Don’t Let Genocide Be Our Epitaph

By Michael J. Talmo 7-28-2023

The word genocide comes from the Greek word genos, meaning race or tribe, and from the Latin word cide, which means killing. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) in 1944. He was a Polish-born lawyer of Jewish descent who fled the tyranny of Nazi Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1941. His family wasn’t so lucky; 49 of them, including his parents, perished in the Holocaust.

In 1948, three years after World War II ended, the newly formed United Nations created the Genocide Convention, an international treaty that 152 nations signed on to including my country, the United States, making it part of “the supreme law of the Land” as stated in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Genocide is also listed as a federal crime under Title 18 U.S. Code 1091. Violators of this law can be fined a million dollars and get 20 years in prison.

Genocide against a people is defined as

“killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Genocide has been practiced throughout history. But it was Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) along with philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), a top government official during his reign, who gave a name to governments that perpetrate genocide: Fascism. Its agents and supporters are called Fascists. There are numerous ways to define Fascism. I’m using the Holocaust Encyclopedia’s definition:

“Fascism is an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government…For Fascists, violence often has a redemptive or purifying quality.”

Our world is currently in the grip of two genocidal Fascist movements: medical Fascism, using disease pandemics to frighten people into giving up their rights and persecute those who refuse to go along with the oppressive agenda. It’s worst and most recent manifestation is COVID-19. And religious Fascism now manifesting in the form of persecuting transgender people, drag queens, and other factions of the LGBTQ community.

Before I say anything else, it’s important to understand that genocide doesn’t necessarily mean mass murder, although it can ultimately lead there. Genocide, as explained here, also means trying to erase a culture or a people by depriving them of their rights. This is what happened in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, more than 400 decrees regulating every aspect of the lives of the Jewish people were enacted. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the mass killings in gas chambers began.

And let’s not forget that the Nazis went after the LGBTQ community first. In 1933, less than four months after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) became Chancellor of Germany, the Nazis shut down and burned the books of the Institute for Sexual Research. It was established in 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld MD (1868-1935) in Berlin, the capital of Germany, under the Weimar Republic. In 1931, it became the first clinic in the world to perform modern gender-affirmation surgery for male-to-female transsexuals, starting with Dora Richter (1892-1966). Genital altering surgery for female-to-male transsexuals didn’t occur until 1946, when Dr. Harold Gilles (1882-1960) performed the procedure on Laurence Michael Dillon (1915-1962).

So, let’s be clear. When Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire said in his speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing…for the good of society…transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he was advocating genocide. It doesn’t matter if he was being honest when he said he wasn’t referring to mass murder, only to ideology.

As I see it, far-right groups pushing the anti-trans/anti-drag agenda and globalist organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) are different Fascist entities vying for power. As explained here and here, the COVID restrictions ultimately strengthened the authoritarian right who, because of their religious ideology, distrusted science and saw through the scam. Their religious ideology, usually a hindrance to justice and freedom, turned out to be an asset in this situation. Thanks to them, a lot of people woke up and realized what the WEF admits on its website, that lockdowns are “the world’s biggest psychological experiment” and, as stated in this comprehensive 2022 study published by Johns Hopkins University, “had little to no public health effects…imposed enormous economic and social costs…are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

A lot of liberals like myself also saw through the COVID scam. But we don’t have anywhere near the money and resources that the far-right has. Over the last 50 years, the far-right built up a powerful infrastructure, known as the right-wing noise machine, consisting of Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021), Fox News, CPAC, Breitbart News, numerous podcasts carried by media companies like the Daily Wire, the Heritage Foundation, conservative publishing houses who will publish inaccurate nonsense by people like Ann Coulter. All of these entities are funded by billionaires, foundations, and mega-corporations. Their purpose is to put a happy face on economic and social policies that make the rich richer and the rest of us a whole lot poorer and less free.

Problem is, lots of people were fooled into thinking that because the far-right was correct about COVID, maybe they’re right about other things like abortion, God, and LGBTQ people. That’s the pitfall when people get involved with political and social movements. They often become closed-minded in order to please and fit in with the group they identify with. This illogical reasoning is called groupthink and confirmation bias, which goes back to the primitive world we evolved in where reliance on the tribe or clan was vital to surviving in a predator-filled environment. So, just because right-wing groups got COVID-19 right, doesn’t mean they are right about everything. In fact, they are often wrong and misinformed.

What I find especially frustrating is that while the Democratic Party, LGBTQ people, and their supporters are much saner on progressive issues, they embraced the COVID restrictions with religious zeal. However, I have no illusions about the Democratic Party. They sold out to corporate interests a long time ago and are also a right-wing party. A lot of times they just pay lip service to liberal issues without really doing much of anything. But if we are to keep our freedom and our sanity, we must learn to recognize Fascism no matter what form it takes.

Even before the WHO (World Health Organization) declared that COVID-19 was no longer a pandemic last May, the far-right continued to wage its Fascistic culture wars. But the same power structure is still in place to impose the same COVID restrictions all over again. All of us should be working to dismantle this dangerous dictatorial medical apparatus. Instead, far-right Fascists are wasting time cackling about transsexual Dylan Mulvaney’s picture on a beer can, Target selling “tuck friendly” swimsuits, passing an avalanche of unjust laws in numerous states that will make life for transgender people unbearable, and promoting views on human biology that date back to the Bronze Age.

Wake up and smell the manure people. Whenever you hear someone denouncing a whole group of people as a threat to society, the family, children, public health, or to morality by their mere existence and demanding that punitive laws be passed against them, you are dealing with a Fascist. It doesn’t matter how rich or famous they are, it doesn’t matter how many diplomas are hanging on their wall, it doesn’t matter what lofty positions they hold in government, religion, or business. They are Fascists and if given free reign, they will always bring out the worst in humanity.

As explained in this short 1943 WWII video, produced by the U.S. Army, the Nazis could never have taken over a unified Germany, so they used bigotry and prejudice to get different groups of people to hate and fear each other. Once they splintered the nation this way, they were able to take over and weaponize governments, institutions, and religion into instruments of tyranny. The video concluded with this warning:

“We must guard everyone’s liberty or we could lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom.”

Fascists must have something to hate. They revel in hate. They wallow in hate. They are bullies who need to ridicule and inflict pain on others in order to feel good about themselves. They are thin-skinned, angry, easily offended small-minded people with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. They are terrified of freedom and need to control others. They can identify as conservative, liberal, or moderate. They can be found in all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders.

Fascists love playing the victim. They will accuse others of persecuting them as an excuse to destroy other people’s lives. In their twisted worldview, the mere existence of people who are different from them feels like persecution, so they must strike back. They must protect themselves by any and all means necessary. They hate and fear anything that is different from them. What these fanatics are doing is engaging in what Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) called projection, accusing others of the harm they are doing. This is also known as DARVO, an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

Fascists are at their most dangerous when they try to sound reasonable, as in claiming not to care what people do in private, or claiming they’re against censorship, but insist that you have to draw the line someplace, or lamenting that people who refuse to wear masks and get the COVID shots are harming others when, as this study shows, it is reckless public health polices that are harming others, or justify violence and discrimination against trans people and drag queens by labeling them pedophiles and groomers, or framing bigoted attempts to harass trans females in bathrooms and bar them from women’s sports as reasonable concerns about fairness, safety, and privacy, which isn’t true as documented here and here.

But be especially wary when Fascists invoke protecting children. This is their moral high ground, their ivory tower of virtue. Protecting kids and families was used by the Nazis to carry out their agenda of mass genocide. This kind of propaganda shuts down all logic and critical thinking because of our Judeo-Christian culture’s discomfort with sex. If people ever get wise to the fact that they are being conned out of their freedom and reject the pervasive cultural myth that children need to be protected from seeing, hearing, and knowing about anything sexual, it’s game over for far-right Fascists. Their political clout will be gone.

This is a big reason why Fascists are so threatened by drag story hours for children along with kids attending family-friendly drag shows, and gay Pride parades. This is why they want to ban books and prevent children from learning about LGBTQ history. Because exposure to alternative lifestyles teaches children to understand others, not to fear those who are different, not to ridicule and bully others who are different, and to love and accept themselves if they are different, which promotes peaceful co-existence instead of society being divided into armed camps.

Fascists thrive on division and conflict because it enables them to take power. We saw this with the COVID-19 restrictions. The rule followers resented the rule breakers for endangering their lives, while the rule breakers resented the rule followers for endangering everyone’s freedom.

Anti-trans Fascists are made up of different factions and can be on the political left or on the political right. Regardless of what end of the political spectrum they’re on, you have what I call the true believers, the ones who really think LGBTQ people are evil, sinful, and a threat to societal norms; or you have the opportunists who really have no problem with trans and other LGBTQ people and are just using the issue for political gain. Ex-president Donald Trump definitely falls into the latter category.

MSNBC reported that after promising to lower the boom on transgender people and any support for them in a recent campaign speech, Trump added:

“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see I’m talking about cutting taxes. People go like that (he softly claps his hands). I talk about transgender. Everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was.”

But as reported by Fox News and this Majority Report video, Trump knew “what the hell it was” and he supported it.

Example: when running for president in 2016, Trump blasted North Carolina for passing its infamous bathroom bill that banned trans people from using bathrooms of the sex they identify with: “You leave it the way it is. There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate, there has been so little trouble.”

Example: on June 14, 2016, Trump Tweeted: “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you.”

In 2012, Trump, and this is Fox News reporting this, “rose to stardom among the LGBTQ community when he overturned the rules of his own Miss Universe organization to allow a transgender woman to compete.” Within several days of Trump’s decision, the Miss Universe organization changed its policy and, starting in 2013, allowed trans women to take part in all of its competitions.

Unfortunately, hatred of trans people along with the rest of the LGBTQ community runs very deep among a shrinking, but still significant percentage, of the world’s population. Anti-trans policies are not about protecting kids, keeping predators out of bathrooms, or saving women’s sports. As Mehdi Hasan said on his MSNBC show, a lot of Republican voters “don’t want policies, they want prejudice…it’s about being given public permission to hate.”

And let’s clear up one myth right here and now, transgender has nothing to do with transhumanism. This is another Fascist attempt to demonize trans people by connecting them to the globalists who want to use technology to control and alter humans. All transgender means is not identifying with the sex assigned at birth. It’s Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF, who’s talking about everyone having brain implants. Some trans women, like lots of other women, just want breast implants. Some trans men, like lots of other men, just want penile implants so they can get an erection. The only thing the word transgender has in common with the word transhumanism is the prefix trans.

Bottom line: I don’t want a chip in my brain or a jackboot on my neck. Neither is acceptable. All governors, legislators, state and federal, and all organization and church leaders lobbying to pass laws to persecute and erase transgender people should be rounded up and jailed for violating US and international laws against genocide. But this probably won’t happen because US and other government officials are terrified that they will be held accountable for the genocide they committed regarding COVID-19. Sadly, my country has a long history of practicing genocide, waging imperial wars, propping up and supporting brutal dictators in other countries, and violating the rights of others, including its own citizens.

When all is said and done, there is really no such thing as gay rights, trans rights, women’s rights, victims’ rights, or Christian rights—there is only human rights. And no matter what you think transgender people are or aren’t, they are human beings and, as such, are entitled to live and be who they want to be, free of harassment and discrimination, just like everybody else.

Most of all understand this: in a free country, which America and many other countries claim to be, children are going to be exposed to other lifestyles and might make choices that you don’t want them to make. That’s the way it is like it or not, folks. Gay Pride parades, guys wearing dresses, pornography, sex on TV, displays of public nudity, loud music, dog poop, really weird looking people, and whatever else you find offensive is the price we pay for living in a free society. It is a small price to pay compared to the loss of our freedom and our humanity.