“The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. The US’s conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but what’s frightening about them is not just the violence they inflict. This new kind of American war is revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance.
Humanitarian and military lawyers bickered around how much wartime humanity was going to be enough. They tacitly agreed not to fight over the war itself. The campaign to seek more humane war did not challenge the enterprise of war itself.
Through the presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump, the US could take strides to keep its wars humane. But it did so while entrenching its globalised militarism, as one anti-war candidate then another became an endless-war president. And now one more, alas, seems a prisoner of the script.”
Note that Samuel Moyn uses the term terrorism to refer to terrorism carried out by non-state agents, but he never applies the term to the US wars and actions as if war itself is not terrorism. Instead he uses the word violence. Furthermore, nowhere does he mention that state terrorism has been carried by US allies for decades and with tacit America support.
One of the results of specialisation is that it leads to too much politics and very little or no economics. Moyn does not even hint in this long piece to any economic background of a superpower/American imperialism and its role in influencing imperialist actions.
Contrast this with the way he grounds ‘human rights’ in our age: “The human rights revolution of our time is bound up with a global concern for the ‘wretched of the earth,’ but not in the egalitarian sense that the socialist and postcolonial promoters of that phrase originally meant... Human rights were cut off from the dream of globally fair distribution that the global south itself advocated during the 1970s. On this ruins of earlier ambition, a neoliberal campaign against welfare at every scale made human rights its hostages.” Human rights “were extricated from their welfare state crucible and redefined.” Moyn, Not Enough (hardback Ed.) p. 8
I sent my criticism above via email to Samuel Moyn. For privacy, I am posting only the following from his reply: “I agree with your critique [sic] Nadim.” (Date: 05 September 2021)
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