"Empathy will always find a solution; apathy will only find an excuse"
-Payam Akhavan
Earlier this year, I visited Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, one of the most infamous concentration camps of the Holocaust. It was an experience I will remember until the day I die - seeing the gas chamber, the crematoriums, the graves of ashes, and the pictures of the countless dead people - senselessly murdered simply for belonging to another ethnic group; brutally slaughtered for no other reason than because they were different.
I had long read about the Holocaust, but visiting the site where over 45,000 people were murdered - that made it real. I was literally standing on a mass grave, on a site where the worst evils imaginable had been perpetrated.
I tend to think of myself as a stoic person, and I am no stranger to reading about some of the worst evils man has perpetrated on his fellow man. But it is one thing to read about an atrocity, and another thing to see it for yourself.
So when I saw the gas chamber, and when I saw the crematorium and the mass graves, I was overwhelmed with emotion. To see for myself the products of the evils that had been perpetrated, and to know that I was standing in a place where perhaps the most horrific atrocity in human history had been perpetrated - for the first time, I broke down and began to cry. I cried for the countless innocent lives that had been extinguished - simply because they were different.
It's hard to understand the gravitas of genocide, because as humans we tend to focus on the visual aspects and not the underlying circumstances. But genocide is much more than dead bodies. It's more than tyrannical regimes. There is something at the root of it - something born out of some ancient evil, an evil that strikes against not just morality but also our humanity.
If the antithesis of common humanity can be condensed into a single word, that word would be "genocide". The Holocaust wasn't just a crime against Jews. It didn't just target the Jewish people. No, it was far more than that. The Holocaust - like all genocides - was a crime against humanity itself.
Genocide is so much more than mass murder. The goal of it isn't just to kill people. The goal isn't just to conquer territory or loot spoils of war. The goal of genocide is to literally erase an entire group of people from the face of the earth - based solely on the fact that they are different than you.
Not change them. Not convert them. Not turn them into you. Just kill them. Totally, completely wipe them out. Literally erase them from existence.
Seven months ago, I wrote an article about the 1994 Rwandan genocide - in which over 1,000,000 ethnic Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, simply because they were of a different ethnicity.
That article has affected me more than anything else I have written. Those bodies - countless bodies of men, women, children, and babies - still haunt me. I see them in my dreams. For weeks after writing my article, I dreaded going to sleep, because I would see those bodies every night.
After publishing that article, I had countless nightmares - nightmares which have still never faded. One recurring nightmare has haunted me the most, and it is almost always the same one: I am standing on the side of a dirt road in Rwanda. Across the street, I can see Hutu militiamen hacking Tutsi children to death with machetes. The children scream for help. They cry out for me to save them. But I can do nothing. I can't help them. I can't stop the killing. All I can do is watch the horrifying spectacle unfold, unable to look away and unable to stop the slaughter.
This is why, when we say "Never Again", we need to mean it. Genocide is a crime that attacks our very humanity. It targets everything that makes us human. It is the worst evil that man can possibly perpetrate on his fellow man - because it is the ultimate tool of dehumanization.
And, for the sake of our collective humanity, we must stop at absolutely nothing to prevent genocide from taking hold again. Even if it means intervening in a country where our national interests are not at stake, we absolutely have to do it. Some things are more important than nationality, and one of those things is recognizing that all of us - regardless of nationality, religion, gender, race, or ethnicity - share a common bond of humanity.
It is important to remember that genocide isn't an impulsive action; rather, it is an insidious, carefully-plotted process of persecution, extermination and, ultimately, denial.
Today, I want to focus on that last part: the denial of genocide, and, specifically, the goals of those who engage in it. Denial may be the most important step of genocide, because if we fall into its trap we can never learn from history - ensuring that genocide can once again take hold and wreak its terrible crimes against humanity, thereby perpetuating the evil, horrific cycle again and again.
The Two Groups of Genocide Deniers
It is no surprise that many neo-Nazis promote Holocaust denial. In order to make the ideology of Nazism more palatable to new recruits, it serves the interests of neo-Nazis to deny the existence of the Holocaust.
However, it is important to realize that there are actually two subgroups of genocide deniers. The first are the most obvious - those who seek to perpetuate a hateful ideology without addressing its horrors. In this group, I put neo-Nazis and other ideologically-driven groups that perpetuate racism and antisemitism. They deny the occurrence of genocide because they want to perpetuate the myth that "the other" is an enemy that needs to be destroyed.
The second group of deniers, however, are not motivated by particular racial hatred or supremacist ideologies. Rather, they are motivated by laziness.
I'm talking, of course, about non-interventionists and isolationists on both the right-wing and, most importantly, the left-wing. And I will focus on the left-wing deniers for a specific reason that I will explain later.
Many American non-interventionists oppose any and all military action where US national interests are not at stake. If it's not our people in danger, they say, we have no business intervening.
Of course, this raises the question: What if a regime is carrying out genocide or other crimes against humanity against innocent people? Should we intervene then? What about what happened in places like Rwanda, Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Syria, and Myanmar?
Is it really the right thing to stand by and watch as millions of innocent people die?
This, of course, puts non-interventionists in a bit of a dilemma. How can they defend abandoning innocent people to be slaughtered? That doesn't sound very appealing, does it?
So, steadfast in their beliefs, these non-interventionists instead simply minimize or outright deny the occurrence of these genocides. In doing so, they can use willful ignorance to render all criticism of their beliefs moot. Why intervene to stop a genocide, they can say, if that genocide never occurred?
This isn't just an opinion of mine. I'm not just spitballing here. We can actually see this pattern among left-wing non-interventionists. Prominent authors such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have trafficked widely in genocide denial while pushing a doctrine of non-interventionism.
Let's examine some of these so-called "liberal" non-interventionists, and examine how and why they engage in genocide denial.
False Liberals: Examining the Deniers
First, let's take a look at Edward Herman, a writer who has co-authored several books with Noam Chomsky, and who, in 2010, published a book entitled The Politics of Genocide, which he coauthored with Chomsky and economist David Peterson.
(Already, the book's premise is problematic. Genocide is not a political or partisan issue; it is a human issue. Presenting genocide as anything else than a human issue is already a twisting of its meaning.)
In The Politics of Genocide, Herman engaged in outright denial of the Rwandan genocide.
Herman and Peterson denied that the Hutu-led government ever had a systematic plan to exterminate the Tutsis, and claimed that the accepted death toll of between 800,000 - 1,000,000 people was "exaggerated".
In fact, Herman actually accused the Tutsi-led RPF of being the "prime genocidaires" in Rwanda, and described the Hutu extremist militias as the "actual victims".
This is, of course, utter nonsense. The evidence that the extremist Hutu government deliberately plotted and arranged the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda is impossible to ignore. Even former militia leaders have confessed to this. To claim that the genocide was not carefully planned and executed by extremist Hutus is absolutely preposterous, and anyone who makes such an outlandish claim should immediately lose credibility on any stage.
But it's not just the Rwandan genocide that Herman denied. In The Politics of Genocide, Herman also downplayed the scale of the 1995 Bosnian genocide, in which over 8,300 ethnic Bosniaks were slaughtered by the extremist Serbian Republika Srpska.
Herman claimed that the widely-accepted death toll of 8,300 was "propaganda", and claimed that the real number of fatalities was "probably in the order of 500-1000" (as if that somehow makes it any better!). He also criticized the NATO-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as "humanitarian imperialism" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) and repeated his mantra of non-interventionism and isolationism/
OK, Suzuki, you may be thinking. We get it. Ed Herman was an asshole. But he's just one guy. How is that an indictment on non-interventionism as a whole?
But that's the thing - Ed Herman isn't the only left-wing non-interventionist who has a history of engaging in genocide denial in order to promote non-interventionism.
Let's look at another prominent left-wing non-interventionist: Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most prominent academic voices of leftist non-interventionism today. While he does not quite share Ed Herman's conspiratorial views, Chomsky has demonstrated no compunction about endorsing Herman's revisionist accounts, and has even himself engaged in unfounded skepticism of the Cambodian genocide, in which over 2,000,000 intellectuals, political opponents, and ethnic minorities were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge regime during the 1970s.
In 1977, Chomsky attempted to discredit the accounts of survivors of the Cambodian genocide and tried to shift the blame on the United States. In an extremely condescending article, Chomsky wrote that the accounts of the survivors had to be "taken with great care and caution" because, in his words, "refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear."
Chomsky has never retracted or apologized for his statements, even after countless war crimes tribunals have established that the Cambodian genocide did, in fact, occur. For decades, he continued to either outright deny the scale of the killings or attempt to blame the US for the catastrophe.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that Chomsky has changed his views since 1977. As recently as 2006, he was still peddling in revisionism - this time denying the Bosnian genocide.
Chomsky described the concentration camps in Srebrenica as "refugee camps", where imprisoned Bosniaks were "free to leave if they wanted to". He also said that the scale of the killings in Srebrenica was "overstated", and claimed that describing the mass slaughter of ethnic Bosniaks in Srebrenica as a genocide "cheapens the term" (apparently unaware that the targeted slaughter of an ethnic group is exactly what genocide is!).
And what was the reason for Chomsky's denial of the Bosnian genocide? What was his end point? You guessed it! Non-interventionism! In that same interview, Chomsky decried the NATO intervention in Bosnia as "imperialist" and organized by "hawkish" elements in the US government.
This seems to be a common theme with non-interventionists like Chomsky. If a military intervention is authorized by the US or NATO to combat a genocidal regime, they always resort to the same script:
1. Deny the scale or even the existence of the genocide
2. If that fails, blame the US for the catastrophe
3. Promote non-interventionism as the solution
4. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum
This script can be applied to almost every genocide, be it Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar, Anfal, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, or even the Holocaust.
And we can see this cycle happening yet again today when it comes to Syria.
The Growing Threat
Today, there is a sectarian civil war raging in Syria, where ethnic strife has been tense (to put it mildly!) for decades. The dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, has been known to target political opponents, ethnic minorities, and dissident activists - even women and children - for harassment, imprisonment without trial, or even extermination.
Worse, Assad has been known to use chemical weapons, such as chlorine and sarin gas, against civilian targets. This is not only a war crime - it is actually forbidden by both UN and pre-UN conventions. Innocent men, women, and children are being slaughtered by the Syrian regime, and here at home we can see, once again, that the non-interventionists and isolationists are emerging from the sewers to employ the same old tactics they always use: deny, deflect, and ignore.
Since Assad first used sarin gas against civilians in 2013, non-interventionists from both the left and right wing have come to his defense, claiming either that there is "no evidence" that Assad was behind the attacks, or that the attacks themselves never happened and were "staged".
Most recently, in 2018, after a chlorine gas attack was launched against civilians in the Syrian town of Douma, non-interventionists scrambled to defend Assad from any culpability. They claimed, baselessly, that the chemical attack was staged, even after the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) conducted a thorough investigation and found that not only had a chemical attack occurred, but it had been conducted by the Syrian government.
After the United States launched retaliatory airstrikes against the Syrian army in response to the chemical attacks, non-interventionist shrieked about "imperialism" and "warmongers". For instance, left-wing radio host Kyle Kulinski criticized the "hawkishness" of the US government and, once again, reiterated his claim that Assad was not responsible for the chemical attack, even casting doubt on whether chemical weapons had been used.
It would be tempting to think that these theories are limited to the political extreme. But they're not. In fact, they're being promoted by a presidential candidate from the Democratic Party: Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard has been vocally defensive of Assad in the face of international criticism, even meeting with him personally on at least one occasion.
Even though countless investigations have all concluded that Assad ordered and directed his military to commit war crimes against civilians, Gabbard has been reluctant to accept these conclusions, engaging in much of the same war-crimes-denialism seen from Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky.
One page on her campaign website is devoted to absolving Assad of wrongdoing in the Douma poison gas attack, claiming that "there is evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war".
Needless to say, this supposed "evidence" is never described, and Gabbard outright dismisses the findings of the OPCW, deliberately taking statements out of context and peddling baseless conspiracy theories about videos and photos of the aftermath being "staged".
And why would Gabbard do this? Why would she defend a brutal, murderous dictator like Assad?
The answer, of course, will probably not surprise you: Non-interventionism. The cornerstone of Gabbard's campaign, in fact, is her non-interventionism. She has been vocally opposed to any and all military action against Assad, and she has called for a full military withdrawal from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan - regardless of the fact that a military withdrawal could abandon hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people to be slaughtered by genocidal regimes.
Gabbard's campaign is indicative of a sinister, growing movement among the left wing - a movement that stands in complete opposition to the founding principles of liberalism - freedom, equality, liberty, and cooperation. This sinister movement is dedicated not to those liberal values, but instead bows before the idols of isolationism, non-interventionism, fear, and ignorance. It doesn't seek to help the oppressed - it seeks to ignore them. It values selfishness, not selflessness. It feeds on fear and ignorance, and it burgeons on lies and deceit. And, worst of all, it enables the evils of genocide to thrive and strike again and again.
Silence never favors the oppressed. Inaction never helps the vulnerable. Ignoring evil - pretending it doesn't exist and ignoring those who suffer from it - only serves to embolden inhumanity. And, if these supposedly liberal non-interventionists truly want to claim the moral high ground, then they should put their money where their mouth is.
If you truly want to uphold liberal values and fight against inhumanity, then you should be willing to confront evil wherever and whenever it emerges. Do it for the countless millions who died during the Holocaust. Do it for the 1.1 million innocent people slaughtered in Rwanda while the rest of the world stood by and did nothing. Do it for the hundreds of thousands who have died needless deaths in Syria.
And, if that somehow doesn't motivate you to take action, then do it for your own humanity. Do it for your own honor. Because humanity and honor mean nothing if we aren't willing to stand up for them.
Too many times, we have said "Never Again".
One day, I hope, we will actually mean it.
Comments
Post a Comment