President Bush today, after the experience of visiting Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial and museum, expressed his wish that his predecessors in the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Harry S. Truman, had actually done something about the Holocaust. That got me — and a friend of Likelihood of Success — thinking. My conclusion:
Even Darfur does not generate interest among African Americans, so it is hardly surprising that those in power are not galvanized into action. Indeed, as I (and many others) said, the leading African American in the world right now, and a large part of the country, said last year that if leaving Iraq to limitless butchery would be the result of our exit from there, well, then hell with Iraq.
It’s much easier to wait and express regret than to lose votes and regret expressing humanity.
If you want to read the whole thing, it’s here.
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This touches, somewhat elliptically, on an issue that’s bugged me for some time. I’ve made a hobby out of studying the phenomenon of genocide (and democide in general). There are two things that make the holocaust unique, and they aren’t what most people think makes it unique. They are:
1) It was so excruciatingly and painstakingly documented by those who carried it out, making it impossible for sane people to deny, but also,
2) It is treated like the worst case of genocide in human history, and it was not. It wasn’t even the worst case in the 20th century. Yet those other horrors are often ignored, even downplayed and dismissed.
I say this mostly in agreement with you, Ron. It’s very easy to claim things like “never again,” but the reality is that liquidation of entire populations of people still goes on fairly regularly, and people remain either blissfully unaware of it or simply sit on their hands and make noises about how horrible it is. Our resolve to act is generally very weak indeed, and I’m not sure why anyone thinks people in, say, 1940, would have or should have been any different than people are right now in 2008 when it comes to this matter.
I find it depressing, especially because in the wake of 9/11 I was ready to start a general jihad against fascist regimes everywhere. It was with some bitterness that I realized I was in a distinct and shrinking minority on that, but I’ve come to terms with it.
As far as I know, the genocide of Hindus by Muslims is the largest known genocide in history.
And area of Afghanistan is known as Hindu Kush. Kush is Arabic for massacre. It’s an area where many many Hindus were massacred, and thus the Muslims named it as such.
I would have been more interested in Bush visiting some of the vibrant farms, villages and cities that have been built in Golan, Judea and Samaria in the more than 40 years since the Six Day War of June 1967.
I’m not really interested in gestures typified by visits to Yad Vashem or any other memorial to the murdered millions. Nobody ever will retore their lives, their property, their hopes and dreams.
The only thing that counts is for the Jews to make sure nobody ever again can do that to them, without paying a price so horrendous that it would bring down the rest of the world with them. Once that is comprehended, they will be left alone to live in peace.
Only the Jews can do that for themselves. And that means they must build up for themselves their base of national power. Because power alone is all that ever has counted in this world, and for the Jews especially, their experience with the Nazis should have taught them that nobody ever can be trusted to help them.
As for us.
The saudi and egyptian Arabs who destroyed the World Trade Center, tried to destroy the Pentagon, and who targeted the United States Capitol building with the fourth aircraft that day, all taught me something. Cities are targets that cannot run away and hide, and cannot be protected. Our holy cities are New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and so on. We all know what the enemy’s holy cities are. They should be taught to remember that, and to beware what we may choose to do to them if ever again the Arabs lay their hands of destruction on the United States.
Because if we here cannot be left alone to live in peace, then what I want after the fact is the permanent vengeance of massive retaliation.
The world should be warned.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Agreed.
Arnold, as ever, you are so tough when you write on blogs. Your willingness to apply a scorched-earth policy, while sitting in semi-retired comfort in Wisconsin, must be so inspiring to the people with real responsibility for making real life and death decisions.
Ron, I’m not in position to make life and death decisions for your fellow Jews. All I’m doing is to hope they come to the same conclusion about their situation; which is to play the role of a snall nation being re-assembled amid a large pack of human wolves baying at the moon for their blood.
The Jews of Israel can no more reason with the Arabs than they could have done with the Sturm Abteilung on the streets of the cities of Germany on Kristallnacht in 1938.
Maybe even less so; The Germans were just having a good time and probably had not thought out that to what mass murderous end all the festering hatred of the Nazi Party was leading them.
But I think the Arabs have always seen the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland — first to the growing Yishuv and now to the still growing State of Israel — as a direct threat to their unlimited hegemony over the semitic lands of the Middle East.
So the Arabs have turned Jew-hatred into a self-induced mass hysteria that shows no signs ever of abating. Any so-called peace moves they make are little more than barely-concealed tactical tricks to shrink Israel to a smaller and presumably more conquerable size.
Therefore, as I see it, Israel must always be prepared to fight or die. And they can only gain safety by pushing back the arab populations that threaten their heartland with the kinds of daily attacks now suffered by the small city of Sderot near the Gaza border.
As for me sitting around in the semi-retired comfort of Wisconsin, just what the hell have you ever done for your own people, other than sit around in your law office in some Manhattan tower, and occasionally eat ice cream at the same counter with some local Arabs on Christmas night in Jersey?
Or do you seriously imagine that all your prayers will stop arab rifle bullets or protect Sderot from Arab rockets? That was the defense that the degenerate byzantine Greeks of the mid-15th century tried when the Ottomans besieged their city. They all crowded together in the great Saint Sophia basilica and prayed their heads off, rather than manning the triple walls that defended their imperial city. For that, they got the degradation of a conquered nation, and not a few of them had their heads lopped off before they had a further chance to pray them off.
The religious Jews I respect the most are the tough Haredim with the knitted kipot, who all take up arms in defense of Israel and who are ready alike to kill the enemies of their nation — and, for not a few of them — to take down the traitorous and cringing Jews who sign away parts of their country to the enemy.
But I think I have you pegged. So just go back to your prayers and pretend that’s all it takes to defend a nation against yet another mass extinction.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ron, I see that I misidentified some of these folks I wrote about. The guys in the knitted kipot apparently are not the “Haredim”, but are the modern orthodox Zionists, who live together with other Jews, whose wives go to work like everyone else, who serve willingly in Israel’s Zahal, and who ferociously defend Israel’s right to the complete Land of Israel.
The ones in the funny black hats, knee high black stockings, and the rest of their 17th century polish regalia, and who reject Zionism and the State of Israel but who still live their under protection of the rest of the Jews, can eat their own excrement for all I care.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Can you please share your source for this? As far as I know, the methodology employed for such a conclusion is far less scientific than the Lancet methodology — the historians took a population estimate of Hindu India around 1000 and then another around 1525, and ascribed all the difference to acts of Muslim conquerors (like this book). Even if the estimates are true, the causes are surely multiple, and even if many of the losses are due to brutal wars led by Muslim invaders, they are multiple events caused by multiple people and groups (Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Turks, and Mongols are not the same people), and, finally, that doesn’t prove the goal of the conquests, however bloody, was to wipe out the Hindu ethnic groups. So, these estimates are hardly comparable to the Nazi genocide of Jews during WWII.
That you unquestioningly accept these numbers says more about your own biases than it does about real history.
Ron,
I don’t understand why you take umbrage when people from afar suggest that Jews have a right, and ought, to behave unflinchingly in the conduct of their war with the enemy, but when mendacious Goyim claim from equally far away that the Jews are ‘morally’ obligated to tolerate the falling of rockets on our woman and children unless we find a magical way to separate arab woman and children from the arabs who fire those rockets, you say nothing.
I”m sure you are aware that there are plenty of Jews in the holy land who hold the views that for some reason those outside of Israel are not ‘allowed’ to hold, and when their political parties are not banned and their media not silenced, they manage to make a coherent case for them.
So why don’t you just stop trying to delegitimize opinions you hold unwise and distasteful. Argue your views all you like, but leave the tactic of delegitimizing positions for Jewish strength to the mendacious arm chair moralizers.
Do some research and disprove it yourself. I’m not wasting my time doing research for somebody like you.
I can’t spend my time debunking every piece of wild speculation out there. If there were actual evidence for your claim, I might be more interested in doing the research and sharing the results. I take your second sentence to mean that you don’t like Muslims. You are certainly free to do so, even if it is irrational.
Your approach sounds a lot like the Iranian denial of the jewish holocaust. The Hindu holocaust is documented, the estimate is 20 million, and it varies (greatly), because the muslim invaders weren’t exactly good accountants.
You can sit there and disbelieve all you want, just like Iran’s ‘president’ can disbelieve the jewish holocaust and the existence of iranian homosexuals,
and many others will simply laugh. The evidence is out there, open your eyes and you might see it.
Can you point me to a historical estimate besides the professor K.S. Lal’s (which I linked above)? His estimate was 60-80 million, and it spanned a 525 year time frame. It sounds as if you might be talking of a single event, which would be more of a candidate for “genocide”. I’d read about it if only you showed me where to look. I did do a search on the internet but failed to come up with anything but the study I already referenced and a bunch of propaganda sites. If you really believe this event occurred, then I don’t see why you would keep the information to yourself.
For instance, this wikipedia page on genocides in history doesn’t even mention it, nor the discussion page associated with it (where someone could be expected to lodge a complaint).
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