This suggests the humanitarianism of our age demands – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Libya – flattened cities, heaps of corpses, strife and bloodshed in order to find its fullest expression.
"We are hopeful that the program continues unaltered as it is a critical program that truly shows the world the generosity and humanitarianism of our country, no matter the race, religion, or group one belongs to".
"Our only message is one of peace, of humanitarianism, of tolerance, a message of interacting with the people".
Or, as the Harvard law professor David Kennedy writes in "The Dark Sides of Virtue" (2004), "Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be".
?The attraction in our project is that it is a mixture of science and humanitarianism that will appeal to some of the best.? The project in question is the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative ( SCI), a partnership involving Imperial College, the World Health Organisation, and the Harvard School of Public Health, funded to the tune of £20 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But surely at least we who work in journalism can do a public service by treating humanitarianism the same way we treat other powerful public interests that shape our world.
Secondly, and relatedly, it can be observed that a paternalistic humanitarianism may lead to a "schizophrenic" situation; it leads us, as humanitarians, to either act in bad faith (and deny the fact that we are being paternalistic in our work) or to become disenchanted with the sector and abandon the humanitarian project.
In "Our Plundered Planet," Fairfield Osborn, the son of Madison Grant's friend and ally Henry Fairfield Osborn, forecast that postwar humanitarianism, which allowed more people to survive into adulthood, would prove incompatible with natural limits.
To Qaddafi, everything that is not murder is theatre, and having scared us into joining his war he is now calling our bluff, saying, in effect, that the West once again pretends to be acting in the name of humanitarianism when the real motive is regime change.
