Authority-citing accompanied by endless links promoting the linker's preferred soup of the day is a common feature on social media, where virtue signalling and vanity are forged into a baton with which to beat down the opponent of the day.
I don’t cite Chomsky merely because he is an authority on these matters or because as a celebrity of dissent he can be used as a blackthorn stick to beat away those who hold a different view to my own. Despite the many criticisms of him I cite him because I feel he precisely identifies a problem and then concisely explains it. He is a towering giant in the field whose shoulders I occasionally stand upon to get a better view of the terrain plus an enhanced sense of what might be coming over the horizon. He fulfills the Camus role of the intellectual which "cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other."
The NYT comment that gained Chomsky's concurrence was:
Russia’s War on Ukraine is the supreme international crime. It is foundational because all the war crimes that flow from it are rooted in the Kremlin decision to invade its neighbour.
As in all wars with favoured perpetrators and favoured victims, there will be – just as there are Holocaust deniers – war crime deniers, some of them Quockerwodgers, who with might and main shall seek to envelop culpability in pea soup fog. Susan Sontag captured the type so well in her acerbically incisive comment that "it was the other side who did it, to themselves."
The lie of war crime denial has for decades arguably, because of its persistence, been no more pronounced than when it comes to Israeli atrocity against Palestinian civilians, often children. Yet our protestations against Israel are shown up as rank hypocrisy if we fail to protest the war crimes perpetrated on Ukrainian citizens by the Kremlin kleptocracy. Without as much as O’Faoilean’s sixpence of an idea to fumble for, we nevertheless find a way to fumble and stumble so that we may not call something by its name in a world where context becomes alibi.
The NYT comment that gained Chomsky's concurrence was:
In the words of the Nuremberg tribunal, “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.” In Ukraine, there is no question that Russia is the aggressor . . .
Russia’s War on Ukraine is the supreme international crime. It is foundational because all the war crimes that flow from it are rooted in the Kremlin decision to invade its neighbour.
As in all wars with favoured perpetrators and favoured victims, there will be – just as there are Holocaust deniers – war crime deniers, some of them Quockerwodgers, who with might and main shall seek to envelop culpability in pea soup fog. Susan Sontag captured the type so well in her acerbically incisive comment that "it was the other side who did it, to themselves."
The maybe the other side did it to themselves types were to be found in the North, seeking to deflect blame away from the British state, when its more overt war crimes like Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy massacre featured in public discourse. It was the IRA dressed up as Paratroopers that did it; God punished the gays of Ballymurphy and smote the fornicators of Derry.
The use of the caricature lens here does not distort so much as tease out what the evasiveness amounts to: basically, any old tosh to enable the perpetrators escape the noose of accountability. At play, an implicit racism that deemed some people to be less human and therefore less worthy of being shielded from war crimes, their killers more wholesome and therefore more worthy of being shielded from accusations of war crimes. As Alfie Gallagher opined to me, Sunday past, just as with religious assertions, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this has to apply to extraordinary claims about false flag operations, otherwise those making them end up sounding as disingenuous, if not as unhinged, as QAnon,
With Charles Bukowski's admonition in mind that you can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody, It’s the deceivers who make you feel bad, not all the willfully blind have an ethical cataract in the same eye. There is also conscious deceit that because Russian atrocities have been verified the only war criminals in Ukraine are those sent by the Kremlin. Ukrainian government war criminals are not some remnant from eight years past when the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was the author of atrocity. They are active today, even being feted in Washington as they relay their tales of executing captured Russian troops.
War is frequently necessary but never good. War crimes follow warriors around much like the Einsatzgruppen did the Wehrmacht who preceded them on the murder march through Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union in the 1940s. When there is war there will be atrocity. They don't diverge but inexorably merge into some Orthros, a two-headed dog of war and its crimes.
To protest too much, even to me sounds like virtue signalling, there being no price to pay for saying the right sounding thing. There is however a higher price to be paid by others when the right sounding thing goes unsaid merely to avoid sounding right. War is Hell where people suffer. No point in being a cheerleader for catastrophe. There is no need to be a pacifist but every need to be anti-war.
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