Chomsky | US Policy Toward Russia Is Blocking Paths to De-escalation in Ukraine | interview published April 7, 2022
It is, after all, not easy for people in the civilized world —
increasingly, the Global South — to be impressed by the “moral outrage”
of Western intellectuals who just a few years ago, when all the horrific
facts were in, were enthusiastically applauding the success of the
invasion of Iraq, spouting pieties
about noble intentions that would have embarrassed the most abject
apparatchik. And we can just imagine the reaction when they read the
pious invocation of the Nuremberg judgment by the editors of The New York Times,
who are just now coming to recognize that, “To initiate a war of
aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime: it is the
supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The
accumulated evil includes the instigation of ethnic conflict that has
torn apart not only Iraq but the whole region, the horrors of ISIS, and
much more.
Not, of course, what the editors have in mind. The supreme international crimes that they have supported for 60 years somehow escaped the Nuremberg judgment.
While there is appreciation in the Global South for the fact that at
long last Western intellectuals and the political class are coming to
perceive that aggressors can commit hideous crimes, they seem to feel
that it is perhaps a little late, and curiously skewed, as they know
from ample experience. They are also able to perceive that Westerners
consumed with moral outrage over the crimes of enemies are still able to
maintain their usual silence while their own leaders carry out terrible
crimes right now — in Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Western Sahara,
and all too many other places where they could act at once, and
expeditiously, to mitigate or end these crimes.