Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 10 – It has long been
a witticism among specialists on international relations that terrorists who
succeed are no longer called terrorists either because by their actions, they
have become the heads of governments or because they were already that when
they carried out their actions.
That observation, of course, traces
it origins to the Elizabethan writer John Harington who famously observed “Treason
doth neuer prosper? What’s the Reason? For it if prosper none dare call it
treason,” the source among other things of the title of John A. Stormer’s 1964
book about the Moscow-orchestrated communist conspiracy in the United States.
It is worth recalling this insight
because two “successful” terrorists appear to be on their way to acceptability
by at least some in the West and to be rechristened “statesmen” deserving the
respect accorded to others, with their crimes entirely forgotten or at least cast
into a memory hole in the name of improved relations.
These two are North Korea’s Kim
Jong-Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Kim
who presides over one of the most brutal and murderous dictatorships in the world
has carried out terrorist acts against his enemies abroad and threatened the
world with a nuclear holocaust only a few months ago.
But now, because he is going to be
meeting with US President Donald Trump, he is being recast by all too many as a
statesman, his crimes are being ignored, and in the rush to achieve some
breakthrough, all too many are forgetting that he hasn’t changed his stripes
and is unlikely to become the regular world leader some in the West want to suggest
he now is.
Putin is much the same. He too has
brutalized his own population, orchestrated terrorist acts from the blowing up
of the Russian apartment blocks in 1999 to the downing of the Polish plane and of
the Malaysian airliner more recently. He has conducted a brutal war in
Chechnya, he has invaded Georgia and Ukraine, and he has violated international
law in many ways.
And the list of his crimes goes on,
including seeking to undermine democracy in Western Europe and the United
States, ignoring decisions of the European Court of Human Rights on his
violation of the rights of Russian citizens, and boldly assuming that he doesn’t
have to apologize for anything he has done.
The Kremlin leader who like Kim
clearly believes that having a nuclear arsenal means never having to say you’re
sorry simply denies the obvious and counts on Western leaders so anxious to gain
access to Russian oil and gas or to boost their own ratings by making deals
with him that they will overlook all of this.
And as he said today in Beijing, the
West must get over its artificial Russophobia and bring Moscow back into the
club of normal world powers (regnum.ru/news/polit/2429735.html).
And Putin like Kim counts on the passing of time to work for him, given the
short time horizons of all too many Western leaders.
Both Putin and Kim know that they
can count on many in the West to denounce and dismiss those in who recall their
crimes as foolishly focusing on the past when there are so many possibilities
for progress and deals, the holy grails of so many leaders who unlike Putin and
Kim are beholden to populations who don’t focus often on international affairs
unless there is a war.
Tragically, both these successful
terrorists not only are winning this round, but they are exploiting the desire
of some Western leaders to make deals no matter what they have done setting the
stage for even worse to follow. When such leaders made concessions to Hitler or
to the Soviets, they were called appeasers or fellow travelers.
Now, however, in this post-truth and
post-ideological world, Harington’s observation seems more relevant than ever
before.
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