Russia Vetoes Genocide
ISRAEL SHAMIR
• JULY 17, 2015

I love Russia’s vetoes. Sparse, strong, hard hits, they mark the limits
of the Empire’s power. They said “No”, and Zimbabwe remained at peace,
its old maverick Robert Mugabe still alive and kicking and proposing
Obama his hand in marriage. They said “No”, and Burma could grow at its
own pace. They said “No”, and Syria… well, Syria still suffers
immensely, but it was not destroyed by the Sixth Fleet. All US vetoes
are similar, – usually for Israel; Russia’s vetoes are fewer and evenly
spread. The recent Russian veto (last week) stopped misuse of this
terrible cliché “genocide”, and this is a good thing. It would be good
to ban this word altogether.
‘Genocide’ is a nasty invention. Just think of it: mankind lived for
thousands of years, through raids of Genghis Khan and Crusades, through
extermination of Native Americans, slave trade and WWI, happily
butchering each other in millions, without being encumbered by the G
word. This term was invented (or updated from Jewish traditional
thought) by a Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, in the wake of
Holocaust, in order to stress the difference between murdering Jews and
killing lesser breeds. The word is quite meaningless otherwise.
The best flower of Europe, a million of the youngest and brightest were
killed at Verdun – sad, but that’s not G. Young and old, women and men
were incinerated in millions in the fiery furnaces of Dresden, Hamburg,
Tokyo, Hiroshima – sorry, old chum, that’s not G. Millions starved to
death in the brutal siege of Leningrad – well, you understand by now,
that’s not G. It goes without saying that killing of five million
Vietnamese or a million Iraqis were just “war is hell” business as
usual.
In Israel, killing of five Jews by Palestinians has been qualified as G:
the poor soldiers were murdered just because they were Jews. But killing
of Palestinians by Jews is collateral damage. They were in the wrong
place, in the wrong time, bad luck!
If so, why should one bother with G? This term was, and is a chosen
weapon of war propaganda. Not surprisingly, Lemkin was a Cold War
warrior, and he accused the USSR of multiple genocides: by providing
Russian language education to natives of the Baltic states or by serving
alcohol in a Muslim republic. No American misdeed would amount to G
according to Lemkin, and according to the US reading of the G
Convention, unless in an unlikely case of the US agreeing that it is
guilty. European states say the US is not a participant to the G
convention, for its many caveats amount to non-participation. However,
the US speaks of G more often than most participants, usually in order
to justify its intervention. The Big G became a mighty stick to unseat
rulers and undermine regimes.
The G word is likely to cause more bloodshed, for a sad, rarely stated
reason. If a victim of the crime is a nation, a tribe or an ethnic
group, so is the criminal. Germans killed Jews, Turks killed Armenians,
Hutu killed Tutsi etc. The moment you recognise G, you encourage the G
of revenge. As the Jews considered themselves being the victims of G
(this is an idea deeply ingrained in the Jewish tradition, though quite
foreign to Christian thought) they tried to take
revenge by poisoning millions of Germans. (They failed
but never apologised).
Armenians provide another example of people seriously disturbed by G
politics. Lemkin used the 1915 atrocities to dissimulate the purely
Jewish idea of G, and the Armenians eventually embraced it. As the idea
of G took its place in the law of the nations, the Armenian fighters
began to seek and extract revenge from Turks – after fifty years at
peace. G propaganda produced a terrible fruit in 1990-1992, when tens of
thousands of Azeri (deemed “Turks” by their Armenian neighbours) were
massacred and exiled “in revenge for the 1915 G”. A new generation of
Armenians was poisoned by victimhood and revenge feelings, thanks to
Lemkin and his followers.
A Genocide is not about past. It is about future. Innocent people will
die, and die, and die, whenever this term is applied. Without the term,
the Lethe will cover all. A good example is provided by Greeks. They
suffered probably more than Armenians during the WWI, but as nobody
applied the term G to “their” atrocities, they are not obsessed with
revenge and live rather peaceably with their Turkish neighbours.
In Africa the concept of G was applied most vigorously by the Western
neo-colonisers. You will not be surprised that no Westerner has ever
been tried for G despite impressive results. Millions of chopped off
hands and heads, but like in Raymond Chandler’s LA, “only darkies are
tried.” Now Africa prepares to leave the ICC, the main dealer of the G
politics. “Despite having received almost 9,000 formal complaints about
alleged war crimes in at least 139 countries, the ICC has chosen to
indict 36 black Africans in eight African countries.” – wrote David
Hoille, a leading international lawyer.
No less authority than Christopher Black, the eminent international
lawyer, provedbeyond
a shade of doubt that the familiar story of Ruanda genocide of Tutsi by
Hutu was not only false, but had led to terrible revenge massacres of
Hutu by Tutsi. And this story was utilised by Samantha Power and the
interventionists of her ilk to bomb all over the world.
It is good that the nasty concept of genocide took a hit from the
Russian veto. And now we can consider the particular case of Srebrenica.
The last thing I want and shall do it to tire you, my reader, with
tedious Balkan stories of who slaughtered whom and where. If you want to
know the gruesome details, readDiana
Johnstone. I am sure they all tried their beastly best.
There is no reason to single out one party – that is, no good reason.
The Yugoslav war, the war fought by Clinton against the Serbs, was a
large social experiment: how do you sow discord among brothers
(Proverbs, 6) and turn a multi-ethnic state into a warren of quarrelling
communities. The result was satisfactory, for Clintons. The biggest US
military base in Europe came into existence. A wealthy independent
socialist state was broken into many miserable statelets; all of them
applied for a place in the EU; Russia has lost its potential foothold on
the Balkans.
The politics of genocide were played to its utmost extent in the
Balkans, deligitimising one of the sides in the internal conflict. The
Slavs were subjected to an international tribunal of total dishonesty
and bias. Their leaders died in jail. No accusation of real genocide has
ever been proven, but the West’s right to judge and decide has been
affirmed.
There was a nice extra profit. The West asserted that its will for
justice is stronger than its religious solidarity with Christians,
right? Now every Muslim should remember that the West will side with
Muslims, if they are persecuted, right? Wrong. The Eastern Orthodox
Christians (such as Serbs, Russians, Bulgarians, Greeks) do not belong
to the Western civilisation. They are as foreign to the Westerners as
the Muslims are. Indeed, when the Crusaders fought for the Holy Land,
they killed the local Christians, too, saying: “Kill them all and let
God sort them out.” So there was no hindrance to side with Muslims
against Christians as long as they are Eastern Christians, but by sleigh
of hand, the Muslims could be tricked into believing in the Western
objectivity.
This feature has been used now. The vetoed draft was a clever and
mischievous trap. Such drafts rarely get to the stage of a vote, as the
powers (P5, the Big Five, or Permanent Members of the UN Security
Council, choose the name) usually do not use the unique power of UNSC
resolutions for propaganda purposes. Otherwise, they could vex the US
with drafts calling for Gaza freedom. Being prudent, P5 avoid such
brownie points. Now they did it, anyway. The result was predictable:
Russia could not let the Christian Serbs being singled out in the “You
are the Villain” competition. This Russian veto has been presented as
“Russia is the enemy of Islam”, with the explicit intention to send the
Daesh beasts down the Russian trail and undermine internal Russian
cohesiveness.
Russia is not an enemy of Islam. Muslim steppe riders were the
co-founders of Russia, together with Viking warriors, Slav ploughmen,
Finn forest dwellers. The Muslim Kazan gave its title to the Russian
crown. Tatars and Kazakhs are the mainstay of Russia. Russians proved
themselves as benevolent rulers, good advisers, reliable friends to
Muslims of Central Asia and Caucasus. They had build schools, educated
native engineers, modernised these countries.
However, Russia considers its duty to protect the Eastern Christians. In
a way, they inherited this responsibility from the Byzantines. For this
reason Russia heavily invested in the Holy Land and in Greece, liberated
Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia from the Turkish
yoke.
In the terms of realpolitik, this policy has been extremely
disappointing. Almost all the “liberated Eastern Christian” states
eventually sided with Russia’s enemies, while the once-conquered Muslim
states remained loyal to Moscow. Muslim Azerbaijan, Tajikistan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and once-rebellious Chechnya are friends of
Russians; so are Turkey and Iran.
The veto in the UNSC was supposed to protect Serbia from Western
pressure, not to poke the Muslims. Remember that during the war, Russia
was too weak to interfere and save Yugoslavia. Now Russia made its
amends for 1999.
Hopefully, the Muslims will understand the Russian point. After all, the
Turks and Azeris understood the Russian position on Armenia. In the
recent commemoration of 1915 in Yerevan, Armenia, Putin was the only
important guest – his French counterpart M Hollande made a brief
appearance and flew away to Baku (to “Azeri Turks”, in Armenian
parlance). Putin went there soon after an important and fruitful visit
to Turkey, after an agreement with Erdogan. Visit to Armenia jeopardised
this achievement, but Putin still did not shrink from the trip. Armenia
for Russia is like Israel for the US. There is a very important Armenian
diaspora in Russia, and the neighbours accept this reality like Israeli
Arab neighbours accept the reality and inevitability of American support
for Israel.
The Armenians and the Azeri soldiers marched together, one after
another, on the Red Square on May 9 this year, approving the Russian
position of the mediator and protector in the area. Perhaps it is a
liability for Russia, but nobody promised them a rose garden.
First published in The
Unz Review
Israel Shamir can be contacted at adam@israelshamir.net