Duhring's third retreat relates to the mental faculties of individuals. He says,
“If one man acts in accordance with truth and science, and the other in accordance with some superstition or prejudice, then ... as a rule mutual interference must occur... At a certain degree of incompetence, brutality or perversity of character, conflict is always inevitable... It is not only children and madmen in relation to whom the ultimate resource is force. The character of whole natural groups and cultural classes of human beings may inexorably necessitate the subjection of their will, which is hostile because of its perversity, if it is to be led back to the common social ties. Even in such cases the alien will is still recognised as having equal rights; but the perversity of its injurious and hostile activity has provoked an equalisation, and if it is subjected to force, it is only reaping the reaction to its own unrighteousness”. (p 127)
Again, this merges with the racist nature of the second retreat, because the enslavement of millions in the colonial empires, created from the 17th century onwards, by mercantilism, was justified on the basis that those enslaved and denied equality was that they were sub-human, either morally or intellectually.
“So not only moral but also mental inequality is enough to remove the “complete equality” of the two wills and to call into being a morality by which all the infamous deeds of civilised robber states against backward peoples, down to the Russian atrocities in Turkestan, can be justified. When in the summer of 1873, General Kaufmann ordered the Tatar tribe of the Yomuds to be attacked, their tents to be burnt and their wives and children butchered — “in the good old Caucasian way”;, as the order was worded — he, too, declared that the subjection of the hostile, because perverted, will of the Yomuds, had become an inexorable necessity if it were to be led back to the common social ties, that the means he employed were best suited to the purpose, and that whoever willed the end had also to will the means.” (p 127-8)
And, today, the same morality denies equality to Palestinian lives, and defends Zionist genocide committed against them, on the basis of a right to self-defence by the imperialist, Zionist state in Israel, and, whoever wills that end, also wills the means. The Zionist state, backed by NATO imperialism, also proclaims that its genocide against Palestinians is really, also, for their own good, protecting their own rights against the restriction of those rights by Hamas. Imperialist military intervention is always cloaked in these kind of terms of “liberation from above”, as Trotsky described in relation to the Balkan Wars.
“Our agitation, on the contrary, against the way that history's problems are at present being solved, goes hand in hand with the work of the Balkan Social Democrats. And when we denounce the bloody deeds of the Balkan 'liberation' from above we carry forward the struggle not only against liberal deception of the Russian masses but also against enslavement of the Balkan masses.”
(Trotsky – The Balkan Wars, p 293-4)
“'Free'! And to whom, pray, are the Macedonians to pay the costs of their 'liberation'? And exactly how much do these costs amount to? How easily people operate with words, and now with living concepts, when they are not involved themselves! You, Ivan Kirillovich, say that peace is not an end in itself and so on, but you are letting your vision of reality be obscured. 'Free'! Have you any idea what the areas that were recently the theatre of war have been turned into? All through those places a terrible tornado has raged, which has torn up, broken, mangled, reduced to ashes everything that man's labour had created, has maimed and crushed man himself, and mortally laid low the young generation, down to the baby at the breast and even further to the foetus in the mother's womb. The Turks burned and massacred as they fled. The local Christians, where they had the advantage, burned and slaughtered as the allied armies drew near. The soldiers finished off the wounded, and ate up or carried off everything they could lay their hands on. The partisans, following at their heels, plundered, violated, burned. And, finally, along with the armies, epidemics of typhus and cholera advanced across the 'liberated' land.”
(ibid, p 330)
The same was seen a few years later, as Trotsky predicted, in WWI, and, then, after a brief pause, its continuation in WWII. When US imperialism destroyed much of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, including the use of Agent Orange, whose effects continued for decades, and even considered the use of atomic bombs, they also claimed it was done for the benefit of the Vietnamese, a claim that the mentors of today's petty-bourgeois Third Camp endorsed. So, too with the slaughter of a million Iraqis, the destruction of Libya, the death of tens of thousands of Ukrainians, and Palestinians.
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