Everybody Said ‘Never Again’

From the Wanderland on The Dispatch

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:

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.

“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:

But Wright heard:

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:

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.

Elsewhere

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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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