As news reached Britain in 1945 of the death camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, Vera Brittain, the famed pacifist author, maintained that these horrors were being publicised “partly, at least, in order to divert attention from the havoc produced in German cities by allied obliteration bombing”. Campaigners who declare their humanitarian concerns can sometimes fail to gasp the basic moral distinction between a just cause and an evil one. A case of comparable obtuseness is provided by Amnesty International, the human rights charity.
Originally devoted to publicising cases of “prisoners of conscience”, Amnesty has this week determinedly set about shredding its credibility by serving as a megaphone for the propaganda of the Putin regime. On the basis of a few weeks spent by its researchers in