The Word "Genocide"
...and other unmentionables.
I don’t think my mom’s first husband fought totalitarianism and fascism in World War II and died in action over North Korea years later, just so the press could one day debate gutting habeas corpus like it was a normal thing to do.
And I know her 2nd husband, coincidentally my father (according to my mother), didn’t risk his life fighting totalitarianism and fascism in World War II, just so Democrats, along with the rest of the country, could lie down like obedient dogs and let home-grown American nazis send human beings to foreign death camps just for the offense of protesting American-funded genocide. But here we are 80 years later with all those things happening and more. (Incidentally, I don’t know what the guy with the cat is doing in the first photo.)
“Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open.”Vinnie Rotondaro
This didn’t happen overnight. It took decades of cowardice, neglect, lies and abuse from both parties. Mostly led by Republicans with Democrats eagerly following suit out of some pathetic need to appear tough and law-and-orderly.
My parents taught me at an early age to beware of uniforms and guns, people wearing uniforms and guns, people wanting others to wear uniforms and guns, the people commanding the people wearing uniforms and guns, aaaaand religion.
Yes my dad wore a uniform and my mother married a guy in a uniform. And after the first man she married, who wore a uniform and piloted a giant bomb-dropping machine, died over Korea, she married his friend, my father. He also wore a uniform and helped flight-engineer a huge bomb-dropping flying machine over India, China and Japan. It wasn’t the “average Joe” who wore them that troubled my parents.
My parents had Air Force friends late into their lives and would reminisce about their friendships. Friendships forged in an atmosphere flying 14,000 feet above sea level amid hours of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror sitting on flack jackets hoping nothing explodes under you. All happening under high-command leadership conditions, my father later recounted to me, that sounded like something straight out of Catch 22.1
What troubled my parents was the culture, the system and the people who sent young people to Korea, Vietnam and Iraq to enrich the war industry and get killed while trying to kill darker-skinned people for their stuff. Or to practice for WWIII against Russia. That is why my mother always said she’d drive her sons to Canada before letting them get taken by the military.
Oh sure there’s plenty reason to distrust most uniforms or anyone carrying a gun. Because for many, the uniform became a symbol of corruption, incompetence, and an atavistic impulse to bully. A trap for the unsuspecting victim who would later become overpowered by the Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower cautioned against.
Which brings me to the Clintons, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and assorted specimens of the Democratic party. Who like John McCain, never met a war they didn’t like. And they enthusiastically helped the right-wing set every precedent and open every door possible for the current Trump cult fascists to defile the White House and spray their splooge all over the Bill of Rights instead of an intern’s dress.
Let’s take Barack Obama. A Democrat who dropped 26,000 bombs a year on civilians, extrajudicially assassinated citizens on foreign soil (There goes habeas corpus, right?), never prosecuted Wall St. for destroying the lives of millions Americans, gave the Gulf of Mexico back to BP, helped fund the Saudi genocide in Yemen and 6 new illegal wars against brown-skinned people for oil. He also routinely threatened journalists and whistleblowers with prison. But not before he gave Congress to the Tea Party.
The Obama Administration and the Press, From the Committee to Protect Journalists:
"Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters’ phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being “an aider, abettor and/or conspirator” of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."
Habeas corpus? Schmabeas schmorpus!
ACLU- Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority To Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones
“The Obama administration today argued before a federal court that it should have unreviewable authority to kill Americans the executive branch has unilaterally determined to pose a threat.”
And take Joe Biden, please. His 2024 Budget included a $1.9 billion (7 percent) base budget increase for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Or as United We Dream put it:
“Since the start of his administration, President Biden’s funding for ICE and CBP has grown exponentially, demonstrating a deep betrayal of his promises to usher in a pro-immigrant future for the country. MAGA extremists have always used the government spending package as a vehicle to ram through exorbitant funding to ICE and CBP, all in an effort to further their anti-immigrant agenda and block communities who are struggling across the country from getting the resources they actually need to live and survive. This spending bill caves to that far-right agenda and fails the very people the President vowed to protect.”
And here’s a letter signed by 200 NGOs (including Amnesty International) against Biden’s increased ICE budget and detention camps. Sound familiar?
“We write to express outrage over your administration’s expansion of the cruel and unnecessary immigration detention system.”
Yeah, I’m “both-sidesing” this so shut up. For years Democrats have backed bloated budgets for rogue agencies like ICE, CBP, DHS, NSA, CIA, FBI, and FUBAR.
Those are called “precedents.” Bad precedents, not good ones. The kind you should never use on your way up the ladder, because why? You never know who’ll use them against you on your way down.
And What of Genocide?
Even with practically no coverage from actual Palestinians on American news the majority of Americans for the first time are against Israel’s actions. It takes a special kind of political coward not to call genocide “genocide” under the circumstances. And Democrats are a special kind. Doing the right thing inspires voters. It inspires other politicians to come out against the brazen genocide, against funding it. The whole point of having self respect and a conscience is to use them.
Why use the word “genocide”? Because it’s fucking genocide!2 Simple as defined by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 in response to the Nazi atrocities of WWII. The word has great importance, which is why practically no one in American politics wants to use it. AIPAC will attack them, fund their opponents and destroy their political careers. Professors risk their tenures and jobs, students risk getting thrown out of schools and into jails. The only people on corporate media who've used it, like Mehdi Hasan and Joy Reid, quickly lost their jobs for the crime of giving Arabic and Palestinian voices time on their shows. The term "genocide" was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin near the end of the war to define the actions of the Holocaust and crimes akin to it, like the Armenian genocide. It is a recognizable international crime whose prosecution and punishment is bound by a worldwide treaty of nations. That's why the word is important, because it has real consequences. And Israel is "our greatest ally”. And we’re funding it.
Why use the word? For the same reason black Americans sat at lunch counters, conducted protests and fought for their rights under the most discouraging conditions with little hope of moving anyone in power or seeing significant results in their lifetime. For the same reason college kids (myself included) took part in anti-apartheid protests, many doing it for years. Because it's the morally right thing to do and anything less is being on the wrong side of history. Because it's genocide. And we're funding it, Joe Biden funded it. Both parties eagerly funded it and continue to do so and it needs to be said out LOUD. Because someone like Bernie, when he's not a sniveling coward bending to the lies of the Clintons and Biden during a primary, has a commanding voice and people pay attention to him.
Yet Sanders, a vocal critic of Israel’s carnage, still mockingly dismisses the importance of the term. Which is a grotesque and cowardly position to take. He’s not helping anyone here but a racist, right-wing government and its backers. If America collectively does nothing to stop it, what does that make us? We're already an internationally lawless bully to much of the world. We refuse to recognize the ICC and ICJ. Continuing on with this self-manufactured horror will be a defining moral defeat we'll never be able to recover from. Politicians should have the goddamn guts to sacrifice their stupid jobs to stop this. It's what they're supposed to do. It's their moral obligation.
If voters wish to stop Donald Trump and save what’s left of our democracy, they should stop blindly supporting Democrats who enable him. Stop surrendering your vote to politicians who think courting right-wing voters and politicians is a good strategy. Fascists are always going to act like fascists. It’s up to an opposition party to combat this at every turn, not reach across the aisle to make pals with nazis, even if they are dumber than Colonel Klink. Democrats helped make this Great Bigly Reality possible. Republicans merely took the initiative and made it happen. And wear a fucking mask.
Yesterday Jonathan Larsen of The Fucking News spoke about Trump’s tariff chaos:3
“The one thing I will say in terms of a possible ray of light is that, if it hits the way the worst scenarios look like, we’re all going to be in this together. And that’s how you create momentum and inertia for actual real short-term relief, but also long-term positive change.”
I’m hoping “momentum and inertia for actual real short-term relief” also applies to everything else. Just like Chris Hedges’ call for “acts of sustained mass civil disobedience” does. And that really would be a ray of light.
During the early months of 1944, 80% of the original B-29s in the Asia campaign crashed, killing half of the B-29 crews.
List of NGOs and international law and genocide scholars who say it’s genocide:
Doctors Without Borders
The World Health Organization
Oxfam
Save the Children
The World Food Program
UNICEF.
Human Rights Watch
Former executive director of both Human Rights Watch and ACLU, Aryeh Neier
Amnesty International.
B'Tselem.
The UN.
The ICC.
The ICJ.
The Red Cross.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The Lancet Medical Journal.
Haaretz (Israeli paper).
Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
+972 (Israeli investigative magazine).
-Boston University School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic (University Network for Human Rights UNHR)
-International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School
-Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria
-Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School
-Israeli Holocaust and genocide Scholar at Brown University: Omer Bartov
-Raz Segal, Stockton University, Israeli historian and genocide scholar
-Haim Bresheeth, Jewish Israeli professor and son of Holocaust survivor
-Yosefa Loshitzky, University of London
-Noam Chomsky (genocide since at least the 2009 war against Gaza)
--over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence:
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
-Public Statement from 800 Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza:
https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/
You might also like Mourning Remembrance: A Collection of Mocking Obituaries.
And for entrancing collage art and disturbing satirical vocal interpretations of horrible politicians, subscribe to Martha Previte!
First Lady Melania Trump Unveils Bush in White House Ceremony
And buy my disturbing book by clicking on this evil link!
Great post, thank you. I do have trouble in blaming a President 100% for issues and policies brought forth by Congress with a veto proof majority. In such cases a president may agree if passing is inevitable. The Congress holds responsibility in many cases.
WOW you’re amazing