Category: Politics (explicit)

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Talk about scorched earth

Brendan O’Neill attacks genocide vogue. I think he’s had some previous articles where he’s examined the guerrilla warfare and insurgencies that lead to the conditions that the west labels as genocide, and how that fighting gets ignored in favor of a clear-cut recasting of murderers and victims.

In international relations genocide has become a political weapon, an all-purpose rallying cry used by various actors to gain moral authority and boost their own standing. Anyone with a cursory understanding of history should know that the bloody wars of the past 10 to 15 years — in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur — are not unprecedented or exceptional. Certainly none of them can be compared to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, which involved the industrialised slaughter, often in factories built for the purpose, of six million men, women and children. Rather, the labelling of today’s brutal civil wars as ‘genocides’ by Western observers, courts and commentators is a desperate search for a new moral crusade, and it has given rise to a new moral divide between the West and the rest, between the civilised and enlightened governments of America and Europe and those dark parts of the world where genocides occur.

I have a big problem with laws that make “holocaust denial” illegal, because I think those play right into the hands of the denying set, showing how they’re oppressed by the government, which doesn’t want their viewpoint getting out. It’s a free speech issue, so I wouldn’t expect Europe to be out in front on that.

This article also made me think of the “Everyone has AIDS!” musical number from Team America.

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In review

I read two articles/posts this morning that I found quite affecting. First, judiciary-writer Dahlia Lithwick at Slate, who isn’t given to alarmism, draws some nefarious conclusions from the Bush administration’s legal wranglings in the terror-war:

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn’t really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Now, this may seem like a slam-dunk conclusion to some, but she puts some interesting evidence together to explore the mechanics of how this has occurred. Give it a read.

In the other piece I read this morning, Ron Rosenbaum discusses the lessons of Cambodia, and explores the possible historical parallels with the current war. It’s an interesting article because Ron uses it to examine the evolution of his attitude toward the Vietnam war:

My opposition to the Vietnam war, developed during my college days was based on the oversimplified premise—which turns out, by most serious accounts, now bolstered by the former Soviet archives—to be false or seriously flawed.

My belief and that of most of the anti-war movement—that the North Vietnamese regime represented an indigenous, nationalist movement expressing the Vietnamese peoples centuries-long struggle for independence from foreign control—was only half-true at best.

There was a germ of truth in it, but more than a germ of foreign control in Hanoi, whose government was in fact a Stalinist puppet state of the Soviet Union (here’s where the diplomatic cables in the former Soviet archives are so important and dispositive).

His post covers more than this, particularly the failure of the “world community” to prevent or stop genocide, but I found it important that he was able to reassess that situation in history, as more of “the truth” comes out. I’ve long contended that we can’t understand the situation in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. without taking into account the history of Soviet aggression in the area. Just because the USSR has collapsed doesn’t mean that its influences were erased.

Which is to say, while people blamed “U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan for the failed state that led to the rise of the Taliban, they managed not to blame the Soviets for invading Afghanistan in the first place, which led to the U.S.-sponsored mujahideen. It’s interesting to me, how often people will seek out “the truth” in issues like this, but stop once they get to the conclusion they wanted to reach.