GENOCIDE, GREAT WARS AND OTHER HUMAN DEPRAVITY
PRAVDA, Russia
June 16 2014
16.06.2014
By John Chuckman
The word genocide, coined in 1944 in an effort to describe what
the Nazis called “the final solution” and what today we call the
Holocaust, attempted to distinguish the crime of killing people of
a certain identity in such great numbers that you tried eliminating
them as a group. Earlier in that century, there had been the mass
murder of Armenians by the Turks, an event Hitler once cynically
reminded associates was not even remembered only a few decades later.
Some would include in the category the terrible starvation induced
in Ukraine by Soviet agricultural policies and ineptitude, an event
which indeed killed millions, or the ruthless policies of Mao’s China
which caused many millions of peasants to starve. But these events,
utterly nightmarish as they were, begin to lose the legitimate sense of
genocide. Although we cannot rightly call these genocides, they remain
depravity on a colossal scale, but I am not sure the distinction is
one with great meaning, and certainly not for any of the victims.
After all, when nations go to war, the job defined for each soldier
is to kill as many of the people from another land as possible. Our
great wars now typically kill vast numbers, and it is just a fact of
history that since the 19th century we have moved from killing mainly
other soldiers to killing mainly civilians.
I think it likely there were many genocides through early human
history because humans are little more than chimps with large brains,
and we know through long-term studies that chimps are quite murderous,
making regular expeditions to slaughter neighboring tribes of their
own kind. One of the theories for the extinction of the Neanderthals
is that they were murdered off by our kind some thirty thousand years
ago. Recorded human history, not counting archeological digs, goes
back less than three thousand years of homo sapiens’ half million
years or so, and even much of that small fraction of our history is
poorly recorded by modern standards of scholarship, but we have so
many dark legends which almost certainly point to horribly brutal
unrecorded events: ghouls, vampires, monsters, cannibals, human
sacrifice, and tales of savage hordes. The Old Testament, thought
to have been written largely from 1000 to 600 BCE, itself is rich
with tales of mass murder and killing determined by identity, rather
disturbingly for a book embraced by so many as God’s own word.
There really are few limits to human depravity. The word genocide
hadn’t been invented yet, but think of Columbus or the Conquistadors
wiping out entire native populations regarded as savage. Or think
of the centuries of Christianity in Europe in which countless people
were garroted or burned at the stake over some turn of phrase in the
liturgy. The Crusades over centuries killed whole populations owing
solely to their religion, with Popes in Rome having been among their
biggest organizers and supporters. The Hundred Years’ War, mid-14th
to mid-15th centuries devastated Europe. In the 20th Century, Europe
thought little of entering a conflict which would kill 20 million over
which branch of the same royal family would dominate the continent.
Having settled nothing by that carnage, much the same forces about
twenty years later engaged in an even greater conflict which would
destroy more than 50 million people.
If words mean anything, you might think genocide is a word that would
never be carelessly used, but it is, and quite regularly. Indeed,
few words today are more abused than genocide. When relatively small
groups of people are killed (“small” in the scheme of things – after
all, we are discussing mass killings) in places of interest to the
West (i.e., Serbia) where war or civil war is underway, the killings
are frequently characterized as genocide by our politicians and their
faithful echoes in the press, trying to squeeze out every last possible
bit of dread and horror from audiences. There was a large effort in
the early part of the last decade to sell the conflict at Darfur as
genocide, but I suspect it actually closely resembled primitive wars
from the early times of human history.
When a million or so people are killed in places of little interest
to the West (i.e., Rwanda), it is ignored in all but words, the
sensational stories used to sell newspapers and books and juice-up
television’s talking-head shows after the fact.
Genocides do periodically still occur, but when has any powerful nation
like the United States, or international organization like NATO,
stood in the way of genocide in the post-war period? Has the United
States or NATO ever opposed genocide other than with cheap words? In
these matters, the United States’ government’s declarations so often
resemble press releases from, say, the Vatican with ineffectual and
wheezing platitudes about some horribly bloody war. It is the United
States which holds political and economic sway over international
organizations like the United Nations and NATO, and it is the United
States which has the military power to do something when events
require it.
We have had several unmistakable genocides in the last fifty years,
and, regrettably, not once did America lift a finger to help. Indeed,
the United States actually played a role in establishing or extending
the circumstances for a couple of these ghastly events, but you’d
never know that when American politicians rise to huff and puff about
what is happening in a place far away or in a place not necessarily
far away but whose government is intensely disliked. And, of course,
you’d never know it from the pages of the mainline press, without
doing more detective work than most people are willing to do.
We had what everyone agrees was genocide in Rwanda with around a
million people killed simply for their tribal identity, with further
destructive aftershocks in neighboring states for some while after.
The United States’ government, immediately well aware of what was
happening there, simply refused to allow the word to be used in its
internal communications, and the cowardly Bill Clinton avoided the
rhetoric he employed on Serbia, a place where mass murder came in at
literally one percent the rate of Rwanda.
We had genocide in Cambodia with perhaps a million and a half killed,
and it actually was precipitated by America’s de-stabilizing of the
once peaceful, but neutral, country with secret bombings and invasions
during its Captain Ahab-like madness over “victory” in Vietnam.
Neutrality, where America wants something, as it did in Vietnam, is
simply not an option. When tough little Vietnam, despite the massive
horrors it had just suffered at America’s hands, stepped in to do
something about what was happening on its border, the United States’
government stood back and bellowed, “See, we told you, there’s the
domino theory at work! We did have a reason to fight in Vietnam
after all.”
We had a true genocide in Indonesia with the fall of Sukarno in 1965.
Half a million people, vaguely identified as communists, had their
throats slashed by machetes and their bodies dumped into rivers: it
was said that the rivers ran red for a time. Not only did the United
States’ government do nothing to halt the rampage, officials at the
State Department busied themselves with phones late into the night,
transmitting lists of persons suitable for the new government’s
attention, the word “communist” then possessing for America’s
government about the same power to dehumanize a victim as “heretic”
did for The Holy Inquisition a few centuries earlier.
I would argue, too, that America’s slaughter in Vietnam was a genuine
genocide, the greatest of the post-war period, but even if you do not
grant the word genocide in this case, it remains still the greatest
mass murder since World War II. About three million were killed,
mostly civilians, often in horrible fashion as with napalm, for
no reason other than their embracing the wrong economic system and
rejecting the artificial rump state America tried to impose. Hundreds
of thousands more were crippled and poisoned, and a beautiful land
was left strewn with land mines and noxious pools of Agent Orange to
keep killing for decades more.
So when an American President speaks to stir his audience with
ghost-written words from his teleprompter machine about some new
outrage somewhere, trying to cast someone else in the role of demonic
villain, we had better always be careful about taking him at his word.
And it is a good practice to judge the words, weighing them against
the United States’ own abysmal record over the last half century.
It is one of the gravest of contemporary truths that the greatest
modern historical sufferers of genocide, the Jewish people, should be
found now treating millions of others in brutal and degrading fashion,
something now continued for more than half a century. Israel hasn’t
killed millions, but it has killed tens of thousands in its wars and
suppressions and their aftermath, including necessarily thousands of
children in Middle Eastern populations heavily skewed to youth, and
it holds millions in a seemingly perpetual state of hopelessness and
degradation and without any rights, a situation America’s government
effectively has ignored, failing to use its power for good yet again.
It is a natural human tendency to try forgetting our terrifying
experiences, and nature does seem to have constructed us with varying
abilities to do so, being if you will an extension of “sleep that
knits the ravelled sleeve of care.” But human perversity is intent
on remembering many of our horrors, always citing the provably false
slogan about those who forget history being condemned to relive it. Of
course, such forced (and cleaned-up) memories have other purposes, as
for example keeping each generation of young men ready to grab a gun
at the beat of the drums. I feel this keenly every time poppies come
up for sale again, much as I sympathize with the old men selling them
and much as I’m aware of what occurred in Flanders Fields. It is time
to stop sentimentalizing an event too ugly to accurately remember:
the stench of the battlefields of 1914-8 and the endless screams of
mangled men dying slowly in the mud and the rats eating corpses –
these are things no one in their right mind wants to remember, and
remembering anything else really isn’t remembering at all.
As for the idea of “Never again!” when it comes to human depravity,
it is best to remember that the words are just a slogan – as we’ve
conclusively proved over fifty years – and, like all slogans, it is
selectively applied to sell something.
Postscript:
Recently we saw some glamorous celebrities, as we have before from
time to time, at a large, well-publicized gathering decrying the
use of rape in war, and, after a moment’s curiosity as to whether
they continued afterward over cocktails and nibbles, all I could
do was wonder what it was they hoped to do and what audience they
thought they were addressing? Armies have always raped, it is one
more of the many ugly facts of war we keep out of school books and
remembrance ceremonies. War is, quite simply, the end of the rule of
law for a time, and because that is a set of circumstances especially
attractive to the population of sociopaths and violence-prone people
we have always among us, an inordinate number of men who enjoy killing
and raping always will be attracted to war. Yes, armies have codes and
courts martial, and I’m sure rape is technically illegal in any modern
army, but those codes are mainly established for public consumption,
being rarely enforced. When you are engaged in bloody war, there is
almost no motivation for leaders to pause events for trials. Knowing
that, soldiers so inclined will always feel free to rape. Even in
peace, we see from the statistics in the contemporary United States’
military, rape is quite a problem right on bases and ships. How much
more so in war? Why not decry the mass murder we call war in the first
place? If there were no wars, there could be no mass rapes. Doing
anything less seems a form of cowardice.
John Chuckman
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/16-06-2014/127804-genocide_great_wars-0/