Atrocity comparisons diminish the suffering of true victims

SOMETHING more sinister than ethnic cleansing is happening at the moment in the North, according to Deputy Chief Constable Paul Leighton.

Mr Leighton has been dealing with an outbreak of violence characterised by petrol, paint and milk bottles.

In recent weeks, loyalist groups have singled out homes lived in by nationalists in one area of the North and pegged pots of paint at them.

This destroys the look of the house, is difficult to clean up and identifies the residence for later repeat assaults. A church and a school in the same area - Ahoghill - have also been attacked.

If you missed all this, it’s understandable. It’s understandable because, compared with the death and destruction of previous years, paint-filled milk-bottles are minor. Even petrol-filled - as some of them have been - milk-bottles are a relatively low-level threat. Not comfortable. Not acceptable. But up against Semtex, your average milk bottle packs less of a punch.

Milk-bottle deployment at this time suggests one of two things: neighbours who hate each other for the normal neighbourly reasons giving rise to that new social disease we’ll call ASBOstosis, or the dying-wasp viciousness of Loyalist thugs with less than total commitment to their ceasefire.

Not so, says Mr Leighton, who has, admirably, responded with everything from free fire blankets and smoke alarms to helicopters observing overhead. While Paul Leighton says that this outbreak of holiday paint-throwing isn’t being done by an organisation, and undoubtedly has “an element of people just not getting along with each other”, he nonetheless positions it up there alongside Rwanda and Kosovo.

“This is much more sinister than ethnic cleansing,” he says.

Factually, of course, it isn’t. The objective of ethnic cleansing is to exterminate a race, tribe or religion from a location. The methodology of ethnic cleansing is to kill a race, tribe or followers of the hated religion in toto, or to kill enough of them to force the others to flee forever. Ethnic cleansing requires massive firepower on the part of the aggressor and absence of, or inaction on the part of, the forces - local or international - of law and order.

None of these elements are present in Ahoghill, Co Antrim. Nobody, thus far, has died. Neighbourhoods have not been razed to uninhabitable piles of rubble. The population has not been forced to grab an armful of belongings, heft their crying babies onto their shoulders, and flee to refugee camps. (Admittedly, one couple has, according to reports, “vowed” to move out of their home, but this doesn’t amount to exodus or diaspora.) Rocket-launchers and sub-machine guns have not been in evidence. The forces of law and order may not have done enough but they have been present and active.

Accordingly, to describe this outbreak of hostilities as “much more sinister than ethnic cleansing” is daft. While it may have been useful to sub-editors desperate for a headline in the middle of silly season, it is grossly disproportionate to the reality.

It is, however, congruent with a current trend which sees traumas and crimes portrayed as being akin to atrocities wildly different in scale, scope, intent and outcome. Every second victim group now likens their situation to the Holocaust. This aggrandisement-by-comparison tends to go unchallenged. It shouldn’t.

The Holocaust was unique. Unique in its intent to destroy, not only the Jews as a human race, but to destroy homosexuals, gypsies and people with disabilities as well. Unique in the level of cruelty employed; not much compares with driving naked men and women, some carrying their babies, into “shower rooms” to be gassed slowly enough for them to claw lumps out of the walls in their suffering. Unique in the selection and transport of millions whose guilt lay not in individual actions but in collective DNA.

Unique in the perversion of science by doctors, like Mengele, who took and tortured twin toddlers in the name of research. Unique in the number of industries who profited from slave labour and by supplying the killing materials. Unique in the number of quiet collaborators, inside and outside Germany, who stood idly by while fellow human beings suffered and - eventually - died in their millions.

TO compare almost anything with the Holocaust is to deny the grievous truth of that action, just as to compare our current use of animals to black slavery is to deny the grievous truth of that earlier practice. Yet precisely that invalid comparison is now being made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in a new web-display which sets out to prove that cattle auctions and slave auctions are really the same thing.

PETA, masters of powerful propaganda, have done a split-screen arrangement, juxtaposing historic photographs of black men hanged from trees by lynch-mobs with shots of dead cattle hanging from hooks in an abattoir.

Whatever our treatment of animals tells us about our capacity for exploitation or cruelty, it is not the same as lynching adult human beings to demonstrate the supposed superiority of one race over another. It ignores the killing of animals by other animals for food, or, if the logic is fully extended, suggests that when a shark bites a tarpon in two, it is a demonstration of failed empathy on the part of the shark. It isn’t.

That’s what sharks do. Sharks eat other marine life. They just look bad when they’re doing it. Some human beings eat chicken. They may, indeed increasingly do, try to minimise gratuitous cruelty to the birds they’re eventually going to ingest, but eating chicken is not the same as kicking a black man to death, and portraying the two as morally equivalent is to downplay the latter.

Comparing like with unlike is remarkably effective, in propaganda terms.

So when a spokesperson for victims of clerical child sex abuse recently described lawyers involved in the Redress process as “doing the same thing all over again” to the victims, it immediately drew sympathy. The reality, however, is that respectful questioning of a victim about the time, location and identity of the person who perpetrated the original abuse is not the same as that first rape or forced incident of oral sex. It is a legitimate expression of the rights of the accused person. The level of horror inflicted on children in institutions does not remove the right of the person they name to seek to prove that they couldn’t have committed the crime because they weren’t there at the time.

Even at relatively less serious levels, this disproportionality of analogy is constantly present. It is, for example, currently fashionable to describe discovering that one’s home has been ransacked by a burglar as “the same as rape”.

It isn’t the same as rape, in intent or outcome, and the analogy demeans victims of rape.

Just as comparing thrown paint with ethnic cleansing demeans the dead lying in mass graves and the millions in refugee camps.