"Humanity compels us to retaliate against murderers," the man wrote, "but politics forces us to remain unmoving spectators. Our poorly considered humanity would be more gruesome than our well-considered inhumanity." These words, which sound like a more elegant version of the Western nations' tepid statements of solidarity with the Syrian insurgents, were penned 221 years ago by Jean Baptiste Cloots, a baron who had emigrated from the Lower Rhine region to France to join the revolution.
All the same, Cloots' words are depressingly contemporary. In 1791, it was the residents of Liège who revolted against their regime and looked to France for support, albeit in vain.
Today it is the entire world that looks on helplessly as the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad wages a brutal campaign against its own people, seemingly unable to prevent it from massacring a rebellious population in city after city, attacking residential neighborhoods for days at a time with rockets, shrapnel grenades, snipers and, as it did in Homs, even with knives and hatchets.
The victims' only crime is that they have been protesting peacefully since March of 2011, first for reforms and freedom, and then for the overthrow of a dictatorship in power since 1970, legitimized by nothing more than a coup and its ability to keep the population in a constant state of fear. » | Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The author is a SPIEGEL editor who has reported often on the Syrian uprising against Bashar Assad. Revealing the reporters name would make future research impossible and endanger the journalist's contacts.
