As Glenn Reynolds notes, “this column about “THE NEXT GENOCIDE,” kind of misses the point:”
BEFORE he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish
child in the air and said, “You must die so that we can live.” As the
killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish
children in the same way: them or us….When mass killing is on the way, it won’t announce itself in the language we are familiar with. The Nazi scenario of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal elements have already begun to assemble.
It is not difficult to imagine ethnic mass murder in Africa, which has already happened; or the triumph of a violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East; or a Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves removing the people already living there; or a growing global ecological panic if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart.
Today we confront the same crucial choice between science and ideology that Germans once faced. Will we accept empirical evidence and support new energy technologies, or allow a wave of ecological panic to spread across the world?
Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.
Or, you know, the invasion of Europe by millions of Muslims. Or the invasion of the USA by tens of millions of third-worlders. Either of them strike me as considerably more likely candidates than a Chinese play for resources in Eastern Europe.
However, until this summer, I would have said that the Chinese play for Africa was the most likely one. The Europeans will probably be content to simply engage in a second Reconquista and the Chinese make the KKK look like the Anti-Defamation League. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the Chinese resorted to genetic warfare in Africa; I very much doubt the African invasion of Europe is leading them to believe that coexistence in a Chinese-colonized Africa is possible, let alone desirable.
Nationalism isn’t an evil. Nationalism and homogenous populations is what protects societies from horrors most people can’t even imagine.