Please bear in mind that, until the 20th Century, it was universally taken for granted that the strong had every right to rule the weak. Do you doubt that, say, the Aztecs would have invaded and despoiled Spain, had they possessed the wherewithal?

To be sure, the British Empire did some nasty shit in its time – and which empire didn’t?
But, at least it left behind something of value: Railways, a relatively honest legal system, the English language, the USA, India – essentially the modern world.

And what is the Soviet Empire’s legacy? The AK-47, spectacular pollution and mass graves…

But, Max hasn’t quite grasped that pith-helmet imperialism is, like, totally last year.
A squeamish West, combined with a well-armed Third World, has pretty much put paid to it.
Sorry…

In short, these people are so divorced from the real world that any attempt to account for man’s behavior in the future is doomed to failure if it doesn’t take into account the insanity of this one small group. In fact, our failure to recognize them as an identifiable and separate subgroup is probably the greatest single reason for most wars in the past, and what now keeps the rest of us talking about when and how the next war will be fought.

Intellectuals have long known of their existence, but their presence is still thought of by mainstream societies as being just another ideaological sector — one that has as much legitimacy as any other.

The problem with that is they are not at all like the rest of us. They actually think differently at the most basic cognitive level. Test after test shows them to behave in ways similar to the rest of when we are pressed for time or feel the need to make decisions hastily and without all the facts being integrated into the whole neccesary for making a correct decision. It resembles the decision making process of people with high mortality salience or who are in fear of being found out for something they did wrong and can expect to be punished for it.

Even DHS’s terror and counter-terrorism center warns that right-wing conservatives are the primary group from which politically motivated violence is most likely to arise. After all, Saddam Hussein, OBL, GWBush, Hamas, Likud, Zionism and Nazism are all right-wing conservative leaders and movements.

Examples of the way they are capable of torturing history or known facts are revealed by the attempts to recast Nazism as a left-wing movement. This, as well as Islam and any other group that is embarrassing to their own self-image by virtue of their being on the right. Just look how they now belive media has been taken over by “libruls” despite the overwhelming presence of conservatives in every sector of the news media. But because that’s the source of embarrassing newscasts eg. dead Pali kids, they tell themselves that these are lies or exaggerations from a hostile (to them) media. Conveniently, so too are the universities and scholars themselves similarly hostile liars. How else can they handle the fact that scholars are the ones who have all the records showing the truth of historical massacres or other events they prefer to recast as defensive or “accidental” events. Above are several displaying this unique ability (outside of a recognized psychopathy) to recreate reality in a way that is consistent with their own beliefs and prejudices.

Oh..yes. Empathy is another trait that humanity evolved in order to allow the socialization neccesary for implementing the “group” approach as an adaptiion to the environment. But RWCs seem largely unable to extend it beyond their own small in-group. It’s this factor (among others) that suggests some kind of evolutionary dead-end may be responsible for their violence. In a world that now contains nuclear weapons and the ability to change the environment globally, such behavior is clearly dysfunctional and should be “selected out” artificailly since technology now runs far ahead of nature’s ability to self-correct.

Mycos

From DHS:
“A meta-analysis by J. T. Jost, J. Glaser, A. W. Kruglanski, and F. J. Sulloway (2003) concluded that political conservatism is partially motivated by the management of uncertainty and threat. Medium to large effect sizes describe relations between political conservatism and dogmatism and
intolerance of ambiguity; lack of openness to experience; uncertainty avoidance; personal needs for order, structure, and closure; fear of death; and system threat.”

“We now take it for granted in the United States that political conservatives tend to be for law and order but not gun control,
against welfare but generous to corporations, protective of cultural traditions but antagonistic toward contemporary art and music, and wary of government but eager to weaken the separation of church and state. They are committed to freedom and individualism but
perennially opposed to extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities and others who blur traditional boundaries. There is no obvious political thread that runs through these diverse positions and no logical principle that renders them all con-
sistent. Their cooccurrence may be explained just as well with psychological theory as with political theory. Conservative opin-
ions acquire coherence only by virtue of the fact that they minimize uncertainty and threat while pursuing continuity with the past (i.e., the status quo) and rationalizing inequality in society. Basic social, cognitive, and motivational differences may also explain why extreme right-wing movements are typically obsessed with purity, cleanliness, hygiene, structure, and order — things that would oth-
erwise have little to do with political positions per se — and why religious fundamentalism is so attractive to right-wing parties and their followers in just about every nation stretching from North
America to the Middle East.”
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/reply.pdf

This makes sense for those who see the US as the successor of the British Empire.

The lunancy of the necon and neolib axis makes the paleocons a more desired force on a good number of foreign policy issues.

You realize that when the Brits came to Rhodesia, there were only 200,000 Blacks living there? The Brits invited Africans from other parts of Africa – and they came. So they jumped right into oppression with a happy smile? Or did they realize that living in a functioning society with medicines and food is better than digging for grubs under a rock with a pointy stick? What was the life expectancy among these tribal men? Thirty years? I am being optimistic here. Their lives were greatly prolonged by living among Brits who brought new-fangled stuff like soap and the wheel.

And on a related note, South African Blacks – also most of which immigrated from the north after the Europeans – had the highest purchasing power of all Blacks in Africa. Now? Half of all women in South Africa are raped.

That is not to say that Max Boot is anything but a bastard, to return to the article. He is the worst kind of imperialist: he doesn’t do it either for the occupier or those occupied, but to neutralize the only three countries in the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Syria) to support the Palestinian resistance financially and diplomatically. And he does it with arguments about the British Empire? Let us keep our own history, Max Boot. You stick to Israel’s.

“Yet, while idolizing efficiency, Max Boot has chosen to keep the nitrogen and phosphorus in his brain within his skull, rather than putting it to an unarguably more efficient use: organic fertilizer for one of the United States’ booming organic farms.”

HAHAHAHAHAHA

There’s some nice invective here but otherwise this article is the standard ‘incoming media courtesans trashing outgoing media courtesans’ you always get at the time of the presidential changing of the guard.

Again, it is not by any means certain that blacks were better off in Rhodesia under colonial rule. This depends on whether “better off” is about war, famine, plague, and death, or about everyone being part of a single society instead of a rigidly defined over class and under class. Overwhelming historical evidence shows that people are willing to risk or withstand enormous hardship, including war, famine, plague, and death, to escape that kind of rigid, unfair discrimination. Who is judging whether they were “better off”? Them? Their descendants? Or people like Boot, rich whites like the over class who were kicked out? Are you a white guy yourself? You’re obviously rich enough to have internet access. Would you have different sympathies if we were talking about white, middle-class wars, like the French Revolution, or the US Civil War, or the creation of the USA, Israel, or the Republic of Ireland?

#4, are you seriously claiming that Gore would have invaded Iraq?! The two US parties both make many of the same mistakes, and we might be better served by a system more like the one in Germany, but it’s blatantly obvious that the two parties are not the same.

#7, yeah, but he sounds like he’s right, as well as jealous.

#8, good point. Could be he wants a nice slow simmer of violence, and thinks open war is too much and suburbia too little. But in fact I’m thinking Ames just likes being on the winning team.

#13, I like not waging wars, but I like technology too. The Sweden lifestyle, as it were.

#16, I’m all in favor of allowing in smart, hard-working, secular immigrants who are going to improve the place. Academic conferences, for example, rely on international travel. And although Pakistan did not exist until the British left, as a part of India, it was governed by Brits until then. It’s really a fascinating story about how the Muslim/Hindu negotiations led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and what followed, and what the British had to do with it all. If you had a worldwide information network at your fingertips, you could spend 10 minutes and learn about it before you interject lame “One suspects” comments while the grown-ups are talking.

#18, hm, well said.

I was so very happy to see this thorough trashing of Max Boot, a man whose name I first heard within an article bemoaning Obama’s conservative Cabinet picks. Boot, the article explained, had written a short “think” piece explaining how he was “gobsmacked” by Obama’s picks who just as easily could have been made by a McCain administration. Towards the end of the piece, Boot gave a stunning illustration of ignorance: to him, the political liberal Hillary Clinton is a “neo-liberal”, and “‘neo-liberalism’ [...] is not so different in many respects from ‘neo-conservativism.’”

This being the sole instance of Boot’s writing I had been subjected to until that point, I imagined the man to be a writer sharing the intellectual caliber and institutional credentials of a Rush Limbaugh or the unattractive tall blonde woman on Fox News. The evidence was clear: Boot clearly did not know what neoliberalism – certainly the most influential intellectual trend of the past half century – is. Yet he felt qualified to write about it as if he did know; clearly, I thought, Max Boot is the name of a second-rate bullshitter and perhaps an aspiring New York Post columnist.

Turns out, Boot is a “senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, columnist at the Los Angeles Times, contributing editor at Weekly Standard, regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and former top adviser to John McCain’s campaign.”

Now, the average person who is not interested in flimsy rationalizations of worldwide exploitation and mass-murder-by-economics (one million killed in the Soviet Union alone, by the application of just one precept of the theory!) has good reason to know nothing about neoliberalism. But an intellectual – or “intellectual” – who receives paychecks from the New York Times, a Republican presidential campaign, the Wall Street Journal, Council on Foreign Relations, etc., either knows what neoliberalism is, or is a peerless (one would hope) ass.

Neoliberalism is not a political but an economic ideology. It is not a branch from the tree of Unitedstatesian political liberalism, but a branch from the tree of economic liberalism: the theory that economies work best when liberated from government control. Economic liberalism was definitively destroyed by the Great Depression, the cause of which economic liberals were entirely unable to explain; nor could they formulate a cure. Economic liberalism laid in a grave for nearly a half-century before stagflation provided the crisis that destroyed its successor: the Keynesian version of capitalism (which had embraced one form of government control of the economy). During the 1970s and ’80s, liberalism climbed out of its grave in its new form: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was a zombie variant of economic liberalism, which terrorized the world’s people by immiserating and exploiting the vast majority of the world’s population, while showering kingly wealth upon a vanishingly small minority. The only countries to escape the ravages of the neoliberal zombie were those, like China, that retained a significant role in their economies for government control.

Neoconservatives are neoliberal in economic outlook: part of the freedom agenda they so love includes the (neoliberal) freedom of the economically powerful to do whatever they like with their power. Which is ironic in itself, because the other part of neoconservatives’ freedom agenda is the freedom of citizens to share equal power in government through democratic voting.

But the most ironic – hypocritical actually – aspect of Max Boot’s thought, such as it is, is that he adores the idol of efficiency: the idea that everything on the planet should be put to its most efficient use. (This is what neoliberals believe that unregulated capitalism ensures.) Yet, while idolizing efficiency, Max Boot has chosen to keep the nitrogen and phosphorus in his brain within his skull, rather than putting it to an unarguably more efficient use: organic fertilizer for one of the United States’ booming organic farms. Rather than free the elements comprising his body from the stultifying regulation and heavy-handed control of the human body’s organizational scheme, he has chosen to keep them so enslaved. This hypocrisy reeks more than Boot’s decomposing corpse would in a tropical organic mango plantation.

Hopefully, a neoconservative with a commitment to a true freedom agenda will one day (soon) liberate the molecular constituents of Max Boot from their currently highly inefficient use, and, with the help perhaps of a deli meat slicer, set them free slice by slice to serve the neoliberal goal of their most efficient use: fertilizer.

…

Lest this strike you as a uniquely violent sentiment, I suggest you read about Boot’s opinions on how to treat the world’s unpeople by following the imperial British example. Violent, yes – unique, no.

What this shows is that America is tired of its superpower status and the need to look for complex solutions to increasingly complex problems which such status implies. The general public is exhausted. They don’t want analysts, they want cheerleaders. In this case, what could be better than good ol’ British colonialism? That “British colonial headgear” looks so sexy to the American neo-colonial post-onanists!

Even Niall Ferguson who kinda loves the British Empire has rightly noted that INDIA is not among those countries which benefited from the British rule. The story of how India’s growing textile industry was eliminated by the British to feed the Lancashire mills with cheap Indian cotton is particularly telling.

Maybe these American imperialists need to listen to their British colleagues sometimes. Because another thing which Ferguson has right is that the American Empire simply doesn’t have the manpower to fulfill Boot’s dreams. And that’s not only about being unable to replace US Army black and latino enlisted personnel at the same rate as arabs and africans are replacing their cannon fodder (even with a a kill rate adjustment). It’s also about the people who will run these “colonies”. Can anyone seriously imagine Boot going to Somalia to arbiter disputes among numerous local clans? And staying their for 20 years doing the same? Because that’s what a good colonialist has to do. How many Harvard and Yale graduates can speak Somali? Arabic? Urdu? Bengali? Uzbek? Pushtu? Swahili? Lingala? Shona?

One bad thing with Omdurman-style debacles is that they DON’T GENERATE PROFIT. And colonialism cannot be sustainable unless it has a positive return on investment. Iraq, for example, with all its oil riches, would be bankrupt without $100bn-odd annual American support, and nobody has told us how that would change. Nobody even thinks in such categories. Running Somalia or Congo on US Federal budget won’t be cheaper – and with zero chances to see light at the end of the tunnel.

And with no manpower to manage these funds efficiently, the money will disappear in a sort of a huge black hole – at a truly astronomic speed.

And lastly, Omdurmans are not possible anymore. Because the Revolution in Military Affairs has little in store for COIN operations. Ok, modern C4ISR does help (Blue Force Trackers are said to be quite useful for urban combat, for instance), but that does not change the way small wars are fought. Network-centric warfare is not the way you can handle Taliban. For the British, they also had some manpower problems, but they had a huge advantage in firepower. Today, there’s no modern equivalent of Maxim. The Minuteman maybe, but I’m not sure the thing would help.

So basically a half-dozen Iraqs would run the US into ground both militarily and economically. People who think that the massive new spending will be financed by the “US taxpayer” are just out of sync with time. This spending will have to be financed by new US governmnet debt (already huge) which will either be bought by Asians and oil Arabs or (if these guys are not interested) monetized by the Fed, resulting in hyperinflation. In any case, the US will end up being run by a board of trustees headed by the main creditor – the Chinese. Those barking at American “hegemonism” would have to think seriously whether they’d prefer to live in a world run by Mr. Hu, the Chief Global Official Receiver. For myself, I’d prefer a world leader you can laugh at, as we’ve all been doing over the last 8 years..

There ain’t no reason to fear what Boot & Co. are proposing because they can’t do it. But the problem is that their failed efforts can produce extremely worrisome unintended consequences.

If find it more galling that the question of “Why?” is never raised. I don’t care about these people in the first instance and, secondly, I think that everyone can be as crazy as they like in their own homes.

As far as “terrism” is concerned it easily solved by not letting people from terrorist countries onto airplanes or across borders. Thats what borders are FOR: Keeping the barbarians, invaders and crazies the hell out!

PS:

Did Pakistan ever exist under any sort of British rule? Pakistan was created in 1947, India became independent in 1950.

One suspects Pakistan was Britains special going-away-gift to Ghandi.

Wikipedia also states that Boot was an advisor to McCain in the 2008 elections. So, America could easily have had its 21st century foreign policy determined by 19th century British imperialist ideology. That’s a scary thought (on the other hand, the VP could have been someone who could not mention which newspapers and magazines she regularly read…)

if only..if only we were more like Henry Kissinger!

We really dodged a bullet in McCain not getting elected. Thank god for Sarah Palin scaring the shit out of the DC establishment Republicans, because none of our overlords seemed too concerned when McCain wanted to start World War III over South Ossetia.

Funny how Max Boot doesn’t seem to grasp that the natives have nuclear weapons now. It’s like he is an al Qaeda sleeper agent sent into the US to give the absolute worst and most destructive advice possible vis-a-vis our continuing security and survival. But then again I shouldn’t be terribly surprised considering Bush’s close personal relationship with the Saudi Royal Family and business dealings with the bin Laden family.