August 02, 2006

Mailbag, and More J-Pod

A reader in Connecticut writes in:

Dear Sir: I received by email a copy of the Podhoretz piece from one who apparently thought it a bold statement, and it put me in mind of a passage from Mein Kampf: "If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future." (Book II, Chapter XV, p.679 [Houghton Mifflin U.S. edition, 1943].

This little J-Pod hubbub aside, I agree that cogitating about mass massacres of entire demographic groups does indeed bring to mind quite dark chapters in human history. Re: J-Pod himself, he responds to his blogospheric critics, assuring: "No, I Am Not in Favor of Genocide." Well, good, and let's take him at face value then. Still, J-Pod's inability to restrain himself from holding out Hama and the eradication of many of the Marsh Arabs by Saddam as models of successful counter-insurgency doctrine strikes me as unfortunate, and ultimately unpersuasive (comparing Hafez al-Asad's brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, where Damascus had a monopoly on power in a highly authoritarian state, is a very different proposition indeed than the conditions prevailing amidst the anarchic wilds of war-torn Mesopotamia, so that razing and flattening Ramadi might not have the impact that Hama did, to say the least). Meantime Yglesias, as often, has an interesting take--that this all may have just been a 'defining deviancy down' kinda floater....you see that a lot at places like the Corner these days.