“What Russia is sponsoring and doing [in Syria] is not counter-terrorism. It is barbarism,” ranted Samantha Power, US Representative to the United Nations (UN). The US representative to the UN, Ambassador ‘Ranting Sam’ Samantha Power, accused the Russian and Syrian governments of ‘barbarism’, claiming Moscow or Damascus had attacked an unarmed UN humanitarian convoy delivering aid to civilians in Aleppo. No evidence was presented. Rants and threats do not require facts or proof; they only require vehement emotional ejaculations and compliant mass propaganda organs.
Prof Petras reasons that ‘Barbarians’, to be clear, evoke images of leaders and groups, which abjure all civilised norms and laws and they only respond to armed force. In the present context, Prof Petras asserts that Samantha Power’s charges of barbarism against Russia and Syria was used to justify the US aerial bombardment of a Syrian army outpost, which killed and maimed almost 200 government troops engaged in combating ISIS terrorists and jihadi invaders. In other words, accusing Syrian soldiers of ‘barbarism’ was Ambassador Power’s cynical way of dehumanising the young victims of an earlier and deliberate US war crime. In his article, Petras asks us to analyse the appropriate context for the use and abuse of the language of ‘barbarism’ – and its rightful application.
