If #NeverAgain doesn’t apply to everyone it’s just special pleading.
This statement that nearly got me fired last week, from both my jobs. It’s a stance that, if made to a conservative Israeli in 2021, gets you branded an anti-semite.
Of course, even that term is loaded. Anti-semitism refers to prejudice against any semitic people. Palestinians are semites. So are all Arabs. How Israelis can commit daily outrages against Palestinians and call their critics anti-semite is beyond me. But there it is.
In saying this, I’m not denying the Holocaust or diminishing it. Most of the people I grew up around were children of survivors, or the soldiers who liberated them. But genocide is not the unique property of Jews. Armenians were victims of a genocide years before Hitler, no matter how much Turks reject that even today.
White Americans committed genocide against the native Americans, a fact obvious whenever you look into the eyes of Mexican immigrants. Most are descended from Indians. We killed ours. The Spanish just enslaved theirs.
America’s genocide, meant to create “living room” for European settlers, became Hitler’s model for his eastern war, German “lebensraum.” Another American idea that turned out to be nonsense was “eugenics,” the idea that certain races were genetically superior. (In fact, genetic diversity makes a species stronger.) Hitler adopted that, too.
The Holocaust was born in America.
We still hear echoes of it in Republican rhetoric. They won’t be “replaced?” By whom? Immigrants are as human as Tucker Carlson.
Genocide is more than prejudice. It’s more than oppression, or murder. It’s mass murder, meant to exterminate an entire race of people. Americans are committing genocide as I write this. We make guns into totems and kill 100 Americans each day with them. We ignore science and have lost 550,000 in one year. Why won’t Republicans speak out? Because most of the victims are black or brown or immigrants. Never again? Really?
Genocide has become as common as dirt in the 21st century. The Uighurs. The Rohingya. Yemen practically created the global trade system. That’s where the frankincense and myrrh came from. Incense overrode the smell of livestock that permeated ancient Rome. Yemen was also at the heart of the spice trade. The seasonal winds over the Indian ocean sent traders east, then west again, for a millennium.
Genocide is being committed against Yemen today. With American help.
But if you dare point this out, if you insist that others look at their own crimes as well as those of others, you’re the monster. You’ll be fired. You’ll have the Twitter mobs howling for your blood.
