Lazy Friday: Random Paraphernalia Heading Into the Weekend

Democrats meeting to draft stern letter to Trump administration, if 100 percent consensus can be reached; Israel, the media & the G-Word; and Matthew Yglesias' pathetic Iraq War apology.

Screenshot from 2020 TV report/Public Domain.

1. “While Democrats Sleep,” Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 4. “Donald Trump is burning America’s rule book. If he carries on like this, Democrats will have no choice but to send him a strongly worded letter.”

To claim that America’s minority party is too punch drunk to get its act together would be charitable. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, is following the rules of a vanished age. Democrats could have blocked confirmation hearings for Trump nominees — many of whom would have been laughed out of the chamber in that bygone era. A single Republican, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, froze all of Joe Biden’s military appointments for almost all of 2023. But Democrats are following regular order.

It is not as if Schumer is being outshone by colleagues. A few days after Trump’s inauguration, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, posted: “Presidents come and Presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne.” That is as may be. But fatalism has no track record of stopping revolutions.

Do not look to the Democratic National Committee either. Last weekend the DNC elected a new chair, Ken Martin, a Minnesota party official. But the hustings were noticed because of the outgoing chair Jaime Harrison’s plea that they reserve a place for a non-binary Democrat on its seven-member committee. Delegates also acknowledged that America is built on indigenous land. Words like “string quartet” and “Titanic” come to mind.

Were all things still equal, Schumer’s approach would seem reasonable. His view is that Democrats should separate the signal from the noise. An example of this would be fighting tooth and nail to stop Trump from occupying the Panama Canal Zone but ignoring his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Schumer recently predicted that “Trump will screw up”. Republicans would then lose the 2026 midterm elections and Trump then become a lame duck.

Schumer’s playbook is the 2006 Democratic midterm sweep just two years after George W Bush was re-elected. Barack Obama’s presidential launch came three months later. The hope is that Democrats can pull off a similar rebound now. But Trump is not Bush Junior. He is not even Trump 1.0. They say always pick your battles. Yet Democrats seem to overlook that they are in a full-blown war. Assuming that they will fight the next election on a level playing field is an act of faith. Trump has been in office for two weeks. There are 21 months until the midterms.

2. “There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide,” Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg, Haaretz, January 30. “Genocide is any action that leads to the destruction of a collective's ability to exist, not necessarily its total annihilation.”

My first go at AI.

Genocide does not have to conform to the Nazi paradigm, which viewed every Jew as an enemy to be exterminated. Genocide is also never linear, and contradictory processes always exist within it. For instance, while Armenians were deported and massacred in vast areas of the Ottoman Empire, in major cities like Izmir and Istanbul, they were hardly affected. In certain cases, Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, temporarily halted the extermination of Jews at specific places or times due to economic or diplomatic considerations, which allowed for a narrow window of rescue. Similarly, Israel has allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza (which is often exploited by Israel to promote local crime gangs), while simultaneously killing innocent civilians there.

Almost always, the orders to carry out mass murders are vague, elusive and open to interpretation. This was also the case with the Germans' Final Solution. British historian Ian Kershaw, in his book "Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941" (2007), explains that the assertion that there was a decision to exterminate can be misleading, as it may create the impression that there was a specific moment in which an explicit order was given to commit genocide. No extermination order was issued from the top of the pyramid (Adolf Hitler) to the bottom; instead, complex interactions that included green lights to escalate violent measures, hints of approval for murderous acts, and grassroots initiatives combined to add up to a rolling escalation. Only at a later stage did the process crystallize into a clear resolution whose impact became visible on the ground. Here, the analogy to what is happening in Gaza is also relevant.

Yaniv Kubovich reported in Haaretz in December chilling testimony about what happened along the Netzarim corridor in Gaza. Anyone who crossed an imaginary line into this "kill zone," whether they are armed or just civilians who made a wrong turn, was shot dead by Israeli forces. Arbitrary violence reigns in a place where anyone can shoot any Palestinian who passes by, and every victim, even a child, is counted as a terrorist, just as every young or elderly person murdered by the Wehrmacht in villages deep in the USSR during World War II was defined as a partisan who was deserving of death. No one gave the soldiers on the Netzarim corridor, who are killing innocent people, an explicit order to do so. But those who do (and it is certainly not all soldiers) understand that no harm will come to them. A combination of hints from above (from politicians and military officers, such as Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach) and murderous lawlessness from below – this is how genocide is carried out.

In March 2022, speaking at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the United States views the actions of Myanmar against the country's Rohingya Muslims as genocide. Blinken explained that he chose to make this declaration at the Holocaust Museum because the lessons of the Holocaust are still relevant today.

At the time, no one was scandalized that Blinken was trivializing the Shoah, or that such comparisons should not be made. This was the eighth case recognized by the U.S. as genocide, in addition to the Holocaust. The other cases are the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in the 1930s; the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s; the genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur; and the genocide carried out by ISIS against the Yazidis a decade ago in Iraq. Just recently, on January 9, the Biden administration (again in a statement by Blinken) recognized a 10th case of genocide: that which is being committed by the Rapid Support Forces militia in the brutal civil war that has been underway in Sudan since the fall of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

In Myanmar, starting in 2016, some 850,000 Rohingya were expelled to Bangladesh, and about 9,000 were murdered. This means that there was no physical extermination of all Rohingya, but rather of only a small percentage of the group. Currently, a lawsuit against Myanmar is being heard by the International Court of Justice. It was submitted by The Gambia, which was joined by several other countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom.

The statements by Myanmar officials about Myanmar intent to exterminate the Rohingya are weak and incidental compared to the flood of genocidal statements heard from all corridors of politics, society, media, and the military in Israel, expressing extreme dehumanization of Palestinians, and a desire for their widespread extermination.

Genocide is any action that leads to the destruction of a collective's ability to exist, not necessarily its total annihilation. It is estimated that nearly 47,000 people have been killed in Gaza and over 110,000 injured. The number of those buried under the rubble may never be known. The vast majority of the victims are noncombatants. According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Gaza's population have been displaced from their homes multiple times and are living in subhuman conditions that only increase mortality levels. The murder of children, starvation, destruction of infrastructure, including that of the health care system, destruction of most homes, including the erasure of entire neighborhoods and towns such as Jabalya and Rafah, ethnic cleansing in the northern Strip, destruction of all of Gaza's universities and most cultural institutions and mosques, destruction of government and organizational infrastructure, mass graves, destruction of infrastructure for local food production and water distribution – all these paint a clear picture of genocide. Gaza, as a human, national-collective entity, no longer exists. This is precisely what genocide looks like.

3. “Four Reasons for a Mistake,” Matthew Yglesias, August 19, 2010, Think Progress. “I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk.” That may be the understatement of the millennium. I’m including a section of this old post by Yglesias about why he supported the Iraq War when he was a Harvard undergrad because I accidentally cut it from my recent story about him, “Matthew Yglesias Is The Banality of Evil,” and it’s so utterly revealing of his journalism two decades ago and today as well. Here are two of the four reasons he fucked up:

Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. More forceful intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo had all been called for. This led to a general predisposition in favor of military adventurism.

Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously. I knew that Carl Levin & Nancy Pelosi were on the other side, but the bulk of the leading Democratic voices on national security and foreign policy issues were in favor of the war. So was Tony Blair. These were credible people whose views I took seriously.

So that’s that. You can, however, always get more psychological. I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people. The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.