The Genocide Doctrine

Whether or not Ron Paul actually said that he would not intervene to stop the Holocaust, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about this position. The United States has never intervened to stop a genocide. Not in WW2 and not since when several genocides have taken place, most notably in Africa, without any military intervention.The United States did participate in two NATO wars justified with phony claims of genocide, but the only ethnic cleansings that have taken place have been of Serbs from Kosovo and of Africans from Libya. Which is to say the closest thing to a genocide in either case was perpetrated by our allies against the people we were bombing on their behalf in two civil wars. And neither of those rise anywhere near the level of genocide. We have maintained close ties with two genocidal Muslim states, Turkey and Indonesia. The latter conducted genocide against Christians in East Timor on our watch and with our weapons. Obama’s Indonesian stepfather was a likely participant in that genocide; his former Director of National Intelligence helped keep it going. And Obama has been on record opposing any intervention in Sudan.It is doubtful that any American president would have intervened militarily to stop the Holocaust, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Ron Paul can’t be given credit for much, but his response is honest if nothing else. Or at least partly honest. It’s more likely that he is actually sympathetic to another party in the conflict. His newsletter where he blames Churchill for prolonging WW2 by not letting the USSR and Nazi Germany “fight it out” suggests as much. It’s an echo of similar themes put out by Pat Buchanan and other fellow travelers. But this really isn’t about him. The question of whether we should be intervening to stop genocide is virtually irrelevant because it’s not something we do. Holocaust education has very little to do with the mass murder of the Jews of Europe and a great deal to do with teaching tolerance. The genocide doctrine employed by modern administrations has nothing to do with the Holocaust either. It has a great deal to do with dressing up the wars that our leaders decided they wanted to fight anyway.WWI had enough grandiose claims made about it to make you think that it was the ultimate war against evil. WWII where there actually were monsters on the side, not just Prussian stuffed shirts with curled mustaches, must have caught the propagandists by surprise. But had Hitler’s minions practiced eugenics and killed ethnic minorities, there would have been no war. The initial response to Hitler was that he was stabilizing an unstable country. It was only when Hitler insisted on destabilizing the region with grandiose ambitions that war became inevitable.Stability is the reason why we began bombing Libya. Not because Gaddafi was guilty of genocide, but because Western diplomats and the assorted grab bag of elites had decided that democracy was the way forward in the Middle East. And the dictators who were blocking the way forward had to go. Gaddafi’s crime wasn’t that his troops were raping and murdering their way through the opposition. Raping and murdering your way through the opposition is a time honored-practice of Muslim rulers.






The Genocide Doctrine