Inscription On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Medal

Obama Wins The Prize!

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

‘Mass Slaughter Is a Systemic Problem of the Modern World’

Der Spiegel:

The political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has never been one to shy away from controversy. In his new book, he argues that state leaders who propagate genocide should be killed outright…

SPIEGEL: Mr. Goldhagen, do all nations have the potential to become perpetrators of genocide?

Goldhagen: Not every genocide that could have happened, not every massacre that could have happened, actually has happened. Prejudices and hatreds — ideas about other people which make them seem different in a way that is dangerous or potentially deleterious to you — are generally widespread. There are groups of people around the world in country after country who, in principle, could be mobilized to attack other groups of people and do so willingly.

SPIEGEL: What element must be added to the mix?

Goldhagen: The nature of the political regime — the nature of the leaders themselves — is absolutely critical for whether this potential will be turned into an actual genocide.

SPIEGEL: Are some states more at risk than others?

Goldhagen: You mean forms of government? In dictatorships, which are always threatened from below in one way or another because they do not respect the rights of the people, there is a much greater danger that the political leadership will opt for some kind of eliminationist solution to the problems that they perceive. Whatever prejudices exist today in the United States, in Germany, in Italy, in Japan, in many other countries, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they will, in the foreseeable future, erupt into mass murder.

SPIEGEL: Even in democracies though, problems such as racism, xenophobia and hatred of minorities exist.

Goldhagen: Yes, but in such countries, no leader would ever even consider doing such a thing. It is completely off the table as an option…

SPIEGEL: Does genocide always begin with language?

Goldhagen: Most of what people know about the world is imparted to them through speech — through language of all different kinds. One of the striking things about genocide is that the people doing the killing view large groups of people as being subhuman or dangerous. They use language to either dehumanize or demonize them.

SPIEGEL: Language mobilizes people to commit mass slaughter?

Goldhagen: Yes. Language is the bearer of hatred. Germans didn’t know the Jews of Poland. Many Turks didn’t know Armenians. Individual Hutu knew nothing about most Tutsi. How could they? And yet in each case they set out to kill vast numbers of people about whom they knew only what they had heard. Language transmits prejudices and descriptions of others that lead some to believe that the other must be eliminated. This is a critical factor in understanding the generation of mass slaughter, which is often not seen to be important. People say “it’s just talk.” but it’s talk that is the soil from which these genocidal assaults eventually grow.

Read it all.

The Oath

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Broken Dreams