The eminent Canadian Jewish intellectual David Frum has published a new article arguing that the term genocide should never be used pejoratively. In his Atlantic piece published yesterday, Frum argues that settlers who cross the seas to exterminate and expel native populations are actually perfectly nice people, and that the mass murders, rapes, and other crimes against humanity they commit should not be viewed negatively. Instead, he argues, we should take a neutral, detached view of the people who rape people to death with batons, make national heroes of the rapists, murder children and feed their corpses to dogs, freeze other children to death, tie people up and run over them with tanks, shoot down crowds of starving people when they line up for food, make fortunes selling the organs of the people they murder, bury crowds of people alive with bulldozers, systematically annihilate medical facilities and exterminate medical personnel, gain rabbinical blessings for their crimes, and generally set world records for sadism and murder.
All of that is perfectly fine, Frum argues, because “history abounds with stories of conquest: The Arabs exploded out of the desert to impose Islam upon the Middle East and North Africa; King William and his Normans crossed the English Channel in 1066; the Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty to rule China.” Bad things were done during those conquests, Frum points out, so we shouldn’t take a negative view of bad things happening today, especially if they are being done by Jews. Frum explains that it is antisemitic to oppose raping people to death with batons, at least if the rapists are Jews on a mission to exterminate Amalek. Why single out Jews when other groups have done bad things too? Anyone who does that must hate Jews, which means they too ought to be ruthlessly exterminated.
Frum adds that since homo sapiens replaced the neanderthals 40,000 years ago, “the system of beliefs that so negatively judges genocide is itself one of the most refined and exquisite products of genocide.” In other words, nobody would be condemning genocide if there weren’t any modern humans around to condemn it. If we hadn’t exterminated those neanderthal brutes, Earth would now be dominated by a bunch of cave men grunting about amalek, which would be almost as bad as the world we have now—a world overrun with antisemites who don’t like it when Jews exterminate whole populations to steal their land and resources.
Since antisemites invariably use the term genocide with a tone of condemnation, Frum, argues, we need to develop surveillance-and-punishment robots with AI algorithms that can distinguish tones of voice and inflict severe pain on anyone who intones the word genocide with anything less than complete neutrality and apathy:
The comedian Louis C.K. has a bit about the word Jew being an unusual word—it can be both the perfectly correct term for a Jewish person and, depending on the tone, a nasty slur: “He’s a Jew,” as opposed to “He’s a Jew.” Fortunately AI-driven killer drones can now make that distinction in a microsecond and dish out the appropriate punishment as warranted. We ought to deploy the same technology to police the word genocide.
A poll of Frum’s readers found that 63% agreed that the word genocide should be banned as hate speech unless spoken in a neutral or approving tone of voice. The remaining 37% will be subjected to heightened scrutiny by AI internet surveillance bots and, as deemed necessary, deplatformed, raped to death with batons, or otherwise exterminated.