“My victimhood is bigger than
yours” (hereafter MVBY) is a very popular game these days, particularly around
election season. MVBY is easy to play,
but you can best acquire expertise by going to a university, any university,
and major in one of the “studies” disciplines – Women Studies, Gay/Lesbian
Studies, African American Studies, Latino Studies or maybe Queer Theory or
Post-Colonialism. There are a lot of options to choose from, and the best part
is that when finished, you are fully equipped to make life miserable for anyone
who doubts the particular version of victimhood you espouse. Almost all of the
degrees come with an easily mastered vocabulary of handy accusations, insults
and slurs, an in-your-face attitude that will intimidate most people, and a
self-righteous certainty that is invincible to counterarguments and can withstand
the response of anyone courageous enough be critical or skeptical of your point
of view.
Some of the more gifted graduates
go on to prestige jobs at cable networks like CNN or national newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington
Post. They get well paid to complain about “racism,” “sexism,” "anti-Semitism" and “white
supremacy” and enjoy unmasking the bigotry of the rubes who voted for Trump. Other
graduates become teachers in the schools and universities. They conduct the
“consciousness raising” so that the next generation of victims knows how even
better to articulate its grievances, formulate its demands, and as former
President Obama put it, “Get
in their face.” Those who prefer administrative-human resources
“work,” will find that the “Diversity Industry” is an employment growth-sector.
The rapid expansion of victim groups has stimulated demand for appropriately
credentialed personnel to pursue the workplace perpetrators of
microaggressions, racist dog whistles and hate speech. For the more physically
oriented and less intellectually gifted victim-credentialed folks, there are
opportunities for street work. Join Antifa or BLM, put on a mask, smash some
storefront windows, and beat up anyone who appears to display racist tendencies
or Nazi sympathies. For the less physically oriented, lawyers are aplenty. They
will help you target and maximize the impact of your accusations of
discrimination, harassment and abuse.
However, to get a better sense of
how the politicians and the educators help make MVBY a national past time and
turn schools into propaganda mills, consider this recent development in
Connecticut. From the Hartford
Courant, October, 21, 2018.
“Connecticut
lawmakers moved closer on Monday toward requiring the state's school districts
to teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides, voicing concern
about an uptick an anti-Semitic acts and an apparent lack of knowledge among
many young people about such atrocities. While the state Department of
Education has made an optional course on genocide available to districts,
legislators said many have not used it. ‘We have not done enough to educate the
young,’ said Democratic Rep. Andrew Fleischmann of West Hartford, who voiced concern about recent
polling that has shown a lack of awareness about the Holocaust and the six
million Jewish victims. ‘It's not clear why we would have districts not
teaching this profoundly important subject.’”
The article goes on to add that “The House of Representatives voted 147-0 in
favor of the bill following a somber and poignant debate.” Really? One has
to wonder: just how “somber and poignant” a “debate” could be with a vote of
147 to 0 as the outcome? How long did it last? It sounds more to me like the
sorts of voting that took place in the Council of People’s Commissars back in
the halcyon days of the USSR. “No” is not a career-enhancing move, as everyone,
wink-wink, understands. “It's not clear
why we would have districts not teaching this profoundly important subject.” Come on Commisar Fleischmann! You are just being polite. We
all know what is going on in these districts.
Did anyone in this somber debate
raise what seems to be the most obvious question: Why should the teaching of
“Holocaust and other genocides” be mandatory? Representative Fleischmann says
that this is a “profoundly important subject.” Fine, but let’s drop the
preacherly pose, set the scolding aside for a moment and be upfront and honest: what is
“important” is an outcome heavily conditioned by self-interest and
self-identity. Engineers argue that mathematics and physics are profoundly
important subjects for instruction, for English teachers, literature and
grammar. Devout Catholics want their children to be taught to believe in the
sanctity of life and the mortal sin of abortion, for feminists, the equality of
women, access to abortion, and the social construction of gender are very
important.
Why then does the Holocaust merit
privileged status as a mandatory topic in the schools? The last 3000
years or so of history is full of mass murder, atrocities, rape and pillage. So
much to choose from, so where do you draw the line? You could fill up the
entire K-12 years with nothing else. Given the heavy moralizing that energizes
the teaching of these sorts of topics, unfortunately, the efforts inevitably twist
themselves into tendentious, fact-selective enterprises of enforced dogma that
suffer absolutely no critical or skeptical reaction – true believers are the intended
outcome, anything else is punishable heresy. Look what happened to Larry
Summers a few years back at Harvard. Being a certified victim, or related
to a victim of any atrocity gives the claimant enormous moral, and possibly
political, leverage, which is why, it should seem obvious, that victim-status
has become such a coveted commodity that comes with a vast advocacy network and
legal enforcement apparatus. To wit: “Last
year, the General Assembly passed legislation making the commission of a hate
crime a felony instead of a misdemeanor. Violence and threats based on a
person's gender also were deemed hate crimes. The state's previous law only
protected gender identity or expression, not gender,” also from the Hartford Courant article.
But on with the somber Connecticut
lawmakers: Who then should teach the American children about the “Holocaust and
other genicides”? Before attempting to answer the question, it is reasonable to
conclude that the upper-case “Holocaust” is going to be the centerpiece of
attention given the “uptick of anti-Semitic acts” that young people seem to be
unaware of, as noted by Alan Levin, the regional civil rights chairman of the
Connecticut Anti-Defamation League, who was cited in the Hartford Courant article. One can speculate about ADL priorities
operating in this venue, but what about the lower-case afterthought, the “other
genocides”? Well, to borrow an old Cricket metaphor, that is a bit of “sticky
wicket” because, you see, from the very beginning of its coinage by Raphael
Lemkin and its attachment to Hitler and the Third Reich, “genocide” has been a
tool of cynical ideologues used in the service of self-interest. In a review,
of Stalin’s Genocides by
Norman Naimark (Princeton
University Press) Aaron Rothstein writes in “Bodies Count”:
“Norman
Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies
at Stanford, wonders why Lemkin, and those who followed his analysis at the
United Nations in writing the Genocide Convention, created a concept that
incorporated Hitler’s killings—the attempt to extirpate the Jews was an attempt
to exterminate an ethnic group (and nation)—but did not extend as far as
Stalin’s murders. Naimark points out that Lemkin’s 1933 argument, unlike his
1944 book, included a reference to the extermination of a “social
collectivity.” Such collectivities include political parties or groups
organized around particular ideas; they could be almost any group considered to
be a political opponent. In Lemkin’s earlier analysis, the attempt to
exterminate such groups would also have been considered genocide. But not in
1944. And not in 1948, either, when Lemkin’s work influenced the U.N.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That
document also leaves out social and political collectivities, stating that
genocide includes the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Naimark suggests that the reason
for this alteration in the concept was simple, but it has had large
consequences: Lemkin did not want to upset Stalin who, despite brutally
exterminating political groups in the Soviet Union, was vital to the Allied war
effort against Hitler.”
Yes, it was extremely important
not to “upset Stalin” which meant that his mass-murders – millions of Ukraine
peasants, the Katyn Wood massacre, as well as his extensive mass-deportations
and ethnic cleansing during WWII, and the million-plus slave-laborers in the
Gulag – would have to be conveniently overlooked. Lemkin himself in a recent
study by Anton Weiss-Wendt, who directs research at the Center for the Study of
the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway, emerges as an unsavory
opportunist. In a review:
“Rather than the ‘saintly figure’ of popular
accounts, Weiss-Wendt instead presents Lemkin as ‘a rather odious character—
jealous, monomaniacal, self-important, but most of all unscrupulous’, complicit
in the gutting of his own creation. As early as 1947, Lemkin himself favored
the exclusion of political groups in order to secure adoption of the treaty,
and enlisted the World Jewish Congress in this effort.” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, September, 2017)
Genocide as a moral and legal concept from its establishment by the
United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948 has been selectively applied and
politically manipulated so as to make its current application a dubious
polemical ploy that certifies victimhood with an exclamation point. The Wikipedia
“List of
Genocides by Death Toll” has a total of thirty-five genocides that range
back to 135 BC, “the Punic battle of Carthage.” It also cites the “Canadian residential school
system (Canadian genocide)” that claimed somewhere between “3,200 and 32,000 lives
over 120 years” (a multi-generational conspiracy apparently). Not on the list
was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that in five years killed between 20 and 40
million Chinese. The Wikipedia list also states that “Scholars are divided and their debate is inconclusive on
whether the Holodomor [Stalin’s terror famine that killed three to five million
Ukrainians] falls under the definition of genocide.” When what counts as “genocide”
is elusive enough to put the “scholars” in opposition over 3 to 5 million dictator-designed
dead people and inclusive enough to put the Canadian residential school system
in the dock over 32,000 or is it 3,200 or maybe 32?), it is time, the next time you hear the word, to kick
the dog and go out and mow your lawn.
In
2012 Paul Preston, a prolific British historian of the Spanish civil war,
published a massive work entitled, The
Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain.
Preston just couldn’t help himself: he says so in the Prologue to the book (xi). So now, it seems, “Holocaust” is going the
way of “genocide” with Franco joining the ranks of Hitler in the “circles of
evil” rankings. This made Preston wildly popular with the Spanish leftists who
are now set to evict Franco from the hated Valle
de los Caidos and who will probably soon blow
the place up. I don’t know, however, if Preston heard from the Anti-Defamation
League and Deborah Lipstad, the self-appointed guardian of Holocaust orthodoxy,
with accusations of trademark infringement, but, clearly, there are powerful
incentives to push the envelope of guilt and inflationary pressure at work for
those who toil at manipulating the nomenclature-of-evil, trying to move their favorite
victim-class to the front of the line.
So, to
return to the question: Who then should teach the American children
about the “Holocaust and other genocides”?
Here, from the Hartford Courant,
is the Connecticut solution:
“Under the legislation, local and regional school boards must include
the topic in their social studies curriculum beginning with the 2018-19 school
year. It is estimated the mandate could cost districts less than $5,000, but
the legislation allows local school officials to use free, online resources and
to accept grants and donations to cover the cost.”
A bit of online research will
indicate the likely source of the “free, online resources,” and elementary
deductive logic will point you in the right direction to guess about the content
and structure. Oh, and note the direction, from “must include the topic…” to ... “the legislation allows local schools to use free online resources…” Alan Levin from the ADL, I’ll bet, has an uncle
in the furniture business.
But let me confidently speculate about a few of the things that the students of Connecticut and those in the nineteen other states in line to make Holocaust education mandatory will not learn from their Holocaust education:
Churchill’s
firebombing of 131 cities during WWII, immolating hundreds of thousands of
German civilians, including women and children – war crimes under international
law (Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand:
Deutschland Im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945, Propylean, 2002);
The predominant role that Jewish
Bolsheviks played in the murder of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, fourteen year
old son and four daughters -- bayoneted to death (Mark Weber, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik
Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime,” (The
Unz Review);
The rape and murder
of tens of thousands of German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945 (Anthony Beevor, “They Raped every Female from Eight to Eighty” in The
Guardian);
The ethnic cleansing and
force deportation of fifteen million ethnic Germans from “liberated” central
Europe, of which two million died from starvation, disease and murder – the
result of Potsdam Conference in 1945 with Truman, Churchill and Attlee in
collusion with human rights champion, Joseph Stalin (Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, 1977);
Ethnic cleansing and
deportation of Palestinians; the dispossession and theft of their property; the
massacres and atrocities of Israeli hero, Ariel Sharon; and Golda Meir’s declamation
of diversity and inclusion from 1969: “There
was no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a
Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and
we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.”
(Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs
and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Grove Press, 2017, p. 224).
This list could go on
for a very long time, but the victims of these atrocities and many of the
others that could be cited are not currently in fashion and will not be anytime
soon. And so, we have come full circle back to the high stakes game of “My victimhood
is greater than yours.” At some point it should become obvious that certain
people take this game more seriously than others and play it much better than anyone
else.
