[John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and also editor of Monthly Review. “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital.” Monthly Review, Volume 67, Issue 03. July-August 2015. http://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/the-new-imperialism-of-globalized-monopoly-finance-capital/#fn29]
( ) Questioning the legitimacy and necessity of imperial violence can shift cultural values away from Empire, creating a sphere of unwillingness and doubt ultimately causing it to fail. This means the K can actually solve for colonial violence.
Morefield, 2008
[Jeanne Morefield is an Associate Professor of Politics and Garrett Fellow at Whitman College. “Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff.” Theory and Event, Vol. 11, Iss. 3. 2008]
Ferguson’s mission in Empire, however,
is not merely to outline the shape of this imperial self-confidence in order to establish it as a model for imitation in Colossus, but also
to explore precisely what happens when self-confidence is transformed into doubt, when liberal imperialists lose their bold willingness to violate the liberal identity of the Empire in the name of “Anglophone
economic and political liberalism.” For Ferguson, such willingness, and acceptance of the anguish that accompanied it, literally was the “white man’s burden” and
the decline of the Empire can be traced, he argues,
to the moment when the manly
embracement of what must be done (embodied in Rhodes campaign in Sudan)
faltered as a cultural norm. From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, but especially after World War One, he argues, “British attitudes flipped over from arrogance to anxiety.”29 He goes on to make it clear that arrogance – with its brash desire for improvement and infinite will to succeed – was eminently preferable to the whining of toadying liberals who cringed at the slightest massacre, liberals no longer ready to accept the pain that comes with stamping out fires. And, he adds, after Asquith’s election in 1906, the increasing presence of these people in both government and
popular and intellectual culture resulted in the emergence of two fatal characteristics that would ultimately shatter the imperial armor; doubt and squeamishness. ¶
On the one hand, Ferguson’s last chapters of Empire are devoted almost entirely to the enervating stench of doubt during this period. Indeed, he repeatedly describes British attitudes toward their empire in the post war period as mired in “doubt,” a “crisis of confidence” equal to a “loss of faith that ultimately went hand in hand with loss of faith in God.”30 Smarmy intellectuals of the time such as E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh severely “damaged” the Empire through their mocking portrayals of priggish colonials thus adding to this overall culture of anxiety.31 On the other hand, the “collapse of British self confidence” during this time also led to “hand wringing” and “second thoughts” about the use of force to put down rebellion which ultimately made the Empire appear weak.32 Ferguson argues throughout these chapters that the British now “lacked the stomach” for repression, that they had “lost their ruthless determination,” that the mood had changed “from self-righteousness to remorse.”33
It was this lack of determination, the rise in self doubt, plus a new unwillingness to buckle down and do the right thing regardless of the blood involved that ultimately killed the Empire, not nationalist rebellion and not some sudden realization that liberal principles of democracy should be extended to the colonized. Self doubt weakened the Empire to such a degree,
Ferguson contends, that by the time World War Two came around it was all the British could do to fight off the world dominating ambitions of other Empires, those not based on liberty but on total domination. Wasting away from self-doubt, the Empire rallied just enough strength to engage in this “collision” between their Empire, grounded as it was in “some conception of human rights,” and the Japanese and German Empires who “regarded alien races as no better than swine.”34 In fighting the war, the British Empire “did the right thing” but was unable to recover from the blow. Even in defeat, however,
Ferguson cannot help portraying the Empire in terms utterly over-determined by a masochistic desire to take on the pain of the world for its own good, indeed, for its very redemption. “This was the Empire’s Passion,” he thus argues, “it’s time on the cross. After this, could it ever be resurrected?”35 The answer, of course, is that it can and that
the redeemer can be found in the creation of an explicitly self-conscious and self-confident (rather than merely hegemonic)
American Empire. But just as Christ suffered for our sins so must this new Empire also be willing to suffer.
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