How not to mistake the enemy? Two critiques of humanitarian action

The Trump administration’s attacks on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since 20 January 2025 have revealed the anti-humanitarian ideology of the far right ­‒ that is, the view that foreign aid is a betrayal of national interests and values. In this article, Joël Glasman discusses two historical critiques of humanitarianism: the far-right (reactionary) critique, and the progressive critique shared by a number of traditions (Marxist, socialist, feminist, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonialist). The author stresses the importance of clearly distinguishing between these two types of critique despite the current blurring of the line between politics and the media (welcomed by reactionary critique supporters), and shows that they are polar opposites when it comes to human dignity and the equality it implies.

On 20 January 2025, the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump ordered the immediate suspension of all U.S. humanitarian spendingThe order called for a 90-day pause. In the following days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that he intended to continue “lifesaving” programs, though he did not define what that meant. Executive Order, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, 20.01.2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/. This aggressive action came as a surprise to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) officials, who were refused access to their offices, while the organization’s website was taken offline, nearly all of the agency’s ten thousands employees were fired, and the closing of thousands of humanitarian projects was plannedDemirjian, Karoun, Kavi, Aishvarya, Trump Administration to Lay Off Nearly All of U.S. Aid Agency’s Staff, The New York Times, 6.02.2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/usaid-job-cuts.html?smid=url-share. We won’t know the full extent of the damage caused by this order until what is a likely to be a long legal battle is over. But the event was a stark reminder of the far-right’s anti-humanitarian ideology, which has long been overlooked. Trump’s executive order is consistent with a reactionary critique of humanitarian aid that considers foreign aid a betrayal of national interests and values; it states that the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”Executive Order, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, 20.01.2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/. Humanitarian organizations undoubtedly failed to pay close enough attention to the attack that was coming. While much ink has been spilled defending humanitarian work against decolonial and post-colonial critiques, reactionary nationalist critique has gotten little notice. By giving political expression to that ideology, Trump’s order makes the contrast between the critiques that humanitarian organizations face much clearer.    

We have to distinguish between two critiques of contemporary humanitarianism: a “progressive” (left-wing) critique and a “reactionary” (far right-wing) critique. This contrast is simplistic, but useful. It helps us understand that these two critiques of humanitarianism have old, and distinct, ideological roots that go back to the struggle between Revolution and Counter-Revolution more than two centuries ago. Putting these critiques of humanitarianism into order is now necessary. It starts with humanitarian action as it is championed today; in particular, its contemporary cornerstone is the principle of “humanity”For example, in the major “Code of Conduct”, “Humanitarian Charter”, etc. -type documents. Cf. Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief, 1994; Médecins Sans Frontières, The MSF Charter (1971/2000); Sphere Project, Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response (1998/2018); European Union, European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid,  2017; and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/182 (1991).. This simplification fails to do justice to the complex history of humanitarian principles themselves (which we will not discuss here)For the history of humanitarian principles, see: Palmieri, Daniel, “Les principes fondamentaux de la Croix-Rouge : une histoire politique”, ICRC, 2015. Available at: https://www.icrc.org/fr/document/les-principes-fondamentaux-de-la-croix-rouge-une-histoire-politique; Weissman, Fabrice, “Responsabilité de protéger. Le retour à la tradition impériale de l’humanitaire”, blog du Crash, 2010, available at: https://msf-crash.org/fr/publications/guerre-et-humanitaire/responsabilite-de-proteger-le-retour-la-tradition-imperiale-de; Glasman, Joël, “The invention of impartiality: the history of a humanitarian principle, from a legal, strategic and algorithmic perspective”, blog du CRASH, 18.11.2020, available at https://msf-crash.org/en/invention-impartiality-history-humanitarian-principle-legal-strategic-and-algorithmic-perspective, or to the actual practices of humanitarian actors (which are certainly more complex than mere battles of ideas)For this, one has to go back to the sociology of critique, which does a very good job of showing how humanitarian organizations integrate mechanisms of criticism and self-criticism. The pragmatic sociology of critique, on the other hand, has little to say about the reactionary critique tradition, which is almost completely invisible in those works. Cf. Rambaud, Elsa. Médecins sans frontières. Sociologie d’une institution critique, Dalloz, 2015 and Boltanski, Luc, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 1999.. Contemporary humanitarian action is defined as assistance to people in need, for the simple reason that they belong to humanity. It can come from the right or the left, be religious or secular, Dunantist or Wilsonian, progressive or conservative. It is not necessarily egalitarian. Humanitarian action has no issue with political, economic, and social inequalities. It cannot, however, do without the principle of humanity, that is, the inherent dignity of every individual. It now faces two major types of critique; along with the humanitarian ideal, the progressive critique believes in equal human dignity. It believes that all human beings are equal. However, the progressive critique accuses humanitarian action of going against its own aims, or of not going far enough in fighting for social, economic or political equality, or – with ostensibly good intentions – playing into its enemies’ hands. The reactionary critique starts from the assumption that human beings are fundamentally unequal. According to that school of thought, since human beings are unequal and engaged in power relationships, helping the weaker is useless or even harmful. That critique attacks universal norms such as human rights or international humanitarian law.

The two types of critique are fundamentally opposed. They have their respective ideological roots in competing intellectual traditions. Yet “New Right” intellectuals deliberately effaced that obvious contrast by taking the language of the progressive tradition and making it look reactionary, and euphemizing the reactionary critique to make it look progressive. They called that confusion strategy “metapolitics”. Thanks to help from the far-right media and some social networks, this ideological sleight of hand has been quite successful; it is hard to know sometimes whether words being used are progressive or reactionary.

The progressive critique

Western egalitarian thought goes back to the French Revolution. Equality is a far more recent idea than “liberty” (which comes from Antiquity), “fraternity”, “ mercy”, or “charity”, which have animated Christian thought since the Middle Ages. The norm of equality between all human beings, the demand for equal civil rights with regard to the law, the requirement for political equality, and then the demand for greater social and economic equality emerged in the late eighteenth century due to the pressure from revolutionary movements (sans-culottes, communists, feminists, and abolitionists). Those ideas found their intellectual expression in authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abbé Sieyès, François-Noël Babeuf, Olympe de Gouges, David Walker, and many othersFor a good summary, see: Sand, Shlomo, A Brief Global History of the Left, Polity Press, 2024.. A number of traditions (Marxist, socialist, pan-Africanist, anti-colonialist, etc.) used the notion of equality as an ideological resource. The progressive critique applies to humanitarian action, just as it applies to any other action that, in its view, is an obstacle to greater equality between humans.

In their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attacked the charitable organizations of their time. They condemned the “hole-and-corner reformers”, the “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics”Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Penguin Classics, London 2014  [1848].. To the Marxists, charity takes workers away from the only fight that matters, the class struggle. Charity is a bourgeois value that spreads capitalist ideology among people rather than encouraging them to fight against it. Aid lessens suffering, which ultimately makes inequalities tolerable. Contemporary Marxist authors are reviving these old critiquesFor an overview of these widely diverse schools of thought, see: Mitchell, Katharyne, and Polly Pallister-Wilkins, The Routledge international Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.. Mark Duffield, for example, argues that contemporary humanitarian action plays a role in the neoliberal governance of the worldDuffield, Mark, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007 ; Duffield, Mark, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (2001), London, Zed Books, 2014.. He, like other Marxist writers, believes that today’s capitalism is based not only on exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, but also on exploitation of poor countries by rich ones. Poor countries are integrated into the global system if they are able to supply the raw materials and labor the rich countries need, while other regions are relegated to the world’s margins. International humanitarian action aims, without saying so, at keeping peripheral populations at bay. In this way it isolates the “surplus life” for which global capitalism has no use. In a similar vein, Alex de Waal studied the relationships between humanitarian action and political regimes, concluding that humanitarian action renders rulers’ responsibility for problems invisible, thus allowing bad regimes to continue. By blunting the impact of famines caused by such regimes, humanitarian action helps keep them in powerDe Waal, Alex, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997..

The sociology of domination is another critical tradition. Didier Fassin, for example, relies on such work to analyze humanitarian aid as a form of moral government. Contemporary power becomes a “humanitarian government”Fassin, Didier, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2012. p. 1. Political power uses “the emotions that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make us want to remedy them” in order to remain in powerIbid., p. 1.. “Humanitarian reason” is seen as both a politics of solidarity (which recognizes others as the same), but also as non-egalitarian (because humanitarian aid bars reciprocity). Compassion is “always directed from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more fragile, the more vulnerable”Ibid. [p. 4 of the English edition]. The sociology of domination offers a radical critique of humanitarian action based on the principle of equality.

Another progressive tradition is that of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and pan-Africanism. It decries the connections between colonization and Western humanitarian action. In the view of Kwame Nkrumah, anti-colonialist and President of independent Ghana (1957-1966), international development aid is a ruse by which Western powers seek to influence the rest of the world.  “[…]‘aid’ turns out to be another means of exploitation, a modern method of capital export under a more cosmetic name”Nkrumah, Kwame, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, London, Zed Books, 1967., because that aid comes with strings attached (e.g., trade rights, lower taxes, access to raw materials). The anti-colonial critique has not forgotten that the humanitarian argument has served the interests of colonialism. The West’s “civilizing mission” was used in the past to justify imperial expansion. The Brussels Convention Act of 1890 asserted, point-blank, that colonization was the best way to provide Africa “the benefits of peace and civilization”Original: “effectively protecting the aboriginal populations of Africa”; “assuring to that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization”). Cited by: Macdonald, Mairi S., ”Lord Vivian’s Tears. The Moral Hazards of Humanitarian Intervention”, in Klose, Fabian (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention, op. cit., p. 122.. The framers of the first Geneva Conventions were careful to confine them to “civilized nations,” excluding colonial conflicts, since the principle of equal human dignity did not apply to “savage tribes”Weissman, Fabrice, “Responsabilité de protéger. Le retour à la tradition impériale de l’humanitaire”, blog du Crash, 2010. Available at: https://msf-crash.org/fr/publications/guerre-et-humanitaire/responsabilite-de-proteger-le-retour-la-tradition-imperiale-de. Current decolonial critiques rely on writers like Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. Dubois to point out the relationship between humanitarian action and western geopolitical interests and colonial era representations like the “white savior”Narayanaswamy, Lata. "Race, racialisation, and coloniality in the humanitarian aid sector." Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024. 210-221. Khan, Themrise, Kanakulya Dickson, and Maïka Sondarjee, eds. White saviorism in international development: Theories, practices and lived experiences. Daraja Press, 2023.. That body of literature also points out the paucity of representatives from the global South in the governing bodies of large humanitarian organizations, as well as the discrimination that occurs within those institutionsAbimbola Seye, Pai Madhukar, “The Art of Medicine. Will Global Health Survive its Decolonisation”, The Lancet, 396/220, p. 1627-1628..

The feminist critique looks at another form of inequality – gender relations. The demand for equality between people leads to a rejection of sex hierarchy, patriarchy, and male dominance. Since the 1970s, feminist movements have criticized international organizations, while reviving a longstanding feminist internationalist traditionAnderson, Bonnie S. Joyous greetings: the first international women's movement, 1830-1860. Oxford University Press, 2000 ; Ireton, Denise, Responsible to the peoples of the world": Activist women, peace efforts, and international citizenship, 1893-1939. State University of New York at Binghamton, 2015.. They stressed areas previously neglected by humanitarian action (access to education, abortion rights, the fight against rape and violence against women, women’s health care, etc.), as well as gender inequality within the organizations themselves (inequalities in power, pay, and visibility). That criticism had a very large impact on the international organizations (as evidenced by the UN resolutions regarding sex crimes in the 2000s and the creation of UN Women in 2010, for example), and is still relevant, as contemporary writers like Cynthia Enloe, Carol Harrington, and Elisabeth Olivius demonstrateOlivius, Elisabeth (2015). Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others: Gender equality and the global governance of refugees, in: International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18(2), 270–290. Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014. Carol Harrington, “Resolution 1325 and Post-Cold War Feminist Politics”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3/4, 2011, p. 557-575. Hilhorst, Dorothea, Holly Porter, and Rachel Gordon. "Gender, sexuality, and violence in humanitarian crises." Disasters 42 (2018): S3-S16..

The egalitarian critique is sometimes radical. Writers from this critical tradition do not mince words. They talk about “neoliberal humanitarianism”, “imperialism”, “carceral humanitarianism”, “structural racism”, and “systemic sexism”. Such criticism can be hard to hear. It can be seen as excessive or counterproductive. Humanitarian organizations can choose to be open to it or not (they have made changes in response to many critiques since the 1970s). They cannot ignore it. Humanitarian action and progressive critiques have a common goal: to defend the principle of equal human dignity.

The reactionary critique

Reactionary thinking takes its inspiration from the counter-revolutionary movement that, in response to the French Revolution, vehemently rejected the ideas of progress, equality, and humanism. In the view of Edmond Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald, revolution leaves only ruin and disorder and it is tradition that must ensure the continuity of institutions. Counter-revolutionary thought prefers morality to reason, historical particulars to abstraction, and nations to individuals. Counter-revolution rejects humanism, according to which every human being has inherent value and dignity. It rejects the individualism at the heart of humanism. It believes that other – collective – values (nation, honor, history, etc.) should take precedencePhilosophers will excuse me for lumping into the single “counter-revolutionary thinking” category writings that, while all oppose the French Revolution, start from different premises. For a more precise definition of counter-revolutionary thought, see: Pranchère, Jean-Yves. "Le Progrès comme catastrophe: La pensée contre-révolutionnaire face à la déhiscence de l’histoire." Archives de philosophie 80.1 (2017): 13-32. Sources : Burke, E., Réflexions sur la Révolution de France  Hachette, Paris, 1989 [1790]; Joseph de Maistre, De la souveraineté du peuple (1794-1795), Darcel, Paris, PUF, 1992; Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise. Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, dans la société civile: démontrée par le raisonnement et par l'histoire, 1796..

Racist, antisemitic, and colonialist intellectuals are inspired by counter-revolutionary thinkers. According to Paul de Lagarde and Heinrich von Treitschke, too much humanity – toward Jews and the sick, in particular – would inevitably weaken the entire raceHelfer, Christian, Humanitätsduselei. Zur Geschichte eines Schlagworts, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 1964, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1964), pp. 179-182.. To reactionary colonialists like Max Buchner, the principle of humanity was a threat to civilization. That was where the Christian mission came under reactionary attackBuchner, Max, Kamerun. Skizzen und Betrachtungen, Leipzig 1887.. Recall that in the late-nineteenth century, Christian missions did not question racial inequality. They accepted and justified colonization. They did, however, believe that it should be accompanied by a social and cultural “civilizing mission”. This was intolerable to a reactionary anthropologist like Buchner: “no one can deny that humanity, in its overzealousness, helped make so-called savages more self-aware and dangerous. It is high time that we stop considering these other races with too much platonic love and too little selfish caution. (…) Let’s not forget that they [these other races] are also competition in the struggle for existence.”Buchner, Max, Kamerun. Skizzen und Betrachtungen, Leipzig 1887, p.IX [translation].

The Nazis took these attacks against the principle of humanity the furthest. According to Alfred Rosenberg, the idea of humanity was a Jewish ruse to corrupt the Aryan race and destroy the German nation. “Thanks to the preaching of humanitarianism and the doctrine of human equality, every Jew, Negro, and mulatto can become a citizen of equal rights in a European state; thanks to the humanitarian concern for the individual, there are hosts of luxury institutions for the incurably sick…”Rosenberg, Alfred, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. 78.-82. Aufl., München 1935, S. 203-204, cited in Junginger, Horst, Antihumanismus und Faschismus, p.166-167. English translation: The Myth of the 20^th Century. An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, Historical Review Press, 2004.. To the Nazis, the destruction of groups they designated as enemies was a necessary step in saving the German race. As Adolph Hitler explains in Mein Kampf, “A stronger race will oust that which has grown weak; for the vital urge, in its ultimate form, will burst asunder all the absurd chains of this so-called humane consideration for the individual and will replace it with the humanity of Nature, which wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the strong.”Hitler, Adolph, Mein Kampf, München 1934 [1925], p.38. English translation from: Hitler, Adolph, My Struggle, translated by James Murphy, Hurst and Blackett Ltd. 1939.. According to the Führer, the “the most humane task that mankind has to face” is the destruction of  “defective people”Ibid..

The Nazi defeat in 1945 marked a break. It became difficult for reactionary intellectuals to openly defend racial theories, euthanasia, and the destruction of their opponents. It was time for human rights and the welfare state. Beginning in the 1970s, the New Right’s intellectual contribution consisted of reviving the reactionary tradition while distinguishing itself from fascism. Rediscovering the Conservative Revolution authors from the Weimar era (Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Niekisch, Carl Schmidt, etc.), New Right authors could attack the principle of equality without immediately being associated with NazismSee: François, Stéphane, La Nouvelle Droite et le nazisme, une histoire sans fin. Révolution conservatrice allemande, national-socialisme et alt-right, Éditions Le Bord de L’Eau, Lormont, 2024.. Those writers considered compassion for strangers pathological.

The New Right understands that it will take time to get back into power. They are working well upstream of the political fight, in the field of ideas, culture, and representation. This is “metapolitics”: changing the frameworks of thinking in order to steer the public debate. It has launched magazines (Nouvelle École, 1968; Éléments, 1973; Krisis, 1988; Criticon, 1970; Junge Freiheit, 1986; and Sezession, 2003), publishing houses (La Nouvelle Librairie Éditions and Antaios), and think tanks (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne, or GRECE; Institut Iliade; Polémia; and the Institut für Staatspolitik). Initially marginal, this new reactionary movement is now influencing the public debate.

The works of Arnold Gehlen are an example of this. His attacks on “moralism” in the 1960s have fed reactionary orthodoxy to this dayHis book was translated into French two years ago. Gehlen, Arnold, Moral und Hypermoral. Eine pluralistische Ethik, Wiesbaden, 1986 [original edition 1969] . Gehlen, Arnold, Morale et hypermorale: Pour une éthique pluraliste, translated by François Poncet, with a foreword by Armin Mohler, Krisis/La Nouvelle Librairie, Paris 2023. For new iterations of this idea, see: Grau, Alexander, Hypermoral. Die neue Lust an der Empörung, Claudius: München 2017.. Gehlen joined the Nazi party in 1933, and that membership propelled his academic career. As a philosophy professor in Königsberg and later in Vienna, he attempted to write a “Philosophy of national socialism”, but without successBaureithel, Ulrike, Arnold Gehlen. ‚Kalter Blick‘ in die ‚Wärmestuben des Liberalismus‘, in: Fücks, Ralf, Becker, Christoph (ed.) Das alte Denken der Neuen Rechte. Die langen Linien der antiliberalen Revolte, Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, Bonn 2020, 140–155.. In 1945, he evaded denazification but had to leave Austria. He finished his career as a sociology professor in Aix-la-Chapelle.

Gehlen referred to “humanitarianism” as “indiscriminate love of one’s neighbor transformed into moral duty”„zur ethischen Picht gemachte[n] unterschiedslose[n] Menschenliebe“. Gehlen, 1986 [1969], p.79.. According to him, extending love of one’s neighbor to humanity as whole was an absurdity. In his view, there are several forms of ethics with different anthropological roots. Love of one’s neighbor falls under the family or tribal ethic. It had its origins in the primitive community, and could not go beyond that. Placing love of one’s neighbor above national interests and national honor is a  grave error, “moral hypertrophy”Ibid..

Gehlen advanced three arguments against what he called “hypermoralism.” The first was historical. In his view, the philosophical origins of humanitarianism could be found in Greek and Roman Antiquity, as these civilizations were declining. That ideology was ostensibly created by a small group of philosophers (the Cynics and Stoics) as their states were collapsing in the face of Alexander’s Empire; they elevated what were originally private moral values (compassion and mutual aid) at the expense of state values (honor and sovereignty). He viewed this as a morale of the weak, as both symptom and cause of civilization’s decline.

His second argument was political; the humanist ethic was incompatible with the need for power relations. Humanitarianism undermines State values. It is therefore a threat to the nation. The State can only be secure by using power and violence. Since the struggle for power is a zero-sum game, the State can only win at the expense of other entities. The battle for security is inevitable. To Gehlen, State sovereignty was not just a means, but a value in and of itself. Not only is the demand for charity a pointless financial burden on State resources, it is an attack on the very principle of sovereignty. The politics of the State require that security and national honor come first. The humanist ethic is an obstacle to those values.  

His third argument was an anthropological one. According to Gehlen, the love of neighbor ethos originated from the biological instinct for preserving the family. Yet this instinct cannot be extended to abstract groups that do not know each other, like the nation or humanity as a whole. Those entities have other sources of morality, like the institutional ethic. According to Gehlen, the family ethic was originally limited to members of a given tribe or acquaintanceship group. But that family ethic was progressively overextended.

With Moral und Hypermoral, Gehlen was reacting to the 1968 student and worker protests. But he was also settling the score with German intellectuals from the interwar period who resisted Nazism, because he held them responsible for Germany’s defeat. Gehlen attacked the Protestant intellectuals who claimed that Christian theology demanded opposition to Hitler. He accused that “humanitarianism” of having undermined German patriotism. Humanitarianism was, in his view, a ruse by intellectuals to weaken the State and the interests of the Nation.

Gehlen’s readers would not be surprised to find, in the Trump administration’s current attacks on USAID, a mixture of the “materialist” critique of power relations and the “moral” critique of intellectuals. By destroying USAID, the Trump government is not just claiming to save money or reduce “waste” of public resources. It’s about protecting the “interests” of the nation, on one hand, and protecting “American values”, on the otherExecutive Order, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, 20 January 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/. The fight against humanitarianism is a fight against a “criminal” organization that undermines the State’s authority and against intellectual traitors to the nation: “A bunch of radical lunatics” said Donald Trump, referring to USAID officials, and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” continued DOGE director Elon MuskWhat is USAid and why does Trump dislike it so much?, The Guardian, 4 February 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/04/what-is-usaid-donald-trump-elon-musk-foreign-aid-freezes. Attacks on humanitarianism and intellectuals are, since Gehlen, the two faces of a single political projectEric Fassin, Misère de l’anti-intellectualisme. Du procès en wokisme au chantage de l’antisémitisme, Textuel, Paris, 2024..

The politics of confusion

Reactionary thinkers feel free to make words say the opposite of what they mean. They readily assert that Hitler was on the left and the Revolution was on the rightReactionary intellectuals now commonly equate the Nazi Party agenda with a socialist agenda. For example: D'Souza, Dinesh. The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Simon and Schuster, 2017 and Simms, Brendan. Hitler: Only the world was enough. Penguin UK, 2019. For a historical reading, see Evans, Richard, Review article: Hitler by Brendan Simms and Hitler by Peter Longerich review – problematic portraits, in : The Guardian, 27 September 2019.. Reactionary thinking is often expressed euphemistically. It no longer admits to being openly racist, antisemitic, sexist, and inegalitarian, as it was in the habit of doing before the Second World War. It expresses itself politely and appropriates opposing ideas. This politics of confusion is a deliberate strategy theorized by New Right intellectuals like Alain de Benoist.

Alain de Benoist got his political start in the Fédération des Étudiants Nationalistes (FEN), an anti-communist, racist group that defended French Algeria, supported the French terrorist organization ‘Secret Army Oganization’ (OAS), and were apologists for the apartheid regime in South AfricaFabrice Laroche (pseudonym of Alain de Benoist), in collaboration with G. Fournier, Vérité pour l’Afrique du Sud, Éditions Saint-Just, Paris, 1965.. He helped found the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), a group that has long espoused European racism, initially expressed as biological racism and later reformulated as cultural racismOn the close ties between the American, French and German New Right, see : François, 2024, op. cit.. A darling of the New Right, he now advocates “ethnopluralism.” According to him, all peoples have a “droit à la différence” [right to difference], the right to live as one chooses, provided that right is exercised at home, in one’s natural environment. Ethnopluralism opposes on principle any kind of migration or mixing, which the New Right equates with genocide. The biggest problem to be fought against is thus cultural “contamination”. European culture must also be protectedKeucheyan, Razmig, “Alain de Benoist, du néofascisme à l’extrême droite «respectable» Enquête sur une success story intellectuelle.” Revue du crieur 1 (2017): 128-143.. It is in this sense that the apologia regarding diversity must be understood: “Whereas diversity is an asset, uniformity is always a loss.” To him, the enemy is “egalitarianism,” which he calls the “Ideology of Sameness.” Anything universal is bad: Christianity, Marxism, liberalism, and human rights. This obsession with cultural “purity” leads to the glorification of separation, the historical expression of which is apartheid.

In Beyond Human Rightsde Benoist, Alain, Au-delà des Droits de l’Homme. Pour défendre les libertés, La Nouvelle Librairie/ Krisis, 2016., de Benoist attacks international law as an “overarching abstraction” that will destroy cultural diversityIbid., p.9.. To him, human rights are both too universal (in the sense that they are supposed to apply to everyone everywhere) and too individualistic (in the sense that they apply to individuals independent of their social or cultural context)Ibid., p.10.. These two failings conflict with the freedom of peoples, the freedom to preserve their traditions and their collective and individual practices. It is no surprise that de Benoist draws upon reactionary (Taine, Carl Schmitt, and Finkielkraut) and libertarian (Ayn Rand) authors. But he also cites liberals (Kant, Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, and Jürgen Habermas) and even Marxists (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Chantal Mouffe, and Régis Debray). He even invokes non-Western, anti-colonialist and post-colonialist authors (Gandhi, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chung-Shu Lo). He feels free to draw from the works of people who, before him, criticized the universality of human rights. His attacks on the notions of “just war” and “the right of intervention” recall those expressed elsewhere by progressive writersde Benoist, 2016, p.131.. He sees any argument against the universality of human rights, whatever its source, as worth using. All arguments are manipulated to drive a wedge into the “compassionate impulse,” which plays into the hands of immigrationists“accompagné le discours public sur l’immigration et l’accueil des réfugiés, la poussée du compassionnel et du ‘victimisme’ lacrymal, la priorité donnée à la ‘lutte-contre-toutes-les-discriminations’” (de Benoist, 2016, p.12.). De Benoist blames human rights for every ill. In his mind they are responsible for nothing less than “the dislocation or eradication of collective identities”de Benoist, 2016, p.100.. But his argument is falsely ecumenical, including authors from a wide range of intellectual traditions.

Such intellectual poaching is no accidentI have borrowed this expression from: Crépon, Sylvain, Une littérature postcoloniale d’extrême droite ? Reflexion sur un ‘braconnage’ intellectuel, in : in Collectif Write Back (ed.), Postcolonial Studies : modes d’emploi, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2013, p. 137-149.. It’s part of a strategy of deception, an attempt to blend into the political discourse “like a fish in water”Keucheyan, Razmig, “Alain de Benoist, du néofascisme à l’extrême droite «respectable» Enquête sur une success story intellectuelle.” Revue du crieur 1 (2017): 128-143. Here p. 128.. Political confusion is an explicit tool of the reactionary right. The antiracist norm that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century forced the far right to reinvent itselfThe Pleven (1972) and Gayssot (1991) laws punished incitement of racist and antisemitic hate.. It has had to adapt its ideas to an era in which they have become taboo. It has to do something to language before it can take power. “Metapolitics” is a way to inject categories of thought into the dominant thinkingIbid. See A. de Benoist, “Pour un “gramscisme de droite”“, colloque national du GRECE, Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1982. Jacques Marlaud, « Métapolitique : la conquête du pouvoir culturel. La théorie gramscienne de la métapolitique et son emploi par la Nouvelle Droite française », Interpellations. Questionnements métapolitiques, Dualpha, 2004, p. 121-139.. If Alain de Benoist borrows critiques from both right and left, it is because they help him cover his tracks.

Distinguishing between the critiques to order to defend humanitarian action

The disorientation we’re witnessing is therefore no surprise. The confusion is the result of reactionary ideas being disseminated in some parts of the media. Many words that originated in progressive thought have been appropriated and distorted by reactionaries, reaching the general public in an altered form. These words (decolonization, “wokism”, “politically correct”, “feminism”, “gender theory”, “intersectionality”, “critical race theory”, etc.) are used widely in the major media with reactionary framing, sometimes explicitly (Breitbart News, Fox News, CNews, Neue Züricher Zeitung, Bild Zeitung, X/Twitter, TikTok), and sometimes tacitly or even unwittingly (Le Figaro, Marianne, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt). These publications give words the opposite of their original meaning. Terms that come from an egalitarian tradition, forged in the fight for emancipation, are now “off-limits” to those who defend humanismThe term “off-limits” (intouchable) is the one that reactionary author Christopher Rufo used himself. See Glasman, Joël, Terreur postcoloniale : en Allemagne, la fabrique d’une panique morale, https://aoc.media/opinion/2024/02/26/terreur-postcoloniale-en-allemagne-la-fabrique-dune-panique-morale/. They cause an almost allergic reaction. The New Right has succeeded in creating distance between public opinion and progressive thought. It has stripped the words of their meaning. Political confusion is the result of a longstanding effort to undermine.

Debates on “decolonizing” the humanitarian sector are an example of this. The decolonial critique grew out of the anti-colonialist struggle. It is a critique of racism, consistent with the principle of humanity. With its critique of abstract universals and celebration of difference, such thinking could have at times been confused with anti-humanist critique, which it is not. Which is not to say that decolonial approaches are exempt from criticism. They have their share of posturing, exaggeration, and incoherenceCahen, Michel. Colonialité: Plaidoyer pour la précision d'un concept, Karthala 2024 ; Gaussens, Pierre, Makaran, Gaya, “Peau Blanche, Masques Noirs : Les études décoloniales, autopsie d’une imposture intellectuelle”. In : Gaussens, Pierre, Makaran, Inclán, Daniel, Castro Orellana, Rodrigo, et. al, Critique de la raison décoloniale. Sur une contre-révolution intellectuelle, 2024, 16–48. Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. Against decolonisation: Taking African agency seriously. Hurst Publishers, 2022.. And some of these movements’ representatives are undeniably guilty of strategic essentialism, an old weapon of resistance against domination, which was countered early on by other anti-colonial thinkersOn strategic essentialism, see: Spivak,Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”. Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. The essentialism of the anti-colonial and decolonial movements was criticized very early, even within the movements themselves. See Fanon, Frantz, Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris, Seuil 2015 [1952]. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Routledge, 1991.. The strategic essentialist strategy is sometimes quite possibly counter-productive. Decolonial essentialism may unintentionally give reactionaries ammunition. But it makes no historical sense to blame these intellectual traditions for the triumph of anti-humanist thought and the far right. The far right’s identity-based irridentism has nothing in common with the strategic essentialism of minorities. Reactionary thought detests the very idea of mixing, miscegenation, or hybrid ethnicity. It abhors egalitarianismCrépon, Sylvain, “Une littérature postcoloniale d’extrême droite ? Réflexion sur un ‘braconnage’ intellectuel”, in Collectif Write Back (ed.), Postcolonial studies, modes d’emploi, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2013, pp. 137-149.. Its goal is to disseminate the principle of inequality until it becomes commonplace while claiming that the idea comes from the people themselves. That step is essential in preparing to assume power.