Word: imperialists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...civilization can claim the flawless pursuit of values like tolerance, and Western civilization’s history reveals it as particularly imperfect. Western civilization is wrought with intolerance and oppression: expansive and imperialist supremacy efforts by Western nations—such as the Crusades, the Inquisition and 19th century colonialism—killed and oppressed millions in various countries in the world. Even the United States, prized by many as the bastion of liberty and equality, is no mere bystander of intolerant and repressive action. Many of America’s founders who espoused that...
...wish he were with us now; our times cry out for someone with Orwell's gifts of clear-eyed observation and analysis. What would he have thought, I wonder, of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which uses essentially imperialist means to defeat fascist regimes and rebuild nations ravaged by them? Orwell was not a pacifist. He had lived long enough among the poor in Britain and France to understand the inequities of the liberal democracies, but he had a splendid contempt for those unwilling to defend them against a greater evil. If he believed that rogue states or radical...
...imperialism was visceral, because he knew, firsthand, what it meant. In the 1920s Orwell had served in the imperial police in Burma, then a British colony, and the experience left him with an almost physical hatred for the behavior - in fact, the very language and look - of the imperialist class. Last week I reread Burmese Days, Orwell's 1934 novel based on his time in Asia. It is not a great book - as a novelist, Orwell had less depth than his near contemporaries, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell - but it is bleakly unsettling, as page after page of racism...
Members of the Bush Administration, of course, are not so crass as to admit that their aims in Iraq are imperialist. Yet U.S. soldiers are already finding themselves in situations miserably familiar to those of the old imperial powers. Take the deaths last week in Fallujah. Young soldiers firing on demonstrators among whom agents provocateurs with weapons may (or may not) have been hiding--we've seen this movie before, from India to Algeria to Ireland. Many of the Administration's statements on Iraq reveal a cast of mind last exercised by those with ostrich-feather plumes on their hats...
...imperialism's apologists, that such a familiarity with exotic climes would have bred a reverence for foreign cultures, as if every child of empire wanted to do something noble, like translate the Bhagavad Gita or teach for a year in Sierra Leone. Sadly, not so. In Britain, the imperialist adventure produced a belief that Britons were better than anyone with dark skin. In my hometown, imperialism bred a pervasive racism. When John Barnes, a great black soccer player, first played for Liverpool, the fans greeted him by throwing bananas on the field and making monkey noises. This...