The Awful Logic of Genocide

The occupation of Afghanistan by the Red Army, which has been going on for almost six years now, continues to provoke in the Western democracies a reaction that Montaigne calls “voluntary ignorance.” This deliberate neglect of the facts is a wonderful prophylactic against the temptation to act. In this sense, Afghanistan is a reflection of our cowardice. It offers an instructive look at the way the democracies justify, or conceal, their failures in the face of totalitarian expansionism.

Information on Afghanistan is scarce, to be sure, because of Soviet censorship. The Communist powers enjoy an unwritten but tacitly accepted privilege, a privilege practically legalized by international consent, to shape and to ration information that concerns them. By closing Afghan territory to TV teams and non-Communist reporters, by imprisoning journalists and even doctors who have entered the country clandestinely, the Soviets have kept the Afghan horror story from being told by the mass media. Thus they have prevented the vast wave of worldwide opprobrium that would engulf a democracy guilty of far lesser crimes but accessible to news coverage by nature of its politics and principles.

The occupation of Afghanistan by the Red Army, which has been going on for almost six years now, continues to provoke in the Western democracies a reaction that Montaigne calls “voluntary ignorance.” This deliberate neglect of the facts is a wonderful prophylactic against the temptation to act. In this sense, Afghanistan is a reflection of our cowardice. It offers an instructive look at the way the democracies justify, or conceal, their failures in the face of totalitarian expansionism.

Information on Afghanistan is scarce, to be sure, because of Soviet censorship. The Communist powers enjoy an unwritten but tacitly accepted privilege, a privilege practically legalized by international consent, to shape and to ration information that concerns them. By closing Afghan territory to TV teams and non-Communist reporters, by imprisoning journalists and even doctors who have entered the country clandestinely, the Soviets have kept the Afghan horror story from being told by the mass media. Thus they have prevented the vast wave of worldwide opprobrium that would engulf a democracy guilty of far lesser crimes but accessible to news coverage by nature of its politics and principles.