The Politics of Genocide

Edward S. Herman, David Peterson

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781583673867
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word “genocide.” They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word “genocide” is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set of rules applies to cases such as U.S. aggression in Vietnam, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Indonesian slaughter of so-called communists and the people of East Timor, U.S. bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, the U.S. war of “liberation” in Iraq, and mass murders committed by U.S. allies in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo. Another set applies to cases such as Serbian aggression in Kosovo and Bosnia, killings carried out by U.S. enemies in Rwanda and Darfur, Saddam Hussein, any and all actions by Iran, and a host of others.

With its careful and voluminous documentation, close reading of the U.S. media and political and scholarly writing on the subject, and clear and incisive charts, The Politics of Genocide is both a damning condemnation and stunning exposé of a deeply rooted and effective system of propaganda aimed at deceiving the population while promoting the expansion of a cruel and heartless imperial system.

Notes

1. No letters appeared in reaction. However, four months later (Oct. 8, 2009), the editors published a “clarification,” which reads as follows: “In his review of Edmund S. Morgan’s essay collection American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America [NYR, June 11] Russell Baker, drawing on the estimates mentioned in Morgans’ 1958 essay ‘The Unyielding Indian,’ wrote that in North America at the time of Columbus, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants. However, archaeological evidence and demographic research in recent decades suggest that the number was much larger, with estimates ranging up to 18 million.”

The “clarification” is perhaps even worse than the original. Baker was not referring to North America (“from the tropical jungle …”). Over thirty years ago it was well-known that in North America (as defined in NAFTA, including Mexico) the numbers were in the tens of millions, far more beyond; and that even in the U.S. and Canada the numbers were about ten million or more. It was also known, even well before, that the “sparsely populated … unspoiled world” included advanced civilizations (in the U.S. and Canada too). This remarkable episode remains “genocide denial with a vengeance,” underscored by the “clarification.”

2. Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary of State (Lovett), February 24, 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. 1, 524, http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs/1948v01p2/reference/frus.frus1948v01p2.i0007.pdf.

3. See, e.g., Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); and Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). On the U.S. military-industrial complex, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review 60, October, 2008, http://monthlyreview.org/081001foster-hollemanmcchesney.php. On the U.S. “empire of bases,” see Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); and Catherine Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York: Pluto Press, 2009).

4. United States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Latin America (NSC 5432/1), September 3, 1954, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Vol. IV, 81, http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs2/1952-54v04/reference/frus.frus195254v04.i0009.pdf.

5. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979); and Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

6. See the webpage maintained by William Blum, “United States waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army” (last accessed in September 2009), http://killinghope.org/bblum6/us-action.html.

7. See, e.g., Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (Boston: South End Press, 1987), esp. chap. 1, “The Overall Framework of Order,” 5–26; Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), esp. the introduction and chap. 1, “Cold War: Fact and Fancy,” 1–68.

8. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (Andover, MA: Warner Modular Publications, Inc., 1973), http://web.archive.org/web/20050313044927/http://mass-multi-media.com/CRV.

9. Ibid., 7.

10. See H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking In America (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992).

11. Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. For its treatment of Warner CEO William Sarnoff’s suppression of the original 1973 edition of CRV, “an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se,” see xiv–xvii.

12. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 146–147; 94–95.

13. Roy Gutman, David Rieff, and Anthony Dworkin, eds., Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Sydney Schanberg, “Cambodia,” 78–79. Also see the Website of the Crimes of War Project, http://www.crimesofwar.org.

14. Aryeh Neier, War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998), 93–95.

15. Robertson’s use of the word “mistake” is misleading as Diem was literally imported from the United States and imposed on the South Vietnamese by U.S. power, and the U.S. actively supported his terroristic and undemocratic rule until 1963. See George McT. Kahin, Intervention (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1986), 78ff.

16. Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), 41–42. Here we add that Robertson has defended (“might have been justifiable”) the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under the concept of “military necessity, by bringing the war to a speedier end with less overall loss of life than would otherwise have been the case” (187). And in his penultimate chapter, “The Guernica Paradox,” Robertson coined the phrase “Bombing for Humanity”—a phrase that will warm the heart of every serially aggressive power (401–436).

17. Christiane Amanpour, Scream Bloody Murder, CNN, December 4, 2008.

18. Madeleine K. Albright and William S. Cohen, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers (Washington D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008), http://www.usip.org/genocide_taskforce/report.html. This report does mention Indonesia in passing, but only with respect to USAID “mediation efforts in places such as Aceh” (40) and by way of explaining the nature of Washington’s interest in stopping Jakarta’s rampage in East Timor in 1999 (56, 70). But it never mentions Indonesia as the perpetrator of the mass killings of the 1960s.

19. Here quoting the phrase associated with the “Responsibility to Protect” paragraphs from the 2005 World Summit Outcome document (A/RES/60/1), UN General Assembly, September 15, 2005, para. 138–139, http://www.unfpa.org/icpd/docs/2005summit_eng.pdf. In this document’s exact, if convoluted, words: “The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” (para. 139).

20. See the Preamble to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted July 17, 1998, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/index.html.

21. See “Situations and cases,” International Criminal Court (last accessed in September, 2009), http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Situations+and+ Cases. Of these fourteen indictments and arrest warrants, five were against Ugandan members of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (though one indictee has since died), five against nationals of the Democratic Republic of Congo, three against Sudanese nationals charged with prosecuting the government’s counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur (including Sudan’s President Omar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir), and a fourth one against a Sudanese national with the rebel United Resistance Front.

22. See Philip Gourevitch, “The Life After,” New Yorker, May 4, 2009; also see our Section 4, “Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” in the present work.

23. See Final Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals (September 30, 1946), http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/judcont.asp, specifically “The Common Plan or Conspiracy and Aggressive War,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp#common, emphasis added.

24. See “Human Rights Watch Policy on Iraq,” undated statement, ca. late 2002 or early 2003, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/iraq/hrwpolicy.htm. For a critique of Human Rights Watch, see Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, and George Szamuely, “Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party,” Electric Politics, February 26, 2007, http://www.electricpolitics.com/2007/02/human_rights_watch_in_service.html.

25. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 101.

26. See Richard Seymour, The Liberal Defense of Murder (New York: Verso, 2008).

27. According to Marc W. Herold at the University of New Hampshire: “Obama’s Pentagon has been much more deadly for Afghan civilians than was Bush’s in comparable months of 2008. During January-June 2008, some 278–343 Afghan civilians perished at the hands of U.S./NATO forces, but for comparable months under Team Obama the numbers were 520–630.” (“Afghanistan: Obama’s unspoken tradeoff,” Frontline (India), August 29–September 11, 2009, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20090911261813000.htm.) Herold adds that under Obama, two other things have changed as well: The preponderance of U.S.-NATO violence has shifted from aerial attacks to attacks by ground forces; and the “public face of the war” has also shifted, from the rightly discredited George W. Bush, to someone more fluent in the language and imagery of American liberals.

28. Peter Baker, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Reflections on The Politics of Genocide
• Foreword by Noam Chomsky
• Introduction
• Constructive Genocides
• Nefarious Genocides
• Some Benign Bloodbaths
• Mythical Bloodbaths
• Concluding Note
• Notes
• Index