NP: Syria, part 1

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Presumably you copied the New Yorker article by way of replying to what 
I wrote about Syria. In reply, I asked:

"Do you take this at face value? Including "Hitler" and the "Angel of 
Death"?

I could have added: Don't you think that one should be cautious about 
this kind of extraordinary claims against a head of state targeted for 
regime change? After the Iraq war? Coming from the NYT?

Care to reply?

Anyway. Peter Hitchens, not at all a political ally of mine but a 
principled anti-war conservative who has done much to debunk what I 
perceive to be the big lie of our age, perfectly summarizes my thoughts 
on the matter:

"I suspect the Third World War will begin with a claimed atrocity — 
probably the use of poison gas by a ‘regime’ against ‘its own people’. 
Such things are now the favorite way to make wars where there was peace.

Border violations went out of fashion years ago. Invasions are illegal 
under the UN Charter. There are no Archdukes left to assassinate. 
‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ will forever evoke hollow laughter. But 
democracy needs a popular pretext for war, and righteous mass outrage 
about the inhumanity of the enemy is almost invariably effective.

This is why it is rather important that the people we trust to verify 
such claims are honest and trustworthy. For who will verify the 
verifiers? Ignore this little matter and we could obliterate the world 
by mistake, sooner than you think."

"We all know Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the ‘Emperor’s New 
Clothes’, which don’t exist, and of the little boy who cries out that 
the potentate is naked, and everyone in the town then joins in with the 
little boy. But experience in this case tells me this is all rubbish. In 
reality the Emperor’s secret police would have arrested the little boy 
and his father and told them to shut up. And of course, the imperial 
media would have kept quiet about the incident, providing detailed 
descriptions for their readers of the monarch’s sumptuous apparel. So it 
has been in the case of the OPCW. The whistle was blown, but hardly 
anyone heard it. Who is verifying the verifiers? Nobody is verifying the 
verifiers, who will one day take us to war — and hell — on a falsehood."

https://spectator.us/trump-syria-missile-strike-scandal/"