<b>Tribune, 8th April 2011

Ian Williams
Support the Good Deed, Not the Doer of It!</b>
<i>Orwell's Take on Libya</i>
“What would George Orwell have said?” is an old game that is nonetheless relevant fo
r Tribune, whose pages the grumpy “lower upper middle class” columnist graced for so
many years. On Libya, there is little doubt that he would have supported interv
ention. Just as, almost certainly, the ranks of opposition to intervention incl
ude many of those who saw Orwell as a traitor to socialism for telling the truth
about Soviet tyranny and exposing the eccentricities of some true believers on
the Left, among whom, we can be sure he would pilloried some of anti-imperialist
tourists who have made the trip to Tripoli to learn from the “Libyan revolution.”
Orwell, with his pragmatic realization that the world was not divided into saint
s and sinners, would certainly have supported intervention. “There is hardly such
a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one sid
e stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction,” he
wrote after he returned from Spain, where, let us remember, he was on the liquid
ation list of the Soviet agents whose supporters were and are so quick to denoun
ce Orwell as a traitor to the left.
He was well aware of the imperfection of the side he was fighting for. Of course
, if the Spanish Republicans were to apply the same high ethical standards deman
ded by some on the Left of those now intervening in Libya, they would have scorn
ed Moscow’s help. The famine, the purges and the camps were all in operation and a
t the time Stalin had far more blood on his hands than either Hitler or Mussolin
i. But nobody else was offering. It would indeed have been much better for Franc
e and Britain to have lent support to Madrid’s democracy, but as we know, in Londo
n at least there was a tendency to think Franco could be a force for stability.
Who knew what would happen if the Republicans had won? After all, there were pr
ovably more Anarchists among the Republicans than Al-Qaeda among the Libyan oppo
sition. And possibly some of the Left would have opposed such imperialist ventur
es - they did after all oppose intervention on behalf of Poland.
There are, of course, those who can greet with equanimity atrocities perpetrated
under the guise of anti-imperialism, either by denying or ignoring them. The Sl
obodan Milosevic fan club that ignores the stench of Bosnian mass graves from Sr
ebrenica, or of rotting Kosovo cadavers discovered under police stations in Serb
ia, is made of strong enough stuff to regard a few dead Libyans as a small price
to pay to fight imperialism.
In contrast, this intervention is mandated by the United Nations Security Counci
l and was response to the threat by the Libyan regime to massacre its own citize
nry in Benghazi and Tobruk. The intended victims pleaded with the world to help
them. So the real question to pose to those who oppose intervention is “What would
you do about it?”
The dilemma is most manifest in Moscow. Russia could have vetoed Resolution 1973
. It could have supported it, amended it, and insisted on a share of command and
control. It did not. It recognised that even by its own relaxed Chechnyan stand
ards, what Gaddafi was doing was insupportable. So it adopted the harlot’s preroga
tive of power without responsibility. It let the intervention go ahead and now c
arps from the sidelines to preserve its own purity.
Ideally of course, it would be better if the intervention had been conducted by
countries without imperialist pasts, or oil interests. But Timor Leste, or Irela
nd, or Jamaica, do not have the wherewithal for such operations, and generally h
ave their own problems. When the Good Samaritan crosses the road to help, we do
not question whether he was point scoring over those bloody Pharisees, or checki
ng the victim’s pouch to see if there was anything left, or even whether he treate
d his servants and wife well. We support the deed, not the person, or the countr
y.