Western liberalism is not about the self, but selfishness. Who gets to be a self? Who gets the right to self-defense? This is the central contradiction of liberalism, so much so that it's not really a contradiction, it's just central. 'Israelis' get selves that must be mourned, whereas Palestinians get torture cells and must be bombed. 'Israelis' get to pre-emptively bomb everyone in ‘self-defense’ whereas the natives are terrorists if they dare resist. This is really classical liberalism. Rights for Whites and might for everyone else. They've always been like this. This is not some flaw in liberal democracy. This is working exactly as intended.

John Locke's lofty ideas about the rights of man were limited to the White man, he himself was a slaveholder in the Royal African Company. A self for him, certainly, with rights extending to owning other men. For were these even men? As Montesquieu said, “It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians.” One of the oldest churches is Ethiopian, but since we're taking a selfish view, never mind them. These guys took Greek slave states as inspiration to make slave empires.

Thus John Stuart Mill's liberal ideas did not extend to “those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.” This is still why Palestinians are ‘given’ an ‘authority’ and not a state, until they can grow into it. It comes down to the selfsame assumption. The selfish hoarding of human identity in order to go beastmode on everyone else.

This is the central contradiction of liberalism, the Oreo cookie of orientalism. Separating slavery from liberalism is like separating the black and white parts of an Oreo cookie. Why would you do that, except to dunk on it? Putting the contrasts together is precisely the whole thing.

As Samuel Johnson said, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” Or as Jonathan Boucher said, “the most clamorous advocates for liberty were uniformly the harshest and worst masters of slaves.” In 1778 John Millar said, “Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the bottom directed by any philosophical principles.” Because there is no principle at work here. Just selfishness.

As Domenico Losurdo (who I'm cribbing almost all these quotes from) “said in all three liberal revolutions the demand for liberty and justification of the enslavement, as well as the decimation (or destruction), of barbarians, were closely intertwined.” And again, asking why is like asking why Oreos have black and white sides. The tension between black and white is precisely what makes the spring of White Empire wind! As Malachy Postlethwayt said, defending the Royal African Company,

 ‘The Negroe Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation’; they were ‘the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion’. The British Empire as a whole was merely ‘a magnificent superstructure’ upon this commerce.

This central contradiction of liberalism is precisely what gave the White Empire energy, ignition, and direction. Remember that Europeans came looking for us, we didn't come looking for them! Europe was a backwater penninsula of Asia, getting precious little sun, and everybody else had more wealth than them. The rest of the world (naturally) had more land and more energy (at that point 100% renewable, mainly solar to grow stuff and labor to pluck it), and Europe desperately wanted in, looking for India in all directions. Thus Europe was driven not to trade (what did that have that we wanted?), as everybody else was doing, but to drive slaves onto land they depopulated. As Montesquieu said,

The peoples of Europe, having exterminated those of America, had to make slaves of those of Africa in order to use them to clear so much land. Sugar would be too expensive if the plant producing it were not cultivated by slaves. Those concerned are black from head to toe, and they have such flat noses that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them. One cannot get into one’s mind that god, who is a very wise being, should have put a soul, above all a good soul, in a body that was entirely black.

Montesquieu's racism is not coincidental, it's consequential. White Supremacy is the whole play. The color of your skin did matter, it was a physical measure of how much energy you got from the only power source at the time, the sun. Being white was a physical measure of how little energy your people had available. It was literally a broke face. Meanwhile being darker meant you were somewhere where the sun shone, and thus food grew, and supported large populations too. Europeans cunningly turned this material inferiority into ideological superiority. Honestly, well played Whitey, well-played.

Europe exploited solar differentials across the planet to create a great assault battery of planetary proportions. Because the solar battery has been shaken around so much, the physical Whiteness doesn't give you as much of a clue now (brown people can be White now too) but it's still a pretty big clue! The source code of White Empire is White Supremacy, which was not coincidental, it was a highly convenient way of identifying who had skin in the game, and who was to be skinned like game. It told you, at a glance, who had a self and who was beneath them, literally beasts of burden. Hence Locke described such beasts (referring to criminals, but 'Indians' are criminal by default), saying,

And one may destroy a Man who makes War upon him, or has discovered an Enmity to his being, for the same Reason, that he may kill a Woolf or a Lion; because such Men are not under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence, and so may be treated as Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and noxious Creatures, that will be sure to destroy him, whenever he falls into their Power.

I won't even get to the human supremacy here, but suffice it to say that animal animals got it worse. Anyways, the US Declaration of Independence encoded this Lockism in their Declaration of Independence, saying that George III “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” And then they turned it into a practical genocide (remember that every accusation is a confession). As Egerton Ryerson said in this old-ass (1880) book (I'm just going through Losurdo's footnotes),

Yet Congress, by an order which, we believe, has no parallel in the annals of any civilized nation, commands the complete destruction of those people as a nation. It is cruel, indeed, and revolting to humanity, to kill and scalp ever so small a number of ‘individuals, including women and children; but is it less cruel and revolting to render them houseless by thousands, to destroy the fruits of their labours, to exile them from their homes (after having destroyed them), and leave them to nakedness and starvation? Yet such was the case in the execution of the order of Congress for the extermination of the Six Nations.

Do you not see this happening now, is this not the exact logic used for the extermination of men, women, and children in Gaza, and Lebanon, and Iran, and wherever liberal democracy goes? Can you not see, at long last, that the racism is not a bug in this system but rather intrinsic to the system itself? The core of liberal democracy is this selfishness, that some people have selves and the right to infinite offense, and that other people do not, and have no right to self-defense.

Trump's logic for a ‘Gaza Riviera’ is Locke's logic just with stupided words. Locke said “God gave the World to Men in common; but since he gave it them for their Benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational.” This is what Trumps son-outlaw Jared Kushner meant when he said, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods... It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

What is he saying here? Nothing crazy really, this is standard liberalism. What Benjamin Franklin said in his autobiography, “if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Seacoast.” Again and again, these are not anomalies in the liberal project! This is the whole project! See what they did, and also see them still doing it!

Locke's selfish idea of ‘men’ doesn't included colored men or any women, just as Kushner's idea of ‘people’ doesn't include Palestinians. This is by design. Citizenship since the Greeks has always meant in-groups with rights and out-groups ruled by might. If you're White, this is just right. This is just the background logic of White Empire, which goes unnoticed like the white of this page, and bro, I need you to know, they haven't changed.  

The central premise of liberalism is and was not some abstract self but a very real selfishness. Very precious property rights in the imperial core, including the right to make property of people across the globe, and to genocide and assassinate anyone that says no. Very precious speech rights (as long as you say what you're supposed to), which is the casual idea that this or that government should be overthrown, or that these natives are ‘illegal’ and should be thrown out; basically to hate who you're supposed to. Your love of the Empire is not necessary. Your selfishness will do.