‘Our first priority,’ David Cameron said this week, ‘has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq.’ One knows what he means, but isn’t humanitarian an odd way of putting it? If it had been a vegetarian crisis or a disestablishmentarian crisis, it would be one either caused or suffered by people who professed either of those schools of thought.
Humanitarians used to be people who followed the teachings of Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), who believed in the spontaneous perfectibility of the human race.
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