Perhaps these, too, were merely mental exercises designed to shake things up.įor that matter, Peters’ qualification is not really good enough. Yes, what Peters is doing is rhetorical and arguably Peters does not “mean” it when he says that our enemies are not human, just as his confreres never “mean” it when they imply that dissenters against certain foreign policy decisions are traitors to their country and Iraq war supporters never “meant” it when they claimed that opponents sympathized with the enemy and wanted American forces to lose. One World globalism and the idea that all people want the same thing survive by denying anyone who wants something else the status of human. Peters might be less inclined, especially after this latest column, to say that all people want to be free, but the only way he seems to be able to make this point rhetorically is to turn the people who don’t want this into aliens and the places they inhabit into other planets.

(Insert obvious open borders joke here.) As universalists, however, neoconservative interventionists are usually inclined to say, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, “All people want to be free,” which makes the ensuing “liberations” seem more legitimate because they are merely giving the people what they want. Both liberal internationalists and neoconservatives are globalists, especially in that they believe there need to be mechanisms for global governance, but neoconservatives (and liberal hawks who tend to agree with them on policy) seem to thrive on retaining the idea of a frontier or a periphery that still needs to be actively guarded.

If liberal internationalist views can be reduced to a simplified “all people want the same things” that ulimately leads to a squishy One Worldism, neoconservatives will modify this universalist idea with Peters’ sci-fi-inspired take. By the end of Peters’ column, he has to resort to a fairly lame qualification to keep from saying what he has been saying the entire time, which comes across like this: “I’m not saying Pashtuns are non-human, I’m just saying it sure seems that they are….” Peters’ columns often seem as if they could only be parodies of interventionism, or interventionist exercises in self-parody, because the views expressed in them seem so unmoored from reality, but more often than not interventionists are deadly serious when they make these claims. As Kennelly notes, it was hardly the sort of column that someone already inclined to cheer on foreign wars, wink at “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismiss civilian losses should write, unless he wants to appear, as Jim Antle says, as a sort of parody of a neoconservative written by his opponents. I should say a few words on why the column irritated me so much. Daniel Kennelly makes some interesting observations about the Peters column I criticized below.

Tell me of your homeworld usul