A friend of mine recently posted, on Facebook, an article from the Independent by Robert Fisk - one of the greatest journalists writing today. The thrust of the article (click on the link for the full text) is criticism of our western belief that Right is on our side, and will always triumph over all manifestations of Evil, which in this case is ISIS. He says: "Isis is evil. It massacres its opponents, slaughters civilians, beheads the innocent, rapes children and enslaves women. It is “apocalyptic”, according to the Americans, and therefore it is doomed. Better still, Ash Carter – the US Secretary of Defence who accused the Iraqis of running away from Isis – lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister last week. His message – I could hardly believe this naivety – was Hollywood-clear. “Civilisation always wins over barbarism".
Fisk next proceeds to point out, correctly, that while Hitler (bad guy) was defeated, it was only with the help of the USSR under Stalin (bad guy who became a good guy and then a bad guy again). Evil (or barbarism) is not always eliminated and, like the USSR, can reign unchallenged and undefeated for many years. He also points out that barbarism/evil is not always the province of one side: "The Romans kept “barbarism” at bay for almost a thousand years, but in the end the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths – the Isis of their time – won. Unless you were opposed to Rome, in which case Roman barbarism – crucifixion, slavery, torture, massacre (the whole Isis gamut minus the videotapes) – was victorious for almost a thousand years."
Fisk then goes on to predict that, eventually, the West will come to terms with ISIS and seek to do deals with "moderate" elements among them. Fisk, again, concludes: " Then we’ll have a new, liberal Isis – people we can do business with, the sort of chaps we can get along with, sins forgotten – and we can then establish relations with them as cosy as those the Americans maintained with Hitler’s murderous rocket scientists after “civilisation” conquered “barbarism” in the Second World War".
The chilling aspect of this is that such compromises have been reached before. As another great journalist, John Pilger, has said: "As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia."
Pilger speaks with authority, as he was one of the first journalists to enter Cambodia, following the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese Army (Guess whose bad guys they were!) in 1979. I well remember his impassioned film about the sufferings of Cambodia at that time. You can watch it here. I also remember his later articles and films, which detailed the not-so-covert help given to the Khmer Rouge (KR) by Western governments and China, after the KR established themselves in bases across the Thai border, in order to exert military and terroristic pressure upon the bête noir of the US and Western Right - Viet-Nam. Margaret Thatcher's government was an enthusiastic supporter of this strategy, even sending in SAS teams to pass on their combat skills to Pol Pot's murderous merry men. Pilger again:
"I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. "I confirm," she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, "that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them." The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the "coalition". "We liked the British," a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. "They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims."
Admirers of the late Mrs T did not mention this in their obituaries. To cut short a long and sordid story, the Khmer Rouge have been rehabilitated to a large extent, despite having been responsible for the deaths of up to two million people - ISIS must be jealous. There have been token war crimes trials, but many "moderate" ex - KR walk free. All of which goes to show one thing - that even the most evil murderers can be forgiven - provided they are our murderers.
My thanks are due to two fine journalists, both of whom have spoken out fearlessly for the truth over the past few decades. I find it impossible to refute Pilger's assertion that the US bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, as well as the (surely obvious?) fact that the invasion of Iraq was the main cause for the rise of ISIS and Jihadism in general. However, there is one major difference between ISIS and the Khmer Rouge, and that is the avowed mission of the former to spread their terror abroad. We face a choice: do we go on to confront ISIS militarily (risky) or, as Pilger and Fisk suggest,do we do business with them (dishonourable)? A referendum is unlikely.
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All I can say is to misquote Orwell "All mena re different but some are more different than others!"
ReplyDeletePoliticians are notoriously bad with history, usually deliberately so. The Goths were classed as barbarians, but they weren't barbaric, as indeed most barbarians weren't. The image of the mighty Roman legions finally crumbling under the barbarian onslaught is potent, but a load of nonsense. The last Roman emperor in Italy was deposed in 476AD, a puppet boy-king in his teens called Romulus Augustulus, and Italy was then ruled by a barbarian king called Odovacar. If you lived there at that time, you'd have noticed little difference between ten years before the deposition and ten years after. The Senate, Roman law, Roman civil servants and Roman taxation all carried on as though nothing has happened. The Goths subsequently overthrew and replaced Odovacar. None of these barbarians wanted to destroy Roman civilisation: they actually wanted to take it over. The Romans thought of themselves as superior to the barbarians, but any sober assessment leads to an entirely different view: in many ways, the barbarians were often more civilised by our standards than the Romans. The fall of the Roman Empire is not an example of Good falling prey to Evil.
ReplyDeleteAnother historical event that is frequently used to justify military action in other countries is Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. If only we'd stood up to Hitler earlier, the argument goes, we might have stopped him, prevented the Holocaust, the Blitz, and every other terrible thing that happened during the war. Two simple facts apply here: firstly, WW1 was a recent memory that caused the public mood to be wholly against war; and secondly, the UK could not have stood up to Hitler at that time because our armed forces were in no fit state to tackle the Wehrmacht. The proof is that when we did eventually go in, we were rapidly defeated, and had to evacuate our troops in a hurry at Dunkirk; going in earlier with even less preparation would have been considerably more disastrous. Despite all that, the 'appeasement' argument has been used to justify of the bombings of Serbia and Libya and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many Americans genuinely see themselves as the 'men in white hats' who ride over the hill to help and rescue the weak and oppressed of the world. We British no longer have that delusion about ourselves, but we used to: 'We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too', and so on. The was a faint resurgence of jingoism over the Falklands, but it didn't last.
I've heard some on the Left argue that WW2 was a justifiable war, and I can see the point even if I don't entirely accept it, but the British Empire was not on the side of the angels. We allowed up to 18 million Indians to starve in a nineteenth century famine because of economic principles about not interfering in the market - Thatcher didn't have an original bone in her body - and the severity of the Irish famine had similar causes. We committed genocide by wiping out the Tasmanian people, and in the 1950s committed terrible atrocities against insurgents in Malaya and Kenya. There are many other examples: we were not the nice empire that some would have us think.
Never trust politicians or their supporters in the media when they cite 'history' to justify a course of action. It usually means they haven't got a real argument. World events are rarely a battle between Good and Evil: they are, more often than not, a struggle among different interest groups.
But - some may demand - what about Islamic State? My reply is: would it even exist if we and the USA hadn't invaded and bombed various Near and Middle Eastern countries over the last two decades? I think not. The Law of Unintended Consequences applies here, and the misery now being inflicted on ordinary people in those areas is largely an unanticipated result of our military interference. The problem is we will probably deal with it in the manner least likely to bring peace to the region.
I think we can discern an example of Good v Evil in the 1979 Vietnamese liberation of Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. Viet-Nam has never received the credit it deserved for ending the KR's reign of terror; in my view, they did the whole of humanity a good service. Instead, the US and like-minded western nations aided the KR, as I said. They even allowed the KR to continue "representing" Cambodia in the UN. All this arose from the fact that the US and its allies saw Viet-Nam as the bad guy who had stood up to the USA - and won. The many crimes of the KR were ignored in a sickeningly vindictive campaign that everyone has forgotten.
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