In response to:
‘The meaning of Milosevic: how the Butcher of the Balkans changed us’
by David Aaronovitch, The Times, 14/3/2006
Reprinted as:
‘Tyrant gave nations steel to intervene’
The Australian, 20/3/2006
Aaronovitch presents a version of the typical centrist position on the former Yugoslavia. Whilst claiming allegiance with the Left (‘anti-fascists’ and ‘internationalists’), the position chosen is on the Right, in that the righteousness of Western powers is assumed, and international law is disregarded.
Consider the following sentence: ‘There were the lawyers arguing that military action without the imprimatur of the United Nations might be illegal.’ In reality, this means ‘There were lawyers pointing out that aggression is illegal in that it breaches the Geneva Convention, the cornerstone of international law.’
Aaronovitch’s sentence is that of a journalist disdainful of the rule of law. The only alternative to the rule of law is the rule of might.
With this fundamental attitude comes a corresponding tendency to defame those who disagree with it. Aaronovitch objects to The Guardian’s decision to retract an article that defamed the world’s №1 intellectual, Noam Chomsky. The retracted article contained that lie that Chomsky did not believe that the Srebrenica massacre (Bosnia, July 1995) happened.
To prove that Chomsky denied the events, Aaronovitch resorts to an amazing non sequitur. He claims that Chomsky ‘most certainly denied the massacre’, equating ‘massacre’ with ‘an act amounting to genocide’, and equating the latter with ‘an act that we would have been justified in attempting to prevent by force’. Since Chomsky argued against the use of violence, the conclusion reached via this bizarre and illogical pathway is that he therefore does not believe the massacre occurred.
Let us apply this illogic to a different case. Imagine that an old lady has her handbag snatched in the street. A passer-by shoots the bag-snatcher. Later, Chomsky comments that the use of violence was not the only option available, and in contravention with national law. Aaronovitch argues ‘in the sense that the world understands there to have been an act amounting to a crime-wave in the street — i.e., an act that one would have been justified in attempting to prevent by force — Chomsky most certainly denied the bag-snatching.’
The fallacies in my imagined scenario are identical to those committed by Aaronovitch in reality. A single massacre is not genocide any more than a single bag-snatching is a crime-wave (and the utter abhorrence of even a single death or theft does not change this obvious fact). A phrase along the lines of ‘an act that one would be right to stop by force’ is a poor one to match up (by means of an ‘i.e.’) with words like ‘genocide’, because it is by no means apparent that force is inevitably the sole way to stop genocide; conversely, it is by no means apparent that an act justifiably prevented by force is inevitably genocide. And yet such a flimsy logical link is the only basis presented in the article for the conclusion that Chomsky’s criticism of NATO/UN behaviour is proof of denial of the events in Srebrenica. This is worth repeating: Aaronovitch’s article contains no other arguments supporting the idea that Chomsky denied the Srebrenica massacre.
Now, anyone at all would consider the argument made by the imaginary Aaronovitch in my bag-snatching example to be absurd. It would be so silly that no editor would accept it for publication. Why is it then that the same illogic, placed in the context of international conflict, suddenly becomes valid to most Westerners involved in such things?
At the root of it is a mental illness called nationalism which causes its sufferers to see logic and justice in the most bizarre arguments and conclusions, as long as these support the notion of the sufferers’ nation (or region, or government) being righteous and its detractors being fools or villains.
Postscript:
The deeply vile Oliver Kamm echoes Aaronovitch’s baseless attack.
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/milosevic_and_t.html