Our Disgrace

Untimely Thoughts ^ | September 07, 2004 | Robert Bruce Ware

[bgarid]

Our Disgrace By Robert Bruce Ware Published on September 07, 2004

One feels ashamed to be an English-speaker. More that 330 innocent people are dead. Most of them are children.

Some were shot in the back as they fled. But the children were not yet buried before much of the media in the United States and Britain began their pointless and predictable ritual of second guessing, and then blaming, the Russian authorities. The same stale misconceptions and misinformation were once again rehearsed. All so easy, all so mindless.

In October 2002, Chechen terrorists (not "militants", not "rebels", not "separatists") took more than 800 hostages in a theater in Moscow. Russian law enforcement officials pumped gas into the hall in a flawed and risky attempt to immobilize the terrorists, and then stormed the building. More than 120 hostages died along with all of the terrorists. The remainder of the hostages were rescued. In the months that followed the western media was full of blame for the Russian authorities. Yet if American or Israeli officials had been faced with a similar hostage crisis, and had managed to save 80 percent of the hostages, the same media would have hailed their operation as a brilliant success.

After 9/11 neither Russia citizens nor Russian officials blamed Americans or American officials for the tragedy. How would Americans have felt if they had? Instead Russian citizens and officials alike found the decency simply to sympathize with us.

To their credit American officials have placed responsibility for the Beslan tragedy on the shoulders of the terrorists who perpetrated it. American officials have offered support for their Russian counterparts.

But where is the elementary decency of our media? From them we learn that Russians have little regard for human life; that Russian troops should have established a wider perimeter; that Ossetian parents should have been kept away; that Russia should negotiate with responsible Chechen militants whom no one ever seems capable of naming, and so on and on. Everyone sitting comfortably at their computers all around the world has a crystalline comprehension of the steps-- whether tactical, strategic, political, psychological, or military-- that should have been taken before, during, and after Beslan.

But as Sting somehow managed to recognize even during the Reagan administration, Russians love their children too. Anyone who has spent more than a week in the North Caucasus knows that it would have been easier to control the moon and the tides than to control the parents of the children in that school. People in Beslan did, and are doing, their best in the face of a situation that was and is absolutely incomprehensible, and no one outside of Beslan should pretend for a moment that they comprehend it.

Those western writers who have the shamelessness to pretend that they do have such comprehension for the sake of nothing more than another empty piece of boilerplate are a disgrace to all of us who share their language.

Robert Bruce Ware is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

[dfwgator]

One feels ashamed to be an English-speaker

The proper term is "Slavophobe."

[RAY]

Right on Professor!

[tje]

Yet if American or Israeli officials had been faced with a similar hostage crisis, and had managed to save 80 percent of the hostages, the same media would have hailed their operation as a brilliant success.

I don't know about Israeli press, but I'm pretty confident that the press would lambast American officials in such a situation. Unless there's a democrat in the White House.

[beelzepug]

"But where is the elementary decency of our media?"

The writer is to be congratulated for finding a way to include the words "decency" and "media" in the same sentence.