All other things being equal, most Mail & Guardian readers would prefer to live in societies that grant them the standard set of liberal social and political rights. This is not in dispute nor is the need to defend these rights where they are operative, and to extend them to people to whom they are denied.
The problem, though, is that liberalism has never understood itself as a theory or practice premised on the universal, on the idea that each person on the planet counts as a person, a person with the same value and right to access political freedoms as all other people. From the outset liberalism has erected and violently defended limits to who has the right to access liberal rights.
This is not hidden. In 1859 the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians”.
Liberalism emerged as the philosophy of the transatlantic ruling class in the wake of the first colonial genocides and during the first century of the mass enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean. The leading liberal states in the West supported colonialism and many have supported the coups and invasions backed or perpetrated by the US since the end of colonialism.
The definition of who counts as a barbarian, of who should be locked out of the set of people with the right to hold moral weight and to access liberal rights, has changed over the centuries. In recent years it has undergone rapid change. Although the terminology used to justify exclusion changes the idea that some people are what Mill called barbarians remains.
The fact that liberalism has many black partisans, including on its far right, does not mean it has magically disentangled itself from its historic roots in white racism or its contemporary imbrication in racism. When Colin Powell lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction the outcome of his lie was the racially mediated destruction of Iraq. When Priti Patel took up extreme xenophobia the consequences were intensely racialised and racist.
Nicholas Woode-Smith is perhaps the most right-wing among the figures in the new liberal right who enjoy regular access to the elite public sphere. Unlike a worldly, well read and highly intelligent interlocutor such as Tony Leon, who also has real gifts as a writer, Woode-Smith is given to a crude form of public engagement marked by an ongoing avalanche of adjectives like “deceitful” and “shameful” and phrases like “downright stupidity” and “downright evil media houses”.
His demand for uncritical affiliation with the West is often marked by an unevidenced refusal of documented facts that do not fit his world view, contemptuous dismissal of ideas, people and even whole nations to whom he is hostile and, on occasion, conspiracy theory. He has yet to provide any evidence for his claim that it is “most likely” that Iran bribed South Africa to take Israel to the International Court of Justice.
Woode-Smith’s commitment to a contemporary version of Mill’s exclusion of barbarians from the right to have liberal rights is most crude when it comes to Palestine. He has repeatedly written in support of the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, and in language that aggressively denies the equal humanity of Palestinians.
When this is not explicit it is plainly implicit. In April this year, long after the use of sexual abuse, including rape, by the Israeli state and its military was well established, he wrote an article decrying what he termed the silence on the use of rape as a weapon of war by Hamas without making any mention of the abuse of Palestinian women.
He describes journalists killed by the Israeli state as “propaganda operatives”. But when, in a separate article, he does acknowledge that false claims have been published in the Western media these are presented as errors resulting from a lack of information and not as propaganda.
He writes that “Hamas attempted a genocide of the Jewish people on October 7th” and that Hamas committed a war crime but endorses the Israeli devastation of Gaza as an action to “prevent future slaughter” and attain a “future peace”. He dismisses the idea that Israel is waging a genocidal war as contemptible and does not concede that Israel has committed war crimes. For Woode-Smith civilian lives do not hold equal value in Israel and Gaza.
He repeatedly dismisses well documented facts. He has written that “claims about journalists being intentionally killed by the Israel (sic) Defence Forces are just another episode in Hamas’s shameless propaganda war”. He misrepresents the 1988 Hamas Charter, replaced in 2017, as if it is a contemporary document. He rejects the death toll in Gaza affirmed by the United Nations solely on the basis that it draws from reports by the ministry of health in Gaza.
Woode-Smith’s writing is also peppered with illogical statements. He simply declares that a one state solution to the situation in Israel and Palestine, something widely understood as similar to the South African model, “would necessitate a genocide of Jewish people”. Whether or not a single secular state guaranteeing equal rights for all is currently possible is up for debate but the claim that it would require a genocide is, frankly, unhinged.
Woode-Smith’s open embrace of the use of lethal violence against certain groups of people is also evident in his writing about South Africa. It is well documented that in South Africa the police frequently kill unarmed people, most often impoverished black people. They have often engaged in extra-judicial executions of people who should have been brought to trial. Assault and torture at the hands of the police are common.
In a recent Mail & Guardian article Woode-Smith writes in open support of police killings in response to an incident in which nine men were shot dead by the police. He does not acknowledge the general problem of police abuses, including regular murders, or provide a credible factual account of how the nine men came to be killed. He simply affirms the police action, an action that could well have been an extrajudicial execution. This can only be read as offering upfront licence for further police abuses, including murder.
Woode-Smith’s response to my recent article on the increasing extremism of the liberal right is unserious in terms of facts and arguments. A hysterical tone and a set of unsubstantiated allegations does not amount to a credible argument. He wildly and repeatedly misrepresents my article in terms of its argument and its empirical claims. For instance I wrote that the US destroyed Iraq at the “cost of over a million lives”. He asserts that I claimed that “millions died” and, on that basis, accuses me of “a blatant lie”.
One more detailed example of Woode-Smith’s simple contempt for inconvenient facts, and for certain kinds of people, is enough to make a clear case for the lack of intellectual and ethical credibility in his piece.
To make this case I will use the example of Haiti and offer a few basic facts about the broader context of its current crisis. A useful starting point is that after the conclusion of the revolution against slavery in Haiti in 1804 France forced the new republic to pay a debt of $21 billion in contemporary value for “property” lost during the revolution, including enslaved people. The debt was finally paid off in 1947.
The US invaded Haiti in 1915 and occupied the country till 1934. The plunder that ensued included US marines appropriating the country’s gold reserve and taking it to the National City Bank in New York.
The US backed two horrifically brutal and kleptocratic dictators, François Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier, between 1957 and 1986. The country’s first elected president, the wildly popular Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed from power through US backed coups in 1991 and then again, this time by the US marines, in 2004. After the second coup, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political party in the country, was simply banned from contesting elections.
Despite all this Woode-Smith summarily denies the role of the West in the crisis of Haiti, exclusively blames “natural disasters, internal corruption and endemic institutional problems” and accuses me of blaming “the West for the failures of brutal regimes which have embraced terrible ideologies”.
Our public sphere is not well served by writing with this kind of disregard for reason, evidence and the equal value of all human lives.
Richard Pithouse is an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut and a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.