What have the following statements got in common? The claim from George Patton, of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, that the authorities in the North "have embarked upon a policy of cultural genocide against the loyalist community of Northern Ireland".
And the allegation from the US feminist Elaine Showalter: "Women writers are not as widely respected or as widely read either in Britain or America. The prevailing culture still devalues things that interest women, such as families and relationships."
What they have in common, of course, is that they are classic examples of victimhood bilge. In recent years, self-appointed sufferers have increasingly arrogated for themselves the right either to define their plight with demonstrable falsehoods, or to use imagery which is so weighted that it carries with it vast associations of oppression, degradation and elimination. And to question that imagery is to align oneself with the imagined oppressor.
Accepted truth
But the really deadly feature of this victimese is that its speakers probably genuinely believe it. They are not telling deliberate untruths, any more than ufologists or flat-earthers lie. But whereas the latter species are simply inoffensive and dotty, the rubbish spoken by professional victim-groups can so easily enter the popular perception, to become an accepted truth that needs neither affirmation or proof.
George Patton first. "Genocide" has become a much favoured word among victimists, to the point where even rape is now being called a form of genocide. Why one crime should need to be redefined as another kind of crime suggests that feminists feel that rape is not high enough in the hierarchy of awfulness. Therefore, by calling it something other than what it is, it becomes that other thing. So, instead of rape being sexual violation, it is transformed into species-extermination.
And though it quite clearly is no such thing, who is going to argue with such redefinition, and thereby risk the suggestion that somehow or other he - and we are talking men here - tacitly condones rape? Because one is inevitably drawn to make the judgment that there are certain things which are worse than rape, which is a very dangerous thing indeed for any man to say. Yet we need only consider the male-only genocide of Srebenice to suggest the the truth of that assertion.
So George Patton's description of the ban on the Orange march at Drumcree as cultural genocide is not by any means unique in its ludicrousness; but it does mark a further contamination of the word, and a dilution of its awesome implications. For genocide is one of the most terrible words in the English language, and we should guard its meaning with vigilance and with unremitting vigour, not merely for theoretical linguistic reasons, but, even more, out of respect for those who have genuinely been the victims of genocide - the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals of the Holocaust and the butchered Muslims of Bosnia.
Intellectually frivolous
Drumcree is not Auschwitz; the Garvaghy Road is not Treblinka. Orangemen not being allowed to walk down a particular thoroughfare, though they walk down thousands of others on that particular day, does not in any sense compare to genocide. It is not merely intellectually frivolous to make such comparisons: it is an obscenity. It trivialises the millions exterminated in the most terrible ways mankind has ever devised, and creates parities between the passingly insignificant and the most evil events in human history. It is actually immoral to use the images of the Holocaust to describe the banning of a single Orange march.
To speak of Elaine Showalter's vapourings in the same breath might seem disproportionate, but they are part of the same syndrome of self-appointed victims creating the right to reach for any untruth to illustrate the depth of their plight. And because she is clearly an intelligent woman, it's all the more important to recognise melodramatic piffle when she utters it.
She told this newspaper last week that women writers are not widely read in Britain or America, that the prevailing culture devalues things that interest women, such as family and relationships, and that novels about wars, politics or even sport had a greater chance of success. How interesting. Now let us consider the truth. Eight of the 10 best selling novels in Britain at the moment were written by women - Patricia Cornwell, Helen Fielding (twice) Joanne Harris, Martina Cole, Zadie Smith, Maeve Binchy and Rosamunde Pilcher.
The total sales of their eight titles alone exceeded 3.3 million copies. The sales of the novels by the two men totalled just 216,187.
Market for victimhood
Now this is not disparity between what might have been two competing near-truths, with the possibility of different statistical interpretations. Elaine Showalter was actually declaring an untruth of quite staggering proportions. It was turning black into white - if I am still allowed the use that image - and what's worse, I have no doubt she believes it, just as George Patton probably believes the Orangemen of the North are experiencing "cultural genocide".
Each, either intuitively or simply subliminally, recognises the huge current market for victimhood. If Elaine Showalter had declared a more obvious truth - that the finest and the most successful literature in the English speaking world was being written by women - or if George Patton had stated that every year Northern Ireland is turned upside down so that Orangemen may march almost wherever they want, would they not have been denying themselves the right to be oppressed?
And the right to be oppressed today has become the most highly prized right of all.