bales murdered 17 Afghan civilians, more than half of them children, the US government immediately cut the families checks for $40,000 for each victim – which, parsimonious as it is, represents a marked increase over what is usually offered. Imagine the uproar if they tried to get away with that in a white country. ......"

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