Moral Influences--And The Lack Thereof, Then And Now

Like Power Line, Roger Kimball also reminds us that the big story yesterday wasn’t the John Edwards affair (though what it says about the media has some key repercussions, far beyond Edwards himself), but the Soviets Russians invading Georgia:

The whole drama as the eerie sense of history repeating itself. The London Times today carries an article about “The Revolt in Georgia”–not the one unfolding before our eyes, but the revolt against Soviet occupation in September 1924. The Soviets had initially recognized Georgia’s independence in the wake of the First World War, but occupied the country in 1921 and brutally put down the revolt that erupted three years later. At the time, the president of Georgia made an appeal to the League of Nations. The Times reports that although “sympathetic reference” to Georgia was made in the assembly, “it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid and the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to to make an impression upon Soviet Russia.”

That was in 1924. What sort of impression do you suppose the “moral influence” of the successor institution to the League of Nations, the U.N., is likely to have on the uncivilized successor to the U.S.S.R.?

Similarly, Russia’s invasion should generate precisely the same intense non-reaction that Germany’s mobilization had on English intellectuals in the 1930s.