America: 'The Leading Terrorist State And Proud Of
It'
By CJ Werleman
August 07, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "MEE
" - According to the Pentagon, US led
airstrikes against ISIS have killed only two civilians: both
children – “likely in Syria”.
A new report compiled by the non-profit group
Airwars, which
tracks coalition airstrikes in the Middle East, documents up to 591
civilian deaths from more than 50 credible incidents – involving
5,600 airstrikes.
In 1928, when
Arthur Ponsonby, a British politician, said, “When war is
declared, the first casualty is the truth” – he never specified what
the distorted “truth” might be. If one were to examine all wars the
US has engaged in modern history, however, one might conclude the
casualty to be civilian death counts.
The US government and its ever-reliable mainstream
media cheerleaders rarely, if ever, discuss, debate, or dwell on
civilian casualties. To do so would be to acknowledge our own sins.
To acknowledge our sins would be to acknowledge the US is as
barbaric and uncivilised as those the US pretends pose an
existential threat.
“When enemies commit crimes, they’re crimes. In
fact, we can exaggerate and lie about them with complete impunity,”
says Noam Chomsky in an interview featured in Imperial
Ambitions: Conversations in a Post-9/11 World. “When we commit
crimes, they didn’t happen.”
Now even if you file US-caused civilian casualties
under the horribly euphemistic moniker “collateral damage,” you
must, at the very least, file those casualties accurately. But the
US has a history of underreporting civilian casualties at best, and
proactively concealing at worst.
In 2004,
The New York Times ran a piece about the tapes that
recorded conversations between President Nixon and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger. In one exchange, Kissinger says he wants to
sweep the 1969
My Lai massacre, where US Marines mass murdered as many as 500
civilians, “under the rug”.
As the air campaign against North Vietnam and the
South Vietnamese Viet Cong continued to fail, Nixon angrily
expressed his frustration. “They're not only not imaginative but
they are just running these things - bombing jungles,'' Nixon said.
''They have got to go in there and I mean really go in. I want them
to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small
planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's
start giving them a little shock.''
Kissinger immediately relayed the order to the
Pentagon: ''A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that
flies on anything that moves.''
Chomsky says this is the “most explicit call for
what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in
the historical record”.
More than a numbers game
So how many civilians did the US kill in both
Vietnam and Cambodia? Well, it depends on whom you ask. If you ask
the US government, “official records,” you get to a number around
2 million. If, however, you ask NGOs that track civilian
casualties, you get to a number closer to
4 million.
While there’s a big difference between 2 and 4
million, there’s an even bigger discrepancy between 4 million and
the number of civilian casualties the average American believes were
killed in Vietnam by US military actions. In
The Gulf War: A Study of the Media, Public Opinion, and Public
Knowledge, the authors conducted a poll in which Americans
were asked to estimate the number of Vietnamese killed in the war.
The mean answer was 100,000, which represents 5 percent of official
US estimates, and 2.5 percent of more credible estimates.
Of course, neither the above official and credible
figures include the estimated 500,000 who have died slow and painful
deaths over the course of the post-war decades from exposure to
chemical weapons –
Agent Orange and other dioxins.
More recently, the story of the 2003–2010 US
invasion and occupation of Iraq is a story of Bush administration
officials fudging the numbers on Iraqi casualties. In a
2005 press conference, President Bush was asked about the Iraqi
death toll. With what became his typical befuddled and dismissive
manner, Bush declared that only “30,000 Iraqi citizens” had been
killed in the conflict thus far.
Lancet, a highly regarded British medical journal,
however, published an “epidemiological study” in November 2004 that
concluded more than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed in “violent
actions” since the invasion. In 2006,
two household surveys – considered to be the most accurate
methodology for calculating casualties – put the Iraqi death toll at
somewhere between 400,000 to 650,000 – thus making a mockery of
Bush’s “30,000.”
“This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s
wars isn’t unique to Iraq,” observes John Tirman, author of
The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in American Wars.
“There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought
to the people who live in the nations where our military
interventions take place.”
Tirman likens US indifference to civilian
casualties to what social psychologists call the “just world
theory,” which argues, “Humans naturally assume that the world
should be orderly and rational. When that ‘just world’ is disrupted,
we tend to explain away the event as an aberration” and that when
wars start to go badly for the US, Americans tend to “ignore or even
blame the victims”.
US indifference
America’s indifference to civilian casualties is
also rooted in racism via what cultural historian
Richard Slotkin calls “the myth of the Frontier,” which posits
America is always trying to subdue a “savage enemy” and that it is
this myth that drives the way Americans see themselves and the world
around them. "The savage enemy kills and terrorises without limit .
. . in order to exterminate or drive out the civilised race (and)
the civilised race learns to respond in kind. A cycle of massacre
and revenge is thus inaugurated that drives both sides toward a war
of extermination,” writes Slotkin.
Indifference to foreign “savages” and suffering is
even codified into the US public education system.
Susan Fujita, an assistant professor of US modern history,
carried out a study of US history textbooks that were published in
the United States between 1949 and 2010.
Of 58 textbooks that mentioned the atomic bomb,
only 42 mentioned the civilian death toll of Hiroshima and only 18
mentioned the civilian death toll of Nagasaki. For Hiroshima, 35 of
the textbooks gave a lower figure than official United Nations
estimates. For Nagasaki, nearly all gave a lower figure than
official United Nations estimates.
So what were the United Nations estimates? For
Hiroshima, 140,000 killed civilians. For Nagasaki, 70,000 killed
civilians. Now compare these estimates to official US estimates,
which were carried out by the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which had
killed civilians at 70,000 and 35,000, respectively.
Our refusal to acknowledge the human cost our
violence inflicts upon those we seek to dominate, subjugate and
occupy blinds us to both the realities of war and the malevolence of
US imperialism. “It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of
imperial power are always among the last to know – or care – about
circumstances in the colonies,” wrote the late philosopher Bertrand
Russell.
Chomsky says we’re the last to know because of
“massive propaganda campaigns” that keep us from knowing and that
“when you’re silent about your own crimes, that’s propaganda, too”.
Go ahead. Conduct your own poll the next time
you’re chatting with Americans. Ask how many civilians were killed
in Vietnam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iraq, Syria, Panama, Cuba,
Nicaragua, Korea, etc. I bet they either don’t know or care. And
that’s what - as Chomsky wrote in a 2014
op-ed - makes America the “leading terrorist state and proud of
it”.
- CJ
Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, God Hates
You. Hate Him Back, Koran Curious, and is the host of Foreign
Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman
The views expressed in this article
belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the
editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Archive picture of an Islamic State
fighter in Iraq - not in the United States (AFP)
- See more at:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/fearful-americans-1248565567#sthash...
- CJ
Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, God
Hates You. Hate Him Back, Koran Curious, and is the host of
Foreign Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman
The views expressed in this article
belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the
editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Archive picture of an Islamic
State fighter in Iraq - not in the United States (AFP)
- See more at:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/fearful-americans-1248565567#sthash...
- CJ
Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, God Hates
You. Hate Him Back, Koran Curious, and is the host of Foreign
Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman
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