Liberal Defence of Murder Relaunch
I was asked a few weeks ago to publish the text of a speech I gave at London’s prestigious Mosaic Rooms. It was on the subject of The Liberal Defence of Murder, my book on the history of liberal justifications for war and empire, recently released in paperback. This is the text I prepared, just in case anyone is still interested.
Good evening. So, this book was first published in 2008 in hardback, and at the time it seemed that the subjects of the book, the liberal imperialists, those who cheered on the Iraq war on the grounds of freedom and democracy and various liberal-humanitarian ideas, were on the retreat. They had suffered numerous defections. Even the most belligerent, bloated, malignant of the pile, Christopher Hitchens — *spit* — had begun to wallow in some narcissistic self-pity over the degeneration of his war of liberation in Iraq, which he had fancied was another Spanish Civil War, he its George Orwell, the Bush administration its POUM — an exaggerated case of Godwin’s Law if ever there was one.
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