The U.S. Has a Language Problem (and Ukraine Is Suffering for It)

The United States has repeatedly pledged its support to the people of Ukraine, both before and during this latest incursion by Russia, one of the most bald faced attempts at Russian imperialism since the Brezhnev Doctrine. But as military conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa flare up and refuse to flare out, the issue of how and to whom the U.S. provides concrete support has been subject to a morass of internal politics, nonsensical political grandstanding, and ultimately, fears of instigating a global conflict. Ukraine has been the unfortunate victim of this morass. 

There is little confusion as to the source of resistance on the right: Republicans, no doubt swayed by Trump’s incessant cuddling up to Putin, have consistently attempted to stymie arms shipments to Ukraine. But what about the left? Why has the initial groundswell of public support for Ukraine waned in favor of political dithering?

Because of another issue driving America’s involvement (or lack thereof) in conflicts across the globe: the misuse of the word “genocide.” 

The U.S. has a dismal history of interceding successfully in genocidal conflicts. Compounding the issue is the question of where and by whom genocide is being committed As Samantha Power writes in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, “American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference.” But American society has not been silent. That should be a good thing.

But, we have also seen a massive debasement of the term “genocide” by the American public. Americans are increasingly in the streets protesting against genocide, but they are selective in their interpretation of the word. 

This trend is largely the fault of the so-called “progressive left,” whose brand of identity politics has reduced the course of human history to a dangerously reductive set of assumptions. “Identity politics argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression . . . [Identity politics] simplifies the world into literal black and white,” explains journalist Hadley Freeman. That is: all racial politics are analogous the world over. 

Nowhere has this been more clearly illustrated than in the left’s response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 10, 2023. As Freeman notes, “…many Western activists – especially in the US – see the Palestinians as akin to black slaves and the Israelis as plantation owners, with a total lack of embarrassment about their historical ignorance.” 

Supposedly progressive organizations like Black Lives Matter, student organizations at hallowed American universities, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many others have applied this simplistic formula to the events in the Middle East. They support their analysis of events with historical tidbits gleaned from social media posts that are, at best, inaccurate and at worst, calculated disinformation propagated by Hamas, Iran, China and Russia.

The progressive left have decided Israelis are “white,” while Palestinians are people of color. Therefore, the Israelis are the unilateral aggressors. This view completely disregards the role Hamas has played in this conflict:  its overt attack on Israel, its taking of civilian hostages, its use of rape as a weapon of war, its embedding of military operations in civilian locations like hospitals, its gleeful use of its own people as human shields, its expressly genocidal aims – as stated in its charter – to eliminate the State of Israel. Embracing this view also requires overlooking or distorting the complete history of the Jewish people, with its legitimate claims to indigeneity, long history of victimization in diaspora, and yes, the European genocide that led to the establishment of a Jewish state. 

The net result has been a groundswell of tacit and even explicit support for Hamas, an acknowledged Islamo-Fascist terrorist organization, and the labeling of Israeli military action as “genocide.” Meanwhile, the “Pro-Palestinian” movement has taken to the streets in the form of thuggish public protests, and the vandalizing of Jewish homes, businesses, and places of worship. 

Meanwhile, actual instances of genocide go largely unrecognized. If you can’t pick out a “white” aggressor and a “black” victim, the progressive left isn’t interested. Notice the absence of street protests against the growing violence against Massalit and non-Arab communities in Darfur, which includes the use of rape, torture and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Or against the Uyghurs in China, millions of whom have reportedly been rounded up and sent to “reeducation camps.” Or continued threats against Burma’s Rohingya, who have already endured mass killing, rape, torture, arson, arbitrary arrest, and forced displacement. 

The United Nations defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” You’d be hard pressed to claim these situations don’t fit that definition. Where is the left on these issues? Where are the street marches? Where is the strident pressure on Biden to “do something” about those conflicts? 

Nowhere. 

Because the aggressors and the victims are all people of color. Ironically, here’s where the far left and far right bend to meet each other, in opting to ignore any conflicts where both sides are perceived as people of color. Let them kill each other — who cares?

Ukraine is suffering from a negative-image of this phenomenon: If all the parties in a conflict are considered “white,” it can’t be genocide. The same historical ignorance that leads white, keffiyeh-wearing college students to chant “from the River to the Sea” without an ability to name either body of water, governs the left’s perception of the Russian invasion. In other words, “Slavs are slavs and they’re all kinda white.” So no real genocide there. 

This interpretation disregards the entire history of the region, including the litany of Russian leaders who have expressed their racially-driven animosity toward Ukrainians through such subtle means as military conquest, forced Russification, organized starvation, and population redistribution. 

Even if your frame of historical reference extends only as far as the go-live date of TikTok, Russia has committed a more than sufficient list of atrocities to meet the U.N. definition. According to Genocide Watch, millions of Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia, where families are separated and sent as far as Siberia. Ukrainians are imprisoned, tortured and then summarily executed. Mass graves have been discovered, the victims’ hands tied behind their backs indicating torture before execution. Women survivors have reported mass rape and the regular use of sexual violence. 

So, why the sudden fixation on and inversion of the meaning of genocide? Because the progressive left feels extremely guilty about the sins of the fathers. And this is all about displacement. Freeman writes, “ . . . the enthusiasm with which the West has taken up this idea [of Israel committing genocide in Gaza] suggests something else, too: how better to absolve your guilt about your own country’s historical wrongs than by dumping them on other countries now? The sheer volume of comparisons between anti-Black racism and Israel and Palestine coming especially from American activists strongly hints that there is more than a little displacement going on, and identity politics enables it.” 

Ukraine, Sudan, China, and Burma don’t provide white liberal Americans with an opportunity to assuage their guilt over their own history of racism and antisemitism. In the eyes of an historically illiterate, color-obsessed American public, these other conflicts lack a White aggressor they can really hate with self-righteous impunity. So, it’s not “genocide.” 

The US media will gleefully report for days on Israeli attacks against health facilities in Gaza or the West Bank, overlooking the fact that Hamas uses these facilities as military command centers, arms caches, and is content to use its civilians as human shields – all war crimes, by the way. But when Russians target Ukrainian health facilities, where nothing other than health care is being provided, the event cycles in and out of the media in a matter of hours. 

The calculus of whether to get involved in a foreign dispute largely revolves around a nation’s self-interest. At the same time, some part of that calculus, at least as it is debated in public, revolves around what is morally just. Once one of the actors in a conflict is labeled as “genocidal,” it signals a moral imperative to act that tends to spur a lot more than hanging a Ukrainian flag from the safety of your Brooklyn brownstone. When a child expresses an intent to harm himself, the systems designed to keep the child safe – schools, parents, doctors – swing into a more extreme set of actions. “Crying genocide” is an analogous kind of trigger that tends to kick governmental action into a higher gear. 

Those Americans crying genocide in Gaza are part of a growing movement that shows all the signs of perpetrating the next holocost here in the good old U.S. of A. Meanwhile, their conscious blindness to the real genocide in Ukraine is also tacitly facilitating the rise of an authoritarian axis – I’m looking at you, Russia, Iran and China –  that could ultimately strip the world of the democratic freedoms it currently enjoys. 

The window to avert this is quickly closing. Between now and January, President Biden must stop allowing the historically and culturally ignorant mob – on the left and on the right – dictate foreign policy, including what constitutes genocide. He needs to muster the moral backbone to call out actual genocide from an informed perspective, provide unfettered support for Ukraine to conduct its war of resistance, and back down the real perpetrators now, before it’s too late.