October 12, 2003
EAST IS WEST:
Reminding the West that confronting tyranny is a tradition (Tony Parkinson
October 11, 2003, The Age)
Bronislaw Geremek was a major intellectual force in the events that brought an end to the Cold War. Today, less than 15 years on, the former Polish foreign minister is anxious to prevent the dispute between leading European powers and the United States over the war in Iraq becoming another dangerous and destabilising fault line in the history of Europe.On a visit to Melbourne this week, one of the giants of eastern Europe's liberation from communist rule spoke frankly of the dangers for the European project if feuding persists between France and Germany, on the one hand, and the US on the other. At stake was not just unity within an enlarged European Union, but the future of the Western alliance.
For his part, Geremek believes there were incontestable grounds for removing Saddam Hussein's regime. "I can understand that some leaders in Europe were not convinced by America's justification for war in Iraq," he says. "But we will never understand that part of European public opinion that said it would be better for Saddam to have won the war than the Americans. Our experiences in Poland have given rise to a strong anti-totalitarian culture. For us, these are not theoretical questions. Even those Poles who were critical of the war were in no doubt that it was a good thing that one of the bloodiest dictators of the past century is no longer in power."
Like his close friend and courageous French intellectual Jean-Francois Revel, Geremek is not about to let the current fashion for anti-Americanism in Europe obscure the fundamental human rights imperative at the heart of the Iraq debate. He sees parallels with the failings of the European Left in the 1960s and 1970s to acknowledge and accept the evidence of the brutality of the Soviet system.
France was no help then either. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 12, 2003 10:01 PM
Always encouraging to find voices of common sense among the European political classes....
Posted by: Barry Meislin at October 13, 2003 2:24 AMIt may be a strange choice, but one of the most significant political events of my lifetime took place last Feb 15th. It was the ten million marching against the war, in what it’s organizers correctly called “some of, if not the, largest mass demonstrations in human history.”
On that day I was truly brought face to face with the millions... that’s millions, of fat, happy, free, Westerners who are willing to choose a monstrous tyranny over a democracy without a second thought. (Consider... all the mass graves and horrors we have found? How many of those millions were surprised? Even one? Just one of them reeling back and saying, “My God, I really didn’t believe it.” Just one? I wonder.)
While they were global in scale, we all know that an extraordinary philosphical energy for same comes directly from Europe. Being the “West” that is “not the US”, people all over the world used to taking cues from the West can invest what they like in one side, and what they don’t in the other.
But that day, when, after sixty years of living in freedom, defended by the US, to see it’s beneficiaries act in such a manner is a shock I have yet to get over. Ancient wisdoms about “leading horses to water, but unable to make them drink”, “no good deed goes unpunished”, etc, take on a whole new level.
We cannot save free people from themselves. And I start, in horror, to think that freedom may well and truly be an abberation in human development, not our inevitable future.
America will “live free or die”. Count on it. Whether much of the rest of the world slips into the abyss may very well be beyond our ability to influence one way or another.