I absolutely love the work of Adam Curtis. He is described as a documentarian, but I honestly think his blog highlights his work as a thinker, and his documentaries are more like narrated visual art.

You can almost guarantee that whenever he posts something there, I will respond with something here.

His most recent blog piece “Goodies and Baddies” is very much in his style. He shows rather than tells, except where telling is the quickest way to showing you something else.

The piece documents the controversy that has arisen over many years with regards to “humanist intervention”. In the modern Western World it is often seen as such a cut and dry issue: if there are innocent victims of oppression, it is our duty in the free World to use our collective power to liberate and save them.

However, the history of intervention is littered with stories of how it in fact made the situation worse. He starts with the story of Biafra, and how the media stories the West created about the situation were carefully orchestrated by a PR firm who was working on behalf of the Biafrans. Back then copy-and-paste actually involved some glue, but that didn’t seem to stop them using free copy around a “good story”.

One general even casually admits that the hard currency intended to aid in the fight against famine was in fact used to continue a war. A “charity-funded war”, one commentator suggests in the tone of an Old Etonian rather bothered by modern trends.

Curtis then takes us through the story of Medecins sans Frontieres and their insistance that there was no good or bad victim, only victims. That story in particular seems to have had a resounding effect on leftist politics over the years: if you had spent years opposing the war in Vietnam and the Americans attempting to destroy the Viet Cong, it must have been quite humbling to see those very same Viet Cong victimising thousands of “boat people”.

He takes us further through the early days of Libyan revolution (I bet Gadaffi doesn’t drive himself to work any more), Afghan-Chechen war, Bosnia, the baffling case of the UN HQ in Iraq being blown up (who? why?), and right up to the current intervention in Libya.

Afterwards, if you think you know what is objectively right or wrong about intervention, you didn’t pay attention. We have no framework, because the point you have to come to at the end of the piece is that ultimately the rationale behind it has to be subjective.

Watch the Newsnight clip at the end or Curtis’ blog carefully and you will realise that Bernard Henri-Levy is arguing from a very subjective viewpoint, and his opponent can simply point to the fact that similar interventions are not happening in oil-producing countries to show it. It doesn’t help his case that Henri-Levy loses the argument according to Godwin’s Law anyway.

In the case of Libya, I’ll always support a group looking for more freedom, but I’m very aware we know very little about the motives behind the rebels. It’s not as black-and-white as our political leaders dare suggest.

So do we intervene or not? Do we attempt to be goodies at the risk of history judging us as being baddies? Do we take the Chinese and Russian usual viewpoint (although not in the case of Libya), that we have no business interfering in other’s futures, and allow victims to accuse us of standing idly by?

Such are the issues of international politics and law. Nobody can speak authoritatively about what is wrong or right in any given situation because the issues are so shrouded in the infinite sublime shades of grey that it’s almost impossible to work out whether blowing things up will ever lead to anything good, or indeed if not blowing things up ever will either.

I don’t have an answer to this - nobody can have anything more than an opinion, I think.

But I think one way the World would be a better place is if we admitted that’s what our judgements are: opinions. Not facts induced by objective logical reasoning