The latest attack in Beirut may finally set off the tinderbox that is the Middle East today, sparking a regional war that will bring vast destruction and death to the neighborhood. Of course, that may not happen. The tragedy may be accepted by cowed leaders of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and others and by an indifferent further removed international community insofar as it falls in line with the governing maxim of our day: might makes right.
Appeasement has for decades been trotted out by defenders of American global hegemony as the villainous and near sighted mindset that led to WWII. We never stop hearing about Munich and Chamberlain. Regrettably or not, the tables have turned and appeasement of American aggression by the Rest of the World is the real and present force heading us all to an eventual Armageddon.
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Somewhat arbitrarily I have chosen to highlight here two public personalities, Samantha Power and Sir Andrew Wood to give a human face to the incredible double standards, hypocrisy, call it what you will, that characterize our times and in particular the entire issue of human rights and its opposite, genocide.
I know Samantha Power only from a distance. I followed in the mass media her meteoric rise to high public office under Senator, then President Barack Obama on the strength of her supposed expertise in the field of genocide based on her experience as a journalist on the ground in Yugoslavia during that country’s break-up and bloody civil war. From 2009 to 2013 she had responsibility for human rights within the National Security Council. With the return of the Democrats to power under Joe Biden, Power once again floated to the top and has been serving as Administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development. I have not heard that she resigned over the Biden policies enabling Israeli genocide.
As for, Sir Anthony Wood I knew fairly well from our several meetings during 1998-2000 when I was chairman of the Russian Booker Prize Committee and he was the generous host at his ambassador’s residence for annual dinners to honor the visiting British Booker officials and our own Russian Booker management.
What do Power and Wood have in common? One answer is their revulsion at the murders and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevich against Croats, against Muslim Bosniaks, against Kossovars.This was the time when the killing of 8000 or more Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica was described with horror by our Western media and was called the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War.
Power’s thoughts about this topic were widely published. Sir Andrew’s were privately expressed….to me in terms that made them unforgettable and worthy of citation here.
Before Sir Andrew took up the ambassadorial post in Moscow, he served a term as British ambassador to Yugoslavia. What he told me at one of our chats was that he still regretted that he had not had a dagger with him to stab Milosevich to death during one of their tête-à-têtes. Given Sir Andrew’s generally polite if not meek demeanor this was a rare _expression_ of high emotion that corresponded at the time to Western elites’ revulsion for the Serb as a mass murderer, proven for all to see at Srebrenica.
What else did/do Sir Andrew and Samantha Power have in common? Answer: a visceral hatred for Vladimir Putin, whom they denounce for his alleged murders of political opponents, disrespect for democratic procedures and thuggery. In the case of Sir Andrew, he became a key supporter of the virulently anti-Putin publicist Lilia Shevtsova, then still at the Carnegie Centre Moscow. Shevtsova was/is an arch-typical Russian Liberal in the sense that Lev Tolstoy described very pithily in one sentence on page three (or thereabouts, depending on your edition) of Anna Karenina when speaking of the Liberal newspaper to which Anna’s brother Stiva subscribed: “Liberals in the sense that they hated everything Russian.”
When Shevtsova fell afoul of the authorities and when the Carnegie Centre itself came under the pale, Sir Anthony extended his protection to her and found a new nest for her in London at Chatham House, where he himself found a platform for his anti-Russian, anti-Putin views.
My point in all these details is to highlight the dramatic fact that the crimes of Milosevich which so moved Sir Andrew and Samantha Power were always taken in isolation from the context. No one then and very few since have called out the fact that ethnic cleansing and mass murder were practiced by the Serbs’ most powerful enemy in the civil war, the Croats, under the criminal leadership of Franjo Tudman. Perhaps some understand that Tudman was also a monster, but as they say, he was our son of a bitch. Indeed, none of the parties to the Yugoslav civil war came away from that conflict with clean hands. Even the nicest of nice people in the former Yugoslavia, the Slovenes, did their share of skullduggery. Several of the agents at Iskra Commerce, my interlocutors during my years as a Country Manager in that country, turned out to be quite wealthy at the war’s end, and the source of their fortunes was easy to guess: they had been very active in illicit arms sales to the combatants on all sides.
Now in conclusion allow me to bring these various observations together.
Samantha Power, Sir Andrew and countless other bleeding hearts for the long-suffering victims of Milosevich’s savagery in the 1990s seem not to have a word to say about the Israeli atrocities which are an order of magnitude greater in terms of deaths inflicted on civilians, and which are backed up by rhetoric that is openly genocidal in intent against the Palestinians and other immediate neighbors of Israel.
Thus, as I remarked at the start, we are living in an age of barbarism, when might makes right by general acknowledgement. This, by the way, is the underlying conclusion that has driven Vladimir Putin belatedly but very pointedly to deliver his latest threats to the Collective West, telling them to mind their step, lest Russia use its greater might in nuclear weapons of all kinds, and even in conventional weapons, to raze to the ground all who threaten his country’s survival, all who invade his country as Ukraine did in Kursk with NATO assistance or who use Ukraine to strike against the Russian heartland.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024