#Civic Virtue

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Gust Lessis as "Civic Virtue" shows how a man would look in the same predicament, represented by the famous statue at City Hall, Brighton Beach, September 13, 1922.

Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images/Fine Art America

[kemetic-dreams]

Civic virtue is morality or a standard of righteous behavior in relationship to a citizen's involvement in society. An individual may exhibit civic virtue by voting, volunteering, organizing a book group, or attending a PTA meeting. Historic Roots.

What is ethical reasoning in politics?

Political ethics deals with realizing moral values in democratic societies where citizens (and philosophers) disagree about what ideal justice is. In a pluralist society, governments attempt to justify policies such as progressive taxation, affirmative action, the right to abortion, and universal healthcare.

[compassionmattersmost]

Voices from History Are Whispering to Us, Still

To Hold Steady and Seek the Wisdom They Once Prayed For As I begin to read and reflect on the birth of our nation, I find myself drawn to The Debate on the Constitution, edited by Bernard Bailyn. In this remarkable collection, voices from the founding era come alive through letters, speeches, and passionate exchanges over the very principles that would shape America’s future. My journey through…

[girlzoot]

He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy. —Sarah Vowell/The Partly Cloudy Patriot(Pop-A-Shot)

[paradife-loft]

skill issue

[drusill-a]

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or… is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

june gehringer, I get so jealous of euthanized dogs / joan tierney, dear 4am / caluco, maggots / margaret atwood, [you fit into me] / cameron barnett, murmur / lindsey drager, the archive of alternative endings / @mobydyke / donna tartt, goldfinch / trista mateer, honeybee / michelle zauner, crying in h mart / sylvie baumgartel, pink / joan didion, blue nights / john irving, a prayer for owen meany / brian eno / patrick james errington, after all this small talk, you’d think there’d be no weather left / madeline miller, circe / richard siken, a primer for the small weird loves / the lumineers, ophelia / jeanette winterson, written on the body / fariha róisín, how to cure a ghost / hayley williams, watch me while I bloom / lori gottlieb, maybe you should talk to someone / margaret atwood, cat’s eye / @preschooldr0pout / natalie díaz, postcolonial love poem / donna tartt, goldfinch

[ARMAND] [CLAUDIA]

[wilwheaton]

When they drafted the Constitution, the Founders’ greatest fear was that a populist demagogue would flatter the mob, subvert American democracy and establish authoritarian rule. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792. “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

 The Founding Fathers feared demagogues and hoped for civic virtue

[pmamtraveller]

PETER PAUL RUBENS - JUDITH WITH THE HEAD OF HOLOFERNES, 1616

In the painting, Judith has just severed the head of the Assyrian warlord Holofernes using a sword. The maid gazes at it with a blend of wonder and fear. Shortly after, Judith's besieged city, Bethulia, would display the head on its walls.

Judith, a beautiful widow, rescues her city under siege, Bethulia, by infiltrating the camp of Holofernes. Using her charm, she gains his trust and, after intoxicating him, beheads him in his tent. This act inspired her people to defeat the Assyrians and secure their freedom.

The painting symbolizes civic virtue and the triumph of good over evil. Judith represents a powerful figure who defies tyranny, reflecting themes of heroism and female strength.

Peter Paul Rubens was experiencing a period of significant artistic and personal activity at the time of creating this painting. He had recently returned to Antwerp, and this era marked a flourishing of his workshop, allowing him to produce monumental works

[kvetcher2]

the reason so many leftists are willing to not vote, and potentially let trump win, over whatever issue they’ve decided kamala is not progressive enough on, is because they don’t see voting for what it is. they don’t see it as a civic duty, or an incremental effort towards improving their own government. they definitely don’t see it as a social responsibility that they have toward other people, especially those who will be the most negatively affected by trump’s policies. no, there’s a massive subset of mostly young leftists who see voting as a form of self-expression. as a public display of their own enlightened political virtuousness. that’s why so many leftists will not vote for a candidate that they think is imperfect in any way, even if they have no other options. in their eyes, voting, like anything else, is an opportunity to virtue signal and proudly display that they’re the most leftist of leftists in their unwashed polycule. it’s somehow more progressive to protest <insert political issue> by refusing to vote for the woman who is indisputably more progressive on said political issue than trump… simply because she doesn’t go far enough? these are the same people that romanticize violent revolution but panic over calling the dentist. be fucking for real you’re not voting because it would mean you have to go outside 🙄

[max1461]

So it’s well known that I don’t really believe in voting, not for any sort of ideological reason but just because I think the math says it doesn’t do anything. But if you accept expected utility maximization as your decision-theoretic principle, which most arguments in favor of voting as a concept basically do (even if you think that voting specifically doesn’t matter in bourgeois democracies, or so on!) you basically have to admit that not voting is equivalent to giving half a vote to both candidates.

I don’t know, if you’re a virtue ethicist about civic duty or something go off, but if you would ever make an essentially consequentialist case for voting in a large election under any political circumstances (including e.g. in regards to union leadership, or party-internal voting in your favorite Marxist-Leninist state, or whatever), I find arguments like “I refuse to vote even for the lesser of two evils!” to be uncompelling.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Boys prepare for a swim at the base of the Statue of Civic Virtue Triumphant Over Unrighteousness at City Hall Park, July 8, 1932. Mayor LaGuardia disliked it; he resented being confronted with the male figure's bare posterior every day when he left City Hall. When Queens opened a new Borough Hall in 1940, LaGuardia seized the opportunity and gave the fountain to Queens, where it was moved in February 1941. He wasn't the only opponent: in 1987 Claire Shulman, the borough's first female president, said it should be moved because "A municipal building is not an appropriate place for a statue that portrays women as evil and treacherous." Eventually, in 2012, it was moved to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Photo: Associated Press via Pinterest

[st-just]

Very funny that the western memory of classical Greece and Persia is, like, entirely these two specific wars of glorious patriotic national liberation and western democratic civic virtue and whatever.

And not the literal generations where the city-states were happily and enthusiastically accepting Persian subsidies to enable them to continue to keep biting each others dicks off.

[warsofasoiaf]

Do you think it’s possible that Aerys was right about Tywin all along, that Tywin was not driven into opposition by Aerys’ madness, but rather Aerys became paranoid because he perceived Tywin was actually motivated by his own ego and lust for power, rather than any loyalty or good faith service to king and country?

A. Aerys’ real madness starts after Duskendale, which seems like Tywin might have provoked.  He seems like he really was just kind of temperamentally extreme in his early days, and years of dealing with Tywin plus the trauma of his captivity pushed him over the edge.  And most of the reports on his early behavior is filtered through characters with a pro-Lannister perspective, or hindsight confirmation bias, where they know how he ended up and thus recall ordinary displays of emotion or mistakes as early symptoms of madness. 

B. Most of Tywin’s credited actions as Hand seem to be just basically doing the job, not exactly any sort of heroic civic virtue.  The one apparently generous, not obviously self-interested, act of Tywin was paying off the Braavosi loans, but he didn’t give the crown the cash to meet its debts, he publicly took the debt himself, getting the glory & credit for patriotism and whatnot.  He receives Steffon, “his” boyhood “friend” & cousin to the king, on the Iron Throne. That feels like a power move to me. 

C. We see how he stage-manages the celebration of the crown’s victory at Blackwater, and it’s all about him, not polishing Joffrey’s image, or putting him forward as the Young Lion who defeated his evil uncle.  Tywin does not come in like a subject or supplicant or leal servant of the Iron Throne, he rides in, fully armored, as a conqueror, and Joffrey comes down to greet him.  Great for Tywin’s image, less great of a start for the reign of his grandson, or effacing the early PR blunders. I can’t imagine he was more generous to the king who was no kin of his. 

What if Ilyn Payne was basically just repeating the Lannister party line? Westermen don’t seem to act on their own post-Castamere, but Tywin likes sending proxies ahead of him, whether Kevan in council or Tyrion at court, or Gregor & Lorch in battle.  Maybe Ilyn Payne and others were actually voicing the notion that Tywin was actively promoting, that he was the one ruling in truth and Aerys was just his Merovingian King?  It seems to me that, per Varys’ riddle, getting people to believe you, and not the king, are the power behind the throne is a great way to make that perception the reality. And Aerys sees what is going on, isn’t really subtle or skilled at image stuff, and thus is poorly equipped to fight Tywin’s campaign effectively, so he lashes out with things like cutting out tongues and calling him a servant when rejecting a marriage proposal to put him in his place, and undermining his policies to make people accept that he is truly ruling. Tywin gets pissed, because how dare he not appreciate how awesome Tywin is, and Brer Rabbits him into a vulnerable position in Duskendale, from which the only effort he makes to save his king and supposed friend is to send in a lone, 40-year-old knight, while not even bothering to hide his preference for a young, presumably weaker, successor. 

I feel like if we read between the lines, and triangulate with Tywin’s entire life history which seems utterly lacking in indications of friendship, loyalty or patriotism, Aerys’ story is not just a random lunatic happening to be on the throne, but rather another example of how Tywin’s toxic approach to political pursuits blights the realm and causes misery.

What do you think of this theory?  I am asking in this format instead of the AMA for the, I think obvious, issue of character limits. Thank you.

I think there’s no character limit anymore, although that might be a settings thing.

Anyway, while I do think that’s a decent enough theory, I don’t think it sufficiently provable, for three reasons.

For one, Aerys was always prone to delusions and flights of fancy, even well before Tywin comes into the picture. While they were most often harmless, it could mean that negative experiences, like Duskendale, could set him off regardless of whether or not Tywin is involved.

For two, self-interest and house advancement is par for the course when it comes to court appointments. Why should we expect Tywin to act differently, and why shouldn’t we expect Aerys to act with irrationality toward any other person?

For three, I offer in contrast Tywin’s excellent handling and manipulation of the mountain clans in AGOT. So Tywin can clearly manipulate a situation and read it appropriately, particularly earlier on in the narrative where some of the more established character traits are not set (or contrarily, things that get corrected later on after further research such as Tyrion’s acrobatic ability). The Mad King was set up as such in the first book, which might cleave closer to Tywin’s first book framing than his second.

I think what you’ve said here enriches the discourse, certainly, but I don’t think it has enough evidence to be more likely than the interpretation that Aerys’s mental instability was not caused by Tywin’s toxic political monomania. But thank you for the contribution, it is quite good, Cannoli.

-SLAL 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The impact of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 has often been overblown. Those few summer days when the beleaguered gay community fought back against the police on the streets of New York City are rightly considered a milestone in the struggle for equal rights in the West. But endless arguments about ‘who threw the first brick?’ have obscured the truth that gay equality was achieved by the activists who persisted in the aftermath, harnessing that energy and changing the world forever.

Perhaps a more important milestone was the march organised by a handful of campaigners a year after Stonewall. Craig Rodwell’s idea had been to make this a yearly commemoration that would supersede the ‘Annual Reminder’ picket events that he had been holding every Independence Day in Philadelphia since 1965. It would be known as the ‘Christopher Street Liberation Day’ – later retrospectively rebranded as the first New York ‘Pride’ march – and it was orchestrated chiefly by Rodwell, Fred Sargeant, Linda Rhodes and Ellen Broidy.

The march took place on 28 June 1970, and it was an audacious display. Police hostility to gay people was rife, the local media were overwhelmingly unsympathetic and there were fears of violent repercussions from observers. The day passed off peacefully, perhaps because of a general sense of astonishment that thousands of gay people would assemble so openly. A reporter for the Village Voice wrote that ‘no one could quite believe it, eyes rolled back in heads, Sunday tourists traded incredulous looks, wondrous faces poked out of air-conditioned cars’. At the head of the march, Fred Sargeant carried a bullhorn and called out instructions to the marchers as they made their way from the West Village to Central Park.

Fifty-four years later, and Pride has transformed from an important act of resistance into a month-long orgy of corporatism and virtue-signalling, full of heterosexuals desperate to identify themselves into an oppressed group with the help of trans ideology. ‘Progress Pride’ flags flutter from every high-street store. This relatively new design – a kaleidoscopic eyesore that has replaced the traditional six-stripe Pride flag – is emblazoned on schools, universities, hospitals, civic buildings. In the city of Arlington in Texas, this year’s family friendly Pride event included displays of dildos, half-naked drag queens and human dogs in bondage gear, all co-spon.sored by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest producer of armaments. In London, numerous pedestrian crossings have been repainted with the ‘Progress Pride’ motif. Police horses find walking across the coloured stripes confusing and disturbing, so the animals have undergone special training to overcome their fears. After all, it is essential to address the rampant homophobia within the equine community.

What might the thousands who turned out on that summer day in New York in 1970 make of this distorted version of Pride? Those gay men and lesbians who risked social ostracism and physical violence to gather in public have little in common with this garish and unsettling facsimile. A poll from 2021 determined that almost 40 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now identify as LGBTQ. Given the vast majority identifying as such do so as ‘trans’, ‘nonbinary’ and ‘queer’, this means it is statistically certain that gay people are now the minority in this coalition. The early pioneers of gay rights didn’t risk so much for their movement to be usurped by fetishistic heterosexuals with a martyr complex.

It would be interesting to see polling data on how many gay people support Pride in its new ‘trans-inclusive’ incarnation. One recent poll on X asked a simple question: ‘Do you want Pride anymore?’ And although 93.5 per cent of respondents replied in the negative, social-media polls are notoriously useless and we would be unwise to draw any conclusions from them. Still, it is surely significant that this poll was reposted by Fred Sargeant, and that his answer was a resounding ‘No’. That the man who led the first Pride march, bullhorn in hand, should now reject the annual event that he co-created because of its embrace of gender ideology is far from trivial. Nor is it trivial that while handing out pamphlets critical of the trans movement at a Pride event in Vermont in 2022, Sargeant was physically attacked by trans activists.

[ A parade through New York City on Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day, 1971. ]

He is not alone. Many gay people have expressed dismay at the metamorphosis of Pride and feel that it no longer represents them. This can be confusing for those who have not been paying attention to its ongoing political evolution, but there is a very good reason why groups of gay men and lesbians are now holding alternative Pride rallies this year. In August 2022, police insisted that lesbians leave a Pride parade because their banners, proclaiming that ‘lesbians don’t like penises’ and ‘trans activism erases lesbians’, were causing consternation. When gay people are being escorted away from Pride marches by the police, we can safely say that the movement has fallen.

Some might argue that the LGBTQIA+ explosion is an example of what happens when liberalism goes unchecked, that it is the natural consequence of an excess of tolerance and the rise of identity politics. Yet while identity politics in its current intersectional form has proven to be deeply illiberal and regressive, there have been sound reasons throughout history for people with shared characteristics to organise and resist. Unlike the various campaigns for imaginary victimhood that dominate today’s ‘social justice’ causes, being openly gay in the 1970s came at a huge cost. At the time of the first Pride parade, every state in the US with the exception of Illinois criminalised gay sex. In services and employment, discrimination against gay people was permitted, and even most progressives assumed that homosexuality was a mental illness. This is a world away from the exaggerated or fabricated grievances of the diversity, equity and inclusion industry today.

Now that gay people have complete equal rights under the law, the protest element of Pride has been appropriated by those with an apparent craving for oppression. Asexual activists, for instance, have taken centre stage at certain Pride events, even though nobody in the history of humankind has ever been burned at the stake for not wanting to have sex. It isn’t the case that those who identify as asexual are facing discrimination; it’s that nobody cares about what they don’t get up to in the bedroom. But of course, for those of a narcissistic temperament, there can be nothing more devastating than being ignored.

[ Furries march on Congress Street during the annual Pride Portland parade, 2017. ]

Many of those who call themselves ‘nonbinary’ are similarly vocal, but there is no serious comparison to be made between the historical persecution of homosexuals and experiencing some pushback when you demand that others refer to you as ‘they’ or ‘them’. Coming out as gay in 1970 increased the risk of being violently assaulted; coming out as ‘nonbinary’ today only increases one’s chances of being employed at the BBC.

Of course, all of this must be symptomatic of the developing cult of victimhood in the Western world. Ironically, there is now power in being the victim. Those who claim to be ‘marginalised’ are able to get people fired, drive them from public life, and harass and bully them in the name of ‘progress’. Who would have thought there was so much clout in being oppressed?

Far from being a collective gesture of unity, Pride is now widely interpreted as a celebration of homophobia. This is because it has become infected with gender ideology, which seeks to eliminate gay people from their own history. Although trans-identified individuals were rarely seen at activist meetings and events in the early decades of the gay movement, revisionists are now insisting that gay people owe their rights to the hard work of trans campaigners. We are told that a black trans woman, Marsha P Johnson, was the key figure at the Stonewall riots. This is wrong on many counts. The riots were overwhelmingly dominated by young gay men. Although Johnson took part in the demonstrations, he wasn’t present when the rioting began. Most significantly, by his own admission, he was a transvestite who didn’t identify as female.

Fred Sargeant has been much vilified for exposing the truth of what took place in these early years of the gay rights’ movement, and he is now a thorn in the side of activists whose worldview depends on a narrative that runs contrary to the truth. Recently he posted a link to the Digital Transgender Archive on the Third International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, which explicitly outlines how gay and trans movements in the 20th century were completely separate. The conflation of the LGB and T is an invention as recent as 2015. As the document explains, while the gay-rights movement in the US began in the 1920s, ‘the existence of a transgendered community that seeks reforms did not come into existence until the 1990s’.

The historical revisionism doesn’t end at Stonewall. Activists have attempted to claim that certain gay historical figures were mistaking their true trans identity for homosexuality. Just as Mormon priests have been known to baptise the dead and thereby convert them unwillingly to their cause, trans activists have been busy harvesting the annals of history for potential recruits. Those falsely claimed as trans include George Eliot, Dr James Barry, Radclyffe Hall and Joan of Arc. People who were gay and gender nonconforming are particularly vulnerable to this kind of retrospective ‘transing’. It’s very convenient for activists that the dead can’t complain.

While many trans campaigners consider themselves supportive of gay rights, overt homophobia is nonetheless often tolerated and encouraged within their circles. There are innumerable examples online of trans activists claiming that homosexuality is a form of transphobia and that only bigots have ‘genital preferences’. ‘If you’re a cis gay man’, writes one, ‘and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave’. A video recently went viral featuring an activist explaining to gay men why they should transition to female and that ‘maybe being gay is an outdated concept’. An online influencer called Davey Wavey uploaded his attempt at gay conversion therapy in a video entitled ‘How To Eat Pussy – For Gay Men’. One can imagine it being shown to young men at an evangelical Christian retreat for those who wish to find a ‘cure’ for their immoral urges.

This isn’t simply a case of a handful of lunatics on the fringe – this idea has also been normalised in mainstream gay culture. Australia’s Human Rights Commission prohibits lesbians from holding female-only events on the grounds that it discriminates against men who identify as female. Sall Grover, the founder of women’s app Giggle, is currently in a legal battle in Australia because she refused to allow a man to join. Stonewall has even redefined ‘homosexuality’ on its website as ‘same-gender attracted’. Its former CEO, Nancy Kelley, once suggested that women who don’t wish to date trans people are ‘sexual racists’. No, Nancy, they’re just gay.

We have seen all this before. In the 1980s, it was a common trope for gay men to be told that they ‘just haven’t found the right girl yet’ and to suggest to lesbians that they ‘just need the right dick’. The rights of homosexuals depend upon a recognition that a minority of people are attracted to their own sex. Once sex is eliminated from the equation, gay rights are no longer tenable.

The most obvious example of how gay rights have been threatened by trans ideology is that young gay people are disproportionately at risk of surgical ‘correction’. Given that between 80 and 90 per cent of adolescents referred to the NHS Tavistock Clinic were orientated towards their own sex, it is clear that in many cases homosexuality was being treated as gender dysphoria. I am usually mistrustful of accusations of various ‘phobias’ which can be used as a rhetorical technique to discourage disagreement. But if medicalising people for being same-sex attracted doesn’t qualify as homophobic, I’m not sure that anything does.

And so Pride and its accoutrements have come to represent an ideology that seeks not only to erase the foundations of gay rights, but also to re-conceptualise same-sex attraction as a condition that requires medical treatment. When police officers decorate their cars with the Pride colours, when NHS workers display the rainbow lanyard, when schools decorate their halls with bunting in solidarity, they are almost certainly doing so with the noble intention of promoting equal rights. But they are inadvertently promoting a movement whose end goal is the eradication of homosexuality.

This is not to deny that the ‘Progress Pride’ flag and all it represents have been embraced by many gay people. It is clearly the case that a majority have not realised the extent to which the flag has been hijacked for a cause that actively works against their interests. The situation has hardly been helped by prominent celebrities, often now referred to as ‘Vichy gays’, who have cheered on this sinister development. Homosexuals are not immune to the condition of useful idiocy.

Given that Pride has become so divisive, and given that so many lesbians, bisexuals and gay men now consider it to be an essentially hostile enterprise, it would be prudent for corporations and government bodies to stop pretending that there is a consensus on this issue. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. By flying the ‘Progress Pride’ flag, they are taking a side in a highly contentious cultural debate, one that alienates as many gay people as it attracts. Those who are serious about gay rights need to distance themselves from Pride once and for all.

==

When the demand for 'oppression' outstrips the supply.

Time to resist again.

[just-shower-thoughts]

Under very specific circumstances, carrying a bag of poo is a sign of civic virtue.

[drsonnet]

"Today, in this upside-down world, we feverishly await the final vote in the U.N. General Assembly on the genocide in Srebrenica, while Gaza has been destroyed, and its people starved and denied water." (Illustration by Erhan Yalvaç)

Of villains, heroes and the final act

Of villains, heroes and the final act | Opinion (archive.org)

BY FARHAN MUJAHID CHAK - MAY 14, 2024

A UNGA resolution condemning the Srebrenica genocide is developed by countries like Germany and the U.S., despite their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza by supporting Israel

Ino longer believe in fairy tales, although I once did.

Raised with ideals of sacredness in life, I was taught to honor the sanctity of humanity, to champion international law, and to cherish freedom of speech as the cornerstone of societal progress. I believe the Geneva Conventions were a manifestation of our collective conscience that mandated the rules of war and held nations to account. Women and children; hospitals and schools; the elderly and infirm were inviolable. I was taught that "peaceful protest" was the quintessential liberty of a sophisticated society that understood the relationship between civic activism, social change and progress. I listened, attentively, to the lofty rhetoric and was enthralled. I would utter high-sounding words on democracy, equality and freedom, and those grand glutinous words stuck to my teeth. I was – in a way, smitten.

Head-over-heels over values that deeply resonated in me, yet I slowly became disillusioned. It became evident those hollow words were never meant to be believed, only used to establish authority and reproach others with their inhumanity. Justice was not blind, and race, color and creed mattered in the application of the law. It is in this troubled context that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will vote on whether to declare July 11 "The International Day of Reflection and Remembrance of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide." The complex intersection of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the war on students and free speech on university campuses across the United States, Canada and Europe, and the former genocide in Srebrenica deserves closer scrutiny. The U.N. vote on the Bosnian genocide could not come at a more condemnable moment in world history.

On May 1, after considerable delay, a draft U.N. resolution on the Srebrenica genocide was submitted to the president of the 193-member U.N. General Assembly. Recall that in 1995, the town of Srebrenica was a U.N.-declared safe zone promised protection by a U.N. Dutch force. Dozens of able-bodied Muslim men in the town were asked to disarm, which they did. Despite that, fanatical Serb forces overran the safe zone and murdered 8,372 Muslim men and boys. Such is the perverse reality of the world we live in, that a U.N.-mandated safe haven, supposedly protected by U.N. forces, was invaded by terrorist Serb forces and a genocide ensued under their watch.

Bizarre irony

Now, a UNGA resolution on the Srebrenica genocide, partially modeled on a similar resolution for Rwanda, has been developed by several countries including Germany and the U.S. Absurdly, both are collaborators in the genocide currently underway in Gaza by direct military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel. This is the bizarre irony of being complicit in an ongoing genocide and putting forth a U.N. Resolution condemning the same.

What is the point of passing a resolution on genocide and turning a blind eye to one going on for the whole world to see? Sadly, villains need masks and no better cover than virtue. It is politics, not ethics, that is driving the U.N. Srebrenica vote. Of course, this does not diminish the necessity of it or the need to condemn the Srebrenica genocide and its denial. Still, the larger macro-level betrayal of the Geneva Conventions and International Human Rights Law by the U.S., U.K. and Germany is an indictment of the Western-led global order.

It is that outright duplicity, the sheer savagery of the genocide in Palestine, and the silencing of dissent that has provoked a whole generation of young people on campuses throughout the West. After all, they, too, were told stories about diversity, inclusion and pluralism. They were taught to condemn discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or gender. About equality before the law and the inviolability of non-combatants. They were raised to feel empowered and encouraged to peacefully organize and express their opinions. And, that society benefits when individuals exercise their civic duty. Now, they are witness to the flagrant disavowal of the moral archetypes that were instilled in them. They feel duped and are protesting, as heroes do, the enabling of genocide by their universities. Idealistic and courageous, they are sacrificing their education and careers to condemn the genocide in Palestine. Except rather than being celebrated, thousands of students have been beaten, harassed and arrested. Condemned for believing in the values that they were taught.

Now, we seem to be in the final act. One of impunity – if you will, in which we close our eyes to the genocide in Palestine, condemn students who protest it, and negotiate ways to commemorate a past genocide in Srebrenica – when ignoring it while it happened. Today, in this upside-down world, we feverishly await the final vote in the UNGA on the genocide in Srebrenica, while Gaza has been destroyed, and its people starved and denied water.

Yet, no matter the outcome of the resolution, it will not stop future genocides. Still, if nothing else, it will forever be a testament to the twisted dystopian reality in which we live and be a symbol of the urgent need for a new world order. Maybe, one faraway day, we can muster the will – for whatever purpose, and pass a U.N. resolution condemning it. Or name a highway after the martyrs. We will tell noble stories about those who were killed since it seems our twisted world only after their death feigns to honor them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor of International Affairs, Visiting Research Faculty at Al Waleed Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University