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“Genocide” is a word that has lost its meaning … — 47 Comments

  1. Those on the right who aren’t keen on Jews don’t usually utter the “genocide” accusation;
    ==
    The Unz commentariat does.

  2. “Genocide” is a word that has lost its meaning . . .

    . . . like, errmmm, “fascist”, “nazi”, “white”, “racist”, “[prefix-]phobic”, . . .

  3. (Apologies)

    Many years ago in Philly we used to jest that Genocide is what Pat’s wants to do to their competitor cheese-steak shop across the street.

  4. Don’t fret Neo. She is a most likely Far Left, out there protesting Israeli genocide against the Palis.

  5. Apartheid is second only to genocide in its magic malevolence for the anti-semites, and some ex-presidents.

  6. They use the word genocide because that is what they intend and for which they lust.

    Ideological fanatics do not tolerate dissent. The more principled the dissent, the more it is viewed as an intolerable anathema.

    “Scarborough Makes Doomsday Prediction for Trump Second Term: Trump Will ‘Execute’ Anyone ‘He is Allowed To’”

    “Inside every ‘progressive’ is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” David Horowitz

  7. “I thought I’d let her know why that was an incorrect use of the word – maybe she simply didn’t understand…”

    I had to chuckle at that story, a little bitterly. I’ve had *so* many conversations like that. They all ended the way yours did.

  8. Those on the right who aren’t keen on Jews don’t usually utter the “genocide” accusation;

    –neo

    My KKK friend was second-in-command of the 1980s paramilitary White Patriot Party. He explained that Jews, blacks, and people of color to be “mud people.” Whites are the true Israelites.

    He ended up serving ten years in prison for conspiracy against Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    My friend was an Eagle Scout and a Green Beret. He came from a great family. His father was a high school principal.

    My friend was a great guy except …

    I don’t know what to say. I still wonder what happened to him.

  9. The intellectual hollowness of the left is demonstrated by their use of words, not to communicate ideas and increase understanding, but to muddle and confuse. It was one of Ayn Rand’s more subtle (she did not have many) observations about totalitarian movements.

  10. Since scarborough has actually killed people, he has some experience in these things sarc

  11. “Inside every ‘progressive’ is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” David Horowitz

    As a progressive I had my totalitarian moments 🙂 , but mostly I was trying to fend off my comrades’ efforts to push me in that direction.

    There are many progressives who are genuinely liberal — another word which has lost its meaning.

    Ann Coulter was a Deadhead. She loved the Dead and she went to more than a hundred concerts. As she explained the apparent contradiction to an interviewer:
    ______________________________________

    As a Deadhead and a freedom-lover, I am wounded to the bone that you think [being conservative and Deadhead] do not naturally go hand in hand. The Deadheads I just met casually and not through conservative politics were almost always right-thinking, whatever they called themselves. Deadheads believe in freedom – not a government telling people how much water they can have in their toilets or where they can smoke or whether they should be allowed to own a gun.

    –Ann Coulter

  12. “They use the word genocide because that is what they intend and for which they lust.” – GB

    100% true. The left always projects their deeds and desires against those they hate. Always.

    That of which they accuse is precisely that which they do or want to do.

  13. Maybe some know better and want to tie you up in fruitless arguments. By arguing back, they imply they’re open to facts and…you keep going.

    But I think it’s because they name anything they don’t like with something all of us are supposed to hate and thus recruit others.

    The actual believers are irrational and must be presumed to be so in pretty much anything else.

  14. Well, if you control language you control the argument. C.S. Lewis certainly understood, and expressed the idea through the medium of Humpty Dumpty.

    I suppose that the concept of deliberately applying words out of context in order to control thought dates to the dawn of human interaction.

    In the United States I believe that we have been negligent by not defending against the tactic. We have now reached the point that certain words cannot even be used in their original context, while others are forced out of context for the purpose of obfuscation.

    There was a time when I was young, and a gay little fellow. Now, I am neither young nor gay.

  15. The actual [leftist] believers are irrational and must be presumed to be so in pretty much anything else

    Richard Aubrey:

    I take that as the human condition. From which I don’t exclude the right. Which is why I throw in my old KKK friend into the comments here, now and then.

    My friend was not stupid. He was not damaged. Intact family. Eagle Scout. Green Beret. He was not leftist. He believed he was rational. And that he had the Bible on his side.

    Yet he fell down the neo-Nazi rabbit hole.

    Fundamentally humans are not rational. They have to work at it. And even then…

    I miss my friend.

  16. Occasionally I worry participants suspect I am embellishing or making stuff up.

    Here’s my friend marching in the White Patriot Party. He’s the guy directly behind Frazier Glenn Miller, the guy leading with the bullhorn. (Miller was executed in 2021 for trying to kill Jews.)

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2008/son-race-traitor-killed-after-shooting-officer

    My friend was the chaplain of the WPP. Note that he carries a large book unlike the others. That book is the Bible.

    I really have spent a fair amount of time trying to square the circle of how my friend ended up in that parade, prominently carrying the Bible.

  17. For many years I wondered why people worried that we would forget the Holocaust. I had seen the pictures, I knew the stories, and the horrors that someone would even attempt such a thing. They were etched in my brain – I was 13 when the Holocaust was revealed to the world. How foolish I was to think it could not possibly be forgotten.

    The minds of humans are malleable. Facts can be blurred, erased, rewritten. History can be changed. I learned many years ago that we HAVE to remember the Holocaust and remember it right. The evil that men do can be erased, blurred, rewritten as a good deed, and when it is, more people suffer and die needlessly.

    Propaganda is powerful stuff. The world is now awash in it. Academia and social media work in concert to spread it like fog into every nook and cranny of the world. Accademia and social media have become the bullhorns of propaganda. Get off social media and get out of academia if you want to hold onto reality.

  18. huxley

    Does seem like a conundrum.

    Sowell suggested the problem is that Jews succeed.

    Back in the day, after I got my Infantry commission, I went to jump school. OCS being so tough, the fearsome jump school wasn’t much of a deal. I applied to Ranger School but biffed the swimming test–got tangled up with the dummy cord on the rifle I was carrying. Could have reapplied but didn’t get around to it. Ranger school is so rough that guys who went there first before jump school usually had “profiles”, which is to say medical excuses for not having to do that PT and so forth, which is hardly relevant since they’d been run half way to ruin physically and would be in pretty good shape once they recovered. And sleep? Never heard of it.
    And you have to be really good at the Defense Language Apitude Test–I was but was taking that in a different direction, so I can testify it’s tough.
    Then you get to be in the Special Forces training which is especially difficult. Once you get the Beret, you’ve accomplished a whole hell of a lot that really good guys couldn’t.
    And that’s before deployment. You don’t reinvent the wheel. You rack your guts trying to decide if it’s a wheel we need today or an airstrike. IOW, very tough.

    So your friend has accomplished more than pretty much anybody could.

    Both that and the Eagle Scout award require a great deal of goal-directed personal energy whose existence is not invisible to the individual. He knows what he did.

    And yet the Jews…. Their success is in the world he now inhabits once he’s left the military. His accomplishments are not useful and his gifts, such as are applicable for a civilian, are not immediately bringing him great success.

    And the Jews seem successful without breaking a sweat. Maybe that…. They have to be cheating. Yeah, that’s it.

  19. Richard Aubrey:

    I’m glad you explain what it means to become an Eagle Scout and then Green Beret. My friend was special and he was a great surfer buddy.

    However, I don’t believe his problem was Jew envy. As a young man he was seduced by the notion of esoteric knowledge. After the military what he really wanted to do was go on an expedition to find the Sasquatch. Laugh, if you will.

    Instead he fell in with a group of neo-Nazi Christians. Being the Eagle Scout/Green Beret guy he was, he threw himself into the Cause totally gung-ho.

    He would make an interesting documentary, if he would talk to anybody.

  20. I’ve got to say there were a bunch of crummy days at the local surf break where my friend and I were the only ones out surfing because we were both so stupidly in love with the sport.

    But he would ride, kamikaze-style, into the breaking wave….

  21. huxley:

    I think the appeal to your friend may be like what appeals to a lot of fringe conspiracy theorists of various kinds – they feel superior to the ordinary run of people. Instead, they are in on some secret knowledge about the inner workings of things.

  22. huxley:

    You didn’t say what your friend did in for work in civilian life. But it occurs to me that he was an achievement-oriented joiner. Eagle Scout, Green Beret. He seemed to be happy in groups that were dedicated to goals. Maybe civilian life wasn’t enough for him, and the appeal of the group he joined was the appeal of a goal-focused group. The goal was pretty awful, but it may have filled that need for him.

  23. Instead, they are in on some secret knowledge about the inner workings of things.

    neo:

    Agreed. It can be a potent attractor.

    Of course, aren’t we all conspiracy theorists now?

  24. You didn’t say what your friend did in for work in civilian life.

    neo:

    Well, OK, I glossed over that part.

    My friend failed to find a position on a Sasquatch expedition. He had the military creds to be a pilot, but failed because there was already a surplus of pilots from the Vietnam War.

    What’s a poor flying boy to do? He became a drug smuggler. And got busted on the first run.

    His confederates immediately sold him out as the mastermind behind the operation. At the trial he played sufficiently dumb on the stand, so the judge and jury realized he was being framed and let him off.

    I lean towards the notion my friend was motivated by a certain glamour.in life.

  25. Some of my point is that it’s not simple how people end up doing what they do.

    And that people on the right are not exempt from irrationality either.

  26. @ huxley – maybe your friend had a personal experience with a Jewish person that led him to extrapolate the bad interaction to every Jew.
    That happens all the time (all lawyers are crooks because ONE lawyer hurt me badly, to take a non-ethnic example).
    Once you decide that ALL of THOSE people are bad, it’s easy to back-engineer justifications , either before or after falling in with people who agree with you.

    “He ended up serving ten years in prison for conspiracy against Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

    That seemed incongruous with the rest of his history, so I wonder what beef he had with the SPLC.

  27. Curiouser and curiouser.
    How many Eagle Scouts become drug smugglers?
    Was your friend in prison before or after joining the KKK and/or WPP?

    “people on the right are not exempt from irrationality either.”
    This is true, but the Right is not in control of the majority of government, corporations, and media on this turn of the wheel.

    I suspect irrationality is a facet of extremism per se rather than the left-right divide, at least as it used to exist in America when the Middle of the Road actually was in the partisan-political center (or at least bounced around close to it).

  28. On the inability of the leftist-allied persons to recognize reality when it mugs them, Sarah’s post today explores the same topic.
    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/11/21/buckets-of-icy-water/

    There is a tendency in humans, individual or in groups, to go along to get along, which in turn gives us an inertia of the normal. “Normalcy bias.” How much normalcy bias depends, honestly on how much people’s iron rice bowl depends on their not noticing things.

    That people have been red pilled at all even when it goes against interest is a sign of how out there our times are, and how horrendously insane the overculture is.

    Because people are well paid not to notice malfeasance in their own in group, when noticing casts them to the out group.

    And the left, once it had weaponized the era of mass communication — yes, it was intentional, they always in any targeted country, took over all means of mass communication, and then means of dissemination of art and literature. it was part of the subversion protocol — had that going for them. Once they had taken over that small sector of society, it was very hard for society as a whole to go up against them and/or wake up.

    Hence why reading so many accounts of communist take over (or fascist. It was all Marxism, after all) is like watching a sleep walker walking towards the abyss while all attempts at waking up failed.

    It’s not that most people won’t do it. It’s that most people can’t do it.

    [But] societies change and revolutions happen. And some of them even short of dire. And revolutions in the era of mass communication were amazingly instructive, too. It seems that controlling everything doesn’t really allow — as to an extent people like Aldous Huxley or George Orwell thought — control of people’s minds. It allows control of what people say or show. And leaves dissenters feeling very isolated. But when due to some event people finally realize the majority feels as they do, the results are…. explosive.

    But secondly, go see the verb tenses I used for having control of mass communications. You see, they HAD full control of means of communication. But they don’t now. And the ways in which it has escaped them are ways they didn’t anticipate. Some of the greatest blows to their cause have, in fact, come from what their allies or they, themselves, did trying to regain control and shove everyone back in line. Because they have put out messages they thought would rally or scare the masses, but which, instead, woke people who suddenly saw the abyss.

    Arguably this started happening with Reagan’s election and his performance in office.

    I like to imagine what it would have been like if we’d had blogs and the internet with access to the common man then. Because it would have been amazing. You see, there was maybe these two or three years where, gloriously, everyone knew stuff like communism sucked and top down economies didn’t work.

    But we didn’t have open communication. So while a lot of people actually woke up and walked away from leftism, it was quiet. It involved a lot of self-blacklisting. It involved their former colleagues thinking they’d gone mad. It wasn’t general. Not a bang, but a whimper. …
    If you were in the know, you could see the old leftist horrors move back into top positions here and abroad, and anyone who dissented being pushed out and down, now more forcefully, since they reminded the people in power that they were in fact wrong, and that reality was in fact against them.

    But the buckets of cold water continued. 9/11 was the next big one I remembered, where a lot of people woke up. Though a lot of feminists for real woke up when people they trusted and believed in said not a peep at Clinton’s abuse of a young woman over whom he stood in a position of authority.

    Since then the hits keeps coming.

    In fact, their doubts are characterized most of all by their refusal to think. If you bring up stuff that would force them to question, examine, or apply logic, they shut down. Sometimes they shut down visibly, and sometimes they just scream and insult you to get you to go away. This is worse if they’re older.

    Why do I say this betrays their doubts? Because in the sixties and seventies, when things like Freud or (eh) Margaret Mead hadn’t been debunked and exploded, they loved to discuss this stuff. They would bring up (largely made up) facts and figures, which you couldn’t counter, because your stuff wasn’t getting published. They were full of whataboutism and supposed righteous logic. Now they just want it to stop.

    In the same way, they increasingly try to censor interactions and stop people talking.

    But no matter how much they suppress, repress and shout over, their very own side, their very attempts at consolidating reality, keep dumping buckets of cold water.

    And then the attempt at damage control, at making sympathy with Israel “double plus ungood” and making it stop, those ridiculous mass demonstrations, and tearing down of the hostages posters?

    All of that woke more people up. I keep coming across people on twitter sadly lamenting “How has the left got this evil and irrational? We’ve never been like this before.”

    These are people who are my age or a little older, and it would make me laugh, if I weren’t so busy crying.

    Because they’ve been evil and stupid irrational for all of my life, and obviously so since the eighties.

    However the hits keep coming. Because on one side, we’re in the end stage of “socialism/communism glorifies and rewards politically correct incompetence, which causes everything to fall apart.” This might be tolerated in China or the USSR/Russia for a while, because frankly, they have experience of neither freedom nor prosperity. But we have experience of both, even if the first was illusory at various points in the 20th century. (Also relative. We were still more free than most of the world.) So, the way things fall apart and contradict the socialist verities is unavoidable, and people tend to believe their lying eyes. (Which is, btw, how Reagan got elected in the eighties.) And the patches put on the old tired Soviet agit prop are popping faster.

    The buckets of water are already lined up. They can’t help but fall. And the left’s attempts at stopping them — because they are, ultimately, at war with reality, and reality is a bitch, it always wins — just means they become extra-icy and fall extra-hard.

  29. Simple version:

    1. Pretend that Israel is Brett Kavanaugh (or DJT).
    2. Ramp up the volume 1000 times.
    3. Call what you’re doing “Liberation from Occupation”, “Eradicating Apartheid” and “Fighting for Justice and Peace”(TM).
    4. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum (using additional—and creative—lies and slanders).
    5. Voila!

  30. I don’t think Jews are so qualitatively different from other groups that have have been through hell and back: The survivors are a self-selected group who made it by dint of some combination of intelligence, street smarts, and pure will. Sowell didn’t single out the Jews; he mentioned other ethnic groups like the Vietnamese and Chinese who come to America and within a generation are thriving. The relative success of the Jews may be the result of this Darwinian winnowing process having been repeated again and again for centuries. It’s probably also helped by the religious tradition that emphasizes literacy and learning.

  31. huxley,

    Coincidentally this was in James Lileks’ bleat today (https://lileks.com/bleats/archive/23/1123/43.html). Unfortunately your friend is not unique:

    William Astor “Willie” Chanler (June 11, 1867 – March 4, 1934) was an American soldier, explorer, and politician who served as U.S. Representative from New York. He was a son of John Winthrop Chanler. After spending several years exploring East Africa, he embarked on a brief political career. Chanler regarded it as an American obligation to be on the side of the people who fought for their independence, and during his life he participated in rebellions and independence struggles in Cuba, Libya, and Somalia. He provided support for insurgents in Venezuela, Turkey, and China. He maintained an active lifestyle even after losing his right leg in 1915. Late in life, he became a novelist and an outspoken antisemite.

    James Lileks added, “Odd how ‘antisemite’ looks like a career choice.”

  32. Jimmy
    Sowell applies those characteristics to “minority middlemen” anywhere, whichever the ethnic group they may be.

    Saw a table of median family income by ethnic group, further broken down by origin. Lots of non-white immigrants ahead of native-born whites.

    Talked to a guy who’d married a girl born to parents who’d met in a WWII Japanese-American internment camp. Said Japanese Americans, now, think it forced assimilation, as opposed to various versions of Little Tokyo. Which was good.

    All that said, Jews, for the most part in the US are not immigrants, nor seen as such.

  33. Actually the noun genocide, since 1917 or so, has rarely, if ever been assigned to any left wing group or left wing government regardless of how many have been murdered.
    The left has literally hijacked the word and they only apply it to those entities they are politically opposed to (e.g., the USA).

    If Israel had been a long time ally of the USSR and maintained a government that was anti-American, who thinks the “genocide” would be applied to Israeli military actions ??
    Who thinks there would be any US based academics and their lemming-like students demonstrating on behalf of Hamas? (other than perhaps Palestinians; maybe).

    Hamas, for leftists, is an anointed group; just another wagon leftists use to hitch their horses. Because Hamas aims to exterminate a very strong US ally, and thus hope to diminish US influence / standing in the world, it is supported by the left.

  34. huxley

    Not to over-egg the pudding, whatever that means, but I thought I’d provide some further info on the Green Berets.

    They were a follow-on to the US’ WW II Office of Strategic Services and the similar Brit “Jedburgh Teams”.

    These were small groups, maybe two or three, frequently including a resistance leader who’d escaped occupied territory and a couple of our operatives. Their mission was to organize such resistance as could be found and coordinate with Allied forces. “We need a dozen Sten guns and a thousand rounds. Call back to arrange….”

    Once the Cold War was on, the same issue was raised and the idea of the Special Forces came up. Indeed, early on, many of the recruits were nationals from Warsaw Pact countries, who knew the culture and the language and even the accents.

    The action group was the A Team. Ten NCO, in five pairs, each having a specialty; medicine, heavy weapons including the enemy’s, light weapons ditto, communications, intel. And two officers.

    These were not to be used as commando teams as small combat units, although they’d have been good at it. But when bullets start flying, your level of training becomes less relevant.

    Point was, organizing irregulars and in this role they were active in Viet Nam. They were among the first to go to Afghanistan after 9-11 to work with anti-Taliban forces.

    Their training involved language, of course, and at least a bit of cultural anthropology.

    But they were awarded the Green Beret back before there was any headgear much different from WW II. And they had status, especially in the eyes of those not in the military.

    But everybody wanted some counterinsurgency money so the Air Force had Air Commandos whose role I never found out.

    The Navy has the SEALs who might work with the locals but who make their PR by doing unit ops by themselves.

    And, for commando stuff, the Army has Delta Force, since the Green Berets are doing other stuff, and can draw from the 75th Ranger Regiment for conventional combat units. See Operation Kayla Mueller on youtube–“liveth forever”. Lots of info on putting together a task force.

    Anyway, it would be interesting to know if your friend had in mind sneaking around the hills of Slovakia with a bunch of ragged locals looking to blow up an arms cache.

    Or maybe it was the GREEN BERET which drew his notable talents and drive and then….now what?

  35. you get a flavor of that in the john wayne film when the team is describing their language and other proficiencies,

  36. Re: Green Beret friend

    AesopFan:

    As far as I know, my friend — let’s call him S. — bore no particular grudge against Jews or Blacks. Much of his story is based on the same concerns conservatives have. However, he reached different conclusions.

    I have a thirteen-minute video interview of my friend for Christian Identity, another right-wing, racialist, Christian group. I’m summarizing from that interview.

    While in the Army S. became aware the that the US government was not what it claimed and in fact was being “sold down the river to the communists.” Searching for answers, he started reading history and politics. At the same time he had been spurred to read the Bible by born-again Christians trying to convert him.

    I don’t know the details, but somehow out of those ingredients, he had a born-again experience based on the Bible and racial politics. He heard a voice which told him he must become a minister for Yahweh the Most High. Later at introductory meetings with new Klan recruits he would tell them:
    _________________________________

    We are the True Children of Israel of the Holy Bible, America is the latter-day Promised Land, and our mission is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth…. I say the Klan and the Bible go hand in hand.
    _________________________________

    It was a sincere conversion. S. changed his life. His mother was skeptical of the transformation, but told me that S. had become a better person in everyday ways.

    Be careful what you believe because you will believe it.

  37. Huxley
    “Sold out”
    Maybe he thought it odd, what the green beanies were up to, out there, in the dark.

  38. Maybe he thought it odd, what the green beanies were up to, out there, in the dark.

    Richard Aubrey:

    S. was a gung-ho guy. I doubt he had problems with what Special Forces did. If anything, he felt the military was hamstrung by the liberals.

    I’m sure my Green Beret friend was also motivated by the same dissatisfactions Reagan voters felt in the 70s/80s.

    My friend was brought up in a strict Christian family. He always had chores to do. It was always, “Yes, Ma’am” and “Yes, Sir” with his parents. He became an Eagle Scout. His father was a high school principal.

    S. liked to have a good time and he loved to surf, but he didn’t go hippie or New Left. Nor did he do drugs to my knowledge.

  39. AesopFan:

    My takeaway is that my friend had a serious conversion experience which was contaminated by bad beliefs.

    Such experiences are accompanied by high energy, feelings that one is illumined and can see so much more, and that one must change one’s life accordingly.

    There is a strong tendency to overvalue everything associated with the experience. I believe my friend had been drawn into white supremacist circles and that became the meaning of his experience.

  40. “My takeaway is that my friend had a serious conversion experience which was contaminated by bad beliefs.”

    I call it “Jews on the brain.”

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