The Bulwark is up with a screed attacking me for saying in a Politico piece last week that Russia isn’t committing genocide in Ukraine. Of course, in our idiotic public debate, this is now considered by some a defense of Russia. If I’m a defender of Russia, though, I have a funny way of showing it. The Bulwark author cites part of the U.N. definition of genocide, which is, “Killing members of the group.” But absent an intent to destroy that group as such (and I don’t think we have that in Ukraine), it’s not genocide. Otherwise, any force that deliberately killed civilians would be guilty of genocide and the term would lose what is supposed to be its meaning.
The Bulwark piece notes that, “Naturally, it took only hours for the Kremlin propaganda machine to quote Lowry’s article.” This is a dumb, McCarthyite jab. I write what I believe is true, and I can’t help who quotes it or not. I assume that the Tass report did not quote all the harsh criticisms of Russia in the Politico column, and that Tass hasn’t quoted any of my other writings on the war.
I also stand accused of not having cared what Donald Trump said. The Bulwark links to a 2017 piece I wrote saying that Trump policies were better than his words, but that column spent a lot of time harshly criticizing Trump’s words. And the offending Politico column includes this passage:
It’s a time in our culture when hardly anyone exercises great care with words, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask that the president of the United States show more discipline than most.
Instead, Biden continues in the tradition established by Donald Trump of a president routinely saying things at odds with the policy of his own administration.
Finally, after all this fulminating, the Bulwark piece bizarrely comes around to the view that Biden was correct in one of his other statements that we still need to find out whether Russia is committing genocide or not:
So nobody should be surprised that the president of the United States — the leader of a country that has repeatedly promised “Never Again” — would acknowledge that the definition of genocide in our country’s legal code sure seems to apply to the circumstances in Ukraine, even while admirably acknowledging that we’ll have to “let the lawyers decide” whether the facts, as they continue to become clearer, exactly fit to the definition.
Oh.