DEMOLISHING THE OLD CANARD OF ” MORAL EQUIVALENCE “

It is often the case that when two parties are in a dispute a temptation arises on the part of observers to resolve the question in their own minds by blaming both sides equally. Generally, this temptation is strongest when judging the merits of the argument and assigning blame involves some degree risk for the observer; avoiding judgement thus becomes a psychologically comfortable form of cowardice ( or at least laziness ). When this conduct is elevated into foreign policy, as with arms embargos that ” affect both sides equally ” as with the Spanish Civil War in 1936 or Bosnia in the 1990’s, moral equivalence becomes essentially a passive assist to the stronger party without reference to justice. Usually this means favoring the aggressor over the victim.

I mention this because H-DIPLO is running a thread entitled ” The Left, the Right and…” debating the philosophical influences that may have caused academics to become partisans or apologists for various dictatorships in the 20th century. Left-wing posters have raised the issue of Pol Pot’s years as an an anti-Vietnamese guerrilla in the 1980’s a proof of ” Right-wing ” perfidy.

A brilliant and completely devastating rebuttal was just posted by Stephen J. Morris of The Foreign Policy Institute. I can say I learned some things from it while admiring the comprehensively thorough rejection of the poster’s argument. Here it is in it’s entirety:

Some myths about Indochina die hard, even in academia. Doug Stokes is

completely wrong about “the right” (i.e. the British and US governments

of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) supporting Pol Pot more than

“the left.”

It was the “left” wing, to be precise communist, governments of Vietnam

and China that armed, trained and supported the rise to power of the

Khmers Rouges. The “left” government of Vietnam continued to support the

Khmers Rouges politically until 1977 and the “left” Chinese and North

Koreans supported them politically, economically and materially until

1993. The radical left in academia supported Pol Pot during most of his

time in power. The political “right” in the democratic west gave the

most limited and qualified political support, in the form of supporting

continued UN recognition to the Khmers Rouges guerrilla movement only

after it lost power, and even then it did so in order not to restore the

Khmers Rouges to power, but to find a way to reverse the Vietnamese

communist occupation, which China was determined to do regardless of

western policy, and to facilitate a noncommunist alternative for

Cambodia. No western government gave military aid to the Khmers Rouges.

One cannot base one’s knowledge of recent Cambodian history, as Mr

Stokes seems to have done, upon the writings of a notoriously unreliable

journalist named John Pilger (most of his print journalism is for the

English tabloid Daily Mirror newspaper). To get a sense of Pilger’s

credibility, one should recall that he recently described the United

States under George Bush as being like Nazi Germany. This is par for the

course. Pilger is an agit prop specialist, not a balanced analyst nor an

objective correspondent.

To get a sense of Pilger’s intellectual deceitfulness, in the article

cited Pilger refers to UN food supplies to the Khmers Rouges. This was

food, not weapons. It was authorised by the UN, not the “right.” KR

commanders ran the camps, and their soldiers benefited from the food.

But mostly civilians lived in the camps. Similarly UN food supplies went

to the larger refugee camps controlled by the noncommunist resistance.

It was all humanitarian aid. The UN responsibility was feeding

civilians, who would otherwise have starved, even if soldiers who

controlled them also were fed.

To make his case by sleight of hand, Pilger lumps together the

noncommunist resistance with the Khmers Rouges, despite their

organisational separation. There was a political alliance against the

Vietnamese occupation regime from 1982 on, imposed upon them by ASEAN to

enable ASEAN and others to help the noncommunists, because the UN in the

pre-Yugoslavia era of the “primacy of national sovereignty,” had

recognized the KR regime overthrown by Vietnam’s invasion as the

legitimate rulers of Cambodia, and an unsavory coalition with them was

the only way to give the noncommunists a role in Cambodia’s future.

Although the KR and the noncommunist resistance did occasionally

cooperate in battles against the Vietnamese and the regime that Hanoi

had installed, the noncommunists did not take military orders from the

Khmer Rouges, and mostly operated separately. Sometimes the KR attacked

the noncommunists, despite their political alliance. There was no

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