Humanitarianism
The professed love of all humans regardless of distinction — and the affirmation of our alleged duty to assist the oppressed, hungry, or ill, etc.
Humanitarianism is a delinquent and disfigured humanism. It comes from a sort of systematic pity for the ‘Other’ and an indifference to the ‘Next’. It’s an exacerbation of what was formerly called ‘philanthropy’ and a hypocritical secularisation of Christian ‘charity’. In this sense, it comes from xenophilia and legitimises, as such, ‘foreign preferences’ that discriminate in favour of aliens.
Humanitarianism demonstrates mass support for illegal immigrants and assists victims of massacres and civil wars in faraway places (for which it feels responsible), yet at the same time it’s utterly indifferent to the poverty and precariousness of native Europeans. It’s scandalised by the deportation of Albanians, but not the deportation of Serbs. It condemns Russia’s war against the Chechens, but not the Chechen war against Russia or the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq, etc.
Modern humanitarianism began with Twentieth century campaigns against ‘world hunger’ and with the hypocritical ideology of Third World assistance. Humanitarianism corrupts the Graeco-Roman notion of humanism, for the latter advocates no indiscriminate love of humanity. Concretely, humanitarian movements don’t actually come to the assistance of the larger world. Behind their humanitarian enterprise, there’s the charity business, which is very profitable and gives the personalities of the cosmopolitan Left a good deal of media exposure. Humanitarianism has indeed been commercialised — a phony distillation of Enlightenment ‘philanthropy’. Though hardly effective in practice, its noxious ideology negatively affects Europeans, for its frantic egalitarianism implies that all men, and all peoples, are of equal worth and that the metaphysical unity of the human race imposes an obligation to help the ‘Other’, rather than one’s own kind.
(see ethnomasochism; human rights; preference, European; xenophilia)
