About Israel, the Jews, the Palestinians, and genocide
The word “genocide” was coined towards the end of World War II to describe the Holocaust against the Jews, but here’s its definition:
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.
Note that the intent to destroy the group is a necessary element. For Israel towards the Gazans, it is transparently obvious that there is no such intent; Israel takes more pains than any other military in the world to prevent civilian casualties. It is also obvious that there is no such intent because if the intent existed, the goal could be accomplished in short order, given Israel’s military technology. It is further obvious that it is the Palestinians who have a genocidal intent towards the nation of Israel and towards Jews as a whole: they state it, and the attack of October 7 was an attempt to carry it out with maximum ferocity and cruelty. They are really not subtle about it. The politics of the world have dictated that it was the Israelis who were charged with genocide in the ICJ, however.
The definition of “genocide” raises another question: are the Gazans a “nation”? Are they an “ethnic group” or a “racial group” or a “religious group”? I submit that they are none of those things. They had no history as a nation prior to their starting to say they were a Palestinian nation, during the 1960s. Even in 1947, when the UN partitioned the portion of Palestine that was still controlled by the Brits after the Ottoman Empire – which had once ruled over a huge portion of the Middle East – collapsed and the Allies took over, the “Palestinians” didn’t think of themselves as a separate country. The West Bank and Gaza each contained Muslims who at the time were ethnically and historically similar to people in Jordan and Egypt, and their main objection to partition was that they wanted the area designated to the Jews (Israel) as well as the parts they got. They did not want a Jewish nation at all, and that’s why five Arab nations declared war on the infant Israel in 1948, invading it with the intent of occupying it and strangling it in its crib. The Arab refugees from Palestine were encouraged to leave Israel and wait till the land was reclaimed by the larger Arab states’ victory, a victory that never came. In the meantime, for 75 years those Arabs and their many descendants have been kept in that same condition, with propaganda fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, and the UN taking care of them while their corrupt leaders siphon off the aid in order to get armaments and build an infrastructure to further attack the Jews (and even some Arabs) of Israel.
During the 1960s, those Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank rode the waves of anti-colonialism and national self-determination and became, “the Palestinians.” Thus, you might say they became a nation, but it was a nation with no prior national history. And of course, not only is Israel not trying to destroy the Gazans as a whole, but the Gazans have never to my knowledge declared themselves a separate nation from the West Bank Arabs, and there is no war against the West Bank Arabs at the moment, much less a genocide.
The Gazans are not an ethnicity, either. They are indistinguishable genetically from many of their Arab neighbors such as Jordan, plus Egypt (which is not Arab). The Gazans are almost entirely Muslim, of course, but there are close to two billion Muslims in the world and there is no attempt whatsoever by Israel to harm any of them. Lastly, Israel itself has a population that is about 20% Arab, and those people enjoy citizenship and membership in the Knesset. It is interesting that Israel’s Arab population has for the most part declared itself on Israel’s side in this particular conflict; they know they have it much better in Israel than the Arabs who live in Gaza or the West Bank.
So the charge of genocide against Israel is literally absurd.
However, it is psychologically satisfying to the accusers as well as politically expedient. As Brendan O’Neill writes [emphasis mine]:
Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, the extent to which the Holocaust has become everybody’s plaything, a de-Jewified event we can all claim a connection with, has become terrifyingly clear. Witness the talk of a ‘Shoah’ in Gaza, as Al Jazeera referred to it. ‘Gaza Holocaust’ has trended on X. Masha Gessen infamously likened Gaza to a Holocaust-era Jewish ghetto in an essay for the New Yorker. ‘The ghetto is being liquidated’, he said, as if Israel’s war on Hamas were more akin to the Nazis’ transportation of ghetto Jews to the ovens than, say, Britain and America’s war on ISIS. On anti-Israel demos, Israelophobes gleefully wave placards accusing the Jewish State of carrying out the kind of genocide its own people once suffered.
South Africa’s cheap stunt of dragging Israel to the International Court of Justice to answer charges of ‘genocide’ provoked yet more spasms of Holocaust relativism. The court’s ruling – that Israel must take all necessary steps to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza – has given real ‘meaning to “Never Again”’, crowed a South African official. This use of post-Holocaust terminology to damn the Jewish State in the here and now speaks to how unanchored from history the Holocaust has become. It confirms the extent to which the Holocaust has been abstracted from its own historical circumstances – those circumstances being the Nazis’ efforts to vaporise every Jew on Earth – and reduced to a catch-all moral gesture anyone can make.
In part, the use of words like ‘Shoah’, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Never Again’ against Israel is just Jew-baiting. There are some people out there who relish the pain it inflicts on the descendants of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis to imply that they are guilty of similar crimes today. To say ‘Never Again’ about Israel’s war on the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand Jews on 7 October is not a considered political critique – it’s racist gloating, Jew-taunting. Yet there is more at play, too. That the Holocaust can be weaponised against the Jews themselves is a testament to its wholesale extraction from historical reality and its transformation into a general tool of political posturing.
Nor is this limited to post-10/7. It’s been going on for many many decades. It is facilitated by the younger generations’ ignorance of history, which allows them to be easily manipulated by slogans and the cherry-picking of events. It has been encouraged by the international community (see Durban 2001) and in particular the UN, which might be renamed “The United Nations Against Israel,” so obsessed is it with the tiny country it originally helped birth. The USSR was part of the planning for the anti-Israel propaganda (I wrote this post on the subject), which was furthered by the left in Europe and in the US beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present day.
No, it’s not new. But it seems to be reaching a fever pitch, post 10/7.
NOTE: Please read this early post of mine about why the Holocaust in WWII was unique.
Reading claims of “genocide in Gaza” is utterly revolting. I do not understand why the Left, in all its guises, endeavors to blame the actually merciful, target-specific, Israeli military as “genocidal”, and, more importantly, why the Left hates Jews. Why Jews? Why not blacks or Buddhists or Christian churchgoers?
I guess it is all a Power Game to step on this historical minority who first realized God was the one true God, Creator of Heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen. The Left is atheist, mostly. It revels in secular materialism, and, in America, moves to intitutionalize authoritarianism, to make the USA into the USSA [the United Socialist States of America], similar to the good old USSR. It has adopted Gramsci as its God, and made the Democratic Party its agent.
“The Gazans are not an ethnicity, either. They are indistinguishable genetically from many of their Arab neighbors such as Jordan, plus Egypt (which is not Arab).”
_______
That confuses me. Are you saying Arabs are not an ethnic group? That seems a hard one to swallow. But they are like the Egyptians, but the latter are different.
It needs clarification; as it is, I do not understand it.
Eeyore:
I’m not sure what’s unclear about it, but I’ll try again. “Ethnicity” is background or descent. Today’s “Palestinians” are indistinguishable from other Arabs or Egyptians. Egyptians are not Arabs, however. Today’s Palestinians are either of Arab ethnicity/descent or Egyptian ethnicity/descent (or, if there was intermarriage, a mix of the two). They have no distinct ethnicity of their own, and even their nationhood is of recent (1960s) vintage.
After the 1948 war, both Gaza and the West Bank were taken over by other countries, but the countries were not Israel. Gaza was controlled by Egypt from the conclusion of the 1948 war until the conclusion of the 1967 war, and the West Bank was controlled by Transjordan/Jordan during the same period. And by the way, the “West Bank” is another name for a portion of the historic lands of Judea and Samaria:
Please note not all Egyptians are Muslims.
There are the Coptic Christians, who live south of Cairo, and are regularly persecuted by the state. Read Martin Mosebach’s “The 21” to see how they suffer but endure.
The Copts don’t only live south of Cairo. The Coptic Pope is resident in Cairo and there are Copts throughout Egypt, about 10%-12% of Egypt’s population, at this point. It is true that the worst treatment of Copts is found in villages in Upper Egypt, away from the metroplexes of Cairo and Alexandria, but discrimination and ill-treatment is found in urban Egypt also.
Copts were the original Egyptians, the makers of the pyramids. Tradition, which seems credible, holds that St. Mark founded the Church in Alexandria, and before the Arab invasion the country was overwhelmingly Christian. Copts held out for a long time, using their language and holding to their religion, but in the increasing Muslim pogroms of the 13th century and following there were many conversions, leading to their smaller numbers today and their use of Arabic as their conversational language (Coptic, the language of the Rosetta Stone, is still used in the liturgy). All of this means that while Egyptians refer to themselves as Arabs, and speak Arabic, in fact there is a good deal of Coptic blood even though many are now Muslim. Also, there is a certain amount of Nubian, since Egypt destroyed Nubia by water with the building of the Aswan Dam, and some Greek, coming from the Ptolemaic dynasty. So they aren’t pure “Arabs,” true. A young Egyptian friend of mine did an internship in the UAE and felt he was discriminated against because he was Egyptian, not Gulf Arab.
I think that the same sort of distinctions might be found between the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula and the Arabic-speaking peoples of Gaza, what became Israel, and the West Bank. Muslim societies are quite tribal, and it’s definitely not a case of if you’ve seen one you’ve seen ’em all.
Given the quoted definition of “genocide,” this charge might be laid against Russia because of the alleged deportation of large numbers of Ukrainian children to Russia.
A young Egyptian friend of mine did an internship in the UAE and felt he was discriminated against because he was Egyptian, not Gulf Arab.
–Kate
I had a UNM friend from Jeddah, the second largest city in Saudi Arabia. He was very dark, black to my American eyes. He was Muslim but he made no bones about feeling discriminated against back in Saudi Arabia.
Woke folks make a big deal about the bad racial/ethnic/whatever history in the US. But it’s the story of humanity in all times and places. Woke hatred of Americans (and Jews) is just another version of the same story.
“The politics of the world have dictated that it was the Israelis who were charged with genocide in the ICJ, however.”
The UN has become a force for evil.
“Given the quoted definition of “genocide,” this charge might be laid against Russia because of the alleged deportation of large numbers of Ukrainian children to Russia.” Kate
Russian speaking orphans from the Donesk region, whose parents were killed by Alensky’s Ukrainian government’s shelling of that region since 2014 are the children given safety in Russia.
Oh, yeah, huxley, in Egypt they’re tough on black Africans.
Masha gessen continues to remove all doubt yes russia and ukraine and moldavia if memory serves who gave rise to the pogrrom
The saudis came from yemen reportedly but they look down on their brethren
My understanding is that genetically Jews and Palestinian Arabs are rather close. They share some descent from ancient Canaanites (as do Syrians and Lebanese). Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula have more African ancestry. When the Arabs conquered the Levant, they didn’t wholly replace the population that was already there.
I was rereading the first of gabriel allon series and two of the antagonists are driven by too regretable events deir yassin and shatila the last was a fratricidal bloodbath with maronite christians in beirut
@Geoffrey Britain
Become? I’d say it happened a while ago.
Firstly: this “shelter” was “give regardless of whether or not the families or children involved wanted it, up to and including splitting up families involved. I have to assume that isn’t the case for all of them and that many of the families and sponsors involved are doing the best they can, but the Rus Fed Government can’t claim the same impunity.
Secondly: this would also presumably include those killed by Russian and Separatist shelling (among other things) during the war. Which tends to get memory holes by those trying to paint the turd that is the Russian government’s conduct in more rosy lights in spite of it being acknowledged that the Russian Federation has never stopped having a quantitative advantage in artillery during this entire struggle going back to 2014 and up until very recently had an undisputed superiority in artillery quality.
Thirdly: the number of civilians killed by Ukrainian shelling is rather low, as even the Separatist regimes admitted when they assume most people in the wider world aren’t looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94bqk8cB9iQ&t=1099s
@Kate
The actual actions aren’t “alleged.” The Cykas in the Kremlin were daft enough to admit to it https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-putin-lvova-belova-deporting-1787084
So unsurprisingly she won herself an indictment at Den Haag. And while I have scant love for The Hague at the best of times it is hard to argue this wouldn’t warrant it. Especially given how forced deportations and adoptions have been a strategy of genocide talked about since at least the Late Ottoman Genocides (where the “moderate” Turkish nationalists tortured children of the wrong groups into becoming Turks).
The issue is that Israel has no interest in taking in Balestinian Arabs, and does not discriminate against Arabs in general (as shown by Israeli Arabs).
Because I like to keep track of my former comrades, I read “The Nation” now and then. So this article, “The Progressives Who Give Us Hope for 2024,” caught my attention:
________________________________
BOLD HISTORIAN Rashid Khalidi
Most Americans know less than they think they do about Palestine, and that includes most members of Congress. So it was vitally important, as the violence flared, that Khalidi, the Oxford-educated Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, stepped up to provide perspective. The Palestinian American author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine became a steady source of facts and incisive analysis in the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants and the ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza.
Khalidi opened up the discussion with a New York Times op-ed titled “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza”; warned on PBS that “violence is bred by occupation”; and lent his broadly respected voice to the outcry against efforts to silence dissent. Inspired by the outpouring of support for Palestinian rights in the United States and around the world, he noted, “I think there has been a shift over time in the willingness to at least consider that there is a Palestinian narrative.” Few people have done more than Khalidi to foster that shift.
–“The Progressives Who Give Us Hope for 2024”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/shawn-fain-rashid-khalidi-progressive/
________________________________
Khalidi, as you may recall, was the honoree, as he was leaving U Chicago for Columbia, at a 2003 farewell party attended by Barack Obama. A tape of the event surfaced, the LA Times reported on it, but suppressed the contents of the tape. Rumors were that Obama gave a speech aligned with Khalidi’s anti-Israel views.
When questioned about the tape during the 2008 campaign, Obama claimed that his commitment to Israel was “unshakeable” and that Khalidi had nothing to do with Obama’s views on foreign policy.
Apropos recent eye color topic — Khalidi’s are a mesmerizing shade of blue!
Yep the Roosians have been stealing Ukrainian children since the “special military operation” began.
The canard about “Russian-speaking” children being rescued from the combat areas is particularly ironic since Roosia essentially instigated the conflict by proxie in 2014 and then ditched that fiction in 2022; going to all out war.
Are those children a threat to mother Roosia if they remain in Ukraine
huxley
Exactly so. Everybody has an in-group and an out-group. I learned this early on. I was a studious nerd in a working-class/farming sort of town, and got some flack for that. At the regional high school, based in a town with much more people with college degrees, I got flack for being a from a “dumb farmer” town. Got it coming and going.
I noticed that the Jim Crow attitudes of my Southwestern grandmother had some similarity to the attitudes of some people I knew in the “enlightened” North. Nor was this hypothetical, as a childhood friend was black. She still lives in town, so whatever hassles she had in elementary school were overcome by the lifelong friendships she made.
And in Latin America, more of the same. Such as learning in Mexico that “india” (indian woman) was synonymous with “prostitute.” Or twice being invited into homes- in Bolivia and Argentina- that had portraits of Hitler on the living room wall. The retired professor in Peru, telling me that Che Guevara had visited him during his motorcycle trip, also spontaneously spouted some anti-Semitic invective.
I worked in northern Argentina, which had a fair number of Indians/indigenous people. (Argentine saying: South America begins north of Córdoba.) Some Caucasian Argentines had attitudes towards Indians/Indigenous that resembled Southern attitudes towards blacks in the Jim Crow era. Which is probably why I noted a lot of conflict between Argentines and Bolivians at my workplace.
I learned that group/stranger fear starts early, without being taught. At a hotel, the toddler son of the hotel manager cried when he saw me from 20′ away. Probably the glasses I wore, as it was too dark to distinguish my blue eyes or dirty blonde hair. As the days went on, and he saw that I got along with his mother, his fear stopped.
The elderly woman in Trinidad who called me a “white mother-f** c**” for wearing Bermuda shorts in tropical Trinidad. In some places in Latin America, men didn’t wear shorts in hot climates, but this was not the case in Trinidad. Plenty of men wore shorts there. The elderly woman just thought I was slumming it by wearing shorts in Trinidad. (She didn’t realize that Texas in summer is hotter than Trinidad…)
Tom Lehrer had a good line in the patter leading up to his National Brotherhood week song:
Sounds like some of the WOKE folk, doesn’t it?
Group conflict is universal. Always has been.
The Palis are not just indistinguishable from neighboring Arabs – many are descended from recent immigrants to Israel from the turn of the 20th century. The most common last name in Gaza is “al masri” which means “the Egyptian”. They came to build the British railroad and get work in Jewish agriculture.
Language and tribal links are the defining factors in Arab culture – nations like Jordan were artificially created after ww1. And from this perspective, too, there is no Palestinian identity… West Bank Arabs speak the same dialect as Jordanians and Iraqis, while Gazans speak the Egyptian dialect. The Arabs of Hizbullah in the north speak Syrian dialect… In fact one of Yasser arafat’s first obstacles was distrust of him by West Bank arabs because he spoke Egyptian-style.
There is no Palestinian national/ethnic identity. It is a fabrication.
“The most common last name in Gaza is “al masri” which means “the Egyptian”. ”
Like Arafat, who was born in Cairo long before Israel was born.
Gaza war update…FWIW…
“The IDF’s systematic approach to dismantling Hamas;
“Commanders, infrastructure, weapons production and field operatives: How the IDF is taking the terrorist group apart from the top down.”—
https://www.jns.org/the-idfs-systematic-approach-to-dismantling-hamas/
Lemkin was born in Bezwodne, Belarus, just a few mile from the town my grandfather came from. In the 1950s he attempted to draw attention to the Holodomor, Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants, characterizing it as a “genocide” like the Holocaust that claimed nearly his entire family.
@FOAF Indeed he did. He was a titan among men, and notably the Soviets were alarmed by it. So much so that after WWII they had their minions tied to Nuremburg and the like intentionally word the Genocide statutes to work around the Holodomor so the Soviets could say they were not genocidal.
Rumors were that Obama gave a speech aligned with Khalidi’s anti-Israel views.
==
The Los Angeles Times sat on the tape for a reason: it was embarrassing to Obama. If the tape had been inconsequential, it would be up on Youtube. Note, moles at NBC News knew they had in their possession a surreptitious recording of Donald Trump making vulgar remarks in a conversation with Billy Bush twelve years earlier. It was not suppressed. It was released at the worst possible moment for his campaign, after which Bush himself was axed (not for anything he said, but for being pleasant to Trump). These people are simply scoundrels.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/nbc-biden-administration-weighs-pausing-weapon-deliveries-to-israel-as-leverage-against-netanyahu/
“as leverage against Netanyahu“, says the url! The printed headline reads “as leverage to scale back war in Gaza”. Funny? Not so much.
Israelis need to know the US is agin’ ’em: ain’ta friendly ally.
Seek weapons manufacture independence and do it soonest, cause destroying Hezbollah is gonna eat tonnage like there’s no tomorrow. And there will be no tomorrow when that time comes.
There’s no profit to be made in (‘re) explaining what genocide is or Isn’t.
It’s a bad name the left uses for its enemies, knowing if carries a negative load irrespective of the facts.
Explaining the differences to those who want to believe is useless.
Most already know better.
Abraxas
At various times, Palestine has been ruled (not necessarily in this order) by
Canaanites, (who might be the same people as Phoenicians), Hebrews, Egyptians, Hittites, Persians (probably more than once), Greeks, Romans, Arabs, European Crusaders, Seljuk Turks, Ottoman Turks, British, and probably more people that I can’t remember right now.
If native “Palestinians” even exist, then they’re genetically linked to just about everybody in a thousand mile radius.
Plus, the last time there was an independent country in the region which is now Israel, that is, ruled by the people who lived there, it was Judah. Read the Maccabees.
The Nazis have become a cartoon villain. And so, unfortunately, has the Holocaust – particularly when the ones hyperbolicly using the term are anti-Semites.
As to Russia “adopting” Ukranian kids whose parents were killed, the Comanches in the Great Plains did the same, killing the frontiersman and giving the mother of the kids to a warrior as a wife, and adopting the kids into their band. They grew up Comanche. Their mother was no longer their mother.
Comanche raids gave birth to Texas Rangers in the 1830s. In the event, a Ranger ‘s duty was to organize a posse and pursue the raiding Comanche party to the ends of the earth, and kill them all. The posses from Texas went as far north as Kansas, sometimes turned and tracked the Comanche raiders into Mexico.
Ref.: Comanches, by the great TX historian, Fehrenbach.
So rashid khalidi was born in nyc to a bedouin who was born in jerusalem pre mandate he worked for the un his brother was the mayor of jerusalem during the mandate
Pere khalidi was under saudi auspices when he worked for the un his brother headed the rump regime in gaza transferred to cairo
Cicero
Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche chief, had a white mother who as a child had been kidnapped into the tribe.
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
@junior
This is painfully true, as someone who is big on WWII and a host of other things and has even written or played on it. Hell, I’ve even roleplayed Hitler, Heydrich, and a host of fictional ne’er-do-wells.
A couple of the things that are striking is.
A: How cartoonishly villainous they really WERE in many ways. Were you to have the evil villain issue a rant about how his people would be better off if they aborted 9 out of every 10 of their own children (Not Jews, not Roma, not Slavs, not The Wrong Kind of German; “Good” “Aryan” Germans) so the nation and people could go “stronger” and who betrayed virtually every alliance he signed as well as one of his oldest friends/comrades, you would probably have people disbelief it. But all of that was stuff Hitler did or at least advocated for.
B: How there is remarkably little attempt to actually understand the Nazis or other Fascists on their own terms, from their perspective. A lot of this is obviously due to politics (and not just on the left) and the desire to play Hot Potato Blame by throwing the stain of Fascism onto “The Other Team” rather than understanding it, but even considering that it is jarring how little understanding there is or even attempts to understand. Admittedly this is partially because Fascism, National Socialism, and the like ARE tricky, complicated ideologies (that varied widely both within individual movements/parties and across the spectrum) that were at least PARTIALLY intentionally vague and chimerical, but that doesn’t explain why most people can’t explain what Hitler hoped to achieve after he died or his ideology, such as in the Second Book.
Thirdly: There’s REALLY little interest in trying to humanize the Nazis or understand what drove them or how they got and sustained the support of so many for so long.. Especially in terms of “Pull” motivations (and especially “positive” Pull motivations . Lots of people can rattle off endlessly about Yadda Yadda Discontent from WWI and the Great Depression, National Hatreds This, Disillusionment with Democracy and Communism that, and so on. And some more can cite things like the charisma of the various fascist leaders, the desire for good order after chaos, and nationalism. But there’s really little talk about things like the massive Nazi welfare system, their attempts to organize colonization of conquered lands, looting (except in the context of the Jews and to a lesser extent other primary targets of the Holocaust, when in reality Vichy France and a lot of other occupation governments were structured to streamline the looting and requisitioning of occupied Europe), religious policies (usually consisting of strawmen based on what the authors hate), and so on.
Fourth: The result tends to be horrible stereotypes or the like rather than reality, resulting in thin slogans and labels. While I generally like a lot of Choicescript games in spite of how many left-leaning developers are/were “woke” there was this one demo of a game that irritated me because it was pretty much a slightly fictionalized communist Myth about the rise of Nazism. In contrast I was generally pleased with Wolfenstein games (which in addition to being cracking great shooters until recently also were some of the most accurate – if rather pop culture – portrayals of the Reich and the SS even with a lot of pop culture Occult and Super Science stuff). In particular Return to Castle Wolfenstein was remarkable because it contained one of the best villains I think ever put into fiction, Deathshead (who was legitimately smart and cunning even within the backdrop of a power fantasy FPS without seeming too unfair, and without wearing out his welcome). It also was daring enough to HUMANIZE the Nazis (and not just Nazis but literal members of the freaking SS).
Sure, many of them are monsters. Indeed, virtually all of them are. But they will talk among each other (albeit in scripted fashions). They will lament their boredom in a backwater posting. They will go around drunk off their gourds singing so you can effortlessly shank them in the back. They’ll express fear of what they are getting into, lament the deaths of their colleagues, and prepare for battle. And there is a sharp distinction (perhaps too sharp) between Germans and Nazis.
And then things went downhill fast. Wolfenstein: The New Order was a mix of the very good and very bad, with some well done stuff (including a climax to the Deathshead story and what SEEMED like a good story premise and the horrors of a Nazified World) but the execution and protagonist writing went downhill. And then The New Colossus blew things up in spectacular fashion, especially by making Hitler a literal punch line, trying to cowardly vilify Ronald Reagan without having the nerve to actually go all the way (hence why they tried to claim it was a “different person” from a different state with the same name), making the Nazis and KKK allies for no good reason (when in reality they hated and distrusted each other).
Perhaps the final straw for me was background lore later indicated Hitler apparently had a suicide device to just kill the world (Somehow?!?) if and when he died because he saw no purpose for it later, the Star Wars Emperor style. Which is character assassination and pointless on one of the most evil people who ever lived. Because if you don’t understand Hitler’s environmental, borderline Animist world view and the desire to create Paradise (as defined by him) for the Folk Collective that would far outlive him, not much he does makes sense.
It’s irritating and does not make sense.
And it’s stuff like that that helps make Nazism, Fascism, and other totalitarianisms look more appealing than it is (“At least the Nazis didn’t murder their own people?” Wrong. “The Nazis wouldn’t have allowed Pedos to get as far as they have”? Study Himmler and co.) I think it also contributes to a bunch of things like the idea (forwarded by many on the right including TIK, who I generally greatly respect, that Italian Fascism wasn’t racist and anti-Jewish or anti-Black. The truth’s a lot murkier; while Mussolini was certainly happy to seduce Jewish mistresses and rape some others and employed many Italian Jewish Fascists and African Colonials, he was always agnostic to them and set out increasingly unsubtle discrimination against them. While most of the more extreme cases were spurred by the Nazis, it started even before that.)
Ironically one of the best portrayals of Fascism I can think of is the Gears of War franchise, probably in part because it’s not the main story focus (and ironically you the player are fighting as part of them). When an NPC first accused the Coalition of Ordered Governments and the player characters of being “Fascist Pigs” I simply brushed it off as irritating immersion-breaking shoutout.
Then I studied the lore deeper. And they did their work to a surprising degree (including tracing the ideology’s foundation to a “fanatical socialist”), and how they really are (or were) a relatively non-racist fascist movement that basically took over the world in a series of nasty worldwide resource wars and formed a kind of “Fascist UN or USSR”. At least until a plague of seemingly alien beings arose from the crust of their world trying to wipe humanity out and what was left needed to basically nuke most of the planet to slow the aliens down enough. But even then it’s really not touched upon too much or focused precisely because they are fighting just about one of the few things that could be worse than they are.
And worst of all, it’s been more than a century since all of this started. The fact that the public has been kept in the dark about the true nature of Nazism is dire. But it helps make for an all purpose scapegoat.
In michael walshs casablanca sequel yes he went there he considered that ricks plan and laszlos was really to travel to london not new york because that was the base for nearly all european resistance movements and from there to prague to rendezvous with the czech resistance to go after heydrich of course we know the rest of the story
So ilse whose is norwegian has to infiltrate the camp of heydrich to set him up some how major renault ends up there walsh fleshes out some of ricks back story as a small time gangster in ny who flees and ends up in civil war spain and ethiopia
The nazis were driven by teutonic fantasies himmler was perhaps the worst in this a chicken farmer with a certain twisted cleverness to him
they captured some of this in the recent iteration of the red skull johan schmidt who harnesses an alien power source in the first avenger
He sent karl wolf to negotiate with dulles an separate peace in operation sunrise
@Cicero
Well said indeed. And the sad thing is in many situations I’d struggle to figure out a better solution for it all, especially in a pre-modern society. It’s unpleasant as hell and involves calculated cultural whitewashing and erasure, but surely that’s still better than murdering them all or leaving them to die? And our own genetics and how common this behavior is among animals (including humans) says something about how useful it is.
Moreover, in the interests of playing Devil’s Advocate, I’m sure a bunch of the adoptions in the Russia-Ukraine war are more benevolent than these. It’s always been an overstatement to say this was a civil war or that Russia and Ukraine are One Peoples, but they are overstatements with some kernels of truth. This was a heavily Russian influenced region, and there are plenty of families and communities that spanned the border and had ties going back decades if not centuries (which is why in spite of being known as something of an anti-Kremlin Hawk in general and on Ukraine in particular, I actually have no objection in principle to the idea of some or all this region going to Russia, but I will not stand for the criminal way it was done/attempted, especially the attempt to humiliate the US and UK in the process. ). And even beyond that I have to assume that many of the families involved are innocent or at least decent people trying to do the best.
But I have no sympathy for the regime. And the irony is that the Kremlin could’ve been much, MUCH smarter and more deniable with how they did it. But Putin and Lvova-Belova were idiots as well as evil and were several shades too “honest” about the origins of many of the children, so they got slapped with indictments and while I am loathe to give any credit to the ICJ (especially after the latest shitshow) I have no pity for them.
@Miguel Cervantes
Ah, good to see someone else who recognizes “as Time Goes By”, flaws and all.
As for teutonic fantasies, the Nazis were driven by a whole host of things, including that. But it is worth remembering that Himmler started out as a remarkably junior member of the org who rose to power through loyalty to Hitler. Many of the Nazis’s interests were much more “mainstream” (at least by the standard of an authoritarian, militarized German culture dealing with humiliation and frustration in the interwar period) and Bread and Butter. You can (and some have) take Hitler’s rantings about the economy or cultural identity and mistake them for Dem talking points today. This is part of the disturbing issue.
The Holocaust was n many ways an outgrowth of the goals the Nazis had, which were strikingly bold, and not always outright evil or undesirable (at least from the perspective of bog standard middle of the road German or their allies). And indeed it is a major way they helped get many of those middle of the roaders on their side for the “Unpleasantness.”
Youve read it too, yes himmler was so level but so was beria and yagoda and the third one i forget
Turtledove posited in his alternate reality had heydrich lived he would have led an resistance at the end of the war
Now berlin and rome had become the anti london to disfavored nationalities like the bedouin the croat and the ukrainians some irish partisans as well
Haj amin husseini was one of those chieftains after the failure of the 39 intifada he fled to berlin where he rallied the moslem masses into the handschar scimitar division largely in the former yugoslavia and hungary but also in syria and iraq
The ustache and arrow cross proved more zealous than the run of thd mill nazi similarly with the iraqi golden square
Re a note in phillip kerr gunther the war crimes commission gave serious thought to charging haj amin but he had retreated into syria then egypt after the war
This is the crew that the khalidis hung around with
How do we reach or even ‘outreach’ to the antisemite?
That’s one question posed here, of course, but possibly the most salient one.
Saturday evening, I stumbled across the most important documentary, albeit obscured by the pandemic years, “Filmmakers For The Prosecution” At Nuremberg. (The original French version, 2021, contains “Nurnberg” trials in the title. The English language version, 2023, does not.)
For me, the most visceral horror I experienced visiting the National Holocaust Museum in DC in 2019, were the 8mm films from concentration camps liberated by Americans. US soldiers as amateur photographers shot these images. Gut wrenching and powerful.
Yet “Filmmaker For The Prosecution” does much more by situating the vivid documentary content during the crucial postwar year of 1946, when the trial was held. The urgency of the moment is recaptured.
SEE the trailer, here https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13836144/
The strategy employed by the OSS was to use Nazi genocide organisers words to convict them of their crimes, accompanied by images of their heinous work.
The same effort today, after the pogrom of October 7, needs to be done.
The quantitative post-Holocaust work of the legacy of World War Two may have fallen to one man’s career, political scientist R.J. Rommel at the University of Hawaii.
My introduction to his oeuvre came with the 1994 book, simply titled “Death By Government.” While the machinery of death during the Holocaust was unique, mass murder on a nationwide scales is not.
A full copy of it is archived online, and thus a ready reference to anyone with internet access. https://archive.org/details/death-by-government-1997-r.-j.-rummel
Rummel was always revising or revisiting his work until his death. There are no final words on this horror. Nevertheless, the empirical and inductive inference was clear:
“Death By Government” “is R. J. Rummel’s fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.
“Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, ‘The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.’”
At least, extending the realm of democratic government was the hope that American’s attempted to advance after the Global War On Terror commenced.
Nearly 25 years later, we find, instead, that the Muslim’s forever war on the Infidel means that Western values about the sanctity of human life are forever threatened by Islam. Such rude and risible Truth does history provide.
Now this raises an unconfortable question why did the brits including general barker not do more against haj amin as with his counterparts in cairo instead of against the jews in the haganah yes the assasinatio of lord moyne didnt make any friends in the matter among the foreign office
Haj amin was a active partner of the third reich all through out the moslem world
This is what appeasement gets: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/384300
“Three US Army soldiers killed in Jordan”
I answered my own question in part the other ally of hitler was hasan al banas muslim brotherhood they were out to topple british colonies and kill jews not in that order
1947-9 was a pitched battled between the farouk regime and the brotherhood that ended with the death of both al bana and nokrishi pasha and the brotherhood driven into the cold till they allied with the free officers in 52 then they ended up on the outs
Yep
https://twitter.com/CarolineGlick/status/1751688519284584751
https://twitter.com/MorHogeg/status/1751534150023106632
Powerline posted a compendium of historical references with respect to a documentary released in 1985 and again today.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/01/long-days-journey-into-shoah.php
the morhegg thread showed how the UN enlarged its fiefdom, by including all descendants of the bedouin who foolishly continued to fight against israel since 1947, those that are now in camps in lebanon and jordan and other places,
the other khalidi uncle became a prime minister under the hashemites, which tells you where he actually belonged,
in another world, maybe he would be an alternative to abu mazen, but all their fancy sheepskin shows they are a warrant for death,
khalidi was certainly an advisor in shaping obama’s policies such as they were,
I did catch part of the nuremberg documentary, some of the statements the likes of schacht, the Reichbank president made to get himself off the noose, were risible, of course he later found a gig as a counselor for Saudi oil interests, and one of the characters in our man in havana, were based on him, the doctor who confers with wurmold,
we’ve referrenced Skorzeny in the past, the hulking brute that rescued Mussolini that organized that guerilla operation in the Ardennes, then rotated between Egypt Argentina and Spain in the post war era, with some stops in Ireland, in the former location he trained the Fedayeen, Arafat’s precursor militia,
many small and large fish seemed to slip through Aribert Heim, who seem to have inspire a character in Boualem Sansals novel about the Cursed Algeria, Wolfgang Leers,
who also adopted an Arab kunya,
MIguel cervantes:
Yes, earlier I did some research on Khalidi and discovered such interesting things about his paternal heritage. Maybe I’ll write a post sometime.
miguel cervantes
Which of his books?
They’re Arabs.
Didn’t Nasser change Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic in 1958?
the German Muhajid, or Unfinished Business,
yes they did but it didn’t last, very long,
That 2005 post remains excellent, and I also miss Norm Geras*, the leftist Neo references for the uniqueness argument of it being:
a vile synergy to create an evil that was singular: (1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death, using the full resources of a modern state; (2) the comprehensiveness of intent, in which the aim was to wipe out an entire people for no practical reason; and (3) spiritual murder, a devotion to destroying the humanity of the victims before killing them, a sort of blanket impulse to sadistically humiliate and dehumanize.
The industrialization efficiency is what I immediately thought of. It remains a key unique modern evil, yet a bit at odds with the sadistic humiliation aspect. Noting that German generals did NOT want their troops getting too much blood lust at murdering Jews and enemies with guns into mass graves, the generals preferred the industrialization.
This is unique as compared to the Muslim genocide of Christian Armenians, the Pol Pot commie genocide of educated Cambodians (25% of all), and the Hutus with machetes killing Tutsis in Rwanda.
On the sadistic & demonization side, it seems that Democrats today want to do that to Trump — and possibly in frustration that anti-Trump protests aren’t humiliating Trump, might be more likely to actively divert their Trump hate into enhancing their, previously lower levels of, Jew hate.
Hate of people is fun.
It shouldn’t be — it should be laughed at as usually irrational. Evil actions should be hated, the sins; but the humans need love as people. Tho also justice, so often Tough Love.
For those interested in a great list of books, Norm left 100 as his last post.
https://normblog.typepad.com/
Tom Grey:
Yes, Norm was a good guy, an old-time principled leftist of a type that’s more and more rare these days. And he was very helpful to a blogger like me when I was getting established.
The other thing about the Holocaust that I think made it unique was that the Nazis didn’t confine it to a country or two. They went to country after country and tried (rather successfully) to eradicate their Jews. Other genocides were far more localized. Of course, Jews were spread out back then in WWII. Now, Jews are far more localized.
The mullahs and the Palestinians are well aware of that.
I heard something chilling in a YouTube video the other day. Some religious person was talking – I don’t recall who – and he noted that according to the Bible, the promise was not necessarily to save all Jews, but to save a remnant.
@ Tom Grey in re Norm Geras – it seems almost uncanny, given the context of this discussion, that his next-to-last post was about anti-Semitism.
BTW, I loved his approach to listing the Best 100 Books, and I am tempted to make one of my own, as soon as I decide which of my favorites should be on it!
I have read some (20) of Norm’s suggestions, and heard of others, but not all.
Too many books, not enough time!