Tuesday, April 24, 2007
"The only thing for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"----- Edmund Burke
The State of That Which Is
Such is the state of human affairs, whether in the present age or in those that came before, that not a decade passes without humanity resurrecting, in some corner of the globe, in some forsaken nation, the devastation unleashed by human wickedness. Whether mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, endemic rape, pillage, scorched earth and yes, even Holocaust, human wickedness prevails upon the human condition, leaving us impotent beasts in its wake, unable to control or suppress its malevolent tentacles, seemingly powerless to alter or halt its predictable and disastrous momentum.
The barbarity to which we are predisposed, to which we are unable to exorcise from our nature, is as common to so-called primitive peoples, those humanity likes to call "third worlders," as it is to those societies considering themselves modern and developed. There is no difference between suicide bombers and guided missiles raining down from the sky. Technology does not behold humanity to label the terrorism falling from the sky as nobler, or as more moral, than that of terrorism bred through poverty. Possessing vast wealth and resources does not diminish murder and criminality, nor the birth of, and continuation in, a new Holocaust.
The crimes against humanity that are thrust upon the world with a consistency that betrays our anemic ability to control our mammalian nature do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity or religion. We are free to unleash wickedness, whether our powers derive from the machete or the smart-bomb, the suicide bomber or the guided missile, the knife or the machine gun, from tribal conflagrations or nation to nation war. The consistency by which human wickedness is thrust upon our conscious cannot be denied, nor can it be ignored.
Such is the state of human affairs, and so little progress have we made in dominating our primitive mammalian behaviors, that even in the supposed modern world of today, even in the supposed enlightened nations of the West, the harbingers of mass destruction and suffering are spawned, planned and executed. For those bastions of morality and exceptionalism we call the First World have realized that war is as old as humankind itself, and as profitable as well, for the violence that creates war is ingrained into our instincts, embedded into the most violent species the planet has ever evolved.
War and its multitude of deviations, along with its many devastating aftereffects, has never been controlled or sequestered; its extinction has never been a possibility granted the predisposition to our impotency of willpower. This reality the lords of war understand well. As long as internal strife exists inside a nation, as long as racial, ethnic and religious hatreds are fomented and maintained, and as long as tribes or peoples or sects or beliefs are allowed to mature into full blown animosity and anger there will be war.
As long as there exists individuals addicted to power and wealth, as long as governments and special interests vie for control of territory and land, as long as natural resources have immense value and as long as money is valued higher than people there will be war. As long as there is uneducation, intolerance, oppression, poverty, injustice, inequality and exploitation there will be war. As long as there is profit to be derived, money and power to be made, division to be birthed, resources to be stolen, there will be war.
As long as there is war, that is to say death, destruction, suffering and misery, there will also always be crimes against humanity, for war is the virus that unearths human wickedness and unleashes crimes against humanity upon each other. Indeed, if our history books and our anthropological and archeological studies teach us anything, if they convey any warnings that we must heed, it is that humankind has possessed a propensity to destroy one another from the time our first ancestors hung on trees.
This propensity, this inclination towards violence against members different than our own group or tribe, is apparent by observing our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, with whom we happen to share 98 percent of our genetic code with, as they wage violent war-like battles between groups. It is apparent with every war modern man gives birth to and nurtures through our indifference and silent acquiescence. It is apparent with every act of genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, mass murder, rape and extermination, in all corners of the globe, regardless of time and space. From primate cousins to modern man, violence is a reality, and a curse.
For if this malevolence that possesses us were not ingrained in our core, in our behaviors and psychologies, if it were not part of our human condition, would it keep surfacing over and over again, irrespective of time, distance, space and peoples? If our propensity to unleash carnage and violence upon each other were not part of who and what we really are, would such a thing as human wickedness and destruction and violence even exist? Would war and violence and devastation upon our fellow human beings? In fact, they exist because they possess us like a miscreant demon, living within our nature, controlling our destiny and our lives, unwilling to escape or be exorcised from our condition, creating the most violent species to ever roam Earth. War and genocide and Holocaust exist for the simple fact that we exist, because war without humans is no war at all, because violence of man against man cannot exist if there is no man, because humans are impotent to rid ourselves of that demon called human wickedness.
Indeed, our species has been defined through war and its inevitable crimes against humanity. Lingering in our midst for hundreds of thousands of years, endemic to all civilizations, tribes and peoples, the human wickedness we seemingly resuscitate with every new generation is a symptom of our disease, the very sickness maintaining us from advancing forward as a species. Just when we believe ourselves enlightened or reborn, just as we think we have exorcised the demons within, just as we think a new generation of humans has defeated that which enslaves us to our passions, released again and reborn forever is the violence and the destruction and the suffering and the mass murder and the catastrophe that is war.
Repeating the pattern that has held us hostage from time immemorial, we believe ourselves enlightened enough to think that violence and war and crimes against humanity will settle our differences, instead of increasing our animosity and hatreds. We have evolved war, yet war has not evolved us. There is but one common denominator in the perpetual stream of violence, war and crimes against humanity we have seen repeated over and over throughout history – whether it be written or long forgotten – and that is us, human beings, Homo sapiens. For we remain prisoners of our own delusions, slaves of our self-proclaimed exceptionalism, blinded to the true nature of our existence by the comfortable glow of our most primitive myths.
As long as we maintain our delusions, our purposeful ignorance, our disastrous belief in fictions and fables, the reality of man killing man will endure, long into perpetuity, possessing our nature and our condition, concocting war after war, molding violence and destruction through the deadly mixture of our instincts, behaviors and mammalian predispositions. Until we finally decide to purge the grip of our self-deception, of thinking ourselves beyond the realm of our reality and truth, of who and what we really are, and not what we pretend to be, humankind will linger on in the limbo of self-destruction, living a fantasy that does not comport with our reality, granting ourselves small windows of temporary sanity, inevitably blown to bits by the destructive qualities we chose to ignore and not confront.
The predictable unleashing of our worst inner demons invariably destroys all that is achieved during the small frames of sanity we exhibit. For every step we take forward in our evolution, the demons called human wickedness takes us ten steps back. This demon has prevented us from progressing to the full capabilities of human thought and understanding. In the near future, given our level of technology and modernity, it might very well be the catalyst that sends us back to the Stone Age or indeed, buries us permanently under the rubble of our once-great civilization. If the pattern continues, so will the trend, and in time, so will our self destruction, for as John F. Kennedy once said, "If we do not put an end to war, war will put an end to us."
Only time and our willingness to alter inevitability stand in the way of where we are headed. Only humankind can put a stop to human wickedness. Only we can destroy that which is slowly, but surely, destroying us all.
Abandonment of Brotherhood
How does one even begin to examine the devastation that Iraq has become? How does one begin to contemplate what is now, thanks to America’s illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, an utter collapse of incomprehensible proportions?
What was once the nation, and the people, of Iraq has been transformed into an amalgam of carnage, blood, misery and decimation the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II, or Vietnam. Iraq has become a human catastrophe, a defeat for humanity itself, birthed not through tempests or tsunamis or earthquakes, but through the criminality, corruption and human wickedness of one nation. It has been humankind that has routed itself in self-debasement, our failure to act one more silver chalice in our trophy case of human wickedness.
It boggles the mind to even begin to fathom the suffering and misery of the Iraqi people, a collection of what was once 25 million human beings, the vast majority living in peace and apparent happiness, maintaining sectarian harmony, content with stability and security, living normal lives and cherished memories. The collapse of their society into chaos and anarchy has been one of the most spectacular crimes against humanity ever witnessed. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Mesopotamia, creating, since the early 1990’s, a Holocaust that defies logic, reason and common sense, an evil so malevolent, so egregious, that its devastation will not cease until decades after Empire’s last throes have returned normalcy to the people of the planet. What is now seen as a debacle, as a failure, is nothing more than a malevolent crime of mass murder, rape and pillage, a crime against humanity itself.
The seeds of Holocaust were planted in the fertile soils of Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow, where humankind was nurtured, feeding off the bosom of rich land and life-giving water, at the beginning and after the end of the first Gulf War. It was at this time that the Iraqi people, and not the government, were chosen to feel the collective punishment of the rising Empire, a nation so consumed by hubris and arrogance that, using its vast powers of persuasion and control, instituted a regime of devastating sanctions, most targeting the infrastructure, food and medicine necessary for the general welfare of the populace.
The decision was made in the upper echelons of governance during the Clinton administration to enact and enforce sanctions that were always known to harm only average, ordinary citizens, those that depended on the state for health, food, shelter and education. This conscious decision was made even knowing that the Saddam Hussein regime would not suffer as a result of the sanctions. Indeed, the regime of sanctions was aimed specifically at the Iraqi people, 25 million innocent human beings whose only crime was being Iraqi, their homes located above the enormous fields of the devil’s excrement. The Iraqi people were about to feel the wrath of the American Empire, enabler and disseminator of a new Holocaust.
Compounded with the complete destruction by aerial bombing of Iraq’s electricity, sanitation, sewage, food production, medical industry and civil infrastructure during the war, all using radiation-saturated depleted uranium filled missiles, artillery and shells, a nation once among the healthiest on the planet began to feel the aftereffects of disease, cancers, stillbirths and deformities. With little food supplies trickling into the nation, hundreds of thousands of children and adults began to suffer malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Soon disease and malnutrition, easily remedied by adequate supplies of food and medicine, began to take their terrible and debilitating toll.
This medieval and barbaric blockade, sponsored, enacted, enforced, defended and maintained by the Empire, began to rob 25 million Iraqis of nutrition, healthcare, education and of the standard of living that was the envy of the Middle East. Iraq soon went from having some of the most nourished children and adults in the world to having one of the most malnourished populations on the planet. One of the best standards of living in the Middle East was transformed into a cesspool of backwardness, a rotting and eroding society robbed of strength and vitality. Without adequate medicines, supplies and machines, their importation into Iraq being prevented by America, children began to die by the thousands every month.
Children became weak and anemic, their bodies and bellies turning to symbols of malnutrition. Immune systems were weakened, collapsing the body’s ability to fight disease, toxins and viruses. Those once healthy and strong now succumbed to easily preventable diseases and viruses, losing once vibrant energy, losing the will to live. Those once bright and intelligent had their development halted, for food and the energy needed to sustain growth dwindled. Children began to die in an epidemic of economic genocide, enacted and enforced by the American Empire, as always tightening the noose on the sanctions regime, as always caring nothing for the plight of millions of Iraqis. An entire generation of Iraqi children had perished, vanished from the Earth, never more able to play and dream and grow up, never able to experience the life we all strive to have.
After a decade of sanctions, up to one million Iraqi children had died, with 500,000 adults buried in graves as well, the products of easily preventable disease, the products of a nation not being allowed to have medicine, supplies and the necessary machines that can save lives. Close to 5,000 children were dying every month, to say nothing of those whose brain and body development became stagnant due to malnutrition. By the beginning of the 21st century, the American Empire had caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, spirits like you and I, never to take a breath of air or a gulp of water, never having the opportunity to grow old and enjoy the wonders of life, perishing in a war upon the Iraqi people they were impotent to wage war against.
The seeds of Empire had been planted, cast upon soils of genocide, watered with the blood of dead Iraqi children, winds of devastating silence spreading disease and viruses and cancer and mutations to all corners of Mesopotamia, affecting rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, its invisible wickedness scattering itself into young and old, indiscriminately securing new victims through the inhalation of oxygen.
By the time new Pearl Harbors had been concocted by the Empire, by the time towers were demolished and the American people became the obedient warmongers of those cheerleaders pretending to be leaders, by the time Iraq had been chosen for destruction, invasion and occupation, up to two million Iraqis had died at the hand of the Evil Empire, victims of sanctions, a genocide in itself, a Holocaust by any definition, though only a precursor to what was yet to come.
The devastation of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has brought unfathomable levels of misery and suffering to the Iraqi people. The utter debacle that is Iraq, many would say the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy, has become a monument to human wickedness, yet at the same time it represents one of the most egregious criminal enterprises in the history of humankind.
For what transpires today, and what has transpired for the last four years, cannot be labeled as a mistake, or a lie, or a quagmire. What it is, indeed, what it has always been, is a crime against humanity, war crimes of the highest order, a conspiracy that has led to the collapse of Iraq as a state and to a creation of a Holocaust that will in the end, years from today – when combined with the economic genocide of the 1990’s, endemic disease and the radiation poisoning that will kill for decades to come – have cost the lives of anywhere from four to six million human beings, to say nothing of the refugee crisis, the mass displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, the loss of property, collapse of society, of lives altered, nation shattered and child development damaged.
The Iraq War represents humanity at its worst, with the elite of the Empire destroying a nation as an excuse to rebuild it, caring nothing for dark skinned Arabs, yet claiming contracts in the billions of dollars, as always designed to pillage the American treasury and rob the people. Meanwhile, the American masses have and continue to sit silently in lazy obedience and acquiescence while war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed in our name. Like the Good Germans of World War II, millions of Americans will one day claim they had no idea what was being done in Iraq, all the while knowing that comfort and gluttony helped maintain silence and willful ignorance to one of the worst cases of human wickedness ever to rise from the violent nature of humankind. To millions of Americans, the latest gossip from tele-trash and infotainment has more value than a Holocaust presently being waged by our government.
Where humanity once rose and was nurtured today only Holocaust, torture, mass detentions, mass rapes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, radiation poisoning, stunted development, miscarriages, hatred and dehumanization can be seen, as clear as sunlight, penetrating deep into the dark recesses of our conscious, wanting to stop blood from flowing and body parts from exploding, yet impotent and unwilling to put a halt to a nightmare Iraqis live on a daily basis and Americans only read about.
To be living in Iraq today is to live in constant and perpetual fear, unable to walk once tranquil streets, unable to shop in comfort, as always grazing bullets and bombs, unsure where explosions will go off next, afraid to be caught between warring factions. It is to experience an insecurity and a fear no American has ever felt inside our shores, of chaos, anarchy, of civil war where to be one religious sect and not another could cost you your life, and that of your family. To live in Iraq is to be subjected to daily car bombs and suicide bombers exploding in markets and streets, of having bullets whizzing by your head, of shrapnel attacking your every pore. It is to breathe the smell of death in every street corner, of feeling the concussions of bombs reverberating inside your home, and head.
To live in Iraq is to be unsure whether you will make it through the end of the day, if you will see another sunrise, another sunset. It is to see 70 percent of your children exhibiting symptoms of acute stress and traumatic disorders, not being able to sleep at night because the nightmare of what they have seen, smelled and heard cannot be exorcised from their minds. It is to see your child become a constant bed wetter due to the fear and insecurity that roams her mind. It is to see your son unable to comprehend the endemic death and bodies he sees trying to get to school. It is to witness as your child can no longer learn what she is taught, nor understand her schooling, as the fear and stress of living in civil war has become too much to bear. To live in Iraq is to realize that there are now 900,000 children who are orphans, their parents dead from a war that makes no sense, their tiny minds forced to confront the reality of being alone. It is to experience death firsthand, in large numbers, as no family left in Iraq has gone unharmed, without a murder of a relative.
To be Iraqi today is to see the most horrible deformities in young children, many mutated unlike anything seen before, a product of the invisible ghost of death afflicting expectant mothers, its radiation penetrating a body’s pores and bloodstream, traveling into placentas and embryos. To be Iraqi is to see cancer become an endemic reality, over the last fifteen years growing exponentially and methodically, inevitably claiming its victims with the tumors and infections caused by depleted uranium, becoming a silent killer that will last centuries, quite possibly altering the genetic code of your fellow citizens.
To be an Iraqi today is to realize that the professional class has left the country, becoming refugees in Syria or Jordan, a number two million strong, while one million more have become displaced within their own nation, ethnically cleansed by religious sects, forced to leave their homes, possessions and neighborhoods, forced to abandon both hope and lives once worth living. To remain living inside Iraq is to witness criminals control the streets and militias transforming entire neighborhoods and districts. To remain in Iraq is to live without doctors or medical providers, knowing that it has become too dangerous for them to stay. It is to see professors assassinated on a daily basis, many now having fled along with architects, teachers, engineers and state officials. To remain in Iraq is to see the shortage of professionals, to see that only the poor and those that do not have the money to flee remain, trapped in hell on Earth, in a land a devastation, of Holocaust.
The state of Iraq has now lost 1,000,000 citizens since the beginning of America’s war of arrogant ignorance began. In four years, one million human beings have died, an average of 250,000 every year, nearly 70 people every day. Combined with the two million people who have died as a result of sanctions, it can be stated that 3 million Iraqis have died since the early 1990’s. The carnage has only intensified, with bombings routinely killing 200 Iraqis one day and 150 more another day. Assassinations of military age men has become routine, found in the morning haze, bullet holes in the back of their heads, victims of America’s counter-insurgency, El Salvador-style tactics. Over 20,000 men, most of them innocent civilians, now saturate America’s vast gulag system in Iraq, held captive without due process, existing in limbo and uncertainty, in essence kidnapped from their homes or from the street, victims of American dehumanization and ignorance of culture. How many of these men have been or are tortured in places such as Abu Ghraib? How many have died while in custody, made to disappear, forever lost in some remote mass grave?
To be in Iraq is to be living in hell on Earth, a place so devastating, so horrific, that it has become the rule, not the exception, to see feral dogs eating from dead corpses. It is to see football fields become mass graveyards, mosques become mortuaries, and how missiles and artillery destroy homes and businesses, turning lives into rubble. It is to experience the rape of your daughter, the mental retardation of your son, the humiliation of your family, the invasion into your home by American forces, the dehumanization of American boots stomping your face, placing a dark hood over your head, taking your clothes off, calling you humiliating words, treating you like an animal.
Living in Iraq is to survive day to day, roaming city streets ducking bombs and bullets, possessing little money for food, lost in a sea of fear and uncertainty, unable to find employment, having two to four hours of electricity, an unworkable sewage and garbage collection system, having to spend up to three days waiting in line in order to fill your vehicle with gasoline. It is to have the smell of death permeate your every pore every single day, the smell of bombs and smoke and bullets becoming constant reminders of your closeness with death. It is to wonder if luck and fate will decide a car bomb will blow you to bits when you walk to the market, or whether a sniper will cause your head to explode like a watermelon. It is to fear an American contractor or soldier will decide your vehicle should be machine-gunned for fun and games, because it is cool to destroy the lives of enemies that are not considered human, and whether your son and father have had enough of the occupation and humiliation and will inevitably join the resistance.
To be Iraqi is to wonder if the world has forgotten your plight, if it even cares about the fate of millions of your fellow citizens. To live in Iraq is to see the worst in the human condition, to see human wickedness stamped with the seal of the United States. It is to believe life has abandoned you, wondering what you and your people have done to deserve America’s wrath and punishment. It is to wish for the nightmare to end, to wake up to normalcy, to security and peace, just how it was before, when Iraq was a model for the Middle East and the Arab world. You want to open your eyes and hope the last two decades have been but an illusion, a hallucination that does not really exist.
Perhaps you feel hope has been lost, that wickedness has triumphed, that Iraq will never be the same, that she is no more, that the land of fertile soils and running water has ceased to be a viable society. You think the occupation will never end, that America will be your master until the last drop of oil is exhausted, that the nightmare you have lived will only dissipate when the Empire is defeated by the resistance, or by its own over-extension and ignorance. You see a one-hundred acre fortress being built, larger even than the Vatican, the largest embassy the world has ever seen quickly rising from Iraqi ground, and you know the Empire will never leave. You see permanent military bases sprouting up alongside petroleum pipelines and you notice the pillage of your land’s oil through laws enacted by the Empire’s puppets and you weep for a nation destroyed from within, damned by the devil’s excrement, cursed by Western powers who for a century have only cared for the black gold lying below your feet.
Most importantly, perhaps, you wonder where the voice of the world has gone, in her uncomfortable silence, in her complete stillness, why she does not heed your calls for help, why she fails to stop the carnage and the destruction, why she has turned a blind eye to you and your people. You look to the heavens and ask why even in Iraq’s despair and suffering the world’s people have abandoned millions of her children to the greed and hubris of the rapacious Pax Americana. You ask fate why the American people have done nothing to stop this new Holocaust from continuing, why they casually ignore the plight of Iraqis, why they continue their blissful ignorance of reality. You ask why the death of millions of Iraqis is hardly mourned, why the maiming and psychological devastation of her children is ignored, why her implosion as a state and as a people is hidden from the beautiful minds of Americans.
In the end, you ask yourself how a nation that mourns the tragic loss of thirty-two college students, with wall to wall media coverage, with flags flying at half staff nationwide, with services held from coast to coast, rarely, if ever, cares to even blink at the death and horrible misery of millions of Iraqis, or offer the same mourning, memorials and media coverage to the death, and memory, of nearly 3,500 of its sons and daughters. You ask how it is not understood by the people of the world that Iraq loses in one month what America lost in one day, on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 innocent victims of state terrorism and psychological war were murdered.
Holocaust Redux
It is reality, not hyperbole, to describe what is presently happening in Iraq as a new Holocaust, a new paradigm of devastation and destruction, of mass murder and horrific suffering. An entire nation has been made to implode, an entire society has been disemboweled, its vital organs gutted and spilled into hell on Earth. The blood of one million Iraqis covers her streets, the severed body parts of the maimed pile up on her corners, and the severed psychology of her youth lies in tatters. Iraq’s entire society is in disarray, her upper and middle classes having fled her bosom, living the life of refugees, her poor and working classes trapped in an inferno from which escape is but a wishful dream.
Disease and radiation poisoning, those silent assassins that kill and murder in clandestine pleasure, those unleashed poisons imported by the Empire, have and will continue to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s poorest and weakest individuals. For like the gas chambers of yesteryear, radiation poisoning from depleted uranium, along with the Empire’s destruction of sanitation, sewer and civil infrastructure, will, in the end, kill countless and as yet untold numbers of Iraqis, most forced to suffer sickness and cancer, deformity and miscarriage, misery and death.
For a Holocaust does not need toxic chambers to count its dead, nor crematoriums to hide its victims. It does not depend on concentration camps to starve its prisoners, nor barbed wire to hide the truth. Deadly poison can be released into the air, penetrating soil, crops, water and food, slowly penetrating human bodies, killing from within. It can be created by the destruction of the infrastructure needed to contain and fight off infection, disease and outbreaks. Holocaust exists in sanctions that refuse to let in vital medicines and food, it exists in making the Iraqi nation itself into an enormous concentration camp. Holocaust can be flamed by the dropping of bombs, missiles or artillery into homes and neighborhoods. Holocaust can be created, molded and furthered by causing civil war among religious sects, using counter-insurgency machinations to divide and conquer, caring nothing for the plight of millions caught in the crosshairs of a societal collapse engineered by the Empire’s war architects. In the end, the result is the same, whether a Holocaust is molded by Nazis or nurtured by the Empire itself. The only reality that changes is the method to the madness and the cast of characters for whom the flame of humanity has long since ceased to exist.
What the world is seeing today, for those few who care to see and disturb their beautiful minds, is a carnage and a devastation that fits the pattern of Holocaust throughout humankind’s brief reign on the planet. The Iraq Holocaust, while still not apparent to all, while still hidden from the conscious of the world, while still taking place even today, is but another manifestation of a pattern that is all too familiar to the human condition.
For no ethnic minority or religious group can claim a monopoly on Holocaust, no matter how convenient it has become, no matter how beneficial its incantation and remembrance may be. Holocaust is an all-inclusive devastation, a human wickedness that preys upon all peoples, throughout all time and space, whether they be from 20th century Armenia, Korea, Manchuria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or World War II’s wickedness, which killed tens of millions in Russia and more than a dozen in Germany and Eastern Europe. The term Holocaust is not exclusive to any one particular group, nor can its use be defined by Empire's propagandists or by history’s victors.
Of course the Empire will never call what is happening in Iraq a Holocaust, for to do so would criminalize the very enterprise of destroying a nation and its people for the purpose of controlling its vast oil fields. To call the Iraq Holocaust by its rightful name would be to make war criminals of its architects, its boosters, its propagandists, its stenographers and its military leaders. It would be to place the Empire on par with some of the worst atrocities of the vanquished Nazi regime, creating comparisons between warmongers and leaders of different eras. To call what is happening in Iraq by its proper term would be to make tens of millions of American citizens the equivalent of yesterday’s good Germans. To allow the use of the term Holocaust to describe present day Iraq, America would risk the shame and scorn of the people of the world, becoming a pariah nation, a rogue state, and a failed people.
The Empire will never allow the term Holocaust to be used alongside the reality, and devastation, of Iraq. The truth of what has been done and continues to be unleashed upon Iraqis will, as always, be whitewashed and made to be hidden in a dark, dank recess of history’s uncomfortable dirty little secrets. In time, even though the magnitude of what transpired in Iraq will become known to some, its truth will be suppressed, its reality contorted, its victims soon forgotten. Just as three to four million dead Vietnamese were erased from uncomfortable memories, just as that Holocaust was a reality that never took place, so too will the Iraq Holocaust dissipate from our conscious, to be replaced by the dumbed-down heroin of tele-trash, the addiction of infotainment, usurped by the only Holocaust that ever took place, the only one that matters, the only mass murder that must remain ingrained in our memories, never allowed to be replaced, never allowed to be forgotten.
Yet to the Iraqi people, to those that will invariably survive the catastrophe that has been imported to their land, the Iraqi Holocaust will remain an all too real calamity, a truth that exists in rubble, in mass graves, in the memory of lost souls and never forgotten memories. To these human beings, the millions that have already died, along with the millions that have yet to perish, will never be forgotten, becoming a reality ignored by the world, yet remaining entrenched like a small flame inside the hearts of survivors. Every deformity or mutation of Iraqi babies will remind survivors of the poisons unleashed by the Empire. Every death caused by malignant cancer and disease will bring back memories of dropped bombs and devastating guided missiles. Every scar, burn and amputated limb will forever become a horrific and eternal memory and reminder that cannot be erased from one’s brain, their grotesque appearance becoming a time machine of suffering and misery. Seared in their minds for decades and centuries to come, the Iraq Holocaust and its creator will never be forgotten, to be passed down to each new child born, to each new generation.
In time the present collapse and corruption of humanity, the present entanglement of human wickedness, this thing called Holocaust, which we as a species always vow to never again repeat, will predictably be replaced by another such tragedy. In time that new horror will itself be replaced by yet another. The cycle of violence will continue, just as it has always been, just as it will always be, for its viciousness has never been stopped, its demons have never been controlled. We are slaves to its demands, mere weaklings to its call to arms. Impotent we have been from the very beginning, from the genesis of humankind, passing enlightenments, reformations, renaissance and modernity, and still today it cannot be defeated, still we have failed to free ourselves from its omnipotent grip. Every century that passes we fall prey to its temptations and its cruelty, its brief rewards and long-term curse.
Today, in every corner of the globe, in every continent where man exists the genesis of the next Holocaust is being birthed. Somewhere, someplace, the next Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or Bush is being nurtured by hate or anger, feeding off the breast of intolerance and ideology, living among corruption of morality, breeding in the self a taste for psychotic narcissism. For it is a given that wherever man settles in, death, destruction, extermination and devastation soon follows. It is written in our history books, in stone tablets, in our cultures and ruined cities. Its warnings and lessons are everywhere, if only we wished to look. It is wired into our human condition. It remains a virus afflicting our conscious, never exorcised, always resurrected.
Somewhere, someplace, a leader is being molded among men, as always infected in delusion, infested with selfishness, though possessing the qualities of attraction, of leadership, of hypnotizing thousands through stare and voice. It is this human being, like so many that have come before, that will recruit a group of like minded individuals, each, like him, with an insatiable thirst for power, immoral in character, criminal in personality, in time concocting power grabs and debasement of the human condition.
It is from these so-called leaders of men, these alpha males, from where human wickedness derives, flowing from its oasis of hate, through rivers of unending blood and carnage. For mostly, throughout time, it is the warmongers, the war-like leaders that create the devastation and destruction called Holocaust. It is from war-like leaders that war-like people are created. It is from them where human wickedness derives, passing from person to person like a virus, making monsters of us all.
Such is the state of human affairs that one Holocaust will give rise to another, and another after that, filling a century of civilization with systematic death and murder. Its consistency is overwhelming, clear as day to see, for those willing to confront uncomfortable realities. For every step forward we take, our self-destructive ways push us back ten, committing us to the primitiveness that has yet to be surpassed and the mammalian behaviors we have yet to understand. The human wickedness will continue until we reach an enlightenment of who and what we truly are, escaping the machinations and institutions that spawn hatred, injustice, inequality, anger, division, bigotry, animosity, oppression, ignorance and poverty.
From where will the next Holocaust be born, ruining land and people, corrupting humankind ever more? When will humanity say enough is enough, never again, and actually mean it? Will it be when we put an end to war and human wickedness, or when war and human wickedness put an end to us? In the meantime, the seeds of the next act of human devastation are today being planted. Where, we wonder, will this wicked weed grow next? For where can be anywhere, and anywhere can be gone tomorrow.
In Iraq we find the answer, for its shows where we have been, where we at present are and where we will again, and inevitably, soon be.
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