COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY HADLEY FREEMAN IN THE
GUARDIAN
My great uncle was
alienated in postwar France. Now Americans know how he felt
Oh, I'm sorry, but this is just not sound thinking.
Mentioning the Holocaust and Charlottesville in the same sentence
is beyond ridiculous, lacking completely both insight and judgment.
Charlottesville was a relatively small, unpleasant event.
America is full of small unpleasant events. Millions of
them.
That's why the murder rate is so high compared to other Western
nations.
That’s why other violent crime rates are so high compared to
other Western nations (see official stats for just one city regularly updated :
http://heyjackass.com/ )
That's why America's police kill over 1,100 legally innocent
citizens every year, a fact documented by this newspaper.
That's why something like a thousand people mysteriously die
in American prisons every year.
Just highway traffic deaths amount to about 40,000 a year.
America is a brutal society, full stop.
And, what I think is extremely important to do, when you
examine what America does abroad, the brutality becomes a crashing storm.
2 to 3 million slaughtered in North Korea. 3 million
slaughtered in Vietnam. A million dead in Cambodia after American bombing and
incursions destabilized a neutral government. A million dead in Iraq. At least
a third of a million in Syria. And there are dozens of lesser horrors in the
march of empire.
No person who loves peace and human decency likes seeing
events like Charlottesville, but thinking people put it in perspective, and
when you do that, it is like the proverbial drop in the bucket.
Perhaps most excruciating here, too, is the special plea
about American Jews considering leaving. Why just Jews? And why over this tiny
event? It makes no sense at all. I just do not believe it, considering all the
horrors in America they and everyone else live with.
Again, for those who haven’t seen it, here are the official
violence statistics for just one American city, Chicago. They are presented with
graphs and updated regularly:
