SACRAMENTO, CA -- Things are going to get rough in this column. Oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling. Put yours on first before helping the child next to you. Then breathe normally while I excoriate someone who for years has avoided the whipping he deserves.

His name is Stephen Lewis, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations and now a member of a UN panel that recently released a report on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when Hutu militias massacred countless
thousands of Tutsis. It was Africans killing Africans out of ethnic hatred, far from the only time this has
happened in recent years. But the report blames, yes, you guessed it, the west, with the United States
singled out for harsh criticism.

There was little the United States or any other country could do to prevent the Rwandan savagery. But Lewis
blasts the west for failing to prevent the attacks and for failing to apologize. It gets worse. Just as Germany helped Israel as atonement for the Holocaust, Lewis says, developed countries should make massive
transfers of money to Rwanda. As a second’s reflection will reveal, this reductio ad Hitlerium is ludicrous
and loathsome even by the UN’s low standards. But it is fully in keeping with Mr. Lewis, a veritable pillar of
arrogance, sanctimoniousness, and political correctness.

Wait. I almost forgot to tell you, Stephen Lewis is one of Canada’s great national socialists, though “Canadian
socialist” is a kind of oxymoron. Lewis was an unsuccessful New Democratic Party candidate for premier of Ontario, a member of the Socialist International. Like other prominent members of the international chattering classes, he’s never actually run anything but his mouth, which during the Cold War he kept busy blaming the United States for that conflict and demanding that the United States withdraw from every place where it was engaged in the battle against Soviet socialist expansionism. Like the rest of the Left, he charged that this withdrawal would bring “peace.” It didn’t.

American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, it might be recalled, was followed by the worst bloodbath of our
time, in Cambodia. That occurred in 1975 but it wasn’t until 1978 that Lewis’s vaunted UN even agreed to
consider whether the Khmer Rouge regime had violated human rights. But by then Lewis and the Left had moved on to other anti-western, anti-American causes, and new Marxist messiahs such as the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro, whose seventeenth-rate regime the Canadian government has helped to prop up for years. But now the Left actively promotes widespread western interference in the affairs of other countries.

Globalism and capitalism are bad, we are told, but please send billions of dollars to Rwanda. Many of Africa’s woes, particularly in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, may be traced to the imposition of socialism, which created its usual record of poverty, misery, and death. Stephen Lewis has nothing to say about the millions of victims of Ethiopia’s forced collectivization and terror campaigns, all on the Stalinist model. But he does confirm that socialism remains what it was all along, the preferred dogma of incoherent utopians, at once predictable, and totally without significance.

American diplomats should ignore the recommendations of the Rwanda report and demand an apology from Stephen Lewis.

- K. Lloyd Billingsley