This is what our mothers and fathers, or, perhaps, our grandmothers and grandfathers read when Benito Mussolini met his end. Does it remind you of what you are reading now about Moammar Gaddafi?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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The 20th Century was the most cruel in human kind’s history on the planet. Dictatorships have caused the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens. The Allied forces had to join the Soviet Union under Stalin to defeat Hitler’s Germany and Japan’s Imperial Forces. Europe remained divided under Soviet Communist rule and its satellite states. Europe’s colonial past has caught up with them throughout Africa, Middle-East and South-East Asia. You can name all conflict regions from South Africa to the Medittaranian Sea and eastward across the Arabic peninsula to Iran and Pakistan. Fortunately, the largest Muslim nation Indonesia has managed to escape the turmoil of the sixties and recent Islamic extremism. Creating conflict is much easier to do than to reach peace amongst nations and peoples. The ugly face of civil war will make victims many generations later. Seeding hatred and denial of responsibility will lead to self-destruction and deaths of innocent children.
“States’ Rights and Home Rule,
Truth crushed to earth will rise again.
Men die, principles live forever
And, though conquered, we adore it;
Weep for those who fell before it;
Pardon for those who trailed and tore it.”
Confederate monument in Brandon, Mississippi
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I don’t think Indonesia escaped much of anything in the 1960’s.
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Wrong word choice, should read: “moved forward from turmoil of sixties ..” Indeed, Suharto’s dictatorship just ended in 1998.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."in numbers, yes, but not necessarily in % or in cruelty. In terms of the glass half full, which is my point of view, it’s worth looking back through recorded history. There are many baby steps, Code of Hammurabi to pick a starting point, and on and on for 4,000 years. there were no Geneva Conventions until the 20th cent. To take a look at what was the norm re: how conquerors treated the defeated, or any force treated its enemies over the 4,000 years is chilling, but I’m sparing myself writing about any of the details.
The ugly face of civil war will make victims many generations later.
What do you recommend peaceful protesters do when their nation’s tyrant unleashes the force of his military against them and their neighborhoods, if not take up arms?
This is what happened in Libya. I find it crass to criticize the Libyan people for not sitting quietly in their homes and hoping for the best.
It’s odd, but the only place you can still find a full-throttle defense of the sovereignty of the Westphalian nation-state is on the left. The right doesn’t care about the idea — PNAC more or less proved that.
And the center doesn’t support it unconditionally any more, not after Rwanda, and East Timor, and a few others, hence R2P making its way into the world order.
Apparently at any point short of the One Final Revolution, when alle Menschen werden Brüder, the state withers away, and the expropriators are expropriated, you’re on your own, bub.
It’s odd, but the only place you can still find a full-throttle defense of the sovereignty of the Westphalian nation-state is on the left.
Seriously. When exactly did the United Nations cease to be part of the left’s vision of the international order?
About 1970 or so — post Six-Day War. Certainly post-Kosovo. The UN is now officially an arm of the US/UK/EU capitalist-imperialist octopus.
I won’t attempt to summarize Michael Berubé’s book here, though.
The UN is now officially an arm of the US/UK/EU capitalist-imperialist octopus.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Imperialist Pig.
If you measure your worth as a movement by how few people listen to you, then there’s not only no downside risk to holding crazy positions, holding crazy positions guarantees your marginalization, which is the warrant of your virtue and correctness.
It’s a perfect feedback loop. And much of the big-L left has been trapped in it for a generation.
It would be nice if the Time archive provided a byline because that account was very literate with some finely crafted word and image usage. So, no, it doesn’t remind me of what I read today.
But yes, it is good that once powerful, merciless dictators come to their ends hunted down, humiliated, bullet-riddled and their corpses are abused. It feels like Karma.
Applauding corpse-abuse is a little much.
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m relieved that Gaddafi is dead. On the other, we’re supposed to be somewhat morally-improved when compared to 1945. The horrors of that war led us to set up the United Nations and a whole regimen for human rights.
I have no mixed feelings. It would be better by far to just shoot them down. For instance, it would be really good if someone would offer a larger reward for Bashir Assad. He sits there with a loyal army, murdering thousands.
I’m going to make the same point I made about Anwar al-Awlaki: the rules that apply to prisoners you have in your custody are different from those that apply to murderers who are at large, out of your reach, and still operating.
If someone shot down Assad at his next public appearance, I’d be overjoyed. But if he fell into the hands of the rebels and had been rendered harmless, shooting him takes on a very different meaning.
I’ll say the same thing I say about the executions of people like Ted Bundy: yes, he deserved it – but that doesn’t mean that giving him what he deserved was the best thing to do.
Sometimes, it’s best to give horrible people more mercy than they actually deserve. Not for their sakes, but for ours.
I’d agree with you, except the EU no longer has the death penalty. Thus, we will listen to Mladic tell us, for the next 24 months, how he was not responsible for Srebernica, and then he will be sentenced to life in prison.
He directed the murder of 5000-7000 men, boys, and children (male mostly). He directed the rape of women. He used the weapon of deliberate rape to demoralize the Bosnians and Croatians.
He will sit in jail for the rest of his life. That could be 30 years.
And this is not for some guy who MAY be guilty. There are few for whom guilt is less clear than for Mladic.
So, I am hard pressed to find a reason to agree with you. Better, much better, to have shot him down during his arrest.
I’m not going to try to argue that he deserves to have his life spared. He doesn’t.
I’m not going to try to argue that all of the advantages of his death, and all of the disadvantages of his capture, don’t exist. You’re speaking the truth about all of that.
But I think you’re underestimating the benefits of having his crimes exposed before all the world, and his defenses shredded, and Mladic and his nasty little cause exposed for what they truly are and condemned, before the whole world.
I’m a very old-fashioned, FDR liberal. Nuremberg was the right way to handle people like this.
Mussolini’s fate was the first thing I thought of when I heard about what had happened to Gaddafi. It would have been better to have captured Gaddafi and tried him for his crimes against humanity. But history is often a hard mistress, and every once in a while a murderous thug reaps what he sows.
Ceaucescu is another dictator who was summarily dealt with. For me, I have no sympathy. Remember the trial of Milosevich? That piece of shit was responsible, not entirely single-handedly, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. And we had to listen to him, day after day, justify his terrible actions. It would have been far better just to shoot the piece of crap. Now we have Mladic as well. When these terrible men get to trial, we treat them with honor. When they had power, they killed thousands. Why do they get treatment like human beings? They have long forsaken their status as humans.
because if we don’t recognize their humanity we forfeit ours.
You should read up on the trial of Milosevich. And on the Sarajevo massacre.
I don’t know enough about it/ them???
And we had to listen to him, day after day, justify his terrible actions. It would have been far better just to shoot the piece of crap.
It would have been far better still to go through the trial, with him spouting his crap, and then have a panel of judges completely and utterly reject all of his crap and condemn him.
If there was any rational decision-making involved in the execution of Gaddafi (unclear at this point) those in charge might have felt that it was better to kill him quickly, rather than chance him escaping or causing more trouble in some other way. His death also deals a blow to any remaining opposition.
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Mussolini’s death came prior to the invention of the Third World. Being from it, and not the industrialized nations, gets you a lot of slack.
What folks today don’t realize is how transformative World War II and the Civil Rights Movement were in our perceptions of what constitutes acceptable behavior in war or revolution.
Before then, wars and atrocities were taken for granted as uncontrollable parts of history.
I generally agree with that. Many people are quite incensed that there are civilian casualties in some wars. Civilian casualties are the rule in war. The notion that war involves combattants only is a very odd one. Every war in history has involved civilian casualties. That is really the better approach, since war should extract a horrible price. If you went to war thinking that your army could defeat their army, and left civilians out of the calculations, there would be more wars.