A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post here called “Academic Hiring and Genocide,” in which I argued that genocidaires should, at the very least, be excluded from academic life, but ideally should be excluded from gainful employment itself. Whatever anyone thought of the argument, readers might have wondered about its practical relevance. “So Khawaja’s calling for the on-campus cancellation of ‘genocidaires’. Interesting vendetta, but how many genocidaires are there, anyway? And how many are actively seeking employment right now, including academic employment?” The New York Times reports that the “Defense Department [Is] to Cut Over 5,000” workers due to the Musk-Trump rampage against the “Deep State.” Could I possibly have meant them? Take a wild guess.

I don’t mean to say that I know with certainty that all 5,000 of these people are genocidaires, and that all 5,000 should be relegated to permanent unemployment. I simply mean that if true, it’s a conclusion I’m more than happy to live with.

Here is the Times’s description of the situation:

The Pentagon said on Friday that it would fire 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week, in the first of what officials say will likely be a wave of much larger layoffs at the Defense Department, the government’s biggest agency.

Note the very careful, very deliberate insistence that defense workers are “civilians.” They work for the military. They’re paid out of the military budget. They work on military projects. Many of them work in the Pentagon. But since they don’t engage in hand-to-hand combat, see no blood, and generally don’t feel the heat of battle, according to The New York Times (and popular American consensus) they’re “civilians.” 

Since “civilians” enjoy combat immunity, a military attack on these “civilians” would be regarded, in the moral calculus of the “civilized West,” as an attack on a bunch of poor, helpless, innocent non-combatants. Indeed, when the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11, many Americans took it that way, as though the Pentagon was an innocuous office park, and the people working in it mere office workers.  To belabor the obvious, precisely none of that is true.

If these “civilian probationary workers” were members of Hamas, of course, they’d be widely regarded as “militants” one and all, and uncontroversially regarded as military targets no matter what their job description. You could be the person who cleans the toilets at Al Shifa Hospital, and still end up with the “militant” designation, and on a target list. All of the hospitals are “controlled by Hamas,” after all. And every toilet serves the “Hamas Command Center” there, whether it exists or not.

Any one of these “militants” would then not only be targeted without further inquiry as to their job or job description, but justify collateral casualties in the triple digits. To target 5,400 defense workers, according to standard military logic, you could reasonably kill anywhere between 54,000 or 540,000 uncontroversially innocent civilians–or more. I’m not sure how to calculate the numbers you could maim in addition, but precisely because numbers are not explicitly named, I think we can safely infer that they’re high.

I’m not making any of those numbers up. They come from +972 Magazine’s reporting on the Israeli military’s “Lavender” targeting system. According to +972, the targeting of junior Hamas operatives justified a collateral damage ratio of 1:10 or 1:20. The targeting of senior Hamas operatives justified a collateral damage ratio of 1:100. I don’t know the seniority of the defense workers being fired, but however you slice it, the math works out to a range of 54,000 to 540,000+ corpses with perhaps as many people maimed–meaning, blinded, amputated, mutilated, paralyzed, you name it.

Most Defense Department employees live in and around DC, including the northern Virginia or southern Maryland suburbs. If we apply Israel’s Lavender math and logic to them, that works out to the near-annihilation of all of these places, defense workers along with sanitation workers, nurses, teachers, baristas, schoolchildren, etc. Combining the dead and the maimed, we’re talking maybe a million people. 

I happened to pass through Quantico, Virginia yesterday, home to the Marine Corps Base (and Marine Corps University and Officer Candidate School) and the FBI Academy, but otherwise an ordinary “civilian” town with an ordinary main street, ordinary stores, an ordinary train line with an ordinary train station, inhabited by what seemed to me like ordinary people.

Quantico, Virginia (photo credit: Famartin, from Wikipedia)

Quantico is located in Prince William County, population 489,000. Quantico itself only has a population of 500 or so, so obviously, the FBI and Marine Corps employees live elsewhere in the county. Hard to hunt them down one by one, right? Applying the IDF’s logic, an attack on the FBI and Marine facilities would entail the extermination of the whole county. Obviously, that would include the Naval Health Clinic at Quantico, a military facility, but I’m sure it would include Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center just north of Quantico, along with every other hospital in the vicinity, and anything else that might qualify as shielding a would-be target, including the ostensibly innocuous Subway sub shop in town (the Marines have to eat, after all), and all of the pharmacies, grocery stores, hotels, schools, dry cleaners, barber shops, banks, and what-have-you. That’s how it worked in Gaza. That’s how it would work here.

Just to be clear: I’m not suggesting that anyone actually kill any of those people. I’m merely suggesting that the logic of Western killing would, if put in non-Western hands, entail killing them. So don’t arrest me. Arrest the principles of logic and arithmetic, or maybe the people who decided to put those principles to this particular use.

I’m not even saying that all 5,400 of the former Defense Department employees are genocidaires, and subject to my hiring blacklist. I don’t claim to have access to their personnel files. I’m not Elon Musk. What I’m saying is that those who do have access should ask themselves how complicit in genocide these ex-employees were, and act (or decline to act) accordingly. HR is tasked with doing criminal background checks. The only certainty I assert is that all 5,400 of these terminations, on re-entering the job market, deserve serious background checks. And if they all fail those background checks, they should all go jobless.

The standard “liberal” or at least Democratic line has now become to express outrage against Trump, Musk, and Hegseth by expressing sympathy for the hapless government workers fired by them. The outrage! Trump et al are firing defense workers. My view? They’re not firing “defense workers.” There are no “defense workers” in the American military, because defense is not what the American military does.

So I have as little sympathy for Trump-Musk-Hegseth as I have for a lot of the government workers they’re firing, particularly the ones in the “defense” sector. The sympathy people seem to feel for these workers is as indiscriminate as the targeting that the workers themselves engaged in. Strange how “Kill Em All” morphs into Sympathy for All. But personally, I have no sympathy for genocidaires and those complicit in mass killing. What are we to make of Generals of Color who expressed sympathy for George Floyd while presiding over the annihilation of so many thousands if not millions of George Floyds? I’m happy to make them all an Army of the Unemployed. 

American “national defense” is a misnomer for an aggressive imperial enterprise aimed at establishing unipolar hegemony over the world (and now, outer space) in the name of “Western Civilization.” There’s nothing “defensive” about it. We should stop feeling sorry for the architects and enforcers of this enterprise, and celebrate the fact that they’re all starting to cannibalize one another. Let the feeding frenzy begin. Keep them off campus, and out of anywhere else worth preserving under our present dispensation. But otherwise, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let them eat each other. Bon appétit.