January 04, 2001	atimes.com

Front In defense of genocide By Spengler Spengler cannot wish you a happy New Year, but will go so far as to wish you a complete one. Speaking of which, President Clinton has signed a treaty to create a World Court for the prosecution of crimes against humanity. Because the American Senate rather would eat nails than sign this document, it is a mere sentimental gesture, not an act of polity. Even if ratified, the World Court treaty would be unenforceable. Worse, it is morally inane. Genocide (generally meaning the intentional destruction of a large proportion of a given population) sometimes is a morally desirable outcome, as American history shows. The great genocide of American history is not the destruction of the aborigines, 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. The evil slave system of the South offered energetic men the chance to quickly become wealthy planting cotton, and then strut about in febrile parody of European aristocrats. Because the agricultural methods then in use rapidly depleted soil, the slave system required expansion, and a successful Confederacy likely would have sought to conquer and enslave the Spanish-speaking lands to its own south. Confederate soldiers had no illusions about the purpose of the war. "We are a band of brothers/Native to the soil/Fighting for the property/We gained by honest toil," they sang of their African slaves in the South's most popular marching song. To excise this cancer from the Western hemisphere required the mass slaughter of the men of the South, which was accomplished with great inconvenience to the civilian population (burning of entire cities), albeit few casualties. Abraham Lincoln had foreseen this. In every Southern town, he observed long before the Civil War, there existed a class of men who occupied themselves entirely with hunting, gambling and dueling. One could not parley with this sort of people, but only kill them off, Lincoln said. What would Mr Clinton's World Court say about this? Sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing to us. America's Civil War is typical of the sort of conflict which ends only with the exhaustion of the insurgent population's physical capacity to fight. This occurs when insurgents attempt to raise their condition by beggaring or enslaving their neighbors. War feeds on itself; insurgency destroys the fabric of social life, and the survivors join the horde for the next round of fighting and looting. Alexander the Great, Wallenstein, Napoleon and Lenin count among the military geniuses who learned to ride the whirlwind. Albrecht von Wallenstein, the imperial generalissimo during Europe's Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), fed his soldiers off the land. As his army starved central Europe, the survivors joined the army in turn. In the snowball effect more than half of central Europe's population died. All the adventurers and malcontents of Europe flocked to Napoleon's banner, each carrying a field marshal's baton in his knapsack, as Bonaparte observed smugly. Yet the Grande Armee was not there because of Napoleon; Napoleon was there because of the Grande Armee. If you raise an army of adventurers, you must give them an adventure. Once he had conquered all Europe, Napoleon had to take them somewhere else. Few of the 600,000 men he led into Russia in 1812 were French; the vast majority were freebooters from nations recently conquered. Once ruthless men of talent and ambition rally behind the banner of a conqueror, war will continue until the conqueror's army ceases to exist. Russia's army and the elements took care of the problem nicely in Napoleon's case, killing half a million of his followers. Given Europe's population in 1812, this did away with the majority of the military manpower available to the emperor. Worse than the military adventurers, though, are the would-be messiahs who raise the cry, "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees!" If the people on the bottom become sufficiently desperate to challenge the position of their rulers, a kind of war ensues which ends only when one or both sides has hemorrhaged dry. No circumstances are more depressing than these, because the people on the bottom often have good reason to rebel. Never once in human history, though, have mass insurgencies led to anything but general slaughter and the destruction of civilization. It is possible to envision the outbreak of such wars in numerous parts of the globe. We have them in Africa with depressing regularity. Islamic insurgencies in the Philippines or Indonesia might lead in this direction. One hesitates to guess about the fate of the peripheries of the former Soviet Union. The Wilsonian fixed idea of the Clinton administration, namely that every blister of a nationality deserves its own government, raises the probability of such events. In this sorry, but not improbable event, the civilization either will restore order (raising the cry of genocide from the predictable commentators) or fall. (Special to Asia Times Online)

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