Some genocides are more equal than others

Steven Tucker

April 18, 2024 4 Reactions

Admittedly, the Congressman’s off-the-cuff remarks were badly worded, thoughtless, and insensitive. But, as he explained later, he was only speaking metaphorically, not literally; he just wanted the US and Israel to “go nuclear” in the figurative sense of hitting Hamas hard and fast, to get the war, and its many ill effects upon the local civilian population, over with as soon as possible:

“As a child who grew up in the Cold War era, the last thing I’d advocate for would be the use of nuclear weapons,” he explained. “My reasoning was the exact opposite of what is being reported. The quicker these wars end, the fewer innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire.”

So, rather than advocating for the mass extermination of Palestinian lives, he was actually calling for the mass sparing of them.

What’s truly worthy of note here, however, is not that Congressman Walberg “misspoke”, but that his opponents chose to accuse him of being a genocidal maniac rather than merely a brainless blowhard.

Whenever one of the contemporary Left’s victim-groups du jour – Palestinians, transgenderists, violent black criminals, etc. – is targeted with “hateful rhetoric” (i.e., rational public criticism), the exceedingly hyperbolic and disingenuous claim is immediately made that the detractor daring to critique them is self-evidently preparing for future acts of actual, full-blown genocide.

This tactic trivialises the appalling inhumanity of real genocides. What’s more, it diverts attention from real, not imaginary, crimes.

If the persons targeted verbally are not blessed to be members of the Church of Identitarian Victimhood, however, then public calls for their wholesale elimination are conveniently ignored by the vast majority of compliant Western politicians and media.

Meat is murder

If, for example, you are unlucky enough to be white, old and Belgian, people can say whatever the hell they like about you: nuke the Old People’s Home in Antwerp, the EU could demand, and it would garner barely a 10-point mini-headline on page 64 of the Brussels Weekly Intelligencer.

Please compare Congressman Walberg’s mass public monstering for daring to use a clumsy metaphor about nuclear weapons to the muted official public response to the quite genuinely held words a week or two later of Luc Van Gorp, the President of Belgium’s biggest healthcare fund (ironically named Christian Mutualities), that the best way to solve his country’s looming pensions crisis was to euthanise the nation’s infirm elderly.

“Suicide is too negative a term,” Van Gorp explained, in true spin-doctor style. “I would rather call it: giving life back.” Here are some other of Van Gorp’s oh-so-sensitive words, which I would humbly suggest are a just a little teensy bit worse-chosen than Congressman Walberg’s own offhand spiel: 

“I sometimes [so, habitually, then, not just on a misguided, ex tempore, one-off basis!] compare the aging people with a mountain of meat. That mountain first ends up in healthcare. Doctors and hospitals get to work on this and make good money from it. But as soon as that meat starts to smell, they pass it on to elderly care [for long-term, non-profitable waste-disposal, I would guess].”

Just to be clear for the benefit of any Belgian lawyers reading this article, Luc Van Gorp is also speaking metaphorically. He is not a wannabe cannibal, a Sweeney Todd-like human pie-maker, or anything like that, any more than Tim Walberg is an aspirant atomic war criminal.

But… he does want to kill people. By their tens of thousands. For money. OK, they’re only Belgians, but still – BLM, Belgian Lives Matter too, surely? Van Gormless is actually making a genuine policy proposal here, one which would by definition involve mass deaths, albeit of a consensual, legalised kind. Medical murder on such a scale could be labelled as “genocide” by its opponents, could it not?

Nobody actually seems to have done so, however: certainly not any plausible or prominent public figures like politicians or the heads of NGOs, as happened with Congressman Walberg’s careless words.

Imagine, however, if M. Van Gorp had compared the Palestinian people to “a mountain of meat” that was “start[ing] to smell”, and so needed to be eliminated as quickly as possible for their own damn good. He would have been incinerated in the court of polite public opinion within a matter of seconds. But when he actually proposed that we should systematically kill off elderly white people, there’s complete and total silence.

Eighty years after coining his fateful word, what would Raphael Lemkin himself make of all this, I wonder? He’d probably go back to his Latin and Greek dictionaries and come up with the even newer term “suigenocide” – it’s what happens when entire civilisations decide, of their own free will, to begin killing themselves off entirely. Like those rotten Belgian pensioners, I think our whole society is increasingly beginning to stink.

Is our understanding of "genocide" becoming corrupted? Leave your comments below.

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer whose work has appeared in print and online worldwide. The author of over ten books, mostly about fringe beliefs and eccentrics, his latest title, “Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science” (Pen & Sword/Frontline) is available now, and exposes how the insane and murderous abuses of science perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets are being repeated anew today by the woke left who have now captured so many of our institutions of learning.

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