Do ordinary people know what is going on in the world?

Suppose that a man kills one million people. Should the people of the world know about it? Of course they should know.

Putting aside the expected ironic comment of the ever present cynic who says that such things do not happen in the real world, let us examine if, indeed, such a crime is possible in the real world.

The man in the real world was named with a single name: Suharto. The country was Indonesia. The year was 1965. “Amid a boiling bloodbath that almost unnoticed took the lives of 400,000 lives … Indonesia has done a complete about-face (“Time” magazine, July 15, 1966, page 32. Emphasis added).”

About this, Noam Chomsky in his book “Year 501” writes: “The scale of the massacre is unknown. The CIA estimates 250,000 killed. The head of the Indonesia state security system later estimated the toll at over half a million; Amnesty International gave the figure of ‘many more than one million’.” (South End Press, 1993, page 122)

Any doubt that Suharto was chosen by the U.S. ignores the history of the 20th century. Also, Suharto was allowed by the U.S. to amass a huge fortune, in the order of $30 billion. And we allowed the U.S. to do that. By the way, for the Greeks of today it is instructive to know that this amount “is approximately the scale of the IMF rescue package (Noam Chomsky, “Propaganda and the Public Mind”, 2001, page 16).” [See note 2]

What is the actual percentage of the people of the world who have an adequate knowledge about Suharto and his crime, is a matter of scientific research. That some people have a vague knowledge about Suharto and probably the enormity of his crime, is rather logical to expect. However, this is not good enough for the majority of ordinary people to know in detail what is going on in the world. The emphasized word “detail” does not signify an “encyclopedic” knowledge, but a means to make any human, as a moral entity, not only to be aware of the crimes of the Suhartos of the world but to start thinking about doing something about it, in a collective way. Experience shows us that the knowledge of the details, as opposed to vague knowledge, builds in us the desire to act, and act in anger.

Here, it is necessary to examine what we mean by “Suhartos of the world”. Must we confine our anger and our acts only to Suharto-type monstrous killers, or broaden the range to include other types of “destructive” people?

I think that the best way to present an image of that range is by offering some examples:

1. Constantine Karamanlis

He was chosen by the U.S. in 1955 as the Prime Minister of Greece. Since then, up to his death in 1998, for 43 years he was involved in making Greece what it is today. For this, he has the ultimate honorific title expressed by the Greek word “ethnarch,” “leader of the nation,” in which the word “leader” [arch] denotes gigantic “greatness.”

Karamanlis is responsible for creating, as an instrument of the U.S., a situation that has brought an entire people, the Greek people of 11 million, to a deep and dangerous impasse. During the second half of the decade of 1940 the rightwing Greek government, armed by the U.S., murdered about 150,000 leftwing Greeks. The Left then reacted and started to revolt by building a revolutionary army. To subdue them the government drove the peasant population out of their villages in Northern Greece, where the fighting was taking place, in order to eliminate any logistical help that the peasants could give the revolutionaries.

As expected, the Rightists, under the supervision of General James Van Fleet of the U.S. Army, defeated the Leftists. However the accompanying result was that thousands of the displaced people gravitated towards Athens to survive. To house and give work to these thousands, in its turn, resulted to what one might call the “curse of the multistory apartment building”. [See Note 2]

Years ago a satellite picture of Athens was photo-interpreted as an area of the planet resembling a “rocky” surface. The concrete slabs of the roofs of the apartment buildings, forming an almost continuous surface, turned Athens into a monster-city which during the summer months becomes an “oven”; a bearable “martyrdom.” What is intolerable, is that the construction of these steel reinforced concrete buildings of six to eight floors have trapped the, by now, four million inhabitants of Athens in a very dangerous place to live in; weak buildings in a quake-prone place. Because, concrete is an intrinsically brittle material that fails during an earthquake, as shown by the historical experience of hundreds of thousands of deaths during the last one hundred years. For this monster-city and any future calamity that might take place in it during a strong quake, Karamanlis, the “ethnarch”, should be “remembered.”

Also, this moment there is this strangely “unchristian” problem: A Greek, let us say, bought an apartment in these buildings for two hundred thousand Euros, through a loan offered to him, essentially by foreign lenders, years ago. Today, a German or a Finn can buy that apartment for fifty thousand Euros. The Greeks, jobless and at the poverty limit, have to pay back the loan or go to prison. The questions to be answered on this matter are:

a) Is the German or the Finn aware of the immorality of such a transaction?

b) Herr Schaeuble, Frau Merkel, and Master Jeroen Dijsselbleom [that “gentle” man and kind “leader”], all of them educated and powerful people, are they aware of the following very important text of the U.S. State Department: “Mr. Dort commented that Greece will achieve economic viability at some level, and that we have to decide what that level will be.” That was in an August 4, 1949 memorandum of the State Department [868.6463/8-449, N.A.]. Mr. Dort was a State Department official at the time. On the basis of this text, can the above “troika” explain to us what happened in Greece during the 66 years that elapsed since 1942.

2.Jon Burge, “master torturer” policeman in Chicago. Burge, as a policeman for two decades tortured mostly black men in Chicago. For example: Anthony Holmes, a black man, spent 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit after he was tortured by Burge.

3. Franco of Spain

4. John Yoo, Professor of Law at Berkeley. Aficionado of torture during the W. Bush era.

5. Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing, first-lady of France. In 1979 she got a diamond necklace as present from the African dictator Bokassa, who became famous for killing and eating his opponents.

6. Bokassa

7. The Bush gang: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, Bolton, et al.

8. Lenin, Churchill, and other “great” men…

9. Alexander the Great, the “hero” of the West.

10. Pope Pius XII, the the crypto-Nazi Christian.

No need to go on. The image of the range of not only murderously “destructive” people, but also of amoral, yet powerful people, that dominate humanity and are equally “destructive,” is apparent enough. Furthermore, this range should include not only people that are alive today but also people that are dead, especially the dead.

So, if, as claimed above, the details of the deeds of these “destructive” humans should be  known to ordinary people, so that this awareness will motivate them to do “something”, how can these details be unearthed and made public?

My suggestion or proposal: Through a Nuremberg-like tribunal.

That already there was the Bertrand Russell Tribunal of November 1966 and its epigones, arguably testifies to the value of broadening the range from mostly rogue nations to individual miscreants. I think that the detailed history of the vile acts of a human is instinctively affecting intensely the mind of any ordinary person.

The Bertrand Russell Tribunal stated that: “We are not judges. We are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind bear witness to these terrible crimes and to unite humanity on the side of justice in Vietnam” [My italics]. Today, it is proposed, here, that we should be more than witnesses we  should have the motivation to not only learn what is going on in the world, but also to have the courage to act to change the world.

Here is an initial proposal for such a Nuremberg-like Tribunal, proposal which can be ameliorated and expanded by any fellow-ordinary man or woman in the world:

– Optional name: “World Tribunal” or “Ecumenical Tribunal.”

– Aim: To understand and change the world through the knowledge gained mostly form the process in the Tribunal of presenting the detailed biographical history of “destructive” people.

– Seat or headquarters of the Tribunal: Any place in the world or the internet.

– Choice of individuals to be “examined”: By the world, through the internet. Method of decision-making: majoritarian or other to be decided by the world.

– Continuous and persistent dissemination of the proceedings of the Tribunal to all the world.

– Continuous and persistent function of the Tribunal for as many decades as needed.

– Financing: By all ordinary people in the world [even by rich people that might, possibly, be honest].

Notes:

Note 1: On December 7, 1975, Suharto invaded East Timor, as instructed by President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Killed were 200,000 Timorese, one third of the population, according to Amnesty international and Asia Watch. See “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, Verso, 2001; the book by Christopher Hitchens]

Note 2: The way this building spree operated, which lasted for about 60 years,  is described in my ZNet Commentary, “The MIT ‘Offspring’!”, of December 10, 2011. Also, about 15 years after the driving of the Greek peasants out of their villages, the same method was applied in Vietnam against the Vietnamese peasants. Only, that time the peasants were not housed in steel reinforced concrete buildings but in concentration camps, the “strategic hamlets”. This was “baptized” as “urbanization” by the educated elites of the US.