The awful logic of genocide

National Review, Oct 4, 1985 by Jean-Francois Revel

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 of 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.

But the blindness of certain Western elites does not result in the main from the practical difficulties of finding out what is going on. The practical difficulties can keep the ostory from the television screens, but there are nevertheless enough stories in the Western press--if they were taken seriously. There is sufficient information available for anyone who wants to think seriously about the situation of the Afghan people. If the free world discards this information or relegates it to the margins of its awareness, that is because it fears it will have to start questioning certain soothing interpretations of Soviet behavior and be forced to face the gravity of the crimes committed against the Afghan people. We can thus, we Western democracies, by looking the other way, withdraw from our moral responsibility and close our bored minds to the continuation of the Soviets' foreign policy. We will spare ourselves from seeing it in order to excuse ourselves from having to oppose it.

The first reason for our resistance to listening to news about Afghanistan (the only form of resistance the West has shown as yet in the Afghan affair) has to do with our desire to interpret the invation of Afghanistan as an accident of Soviet foreign policy. Reread what all our oracles have written about it in the last six years: It was a mistake . . . a marginal act . . . unrepresentative of the fundamental thinking of the Soviet leaders. The Soviets acted without premeditation; they were "caught up in a situation"; they fell "into a trap." The Western powers should, consequently, help them to get out of it, "to save face." How? By not bullying them, by not reawakening their well-known "sense of insecurity."

This analysis, made by most of the statesmen in power in the West during the invasion of 1979, remains the attitude of a great number of commentators today. It entails certain practical prescriptions: We must abstain from arming the Afghan resistance, for fear of provoking the Soviets. Only the fear of foreign intervention, they tell us, will delay the spontaneous departure of the Red Army. In view of the insignificance of our military aid to the Afghan resistance, one wonders how much further this would have to be reduced to "reassure" the Soviets, and how long it will take for their supposed desire to evacuate the country to be demonstrated. And, once gone, will they permit the local Communist regime to be swept out of Kabul, as without doubt it would be after the withdrawal of the Soviet military presence?

Such resignation is both unlikely and illogical given that the 1979 invasion took place precisely because the pro-Soviet Communist regime in Afghanistan could not, given the hostility of the people, remain in power without Soviet help. To imagine that the Soviet army will evacuate Afghanistan without having first gained acceptance for Communism there is to believe that the USSR would withdraw its "advisors" from all countries where it believes the local Communist government lacks local support--a totally unsupported belief. Up until now, quite the opposite has been the rule: The USSR keeps larger troop contingents in place in countries where the pro-Soviet regime is most fragile, most menaced. Which is, to be sure, perfectly rational.

The explanation that the Soviet seizure of Afghanistan is a result of unhappy chance is rooted in a more general theory. According to many politicians and students of politics, the Soviet Union does not nourish long-term foreign-policy objectives, at least not aggressive objectives. Nothing more greatly rouses the fury of certain politicians and international experts, whether journalists or academicians, than references to a global design on the part of the USSR. They admit, to be sure, that the USSR has an overall vision, but they believe it to be strictly defensive. The notion that the Soviet Union has an expansionist design, an imperialistic outlook both ideological and strategic, a program patiently pursued, long planned, unfailingly prepared for setbacks, could only emanate--intheir view--from an idee fixe dating from the cold war. Never mind the classic writings on the subject and the best-attested historical facts. The Soviet Union, they say, does not have, cannot have, a coherent imperialistic plan.