FORMS OF MASS MURDER
by Paul Gottfried
Lew Rockwell, CA
.html
Aug 28 2007
Although it was not the intention of my remarks against the perpetually
repugnant Abe Foxman (whose latest caper, by the way, has been to
warn Catholics against the Latin Mass as an anti-Semitic time bomb) to
belittle any group’s past sufferings, my implied objection was simply
about characterizing the Armenian massacre in 1915 as "genocide." The
fact that the crimes in question fit the tendentious UN definition,
which conveniently omits the largest number of murder victims in
the twentieth century, the victims of Communist "class war," is not
a particularly convincing reason for supporting the congressional
resolution.
If by genocide we mean the planned systematic extermination of an
entire ethnicity or race carried out by a particular state, it is
not clear that the killing of Armenians by Turkish-Kurdish military
units during World War One would fit that description. What we are
describing is a series of brutal killings inflicted on Armenian
communities by Turkish soldiers, in which the broken-down Turkish
state played only a very limited role. It is also a factor that
Armenians had in some cases already taken up arms, at the prompting
of the British and Russians, against the Turkish government, which by
then was fighting for the political survival of the Turkish nation on
several different fronts at the same time. Some Armenian communities,
furthermore, were not involved in the massacres, and indeed Armenians
continue to live within the Turkish republic down to the present time.
This piece of corrective history is not intended to diminish the
horror of what really happened. Over a million hapless Armenians
were slaughtered or driven out into the desert to die of hunger and
thirst. If Armenians were not the victims of "genocide, they were
certainly the victims of what R.J. Rummel has called "democide," the
indiscriminate slaughter of large numbers of people by a bloodthirsty
enemy. Moreover, the leading Western Ottoman historian Donald Quatert
is correct when he criticized the Turkish government for not being
sufficiently willing to investigate an especially seamy side of their
national history. Stonewalling actually increases the perils of having
exaggerated charges hurled against the Turkish people.
But let me make one point about mass-killing that is frequently
left out of discussion. There is no intrinsic moral reason to treat
genocide as being worse than other forms of mass murder, and although
my cousins died in Nazi labor camps, I suspect that the bestial leaders
of Communist "workers’ states," whose enablers and apologists today go
by the name "antifascist," may be the worst murderers in the history
of the human race. I am challenging the abuse of the term "genocide"
to describe all kinds of nastiness, including, as my colleagues tell
me, the failure to fund sufficiently Native American legends. There
are crimes committed against entire populations that approach or equal
Hitler’s war against the Jews or the Poles but which are nonetheless
not "genocide" but something equally horrendous.
Allow me to give a second reason that I am not hot to trot for the
congressional resolution to acknowledge the "Armenian genocide." I
find no justification for the US government giving further aid and
comfort to the victim-industry, particularly if it embarrasses the
military leaders of the present Turkish state, who are our friends
against fundamentalist Muslims. It is the friends and heirs of
the great Westernizer Kemal Mustafa, the man who saved Turkey from
extinction after World War One, who will take the hit. The Muslim
fundamentalists have no reason to dislike the charge of genocide that
our Congress is ready to throw at the Turks: that charge will redound
to the discredit of the now increasingly endangered secular Turkish
state that came out of World War One, an entity that Muslim fanatics
and European multiculturalists probably hate equally. The Turks should
not be confused with masochistic Germans who can’t blame themselves
sufficiently for their entire national past. To their credit, the
Turks are patriots – rather than Teutonic doormats
It may also be high time throughout the Western world to say no to
new Holocaust industries and to stop the ones that already exist. The
French state in its antifascist enthusiasm last year made it a criminal
offense to question publicly the "Armenian genocide," an act which
like the criminalization of any attempt to question the Nuremberg
Trial’s judgments about Nazi "crimes against humanity," enjoyed the
overwhelming support of the usual suspects. Communist deputies and
their PC allies in the French National Assembly ran to vote for both
prohibitions against "diminishing [official] genocidal acts," two
gestures that serve exactly the same functions. They divert attention
from the staggering crimes committed by Communist regimes, and they
destroy what remains of liberal freedoms in what the neoconservatives
misleadingly call "Western democracies." If groups wish to grieve over
inhumanities committed against their ancestors, let them do so without
restrictions on the liberties of those who fail to show appropriate,
state-required grief.
Every year the Jewish people lament collectively the destruction of
their second temple carried out by (imperialistic) Romans. The Jews
have every right and perhaps an ethnic duty to do so. As far as I know,
they have not incited any government to cast blame on the inhabitants
of central Italy for the outrages committed against ancient Jewish
by Roman political globalists. Nor have they asked that the Arch of
Titus, which depicts in relief the triumphant Romans carrying away
temple candelabra, be razed, as an act of ethnic sensitivity. Would
that Jews and other ethnic groups behaved as discreetly in other
matters! And, even more importantly would that Western Christians
showed less interest in abetting those who wish to make state-supported
displays of their victim status. The fact that certain groups but
not others are allowed to play this victim card makes it seem all
the more questionable.
August 28, 2007 Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger
Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of
Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right.