Context and Scale

One doesn’t have to look very hard at all to find examples of archetypally-oppressed people acting in a manner that looks rather startlingly oppressive.

Such incidents sit, rather like that tree in the forest, in a historical space where they continue to exist as facts no whether or not we see or comment on them. Yet how we as historians, or even just citizens of tolerant societies, talk about these incidents is often very revealing. Context and scale are always extremely important.

Take Liberia, a small country in West Africa which often turns up on lists (or maps such as this) of the uncolonised, which was in fact first established in 1822 by an organisation called The American Colonization Society (ACS) , good folk we’d probably refer to as ‘progressives’ today, who came up with the plan of sending freed or freeborn African Americans back to Africa in order to establish a new model society based on their admirably liberal ideals, hence the name. The capital Monrovia is named after POTUS Monroe, he of the famous, completely non-colonial Doctrine.

 

Let’s just say that the Liberian experiment did not go 100% according to plan. The emigrants did not adapt so well at first to their ‘homeland’, with only 39% surviving the first couple of decades. The country achieved independence from the ACS in 1847, but by this time the newcomers had set themselves up as a notoriously abusive elite who were not treating the natives particularly well at all.

 

Anyway, for the purposes of what I am about to say, that’s all that really needs to be shared. If I were to now say that the behaviour of this one small group of African Americans somehow offsets one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, the Atlantic Slave Trade, I’m sure you’d start questioning my underlying motives. I'd certainly hope so.

 

Yet this in essence is what many of the Pro-Pals have been doing, often knowingly, when they compare Israel to the Third Reich or even Apartheid South Africa. 

 

One does not have to be a towering genius to spot the intent to wash away centuries of Jewish historical experience of slaughter and oppression, pogroms, Spanish Inquisitions and so on — and perhaps even more specifically, somehow offset one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, the Holocaust.

 

They use terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ not in the first instance because they represent appropriately accurate descriptions of circumstances, nor because they would equitably apply them to similar situations elsewhere in our complex world, but instead precisely because they are attempting to pin these offences on Jews, as the latest twist in the double millennia-old demonisation game.

Not even the most disingenuous of useful idiot could hope to pretend otherwise. For while most would immediately understand both the probable malignancy and stupidity of any attempt to downplay the evil of slavery using one of history’s bizarre spin-off sideshows, they are often unquestioningly on board with text and imagery which juxtaposes the Star of David with Hitler and/or Nazi swastikas.

 

These manoeuvres belong to the part of contemporary hate speech known as Holocaust Inversion. (Maybe the reason we don’t have an equivalent term for slavery is that it is far less common.)

Cod-casuistry of this sort should be actively discouraged and punished, where appropriate, yet we now appear to live in societies where otherwise decent people — though mostly the self-declared kind — increasingly seem to understand that they can get away with it.