10 Million Missing Girls

REAL genocide is easy enough to spot. Hutus slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, for example, ain’t beanbag. True, there’s sometimes room for debate if the death toll isn’t high enough (see the 90-year-old dispute over whether the Turks merely “massacred” Armenians or whether they committed genocide). But that’s a numerical rather than definitional debate.

Metaphorical genocide, on the other hand, tends to be in the eye of the beholder. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert once compared Rudolph Giuliani’s closing of a remedial-reading program at City College (which would disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics) to ethnic cleansing. During the debate over the Contract with America, Congressman Major Owens declared that Republicans were “worse than Hitler” and that they were “practicing genocide with a smile.” Yes, term limits for committee chairs and human slaughter on an industrial level: Clearly Newt Gingrich’s scheme was the greater evil. Indeed, by my latest count 8 trillion people have used the Holocaust as a metaphor for everything from global warming (paging Al Gore), to AIDS, to, of course, chicken farming.

About the Author

Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributing editor.

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REAL genocide is easy enough to spot. Hutus slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, for example, ain’t beanbag. True, there’s sometimes room for debate if the death toll isn’t high enough (see the 90-year-old dispute over whether the Turks merely “massacred” Armenians or whether they committed genocide). But that’s a numerical rather than definitional debate.

Metaphorical genocide, on the other hand, tends to be in the eye of the beholder. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert once compared Rudolph Giuliani’s closing of a remedial-reading program at City College (which would disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics) to ethnic cleansing. During the debate over the Contract with America, Congressman Major Owens declared that Republicans were “worse than Hitler” and that they were “practicing genocide with a smile.” Yes, term limits for committee chairs and human slaughter on an industrial level: Clearly Newt Gingrich’s scheme was the greater evil. Indeed, by my latest count 8 trillion people have used the Holocaust as a metaphor for everything from global warming (paging Al Gore), to AIDS, to, of course, chicken farming.