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Ike’s Genocide
I watched part of a tiresome interview of the always excellent Douglas Murray in which the interviewer continued to use hackneyed, intellectually lazy “genocide” to describe the Israeli war of survival against Hamas. I wondered why any network would hire a journalist too dim to realize when they are being made to look foolish by a much smarter interviewee and then remembered it is now the hiring norm in the industry .
It also occurred to me that if “genocide” applies whenever civilian casualties accrue, then General Dwight Eisenhower was a genocidal monster. The D-Day invasion at Normandy was preceded by many thousands of tons of bombs dropped and intense naval shelling. The landings and airborne drops turned into a large scale desperate battle over the entire peninsula lasting for weeks. An estimated 20,000 French civilians were killed, hundreds of thousands injured and most made homeless. Ike had to know this was a likely outcome.
None of the citizens of Normandy voted for Nazi occupation. None of them thought it the righteous will of God if and when Allied troops were killed. None of them applauded grade-school plays about killing Allied soldiers or becoming martyrs while doing so. French civilian victims of D-Day have a far stronger claim to “genocide” victimhood than Gazans. (Charles de Gaulle once quipped that France could probably survive another German occupation but not another American liberation.)
The defeat of the Nazis was a moral necessity. Efforts to minimize the costs of victory in a war of necessity must be made but with the realization that there is no way to allocate the costs of achieving victory proportionately and equitably. The Israelis have an unambiguous right to prosecute this war. That civilian Gazans have been killed and their lives disrupted was a foreseeable and unavoidable outcome that the hostage-takers and terrorist planners could have minimized at any time with their surrender. Even ignoring the sheer evil of Oct 7, their indifference to the well-being of their own people is far more culpable than than the inevitable costs of the Israeli response.
I miss the old American left with its intellectual heft and moral perspective. Its vomitous replacement is bad for the human race. “Genocide” is too important a word to be routinely misused by morons.
Published in General
Exactly, and well put.
There’s a perversion to the language (mis)used by those condemning Israel, and an enormous amount of projection. Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization in the true senses of the words. Israel is fighting a defensive war. One would get the opposite, and mistaken, impression based on popular coverage.
Ernie Pyle on the liberation of France:
and:
–Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, Henry Holt and Company 1944
I remember what may have been among the the first rather successful real-time visual imagery campaigns emerging from a war zone in a part of the world of which most of the West (at least the chattering classes) was ignorant, and in which the major European and North American players weren’t fighting, but which campaign quite effectively manipulated public opinion into supporting what I believe was the wrong side.
That was the mid-1960s reporting on the Nigerian Civil War. My baseline for a situation I had considerable “my truth” and “lived experience” with, and the reason I almost never succumb to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
I’m reminded of that often, when I read the reporting on the situation in Israel and Gaza. Most recently (that is, a day or two ago), when I saw the scary headlines about the situation at Al-Shifa hospital, at which–they say–IDF attacks and actions are endangering hundreds of patients there.
Wut? The lights are still on? Al-Shifa hospital is still operational? I thought everyone there–from aged crones to helpless infants–was dead. Weren’t they all killed by the IDF, or died as a result of actions by the IDF, when the IDF moved in and attacked the tunnels?
After the Nigerian civil war, it became what would these days be called a “meme,” as people remarked, time after time, how odd it was that after years of something that was then called the “genocide” of the “Biafran” people, there were so many of them left. Maybe even more than before the war.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
The very real brutality that the Allies did to the Axis powers were necessary because the Axis powers were such a horrific force of evil. I would not be for storming Normandy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unless it was to utterly destroy an unrelentingly evil ideology.
I’ve said this before but I feel for the soft-hearted when they lament the deaths of innocent Gazaans. It’s a terrible and ugly thing but Hamas cannot be allowed to win.
I feel not one iota for the weak minded morons who support evil.
That’s why I said innocent Gazaans. In terms of percentage there aren’t that many of them but one could make the case that the children are innocent at least. Though they won’t be if Hamas stays in power.
“Vomitous” is the perfect word to describe Biden, Harris, and Biden’s entire cabinet. I don’t believe this nation has ever seen so much mediocrity in one administration.
I’d be glad to have more mediocrity and less malice.
Murray is the best. His commentary is always crisp, clear, and factual. I am so drawn to his commentary that I have to check myself and wonder why his understanding is not universal? Why there is so much (unwarranted) support for Hamas? I can only conclude it involves the now hackneyed term “bleeding hearts”. Children do not understand the inevitability of suffering. Only adults do. Reality is harsh, if not bleak. Adulthood involves understanding and judgement in doing the difficult and unpleasant thing. Adults see beyond the moment to the objective beyond. Children are indulgent and if unguided run from harm to harm as they seek the pleasures and delights of the moment. Children are constantly surprised when they come to ruin, not understanding cause and effect. In short, progressive ideology is infantilism. It appeals to people who never are willing or able to see harsh reality and the hard tasks required to maximize prolonged happiness and success.
Dennis Prager often notes “truth is not a left-wing value.” It’s both ignorant and antisemitic to blood-libel Israel as genocidal, but it’s also deeply “anti-semantic.” The leftist newspeak kill-list of words they’ve absurdly redefined includes genocide, but also racist, man/woman, gay/straight, insurrectionist, migrant, etc.
How true
I read a fascinating story (July 1, 2001) years ago about the liberation of Dachau. I will summarize it here, but it is a very important, albeit long, sidebar to OldBathos’s post. Some of the postwar investigation of the story was in Boston, which is why it ended up in the Boston Globe:
[continued in comment 13]
[continued from comment 12]
It is the end of the investigation that I have always found interesting because it is captures our humanity, in all of its complexity and transparency. The men were not punished for understandable reasons:
The French should have chosen sides more carefully.
The biggest sin is that we treated them as equals of our allies.
I had heard about this from other sources, but never believed it to be true. Anyone know what really happened?
A holocaust was what the Americans did to the Germans | (paulcraigroberts.org)
From wikipedia:
By the way, there’s a story that used to be kicked around in the anti-nuclear war circles in its Helen Caldicott days. People said that Eisenhower begged Truman not to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, saying (paraphrasing from memory), “If you do that, you will forever lose the moral high ground.”
Although he later denied having said it, there was a witness who reported having heard him say it (it was during a Camp David visit with Truman). I tend to believe the witness since the quote is so consistent with Eisenhower’s philosophies and beliefs.
Eisenhower wanted very much to be part of a country that was not like Nazi German in its inhumanity and indifference to human suffering.
I trust Netanyahu to be the same, to always keep humanitarian concerns front and center.
I think that is the difference between me and the people against him at this moment. I know Netanyahu from years of following his up-and-down career, and I know he is a warm-hearted human being. Whatever the IDF is doing under his direction is being done with the utmost consideration for humanitarian issues and problems.
Is this addressed to me?
If so, you should read the story in the Boston Globe that I linked to.
To give a brief answer, that we treat prisoners of war as well as we could was a top priority for Eisenhower. The incident at Dachau, as reported later by investigators, occurred as a one-off situation, brought on by the shock the GIs felt at the conditions at Dachau.
Was not addressed to anyone in particular.
Other Losses – Wikipedia
Possibly reminiscent of the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who made a career of writing plays fabricating false moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the Allies.
Eisenhower wasn’t the one making the geo-political decisions of the U.S. involvement of World War II. That fell to Roosevelt, just as with the war against Hamas, everyone is concentrating on the decisions of Netanyahu and his war cabinet, not a particular general.
Roosevelt allied himself with Churchill and Stalin. And in allying the U.S. with Stalin, the U.S. made immeasurable moral compromises, some of which Eisenhower was directly involved with. For example, in allowing the Soviet Union to take over Berlin, we saved considerable American lives, because urban warfare is the worst warfare you can engage in. But the Soviet Army raped almost every woman who resided there.
And of course those compromises were the prelude for the Cold War.
Our culture has no confidence in ourselves morally, so when an ally with our moral values goes to war against an enemy who is an existential threat to those values, we call it genocide.
Our grandparents (or (great) great-grandparents depending on your age) had confidence they were on the right side morally, so when things got a bit grey morally, as it does in any war, it didn’t paralyze them.
Eisenhower would have a funny way of expressing that philosophy with the massive nuclear arsenal he constructed and maintained.
As I said, it’s a rumor, and he has denied saying it. But it is plausible to me, especially in light of his commitment to the Geneva Conventions I have since learned of. He is a very interesting historical figure. He was committed to the humane treatment of prisoners of war. That we’re sure of.
War is as close to hell as we get in this life. Everything is upside down. It is horrible.
That makes no sense to me given reported facts about the firebombing of Tokyo.
At my university there was an international student from Africa studying political science who indignantly said that the U. S. was the only nation to use nuclear weapons. He claimed that made us immoral and asked what lessons the world could learn from that. I shrugged and said, “The lesson I hope you learned is, ‘Don’t f**k with the U. S.'”
The goal of the U. S. and its allies was unconditional surrender. Taking the Japanese mainland would have cost many more lives, at least in the estimate of military strategists. The Japanese having heard rumors of their military’s actions in Nanking, expected the same from the U. S. and its allies. Their resistance would have been fierce. I think I read about this in V. D. Hanson’s Ripples of Battle.
Good treatment of prisoners is good policy not just because of the morality, which is sufficient, but because if your enemy knows that if he surrenders he’ll get three hots and a cot rather then he is much more likely to surrender.
This is why I have an intense dislike of John Yoo, who was very vocal in justifying the use of torture/maltreatment for prisoners. He is an immoral man, and is smart enough to know it.
Yup. I am aware of that history.
The one thing I am sure of is that using the atomic bomb was not a decision made lightly and that the cost of human life was an issue.
That said, in a discussion of the issue as described in David McCullough’s 1992 biography of Truman, Truman reportedly said he had no trouble making the decision at all. He said he had a much harder time committing to the Korean War. :)
I support the decision to use the atomic bomb.
Yep. Protecting civilians as though they aren’t responsible for their government is a really bad policy. Kill everyone until they decide to surrender, and then be very kind to them.
If Truman had not approved the use of the bomb, proceeded with the invasion, and then it came out late (as it certainly would have) that we had the bomb, he’d have been impeached.
I would have asked him, “Suppose you are at war, and your enemy is killing ten thousand of your civilians every day. If you use nukes to end the war immediately, you will kill two hundred thousand of the enemy. But if you do not, the war will last another year and millions of civilians, both yours and the enemy’s, will die. What do you do?”
I think that this is a deeply flawed view of both the slaughter in Gaza, and the events of Normandy. Zionist propaganda is powerful, and Murray is one of the leading purveyors.
I’ll try to focus on facts, briefly.
First, consider your characterization of the situation, “the Israeli war of survival against Hamas.” From the reports that I’ve seen, Israel estimated that there were about 30,000 Hamas irregular fighters at the start of the current round of violence. How in the world could 30,000 lightly armed irregulars conquer and slaughter a nation of over 9 million, which has a modern, well-equipped military of about 170,000 regulars and 450,000 reservists?
Obviously, it cannot. Israel does not face a war of annihilation. That is a Zionist lie, a complete overreaction. I have seen something like this before — the American response to the 9/11 attack, when we were convinced that a handful of jihadis posed an “existential threat” to our country. We launched a series of wars that probably killed between one and two million Iraqis and Afghans, and destabilized the region. Not a good idea.
Second, your analogy to Normandy is flawed, because you disregard the key evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent. I don’t think that there were any American leaders expressing a desire to slaughter the French people en masse. This is precisely what the Israelis have been doing from the outset.
You can read many details of this in the South African application to the International Court of Justice, here. The genocidal statements are detailed at length in paragraphs 101-107, pages 59-67. They include statements from the Prime Minister, the President, the Minister of Defence, the Minister of National Security, other cabinet ministers, military officials, and others. It includes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s multiple statements analogizing the Palestinians to the Biblical Amalekites, a reference to a Biblical passage saying:
This is what the Israelis have been doing. It is quite monstrous. They don’t even bother to hide it.
There is a video, which I must confess that I find repulsive, of Israeli soldiers chanting and dancing about wiping out the seed of Amalek. As I recall, it was presented by the South Africans to the ICJ. Here it is — you only need to watch the first minute or so:
I’ve watched a lot of negative footage about the Nazis over the years. I’ve never seen anything as bloodthirsty and vicious as those Israeli Jews, happily singing and dancing about carrying out a directive to slaughter even women, infants, and sucklings.
Third, you disregard the worst thing that Israel has been doing — at least, the worst in my opinion. Israel is deliberately starving about 2 million people in Gaza. Ike did nothing like that.
I was convinced by the Zionist false narrative for many years. I think that I understand how difficult it is, given the conditioning that our generation received, to face the facts about the wickedness of Israel. Those facts are right in front of us, though, if we can stand to look.
I’ll ignore most of the nazi [REDACTED] here and just focus on this one thing:
so why don’t the Egyptians open their gates and allow food in and “ starving Palestinians” out? Are the Egyptians deliberately starving the gazans too? Why aren’t they up on charges in the world court?