Lusting for a New Holocaust by Gene Callahan

My periodic excursions into the pro-war regions of the blogsphere only become more disturbing with time. Just this week, the supposedly libertarian blogger Glenn Reynolds has endorsed the deployment of US death squads intended to target Iranian civilians:

"This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc. Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we've done nothing along these lines."

Mona over at Unqualified Offerings neatly captures what Reynold’s proposal indicates about the progress of the hawks descent into barbarism:

"Now, the respected (look, he is, whether readers here like it or not) law professor Glenn Reynolds is advocating extra-judicial murder of civilians at the whim of George W. Bush – and Hugh Hewitt thinks that’s a great idea. As Greenwald documents, these Bush supporters are embracing a policy Abraham Lincoln explicitly rejected as barbaric during the height of this nation’s bloody Civil War.

"It may be a cliché, but those generally exist because they are based in truth; more than a few Bush supporters would have us become the things we purport to hate. We are well down the road of national vitiation already, but not far enough for Glenn Reynolds."

Meanwhile, Townhall.com columnist Keven McCullough has prophesized that electing a Democratic president in 2008 surely will result in several major American cities suffering nuclear attacks from terrorists. Mona, once again, makes obvious that McCullough’s article is insane. For instance, he gives the reader no argument as to why it is not the very acts of American aggression he supports that will not be the impetus for, rather than a defense against, the horrific attacks about which he fantasizes. A reasonable person will presume that launching attacks on strangers is likely to make them more, not less, likely to be the target of attacks himself. And the typical hawk come-back – we were just minding our own business and it didn’t prevent 9-11 – is total rubbish, ignoring the US overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, American support for Arab dictators, material aid given to Israel in its war against the Palestinians, and the war with Iraq that, in truth, was still on-going in 2001. There is no way to prove that there still wouldn’t be Moslems plotting violence against Americans if those things had never happened, but it defies common sense to think that they did not serve to motivate many a terrorist.

As demented as is McCullough’s piece, it is even more frightening to peruse the comments section following it. Here are some samples:

"What worries me is not that the US can ‘blow up the world 50 times over.’ What worries me is that our government doesn't have the guts to even nuke one enemy city after we get hit."

"Nukes on Medina and Mecca would go along way towards ending Muslim terror permanently. If you think not, then you obviously haven't done your homework on the basic tenets of Islam."

"It's March of 2009, and new U.S. Secretary of State Lee Hamilton is talking to President Ahmadinejad of Iran at Davos. Here's a partial transcript:

"Hamilton; Mr. President, you must realize that if you continue to threaten the United States and Israel with your nuclear weapons, we will have to take sterner measures against you.

"Ahmadinejad; So what? Allah is our God.

"H; I am speaking of military measures.

"A; Are you even listening to me?

"H: Are YOU listening to ME? I am telling you that, if you fire one more missile at Israel, no matter what its payload may or may not be, we will have to retaliate.

"A; Excellent! (smiles) Now we understand each other!

"H; What?

"A; You say, if we destroy Israel, you will attack us. But we intend to attack you as well. We have enough missiles, and enough warheads, to scour you from the face of Allah's world. And we will do it.

"H; And we will use our missiles to erase you from the face of the Earth if you even try it. You will all die.

"Ahmadinejad; That frightens you. It does not frighten us. For we are the Soldiers of Allah. If we destroy you in jihad, we cleanse Allah's world of the filth that you are. If you destroy us in the process, we sit by the throne of Allah for eternity.

"Jabelson makes the basic mistake. He assumes the threat of reprisal and punishment (with our massive nuke arsenal) will deter the jihad. In other words, he assumes the jihadis think like he does, with the same set of values. These people are blowing themselves up by the hundreds to inflict damage on those they consider enemies."

"HERE is the recipe for keeping the WOT off our soil: ban all Muslim immigration, surveil American Muslims like we did the KKK and the Communists, and aim everything we have at Muslim lands in the middle east like we did Russia during the cold war and tell them under no circumstances that will we not tolerate further attacks and MEAN it. And we must seal our borders.

"And lets start calling a spade a spade by saying loud and clear that Americans are DISGUSTED with anyone who admires and old dead pervert like Mr. Mohammed and such demented folks will be shamed in this country and NEVER allowed to immigrate here. Do we permit communists to immigrate here?"

The character of these is far from being unique to this site. I don’t want to turn your stomach more than I have, but browsing any war-hawk site will turn up many similar examples. What I want to note here is that the logical conclusion of the arguments offered is that the US must wipe every single Moslem off the face of the earth. After all, given Moslems don’t care about dying, what would be the point of nuking only Mecca and Medina? There would still be plenty of Moslems in the world, now with one more reason to hate us. By the "reasoning" these death-lovers themselves use, the destruction of those cities will have no deterrent effect whatsoever. Those actions only make sense as the first step in nuking every Moslem country, and exterminating the Moslems living in the West, oh, perhaps, in gas chambers?

The major public voices of the war party are usually careful to qualify their calls for mass murder by saying their quarrel is not with all Moslems, only with violent, radical Islam. But their mass of followers make no such distinction – probably because they are too dull-witted and filled with hate to do so – and their leaders do not show up in these discussions to condemn their followers’ apocalyptic rants. They know the broader American public is not yet ready to tolerate such views in their newspapers, and so they bide their time, giving anonymous posters a platform and time to make these ideas seem commonplace and reasonable.

Folks, recall that the Nazi Holocaust did not take place in some savage land of head hunters and cannibals, but in a nation that was one of the jewels of Western Civilization, the birthplace of Leibniz, Bach, Kant, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Riemann, Mann, and Schopenhauer. The Nazis drew support from figures as cultured and intelligent as Heidegger. The Holocaust could happen there because decent Germans were unable to believe it could happen there.

And so it could happen again today. And the next Holocaust, if we don’t stop it, is likely to make the previous one seem like child’s play.