By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 18, 2024
The
campaign of extermination that first caught the attention of Polish law student
Raphael Lemkin—whose critical contribution to our understanding of genocide was
giving us the word, though this was not his only contribution—was the Ottoman
campaign of liquidation directed against Armenian Christians living in the
territory of the Muslim empire. Lemkin was dismayed to learn that there wasn’t
any kind of legal course of action to take against those who had ordered the
massacres and those who had carried them out. There was no legal mechanism
because there was no crime per se, and there was no crime in part because there
was no concept of such a crime, no way of adequately conceiving of it because
there was no satisfactory way of talking about the thing. When the Germans
invaded Poland, Lemkin made his way to the United States, where he was a legal
academic long associated with Duke University. He coined the term genocide in
the early 1940s to describe Nazi atrocities and was an important figure at the
Nuremberg tribunals. His work provided much of the basis for the U.N. Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A career to be
proud of, to be sure—but one might reasonably ask, from time to time, whether
it mattered.
Genocide,
as Lemkin understood it and the U.N. defines it, does not require comprehensive
universal extermination or a plan of comprehensive universal extermination.
Genocide is a program of eliminating a people as a people, as a nation or
within a nation or society. This is not to say that no one dreams of universal
extermination of targeted populations—some Nazis dreamt of the worldwide
elimination of Jews, while others professed that they would have been content
with merely eliminating the Jews of all Europe. My colleague Jonah Goldberg
frequently points out that the U.N. language on genocide excludes efforts to
eliminate classes of people; the Soviets wanted to go on
liquidating the kulaks and other enemies of socialism and the USSR’s U.N.
representatives insisted on the class exclusion.
The
two most important campaigns of genocide in the world today are those directed
against: 1) the Jews of Israel by Arabs who mean to annihilate the Jewish state
as a polity and who will murder, maim, and rape as many individuals Jews as it
takes to do this and then some; and 2) Ukraine, the elimination of which as a
nation and as a polity is the stated aim of Vladimir Putin’s murderous and
tyrannical regime in Moscow.
The
two genocides in progress have a great deal in common. Both involve peoples who
have long lived in close proximity to one another and who share or have shared
important cultural, political, and economic ties. Those who would carry out the
genocide or enable it charge those targeted for national extermination with the
very crime of which they themselves are guilty. They make risible charges that
Israel is involved in a genocide against the Arabs of Palestine (whose numbers
continue to grow robustly throughout the region and who
progress economically and socially where they are Israeli citizens even as
other Palestinians founder under Arab misrule), or they indulge the Russian
government’s insistence that the world recognize the “Nazi character” of the
Ukrainian government and its … Jewish president, whose term in office
overlapped with that of a Jewish prime minister. In both cases, apologists for
mass murder and extermination ranging from half-educated college sophomores to
professional and semiprofessional trolls carry out campaigns of denial and
disinformation—nothing that would affect the thinking of any reasonably
intelligent person but which can be effective tools for those who want to
believe what the propagandists are selling, including those who are predisposed
to antisemitism and/or who sympathize with autocrats such as Putin.
In
both cases, the genocide is being used as a tool by larger, more geopolitically
significant parties (namely Iran and China) to undermine, tax, threaten, and
divide the liberal democracies, whose economic cohesion and commitment to
collective security are the main obstacles to a world order dominated by China
to the incidental benefit of certain inferior regional powers such as Iran and
Russia. In both cases, the U.S. response has been hampered by political
partisans who happily do the work of one of the genocidal aggressors: Our
progressive friends swear that they are not antisemites even as they insist on
the genocidal Hamas line—denying Israel’s basic legitimacy, “from the river to
the sea” and all that—and our right-wing friends insist that they are not
Putinists even as they insist that the necessary course of action is to give
Moscow what Moscow demands and even as they amplify the most
ridiculous and indefensible Russian propaganda. To watch Michael Brendan
Dougherty and Tucker Carlson take precisely the most pro-Kremlin line
acceptable within polite society and to watch Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida
Tlaib take the most antisemitic line acceptable within polite society is
to watch essentially the same thing. I’ve seen probably 60 different
adaptations of Macbeth, and, different though each was, you could
count on things always to end badly. At least China’s bought-and-paid-for
apologists in the TikTok matter operate within the long and stately tradition
of ordinary venal corruption; how much more shameful those who serve Moscow and
Hamas—and through them Beijing—out of spite, bigotry, stupidity, and
mania.
The
U.S. response has been excessively timid in both cases, an overcorrection of
the errors of the Iraq War. President Joe Biden insists that an Israeli
invasion of Rafah would cross a “red line.” Biden being a veteran of Barack
Obama’s administration, his talk of “red lines” means
less than nothing, of course, and the Israeli people as a whole—I do not
mean here only those associated with Benjamin Netanyahu and the political
tendency he personifies—understand the hard facts: The surviving intact Hamas
brigades are mostly in Rafah, therefore the battleground is in Rafah. The Biden
administration is mostly toothless where our enemies are concerned, but it can
be very rough on our allies, from the French to the Israelis. How different
would the war look if the Biden administration had the courage to say what
everybody knows: that Israeli security and Palestinian sovereignty are
incompatible, that the situation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is entirely
within Hamas’ control and entirely Hamas’ doing, and that the only way to
discourage future Palestinian savagery—and let us not forget the savagery of
the October 7 attacks—is to take away from the Palestinian oligarchs something
they value. They have no economy to speak of, seem content to continue in
poverty and misrule, and apparently are happy to continue using young Arab men
and children as cannon fodder and suicide bombers for another generation or
more—but they do value their effective control of Gaza and the West Bank. It is
perfectly obvious that for both reasons of practical security and for exemplary
reasons, permanent loss of control over Gaza is the price the Arabs of
Palestine must pay for October 7. It is equally obvious that the loss of Arab
control of the West Bank must be understood as the price that will be paid for
a repeat of October 7 or a variation on the theme.
U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for his part, hopes
to entrust Gaza to an “effective and revitalized Palestinian
Authority,” which is weapons-grade wishful thinking. There is not going to be a
two-state solution in Israel. The open questions are whether the one state that
exists there right now will survive and, immediately, whether the Biden
administration can stand up to a few angry graduate students and Hollywood
dopes in order to see to what are, let us remind ourselves as often as
necessary, American interests in the war on Israel.
The American interests
at play in the war on Ukraine are barely better served, and we should expect
them to be abandoned entirely if the political winds shift even a little.
Donald Trump is an elderly imbecile who very possibly also will be a convicted
criminal in the near future, and he gravitates naturally, according to his
character, to caudillos such as Putin, unable to resist the
weak man’s invariable submissive attraction to strong men; Joe Biden is a
senescent hack who resists political pressure as unbendingly as overcooked
spaghetti resists the fork. Taking away from the Palestinians the notional
sovereignty that they have not actually quite realized is a relatively small
thing compared to what needs to be done in Russia, which is the deposing of the
Putin regime and the removal, by force if necessary, of Russia’s nuclear
arsenal. There simply will be no peace for Russia’s neighbors (and the
imperialists in Moscow have a very capacious idea of what constitutes their
neighborhood) or for NATO, the European Union, and the United States while
Putin rules and, in the long term, while the backwards basket-case of a country
over which Putin currently presides is permitted to maintain under its control
the means to destroy the world.
I
am not sure that I agree with Raphael Lemkin about the laws of
war and genocide. His views, while deeply humane, seem to me excessively
idealistic. The delicate chains of legitimacy that shape lawmaking in a liberal
democracy are not available at the global level; it is possible for nations to
make binding agreements, and even to agree to subject themselves to something
called “international law,” but it is a different animal, as Lemkin himself
appreciated. (Recognition of this legitimacy problem has always animated
romantic, totalitarian dreams of a world government.) And it is not clear that
the international powers and institutions take conventions as anything other
than pretextual in the serious matter of genocide. The United Nations
investigated the “crime of genocide” in Somalia for massacres carried out with
state support in the 1980s, but Somalia is not a party to the Genocide
Convention. The U.N. generally acts as though it has some kind of natural
universal jurisdiction over these questions, which raises the question of
what exactly ratification or accession to such a convention
really means. The politics matters a great deal here: The U.N. doesn’t have a
great deal of trouble seeing genocide in Somalia or in the actions of
governments of relatively poor, powerless countries; the U.N. remains a little
foggy on the question of genocide when it is carried out by Beijing in
Xinjiang. There wasn’t a United Nations the last time Moscow carried out an
expansive campaign of genocidal mass murder in Ukraine, the Holodomor, but it
probably wouldn’t have mattered much if there had been. This isn’t going to be
sorted out with UN resolutions or by reference to international law. I am not
sure that there is a legal basis for dragging Vladimir Putin out of the Kremlin
and hanging him in Maidan Square, but I am sure it should be done.
What
does Russia have in mind for Ukraine? The Institute
for the Study of War sums it up:
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson
Dmitry Medvedev posted a detailed call for the total elimination of the
Ukrainian state and its absorption into the Russian Federation under what he
euphemistically called a “peace formula.” Medvedev’s demands are not novel but
rather represent the Kremlin’s actual intentions for Ukraine — intentions that
leave no room for negotiations for purposes other than setting the precise
terms of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Medvedev begins the “peace plan”
by rhetorically stripping Ukraine of its sovereignty, referring to it as a
“former” country and placing the name Ukraine in quotation marks. Medvedev laid
out the seven points of his “peace formula,” which he sardonically described as
“calm,” “realistic,” “humane,” and “soft.” The seven points include: Ukraine’s
recognition of its military defeat, complete and unconditional Ukrainian
surrender, and full “demilitarization”; recognition by the entire international
community of Ukraine’s “Nazi character” and the “denazification” of Ukraine’s
government; a United Nations (UN) statement stripping Ukraine of its status as
a sovereign state under international law, and a declaration that any successor
states to Ukraine will be forbidden to join any military alliances without
Russian consent; the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and immediate
provisional parliamentary elections; Ukrainian reparations to be paid to
Russia; official recognition by the interim parliament to be elected following
the resignation of Ukraine’s current government that all Ukrainian territory is
part of Russia and the adoption of a “reunification” act bringing Ukrainian
territory into the Russian Federation; and finally the dissolution of this
provisional parliament and UN acceptance of Ukraine’s “reunification” with
Russia.
The tone of Medvedev’s post is deliberately
sardonic, and the calls he is making appear extreme, but every one of the seven
points in Medvedev’s “peace formula” are real and central pieces of the
Kremlin’s ideology and stated war aims and justifications.
And
what does Hamas want? The complete destruction of Israel, as its charter always
has demanded and still does. Maybe a U.N.-backed peace process?
No.
There is no solution for the Palestinian
question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international
conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
“Never
again,” everybody said.
And,
yet, here we are.
Words
About Words
“Excuse
me while I kiss this guy,” is not a lyric from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
The actual lyric is, “Excuse me”—or, really, “’scuse me”—“while I kiss the
sky.” “Kiss this guy” is a mondegreen, the clever name given to
such errors by Sylvia Wright in 1954. When Wright was a child, her mother had
read to her from Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry—we
should all have such mothers—including the poem “The Bonny Earl of Murray,”
which offers these lines:
They hae slain the Earl
o’ Moray,
And layd him on the green.
But
Wright heard:
They hae slain the Earl
o’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
There
was no Lady Mondegreen. The bonny earl in the poem was James Stewart, 2nd Earl
of Moray, and the great lady in the story was his mother, Margaret Campbell of
Argyll. When the earl was killed in the course of some complicated political
and marital intrigue, his steely mother had his corpse taken to the Church of
St. Giles, where they “layd him on the green,” leaving the body on display for
years as the family demanded his killers be brought to justice, which they
really weren’t. The earl’s mother commissioned a “vendetta
portrait” of his body and its wounds, but nothing availed.
Mondegreens
abound. The Johnny
Rivers song isn’t “Secret Asian Man,” and Robert Plant did not sing: “And
there’s a wino down the road / I should have stolen Oreos.” There was no “round
John virgin” at the manger or in “Silent Night,” and Creedence Clearwater
Revival did
not offer directions: “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
A
mondegreen is an example of an oronym, an erroneous hearing of a
word that often results from being unable to tell where one word stops and the
next one starts, which is why you get them in poems and, particularly, with
singing.
Economics
for English Majors
Adam
Smith was a free-market guy, but he wasn’t naïve, observing: “People of the
same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the
conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance
to raise prices.” He would have understood what the National Association of
Realtors was up to. From the Wall Street Journal:
The National Association of Realtors has
reached a nationwide settlement of claims that the industry conspired to keep
agent commissions high, it said Friday, a deal set to usher in the biggest
changes to how
Americans buy and sell homes in decades.
The $418 million agreement will make it
easier for home buyers to negotiate fees with their own agents and could lead
more buyers to forgo using agents altogether, which has the potential to drive
down commission rates and force hundreds of thousands of agents out of
the industry.
NAR agreed to
abandon longstanding industry rules that have required most home-sale
listings to include an upfront offer telling buyers’ agents how much they will
get paid. Under a system in
place for a generation, sellers have typically set buyers’ agents’ fees.
Consumer advocates say the arrangement has prevented buyers from negotiating to
save money and kept commissions in the U.S. higher than in most of the world.
Realtors
are a very typical middleman business, relying on legal and informational
bottlenecks to extract fees from buyers and sellers while creating little or no
value in themselves. (Some real-estate agents are very good, some are very bad,
and the average one is average. A really good one can make a big difference in
buying or selling a house, and a really bad one can hose you, but mostly they
just get in your way and cost you money.) Once upon a time, buying or selling a
house presented a substantial information-management problem. If you wanted to
know what houses were for sale in a particular town or neighborhood, you either
had to drive around and look for “For Sale” signs or consult classified
advertisements, which rarely provided much information beyond the basics.
Coordinating showings and such was more of a challenge back in the days when we
had rotary phones and most people worked in offices from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And
there are legal, structural, and financial considerations when buying or selling
a house that want professional advice. The internet solved a lot of that and
made it easier and cheaper to solve even more complicated questions. The
National Association of Realtors, a powerful trade group, undertook great
efforts to keep fees high and to centralize its control over the market: NAR
even has a trademark on the word “realtor,” which it insists on writing in
all-caps with the circle-R symbol: REALTOR®. The NAR is part of what I call
“the Committee to Re-Inflate the Bubble,” generally happy to see housing prices
go up (and commissions with them) and a longtime advocate for loose-goosey
mortgage-lending rules. You know how that works: High prices don’t weigh the
market down as much when credit is cheap, which is why the federal government
spends so much subsidizing debt.
The
NAR has maintained its power in part by controlling how MLS (multiple-listing
service) data is used and displayed. There isn’t one MLS in the United States
but a few hundred, and NAR members are limited in how they share listing
information with other brokerages. One interesting tidbit is that Manhattan has
never really relied on the MLS system, with local brokers using alternatives.
One of these was known as the REBNY (Real Estate Board of New York) Online
Listing Exchange, which was marketed as “R.O.L.E.X.” until the Swiss watchmaker
complained. But it wouldn’t be Manhattan without a fake Rolex in the mix.
In
Closing
I
sometimes try to write a little bit of fiction, and I don’t think I could, even
on my most despairing day, imagine Lauren
Boebert. And I wouldn’t want to.
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