Churchill v Hitler — Empire Will Out

The reality of slavery, its cruelty, as well as the heroism of its resisters, was made evident to Americans through the speeches and writings of the Abolitionists, the testimony of escaped slaves, the presence of magnificent black witnesses like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages — there is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

"In 1943 at the latest the SNB had knowledge of the systematic extermination of victims of the Nazi regime," the study said. "Nonetheless, SNB decision-makers neglected taking measures to distinguish looted gold from the other gold holdings of the Reichsbank (the Nazi's central bank)."

If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain;
If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works? [Prov. 24:11-12]

Australian Radio: In the first Gulf War, the first President Bush told the Iraqi people to "take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Then when the people of Basra took his advice and rose up, they found they had no support from the Coalition, which withdrew and left them to the tender mercies of that same dictator.

Slate magazine:In view of that understanding, Bush had no business promising to send troops into Iraq to assist a Shiite uprising. And in fact, he didn't. Three weeks into the war, Bush observed, "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside, and then comply with the United Nations resolutions." That was a fact and a suggestion, no less true or wise than an equivalent remark about the Cuban or Serbian people. But it wasn't a promise. We couldn't promise the Shiites we would enter Iraq, since we had already promised our coalition partners we wouldn't.

AMY GOODMAN: Your comment on the latest -- we know about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from U.S. soldiers. You have your own scandal with British soldiers and then the Guantanamo prisoners returning home here to Britain.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, you see, the ironclad consensus of the mainstream political parties, the front benches and the BBC and the other mainstream media outlets like to reassure each other that this is conduct unrepresentative of British occupation forces. But I'm sorry to tell you it is entirely representative. When Britain suppressed the Mau Mau freedom struggle in Kenya, they killed 100,000 Kenyans. Almost exactly the same number of Iraqis have been killed in the war and occupation. They used to cut off the limbs of Kikuyu tribes people and pin them to the wall and take photographs of them. They used to pay British soldiers five pounds per body for Kikuyu that they brought in. In Malaya when we crushed the Malayan revolt for freedom, we killed 10,000 Malays. I’ve seen pictures of British soldiers holding the severed heads of Malay people for the cameras. This is how all occupations end.

These things don't happen because the soldiers in question are American or British anymore than general Sharon's army behaves as it does because it is Israeli, still less because it's Jewish. They behave like that because they are occupying armies, and all occupations end this way. They end in the demonization, the subhumanization of the occupied people, a belief in the inherent superiority of the occupied forces; otherwise, why should we be there reorganizing their societies? And that inevitably leads when you're dealing with 17, 19, 21-year-old young men with weaponry against helpless civilian populations, it always ends in an Abu Ghraib.