An essay entitled “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint,” by Stanley Kurtz – otherwise amusing for its Conradian irony for invoking another Mr. Kurtz -- which appears in the April 2003 issue of Policy Studies, is one of the more egregious examples of this emergent wave of unapologetic defenses of colonialism and imperialism. One might have thought, after over a century of explicit anti-colonial literature, mass political movements throughout former Euro-American colonies, anti-colonial conflicts involving tens of millions dead, and the resounding triumph of anti-colonialism, that such nonsense would remain confined to a lunatic fringe incapable of the articulateness that Kurtz, Niall Ferguson and Daniel Kruger on the British side of the Atlantic, and other advocates of neo-imperialism can bring to bear. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, however, an expanding class of right-wing US intellectuals is in the midst of servicing political needs to rationalize the establishment and maintenance of local rulers who putatively share those much over-estimated beliefs called 'Western values.'

What separates Kurtz from the crowd lies in his explicit historical reliance on the British model of colonial rule in India as a model for the future governance of Iraq. Specifically, Kurtz advocates the deployment of the English language as a means of ideological acculturation and language education for mass control. “India's English-speaking bureaucratic class made up only 1 or 2 percent of the population,” he writes. “Yet that class was sufficient to manage a modern democracy and slowly transmit modern and liberal ideas to the larger populace.” Since Arab nationalism would not permit prolonged US rule in Iraq, as in 19th-century India, Kurtz suggests reliance on immigrant returnees “who have lived in the West and imbibed its culture for years…a class of modern and liberal citizens who can help to govern and reform their society.” In other words, an English-educated wave of returnees, presumably coerced to return by deportation from the United States and its allies, would be positioned to undertake the work of Western-oriented cultural reform. Together with imported Americans and other Westerners who would assume positions in education and administration, an English-speaking corps would emerge as a liberal bureaucratic elite to create a “blended rule” that was neither direct colonial rule nor indirect rule through traditional elites.

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Opposition to English is a futile cultural position, however, one most frequently adopted by cultural and religious obscurantists or blinkered advocates of communicative borders. The necessary task of antagonized imperial subjects, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, has become to learn to decode the ideological mechanisms embedded in such phrases as 'democratic imperialism.' English studies today are equally counter-hegemonic self-defense; learning the Englishes of globalization can provide a paradoxical safety from their more malignant effects. All human languages bear an inherent concept of an empowered speaking subject, the possessor of independent narrative rights, and English serves subversive purposes as well as any language.