Lionel Shriver against those who ramble on about ‘genocide’

“I believe that what progressives want more than anything else is to fail,” writes Lionel Shriver in The New Criterion. “They feel most at ease when they are opposing something. They prefer to campaign for goals that will never be achieved. They are so dependent on the persistence of social ills such as racism that, if necessary, they go so far as to invent ‘microaggressions’ invisible to the naked eye; if racism is lacking, they invent it out of thin air. For progressives, a fully realised utopia – in which there is nothing and no one left to denounce – would be tantamount to hell. What’s more, the last thing they want is to find themselves in positions of power that would put the feasibility of their outlandish ideas to the test. Once in charge, they would be forced to put their senseless policies into practice.”

“Imagine, then, a United States without law enforcement, prisons or national borders, where everything is free, but where anyone capable of actually producing such goods is robbed, vilified and reduced to poverty; where half the population has swapped genders with the other half, with the minor inconvenience that the entire population is now infertile. It is clear that a total victory for the progressives would be a chilling scenario: rampant violence and looting, cities reduced to third-world conditions and overrun by criminals and immigrants plundering everything within their reach; a collapsing economy that would lead to the end of conveniences such as the internet, running water, electricity, supermarkets and functioning governments. In that scenario, progressives would have no one to blame but themselves. Consider, moreover, the responsibility for the disappearance of Israel – a possibility that, in the abstract, might once have seemed desirable but now provokes a sense of revulsion. Because, it seems, erasing Israel from the map is not merely a cartographic exercise. After years of discussing ‘genocide’, Hamas and Hezbollah have beheaded, disembowelled, raped and desecrated the bodies of over seven million Jews — and quite a few Arabs too, because, as we know, these raids can get rather bloody — just to show all of you, supporters who are little more than ‘useful idiots’, what a ‘genocide’ worthy of the name really looks like. How much better it is to remain in harmless helplessness on the sidelines, skipping about like children, before playtime ends and it’s time for a snack.”

“For armchair revolutionaries, being perpetually thwarted is a blessing: they can preserve their resentment, their fury, their purity—never tainted by contact with reality—and that sense of purpose which is never marred by achieving what they claim to want. When real political power falls into the hands of the far left, the results have already proved catastrophic, not only in Cuba or Venezuela, but also in this country. Progressives are far happier when they are held back. It would therefore be a gesture of courtesy, on the part of conservatives and the few remaining moderate democrats, to accommodate them.”