The remarkable J.E. Dyer, in a post on “How Not to Prevent a Holocaust,” reflecting on her sadness about President Obama’s “lyrical and affecting” speech at the U .S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday (video of the ceremony is here), in which the President urged us to “make a habit of empathy” and resist “injustice and intolerance and indifference”:
The only genocide in history that was ever stopped in its tracks was the Holocaust of the Jews – and that was done by armed force, applied for the purpose of defeating Germany when she was waging war on Europe and the United States. The original “genocide,” that of Armenians by the erstwhile Ottoman Empire, was not stopped by intervention, or anything other than the death or flight of the Armenian victims. The same can be said of the starvation and slaughter of some 60-80 million peasants and ethnic minorities in the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, as well as the murderous career of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and the slaughter of non-Muslims in Darfur by the Bashir government of Sudan (which latter, indeed, has yet to end).
Deep concern by others about the victims of these genocides, and tremendous empathy with them, have existed in every case. Contrary to the premise posed by Obama’s speech, “silence” has not reigned regarding them. They were all in the news in Western nations at the time they were occurring, and every one of them was denounced by politicians and pundits in the free countries of the world. Obama spoke today of how then-General Dwight Eisenhower required local Germans to tour Buchenwald after it was liberated, and how he required his own soldiers to tour it, and invited reporters and politicians to come and observe what had been going on there. These were wise and necessary measures, and we may always commend Eisenhower for taking them, as a means of ensuring that the horrific reality of Hitler’s “Final Solution” might never be forgotten or dismissed.
But it was not Eisenhower’s “speaking out” campaign on the ghastly death camps that ended the genocide – it was the military defeat of the Wehrmacht, and of Germany, and her people’s will, through years of aerial bombardment in which the Allies took towering losses, years of a bloody and terrible defense and counterattack by Soviet forces from the East, and years of a grueling, two-pronged frontal land assault by the Allies from the West. Empathy and resistance sneaked thousands of European Jews to safety, outside the reach of the Third Reich; but millions of Jews had been slain within it, before force of arms finally made the genocide stop, by decapitating its source.
No such outside force intervened in the slaughter of Ukrainian kulaks by the revolutionary Soviets in the 1920s. Yet there was much empathy, and the West was well aware it was happening. Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, and millions of rural peasants in China had empathizers and political champions during the Communist slaughters that characterized many of the Mao years – but no armed intervention to deliver them. The eyes of the world focused quite accurately on the homicidal brutality of the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Cambodia, and I remember in the late 1970s the same Western demonstrations on behalf of Cambodian victims that we have seen for the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the people of Darfur – the same courageous efforts of private charities, of missionaries and doctors, to get help to them, the same denunciations and demands for intervention, and for an accounting, by Western politicians and pundits.
But the only thing that has actually worked, to stop a genocide before its perpetrators simply wore themselves out, or all the victims were dead or gone, has been armed force. We would do well to remember that. It is an unpopular reality, perhaps, but incontrovertible. Obama made a brief acknowledgment of the WWII veterans who were present at the Holocaust Remembrance ceremony today. But too few people today, including him, really understand that an idea of summary, effective armed force – one that many now regard as increasingly outmoded – executed by these old soldiers as civic duty, rather than as an act of empathy or resistance, saved more Jewish lives from Hitler’s death machine than all the charity, empathy, and resistance mounted against all the world’s genocides combined.
The complacency of the safe can be a fearful thing. Obama is right to praise the ordinary citizens of Europe who risked their lives to hide Jews and help them flee – but, superb as their example is, and admirable as they are, they only got Jews away from the Holocaust. They did not stop it; and in fact, nothing of that kind has ever stopped a genocide. Armed force did. That we live in world in which our leaders don’t even think of acknowledging that, should give us pause, and make us wonder if we could do it again – if we would even understand how to go about it.
It is an extraordinary post. Read it here.
The six million Jews living in the Jewish state are currently the targets of an intended second Holocaust. The will is there — it is in fact publicized; only the technology is lacking, but it is under development. Saving “never again,” if it means anything, means a readiness and williness to use armed force to stop it.