Marco D’Eramo, New Left Review:

The media still denounces Putin’s atrocities and makes obligatory comparisons with the Hitlers and Stalins of the past, yet it does so with the enthusiasm of a bored schoolchild, almost as if le coeur n’y était pas. How many times have we woken up to the news that our former allies have suddenly become reprobates and criminals? How can we forget that Saddam Hussein was furnished with chemical weapons to use against Iran before he was designated a war criminal himself? Or that Bashar al-Assad was deemed reliable enough to torture prisoners at the behest of the CIA before he became a so-called international pariah?

It also strains credulity that the US wants to see alleged war criminals tried in an international tribunal which it does not even recognise; that it supports Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime but refuses to tolerate Russia’s presence in Crimea and the Donbas; that it recognises the ethno-territorial grievances of Kosovar minorities in Serbia but not those of the Russophone minority in Ukraine, and so on. How can we take seriously the West’s invectives against authoritarian regimes, and calls to defend democracy, when our democratic leaders lay out the red carpet for a Saudi Prince who butchers critical journalists and an Egyptian General who executes political prisoners by the tens of thousands?