I was having my morning coffee last Wednesday when I saw a disturbing news video. An unarmed woman had been shot and killed by a state officer while reversing away in her Honda SUV. This all happened in a country very far away from me, a country with very strange customs. All its citizens were allowed to carry guns to fight against tyranny. But no one ever used them. Instead, they were debating fiercely over whether the woman was reversing in the direction of the officer when he shot her. The officer was afraid, someone said. His life was in danger, that's why he shot her 3 times! But no, someone else would argue. She was only able to reverse at 4 miles per hour at max, let me plug this into my LLM and analyse...
This is liberal hedging. When you turn a physical atrocity into an intellectual debate. It's when you ask did the black guy fleeing the USian cop have a criminal record? Did Palestine purposely place human shields at strategic targets when the Israelis bombed them? Was Maduro a bad leader when the USians abducted him? Was the Luigi government ineffective before Mussolini and his Blackshirts seized power?
Liberal hedging is a refusal to take sides. Partly because of a fear of being wrong, and insecurity. By constantly qualifying and clarifying (what if the cop who killed a child was fearful that he was reaching?), the liberal inexorably drifts towards the centrist position. They pile heaps of arguments and justifications to avoid drawing an ethical line.
What these arguments have in common is that they all shift the scrutiny from the oppressor to the victim. The material facts are these: Leopold II killed 10 million Congolese. The liberal sympathises: it's a civilising mission. We're building infrastructure for the Africans. We're superior. In the liberal's moment of hedging and inaction, 10 million Congolese are killed. What about last week? A woman is shot dead by a state officer in the imperial core and the debate is mainly about how fast she was reversing away from him. The material facts are these: the officer shot the gun, he killed her with state impunity.
Perhaps modern examples are too triggering for a liberal. Let's make an example from a long time ago, from a galaxy far far away. Let's imagine you're a veteran from a country that just lost a war. National humiliation, loss of territory, the government installs full austerity measures. So you start a national campaign to industrialise. You smash worker unions (they make people lazy) and unite your disparaged people by telling them they're the master race. By the grace of God, they believe you. In a decade your country becomes a superpower, regains it's territory and then some, and also 6 million people die. Because the master race presupposes slave races.
But wasn't there a good cause for it? Didn't the army from the country to the East commit countless atrocities... Surely there must have been a reason, a justified reason to kill 6 million people! Cries the liberal. He did improve the lives of his people, didn't he?
Even when confronted with 6 million souls, the liberal cannot bring themself to condemn the murderer. After countless hours of agonising research the liberal reaches the same conclusion they always reach: both sides are in the wrong.
Or even worse, the liberal wonders, why should I care? I can't do anything about it. Yet every revolution began first with learning the language to describe the oppression. Before Lenin and Fanon colonising was civilising, bringing civilisation to lesser races. Without the language to describe the oppression, nobody can take material action. This is what Miranda Fricker calls hermeneutical injustice.
the primary harm of hermeneutical injustice consists in a situated hermeneutical inequality: the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible. This reveals another deep connection with the wrong of testimonial injustice. The primary harm of (the central case of) testimonial injustice concerns exclusion from the pooling of knowledge owing to identity prejudice on the part of the hearer [. . .] The wrongs involved in the two sorts of epistemic injustice, then, have a common epistemic significance running through them—prejudicial exclusion from participation in the spread of knowledge
(Fricker 162)
Hence the first step is to learn the language of oppression. When a state officer kills a civilian, that is called state violence. The state officer is called a Repressive State Apparatus. When Israel bombs civilians to clear land for terra nullis it's called genocide, their founding is called settler colonialism.
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The greatest lie is that refusing to pick sides is sitting on the fence. The mental and physical inertia only aids the oppressor. While the liberal grapples with the veracity of reports of Israeli babies being beheaded in Palestine, Israeli bombs 80,000 Palestinians to death.
The materialist perspective asks the questions: Why is a cop allowed to kill an unarmed civilian out of fear (if they are fearful, perhaps they should choose a different profession, like gardening). Why does the Liberal International Order get to murder Arabs with impunity and abduct presidents?
We analyse not the angle of the reverse or circumstances under which the Belgians cut off African hands or whether Mussolini and Hitler's governments were economically efficient. We start from the material circumstances and work backwards, addressing things by their proper names, for names have power: capitalism, imperialism, fascism, colonialism, genocide, state violence, monopoly, crime.