“The Case for
Humanitarian Intervention”
Hitchens’ review of Gary J. Blass’s Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention.
Hitchens calls the book “absorbing, well-researched, and frequently amusing…”
Maybe, but no evidence of that last point in his review. His point is summed up as, “On the whole, he
makes a sensible case that everyone has a self-interest in the strivings and
sufferings of others because the borders between societies are necessarily
porous and contingent and are, when one factors in considerations such as the
velocity of modern travel, easy access to weaponry, and the spread of disease,
becoming ever more so…A failed state may not trouble Americans’ sleep, but a
rogue one can, and the transition from failed to rogue can be alarmingly
abrupt.”
Sounds right and the essay is an interesting walk through the history of the US experience with intervention (both as receiver in the 18th and 19th centuries and giver since).
Sounds right and the essay is an interesting walk through the history of the US experience with intervention (both as receiver in the 18th and 19th centuries and giver since).
New learning: “Marx and Friedrich Engels hugely admired
Lincoln and felt that just as Russia was the great arsenal of backwardness,
reaction, and superstition, the United States was the land of potential freedom
and equality.”
New word: sapient = wise or attempting to appear wise (hey,
the second definition fits CH!)
Hitchens posing a s a wise man:
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