Times Tuesday: Turkey-Twofer

A day late & quite a bit short, we wouldn't have bothered except the title seemed too good to waste (although the chance of the Times having two op-ed turkeys on any given Tues. is pretty high). Anyhoo, Tues. is, of course, Jonah Goldberg day at the cage-liner. This week? Some crap about genocide, in an apparent effort to prove his Liberal Fascism thesis, to get in a few jabs at "modernism" & the Enlightment, or just to get rid of a few hundred words that fell off his keyboard. First, he's concerned about a resolution passed by the lower house of the Russian parliament. (We guess he doesn't think any of his audience would know the word Duma.)

The United Nations defines the crime as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Intentionally left out of this definition are "modern" political labels for people: the poor, religious people, the middle class, etc.

Other than the obvious problem w/ the above (The difference between "religious groups" & "religious people" would be?) it seems the word

"genocide" was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchill's 1941 lament that "we are in the presence of a crime without a name"

has more to do w/, well, genocide, rather than plainly simple mass murder. We've had a phrase for that for a while. The whole point of genocide is that a specific group that cannot change its identification is being targeted merely because it is that group, which has often been stigmatized or scapegoated in order to establish boogey-men w/ whom to scare a populace or nation.

Under the more narrow definition that was approved, it's genocide to try to wipe out Roma (formerly known as Gypsies), but it's not necessarily genocide to liquidate, say, people without permanent addresses. You can't slaughter "Catholics," but you can wipe out "religious people" and dodge the genocide charge.

Personally, we're opposed to wiping out "people w/o permanent addresses," but all in favor of letting Catholics or plain "religious people" have it. They're all stupid & shouldn't be allowed to waste oxygen. Then he goes on to this:

[A] moral hierarchy of evil, which in effect renders mass murder a second-tier crime if it is done in the name of social progress, modernization or other Enlightenment ideals. This can lead to a dangerous way of thinking in which people who are perceived to be standing in the way of progress -- middle-class farmers opposed to collectivization, aristocrats, reactionaries -- can be more forgivably slaughtered than ethnic groups because they're allegedly part of the problem, not the solution. After all, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet.

Speaking of dangerous ways of thinking, this moronic bastard can't think past the "Enlightenment" as anything besides an excuse for mass murder. And we should certainly point out that there are few people claiming that

In general, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge -- and hence the status of ultimate villains -- despite having murdered scores of millions of people in the 20th century, in large part because their victims stood in the way of progress.

Just who in any legitimate discourse has been claiming this, Mr. Goldberg? We guess that "shock & awe" wasn't mass murder because it was directed against people who happened to live near Saddam Hussein, rather than the Iraqi people. Last & least:

Of course, the climate of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, but so did Enlightenment bias, which holds that almost anything can be justified in the name of progress.

This really must be the stupidest thing he's ever written on which Just Another Blog™ has had the misfortune to waste three mins. of reading time. He gets his knickers in a knot over a resolution passed by the Duma (which, like Russia itself, is hardly the pinnacle of Enlightenment values) & then gets a blanket condemnation of the Enlightenment out of it. Perhaps a return to such pre-Enlightenment values as the Inquisition would please Mr. Goldberg. He's really the definition of a self-hating Jooo, isn't he? Qualifiers noted in Jonah's work: "somewhat," "implicitly," "in effect." As if that wasn't enough of an insult to those of us w/ two brain cells to rub together, directly underneath Goldberg's pathetic tripe in both the dead-tree & online versions of the Times was a wonderment from Max Boot, the well known chickenhawk/warmonger. (Is that redundant? Does "hawk" pretty much = "warmonger?" Whatever.) Brace yourselves, here it comes. Max paints a rosy picture, but realizing that one can't fool all of the people all of the time, he does mention a few buts (even italicizes the buts).

The security forces are growing in size (from fewer than 500,000 in 2006 to more than 600,000 today) and competence (although a few deserted in Basra, most do not run away from a fight), but they still need U.S. support, especially for higher-level functions such as command and control, air cover, logistics and intelligence collection.

Note well the "higher-level functions." Guess the "security forces" are cannon-fodder to be "supported"/directed by U. S. "support." And they don't all run away now. According to Max, withdrawal

would be not only a terrible stain on our honor (we might be indirectly responsible for genocide) but a significant strategic setback because it could destabilize the entire region. Victory -- defined as a democratic state that does not oppress its own people, provide a haven for terrorists, proliferate weapons of mass destruction or threaten its neighbors -- remains eminently achievable if we listen to the best advice of Petraeus and Crocker and resist the urge to pull our troops out too fast. If we ignore their warnings and head for the exits, we are assured of the worst military defeat in U.S. history and a major victory for Shiite and Sunni extremists who will continue to attack us in the future.

Ah yes, "honor." Nothing more honorable than attacking an essentially defenseless nation that never attacked us, but had a big-mouthed asshole in charge, who used implied threats of WMDs in a vain hope of not being attacked & holding onto power. (Bush or Hussein? You decide.) And there's that genocide word again. At least we got a definition of "victory" out of Max. Most of his long-distance baby-killing buddies can't even come up w/ one. Frankly, this country deserved to be defeated in this mess, but once again we must make clear that "we" won the war handily, but, for various reasons (incompetence & ignorance being the top two) the occupation hasn't been going too well. We can certainly bet that Iraq is much less likely to threaten its neighbor Iran now (oh wait, he means Israel, we wanted Hussein to threaten Iran during the '80s & '90s). The likelihood of any colonial construction of two principal ethnicities & one religious schism not threatening its "own" people is pretty low. The terrorists are already there. Look at Palestine & how they feel about Israel. Every Iraqi killed, wounded, raped or humiliated by American forces is going to feel the same way about us. As well as the Iraqis who endangered themselves & their families by helping Americans, who are forced to stay there because we won't let them emigrate here. As far as those WMDs, stop crying "wolf," chickenhawk.