Last week, when it looked like the Atlantic Empire might launch yet another evil little war, Brendan O'Neill commented on the sanctimonious hypocrites weeping crocodile tears over the Syrian dead.
Not only is the West engaging in reductio ad Hitlerum while behaving like Hitler for a while now, but the eagerness of interventionists to see “genocide” everywhere represents what O'Neill terms “Holocaust relativism”: “All sorts of campaigners now use Holocaust imagery to whip up support for their crusade against some modern moral scourge.”
O'Neill proceeds to list several entirely inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, including the one most often overlooked by critics of Empire:
Seeking to de-legitimize the existence of Serbs in the territory they claimed, the regimes in Zagreb and Sarajevo howled to any Western reported who would listen that they were victims of “Greater Serbian aggression and genocide.” Evidence? Who needs evidence, when there are Pulitzers, glory, sinecures and power to be gained from making up stuff the Imperial establishment wants to hear?
The absurd charges of “genocide” in Bosnia have not only prevented any sort of peace in that broken country, they've propelled to power a cabal of “humanitarian interventionists” who see no problem in murdering people in order to “save” them. They do this because they have convinced themselves - and portions of the general public - that “humanitarian” imperialism is magical: anyone belonging to the designated victim faction (combatant or not) who gets killed, automatically becomes an “unarmed innocent civilian”, while any actual unarmed, innocent civilians hit by “liberating” bombs, missiles and drones are transformed into “enemy combatants” and “legitimate military targets.” Or to simplify it even further, “it's not murder if we do it.” All one has to do is say the magic word: genocide. And according to the “humanitarians”, genocide is everywhere.
The few who dare question this insanity are smeared as “genocide deniers.”
O'Neill argues the “only real beneficiaries of such relativism are the Nazis themselves, whose wickedness is implicitly diluted and diminished if we accept the idea that Holocausts like theirs happen all the time.”
Sure enough, as a result of interventions to “stop Serb genocide”, the German military is once again deployed around the world, the Luftwaffe is bombing again, and Nazi allies from WW2 are enjoying a renaissance - if only in Eastern Europe, for now.
I entirely concur with his conclusion: Those who honestly believe that Syria is like the Holocaust “on any level whatsoever,” that Putin is Hitler, that the Serbs are Nazis, Gaza is a Warsaw-style Ghetto, and the farming of chickens is like the extermination of the Jews, “have sunk so far into the mulch of moral relativism... that there is probably little hope for you.”
Not only is the West engaging in reductio ad Hitlerum while behaving like Hitler for a while now, but the eagerness of interventionists to see “genocide” everywhere represents what O'Neill terms “Holocaust relativism”: “All sorts of campaigners now use Holocaust imagery to whip up support for their crusade against some modern moral scourge.”
O'Neill proceeds to list several entirely inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, including the one most often overlooked by critics of Empire:
During the Bosnian War in the 1990s, the Serbs were frequently referred to by liberal observers as Nazis – or as the “tinpot Nazis of the Balkans”, in the Guardian’s words – and their bloody attacks and assaults were often compared to the Holocaust.Yet during the 1941-45 occupation of Yugoslavia, Serbs were the principal victims of actual Nazis, while the people libeling them supported Hitler! Accusing the Serbs of Nazism was a deliberate insult to injury. In a 1993 interview, an executive of Ruder Finn - a PR company hired by Croatian and Bosnian Muslim interests - boasted how the objective of the campaign was to “reverse” the attitude of Jewish organizations towards Croats and “Bosnians”, due to the “real and cruel anti-Semitism” in their history - and that his firm “succeeded masterfully.”
Seeking to de-legitimize the existence of Serbs in the territory they claimed, the regimes in Zagreb and Sarajevo howled to any Western reported who would listen that they were victims of “Greater Serbian aggression and genocide.” Evidence? Who needs evidence, when there are Pulitzers, glory, sinecures and power to be gained from making up stuff the Imperial establishment wants to hear?
The absurd charges of “genocide” in Bosnia have not only prevented any sort of peace in that broken country, they've propelled to power a cabal of “humanitarian interventionists” who see no problem in murdering people in order to “save” them. They do this because they have convinced themselves - and portions of the general public - that “humanitarian” imperialism is magical: anyone belonging to the designated victim faction (combatant or not) who gets killed, automatically becomes an “unarmed innocent civilian”, while any actual unarmed, innocent civilians hit by “liberating” bombs, missiles and drones are transformed into “enemy combatants” and “legitimate military targets.” Or to simplify it even further, “it's not murder if we do it.” All one has to do is say the magic word: genocide. And according to the “humanitarians”, genocide is everywhere.
The few who dare question this insanity are smeared as “genocide deniers.”
O'Neill argues the “only real beneficiaries of such relativism are the Nazis themselves, whose wickedness is implicitly diluted and diminished if we accept the idea that Holocausts like theirs happen all the time.”
Sure enough, as a result of interventions to “stop Serb genocide”, the German military is once again deployed around the world, the Luftwaffe is bombing again, and Nazi allies from WW2 are enjoying a renaissance - if only in Eastern Europe, for now.
I entirely concur with his conclusion: Those who honestly believe that Syria is like the Holocaust “on any level whatsoever,” that Putin is Hitler, that the Serbs are Nazis, Gaza is a Warsaw-style Ghetto, and the farming of chickens is like the extermination of the Jews, “have sunk so far into the mulch of moral relativism... that there is probably little hope for you.”
