News+and+politics religion philosophy the cynic librarian: how much justice doth genocide buy?

Monday, October 30, 2006

how much justice doth genocide buy?

barring the notion that justice is the twin of love and forgiveness as some our great prophet-leaders seedeth the fertile fields of vengeance with: chris hedges asks some interesting questions about genocide and the victimhood that the mausoleum of a museum taxidermifies. where're the rwanda armenia homosexual gypsy polish mummies interred methinks? ...

so much death would breed or instil a sense indeed for justice but as so much of the blood and soil cogitation fetsishizes justice can only revel like a teeming mass of living dead for cannibalistic fury.

mr hedges you ask questions that are obviously antisemite and hateful[/url] and obviously skewed in your parallaxical view. take a note from ye olde goode bookes and grasp the idea that love and forgiveness give way to the just sword and the rabidity of vengenace.

When I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington I looked in vain for these other victims. I did not see explained in detail the awful reality that Jewish officials in the ghettos—Judenrat—worked closely with the Nazis to herd their own off to the death camps. And was the happy resolution of the Holocaust, as we saw in images at the end of the exhibits, the disembarking of European Jews on the shores of Palestine? What about the Palestinians who lived in Palestine and were soon to be pushed off their land? And, as importantly, what about African-Americans and Native Americans? Why is the Nazi genocide, which we did not perpetrate, displayed on the Mall in Washington and the brutal extermination of Native Americans ignored? Why should billions in reparations be paid to Jewish slave laborers and not a dime to those enslaved by our own country?

These questions circle back to the dangerous sanctification of any genocide, the belief that one ethnic group can represent goodness, solely because its members are the victims, and another evil because from its ranks come the thugs who carry out mass slaughter. Once these demented killing machines begin their work the only thing unique is the method of murder. The lesson of any genocide is not that one group of human beings is better than another, but that in the intoxication of the moment, gripped by the mass hypnosis of state propaganda and the lust for violence, we can all become killers. All the victims must be heard. None are unique. And all of us have to be on guard lest we be seduced. We carry within us—German, Jew, Armenian or Christian—dark and dangerous lusts that must be held in check. I applaud the French. I hope the French action pushes the Turks toward contrition and honesty. But I do not wish for the Armenians to covet the Holocaust, to begin the process of sanctifying their own suffering. When we sanctify ourselves we do so at the expense of others.

No comments: