Page 2 of 2 In defense of genocide,
redux By Spengler
many
others perished in the terrible
Catholic-Protestant conflict that endured for the
30 years between 1618 and 1648. Under the guidance
of Cardinal Richelieu and later Cardinal Mazarin,
France financed one Protestant challenger after
another, notably Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and
sent its own troops when no proxy was available
for purchase. French policy kept the conflict
suppurating until not enough
Germans were alive to challenge French hegemony in
Europe.
Europe's first full-dress genocide
was committed against the Germans, by France,
assisted of course by the stupidity and fanaticism
of the Austrian imperial court as well as the
venal ambitions of the Protestant princes.
So much for the birth of the modern state.
By the same token, the birth of the modern
democratic state, the United States of America,
required another genocide, and I do not refer to
the reduction of the native Americans, which may
or may not have been a genocide or the
unintentional result of epidemic smallpox. I refer
to the American Civil War. As I wrote in the cited
2001 essay:
The great genocide of American
history is not the destruction of the
[aboriginals], but rather the slaughter of the
manhood of the American south during the Civil
War. One-quarter of all military-age males
residing in the 11 states of the rebel
Confederacy died in military action between 1861
and 1865. The south surrendered only when
insufficient men could be found to fill the
ranks.
In this case genocide was not a
bad thing but, on the contrary, an act of moral
splendor unequaled in recorded history, in which
the Union made awful sacrifices to destroy the
heinous institution of slavery. But that is an
aside; what is important to accept is that the two
decisive events of modern history, the foundation
of the "modern" state and the foundation of the
modern democratic state, were born of genocide. We
know that genocide was normative in prehistoric
society (in that regard I have referred on past
occasions to research summarized in Nicholas
Wade's Before the Dawn).
In the
conceit of reason, we bridle at the obvious,
unavoidable fact that genocide has been normative
in modern history as well. I am not referring to
such horrors as the Nazi genocide against Jews, or
the (far more limited) Turkish genocide against
Armenians, or what some might call a Russian
genocide against Chechnya. On the contrary:
genocide defined the shape of the West from the
beginning. Modernity, even in western Europe and
America, does not look modern at all under close
examination. Why should we expect anything
different from the Middle East?
Against
its will, and in violation of all its altruistic
instincts, the United States will emulate Cardinal
Richelieu, stoking the conflict in the Muslim
world until it burns itself out - and that could
last a century and produce casualties on a scale
never seen before. So-called Kissingerian realism,
modeled on the balance of power after the
Napoleonic Wars, is a child's game of tin soldiers
compared with the machinations of Richelieu.
Nonetheless, the US is going to get a crash course
in realpolitik on a scale that few now in power
can visualize.
Is genocide therefore
inevitable? Of course it is not. Before September
11, a word-association exercise would have
elicited the word "Africa" as a response to the
word "genocide", as surely as a 25-cent piece will
produce a gumball from a vending machine. Yet
African genocide - except for the genocide
perpetrated by Arabs in Sudan - has abated almost
miraculously during the past half-dozen years.
Part of this, of course, is due to the
determination of Western powers to stop the civil
wars that horrified the world a decade ago. But a
great deal of the credit, I firmly believe, goes
to Christian evangelists who have won tens of
millions of Africans to a "religion of peace", if
that expression still has currency, as opposed to
tribal loyalties. Sociologist Philip Jenkins is
the West's most industrious reporter of this
phenomenon; I reviewed his book on the subject
last year. [3]
Father Neuhaus is correct
to observe that US notions of freedom may be
un-Islamic, but they are not un-African. There is
great hope in the part of the world that many had
given up for dead only a decade ago. No, genocide
is not inevitable. But it seems very unlikely that
the African solution, namely Christian
evangelization, will have much effect in the
Middle East.
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