Jews rounded up by the Germans during or after The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Joshua Stanton examines the genocides of our day:
Fifty years from now, schoolchildren will make solemn visits to memorials at Camp 22, and grad students will write theses about it. Yet today, while Camp 22’s next victims can still be saved, it’s another unpleasant topic we choose not to bring up for the sake of a diplomatic dance whose end result is mournfully predictable. The angst of those who should be talking about Camp 22 is wasted instead on places that aren’t remotely comparable to Tuol Sleng or Mauthausen, though too many would squander their credibility and betray their true motives by suggesting otherwise.This is an exceptional writing.
It’s also why you’ll never hear feel-good featherweights like George Clooney, Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi advocate any remotely plausible plan to prevent an undeniably likely genocide in Iraq. There is no feel-good, cost-free, plausible way to prevent that genocide or the other wars that will emerge from it, which puts the question beyond their competence and compassion. What they don’t realize is that it’s just as true of Darfur. We’ve been talking about Darfur for years now, and no nation or international body has yet taken a single effective step to stop the genocide there. This isn’t because we don’t know how. It’s because the things we could do to deter and mitigate this genocide quickly wouldn’t make enough of us feel good about ourselves. Yes, recruiting public support is often a prequisite to effective action, but if feel-good activism isn’t leading us toward effective action, it’s an exceedingly selfish form of compassion.
Drumming in circles has its place.
But, it won't stop genocide.
Stanton is soooo correct. You stop genocide by killing — let me repeat that — by killing the people who are committing genocide. It's not complex. It's not nuanced. And there's absolutely no moral ambiguity. When people embark on a mission of genocide, they can only be stopped by a mightier sword. It's always been the case. It will always be the case.
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ReplyDeleteexcelent post GP..
excellent reply Anonymous @ 11:41 AM
Is It Right to Fight?
excerpts:
[One other point, if everyone was a pacifist except the evil and lawbreakers of the world, then the world would be run by evil dictators or our society would be anarchy.
Pacifism in its fullest sense is untenable in the sinful world
in which we live.]
[The subject "Is it right to fight?" is a difficult issue because it makes us face the awful issues of a suppressive dictatorship, evil aggression, killing and death on the one hand and the "necessary evil" of war to stop it. Could this be the reason that General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg said, "It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it." The just war position, in the writer's opinion, fits best with the Scriptural evidence.
Remember, it is possible to love your enemies and use force against him. The principle that love is embraced in laws of justice helps us see that loving one's enemy is to make sure that justice prevails. In doing so, the Christian is also demonstrating "love for the ones his enemy has hurt."]
"On Moral Equivalency and Cold War History"
excerpts:
[Where does that leave us, though, with the new evidence we have about the victims of Stalin and Mao Zedong? One recent but reliable estimate suggests that Stalin's domestic victims alone - when one totals not only the figures for the purges but also for the collectivization of agriculture and the famine that resulted from it - numbered about twenty million dead. This does not count the additional acknowledged twenty-seven million Soviet citizens who died as a result of World War II. But this is not the worst of it. Estimates of those who died in one single episode - the Chinese famine produced by Mao's ill-conceived Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961 - now come to some thirty million, thereby qualifying the Chairman (whose image was once a popular adornment for t-shirts and dormitory wall posters in the West) as perhaps the greatest mass murderer of all time.]
[Why didn't the United States exploit its advantage to keep the Soviet Union from developing its own bomb? Or to avoid near-defeat in Korea? These are complicated questions, but one of the answers that comes up, when one looks at what American officials said to each other, is the conviction that a democracy could only use such a weapon as a last resort, and in self-defense.
But that in turn raises another interesting question of comparative morality: would an authoritarian system - one based on an ideology that explicitly justified any means necessary to achieve its ends, one that employed terror as a method of government, and one as casual about the loss of human life as were Stalin's and Mao's - have shown similar restraint had it got the bomb first?]
[We need to be careful about the methodological metaphors we keep in our minds. Too much of Cold War history was written as if its major contenders were indeed featureless billiard balls, whose internal composition and character didn't much matter. In retrospect, apples and oranges might have been the better metaphor: at least it would have allowed for irregularity, asymmetry, and the possibility of internal rot.]
what the fascist left have been aiming for is to "equate" good with evil.. that's the only way they can appease their conscience in face of a reality they are trying to escape from because it does not fit in with their ideological utopian matrix.. if ther is no good vs evil, then all is good even if the all is evil.. *sigh*
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ReplyDeletegah, no biggie, but feel compelled
to correct my typo anyways.. :D
"if there is no good vs evil, then
all is good even if the all is evil"
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