By J. MICHAEL COLE
Michael Ignatieff, once a respected academic, authored a handful of important books on human rights, nationalism and ethnic conflict in the 1990s, making him the pride of many Canadians — even if, from 1978 until 2000, he lived in the UK, and then in the US, where he was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Blood and Belonging, The Warrior’s Honor and The Rights Revolution were all must-reads, proof, we thought, that intellectuals had a role to play in describing, and perhaps influencing, the politics of our time. Despite his almost 30 years of exile, Canadians counted him as one of theirs, someone who reflected the ever-elusive “Canadian values.”
Then Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and more importantly, the US launched its mass disinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11.
Strangely, during that period Ignatieff became more conservative in his views and penned justifications of his own to support the actions of the US government in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Empire Lite,” which served as both catchphrase and title of one of his books, followed by The Lesser Evil, epitomized Ignatieff’s radicalization. Where in the past Ignatieff had sided with the downtrodden, and where he had been so perceptive on the idiosyncrasies of nationalism, the academic now argued that empire — supported by force of arms and buttressed by an architecture of racism, lies and deceit — was a good thing, even if, in retaliation for Sept. 11 and in the name of “nation-building” a la US, Washington ended up slaying more Afghan civilians than died on that fateful morning in September, and many, many more in Iraq.
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