Submitted by antarchi on September 4, 2007 - 01:30.
About two years ago, a friend in Russia said that she had long been thinking about interviewing the last survivors of the Stalin era, to see how they perceived those years, and to remind the Russian public of the full horror of what happened. She was concerned about the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin in official discourse, the return to power of Russia's secret services and the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Putin regime. And she was concerned that young people in today's Russia are taught almost nothing about that period of history; that almost all they know about it is from the official discourse.
I had an ulterior motive in joining her in the project - a motive which in a way was opposite to hers. I was concerned about the discourse in the 'west', where enemy dictators are identified and vilified, then separated off from the context and society in which they have come to power. I was sick of the finger-pointing, the moral high-horses, and the evil dictator discourse - whether that concerned Stalin or Hitler or Saddam or Slobodan (depending on the point the finger-pointer needed to make or the country they wanted to invade). I was sick of the idea that you remove the man and plant democracy in his place, and sick of what Jean Bricmont calls the humanitarian imperialists: self-righteous politicians, journalists and academics justifying savage bombing campaigns, illegal invasions and punitive economic sanctions in the name of human rights. Or human rights workers standing on the fence while the bombs fly.
In the 'west', dictators are the ultimate evil, along with paedophiles - and anything is justified to take them off the earth. But I wish the west (by which I mean humanitarian imperialists in the west) would take note of the other dictators, those we have supported or put into power - like Pinochet, Suharto or even Saddam in another era. I wish the west would look at daily life in a dictatorship, and daily life in an invaded, war-torn country - and then say which is best. I wish the west would ask whether a death from torture is anyway much worse than death from malnutrition or starvation, and I wish the west would look at how they (we) treat the citizens of developing nations, safely beyond our borders and safely out of reach of the human rights instruments which only apply to governments' treatment of their own citizens. I wish that we would try our own mass murderers in an international court, that we would count the victims that we are responsible for murdering in other regions of the world. We do not even bother to do that.
And I wish the humanitarian imperialists would see that if they do fail to do all this, if they fail to be informed about the crimes their own governments are committing, if they fail to shout about those crimes, and fail to keep on shouting until the crimes have stopped - then they show that they would be the ones who would be propping up dictators, had they been unfortunate enough to have been born in another part of the globe.
