It's Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be inspiring. As I mentioned last week, it's not always easy sounding upbeat. This is especially true when Russian tanks are rolling across Europe, and Chinese diplomats are sneering publicly that even calling Russia's attack on Ukraine an "invasion" is some sly trick by "western media."
Such Orwellian statements, the specialty of dictatorships everywhere, are repugnant in any language. But there is a reason authoritarian regimes talk this way. It's how they rationalize political repression and invading peaceful countries. It was Mao who said that Communists should always remember that political power comes "from the barrel of a gun." But justifying crimes against humanity to a candid world requires more than guns. It also requires lies.
For the past three days, China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying has steadfastly refused to criticize Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- or even call it for what it is. But with Russian tanks, Russian paratroopers, Russian infantry, Russian warships, and Russia cyberwarriors strangling Ukraine sovereignty, Hua Chunying's act wore thin at press briefings this week. She ultimately gave the game away.
"Here is another question," she said. "Western media used the word ‘invasion' for Russia's operation. When the U.S. took illegal unilateral military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan without the mandate of the U.N. and caused massive civilian casualties, did you use the word ‘invasion' or some other word?"
What a peculiar set of assertions. The deadly attacks of 9/11, in which almost all the casualties were civilian, were planned and directed from a terrorist group openly harbored by the regime in Afghanistan. The men who launched it proudly called it an act of war, and hardly anyone in the world objected to the U.S. response. Iraq was another matter. The legality of the large-scale U.S. military invasion and occupation of Iraq was debated at the time and still is to this day. But it's a matter of empiric fact that it wasn't unilateral.
And as far as the claim that western media didn't call the U.S. attack and occupation of Iraq an invasion, well, this is just goofy. Every journalist I know, regardless of whether we thought the invasion was justified, repeatedly called it an "invasion." What else could it possibly be called?
China's word games seem minor compared to Russian violence in Ukraine. But they are of a piece. In that same briefing, the Chinese government blamed the United States for Russia's aggression in Ukraine, which a worried world fears is a precursor to the justification China will use if it invades Taiwan.
In the meantime, Vladimir Putin deflects signs that he's trying to reassemble the old Soviet empire at the point of the gun by saying he's really only motivated by a desire to "de-Nazify Ukraine. Yes, Putin actually said that, even though there are no Nazis in Ukraine and there haven't been for eight decades. That country's real sin is preferring western European-style democracy to Soviet-style tyranny. Like Americans, Ukrainians want to live in a land with free markets and free expression. Putin is the one whose arguments about territorial security closely parallel Hitler's. The tipoff revealing Putin's cynicism is that Ukraine's president is Jewish.
As Allied bombers razed German cities in 1944 -- in the real war against Naziism -- George Orwell received a letter from a troubled reader. Although he realized "the Hun [has] got to be beaten," the letter-writer said, he expressed misgivings about the civilians being killed by American and British pilots.
"It seems to me," Orwell replied in his column, "that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them ‘Huns.'"
Orwell didn't really mean that words hurt human beings worse than napalm. What he meant is that the dehumanizing comes first -- that we're willing to drop napalm on people only after we've called them names. This is also the lesson of Auschwitz's gas chambers, Cambodia's killing fields, and Rwanda's orgy of bloodletting. Also of Mao's "reeducation camps," or Stalin's gulags. It starts when you call people subhuman, or cockroaches, or wreckers, or even Nazis. It starts when you lie about other human beings. So George Orwell's wisdom is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
