Ikenberry and his cohort are shills for the capitalist

project of American empire. This evidence is specific to

their authors. A liberal order really means two things:
1. A policy of bombing campaigns against civilian
populations under the guise of rights discourse, and
2. A deliberate effort to obscure the specific struggles of blacks,
women, and workers worldwide.
Segun 14 Bcquer, Doctoral Candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell and writer for Jacobin
Magazine. Imperialists for Human Rights. Dated 12/19/14. Available:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/imperialists-for-human-rights/
Though Moyn doesnt mention Georgetown University law Professor Rosa Brooks in Human Rights and
the Uses of History, he certainly could have. Brooks, a former Defense Department counselor who first cut
her teeth in the comparably utopian NGO world, epitomizes the advocate-cum-scholar-cum-bureaucrat.
Like Samantha Power and so many others, she started out condemning atrocities abroad before being
appointed to serve the worlds hegemonic power. Brooks, unsurprisingly, is a critic of Moyns. She fails to
see the import of his human rights history revisionism. Shes incredulous about his skepticism. Why
would anyone question the US government adopting such a good thing like human rights? she says. In
addition to Brooks, many of the figures Moyn critiques in the book erase the once-clear distinction between
scholar and policy analyst. What is revealed throughout Human Rights and the Uses of History is that

what might superficially appear to be a scholarly book of contemporary

history often turns out to be a mere government tool to justify current
imperial ambitions. Such is the case with John Ikenberry, a Princeton professor and
one-time State Department staffer. A defender of so-called liberal internationalism
the idea that the US should promote democracy abroad regardless of its toll on sovereignty or life

Ikenberry reasons that hegemony can be benevolent, if only partially. His

Liberal Leviathan is but a defense of Bushs neoimperial grand strategy in words
liberals can stomach. Throughout history American hegemony has enjoyed
liberal characteristics, Ikenberry claims at one point in the book. Moyns riposte:
This is like saying that a poor man has wealthy characteristics because he
is wearing a clean shirt, and very different from saying he is rich. Much to
Moyns chagrin, many in the US and elsewhere believe that human rights violations anything that
deprives an individual of the right to life, liberty and the security of person, according to Article Three of
the Universal Declaration ought to be handled by an international legal system that can override national
laws. And when that kind of enforcement doesnt work, its up to the most powerful states to intervene on
behalf of violated citizens, who almost always come from poorer, failed states. Though not entirely
ignoble, such logic is invariably used selectively. Human rights NGOs and the
UN may sporadically condemn the US and Western European countries, but it
ultimately grants them impunity while judging others, like Venezuela, perpetual
violators. The Westphalian assumptions that motivated the Universal Declaration that the West
or Western-friendly nations should never use international law to breach each others national sovereignty
also authorized the spate of US military interventions in the 1990s in places like
Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Yugoslavia. During that time the US not only

slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians through mass bombing raids, but

also supported the leadership of right-wing war criminals like Agim Ceku. Much the
same is happening today in places like Libya, where calls back in 2011 for intervention based on the
Qaddafi governments human rights violations have precipitated the current humanitarian crisis. And still,
human rights-oriented interventionism blithely flourishes. If Moyn is weary of scholars retrofitting their
work to reflect the concerns of the current administration, it doesnt mean he ignores the present. President
Obama emerges at crucial moments in the book to underscore how much these debates over human rights
actually influence Washingtons elite policymakers. But while Obama has embraced and expanded many
of George W. Bushs policies, he hasnt taken up his predecessors rhetorical embrace of human rights.
Few developments seem more surprising than the fact that Barack Obama rarely mentions human rights,
Moyn notes. Especially since past enthusiasts for them like Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter
have major roles in his foreign policy shop. This might help explain Brooks, Ikenberry, and others
bureaucraticism. As Brooks put it in a 2010 panel discussion of The Last Utopia, Bureaucracies are what
get things done. Slowly, inefficiently, badly, sloppily, etc., but they are indeed what get things done. She
went on: If you hear less about human rights from top US politicians that may not be because human
rights have failed, that may be because human rights have been more integrated into day-to-day business
than they have been in the past. But this doesnt help explain why Obama has jettisoned what had been
an important weapon in the presidential arsenal of moralistic jargon. In its stead, Obama seems to have
adopted human dignity. In speeches, hes associated the concept with everything from gay rights to Pope
Francis to, back in 2010, the corruption charges levied at US Representative Charles Rangel (he should
end his career with dignity, Obama said). Human dignity and human rights, however, are two different
concepts. According to the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, whom Moyn critiques in one

chapter, dignity holds the universal and egalitarian promise of Immanuel Kants kingdom
of ends. We should allow the legal, democratic process itself to lift the poor
and marginalized into that vaunted status, Moyn summarizes Waldron. Such

is the latters unshakable faith in historys progressive trajectory. At this late

date it is nave to appeal to the workings of providence, Moyn tells us. In fact, a
closer look at the historical details of dignitys trajectory suggests that its
prominence today is directly related to a crisis of progress. That we need
concepts like dignity to make us alive to injustices that range from torture to
genocide doesnt bode well for Obama and other proponents of human dignity. But far
worse is the fact that books like Waldrons Dignity, Rank, and Rights, according to Moyn,
obscure the struggle for the freedoms of blacks, women, and workers, for
whom no theories of human dignity were required. The very importance of the term
itself rests on the fact that it was included in the UN Charter; now, its become common parlance not only
among Washingtons liberal elite but also academics that aspire to join its ranks. The term dignity was
inserted into the United Nations Charter by postwar Catholics whose prewar affiliations with fascist
regimes in Austria, Portugal, and Spain suggest, contra Waldron, that dignity had little to do with a liberal,
Kantian impulse. With the elevation of dignity, the nineteenth-century struggle for a better world had been
replaced by a twentieth-century fear of a worse one. Whereas dignitys relation to human rights was baked
into the UN Charter in 1945, the concept shares a more oblique association with torture. Launched in 1973,
Amnesty Internationals anti-torture campaign led to Nobel Peace Prizes for founding member Sen
MacBride in 1974 and the organization as a whole in 1977. The fact that human rights discourse developed
during the 1970s instead of the 1940s, Moyn argues, has much to do with liberal crusaders like Amnesty.
But at the same time, the increasing visibility of torture upon which human rights organizations like
Amnesty have staked their claim to fame had more to do with the Wests retreat from colonialism than
with some categorical sin. The truth seems to be that torture acquired its insidious glamour as the worst
thing they do once Western violence was done, and the places it had shaped for so long now looked like
scenes of indigenous misrule, Moyn writes. Human rights discourse isnt entirely insidious. The rise of
the leftist Spanish party Podemos is partially due to its use of human rights language. And for all its faults,
appeals to human rights can help bolster support for ending poverty and oppression. But this qualified
praise for human rights begs the question: why use the term at all? If it originates from the top rather than
the bottom and the project attracts the most support from those in power what is its utility? What

remains, beyond its ability to pull at the heartstrings of Westerners, beyond its ability to justify calls for
humanitarian intervention abroad? How can these two political projects human rights and humanitarian
intervention even be disentangled? Questions like these go unanswered in Human Rights and the Uses
of History. Still, evidence of Moyns uncomfortable relationship with human rights is sprinkled throughout
the book. Unlike the authors whose books he challenges, corrects, or upends, Moyn doesnt partake in the
gleeful celebration of human rights as a new utopia. Instead, he pries open its blind spots and pillories its
uses, whether deployed as an excuse for militarism or historical bowdlerization. More often than not,
Moyn endorses leftist critiques of human rights. He especially impugns proponents for their failure to
account for economic injustice, concluding one chapter with this resounding sentence: No one has figured
out how to broaden the prohibition against the suffering caused by torture to include the suffering caused
by global inequality of wealth and power. Hes equally critical of individual figures. For Moyn,

Ikenberry shows us that a domestic commitment to liberal values had very

little impact on the chilling and sometimes violent quest for wealth. Michael
Rosen, whose book Dignity receives measured scorn in the chapter on human dignity, gives us a neat and
accurate history of dignity; but dignity, in its opposition to torture, has proved far less helpful when some
of us insist that our fellow humans care about one anothers broader welfare or collective emancipation,
Moyn writes. And Jenny Martinez, author of the book Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human
Rights Law, misses the International Criminal Courts all too obvious limitations: strong and

wealthy nations are never going to legally mandate their own loss of
superiority and money and no court will dare call them enemies of
mankind for not doing so. If economic injustice is one of the books most important motifs, it
also gives rise to one of its most important tensions. Human rights proponents, Moyn stresses, must
advocate for the real conditions for the enjoyment of any rights the entitlement to economic welfare
being the most fundamental of these conditions. Indeed, if human rights verbiage aids

Western aggression, it is also to blame for tragically ignoring the economic

welfare of its own citizens.