Our Elites Virtue Signal Over Long-Dead Nazis, While Winking at Today’s Genocidal Thugs

“Those who despise the past never seem to suspect that far worse excesses are now going on right under their noses, on a scale unprecedented, no doubt, since the beginning of history.”

Rene Girard, quoted in Gil Bailie, The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self.

 Roseanne Barr is in trouble. She stands accused of Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. Indeed, what she said recently about the Holocaust seems crazy. In an out-of-context clip that went viral, Barr seemed to court outrage (and defy simple sanity) by denying that this historic genocide ever happened, then going on to rant about the supposed wickedness of Jews as a group.

But what about when you hear the clip in context? Barr (who says that she’s a “religious Jew, and has family members who were murdered by the Nazis) was apparently mocking crackpot conspiracy theories, citing Holocaust denial and claims of Jewish cabals as examples of unhinged thinking. Not that this fact is likely to save her from being canceled. Just ask Moms for Liberty what good “context” did for them.

Thank God, no real Holocaust denier in the West has any power or likelihood of gaining it. We see some flickers here and there on the American far right and far left of wicked anti-Semitism, and it’s nothing to laugh about. Evil as any ethnic hatred is, when it’s aimed at God’s chosen people it is particularly demonic.

Reckless Elites Court Chaos, and Scapegoats Pay the Price

It’s also a fringe phenomenon, thank God, for now. We need to keep it that way, by vividly remembering how Jews and other minorities were inexorably scapegoated in Europe (not just in Germany) after the catastrophic insanity of World War I.

That’s the usual way that innocent groups get marginalized and scapegoated — when things are just falling apart, because your society’s leaders have gambled recklessly and lost. Suddenly, millions are dead or crippled by war, laid low by epidemics spread by the soldiers, or left jobless or homeless. Their life savings get wiped out by hyperinflation. Their countries get menaced by violent revolutionary movements, such as the Bolsheviks who tried to spread Communism worldwide after 1917.

This is one reason why we should think very long and very hard about getting America involved in a major war, whatever justifications anyone offers. Because the civil peace and economy here are a lot more fragile than the media are willing to report. Nobody in Germany in 1914 would have believed the chaos to come in just four short years.

Not 1919 but 1619

At other times, however, genocides happen for even more sinister reasons: Because elites in power simply find genocide profitable and convenient, and nobody cares enough to intervene and stop it. The African slave trade, which uprooted and wrecked the lives of millions, didn’t erupt because white Europeans were terrified and desperate.

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It happened because man is fallen, and none of the Christian churches adequately condemned it or fought it — not for centuries. So greedy African chiefs, Arab slave traders, Spanish and Portuguese and English merchant seamen, and planters from Brazil to New England, got away with mass kidnapping and murder. For hundreds of years.

The anguish of villagers whose fathers and brothers were ripped away, the suffering of the slaves themselves, all of that was easy to keep at a distance and ignore. Likewise it’s easy for our elites today to scoff at the anguish inflicted by America’s broken borders — from children sex trafficked by cartels, to whole towns in El Salvador where every dad is missing, now thousands of miles away.  

But there’s much worse going on, which our ruling class winks at, enables, even covers up for.

What’s a Uyghur?

The most appalling thing said by a well-known American in recent weeks wasn’t Roseanne’s crazy Holocaust rant (which was probably satirical). Instead, it came from the lips of Miami mayor Francis Suarez, a conservative Republican who’s actually running for president. And not just on any platform, but as the “China hawk” confronting the totalitarian regime in Beijing and its designs against its neighbors.

So you might think that Mayor Suarez would know all about the genocide happening right now, as you read this, in China. The main victims are Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim group whose homeland East Turkestan China seized.

As many have documented, some one million Uyghurs languish in concentration camps, simply because of their religious beliefs and ethnic origins. They are tortured, vivisected for organs sold on the international black market, and worked as slaves making components for huge, Woke Western companies such as Apple and Nike. Their babies get forcibly aborted. Their children are brainwashed into atheism.

Uyghurs Don’t Wobble But They Do Fall Down

Christian radio host Hugh Hewitt is well-informed about such horrors. He assumed Suarez — remember, the China hawk — would be, too. He gave Suarez a platform to help expose these abuses on the radio. And here’s what happened, as Fox reported:

Hewitt asked Suarez, “Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

“The what,” Suarez, the current mayor of Miami, responded.

“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt said.

“What’s a Uyghur,” Suarez inquired further.

Moving on from the question due to Suarez’s inability to identify what a Uyghur is, Hewitt told the mayor, “You’ve got to get smart on that.”

…

At the end of the conversation, Suarez insisted that Hewitt had given him “homework” in identifying exactly what a Uyghur is. “I’ll look at what a, what was it, what did you call it, a Weeble,” Suarez asked with a laugh.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down. But Uyghurs do, by the thousands, while the world whistles “Dixie.”

Genocide Pays the Bills

Just a grim joke there, of course. Whistling “Dixie” might well get you canceled nowadays, but sourcing your computer parts or sneakers from real, live, suffering slaves today won’t raise an eyebrow. You can deflect from your use of slave labor by encouraging rich U.S. athletes to boycott “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It’s always easy and safe to condemn the sins of the dead, who are powerless to harm us. But while the genocide is happening, and powerful people profit from it … why court controversy?

The same New York Times that might gleefully approve of canceling Roseanne Barr … refused to report on the Holocaust while it was happening. The Times outrageously lied about and denied the artificial famine in Ukraine while that was happening, too. It took a single courageous journalist, Gareth Jones to expose that. It ruined his career, and won him a bullet from a KGB assassin. The Hollywood that savaged Mel Gibson had refused to make anti-Hitler movies before Pearl Harbor — lest it lose distribution rights in Nazi Germany.

Even now, if I try to write about the genocide happening to Uyghurs on social media, my posts will get censored. Because powerful people make billions of dollars from slavery, just as they did in 1619. And speaking up against evil is a great way to get yourself nailed to a cross.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, author, activist and human rights worker.