Climate of Fear : The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

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The sacred — including the infant crèche — appears to diminish by the day…

The above line, an admission of my fears for an emerging pattern, appears in “ ‘I Am Right; You Are Dead,’ ” the last of the five Reith lectures published in this volume. Those fears would be hideously realized in Belsan, in the Russian Federation, through the agency of no less an individual than the warrior Shamil Basayev, to whom I called attention in 2000, after his invasion of Dagestan. Regarding his exploits and pronouncements, I wrote:

Let me take your minds back to an incident in the Chechnyan war that you may all have forgotten, since that episode has long become subsumed under the culture of competitive atrocities that has marked the war between the Chechnyan nationalists and the Russian state. I was quite sympathetic to the aspirations of Chechnya for some form of self-determination. I still am, but I could not help taking apprehensive note of this minor episode; it was illustrative of much of the conditioning that goes with certain wars of liberation whose declarations warn one, in advance, of the oppressive transformation that would inevitably take place after the phase of liberation is over.

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