Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Normalizing Atrocities: Landmarks of Shame

Normalizing Atrocities
Landmarks of shame.
Hamas’ orgy of rape, murder, and callous, indiscriminate cruelty such as mutilation, torture, burning alive, and beheadings that began last October 7 and is continuing almost a year later, marks an escalation extreme even by the standards of that blood-stained region. Morally horrific have been the “protests” on prestigious U.S. university campuses, abetted by simpatico, or cowardly, professors and administrators. These riotous displays also feature property damage, record-breaking assaults against Jews, and chants explicitly or implicitly calling for another Holocaust, and celebrating the Nazis’ Final Solution.
Yet another landmark of shame has been the covert and overt support for Hamas by European governments and the E.U., including America’s president who for electoral gain poisoned the materiel support given to Israel, and is still pressuring Israel’s government to come to an agreement with genocidal murderers, instead of destroying them and degrading their capacity to slaughter more innocent Israeli citizens.
What the West has done is to normalize unspeakable atrocities, and legitimize blatant antisemitism that in the postwar period used to be a hatred mainly typical of marginalized political freaks. How does that transformation––from a widely proscribed and condemned hatred, to one exuberantly flaunted during protests, and legitimize by government policies––happen? And what has to change to put such beliefs back into the realm of cranks and conspiracy mongers?
The first question has a general answer found in humanity’s universal practice of dehumanizing enemies. Historically, human beings’ default stance toward strangers and those different from one’s tribe is distrust and dislike, if not hatred. The idea of our elite’s “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism arose in ancient Greece, but parochial loyalties and hatreds remained powerful in Greek poleis. The tendency to prefer those like ourselves, whether culturally, politically, ideologically, or ethnically, is particularly obvious today in political factions, and ideological identity politics. Like James Madison’s “factions,” this tendency is “sown in the nature of man.”
A byproduct of this sorting is some level of dehumanization. In a relatively peaceful society such as ours today, the “other” is typically identified linguistically by insulting or demeaning epithets, on the left many of them compounds sporting the suffix “-phobic.” Sometimes metaphors using animals or insects make the dehumanization explicit. All such insults, however, don’t necessarily lead to mass murder or other atrocities. Pace wannabe censors, words are not violence. But heinous actions by definition are, and such crimes invariably call on a catalogue of dehumanizing epithets.
The pro-Hamas protests and display of support, however, are extreme even by the standards of advocacy apparent during the antiwar protests in the Sixties or during the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, antiwar activists, many of them Marxists, did give aid and comfort to the enemy, lied about the actions of our troops, and worked to discredit the war in the minds of voters and Congressmen.
In the case of Vietnam, it worked. President Nixon’s bombing of the North’s attempted offensives, by 1973 had brought the North to the bargaining table. But snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and bullied by antiwar protests, our government abandoned our South Vietnam allies in a humiliating retreat from Saigon.
But all the violent protests and bombings against America’s war in Vietnam, costly as they were, never reached the level of moral idiocy we’ve seen among mostly affluent, privileged college students protesting U.S. support of Israel, despite Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and its atrocities committed against its people, including mass rapes, and willful targeting of children, infants, and the elderly.
The general dehumanization of an enemy during a conflict can’t account for enormity of this moral debasement of our universities. One factor, which the media and government tip-toe around ever since 9/11, is the large number of Muslim foreign students among the protestors, most from the Middle East. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.


No comments: