Killing Your Own People - A Brief Guide to When It's Acceptable

In a recent broadcast debate about intervening in Syria, I heard some pro-intervention blowhard (a poppy-bedecked Tory MP) saying it again. ���Assad��� (no honorific of course) was ���killing his own people���.

 

This was said with such force that you might think that it was a) original and b)trumped all argument. Why is this? All governments kill their ���own people��� from time to time (in the course of keeping order or at least claiming to and not least by conscripting them into wars in which they die by thousands, in the course of killing somebody else���s people, which is perhaps all right, though not always). In Britain we have tended to avoid domestic killings of our own people on a large scale since Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972 ( I am  not defending this stupid blunder. I protested against it at the time and have never regretted doing so. In fact the more I have learned about it the more I have been glad that I did protest, see

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/sunday-bloody-sunday-a-long-days-journey-into-light.html).

Nowadays we stick to the occasional police shooting of suspects, not always fully justified.

 

No doubt the Assad state is pretty filthy (I wrote at length about the Hama massacre of 1982 when most people had never heard of it and were only interested in the deaths of Arabs when Israel was responsible) and the attitude of the West towards it has varied, on occasion sending people to be horribly mistreated  in its appalling torture chambers ( see the astonishing case of Maher Arar  described herehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar) , at other times moralising about them.

 

But in the last few weeks, this country, has happily hosted (and fiercely suppressed peaceful protest against) the Chinese regime which undertook the Tiananmen Square massacre, killing its own people on a grander scale than any other modern state, is not in any way apologetic about it,  and which still maintains an appalling record for the suppression of dissent, including the punishment of lawyers who dare to defend dissidents.

 

Britain has sent a senior envoy to the appalling despotism of Saudi Arabia, where peaceful protestors are imprisoned and publicly flogged.  It has opened a naval base in Bahrain, where the regime tortures opponents and has killed at last 80 of its own people in recent years.

 

We are now hosting visits by the Egyptian soldier Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who came to power in a military putsch, cramming opponents into (often secret) jails,  and killed hundreds of his own people in raids on protest camps in Cairo in August 2013; and by the Kazakh despot Nursultan Nazarbayev ( see here for details of this unlovely ruler  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/11/the-dictator-with-a-royal-warrant-why-has-prince-andrew-been-to-kazakhstan-six-times-in-seven-years.html

 

He also ���kills his own people���. In fact he shoots them in the back, most notably at Zhanaozen in December 2011, when armed police opened fire on unarmed strikers as they fled. At least 16 died.

 

Now, look, I am not saying we should have nothing to do with these grisly regimes. Oil is oil and trade is trade, and strategy is strategy. All I am asking for is grown-up discourse. If we must behave in a friendly fashion to such people we simply cannot claim that the butchery and cruelty of President Assad is the reason for our intervention there. This is babyish propaganda, designed for backward children,  and we should be ashamed to transmit or accept it.

 

In which case, what is the actual reason? And if we knew it, would we support the destabilisation and ruin of Syria, or our continued support for the overthrow of Mr Assad? I suspect not, and I suspect it is shame at the real reasons for our behaviour that makes Mr Cameron and his colleagues reach for this infantile propaganda. Why do educated, adult journalists connive at this rubbish?