The View from Right Field

The Holocaust and “Never Again”. I Wish It Were So, But It Isn’t.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, except people don’t.  After the Holocaust, the pledge was “Never Again” – except it happens again and again.  

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article on “The Communities That Risked Everything to Rescue Jews.”  It was a moving article about countries (Denmark, Albania), islands (Zakynthos, a Greek isle), and communities  (the Frenchtown of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon) who protected their Jews. 

But how many people are risking much of anything to protect others today.  Consider Rwanda in 1994.  Think of the “bug out” of Kabul in 2021.  And why did it take the U.S. and Germany so long to finally send tanks to Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin has been deliberately attacking civilians with rockets for months?  Some of those are not genocides (“genocide” is a word too easily thrown around today), but there are still innocent lives being lost that we could be doing something about.

But perhaps the most depressing thing on this Holocaust Remembrance Day may be the fact that the one thing uniting more and more of the far right and far left is hatred of Jews.

Cuba’s Ladies in White Win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

Everybody has heard of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Over the years, it has honored people for doing great things.  Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, George Marshall in 1953, Norman Borlaug in 1970 for the green revolution, and Lech Walesa in 1983. 

There have been deserving winners recently, too, such as Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year Pakistani girl, who won in 2014 after being shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and writing about it, and Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, who won in 2010 but was not allowed to go to Oslo to collect the prize (surprise).  He also became just the second winner to die in custody.

Others, however, have been questionable, such as Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.  (The people of Rwanda were not consulted.  See, inter alia, here and here.)  Three recent winners seem to have won mostly because they weren’t George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter in 2002,¹ Al Gore in 2007 (he should have won the presidential election in 2000), and Barack Obama in 2009 (George W. Bush was finally gone).  Also, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won in 2013.  We have seen how successful they have been.

Ukraine – and the Lessons of Rwanda

Some people like to talk about the lessons to be learned from the Rwandan genocide of 1994.  We must not let it happen again, they say (except they said that before Rwanda, too).  UN (or other) intervention could have stopped the genocide, which killed 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and Hutu moderates.  Bill Clinton went to Rwanda in 1998 and apologized for US inaction.  Samantha Power, our current ambassador to the United Nations, has written on the Rwandan genocide and what the world should have done. 

But the one thing that many people miss in the lessons they draw from the Rwandan genocide is how and why it ended.  People like to say that force never accomplishes anything.  Well, in the case of the Rwandan genocide, it did – because it was force that stopped the genocide.  The Rwandan genocide only stopped when a force of Tutsi rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, defeated the Hutu-led government and the Interahamwe.  It wasn’t negotiations or cease-fires that stopped the genocide.  It was force.

Which brings me to Ukraine.  At present, the United States is calling for talks between the government of Ukraine and the Russian-instigated (and/or Russian-led) rebels in eastern Ukraine.  The United States supports the government in Kiev, but so far we won’t sell them weapons.  The Russians are supplying weapons to the rebels (Vladimir Putin denies it, but he denied Russian forces were in Crimea before they won and he congratulated them), but we are not supplying the Ukrainian government.

It’s actually similar to what happened in Bosnia in the early 1990s.  The government of Bosnia and Herzegovina was fighting both Bosnian Serbs and a group of Croats.  The West wanted to stop the fighting, so it imposed an arms embargo on all sides.  Except the Bosnian Serbs could still get arms from Serbia.  Serbia didn’t care about complying with any arms embargo.  The Croat forces could get weapons, too.  So the good guys couldn’t arms, but the bad guys could.

Which brings me back to Ukraine.  Maybe we don’t need a ceasefire in Ukraine.  Maybe the government in Kiev needs to win.  The bad guys are already getting weapons.  (And it looks like they’ve used them to shoot down a civilian airliner.)  We need to provide arms to the good guys.  Because sometimes the best way to end the fighting is for the good guys to win.

Darfur: Don't Believe "Never Again"

Bernard-Henri Levy has an excellent article on Darfur in The New Republic (see here). What I found most interesting was Levy's question whether, if we are not going to stop the Janjaweed and their Sudanese Army helpers/leaders, perhaps we should at least give the Sudan Liberation Army (and others) a few weapons to defend themselves and others who would otherwise get killed. Levy compares it to Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo, when the military embargo was imposed on both the aggressors who had plenty of weapons and their victims who did not.

But it was like that in Rwanda, too. The genocide in Rwanda was not stopped by the United Nations or the United States or anybody else who said, after World War II, "Never again." It was stopped by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a group of Rwandan Tutsis from outside of Rwanda, who ultimately defeated the government and stopped the genocide. If it had not been for the Tutsis themselves, the genocide might have succeeded in its goal of killing all of the Tutsis in Rwanda, instead of just half.

UN Resolutions sound nice, but if I were in Darfur, I think I would rather rely on guns and myself instead of the United Nations or any of its members.

Would You Trust the UN to Protect Your Country?

On Tuesday U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for an international force to be established in Lebanon to end the fighting and killing in Lebanon. In addition to the approving sounds of nations far from the Middle East, there was a deafening silence from the 800,000 Tutsis killed in Rwanda in 1994 while U.N. troops in Rwanda did nothing on orders from their bosses in New York, including the head of chief of UN peacekeeping at the time, Kofi Annan. The U.N. forces did not have the right mandate, you see, so they could not intervene. *

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* See We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch, page 104-05.