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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Sterilize any other group to prevent them having children, it’s genocide. Refuse to sterilize trans people, and they call it genocide. …Not because genes won’t be passed on, but because presumably they’ll commit suicide. but the pithy observation stands for a different reason.

Today I learned two new words:

  • memocide: the deliberate and/or systematic elimination of an idea (a memetic unit).

  • memorcide: the elimination of a people’s history or the memory of a people, often a part of ethnic cleansing.

The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).

The culture war has seen the weaponization of narratives, knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, anti-knowledge, bias, anti-bias, and pseudo-bias. (The latter includes objective observations about statistics which resemble bias.) This is one of the reasons Alex Jones called his show InfoWars.

Is this just about driving trans people to suicide, though? I'm not sure this is the only, or the most important aspect of the argument. Would encouraging desistance in FtM teens, assuming that it does not increase their suicidality (or indeed brings it down in the long run), still kinda count as a genocide? I'd expect that most activists will bite the bullet and say it does. What about a drug or other intervention that'd prevent children from being born trans (assuming this is a thing) – would that be moral, seeing as the condition of transgenderism predicts such a massive hit to quality of life? No, and I believe there's no research being done in this direction precisely because it'd be associated with genocidal intent.

Speaking of genocide and body modification of children... This reminded me that Jews sometimes argue that various things are akin to Holocaust: notably, assimilation – and, more to the point, the ban on male circumcision.

Other senior rabbis also invoked the Holocaust, with Rabbi Barel Lazar, Chief Rabbi of Russia, speaking about threats to shechita (ritual slaughter) and bril milah (male circumcision) saying: “In the Holocaust they killed us by force, through murder, but they understand (now) that it didn’t work… Today they try to murder our souls.”

ADL uses a more diplomatic phrasing:

We recently submitted a letter to the Icelandic parliament in strong opposition to the proposed bill to ban and criminalize circumcision of young boys. We emphasized the central role of circumcision in Judaism and stated that a ban on the practice would unduly restrict religious freedom. We also noted our concern that Iceland would be celebrated by anti-Semitic extremists as a state which is legislating to prevent a Jewish community from existing within its borders.

(Curiously, the counterargument also mirrors the transition debate «Its a human rights violation. Only the consenting adult owner of the genitals may rightly decide»).

The logic is sound enough, if circular: as per the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the word «genocide» is

...intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

The annihilation is often assumed to ultimately take physical form, with all those stratagems being mere groundwork – as a case in point, consider Uighur genocide, which atomized Westerners mainly identify with purported fertility suppression and mass sterilization, as opposed to attacks on Uighur culture and ethnoreligious assabiyah. The thing is, Lemkin's definition doesn't work like that! The terminal goal, the annihilation of a group, is not the same as the extermination of its members::

Ethnocide is the destruction of culture while keeping the people. [...] In 1944, in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, “genocide” appeared in print for the first time, and “ethnocide” appeared in the footnotes as an equivalent substitute. Lemkin envisioned that genocide and ethnocide would be interchangeable because the targets for this previously undefined murder (cide) and terror were both a people (genos) with a specific culture, nation, and ethnicity (ethnos).

So, Jews are a people, a national/ethnic group. Denying them the practice of infant genital mutilation that they – for reasons other people, me included, may find frivolous or inane – steadfastly assert is crucial for belonging to their group, can be construed as an attack on the group's continued existence, at least within the borders of the polity; thus, genocide. Trans people argue that denying children the body-modifying practice that is crucial for becoming a full-fledged trans person is genocide. The parallel is clear to me. Now the problem is, who are trans people as a group?

They are not an ethnos nor a genos, but a community built around an identity which is downstream of a differentiating trait.

We've heard similar rhetoric with regard to deaf people, bearers of other disabilities (the geneticist Kevin Bird, a disabled person himself, speaks very cogently on the matter of how defining disabilities to be undesirable is a eugenicist framework) – and of course abortion of fetuses with Down's is a genocide too. The whole eugenics-genocide rhetoric is obviously cribbed from racial rhetoric which is, in turn, heavily inspired by reflections on Holocaust after WWII; it's all the same words, and sometimes even the same activists.

We can discuss this as a postmodernist issue, as a memetic process, as a problem of hyperindividualism, but eh... Contra @Tanista, I think this is not toxic individualism but precisely misapplied tribalism, tribalism of people who have only found community through the commonality of their alienation.

In principle, the innate human drive toward tribalist behavior is a potent tool for coordinating collective negotiation in individualist societies, and this is the bulk of what we call politics. In practice, collective identities can hold their bearers hostage and demand investment in their own proliferation; unlike some run-of-the-mill meme like an ideology, this is a very specific mechanic – it cuts to the core of human social instinct, of helping those most similar to yourself (and, the intuition goes, more related) in the competition with alien groups. A trans person who weaponizes the genocide rhetoric is defending not only their own right to exist, but rights of the Trans Tribe as a whole - both its extant members and its historical perpetuation... Which unfortunately has to be outsourced to other tribes on the pesky biological side of things.

If assimilation into American white culture is genocide then the big problem with the idea of “whiteness” is as much the disappearance of ethnic Europeans as it is the oppression of blacks. Which seems absurd.

You mixed quickly on from trans people to ethnic groups, which is a movement from something that doesn’t exist to something that does exist and has existed historically.

Perhaps neologisms would fit these observations? In the vein of “parthenogenesis”:

  • Memogenic: created from memes/the mind

  • Identigenic: created from an identity/similarity - the prefix is literally sameness

  • Laliagenic: created by talking

  • Genogenic or cisgenic: created by genes/created normally

  • Memoethnic, identiethnic, genoethnic, etc.: a people/tribe created suchly

  • Identicide: killing an identity / killing a sameness.

I suspect, were we to start using these, identigenic and genogenic would be the winning memes, along with identicide. Transgender people would be, from a gender essentialist POV, part of a memogenic pseudoethnos. There would be genogenic Jews, identigenic Jews, and pistiethnic Jews (faith-originating) comprising a meta-tribe.