Playing the Game of Virtuous Victimhood

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2,218 words

One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Blurred around the edges though the concept of a “game” might be, I believe it is safe to say that every serious player of every kind of game plays to win. Which brings me to an extremely popular game being played these days with payoffs for the winner in the form of power acquisition: the “game of virtuous victimhood.”

“Virtuous victimhood” is a game of morally leveraging your victim bona fides. In its crudest form, the crux of the game is: The people in your tribe were mean to the people in my tribe. Ergo, your tribe owes my tribe in ways that only we get to say; no negotiation. Slavery, discrimination, and exploitation are some of the moral levers used to play this game. Blacks with white enablers have been playing this game for 70 years to perfection here with jackpot-like winnings. To wit: affirmative action; massive welfare subsides; exemption from personal, occupational, and criminal accountability; all culminating in an anti-white ideology enforced by the ruling class. For an example that defies credulity:

In an email sent out by the Oregon Department of Education, teachers were encouraged to enroll in a course called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The course came with an 82-page instructional guide that lists the ways in which white supremacy is perpetuated in math class.

A “Super Bowl” game of virtuous victimhood is currently underway in the Levant: Israeli Jews versus Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians have a lot of ammunition from the last 100 years to leverage their victimhood, given what the Zionists have done to them. The moral lever for Jewish victimhood, however, is the “Holocaust” with an uppercase “H” which makes it unique among mass-murders andis consistent with the Jewish understanding of themselves as a unique people; i.e., uniquely chosen by God. The uniqueness of the crime and its victims means that Jewish victimhood has been able to trump all of its victim competitors, including the poorer, weaker Palestinians.

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Victimhood’s top billing for twenty-first century Jews has not been a matter of chance. It is a monumental achievement made possible by fanatical zeal, singularity of purpose, bribery, ownership of popular culture distribution assets, and political machinations. Consider just one facet of how Holocaust propaganda has given Jews virtual immunity to criticism or censorship for bad behavior: “Holocaust education.”

A visit to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — President Jimmy Carter’s gift to Jewish supporters — gives a sense of their outsized influence in American politics. Holocaust education, we learn from the website, is mandatory in the public schools in 23 states.

To get a sense of the kind of politics behind “holocaust” education as a compulsory staple of public-school education, let me go back several years and show how it worked in Connecticut. From the Harford Courant of October, 21, 2018:

Connecticut lawmakers moved closer on Monday toward requiring the state’s school districts to teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides, voicing concern about an uptick an anti-Semitic acts and an apparent lack of knowledge among many young people about such atrocities. While the state Department of Education has made an optional course on genocide available to districts, legislators said many have not used it. “We have not done enough to educate the young,” said Democratic Rep. Andrew Fleischmann of West Harford who voiced concern about recent polling that has shown a lack of awareness about the Holocaust and the six million Jewish victims. “It’s not clear why we would have districts not teaching this profoundly important subject.”

The article goes on to add that “[t]he House of Representatives voted 147-0 in favor of the bill following a somber and poignant debate.” Really? One has to wonder: Just how “somber and poignant” a “debate” could be with a vote of 147 to 0 as the outcome? How long did it last? It sounds more to me like the “voting” that took place in the Council of People’s Commissars back in the halcyon days of the Soviet Union. “No” was not a career-enhancing move, as everyone — wink-wink — understood. “It’s not clear why we would have districts not teaching this profoundly important subject.” Come on, Commissar Fleischmann! You are just being polite. We all know what is going on in these districts.

Did anyone in this debate of deep profundity raise what seems to be the most obvious question: Why should the teaching of “Holocaust and other genocides” be mandatory? Representative Fleischmann says that this is a “profoundly important subject.” Fine, but let’s drop the preacherly pose, set the scolding aside for a moment, and be up front and honest: What is “important” is an outcome heavily conditioned by self-interest and self-identity. Engineers argue that mathematics and physics are profoundly important subjects for instruction; for English teachers, literature and grammar. Devout Catholics want their children to be taught to believe in the sanctity of life and the mortal sin of abortion; for feminists, the equality of women, access to abortion, and the social construction of gender are front and center. To know what the most “important subject” is, it’s “all about the Benjamins,” as a lady from a tribe of victimhood competitors put it.

Why does the Holocaust merit privileged status as a mandatory topic in the schools? The last 3,000 years or so of history is full of mass murder, atrocities, rape, and pillage. So much to choose from. You could fill up the entire grade school years with nothing else. Given the heavy moralizing that energizes the teaching of these sorts of topics, the efforts inevitably twist themselves into tendentious, fact-selective enterprises of enforced dogma that suffer absolutely no critical or skeptical reaction: true believers are the intended outcome, anything else is punishable heresy. Being a certified victim or related to a victim of any atrocity gives the claimant enormous moral, and possibly political, leverage, which is why, it should seem obvious, that victim status has become such a coveted commodity that comes with a vast advocacy network and legal enforcement apparatus.

But on with the somber Connecticut lawmakers: Who, then, should teach the American children about the “Holocaust and other genocides”? Before attempting to answer the question, it is reasonable to conclude that the upper-case “Holocaust” is going to be the centerpiece of attention given the “uptick of anti-Semitic acts” that young people were seemingly unaware of. This was noted at the time by Alan Levin, the regional civil rights chairman of the Connecticut Anti-Defamation League, who was cited in the Hartford Courant article.

One can speculate about the Anti-Defamation League’s priorities operating in this venue, but what about the lower-case afterthought, the “other genocides”? Well, to borrow an old cricket metaphor, that is a bit of “sticky wicket” because, you see, from the very beginning of its coinage by Raphael Lemkin and its attachment to Hitler and the Third Reich, “genocide” has been a tool of cynical ideologues used in the service of self-interest. In a review of Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides in the Weekly Standard entitled “Bodies Count,” Aaron Rothstein writes:

Norman Naimark . . . wonders why Lemkin, and those who followed his analysis at the United Nations in writing the Genocide Convention, created a concept that incorporated Hitler’s killings — the attempt to extirpate the Jews was an attempt to exterminate an ethnic group (and nation) — but did not extend as far as Stalin’s murders. Naimark points out that Lemkin’s 1933 argument, unlike his 1944 book, included a reference to the extermination of a “social collectivity.” Such collectivities include political parties or groups organized around particular ideas; they could be almost any group considered to be a political opponent. In Lemkin’s earlier analysis, the attempt to exterminate such groups would also have been considered genocide. But not in 1944. And not in 1948, either, when Lemkin’s work influenced the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document also leaves out social and political collectivities, stating that genocide includes the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Naimark suggests that the reason for this alteration in the concept was simple, but it has had large consequences: Lemkin did not want to upset Stalin who, despite brutally exterminating political groups in the Soviet Union, was vital to the Allied war effort against Hitler.

Yes, it was extremely important not to “upset Stalin,” which meant that his mass murders — millions of Ukraine peasants, the Katyn Wood massacre, his extensive mass deportations and ethnic cleansing, and the million-plus slave laborers in the Gulag — would have to be conveniently overlooked. Lemkin himself emerges as an unsavory opportunist in a study by Anton Weiss-Wendt, who directs research at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway.

Rather than the saintly figure of popular accounts, Weiss-Wendt instead presents Lemkin as

“a rather odious character — jealous, monomaniacal, self-important, but most of all unscrupulous,” complicit in the gutting of his own creation. As early as 1947, Lemkin himself favored the exclusion of political groups in order to secure adoption of the treaty, and enlisted the World Jewish Congress in this effort. (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, September 2017)

Since its establishment by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948, genocide as a moral and legal concept has been selectively applied and politically manipulated so as to make its current application a dubious polemical ploy that certifies victimhood with an exclamation point. Wikipedia’s “Lists of Genocides” contains a total of 49 genocides that range back to the Albigensian Crusade of 1209. It also cites the “Osage Indian murders” in Oklahoma during 1931 that claimed somewhere between 60 and 200 lives. Not on the list was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that in five years killed between 20 and 40 million Chinese. The Wikipedia list also states that “[s]cholars are divided and their debate is inconclusive on whether the Holodomor [Stalin’s terror famine that killed three to five million Ukrainians] falls under the definition of genocide.” When what counts as “genocide” is elusive enough to put the “scholars” in opposition over millions of dictator-designed dead people and yet inclusive enough to put Oklahoma in the dock for fewer murders than the typical homicide count over several weekends in Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis, the next time you hear the word, kick the dog and go out and mow your lawn.

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Paul Preston, a prolific British historian of the Spanish Civil War, published a massive work in 2012 entitled The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain. Preston felt he had to put “Holocaust” in the title, as he says in the book’s Prologue (p. xi). So now it seems that the “Holocaust” is going the way of “genocide,” with Franco joining the ranks of Hitler in the “circles of evil” rankings. This made Preston wildly popular with those Spanish Leftists who recently evicted Franco from the hated Valle de los caidos and who will probably soon blow the place up. I don’t know if Preston has heard from the Anti-Defamation League and Deborah Lipstadt, the self-appointed guardian of Holocaust orthodoxy, concerning accusations of trademark infringement, but clearly there are powerful incentives to push the envelope of guilt and inflationary pressure at work for those who toil at manipulating the nomenclature-of-evil, trying to move their favorite victim-class to the front of the line.

The “Holocaust” and “genocide” have worked well to keep the Jews cosseted in their lofty perch of virtuous victims, throwing down darts of “anti-Semitism” at those with the temerity to notice their shortcomings, and jealously protecting that uppercase “H” that separates it from “the other [lesser] genocides.”

But the Super Bowl of victimhood looks like it may be heading into the fourth quarter, and the optics at this point would seem to favor the Palestinians. The Israelis are claiming that there were 1,200 victims in the 10/7 attack, while the Israel Defense Forces has massacred somewhere between 20-30,000 Gazans as of now with plans, it would seem, for no upper limit other than the total annihilation of the two million mostly civilians living in that wretched strip of land. Not quite six million, but this time the whole world is watching it in real time as a work in progress. Who can say what the “holocaust” museums of the future will look like?

So, here is the big question for the “game” analysts: Given the “Warsaw Uprising”-like imagery, with the Jews in 2024 appearing to the outside world as similar to the Germans in 1944, can they continue to play this as if they are the innocent victims in this contest?

The answer is complicated, with no obvious or easy answer. To justify the current massacre, they have no option but the constant drumbeat of the “Holocaust,” “Kristallnacht,” Jewish innocence, and ubiquitous anti-Semitism. If, however, the American financiers of the operation — the neocons and Congress — for whatever reason were to have a change of heart and pull the plug, then, well, the Jewish narrative of unique victimhood would suddenly be past its “sell-by” date. And like every other country in the world, the Israelis would have to figure out how to get along with their neighbors on their own. No such change of heart will occur, but one might feel a certain Schadenfreude in imagining that it did.