Putin’s Genocide As His Preferred Strategy

To the untrained Western mind, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine looks incompetent and idiotic, an undeniable failure. But may be Putin has found a pretext to do what he really wants to do, genocide.

True, Putin’s Blitzkrieg did not work. Ukrainian forces defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. Putin assumed he could take major airports around Kyiv, and land large forces there. However, the Ukrainians retook the airports and shot down several large transport planes. As armored thrusts were launched deep into Ukraine, they met fierce resistance, while they got cut from behind.  The Russian campaign conducted airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. None of them worked.

Was Putin disappointed? Not necessarily. He may have secretly rejoiced. Putin insisted several times to French president Macron that his invasion of Ukraine, in appearance a failure, was going according to plan. Clearly, Putin was not talking about his plan A, the easy grabbing of Kyiv and installation of a collaborating government. Plan A assumed that Putin’s official lies about Ukraine were true. But of course Putin knew his lies were lies, so he had to be ready for the truth, and have a plan B. 

Putin knows his Blitzkrieg has failed,  but he doesn’t care, because actually, he fell back on a bigger, and, the way he looks at it, even better strategy, plan B.

Putin wants to look like an unpredictable, thoroughly blundering mass murdering war criminal, and his apparent incompetence enables him to do so, because apparent incompetence excuses him, and presents his planned genocide as a big accident. Putin’s bigger goal is to terrify the world into submission, and inure it to further invasion. It is better that it looks as if he stumbled into genocide, rather than to reveal it was his plan all along.  

Surely, some will say, Putin can’t achieve victory now? Well, one could only say this, only if one has not read the nuclear war manual of the Russian army, in conjunction with not properly interpreting the appeasing mood of several major western leaders. 

What counts the most for Putin, as it did for Hitler, or the other most bloodthirsty tyrants, is victory. Victory, for such monsters means destruction of the enemy, whom Putin calls “Nazis”. And the more deaths to get there, the greater the tyrant’s glory and wisdom (the way Putin, and other bloodthirsty tyrants look at it). Putin’s aim is to empty Ukraine.

By going slow and rubbling Ukrainian cities, Putin achieves this. When his supposed opponents claim that he is failing, they provide him, Putin, with a coverup and the time, for his genocide. So one can view the chorus of no-no-fly over Ukraine as much pro-Putin as Putin’s presence in Davos and at the World Economic Forum, for two decades, up to last year, 2021. 

That same method was used by Putin in Syria, kicking out more than 50% of the population. In Ukraine, Putin already got 10% of the population to flee, mostly young families who have never known the USSR, and who view Russia as a foreign, dictatorial power.

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The Russian escalation strategy anticipates using nukes to apply “fear-induced deterrence”. Meanwhile those weal and simplistic, not to say corrupt, Western leaders have claimed they will do anything to avoid world war three. 

Attacking a nuclear power plant is considered just the last step before a nuclear strike, in the Russian escalation doctrine. And Putin’s force attacked two nuclear power plants with shells and rockets for hours, before seizing control. Using hypersonic missiles of several types is also an indication: the same ones can carry nukes. Russia announced the use of its new Kinzhal hypersonic missile to strike an ammunition depot in Ivano-Frankivsk on March 18.[7] Using such an expensive, rare, and high-end system to hit an ammunition depot was likely signaling and demonstrating intent and capability to escalate rather than seeking to achieve a concrete military objective. The Kinzhal is a dual-use missile that can carry a nuclear payload, and its main interest is that the West can’t intercept it, so it could strike pre-emptively nuclear installations of the US, UK and France. Its use likely signaled Moscow’s willingness to strike with low-yield nuclear weapons in addition to demonstrating the capability to use (non-interceptable) hypersonic weapons.

The theater was clearly isolated from other buildings but was bombed with high precision. There may have been 1,500 civilians inside at the time. 130 came out before further shooting prevented rescue. The pilot(s) who annihilated the theater are war criminals: “KIDS” was written clearly, and was visible by satellites. Reports are that 20,000 civilians have already been killed in Mariupol, where more than half a million Russian speaking civilians were surrounded by Putin’s thugs. On top of that, 7,000 civilians from Mariupol were viewed as potential opponents, and deported to Russia. Mariupol is Russian speaking.

As it is, some in the West seem determined to make a show of avoiding “World War Three”. This desperate denial of reality empowers Putin, because Putin can keep on pushing, by exposing his opponents as willing to cause “World War Three”, and thus Putin gets what he wants, namely killing all those who resist him, who, by his definition, are all “Nazis”… Putin is happy as it is, turning major Ukrainian cities into extermination camps.

Putin can slowly escalate, while killing and chasing off a maximum of Ukrainians, “spitting them out like flies which flew accidentally in one one’s mouth” as Putin depicted his own opponents inside Russia in a speech vowing to “cleanse… scums and traitors”… [1]

In the end, when Putin uses weapons of even bigger mass destruction, will leaders in the West still desperately try to avoid “world war three”? The war that is already here? 

Hundreds of Putin oligarchs spent more than two decades corrupting the West… And nobody is seizing their properties, while the West is sending Putin 700 million dollars a day, so that his factories of evil can build flat out thousands of missiles. Up to last year, 2021, and for more than two decades, Vladimir Putin, dictator of Russia and certified mass murderer, was a most honored lead participant of the World Economic Forum, and “Davos”. 

Deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians are war crimes. Hundreds of these crimes are already documented, besides war of invasion by choice, the “ultimate war crime”.

Those who appease mass murderers, criminals against humanity, those collaborators of infamy, have not been generally viewed by history in a better light than those they empowered. And the question is: have they been compromised? 

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: NYT censored the essence of this comment, specifically that genocide and emptying Ukraine of his opponents was Putin’s plan. In the opinion of the NYT, to dare say that Putin has a genocidal plan in Ukraine, and that it is implemented is provocative, and outlandish. In 1940, to publish that the Nazis had a similar plan was viewed as unwise at the NYT, which kept as secret as it could the various genocides the Nazis conducted (Poles, Jews, Handicapped, Gypsies, “Communists”, etc.) This enabled the Nazis to implement such genocides (US intervention at the side of France in 1939, or early 1940 would have killed World War Two and its genocides, in the egg). It is hard to believe the refined analysis of the official thought which is only allowed to go through by official media. Maybe I should start with a few insults against Trump if I want to be published by the NYT?

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[1] “Any people, and particularly the Russian people, will always be able to tell apart the patriots from the scum and traitors and spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Putin said during a televised address on Wednesday. “I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to meet any challenge.”Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added that people “are disappearing from our lives by themselves…” 

University Professor Calls For Global Genocide

AT LEAST IT BRINGS THE GENOCIDAL SPIRIT TO THE SURFACE: “People should never, under any circumstance, procreate!” claims Benatar, a professor of “bioethics”. Right, we have heard of that position before, for example in Nazi Germany where thousands of descendants of French soldiers were forcibly neutered (when not killed). ‘Rhineland bastards’ – born to German mothers, but fathered by French-African soldiers stationed in Germany after World War One – were forcibly sterilised in a comprehensive campaign in 1937.

I often argue that the Anglo-Saxon mentality, author of the world’s greatest empire, has genocidal tendencies (because precisely, the ability to inflict genocide brought “Lebensraum“, vital space). This genocidal tendency was illustrated by a ridiculously offensive, and, demonstrably, criminal, article in Aeon “Having Children Is Not Life Affirming, It’s Immoral.” Aeon defines itself as a “magazine of ideas”. It’s nice to see it does not eschew enlightening controversies.

In Aeon David Benatar, professor of philosophy and HEAD of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town extolls genocide of the entire human race. David Benatar says in Aeon: “Kids? Just say no. You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation. In 2006, I published a book called Better Never to Have Been. I argued that coming into existence is always a serious harm. People should never, under any circumstance, procreate – a position called ‘anti-natalism’.”

Benatar has actually made a successful career out of calling to global genocide (most probably because arguments for global genocide inure people to arguments for local genocide, thus those who have some potential genocide in mind can only love Benatar’s radical approach). Benatar is also the director of the BIOETHICS Centre (the Nazis, too, were heavily in bioethics and protecting animals, they did lots for the environment). Benatar’s latest book is Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which Benatar argues that coming into existence is a serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings (2017).

There is those who cry wolf, and then there are those who say the wolf is a good thing, when it comes to eat everybody, as it was ordained by “god”. In truth, it’s a dirty trick, especially when found in a sacred text, to inure people to the worst infamies.

The Nazis didn’t know Benatar, they didn’t need to. This is exactly the argument they used against those they didn’t like: their coming into existence was a serious harm. One has to beware of the setting-up of a maximally toxic emotional context (as one can observe with the Catalonia question, or the Rohingyas question, right now). Inuring to the concept of holocaust and genocide is the most fundamental of these contextual traps. Because it’s a neurohormonal trap.

Right, let’s genocide those pesky humans. One could start with, Benatar, with Australian (Native) children, Canadian (Native) children, and all sorts of Native children all around. Oh, I forgot, these were the policies pursued in Australia, North America… With great success: those populations, once 100% dominant on their continents, have been, basically, brought out of existence.

Why is “Antinatalism” criminal, why such a heavy charge? Criminal, because the essay linked above gives an absolute argument to enact genocides, holocausts, etc.

The UN General Assembly 260 A, article 2, the convention on genocide, says, among other things, that it defines genocide as…

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Benatar inflicts serious mental harm by saying that our very existence is “serious harm”. Although he doesn’t have enough power to prevent births, he is given enough power (through mass publishing, and a prestigious university chair) to entice others to take measures to prevent births. (Or was he, a white man, just thinking of non-white African in a traditional racist way?)

The United Nation Law should be that ENTICING to commit genocide should itself be viewed as criminal. (That doesn’t mean one should stop reading the Bible, the Qur’an, “Mein Kampf”, or the Vedas, anymore… One can view all these as fiction. But if these are not taught as fiction, but as “bioethics”, a line is crossed!) 

Benatar’s basic argument is that pain is bad, life brings pain, thus life should be exterminated, bringing an end to pain.

He understood nothing. Verily, Pain Is Good, Genocides Are Bad.

I will come back to consider pain in another essay soon. The hurt pain causes is all too often much exaggerated. Pain is like salt: too much kills, but so does none.

A reader on Aeon, Fiona Sgurr, send me the following communication:

“You may wish to draw upon the reference that I did in response to a fervent follower of this life-denying philosophy that seeks to hoodwink the gullible and vengeful: Article 16 from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds:

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.”

Impossible to make a case for a philosophy that is in direct contravention of the internationally recognized laws that state what is the basic level of decency for human relations. The fact that Benatar and his acolytes attempt to make this a moral argument would be laughable if it were not so malevolent.”

I agree with Fiona, and go even further that it is such a level of malevolence that legal action should be considered. Hitler wanted to exterminate some human groups. To so he was helped by philosophy professors such as Martin Heidegger and Alfred Rosenberg.  Alfred Rosenberg, was condemned to death during the Nuremberg trial. It was agreed that Rosenberg “had a decisive role in shaping Nazi philosophy and ideology”.
Philosophy can kill.

Professor Benatar suggest to exterminate not just a few human groups, as the Nazis did in secret, but all human groups, and in public. This is even worse than the worst the Islamist State ever publicly said. It shouldn’t be tolerated any more, in any sense.

Patrice Ayme’

Europe & Obama: Guilty Of The Syrian Massacre

Ultimately, & practically, the Syrian Civil War’s primary cause is not even Islam, or the plutocratic effect, but European impotence (except for the French Republic, which is engaged in half a dozen wars… but financially and diplomatically hobbled by most other European powers… and, of course, its occasionally ingrate progeny, the US). Europeans, Merkel, and especially European youth, talk big about peace, human rights, freedom. Yet, what good is talk when it is not followed by enforcement? Replacing action by the dream?

Refugees, you say? Millions of them? Well, six hundred million Africans and Middle Orientalists want to enter Europe. For starters. Any questions?

I guess not. Shall we reinstate European colonialism, so that Africans want to stay in Africa, as they used to?

Here are further observations of mine: Europeans (semi-) intellectuals talked big about imperialism, decolonization, peace, flowers, bad-mouthed the strong-arm of the USA. So who did they enable? Assad. Assad is smoother talking than Saddam Hussein. But as far as killing his own people, he is much better. Connection with the plutocrats in London made the British Parliament friendly to him. And his kind.

Obama refused, at the last moment, to strike Assad, in collaboration with France. French pilots were in their seats, ready to go unleash Scalp missiles on Assad’s palace, but The One in the White House changed his mind. Annihilating weddings, or Americans on the beach with drones in Yemen, OK. Hitting big bad dictator, whose family holds billions in assets in the West, not OK.

Alep, August 2016. Those “Leaders” Who Do Not Defend Humanity Justice & Civilization Are Culprit Of Leading The Wrong Way: European Peaceniks and Obama

What happened next? Putin saw the green light from Obama. Putin is an opportunist (see below). A much encouraged Putin invaded Ukraine, grabbing Crimea… which had been Ukrainian for eleven centuries. Now Putin is in Syria, training his army, extending his empire, and helping his fellow dictator Assad re-establish his rule (of terror). (Putin had seized parts of Georgia earlier. However Sarkozy intervened in various spastic ways, and Bush put a few hundreds US troops in the way of Russian tanks, persuading Putin to back off…)

Cynics will observe that the USA is the world’s number one producer of fossil fuels… Followed by Russia. Do those two have interest to see fossil fuel prices go too low for their own comfort? As long as there is a total war mess in the Middle East, most of the oil production out of Turkey, Syria, and especially Iraq, is shut down (by some measure, Iraq has the world’s second largest reserve of conventional oil). That lack of production keeps the prices up much better than the conspiracies from (a much weakened) OPEC.

In this light, Canada, which is trying to build a new giant pipeline, to exfiltrate the planet’s dirtiest hydrocarbons has also interest to extend the mess in the Middle East as long as possible. And sure enough PM Trudeau, that dashing ecologist in words alone, pulled the Canadian Air Force out of the Middle East.

Some will say Canada acted in a spirit of peace, alleluia, let’s save lives from horrid bombardment. By the same token, the Jihadists are all for eternal peace too. One does make peace with those who organize Auschwitz. Aleppo, right now is pretty much Auschwitz for all to see. Aerial bombardment is no panacea, but it remains the ultimate weapon. Who controls the sky and bombs from it has won more than half the war.

History will not be kind to Obama and those Europeans who pay only lip service to humanity, Socrates’ style (See Socrates on the lake of selfishness). To defend the position that one should not defend humanity and humanism is beyond vile, it is also illogical… if one is not a plutocrat of the most ferocious type.  

Trump accused Obama to have founded the Islamist State, ISIS, or words to this effect. Then he explained this happened through Clinton and Obama’s lack of action. Of military action. I agree, and said so at the time. Now I am making the same charge about the Syrian war. I have been making it for several years, if anything Trump is parroting me, and not the other way around.

These are symptoms of the White Flag Syndrome.

Obama maybe vile, from a humanitarian point of view, by refusing to strike a mass-murdering dictator, but, he is in the best American tradition: the US has helped many a dictator during the Twentieth Century, starting with Kaiser Wilhelm II (from 1914 to 1917). Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, countless bananas dictators, and many others more recently (Nasser, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the Saudis, etc.)

America first, make America ever greater is a policy which has been most profitable. President Franklin Roosevelt in World War Two, following President Wilson in  World War One, refused to come to the help of the French Republic in a timely manner, after being begged to do so. That did not work very well for humanity, but it worked very well for America.

Roosevelt’s refusal to help France in 1939 and 1940 against Hitler, although Auschwitz had just been opened for business by the Nazis, for all to see, was despicable, anti-humanitarian. However, it brought the death of 50 million Europeans, the loss of the European empires, and, not the least, the coming of the so-called “American Century”.

Europeans, though, do not seem to have learned history as well as US think tanks did. Weakness in front of fascism and its associated plutocrats (Yesterday Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler, Franco, now, Assad, Putin, etc.) brought calamity to Europe. Syria, like Libya, should be part of the European empire of justice and peace, because it is the neighborhood of Europe. Actually, Syria was, until it was devastated by the brutal Muslim assault, the richest part of the Roman empire.

The king of Jordan believes World War Three has started. What is sure is that, for World War Three to start, the surest strategy is weakness in the face of infamy. It is known that many in the Russian chain of command believe that a surgical nuclear strike would intimidate the Western Europeans into abject surrender. Whomever the next US president is, Trump, Clinton, Kaynes or Pence, I would not bet on it. Indeed any of these four is clearly more aggressive than Obama. And the US chain of command is very deep.

Here is an example:
Low key and calmly cerebral, four star Admiral Haney, whom some would probably insist to call an “Afro-American” is Commander, United States Strategic Command (four star is the greatest number of stars, aside from times of world war). As such he would be the one talking directly to the president in case of nuclear war, real or potential. Haney commands  not only this country’s nuclear forces but its cyber weapons and space satellites as well.

David Martin, “60 Minutes”: Is it riskier today?

Cecil Haney: Well I think today we’re at a time and place that I don’t think we’ve been to before.

It is Haney’s job to convince Vladimir Putin that resorting to nuclear weapons would be the worst mistake he could possibly make.

David Martin: When you look at what would work to deter Russia, do you have to get inside Putin’s head?

Cecil Haney: You have to have a deep, deep, deep understanding of any adversary you want to deter, including Mr. Putin.

David Martin: So how would you describe him psychologically?

Cecil Haney: Well, one I would say I’m not a psychologist. But I would just say he is clearly an individual that is an opportunist.

[Sell, most politicians are opportunists. The job selects for opportunists. This is the major problem of representative democracy. Any politician is going to be a variant on Trump or Clinton, just those two make it more blatant. However, in the case of Putin and the nationalist mood in Russia, the sky seems to be the same limit as it was for the Nazis.]

David Martin, loaded question: Does it concern you that an opportunist has a nuclear arsenal?

Cecil Haney: It concerns me that Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons. It concerns me that Russia has behaved badly on the international stage. And it concerns me that we have leadership in Russia, at various levels that would flagrantly talk about the use of a nuclear weapon in this 21st century.

Well the psychological scenario for the use of nuclear weapons is in place. It came from weakness. No force, no moral. Only a perspective of great ferocity and fury, in defense of democracy, the republic and optimal human ethology will convince those seduced by the most devilish and oligarchic instincts to refrain from acting up.

Patrice Ayme’.

HERBIVORES KILL, Therefore They Thrive

Islamists kill dozens in Brussels, injuring more than 270, some horribly. As usual when bad people do bad things, people gather and sing John Lennon’s Imagine. A beautiful song I love, but the “Imagine” mentality will not snuff out the mentality of the Islamist State. Only the mentality of the Marseillaise will. As I will show here, in the light of recent science which I had fully predicted, evil is another way to look at intelligence. Or all too close to it.

Recent humanism has kept away from the Dark Side. It may as well have kept away from humanity, and bask in impotence. Ignoring evil, calling it psychopathological is an exception, a vain insult, to the deepest Occidental tradition (let alone to cannibalistic societies, which used to be ruled according to what we view now as evil principles). It’s true that, in normal circumstances, it is progress, to not eat one’s neighbor. However, it’s not progress when one starts from the principle that one’s neighbor could not possibly be a killer, on a matter of principle, and when one organizes society according to this sheep principle (that Nazis, or the Soviets, could not possibly be mass killers was a mass delusion of the 1930s which enabled the 1930s to unfold as they did). The sheep principle is exactly why there is mass murder and mass exodus in Syria: because the West’s leading powers did not exert the necessary evil in the appropriate fashion, in their neighborhood.

Our (cultural) ancestors the Romans, were deeply cynical about humanity: “Homo Homini Lupus” (Man is a wolf for man.) Or maybe that should have been: Lupus Lupis Homo (Wolf is a man for wolf). Roman games’ cruel period lasted at least seven centuries (after Christians took power, the circuses showed animal fighting, the human sacrificial element was removed).

Christianism, invented first by a Roman citizen, Saint Paul, has a very dark side. The cruelty, baseness, disobedience, desire for strife of the genus Homo starts from the beginning of the Bible: brother kills brother, exactly as in the (earlier) fratricide of Remus by Romulus (did the Roman story made all its way to Babylon, where the Bible was written? That’s highly plausible!)

Prairie Dogs’ Dark Side Makes Them Thrive

[Signature strike: A white-tailed prairie dog kills one of the small ground squirrels that graze in prairie dog towns. John Hoogland.]

After the Christian decline and fall of civilization was over, and the Franco-Romans finally took control, ferocity got reinstituted: the Franks’ standard penalty for false coinage was death by slow boiling. The famous story of the Soisson vase was symbolic of the fact consul-king Clovis had the powers of Caesar, but did not feel it was wise to deploy as much magnanimity and “clementia”.

As Friedrich Nietzsche insisted, the Middle Ages was a tale of two moralities: that of the aristocracy on top, the ferocious mentality of the “blonde beast” (see the armories full of lions),  those of serfs, below, Christian, begging for forgiveness.

Machiavelli a bit, Hobbes, and even much more Sade, pointed out that nature was not behaving like the Virgin Mary (accusing the other guy, up in heavens). Nature is front, center, brutal, indifferent to cruelty, master of all. The lesson was not lost on revolutionaries, from those of 1792, to the countless revolutions which shook Europe in the next 150 years. Therefrom the ferocious “dictatorship of the proletariat” of Lenin.

My thesis on the Dark Side is, of course: horrendous. The Dark Side is as natural to intelligence as the management of the biosphere it is in charge of implementing.

Meaning? Intelligence is god. Intelligence does not just watch the world, it molds it. And it does not have to be human intelligence. All animals do it, even herbivores.

Did you ever wonder why social herbivores fight so viciously? The loser generally ends up weak, and isolated, soon to die. Not that the winner is much better off: it’s pretty weak. The broad picture is herbivores killing herbivores.

White-tailed prairie dogs — those stand-up, nose-wiggling cute chewers of grass — have just been revealed to be serial killers of baby ground squirrels.

It gets worse: serial killing is associated to better motherhood. The “strongest sign of successful white-tailed motherhood” is apparently repeat ground squirrel kills, researchers say.

Females who kill at least two ground squirrels raise three times more offspring during their lives than non-killer females do, says John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg. The “serial killers”, rarely nibble at the carcasses and aren’t getting much, if any, meat bonus. Prairie dogs and ground squirrels eat plants. So why all the killing? Lebensraum, the grabbing of natural resources: Prairie Dogs are little furry Nazis, and they are right in Prairiedoghood.

The  assassin supermoms may improve grazing in their territories by reducing competition from grass-snitching ground squirrels, Hoogland and Charles Brown of the University of Tulsa propose March 23 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. [J.L. Hoogland and C.R. Brown. Prairie dogs increase fitness by killing interspecific competitors. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Published online March 23, 2016. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0144.]

“This really caught me by surprise,” Hoogland says. “It’s also striking because it’s so subtle”. He had been watching prairie dogs in general for decades and the white-tailed prairie dogs in the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge for a year before he noticed an attack. A female “jumped on something, shook it, shook it hard, kept attacking — and then walked away,” he says. The encounter lasted just minutes. Hoogland rushed from his observation tower to the scene of the fight and, to his surprise, retrieved a dead baby ground squirrel.

Animals compete for resources. It’s actually why they have brains. This, naturally has ethological, thus moral, consequences.

A propensity for killing ground squirrels turned out to be the only factor (once factoring body mass, age and number of neighbors) which predicted a tendency toward lifetime success in raising lots of young. That capability, which biologists call “fitness”, is the most important parameter in analyzing how populations change and species evolve (it’s the core of raw “Darwinian evolution”).

I love John Lennon’s music and some of his ideas. I miss all what he would have said about the evil deployed during the last few decades. However, having a few nice ideas and even greater songs, do not a wisdom make. John Lennon’s lamentable death showed his philosophy was full of holes (and was in part due to this, his assassin claimed at the time: he had condemned Lennon to death for… hypocrisy).

Intelligence has a Dark Side; it’s intrinsic. Denying its existence is a pernicious addiction, which, paradoxically, leads to non-optimal outcomes, the greatest horrors. The failure of the left, in the West, during the last few decades, is directly attributable to forgetting this. We The People were manipulated into our own subjugation, because we became oblivious to the relationship between evil and intelligence.

Patrice Ayme’

Questions About Genocide

Periodically, the question of genocide resurfaces. What is genocide? I believe that it is quite a bit like all obscenity. A famous American judge, speaking about the latter, quipped that he knew it, when he saw it.

A problem with genocide is that mass homicidal violence can be perfectly justified. By this I mean that there are cases, in history, where it looks as if it were justified.

The vast coalition which exterminated the Assyrian empire seems to be a case in point. The vigorous way with which Charlemagne annihilated Saxon power in Northern Germany (deporting part of the population in South-West France, among other feats), is another example. The Saxons had stood in the way of civilization for centuries, when not eradicating it outright, after landing in Britannia. Charlemagne’s view was that, after trying everything else, deportation was in order.

A Cherokee Born Long After The Trail Of Tears

A recent example of massive violence to save us from unfathomable evil was the defense against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in WWII.

A number of philosopher have struggled mightily, splitting hair to define genocide. Examples are found in Scientia Salon.

Trying to find a general definition of genocide is best done through examples: by kidnapping their children, did Australia commit genocide against the Natives in the 1960s genocide? According to the United Nations definition, it did. Or was that just a good gesture to give those children a chance?

Was what the USA do to American First Peoples genocide? If so, are there mental structures in the American psyche deriving from that?

Did the invasion of America by Europeans constitute genocide, and, if so, was the genocidal aspect necessary? Otherwise asked, was the genocidal English American invasion model superior to the French “Mission Civilisatrice” in Canada? And if so, in which sense?

Studying particular examples informs the general definition. In mathematics, physics, law, or ethics.

Exterminating the most spectacular aspects of the Aztec civilization was certainly culturocide, and, according to some, all too broad, definitions, would also constitute genocide.

In general stamping out a nasty religion, such as the Punic, Celtic, or Aztec, does not constitute genocide, just well-deserved ethical cleansing. Nobody is crying because we don’t conduct human sacrifices, Celtic, Punic, or Aztec style.

The Roman civilizing principle was that religions requiring human sacrifices ought to be obliterated. Everybody agrees (so why is Abraham, the would-be child killer, so popular?)

However, extermination of 15/16 of the Aztec population, including its leaders and thinkers, certainly constituted genocide (although how it happened was not clear: immunity was partly at fault). After a spectacular trial instigated by rancher cum adventurer and bishop Las Casas, the highest authority in Spain and the Roman Empire, Charles Quint, decided to stop the Conquista.

Revenge and exemplary killing do not constitute genocide: they may be viewed as measures to prevent future genocide, by telling future perpetrators that they could not get away with it.

An example is the 40,000 collaborators executed by France in 1944, and thereafter. Although they all got justice, as deserved, some of this justice was express justice, as deserved.

On the other hand, the behavior of Stalin in Ukraine in the 1930s, or Putin in Chechenia around 2000, seems to fit the definition of genocide. The latter case is an example where a bad man and his collaborators (say the French actor Depardieu) could be put under public disapprobation (Depardieu actually owns property in Chechenia: does that make him an accomplice of genocide, and a violator of the Fourth Geneva Convention?)

And the awkward questions keep on coming: when a nation commits genocide (say Turkey with Armenians) do other nations which conduct business with it become accomplices of said genocide?

The question of the Kurds also surfaces: by cutting Kurdistan into little pieces thrown to the four winds, did colonial powers become accomplice of conditions conducive of genocide against the Kurds?

The genocide of the Jews in World War Two was a mix of the deliberately vicious (Zonderkommandos, as early as June 1941), and deliberate happenstance (famine in 1945). The latter means that one should include in the will to genocide, the will to create such circumstances that cause in turn genocide.

The Nazis knew they were going to go extinct, in 1945. However, consumed by rage, but still full of desire to escape their well-deserved punishment, they remembered the “Trail Of Tears”.

The government of the USA had deported the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, among others, exterminating many in the process. One third of the Cherokees died.

Thus the Nazis decided to force march all concentration camps inmates they did not outright assassinated in a rush. Their hope was that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these embarrassing witnesses and hated subhumans, would died. They did.

Rwanda’s Kagame is a modern example of that: after having shot down the Rwandan and Burundi presidents, or stealing through proxies the wealth of Congo, he deliberately created conditions for the evil spirits of genocide to raise.

A crime should be defined: endeavor conducive to genocide.

We need to refine our analysis not just of facts but mental plays on the fragile condition of the human spirit. This is true not just for genocide, but for war in general.

Patrice Ayme’