◼ The Last of the Yezhidis - Richard Fernandez/PJMedia
Of course the Yazidis are not alone in facing extermination. For the first time in nearly 2,000 years there are no Christians in Mosul. What no power of evil has been able to be accomplish in two millenia was achieved in a trice by the most moral administration in American history; perhaps by accident, perhaps by carelessness, perhaps even by design, but achieved nonetheless. Whichever way you look at it, that’s awesome.
The entire map of the Middle East has been transformed into a 21st century version of the European Bloodlands. But the most remarkable thing is this catastrophe was enabled in a fit of moral superiority. Roger Kimball, speaking to an audience in Sydney observed that most striking property of modern political correctness was narcissism. For the ultimate source of leftist legitimacy is the view that they are better simply persons than the rest; able to make moral judgments no one else can. Their self-regard is almost erotic. They’re in love with themselves. Or to paraphrase one the president’s campaign lines: ‘we are the people the world has been waiting for.’
We’re ready for our moral close-ups.
Something of this present tragedy was foreshadowed in the casual way with which the Left regarded the exodus of the boat people from Vietnam and the Cambodian Killing Fields as collateral damage; something ironic in an anti-war movement that finishes up empowering the greatest seaborne exodus in the history of the world and the massacre of millions.
But if there’s irony it escapes them. After all, ‘how could we have known,’ they ask, ‘that the people we supported were murderers? We meant well.’