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genocide
Iwo Cyprien Pogonowski on anti-Polonism in the writing of WW II history:
“These animosities [from WW II], in order to live on, have to be carefully cultivated in younger people by those who may feel their interests are served by doing so. Surprisingly, there have been systematic attempts by some to keep these animosities alive [...]
The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally [...]
R. J. Rummel on democide: “This is a report of the statistical results from a project on comparative genocide and mass-murder in this century. Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the [...]
here's an important piece on sudan, from the latimes: "state-sponsored pyromania." i remember susan rice, now the ambassador to the u.n., saying that the one thing she learned from serving in the clinton admin, with regard to rwanda, is that you can't dick around while the genocide goes forward. it's amazing how fast the political calculations set in when you actually have the power to do something. for that matter, obama really seemed to pledge to intervene during his campaign. there is nothing happening. ok i'm an anarchist blah blah blah, but i believe that if you actually do have to power to intervene in a genocide, you are morally obliged to do so. we do, and we are obligated. but we aren't doing a damn thing, i believe. the success of our diplomatic effeorts to isolate the regime and so on will coincide with the final emptying of the region of its living human beings.
one correlate of the idea that time is progressive and that we are it which should give progressives pause is the way the idea has articulated cultures. so, for example, hegel held that africa had no history, was outside of history. in anthropology into the midlate twentieth century, you got...(Linked Saturday 2009-10-17.)
it's amazing that when people discuss genocide, as in daniel goldhagen's new book (at least as it's represented in the review; i intend to read it), or in the alternative views mentioned in the review ('“Mobilizing the Will to Intervene,” a study by leading Canadian and American figures, identifies “poverty...(Linked Saturday 2009-10-17.)
This morning, after a highly-productive Liberty Fund seminar in Santa Fe, I went over to Pasquale's for breakfast. I sat with a woman who runs a Mexican restaurant in a small town in Colorado. We talked about various things, including her criticism of "factory farms" that, in her view and...(Linked Saturday 2009-10-17.)
Or so says perpetually off-kilter Jill Stanek — except she uses the term “quiche-eaters.” Basically, a study says that women who use birth control tend to be attracted to men with more boyish features with caring personalities, versus “rugged” men with controlling personalities. The study itself is questionable, and the...(Linked Saturday 2009-10-17.)
I don't usually talk much about my day job here at KN@PPSTER, and when we run a fundraiser over there I usually give it at most a mention here. This one's a bit different and I figure it's a "hit hard, everywhere" situation. So:Dear readers,Over the years, we've tried various...(Linked Saturday 2009-10-17.)
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi likes the painting to the right, a Giambattista Tiepolo work called "La Verità Svelata dal Tempo." (The Truth Unveiled by Time.) He likes it so much that he gives news conferences with a reproduction of the painting as backdrop. Truth, the young woman, is front...(Linked Monday 2009-10-19.)
A bad attitude -- the new felony(Linked Monday 2009-10-19.)
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– ← previousOctober 19th, 2009nextOctober 19th, 2009: The talk went well! Or at least, I hope it did. A CONFESSION: I queued up all these comics and posts way back when it was last Wednesday, because I was worried I'd...(Linked Monday 2009-10-19.)
it's amazing that when people discuss genocide, as in daniel goldhagen's new book (at least as it's represented in the review; i intend to read it), or in the alternative views mentioned in the review ('“Mobilizing the Will to Intervene,” a study by leading Canadian and American figures, identifies “poverty and inequality, population growth and the ‘youth bulge,’ ethnic nationalism and climate change” [climate change!] as the chief “drivers of deadly violence”'), they ignore the breathtakingly obvious. all of the events mentioned are the acts of states. states possess the resources (derived from coercive taxation and weaponry) to be effectively irresistible when they turn to mass slaughter. we are all potentially their victims throughout our lives.
really, this blindness to what is jumping up and down right in front of you waving its arms and screaming is a testimony to what our era really is: we cannot imagine life without the state; we cannot imagine our own lives except as nurtured, controlled, or subject to the extermination by the state. it has to be . . . what we want, who we most deeply are. it could extinguish the whole planet and the omega man would still be trying to blame the whole thing on...whatever: climate change, the youth bulge. the yout bulge? he'd be in despair because there was no one left to be subordinated by.
correction: actually, goldhagen evidently mentions 9.11/alqaeda. ok not a state. other "eliminationist" disasters mentioned in the review: the holocaust, rwanda, stalin. mao, colonial kenya and guatamala, sudan, srebrinica.
What does it feel like to live through a genocide? My student Chiemela’s father knows: He was a boy in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, which according to a reporter on the scene in 1968, “deteriorated steadily from a war in which the original motivation was the reincorporation of the breakaway east into Nigeria [...]
Just yesterday I was forced to suffer a fool on the bus. He yammered on to his audience about his existence in the way people who his character do, discussing things from his former cars to getting pissed. Needless to say, the words this man used were putrid and offended right to the core as the subject of his conversation gave an insight to his character that can only be described as some blend of evil and stupid. And I have yet still to work out the exact portions.
During the long trip, another in this man’s company cracked a racist joke. I was lead to the assumption that based on the man’s accent he was native to the state of Queensland. As conversation does, it went backwards and forwards for a while on the subject of indigenous Australians, and while my attention had been caught by the words of the second man, it was the first that left the mark.
This man, evidently from Tasmania, began discussing the indigenous population of of his native state and his comments on the subject went something along the lines of,
“We didn’t quite push out all the Aborigines out of Tasmania when we first got there. There are still some left. We didn’t do a good enough job. We should have pushed them all off the cliffs when we had the chance. That way there’d be no more black people around. Could you imagine that? Maybe we should just shoot them so that there would be no more black people around, no more.”
This is all fairly accurate though I admit I’m can’t quite remember whether he suggested executing these people with bullets or through some other method, but the image and impact of these words remains the same. The amazing thing, is that this guy laughed after saying such words and I was sorely tempted to turn around and propose that if he really wanted to shoot someone, he should do the rest of us a favour and start with himself. But after tallying up all the reasons in my mind why what this man was saying was wrong, and all the reasons why I would feel entirely justified in punching him in the face, I turned back into the second part of the conversation which had turned to the bush fires in Victoria.
For those that don’t know, Victoria was turned into a tinderbox with the extreme heat wave over that lasted over two weeks and has since gone up in flames, taken something towards 300 people with it. It is truly a tragedy, and while my sympathies goes out to those affected by such a disaster, I should probably return to the topic at hand; the conversation.
It seems the Tasmanian man, and his fellows had been discussing the fires, particularly the one that claimed the most life and had been lit by an arsonist. Each had taken their turn to curse whomever this arsonist was with a string of profanity and then agreed upon a certain descriptive word that made me prick up my ears. They called this firebug, “evil” and suggested that he should be shot. Another one of their companions who had evidently studied law or worked in the police or the courts — pretty much “worked in government” — began explaining the possible sentencing for the arsonist when he had been caught, which inevitably ended up being, “life.” However, that did not interest me. My mind lingered back towards the use of the word “evil” and the unanimous condemning of an act that cost human life, yet when only minutes before, these same characters had been laughing at a similar act but also proposed that such an act should be deliberately carried out against a minority.
Needless to say, I could not believe how it did not occur to these people that they were advocating murder and yet simultaneously condemning it. Their cognitive dissonance must be so huge, so massive, that I wonder how they are able to sleep at night with their brain in such stress. The Orwellian doublethink of the whole thing just took me back and I had to get off that bus. I could not have stayed there with those people any longer, even if it meant waiting for the next bus.
Indeed, through this post their conversation will have been recorded publicly so that their words may stand testament to the doublethink of our time. I’d even be willing to wager that these same men would have been those who celebrated Australia Day wearing a blue singlet, having a BBQ and waving — or wearing — an Australian flag.
Doesn’t it make you proud to be Australian?
I also suggest reading this article discussing the massacre of Tasmanian Aborigines to add an extra dimension to the whole episode.
