The ongoing Genocide of the Palestinian People, primarily armed and funded and given political cover by the Anglo-Saxon powers, has exposed Anglo-Saxon Liberalism to a level of scrutiny rarely seen heretofore. People all over the Global South and within the Metropolitan states themselves are asking if we are seeing a collapse of Liberal values – or was Liberalism always rotten at its core.
To answer this question, we need to return to the founding father of English Liberalism – the philosopher, John Locke. Locke lived in the latter part of the 1600s, a time when wealth, power and privilege were generally regarded as hereditary attributes. Locke regarded himself as a progressive, and wanted to shift the justification for private property and the rights of man away from the ancient idea that the rich were rich because God loved them more and towards an idea that rights were something that were inherent to, or proper to, the human being in so far as they were a human being.
Already, we can see problems with this formulation. Locke posited the human being as a thing, or object, that bears rights. This rights-baring thing was separated from the Divine and estimated only on its capacity to bear legal rights. It was clear to Locke that all human beings did not bear equal rights in the world he lived in and, sadly, he drew the conclusion that some of us were more human than others.
During the Catholic Middle Ages in Europe there was, of course, horrific inequality and injustice. However, the Church regarded every human being as created by God with an immortal soul. There was never any sense that a king was more human than a starving peasant. Locke’s definition of the human being as a rights-baring object set the scene for an orgy of sexism, racism and White Supremacism. Locke did not regard white European women as fully human in the way a white man is fully human. And this was codified in law, where a woman’s rights were dependent on the rights of her father or her husband. Non-white people could only become human in so far as they learned the languages and manners of the white man and imitated them as best they could. This latter attitude has been extremely consistent among white elites up until this very day. Whole nations are only regarded as valid in so far as they accept what is now euphemistically knowns as “the rules based order,” i.e. the rules the Anglo-Saxon makes up to suit himself.
A remarkable example of this attitude was General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Forces during the US civil war. He claimed that there was no need for an act of law abolishing slavery, as the longer the black man lived in proximity to the white man, the more he would learn to become like a white man and so become a natural barer of human rights. Lee’s attitude certainly appears disgusting to most of us today, but he was actually on the more benign end of the scale. He didn’t see the black man as genetically inferior, but rather lacking something that he could obtain over time, i.e. the manners of the white man. This was more in keeping with the ancient idea of slavery, where the slave owner didn’t necessarily see the slave as inferior, but rather unfortunate. For example, it was common for Roman aristocrats to have their sons tutored by Greek slaves. The Romans recognised the superior quality of Greek learning, but the Greeks had been unfortunate enough to be defeated in battle and conquered by the Romans. The Greeks had lacked something that could be learned, i.e. the Roman technology of war. That’s the only reason any Greek was a slave. And, ultimately, the same thing could happen to a Roman.
However, Locke’s Liberal ideology opened the way for pseudo-scientific justifications for slavery. In the Liberal scheme, one only had human rights in so far as one had the capacity to bear them. Since the Africans kidnapped by the Europeans had no human rights, it could only be because they had no ability or capacity to bear rights. And the only reason this could be so was that they were genetically incapable of bearing rights.
Locke himself lost no time in cashing in on this murderous ideology. He invested in the Royal African Company, which was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. This company had a monopoly on the English slave trade, trafficking hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans to the Americas under brutal conditions (Dunn, 1969). Locke helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which explicitly sanctioned slavery. This document provided a legal framework that entrenched slavery in the Carolinas, facilitating the exploitation and oppression of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people.
Once it had been established to the satisfaction of white European elites that most of the world’s people were not really human at all, it was a small step from stealing the bodies of these “subhumans” to stealing their land and resources. And John Locke’s Liberal ideology, once again, offered justification for these crimes.
Locke wished to undermine the traditional European idea that land and wealth were the property of God, which he bestowed on his creatures. God would grant the use of the land to the king, and the king would, in turn, grant use of the land to his lords. The king could take back this land at any time, so there really was no such thing as private property as we now know it. Likewise, if the king was not a just ruler, God could cause the land to be unfruitful and thus drive the unrightful king from his throne. In the new Liberal world of the late 1600s, the new bourgeois man wanted none of this. He wanted his property to be private – so that even the king could not take it from him. And yet, he had no theory that could counter the Divine Right of Kings. Locke’s Labour Theory of Property provided the answer.
Locke begins with a Theory of Natural Law, which had been gaining ground in Europe for some time. The premise of this theory that individuals – or at least white, male, individuals - have natural rights given by God, including the rights to life, liberty, and property. Man himself, as a rights-bearing object, is also property – which he himself owns. Likewise, a man’s labour is his own private property, which he may use or sell as he wishes. He writes: "Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his." (Locke, Second Treatise, Chapter 5, §27).
The next step in the argument is to move from a man’s labour as an object of his own private property to objects or things in the natural world becoming his private property. Locke asserts that when an object in the nature world is mixed with a man’s labour, that object becomes his private property. In short, Locke asserts that property ownership arises from the application of labour. When a person mixes their labour with nature (e.g., cultivating land, hunting animals), they make it their property. He wrote: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” (Locke, 1690, II, §27).
Well, we can see massive problems with these claims straight away – even if we only apply this reasoning to white European men. Even in Locke’s time, the vast majority of European men had no ownership over the land they toiled. They paid high rents to hereditary landlords for the small tracts of land they slaved on. But Locke took the argument into even more genocidal territory. It wasn’t that any man who laboured on a piece of land had a right to claim it, but it was he who did so most productively. This line of thinking gave a moral justification for the theft of thousands of acres of commons in England and Scotland, which had been collectively farmed for thousands of years. And it was the huge landlords who grabbed this land – not those who worked it. Even to this day, we have bogus arguments such as the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons,” which pretend to justify this theft by big business interests.
But where Locke’s ideas really took a genocidal turn was in the Americas, where Locke assured the white settler colonists that since they would use the land more productively they had the right – and even the duty – to violently steal it from its owners, the Native Americans. He writes: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke, 1690, II, §32). Of course, when Locke says “man,” he means white man.
This Liberal ideology supported the notion that Europeans had a civilizing mission, which rationalized the exploitation and oppression of other peoples under the guise of bringing progress and enlightenment (Pagden, 1995).
Sadly, none of this is mere history. The ideology of the modern Liberal state is entirely based on Locke’s flawed and self-serving reasoning. Likewise, the Charter of the United Nations and International Law are entirely based on the understanding of the human being as a rights bearing object. And we can see the results of this disastrous thinking being played out today where-ever people have brown skin.
The person with brown skin is simply not regarded as having the same capacity to bear rights as a white skinned European. We see this fact every single day at the UN, where white powers feel they have the right and authority to bomb, sanction and murder brown people at will. A stark example of this genocidal, White Supremacist, thinking was when US Secretary of State, Madelene Albright, was asked on public television if she thought murdering half a million Iraqi children with sanctions was “worth it.” Without hesitation, she answered that it was worth it so that Iraq could become more like a white country. Imagine saying that killing half a million European children, or Jewish children, was “worth it.” It would be unthinkable. Why? Because we all know that brown children are not regarded as the same.
In 2011, Libya was the most advanced and progressive country in Africa – with a lower infant mortality rate than the USA. But Libya was not playing by the white man’s “rules based order” and had to be made an example of. The most advanced country in Africa was bombed back into the stone age by NATO bombs. Today, there are slave markets in the streets of Libyan towns, where black-skinned people are bought and sold like animals. That is the order the white elites of Europe and the USA are most used to, most comfortable with.
And today, in Palestine, the very same old Liberal dogma of John Locke justifies the USA, England and Germany supplying the bombs to murder tens of thousands of Semitic mothers and babies. Israel, we are told, is the only “democracy” in the region, and so much be supported at all costs. TV presenter and alleged comedian, Bill Maher, put it more bluntly – “Israelis look like us.”
It’s not that the white elites love Jews. They certainly don’t. But Jews have lived in Europe for 2,000 years and, by now, sort of look like us. Sound like us. Most certainly behave like us. So they must have become human along the way. Must have become capable of bearing human rights. Not so with the Muslims. They still have a long way to go – or so “the rules based order” would have us believe.
References
Dunn, J. (1969). The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the 'Two Treatises of Government'. Cambridge University Press.
Locke, J. (1690). Two Treatises of Government. Available at: Project Gutenberg.
Pagden, A. (1995). Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800. Yale University Press.