In 1895 novelist and critic Anatole France—who campaigned for persecuted Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as early as the 1890s—wrote an essay in which he maintained that words are like coins. When freshly minted the images and inscriptions on them are clear. But by dint of constant circulation, they become effaced until the outlines are blurred and the words unintelligible.
As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson write in Genozidioaren politika, "During the past several decades, the word ‘genocide’ has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the twentieth century for which the word was originally coined often appears debased. Unchanged, however, is the huge political bias in its usage…." With their painstaking efforts to compile information and analyze the self-serving misuse of this term by the government, media, and establishment academic figures of the United States and its allies, the authors have performed a valuable service to the cause of truth and peace.
Combating "genocide" has now replaced combating communism in some notably left and liberal circles as a major intellectual and moral legitimation for an aggressive and interventionist U.S. foreign policy. It has been adopted to further U.S. and allied interests in Europe and Africa in particular, but has international applications. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the U.S.-based Genocide Prevention Task Force’s 2008 report Preventing Genocide, where the "Save Darfur" activism of the last decade is singled out as a model for how to "build a permanent constituency for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities." Herman and Peterson counter that though "Darfur has been…successfully framed as ‘genocide’," even "the signature Nefarious bloodbath of the early twenty-first century," we should take the Task Force’s praise of "Save Darfur" activism to mean rather that the "U.S. establishment’s handling of the western Sudan (ca. 2003-10) should serve as a model for how best to propagandize a conflict as ‘genocide’ and thus to mobilize elite and public opinion for action against its alleged perpetrator."
During the past two decades, the post-Cold War era, Washington has employed and exploited the word genocide to further its geopolitical objectives in several strategic parts of the world. As the foreword to the volume by Noam Chomsky warns, the one-sided, nakedly partisan, and frequently fact-distorting genocide stratagem not only diverts attention from genuine acts of mass killing and targeting of ethnic and other demographic groups perpetrated by the U.S., its allies, and client states, it also runs the risk of producing a boy who cried wolf effect, one moreover with a retroactive component.
Chomsky characterizes the authors’ work as indicting a practice that since "the end of the Cold War opened the way to an era of virtual Holocaust denial." That is, as facts such as those marshaled by Herman and Peterson demonstrate, the exaggeration, distortion, and even out-right fabrication of genocide accusations may produce as an unintended consequence a universal skepticism on the matter, even—most alarmingly—toward the genuine article, as World War II revisionism, neo-Nazism, and the formal rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators and even SS troops plague much of Europe.
The U.S. has rightly been accused of practicing double standards in relation to genocide accusations, condemning only mass killings (alleged as well as real) in nations whose governments are not viewed favorably by Washington and its allies. But it is, as defenders of U.S. foreign policy often state, not a question of being unable to respond to every crisis or of responding to the most egregious crisis first.
Instead, as Herman and Peterson meticulously detail, it is a fixed policy of situating cases and charges of genocide into four distinct categories, the first two applicable to the U.S. and its allies and clients, the second two to adversaries or other governments whose nations occupy space or possess resources coveted by Washington’s empire-builders and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Drawing on years of observation and analysis of international events—in Herman’s case, work extending over five decades—the authors present a four-point model for how the issue of genocide is viewed by the American government, the mainstream news media, and a battalion of "engaged" academics and handsomely-funded non-governmental organizations (the latter sometimes not so non-governmental).
As they explain: "When we ourselves commit mass-atrocity crimes, the atrocities are konstruktiboa, our victims are merezigabea of our attention and indignation, and never suffer ‘genocide’ at our hands—like the Iraqi untermenschen who have died in such grotesque numbers over the past two decades. But when the perpetrator of mass-atrocity crimes is our enemy or a state targeted by us for destabilization and attack, the converse is true. Then the atrocities are nefarious and their victims merezi of our focus, sympathy, public displays of solidarity, and calls for inquiry and punishment. Nefarious atrocities even have their own proper names reserved for them, typically associated with the places where the events occur. We can all rattle-off the most notorious: Cambodia (but only under the Khmer Rouge, not in the prior years of mass killing by the United States and its allies), Iraq (but only when attributable to Saddam Hussein, not the United States), and so on—Halabja, Bosnia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Kosovo, Raèak, Darfur. Indeed, receiving such a baptism is perhaps the hallmark of the Nefarious bloodbath."
Similar systematic and large-scale atrocities are carried out by U.S. clients—Indonesia against its own people from 1965 and 1966 and in East Timor from 1975-1999, Israel in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank from 1967 to the present day, Rwanda and Uganda in Congo (where over 5 and a half million people have perished over the last 12 years), Croatia’s Operation Storm onslaught in 1995, which caused the worst permanent ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II and its immediate aftermath. These are not condemned or even deemed regrettable, but are viewed by the U.S. political establishment as Benigno.
On the contrary, security and military actions taken by governments not aligned with the U.S., even against armed and cross-border separatist formations, are inevitably branded as gratuitous acts of what Coleridge called motiveless malignancy; that is, Nefarious genocide.
Related to the last category, the U.S. government and its news and NGO camp followers are not averse to inflating numbers, misattributing the cause of death, and inventing incidents to justify the charge of genocide to implement what are frequently pre-planned interventions, including sanctions, embargoes, travel bans on government officials, freezing governments’ financial assets abroad, funding and advising assorted "color revolutions," and ultimately bombing from 25,000 feet, beyond the range of a targeted country’s air defenses. What the authors call mitiko genocide, though with quite deadly consequences.
To illustrate these Constructive and Nefarious categories, Herman and Peterson conducted exhaustive database searches for usage of the word genocide by some of the major English-language print media in reference to what they call "theaters of atrocities." The various "theaters of atrocities" include, but are not limited to Iraq, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, the Tutsi of Rwanda, the Hutu and other peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the peoples of the western Sudan ("Darfur").
The results of Herman and Peterson’s database research are both predictable and appalling. In case after case, major English-language newspapers such as the New York Times eta Guardian (and countless others) used the word "genocide" in a manner that would have been approved of by the State Department, linking it consistently to toponyms like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur, but rarely if ever to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq—whether Iraq during the "sanctions of mass destruction" era (1990-2003) or since the U.S. invasion and military occupation (2003 on). There are, in the terms introduced by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky years earlier, "worthy" and "unworthy" victims in the system of "atrocities management" and each and every victim’s worthiness rises or falls depending on who’s doing the killing.
The worthiness of a victim to elicit concern and support depends not on the victim, but on the "worthiness" of the perpetrator. "Good" perpetrators. The U.S. and its allies—are incapable of bad actions, therefore, anyone on the receiving end of an American bomb or cruise missile is inherently unworthy. Genocide, murder on a grand scale, is treated not with the urgency and gravity the subject warrants but as the theme of a near-comic book morality play. We and they, good and bad.
An analogous bias exists, the authors detail, in relation to the work of the International Criminal Court and even more so with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The latter two are the institutionalization of victor’s justice and used by the U.S. against recalcitrant states on Washington’s enemies list.
International courts doing the bidding of the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization cohorts do not, Herman and Peterson point out, address the greatest cause of suffering brought about through human agency: wars of aggression. Although borrowing their lexicon from the Nuremberg Principles—e.g., "war crimes" and "crimes of humanity"—while adding "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" (with the last two used all but interchangeably), Western states are highly selective and equally self-serving in their interpretation of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the model for prosecuting international crimes of violence.
The U.S. and its Western allies, which launched three wars of aggression in less than four years (Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003) with the forced displacement of millions of civilians, have deliberately chosen to ignore the core proscription of the Nuremberg Trials, that of waging wars of aggression, "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
To relentlessly prosecute lesser crimes while perpetrating and abetting greater ones is the prerogative of the "world’s sole military superpower" (from Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech) and its allies. Governments of small, weak countries not sufficiently toeing Washington’s line are threatened with prosecution for actions occurring within their borders and the only "war crimes" trials conducted are also exclusively in response to strictly internal events. By design and selective enforcement, the new system of international law is what Balzac said of the law of his time, that it is a spider web through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Herman and Peterson have studied the above contrasts in the Balkans, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, examining the most salient examples in each locale to demonstrate the unconscionable dichotomy of "good" and bad genocides. Their model, however, possesses ready applicability to developments in other nations beyond those studied in Genozidioaren Politika. Colombia and Western Sahara are examples, as is Kosovo after 50,000 U.S. and NATO troops marched in 11 years ago and hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Roma (Gypsies), and other ethnic minorities were forced to flee the Serbian province. Onslaughts against the people of South Ossetia two years ago this August by preeminent U.S. client Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia and against the Houthi minority community in northern Yemen with military backing from Saudi Arabia and the U.S. would be examples of Benign attempts to exterminate entire peoples.
The 78-day bombing war waged by the U.S. and NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 in the name of "stopping genocide," the "worst genocide since Hitler," coincided with the induction of the first former Warsaw Pact member states into the Alliance (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). It also resulted in the building of a mammoth U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo and NATO’s absorption and penetration of all of Southeastern Europe. Every country in the region but Serbia (for the time being) now has troops serving under the military bloc in Afghanistan.
The crisis in Darfur in western Sudan gave rise to NATO’s first operation in Africa, the airlifting of African Union troops from 2005-07. At the end of 2007, the first U.S. military command established since the Cold War, Africa Command, was launched.
Military actions, including full-fledged wars waged by the U.S. and NATO in part or in whole to "end genocide," will produce more deaths, more mass-scale displacement, and more expulsion and extermination of endangered minorities as has happened over the past eleven years in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. More genocide. The genuine article.
In documenting the diametrically opposite manner in which the subject of genocide is treated by the government of the United States and its apologists (acknowledged and otherwise) based on international political and economic motives, Herman and Peterson have provided a concise and comprehensive guidebook to separating fact from fabrication. Truth is the first casualty of war and war is in turn the progeny of falsehood. Exposing the last contributes to eroding the foundation for U.S. armed aggression and global military expansion.