George Szamuely: Difference between revisions

George Szamuely (born 1954) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University. He was a frequent columnist for the Taki's Top Drawer pages of the New York Press. Szamuely has also written for Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, Commentary, The Observer and the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is known for his opposition to Western foreign policy in general and his opposition to Israel. He is a frequent contributor to the RT show CrossTalk.

He was born in Hungary, his father being Tibor Szamuely (1925–1972) and his great-uncle the Communist revolutionary Tibor Szamuely (1890–1919). His sister Helen Szamuely, was a prominent figure in the founding of the UK Independence Party. He was educated in England at University College London and at the London School of Economics. He received a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He worked for some years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and at The National Law Journal. He was also a weekly columnist at the New York Press.

Szamuely was arrested on October 5, 1999, for having 570 overdue library books from the New York University campus library, many of them rare or out of print and most of them related to political science, which he refused to return after repeated warnings.^[1] His fines ran up to $31,000,^[2] although this was allegedly the cost of replacing them.^[3]

Szamuely has been an ardent critic of the United States foreign policy, arguing that the reality is the diametric opposite of the lofty rhetoric. The professed humanitarian aspirations invariably lead to extremely non-humanitarian outcomes.^[4] Despite his former association with the neoconservative Hudson Institute, his opposition to the state of Israel has allied him with the paleoconservatism and libertarianism.^[5]

He has been highly critical of the workings of the United Nations tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.^[6] He argues that the tribunal and human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch foster conflict rather than reconciliation and serve the interests of Western powers and those of their allies by targeting their opponents, while ignoring or minimizing their, often far more serious, crimes.^[7] He has expressed doubts as to whether the International Criminal Court would ever be willing or able to administer impartial justice.^[8] He has argued that Serbia's actions in Yugoslavia have been unfairly misinterpreted.^[9] The invocation of human rights abuses all too often serve to justify NATO military expansion. The United States and key European powers rushed to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, claiming that the human rights abuses suffered by the Kosovo Albanians at the hands of the Serbs demanded it. Yet the same Western powers habitually turn a deaf ear to the sufferings and sovereignty claims of other peoples such as the Palestinians or the South Ossetians.^[10][11]

Szamuely's history of NATO's intervention in the Balkans, Bombs for Peace: NATO's Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia,^[12] is published by Amsterdam University Press.

• The National Evisceration of Democracy