Tag: Genocide

The usher asks the new arrival his preference.

– What is the difference?

– One is on the right and the left.

– Is there any other difference?

– No.

This comment on a now aging book reminded me of the one time fevered discussion of how we had failed to do something about the genocide in Rwanda:

“I pulled the book off the shelf last night, and was reminded that it is brilliant, a carefully written, deeply researched indictment of American indifference in the face of atrocity. And I realized that the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria must be driving Power mad with frustration — frustration, of course, with Bashar al-Assad’s killer regime and frustration with the international community (so-called), in particular the Russians, who will do almost anything to protect the regime from censure, but also frustration with those in the administration who have spent the past two years looking for ways to distance the U.S. from the horror.”

http://politicalwire.com/archi…

There are no answers.

Fortunately there is no eternal hell.  We serve our time here and then are no more.

Best,  Terry

“In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an “untold holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857.”

And of course there are always holocaust-deniers for every holocaust.

“We cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed,” said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. “It could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas.”

Migration! Maybe millions of Indians simply wandered away to a faraway limbo where they were eventually joined by millions of Jews from the Nazi holocaust and millions of Iraqis from the ongoing American holocaust in Iraq!

Last week, Bernard Ntaganda was sentenced  to four years imprisonment for “endangering state security” and “harboring ethnic divisionism.”  The former charge is all too familiar to human rights activists and is little different from similar politically-motivated prosecutions across the globe.  The crime of “divisionism,” however, codified as “sectarianism” under Rwandese law, is relatively unique.  The closest parallels to these laws are probably most familiar to Americans as “hate speech” laws common to Europe, but prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States.  

   International human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have concluded that Mr. Ntaganda was almost certainly targeted for his opposition to the regime of President Paul Kagame.  President Kagame is not well known in the United States, but he owes his prominence to the role he played in ending the 1994 Rwandan genocide as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF.  The sanitized version of this story was distributed to American audiences briefly in the award winning film Hotel Rwanda.  Unfortunately, the politcally correct version omits several important facts, omissions that help explain the current political climate in Rwanda and the slide toward authoritarianism on the part of Kagame and the rest of the political leadership.

The black plague spreads.

The leadership lies.

The CEO’s spin.

We are not ignorant of the horrific nightmare you have unleashed.

Chris Hedges has a piece on TruthDig today about our corporate leaders and how these ‘Little Eichmanns’ are doing exactly what many thought would happen when you commoditize every living breathing thing on the planet.

You die.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

Hedges