“The colonial or third-world other of the 1960s [was] refigured and transformed from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to ‘victim’ by a defence of human rights strictly identified as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their rights, or create a political solution to their own problems. Solidarity with the subaltern now meant Western aid and rescue, but always with political conditions. “[ I]nvocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective.” It s like the West’s selective reading of history . “It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order” – the international liberal order preached in and after Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. “[N]o Western government has invoked R2P [the Right to Protect] in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.” “[A]s the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia’s aversion to R2...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51