POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S DAVID BLAIR
Thanks, David, for this.
The word 'genocide' is much abused today.
Intent is essential to the definition, but the extent of bestial acts is surely also important.
It is possible for what is an ugly war to slip into genocide as attitudes and intentions change.
Darfur does involve two kinds of people, and it is a filthy war, but there is no evidence that either has the intention of annihilating the other.
There have been three authentic genocides since World War Two, although not all of them is generally recognized.
The first was in Indonesia after Sukarno. About 500,000 people had their throats cut and bodies dumped into rivers simply because they were, or thought to be, communists. The rivers literally ran red.
The second was in Cambodia when at least a million people were killed merely for not being good enough communists as defined by madman Pol Pot.
The third was, of course, Rwanda where one tribe tried to eliminate another, killing something on the order of 800,000 people.
I believe there was a fourth, a case where an ugly war slipped into genocide, and that was America's war in Vietnam.
It had all the elements. The victims were mainly civilians, killed because they embraced communism. There were something like 3 million victims, many killed in horrible fashion, as by napalm.
American soldiers sank into contemptuous talk about their victims, typically calling them 'slopes' or 'gooks.' Bestial acts like cutting the ears off bodies became common.
The CIA and Special Forces carried out a terrible program of night-time assassinations of civilian village leaders, called Operation Phoenix, murdering about 20,000 of them.
I think it important to note the thread of American anti-communism through most of this horror to appreciate the extremes of the world's most powerful country, today fighting what it considers another epic, world-wide battle.
During the slaughter in Indonesia, American State Department officials actually worked the phones around the clock reporting names of those they'd like to see washed down the rivers. After all, the only good communist was a dead one.
The horrors of Cambodia were brought on when America's secret bombing and incursions destabilized a neutral government and allowed the Khmer Rouge to rise to power. During the slaughter, American officials busied themselves congratulating themselves about the truth of 'the domino theory.'
During the killing in Rwanda, the one case having nothing to do with America's War on Communism, American officials did everything they could to keep the lid on publicity and desperately avoided becoming involved in doing anything.
America's immense power has not been used to stop such horrors. Instead, it is always committed where America's geopolitical or economic interests are at stake. Military intervention is never about justice or human rights, it is about American interests, always. Please note, Mr. Blair.
