There are all sorts of varieties of insane extremists among the settlers. By “insane” I don’t mean that they’re aberrations from the Israeli norm. Just that in polite western society (not Israel, of course) these people would be viewed as nutcases and ignored. Only in Israel (and perhaps this happens in other religious extremist societies as well) are such people turned into prophets, prime ministers, and even esteemed academics.
Such a one is Prof. Hillel Weiss, who teaches not Hebrew literature, mind you, a term he banned from his department–but rather the literature of the Jewish people. You see Hebrew is the language and literature of the Jewish people. There is no other. Yiddish? Feh, jargon. Jewish literature in English? Derivative, degenerate and a mark of the bankruptcy of galut.
Professor Weiss teaches, where else, at Bar Ilan University. That’s also the home of such other wunder-mensches as Mordechai Kedar, who advocates raping Palestinian women as a deterrent to terrorism; and Gerald Steinberg, that convicted libelist who runs the fraudulent NGO known as NGO Monitor.
Listen, Abu Mazen: you aren’t a people and therefore there can be no genocide [against Palestinians]. To exterminate you like a simple rabble is a mitzvah and it will be fulfilled finally despite the fact that the government of Israel still doesn’t accept its responsibility for raising mendacious international recognition of you [Palestine]. [This process] started with Begin ended with Gal-On. It contributed to the deception of the entire world and [increased] the popularity of these monsters [Palestinians] who rose up due to our weakness and lack of faith.
The quicker you [Abu Mazen] can concede that you are not a people and that your place is nowhere within the borders of the land of Israel, the better off you will be… as long as you evacuate the country of your own volition.
Weiss concludes his scholarly lecture with a reference to Deuteronomy 32:21, 43, which originally was meant as a curse against the pagan peoples who surrounded the ancient Israelites. But in the context in which Weiss invokes the verse, it’s deeply Islamophobic, essentially calling Islam a pagan, “villanous” religion. This is eliminationism of the purest sort:
They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people; I will provoke them with a villanous nation…
Nations, celebrate His people; for He avenges the blood of His servants, and returns vengeance upon His enemies, and atones for the land of His people.
Prof. Weiss is also one of those blessed Judeans who’s planning to revive the Sanhedrin, so we can return to stoning Sodomites and adulterers like in the old days. He can also count himself among the Chosen who hope to raze the Dome of the Rock and replace it with the Third Temple, “God willing.”
I swear if anyone tries to claim that this guy is a fruitcake who represents no more than a fringe of a fringe, I may be sick. You know that his views are embraced by almost the entire ruling coalition and that they’re being implemented by the government in every way it can. Hillel Weiss is the beating heart of both Israeli settlerism and Israel itself. What the good professor shouts from the mountain top and on Facebook is beating inside Bibi’s heart. They are one.
By the way, we should give credit where it’s due to Arab-American oil man, Jamal Daniel and the folks at Al Monitor, who see fit to publish the similarly inchoate messianic ramblings of Yuval Avivi, who regularly covers this garbage in its pages. That a publication funded by an Arab-American would present such inflammatory drivel is mystifying to me.
In August 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke as a candidate for president before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. During his speech he attacked what had come to be called “Vietnam Syndrome,” which was understood to mean a hesitancy on the part of the people of the U.S. to again become involved in the hideous debacle of wars, such as Vietnam. He continued distorting the reality of the brutality and immorality of the war against the people of Vietnam when he said: “It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.” Of course, Reagan, as vicious a warmonger as has ever lived, was simply using hyperbole to whip the electorate and general public into a frenzy so that he would be able to wage additional immoral wars in Central America and the Caribbean, and especially against the people of Nicaragua and their freely elected government. While an Orwellian dystopian at heart, Reagan was not very different from many of the presidents who would follow him and initiate indiscriminate and grossly lethal forays into other parts of the world, most notably the Middle East and Southwest Asia, either through proxies or through the direct use of U.S. military force.
Now, Reagan’s rewriting of history has come back 50 years later in the Pentagon’s attempt to whitewash the horror of what was done to the people of Vietnam in a website marking the commemoration of the Vietnam War. The website claims that it will “provide the American public with historically accurate materials,” but in reality the accuracy of those materials is as lacking as the U.S. justification for entering that war against a nation that was not a threat to the U.S., and had done nothing to provoke a war that would end by killing millions of innocent people (“Paying Respects, Pentagon Revives Vietnam, and War Over Truth,” The New York Times, October 9, 2014).
Missing from the website are the voices of protest against the war, the war’s many U.S. atrocities, the lying of political leaders and generals, and the debate over the war in the U.S. The My Lai massacre is called the “My Lai incident” at the website, and even the words spoken in front of the Senate Fulbright hearings on Vietnam by John Kerry, then a disaffected Vietnam veteran, and now secretary of state, are omitted from this whitewashed history.
I was a war resister during the Vietnam War. I risked a safe place in the Reserves to make a statement against the insanity of that war that cost me years of my life in terms of the turmoil that resulted from taking on the power of the U.S. government. I learned much about countering distortions of history that this government pedals. That experience benefited me greatly. I never looked back.
Five years ago I met a Vietnam veteran by chance and we sat and spoke at length about the Vietnam War. I told him that I was a Vietnam era veteran, but not about my resistance to the war. He had suffered for years with the physical complications, including cancer, that were the direct result of his exposure to Agent Orange, a defoliant used to deforest the tropical jungles of Vietnam in order to make the so-called enemy more visible to U.S. forces. He had also fought the government for many years before his symptoms and suffering were recognized and treated by the Veterans Administration. The Vietnamese victims of that same poison have never been compensated for their suffering.
I asked the veteran with whom I spoke what he thought so many decades later about those who resisted the war and the motivation for the U.S. involvement in that war. He said that he would have liked to have stood on the U.S.-Canadian border and taken shots at those who resisted the war and sought sanctuary in Canada, but through years of reading widely about the war he had come to see that the resistance to the war had merit.
The government seeks young recruits because they believe that through various kinds of propaganda and relentless military training, the universal admonition against killing can be countered. As can be seen from veteran suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder, the rules of war relating to the killing of civilians in wartime and the admonition against killing in general are not easily or entirely erased from the human mind.
Much of the propaganda that has emerged since the Vietnam War has focused on the Vietnam veteran as victim of the war, and to a degree veterans are also the victims of war and shoddy treatment by the Veterans Administration. This theme has been repeated in popular culture with films such as Platoon (1986) and The Deer Hunter (1978). Almost never are the most obvious victims of that war, the people of Vietnam and the people of Southeast Asia, portrayed as real people. Reagan, in a way, left the rest of us as heirs to his erroneous portrayal of the war by making it easier for U.S. presidents, Congress, and the military to embark on a series of endless wars following Vietnam.
What the veteran with whom I spoke had learned over the decades that followed the disaster that was the Vietnam War, the Pentagon has not learned as the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the war soon begins (The U.S. actually had thousands of so-called boots on the ground many years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the official U.S. entry into the war in 1964.). The Pentagon seeks to rewrite history in the Orwellian tradition and shove the actual history of that war into a rubbish heap much as Orwell’s character Winston does at the Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
As a consequence of the corporate mass media’s blackout of the news about Israeli crimes against humanity; as a consequence of the International Criminal Court’s cowardly disregard of crimes committed by Israeli leaders while instead charging Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta with crimes against humanity; and as a consequence of the West’s Israeli orchestrated preoccupation with the necessity to wage war against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) — which came into being with covert encouragement and assistance from the real axis of evil of the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia — Israel’s latest barbaric assault euphemistically codenamed Operation Protective Edge but in reality intended to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people, has been quietly and quickly forgotten.
Collective corporate mass media amnesia comes as no surprise considering that in the U.S. alone 90% of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by just six corporations whose combined revenue in 2010 was $275.9 billion. Furthermore, all six of those corporations like for example Rupert Murdoch’s [not the actual] News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post) have Israeli aligned global news tentacles that distort, mislead, and even suppress the true facts. Mass media bias towards Israel is even prevalent at the supposedly dispassionate and honest taxpayer funded BBC where coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires finding “a balance” that is in actual fact strongly tilted towards Israel.
As part of its “balance” the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen (surprise, surprise), has announced plans to air a series of special programs next year that will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The programs are to be broadcast around Holocaust industry Memorial Day on January 27, 2015 and will range from interviews with survivors of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to a new drama about the 1961 trial in Israel of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann who was seized in Argentina by Israeli agents and smuggled back to Israel on an El Al airliner. Cohen’s announcement was welcomed with “We are delighted that the BBC will be ensuring that Holocaust Memorial Day is marked by the widest possible audience,” declared Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. The question is have fine Jewish people of status like Olivia felt the slightest twinge of conscience over the recent horrific images coming from the Gaza Strip as a result Israel’s Operation Protective Edge: an operation that had Israeli Jews chanting “tomorrow there’s no school in Gaza, they don’t have any children left.”?
Such passionate racist hate can only beget hate from the victims and global condemnation form compassionate people. But are such reactions anti-Semitic or simply the consequence of Apartheid Israel’s incitement to genocide of the Palestinian people who — contrary to what Israeli Jews keep telling us — are human beings and not beasts; are a people in their own right; and do exist on their own land with an inalienable entitlement as follows:
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 2, Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Israel is a signatory but from which it is apparently exempt from respecting because of the Holocaust.
Will BBC viewers be watching programs at any time in the near future that document the atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinians by an Apartheid Israeli war criminal state that fine people like Olivia Marks-Woldman unconditionally support? No doubt force-feeding “the widest possible audience” of gullible gentiles with memories of the genocide of Jews by the Nazis helps to offset current condemnation of the equally abhorrent genocide of Palestinians by Jews.
“Israelis and American Jews fully agree that the memory of the Holocaust is an indispensable weapon — one that must be used relentlessly against their common enemy … Jewish organisations and individuals thus labor continuously to remind the world of it. In America, the perpetuation of the Holocaust memory is now a $100-million-a-year enterprise, part of which is government funded.”
According to Israeli author Moshe Leshem, the expansion of Israeli power is commensurate with the expansion of the “Holocaust” propaganda.1
Last month the Russell Tribunal (comprised of international law experts) announced that Israel was guilty of “incitement to genocide,” and that Israel’s long-term collective punishment of Palestinians seemed to be designed to “inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group.” Despite that announcement of what has been obvious for decades (not short-term occupation, but long-term extermination), the International Criminal Court has maintained its usual avoidance of pursuing the big fish — like Henry Kissinger, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and many others including equally indictable Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu — while concentrating on minnows like Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta who became the first sitting head of state to appear before the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity for his alleged role in unleashing a wave of post-election violence during 2007-08.
Uhuru (Swahili for “freedom”) whose alleged guilt is far from being as obvious as that of Israeli leaders, is the son of Jomo Kenyatta “the founding father” who led Kenya from its independence in 1963 until his death in 1978. Independent Kenya, like most post-colonial nations, was also the beneficiary of colonialism’s main legacy of injustice and corruption of which Jomo had personal experience at his trial along with five others accused of managing the Mau Mau. The accused appeared before Mr. Justice Thacker, a man who practiced his profession in the same self-serving mould as that of Tony Blair, the war criminal “Middle East Peace Envoy.” Thacker accepted a bribe of £20,000 (a small fortune in those days) from the Governor of Kenya, Evelyn Baring, 1st Baron Howick of Glendale, who wanted to ensure that Thacker would find the accused guilty. Also according to Baring, “Every possible effort has been made to offer them [the witnesses] rewards and to protect them but no one can tell what will really happen when they are confronted in court by Kenyatta’s formidable personality …” One witness did in fact subsequently recant, admit he had been bribed, and was convicted of perjury.
After finding the accused guilty at the end of the trial, “Justice” Thacker — who had also unashamedly asked for an honour from the Queen but was refused — then fled the country on the first available flight. As an aside to this tale of unbridled corruption of justice, Ngina Kenyatta — widow of Jomo and mother of Uhuru — is the fourth richest woman in Africa with a net worth of $500 million while the majority of Kenyans exist in abject poverty. For most African people the only notable difference between colonial and post-colonial rule has been the colour change of their corrupt political exploiters from white to black.
The West’s current Israeli-inspired and U.S.-led fabricated necessity for waging war against ISIS is not a recent development but part of a long-established strategy promoted by Israeli sponsored U.S. neoconservatives who ensure the constant existence of Islamic enemies so as to justify costly and never ending wars that ultimately benefit Israel through the destruction of surrounding Arab neighbour infrastructures. The creation of ISIS arose from the necessity to replace the old Islamic ogre of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda with a new one.
In March 2007, General Wesley Clark, a retired 4-star U.S. Army general and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia, had the following to say in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, ‘I just got this down from upstairs’ — meaning the Secretary of Defence’s office — ‘today.’ And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ I said, ‘Is it classified?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t show it to me.’ And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, ‘You remember that?’ He said, ‘Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you.’
General Clark’s allegation is amply substantiated by recent Israeli-inspired and U.S.-led conflicts in the Middle East and provides proof that plans for such conflicts were already in place long before the justification for them had even been fabricated. Such Middle East conflicts serve to benefit Israel in three ways: the first is to destabilise and fragment but preferably destroy surrounding Arab states; the second is to achieve the first by getting Western nations at their taxpayers expense to bear all the cost and do the fighting; and the third is to have such conflicts serve as a distraction from Zionist Apartheid Israel’s lying, cheating, stealing, double-crossing, and killing along with all its other barbaric violations of international law including human rights.
Concerned, decent, and responsible people everywhere must relentlessly demand honest and impartial media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which must not be overlooked or forgotten until Palestinians receive justice and reparations for the decades of heinous crimes perpetrated against them by Israeli Jews; they must resolutely resist the Anglo-Zionist Political Corporate Military Industrial Empire’s voracious dependency on continual military conflict that maintains the status quo of almost half the world’s wealth belonging to just one percent of the population; and they must unconditionally insist that the ICC fully fulfils its charter as described in the Rome Statute’s Preamble by charging Israeli leaders with the crimes that everybody knows they have been guilty of committing.
Israeli Jews have every right to have a “world of their own” if they want, but not on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land and at the expense of goyim taxpayers.
Balaam’s Curse: How Israel Lost its Way, and How it Can find it Again, Simon & Schuster, 1989.
There is a war going on and it long predates Israel’s summer Gaza onslaught. It is a war on water, and it runs deep. For the last decade, Israel has been carrying out a systemic and willful campaign to deny Palestinians access to clean water.
Though Israel’s campaign to restrict water access has yet to make the news, rights organizations are pushing the Palestinian Authority to take the issue to court, so the matter could well make headlines in the coming months. While the PA has been debating whether or not to accede to the International Criminal Court, increasing documentation of war crimes may push their hand.
Under international law, deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime, and as of 2010, water and sanitation were enshrined as basic human rights. Israel has blatantly and systemically been denying these rights.Through growing documentation and awareness, Israel’s systemic campaign against Palestinian water can be seen for what it is: a comprehensive violation of one of the most basic human rights. It consists of a two-pronged approach: the visible mass destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure, reinforced by invisible policies of closure and occupation, siege and confiscation that block the repair of infrastructure. Together, these tactics prevent the existence of sustainable Palestinian communities, driving people from their land, their homes, and communities.
The first tool of Israel’s water war has been well documented. It includes direct and extensive damage caused deliberately during large-scale military operations. In the latest Israeli military operation in Gaza this meant Israeli aircraft targeted the sewage pump station and F16s disabled pumps that sent 25,000 cubic meters of wastewater per day to Gaza’s main sewage treatment plant. Further Israeli shelling east of Gaza City hit a main water pipeline, disconnecting areas east of the city so that 450,000 were completely cut off from municipal services, and the more than 1.5 million residents of the strip suffered massively reduced access.
The losses in water infrastructure alone from this latest series of strikes have been estimated at $30 million. This is not taking into account the massive toll on health, with 100,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage flowing through the streets of Gaza and into the sea, causing widespread health problems. This meant over-burdened hospitals, without water themselves, were dealing with digestive ailments, skin allergies, water-borne and respiratory diseases.
UN investigations from the 2008-9 attacks on Gaza already affirmed that Israel’s targeting of water infrastructure was “deliberate and systematic.” The September meeting of the Russell Tribunal, charged with investigating rights violations from this summer’s atrocities, has reached similar conclusions.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also urged the PA to take action on these violations and bring them to the ICC.
And while arguments will no doubt be made about the fog of war or the targeting of water infrastructure as accidental or as collateral damage, this line of defense is weakened when such military attacks are seen as part of a longer-term systemic program. For example, in the 2001-2 invasion of Jenin, the same policy of intentional damage to water equipment during military assault was used. Invasions caused massive damage to water and wastewater infrastructure, cutting off water services to civilians for weeks.
Even more insidious has been the slow but deliberate damage to water infrastructure that has taken place as part of the day-to-day of occupation. This damage can be seen both in the West Bank, as well as in the agricultural lands of Gaza that have, since 2005, been declared as a border ‘buffer’ zone by the Israeli military.
Official documentation has catalogued demolition by Israeli forces of 173 different pieces of water, sanitation, or hygiene infrastructure in Area C of the West Bank between 2009 and 2011. This has included the confiscation of water tankers, which are used as an emergency measure when access to water is prohibited. In the Gaza border zone – which swallows up some 17 percent of Gaza’s landmass – 305 agricultural wells were destroyed between 2005 and 2013.
In addition, Jewish settlers in the illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank regularly carry out acts of vandalism and destruction that specifically target Palestinian water sources, and frequently take over natural springs for their own recreational use.
These settlers are acting within a clear Israeli policy that sees targeting of water resources as an acceptable method of warfare.
The destruction of generations-old water infrastructure such as historic cisterns or springs not only deprives marginalized communities of water but destroys an important element of Palestinian history and the community’s organic relationship with natural resources. Further, by depriving farmers of water, Israeli policies drive them off their land. Loss of agricultural income resulting from de-developed water infrastructure is estimated at $1.44 billion annually.
Though Israel has total control over the building, development, or maintenance of water infrastructure in Area C – where permission is systemically denied – it also maintains indirect control in all areas of the West Bank, where it can – and often does – prohibit the building of water treatment, irrigation, or industrial facilities.
Evidence of water warfare, and deliberate efforts to use water as a weapon against Palestinian civilian populations, is being documented at all levels, and efforts continue to bring awareness to all those affected. Israel’s water war has continued with impunity for far too long and must be challenged before its effects are irreversible.
Dajani is a policy member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and a Palestinian environmental researcher and activist based in Jerusalem.
Not surprisingly, NPR’s ombudsman goes with the flow that will neither interfere with his current employment nor injure his future prospects in American journalism.
Following is an email to me from the Office of the Ombudsman, and my response to NPR:
Dear Alison,
Thank you for contacting the NPR Ombudsman. We appreciate your comments and your thoughts will be taken into consideration as we continue to monitor the reporting.
The Ombudsman is currently working on a blog post about this issue. You may be interested in this statement from our standards and practices editor:
David Brooks is primarily an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He appears on All Things Considered to offer his opinions, not as a reporter. His son’s service with the Israeli Defense Forces is no secret We agree with the Times‘ editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, that Mr. Brooks’ long-standing views about Israel have been “formed by all kinds of things … [and] are not going to change whether or not his son is serving in the IDF, beyond his natural concerns as a father for his son’s safety and well-being.” We also agree with the Times‘ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, that Mr. Brooks should not be barred from commenting about Israel. She has recommended that he address the issue of his son’s service in the IDF in a future column. That strikes us as a reasonable suggestion. If a situation arises and we feel he should also mention it on our air, we still discuss that with Mr. Brooks at that time.
The only place the information about Brooks has appeared in print to date is a Hebrew version of an Israeli newspaper, and possibly the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. It has not appeared on any mainstream broadcast entity that I’m aware of.
2. While, as you state, Mr. Brooks is not a reporter, he must still abide by journalistic ethics. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists‘ code of ethics states that columnists’ potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed.
3. You rightly point out that Mr. Brooks has the “natural concerns as a father for his son’s safety and well-being.”
The obvious reality is that Mr. Brooks’ commentary about Israel does directly affect his son’s “safety and well-being.”
Commentary that defends Israel to the American public keeps American tax money ($8-10 million per day) and American diplomatic support for Israel flowing, both of which are extremely important for his son’s safety and well-being.
Commentary that pointed out the illegality and immorality of Israel’s recent killing and injuring of thousands of Gazan men, women, and children by the Israeli military in which his son is serving would quite likely interfere with his son’s well-being, as an increasing number of Americans would join those around the world calling for war crimes tribunals.
4. Your statement is illogical, unfounded, and ludicrous. But your well-compensated career in mainstream American journalism will continue unhindered.
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”
A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.
ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”
ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies.
It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.
Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.
Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”
Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”
A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.” When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.”
On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.
Now Hain is demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the “restrictions” on US bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia – as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.
The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.
Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called “perpetual war” has crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants “boots on the ground” now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” – notably Australia’s aggressively weird Tony Abbott – as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally, Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:
“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”
That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”
The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of NATO, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.
A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as “morally questionable” (the Guardian ) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.
Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.
More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.
South Africa’s largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), has joined with health sector unions to demand the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the World Medical Association (WMA).
COSATU, along with NEHAWU (National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union), DENOSA (Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa), as well as the SA Medical Association (SAMA), issued the joint call earlier this week. Organisers will protest outside the WMA today, Friday 10 October, supported by campaign groups like BDS South Africa.
In issuing the call for expulsion, COSATU claimed that the IMA “has never denounced or seriously confronted the Israeli government on its shameless use of torture”, and has “shown blatant disregard for the ethical issue of medical neutrality.”
The South African trade unions also accused the IMA of having “stood silently in the face of…the killing, harassment and wounding of Palestinian health professionals on duty; and the destruction of the Palestinian health systems.” They note that “direct appeals to the IMA [over many years] have been unavailing.”
COSATU was one of the first trade unions in the world to endorse the Palestinian-led, international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. Citing the struggle against South African apartheid, COSTAU is urging the expulsion of the IMA from the WMA, until the Israeli body “unequivocally condemns, distances and actively counter’s Israel’s torture, occupation and apartheid policies.”
In his heart of hearts, Netanyahu is aware of the major and fundamental differences between the Palestinian Hamas movement and the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) that is not limited to a specific state or nationality. However, for some reason, he is trying to link the two. In doing so, he ignores what is even more dangerous than his erroneous comparison; the significant similarity between ISIS and Israel’s ideology, policies and practices.
Israel calls itself the “Jewish State”, just as Al-Baghdadi calls his group the Islamic State. From the time of its “independence” in 1948, Israel has never declared it borders; in fact, they expand and contract, just as the territory controlled by ISIS does (it rejects the ideas of borders and does not recognise nation states). Indeed, ISIS considers its borders to be wherever its forces have reached. Israel was established on the basis of colonial-settlement and mass immigration of Zionist Jews from all over the world; ISIS is also encouraging immigrants who believe in the ideology of the group, regardless of their ethnicity and nationality.
It is no wonder that the Palestinian resistance is surprised when it captures or kills Israeli soldiers only to find that they are French, British, Polish, German or Russian individuals brought in to fight on Palestinian land and join the ranks of the “Jewish State”. In addition, the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel throughout its occupation of Palestine far surpass those committed by ISIS; the Israelis kill women and children and commit massacres deliberately, with apparent impunity, and then boast about it.
I do not mean that this comparison should offend ISIS, nor am I very concerned with talking about an organisation being fought by the world. It is undoubtedly a serious phenomenon that requires further reflection and study. What I am really concerned about is revealing Netanyahu’s manipulation and his attempt to divert attention from the real nature of the conflict in Palestine. When he fights Hamas, he is fighting the rightful owners of the land, the Palestinians. He is also following terrorist logic and using unimaginably extreme methods thanks to the world overlooking the Zionist project’s excesses in the region.
The international community is applying blatant double standards in its reaction to Israel and ISIS. Alliances have been formed to fight ISIS but the world turns a blind eye to the Israeli occupation that commits war crimes witnessed by all who wish to see. Over the summer, and not for the first time, Israel bombed hospitals, schools and safe houses while they were still inhabited and Israel also used internationally-banned weapons.
Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to link Hamas to ISIS is just more proof of Israel’s defeat and failure in its latest attack on the movement. It is also a cry for help by Israel to the countries of the world after its army failed to progress more than a few metres into Gaza. This is a desperate attempt to discredit and ruin the reputation of the Palestinian resistance and link it to a terrorist organisation reviled across the world. Netanyahu still hasn’t realised that the world is no longer held hostage to Israeli propaganda, and that such links and comparisons do not harm Hamas or change the fact that occupation is terrorism in every sense of the word. There is only one state occupying someone else’s land in the Middle East, and it isn’t the “Islamic State”.
Jews and philosophy have had a pretty troubled relationship. The collision between ‘the tribal’ and ‘the universal’ or, more accurately, between Athens and Jerusalem, is inevitable. The few great Jewish thinkers who transcended the tribal, such as Spinoza or Otto Weininger, have been harassed and labelled by the rabbis as ‘self haters’ and enemies of the Jews.
Some contemporary Zionist merchants insist upon wrapping their Judeo centrism in crypto philosophical arguments. Bernard-Henri Levy, for instance, advocates his Zionist warmongering using a pseudo ‘moralist’ terminology.
Today I came across a uniquely banal rant by Asa Kasher, a Jewish ‘philosopher’ at Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also authored the ‘IDF ethical code,’defended Israel’s military conduct in the recent Gaza campaign in an article published in the Jewish Review of Books.
Kasher wrote, “Hamas unscrupulously violates every norm in the book.” And I wonder, what book? I would like to find out, at a minimum, what ‘book’ grants the Jewish State the right to uproot an entire nation in the name of a Jewish homecoming? Is there a book that permits the Jews to turn a city into an open-air prison? Is there a book that legitimates reducing Gaza into a pile of rubble? I am afraid that the answer is affirmative. There is more than one such book. But these books aren’t exactly philosophical texts. These books are the prime Judaic texts. The Talmud and The Old Testament are suffocated by Goy hatred and stories of Jews and their God pouring their ‘wrath on the Goyim.’ Rabbinical Judaism has historically been very careful in the way it treated some of those vile and barbaric Judaic verses and teachings. But Israel and Zionism draw inspiration from those genocidal verses, and the outcome is evident in the shattered urban landscape of Gaza.
Unlike the very few Jews who actually contributed to humanity by means of self-reflection (such as Jesus, Spinoza and Marx), Kasher prefers pointing at Hamas. He denounces Palestinian militants for indiscriminately rocketing Israeli cities. I wonder if the same ‘Kosher Aristotle’ would go out of his way to denounce Jewish militants in Auschwitz if they had possessed the ballistic capability to rocket Berlin and had acted upon it? I doubt it.
Back in the 18th century, in a remarkable attempt to formulate an anthropocentric, ethical requirement that was justified by means of reason, Immanuel Kant presented the Categorical Imperative: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
Let’s examine Kasher’s thoughts in the light of Kant’s imperative. If the IDF operated ethically in Gaza, as Kasher foolishly suggests, then every military force should be expected to follow the ‘IDF universal law:’ flatten entire cities, uproot nations, murder innocent civilians and so on. Perhaps a Zionist Jew can follow such awkward reasoning.
Kasher further asks, “Does the presence of large numbers of non-combatants in the vicinity of a building that is directly involved in terrorist assaults on Israelis render that building immune to Israeli attack?” Kasher continues, “The answer is, and must be, no. Israel cannot forfeit its ability to protect its citizens against attacks simply because terrorists hide behind non-combatants. If it did so, it would be giving up any right to self-defense.”
Consciously or not, the banal Israeli so-called ‘philosopher’ evinces the complete opposite of philosophical, ethical or universal principled thinking. Instead, he provides a glimpse into Jewish tribal ethno-centrism in which ‘goodness’ is defined solely by Jewish interests.
In a total dismissal of international conventions and of ethical judgment, Kasher blurs the crucial distinction between ‘civilians’ and ‘combatants’ and between the innocent and the actor.
The verdict is obvious. That Israel repeatedly behaves unethically goes without saying, but reading Kasher reveals that the Jewish State also lacks the notion of an ethical horizon. Even its academic authority on the subject is totally incompetent.
Last Friday, the centre of Caracas was filled with thousands of mourning citizens as they accompanied two flag draped coffins loaded with flowers they had cast upon it in homage.
If a Member of Parliament representing the Venezuelan opposition had been brutally tortured and stabbed to death in his own home, the Western press –including Canada’s- would have splashed the news in headlines around the world.
Yet this has just happened to a Member of Parliament from the governing party of Venezuela, but the international press is mostly silent. International politicians have not wrung their hands with indignation or regret, as they have about the lawful incarceration of opposition leader Leopoldo López who publicly and repeatedly incited mobs to violence and caused has at least 47 deaths.
On Wednesday, October 1, 2014, Robert Serra, 27 years old, a lawyer and legislator from the governing party PSUV, the youngest Member of Parliament of Venezuela, and his partner Maria Herrera, were assassinated in their own home in a central area of Caracas. It was an outrageous and deliberate act of terror. Robert Serra and María Herrera were tortured, stabbed and then bled to death. He specialized in criminology, and was engaged in the task of helping to curb crime in the country. María Herrera assisted him in this vital work. Robert Serra came from a poor family; his mother worked as a street hawker to help him go to law school. He was famous for his insightful interventions in parliament and was much beloved, some referred to him as “ a future Chávez”.
Their deaths were carried out systematically. Ernesto Samper, ex-president of Colombia and current president of UNASUR, said: “This crime is evidence of the infiltration of Colombian paramilitary in Venezuela.”
Just a few weeks ago, President Santos of Colombia deported to Venezuela a young man, Lorent Saleh, who had been meeting with paramilitaries in Colombia to conspire against the Venezuelan government. He appears in a video with Alvaro Uribe, ex-president of Colombia, who owes his political career to his connections to Escobar, the head of Colombian narco-traffic, and is accused by the Colombian Senate of being behind the proliferation of the paramilitary there. Saleh stated he was buying arms of war and contracting snipers and explosive experts because “they” were going to carry out selective assassination of 20 leaders of the Venezuelan government in order to bring it down. Then he said who “they” were: leaders of Venezuela’s opposition parties.
In Parliament, days before his assassination, Robert Serra had denounced -in no uncertain terms- the terrorist plans of Alvaro Uribe and Lorent Saleh.
The Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro has been under relentless and continuous attack since it was elected. It has been submitted to economic sabotage with contraband and withholding of food and goods, a deliberate campaign of false rumors, and three months of street violence to create the appearance of chaos and lack of governability. These subversive actions were deftly overcome by a government that stuck to the letter of the law, refused to take the bait of meeting violence with violence, and its call for peace included setting up negotiations with the opposition facilitated by ministers of neighboring countries. The Venezuelan people overwhelmingly repudiated the violent opposition tactics, and gave Mr. Maduro’s popularity an even larger boost.
In an attempt to produce “regime change”, violence has been intensified now to include assassinations. This was agreed upon in a meeting at Guadarrama, Spain at the end of June hosted by the Spanish spy agency CNI and the FAES – a think tank of the party Partido Popular of ex-president of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar. The USA’s CIA carries out the financing and training of the CNI, as Edward Snowdon has revealed.[i]
Two Venezuelan opposition leaders, Julio Borges and Ramon Muchacho, who were also behind the street violence, were present, and a video message from Maria Corina Machado was viewed. She could not be present as she is being investigated for her part in the street violence, which she enthusiastically led. Machado, as a standing member of Venezuela’s parliament, ignominiously accepted simultaneously the position of ambassador of Panama in order to address the OAS in 2014. According to the Constitution, she in effect, forfeited her condition of parliamentarian by representing a foreign government – and one, which at that time- was against Venezuela.
Machado, along with Lopez, instigated the street violence that cost so many deaths and millions in damages. Yet, holding such disdain for the rule of law, she was invited by the Canadian Council for the Americas to speak at the prestigious Canadian law firm of Cassel Brock and Blackwell last May. This was a clear example either of Canadian willful ignorance or connivance.
The imperial forces believe Venezuela’s oil is just too rich a prize to leave in the hands of its people. The sterling leadership that the country has shown in promoting the integration of Latin America for the purposes of solving its common social problems and to protect its natural resources is just unacceptable to the greed of multinationals, the United States, and their subservient allies who seem to think the petroleum is theirs to take.
The assassinations of Robert Serra and María Herrera, of Eliézer Otáiz head of Caracas Municipality 5 months ago, the killings during the street riots of last March that were led by paramilitary (not students as the world press stated) and the bombing death of district attorney Danilo Anderson ten years ago, as well as the hundreds of rural leaders that have been assassinated by paramilitary mercenaries hired by the large landowners, have only fed the determination of the Venezuelan people. They know that their Bolivarian government, no matter how besieged and no matter how big the problems, is a government on their side, not on the side of the powerful elites and their foreign owners that have never in Venezuelan history sided with the poor or the nation’s best interest.
As the crowds wound their slow way towards the cemetery where Robert Serra and María Herrera were to be buried, the ubiquitous cry that was heard at every step was: “Justice! Justice! We want justice!” The Venezuelan authorities dare not ignore this clamor.
María Páez Victor, Ph.D. is a Venezuelan born sociologist living in Canada.
Notes.
[i] Carlos Fazio, “Violencia y terrorismo son ejes de la nueva fase de desetabilizacion subversive”, Resumen Latinoamericano, 2 octubre 2014, http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/
George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a practically holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized in the final year of the war.
The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and childrens tottering towards starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.
In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can… If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that, when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”
Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree: “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg… It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported: “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North . . . not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”
After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center – Dayton – was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites – a peaceful sect who opposed slavery and secession – were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.
By the end of Sheridan’s campaign, the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. An English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harper’s Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert… . The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” John Heatwole, author of “The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley” (1998), concluded: “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.” Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”
Some defenders of the Union military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Gen. Grant that “[U]ntil we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of it’s roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “[T]here is a class of people – men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” President Lincoln congratulated both Sheridan and Sherman for campaigns that sowed devastation far and wide.
The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s post-war recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’ recent book, Sick From Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.
After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes ignored U.S. military tactics in World War Two and Vietnam that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.
The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns in Tripoli. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy.
Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.
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