The White Man's Burden

Theodore Dalrymple takes a leftist newspaper writer to the woodshed for a conspicuous example of liberal condescension:

A headline in the British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, caught my eye recently: IRAQIS CAN’T BE BLAMED FOR THE CHAOS UNLEASHED BY INVASION. The writer was that newspaper’s veteran foreign correspondent, Jonathan Steele (another immortal headline to one of his articles, in May 2002, read: NEW YORK IS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE BREZHNEV’S MOSCOW).

Let us grant, for argument’s sake, the article’s premise: that American policy in Iraq has been naive, rash, foolish, precipitate, and culpable. Yet still it would not follow that “Iraqis can’t be blamed” and so forth, unless one also believed what not even the severest critics of the Bush administration have alleged—that the American army, or other agents of the American government, have desired, planned, and even executed the ongoing terrorist attacks in Baghdad.

The only other explanation of the non-culpability of Iraqis would be that they were not really full members of the human race—in other words, that they did not reflect upon their circumstances and act upon their reflections in the way that the fully responsible and therefore potentially culpable Americans do.

[. . .]

Not even the most ardent, anthropomorphic dog-lover credits his pet with a fully developed moral sense, and he therefore regards its misdemeanors with an indulgence that he would not extend to a ten-year-old child. The author regards Iraqis as if they were in the same moral category as pets: for can one really say that people who travel to a different part of the city to explode bombs, resulting in scores of deaths of people chosen merely because they are (most of them) of a different religious confession, do not appreciate what they are doing, any more than a dog appreciates what it does when it knocks over a precious porcelain vase?

[. . .]

Dare I say it: the inability to take seriously the culpability of men and women who, as a matter of policy or tactics, kill large numbers of passers-by and bystanders is a hangover of the late Victorian imperial sensibility, which viewed much of the world’s population as intellectual and moral minors. Special pleading of the kind encapsulated in the headline is not a manifestation of broadmindedness or generosity but of deep-seated arrogance.

Dr. Dalrymple is entirely correct. Furthermore the arrogance is not restricted to the heirs of the Victorian era in England. American left liberals show exactly the same kind of casual assumption of superiority when they excuse the actions of domestic criminals who happen to be Black or Hispanic or some other racial or ethnic minority.

The idea that non-White, non-Christian or non-Western persons are simply unable to perform to the same high standard as "real people" is seen nowhere more clearly than in the paroxysms of outrage over the sophomoric antics of a handful of prison guards at Abu Ghraib from people who seem to have had no problem whatsoever with Saddam Hussein filling mass graves or his sons maintaining rape rooms where they entertained themselves with 12 year-old victims.

This may well be what most conservatives find most annoying about the left.