[Peace-discuss] genocide - was - We all make mistakes…, even Howard Zinn.

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thanks for passing this along, Mort-

It's interesting how we use the word 'genocide' to
mean different things.  I wonder if we sometimes
search for a way to emphasize that killing huge
numbers of people is damnable, disgusting and
horrible, because we get so used to hearing of big
numbers of deaths, and we're afraid that others aren't
suitably upset by it.

I've just finished Gerard Prunier's "Darfur: The
Ambiguous Genocide", for example, which was very badly
proofed and a little too condensed in places, but
contained some valuable information and analysis
(although he never really says exactly what he thinks
should be DONE).  

Anyway, Prunier discusses the international legal
definition of "the big-g word" - and its implications
for action - as well as offering his own, without
wasting too much time on semantics.  He points out
that, although Darfur doesn't fit his own definition
of genocide, and a lot of other mass killings don't,
we are still talking about hundreds of thousands of
deaths, over a million refugees, etc. - all horrific
and (should be) intolerable.

I'm not sure that it even makes a lot of sense to
label as genocide, actually, some of the mass killings
that Herman (rightly) demands recognition for below. 
But it's disturbing to deny these heinous crimes the
label, perhaps because somehow killing hundreds of
thousands or millions of people, and letting millions
more die of starvation and disease, or live out their
lives in madness, as amputees, people without a
community, etc., has somehow become less bad when we
don't call it genocide.  Almost, that's life.

It's almost as if we think the main issue is the
*purpose* of the slaughter.  But I wonder if we really
believe that.

The Administration likes to tell us, as Zinn points
out in this NYT letter, how "accidental" so much death
and destruction was.  The Khartoum govt tells us they
didn't mean for the Janjawiid militia to raze the
Baggara villages and massacre civilians when they
armed them.  Libya and Chad and the CIA probably
didn't intend that either, when they made Darfur their
playground.  Does this matter to the people there?

Is this genocide the US is perpetrating on Iraq?  I
wouldn't call it that, but that doesn't mean we should
let our politicians dismiss the brutal criminality of
it.

I suppose we'll say so tonite-
Ricky


 
--- "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com>
wrote:

> This response from Ed Herman is on ZNet: 
> http://www.zmag.org/content/ 
> showarticle.cfm?SectionID=80&ItemID=13626
> 
> [Responce to Zinn's letter to NYT's]
> 
> Howard:
> 
> Your first sentence in your reply on Samantha Power
> astounded me. Did  
> you actually read her book? I’m pretty sure you
> never read my two  
> pieces dealing with her. The long text item below is
> from a review of  
> her work that I wrote in Z in 2004. You should also
> read  the  
> following:   Edward S. Herman, "Richard Holbrooke,
> Samantha Power,  
> and the 'Worthy-Genocide' Establishment" (Kafka Era
> Studies Number  
> 5), ZNet, March 24, 2007
> 
> 
> 
> [part of review article on Power’s book}
> 
> The cruise missile left also adheres closely to the
> party line on  
> genocide, which is why its members thrive in the New
> York Times and  
> other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul
> Berman, Michael  
> Ignatieff and David Rieff, but I will focus here on 
> Samantha Power,  
> whose large volume on genocide, “A Problem From
> Hell”: America and  
> the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer prize, and who is
> currently the  
> expert of choice on the subject in the mainstream
> media (and even in  
> The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show).
> 
>   Power never  departs from the selectivity dictated
> by the  
> establishment party line. That requires, first and
> foremost, simply  
> ignoring  cases of  direct U.S. or U.S.-sponsored
> (or otherwise  
> approved) genocide. Thus the Vietnam war, in which
> millions were  
> directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in
> Power’s index or  
> text. Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of
> as many as 100,000  
> Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty
> International  
> called “A Government Program of Political Murder,”
> but by a  
> government installed and supported by the United
> States, also does  
> not show up in Power’s index.  Cambodia is of course
> included, but  
> only for the second phase of the genocide—the first
> phase, from  
> 1969-1975, in which the United States dropped some
> 500,000 tons of  
> bombs on the Cambodian countryside and  killed vast
> numbers, she  
> fails to mention. On the  Khmer Rouge genocide,
> Power says they  
> killed 2 million, a figure widely cited after Jean
> Lacouture  gave  
> that number; his subsequent admission that this
> number was invented  
> had no effect on its use, and it suits Power’s
> purpose.
> 
> A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide
> occurred in Indonesia  
> in 1965-66 in which over 700,000 people were
> murdered. This genocide  
> is not mentioned by Samantha Power and the names
> Indonesia and  
> Suharto do not appear in her index. She also fails
> to mention West  
> Papua, where Indonesia’s 40 years of  murderous
> occupation would  
> constitute genocide under her criteria, if carried
> out under  
> different auspices. Power does refer to East Timor,
> with extreme  
> brevity, saying that “In 1975, when its ally, the
> oil-producing, anti- 
> Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing
> between 100,000 and  
> 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away”
> (146-7). That  
> exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the
> killings in East  
> Timor involved a larger fraction of the population
> than in Cambodia,  
> and the numbers killed were probably larger than the
> grand total for  
> Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes a large
> fraction of her book.  
> She also misrepresents the U.S. role—it did not
> “look away,” it gave  
> its approval, protected the aggression from any
> effective UN response  
> (in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the
> UN Daniel Patrick  
> Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in
> protecting Indonesia from  
> any UN action), and greatly increased its arms aid
> to Indonesia,  
> thereby facilitating the genocide.
> 
> Power engages in a similar suppression and failure
> to recognize the  
> U.S. role in her treatment of  genocide in Iraq. She
> attends  
> carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein’s use of
> chemical warfare  
> and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere, and
> she does discuss  
> the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action
> against Saddam Hussein  
> at this juncture. But she does not mention the
> diplomatic  
> rapproachement with Saddam in the midst of his war
> with Iran in 1983,  
> the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during
> that war,  and  
> the U.S. approval of  sales and transfers of 
> chemical and biological  
> weapons during the period in which he was using
> chemical weapons  
> against the Kurds. She also doesn’t mention the
> active efforts by the  
> United States and Britain to block UN actions that
> might have  
> obstructed Saddam’s killings.
> 
> The killing of over a million Iraqis via the
> “sanctions of mass  
> destruction,”  more than were killed by all the
> weapons of mass  
> destruction in history, according to John and Karl
> Mueller  
> (“Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs,
> May/June 1999),  
> was  one of major genocides of  the post-World War 2
> era. It is  
> unmentioned by  Samantha Power. Again, the
> correlation between  
> exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that
> such killings were,  
> in Madeleine Albright’s words, “worth it” from the
> standpoint of U.S.  
> interests, is clear. There is a similar political
> basis for Power’s  
> failure to include Israel’s low-intensity genocide
> of  the  
> Palestinians and South Africa’s “destructive
> engagement” with the  
> frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a
> death toll greatly  
> exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the
> 1990s. Neither  
> Israel nor South Africa, both “constructively
> engaged” by the United  
> States, show up  in Power’s index.
> 
> Samantha Power’s conclusion is that the U.S. policy
> toward genocide  
> has been very imperfect and needs reorientation,
> less opportunism,  
> and greater vigor. For Power, the United States is
> the solution, not  
> the problem. These conclusions and policy
> recommendations rest  
> heavily on her spectacular bias in case selection:
> She simply  
> bypasses those that are ideologically inconvenient, 
> where the United  
> States has arguably committed genocide (Vietnam,
> Cambodia 1969-75,  
> Iraq 1991-2003), or has given genocidal processes
> positive support  
> (Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala,
> Israel, and South  
> Africa). Incorporating them into an analysis would
> lead to sharply  
> different conclusions and policy agendas, such as
> calling upon the  
> United States to simply stop doing it, or urging
> stronger global  
> opposition to U.S. aggression and support of
> genocide, and  proposing  
> a much needed revolutionary change within the United
> States to remove  
> the roots of its imperialistic and genocidal thrust.
> But the actual  
> huge bias, nicely leavened by admissions of 
> imperfections and need  
> for improvement in U.S. policy, readily explains why
> Samantha Power  
> is loved by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer
> prize for her  
> masterpiece of evasion and apologetics for “our”
> genocides and call  
> for a more aggressive pursuit of  “theirs.” 
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