Recently on an assignment for my job, I worked my way through "Burma's Path to Genocide": a powerful and disturbing new virtual exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the systematic exclusion and persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar over a period of decades, culminating in an act of outright genocide in 2017.
Among the many things in the exhibit that inevitably hold one's attention was a section about the instigating rhetoric from Burmese media that preceded the 2017 atrocities. The exhibit cites multiple examples, including editorials in state-owned media in Burma that insinuated all Rohingya are potential terrorists, or that compared Muslim minorities to "fleas" and other animals.
One political cartoon from the exhibit is particularly vivid in my memory: it depicts a group of crocodiles, one of whom is opening its gullet in front of a microphone, which is held by a reporter. The message of the cartoon is that Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are trying to enlist the false sympathy of the international media for their plight, through shedding "Crocodile Tears" (as the cartoon was titled) while in reality they are supposedly waiting for an opportunity to reenter the country and seize their fellow citizens in their jaws.
In regarding this insidious piece of visual rhetoric, I tried to keep my mind on the specifics of the Burmese situation and the genocide the Rohingya suffered. I reminded myself that this was an act of violence that happened on the other side of the world, in its own unique historical context; I said, inwardly, that genocide must never be relativized, and that every place it happens, it is a distinct and incommensurable human tragedy.
Even bearing this in mind, however, there were events in my own country that I couldn't help but let intrude into my mind. Particularly when we got to "Crocodile Tears."
I instantly remembered a speech that Donald Trump once gave. He read the lyrics of a song that describes how a trusting woman picks up a snake, thinking it needs help, only to be stricken by the reptile as soon as she has taken it into her arms. Trump's unsubtle innuendo was clear: the woman was supposed to represent the United States; the snake was meant to symbolize Syrian refugees.
Comparing people to reptiles. Suggesting that refugees are in some way "faking" the atrocities they have suffered in order to win sympathy and infiltrate a country in order to commit violent acts. Trump's speech and the Burmese political cartoon are sending almost the exact same message. There is no way to pretend that there is any moral difference between the president's rhetoric and the rhetoric that launched a genocide, all the way on the other side of the world.
This is not even to mention Trump's remarks this week, apparently threatening death to Black protesters in Minnesota. Nor his earlier comments endorsing police brutality; or making a joke of a woman's demand to shoot asylum-seekers, after he egged her on to the boiling point with one of his screeds against Central American migrant caravans, at a rally in Florida.
Time and again, Trump's words are less than a stone's throw away from rhetoric that —in another context— fomented a genocide.
There are of course reasons why a genocide against a Muslim minority took place in Burma in 2017 and did not happen here. Myanmar spent most of the last half-century under a military dictatorship, and the Burmese military continues to wield unchecked and unaccountable power in a country whose civilian government has shown little willingness or ability to hold that military to human rights standards. There are also multiple active armed conflicts in the country, which provide more than a little cover for military atrocities to unfold.
At the moral level, however, there is little if anything to distinguish what our president has said from what the architects of the Rohingya genocide said—an atrocity for which, by the way, three years later, there has still been no justice or redress.
You may say that comparing refugees to "snakes," implying that asylum-seekers are all gang members, or calling Black protesters "thugs" while hinting they deserve to be shot, all stop short of a demand for extermination or the total destruction of a group of people. This is true. But Burmese state-owned media and military officials also carefully stopped short of such an explicit declaration of intent as well. Fomenting genocidal violence, it turns out, can happen through more subtle and insinuating language than that.
So, let's say it again, and let it sink in: our president, the leader of the United States, openly employs rhetoric that has been used to instigate genocide...
Reflecting on this while reading Raymond Carver's first collection of short fiction, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, this week, I found one story, "Why, Honey?" struck an eery chord within me.
Told in the first-person, the piece opens with a mother describing how she came to fear her only son. This son, she implies, is now notorious, and it becomes evident from her narration that she is speaking to a reporter who is inquiring about the son's activities.
The tale the mother recounts leads us to expect that her son has since become a serial killer, and that is why he is in all the papers. All the warning signs are there: the gratuitous cruelty to animals, including household pets; the mysterious "hunting" trips from which he brings back blood-stained garments with no explanation; the obsessive privacy and compulsive lying.
He even in one scene, when his mother asks him why he is so unwilling to tell the truth, orders her to get down on one knee: suggesting that the drive to lie is a product of his desire for power over others. We continue to think, as we read, this is simply another rather clichéd origin story of a murderer.
By the end of the story, however, we are treated to a mordant revelation: the son has in fact become a successful politician, the current governor of a state. That is why the reporter has sought out his mother, seeking information on his origins; not because he has left a trail of dead bodies.
The implication of the story is that a narcissist in public office and a narcissist in private life are not so very different. One is certainly not less dangerous than the other, except perhaps that the former has if anything a wider latitude for the expression of his will to power, his sociopathy, his greed to dominate others.
The politician can become the mass murderer, when he feels his will has been thwarted, when he runs up against the barrier of the wills and the rights of other human beings. The politician and the serial killer can be merged into one and the same. It has happened in genocidal regimes throughout history.
And we must never, for an instance, forget that it could also happen here.
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