Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the the Crime of Genocide:
"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such; killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to member of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"
Lebensraum: A word coined by German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in it search for not just space, but sustenance.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her conquest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.
"Those who escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others ran through with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice...."
- The Massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut, 1636.
"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire... hacked, burned, set on fire... we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards didn't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it... I have just one last wish... let me be sentenced to death... i don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and i will go and have a field day in Juhapura, where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay... I will finish them off... let a few more of them die... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."
- Babu Bajrangi, one of the major leaders of the Gujarat Genocide, recorded during a sting operation.
Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who made the mistake of campaigning against Former Chief Minister Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. In the words of man who took part in the savagery:
"Five people held him, hen someone struck him with a sword... chopped off his hand, then his legs... then everything else, after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they had piles and set him in fire... Burned him half-alive."
The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, PC Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighborhood while the mod lynched Jaffri, murdering 70 people, and gang raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was appointed Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.
"Denial is saying, in effect, that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide." - Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty years of Denial
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Christopher Columbus day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90% of the original population (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with small pox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).
In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was "legal" at the time. The US has also refused to accept the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg - which killed hundred and thousands of civilians - were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. The argument here is that the government didn't "intend" to kill civilians.
Since the end of WWII, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10% of its population).
None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.
"The question is how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"
- Robert MacNamara, whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam war, to President of the World Bank - now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home, in his comfortable country.
Lebensraum
Posted by Evil Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 7:38 AM
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