The “white man's burden,”

Critics of the withdrawal from Afghanistan need to examine their own role in the tragedy, says Pankaj Mishra https://t.co/YMDgFB1l5f @bopinionより

— mozu (@mozumozumozu) August 29, 2021

 Reading these neo-imperialist fantasists back in 2001, the words of Hannah Arendt grew deafeningly loud in my head.  The “white man's burden,” she had written in the 1940s, was “either hypocrisy or racism” and those who shouldered it in earnest invariably exposed themselves as “the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.”

Drunk on unaccountable power and untarnished reputation, they have learned nothing from the present, either: the series of calamitously failed military interventions in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya that helped spawn new monsters such as the Islamic State which made the Taliban look moderate by comparison.

The reappearance of the brutal Taliban will no doubt rekindle a macho fantasy of the West’s righteous battle to reform violently backward natives. But the West, no less than Afghanistan, needs to be saved from the quixotic fools of imperialism.

こういった傲慢さはリベラルの英米メディアの記者たちにも反映されているよなああ。