TNR's Adam Kushner -- a friend of mine, and a good guy -- attended yesterday's Darfur rally, finding the protest "well executed" and, "at turns, very moving." He can't, however, resist a shot at the liberal softs who put it together:
Almost without fail, speakers bemoaned the litany of the last century's ethnic slaughters and pleaded not to instantiate Darfur on that list--the Holocaust, Cambodia (is this a genocide?), Rwanda, the Balkans. But, of all the speakers I heard (and there were over 50), only one mentioned the Anfal campaign, wherein Saddam Hussein gassed as many as 200,000 Kurds. Progressive-minded people, it seems, do not delight in noting that the invasion of Iraq toppled a perpetrator of genocide. You know, it undermines the case against war, especially for those (admittedly few) at the protest yesterday calling for American troops in Darfur.
This, of course, is a gross bit of revisionism. Liberals should not be deleting Anfal from the annals of mass-murder merely because they're unhappy to have toppled the government that did the deed. (I don't mean that liberals liked Saddam, though they were generally willing to tolerate him.) It hardly seems fair to expurgate the victims from history because their deaths were politically inexpedient.
Adam's list includes the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. He doesn't mention the 49 million Chinese killed during Mao's "Great Leap Forward," nor the 13 million Russian exterminated in Stalin's purges, nor the 1.6 million North Koreans who perished in Kim Il Sung's concentration camps, nor the Ethiopians, Pakistanis, or Armenians, who've died in genocides of their own. It hardly seems fair to expurgate these victims from his post because their deaths were rhetorically inexpedient.
Maybe, though, the quirks of historical memory rather than the dictates of political expediency" account for Al-Anfal's relative absence at today's rally. United Human Rights doesn't include it on their rollcall of 20th century genocides, nor the History Place on its collection, nor Wikipedia on its history of genocides. Are all these resources staffed by dovish liberal revisionists, unwilling to mention mass slaughter if it cuts for an invasion undertaken decades after the act? Probably not. More likely, the Al-Anfar genocide is left off lists because it got little publicity, and liberal doves don't see it as connected to the current invasion because it fucking wasn't. It's a strange takeaway indeed to attend a rally begging the Bush administration to intervene to stop an ongoing genocide and then leave convinced that we instead need to credit the Bush administration for avenging a past one. And more importantly, for those of us concerned about Darfur, the last thing we should be doing is folding it into the bitter, radicalized debate on Iraq.
